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I TOLD her so.
Eda was racing through the night air on her staff. She’d lost her two targets amongst the trees below, but they had been making a beeline for the cliffs so the flying witch sped the same way. Why wouldn’t Luz ever listen? Why did always take it take an action-packed misadventure for the kid to learn the lesson Eda had tried to teach from the beginning? The grey-haired woman shook her head with a sigh, definitely NOT thinking about any rebellious behaviour she’d displayed at that age.
The trees cleared and Eda spotted Luz squatting on the cliff edge, facing away from the rippling black mass approaching her. The girl had her hands up over her ears, blocking out whichever of her inner fears Grom was shouting at her.
"SPICY TOSS!" Eda cried, throwing a fireball at the creature as she swooped her staff down over it. Grom was knocked down to the floor, its spindly, amorphous legs giving way beneath its hulking body.
Eda followed her swoop through back to the treeline and turned as she hopped off her staff, twirling it round to point at her foe. She planted her feet in a wide stance, making the most of the extra freedom her brown suit was giving her compared to her usual red dress – she filed away the mental image of the dashing figure she must be cutting for later.
"Hands off my human, you misshapen excuse for a monster!" she snarled.
The human torso rising from the monster’s back (Luz’s mother, Eda guessed from the girl’s reaction) raised its head and shot the witch a glare through its glowing white eyes. But then it turned to loom over Luz again, determined to break its chosen target.
"Eda!" Luz cried desperately, now looking over at her mentor. "You were right! I’m not ready!"
Eda’s frustration vanished when she saw the fear in the human’s eyes. "That’s okay," she sighed, lowering her staff and beginning to conjure a spell circle in the air. "I got this one." But she’d barely started drawing the glowing golden shape with her finger when a rising cry began to sound above her in the trees.
Amity Blight suddenly burst through the branches with a yell and landed on the grass, sprinting forward towards Luz. Eda blinked in surprise; she thought she’d left the girl behind with the other students, but apparently Amity had overtaken all of them.
The green-haired girl slid across the grass, muddying her expensive-looking shoes, to place herself between Luz and Grom, holding her arms out wide. "Stay away from her!" she cried.
Grom roared, and its glutinous black tail whipped forward to grab Amity, lifting the struggling girl up from the ground.
"I’m sorry Luz!" she called out. "I should have fought my own battle! I-"
But Grom’s many eyes had turned a shining white again and Amity’s eyes started to glow with it, her apology cut off by the trance the monster was putting her under.
"Amity, no!" Luz cried out. "Your fear!"
Eda watched the mass of the creature swell and increase as it processed the information from its new target. Luz’s tone had been anxious, and Eda recalled the human’s earlier determination to spare her classmate this fate; whatever inner terror was being extracted from the witchling, a girl insecure enough to put down other kids and play with people’s memories, was likely a devastating, humiliating one.
Eda folded her arms and leant back on a tree trunk with a smirk. Now that Luz was safe, she was happy to let this play out. Especially if it meant her sister’s old student got taken down a peg or two.
Grom’s now-huge form began to shrink again, down to the size of the girl it had now placed back on the ground. The tail wrapped around Amity became a hand on her shoulder, and the remaining black substance formed the silhouette of a person.
It was unmistakably Luz. After weeks of having the human in her house and having to quickly scan a room or monster’s lair to find her in a critical moment, Eda would recognise that frame anywhere. The rippling waves on Grom’s head even flowed in a shape to match the girl's currently slicked-back hair.
"Who is that?" Luz asked, and Eda rolled her eyes. Hadn’t the kid ever seen a shadowy duplicate of herself before? It was practically Magical Adventuring 101.
Grom’s new form lowered its hand from Amity’s shoulder, and reached the other one to pluck something from a pocket in the girl’s skirt. It was a folded piece of pink paper, which Grom ripped in half and let fall to the ground. Looking heartbroken, Amity clutched her skirt in bunched fists before bending down to pick up one of the discarded pieces. Grom slunk away, its work done.
Eda frowned, a little disappointed that whatever had just been revealed hadn’t been more scandalous, and watched curiously as Luz hurried forward and picked up the other piece of the note.
