Chapter Text
The tower still reeks of smoke. Ash curls up like wisps of breath, clinging to the edges of what used to be grandeur. Now, there is only ruin. Kakavasha picks through it with the excess of care one would extend if they were sifting through shards of glass.
It's far enough from his people's woodland settlement that the chance of being discovered stands at a firm slim to none. Close enough that he won't have too far to lug back whatever spoils he finds here.
Still, as his grandmother always told him: ‘Magic never truly dies; it merely changes shape.’ And he's inclined to believe her. If there are any stray talismans, bones, or curiosities, they'll be put to better use back home.
To the world beyond the trees, the Avgins of the deep forest are deemed a fearsome bunch, their affinity for unusual magick a defiance of that endorsed by the Dnies Institute for Magic. Kakavasha knows that the truth is far simpler than that. His people's methods are simply…traditional. A distinction lost on the capitalist clutches of the Institute, which brands any magic not born of its approved ‘geniuses’ as mere heathenry.
Their disdain suits Kakavasha just fine. Life has its own rhythm here within the Avgins’ three small settlements. It's vibrant enough that there's always something to do or someone to talk to; quiet enough that he can take moments of solitude, should he need it.
Right now, the quiet is a blessing. Let it be known, Kakavasha can be a people person when the job requires it, but for the most part, he gets more done alone. Perhaps because his own methods, his own intentions stray into the realm of unusual, even for an Avgin.
He has his Grandma Fenge to thank for that. The late grand witch of the coven, she gazed her third eye upon him at birth — now thrice closed, leaving him with an abundance of occult know-how and wise words and no discernible direction to take it in.
Never mind. He's nothing if not resourceful.
He steps over a fallen beam, throwing an arm across his face at the jarring stench of charred bat guano and rosemary. The sorcerer who occupied this tower must have been prolific, if the residual energy is anything to go by. He's learned over time that magic doesn't just change shape; it lingers. It hums beneath his skin as he walks, hissing through stone walls like an echo. An echo that hasn't yet learned that it's meant to fade.
“Suppose you were powerful,” he murmurs under his breath, to no one in particular. He crouches near a fallen shelf, fingers skimming over the jagged vertebrae of what used to be a stack of books. He almost pockets them, but the wards here feel sharp enough to bite. “Suppose whoever stormed this place didn't like that… Ah, but what exactly were you anyway? And why so many enemies?”
The tower doesn't give an answer, it just creaks under its own ruin. A jar rolls from atop a winding shelf and clatters; a scruffy brown rat scurries away into the rubble. Kakavasha watches as its tail disappears between shards of pottery and stone. He exhales through his nose, a dry laugh slipping free.
“Can’t say I blame you,” he mutters. He must be going mad. Everything in this tower feels sentient, like it expects him to fill the silence. “The place doesn’t exactly scream welcome.”
He straightens, rolling the stiffness from his shoulders. The tower had been taller once — he can tell by the broken spiral of stairs clinging to the walls, each step leading nowhere now. The upper floors must have collapsed when the adventurers raided the place. Rumour has it they'd eradicated the Sorcerer here, his bones taken as trophies, leaving Kakavasha with nothing but the dregs.
Still, something whispers in him to keep looking. Call it baseless intuition, or just plain curiosity.
He follows the foyer deeper into the wreck, past a wall daubed with half-burned sigils and a cluster of vials whose contents have fused into a shimmering neon film on the floor. The quiet is tangible — eerily so, in that Kakavasha can hear his pulse in his ears, and the distant static of half-alive machinery somewhere below.
Perhaps he could hoist whatever that is home with him. Break it all down for parts and sell it to the neighbouring towns. Maybe he could make them play cards for it, then pocket the money when he comes out victorious. For a deceased sorcerer’s tech, he could help his sister get through university thrice over. He could pay the rent on old Aunty Malina's shop in town — and perhaps he'd still have enough left over to replace his cracked watch and finish writing the book his grandmother had started long before her passing.
And boots. He's definitely going to need a new pair of boots after this little expedition.
He's roused from his delusions of grandeur by a sound. Small and muffled.
He pauses in place, tilts his head.
There it is again, this time more pointed. Something's trying to attract his attention, albeit weakly. Kakavasha pivots on his heel in the general direction of the noise, and shoulders his way under a splintered beam, over a pile of old dusty tomes.
