"Nicolas, compared to your alchemy, Voldemort and I are both amateurs."
Nicolas had acted, and his interventions did not fail. Dumbledore scooped the potion from the basin and poured it into the lake, and this time nothing reversed itself. The liquid left and did not come back, and the level in the basin dropped accordingly.
While Dumbledore worked through the emptying, Nicolas turned to Tom. "Did you follow what I did and why?"
Tom nodded.
"Then explain it." Nicolas watched the boy with the particular interest of a teacher who has largely run out of opportunities to find fault. Tom was a specific kind of problem to have as a student. In the beginning there had been gaps, errors, the ordinary friction of someone learning something new. But that period had been brief. The further they went, the narrower the windows became where Nicolas could catch him making a mistake worth addressing.
The speed of it was one thing. The memory behind it was another. But what Nicolas found most difficult to replicate in any other student was Tom's insistence on fundamentals. Most talented young people wanted to skip past the basics because the basics felt beneath them. Tom treated them as the only part that actually mattered, drilling the foundation with a patience that most half-trained alchemists never bothered to develop across entire careers. And on top of that solidity, he built connections, took what he had learned and pulled it sideways into territory it had not originally covered.
Nicolas occasionally wondered if the boy had more than one mind operating at once. How else did you sustain the kind of physical power growth Tom had been putting up while also making steady progress through a discipline as demanding as alchemy?
"Voldemort doesn't actually know alchemy," Tom said, making one circuit of the basin. "He used Dark magic to achieve alchemical effects. Taking ordinary objects and investing them with magical properties through brute force. What you did was solve the same problem using alchemical thinking."
Nicolas nodded, with genuine approval.
That was exactly it. Using an alchemical framework to address a problem that alchemy had not created. That was the principle Nicolas most wanted Tom to carry forward.
"Newt," Nicolas said, noticing something. "What are you looking at?"
Newt had been staring at the basin for some time. His expression, on closer inspection, contained something that resembled regret.
"Nothing," he said, still looking at it. "I was just thinking. This would make an excellent feeding bowl for the larger creatures."
Nicolas had no immediate response to that.
The liquid was fully emptied shortly afterward. Dumbledore reached into the basin and retrieved what Regulus had left there. He noticed the locket could be opened, considered it for a moment, and decided against.
"Sirius should be the one to open it."
"I'll put a replacement in," Tom said, already moving. He had been looking forward to this part. Taking Regulus's locket meant replacing it with something, and leaving something behind for Voldemort to eventually find struck him as a courtesy worth extending.
Dumbledore's expression shifted when Tom produced the decoy.
A Horcrux had a particular quality, dark and compressed, contained, like something very heavy sitting perfectly still. What Tom was holding radiated openly, and every wizard on the platform felt it land.
"Tom. What did you do to that locket."
"I rushed the final adjustment yesterday. Forgot to account for it." He said this with the mild apology of someone who has left a tap running. He worked at it for a few moments, and the emanation pulled back, tightening inward until the locket felt like nothing in particular. "Just a few standard curse overlays. Significantly weaker than the original."
The group absorbed this in silence.
Whatever they had just felt was someone's definition of significantly weaker.
Tom was, technically, not lying. Most of the curse structures in the Frost Crown's records required a lich's body to operate at full effect. What he had installed was genuinely a reduced version. He had also sacrificed the last of several research materials as the binding component, which was not an insignificant investment.
Voldemort, he thought, should appreciate the gesture.
The basin was refilled, not with the original potion but with something transfigured to the right viscosity. The trap looked intact.
Dumbledore's business here was finished. Tom's was not quite. The remaining Inferi had gathered around the island during the operation, drawn by the disturbance.
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