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Raine dies in her arms, and all Eda can do is watch.
It’s a strange thing, really. First all she really feels is pain, because she is dying too, her curse strong and fast but not fast enough to counter the draining spell killing her.
And then Raine – sweet, kind Raine who deserves so much better than this – takes her hand and smiles. They’re in pain, they’re suffering, and still they look at Eda with warmth in their eyes.
“I promised… a special kid… that I’d protect you.”
And then Eda doesn’t feel pain anymore, doesn’t feel her arm because it’s gone but the pain is nothing compared to watching the one she loves fall in her arms, unmoving.
“Raine?” she calls, voice smaller than she remembers it ever being. They don’t even stir.
Minutes pass, but all Eda can do is watch as the people with whom she spent her childhood with suffer, their magic draining away. All she can do is wait for them to move, to get up.
They don’t.
And, once Eda gathers enough courage to raise her head and look around, she realizes that no one can.
The silence is the worst.
Eda doesn’t how much time passes, mind numb as the bodies of her friends and enemies surround her. But this, she notices. The silence is loud, heavy like the one after a scream cut short.
This must be the sound of death. Eda cannot think of anything else to call this terrible silence. For a long time, this silence surrounds her, traps her in her own mind, until soft steps manage to reach her ears. A shadow looms over her.
“Get up.”
The voice sounds distant, as if coming from a dream, but Eda still raises her head.
A girl is standing before her, one rather young, though not as young as Luz. Closer to Katya’s age, or Morton’s. In her twenties maybe. Still a kid in Eda’s eyes, someone who should never live through what they are fighting.
(What they were fighting, at least. They lost, after all.)
“Get up.” the girl repeats. Her voice is firm, but Eda notes that her hands are shaking despite the tight grip the kid has on her palisman, and there are tear marks on her pale face. Her wrists are devoid of any sigil, and her hair is a very bright red, a kind that Eda has never seen before. It should be beautiful, but all it reminds her of is blood.
“What?” Eda manages to croak out, and instinctively her arms tighten around Raine’s corpse. The girl notices, and clenches her fists. There’s something like pity in her eyes, though closer to empathy, but Eda doesn’t bother wondering who the kid lost. It’d be easier to ask who she hasn’t.
“Get up.” the girl repeats, voice softer but just as firm.
“Why?
The girl swallows, but still her voice doesn’t shake when she answers.
“There are people who need help, everyone’s help.”
Eda lets out a sound akin to a sob and a laugh, shaking her head. “You blind kid? Everyone’s dead. There’s no one to help.”
Her answer seems to anger the kid, who glares at her with furious hazel eyes.
“Not everyone is dead! Kids are still here! We are still here!”
The girl is crying. There’s blood on her hands, from where her nails pierced her skin. She turns away from Eda, looks at the corpses around them – Darius, stupid princely arrogant yet kind Darius and Eberwolf whom she barely had time to know but who her friends loved so much – and swallows. Her eyes are fixed on the place below, and though Eda can’t see it, she knows that the only people down there aren’t breathing anymore.
“There’s so much to do.” the girl whispers, and she walks towards one of the corpses.
Eda follows her with her eyes, still holding the slowly cooling body of Raine in her arms and refusing to get up. Soon enough though, the sound of another set of steps reaches her ears. When Eda turns her head, she sees an old man climbs up until he’s at their level, and the red-haired girl leaves as soon as he arrives, only sparring him a nod and a whisper that Eda can’t hear from where she is.
“Clawthorne,” he calls, tired, before sending a glance to the body in her arms. “And Whispers.”
There’s resignation in his voice, like he was hoping for something but isn’t surprised not to see it. However, there are no tears in his eyes. Eda wonders how many dead he saw while climbing up to this place.
It takes her a while to recognise him: Yunan, an old wild witch who she met in her youth, back when she was nothing but a new wild witch, not yet the infamous criminal that the Emperor’s Coven claimed she was. It feels like forever ago since they crossed path.
“Yunan.” she says, and nothing else. “How is…”
She doesn’t know what she wants to ask, but the old man answers her anyway.
“Only those unmarked survived,” he says, confirming what Eda already knows, “The wild witches and the children are the only survivors.”
Eda opens her mouth, only to close it seconds after.
This is terrible. This is actually the most messed up thing that has ever happened to her, scratch that, to the Boiling Isles.
Wild witches are a minuscule percentage of the population and most of them are older than Eda. She is the only one of her generation, and it has gotten rarer over the years as the fear of the Emperor’s Coven grew in force and influence. It was easier to follow the law, even if it meant losing a part of your magic.
Look where that lead them.
