“Hmhmhmmmm~” Lilia hummed as she walked down a well-maintained brick road. Days had passed since she left Master’s hometown. Despite spending all of those few days on the road, Lilia had made only limited progress. Her time in Master’s basement had reduced Lilia’s stamina greatly, so she needed to make frequent stops to rest throughout the day.

  The joy of being outside after so long more than made up for how slow Lilia’s progress had been, though. Sounds she’d all but forgotten during her studies surrounded her. Wind blew through the trees lining the road. Leaves shook and branches swayed. Birds sang—no, Directions sang, but that was good enough. The other birds must have migrated north for the winter a little earlier than normal. At least Directions sounded cheerful.

  Cyclops burst from the bushes along the road, startling Mr. Bearbones. Lilia had felt the bobcat coming, though, so she just greeted him with a one-handed wave while patting Mr. Bearbones comfortingly with the other hand.

  “Rrrrrgh,” Cyclops growled, falling into step with Lilia and Mr. Bearbones. That sounded like disappointment to Lilia. Possibly frustration.

  “That’s rare. I’ve never seen you fail so many hunts in a row before,” Lilia remarked. Since leaving Master’s town Cyclops hadn’t caught a single animal. Normally he would have turned up at least a squirrel or an inkymink by now. Then Lilia would have made him release the poor, terrified creature and he would have sulked for a good six hours.

  At least Cyclops knew he didn’t need to eat. Otherwise he’d probably kill his prey every time instead of just some of the time. Lilia had never quite figured out if that was accidentally or if the bobcat just craved blood on occasion.

  “Rrrruh. Rrow!” Cyclops replied, bumping against Lilia’s shin insistently.

  “No!” Lilia replied, guessing what Cyclops wanted. “And I wouldn’t use my soul sense to find something for you even if I could! But my range really isn’t that good out here. Towns are just easy to see across because everyone is so close together.”

  It had taken Lilia half a day to figure out what Cyclops wanted the first time he’d done this. He’d kept headbutting her until she finally guessed correctly. After every few failed hunts he tried again even though Lilia gave the same answer every time.

  “Look, we’re at the edge of the forest now. Maybe you can find a rabbit or something in the fields. It feels like summer, so I bet there’s a bunch of them eating the weeds under the barley,” Lilia suggested. “Wait…if it’s summer, then the birds migrated really early, not just a little. Maybe we’re having a really hot fall. But this weather really feels summery to me.”

  Lilia came to a stop as she muttered to herself, trying to unravel the contradiction. Summer in Selkarc was short and intensely hot by Lilia’s standards. Midsummer even more so. If summer was on its way out then Lilia should have been able to felt a noticeable drop in temperature by now, but instead the days only seemed to be getting warmer.

  So where were all the birds?

  “Mmm…I don’t get it!” Lilia declared suddenly. “If it’s this hot, there should be birds! If there are no birds, it shouldn’t be this hot!

  Just like that, Lilia gave up. This mystery had nothing to do with necromancy, so her interest in it was short-lived. Her attention soon shifted to the open fields ahead as she exited the forest. For kilometers around, all Lilia could see was green.

  Seeing those open fields of barley, Lilia instantly detected something wrong. She hadn’t grown up in a farming village for nothing. Lilia wandered towards the side of the road and peered over the fence into some farmer’s field. There were bugs on the leaves and red-orange clumps stuck to the stems of many plants.

  She’d never seen anything like it. Typically insects avoided the crops. Lilia always assumed they tasted bad to animals. She’d seen rusted plants in the wild, too, but never on barley of all things. Strange things were piling up rapidly, but Lilia lacked the interest to investigate. That would mean finding a farmer and asking questions, all of which seemed like a big detour for something she only cared about enough to note in passing.

  “The barley looks weird, so be careful if you go hunting, Cyclops,” Lilia warned her friend before moving on. He, of course, ignored her advice and vanished into the barley field. Its fence, meant more to define the property line than to deter intruders, did little to stop the bobcat.

  Setting the matter of the crops aside, Lilia kept walking. Two hours or so passed as she walked. When Lilia was wrapping up her seventh stop in those hours and Cyclops had just returned from another failed hunt, something she saw through her connection with Directions caught her attention.

  “Something’s coming towards us. I think it’s a horse,” Lilia informed her land-bound friends. “No one is riding it, though.”

  Unconcerned by the riderless animal, Lilia pressed on. The moment it entered range of her soul sense Lilia checked the horse. It appeared to be alive. Not half alive, but fully alive. That made it the first fully living creature Lilia had seen in days. Though now that she thought about it, she’d forgotten to check the bugs.

  “Woah, hey there!” Lilia called out to the spooked horse as it came closer. It slowed for a moment, but the moment it noticed Mr. Bearbones, the horse’s panic seemed to double. Apparently seeing no alternative, the horse sprinted off the road and leapt headlong into a neighboring field, disappearing into the sea of barley without a trace. Lilia turned to Mr. Bearbones. “Now what did you do to make it react like that?”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  The bear only shrugged.

  By the time Lilia encountered what the horse had been fleeing from the sun had nearly completed its descent towards the horizon. Lilia had just begun considering where to sleep that night when she again noticed something in Directions’ field of vision. An open-topped carriage filled with boxes. Several figures were milling around the vehicle, which appeared to be intact aside from its conspicuous lack of a horse.

  “A saddle made for skeletal bears would be nice right now…” Lilia moaned as she pressed onwards, determined to reach the carriage before nightfall. “Then again, I guess I can’t really ride you up to them when no one is supposed to see you, huh, Mr. Bearbones? Go ahead and hide in the barley. You too, Cyclops. Go on.”