He squints for movement, but it's difficult to tell what's what and where's north when the rubble looks the same no matter where he looks.
“Tell me,” he ventures, taking a creeping step forward, “am I getting warmer?”
‘Kree-kree.’
Okay. Definitely warmer. Still not convinced he's not talking to a sentient tower, he bunches the sleeves of his tawny cloak up to his elbows and gets to digging through the remnants of what probably used to be the ceiling, gravelly stone and plaster nicking through his gloves. If his watch was at least somewhat functional beforehand, it's most certainly ruined now.
Oh well. Curiosity comes with a price, as the Institute would say. This happens to be his.
His hands hit bundles of crinkled paper first — now made red by the sporadic glass shards hiding amongst sediment. Then, after bypassing everything determined to bite him, his fingers sink into something soft.
Soft is an understatement, really. Fluffy would be far more apt. Fluffy and solid and warm — though barely. At first he mistakes it for a rag, singed and streaked with soot. But then, it stiffens and shifts in place, and then comes that noise again, a sorrowful squawk that grates.
“It's okay,” Kakavasha finds himself saying as he clears down the pile, just enough to see the dented bars of an ornate golden cage, and the aborted twitch of an injured wing. Two feathery tufts appear soon after, followed by a pair of wine-amber eyes that seem to scrutinise in spite of their blatant fatigue.
His eyes fall to the owl’s wing, bent at an odd angle against the side of the cage, and Kakavasha scrabbles to claw away the last of the rubble from atop it.
“Fuck,” he whispers, frantic for something to do with his hands. “Okay. Alright, give me a moment. Let's see what we're working with here.”
Skirting his fingers along the embossed bars of the owl's cage, he purses his lips to the side, closes his eyes and concentrates for an invisible latch. The pads of his fingers brush over a lock — and he yelps, drawing his hand back with an uneasy laugh.
A spark arcs between his fingertips and the metal, blue-white and sharp. “Still warded,” he utters. The owl levels him with an unimpressed stare, tired eyes flitting from his face to his hands. Smart thing.
Sassy, too, apparently.
With a knowing quirk of his lips, he blows on his stinging fingertips, wincing as the torn edge of his glove catches on a burgeoning blister. “Alright, alright. No need to look at me like that. I get your point.”
The owl doesn't respond, obviously, but its gaze doesn't waiver either. There's an intelligence to it, steadier than any animal should be. He can see why they say owls are wise.
“Right,” he mutters, sitting back on his haunches to scan the cage again. If he squints, he can almost see the blur of powerful magic weaving in and out of the bars. “We can do this the easy way or the foolish way.”
They're one and the same, really. A fool's risk has always been Kakavasha's favourite kind, if not for the way it makes success all the sweeter.
He tugs at the forefinger of his glove with his teeth, peels it off, and presses his bare palm to naked metal. The wards react to him immediately, as a trapped wolf would gnaw at a piece of meat held just an inch too far away, all sharp teeth and desperate intent. Underneath the ancient magic fizzing against his skin, a pulse hums. It's weak and erratic, and it feels a lot like something trying to get out rather than to contain something, but it's there.
Closing his eyes, he draws upon his ancestors’ old power, and channels it into the gilded bars. He draws his dagger with his free hand, pressing the tip to one of the runes circling the lock. His grandmother had always told him that most magic, no matter how vicious, hates to be mocked. Reverence is required to gently coax it to one’s will; panic only invites it to snarl back. It feeds on fear. So Kakavasha does what he does best — refuses to play by the odds.
“You’ve served your purpose, had your fun,” he tells the cage, his voice light and breezy, as if he were haggling with a merchant in the market rather than disarming a hostile binding-charm. “Ah, but I think the game’s over now.”
With a deft flick, he scores the rune with his blade, nicking the metal just enough to make it bleed out light. The ward sizzles, then hisses like a snake poised to strike. Kakavasha hums through it, a jaunty little folk tune, pretending not to notice when the static zips up along his forearm.
A second pulse shudders through the cage in warning. The owl inside keens its disdain for the disturbance. Then, all at once, the magic snaps.
The sound of it is sharp enough that he feels it in his jaw. The lock splits open, far easier than he'd expected, with a ghoulish sigh and a dim spark of cold light.
