Regulus stepped into the washroom and twisted the brass tap. Steam billowed up, fogging the mirror.
He stood under the stream, eyes closed, hot water pouring over his head, tracing down through his hair and across his face, washing away sweat and fatigue. He shut off the tap, and in the next instant every droplet on his skin evaporated into nothing.
A deep grey house robe, belt cinched at the waist, and he was back in the bedroom.
Seated at the desk, he tapped his fingers lightly against its surface.
Set aside the intent behind the gift, and the object itself was worth serious thought.
Magical inheritance took several forms in the wizarding world. Written texts, oral instruction, sealed memories. And then there was the Black family's method: ancestral insights preserved in inheritance crystals, transferred directly through touch.
But the Dark Awakening was different. It showed your soul, directly, what you stood to gain by walking the dark path.
It let you watch a city crumble in your palm. Let you hear power surging through your blood. Let you taste what it felt like to hold another person's fate in your hands.
It bypassed every intermediate step and injected the result, or rather the euphoria of the result, straight into your mind.
Voldemort had obtained and understood something like this while still young, then shaped it into an artifact others could experience.
The talent was staggering. The power, undeniable. And his comprehension of magic had reached heights that defied easy measurement.
The danger was every bit as real.
By comparison, the Black family's inherited magic was gentler, more purposeful.
Verdant Magic, for instance, centered on guiding external magical energy, on understanding symbiosis. What the inheritance crystal preserved were concrete operational principles and the insights of the ancestor. Nothing forced itself on you.
The bone box operated on a different logic entirely. Chaotic, open-ended, no fixed destination.
It said only: Here are many possibilities. Then it displayed the most seductive among them and lured you into jumping in of your own free will.
More elegant.
Far more dangerous.
Regulus leaned back and let his gaze drift toward Grimmauld Place beyond the window.
Voldemort claimed the gift was a reward for his performance at Hogwarts.
That might be part of it. More likely, Voldemort had caught the scent of something that didn't quite fit.
His contact with Dumbledore, however discreet, might have left traces.
Or this could be nothing more than Voldemort's paranoid nature expressing itself as a preemptive probe.
Toward any pure-blood heir who displayed unusual talent without fully committing to his side: toss them a vial of poison first. See whether they swallowed it and became one of yours, or spat it out and revealed divided loyalties.
A thought surfaced, bordering on arrogance.
Dumbledore and Voldemort, the two wizards standing at the apex of the magical world. Were they, right now, waging a silent tug-of-war with him as the rope?
One using harmless guidance to illuminate the road ahead. The other using poisoned generosity to corrupt and claim.
It wasn't implausible. His talent and ability were laid bare for both to see, enough to move either of them.
Dumbledore had acted first. Voldemort followed close behind.
Honestly, what both were doing shared a fundamental similarity. Each was trying to influence him, to shape the course of his future.
Voldemort's methods were blunt, domineering, saturated with temptation and threat.
For the vast majority of young wizards who craved power and believed in pure-blood ideology, the Dark Awakening would have felt like divine providence. Enough to earn undying devotion, or at the very least, reverent longing.
For Regulus, this gift that brooked no refusal felt more like a chain dressed up as a crown.
Walk my path. I'll give you power. Refuse, and you're nothing.
It exposed something: Voldemort was growing impatient. Increasingly autocratic.
Early on, he'd still needed pure-blood families for their connections and resources. He'd observed the old social codes, recruited slowly through shared interests and ideology.
Now he'd begun crushing those codes under raw force.
Bellatrix's behavior today was a signal.
Arriving unannounced, barging through the Floo Network into the Head of House's residence. In pure-blood etiquette, that was a grave offense. Even between family members, it was nearly unheard of.
That she'd dared meant one thing: Voldemort and his inner circle had begun to actively disregard, even deliberately trample, the ancient rules of decorum.
They believed power superseded everything. Tradition, courtesy, all of it could be ground underfoot.
