novelnext Chapter 308: Desecrating Loyalty, Bella Unhinged [bonus]
Chapter 308: Desecrating Loyalty, Bella Unhinged [bonus]
On Bella’s side, a churning mass of darkness. On Regulus’s, a roaring sphere of flame.
Neither gained ground. Both burned through reserves.
Separated by a dozen meters, they began trading shots.
Black arrows condensed from the fog and streaked toward him. He split head-sized fireballs from his domain and hurled them back.
The fireballs plunged into the mist, and the fog surged up to smother them, wrapping tight, grinding them down. It wasn’t effortless. Each fireball’s expansion blasted the mist open briefly, but the fog closed fast enough to devour most of them before they reached their target.
He sent two conventional spells through. A Piercing Curse and a Severing Charm lanced through the flames toward Bella.
The mist rose to meet them, swallowing the beams. Wwhite light dimmed inside the fog and guttered out halfway across.
The few that punched through were absorbed cleanly by the black barrier.
Arrows came from the other direction. He let the fire intercept.
Each arrow lost a layer passing through, thinning, fading, arriving at his Protego with most of its force already spent. The shield flickered once on impact. Barely registered.
Manageable.
Bella’s magic signature was doubly screened by the fog and the barrier. His perception couldn’t reach her.
He couldn’t read her reserves directly, but the fog’s output rate and arrow density suggested her magic was still running steady.
Regulus raised his wand again and gathered metal fragments.
Faster this time. High density spike took shape in three seconds, shorter than the last but denser.
It began to spin. Speed climbed. The tip went white-hot.
Then he wrapped it in fire.
A tendril of blue-white flame peeled from the domain and coiled around the spinning spike, winding from tail to tip.
Flame and metal fused into one thing. The heat doubled. The hum in the air sharpened to a scream.
Deep inside the mist, Bella saw it happen. The ease left her face.
The spike launched.
It tore through the fog trailing fire. The mist tried to wrap it, clinging to the shaft, but the flames burned it off and the rotation flung it clear. The fog held for an instant before being shed entirely.
Through the mist. Into the barrier.
This time, the impact dwarfed the first.
The explosion was larger, brighter, the shockwave clearing a wide circle of fog around the point of contact. Blue-white flame and dark barrier magic tangled together, the heat scorching a bright spot onto the barrier’s surface.
The dark patterns across the barrier flared as they absorbed the blast energy, but this time absorption hit saturation.
The barrier shuddered. In one small area, a hairline gap opened, already racing to close as the explosion faded.
Regulus caught it.
The blast’s glare blinded everyone else in the hall. Inside that searing white light, his wand found the closing gap. Piercing Curse.
The spell didn’t travel in a straight line. The instant it left his wand tip it entered a spatial corridor, a Space Warp that skipped the intervening distance and the shrinking gap, delivering the curse directly through the breach.
The pale beam punched through Bella’s left shoulder, entering below the collarbone and exiting through her back in a spray of blood mist.
Her body lurched backward. Her left foot skidded half a step. The wand in her right hand nearly slipped from her fingers.
She glanced down at her shoulder. Blood flowed, but only for a few seconds.
Dark mist climbed from beneath her, rising along her legs, past her waist, up to her shoulder, and burrowed into the wound. Fog merged with torn muscle tissue, black filaments weaving together inside the cavity to form a temporary filler. The bleeding stopped. The wound sealed.
Fire and debris cleared, revealing her silhouette.
Her gaze cut through the roiling mist and locked onto Regulus.
Pain, surprise and something new: wariness.
These two spells had been taught to her by the Dark Lord himself.
The dark mist and the black barrier. Since the day she’d mastered them, no one facing them for the first time had ever broken through. No one had ever wounded her.
Not the Ministry’s Aurors. Not the Mudbloods who fancied themselves capable of resistance. All of them fell inside the fog, corroded to nothing, pinned to walls.
But Regulus had found the weakness and punched through it within minutes.
He’d used that twisted fire-laced Transfiguration to crack the dark barrier open, then threaded a Piercing Curse through the gap to blow through her shoulder in the same instant.
The Dark Lord’s interest in him was well-founded. Which made it all the more imperative that she defeat him.
Her eyes turned vicious. The dark glow on her wand intensified.
Regulus stood in his fire and watched.
She was wounded. Her left arm was temporarily useless. But her right hand still held her wand, the fog still churned, and the breach in the barrier had already healed.
Her fighting capacity remained.
And her mental state...
He studied her expression.
Anger, yes. Wariness too. But reason still operated behind her eyes.
Pushed this far, her response wasn’t to spiral. She’d grown calmer.
Strikes harder, spells stronger, Dark magic deployed, a major escalation, but fundamentally still a tactical upgrade.
Her emotions were still under control.
Same problem as before. Not mad enough.
A rational Bella wielding Dark magic was dangerous, difficult, but containable.
