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aparticularbandit · 1 year

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Carving

Summary: Carving’s not all that different from sewing.He tells himself that – he’s told Willow that, a couple of times – but it’s just as true as they believe it is. The only similarity is holding a concept in his head and fiddling away until it either comes together or it doesn’t. With Camila’s sewing machine, he’d gotten better, but there aren’t any similar shortcuts in carving. He either makes it, or he doesn’t. For all intents and purposes, carving should be harder than sewing.

It isn’t.

Hunter (Owl House) Rating: G. Word Count: 2773

Carving’s not all that different from sewing.

He tells himself that – he’s told Willow that, a couple of times – but it’s just as true as they believe it is. The only similarity is holding a concept in his head and fiddling away until it either comes together or it doesn’t. With Camila’s sewing machine, he’d gotten better, but there aren’t any similar shortcuts in carving. He either makes it, or he doesn’t. For all intents and purposes, carving should be harder than sewing.

It isn’t.

The thing about palismans is—

After the Collector, after the war, after the final defeat of the person who created him to be someone he wasn’t (or maybe someone he was; the more they hear about Caleb, the more Luz and Amity are certain he isn’t who Belos – Philip? – Belos wanted him to be, that that’s why the Golden Guard kept turning his back on him, why he kept being destroyed and remade), after all of that, there was nothing.

A long, seemingly endless expanse of nothing.

He wasn’t a human, not really, but he wasn’t a witch either, couldn’t command magic like the witches could, and now that the Titan was gone, he couldn’t use Luz’s glyphs either. And without Flapjack—

He…didn’t really like to think about Flapjack.

(Sometimes he could still hear him, like how he could hear Belos in the human realm before—

But comforting. Soothing. Better.

Not…not at all like that, actually.

…if he absorbed Flapjack the way Belos absorbed all of those other palismans, did that make him evil, too?)

The others went back to Hexside, and Luz split her time between the human realm during their normal school year and Hexside during her breaks and summer vacation (and many, many weekends), and he….

He left. Pushed himself into reconstruction efforts, although the Collector did most of that. And then found himself with that same long expanse of nothing. Nothing to do. Nothing to be. Nothing to chase after, nothing to propel him forward, just….

Nothing.

Making palismans isn’t really like carving. It involves carving, sure, but it isn’t just carving. You can carve – or whittle, really, is what Camila called it when she gave him the pocket knife one of the times he returned with Luz to the human realm – a lot of different kinds of wood. Of course, you need to know your wood, need to know whether it’s soft or hard or somewhere in between, need to be able to know it well enough to understand how your knife will slide through it or nick along it – and you need to know your knife, too, how to take care of it, to keep it clean, to keep it sharp so that you don’t press too hard with a blunt edge and end up cutting yourself (and he cut himself…a lot, not just in the early days, but after, too, most often when he forgot to sharpen his knife – like when he’d first learned to use the sewing machine and kept nicking himself, kept forgetting to keep his fingers out of the way)—

With palismans, sometimes you have an idea in your head already of what you’re planning to carve and how you want it to turn out, and then you get to whittling – carving – and the wood just. does what it wants. knows what it wants, knows what it’s supposed to be. And sometimes that’s according to his plan, and sometimes it’s something else entirely, and he can just be walking through the Boiling Isles, whittling away, and find that the palisman he’s created is nothing like what he was thinking of at all – but still somehow perfect for the next person he meets, the next person who’s wanting one.

Somehow perfect for him.

There’s an intrinsic magic in carving a palisman, but it’s one that requires absolutely no magic at all, and so he feels at peace.

If not for Raine, he might have stayed at the Owl House, after everything.

Eda knew what it was like to suddenly find herself deprived of magic and having to learn how to do things differently. It wasn’t really the same, since he’d never really had magic of his own, but it was…close. Similar, at least.

But Raine was there, and they were doing that whole coupling thing where they were getting to know each other better after years apart, and it was really awkward, and he didn’t really want to be there for any of that, so he’d....

Well, he hadn’t left because he hadn’t been there in the first place, but, again, close enough.

Lilith wasn’t even an option because he’d spent so much time with her when she was head of the Emperor’s Coven, and he knew better than to try and stay with her. Sure, she’d lost her magic, too, perhaps even more abruptly than the Owl Lady had, and he wouldn’t have to deal with all of the potential coupling relearning stuff, but he….

