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It was only a few months after Belos was defeated that Eda sat King down to have an “important talk.” That was new. Anything important from before could be shouted from the other room. There had been some changes in the house, of course. Raine had moved in. Luz was in-and-out of the Demon Realm as she started attending human high school again. And Hooty was mostly off with Lilith, wherever she happened to be. King had thought that was what they were going to talk about.
“So," Eda started, one leg slung over the other, “Lilith and I have been doing some digging through Titan history. There’s not a lot to go off of, but we have a better understanding than before.”
“Oh,” King kicked his feet back and forth, shifting his position on the couch.
“You can know as much or as little as you want,” she said, reaching out and putting her hand against her skull. Her eyes were warm, something King would have teased her for before. “There is something that I want to talk to you about, though. You’ll be nine soon.”
“Yeah!” King beamed up at her. He was excited for his birthday (or, the anniversary of the day Eda had found him, since they didn’t know his exact birth date). Before it had just been him and Eda, and that had still been nice, even if they hadn’t been happy like they were now. Hooty had tried to join in back then, but had quickly been banned from going inside on any birthday. That ban was lifted now, per Lilith’s request. Regardless, birthdays had been lonely affairs. Now they weren’t.
Now, King had a big, chaotic, and wonderful family. Eda was his mother, even if he still called her “Eda” out of habit. Luz was his sister, and she’d brought Camila into the family too, and sometimes Vee, when she felt secure enough to venture out into the Demon Realm. Lilith was his cool aunt, though King was less convinced of her coolness factor than Luz was. Eda’s parents were his grandparents. And all of Luz’s friends and her girlfriend were family too.
“You age like any other kid so far,” Eda said, “but there’s a point where it’ll start to get different. You know that, right?” He nodded. “You’ll be around to see Luz’s grandkids, if she ever has them. And great grand-kids. Probably beyond that too.”
“Oh,” King nodded again. Part of him had realized that already. Maybe he could be a guardian for the family. Maybe that was his purpose. There wasn’t any evil emperor to fight anymore, after all.
He didn’t think about his and Eda’s conversation for a long time after. He knew he was going to outlive all of his family. He knew that the future had death and new births to bring. But he was only nine years old. And, to a nine-year-old, the future was just an occasional flash on the horizon. It had no shape. Death wouldn’t happen for a long, long time, right?
He was wrong twice with that.
The first death was sudden. It happened over the span of only an hour. And nobody expected it. King was ten, then. The Boiling Isles had been granted two years of relative peace, the complicated rebuilding process still keeping everyone the Isles busy enough to avoid killing each other. Yet.
All peace came to an end eventually, though. King remembered everything from that particular day in perfect detail for the rest of his life, even when the rest of his memories started to fade with age. Luz had been home for the weekend, and she was out with her friends while King helped Eda with a potion, mostly just getting underfoot.
The front door was thrown open just as Eda was finishing, a long spoon stroking a bubbling orange liquid. King couldn’t remember what it was for.
“Eda!” Luz shouted from the doorway. She was panting, her eyes wide.
“What?” Eda turned around in a nonchalant manner. Luz had always been a shouter, even in mild situations.
“Someone came into the council meeting today with a knife. They were shooting out death hexes, I don’t know anything else, but -” Eda was out the door within seconds. King knew where her mind had gone. Raine . Raine was a part of the council. So were Darius, Eberwolf, and Steve. Three witches and one demon who had become so dear to so many. So dear to King’s family.
Luz lifted him up with a grunt and ran to catch up with Eda.
The sky was blood red and the wind was cutting as they finally arrived at the building the council met in. There was a panicked crowd outside of it already. They pushed through it together.
The first thing any of them saw was a knife, laying discarded on the ground. It had a sizable blade and a well-sharpened tip. It was covered in blood and a strange blue substance, thick like firebee honey and glittering like the stars. King knew what it was. Poison. One of the most lethal. If it got into the bloodstream, even the strongest healing magic couldn’t save you.
Of course, a little further back, was Raine. Blood was caked into their hair in clumps, staining their hair and their arms. But they were upright and alive. Eberwolf was beside them, blood also staining their fur.
