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or, How Boys Become Real
Once upon a time, when Luz Noceda was young enough for such things to seem an acceptable dalliance, at the tender age when a fertile imagination was a virtue and not a hindrance, and on those nights when her mother had not worked the graveyard shift only to come home and get her daughter fed and dressed for the school bus before heading off to bed herself-- once upon a time, Luz had been tucked in every night with a story.
She loved all kinds of books, at and above her technical reading level: paperback easy-readers about plucky middle school girls riding horses, scientific journals detailing the taxonomy of mushrooms, golden high fantasy classics featuring worlds too fantastic to be real. Her Mama would read a chapter, and then, if her eyelids weren’t too heavy, once the light had gone out Luz would drag the book out from the drawer of her nightdesk and read by the faint greenish tinge of the glow in the dark stars haphazardly applied in the vague approximation of real constellations on her ceiling, hungry to escape, in her mind, to somewhere else.
The first book she could remember being read, the special book, was The Velveteen Rabbit. On the days when she walked home from kindergarten alone, letting herself into the empty kitchen through the back screen door, and the days when she ate lunch alone on the playground, when other girls ran from her or hid their snide laughing smiles behind perfectly manicured hands, she remembered her Mama’s smooth, quiet voice telling her:
Once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
Nobody understood Luz, but that was alright. Someday she would be real too, all of her own accord.
---
Hunter didn’t have a family. What he had was lies. There were memories, foggy at first, but then that had never seemed all that untoward or suspicious-- no witch remembered much of his childhood, not before about the age of three. There was no mother in what nebulous, drifting impressions he had, no father, only Uncle Belos and his powerful arms holding him, a steel-strong grip that somehow had the consistency of rotting wood. Uncle Belos’ soft voice, though not the words he had ever said. He remembered being a child who studied a lot, who disappeared into the vast rustling halls of the Emperor’s forbidden libraries, scouring each page hungrily, reading and learning how magic worked, what the world was, how to be a person. Things sharpened with clarity over the last year or so: Belos pressing the cool impersonal metal of the Golden Guard’s staff into his hands with the command to make himself worthy of it, flying over the sea for the first time with flecks of superheated foam spraying across his cheeks, cruel yellow eyes watching him from the shadows.
The first warning sign should have been that he couldn’t remember how he got the old, weathered scar that cut across his cheek. Hunter had an angular face, rough-hewn and blocky, as if he’d been carved without much care out of granite; perhaps when the Titan had made him, he thought, the knife had slipped. A birthmark, not a scar.
That was an idle thought that turned bitter with the truth, so close and yet so far. Though, of course, Hunter had never been born.
It was the human who brought him the book, a truce of sorts, after having returned from a brief failed sojourn in her own ancestral realms. “I still think you’re a bad person,” she said. She’d thrown pebbles at his frosted bedroom window in the palace until he’d opened it to find her hovering a thousand feet up astride the Owl Lady’s borrowed staff, and then barely given him time to curse her before she was shoving the old tome across the sill. “But you deserve to know.”
Curiosity got the better of him. He took it, and then slammed the window in her face. The title read Homunculi and Their Uses in runes so old as to be almost illegible, and a certain page had been bookmarked. Hunter flipped to it and found an illustration of his own red-purple eyes staring back up at him, enviably empty of all emotion.
By light of the moon and candle, carve each greenstick bone from the wood of the Palistrom, read the instructions in crumbling, faded ink. And inside the rib cage place a sacred Galdorstone, just to the left. This will form the heart…
Hunter’s heart, which felt real enough, shuddered beneath his breast. But all true things have the ring of inevitability about them, and from the way his skin prickled up the back of his neck and his gorge rose, backs of his hands clammy with cold sweat, he knew. It was the last piece of a puzzle that had been quietly assembling itself in the back of his mind unbidden for months. Grimwalker: he whispered the name out loud, tasting the sour shape of it in his mouth, and as if he’d called her name instead Rascal flittered over to land on his trembling shoulder, pressing the time-dulled tip of her beak into the soft place behind his ear.