A Bella who’d lost her mind wielding Dark magic was what he needed.
He needed her judgment gone. Needed her past the point of caring.
She moved.
The mist erupted outward, no longer the low ground-hugging spread from before. It expanded in every direction at once, surging upward, pushing outward.
Fog climbed from the floor to the vaulted ceiling, from the ruined walls to every broken pillar stump. Every remaining pocket of air in the banquet hall filled with black.
Darkness swallowed all light beyond the flames.
No one outside could see a thing.
The mist coated Orion’s barrier, reducing his field of vision to the small bright space inside the silver shell, the fog pressing against it from every side.
Sirius’s hand clenched in the fabric of his robes. Narcissa stepped closer to Lucius, who held his wand crosswise in front of them.
Walburga gripped Orion’s hand. She was trembling.
Two points of light remained in the hall.
One was the blue-white fire rolling around Regulus, burning in the dark, illuminating a few meters in every direction.
The other was the dark glow at Bella’s wand tip, flickering deep inside the blackness a dozen meters away.
The corner of Regulus’s mouth pulled.
Full coverage. The outside couldn’t see in.
Good.
He chained the Side-Shift Spell into the Sprint Spell in rapid succession, carving a straight trail of fire through the mist behind him.
His figure flickered through the darkness, punching through the churning fog, arriving two meters from Bella’s barrier.
She saw the fire closing in. Assumed a frontal assault. Her chin lifted, her mouth beginning to stretch wide.
A sphere of light detonated outside the barrier.
His other hand moved. Fingers curled in a subtle gesture. Space Warp, on the smallest possible scale, opening a pinhole window in Bella’s black barrier. Duration: less than three-tenths of a second.
Enough.
Light passed through.
Bella saw it.
Her eyes caught the white flash in the darkness. Her pupils contracted. The ink staining her irises washed back a shade.
Light Source Magic was, at its core, information inscription.
Light entered the retina. The retina passed the signal to the brain. The brain processed the visual input and, simultaneously, received the information embedded in the light.
Protego couldn’t block light. Protego didn’t filter information carried inside it. The black barrier might. Or might not.
But Regulus played it safe and assumed it could.
In the briefest fraction of an instant, the message was in.
A simple thought. Your master doesn’t need your loyalty.
Bella’s brain processed the thought as her own for a fraction of a second.
Somewhere in the depths of her consciousness, a voice said: He doesn’t need you.
Then she saw an image. Her own mind generated it, sparked by that single planted thought.
She saw the Dark Lord seated in a high-backed chair. She knelt at his feet, the way she had countless times before. She was speaking, reporting, professing her devotion.
He wasn’t looking at her.
He was looking elsewhere. Out the window. At the wand in his hand. In any direction. Every direction except hers.
Then he turned his back to her and spoke to someone whose face she couldn’t make out.
That person’s voice was flat. So flat it bordered on contempt.
Her?
Her loyalty is worthless.
The Dark Lord didn’t object.
She called out. Master.
No response.
She called again, louder, more urgent.
Nothing.
The image vanished. The entire sequence lasted less than half a second.
Bella’s eyes snapped wide.
Her body locked. The wand still pointed forward, but her fingers had frozen, her breathing had stopped, every part of her suspended in place.
Then understanding hit. This thought wasn’t hers. She could never have produced it.
Her loyalty to the Dark Lord had grown from her soul. It was her entire reason for existing, her identity, the meaning behind opening her eyes every morning.
Your master doesn’t need your loyalty. Those words were not hers.
Someone had touched her mind.
Someone had taken a blade to the most sacred bond between her and her master, using means she couldn’t identify.
That bond was everything she had.
Her loyalty to the Dark Lord was not a choice. Not an attitude. Not a position.
It was her. It was the definition of the person called Bellatrix Lestrange.
Someone had touched that.
Someone had left a mark on it.
Bella’s face changed.
The smile froze, shifted from rigid to contorted, from contorted to something beyond her own control.
Her mouth opened but no sound came out. The muscles in her throat spasmed. Her teeth clenched, then released, then clenched again.
The muscle above her cheekbone began to jump, dragging the corner of her right eye upward, but the left side didn’t follow. Her face was asymmetric for one terrible instant.
Something shattered behind her eyes.
Desecration.
Someone had desecrated her loyalty.
"How dare you..." The words scraped out of her throat, pitch warping under the weight of her fury. "How dare you touch that!!"
Her magic detonated.
Dark energy erupted outward from her body. The black barrier, overwhelmed by the uncontrolled surge, shattered. Fragments blasted in every direction, punching through her own fog.
Regulus watched her. Watched the mist lose coherence around her, churning without direction. Watched the light in her eyes become something entirely different from what it had been before.
She was beyond anger. Beyond control.
She’d finally lost her mind.
This was exactly what he wanted.