The disrespect betrayed their arrogance, and their hunger to remake the existing order entirely.
Dumbledore's approach stood in stark contrast.
No coercion. He offered perspectives. The concept of magical negative space, for example: never telling Regulus what to do, only giving him a direction to think in.
Critical support flowed through professors like McGonagall and Sprout, resources tilted his way, but nothing was ever demanded in return.
Most important of all, Dumbledore handed the freedom of choice back to Regulus.
His greater skill lay in this: he appeared to have no predetermined path for Regulus, yet through his philosophy and his own example, he'd sketched out a landscape more worth pursuing.
Dumbledore wasn't recruiting muscle. He was cultivating a future peer. A fellow traveler, or at least someone worth talking to as an equal.
Of course, that might be nothing more than a subtler form of shaping.
But at least it granted the one being shaped dignity and room to think.
Regulus rose and crossed to the window.
One finger hooked the corner of the heavy curtain aside. Sunlight had broken fully through the clouds, bathing all of Grimmauld Place in the bright glare of a summer morning.
A Muggle postman pedaled past on a bicycle, his basket stuffed with letters.
Across the square, a second-floor window stood open. An old woman was watering the flowers on her windowsill.
He had accepted the gift. That didn't mean he'd walk the path Voldemort had laid out.
The Dark Awakening had shown him two things: intoxicating worldly power, and tantalizing magical secrets.
Power, in the wizarding world, tended to follow strength as its shadow.
He pursued strength. Power might come with it. But power was never the goal.
The magic itself, though. That was genuinely tempting.
But Regulus wasn't the sort to spot a distant peak and abandon all caution in a desperate scramble to reach the summit.
He believed that through his own research, accumulation, and exploration, he could arrive at the same heights. Open new routes, even. Surpass them.
Along the way he might accept certain aids: this quarantined dark knowledge, family inheritance, a professor's guidance. Shortcuts of a kind.
But always under his control. Tools, never masters.
Clear-eyed recognition of limitations mattered.
The Awakening's power was beyond question, but its limitations were equally plain.
At its core, it was a profoundly addictive psychic drug paired with a predetermined dark trajectory.
He'd isolated the contamination from the first contact, but he knew that sustained exposure would deepen the corruption.
It would try to warp his cognition, his emotions, his values.
He could picture what full erosion looked like.
A wizard drunk on the instant gratification and dominance that dark power brought, thoughts hardening by degrees into something cold and extreme. Regarding Voldemort as the sole embodiment of power and truth, until you became, willingly, his zealot.
Or worse.
The simulated persona had weathered the first wave.
But what if the contamination intensified? One construct couldn't hold. Build another?
The thought brought him up short.
He'd constructed the consciousness chamber only yesterday, wondering what to put inside it. What if he repurposed it as a containment cell?
House the simulated persona within it, sealing off contamination from his core awareness.
Then, in controlled increments, feed the quarantined Awakening core into that chamber. Let the simulated persona make contact, study it, even attempt to use it.
Knowledge gained without contamination spreading beyond a designated cage. A testing ground for the characteristics and limits of dark power.
But consciousness chambers couldn't be created without end. Maintaining a simulated persona demanded continuous psychic investment.
It came down to the strength of his soul and his total reserves of mental energy, plus their rate of recovery. The Star Guided Meditation was the foundation for building all of that.
At present, constructing and maintaining one fully functional containment chamber with one reasonably complex simulated persona sat at his safe limit.
Anything more risked clouding his core awareness and compromising everyday magical control.
Beyond that, he could lay traps along the chamber's perimeter.
Any psychic force that tried to breach his deeper consciousness without permission, a Legilimency probe, say, or a future encounter with something like the Dark Awakening's direct mental assault, would be routed into the chamber before it ever reached his core.
What the intruder would find there was a space saturated with dark contamination and inhabited by a simulated persona. A minefield capable of lashing back, poisoning the invader with the very corruption it contained.
A creative leap in mental defense.
No reason to wait. He got to work.
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