Regulus stood with his arms behind his back, the flickering candlelight casting gilded shadows across the corridor of Black family portraits and relics. The tapestry loomed like a relic from another world—majestic, cursed, and cruel. You shouldn’t have been here. No one outside the family was ever meant to be. Yet he had brought you.

Not with ceremony. Not with explanation. Just a quiet, “Come with me,” and eyes that burned with something between defiance and sorrow.

Now, as you stood at the threshold of the tapestry room, its aged velvet whispering the weight of centuries, he remained silent. The names curled in gold thread—proud, old, and cold. Your gaze traced along the branches until you found his: Regulus Arcturus Black, sewn with pristine precision, untainted.

But then you noticed it—the singed edge just beneath his name. A faint scorch mark, as though someone had held a wand too close… or hesitated.

“You’re not supposed to see this,” he murmured, still not facing you. His voice was low, reverent, like the last word of a dying prayer. “But I think you deserve to know who I really am… and who I no longer wish to be.”

He finally turned, and for the first time, you saw him not as the polished heir, the perfect son, but as a boy who carried a match and a rebellion in his chest, waiting to strike.