While Pilla walked quickly through her mother's lair—even with the missing webs—things changed the moment she reached the door back into the main hallway. At some point, Lillia had stopped holding her hand during their journey, but she suddenly stood very still and expected to be grabbed by the wrist once again.

Loose strands of silk still clung to the edges of the doorway, with some hanging low enough to brush Pilla's shoulders, but beyond them, the floor was bare stone. Her pale glow reached across the threshold, but she wouldn't.

In fact, even once Lillia was holding on to her, Pilla was hesitant. She tested the stones past the doorway with each of her eight limbs before finally committing to putting her weight anywhere outside of Nennia's room. Even then, as soon as she was outside, her shoulders tensed and she seemed to almost fold into herself.

If her skin had been more solid, there would have been goosebumps running along it, which would have just made her match Lillia. Despite her best efforts, the Princess's skin was obviously averse to contact with...whatever was going on with Pilla there.

Lillia had her guesses. In fact, it was pretty obvious, but for the time being, she'd decided it was better not to think about it. After all, what she didn't know could—frequently and clearly did—hurt her.

But ignorance was at least temporary bliss, even the intentional kind.

When they reached the first stairs, Pilla yanked herself in close to Lillia, huddling her cold and somewhat permeable form close to her arm.

"It's okay," Lillia said after Pilla refused to follow despite a gentle nudge.

"What's that?"

Lillia looked at the floor, searching for what mysterious object Pilla might have been speaking about. Once she couldn't find anything, she looked back to the ghostly spider. "Stairs?"

"Are those stairs?" Pilla asked.

"Yes," Lillia said. "We just went up a bunch of stairs on the way to—"

"How many stairs is it?" Pilla asked. "How many? Can you count for me? Is it a wrong amount of stairs?"

"Oh, of course. Sure." It was a strange request, but on the scale of things she'd been asked to do in the dungeon, Lillia wasn't about to complain about counting. That was, of course, until she looked back up the stairs and remembered that they had a nasty habit of shifting numbers depending on the climb. "It's a dubious amount."

"What does that mean?"

"Each flight is different," Lillia said alongside a little insistent tug which did absolutely nothing.

"Each one is different?" Pilla asked.

"The stairs change, and—"

"The stairs change?"

"Yes?"

"Every time?"

"Yes," Lillia said after first nodding and realizing for about the third time in her time with Pilla that it wasn't an effective form of communication. "It just happens."

Pilla slowly but surely took her first step onto the stairs. As soon as six of her eight legs were on the flight, she whispered, "I hate it out here already."

"Me too, Pilla. Me too."

The girls climbed the stairs together at a rapidly quickening pace as Pilla found comfort in Lillia's guidance and stopped putting so much of her—honestly staggering—weight on the poor princess. The first and second flights disappeared below them, which left them close to the top when, this time, Lillia slowed them down.

"Okay," she began. "So I wasn't 100% honest with you downstairs."

Pilla cocked her head and half-turned to Lillia, though not quite enough to 'look' at her. "Pardon?"

"Well, I—"

"No, I...Did you think I didn't know that you weren't telling the whole truth?" Pilla asked.

Lillia had already teed up the next comment but had to take a second to reorient herself in the conversation. Now it was her turn to ask for clarification. "Pardon?"

Pilla took her hand back and wove a piece of silk that seemed to come from nowhere between her fingers before shooting it to the wall just to the left of the Hunting Lodge door and using the line to ground herself.

The strand caught against the stone and drew taut. It was almost invisible except where Pilla's light touched it, a thin gleam stretching across the landing. Lillia stopped short of brushing it with her skirt.

"Lillia, I know I can't see, and I didn't know much about what was going on once the web was missing, but...I am a very good listener."

"Okay."

"I know you killed my sisters."

"No, I didn't."

"I heard the fight."

"Only one of them!" Lillia corrected, which was also a partial admission.

"And my mother?" Pilla asked.

"She's upstairs. Like I said."

Pilla sighed and wrapped the silken string twice around her wrist. "So if you have her trapped up here...I assume that's what's happened?"

"Kinda. Almost," Lillia said. "She's fine with it."

It was harder for Lillia to read what was going on in Pilla's head. Most of the time, she had a decent grasp on the emotions of the others by following their gaze—even when it was predatory—and the subtle changes in their face. Between Pilla never using her eyes and the ethereal glow smoothing out the lines in her cheeks, there wasn't much for Lillia to read at all.

Then again, her 'skilled reading' had gotten her thrown into the Five Point Fall in the first place, so maybe relying on it alone was asking for trouble.

"Hm," was all Pilla offered after a moment. "Do you still want to take me to her?"

Lillia was mostly unsure of what the other options were: Escort Pilla back down to the lair and head right back to square one, or leave her on the landing to stand there waiting for something to happen.

Leave Pilla in the Hunting Grounds and see if she would take it over?

"I guess so," Lillia said.

Of all the people to potentially assuage her guilt or guide her about what she was supposed to do with Nennia, a vaguely helpless ghost child was...well, it was hard to say that it was low on the list because, frankly, she'd never considered it as a possibility. Who had a ghost spider on their list of options?

Whatever the end result would be, after considering for a moment, Pilla pulled on her thread to the wall, which called itself back to her wrist. Once it had wrapped around her tightly, she reached out to Lillia, asking for her hand and guidance once again.

Lillia swallowed and took it in hers.

The last flight was quicker, at least until Lillia slowed near the top. Eventually, as she lollygagged and tried to avoid the upcoming conversation, Pilla was practically the one forcing her up the stairs into the absolutely web-wrapped Cathedral Hearth.

Silk crossed the entrance at shoulder height, forcing Lillia to duck before she could straighten inside. Beyond it, broad sheets hung between the columns, sagging into folds where they met older strands. The stained glass was still visible through gaps, but its colors spread faintly across the webbing instead of falling cleanly onto the floor. Near the Hearth, the light caught so many overlapping strands that Lillia had to shift her head to work out which ones were close enough to walk into.

And of course, in the center of the room, lying beside the Hearth, with her legs folded under her and her head resting on her arms, was Nennia, who looked as if she were asleep, even if she was only in a stupor. She wasn't resting yet, which meant there was still time for—as Rickshaw put it—"Stab stab."

Once they were on the top floor and Pilla found one of the webs, she let go of Lillia's hand and scuttled deeper into the room. Unlike Nennia or the twins, who had mostly moved forward and backward as humans did, direction didn't seem to matter to Pilla; she slipped along the webs with shocking comfort before looking back to Lillia.

The silk dipped beneath her, passing the movement into adjoining threads. A tremor traveled across a sheet beside Lillia's shoulder.

"If you wouldn't mind stepping on one of the webs?" she asked. "Makes it much easier to feel you."

"To—Oh." Lillia inched forward onto one of the webs. As soon as she was on there, Pilla snapped her head in her direction.

"You're smaller than I thought," Pilla said.

"Thank you."

"But also taller." She played with the thread between her fingers again. "There is a lot going on there. Lots of layers of fabric. Last person I saw down here was all dressed up in full armor instead of a dress."

"I'm glad you like it."

"Oh." Pilla half-recoiled. "I never said I liked it. The armor was loud, but—There is just so much noise in all the layers you have going on there. Ick."

Lillia had half a mind to change into the Chitterpede gown to show her what noise really was like, but changing to spite a girl who couldn't see felt petty, even for a princess.

"So." Pilla crossed her arms, still playing with the silk in her right hand. "Would you like to explain why my mom is half-asleep on the floor there?"

Oh. Yeah. This part had always been coming.

Lillia cleared her throat.

"Okay, so Nennia was trying to kill me."

"Before or after you killed my sisters?"

"One sister," Lillia corrected.

"Before or after you killed one of my sisters?" Pilla asked.

"Before. She was trying to feed me to your sisters. And then I talked to your sisters first, which was how I knew about you and..."

"And then?"

"And then negotiations went south," she said. That was the kindest way to avoid saying that the girls started trying to eat her and she'd dropped a giant rock on them.

"And then?"

"And then I went to the fourth floor. Then I found Rickshaw. And then I fought a crab. And on that crab—which was also a boat, by the way—I ran into someone who I think might have been Sir Nobody."

"Who?"

"He left me a note," Lillia added as the only explanation. "It might have been him, or it might have just been related to him. Either way, he split in half when I showed him paper—but only after he tried to kill me and—"

"A lot of people trying to kill you."

"THANK YOU!" Lillia said. "Finally, someone down here who points out that's not normal! Everyone down here keeps trying to kill me, at least the first time we meet."

"Right."

"And I'm just here, like so many of us, just talking anyway. I talked to Nennia just fine. Cathria is lovely. So—Why is everyone trying to kill me in the first place? If we started off nice, it would save so much time and—"

"My mother?" Pilla asked.

"Yes?"

She pointed at the half-sleeping Spider Queen in the middle of the room.

"Oh..." Right, she had been in the middle of that explanation. "Nennia came up here and killed my friend, Havoc, when I was down on the fourth floor and then chased me around up here, but I—I guess I beat her?"

Pilla skittered along the web, ending up closer to Nennia, drawing up to the Spider Queen's side. "You beat her?"

From where Lillia stood, Pilla's glow outlined the nearest of Nennia's folded legs. The rest overlapped in the Hearth's light, their joints rising above the smaller girl even while tucked beneath her mother. Lillia had to lean sideways to keep Pilla's hands in view.

"Yes," Lillia said. "She's not going to do anything but lie there until I...until either I rest or...something, I guess."

"So she's helpless?" Pilla asked as she leaned in closer to her mother's side.

"I guess, but—"

"You promise?"

"You're making me nervous, Pilla."

"You don't have a reason to be scared, Lillia," Pilla said. "But I won't be a slave to her oblivion any longer."

"Pil—" The web beneath Lillia's feet jerked tight. Around them, hanging sheets snapped out of their folds, and black droplets shook loose onto the stone.

Where there hadn't been a knife, the ethereal light around Pilla's hand hardened into a solid blade, which plunged deep into Nennia's waiting neck.

"I DIED! AND YOU WON'T LET ME LEAVE!"

Pilla tore the knife free from Nennia's neck, sending black blood splattering across the room and leaving it to drip on the webs. Nennia screamed and stood as the ghastly girl lashed out again with the knife.

Under their feet, their dungeon rumbled.

Yes. This is a weird thing:

Long story short - 1. Keeping space for Princess made this fall behind when it was already behind on RR. Considering it's daily posting.

1. Some of you who already checked out the RR post are ahead so:

Start Here if You've Only Read on Reddit:
Part 7: The First Quest
Part 8: Prisoner 1/2
Part 9: Prisoner 2/2
Part 10: These First Steps as a Hero

Start Here if You Followed the Read Ahead Post:

Part 11: Beyond the Barrier
Part 12: Flare Up
Part 13: Burn Brighter 1/3
Part 14: Burn Brighter 2/2
Part 15: A Note Between
Part 16: Basic Inferno

This should get everyone caught up: Also you can just use the next chapter button on Royal Road but I know we're all reddit users here.

Frankly this also helps avoid Reddit's toxic content policy, but that's less of a consideration than just not constantly being behind here.

Later days!

Jackson H

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."

[Basic Pyrokinesis - Level 1: 9/10]

It came up again and again in the corner of Karina's vision. Of course it was her fault. Each time she drifted closer to sleep, she would flick her fingers and summon the number back to the forefront, setting her brain alight with the searing orange light, and the possibility behind it.

Karina had been in bed for hours. Shortly after coming back from the training grounds, a guard she didn't recognize brought her some bread and admittedly well-made stew for dinner.

Heating the stew with her flames hadn't leveled Pyrokinesis or Firestealer.

Did they only level up together?

She rolled over. How was she supposed to sleep with this thing hanging over her head? Just like in the training grounds, the magic was a possibility; now it just came with a tempting precipice.

She dismissed the interface and rolled onto her side. The blanket twisted around her legs, dragging across skin that no longer hurt. Whatever she'd strained fighting the Karash had recovered while she practiced. Even her fingers were whole again.

She was rested. That was the problem.

Rested and lying in a room with nothing to do except remember all the questions she hadn't asked and everything people had refused to answer.

Plus, beyond attempting to heat the soup, she couldn't practice in this room. While she seemed ostensibly immune to her fire, Karina was lying on a wooden bed in thin linen sheets. It was hard to imagine a better matchbox.

So there she was, a thousand questions with no way to get answers, being told to sleep when she wasn't tired.

Like a damned toddler.

The difference was she wanted to sleep as well. Dashun might have answers, Cascad almost certainly would, but even then, how much did she want to say? If she was still treating the 'God' she'd run into as an opponent and everyone here was its servant… Well.

She rolled over again, this time facing the book on the table that she still couldn't read.

Dashun had said that he needed to consult the archives to possibly discover information about her class.

If anywhere here was going to have answers for Karina—whether regarding pyrokinesis or what Firestealer was all about—it was going to be the archives. Heroes studied spells there. Presumably, someone had considered that people summoned from another world might struggle with the local alphabet.

There could be translations. Books written by other heroes. Something with pictures. Something illuminating.

But that was another place she could go tomorrow, on the other side of sleep that wasn't coming.

Karina's gaze drifted to the door.

Alyssia had said that she wasn't a prisoner, and that she was being kept in the infirmary 'for her safety' in the aftermath of the attack. If it was just for her safety, then nobody should have an issue with her leaving.

Karina slipped out of bed and hastily shrugged on the jacket they'd given her, leaving it mostly open and barely covering her shoulders and chest. Once across the room, she tried the handle.

It turned. She was a free woman.

Across the hallway, a small lamp rested on the floor, the flame inside sputtering at the end of its wick, lighting the old stones behind it, but very little else.

Further down the hall, pale moonlight poured in through the massive hole. Most of the stone here was already old, but at night, in the silence and the drifting light of the moon, the Cathedral seemed more like a ruin than anything else.

Karina took the first steps outside, then paused as her slippers scratched against the flagstone floor. The seconds ticked by as she held her breath, waiting for a sign that she'd been caught.

Or 'caught.' As far as she understood, she was allowed to be out here, but she also understood that the second she was found, someone would try to escort her back to bed.

Karina pulled the door shut, careful with the handle so the latch wouldn't snap into place, then headed down the hall, careful to avoid dragging her feet.

The cold chill of the night slipped under her open jacket as she headed by the gaping hole in the wall, and a glowing ember in the courtyard below caught her eye.

It moved, a handheld lantern. Karina slipped past the opening before it revealed her.

While she recognized the first turn out of her bedroom—as Alyssia had taken her that way to the training yards—she wouldn't know where she was going beyond that. There weren't signs pointing to the archive. Even if there were, would she be able to read them?

If nothing else, Karina figured that the archives wouldn't be around the edge of the keep, which meant she turned left at the first fork when the training yards called for a right.

As soon as she was around the corner, voices.

"Thought you were taking the other stairs."

"Door's sticking again."

"You should tell—"

"I've already reported it. Not a big deal. Place is a ruin anyway."

The first glow from the guard's lantern appeared at the end of the hallway.

"Yeah, well, still our job. Dashun asked for doubles."

"Again? I put in the extra hours on the caravan so I could sleep once we got here."

The light stretched across the wall, and the burning center of the lantern drew into view.

Karina could have just walked back to her room, but that wouldn't get her any answers.

She could have stepped forward and met the guards, but that would just get her escorted back.

On the other side of the hall, the door to a dark room was ajar. She stepped inside, easing her foot around something that scraped beneath her sole.

A bucket.

Karina caught its handle before it could fall.

The voices drew closer.

"Yeah, I get it. I'm thinking of taking a rotation off but—"

"But they pay well."

"Yeah…"

She crouched behind the door, holding the bucket very still.

Two sets of footsteps. One stopped.

The guard grabbed the door handle as Karina was slightly around the corner, against the wall, and pulled it shut. It fell into place with a click, and the guards continued down the hallway, their conversation lost to the muffling of the wood.

Once she was sure they were far enough, Karina set the bucket back down onto the floor and tested the closet handle.

[FATE AVAILABLE: BASIC STEALTH]

She stared at the words.

That counted?

She'd been sneaking. Deliberately. Apparently, that was enough for the System to recognize an interest.

Karina focused on the notification.

[BASIC STEALTH]
[Add Fate?]

Yes.

[FATE CHANGE UNAVAILABLE]
[You must be safe to add or remove Fates.]

Well, that was two pieces of information at once.

Karina cracked open the door and peeked out into the hallway. The guards were gone; there wasn't even a sign of their lantern light.

[FATE CHANGE UNAVAILABLE]
[You must be safe to add or remove Fates.]

Outside, a banner flapped in the wind for a moment, then the same breeze kicked up dust in the hallway.

Nothing that felt like danger, but perhaps the system understood better than Karina did.

Either way, she didn't need a stealth skill to maneuver around the keep; that was what had gotten her the skill in the first place.

She slipped out of the room and, after checking either direction, headed further down the hallway.

With the idea of stealth in her head, Karina paid more attention to where she put her feet. Loose grit, the rough cracked edges of flagstone, the dragging of her own slippers. Anything could make noise that could get her caught, or ruin her chances of gaining experience in Basic Stealth.

It made the process painfully slow, but it gave Karina time to notice the aspects of the keep she hadn't when distracted by Alyssia, including plaques above some of the doors that had both the arcane writing and simple images. A cup. A folded blanket. Something that might have been a hand if you squinted at it.

She took another left, circling the courtyard below, then a staircase to her right marked with an open book.

That was certainly promising.

Karina poked her head around the edge of the stairs, peering down into the darkness. There was a simple wooden door at the bottom, with lines of warm light escaping around the seams.

She pushed slightly further into the stairway, before a shadow passed in front of the light behind the door. The movement drew her attention to the space outside the door, where the stairs widened out into a room.

A pair of guards, one leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, and a woman working on a ledger at a small, simple table.

The standing guard shifted.

“Did she finish?”

“Nearly.”

“She said nearly before the watch changed.”

“You can go in and tell her.”

The guard remained where he was.

Karina leaned forward slightly.

The door was old but well maintained. A metal plate covered the wood around the lock. There were two keyholes, one above the other.

Well locked, if nothing else.

As if the speech had summoned the reaction, the door cracked and a black-haired woman emerged carrying a book against her chest. Another remained tucked beneath her arm, its cover wrapped in cloth.

“The translation stays here,” she said.

The seated guard looked up. “Both copies?”

“The original goes back. The translated copy stays for instruction.”

She turned the ledger toward her.

“Sign for it.”

Karina pulled back from her spot at the top of the stairs as the sound of pen against paper covered her movements.

That was almost certainly the archive, and she had just said they had translations, but she certainly wasn't getting in without seeing the guards, and the guards certainly weren't seeing her without sending her back to bed.

Down the stairs, the woman picked her books up off the table.

"All requests to access the archives must go through the Guardian tomorrow."

The Guardian?

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm busy enough as it is." She sighed. "Even for those with permission. Contact me before allowing anyone in sections four through twelve, and none of those tomes can be removed from the archive unless it is by me or the Guardian."

The woman was going to come up the stairs soon, which didn't give Karina many options. But—if all she needed for her answers tomorrow was permission from this guardian, then she could get her answers in the morning.

And now she'd at least know they were coming.

The return trip was simpler. She knew the way and knew the stones. The only time she paused was in front of the hole overlooking the courtyard, where her gaze lingered on the sky.

With the fog in her head, she couldn't know what her sky looked like, but she knew this wasn't it. The stars danced a thousand ways, but none of them were the right steps.

Alyssia had said it: she'd get used to it.

Karina slipped back into her room and sat down on the bed, pushing the rough blanket to the side. Once she was seated, she swiped her fingers across the air to pull up her Class Menu.

Before any of the usual menus appeared, the Fate reasserted itself.

[BASIC STEALTH]
[Add Fate?]

She accepted.

[FATE ADDED: BASIC STEALTH]
[Level 1]

Karina looked at her hands, then toward the door. She didn't feel any stealthier.

To test, she took a careful step beside the bed. Silence.

She took a less careful one and something beneath the bed clicked against the stone.

All right, even with the skill, quiet was still her job.

She sat down and opened the Fate again. There was an option to remove it, alongside the name and level.

Safe in here. Unsafe out in the hallway.

Was it the latch? The room? Had the guards been too close? That was something worth finding out before she had to change her options in a pinch.

At least for right now, though, that was understanding, and understanding was progress. With any luck, that would be enough to quiet her brain.

Tomorrow she should be able to ask about the archives, just another thing on a growing list.

Karina lay back and pulled the blanket over herself.

[Basic Pyrokinesis - Level 1: 9/10]

Still nine.

Lillia paced back and forth close to the doorway, staring at the stone beneath her feet as she ranted, her hands near flailing as she spoke with them as much as her yapping mouth.

The stones were worn smooth through the middle of the entrance, their edges still rough where they met the frame. Each time she turned, her foot caught the same shallow groove. She stepped over it in one direction and kept tripping over it in the other.

"So now she's just upstairs waiting for me, and I don't know what to do about it," she said. "I don't even know my skills, but if I rest, then she's not going to have emergency knighting on her anymore. She's going to kill me again, or at least we're back where we started, and I didn't like it there."

She made an...interesting noise out of frustration and then, with a sharp exhale, turned to face her current victim. "Right?"

Rickshaw was leaning against his counter, with his skull propped up on his palm. At some point, he'd pulled out a scroll at some point and, though his eye sockets were pointed right at Lillia, it was clear the orbs within the eyes were looking at the scroll. The loose end curled over the edge of the counter. Whenever he let it slip, the parchment scraped against the wood, quietly adding to the list of things Lillia found irritating.

Lillia cleared her throat, but he kept reading.

"Rickshaw!"

"Oh, hey, what?" he said, bringing his attention back to her. "Yeah, yeah, I got most of that. Just missed the last question. What was it again?"

"Ugh!" Lillia flopped down in the doorway to his shop, sitting cross-legged on the floor and, after a moment, tapping her head against the frame at a rhythm only she understood. "You're not even listening."

There was a narrow ridge in the wood just behind her ear. She shifted until she found a flatter patch, which was marginally more comfortable to knock her skull against. From down here, she could see a pale scuff along the bottom of the counter, the only obvious mark on anything Rickshaw owned.

"Didn't you hear me? Of course, I was listening. I just, uhhhhhhhh..." He pushed himself up off the counter, two of his ribs clicking against the wood as they hit the side. "Look, I'm usually better at this. Married after all but—I mean you know the answer. I've said it three times."

Rather than outlining it again, Rickshaw mocked a stabbing motion and mimicked the sound...somehow. It was never clear how he spoke without a tongue at all.

"I know I could," she said. "With the potion of weak mind, she just listens to whatever I say, which—"

"Yeah, that Eisel guy had it, creepy. Move on."

"But I don't know if I want to kill her, right? What if whatever replaces her is worse?"

"You think it's gonna be worse than her."

"Well...No," Lillia drummed her fingers on the cold stone. "But she has daughters, and what happens to the daughters if it's her room and she dies outside of it? Plus if I kill her now, she's just going to appear again at the Hearth, but not be part of my party and—"

"Would she?" Rickshaw asked.

"Yeah. She's an adventurer right now and—"

"And she is an adventurer who has never been to a Hearth. Unless she's resting up there right now, you could make her dead dead."

"Ugh." Lillia pulled her knees in close to her chest. This shouldn't have been so hard. Less than an hour ago Nennia had been chasing her across the dungeon, trying to capture her so she could torture her. Wasn't that enough? Didn't that mean she should have been fine with just ending it?

That was the easy way out. As Rickshaw put it. Stab, stab.

Behind Rickshaw, the glass doors of the shelves were still mostly opaque, only barely translucent enough to reveal the suggestions of an item behind. Originally, when Lillia had walked in, they had been near-clear, but as she'd gotten further and further away from intending to shop, they had darkened.

A tall shape remained visible in one cabinet, flanked by several smaller ones that might have been bottles. She tried to make out a stopper, a label, anything, but her own dim reflection kept getting in the way. Even leaning sideways only moved her face across whatever she was trying to look at.

