Chapter Text
Where will the forests go when the winds have worn the earth away, and the sea has washed away the Titan’s bones?
Even the night creatures know not to call on starless nights.
The wind howls, louder than Amity’s thoughts.
The dark is absolute in the forests. The trees swallow the light, losing everything within.
Leaves swirl past her, in the darkness. They whisper, fragments of something, as they go.
The night falls through the trees in pieces. The wind is everywhere, making Amity’s eyes sting. The mushrooms that light up the Titan’s bones hide from the wind. The howl of leaves is the only sound, drowning all else. Starless nights, everything left outside is lost.
Amity keeps walking. Around her, leaves swirl.
All the Isles rest amidst the dark. Winds sweep from the ends of the sea around the roofs of the houses, their windows, the spaces between them. Salt gathers upon windowsills, and the traces of living things, somewhere, once, beneath the waves.
It hadn’t been nearly this dark, Amity thinks, when Edric and Emira were with her.
Forests stretch around her. The leaves might swallow her whole, swirling in the wind. She looks forward, dully, as she walks. She thinks of the vanishing of stars.
The rain had fallen like light through the trees.
She can’t remember the sound.
Her breath hitches.
The dark of the trees breaks. Ocean spray flings through the air, white as bone.
Waves crash against the cliffs. The wind is cold. It whistles through the Titan’s bones, beneath the unending clouds. All the stars had fallen from the sky that night. They’d shone in the wild of the rainwater. The wind had danced between the lightning, as if free.
Waves break in the wind, falling to Amity’s feet.
The water hisses, white, against the stone.
Edric’s hair had burnt in the rain. They hadn’t thought to cover it up. It had been Amity’s birthday the next day. Willow was coming.
When Amity was younger, she’d worry about the Titan; whether it was warm enough in the sea at night to sleep.
She walks, now, sleepless, upon its bones. The leaves of the forests coil past into the sea.
She’s cold.
Waves crash. Winds sing. Something snaps. Magenta falls from her fingers. She leaps into the sky, wings like ghosts in the night.
It begins to rain.
Water, like a whisper, fills the sky. It falls through the space of the night, and leaves wisps of steam against Amity’s force field. The winds sweep every which way from the sea. They tumble between raindrops. They curl around the Titan’s bones, and Amity looks at nothing at all, and lets them carry her anywhere. The seas rise from their beds, towards the fall of the rain. Water splashes up cliffs, falls through trees, litters the sky, washes the last of the light away. Trees fall beneath the rain, the land beneath them crumbling away, rising again as so much mist, steam in the night. All the earth below reforms beneath the rain.
Feathers flutter, pink, around Amity. She turns, surrounded by so much empty space.
In the darkest of storms and the sharpest of the white frosts, witches tell of the Titan’s fall, the endless nights therein. When the rains drip from every branch, their stories rise with the cauldron smoke towards the herbs and barred, wild feathers hanging from the rafters. Foxfire dances through the air. The fireplace flickers, and the candles shiver beneath their own weight. The waves reach towards the empty spaces where there should be stars as the Titan falls, and its bones gather frost outside.
The rain falls like a memory. The trees below sway in the wind, surrounded by mist. Amity wonders if it feels like this to be lost in space: drifting between galaxies, searching for light amidst the interstellar clouds, the dust in the empty, endless places. Water curls around her. Her vision blurs. She dives, blindly.
She stops, awash in watery light. The Owl House glows, softly, in the night, lighting up the mist.
She hadn’t thought, consciously, to come here.
The windows of the house gleam with quiet, golden light, in pieces. Rain falls. The wind chimes upon the balcony jingle amidst the wind and water sound. Beneath the shine of a force field, orange moss spills from the stones, and purple ivy climbs around the potted plants, the spill of the eaves.
Slowly, Amity lets out a breath; mist in the light.
The rain leaves white, dancing water upon the path to Hexside, light scattering within it. Afternoons, the path, beneath the lean of trees, comes alive with light between leaves, and the sound of waves against the cliffs. The sun angles across sheets of homework and the dust of an ancient world. The red and gold of living room windows cast across books piled through the light.
Raindrops burst around Amity; and then, she lowers her head, and closes her eyes, wings beating around her.
Maybe the stars are waiting too. The light threads through the emptiness of the sky.
The air is dark, and wide, around her.
The wind moves through the trees, and carries the chimes out to the sea.
