"Honor?" Sirius shoved to his feet. His chair skidded backward across the floor.
"Look at that thing! The box is leaking dark energy! Bella, being driven mad by Voldemort wasn't enough for you? Now you want to drag Regulus down with you?"
Bellatrix's head snapped toward him, her voice cold enough to crack stone. "Shut your mouth. Traitors don't get a say in this room. You think you're fit to pass judgment on the Dark Lord's gift?"
Regulus had no doubt that if they'd been anywhere but the Black ancestral home, Bellatrix would have attacked Sirius on the spot. With the worst curse she knew.
Color flooded Sirius's face. His fists clenched white at the knuckles.
"I'm trash? Then what are you? Voldemort's rabid dog? Trailing behind him, licking his..."
"Enough." Orion's voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
He braced one hand on the table's edge and rose, gaze sweeping first over Sirius, then settling on Bellatrix, then finally coming to rest on Regulus.
Regulus didn't look up. His face showed nothing. His eyes were fixed elsewhere.
That told Orion everything he needed to know.
"The gift," Orion said, his tone level, stripped of inflection, "Regulus will accept."
Walburga exhaled, relief softening her features into a smile.
Sirius opened his mouth, but a single look from Orion shut it. He ground his teeth, swallowed whatever he'd been about to say. His chest heaved.
Bellatrix turned back to Regulus, that strange, feverish smile sliding into place again.
"There we are." She pushed the bone box closer. "Take it. Show the Dark Lord that the heir of the House of Black deserves this gift."
Regulus looked at the box before him.
Every pair of eyes in the dining room was on him.
Walburga's anticipation. Bellatrix's coercion. Sirius's fury. Orion's silence.
He ran through his options in the space of a breath.
Refusing was out of the question. The House of Black did not refuse Voldemort.
Bellatrix was dangerous, unhinged. Regulus wasn't concerned. Killing Bellatrix wouldn't be difficult.
But she had come as Voldemort's proxy. Her presence here was Voldemort's will made manifest.
There would be no refusal.
Acceptance was the only viable path. The question was how to accept.
What did Voldemort want to see?
A Black heir seduced by dark power, sinking into it, corrupted by slow degrees?
Or a pure-blood prodigy who mastered the darkness with ease?
Neither.
He needed a middle ground. Shaken, drawn in and struggling against temptation. Barely managing a preliminary result.
A young wizard of enormous potential, still within reach of control.
Regulus raised his hand and touched the edge of the bone box. His fingertips registered the cold of concentrated negative energy.
The runes flared the instant he made contact, shifting from dark gold to deep violet. The light didn't radiate outward. It collapsed inward, swallowing itself.
He gripped the box.
Then every sound vanished.
Walburga's mouth moving in speech. Bellatrix's smile widening. Orion's pupils contracting. Sirius lunging forward.
All of it slowed to a mute pantomime, color draining away until only black and white and grey contours remained.
The thing inside the box woke.
It burrowed through the point of contact, slipping beneath his skin. It had no substance. It wasn't magic, not exactly. It was closer to a living concept.
Darkness, pain, temptation, madness. Abstract words that now possessed shape.
Viscous ink flooding his veins. Countless voices whispering at the edges of hearing. Shattered visions detonating behind his eyes.
Regulus saw ruins.
An alien cityscape, architecture he didn't recognize, burning beneath a blood-red sky. No era he could place.
The air reeked of sulfur and the accumulated rot of mass death, yet the smell wasn't repulsive. It carried a strange, cloying sweetness.
A figure stood at the center of the destruction, back turned, black robes rippling in waves of heat.
The figure raised one hand. Every structure in sight collapsed without a sound, stone dissolving into black powder before it could hit the ground.
The collapse spread outward until the entire city was gone, erased to the very edges of the vision.
Nothing remained but a layer of black ash.
Power.
Pure, primal, unbound.
Its mere display was the temptation.
You could be this. You could have this. You could become the wizard who looks down on all the rest.
The whispers sharpened:
"Pain is fuel..."
"Fear is the finest catalyst..."
"Love? Compassion? Those are weaknesses.... Chains.... Obstacles to truth..."
"Tear them away. Tear away every restraint, and you will see the world as it truly is..."
The visions shifted...
Regulus saw himself in the corridors of Hogwarts, students parting around him with awe or dread written on their faces. Simply because he existed.
He saw himself standing on some great height, a crowd prostrate below. Wizards and Muggles alike. Faces he knew and faces he didn't.