There’s probably some kind of irony to this, to the criminals and outcasts outliving everyone, but as Eda stares into the eyes of the other survivor, she finds nothing but a profound, seemingly endless despair.
“Shit,” she whispers, then again, louder, “Shit.”
Yunan grips his palisman tighter, and she can see his knuckles turn white.
“You need to get up.” he says, echoing the girl from earlier. It would usually make Eda snort, but now she feels nothing.
“Please.” he adds, and he sounds exhausted, “There are so many dead, and so few living.”
Perhaps it’s his voice that does it, so similar to her own father, but Eda gets up.
Her legs wobble, and it takes a few deep breaths to keep herself from looking at Raine. Eda doesn’t want to let them go, even though she knows there’s nothing she can do for them, or for Darius and Eberwolf. She doesn’t need to check their pulse to know there’s none. At least, the image of the girl from before and Yunan’s presence manage to keep her grounded in the present, as horrifying as it is. Right now, there is so much to do that the future is terrifying.
So many dead, an entire civilisation crashing down – where are they supposed to start?
Together, they climb down until she turns a corner and freezes, breath punched out of her. Yunan follows her gaze, and he closes his eyes when he sees what caught her attention.
“Your sister?”
Eda doesn’t answer.
Lilith looks almost peaceful, Hooty wrapped around her, but the house-demon’s loud sobs don’t hide how her chest isn’t rising. Neither is Steve’s, or Katya’s, or Amber’s, or Derwin’s.
It should hurt more than this, but all Eda feels is cold, her lover’s corpse left behind her and the only sight around her being the corpses of her family, friends and strangers.
“So many dead.” she says, and she wonders if it’s the shock of it all that keeps her from falling apart.
She tries to take Hooty, but the house-demon only cries louder, and for once Eda doesn’t have the heart or the strength to oppose. This is his grief, too. At least, she knows that her sister’s body will be safe.
“Shit.” she says, and a sob escapes her, “Shit!”
Yunan grips her elbow, keeping her standing even as her legs shake once again. Eda struggles to stay upright – she has the feeling that if she collapses now, she’ll never get up again.
Eventually, the two wild witches reach the ground. The sight that greets them is enough to
“I should catch up to Soleil,” Yunan whispers, and Eda doesn’t bother asking who he is talking about. “Will you…”
Eda doesn’t answer. She turns away and starts walking through corpses.
The amount of bodies stuns her. When she walks around them, unable to tear her gaze away, she can’t help but notice how warm they are, just like Raine was, still is back with the other dead Head Witches. Some of them seem to just be asleep, eyes closed and face strangely peaceful, while others have their eyes wide awake, terrified and as if pleading for the pain to stop. Her gaze lands on a child’s and it takes everything in her not to throw up.
All dead.
All intact.
No wounds. No blood. Just a mark on their wrist and blind faith in a man that took their lives.
Just a hollow, eerie peace clinging to the corpses like fog.
We lost, Eda thinks, and it’s one thing to know and another to realize how many people they failed, we lost.
For a moment, she is grateful that Raine will never see it.
Eventually, after walking around bodies for what seems like an eternity, she sees movement ahead of her.
The two wild witches – because what else could they be? – must be around their fifties, both women, and they look as in over their heads as Eda feels. They look familiar, people she probably saw on wanted posters, but their names don’t come to mind.
They don’t look surprised to see Eda, and she wonders how many people knew she was a member of the CATTs, and how many of them were members too.
Neither of them bother introducing themselves, only nodding at her as she arrives at their level. Their faces are pale, their eyes wide open, but when one of them starts speaking, her voice doesn’t shake.
“We’re trying to gather the bodies.” she says, “But it’s…”
She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t need to, when their surroundings already give the answers. There are simply too many dead, too many corpses to gather.
They can barely see the ground anymore.
“We’re criminals.” she hears the other woman whispers, the one with a scar marring her chin. “We’re – it should be their family, doing this.”
Eda doesn’t look at her.
“This,” she says, gesturing at the countless other bodies, “is their family.”
No one talks after that. They just start gathering the bodies.
At least, she thinks again, the kids are safe. Away from all these deaths, this disaster, and it’s the only relief she has in the middle of this massacre.
Her kids are safe.
Eda doesn’t know how long it takes, but by the time they manage to create enough vehicles to gather and arrange the bodies in a somewhat decent way, it’s pitch black.
Other wild witches have joined them by then, each covering bodies and creating carts to carry them, though everyone seemed reluctant to actually pile up bodies.