The night falls away from her, softly. She looks up, through the falling rain, at the clouds, the bones rising amidst them.
She stops. Her feathers flutter.
The trees that grow upon the Titan’s bones shed their leaves to the earth far below like snow. They say the Titan lives most in their bark and the loneliness of their leaves. The winds sing, sometimes, through their branches, the sound distant as the moon. Even the melt of the snows passes them by without a trace.
Everything falling, Amity soars up through the rain and night, out of the reach of the light, until the trees stretch before her, sideways, from the Titan’s bones.
No rain falls here, beneath the underside of the Titan’s ribs.
Leaves whip past Amity on the wind.
The sound is distant as snow.
Faintly, the light spell amidst the branches flickers with every gust, creating shadows amidst the leaves.
“Amity?” Luz asks, distantly, wrapped in feathers—as if seeing a ghost.
New shoots grow in the forests beneath the rain.
“Luz!”
The leaves rustle as Amity dives through them, landing in a rush amidst wood and branch, leaves and empty space beneath. Branches sway around her. Her wings catch against the leaves. The wind coils around the Titan’s bones.
Shadows fall from every leaf. The red of the trees melts in and out of the light as Amity hurls herself forward, through the space of the night, rain falling everywhere, taking Luz’s hands in her own.
“What are you doing up here?” Amity asks, voice quavering. “It’s raining everywhere—Luz, you’re freezing!” Pulling back, she draws a spell circle, and summons a fireball hovering above her open palms. The flickering warmth is a strange thing amidst the smell of the rain. Almost imperceptibly, her hands shake. “Luz, what’s wrong?”
The breadth of Luz’s wings curls around her in the dim light. It’s hard to tell amidst the movement of the shadows where she ends and where the magic of the feathers begins.
“I just… couldn’t sleep,” she says, finally. “It wasn’t much. I… I just needed to be somewhere else.”
The wind stirs throughout the branches and leaves, and colors the fall below.
Amity stares. She presses forward, the fireball snapping sharply in the night. “Wasn’t much?” Rain falls, distantly. The sound weaves through her bones. “I don’t—”
—understand.
The lone light spell amidst the branches flickers.
Her fingers dig into her palm.
She looks, glassily, at Luz. There are feathers in the empty spaces between Luz’s arms, beneath her knees. She looks down at the tree beneath her, as if trying not to vanish into the dark, leaves in clusters and fans around her.
Amity’s breath hovers halfway in the air.
She thinks, for the first time, of all the things hidden amidst the rain. Her memories strum through the air like ghosts.
She bites down. She lets them go.
The sideways forest above them, below them rings hollowly with the distant, ricocheting sounds of the rain. They might slip through the fabric of time. With a slow, shaking exhale, Amity turns, to the side, and lets her legs hang over the side of the tree. She holds the fireball, lightly, in one hand between her and Luz. She watches its light dance away into the darkness. She feels Luz’s eyes lift up from the tree, and follow her.
One last breath out.
The leaves rustle. “I… couldn’t sleep either.” Her shoulders sink, a little. “Whenever it rains, it always brings back memories for me—and things I don’t remember.” She scratches the back of her neck. “If that makes any sense. I usually always stay away. I don’t… know what went wrong this time.”
Her words end up flat, falling like smoke, white. She blinks down into the night for a bit.
If this is what it’s like to be in free fall—the empty space between her ribs—she curls the fingers of the hand holding the fireball. The fire flickers.
The wings upon her back trail in the wind.
“But…” she begins again, slowly, ever so slowly, “I think I’m glad I didn’t stay away.” All around, the rain swirls in waves across the sky. They ripple upon the wind, like so much fabric. Amity ducks her head towards the ground. “After all; how else am I supposed to make new memories?”
Something falls from her heart as the words leave her. It vanishes in the steam rising everywhere towards the clouds.
She sighs down at the impressions, in the dark, of faraway forests and the fragmented lands between them. The wind is an insistent thing this high up. She resettles, sitting back up to push the hair out of her eyes.
Luz is staring at her as if about to break, the light and the magenta of the fire tumbling, melting around her.
Amity’s hand falls to the space before her.
Luz’s gaze drops to the dark beyond the leaves, the thought of a world unfolded in the dark below them. There are few places on the Boiling Isles where the leaves are so red. They sweep like flames in the flickering light around Luz. The white of bone frames the spaces behind her, spectral between every tree; arching far above her head towards the clouds.
