Joachim only watched them. No hostile stance. Instead, he reached into his robes and drew something out.
It looked like the remains of some unidentifiable sea creature, palm-sized, glowing faintly green. Shaped like the spine of a fish, each vertebra etched with intricate patterns.
He raised the bone fragment to his lips and murmured something soundless.
Neither Regulus nor Freya moved. They watched, guards fully up.
The patterns on the surface began to shift. Existing lines deepened. New ones crept outward, branching and spreading.
After a moment, the glow dimmed.
Joachim tossed it gently. The bone drifted upward and came to rest in the air between Freya and Regulus, hovering.
"Activate it on any ocean surface and the nearest member of our organization will sense it. They'll answer the call."
Nothing more. He didn't list what the Abyssal Whispers could do, what they specialized in, how far their reach extended.
He didn't mention the members they'd killed.
He said his piece and waited.
Regulus understood. A gesture of goodwill.
There will be times, he thought, when I need to operate on this ocean.
The ocean was vast. Whole stretches had no wizarding settlements at all. Nothing but water, scattered islands, and storms.
The Abyssal Whispers had been active in these waters for as long as anyone could remember. And not only here. The Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific... their reach likely stretched far wider.
Centuries of existence. Every member an elite. Even the ones who'd died at his hands would have been formidable by any normal standard.
A force like that couldn't be ignored. On open water, they were the people who knew the rules best.
The gap between ordinary wizards and true elites was sometimes wider than the gap between wizards and Muggles.
Blind trust was out of the question. But limited contact? That was reasonable.
He also knew he didn't carry enough weight with this organization to warrant the gesture on his own merits, and adding Freya didn't change that equation much.
The Blacks and the Eisenhardts were prominent, among the most powerful families in Europe, but the Abyssal Whispers operated primarily at sea. The two spheres of influence barely overlapped.
Even if they'd harmed both families' heirs tonight, retaliation would have been nearly impossible. The open ocean offered no address. And even if found, a real fight would cost both sides dearly.
Wizard combat at this level, especially on open water, negated numerical advantage. With that kind of mobility, if you couldn't catch someone, you couldn't catch them. If you couldn't pin them down, they walked away.
It wasn't even clear which side could field more combatants.
Yet despite all of that, Joachim had chosen diplomacy.
Why?
The ruins.
Grindelwald.
Not because of him.
Regulus glanced at Freya. She met his eyes. A brief, wordless exchange.
Freya reached out and closed her hand around the hovering bone fragment. She examined it for a moment, then handed it directly to Regulus.
Something flickered behind Joachim's mask, but he said nothing. He stepped back with the courtesy of a man concluding a formal visit.
"Goodbye, Miss Eisenhardt. Mr. Black."
He Apparated. The other four followed in quick succession, vanishing one after another from the surface of the sea.
---
Below deck, they sat across from each other.
Regulus turned the bone fragment over in his hands. Lighter than it looked. Smooth and warm to the touch..
He looked up at Freya. "Why give it to me?"
"Everything from this trip is yours." Her tone left no room for ambiguity.
He blinked. "His idea?"
A pause. Then she nodded.
That told him what he needed to know. This wasn't over. There would be more.
His mind drifted, tracing the shape of the whole affair.
Looking back, even the Abyssal Whispers learning that the Eisenhardts held the archive might have been orchestrated.
It would have been simple. Drop a word through the right channels, let it ripple across the water until it reached the right ears. The Abyssal Whispers would come looking on their own.
Grindelwald wouldn't have needed to involve himself directly. No commands, no supervision, no effort. He only needed to know how things would unfold.
He saw me, Regulus thought. Through foresight. Saw what I might become.
At some point in the future, he might possess a certain power, or stand in a certain place, or make a certain choice. And that future might not be the one Grindelwald wanted.
Or perhaps it was the person he'd become, or the things he'd do, that didn't match the old wizard's expectations.
What shaped the final form of any witch or wizard? Experience. The magic they mastered. The path they chose.
Magic changed its practitioners. Extended study in any discipline left its mark. The wizarding world accepted this as fact.
Prolonged use of Dark magic bred cruelty and detachment. The Patronus Charm, practiced often enough, cultivated optimism and clarity. Healing magic made a person instinctively generous, allergic to suffering.
And the future was linear, developmental, sculpted by countless individual choices and small events accumulating over a lifetime.
