Stolen Time A Tom Marvolo Riddle Fanfiction completed

Chapter Seven

The weeks went by and Cassiopeia rarely saw Tom at all. When he came to Houlton Manor it was always late at night and he just went to sit in her mother's study for hours. Cassiopeia began to wonder what he was working at. She had only looked at the top layer of papers the night when she had ventured into this room she had originally intended to never set foot in again. Yet, as so many times before, her curiosity had got the better of her, and knowing that Tom was right after all, that it hadn't been the room that had killed her mother, she had decided to have a look at her mother's sanctuary. She had been curious to see what her mother had spent her time experimenting with and so she had sat at her desk and read through the papers. All of the notes had been about curses and rituals that aimed at the prolongation of life, making the caster stop aging and staying young forever. As far as Cassiopeia could tell there had been nothing about time travel among these notes. Clearly, it hadn't been her mother's intention to travel through time. That left her wondering what Tom had found in those yellowed parchments that let him return time and time again, spending hours on hours studying her mother's notes. After all he didn't need to prolong his life with some unreliable and probably insecure curse anymore. He already had his Horcruxes that obviously saved him from aging the normal way, judging from his still so youthful appearance.

Cassiopeia thought about Floris' time turner again. Honestly she had been quite surprised that Tom had not asked for it ever since that evening when he had ordered her to retrieve it from Gringotts as soon as possible. She had expected him to keep reminding her with his so very own charming demeanour until she would finally leave the device in his possession. Yet Tom had not even bothered to say hello whenever he came to her mother's study. She only knew he was there because she had put an alerting enchantment on the room. Cassiopeia sighed. If she had hoped that things would be different after Dumbledore's death, that Tom's behaviour would somehow change after what had happened that day at Hogwarts, she had been wrong. She pursed her lips. Tom might care for her somewhere in the endless darkness of his self but aside from that he remained just as detached and selfish as ever.

Cassiopeia had just gone to bed when she suddenly felt a tingle in her arm, accompanied by the familiar burning sensation. Sleepily she shoved her sleeve away. With a frown she noticed that the mark had been activated. Cassiopeia glanced at it for another moment before she slowly got up again. From the way the mark was burning she could tell that Tom had used one of his Death Eaters to signal the others. The frown on her face intensified. She wondered what made him gather his knights this late at night. He hadn't summoned them at these hours in quite a while after all.

Before the Ministry had fallen under Tom's control, this had used to happen more frequently. With the kind of war that had been raging back then it had been the Death Eaters' way of alerting one another that they needed support in a battle. Back then Tom had always been more than clear on the fact that he didn't want her to comply with the mark's summoning.

Cassiopeia knew that he probably didn't want to see her reacting to the mark's burning this time either but she was desperately curious to know what had happened and decided to find out. She quickly dressed the way the Death Eaters usually dressed, with black robes and a large hood to cover her face. Throwing a glance into the mirror, she noted with some satisfaction that she actually resembled the average Death Eater. She grabbed her wand and apparated to Tom.

Cassiopeia wasn't the first to arrive. She went to wait among the others, carefully trying to blend in, making sure the hood was shielding her face from view. With a quick look around she scanned her surroundings. They were standing outside a large building that seemed to be one of the asylums the government had established to educate Muggle-born witches and wizards.

After Tom had abandoned his initial plan of eliminating all Muggle-born wizardry he had eventually come to realize that he needed to control the magic of Muggle-borns if he didn't want them to turn into a possible danger to his reign. Consequently he had made the Ministry build asylums where Muggle-born children were taken as soon as they showed any signs of magic.