"Has someone caught on fire before?"

"Depends," says Feral. "What are you gonna do about it if they have?"

"Diagnose you," says Healer Song dryly.

Feral rolls his eyes.

"I'm obligated to inform if you are a danger to yourself or others. That's are, in the present tense."

"Then yeah," says Feral. "Somebody's caught on fire before. Way before - before I ever got here, before I knew anything about magic except 'stuff catches fire sometimes'."

"And I surmise you were upset at the time."

"Extremely," Feral agrees, with a not particularly nice little smile.

"Now - the puzzle pieces aren't aiming this way so far, but I have to ask - you were not upset at this person for anything along the lines of copying off you in class, throwing a hex in the corridors, or name-calling."

"Nope," says Feral.

"All right. What I think the other faculty have been assuming this is is just particularly neotenous, thematic accidental magic - that means it's the same thing as when children levitate their toys or turn their hair pink, only continuing longer than usual and themed around a specific thing - but I think it may be something else; am I right that if you deliberately cast a fire spell you get dramatic, intense results?"

"Sometimes," says Healer Song, gently, "if a wizard whose magic is still forming spends a lot of time in a state of panic, his magic will try to find an outlet to do something about that situation, early. But the reason magical education starts at ten or eleven is because magic used before that age isn't reliably controllable, and if too much of it is forced out, it leaves a sort of - wound, in the magical core. It's called a premature spillway."

"So... what?" says Feral. "Am I just gonna keep lighting things on fire?"

"Not necessarily, but controlling it will never be effortless, and if you let up on the effort even a little, it will mean you'll need to redo some of the work to assert control. This happened because fire was the only thing your immature magic could come up with to do. Continuing to use uncontrolled fire - the spells are fine and you'll always have the extra affinity; this is just the uncontrolled, especially wandless, kind - sort of tells your magic that it still needs to do this, that you are still in situations where the only thing is to react instantly by igniting something and there isn't other recourse."

"But I can figure out how to cast spells without burning anything I don't wanna burn," he says. "Can I stop lighting up the bed, too? Or would I have to give up wandless fire? Is it just wandless fire I don't mean to use that's the problem?"

"Any wandless fire, whether you mean it or not, runs the risk of keeping the wound open, and as the wound closes all of it should be easier to avoid, sleeping and waking alike - but - I haven't actually heard of other cases where there was much voluntary, deliberate use of the spillway to speak of; how much control do you have?"

"That's - uncommon. It's otherwise very much a textbook premature spillway, but there might be a complicating factor somewhere I'm not seeing," muses Song. "At any rate, I have no way to directly observe the spillway, so I can't definitively say if wandlessly setting things on fire deliberately will prop it open as much as accidental cases will, but my best guess is that you shouldn't use any wandless fire you can possibly avoid."

"Damn," snorts Feral. "So what do I have to do to get back into Transfiguration?"

"Well," snorts Healer Song. "How do you get along with your classmates and your teacher in that section? Considering the nature of the problem I can authorize some shuffling to put you with people who won't rub you the wrong way as badly, at least for this year while you start getting your spillway more firmly in hand."

"I don't have that much trouble with the teacher, but we were doing firecrackers to fireflies today and she didn't seem to get that that might be a bad idea for me, which did tick me off a little," he says. "Would somebody else be any better about that, though?"

"She expected you to have grown out of it; I can give you a signed note you can show to anyone who continues to expect that."

"That'll help," says Feral agreeably.

"And of course anything that would be a disaster to set alight shouldn't have your wand aimed at it. Have you checked how you stack up against fire suppression spells?"