Book 2 - Chapter 4 - Narratively Satisfying - Part 2/3

Lillia ‘landed’. She didn’t know where or how, but at some point she stopped falling.
In truth, she knew how it happened; she just simply wasn’t interested in accepting how many separate webs she was tangled in at the moment. Plus, it was easy to ignore, considering she was in darkness so absolute it was easy to forget whether her eyes were open or closed.
On the upside, denial. On the downside, she would never see the other children coming.
Lillia tried to wiggle herself out of whatever bind she was in, but without seeing the braided strands of webbing, it was hard to tell which were in the way. That, and even if she untangled herself successfully, she didn’t know how much further there was to fall.
Was there even a bottom?
“Well shoot.”
After swinging, Lillia was slowly spinning in her webbed prison. She was probably getting more and more tangled with each rotation, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Or at least, she was going to have to do it in steps.
Lillia tried to get her hands together, but they were each too wrapped in their own ordeals to reach. In fact, she was well-splayed, like Nennia had somehow calculated how she would land in the webs when she’d pulled the ‘ground’ out from under her.
“First things first. Let’s not think about how gross this all is,” Lillia said. Of course, a shiver immediately rallied, ready to shoot down her spine once the statement brought on realization. “Second things second. I should see.”
Three burnmite cloths.
Usually, the dress would bloom outward from her, expanding in every direction and flowing with each movement. Due to her current predicament, the fabric stayed locked tight against her skin.
Luckily, even bound, the Inferno Spelldress’s fiery stitching glowed bright enough to provide some light, enough to glisten off the thousand silver threads around her in a glittering cascade almost pretty enough to smother the horror of being upside down—apparently—in the Spider Queen’s web.
[Inferno Spelldress - 3 x Burnmite Cloth]
[Searing Hot - Once per day, the Princess can empower her weapon strikes with fire damage for a short time. This effect ends if the Spelldress is removed.]
[Up to three times per day, prevents fire damage to the Princess. Fire damage absorbed this way recuperates the use of Searing Hot.]
Seeing was one item struck off the list of things Lillia needed to do to escape. Fire could have taken care of the rest—and probably sent Lillia back to the Cathedral for good measure—but, unfortunately, they’d already tested the Inferno Spelldress and discovered that her empowered sword did fire damage, but it couldn’t ignite anything.
At the time, that had felt like a saving grace.
Something moved in the shadow beyond the glittering reflections in the web.
“Hey kids,” she began. “It’s your Aunt Lillia here. Or…I don’t know if your mom calls me Aunt Lillia or just a friend or…Godmother of something? It’s… I don’t know if she talks to you at all.”
She cleared her throat as the shadows continued to move.
“I know your mom and I are a little touch and go right now…but I don’t think she’d like it if something happened to any of you. So if you could all just stay away while I figure this out, that would be lovely.”
Nothing.
Lillia scanned the darkness, flicking her eyes back and forth to try to see something in the abyss of black beyond her ambient glow.
How scared would she have been when she first fell down into the dungeon if she’d ended up here? Would she have been a terrified, babbling little thing? Would she have even managed to make half a plan?
Had she really changed that much in forty days?
Or was it simply a matter of knowing that, whatever horrible things happened, they would be over as soon as she died and she’d be back in the…somewhat comfortable Cathedral.
Lillia Ashvalin was getting a little cavalier about death, a clear sign of mental stability.
“Alternatively, if you’re open to listening, kids. You could let your Aunt Lillia down? Let me out of the web and I’ll just go ahead and fumble my way out of here, if you don’t mind.”
There was nothing in response to that either.
“Bit of a big ask there. I get it.”
While the spelldress had provided some light, Lillia was no closer to seeing the ground or understanding where she was. Every direction ended in a void of darkness. In fact, she’d fallen so far that she couldn’t see the blue light of the cavern she had fallen out of.
It might have made sense, considering there was an entire castle and a savanna in some of the other rooms, but she hadn’t expected Nennia’s lair to be this big. Or at least, after crawling through it as much as she had, she hadn’t expected to find herself in such a large somewhere she’d never been.
Lillia tried to bring her hands together again. That hadn’t changed. If anything, swapping dresses had gotten her more stuck.
Following that logic, there was a world in which she could have tried taking everything off to escape, but that would mean touching all of this with her bare skin, which…ew.
No. Lillia was headed one way, and that way was down. If that ended horrifically on a stone floor, at least it meant this would all be over.
In the corner of Lillia’s vision, the shadows began to move again. The webs binding her began to vibrate as something else moved along them.
“Okay, well, bye, I guess.”
Lillia stretched her fingers out to the void below her.
[Tantrum]
Hooke flew from the space in front of her fingers and spun end over end, flying a whole several feet before ending up so tangled in webs that it ground to a stretching halt. A cascade of broken threads fell in its wake, and Lillia gasped as she dropped several inches, but didn’t fall.
It was something, but she’d kind of been hoping for more.
