So…
I was doing an rp with @sad-boy-coven and a few others where young Caleb and Philip (I was Caleb) fell into the Boiling Isles and then fell through a time pool, eventually meeting Lilith and Eda.
Caleb is initially friendly, though internally suspicious, and Philip is outright antagonistic at times. I’m a big fan of the idea that Caleb used to be as into witch hunting as Philip (and maybe even introduced him to it) but later realized it was wrong, so he suggests to Philip that niceties would be a good manner to win over the witches and capture them off guard.
Then, Philip likely being the child who caught the common cold every year since he was two and nearly died each time, gets the common mold.
See, the thing about time travel is that going back in time could create a plague from all the viruses, bacteria, etc. that you developed an immune defense that the people of the past would not be able to fight (see the Spanish Influenza as well as the growing resistances against antibiotics). Meanwhile, going to the future could kill you due to the aforementioned reason.
So Philip gets absolutely messed up by the modern common mold, so Lilith, not knowing better, gives him the medicine for it. The medicine that is made for witches, not humans. This would likely be toxic, so Philip becomes even more sick, and Caleb panics.
Prior to this, Caleb had been slowly opening up to the idea that witches weren’t as bad as Gravesfield and the Bible suggested. He had been slowly bonding with Lilith of older sibling issues and trauma.
After this, Caleb immediately reverts back to his “default programming” and assumes that everything the connected over was a trap in order to lower their guards to kill them. He then attempts to find his way through time pools to get back to town and see the minister/priest to beg him to save Philip.
He finds the time pool as Lilith catches up to them, but Philip is incredibly weak and at the edge of death.
In the rp, Caleb’s desperation to do anything to save his brother overcomes his distrust of Lilith, and he allows her to administer an antidote for the toxins that Philip ingested.
But…As soon as that happened…
If it matters to anyone, they ended up going to the demon realm because Caleb wanted to take Philip to the beach like he had wanted as a child. So cue feelings of guilt for the unintentional death of his brother.
This is the first post as I do not have character designs drawn up yet. In the actual canon of the AU, I might make it a Clawthorne ancestor (probably Evelyn) that the brothers meet (so they simply fall into the Isles rather than the future as well.) to make it more sensible and not have to worry about “the Bloodyfly Effect” as Lilith put it.
So now Caleb has been left entirely alone, been abandoned by the church when he needed it most, “tricked” by witches, and forced to bury his brother. Caleb would grow up to go on a full blown crusade to destroy witches.
In the most recent episode, For the Future, we see that Philip’s lies are slipping through his fingers—even the ones to himself. Caleb would not have that feeling because of how his brother died. (I am not sure how/if grimwalkers will be integrated.) However, his relationship with the Collector is more positive because it reminds him of Philip’s gremlin energy as a child.
More updates will come in the future.
Welcome to what I call the Relapse Au.