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Philip slipped off the back of the wagon while the workmen unloading its wares had their backs turned, and disappeared into the bustling chaos of the kitchens. Sneaking onto the wagon and staying hidden through the inspection checkpoints had been the hard part. No one took notice of one more ragged little boy darting through the kitchens. If he were to stand and gawk or wander about, then they might - or more likely a cook might seize him and put him to work - but so long as he moved with purpose, anyone who paid him the least bit of mind would simply assume he was already about some task for someone.
As a child, he’d gotten into all sorts of places he didn’t belong by simply scampering along like he knew just where he was going and what he was doing. He’d realized early on that a lie need not be convincing if it was earnest.
There hadn’t been a single location the recently founded town of Gravesfield had to offer which could provide half the excitement of his own castle’s kitchens. All the busy steam and clangor rattled his carefully laid plan quite out of his mind. He’d never been down here during his reign as Emperor; why would he?
In this form, though, all of it fascinated him. He wiggled himself into the crevice between an unlit oven and the wall and took the time to watch. Everywhere there were staff standing and sitting and striding about, engaged in processes at once arcane and familiar. It was loud and crowded and full of half a hundred different close, dark little spaces he could crawl into if he so wished.
The smells wafting through the air - as cacophonous as the sounds in their own way - had that same familiar-yet-not quality. His current body had never scented them nor tasted what produced them, and yet he could remember forward in time to decades’ worth of meals crafted to his own exacting specifications.
The Owl Lady was unwilling to simply starve him, at least while he wore a child’s guise. Her pantry was stocked for a human’s digestion, a small mercy, but of course he couldn’t expect her to have any of his painstakingly discovered favorites. Picking up the scent of those favorites here made him suddenly aware of his body’s hunger, at the same time as it filled him with the natural revulsion of a child who had never stepped foot in this infernal realm before.
Resolute once more, he pulled himself away from the allure of the kitchens and continued out into the lower halls. Down where the staff traveled, they were rougher and more crowded, but still soothingly dim and quiet compared to the kitchens.
Away from the pack of scullions, potboys, and spit-turners, he attracted somewhat more attention, but not much. He walked with purpose, sticking close to the wall with one hand trailing over the smoothly polished stone, and with his face hidden behind the mask, no one could meet his eyes.
After some minutes, he emerged into an area of the castle he was more personally familiar with. Not quite the shiningly polished public face of it, no, but the halls that he and those who reported to him traveled. Once there, he paused to get his bearings, and then began a slower and more purposeful search.
There were a number of servants who might help him. His goal was to find Kikimora. As his assistant, she carried enough borrowed authority to get him where he needed to be, and was obsequious enough he expected she’d believe his message. Even if she didn’t quite believe, he judged it likely that she wouldn’t risk doubting him.
Of course, making the plan was one thing. Actually finding such a busy little creature as her in the vastness of his castle was quite another.
He had built the damned thing up around himself. No one alive knew its twists and turns, its corridors and hallways, its secrets as well as he did. And yet - the walls rose so much higher around him, the floor between so much wider-stretched a gulf, and again and again he tried to return to his mental map of the place only to come up unsure of where he was or where he’d already been.
The frustration built, a tight knot that grew rapidly too large for his small body. Every passing pair of footsteps or snippet of conversation began to feel like a clout to the ear. He bared his teeth behind his mask whenever he saw someone, because none of them were who he wanted.
Just when he thought he might collapse entirely beneath the weight of his thwarted plans, he spotted a familiar figure striding down the hall.
Darius, head witch of the Abomination Coven, was not his first nor his second choice of ally. Not even in the top five, really. Oh, he was loyal enough - although Philip still bitterly suspected that his influence had played a part in the betrayal of the previous Golden Guard - and talented with his devilry. He was not a man who Philip expected to believe a child who came toddling up claiming to be the Emperor, though.
But he also wasn’t a man who Philip expected to be cruel, either, which was more than could be said for some of his servants. They had their uses, those monsters, but only so long as he was strong enough to hold their leads.
They draw even with each other. Darius paid him no mind. Philip stopped, too overwhelmed by the sheer scope of the task he’d set himself to reason through the decision, then turned and ran after the man.
A quick tug on his cape brought him to a halt. Darius stared down at him like something he’d stepped in. “Where’d you lose your manners, little emperor? Go on, now, I’ve got business to attend to.”
For one startled moment, Philip thought somehow the man must know. Then he realized it was simply a reference - not a terribly kind one, either - to the mask he wore, after the fashion of which he had designed the one he wore as emperor.
Darius tugged his cape from Philip’s hand and resumed walking. Philip caught him up and this time grabbed a hearty handful of it, digging in his heels. This time, the look he earned was less indulgently exasperated, more irritated.
