The thick smell of mold and dust slowly dragged Sylvia back to reality from the depths of unconsciousness.
Her consciousness rose little by little, like fragments submerged in icy water.
She struggled to lift her heavy eyelids.
At first, her vision was a blur of swaying double images and patches of light. Several seconds passed before it gradually came into focus.
A wooden ceiling covered in stains and cobwebs greeted her eyes.
Several rough beams lay exposed, their surfaces covered in thick, gray-black patches of mold.
Moonlight slanted through a wide crack in the side wall, casting a deathly pale strip of light across the dust-covered floor and illuminating countless motes drifting slowly through the air.
This was a dilapidated cabin.
It was certainly not any building at the Academy.
Where... was she?
"You're awake."
A voice so calm it was almost indifferent came from the shadows on the other side of the room, beyond the reach of the moonlight.
Sylvia whipped her head around toward the voice.
Professor Audrey Hope sat in the shadows on a crooked, battered wooden chair.
She still wore her dark professor's robes, but they were now covered in dust and bits of grass, and her hair was somewhat disheveled.
Her face held no expression, neither madness nor guilt, only a bone-deep exhaustion and a kind of... numbness born of casting aside all emotion after making some irrevocable decision.
"Professor... Audrey..."
Sylvia's voice trembled uncontrollably. "Where... are we? Why... why did you bring me here? What do you want... to do to me?"
Faced with her barrage of questions, Audrey barely moved her eyelids.
She slowly rose from the chair and walked to the boundary between moonlight and shadow, letting the deathly pale light illuminate half her face.
Her eyes remained empty.
"This... is a