The owl was small.
It was lying on the ground, near the edge of the glade.
The left wing was broken and set at an angle, making it impossible to call it a wing anymore.
The owl was breathing in short gasps characteristic of small birds that had less than an hour of life left.
Cael had been looking for an opportunity to perform the spell for nearly a fortnight.
He hadn’t been thinking, in vague terms at the back of his mind, of owls at all.
He had thought of mice — there were mice in the Forest, and some of them died of falls, or cold, or owls themselves.
Mice had seemed perfectly adequate for the purposes of the test.
This was more than he had asked for; this was, he realized, approaching the owl carefully, definitely someone’s owl.
It must be an old owl that got driven away too far from home due to hunger and bad weather and clipped a branch on its way down.
The owl looked at him without flinching.
It had stopped flinching long ago.
Its eye, upper one, was bright and tired.
He stopped two steps from the bird.
He glanced back.
Neville was waiting at the rock about fifteen meters away, kneeling beside an open sheet of parchment and a charm hanging around his neck.
They had entered the clearing together and agreed that they would use whatever the test yielded.
They didn’t expect it to yield anything within the first ten minutes.
Neville’s face, seen across the clearing, was very still.
Cael walked back.
“It’s an owl.” “I know.” “It looks like a school owl.” “It does.” “Neville.” “Agreed.” “It’s dying.” “I see that.” “I’m going to do it.” “Okay.” Cael returned.
He knelt down next to the dying owl.
In the small leather bag he was carrying with him he had brought a clean handkerchief, especially for this purpose.
He placed it on the moss next to the owl and lifted the bird very gently with one hand under its belly and the other supporting the broken wing.
The owl breathed again, not protesting.
It was dying quietly, and he understood that.
He took out his wand.
He had practiced the wand-form, alone, in the dormitory, every night for a week.
He hadn’t uttered the words aloud in any other situation — although he knew them inside-out, and sometimes repeated them silently, in the shower.
These words were the most dangerous in this universe.
The process of using them to cast the spell in the regular manner, by intent alone, was a felony — maybe a capital one.
But these words, in his hands, were about to become something else entirely.
He raised the wand.
With great clarity, he thought about the reverse of what AK did.
He also thought about restoring something that was missing and about actively making things.
And about the small, dumb, dying owl on the handkerchief, about the fact that two hours ago this owl was a working and healthy creature with a job and a routine, and that it had been interrupted.
He was going to stop the interruption.
He cast.
“*Avada Kedavra.*” The light coming from the tip of his wand was not green.
It was warm, and it was the colour of late autumn sunlight.
It was also a colour he had never produced before using his wand, despite casting countless times before.
The light surrounded the owl, and the bird on the handkerchief began to breathe again.
The breathing was no longer the gasping of a dying bird, but the steady breathing of a living creature — as if it remembered only at the last moment that it could.
The wing straightened.
Cael saw it happen.
The bone snapped back into place and became correctly aligned again.
The bone, which had been broken at a wrong angle, was restored.
The feathers, aligned in a straight line along the bone, fluttered and settled.
Two eyes — both — opened.
And the light disappeared.
The owl turned its head.
It looked at him, at the handkerchief.
Then it briefly raised its head and looked up at the sky through the glade’s canopy.
The bird bent its legs and pushed itself up, then hopped twice on the moss, onto its feet.
It spread out its wings, testing them, and took off in the sky, flying around the clearing once, gaining altitude.
With the briskness of someone with a job to finish, it headed toward the trees.
Cael watched it take off.
Nearly a minute passed until he could make himself move.
His knees were still on the moss, his body still resting against his own breathing.
He held his trembling hands motionlessly in his lap.
Behind him, Neville rose and came across the clearing slowly.
He sat beside him and said nothing, waiting for him to finish.
“Cael?” “Yes.” “It worked.” “I noticed.” “That bird is *flying*.” “I noticed.” “It was a dying bird, Neville.
It had a wing that was broken.
I cast at it — and it has a fine wing.” “I know, Cael.” He had started to laugh then, but it was not a happy laughter.
It was the laughter of relief and terror, laughter of a person who had spent a long time standing on the brink of a precipice, trying to decide whether to leap over or not and finally taking the plunge.
He laughed for about ten seconds, stopped, picked up the handkerchief, and folded it, putting it back into the bag.
He stood up.
“Neville.” “Yeah?” “We won’t say anything about this.” “I know.” “Not to Hermione.
Not yet, or to Harry.
Or Ron.
Or anyone else.
I need to reproduce this.
I will perform a test, and if it works I will repeat the procedure on a different subject.
Then I’ll go talk to Snape and then Hermione, and we’ll think together how to proceed.” “You won’t say anything, either.” “I know.
I say this because I need to hear it.” “Okay.” They went back to the castle.
They took the long way not because it was necessary, but because he had needed to take it.
The Forest in late November smelled particularly good: leaf mould, frost, faint smell of Hagrid’s fireplace.
Cael walked through it, feeling the clean satisfaction of finally confirming a theory he had come up with a fortnight ago and been mulling over for nearly a year.
In the dormitory, late that night, in the quiet of the darkness with curtains pulled shut, he wrote the entry in his notebook with his own hand: *Reversed AK confirmed.
Subject: owl, dying, wing fracture and exposure.
Cast: moderate-tier.
Light: warm golden.
Duration: approx.
two seconds.
Result: complete restoration.
Subject flew after recovery and left.
Active restoration confirmed.
Mechanism per model.
Reproduce before disclosure.* For quite a while he hovered over that page with the quill held in mid-air.
Then he underlined twice those words: *active restoration*.
That was the fourth double underline in his time at Hogwarts.
He had never counted his underlines until that very moment, and he found out that he had used them three times before.
He now had four of them, in a row, in his notes.
In order, they were: the principle of inversion itself, the theoretical confirmation of AK effect, the *reliability* of the effect on the night of the World Cup match, and now the active restoration, empirically confirmed.
It was the last line he wrote that night.
He closed the book and put it under his pillow.
He lay awake for quite a while.
It was a warm night, and Ron was breathing steadily and deeply — he was deep asleep.
Harry made small, inarticulate noises of a boy having trouble in his sleep somewhere in the next bed.
Cael lay motionless and with one hand resting on his notebook, thinking about a dying owl, a gentle handkerchief, a warm golden light, and the bird that had flown away.
He finally fell asleep.
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