Chapter 19 & 20 - Lillia the Huntsmaster

Lillia and Havoc stood three steps down from the second-floor landing, staring into the darkness below.
The fourth step would not let her exist on it.
She hadn’t been shoved back. She didn’t bounce off anything. She simply stayed in place when she meant to move forward. It wasn’t so much a wall as the universe clearing its throat and suggesting she try something else.
“See, I told you,” Havoc said. He had a small pack over his shoulder and a few burnt-out sticks tucked under one arm, prepared either way.
“I could just walk down to the exit,” Lillia said. “Four floors isn’t that far.”
“Four floors, not counting the rooms.”
“I know. I can’t count the rooms.”
Lillia wasn’t carrying a bag. Being an adventurer apparently meant having an infinite abyss somewhere inside her, one that currently held dresses, chitin, leather bandages, and two of Havoc’s hammers.
Her hammerspace.
With the stairs out, she turned to the fields door—wooden, towering, far larger than the door to the Architect’s challenge had been. She couldn’t remember if it had always been that big. Worse, she couldn’t decide which answer would be more comforting.
Lillia looked to Havoc then the door, then Havoc, then the door again. When she went for one more glance at him, he cut her off.
“Kid. You said you’d go in there if the stairs didn’t work.”
“Yes.”
“The stairs didn’t work.”
“Also yes.”
“So you’re ready.” He didn’t phrase it as a question. Lillia didn’t move anyway.
Havoc’s eyes searched her from hat to heels, hunting for any sign the stock-still princess planned to become less stock-still. Eventually he huffed. “You’re not waiting on some kind of speech, are you?”
“What?” That broke her out of it.
“I’d hear ’em through the trapdoor. Some guy telling the girl how she could really do this. How she was so brave and strong.”
“That’s nice.”
“It was bullshit. They only ever said it to the one going down first.”
Lillia’s smile flattened. “That was not the moral I wanted.”
She tried to stare him down and lost, fidgeting first—adjusting her garish yellow hat, fixing the neckline of her red dress, crouching to check the strap on her heel.
“Are you seriously wearing those shoes?”
“They’re the only ones I have! The others are ruined.”
“They’ll get stuck in the mud.”
“Ew. You think there’s going to be mud?”
Havoc looked at the field door. “Kid. I think that room likes hearing questions like that.”
Then the hobgoblin swear words came back.
She gave him space to finish, took two breaths at the towering door, and let the dread settle in. There could be a monster in there. There could be nothing in there. Rickshaw could be in there. Her throat went tight, her palms damp. Even the inventory inside her seemed to be holding its breath.
A heavy hobgoblin hand landed on her shoulder. Lillia cracked one eye to find Havoc reaching up for the reassuring gesture, care buried somewhere under all that thick, leathery skin.
“Kid. Even if you die, you come back.”
Lillia opened her eyes.
What.
That was it? Those were the words?
“Havoc… I suppose I appreciate the sentiment.”
“You’ll be fine. Stick far back, spray the goo, hit it with the shouty thing.” He patted her twice. “You’ll do fine, kid. Hopefully. Maybe.”
“If you’d stopped before ‘hopefully,’ that would’ve been nice.”
“You want me to lie to you?”
“I want you to believe in me,” Lillia said. “More than I do. So yes. Lie to me a little.”
“Why?”
“Because I grew up in court, Havoc. Everyone lies constantly and somehow it works. Right now I need you to tell me I’ll be fine, that the hour we spent swinging this dumb maul mattered, and that killing the Architect wasn’t a fluke because I am obviously tremendously talented.”
“But none of that’s true.”
“None of this is true!” She grabbed his shoulders. “I shouldn’t be working, Havoc. I am not supposed to be here. But I am, so lie to me!”
Havoc scratched behind one long ear, nails scraping flaky skin. “Uh. Yeah. You’re gonna do great in there.”
She let go and pressed her palm to the door. “Now it just feels forced.”
“It was.”