Because lying between them was Darius. His abdomen was stained in blood sluggishly leaking from a long gash down his front. Every heave of his chest seemed to take a great deal of effort.
Steve was off at the left, a witch with a face cold with hatred held still in his arms.
Eda came to a halt at the edge of the crowd, her hands curling into fists. There was nothing she could do. Nothing any of them could do, at this point. Raine and Eberwolf were simply shifting his position to make him more comfortable.
King reached up and held onto Eda’s hand as Hunter broke through the crowd. It was a childish gesture, but one that he so desperately needed at the moment. Eda gave his paw a little squeeze.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Hunter threw himself down and Raine and Eberwolf moved back to give him space. Darius, looking rather bored with the situation, reached up and cupped Hunter’s cheek, his fingertips digging into the edge of Hunter’s hair, staining it red. Hunter cupped his hands around Darius’s.
Darius’s chest ceased to rise again before he could vomit or convulse, or otherwise react to the poison that had been stabbed into his body. He preferred it that way, King knew. His eyes stared at nothing. He left behind a heroic legacy, and a broken eighteen-year-old boy, fatherless once more.
It was a politically motivated attack, everyone said later. The witch who had been the perpetrator had been interrogated and discovered as a former Belos fanatic. He’d held a grudge against the new governmental system, especially the witches who had been directly involved in taking down the old one.
So Darius had to die, because of one man’s hatred.
Darius hadn’t been closest to King, in fact, they’d barely spoken more than a few sentences to one another in their three or so years of knowing each other. But his loss was enough to shake him. Hunter stayed with Willow and her fathers as he tried to find a place for himself. They upped security in council meetings. Darius was honored, and witches made promises to remember him.
King wondered just how many would hold to their words.
Loss didn’t just come in the form of people. It came in a size and an age sometimes. For King, it was 12 years. He’d always been shorter than other children his age, since Titan’s aged differently than other species. But he was still growing larger each year.
Luz was accepted into Eda’s university. She was actually around more now that she was, since she planned to stay solely in the Demon Realm as a now-adult. She set aside time especially for King every few days, and this new stage wasn’t a loss.
What was a loss, was when Eda reached to pick him up as they were heading out to the market. Instead of swinging him to her hip like she normally did, she put him back down, wiping sweat from her brow, “you’re getting a bit big for that, kiddo,” she said.
“No I’m not!” King immediately replied, even though he knew he was, even though he’d known for a long time now.
“Bout time to start walking like the rest of us,” Raine came in, laying a hand against his skull. The subject had been closed then and never reopened. King walked with them now instead of being carried. And it was weird.
Eda and Raine had never had any other children between the two of them, and had shuddered whenever anyone had asked if they were going to. There was just Luz and King. And King was the youngest, the baby. Even though he wasn’t quite so little anymore.
But he got used to it, like all babies of their family eventually have to.
He didn’t know until later that Eda had been more upset than he’d been, in the shelter of her room. Because he was her baby. She’d raised him since he had been just a tiny thing.
And he was growing up.
Luz and Amity got married when King was sixteen, something they’d known they wanted to do since they were just teenagers.
“Darius would have thought the decorations we chose were so tacky,” Luz said in the middle of the wedding, and everyone laughed, Hunter the loudest of all. Wherever Darius’s spirit happened to be, King knew it was proud.
The wedding itself was a loud and joyful affair, and it should have marked the beginning of a wonderful year for everyone.
And then Raine got sick.
Just a fever, at first, that seemed to drain all of their energy, leaving them disoriented and tired. King wasn’t frightened. Things happen. People get sick. Then they get better. That had always been the way of the world for him. Luz was worried. But Luz was always worried whenever anyone got sick. Because she had watched someone not get better once, she had explained to him when he was younger.
The fever broke after a week, and they should have been fine. But they were still exhausted. King wasn’t frightened until he walked downstairs one day. Eda was sitting at the couch, Raine curled up at her side, their eyes closed and their face flushed. Another fever.
Raine had always been a gentler, calmer counterpart to everyone in the house, though they had their more chaotic moments. You didn’t participate in a revolution under Belos’s nose without having some sort of spark in you, driving you forward.
