Book 2 | Chapter 15 | Pilla

For someone who had spent so long trying to get to the fourth floor, Lillia didn’t feel like she was being allowed to spend enough time on it. After 40 ‘days’ in the Dungeon, she’d finally battled her way past her original circumstances, but the place kept dragging her in.
What felt like a lifetime in the experience of the dungeon really all still broke down to back, forth, back.
That quest was almost done. Soon there would be progress, and plus, defeating Nennia was progress. She’d never done it on the way down. If Havoc weren’t dead, he would probably have had something to say about taking shortcuts in the first place.
There was also the point that Lillia knew Havoc was dead, but she didn’t know where the heck Nennia had stuffed his body. Technically, she could have asked before heading down to talk to Rickshaw, but in her moral panic over potentially killing the spider queen, she hadn’t thought to.
He would re-spawn by awaking next to the Hearth either way. Right? Or was he about to wake up to a nasty fall? It wouldn’t have been the first time the Dungeon dropped someone from height. It was just typically Lillia.
Either way, before Havoc’s body mattered—or she dug through piles of silk looking for the equipment she’d left upstairs, Lillia had to head back into Nennia’s domain.
She had a running theory that Nennia, being in her party, would keep her children away, but she couldn’t know. Bringing Nennia with her would have solved that issue, but the Queen was near comatose after the Potion of Weakmind, which was deeply unsettling and also made her useless as a companion.
Problem theoretically solvable by Heiress’ Blessing, but that felt like it was tempting fate.
Lillia placed her hand on the cold metal door to Nennia’s lair for the second time ‘today’ and closed her eyes. Whatever came for her, she was ready.
Though it would have been really embarrassing if she was killed by a bunch of random spiders after how far she’d come. As Cathria had put it, it wouldn’t have been narratively satisfying.
Lillia shoved the door and it swung inward easily, but unlike every other time she’d come into this room, it didn’t catch on a thousand threads pulled across the floor. Instead, it opened to a world falling apart.
Nennia’s webs, which stretched from floor to ceiling and usually hung down like titanic silk curtains, were missing, and nothing was in their place. The bare walls of the crypt, like a stairway at the entrance to Nennia’s lair, looked ‘wrong’ to Lillia. The tunnel was too wide, the stone was too smooth.
That and her first footstep echoed instead of being muffled by a hundred layers of webbing. She could hear herself walking into the empty domain.
Lillia descended downstairs. That seemed much shorter than last time she’d been here. While her first few steps were cautious, she gained speed, almost stepping down normally by the end, like she wasn’t headed down into a crypt with an untold amount of spiders.
But none of those spiders were there waiting for her. None of the tightly wrapped bundles of silk that hid the [Webbed Shamblers] hung from the ceiling or hid in the corners. Lillia walked into the main jail-block of Nennia’s mock dungeon and it was—clean? Almost swept.
The entire time, she’d had Vianaffir held to her side, relatively at the ready. She hadn’t been paranoid enough to try and stay in the battle stance Havoc taught her the entire time, but she’d been ready to swing. It just seemed as though there was nothing in here for her to swing at.
So, she let Vianaffir vanish back into her inventory and walked out into the middle of the room. Even though she knew all the webbing was gone, she kept checking over her shoulder to ensure that none had gotten in her hair.
For a while, she followed the normal path Nennia led her down during their meetings. Down the main hallway. Then to the right after the third cell. Then she’d climb into the roof and Lillia would have to navigate the thin crevice on her own.
But now she couldn’t. Where there had once been a thick layer of webbing to act as a bridge, there was now just an abyss. Her usual pathway was a dead end.
“Hello?” Lillia called down into the void. Her echo answered, but nobody else heard her. Or at least nobody else bothered.
“Shoot and sugar,” Lillia said as she turned around. She’d kinda known how to get to Nennia’s daughters at the bottom of the pit—though getting down to the bottom would have been a serious issue without the webbing—but without that option? Where the heck was she supposed to go? This place was a maze.
Lillia turned to head another way, and then nearly leapt out of her skin.
Of course, she also screamed.
Behind her was a hollow looking facsimile of Nennia. A pale waif’s torso on an ashen grey and dusty spider carapace. Her hair had been tied back with thread, but somehow still managed to cover her eyes.
Most of all, Lillia had only ever seen that pallid hungry look on beggars before her guards had shooed them away when she was a child.
The girl cocked her head, and her hair fell to the side with it, slowly, almost like it could float.
“Hello?” Lillia tried again.
The girl blinked and then stepped forward. Lillia matched it by falling back, step by step until one more would send her into the void.
“Could you please try talking?” Lillia said. “Or at least let me know if we’re going to fight?”
The girl straightened. At her full height she was almost eight feet tall, but somehow she still appeared slight. Slowly she turned her head to meet Lillia’s. All of her eyes were near opaque and glassy.
“There you are,” she said. Her voice was high and thin, like a yarn pulled past its thread. “It took me a minute to find you.”
