Chapter 31: Lighting the Fourth Star
Silence filled the dormitory.
Regulus drew the heavy curtains around his bed and set wards for quiet and privacy, sealing himself away from everything outside: the praise, the gossip, the wary looks, the calculations, and the feverish warmth still clinging to Bellatrix's letter.
He sat cross legged on the mattress, closed his eyes, and let his awareness sink inward.
His basic magic circulation followed its familiar route, washing through him like a steady stream. It nourished and tempered him in the same patient way as always, strengthening skin, muscle, tendon, and bone, layer by layer.
Then, higher in his consciousness, his mind tightened and gathered.
Three stars lit one after another in the darkness of his inner sea. Orion's Belt. They drifted with a motion so slow it was almost imperceptible, yet undeniably real.
Star track Guided Meditation began to turn, and the rough edges of his thoughts smoothed under that vast, steady imagery. When his mind was finally level and still, Regulus reached for the next step.
The fourth star.
Things were moving faster than he had expected. He needed to move faster too.
Synchronising three stars was only the beginning. It was the threshold, not the summit.
He angled his awareness towards Orion's bright right shoulder, the red supergiant Betelgeuse, glowing with a dark red presence that felt heavier than the stars of the Belt.
Adding it meant more than placing another point of light.
He had to fold it into the entire moving system while keeping the Belt stable. Betelgeuse had its own trajectory. Its relative distance, angles, and slow shifting relationship with the Belt formed the foundation of Orion's upper body structure.
The difficulty rose sharply.
A static model was simple by comparison. This was motion, and motion demanded precision. It demanded calculation. It demanded control.
He had to hold the exact positions of all the light points in his mind at once, then make each of them drift with a tendency so slow the eye could barely register it, yet accurate enough to obey celestial laws.
It was like controlling several lights at once, each following a different complex path, while ensuring the shape they formed never broke.
He could not relax. A single lapse would throw one star's momentum off, and the entire balance would slip, wobble, or collapse.
That slowness did not make it easier. It made it worse.
A movement that barely moved still had to be maintained. It had to be maintained continuously, without error, without impatience, without letting the mind wander.
Regulus began by locating Betelgeuse's position.
A dark red point flared into view, slightly larger than the Belt stars, appearing above and to the right of them.
Next came momentum.
Betelgeuse's motion data differed from the Belt stars. Even its direction was subtly different. Regulus had to divide his attention, assigning part of his mind to calculate and sustain Betelgeuse's drift, while another part coordinated the changing geometry between all four points.
Distance, angles, direction, all of it shifted, slowly, steadily, and without mercy.
When he tried to introduce Betelgeuse's motion, the three star model immediately faltered. The Belt stars developed a slight disorder in their trajectories, and the whole structure began to feel precarious.
He stopped at once.
He returned to the three stars, stabilised them, and only then tried again.
This time he was cautious to the point of ruthlessness.
He placed Betelgeuse as a static point first, anchoring its relative position with the Belt. Only when the four point shape held steady did he begin, painfully slowly, to inject momentum into Betelgeuse, while fine tuning the Belt stars to accept the new variable and search for a new equilibrium.
The strain built.
His spirit felt like a bowstring pulled to its limit. A faint throbbing settled at his temples.
Four stars consumed far more mental energy than three. The increase was not linear. It climbed like a wall.
Time passed in silent calculation and constant adjustment.
Then, after what felt like an endless stretch of resistance, something clicked into place.
Not a sound in the room, but a sensation in his mind, like an invisible gear catching cleanly.
Betelgeuse no longer felt like an intrusion.
Its slow drift aligned with the Belt stars in a way that made the whole system coherent. The simple four point structure began to move as one in the void of his consciousness, not identical motion, but a unified rhythm.
He had done it.
The four star dynamic model was formed, at least in its first stable state.
Regulus held it carefully, feeling for the difference.
The mental drain was immense, but it was not only strain. With the success came a deeper quiet, and a faint sense of expansion, as though his mind had been stretched into a larger shape and had decided it could live there.
The meditation state itself seemed more layered, more stable. Even his perception of the loose ambient magic in the castle felt sharper, as if the air had gained edges.
He eased himself out of the deepest layer and glanced at the magical timer beside his bed.
Nearly two hours.
Two hours to add a single star, and that was after he had already mastered the moving three star model.
If he continued, each new star would multiply the complexity. Every addition would increase the time, the calculation burden, and the mental load at an alarming rate.
But there was another truth, just as certain.
Depth would forge him.
As he worked under this sustained pressure, his mind would toughen. His calculations would grow faster. His spatial imagination would sharpen. The early stages would be slow and punishing, then the pace would gradually accelerate as the foundation strengthened, a spiral that started heavy and became swift.
Still, the greatest challenge was not adding stars.
It was solidification.
Motion was the essence of this method, and also its hardest demand. He had to calculate, build, and maintain the dynamic model every time he meditated. It could not be turned into an instinctive pathway the way a fixed meditation pattern could.
To make a moving star track reach the state of occurring naturally whether walking, sitting, or lying down would be almost impossible.
Solidification usually meant fixed and unchanging.
He was trying to solidify something in eternal motion.
That would require his mind at its deepest level to form an active structure capable of automatically processing complex changes, automatically fine tuning synchronisation, without conscious effort.
The road ahead was long, but it was visible.
Regulus closed his eyes again. He did not reach for a fifth star tonight.
The fourth was already a breakthrough. He needed to consolidate, to make this four star model steadier and more natural, to let it settle into him.
Breath by breath, calculation by calculation, synchronisation by synchronisation, the star track continued.
And outside his curtains, the castle did what it always did.
It talked.
The news of Regulus crushing the fifth year Alge Travers spread through Slytherin like cold water thrown into boiling oil, then leaked into the wider pure blood circles of Hogwarts.
Slytherin prized power, but it also prized the sense to use it. When both were displayed so cleanly and so publicly, the shock was inevitable.
Overnight, Regulus's place in the house shifted, subtle in form and fundamental in truth.
Upper years no longer looked at him like a promising younger student. Their attention carried respect, and something sharper beneath it, a cautious awareness that he was not safe to dismiss.
No one spoke foolishly around him anymore.
Young pure blood students who had kept their distance from the House of Black, whether because of family politics or because of the Sirius incident, began to look again, reassessing the younger Black with new eyes.
At breakfast, in a quiet corner, a seventh year whispered to a companion.
"The Blacks might truly be rising again."
"Think about the power he showed," the other murmured. "And his casual attitude towards Dark Arts. That suits certain people."
"What matters is strength," his companion replied, suddenly serious. "He is in first year and he played a fifth year Travers like a toy. What happens when he graduates?"
"Voldemort is at the height of his power now. If the Blacks produce someone that ruthless, their future status…"
The sentence did not need finishing.
Similar conversations took place in many corners of the house, and beyond it.
Pragmatism was one of Slytherin's rules of survival. When power tilted, people adjusted their stance. They always did.
Owl post grew busier in the days that followed.
Many Slytherin students, especially those in upper years with strong family ties, wrote home about the duel and about the strength Regulus Black displayed, strength that far exceeded his age.
On Thursday morning, just after Transfiguration ended, a seventh year stopped him in the corridor.
"Black. Professor Slughorn would like you in his office."
The older student's tone was polite, with something faintly eager beneath it.
Regulus nodded, gathered his things, and headed towards the dungeons.