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The story begins as a fairy tale, the kind of easy narrative murmured to children before sleep, the type of virus that only begins wreaking havoc years after incubation.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl cursed to wander. She was far too young to understand the dissatisfaction propelling her feet or the paths she chose to tread - she would simply find herself in new places once the old ones started to itch, with very little memory of her travels.
And once upon a time, this cursed little girl wandered through an unwatched door into a dreamscape fairyland, and like in all fairy tales the danger spoke to her personally, and the island of bones sang a song that soothed her soul, and then she stopped wandering and started surviving.
And unlike the more familiar version of this story, the one with summer camp and a lost book and a loving but misguided mother, this little girl was so little that she could forget entirely the world that had built and abandoned her.
It just so happened that this dreamland fairy monster paradise was ruled by a benevolent but strict Emperor whose guards found the little girl foraging for berries in the woods. They brought her to the Emperor, because her strange ears and mannerisms marked her Other, and the emperor rejoiced, for he had no worthy heirs despite multiple tries and had truly always wanted a daughter with whom he shared so many similarities.
The little girl grew up to be a princess who might one day inherit a kingdom built on bones. But she had no expectation of this inheritance, because her doting father did not age and never wearied of war or statecraft or expanding his rule, so she could not imagine that he would ever abdicate his throne.
But as with any fairy tale involving royals, circumstances and politics and obligations change in ways no one expects.
"Now, Luz," her father, the Emperor she loved and studied and wished to someday be, said on her sixteenth birthday, "I believe you're old enough now to learn some truths about this world. And I believe you're intelligent enough and brave enough to make the right choices. These facts may be confusing or difficult to process, and your feelings will likely be complex. Please take all the time you need before we discuss them."
There are some things that can turn a tale's genre very quickly from whimsy to cautionary tale, from comedy to horror.
An Emperor who conquers a skeleton kingdom will inevitably amass a certain number of bones along the way.
-
There's another fairy tale interwoven with this one, recycling characters and settings and motives and a dash of terrible cognitive dissonance.
In this other fairy tale, a girl lost in fairyland learns to make magic out of certain art and symbolism and the ghostly presence of an island. This girl becomes the first practitioner of this magic in several generations, after the knowledge died out. But the girl's father, who happens to be the Emperor, has strictly forbidden all such wild and uncontrolled practices for fear of destruction, and so the fairy-touched human learns her glyphs in secret by candlelight each night.
The magic is actually not the most important part of the tale. The most important part is that the princess has a captain of her guard, as is often the case in sweeping royal fairy tales, and this captain of the guard would be next in the line of succession, if this wandering little nuisance hadn't stolen the Emperor's heart.
So in the traditional stories, there are two main paths available. The first is one of resentment, in which the princess is eventually betrayed by her closest confidante so he can claim the throne, because he believes himself stronger and better and more cunning than someone with commoner blood. The second path is one of formulaic romance, in which there are heart-fluttery reasons she spends more nights in his room than her own, and the two eventually wed and share the throne through happy coincidence and there are never political rivalries again.
In this story, the princess and her captain are compelled by things other than power struggles or star-crossed fates; their relationship is built on mundane trust and happiness. In this story, the princess spends her nights in his room so that they can both put aside their artificial staffs and play with forbidden magic and giggle about the other Coven Heads and trade book recommendations and write and draw and wrestle and laugh and fall asleep curled up inside blanket forts of their own creation, still-open sometimes-drooled-on books splayed across their chests.
In this world, the princess is confident enough in the continued love of her father the Emperor that studying wild magic becomes an illicit thrill -- the same giddiness as a teen sneaking sips of alcohol or stealing a cookie from the jar. She's not in any real danger, she's sure.
The stakes are slightly higher for the captain, but he trusts the princess implicitly, and he's never been able to say no to magic.
-
Two days after an extravagant party celebrating the princess's sixteenth birthday, Hunter finds Luz curled up in the window seat in his room, staring out at the castle grounds. He's not surprised to see her, nor is he surprised that she's dragged all of the bedding off of his mattress and wrapped herself up in a veritable mound of comforter, so it's more like Luz's face peeping out of a fabric mountain than an aesthetically wistful image.
The whole thing is not surprising because this happens basically every time there's a large social gathering. Luz will throw herself into the event, endear herself to nearly everyone she meets, make a few unintentional enemies, genuinely have the time of her life, craft enough memories for a decade, and thoroughly burn through her entire energy reserve for the next two weeks.
