After the first bleeding, time did what time always did, it kept going.
Lily had expected something to change. Maybe the sky would crack open, and the Godling might appear and explain why bodies were allowed to betray people without warning. Maybe mama might finally step from the trees, see the blood, and tell her this was normal, awful, embarrassing, and not a curse.
None of that happened.
The lake remained the lake. The forest remained the forest. The chickens remained political. Mister Terminator still believed dawn was his personal responsibility. Scar and Sleemo collected their egg tax. The rabbits multiplied. The frogs judged. The rats complained underground.
So Lily tried to ignore the whole thing.
Maybe it had been a one-time body error. Maybe poison damage. Maybe a curse that would vanish if she refused to believe in it hard enough. A small, ridiculous part of her still hoped belief could shape reality. Maybe if she believed properly, she could still become a tall, powerful bodybuilder man with huge arms and heroic posture.
Then the bleeding came again.
Not right away, but after enough days had passed that she had almost stopped worrying. First came the ache low in her belly. Then the heaviness. Then the strange sadness. Then the blood.
Lily sat very still and understood something she did not want to understand.
She was a girl indeed, and she was getting older.
And if time kept moving, she would one day become a woman who knew everything about lake politics and animal border disputes, but almost nothing about the world beyond the trees.
That was unacceptable.
She could not read Albion writing. She could barely speak Albion properly. She had no money, no map, no teachers, no books, and no idea where Mama and Papa had gone. If she stayed here forever, she might become clever about chickens and rats, but stupid about everything else.
Nothing would change unless she changed it herself.
So she herself had to find Mama and Papa. She had to find Rob's village, or a road, or at least some scrap of civilization through which she could get answers. But the thought of walking far beyond the lake still tightened her stomach. What if village children laughed at her wild hair, ragged clothes, and chicken smell? What if they called her a little forest beggar while she stood there trying to explain herself in broken Albion like a confused caveman?
Now that would be extremely embarrassing.
So Lily made the decision to not leave yet. Instead, first she would prepare.
Civilization after all needed money. Rob had once said people used copper, silver, and gold coins, and coins could buy useful things: tools, books, lessons, maybe even someone clever enough to help search for Mama and Papa. If medieval private detectives that could help her find her parents existed, they probably wanted payment too.
So Lily needed coins. And to get coins, she needed something worth selling.
Sadly there was no online shop where she could post chicken videos and become rich. So she needed real things. Paper, maybe. Advanced tools, clay goods, strange inventions. Anything rare enough to make people look past her wild hair, bad grammar, chicken smell, and suspicious lack of parents.
She also needed skills, because skilled people survived better. Skilled people got hired. Skilled people were useful.
So Lily began a new phase of her life.
She would learn. She would make things. She would become someone civilization had no choice but to take seriously.
At least, that was the official plan.
In her mind, it became something like one of those old strategy-game technology trees. Agriculture had already been unlocked. Animal husbandry was mostly chickens. The United States of Lily's Lake had food, borders, a defensive wall, and a dangerously complicated poultry population. Unfortunately, its overall development level was still primitive.
Therefore, Lily, president of the United States of Lily's Lake, opened the first great research program of her civilization.
She began at the bottom.
First came better stone tools. She had made tools before, of course, but mostly in the desperate way a person made things when the alternative was starving, bleeding, or being bullied by rats. Now she worked properly. She practiced, she focused, she shaped flint, bone, sticks, and cord into scrapers, hooks, digging points, little knives, and rough saw-toothed edges. Some worked, most broke, a few injured only her pride, which was acceptable.
Slowly, her hands learned what her old mind only half-remembered. How stone chipped. Which bones snapped, which cords held, which knots betrayed her at the worst possible moment. Little by little, the tools stored in her cabin began to look less like broken forest trash and more like actual equipment.
That was the strange part.
In her old life, Bruce had not been an engineer. He had been an undercover cop, a movie watcher, a gamer, and a man who knew many things only in the vague way modern people knew them. But Lily discovered that vague knowledge was not useless. If she sat still, thought carefully, failed repeatedly, and tried again, half-remembered ideas became shapes. Shapes became experiments. Experiments became skills.
She did not know how to rebuild civilization.
So she decided to crawl through mankind's old technology tree one step at a time.
After stone tools came archery.
