I've been gone for a while. Not denying that. I just had a hard time getting this one to flow naturally. First off, a shoutout to an icon of my childhood. Rest in Peace, Jason David Frank. The Green Ranger, the Red Ranger, and when I first got to know him, Dr. Tommy Oliver, the Black Ranger.


"Not much happened after the Owl Beast incident for a few days," Luz continued. "The next exciting thing I can remember was the Covention," Camila could see Amity in the corner of her eye, growing visibly nervous. It was clear she'd be involved in this one, and that she probably wasn't a friend of Luz's by this point. "It started with Gus and Willow coming up to the stand Eda was operating and telling me there was something amazing happening,"

"The Covention was that day, where student witches see all the different covens before they're placed in one," Willow explained. "Gus and I were so excited to see all the different covens back then," Gus looked away, he and Willow having the same thought. "We were so naive back then,"

"Eda didn't want to go but I...talked her into it," Luz added, smirking. Camila raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. If it was important, it would come up eventually. "I had to learn more about the coven system in that world and this seemed like the best choice since I wasn't in school there,"

"You mentioned covens before," Camila interrupted. "What are they?"

"Covens are how witches are sorted throughout the Boiling Isles," Willow explained. "Each coven specializes in a specific type of magic, as do all the witches in it,"

"For example, I've always been gifted at illusions," Gus cut in, putting a hand to his own chest. He spun a spell circle from each hand, changing his face to now have a goatee on it. "Meaning, I would be a great fit for the Illusionist Coven," Camila, growing used to these illusions, inspected the facial hair. It had all the appearance of real hair, but it looked unnatural on the young boy. Vee leaned in too, scrutinizing Gus's form change.

"Not bad, but I could do better," she challenged. Suddenly, she grew a large mustache, growing out until each side was as long as her arm. Once it was long enough, they twisted themselves into the actual shape of arms, with hands and fingers intricately woven in. Once they were completed, Vee flexed her… mustache. Gus giggled, admiring her attempt to one-up him.

"That is impressive," he admitted, a sly smile on his face, "but can you bring us to a beach like I have?" This question was met with confusion from everyone present, until they suddenly noticed the walls around them gradually faded away, slowly revealing a clear-blue sky along the ceiling and sandy shores beneath their feet. Behind Camila, there was an expanse of blue, ocean stretching as far as the eye could see.

"I… can't do that," Vee agreed, no longer sporting her bicep mustache. She didn't notice, but she had a cream colored spot left on her cheek. Gus let out a breath, letting go of the illusion he had cast.

"Tell me more about these covens," Camila requested, urging the story on.

"The Illusion Coven is one of the main nine," Hunter said, drawing on a piece of paper he had nearby. "The other eight would be Bard, Healing, Beast Keeping, Oracle, Construction, Potions, and of course…" he trailed off, hinting for another to continue.

"The Abomination Coven," Amity said, making a miniature abomination in her hand.

"And the Plant Coven," Willow concluded, making a rose bloom from the palm of her hand. Camila took all this in, listening carefully to the story. Hunter finished drawing on the paper and showed Camila the symbols for each of the ten covens.

"While they're not counted among the main covens, the most powerful coven was the Emperor's Coven," Hunter added, pointing to the last symbol on the paper. "They're the only coven allowed to use all types of magic,"

"Interesting," Camila said. "If there are main covens, what are the other covens?"

"There are hundreds of smaller covens, each one is a small branch of the main nine," Willow explained. "For example, the Flower, Forestry, and Farming Covens are all branches of the Plant Coven. The Big Dog, Small Cat, and Tiniest Cat Covens are all part of the Beast Keeping Coven."

"A coven I think you would be interested in was the Beast Healers," Hunter added. "It's a branch of the Healing Coven that works specifically with the animals of the Isles,"

"That sounds nice, Hunter," Camila answered, "but I think I'd prefer the technology we have in the Human Realm over magic. No offense," Hunter shrugged, as did the other witches.

