The End Product
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My name is Donovan Appleby and my days at Hogwarts were marked the most by my best friend, now the Minister of Magic, Anthony Rosier.

I met him on my very first day of Hogwarts on the train, where I was told the most bonding friendships were forged. Back then he appeared as I was looking at the mirror. Young, excited, with a full head of blond uncombed hair and bright, intelligent, blue eyes.

He had his potion book out and read it with such single-mindedness I couldn’t help but find it endearing. Here, I thought, is a familiar soul, someone who understood what a great opportunity attending Hogwarts is, and who would use his time there to become the best wizard he could.

It didn’t take us long to start exchanging childish theories of magic backed with our limited knowledge of what we were just about to learn, and it was probably where I decided Anthony was exactly the sort of friend I had hoped for.

I still find it funny we hadn’t introduced ourselves until the train started to slow down. It made us both jump when we felt it, and he smiled sheepishly, extending his hand that I immediately accepted.

“I think this will be a start of great partnership,” he said and I thought nothing of words then. There were many partnerships I was looking for. I imagined us lurking through the empty halls of the castle, figuring out all its riddles, or perhaps expanding our knowledge in the famous library or through experiments in some long forgotten dungeon.

It came as a surprise when he was sorted Slytherin and I Ravenclaw, but we didn’t allow different houses to step in our way. We seeked each other in between classes, and sat together on those we’ve attended together, all the way chatting magic and charms and Hogwarts.

Only a couple weeks into our first year he found an empty space he thought would make a great hideaway for us to finally start our journey towards greatness. I must admit, I liked both the space and the idea. It was a dusty place, barely as big as three broom cupboards, but with a small desk with a cauldron on it, and a couple of thick tomes on the high shelf we needed ladders to reach.

I asked him many questions then, all the obvious ones except the one I had to ask, the one that might’ve rendered my days at Hogwarts different, away from my friend Anthony. Today I know that he had planted those books there. I know he spent hours picking the right ones. I finally know who Anthony Rosier is.

When we managed to reach the high shelf, I still remember the clarity of the sick fascination I had as I scrambled through yellowish pages describing constructs of potions and charms that could outlast all, ones that will rule the world long after our species discovers its end.

“Why would anyone make those?” I asked, and not just once. I was fascinated by both the theory and the anatomy of purely magical constructs and so I went along. I would like to say I went along unwillingly, but I was as eager as Anthony.

“Why not,” he answered. “Why limit ourselves?”

Why indeed. Our whole first year was decided then. We read through the books, over and over, all until we understood what they were trying to say to us. Nothing good, I reckon, but it was knowledge, and I craved it, as any good Ravenclaw did in those times. My housemates spent their time running through the halls, laughing, casting jokes and brewing pranks as Anthony and I lived in the world of parchment and ink, losing both sleep and childhood on magic best not trifled with.

In our third year we made a first major breakthrough. We’ve both taken the Care of Magical Creatures on a whim, neither knowing it was precisely the subject we needed to master. Muggleborns might think magical creatures are no more than animals with magic, but the two of us realized what they never could. I wasn’t just a muggle with magic, and a unicorn wasn’t just a horse with a horn. The two didn’t exist separately but rather made one completion, remove either and it wouldn’t be.

It was what we didn’t grasp earlier. We had tried to make a construct only to enchant it later, and only then doze them in the cauldron of foul potions that would finally raise them into consciousness.

Anthony was still a model student, though his looks changed some. His blond hair was now slicked to his head with a liberal amount of potion, and he had acquired small round glasses that he’d push up the bridge of his nose whenever he made his mind.

And so I entered our hideaway one day, and there it was, the first magical construct Anthony had ever successfully made. It was just an arm, rotten and filled with black boils, yet it moved, dragged itself over the floor in hot pursuit after the rat that Anthony had trapped.

I gave a cry of surprise that soon became that of triumph.

“Where did you get the arm?”

In response he clutched his hand, fondling it up and down. We made eye contact and it caught me by surprise. They were still bright and intelligent but they were also something else, something I was too young to understand. I’m not sure I fully grasp the emotion even now.

“We’re wizards, are we not?”

I nodded, feeling a bit dizzy, and then crouched next to the hand, prodding it with my wand. It paid no attention to me until I tried to stop it in its mission. Only then it tried to reach for me, straight for the throat and the movement was so sudden I stumbled back, crashing down on the floor over the chair. The arm paid no more attention to me.