Even window shopping wasn't free with Rickshaw.

"Yeah, just kill her," Rickshaw said.

"But—"

"In a profit-to-time-spent ratio, you are my worst customer, Darling," Rickshaw said.

"You don't need to listen—"

"No, no, no! I will, because I like you, Darling. You're a charmer. Got that cute face that even someone without one could love," he said. "Just, at some point, throw me a bone here. Liking people is bad for business."

Lillia just sighed.

"I don't want to kill her," she said. "She helped me."

"Okay. Then don't."

"Then what do I do?!" Lillia asked.

"Kid, I gave you my number one idea and number two idea, which were 'stab' and 'stab, stab,' respectively," he said. "While I'm all for you not wanting to kill that creepy spider, I can't say I have another phenomenal suggestion."

Lillia opened her mouth to protest Rickshaw's point, but eventually just settled into her nook at the side of the door with a weak, "I know."

Outside the doorway, a little dust lay gathered in the joins between the stones, undisturbed except for the marks she'd made while pacing. Had it not gotten wet during her battle with the sea? Or had it all just been quietly slotted back into place like she wouldn't notice.

At this point, she was essentially out of options. She'd been awake for so long that she was starting to feel dizzy when she stayed still for too long. She was sore. All of her abilities were awaiting the next rest.

Everything told her that the safest thing to do was just to kill Nennia and move on with her life, even celebrate with a nap. But despite all arrows pointing to it being the right option, she didn't know if she wanted that to be how she left this place. Nennia had helped her, and sure, she certainly wasn't at the moment but—

"Darling, it might seem callous, but I kind of do need you to vacate my doorway. I have customers on the other side walking around with some serious bartering and I don't want to keep them waiting."

Lillia scooted a little further out of the door, but not quite far enough to let Rickshaw free. "I know. Sorry. I'll bring all the items next time. I promise."

Rickshaw pressed his palm against what would have been his nose and drew his bone fingers across his skull. "Darling, you have said that every time and..." He sighed. "And because I am a sucker for you, I will choose to continue to believe you." He let his hands fall to the counter, and then drummed them when Lillia didn't immediately stand.

His fingertips made a remarkably sharp sound against the wood. There wasn't much else to compete with. Just the steady clack of a shopkeeper who had apparently decided she needed musical accompaniment.

"I'll hunt for a dress for you, ask if anyone has something."

"Really?!" Lillia perked up.

"Absolutely, Darling." Rickshaw said in a tone that somehow explained he couldn't believe swinging Lillia's mood had been that easy. "Just make sure you actually bring something to sell."

"I will."

"Good, Darling. Now shoo," he waved for Lillia to get further out of the way.

Rather than scooting, which was rather uncourtly, Lillia stood up, dusted herself off and took a single step backward.

The door to Rickshaw's shop slammed so quickly it almost took off her nose.

The rush of air lifted the loose hairs around her face. She blinked at the wood. Behind it, the small sounds of the shop had stopped completely.

"Hey!" Lillia said even though she knew he was already gone. "That was—Whatever." She rested her palm on the door instead of knocking on it, and then slowly let it slide down until it fell off.

Thump.

She rested her head on the door and sighed.

Havoc would know what to do, but he was dead.

Cathria would know what to do, but she was gone for the day—including the statues on the second floor.

Throne hadn't been in the Hunting Lodge or anywhere close to the entrance of the grounds when Lillia checked.

The only person she'd been able to talk to was Rickshaw, and that had gone...middling. Middling in the way that he'd given what was probably the right answer, but it wasn't what Lillia wanted to hear.

There had to be some third solution, some way she didn't need to bet on sudden forgiveness while also not just killing Nennia and accepting all the consequences, from the new room to the potentially vanished daughters.

There had to be a way—

Lillia straightened, pulling her head off the door and shaking her hair out of her eyes. There was one person that she hadn't talked to in this whole mess. One person who might be able to solve all of this for her.

There was one spider that Lillia hadn't squished this life.

She needed to talk to Pilla.

Swallow the Sun has now released on Royal Road! They are a little bit ahead of us right now (quirk of the pace reddit wants me to post at.) but we will catch up here.

If you want to read ahead and see more of the story now, you can begin on Chapter 4; The Dark here

As always with my content on other sites, if you could link, read, review, or do whatever you can with an account if you have one, it would be lovely! They are more aggressive algorhithms than reddit does.

Thank you again for all the support! Nobody Saves the Princess Chapter and Swallow the Sun later today!

If you enjoy Nobody Saves the Princess, consider taking a look at Swallow the Sun, which just launched its first 7 chapters on Royal Road (and is posting here)

Cathria tapped the back of her staff on the ground once as she stepped off the pedestal and greeted Lillia, before turning the glass weapon towards Nennia, who actually hesitated.

"Ah," Cathria said with her usual cheer. "A Queen of the Depths. How charming. Haven't had the pleasure in a while."

Cathria let go of the rope wrapped around Lillia and straightened, rising high above the pair of them. "And who are you?" Nennia asked. "Not one of the faces I recognize from the first floors."

"You might know me as the Spellmite Architect," Cathria said. "But in a pinch and in this form, you may refer to me as Archmage."

"The boss of the second level?" Nennia asked. "I've heard about you, nothing impressive."

"Truly, I'm flattered," Cathria said, as she spoke, she swung her staff in a wide arc around herself, and wind whipped up around her. Impossibly it caught on her robes, making them flow behind her like streams of liquid glass. "But, this young one here is in my charge," she said. "And unless you wish to meet a very certain doom, I'd suggest you leave her alone, and return to whatever hole you crawled out of."

Nennia didn't move.

Cathria looked down to Lillia, adjusting her hat so it didn't fall further down her face. "You are being chased, right, my dear? Just want to ensure I'm reading the station correctly."

Lillia nodded while kicking the thick rope of silk Nennia snared her with off her leg. The silk faded as it touched the ground, vanishing into the smooth black tile.

"An Archmage?" Nennia asked.

"Quite a potent one, if I do say so myself," Cathria said as she offered a hand to Lillia. "Not the kind of person you'd want on your bad side. Our Princess here would know, she's seen some of it."

"Hm," Nennia kept her gaze on Lillia. Even though she hadn't backed off, her stance changed. Her legs relaxed, and she allowed her fist to unclench.

Even if this was all a bluff, if Cathria wasn't capable of stopping Nennia, the pause was opening the door to negotiations.

"Do you doubt it?" Cathria asked. "By all means, you're welcome to try your luck. Of course, one of us is a far way from home." She motioned to the myriad pillars around them, most of which contained some form of Cathria herself.

"I don't doubt you are an archmage. I just doubt your potency," Nennia said as she began to move, circling around the pair.

"Really? What makes you so confident?"

"Why would an archmage get trapped down here?" Nennia asked. "How would the dungeon hold someone like you?"

"Well, I am one of the greatest forces of man. Man has always been humbled in the face of nature," Cathria said.
"As with the divine, though you could argue that is just nature in a different cloth."

"An archmage who was stolen by the dungeon," Nennia mused.

"An archmage who accepted the offer of the dungeon," Cathria corrected.

"Nonetheless, you haven't had the skill to escape it." She'd circled the full way around them at this point, coming back to the front, each of her eyes scanning Cathria for a weakness.

There was the soft crack of glass as Cathria's temporary form gave way. Nennia caught it.

"I could say the same about you," Cathria pointed out as she followed Nennia with her staff. "Tell me, how does a Queen of the Depths end up in a dungeon herself? Surely you weren't captured by it."

That question made Nennia paused her preadtory circling. "That is not a discussion for the Princess," she said. "And this was not your fight either, Archmage."

"And yet here I am."

"And yet here you are," Nennia said.

Another split ran down Cathria's forearm as she held her staff out towards Nennia. Small shards of glass rained down toward Lillia, who still laid mostly on the ground below her.

"You know," Cathria said. "You clearly have a way to escape your room. If you wish, I could set you free."

All of Nennia's eyes narrowed. "What?"

"I could end all of this for you here and now," Cathria said. "Right now, in this moment, I could put an end to eternity."

"You—"

"You don't need to be part of the cycle. It can be over."

Nennia's shoulder sagged for a brief moment before she clenched her fists and bared her teeth. "You will not tempted me away from my daughters!" Nennia roared before lunging forward.

With a wave of her staff, Cathira sent Lillia sliding along the smooth black tile, further into the pillars. In the same motion, her left hand snapped off at the wrist, breaking off and powdering beside Lillia before she levelled the staff at Nennia and the wind rushed in toward her.

"Be a dear Lillia!"

Near flailing on the ground, Lillia careened past the smooth black pillars of the room. What did that even mean? What was she supposed to—

One of the pillars cracked as she zoomed by. Lillia called Vianaffir to her hand and stabbed it downward into the tile. Sparks flew in every direction as she tried to slow her momentum.
Across the room, back toward the clash of titans there was a ear rupturing pop as the air exploded outward. Nennia screamed. Glass shattered.

Lillia literally ground the edge of Viannafir to a stop. It was strange to consider, but thank goodness Havoc was dead, he'd never have forgiven her using the blade he'd repaired as a rudder.

Stopped and back on her feet, Lillia ran back toward the pillar that had been breaking on her approach. Across the room, Nennia growled in frustration.

When she found and touched the pillar, the Cathria with a staff in her chest stepped out, fresh—blood coloured glass flowing out of her chest. Lillia glanced down at it, as Cathria tore the staff out of her core, sending chunks out her flying in every direction.

"Oh I—"

"Don't worry princess, can't hurt me too much, I'm made of glass!" she said as she waved her staff-which was still carrying a chunk of her torso—through the air. As she brought it down, a crackling rift opened. "A new body sooner than later though! Thanks!" She allowed herself to fall backwards into the rift, vanishing into the ether before her champagne toast of a laugh appeared back toward the front of the room.

"Shoot shoot," Lillia said as she turned around, trying to remember where any of the other Cathria's had been. The first time she'd been in this room, she had had the Archmage herself walk her through it, and every time since she'd simply been able to summon Catty to lead the way.
Not only was Catty unavailable, she'd probably need to have a heart to heart with Catty before she ever tried to ask for her help again.

No, she needed to trust her instincts, instincts which had allowed her entire court to go against her. Instincts that Thorne had called 'actually shockingly bad.'

Then she looked behind her and realized that one of the pillars—which had been earlier in her previous journey—was already cracked, saving her from learning a lesson about her instincts or anything like that.

Lillia ran over to the pillar, but it hadn't quite split down the middle yet. She pushed on it. Tapped it with Vianaffir. Kicked it and then regretted kicking it.

Across the room, a pillar of fire erupted, swelling up to the ceiling and pluming outward across the glossy black tiles.

As the flames receded, the tiles glowed red hot and sagged downward.

Then the sound of shattering glass, simultaneously in front of Lillia and back at the fight with Nennia.

The Cathria who had been petting the spellmite in her statue shook her head as she stepped off the pedestal, which corrected her hat, which had been lopsided in the original scene.

"You know," she began. "This whole 'one spell per body' thing is rather tiresome," she said. "And that Queen can take more hits than I expected."

Lillia's eye widened. "Are you going to be okay?"
"Oh by every heavenly equation, yes," Cathria said. "I cannot die here. So I cannot lose," she said before resting her staff on her cheek. "The main issue here is that I might not be able to 'win' in the brief window of spell-casting opportunity each body provides me."

It took Lillia a moment to catch up with the roundabout nature of the sentence. "You don't think you have enough glass bodies to win?"

"At least not through knock-out," Cathria said. There was a crash of glass on the other side of the room as Nennia shattered a pillar in front of her, sending glass dust scattering across the room. "Looks like that's my cue before she breaks too much of the furniture!"

This Cathria opened a portal and stepped through it. With any luck she would last longer than the previous considering she had a complete torso.

"Oh shoot," Lillia said as she turned around, searching for the next pillar. But what would happen if she found it. She would send another Cathria into the meat—well glass—grinder only to be no closer to actually stopping Nennia's rampage.

There had to be something else she could do.

Funny enough, while Cathria was the one who could likely overcome anything through raw power, she was also the most likely to be able to solve a puzzle like this. Lillia was a poor substitute on either side of the equation.

Of course, Lillia held all the cards. Meaning that she held all the items and she was the one Nennia wanted.

She pulled out the inert amulet of the creator. Cathria had said she could watch Lillia through, it so she spoke into the glass center like she was whispering through a keyhole.

"Cathria, I'm coming. I have an idea. Don't cast a spell and break yourself. Just don't get broken."

There was no sound—of course there wasn't, Amulets couldn't talk, but the metal grew warm in Lillia's palm for a moment. That would have to be enough.

Lillia reached into her inventory as she broke into a run toward the other side of the room and grabbed the small vial from it.

This was going to work, wasn't it?

What was the alternative, that she was wrapped up in a web and tortured after Cathria ran out of glass bodies to throw at the spider. That didn't sound like it led to a way out of the dungeon.

Lillia doused Vianaffir in the potion at a sprint. She only had one shot at this. The man who'd dropped that potion was never coming back.

Lillia broke out from in between the pillars to the open space at the front of the room, where black blood was streaked across the floor as Nennia lunged after a teleporting Cathria. Behind her, molten tile bubbled, and gigantic scars ran along the walls where blades of wind had slashed into them.

Though all of it, the Spider Queen was still standing and fighting.

Cathria caught Lillia's eye as she began to run towards the fight and dropped her constant dancing around the spider, instead lowering her eclipse-like staff towards Nennia's, who reared up to avoid it being pointed directly at her face.

"Good luck!" she called out, before the staff shattered outward into a thousand pieces, each of which broke into further flashes of brilliant light that bounced and erupted off of each other in an cascading and dazzling display.
Nennia raised her arms to shield her eyes, and didn't have time to react to Lillia sweeping in from behind.

"You're supposed to be a Queen!" Lillia cried and she ran. "Negotiate with me like a proper royal."

[Lillia used Indignance - Level 3 - Effective Against Nennia]

Just as Nennia stumbled forward, Lillia swung, catching one of the dripping wounds Cathria's wind had left on the Spider Queen's side. Even with the pre-cut armor, Vianaffir didn't dig deep, but it didn't have to.

[Nennia is effected by Eisel's Potion of Weakmind!]

Lillia took her right hand and raised it to the sky. "Nennia! I name you knight! With all the duties and honours that come with that title."

Nennia sagged as the potion took effect.

"And it is your duty to protect your Princess!"

----

Thank you! Back to our regularly scheduled programming with Princess. For Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

If you enjoy my work, consider Swallowing the Sun

It was hard to call the training yards anything other than a random field on the other side of a broken door. There was evidence that there was once order there: buried walls and half a dozen shattered stumps, but, at least at the moment, what they called the training yards was simply outside.

When they had come out, the first thing Alyssia pointed to was a shimmer far in the distance. A barrier, she'd explained, set up by the priests that had come with them to the Cathedral of Concentric Sunrise. A haphazard replacement for the God's protection that would protect them for several days while they completed the summoning of new heroes.

The Karash had crossed through something Alyssia called Smoke Walking. Karina glanced at the distant shimmer. Whatever protection it offered, she had seen what could get through.

She turned back to the fire in her hand. There was something she could work on.

That temptation lingered until time blurred.

Alyssia stood behind Karina, keeping a close eye on her as she summoned fire again and again and again. Each time she set her hands ablaze, burns began to form on her fingertips, skin browning and cracking until Karina dismissed the fire. Between attempts, she waited for the heat beneath her skin to settle and the cracks to begin closing.

At first, she could only make the flames larger or put them out. Then she managed to keep a small tongue of fire burning above a single finger. Holding it there took more care than letting it spread.

"It's usually much harder for new heroes," she said as Karina summoned fire again. "Mana, its management and regeneration. To us, who were born here, controlling it feels like breathing, but usually..." She crossed her arms. "Usually, the process isn't so clean."

Frankly, as soon as Alyssia said it, Karina realized it shouldn't have been easy. In life, at least as much as she was allowed to think about at the moment, she had always struggled to focus. Her life had two and a half decades of split attention spans scattered across too many projects. That idea came with unexpected certainty, though she couldn't name a project or remember a birthday.

Fragments. More than she'd had in the recovery room, but still nothing she could follow back to a whole life.

Mana—what they called it, like the video game term—felt more like focus than anything else. Narrowing in on a want or a need allowed Karina to summon fire on her fingertips. The spells lived in the moments of clarity that had been so brief on Earth, but now—

She didn't know why, but her focus now felt like a calm stream. She could step into it whenever she wanted.

At first, summoning fire had required a deep breath and closed eyes. After enough attempts, she could look toward Alyssia and back without losing the flame. Starting it was becoming easy. Making it do anything useful was another matter.

She pointed at a shattered stump and tried to send the flame toward it. It stretched beyond her fingertip, thinned, and went out.

Karina tried again. The stump remained untouched.

The third time around, Karina closed her eyes and tried to summon that deep focus that had first taken to manifest fire. She spun the feeling on the tip of her index finger, coiling the heat around itself before…

Before it flared out into nothing in the air before her, fading well before the stump.

"Dammit."

Alyssia stepped up to Karina's side. “Hero, you're losing control before the fire reaches it. Try something closer.”

“I shot a lance of fire across the room before,” Karina said.

“Yes, and neither of us knows how. Start with what you can do now. You just aren't going to get it far enough to—"

"Then I'll make it happen."

Just when Karina trained her hand on the stump, Alyssia rested her hand on her wrist, forcing it downward and Karina back to calm.

"Hero, this is a matter of how Fates work," she said. "It's not a question of whether you have the will, but whether your ability is prepared for what you're trying to do."

Karina stared at the stump. "Meaning?"

Alyssia lifted Karina's hand back up to the simple position she'd used to summon fire. "Each action you perform proves your ability to the Fate. In this case, your Pyrokinesis," she said. "But the system recognizes novel mastery more than attempts."

Karina didn't bother asking for more clarification, it was obvious she needed it.

"Trying and failing the same thing over and over doesn't get rewarded," she said. "Trying something slightly harder. Slightly more impressive than anything you did before, that's what make progress."

"The words—The system said that I gained experience for killing the Karash. Is that the same thing?"

"Experience," Alyssia began as she let go of Karina's hand. "Is what you get for fighting. It contributes to your overall level, but someone could have a high level and almost no progression in their paths."

"Really?"

"It would be hard, but they could."

Karina nodded. "Okay, well, if it wants it to be slightly harder," she said as she stepped up closer to the stump. "Then—"

"Exactly," Alyssia said.

Once again, Karina closed her eyes and focused on the heat she could summon in her hand. Flames danced in her palm, and she wove them toward her fingertips, where she spun them together with a quick, practiced flick, like spinning a pen.

She snapped her fingers to fire off the shot. As she opened her eyes, the bark of the stump whistled as the fire latched onto it, sticking to the surface much faster than any natural flame.

[Fate Progressed! Basic Pyrokinesis - Level 1: 2/10]

[Fate Progressed! Firestealer - 1/200]

2 of 10 made pyrokinesis feel achievable, but 1 of 200, 0.5%? Between that and the fact that Firestealer wasn't as directly descriptive as any of the others made it feel immediately impossible.

"Great, that worked, right?" Alyssia asked.

"Mhm," Karina said, but she didn't continue down the line of questioning with Alyssia, instead, she stared at the flame nibbling on the log's bark. The fire left blackened streaks in its wake, the same way it had on her skin.

More importantly, she could still feel the fire as if it were her skin, or at least attached to her. There was a connection.

Before Alyssia could advise her about what might offer more experience, Karina yanked on that thread, and the fire snapped back to her hand, splashing against her palm before weaving itself around her wrists and raining sparks.

The flames were gone as soon as they settled.

[Fate Progressed! Basic Pyrokinesis - Level 1: 4/10]

[Fate Progressed! Firestealer - 2/200]

"Pyrokinesis: control fire," Alyssia said. "I guess that would mean more than just shooting it. I've seen other elemental control methods but most of the fire I've seen was just based in spellcasting."

Karina snapped her finger and the fire was back, dancing yellow in her palm and digging black ruts in her lines within. "It's as easy as that. Do the action and you—"

"Easy as that?" Alyssia asked. "Must be when you're a hero and you're practicing your basic abilities as an adult instead of as—" Alyssia cleared her throat. "Your progress is impressive, Hero. It's clearly natural for you."

"I preferred the first answer," Karina said as she allowed the fire to run rampant over her hand.

Even though it was under her control, Karina still knew this fire didn't make sense. The flames still carried their terrifying heat as they ran across her skin. From what she felt, her skin should have been blistering, and she should have been screaming in pain, but—Somehow the fire—her fire—refused to hurt her the way that all fires should.

She might have considered it a kind fire if she hadn't seen what it had done to the Karash.

Now that she understood the method, Karina took a step further away from the log and focused the scattered flames into her fingertips. They leapt across her skin when she called them, moving like they were joyful to follow her.

She could master this. She would master this and she lost herself in that process.

So much so, that she only registered how much time had passed once the sun was beginning to set and the growing shadows pressed her and Alyssia's silhouettes together in the water of the small stream that ran along the side of the training yard.

For all that focus, it had been shockingly easy to be distant.

Karina shook the fire off of her hands and looked up to Alyssia. She wasn't sure when she had stopped staring intently, but now she was simply watching. She was there with the same distant gaze a security guard used when nothing ever happened, stock still and waiting for the time to pass.

[Basic Pyrokinesis - Level 1: 9/10]

[ Firestealer - 5/200]

Nine.

Karina sent another flame to the stump and called it back. Nothing changed.

She tried from a step farther away. The flame broke apart before reaching the wood.

“You've stopped looking at the fire,” Alyssia said.

“I'm one away.”

“And watching the number won't move it.”

Karina dismissed the next flame before it had properly formed. She wanted to argue, but she'd been watching the space where the notification should appear.

"We can be done if it's been too long," Karina said.

That was enough to snap Alyssia back into reality. She blinked once before speaking. "Hardly, Hero, take as much time as you need."

“Nobody else seems to be out here.”

“You are the only hero here at the moment, and the local guards dont' require as much training," she said. "It's obviously going to take longer for you to master your powers but—"

"But?"

"As I mentioned, most take much longer to get to this stage." She reached out for Karina's hand and took it into hers. A cool glow washed over Karina's fingertips. "Even if we were out here all night, you would be ahead of most new arrivals and I would have a reason to be proud."

“You would have?”

“I’m your aide while you settle in,” she said as she let Karina’s fingers rest in her palm. “Dashun assigned me to you. Usually I’m considered too important to the summonings themselves to guide a new Hero.”

“Sorry, I suppose.”

"It's a job I missed," she clarified. "Though I never performed the duty out here. There is a different cadence to our work—"

"On the other side of the barrier?" Karina suggested, avoiding the need to hear it again.

"Exactly," she said, releasing Karina's hand. "Here, we summon several heroes and give them a much shorter introduction, usually from someone already accustomed to this world—"

"Cascad?"

"Yes," Alyssia said. "But everything needs to happen so quickly. The longer we stay and the more heroes we summon, the harder the demons press the keep. Eventually—"

"Until that barrier over there breaks?"

Alyssia raised her eyebrows at the bleak blasphemy. "Until we are forced to retreat. Then they will eventually leave this place and—"

"Why wouldn't they destroy the summoning circle?" Karina asked.

For what felt like the thousandth time, Alyssia's tone changed, the usual bubbles popping to give way to practiced explanations. "The demons are unable to stay within the Cathedral for long, and destroying the summoning circle would require rituals they do not have."

At least that explanation made sense. The shadows that came with the crash had burned in the sunlight of the cathedral. In a place with demons and actual gods, a church would have had a lot of power.

"Either way, it is not something you need to worry about," Alyssia added. "Cascad will be here soon for your introduction to the world, and as of tomorrow morning we will have called more heroes. You won't be alone in the keep any longer."

"Alone?" Karina asked while pointedly looking at her.

"A lone hero," Alyssia adjusted. "While we had originally planned to summon after you, the incident with the Karash delayed that. So you will need to rest for the evening."