The spark in Raine’s eyes was gone, lost to an exhaustion that seemed to weigh down on their very being, now. Eda lifted them up that night and carried them to a healer, King following. He didn’t understand the implications behind most of the words said that night.
“Bilesack infection.”
“Slowly draining them until it attacks their system completely.”
“Nothing we can do…”
“Time.”
Those words weren’t important to King. What was important was when they went home, when Eda cried once Raine was asleep and she thought King was as well. When Luz slumped to the ground upon being told with her fingers gripping into her hair, Amity gently removing them before she could pull any out. When Raine’s beloved instruments became untouched, because they could barely lift up a cup, let alone a violin.
“King?” They whispered from the nest they shared with Eda one day. She was downstairs, talking to Luz and Amity, who had temporarily moved in to help. King turned his head in Raine’s direction, then scampered over. They smiled at the sight of him. Or the sight of his shape. Their vision wasn’t very good anymore, even with glasses, Eda had said. “There’s a box in my music room. It’s long and blue. I want you to open it when the time’s right.”
“You mean when you’re gone?” King whispered back, his voice wavering. Raine had become his second parent. Someone he looked up to and loved and needed .
They reached out, their fingers brushing against his fur. They weren’t but so old, King realized. They shouldn’t have been dying. Dying was for old people. And Darius, in his unique case.
That didn’t matter, though. Dying was for anyone, he realized that evening. He didn’t watch it happen. He just heard from Eda, later, once she was speaking again. Raine had convulsed, their magic passing through them in a wave as their body gave in. It had been quick.
King found a violin later, in that little blue box, handmade by Raine over the course of their time together. K.C. Was engraved on it. King Clawthorne.
He kept it in the box under his bed. He couldn’t bear to learn to play.
He knew that one day his paws would be too big to even hold it.
Eda did her best to make the rest of King’s childhood a good one by herself. But she wasn’t happy. King knew that. It was almost like they were back at the beginning anyway, when Eda had been lonely and King had been confused, and Luz had accidentally crashed into their lives like a bolt of lightning, and turned everything upside down.
A tinier Luz did it again. Though her arrival wasn’t quite so sudden. She grew in Amity’s stomach first, nothing more to King than a few kicks against her mother’s skin. He liked her some already, though, because the news of her successful presence had put a smile on Eda’s face for the first time since Raine had died that quiet night years ago.
Maybe he had the slightest twinge of jealousy, since he had been the baby for so long. But it all melted away the moment he saw her.
Edalyn Raine Noceda-Blight. Eda cried when she heard the name. A baby with Luz’s eyes, skin, and smile.
Luz took Lyn outside the day she was born, the pride on her face swelling in King’s own chest. It was night, moonlight shining on the infant as Luz held her up for the world to see, or for her to see the world. King never asked which one it was.
A year later, Camila died after being hit by a drunk driver. Lyn spent a lot of time in the Owl House with King and Eda, that year. Lilith came over sometimes too, though she seemed considerably less impressed with the infant than everyone else, not a baby person in general. That was fine. King liked to talk to her now. She always answered all of his questions about existentialism and history, two things he’d scoffed at as a child, to the best of her ability, though sometimes with a raised eyebrow.
Twins came when Lyn was two, son Manuel and daughter Camila-Azura. Hunter and Willow had a daughter that summer, around the time first Alador, then Eberwolf died.
Just as the old generation was beginning to fade, a new one was taking hold.
Eda lived to old age. Old enough to smile as Lyn grew older and entered school, getting into trouble for roughing up bullies, finding pronouns that happened to fit them, and getting their first girlfriend. Old enough to laugh as Manuel got into trouble in school and pranked the teachers. And old enough to fondly roll her eyes as Camila-Azura became the top of her class and never stepped a toe out of line.
“Kinda funny how things turned out so nice. Considering where we started,” Eda said one day as they laid in the grass together. They’d originally been trying to find Manuel in the woods, but decided that he’d find his way out eventually.
“Hah. Yeah,” King looked up at the sky, a pale orange.
“I got my happy ending. Ugh, it sounds so boring,” Eda threw her arm over King’s chest, King smiling fondly,
“Yeah. I wish Darius could have. And Raine.”