“Look, I don’t have time to babysit. Whatever errand it is you’re on, it’s not -” Frowning, Darius cut himself off, and looked Philip over more closely.
No doubt he’d assumed, as Philip had hoped, that the boy before him was simply a message-runner or some other member of staff. The frayed, worn quality of his clothing, not to mention the dissimilarity in style and cut and craft to modern-day Boiling Isles fashions, gave the lie to that idea immediately upon inspection, and Darius was neither unobservant nor unintelligent.
Once the realization sank in that he wasn’t dealing with a member of the staff, Darius groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he reached down, offering his hand. Smiling, Philip took it. Progress.
“You should not be here. Where are your parents? Do they work in the castle?”
Philip shook his head, then did it again when Darius finally stopped waiting for a verbal reply and looked at him.
“Ugh. Great. How did you even get in here, then?” As he spoke, he walked, reversing course back up the hallway he’d just come down, pulling Philip along at his side. He wasn’t rough, but he didn’t bother to adjust his long-legged stride either, so Philip had to scramble to keep up. “Trying to come usurp the throne, perhaps? I suppose you couldn’t do worse than the mess we’ve got on our hands right now.”
Philip would remember that when he regained his true body. Although perhaps it was meant less as a statement of his general ability, and more a reflection of whatever was going on with his body without him inside to command it.
“Honestly, I should just let you wander and get into trouble. I don’t get paid to babysit. And what kind of parents let their brat out of sight long enough for it to infiltrate the castle, anyway? What entrance did you come through? I’ll have those door guards on latrine duty for a week.”
Philip giggled. Perhaps he ought to revise his estimation of Darius’s loyalty. He never much cared to hear whining, and especially not now when he had his own problems to attend to, but he had always enjoyed the man’s wryly petty attitude.
They came to an intersection, and Darius paused. Philip took advantage of the moment to reach into his pocket and pull out the carefully folded letter secreted away there. He’d labored over it for quite some time in the Owl House, struggling to force his uncoordinated child’s hand to form neat letters. In desperation, he’d even reverted to using his left hand, rather than the godly right he’d been trained in his letters with.
The result was still an embarrassment, but it was a legible embarrassment which neatly explained his situation. If he could simply speak, it might be easier, but that was yet another burden placed upon him. There was no physical reason for that inability of his child self, and yet even with all the oratory skills of his lifetime still within his mind, he could not coax more than the occasional word or short phrase from his lips. Maddening.
He tugged on Darius’s hand. The man glanced briefly down at him and the proffered paper. When he didn’t immediately take it, Philip tugged harder.
Sighing, Darius took and unfolded it. He briefly scanned the words, then snorted. He folded it back up - carefully so, along the lines of the original folds - and handed it back. “I’m not playing this game with you. I told you that I don’t have time to babysit. The door guards let you in, so they can figure out who you belong to.”
With that, he started walking again. Philip tried not to come along, but he was simply too small. He had to either walk alongside Darius or risk being pulled right off his feet. The man probably wouldn’t drag him through the halls, at least.
Trying to twist and pull away from Darius didn’t work. He just tightened his grip with an impatient noise and gave Philip a come-along tug.
Bereft of other options, panic bubbling in his chest as they came nearer and nearer to the front entrance of the castle, Philip chose a cruder method: he kicked Darius in the shin.
That worked. Darius dropped his hand and drew back, swearing. Before he could grab him again, Philip darted away, running full pelt down the halls as the sound of Darius’s outraged voice echoed behind him. He ran, arms out, turning down hallways at random. Darius wasn’t mad enough to follow him for very long. When he finally stopped, pressed up against a wall holding his breath to listen for the sound of footsteps or Darius’s voice, he couldn’t recognize what part of the castle he was in.
That same earlier sense of frustration squeezed his chest tight once more. He didn’t have time to run around getting lost. There was no earthly reason at all why he ought to be fleeing pell-mell from his own coven heads. They were his servants, and even in this reduced state, they needed to damn well heed him -
He slid down to sit on the floor, knees drawn up, both hands buried in his hair. The urge to rock his body rose, so strong it felt as if it were pushing out through his skin. He simply curled more tightly into himself, still against the wall, and pulled at his hair until the sting in his scalp lessened that overwhelming need. He clenched his jaws against the desire to wail.
Bit by bit, the thwarted, childish fury drained away and his reason returned. He simply had to stick to his initial plan. He’d chosen Kikimora as his contact for a reason, after all, and the encounter he’d just escaped only confirmed that he’d been right to do so.
Having come to that decision, he still couldn’t make himself stand up. The hall was simply so cavernous he felt it might swallow him without the reassuring solidity of the wall at his back. He still wasn’t sure where he was or which direction to head, and when he thought of simply wandering like a lost little foundling through his castle until he stumbled upon Kikimora, it made him want to scream again.