What is unusual today is the way that Luz doesn't glance toward Hunter, not even when he tosses a pillow at her head. Her expression doesn't change at all. The pillow bounces off her ear and onto the rug. She's far away somewhere.
"Hey," Hunter says, "first off, I'm not making the bed again, and second, I'm not making a servant make the bed again, and third, I hate having abomatons in here. There's literally a linen closet two doors down."
"I didn't want linens."
"This is why people think we're weird," Hunter points out, but it's gentle, teasing. "You don't even try to make people think you're weird either, that's what's so amazing. It's genuinely effortless."
That, at least, finally seems to grab Luz's attention. "Are you telling me you're not weird?"
"Depends who we're comparing. If it's you and me..."
Luz unwraps herself from the mound, scoops up the recently-thrown pillow, and lobs it back at Hunter. He catches it with a lot more diving and drama and general nonsense than the toss actually requires.
"I rest my case," Luz says, as Hunter picks himself up, hard-won pillow in hand.
"Titan forbid anyone have good reflexes. Oh, no, I got the cloak dirty. Don't say this is what I get for not having abomatons in here. It's too easy." Hunter takes said cloak off, frowning at the sooty smudge across the Golden Guard insignia.
Luz makes a tiny sound of distress. It does not sound like playing.
Hunter stiffens immediately. "No, hey," he says, "what? I can clean it, it'll just be a pain. I didn't ruin the damn -- what is wrong?"
Luz, despite her best efforts at composure, has begun to cry, silently, because she always cries silently. And because she always cries silently, Hunter is the only person who ever notices it, because the time spent as two weirdo magicless kids surrounded by hostile adults in a cavernous witches' palace has given them some similar methods of self-expression.
When Luz doesn't answer, Hunter drops the cloak entirely and bolts to her side, gloved hands hovering over her face and shoulders, somewhere between fretful mother and exasperated brother. "Are you hurt? Luz? Luz?"
Luz shakes her head.
"Tell me what to do," Hunter says. "Tell me how to fix it. Whatever's wrong."
"I need to tell you something else," Luz says.
-
It turns into a long night with a lot of revelations, and Hunter can tell that Luz still didn't share everything with him. Again, it's one of those situations where he wouldn't be able to tell if he didn't know Luz like he knows his own heartbeat, but... it's just... she's too careful. She backs up from her words, considers her phrasing, relays only the impartial facts, takes refuge in abstraction, hesitates and chews her tongue and half-sobs and breaks off mid-sentence in multiple places over multiple subjects. Something bad happened that Luz is not telling him.
But what she does tell him is enough to occupy his mind completely, so he doesn't press. "It's all some kind of human-versus-witch deal, then?" he asks. "The whole Empire?"
"He said the coven system exists because it's too dangerous for some people to have magic and some people not to."
"Well." Hunter considers this. "He's right?"
"He's what."
"He's right. He made our staffs for the same exact reason. Are you going to destroy your whole staff just because you're upset about the coven system?"
"Hunter. It's not just the coven system. He outlawed wild magic because he said humans were using it wrong."
"Oh." That clicks, at least. "Well, you're not using it wrong."
"Any human using it is using it wrong. That's what he thinks."
"I bet he'd change his mind if he knew-"
"Hunter," Luz interrupts, and again she teeters on that edge, that eternal pause in which Hunter is certain she has more to say, and then she shakes her head and sighs. "I don't know if I believe any of this is -- is -- necessary."
"Okay -- okay. So if that's true then -- then you'll fix it when you become Empress, right? He just told you he's going back to the human world eventually-"
"I don't know how!" Luz shouts. When Hunter blanches, she buries her face in her hands, scrunching her whole body as small as it'll go like that'll help. "Sorry, sorry, sorry, I didn't mean to get upset. Sorry."
"It's okay." Hunter plops crosslegged on the floor in front of her, because if the cloak is already dirty then the rest of his uniform is fair game too. "I guess I must be... half? I guess my father must've been human, if the Emperor is too. That must be why I don't have magic. Huh. I don't know why he wouldn't just tell me that. No wonder he picked you for the succession instead, you at least look the part. Good thing I don't want it."
"Okay, hang on, hang on, no, back up," Luz says, sitting up straight and peering down at him. "Did you just tell me with a straight face that you lost out on the chance to rule the entire world because the guy in charge didn't like your hypothetical witch mom and you've just decided that's fine?"