Forgive him, but he didn’t like Lilith. And she didn’t really like him. So it was a match made in nowhere at all, so—

So—

He doesn’t mean to make himself a new palisman.

He’s never known another witch who lost a palisman and then got a new one; every witch who’d lost their palisman to Belos had usually ended up dead shortly thereafter (petrification, most often, but not always), if they weren’t dead before he claimed them, and the ones who survived – the ones in covens, the ones who’d given up their palismans when they’d given up their wild magic – weren’t really looking for new ones.

Mostly.

Some of them might have been, but felt so crippled and torn over what happened to their last one that they—

It was easier to wander, to plan to wander, to return to the human realm and learn what he could about the man he was supposed to be (what urban legends were left) and stare at names of parents and other family members and spy descendants of the rest of the family from far off – a witch hunter who had fallen in love with a witch, and he never found out what happened to the first Caleb, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, if what Belos did to every other one after was any indication – before starting off to explore….

Camila gave him a pocket knife in case he needed something to protect himself, which wouldn’t help much outside of the human realm – didn’t help much in the human realm either – because the Boiling Isles were built around magic, around needing magic to survive, and a pocket knife wasn’t magic and wouldn’t protect him from magic the way that magic could (but wouldn’t).

(Maybe this was why he’d never been good at magic; maybe this was why he’d never had an affinity for it; maybe it knew – it knew – that he would end up just like his not-uncle, drawing on magic from his palisman and destroying it that way.)

The human realm was full of dangers of its own, but at least there, he didn’t feel like he was expected to be anything he wasn’t. It was almost like having a new start.

…except that he was too young for it.

He doesn’t mean to make himself a new palisman.

He doesn’t even know that the chunk of wood he’s carving is Palistrom wood, only finds a chunk of it discarded somewhere just like he finds other chunks of wood discarded somewhere while he’s traveling, and tucks it away for use later. Most of his bag is full of scraps of wood he picks up around the Isles; if he doesn’t use them for firewood, he uses them for carving while he sits next to the fire. They’re multipurpose. Or maybe, like him, they don’t really have a specific purpose until they’re given one by someone else.

(Does he even have a purpose anymore? What does his future even look like? Nothing like the others. Willow doesn’t seem to mind it, but he does. He needs to have some sort of…not a goal, not that specific, but something. He needs something. And right now, when he tries to think about any of that, it’s just that…that long expanse of—)

He carves birds a lot, once he gets the hang of it. Different birds in the human realm, different birds of the Boiling Isles, all sorts of birds. Someday, he’ll be good enough to carve Flapjack.

He will never be good enough to carve Flapjack.

Funny, how the human realm cared about the ages of its children, but the Boiling Isles didn’t care about that at all.

Of course, going around to explore the different regions and cities and towns and little hidden areas with his knapsack full of goodies almost felt like being on a mission again, which was admittedly horrible. Whenever he entered a town where he’d done something for Belos, he felt immediate shame. Even if the people in the town didn’t recognize him, he recognized them.

Especially the ones he had hurt.

The thing about a carved palisman is that it doesn’t wake up until it hears your wish, what you most want, and agrees to bond with you.

So how could he have known that he carved one in the first place? It’s just a piece of wood like any other piece of wood. Gives way to his knife a little bit easier, forms what he wants a little bit easier, but takes on its own will, its own desire, its own shape.

He doesn’t know who Michelangelo is, but when he tells Camila about it later, she mentions something about the sculptor saying something like, Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it, and maybe, when he makes palismans, it’s a little bit the same – every piece of wood has a palisman inside it, and it is the task of the carver to set them free, so when he creates his first palisman, quite by accident, he is simply setting free the creature that is already living and breathing inside the Palistrom wood, one that simply hasn’t found a wish strong enough to waken it yet—

Luz would say this is a bit like fairytales, like a prince charming coming to wake the sleeping beauty or something like that, only she’d make it so much more fantastical, and he still wouldn’t understand any of it. The Boiling Isles doesn’t have cutesy stories like that. There are no prince charmings here, only emperors and golden guards and titans and a coven system meant to drain them all dry.

A lot of lies. Their stories are a lot of lies.

(Just like him.)

He stayed away for a really long time.

