Regulus sat cross-legged on the floor, turning a word over in his mind.
Ritual.
His understanding of ritual magic was broad but shallow. It wasn't something a single spell could accomplish. Multiple steps, specific conditions, sometimes offerings, contracts, an entire framework of magic far more complex than ordinary casting.
The feedback was usually powerful. The cost, usually steep.
Animagus transformation qualified as standard ritual magic. Fixed sequence, long-term steps, specific materials, celestial alignment, environmental conditions. Succeed, and you gained an animal form with full consciousness intact. Fail, and you were trapped forever between human and beast. No reversal.
Voldemort's resurrection counted too. Bone of the father, flesh of the servant, blood of the enemy. Three components, each essential. Willingly given, unknowingly taken, forcibly seized. Three different methods of acquisition, each carrying a different magical meaning. Success meant a fully restored body, stronger than before. Failure... failure probably meant an explosion.
The Unbreakable Vow was another. Once sealed, it became an absolute magical contract. Break it and you died. No negotiation, no loophole. A binding etched into the soul itself.
The Fidelius Charm? Hiding a secret permanently inside a single person's soul, accessible only if the Secret-Keeper chose to reveal it. That fit the pattern too.
And the oldest of them all: Sacrificial Protection. A willing death as the price, love as the medium, creating a shield against death itself for another person. What Lily had done for Harry. That was ritual magic at its most fundamental.
Regulus turned the common threads over in his mind. Every one of these rituals left an imprint on the soul. Every one, once complete, produced effects far beyond what ordinary spells could achieve. Irreversible. Unchangeable. Final.
So what about the sixth star?
His hypotheses so far:
It might require a first genuinely proactive act of decisive influence, rather than a reactive response.
It might require seeing through something no one else could, and leveraging that insight to achieve a goal.
It might require accepting that brilliance invites destruction, and choosing to wield it anyway.
If any of that held true, then the process itself bore the hallmarks of ritual. Long preparation. Specific conditions. Powerful effects. Soul-level involvement.
Bellatrix and the sixth star were different creatures.
Bellatrix had been difficult, but inward-facing. Protection. Self-boundaries. Abstract concepts, but comprehensible. As long as you knew what you wanted to protect, you could light it. Even if external forces played a role, the path was clear.
The sixth star might demand outward influence instead. But the question was: how much counted as enough?
Influencing one person, or ten thousand?
For a day, or a year?
Making an opponent lose a duel, or making an entire family afraid to raise its head?
And the scope? Hogwarts alone, or the whole of magical Britain?
The depth? Making people remember his name, or making them cross the street when they saw him coming?
Regulus couldn't find the answer. He wasn't even sure his hypotheses pointed in the right direction. They could be completely wrong.
But if the sixth star did require some form of defined ritual, then in a sense, it was seeking outward. Seeking influence, seeking feedback, seeking some kind of response from the world itself.
Bellatrix was the inward path. The sixth star was the outward one.
Two roads. One toward inner fortification, the other toward external expansion.
Could they be walked at the same time? Run in parallel? Were they independent of each other, or did they feed into one another?
The thought chain snapped taut on a single word.
Feedback.
If his theory was right. If lighting the sixth star was itself a kind of ritual. If he truly met every requirement that ritual demanded...
Then who provided the feedback?
How was it delivered?
What was the underlying mechanism?
Was it magic power? Or magic itself? Or did this world contain some deeper architecture, some invisible set of rules, something that automatically responded when a ritual was fulfilled?
He couldn't work it out. His knowledge wasn't deep enough. Most records on ritual magic were maddeningly vague. Successes were repeated endlessly in texts. Failures were buried on purpose.
The real core of it was probably locked away in some family's vault, or inside someone's head. Not sitting on a shelf in the Library, that much was certain.
But the Restricted Section might have something. There was his next objective.
He shook his head and let the thoughts scatter. What couldn't be solved now could wait.
But this was where magic got interesting.
Spells you could see through at a glance, charms you could learn from flipping through a book... what was the point?
The things truly worth pursuing for a lifetime were the ones you couldn't figure out.
He closed his eyes and let his consciousness sink inward.
In his mental landscape, six stars still traced their orbits. Betelgeuse burned at the farthest edge. Bellatrix held the center, guardian and anchor. The sixth star sat quietly in the lower right corner, glowing.
The soul-figure stood where all the light converged, radiant.
Regulus focused on the sixth star and studied it for a long moment.
Its light was distinctive. Not fierce like Betelgeuse. Not gentle like Bellatrix.
It hadn't changed. Still the same. Faint, dim, doing nothing more than existing.
