After the fox attack, Lily understood that the cabin had a serious defensive problem.
The door was still not truly a door. It hung crooked in its frame, blocking the entrance more through hope than usefulness. The garden fence was not much better. It had once been built by stronger hands, then broken by soldiers, then repaired by one desperate little girl using sticks, scraps of cloth, and stubborn optimism. It might stop a rabbit if the rabbit was polite. It might slow a lazy fox. But it would not stop anything that truly wanted to come in.
And the forest, Lily was certain, had noticed.
Foxes still prowled along the outer edge of the garden, slipping between shadows with thin red bodies and hungry eyes. Rats scratched beneath the floorboards at night, always digging, always testing, always searching for some new tunnel into her domain. Predatory birds circled overhead with suspicious patience, watching the chickens as if waiting for Lily to make one mistake.
Then came the deer.
At first, Lily had liked deer. They were graceful, quiet creatures, soft-eyed and gentle-looking, stepping from the trees like spirits from an old story. In cartoons, deer had singing friends and tragic mothers. In tales, they were noble animals of the forest. Lily had therefore placed deer in the category of suspicious but probably acceptable.
That was before the horned one arrived.
It stepped out from the trees one bright morning with antlers on its head and arrogance in every movement. It approached the garden fence, lowered its nose, sniffed once, and then simply stepped over it as if the fence had been nothing more than a decorative suggestion. Lily watched in disbelief as it landed inside her garden and walked straight to the cabbages.
The cabbages she had grown yesterday. The cabbages she had fed with precious light-heart warmth. The cabbages that were supposed to become food.
The deer took a mouthful.
Lily stood in the garden with both hands clenched around her rusty knife, her tiny body trembling with outrage.
"No," she said.
The deer chewed.
Lily narrowed her eyes. "No, no no, bad deer, bad."
The deer looked at her. Its ears flicked. It considered her with calm, forest-born confidence, then took another mouthful.
That was when Lily gave the order.
"Chicken army!" she cried, pointing with great authority. "Attack!"
Mister Terminator answered first, charging forward with a furious battle cry, wings flaring and claws striking the dirt. The hens followed in a flapping wave of feathers and indignation, because if there was one thing chickens understood, it was attacking something for reasons no one had fully explained.
The deer startled.
For one glorious moment, the plan worked. The deer found itself trapped between the garden fence, a screaming toddler with a rusty knife, and a flock of furious chickens. Lily ran forward, yelling threats she was fairly sure were causing serious emotional damage and possibly several invisible debuffs. She scooped up fistfuls of dirt and threw them toward the deer's face.
"Leave cabbage!" she shouted. "Cabbage not yours!"
The deer backed up, confused and offended, while the chickens swarmed around its legs, pecking, flapping, and shrieking. The hens darted in and out with reckless bravery. Mister Terminator struck at one hoof and escaped with heroic timing just before the deer stamped hard enough to shake the soil. Lily cheered and swung her knife in the air.
"Good! Good! Fear us!"
But the deer did not flee. Instead, it kicked.
The chickens scattered as a hoof flashed through the place where one hen had been a heartbeat before. Lily's stomach clenched. The deer was frightened now, yes, but frightened animals were not safe animals. It twisted, snorted, and lashed out again.
Most of the hens understood the danger.
Miss Attitude did not.
Miss Attitude was one of the younger hens, sharp-eyed, fearless, and deeply convinced that size was a social construct. While the others attacked the deer's legs, she slipped around behind it with terrible purpose.
Lily saw her move.
"No, wait—"
Miss Attitude leapt.
Her wings spread wide. Her beak aimed straight for the deer's backside with the confidence of a warrior entering legend.
The deer screamed. Or perhaps it made a deer noise. Lily did not know deer language. Either way, it sounded deeply offended.
Then it kicked, and Miss Attitude flew. She sailed across the garden like an unfortunate feathered comet and landed in the bean patch with a sound that made Lily's heart stop.
For half a second, everything froze. Then the deer, perhaps deciding that this tiny war had become too strange even for deer, bounded over the fence and vanished into the trees.
Lily dropped the knife and ran.
"Miss Attitude!"
She fell to her knees beside the hen. Miss Attitude was alive, but badly hurt. One wing hung wrong. One leg trembled beneath her. Her little eyes were open, stunned and furious, as if she could not believe the universe had dared strike back.
"Oh no," Lily whispered. "No, no, no."
She lifted the hen as gently as she could and carried her into the cabin.
For the next week, Miss Attitude received the most concentrated magical healing treatment Lily had ever given anything that was not herself or Mister Terminator. Lily fed her warmth in tiny, careful threads, never too much at once. She stroked her feathers, guarded her from the other hens when they grew too curious, and hand-fed her worms and little scraps of food. She even made weak herbal tea, or at least something close enough to herbal tea that Miss Attitude drank it without dying, which Lily considered proof of medical success.
