Harry Potter: Reborn as Regulus Black

Chapter 351: Chapter 351: The Stake and the Wizard

On the second day of term, Cuthbert was kicked awake.

Hermes drove his foot into the bedpost. The whole four-poster shuddered with a bang, and Cuthbert shot upright from under the covers, hair matted into a nest, one eye still glued shut. He mumbled something obscene.

He’d been up past midnight tinkering.

"What time is it?" he croaked, rubbing his eyes.

Nobody answered.

Regulus stood by the desk fastening the clasp of his cloak. Baruk circled the desktop in slow loops. The fire in the hearth was still burning.

Baruk’s eight amber eyes fixed on Regulus, then swiveled to the hearth, then back. His chelicerae clicked once.

Regulus looked down at him. "Go on."

Eight legs tensed. Baruk launched himself off the desk in a clean arc and landed squarely in the fireplace, right on top of the glowing coals. Sparks erupted in every direction.

Cuthbert had one leg still tangled in the blankets. He turned and froze.

"He..." Cuthbert pointed at the hearth. His voice shook.

Alex had just come out of the washroom, towel draped over one shoulder. He saw Baruk nestled in the flames and his voice jumped an octave.

"Regulus, he’s in the fire!"

Regulus fastened the last clasp, turned, and glanced at the hearth.

Flames danced around Baruk. He looked perfectly comfortable.

"I see that."

Cuthbert leapt off the bed barefoot and crouched in front of the fireplace, face inches from the opening. The heat forced his eyes to narrow, but he refused to pull back, staring at Baruk.

He twisted around. Pure wonder in his voice. "How’d you do it?"

Regulus ignored him and slung his bag over his shoulder.

"What did you do to him?" Cuthbert’s eyes were wide and bright, sleep gone in an instant. "He’s not afraid of fire? How is he not afraid of fire? Acromantulas are supposed to be afraid of fire!"

"Class," Regulus said, and walked toward the door.

"Wait, at least tell me one..."

Regulus was already out of the dormitory.

Cuthbert opened and closed his mouth. A dozen questions jammed in his throat, none going up or down. He stamped his foot and scrambled for his shoes.

Alex stepped up to the hearth for a last look. Baruk raised his head from the coals, eight amber eyes regarding him with lazy indifference. His chelicerae opened and closed once, unhurried, and he settled back down.

Alex shook his head and followed the others out.

Regulus’s Acromantula, fireproof. Strange, sure. But with Regulus, only so strange.

Hermes brought up the rear. Passing the hearth, his gaze lingered on Baruk. His brow furrowed, but whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.

---

First class of the new term. History of Magic.

Professor Binns drifted through the blackboard, his translucent body passing through the edge of the lectern, and began to speak.

Same as always.

"Today we cover the medieval conflict between Wizards and Muggles."

On the Ravenclaw side, quills began scratching parchment almost before he finished the sentence.

On the Slytherin side, several students had already folded their arms on the desk and let their eyelids drift shut, synchronized perfectly with the cadence of Binns’s droning.

"In the early medieval period, the relationship between wizards and Muggles was not adversarial. Most wizards lived within Muggle communities, serving as healers, seers, or advisors. A village midwife might also be a magical healer. A lord’s astrologer might possess genuine prophetic talent. When Muggles needed wizards, they sought help willingly. When they did not, they looked the other way. Or they informed."

He continued.

"This symbiosis was fragile. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death swept across the continent. Muggle social order collapsed under mass death, and they began searching for scapegoats."

"The first wave of large-scale witch hunts erupted in Switzerland and the southern German territories. The Muggle Church, a faith-based Muggle organization, incorporated witchcraft into the framework of heresy trials. The Malleus Maleficarum became the judicial handbook of the witch hunter. From that point on, witch-hunting transformed from private mob violence into sanctioned public trial."

The classroom quieted. Several Slytherins who had been slumped over raised their heads.

Binns kept reading.

"Bamberg, between 1623 and 1633, executed over nine hundred people. Würzburg, in the same period, executed over nine hundred. Trier, earlier still, from the late sixteenth century into the early seventeenth, executed more than a thousand."

"The common feature of these regions was that the bishop simultaneously served as secular lord. Religious and civil judicial authority merged into one, and the efficiency of witch-hunting reached its peak."

Cuthbert gripped his quill, its tip frozen on the parchment. His lips pressed tight, the muscle in his jaw twitching.

Behind him, a Pure-blood boy had lifted his head, mouth slightly open, jaw thrust forward, as if he hadn’t heard right, or couldn’t believe what he had.

