Chapter Text
Luz is sprawled out across her bed, Mari a maned wolf blankly staring out the window, when their echo mouse Echo begins projecting a new entry.
It’s been—hard. She’s not going to lie about that, and she and Mari are trying not to keep things from each other, anymore. Mari still wants to see Mami again, and Luz does too. But doing that means making a portal back to the human realm, means going back to that place that stings against both of them, and it’s just…hard to focus on it, even now, locking herself in her room until she makes some sort of progress.
We can’t give UP, Mari says, and yeah. Luz knows. She loves her Mami, it’s just—
What happens when they get back, and can’t keep doing this? She’s comfortable, finally, here in this place where she actually fits in, but if she goes back…
I don’t want to force it, Luz says, because they tried, and it kept tearing at them. Mari rolls to her paws, flits about to land on Luz’s chest as an owl, her warm brown feathers pressing out against Luz’s skin. But at this rate, if we go back now…
Mari turns away, I-don’t-know. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? They don’t know. They got the Titan’s Blood stolen, and they have no idea where they’re supposed to get more save from stealing it back, which…well, even if they accomplish that, they’ll still have barely any at all. Just enough for one more portal, if they’re lucky, which means it has to be perfect—no more of wherever they ended up last time, reflections in glass. They’re the one turning their backs on the way the world works, and like.
So sure, that’s going to be hard, but…
And then the echo mouse goes off, and Luz yelps, “gah! Paper! Mari, paper!”
“On it.” Mari’s a cyclops in a second, that little, black-and-white one-eyed monkey, as Luz digs a pen out from under her pillow and throws that to her daemon, pulling one out of her hair to use herself. Mari tears a light-glyph in two and passes her one half, and between the two of them and Echo’s flickering projection of the diary she ate, they’re able to get down this new entry:
After careful analysis during this era, I believe the current human year is 1660…or is it 70? The years are flashing by and this place does not follow the logical cycles it should. But it will be worth it. I’ve gathered all the ingredients, including Titan’s Blood. All that’s left is to seek out The Collector. And he will tell me what I need to complete my mission. But, first, my companions and I must face—
The black-and-white pages, leaving off on a drawing of Philip, his lion daemon Temperance, and two shadowy shapes that must be the companions mentioned, blink away in an instant as the echo mouse yawns and returns to her sleeping hut, and Mari groans, thumping onto her side.
“Face what?!” she complains. “This doesn’t help us any! So he found the portal ingredients and now needs to find some Collector guy? I’ve never even heard of him! He probably died like, four hundred years ago!”
“Yeah…” Luz folds up her messily-written copy of the entry and drops it onto her desk with a sigh, pushing herself standing. Mari shifts owl beast and flops off the side of the bed with a thud. “But!” Luz claps her hands together. “On the bright side, we learned something new and can get out of here!”
“Not really,” Mari says, her beak muffled against the floor. “We basically know less than when we first locked ourself up here.”
“None of that.” Luz wraps her arms around her daemon’s middle and tugs her towards the door. “Besides! It’s Lilith-Burkit’s party. We’re gonna miss the toast, and missing the toast didn’t inspire us to find any new insights a few minutes ago so I doubt it’s gonna work now!”
Mari flits up out of Luz’s grip as a dragon, her spines rattling down her back. “Yeah, alright,” she says, as she drapes herself around Luz’s shoulders, the tip of her long tail flicking. Its sharp end pokes odd against Luz. “I guess I would rather hang out with Lilith and everyone.”
Unluckily, they get downstairs just at the tail-end of the toast, led by Hooty, to congratulate Lilith-Burkit on her new job as assistant curator as the Supernatural Museum of History, which Luz is actually pretty sure she’s gone to before, as a Hexside fieldtrip that was less of a let’s learn things fieldtrip and more of a Hexside is on fire so let’s all get the kids out of here sort of deal. Luckily (or…also unluckily), they’re just in time for Hooty to offer them his appetizers, which are…owl pellets. Alright. Oh, and a twitching, half-alive mouse, which Firefly trots by to snatch up.
“Yeah,” Mari says, sliding off of Luz’s shoulders to start heading for Lilith, “I think we’re good. Hey, Lilith!”
She flaps up and onto the couch where Lilith is sitting very straight, Burkit a new sort of—ooooh, is that a hermit crab? Whatever it is it’s very hermit-crab-like, with a dark black and vibrant yellow shell that reminds Luz of poison dart frogs.
