Like passing through a membrane, Regulus felt his body lighten, the ground vanish beneath him, and gravity reassert itself.
He and Freya tumbled out of the seawater and dropped.
Regulus cast the Flight Spell instantly, stabilizing mid-air, and reached out in the same motion. His arm hooked around Freya's waist, pulling her against his side.
She went rigid. A brief struggle, then stillness. She hung there, stiff as a board, as though her body hadn't decided how to respond.
Regulus didn't notice. His attention was already on their surroundings.
They'd entered a space beneath the seabed, carved out and sealed by magic.
The ceiling stretched impossibly high. They floated in the upper reaches, and above them was nothing. Blackness.
Light existed here, though. Sourceless, soft and even, coming from nowhere and everywhere, illuminating without origin.
Below them lay land. Rock, flat and grey, extending in every direction until it met the edge of sight.
Regulus descended slowly, touched down, and let go.
Freya stood beside him, her expression slightly off. She smoothed her clothes, then her hair, her gaze wandering with nowhere to settle before finally fixing on the distant dark.
He glanced at her, said nothing, and began examining their surroundings.
The space was quiet. Not quiet but silent. He couldn't hear his own breathing. He cleared his throat as a test. Sound emerged but died instantly, absorbed by the air before it could travel.
The rock beneath his feet was smooth, yet bore no chisel marks. It looked naturally formed, pressed flat under some tremendous force.
Deep grey. Tiny crystals embedded in its surface caught the ambient light and threw back faint glimmers.
Something in the distance was calling to him. Not a sound. A pull, sourceless but unmistakable.
"That way." He lifted his chin toward it.
Freya followed his gaze and nodded.
They walked.
Footsteps struck rock. He could feel the impact, but heard nothing.
Regulus tried again, stamping hard.
Silence.
Their eyes met. The same confirmation in both: this place devoured sound.
He probed further and suspected this wasn't a magical effect. The physical rules here were different from the surface.
After a while, the texture of the ground began to change.
Faint lines appeared on the uniform grey stone. Thin as hairline fractures, easily mistaken for natural fissures, but on closer inspection, too regular.
They walked further. The lines grew denser.
Further still, and the lines began to glow.
As they pressed deeper, the glow intensified, the lines thickened, graduating from threads to veins to something organic, like capillaries pulsing beneath living skin.
Regulus stopped, crouched, and pressed his fingertips to one of the luminous channels.
The instant he touched the rock, the line flared, brighter by an order of magnitude, as if answering him.
Light raced along the vein, flowing forward, swift and purposeful, streaming into the distance.
He pulled his hand away. The glow dimmed at once, settling back to its original intensity.
He stood. Freya crouched and tried the same thing. Identical response. Light surging forward, then fading when she withdrew.
A shared look, and they kept walking.
The veins grew denser and brighter. The flowing light wove into a lattice beneath their feet, stretching toward the darkness at the edge of vision.
The surrounding rock shifted too, rising and dipping in strange folds and curves, as if some vast hand had crumpled it like paper.
Regulus noticed that every ridge, every arc, oriented toward the same point. The source of the call.
The core.
They walked. For how long, he couldn't say. In this sound-swallowing space, time blurred. He tried counting steps. One, two, three. Lost count. Started again. Lost count again.
Until the glowing veins stopped.
Fifteen meters ahead, every line on the ground converged, funneling into a massive circular region.
At the rim, the veins packed together like arteries, coiling inward ring after ring, vanishing into the center.
And there, at the heart of it, was... something.
It defied description. Not solid. Not light. Not anything that could be categorized. Present, and somehow not. Shifting ceaselessly, like a reflection rippling in wind-blown water, like air shimmering above a flame, like lamplight glimpsed through heavy fog.
Each shift revealed a different vision.
Sometimes the endless deep sea. Dark, cold, bottomless.
Sometimes distant stars. Brilliant, unreachable.
The two visions alternated, occasionally merging, as though stars were meant to hang at the bottom of the ocean.
