Part 2: Chapter 2 - Rainy Veil

Lilith pressed a cup of tea into Amity's hands, sitting down on the couch beside her, facing her slightly. Eda had long since mumbled something about losing her power in a pointless fight and marched upstairs in the Owl House, while King was outside the door, sitting down dejectedly and ignoring the chattering of Hooty.

And Amity?

She couldn't do much more than sit there, staring at the wisps of steam rising from her cup as she tried to process what they had seen. In the end, her thoughts were locked into an endless loop. Every time she tried to escape it she was dragged back to the single, overriding realization.

Luz was gone.

Luz was gone.

Maybe it was selfish of her, but Amity's first follow up thought on the silent walk back to the house, as she tried not to fall over from forgetting to get the ends of her crutches over protruding roots, had been that she had lost the chance to tell the human girl what she had begun to realize only weeks before Grom. At least, it felt selfish to think that.

But she had lost the slim ghost of a chance there had been to explore the possibility. And she had lost a friend who genuinely cared about her, who cared enough to try and fix the friendships she had ruined.

She raised the cup to her lips and drank automatically, closing her eyes as the warm tea shook her mind out of its loop enough that when she opened them again she could instead study the older witch sitting before her. She started at the sight of the studious gaze that was leveled at her, cheeks beginning to burn in embarrassment.

Miss Clawthorne seemed to realize that she had been caught staring a moment later, looking down at the saucer that held her cup. "There's nothing for you to do for her now, and you couldn't have stopped it." There was a pause. "You carry enough weight on your shoulders already."

Amity silently thanked the Titan for the woman being unable to read her thoughts. But it had been very clear that she was still thinking of the girl, and after that first selfish thought had finished, her mind had instead turned to worrying on the situation.

Was Luz okay?

Was she home, or had Belos sent her somewhere horrific?

Was she injured, captured, crying somewhere out of reach?

Amity shook her head to stop her from falling down into the loop again, staring into the dark tea in her cup for a long moment before looking up to meet her mentor's eyes. "I just want to know if she is safe. I know I can't.." Bring her back.

But she didn't say it. She trailed off, thinking back to how easy it had been to cast the tracking spell. Magic had never felt so simple before, grasping the mechanics of a spell had always been a labor of focus and determination for her. Abominations was careful portions and ingredient control, the mixture more important than the casting, the intent behind the spell more impactful than the form. Not that she had anything less than perfect form.

But this spell.. It had been like breathing.

Maybe she could find out why that had been.

She couldn't bring Luz back to the Boiling Isles.

Not yet.

Again, as if sensing the train her thoughts had been following, Miss Clawthorne cleared her throat as if to brush away the awkward silence that had fallen between them. "There is a way, actually. To see if she is safe. It is called scrying, peering through the veil to look in on someone over great distances." Amity felt her ears flick upwards in interest. "However, even if we did not factor in that the Human is in another realm, it is advanced Oracle magic."

The woman tapped a long finger against her chin, looking over Amity with a discerning gaze. "Though, with how you took to the tracking spell, perhaps your specialities lie in the realm of Oracle magic. Have you ever considered switching tracks?"

That brought a frown to her lips, and an automatic answer followed. "No, I'm quite proud of my work with Abominations."

There was no warmth in her tone, nothing but a trained response. A practiced phrase whenever her mother wanted to needle her about school. And the older witch had noticed, her eyes narrowing. "I.. See. Well, it wouldn't hurt to try the spell. It is not dissimilar from the tracking spell. Scrying is also a focus of intent, familiarity, and will. You must know the person or thing you want to look in on, and you must maintain an intense concentration on it. But, just as before, if you master these aspects of focus, your magic will do the rest."

Mixing tracks of magic wasn't allowed.

Luz could be in trouble.

If mother and father found out..

She grit her teeth. Luz could be in trouble.

Amity set the saucer holding her half-drank cup of tea on the table and raised her arm out straight, closing her eyes and moving her pointer finger in perfect spellcasting form. She thought again of the hoodie, the scent that had filled her nose and filled her mind with that perfect image of the human girl.

She drew the circle.

And nothing happened.

Blinking and shaking the frustration from her arms, Amity reset to the first step and tried again.

And again.

And again.

Frustration gave way to anger, not allowing it to show on her face as she glanced over at Miss Clawthorne.

No, a Blight needed to present themselves with pride, not unrestrained emotion, her mother's voice echoed in the back of her head.

Amity had never really been as good at restraining herself as her parents, and now it was like she had taken a match to a pile of kindling that had been building since the moment she had realized that something had happened to Luz. Anger spread through her chest, and her magic followed with it. The circle completed in a blazing purple color, and she opened her eyes with a gasp as she looked upwards.

It felt as though her gaze was being pulled upward, further and further away until she only felt a brief tether to her body below.

She could see trees. And a shadow moving among boughs. But it was all.. Wrong.

