After afternoon classes, the four of them gathered in the Room of Requirement again.
Cuthbert and Alex were sparring. Cuthbert's Protego could hold for about two minutes now, the edges still wavered, but the shape was solid.
Alex's Full Body-Bind Curse struck it dead center, white sparks bursting on impact. The barrier shuddered but held.
"Again!" Cuthbert called.
Alex raised his wand. "Petrificus Totalus."
This time the trajectory drifted, grazing the edge of the barrier and sailing past to hit the wooden training dummy behind him. The dummy's chest turned gray, then faded back to normal.
Cuthbert dropped his shield and wiped the sweat from his forehead. "See? I can block it now."
"Yeah." Alex nodded, expression serious. "But that Dark spell Hermes uses..."
Last week, Hermes had tested a weakened version of Bone and Blood Stripping on the shield. Cuthbert's barrier hadn't lasted three seconds before it shattered into points of light.
Cuthbert glanced toward the other side of the room.
Hermes sat cross-legged on the floor, an old book spread open before him, one finger tracing a complex diagram on the page.
He felt the eyes on him and looked up, the corner of his mouth twitching.
"Want to try?" he asked.
Cuthbert shook his head. "Let me practice more first."
He knew the gap between himself and Hermes. He also knew the gap between Hermes and Regulus.
That second gap was wide enough to make you question reality.
Were they truly attending the same school, taking the same classes?
Did the Black family carry some special bloodline power that let a first-year master magic that gave adult wizards headaches?
Regulus wasn't paying attention to their conversation. He'd moved on to coaching Alex through Protego.
"You have to want to block it," Regulus said. "Reciting the incantation isn't enough. You need to actually feel the refusal to be harmed. Your magic follows your intent."
Alex gripped his wand, closed his eyes, and furrowed his brow.
He spoke the incantation. A flicker of silver light emerged from the tip, but the glow held for barely two seconds before dissolving. It never even took the shape of a barrier.
"I... I was thinking it." Alex opened his eyes, voice tinged with frustration.
"Make it more specific," Regulus continued. "Imagine a curse actually flying at you. You have to protect yourself. Feel the urgency."
Alex tried again. The silver light lasted one second longer this time, its edges expanding slightly before collapsing.
Cuthbert watched from the side without comment.
He knew his own experience learning Protego hadn't been this difficult. His father had forced him through five days of practice, eight hours a day, until his wrist swelled up.
But by the fifth night, the barrier had taken shape.
The process had been agonizing, but the result was clear. He could cast it.
Alex's talent was weaker, or rather, something in his personality was getting in the way. He was too cautious, too quick to doubt himself. That whisper of I probably can't do this contaminated his magic like an impurity during casting, making the spell's structure brittle.
But Alex listened to Regulus. When Regulus told him to keep practicing, he raised his wand again and again, repeated the incantation again and again, even when nothing changed.
That kind of persistence was its own gift, though it was a gift of character, not spellwork. It had nothing to do with Protego specifically, but it might bloom with a different spell someday.
Once they were all settled into their routines, Regulus crossed to the far side of the room. Time to work on his own.
Progress on Space Warp had accelerated beyond expectation since he'd locked down the incantation.
He raised his wand and aimed at a stone platform five meters away.
No incantation needed. A thought, and magic surged through the wand.
The air around the platform began to warp, the spatial structure shifting. Through his spatial perception, a half-meter radius centered on the platform buckled as though kneaded by invisible hands, gridlines bending, folding, unfolding.
It happened in the span of a blink. The platform vanished and reappeared twenty meters away in the corner of the room.
The placement was precise.
Regulus walked over to inspect. Surface temperature was normal. No frictional heat, no residual magical energy of the kind spatial transfers usually left behind.
That meant the warp had been smooth enough. The object hadn't been subjected to extra stress while passing through the spatial fold.
He kept testing.
Fifty meters. This time the target was a thick book on a wooden table, to be sent to the top shelf of the weapon rack at the far end of the training room.
Wand up, wand down.
The book vanished from the table and appeared on the top shelf in the same instant, spine facing outward, standing upright and perfectly steady.
A hundred meters. This time, the table itself.
The training room wasn't long enough. Regulus willed the Room of Requirement to expand, and the far wall slid back another fifty meters.
The table vanished and materialized on the open ground a hundred meters away, all four legs touching down at once. It didn't even wobble.
The upper limit on object size had increased too.
Something larger, like a human body, was theoretically possible. But Regulus hadn't attempted it.
