The seasons kept turning.
Winter passed into spring, spring into summer, and summer back into cold again. After a while, Lily stopped understanding time the way adults once had. She tried to mark the days on the cabin wall beneath the old number 904, but days became scratches, scratches became confusion, and confusion became an argument with herself about whether she was five, six, seven, or possibly the ruler of her own new calendar system.
In the end, she decided it was Year Five of Lily's Lake.
Or perhaps Year Seven.
The chickens did not correct her, so the matter became law.
What mattered more was that the lake was changing.
The living wall thickened year by year. Apple saplings became young trees. Vines braided between trunks. Brambles filled gaps with thorny green malice. Moss climbed the cabin walls, and flowers Lily had never planted appeared along the garden paths because the bees liked them and Lily had decided bees were useful citizens. The broken doorway was no longer guarded by dead wood, but by a growing apple tree and a curtain of vines that forced anything entering the cabin to squeeze, bend, and think twice.
The cabin slowly stopped looking like a cabin and began to look like something the forest had grown around a memory of one. It was half house, half hill, wrapped in green, hidden beside the lake.
At first, Lily was proud.
Then came the consequences.
Her light made the soil richer. Rich soil made plants grow faster. More plants meant more berries, more roots, more seeds, more flowers, and more green things for every hungry creature within smelling distance. Rabbits multiplied. Deer came more often. Birds nested closer. Squirrels filled the trees and dropped acorns on her head with suspicious accuracy. The chickens grew fat, loud, and politically complicated.
And then came the rats.
They came from under the cabin, from roots, from holes near the lake, and from dark places beneath the old trees. They stole fruit, chewed roots, gnawed stored food, dug tunnels under the garden wall, and skittered through the night as if planning crimes in tiny council meetings. Lily heard them beneath the floorboards, inside the walls, around the garden beds, and under the mossy stones near the shore.
At first, she tried patience.
Then she tried shouting.
Then she tried diplomacy, which mostly involved pointing a spear at rat holes and saying, "Leave. This is legal order."
The rats ignored the legal order.
So Lily declared war.
Thus began the First War for the Freedom of the United State of Lily's Lake.
It was called the United State because there was only one state. That state was Lily. The population was mostly chickens. Mister Terminator accepted the title after some discussion.
Lily armed herself with her rusty knife tied to a stick. It was still a poor spear, too short and slightly wobbly, but it had extreme poison damage in theory. She gathered her army: Mister Terminator, Sergeant Flap, Sir Pecksalot, Miss Attitude, and the hens brave enough to answer the call of history. Together, they hunted rat holes.
They smoked them out with little fires. They dug at tunnels with sticks. They blocked exits with stones and mud. When rats burst from the earth, Lily pointed and screamed, and the chickens attacked in a storm of feathers, claws, and righteous fury. The rats fought back with squeaks, teeth, and terrible manners, but the chickens were relentless.
For weeks, the war continued.
Lily drove the rats from beneath the cabin. Then from the garden. Then from the clearing around the lake. She patrolled the shoreline with her spear, marching past reeds, stones, and frog territory, searching for enemy bases. By the end of it, the rats were not gone, but they had been pushed back into the forest, away from the heart of her little republic.
Lily stood on the lakeshore, muddy, scratched, exhausted, and victorious.
"The United States of Lily's Lake endures," she announced.
Mister Terminator clucked.
"Yes," Lily said. "Very patriotic."
With the rats reduced, the garden grew stronger than ever. That brought the rabbits.
At first, Lily feared another war. Rabbits ate greens. Rabbits multiplied like someone had left the universe unsupervised. Worst of all, rabbits were cute. Soft, twitchy-nosed, harmless-looking little things that stared at her as if they had never committed a crime in their lives.
Lily could not kill them.
The chickens did not seem to hate them either, which made judgment difficult. So the rabbits stayed. They nibbled weeds along the outer edges. They made paths through the grass. They looked adorable and suspiciously innocent.
Then the foxes began eating them.
At first, Lily was angry. Then she slowly understood. The foxes were not evil. Scar and Sleemo had taken chickens, and Lily would never forgive that entirely, but they had not done it because they hated her. They did it because they were foxes. Foxes ate rabbits. Rabbits ate plants. Chickens ate bugs. Rats ate everything. Lily ate eggs, fish, greens, and sometimes things she preferred not to remember.