It’s a strange sight to behold, those wild witches working together. Wild witches don’t really keep in contact with each other. When one lives on the run, it’s hard to form a friendship. Eda knew of the other wild witches – most of them had wanted posters, after all – but that didn’t mean they kept in close contact. Most stayed away from towns like Bonesborough, for good reasons. Living near towns would mean living near the Emperor’s influence, and everyone knew what happened to wild witches when they got caught. The only reason Eda managed to live so close was because of her curse and Hooty, with the occasional help from Lilith.
Despite it, Eda still knows some of them. Though the Owl Lady is infamous across the Isles for her curse, she is not the only one to have a reputation.
Yunan is one of them, an old wild witch nearly a century old who once saved her from a trap near the Titan’s toes, back when she was still getting used to the life of a criminal. He is, as far as Eda knows, the only wild witch who was trained by the former Head of the Healing Coven, which made his bounty higher than the average wild witch.
It’s somewhat fitting, for this old healer who first met her when she lost everything, to be the one to meet her at the end of her world.
“EDA!!!”
The cry startles them, the other wild witches immediately gripping their staffs and searching for a threat, but Eda immediately recognizes the voice.
“KING!”
She looks around, looking for her son, when she finally catch sight of Yunan flying on his staff, King with him. Behind them, the red-haired girl from earlier follows at a slower pace.
Yunan doesn’t even have time to land before King is jumping off his staff, sprinting as fast as his little legs can towards his adoptive mother. Eda does the same and scoops him up in her arm as soon as he reaches her.
Her immediate relief at seeing him is soon replaced with unease.
“You’re supposed to be with Luz.” she whispers, suddenly alarmed, “Why aren’t you with the other kids?”
He doesn’t answer. King keeps crying, face hidden in her chest, and a sinking feeling envelops Eda. In front of her, Yunan and the red-haired girl are very pale while the wild witches behind her stare, confused.
It’s the red-haired girl who opens her mouth first.
“We found bodies in the Titan’s Head.” she says, and Eda’s world shatters.
King explains it to her, afterwards.
She wakes up away from the area, closer to the woods with King in her arms and Yunan watching warily a few feet away.
The shock had made her lose control. It had taken almost ten wild witches to get the Owl Beast to calm down, even aided by King. Eventually, her body must have given up, too drained to do anything but collapse as she slowly transformed back into a human.
She should feel bad about it. She was supposed to have the curse under control. Her worst fear had always been to hurt someone while transformed, just like she hurt her dad.
Yet, Eda tightens her grip on King, and feels numb.
Luz is dead. Her kid is dead. All of the kids are dead.
How can she feel anything except despair?
They do, eventually, return to the place where it all fell apart.
It’s been hours, and though the amount of bodies has lessened, it is still far more than what Eda has ever seen in her life. There are more people than before, probably other wild witches who weren’t there before but came to see what happened. It’s still far from enough. Carts have been brought or created, and even though the inside is covered by makeshift roofs, Eda knows they are full of corpses.
She finds Yunan and the red-haired girl near one of the carts carrying bodies and walks up to them.
“The kids.” is all she says, because she cannot bring herself to say more.
There is no pity in Yunan’s eyes, and Eda feels stupidly grateful for it. She thinks that she might break again if someone stares at her as if she’s broken.
(She is, she was already broken and now it feels like she’s turning to dust, and only King’s warm and small body in her arms keeps her from disappearing.)
“Soleil and I put them near the east border of the town.”
Eda wonders if she should ask in what state they are, if they had to cover them up, but she’s doesn’t have the strength for it. She turns away from the two, ready to get what’s left of the kids.
Yunan grabs her arm before she can go.
“Clawthorne.” he says, and his voice is firm. “Don’t do this to yourself. We can take care of them.”
She doesn’t bother answering, simply shrugging off his hand on until another voice interrupts her thoughts.
“Is he your son?”
It’s the girl’s voice, Soleil, watching them with worry and unease, but she points determinedly at King.
She’s trying to distract me, Eda thinks, but she doesn’t have the time to call her out on it before the brat speaks again. Her words punch the air out of her lungs.
“Are you really going to take him to see the corpses of his friends?”
For a moment, white noise is the only thing Eda hears as her brain desperately tries to understand the words.
Corpses, children’s corpses, and King is so small against her, a little Titan who will outlive the few survivors of this dreadful place.
He’s already seen the corpses of his own kind on that island where Eda couldn’t protect him, he walks on his father’s dead body every day.
She cannot do this to him.
“Eda?” King whispers, and she is brutally reminded that for all her losses, her son is safe. Eyes closed, she takes a shuddering breath, Yunan and the kid’s gazes burning holes in her head.