"The Emperor's Coven was also doing an exhibition that day, even having a mystery guest," Amity added. "That's roughly where I bumped into Luz. Or… she bumped into me,"

"You're getting a little ahead, Amity," Gus said.

"Right, sorry, I wasn't there for most of this story, so I was just jumping ahead,"

"When I heard about the Emperor's Coven show and my friends ran ahead to get Gus's forehead signed, I wanted to check it out and see what they were like," Luz continued. "Eda wanted to refuse since, in her words, of all the covens, they're the worst. She only agreed to watch because some of the guards were onto her,"

"Now I wonder what I looked like with the words, 'Emperor's Coven' written on my forehead," Gus commented. "Probably a total poser,"

"Like this?" his voice said, but not from him. He looked up and saw himself with his clothes from the Boiling Isles, the Emperor's Coven written on his forehead in black ink. She'd tried posing like the Thinker, going for a fake dignified pose. The image made Gus giggle, enough that he didn't feel like correcting her that they'd used white ink to autograph him and that he used to be even shorter than he was now.

"So, the Emperor's Coven was showing off their magic," Willow continued, patting Gus on the back as Vee transformed back. "The mystery guest was about to show themselves. We were guessing some high ranking official, but we weren't expecting the Coven Head herself."

"Lilith Clawthorne," Amity finished. "She was one of the youngest witches ever to become head of the Emperor's Coven. She excelled in all types of magic and had been considered the best witch of our time… next to the emperor,"

"She's also Eda's sister," Luz added, surprising Camila. "Yeah, there's a lot of baggage there. As soon as Eda saw Lilith, she decided to leave the Covention as soon as she could and just after we split up, I accidentally walked into Amity, literally," Amity smiled at the memory before suddenly looking ashamed, no doubt remembering what happened next. "I figured since it had been a little while since the abomination incident, it was a good time to start over and apologize,"

"And I was pretty good at holding on to grudges so that didn't work too well," Amity admitted sheepishly. "I was still upset about being in trouble with Principal Bump and I just wanted to get away from Luz, even trying to shoo her away since she wasn't a witch."

"And I told her I was learning to be one from a powerful witch and a ferocious demon. Then King came by wearing a bunch of free merchandise from all the covens and eating a cupcake," Amity visibly became more ashamed when the cupcake was mentioned. "He was showing me all his offerings when he tripped and dropped his cupcake. While I was helping him up, Amity… squished his cupcake," Silence followed the statement, some of the teenagers gauging Camila's reaction. Unexpectedly, it was Vee who broke the silence.

"Well that was rude," she commented.

"Vee," Camila said, admonishing the basilisk.

"No, she's right, it was," Amity said. "I wasn't my best self at this point. Come to think of it, I never even apologized to King,"

"If it makes you feel any better, he spent the whole night after you went to Eclipse Lake talking about how cool you were," Luz offered, making Amity blush slightly. She turned back to her mom and Vee. "So, I was… irked about the cupcake and did what Azura would do: challenged her to a witch's duel,"

"You challenged her to a duel," Camila repeated, prompting Luz to nod. "And this duel would involve Amity using magic to fight you." Another nod from Luz. "And your only spell made a ball of light," Luz nodded again. "And knowing you, you did this without thinking it through," Luz hesitated, giving her mother a small instant of hope, but she nodded. Camila sighed. "Please tell me that witch's duels weren't a real thing,"

"They are completely real," Hunter stated simply. "They're a test to narrow down the number of entries into the Emperor's Coven,"

"And generally are a way to handle legal disputes," Gus added.

"They're usually a trial by combat, to put it simply," Luz summarized.

"And you challenged Amity to one," Camila said.

"It seemed like a good idea for about forty-five seconds," Luz argued weakly. "It took that long for us to set the stakes,"

"What were the stakes?" Hunter asked.

"I demanded that she apologized to King for squishing the cupcake and admit that humans can be witches too,"

"And I told her she had to stop training forever," Amity added sheepishly.