“Do you ever wonder if we’re meant to be doing the things we do? I don’t know what it means to do things right. Nothing ever works for me, and no one’s ever told me why. Maybe they’re right, and I need to be fixed. I stayed here on the Boiling Isles because I wanted to be a witch, and mean something. But I—” Her shoulders shake. “I can’t even do that correctly.” She flings a hand up into the air. A crumpled glyph flutters between her fingers. “I try so hard, but it’ll always be like this. I don’t even know anymore why I thought it would make me special. I don’t even know anymore what that means—”
Her wings flare outward in the backlight.
“I know they don’t go anywhere,” Luz says, all the light refracting through her feathers to the dark below. “I know they just dissipate when the air warms up again. What am I supposed to do about that?” she asks, face silver with tears. “Where am I supposed to go?”
It’s a strange sort of feeling: one that bursts, sometimes, through the fog of Amity’s life. There’s a tingling down through her fingertips, and the air is wild, a free thing, in the empty spaces in her body. The light spell flickers amidst the leaves, and rain falls everywhere but here. The evanescence of the forests and the slightest things blows upon the wind, sea salt and stardust in coils of steam.
Through the firelight and cold between them, Amity sees Luz beneath the shadow of the covention, standing off against Willow, wreathed in flames, surrounded by a blazing crown of feathers and light.
alone beneath an alien sky.
Amity closes her eyes. All the world moves around her, like the flow of stars.
Climbing to her feet, she balances atop the tree, wings outspread. Leaves whisper around her, some sort of song. She extinguishes the fireball in her grasp and, shards of pink falling into the night, holds her hand out to Luz.
The bones rise into the sky. Luz looks up, through the light, at Amity, and takes her hand.
Amity looks up at the clouds. Rain and leaf sway across her sight.
She draws a spell circle, force field enveloping them both. Leaves fall, through the steam. She leaps into the air, weightless, amidst the leaves, and into the sky.
The rain falls everywhere around them, streaking from the sky to the land. The world is wind and air and mist, and the loneliness of the Titan’s bones, littering the sky. The trees and light fall away beneath them. Winds from faraway lands rise, spiraling. Everything vanishes beneath the space of the sky.
In a rush, clouds surround them, on all sides. The dark is absolute; breathless.
The mist, infinitude, fills the sky.
Amity thinks of all the days when the leaves stream on the wind, and all the nights when the quietest things glow.
Rain falls, still, like a guide.
She spreads her wings, through the dark, and flies.
Clouds part before her.
In a surge of light, she soars from the clouds, wrapped in wind, and the endlessness of the sky.
All the pieces fall away, shattered ice.
Clouds arc through every part of the ceaseless, frost-sharp sky. They hover overhead, vast, unimaginable worlds, and split the sky. Snowy mists fall away in all directions. Silver streams of cold moon spill through drifts and chasms, and the light of the stars falls, like dust, through the glass of the air. Moon-blue shadows and mist wreathe around the tallest of the Titan’s bones. They seem almost like clouds. Forests, ghosts, touch the sky.
All the stars in the farthest places span the sky.
The light of another place wreathes through Amity’s hair, faint, ghostly impressions, promising comets and solar winds.
There are stars in every one of Amity’s breaths.
Beside her, Luz’s shoulders begin to shake. The starry light catches upon her tears.
Amity’s eyes widen. She turns, holding Luz’s hand in both of hers. “Hey, hey, hey, Luz!” The sky surrounds them, star-spun. Throwing her gaze out across the clouds, Amity pulls Luz over towards the peak of a snow-covered bone, its mineral shining with ice. A mist of snow flies, brilliant in the air, as Amity lands, her feathers trailing in the snow.
The ancient forests pass, in the mist, into the clouds.
The snows, undisturbed for lifetimes, stir around them as Amity holds Luz lightly by the elbows, and clouds move towards the stars. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Amity says, snowflakes falling. The light from the moon drifts, distant and blue, through the clouds. They might be beneath the sea, a thousand realms away from home.
Lightly, Luz scrubs the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. She smiles, waterily.
“Sorry,” she says, through the ghostly light and ice. “Sorry, this is just—” She hiccups, wiping a few more tears away. “This is just a lot for me. I—” The mists stream past, ethereal in the light. They catch upon the corners of her body, her feathers. There’s a glittering, wavering thing in her smile, and the way she can’t look up from the snow. “It’s just—places I never thought I could be, you know?”
