Chapter 33 - The Hall of Memory

Lillia was falling.
Oh shit she was falling.
Lillia screamed.
Water.
Lillia choked before she understood what had hit her. She slammed her mouth shut, but water was already in her throat, her nose, her lungs. Soft light spun around her. The world tilted. Sank. Pulled.
The Usurper’s cloak was heavy on Lillia’s neck. She tried to undo the clasp, but there wasn’t one. Her fingers fumbled around the metal bauble on her neck. It was pulling her down. It was so heavy.
Her feet struck smooth, polished tile. The bottom.
She kicked upright and broke the surface, water at her chin, her head barely high enough to breathe.
Lillia dragged herself to the nearest wall. Her chest heaved as her body tried to force the water back out. It came too slowly, in thin, humiliating coughs.
Eventually, the choking slowed. Eventually, it stopped.
Lillia hung from the pool’s edge, white-knuckled and vacuuming down air.
The princess laid her head down into the shallow water, her cheek pressed against cool stone, just before the water would have touched her lips. She let the seconds tick by. Eventually, the heaving aftermath was replaced with the slow, steady, calm of rest.
Lillia opened her eyes.
She was in the baths, the place she had wandered into after Rickshaw’s Market. She had somehow dropped from the ceiling and into this room after her battle with Eisel. Aside from the cloak, she was naked. She was unarmed. She was ill-equipped. She didn’t know how she had gotten here.
Lillia curled her fingers. Her breathing unsteadied. She closed her eyes again. Eisel. The dungeon. Vianaffir.
She hadn’t been able to do anything. Lillia had tried so hard. Lillia had done everything she could. Lillia had lost handily. Lillia had lost, in every sense of the word. Lillia had lost, and Eisel had seemed bored to win.
How many times had Sir Nobody thrown himself against that wall? How many times before he decided that coming back from the land of wheat and silk wasn’t worth it? How many times was Lillia willing to do it?
Did willingness matter? She only had one charge of the hearth left.
The princess opened her eyes and stared at the glassy surface of the pool around her. She watched the soft ripples running across the surface from splashing water on the other side of the room.
She had been told she was being brought to a hearth. So what was this…
Lillia pushed herself off of the floor. Water cascaded from her sopping hair as she did. As soon as her hair was free from the water, it slapped against her side.
In the centre of the room, above the pillar from which all the statues borrowed their form, a fire burned.
It had not been there last time.
The flames did not steam. They did not gutter. They burned above the bathwater as if the room had always been built around them.
[Location - The Hearth of Memory]
Lillia blinked twice.
She tried to splash water at the text.
“YOU CAN TELL ME WHERE I AM!?”
Water fell uselessly through the glowing text before it changed.
[Lillia used Indignance - Level 2 - There was no target!]
“Yeah, yeah.”
Lillia sank into herself. Just another thing she didn’t know. Just another way she was a foolish little girl in over her head.
She lay back in the shallows. The cold crept over her exposed skin.
If the water had been warmer, it would have been so easy to stay there. Not forever, maybe. Just long enough to stop proving she was not good enough.
The mystery was kinder than failure. In the mystery, Lillia was still allowed to imagine a version of herself who won.
The cloak stuck to her skin, a reminder of the person who had given it to her. She tore at the clasp, attempting to rip the cloak off. The fabric of the cloak snapped back into the collar, but the collar held fast around Lillia’s throat. The rest vanished into her inventory.
“Damn it,” Lillia said as she lay down in the shallows pool. Her hair spread out around her in a wide wreath. It didn’t take long for the exposed part of her body to get cold.
If only she were more comfortable, it would have been so easy. She could have just kept lying there until it was all over. She didn’t need to learn that she wasn’t good enough if she didn’t try in the first place. The mystery was better than the failure. At least Lillia was allowed to imagine a world where everything went her way, instead of knowing that was where she wasn’t.
Now that Lillia was cold. Lillia needed to get up. Or at least get in one of the pools.
Lillia stood and shook the water out of her hair. Just as the wet slapping of hair on shoulders stopped. There was a voice.
“That you kid?”
Havoc.
Lillia broke into a sprint. Slowed because running on the smooth pool rock almost killed her. Stopped when Havoc said.
“Girl, don’t keep running. Ain’t got clothes on.”
Lillia had stopped on the right side of one of the statures, a crying lamb she recognized from her previous time in the room. Which meant—
There it was, just in front of Lillia.
A towering representation of her. Pristine blade in one hand, jug in the other, pouring water into the pool.
Something bitter clenched at the back of Lillia’s throat.
She was supposed to have that blade.