“Let’s get out of there.”
Neither Yunan nor the girl calls her as she leaves.
The headquarters are empty. Of course they are.
Eda doesn’t know why she chose to go here instead of the Owl House. Perhaps the idea of going back to the now empty house scares her. Everything has already become too empty.
They sit on Luz’s bunk-bed, and stay there in silence for what seems like an eternity. Eda tries to think of anything to say, but it feels like she’ll break if her mouth opens.
“Eda,” King whispers, and he’s been so quiet since it all began – or ended? - and it breaks her heart. Her son has never been quiet. “Eda, your arm.”
Oh, yeah. That. Her arm is missing and it feels like the least important thing in the world. Like a bad joke.
“Don’t worry about it,” she tries to smirk, cocky and confident like she always is in front of her children, but her lips don’t move. Instead, she pats his head and says: “We need to get our things back.”
They need to do something. The corpses – King has seen enough of them, and she almost brought him to see the bodies of his friends. As much as it feels wrong to let someone she barely knows take care of something so terrible and important, she cannot leave King alone. Not after that.
But they have to do something. They’ll go crazy otherwise.
Getting their home back seems like a start, at least.
Getting their things back takes little time when everyone had been… there when it happened. The few they meet are lying on the ground, and Eda doesn’t need to check to know that their hands are cold and their pulse absent. And so they grab what they recognise as theirs – and some more too – and though some of their furniture have disappeared, it’s still enough to turn back the empty house into the ghost of the Owl House.
Eda busies herself with this, with trying to get this part of their normal back. When she hangs her clothes into her wardrobe, she can pretend that everything’s fine, that Luz and her friends are just at Hexside and Lilith at her mum's, that the Emperor didn’t win. King does the same, carrying François everywhere he goes alongside his other plushes, and Eda knows that the right thing to do would be to talk about it instead of burying themselves in the sand, hiding away from it all, but she’s never been good at doing the normal, sensible thing.
Alas, there’s only so long she can pretend, and reality comes knocking in the form of the Yunan, who comes to give her the bodies.
He comes once, alone at first, softly knocking on the door. Eda doesn’t open until she hears another, far more annoying voice that she knows all too well.
The second she opens the door, Hooty warps her in one of those awful hugs of his, and for once she doesn’t protest. His eyes are still full of tears, but he takes back his place on the door, far more quiet than she has ever seen him. It hurts like salt on a bleeding wound, a pain followed by something close to a relief. King is asleep on her bed right now, surrounded by their still unpacked furniture, and the house isn’t quite back to its former state, but it suddenly feels like it could be back with time.
Once Hooty lets go of her, she stares at Yunan, too tired to ask what he wants. He seems to understand because he speaks before she can opens her mouth.
“The bodies have all been taken care of.” he says, and Eda can’t hide her flinch, “The kids and your sister’s. I can bring them to you so you can put them to rest however you want.”
So you can bury them wherever you want, is what he doesn’t say, and Eda is stupidly grateful for it. Behind her, Hooty makes a sound between a whimper and a hiss, and she wonders how Yunan convinced him to come back and leave Lilith and the kids behind.
“When you say “taken care of”,” she starts, voice dry, and Yunan doesn’t let her finish.
“They’re clean and presentable.” he doesn’t elaborate and Eda only nods, not daring to ask how they were when he found them.
Two days later, he comes back with two other wild witches carrying multiple wooden coffins behind them. Eda recognizes the red-haired girl – Soleil, she remembers – from the Day of Unity, but the dark-skinned man is a stranger to her. They all look incredibly tired, and Eda doesn’t even want to imagine what their days have been like. Full of death and despair, doubtlessly.
Yunan gives her a nod before gesturing to the ones with him.
“You’ve met Soleil.” he says, and the red-haired girl nods briefly, “She’s the one who made the coffins. And this is Alban.” Eda’s surprised to see the man – Alban, then – smile when he greets her, though it disappears almost immediately.
The wooden coffins are devoid of anything that could indicate who rests inside. Soleil approaches her and points to two of them.
“Your sister’s,” she explains, voice hard though not cruel, “and the human’s.”
Her words are like a punch to the guts, adding to the several world shattering words that keep coming to destroy her reality.
For a moment, Eda thinks about going back inside, hiding away from everything. It’s too much, to soon, too fast, and even though it’s been days it feels like she still hasn’t processed anything. All of this is too horrible to be real, and yet it is, and she can do nothing about it.
But this is Luz, and she deserves better than being left in the care of strangers because her mentor is too much of a coward.
Soleil glances at her, and after a moment of hesitation, speaks.