“Ohh,” crooned an unfortunately familiar voice from around the corner, “what do we have here?”
He leapt up, heart hammering in his chest, and ran. A sneaky tendril of vine curled around his leg and yanked him off his feet, hauling him into the air moments before his face smacked into the ground. His mask clattered to the floor below.
Struggling only made the thorns dig deeper into the meat of his calf. He went still, dangling limply as he was turned to face Terra, who sat in the maw of one of her monstrous plants looking quite like a fox which had got into the henhouse.
“What’s a little sprout like you doing up here?” She reeled him in closer, then stopped with a gasp, eyes widening. “Why, you’re not a witchlet!” Her vine dropped him into her waiting lap, and before he could even think of squirming away, she wrapped an arm around him, pulling him firmly back against her body. With her other hand, she tucked his mop of hair behind his ears and traced their rounded edges. “However did a human come to be wandering about the Emperor’s castle, hm? You don’t look a thing like the other one, either.”
Terra took him by the chin, still all gentleness, and turned his head to press his face into her bosom. Her thumb swiped across his mouth, catching and pulling at his lower lip. “Poor little thing. You’re terribly lost, aren’t you? There must be some poor humans back in your realm fretting over where their child has gone, and they’ll never know, will they?”
When her thumb slipped between his lips, he wrapped them around it and suckled on pure reflex. This game that Terra wanted to play, he knew the rules - Father taught him, sat in his lap with one strong arm holding him in place while the other hand caressed him just like this.
Father’s body was broad and firm, though, nothing like the enveloping, earthy softness of Terra’s. He snuggled in closer, sinking into the mounds of breasts and belly, earning himself a pleased chuckle. She smelled like soil, too, with a cloying floral sweetness overlaid, nothing like Father’s scent of sweat and woodsmoke and shaving soap.
And Terra - his longest-serving coven head, first among his followers, a most useful monster indeed - had never hurt him the way Father did, so that he craved those moments of relative tenderness where all he had to do was submit with good grace and patience to being touched.
Still, it was the same game. Playing it well always pleased Father and earned him a reprieve from punishment. Perhaps Terra wouldn’t hurt him if he showed himself to be biddable.
“Oh, someone really must be missing you. Such a well-tended little sapling.” She pulled her thumb from his mouth and pushed her first two fingers in, nails scratching at the back of his throat. “Well, they won’t be finding you again, but at least the fruits of their labor won’t be going to waste, mm? I think I’ll take my time enjoying you.”
Panic burned away the cozy fog of familiarity shrouding his mind. Terra wasn’t Father. She wouldn’t shoo him off her lap to fix his clothes once she was done and then bid him go help Caleb with the chores. He knew how she played with her toys and what she did once she was done.
And if he revealed himself, she would simply have to kill him for the sake of her own safety. He had to get away from her.
She loosened her grasp on his waist and dropped her hand to his leg, drawing her nails up the delicate skin of his inner thigh. His body stayed lax for a moment, even while his mind screamed that this was it, this was the best chance he would get -
He bit down on the fingers in his mouth until the taste of blood filled it. Subtly wrong - this body’s mouth held the memory of its own blood so clearly, but witch blood didn’t taste the same. It was sour, not so metallic, and cooler.
Swearing, Terra snatched her hand away. Before she could retaliate, he wriggled out of her grasp, her fingers catching at the hem of his pants as he leapt out of her lap. He stumbled and fell when he hit the ground, then scrambled upright and began running. The hallway in front of them was straight, easy for her to pick him up at her leisure, but if he darted behind her and around the corner, then perhaps he could squeeze himself into some nook or cranny or pull open one of the heavy doors lining the corridor before she could turn around and follow -
She’d been nearly gentle the first time she caught him, dangling him daintily in the air by one single curling tendril of vine, the thorns only just pricking into him. This time, thick vines wrapped him up tight, pinning his legs together and his arms to his sides, and the thorns dug viciously in, tearing his clothing and skin alike.
No graceful sailing through the air for him this time, either - she dragged him back to her over the floor. When she raised him up to her eye level once more, all pretense of kindness was gone from her face.
“I begin to see how someone might have misplaced you. Well, let’s just make sure you can’t make any more ill-thought-out escape attempts, shall we?”
At a gesture from Terra, the vines shifted to hang him upside down. She plucked his shoes from his feet, tossing them to land with a pair of soft thumps somewhere in the hallway behind her. He wiggled, trying to crane his head to see what he was doing, but he was held tight in place and had no leverage to move.
Her fingers stroked over the sole of one foot, coated in some wet, sticky substance. An unwilling laugh burst out of him, and he jerked, squirming again. She spread the substance thoroughly all over the bottom of his foot and between his toes as well. The sensation went swiftly from a light tickle to utterly unbearable, and his laughter took on a sharp, hysterical edge, but of course Terra paid that no mind.
