Chapter Text
Luz sat up, trying to catch her breath as the brilliant light faded. She looked around the clearing, eyes drawn to the black marks in the ground.
She was gone. Amity was gone.
She was just there. It had happened so fast. One moment they were together, reading, laughing, experimenting with magic. The next… silence. Fear grips her heart as she searches, desperately, for any sign of the pink-haired witch.
But nothing else is amiss. The echo mouse is asleep in it’s terrarium. The vial of titan’s blood sits half-full within an open notebook, a re-creation of Wittbane’s diary. Amity’s bag lies abandoned beside it, resting against various books on magical theory borrowed from the library. There’s pages full of experimental glyphs, some cartons of chilled apple blood, her brush dipped in a bucket of white paint, and a drawing of a long abandoned shack surrounded by the forest of another realm.
Everything is accounted for, except for Amity.
And the scorch marks.
Hesitantly Luz crawls over and lays a hand on it. There’s no heat, but she can feel an even cut in the grass. As though someone had mowed just this patch of the forest. The air directly above feels cooler, less humid, but a gentle breeze blows it away.
She closes her eyes, trying to recreate the scene in her head. It was Amity’s idea to add a touch of the blood to a spell circle. When that didn’t do anything, they tried it on a light glyph before Luz had activated it. They had watched as the rose-colored ball vanished. In its place was a single blade of green grass.
The witch had theories about the ambient magic getting pulled into the glyph and matched them to some of the pseudoscience Whittbane had spent days ranting about, but Luz was barely listening. With her paintbrush she made a huge glyph on the forest floor. Amity very carefully poured a few drops over the circle, white tinged pink as the blood mixed itself with the paint. They stepped back, Luz took a picture with her phone, and activated the glyph.
No, that wasn’t right. She gazed at the black lines still in the shape of the glyph. Before activating it, Amity had said something.
“Whatever happens, we do it together.”
Luz looked back into her eyes. She was going to say ‘together’ like they always did. But Amity was holding her hand, and looking back at her with that beautiful, determined smile, and she started to lean in and-
“No!” She screams to the woods. Please no. This can’t be my fault. She grabbed the brush and raced around the clearing, painting a new glyph, using the blackened grass as a guide. How much blood did she use? This much? Would a little more help? It’s staining her hands and clothes but she doesn’t care as she taps the glyph.
Nothing happened. No light, no rush of wind. She tapped it again. Still nothing. Again and again, each time more frantically. Paint splatters from her touch, running through the grass, ruining the perfect circle. Useless. She can fix this! Another circle, take more time, be more careful. But she’s out of titan’s blood!
Paint-covered hands in her hair, struggling to stay calm. The Owl House isn’t far. Eda didn’t say how she came across the blood, only that she had given the teens just the one vial to test with. She must have more. She must!
Luz ran. She needed to get to Eda. They could make a new glyph. She had to know what happened. Had it worked? Was Amity on the other side? Or had she-
No! She couldn’t think that. She’s alive. She has to be.
The girl sits up slowly, arms shaking. She’s exhausted. The world around her spins. She focused on her breathing, letting the fog clear from her head, before looking around.
She has never been here before.
The grass here is green, without any shades of yellow or orange or blue. Some of the trees are green, too, but many of their leaves ahead started turning colors, picked up by the wind and scattered around the woods. The sky is blue, the air is chill. She looks back and finds the abandoned cabin from Luz’s drawing, and she shivers as it dawns on her.
Amity Blight is in the human realm.
Slowly she gets to her feet. Her muscles are sore, and she realizes she must have been lying there for there for some time. The sun is lower in the sky here than it was in the demon realm. Could you tell the time the same way? She had no way of knowing.
The memories trickle in. She remembers falling onto the glyph. Her energy sucked away, and then she’s falling again, landing in the soft grass. Okay, so the blood, powered by the glyph and the witch’s own energy, pulled her through to the human world. Then why was she still here? Wouldn’t Luz have opened a new glyph by now?
Unless it only works one way. And there’s no ambient magic here, and Amity doubts she had the energy needed to power such a huge spell. Not to mention she lacked titan’s blood.
She’s trapped here, she realizes, with a weight in her stomach. Trapped in a strange new world, with no idea what to do or where to go.
My scroll! Maybe she could reach someone in the demon realm! Luz doesn’t have a scroll, but Willow does! Her family all has scrolls, too, but calling them is the last thing she wants to do.
She traces the familiar circle to summon her scroll. Nothing happens. She tried again, then again. Nothing. No scroll. Was there not enough magic here to summon it? Or was it locked somehow in her home realm? It didn’t matter why. She had no scroll. No means of communicating with the other side.
Was this how Luz felt when she first came to the Isles? She bonded with Eda and King quickly, but before that? What was Amity supposed to do, in a world without witches and magic? What would her parents do when they realize she gone? How long would it take Luz to find her? Could Luz find her?
Her thoughts are dashed as a new, more urgent fear manifests. She can hear something moving through the forest, coming her way. She’s frozen in place, trembling, as a figure steps into the clearing and stops, beholding the pink-haired, pointed-eared girl lost in the woods.
But as she sees the figure and they approach, her fear turns to confusion. She knows those eyes, that face, those gangly limbs. But there’s just something off about them. The way the figure carries herself, the dullness in her eyes, the lack of exuberant energy and radiant joy ever present in her every expression.
She hesitantly opens her mouth as the figure steps up to her, folding her arms. “…Luz?”
She looks at the witch with surprise before a grin breaks out across her face. But her smile is too wide, with too many teeth, and her gaze is too intense, making Amity wilt. Her voice is quiet, curious, and wrong. “That’s my name!”
It’s not a lie. She had stolen it, along with everything else. “And what’s your name, witch?”
There’s a loud bang as Luz bursts through the back door of the Owl House. She rushes through the kitchen into the living room, stumbling to the floor. Eda and King jump, surprised, their card game forgotten.
She was quite a sight. Panting desperately, hands and hair covered in paint, with red and white staining her clothes. She gasps, trying to gain control, pointing back out to the woods. “Blood! More… blood! Eda-!
The wild witch jumped up, quickly approaching. “Kid? Slow down, what’s wrong?”
Luz takes a breath, tears running down her face as she points weakly behind her. “Amity! Amity, she-!” Another gasp, then a sob as she starts to lose it.
Eda puts a hand on her apprentice’s shoulder, concerned. King, however, leans back against the couch with a teasing grin. “What’s the matter? Did she kiss you again?”
Amity leaned forward, face red, inches from Luz’s own. But unlike last week, the human saw it coming. They hadn’t talked at all about the incident. Yet there had been so many more awkward pauses and stolen glances between the two. More than once Luz had caught the witch staring at her lips. More than once she found herself doing the same.
And at the very last moment, barely an inch apart, she panicked, falling backwards, flailing arms smacking Amity’s face. She fell awkwardly onto the glyph. There’s a blinding flash of light, a rush of wind, and she’s gone.
I did this. It was my fault.
Luz falls to the floor, screaming incoherently, as Eda and King try in vain to console her.