Chapter 16 - A Song for Sir Nobody

The interior of the Hunting Lodge was not somewhere Lillia wanted to wake up ever again. It stank. She stank. Stale alcohol clung to her as if she’d been on the wrong side of the bar for years. Everything about her was sore, from her joints to her butt to her ego.
Lillia went to wipe the sleep from her eyes. The back of her palm brushed against the dried salt on her cheeks. That was fine. That was fine. That was fine.
It wasn’t her fault. It was just because it had hurt. That meant it didn’t count. She hadn’t cried; she’d just…
Lillia stretched out as best she could without putting her legs in her blood or the chitterpede’s guts. She’d been wrong. Beyond the rank of alcohol hung the over-sweet smell of the chitterpede’s innards that had seeped into the floorboards and her dress.
Standing was a slow process. She used the wall for leverage, her palm pressing against the rough, unsanded surface. It was as if someone had hewn the plank as Lillia walked into the room.
Thankfully, no splinters.
Once she was on her feet, Lillia tried to force down a deep breath. The world teetered as she struggled. Her body kept insisting that short, shallow breaths were the answer. It told her she needed to continue wallowing in panic. She needed to—
Lillia slammed her fist into the wall, and a dull thud shook through the room. That was stupid. She sighed as she shook her hand and tried to massage the future bruise away. While a splinter would have been unfair, bruising in response to the punch was justified. She wasn’t supposed to act like that. She was an aristocrat. A noble. A princess.
No matter how bad it got.
Unlike the Hunting Lodge, which had forgotten that Lillia had ever been there, the landing clearly remembered all of Lillia’s crimes, namely as Havoc’s blood splattered across it.
Frustrated, upset, and somehow tired despite just having slept, Lillia dropped to her knees beside the knight and began the labor-intensive process of extricating a corpse from the armor it died in. She pulled off the first gauntlet, and finger bones scattered across the floor. She shifted the breastplate, and ribs clattered within. She tossed pieces of armor to the side as her fingers numbed from the cold.
Halfway through, the realization crept in, and Lillia slowed, then finally stopped. For a moment, she sat with her hands on her knees as if she were praying before the knight. Maybe she should have been praying. Maybe she should have been careful. Maybe she should have been doing something more for him. He deserved more than that, didn’t he?
Lillia balled her hands, taking fistfuls of her new dress. She heard the crackle of dried blood stretching across the pulled fabric where the chitterpede bit her. She felt the blood around the dress’s neckline scratch against the bare potion-grown skin.
Sir Nobody might have been a nobody, but he had probably fought through something like Lillia’s yesterday. He deserved something more than this.
Luckily, while Lillia wasn’t an adventurer and was horribly ill-suited for this place, she could be the pinnacle of pomp. She had command of circumstance. She was a master of ceremony.
She wasn’t wearing black, but maybe black wasn’t fashionable where Sir Nobody was from anyway. Red… blood-stained red would have to do.
A new purpose came with vigor. The somber work of de-armoring a knight, removing bones from plate that had contained them for dozens—hundreds?—of years was a less somber task when re-framed from desecration to preparation. Of course, the re-framing also helped overcome the fact that bones were icky and she probably shouldn’t be touching them.
Oh! Lillia had a dress with gloves. She reached inward toward her chest and thought about the battlegown. Nothing came to her hand. As she kept trying, the text in the periphery of her vision changed.
[Inventory]
[Key Item - Note of Sir Nobody]
[Empty Bottle x 1]
[Rusty Knife x 1]
[Ruined Royal Slippers x 1]
[Scroll - ??? x 1]
[Potion - Basic Healing x 2]
[Soap of Empowered Scrubbing x1]
[Chitterpede Chitin x 1]
[Architect’s Spellmaul]
[Amulet of the Creator]
[Architect’s Ichorblood x 4]
There was everything she hadn’t sold to Rickshaw, and everything she’d picked up off of the architect—the same items she’d planned to show Havoc upon meeting him again—but her dress… the chitin battlegown was missing.
