Chapter 235 - Reforging binds!

{15th July 1991} 

{Rigel's POV}

I sat very still and focused on slow breaths to maintain my calm; the wait was likely going to be longer than before. I looked around again. The candle above me fluttered in a draft I could not feel, its flame drawing a thin gold ellipse on the ceiling before settling again. Dust lay on the fan blades like frost on leaves, unmoving, each mote a tiny moon in the candlelight. Stone pressed a damp chill through the soles of my feet. The chains around my wrists and ankles had stopped biting some time ago, and the pain had receded when you teach your mind to file it away. I counted my breaths and then stopped counting, because numbers had a way of making minutes into adversaries.

Meditation is not emptiness or lack of thoughts. It is attention arranged into furniture. I went to the library, I know better than my own face: oiled oak, lamps turned low, snow banked at the windows so that the glow deepens rather than spills. The serpent on the hearth slept in a loose coil, one lidless eye half-open, a quiet weight of watchfulness. You cannot demand calmness any more than you can demand sleep. My mindscape pulsed with comfort as I felt the fatigue melting away. 

'Was this the reason that the imperios didn't work on me, or is it because my mind is protected by the system itself?' The thought remained unanswered as time passed. The candle sang a quiet, even note. My pulse slowed. Somewhere outside my door, a shoe scuffed, then nothing. 

My mana would not move under me, no matter how gently I called to it. With a calm mind and focus, I suppressed the effects of the runes. I realized that whatever it was had to do with the ropes binding me; the disturbing suppression emerged from them. But my mana sense—whatever odd, stubborn tendon that was—still stretched like a wire through plaster, through stone, through the thick knit of wards. Emotion has a temperature, a frequency of mana, and I have spent the last year learning to feel.

When the wall to my right shivered, I felt it before I saw it: a ripple like a pebble tossed into a still pond. The stone went liquid, then glass, then the air itself. Nalini stood in the threshold of the adjoining room, her profile cut clean as a coin, and tilted her head a fraction toward me. A nod. Not courtesy—acknowledgment of terms tentatively accepted, the game continuing.

She turned from me and pointed her wand at Sirius.

The spell she cast was small and sharp—my bones recognized the thistle-prick of a stinging hex. He flinched, shoulders tightening against the back of his chair. The blindfold meant panic was not performance but reflex; Sirius went from still to electric in a heartbeat. He shouted—my name, I think, or "show yourself"—and the room around him reacted like a flock startled into flight. Harry's mana spiked hot; Ron's surged and stumbled; the twins tangled together, bright and brittle, Ginny's flared like a struck match.

Nalini flicked her wand without looking at them. Sound did not so much stop as slide sideways. Sirius's mouth still moved, the cords in his neck standing out, but the air between them took his voice and laid it flat. A wide silencing, careful as a lid placed over a pot just shy of boiling. I told myself that was good. She was choosing clean methods.

She spoke. I could not hear the words, but I watched them land. Relief first—an easing in Harry's shoulders, an exhale unbound in Ron's chest, the twins' alignment settling less brittle and more elastic. Then something else: fear. Not the sharp spike of immediate threat; the slow-closing hand of inevitability. Nalini didn't gesture much. She didn't need to. The wand punctuated points, nothing more.

Ginny shouted something. It looked like "no." She leaned forward as if she could physically push the situation back. The red bolt caught her squarely, neat as a stamp on parchment. She folded as if a string had been cut, head lolling; it is not a posture I ever want to see again. My fist clenched so hard the chain protested. I made myself breathe. Her mana did not flutter; it pressed quietly against the stun, steady as a tide working rock. Stunners are not elegant magic, but they are mercifully predictable. It suppressed most of her mana from reaching her head, which caused her to lose consciousness. 

'One should be fine, anymore and it would be trouble.' I concluded as I tracked her chakra.

Nalini moved down the line. Harry was next, jaw set, eyes alight; the jet of red took him in the shoulder and he sagged reluctantly, the boy who survives begrudgingly, even to enchantment. Ron cursed with his whole body before the spell put him under; the twins tried for a joke without sound and managed instead a synchronized glare; both went down soft. Sirius, last, watched Nalini with the quizzical calm of someone filing details he might need later. The stunner she cast at him had weight. I felt it through the wall like a hand placed firmly on a chest. He went under deep, head bowed a little as if in some jagged courtly acknowledgement, and then gone.

Nalini stood for a moment, surveying the stillness she had made. I was expecting her to cancel the charm on the wall, but she didn't, with one more nod in my direction as he moved around.

I stared at everyone falling over their chair, letting the tremor in my hand finish itself. Then I smoothed it. I catalogued the feeling without argument: anger, fear, too much of both, and beneath them something like relief that action had begun at all. I returned to my mindscape, which was modeled after the Hogwarts library, and retrieved blank paper from a nonexistent drawer, where I wrote down the necessary terms to bring to the table: I had to write down the clauses that needed to be put in place to make sure everything worked out.

...

The door opened, and I woke up from the slight trance. Nalini stepped in first; her husband, Mr. Patil, his potbelly more noticeable now that he was nervous, followed with a roll of parchment and a feather. He carried them as if they were fragile, or holy, or both. Nalini did not bother conjuring a chair for herself this time. She drew her wand in a neat arc, and a low table grew out of the air like a shadow becoming a thing. It had no ornament. Function is a style in itself.

She did not speak a word and waved her wand at my hands, freeing them from its confines. The chains unknit and vanished without clatter, dematerializing mid-fall like frost evaporating in sunlight. I did not realize how much I had been leaning into restraint until I wasn't. My shoulders pitched forward; my back tried to reassert its own geometry and flailed. I caught myself on my forearms and then sat with the gracelessness of a man who had been bound too long. Pride is an unnecessary weight. I let it drop and rubbed my wrists. The skin there was angry but intact. Even their shackles had been carefully placed. 

Mr. Patil placed the parchment on the table and, with a little flourish as if to reassure himself he could still do magic and I couldn't, as the pinch of suppression was shifted from my wrists to my ankles. He conjured an inkwell that smelled faintly of night-blooming jasmine and iron. His hands were damp. Nalini stood to my left so that the candlelight cut across her face in asymmetric planes, one eye bright, one eye sunk into shadow. She was not smiling, but neither was she hostile, her visage perfectly neutral. She looked like a woman about to pay for something expensive and necessary as her mana reallyed her reluctance.

"So," she said, voice even, "shall we go over the terms of the contract?"

...

---

AN: Moving to wrap up the summer arc in the next 10 chapters. See ya guys tomorrow!