Everything ate.
Everything fed something else.
It was cruel, but it was not pointless. Without foxes, the rabbits would overrun the garden. Without rabbits, the foxes would hunt the chickens harder. Without limits, even her beloved chicken nation would grow too large, strip the ground bare, and fight itself into disaster.
Lily began to understand the circle of life.
She did not like it.
But she understood it.
So she became less of a survivor and more of a manager. A ruler of one lake, one green cabin, one living wall, one chicken nation, too many rabbits, two dangerous foxes, some exiled rats, several judgmental squirrels, many frogs, and a number of birds she still considered potential criminals.
She even began paying the foxes an egg tax.
When the hens laid more eggs than Lily could eat, save, or hatch, she carried a few to the edge of the forest and left them there as offerings.
"Take egg," she told the shadows. "Not chicken."
Sleemo came first, silent as smoke, took the egg, and vanished.
Scar came the next night. He stared at Lily for a long moment before taking his offering, as if accepting tribute from a rival kingdom.
Mister Terminator hated the policy.
Lily explained it many times.
"Peace requires taxes."
The rooster did not approve of taxes.
Still, the fox attacks on the chickens lessened. Rabbits took most of the damage now, which made Lily feel complicated, but the balance held. She also encouraged some young roosters to lead small groups of hens into the wider forest, founding brave new colonies beyond the clearing. Not all survived, but enough did.
Lily called this the Chicken Age of Discovery.
Miss Attitude, apparently offended by population management, began producing eggs with renewed intensity, as if personally determined to defeat policy through productivity.
Life went on.
As Lily grew, so did her connection to the light-heart. It no longer felt like something she had to force out through her hands. Sometimes it moved from her without effort, a soft aura that seeped into grass, roots, moss, water, and living things nearby. Plants leaned toward her. Injured animals calmed when she sang. Birds gathered in the branches above her. Frogs turned their wet little faces toward her when she floated in the lake and hummed old songs she barely remembered.
In her old life, Bruce had not been a singer.
Lily was different.
Her voice was young, sweet, and clear, soft enough to belong to the forest and bright enough to carry over water. She sang whatever she could remember: road songs, old country songs, songs from films, songs about mountains, stars, princesses, lonely travelers, and brave fools walking too far from home.
The animals listened.
At least, Lily thought they listened.
Sometimes squirrels dropped nuts near her while she sang. She was not sure whether these were gifts, tips, or complaints. Birds landed on her shoulders and once, very rudely, on her head while she was trying to do push-ups. Frogs watched from lily pads like serious little judges. Even Scar and Sleemo sometimes paused at the tree line when she sang, ears lifted, eyes bright in the dusk.
By the time Lily was perhaps seven, perhaps eight, perhaps Year Something of her own calendar, she had become a wild child of the lake.
She climbed trees. She swam every day. She slept outside when the weather allowed, curled on grass warmed by her own faint aura and surrounded by chickens who acted like royal guards. She could do pull-ups from low branches, handstands against tree trunks, squats with stones held to her chest, and backflips into the lake after many failures, much pain, and one very judgmental stare from Mister Terminator.
She wore rags, bark ties, bits of leather, feathers, and flower crowns when the mood demanded ceremony.
She made armor for the roosters from scraps of hide and bark. Mister Terminator resisted at first, then discovered it made him look larger and accepted it as his natural right. Once, she made him a crown of flowers. He wore it so well that Lily became concerned.
Maybe he knew things.
Maybe he had always known things.
That thought became worse after the rats started talking.
Or seemed to.
One day, Lily tripped over a root, fell face-first into the dirt, and opened her eyes to find herself staring into a small hole under a mossy stone. Inside, red-black eyes stared back. Rats. Several of them. They squeaked, chittered, and shifted in the dark.
Lily stared.
The rats stared.
Then, somehow, she felt as if she understood them.
Not words exactly. More like meaning. Complaints. Insults. Gossip. One rat seemed to think she was too big. Another perhaps called her small. A third was definitely rude about chickens.
Lily sat up slowly.
"Excuse me," she said. "I am not small. I am medium."
The rats chittered.
