Eda nothlit!Luz: Part One
She was a sweet, poetic kind of girl. The kind bullies love to pick on. She used to have brown, out-of-control hair and dreamy eyes that always seemed to be looking at something no one else could see.
Now she has striking, fierce eyes that look through you like laser beams. Now she has long gray hair, and ghostly white skin, and an angular face, and clawed hands, and an imposingly tall stature.
A piece of Belos landed on Luz instead of Hunter when he was splattered to the wall by the Collector. In the Human Realm, the unhealed scar he gave her gives Belos an opening into her body, and he slips into her system unnoticed. During Halloween, he takes control of her when she and Hunter come across a vial of Titan’s Blood. While confessing to her loved ones that she helped Belos find the Collector and showed him the Light Glyph, Luz attempts a murder-suicide on the emperor by trying to drown herself in the graveyard swamp’s waters with him in her body after she wrestles back control. They both survive, but the possession severely prostrates Luz and covers her in scars by the time Belos leaves her body to return to the Demon Realm using the Titan’s Blood. Luz chases him to the other side of the portal with what little strength she has, her mother and friends following her.
Back in the Boiling Isles, nobody knows how to save Luz when she starts to waste away after collapsing a few feet from the portal. When she reaches the point between life and death, her spirit meets King’s father in the In Between Realm. He gives her the power to morph and tells her that she already has Eda’s DNA in her from the “body swap” spell, which was actually a morphing spell. She is able to transform into a genetic copy of Eda with the location of an Escafil Device in the Demon Realm and the knowledge of where on planet Earth another morphing cube is imparted to her by the Titan before returning to the mortal plane, but discovers that her newfound morphing powers can’t heal her unmorphed form since there is still some of Belos’s unremovable essence within her human body which - instead of being purged - is sent into Z-space along with her original form by morphing and takes effect again if she demorphs. She becomes a nothlit - a person who lost their morphing powers because they got trapped for the rest of their life in a morph by staying morphed for more than two hours at a time - to safely shunt away the leftover part of Belos that had been slowly killing her forever, though her palisman egg that she brought to the Demon Realm does not hatch despite her finally achieving her dream of becoming a witch.
Realizing that the Titan screwed her over as much as he saved her life, Luz becomes even more despondent and begins to doubt her relationship with Amity could still work now that everyone will think she is too old to be having even a crush on a 14-year-old witch. Camila can’t look at her without getting uncomfortable or sad (which is initially assumed to be because the body Luz trapped herself in is to her mom the copied body of a complete stranger, but is later revealed to be that Luz’s acquisition of morphing powers signified to her mother that the vision shown by the Ellimist is all but guaranteed to happen), which leads her to think that her mother is acting as though she really did die; this gets Luz wondering if she is even still Luz or if her late father Manny would still be Manny if he gained morphing powers and used them to nothlit into another body to cure the terminal disease he had, which in my story was genetic and thus could not have been removed through any other means. Amity assures her that a way for Luz to regain her morphing powers which comes with the restoration of her human body will be found when they get their hands on an Escafil Device, and the team tries to cheer her up by saying they do not blame her for the Day of Unity as Belos manipulated her; Hunter even states that Belos most likely would've used somebody else instead if he hadn’t used Luz, while Camila asserts that she does not think she lost Luz when her child’s only two options were to get stuck in a morph or die. Her resolve back, Luz declares it is time to fight back against the emperor.
My name is Luz. A freak of nature. One of a kind.
I won't tell you my last name. I can't tell you my last name. Or the name of the city where I live.
I want to tell you everything, but I can't give any clues to my true identity. Or the identity of the others. Everything I will tell you is true. I know it's going to seem unbelievable, but believe it anyway.
I am Luz. I'm a normal kid, I guess. Or used to be. I used to do okay in school. Not great, but not bad either. Just okay.
I guess I was a dweeb, kind of. Big, but not big enough to keep from getting picked on. I had brown hair, kind of wild because I could never get it to look right. My eyes were . . . what color were my eyes? It's only been a few weeks, and already I'm forgetting things about my human self.