“You know what I thought was the most frightening spell in the world, during those horrible three years of having Voldemort, death eaters and werewolves in my home?”, Lyra sat on the couch, hugging her knees.

“I’m afraid, with those people, the list would be extensive”, Viktor frowned, and Harry and Hermione seemed to agree.

“Expelliaramus”, Lyra whispered.

They all looked at each other, not understanding.

“Oh, it’s quite simple, in fact”, she nodded. “And it’s the reason Harry uses it in duels. Once you remove a wizard’s wand, the next spell can be whatever you want, and you can even take your time, because you’re no longer dealing with a wizard, you’re dealing with a muggle”, she explained. “Once the wand is out of your hand, the duel is over. The fight is over. Your bodily autonomy is over. Your life is over. My greatest fear was being disarmed from an ambush, being rendered helpless, and then having someone… take their time with me”, she shivered. “They were already making suggestions out loud. I didn’t even have to use my imagination”.

The rest of them felt as if the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. “Oh”.

“And you gave me your wand”, Harry whispered.

“Yes”, she smiled. “I did get some other wand, that didn’t like working for me very much, and then I thought, this is hardly better than having no wand at all, so why not try that”.

“How long did it take you to get it to work?”, Hermione wondered.

“Not long. Days. What actually helped is that the new wand processed everything with a delay and a reluctance, and I could feel individual steps being taken, now my command is being translated into the magical layer of the world, what it ends up being… and then I stopped telling it to the wand, and started telling it to the world itself”, she explained. “With my old wand, it would actually be much harder, with how eager it was to obey me”.

“Those must have been a terrible few days”, Viktor rubbed his chin. “Having a disobedient wand, not yet figuring out how to do it wandlessly, and all those horrible people roaming about”.

“One would think, but actually it gave me something else to think about, and they also had other things to think about, with Harry, Hermione and Ron breaking into Gringotts about that time. Nobody was giving me any thought”, she smiled. “And once I got it, I very quickly advanced from the basics to replicating everything I could do with a wand”.

“Also, a wand limits you to what you’re pointing at. When those five thugs surrounded me, my first thought was that I can’t deal with more than two of them in time the others will get me. From what I could see, wandlessly you just dealt with them all at once”, Hermione noted. “You need to teach me this”, she hugged her friend. “It makes me feel exposed to be the only one not to know it”.

“Well, technically, nobody knew it before Lyra figured it out, and you didn’t miss it then”, her husband pointed out.

“That’s true, but now that all of you know it, I feel I need to learn it quickly”, Hermione managed a weak smile.

“Tomorrow after breakfast”, Lyra nodded. “We’re all too tired now. Also, keep in mind that it’s more dangerous than using a wand. You put your wand away when you don’t mean to use it. You are also deliberate about where you point it. You can’t put your mind away when you’re not using it, and once you get accustomed to binding it to magic directly, you can’t allow your mind to wander aimlessly, or think too hard about something because you will make it happen”, she pointed out.

An orange levitated, peeled itself, separated into slices, the slices transformed into roses, assembled themselves into a bouquet, and fell into Hermione’s lap.

“Point taken”, Hermione giggled.

“Also, avoid messing with space geometry. That’s probably the easiest way to get yourself killed by accident”. She pointed in the air, and space suddenly looked like a cracked mirror, one shard showing Hogwarts main hall, the other Slytherin girls’ dormitory, another their office in the Ministry, and the final one showed Diagon Alley. She closed her eyes and the space healed.

The others looked at her with mouths agape. “Scary girl”, Harry smiled.