At first, Lily wanted a crossbow. A crossbow seemed proper serious, tactical. The sort of weapon a small person could use against a large enemy while looking mysterious and cool. Unfortunately, crossbows were much easier to admire than to build, especially for a physically small girl with primitive tools and more ambition than caution.
Her first attempt nearly snapped back hard enough to remove her arm from future research.
After lying in the grass for several minutes, shaking and crying from pain, Lily decided that advanced weapons technology should proceed more slowly.
So she made a simple short bow instead.
It was ugly, the string was rough, the pull was almost too much for her. The arrows were made from thin sticks, stone points, and chicken feathers donated to science without proper consent, mostly from Miss Attitude and Mister Terminator, who had the strongest and most beautiful feathers in the forest.
At first, because Lily had never actually shot a bow before, the arrows flew wherever they pleased. One nearly hit a squirrel. Another vanished into a bush and was never seen again. A third landed so close to a frog that Lily had to apologize formally to the entire lake.
After that, she built a target.
It floated on a rough wooden raft in the shallows: a scarecrow warrior made from sticks, straw, ragged cloth, and a bark shield. Lily named him Enemy Barbarian Number One and practiced against him every day. Most shots went low. Some went wide. A few hit the target, and those were celebrated as national achievements.
She thought about hunting, briefly.
Then a rabbit looked at her with soft, foolish eyes, and Lily's career as a deadly forest ranger ended before it truly began.
So the bow became mostly a tool for self-defense, practice, and feeling cool from a safe distance. Later, it became useful in another way. Lily tied cord to arrows and used them to shoot lines over high branches. With those lines, she could pull ropes upward, drag vines into place, and begin her first great building project since the living wall.
Which was a treehouse.
This counted as construction technology. Possibly masonry too, if one was generous and did not ask where the stone was.
The idea began because the cabin had become too alive. Moss, vines, bugs, chickens, feathers, nests, and poop had conquered every corner. In winter, Lily loved the crowded warmth. In summer, the cabin became a green, chicken-filled sauna with political arguments at dawn. She wanted one small place that belonged to her alone.
So she chose a broad tree near the cabin, one with strong lower branches spread like arms, and began to build.
At first, it was only a platform. Then it became a platform with sides, then a roof, and a set of crooked steps curling around the trunk. She built with primitive tools, rope, vine cord, bark strips, wooden pegs, and stubbornness. She wedged branches into forks, lashed poles together, wove walls from thin sticks, and strengthened weak places with living vines.
Where wood did not want to hold, she pressed her palms to the tree and fed it light.
That changed everything.
The bark slowly swelled around supports. Branches thickened where she needed them. Roots gripped the soil harder. Vines tightened like patient ropes. Lily did not have nails, saws, iron brackets, or clever carpentry tools, but she had living wood. If she was patient, if she guided the tree gently enough, it would grow around her work and lock the pieces into place.
Her construction became half building, half gardening, half magic.
That made three halves, which meant it was probably advanced engineering.
By winter, the treehouse existed.
It was not high enough to impress a proper architect. It was not the grand elven palace from her imagination. It leaned slightly in a way Lily chose to call artistic. But it stood above the mud. It had a lookout over the garden, a dry corner for tools, a little sleeping space, and a roof that only leaked in decorative places. Most importantly, from there Lily could shoot arrows down at imaginary enemies as if defending castle walls.
For three whole days, she thought she had made a private home. Then the chickens discovered the steps.
Mister Terminator climbed them first, slowly and with grave authority, as if ascending to a throne. The hens followed under Miss Attitude's supervision. Sergeant Flap and Sir Pecksalot inspected the platform, declared it strategically valuable, and by sunset the treehouse had become a military outpost of the chicken nation.
Lily considered resisting.
Then she saw Mister Terminator standing on the highest step, looking over the lake with his chest puffed out and his flower crown slightly crooked.
She sighed.
"Fine," she said. "Shared base."
The rooster accepted her surrender.
After the treehouse came pottery.
The Season of Blood had returned many times by then, each visit leaving Lily sore, angry, emotional, and more determined to invent civilization faster out of spite. Some days she worked furiously. Other days she lay in the grass and cried because a cloud looked lonely. Mood swings, she decided, were bad design.
Still, she kept going.
