If there was any holiday that truly united witches all across the Boiling Isles, it was none other than the great Samhain Festival. One of the few traditions of the Savage Ages that weren't eliminated from the Boiling Isles when Emperor Belos took over, the Samhain Festival was when all the witches got together to celebrate a fruitful harvest, one that produced plenty of food and only had a small number of the population devoured by Promethean bobbitt worms. It was a time of celebration, a time of merriment, and more importantly, it was a time for family.
For Lilith Clawthorne, it would be the most important Samhain Festival in decades, for it would be the first one she would be celebrating with her sister since they were separated by the consequences of Lilith's envy and hubris. Ideally, she would have preferred it if they could have gotten back to that point without the truth of her actions being revealed and Eda and herself losing the ability to use magic like normal witches, but she deserved it, and she had long since accepted that it was an appropriate sacrifice for being able to have a relationship with Eda again. Not only did she have that again, but she even had a whole new family in the colorful cast of outcasts and misfits who called the Owl House home; it was still an odd sensation to put herself among them, but it was what it was.
"Come on, Luz, we don't have all day!" Eda said, yelling at the shut door to Luz's room.
"I feel stupid, though," Luz said from behind the door.
"Stupider than when you were wearing that vampireface getup you walked in with?" King asked.
"You all said this holiday was like Halloween, so sorry if I thought dressing up as a monster—sorry, a demonic individual—was okay! I mean, what kind of fun can you have just by dressing up like humans, anyway?"
"Well, what kind of fun can you have just by dressing up like the demonically inclined?" Lilith asked, not bothering to get up from the couch to talk to her for reasons beyond the couch being her bed for the last several months. Luz let out a groan in response. Lilith didn't understand what was so hard to understand about it all. A proud tradition of the Samhain Festival was children dressing up in costumes for their own amusement, and since humans were the most mysterious of creatures to witches, of course, they dressed up like them.
"Luz, you're going to look fine, and we're going to have a great time at the dance, but that can't happen until you come out." Even Amity had gotten into the spirit as she waved around a wooden bat while wearing her old Grudgby facepaint and some white-colored, unisex athletic wear with her name on the back and a backwards cap on her head; Lilith believed that it was the uniform for a human sport called "luge". It would have been hard to imagine the Amity of just a few months ago dressing up as a loogie, or whatever the right terminology was, but Lilith wasn't the only person who had been changed by Luz and the rest of the people of the Owl House. Although, it was easy to imagine why Luz, specifically, would have had such an influence on Amity.
"Okay, okay, I'm coming out." The door swung open, and out stepped Luz in her human costume. Luz was holding a briefcase in one hand, her hair was slicked back like in the Grom pictures Amity accidentally forwarded to her, and she was wearing heels and a gray skirt on her lower half and, on her top half, a white shirt with suspenders and a purple tie with pictures of a cat skull patterned across it. "Well, do I look especially boring?"
"I wouldn't be caught dead with you, so it's a winner for me," Eda said. Lilith could see Amity nodding enthusiastically at the sight of Luz and just sighed with resignation.
"Yep. Came in dressed like a vampire, and now I'm a lawyer or something. I can make it work, though." Lilith rolled her eyes as Luz gave her best impression of an adult woman and said, "'Your honor, my opponent is badgering the witness, and I would like to request that you make him stop.' Ugh, I wanna punch myself in the face. I'm just gonna go in my street clothes."
"Don't. You. Dare," Amity said, pointing her luge bat at Luz while wearing the kind of smile that said things she didn't know she was fully comfortable with.
"Right, I forget boring stuff works on you. Okay, um," With a wider smile on her face, Luz did her impression again and said, "'I know that a surprise witness is highly unorthodox, but he is a credible source for proving my client's innocence, and as this state has no official law prohibiting a surprise witness, his testimony should be allowed to stand.'"
"You bet it should." Amity sounded uncomfortably delighted when she said that.
"'I object to that last remark, and I ask you, good people of the jury, to not fall for my opponent's words. They are nothing but pure, unadulterated, chicanery.'" It took Luz a few seconds to say that last word, almost as if it took her a while to come up with the word. Regardless, Amity dropped her luge bat while whispering something along the lines of "Oh, mama" and picked it back up with a face dyed crimson. The only solace Lilith could take in it all was that Eda and King seemed annoyed by the whole exchange, as well.
"You seemed smarter than this when I met you," Lilith said.
"Thank you," Amity said, spontaneously regaining her composure. "So, Luz, still feel stupid?"
"Not any more than usual, but hey, who am I to go against tradition, right? The ones that have a chance to be fun, anyway," Luz said. "Speaking of which, what kind of stuff do adults and demons do for the Samhain Festival?"