"Why make her promise that?" Hunter asked.

"Back then, I had thought her trying to practice magic had given witches a bad name," Amity avoided making eye contact with anyone, keeping her head down. "I've practiced and practiced to exceed every expectation I'd been given. Yet someone who's supposedly unable to perform any magic could just call herself a witch. I just wanted her to stop at the time. I even bound her with an everlasting oath." Amity stopped, taking a deep breath, exhaling slowly. "Look, can we just skip to a part where I wasn't there?"

"Amity, you left after that," Luz reminded her. "You told me to meet you inside the theater an hour later and I ran to find Eda as soon as the realization of what I'd just agreed to had hit me,"

"You agreed to an everlasting oath?" Gus asked. "That could have been bad,"

"What's an everlasting oath, anyway?" Camila asked.

"To put it simply, I could not physically try to train in magic ever again if Amity won the duel," Luz explained. "If I did it anyway, my hand would be in excruciating pain to remind me of my promise,"

"That's barbaric," Camila commented.

"That's why it's not a common practice on the isles anymore," Amity agreed. "I only know the spell because my mother taught me it," Amity looked away from Camila, taking a mental note to reexamine how immoral individual practices Odalia had taught her could be. Luz knew Amity would want to steer the conversation away from Odalia so she quickly continued.

"I went to find Eda and started panicking because I knew Amity was way better at magic than I was and she could possibly… unalive me," Luz said hesitantly before turning to Amity. "Not that she would, even back then. I was just too freaked out by everything. I found Eda talking to Lilith and just blurted everything out. Lilith made fun of me for being human and removed Eda's wanted posters just so we could have the duel, considering Lilith had trained Amity," Luz paused. "Now that I think about it, that never came up again for as long as I've known you,"

"Not long after the Covention, she said there was a task she needed to complete for the Emperor's Coven so all training was postponed until she finished," she explained. "She gave me a lot of homework to do while she was gone. Practice each spell she'd taught us before going to bed every night and my mother made sure I did it,"

"A task she needed to complete," Luz repeated. "And this was shortly before the two month period of Lilith continually trying to arrest Eda and bind her to the Emperor's Coven," The other witches nodded, each remembering Lilith's persistence in her goals. Luz turned back to her mom. "Lilith removed Eda's wanted posters for one day to prove that she was the better teacher and went to coach Amity before the duel. Eda took me and told me to prepare for bloodshed,"

"Whose blood?" Hunter asked.

"Her exact answer when I asked was anyone's guess," Luz answered. "She tried to coach me by asking me what I would do if she came at me with a blast of fire. These days, I would make an ice wall to block, then wrap her up in vines. Or catch it with a fire glyph in hand and throw it back, twice as strong, but since I had none of those glyphs, my only option was to play dead and hope for the best,"

"Would catching a fire ball with a fire glyph actually work?" Hunter asked.

"I don't actually know for sure," she admitted. "I came up with the idea while thinking of a show I liked watching on Earth. It technically uses the water element principle of taking anything thrown at you and returning it with your own force added, but that show made a good point of using wisdom from more than one element."

"I must watch this show," Gus declared.

"I will add The Final Windwarper to the list of shows to watch along with War of the Warlocks," Luz agreed. "There's a character in that show I think Hunter would really identify with. Willow too. And Amity. Actually, Vee might too, if you think about it,"

"Okay, so before you had any of those options, you were confined to surrender," Camila said, trying to get everyone back on track.

"Eda had to come up with a new plan because, let's be honest, the me from four and a half months ago couldn't take Amity in a one-on-one fight." Luz said. "She was a top student at Hexside for a reason,"

"It only took me a week or two to get the badge back, but I stopped wearing it," Amity said. "I couldn't help but feel a bit of shame in how I conducted myself and just kept it in my bag instead,"

"She didn't tell me what it was until we were in the stadium," Luz continued. "To this day, I will never know when she'd prepared the plan, but she hid several magic landmines under mounds on the sandy ground. She told me to get Amity to step on one of them and to everyone around us, it'll look like I was performing magic. That didn't sit right with me. I wanted to win a duel fair and square,"

"You were okay with cheating in a school project," Vee interjected, "but cheating in a magic duel where you could be crushed by a gigantic pile of… whatever abominations are made of… was where you drew the line?"