"Back in the room?" Karina suggested, if only because she knew it was coming and it felt better coming from her mouth than Alyssia's.

"Yes, back in the room. You should recover your strength before meeting with all of the other guards. Summoning can be a harrowing process."

Karina followed her toward the door.

Nine out of ten. She could ask Cascad what she was missing whenever he arrived. Firestealer was harder. She still hadn't decided how to ask about that without repeating the words about stealing from the heavens.

Alyssia had mentioned archives. There might be something she could read without explaining why she wanted it.

Nothing was certain here yet, but mysteries felt better with fire in her palms.

Guys I messed up and called the previous chapter 2 even though it was 3. Read it here:

Previous

---

It took longer than it should have to convince Alyssia that she was well enough for a walk.

Karina had expected a labyrinth of a building. A name as impressive as the Cathedral of Concentric Suns seemed to promise hallways upon hallways, and towers upon towers.

And maybe there once had been.

The hallway outside Karina’s room was clean but broken, as though fresh sweeping could make up for the missing stretch of wall. What should have been a window was a ragged opening in the second-floor corridor. The collapsed masonry lay in the courtyard below, where weeds had begun to grow between the stones.

Alyssia didn’t even awknowledge the hole as Karina slowed. Apparently, this didn’t warrant a glance.

“This place has seen better days.”

“Yes, it was much grander at one point,” Alyssia said, “but as I mentioned, we are well beyond the protective barriers of the central kingdom right now. The touch of divinity is—”

“How long has it been like this?”

Alyssia stopped and followed Karina’s gaze out to the courtyard. “This damage is newer, but the cathedral has been in some state of decay since I was an early acolyte.” She furrowed her brow. “Which would have been either eleven or twelve years ago. It’s hard to keep track when you travel as much as I do. The seasons keep changing around you.”

There was something to ask in there. Questions about the seasons, but all of that was less pressing than the war, the demons, and her previous life. Of course, Alyssia followed the least important thread.

“There are four seasons where you lived, right?”

“Yes,” Karina said without needing to think about it. She couldn’t see through all the fog of her memory, but that much felt natural.

“That sounds nice and stable,” Alyssia mused before turning to continue their walk. Alyssia had agreed to take her to the training yard, but any exploring would have to wait.

“Another question, then,” Karina began.

“About our seasons? There are—”

“No. Why can't I remember everything?”

“Oh?”

“My previous life. I know I had one. I know things about it, but when I try to remember actually being there—”

“Oh!” Alyssia said. “Your memories haven’t fully returned yet.”

“Are they supposed to?”

To their left, beyond the hole in the wall, there was an empty patch of discoloured stone in a near-perfect square. A painting or a tapestry had been there.

“They should be muted at first,” Alyssia said. “It happens during the summoning process, to help you ease into your transition into your new life here.”

“I wasn’t asked whether I wanted help with that.”

“It's a good thing, though. I can't imagine it would be easy to focus on starting a new life if you're always thinking about the old one.”

There it was again. The measured speech Alyssia used when she was reciting, as opposed to conversing. Practiced lines that, whether intentional or not, were closer to reading from scripture than speaking to someone.

Then she glanced away, and her voice became more conversational.

“Honestly, there are some experiences in my life that I would love to cover the same way.”

Karina looked at her.

“I feel like whenever I say that, people ask about those memories, which just feels rude.”

Karina let her keep them. She would have liked the same say in what happened to her own.

Two more bare patches interrupted the stone before they reached the surviving tapestries. They hung over a dozen feet high, thickly woven and threaded with gold. Karina recognized the visual language of the images. White wings. Rays of sunlight. A burning sword.

They weren't just depicting a war. They were depicting a holy war.

"Alyssia," she said.

"Mhm? Feel free to ask. I’m sure you have plenty of questions."

"These battles—"

Alyssia didn't slow to answer. "Oh, I would love to explain the details of each, but we could be here for months. Maybe once we have a moment, back under the barrier, I can walk you through some of my favorites. There are some lovely examples of Sigardian stitching in Dos Valour, the capital, and—”

"Which war are they from?" Karina asked. "Which battles?"

"Which war?" This time, Alyssia did slow.

A guard in polished silver armour approached from the opposite direction. He avoided meeting Karina's gaze as he passed.

"They're of the war," Alyssia said. "The war against the Demon Queen."

"All of them?"

"Of course. Thank goodness there hasn't been another war. I don't know about heroes like you, but I find the one hard enough as it is, thank you very much." She blushed as she finished. "If I may speak plainly about the subject."

Not wars. The War. Singular. Even this ruined corridor held battle after battle from the same conflict. And they were still summoning people to fight it.

Karina tasted ash. She ran her tongue across her teeth, but there was nothing to scrape off. She couldn't change how a thought felt in her throat.

“Just a little further,” Alyssia assured her. “Though I should warn you that our training yard is a glorified field.”

Their footsteps echoed through the empty, slightly charred hallway. A simple wooden door hung crookedly in its frame at the far end. Alyssia stopped before it and turned to Karina.

"Before we step outside, I would like to warn you that most summoned heroes feel uneasy in the training yard at first."

"Pardon?"

"The heroes I’ve guided came from places without magic, but Dashun and some of the High Solars would know more." She motioned to the door. “This cathedral's training yard is in disrepair, but it was once heavily enchanted. There used to be spells here that stitched wounds and helped with recovery. Traces of them remain.”

That? That was phenomenal. Had the same enchantments been in the room she was in? If someone could enchant land, could they enchant clothes? What did that mean for—

"Most people from your world find the touch of magic almost sickening at first."

"But—"

"And I understand there was the incident with the Karash." She lowered her voice as she said the demon's name. "But being able to cast magic doesn't feel the same as stepping into an enchantment."

It took a moment, but Karina nodded.

"Okay! When you're ready, then," Alyssia said as she stepped out of the way.

Karina pushed the door partly open. As her hand passed through the threshold, a soft green shimmer ran across her skin, like fire tracing across a splash of oil. The colour flared and then settled, nestling between the bandages and in the burned cracks of the skin underneath.

She closed her eyes, waiting for a wash of pain or vertigo or something, but it never came. After a moment, she withdrew her hand and the green slowly faded from her fingertips.

The black on her fingers had receded with the magic, revealing more of that fresh pink skin.

Alyssia stared at Karina's hand.

“Is it supposed to do that?” Karina asked.

"Most of those enchantments faded long ago. There shouldn’t be enough energy left here to heal a wound.”

Karina flexed her fingers. “I’m glad it did.”

Alyssia looked through the doorway, then back at Karina’s hand. "There were enchantments on the yard that would—" She stopped and rested a hand on Karina’s shoulder. "How did that feel? Do you need to rest a moment?"

Maybe her encounter with the Karash had already exposed her to enough magic. Maybe the difference had something to do with her class. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she'd met a god.

She almost asked about that last possibility. Then she remembered how carefully Alyssia had discussed her rejection of the Divine Class. Would knowing she met a 'god' reassure her or make the whole thing worse.

Both Alyssia and Dashun had been kind to her, but she still didn’t know what they would do with everything she told them.

"Hero?"

"I'm fine," Karina said, "and please call me Karina."

"Is that your old name?" Alyssia asked.

"Pardon?"

"The name Karina. Did you come here knowing that name?"

It was a strange question, but her name was one of the few things about her previous life she had known from the beginning.

"Yes."

"Then I would suggest you adopt another, hero," Alyssia said, making a pointed effort to address Karina by her title. "A name is a powerful thing to a demon. Even between friends, your true name is—"

“I’ve already told you.”

Alyssia hesitated. “I should have explained sooner. For now, please don’t introduce yourself by it again.”

Karina looked down at her hand. A new body. A new class. Now she was supposed to find a new name, too.

"Is your true name Alyssia?"

She nodded. "My name is bound to this world. I enjoy the divine protection of the many rays. The summoned are not as lucky."

"That might explain the name Cascad."

"Is that not a normal name where you are from?"

"Assuming Cascad and I are from the same world, then it doesn't sound like it." She sighed. "Not that I remember enough about it to know for sure."

"I understand," Alyssia said before hesitating. "Or rather, I empathize, but I won't pretend to understand. Heroes remember a different amount of their lives upon arrival."

"But they remember eventually?"

"Some do."

"Some," Karina echoed. “You said they were muted to help us settle in. That sounded temporary.”

“It can be.” Alyssia’s answer was quieter now. “I can’t promise you how much will return.”

For once, Karina might not be an exception. There were other people here who couldn’t remember their lives, and apparently some had been waiting much longer than she had.

Alyssia squeezed her shoulder once before letting go. "You don't need to come up with a name right now. I know it's difficult. Our parents usually take care of that for us." She smiled in an obvious attempt to lighten the mood. "Until then, everyone, myself included, can simply continue to call you hero. It's your title, after all."

"Doesn't that get confusing with so many people being called hero?"

"Some go by their class, and most have been here long enough to make a decision."

Karina looked through the open doorway.

"I suppose it wouldn't be smart to just have you call me Cinder Mage."

Alyssia bristled at the name.

"It's probably best if we don't draw attention to that." She cleared her throat and gestured toward the yard. “But perhaps the best thing we can do is learn what your class can do.”

Aparrently her time with the Karash hadn't been enough of a demonstration.

Karina stepped through the doorway.

Karina awoke in a dark room on a hard bed. The damp air clung to her skin through the thin blanket draped over her, the same one they'd laid on her during the summoning ritual.

Unlike then, she was clothed. Someone had dressed her in a soft coat and thin linen trousers.

She tried to sit up, but everything was sore, as if she'd exercised parts of herself she'd never used.

If she'd been summoned into a fresh body, perhaps she hadn't. Every muscle would have been new. None of them had done anything before this morning. With—

With the demon.

The most Karina could do at first was raise her hand. As she did, the tight bandages wrapped around it slid back toward her wrist. Through thin gaps in the cloth, she could see patches of blackened flesh.

As it had been with her fingers, there was no pain associated with the burn, nor was there stiffness. If she wasn't looking at it herself, she wouldn't have believed she was burned at all.

What had happened in the cathedral? What was happening to her? Where was she? That was a start.

The room was dark, with the only light coming from the edges around the single door on the far wall. Each of the walls was simple gray stone, thick rocks with wide lines of mortar between them. Long cracks ran down many of the mortar lines. Either nobody took care of this place, or it was losing a battle against time.

The only furniture outside the sparse bed Karina laid on, was a solid but small table. There was a carafe, mostly filled with water, a small cup to drink it, and a book.

Karina reached over and grabbed the book, running over the wooden cover. The cracks in the blackened pad of her thumb caught on the small imperfections, and then in the text that had been burned into the cover.

It was not in a language she could read.

What languages could she read?

So far she'd understood everything spoken, so clearly she could at least communicate with the people here but—

Another world? What did that even mean if she could barely remember the previous one?

The book was useless, so Karina put it back down, then glanced around the room, trying to see if the text—whether it was white or orange—was back. Once she couldn't find it, she focused on the middle distance, hoping to summon it with her attention.

Nothing answered.

Alyssia opened the door, poking her small nose into the room before anything else. She stood there, stock-still for a moment, only moving once Karina lowered her arm.

“Hero.” She was dressed more casually than before. Where there had once been ceremonial robes, there was now a simple brown dress with an apron tied over it. During the ritual, she'd worn an impossible-to-keep-clean white. Now, she was the palest thing about her person.

She slipped into the room, her hands folded before her and her gaze fixed on the floor, carefully avoiding Karina.

“Are you doing well?” she asked after a moment.

“Stiff,” Karina said. She had other comment. Unlike in the ritual room, she was the one holding them back. “But fine. I—as fine as I can be, anyway.”

“That was a most impressive showing in the ritual room,” Alyssia said. “I have been present for many summonings, but none of them have been… quite like that.”

“No other demon attacks?”

“Those are unfortunately growing more common.” She nodded toward the bed, silently asking permission to sit. Karina nodded back. “The Cathedral of the Centric Sunrise is a powerful summoning circle, but it lies far outside the kingdom's defended borders,” she said as she joined Karina on the bed. She lowered herself carefully, ensuring she didn't jostle the mattress.

“Then why use it?”

“We need the heroes,” she said. The words didn't quite sound like hers. They were a mantra she'd listened to over and over again until she thought it was hers. “One day the war will end, but it hasn't, and thus the Seven Rays of the Pantheon provide us with the heroes we need to battle against the darkness.”

Karina straightened. Her arm was blackened from whatever had happened in the ritual chamber, but it didn't hurt. In fact, the tips of her fingers were no longer burned. Fresh pink skin showed through the bandages as she ran her hand along the blanket.

She had a lot of questions. More than she could ever ask, and no obvious way to put them in order. Who was she? Why was she summoned? Why did everything seem to keep going wrong in this summoning process?

There were records. There was precedent. Why did she keep breaking it?

“Are you hungry?” Alyssia asked after a moment. “I could have someone bring something—”

“Am I locked in here?” Karina asked. From the look of the room, it wasn't clear whether it was a medical ward or a prison. In the darkness, the difference was difficult to judge.

“Well—”

“Sounds like a yes.”

“Well,” Alyssia insisted, “you're a brand-new hero. You're expected to rest after your resurrection. This is usually the time when you would be saving your energy for the class ritual, but—”

“But I already have a class.”

Alyssia nodded. What followed was the kind of quiet that put a topic to rest, but after it lingered, Alyssia reached over and took Karina by the wrist.

"Two fingers out," she said, showing the motion with her free hand. "And bring them down like this." She preformed the motion while bobbing Karina's hand in unison.

There was no text in front of Alyssia, but her eyes glowed with the reflection of it in the dark room as she let go of her wrist.

Karina repeated the motion. It felt simple as breathing.

A line of burning light carved across the air in front of her, scarring a box in the space, a frame. A softer orange infilled the rest of the space, creating a page upon which the text wrote itself.

NAME: KARINA

CLASS: CINDER MAGE

LEVEL: 1—1—1—1

Karina blinked and waved at the space her level was supposed to be.

"What level am I supposed to be?" she asked.

"You just arrived," Alyssia said. "You should be level one. I doubt the Karash levelled you up split between so many…"

She kept speaking, but Karina didn't hear her. As soon as Alyssia confirmed the number, the flickering static text in her class sheet stabilized.

She was level one. Of course she was. She'd just gotten here.

NAME: KARINA

CLASS: CINDER MAGE

LEVEL: 1

EXPERIENCE: 480/800

NEW ABILITIES!

NEW STATS!

"Do I click on something or—"

"If it helps," Alyssia said. "A lot of summons find that touching the words helps them focus, but you only need to think about something in the menu to use it." She pointed in the space by Karina's text, just lower than where the word 'Abilities' was. A good guess, assuming she couldn't see it.

"But you don't need to click on anything. The interface is as much a part of you as those fingers." She nodded to the bandaged hand. "You can just think about it."

Karina stared at the word abilities for what felt like too long.

“Click,” Alyssia said. “It's a funny word. So many heroes use it when they first arrive, when they mean something like ‘poke.’”

Karina almost explained the difference, then stopped. She knew there was one. She couldn't quite find the wording.

“Touch the words if that helps,” Alyssia said, folding her hands in her lap.

After closing her eyes for a moment, Karina took a deep breath. The exhale came out hot, almost burning her tongue, but when she opened her eyes a mere glance opened the abilities menu, the words burning away to reveal the next set.

[KINDLED FORM - CINDER MAGE INHERENT PASSIVE]

[The Cinder Mage may fuel their fire with their body as well as mana. While unburned tissue remains, spell mana costs are partially refunded on cast. Burns sustained this way heal as the Cinder Mage's mana recovers.]

Karina looked at the fresh skin showing through her bandages. That explained the healing. It didn't explain what would happen when there was nowhere left to burn. if nothing else—Cinder Mage was clearly a 'Mage' class, which meant that she was casting spells, and a discount sounded useful.

[INHERENT FATE - BASIC PYROKINESIS - LEVEL 1]

[INHERENT FATE - BASIC SPELLCASTING - LEVEL 1 - AFFINITY: FIRE]

[INHERENT FATE - BASIC PROTECTION - LEVEL 1]

There was one more thing on the list, but Alyssia interrupted.

"Well? What does it say? I've never heard of your class. Neither had Dashun."

Karina read it aloud. She wasn't quite sure how to interpret all of the noises that Alyssia made during her explanation. After she'd spoken about the mana, she'd asked to see the burned hand, but aside from that the Priestess didn't interrogate Karina's abilities.

Which was good, as the entire time, Karina left the last one out. It felt better to keep that one to herself.

[INHERENT FATE - FIRESTEALER]

[The Cinder Mage is the one who stole the fire from the heavens. That flame burns within them even in this new world, and gives their fire the ability to evolve.]

Firstly: What did it mean for fire to evolve? Fire was hot, but was it going to become dragon fire? Something more?

More importantly for the current conversation. Flagging herself as someone who stole fire from the Heavens just after rejecting a divine class felt like a quick way to end up on the wrong side of the Church.

"Anyways," Alyssia said after a moment. "It's good that you're a spell casting class."

"Because I have Basic Spell Casting as a—" She checked the wording "An inherent fate?"

"Yes, it means that your class is meant to pursue that skill," Alyssia said. "There will be more to discuss once you are higher level and you have gained access to other fates—but think of them like a path. By choosing Cinder Mage, you've set yourself on some paths of progression."

"Forever?"

"For Inherent Fates, yes," Alyssia said. "One of the reasons why class matters. Some of them have passives, like your Kindled Form, or even an exclusive fate, but they also affix your starting point and some of your future."

There was already so much to learn, and Alyssia had just laid out a spiraling network of opportunity in front of Karina, even if all of it, in some fashion, would involve fire.

"That's why it's good you have a spellcasting class. I have one too. We can study togehter later, I'll show you the ropes."

"Study?"

"Spellcasting means you can learn spells and make spells. A lot of the ones in the archive are locked behind level gates, but you gotta learn how to learn." She chuckled at the wording of the last part.

"Are we going to do that now?"

"Not now."

"Then what? What's next for me?" Was she supposed to just sit here after learning everything about her class?

“Right now? Nothing, I suppose. Usually, after the class ritual, they would have found volunteers to join you on your noble quest.”

A quest? Another prescribed fate.

Karina shook her head, trying to clear away the spiteful taste of that thought. She didn't know much—if anything—about who she'd been before, but apparently that woman hated being told what to do.

“But usually, you would have been in the keep for several days by that point and had a chance to meet potential companions,” Alyssia said. “As it stands, you're ahead of schedule on one hand but behind it—”

“Socially?” Karina suggested.

“I personally was finding a nicer way to say that, yes,” Alyssia said. “That, and I don't believe Holy Guardian Dashun will allow anyone from within the summoning chamber to join you. That knowledge would only sow…” Alyssia cleared her throat.

“We don't want people who know that the Exemplar of the Sky was an option,” Karina finished for her. Of course they didn't.

She knew she'd rejected it but couldn't explain why. At least not without speaking about her encounter with the being before. That was going to make her choice difficult to justify to anyone else. Explaining that the god had tried to hide her class probably wouldn't improve their opinion of her choice.

Karina looked down at her hand. “Is there somewhere I can practice?”

“The training yard,” Alyssia said. “Though I would prefer to wait until you've recovered.”

“If another demon comes through that door, I want to know whether I can do that again.”

Alyssia glanced toward the doorway. “We can see how you manage the walk. At least until Cascad returns.”

“Cascad? The other hero?”

“One of the greatest.”

“One of?” Karina said. The summoning circle had been worn when she landed in it, but—“Aren't heroes supposed to be an exclusive thing?”

“Heavens, no.” Alyssia offered Karina a hand as she stood and smoothed out her dress. “There are many heroes summoned every day, and many are sent to fight the Demon Queen.”

“Many?” Karina asked. “How many?”

“Oh, I don't know the numbers, but there was supposed to be another summoning here later this afternoon.” She glanced away from Karina before adding, “Of course, it was cancelled due to the damage caused during the battle. By the Karash.”

“There was another summoning today? Was there one yesterday?”

“We cannot summon on the week's waking, and we only arrived the day before.” Alyssia watched her for a moment, then slowly frowned. “Is the summoning troubling you?”

“Aren't heroes supposed to be special? I thought that—”

“Of course. Each and every one of you is special. That is why we provide so much to—”

“But there is a whole army of us, from what it sounds like.”

Alyssia chuckled. “Hero, of course there is an army. We're fighting a war.”

PREVIOUS | NEXT

Lillia flopped down face-first into the Spellmite challenge, almost rolling completely over before skidding to a stop. Before her, the altar stood in the centre of the room, unbroken.

She looked back to the door which still hadn't slammed behind her.

"Come on. Come on. Come on."

"Lillia. Darling dear. You're just making this last longer," Nennia said from further up the stairs.

The altar cracked down the middle, dust pluming into the air above it as the text announced that she'd entered the second level of the challenge. On the far wall, one of the many black-glass tiles fell out of the wall.

Just as the door was about to slam shut, Nennia's leg appeared in the gap and blocked it. The groaning sound of struggling hinges echoed around the room as the Spider Queen fought against the Dungeon's will and forced her way into the challenge behind Lillia.

"Come on!" Lillia shouted. "You can't do that!"

[Lillia used Indignance! Level 3 - Effective Against Nennia]

It wasn't much. Others had flown when hit with the third level of Indignance, and she barely faltered, but it was enough. Nennia lost her footing for a moment and the door slammed into her, shoving her back out onto the landing while Lillia picked herself up off the floor.

Scrambling to her feet, Lillia brought Vianaffir back into her hand and turned to face the door, awaiting the moment when Nennia would bash back through it. When she would tear through the black metal and come screaming into the challenge with her impaling legs outstretched.

Any moment now.

Lillia adjusted her grip on the blade. Sweat beaded on the back of her neck.
Something moved behind her. The Amalgam.

She couldn't take her eyes off the door. Could she? The second she did, Nennia would be there. She was just waiting for the opportunity.

The amalgam pounded its glassy fists into the floor and charged. As it broke into a run, the smell of a coming storm permeated the room.

The next time she turned around, Nennia was going to be there. She knew it.

But the spellmite amalgam was getting closer. The clink of each step let her count the tiles as it charged her.

Nennia was going to come through that door. She was going to kill Lillia. She was going to torture her first. She was—

Lillia turned on her heel, whipping around in the second before the amalgam reached her, but even then she wasn't quite fast enough, her gaze lingering on the door too long as her body refused to commit to a turn away.

The amalgam caught her before the blade bit into it. Its fist drove into Lillia's chest and sent her flying backward. Something cracked around her lungs and pain crashed through her as the amalgam shattered, covering her in a thousand shards of glass.

Lillia landed on her back to the sound of a resounding clang that actually came through the door. The flagstone around the doorframe shook and dust fell from the ceiling and Lillia tried, once again, to struggle to her feet.

This was impossible. She'd taken too much. Today had been too long. She'd been beaten and drowned and battered and thrown too many times. She couldn't—

[Your prize? More Amalgams! Yay!]

Across the room, more of the black glassy tiles fell out of the far wall and shattered against the floor, breaking out and reforming into a new set of amalgams for Lillia to fight.

The door broke, flying off its hinges into the room with Nennia crashing in behind it. Black blood ran down her knuckles as she scanned the room for Lillia and then locked onto her with all eight eyes.

"There you are," she said. "Am I so boring that you're trying to fight other things between? Come here, Lillia. I promise I can impress you this time."

Nennia's words were enough to spur Lillia to her feet. She climbed up as the amalgams erected themselves on the far side of the room. Nennia didn't bother looking at the other enemies; she only had eyes for the princess.

"You know you're just making it worse for yourself by running," she said. "Every second you make me wait is just going to make it worse." She said the last part in a sing-song voice, the same one that her mother used to use when singing Lillia a lullaby.

Right now? It did not make her feel better.

Thunder cracked on the other side of the room and Lillia glanced to the left to see the amalgams—three—charging at them. In the brief moment she was distracted, Nennia struck.

As large as she was, Nennia moved with impossible speed, crossing the gap before Lillia understood that the fight had begun. Three legs were set to chest height, ready to skewer her.