“I didn’t carve anything into the wood. I know nothing of them, it would have been disrespectful. But if you want me to, I’ll do it.”
Her tone is matter-of-fact, as if she doesn’t really care, but her gaze stays on the ground and her eyes glint with sympathy.
Eda glances at the other coffins. She can guess whose bodies are in it, her kid’s friends whom she barely knew but whom she mourns nonetheless. It is not her place to bury them, but she doesn’t know if those who should do it are even alive.
Eda doesn’t want to open the coffins, but she has to know. If not for her, then for King, who she knows is looking through the windows, hiding behind François.
And so she opens it.
Luz looks peaceful, and it is what hits Eda the hardest. It feels like an eternity since she’s seen her kid like that. Even in her sleep, she had wrinkles of worry carved into her face.
In death, Luz looks peaceful.
The funeral is short. Yunan and Soleil stay, looking supremely uncomfortable, but they remain, and Eda is too tired to wonder why. Perhaps it is pity, or sympathy. A child’s funeral is a dreadful thing, made even worse when only five are attending it – two of them strangers.
Luz Noceda is buried near the Boiling Sea, not that far from the Owl House but still out of sight. The tombstone only has her name on it – Eda knows that this will change, wants to add something, but it’s too soon, too fresh, too much. She can’t do it yet.
Instead, she stands in front of what remains of her kid, her son sobbing in her arms.
“You were a good kid.” is all she can say, and there’s that.
Soon after, Eda goes to her childhood home, Hooty on her back carrying her sister’s coffin.
Her parents had never cared much for the Emperor, and even less for the Day of Unity. Neither Lilith nor Eda could bring themselves to tell them the truth about it all, too scared or ashamed, so she is certain that she will find them there.
There is no noise in the house, no sign of life, and Eda braces herself before forcing the door open.
She finds them lying on the ground, surrounded by pictures of their daughters as children, her father hugging her mother tightly. Perhaps in the end, they realised what was happening despite their children’s attempts to keep it hidden from them.
Eda buries her parents and her sister in the garden, near the flowers and trees they loved so much, and that’s the end of it.
Raine is buried alongside Darius and Eberwolf.
It is not Eda who takes care of the funeral, but some other members of the CATTS, a few wild witches who survived.
They reach out to Eda, and so she comes.
She doesn’t bring King. Her son has seen more death and funerals in recent days than any child should ever see.
The funeral is longer than Luz’s was, not just because it is three people being buried alongside each other. There are more people, some even saying a few words, though Eda remains quiet, staying close to the edge of the gathering, close enough to be respectful but far enough to avoid questions. Perhaps she’ll speak, once she’s alone with the ghost of her old love, but she can’t bring herself to do so in front of strangers.
She can’t even bring herself to listen to them speaking, choosing instead to study the faces around her, trying and failing to recognize someone. She can see the two wild witches Eda met that terrible day, Lyra and Julya, but Eda can’t bring herself to speak to them.
Then, her eyes fall on a short, red-haired girl.
Eda frowns, studying her from a distance.
The girl’s name surfaces slowly, like something half-remembered from a dream.
Soleil.
Eda hadn’t seen her since Luz’s funeral, though to be fair, she hadn’t really seen anyone since then.
And now, here she is, a familiar face in a sea of strangers.
As if sensing her gaze, the other witch raises her head, and their eyes meet.
Soleil blinks, as if trying to check if it is truly Eda, before offering a faint nod. Barely more than an acknowledgment, but something in it steadies Eda.
She steps a little closer, careful not to intrude. She doesn’t dare to speak, just standing nearby.
Soleil doesn’t move away.
“I spoke to Raine a few times.” Soleil said, “They were kind.”
It’s been a few hours since the funeral. Eda doesn’t really know why she asked Soleil to come drink at her place. It felt right at the time. That, and the idea of coming home to the Owl House after yet another funeral, King already asleep upstairs, made her sick.
Eda swallows, choking on the words before managing to speak. “Yeah. Yeah, they were.”
A comfortable silence falls, and together they drink quietly until Eda asks another question:
“Were you a member of the CATTs?”
Soleil blinks, surprised. “No, but I knew of them. They reached out to a lot of wild witches back then.”
Eda doesn’t ask why she didn’t join. Soleil looks young, and Eda remembers being this young, alone against a world that refused to accept her. Going against the very people seeking her death is something very few people would do, especially with strangers.
“How’s your son?”
Eda sighs. “He’s… dealing with everything.”
Soleil grimaces.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I asked something like that.”
Eda snorts, and the sound surprises her. It feels like forever since she did anything other than cry. Soleil looks surprised too, but she smiles when her gaze meets Eda’s.
