Greyback hadn't moved. His chest still rose and fell, but the yellow eyes stayed fixed on Regulus, pupils shrinking and widening, a cornered animal trying to read what the predator meant to do next.
The rest of the pack watched from a distance. Seeing that Regulus wasn't finished, Lucius narrowed his eyes and waited in silence.
Regulus lifted his gaze, met Greyback's, and drove his mind straight in.
Greyback's body locked rigid. His jaw dropped to howl and only a strangled whine came out. His mind threw up a wall on instinct. Coarse, hard, nothing but brute animal force piled into a barrier. Against Regulus's will it might as well have been paper. It split with a crack, crumbled, and got shoved aside.
Outside, Greyback grunted and swayed, legs nearly folding.
The wolf had probably never been subjected to Legilimency in his life. He knew now. A hand reaching into his skull, fingers pressing outward against the bone until his eyes felt ready to burst, then pain splitting downward like a chisel driven from the crown.
The animal in him detonated, every hair rising, and the eruption stopped halfway. Reason held it down.
Don't move. Don't move at all.
He stood with both clawed hands clenched shut and let Regulus rummage.
Images came churning up. Moonlight. Running. Teeth in flesh. Blood, screaming, one terrified face after another, night roads with Aurors at his back, the corpse of his own kind he'd gnawed at when starvation got bad enough. Mostly the biting, old and new tangled together.
Everything Greyback had made of his life was here. Bloody, cruel, and dull as ditchwater.
None of it was useful. What Regulus wanted was underneath. The architecture. How man and beast were fitted together, which part each occupied, where they touched.
His will sank past the memory layer to the bottom, and there it was.
Greyback's mind came in strata.
The animal sat outside, a thick shell sealing the core in completely. The surface crawled with rough grain, like old bark, like cracked mud, every seam leaking bloodlust toward anything living.
Regulus pressed through to the layer beneath. The human one.
The man was still there. Not resisting. Not pinned and beaten. Merely present.
Door locked, windows shut, dust lying thick over everything, tables and chairs standing exactly where they'd always stood, and no one coming back to move them.
No sign of a fight. No door forced. Nobody had struggled in here, or shouted, or thrown themselves against the walls.
Regulus stopped. Something in his head had been struck.
For the better part of a year he'd been in the Containment Room dealing with the Dark Awakening. The Filtration Layer, the Isolation Zone, structure upon structure, and the whole apparatus meant one thing. Lock the dark away. Don't let it out, and above all don't let it touch what was bright.
Bellatrix, Star Guided Meditation, the little soul figure. Those were his core, the things to be protected, each kept in its own territory.
He'd feared contact. Feared that contact meant war, that the dark would foul the light. So he'd built partitions.
Inside this wolf there were partitions too. Man and beast in strata, unmixed, cleanly divided.
So cleanly that the man within had quietly walked off the stage.
He wasn't equating Greyback with his own light and dark. Greyback's man and beast had been carved out by a single bite, a virus forced in from outside. Passive and filthy. His own had grown out of his soul, two branches off one root, active and clean.
Two things a world apart. But the partitioning was the same.
He'd feared a fight, so he'd separated them. Inside Greyback, separation had also happened. And the result of it stood in front of him. An empty house.
The beast hadn't killed the man. The man had left on his own, killed the lights, and made room.
He'd assumed the hardest part of coexistence was keeping the two from fighting. His entire design pushed at that single problem.
Then Voldemort had shown him another possibility. With Voldemort's Legilimency bearing down, the dark had come boiling up to the edge of the wall, and Bellatrix hadn't moved to crush it, hadn't raised light as a shield. It had only brightened, once. Both had lived. Neither had moved to annihilate the other.
Contact didn't necessarily mean combat. But he'd only worked out half of it. He'd never figured out what the two were supposed to do with each other once the walls came down.
Now Greyback had handed him a failure mode he'd never considered, and the worst one at that.
Coexistence could fail, and failure didn't only mean beating one side to death. There was another kind. No fight at all, one side vanishing quietly, not even a battlefield left behind.
The other side would think it had won, think it had grown strong enough to swallow its rival. It had won nothing. It had moved into an empty house and turned off the lights, alone.
A fight to the death at least made noise. Not this. This came silently, and by the time you noticed, nobody was home.
His old approach, partition, each to its own ground, would grind both light and dark down. Sealed off that thoroughly, given enough time one of them might do what the man inside Greyback had done. Gutter out. Withdraw without a sound.
Isolation looked safe. It had that buried in it. That road went nowhere. And nothing like Greyback either, where one side was allowed to drive the other out.
So what did the right shape look like?
He could only guess. Probably both had to live, both had to keep their strength, neither shrinking, neither ceding an inch. But not merely holding ground and living separate lives.
Two things pressed up against each other, meshed along the border. This side swells by a measure, that side yields a measure. Back and forth, advance and withdraw. Alive and moving. A little of each carried inside the other. The stronger holding the seed of the weaker, the weaker holding the force to turn it around.
When the light rose, the dark didn't die, only drew in and waited. When the dark swelled, the light gave ground and gathered itself. Each borrowing the other's force, turning without stopping.
He stopped there. A guess, nothing more. He couldn't verify it, or even say how such a thing would be assembled.
Still, one thing had clarified. He knew which roads were dead ends. Isolation was a dead end. Letting one side run free was a dead end. With those closed off, the right road had to be somewhere in what remained.
Regulus had come to help Lucius, and to get a look at werewolves along the way, and had walked into a live specimen aimed directly at his own central problem. Most of the important things in his life had arrived that way. In the middle of doing something else, out of nowhere, a collision.
The trip had earned itself.
He withdrew from Greyback's head as roughly as he'd driven in.
Greyback jerked, swayed, and a clawed hand shot out to brace against a broken wall.
He couldn't have said what had happened. Only that something had forced its way into the innermost place, a place he'd never been himself, turned it over top to bottom, and pulled out without mercy.
He still didn't dare move. An animal, running on the cleanest instinct there is, had scented it out. The small one in front of him was the larger predator.
All those scars, all those teeth, a territory of thirty or forty wolves, and none of it amounted to anything here.
Regulus looked away, his gaze sweeping deeper into the ruins and settling behind a section of collapsed wall.
The werewolf who'd looked up at him on the way into the village, who'd seemed to recognize him and dropped his head fast, was still crouched there.
Regulus watched him and tilted his head.
The wolf froze, then tapped a finger against his own chest. Regulus looked away, done with him.
The young werewolf stood, hesitated through a few steps, then came around from behind Greyback with his head down.