By the time she started in on his other foot, it began to burn. He writhed, trying to kick, heedless of how the thorns gouged at him, unable to hold still under the onslaught even if he’d been able to think well enough to realize he ought to.
Once, when Father caught them at one of their fantastical little games, he had Philip and Caleb each grasp a hot coal in their hands and hold it until they could bear to no longer. This, Father had said, is but the merest taste of Hell.
Though he was three years the younger, Philip had ever had a higher tolerance for pain, and held onto his even after Caleb had let go.
More than the pain, he recalled the greasy, porkish scent of his own burning flesh. He did recall the pain well, though, and as the itching and burning on the soles of his feet reached its highest pitch, it felt quite like that coal searing the skin off of his palm. He’d not been able to close nor fully open that hand for such a long time.
This body didn’t bear the scar yet. His mind remembered it, though, and recoiled from imagining what state the soles of his feet might now be in. Even once the worst of the pain subsided, however long that took, the very air was abrasive against them.
Terra bundled him back into her lap, tucked more tightly between her thighs this time, arm once more around his middle to keep him held snugly against her body. A vine curled around his arm and stretched it out, snaking over his palm and between his fingers to splay them.
“Now, since you want to be naughty, I think you need to be taught a lesson, don’t you?” She took hold of his pinky finger and wiggled it. “Let’s start with these little twigs.”
Slowly, she pushed his finger towards the back of his hand. The strain was simply uncomfortable at first, even when he could look down and see the unnatural angle at which she’d bent his finger, but as she increased the pressure, discomfort soon gave way to pain. He took it as he always did: blank-faced, dry-eyed, small somewhere inside of himself where it barely reached.
The dry crack of his finger finally snapping throbbed up his arm in time with his pulse. Terra paused a moment, then moved on to the next finger. By the time she reached his thumb, he was crying silently, a helpless slow seep of tears. When she reached down, wrapped her narrow, wrinkled hand around his, and squeezed, it drew a high, hoarse cry from him.
“Oh, so you do have a voice, little sprout.” Terra chuckled and tightened her grip, making him squirm and cry out once more. “I was starting to wonder. You’re a sturdy little thing, though, aren’t you? I like that. It makes it fun.”
The pain from his hand crawled around inside his skin, gnawing at his bones, so huge and hot that he hardly felt the vine winding its way up his leg until its thorns bit into the soft flesh of his inner thigh. Eyes wide, he looked down, saw it disappearing up the leg of his pants at the same time as he felt it inching closer towards -
A polite, throat-clearing cough came from behind them. The vine stopped its progress, nestled in the crease of his thigh. Sing-song, Terra said, “I do hope you’ve a reason for this interruption.”
“Ah, yes, Head Witch Snapdragon.” That was Kikimora, tremulous but taking refuge in officiousness. “I’ve been sent to fetch you. You’re needed in the Emperor’s quarters.”
Philip bit his lip to stifle his whimpering, sitting still as he could in Terra’s grasp. If she were called away for business, she would have to let him go. He could run to one of the castle’s dim, empty rooms to lick his wounds. That was as far ahead as he could think, to just getting away.
With a disgusted noise, Terra wheeled around. Kikimora’s visible eye widened fractionally upon seeing Philip, but her expression did not otherwise change.
“I swear,” Terra muttered, “those bumbling healers couldn’t find compost if you buried them up to the neck in it. Fine. Here - you take this.”
The vine around Philip’s leg tightened and lifted him, then dropped him in an ungainly heap beside Kikimora. He pushed himself into a sitting position, hurt hand curled against his chest, and stared down at the floor.
“I’m sorry, Head Witch? Take him -”
“To my chambers, ” Terra clarified impatiently. “You’ve interrupted my playtime, so now I’ve got to save him until later.”
“I -” A shuffling noise. The crisp white of Kikimora’s garments shifted in his peripheral vision. “Yes, Head Witch.”
“Toodle-oo, sproutling,” Terra said as she swept away down the hall. “I’ll see you later!”
Once Terra was gone, Philip looked up at Kikimora. Their eyes met. Then she sighed and crossed her arms, nudging at him with one taloned foot.
“Stand up. You heard her.”
He shifted onto his knees instead, then began an awkward three-limbed crawl, left hand curled in protectively against his chest. His mask lay on the floor ahead. That was all he saw. So single-minded was he in his need to have it back - to cut out the suddenly unbearable light even of this dim hallway, to cover up his leaking eyes and trembling mouth - that he didn’t even hear the busy little click of Kikimora’s claws on the tile keeping pace with him.
She caught him by the back of the shirt and yanked him up. “Do not make this harder than it has to be. Just get up, will you? I don’t want to drag you, but I will if you make me.” She grabbed him under the arms, claws digging into him, and hauled him to his feet.