“How have things been on your side?”
Soleil frowns. “Work, mostly. I’ve been exploring the Castle with some others, and doing a lot of reading.”
Eda pauses, wondering if she should ask about the Castle, but all she can think is that this is the place where Luz died. The mere thought of it is almost unbearable.
“Reading?”
Soleil hums. “Trying to put families together. Making death certificates, checking birth ones.”
“I didn’t take you for someone who’d like that kind of stuff.” Eda notes, and Soleil snorts.
“Not at all! I don’t like paperwork, but needs must. There are so few of us that no one dares complain. Not at a time like that.”
For a moment, Eda feels guilty – all she has done has been to mope around – but Soleil doesn’t sound angry.
“Hexside has been serving as headquarters, I guess. That’s where all the kids are, and the older ones are helping with the babies while the adults take care of the funerals and everything.”
Hexside. Eda hadn’t thought of that place in a while.
“I may come by soon, see if I can help.”
“Any help is welcome. Everyone is overwhelmed.”
Soleil sighs, drowning her glass of apple blood before standing.
“I should go. I still have a lot of things to do. See you, Eda.”
Eda stares at her own drink, frowning as she thinks over what she’s learned.
“See you, kid.”
Eventually, Eda finally gathers enough courage to go back in town.
Bonesborough looks dead when she steps into town. Everything is still intact, nothing is falling apart yet. But there’s no one in the streets, no voice nor movement, and even the houses add to this impression, with their curtains shut and doors locked.
It is at Hexside that she finally finds life.
She doesn’t know why she goes there, when all the kids she knows are dead, but her feet lead her that way, and she can’t help but hurries once voices reach her ears.
Hexside is full of life – somehow, even more now that before the Draining Spell. It is not only students that she sees outside, but adults – though far less – who look over the students, talk to them and with each other.
The sight and the noisiness of life, after spending so long in silence, stuns her. Even as she walks through the courtyard, kids mill around and though there are no smiles to be found and no laughter, there are still conversations, debates, movement and life.
King blinks from where he’s perched on her hair, surprised.
“Those are Hexside students, right?”
“Yeah,” Eda watches them, not stepping into the school yet, “They did manage to escape being brought into the covens, after all.”
Soleil’s words, from back when everything collapsed, come back to her.
Kids are still there!
Indeed they are, and Eda feels something warm in her chest. It’s not quite hope, but it’s something other than despair, and that’s enough.
She steps inside the school.
Working at Hexside helps more than anything had up until this point.
Alban is the one who greets her and explains what she can do to help, which is basically anything.
King and her raid her parents’ house and other places for food, bringing as much as they can to Hexside. They cook too, even though they are far from the best. The school's kitchen is a mess – adults and older children both try their best, but there is so much to do, it’s hard to keep track of it all.
More than food, they take clothes, toys – all for children who come from all over the Boiling Isles, looking for a place to rest after seeing their world crumbling down.
Eda doesn’t have magic anymore, but she is still strong, and her harpy form helps a lot when carrying materials – the other wild witches have magic, but there are so few in the school, and most of the kids were only taught one form of magic.
King watches over some of the kids, entertaining the youngest with shows with his stuffed toys while helping the older ones with their own tasks as much as he can. So does Eda, and with the amount of work that needs to be done, they get swept in the flow of it all.
After a while, a child says something and Eda feels something bubbling in her throat.
It takes her a while to realize it’s laughter.
The knock comes in the evening.
Not polite. Not desperate. Just... insistent. Like someone who hasn’t decided whether they want help or a fight.
Eda sits up slowly, wondering who could knock at this hour. Everyone that ever did that before were now dead.
When she opens the door, Soleil nearly falls into her.
“What the heck are you doing?!”
Soleil laughs, and it freezes Eda right to the core. She’s never heard Soleil laugh before, but she knows it’s not the right kind of laughter.
“King, go to your room.”
The demon snaps his head towards her, offended. “What?! No! She needs help, I can handle it-”
“King. Please.”
Something in her tone must have struck, because he stops protesting, slowly climbing up the stairs while sending the still laughing girl a concerned glance. Eda immediately turns her gaze back to Soleil, who beams, swaying on her feet. Eda grabs her before she can collapse on the floor, and grimaces.
“You reek of alcohol! How much did you drink?! I thought you were responsible!”
“Hey Eda, did ya know I’m the only witch in their twenties on the Isles?”
It takes a second for the sentence to make its way around Eda’s brain, but once it does, she freezes.
“What…?”
