Chapter 60 - Said the Fly

After her revelation from Cathria, Lillia had expected to hold a round table with the two people who were willing to help her in the dungeon.
It turned out that Thorne’s need to leave the Hunting Grounds didn’t just mean she couldn’t stick around in the lodge. She fully disappeared as soon as they had left the grounds, leaving Lillia to make the climb back up to Havoc alone.
It wasn’t a long climb up the stairs. It was only two floors. It felt like a lifetime with the weight Lillia carried.
Havoc had, at first, been excited to see her. After all, Vianaffir was mostly repaired and he wanted to show off his progress.
It had only taken one look at Lillia for the hobgoblin to drop what he was doing and…
Well, Lillia had expected a hug considering the mood, but that would have been wildly out of character for Havoc. Instead, he had simply sat down on one side of their new long table in the middle of the room and motioned for her to sit across from him.
It wasn’t a round table. It was a mostly empty banquet table, but it was theirs.
Lillia sat in silence for a long time, allowing the crackle of the fire to carry the conversation. Havoc waited across from her. He never moved. He never seemed uncomfortable. He just waited.
Some of the silence was her being physically unable to say everything she wanted to say. Some of it was from her not wanting to talk about it.
Vianaffir lay across the table between them in two pieces that no longer looked entirely broken. Havoc had fitted the shattered edges together with tiny seams of dark metal, each one hammered so fine Lillia could barely tell where Vianaffir ended and the repair began. It still was not whole. The break still caught the light wrong. But it looked less like a corpse now and more like something sleeping through a fever.
That was a glimmer of hope somewhere left of centre in her chest, and eventually that glimmer was enough to drive her to speak. It began simply.
“There is a man on the third floor. One of the bosses. His name is Eisel.”
“The man you fought before you found me at the Hearth of Memory? You just talked to him. I know about him.”
Lillia nodded. “He’s been absorbing experience from everything I’ve done, and it’s my fault.”
“Your fault? How?”
“I—” Her tongue pressed against the shape of the truth and went numb. Not asleep-numb. Not cold-numb. Obedient-numb. As if some invisible hand had pinched the words between gloved fingers and smiled while it did. It wasn’t something she could fight. It wasn’t something being her own champion would fix. Lillia chose silence over lying around the topic again.
Havoc sighed. “That explains the last conversation. You’re not allowed to talk about it. Sounds like fae bullshit to me.”
“Fae?”
“Backhanded deals and that sort of work. If you’ve ever lived near a forest, you’d know all about it.” Havoc clasped his hands in front of himself. “You said he’s absorbing experience?”
“Cathria took a look at me and explained that with everything we’d done, I should be level thirty.”
“What level are you?”
“Ten.”
“Well, doesn’t that just explain it. Was wondering how the hell I was a higher level than you after all the times you went through the siege.”
“What level are you?” Lillia asked.
“Still fourteen. Don’t know if that can ever go up,” he said. “I know I talk about it a lot, but I was never that much of a fighter before I came here. If killing things is the only way to gain experience, then it makes sense that I only hit fourteen in seventy years.”
“That didn’t change even when you were in the siege?”
Havoc shook his head.
Lillia sighed. She’d been supporting herself on her arms as she leaned over the table, and they suddenly felt like they couldn’t hold her at all.
Eisel had taken more from her than Havoc had earned in seventy years. Plus, Havoc couldn’t earn new experience, which meant they couldn’t mitigate Eisel’s growth by having Havoc and Thorne grow alongside Lillia.
Anything they fought, anything they killed, they could gain equipment, but the gap would just grow wider.
“The way I see it, there’s a simple solution. We just get Cathria to take that off and—”
“He’d know.”
“He’d know?” Havoc asked.
“If there’s a connection, then he’d learn about it if I took it off, right? And I can’t take it off without Cathria’s help.”
“So what if he knows? Let him be mad about it. We’re worried about this guy’s feelings?”
Lillia sighed. No. There was a reason that Vianaffir was a poison pill. “I agreed to one more conversation with him. I agreed to it when he gave me Vianaffir.”
Havoc sighed. “Why would you make another deal with him?”
“I made a choice because I didn’t know how this worked.” Lillia tapped the clasp. “But I know he has the ability to pull me into a conversation once.”
“What did you agree to?”
“One more talk.”
Havoc sighed. Lillia couldn’t tell if he just thought she was reckless or if he’d reached the same conclusion she had.
“And I don’t think that talk goes well if he knows I’ve taken this off. I think the only reason he’s played so nice is that he’s known there’s no way for me to close the gap.”
Havoc frowned. Which was normal. He nodded, which was less normal.
“Kid, if I had any room to judge, I’d have a lot of choice words for you, but I’m only here because of a choice I made that I can’t remember. So…you know.” Havoc’s shoulders sagged as he spoke. “Always told myself once I was a grandfather I’d stop being a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is something parents gotta do but…”
Havoc reached into his pocket below the table and pulled out a small locket. The same one he’d kissed in that quiet moment all those battles ago.
He dug one thick claw into the crack and opened it.
There was nothing inside. No scrap of paper. No curl of hair. Not even a clumsy little sketch tucked behind cloudy glass. Just the dented inside of the thing, scratched from claws that had opened it too many times to find nothing waiting.
“I made this when I stopped making swords. Everyone told me I’d gotten too old, but I was too stubborn to sit back and be a mentor if I couldn’t work myself. So, I tried to make something smaller, something that would be easier on my back.”
He made a noise. It was somewhere halfway between a chuckle and a cough.
“It’s a piece of shit. I’m not a jeweler. Never had the hands for detail, and the shakin’ doesn’t help.”
Lillia held her tongue. The nicest thing she could have said about the crude locket was that it was quaint.
“Now, I don’t know how much royalty would deal with stuff like this, but there’s supposed to be something inside. I was gonna get something made, something drawn. Never did, never put anything in there.”
He sniffed.
“When I made the deal, if I had thought about everything and been 100% rational, I would have asked for just a little more time so I could have put something in this locket. Put anything in here so that a thousand deaths later I wasn’t just pretending to care about it.”
Lillia stared at the table. She knew how the conversation would go. If she tried to offer any sympathy or condolences, Havoc would shut her down. She would protest. They would move on.
She hoped the quiet carried everything she needed to say.
Havoc snorted again, closed the locket, and put it back in his pocket. Then he reached for Vianaffir again, because apparently a broken legendary sword was easier to look at than an empty locket.
“Alright, so we grab Thorne and go punch this loser?”
Lillia shook her head. Of course Havoc would suggest that. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen. He hadn’t seen Eisel in a fight. He didn’t understand the impossible gap between Eisel and Lillia.
If the three of them went in there, no matter how fast Thorne was and how stubborn Havoc was, all three of them would be killed the second Eisel wanted them to die. Then Lillia would be back in the Land of Wheat and Silk. She didn’t know how he did it, but she knew that Eisel could reach her there.
She sighed as she looked down at the table and slowly shook her head. She had an idea. It was a much dumber idea than Havoc’s. But it gave them a chance to come out on top.
On the plains, when she considered the shape of the dungeon and what it taught her, Lillia had assumed that she was supposed to negotiate with Eisel. Eisel was a true monster. If Lillia was a heroic princess, she would need to be the kind that killed monsters.
If this dungeon was teaching her to negotiate, then she had one last person to talk to and one last deal she could make before falling back on Havoc’s original idea and trying to kill him.
There was one last thinking person on this side of the dungeon.
“I’m going to go talk to Nennia.”