A structure made entirely of magic rotated slowly in the air before him.
Roughly eight inches across, irregular in shape, like an enlarged root system rendered in abstract. Countless threads of magic wove together into a mesh, the gaps between them varied with purpose. The main trunk ran thick and bright, the tributary veins thin and dense, and at the tips, they fanned out into innumerable hairlike tendrils.
Every thread was in motion. Magic poured in through the entry point, wound along a preset path, completed seven and a half loops, and flowed out the exit.
What emerged was grey-green.
Decomposition.
Regulus watched it turn.
Nine days. Twenty Mandrakes' worth of magic. Dozens of failed models. And he had replicated the Mandrake's Magic Circulation in full.
He could now build this structure from his own magic at will. Pour raw magic in one end, and what came out the other carried the Mandrake's decomposition attribute.
No plants.
No extraction.
No preparation.
His own magic was the raw material.
He stood and pushed open the greenhouse door.
Still the middle of the night.
Early July now. The days baked, but at this hour, the sea wind came from the east carrying a thread of coolness.
He followed the stone path toward the plantation's east side.
The gnome burrow was still there at the base of the wall. Gnomes were most active at night, and the edges of the opening showed fresh tracks: tiny footprints pressed into the dirt, a few coarse brown hairs rubbed off against the stone.
Regulus crouched, raised his right hand, palm facing the burrow.
Magic surged from his body, unfolding along the preset path in front of his palm. Less than two seconds, and the structure he'd spent nine days replicating blazed to life in the dark.
Against the night it was striking. Grey-green light, fine ripples spreading from its edges.
He kept feeding magic in.
A Mandrake attacked through sound. The cry was the carrier; the magic was the payload. He didn't need a carrier. He released the payload directly.
The grey-green light pulsed once in the open air. Less than half a second.
Below him, inside the burrow, a dozen magical signatures winked out simultaneously.
Those faint, flickering pulses that belonged to living things went still in the same instant.
Regulus lowered his hand.
The grey-green glow dissolved into the night wind, leaving nothing behind.
He stayed crouched, listening to the sea waves strike the rocks. One after another, rhythm unchanging.
The Space Warp spell had taken him half a year from conception to completion.
Fiendfyre, from first contact to precise control of three firebirds, three months.
Verdant Magic, though. From the first seed of the idea to inheriting the tradition to this moment of proof, the work had stretched across his entire first year at Hogwarts.
He rose. A quiet but unmistakable thrill moved through his chest. Sustained investment, finally yielding return.
He let it live for a moment. Then he exhaled, and it settled. His eyes went calm again.
Not finished. Understanding it, replicating it, that only closed out the research phase.
He needed to make it a spell. Something he could call on instantly, without constructing the magical structure from scratch each time.
The way Space Warp worked. He wanted decomposition to work the same way.
---
Back in Greenhouse Three.
All twenty Mandrakes were dead. Their leaves drooped and curled, stems shriveled, the humanoid outlines reduced to barely recognizable hollows.
They lay across the edges of the planting troughs like a row of specimens gutted of everything inside.
He sat by the window, back to the row of corpses, facing the dark, and sank his consciousness inward.
The stars spread across his mental landscape. Four and a half stars' worth of radiance swept the surface of his mind, pressing down the nine days' accumulated fatigue and exhilaration alike, leaving his thoughts clean and empty.
Then he began retracing how the Space Warp spell had come into existence.
At first, all he'd known was that house-elves could do it. He'd understood the principle: fold space so two points touched. But there'd been no existing incantation to recite, no standard wand movement to copy.
He'd had to produce the result first, then reverse-engineer the process from there.
Now he needed to do the same thing, and this time it was simpler.
He already had the result. He already had the experience of developing a spell.
All that remained was to derive a spell framework that could reliably reproduce the effect.
His eyes opened. The sky outside the window was still black, sea wind still pushing in from the east, still cool.
He began defining the boundaries of this magical action.
It acted on the structure of existence itself. It severed the relationship between whole and parts. Its core image was the loosening of what had already set.
He needed a Latin root that could carry that image precisely.
He searched his memory.
Reddo. To return, to restore to an original state.
Solvo. To loosen, to untie, to release.
Dissolvo. To loosen completely, yo break down entirely.
He repeated the word silently, feeling the syllables vibrate against palate and throat.
Three syllables. Stress on the second. The vowels open enough, the consonants closing with enough force that the word wouldn't blur during rapid casting.
That was the one.
What about the wand movement?
Space Warp used a single-handed arc, representing the path of folding space.
But this magic wasn't about folding. It was about loosening and dissolving. No complex trajectory needed. A single, clear gesture aimed at the target would suffice.
