1st of September, 1991

The platform was bustling with people. Girls, boys, their parents and a varied assortment of animals in cages, the noise of the crimson engine outshouting them all as they stood there, uncertainty, nervousness and joy mixed in together, on all of their faces.

These were the obvious emotions, the obvious children, the ones standing in plain sight. There are always more than a few who slip between the cracks. One such made his way past all the other children, past the parents, past the worried words, and words of comfort and love.

The boy was small, some would say too small, for his age as he dragged the trunk behind him. A few things could be observed about the boy; his pitch-black hair, unruly, yet short; the wire-thin glasses he wore, obscuring his eyes slightly, but helping him to see to an extent.

There were still some blurry shapes in the distance or in the corner of his eye he paid no heed as he reached the back end of the train, well ahead of the schedule for its departure.

Silently, the boy made his way through the empty train, every compartment he encountered void of people, but he would not place himself near the first half of the train, those would fill out too quickly and with, he assumed, too many people at once. He'd have some solitude and peace for a while before others forced their presence onto him.

A quarter past the other half of the train should suffice for what he had in mind. He shoved the trunk, not too heavy, not too light, beneath his seat, having no desire to let the others in his compartment aware of anything he could do. It would not do well for them to come into the compartment and see the trunk lifted up on the perch above the seats, way higher than a child of eleven could reach.

Because in the end, he'd have to bring it down again and that would be done in the presence of others.

As he settled down his body onto the seat, he took a peak outside, observing the platform and the increase in the population of people standing there, more and more arriving as he watched.

Deciding that it was a frivolous pursuit, to watch the people he didn't know, he looked up at the big clock on the platform, seeing he had almost an entire hour before more people started converging onto the train itself. He bent downwards, pulling out his trunk, tapping it in a specific order, with a melody in his mind, and retrieving two books, one with slightly more worn covers than the other.

For now, there was no outside.

There was no thought of other people coming into the compartment and disturbing his reading.

For now, there was only the book and the knowledge it would provide, knowledge he would brush upon.

He fingered the spine of the book with adulation in his face, inhaling its scent, his face buried in its pages, remembering how all of this began.