Havoc gave Lillia space while she stumbled back into the world of the living and tied the cloak around herself, staring down the stairs. After sitting up and shaking her head, Lillia snapped a piece of chitin to equip the battlegown. Thankfully, dying had cleaned all her equipment.
Dying reset Lillia’s form. It had felt strange in the realm beyond to be back in a body unmarred by her treacherous descent through the dungeon, but now that she had her real—though bare—feet on the ground, she felt at home again. Well, a slightly different home. The puncture scars she’d imagined had stayed with her through resurrection; permanent reminders of her time in the dungeon.
Of course, if trauma counted, Lillia had already been swimming in that.
She never gave Havoc the go-ahead to turn around, but once she’d been seated by the fire for a while, Havoc joined her, staring into the flames.
“Well, kid, now we’re even.”
“Even?”
“Long as we start when you got here, we’ve both died once,” Havoc said as he unwrapped a small leather package. There was dried meat inside of it. It looked tough enough to shatter Lillia’s teeth. “You hungry? I always wake up hungry.”
Lillia continued to stare into the fire. “Not really. Thank you, Havoc.”
“All right more for me then. Don’t have much of this to go around anyway.” His fangs ripped through the tough cut as if it were slow-roasted and basted for a fortnight. Chewing filled the silence, underscored by the light crackle of the hearth as Lillia stared into it.
“So,” Havoc began before swallowing. Lillia twinged at the horrid manners but stopped short of flinching. “What got you out there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what killed you? How can you not know? What? Were you not looking? Were you worried about your hair?”
“My hair was fine,” Lillia said. She didn’t have to look to know Havoc was rolling his eyes. “It came from above. I saw big talons. Then I was dead.”
“But you killed something in there.”
“Yeah I got one of the…How did you know?”
Havoc took another bite and responded with his mouth genuinely stuffed. “You’re wearing a big cloak. You didn’t have that before.”
“Right. Yeah.”
The lie sat in her mouth like a stone. She could tell herself that it wasn’t quite a lie, that she simply hadn’t corrected him, but that was how you lied in court. Someone assumed something convenient and you let them keep assuming it.
Mom would have called it a lie.
Lillia took the hem of the cloak in her hands. The fabric was luxurious, but thick. The kind that she’d seen visitors from the northern regions wear.
[Usurper Lord’s Cloak]
[A Bargain Made and Kept - The Usurper Lord’s Cloak is not lost on death.]
[Dance with Death - After narrowly avoiding or otherwise taking 0 damage from an attack, your next strike, physical or magical is greatly empowered.]
[Bound. Cannot be removed from inventory.]
[There will come days when the sun blackens and the sky bleeds. The dungeon will never know. Its Lord will. Plan and wait for the day of black sun, fight for the throne you deserve.]
Lillia read the final lines over and over. A day of black sun. A bleeding sky. A dungeon lord. Any of it could matter. Lillia focused on the last words.
[Fight for the throne you deserve.]
When Lillia read the name, she assumed that the title referred to Eisel, to the strange man she had met on her journey back to the hearth. But the last line of the description sat heavy in her chest. By the time Lillia was out of the dungeon, her aunt would be queen. She would be the usurper.
Rightful ruler or not, Lillia would have to steal her parents’ throne. Stealing it back didn’t mean it wasn’t stealing.
Havoc tore Lillia out of her thoughts about the throne.
“Alright. Something from above. Ready to get to work?”
“Get to work?” Lillia asked. Havoc had already stood up and walked around the fire. While Lillia was dead, he had clearly made some trips back to his cellar. Rough chunks of iron were spread around the edge of the fire, and aged but meticulously kept crude tools had been set up on the far side of the Hearth.
Havoc had a table, an anvil, and what looked like a collection of rocks he’d broken off one of the walls.
“Well, you don’t got a lot of your shit,” Havoc said. “And clearly what you did before didn’t work. So we need to figure out what we can do better.”
Lillia cocked her head. “Well that’s positive thinking.”
“It’s not positive thinking, kid. It’s how life works. Make a mistake. Do it again. Do it right.”
“Oh…yeah.”
“So if we’re gonna do it right, we gotta think about the problem. What do you got?”
“Pardon?”
“Your equipment: what are we working with? What are your skills or whatever they’re called?” Havoc grunted as he pulled one of the larger rocks off the ground and placed it on the edge of the hearth.
“What are we working with?” Havoc asked. “What’s in that invisible pocket of yours?”
“My battlegown,” Lillia said. “Vianaffir. Some soap. An empty bottle. A ruined pair of slippers.”
“That’s everything?”
“I have Sir Nobody’s note.”
“That’s everything?”
“There’s a scroll I can’t read. A rusty knife.”