Long enough for his hair to grow out multiple times, long enough to learn how to cut it with the sharp blade of his pocket knife, long enough for the first hack job to grow out and need to be cut again, long enough for him to start growing a beard that came in patches over his scars, unable to hide them, long enough for him to learn how to use his pocket knife like a razor.

He would have liked the beard, if it came in full, because it made him look less like Belos. The older he got, the worse the resemblance was. Sometimes, when his hair got long enough to curl about his shoulders, that was all he could see. Just Belos, the remnants of him, when he’d looked most human, staring back at him from his own reflection.

Sometimes, he didn’t cut his hair.

Sometimes, he wanted the reminder.

It’s weird, the first time he has to use one of his carvings for firewood.

He doesn’t like it.

After that, he makes sure to have more wood with him.

…and he starts selling the carvings. He needs the money, and people, oddly, like them. Sometimes, they make requests, and he tries.

For some strange reason, he never gets rid of—

The first time a child called him Belos, he ran.

The second time, he froze and waited.

Everyone had a first and last name. He just…just had the one. But even his name wasn’t so much a name as it was a title. Witch Hunter. Belos had never named him Caleb, if that was who he was supposed to be, because…because that wasn’t really what Belos wanted. He hadn’t wanted Caleb as he was, he wanted Caleb as he wanted him to be, he wanted his brother the witch hunter.

The third time, he realized they weren’t calling him Belos by mistake; they didn’t actually think he was Belos. They thought he was related. Kin of Belos. Kin of the emperor. They weren’t wrong.

The fourth time, he wasn’t sure if it was worse to be seen as his kin or if it was worse to be seen as part of his coven or if it was worst of all to be seen as both.

(They only stopped once he had a palisman of his own. No kin of Belos would ever use a palisman.)

In a little town, much further in the Isles than he’s ever really been before, mostly because none of his missions ever brought him this deep in this area, he finds palismans. Broken ones. Others like Flapjack. The big bat who keeps an eye on them all.

And, with them, a witch with pushy white hair and a layered beard and a scar that reminds him of his own across one of his eyes. A witch who seems particularly interested in him, once they sit around a fire together, once he sees the birds that he’s carved in his travels. The witch takes one of his birds in his hands, and a wry smile lifts one side of his beard, one that turns into a heartfelt grin.

This is good carving, son. How would you like to—

His eyes grow wide, so wide that the witch doesn’t wait for an answer, only gives a little nod and a little hm and doesn’t bring it up again.

He doesn’t stay long there. It hurts in a way he would never have expected. Or maybe, if he’d realized it existed, he would have expected it.

A lot of things hurt now.

It doesn’t surprise him as much as it used to.

(The old witch examines his other carvings before he leaves, and he holds onto the jay in particular a little longer than any of the others. That surprises him, how much he does not like the other witch holding the jay, running his fingers along it, examining it. It’s just a block of wood. He shouldn’t be so attached.)

He didn’t mean to carve a palisman. He didn’t even know that he did.

When he makes it to the end of the Isles, when he sits on the edge of one of the cliffs, he rests his head in his hands and stares out on the oceans and sighs.

I just wanted to be good, he says to no one. I wanted to be good and to know who I was. And now I’m neither.

He stares out at the rainclouds coming for him and thinks that maybe the rain wouldn’t be so bad.

So he waits.

He never did figure out how Waffles got out of his knapsack.

He only knew, later, that she did.

The blue jay speaks like Flapjack. A little higher. A lot more insistent. She’s new and young and doesn’t know anything but knows that the rain will hurt him and pushes him out of it, away, away, away.

She attaches herself to him and won’t leave.

Just like—

Eventually, he returned to the witch – to Dell – and the Bat Queen and the other palismans. It wasn’t that he thought they needed him; they certainly didn’t. But it was similar to wanting to help rebuild what he could after everything with Belos, after everything with the Collector. He couldn’t take back what he did, but he could give something back to help repair it.

He couldn’t bring back the palismans he’d stolen, but he could make new ones.

And if he, the former Golden Guard, was allowed another palisman, then—

The thing about palismans is this: they don’t care if you deserve them or not. They simply choose you for their own, and then you are.

(Carving’s not so hard after all. The palismans always tell him what they want to be.)

#bandit fic #carving with hunter #hunter owl house #the owl house #the golden guard #idk new fandom who dis #idk what all should tag this with #but ah #here?

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