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IN THE PITCH darkness of the station, she recognised the figure that was already waiting for her with a statuesque posture. Alethea could not explain how she was capable of recognising him in the blackness that covered the night like a blanket. It would have been too easy to fear and flee, but her feet remained firmly planted on the ground.
No lanterns were lit that evening, and as soon as the train she had come on left the station there was a utter and pure silence; not once did she hear the wind whispering in the distance, not the game in which it tangled the trees in search of a companion.
The signs of the coming storm, which the prophet had announced to last several days, weren't obvious.
Alethea sighed deeply and bowed her head slightly as she saw Érebos walk past her, sauntering towards the figure and confirming her suspicions. If he had only been a trick of her tired mind, the cat would not have walked towards him with familiar steps.
"Good evening, Professor," she greeted him from a few metres away, and the closer she got, the better she recognised his handsome face. Marveling at how the moon was able to portray him as he stood in the daylight.
"Good night would be appropriate," he said, and as he spoke, Alethea's gaze fell on the large clock in the station. It was two hours past midnight. "Did your journey go well?"
"Eventful, I must confess. I burnt down my family's mausoleum," she replied truthfully, and perhaps there was some surprise in Riddle's gaze to be seen. Or horror? Perhaps she was telling him the truth merely to see this sight.
"Magic will restore it, sir, a purely symbolic act," she reassured him, or perhaps herself, with a lie as he took her suitcase.
"That does not diminish the astonishment you cause. I never considered you to be an arsonist, Miss Desmond," the professor confessed, and as a smile formed on her lips, she averted her gaze and looked down at Érebos, who sat between student and professor. Watching the false night with watchful eyes.
"You must know that I am many things you would not expect me to be," she ventured, not daring to look at him again as he hummed in agreement, his voice so deep it seemed to vibrate in her body and set fire to her heart
"Even if the journey was a conclusion, it did raise some questions," she said after a while, as the professor gestured for her to follow him. They crossed the small bridge that ran over the railway tracks, the night sweeping around them. "About your mother? Or did you learn more about your talent?"
"About my cat," she corrected him, wondering for a moment if she should tell him what had happened. But thanatology was his speciality, and if she didn't ask him, who should she ask? "There was a moment in the crypt of Galantis when the damned and lost souls of my family... attacked me."
His head snapped towards her, and immediately he seemed to understand everything, every incongruity. Her earlier arrival, her wanton destruction of the family mausoleum, and her slight absence.