A low moan slid out of him as his weight settled onto the raw soles of his feet. Pain bubbled up his legs, coating the inside of his skin, throbbing in time with his pulse. His legs trembled underneath him, toes curling as he tried to balance on the outer edges of his feet. He stumbled forward into Kikimora, grabbing at her for balance.
Kikimora pushed him away. He sat down heavily, jarring his hand, and made a rusty, formless blurt of noise. She was supposed to help him. Why he should expect help from such a devilish-looking creature, he didn’t know. All he knew was that he needed his mask. If he could get it, then he could find the quiet place inside himself to think.
She hauled him to his feet once more, than grabbed his wrist and began pulling him impatiently along. He tripped behind her, trying to walk without walking. As they passed by his fallen mask, he leaned his weight backwards, trying to reach for it.
Standing, they were the same size. He may have even been heavier. She was stronger, though, and her talons dug hard into his wrist as she jerked him away from the mask, down the hallway.
Each step sent a new wave of hot nausea sweeping through him. Staying upright enough not to fall to the ground and be dragged consumed his awareness. When she finally stopped, he trudged mindlessly into her back, only stopping when he collided with her.
She looked between him and the door in front of them with an unhappily furrowed brow. A small, quick circle of her finger and the door swung open and she ushered him inside. Once he got over the threshold, he let himself collapse onto the floor, legs out straight to try to get his feet as far from the rest of him as possible, so the pain had further to go.
Kikimora stood there in the doorway, looking at him in silence. What the expression on the uneven slice of her face he could see meant, he had no idea. Shortly, without further words, she closed the door, leaving him alone.
Terra’s rooms were lush and full of lace and chintz. Runners crawled up the walls and shelves, vines hung from the ceiling and fixtures, and everywhere there was a spilling profusion of flowers and leaves. The cloying, overlapping scent of them invaded his mouth and nose and coated his throat. Globes of light bobbed gently about on the ceiling, turning the interior room as bright as daytime.
Without his mask there to lay its comforting shadow across his face, the light flooded his eyes, making them squint and water. It pierced like a needle through the holes of his pupils, straight back into his brain, so he couldn’t think.
He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. The motion jarred the broken fingers of his left hand, sending a monstrous, jangling pulse rolling up his arm. In that makeshift darkness, he tried to bring his thoughts into some kind of order, but every breath was thick with a hundred different headachey smells.
His breath came fast and shallow, chest squeezing every time he tried to inhale. A high, stuttering whine reached his ears - it issued, he realized belatedly, from his own throat.
Unnameable sensations met inside him, radiating down from his mangled hand and up from his abused feet, all wrapped up in the inescapable flavor of the perfumed air. He was overfilled, a skin so fat with water it was about to burst. Vividly, he pictured his own disintegration, his body simply falling apart into a wet, red, stringy pile of viscera and bones.
Subjected to such unbearable pressure, he finally gave into the urge to rock. The movement broke the sound of his own thin, breathless whining up even more, made it jagged in his throat, but it lessened that awful sense of overwhelm as well. It bled the feelings off until there was room, once more, for him inside of his own skin.
A single thought beat in his brain: he had to get out. He couldn’t still be here when Terra came back.
He rolled over onto his hand and knees and crawled the short distance to the door, then climbed painfully upright. After the brief respite of sitting down, standing once more on his raw feet made the muscles in his legs shiver and twitch and his skin prickle with sick sweat.
He grabbed the handle of the door and yanked on it, leaning all his weight against it… and fell backwards, sweaty hand slipping off the metal. Without thinking, he reached to catch himself, and instead bent two of his broken fingers under his palm. The sensation that evoked was not even pain, but something so huge and bright that it took his sight as it crashed over him.
Awareness came back gradually. He lay in a fetal curl, gasping, and could not for a moment get any part of his trembling body under his command enough to sit up. When he did, though, he saw that the door was entirely unmoved.
Of course. It was locked. He was a captive, here to await Terra’s return and slow, destructive pleasure. A growl slipped out from between his teeth. He reached up and took a handful of his own hair and yanked it, overcome with frustration at his own slow and stupid mind for having wasted the effort on such an obvious failure.
There would be a window in the bedroom. He tried once more to get to his feet. Kikimora had dragged him a terrible length through the castle, stumbling along behind her - already that memory receded into the gentle fog of un-recall, dreamlike and vague. Without being pulled, though, the best he could manage was a few tottering steps before he fell to his knees.
Gritting his teeth, he crawled, although the thick pile of the rugs scraped at his hand and the muscles of his arm screamed at being forced to support the weight of his body. He pushed the bedroom door open with his head, then made his lurching way past the end of the bed and to the sliver of daylight streaming in through the window.
