Chapter 170: Robbery
The dreary walls of the Orphanage faded into the distance as Quirrell escorted Tamara aboard the Eurostar Express, the premier international magic train. Unlike the Hogwarts Express—a clattering steam engine perpetually echoing with the obnoxious chirping of underage wizards and the smell of cheap pumpkin pasties—this locomotive catered exclusively to adult wizards. The atmosphere was blissfully subdued, wrapped in an air of quiet, expensive discretion.
Heavy pouches of gold paved their way straight into a top-tier luxury soft-sleeper compartment.
Naturally, the Dark Lord was never truly short on funds. Yet, Tamara harbored no vulgar, worldly greed for the shiny metal itself. To her, Galleons were merely stepping stones, crude tools forged to build a ladder toward the absolute pinnacle of power. During her previous reign, she had unhesitatingly incinerated mountains of gold on forbidden dark magic experiments, the acquisition of rare cursed relics, and the astronomical war expenditures required to keep her Death Eaters operational. The irony was sharp: the Dark Lord who had once brought the entire wizarding world to its knees actually had very few personal Galleons left to her name.
As for paying salaries to her subordinates? The very concept was a laughable absurdity in Voldemort's philosophy of rule. The mere privilege of kissing the hem of her robes and serving the great Dark Lord was the supreme honor. They should be paying her for the opportunity.
Therefore, when Tamara watched Quirrell casually drop a heavy, clinking bag of Galleons into the conductor's hands without a single twitch of heartache, a rare flicker of genuine confusion crossed her perfectly arched eyebrows.
"Where did you get the money?" she asked, her tone dropping into a freezing drawl as she stepped into the compartment, her dark eyes sweeping over the plush velvet upholstery and polished brass fixtures.
Quirrell immediately folded himself into a deep, respectful bow. "Re... Reporting to Master," he stammered, his voice adopting that familiar, pathetic tremble. "This is the... the salary from my past six months serving as a professor at Hogwarts." He swallowed hard, keeping his eyes glued to the expensive carpet. "Along with some savings accumulated from my previous travels. As long as I can serve you, everything I have is yours."
A dark, mocking sneer tugged at the corner of Tamara's mouth. Oh, the delicious irony. That hypocritical old fox Dumbledore, a man who prided himself on his boundless wisdom, would never in his wildest dreams imagine the truth. The very salary he personally signed off on for his Defense Against the Dark Arts professor was currently funding the Dark Lord's luxurious private train journey across Eastern Europe.
The heavy brass door of the compartment clicked shut. The embedded Silencing Charms flared to life, instantly severing them from the rhythmic clatter of the tracks and the prying eyes of the outside world. Tamara closed her eyes, taking a slow, measured breath of the filtered air, catching the faint, expensive scent of burning agarwood.
In the next second, the illusion shattered.
The gentle, polite Tamara Riddle—the flawless top student of Hogwarts who smiled at mudbloods and helped fools with their homework—vanished completely. She casually shrugged off her outer black robes, letting them pool on the floor, and flicked her wand. A silent Sleeping Charm shot across the room, instantly knocking out that utterly stupid, shrieking furball of a cat she was forced to keep around.
Silence finally secured, Tamara sank into the dark red velvet sofa. Her posture shifted into something lazy, arrogant, and lethally dangerous. She crossed her long legs, resting one pale hand casually against the armrest while her index finger began a slow, rhythmic tapping against the leather. Tap. Tap. Tap. Those pitch-black eyes, usually kept demurely lowered to feign sickening innocence, now lifted fully. A chilling, absolute cruelty swirled within their depths, cold enough to freeze blood.
"Take off that stupid hat, Quirrell."
She glanced down at the fidgeting figure of 'Aunt Quirina.' Her voice was a soft, silken hiss, dripping with casual intimidation. "In my presence, you no longer need to play the part of a ridiculous old woman."
"Ye... Yes, Master."