  With her friends safely out of sight—but remaining close by just in case—Lilia approached the stranded carriage. What began as tiny figures in the distance soon resolved into men in light armor clutching axes and spears. At first she thought a group of soldiers had lost their horse, but then she spotted several bodies lined up on the ground which had at first been hidden by the carriage.

  “Did they get attacked by monsters? They usually stay deep in the woods,” Lilia said to herself. In all her life, she didn’t think she’d ever heard of anyone getting attacked on the road. She’d never even considered the possibility. Deciding she had gotten close enough to be heard, Lilia called out to the soldiers. “Hey there! Hello! Is everything alright?”

  No answer.

  “Maybe they can’t hear me with their helmets on,” Lilia muttered. “Hello? Are you looking for a horse?” This time the closest soldier turned towards Lilia, but he didn’t respond. However, he did start walking towards her, so she guessed that he preferred to talk up close. Soon only twenty meters separated the two, then ten, and then five. No matter what Lilia said, the soldier remained silent.

  With just a few meters left, he began to raise his axe. Confused, Lilia looked around, but she didn’t see any monsters nearby. Mr. Bearbones and Cyclops were still hidden as well. So what was there to attack?

  Thwack.

  Lilia turned back towards the soldier, surprised by the noise. Even more surprising was that Mr. Bearbones now stood between them, bony paw outstretched. The soldier’s axe now sat lodged harmlessly between Mr. Bearbones’ collarbones. The soldier’s head was nowhere to be seen.

  Thud.

  That solved that mystery.

  Before the soldier’s body even hit the ground Lilia was activating her soul sense, intending to resurrect the poor man as quickly as possible. However, the body never did hit the ground. It stood there, seemingly unbothered, as it attempted to retrieve its axe. Which made sense to Lilia, as now that she was looking, she saw that the man’s soul hadn’t even left his body.

  “He’s just like those chickens. All of them are,” Lilia noted clinically. Now that she’d noticed the state of the soldiers’ souls, she felt much less worried about the fact that Mr. Bearbones had revealed himself. “Should I release their souls…? But they’re technically alive. I’m not supposed to…oh, but the chickens were technically alive too, and I didn’t have any trouble with their souls…”

  Lilia stood there muttering to herself as Mr. Bearbones smacked the headless man to the ground and snapped his bones like twigs. She found herself faced with a conundrum. Her parents told her growing up that Mortos hated bad children that interfered with the souls of living people and that he would punish her if she ever did. Did it still count if they were already half dead?

  Deciding that lacking a head was enough sign that the man who’d tried to attack her was meant to be dead, Lilia reached out with her mana to end his suffering. Something stopped her, though. In fact, she found her mana outright repelled just before reaching the soul conduit this time. That alarmed Lilia much more than anything else had so far.

  “Uh-oh. Did I mess up? Um, Mortos, if you’re listening, I promise I thought he was already dead! Dying, I mean! Supposed to be dead, that is!” Lilia pleaded. When nothing struck her dead, though, she decided to look more closely. “Wait. Is that a spell? I see a few of them, actually. There’s not as many as Master used for his thralls, so I didn’t notice at first.”

  That wasn’t the only thing Lilia hadn’t noticed. The other soldiers had gotten a lot closer while she’d been preoccupied. Although she hadn’t really given it much thought when the first soldier attacked her, Lilia now realized she was probably in danger. Her first instinct, to sever her attackers’ soul conduits, had already failed. Mr. Bearbones might not be able to stop so many on his own, either. The only other way to permanently stop these soldiers would be to destroy that strange mass clinging to their spines, but their armor was in the way.

  There had to be another way, Lilia thought as she backed away. Mr. Bearbones, standing protectively in front of Lilia, tried to intimidate the soldiers by roaring. He only succeeded in rattling his own bones. The soldiers advanced, undeterred, until they drew within smacking range. But when Mr. Bearbones tried to swat one soldier away, the others finally reacted to him. They raised their weapons.

  “Stop!” Lilia screamed as she watched those deadly implements rise. A pulse of mana accompanied her shout as Lilia tried to intervene by targeting the soldiers’ soul conduits. Her mana bounced off…but the soldiers froze in place.

  A second passed. Then two. Abruptly the soldiers jerked into motion again, seemingly remembering that they’d been about to attack. Before they could strike, Lilia interrupted them a second time, screaming “Stop!” Again they froze.

  Now Lilia understood what was happening. These not-dead soldiers had someone’s spells carved into their souls, so they were under someone’s control, but that person hadn’t actually included any way of stopping anyone else from giving them orders. Every time Lilia’s mana carried that one command to them, the not-dead obeyed, then but only until their original order was repeated.

  She didn’t know if one of the spells was responsible or if the necromancer controlling these not-dead had done it remotely, but it didn’t matter. What was important was that if her hunch was right, Lilia had a way of getting past them.

  “Don’t see or hear us!” Lilia ordered. The soldiers stopped mid-motion. They looked around in confusion, as if they couldn’t remember what they had been doing or perhaps couldn’t figure out who they’d been fighting. “Mr. Bearbones, back away. I…think it’s safe now.”

  Lilia watched nervously for any signs of danger, but the soldier soon went back to whatever they had been doing. Even the one damaged by Mr. Bearbones began dragging itself back towards the carriage. It seemed like as long as Lilia’s order didn’t contradict anything else they were told to do then it would remain in effect.

  She’d been wrong before when she assumed this phenomenon had nothing to do with necromancy. But staying around these soldiers would be dangerous. Lilia needed to leave quickly in case their master noticed her.

  “Come on, Mr. Bearbones. Let’s go around them. Be very careful.”