Rhea drifted awake, her nose accusing her before her eyes opened: something was burning, and against all statistical likelihood, it wasn’t just her patience. She blinked to find herself headfirst in a pile of hay and misfortune. Memory returned in staccato flashes: Valerius’s heroic plan pivoting abruptly into treachery, a stray flailing elbow, and being left behind—a teenage witch-shaped afterthought. The acrid tang of smoke sharpened everything. Rhea sat up and noted, with academic detachment, that the barn was now officially on fire.

The owl flapped manically above, half-choking on the haze. ‘FLAMES!’ it hooted. ‘NAME? BEAK?’

Rhea lurched to her feet, eyes watering. ‘Stay up! I’m working on it, just—try not to combust, all right?’

The owl, naturally, only heard what it wanted. ‘LOOKING! BOOKING! TOOK!’ it hooted, confusion and existential terror in perfect, feathery harmony.

Smoke thickened. Beams glowed with malevolent orange light. Rhea desperately tried to channel her magic, to find the quiet focus that had worked before. But panic was a terrible conductor. She raised her arm and shouted, ‘Aqua Immediate!’

A rusty length of copper plumbing appeared and thudded uselessly onto the hay.

‘Oh, come on,’ she groaned, ‘that’s not even technically a liquid!’

The owl buzzed lower, its feathers singed. ‘LICK IT? QUID?’

‘Not helping!’ Rhea barked. ‘Hold on, I’ll try again—Aqua More-Aqua!’

This time, a plastic yellow duck landed with the smug cheerfulness of a child’s bath and all the utility of a philosophy seminar during a shipwreck.

Rhea lobbed it out the nearest scorched window. ‘Unless you can swim, that’s useless!’

The flames advanced, crackling cheerfully, eager for participation grades.

‘Stay up top!’ she shouted at the owl. ‘High up—don’t flap down here, unless you want to become a rotisserie feature!’

The owl, panicked now at full barn volume, circled wildly. ‘TOP! BOP! CHOP!’

Rhea gathered the last dregs of focus, squinting so hard she threatened to reverse her own eyesight. ‘AQUA SERIOUSLY-THIS-TIME!’ she commanded, enunciating each syllable with the force of someone who’d been failed by several centuries of magical curriculum design.

A toy sailboat appeared, crisp and nautical, riding the rising smoke like a metaphor for all failed escape plans. Rhea shriek-laughed, half-mad, half-furious.

‘Fantastic! Just what I need—a vessel for fleeing, if only this barn had a river, or an exit less flammable than my dignity!’

The owl dodged a falling beam, hooting at double speed. ‘QUIVER! DELIVER!’

Rhea clambered onto a pile of suspicious hay bales and waved to the owl. ‘This way! Follow my voice! Or, you know, my increasingly unhinged shouting!’

The owl spiralled downward. ‘POLLEN! FALLEN! CALLIN’!’

Rhea coughed, pounded at her dizzy head—the smoke making hallucination plausible and owl comedy tragic. ‘Look, I’m not letting you barbecue on my watch! You and me, flammable to the bitter end!’

Above, a portion of the ceiling creaked menacingly. She yanked the copper pipe, brandished it at the straw, then tried, ‘AQUA FOR THE LOVE OF MUD!’ one more time with desperate, teenage volume.

A toddler-sized rain poncho appeared, minuscule and floral-printed. She stuffed it over the owl’s head in a fit of indignant improvisation.

‘There, now you’re waterproof. Nearly.’ She snorted. ‘I hope ‘Protection by Fashion Disaster’ was in one of your previous lives.’

The owl fixed her with a look of haunted dignity, its rain poncho askew.

Rhea, half-crazed, yelled at the rafters, ‘OWLS! Why do I always get the ones with hearing the consistency of stale porridge?!’

The words swirled with the smoke, a vortex of nonsense pulling her under. She needed to concentrate, to find that calm centre her grandmother always spoke of. A good witch works with her heart, Iris’s voice echoed in her memory. Rhea squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the roar of the flames and the owl’s tragic comedy. She took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to relax, to let the magic flow.

But the barn wouldn’t let her. A heavy timber crashed down just feet away, sending a shower of sparks into the air. The heat was immense. The smoke wasn’t just carrying words now; it felt like it was shouting at her, mocking her. Her lungs burned. Her patience, already incinerated, was now just ash. Through the swirling grey haze, she saw it: a small, high window, its wooden frame still untouched by the flames. A perfect, singular point of escape. Hope surged through her.

‘The window!’ she yelled, pointing at the owl. She scrambled over a pile of smouldering hay, her eyes fixed on that rectangle of clear, smoke-free morning sky. It was their only way out. She reached the wall, coughing, and pushed with all her might.

It didn’t budge.

She pushed again, her shoulder screaming in protest. The wood was warped, swollen shut by years of damp and neglect. It was sealed as tightly as a forgotten tomb.

And in that moment, something inside Rhea snapped.