He extended his right hand. The wand slid into his grip. Facing an empty corner of the greenhouse, he pressed his wrist downward, the tip angling toward the floor.
Like pressing something into dust.
That was it.
Simple and direct.
He had the incantation. He had the wand movement. What remained was the part where magic completed itself.
Dumbledore had said magic needed white space. Do what needed doing, then leave room for the magic to breathe. Let it ferment on its own.
Regulus closed his eyes.
In his consciousness, he built the Mandrake's Magic Circulation one more time.
Then he opened his eyes, raised his right hand, lifted the wand, and brought the tip down.
"Dissolvo."
The spell structure snapped into form faster and more smoothly than he'd expected.
The threads found their positions on their own. The mesh adjusted its density without guidance. Grey-green light flowed along the edges, and then...
Then the spell was complete.
He held the stance and repeated it.
"Dissolvo."
This time he caught every detail. The incantation triggered the hardened model in his consciousness.
Magic flowed from the wand and automatically traced the model's preset path through one full cycle, releasing in the form of the decomposition attribute.
He hadn't directed the magic to do anything. He'd only laid down a track. The magic ran it on its own and stepped off at the end.
That was what a spell was.
Regulus lowered his wand.
Outside, the sky had begun to lighten.
He walked outside and cast the spell on a freshly dug-up gnome from the plantation grounds.
The instant the grey-green light touched it, the gnome went rigid. Then it decomposed. Skin to bone, outside to inside, losing its order with perfect order.
Zero point three seconds.
He noted it down. Against organic life, the spell took effect in zero point two to zero point five seconds, varying with the target's size and magical resistance.
Next, he tested it on inorganic material. A chunk of granite picked up from the base of the wall, about the size of a fist.
"Dissolvo."
Grey-green light struck the rock's surface. A chip flaked off, roughly the size of a fingernail, the edge ragged.
Three more casts. Three shallow pits in the stone, none deeper than half an inch.
He noted it. Extremely low efficiency against inorganic matter.
Then he tested it on a magical construct.
He retrieved an old charm box from the storeroom, its lid inscribed with defensive enchantments.
Six casts at full power. The charm box's surface dimmed for an instant, then recovered.
He continued recording. Essentially ineffective against established magical structures.
Testing complete.
Regulus had finished the Decomposition Curse's first form.
Standard casting. Wand-aimed. Single incantation trigger. Grey-green beam. On contact with organic life, decomposition.
Protego could block it effectively.
Then he started modifying.
A Mandrake's magic propagated through its cry. He didn't need a carrier, but carriers had their own advantages.
Sound waves ignored cover. Sound waves hit an area. Sound waves, if you couldn't hear them, you didn't know how to defend, or whether you needed to.
He sat in the corner of the greenhouse for six hours, layering the magic model onto the physics of sound-wave generation.
The Mandrake's cry was a biological trait. So he needed the magic model itself to produce sound waves.
Three hours to make the model generate a vibration frequency during operation. Two more to push that frequency below the range of human hearing.
Below twenty hertz. Infrasound.
He cast at the dead Mandrake husk in the corner of the greenhouse.
An invisible ripple expanded through the air, struck the wall, rebounded, and dissipated.
He couldn't hear it. Didn't want to. But he didn't need to take precautions either, because his Constant Protego was active, and it was strong.
What he could sense was the grey-green decomposition attribute riding inside that ripple.
He recorded this as the Decomposition Curse's second form.
Low-frequency sound-wave propagation. Area effect. No specific directionality. No visual signature.
Protego could weaken it but not fully block it. Sound waves would penetrate the barrier, though the barrier would strip away the harmful magic.
Without protection, a direct hit would be near-certain death.
Near-certain. He hadn't tested it on a living person yet.
Regulus set down his wand.
Nine days to understand the Mandrake's decomposition. One day to turn it into two spells.
One visible. One invisible.
One a beam, precise and lethal at a single point. The other a ripple, sweeping a battlefield in silence.
Both had grown from the same plant. The same drop of magic. The same pinch of dust.
He'd completed an advanced application of Verdant Magic. A full closed loop from observation to replication to creation.
A summation of everything he'd been building toward over the past year.
But it wasn't enough.
What he had now was a perfect copy of the Mandrake's decomposition effect. Callable at will, no Mandrakes required, no preparation needed.
Still, it remained the Mandrake's trick. Not his own.
Its applications were narrow. Devastating against organic life, negligible against inorganic matter, useless against magical constructs.
On a real battlefield, one Protego and the whole thing became a light show.
That wasn't what he wanted.
---
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