The first thing that jolted Lilith back to life was cold water.
It hit her all at once: a sharp, jarring splash that pulled her out of the dark before she was ready. Her silver eyes opened slowly. She lay still for a moment, blinking at a ceiling she didn't recognise, waiting for her brain to catch up with the rest of her.
It didn't.
Her whole system felt numbed , muffled, like sound coming through water. She turned her head. Looked around.
Everything was strange.
The walls were stone. The air smelled of damp and rust and something older that she had no name for. Iron bars ran from floor to ceiling directly in front of her, and beyond them, a corridor lit by torches that flickered without any wind to explain it.
Oh, she thought. "I'm in a cell."
She sat up slowly, pressing a hand to the cold floor to steady herself.
Right. The cliff. She had fallen off the cliff. And this, wherever this was, was very clearly not a hospital. Not even close.
Another splash of cold water hit her square in the face.
She turned, sputtering, and found the source: a guard standing just outside the bars, holding an empty bucket and wearing clothes that belonged to no era she recognised. Old. Very old. Like something out of a historical painting that nobody had bothered to update.
"Who are you?" she said, pushing wet hair out of her face. "What am I doing here? Let me out."
The guard set the bucket down. Didn't look at her.
"She's awake," he called out, to no one she could see.
"Hey." Lilith stood up. "Hey, I am talking to you. Do not ignore me."
Nothing. He didn't flinch, didn't turn, didn't acknowledge her in any way. Like she was making a sound he simply couldn't be bothered to process. She tried everything, raised her voice, changed her tone, knocked on the bars, demonstrated with her hands. Nothing worked.
"Maybe he doesn't understand English", she thought. Then immediately: "Lilith, he just spoke English two minutes ago." She said to herself.
After a while, he simply turned and walked away.
"No– no, don't go, you have to explain why I'm here, this is against the law, LET ME OUT!"
The corridors were empty and dead silent as he walked away. The torches flickered. Nobody came.
Lilith stood at the bars for a long moment, then lowered herself back down to the floor.
The floor was cold. And filthy. And unhygienic in a way she was trying very hard not to think about.
She took a slow breath and made herself look around properly.
The cell was small. Against one wall hung chains, thick iron ones, bolted directly into the stone. Beside them, a row of instruments she recognised from history books and immediately wished she hadn't: things designed for restraint, for pain, for keeping someone in a specific state of suffering for a specific amount of time.
Then she looked down at herself.
The yellow dress was gone.
In its place she wore something that could generously be called a garment, a loose, tattered thing in dark brown that smelled like it had been worn by several people before her and washed by none of them. She lifted the hem slightly, inspecting it with the expression of someone who had just been handed something deeply offensive.
She sniffed her own arm.
Gagged.
"Oh my God. I smell absolutely foul."
"Have I been trafficked', she thought. Then, looking around at the chains and the torches and the stone walls: No. No, this is something else entirely. Something worse, possibly.
The sound of heels on stone reached her before the woman did.
She walked in slowly, deliberately, like someone who had never once hurried for anything in her life and didn't intend to start. Her clothing was elaborate and revealing in a way that seemed designed to communicate something specific about the kind of place this was. Two guards flanked her, the one from before, and another one who was larger and looked considerably more dangerous.
"So you're the one making all the noise," the woman said, stopping in front of the bars and looking Lilith over with the casual assessment of someone pricing livestock.
"Where am I?" Lilith said.
"Well, Welcome to Thaloria"
The woman smiled. It didn't reach her eyes.
"Thaloria, never heard of a country like that" before Lilith could ask the woman anything…
"I don't –" she was cut short.
"Guards, remind me where you found this one."
"Near the river, my Lady. Barely breathing."
The river. Lilith turned that over. She had fallen off a cliff and ended up in a river. That was… something.
"You see, girl," the woman said, her voice light and pleasant in a way that made Lilith's skin prickle. "We saved your life."
"I didn't ask to be saved," Lilith said. "You should have left me there."
The woman laughed softly. "Well. Since you have no use for your life, we'll put it to use ourselves. F1, bring her out. She's been unconscious long enough. Let's see if she's presentable."
"Two weeks," one of the guards said by way of explanation.
"Two weeks?" Lilith said out loud.
She turned that over too. Two weeks unconscious. Well — she had fallen off a cliff. Landed in a river. Had taken five sleeping pills and two stimulant pills within the same day before any of that happened. She supposed her body had simply reached a threshold and shut everything down.
Justifiable, she thought faintly.
Something else was strange too, now that she was paying attention.
She should have felt worse. Two weeks unconscious after the day she'd had, the trial, the cliff, the river, her body should have been a wreck.
She should have been weak, disoriented, barely able to sit upright. And she was sore, deeply sore in a way that lived in her bones rather than her muscles. But underneath the soreness was something else.
Something alert and alive that had no business being there.
She felt aware in a way she couldn't explain. The flickering of the torches. The exact weight of the chains on the wall. The sound of breathing from the corridor outside, two sets of it, steady, slightly slower than human breathing should be.
She noticed all of it without trying.
That was new.
She filed it away in the part of her mind where she kept things she didn't have language for yet and turned her attention back to the immediate problem of being imprisoned in a world she had no map for.
The guard called F1, the one with the bucket earlier, approached the cell door and began to unlock it. Lilith watched him. Watched the angle of his body, the placement of his feet, the distance between him and the door frame.
She'd earned a taekwondo belt at fourteen. She'd kept up with it because it made her feel less like someone things happened to and more like someone who could happen to things.
"Easy peasy", she told herself.
She knew better. She did it anyway.
The moment the door swung open she moved, one clean kick to F1's side that sent him stumbling, and then she was through the gap and running. The corridor stretched ahead of her, torches blurring past, and for one glorious second she thought —
Something hit her from the side at a speed that wasn't human.
The floor came up fast. She hit it hard, the breath knocked entirely out of her, and when she managed to turn her head she found F2 crouched beside her, one hand pinning her to the ground with a force that had nothing to do with ordinary strength.
"Ow," she said, to the floor.
The woman's heels clicked toward her slowly.
"I knew you'd try that," she said, sounding almost fond. "Filthy humans. You always do. If you'd like to avoid further pain, I'd suggest not trying it again."
"Filthy humans."
Lilith lay on the floor and turned that phrase over very carefully.
If she wasn't human, then what was she? And more to the point: where exactly had that cliff dropped her?
Lilith, she told herself firmly. Relax. This is a dream. None of it is real.
None of it is real.
None of it is real.
She kept repeating it
But even through the fog of her own denial, Thaloria was impossible to ignore.
The corridor alone told her things she wasn't ready to know. The stone walls were carved, not roughly, but with an intentional intricacy that ran floor to ceiling, symbols and patterns she had never seen in any book or any museum she had ever visited.
The torches burned without smoke. Without smell. Without any of the chemical logic fire was supposed to follow. The light they cast was slightly wrong, too gold, too warm, pooling in corners in ways that light didn't naturally pool.
And the air.
The air was the strangest thing. It sat differently in her lungs, fuller somehow, richer, like breathing here used a part of her chest that breathing back home never had. She noticed it the way you noticed a sound that had always been there the moment it stopped, suddenly, completely, unable to un-notice it.
This was not her world.
She had known that already. But knowing it and feeling it in your lungs were two very different things.
Lilith had been so lost in her thought that she didn't realize when they finally arrived at their destination until F2 dropped her.