Chapter Fourteen
"… To ensure the argil is properly processed," Darius said, his deep voice somehow droning. "Can't have poor workmanship leading to crusty Abominations, now can we?" he added with a fake laugh.
Amity kept her back straight and her chin up, but her mask let her face twist with the boredom she felt. She would probably find all of this fascinating if he was saying anything new to her. She had long since learned that the foothills surrounding the ribs produced the best-quality argil, or matter that served as the base of Abomination clay. She knew that it had to be dried very specifically in order to refine into powder that would be mixed with other ingredients to produce the clay at its finest. And she knew that the Abomination Coven was in charge of handling this process rather than the Construction Coven.
Her "mentor" had brought her to the marketplace of Femora, one of the cleanest cities on the Isles that was known as the best city to buy argil. It was where her mom arranged to purchase all of her dad's supplies for Blight Industries' Research and Development. But Amity had a strong suspicion that this was much more a way for Darius to parade his new apprentice while making it seem like he was being productive.
She wondered briefly if Willow had to go through this kind of tedium with Lady Feronia.
"And you can tell not just by the feel of the argil," Darius continued, reaching into a clay jar to scoop some onto his fingertips that he rubbed into a thin mash, "but by the smell." He demonstrated by taking a long whiff of his fingers. "Ah, like moist earth and the spice of the Titan's power."
Amity rolled her eyes behind the mask … and then stood somehow even straighter as a shock traveled down her spine. Her instincts, honed by years of life among socialites, were warning her of eyes on her back. "We're being watched," Amity — the Amethyst Artisan — said seriously.
"What?" Darius chuckled. "My apprentice, if that were true-"
"Amethyst Artisan!"
The title echoed across the market, the words ringing with suppressed fury. Out from the crowd stomped a witchling about her age, with dark skin, full lips, piercing purple eyes, and a mole on the side of his chin. He was dressed in a Glandus High school uniform in the orchid of the Abomination Track. He pointed at her and shouted, "I challenge you to a witch's duel!"
The shoppers and shop owners gasped in a surge of faint noise and buzz of whispered conversation. Many of them were backing away from the confrontation, but all of the others were almost pressing inward in eagerness to see where this would lead.
"On what grounds?" Amity asked, her hands folded over her front and her tone cold and remote like she would use before she met Luz.
"To see if you're really as good as the coven head says," the boy said.
'This must be the "Gavin" guy that Matt mentioned had an issue with me,' Amity thought. She strode forward in her ridiculous ballgown-like uniform and leaned her masked face close to his. "I accept." She stepped back and crossed her arms as haughtily as she could. "We meet back here in one hour. We'll see what kind of witch you are." With that, she turned and walked away to message Luz, Willow, and Gus about the situation.
Amity's stomach twisted at the familiar words, ones she had delivered to Luz so long ago before she had begun to change. She'd been running on autopilot and spat them back up. 'There's no draw to be taken here,' Amity thought. 'This is going to end badly, one way or another.'
Willow's scroll buzzed under a silent spell as she waited, sitting with her legs folded on the floor of the Secret Room of Shortcuts. Gus and Luz sat on one side of her, while Viney and Barcus sat on the other. Amity had been invited, but her trip with her "second job" had gotten in the way.
"So, what's going on here?" Luz asked.
"Dunno," Viney answered. "Jerbo just said it was super important and we all needed to be here." Barcus whined, his head perched on his paws. "Barcus says he's never seen Jerbo this nervous before."
"Wow, then it must be really bad," Willow noted.
Finally, one of the secret doors opened to admit Jerbo, who waved in someone else, someone none of them would ever have expected. "Amelia?" Willow asked in surprise.
"Hey," she said with a tense smile and a small wave.
"Jerbo, what's going on here?" Viney asked, the normally-chill girl almost yelling in her outrage. "You brought a member of Boscha's crew into the secret room?!"