Regulus stood before it, and a strange awareness settled over him. He could perceive it.
But not through any means he recognized. Not magical sensing, not spatial awareness, not sight, smell, or hearing.
Something else entirely. It existed directly in his consciousness. The way he knew he was alive without needing to confirm it. The way he knew he was breathing without checking.
It was there, deep in his awareness, sitting alongside cognition, memory, emotion. Equal to them.
It wasn't doing anything. It was only existing. But existence alone was enough to make it impossible to ignore.
Standing there, he felt his consciousness begin drifting toward it. Involuntary.
Like two adjacent bodies of water with no barrier between them, beginning to merge.
He wanted to resist, but couldn't identify what to resist. It wasn't attacking. It was only being.
And his consciousness, having perceived that being, instinctively wanted to understand it.
Understanding required proximity.
Proximity meant contact.
Contact meant influence.
Regulus drew a deep breath and steadied himself. The Star guided meditation surged to full power. Orion's four and a half stars blazed in his mindscape.
Clear and stable. He anchored his awareness to those stars and refused to let it drift closer.
He turned to Freya. She stood a few paces back, no longer advancing.
When his eyes found hers, she gave a small shake of her head.
She didn't know what this thing was. She'd come here to accompany Regulus, to fulfill the task set by that person.
But she understood enough by now. The answer to that question, the one she'd asked him, was this.
She wouldn't make contact. Not yet.
She didn't know how it worked, didn't know what it would do to a wizard. If two of them were here, one needed to stay lucid.
Regulus looked at her, nodded, then turned back to it.
Still shifting. Deep sea and stars, alternating.
He wasn't in a rush. He'd wait and see what it wanted.
The next moment, something in his consciousness stirred.
It bypassed every mental defense and reached directly into the magic he possessed. The Decomposition Curse.
The spell he'd spent ten days developing, burning through twenty Mandrakes to create. Extracted from his consciousness, lifted out and placed before him, as though someone had pulled a blueprint from his mind and unrolled it for his inspection.
Then came information.
"Decomposition Curse."
The voice had no source. It felt like his own thought, but the content wasn't his.
"You perceived a tendency toward dissolution in the Mandrake and reproduced it in your own way. You observed, understood, converted, created. That path is correct."
Something flickered inside him. Acknowledgment?
The next sentence followed without pause.
"But have you considered what that tendency toward dissolution truly is?"
The Decomposition Curse unfolded in his awareness. Structure, theory, mechanics, all laid out before him like a schematic.
"You aimed it at matter. Broke down structures. Reduced them to dust. You believed your will drove the magic that accomplished this."
"The truth is, you learned to execute a rule the world already possessed."
The information deepened, as if peeling back something he'd always overlooked.
"Entropy. The flow from order to disorder. All things tend toward chaos. You didn't create this. Magic didn't create it. It is a rule of the world itself.
The Mandrake happened to carry a fragment of it. And you learned to borrow that fragment."
"Your Decomposition Curse is powerful not because of your talent, not because of your effort. You touched a rule at the foundation of reality.
You are its executor. Not its master."
Regulus said nothing. He wanted to hear what else it had to say.
"If you understand this, you can go further. The Decomposition Curse need not remain a spell. It can become a conduit between you and that rule.
No incantation. No gestures. Only permission for that rule to pass through you and act upon its target."
"That is true decomposition. It doesn't need your magic. The world will do what it was always going to do."
The information continued.
"But the price is this: accept that you are not a creator. You are an executor. Your pride, your sense of achievement, your confidence in your own talent... all illusion."
A ripple passed through Regulus's mindscape.
What it said made a certain kind of sense. But he had no intention of accepting it.
This wasn't about pride. His path wasn't walked that way.
He was the observer, the one who understood, who converted, who created. He'd never been anyone's executor. Not even for the rules of the world itself.
The thought was still forming when another piece of magic stirred in his consciousness.
The Patronus Charm.