Baruk was silent for a long time. Its chelicerae opened and closed without sound.
All eight legs bent slightly, its center of gravity sinking, as though it were replaying the experience, struggling to organize the strangeness into words.
A string of low, halting clicks emerged, thick with uncertainty.
"Strange... the light... when it hit me... something in my head just... buzzed..." Baruk's voice was thinner than Aragog's, pitched higher, but it carried the same friction-textured quality unique to spiders.
"Then... I just felt... like everyone around me... why were they so slow? So stupid? Father Aragog... didn't seem like much either? I... I could do better... I was better than all of them..."
The more it spoke, the more confused it became. Its chelicerae ground against each other, forelegs tapping the ground in scattered bursts. Click-click-click-click.
"But those weren't my thoughts... I know they weren't... except right then, they were just there... and they felt real..."
Baruk continued: "I... I could do better... I was better than all of them... I should be the one leading..."
Aragog's massive head swung toward Regulus. All eight eyes brimmed with shock, doubt, and something deeper. A gravity that hadn't been there before.
It didn't understand the magic. Didn't understand how a beam of light could make its smartest offspring suddenly believe it was the greatest thing alive.
But it could tell that Baruk shouldn't have acted that way. This young wizard had done something inside Baruk's head.
Regulus ignored Aragog for the moment and kept his attention on Baruk.
"Do you still feel any of it now?"
Baruk shook its whole body hard, all eight legs trembling at once. The bristles across its carapace rippled in a wave, like a dog shaking off water.
"Gone... it's like... I had some strange dream... and now I'm awake..."
Regulus gave a satisfied nod, stowed his wand, and stepped forward to pat the foreleg Baruk had lowered toward him.
The leg was thicker than his arm. The chitin was cool and smooth beneath his palm, like touching a black stone worn slick by years of tide.
"Thank you," he said.
Baruk was too tall. It dipped its head so he could reach its back.
The dorsal carapace was covered in fine, dense bristles that felt like a stiff-haired brush under his hand. A shallow groove ran down the center from head to abdomen, the chitin inside it darker, almost too deep to see into.
Regulus patted twice.
Baruk answered with a quick, bright click. Nothing like any of its earlier sounds.
A question surfaced in his mind, unbidden.
Spiders dreamed?
Was dreaming the exclusive privilege of intelligent creatures?
What about Bowtruckles? Did those things even have brains?
Did they dream too?
Aragog held its silence for a long time. The light in its compound eyes flickered, dim and bright by turns.
Its chelicerae pressed together, barbs tucked against the inner walls, motionless. Eight legs stood planted, not a twitch among them.
Regulus watched it. The smarter the spider, it seemed, the more its eyes could carry emotion.
He glanced at the others around the clearing. Some had cloudy eyes, filmed over like dirty glass. Unreadable.
Others were hollow. Nothing in them but the cold gleam of a predator.
Baruk's kind, where you could read curiosity, confusion, bewilderment, that was already a high order of intelligence.
Most of the rest hovered somewhere between slightly clever and pure instinct, the light in their eyes monotonous to the point of pity.
Aragog spoke at last. "Your experiment... it worked?"
Regulus nodded. "It worked."
A preliminary success. Weaker than he'd hoped. The arrogance had lasted only ten seconds and hadn't been strong enough to do more than make Baruk strut in front of its kin. It hadn't truly compromised its judgment.
Short duration. Shallow impact. Needed fixing.
The direction, though, was clear. The light had to be more focused, not diffused. It needed to hit the most central pair of compound eyes dead-on.
The emotional sample had to be purer. The arrogance had been contaminated with scorn, and the scorn laced with disdain. Too muddied.
The transmission had to be faster. Three seconds was an eternity. No one in a fight would give him three seconds.
Baruk's feedback confirmed the underlying logic was sound.
Light could carry emotion. Emotion could skew judgment. The brain would mistake an external impulse for its own thought.
But this version was nowhere near ready for use on a human.
He'd have to come back. Often.
Baruk let out a light, quick click with an upward lilt at the end.
Regulus caught the cheerfulness in it.
The spider was pleased. Hit with a beam of light, brain buzzing for a few seconds, and it woke up feeling like it could rule the colony.
It knew the feeling was false, but apparently the experience had been a rush all the same.
He turned to Aragog. "You said I owe you one. You can claim it now, or take your time."
Aragog considered. Its compound eyes shimmered.
The uppermost pair hung half-lidded. The middle sets rotated rapidly. The lowest pair fixed on Regulus without blinking.
"Later."
Regulus shrugged internally and nodded. A debt was a debt.
But debt or not, the matter of secrecy still needed settling.
He couldn't let the spiders spread word of his visit or the magic behind the experiment. Not because he feared Aragog would betray him deliberately. It had no reason to.
But Hagrid would ask.
Hagrid visited Aragog on a regular schedule, bringing food and news.