"I never said it was fine. I'm currently nonplussed."
"Nonplussed."
"Yeah. I'm too nonplussed to be upset about it. Maybe in a few days I will be. Also, it's not ruling the entire world. Wow. Wow, no wonder he likes you so much better than anyone else. An entire door is opening in my brain right now."
"I'm sorr-"
"What? No, no, what, I don't care. I just can't believe I didn't screw up somehow."
"Hunter."
"No, you know what? I feel like I'm digging a deeper hole with everything I say and this isn't even about me. This is about you having a -- a crisis over... public policy, or whatever. Luz, public policy is just part of life."
"That is. So defeatist."
"No, I just mean -- it's more important for you, right? How you feel is more important, right now. The human-witch thing affects you more. I'm fine with being half-human. That's fine by me. Glad I didn't find out when I was younger or I bet I'd've cut my ears, but I'm fine with it now. I'm not -- I'm not mad. It's okay."
"Okay, you're clearly -- you're clearly having some kind of really calm breakdown that's clouding your judgment. Because all of this sucks. On literally every level."
"Probably," Hunter agrees, amiable. "It does feel like something I'm gonna get mad about later. I'm just saying, it's a little bit of a relief. Like, holy -- Titan, there was nothing I was ever gonna do to make him happier. Wow. What a waste. That is so freeing. I didn't even mess anything up. So it's fine. It's literally fine. There are way worse things I could be than part human."
Luz looks blankly at him for such a long time that he starts to wonder if she's having an absent seizure. Her facial muscles don't twitch, her pupils don't dilate. She just stares, and the torches flicker strangely on her tense jaw, making unusual shadows of her mouth and eyes, and she stares, and she does not look like the girl Hunter grew up with at all, but she does still look like the girl he'd die for in a heartbeat, because a little firelight isn't ever going to be enough to change that.
"Yeah," Luz concedes finally, and smiles, and her muscles move the same way they always have, and her teeth gleam and her eyes crinkle the same way they always do, and somehow the lighting twists the expression regardless. "There are worse things you could be."
-
Luz starts having nightmares.
She won't tell Hunter what they're about.
She won't tell Hunter why.
The dreams don't go away, even when she and Hunter trade their fictional adventure books in for history and law and justice and politics, even when Hunter begrudgingly accepts that the coven system is an unnecessary extreme and starts charting alternatives, even when Luz and Hunter brainstorm a thousand potential policy updates and their ripple effects and the positive and negative impacts in ways that make her happy and hopeful and flappy with earnest excitement. Luz will literally fall asleep on Hunter's shoulder in the middle of an animated discussion about how wild witches hid their practices from the might of the Empire for at least a century, and then within an hour she'll be twisting and crying for help in her sleep.
"Did something else -- happen?" Hunter asks her once, because clearly something else did, but Luz just shakes her head and whispers, "No, no, no, no, no," over and over again until she begins to snore.
"I know something's wrong," Hunter says after waking her from the millionth nightmare, and that's the last night that Luz comes to his room to read and nap and be at home.
She still lets him inside when he knocks on her door instead. But there's a chill between them. It bites.
-
The Emperor dies two weeks before a planned expedition-slash-retirement into the human world and two months before Luz's seventeenth birthday.
The circumstances are not mysterious, aside from how they are. The Emperor is an old man and old men are prone to dying from heart failure in their sleep, exactly like this.
The Healing Coven confirms through autopsy that there are no known magical interferences in the death. No coven spells or any of the traceable wild magic. Of course, the Emperor's body was already a magical ruin thanks to his curse, and nobody mentions his human physiology, so Hunter suspects that he was so far from recognizable in death that there was no way to find evidence of foul play.
Sometimes old men die, but old men who have owned the world for centuries and intend to return to a second world within mere weeks are not supposed to.
Everyone with sense knows that it was some type of assassination, and everyone with sense also knows not to pursue that angle publicly, both because of the cost of unrest and because of the cost of forsaking the Titan's will. In the days following the death, no schisms occur in the local government, no rival factions rise to challenge the Empire, no covens break off to form their own microsocieties, no individual or group claims credit for such a well-orchestrated murder.
An emperor dies and no one is at fault and his heir succeeds him through a series of stupidly elaborate rituals and the world goes on without a hitch. It's clean. It's good.