Over the following days, she listened more carefully. Maybe she was imagining it. Maybe loneliness had finally done something permanent to her brain. But the rats seemed to have opinions. They disliked mice, whom they considered lower creatures. They disliked birds. They disliked chickens. They disliked the world above ground in general, which they viewed as dangerous, bright, and poorly designed.
Mostly, they wanted food.
They liked the underground. The underground was safe. The underground was proper. The problem was that food grew above.
Lily thought about that for a long time.
Then she began a new project.
At the edge of the forest, far from the cabin and garden, she dug shallow pits and covered them with branches, moss, and soil. Inside, she placed old wood, damp leaves, and mushroom scraps. She fed the darkness with a little light, not bright sunlight, but soft earth-warmth. Slowly, fungi spread through the buried wood. Pale caps appeared in the damp shade.
Underground gardens.
For rats.
This made Lily pause more than once and ask herself what exactly she was doing with her life.
Was she negotiating with rats? Was there a race war brewing between chickens, rats, mice, rabbits, and foxes? Was she now responsible for cross-species diplomacy? Were the squirrels bribing her? Was Mister Terminator secretly a king?
She did not know.
So one evening, overwhelmed by politics, ecology, and possible madness, Lily went to the familiar flat stone at the lakeshore and sat there with her knees drawn up to her chest.
The lake was quiet. The living walls rustled behind her. Chickens scratched softly in the grass. Somewhere in the reeds, frogs murmured. In the trees, squirrels watched with tiny, suspicious hands.
Lily looked down at her reflection.
The girl in the water was older now. Still small, still wild, still violet-eyed and pale-haired, but no longer a helpless baby in a broken cabin. Her hair was tangled with leaves. Her knees were scratched. Her hands were dirty. A crown of little white flowers sat crooked on her head because Miss Attitude had stepped on it earlier.
Lily stared at herself.
"Can I talk to animals?" she asked.
The lake gave no answer. Behind her, Mister Terminator clucked.
Lily looked back at him. The rooster stood proudly with his flower crown, watching her with deep and suspicious wisdom.
"You know something," Lily said.
Mister Terminator blinked. Lily narrowed her eyes.
"Maybe you need scepter."
She paused.
"Or parliament."
Another pause.
"No, bad idea. Chickens with parliament make too much noise."
Mister Terminator gave a soft, dignified cluck, as if the matter required further debate.
Lily sighed and looked back across the lake. The sun was setting now, turning the water gold. Around her, the little world she had grown breathed softly: trees, vines, rabbits, foxes, rats, frogs, squirrels, bees, birds, chickens, and one confused girl who might be a forest princess, a republic president, a magical gardener, or simply very lonely.
She did not know what she was becoming. That was the worst part.
For nearly a year now, one thought had kept returning to her. Maybe she should leave.
She was not helpless anymore. Not really. She could climb, swim, run, hide, and fight well enough to survive most things in the forest. She knew where the foxes hunted, where the deer passed, where the rats nested, and which trees could be climbed fastest if trouble came. If she met bad men, she could run up a tree and wait them out. Surely grown men in armor could not climb as well as a girl who had spent half her life scrambling through branches like a suspicious squirrel.
She could go looking for Mama and Papa. She could try to find Einsway, Rob's village. She could follow the old paths beyond the lake and finally see what was left of the world.
But the moment she imagined walking away, something heavy settled in her chest.
Could Mister Terminator keep order without her? He was still proud, still fierce, still the greatest rooster-president-vice-king-general Lily had ever known, but he and Miss Attitude were getting old. Miss Attitude especially spent more time watching the younger hens than doing anything herself, as if she had retired from war and entered a career in judgment.
And what if Mama and Papa came back the day after Lily left? What if the animals needed her? What if the garden failed without her light?What if something bad happened because she was not here?
Lily lowered her forehead against her knees, she was stuck. That was the truth of it. Not trapped by walls or chains, but by roots, promises, fear, and love. Living at the lake was lonely, yes, but it was not terrible. She had food now, more food than she had ever had in the first hard years. Eggs, berries, fish, greens, apples, mushrooms, roots, and sometimes things she pretended were normal food because thinking too hard about them made life worse. She did not get sick, not really, thanks to the light-heart. She did not answer to anyone except herself, the weather, the chickens, and the mysterious will of the forest.
