December 23, 2022, 2 AM
The Schnell Estate, near Kazan in Tatarstan, Russia

Valentin awoke, dripping with sweat and tearing at the confines of his sheets as they seemed to draw around him like shackles. Panting with a shriek, the boy pushed himself off the cushion at the center of the crystal tower’s dome and onto his hands and knees. He was shaking. Hell-chaser Val, the fearless frost captain and so-called immortal, trembled so hard he sank back down to the ground in a heap. No one could see him, utterly alone as he was atop his tower, but he felt as if a hundred tongues of the devil licked at him from every side. After all, Romeo was dead. Valentin had killed him when his bare hands grasped him and surged with uncontrollable dual lightning bolts. Eyes blurry and stinging, Valentin's heart ached. No, wait, was it real? A dream? The air hung heavy with the smell of smoke – charred flesh? Coughing as he rubbed his eyes, Valentin spotted a flicker of pale orange warp across the dark face of his upright piano. The crystal dome’s facets refracted the outside world with incomprehensible distortion, but as Valentin turned to look through the open archway behind him, the sight of a burning tower struck with perfect clarity. It was his father’s spire, engulfed in golden-red flames.

Scrambling to his feet, Valentin’s hand reached for where he kept his Silver Arrow by the exit leading to the outer deck, but it wasn’t there. The night before, he had been re-varnishing it downstairs after trying to stabilize the cracks that were spreading from the broom’s earlier encounter with lightning – even in an emergency, the Arrow was not airworthy. Sparing only a moment to grab his wand from the tangle of bedsheets, Valya flew down the internal stairwell’s corkscrew. He burst out through the heavy ground floor door, hardly dressed as he staggered through the masses of Russian snowdrift aglow with surreal warm hues. With only his black silk sleeping pants to protect him, the ice bit deep as pure adrenaline spurred Valya through the tall banks separating him from his father’s tower. Once he finally reached its base, the boy found its dark oak door wedged partially open by a heap of ice.

Shoving himself into the crack of the doorway with a shiver, splinters dug into Valentin as the wood refused to budge. Yet, despite having regained a healthy weight, Valentin still proved skinny enough to wedge himself into the warm interior. Warm, yes, in fact, stifling hot – the entire tower rumbled with the vibrations of its well-fed conflagration. While dashing up the stairway, Valentin felt for the wand he thought he’d shoved into his back pocket. It wasn’t there. Stopping midway up the tower, Valentin seethed with annoyance and coughed again, only to find the wand in his front pocket just as a loud crack made him look up. A falling beam slammed down one meter in front of the boy, and it began rolling down at him, spitting burning slivers and picking up speed. Even as he tried to squeeze against the wall to avoid it, the flaming wood thudded against Valentin’s bare foot. The athlete winced in pain but scrambled over it, only to catch another shard of the falling beams across his face. Groaning, Valentin wrapped one arm over his head but continued to the top of the tower where the roar of the flames grew earsplitting.

“VALENKA! GET OUT OF HERE!” screamed a man barely visible through the flames – Valentin’s butler, Sergei? Holding his arm back as if to stop Valentin, the man cast extinguo, once, twice, but whole bookshelves were already toppling and spreading flames across every part of the room. Was that... his father's black wand in Sergei's hand? Keen Eye: 1d10:10


“SERGEI! BACK UP! You’re ON FIRE!” Valentin ran to pull him down the stairs but, just as his hand reached Sergei’s shoulder, a loud series of twangs reverberated through the chamber as the grand piano at the center of the room popped strings, heaving flames through its open maw. Turning to push his body weight into moving Sergei out, Valentin's side felt a wave of heat as the piano's prop crumbled and slammed its heavy lid shut with a deafening, infernal gust. The boy took the brunt of the flames at his back, and Sergei finally began to back up as he stabilized Valentin in his arms. “Stand back or you’ll die!” cried the thin albino as his hair and pants caught fire. Sergei took Valentin down a few more steps as the tower shook with structural fatigue, but something was holding him back. “His stuff is not worth your life. The fire is too far gone, even for two of us…! We have to leave, NOW!” Valentin’s command boomed as he bore down on the man. Finally, the butler took him by the arm to go downstairs in loping strides just as another bookshelf spilled a wash of cinders around their feet. Rolling debris followed them down, sputtering sparks along the rest of the tower in their wake.

“I’m sorry…” Only halfway down the tower, Sergei slowed to a fast walk and patted down his clothes as if it were just another day of being on fire. He didn't sound very apologetic.

“It won’t bring the past back,” soothed Valentin, trying to put the flames out in his hair with his palms. The smell of the boy’s burned-off peach fuzz wafted into his nose, bringing him to cough again. “Stay with me now.”


“Yes, sir,” came the butler’s cheerful reply. What – was he glad that Valentin was alright, or was he simply relieved to no longer be facing the flames?

“How did this happen?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.” Amusement sparked briefly in the man’s eyes. Could it be that he was an even bigger adrenaline junkie than Valentin? He had never seen Sergei like this before.