No magic of his own, only what he was given, because he wasn’t a witch. No memories, because he’d never lived them. No Uncle, only a decaying old creator whose insides had filled slowly with mold and silt and sludge. No purpose, only an unknown use he would be put to later, like the dozens of Palismen who had been cracked open and slurped down the man’s gullet.
Hunter, who was a thing after all and not a real boy, closed the book and hid it under a pile of other books, wishing he had the courage to burn it instead. And then he carefully cupped Rascal in both his hands and set her aside, and because it was late, he went to sleep.
The hopeful lies were better than a rotten, desolate truth.
---
“I am disappointed in you, Hunter.”
Belos was wearing the mask. They were alone. These were bad signs that portended worse things, historically. Just because Hunter could not remember the origin of his most prominent scar didn’t mean he was incapable of vividly remembering the providence of others.
The throne room was dark and humid, and Hunter knelt on the sweating stone with his head bowed, listening to the great chambers of his Uncle’s grotesque heart contracting, echoing into the twilight gloaming until his own heart matched it in time. “I’m sorry, Uncle,” he said, addressing the floor. The flagstones ached against his bony knees.
“It is broken,” the Emperor said. “Useless, but for a drop of blood. I will have to create a new key after all.” This was information they’d known for weeks, since Hunter had surrendered the war prize he’d won off the youngest Blight beneath Eclipse Lake, and yet his capricious Uncle, who had greeted him so gently when he confessed to his transgression and handed over the original key, was choosing now to be angry over it. Hunter did not move as he heard him rise, heard the click of his boots against the unforgiving stone as he descended the dais. “Do you know what the components are?”
“Gold,” Hunter said automatically, as if reciting from a textbook. Gold, which was the root of all alchemy, the transactional metal. “Titan’s blood.” He wet his cracked lips, keeping his voice steady. “A sacrifice.”
Belos cupped the corner of his jaw with a gentle, absurd tenderness, the leather of his glove rough against untouched skin, and he tipped Hunter’s head up and back, forcing him to look deep into the dark, empty sockets of the mask. His other hand rested higher on Hunter’s opposite cheek, the tip of his thumb just under the exhaustion-swollen eyelid.
“An eye,” he said.
Hunter strangled his screams as the thumb dug in, pressed down, and pressed, and pressed, relentless and wet, remembering the impassive eyes of the Grimwalker in the book.
This was what he’d been made for.
---
“You two match now,” the human said to him, the next time they faced off. It happened a lot these days: in any idle moment he found himself flying down by the Owl House, not because it was what Belos wanted or had assigned him to but simply for the frustrated teenage pleasure of metaphorically egging their windows. Luz or the infernal owl-worm or sometimes Eda herself would always come out to run him off, though it was all very half-hearted, from everyone’s end. Sometimes Amity Blight was there, and sometimes she wasn’t, and if she was Hunter would do a quick circle around the broken tower for reconnaissance and then leave immediately.
Tonight he’d barely landed, and this was her opening salvo, personal attacks. “Wow,” he drawled, dismounting the staff and giving Rascal a pat on her carved head. “I’m hurt.” He might have been, actually, deep down in a place where sunlight and recognition never reached. Probably he should have put his mask back on before coming here to harry after her, cover up his new weakness, but he’d long since stopped wearing it anywhere, more or less, and especially stopped wearing it around her. What would have been the point?
Luz bit her lip. “Who--”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She seemed to consider this, and then she folded up her prepared squares of glyph paper and tucked them away in the pockets of her cloak. “Okay,” she said. “But I don’t want to fight you. Not tonight.” And she went inside, leaving the heavy wooden door cracked open. A shaft of syrupy golden light spilled out over the lawn, beckoning, and after a moment distant peals of laughter rang out like not particularly melodious or harmonic bells.