The human gasped as she read it. "You were afraid of getting rejected!"
Oh. Eda suddenly connected the dots in her head - kids and a school dance. An aggressive rivalry turned to friendship. Two girls willing to jump into danger for each other. The fact that both seemed to have entirely forgotten that Eda was there, with eyes only for each other. Eda’s own eyes became fixed firmly on Luz to see her protégé’s reaction, and she cursed herself for not packing a bag of Hex-Mix in her hair tonight.
"Oh, Amity it’s okay," Luz was saying. "What if I went to Grom with you instead?"
"R-Really?" Amity’s expression turned from downcast to surprised and hopeful. Eda grinned; she was just as surprised at how smoothly the perpetually awkward human was behaving given the revelation and the other girl’s radiating glee. The slight vagueness to her question had even been a little flirty – Eda had to admit, Luz had game.
"That’s what friends do," Luz smiled.
Or maybe she was just an absolute bonehead.
To her credit, Amity managed to hide any disappointment at the clarification. Instead she turned her attention to the now reforming black monster that was slithering back out from the trees, returning to its original target that it still had to finish off. The black goo shaped itself into a great maw and let out a roar, and Eda began to lift her staff again. But then she saw how the two girls were facing the monster together.
"Well then, if that’s settled…" Amity held out her hand to Luz. "May I have this dance?"
The human took the proffered hand, and the two girls pulled each other into a near-embrace.
"…Is now the time?" Eda asked, but her voice was drowned out by Grom’s animalistic growlings. She watched Luz and Amity swing each other around, staring into each other’s eyes again. "Am...Am I meant to be stepping in or… oh wait, there it is." Eda nodded with relief as a huge Abomination rose up from within the spell circle that the dancing pair had drawn on the ground with their feet, and watched it lift them up on its head.
From their tiny platform on the Abomination’s scalp, Luz pulled out a handful of glyph sheets and held them like a fan in front of her face. She was giving Amity a mysterious look over them, clearly enjoying playing the role of an enchanted dance partner. Amity responded by pulling Luz across her with flourishes of her own, their eyes still fixed on each other’s in spite of the monster only feet away.
"Oh, this is what friends do, is it?" Eda muttered to herself. Then her ear twitched at the sound of a projected voice approaching from inside the forest.
"…Come on, keep up with me just like that local sports team! When they do the running! Better catch up quick!" There was a rustling and King burst out from the bushes next to Eda’s feet. "Where’s Luz?" he hissed, putting a paw over his microphone. "I’m finally getting this audience on side, it’d put a real downer on things if she’s dead."
"Nah, she’s…" Eda trailed off, unable to describe the sight she was gesturing to. Amity was swinging Luz down in a low dip so the human could slap a glyph onto the Abomination’s body.
"Oh." King tilted his head at them. "Well that’s… needlessly extra."
Eda shrugged. "Teenagers..." she sighed with a small shake of her head.
The Abomination bent down on all fours and pounced towards Grom. The two girls hopped off the purple creature into the air, and Eda whistled casually as she drew a quick spell circle of her own to give them an invisible platform to bounce off on the way down – she figured a broken ankle might ruin the moment.
Grom was scuttling forward with a roar, and the Abomination launched itself into its jaws. The darker monster swallowed the purple one whole, but the impact seemed to activate Luz's glyph. Green light lit up Grom’s insides, and flowers and other greenery began to burst through the outer surface of the gooey creature. As it swelled to burst, Luz landed on the grass and caught Amity in her arms, spinning her around into a finishing stance in which, once again, they were only looking at each other even as the monster they’d been fighting exploded.
Eda and King gaped at what now stood where Grom had been; Luz had only sent a single plant glyph in with the Abomination, and yet here was a huge tree with a thick layer of pink leaves. Eda’s eyes fell back to the victorious pair and saw that, with Grom defeated, the traditional tiaras had materialised on their heads.
"Nice!" King gave a little fist pump as Luz and Amity chatted quietly to each other. "Nothing makes a crowd like you more than when you tell them their team won!"