There are some things that Hunter knows, though, as one of the two kids who had to endure this place and who developed similar survival mechanisms. So the day after the unbelievably wasteful weeklong funeral-and-coronation extravaganza, he knocks on Luz's bedroom door, the same bedroom door he's always knocked on, because she hasn't moved into the Emperor's quarters despite the crown she now wears. Hunter doesn't know if she ever will.
The door opens almost immediately.
"Hey," Luz says, and when she smiles, it's genuine, no shadowed trickery in the lights. It's raw and exhausted, but it's genuine. There's something about it that's been missing lately -- a certain gleam in her eyes, maybe. Hope. Excitement. "You're just in time. I'm hitting my party wall of death vampire energy exhaustion and I'm so glad everyone is finally gone and also I am so so so freaked out and just getting more freaked out. Welcome to the Terror Dome. I can usually talk myself down better. Give me some platitudes."
"Take it one step at a time," Hunter suggests, stepping inside and carefully closing the door behind him. "Sleep is the best medicine. All the strength you need is inside you. Everything you go through is survivable except for the last thing."
"Thanks. They're not helping at all but I love how many you have on hand. I kind of think I'm not ready to be Empress but also that no one is ever ready to be Empress because it's a horrible thing that shouldn't exist and we need to burn the whole castle and most of our society down," Luz says, quivering with the energy of ten thousand very small and very nervous puppies. "I know I've said this all before in the abstract and you know it all already but coming off a week of pretending I love everything happening here, I am like, really, really feeling it tonight. I am so stressed out, Hunter."
"Yeah, I hear you. I promise we'll figure it out. You should sleep first, though. Sleep before arson. There's another platitude."
"I hate that that's reasonable. I want to do the arson. Right now."
Hunter laughs. Then he glances at the closed door behind him and flicks his eyes around the room, scanning for any signs of spying magic. He and Luz have gotten away with a lot in private over the years, but now would be the perfect time for the other Coven Heads to try to collect intel. He doesn't see any odd shadows or objects or shimmers or creatures, but he unshoulders his staff just in case.
After one magic detection spell comes up negative, and he checks the thickness of the walls one more time, he exhales and says, "You could have waited until you were ready."
Luz has been incredibly patient while he checks for eavesdroppers, but immediately she's off another mile a minute. "Oh, no, no, no, nope, I could not have. Someone else would have taken the throne in the meanwhile. You know they were all already talking about it. The amount of backstabbing and murder that goes on without a power vacuum? Can you imagine who'd claw their way onto the throne? With our luck it'd be Kikimora or Hettie."
"That wasn't the part I meant."
Luz tilts her head, squinting at him, giving nothing away except her own desire to analyze. When Hunter doesn't waver or crack a grin, she frowns, and then she takes a step back. "Oh-kay," she says, "I don't really know what that's supposed to mean and I don't think I-"
"Come on, Luz."
Now annoyance flashes across her face. She turns and stalks away with great drama, making elaborate motions with both hands. "I'm not gonna play word games with you, okay? I am tired and I have to play word games with everyone else until I die, so you and I are-"
Hunter only realizes that she's playacting a ruse when she finally gets within arm's reach of her staff and snatches it up like a knife. The sudden movement surprises him into raising his own, but by the time Luz has swung hers around to face him, Hunter's brain has caught up and he's thrown his halfway across the room. The metal in the mechanism clangs like an entire shelf of dishes shattering as it bounces, rolls, and stops, passive as a broom, halfway between them.
Hunter holds both hands up as if to doubly prove he's unarmed, fingers spread wide. It's difficult to describe just how hard he has to fight his normal instincts to do so. "Hi? Hi. It's literally just me."
To Luz's credit, the transition from prey animal defensiveness to horrified mortification only takes about five seconds. She drops her own staff with another clatter and claps her hands over her mouth, eyes wide. "I'm so sorry, I'm so-"
"Did you seriously think I was gonna attack you?"
"Well! What was I supposed to think! When you come in here acting scary! What did you think I was gonna think, stupid!"
"Not that I'm here to hurt you?" Hunter says incredulously.
"I'm really sorry," Luz says, and sounds like she means it. "I'm genuinely so, so sorry." She massages her eyes and then her temples with her fingertips, her shoulders slumping. "I'm sorry. I don't know what's wrong with me. I know you wouldn't -- sorry. I don't know. I haven't felt like myself lately. I'm sorry."
