The parchment unfolded, flattened, its edges curling upward. Fibers rearranged, restructured, sprouting a beak. Two dark spots appeared where eyes should be.
A bird the size of a palm stood on the desktop, wings tucked, head cocked, as though taking in its surroundings.
The blue-white bead drifted from Regulus's right hand toward the little bird and sank into its chest.
A tremor ran through its body. A faint blue glow washed across its wings, imbuing it with magically driven life.
The bird fluttered its wings, lifted off, and landed on Alex's right shoulder.
It sang once. The sound was soft.
Alex blinked, and the anxiety drained from his eyes like a receding tide, replaced by something calm and clear.
As though his brain had been freed from the weight of emotion. Thinking became effortless.
He turned his head toward the bird on his shoulder. It was pacing, its eyes two dots of black ink, but there was something lively in them. Almost intelligent.
It sang again. The last trace of agitation in Alex's chest smoothed away.
He looked at Regulus. "Thank you."
Regulus nodded. "Study well."
He walked back to his own desk.
Cuthbert sidled over to Alex and reached out to poke at the bird. It tilted its head and regarded him.
The birdsong eased the knot of tension Cuthbert hadn't realized he'd been carrying. He glanced toward Regulus, asked nothing, and returned to his seat to open The Standard Book of Spells, Grade One.
The dormitory settled into quiet. Turning pages, the scratch of quill on parchment, and the bird's occasional call.
That sound seemed to carry its own kind of magic. Each time it rang out, the air shed another layer of restlessness and gained a measure of focus.
Regulus sat at his desk, thinking about Verdant Magic.
He hadn't practiced much this term. Hogwarts had no shortage of magical plants, but the ones students could access were all low-grade specimens.
Their magic was faint, their properties gentle. Fine for fundamentals.
But going deeper, extracting stronger magical properties, achieving finer control, that required higher-order species.
Those materials lived in the back reaches of the greenhouses, locked inside Professor Sprout's cabinets, or in the Forbidden Forest.
The Forbidden Forest. The image of that dark, lightless expanse flickered through his mind.
Hogwarts's restricted grounds. Entry forbidden without permission.
Every witch and wizard knew it held treasures, and every one of those treasures came with teeth.
Centaurs patrolled the deeper reaches. Acromantulas spun webs in the shadowed hollows. Thestrals soared between the canopy gaps. And there were things even Hagrid couldn't put a name to.
Next term. I'll need to go see for myself.
For now, what he could manage was direct extraction from low-grade plants like the Soothing Flower, preserving their calming properties.
Infusing that magic into a Transfiguration gave the resulting bird an inherent soothing effect.
Not as potent or immediate as a dedicated Calming Charm or a potion, but it lasted longer. The bird would persist until its magic ran dry, roughly four hours.
Progress was incremental, but his proficiency was climbing.
Over the holidays, he planned to spend a few days at the Black family's estate in Cornwall. Generations of the family had cultivated magical plants there, some varieties the outside world had never seen.
---
The exams themselves were unremarkable.
Charms.
Flitwick called students up one at a time to cast a Cheering Charm on a colorful feather.
One touch of Regulus's wand and the feather didn't just float. It waltzed through the air, trailing golden sparks.
Flitwick applauded.
Outstanding.
---
Transfiguration.
McGonagall required each student to turn a mouse into a snuffbox.
Regulus produced a silver case engraved with the Black family crest. When opened, a tiny mechanism sprang up and unfolded a miniature family tree.
McGonagall's mouth twitched.
She gave him the Outstanding anyway.
---
Potions.
Slughorn's exam was to brew a Pepperup Potion.
Regulus's finished product was crystal clear with a pearlescent sheen. Slughorn took one sip, and his eyes lit up like someone had cast a Cheering Charm on him.
Outstanding again.
---
After each exam, Regulus went to the library. Evenings were spent in the Room of Requirement as usual.
Space Warp practice had hit a plateau.
He could now transmit a Disarming Charm through a spatial corridor with zero degradation. The red bolt traveled the channel and struck the training dummy on the other side at full power.
But two problems remained unsolved.
First, the limit on Space Anchor Charms. He could sustain a maximum of five anchors simultaneously, each lasting twenty-five minutes.