Quirrell slumped as if granted a massive reprieve. He hurriedly yanked off the hideous wide-brimmed hat and clumsily cast a Scourgify on his own face. The thick, suffocating layers of cosmetic foundation vanished, revealing his original pale, gaunt, and twitchy features. Even in his true skin, he did not dare presume to sit. He merely bowed his head, standing rigidly to the side like a well-trained hound awaiting orders.
"Speak," Tamara commanded. She leaned forward slightly, picking up a delicate porcelain cup of black tea from the mahogany table and taking a slow, measured sip. "How is the situation over in the Albanian forest?"
At the Dark Lord's inquiry, Quirrell snapped to attention, his mind racing to organize the intelligence he had painstakingly gathered across Eastern Europe over the past few months.
"Master, the perimeter of the Black Forest has been highly restricted lately. Ever since... since the Philosopher's Stone incident last year, Dumbledore has clearly alerted the International Confederation of Wizards."
Quirrell paused, his eyes darting up to cautiously gauge Tamara's reaction. Seeing only an impassive mask, he swallowed hard and pressed on.
"The local Ministry's Aurors discovered a massive graveyard of animal carcasses near the tree line. They died in extremely bizarre ways, their bodies radiating heavy traces of dark magic. The Ministry dispatched several search teams into the woods, but they found nothing. They retreated quickly, terrified of the toxic miasma lingering in the deeper sectors."
Tamara's expression remained entirely unreadable. She merely offered a fraction of a nod, the rim of the teacup resting against her lower lip.
Encouraged, Quirrell continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "That... wandering soul... indeed fled back to the deepest depths of the forest. But he is exceptionally weak now, Master. He is only able to sustain himself by possessing lesser creatures—snakes, insects, rats. He does not dare show his face to the world."
A sudden wave of panic seized Quirrell. Terrified that Tamara would punish him for failing to eliminate the rival fragment entirely, his sallow face drained of what little color it had. He waved his hands, explaining in a frantic tremble.
"I did not act rashly! I swear it! Although that wandering soul is on the brink of dissipation, he still lacks a physical form. Ordinary Killing Curses and standard destructive magic cannot completely obliterate a mass of pure, unanchored soul, and..."
A violent shudder wracked Quirrell's thin frame, as if the mere memory of his time in those cursed woods was too much to bear. "And if I drew too close, I feared he would be driven to absolute desperation. He might have attempted to forcibly possess me to survive... Therefore, I strictly followed your precise instructions. I only monitored his movements from the absolute edge of the wards. I never alerted him to my presence."
"You did well, Quirrell."
A freezing light of utter contempt flashed through Tamara's dark eyes. Just as she had calculated. That pathetic remnant soul had not given up on his miserable sanctuary in the Albanian forests. Let him hide in the mud with the rats. Right now, whether measured in sanity, magical potential, or sheer soul integrity, she had vastly surpassed that fractured madman struggling to survive in the dirt.
However, her journey to Albania was not a petty trip to mock a failure. She had far more pressing matters to attend to.
"What about my camp?"
Tamara set the porcelain teacup down with a sharp, definitive clink. Her gaze sharpened into two piercing daggers. "The private stronghold I established in the heart of the forest—has he laid his filthy, incorporeal hands on it?"
This was the crux of the matter. Her primary concern. The camp itself did not hold a vast treasury of gold, but it held something far more valuable: Perist and her dragon. Even though she and that pathetic wraith shared the exact same origin, the word 'share' simply did not exist in Lord Voldemort's dictionary. What was hers belonged solely to her.
"No, Master! Absolutely not!" Quirrell practically shouted his reassurance, desperate to appease her. "I maintained a strict observation from a distance. That wandering soul is so utterly depleted that he lacks the magical core to cast a simple Levitation Charm. He has absolutely no means of breaching the wards of your camp!"
"Very good."
Tamara curled her lips into a slow, terrifyingly beautiful smile of pure satisfaction. As long as the stronghold remained untouched, as long as those specific resources and her hidden forces were still waiting in the shadows, she possessed the foundation to rise again. She would rule over the dark world once more, but this time, in her most flawless, perfect form.
