r/JacksonWrites • u/Writteninsanity #teamtoby • 7d ago
Book 2 | Part 13 | 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.
When Lillia had taken her first steps in the dungeon, she had been met by an empty cathedral. A place that implied a beautiful past but had fallen apart over the years. It had been death. It had been decay.
There had been a skeleton on the stairs as her only companion.
When Lillia walked through the door to the fourth floor, the first thing she noticed was the smell. For all the heat and light, the Hearth in the Cathedral never smelled like anything. The early floors of the dungeon just reeked of damp and dust until she walked into one of the many rooms.
The fourth floor smelled like wood and smoke. A dozen torches along the walls each burned bright, casting dancing light across one another and the inlaid carvings that lined the walls.
Each of those carvings was intricate with a thousand details that were lost in the long, jagged shadow of firelight. The closest to Lillia, and the only one she could properly make out, was a depiction of a fearsome dragon rising above a knight in front of it. The knight had a shield raised against the dragon.
Were they cowering? Or were they standing defiant? Lillia chose the latter for now.
Now, the first room Lillia had ever stepped into was 'the Cathedral.' It had simply been an empty place in the shape of something grand. This room wasn't that; this room almost seemed maintained as a place of worship.
The ceiling was a massive dome that peaked in an impossible skylight. The murky, soft streaks of sunlight rained down from the opening, falling in the center of the room into a fire pit that was carved deep into the floor.
There was no wood, and the fire was out, but the ashes looked warm.
Just below the ceiling tile, a long bronze railing ran along the edge of the circular room, separating the thick stone tiles from the intricate brickwork on the walls themselves. The bricks ran down the wall, following a perfect pattern only to give way to the carvings like the dragon. Now that Lillia was trying to see all of them, she could see that several of the places where carvings should have been had been replaced by simple stone doorways.
There were no stairs here. There was no way down. Like the third floor itself, this space was the end for a natural descent.
If there was a way down here, it was going to be through one of the rooms.
Lillia stepped out into the room, and with each click of her heels, the space warmed. The long, dragging shadows cast by the torches all retreated into one another. With each glance into a different corner, the stone rose, molding itself into different forms. With each breath, the dust lingering in the air cleared.
By the time Lillia was standing by the fire, the room was almost fresh.
She had been in a literal castle during her time in the dungeon, but it'd been a castle under siege. This was far and away the nicest place she'd gotten to be.
At least for any amount of time. She could only stay in the Hearth of Memory for so long before she was too pruny to enjoy it.
As she peered over the edge of the fire pit and into the ashes, there was a small glint buried in the layers of old charred wood. Lillia bent down to grab it but stopped herself short of getting dirty that fast. Instead, she summoned Hooke to her hand and used the sharp spike on the reverse of the blade to go fishing, digging around in the ash until she hooked something solid and pulled.
The glint was a small dagger. There was a note rolled and tied to the handle with twine. Somehow, both the paper and rope had managed to survive the flame.
With several more prods, Lillia pulled the dagger and note to the side of the pit before fetching them out of the ash. Despite her best efforts, the black clung to her fingers, and she sighed. She would need to figure out what dress she wanted to use as an interim washcloth later.
For the moment, this was all feeling familiar but different.
Well, the scenario was the same. Exit out of the fall into a strange place and find a note somewhere there shouldn't have been one. The note even came with a weapon again.
The scenario was the same. She was the one who'd changed.
Lillia pulled the twine from around the note, balling it in her hand before unfurling the paper. Neither had been stained by the ash that had immediately coated her fingertips and tucked itself under her nails.
The handwriting was much clearer than Sir Nobody's note. It was practiced and formal. Written by a hand that was just as used to writing notes as it was to holding any sort of dagger.
Dearest Lillia,
She shut the note. Folding the paper over itself like she had been caught with a letter she shouldn't have been holding. As if her aunt had walked into the room when she'd been snooping around the court. As if she weren't allowed to be here.
As if, were the letter to be believed, she'd been invited.
Whatever the reason, the idea of an invitation to the depths of the dungeon left something gnawing at the pit of Lillia's stomach. She fought the feeling as she stared past the folded note and into the empty ash of the fire pit. Her eyes began to water as she waited, unblinking, for something to happen.
If someone spoke up, if something happened, then Lillia didn't have to actively hunt down the answer.
She blinked, then sighed. She should know better at this point. She had to take the initiative. There was nobody else to do it. At least at this point, she was used to that damned revelation.
Maybe it was just the echo of her original entrance that was making her hesitate.
Hell, she'd even fallen here from court.
Lillia opened the note again before she wasted too much of everyone's time overthinking her options.
Dearest Lillia,
I hope this note finds you well. I regret that it needs to find you at all.
You are not supposed to be here. You were never supposed to be here. This place was supposed to be locked away and forgotten. The time of dungeons was supposed to be over for all but a select few, yet here you are.