Lillia checked back over her shoulder, looking down into the abyss below. “Glad you did.”
“It’s not easy. I can only tell where…” she trailed off as Lillia stayed still and began looking around as if she’d lost track of the Princess. “Hello?” she asked.
“Um, I’m still here,” Lillia said.
“Oh, there you are.” The girl ran one of her thumbs across the other as she spoke, rubbing it back and forth. “You weren’t very quiet walking around, but you’re not making that much noise anymore.”
Running over what the girl could have meant made Lillia realize she’d been holding her breath. She exhaled and the girl stopped her nervous hands.
“Are you the princess?”
Lillia nodded.
And the conversation stopped there for a moment until the girl added, “Hello? Did you hear me?”
“Yes, you asked if I was the Princess.”
“Well, are you?”
“Well, I—” Lillia took a beat before raising her hand and waving at the girl, who didn’t wave back. She was either rude, or she couldn’t see at all. “Yes, I’m the princess.”
“The one my Mom was talking to?” the girl asked.
Lillia almost slapped herself on the forehead—but didn’t as it would have been uncouth. Of course this was Pilla. She’d come here to talk to her. She just hadn’t expected uh—Well this.
“Yeah, I’m the one your mom was talking to, and depending on what conversations you heard, that might be a good thing.”
“I heard all of them,” Pilla said. She looked away from Lillia, but not to intentionally check anything. Her gaze just seemed to drift naturally. “She really enjoyed your conversations. You were more talkative than the knight was.”
“The knight? Sir. Nobody.”
“The knight that was here before you, I don’t know his name. We don’t remember much in between visitors,” she said before adding. “Why are you here?”
“Oh! Well, I came here to uh—” The pauses were making it obvious that she was searching for something other than the truth, but Lillia hadn’t really planned on lying until this very moment. “Well, I’m working with your mom now, and she’s outside and thought I could get you.”
Pilla turned her head back to Lillia at that point, though her gaze never quite followed the motion. “Mother’s alive?”
“Upstairs,” Lillia said. “In the Cathedral.”
“There’s a Cathedral?” Pilla asked.
“Yes, there’s… Have you never been into the other parts of the dungeon?”
“No,” Pilla said before backing several steps away from Lillia as smoothly as she’d walked forward. “I haven’t been allowed outside of the room.”
Once Lillia had gotten away from the ledge, Pilla continued.
“Did she say it was okay for me to come outside?”
Now that Lillia knew she was spinning a tale, it was as easy as anything else. Getting a lie started was always the hardest part. “She didn’t ask for you directly, but she said she missed her daughters, so I thought it would be fun to…”
“She meant Spinna and Nicole,” Pilla said, letting her head hang and restarting her fiddling, this time picking at her nails. “I’d offer to lead you to them, but I can’t find them.”
“Oh! Yeah, don’t worry about it, I can take care of that later.” It took everything in Lillia’s power to keep a straight face through that statement.
What the hell was she doing? Pilla was going to find out that Lillia had made one of her sisters submit and killed the other. Plus, if she brought her out to the Cathedral, she was going to see that her mother was a drooling wreck.
She’d come here to assuage her guilt over possibly killing Nennia. So far all Lillia had done was make it likely that she was going to need to stab someone else today.
The best days were when that list stayed at zero, but usually she could get away with one or two, but at this point Lillia was rapidly closing in on five people who could talk.
“Hello?” Pilla asked. “Did you leave?”
“No, I’m—I’m right here,” Lillia said.
“Oh! Sorry,” Pilla said. “I get nervous without Mom’s webs around. It’s harder to find my way around without the feeling in those.”
“Oh,” Lillia echoed the girl.
She couldn’t see, could she?
“I was able to find you because you were loud but—You keep holding your breath and—wait, you do need to breathe, right?”
Lillia nodded and then hastily corrected herself. “Yes.”
“You keep holding your breath, and it makes it really hard to know where you are,” she said.
As an answer, Lillia ensured she was taking deep breaths. In through the nose and out through the mouth. As she did so, Pilla stopped fidgeting.
“Well, your mom needs you upstairs,” Lillia said. “So if you want to come with me then—”
“And you’re sure she asked for me?” Pilla asked.
“Yes. Of course.”
Pilla swallowed and began fidgeting again. Then, after a little too long, she nodded to herself, then held out a hand towards Lillia. “If we’re going outside, can you lead me? I can move around in here okay because I’ve memorized it, but once we’re out there I won’t know where to go.”
“That’s okay,” Lillia began. “It’s just stairs. It shouldn’t be an issue.”
She took Pilla’s hand, which felt colder than death itself. When Lillia looked down to ensure she wasn’t freezing, she saw that her fingers had drifted past the edge of Pilla’s skin, dipping into the translucent edges of her form.
“Lead the way,” Pilla said.
Lillia swallowed. “Uh. Yeah.”