Chapter 389: Regulus: It Stinks [bonus]
Bellatrix's guardian intent, blue-white light, steady and unchanging, bled down the mental link and wrapped the anchor layer by layer.
Something in Edgar's head began to glow. Warm, and level, like the fire in the Hufflepuff common room. It drove nothing out and held nothing down. It was simply there.
The guardian image sank through him, reinforcing his home, his sense of self, his refusal to hurt anyone, then settled and drove itself into the floor of him.
On future full moons, when the animal broke through and swept his reason away, everything else would go. Only this anchor, sheathed in Bellatrix's light, would hold.
The last rope he'd be able to grab before he turned all the way into a beast.
It wouldn't take shape in one sitting.
Regulus knew he'd only planted a seed.
Whether it grew, and into what, depended on the man himself, on one full moon after another, on every round of tearing between the animal and the human.
He'd only started it.