"I won't tell, I swear!" Amelia said. "This isn't about the Banshees or social hierarchy, or any of that." She took a breath and ran her hands back over her hair to calm down. "Willow, everyone … Boscha suspects that Hunter is the Golden Guard."
It took a moment for the words to register, and Willow's stomach turned at the thought. "…What?"
Amelia went on to explain her conversation with Boscha after last week's practice, the "favor" she'd all but demanded, and her talk with Jerbo about it. Jerbo then jumped in to lay out their ideas on how to throw Boscha off the trail, including the suggestion of Amelia giving false information to Boscha.
"So, could that work?"
"The illusion part I could handle in my sleep," Gus said with confidence.
"And even if you couldn't make an Abomination to fit Hunter's shape, which I'm sure you could," Luz said, to which Jerbo waggled his hand in a so-so gesture, "I know Amity could."
"The hard part is going to be arranging this without making anyone suspicious," Willow said. "Not just Boscha … but Emperor Belos or the Emperor's Coven. If they found out Hunter's identity might be compromised …" She shivered and held her hands to her belly in sudden nausea. "I don't want to know what would happen."
Everyone traded glances ranging from concerned to horrified at Willow's words, but they didn't understand. Amity might have had some idea of what Hunter had gone through if she were here, but no one else. Willow's stomach twisted further at the memory of his breakdown during their palismen mission, his words that he "had to be useful."
"I'll get in touch with Amity," Willow said, summoning her scroll. "Tell her that we need to talk to her as soon as-" She cut off with a gasp, clapping her hand to her mouth in shock at Amity's messages. The Glandus kid challenged me/Amethyst Artisan. Dueling in an hour. Tell Luz. "Uh, Luz?"
Luz took Willow's offered scroll and scanned the messages. "¡Ay caramba!" she spat. "¡Cuando llueve diluvia!"
In the hour that had passed since Gavin's challenge, the spectators had erected seating along the sides of the market square, vendors had popped up to sell snacks and drinks, and a news crew had even shown up to record the event.
'Scavengers,' Amity thought viciously at the news crew. Brushing the thought aside, she focused on her breathing to get her bile sac warmed up. It was a practice she had learned from Lilith during her apprenticeship. Amity's lips twisted in faint disgust at the thought of her former mentor, but brushed those feelings aside, too.
As the town's clock tower struck the hour, Amity made her way toward the center of the square where Darius stood with a poorly-hidden thunderous expression. Gavin mirrored her movements, his lips tight and his eyes practically burning as his fingers twitched. Amity continued to breathe and keep herself calm.
"People of Femora!" Darius shouted. "You all have the honor to bear witness to the strength of my dear apprentice, the Amethyst Artisan, defend her honor against this wayward challenger!" He gestured somewhat derisively at Gavin, which seemed to incense the boy even more. "Let us begin!" With a swish of his cape, he dissolved into Abomination clay and seeped into the cobblestones to emerge a healthy distance away.
"You don't have to do this," Amity said, trying to sound placating.
"Yes I do," Gavin snarled, and traced a spell circle along the ground. "Abomination, rise!" Up from the circle formed a blocky, wine-red Abomination about twice Amity's height, its face molded into a look of rage. It roared rather than groaned and formed its fists into hammer heads. "Destroy!" Gavin shouted.
Amity leapt backward and out of the Abomination's reach, almost tripping on the folds of her skirt. It didn't reach her ankles, merely halfway down her calves, but it still restricted her movements. Amity hissed and took hold of the skirt to tear it away at mid-thigh and reveal the black tights she wore underneath.
With a quick spell, she produced the jar at her belt containing a flexible Abomination that she had long prepared for a surprise fight and had spent the last hour practicing with. She spooled out the entity and formed it into a lance that struck out at Gavin's and tore a hole in the middle of its head. As she retracted hers back to her side, the hole in its head slowly filled back in so that it could gnash its fangs.
