The castle had arrived.
He descended and touched down on the Astronomy Tower, then walked inside.
Baruk was still perched on his shoulder. Eight eyes finally pulled away from the outside world and began studying the corridor.
Back in the dormitory, Regulus pushed the door open.
Cuthbert’s and Alex’s bed curtains were drawn, breathing steady. Asleep.
Hers’s bed was empty, covers thrown aside. The washroom door was shut, water running behind it.
Two in the morning, and the man was still up. Impressive stamina.
Regulus crossed to his desk and pulled open the bottom drawer.
It wasn’t large. A few notebooks, an ink bottle, a wand-maintenance kit. He pushed everything deeper, clearing a space.
He reached up to his shoulder. Baruk’s eight tiny legs released the fabric, and the spider crawled into his palm. Regulus set him in the drawer.
Baruk walked back and forth across the cover of a notebook, chelicerae working, surveying the space.
Then he tilted his head up. The voice was mosquito-faint but carried that familiar clicking texture. "This... colony... ho...?"
Regulus shook his head. "This isn’t ho. It’s a school."
All eight eyes fixed on him. "School... many... wizards...?"
"Lots of young wizards. They co here to learn magic."
"Young wizards..." Baruk’s chelicerae clicked twice. "Can... eat...?"
"No eating."
Baruk was quiet for a mont, then asked, "They..." One foreleg gestured toward the two curtained beds nearby. "Also... wizards...?"
"They’re from other colonies." Regulus considered his phrasing. "Other nests. Different from mine. But we share this space."
The chelicerae stopped. In an Acromantula’s world, spiders from different nests cohabiting ant only one thing. One side had been conquered.
"You... chief...?" Baruk asked.
The corner of Regulus’s mouth lifted. "Close enough."
Baruk’s eight legs shuffled a few steps across the notebook, chelicerae opening and closing. Satisfied.
"Stay here," Regulus said. "Don’t crawl out."
Chelicerae sealed, legs tucked in, Baruk retreated to the deepest corner of the drawer and curled into a fuzzy little ball. Perfectly obedient.
"A few more days," Regulus said, watching him. "Then I’ll take you to my nest and make you powerful."
All eight legs snapped outward at once. chelicerae spread to their widest. Forelegs drumd the notebook cover in a rapid staccato. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.
"Powerful... powerful..."
Regulus closed the drawer, leaving a gap for air.
He turned toward the washroom.
Hers was stepping out, bathrobe draped, hair still wet, water trailing from the ends.
They sidestepped each other in the doorway.
Hers stopped. Didn’t go in, didn’t move aside. A slight frown. "I heard you talking to sothing."
Regulus nodded. "A small creature."
The frown deepened.
Hers had zero interest in small creatures. Nobody in the dormitory kept pets.
But the idea of Regulus talking to a small creature struck him as wrong sohow.
An image flashed through his mind.
Regulus crouching on the floor, leaning toward sothing small and furry, face soft, voice gentle, cooing the way those younger witches did at their pet cats. Who’s a good baby, yes you are.
The image lasted less than a second.
No. Absolutely not. Worse than Dark Magic.
A full-body shudder.
Regulus watched the expression on his face and had no idea what was going on in the man’s head, but whatever it was, it wasn’t anything sensible.
"The kind of small creature that could kill you," Regulus added.
Hers’s face ca alive.
First, disbelief. What small creature could kill him? His Dark Magic could wipe out every cat and dog in Hogwarts without exception.
Then he reconsidered. Plenty of magical creatures could kill him, but the kind you’d keep in a dormitory was, at most, so pet with a trace of magical bloodline.
Then he reconsidered who was saying this.
If it was Regulus, he had to believe it.
The frown tightened. "What is it?"
"I’ll introduce you all in the morning." Regulus stepped into the washroom. "It’s in my drawer. Don’t go poking around. Dangerous."
Hers’s gaze drifted toward Regulus’s desk, then pulled back. He nodded.
He moved away from the door, walked to his bed, and lay down.
Didn’t go poking.
Regulus entered the washroom. Even while washing up, his mind kept working.
Baruk was curled up in the drawer, well-behaved, but the next steps needed planning.