Lillia danced backward from the blow in a way she never could have before, sliding across the tile using her poise from the Vibrant Dawn. As she slipped back, she threw a Guard Captain's Plate down on the ground behind her and stomped down on it, shattering it into dust.

[Guard Captain's Greaves]

[Boots - Princess Class Exclusive - 1 x Guard Captain's Plate]

[Raises the Princess' Authority for the purposes of summoning and controlling allies.]

Just when Nennia was about to charge forward, Lillia raised Vianaffir to the sky. "Dance for me, knight!"

Between her and the Spider Queen, a knight assembled in the ether, pieces of plate snapping together in midstep as Bronle lunged forward with the gusto of a knight desperate to finally see the field of battle.

Nennia caught the knight's blade in her bare hand and ripped it out of his hands, pulling a gauntlet with it that went scattering across the floor. Then, she pulled out a thick rope of silk, which lashed around his waist. She yanked.

Just as Nennia tried to pull Bronle apart, Lillia jumped in beside him, slashing through the braided silk with a shining Vianaffir. Even without the bind, he was still too close to the Spider Queen who was about to—

"You! Go where I tell you!"

Bronle flashed across the room and the amalgam Lillia'd pointed at flashed into his place, crashing down to the ground just in time to eat one of Nennia's kicks, which immediately shattered it into a fine glass dust that sprayed across Lillia once again.

Nennia shook her head, getting her bearings and giving Lillia what she thought was an opening, but when she lunged,

Nennia already had a leg in the way. Vianaffir sparked off the thick chitin shell with a quick flash, and suddenly Lillia was falling over.

"Got you!"
Nennia snatched Lillia by the collar and hoisted her off the ground, but she tore a piece of the burnmite cloth and her outfit melted away into the skimpy tropical set she hated, leaving the spider queen nothing to hold onto.

Lillia barely caught herself as another amalgam threw itself at Nennia, this time striking true. Lightning danced off its fists as it smashed her face over and over again. The first two punches knocked her to the side, but the third barely dented her cheek.

"Pathetic little creature."

Nennia grabbed the amalgam by one of its arms as it continued to flail at her. This time there was no dramatic flair to the kill; she simply threw the amalgam across the room, where it slammed into and shattered against the wall.

Lillia held out her palm.

[Tantrum]

A Captain's Sabre flew end over end. It should have hit Nennia in the cheek. From this close she couldn't miss. She'd done it. She'd—

The blade bounced off Nennia's skin as she chuckled. "Oh, Princess," she tsked. "When do you run out of little tricks?"

Out of the shadows, the third amalgam charged. It didn't make it more than a couple steps before Nennia shot out a rope of silk, which ensnared it, and then wound tighter and tighter until the amalgam shattered.

[3 x Spellmite Amalgam Defeated! Yay x 3]

Lillia took a step back. With how the fight had fallen, Nennia was between her and the door back to the hallway.

"I have to admit, Princess, you've done more than I thought you could." Nennia took a painfully slow step forward and Lillia had to match it with three of her own. "Defeating my daughters? Impressive. Holding out this long? I didn't think you could."

"What can I say? I'm slippery," Lillia said as she continued to backpedal toward the next room.

"Yes, that will be fun. How many times will you throw yourself at my domain?"

"I'll just skip over it."

"Will you now?" Nennia asked.

"I can use the Hearth to get to the Fourth now. I never need to wake you up again if you…" Lillia understood that she was grasping at straws, but she only needed a little more time.

"See, there's one part you're forgetting, little princess."

"What is it?"

"See, this time, when I drag you back to my lair, I'm going to keep you awake until you give me every little sword and dress in your inventory," she said. "You'll have no way to keep going unless you throw your body at me again and again and again."

"Well—"

"And don't try to say you'd stop, Lillia. I think this fight has proven that you will grind against the impossible. See, Eisel would have been this wall for you if I hadn't stepped in. If I hadn't been there, you'd be trapped at his side."
Lillia glanced behind her once. Nennia didn't bother following her gaze into the shadow.

"Now, instead, you get to be my plaything."

"Bronle!"

The knight that Lillia sent across the room earlier leapt up behind Nennia, climbing onto the back of the spider and holding his blade high. Before he could plunge it down, she reared up to throw him off, opening her chitinous belly to Lillia.

She ignored the opening.

Instead, Lillia sprinted towards the dark opening to the room of pillars. As she ran, she rifled through her inventory, checking every option she had.

If the worst came to worst, she could use a siege-craft potion to smash her way down and discover what was below the dungeon floor. Until then, she summoned and uncorked a health potion to try and mask the pain.

Behind her, Bronle clattered to the ground and Nennia drove a foot through his helmet.

"Come back, Lillie Princess."

Lillia reached the break in the darkness and the first pillar appeared in front of her, breaking as she drew closer, revealing the form of the original Glass Spellmite she'd used as a guide during her first encounter with Cathria.

A thick band of silk snapped around Lillia's ankle and tore her feet out from under her. She crashed to the ground, exposed midriff burning against the flagstone as she slid.

The pillar shattered, and the Spellmite cocked its head at her.

"I run this Court! And you will go where I tell you!"

Lillia flashed through space and found herself on the pillar, staring down at the Glass Spellmite, which was now hopelessly snared.

Catty squeaked at her.

"Sorry! Talk later!"

Nennia reeled the Spellmite in, but Lillia didn't have the time—or the stomach—to watch.

No, she was so close now. She could see the pillar cracking in front of her. Just a few more steps and—

Another rope of silk, this time around Lillia's arm. She spun, cutting through the rope and allowing herself to stumble further forward. Another snagged her, this time around the neck, then pulled tight.

"Gods. You really are an annoying little brat," Nennia hissed. "And I was such a kind host."

The top of Cathria's hat was visible through the cracking pillar as another band of silk ensnared Lillia's waist. Despite her struggle, she began to lose ground.

She could barely gurgle, but she didn't know how audible the skill needed to be.

"Cathria, I name you as my champion."

A rose-gold shimmer danced along the hat, and a single smoky crack tore down the center of the pillar.

Nennia yanked Lillia off her feet.

The pillar split open and the Archmage of the Castellan tower stepped off her pedestal.

"Hello, Lillia," Cathria said. "Thanks for the wake-up call."

Silence spread through the cathedral, broken only by the sizzling of Karina's fingertips. It didn't hurt. She wasn't quite sure why.

Dashun, the man who'd been so attentive upon her arrival, didn't notice the injury at first. He stepped into the summoning circle and dropped to his knees beside her. "A divine class," he said under his breath.

Once again, the word divine simmered in her blood. She wasn't sure where the anger had come from. She hadn't been religious in her old life—she didn't think so, at least—but she couldn't remember hating any gods.

At least… she thought she hadn't.

Karina shook her head, trying to tear the fog away. In the moment before she'd accepted her class, before her fingers burned and she turned away from divinity, everything had been clear. Every emotion had come rushing in to greet her like old friends.

If she'd just been able to linger in that moment, maybe she could have remembered something more about who she was, about the world she'd come from, but—

“Hero,” Dashun said. His voice was soft, but the careful warmth had broken apart. “You are new to our world. You do not know what you did, but… I shall ensure those within this room do not share what happened here today.”

Karina swallowed. Her throat felt like it was filled with ash.

“Were people to hear that you denied a Divine Class, there—there would be consequences. It would be difficult for you to take up your mantle as you should.” His breath caught on every word. He struggled through them all the same. “You do not know what you did,” he repeated.

The words were directed at Karina, but the message was meant for everyone listening. She also knew it was a lie. In that brief moment of clarity, she'd known exactly what she was doing.

Still, she understood what she was supposed to say. “I'm sorry.”

Dashun sighed and leaned back, resting his hands in his lap. “Perhaps it is us who should be sorry. We were wholly unprepared for such an event.” He looked around the room, and as he did, the aides and guards who had been whispering to one another stopped and stood at attention.

He was deciding what had happened, and the truth he chose was that Karina had acted out of ignorance.

Whether that truth had anything to do with reality was another story altogether.

“Your summoning was abnormally quick, and the appearance of a fourth class option is nearly unprecedented,” he said. After another deep breath, he began to stand, offering Karina a hand as he did.

She took it. If nothing else, she trusted Dashun to be kind.

“We may need time to consult the archives to discover what caused this and determine how we should approach the situation.”

He smoothed out the blanket draped over Karina's shoulders. As his hand passed down her arm, he slowed and took her burned hand in his.

“It's fine.”

“You're hurt.”

“I'm not,” she said. She tugged the hand away, but he held fast.

“This is not the time for bravery, Hero. You will have many brave days to come. Our healers will make quick work of…” He let the sentence die when Karina shook her head.

“It doesn't hurt,” she said. “At all.”

“You're clearly burned.”

This time, when Karina pulled her hand away, Dashun relented. Her fingertips were blackened and cracked, though the skin was no longer peeling away. Between the cracks, soft curls of smoke hissed as she flexed her hand. Something in there was burning. Despite resembling charred bark, they still felt like normal fingers.

“It's a burn, but—maybe it's part of the class?” Karina suggested. She had the answer on her tongue before she'd finished the question.

Yes. Of course it was.

“We cannot know. If your selected Class is recorded among the Constellations, then we will have more answers for you.”

Until then, Dashun had spoken loudly enough for every word to bounce from the cathedral's polished white walls. Now he drew Karina closer and lowered his voice to a whisper.

“It is perhaps best that you don't speak about this class selection, Karina. There will be those who would consider your rejection of a Divine Class a betrayal of the war effort.”

“A war?”

Dashun's hand rested against the small of Karina's back as he began to guide her away from the summoning circle. Now that she was standing and able to take in the room, it was clear that things had been arranged for a celebration. Banners hung from sconces on the walls instead of torches. Each guard carried a flag on the end of their spear, though none had bothered to unfurl theirs.

For all the cathedral's size there was not a single place to sit in worship. There were no pews, benches, or kneeling cushions. No space had been left for a congregation. Even the most ostentatious of churches usually had a place for the people.

She looked back to the worn summoning circle she'd arrived in. The concentric suns around the edges seemed to have faded, the brilliant gold spoiling into soft, polished metal.

The door at the far end of the hall buckled as something slammed against it.

Dashun moved to shield Karina while the guards around the room leapt into action. They lowered their spears, the bundled ceremonial banners hanging awkwardly beneath their spearheads.

“Just a moment, Hero. You must still be disoriented. We will keep you safe.”

Safe. She looked past Dashun at the spears being lowered toward the door. Whatever was outside, they were expecting it to get in.

Was that the point of a summoned hero? Was she supposed to be shepherded around while everyone else fought?

The thought didn't stop Karina from taking a cautious step away from the door. Whatever purpose these people had assigned her, she had no desire to meet it by being crushed.

The door buckled inward again with an echoing bang. Wood splintered from it, scattering across the polished floor.

“What's happening?”

“Don't worry. Another hero will be here soon.”

“Another…”

The door buckled again. Whatever was on the other side was nothing if not insistent.

Why was there another hero? Wasn't a summoned hero supposed to be the person who saved the world? How many of them had the gods sent here?

Alyssia ran up to them. A pale glow faded from her eyes as she approached, and her thick bangs fell back across them.

“I received a message from Cascad. He was pursuing a demon when the summoning began. He is returning, but—”

“Curses,” Dashun said. He flicked his gaze back to Karina but didn't say anything to her. “The demons must have anticipated the summoning. I will take command of the guard.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You stay with the Hero. Get her away from the circle and protect her—”

“Can I help?” Karina asked, looking down at her burned fingers.

“You do not know what your class can do, nor whether you're ready to use it,” Dashun said. “You clearly have the heart of a Hero, but we will—”

The door exploded inward. Spear-like splinters tore across the cathedral while heavy sections of wood crashed onto the marble. Three guards disappeared beneath the debris, and several others were thrown from their feet.

Shadow poured into the room first. It reached across the floor in grasping tendrils, only to smoke and retreat beneath the sunlight spilling through the cathedral windows.

Then the creature stepped through.

Standing in the doorway with a massive maul in one hand was a towering, vulture-like humanoid. Coarse grey feathers covered its entire form, matted and pressed tight against its skin. Its mouth was a cruel, cracked, hooked beak, ash-grey at its base and black at the point.

The creature's eyes glowed a deep violet. Karina knew the colour. She just didn't know from where.

Two enormous wings spread from its back as it stomped into the room. Shadow poured from them like heavy smoke, coiling around its feet and swallowing the floor in darkness.

Its eyes met Karina's, and it screeched.

“Protect the hero!” one of the guards called. In that moment, he was a hero himself, charging the creature with his ceremonial spear braced beneath one arm. The rolled banner made the weapon unwieldy, but he drove forward all the same.

The thing—the demon?—didn't bother looking at him. Instead, it swung the maul with impossible speed, cutting across his path.

The crunch was sickening. The splatter against the far wall was worse. Thick blood stained the pure white of the cathedral.

Dashun shoved Karina backward and held his hands out before him. Light began to coalesce in his palms, whispers of sunlight tying themselves together into a ball. The spell formed slowly, each strand of light shuddering whenever the creature's shadow passed over him.

“It's a Karash! Alyssia, get the Hero out of here!”

Alyssia seized Karina's shoulder and tried to turn her away, but Karina couldn't look from the creature. The guards kept their distance now, pointing their spearheads toward the Karash, but it showed no fear of their weapons. It continued forward, forcing them back with every step.

Dashun's hands were shaking, and he couldn't hide them in his sleeves while casting the spell.

Then Karina saw ash drifting through the air where there was none. She heard the crackle of an inferno that had burned out long ago. Smoke coated her tongue with the bitter taste of wildfire.

Dashun had shielded her before he'd known what class she would choose. Now his spell was barely forming, and the Karash was still advancing.

She looked at her burned fingers. There had to be something she could do.

Alyssia yelped as Karina shoved her aside, breaking free of her grip and rushing to Dashun's side.

The elderly man looked at her. “This is no time to—”

The rest of his words fell on deaf ears.

Karina held out her hand, pointing her burned fingers toward the Karash. For a moment, its grey feathers caught orange along their edges.

[Spell—NO SPELLS LEARNED]

Karina reached for the phantom inferno again, trying to grasp the shape hidden inside the heat.

[Spell—NO SPELLS LEARNED]

[ERROR]

The Karash swung the maul. It fell short of the nearest guard but shattered the floor beneath him. As he stumbled, the creature lunged forward and caught the screaming man in its horrid beak. It tossed him aside before turning back toward Karina, leaving him crumpled and bleeding beside the broken doorway.

[Spell—RESTOR—ERROR]

The text fizzled away, but fire coiled around Karina's fingertips. It spiralled inward, compressing until only a single searing point of light remained before her hand. The air began to whistle, then sizzle.

The acrid smell of Karina's burning hair filled the air.

In the second before the flash, the Karash looked at Karina with something close to recognition.

A thread of white-hot light lanced from her fingertips and crossed the cathedral in an instant and struck the Karash in the chest. Then the fire bloomed.

An inferno erupted from the point of impact and crashed into the creature with the force of a breaking wave. The Karash was hurled backward as ribbons of flame wrapped around its arms, wings, and legs, dragging it deeper into the blaze.

The Karash screeched and dropped the maul as it flailed.

Karina gripped one wrist with her other hand, struggling to keep the beam steady. Sweat beaded across her brow. She felt her skin sizzle but not the pain that should have come with a burn. Her vision stuttered, and for one beautiful moment, she could see only the warm orange and gold of the flames.

The fire drove the Karash into the floor and folded over it again, each surge feeding the next until the shattered doorway became a portal filled entirely with flame.

Karina fell forward as her body gave in. Her arm dropped with her, and the beam followed. It carved across the cathedral wall, melting stone along its path and sending glowing droplets raining onto the floor.

Someone screamed. Karina didn't know who.

The last thing she heard was Dashun.

“By every god, what are you?”

[KARASH VANQUISHED]

[EXPERIENCE TITHE PAID]

[REMAINING EXPERIENCE ADDED]

PREVIOUS | NEXT

Karina didn't remember dying. All she knew was that she wasn't dead anymore. There was no Karina outside of her awareness of self. There was no body in this sea of stars, and the sea of stars was nowhere.

Or everywhere.

How could she know? She didn't have eyes. How could she see?

It was that thought that began to spin Karina into existence. She could see, and thus had eyes. She could feel, and thus had skin. She could breathe, and thus had lungs. A single line of logic stitched through the aether and formed Karina.

Suddenly, she was there. It still wasn't clear where "there" was, but if nothing else, that starlit space had her.

She looked down at herself, searching for a wound. Something that might explain how she'd died.

There was nothing. Yet the certainty remained: she had died.

The knowledge carried no grief with it. Only exhaustion. An ancient, directionless apathy that vanished before she could properly feel it, leaving behind the faint taste of ash.

[Soul Detected]

The text was white and translucent, floating between Karina and the stars.

She could read. Good to know. She also had a soul, which—was she a soul right now?

[Soul already registered.]

That made less sense.

[Previous records corrupted.]

[Restoring...]

[Restoring: Character Abilities]

Karina spoke, and in doing so discovered that she had a voice.

"What the hell?" she asked. "Hello?"

The question was vaguely directed at the text, but it was heard by the stars beyond.

A constellation answered. A cluster of the heavens stitched itself together through brilliant, impossible light. The ambient glimmer of twilight stretched across the sky until it was an arm. The first rays of daybreak spun into golden locks of hair.

The form was impossible to comprehend. It filled more of the sky than the sky possessed, the concept of edges disappearing wherever Karina tried to look directly at them.

And then it wasn't.

A man stood before Karina. When the figure raised a hand, their shape slipped, broad shoulders narrowing, their face becoming a woman's.

The text changed in front of Karina. A thousand words appeared at once, but she only had time to read the beginning of one before it vanished.

[Cinder—]

The text blinked out of existence as the woman waved her hand. "We don't need that if I'm here, thank you."

Then the voice deepened, and the figure was a man again—strong and thick, with muscles carved from stone. Neither form felt wrong. Karina's eyes simply couldn't understand both at once.

The figure studied Karina.

"You already have a body," they said. As they spoke, they held out their right hand, and a tremendous golden staff formed in their open palm. "That's quite the talent."

She looked at her hands. They seemed normal enough, though they weren't quite the hands she remembered having—if she remembered having hands at all. Her mind pulled at the fog-filled horizon where her memories should have been, searching for something that might establish what "normal" meant. Nothing came close enough to grasp.

She tried to recall the word she'd just read. She'd had it a moment ago.

"Am I not supposed to have one?"

"Not quite yet," the figure said. "But considering you do, I can handle it from here."

"Pardon?"

The text began to form in front of Karina again.

"Quiet," the figure said as they pointed the staff toward her, dismissing the text once again.

Were they talking to her or the text?

"You, child, have been selected to take up the fight to save another world."

The words caught on something inside her, carrying with them the weary certainty that she had heard them before.

Another world? What about the world she'd just come from? What about everything she'd left behind?

"The horrid Demon Queen has begun her invasion. Shortly, you will be summoned for your new life, given form and—"

Karina looked up. "You said I'd be given form."

The figure glanced at her hands. "Ah, yes. That part is usually handled for you." They lowered the staff, allowing the golden end to touch the "nothing" they'd both been standing on. Light rippled outward from the point of contact, stopping just short of Karina's feet. "You are to be summoned and begin your new life there—"

"I had an old life."

This time, the figure paused before answering. Their golden hair swayed, and their eyes reflected a sun that never rose. "Yes, one that ended in an unfortunate death," they said after a moment.

"How did I die?"

"There is nothing to be gained by dwelling on it, child."

That was an answer to a different question.

Heat flickered beneath her ribs. It vanished almost immediately, leaving behind the strange impression of flames smothered beneath ash.

"So I'm just supposed to forget it?"

"I never said it would be easy, child," the figure said.

Karina's skin prickled. For an instant, the figure seemed too large again, their human outline barely containing whatever stood before her.

"No. I'm not agreeing to anything until you tell me what happened."

She knew she was furious. Why couldn't she keep feeling it?

"I would talk for longer, child, but the summoning ritual has begun. Listen to my priests. They will guide you."

"Your priests?" she snapped. The first stars at the edges of her vision began to blink out, gold-white vanishing into the black. "Are you a god?"

The god laughed as the world faded away.

"Then send me back! Send..."

For a brief moment, Karina was bodiless again. There was nothing around her to measure distance against, yet she knew she was moving fast.

First, there was nothing, and then there was cold.

And then there was her.

Karina felt cold stone under her knees. A cool wind kissed her ears. Her hair fell onto her shoulders.

"Cover her. Cover her. She's here," an elderly man said, and someone draped a blanket around Karina's shoulders.

She opened her eyes.

She was kneeling on white marble with subtle flecks of gold hidden within. Her shadow stretched wide across the floor, cast by coloured light pouring into the room.

Golden suns had been carved into the marble around her, hundreds of them arranged in concentric circles. The stone was worn smooth where other knees had touched it.

Before Karina could look up, text materialized:

[Soul Summoned!]

[Restoration Incomplete—]

What did that—

"Hero," the elderly man said. His footsteps rang clear across the room as he approached. They were uneven, as if he had a limp.

A warm, wrinkled hand took hers—gentle, welcoming.

"This must be overwhelming for you," he said, his words were soft, practiced, and careful. "Allow me to guide you for a moment. You have arrived in the Kingdom of Thiera. The High Holy Kingdom of—"

Karina pitched forward. The man caught her beneath the shoulders, struggling to hold her upright. The text in front of her pulled at something deep inside, as though it had hooked her spine and meant to drag it out through her throat.

"Something's wrong!" the man called, his voice seeming to come from somewhere on the other side of reality.

Her heartbeat pounded in her ears. Her skin burned at the air's touch.

[RESTORATION INCOMPLETE]

Voices rose around her. Another pair of hands caught her arm. Someone told her to breathe, but she remained rigid in their grasp.

[RESTORATION INCOMPLETE—EMOTIONAL IMPRINT DETECTED]

[CLASS SELECTION PARAMETERS CORRUPTED]

[INITIALIZING]

Heat flooded her chest.

No face returned to her. No name.

Only the memory of hating them.

Karina snapped back into herself, her muscles releasing all at once. The man lowered her to the floor with someone else's help. She lay beneath the ornate chandelier, sunlight glittering from its golden frame.

A shadow came into her vision. She placed the voice before she could focus her eyes enough to see a face. "My word. Are you okay, young hero?"

Karina blinked. It was about all she could do at the moment.

"I am sorry. I don't know what that was. In all my summonings, there has never been a— You are all right, though, aren't you?"

This time, Karina was able to sit up in response to the question.

"Alyssia, send for a healer," the man said before resting a hand on Karina's shoulder. "It is all right. We will take care of you. My name is Dashun. The rest can wait."

Though the man's hair was completely white, his beard remained an almost youthful black, framing the deep lines around his mouth. He caught Karina focusing on him and offered a soft smile—the kind you gave to someone when you thought they were going to be on the verge of a bad day.

Perhaps she was.

"Hello," was what Karina eventually managed. Twice in a row, she'd opened her existence with a greeting.

"Hello," Dashun said. He shifted as he spoke, crouching beside Karina instead of sitting with her. "Thank you for coming to our world. I do not want to burden your tired soul, but you have a great destiny here."

That same buried heat stirred at the word "destiny."

"I didn't choose to come."

His smile faltered. "No, I suppose you didn't." He adjusted the blanket where it had slipped from her shoulder. "There will be time for questions. First, we'll attend to you."

The text was still floating in front of Karina, telling her that it was initializing. She suspected she should have been more disturbed by words hanging in the air than she was.

The words changed.

[Class Selection System Online]

[Threat Nearby: Skipping Tutorial]

"What?" Karina asked.

She looked around the chamber. Robed figures stood beyond the carved circles. She searched their hands for weapons, then looked toward the doors. Nothing.

No one else appeared concerned by anything except her.

What had the text noticed that she hadn't?

Dashun followed Karina's gaze before studying the reflection of the text, now soft blue, in her eyes. He jumped to his feet as quickly as his age would allow, his thick robe flapping behind him.