'Rigid formation,' Amity noted. Abominations had two broad schools of texture: Rigid and fluid. Rigids were designed to be more tough and physically powerful, but were less flexible and tended to reform far more slowly. Fluids, on the other hand, were less stable and more prone to damage, but were also far easier to reform into different shapes. Amity favored fluid Abominations while it seemed Gavin favored rigids; a very common trend between the sexes.
Gavin snapped, "Abomination, launch!" and traced a spell to bolster its magic. The Abomination's fists swelled and it braced its stance before launching them as massive projectiles with the force of a siege engine. Amity reformed her Abomination under her feet as a wave, much like she had done during her coerced duel with Willow as the Silver Belle. She kept her arms moving to direct the wave's motions and keep ahead of the barrage of clay missiles, noting that each time it fired the fists took several long seconds to regenerate.
After ducking and weaving to avoid another onslaught, Amity slid to a halt and reformed her Abomination into a crossbow, styled after her father's recent creation, and launched two pairs of hardened bolts at her opponent's puppet, targeting the wrists. Her aim was good as the bolts dug into the clay and sizzled before exploding with pink flames. With the towering Abomination distracted and reforming, Amity turned her sights to Gavin — or more accurately the ground in front of him. She fired two more bolts that struck in front of him and began to sizzle, and Gavin conjured a small wall of clay to protect himself from the ensuing explosion.
Amity took a deep breath to center herself and traced a spell to bolster her Abomination, summoning clay matter from home to add to it and make it bigger. Six bolts may not have seemed like much, but she needed to build it back up while she had the chance. As it welled to an appropriate size, Amity reformed it into the quadruped shape she'd favored recently for attack, its frame lean and sinuous like a feline or direwolf.
As the dust settled from her previous offensive, it revealed Gavin with his Abomination standing solidly beside him. "I'll admit, you are good," he said through gritted teeth. "Pretty sure I saw some inspiration from Blight Industries products in that mix." He narrowed his eyes. "Wonder where you could have learned about that."
"You've got real talent yourself, Gavin," she replied, and he seemed surprised that she knew his name. "You've proven your skills. You don't have to keep fighting."
"You don't understand," he spat. "It's not just about you." He traced a pair of spells. "It's about proving a point. Abomination, forearm!"
The Abomination groaned with compliance and began to melt before moving to surround Gavin. It closed in and swirled around him before resuming a humanoid form … with Gavin's head in place of its own and its face in line with his chest. The effect made Gavin seem larger and no doubt stronger and tougher. Unless she missed her guess, he'd modeled this strategy on Darius's talent of intrapersonal transmutation.
"Whoa," Amity admitted.
Gavin slammed his fist into the opposite palm. "Come on!" And in his new Abomination armor, he charged with thunderous steps.
"Attack!" Amity shouted, and her lupine Abomination snarled and launched itself at Gavin. It latched onto the chest and began ripping and tearing with reckless abandon, sending chunks of wine-red clay flying. Gavin merely snarled back and took hold of the construct in his massive fists before squeezing and then crushing it into paste. As Amity's darker purple clay fell limply from his hands, Gavin snorted. "Is that all you've got?"
Amity responded by conjuring another, smaller Abomination that flowed down her arm and swirled around her wrist to form a spout out of its head. She lifted her other hand and traced a spell circle around it, the magic seeping into the clay, before lifting the wrist bearing the spout and willing it to pour out a spray of pink flames, the magic amplifying her fire spell into a raging, concentrated inferno.
Gavin yelped and shifted his armor's arms into a flat plane of a shield that he clapped together just as the blaze hit him. The force of the fire pushed Amity back a bit, forcing her to dig her heels in to keep from sliding backward on the cobbles, and it put even more pressure on Gavin. But more than that, the clay of his shield started to melt away from the intensity of the heat.
Amity only cut off the stream of fire when she began to gasp with the effort, her bile sac quickly diminishing. She cut off the flow and took a rattling breath to settle her heart rate. As the fires dimmed and died, it revealed a pile of melted, useless Abomination clay … and Gavin standing there covered in sweat, part of his face lightly burned, and covered from head to toe in a thin layer of the remaining clay.
