Book 2 | Chapter 7 | The First Fourth Room

Door number one was lighter than Lillia expected. It looked as if it were made of stone, but the second she touched it, the door flung open much too fast, rocketing inward and slamming against the inner wall on the other side.
That was one way to check a corner.
But in that moment, Lillia wasn’t focused on avoiding someone hiding in the doorway; instead, she was focused on the amount of glittering light pouring from the room before her.
Instead of walls, the room was lined with brilliant cabinets with expensive glass ‘windows’ in each of the doors. It was extravagance beyond even what Lillia had seen in the castle. Who would waste something as expensive as glass on something as trivial as a cabinet door?
Someone with damned good taste.
In each of the cabinets, there was something Lillia could only describe as fog. The thick clouds within stopped short of pressing on the glass, but they lingered in the space, swirling with each of Lillia’s glances, as if her attention was moving them.
Just when she’d begun flickering her gaze to test the theory, someone spoke.
“That you, Darling?”
Lillia perked up. “Rickshaw?”
“Ey! It is you. Look at you. Making it all the way to the fourth floor of the Fall. Downright little champion princess we’ve got here.”
Lillia stepped into the room and the door slammed shut behind her. As it did, the ambient light in the room dimmed to a flickering, warm candlelight that brought out all the life in the wooden floor and cabinets.
Along the back wall of the room was a long bar-like counter. Lillia recognized the look of it from a tavern, though she’d never stayed in one herself.
Rickshaw, the skeletal merchant, stood behind the counter, wrapped in his usual thick shawl, the golden orb within his eye socket glowing a deep, welcoming amber.
“Good to see you, darling. It’s been too long. Though—uh…” Rickshaw leaned to the side, trying to look over Lillia’s shoulder or behind her back. “You didn’t bring any corpses with you this time. Did ya?”
Lillia checked over her shoulder. “No?”
“Oh, good. Good. Still haven’t quite got all the blood out of the Traveling Market,” he said as he straightened himself out. “Turns out that bastard had magical blood. Stuff stains whatever it touches and keeps running even when it shoulda dried.” He sighed despite his lack of lungs. “Ruined two perfectly good mops trying to get rid of all the mess.”
“I’m sorry,” Lillia said. She kept the apology formal and slightly distant, hopefully falling short of sounding like she was offering to do anything about Eisel’s blood. It sounded gross.
“I appreciate the sentiment,” Rickshaw said. “I really do, but—well, let’s just be glad that ain’t where we are right now so I don’t need to ask for your help.”
“Because you don’t want to ask for it?”
“Because I don’t think that a princess is going to make a cleaning crew worth hiring, and I don’t know whether you being grossed out or generally polite would win out.”
It took Lillia a moment to untangle whether that was a compliment or not. The results were inconclusive.
“Where are we, anyway?” Lillia asked. They were on the fourth floor, but this certainly wasn’t anything close to the market she’d seen before. It was less nautical, if nothing else.
“Oh, this?” Rickshaw began. “This is a storefront of mine. One of many. Gotta have places in a lot of dungeons to make a profit, right?”
“So when—”
“Yeah, when I said I had to go for other customers before, it was for places like this,” Rickshaw said. “Ain’t twelve-gate hex studies or anything, but I get it. Magic is complicated.”
Lillia walked further into the room and peered around in an attempt to see within any of the cabinets. In the Traveling Market, the markets she was far from had fallen out of focus. The clouds might have been the equivalent of that, but even as she approached, they didn’t clear to reveal items inside.
Rickshaw was suddenly beside her. Lillia yelped as she jumped away from him.
“Trying to shop?” he asked.
“I was, but—”
“Yeah. Can’t be the first room on the floor, unfortunately,” he said. “Gotta have a Hearth there to get everything set up. Think about how it was upstairs. Right?”
“I need to have the Hearth ready?” she asked.
Rickshaw nodded, then patted her shoulder as if she’d just said something adorable.
“Hey, I didn’t exactly see a corpse out there that I can use to activate the Hearth,” Lillia said.
“A corpse?” Rickshaw asked.
“Yeah. A corpse. Sir Nobody?”
“Who?”
That was fair. Sir Nobody was just the name Lillia had given Vianaffir’s previous owner. Just because Havoc and Cathria understood who he was didn’t mean he didn’t need introductions.
“Okay, so when I found the dungeon the first time, Sir Nobody was a dead man who was on the stairs below the Hearth. I didn’t know I needed to throw his bones into the—”
Rickshaw waved off Lillia’s explanation before she could turn it into a moderately successful novel retelling her adventures.
“Activating the Hearth last time. Understood, Darling,” he said. “You don’t gotta explain everything. Just remember, I’m in a lot of places. I know a lot about dungeons, but I’m not an encyclopedia of the mechanics of every dungeon.”
Lillia nodded along again. “Okay, then how do you normally activate a Hearth?” she asked. “If the whole bones thing is weird,” she said.
“Bones are pretty normal. You usually just don’t name ’em.” As Rickshaw spoke, he sat back as if there was a chair there to catch him, and suddenly there was one. The same old wooden chair from their first encounter rose out of the floor and caught him before he could clatter to the floor.
“I just need to go find bones?” Lillia asked.
“Firstly, don’t appreciate how you look at me when you say that, Darling,” Rickshaw said. “Secondly, only kinda. Some Hearths are activated by proximity. Others by finishing a room. Some by starting a room.”
There was a reason he had left that one until last. “I need to start a different room.”