The risk of warping living matter was orders of magnitude greater than with inert objects. If the spatial fold fluctuated even slightly mid-transit, what arrived on the other side might be a pile of shredded meat.
He stood in the center of the training room, staring at the distant table, and a new idea surfaced.
Could Space Anchor Charm be combined with Space Warp?
Space Warp had an obvious flaw right now: it could only transport objects with no active magical properties.
He'd tried sending a spell through. A Disarming Charm, for instance.
When the beam of light entered the spatial corridor generated by the warp, the spell's internal magical structure and the spatial fold interfered with each other. Two fundamentally different types of magic colliding.
The result was the spell detonating midway through, scattering into a spray of meaningless magical debris.
Regulus thought: what if, at the exact moment the warp corridor formed, he used Space Anchor Charm to lock the spatial structure in that region?
The essence of the Space Anchor Charm was stabilization. It drove magical stakes into a selected area, pinning space in place, resisting external distortion and tearing.
That stability was normally applied to static space. Preventing an enemy from Apparating away, for example, or shielding an area from spatial magic.
But what if you drove the anchor into space that was actively changing?
The corridor generated by Space Warp existed for a fraction of a second, maybe a tenth of one, and during that window the spatial structure was in a state of extreme instability.
If an anchor was driven in at that precise moment, forcibly locking the corridor's shape, it might allow a spell to pass through safely.
The theory held. Practice was another matter.
Regulus spent two days on it. The first day was a total failure.
He cast Space Warp first, then tried to layer the Space Anchor Charm the instant the corridor formed. The two spells' magic clashed. The anchor had barely taken hold before the corridor collapsed, taking the warp with it.
The object he'd been transporting got stuck halfway. One half in normal space, the other half lodged in a spatial gap. It took considerable effort to fish it back out.
The second day he reversed the order. Pre-set the anchor, then activate the warp within its range.
This time the corridor stabilized, but the anchor's stabilizing properties were too dominant, locking down the flexible folds the warp needed to function.
The corridor opened, but nothing could pass through. The spatial structure had gone rigid as steel plate. Objects bounced off it on impact.
The third day, he found the compromise. He manipulated both spells simultaneously, restricting the anchor's stabilizing effect to the corridor walls and leaving a flexible channel through the center.
This required splitting his magic into two streams. One maintained the warp's fold generation. The other controlled the anchor's area of effect. And the two streams couldn't interfere with each other.
On the seventeenth attempt, it finally worked. A Disarming Charm's red light passed through the corridor and struck the wooden dummy on the other side.
But the result was poor.
After traversing the corridor, the spell retained maybe a tenth of its original power. The red light had gone thin and pale, leaving only a faint mark on the dummy's chest. It didn't even kick up splinters.
Magical analysis told him the spell had been diluted in transit. The anchor's stabilizing effect had protected the corridor but also filtered out most of the spell's magical energy. What arrived on the other side was little more than a warm glow, incapable of real damage.
Still, compared to the spell simply detonating, this was progress.
Regulus kept refining.
He found the problem lay in anchor strength.
Too strong, and the anchor stabilized the spell's magic along with the space, leaving nothing but meaningless light on the other end.
Too weak, and the corridor couldn't hold. The spell blew apart midway.
He needed a critical threshold. Just enough stability to hold the space without interfering with the magic passing through.
That demanded extraordinarily precise control.
In the instant of casting, Regulus had to gauge the corridor's stability threshold, then fine-tune the anchor's magical output in real time.
A fraction too much wouldn't work. A fraction too little wouldn't either.
By the fourth evening, he finally managed to send an Impediment Jinx through the corridor intact.
The spell landed near the dummy's feet.
But the cost was steep. He was mentally exhausted.
Simultaneously controlling two advanced spatial spells while adjusting parameters in real time was a heavier burden than raw suppression of Fiendfyre.
Suppressing Fiendfyre was a contest of force. You faced a raging, semi-sentient mass of energy and held it in place through sheer will. The whole thing was pulling and pushback, a constant wrestling match.
That kind of fatigue was physical and magical. An arm-wrestling match with an invisible opponent.
Layering spatial magic was weaving. Two streams of magic, different in nature and almost adversarial, had to be twisted into one without canceling each other out, working in tandem.
It required playing two roles at once. His mind split into two independent processing regions. One calculated the fold curvature for the warp. The other monitored the anchor's stabilizing output. Both had to exchange data in real time, correcting deviations on the fly.
That kind of fatigue lived in the mind.
But the direction was right.
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