Like looking through water with no light source to guide her, like someone had draped a cloth over her head to blind her. She tried to reach up to clear her eyes, only to find that her body did not respond. That tether she felt was so far away, so frighteningly distant, that it felt like it was fading away. Panic set in over the anger that had pushed her to this place, and her concentration wavered.

It was like falling from a great height, a sinking feeling in her stomach as her magic ripped her back to her body. Even though she had not moved from the position she had held when casting the spell, Amity lost her balance and flailed her hands out in warning as she suddenly felt like she had been slammed back down onto the couch.

Luckily, Miss Clawthorne caught her hands, bringing her back to a semblance of reality as Amity fought to catch the breath she didn't know she had lost. "What did you see?!"

Shaking her head as she tried to put it into words, she stammered as her heart kept pounding away in her chest. She had done it, she had really cast it.

But it had been something instinctual, not logical.

Nothing like she had ever been taught.

"I couldn't see anything except vague shapes.."

She felt a twinge of embarrassment at her failure, but when she rose her eyes to look at the other witch, she found a wide grin waiting for her. "I really think you should consider the Oracle track, Amity. You have a natural talent for it." There was a bit of worrying at the woman's bottom lip before she spoke again. "I think your mother would be very excited by this."

That stole the wind from her brief taste of success. Her mother, excited for her? Proud of her? She could remember wanting that more than almost anything.

Now it made her feel anxious

Or maybe that was just left overs from feeling that thin tether of the spell.

Yeah, that was it.

"But not seeing anything.. It could be the barrier between realms, with the portal Edalyn had now destroyed. I wonder.." Lilith stood then, marching towards the stairs and ascending them, leaving Amity feeling conflicted, confused, and more than a little breathless.

This day had not gone at all how she had pictured it was going to.

Luz was gone.

The Clawthorne sisters were somewhat.. Working together? Or very angry with each other. That seemed exactly the way it was supposed to be and bizarrely out of the ordinary at the same time.

The Emperor had hurt Luz, and had lied to them all. Lilith had known, had doubts. Principal Bump had started allowing multi-track students, despite all the dangers they supposedly brought. Her parents probably knew this truth, too. Her mother certainly must have, being as shrewd as she was, and being a member of the Emperor's Coven.

Emperor Belos didn't speak for the Titan. There was nothing watching over them, no great being guiding their society to be better. Amity's heart stalled a half beat when she found herself questioning whether or not all witches just happened to live inside a magical skeleton.

Strangely enough, it occurred that the Owl Lady was one of the only adults who had been completely honest with her and her friends. She had written off the witch's ramblings about the Emperor as her usual zany antics that Luz had described in horrific detail to her, but now she knew that Eda Clawthorne had simply known the truth and not cared to be quiet with it. No wonder the Emperor considered her a threat, no wonder he had wanted her petrified.

As if summoned by her thoughts, the two sisters returned to the room, bantering to one another the whole way down the stairs and into the kitchen. Amity saw cupboards being opened and heard something metal crash before it bounced off the ground and skittered in a direction she couldn't see from where she sat.

After a couple of minutes of the two witches arguing back and forth in half-sentences that she could only compare to the way Edric and Emira spoke to each other sometimes, both sisters turned to her. The Owl Lady was triumphantly holding a crystal vial up. "Ah ha! I knew I had it sitting around." Eda caught her bewildered look and grinned. "Truesight potion, I brewed it up when this one-" A glare was sent Lilith's way. "-tried to get cute about using invisibility spells to capture me."

Lilith's face contorted in thought and then a small touch of frustration. "Which means its almost a decade old, Edalyn. Be careful with the vial!"

The Owl Lady tossed it between her hands as she walked towards the couch, her older sister in tow. "Unlike some people, I don't brew a potion so strong that it will eat right through the crystal." Eda stopped before her, holding out the elaborate looking vial. "Now, still you'll need to be careful with it. This powerful of a potion, and the time since it was brewed.. Well, it leaves the crystal brittle. So don't break it, you got it, Blight? I don't have the ingredients on hand to replace this."

Amity stared up at the vial, slowly raising her hand to take it with no small sense of confusion filling her. "I.. Uh, what?"

"Lily didn't fill you in?"

"I was about to!" Miss Clawthorne stepped beside her sister, her expression of exasperation fading into a small smile of encouragement as her eyes found Amity. "I thought that a few drops of a truesight potion might help to lift the veil, and you could try the spell again."

Combining a potion with Oracle magic? Mixing tracks wasn't..

It wasn't anything, apparently. Probably just another lie they had all told each other, a lie of the Emperor's. Miss Clawthrone - Lilith - didn't seem to think that there was any issue here.

She pulled out the stopper on the bottle, the sound much louder than she had thought, and looked at the clear liquid within. "It's gonna be strong stuff, so you'll only want.. Three drops or so." The Owl Lady gave the instructions with a flippancy that Amity saw through now, noting the hopeful glint in those mismatched eyes.

She gave the witch a confident nod before slowly tilting the bottle up, watching as a drop began to coalesce around the opening. One. Two. Three. Amity lowered it, grasping it gingerly and closing her eyes as she swallowed.

