ORIGIN

The owl had searched many places before he'd decided to build his nest.

Pisces was the natural choice; it was where Maji Walezi lived, where they gathered, where they guarded their "lifeblood of the cave," as they called it--the water. He wasn't sure why, since there was water in Eridanus, in Cetus, and dripping in all of the tunnels, but it didn't matter to him. He'd have preferred to stay close to Bevy, in any case--close enough to hear her call, to be there if he was needed. But in the end he'd decided on two nests--one in Pisces, and one outside it. The fact of the matter was, Pisces was just too damn loud. For a blind creature, and one who depended on his sense of hearing most of all, the constant roar of the waterfall was an eternal strain on his nerves. The loud bird- and insect-song of Eridanus wasn't quite as bad, but there tended to be intermittent shrieks and shrills that woke him, and again, this was a source of stress.

Cetus, however, was cool and peaceful, the insects' hum a low and tolerable drone--even moreso when he nestled high in the branches of the trees. That was another strike against nesting in Pisces; no trees. He'd built a halfhearted nest on the falls-slicked ledges, but it just didn't feel the same. He didn't feel comfortable sleeping without his talons wrapped firmly around a thick tree branch.

He wasn't sure why he even felt the need to build a nest, truth be told. He probably would have just slept in Cetus, winging and shuffling his way back through the tunnels to Pisces once awake, but someone had mentioned something recently to him about home. The crow, too--Eve--had given him a small glowing stone, and he'd realized that he had no place to put it. Lastly, he felt some stirring of parental instinct; he'd given some of his life force to a stone, recently, and though it had been taken from him (whisked away and stolen, leaving him miserable for a few days), he still felt some instinctive urge to prepare.

The owl wasn't really one to question his instincts. Or anything else, for that matter. At two feet tall and with a five-foot wingspan, his feathers a slightly tattered, dusky grey-brown, the owl didn't seem special or out of the ordinary. Even the gem that replaced both of his eyes and left him blind just looked green, and not very startling. It was his mind that was different; he was childlike, plain, his actions strange to others at times. Incomprehensible, even. After all, here he was, having left his family and home to build an unnecessary nest in a dark and unforgiving swamp.

The owl had tested several different trees, climbing to different heights, trying out their branches. He'd soon realized, however, that if he chose a random tree, he'd never find it again. He knew a way around this: if he used his magic to see, to really see, then sometimes he could get a good enough mental image of a place to successfully fly through it later on.

The owl chose a tree just inside Cetus's entrance, at the absolute outer edge of the cluster. It was relatively near to the Divine, but certainly not the closest to it, and as he closed his eyes and clutched its branches, feeling outward with his magic, he caught a glimpse of it all.

The tree he was on was, in the image that he saw, much smaller, much younger. He could see the shivering shadows of all of Cetus's forest, all indistinct and shifting. But he could still pick it out of the group, could still plan a decent flight path to it. He'd probably smack into the trunk half the time, or entirely miss his branch, but he could find it again.

Now all he had to do was start building himself a nest.

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The very center of the nest held a small, glowing stone. It might have seemed like an egg, but it wasn't; it was just a rock, a large and smooth pebble, that a crow Dark had met had enchanted to glow like one of the light-orbs stringing the cave and tunnel walls.

The irony was somewhat grim; the owl treasured the object, the thing designed to light his way, to make things easier to see--but he could not see it. It did not help him. He'd seen it once through magic, though, and it had pleased him, and so he kept it.

The nest itself wasn't quite finished. The owl launched out, sweeping back down, curving and landing carefully; he was learning the distance between his nest and the ground, so his tumbles through the mud weren't quite so bad anymore.

Settling his wings on his back, he began to pick his way through the swamp quietly, talons pulling himself over the grass and through the muck.

He paused when his foot hit water, and bent down to drink, eyelids dropping contentedly closed as his beak entered the cool swamp. The water was hardly fresh, but it was cold and it wasn't mud, so it--to him--was good.

Why is Maji Walezi's water so important? he thought for the tenth time. There was water here, and it was perfectly drinkable.

Quietly, he worked his way along the river's edge; he finally found what he was looking for, a clump of stiff, dried grass. Chortling softly to himself, pleased and content, he began to pull and tug strings of grass from the ground, weaving them into a clump. Once he had as much as he could carry he turned, pausing to reorient himself to the acoustics of the room. He walked back to where he'd been, then flew up, banging off a few branches and nearly falling from the air before finally finding--and landing in--his half-finished nest.

Here he settled, clicking his beak, resting for a moment and catching his breath.

Then began the weaving.

Slowly, carefully, Dark pulled the stiff strands from his talons, one-by-one. Then he began to weave them into the base of the nest itself, strengthening it, enlarging it.

It would be done soon enough, and this made the owl happy.

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