Rickshaw nodded.
“And the door might close behind me. Which would lock me down here.”
“And that part I don’t know,” he said. “But hey, if you got here once, you can probably do it again ri…” It was clear that Lillia wasn’t confident in that idea, so he pivoted. “Well, you know the way down here at least.”
Lillia looked back over her shoulder to the door. That was going to be an issue. Sure, she did know how to get back down here, but she didn’t have a Hearth to teleport to from the Hearth of Memory, and if she couldn’t do that, she would need to go through Nennia’s lair again.
For many obvious reasons, she wasn’t sure she could do that again.
“Understood, darling,” Rickshaw said. “Intimidating, I know, but what about this hasn’t been for you?”
Lillia chuckled at that point.
“Do your best and keep on swinging. That’s all we gotta do in a place like this.”
“Thanks, Rickshaw.”
“Course. After all—what’s a couple of memories for another chance?”
“Yeah, I—wait.” She slowly turned to Rickshaw, who was walking back over to the counter, as if he hadn’t just said something that really begged elaboration. “What do you mean?”
“What do I mean with what?” he asked.
“Rickshaw.”
“Lillia,” he echoed in a tone that told her he was actually baffled by her question.
She took a quick breath to step off the path to bickering. “What do you mean when you say a couple of memories?”
“Well.” Rickshaw leaned back against the counter. As he did, his cloak slightly parted, revealing the void within. “What’s some unimportant name from your life back before?”
“Unimportant name?”
“Oh, don’t pretend you’re not a princess. How many servants did you have?”
“Well—”
“It ain’t no judgment! I would love to have a servant around. I’m just asking for some names.”
“Otto and Sven threw me in here,” Lillia said.
“You were thrown in here by your own servants?”
“My guards.”
“Weird way to guard someone. Keep going.”
“Nicole. Who was one of the handmaids. Same name as one of the spider girls.”
Rickshaw nodded. Instead of speaking, he simply motioned for Lillia to continue.
When she tried to oblige, something caught her tongue. It wasn’t a harsh catch like Eisel’s curse had been. Nothing was stopping her so much as she realized she didn’t have anything to say.
But no, no, that wasn’t right. There were a ton of people around the castle. Nicole had been her handmaiden for a long time, one of the few who had stuck with her through her aunt’s takeover, but there had also been…
“Mary-Anne!” Lillia said, a little too excited. As soon as she said the name, she realized it was more that it sounded correct than anything to do with remembering a face connected to that name.
No. There had been more than three. She could remember their faces. She knew that one of the servers in the kitchen got way too many freckles during the summer months. She knew that the stable hand who fetched her horse for her had a scar above his eye where he’d been kicked by…
“Yeah, sorry, I wasn’t intending to drop a revelation. Hard to know what you know and what you don’t at this point, Darling,” Rickshaw said as he scratched his skull. “Sometimes you hit me with some stuff I don’t even know, and other times you don’t even know about level burn.”
“Level burn?”
Rickshaw pointed at Lillia and then flopped his hands down against the counter like she was the unbelievable one. How was this her fault? As far as she knew, he was just making things up to make her feel like she was out of the loop.
Well, she certainly was out of the loop, but he didn’t need to make her feel that way.
“Level burn is the fact that it takes a little, small bit of experience to wake up every morning. Think of it like a tax on—You ever paid taxes, kid?”
Lillia shook her head. “But I know what they are. My Mom was in charge of those.”
“Lucky woman. Would have loved to see the other side of the…” Rickshaw clicked a tongue that wasn’t there. “You know. Come to think about it, that’s just me leaning into the idea of being a merchant. No taxes in the dungeon. Neither of us has ever paid taxes. Lucky us.”
Lillia waited for Rickshaw to continue his original point, but he was trapped in the toothiest of smiles upon the revelation that he’d beaten both death and taxes.
“Lucky us,” she eventually echoed.
When Rickshaw still hadn’t continued, Lillia eschewed the waiting part of politely waiting. “Okay, so I lose experience every morning?”
“Oh! Yeah. You do. Only really matters if you take a bunch of days off in a row, though. Supposed to keep you moving.”
“And the more important thing. The memory part?” Lillia asked.
“Oh! Thought I explained that part. There ain’t really much to say there, Darling. Each time you die, you pay a little more tax—there it is again—to the reaper. He takes a couple thoughts from your head and sends ya back here. You know, if here is where you wanna go.”
“I can choose somewhere else?”
“You can always end up a skeleton like me,” Rickshaw pointed out. “Though, I can’t offer any guarantees about life after death. That part is a Rickshaw exclusive.”
Lillia didn’t follow the last part of the joke. She was stuck further back in the conversation, waiting for the revelation to get out of her way.
Each time she died, she paid in a memory.
That was important. That was critical, wasn’t it? The whole point of her time in here was so that she could escape and get back to the surface. To the place she remembered!
But—
In that moment, that wasn’t the point tugging at Lillia’s thoughts. The memories made sense. Havoc struggled to remember his family. Sir Nobody hadn’t called anyone out by name in his letter.
No, what stuck in the back of Lillia’s mind was that she couldn’t put her finger on any memories she’d lost. She hadn’t even noticed something missing. A hundred conversations with Havoc and Cathria about her life before the dungeon, and she’d never noticed the holes in her thoughts.
Losing the memories was an important revelation.
But it paled in comparison to the revelation of how unimportant most of her previous memories were. How few moments of her life were worth remembering? How few days mattered?
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.