"I dunno," Eda sighed. "I don’t think either of those two got what they wanted from tonight. Maybe we should give them some space to-"
"AND THERE YOU HAVE IT FOLKS, A HAPPY ENDING FOR THIS YEAR’S GROM!" King cried, having already run up to the two suddenly awkward-looking girls. "Let’s give it up for our Grom Queens, Luz and Amity!"
Eda heard more rustling as the students who’d followed King from Hexside came out from the treeline. After a brief pause to confirm Grom had indeed been vanquished, they charged forward with whoops and cheers. Eda let a proud smile spread over her face as she saw her apprentice lifted up by her classmates, and joined in the applause. She walked forward as the small crowd approached, but headed past them – the large, pink-leafed tree was what held her attention now.
Eda ran a finger down the trunk’s bark, examining the small crumbs captured by her long nail. She thought back to the Abomination that Amity had summoned, which towered over the small-to-medium ones she’d seen the girl manage previously. The intensity to the magic these two had achieved together was evidence of a stronger connection than Eda had ever seen before. However tonight had turned out, she knew things between them weren’t over.
After listening briefly, Eda softly knocked on the door to Luz’s room. A faint grunt of acknowledgement came from the other side, so she went in. She’d been right about the source of the breeze that had been flowing through the hall; Luz was sat in the open window of her room, staring broodily out to sea.
The girl turned her head and gave Eda a sheepish smile. "Still up?" she asked.
"Yeah," Eda nodded with a yawn. "Crashed on the couch for a bit, but I gotta take off this suit if I don’t want King kneading his way through it." She pulled the bow tie loose to drape around her neck as she approached the human. "So…" she said, leaning against the wall next to the window. "You and that Amity girl looked like you had fun tonight."
Luz nodded, but there was a sad look in her eye as she went back to looking out at the purple ocean.
"You wanna talk about what happened?" Eda prompted.
Luz sighed, lowering her head. "I never thought my Mom would be my greatest fear. But it feels weird hiding stuff from her."
"…Ah." Eda suddenly saw why Luz might have been too distracted to notice some particularly glaring things earlier. "Was she the looker with the glasses and the blue scrubs?"
Luz shot Eda a surprised look before laughing and giving the witch a playful thwack to the arm. Eda grinned at the sight of her human smiling again.
"Yeah, that’s her," Luz replied. "We never kept secrets from each other before, I could tell her anything. But now I’ve got to hold things back and it doesn’t feel nice."
"Mmm." Eda wasn’t sure what the answer to the girl’s situation was; any other human who had wandered into the Boiling Isles had run screaming straight back through whatever portal they’d come through. Whatever similarities Luz’s mother might share with her daughter, a curiosity for the grotesque might not be one of them.
The brown-suited woman eyed Luz’s sad, vulnerable expression. She thought she’d been discouraging the kid from taking on Grom because of general human weakness. But now as Eda looked over her young apprentice, who had clumsily dressed herself up for a party and was now missing home, she recognised the uncomfortably maternal instinct that had been sitting unacknowledged in her belly for some time now.
"Well, she might not get the magic stuff," Eda began, "but if she knew that you stood together with your friend so you could conquer your fears together, I bet she’d be really proud of you for that. I know I am."
Luz looked back at Eda, her eyes shimmering a little. She pulled Eda into one of her hugs, and for once Eda didn’t feel like pulling away. She even felt the strangest urge to put her lips against the human’s forehead, and had to shake away the odd instinct.
"Thanks Eda," Luz murmured. After a few more seconds she let the tall woman go and lowered herself back down to the floor, closing the window behind her.
Eda smiled and ruffled the girl’s hair before heading back out of the room. "Sleep well, Luz," she said as she closed the door.
She then reached into her pocket and pulled out the two pieces of torn pink paper that she’d spotted on the floor by Luz and Amity’s tree. She looked down at the words written on them for a few thoughtful seconds.
She drew a spell-circle with her other hand and the paper caught fire, quickly smouldering away into nothing.
Eda couldn’t help another smile escape her mouth as she headed towards her nest. The kid had so much more to discover for herself, and Eda wasn’t going to take any of those discoveries away from her.