“Ha.” Had he been holding his breath the whole time? The first few huffs of oxygen feel like a luxury earned. “As luck would have it. Looks like you’re safe now, friend.”
Sheathing his dagger, he pulls open the cage door. The bird doesn’t move. It just blinks owlishly up at him, feathers standing on end, its eyes far too lucid for something seemingly on death’s edge. Heavens, Kakavasha might be inclined to go as far as to say this owl is judging him. Which is— well, it’s not the kind of gratitude he’d usually hope for. Though, an argument could be made that Kakavasha is the one talking to a bird. That’s always been big sis’s specialty.
“O ye of little faith, hah. But I get it. You don’t trust me,” he says quietly, absentmindedly flattening the rubble down from around the cage door. “Sensible choice, perhaps. But I promise, I'm not here to hurt you. I swear on the name of the late Grand Witch, Gaiathra. May she strike me down if I break it.”
(And she would. A formidable woman was his grandmother.)
The thought always settles oddly. Trust isn't something he's particularly good at either — not giving it, not receiving it. But still, he can't leave the poor thing here. Not when it's looking at him like that.
“Alright,” he sighs. “Let's get you out of this place. Let's see if we can't get that wing straightened out for you.”
He shrugs off his cloak, pleasantly surprised when the owl steps out of the cage on its own accord, and into the relative safety of fabric. It's lighter than it should be, for a Nousian eagle-owl, its typical six-foot wingspan greatly curbed by its all-around inability to spread its wings at all. Its talons are worn down — likely from struggling against the collapse, and its mottled plumage has a violet tint to it, underneath all the soot and sediment.
All in all, a very pretty bird. It's a wonder anybody would cage it at all.
“It's okay. It's okay, friend. I've got you,” he murmurs, a little softer than intended. An old habit, maybe, from when reassurance used to mean something. Big sis's attempts at bandaging scraped knees springs to mind. “You're alright now.”
The tower seems to disagree. A gust ripples through spinular archways of broken stone, and the sigils on the walls flicker like dying fireflies. Kakavasha ignores it, though his skin prickles precariously as he cradles the owl against his chest. It slumps against him near instantaneously, but not without one last chuff; a sound so indignant, it could have been made by a weary human.
That's as good a sign as any that Kakavasha has been here too long, pushed his magic too far. The risk had granted the reward of a good deed well done, but still, he's coming home with little more than blistered fingers and an injured owl to show for it.
Outside, the air needles his skin, far colder than expected. The Autumn Equinox hasn't long since passed, but the woods are already holding their breath for winter. The path home is a ragged tapestry of reds and browns, the leaves slick and mulchy underfoot. There's a rain-spell approaching; Kakavasha can smell the petrichor from miles away.
He shifts the owl closer to his chest, draping the hood of his cloak over its face. “Don't worry, we're almost home. We just need to make it past the haunted bit.”
‘Haunted bit’ isn't exactly inaccurate, though there's more to it than that. The neighbouring town, a few miles west, has an affinity for necromancy magic. That alone earned them the wary seal of approval from the Institute, so long as it is used honestly. But it's no secret that the Avgins and the Katicans don't make for peaceful neighbours.
While the Avgins do make the occasional foray into raising the dead, their magic leans towards communion over resurrection.
Manipulating the natural order of things, so to speak.
His ma gave him courage; his father, a knack for reckless choices. His grandma, on the other hand— she gifted him his luck. Said she bound it to him before he ever opened his eyes to the world; that every risk he took would tip just slightly in his favour. She foresaw that he'd make for a powerful witch someday, and equipped him with the wisdom to match.
Those traits probably explain why he's ended up here, walking home through forlorn leaves at the risk of being mobbed by the undead in the dying dusk, a stray bundled in his arms.
Eh. Stranger things have happened.
At least the trail is blessedly quiet, devoid of reanimated corpses gone rogue. There's just the hush of wind through skeletal branches, the faint thrum of magic in the roots beneath his boots.
By the time the first drop of rain licks a path down the side of his cheek, the last of the tower's silhouette is long out of sight. The owl stirs faintly, feathers brushing against his chin, its heartbeat fast and small. Kakavasha glances down and huffs out a breath.
“Alright, my feathered friend,” he murmurs, giving it a wry pat on the head. If they're lucky — which they will be — the creek will be dry enough to cross, effectively shaving fifteen minutes off their journey. “Nearly home.”