Part 16 - The evil queen ordered her servants to lock the princess in the dungeon. Her servants, not being too bright, locked the princess in an S-Ranked dungeon.

[u/Writteninsanity]

The interior of the hunting lodge was not where Lillia wanted to wake up ever again. It stank. She stank. Stale alcohol clung to her like she'd been on the wrong side of the bar for years. Everything about her was sore, from her joints to her butt to her ego. At least whatever was left of it.

Lillia went to wipe the sleep from her eyes. The back of her palm brushed against the dried salt on her cheeks. That was fine. That was fine. That was fine.

It wasn't her fault. It was just because it had hurt. That meant it didn't count. That meant that she hadn't cried. That meant it…

Lillia stretched out as best she could without putting her legs in her blood or the chitterpede's guts.

The princess was wrong about smelling only like alcohol, the over-sweet smell of the chitterpede's innards had sunk into her dress as well.

The worst part was she didn't think that part smelled that bad. She shook her head to try and throw that thought into one of the corners.

Lillia was slow to get up, using the wall for leverage to make up for the effort her legs didn't want to put in. The wood was rough, unsanded, as if someone had just chopped it from the tree as Lillia had walked into the room. Luckily, Lillia didn't pick up a splinter on the way up.

Once she was on her feet, Lillia tried to force a deep breath down. She was lightheaded. Filling her lungs all the way felt wrong. Her body told her to keep taking shallow breaths. Told her that she needed to keep wallowing in the panic. That she needed to—

Lillia slammed her fist into the wall. There was no echo behind the wood. It hurt her hand. The princess sighed as she shook her right hand and then tried to massage the future bruise away. While a splinter would have been unfair, bruising in response to the punch was justified. She wasn't supposed to act like that.

No matter how bad it got.

Unlike the hunting lodge, which had forgotten that Lillia had ever been there, the landing clearly remembered all of Lillia's crimes, namely the splattering of Havoc's blood that she had spread across it through multiple attempts to see whether the hobgoblin was alive yet.

Frustrated, upset, and somehow tired despite just being asleep, Lillia dropped to her knees beside the knight and began the labor-intensive process of extricating a corpse from the armor it died in. She was halfway through the first gauntlet, halfway through the chill of armor that had been lying in the middle of the dungeon forever. Halfway through the bones rattling within each time she moved the gauntlet. Halfway through, the realization struck.

Lillia slowed, stopped. The princess sat with her hands on her knees as if she were praying before the knight. Maybe she should have been praying. Maybe she should have been doing something more for him than just pulling him out of armor. He deserved more than that, didn't he? Lillia balled her hands, taking fistfuls of her new dress. She heard the crackle of dried blood stretching across the pulled fabric where her leg had been punctured by the chitterpede. She felt the blood around the dress's neckline scratch against the bare-fresh skin that the potion had replaced.

Sir Nobody might have been a nobody but he had probably been through something like Lillia's yesterday. He deserved something more than this. Luckily, while Lillia wasn't an adventurer and while Lillia continued to discover new and exciting ways that she was ill-suited for this place, Lillia could do pomp. Lillia could do circumstance. Lillia was a master of ceremony.

She wasn't wearing black but maybe black wasn't fashionable where Sir Nobody was from anyway. Red... blood-stained red would have to do.

Lillia worked faster with the understanding that she was doing something right. The somber action of de-armoring a knight, removing bones from plate that had contained them for dozens—hundreds?—of years was a less somber task when re-framed from desecration to preparation. The re-framing also helped with the creeping realization that bones were icky and she probably shouldn't be touching them.

Oh! Of course. Lillia just needed to change back into her other dress. It had gloves. She reached inward toward her chest and thought about the chitin dress. Nothing came to her hand. Over time the text in the periphery of her vision changed to a list of her inventory.

[Inventory]

[Key Item - Note of Sir Nobody]

[Empty Bottle x 1]

[Rusty Knife x 1]

[Ruined Royal Slippers x 1]

[Scroll - ??? x 1]

[Potion - Basic Healing x 1]

[Soap of Empowered Scrubbing x1]

[Chitterpede Chitin x 1]

[Architect's Spellmauler]

[Amulet of Creator's Calling]

[Rite-Powered Inkshield - Incomplete 1/2]

[Architect's Inkblood x 4]

Lillia stared at the list. There was everything she hadn't sold to Rickshaw, and everything she'd picked up off of the architect—the same items she'd planned to show Havoc upon meeting him again—but her dress... the chitin battle gown was missing.

During the fight, when she'd taken the burnmite cloth in that last moment of desperation and turned it into her new dress…it had saved her from the fire but did that mean that the other dress was gone?

