The next ten days passed without incident. The Abyssal Whispers never resurfaced.
For Regulus, it was a rare stretch of quiet.
Three patrols a day, morning, noon, and evening, always with Freya. They'd walk the perimeter of the town, check the protective runes, confirm no unusual magical fluctuations. The rest of the time was his.
He wandered the town when the mood struck, working his way through every shop lining the cobblestone streets.
The magical materials shop carried pearl powder and seaweed extract unique to the North Sea. The owner was a taciturn old wizard who acknowledged Regulus with a nod and went back to sorting his stock.
The general store was run by a woman with more to say. She spoke English thick with accent and wanted to know where he was from, how old he was, how long he'd be staying.
Regulus answered politely and told her he was eighteen. She studied his face, shook her head, and muttered something in German he didn't catch.
Most of his hours were spent in the cottage. There was no shortage of things to practice.
The Decomposition Curse needed refinement. Switching between its two forms had to become instinctive, seamless, with no hesitation in the transition.
The coordination between space warp and spatial anchors still required calibration. He experimented with integrating the mind splitting technique into the process.
His Fiendfyre control held steady at three birds, but the splitting speed and precision of his command could still improve.
He'd brought Professor McGonagall's notebook with him and read a few pages each night before sleep. The geometric figures on the page moved and shifted, rearranging themselves into new configurations. He was beginning to read meaning in their patterns.
Ten days of simple living. Patrol, sea, practice, notebook.
His time with Freya grew longer by degrees. Some evenings they'd walk to the tavern together for dinner.
Anyone who spent enough time around Regulus, provided they stopped fixating on his appearance, stopped treating him like a child. The way he carried himself, the way he spoke, the way he assessed the world around him... spend enough time in his company and those things became impossible to ignore.
He never had to perform maturity. People simply forgot his age on their own.
Freya's perception of him was shifting too.
One evening after patrol, they stood at the edge of the cliff watching the sun go down. She spoke without preamble. "You remind me of someone."
He turned to look at her, but she didn't elaborate. Her gaze rested on the distant water, lost in thought.
From Freya's perspective, the boy was genuinely unusual.
Through their conversations, she'd discovered that his understanding of magic didn't merely exceed his age. It exceeded most wizards she'd ever known.
Not all of them. But enough that her mind had begun, almost involuntarily, to place him alongside that other person for comparison.
The comparison itself was telling.
Once, they'd talked about the nature of magic.
Regulus said it offhandedly: "Magic is a tool. It's a language. But at its core, it's a relationship. Between the caster and the world. Between magical energy and matter. Between individual will and collective will."
Freya was quiet for a long time after that.
She remembered hearing something similar, years ago. She'd been fully grown then, seated below, listening as he laid out his grand theories of magic.
But all she could do was listen, accept and absorb.
The boy in front of her was twelve. Nobody had taught him this. Nobody had guided him to it. He'd arrived there on his own.
Another time, the subject turned to change in the wizarding world.
"The situation in Britain is really just a long-overdue reshuffling," Regulus said. "Voldemort's ideology isn't new. People were saying similar things centuries ago. But he turned ideology into a movement, and a movement into a war. That's what sets him apart from his predecessors."
"War changes everything," he continued. "Old rules shatter. New ones get built on top of the rubble. Families that cling to tradition without adapting will be swept aside. The ones that can adjust to the new order, or better yet, shape it themselves... those are the ones that survive."
The words pointed nowhere specific.
He was stating a pattern. Nothing more.
Freya asked, "Which kind is the House of Black?"
He glanced at her and smiled. "We'll survive. And we'll thrive."
She nodded and let it drop.
He said many things like that over those ten days.
About how Muggle technological development would eventually impact the wizarding world. About how Pure-blood ideology mutated differently from country to country. About where the confrontation between Dumbledore and Voldemort was ultimately headed.
His perspectives were always sharp, always from an angle no one else seemed to occupy.
Freya listened. Sometimes she nodded. Sometimes she frowned. Sometimes her expression said, plainly, How do you know all of this?
Whenever he caught that look, he'd smile. The dynamic was simple and comfortable.
Normally, he had no outlet for these thoughts.
Saying it all to Freya carried no agenda. No calculation. It was simply the act of speaking.
And that felt good.
As though all those thoughts he'd been carrying for years had finally found somewhere to go. He didn't need to worry whether she believed him, didn't need to wonder if she'd weaponize the information. Just saying it aloud was enough.
Freya gave back in kind.
She'd share how German wizards viewed this or that issue, what the elders of the Eisenhardt family thought about a particular question, what she'd read in some obscure text. When she spoke, her expression turned serious. She'd work to organize her thoughts, and sometimes when the right English word wouldn't come, she'd switch to German mid-sentence, catch herself, and switch back.
Regulus found it endearing.
One conversation turned to Voldemort.
Any discussion of the current European wizarding landscape inevitably circled back to two names: Dumbledore and Voldemort. Both operated in Britain, but wizards at their level cast shadows far beyond national borders.
Regulus brought them up first.
When he spoke about Dumbledore, something flickered across Freya's face.
Not hostility. Not discomfort. More like she had a great deal to say but had chosen, for reasons she kept to herself, not to say any of it. She listened, nodded occasionally, and never once took the thread.
When the subject shifted to Voldemort, she finally spoke. "He is an extraordinarily powerful Dark wizard. In Britain, his influence is at its zenith. Most Pure-blood families have already aligned with him, and the fervor is spreading."
She watched Regulus as she said it, studying his reaction.
His face showed nothing. The same neutral composure as always, edging toward indifference.
There was no fervor, no fear, and no loyalty.
Freya saw his reaction and quietly exhaled, relieved. Then she went on.
"His power is beyond question. But that's about it." Her tone was flat. Matter-of-fact. "He's been working the British Isles for years now, and he still hasn't secured a decisive advantage. Compared to..."
She stopped herself.
Regulus finished the thought for her. "Compared to a certain someone, the ambition's a bit small?"
She looked at him. Something brightened in her eyes for an instant before she caught it and smoothed it away. She neither confirmed nor denied.
Nobody doubted Voldemort's strength. He could turn Britain upside down and terrorize it to his heart's content.
But to the old Pure-blood families of Europe, the ones who'd lived through the Grindelwald era, a Dark wizard who'd spent this many years and still couldn't bring the British Ministry of Magic to heel was... well. Not that impressive.
That afternoon, after patrol, they found themselves at the cliff again.
"The view here is something else." Regulus gazed out across the water.
Freya looked around, then raised her hand and beckoned. The air rippled, and a house-elf appeared from nothing.
She spoke a few rapid sentences in German. The elf nodded and vanished with a crack.
Regulus raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He waited.
A few minutes later, the elf reappeared carrying a picnic blanket and several food boxes.
The boxes opened to reveal grilled sausage, dark rye bread, potato salad, pickled cucumber, and a few wedges of cheese, alongside a bottle of Pumpkin Juice and a glass of dark beer.
They settled onto the rocks, facing the sea, and ate.
---
Join my Patreon for early access to chapters: patreon.com/rivyura
Next Target 400PS :)