"Not good enough," he said, his breaths heavy with effort. He traced another spell that had his suit glowing with magic and charged with unnatural speed.
Amity traced a circle of her own that had an arm of Abomination matter burst from the ground to knock him aside as she spun out of his path, the motions added together to keep him just off of her. Another spell and the arm melted and reformed around her fist to augment her own, and the power of her magic amplified her right hook to plow into his armored chest and send him reeling.
"You want to be a knight in your armor?" Amity asked, tracing a larger circle that had her Abomination melting again and growing as it flowed behind Gavin. "You're forgetting a steed!" Gavin looked at her with dazed confusion before a shadow fell over him and he looked up to find the shape of a Diomede — a flesh-eating beast demon that Luz had compared to a red-skinned fanged "horse" from the human realm — rearing with a hideous cry to fall over him and reform into a trap.
Amity slowly backed away, muscles tensed, as the circular prison that entrapped Gavin bulged and flexed under his obvious attempts to escape. She felt his struggles and sensed the tear he made that let his head out to gasp for breath — and she traced a final spell that had the dome strike out as solidified spikes that lanced all around him, inches from his flesh.
The message was clear: I let you live.
"Yield, Gavin," Amity said firmly.
Gavin trembled with clear terror at how close he had come to death. "I yield," he said weakly, and Amity traced a circle that had her Abomination return to the jar at her belt that vanished with a purple glow.
"Well, it seems we have a winner!" Darius crowed to the cheers and shouts of the crowd. "My own apprentice, the Amethyst Artisan. As if there was any doubt at all!" He approached the witchlings and clapped a hand on Amity's shoulder. "Well done, girl. Well done!"
Amity shrugged off the contact and approached Gavin, drawing just near enough to not encroach on his personal space. Part of her reveled in the cheers of the crowd, but she locked that part away and focused on Gavin, on his hollow, disappointed purple eyes. They shined with unshed tears and he turned his head away.
"I know what it's like," she said quietly, "not being good enough for an uncaring parent." He looked back at her, his eyes suddenly wide with shock. She tilted her head back at Darius, who was still pandering to the crowd, going on and on about the duel. "He's not worth it." She sighed. "I've learned lately that there are people who won't make you feel worthless," — she flashed back to Hunter in that cave when he tried to comfort her, when she said these exact words.
She took hold of her mask and shifted it to bear one side of her face. "You just have to let yourself meet them." She replaced the mask and nodded, turning away to walk up to Darius and stand neutrally beside him, her stance rigid and uncaring. She watched as Gavin summoned a staff topped with an anteater to mount it and fly away, but not before casting a pensive glance at the Amethyst Artisan.
Amity blinked behind her mask as she felt her scroll vibrate, tracing a quick circle to summon it and find a message from Luz via Willow: Saw the whole thing! You were AWESOME! Meet at the house later?
She smiled and messaged back with a Yes before shunting it away and resuming her stance.
It was almost dark by the time Amity had changed clothes and arrived at the Owl House.
She sighed heavily and hopped off her staff to let Ghost return to her true shape. She scooped the cat up and tucked her under her arm, scratching the palisman's head as she approached. Hooty greeted her very quietly, and she snorted at the memory of beating the house demon to a pulp. His role in getting her and Luz together had earned him some slack, but she was happy to see he wouldn't push it.
The door swung open to reveal Eda, King, Luz, Willow, and Gus in the living room, and Amity heard Hooty extend to join the group. "So what's going on?" Amity asked.
Everyone traded wary glances before Luz replied, "You might want to take a seat."
When she did, taking Luz's hand in her own out of reflex, they all took turns explaining their most recent situation. Boscha guessing that Hunter was the Golden Guard, Amelia being strong-armed into spying for her, her talk with Jerbo, and their further talk with the Owl House group and the Troublemakers. They went on to explain the plan to throw Boscha off the trail.
