Thursday afternoon. Herbology. Greenhouse Three.
Professor Sprout stood at the head of the bench.
Second-year Slytherins and Gryffindors lined up on opposite sides of the bench, facing each other across the six pots with an aisle between them. The Slytherin side was quieter. The Gryffindors, fewer in number but louder, whispered among themselves, a few craning their necks for a better look at the Tentacula.
Sprout clapped her hands twice. The greenhouse fell silent.
"Today's lesson is straightforward," she said, her voice warm. "Trimming dead vine tips."
She picked up a pair of long-handled shears from the bench and held up one of the pots so they could all see. Several tendrils had gone grey and withered at their ends, a stark contrast against the living purple-green.
"Dead tips no longer secrete venom, but they remain attached to the living vine and continue draining nutrients from the plant. They need regular clearing."
She shifted the shears to her right hand and raised her wand with her left, lips moving. "Herba Protego."
A pale green light shot from the wand tip and settled over both her hands and forearms in a thin film, clinging to the skin, no thicker than a sheet of parchment.
"The Plant Shield Charm, Herba Protego." She flexed her arms. "Designed specifically for magical plants. Much lighter than Protego, so it won't dull your grip, but it blocks most plant toxins from direct absorption. Dragon-hide gloves are your physical barrier. This is your magical one. Both layers together, and only then are you covered."
Her right hand darted forward, wrist flicking. A sharp snip, and the dead tip dropped away. The living vine lashed reflexively at the air and struck nothing.
The severed piece landed on the bench, dry and brittle, crumbling at the slightest touch.
"Remember the order. Cast the charm first, then work. Gloves up to the elbow. Shears touch only the dead sections. Dead tips are grey and brittle, easy to tell apart from living vine. Check the color before you cut, and don't get curious with living growth."
She set the shears back on the bench and looked over the class. "If a vine wraps around you, do not pull. The harder you pull, the tighter it squeezes. Hit it with a Freezing Charm, then peel it off slowly. Wild Venomous Tentacula love rock crevices and dead trees. Out there they're far more aggressive: longer vines, thicker, higher venom concentration. The greenhouse variety has been selectively bred over generations to reduce aggression, but don't let that make you careless. Even the tamest Tentacula is still a carnivorous plant. It can't tell if you're here to prune it or if you're lunch."
A Gryffindor boy raised his hand. Sprout nodded.
He pointed at the fine spines along the vines. "One prick and you're poisoned?"
"The vine tips are the most toxic. The lateral spines are mainly for climbing and holding prey. Lower toxicity, but they'll still cause numbness. Diluted Tentacula venom is one of the ingredients in Deflating Draught. St Mungo's experimented decades ago with higher concentrations as a local anesthetic..." She shook her head, her tone turning reminiscent. "Dosing was too difficult to control. They abandoned it after a few years. Overdo the anesthetic and the patient never wakes up."
She distributed the shears, adding one last reminder. "Gloves to the elbow. Don't skip it because it's a bother. A former student of mine thought he was tough enough to go bare-handed. His fingers were numb for three days. Couldn't hold his wand."
Laughter rippled through the greenhouse, loudest from the Gryffindor side.
They broke into pairs. Slytherins on one side, Gryffindors on the other, two students to a pot.
The Slytherin half worked in relative quiet, nothing but the clip of shears and the occasional murmured exchange.
Regulus was paired with Cuthbert.
Cuthbert wrestled the dragon-hide gloves up his arms, muttering the whole time. "These are enormous. My fingers are swimming around in here. Can't even hold the shears properly."
He held up one hand in front of his face. The glove fingers dangled past his own by a full joint, all five tips flopping emptily.
Regulus ignored him, his attention on the Tentacula in front of them. His magical perception spread over the plant automatically.
The Tentacula's magical circuitry was an entirely different system from the Whomping Willow's.
The Willow was linear. Magic flowed from the roots up through the trunk at high speed, direction clear, splitting at branching nodes, narrowing and compressing toward the extremities before releasing. The whole process was rapid and purposeful.
This Tentacula was nothing like that. Magic seeped from the roots toward the vine tips without following fixed channels, diffusing everywhere, flowing wherever it happened to reach, only gathering at the venom glands once it arrived at the ends.
He recalled Sprout mentioning the Tentacula's magical property: paralysis.
He'd never seen it strike a living target, so he couldn't confirm how the paralytic effect operated. Based on the magical distribution alone, it was structurally opposite to the Willow's oscillation.
For now he could only observe the magical characteristics. How it functioned on living tissue would require seeing it in action.
But if the effect matched its distribution pattern, the attack was probably single-trigger: contact and activation, one and done.
A vague thought flickered.
If that was the case, then the Tentacula's attack logic was the perfect complement to oscillation. One for pinpoint destruction, the other for total-area coverage.
He let the thought go. Not every plant he studied needed to become a new spell.
Cuthbert, after considerable struggling, finally got his gloves and cuffs secured. He picked up the shears, leaned toward the Tentacula, identified a grey dead tip, and reached in to cut.
Snip. The dead tip broke off and fell onto the bench, breaking into several pieces. A living vine beside it probed toward his wrist. He yanked his hand back so fast the shears nearly flew out of his grip.
"Shit!"
He hissed the word under his breath, then looked at Regulus and found him staring at the Tentacula in what appeared to be a trance.
Cuthbert shrugged and went back to trimming.
The greenhouse filled with the intermittent clip of shears, the scrape of dragon-hide, and the occasional yelp.
Something went wrong on the Gryffindor side.