A few rows further back, a Pure-blood girl stared at Binns with the expression of someone listening to something fundamentally impossible.

In their understanding, Muggles were an inferior species. Beneath notice. Lower than Gnomes. A population without magic couldn’t possibly harm a wizard. Wizards stood on the earth; Muggles were the mud underfoot, too filthy to bother stepping on.

And now Binns, in the same tone he might use to read an inventory list, was telling them Muggles had burned thousands of people.

They knew most of the dead couldn’t have been wizards. There wouldn’t have been enough wizards for that. But some of them had been.

For the Pure-bloods of Slytherin, the very idea of being harmed by Muggles was intolerable.

Every one of them sat up straight, brows furrowed, a mix of confusion and contempt, but none spoke. For once, they were paying attention.

The Ravenclaw reaction was different.

Quills scratched faster, racing across parchment, recording place names, dates, numbers. One girl half-raised her hand, then lowered it, probably realizing it wouldn’t do any good. They cared about the knowledge itself: whether the data was accurate, whether the causal chain held up, whether other sources existed for cross-referencing. Muggle atrocities were a historical event to them, material to be documented and analyzed.

Regulus glanced at the twisted expressions on the Slytherin side, then at the bowed heads and flying quills on the Ravenclaw side, and looked away.

Binns was still reading.

"The vast majority of victims were women: widows, midwives, herbalists, elderly women living alone. Their social ties were weak, their property unprotected. Once accused, the cost of mounting a defense was prohibitive. But the Muggle Church’s purpose was never to eliminate real witches."

"The witch hunts were, in essence, an exercise in mass social control by a Church reeling from the Protestant Reformation. Fear consolidated the Church’s moral authority. Trials maintained ideological uniformity within the parish. Accusations of witchcraft were the instrument. The victims were the price."

Binns finished the last passage: "The witch-hunting movement inflicted enormous harm upon the wizarding community."

That was it. One sentence.

He didn’t elaborate on what that harm was, why it happened, or why wizards hadn’t fought back. He simply moved on, reading things the Slytherins had already stopped listening to.

"In 1689, the International Confederation of Wizards convened to..."

Regulus stopped listening too.

Binns had wrapped up the witch-hunting section with a single summary line and leapt straight to the Statute of Secrecy. Thousands of deaths reduced to "inflicted enormous harm." How many of the dead had been real witches and wizards, he never said.

The wizarding world had a story it liked to tell about this era.

Wendelin the Weird, captured forty-seven times. Each time she was lashed to the stake, she cast the Flame-Freezing Charm, pretended to scream, and vanished. The story got passed down with a smirk, a note of triumph. Look at these stupid Muggles. Can’t even tell real fire from fake.

But the story never mentioned that Wendelin was a trained adult witch. She had a wand. She knew the Flame-Freezing Charm. All forty-seven times, she was prepared.

What about those who weren’t?

It was a statistical catastrophe.

The overwhelming majority of those burned were Muggles. Neighbor denounced neighbor. The jealous pointed fingers at rivals. Sons fighting over an inheritance accused their widowed stepmothers. The

The Church wasn’t hunting real witches. hunts ran on the internal machinery of Muggle communities, a process of self-purging that had almost nothing to do with actual magic.

The Church knew magic existed, of course, but they attributed it to Satan. What they wanted to burn were witches, brides of the Devil, a category entirely unrelated to magical ability. Their target was something else: women who had signed pacts with demons, women who had forsaken God.

The bullet was aimed at heresy. A few real witches just happened to be standing in the trajectory.

Random historical violence doesn’t spare the people in the line of fire just because the aim was off.

Binns’s voice droned on. He’d reached the details of the 1689 signing: which countries’ representatives attended, which building hosted the ceremony, what kind of ink they used.

---

Regulus stepped out of the History of Magic classroom. The corridor was brighter than the room, torches burning on both walls.

Cuthbert caught up and fell in beside him, already talking, making up for a full class period of enforced silence.

"What Binns was saying, about the hunts. Muggles really burned wizards?"

Regulus glanced at him.

"So why didn’t wizards fight back?"

Regulus didn’t break stride. "Figure it out yourself."

Cuthbert blinked. He didn’t press further. Something in his expression shifted, turned serious, his brow knotting.

Alex followed behind, quiet.

Hermes walked at the back, hands in his pockets, wearing the same expression he always wore: sullen, restless, disconnected from the world around him.

Four sets of footsteps merged in the corridor as they headed toward the Great Hall.

---

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