He'd attempted six three times. Each attempt ended the same way: uneven magic distribution caused the anchors to interfere with each other, and two would collapse.
This demanded finer magical control and sharper spatial awareness. Likely he'd need to advance his star guided meditation further.
Second, sequential casting. He couldn't send two consecutive spells through the same corridor.
When the first spell passed through, residual magic destabilized the channel. A second spell entering the same corridor triggered spatial ripples, either deflecting the spell off-target or collapsing the corridor entirely.
The current workaround was more anchors. If he preset multiple anchor points around a target area, he could open a second corridor before the first one collapsed.
But that required completing a cycle of cast, warp, anchor, recast in a fraction of a second. Reaction speed, magical control, and spatial calculation, all pushed to their limits simultaneously.
The better solution was mastering spatial deformation.
If he could manipulate spatial structure directly the way McGonagall did, he could construct isolation layers within the corridor, allowing multiple spells to pass through in parallel.
Or he could wait until star guided meditation lit the fifth star. Once fully illuminated, the qualitative leap in mental and magical control should open new doors.
All of it needed time. The holidays would have to count.
---
Fiendfyre practice had shifted toward precision sculpting.
The Fiendfyre serpent was well-behaved now. It could coil around Regulus's arm, rear its head into a strike posture, temperature held within skin-safe range.
Splitting into two had stabilized as well. The duration was only thirty seconds, but both serpents could act independently, one climbing each arm, without devouring each other.
Regulus wanted to push further.
He'd never had a particular attachment to any animal before. But ever since summoning his Patronus, he'd decided: birds were nice.
They could fly. Their movement was elegant. Their vantage point was unmatched.
So he tried shaping the Fiendfyre into a bird.
Orange-red flame rose from his palm. He began sculpting, elongating the mass, separating head from torso, drawing out wings, trailing tail feathers.
But Fiendfyre had a natural inclination toward beasts. Fire dragons, Serpents, Chimeras.
It resisted small, delicate forms. The flame kept trying to swell, to expand, to sprout fangs and claws.
Regulus pressed back with his will.
He suppressed the fire's instinct to expand with one hand while carving detail with the other, the curve of the wings, the shape of the beak, the fork in the tail feathers.
The process was exhausting. Three tasks at once: maintaining the Fiendfyre's existence, suppressing its nature, and executing fine sculpting.
Magical drain was manageable. The mental load was brutal.
His brain split into three zones. One monitoring flame temperature. One maintaining structural stability. One executing sculpting commands.
Two hours later, the first Fiendfyre bird took shape.
It stood in his palm, sparrow-sized, its outline recognizably avian, but the details were rough.
Wings like two flat slabs of fire. Tail a loose bundle of flames. Head a featureless sphere.
It raised its head in a call, but no sound came.
Regulus began refining.
Using the Starlight Kite as his reference, he pushed and pulled at the Fiendfyre's surface with his magic. Wing feathers emerged in layers. Tail plumes separated into distinct tiers. Eyes and beak took shape on the head.
Refining was harder than the initial sculpting.
Three more hours passed. The Fiendfyre bird had become something worth looking at.
It stood in his palm, temperature beautifully contained. But it wasn't alive.
The paper bird he'd Transfigured for Alex paced on its own, tilted its head, sang unprompted.
Every movement the Fiendfyre bird made was directly controlled by Regulus. It had no autonomy.
That was Fiendfyre's nature. Destruction given form, driven by an instinct to consume and expand.
He could suppress it. He could shape it. But granting it a spirit, that ran counter to what Fiendfyre fundamentally was.
Regulus sent the bird on a circuit around the room.
It banked through the training chamber, wings beating, trailing waves of heat, its flight path steady.
But past three meters, he felt his control degrade. The fire grew restless. Jagged spurs appeared along the bird's edges. Temperature began to climb.
He recalled it immediately and crushed it out with his will.
After the Fiendfyre died, a scorched trace lingered in the air.
The magical structure in that patch had been warped, leaving irregular wrinkles.
Viewed through magical perception, the area was thinner than its surroundings. Spatial stability, compromised.
Regulus stared at that mark, and an idea surfaced.
What if I combined Verdant Magic with Fiendfyre?