Regulus let his protective will spread through the space around him.
He started with the same invitation he'd used at Hogwarts.
Nothing answered. It didn't reject him, either. This stretch of space had no will to speak of. It was just there, empty and indifferent.
So he stopped asking.
His will pushed outward, direct and unrestrained, and sank into the space around him without meeting the slightest resistance. The Patronus magic seeped into every inch of it until the space itself carried that protective quality.
Regulus blinked.
He could feel it now. Not the way spatial perception swept an area for information. The space itself was reporting back to him. For five or six metres in every direction, it had become part of him.
Wind moved across the cliff. A gull cut past overhead, and he caught the tiny disturbance from its wings. Even the dead grass at his boots registered, every blade bending and quivering in the breeze.
It felt as though he'd dissolved his senses into the landscape.
The corner of his mouth lifted. Months of banging his head against this problem at Hogwarts, and out here it had taken minutes.
So that was the issue.
It had never been him. Natural space simply let him work.
He got to testing.
First came spatial folding. With his wand, he drew the familiar arc for Space Warp: find the target, guide the fold, stabilise it. He pinched a small section of space and shortened the distance between two points.
At Hogwarts, folded space always fought him. He had to keep feeding it magic or it would spring back into shape. Here, once the fold settled, it stayed put. The initial cost hadn't changed, but there was almost no upkeep.
That was a very nice difference.
Next, he placed two spatial anchors, one beneath his feet and another beside a boulder ten metres away. Both settled cleanly.
Hogwarts' space had an irritating elasticity. Anchors worked there, but the castle kept tugging at pinned areas, demanding a steady flow of magic to keep them in place. That was manageable when he only needed the Spatial Network, a closed loop for spells to travel through.
People were another matter. Spells didn't care if the space around them buckled for half a second. A person very much did.
But here, his protective will had soaked into the empty space. If he folded the distance between two anchors, it could fill the join and hold a real passage open.
He widened the gap. Twenty metres. Thirty. Fifty.
Then he opened it.
From the outside, the result looked like a vertical crack hanging in the air. It was roughly as tall as a person, its edges uneven and lit by a soft silver-white glow, the same light as his Patronus. Through it, he could see the boulder, dead grass, and the sea beyond, all rippling faintly like heat haze.
Two places, pressed together with a single step between them.
He studied the opening with both magical and spatial perception. Protective will lined the edges in an even layer. No thin spots. No wobble. The interior held steady, and the space itself gave him a simple, wordless answer.
Safe.
Of course it was. His Patronus was guarding him.
He sent the Starlight Kite through first. It tucked its wings and became a streak of light as it plunged into the crack.
For a heartbeat, silver light ran in from the passage's edges. The Kite burst out beside the boulder, opened its wings, circled once, and landed. It cocked its head at Regulus.
Regulus stepped through.
The passage had substance beneath his feet. Silver-white light washed over its narrow interior, maybe two paces wide. Through that glow, he could make out the texture of folded space, dense grey fibres like creases left in cloth after it had been folded too many times.
The boulder stood ahead, framed by the exit.
One stride later, he was standing beside it.
He looked back. The crack remained open, showing the cliff edge and grassland fifty metres away as neatly as a picture frame.
One step. Fifty metres gone.
Regulus went still, thinking.
If he could make these passages permanent, they were doors. Set an anchor somewhere, and he could open a route to it. Anti-Apparition Charms wouldn't matter. No Floo Network, no Portkey, no signature anyone could trace. It would be entirely his.
If he could stretch the range between cities, he'd have a private transport network. If he could fix the passages in place, he could build strategic nodes that made his reach frankly absurd.
One at Grimmauld Place. One at Hogwarts. One in the Ministry of Magic.
Actually, one in every Ministry.
At the moment, only he could use them. The protective will recognised him and nobody else. If he ever solved that problem, though, the possibilities became military-grade. A hundred wizards could enter at Point A and emerge at Point B with their wands already drawn.
Who was supposed to stop that?
And distance itself barely mattered in theory. If the magic held and the anchors stayed stable, spatial folding had no real ceiling. He could open a door between planets.
