#by throwing the blood in the water either belos never goes back to the boiling isles

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

Yes yes fire imagery with belos but american witch trials never burned witches at the stake. European trials did that. American witch trials hanged them. (Except for a few fringe cases lmao i think a dude was pressed to death with stones)

Drowning was used as evidence to prove someone was a witch. People would tie you to a chair weighed down with rocks and if you drowned then you were innocent, but if you survived you would be deemed a witch and probably executed. It was a situation where youd die either way and that was kind of the point because a lot of these accusations really were just people trying to get rid of social outcasts.

Hunter almost definitely didnt know any of this but the scene where he tries to drown himself was. So thematically appropriate. Identity crisis aside, he was a witch in everything but biology. And by now he is even a wild witch, the exact kind that phillip despised the most. But phillip is no longer human. No longer a good puritan man, even if he still believes he is.

So a wild witch tries to drown himself to bring down a not-human. Both of them, in belos's eyes, an abomination of god and the natural order. hunter didnt know but given how easily belos left his body later belos could have avoided drowning at any time. But he keeps possessing hunter to hold him underwater and kill his brother (who had fallen in with the witches and was now no better than one himself) once and for all.

But hunter doesnt drown. Not because he has witch powers to save him but because camilla, his new mother figure, dives in to save him. Because unlike the "witches" of phillips time, hunter is no longer a social outcast. He has a family now. He is loved. Something that belos no longer has