"Think you can do it?" Luz asked.
"Make an Abomination with Hunter's measurements?" Amity clarified. She thought it over for a moment and nodded. "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I could."
"Figured as much," Eda smirked. "The real problem is when we pull this off."
"What do you mean?" Willow asked.
"We'd need a pretty public place to pull off this scam," Eda explained. "One where it wouldn't be suspicious for the Golden Guard to be out in public where Willow and the fake Hunter could be seen."
"But wouldn't that cause the guy problems later?" King asked from his spot in Luz's lap. "I mean, if Belos sees footage of this — which there would definitely be in a public place — it would mean that someone knows who he really is."
Everyone looked at King in shock before trading more glances.
"So a big public appearance of the Golden Guard is out," Gus surmised. "Any other ideas?"
Willow perked up as she felt her scroll vibrate and summoned it to find a message from Hunter himself. Saw Amity's witch's duel on my scroll. Is she doing okay? Tell her the EC is super impressed. Heard a few scouts wishing she was one of us.
Willow giggled and messaged back that she'd deliver the compliment, then messaged again about their little situation with Boscha.
"So what's Hunter think?" Luz asked, her chin perched on her hand and her lips curled in a sly smile. Everyone else was watching, too.
"He says that the Emperor's scouts were impressed by Amity's duel today," Willow reported. "He says they wish she was one of them."
"Well that's ironic," Amity chuckled. "Hard pass." Everyone laughed and Willow felt another message come through. She adjusted her glasses and read closely, a sly smile of her own growing.
"Does he have an idea?" Eda asked.
"Better," Willow reported. "He has a plan." She showed the message to everyone else and they all looked at each other with devious grins.
"This is gonna be so much better than the parade thing," Luz commented.
"Parade?" Amity asked.
"Yeah," she said sheepishly. "I figured when we said 'public appearance' that we were gonna have the Golden Guard appear in a parade and have Willow and fake-Hunter make an appearance. Then when Boscha freaks out, all of our friends pounce to hold her down and the G.G. orders her to be arrested or whatever."
Everyone looked at her with varying amounts of amusement, confusion, and exasperation.
"But this is better," Luz added, tenting her fingers to try and reclaim the lost air of conspiracy.
Chapter fourteen, everybody! This one is has been long-planned and was a blast to write!
*Argil is an archaic word for clay. I thought it sounded cool for the base substance of Abominations, which we have little to no canon information on.
*I imagine that the Troublemakers were near the bottom of the social ladder when they were in the detention track and, though they've improved somewhat, Boscha still derides them because she's just that kind of a bitch.
*Luz's exclamation in Spanish is google translated to roughly mean, "Oh come on! when it rains, it pours!"
*The rigid and fluid formations are all my head canon. I think it's a fun comparison.
*Gavin's command of "forearm" can mean two things. It's the part of the arm between the elbow and wrist, but it can also mean "arm before [the fight]" and is an archaic way to say "put on armor" - which is what it does.
*I've been eager to write the Abomination flamethrower for ages!
*A "diomede" that Amity based her Abomination on - the move inspired by Amity's "wave" move against Hunter in Eclipse Lake - is based upon and named after the Mares of Diomedes, flesh-eating horses that were Heracles/Hercules's eighth labor.
*I was originally going to have Amity publicly chew Darius out for being a bad father, but figured that A) Amity wouldn't out Gavin like that anymore, and B) It would destroy her position as Darius's apprentice and hence her position on the inside of the coven system. So I had her quietly try to support Gavin.
*Luz's comment about doing the trick during a parade was based on my original plan for the upcoming chapter, but I soon realized it was way too big and sized it down to something I was more comfortable with. It was also devised long before we learned about the Coven Day Parade.
This chapter was very fun to write! I really hope you all enjoyed it! As always, reviews are welcome with open arms. May your own projects unfold smoothly and with the most fun possible...!