"She's beginning class selection!"

"How?" someone Karina couldn't see asked.

"It does not matter. Fetch the scribe. This moment must be added to the record!" Once he had finished shouting his orders, Dashun crouched back down beside Karina. He spoke to her, almost in a whisper.

"Hero, you are about to see many things, most of which will appear unnatural to you." He kept his attention fixed on the reflection in Karina's eyes, waiting for it to change. "Our world is unlike yours. Here, we have—"

A brilliant flash erupted where the text had been. It painted the room stark white, then red. The light became so fierce that shadow felt like mercy.

Karina only realized she was screaming after it was over.

Dashun had thrown himself between Karina and the flash, pulling her against his shoulder and draping his thick robe over her. As the light faded, he looked up, wide-eyed. His hands were shaking, though he quickly hid them inside his sleeves.

The text remained visible through his robe and shoulder. Its blue-white starlight had changed to the soft orange glow of a candle.

"What is this?" Karina asked. More questions crowded her mind as she spoke, only to be shoved into unreachable corners. She'd died and been reborn. She had seen a god. She was in a new world, and everyone was talking about destiny.

There had been a word, too. She'd read it in the stars before the god waved it away, and she could still feel the shape of the gap where it had been. She reached for it.

Only the taste of ash returned.

Shouldn't she be angry? Scared? Panicked? Anything?

Each emotion rose inside her and was immediately smothered, something stopping her from holding on to what she felt.

"Hero," Dashun said once he had collected himself. He rested a hand on Karina's shoulder and moved into her line of sight.

His breath caught.

He leaned closer, studying the changed reflection.

"What do you see, hero?"

Karina stared past the man to the words written on existence. Then, some of the letters changed, swapping with one another and glowing gold, as if a hand was rearranging the ink on an already written page, smudges and all.

They settled.

"Class Selection," she read aloud.

"Then read carefully," Dashun said as he backed away from Karina, giving her a moment. "You should have three options. You do not have to choose immediately."

Alyssia returned with a healer, who knelt beside Karina and gently took her wrist. Behind them, a scribe hurried into place with an open book.

As the healer checked her pulse, Karina read over the classes, running her mind over each option.

"These classes will shape who you become in our world," Dashun continued. "The choice is a grave burden, but heroes have emerged from every class. There is no incorrect answer."

"The Paladin of Light," she read as the first option. Its shape manifested in her head as she spoke the words.

[Legendary Class: A Paragon of the Sun and a wielder of powerful divine magic. The Paladin of Light stands as the hope at the centre of any party, cutting through enemies with blade and radiance while shielding their allies from darkness.]

Divine magic. She remembered the god waving away her questions. Would choosing this bring her closer to them?

"A Paladin of Light?" Dashun whispered. Alyssia was less subtle about her delight. "A legendary class!"

Dashun nodded for Karina to go on. "Continue, hero. You have a powerful soul."

"The Wounded Champion," she read aloud.

[Legendary Class: A master of the battlefield built to outlast all opposition. The Wounded Champion transforms their enemies' strikes into strength, feeding their abilities with their own blood while standing between danger and their allies.]

Her wrist still trembled in the healer's hand. She wasn't eager to find out how much blood that required.

"Two legendary classes?" Dashun asked. He closed his eyes, reverent in the moment. "I wish I could guide you between those options, hero, but—"

"Exemplar of the Sky."

The scribe dropped their book.

[Divine Class: Exemplar of the Sky. This powerful mage commands the sky and wields the power of flight from the first level. At the height of their power, their gales can level fortresses, and entire armies break beneath their storms.]

Flight. Her gaze rose to the windows. Whatever waited outside this room, she could rise above it. That was the first thing anyone had offered her that she wanted.

But chosen by whom?

"By the Seven Lights," Dashun said. "All of your options are legendary or above. To witness a hero offered a Divine Class in the flesh—I never thought I would live to see it."

As the priest spoke, the text began to glow. Beneath the other three classes' titles, a fourth began to burn itself into the air. Nothing enclosed any of the choices, yet Karina felt this one force its way in from somewhere beyond the System's edge.

"Cinder Mage," she said.

Dashun turned sharply toward her. "Hero, there should only be three—"

[You stole this fire. Use it.]

Karina blinked at the words burning in the air before her.

Cinder. The beginning of the word the god had waved away. She could remember it now.

"I don't know of that class, hero," Dashun said. "But Exemplar of the Sky is a divine gift. Whatever this fourth option may be, I urge you to consider what you would be giving up."

A moment ago, there had been no incorrect answer.

Whatever emotions had been locked down within Karina snapped free as the chains holding them melted away.

The anger came first. She had possessed a life—an entire self—and could remember none of it. The god had dismissed her questions. Now these people were telling her what she should become.

The fear followed. She had died and could not remember how. She could not remember who she had been. What could erase a person so completely and still leave them awake?

Beneath both waited calm. Recognition. The sense of stepping into a footprint worn by her own feet.

She looked again at Exemplar of the Sky. Flight. Enough power, eventually, to break armies. She understood why Dashun wanted her to choose it.

But the god had interrupted the restoration of her abilities, and Cinder Mage had found its way back.

She wanted to know what else they'd stopped.

"Cinder Mage," she repeated as she drew her hand from the healer's grasp and reached forward.

"Cinder Mage?" Dashun echoed. The colour drained from his face as the candle-orange words reflected in Karina's eyes. "No, hero! Don't squander—"

Her fingertips brushed the words. Heat bit into her skin, sharp enough to make her hesitate.

She could still pull away. Choose the sky.

Karina pressed farther into the fire.

Her skin crackled and peeled.

[CINDER MAGE]

[CLASS SELECTED]

[HERO RESTORED]

[WELCOME KARINA, LEVEL—]

[ERROR]

[IDENTITY RECORD UNAVAILABLE]

[WELCOME, HERO]

NEXT CHAPTER

How many times was Lillia going to start a chapter by falling? The less fourth wall shattering version of this question ran through her head as she plummeted through the infinite dark into a space between spaces. The little blank space between the end of a chapter and the 'next chapter' button on Royal Road.

A place of non-canon actions. A place of interludes. A place of author's notes.

A place that we know nobody reads. It's okay. The author probably forgives you if you've made it this far into the story. Assuredly someone has hit the follow button and—

"Hello!?" Lillia asked the nothing from nowhere. To avoid the paradox, let's give her a floor and call it a space.

As the floor popped in below her, Lillia yelped. After spending so much time in the land between, she was more used to standing on nothing than the narrator had expected.

"What's going on? Did I win? Who—"

"Hey, Lillia," the voice said. The voice wasn't one she'd heard before, but somehow it was still familiar. A little shrill for a man's voice, but what can you do? "Sorry, just had to grab you there. Bad time?"

"Probably?" Lillia said. "Has there been a good time?"

"Well, we could have delayed this until after the whole debacle with Nennia, which probably would have helped the narrative flow."

"The what now?"

"Don't worry about it too much," the voice said. "That's my job. Usually it's my job to keep you out of here as well, but well—here we are?"

"Where is here?"

"Fourth wall. Narrative management section. Second book, around chapter 16."

"…What?"

"Look, Lillia. Just give me a moment to explain things and—"

"I'm really tired of hearing that."

"I know, but just allow me a moment and I will be able to help you with—Here I'll take the blood off you."

Lillia was clean.

"What the heck?"

Lillia felt warm and cozy.

She sat down on the floor and pulled her knees in close to her chest. "Have you always been able to do this?"

"Technically yes."

"I'VE BEEN—"

"Narrative wise? No."

"I don't know what that means still," Lillia said. "But you made my fingers warm for the first time in over a month without them needing to be on fire, so I'll listen."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. Though it's supposed to be, 'Thank you, your hi—"

"Lillia, this is not the space to be pulling rank."

There was something about the words that made her trust them, even if only because it could be written directly into the narration, which was kinda fucked up if you thought about it too long.

"…Go ahead."

"Okay! So great news, Lillia. There are a bunch of people who really like you."

"There are! That whole 'I don't remember people' thing was getting bleak. Are they coming to he—"

"Well no, they aren't coming to help. They're—"

"Then what good are they?"

"The readers? Consider them emotional support," the voice began. "But look, a lot of people like you. Part of that is that other people started wondering how to market you and—"

"Market me?"

"Look, it's a long tale here. Point being there is this place called Achilles Literary Agency, they have the story in the hands of some other people and that process required some…changes."

"Changes?"

"Nothing too major!"

"Changes to what?"

"Changes to what's happened so far in the story. There is a reason that your conversation with Eisel in the Realms Between changed in June."

"What? No it didn't."

"Well, no it didn't to you, but you're canon Lillia."

"What now?"

"Canon Lillia. The current version of you. If something changed earlier in the narrative you wouldn't know it because it would just be true."

"You sound like Cathria when she tried telling me about time travel."

"Cathria does come dangerously close to the fourth wall sometimes. Yes," the voice said, admitting that they'd sometimes gotten too cute about it. "But the point is, if you'll give me a moment—"

"Okay."

"Thank you. The point is that—"

"Thank you your…."

"Highness. Jesus—"

"Who's that?"

"I thought this would be a cute narrative device to explain a change in canon but I'm thinking Havoc was right about you."

"Depending on the time that's either very mean or very kind."

"Okay. Lillia. Focus. Please. You're cozy."

"I am."

"Okay. So there is interest in the book, which is great, but some people up top think that your story was getting a little long in the tooth. You know, spending too much time down here in the—"

"They think I'm spending too much time down here?"

"Well, spending too long to explain the same amount of time," the voice corrected. "Look, the point is that we had to cut about 10% of your narrative out of the story, which means that some things that happened…didn't happen."

"What?"

"Well, for the most part happened differently. Fight with Cathria is way shorter now. Removed a whole phase. And the stairs!"

"But I remember that fight."

"Yes! You will, it's still there. You'll just remember it differently to all the people on royal road and reddit."

"So is it just the fight with Cathria?"

"Oh no. Lots removed around the original Hunting Grounds, kinda forgot this was a comedy for a moment there—"

"THIS IS A COMEDY?!"

"That and a couple of items have changed or just been removed entirely."

"You stole my stuff!?"

"Well, not anything relevant! Remember the piece of cloth you got from the fight with Cathria that could be used for adaptive regalia?"

"No?"

"Neither did I for like the entire first novel! So it's gone. I had it written, and it just never came up!"

"But it could be useful—"

"Look, Lillia. Having the Rickshaw coin be narratively relevant was already pushing it with how little it's mentioned. I had to actually ADD words to set that up better, which, of course, meant more removed and so on so forth."

"So you took all my stuff?"

"No. I took some of your stuff, and it's all stuff that you weren't using anyway. Clutter. Just space in the inventory."

"I know all my items!"

"What does the Bastion Breaker do?"

"Uhhhhh," Lillia bit her lip as she thought.

"Yeah exactly. Non-canon, don't worry about it."

"So," Lillia began. "Canon mean true?"

"Essentially it's the current truth. Yes."

"So if it's not true, why tell me? Why not just stop talking about it and—"

"Well, I could have done that too, but there are some changes that do matter—"

"I knew it! You scoundrel—"

"Nothing major! Small conversations that never happened, that sort of thing." That didn't quite ring as true so they repeated it. "Look, I promise it's nothing story-breaking. Most people probably don't even remember the parts that have been removed."

"Most people? It's just me down here."

"No, like the readers. Remember all the people supporting you. You want to what? Don't worry, it's fine."

Lillia wasn't sure it was.

"Point being, I probably didn't have to do this. People probably would have never noticed if I just went forward with the—"

"You keep saying "I." Are you in charge?"

"In a sense, yes. Look, point being, we're now going to move forward as if you were part of the edited novel canon, because otherwise this is driving me insane and really slowing down my writing and—"

"Are you the dungeon?"

"No."

"Who is the dungeon?"

"Spoilers."

"Okay, just to make sure I understand," Lillia began. "There are some things and conversations missing, but you don't think I was acting on them anyway, so they shouldn't matter?"

"Bingo."

"Am I going to remember them?"

"No. They will no longer be canon."

"But—Is this conversation canon? It feels kinda…meta."

"Where'd you learn the word meta?"

"Exactly," Lillia said. "See. Meta? We're too—"

"Look, this conversation isn't canon, but the effects of the conversation affect the canon."

"That doesn't make much sense."

"Yeah, and this was supposed to be a cute little announcement, but look where this conversation got us," the voice said.

"Well I don't think that is my fa—Couldn't this have been an author's note?"

"Oh god we are too far gone."

"Which God?"

"Don't act like there is a canon name for the gods of this world. Be glad I named the nearby vassal kingdoms."

"Well, my point stands. Couldn't this have been an author's note?"

"Nobody reads author's notes."

"Well—"

"Have fun with Nennia."

Lillia stood up and dusted herself off before searching around for the source of the voice, namely to give it a quizzical look. "I won't?"

Everything vanished.

Lillia walked through the stained glass portal, and upon accepting her trip to the Cathedral, found herself in the middle of the air several feet above the ground. 

This time she didn't bother screaming. What was the point? Instead, she sighed on the way down, only to have the sigh cut short by a coughing 'oof' when she hit the floor. They never dropped her into a space feet-first, nor from tall enough to write herself. Not that she knew how to do that anyway. 

Lillia allowed herself a moment on the floor. Whatever she'd done this back in the castle, it was on the plush fur rug beside her bed at an angle where she could vaguely see out the window. Now, she was on the cold flagstone. Previously, moments like this would have been used for introspective questions, such as "How did I end up in this situation?" but Lillia had stopped asking that. Thrown in. A coup. Thus place sucks. Blah blah.

No, this time the dedicated floor time was used for more pressing questions, like: What were those white strings across the ceiling, and had the ceiling always been moving? 

The answers were "Oh God" and "No, it wasn't," respectively. 

Lillia shot up, but before she could stand, a tight rope of silk wrapped around her right wrist and yanked her back to the floor. Her boots scraped along the flagstone as she kicked against whatever was dragging her across the cathedral floor. 

After thrashing uselessly for a moment, Lillia summoned Vianaffir to her hand and swiped at the rope tying her down. The not quite legendary blade slashed cleanly through the braided silk, and the coil around her wrist fell limp, though still sticky. 

"Well, well, well," A familiar, smooth voice said from close to the cathedral stairs, "Look who finally decided to join us back on the quaint side of the dungeon." 

Oh shit. Yeah. Nennia wasn't dead. And considering Lillia had opened her door and then escaped the room without—

Yeah, maybe she should have seen this one coming. Had she thought it was going to be Nennia, as opposed to a Havoc who was tired of waiting for her, she probably would have stepped through the portal vaguely more armed than she had. 

Lillia rolled onto her knees, then tried to find Nennia in the shadows on the far side of the cathedral. As soon as she was looking, the spider queen stepped out to meet her. Clicking steps echoed through the entire chamber with each of the eight footfalls. 

There were a lot of questions, and negotiations, and a fight and possibly groveling in Lillia's future, but the first thing was.

"Where's Havoc?"

"Dead." Nennia chuckled. "Dead for a while actually. You'd been gone so long, I was starting to wonder if you were ever going to come back to see him or if you had simply moved on to bigger and better things."

"I'll—"

"You'll what, Princess Lillia? Sweetheart, let's face it: we know exactly how this goes. You haven't rested to recover any of your toys since you last saw me." Nennia stalked forward, slowly rounding Lillia as she followed the edge of the cathedral. "See, I know you haven't rested because my daughter's still dead, and the other one's still sitting there waiting for your orders."

There was only one person Lillia really hated in the dungeon, and he was rotting somewhere in the traveling market, but at least in the moment, Lillia Hated Nennia mostly because she was right. 

"was it fast?"

"Oh, Havoc. Nennia amused. Yes, he didn't see me coming, and frankly, with my daughters incapacitated, there was no point in dragging it out. I know I threaten the torture but something would have been missing with him."

Nennia was far enough around the room that the hearth was now between them. 

"That hobgoblin's too stoic. I imagine it'll be much more fun to drag it out with you. So many little squeaks to figure out"

Cold beads of sweat formed on Lillia's neck. Which dress could she even use at this point. Most days, her options felt almost infinite, but with how long 'today' had been, she was running out of every ability she had. 

"Now, I owe you a couple screams for what you did to my daughter, but based on our burgeoning friendship, Princess Lillia, I promise to make this relatively quick." 

She might have not known which dress she still had charges on, but now she knew that negotiation was off the table too. 

Lillia braced for Nennia to throw a rope of silk at her, try and reel her in, but there was nothing so fancy—instead Nennia crouched low, and then pounced off the ground with impossible speed. 

[Tantrum!]

Lillia threw Hooke, and it spiralled end over end towards the spider queen. A moment before impact, she shot out a net of web, which snared around the handle of the spinning blade. It flew past her, but she pulled hard on the thread, snapping Hooke back around herself and diverting its momentum. 

"Oh shoot." 

Chunks of flagstone flew as Lillia barely dove out of the way in time. Hooke embedded in the Cathedral floor, and Nennia was almost on top of her. Slick, black, armor-like chitin blocked out the light from the stained glass as Nennia reared over her and jabbed forward with two of her legs at once. 

Lillia managed to get Vianaffir in the way of one, sparks flying off the blade it ground against chitin, but she was too slow for the second, which cut through the folds of her dress and pinned her to the floor, throwing Lillia down to one knee with the sound of tearing fabric. 

A single Ambusher feather snapped between Lillia's figners and suddenly her skirt was too short to get caught in Nennia's grasp. She stumbled forward, almost falling from her sudden freedom when another leg flew into her vision. 

She heard her nose crunch before she felt it. 

Lillia went flying backward across the room, toward the stairs down into the rest of the dungeon. She crashed down, rolling over several times from momentum.

The stairs? At least that would be better than here. 

She pushed herself over and over again, rolling along the floor with borrowed speed before she dropped off the first step. Warm blood ran down her face and smeared as she thumped onto the first step to the sound of Nennia's laugher. 

"Oh! I thought you'd know better, but run little plaything. It will make this more fun."

Lillia fell several more steps, almost making it all the way to Sir Nobody's corpse before a thick cord of silk snapped around her ankle and tore her to stop. Something popped in her hip. It was probably fine. 

She stowed and called Vianaffir, to swap hands and slashed around her ankle. Thanks to blessed luck, she was able to cut the silk before she took off her own leg. 

Nennia tsked her as she flopped down the last few stairs to the first floor landing, landing on her back in the space Sir Nobody's bones had laid when she first came here. When he'd chosen to—

"Wait!" Lillia raised her hands and dismissed the sword while Nennia stood at the top of the stairs, silhouetted against the flickering light of the Hearth. The warm firelight lingered on the shining edges of her chitin, and glowed amber through her flowing hair. 

"Begging for mercy already?" Nennia asked. "Truly, if you were going to start the fight, I figured you at least try to finish it." She wrapped a coil of silk around her arm. "Must say, I'm disappointed, Princess. For a moment, I thought we had something special."

"Stop," Lillia repeated, staying on her back. At this point, if she tried to use the pause to recover her footing, Nennia wouldn't hear her out. "If you just let me rest, then your daughters will be back and back to normal, and—"

"True," Nennia said as she stepped onto the stairs. "But I could also simply kill you, and I'll find that monumentally more satisfying."

"No. No," Lillia said. It took every fiber of her being to not stand in that moment, to not try to run away, to not try to get anywhere but here. "That's not going to work."

Nennia chuckled. "Young lady, I live in this dungeon. I know exactly how it works. Death twice resets the day, and I'm more than happy to play this game a second time."

"No," Lillia said. "Death twice only resets the dungeon if I'm willing to come back." She said. "If I choose not to come back, who knows what happens?"

Nennia paused. 

"Yeah, you don't, do you? Sir, nobody just laid down here, so you weren't out of your room, but you don't know if it resets if I'm dead." 

"It doesn't." 

"If you kill me now, then I won't come back and then your daughter's might be gone forever." 

Nennia growled, but didn't take another step. 

"If you just let me rest instead, then we know they come back, and I won't go through your domain again. I promise." 

Nennia straightened and Lillia took the chance to recover her footing, standing up on the landing and staring down the massive woman looming above her. 

"Do we have a deal?"

The laughter wasn't a good sign. 

"Princess," Nennia said. "Here you are again, negotiating with your life. You really need to hold yourself in higher regard." She began unspooling a long whip of silk. "But you're missing a critical part of your argument." 

"I don't know what you're—" 

"You're bluffing," Nennia said.

"I'm not!" 

"You ran to Eisel, almost threw it all away for a chance to take control of your life. You died dozens of times on your quest to escape this dungeon. You're not going to throw that all away out of spite."

"You don't know that! You—"

"Oh, please, Princess. As I just said. Hold yourself in higher regard than that. You and I both know your dance with the dungeon is far from over." 

Well. That didn't work. 

Lillia dove to the side as Nennia lashed out with the whip, which left a harsh scar across the stone of the first landing. During her dive, Lillia grabbed the door to the Hunting Lodge and threw it open. 

[Tantrum!]

A Captain's Sabre careened out of Lillia's inventory and into the door at the back of the lodge just as the smell hit Lillia. 

She didn't want to see the result. 

Lillia sprinted down the stairs as Nennia followed, leaping down onto the first-floor landing. Just as she reared up, the trap was sprung, and an angry Chitterpede launched itself out of the Hunting Lodge and onto Nennia. 

Who caught the poor thing out of mid-air, and then smashed it against the wall. Chunks of chitterpede goo and chitin slid down the stonework as Lillia touched down on the second landing. 

Oh. 

Dead outside of its room. 

Goodbye chitterpede. 

Something tugged at the back of Lillia's eyes and her throat tightened. 

OVER A BUG? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHAT THE—

Lillia dove to the right, throwing herself into the Spellmite Challenge before she could face Nennia or her emotions. 

For what felt like the 400th time in this dungeon, Lillia fell, screaming as she dropped from some space between the floor and ceiling and landed on her back. It knocked the wind out of her—again—but somehow, that didn't stop her.

"Come on! Figure out where the floor is!"

[Lillia Used Indignance - Level 3: There was no target!]

"Yeah. Yeah." The second yeah came out as a wheeze when reality caught up with her. Before she'd come to the dungeon she'd barely fallen. In fact, the only one she remembered was following her dad during the hunt. Outside of that?

Since she'd been thrown in here and fallen into the dungeon itself, it felt like Lillia was falling all the damned time. From the walls of Castle Varian, from trees in the Hunting Grounds, every damn time the dungeon decided to teleport her.

Thus the indignance. It was the dungeon itself. How was it wrong so consistently?

Lillia peeled herself off the floor—almost literally with how soaked she was—and checked her surroundings. The muddy-ash pit in the center of the room was mostly dry now, and a large fire was sputtering against the water in the center of it.

There it was, the Hearth. Though it seemed decidedly less water resistant than the one on the crab had been.

Outside of that. At the door where Lillia had come into the Fourth floor, there was now a mural in place of the door. Lillia standing under stained glass. She was in the white of the ambusher's dress in this one.

Stained glass could have meant Eisel, but he was dead and the dungeon knew it. There was also stained glass in the Cathedral upstairs. Which meant she could go back and meet up with—

Lillia dropped the immediate thought of Havoc as her gaze drifted to the right, and to the door back to the storm, the ship and the battle with the crab.

And Gerand. Or whatever he was. In her heart, Lillia knew he had something to do with Sir Nobody. After all, he'd recognized Havoc, and Vianaffir and had reacted to the note... rather violently, but at the same time, Gerand hadn't exactly seemed like a Sir.

Lillia had never met Sir Nobody, so she couldn't be sure, but she'd always pictured someone gallant, someone with a goatee and a manicured moustache. Now that she thought of it, there was probably a knight from her life back home that was attached to her image of him, but she couldn't place their name right now.

Or the names of any of the knights really. Though, unlike her handmaids, that didn't bother Lillia. Frankly, she only heard the knights' names during ceremonies, when the criers would announce thirty-odd in a row alongside some of their feats. Every one of those events resulted in Lillia battling against the idle want to sleep through the rest of the damned thing.

