Tom watched the spellwork carefully. What Dumbledore was using was an ancient purification enchantment, something with no modern equivalent, accessible only through archaic magical script. It said something about the old man's range that he could produce it without apparent effort.
A hexagonal fighter in the truest sense. Dark magic and Light, Transfiguration and ancient runes, all of it equally within reach.
Tom sent out a few more transfigured birds. They crossed the lake surface freely, without resistance, without being dragged down.
"I think we're through," Dumbledore said.
"I brought brooms." Newt produced them from the case and distributed them. Lupin declined, choosing to stay with Sirius on the bank. Nicolas also declined, on the grounds that he had brought a flying carpet, and sitting on a carpet was in every measurable way preferable to sitting on a broom. Tom immediately helped himself to a corner of it. He had never ridden one before.
Which left Dumbledore and Newt crossing the lake the traditional way, side by side on brooms, proceeding at a dignified pace.
"This is very pleasant," Tom said, from the carpet. It moved without the lurching instability of a broom. Smooth, stable, like sitting on something that had decided to be solid. "Much better. Almost like a sofa."
Then, without embarrassment: "Have you got more of these? I'd like two. For Daphne."
Nicolas gave him a look that communicated several things, the most prominent being that if Tom wanted them, he was perfectly capable of coming to the house and finding them himself, and asking was entirely redundant.
He didn't answer Tom. He spoke to Dumbledore instead. "The flight suppression Voldemort used comes from a tradition in the dark continent. I encountered it once through a tribal lineage. It requires living sacrifice to establish. More lives, stronger effect."
Dumbledore's tone did not change, but something underneath it did. "There was a village near here. Several decades ago. One day, the official record states, a plague broke out. No survivors."
Newt and Nicolas looked at the lake at the same time.
The village was at the bottom of it.
"Tom." Dumbledore looked at him. "You have nothing to say?"
He knew Tom had followed the implication. He was certain of it.
"Professor, you should read more Muggle history." Tom moved his gaze from the carpet's edge to Dumbledore's face. "A village's worth of deaths sounds appalling by wizarding standards. By the standards of Muggle warfare, it barely registers. During wartime, that number died every minute, sometimes every few seconds."
He paused.
"Voldemort has lost his humanity, I won't argue with that. But I'm not shocked by him. People who do what he does are not rare enough to be shocking."
That was Tom's honest view of Voldemort. Strip away the magical power and what remained was a figure who, in terms of character and scale of harm, occupied no particularly exceptional place in the history of human cruelty.
"Yes," Nicolas said, the word barely above a murmur. He was thinking of the century he had been born into, the Black Death moving through Europe village by village, the arithmetic of it. Six hundred years of watching people die had given him a perspective on the subject that he rarely shared and never enjoyed having.
Newt was thinking of Jacob, and the things Jacob had described about the Western Front in the war to end all wars. Wizards, for all their power, were very small things against the full scale of what humanity had managed.
"Whatever the accounting," Dumbledore said quietly, "life deserves its reverence."
He had come here intending to find a teaching moment. He had found that Tom had already arrived at the conclusion and moved past it. There was nothing left to add.
By then they had reached the island.
It was barely a platform, a flat shelf of rock just wide enough for a group to stand on without much room to spare. At its centre sat a stone basin filled with liquid, luminescent and faintly green, and at the very bottom of the basin, visible through the potion, sat the locket that Regulus had placed there.
Everyone landed. The platform immediately became crowded.
Voldemort had not imagined this many people standing here. He had not imagined any of it, really.
Dumbledore produced a cup and dipped it into the basin, then tilted it toward the lake. The liquid fell from the cup and vanished before it hit the water, and the level in the basin restored itself to full without any visible source.
He tapped the basin with his wand several times, frowning slightly.
"I can destroy the basin outright by force, but the resulting chain reaction would collapse the cave. The alternative is to drink the potion. All of it. As Regulus did."
"Try Transfiguration," Tom suggested.
Dumbledore obliged, conjuring a goat on the platform edge and directing it to drink. The goat managed several swallows before it toppled, and reverted to stone.
"Ordinary animals lack the constitution to drink the full quantity." Dumbledore straightened. "It would need to be a large magical creature. A dragon, perhaps, or an Aethonon. But nothing of that size could reach this platform." He paused. "Assuming one excludes present company."
His understanding of Voldemort's methods had deepened again. Cleverer and crueller than he had fully credited, though still ultimately dependent on exploiting people rather than anticipating them.
"He could never have imagined Regulus," Newt said. It was a quiet observation, but it landed on the exact flaw in everything Voldemort had designed here.
"There's no need for any of that."
Nicolas had walked a full circuit of the basin, tapping his wand against the stone at three different points as he went.
"Albus. Try it again."