Every day, Lily sat beside her and whispered encouragement.
"You brave," she told her. "Very stupid. But brave."
Miss Attitude survived. Although she limped for a while afterward and held her injured wing close to her body, but slowly, with food, rest, and light-heart warmth, she recovered. She never again charged a deer from behind, which Lily considered personal growth.
The horned deer stayed away for some time after that, but Lily understood the lesson.
The fence was not enough.
It had been built with adult hands and repaired by toddler hands, rope, sticks, and optimism. That was not a proper defense. It was a polite request. It was a made-up law of borders that only worked if animals chose to respect it. Rabbits might respect it. Foxes might hesitate. Deer did not care.
Bad men would care even less.
Lily could not build a true wall. She was too small. She could not cut heavy timber, raise proper posts, or move enough stone to make anything strong. She could not fix the door no matter how many times she pushed, kicked, cursed, and shook her fist at it.
So if she could not build a fence, she would grow one.
That thought settled inside her like a spark. Living wood, branches, thorns, and roots. A wall that drank rain, held soil, grew stronger every day, and did not need her tiny arms to lift it into place. A wall the forest itself would help her make.
Luckily, she had apples. A few remained in one of the smaller clay pots near the wall. They were old now, soft and brown in places, too far gone for proper eating. Rats had nibbled at some of them, because rats were criminals by nature, but Lily did not need the flesh. She needed what slept inside.
She braced both hands against the pot and pushed with all her strength. At first, nothing happened. Then the pot scraped across the floor. Lily pushed harder, face red, feet slipping, until the pot finally tipped, rolled, struck the floor, and cracked.
The chickens gathered immediately.
Mister Terminator arrived first, because he considered all falling objects a matter of national importance. The hens came after him, heads bobbing and eyes bright, already suspicious that food might be involved.
Lily pointed at the rotten apples.
"Open their flesh," she commanded. "Tear out their seeds, my soldiers."
The hens attacked with enthusiasm. Beaks tore through soft apple flesh. Rotten pieces scattered across the floor. Mister Terminator supervised with solemn dignity, because supervision was his preferred role whenever food was involved. When the apple cores split, Lily dug through the mess with careful fingers until she found what she wanted.
Which was seeds, those small brown apple seeds. Tiny things, almost nothing. Yet inside each one slept a tree.
Lily stared at them with awe. There were other seeds too, in the cabin and in the garden. Like tomato seeds, bean seeds, herb seeds, and lots of berry seeds, if she had the patience to think like a berry. But apples came first. Because apples were food, and trees, and trees made shade with branches and leaves. Like so, apple trees if planted in rows and guided properly, could become walls.
The next morning, after rain had softened the ground, Lily took one apple seed and planted it in front of the cabin steps.
The doorway was still open. The broken door still hung uselessly to one side. If something wanted to come in, the entrance was too wide, too easy, too exposed. But if a tree grew there, perhaps one day the doorway would narrow. Perhaps roots and trunk and branches could form a living choke point. Something large would have to squeeze through. Something dangerous would have to slow down. And if it slowed down, Lily and the chickens could fight.
That was the theory, and it was a good theory, probably.
Lily patted the soil flat with both hands. Then she knelt before the buried seed, closed her eyes, and reached inward.
The light-heart answered.
It had grown over the past months. Not dramatically. Not enough to make her powerful. But it was no longer the tiny candle it had once been. Now it felt like a little hearth inside her chest, warm and white, no bigger than a small apple but steadier than before.
Lily drew warmth from it carefully, slowly, then pushed that warmth down through her hands and into the seed.
At first, nothing happened. So Lily waited. The chickens watched.
Mister Terminator pecked at a stone and pretended he was not interested.
Lily kept pushing and soon minutes passed. Her arms began to tremble. Sweat dampened her hair. The light moved out of her in thin, careful threads, sinking into the dark soil.
Then the earth cracked, and a pale green shoot curled upward. Lily's eyes opened wide.
"Oh," she breathed.
The sprout trembled in the sunlight, tiny, quite fragile, yet alive with the power of the light. She had done that.
Lily laughed once, too softly to be a proper laugh, then pressed her hands to the soil again, giving it more power.
She pushed again, and the minutes stretched. The sun moved slowly across the doorway, and the shadows changed around her while she worked. Twice she had to stop and drink from the lake. Once she ate dried berries with shaking hands. Once she lay flat on her back in the grass while the world spun gently above her and the hens peered down as if wondering whether she had become food.
But by the end of the day, a tiny apple sapling stood in front of the cabin.