“Hmm? Oh, hello, Mari, Luz.” Burkit waves one of his claws as Luz drops down next to her daemon, nearly crushing Mari’s tail underneath her. Most of the people here she recognizes—obviously Eda and Firefly, King and François, and Hooty; Gwen and Haukr, that one demon who is mostly nose with a smooth rock always balanced in her hair and is Hooty’s friend, Eda’s potion guy; and then an Emperor’s Coven scout, entirely in uniform save for the shirt proclaiming him STEVE! and PHOEBE!, and his palisman, a small hobby with mostly brownish feathers, save for the russet ones near her legs.
Mari blinks. “Do you know that guy?”
“That—oh, you mean Steve and Phoebe?” At Mari’s nod, Burkit continues, waving a claw, “yes, they…rather looked up to us, when we were still in the coven, as you can probably tell.”
Luz glances back to the bird-palisman. If you really squint…yeah, she sort of looks like Burkit did as a peregrine falcon, and, hey, they’re both falcons! She can see it.
“Hmm, cool,” Luz says, and then, “so, is the party fun? Is it everything you wanted?”
“I actually did not ask for a party,” Lilith says, huffing. Luz giggles. “And I certainly didn’t ask for this many people to be—oh, what is that?” She’s cut off by a knocking on the door that nobody else seems to notice, too busy either in conversation or trying to discreetly offer Firefly their horrible owl pellet appetizers. Which, Luz has to say: seeing as the drinks have actual eyeballs in, them, those pellets must be bad.
Luz snags her own drink off the coffee table—the more human-safe eyeball-less version Eda prepared for her, and joins Mari in following Lilith to the door.
The woman at the door is…nobody Luz knows, though she looks pretty cool, and her palisman is some sort of massive greyhound-type dog, the specific breed hazy in the way pretty much every dog-palisman Luz has ever met on the Isles is, unless it was Bailey trying to mimic the weirdest dog breeds Luz and Mari could come up with.
Luz leans into Lilith’s side. “Who’s that?” she whispers.
“Flora-Boots D’splora,” Burkit hisses back, his claws clacking as the yellow parts of his shell glow brighter. Which—seriously? Luz holds back a snort of laughter only because Mari nips at her ear, we hardly know the stakes here. “She’s a historian in the Emperor’s Coven, mentored us for a while.” He narrows his eyes. “I don’t know why she’d be here. We aren’t friends.”
“Hello hello!” Flora greets, her palisman baring his teeth in the most unfriendly grin Luz has seen recently, and she’s seen a lot of people fake-smiling at her. “Emperor Belos sends his regards. He heard you managed a new job.”
“Did he now,” Lilith says, her voice coming out somewhat jerky. “It’s a very small position, I can’t imagine it would matter to him.”
Luz locks eyes with Mari—what does Belos want? Something like determination swims up sharp in her, because—Belos said he wasn’t going to pay them any attention!
“Why does he care?” Luz cuts in, crossing her arms. “We haven’t done anything he can prove.”
Flora’s gaze glances down to Luz before returning to Lilith. “You need your niece to fight your battles for you? Pathetic.”
“Hey!” Luz protests, but Flora’s already ignoring her. Mari drops down to Luz’s side as an owl beast, Firefly in the miniature, flaring out her wings like Firefly does when she’s mad at something.
“Get to the point, Flora,” Burkit says, sharp. He’s changed form, now, back into one of his regular slug-forms, bright and toxic, if Luz is remembering correctly. “I doubt you came here just to tell us that.”
“You’re right. I came to tell you that I’ve left a box of your things at your old desk. Drop by and collect them whenever. Oh, and do be careful about what exhibits you put together. History is supposed to be exciting, but I seem to remember you digging through the most boring of books.”
She spins a spell-circle to summon a rope, lassos a passing griffin right out of the sky, and she and her palisman leap onto it’s back and are gone.
Luz blinks. Mari opens and closes her beak.
Hunter said Belos would leave us alone, Luz thinks at her.
Yeah, and he betrayed us, so why did you believe him for a second? Mari’s feathers prickle up, uncomfortable pinpricks of itchy on Luz’s own skin.
“Oooh, I hate her,” Lilith mutters, Burkit bristling up on her shoulder, a brightly colored slug. “Thinks she’s so much better than me, well, I can be a bad-girl historian too! I’ll create a first exhibit that is going to knock her socks off.”
Lilith storms back inside and Luz stares after her.