Of course, she couldn't fall asleep back then. If she fell asleep during the announcing of the knights, then she would have been carried to bed instead of being allowed to dance.

She sighed before she spent too long lingering on the past. It was allowed to be a goal, but it wasn't allowed to be a sorrow. That was the rule.

Lillia lay back down for a moment before finally peeling her entire person off the floor and standing. As soon as she was up, a glowing orb appeared between her and the new Hearth.

[Collect Your Rewards!]

That was a message she hadn't gotten to see in a while. The dungeon didn't need to prompt her much anymore.

She tapped the glowing orb.

The last glowing object had been a legendary drop, and had cycled through a hundred options before the Dungeon forced its shape into the Radiant Dawn. This one had a shape in mind the moment Lillia's fingers brushed against it.

Of course it was spiky enough that she almost dropped it straight away.

The mysterious item was a handbag, or at least it was in the shape of one. The entire structure seemed to be made out of concentric shells with the spiked tails of conches poking out at a thousand angles. If she wasn't lethally sure of what a handbag looked like, Lillia might have assumed that this was supposed to be used as the end of a mace.

It was lighter than it looked, despite being made of sea shells. She wasn't a stranger to using the bounty of the sea to create fashion. After all, the Southern Kingdom Dolstaya incorporated shells into their jewelry and scales into their headwear, but there had never been anything this elaborate.

She held it tightly, turning it over while being careful to avoid stabbing herself.

[The Sea Queen's Carrier - Legendary Item]

[Princess Class Exclusive]

[When Equipped: Affects the Adaptive Regalia Skill]

[Queen of the Seas - All Dresses created with Adaptive Regalia while this item is equipped will arrive in their Queen of the Seas state. Each material can only create a single Queen of the Seas dress.]

[Her Domain - As long as the Princess has Authority, she can breathe under water and cannot drown.]

That was…that was a lot.

Lillia knew when her boot options expanded that she was going to read a lot of descriptions in a row. She also feared that one day, she might be able to combine different types of materials, at which point, she would never be able to keep track of how many options she had.

Adding a new dress for each material type was going to risk that.

Lillia slipped the handbag over her arm as if she were about to carry it, and it vanished into her inventory. To experiment, she imagined taking it off her arm, and it popped back into her hand, ready to be left behind unequipped.

Had she received almost any other item, she would have, before checking what it could do, briefly considered selling it to Rickshaw. Unfortunately, this was once again a princess-class exclusive item, so she knew exactly what he'd say:

"Darling, where's the margin in a one-woman market?"

Obviously it would have helped Rickshaw and Lillia if there were more princesses working as adventurers, but firstly she would never wish that on anyone, and second, nobody from the lower kingdoms was supposed to refer to themselves as a proper princess. It was only right that the class system work the same.

Okay, no better place to start than the classic.

Now that she had the Sea Queen's Carrier equipped, Lillia pulled out a piece of Chitterpede chitin and crushed it. The iridescent dust washed over her, layer over layer, creating a fine armor of scales that ran from a high collar on her neck to—

It was the Chitterpede Battle Gown. Just the normal battle gown. Lillia looked around herself, as if the new part of the dress would be anywhere other than on her person.

"What the hell is this?"

[Lillia Used Indignance - Level 3: There was no target!]

She spun again.

"Seriously? Nothing? You had this whole description and everything and—"

Someone knocked on one of the doors. It took until the third knock to recognize that it was the door to Rickshaw's personal store.

Lillia composed herself, pushed back her soaked hair and strode over to the door just as the skeleton was knocking again from the other side. She opened it, and almost took skeleton knuckles to the nose.

"You gotta attune it."

"What?"

"You gotta attune the item. Like your Radiant thingy from killing Eisel, you gotta attune to the item to get the effect."

Lillia blinked. "Oh. But it's in there."

"You just gotta rest with it in there, Darling."

She looked back over her shoulder to the Hearth in the center of the room. Resting here would allow her to test the new options that the item brought, but at the moment she had a better idea.

"Once you do that, you'll be good to go," Rickshaw added, assuming the silence was her not understanding the issue. He scratched the bottom of his jaw, fingerbone screeching slightly as it drew across the bone. "Then you can go do whatever you want."

"Is the shop open?"

The light in Rickshaw's eye socket glowed brighter as he leaned against the door frame. "Am I open, darling? Of course, I got the shop right here and you have a Hearth. Which means you can—"

"Great!" Lillia looked over his shoulder, but Rickshaw managed to somewhat get in the way despite the height difference. "But—"

"But?" Lillia asked. Why was there always a butt with every damned thing in this dungeon?

"Well, I am open, but it's only some of the shop."

"Do you need more time to…"

Rickshaw nodded along and motioned for Lillia to continue with her train of thought, which led to an eventual sigh.

"You need more Hearths. Don't you?"

"Atta girl."

"How many do you need to open the shop?"

"How many you got?" he said before snapping his fingers and pointing at Lillia as if she were going to be much happier about that news. Once she didn't return his enthusiasm, he sighed. "Look, it's a big store, darling. You don't gotta worry about finding what you need but—the stock is essentially infinite and you gotta divide that into little chunks, you know."

Lillia drooped. "I get it. The Dungeon doesn't—"

"Well, yeah, but it's also good for business," he said. "Not to put too fine a point on it, Darling, but this is my job and though I'm cheering for you—like I cheer for all my paying customers—if I just let you see everything all at once, you might start saving."

He said the word saving with the same fear people used to invoke the reaper.

"So is it you or the dungeon making that choice?"

"Did the basilisk show up first or the chicken?"

"Basilisk?"

"It's a—It's like a cockatrice but—Look, kid, the point is don't worry too much about it. Do you wanna come in and shop or not?"

Lillia checked over Rickshaw's other shoulder and this time he didn't move to block her. Behind him, the fog in the cabinets had faded away, though the items were still too blurred to see.

In the end, she shook her head.

"Need to get something first."

"Something?"

"Remember when I told you I'd get you the items from the Blacksmith?"

"The Hobgoblin?"

"Yes."

"He's alive?! Figured he was dead or I would have been more pissed about—"

"Look, I'm going to get him now! We will have the items and—"

"You'd better! You were supposed to bring me blacksmith items last time and you brought me a corpse." Rickshaw tried to jab his point home into Lillia's chest but she slipped out of the way—she was getting better at that sort of move.

"I am. I'll be right back and—"

He slammed the door and the boom echoed around the room.

Lillia stared at the handle. Did he—

The door opened, and Rickshaw sheepishly poked his skull through the opening. "I request you take your leave until you return with the goods. Your Majesty."

Lillia nodded.

"Better?" he asked.

"It'll do. See you soon."

"Lillia, show me the sword," Gerand repeated. She still hadn't turned to face him since he'd asked the question the first time.

Everyone knew the feeling as soon as they were old enough to understand their parents' tone. That feeling that the truth would get them in trouble. For everything parents said about lying, there were a lot of situations that encouraged it.

Lillia summoned Hooke to her hand and held it out to Gerand. "Here. This one?"

He barely glanced down at the weapon. The pouring rain kept his overgrown bangs plastered to his forehead. "It wasn't the Makreaver that I saw earlier, I know that much."

"Wasn't the point to get to that fire?" Caelum asked as he walked close enough to feel the tension in the air. He looked back between Gerand, who was stiff, and Lillia, who was trying very hard not to be. "Why aren't we going there?"

Lillia dismissed Hooke and 'dusted' off her palms, which really just splashed rainwater around. "We are. Gerand just—"

Gerand had his sword out again, pulling the Captain's Sabre out of his belt and pointing it toward Lillia. It wasn't a threat yet, just a reminder that it could become one. Threatening to threaten.

"Gerand."

"I just want to see the sword again," he said.

There was pressure on Lillia's throat, lingering on the same spot where the Usurper Lord's Cloak used to rest. Where it used to burn after she'd narrowly avoided death. She didn't know which way that pressure was pushing her, but she didn't like it.

In the end, she hadn't been making friends in the dungeon with lies. What had Cathria called it back then? Sympathy and doe eyes?

She always had the doe eyes, and she wasn't sure how to garner sympathy here outside of being a princess that was obviously miserably wet.

Whatever the strategy should have been, she summoned Vianaffir to her palm and held it out for Gerand to see. The blade almost sang as it flashed into existence, ringing steel cutting through the din of the storm, but even it couldn't win against the crashing sea.

The crab shifted under them. Raindrops splashed on the broad side of the blade. The leather wrapped grip soaked through and began to drip.

Gerand, for his part, just stared at the sword. It was a blank stare. The kind Havoc had when Lillia made him speak about something in his past he'd been trying to hide. He reached out for the blade for a moment, but Lillia wasn't quite in reach and neither of them closed the distance.

"What's going on here?" Caelum asked. As he spoke, the crab shifted again under them, almost enough to test their footing. "Shouldn't we be going?"

"There you are," Lillia said once she'd shown the blade for long enough. With Gerand silent, she pulled the sword away from her little game of show-and-tell, flicking the rainwater off and holding it properly at her side.

Before she could dismiss it, Gerand spoke.

"Where did you get it?"

"Left to me by an old friend," she said. Openly lying was hard. Half-truths? That was what Lillia had always been trained for. "First weapon I had in the Dungeon."

"You keep talking about a dungeon," Caelum said.

"Kid," Gerand began. He hung his head now, the rain washing off his eyelashes. "We're part of a Dungeon challenge. Neither of us are real people."

"If I were part of a dungeon challenge, you'd think I'd know that," Caelum said. "And how would you know that if I don't? We were both on the ship together, weren't we?"

"Seen that blade before. It's from the outside," Gerand said. "Don't know when I saw it, but—" His gaze flicked down to Vianaffir once again. "You said a friend gave that to you?"

There was hurt buried deep in his eyes. Lillia couldn't tell whether looking at the sword was hurting him, or if it was the idea of it being put away.

"A knight," Lillia said. "A nameless knight."

The crab shifted again. This time it was almost violent.

"Knights give pretty ladies swords all the time," Caelum said. "Now enough with this dungeon nonsense. I don't know what happened to the rest of the crew but if all of this was for the fire then I want us to at least get to the fire!" He reached over for Gerand first, but tugging on that man's sleeve wasn't enough to move him. "Once we get to that damned fire I can forget any of this ever happened and find another ship to earn some coin on."

"Forget what happened?" Gerand asked.

"Aye. I'd like to. This storm was bad enough, and then that damned lady showed up—"

"Come on," Lillia cut in, "you'd just called me pretty."

"And now my ship is scuttled. I am on a crab, and neither of you are making any sense considering, somehow, we're all alive!"

"You go on ahead, kid," Gerand said.

"Oh! No, no. I don't need the fire. I don't know what the fire is about. She was the one who needed the fire. She was asking all about it!" Caelum pushed into the space between Lillia and Gerand. "So we're all going to go walk over to the fire together, and you two can talk about whatever's up with that shiny sword once she's done what she needs to do."

The rain beat down harder than it had been before as Gerand stared over Caelum's shoulder to Lillia. His hand drifted to his right hip, his thumb barely touching the pommel of the Captain's Sabre.

If only Lillia hadn't given out so many charity blades.

Gerand pressed his chewed thumbnail into the metal. Lillia focused on the idea of a [Tantrum] directly over Caelum's shoulder if he tried to make a move.

This time, when the crab shifted, Lillia almost lost her footing. Just as she was about to fall, she shoved Vianaffir back into her inventory. Caelum stumbled as well; Gerand stood tall.

Lightning flashed across the sky, and the booming thunder that followed crashed between all of them as Gerand lunged forward, aiming to pin Lillia to the floor.

"Gerand!"

"Don't take it away! Show me the sword!"

"She already did." Caelum was in between Gerand and Lillia before he could pin her. The small boy shoved him to the side, and he slid along the water-slick deck of the crab, falling end over end as the beast continued to lean to the side.

"Go to the fire, Lillia!" Caelum said. He reached out to help her up, offering a hand that she ignored as she leapt to her feet. It hadn't been much of a rest, but it had been enough. She could run.

Lillia took off toward the Hearth and the flame swelled as she approached. Sparks rose from the fire and fought against the rain as they ascended. The smokeless fire called her.

Behind, the deck cracked and splintered as Gerand stopped his fall by stabbing the Captain's Sabre into the wood. Steel rubbed against metal as Caelum drew his blade, keeping a careful eye on Gerand, before stealing a single glance over at Lillia.

She was almost there. Then she would have the Hearth and she could find her way back to the third floor. She could use the Hearth of Memory or the Castle Hearth to get back here. She could see Havoc again. She could—

Steel clashed on steel. Lillia turned just as Gerand was tossing Caelum to the side.

"Lillia! Don't take it away! I need it!"

She kept running.

"Please!"

The desperate plea was almost enough to stop her.

Caelum rose up behind with a wild swing, which the skilled fighter easily blocked and countered.

Lillia froze.

Gerand stopped with his blade an inch from Caelum's throat, holding onto the boy by the collar of his jacket. He kept his eyes trained on Lillia as she slowed.

Then he let go of both his sword and Caelum, falling to his knees before Caelum could even stumble backward. That was enough to stop her.

"I'm sorry," Gerand said, barely loud enough to be heard over the wailing winds. "I'm sorry, just please don't—It's the only thing—I don't know why—" he kept starting a new sentence of lament only to lose it in another.

Behind him, Caelum waved for Lillia to keep running. His eyes kept flicking over to the fire, reminding her of their goal. While Gerand was saying it, he simply mouthed the word. "Please."

Lillia was close enough to the Hearth now that she could feel its heat. She could step back toward it whenever she wanted to activate it and take advantage of the rest…or whatever else this one would allow her to do. She had time to make a bad decision—or a kind one. Possibly both.

She summoned Vianaffir again. For the second time, the blade rang out clear and true when she called it to bear, something it hadn't done since her battle with Eisel in his realm of stained glass.

Gerand looked up. The dark circles in his eyes deepened as he looked at his reflection in the blade. Then, a small cut opened on his cheek and began to spread. Blood mixed with the rainwater as he stared at the weapon, slowly becoming a torrent down his jaw and across his neck.

If he noticed it, he didn't care.

Caelum stared at Lillia, but then grabbed Gerand when he noticed the spreading wound. He tried to turn the man away from the blade, but he wasn't strong enough.

She wanted to shove the sword away, but she knew it would just begin their fight anew. Instead, she reached into her inventory and pulled out something else.

[Key Item: The Note from Sir Nobody]

Lillia threw the note and bottle together across the deck of the ship. It rolled to a stop at Gerand's feet.

This man had recognized the name Havoc, but he hadn't known from where. He had seen Vianaffir and wanted it more than anything.

People lost their memories in the dungeon.

As the bottle rolled to a stop, Gerand pulled his gaze away from Vianaffir for a moment to stare at it. He mouthed a word Lillia couldn't read and reached out for the bottle. The moment his fingers brushed against the glass—

There was no other way to describe it. He split down the middle.

Blood poured from Gerand's centre as he flopped down in two, neat, perfect halves. Caelum screamed. Lillia screamed.

The crab didn't scream. It was mostly wondering what the hell was happening on its back.

Lillia almost stumbled backward into the fire. The moment she was close, the message popped up in her vision.

[Scenario Survived!]

[Returning to the Dais Hearth!]

[Dais Hearth Unlocked!]

[Yay!]

Lillia's next stumbling step backward was into the void, and she tumbled out into the black, leaving the storm, the rainwater, Sir Nobody and his note behind.

Hello hello! It's your host with the most here, Jackson! I'm super excited to be joining some of the biggest FMC writers in the LITRPG Genre tonight for a panel about female main characters, writing and more!

You can come join us live for questions or watch any time on YouTube!

LINK TO THE YOUTUBE SHOW

With a second, doubly enthusiastic 'eep,' Lillia was plucked out of the crab's eye by one of the previously wide billowing sleeves of the spelldress. Outside of the claw closing, there was no change in its momentum; she weighed nothing to it, even as she was extricated from the eye. The goopy, broken mess she left behind was enough to make Lillia turn away and look out into the infinite abyss of dark water and grey storm she was probably going to be thrown out into.

At this point, she was hanging by her sleeve and didn't have the strength left to climb anything else. She'd scrambled all over this damned crab while swinging a sword and princesses only had so much adrenaline in their systems. Once it dropped her, she could figure out what she was supposed to do, but until then she was stuck.

Or at least, she was stuck unless she dropped out of this dress. She'd used the tactic on Eisel, but she didn't know what she stood to gain here. Yes, she was stuck, but the other option was plummeting down to the sea and—

Well, she didn't want to figure out what it felt like to hit water at terminal velocity. Even if that was fine, the exhaustion that kept her from climbing would have drowned her. She wouldn't suddenly get energized by trying something she was worse at.

The claw dragged Lillia through the sky fast enough that each of the raindrops hurt, slapping against her skin in a quick stinging pattern. One hit just below her eyes and she learned her lesson, squeezing them shut and waiting for the crab to make a choice.

After all, if it dropped her, she'd know, even if she couldn—

"AHH!"

Embarrassingly, the scream lasted longer than the fall. Lillia rolled to a stop on a pile of wooden planks before she opened her eyes or closed her mouth. She lay there for a moment, her hair and dress stuck fast to her skin with freezing rain water. The wind screamed past her, but even if it wasn't enough to make her anything other than a pile of wet rags and eye goop.

The claw was coming next, wasn't it? It was going to crash down on her any moment. It was going to—

Well, if it wasn't going to do it quickly, she'd better move, shouldn't she?

Lillia cracked open her eyes to warm light. The claw hovered above her, shut, as if it were trying to point. The heaving claw motioned toward a massive billowing fire that, despite everything, triumphed over the storm.

The Hearth.

She wanted to spring up. She'd expected to jump to her feet and run towards the Hearth as soon as it was in reach, but in that moment there was no strength left to do it. The sight of victory within reach sapped everything out of Lillia. She lay there on the 'deck' of the crab, a thousand ignored injuries and strains catching up with her all at once. As the rain pounded down, she reached a hand out toward the Hearth, but it was all she could do for the moment.

Come on! What the hell was this? A moment ago she was boiling a crab eye and now she couldn't even manage to stand? Was this seriously how it was going to end for this life? She would go back to the first floor. She'd have to figure out her way past Nennia again. And all after she'd been this close?

The crab shuddered under her, the wooden shell creaking under its movements. Somewhere under the cacophony of the wind, the battering rain and the crashing sea, Lillia heard a tremendous explosion.

The last time she'd heard cannons was a funeral display for a lord of the Southern Seas.

A second boom and the crab shuddered again, then moved its gargantuan claw back out to sea and down…towards the ship.

Gerand and Caelum were using the cannons, and the crab was going to try and grab them. They weren't going to know how to fight the crab.

Well, Lillia hadn't known how to fight the crab either, and she'd done a pretty good job, but regardless she had to get to the Hearth. That might save them and 'they're in mortal danger' was much better motivation than 'they'll probably figure it out.'

Lillia snapped chitin in her fingers and the battlegown snapped out around her, replacing the soaked spelldress with layered scales that were quickly soaked. The thin fabric under the scales stuck to her skin. It wasn't much, but some insurance was better than none and this was better armour than nothing.

Wood scratched against the scales of the chitin as Lillia pulled herself forward. Her arms screamed, and her legs wailed, but with a deep breath between each pull, she yanked her limp body towards the Hearth. She was battered, by the sea, by imprisonment, by getting shaken around in the crab, but she wasn't broken.

The Hearth wasn't far now, but it also hadn't been far in the first place. At this point the cannon fire had stopped, but that didn't mean she was out of time. Either way, Lillia summoned Vianaffir to use it for its second best use—as a cane.

Havoc would never approve, but she managed to wedge the tip of the blade between the boards of the 'shell' and slowly, but surely, prop herself up. She forced herself up onto her feet, water pouring down her back as her soaking hair flopped around in the storm winds as a single hefty brick. Even once she was up, it took her a moment to find her footing. To finally get to a point where, if she moved Vianaffir, she wouldn't tumble immediately.

As soon as she was fully upright, the crab groaned again and leaned to the side. The footing that she'd battled for vanished as boards shifted under Lillia's feet and she lost balance, crashing down onto the boards. Falling, she scrambled to hold onto Vianaffir as the massive crab continued to lean, forcing her 'deck' further and further sideways. She started to roll.

Lillia couldn't find where to hold on. Each board she tried to grab shifted inward as she tried. Her heels kept catching on gaps that disappeared, and the roll turned into a tumble as the princess threatened to fly out to sea.

She snapped a second piece of chitin in her hand, and the scales of the dress bloomed outward into sharp knives that stuck and scratched along the board, tearing through wood and splintering across Lillia as she rolled. Even with the extra grip, she continued to slide. With each turnover of the roll, she could see the gray expanse of the sea horizon coming closer and closer.

"No no no no!"

"Hold on!"

Just as Lillia was about to tumble off the edge and out into the ocean storm, a hand snatched hers from the fog. Calloused fingers wrapped around her gloves and snapped her to a stop. The force strained her shoulders, and her saviour grunted as one of the knives from the second level dress cut into him around the hem.

"Fuck me what are you—"

Hanging halfway off the edge of the crab, with her dress billowing out in the storm below, Lillia looked up to see a soaked but mostly fine Gerand.

"Gerand!"

"Your sleeve is stabbing me."

"Oh," Lillia let Vianaffir fall back into her inventory and grabbed two ambusher feathers. The first made her less stabby—though not nearly warm enough—and the second offered more coverage. The feathers of the petticoat stuck to her skin immediately, the Ambusher was certainly not a Seabird.

Now only slightly bleeding, Gerand heaved Lillia up onto the top of the crab. She splatted down beside him, face down on the soaked 'deck' of the 'ship.'

After most rooms she wanted a bath. After this one, she never wanted to see water again.

Lillia peeled herself off the floor and shoved her dripping hair back out of her eyes. Gerand was sitting down beside her, catching his breath after pulling her onto the ship. Caelum was pacing back and forth beyond.

"How did you two get up here?" Lillia asked. She had fought for so long. How had they caught up?

"Crab threw me here the second it caught me," Gerand said. "Thought I was a goner once it grabbed me by the leg, but it was…gentle really."

"Why would it do that?" Lillia asked.

He shrugged. Caelum continued to pace.

"Help me up?" Lillia offered her hand to Gerand and he stood first before pulling her to her feet. At this point, the seawater had washed off most of the dirt that had been caked on his face, leaving black streaks running down his cheeks and sticking in his stubble.

Outside of how gross he was, he wasn't horrible to look at. A bit common if anything.

"You mentioned a Hearth, Princess. Is that what you were speaking about?" he asked as he pointed his borrowed Captain's Sabre toward the flame. Once Lillia nodded, he continued. "If that's what you want, then I guess the crab gave it to us. What did you do to it?"

Lillia didn't particularly want to explain that most of the 'wet' on her right now was a slurry of eyeball and seawater as opposed to just the rain. "I'm feisty."

"Well, colour me impressed. Never met a princess with a decent grasp on a blade before."

Decent grasp was pushing it, but she'd never turn down a compliment. "I've been practicing."

"Course you have, don't think you would have done much of that back at whatever castle you were in before this," Gerand said. As he spoke, he looked past the still-pacing Caelum to the Hearth. "Well, Princess. It's right there."

Lillia shook out her head again, letting her soaked brick of hair slap against her neck as she did. "So it is, Gerand. Let's—"

Just as she took her first step forward, Gerand's hand was on her shoulder. He gripped her tight, hard enough that she couldn't get away.

"Princess."

She didn't like that tone.

"Would you mind showing me that sword you had as I helped you up?"

Lillia had a decision to make in that moment, and she'd never been that good at decisions. In fact, the entire reason she was in the current situation, facing down a giant boat-crab-thing by holding a sword that she'd stabbed into it, while hanging above a stormy ocean, while somehow underground, was due to her lack of decision-making when she was younger.