The original approach was to use the Decomposition Curse to loosen Baruk’s magical structure, then introduce the Forbidden Forest’s Verdant Magic, letting his magical system widen its pathways during restructuring and break through the species ceiling.
That plan still held as the foundation.
But after reading Transfiguration: Beyond Form, new possibilities had opened up.
Cross-species ability transplantation. If wizards could use it, magical creatures should be able to, with adjustnts.
In so ways, magical creatures might even have an advantage.
A wizard’s magic was chaotic, capable of becoming a hundred different things, which also ant directionless. Introducing foreign magical traits created too many conflicts with the wizard’s own system.
A magical creature’s magic was singular, directional, and its mind was simpler. Fewer stray thoughts.
With proper control over the infusion process and its direction, the success rate might exceed a wizard’s.
Given the frawork and the technical feasibility, why not go all the way with Baruk? Or take it slow, but aim for sothing more thorough.
Regulus began considering which creatures’ abilities would suit Baruk.
An Acromantula’s racial strengths were venom, silk, strength, and speed, but these leaned physical. Magic played a minimal role.
What he wanted to add was sothing more magical.
Occamy.
Occamies could resize their bodies to fit available space.
Spiders were natural ambush predators, built for squeezing into crevices and striking from the dark. If Baruk could control his own size, enlarging for combat to gain strength and reach, shrinking for stealth to maximize concealnt, the tactical applications were enormous.
Compatibility between Occamy and spider magic should be reasonable. Both cold-blooded, both reliant on ambush strategies, overlapping ecological niches. Their underlying magical tendencies were likely similar.
Demiguise.
The Demiguise’s core abilities were invisibility and short-term precognition.
Invisibility would push an Acromantula’s ambush capability to its absolute ceiling. Short-term precognition was practically a cheat.
Bowtruckle.
Bowtruckles communicated with trees, sensing the state and moods of plant life.
The Forbidden Forest was nothing but trees. If Baruk could forge a connection with the forest’s vegetation, he’d beco an entirely different class of creature within it.
Salamander.
The Salamander’s core trait was fire resistance. Simple, singular, practical.
Regulus used Fiendfyre. If Baruk was going to operate alongside him, surviving within its area of effect was a baseline requirent.
Acromantulas feared fire. Webbing was flammable, carapace heat tolerance was diocre. Fla was an apex-level threat to any spider.
The Salamander’s magical structure was extrely straightforward, creating minimal conflict with spider magic. Probably the easiest of the four to integrate.
Four abilities. Four directions.
Occamy solved the size problem. Demiguise solved concealnt and combat. Bowtruckle solved environntal connection. Salamander solved survival.
But the texts were clear: more than two foreign magical systems in a single body would conflict with each other.
Magical creatures had simpler magic than wizards, so the conflicts might be milder, but cramming all four in at once was out of the question.
One at a ti, then. Integrate one, wait for stabilization, add the next.
Salamander was simplest. Start there, use it as the first experint.
If it worked, move to the Occamy’s size-shifting.
Then the Bowtruckle’s plant communication, tid to coincide with the Verdant Magic introduction back in the Forbidden Forest. Two steps rged into one, building the environntal connection simultaneously.
Demiguise last. The hardest.
As for using the Decomposition Curse to loosen the magical structure, that could wait.
Today’s test on the Gno at interdiate intensity had turned it to ash. Baruk was far stronger than a Gno, but whether he could withstand that level of force was uncertain.
Maybe a different approach: integrate the abilities first, build Baruk’s foundation, let him grow strong enough, then apply the Decomposition Curse for pathway restructuring.
His tolerance would be far higher by then. The success rate, too.
And if he could push further still, if he could decode the principles behind the Basilisk’s hatching ritual, there might be room for an even more radical transformation.
But that was another tier entirely. No rush. Handle what was in front of him first.
Regulus dried his hair and left the washroom.
Hers was already down, curtains drawn, sleeping like the dead.
He walked to his desk and eased the drawer open.
Baruk was curled in the corner, legs drawn tight, compressed into a ball even smaller than before.
When Regulus’s face appeared above, the chelicerae opened and closed once, producing a click so faint and thin it barely registered.
A greeting.
Regulus closed the drawer, left the gap, and lay down.
The holiday would co. One step at a ti.
He slept.
---
Next Target 800PS :)
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