He raised his hand, and they roared their worship, voices crashing together like a wave.
Power of a different kind.
Subtler and more insidious. Closer to the true hunger of a pure-blood dynasty's heir.
But somewhere at the core of him, the reaction was flat. This is the test? This is what's supposed to break me?
People actually fall for this?
Regulus's true consciousness floated steady at the center of his mindscape.
The Star Guided Meditation ran at full capacity. The four-and-a-half stars of Orion blazed against the dark backdrop, fierce and unwavering.
Each star was an anchor, locking his core awareness in place, untouched by the visions and the whispering.
Occlumency activated in parallel.
He constructed an intricate maze of channels along the outer perimeter of his mind, actively routing the dark magic and its illusions into predetermined circuits.
Then, within an isolated chamber of the maze, he spun up a partial psychic construct.
A simulated Regulus.
This persona carried the traits it was supposed to carry.
Hunger for power. Belief in pure-blood ideology. Reverence for Voldemort.
The simulated persona saw the ruins and the robed figure.
It heard the whispers.
It felt the pull.
In the physical world, in the dining room, Regulus's body began to react.
The hand gripping the bone box trembled. Fine beads of sweat broke across his forehead, tracking down his temples, gathering at his jawline.
His breathing turned ragged, chest rising and falling in sharp, visible hitches.
The eyes were the hardest part to fake.
He triggered micro-spasms in the orbicularis oculi, let his pupils lose focus at intervals before snapping back, replicating the physiological signature of psychic trauma.
His lips pressed tight, then parted involuntarily, releasing a few fractured syllables.
Fragments of some ancient, twisted language. Knowledge the Dark Awakening had leaked on purpose.
"A... k'tath..." The sound came out low, half-murmured, but the dining room was so quiet that every syllable landed.
Bellatrix's eyes lit up.
She leaned forward so far her balance shifted, face alive with greed and excitement.
Walburga pressed her hand over her mouth, fingers trembling. Whether from fear or exhilaration, even she probably couldn't tell.
Sirius had already charged around to this side of the table, but Orion's raised arm stopped him cold.
The father's hand clamped down on his son's shoulder, grip heavy enough to pin him in place.
Orion stared at Regulus's face.
He was reading the details.
As a wizard who had endured countless magical trials and seen real combat, he knew what genuine psychic assault looked like.
Chaos.... Loss of control.... Physiological responses synchronized with mental anguish.
And then he noticed it.
Regulus's performance was too clean.
Textbook shock. Textbook agony. Textbook resistance.
Like a manual demonstrating the expected response when a wizard comes into contact with a high-intensity Dark artifact.
But something was missing.
The raw, blindsided panic. The instinctive thrashing of a mind under violent intrusion. The uncontrolled magical discharge triggered when foreign power clashes with a host's own magic.
Regulus's magical fluctuations were unstable, yes. But the instability had a pattern. Dim first, then violent, then easing, then cycling back.
Too rhythmic. Too composed.
Orion's fingers tightened on Sirius's shoulder.
Sirius felt it. He twisted to look at his father, but Orion didn't meet his eyes. His gaze never left Regulus.
Time passed.
Inside the mental maze, the simulated persona's struggle reached its critical phase.
It didn't defeat the Dark Awakening. That was impossible, and it wasn't what Voldemort expected.
It compromised and guided. Submitted on its own terms.
The simulated persona used its own dark inclinations as a bridge, establishing a connection with the foreign force, building an unstable symbiosis.
In one corner of the maze, it shaped a cage and locked the Awakening's core inside.
The cage was transparent. The dark magic within still churned and whispered and projected its visions, but it was confined. It could no longer reach the rest of the simulated persona's space.
At the same time, the simulated persona gleaned something from the encounter.
How to convert negative emotion into magical output more efficiently. A simplified trigger sequence for an ancient curse. A handful of Dark spells, none of them particularly advanced.
The knowledge was real.
The Dark Awakening had offered it freely, bait on a hook.
Want more? Go deeper. Keep going until there's no way back.
Regulus let the simulated persona accept it all, but didn't absorb it wholesale. He filed it away in quarantine, flagged for later analysis.
The external performance adjusted in sync.
His trembling began to fade. Breathing steadied. His pupils locked back into focus.
Sweat still ran down his forehead and neck, and color was only starting to creep back into his pallid face.
His grip on the bone box slowly loosened.
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