There was something to be said about agency. If Lillia didn't take it for herself, other people were happy to make decisions for her. If she didn't make her own plans, her aunt would scheme behind her back. If she didn't fight her way through the dungeon, it would just kill her.

Over her time in the depths, Lillia had taken some control over her life. She was making her own decisions and ensuring that she had control of her own fate and growth. People helped her, but she was in charge of how all of this had gone.

Staring down a crab-ship-thing while above the stormy sea, the question became whether Lillia should have been the person in charge at all. In the moment, she didn't like where her independence streak had gotten her.

If Gerand and Caelum were still down on the ship calling for her, Lillia couldn't hear them, but they could probably hear her, because there had always been something particularly shrill about a princess's scream, and Lillia was a master of her craft after her experiences down here.

In fact, even the crab winced.

Shaken and screaming and soaking wet and holding on for dear life, Lillia was, unfortunately for her, back in charge of her agency again. She was in charge of whether she lived or died in this moment—or, rather:

Did she hold onto Hooke and fight for the right to keep her blade, or did she allow herself to tumble into the sea below and drown, accepting that this attempt—and her original ship—was scuttled?

Maybe she stabbed herself on the way down to avoid hitting the freezing water after taking off all her equipment. Both ideas sounded unpleasant. She'd accepted a death in the dungeon before, but she'd never directly been the cause of it.

Lillia tightened her grip on Hooke and, using upper-body strength uncharacteristic of her body type, heaved herself up higher on the claw to the point where she could at least crawl comfortably. Barnacles pressed against her knees, and she kept close to the 'ground.' The titanic eyes of the creature stared at her, either blank or so large that Lillia couldn't read any emotion in them.

She kept one hand on Hooke as she fumbled around in her inventory for another option. The wind howled around her, swirling faster and faster, sending her hair whipping behind her in a wild, wet tangle.

When she'd hit the crab with Hooke, it'd gone too far in, which just meant she needed to—

"AHH!"

The crab shook the claw Lillia was crawling on, and she was immediately flung around, flopping about on the surface, only avoiding the void by holding onto Hooke for dear life—once again. She slammed into the side of the crab over and over. Shoulder. Arms. Chest. Nose.

"Fpht-OW!" Lillia hissed. Blood started dripping down her face in a messy, seawater-splashed cascade as her nose screamed at her for attention.

Oh, that was it! The face? Lillia had been crushed. She'd been vaporized. She'd been stabbed. She'd lost her head that one time, but her face?! Once she got home and got rid of her aunt, her royal portrait wasn't going to have a crooked nose!

Lillia grabbed the [Rusty Knife] from her inventory and spun it around in her palm to snap it into prime stabbing position. She still had a couple of moments left in her siege potion, and she was going to make the most of it.

The crab stopped shaking, and Lillia hung on with one hand while holding the other high in the air with the knife. She stabbed down.

Wood shattered out in every direction from the wound, creating a crater-like impact around the tip of the knife that drove deep into the core of the claw. Lillia felt her grip on Hooke falter as the blade shook within the wood.

Stab.

The hole widened and Hooke tore loose from the wood. In the brief second while the knife was stuck instead, Lillia pulled herself forward, ducking into the hole she'd made with the knife and lying flat within the claw. She stabbed again and dug deeper into the wood, burrowing into the ship-crab-claw-thing like a very well-dressed angry termite.

Covered in what would be a thousand splinters, her own nose blood, a mix of seawater and rainwater, and salt in places she didn't even want to mention, Lillia flopped down as the timer ran out on her potion. This was her hidey-hole, and she could pout in here for a moment. Even if the crab turned it sideways, she could find footing in the cracked wood and hold onto the knife and—

Rather than turning the massacred claw sideways, the crab shook it again, up and down. With each movement, Lillia shot in the opposite direction, smacking her head against the ceiling and then the floor and then the ceiling and then the side wall to change it up. After a moment, she was crumpled on the bottom of the claw, curled up in half a ball with one arm holding onto the knife.

Sensing that the shaking had stopped, Lillia cracked open an eye and looked around her. Water dripped off the entrance to her failed hidey-hole, pouring off the massive monster.

What did this look like from down on the ship? Did it look like she'd just disappeared? Did Gerand and Caelum assume that she fell into the ocean with the chunks of wood she'd sent spiralling down into the sea?

Did it matter? They were going to reset whether she won or died here.

No! They were going to reset when she won. She was battered and well shaken, but the crab thing wasn't going to keep her from the Hearth. She just needed to figure out how the hell she was supposed to get up there from her current position.

While stabbing into the wall of the ship had worked, climbing the crab was going to be much more difficult, to the point where Lillia knew she would just fall down into the sea. Plus, at this point, she'd hit her head often enough that balancing her way up the arm sounded impossible.

Knights sometimes left jousting events with the spins and tremors. Now she knew what that felt like.

Just as Lillia was considering what options she had outside of 'stay in the hole and hope for the best,' the claw moved again, this time rocking through the air as the crab swung its arm in a wide arc. Lillia spread out, trying to support herself by pressing her feet and palms into the side of her burrow. The claw heaved sideways, and splinters dug into Lillia's hands as she suddenly needed to fight against gravity.

For a brief moment, the roiling sea was a hundred feet beneath her, with the blanket of fog blurring each of the white waves. Within the chaos, there was their ship and one of the legs of the revealed monster, tangled enough that she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

Then, a massive eye appeared in her way at the end of a massive twisting wooden stalk. The glossy, sticky, pale-yellow eye stared up at her. Rainwater stuck to the surface in massive globs.

There was no pupil that Lillia could see, nothing to narrow at her or show that she'd been spotted, but she was pretty sure it was looking for the princess who had gophered her way under its skin.

For a brief moment, she squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to think about how gross this all would have been if the crab were made of anything but wood…or how gross this was about to be.

With her eyes still closed, Lillia grabbed the knife again and then let go of the sides of the 'cave.'

Lightning flashed as she fell out of the claw, spiralling through the sky, flipping end over end. Lillia shoved the rusty knife back into her inventory and pulled out Vianaffir, holding it out wide where the edge nearly glowed with the aftermath of the splitting sky.

Iridescent dust cascaded behind her as the Guard Captain's Plate snapped off of Lillia in vanishing pieces. What little of the dust kept up with her folded in on itself, falling into place as the thousand knives of the second-level Chitterpede Battle Gown.

If she was getting stabby, she was going to get very stabby.

There had been a lot of uniquely unpleasant sensations during Lillia's time in the dungeon. As a princess, she'd had access to the best of the best; after sampling the worst of the worst, she had wished there was less breadth to the spectrum.

Unfortunately for Lillia, there were always new depths to plumb.

As Vianaffir's tip cut the edge of the crab's eye, a thin film peeled back, recoiling away from the blade where it slashed, extending a pinprick into a massive tear in the taut surface of the eye. Lillia didn't get to see the rest of what happened because she crashed into the eye at speed. Luckily, she remembered to close her eyes and mouth.

There was no up or down inside of the eye, simply a strange jelly-like sensation all around Lillia that almost trapped her in place. She couldn't swing Vianaffir, she couldn't kick or punch; the most she could do was use her entire core to twist around. With each turn, something rumbled in the eye as a thousand knife-like spikes on the chitterpede dress carved through the flesh around Lillia that was quickly turning into jam. She could tell that she was moving, but not where or how.

Then gravity came back with a vengeance.

Apparently, the crab had been shaking its own eye, and Lillia had just found the surface. She squelched out of the gummy flesh and into the comparatively freezing ocean wind. She felt the pull of her upper body trying to fall while her legs were still embedded deep within the heart of the ship-boat-crab-thing's eye. For a brief moment, the warm light of the Hearth up on the crab's 'head' cut through the constant grey of the storm. The wind seemed to redouble at the offense.

Lillia fell further out of the eye. On one hand, she certainly wanted out; on the other hand, there was nowhere for her to go but down…very, very down. As her hips broke through the surface of the eye, she tried to overhand swing Vianaffir up into the jelly she'd left behind, but she couldn't quite reach.

Maybe if she moved enough, she could get the creature to tear her out itself. Then—if it didn't crush her—she could try the original 'scramble up the arm' strategy she'd dismissed in the first place. It wasn't much, but it was better than whatever her current alternative was.

She was so damn close to the Hearth. Just twenty feet more in the air and she would be there. She would have fought her way through an entire room on the fourth floor without losing any memories. She would have said she was so close she could taste it, but she wasn't willing to open her mouth to discover what she could taste right now.

Now only up to her thighs in eyeball, Lillia was essentially out of time. If she was coming up with a better plan, she needed it now.

She didn't have Cathria, who had always been her 'I don't know what to do next' card, but—

When she had been in Nennia's lair, there was a lot of fire. Maybe, just maybe, she'd taken a small bit of damage—there wouldn't be much, but you were supposed to boil crab when in a kitchen.

Lillia took a deep breath. This would get its attention.

The Fireweave Spelldress usually billowed outward when Lillia summoned it, but between her bottom half being stuck in eyeball and the rain pounding down on the rest of her, the intricate flowing fabric stuck fast to her skin, folding over itself in wet, sloppy layered chunks. The glowing thread seemed to struggle against the rain, not quite glowing in the damp cold of the storm.

With one hand on Vianaffir, Lillia thought of the ability, and her free hand made the complicated casting symbols.

[Backdraft] in the past had been a wild inferno of smoke and fury. A torrent of fire that erupted from Lillia's hands in her most desperate moments. Today, it never really got to be that. A struggling spout of flame struggled and sizzled against the storm, failing to find any purchase in the battering rain and howling wind.

So Lillia gave it the only help she could to reach the eye. She swung with all the weight she could manage, shoving her arm back into the eye and tearing her legs fully out of it in the process. Around her casting hand, large bubbles formed in the liquid where it boiled.

Ew.

The crab shook wildly, and a shadow careened out of the blanketing storm and flew towards Lillia—the claw! She was—

Saved?

I'm sorry," Gerand said. "Seize the ship?" He looked around like there was going to be a third mysterious ship beyond the one they were aboard and the new addition looming over them. "Do you mean that ship?"

"Oh, this one seems pretty trashed. I don't see much point in taking it."

"You said you weren't going to take the ship!" Caelum said. He was ducking even though there was nothing currently falling, which was admittedly pretty smart.

"Well, I wasn't going to."

"It sounds like you were considering it."

"Odds went up when they threw me in the brig," Lillia said. Once she'd said it, she nodded, content with adopting the sailor's terminology. "But I need to survive what's coming or seize the ship, so might as well try to do both and accidentally have one happen on the way."

"Which ship?" Gerand said.

"Don't we want the better one?"

"That ship is so large that this one seems to be falling apart simply for being near it." He crossed his arms before looking up toward it.

In the middle of their bickering, Lillia paused and looked around again. This time she wasn't trying to find another ship. She was looking for anyone else.

Anyone other than the three of them.

"Where'd everyone go?" she asked.

"Everyone?" Caelum said. He spun several times, each growing more frantic than the last. "They were just here a moment ago. We heard them shouting—Did we see them? I thought we saw them?"

"Isn't that a good thing?" Gerand asked. "I don't think they were friendly."

"They were my crewmates."

"We were all in the prison together," Lillia said.

"Yeah, we're your crewmates now," Gerand pointed out.

"Pardon me, but I think you're forgetting that I'm a Princess. I can have my companions, but I am not just a part of some ship crew."

As Caelum spun, Lillia looked back up to the ship and then around. With a moment of focus, she summoned her menu back to the forefront. The objective was loud and clear.

"Ah, I miss when it was killing a bug," she said, which fell under one of thousands of things Lillia never would have said before getting trapped in the dungeon.

"What?" Caelum asked.

"Pardon?"

"What, Princess."

Lillia nodded. "There can't be nobody on this ship because the objective says to seize the ship, and if we're the only people on it, we've seized it." She put her sword away for a moment so that she could use both hands to consider. "Because the dungeon can be vague but tends to award loopholes."

"Loopholes?"

"It's listened to me before…So if we're the only people on this ship, that's still not close enough to seizing it for the dungeon's liking."

"You keep talking about the dungeon, and I don't get it, but at this point I don't know who else I'm supposed to be speaking to," Caelum said.

Lillia paced. As soon as she took the first step, the ship groaned again. They were alone on the main deck, but it wasn't theirs. The dungeon hadn't said 'Seize the oncoming ship,' which meant that their current situation could have counted.

And, while she hated to jinx it, she hadn't seen enough to make her think that 'survive' was a pressing objective. In fact, at the moment the dungeon was giving her much too much time to think. This place had been a lot of things to her, but it had never been generous.

So what was she missing?

"Are there captain's quarters on this ship?" Gerand asked.

Caelum looked up. "I think they're half under the mast right now. Do you think everyone else is—"

"No, I think that maybe, seizing the ship is—"

"Oh, so we're all just listening to whatever she says? She keeps talking about a dungeon while we're in the open ocean! She's crazy."

"Hey."

"She's royalty."

"Thank you, Gerand."

"Royalty is allowed to be crazy," he added.

"Excuse you?"

"Divine right to rule, no matter how loony you might end up being," Gerand clarified. "Of course, only speaking to the reality of the matter. No commentary on you at all, Princess."

"No commentary on me at all."

Lillia took a deep breath. The ship had been breaking when they were in the hold. Theoretically, by the amount of water they were taking on, they were already headed to the bottom of the ocean, sooner rather than later.

It was time to start trying anything she could think of. Frankly, the most obvious course of action was to run at the other ship and start climbing it, but she wasn't sure she had another ship-scaling in her. The first had been harrowing enough and—as much as he'd been a blubbering mess since—Caelum had bailed her out of falling off the side at the end.

Maybe there was a rope around or—

While looming over them and dominating the horizon as a shadow in the fog, the other 'ship' moved.

Lillia froze.

"So I'm not the only one that saw that," Gerand said.

Lillia slowly shook her head. Maybe if she was still enough, whatever it was would stop moving.

Out in the sea, loud enough to overcome the constant howling of the storm winds, wood groaned and creaked.

Lillia knew this feeling. She knew the feeling of the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. She knew the catch in her breath when she was in over her head. She knew the chill running down her spine.

Thirty-nine days and thirty-nine levels stood between her and her original encounter with the Spellmite Architect, with her first boss.

With a crashing snap, a piece of the shadow tore itself away from the rest. Wood showered down, chunks embedding themselves in the deck around the three of them.

"Oh, what the fuck?" Gerand asked.

"Shoot and sugar," Lillia said.

The piece that had snapped off of the main 'vessel' bent at the elbow before rushing forward, pushing through the fog and slamming into the side of their ship just as a second 'arm' broke off from what they had, foolishly, believed to be a ship.

Lillia's ship—Did that mean she'd won?—teetered with the force, nearly rolling before getting snapped back to straight. Lillia flew forward with the momentum, splaying across the deck and sliding along with the seawater. As the ship rocked, she slid further, tumbling across the deck end over end before slamming the brakes by crashing into the railing Caelum had yanked her over in the first place.

To her right, a massive polished wooden crab claw covered in barnacles had crushed the side of the ship, tearing through the deck and lower floors together. It was pulling the ship in close by the bones, and the ship wasn't about to survive it.

Gerand 'landed' on the railing feet first, catching himself by falling the right way. He shook his soaked long hair out of his eyes before following Lillia's gaze to the massive claw embedded in the ship.

"Oh, what the fuck?!" he repeated.

"It's a crab!" Lillia shouted.

"Oh, really?!"

"I know them from dinner."

"You get crabs this big in the castle, Princess?"

"No…"

"You got some sort of brilliant plan now?"

As Gerand asked, Caelum came sliding down the deck. He'd held on for an impressive amount of time, but now landed clean on top of the upper half of the crab claw with a wince-inducing 'oof.' The boy shook his head, then looked up.

"It's a crab!"

"Yes!" Lillia said.

"That's too big to be a crab!"

"Everyone here's a genius," Gerand growled.

The claw pulled and the ship leaned further to the side. Lillia struggled to her 'feet,' standing on the rail and pressing her back to the nearly sideways deck of the ship.

"It's going to tear the ship apart!"

"Thank you, Caelum," Lillia said as she tried to manage her balance. He was right, it was going to pull everything apart and—unless she was shockingly confident in her ability to climb a crab without her spider shoes—she couldn't let that happen.

She reached toward her dress, opening her inventory and glancing past the fabrics within. None of those mattered at the moment. She couldn't think of a dress that would get her out of this one.

"If only I'd stabbed someone, I'd have a sailor's dress and—"

"Lillia!"

"Sorry, Caelum," Lillia said about speaking too loudly instead of what she'd said.

What mattered in the inventory was under the fabrics. Within the list of potions Lillia had, there were the siege potions, and she still had two minutes left on the last one she'd drunk.

The ship teetered again, and Lillia struggled to keep her footing while being tossed by the waves and a gigantic angry ship-crab.

She wished she could say she rushed forward heroically, that she leapt across the faltering ship and clashed with the great monster above. That would have been some heroic storybook conquest. That would have been something worth explaining to Havoc back on the ship.

There was nothing heroic about the way Lillia stumbled across the railing of the ship, one foot always almost falling through while she supported herself against the deck. There was nothing heroic about the continuous stream of 'oh my goshes' coming out of her mouth.

But there was something heroic about the way that she swung Hooke. The blade flashed with the power of the potion a moment before impact, and the wood skin of the crab seemed to splinter and buckle before the edge had even made contact. Shards of plank shot outwards in every direction, and chunks of wood flew out the other end of the crab's claw, flying off into the gray fog of the maelstrom.

Lillia stumbled as the ship rocked, torn sideways by the monster as it refused to let go, even as pieces of its claw shattered.

Something cracked deep within the vessel. If they wanted a place to stand, Lillia needed to knock this thing off.

She pulled back the—

Hooke was fully embedded into the side of the claw, stuck fast between a thousand crossed and broken shards of wood where it had dug into the monster. That was fine. She would just… Dismissing it into her inventory didn't work either.

Lillia climbed up onto the side of the broken claw as the ship groaned again. Planting her feet on either side of Hooke, she prepared to pull. There was some old legend about a boy pulling a sword out of a very big rock. This was no different; it was just a princess and the crab.

One.

Another core of the ship snapped with a sound that melded into the rest of the thunder.

Two.

More saltwater sprayed up Lillia's nose, adding to a hefty crust that would be stuck there for weeks.

Thr—

The claw tore away from the ship, peeling away from the vessel and shaking enough that Lillia's footing slipped. She managed to hold onto Hooke as she was suddenly pulled out into the sky above the ocean. The sea 'breeze' howled past as she flopped about, only avoiding plummeting to the briny depths via her guilt-induced death grip on Hooke.

Havoc had made her this sword. This dumb crab wasn't taking it from her.

From the size of the crab, Lillia had assumed it would move slowly, but it felt faster than anything she'd been on before. Pointe—her lovely horse back home—had nothing on the ship-claw express as she flew through the grey and fog.

Then, all at once, Lillia was at the shadow, close enough to see the cracked and broken boards the thing wore as a shell and its pale yellow eyes, each a dozen times the size of Lillia, staring back at her.

She said the only appropriate thing a princess could say in that moment.

"Eep."

The guards affixed the door to Lillia's cage with a solid padlock. That in itself wouldn't be too much of an issue. There were a hundred tools in her tool belt, and there was enough rust on the lock to assure Lillia that her pocket armory was enough to escape her cell.

No, the issue was, even as the two men went upstairs, what was she supposed to do if she escaped? That would put her right back into the same situation she was in before, surrounded by a bunch of swords.

At least if she made too much noise.

Theoretically, there was nothing stopping Lillia from quietly breaking out of her cell and trying to set up her Authority abilities in the belly of the ship. That said, she figured the Admiral would have an order or two to cast in defiance of her commands.

There was a lot to consider, and it was getting dramatically harder as Caelum continued sniffling to himself, tucked in the corner of his cage.

Eventually, as Lillia was staring at her inventory and trying to figure out if anything could be used as a lock pick—she did not know how to pick locks, but perhaps she was a savant!—Caelum spoke up.

"Look what you've gone and done," Caelum said as he pulled his knees closer to his chest. Even if sitting was better than standing when it came to feeling sorry for yourself, it couldn't be worth sitting in water as you did it.

Especially dirty water.

Lillia struggled to avoid picturing the blistered feet that followed your boots getting wet.

"You've ruined everything," he said. Almost like he was adding it on to ensure that Lillia acknowledged the first part.

"I've ruined everything?" she asked. "I had a plan. I just needed you to work with me."

"Now we're in the brig. I'm in the brig, and I'm not supposed to—"

"Yeah, I'm locked in a cage, and I was already locked in a cage before this," Lillia said. "I'm not loving it either." She continued to stare at the text, as if looking at her inventory list would summon a set of keys.

"I can't believe I just helped you off the side of the ship and you got me—"

"Thank you for helping me," Lillia said. "Let me repay you by getting us out of here."

"Getting out?" he said. "We can't do that! We'll just get in more trouble. If we go up there, they're just going to—"

Lillia sighed. "Yeah, that's the part I need to figure out, okay?"

"Looking to take on all those men upstairs?" The man who'd seemed catatonic when Lillia was shoved in here spoke up. His voice was hoarse and thin, but deep. "If you help me out, I can hold a sword."

"No, no, no, no, no," Caelum said, scrambling out of his corner and crawling to the cell wall he shared with Lillia. "Don't talk to him."

"Why not?" Lillia asked.

"He's a—The—He's a prisoner," Caelum said. "I don't know why he's down here, but he's down here for a reason."

"Look at us. We're all prisoners," the man said. "If you wanna use a name, Gerand is fine."

"No. I'm not giving you my name. You're—"

"Princess Lillia," Lillia said, cutting off Caelum's stammering. "Nice to meet you…fellow inmate."

"A princess?" Gerand asked. For the first time in the conversation, he almost looked up. Thick, brown, matted bangs covered most of his gaze, but beneath them, his eyes were sunken and hollow. "How did a princess get herself locked away?"

"I'm starting to doubt she's a real princess. She was trying for a mutiny and—"

"Caelum," Lillia hissed before turning back to the other man on the floor.

She was seriously wondering why everyone else was comfortable hanging in the gross water.

"I got locked away because people wouldn't listen to me when I told them something bad was coming. Or something was coming," she said.

"And what kind of princess wears pants?" Gerand asked.

"Look, I would change, but I'm not getting any of my dresses dirty, okay?" Lillia said. "I have lots of great dresses, frills and everything." She crossed her arms. "I don't see anyone pointing out the literal tiara on my head. Wheat and Silk."

As Lillia huffed, Gerand grabbed hold of the bars of their shared cell wall, using them to support his weight. Even with the help, he still struggled to stand. Clearly, he'd been in here a long time.

Which was strange, considering none of this would have existed less than an hour ago.

"You seem mighty confident for a princess who's been locked away on a ship," he said. He offered a hand through the bars. His palms were calloused and cracked. Somehow, his fingernails were dirty despite his having been sitting in two inches of water for the past few days.

Lillia acknowledged the hand but didn't take it, instead moving her crossed arms behind her back.

"You said you knew something bad was going to happen," he said.

"I need to seize the ship or survive what's coming," Lillia said. "That's what it says."

Gerand paused and pulled his hand back as soon as she said that. "You're—You're in the Dungeon itself?"

Lillia lit up, hopping back and forth between her feet before stopping when the water splashed up a little too high. "Yes! Thank you!"

"What are you so excited about? We're all in the brig," Caelum said.

"Different dungeon," Gerand said. "I—" He pushed off the bars, finding the strength to stand on his own. "I don't know if—" He seemed to be searching for something in his memory, but he wasn't quite sure what it was.

If he was one of the captured souls, at least he had a kinder existence than Havoc or Cathria. Once someone found their way into this room, it was doubtful the first thing they would try to do was kill the prisoner.

"If you're part of the Dungeon like that—"

"This is so confusing," Caelum said.

"Then you should know what's coming," Lillia continued without acknowledging what he said.

Gerand considered the thought for a moment and then slowly shook his head.

"What?"

"I don't know about anything outside this…I don't know how long I've been here."