In her last moment of desperation, she had turned the burnmite cloth into a new dress. It had saved her from the fire, but what had happened to the battlegown?
Lillia checked the list again, despite knowing that it would have been hard to lose something in a twelve-item list. She waved at the text in front of her, trying to move it in a way that would suddenly reveal more items in a pocket she didn’t have.
No, it was gone. Putting on her new dress had burned it away. The princess slumped. The battlegown was so shiny.
Lillia looked over her shoulder, back towards the Hunting Lodge. The corpse of the chitterpede was still oozing on the floor in the back room. If she wanted the battlegown back, she could just grab it and replace what she was wearing, but—
It took a moment. Maybe several more moments than it should have, but staring at the dead bug on the ground solved the mystery for her.
Lillia’s battlegown was no longer a battlegown. It was once again bug parts.
Ew.
But it did solve the glove problem.
Lillia took out the chitterpede chitin and crushed it into a brilliant, fine powder in her fist. The dust twinkled in the torchlight as it slipped between her fingers. Lillia closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Rank. Gross. Disgusting.
Lillia was soaked. Architect’s blood was pressed between every scale of the battlegown. Every slight movement arrived with a cascade of squelching and sticking. At some point, ink had wormed through her neckline and stuck to the inside of the dress. Lillia didn’t scream. She sat there covered in the architect’s gallons of blood in front of the knight. Blinked once. Twice. Thrice.
Took a deep breath.
Then Lillia REALLY screamed.
“Get it off, get it off, get it off!”
Lillia slapped at the scales of the gown, attempting to wipe off congealed blood that simply stuck to her gloves and spread further. As she flailed, she fell backward, kicking as if it would remove the dress that was magically affixed to her.
There was a brief moment of clarity within the panic, and Lillia pulled one of the burnmite cloths out of her inventory, ignoring the blood that was getting on it, and smashed it between her palms in a resounding clap.
Powder went all over the place. It was probably pretty. Lillia was teetering too close to the edge of trauma to notice.
Once the battlegown was off, Lillia wasn’t as sticky, but she was suddenly cold. Bare knees and bare thighs against the chilled flagstone floor. She didn’t have sleeves, and she could already feel goosebumps on her arms. Reaching for the neckline of her dress, she traced down a V that was wildly inappropriate for a princess.
Whatever tiredness had been clutching her vanished as Lillia shot to her feet and felt the breeze on way too many parts of her body. The princess looked down at the fur-lined, bright red tube top and tiny skirt.
“What is this? Where is my red dress?”
[Lillia used Indignance - Level 2: Sir Nobody is unaffected due to status: Dead.]
Lillia looked around like one of the three corpses within earshot could answer her.
“No seriously? What…” She spun, trying to get a grasp on how much of her this abomination actually covered. It was as if she’d gotten caught half-dressed. She knew courtesans who wore more on a regular basis. She—
[Spellfire Tropics Set]
[While worn, the Princess is immune to up to 2 instances of fire damage and takes greatly reduced damage from any further fire that hits the set.]
That hit the set? There was nothing to hit! This was improper. This was a scandal!
Lillia stopped spinning, and only partially because she was getting dizzy. Shaking her head, she broke a second piece of burnmite cloth in her hands.
The skimpy set expanded outward, back into the elegant, flowing, and slightly unwieldy blood-covered dress she’d gotten stuck with in the first place.
Lillia frowned. Considered her options. Blood. Architect blood. Indecent.
She was faster once she returned to work, only pausing to shake her head when her mind wandered back to the ‘Tropics Set’. Eventually, she had a medium-sized pile of armor to one side of the landing, and a small pile of bones on the other.
The princess reached over and touched the armor with the intent to add it to her inventory. The pile vanished, along with any trace of it, apart from bones and an outline in the dust.
So far, most of the items Lillia carried had seemed reasonable to store…somewhere. But the Architect’s Spellmaul and a set of full plate was pushing the limits of what could fit in a bag, let alone on her person. Either her inventory didn’t care about reality, or Lillia was a lot stronger than she thought.
