In the Beginning by Marta

Chapter 1

Outside, the thunder boomed ominously into the night. The cat jumped up from his resting-place behind the typewriter, his fur all standing on end. Looking sharply at his companion, he turned around so his tail brushed under the professor’s nose before lying down again. That was his revenge; the professor would swear the cat rubbed against him out of spite, just to make his eyes water.

Revenge for what, though? The professor was no master of cat-lore, but certainly even one as suspicious of him as this beast would not blame him for the storm.

Yet there was a niggling doubt: the rain did seem to match his moods, or his thoughts. It had fallen for an hour and more in steady tempo, peaceful, the water-drops playing a faint symphony against the glass of the window. The cat had hovered on the edge of sleep, then, his soft purr lulling the professor into a gentle tedium. But then the name Melkor had sprung up in the professor’s mind, and a lightning-bolt had torn the sky in two.

It was a bit eerie, really, when he thought of it: how his thought and the lightning had come together. And how persistent those made-up Powers were in his mind; almost as if they were friends, real friends and not just idle fancies. But that was foolishness, and he wouldn’t waste what time he’d found for his faerie-tales on such things. He knew he’d not find another quiet hour again for a while, not with all he had to manage this week.

So he turned back to his typewriter and set down the words that had been circling around his thoughts for too long already: “Therefore I say: Eä! Let these things be!”

The cat hissed, then, but the professor left him alone.