Regulus knew full well that nothing in this world came without reason. Especially not from someone of that caliber. Especially not directed at him.
If the guess held true, what was the purpose?
Star guided meditation was his foundation, the bedrock of his entire magical system. If Bellatrix wouldn't ignite, if the Orion model stalled at four and a half stars and couldn't be completed, his growth beyond that point would suffer.
Perhaps that person had seen this possibility.
Seen him stalling at a fork in the road. Seen him unable to break through for want of something he lacked. And chosen to intervene.
Or perhaps he could ignite it, but the wrong way.
Maybe someday he'd have done it naturally, driven to protect someone or something. But the outcome of that path, both the event itself and what it would make of him, might not be what that person wanted to see.
So they intervened. Let him ignite it early. On their terms.
Regulus turned these thoughts over and smiled to himself.
Whatever the case, one thing he knew for certain: he wouldn't quit.
Star guided meditation was his foundation, and he'd walk that road to the end. If he had to find another way, so be it. If Orion didn't work, he'd build from a different constellation. The sky was vast. Something out there would fit.
He spread out on the bed, arms wide, drew a long breath, and let it go slowly.
He could leave right now.
Go home, explain everything to Orion, lay out what had happened over the past ten days, share every suspicion. Even if it amounted to baseless speculation, he trusted his father would approve of how he'd handled it.
But if it really was that person. If it really was Grindelwald.
They'd built a stage for him. He wanted to step onto it. He wanted to see what he looked like through those eyes that could see the future.
The pull was strong.
Not only because it might ignite Bellatrix, though that mattered enormously.
More than that, he wanted a dialogue across the distance with that person.
He even wanted, through all of this, to brush against the power of time itself.
Foreknowledge. Wasn't that what time was?
Was there anything more astonishing?
A magic that wove past and future together, that turned choice into inevitability, that let an event that hadn't yet occurred become a landscape in someone else's eyes before it ever happened.
His thoughts drifted, circling back to Freya's question.
What could make everything he'd learned feel juvenile, clumsy, shallow?
His answer had been smooth.
Recalling Freya's expression after hearing it, he laughed inwardly. From her perspective, a twelve-year-old wizard saying something like that probably looked like posturing.
But he'd meant it.
Looking at what he'd actually built so far, the list of fully developed systems was short.
Verdant Magic.
Spatial magic.
Star guided meditation.
Three directions. Few in number, but each one could expand almost without limit.
The end of verdant magic was the understanding and replication of every magical plant's properties.
The end of spatial magic was dominion over space itself.
The end of star guided meditation was the entire sky unfolded within his consciousness.
He was certain he walked the right path. He could see where it led. Every step was solid, every result verifiable.
These weren't theoretical exercises. They worked in combat. They kept him alive.
But he wasn't arrogant enough to believe his path was the strongest.
Magic had never been a race to see who reached the finish line first.
Out there lay a bigger world. Older traditions. Magical systems he'd never seen, never imagined.
Before he'd even started school, Orion had told him: beyond every world lay another.
The British wizarding community was one corner of Europe. Europe was one corner of the planet. The planet was a speck of dust in the universe.
He'd seen Dumbledore's magic. That light had purged centuries of accumulated curses from the Elder Wand.
He'd held Voldemort's Dark Awakening. That dense body of concentrated dark knowledge represented an entirely different road.
He'd experienced the Abyssal Whispers' Mental Erosion. An attack on the will to fight itself, unlike any Dark magic he'd encountered.
He wouldn't refuse any of it.
If there existed a magic that could make his current knowledge look childish, clumsy, shallow, he wouldn't deny his own inadequacy.
Even Dumbledore acknowledged that no one had traveled further down the path of Dark magic than Voldemort.
Regulus didn't want to claim everything. That was impossible. He was walking his own road.
But the curiosity would gnaw at him.
What kind of magic could make him feel that way?
He lay on the bed staring at the ceiling.
His mind returned to that person. Grindelwald.
Prophecy, or foresight, was an unreasonable power.
That placed him an entire dimension above a normal wizard.
Like ants living on a two-dimensional plane, only forward and back, left and right, unaware that something loomed above them.
Humans existed in three dimensions, could see the ants, could remove the food in front of them, could reshape an ant's entire world.
To an ant, human behavior was incomprehensible magic.
Add time, and you had a four-dimensional perspective.
From that vantage, a human life was a line. Perhaps you couldn't see the beginning, but you could see where it ended.
Choice was nothing more than moving along that line. No surprises. No accidents. Everything predetermined.
If such a perspective existed, then Regulus, in Grindelwald's eyes, was likely a segment of a line.
When he was born, when he encountered what, when he made which choice... all written in advance.
And yet Grindelwald had still lost. Lost to Dumbledore.
Which meant foresight could be defeated. By some means or another.
Maybe Dumbledore's emotional blind spot. Maybe the guilt shackles of Ariana's death. Maybe the Elder Wand's allegiance rules. Maybe an over-reliance on the power of foresight itself.
Regardless, Regulus couldn't do it. Not now.
Against someone of Grindelwald's magnitude, he had no capacity to resist.
So he could only accept the arrangement passively.
Even if it didn't bother him. Even if the arrangement genuinely helped. Being arranged was still being arranged.
The same way Voldemort had offered the Dark Awakening. That, too, was an arrangement.
The difference was in method. Voldemort used poison, threat, pressure that brooked no refusal.
Grindelwald was more sophisticated. He offered a stage. A trial. The illusion of choice.
But the essence was the same.
Regulus rolled onto his side. Outside, the waves kept their steady rhythm.
He thought of the first day he'd met Freya. That unreadable look in her eyes. The blue flame that had flickered and vanished in an instant.
He thought of her face when she'd asked her question. The seriousness. And the quiet exasperation after she'd heard his answer.
None of it was coincidence.
But he didn't resent it. If anything, something close to anticipation stirred in him.
He wanted to know what the person who could see the future had seen in him.
Regulus rose, walked to the window, and pushed it open. Sea wind rushed in.
He closed his eyes and let his consciousness sink inward.
Star guided meditation engaged. The four and a half stars of Orion blazed to life in his mental landscape, their cold, steady radiance sweeping through every corner.
The restlessness in his chest smoothed away. The faint turbulence in his magical energy, stirred by emotion, settled into calm.
Wait and see.