Havoc waited. Lillia waited longer.
“That’s everything?”
“Yes, Havoc! That’s everything. I died.”
The hobgoblin grunted and turned to the fire. “Alright. What do your skill things do?”
That conversation was longer. Havoc wanted details that Lillia couldn’t provide from memory. The hobgoblin agreed that her inability to check was stupid. He thought Adaptive Regalia was cheating and denying people the chance to do good work. He found the idea of a skill that motivated Lillia to be an obscene waste of potential.
“That’s everything?”
“Yes!’ Lillia hadn’t brought up Privileged Position. She was exhausted by the persistent questions and that only mattered if she killed something.
Havoc was stoking a fire that didn’t need stoking. “Tell me about the room.”
That conversation took even longer. Havoc wanted details Lillia hadn’t cared about. How tall was the grass? Pretty tall. Could she see the sky through the canopy? Kinda. Were the beasts’ hooves split or solid? She didn’t know what he was asking. Did the wind change direction? She hadn’t been paying attention. Each question she couldn’t answer earned a grunt that sounded increasingly like disappointment.
“What about the dirt?” Havoc asked.
“What about it?”
“Was it soft? Hard? Muddy?”
“It was dirt, Havoc.”
The hobgoblin sighed the sigh of a man who had given up on several fronts at once.
By the end of the exhaustive explanation the hobgoblin had finished making a pile whose purpose Lillia didn’t understand. He put his hands on stout hips and nodded at the assorted rocks. “Way I see it, we already got a solution for the thing dropping down on you. Just wear that battlegown you got on. If the first hit doesn’t count, who cares where it comes from?”
Lillia nodded along.
“Why weren’t you wearing it in the first place? That was dumb. You said your other one absorbed fire? Were you worried about fire while you were stalking those beast things?”
Lillia stood up and the battlegown rattled. The sound echoed around the cathedral and made her point for her. The princess shimmied to shake the dress more. Half for the noise, half for the way the firelight danced off her scales in iridescent reflections.
Havoc nodded along. “Okay, that’s fair.” He frowned into the flames. “How fast can you change into that thing? If that flying monster is coming at you, can you put on the dress while it’s about to happen?”
“I don’t need to get dressed,” Lillia said. “It’s fast but it only really works if I see it coming.”
“So keep better watch.”
“That and I don’t have another dress to wear right now.” Lillia let her hands flop to her side. More rattling and clinking from the battlegown. “I have nothing to change into.”
“You could just wear the cloak.”
“No!”
“Cloaks are practical. People wrap them around themselves all the time and—”
“That’s not happening, Havoc. Ew! Gross! There is so much dust and smelly stuff in there.”
“Would you rather die?”
Lillia narrowed her eyes instead of admitting the answer was ‘kinda yeah.’
“Well if you won’t do that, then is there anything else you can turn into a dress?”
Lillia walked toward the stairs before responding. She had never collected the second chitterpede she killed.
“By the way,” Havoc called after her, “I don’t know if all of it is like that but Adaptive Regalia is an adventurer skill, the whole thing seems like bullshit.”
“Thank you for your opinion Havoc,” Lillia said as she hopped down the stairs to the Hunting Lodge. The first landing seemed so empty now that Sir Nobody was no longer there.
Havoc was better company than a corpse but the corpse had been her first company.
The Hunting Lodge door was still open, and so was the door to the back ale room. Lillia’s blood and the chitterpede’s guts still stained the floor.
But something had changed.
On the table in the center of the room, a small gleaming hunting knife had been stabbed into the old wood, splinters pushing out of the table where the blade had been driven in. There was a yellowed parchment note on the table beside it.
[Pelts Collected = 1 ]
[Pelt Quality = Low]
[The Huntsmaster is not impressed with your hunt. Keep going.]
Lillia sneered at the note and focused on the knife beside it. It was a good knife too. Clean steel. Simple handle. Something small enough to hide and sharp enough to surprise.
It was coming with her. She grabbed it with two hands and yanked. It wiggled but didn’t give. Lillia braced one foot on the base of the table and heaved with both hands. The table moved. The table fell. The table landed on Lillia.
“Ow.”
Havoc called from upstairs, “You good Lillia? Thought the bug was already dead.”
“Yeah I got it.” Lillia called back despite losing a wrestling match to a table. She shoved it off with the knife still stuck in it. Once she was standing she kicked it.
Lillia was in bare feet. For the second time in the Hunting Lodge, she regretted kicking that stupid table.
It took the princess a moment to hop off the pain. She grumbled the entire time. “Stupid Huntsmaster. I died for that dumb skin. Least you could do is let me take the stupid knife.”