Mari lands on Luz’s head, an owl again. “Congratulations on your new job!” she calls, and then, at Luz’s sideways look, “what? We never actually told her.”
“I guess,” Luz says, trying to swallow back the unease building in her gut. She…doesn’t like what just happened. She really, really doesn’t.
But what can they do about it?
They head inside to rejoin the party.
A few hours later finds the party dissipated, mostly because Lilith and Burkit ran off yelling about bad-girl historians and its sort of hard to have a party when the person the party is for has left. Luz lies upside-down on the couch, Mari flopped on her side on the floor next to her, eyes glazed over as she stares at the tiny scribbles that are their copy of the last diary page Echo managed to show them. Without party yay! as a distraction, and no amounts of intense thinking making Belos’s goals any more obvious, it’s left them very little to do.
“You look…painful,” King comments, sitting at Luz’s head, his claws poking into her hair and François draped across her face. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything is so hard all the time,” Luz whines, making grabby-hands at King. “I want to stop thinking about it and text my girlfriend.”
King sticks out his tongue but hops off the couch. “Gross,” he says. “I’m not getting you your scroll.”
“But I left it upstairs!” Luz rolls onto her belly, pausing only to make sure she doesn’t crush François. “And all I have to do down here is look at this stupid diary entry! What even is The Collector!”
“Who,” Mari says, half-heartedly. “He’s clearly a person of some sort.”
“Collector?” King tilts his head. “Never heard of them.”
“Because he died centuries ago!” Luz says. “I’m starting to think building a portal is impossible! And that I should just suck it up and live here forever ‘cause at least then I won’t have to deal with Mami being all disappointed in me!”
“Hey,” Eda says, entering the room, “don’t talk about yourself like that. This Philip guy had a lifetime to build his portal. You’ve had like, a month and a half. And I bet he didn’t have to deal with some twerp kid stealing the most important ingredient. Still can’t believe Hooty didn’t notice the guy.”
“Nnnnnnn.” Luz flips back right-side-up, hugging François to her chest. Mari prods her muzzle to the words of the diary-page, and Luz can feel the headache she’s getting from nonstop staring at it. “I’m sure he’s very sneaky.”
“Kid, as someone who saw him at Eclipse Lake: no, he really isn’t.” Eda snorts, picking up some leftover eyeball-bits off a shelf and tossing them to Firefly roosting in the corner, who snaps them out of the air with a happy croon. “Anyways. Point I’m making is you’ll figure it out.”
“What if I want to figure it out now?” Mari swats the page away and hops up onto the couch, her paws pressing into Luz’s chest. “Ugh! If only I could go back in time and just ask him, and meet this Collector guy myself, and clearly there’s Titan Blood back then, too, if Philip has some! That would solve…everything…” Mari goes quiet for a moment before she says, in a rush bubbling in Luz’s own gut, “Eda is time magic a thing?”
“Ha!” Eda pauses her cleaning to dig a book out of her disorganized bookshelves. “Not technically. But little-known fact about me,” she nudges Luz to the side to drop down on the couch, and Luz scrambles up, Mari practically tripping over her to shove her face in the book, “Lily ‘n I were sort of urban legend junkies back in the day. Went searching for all the classics. Skinnyman, Frowny Dog, possums—”
“Those are real,” Mari says, “I could turn into one.”
“Yeah, sure, kid.” Eda stops on one page, laying the book out for all of them to see, including King, who’s perched himself on Eda’s shoulders, and Firefly, who mostly seems to be wandering over just to be a part of things. “But the most mysterious of them all were these things called Time Pools. Spent ages trying to find one of them. They’re supposed to be, like, windows into the past. Said they move around all the time, why nobody’s managed to come across them, yet. Made all sorts of tools to try and find some, but.” Eda shrugs. “Never came across it.”
“Woah.” Mari drags the book over into Luz’s lap, tracing a claw across the letters. “If we could find one of these, it could be huge!”
King frowns. “That’s not how anything works though,” he says. “You can see the past really easy if you just look up. Why would you need to go all the way back to it?”
Eda taps him on the nose and King shrieks, grabbing François to throw at his face. “Maybe if you can see thoughts, silly. Most people can’t.”
“Oh.” King wriggles off of the couch. “Well, Luz-Mari, I’ll look at the thoughts here for you! See if I find any about, uh…The Collector?”
Mari nods, and Luz says, “yeah, that’s what it said. And, um, maybe also Philip? Or his daemon, her name was…gah, I know it was mentioned once…oh, Temperance! Anything about any of those people, and we can swap notes!”