Amity does.
She lets her arms fall away, and turns to the open sky. There are more stars between the clouds than can fit in her body. With a rustle of her wings, she lowers herself to the ground and sits, surrounded by mist, encircled, on all sides, by clouds.
A dusting of snow flies in the air as Luz sits down next to her. She casts a glance, warm, her way.
How can anyone look at a person like that?
Snow falls through the air, before Amity.
Starlight curls on the wind from far away. There are ancient things in the bone beneath them. It’s raining so far below. Tremblingly, Amity brings a hand up before her, to her chest. She looks up at the clouds.
“They say that the stars are where the last of magic in the Realm will go,” says Amity. “They say the Titan fell while trying to catch their light. It’s why its magic is strongest at the highest points of its bones. I don’t know if the sky is enough for all the light that needs to fall. I don’t know why things turned out the way they did. Sometimes I think if I plant enough forests, I can stop myself from wearing away. Sometimes I think there’s life in the Titan’s bones.”
The snow is cold. She can’t look at Luz. The clouds are full of impossible things, like worlds in a frozen sky, around them. She’s never felt so small.
The rain had worn holes into the stone of the old, empty houses in Bonesborough. Emira had said it was so they could match the moon.
Amity wonders if life feels like this.
“When a cloud disappears, its water remains, in the air. There’s wind and sun and cold and the light of stars. And someday, it forms a cloud, again. I don’t know where they’re going,” Amity says. “But doesn’t everyone deserve to make that journey?”
She turns away from the clouds and stars. She digs a hand into the fabric of her shirt. She looks at Luz.
“You’re an incredible, talented person. You’ll be able to do what you want to do, in whatever way that is. You’ve already changed the lives of everyone around you.”
Starlight whispers down from the edges of the sky, collecting in the hollows of her sleeves.
“That’s your strength, isn’t it? Seeing what other people don’t see.”
Her gaze falls to the snow, her fingers finding a hold there.
Something trembles in her ribs.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.”
The snow curls in wisps through the air. The bone beneath is old as time, as much a fixture of the sky as the stars.
Amity feels the gravity of the constellations overhead, their storied light.
“Hey.”
The sound is like the rustle of leaves. Amity looks up.
There’s a wavering sort of light in Luz’s eyes. The feathers of her wings loom around her like a starry sky. Galaxies line their plumes. She looks away, for a moment, down and to the side; her hair swings across her eyes with the motion. She looks back, through the astral light, at Amity, and reaches forward, taking Amity’s hands gently in her own. Snow drifts before her face. It captures the alien light; vivid with stars.
“Me too,” says Luz, through her shaking smile. Tears light up anew the corners of her eyes.
The sky aligns around Amity.
With a gentle tug, Luz pulls her in. She brings them close.
The snow rises on gusts of wind. It scatters beneath the stars. An arm wraps warm around Amity. She takes a hesitant hold of the fabric of Luz’s jacket, the motion soft, unsure. Feathers ripple in the cold of the currents of the sky. Starlight sways through the clouds like light through leaves. The rain falls across the bones of the Isles, and the world turns towards its dawn, through time.
Pulling back, Luz looks at Amity, fondly, still holding her close. A shy smile brightens her expression. Stars shine on her feathers. “Uh… Hey.”
A warmth unfurls its feathers in Amity’s chest.
“Hey yourself,” she whispers back, laughing softly. All the clouds encircle them like the orbit of a world. She reaches forward, tentatively, and brushes away the last of Luz’s tears. She pulls her gently into her side; warmth from the cold of the sky.
Quietly, she lets out a breath, heavy with strange light. It turns to mist. She lifts her head up towards the clouds.
“I don’t know why it took me so long to find you,” she says towards them, voice nearly a whisper.
Luz turns, a little, to look up at Amity. Her eyes are bright.
The movement of the clouds is an unfathomable thing around them; like watching the shifting of continents, the freezing of seas.
Amity sees her memories in their depths.
“It’s just like rain, isn’t it?” Luz says, lifting a hand up partway towards the clouds. Her words hum through Amity’s bones. “It finds you, wherever you are—no matter how long it’s been.”
Amity feels the light of the stars. She supposes it’s so.
Endless sky surrounds her.
She pulls Luz close.