Dead Love || Tom Riddle

Chapter IX - Torment

✿✿✿

Tom Riddle placed a ring on the desk in front of her. On a thick gold band, the foggy black stone had a strange symbol in its center. Aurelie thought it rather ugly.

She stared emptily, "Who's is that?"

"The answer is debatable." He stood up from his seat. "Do you feel any connection to it?"

"No." She answered surely. "Why? Is it magic?"

He didn't answer, instead, he placed the black gem in her palm folding her finger into a fist. He spoke carefully, "Can you try to summon your ghosts?"

She tore her eyes away from the ring, "What? Why?"

"I cannot explain. I only ask you to try."

She looked up at her professor who pulled on a very rare smile. It was meant to be a comfort, but it only made Aurelie uneasy.

It was more than whispers and gauzy faces. The dead were a paralyzing coldness slithering inside her body and infected her with fear. Everlasting fear of being vulnerable to attacks by her own mind. If she still had a voice, she could only scream. If her body still had feeling, she felt only pain. Her throat was shattered, her limbs were torn into. She felt like a meal for the ghosts. Tearing her apart like meat on a platter, victim to their terroristic hunger.

"Even if I could, I wouldn't ever wish to." Tom couldn't explain to her that he was testing her abilities with a legendary object. He could already feel the anger rising in her. As her brother taught her, Aurelie suspected anyone who had an interest in her curse.

He sat on the edge of the desk watching her eyes darken. His demeanor was almost entirely calm besides the tightening in his jaw and the slight narrowing in his black eyes above the sharp angle of his cheek.

"I'm doing this for you."

He wasn't lying. Caution would not benefit her any longer. Embracing the power of her curse would give her the means to protect herself. How could she not see that? He felt sympathy dissolve in his frustration. She'd succumbed to cowardice.

"I, who do nothing for anyone, help you. This is for the best."

Aurelie stood up from the desk. "How do you know?! Because of some dusty books and outdated papers you found. Why should I trust you? I know nothing about you!" Tom began to speak. He, who no one dared to interrupt, was silenced. "Do not say because of my brother. He is dead. Where did his trust in you get him?"

"Do not speak to me like that! I am still your professor."

"No! I never should have listened to you. You are no different from every selfish wizard in this place. You don't know what they're like. You think you can control the dead, professor. You can't control people in life." She threw the ring across the room, the metal resonating a harsh chime against the stone, and ran from his office.

✿✿✿

On a wet summer mourning in the Black gravesite, the sun lit the dewy grass the swallows dived in for wasps and beetles. Aurelie's knees dug into the soil of her brother's grave. She'd been there for hours. For the first time in her life hoping to hear the dead. Desperately sifting through her sacred memories with her brother, imagining his death, his screams, his burnt body. But Augustine never came to her. No one came. Pure silence beside the sounds of morning.

Orion Black found his daughter there that morning staring at the gravestone. Black eyes sunken into her face above swollen cheeks and bleeding lip. Black curls fell over her face, strands sticking to the tear-soaked skin on her neck and cheekbones.