It was nearly as tall as she was, it was glorious. Although to anyone else she realised, it might have looked like a weak little tree that could be snapped by a careless boot. But to Lily, it looked like victory.
She stared at it in awe. Then Mister Terminator stepped forward and pecked one leaf. Lily shoved him away with both hands.
"No, bad Terminator. No destroy future wall."
The rooster looked deeply offended, but he obeyed.
After that, Lily planted more.
Apple seeds went around the garden fence, beside broken posts, and near the cabin itself, where roots might one day hold the soil and branches might tangle into something stronger than dead wood. Between them, she planted vines, brambles, and anything else she could find that climbed, twisted, gripped, or grew thorns.
At first, the work was slow and crooked. Some saplings rose straight, while others leaned as if already tired of being alive. One was eaten by a hungry rabbit, after which Lily surrounded the rest with sharpened sticks and declared a private war against all rabbitkind.
But the more she worked, the more the garden seemed to answer.
Her light did not only enter the seeds anymore. It seeped into the soil itself, faint and warm, spreading through roots, worms, fallen leaves, and damp earth. At first Lily thought she was doing it on purpose, but soon she realized the warmth was always there, leaking gently from her whenever she stood among the plants. It did not drain her the way direct healing did. It was softer than that, almost like breathing.
The stronger her connection to the light-heart became, the stronger the effect grew.
Grass thickened around her feet. Weak stems straightened. Leaves deepened in color. Vines crawled eagerly between young apple trees, curling through gaps and around old fence posts. Brambles filled open spaces with thorny green malice, while berries swelled bright and sweet along the edges of the clearing.
The land around the cabin began to change.
It was not wild forest anymore, not exactly. Nor was it a proper garden made by human hands. It was becoming something between the two: a living wall, a growing shelter, a small green fortress shaped by a lonely little girl with a glowing heart.
Life was still hard. The cabin was still cold. Food was still uncertain. Mama and Papa were still gone.
But Lily had begun making something truly grand. She was not only surviving here. She was changing the world around her, one seed at a time. And for the first time, she felt it clearly. She was becoming useful.
Yet magic did not solve everything.
The foxes still came. Again and again, they tested the edges of her little kingdom, slipping through shadows, circling the fence, waiting for weakness. Lily repaired what she could, grew what she could, and stood guard with Mister Terminator and the hens as bravely as a ragged little girl could stand. But bravery did not make her tall. Magic did not make her everywhere at once.
That year, three hens were taken.
Lily cried for each of them. She named them the Three Stolen Princesses, because names mattered. If something had a name, then it had not simply vanished. It had lived, it had belonged, it had been loved by someone, even if that someone was a half-wild child in torn clothes holding a rusty spear and declaring war on foxes.
But the Three Stolen Princesses left something behind, eggs.
At first, Lily had not understood eggs properly. She knew some basics, but there was a large difference between knowing that chickens made eggs and watching life actually happen inside one. Until then, eggs had mostly been food. Sometimes the hens gave her one or two when they were well fed. Sometimes they gave her nothing at all and looked offended when she asked. Lily usually ate the eggs raw, while Mister Terminator watched with the stern expression of a bird judging her table manners.
Then, one week, when food had become a little less desperate and Lily forgot to gather them, some of the eggs changed.
The hens sat on them. The eggs warmed, trembled, then they cracked.
Tiny yellow chicks pushed their way into the world, wet, peeping, and unbelievably fragile. Some came from eggs Lily had saved from the Three Stolen Princesses, tucked carefully beneath brooding hens as if she were guarding royal heirs.
Lily stared at the first chick as if the universe had performed a magic trick in poor lighting.
"Oh," she whispered. "Baby chicken."
Mister Terminator stood nearby looking deeply smug.
Little by little, Lily began to understand. When Mister Terminator mounted the hens in that strange flapping way Lily had decided not to think about too closely, eggs kept coming. Some eggs were food. Some eggs became chickens. Chickens, apparently, were made through a process that seemed rude, confusing, and extremely efficient.
She had questions. Sadly, there was no internet.
So Lily observed scientifically and tried not to make eye contact with Mister Terminator during certain activities. She even drew notes on pieces of bark with burned sticks, though most of the drawings looked like angry circles with legs.
The chicks were difficult. They were tiny, foolish, and determined to die. They got cold. They wandered away from the hens. They became ill. Hawks and other flying murder-birds watched from above. Foxes watched from the trees. Rats watched from cracks and shadows, but many lived.
Lily saved the weak ones when she could, warming them in her hands and feeding them tiny threads of light. She learned how much warmth was too much. She learned that small bodies needed care, food, shelter, and constant guarding. She learned that baby chickens were somehow even stupider than adult chickens, which was impressive.
The flock grew, and with that so did the amount of poop she had to clean from the cabin.