King collects François off the floor and shoves him between his horns. “On it!”
“But,” Eda says, before either of them can run off, “first, you’re helping with clean-up. Time Pools later, making sure there aren’t terrible owl pellets around now.”
“Aww, Eda,” Luz whines, but she hops up, allows Eda to ruffle her hair. There…are still a lot of owl pellets around. Seriously: how many did Hooty make?
Firefly grabs the Time Pool book out from under Mari’s paws, and Mari yelps, shifting into an owl beast to shriek up at Firefly, who just purrs, much larger than Mari, and, after dropping the book off with Eda, grabs Mari by the scruff and proudly carries her to the other side of the room.
“This,” Mari says, swatting her talons through the air, “is a war crime.”
But overall clean-up goes pretty well. They do have to fight a horrible amalgamation of owl pellets, which turns out to be the why behind the lingering pellets, but a few well-placed fire-glyphs after Firefly tackles it out a window makes quick work of that, and Hooty agrees that he might have gone a little bit overboard. A little. Like, barely toeing over the line.
It’s night by the time they finish and they maybe could go out hunting, but…inside is warm, and King is trying to get them to play war, and, like, look: Luz will start figuring out portal stuff tomorrow, okay? Tomorrow.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to go back home. She’s just…being strategic! Yeah. Good night’s rest before doing the big things.
Mari laughs, a maned wolf with her tail wagging away. “You are not fooling anybody, least of all me,” she says, but she’s not pushing it, either, here in this place where she can sprawl out easy, and—
One day, they’re going to go back to the human realm, and have to figure this out.
But tonight, at the Owl House, Luz and Mari laugh, and play, and worry about the future not-at-all.
The next day finds them making the flight over to the Clawthorne house, after accepting Firefly trying to groom them, Eda telling them, quote, “if you get bored of Lilith’s nerd shit I will personally wrestle Firefly until she agrees to go into a Time Pool with you,” and King promising to spend the entire day on the roof watching the old thoughts spilling through the sky, and keep them updated if anything mentions a Collector.
Mari mostly lets the wind carry her, kraift-shaped and gliding, while Luz texts Amity and Alma, nothing super important, just I miss you and yes I would support you if you decided to destroy both of the twins and hey so is school still off tomorrow due to the explosions in the greenhouse or was that just super over-exaggerated, the last of which neither of them can get an answer to, since Willow-Clover is the one who would know that and she’s apparently helping to fix it, which means she’s busy.
It’s really nice for Willow and Clover to do that, Luz sends, since she’s like, so talented with plants she’s using her free time to help Hexside rather than do whatever she wants like us.
I suppose, is Alma’s response, who said she’s the one texting because Amity is busy beating their siblings over the heads with pillows, an activity that apparently doesn’t take much brainpower, and honestly, with the way some of Luz’s brawls with King have gone, she can see it. Usually they don’t let students help with repairs. Probably because that makes things worse, more often than not.
Yeah fair. Luz frowns. Hey if school is still off tomorrow wanna meet up and do something?
Like a date?
Um I mean like. If you want it to be a data haha lol. Luz presses her face into the spot between Mari’s wings, hopes with the cool air her face isn’t burning up so much because what? Her? Flustered? When has Luz EVER. I don’t know I’m banned by association from a lot of places in Bonesborough but Eda says all the best places haven’t banned us yet. Well idk if her definition of best is good date places but um I mean
No no no, comes Alma’s response before Luz can figure out a good way to end her text, I’d like that. That’s—good. Yes. I want to do it.
Ok cool. Cool cool.
Very cool.
Luz hugs her scroll to her chest and squeals. “Mari! We have! Did you see? Did you see!”
Mari’s wings beat against the air and nearly tug them off course. “I did!” She spins through the air and Luz hugs her tight, fisting hands in feathers so she doesn’t fall off. “Luz!”
“Mari!” Luz echoes back, and laughs, “oh, this is so—ah, wait, that’s the house, dive dive dive!”
They crash-land a little bit, and all the ruckus brings Avis out of the house, squeezing her way through a cracked-open window as some sort of shiny gold bug before returning to palistrom cardinal. “Luz? Mari? Are you guys okay?”
Mari rolls to her side as a maned wolf, dirt and grass stuck in her pelt. Luz offers a thumbs-up. “We’re good.”