Colin Macmillan's glove wasn't secured properly. Mid-trim, a living vine whipped in from the side and its tip scraped through the gap between glove and sleeve, catching the inside of his wrist.
He hissed. A shallow mark, no blood, but his fingers went dead. The shears clattered onto the bench.
Gareth Diggory, across from him, reacted fast. He grabbed Macmillan and hauled him backward, turning to shout, "Professor."
Sprout crossed the distance in a few quick strides. She froze the still-writhing vine with a Freezing Charm. It locked in midair, a thin layer of frost crystallizing over the barbs at its tip.
From her apron pocket she produced a glass vial no bigger than a thumb, unscrewed the cap, and dripped a few drops of clear liquid onto the scratch.
Two fingers pressed against specific points on Macmillan's wrist, and she spoke softly. "No pain. Give it a moment."
"Tentacula paralysis travels from the contact point upward through the body. It moves slowly, numbing as it goes." She glanced at his wrist, her tone still calm, unhurried. "You only got grazed. Not much venom. Your fingers will come back in a few minutes. If a vine wraps you and venom keeps seeping in, within a minute your entire arm goes numb. If it wraps your throat..."
Her gaze swept the class.
"Then numbness is the least of your problems."
The greenhouse went quiet.
"So. Gloves secured."
She walked back toward the Slytherin side, checking progress along the way, pausing at Alex's pot for a brief look. A nod, and she moved on.
While Sprout treated the wound, Regulus had swept his magical perception over Macmillan's wrist.
He caught the paralytic property's path of diffusion beneath the skin.
It matched his earlier assessment. Once the Tentacula's magic entered the body, it permeated along the nervous system: diffuse, even, following no fixed channel, spreading wherever it reached.
A sharper thought formed.
The diffusion logic bore a strong resemblance to his own magical perception.
When his perception covered a target, it infiltrated along the target's magical circuitry, taking existing channels where it found them, routing around where it didn't. The Tentacula's paralytic magic did the same thing, only instead of magical circuitry, it traveled the nervous system.
Two modes of diffusion, same underlying logic. The difference was that his perception only observed. The Tentacula's paralysis took effect.
And nearly every offensive spell he'd encountered worked the opposite way. Magic hit the target and then forced inward from the point of impact, no path discrimination, brute-force coverage.
Self-routing diffusion versus brute-force saturation. The contrast brought an extreme example to mind: the Killing Curse.
Green light touches a living body and it dies. No intermediate state.
But the Killing Curse hadn't started as a killing spell.
Its root words, Avada Kedavra, came from ancient Aramaic. The meaning: let this thing be destroyed.
Originally it was a medical incantation. Ancient healers used it to kill diseased tissue with surgical precision. Plague, gangrene, tumors. It destroyed what needed to die and left everything else untouched. The disease dies; the patient lives.
But perhaps because it was too hard. The precision it demanded was immense: exact delivery, the ability to distinguish target from non-target, to let only the condemned perish.
Or perhaps because it was too easy. Strip away all those requirements, fire a bolt of green light, and disease and patient, the condemned and the innocent, die together.
Either way, it became what it was today. One hit, total lethality, contact equals death.
But what if the precision problem could be solved?
What if there were a way to make magic route itself the way Tentacula paralysis did, following the nervous system to find exactly where it needed to go? Then perhaps the spell could return to its original purpose.
Kill the diseased tissue. Kill the parasitic magical entity. Kill the cursed, contaminated magical node. Preserve everything healthy.
The idea was a long way from practical application. The precision threshold was enormous. The slightest miscalculation and everything dies together.
And even if the theory held, there was no immediate use case.
Regulus's mouth twitched at the corner.
But he was, in his warm and benevolent heart, unable to stand idly by while people suffered. Someday, when the time was right, he could try.
He withdrew his perception, picked up the shears, and went back to trimming dead vines.
The rest of the session passed without incident.
Sprout moved between the benches, stopping now and then to check each pair's progress, crouching beside one Gryffindor's pot to smooth out a cut he'd made at the wrong angle.
When trimming was done, she inspected the results group by group.
The Slytherin pairs had all met the standard. The Gryffindor side was rougher: two or three pots unevenly trimmed, dead tips left behind, a few living vine ends accidentally clipped. Sprout shook her head but didn't scold, only reminded them to secure their gloves next time and pointed out the correct cutting locations for the offending groups.
Colin Macmillan's fingers had recovered. He stood shaking out his hand while Diggory ribbed him about nearly being disarmed by a plant.
Class ended. Students packed up tools, peeled off gloves, and filed toward the greenhouse door.
Cuthbert dropped his gloves on the bench and glanced at Regulus.
Regulus was wiping down his shears and placing them back on the bench, movements unhurried, showing no intention of leaving.
Cuthbert shrugged, took his gloves, and walked out. Alex and Hermes followed.
The greenhouse fell quiet. Two people remained.
Sprout gathered the leftover dead vine tips from the bench, fingers smeared with dirt and sap, wiping them absently on her apron. She bent to pick up a few fallen pieces from the floor and tossed them into the compost bin, then hung the scattered shears back on their wall hooks one by one.
That done, she straightened up and surveyed the greenhouse, as if deciding what to attend to next.
Then her gaze settled on Regulus. Her tone was warm, touched with knowing. "Mr. Black, you spent the entire lesson observing the Tentacula's magic. What did you find?"
Regulus stood on the opposite side of the bench, not surprised in the least.
He'd used only his magical perception, hadn't drawn on ambient magic at all, and the professor had still noticed.
Sprout was a formidable witch.
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