#in the version without willow i'm having a great time imagining camila refusing to answer one way or the other whether she is a basilisk

[crimeronan]

It feels unlikely given the way you structure the series but it would be SO funny to me if Willow properly stumbled into their not too long before the dying basilisk situation and for whatever reason happened to Be There.

Like imagine you're a bitter anarchist young adult who's been reluctantly drawn into the web of the entirely too kind Empress and you still really don't trust her or her overly aggressive bodyguard, and then you all stumble into a dying basilisk, a creature that you narrowly avoided being killed by at school that one time and then the Emperor's Coven carted them away and they were clearly terrified.

And then you react first, of course you do, why would the Empress and her stooge care about a member of what your research since you dropped out suggests is an extinct species (and you figure the Empire probably is the reason they aren't and not for anything good). Of course, what you don't know so that the Empress is only slower to react because of her extremely pertinent to this bizarre situation PTSD, and it's a moot point because she does arrive at your side a moment later.

Having presumably never gotten a coven mark, you know some healing magic, but not enough for a situation like this, and it's all you can do to buy the basilisk a minute at a time—and then the Empress calls her mom??? The human one????? And you write her off as useless right now because what help is human going to be here but then the human offers VERY specific guidance that helps you save the basilisk's life.

So now you know that 1. The Empress knows her human mom, 2. The Empress' mom knows exactly how to save a basilisk's life, 3. The Empress is genuinely as compassionate as she seems and oh now that you're able to think about it that complete loss of composure seems REALLY out of character for her; did this strike some sort of personal note?

Now for all her cleverness, I don't think Willow is the sort to be able to extrapolate anything beyond that given her limited knowledge of Luz's life compared to someone like Raine, but! I think it's possible Luz in her panic could let things slip about the Grimwalkers still.

On the one hand, Willow is an unknown who Luz doesn't trust yet and normally Luz is good at secrets.

On the other hand, Grimwalkers are possibly the only thing where Luz is LESS likely to tell Hunter than she would a whole lot of other people she knows, AND we've seen with Eda that Luz gets a lot worse at compartmentalizing information when she's Doing Rough which. Damn she sure is doing rough here, isn't she?

SHE SURE IS DOING ROUGH HERE.

i love all of this. LOVE the concept of willow as a bystander like "well, this is some out-of-touch rich people nonsense. can i actually do something useful here or"

willow, arriving at the correct conclusion pretty much immediately: ....your human mom knows a basilisk already??

camila, who probably isn't even here yet but has materialized out of thin air for the bit: AHAHAHAHAH NOOOOOO. I'M JUST. A MAGICAL CREATURE.... ALL BY MYSELF.....