"Try to amass an army of the damned," King said.
"Get drunk off apple blood to forget my troubles," Eda said.
"Don't you two do that every day, though?" Amity asked.
"That wasn't the question." Lilith would have said something about it if her new status quo didn't make her see the benefits in that kind of activity.
"What about you, Lilith? You have any Samhain traditions? I know you've basically been by yourself since you joined the Emperor's Coven, so did you do anything with them?" Lilith was doing her best to stay as uninvolved with the conversation as possible, but the question Luz asked of her was one that actually made her remember something good about her past life. It even inspired her to stand up from the couch for the first time in three days.
"Well, since you're asking about it, the Emperor's Coven did have a little tradition for the holiday called the Samhain Swindle," Lilith said. "Every year, we would take a relic out of evidence and put it on display in the middle of the office where everyone could see, and everyone who was on duty would try and do whatever they could to steal it. Whoever managed to hold onto it until midnight would win a week's paid vacation and a trophy that says 'Ultimate Witch/Genius'; I voted against the trophy, but the majority out ruled me on that."
"Wow, that sounds like a ton of fun!" Amity rolled her eyes at that, for whatever reason.
"Yes, it was fun, wasn't it? Working in the Emperor's Coven was nothing but paperwork and chasing down criminals who didn't deserve it three times out of ten, but I guess that was something about being there that was actually fun, even in hindsight." A part of her wanted to say that it made her miss being in the Emperor's Coven, but that seemed like it was better left unsaid.
"How fun could it have been to always lose, though?" Eda asked, the question replacing all feelings of nostalgia with feelings of annoyance.
"Excuse me? What did you just say, Edalyn?"
"Don't act like you didn't hear me. How much fun could someone like you have possibly had with something like that when you'd only ever lose year after year?"
"I'll have you know, Edalyn, that I won every single year I was able to participate." There were a few seconds of silence before Eda started laughing uncontrollably. "It's true! Tell her, Amity!"
"She's not lying. Lilith always won the Swindle whenever she was free to compete. Not that I have any personal experience with that, since she never let me participate," Amity said. Luz patted her on the back, for whatever reason, but Lilith wouldn't have cared, even if she wasn't in the middle of being mad at Eda.
"I feel like that says more about the Emperor's Coven than it does about you," King said.
"No, it says a lot about me, in particular that I am a brilliant mastermind," Lilith said.
"Sure you are, Lily. Sure you are," Eda said, bits of laughter still peppering her speech here and there. "If you're such a brilliant mastermind, then where was all of that for the twenty-plus whatever years you failed to take me in, huh?"
"I-It's always been there! It's just that the kind of skills needed for the Swindle are different from the kind of skills needed for taking in people like you!"
"So they're ineffective and pointless, then? Got it."
"Our moms are fighting. What do we do?" Luz whispered to Amity. Amity whispered something inaudible, and Lilith did her best to ignore it.
"But you know what, Lily? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you winning all those times that you did shows some real skill on your part. However, it doesn't change the fact that if you were competing with someone just as good as you, if not better, then you'd lose every single time."
"And when you say that, you mean yourself, yes?"
"Bingpot. Even without my regular magic, I bet I could out-Swindle you any day of the week."
"Isn't this the only day where that would matter, though?" King asked.
"Incorrect, King," Lilith said. "It will matter every single day for the next year as I continually mock Edalyn for her failure to defeat me and for handing me undeniable proof that I am the supreme Swindler!"
"Oh, I guess it's on, then!" It was, indeed, on. It was more on that Eda could possibly imagine.
"This sounds like fun. Can I get in on it?" Luz asked.
"Nope. Just go swap spit at your dance, kid."
"I can do that anytime, though. Please? This sounds like it's going to be really fun."
"Yes, it will be fun when I tear Lily a new one, but this is just between the two of us, so go do something else."
"Fine." Luz let out a dejected sigh as her shoulders fell into a slump.
"Don't make a big thing out of this, Luz," Lilith said. "I never let Amity join in on the Swindle, and she's always been fine with that. Right, Amity?"
"We're going to the dance, now. Bye," Amity said, pulling Luz out of the Owl House by her wrist. Odd that she didn't answer her question, but there were bigger things to worry about now, like where she would display whatever they'd use as a trophy after defeating Eda.
"Do I have to leave, too? I kind of want to see you two try and destroy each other," King said.
"Yeah, stay. It'll be nice to have a witness for Lily's slaughter," Eda said.
"But not as nice as it'll be to have someone watch me reduce Edalyn to the pile of filth that she is," Lilith said.
With that all being said, the Samhain Swindle was on.
A short story that combines two of my newest obsessions into one. Enjoy the ride.