Chapter 53

"Okay, explanations," Luz said as she processed that she was once more talking to The Titan. "You can start with... Why didn't you tell me that you were King's dad?"

"Well, I didn't know how much you'd remember," The Titan replied. "You were delirious with the common mold, after all. And I couldn't count on you just not assuming that everything I told you was a dream. Chances were, if I'd told you and you'd told King he wouldn't have believed you."

"...Okay," Luz replied. "That's fair."

"Of course, if I'd known that just a few days later your world's Sorcerer Supreme would confirm half of what I told you I might have gone for it," The Titan admitted.

"Yeah, okay... Um... You said the... Why didn't you..."

"Warn you about Philip?" The Titan asked. Luz modded, so he continued. "If I had told you... Either you would have still gone to the past but tried to stop him... Or just never gone to the past, right?"

"Probably," Luz admitted.

"In which case, well, it'd cause a paradox." The Titan explained. "The Boiling Isles only exists in its current form because of Belos's actions. Maybe the world would be better... Or maybe it would be worse. At the very least, many of the witches and demons you've met and befriended would likely never have been born and even if they had, without Evelyn stealing the portal door and burying it where Eda would one day find it, you'd never have had a chance to come here and meet them."

"Okay, that's..." Luz suddenly found herself trying to picture a world where she just went off to Camp Reality Check and never met Eda, King, Gus, Willow, Amity, or... Vee... Hunter... Vee and Hunter who for absolutely sure would never have existed without Belos.

"And I'll be honest, and this might be selfish of me," The Titan admitted, "but I much prefer the timeline where my child has a mother and a big sister who love him and who he loves back to one where he wouldn't have one and might not have either."

"Yeah," Luz agreed. "Me too."

"Not to mention that it might not have done anything at all," The Titan continued. "Time Travel is tricky business. Sometimes you can change things, sometimes what you did in the past is what always would have happened, and sometimes nothing changes for you, you've just created an entirely new timeline branching off from where you came in. Honestly, I didn't want to roll those dice."

If the best-case scenario was nothing changing in the world Luz knew, but Belos was still helped by a Luz... And Luz wouldn't have gotten splashed by the Titan Bile. She wouldn't have grown her own bile sack, so she'd be less powerful, so if she had to fight Belos her odds would be worse.

"Okay, yeah. This... Probably isn't the best possible timeline but I understand not wanting to risk a worse one or... Time travel makes my head hurt," Luz finished.

"I am sorry," The Titan continued, "that I had to mislead you. And that you found out in the way you did. That had to have been the worst possible way you could have learned."

"No," Luz said. "I figured it out on my own when he called me by the name I gave him in the past and got confirmation from his memories afterward. If he'd just dumped it all on me at once after everything, then... That would have been worse... Honestly, I think I'm more hung up on him trying to bribe me into joining him by offering to let me keep Amity as a..." Luz shuddered.

"That's not something you should feel bad about," The Titan reassured. "Belos wouldn't understand love, especially romantic love, even if it was spelled out to him in giant flaming letters. The only person he ever truly cared about was Caleb and he still murdered him in cold blood when Caleb grew and matured and changed for the better, into something that went against the hate that Philip had nursed all his life. What you and Amity have is beautiful and pure, something you've already put a lot of effort into building. That Belos can only see it as something vulgar and sinful to use to tempt you, see her as your possession instead of your partner, is his problem, not yours."

"Thanks but..." After tonight, Luz wasn't so sure she deserved to be loved by someone like Amity. "There's still one thing I'm confused about. You said that the last Archivist wasn't a threat, but...?"

The Titan sighed. "When I took my last stand against the Archivists, the Collectors, I was filled with unfathomable rage. My friends, my family, my children, were all gone except for King whose egg wouldn't hatch until long after I would be gone at this rate. In my rage, I acted rashly: I trapped each archivist in this realm and imprisoned them in a sphere of magic so that they would never escape, with only a mirror to see into the world outside the in-between realm... And if that mirror were to break, the Archivist would die in pain and their magic would be stolen to strengthen the spells imprisoning their siblings."

"Oh, wow."

"And I made sure that each mirror was broken," The Titan continued. "Except for one. The mirror of the last Collector, though... They're just The Collector now I suppose... He was the one I hated the most. You see, The Collector appeared to us in the form of a child. They said that his family had cast him out and that since he no longer had to preserve things he wanted to know if he could play with us. We took The Collector in, my people did, and our children adored playing games with him... Until their siblings came and all the young titans disappeared. We'd been tricked, and I wanted The Collector to suffer the way I had, so I arranged for a demon born from the body of one of my ancestors to bury the final mirror deep within my own skull never to be found again, but..."

"But what?" Luz asked.

"It was only after I used the last of my strength to drag The Collector down here, that I laid down and died, that I had the time to think and realized facts that didn't line up. The Collector... Had seemed genuinely surprised and concerned when our children went missing. He seemed upset to realize that his siblings were 'taking them away' but in my rage, I ignored it until... The Collector wasn't in on the plan. His siblings used him to lure us into a false sense of security, then killed not only our children but his friends. In a way, he was just another victim of the Archivists." The Titan seemed to conjure a pair of chairs from the dark muck beneath them. He sat and gestured for Luz to take the other seat, which she did. "I don't regret killing the other Archivists. They deserved everything that happened to them and worse and it's my sincere hope that their crimes in life lead them to The Below Place to suffer the mad ravings of The One Below All for eternity, but... The Collector is an innocent child. I don't even think he understands what death is. I lost control, and I hurt the wrong person. And now Belos spent the last few centuries manipulating the poor kid with a promise of freedom that will never come."

