The masked figure flicked his wand forward. The motion was light, but carried weight.
At the same time, the other two had been fighting their way backward, step by step, until they stood at the cliff's edge. No words passed between them. They retreated in unison, launched themselves into the void, and vanished into the dark. Below, the heavy slap of bodies hitting water echoed upward.
They were gone. But the invisible attack they'd left behind was not.
It surged toward Regulus and Freya.
It struck his mental barrier and spread instantly.
Once inside the barrier, it didn't attack. It searched.
It moved like a living thing, spreading along the surface, probing for gaps, thin points, flaws. Anything it could exploit.
There were none. His barrier held seamless and whole.
Then it changed tactics.
No brute-force assault. Instead, it chose infiltration. It split itself into countless hair-thin tendrils and bored inward from every conceivable angle, each one carrying the same message: What's the point of fighting? What's the point of resisting? What's the point of staying alive?
The thoughts flooded in, a tide trying to drown his will.
Regulus could feel it. His surface-level consciousness was being rewritten.
The desire to fight, the hunger for victory, the drive to prove himself... all of it blurred, softened, faded. Every conviction about why battle mattered was swapped for indifference. Every belief about the value of survival was overwritten with meaninglessness.
Why am I standing here?
Whether those two masked figures live or die... does it matter?
Whatever Freya's hiding... what difference does it make?
None of it matters. Nothing matters at all.
He understood now what Freya had described. The kind of attack that made you forget why you were resisting in the first place.
But his core self-awareness remained untouched.
He sat at the center of his mental landscape, watching the erosion spread. The Occlumency labyrinth he'd constructed held it in check, trapping the intrusion in its corridors, keeping it far from anything vital.
He didn't rush to purge it. Instead, he deliberately opened a crack and allowed a sliver of the attack to seep into a deeper layer of consciousness. Not the deepest. Just deep enough to observe.
He wanted to feel what this thing did when it got further in.
In the deeper strata, his star guided meditation ran denser, tighter.
The attack met starlight. The tendrils of erosion touched the net and stalled, but they didn't relent. They coiled around the orbital paths, trying to worm past, pushing toward the core.
Their message never stopped. A thousand voices whispering at once: Give up. It's pointless. Nothing matters.
Then came something more direct. A chill, not physical but cognitive.
Like the floor of the deep ocean, a place without light, without sound, without life. Only crushing pressure and endless dark. The environment itself was the argument: individual existence is meaningless, individual will has no value, individual struggle is futile.
The cold tried to smother the starlight. Tried to plant the concept of that abyss at the center of his mind.
But the star guided meditation held firm.
Light and cold collided. Annihilated each other. Consumed each other in equal measure.
And then Regulus noticed something.
Bellatrix.
The star of Orion that symbolized protection. It had been half-lit before, flickering between dim and bright. Now, slowly, its glow was strengthening.
The change was subtle, but real.
Rewriting consciousness. Guarding the self.
Guarding?
Something stirred in him.
Bellatrix corresponded to the concept of protection. And right now, it was actively resisting an attack that tried to overwrite his identity.
Didn't that qualify?
Guarding his consciousness from erosion. Guarding his sense of reality from being overwritten. Guarding the fundamental definition of who he was.
The discovery opened a new line of thought, but the experiment was over. He let nothing more through.
His mental barrier snapped tight. Every tendril that had wormed its way inside was severed in an instant, trapped and isolated.
He channeled the full force of the star guided meditation. All four and a half stars blazed to life. Magic Circulation accelerated, grinding the erosion piece by piece, scattering it to nothing.
The entire process, from the attack's arrival to his experimentation to the final purge, lasted no more than three seconds.
Regulus turned his attention back to the real world.
And saw the flicker of blue flame in front of Freya.
It was small. Just a brief flash in the space before her, lasting less than half a second, like a shield triggered and immediately withdrawn. It had blocked something. Destroyed something.
That distinctive shape, that striking color, and that purposeful function all come together seamlessly.
Something in the back of his mind jolted.
Freya lowered her wand and turned her head. Their eyes met.
In the dark, hers were very bright.
For reasons he couldn't entirely name, Regulus raised one eyebrow. Barely a motion, but enough for her to catch.
She looked away first. Turned toward the cliff where the masked figures had jumped, her lips pressing into a thin line.
The battlefield, so violent a moment ago, fell quiet.
Freya stood at the cliff's edge with her back to him.
Her gaze drifted out over the distant water and gradually lost focus. She didn't turn around. Didn't look at the boy walking steadily toward her.
Her braid hung down her back, a few loose strands lifted by the sea wind. She just stood there.
Regulus watched her silhouette, his stride unhurried, the distance closing. His mind turned.
The blue flame. Had she meant for him to see it?
Or had she not expected him to recover so quickly, to end the fight against that Mental Erosion so fast?
Or maybe she hadn't expected him to resist it at all?
Any of those were possible.
He replayed the battle. Freya's performance had been too deliberate.
She'd warned him beforehand that Protego wouldn't hold, told him to prioritize his mental defenses. She understood this type of attack intimately.
Understanding it but not preventing it could only mean one thing: she'd let it happen on purpose.
But if that part was intentional... what about the blue flame?
Was that deliberate too?
Germany.
Blue flame.
Those two words side by side made it impossible not to connect them.
Was Freya truly a member of the Eisenhardt family?
The question surfaced, but Regulus weighed it against what he knew. His father had made the introduction personally.
Orion Black, Head of House Black, had led the family for decades. He'd met countless people, handled countless affairs, and maintained close ties with every major house. The Eisenhardts and the Blacks had been allied for generations. Their standing in European wizarding society was comparable, and they interacted frequently.
Under those circumstances, Orion would never make an error as elementary as misidentifying someone.
Some stranger shows up claiming to be so-and-so of the Eisenhardt family, and Orion just accepts it? Formally introduces her to his heir in the drawing room of 12 Grimmauld Place?
Regulus dismissed the idea.
Impossible.
Orion Black could not be fooled.
Unless...
Another possibility took shape.
Unless the identity of Freya von Eisenhardt was itself genuine. At least on some level.
She truly was Eisenhardt. She simply had another layer beneath it. Another history, another lineage, another bloodline no one spoke of.
Was that possible?
He considered it carefully and realized that it was.
Pure-blood families had been intermarrying for centuries. Bloodlines were tangled beyond separation. Carrying the blood of several houses at once was the norm, not the exception. If one of those houses had, at some point, married into something exceptional... then a descendant inheriting that person's blood and certain traits was entirely plausible.
It was all speculation, perhaps baseless, but that blue flame was too distinctive to ignore and too singular to dismiss without a second thought.
He reached her side and stood shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the cliff.
He didn't ask.
Whatever Freya's purpose, everything so far pointed in the same direction: she meant him no harm.
If she'd wanted to set him up, she wouldn't have come to England herself, wouldn't have brought him here from the Black residence. She wouldn't have fought alongside him, wouldn't have warned him about those defenses ahead of time.
Letting that Mental Erosion through... that looked more like a test.
She was testing him, pushing him, watching to see whether he could hold, how much he could withstand, and what he would do once he did.