There were no taxes. No bosses demanding overtime. No drug dealers selling poison to kids. No Amber stealing her credit cards again.
Most crime around the lake involved petty theft of fruit, illegal digging, and murder, but it was nature murder, which was apparently legal under forest law. So things were good, mostly.
She had no television, no movies, no video games, and no one to talk to except animals, imaginary versions of old friends, and herself. But the lake had its own dramas. Rabbit politics. Fox border disputes. Chicken marriages. Rat rebellions. Squirrel bribery. Frog judgment. If she ignored the loneliness, the place was almost exciting.
Still, Lily sighed. She wanted to leave.
Not forever. Maybe not even for long. Just for a little adventure. A vacation. A quick journey beyond the trees. Maybe she could find a road, see a village, hear human voices, maybe even say hello to someone.
Even if they were mean and laughed at her, that would be fine. At least it would be different.
Then she imagined actually speaking to people and immediately felt embarrassed.
What would she even say? Hello, I am Lily, president of a lake, veteran of the Rat War, friend to chickens, tax collector for foxes, and possible rat diplomat? Would normal people want to hear about lake politics? Could she explain the Chicken Age of Discovery without sounding insane?
And worse, could she even face people looking like this?
Lily leaned over the water and stared at her reflection. She did not look cool, rich or even normal. She most definitely didn't look like a warrior.
She looked like some strange mixture of homeless girl, forest elf, and lost princess.
Through all those years of exercise, hard work, hunger, and danger, the light-heart had kept her annoyingly soft. It healed every cut before it could become a scar. It smoothed every scrape. It stole away the rough calluses that should have proved she worked hard. Her hands should have looked like useful little tools by now, tough enough to punch rocks and win. Instead, they were still small and smooth beneath the dirt, with slim fingers and soft palms, as if the forest itself refused to let hardship leave proper evidence.
Her feet were the same. She ran barefoot over stones, roots, bark, and mud, yet the light kept mending them back into something too neat, too delicate. It was deeply unfair. She trained. She climbed. She carried things. She did push-ups, squats, pull-ups, handstands, and very serious combat rolls. She had muscles, small ones, but real ones.
And still, in the water, she looked like she practiced baby gymnastics.
Her face was worse. It had stopped being only cute. Now it was becoming more like Mama's: small, heart-shaped, and pretty in a way Lily found deeply unhelpful. White-gold hair fell nearly to her hips, because Mama had once said long hair was beautiful and Lily had never found the courage to cut it with her poison-damage spear blade. Her eyes were still large and violet, too clear and bright for proper intimidation. Her lashes were long. Her brows were sharp enough that she looked as if she had makeup, even though she absolutely did not have makeup and would not have known what to do with it if she did.
Her nose was small. Her mouth was soft and red from berries. Her jaw tapered delicately.
Even dirty, wild-haired, crowned in flowers, and dressed in scraps of old cloth, hide, and desperate knot-work, she looked less like a hardened forest survivor and more like a little forest princess pretending to be a cave girl.
Lily glared at the water.
"Why I not look strong?" she muttered. "Maybe lack protein. Maybe eat more eggs."
A frog croaked from a lily pad. Lily turned her glare on him.
"That not advice."
The frog remained a frog.
But it was not truly the prettiness that bothered her most, not really. She had grown used to being small and strange and painfully adorable against her will. What truly offended her were the practical things.
The way she sat without thinking, knees close together or legs tucked to one side. The way she walked and ran, light and quick instead of heavy and powerful. The way her throwing was still terrible. The way she still screamed when a squirrel dropped an acorn near her during deep philosophical thought.
In her old life, Bruce had been big and slow, yes, but steady. Calm, mostly. When trouble started, he moved. He reacted. He did not squeak because a bird flew out of a bush. He did not cry because a rabbit looked at him too kindly. He did not feel lonely so sharply that even talking to rats began to seem reasonable.
This body was different, too different.
It felt more emotional, more sensitive, more in need of company. It kept changing without asking her permission. Her waist had narrowed. Her hips had shifted. Her chest had started becoming soft where Bruce would have preferred armor-like muscle. Bits of cloth now had to be tied, adjusted, and arranged so she could move without feeling awkward. Even peeing was humiliating on principle.
