Regulus was always strange.
Water liked him too much.
He couldn’t drown.
Not like others.
He’s not fully Kelpie — not a shapeshifter, not a beast — but his mother’s bloodline carried something old. Something dark. Something that let him walk into the Black Lake at eleven and come back out with his robes dry.
So when he drinks the potion in the cave — his hands shaking, Kreacher wailing — he whispers, “Don’t fight me. I’ll come back.”
And he does.
The Inferi don’t touch him. The lake parts.
Because Regulus is not prey — he is kin.
He washes up a mile down the cliff, coughing salt and bile, the locket clutched to his chest.
It takes him two years to recover.
But he lives.
What follows is a period of humiliating survival. A slog through the unforgiving terrain, too weak to get far. He drags himself to a creek and eats little minnows and tadpoles that crunch beneath his teeth.
He hides in the marshlands of Wales, living off raw fish and memory. His body changes. His teeth lengthen. His eyes lose all white. He avoids his reflection in the water.