"Wizards' mouths really are terrible at speaking. How strange."
The black cat leapt onto the table.
"What do you think they ought to say?"
Leta laughed.
"The things they never finished saying."
In the blink of an eye, the black cat disappeared.
Leta watched it pass through the wooden door and leap toward the fireplace, and for some reason, she suddenly felt at a loss.
When she remained in the kitchen, when she stood by the cupboard holding a steaming pumpkin pie in confusion, the black cat reappeared.
Outside, the snow had fallen into silence. A faint pink glow blurred the dreamscape.
The black cat returned like a messenger from the night, carrying dusk back with it.
Its tail swayed, and only then did Leta realize the ground beneath her feet was shifting.
This was the black cat's magic. And yet she also knew that in the Borderland, magic was precious and rare.
Very few wizards still carried magic with them once they entered the Borderland.
She was sent outside. In that twilight, it felt as though she had stepped into a night sea, as though someone had invited her to fish out lost stars.
"I never hated you, Leta."
Newt said it, and saying those words seemed to take all the strength he had.
"I chose it myself. Whatever worries you have, I forgive you. You should know that I've always forgiven you completely."
Reality might be a dream that demanded constant caution, while dreams were a kind of reality where one could finally be fearless.
The black cat had only explained Leta's state of mind to Newt, and the silent Mr. Scamander had suddenly understood what he needed to say.
"Why, Newt? If you don't hate me, why do you still try to comfort me?"
For the first time, Leta looked genuinely lost.
"Because there's nothing that hurts me more than your unhappiness."
Newt said it simply.
Neither of them spoke after that. The only sound the black cat could hear was the snow falling softly outside.
"I missed you, Leta."
That was the last thing Newt said.
For someone so bad with words, it was the last thing he had.
Outside, the mist thickened. The black cat knew the Borderland was about to drive them out.
Newt and Leta realized it too.
Newt began to panic. At moments like this, he always did.
Winter in the Borderland was too sluggish. Some words only fell like breaking glaciers into the deep sea, and it could take a century before their impact was finally heard.
The mist had grown so dense that Newt could no longer see her face. Dense enough that he had no choice but to look straight at her.
He could not keep avoiding this.
Newt heard the floor creak, as if something were moving quickly across it.
He heard the sound grow denser, closer, nearer.
And then he froze.
Something pressed against him, warm-bodied, carrying a rich fragrance like roses.
Something cold dripped onto his neck, ticklish, and it made him think for no reason of the ice outside that never thawed.
"Thank you."
He heard someone say it.
He strained to hear it clearly, to remember this feeling forever.
But he was already too late. The Borderland did not much care for foreign guests like him.
Newt lowered his head, and in that final moment, he could only let something long buried inside him fall to the ground in the form of tears.
He jerked awake.
The cottage was still the same cottage. Three kneazles had become one. Its black fur was dusted with snow, and a slab-like object at its chest gave off a faint glow.
It had forcibly pressed the mist back down.
Inside the cottage, the two of them—after being separated for nearly a century—embraced again. And when they finally drew apart, they both knew there was nothing left in the world that could ever separate them.
The Borderland had dusk and dawn, but it was never truly dark. It was always pale and white, always filled with rolling mist.
"We'll meet again in a place without darkness."
Leta said it softly.
Then the world flipped over again, and a wizard who had sunk too deeply into a dream had to return to reality in the end.
Dorset.
Old Newt stared blankly at the slowly brightening horizon.
Something had leapt out from the deepest part of his heart. Sometimes it seemed like a little coiled snake, casting magic across deep snow; sometimes it seemed like a gentle dove, cooing softly against a pale window.
He picked up a notebook from the table. Its pages were filled with sketches and notes about a black cat. He decided to call the book Dreams and Gods, and before he knew it, he had already made finishing it the last great task of his life.
"A black cat that walks the boundary between life and death, a lord of dreams who appears and disappears in the mist…
I have always believed it watches over the wishes of wizards in secret. Perhaps it does not know it itself, yet it always brings luck to them…
The ancient wizarding legends are not entirely false, and in the end, the source of all those dream-stories leads back to a black cat that can speak.
And the things shut away by daylight will, in the end, be brought back to us by the black cat of dreams."
Newt wrote the preface to the book, then turned his head and saw that it was raining lightly in Scotland.
From sparse droplets to a full downpour, it fell to the earth and touched the ground. Then, when the morning sun rose, it returned to the sky.
For a brief moment, it had eloped with the earth.
Even if dawn always comes, night is long enough.
…
The Borderland.
Now there was only a black cat and a beautiful witch left here.
The mist drove guests away, but it did not drive away its hosts so quickly.
The black cat could always stay a little longer than the guests it had invited.
Just as it had said—this was its dream.
But the black cat still could not control when the dream would end.
Just like now: one thread of mist had suddenly thickened violently, and so it remained here unpredictably.
Leta did not look wistful. To the sound of the snow outside, she quietly cleaned up the broken display shelves.
She repaired the wooden door. She threw away the shattered bowls.
Now and then she glanced toward the wooden table and saw the cat, lit by the fireplace, battling with a pumpkin pie.
Its white whiskers were stained with sweet pumpkin juice, and its paws waved as it directed the knife and fork.
She laughed brightly, pure as the Gabriel flowers outside.
She brushed the crumbs off it and let it settle on her shoulder.
On this bright day, she set everything down.
She burned away regret, and so her dream became transparent. She threw away all her yesterdays, and so her steps became light.
She moved through the garden, busy trimming branches among the blooming Gabriel flowers.
A hummingbird perched on a honeysuckle blossom.
There was nothing in the world she wanted to possess.
She knew there was no one she needed to envy.
Every misfortune she had ever suffered, she had already forgotten.
Even the thought that the woman she used to be and the woman she was now were the same person no longer embarrassed her.
In her, pain had, for the first time, mostly disappeared.
When she straightened up, she saw the blue sea and the shadows of sails.
On her shoulder, the cat seemed to have fallen asleep. After eating the pumpkin pie, it looked very sleepy.
Leta knew that pressing the mist down had cost the lucky messenger a great deal of strength.
And so, in the middle of that ordinary little routine, she suddenly touched a fragment of eternity—a fragment of happiness.
That night, she slept more peacefully than she had in a very long time.
After all, tomorrow would be a new day.
~~~
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