At least whoever had carved this place had believed she was worthy of it.
Whatever that was worth now.
Vianaffir. The knight had left her that blade and now she’d lost it. If she had just listened to Eisel and gone along with what he was saying, that would have been easier. That would have been so much easier. She could have looked like this statue or…
Lillia sniffed away the tears before they could come.
“You crying, girl?”
“No!” Lillia said a little too fast. She wasn’t crying yet. These tears weren’t worth it. She couldn’t get too used to crying. She sniffed again and then focused on counting deep breaths. She needed to focus on something other than the staute. “How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Heard you fall.”
“And you didn’t say anything?” Lillia asked. She didn’t like having to speak around the corner, but she refused to even picture what Havoc looked like without clothes.
“Seemed like you needed a moment” Havoc said.
“Didn’t think you were the kind to consider that,” Lillia answered. She sat on the edge of the pool her statue was pouring into. There was the mirror to her left. She didn’t look into it. She just wanted to be there becuase that water was warm.
“I had fourteen boys. There were a couple dozen girls among the grandkids. You learn.”
“Dozen?” Lillia asked.
Havoc chuckled.
Lillia pulled out her soap and set to work on her hair. Her breathing regulated as she began the process of washing it.
As the princess worked, the silence started to weigh on her shoulders. A mounting pressure of the things being left unsaid stacking up in the corners of the room.
“Havoc, you shouldn’t have—”
“Yep.”
“You didn’t have to—”
“I know.”
“Havoc, I come back if I die—”
“And so did I, kid.” Lillia heard the growl of frustration lingering on his voice. “You made sure of that. So stop telling me what I shouldn’ta done.”
“Well—”
“Because I know! Alright? I know. I know it was dumb to jump in front of ya and take that hit, but you go stare at a scared little girl on the ground about to get stabbed and tell me what you’re gonna do.”
“Havoc.”
“Because I’m a lot of things, and I been here a long time. But I’m glad this place didn’t change this about me. So stop trying to argue and—”
“Havoc, I’ve been trying to say thank you.”
Havoc had been splashing during his rant. Hititng the suface of the water with his fists and adding the echoing slosh to the sound of the room. That echo faded and Lillia heard him slowly put his hands back in the water.
“Yer welcome kid.”
Lillia kept trying to scrub her hair. There, thankfully, wasn’t as much grime to remove as the previous time, but the was still enough that her past self would have been theroughly horrified.
“So, you said you have fourteen boys? That must have been—”
“I said what I said. You ain’t gotta hear the whole life story.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
Lilla finished her hair and glanced over her shoulder to the mirror. She should have checked it, tried to get more information about her skills and adventuring but—
None of it had been enough anyway, right?
“So if you have kids. And a family outside.”
“You’re still talking?”
“Then how did you end up in here?”
Havoc didn’t answer. Lillia heard the water slosh as he shifted himself uncomfortably on the other side of the statues.
Lillia spoke up. “You don’t have—”
“I don’t remember,” Havoc said. “I know what I had—I-I know what I have. I know that I made a choice to come here to help them and, well…”
Lillia slipped into the warm water itself. “So it’s like a job?”
It was impossible to be sure, but she was fairly sure she heard Havoc break at that question.
“Girl, do you even know what a job is?”
“Of course. My job is to be a princess.”
“Princess is a title.”
“And a job! And we had staff, Havoc.”
“Oh good, you clearly understand a hard days’ work then….No,” Havoc said. “It wasn’t like a job. This ain’t a job anyone would want.”
Water shifted on the other side of the statues.
“I took an offer. That’s all I remember.”
Lilla looked down at herself. At the massive bruise that was forming where the stained glass spike at hit her.
If she was lucky, her deal wasn’t the same as Havoc’s. She still didn’t know what the text had done. She didn’t know how it had dragged them all the way here.
She only knew this was the second bargain she had accepted in the dungeon without understanding the price.
Or at least, if the first hadn’t been a dark deal, then it had been offered by a dark person.
Whatever it was, now Lillia had to take things into her own hands.
And find Havoc some clothes.
Lillia turned to the mirror. As she gazed into her eyes—and tried to ignore the bags under them—the text slowly started to impose itself on the screen.
The princess took a deep breath and put the soap away.
Sure it would have been easier to just lay down there and stop fighting. It would have been easier to accept whatever fate was coming for her, but that wasn’t about to happen.
She could do this. They could do this. They could conquer it together. Beat the dungeon. Put Eisel in his place. Invite a million grandkids to the castle.
They even had the room.
First things first. How much information could Lillia pull out of this mirror.