She dug clay from the lakebank and damp places in the woods. By diving into the shallows, she found better clay near the lake bottom and carried it back in baskets she had woven herself. She shaped bowls, cups, jars, tiles, bricks, storage pots, and one heroic attempt at a large toilet that collapsed so tragically she repurposed it as a rat tunnel entrance.
The rats seemed to appreciate the architecture.
Lily learned that clay needed patience. Wet clay cracked if rushed. Thick clay could explode if fired badly. Chickens should never be allowed near unfired pottery. Squirrels could not be trusted near drying shelves. Rain was an enemy of civilization.
Still, she improved.
Her bowls became neat enough to be beautiful in a rough forest way. She pressed dried flowers into some of them. Her jars held water. Her tiles, when arranged carefully, made little dry paths through mud like primitive roads. Her storage pots received painted scenes of great historical events: chickens fighting rats, Lily standing heroically with a spear, Mister Terminator defeating foxes, and one confusing image of Scar accepting egg tax. Pottery, Lily declared, had been unlocked.
Next came metalworking, which went poorly.
Lily built a little furnace outside from clay, stone, and ambition. She dug holes in the forest, gathered strange rocks, heated them, stared at them, and waited for iron to reveal itself.
Most rocks remained rocks. Some cracked. One popped loudly enough to make her dive behind a log. Another produced a smell so foul that even the rats withdrew from the area, which Lily considered impressive but not useful.
Once, after falling asleep from exhaustion while the furnace was still hot, she nearly started a forest fire. After that, she added "do not burn down republic" to her research rules.
Since she could not reliably tell ore from ordinary stone, and honestly had no real idea what she was doing, Lily became extremely frustrated with metallurgy and turned the furnace into something better.
An outdoor cooking place. That, at least, worked.
She built a clay oven, a stone fire pit, and a little rack for roasting fish, vegetables, mushrooms, and eggs. The iron pot was still too heavy to move easily, so she treated it like a sacred fixed monument. For flatter cooking, she used the old axe blade, heating the metal near the fire until it could fry eggs.
After years of eating eggs, Lily became a true master of egg-based survival cuisine. She made omelets with herbs, mushrooms, greens, fish flakes, roasted roots, and whatever else seemed edible enough to risk. She sang while cooking, little nonsense songs about frying, stewing, chopping, washing, and not letting the chickens steal dinner. Sometimes she danced with a wooden spoon like a performer before an audience of deeply unimpressed hens.
The food became better. Not village-inn better. Not Mama's cooking better. But good enough that Lily sometimes sat beside the fire, ate slowly, and felt almost civilized.
Yet civilization still had cruel gaps.
She wanted milk. Sleemo refused to provide it. So did the deer. Lily considered this unfair but understandable.
She wanted flour too. Real flour for bread, pancakes, noodles, even pizza. Civilization had been foolish in many ways, but it had understood wheat. Unfortunately, she had no proper grain and no mill. So she experimented with acorns from oak trees, starchy roots from wet places, and seeds from stubborn weeds in sunny clearings. Most required soaking, drying, grinding, or cooking before they became even slightly trustworthy, but Lily learned. Slowly, bitterly, with many suspicious mouthfuls.
Then, while partially distracted by mastering forest cooking, she finally made rough paper. Which was not good paper, smooth or something that any proper scholar would respect, but it worked.
She made it from plant fibers, old cloth scraps, bark pulp, water, pressure, and stubbornness. She soaked, mashed, strained, pressed, dried, and guarded the sheets from rain, birds, chickens, squirrels, and one mouse who apparently believed literacy was edible.
When the first usable page survived being lifted, Lily nearly cried.
Then she immediately began drawing castles, towns, tools and people. At some point, she forgot why she had made paper in the first place.
That happened often now. Lily was lonely. She got distracted by hunger, chores, mood swings, inventions, animal politics, and her own imagination. One moment she was preparing for civilization. The next, she was building civilization in miniature from clay.
Beside the lake, she cleared a patch of wild grass and apologized to it. Then she began making a castle town.
At first, it was only a grand castle on a little clay hill, with enough space inside for mice to run around. Then came a few houses. Then a wall. Then towers. Then a market square. Then a mine, because every proper town needed income. Then a refinery, because old Bruce remembered enough about industry to know raw materials were only the beginning.
Then another castle, because obviously.