"It's okay." Hunter forces himself to relax, to match her posture instead of unconsciously adopting the stance of a soldier sent to do an execution. It's not easy when his heart is still hammering so hard it's audible. His ears ring. He exhales. "Sorry for scaring you. I didn't mean to do that, either. I should've thought more about how to approach it."
"It's okay."
"Can we... talk about it, though?"
"If it's the thing I think you want to talk about," Luz says, "then it's actually really, really important that I don't ever say a single word that could be hypothetically incriminating out of context or imply I definitively know what you're talking about or make any other person a hypothetical co-conspirator."
"Very diplomatic of you," Hunter deadpans.
"Very common sense of me. Kind of. Are you... upset with me? Or can we just -- go back to how things are supposed to be? I am so, so down to go back to normal."
"I'm not upset. I'm..." Hunter hesitates, searching for words, and then hedges, "...worried?"
Luz reaches onto the mattress behind her, where she'd originally snatched up her staff, and snatches up a pillow to chuck at Hunter instead. "NO. THAT ONE IS WORSE."
It's such a ridiculous roar and such an unexpected hilarity that Hunter lets out an enormous, breathless laugh of relief. It takes about half a minute to compose himself. "Good news," he manages, between slight wheezes, "I'm less worried now."
"Good. I'm okay."
"Well, now you're just lying."
"Okay, yeah, I'm lying."
Hunter wants to go over and hug her, but there's still a little wariness in her stance, and there's still a little of that emotional distance between them, so he takes a deep breath and says what he actually came to say. "I would have done it for you if you'd asked me to."
Luz inhales sharply.
"I would've done it," he repeats. "You could've let me in on the plan. Whatever it was. However you did it. I would have done it for you. All you had to do was ask."
"Okay," Luz says, "here's the thing. Here's the thing. The thing is that that's an insane person thing to say, because normal people are not down to do that, especially no questions asked, especially if it's about family, so you are insane, but that's also the nicest thing anyone's ever told me and I'm gonna cry."
"Alright," Hunter says, "if this is the nicest thing anyone's told you, then you are also an insane person."
"I'm telling myself to tell you not to be that loyal because you should not be that loyal to me or to anyone and it's bad and your sense of self sucks but I love you so much. I love you so much. Thank you. I'm sorry I checked out for a bit there, like, mentally. I'm gonna try to be at home more now. I missed you. I'm back. I'm here. Sorry I thought you were gonna kill me for a second there, also. It's been a super weird year. I don't feel like myself."
"Yeah, I can tell," Hunter says. "Look, you don't have to -- I'm not gonna be upset if -- look, listen. Just, listen, okay? I know something happened between you two that I don't know about. Something big enough to... I know he did something, said something... no, I don't know what happened. Not for real. There was something. You don't want to give details, fine, I just -- just want to know you're gonna be okay. Is it... is it... is the problem fixed if he's not here anymore?"
It's a little distressing that Luz has to take several minutes to silently consider this question. Like, it's sensible, considering the discussion is vaguely-but-also-explicitly about assassination and patricide and various other crimes with massive ripple effects and traumatic impacts, et cetera. Hunter just sort of thinks that murder shouldn't be committed if the benefits of the murder don't easily outweigh the drawbacks.
Finally, Luz nods. "He taught me to do something I would really rather not know how to do," she says, "and now I'm gonna remember how to do it forever. No, not like -- he didn't hurt me, not physically, it wasn't -- relax. It's just... it's something I can't un-know now."
"Okay," Hunter says slowly.
"And I could be exactly like him if I wanted to, now. Now that I know how to do it. There are so many things I could do."
"Luz."
"And no one can even stop me. How crazy is that?"
"We're gonna fix it," Hunter says, and he mostly means the system, but hell, he can mean whatever secrets Luz is sitting on, too. "You're nothing like him. You couldn't be."
"No, I promise you I really, really, really could. And I can't tell you because then you couldn't un-know it either."
"I mean, you could," he says. "I'm positive I've heard worse."
Luz just smiles an even smaller, more tired smile than before. "I'm really glad you're my family, Hunter," she says, which is definitely not the un-knowable thing. "Out of everyone it could've... you're one of my favorite people, probably. I'm glad it's you. I'm glad you're safe. I'm glad he's dead. Let's just get back to normal."
Now, finally, he crosses the room to hug her properly, burying his face in her hair. The embrace says more than clumsy words can, and he holds her tight until his arms begin to go numb, and he pretends not to notice her trembling or silent laugh-crying into his chest.