If you could intervene at the right juncture...
For Regulus, igniting Bellatrix might have been one such juncture.
Grindelwald had arranged the Mental Erosion from the Abyssal Whispers first, giving Regulus his first exposure to that kind of mental assault. Then he'd sent Freya to bring him to the Slumbering Abyss, to face the core's magical deconstruction and the cognitive shock that came with it.
But he hadn't forced anything. He'd built the stage and laid the road.
Whether to walk it was Regulus's choice alone.
And he had walked it. The result, at least from where he stood now, was good. Beneficial.
Pushing deeper: Grindelwald had known about the Slumbering Abyss long ago, had possessed the archive for years. Claiming he'd never made contact with the core was absurd. Which meant he knew exactly where the Abyssal Whispers came from.
Drawing them into this might have been deliberate too, a way to establish ongoing contact between them and Regulus.
He caught himself and shook the thought loose. Maybe he was overthinking it.
He didn't have the elevated vantage point needed to see clearly. All he could do was work from limited information and take it one step at a time.
He pulled back from the thread and found Freya staring at him.
He recognized that look. The first night, when she'd wanted to ask about the Decomposition Curse. The same expression.
Curious.
Wanting to ask.
Not quite willing to come out with it.
He smiled and began telling her what had happened inside the ruins.
How the presence had appeared. How it existed directly within his consciousness. How it had deconstructed his spells one by one, revealing an alternate path.
How he'd faced each reconstruction. What he'd thought. How he'd responded.
Freya listened, turning it over in her mind.
She'd been right not to touch the core. That level of cognitive assault... she wasn't certain she could have held steady the way he had.
If it had pulled her off course, led her down that cold path of self-erasure...
She drew a slow breath, then asked a question.
Her expression stayed neutral. Her voice was even. But her eyes carried a trace of caution, watching him closely.
"Doesn't it make you angry?"
She hadn't planned to ask.
At first, her thinking had been straightforward: any young wizard from the Black family ought to feel honored by this kind of attention. A wizard of that caliber, spending the effort to arrange things for someone else's child, a boy who wasn't even thirteen.
But things were different now. They'd grown close. They were friends.
And Regulus had never matched his age. He wasn't a naive child. He was far more mature than she'd expected.
Someone like that, discovering they'd been maneuvered... it could sting. It could infuriate.
She didn't want to lose this friend.
Regulus looked at her and shook his head, his expression warm. "Not angry. The opposite, actually. I'm grateful."
Confusion crossed her face.
This wasn't what she'd anticipated. She'd expected magnanimity performed for show, or blunt displeasure, or at least a veiled suggestion that next time a more direct approach would be appreciated.
Instead: not angry. Grateful.
She studied him again, closer this time, and found that he meant it. No mask. Nothing hidden behind the eyes. He was simply, genuinely, not angry.
She didn't know what to make of that, but she exhaled, tension leaving her frame.
Her posture relaxed, though she still sat straight-backed, arms folded neatly on the table. Proper enough to be endearing.
"Did you gain anything?"
Regulus considered.
The star guided meditation was fundamental. No matter how much he trusted Freya, some things stayed private.
He raised his hand and made a fist.
When it opened, a small orange-red shape sat in his palm. An egg.
Constructed entirely of Fiendfyre. Fine, delicate patterns covered the shell, eerily lifelike.
The shell cracked. A tiny bird wriggled free, shook its feathers, spread its wings, and hopped to his fingertip.
The same as before. And yet, subtly different.
It perched there, bright-eyed, looking at Freya, then Regulus, then back to Freya. It pecked at its own plumage and a spray of orange-red sparks scattered outward, winking out almost instantly.
"Some progress with magic tied to mental focus and willpower," he said.
Controlling Fiendfyre through thought. Suppressing it through will. Things that used to demand constant effort now came easily.
He watched Freya's gaze fix on the little bird, her eyes brightening despite herself, and added, "And I believe in myself a bit more than I did before."
The words carried more weight than their surface. But he left it there.
Freya glanced at him. She didn't press.
They sat in the quiet, listening to the sea against the hull.
This trip, dressed up as a family assignment, was over.
By the time the ship reached reef town, a thin line of pale yellow had appeared on the far horizon.
They disembarked and walked back along the stone path. At the door of the cottage by the sea, both stopped.
"Goodnight, Freya."
"Goodnight, Regulus."