She made little people too. Guards to guard it. Citizens to live in it. Horses made from acorns and sticks. Knights with pebble shields. A king and queen to rule over everything. The king was Rob. The queen was Mama. There was also one angry guard named Frank, who looked extremely serious and lived in a nice house with Sarah and their two children.
The mice moved in before she finished.
At first, Lily felt honored. Then she noticed them licking dried berry paint from the castle walls and felt robbed.
Still, she let them stay. The rats had underground gardens and tunnels. The mice could have a castle town. That seemed fair. A city needed citizens, and apparently these citizens had tails.
By the next summer, after once again forgetting to mark her calendar properly, Lily found herself lying belly-down in the grass beside her clay kingdom while lunch cooled in the garden.
The table stood beneath the shade of the living wall, set with great care. Her best clay plate waited under a folded cloth, along with roasted fish, sliced apples, greens, and an omelet stuffed with herbs and mushrooms. The cloth was there to protect the meal from flies, birds, and ambitious chickens.
Her plan was simple.
Play for a little while as the food cooled. Then swim. Then eat. Then, if she still felt serious and civilized, return to inventing the future, maybe.
For now, the day was too perfect for responsibility.
The sun hung high over Lily's garden, warm and golden. Lavender swayed in the breeze. Bees wandered from flower to flower. Somewhere near the crooked treehouse, hens clucked in soft, sleepy rhythm. The living wall rustled gently around the garden, thick with apple branches, vines, brambles, and flowers.
Lily lay with her elbows in the grass, chin in her palms, bare feet kicking lazily behind her. Her clothes were simple things she had made herself: a rough hide skirt stitched with nettle thread, and a narrow top of softened hide and cloth tied across her chest because life had become rude and practical in that way. They were not pretty by town standards, probably. But they were useful. Easy to move in. Easy to swim in if she had to. Easy to repair.
Besides, there was no one here to impress.
Spread before her like a grand, melted board game was New Town, the greatest clay city in the United States of Lily's Lake.
It had walls now. Real walls, mostly. Little towers leaned over crooked streets. A market square sat near the center. A mine district sprawled at one edge, filled with pebble carts, twig rails, and tiny hunched miners. There were houses, workshops, a refinery, a castle, and even a sad little bathhouse no one used except mice.
The mice watched from windows and doorways, their black eyes bright with suspicion.
They were not afraid of Lily anymore. Not truly. They had accepted her as the enormous outside person who built houses, repaired roofs, left crumbs sometimes, and occasionally shouted at imaginary citizens. Mostly, they seemed confused by her. That was fair. Lily was also confused by herself.
At the castle gate stood King Rob.
He looked heroic today, despite his half-collapsed neck. His body was clay, his armor was bark, and his sword was a sharp little stone Lily had shaped with what she considered caveman precision. A scrap of leather tied around his shoulders served as a cape, and a faded star marked his chest in berry juice. His crown was a tiny ring of dried flowers because Lily had not yet figured out proper royal metalwork.
Beside him stood Queen Mama, elegant in her lopsided way. Lily had made her tall and graceful, with long arms and a mane of grass hair glued down with honey she had absolutely not stolen from the bees, only borrowed from civilization. The face had started kind, but a chicken footprint had smudged one eye into a dark pit.
Lily had decided this made her look wise, not haunted, but wise.
Below the royal couple, the mine district awaited command. Lily reached out and nudged a cart with one finger, sending it wobbling along twig wheels toward the refinery.
"W-work faster, damn you," she barked in her deepest King Rob voice. "The galactic war is won, but enemy may come back. Republic need resources."
The mice stared and Lily ignored them. Inside her mind, trumpets sounded. Drums rolled. Flags snapped in the wind over the proud nation of New Town.
Then she shifted into Queen Mama's voice, softer and calmer.
"Now, now, dear. War is over. Let them rest. Maybe say something nice instead of yelling."
Lily sat up a little, threw one hand into the air, and cleared her throat.
"My citizens!" she cried. "Your courage build this great town. But peace is no excuse for lazy. Go forth. Mine iron. Build cannon. Build toaster. Build…"
She paused dramatically.
"Build C-3PO. Advanced communication robot for better translation and language learning."
Then she collapsed into giggles.