Soleil laughs at her answer, almost seems to choke on it. It’s a terrible sound, and it makes Eda want to throw up.
“It’s true! I checked everywhere! I looked for everyone, you know. The kids who were with me back at St Epiderm, I mean.”
“There must be someone-”
“There’s not!” Soleil cut her off, and her laughter finally stops, replaced by anger. “I checked everywhere. I even looked for the bullies I hated, and for the kids from the other schools I barely knew. All dead.”
“The youngest witch after me is sixteen.” she whispers, eyes far away. “I heard he was supposed to join the Healing Coven but couldn’t because of familial issues… and the oldest witch after me is thirty-one. Some wild witch who lives near the sea and specializes in the creatures living in it.”
“Are you sure? I heard they hadn’t finished accounting for those who lived-”
“Oh, they’re not quite finished counting all the survivors,” Soleil waves her argument away easily, looking at the ceiling with a vacant stare, “but the ones missing are babies who lost their parents, which makes it hard to figure out who they are. But around my age… there’s no one.”
Her voice is quiet, almost thoughtful. But while it doesn’t shake, Soleil does. It’s like watching a balloon fill with water, knowing that an explosion is imminent and still unable to truly prepare for it..
“Eda,” she says, and for the first time since Eda met her, Soleil’s expression conveys nothing but despair, “I’m the only survivor of my entire generation.”
Soleil collapses like a puppet with strings cut, and Eda barely manages to catch her as they both fall on the ground. Soleil is shaking, and Eda tightens her hold on her even as her eyes burn.
“Let it out, kid.” she whispers, voice soft. “Let it out.”
Soleil sobs, buries her head in her neck, and screams.
“She had a mother, you know.”
Soleil looks up from her book, sending Eda a surprised glance as her eyes narrow. “Who?”
“Luz. In the human realm, I mean.”
The thought has been haunting Eda for a while, first at the back of her mind, just another crushing thought in the wake of the Draining Spell that took a back-seat in face of the disaster that has become their world.
“She must still be there. Waiting for her child to return. But she won’t, because she’s buried in the ground of a world that isn’t hers.”
Soleil doesn’t stay every night. She has her own place, built by her own hands which she loves very much. It’s also closer to the fields and forest lands that the Emperor’s Coven destroyed and that she intends to use to plant palistorm seeds. Dell’s books teach her what they can and the Bat Queen explains when they can’t, telling her what she remembers from back when Dell still planted trees, before the Owl Beast and Belos tore everything apart.
No, Soleil doesn’t stay every night, but she does stay. At least twice a week, sometimes knocking on the door in the evening with dirt on her clothes and face, tired from her work but also happy. Other times it’s in the middle of the night or at dawn, when there is no smile on her face and dark circles under her eyes. Eda is always here to greet her no matter which time it is.
It’s different from Luz, but in a good way. There are no common points, and the moments where Soleil reminds her of Luz are few and far in between, so rare that they don’t really count.
Though Eda still considers her a kid, Soleil is not one anymore. Most of the time she is calm and quiet, even when excited. Eda has never heard scream since the day she collapsed in tears in her arms. Her favourite dishes are the spicy ones, and she had taken one look at the Azura Books before politely hiding a grimace.
Soleil is nothing like Luz, but just like the human, she carves a place for herself in Eda’s heart, and all she can do is sigh and smile.
Slowly but surely, Eda heals.
Soleil is the start, of course, that wild girl who has slowly wormed her way into Eda’s heart, so much like herself yet so different.
The hurt never disappears – how could it, when everything they knew has been torn away? – but it lessens. Going to Hexside helps, and teaching and watching over the kids slowly becomes one of her favourite moments of the day. The oldest ones especially, who are lost but determined to help, are the ones she likes and admires the most despite herself. She can’t begin to imagine what it’s like, to be a child losing everything but still choosing to keep going.
The idea comes one evening, when King and she are eating at the table in silence.
“I think I’ll be a teacher.”
King, whose mouth is full of food, blinks and swallows before asking in a puzzled tone.
“Aren’t you already one?”
Eda grins, small but sincere, grabbing King’s glass and keeping it from falling off the table as he leans on the table to grab another portion of food.
“Nah, I just watch them to make sure nothing explodes. But I think I’d like it.”
Bump would roll in his grave, she thinks, and only feels a little sad.
Nora and Alban accept her with barely hidden relief.
“We’re so few,” Alban admits when helping her organise her classes, “And everyone’s helping, sure, but it’s still so much. Hexside still feels more like an orphanage than a school.”
Eda remembers Luz talking about students at her school who stayed to sleep in apartments nearby, coming from far way just to attend school. It had felt so stupid, at the time, when her only good memories of school were more of the people than the studies.