And Aragog couldn't lie to Hagrid. It was capable of lying, but it wouldn't. Not to him.
That kind of bond, anyone who'd ever raised something understood it. This was a gap that needed sealing.
"As for the explanation you wanted," Regulus said. "Why I thought I could do this."
Aragog shifted its great head. Eight eyes fixed on him.
Regulus said nothing more.
In the next instant, orange-red flame erupted across his body. Fire flowed along his arms, coiled over his shoulders, leapt from fingertip to fingertip.
Every tongue of it was locked tight under his will, not a wisp escaping outward.
He'd suppressed the temperature to its minimum, but the air inside the nest still turned scorching. Strands of silk trembled in the heat, their edges curling, though none caught fire.
Aragog lurched backward. All eight legs kicked at once, claw tips gouging eight deep furrows through the silk-padded floor. Its enormous body slammed into several thick silk support columns behind it, and the whole nest shuddered.
Dewdrops clinging to the web shook loose and pattered down, vaporizing into mist in the heated air.
The fine bristles covering its body curled at the tips, releasing a sharp, acrid stench of singeing.
Fire. The thing Acromantulas feared above all else.
Aragog didn't recognize Fiendfyre, but it recognized the terror. That kind surged up from blood memory, faster than any rational thought, seizing the body outright.
Its legs shook. Its chelicerae trembled. Even its breathing fell apart.
But it didn't flee. Intelligence won over instinct again.
Mostly because it saw that the silk beneath the fire-wreathed young wizard's feet hadn't burned. Not a single strand.
Not just unburned. Not even curled at the edges.
The silk lay quietly around his feet as though the flames beside it were someone else's problem entirely.
The smaller spiders scattered in every direction. A few panicked ones collided, tangled into a knot of chelicerae and legs they couldn't untangle. One slammed into a support column and got a face full of webbing, frantically clawing at it with its forelegs.
Mosag had retreated to the deepest recess of the nest. Eight legs drawn tight, abdomen pressed flat to the ground, compound eyes squeezed shut, chelicerae tucked beneath her head. The posture of something waiting to die.
Baruk hadn't run. It backed up a few steps and held, legs slightly bent, weight low.
Its compound eyes stayed locked on Regulus, and there was no fear in them. Only something indefinable, shifting.
Then its gaze drifted toward Aragog. Just for a moment before it pulled back.
Regulus noticed.
The magic's effects had faded, but that feeling, I could do better, might still be lingering somewhere inside it.
It had looked at Aragog. Its father. As if confirming something. Or denying it.
He brought his gaze back to Aragog.
The orange-red flames withdrew into his body and vanished, instant and total.
All that remained in the nest was the acrid smell and the soft rustling of silk still swaying. Hot air hung heavy, carrying the stench of scorched bristles as it drifted upward.
Regulus didn't say another word.
You wanted an explanation. That was the explanation.
There was no "I thought I could do this." Only "I can."
Aragog watched the flames disappear but didn't dare approach. It stood frozen, all eight legs bent, body slung low, chelicerae clamped tight.
In that moment, it couldn't even locate its anger. All that was left was fear.
Regulus's voice carried no inflection, as though nothing had happened. "I'd prefer that no creature outside spiderkind learns I was here tonight. The magic, as well. Same rule."
There was no threat in the words. But if Aragog couldn't read between lines that plain, then all that intelligence was wasted.
Its chelicerae opened and closed once. The voice was still low, still deep, but scraped clean of emotion. As if the fire had burned everything else away.
All it said was: "It won't."
Regulus nodded, satisfied.
Aragog ventured a careful question. "The condition?"
Regulus allowed himself a small smile. "A promise is a promise. Take your time deciding."
Then he added: "I'll be back."
Aragog fell silent. When it spoke again, the voice was small, carrying a reluctance it couldn't quite suppress. "You're really not going to the centaurs?"
Regulus didn't take the bait. He gave Baruk one last look. "Baruk's impressive."
And then he was gone.
Silence reclaimed the nest. A long while passed before Mosag crept to Aragog's side.
She moved slowly, eight legs reaching forward in cautious alternation, as though afraid of disturbing something.
Her chelicerae brushed Aragog's foreleg, and a string of low, worried hisses spilled out.
Aragog touched his chelicerae gently to Mosag's, compound eyes still trained on the spot where Regulus had vanished. The uppermost pair stayed wide open. The middle sets turned slowly. The lowest pair didn't move at all.
Off to the side, Baruk clicked softly. Click... click-click... click. Quiet, halting sounds, like someone savoring a memory, or mumbling to itself.
Its foreleg tapped the ground in an aimless rhythm. Tap-tap-tap-tap. No pattern to it.
Aragog glanced at it once, then settled back onto the silk cushion and closed its largest pair of eyes.
The Forbidden Forest sank into stillness. Only the distant call of a night owl carried through the dark, and the mist that never left the hollow drifted on, unchanged.