Nearby sat Sir Ironman, the royal blacksmith. He was more blob than man, with squat legs, a square stone chest, and arms too wide for his body. Around him lay treasures of imagination: a broken clay gun, a soot-painted bark monitor, a rune-scratched sword, and a crooked forge made from burnt twigs and stones. In Lily's head, Sir Ironman grumbled about software updates, cursed magical glitches, and insisted he was very close to fixing C-3PO's memory core.
"They happy now," Lily murmured, watching the clay people stand proudly in place. "Internet come last week. Galactic war over. Everyone play Warcraft and send cat pictures."
Just then, Big Mama, one of the younger hens, charged through the mine district after a mouse.
Crunch, came the sound.
A clay cart flattened beneath her foot. Two miners toppled. One tiny house collapsed into a trench. The mouse escaped through an alley while Big Mama clucked in triumph, clearly believing she had saved the nation.
Lily gasped, hands flying to her mouth.
"Oh no," she whispered. "Disaster."
She sprang upright in official emergency mode.
"Ladies and gentle-chickens of press," she announced, "we receive report of catastrophic mine collapse in Clay Region. Early estimate: twelve casualties, one broken cart, and local broadband outage. Mud engineers are coming. They bring hay. And prayer. May gods protect us all."
Nobody cared.
Big Mama began laying siege to the mouse castle. The mice squeaked at her in furious protest. The chickens nearby continued their normal business as if New Town's infrastructure crisis meant nothing to them.
Lily fell back into the grass with a sigh, arms spread wide, long pale hair spilling around her.
For a little while, she only stared at the sky. It was blue and empty and enormous, stretching above the lake like the space between stars. A hawk circled high overhead, probably planning murder. Deer slept at the forest edge. Rabbits nibbled grass. Rats moved toward the shore for water. Chickens scratched through the compost. Bees drifted through flowers.
Everything was alive. Everything had something to do.
And then, as sometimes happened when the Season of Blood was near, the silence turned heavy.
Lily sat up slowly and hugged her knees.
The clay town remained before her. King Rob stood at the gate. Queen Mama watched wisely with her haunted eye. Sir Ironman had still not finished the toaster. Her citizens lay scattered in the dirt.
And suddenly it all felt pointless.
"What am I doing?" she whispered.
No matter how many clay houses she made, no one truly lived in them. No matter how many taverns she built, no one drank there. No matter how many little shops, bridges, banks, and heroic monuments she crafted, no one cared except the mice, and they mostly cared if the walls tasted good.
The animals would not play properly.
She had tried. She had tossed acorns for Mister Terminator, but he only pecked them and looked offended. She had made leather armor for chickens, tiny belts for rabbits, and once even boots for the horned deer as a prank. She had spent an entire week trying to convince Scar to wear a bone necklace and become a Night Elf druid.
Scar had stared at her like she was the strangest creature in the forest.
Then he ran away.
Lily pulled a bitter flower from the dirt and chewed the stem while thinking. It tasted awful, but thinking often required sacrifice.
The animals all had lives. The chickens had flocks. The foxes had kits. The rabbits had too many relatives. Even the rats had tunnels full of gossip and complaints. She had healed them, fed them, sung to them, let them sleep by her fire during cruel winters.
Then they left, because they could, because they had others like them. Lily did not.
She rested her chin on her knees.
It was not only loneliness. It was the stillness. The way days stretched and repeated until victories became small empty boxes to check. Catch fish. Fix roof. Make bowl. Survive storm. Grow cabbage. Stop chicken rebellion. Repeat.
She missed people.
She missed Frank most of all. His steady voice. His tired encouragement. His laugh. His children calling Bruce "Uncle Bruce" like it was the most natural thing in the world. She even missed Amber sometimes, which proved loneliness was a dangerous illness. Amber had been rude and selfish and impossible, but at least she was a person. At least she spoke.
Then, for no reason except memory was cruel, Lily thought of Sarah.
Back in middle school, Sarah had been one of the pretty girls. Not the worst one, not like the truly mean ones, but still sharp enough to sting when she laughed with them. She had teased Bruce sometimes. Called him slow. Big. Weird. Frank had stepped in more than once, quiet and hard-eyed, stopping the laughter without needing to throw a punch.
Then Sarah had changed.
Or maybe she had only gotten tired of pretending to be someone else.