Now though, she pauses and looks at Alban with a glint in her eyes.
“You know,” she says, a grin on her face, “I think we can do something with that.”
The idea of a boarding school is one easy to explain, and though most of the other adults agree, it’s still a pain to organise.
“What about the other schools?” Lyra – one of the two wild witches Eda met back that terrible day – points out, nodding but still sceptical, “We can’t just let them go to ruins.”
“It doesn’t matter though, does it? Only Hexside students survived the Draining Spell. No one’s left to use them.”
There’s a heavy silence at Julya’s blunt but correct observation.
“It’s true.” Yunan says, thoughtful, “But that doesn’t mean we can’t use them for other purposes. We do have children far too young for school, after all.”
The witches share a look in silence before Alban speaks up.
“You want to turn them into an orphanage?”
“Why not? Hexside and Glandus are filled with children who have nothing left in their lives. The only students who survived are from Hexside, so giving back this familiar environment would help them. And Glandus High isn’t that far from Hexside, if siblings are worried about being separated.”
“We can’t have as many students as before.” Eda declares, face grim.“Especially the toddlers. Taking care of teenagers would already be hard enough, but the little brats would be a nightmare.”
Yunan grimaces at her crude declaration, but nods.
“I agree. Besides, the little ones would probably be better off at the orphanage, away from the grieving and potentially violent kids.”
Alban frowns. “You think there could be incidents if we left them?”
“Grief manifests in different ways. The only reason there has yet to be an incident is because of the sheer magnitude of the catastrophe. This could soon change.”
Eda thinks of Soleil, who kept a calm and determined facade before almost getting drunk to death and breaking down in her arms.
“Yeah… I can see it.”
Yunan sends her a surprised look, but doesn’t ask.
“Well then,” he whispers, sounding very tired but still determined. “Let’s get to work.”
For the most part, the kids take the news fairly well.
Of course, some protest, mainly the few who have baby siblings, afraid of being away from the only family they have left. But eventually, maybe because of their caretakers’s tired faces, their red eyes and the way the babies keep crying when the older kids get too loud in the corridors, they agree to the plan with demands to come visit the soon to be Glandus Orphanage at least once a week and during the week-ends.
And so the work begins.
Eda doesn’t help much with the orphanage besides giving them the few baby things she managed to find in her parents’ home, mainly because babies and toddlers aren’t really her thing, but also because she gets busy with turning Hexside back into a real school – a residential one, at that. Soleil offers to help – being a former Construction student and all – but Eda knows she’s already busy with her work as the future Carver even as the Bat Queen helps, as well as the usual tasks done by everyone to gather supplies and search the Emperor’s Castle. And so the task to turn Hexside into a boarding school is left, for the most part, to Eda and Alban.
Unsurprisingly, the hardest part is building the dorms. Neither she or Alban are specialized in Construction, though far from ignorant. While they know how to create, drawing plans are far from easy, and building a place where kids will live in is not something that must be done lightly. Eda hasn’t created something like that since she turned her father’s tower into the Owl House, and even then she had Hooty. But with the other wild witches’ help, they manage to make it work.
The kids help too. The students in the Construction Track draw different plans and share ideas, and upon hearing some of them Eda can’t help but be impressed. The plans to turn the rooms used by the baby class into a common room, linking it to the building of the future dorms, are ambitious. They ask around for the other students’s opinions, from all Tracks, probably trying to include as much as possible in the place that will be their home for the foreseeable future. Matt Tholomule in particular throws himself into the plans of building the dorms with an almost worrying single-minded determination, so Eda’s keeping an eye on that.
Even when they finish the plans after weeks of sleeping in the corridors alongside students, they don’t immediately start the construction until the orphanage is ready.
Glandus Orphanage is the first to be ready, to no one’s surprise. The orphanage was deemed far more important, as teenagers could help the adults at Hexside and take care of themselves and their younger peers. The babies were the priority, and so most of the wild witches knowledgable on Construction focused on that.
Once the orphanage is finished, babies and toddlers are taken away from Hexside, and though it causes some anxiety among the students having younger siblings, it makes working on the school much easier.
It is the one of the biggest progresses they’ve made, and it does wonders on them.
Their world keeps moving forward, until a year has passed, until flowers has grown on the graves of those Eda called family.
The anniversary of the Draining Spell Day, as it has been called, comes a sunny day.
“King, you ready?”
Her son nods.
“I’ve got my bag!” he says, and Eda smiles.
“Then let’s go.”
They have a lot of people to visit, after all.