If anything, it felt like it was broadcasting a mood: I'm just sitting here. If you're not good enough, don't bother me.
The thought made him laugh.
Regulus opened his eyes.
What couldn't be solved through thinking, solve through reading. What couldn't be found in books, find by asking people. Dumbledore couldn't possibly be ignorant of ritual magic. Professor McGonagall was an Animagus herself and would know plenty.
Tonight's work was done. From here, all he needed was to keep watching the sixth star for changes and let the results validate or discard his theory.
He stood, lingered in the cabin for a moment, then sat back down cross-legged.
The Spatial Network still needed work.
Three hours in the cabin. The network expanded from five spells to six.
Trajectory paths, intersection control, exit timing... everything had to be recalibrated from scratch. Six was far more complex than five.
Regulus stood and pushed open the cabin door.
A glance toward the training area. Alex was flat on his back, chest heaving, utterly spent.
Regulus ignored him.
Over in the dummy section, Hermes was still at it. He stood surrounded by four training dummies, holding a Protego barrier while their spells hammered into him.
The shield wobbled. Every hit cracked a piece away. He gritted his teeth, poured more power in, rebuilt it. Cracked again. Rebuilt again.
Regulus watched, amused.
Earlier, Hermes had worn that look of total indifference. Scornful of borrowed power. Anything that wasn't his own was worthless.
And yet here he was, grinding Protego drills.
He cared. He just wanted to earn it through his own effort, not take the shortcut Alex had been tempted by.
Regulus walked over and raised a hand to halt the dummies. Hermes was still holding his barrier, too deep in concentration to register the change.
Two seconds passed before he turned his head, eyelids drooping, and gave Regulus a single look.
Then he dropped the shield, staggered over to Alex, and collapsed flat on his back beside him.
Limbs splayed. Chest heaving. Eyes half-shut.
Waiting to be collected.
Regulus stared. The audacity was almost impressive.
He left the two of them and walked to the dummy section.
A wave of his hand sent magic flowing outward, and the dummies reactivated. No spell-casting this time, movement only.
He set the speed to maximum. The dummies blurred into dark streaks, barely visible as they shifted positions.
Hermes, still on his back, turned his head to look. His eyes widened a fraction.
That speed...
His gaze shifted to Regulus.
Regulus stood among the dummies, not looking at him, already focused on his own work.
First, he cast Space Warp, shaping the channels into existence.
Then he drove anchor points into them. Twelve anchors, each locking a separate independent channel in place.
Next came the connections, linking them into a single unified network.
Then flow. Making the network move, circulate, shift from moment to moment.
Once that was done, he raised his wand and fired six Disarming Charms in rapid succession.
Streaks of red light shot into the channels one after another and vanished.
But the distance was so short, the channel entrance hovering right at his wand tip, that the process was nearly invisible. It looked like nothing more than tapping his wand at empty air a few times.
Now all six spells were inside the network of twelve channels, cycling at high speed, weaving past each other.
His consciousness followed them in, tracking every trajectory.
Ten seconds.
He released all six exits at once.
Six spells erupted from six different anchor points simultaneously, crisscrossing through the air in a web of red light, each one striking a separate dummy.
Six fake wands ripped free and clattered to the floor.
Regulus watched. A nod.
Six. Done.
From here he could keep scaling up. Seven, eight, nine. As long as his mental stamina and computational capacity held, there was no ceiling.
Though if the goal was purely maximizing the number of spells in a single volley, the setup didn't need to be this elaborate. No need for sustained cycling through the network, no need to calculate that many intersections. He'd only need them to coexist for a fraction of a second, long enough to fire from different anchors simultaneously.
That would slash the computational load. Ten spells might be possible. Maybe more.
He withdrew his power and let the network dissolve, standing in place, still turning the numbers over.
Hermes lay on the ground, eyes wide open.
He'd seen the whole thing.
Six spells, fired from six different positions at the same instant.
Those positions were far from where Regulus stood. The spells appeared as if from nowhere.
He imagined, for a moment, those spells aimed at him.
How would he defend? Protego could block a Disarming Charm. But swap those for the Killing Curse?
Dodge, then? Six spells from six different directions, arriving at the same time. Dodge where?
There was no defense. No evasion.
Hermes lay there, staring at Regulus's back, and a thought surfaced unbidden.
He had this up his sleeve the whole time?
If he ever turned that on me, what would I do?
The corner of his mouth twitched. Couldn't tell if he wanted to laugh or sigh.
He closed his eyes and went back to lying still.
Forget it. Why bother thinking about it?
Even with that trick, he still can't beat me in a straight fight.
He kept his eyes shut and waited to be collected.
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