“Single minded, aren’t they?” Anthony asked with a smirk.

“Why?”

Anthony shrugged. “Biology, I think. We have to eat, drink, shit, and we’re driven towards survival. Adam, here, has no such constraints. He is free to pursue his mind.”

“His mind?”

“Mine, in this case.”

I gave a reflexive nod while pondering the implications. Meanwhile, the arm reached its destination and clawed out the rat's entrails, and then just relaxed in its spot. It was a primitive thing, for sure, but it was working in the scope of regulations and expectations Anthony had set up. It was but a first step though.

“Why Adam?” I asked instead.

“The first of his kind. The first letter of the alphabet.”

“So we have until Zed to succeed?”

He smirked again. “Yes.”

In the winter of our fifth year his grades started to suffer as he spent more and more time in our hideaway. His hair was once more uncombed and wild, his eyes bright and intense as he devoured through the library searching for the clue we were still missing. By this time I felt like no more but his assistant. He had replaced so many of his limbs by this point that I’ve wondered about the potency of many times replacing arms and legs.

If I knew what I know now, I would have never voiced my thoughts to him. I had outright refused to part with my libs and so we turned towards Forbidden Forest, towards whatever magical species we could land our hands to. In my fifth year in Hogwarts I was a butcher.

Anthony was no longer satisfied with the potion recipe either, so we started to alter it, adding parts of whatever we were about to turn into a construct into the cauldron, and chanting over it as we fed it blood. You see, once final, they didn’t need blood nor bones nor flesh, but they were vital for movements and understandings we have skipped by that point. How could construct understand a mission if it didn’t have the parts needed to accomplish it. It was only a dumb luck that Anthony’s arm even worked in our third year. A dumb luck then, but a progress now.

“It’s no good,” he said as Centaur struggled to his legs, his black rotten fingers failing to grasp the bow we’ve made for it. “He’s trying to do it all at once.”

I stood silent, shooting wary glances towards Anthony. Acromantulas and wild boars were one thing, but Centaur was a part of society, conscious and capable.

“To stand up, to understand the workings of the bow, and to shoot the cat, it doesn’t understand the proceedings of those actions,” he went on, narrowing his eyes at the dead Centaur. “We need to animate his brain.”

“How?” He gave me a look that made me feel stupid. “How did the limbs work then?”

“The arm moved the only way it knew how to. Killed the rat the first way it came to its mind, to speak so. We want this Centaur to do so by following precise instructions.”

We struggled with it the rest of our year, and at one point I had to focus on my OWLs so I left my friend Anthony alone in our hideaway, alone to study the deep secrets of mind and reanimating it once dead.

I felt I did well on my exams, and the first thought I had was to share happy news with Anthony. I knew already where to find him, it was no secret these days. I took a deep breath before entering the room, as I grew to expect the worst to face me on the other side of the doors, yet I knocked our password, and then pushed, and then screamed. There was a corpse, red where its skin was inflamed and purple where rot started to spread. Both of its arms were planted on its head as its mouth was wide open. It would have been screaming, no doubt, if only it had a tongue and throat to do so.

“Donovan,” Anthony said in greetings. “Meet Quentin.” He then went on to explain how he waited for someone to die in Hogsmeade so he could get his hands on a fresh corpse. It worked well, he explained, for the body still remembered how it felt like to be alive, and simple actions like walking and screaming were imbued in its bones and muscles.

The trouble was its mind was far too gone. It met something in death that it couldn’t comprehend once it came back to life once again, and all it knew was some sort of agony, or perhaps truth so terrible it lost all other senses.

“Paintings can handle it,” I said. “As well as ghosts. We’re missing something.”

I was too invested in the project by this point. Anthony nodded along and licked his lips, pushing his lenses up his nose. He then looked at me, his blue eyes bright and thoughtful. I thought I had imagined it but the way he looked at me, it was like he saw all. My body, my mind, and my soul. The part that was troubling me was that he needed only two of those three.

In the middle of our last year at Hogwarts our hideaway wasn’t big enough for all the crawling constructs that were pursuing their simple missions. We then migrated to the dungeon where we already had chains and hooks to test different challenges of our subjects. Corpses, mostly human, were functioning well, if you take into consideration that some of them were headless, some legless, and some just torso rolling around.