She started standing near them at the edge of the playground. Then she came to Frank's house. Then she stayed for games, movies, snacks, and summer days by the lake Frank's family owned in the little mountain valley above town. Bruce remembered that lake clearly: cold water, pine trees, Frank's mother bringing lemonade, Sarah shrieking when the boys splashed her and then splashing them back twice as hard.
Eventually, Sarah belonged there. Eventually, she became family. Eventually, she married Frank.
Lily looked down at herself and felt something strange twist in her chest. Sometimes, in the water, in certain light, she thought she looked a little like Sarah had then. Pretty in that same sharp, delicate, unfair way.
Except Sarah had found people. Lily had a clay town and mice.
"Even night elf dancers talked to me," she whispered.
Her voice broke a little.
In her old life, she had spent years in World of Warcraft. She had never made it to max level. Never bought a proper mount. She had given away gold constantly, especially to dancers in Stormwind, because they smiled and said thank you. Because for a few seconds, Bruce had felt useful.
Lily missed that feeling.
She missed loading screens. Mailboxes full of junk. Buying food she did not need. Being told she was bad at the game. She missed voices, even annoying ones. She missed people, even terrible ones.
She pressed her hands over her face and breathed.
Her body felt wrong today too. Sore and tender in ways she hated. Her shape had changed again over the last year, becoming softer, narrower here, wider there, more like this new life and less like the old one she remembered. She did not want to think about it, but the body insisted on existing.
It always did.
"Maybe next year," she whispered. "Maybe Mama and Papa just late."
The wind shifted.
Lily turned her gaze toward the old cabin. It was almost swallowed now. Vines covered the walls. Moss softened the roof. Flowers sprouted from the chimney like bright little memories. An apple tree had grown through part of the structure and lifted branches into the sun. It no longer looked like the home Mama had made. It looked like the forest had buried it gently rather than letting it rot.
Lily stared at it for a long time. Then she bowed her head.
"Sorry, Mama," she whispered. "I being lazy. I go swim. Then work."
She stood, brushed grass from her knees, and walked toward the clay town under siege.
"I return later," she told the mice. "No licking castle paint."
The mice offered no promises. They were busy surviving Big Mama.
The old flat stone waited by the water, "Victory Boulder."
Her stage, her throne, her diving platform, her place to think. It jutted over the lake, warm in the sun, worn smooth by years of bare feet, cannonballs, and heroic belly flops.
Lily stepped onto it, glanced around once, and began undoing the knots of her clothes. There was no one here, only frogs, and frogs were not people. She set her skirt and top neatly on the stone, stretched her arms, and took one breath.
Then she leapt.
A quick front flip, a flash of sun, and then the lake swallowed her with a clean splash.
Cold water closed around her. Lily opened her eyes beneath the surface and let herself drift. For a moment, the ache in her body softened. The world became blue and green and quiet. She kicked upward and floated on her back, hair spreading around her like pale weeds.
Then she noticed the chickens. They were climbing. Not wandering or playing, but climbing.
Her smile faded.
One by one, hens moved up the old cabin roof and into the treehouse. Sergeant Flap and Sir Pecksalot led groups to higher branches. Big Mama abandoned the mouse siege. Even the younger hens scrambled upward in nervous bursts.
And on the mossy roof of the cabin stood Mister Terminator. Armor strapped across his chest. Flower crown crooked between comb and eye. Silently watching the forest.
Lily went still. The chickens always took high ground when danger came.
The clearing changed around her. Rabbits froze, then vanished into grass. Deer lifted their heads at the forest edge. Birds burst from the branches. Even the frogs stopped singing.
Then she heard it, hooves. Slow, heavy, careful. A creature was moving through soft earth beyond the living wall.
Branches cracked, leather creaked. Something large pushed through the forest where no deer would be so careless. Lily slipped behind Victory Boulder until only her eyes showed above the stone, lake water dripping down her face.
Her heart hammered.
Then a voice came from beyond the trees. A young man's voice, calm and confident, speaking softly to his horse as if he had every right to be there. And he was far too close to her home.
"Hold here, boy. I would see what place this is. Smells good enough to be worth a look."
Lily's breath caught so hard it hurt. A person had come, a real person. Not memory, not imagination, not an animal she had half-taught herself to understand.
A stranger had smelled her breakfast.
He was in her forest, near her garden, near her home, riding a horse and speaking like he had every right to be there.
The United States of Lily's Lake was no longer empty.