Standing painfully upright, he grabbed onto the edge of the windowsill. That was enough to hold him upright, but he couldn’t pull his whole body up with just his hand. There was nothing in the room that he had any hope of being able to move over to climb on. Steeling himself, he dug his nails into the wood of the windowsill and swung his feet up, scrabbling at the stone wall with his toes, trying to push himself up and over.
He managed to drag himself a couple of painful inches upwards, and then slipped abruptly back and fell. The impact with the ground knocked all the air out of him. He lay on his back, mouth open, lungs empty, unable to draw a single breath.
When he finally could, it came out in a choked wail. He put his good hand over his face and raked his nails down it, tearing into his own cheeks. He writhed where he’d fallen and drummed his heels on the ground and wailed louder at the pain that caused. He slapped himself across the face until his palm was numb and his cheek hot and swollen. When he could no longer feel the blows except as a sudden pressure, he shoved his knuckles into his mouth and bit down savagely, his formless wailing vibrating against the bones of his hand.
Eventually, as always, the fit passed. The deranged and devilish rage left him limp and weary, his mind full of sludge. Whimpering, he rolled over and wiggled on his belly until he made it under Terra’s bed.
There, in the respite of that dim and dusty cave, he curled once more onto his side and closed his eyes. He didn’t quite sleep, but entered a cold sort of hibernation, where his breath and thoughts came slow as tree sap in the spring thaw and he had not even a child’s sense of reason.
Some time later, his faculties returned. Just how long, he wasn’t sure, but the angle of the light through the window was different. Time was running out.
Panic threatened to overwhelm him once more, but he fought it down. There would be no conventional escape from this room, no, but - and the realization made him want to yank at his hair until fistfuls came out in his hands once more - he didn’t need to use the door or the window. He only needed paper and an implement of some sort.
Unlike in his childhood, paper in this realm was plentiful. He snagged a notebook and pen both off of Terra’s desk, hauling himself up onto the chair to pillage it, and then retreated with both back under the bed. If she came in while he was working on his escape, it wouldn’t take her long to find him there, but he’d have more time than if he were just out in the open.
His eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness under there. Laid out on his belly, he painstakingly drew out the sprawling picto-glyph array for a teleportation spell.
It didn’t go easily. He had to use his right hand, clumsy despite all the patient training Caleb had put him through. Every time a line wobbled off course, he had to bite back the urge to scream, and frustrated tears rose into his eyes, blurring the page in front of him.
He discarded paper after paper, failed attempt after failed attempt. Crumpling them viciously up helped release some of the anger that built inside of him at each failure. He kept on trying, though. There was no other choice. The scope of his awareness narrowed down to only the paper in front of him and his pen scratching on it, his stiff fingers and cramping, sweaty palm clenched around the pen.
When, finally, a finished array flowed from his unruly pen, he simply stared at it, almost unable to comprehend that he’d done it.
He dropped the pen and held his hand over it. His arm froze, muscles all locked up with fear. What if he hadn’t done it? What if he’d missed some stroke, blurred some line? What if it didn’t work, or, worse, activated but malfunctioned?
Out in the front room, the big main door swung open, creaking on its hinges. His stomach flipped and his heart skipped in his chest. He slapped his hand down on the paper and was whisked away, surrounded by heat and blinding light.
The spell tumbled him out onto the stretch of rocky, overgrown grass between the Owl House and the forest. He sat up, squinting in the daylight - mid-afternoon by the position of the sun.
There stood the dubious sanctuary of the Owl House, with its curving roof and stained-glass windows and the bulk of the ruined tower behind it. Only a few dozen feet away, but it might as well have been across the Boiling Sea; there was no way he could walk that far, and crawling would tear his knees and palm up.
He couldn’t just sit there either, though, utterly exposed to any wandering witch or creature that might come by.
Before he could prod his shocky-stiff body into moving, the Owl Lady’s house demon spotted him. It stretched its sinuous bulk across the distance separating them and curled around him, boxing him in place and fixing him with its black, beady eyes.
“Hey there! Boy, has everyone been worried about you!” Its voice grated even more than usual. He hunched, raising his hands to cover his ears, unable to even pretend to bear the noise with grace. “Oh, whoa -” If he didn’t know any better, he might have thought the thing sounded concerned - “what happened there?”
The demon coiled about him and lifted him bodily from the ground. Reminded abruptly of the painful squeeze of Terra’s vines, he thrashed in its grip. It was smooth, however, and held onto him only as tightly as was necessary to keep him from dropping out of its grasp.
“Eeeeda,” the demon called as they neared the house. “Guess who Iiii found!”
Thank God, it deposited him gently onto the doorstep rather than continue holding him. No sooner had he begun to catch his bearings from being so suddenly yanked about than did the door swing open, revealing the Owl Lady.