Heroes, Lily felt strongly, should be able to pee standing up and look proud while doing so.
She wondered what Frank would think if he saw her now. The thought was so embarrassing she nearly slapped the lake.
No, absolutely not. She would not imagine herself riding in a police car like this, tiny and pretty and flower-crowned, while Frank sat beside her looking calm and badass with a rifle. That was forbidden thinking.
Lily pressed both hands against her face and groaned.
Why could her body not simply get bigger and stronger the more she worked? Why did it insist on becoming softer and more feminine instead? What was the tactical value? Where was the usefulness? What mission required this many confusing body changes?
Then she felt it again. A strange ache low in her belly.
Lily went still. For the last few days she had been feeling odd. Mood swings, maybe. Depression, perhaps. Usual lake insanity, possible. But the stomach pain had worried her most. Had she eaten something bad? Had there been a poisonous snail hiding in her food again? Had the mushrooms betrayed her?
She rubbed her stomach carefully. It was still flat, with the faint little muscles she was privately proud of, but beneath her hand the ache deepened.
Then it struck harder.
Lily sucked in a breath.
The pain twisted low inside her, not sharp like a cut, not hot like sickness, but deep and strange and wrong. She shifted on the stone, trying to stand, but then she felt something wet between her legs, warm and wrong.
Lily froze, and slowly she looked down. Red spread across the stone beneath her.
For one heartbeat, her mind went blank. Then horror rushed in. She was bleeding.
Lily scrambled backward so fast her heel slipped on the edge of the stone. A small red smear marked where she had been sitting. She clapped one hand over her mouth to stop herself from screaming and dropped to her knees, looking around wildly.
Had something attacked her? A hidden enemy? A poison dart? A tiny assassin? A curse?
The lake was peaceful. The reeds swayed. A dragonfly skimmed over the water. Frogs watched from lily pads with useless frog faces. Nothing leapt from the bushes. No arrow stuck out of her. No wound burned across her skin. But somehow she was bleeding.
Lily pressed both hands to her belly and tried to send light inward. The light-heart answered, warm and gentle, but it did not rush to heal. It found no cut. No tear. No wound to close. That frightened her more.
"No," she whispered. "Heal. Heal, please."
Nothing changed. She wanted to call for help. Then she looked toward the cabin.
On the roof, Mister Terminator stood in his little armor with a crown of flowers on his head, proud and watchful.
Lily stared at him. Mister Terminator had many talents. First aid was not one of them. Somehow that made everything even worse.
Embarrassment burned through her. She was bleeding for no reason, from a place heroes were absolutely not supposed to bleed from, and the only nearby authority figure was a rooster in a flower crown.
"This is lame," Lily whispered, horrified. "Very lame."
Quickly, she set her own flower crown down on the stone, gathered what dignity she had left, and slipped into the lake.
The water closed around her legs, cold and clean. She waded deeper, then let herself float, trying to act as if everything was normal. The lake held her gently. Her hair spread around her like pale weeds. Above her, the sky was blue and innocent. Around her, the water washed the blood away in faint red threads that vanished almost as soon as they appeared.
Lily stared up at the sky, and that was when a word came back to her from her school days, "Period."
She did not want it. She did not want the memory of classrooms, diagrams, awkward teachers, and children giggling. She did not want to remember that girls bled sometimes, not from wounds but because bodies were strange and unfair and made terrible decisions alone.
Periods were for older girls, normal girls.
Girls with freckles, glasses, squeaky voices, mothers, sisters, spare cloth, and someone nearby to say this was not the end of the world.
They were not for someone like her. Not Lily of the Lake, president of one republic, friend of chickens, possible rat diplomat, and a person who still was not entirely sure how old she was.
But then the truth pressed in, quiet and awful. She was a girl, right?
Whatever Bruce remembered, whatever she still felt inside, this body was a girl's body, and it had begun making decisions without asking her. Did this mean she was already that old? How many years had truly passed? Was this puberty? Was she a woman now, or still a girl? Could a person become a woman by accident while living alone with chickens?
Lily floated in the water, silent and stunned, while the lake carried her gently in place.
Life, she decided, was far too strange. And now it had brought her another mystery.