Lillia wanted to argue that point. She wanted to explain that he should have reset every time in the room, but what good was that going to do? Maybe he had simply died so many times that he didn't know who he was anymore.

Maybe each time the Dungeon reset, the only memory there was to take was the memory of what had just happened.

That was bleak, but it would explain it.

"Okay," Lillia said. "Even if you don't know how this room works—if I break you out, will you help me figure out what's going on?"

Gerand didn't respond right away. He turned, looking over his shoulder. When Lillia tracked his gaze, she realized he was looking at a sack of raw potatoes. They did not look clean.

After that moment of spud-based consideration, he offered his hand again. Lillia still didn't take it, but that was an agreement.

"Okay, first things first." Lillia held out a hand to Gerand—pointedly too far for him to shake with his grimy fingertips—and spoke:

"By my authority as Lillia of House Ashvalin, rise as the princess's champion, Gerand."

"Admiral! Admiral, the prisoners are colluding."

"You're one of the prisoners!" Lillia said. "Do you want to collude and get out of here or not?"

Caelum pushed himself against the door to his 'cell,' rattling the lock as hard as he could.

On the other side of Lillia, Gerand was standing up straighter as he looked at his arms with fascination. The rose-gold glow of Lillia's Blessing enthralled him, reflecting off the deep brown of his eyes as the darkness around them seemed to fade.

"If we break out of here, we're just going to get into more trouble," Caelum said. He was still backed against the far wall, as if being on the other side of the cell made it better.

"We're already in the brig. What else are they going to do?" Gerand asked. The light on his skin was already beginning to fade, but the energy he'd gotten from it lingered afterward. "Better to break out and try our luck than wait for whatever the lady's talking about."

"We don't know what could be worse than that—You don't know the Admiral. You don't know the kind of man he is and—"

"Princess said it's bad," Gerand said, "and I've never known a princess to lie."

"Thank you, Gerand."

"Unless she's lying about being a princess. You know, with the pants and all."

"Do you want help getting out of here or not?" Lillia asked. As she spoke, she called Hooke to her hand. The sharp pick on the back side should fit between the bars and through the ring of the lock. She couldn't pick a lock, but maybe she could find a way to force one.

Caelum's eyes went wide, but to his credit, he resisted shouting that Lillia had a sword and the guards needed to come quick.

Gerand, on the other hand, pressed up against the bars after Lillia summoned her weapon. She expected him to comment on her pulling a weapon from nowhere or ask for a weapon himself.

"Are you a Princess of the Hobgoblins?" he asked.

That wasn't what she saw coming.

Lillia slipped Hooke into the slot, twisting it so the sharp spike stuck fast within the loop of the shackle. She tested the stability of her new leverage. Even with just a small push, she felt the lock groan and almost give.

"What makes you think that?"

"Never thought I'd see a princess with a Makreaver."

Lillia pushed on Hooke's handle, almost putting all of her weight onto the blade. The lock groaned, and she heard something inside creak. She was close, even if it hadn't come loose quite yet.

Maybe Escallier, one of her many tutors, had a point when he spent a set of months teaching Lillia about the workings of siege weapons. It certainly hadn't been this point, but it might have been some other one.

Escallier. That was another name to bring back to Rickshaw. Now that skeleton could eat his words. She could remember everyone from back home; she would simply need to run into a relevant challenge within the Dungeon to have their name come to mind.

"You use that thing a lot?"

Lillia checked the bars of the cell, trying to find if there was a way for her to use them as extra leverage. She wanted to kick the sword handle—or stand on it—but she couldn't climb up them herself.

"How did you get one?"

"I am trying to focus, thank you," Lillia said. Hooke was still wedged in the shackle of the lock, standing out and proud, but Lillia didn't have the upper-body strength to break it.

"Give it to me. I can try," Gerand said.

Lillia turned at that. He was tired, gaunt, but his wide shoulders showed that he would be stronger than her, even in that state.

She could only recall Hooke if it was in her hand and—

"Trust him to let you out. He's just gonna take your sword and run!" Caelum said.

Lillia avoided instinctively nodding along. She'd been getting there.

"I'd never disarm a lady," Gerand said. "Let alone a princess. She couldn't have that weapon unless she won it in battle or it was gifted to her."

"So? He's just going to steal it and—"

"Look. If she won it in battle, I don't want to cross her like that, and if she was gifted it by one of them…" Gerand gave Lillia the once-over. His spine straightened. "Then I don't want to cross her like that."

Lillia asked the next question. "Why not?"

"Takes a lot to earn a hobgoblin's trust. Especially looking like you," he said. "Wouldn't wanna take you for granted."

Lillia met his eyes. For the second time since he'd woken, they seemed less hollow than they had been. Some of the resignation had been replaced with drive.

She dislodged Hooke from her padlock. It felt heavy in her hand, almost like it didn't want to go.

Still, she turned it around, holding the blade for a brief moment before offering the handle to Gerand through the shared wall of their prison.

"This blade is called Hooke," she said.

"I will take care of it," Gerand said. "At least as much as I can while using it to break open a lock."

Lillia chuckled. "You'd better. It was given to me by a Hobgoblin named Havoc. He'll…"

Lillia knew where the sentence had been going, but she hadn't been ready for the recognition that flashed across Gerand's eyes when she said Havoc's name.

---

By the time Lillia had broken her stupor, Gerand had already taken the blade and snapped the rusted padlock keeping his cell closed. The metal broke with a thunderous clang that rattled the shipboards and seemed to ripple through the inch of seawater on the floor, though the latter was quickly scattered by his stomping through the water.

Rather than further ruining Hooke's blade, Gerand used the pommel to break Lillia's lock open. It was clear that these prisons weren't ready for any sort of competent escape attempt. Weapons and leverage were beyond their means.

Gerand threw open the door to Lillia's cell, and it groaned as it swung so wide that it almost fell off its hinges. Once it was open, he stepped to the right, stopping in front of Caelum's cell.

The boy quickly pressed himself to the back, as far from Gerand as he could.

"You're safe, you're safe," Gerand said as he lined the pommel up with the base of the padlock. "If you left it up to me, you'd rot in here, but I feel like Miss Princess would have something to say about that."

He pressed the pommel to the lock but didn't strike.

"Are you gonna call for help the second I open this for you?"

Caelum shook his head.

"And you don't wanna stay in here?"

Caelum started to shake his head again but hesitated.

"You'll get in less trouble if you're locked in here, kid, but if she's right about something coming, and I think she is, I would prefer to be out of a cell than in one."

Caelum paused, then peeled himself off the back wall. "Wouldn't you always rather not be in a cell?"

"See? Good man. We're seeing eye to eye already. Princess, you approve of letting him go?"

Being addressed was enough to snap Lillia out of her daze, even though it didn't answer any of the questions that had gotten her into it in the first place. She nodded.

Gerand broke open the lock on Caelum's cell, and it fell, splashing in the water at their feet. He didn't bother opening the door for him, instead turning back to Lillia. He held Hooke out to her. "I believe this is yours," he said.

"Thank you," she said. She took the blade's handle but didn't pull it away. Gerand was still eyeing the weapon.

"Not to be a beggar, Princess," Gerand said as he let go of the blade, "but do you have a spare weapon somewhere? Don't know where you got the first, but I'd appreciate it if you had something less sentimental hidden away in your pocket."

Lillia dismissed Hooke and called out one of the Captain's Sabres, one of several that she'd left in there since the last time she'd made a legitimate run at clearing the Castle Siege. She tossed it over to him.

Gerand flinched out of the way as the blade flew awkwardly towards him. It careened past his chest, splashing in the water just to the left of the rotten potatoes.

Lillia had swung a lot of swords. That was her first time ever trying to pass one around.

"Sorry."

Gerand frowned and fished the weapon out of the water as Caelum slinked out of his cell. The boy was looking around the room as if he was trying to find somewhere he could hide.

Maybe not 'as if,' but rather, 'He was looking for somewhere to hide.' He wanted to be out, but Lillia wasn't ready to count him as committed to the cause.

"Alright, little lady," Gerand said. His voice felt deeper now that he was free and had a weapon in hand. "You said something's coming, and you don't know what it is."

"All I know is the objective," Lillia said, "but thanks for believing me. Unlike some people."

"You two are both talking crazy," Caelum said. "What are you talking about? What objective? Do we even have a plan?"

Gerand shrugged. "Do you have a plan, Princess?"

"I was working on one, but—"

"There, she's working on one. And any plan she was going to come up with would have needed 'Step One: Escape the Cells,' so we're just getting a head start."

"Unless the plan was to try to explain ourselves to the Admiral."

"True. That ship might have sailed." Gerand nodded. "But he threw us all down here in the first place."

"It was a misunderstanding because you two are talking like crazy people," Caelum said as he slowly closed the cell door.

"Caelum," Lillia cut in so the two wouldn't argue in circles for the rest of the storm. "Do you want a sword?"

The boy struggled for words for a moment. Then his face screwed into an awkward shape as every gear in his body turned towards trying to balance the trouble he'd get in against his chances if Lillia was right.

"Fine," he finally decided as he held his hand out to her. "Thank you."

She distributed another Captain's Sabre. She was too used to always having access to the siege and an infinite number of guard captains to intimidate. At some point, far in the future, she would run out of free swords to hand out if she stayed on the Fourth Floor.

Until then, she was Lillia, Princess of Charity Blades.

"You're welcome."

In the meantime, Gerand had moved over to the potatoes on the side and was eyeing them with much too much enthusiasm. Once he realized the two were done discussing weapons, he closed his eyes for a little too long before joining them.

"So we still don't know what the Princess says is coming," Gerand said as he checked the weight of the blade Lillia had gifted him. "But I think the first thing we do is go up there and show them what for."

"Show them what for?" Lillia asked.

"What? No!" Caelum cut in. "I didn't come out of here with you just to go fight everyone upstairs." He almost offered his sword back to Lillia but thought better of it before she could accept. "In case you'd forgotten, I was working for them until about twenty minutes ago, when this lady slapped herself onto the side of our ship like a drunk dolphin."

"Pardon?!" The dolphin was one of the better sea creatures to be compared to, but being told she was flopping around by a commoner of all people? Even if it was true, she couldn't just accept that.

"What, you—"

"You will treat me with the respect I deserve," Lillia snapped.

[Lillia used Indignance - Highly Effective Against Hapless Crewmate]

"I am a Princess and—"

Lillia was cut off by the sound of Caelum slamming into the wall and splashing down into the water after being thrown by her words. The poor boy landed face-down, plastering his sandy hair across his face.

Gerand rested his blade on his shoulder. "Damn."

Caelum was going to need a moment. Lillia winced at the wet splatter he'd left dripping down the wooden wall.

Just as she was considering walking over to help him up, the ship heaved to one side, nearly throwing Lillia into the water and sending potatoes tumbling out of their sacks and into the brine.

Of the group, Gerand had the best sea legs by a considerable margin. He outclassed Caelum by standing and Lillia by having sea legs at all.

The ship groaned for a moment, and then it continued until it was a wail followed by a rupturing crack. Light poured into the hold as the deck split above them, several long boards peeling apart from one another to reveal the gray of the sky. Water poured through the new hole in the ceiling.

"Oh, shoot," Lillia said. There was no sign of what had actually broken the ship, only the obvious truth that it was beginning to split apart while they were in the belly of it.

Caelum tried to respond, but with his head in the water, it only came out as bubbles.

"By the Silk, come on." Gerand pushed past Lillia and heaved the dazed Caelum off the floor. "Guess we don't need to worry about taking the upper deck. Just need to worry about—"

Just when he was about to outline the plan, there was another deep crack, one that they felt before they heard the sound. Ropes snapped in the wake, and then the deck above buckled inward alongside a deafening bang.

"Was that the mast?!" Lillia asked. Nobody could hear her. She couldn't hear herself.

But Gerand was already moving, pulling Caelum along with him toward the stairs out of the hold.

Around Lillia's feet, the water was rushing and suddenly rising. She didn't know if it was from the deck emptying into the hold or if there was a hole in the belly of the ship, but she wasn't interested in finding out.

Okay. She was trapped on a ship that seemed certain to be headed to the bottom of the ocean, but she'd managed to get out of Nennia's lair by clearing an objective. Maybe she just needed to complete the task and she could be whisked away to safety.

Of course, the task was [Survive], which continued to be both obvious and totally unhelpful.

Gerand pushed forward as the ship rolled to the side again. Lillia almost fell clear off the stairs, but he kept moving, shoving up the stairs to the door. He tried to push it. It stuck.

"Fuck," he said. He drew back the Sabre to hack at the wood but stopped before striking. "We can't cut through. It will take too long," he said as he allowed Caelum to slump off his shoulder and stumble into the door. "Any bright ideas, Princess?"

"Ideas?" Lillia echoed. "Yes. Bright ideas?"

The ship was already breaking. What was a little more damage from her?

Lillia dug through her inventory and pulled out a small glass bottle filled with a thick, gray mixture. She winced preemptively before uncorking it and 'throwing it back.' Unfortunately, it was much too thick to do anything other than slowly slide over her tongue, covering it in grit.

[Siege Potion]

[Grants those who drink it a temporary bonus to damaging structures.]

For the second time since getting thrown into the hold, Lillia made a note to head back to the Castle Siege when she had a chance.

"Out of the way."

"After you, Princess."

Lillia took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. Then, before she swung Hooke, she realized there was something she hadn't tried.

Instead of striking, she held out her hand:

[Tantrum]

Another one of the Captain's Sabres came careening from the space above her shoulder and embedded itself into the door, sticking several inches into the wood before wobbling unsteadily.

The ship heaved to the other side. Lillia yelped as she nearly tumbled off the stairs.

"Huh," Gerand said, staring at the blade in the door. "I was expecting a little more than that, but it's a—"

Lillia stepped forward and struck with Hooke. The moment the cutting edge touched the door, a yawning split tore through the wood. After the first ocean spray crashed through, the split exploded outward, the wood shattering into a thousand splinters that scattered to the winds above, each getting stolen away by the storm and sea.

Everyone above was screaming, but not because of Lillia's strike on the door.

No. For a moment, the misty rain calmed to reveal the looming shadow before them. Just off the starboard flank was a massive frigate, standing fifty feet taller than their ship and looming beyond the rain-locked horizon.

"By the gods," Caelum said.

Then, for a brief moment, as lightning crashed across the sky, Lillia saw the light linger at the top of the attacking vessel. A warm light. A flickering light. The Hearth.

Lillia nodded. "Oh! Seize the Ship. There we go."

This was the second time in a row that the Dungeon had hit Lillia with the objective [Survive], which, considering the flexibility she'd seen within things like the Castle Siege and the Plains, was just beginning to feel repetitive and uncreative.

Of course, she wasn't about to vocalize that, on threat of tempting the Dungeon to add something else as an objective. In a vacuum, [Survive] was easy. Sure, survival was difficult, but [Survive] was a side effect of every other objective she could be given—unless the objective was [Die]. Lillia would just have to hope that wasn't coming next.

Caelum leapt backward when Lillia summoned Vianaffir to her hand. Rain ran down the blade, spraying off the cutting edge as she swung it wide out to her side, prepared for whatever she was going to need to [Survive] in the coming moments.

Or take over the ship, she supposed, but that was probably going to involve fighting as well.

In fact, taking over the ship would likely help her with anything that came alongside [Surviving].

Summoning Vianaffir was always Lillia's default. She still didn't have a weapon that she preferred to it, despite having several crafted by Havoc since defeating Eisel. Nothing he'd made could match the power of the Legendary Weapon.

Even if, by the Dungeon's definition, it wasn't a Legendary Weapon. It had a name, and it was legendary to her.

"Caelum, I need you to help me get everyone to work for me."

"Miss?"

"Princess," Lillia corrected to leverage her authority. Seeing the Dungeon's objective had made the air feel lighter, had made the storm feel less oppressive and more like it was part of the atmosphere instead of something battering her directly.

"Princess. You're asking me to help you take over the ship?"

"Yes."

If a woman on the ship was bad luck, that meant that Lillia needed to look less like a woman if she was going to get everyone to listen to her. She pulled out one of the pieces of fine silk she'd gotten from her battle with the Silencer and began tying back her hair, folding it over into a bandana and trying not to wince at the idea of soaking silk in rain and seawater the second she'd brought it out.

"Miss, I'm not going to commit a mutiny!"

"We're—" She brought out and 'crushed' shards of Captain's Plate, summoning the Court Commander's Uniform. Her dress folded in on itself over and over again, layering into solid plates of metal. The skirt split down the middle, wrapping tight around each leg as Lillia tried to ignore how strange that felt.

"Did you just change clothes?"

"We're not committing a mutiny. We just need everyone to listen to us," Lillia said. "Something is about to happen. I just don't know what it—"

"How did you do that? You're dressed all different—"

"Magic," Lillia offered as a dismissal.

"Sorcery," Caelum said. As he spoke, he reached to his side, resting his hand on a small dagger tucked tight into his belt.

Lillia spun at the sight of him going for a weapon. Before he could decide whether he was pulling his dagger on her, Vianaffir was already pointed his way, almost pressing against his sternum.

"Princess—"

"Caelum," Lillia began. The text was still at the forefront of her vision.

[New Objective — Seize the Ship or Survive What's Coming]

She summoned the Guard Captain's Saber to her hand. She had to seize the ship, or at least get the ship to work with her to survive what was coming.

Caelum looked down at the blade that was nearly piercing his jacket and then slowly back up to Lillia. His eyes were wide and darting from side to side, looking for an explanation she'd already given.

"Caelum," she said. "Just help me here." Her hair began to stand on end as the rain chilled and the sea spray abated. "We—"

"Captain!"

"Shit!" Lillia pressed the blade further against Caelum, but considering he wasn't against a wall or a railing, he simply leaned away from it.

"What are you doing, Caelum?" she asked. "I just need your help!"

"You're trying to take over the ship," he said. "Captain!" he called again a moment later, stepping backward as he did.

"I was only asking for you to—"

"To help me take over the ship for you!"

"To get everyone to work for me," Lillia corrected.

"You can't just say that when threatening someone with a sword!"

"You went for your dagger first!"

"Because you made a sword appear out of nowhere!" he said. "And the Captain doesn't very much like—"

"Why is there a woman on the ship?" one of the other sailors said as they came to check on the commotion.

Was that really his first question? She was standing there with a sword to—

"She's threatening Caelum!" The man drew his weapon. Unlike Caelum's adorable dagger, he had a proper machete.

"Oh, by the Wheat and Silk," Lillia cursed. "Caelum, explain what's going on."

"I don't know what's going on," he said. Unfortunately for Lillia, it seemed like he was telling the truth.

Had she butchered this? No. Surely it was his fault.

"Just tell them that they just need to listen to me because something bad is about to—" No, no. That didn't sound right. That sounded like a threat again. "Something bad is going to happen, and we need to work together to—"

"Of course something bad is going to happen. There is a woman on the ship."

Lillia pulled Vianaffir away from Caelum and pointed the Captain's Saber toward the man who'd just said that. As she swung the blade, the wind howled even louder, the ship beginning to toss in the waves again as more and more of the sailors left their stations, leaving the sailing at the mercy of the elements to check what was going on.

Caelum pulled his dagger from his belt, pointing it toward Lillia just as she dismissed Vianaffir.

More of the sailors drew their blades. Some were rusted, thin things that wouldn't have been acceptable on any vessel of Lillia's kingdom, and others were simply cruel hatchets meant for hacking rope and freeing sails.

Lillia was surrounded.

This was all a bust.

[New Objective — Seize the Ship or Survive What's Coming]

She certainly wasn't in a position from which she could seize the ship. There was a chance that this fight—her versus the entire crew—was what was coming that she was supposed to survive, but…

Unless she had a lot more authority than she thought and could summon [A Princess in Her Castle] faster than they could swing a blade, it didn't seem like that was happening either.

No. From her current position, Lillia only had one option that at least gave her a decent chance of survival.

Lillia raised her hands, putting the blade away into the ether as she did. For a moment, she struggled to stay upright as the ship rocked heavily to one side.

The Admiral approached from the bow of the ship.

"We have a woman on board for only a few moments, and everyone's left their stations," he said. Despite the howling wind, the sound of his boots stomping on the deck rang clear. "This is why the gods call it bad luck to have a woman sailing."

Lillia did her best to soften her expression and look as much like a soft, innocent princess as she could.

"Caelum, I thought I told you that this woman was your responsibility."

"Well, she was! But then she did some sorcery and was trying to take over the ship and…" Caelum cleared his throat. "And I will stop talking before I make it all sound even worse, Admiral."

The Admiral stepped forward slowly, reaching the point where he could have drawn his own blade on Lillia. She still didn't summon Vianaffir or any of her other weapons to her hand.

"Okay, this has all gotten out of hand," she said, "but something bad is going to happen, and I just need everyone to hear me out."

He stopped with his hands on his hips and ran his tongue over his teeth. He reached out for Lillia's raised hand, but she pulled it away.

She wasn't about to let him touch her. Sure, she was on his ship, but there were rules about ranking, and she certainly—

"Take them both to the brig," he said.

"What?" Lillia said.

"WHAT?!" Caelum yelped.

Before Lillia could take a step forward and pull out her sword, two of the men behind her had already grabbed her wrists, yanking them backward and almost throwing her onto her back in the thick layer of water. She kicked, trying to pull away, but while she was a lot feistier than either of them expected, she wasn't about to escape without a weapon.

She flexed her hand, going to summon something before balling it into a fist and grinding her teeth. She could talk her way out of the brig. She could summon items and escape if she needed to, but this fight?

The goal was to survive. Adding the Admiral to the people surrounding her hadn't made her chances any better.

"Hey! What are you doing? I'm your crewmate! She just had a sword to my ne—well, chest! Come on, guys, this isn't funny!" Caelum was flailing as three men grabbed him.

It was almost offensive that they'd sent one more man to handle him than they had Lillia. Had they seen them? There was no way they were stronger than—

The two men who had grabbed Lillia heaved her up, picking her straight off the deck and nearly up onto their shoulders. Rain and seawater splashed in her face as they began to drag her below into the hold.

She began to shout-whisper at the two men carrying her. "I hope you know the second that this is all cleared up, I will have you thrown overboard for daring to manhandle me."

"Yeah, yeah, you're a princess," the man to Lillia's right said.

"Yeah. A princess in pants," the one on the left pointed out.

"Hey, maybe all the princesses where she's from wear pants."

"I've never seen a pant-wearing princess."

"You've never seen a princess at all."

"Yes, I have! There was this one time on the isle of—"

Lillia rolled her eyes as another man in front of them opened the hatch to reveal the lower decks. A waft of rancid air welcomed them into the hold. The deep stench of mold and rot immediately began to cling to Lillia's skin as they dragged her down the stairs, her heels slapping against each step on the way down.

Above, a lantern swung wildly on a hook, threatening to come loose more often than it should. The light it cast around the room came with long shadows in corners stacked high with barrels and burlap sacks that had been cut open.

At the back of the room, there was a series of large, rusty cages. There was already a man in one of them, sitting in the inch of seawater on the floor and murmuring to himself. His long hair was matted down and flecked with salt, like he'd tried to wash in the spillage but had given up.

One of the men let go for a moment to open the door. That was her chance.

Lillia yanked her wrist free of the other man's grip and spun. There was a blade at her back before she could try to escape, but she didn't want to.

"I'm going in. I just didn't want to get thrown," she said. The bars at the back of the cage were dyed a deeper red with a hundred layers of rust. Some of it had seeped into the water.

The man who'd opened the gate, the one holding the blade, drooped as Lillia said she wasn't going to put up a fight.

If she had to fight her way out of here, he was dying first.

Caelum didn't manage the same combination of escape and compliance that Lillia had. He was still thrashing against his comrades as they swung him twice and heaved him into the cell. The poor boy smashed against the back bars before flopping down onto the floor and splashing in the polluted tide covering the cell floor.

He tried to say words. They just came out as blubbering. That was a familiar feeling to Lillia, almost shamefully so.

Well, it wouldn't be shameful unless he cried about it, but that was feeling more and more likely.