She leaned her forehead against the rough planks. “Thanks, Havoc. I’m going to go stand in some grass. Maybe work on the reassuring thing while I’m gone.”
“I have better things to do.”
“Thanks, Havo—”
The door gave beneath her weight.
“AHH!”
She landed face-first in grass.
Actual grass. Dirt under her palms. Stems against her cheek. For one beautiful, humiliating second, Lillia thought she’d fallen outside.
The door slammed shut behind her. The boom snapped her up and around. There was text on it.
[Welcome to the Hunting Grounds!]
[You are free to leave at any time.]
[Bring pelts to the Huntsmaster in the Hunting Lodge to receive rewards.]
[Completion Condition: Impress the Huntsmaster.]
[Pelts Collected: 0]
[Predators Slain: 0]
[Secrets Collected: 0]
She read it twice. One line stuck.
[Secrets Collected: 0]
What kind of maniac came to a place like this and wasted time collecting secrets instead of leaving? Lillia decided, immediately and confidently, that this was irrelevant.
She turned around to a vast field and an endless horizon. Blue sky. Sunlight.
For one impossible second, she forgot the dungeon existed.
Then she saw the seams. There was no warmth in the light, and when she stared, dark-blue lines crossed the sky—ceiling stones showing through. She was not outside. Of course she wasn’t.
A breeze rolled over the horizon and pushed the grass toward her in one smooth wave. She caught the brim of her cap before it flew off. Not outside. Still better than anywhere she’d been recently.
In the distance, hazy, stood a towering tree bent at strange angles, its trunk splitting into hundreds of branches. A single shadow slipped from the canopy and climbed into the sky. Lillia smiled. Even here, there was something freeing about a bird.
Then she looked back at the tree.
There were two trees now. When she looked right, there was a third. Hills rose behind her. Ravines carved themselves into the earth whenever she glanced away. The room never changed while she watched—only while her attention slipped, building itself at the edges of her vision.
Havoc had been wrong. This wasn’t an empty field. It was an ecosystem, and it had been waiting for her to wake it up.
Which left a problem. The door and its wall were painted the same false blue as the sky. Walk too far into a landscape that rearranged itself every time she blinked, and “free to leave at any time” wouldn’t mean much if she couldn’t find the way out.
Standing by the door until prey wandered close lasted about a second as a plan. The dungeon had never once let her solve anything safely. If it counted as something that thought—and Havoc swore it did—it wasn’t going to be fooled by cowardice in a nice hat.
She pulled out the Spellmaul, wincing as ichor dripped into the grass and left it blackened and rotted. Then she swung it into the door. A spike bit deep; she pressed, twisted, and tore it free. A chunk of wood came with it, leaving a black wound in the sky-blue door.
A scar in the sky. One she could follow home.
If Havoc had seen that, he’d have had no choice but to believe in her. Or he’d tell her she’d ruined perfectly good wood. Probably the latter.
She walked out into the grass, heels digging into the dirt. She’d never been allowed on her father’s hunts, but she’d heard him talk about them often enough.
How different could it be?
 
The creatures kept looking up.
That was the first thing Lillia noticed. Not the antlers. Not the matted black fur. Not the fact that they looked almost like deer, if deer had been assembled from a frightened description.
The looking up.
She’d crept through the grass an inch at a time, knees bent, breath trapped. From the horizon, the shadow under the twisting tree had looked like one patch of dark. Up close it was a herd—grazing, mostly ignoring the grass around them, except that every so often one would lift its head, stare into the branches, and keep chewing. Then another would take over. Not nervous, exactly. Practiced.
At least they were facing the wrong way. That was comforting.
Probably.
She wanted to call out Vianaffir, but Havoc told her to practice with the maul if she found something harmless.
Lillia pulled out the Spellmaul. She ate meat at feasts all the time; this was the same, she was simply nearer the cleaver end of it. Her mouth went dry anyway. Her grip turned clammy.