She loomed, wild-haired and tall, a fearsome figure in her own right when he was in such a reduced state. As soon as she saw him huddled there at her feet, she crouched down to his level.
“And just what have you been up to, you little brat?” Her mismatched gaze flickered over him, taking in just what a sight he was: disheveled and blood-smeared, clothes torn, mangled hand pressed in against his chest. Her expression softened from irritation to something uncomfortably close to pity. “Looks like it didn’t go well for you, huh?”
Carefully, she scooped him up off the ground and balanced him against her hip to bring him inside. He stayed as stiff in her grip as he could, though it took all his control not to bury his face in her chest and clutch at her. She was a witch, a savage and wild thing, the very perfect picture of what he’d dedicated his life to eradicating, but the way she held him reminded him of the few memories he had - more in his body than his mind - of being held in such a way by his mother.
He wanted a mother very badly right then. Or Caleb, who had spent far more time tending his childish hurts and drying his tears than Mother ever had. Or Luz, that sweet human girl whose vivacity and curiosity reminded him so achingly of Caleb, who he so wished he could save from the corruption of this infernal realm.
He very much did not want the Owl Lady. But she was the one who brought him into her home and up the stairs and sat him on the toilet in her bathroom. She was the one who knelt before him on the floor, peeled the blood-sticky, torn rag of his shirt off and cleaned him off, then dabbed stinging antiseptic over every deep scratch and puncture from the thorns on Terra’s vines. She was the one who carefully, with gentle hands, stuck ridiculous colored adhesive bandages over the worst of them.
And when her pet came scampering in, she sent it to fetch a clean shirt for him. Once the creature handed that over, she said, “I’ll be out in a second, King. Why don’t you go get my scroll and tell Luz to tell Hunter that we found the little Emperor, and that he’s a bit roughed up but he’s okay, and to come on home?”
She slipped the new shirt over his head - soft and white and sleeveless, it smelled like the human girl - and then pulled his shorts off, letting the hanging hem of the oversized shirt spare as much of his modesty as she could. With her wet, warm cloth, she followed the dried streaks of blood up his thigh, to the highest place that creeping vine had reached before Kikimora interrupted.
Brows lowered, she said, “Once we’ve got you settled, kiddo, I want to know who did this.”
She wrapped his torn ankle in bandages, then picked his feet up and, one by one, spread a salve on them. It itched fiercely for a time, enough to make him squirm and whimper while she made soothing I-know noises in her throat, but when the itching faded it took with it all the whopping heat and pressure of the pain and left him blessedly numb. The sheer relief made his eyes start leaking.
“Okay,” the Owl Lady said, grimacing as she took his left wrist and gently extended his arm, “this is gonna suck. I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t pleasant, to say the least. He watched her pull and push his crooked fingers back straight, his own broken hand so small in hers, though it was already terribly swollen. Her fingertips left dimples in the skin where they pressed. Deep bruising mottled it, reaching across the back of his hand down to his wrist, curling between his fingers, quite similar to the vegetal matter that spread across his adult body from any wound.
She splinted each finger so it would heal straight, then wrapped him in snowy white bandages from wrist to fingertips. “You know,” she said conversationally while she wrapped, “when I was your age, I was always running around bouncing off of stuff and messing myself up too. Didn’t take it quite this well, though. It’s kinda spooky, to tell the truth.”
Bandaging done with, she cradled his hand in hers, and looked him in the face. “You’re pretty used to getting hurt like this, huh?”
Exhausted past the point of coyness or pretense, he simply nodded. The Owl Lady’s lips thinned into a displeased line, but she didn’t say anything else. After a moment, she let go of his hand, then climbed to her feet with a groan.
“C’mon, let’s go get you settled.”
This time, when she picked him up, he gave in to the urge to nestle into her chest for the whole short trip between the bathroom and the bedroom she’d put him and Hunter up in. The couch was his; Hunter slept on a scavenged bedroll and pile of pillows and blankets on the other side of the closet, where it couldn’t be seen from the door.
The Owl Lady, perceptive enough to pick up on his weakness, pried him gently off herself and placed him down in the nest of Hunter’s bedding. He burrowed in, tugging the borrowed blankets around himself.
They smelled - familiar. Not like Caleb. Caleb had smelled like a human, and witches had a subtly different scent, something about their sweat or skin or blood, a constant reminder of their unnaturalness. The grimwalkers smelled like something else entirely - like wood left out in the afternoon sun, hot from its rays, with just the faintest whiff of ozone. It wasn’t any more natural or human than the smell of a witch, but it was comfortingly familiar nonetheless.