By the time Lillia was done hopping and complaining she was by the chitterpede’s carcass. She tried not to focus on how gross it was…or how gross her own dried blood on it was. Lillia winced as she touched the bug and added it to her inventory.
“Victory,” she whispered to herself.
[Chitterpede Chitin x 1]
[Chitterpede Bloodfang x 1]
Lillia pulled out the bloodfang. It was one of the gross bugs mandibles, covered in her blood. Lillia shrieked and chucked it across the room. The thing embedded in the far wall with a resounding thud.
Both the march to grab the fang and the return upstairs felt like walks of shame. By the time she was back Lillia’s head was hung low.
“What took you so long? You were just grabbing the—”
“We’re not going to talk about it,” Lillia said.
Havoc stared but didn’t press. “So you’ve got your second piece of bug now…Gonna add it to the dress?”
“I am going to make shoes.”
The hobgoblin opened his mouth then let it close. An argument waited there: optimization, the empowered dress could do versus a pair of shoes. They weren’t going to have it.
“I got this too. Um.” Lillia hesitated at the thought of pulling out the bloodfang again and getting it on her —admittedly gloved—hand. Instead of properly grabbing it, she walked over to Havoc and held out her palm until he did the same. Like Sir Nobody’s bones, Lillia dropped the icky fang into his hand.
Havoc made a noise Lillia recognized from her father seeing catapults.
“You just got this now?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“Because you would have told me about it earlier, right? You’re not holding out on me?” Before this moment, Lillia would never have described Havoc as emphatic, but it was apparently possible.
“No I told you about the rusty knife.”
“Oh kid, can I have some time with this?” Havoc sounded like a younger man as he asked.
“Yeah it’s gross.”
“Gross! I’ve never seen one in this condition. And it’s got real blood on it and…” Havoc paused. “That your blood? “
“Yeah.”
“Kid, you got good blood.”
Lillia didn’t know what to say to that. “Um, yeah you can have it Havoc. Keep the fang thing.”
“Finally something worth working with.” He kept turning the fang-mandible thing over and over in his palm. Lillia’s eyes were drawn to the calluses in his palms.
Once it was clear that Havoc wasn’t going to stop staring at his new prize, Lillia gave him space and sat down beside the fire. The chitin was much nicer than the fang she’d handed Havoc. Of everything she’d received in the dungeon, the chitin was the first material that had made her think the dungeon was worth something.
The chitin didn’t make getting thrown in here worth it. Paying adventurers to come here and get her materials for clothes once she was queen, would be worth it.
Lillia crushed the chitin in her palm. As she did she imagined shoes. She felt the fine dust slipping between her fingers. When she opened her eyes she could see the iridescent shimmer catching firelight in the air.
Then Lillia couldn’t feel the heat of the flame on her open toes.
Rather than small heels, the chitterpede chitin had become lengthy riding boots made of the same scaled weave as Lillia’s battlegown. The green scales ran up, only ending at her knees with a thick double-wrapped layer of leather-like finer scales. The shoes still had a heel but it was far less pronounced than the Thundersteps had been.
These boots were nicer than the ones she laced up at home to ride Pointe. The princess ran her fingers up the scales on her calf. Her nails clicked along the way.
[Chitin Chitterboots]
[Sure-footed. The wearer cannot be tripped, slowed, or knocked prone by terrain effects.]
There was nothing after that. Lillia ran her hand back and forth over the scales on the side. She sped up until it almost looked like she was scrubbing the side of the boot. Did they really do nothing aside from make her balance better? The other ones had allowed her to kick lightning! Lightning!
Well, it was what she had.
When she took her first step the click rang around the room was resounding. The way it echoed off the walls, it nearly sounded as if a hundred chitterpedes were in the room with them.
“I don’t think this is helping our sneaking problem.”
Havoc regretfully pulled his attention away from the blood fang in front of him. “Quite the armour.”
Lillia shrugged. “I don’t know how I’m getting close to anything wearing this.”
“You said that the Huntsmaster was unimpressed with your kill, right?”
“Yeah so I need to get even more of them, and I don’t have a way to do that.”
“Kid, I don’t think you have to.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you can’t catch the minnows be loud and get yourself a big fish.”
Lillia did not like this metaphor.
The big fish was the thing with the talons. The thing that had landed on her and turned her into a stain. Havoc wanted her to go back into the Hunting Grounds, make as much noise as her clattering dress could produce, and let the apex predator come to her.
Lillia looked down at the battlegown. The chitin scales caught the firelight and threw it around the room in a hundred iridescent directions. Her thoughts lingered on the cloak Eisel had given her. Dance with Death. Take zero damage. Hit back harder.
She looked at Havoc. “You want me to fight that thing.”
“I want you to let it fight you,” Havoc said. “There’s a difference.”
Lillia did not like this difference either.