Having picked up the armor, Lillia continued over to the bones on the landing. In her current circumstances, the only ceremony she could offer was a cremation; she just had to get the bones to the fire, a simple task using her inventory.
After almost sixty flights of stairs to hand-carry every bone and avoid having human remains inside of her, Lillia laid the last of Sir Nobody to the side of the campfire. Finished and exhausted, she sat down beside the bone pile and tried to convince herself that carrying everything manually had been completely reasonable.
The seconds drifted by as Lillia stared into the warm heart of the fire. Her breathing slowed. Her shoulders relaxed. She leaned back, using her arms for support. She closed her eyes.
There, with the quiet crackle of fire, the familiar smell of smoke, and the welcoming warmth on her skin, Lillia could almost imagine opening her eyes to the night sky. She almost felt that if she sat here long enough, she’d feel the cool breeze of a summer evening on her cheeks — that as long as she kept her eyes closed, the only thing that could interrupt the moment would be the sunrise cresting a hill on the far horizon
Lillia let her fingers drag across the ground, but instead of running through grass, her nails caught on the rough, icy surface of flagstone. Lillia swallowed, opened her eyes and stared into the fire.
Soon no longer a fire, but a pyre.
Her eyes watered, but like the tears from pain earlier, it didn’t count.
“When those above the altar sowed us into the world, they made a solemn promise. They promised that at the end, when we are ripe and the sun has set on every season we will grow through, they will reap us along with the rest.”
“We know that our brothers and sisters around us…” That part felt hollow on Lillia’s tongue, but she focused on echoing her father’s words. “Those above the altar cannot keep every promise they make. Some are trampled before their time.”
Lillia looked over to Sir Nobody’s pile of bones. She slid her hand across the ground, drifting closer, but didn’t quite touch it.
“I don’t know whether the gods saw you as ripe or not, brave Sir Nobody. All I know is that, in your final moments, you thought of me. Maybe not me, I don’t think I was what you expected.” Lillia extended her fingertips and let them touch the tibia on the edge of the pile. “That’s okay. I didn’t expect to be here either.”
“I mean Rickshaw, who’s also a skeleton, said that Vianaffir is a really good sword so you kind of set me up for success, and I guess…Um…” Lillia closed her eyes again and stopped addressing a congregation that wasn’t there. “Oh. Gods, Dad made this look so easy when he did it. I think he would have liked you, Sir Nobody. I think Dad liked anyone who took care of me.”
Lillia pulled her knees close to her chest.
“If…when…if I get out of here, I’ll have to make a statue or something. To say thanks for your help.” Lillia managed a soft smile. “But I still wish you’d left a longer note and explained some more things. None of this makes any sense.”
“Sir Nobody, I’m rambling and I never really met you and I don’t really know what kind of honors you would have liked. I’m sorry again if my grandad did something to your king, but I only have the honors of my house to give.”
Lillia stood and dusted herself off. The bones of Sir Nobody almost glowed in the firelight; the small spots where white had persisted through age caught the flame and pushed past the decay of death.
The princess touched the bones and added them to her inventory before putting her hand above the flame. This time it felt right.
“Sir Nobody, a knight not of House Ashvalin, but one who gave part of his life to defending their princess. In the fields of wheat and silk. May you enjoy our hall with honors.”
Lillia called the bones to her hand, and they added themselves to the fire instead of tumbling out.
“Thank you.”
The campfire roared to life, wrapping around and consuming the bones. Lillia pulled her hand away to avoid the flaring heat.
Within seconds, the bones were ash at the base of the fire. Then, the shadows seemed to retreat for the first time since Lillia had entered this place. Above her, the chain stopped rattling. Across from her, she swore for the briefest moment she could see something on the other side of the muted stained glass windows.
Lillia’s text changed.
[Hearth Unlocked. You can rest here. It is safe. Doing so will advance the dungeon by [1] day.
[Upon death, you will respawn at this location without your current equipment. You can respawn at this location [3] more times before the flame dies. Stoke the flame with another Hearth]