It didn't taste like anything, and it didn't feel all that different.

But she focused again on Luz, and on the anger that fueled that focus the first time. She raised her finger again and drew the circle. This time it was second nature, and on the first try she suddenly found her consciousness dragged upward again.

But this time it was also much different. She caught a glimpse of her own body behind her as her perception was yanked out of the Boiling Isle and across a vast space before rocketing down into a set of woods, the same she had been in before. Amity let out a gasp, or tried to, as she realized that these trees were taller than most she had ever seen. More importantly, these trees were green.

She had never seen so much green before, and the sky above was a startling blue expanse, what bits of it she could make out through the treetops.

And it was raining.

Amity tried to cringe away, to look for cover, only to remember that she was not physically there. Her momentary panic that she was about to be boiled alive was lost as she realized that the rain didn't seem to be boiling.. Anything.

It was just harmless water. Falling from the sky.

The Human Realm was weird.

And it still looked like a painting whose colors had run into splotches and smudges.

Caught up in studying the strangeness around her, she almost missed the figure moving through the trees. Small and nimble, with a exuberance to their step that Amity identified immediately, despite the hooded jacket the girl was wearing.

She reached out her hand.

Or.. Tried to, again.

The spell only let her watch as what had to be Luz paced back and forth in front what looked like a blurry mass of brown and grey. After a moment, the human girl ran forward and pulled open what looked like a door. In a beat the door was slammed back into place, as if an expectation had not been met.

Amity realized then that she didn't hear any noise. When Luz turned toward her, and her breath caught with the hope that she could be seen, but all that waited beneath the hood she saw was a dark, murky afterimage. She noticed even the clothing that she had excitedly thought was in focus was smudged, and her hearing wasn't just muffled, it was deafened.

The veil still remained strong enough that as she struggled to reach out for the other girl, tried to plea with a voice that could not exist in this space, that the tether began to fray and twist. She struggled to maintain the connection, but the pull of magic in her chest weakened significantly and soon she was yanked back through the would, towards her distant body.

This time was much different. She hadn't just been left winded as she slammed into the couch, the expenditure of magic had left a deep ache in her chest that almost caused her to smash the vial as her hand lept to hold it. It was stopped only by the Owl Lady, who had caught her wrist and pried the small bottle away from her. A moment of Amity sitting there on the rough cushions, gingerly rubbing a palm against her sternum, and the older witch spoke up with that hopeful touch in her voice. "..Well?"

Eda and Lilith had listened quietly as she had described how the spell had failed to show her detail again, nodding quietly and offering explanations for what could be causing it. Her lack of experience with Oracle magic, the distance between the Human realm and the Boiling Isles, maybe even some residual effect of whatever the Emperor had done to banish Luz.

Their theories answered little for her, and left her feeling even worse that she had failed to confirm more than that Luz was alive. A part of her thoughts told her that should have been enough for all of them, but it still left her queasy.

She missed her friend already, and that made her heart ache.

Or it was the ache of her nearly depleted bile sack. Nothing she hadn't experienced before, but it was as unpleasant as she remembered, like a bruise in her chest that wouldn't go away, wrapped around her heart.

She was going to blame the bile sack, and just the bile sack. Couldn't be anything else.

Nevertheless, Amity had left the Owl House in darker spirits than she expected, just before dusk. But she hadn't left empty-handed. The Owl Lady had given her the vial of Truesight potion, asking her to keep trying. Both Clawthorne sisters had promised not to give up on their end either, and to keep looking for a way to hopefully clear up the Scrying spell.

They had all agreed that the first priority had to be finding out if Luz was alive and unharmed, at least with more clarity than the spell had already shown. Before she left, Lilith had asked Amity to promise to keep trying and keep practicing Oracle magic if she found it engaging at all. The rush of power she felt while casting the two spells she had been taught, the way it naturally came to her? She didn't have a hard time saying no.

Amity had left the Owl House with both crutches tucked under her arms, a lot less hope, and a gnawing thought that the hurt she felt in her chest wasn't just the bile sack. As she slowly made her way home to Blight manor, knowing that her absence wouldn't have been noticed, she mulled over her thoughts and feelings that the day had uncovered.

Luz was gone.

They were just trying to make sure she was okay, see her.

Amity wanted more, she wanted to talk to her again.

She wanted her back.

Oracle magic wasn't going to be enough. Abominations? Probably useless for that. Portals weren't a taught magic, but the Owl Lady was proof that magic existed that wasn't taught.

She needed to explore more tracks.

Mixing magic wasn't allowed by the Emperor, by her parents, and by society.. But at Hexside it was.

Amity moved a bit faster now, as fast as the cast around her foot would allow. She needed to speak to her parents about her schooling.

Author's Note: Annnd we're back! Sorry about the looong delay, got covid and that took a few months out of me, and then I had to get my D&D setting ready to start up playing again, but I should be back to writing this fic regularly, so long as the motivation holds! Thank you for everyone who sent me messages, your kind words are appreciated! -Fox