Xandar was the best of all. He went from construct to construct and tried to shake their hands. His success, however, was in the fact that he had learned with whom he would be able to accomplish his mission and avoided handless ones altogether. It was a simple logical exercise but it was what made him different, and Anthony’s gaze lovingly followed him around the room.

“You reckon we’ve done it?” I asked, smiling. I was both proud and relieved. Anthony and I touched magics few did in their time in Hogwarts, and we were better wizards for it. For all our troubles and all my fears I felt I got out of the school exactly what I wanted, and I felt I’d be able to sweep the magical world with my knowledge and skill, far superior to those who had spent their days chasing childhood fantasies and teenage lusts.

“We’ve Yvone and Zed left,” he answered, his arms crossed over his chest as he nodded something to himself. He approached the desk and pulled out the very same tome we’ve started with, the one I now know he had planted all those years ago. He opened it on the first page, tapped his finger against it, and pushed his lenses up his nose. I came to look as well.

“The constructs that will outlast all,” I read. I had completely forgotten that part. It wasn’t why we’ve started all this, I thought, and I paid it no mind in place of more important questions. “We’ve no means to test it, either way. We could task our bloodlines with keeping an eye on it, I suppose, but we would never have definite proof.”

His eyes shifted towards me for a flick of a second before he gave a hesitant nod. “You’re right. Still, we’ve time to perfect our recipe for the last two, and then be done with it.”

I agreed with a smile. We’ve made it our mission to create Zed and so we would, together, just like we started. We both knew so much magic that NEWTs were no challenge at all and we needed not to waste our time preparing for them. Instead, we focused on our method, polishing it to excellence and keeping an eye on the morgues so we could snatch us a corpse. It was long since we’ve established that humans worked best. There was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that knew that the book was meant for humans in the first place, but I firmly ignored it. I chose long ago to live in ignorance, I think. I think I knew all along, now that I have a clear view of the whole timeline.

That aside, once we finished with Zed, we were so confident in him that we left him alone for a day in the castle, to roam around, to nod back at people who nod at him, to talk with a couple of paintings and even to have a meal in the Great Hall.

Anthony and I remained the whole day in the dungeon, nervously awaiting for his return. And so he did, just as the sun settled, he walked back into the room with a single difference. When we had left him his face was blank and emotionless, relaxed into a resting expression of a corpse. He came back with a wide smile, with a sparkle in his eyes that could only be a result of excitement. It made me gape. It was not what I expected, not at all. But Anthony grinned right back at Zed and gave him a hug, the hug that the construct returned with the same gusto.

“We’re burning them tomorrow, right?” I asked.

He broke back from the hug and nodded. “That’s what we decided. The last day, then? At dawn?”

I agreed and shook hands with him. We had no illusions that we would remain friends after Hogwarts. It’s how it was back in those days, I reckon. You came, you studied hard, you left to pursue your own road. It was expected of any wizard with a shred of ambition. No legacies, no inheritances, no positions gained through family influence. The Wizard was supposed to make his own way in the world, and become better for it.

The last morning of my days at Hogwarts I arrived at the dungeon Anthony and I had chosen for our experiments and found it reeking of burned flesh. Anthony stood in the middle of it, heavily breathing, his back facing me. “I’ve done it,” he whispered.

I rolled my eyes and smiled. “You could’ve waited for me.”

He turned around. He had his long blond hair tied into a neat tail and was wearing his official robes that had not a single wrinkle on them. He looked a model student, a fine young wizard that was ready to conquer the world. Yet I focused only on his eyes. They were blue, deep and sunken, none of its usual brightness to them.

He made a couple of insecure steps towards me, extending his hand. “I did it, Donovan,” he said. “From Adam to Zed.”

I took a step back. “Who are you? What are you?”

“Me?” he asked with a small, proud smile. “I’m Anthony. The end of the circle.”

I ran. I didn’t wait for the ceremony, but went straight for the Hogsmeade and flooed away, and continued to run for decades later, finding my own way in the world, as wizard was supposed to, yet I couldn’t help but read in the newspapers about my friend Anthony, how he made waves in local politics and scientific circles.

Now I am an old man, alone in my little apartment and my hands are shaking as I write this. My friend Anthony is smiling back at me from the little photo that is on the cover of today's paper, tipping his head politely, looking no different than the man I’ve run away from all those years ago.

No one is questioning it either, that our Minister of Magic is looking the same after so many mandates in the same office. I guess they have accepted the truth I still find hard to grasp, even now that I’m dwindling away.

Anthony will outlast us all.