Mister Terminator became a father, a king, a general, and the overworked border commander of a rapidly expanding chicken nation. Two of his sons grew into proud young roosters. Lily named them Sergeant Flap and Sir Pecksalot, because names were important, because their attitudes demanded recognition, and because she was lonely enough to hold official ceremonies for chickens.
She learned about the foxes too. There were two who ruled the lake territory.
One was smaller and darker, slim as a shadow, with clever eyes and a habit of appearing exactly where Lily least wanted her. She moved like a thief and vanished like smoke. Lily named her Sleemo, because she was slick, sneaky, and almost certainly had rogue-class abilities.
The other fox was larger. Redder. Bolder. Arrogant in a way Lily recognized from certain criminals and badly behaved gym men. He came closer than Sleemo, challenged the flock more openly, and sometimes clashed with Mister Terminator at the edge of the garden.
He had scars across one eye now, three pale claw marks left there from some battle Lily had not properly seen, though she was certain Mister Terminator had been responsible. After that, she named him Scar.
Scar did not appreciate the name. Or perhaps he did not appreciate Lily standing safely behind her living wall and making faces at him while calling it.
Either way, he hissed at her and ran away. That made the name even better.
Then winter came again.
It arrived with rain, mud, thunder, damp air, and nights that crawled under Lily's rags and into her bones. The living wall helped a little. The apple sapling before the doorway had grown thicker now, and vines curled around its trunk and branches, forming a rough green screen that forced the cold wind to twist before entering the cabin. It was not a door, but it was better than nothing.
By then, Lily had also learned to make fire, mostly.
She had tried several methods, because Bruce Redford had once seen enough survival videos to believe this should be possible. The bow drill was too large and complicated for her little hands. Rubbing sticks together was a cruel lie invented by confident adults. Striking stones worked only sometimes, and even then mostly by accident. In the end, Lily's best method was to drop one stone against another over dry grass, scraped bark, and charcoal dust while whispering prayers, threats, and ugly little words until the universe took pity on her.
One day, by some miracle, sparks came. The tinder caught. A tiny flame rose.
Lily stared at it, trembling. Then she cried so hard she nearly put it out.
After that, she became a cooker of eggs, and sometimes fish. Not a good cooker, or a graceful cooker, but a cooker all the same.
The iron pot was far too heavy for her to move properly, so she mostly left it where it was and treated it like a holy object. When she needed something flatter, she used the old axe blade she had found among the cabin's forgotten things, setting it near the fire until the metal grew hot enough to fry food. Eggs hissed on it. Small fish curled on it. Sometimes she burned things. Sometimes she undercooked things. Sometimes the result was black on one side and cold on the other.
But fried egg was better than raw egg. Cooked fish was better than cold fish. Warm food was better than chewing bitter leaves and pretending they were dinner.
The fish trap helped too, though only when it felt like cooperating. The idea was simple enough: stones and branches guided fish into a narrow place, and then the opening had to be closed before they escaped. The problem was that stones were heavy, water was slippery, and Lily was still a very small girl. More than once she saw fish swim out while she struggled with a rock half the size of her chest and shouted insults at the lake. Still, little by little, she improved.
That winter, Lily turned two years old.
She did not become strong, not truly. Not in the way Rob had been strong, or Mama had been strong, or old Bruce had once been strong. But she became stronger than before. Her arms could carry more. Her legs could walk farther. Her fingers learned knots, sparks, roots, feathers, fish bones, and hot metal. She learned what could be eaten, what should not be eaten, and what could be eaten only if one was desperate and willing to make a sad face afterward.
She ate eggs when she had them. Fish when the trap worked. Berries and greens when the garden allowed it. Sometimes worms, sometimes bugs.
She did not like that part, but survival was not always polite.
The winter was still hard. Too many mornings began with stiff fingers, a sore throat, damp clothes, and roosters yelling around her as the chicken nation woke all at once. There were twenty-two of them now, which meant the cabin was warmer, louder, smellier, and politically more complicated.
But there was fire sometimes. There was cooked food sometimes. There were chickens, many chickens, warm and noisy and alive.
Mama and Papa did not come back. In fact, nobody came.
Once, deep in the cold season, Lily thought she heard men far away in the forest. Voices. Cursing. Dogs barking. The sounds moved between the trees, distant and lost, never coming close enough for her to see.
Maybe the bad men had returned to search for her. Maybe they had simply gotten lost.
Lily smiled at that thought.
"Stupid bad men," she whispered into her little fire. "Can't even navigate forest. Why they no have maps?"
Her Albion words were still poor and rough, closer to a cave child's speech than anything elegant, but she was trying to remember how people here spoke.
And besides, no one was there to correct her.
Thus time moved on and another season began.