In there was an artificial little family, not one that was born but made, welded together from disparate parts. He knew without knowing that it would be warm by their fire, where he had only ever been cold inside; the kind of cold that came from not knowing what real warmth felt like. It was a frigid numbness that couldn’t be thawed by one cozy evening, or even many of them, but somehow it had started to be permeated by the times he scuffled with Luz. Not talking, not thinking, just adapting to each other’s innate talent and cleverness, inventing spells on the fly.
The door-guard’s beetle-black eyes were on him, and the door swung open another inch. It made the bile-sac he’d never been formed with squeeze at the thought of her pity.
He climbed back on his staff and went away.
---
Hunter lost his eye to a kind of bleak necessity. He lost his hand to sentimental stupidity.
They were in the throne room, where the new Doorway had been erected. They were so close to Belos’ goal, which was of course Hunter’s goal as well, because it had to be. The day of Unity was what he’d been made for: the glorious day when the realms would be brought together as one under his master’s rule, and when Belos’ soul would become one with Hunter’s own body, which, even banged up and hobbled as it was, was still a sight better than the old vessel had become.
He had accepted it, he’d thought. Accepted it into his cold stone heart the night he’d been handed the horrible book and felt the bite of some invisible sword pressing down on his neck. Accepted it on his knees, manufactured body farmed for parts. No past, no future, no ties to anything but Belos. At dawn that morning he’d unscrewed Rascal from her staff and tossed her out the window, watched her fly away back into lonely freedom until she was just a dot on the distant horizon, and then nothing. Maybe one day, when he wasn’t himself, his body would find her again, his hands would crush her for the nourishment inside, but he, Hunter, wouldn’t be around to see it.
That was alright. If he could never be special, it was better just to serve his purpose.
Now the key was in his Uncle’s hand, his own bloodshot stolen eye staring accusingly back at him, and the tines of it were almost in the lock-- now the other doors were blasted open in a hail of smoke and splinter shards by the bright pure fire of a glyph, the Titan’s gift. “Get out,” Hunter shouted, trying to shoo the human away, but she wouldn’t go, and then Kikimora and half a hundred guards were pouring in after her, and they fought.
In the chaos of battle it was easy enough to do nothing. He didn’t want Luz to die, Hunter realized, with a brief stab of shock at the ease of wanting anything other than what Belos commanded of him. It wasn’t easy at all, admitting that guilty thought was like dragging himself on his belly through a field of thorns, but Hunter had never been afraid of pain. He felt less of it than most people did. He didn’t want Luz to die, for that light to be snuffed out like a star going supernova, something so bright that left only empty blackness.
But she was going to. The dog wasn’t even with her; and yet Rascal was, flitting around her head and chirping frantically. Hunter cursed himself for not leaving her in a cage. Of course she had led the human right to them.
Of course it was Belos who drew the sparking circle with the tip of his finger in the air, who hurled all his energy at Luz.
Hunter felt himself move, without thinking to, putting himself between the girl and his Uncle with jerky, hasty movements, a toy soldier wound up too tight. He was going to die anyway, but Luz didn’t need to. He told himself that as he held up his hand to shield her, caught the lightning in his palm, smelled the oddly oaky smoke as flesh and blood and bone sizzled away with a pain so exquisite that it took what remained of his sight. Dimly, as if from very far away, he felt himself crash to his knees again, heard her screaming.
It was a relief.
---
Life isn’t a storybook. There are no real endings, happy or otherwise. Hunter woke up a day later to find that his right hand was gone and someone had tucked him in on the Owl Lady’s threadbare couch with a hand-knitted blanket that smelled of must and mothballs pulled up to his chin. Eda’s dog was a deceptively heavy circle of dark fur and keratin curled up on his feet, which he’d lost all feeling in but not the anatomical use of.
Belos wasn’t dead, but no one else was, either. Hunter found all of this vaguely disappointing.