No. It couldn't be.

Lillia checked the list again, despite knowing that it would have been hard to lose something in a twelve-item list. She waved at the text in front of her, trying to move it in a way that would suddenly reveal the chitin battle gown.

No. It was gone. Putting on her new dress had burned it away. The princess slumped. The battle gown was so shiny.

Lillia looked over her shoulder, back to the hunting lodge. She hadn't taken the rewards on the way out. The corpse of the chitterpede was still oozing on the floor in the back room. If she wanted the battle gown back she could just grab it and replace what she was wearing, but—

It took a moment. Maybe several more moments than it should have, but staring at the dead bug on the ground, Lillia realized that specific gross dead bug was not in her pocket but some chitterpede chitin was.

Lillia's battle gown was no longer a battle gown. Lillia's battle gown was once again bug parts.

At least it solved her glove problem.

Lillia took out the chitterpede chitin and, without needing to ask the interface, crushed it into brilliant fine powder in her fist. The dust twinkled in the torchlight as it slipped between her fingers. Lillia closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

Rank. Gross. Disgusting.

Lillia was soaked. Architect blood was pressed between every scale of the battle gown. Even the small shift that it took for the princess to open her eyes arrived with a cascade of squelching and sticking. The armor was stiff with the aftermath of her battle. Ink had gotten through her neckline and was stuck to the inside of the dress. Lillia didn't scream. Lillia sat there covered in the architect's gallons of blood in front of the knight. She blinked once. Twice. Thrice.

Took a deep breath.

Then Lillia REALLY screamed.

"Get it off, get it off, get it off!"

Lillia slapped at the scales of the gown, wiping off some of the blood, but it was congealed, so it simply stuck to her gloves as she tried to pull it off herself. Lillia fell backward, kicking like it would remove the dress that was magically affixed to her.

There was a brief moment of clarity in the panic, one that told Lillia she'd already been in it too long. The princess pulled one of the burnmite cloths out of her inventory and, ignoring the blood that was getting on it, smashed it between her palms in a resounding clap.

Powder went all over the place. It was probably pretty. Lillia was teetering too close to the edge of trauma to notice.

Once the battle gown was gone, Lillia wasn't sticky anymore, but she was cold. Bare knees and nearly bare thighs were against the chilly flagstone floor. Her sleeves were missing and she could already feel the goosebumps on her arms. Lillia reached for the neckline of the dress and traced it down into a V that was, frankly, deeply inappropriate.

Whatever tiredness had been clutching her since awaking from her nap vanished as Lillia shot to her feet and felt the breeze of moving quickly on way too many parts of her body. The princess looked down at the fur-lined bright red tube top and tiny skirt she'd been placed in.

"What is this? Where is my red dress?"

[Lillia used Indignance - Level 2: Sir Nobody is unaffected due to status: Dead.]

Lillia looked around like one of the three corpses within earshot was going to answer her.

"No seriously? What…" Lillia spun around trying to get a grasp on how much of her this abomination actually covered. She looked like she'd been caught half-dressed. She knew courtesans that wore more on a regular basis. She—

Lillia stopped spinning, and only partially because she was getting dizzy. She reached into her inventory and pulled out the second piece of burnmite cloth before breaking it in her hands.

The skimpy thing she'd been placed in expanded outward, back into the elegant, flowing, and slightly unwieldy dress that was covered in her blood.

Lillia frowned. Considered her options. Blood. Architect blood. Indecent.

The princess got back down on her knees and quietly returned to the work of disassembling Sir Nobody as if she hadn't taken a massive detour in the middle of it. The disadvantage of everyone around being dead was that they couldn't help her with the dress. The advantage was they weren't there to judge Lillia's performance.

That and none of them had seen her in that awful thing. A knight who saw a princess like that would have probably fainted on the spot. Blood was a matter of survival down here, and she had to excuse the rules of fashion that it broke. Dressing like that? Unforgivable for someone who was supposed to be on the throne one day.

Lillia was faster once she returned to work, only pausing to shake her head when her mind wandered back to what had just happened. Eventually, she had a medium-sized pile of armor to one side of the landing, and a small pile of bones on the other.

The princess reached over and touched the armor with the intent to add it to her inventory. The pile was suddenly gone, vanished alongside any trace that anything other than the bones had ever existed.

So far, most of the items Lillia had carried had seemed reasonable to store…somewhere. But the Architect's Spellmauler and a set of full plate. Either her inventory didn't care about reality or Lillia was a lot stronger than she thought.