"Cheating on a school project is different from cheating in a duel," Luz argued. "School's supposed to prepare you for the future. Bringing notes or getting help from piers should be the standard but it's not. Getting help to prepare for a witch's duel is kind of like that, but cheating during the duel wouldn't let me feel like a winner. If Amity knew about the traps, we could have called it an obstacle and it would have been okay with me,"

"That's… fair, I guess?" Vee said, unsure.

"I wanted to stop the duel, but by the time I knew, it was too late. We greeted each other and that was the start of the fight. Amity summoned an abomination three times our height and while I wish I could say that I stood my ground, I ran in the opposite direction until my back was to the wall,"

"It was the biggest abomination I'd ever summoned," Amity added. "In hindsight, that should have been the hint of what happened later," Camila wondered what she meant, but kept quiet, knowing it would come up when it needed to be said.

"Luz, some advice for the next time you get in a fight," Hunter said, "try to show your back as little as possible. It'll make it easier to dodge whatever comes at you if you can see it,"

"Yeah, I only dodged the one attack out of sheer luck," she agreed. "I just wasn't good under pressure and it got me cornered against a wall. I just barely noticed the mound of sand the abomination was about to step on which probably saved me. It was a giant blast of fire under that one and it blew away Amity's abomination. When she asked me how I did it, the only answer I could think of was 'Uh, magic?"

"At this point, King came up behind me and Willow with more free stuff," Gus said. "He asked what he missed and I felt a boost of confidence from the fire blast. I told him Luz could win and he just gave me a confused 'Weh?"

"Weh?" Vee repeated, confused.

"I don't think any of us have mentioned, but King say weh pretty much all the time." Luz explained. "Sometimes as a battle cry, sometimes it's when he's confused, when he's happy, it's just a sound he makes,"

"Do you know where it comes from?" Vee asked.

"As far as I can tell, it's an instinct that comes from his species," Luz said, not fully answering the question. Hopefully, no one asks what species of demon he was until she could tell them. "I kept staying away from the abomination and it stepped on another trap, causing a wind gust to knock both Amity and the abomination off their feet. This time she knew I didn't use my hands so there was something going on. This kept happening for a little bit until she started walking toward me herself. I saw her about to step on a mine and tried to stop her from stepping any closer. And she questioned me, saying, 'Why, Luz? What happens if I step closer?' And I might have answered that Eda rigged the field with traps and called off the duel if I could. But King fell on the trap and set it off. It was a spike trap."

"Spikes?!" Camila shouted incredulously.

"My word exactly," Luz agreed. "I asked her about it later and she said that it was a dirt spike spell. Great for ripping up abominations, only good at getting people's skin dirty, since they'll crumble the second a living person touches them. It's why King only got pinned up by his shirts," Camila calmed down. "It still tore up the clothes when I pulled King off of them, but he didn't need them anyway."

"I may have already been suspicious about Luz cheating, but the spikes shooting out when King hit the ground made it certain," Amity continued. "Lilith walked over and inspected them herself and knew her sister's handiwork when saw it, declaring that she lost," She looked over to Luz, who seemed to be remembering the events that happened next as well. "Luz tried to explain herself, but I wasn't willing to listen. I didn't know her at all and she'd been cheating in our duel so I walked away. But Eda stopped me, seeing something no one else had seen," Amity rubbed her neck, remembering the trick Lilith had pulled. "She peeled off a power glyph from the back of my neck,"

"Another glyph?" Camila asked.