Left once more alone, he tried to summon his mental defenses. Perhaps the Owl Lady pitied him in his child’s guise, but she was still a witch. Still a vile creature of Hell, still a liar and a thief. Even knowing that, though, some pathetic part of him yearned for her to come back, to sit beside him and hold him in her lap, as if she truly were his own long-dead mother.
On the morrow, he’d need to start working on a new plan. The longer he stayed here, the harder it became to keep his goal in sight. He was struck with a new appreciation for the temptations Caleb had faced - but he would remain resolute. Caleb’s mind and heart had been too open. He wouldn’t make the same mistake.
He sat on the drowsy edge of sleep when Hunter and the girl returned. Footsteps thundered up the stairs and then down the hallway outside, and then the door swung open. Half-aware, he scrambled to wedge himself into the corner, a pillow clutched against his chest - as if that would offer any protection from Terra - except the faces that came around the protruding wall of the closet weren’t Terra’s at all.
“You woke him up,” Hunter muttered to Luz. “I told you not to be so loud -”
“Shh! Who’s being loud now?” Luz left Hunter sputtering in indignant disbelief and swiftly knelt down beside the mussed-up nest of bedding. “Heyyy, Philip. Eda said you got kinda messed up? Where’d you go, anyway?”
Whether or not she expected an answer, she wasn’t going to get one. He did crawl out of the corner, though, and into the welcome shelter of her lap. She wrapped her arms around him and sat back against Hunter’s pillows, doing her best not to jostle him too badly as she did.
Still scowling, Hunter came and crouched at the girl’s side. “Did the Owl Lady treat your injuries? Let me see.” Dutiful as ever.
He held his hand out for Hunter to look over. As adept as the boy was with first aid - all scouts needed to be, and he’d spent years helping Philip deal with the ravages of old age and his condition alike - he’d find nothing to fault in the Owl Lady’s technique. Still, it presumably made him feel better to fuss, and Philip couldn’t deny that he enjoyed being fussed over.
Hunter inspected his hand, then the assortment of adhesives plastered all over his bare arms and legs. That led him, naturally, to Philip’s bandaged ankle and then his bandaged feet - the woozy thought came to him that he was really all over bandages, it had to look quite silly.
With nothing to complain about and also nothing else to do, Hunter clambered awkwardly over Luz’s outstretched legs and sat with his back against the wall, positioned to keep watch.
He nestled in against Luz’s chest and closed his eyes, drifting once more towards sleep. She rubbed his back and murmured to him, scolding him softly and without heat for having left. Hunter didn’t speak, but he was a palpable presence. Philip’s good soldier, his ever-vigilant guard.
It all felt so natural, so comfortable, when it shouldn’t have been anything of the sort. This was enemy territory, and Philip was weaker than he’d ever been. He’d suffered a terrible setback, and with each passing hour the day he’d spent hundreds of patient years awaiting crept closer without him there to greet it. This house itself was an abomination, the girl holding him a lost lamb whose soul he wished to save but who he knew he couldn’t trust, and the boy sitting watchfully against the wall who wore Caleb’s face was nothing but a simulacrum, albeit the most successful one to date. Now was not the time to let down his guard.
And yet, they had been kind to him. Today, yes, in the extremity of his pain, but ever since he’d been dragged from his own mind in this small and helpless body too. Even knowing - or suspecting - who he truly was, they’d been kind to him.
The devil, he knew, took many guises. Sometimes the devil might offer comfort or solace. A godly man knew to turn away from such undeserved luxuries, for there lay the path to temptation. Failing to do so had been Caleb’s undoing.
Only on a handful of occasions had even Caleb tended him so gently as the Owl Lady had earlier. Nicks and cuts and scratches and bruises a-plenty he’d gathered during the course of his childhood. He’d been a wild thing, unruly, with a devil in him that had to frequently be beaten out, and while soft-hearted Caleb had never raised a hand to him even when it had been warranted, only the most savage punishments had ever earned Philip such coddling as this. A few broken fingers and some blood certainly wouldn’t have.
These witches were all soft. He’d made them that way, he supposed, the better to mold them into good little followers who wouldn’t question his plans until it was too late. The girl, too - the human realm must have changed indeed since his own day. Perhaps that was why she fell so easily to the temptations of witchcraft; she’d been spared the rod and now she was spoiled.
It felt too good. It was dangerous. If he truly wished to preserve himself, he’d wiggle out of Luz’s grasp and retreat to the sofa, or another room entirely. But his body was so heavy, all lax and warm, and he simply couldn’t bring himself to refute this comfort.
Tomorrow, he would. Tomorrow, he would begin his planning anew. His mistake, perhaps, had been going alone; he’d work on Hunter, assuage what doubts the boy might have about Philip’s faith in his loyalty. It had been shaken, but not, Philip judged, broken entirely. He needn’t be discarded just yet.
Tomorrow. Just for now, though, he would allow himself an indulgence.