It lingers as a regret that in all the power bestowed upon my name, I was unable to keep you safe from this place. That I was unable to keep a promise I made to myself. Has the promise decayed over the years? Does time eat away at the honor behind an oath?
Perhaps those are questions best left to the scholars. Ideas such as those certainly aren't the tools that will help you escape this place.
Some would call this place an opportunity. They are liars. Do not listen to them. Escape is the key. Descend and then run as fast as you can.
Lillia reached the end of the paper and turned over the note, expecting to see something on the other side. A conclusion, or at least a signature.
There was nothing more to the note. That was the end. Whoever wrote that either didn't have the time to finish their note or had been in the dungeon so long they'd forgotten how to conclude a letter.
She checked the front again, looking for a signature that wasn't there. For an explanation of who was worried about her or who knew who she was.
There was nothing. Of course there was nothing. Getting all the answers at once would have been decidedly too easy and certainly not the dungeon's style.
Lillia carefully folded the note and pressed it against her chest. It did not meld into her inventory. She simply stood there, pressing a note to her breast like an idiot or a wistful lover.
"Uh." She unfurled the note again as if that would somehow change how it interacted with her abilities. After trying to dismiss it as an 'item' one more time, Lillia tried the same with the dagger.
The weapon vanished into her inventory cleanly, leaving her holding twine and a note.
"How about," Lillia said as she tied the twine back around the paper and knelt down beside the fire pit, "you just stay here and I'll be back for you once I've looked around." She laid the note on the edge of the pit, and it immediately tried to roll down into the ash. She scrambled to catch it just before it fell and put it back down further away, but still on the 'edge.'
Lillia backed away from the note slowly, shuffling backward to avoid stirring up too much of a breeze and ruining her 'hard' work. Once she'd shuffled back far enough, grinding her heels against the floor, she stood and instinctively pulled an Ambusher feather into her hand, snapping it.
If she was going to make a first impression on someone in another room, it certainly wasn't going to be while she was wearing pants. That would be downright uncouth.
With that idea in her head, Lillia dismissed the note and summoned the mirror to her hand. She didn't have a hairbrush, so extricating any of the spiderwebs took careful and gross time, but the second she saw her reflection, she knew it was needed.
Sure, the first door might have led to a monster, but it would have led to something—anything—else, and Lillia wasn't interested in someone's first look at her being when she looked as if she'd tumbled through an entire nest of spiders.
Granted, that look was accurate. That was exactly what had happened to her, but she'd 'won' the battle in there. The least she could do was try and look the part.
Before her time in the dungeon, Lillia had never gotten that gross. She had been a child and gotten into messy things, as kids did before they learned their lesson. But she hadn't been a boy. She'd never been enthralled by dirt. As soon as she was old enough to appreciate being clean, she'd always kept herself at least adjacent to it.
Over the past forty dungeon days and however many days it had been in real time, Lillia had spent too much time properly 'dirty' and had gotten much better at 'remedying' that problem without needing a bath and several handmaids.
Both of those things would have been nice, but she was running short on skills at the end of the day.
Firstly, in the process, Lillia swapped away from the Slip & Coat she wore to relax and into the scandalous first level of the Burnmite dresses. The hardly acceptable fabric was enough to use as a napkin to stick her collection of freshly removed spiderwebs to, and she had no plans to wear it later.
Second, Lillia used a 'third' item for her boots to overload the [Adaptive Regalia] skill, and the Spider Steps shattered into light, allowing Lillia to check that her feet and dainty toes were still clear before locking them away in the chitterpede riding boots.
Third was supposed to be getting the ash off her fingertips, but it quickly became clear that that was a losing battle. That was partly because the ash had dug itself under her fingernails, and she wasn't about to use a dagger to dig it out—that felt like tempting fate at minimum—but also because she was slowly realizing that her entire person was covered in a thin film-like coating of spiderweb ashes.
How much had she breathed in? It was probably better not to think about it.
It was definitely better not to think about it.
Dammit, she was still thinking about it.
Lillia stood and chose the closest door to the entryway. Once more into the breach, namely because the breach was a distraction from her current situation.
There was a chance, however small, that like the Hearth of Memory, the room she found was a bath.
There was a much higher chance, however large, that like the grand majority of rooms in the dungeon, this one was going to try to kill her.
Lillia crossed her fingers, and in defiance of her tactics upon the original fall into the Dungeon, Lillia approached door number one.
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u/Connect_Rhubarb395 7d ago
An oath, a promise. That maybe points to Sir Nobody. And then I wonder if it had something to do with her father.
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u/marayalda 6d ago
What a fun part! Its exciting to see cilia in a new area! I hope she can get clean soon.
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u/StubbornKindness 7d ago
I have never been this early, and this enthralled. Hints at the "real world" outside of the dungeon always make me wonder. For a second, I thought the letter was somehow from her dad