“What makes you think they didn't? Yeah, neither of them went out in great ways. Yeah, they didn’t get to see this. But for at least a few years after Belos they were happy. I think that’s what matters most. That in the end, they could be with someone they loved.”
“You’re getting too mushy for me in your old age,” King teased. This, of course, started a rigorous game of chase. She was old and he wasn’t a kid anymore. But they both still had it.
He never would have thought that she would die in her sleep that night. No one would have. She was in perfect health. She was still strong, even if she was old.
“She was happy,” King said later at her funeral, which was extremely well-attended.
That was her happy ending. All of the people filling in the rows of seats. All the people she’d loved, the lives she’d changed.
King sat in the living room of the Owl House with Luz that night. Just Luz. Not even Amity or the teenagers. They talked together, about Eda, about life, about death. About everything. After all, Eda wouldn’t have wanted her funeral to be a solemn affair. This was more to her liking.
He knew it.
“How the fuck is she still alive?” Manuel had said less tactically than his siblings one day, as Lilith came to the Owl House for a visit. Amity and Luz lived there now. King didn’t think he could bear it if it was moved from the family, even if he was a bit big to inhabit it himself, now.
Lyn elbowed their brother between the ribs, receiving a shriek in response.
“Hooty,” King said.
“What?” Camila-Azura asked.
“Hooty protects her from any physical harm. Just luck for the rest of it, I guess.” They stopped discussing it as she approached. King spent the visit listening and watching. Lilith told stories to the three teenagers, Luz and Amity laughing from the background as they remembered the events she recalled.
They were staying with a new generation, King realized. Nobody who had died had really left. They were still alive in these stories, shared lovingly from one to another. This was their happy ending. He knew then, what his purpose was for, for this family. Eda had talked to him about it all those years ago, when he was proudly almost nine, an age that had seemed so big at the time.
He would tell these stories, when Lilith was gone. He did tell these stories, years after she finally took her last breath, looking more relieved than anything (who the fuck wanted to live to 119?).
The seasons seemed to pass more quickly now. The kids grew up. Lyn served on the council and headed reform for the entire island, meeting threats with a quick and innovative efficiency, like both Luz and Raine were in their blood, instead of just one of them. Manuel served as the headmaster of the university Eda had started, because Eda’s rules, still alive and applicable, somehow saw him as qualified. And Camila-Azura worked in the library and had children, the family line continuing with the two little girls who grew a few years apart in her womb. They’d each been inserted through magic, as the woman herself had little to no interest in love or partners.
Hunter was the first to go from the old group, killed in an accident at the sidelines of a grugby match. King knew once he was gone that the rest of them would start to go as well, and the new generation would inherit the world.
But he would keep their stories alive.
Especially this story, the one most dear to his heart. Luz’s story. Full of adventure, daring, and love. Luz was like Lilith. Whether by accident or on purpose, she was the last one of her friends and peers to live. The last one to speak to King, and stroke her fingers through his fur.
He was much bigger than her now. He held her in his arms instead of the other way around.
“Hey, are you going to be okay?” Luz whispered once she knew what was going to happen. Once she knew what King had sensed for weeks.
“What?”
“Are you going to be okay? I know you’ve got my kids and grandkids, but this is it, I guess. It’s just me left from before. I’ve got my happy ending,” she reached a hand towards the window, towards the beautiful Boiling Isles sky, “do you get one?”
“Yeah,” King smiled, thinking of Darius’s statue in the park. The violin tucked away under his bed, in the little blue box. The smile on Eda's face, that would stay imprinted in his memory forever. “I’ve got time. All of the time that I spent with you, and everyone. I’ve had a good life. I’m going to make sure they don’t forget everything that happened. All of the lives that have been lived.”
“Awww, buddy,” Luz smiled. She still called him that, even though he was bigger than her now.
He was with her that night. He wrapped his giant paw around the hand of his big sister, that had once seemed so large to him, when she was small and he was even smaller. He wrapped his paw around time, giving it one last embrace and waiting with bated breath for it to become little more than a whisper in his ear.
Luz Noceda died quietly in the evening.
An era ended, and King remained.
And the stories lived on after the night.