After a while when the temperature started to drop, Primose grabbed his satchel once again and left the living room for the front door, still chatting with Merille, accompanying him. She grabbed a small paper bag and handed it to him before he passed the door, waving me goodbye after he put it in his bag. Merille closed the door behind him and silence fell again on the house.

“Did you enjoy your drink?” Merille asked as she came back to clean the living room side table.

“Pretty delicious” I replied, clenching the cup now barely warm and almost empty.

“Infused milk and coffee. It’s a little late for a refill but I can make you something else if you want.” She gathered the cup she and Primose used and set them next to the press still on the wooden tray.

“I’m okay”

“You looked upset earlier. Feeling better?” She grabbed the tray and stood there for a response. She wasn’t threatening or mad, I guess what I was seeing was concern.

“I was just wondering something”

“I could tell” She pulled me in with a jerk of her head, asking me to follow her “Well, I think this is as good of a time as ever. Ask”

I clenched the cup close to my chest as I hopped down the seat. We both went to the kitchen where she set the tray beside the sink. She grabbed a cup and turned on the faucet lightly.

“If you saw someone else’s… soul, would you have picked them instead?” I found a small wooden stool under the kitchen table and pulled it to me.

“I’m not sure… Yes, I think so.” She continued to wash the cups gently, making sure they were clean by pulling them up to eye level sometimes.

“Why were you in there that night?” I tried not to react to her responses just yet, making sure to gather as much as I could.

“I was… visiting someone. And I needed things I can’t get here easily”

“Where is “here”? Are we… far away from the Orphanage?” I asked incredulously. The words passed my lip before I could ask who she was coming to see at the dead of night.

“We are.” As she grabbed the coffee press, she sighed longly.

“More than an hour away?”

“Yes, more than an hour away.”

“More than a day?” I insisted.

“Yes, I’m afraid”

I searched my memories for any place I’d heard about, that would be even remotely further to anything than a day. I had never taken one myself, but I understood that you could virtually get anywhere quickly by hopping on a plane, as Mother said a few times. Being a day away from an airport would make sense, I imagined.

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“Do you mean…”

“That night” She jumped in, grabbing a cloth hanging from the handle of one of the cabinets “That night, in the chaos and death, I saw you, you were shining like a sun, from inside. It’s hard to explain, even for me. I have seen many souls in my life -I have lost a great deal of them- but I have never felt someone cling onto life that way. It scared and intrigued me.”

I couldn’t do anything but listen to her mouth open. She wasn’t looking at me this time, it was different from all of our interactions so far. Her tone was ceremonial and heavy, in a way it felt like she was telling a story.

“I looked in the rubles wanting to see who you were,” she continued. ”I was afraid that I was too late. I saw your… family, laying lifeless around; but there you were. I’m not even sure I saw your face or who you were at that moment. I grabbed your arm and brought you to my home.” She stopped patting dry the set now clean and turned to me.

Like I had done before her moments ago, she pulled a second stool next to me and sat down. I couldn’t say anything, trying to take in her every word.

“This place” She described, looking around, “is very far from your home. I wish I could tell that I could bring you back to what you knew, but that is no more. This is a new world, a chance to do what you want” She tapped my knee with the back or her hand, figuratively hammering her words into me.

“That’s… kind of sad” I punctuated.

“Maybe it is, but we might as well make the best of it. I can teach you things you’ve never seen before, I can make you strong, the one thing I can’t do is give you back what you lost.”

Toby’s faint meow escaped from the hallway, as he joined us. Making sure the house was just ours again, he walked in the kitchen, rubbing his back on Merille’s leg. It was the first time I saw his strange face in direct light. His face was covered by a mask of sorts, only letting his eyes pass through small holes. There was another opening bigger, where I assume his mouth would be. There was something frightening in the expression the mask was showing, uncanny. She was right, this place was far from anything I knew.

“When the time is right, I’ll show you around the study upstairs, and there you’ll be able to find out almost anything you want to know.” She reached down the little creature and petted him. “I can also teach you about this.”

She extended her arm to the furnace and with the tip of her nail barely reaching it, she scratched something off it. In a moan, she sat back straight, making sure I saw what she had on her nail: ashes. She proceeded to deposit it in the middle of her palm, and flicked her finger once.

Like a small, innocent dancer, a small light rested and flickered at the top of the nail she just threw in the air. I couldn’t believe what she just did, with simply ashes and her bare hands. Narrowing my eyes, I came closer to her hand, her finger still pointing to the ceiling. There was a gentle flame at the top of her finger. It wasn’t menacing or ravaging. It was there dancing.

“What… Does that hurt? How?”

With a proud and cheeky smile, Merille blew on her finger to put down the flame she had created.

“It doesn’t hurt at all.”

“How did you do that? How did you even do that?” I repeated, almost sure that it was a trick of sorts.

“It’s… You could call it: magic” She smiled again.

“No way. I don’t believe you” I assured her, leaning back as far as I could on the stool without falling.

“What do you mean?” She laughed, “I can do it again” She slapped her hands on her lap in accomplishment.

“No, you hid a match in your hand”

“I haven’t used a match in probably 40 years.”

She pulled her stool closer to the furnace and waved at me to do the same. I didn’t want to believe it was really magic, she created another flame, seamlessly but with more theatrics this time. As much as I tried, I couldn’t figure out how she pulled the trick. Once again, she blew it off, repeating the easy steps once more slowly, giving me time to study her movements. No matter how many times she conjured the flame, I had nothing. Her finger wasn’t red, she didn’t seem to be in pain.

If anything, she was laughing at my poor attempts to debunk her spells.