When the dog opened one big yellow eye and found him staring back, he yawned his pink little mouth open, turned around a few times on Hunter’s feet, and called, “Luz! Your boytoy’s awake!” before hopping off and scuttling out into the hall. A moment later the human came in with a tray full of sandwiches that Hunter felt too sick to eat and a glass of water, which he downed in two gulps, unsteady with only his nondominant hand. He closed his eye while he drank and pretended he couldn’t still feel her looking at him.
“Why did you do that?” she asked. There was nothing accusatory about it, just quiet, defenseless vulnerability.
Hunter set the glass on the tray again and lay back, arms folded across his chest as though he were properly dead. He might as well have been. The person of Hunter-- formed from wood and blood and wishes, made for a purpose in his master’s own image, named after what function he was to serve for his Uncle, for the Titan’s own obvious sake --had been seared away in the aftermath of that decision. “Do you still think I’m a bad person?” he asked.
He felt her fingers circle around his foreshortened wrist, swaddled in bandages and self-cauterized and dead to the pain. “I could fix this,” she told him instead, matching non sequitur for non sequitur. She swallowed audibly, and he looked up into her wide, dark eyes, glassy and soft with tears she kept to herself. “Palistrom wood, right? I wasn’t wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong,” he said, placing his good hand atop hers. “I was. All along, from the beginning.”
She squeezed harder. Now it was beginning to hurt, but the hurt was good. “We’ll do it tonight. I have to ask Eda how.”
No asking for Hunter’s input on what happened to him, but that was fine. No one ever did.
Hunter napped fitfully through the afternoon and dreamed blissfully of nothing, and then as the sun went down they got him up and ushered him blearily into the kitchen, which had been scoured of food scraps. There was a good fire going in the soot-encrusted stove, and more sandwiches set off to the side. Eda sat him down firmly in a rickety hard-backed chair with his whole arm flat against the tabletop. “We’ll use this hand for reference,” she said, laying out the chunk of wood between him and Luz. In stark white chalk she drew the outline of a hand down to the wrist on the block, a cartoonish caricature but a serviceable one. She turned her predator’s gaze upon him, and then upon Luz. “Are you sure you want to do this?” She could have been asking either of them.
It was Luz who nodded sharply, jaw set. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve decided what I want.”
Eda shrugged. “Alright, then,” she said. She unwrapped a short knife with a thick, triangular blade from a piece of felt so aged the fuzz was flaking off. The blade glinted unnaturally in the firelight, its steel too sharp, its edge too keen. Eda pressed it handle-first into Luz’s waiting hands. “Carve the hand from the wood. You have to do it, you alone; even if it’s for him, he can’t help you. It doesn’t have to be good, just good enough. If your heart’s in the right place, the magic will do the rest.”
She patted Luz on the head and snagged a sandwich from the plate as she sauntered out, shutting and locking the hallway door behind her.
They worked by candlelight, or Luz worked, and Hunter sat still and listened. To the soft ebb and flow of her voice, the scrape of the knife shaving off curls of gnarled wood, to his own false heart crashing in his ears. The tallow never seemed to burn down, though the shadows it threw got deeper and blacker until dawn, the heaps of magical and mundane detritus that adorned the shelves and hollows of the Owl House casting strange, crooked shapes against the walls that flickered and moved with the candlelight.
Luz set the flat, rectangular glass-and-plastic box she named a ‘phone’ up against the side of a stack of old books with dog-eared, tooth-yellow pages and tapped the cracked screen a few times, and then she started to work. There was a rhythm to it, almost trancelike, that she fell into once she began; at first it was just a matter of hacking away crudely at the chalk outline, chopping the hunk of wood down into roughly the right size. Then she would be able to finesse it into the right shape, sanding the blocky half-formed lines of splayed fingers down to something delicate and articulated.
“Have you ever done this before?” Hunter asked abruptly, an hour in. The hand still looked more like a log than a hand, around the base not even all the bark had come off, but there were the red weals of blisters already rising around the inside arc of her own soft brown hand between thumb and forefinger, raised by the hilt of the knife as it rubbed against the webbing there. “Carving in general, I mean. Not Palistrom work.”
