07/17/2026: Two of Everything

Dawn breaks over Strixhaven, and KFC is smuggling a twelve-foot shambling mound down five flights of spiral staircase underneath a carpet. This is, she will insist to anyone who asks, a school project. Quintilius asks. He is coming up the stairs after an all-night band practice, guitar case flattened against the wall, and he wants to know why the project smells like something decomposing. KFC explains that it is a project about how magical creatures decompose, which is the kind of answer that is technically airtight and convinces no one. He squeezes past. The mound — Humphrey, to his friends — makes it to the bushes below the dormitory to do his business.

His business, it turns out, is eating Professor MacDonald's Great Dane, Otto.

Otto vanishes into the shrubbery mid-bark and goes ominously quiet. Debbie, watching from her fifth-floor window, delivers the morning's headline — it ate the dog — and descends by Rope of Climbing, because some emergencies call for rappelling. Together the girls stage a rescue: Debbie grips the dog's back legs while KFC deploys a pencil as bait, Humphrey abandons his breakfast to chase it into the bush with happy crunching sounds, and Otto emerges mostly whole, thoroughly slimed, and wearing the expression of a dog who has not yet processed recent events. 

KFC washes the vile smelling Otto as well as she can from a landscaper’s hose and prepares to return the dog to his owner, Professor MacDonald.  KFC hauls the still-stinky creature across campus to Silverquill, explains to a grateful Professor MacDonald that Otto must have rolled in something dreadful, and pockets a reward. Debbie, meanwhile, wrestles a carpeted compost heap up five flights and through a common room full of hungover students, and decides the whole thing is no longer her problem. Humphrey settles onto his rug and begins quietly eating a side table.

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Elsewhere, the morning is heavier. Titania wakes to find Squid gone and his locket left on the pillow — he has slipped off to meet the other timeline's Votress, the mother he never had. Titania tracks small footprints through the swamp, splashes swamp water on her tear-streaked face, a questionable skincare choice. 

They find a cozy cottage with the family name painted on the mailbox in her own handwriting. Through the window: breakfast, two identical children hurling grapes, and a household that is tense but tender. She spies. She is caught. She is invited in, seated between two versions of her own life, and holds hands for a blessing about friendship, forgiveness, and memory. 

Over tea — honey and lemon, however she likes — the Votress asks the question gently: “How did I die in your world?” And then, understanding at last why this strange visitor has hovered so upsettingly at the edges of her family, she crosses the room and hugs her. Titania insists she has simply got something in her eyes. 

Also learned over lunch: Oberon is long dead of a suitably disfiguring disease, and his human-headed son Anerion sits the throne. Small mercies.

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Hester and her alternate fly out for breakfast and perch on a rooftop, where alt-Hester shows the letter her father passed to her, along with her dead mother’s jewelry. Alternate Hester’s mother is dead here and she dislikes school. All very different from her counterpart's life. 

Alternate Hester wants to drop out, fly north, maybe to Waterdeep, maybe Baldur's Gate, maybe nowhere. Hester mentions having a sister and immediately regrets it. Alternate Hester’s self-pity is thick enough to spread on toast, but underneath it, two girls who used to draw are talking about making art again.

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Reyna fares best of anyone: her duplicate lights up at the word "smithing" and reveals a forge installed in the tower basement. Blueprints are discussed. Bracers are dreamed of. Somewhere, two Reynas are about to be very productive.

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And Aurora, red-eyed but resolute, finds KFC to announce her decision: she is breaking up with Quintilius, she is going to the dance with her friend group, and KFC — jerk, sage, unlikely life coach — is coming with her. KFC accepts. A broken clock, as she notes, is right twice a year.

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Rampart, for reasons undisclosed, has requested six extra tickets to the dance. Nobody in this dormitory has twins. Officially.