“I’m so confused…” Valentin admitted as they reached the bottom of the stairwell. “Help me with the d–“

“Allow me.” Sergei stepped in front and pushed against the door without waiting, crunching back snow despite the heaviness of the dense oak. The man made it look so easy that Valentin couldn’t help but sigh in annoyance with himself. No matter how much he ate nowadays, Valentin never seemed to get much stronger. Moments later, the pair was staggering hip-deep through snow towards the main complex when the top of the tower behind them groaned and crumbled into a rain of flaming clumps. A slab of stony mortar the size of an erumpent slammed into the earth, sending the tiny wizards diving to the side. The burning hunk missed both, only to explode into shrapnel. The sound of rock tearing through cloth and flesh spun Valentin around to find his companion collapsed, face down, with a bloody gouge across one deltoid.

“SERGEI!”

Valentin pulled at the man’s opposite shoulder, only for Sergei to get himself back to standing with a toss of his head. Sweeping his hand about and flicking clusters of snow from his face, hair, and clothes, the butler had no interest in accepting help from the spindly boy. Without a word, he continued to trudge towards the main building as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it was the weaker light thrown by the collapsing tower, or a trick of the flame-cast colors, but the man seemed darker for a moment. Once they arrived at the stairs of the central dome, Valentin turned just in time to witness the final disintegration of his father’s spire. With its distance from other buildings, there was no risk of the fire spreading anymore, and the boy resigned himself to picking through the rubble for salvage come morning light. So much for leaving everything exactly as it was on that frigid Christmas day the aurors took away his father, Hugo. Now Valentin could never show it to his co-captain. Shivering against the unexpected coldness from Sergei, Valentin sighed with the realization that this winter, too, would be bone-chilling.

December 24, 2022, 4 PM
The Schnell Estate, near Kazan in Tatarstan, Russia

Valentin lay in the still-warm ashes of his father’s tower ruins, staring up at the clear sky in his long black coat. Due to the high latitude, the sun had just set despite the early hour. With the evening chill setting in, Valya knew it would be unusually frigid again; it was already -22° C (-7.6° F) the night before. At such temperatures it would not even snow, leaving the current snowcover blackened with fallout from the tower’s immolation. At his chest the boy held a large iron rock between his mittens – one of the only treasures to survive what Val was convinced must have been arson. It was the meteorite chunk Valentin and his father recovered when they chased down the shooting star that fell into what they renamed “Starfall Lake.” Far away, somewhere much warmer, maybe another boy was looking at the slice taken from the same stone, polished and set into the handle of an heirloom Firebolt. As unlikely as it was, Valentin could still dream.

It was almost time to go, but the boy clung to the embers in the knowledge that they would be dead by the time he returned from Kim’s Christmas party. Being around others was just what Valentin needed most now, so that invitation was like a godsend compared to last Christmas’s desolation. Wondering who would be there, Valya imagined the faces of his friends: Kim, Ginyami, Hiro, Romeo… No, no... Romeo wouldn't make it. It would be the second time Valentin invited him as his plus one to Kim's party just to be turned down. Hopefully this party he’d make less of a scene, as compared to the Halloween bash where Val had almost passed out. To the side, angry cries turned his attention to a chocolate-colored eagle owl and a white Ural owl clawing at each other mid-air.

Getting to his feet, Valentin recognized the white owl as one of his own – his favorite, Amet. Soon overhead, the brown one dove towards Valentin as it tried to dodge, but Amet’s talons scraped across the other bird’s head and caused it to drop a scroll into the ashes at Valentin’s feet. With a serpentine flick of its neck, the eagle owl still slipped away and climbed high and far with its powerful wing strokes, exiting.

“AMET!” Raising one arm, Valentin signaled his bird to land. A trail of blood dripped off into the distance as the dark one fled, but as the white one landed on Val’s wrist, it became clear it was in perfect health. A sizzle hissed at Valentin’s feet as the dropped parchment caught fire from a stray ember, and he hurried Amet onto his shoulder as he stopped to pick it up. With a mash of his mittens he extinguished it, meteorite digging into his side from under one arm.

Son,

Please come immediately to the address below and tell no one you received this. It is a ma–

[illegible]

I know I can count on you, Valenka.


- Hugo

Half of the letter was reduced to cinders, but the location was still intelligible as the mansion in Germany where Valentin grew up during his earliest years. Squinting at it as Amet made concerned hoots, Valya sniffed the letter. There was something funny about it. Wasn’t his father in prison? For however normal the handwriting looked, and wherever the scrap of paper came from… a nasty crunch turned in his stomach. Keen Eye: 1d10:10 – success It was normal for Val’s father to sign off using his first name, even when writing his son. Yet… There – ‘Valenka.’ It was a diminutive form of Valentin’s name that he heard on a daily basis in the Schnell Estate. Yet, Hugo never used it himself, always preferring brevity and the shorter “Valka.” Valya doubted this characteristic about him would have changed, even after however traumatizing his time in jail may have been. Retreating to the privacy of his own tower, Valentin cast a glance over his shoulder. For the first time, Valentin felt all-too-visible in his own home. Could he even send an owl of his own without it being intercepted? Perhaps he could send one from Kim's house without being spotted...? If he was lucky, maybe Kim would even let him spend the night, allowing him to avoid not only the terrible Russian chill, but also the nightmare of trying to sleep in his own tower that overlooked the ruins of his father's spire.

Mentioning: @Kim Sato; end of thread