"...I get it, though. I kind of lost it out of anger, too," Luz said.

"That's the other thing I wanted to talk to you about," The Titan said. "Are you alright?"

"I ate a man alive tonight," Luz deadpanned. "So I'm gonna have to say no. I'm not alright."

"So, Luz, I'm not going to tell you that what you did was okay," The Titan said. "Right and wrong are complicated, no one but you can decide that. But from where I'm sitting? Killing Bill and tearing your way through the rest of the trappers isn't like what I did to the Collector. These weren't innocent people who you attacked by mistake: You knew exactly what they were and what they were planning to do."

"But I ate him," Luz said. "I was just so angry and... It'd be easy to say I lost control but the truth is I think part of me wanted to, to... I..." Luz took a deep breath. "I got caught up in having cool powers and, later in being able to use magic and... I guess I was focused a bit too much on the good ones like Toxin or Agent Venom that I forgot about what the rest of them are like. I forgot what symbiotes were, so it didn't occur to me that... Being part symbiote means I'm a monster."

"Luz, you're not a monster," The Titan insisted.

"I ate a person," Luz insisted. "Not only am I a monster, I'm a hypocrite! I had that whole conversation with Amity about fairy pie, I, I..."

"Okay, Luz: May I ask you a question?" The Titan began. Luz nodded, so he continued. "Is Eda a monster?"

"What? No, of course not!" Luz insisted. "How can you even ask something like that?"

The Titan summoned forth one of the floating cubes and held it so that one face was... Facing, Luz. Suddenly an image was projected onto the screen, of Eda holding a small, octopus-like creature pinched between her fingers.

"Well, that's the last time I take an outside referral," the image of Eda said before she swallowed the creature alive.

"...Adegast, the puppet demon." Luz had encountered him on her first full day on the Isles. He was a rival of Eda's who had appeared to Luz in the form of a wizard and convinced her she was a chosen one before sending her on a fake quest using illusions and puppets in order to get her alone to use her as bait for a trap for Eda. In hindsight, Luz hated that she was so naive as to fall for such an easy adventure, and... "Eda ate him..."

"To make sure that someone who tried to harm her and people she cared about couldn't hurt them again," The Titan continued. "And let me tell you: Bill was much, much worse than Adegast. The puppet demon was just a criminal. Bill was a manipulative cult leader who found the skulls of my children and the prison that contained their executed murderer, put together an incomplete story, and convinced himself that he could gain eternal glory and phenomenal power by releasing the Collector, who he had no true understanding of. He created a cult to gratify him, while lying to them all the while—he knew full well that my people weren't evil—and at most his ritual might have connected King to the Collector's prison. Spilling his blood on the broken mirror of the so-called Grand Huntsman would have done nothing, that archivist is dead. In a way, Bill is more like Belos than anyone else you've ever encountered."

"Yeah, but..."

"If you don't think bad of Eda for eating Adegast to make sure he couldn't hurt the apprentice who she'd only known for a few days," The Titan continued. "Then you shouldn't think bad of yourself for eating Bill to protect your little brother."

"I guess but... I still feel bad," Luz said. "I never want to be that angry again"

"And that's your right." the Titan reassured. "Taking a life is a serious matter, even when justified, and you're a child. Not a trained soldier. I'd... really suggest you see about getting a therapist when this is all said and done."

"If we all make it out of this in one piece," Luz mumbled.

"You might have better odds than you think," The Titan said. "Belos is going to have the Collector in my Skull, right next to the portal on the day of Unity, and he has no intention of releasing him. If you can't stop the draining spell, the Collector can. If King lets him out. And no, he doesn't need to spill his blood."

"...That's..." Luz started... "Good to know. Anything that gives us better odds is... Thank you." Then Luz started feeling funny. "Uh, what's going on?"

"You're waking up," The Titan said. "It always seems like you're waking up too soon when I can bring you here, but especially now when you most need the rest but, what is there to do about it?"

"Wait, um... Before I go, is there anything you want me to say to King?"

The Titan looked thoughtful, almost playful, for a moment and then told Luz what he wanted her to say.

TLOA

King was woken up as Luz began to stir. So he climbed off her and stretched while she sat up. She blinked the sleep from her eyes and looked down at him. "Hey, little guy. How are you feeling?"

"A little better than yesterday," he admitted. But only a little. "You?"

"I talked to the Titan in my dreams again," she said. "I talked to your dad."

"You, you did?" King asked. "Did... Did he say anything about..."

"We've got a lot to talk about when we get home," Luz said, "but first... There's something he wanted me to tell you."

"What?"

Luz smiled as she began. "He said to tell you that it's really crumby that he can't be there to play catch with you, and that if he could brioche the barrier between life and death to spend time with you he would, but at the very yeast he can take comfort in knowing that you have friends and a family who loaf you very much."

It took King a moment to process that before he realized "Bread puns!" he started, like, half laughing and half crying, whatever that was called, and jumped up onto Luz who hugged him. He was feeling a lot of feelings right now, but... His Dad loved him.