Time for something more manual. Lillia summoned Vianaffir to her more-free hand and swung it once. Similarly to Hooke, it didn’t get far before becoming so tangled that a cutting edge meant nothing. Still, the webbing holding her arm sagged as it lost support. Progress.
Lillia called Vianaffir back to her inventory and then reset it into her hand.
The webs that had been wrapped around the blade fell around her, and absolutely none of them got into her hair. None of them were tangled in there and matting it down, and she wasn’t going to feel them on her neck later. Nope.
With a fresh blade, Lillia returned to cutting. Each swing and reset took down more of the webbing, until denial couldn’t carry the load any longer and Lillia was stuck with the fact that she was going to be more spiderweb than princess by the time she escaped Nennia’s lair.
Or killed Nennia, as was probably what she needed to do, but there was an order to her problems.
The next slash was followed by Lillia’s shriek as she fell several feet, her left leg now almost completely free.
Okay, so she could cut herself free, but there was still the matter of what happened after. Escape didn’t mean much if freedom meant free fall.
Lillia put Vianaffir away and pulled out the Amulet of the Creator. While she’d already used Cathria’s summon for the day on her conversation in the Hunting Grounds, she still had someone else she could use for help.
“Hey. Uh. Sorry if you just fall and shatter, but…you come back. You know.”
She tapped the centre of the Amulet and the Glass Spellmite popped into existence in front of her. For a moment, it floated impossibly, hanging in the air before Lillia, then, as soon as it looked down, it fell, vanishing into the darkness with a soft whistle.
Based on how fast the crack of glass against stone came, it didn’t vanish very far.
“Glass Spellmite, I name you my champion.”
Rose-gold glitter outlined the Spellmite. Below Lillia, just far enough that the glow of the Inferno Spelldress didn’t illuminate it, was the ground.
This whole time, if she’d fallen, it would have hurt, but it wouldn’t have been the end of anything. She’d tumbled from further heights several times, mostly from the castle walls post-trebuchet.
“You good there, buddy?”
The Glass Spellmite offered a thumbs-up.
“Little help?”
Unfortunately, despite jumping in an attempt to help, the Glass Spellmite was fully and completely ‘a little guy,’ and reaching Lillia was out of the question.
“And no volunteers from among the kids?” Lillia asked.
Something shifted in the webs beyond the darkness again, but outside of that, Nennia’s children seemed happy to observe for the time being.
Whatever. Fine. Being an independent woman was the fucking worst.
Lillia restarted the process of hacking away at the bonds around her. With each cut, her situation became more precarious, with each slice feeling as if it would be the one that sent her tumbling down to the floor.
Twice she tried to shoo the Glass Spellmite away in case she landed on him, but both times, it’d eventually scampered back over after she almost dropped out of the web, jumping up to try to catch her.
The enthusiasm was infectious. Lillia swung Vianaffir a little too hard and almost took off her foot as she carved through the thickest braided rope wrapped around her leg. Suddenly, she was weightless.
Then she wasn’t, because a new rope shot out of the darkness and wrapped around Lillia’s leg.
“Hey! Come on! I just spent way too long getting out of that.”
A second rope snapped around the throat of the Glass Spellmite, and then yanked hard, slamming it down to the side. It shattered on the floor.
“Catty!”
Lillia called Vianaffir back to her hand, fresh and free of webbing. Just as she was about to take out the new rope around her leg, a fresh coat of silk launched from the darkness and smothered her hand.
“Hey! Woah, woah. Stop, stop. Please!”
It had been hard, between the clinking of the Glass Spellmite—Catty—and the sound of her own overenthusiastic slashing, to hear anything out in the darkness, but now that there was only her heaving breath, Lillia could hear something, or someone, murmuring.
Over a series of back-and-forths, the murmuring conversation escalated from soft voices to whisper-shouting.
“She said please.”
“Yeah, but Mom doesn’t send anyone down here unless we’re supposed to eat ’em.”
“You’re the one who told me to wait.”
“Yeah, because the things Mom sends down here aren’t usually pretty!”
“So, we just don’t eat the pretty things?”
“I don’t know. But do YOU wanna go ask Mom?”
“I’m not asking Mom. It’s your question!”
“It’s not my question. I just wanted to wait and see what she did.”
“So we eat her.”
“But now she’s being polite!”
“We’ve eaten polite things.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t like it as much.”
Lillia summoned Vianaffir to one hand, and then the Black Beast she’d never gotten around to offering Nennia flopped onto the ground below her with a wet plop.
The voices stopped.
“I don’t know if I get an official vote,” Lillia said, “but as another princess, I vote that princesses shouldn’t be allowed to eat each other.”
The webs around Lillia pulled tighter, and suddenly she was being reeled in. Slowly but surely, she was pushed through the darkness until the edge of her dress’s glow revealed sixteen wide, red eyes staring at her.
Half-spiders, like Nennia.
On one hand, that made Lillia feel like she had a chance.
On the other hand, that brought up so many questions.