She stopped to set the knife down, clenching and relaxing her knuckles to smooth out the beginnings of an arthritic stiffness. “No,” she said, bright and brittle. “But how hard can it be?”
This did not do wonders for Hunter’s confidence.
The silence must have seemed unnatural to Luz, though it didn’t to him, because after that she kept trying to break it. Small talk didn’t soothe him, he was still fidgeting, twitching the fingers of his remaining hand where they rested on the table as type specimen, and after a while Luz told him: “Okay, sit still then, just listen.”
Luz tapped the screen of her smartphone again, and then she began to read. “There was once a velveteen rabbit,” she started, intoning the words with the same steady cadence that Amity might have employed for an audience of five year olds, “and in the beginning he was really splendid…” Hunter had expected a recitation from the canon of Azura the Good Witch, but what he got was a simple children’s fable. It wasn’t hard to follow, though in her distraction Luz spoke slowly, sometimes paused between sentences to bite her tongue while the knife blade caught against some subcutaneous knot or whorl in the wood that had to be sawed around or pushed through.
“This is a story for babies,” Hunter pointed out, a few paragraphs in, and she shushed him.
“It’s a story for everyone,” she said. The pile of wood shavings was growing larger, the hand beginning to resemble the abstract idea of a hand. “Now listen.”
In the story, there was a stuffed rabbit. Though he was nothing but cloth and sawdust, made to resemble the shape of the thing but without its particular soul, he felt and thought and loved, and he was loved in turn. Loved so hard and so long that he went shabby, his eyes losing their luster, his felt coat losing its spots, but still beautiful and beloved and real. No longer just the idea of a rabbit, but something else.
Hunter felt the fingers of his remaining hand form an involuntary fist, and he thought of himself as she must see him. Scruffy, scarred, a hole in his head where the eye had been pried loose. “It doesn’t happen all at once,” Luz read, without looking up at him. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. By the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Now she glanced up at him, and he wondered if she was thinking what he thought, if only shallowly, only for a moment. “But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
The story went on. The night went on. Eventually, both ended. Luz chose another story, but once they got far enough into Pinocchio that Hunter got the gist he groaned and demanded something else, so she stopped talking and put on a recording of soothing whale noises instead. They sounded very mournful, very strange. Hour by hour, the hand took shape, and Luz’s hands shook and got pricked with splinters that Hunter couldn’t have helped her remove even if he’d wanted to, and the blisters burst and got dark blood and pus down the red handle of the knife.
And when she was finished it didn’t look very much like his original hand at all, too angular and unbalanced, too much like an artist’s sketch of the shapes that a hand should be, but it was good enough. Dawn was breaking, leaking red-golden light into the room long after the fire had burned down to cold ash.
“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” Luz said quietly, fitting the wrist of the hand up to the naked stump of his wrist until the seam began to glow with a light like the dawn, that spread down the palm and out through the fingers and lit them as the brightest summer day. “I think you’re a person, good and bad and everything.”
And that, too, was good enough.
---
The hand was also a sacrifice. Hunter knew what the wood had been meant for, and what it would now never be, and what it had become-- what it had made him. Her blood and magic was wound into the wood that had reshaped itself into a flesh and bone hand, which was a little stiff on rainy mornings and not as dexterous generally as it had been before. She had made herself a part of him, and him a part of her.
But it was a sacrifice freely given, and she showed no signs of resenting him for it, even when she had to keep borrowing Eda’s staff to fly, even when she realized that she’d always be dependent on the glyphs, never able to use a Palisman’s outside magic as a source to do tricks with a staff and a circle. She held his new hand as she introduced him to her friends, and as they studied together on quiet afternoons, and sometimes for no reason at all.
Maybe someday she would have to return to the place where she was from, and maybe she would take him with her, and maybe she wouldn’t. The hand was a gift that could not be taken back, and she’d given him more than that, too. That was forever. For always. He was hers, in a way that he had mostly chosen to be.
He was himself, at last.