The slow build of frustration from months of being powerless; the indignation of confiscated brooms and silenced wands; the fury at bullies and frauds and stories that refused to change—it all coalesced. The desperate need to relax and concentrate was a cage, and she was done with cages. She was done being a ‘witch-in-training.’ She was done with being careful.

The air in the barn went still. The roar of the fire seemed to dim, and the owl’s frantic hooting fell silent. A low, powerful hum began to emanate from Rhea, the same sound that had shaken her hut, but a hundred times stronger. The useless copper pipe at her feet began to glow cherry-red. The toy sailboat burst into splinters. The yellow duck melted into a puddle of smug, defiant plastic.

She placed one hand flat against the wall beneath the window, not to push, but to connect. She didn’t whisper an incantation. She didn’t think of a spell. She just thought of one word: Open.

Outside, Valerius, safely behind a barrel of boiled onions, raised his stick-sceptre to the sky and boomed for all to hear, ‘BRACE YOURSELVES! FLAVOURED CARNAGE IS IMMINENT!’

With the apocalyptic roar of a mountain breaking apart, the entire barn blew outward from the point of her touch in a majestic, slow-motion wave of force. Timber, hay, and unlucky tools erupted into the morning air in a spectacular, liberating explosion.

Rhea and the owl were thrown clear, carried on a wave of pure, untamed power. The owl, its feathers catching the light, let out a single, clear hoot of what sounded suspiciously like approval and soared into the sky, free.

The crowd of Sloggendorf’s finest, holding pitchforks and bagged marshmallows, stood blackened and blinking—eyebrows singed, boots smoking. In their midst, Valerius the Valiant was face-down in his barrel of boiled onions, his Very Very Good Plan having received a very, very final review.

Rhea, breathless, landed face-first in a muddier puddle than before. She pushed herself up, slick with mud and triumph, every inch of her thrumming with power. She waved to the astonished townsfolk and called out, a fierce grin splitting her face, ‘Well, it looks like your Very Very Good problem just Very Very flew away!’

Then she felt that familiar storybook trembling, and she understood she was about to leave the folktale. With a last smirk to Valerius, the provisional, confirmed not really valiant, she landed with a bone-jarring thump right in the sagging centre of her throne, a chaotic masterpiece of soot, singed fabric, and hay-flecked hair that defied gravity.

For a second, a dead, ringing silence filled the hut. Gorbaclaventichun stood bolt upright, fur on end. Gus and Tavo, having dropped their instruments, stared with antennae twitching. Then, as the reality of the moment sank in, they exchanged a look of artistic purpose. Gus picked up his comb, Tavo raised his thimble, and they launched into a triumphant, if wobbly, orchestral march that sounded suspiciously like a heroic theme from a poorly dubbed fantasy film.

‘I am back.’ The grin from her victory vanished as she saw the terrified stillness of her companions. It was the ringing silence after a very loud noise. A noise they had all heard.

‘Oh no,’ she whispered, her triumph curdling into pure panic. ‘Oh no no no. Did you hear an explosion?’

The cockroaches paused their pompous music just long enough for Tavo to execute a dramatic cymbal crash with the baby tooth before resuming.

She scrambled off the sofa and scooped the cat into her arms. ‘Right. New plan. You don’t exist. You’re a rumour. A particularly fluffy, judgmental rumour.’ She hugged him tight, burying her face in his smoky fur. ‘They can’t take you. Your name is too long for the paperwork; it’s our only legal defence. We just have to hide you until the heat dies down in, oh, four million full moons.’

As the cockroaches’ march swelled dramatically, Rhea frantically looked for a hiding place. ‘The cauldron? No, too cliché. Under the sofa? They’ll look there first. We need a place of profound unimportance!’ She tried to gently nudge him into a large, dusty teapot meant for potions. Gorbaclaventichun, however, seemed to gain fifty pounds, becoming a solid anchor of feline defiance. He refused to budge.

‘Don’t you get it?’ Rhea hissed, kissing the top of his head. ‘This isn’t a joke! That was a magical detonation! They’ll take you away and reassign you to some perfectly behaved wizard who, for sure, alphabetises his socks!’

Growing more desperate, she flung open the hut door. ‘Fine! If you won’t hide, you’ll flee!’ she cried, trying to shove him outside. Go on! Be free! Live among the squirrels! Avenge me! Just don’t get arrested!’

But he didn’t bolt. Instead, Gorbaclaventichun calmly walked out of her arms and planted himself in the doorway, his body rigid. He faced the dark woods, a low rumble in his chest, as if daring the entire Ministry of Witchly Misconduct to approach. He wasn’t running. He was guarding her.

Rhea stared at him, her panic momentarily silenced by his quiet bravery. With a shuddering breath, she slowly closed the door, her cat now safely inside with her. The cockroaches, sensing a shift in mood, transitioned their music into a tense, dramatic overture.

‘Well,’ Rhea whispered, sinking to the floor and pulling her steadfast familiar into another hug. ‘I suppose if you’re not leaving, you’re listening to music with me.’