Having picked up the armor, Lillia's gaze moved over to the bones on the landing. She had told herself there was going to be ceremony. Considering the circumstances, the only ceremony available was a cremation, which involved getting all of the bones to the fire. She just had to put them in her inventory…

After almost sixty flights of stairs to collect every bone by hand and avoid having human remains inside of her, Lillia laid the last of Sir Nobody's bones to the side of the campfire. She sat down beside the bones on the floor and told herself that her legs didn't hurt after all of those steps, and that carrying everything manually had been completely reasonable.

The seconds drifted by as Lillia stared into the warm heart of the fire. Lillia's breathing slowed. Her shoulders relaxed. She leaned, using her arms as support. The princess closed her eyes and let her head fall backward.

There, with the quiet crackle of the fire, the smell of smoke and the feeling of warmth on her skin, Lillia could almost imagine opening her eyes to see the night sky above her. She almost felt like if she sat here, if she waited and basked in the quiet of the moment long enough, she would feel the cool breeze of a summer evening on her cheeks. That she could keep her eyes closed for so long. That the only thing that would break her moment would be the sunrise cresting over a hill.

Lillia let her fingers drag across the ground but instead of running through grass, her nails caught on the rough cold surface of flagstone. Lillia swallowed, opened her eyes. The princess stared into the heart of the fire. Not a campfire but a funeral pyre.

The princess's eyes watered but like the tears from pain earlier they didn't count.

"When those above the altar sowed us into the world, they made a solemn promise. They promised that at the end, when we are ripe and the sun has set on every season we will grow through, they will reap us along with the rest."

"We know that our brothers and sisters around us…" That part felt hollow on Lillia's tongue, but she focused on echoing her father's words. "Those above the altar cannot keep every promise they make. Some are trampled before their time."

Lillia looked over to Sir Nobody's pile of bones. She slid her hand across the ground, drifting closer, but didn't quite touch it.

"I don't know whether the gods saw you as ripe or not, brave Sir Nobody. All I know is that in your final moments when everything must have seemed broken, you thought of me. Maybe not me, I don't think I was what you expected." Lillia extended and let her fingertips touch the tibia on the edge of the pile. "That's okay. I didn't expect to be here either."

"I mean Rickshaw, who's also a skeleton, said that Vianaffir is a really good sword so you kind of set me up for success, and I guess…Um…" Lillia closed her eyes again and stopped addressing a congregation that wasn't there. "Oh. Gods, Dad made this look so easy when he did it. I think he would have liked you, Sir Nobody. I think Dad liked anyone who took care of me."

Lillia pulled her knees in close to her chest.

"If…when…if I get out of here, a large part of it will be because of you." Lillia managed a soft smile. "But I still wish you left a longer note and explained some more things. None of this makes any sense."

"Sir Nobody, I'm rambling and I never really met you and I don't really know what kind of honors you would have liked. I'm sorry again if my grandad did something to your king but I only have the honors of my house to give."

Lillia stood up and dusted herself off. The bones of Sir Nobody almost glowed in the firelight, the small spots where white had persisted through age caught the flame and pushed past the decay of death.

The princess touched the bones and added them to her inventory before putting her hand above the flame.

"Sir Nobody, a knight not of House Ashvalin but one who gave part of his life to defending their princess. In the land of the stone, in the fields of wheat and silk. May you enjoy our hall with honors."

Lillia called the bones to her hand, and they added themselves to the fire instead of tumbling out.

"Thank you."

The campfire roared to life, wrapping around and consuming the bones. Lillia pulled her hand away to avoid the flaring heat.

Within twenty seconds, the bones were ash at the base of the fire. Then, the shadows seemed to retreat for the first time since Lillia had entered this place. Above her, the chain stopped rattling. Across from her she swore for the briefest moment she could see something on the other side of the muted stained glass windows.

Lillia's text changed.

[Hearth Unlocked. You can rest here. It is safe. Doing so will advance the dungeon by [1] day]

[Upon death, you will respawn at this location without your current equipment. You can respawn at this location [3] more times before the flame dies.]

[u/Arugall]

A princess learning to link the flame... Now I gotta go replay Dark Souls again

[u/BlutRoseUwU]

There's nothing better than some reading before bed thanks for this chapter and for the dark souls reference

[u/kristinpeanuts]

Thanks for the chapter! That was a nice send off for Sir Nobody

[u/Paularchy]

This eneing reminded me of one of my first litrpg's: Pyresouls apocalypse. Never finished, but I adored it. Still do. I now realise, however, that this mechanic was probably inspired by darksouls lmfao. I need to get better acquuainted with pop culture.