A low screech of metal against metal echoed through the floorboards as the international train began to decelerate, eventually grinding to a halt at a dilapidated border station somewhere deep in Eastern Europe.
Despite the opulent luxury of the compartment, the stagnant, heavily perfumed air was beginning to claw at Tamara's nerves, making her inexplicably irritable. She frowned, waving a dismissive hand to order Quirrell to remain seated. Pushing open the heavy brass door, she stepped past the threshold of her protective charms and out into the narrow, dimly lit carriage corridor to clear her head.
Bang!
The connecting door at the far end of the corridor, leading to the adjacent standard-class carriage, was violently kicked open. The heavy wood slammed against the wall, rattling the glass windows.
Three adult wizards burst into the narrow space. They were draped in worn, foul-smelling leather coats, their boots stomping heavily against the floorboards. Each of them gripped a battered wand, their sunken eyes gleaming with the feral greed and desperate ferocity so characteristic of the exiled dark wizards who infested the Eastern European borders.
Train robbers. A common, pathetic plague along these unregulated border routes. They clearly lacked the magical prowess to breach the heavy defensive wards of the luxury compartments, so they resorted to scurrying through the corridors like scavengers, hunting for lone, vulnerable victims who had foolishly stepped outside.
"Yo, so sorry to disturb the peace..."
The leader of the trio, a hulking dark wizard with a jagged, ugly scar slicing across his cheek, let out a grating, raspy laugh. His predatory gaze locked onto Tamara, greedily raking over her slender, solitary figure standing in the dim corridor. "Well, well. Look what we have here, boys. A beautiful little lost lamb."
He took a menacing step forward, tapping his wand against his open palm. "It's not very peaceful on these border trains, sweetheart. Hand over all your Galleons and any valuable magic items you've got hidden in those robes. Do it quick, and maybe—just maybe—if we're in a generous mood, we'll let you keep your pretty little life."
The narrow corridor plunged into a dead, suffocating silence.
Faced with three wands and a textbook death threat, Tamara did not scream. She did not shrink back against the wall, nor did she fall to her knees begging for mercy as they so clearly expected. In fact, she didn't display a single microscopic hint of panic.
She simply stood there, utterly expressionless. For a fraction of a second, her deep, pitch-black eyes widened slightly—not in fear, but as if she had just been told the most incredibly absurd joke in the history of magic.
Robbery?
They were trying to rob the Dark Lord?
Honestly, one could hardly blame Tamara for her delayed reaction. It was simply too much to process. In those long, blood-soaked decades of her past reign, even if Albus Dumbledore himself or the Minister for Magic stood before her, they would be gripping their wands until their knuckles turned white, sweating in absolute, hyper-vigilant terror.
Attempting to extract a 'toll' from Lord Voldemort was, without a doubt, an incredibly niche and highly creative method of committing suicide.
Her brilliant mind, so thoroughly accustomed to unraveling complex political conspiracies and orchestrating mass slaughter, genuinely short-circuited for a moment. She simply could not connect the sheer, astronomical stupidity of these three thugs with her current reality.
The beautiful young girl remained perfectly still, her head tilting slightly as she stared at the scarred leader. She looked at him with the detached, clinical fascination one might reserve for a particularly rare, brain-damaged insect.
Misinterpreting her silence, Scarface assumed she was paralyzed by sheer terror. He sneered, impatiently rapping the tip of his wand against the wooden paneling of the corridor wall.
"Are you deaf, you stupid brat?!" he snarled, his voice echoing loudly in the confined space. "I told you to hand over your valuables! Do you not understand human speech?!"
At the second crude shout, the gears in Tamara's mind finally clicked back into place. She snapped out of her absurd bewilderment.
Not only was she entirely devoid of the panic expected of a mugging victim, but a slow, breathtakingly cruel smile began to bloom across her pale, exquisite face. The sheer novelty of the situation sent a dark thrill of excitement humming through her veins.
She tilted her head to the side, her dark hair spilling over her shoulder. Raising a slender, porcelain finger, she pointed casually at her own chest. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was soft, silken, and laced with genuine, delighted surprise.
"Are you... talking to me?"
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