Sympathy was one thing. Resonance was another. Right now, they were enemies.
Enemies demanded everything you had.
Especially the Abyssal Whispers. Every member was elite.
Their people could sever their own shoulder the instant the Decomposition Curse grazed them. They could condense a magical barrier in the split second a stone spike flew at the back of their skull. They could watch a comrade die and still retreat with icy composure.
Every single one deserved to be taken seriously.
The masked figure had said he'd be waiting on the island. But that was their ground.
The island wasn't large. From the outside it looked like a heap of black rock, barren, lifeless. Not a blade of grass. Only the cluster of low buildings at its center, grey and weathered, nearly indistinguishable from the stone beneath them.
Nothing remarkable to the eye.
But a wizard's territory that looked unremarkable was rarely what it seemed.
An Extension Charm could turn a single hut into a labyrinth. Concealment charms could hide entire structures. Wards could be buried underground, trigger hexes set behind doors, alarm enchantments woven into every stone.
The places that looked like nothing often hid the worst of everything.
That island was a prepared battlefield, and Regulus wasn't walking into it. Too foolish by half.
About fifty meters out, he signaled Freya to stop.
They hovered in the air, brooms adjusting angle to hold steady.
Freya's expression didn't change. She'd clearly intended to stop here herself.
Regulus knew she'd undergone formal combat training. Her tactical instincts were sharp. She wouldn't hand over the initiative by entering a prepared killbox any more than he would.
Their eyes met.
"Ready," he said. "I'm casting the second form of the Decomposition Curse."
Open water, nothing between them and the target. A perfect testing ground.
Freya nodded once, then drew her wand and swept it through a wide arc before her.
The wand's path left a faint blue trace in the air that spread outward. Deep blue flames surged from around her body, coiling and writhing with a life of their own as she sat astride the broom.
She hovered there, fire dancing across her features, painting that sharp face in shifting indigo light.
Regulus watched.
Blue fire.
The guess that had flickered through his mind that night now sharpened into something close to certainty.
He looked away. Now wasn't the time.
He raised his wand. "Dissolvo."
The second form of the Decomposition Curse.
An invisible ripple expanded outward with him at its center.
It swept over Freya. The blue flames around her body shuddered, contracting inward like the surface of a lake touched by wind, then snapped back to their original shape.
The ripple continued outward, crossing the water.
A few meters below the surface, a group of fish froze mid-stroke.
Their bodies still carried forward momentum, but every vital sign had already ceased. Scales, skin, flesh, bone, everything that had constituted a living whole lost its coherence in the same instant. They came apart, dissolving into countless unrelated particles that mixed into the seawater and vanished with the next wave.
The ripple traveled at the speed of sound.
Fifty meters. 0.15 seconds.
It struck the island. Almost simultaneously, a translucent barrier shimmered into existence above the building cluster at the island's center.
The barrier rippled like disturbed water, concentric rings radiating outward from the point of impact. The oscillations were violent, the entire shield shaking as if under assault from something invisible, on the verge of being torn apart.
That ward could stop physical force. It could stop conventional spells. But it wasn't Protego.
Protego was a solid wall of condensed magic. Anything that wanted through had to hit it first.
This barrier operated more like a filter, intercepting only the attack forms it recognized. The Infrasound of the Decomposition Curse wasn't on its list.
The ripple passed through and kept spreading.
Freya watched it unfold.
She saw the barrier reveal itself under the impact of an invisible force, saw it shake violently and stop nothing.
She remembered what Regulus had told her about the two forms of the Decomposition Curse.
Hearing the description was one thing. Seeing it was something else entirely.
There was no defending against this. You wouldn't even know the attack had arrived before it hit you.
She glanced at him.
He held his wand steady, expression calm, gaze fixed on the island. Wind tugged at his hair.
On the island, the masked leader knew they were under attack the instant the barrier appeared. But he'd never seen this magic before.
He'd seen the other one. The grey-green beam from that first night, the spell that had killed his comrade before his eyes.
What he didn't know was that these were two forms of the same curse.
He'd analyzed that first encounter afterward. The spell was powerful, but it could be dodged. Keep your eyes on the boy, track his wand, evade the moment he cast. With their reaction speed and combat experience, it was entirely possible.
He'd shared that assessment with everyone.
What he didn't know was that Regulus's true delivery method combined Space Warp with spatial anchoring, letting curses skip the transit phase entirely and land on target. The leader hadn't witnessed that. He believed the Decomposition Curse was formidable but avoidable.
His people had been given the wrong playbook.
And now, with the second form in play, everything he'd told them was worthless.
This attack had no wand direction. No visible beam. No sign at all that could be read or anticipated.
He didn't even know it had come until the barrier's convulsions told him.
Seven masked figures reacted in the same breath.
The leader and the one other survivor of that first night threw up Protego instantly. Transparent shields expanded around them, encasing their entire bodies.
Three of the remaining five did the same, Protego flaring to life in quick succession.
The last two chose to run.
They mounted their brooms and shot sideways, trying to clear the area of effect.
But the second form of the Decomposition Curse was area-of-effect at the speed of sound.
They made it less than two meters before their bodies locked.
Then they came apart.
Outside in. Everything that had once constituted them lost its coherence in the same instant.
No blood. No screams. No sign of struggle. Existence, then absence.
Two small clouds of grey dust caught the sea wind and scattered.
Five masked figures watched two of their own vanish before their eyes. Nothing left behind.
Protego still held around them, but the transparent shells felt impossibly fragile now.
But none of that mattered yet. Behind his mask, the leader's eyes went wide.
He stared out at the two figures hovering over the water.
The boy still had his wand raised. His face was calm, his gaze on the island, studying the results with the detachment of someone reviewing an experiment.
The leader's attention shifted to the witch beside him.
Freya von Eisenhardt.
The color of that fire. The way it burned. The pressure it radiated even across this distance...
His pupils contracted. He knew what those flames meant.
That wasn't ordinary magical fire. It wasn't Fiendfyre's destructive dark magic. It wasn't any spell a common witch or wizard could cast.
It represented a person. A name. A history.
Decades had passed since that history was written, but the mark that name had left on the world had never faded.
The Eisenhardt family...
No. That wasn't it.
Something clicked in the leader's mind, connections snapping into place.
This witch wasn't an ordinary member of the family. This island, this document, this entire conflict, from start to finish, none of it had been a straightforward territorial dispute.
A thought flashed through him: someone was pulling strings behind everything.
Before he could think further, the boy moved again.
Regulus raised his wand, but this time it wasn't the Decomposition Curse.
Three small birds, orange-red, burst from the tip. They beat their wings, circled once, and flew toward the island.
Tiny things. Sparrow-sized, each one, with delicate feathers and nimble movements. Almost endearing.
About thirty meters out, all three swelled, split, and detonated.
Orange-red flame erupted from those small bodies as if something long compressed had finally broken free.
Three little birds became three colossal beasts.
They plunged toward the island.