"It's similar to mine, but not something I can use," Luz explained. "While it's imbued with power from another witch, it's still activated by the internal magic of the user. If I'd put some time and practice into it, maybe I could have worked out a way to use it regardless, but I actually kind of forgot about it until now,"

"The Construction Coven excels in making them," Hunter continued. "They use it to increase their physical strength exponentially and can build entire houses single-handed."

"Since they rely on another witch's power and can increase the power of any spell, they've been banned from official duels," Willow added, "which is the reason why it shocked the entire audience who was watching,"

"I didn't know Lilith planted it on me," Amity said dejectedly. "And when Eda pulled it off and announced it to the entire Covention, I was mortified,"

"Yeah, Eda probably could have handled that better," Luz agreed. "She was just so happy that Lilith, who was supposedly the perfect child and never-do-wrong type of person would cheat. She even did a happy dance while Lilith defended herself by saying she knew Eda would cheat, but Eda brushed it off, saying, 'Welcome down to my level.' Amity ran off around this point and I don't know completely what happened at that point,"

"Eda kept annoying Lilith with her bragging and even started to rhyme just to provoke her," Gus explained. "It only took about twenty seconds for Lilith to attack Eda,"

"No one can get under someone's skin as well as their sibling," Amity said sadly, remembering the twins. "I ran off and hid in a dark corner. I was too ashamed to show my face for the time and just wanted everyone to stay away from me, but Luz followed me. I tried to get her to leave me alone, but we all know Luz,"

"She'd feel responsible even though it wasn't her fault and do anything to help you," Camila summarized. Amity nodded.

"I tried to make her go away and told her off for thinking she could just call herself a witch, but she only stayed calm and showed me her glyph magic for the first time," Luz smiled, showing another drawing of a light glyph. "And I immediately stopped yelling at her. I tried to dismiss it still by arguing that a child could do a light spell, but I couldn't argue against seeing it cast through paper,"

"I told her that I'd been training hard to be a witch, that I can't do magic naturally like she could, so I had to improvise my own method," Luz continued. "She made another spell circle and unbound our oath,"

"I tried holding onto my beliefs that humans couldn't do magic, but I also had a feeling that something as trivial as an everlasting oath would stop her," Amity said. "So I just let her off the hook,"

"I definitely would have practiced magic anyway," Luz agreed. "Amity left just as King caught up to us from the arena and he gave me a tote bag so he could ride inside it,"

"That sounds like something King would do," Willow commented, smiling at her memories of the small demon.

"Eda caught up after her fight with Lilith and said we had to go, but the events of the day and my conversation with Amity were nagging at me. I stopped and asked if she thought I'd ever be a true witch," Amity looked regretful. She remembered the things she'd said and while they both may have glossed over the particulars, she was trying to kill any ideas of ever being a witch from Luz's head. She'd been purposely causing as much self-doubt as possible in a girl who'd only treated her with kindness whenever they met. "She answered in a truly Eda fashion. She asked me who a true witch was. According to everyone else, that meant joining a coven but she never joined one and she was better than all of them combined. I have to be my own witch,"

"It's funny how you get pretty good life advice from someone who is the most wanted criminal in their world," Camila commented, making Luz smile.

"We took off and Eda told me about Lilith being her sister," Luz finished.

"And Gus and I took off once we realized Luz was gone," Willow added, before turning to Hunter. "Were you there too?"

"I actually had to take Lilith's work for the day so she could lead the demonstration," he said. "I traced down a few witches and reported their locations to other members of the coven. I still wasn't ready to hunt down wild witches myself, according to Belos," Willow nodded.

"So, that wraps up the Covention," Luz said. "What was the next important thing that happened?" Gus thought for a second before recalling.

"I think it was the Moonlight Conjuring,"


While I wouldn't call this one impressive, by any means, I hope the next couple will get some ideas flowing. This felt so awkward to write in so many places, I had to backtrack and rewrite a lot of it. About eighty percent of this replaced something else that I'd had to backtrack on. I won't promise that I'll get the next one out soon, but it should be a little easier for me to write at the very least.