In theory.
He couldn't even leave Earth yet, so perhaps he should not get ahead of himself.
Regulus pulled the anchors. The silver-white fissure stitched itself shut, leaving nothing behind. Space settled back into normal as if he'd never touched it.
Baruk poked his head out of the inner pocket, all eight amber eyes fixed on where the passage had been. His chelicerae clicked.
"...Road?"
Regulus stroked the spider's head.
"Road."
That was enough spatial work for one day. He stood in the wind for a while, hair whipped back from his face.
Outside Hogwarts, everything worked. He hadn't suddenly become stronger. The castle had been suppressing him all along.
Some things simply needed the right place.
Of course, the opposite was also true. Hogwarts had a will, a thousand years of accumulated magic behind it. If it ever chose to work with him rather than merely tolerate him, the things he could do inside those walls would make this look modest.
That was a problem for a day when Dumbledore was no longer headmaster. The position went to whoever the Board of Governors appointed, not whoever could punch hardest.
Not yet, anyway.
Too far ahead again.
Time to fly.
Regulus rolled his shoulders and flexed his wrists. The spatial testing had taken some concentration, but not much. The brief break had left him mostly recovered.
His first Fiendfyre flight, above the Forbidden Forest last term, had been exactly what it sounded like: a Protego shell with Fiendfyre blasting out the back. It had been fast. It had also been a nightmare to steer. Turns meant wrestling the airflow with raw magic, and near the speed of sound the shell had vibrated hard enough to nearly tear apart.
This time, he had at least skimmed the basics of aerodynamics.
Lift, Drag, Airfoils, Angle of attack, Thrust line, Sweep angle, Shockwaves, Wing loading...
He didn't need a proper aircraft. He only needed his shield to stop behaving like a round object being shoved through the sky.
Protego flared around him, and he began shaping it. The nose lengthened and sharpened. Its forward cross-section became elliptical, the upper surface more curved than the lower, forming a simple airfoil.
The small side wings stretched wider, nearly doubling their span. He rounded their leading edges, narrowed their trailing edges, and added camber. A higher aspect ratio meant better lift and less induced drag. At the tail, he built horizontal and vertical stabilisers, one to manage pitch and the other yaw.
He moved the exhaust port lower instead of leaving it dead centre behind him. The thrust line now passed through the craft's centre of gravity, cutting most of the torque that had made his first flight so twitchy.
Narrow adjustable slits ran along the wingtips and trailing edges. Not real flaps or ailerons, but close enough. Alter the slit width, change the local airflow, create a lift difference, turn.
Before he launched, he layered a cushioning charm over an anti-G Force Charm. Last time had nearly flattened his organs. He had learned from that particular mistake.
Fiendfyre poured from his palms, orange flame threaded with dark veins. It flowed along the inner walls of the Protego shell and collected at the exhaust port. Pressure built, but the new shape spread the strain evenly instead of concentrating it in one miserable spot.
He launched.
Orange fire blasted from the tail and lifted him into the air.
It was completely different.
Before, thrust had done everything. It shoved him forward while he fought to point himself in a useful direction. Now the wings handled lift and Fiendfyre handled forward motion. They each had a job.
He started low, skimming the clifftop. A gust came in off the sea, shifting his angle of attack. He adjusted the wing camber with a thought, and the lift steadied immediately.
Then he accelerated.
He narrowed one wingtip slit. Less air bled from that side, its lift increased, and the craft rolled smoothly toward the other wing. The turn came without the familiar sickening skid.
Regulus circled the cliffs once. Then again, thirty percent faster. The shell responded to every small adjustment with crisp, proportional movement. No brute-force hauling. No desperate correction.
He tested a dive. Nose down, thrust off, gravity taking over.
At the bottom, he increased the angle of attack, felt the wings bite, reignited the Fiendfyre, and pulled up in a clean arc to his original altitude.
G-forces slammed him into the seat. The two charms took most of it, though his stomach still tried to climb into his throat.
Manageable.
Regulus began to accelerate
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