One beast stood apart from the rest—frailer, though she couldn’t tell if that meant young or old. She held the maul out at arm’s length, leaving a black smear across the plain where the ichor ate the grass. Her shoulder ached almost immediately, but she was not about to get any of this on her dress.
One breath. Two.
Something chirped in the tree. The creature flinched, head snapping up.
She took the third breath anyway and leapt, swinging wild.
It connected. She felt the awful resistance of flesh against spike, and the iron smell of blood hit the back of her nose. The beast bleated and wrenched away. She heaved the maul up for a second blow—
—and the thing slipped aside with shocking grace. The Spellmaul buried itself in the dirt, flinging earth in every direction. By the time Lillia dragged it free, the bleat had been answered. Then answered again. The whole herd came apart and fled into the savanna at a pace she had no hope of matching.
The one she’d hit ran with a limp, black blood sheeting down its side, until distance swallowed it.
This didn’t feel like hunting. It felt like murder in installments.
She wiped the maul on the grass and watched the blades wither. Havoc had called this a weapon of attrition. He hadn’t mentioned that attrition meant the target got to look at her while it bled.
She missed venison. Her father used to boast about his hunts—the cornering, the perfect killing shot, all of it somehow gentle—and she’d clapped while the servants carried the meat to the table. Funny, the parts he left out.
The herd had scattered and then bunched up again under another massive tree, this one at the lip of a ravine. Carrying her father’s words, Lillia circled until the herd stood between her and the drop. If they bolted, they’d have fewer directions to run.
It was almost clever.
The second approach was harded. The herd had trampled the grass flat, leaving her to crawl from one thin patch of cover to the next—and she couldn’t tell which beast she’d wounded. Black fur, black blood, all of them identical, all of them targets. She tightened her grip. No skins, no impressing the Huntsmaster; no impressing the Huntsmaster, no leaving. Simple as that.
She had to keep going, even if it meant hitting every beast in the damn herd twice.
Then she found it—near the base of the tree, slower than the rest, spine sagging, one leg trembling each time it shifted its weight.
Just once more. One more, and she’d have something to bring home.
She sprang from the grass, maul wide. The nearest beasts bleated, the sound rippling through the herd, and they began to run.
Her first steps were careful. The next were desperate. By the time the wounded one looked at her, she was running too hard to stop.
She had wanted fewer directions for them to run.
Too late, she realized she was standing in one of them.
A beast crashed into her side, dodging the rest of the stampede. They were thin and wiry—but only for things their size. Lillia’s feet left the ground. She hit the dirt shoulder-first, curled into a ball, and braced for something horrible as hooves hammered past her ears.
Nothing came.
She was alone in the grass, spitting dust. At least, she thought she was alone.
One beast remained under the tree—the wounded one, leaning into the gnarled bark for support, blood and ichor running down its side. Close enough, now, to hear it whimper.
Lillia got up, choosing not to count how many times she’d been knocked on her backside today. The creature watched her, tired, resigned. She raised the maul.
Something screeched above the plains. Thin. Metallic. Far away, but not far enough.
She checked the grass behind her. Nothing.
The beast looked up at the canopy.
Lillia struck.
The crunch went straight through her. One spike sank into the glassy eye that had been staring at her, and the beast was limp before it hit the ground. Around the wound, the flesh pulled back and corroded, as though it had been infected for weeks.
The field went quiet. The insects stopped. The wind stalled. Even the distant herd had fallen silent, the whole ecosystem pausing to register what she’d done.
Something caught in her throat.
Another screech. Closer.
She searched the grass. The ravine. The empty horizon.
Nothing.
The dead beast’s eye stared past her. Not at her. Past her.
Up.
The canopy shattered—branch and leaf giving way to a blaze of gold-tan feathers, bronze scales, and talons like curved swords, each scythe of a claw as long as Lillia’s leg. The creatures had been watching the sky the whole time.
Lillia screamed.
The monster didn’t bother with its talons.
It landed.
And on the grass beneath the tree, Lillia became a red smear across her very first trophy.