Meet Liam Woodward, a junior at Hatchetfield High, member of the varsity cross country team, and student volunteer at the school library.
He had a pretty standard childhood, which honestly surprised him a little. No shocking deaths. No outstanding trauma. No harbored grudges against friends or relatives (well... his Uncle Bill had been a bit overbearing ever since Alice moved away, but he couldn't really blame him for that). With the sort of omnipresent creepy vibe the town gave off, Liam was sure that something more visibly wrong would have happened before, but he wasn't complaining.
In his first few semesters at Hatchetfield High, he was content to devote his time to his studies, to running, and to volunteering in the library. It was his safe space, somewhere to retreat to when the tensions of Hatchetfield High became too much, or when the world just had a tinge of... wrongness to it. Here, in the school library, sorting books, surrounded by the knowledge of generations, he could finally breathe.
Admittedly, the spiders made that hard sometimes. Liam was about ninety percent sure the library has a infestation- nearly every day he spotted an arachnid scuttling over a stack of books or whispering down from the ceiling. They were lucky it was him who worked there, and not one of his more violently-inclined classmates. It was weird though- any time he found any in the storage room and tried to catch them, they scurried away to the wall behind one of the more ancient-looking bookshelves, and just... vanished. There one second, gone the next.
He'd been volunteering at the library for a year or so before he finally realized how they did it; there was a tiny tear in the wallpaper, and a hole in the wall behind it.
It was a few more weeks before he lost his balance carrying a stack of books and fell against said wall, which made a hollow, echoing thunk.
When the school librarian took her lunch break, Liam felt along the wall, searching for something, though he wasn't exactly sure what. There- behind the bookshelf! Buried under layers of wallpaper and paint, could that possibly be... the shape of a hinge?
His curiosity got the best of him, as it would have anyone. It took some time, of course; unpeeling what seemed like centuries of paint and wallpaper wasn't exactly easy to do (or to keep under the radar), but at last, he revealed a small door. It opened to a cramped staircase descending into darkness, the stone steps covered with an inch of dust.
A gray-clad figure awaited him at the base. White hair tumbled over her shoulders, and her eight black eyes blinked open at him.
Liam's first words directed to an immortal goddess were: "HOLY SHIT!!"
Liam is a part of my untitled hatchetfield fanfic, where every so many years the lords in black each choose a sort of "champion", and pit them against each other for entertainment. However, unlike his peers, Liam is not a champion. In some timelines, he sort of flies under the radar, and doesn't really interact (anymore) with the real champions. But in each of the timelines where he finds the Waylon's lost library, it means Webby has finally had enough of her brothers' sadism. Liam is less of a puppet or a victim, and more of a steward or a savior, but he is chosen all the same.
It was Webby who appeared to him in her spider form all those times, and it was Webby who then grabbed his shoulders (with two of her six hands, was he hallucinating?) and explained everything. The Black and White, her brothers, their games, the Waylons, and the fact that some of his peers had their days numbered.
"The Waylons built this library to hold all of their... everything. From spellbooks to grocery lists, it's all here." Webby gestured to the shelves, crooked and warped, slanted at odd angles, stacked with books and scrolls and layers of dust. "After they were murdered, and an earthquake blocked the undergound tunnel leading here, I guess the remainder of the cult forgot about this place."
She let go of Liam, and he rubbed his shoulders. "Why can't you break the curse, then? Or... whatever this is?"
"I can read the texts, but I can't use them. They're sort of in-between this world and the Black and White, and I'm very much on this side of the Black and White. But, if my brothers can make their victims into something in-between, some amalgamation of human and supernatural.. then maybe you could be the same."
"The same?" Liam flinched.
"Not the same," Webby said hurreidly. "I'm not going to... be in your head, or anything. I'm not going to control you."
"Why not?" Liam watched the goddess for a moment, watched a few of her hands fiddle with the gray lace of her dress, watched her nervously click her... fangs?... mandibles? "How do I know you're not one of them? Am I supposed to just take your word for it?"
She paused at that, and wilted a little. "I mean... yeah, I was kind of hoping you would..."
After a moment, she grinned. "Alright, hear me out. Giving a victim knowledge is the opposite of what my brothers would do. They... prey on people by keeping them in the dark. If their victims don't know they're being toyed with... or don't know how to do anything about it... then no one can stop them."
She pointed, suddenly, into the darkness. A small whoosh, and something ignited- a candle, in an old-fashioned holder, on a desk littered with papers and books and broken quills.
"I know you want answers about the world," she continued, "And I want to give you those answers. Like my brothers, I only have so much power. But unlike them, I can't use all of it. I... won't use all of it." She leaned closer, each beady eye fixed on Liam. "I need someone else, in this physical realm, to do what I can't. Please. Its not just for your classmates, it's for everyone after... and before. Do you know how many people they've killed just from these games? Hundreds. And they'll keep going, and people will forget, because this town is so, so cursed, and... Look, if there's any chance to save anyone, even a tiny bit of hope, I think we have to do something. It's not like I picked you at random, man. It's not every day that a mind like yours comes along. You might be their last chance. What do you say?"
"I mean, I was going to help you anyway. I've never exactly run across an underground secret library with a sidequest before. But when you put it like that?" Liam grinned. "Yeah. Let's save the world."
With Webby's help, he learns to decode the Waylons' writings, and begins sifting through their works, their spells, their studies of the dark forces of Hatchetfield. He learns of the dark arts they used, but Webby also teaches him ways to counteract these spells, secrets to harness the powers of truth and goodness and wisdom.
Holiday tracks him down eventually, because although no one knows about his time in the Waylon's library, his peers see him coming and going from the school library all the time, and everybody talks about everything in high school.
Liam thought he was prepared to meet the five champions. He was so very wrong.
When Holiday called him into her office, Liam first saw a girl with blue hair and enough studded jewelry to rival a Hot Topic clutching the hands of a redhead girl who, as best he could guess, was having some kind of panic attack. An obnoxiously blond, obnoxiously pink-clad cheerleader scrunched her nose like 'really?', and that one pathetic basketball player curled his lip.
He swallowed the lump in his throat that definitely was not there before, and painted on a smile. "Hi, Wyatt... Hi, everyone. Miss Holiday's, um, told me a bit about you guys."
Next time he saw Webby, he told himself, he would ask her how she possibly expected him to deal with the scene band geek, the walking panic attack, two egocentric jerks who hated him on sight, and his ex-boyfriend.
Then, he would strangle her.