Avis tuts. “Witchlings,” she says, fondly, landing on a branch just above their head. “Well, what brings you here? Dell and I were actually about to head out to the Owl House. Is Eda there?”
“Looking for Lilith-Burkit,” Mari says, trying to lick grit off of her and crinkling her nose, “and yeah, she’s home. Why?”
“I’ve been…wanting to see her.” Avis ruffles her wings. “Lilith and Burkit are up in their room. Just be sure to lock the door when you go, if we’re already gone.”
“Will do!” Luz chirps, darting for the door. Dell’s already opening it when she gets there, and she gives him a little wave, pausing while Mari continues for the stairs. “Hey, um. Thank you. I never said, for—for what you told us, about. Settling and all. And it was—really helpful. And things are still—messy, and weird, but—less-so than if we didn’t hear that, I think.”
Dell touches his scarred hand to his heart. “I’m glad I helped,” he says. “You know where to find me if you need anything else.”
“I know,” Luz says, and hurries upstairs after Mari.
She’s never actually been in Lilith-Burkit’s room, since whenever they stay over they’ve always been in Eda’s old room, so Luz isn’t so sure what to expect when she knocks and Lilith calls, come in! following Mari as she noses the door open. But it’s—actually a lot messier than she was expecting. There’s a box of random things near the door, a bed littered with open books, and Lilith herself is at her desk, which is absolutely covered in…something. A lot of somethings. Burkit’s a snowbeak, holding a quill in his beak that he seems to be using to paint something small.
“Um,” Luz says, and Lilith spins to face her.
“Luz! Mari! You came at a great time.” She sticks out her arm for Burkit, who drops the quill and flaps over to it. “I’m putting together my first exhibit for the museum. Flora says I can’t be a bad-girl historian, and I say, well! What’s more bad-girl historian than,” and she flips over the large poster she was working on, “Deadwardian balusters?”
Mari sneezes dirt off of her nose.
“Yes, indeed,” Lilith says, as Burkit spirals up her hand as a snail with a rather intricately-carved shell. “It is said that the patterns on these balusters was actually inspired by the mass migrations of the Deadwardian snail, which vanished sometime later in the Savage Ages, and was…presumed…extinct…” Lilith wilts. “This is not bad-girl at all, is it.”
“I mean,” Luz offers, and Mari lifts a paw, wobbles it eh? “But! I found something that will be super cool and also historical! Check it.”
She shoves the book Eda had on time pools into Lilith’s hand, who takes it. “Possums?” Burkit says, peering down, “well, they’re—”
“Uh—turn the page.” Luz says, and Lilith does.
“Oh!” She brightens. “Time pools! Wow, this brings me back…but Eda and I were never able to find any. We didn’t have good enough equipment.”
“I hear you, and to that, I say,” Luz says, digging through her pockets to pull out a few sheets of paper, with hastily-scribbled glyphs on them, “could glyphs work? Because if it’s magical power you need, King happens to be, like, crazy good at it.”
Lilith takes the papers and considers it as Luz stands there. It was her idea, one that had her shooting up late at night—King! He was still telling them about the crazy-powerful magical distraction he pulled off during the coven day parade last week, and Luz is pretty sure he needs more outlets than that, since, you know, otherwise whenever he messes with glyphs something, usually the Owl House, catches fire. And Mari was still half-asleep but with her groggy head tilted said, I mean, maybe. And then, do you think overpowered glyphs could power a portal?
It had dimmed the excitement in Luz’s chest, but she’d said, I mean, King’s powerful, but he’s not Titan’s-Blood powerful.
Right. Mari shook herself. Well. If this works, maybe we can find Titan’s Blood in the past. So—let’s do it.
“It—could,” Lilith says, “it could, and I can dig out all our old tools—Luz, Mari, do you know what this means?”
“We’re gonna do time magic!” Luz cheers, Mari leaping into the air as a dragon with an excited roar.
“I’m going to prove to Flora-Boots D’splora that I’m a bad-girl—er, or, time magic! Yes!” Lilith weakly pumps her fist into the air, and Burkit lifts his head a bit higher.
Luz beams. “Either way. Let’s go!”
And so, after a quick pit-stop at the Owl House for King to nearly explode Lilith’s time-pool-tracker, a bunch of weird tools Luz doesn’t understand, and a dream, Luz-Mari and Lilith-Burkit head out to fight time itself. Er—to witness time itself?
To do something to time, that’s for sure. Luz pets Mari’s head, and grins to herself. She can’t wait!