“My chief invades your town hall. I win!” Lilia declared. Across from her, Mr. Bearbones clawed furiously at a clay writing tablet Lilia had discovered a few days prior. He raised it up for her to see once he was finished.

  “I did not cheat!” she argued after reading the message. “Chiefs can ignore enemy watchtowers if all the patrolmen are captured. That’s been a rule from the start.” Mr. Bearbones withdrew the tablet and scrubbed out the previous message before writing a new one. “No, I am not gaslighting you. What does that word even mean? Where did you even learn a word that I don’t know?”

  Deciding that Mr. Bearbones was getting too heated to continue, Lilia began packing up what she’d decided to call her Feuding Towns set. She still had no clue what the actual games was supposed to be or what it was called, but she’d come up with an intricate ruleset and taught Mr. Bearbones to play it.

  “Raoh!” complained Cyclops. Lilia turned to find the one-eyed bobcat glaring at her from the bottom of the ladder leading out of the basement. When she’d found the poor thing’s body all those years ago his head had been half buried and the exposed half already picked clean. One cloudy eye seemed to look at her face while the empty socket beside it stared into Lilia’s soul.

  “No, you can’t go outside. I’m sorry, but I still haven’t figured out how to open the door. Besides, Master said to stay down here until he comes back. I couldn’t let you out even if I knew how,” Lilia reminded the undead feline.

  “Hisssss!” Cyclops replied, his single eye narrowing. Lilia leaned backwards as if struck.

  “What do you mean, I’m being lazy? I’ve been trying for weeks. Is two days off that much to ask for?” Lilia questioned. She didn’t actually know what Cyclops was trying to say, but that wasn’t going to stop her from trying to interpret.

  “Rrrrah.” Cyclops lifted a paw and unsheathed four claws. It took Lilia a few seconds to guess what that was supposed to mean.

  “Four? It has not been four days. It’s only been…one, two…three…okay, maybe it has been four days. But this is really hard!” Lilia declared, glaring up in the general direction of Master’s thrall. She couldn’t see it directly, but she could detect its presence and perceive its soul.

  The more Lilia examined that soul, the less she felt she understood. As Lilia had never had any kind of formal education she didn’t even have the words to accurately describe what she was looking at. Somehow Master had seemingly carved spells into the surface of the thrall’s soul. “Carve” implied that the spells had been physically inscribed, though, so that wasn’t quite the right word. The spells were layered over top of one another and on a physical object that would have meant the most recent ones scratched out the ones before them.

  Pulling a bit of mana from her own soul conduit, Lilia poked at the thrall’s soul in a particular spot. Its arm twitched. She’d managed to figure out which spell controlled the arm and that was about it. Through that, she’d determined that Master had probably used an incompatible soul for this thrall. She was unsure why. According to what little he’d told her, though, a compatible soul could have controlled the body on its own.

  “Urgh…” Lilia groaned, pressing her fists into her temples and grinding away. She was already feeling a headache coming on. The reality was that Lilia barely even knew what a spell was to begin with. She didn’t know how to cast one, so how could she ever find meaning in someone else’s spells?

  Master had seemed convinced that she had learned magic from someone and then used it to resurrect her friends, but she hadn’t. It had all been done with mana. Since Lilia had been able to see souls as long as she could remember, she’d also been able to perceive the mana trickling out of her own soul conduit. As soon as she’d noticed that, she’d tried to control it. Through trial and error she eventually succeeded.

  From there one thing had led to another. Lilia knew living being had souls, and became confused when she found a dead animal and realized its soul was missing. Its departure had left behind a trail. When her fingers passed through that thread, she tried using mana instead. Then she just had to reel Directions’ soul in and tie it to his body. Doing so using her own mana had left Directions tied to Lilia as well.

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  It all seemed perfectly logical to Lilia, but Master had been confounded when she explained her process. He’d said that she must have been trained to see souls. That the link between corpse and soul didn’t exist. Then he even insisted that Lilia couldn’t possibly have known where to attach the soul without being taught.

  Which must have been a joke, because surely a master necromancer like him knew about the frayed bits that a detached soul left behind at the base of the skull and mid-spine.

  “Yowch!” Lilia yelled as something sharp tapped her on the head, dragging her away from her thoughts. Her hands flew up to clutch at the spot where Directions had pecked her. The undead cardinal hopped out of the way of Lilia’s hands and fluttered down to the table, chirping indignantly at being displaced. “I was thinking about the task Master gave me that time!”

  Directions replied with an apologetic chirp. Lilia sighed.

  “I just don’t get it. I didn’t have to do much to your souls to revive you all. If I can’t even figure out what all the spells Master used for his thrall are for, how am I supposed to take control of one?” Lilia asked, expecting no answer. Predictably, Directions just cocked his head to the side.

  Mr. Bearbones started running his claws over the clay tablet again, wiping out the crude letters he’d inscribed earlier. With nothing better to do, Lilia just stared as he worked. In the back of her mind she kept going over what little she knew about souls. But she had trouble summing it up when she couldn’t accurately describe any of it. How does one even put into words the concept of writing magic into something with no physical form or appearance?

  A spark lit up in Lilia’s mind as Mr. Bearbones smoothed out the clay. She suddenly had an idea. An intuitive leap. What if instead of learning how to manipulate the existing spells she simply erased them? If she considered a soul like a ball of clay with spells carved into it, was anything stopping her from rubbing those same spells out?

  “That it!” Lilia declared, shooting to her feet. Surprised, Directions hopped backwards and landed on Mr. Bearbones’ clay tablet before being promptly swatted right off of it when Mr. Bearbones looked at Lilia without halting his movements.

  Off in the corner, Cyclops yawned.

  With renewed vigor, Lilia seized control of her mana. This time she drew out much more of it; enough to smother the thrall’s soul in it instead of merely poking at it. It was an instinctive act; like moving her own arm. Lilia “reached” out and brushed the soul with her mana, observing the way it rippled and shied away from the “touch.”

  Then Lilia spread out her mana. Enveloped the soul. Held it in place as she rubbed at the “surface” with an intangible hand. A spell Lilia couldn’t begin to read faded more with each pass until nothing remained. Just as a smile crept its way onto Lilia’s face at the success, however, the spell she’d erased seemed to reform on its own.

  “Cheating! That’s cheating! Dirty cheating cheater!” Lilia screamed in frustration, stomping her feet and pointing at the thrall. Her tantrum continued until she was out of breath; panting, she turned her mind back to the problem. “Was that another spell, or was the soul repairing itself? I could try erasing them one by one until I find the one doing it…but can I even erase the inner spells without going through the outer ones?”

  Deciding that the only way to find out would be to try, Lilia gathered her mana again and took hold of the thrall’s soul once more. She tried to run a wave of mana across the entire surface, but she couldn’t do it fast enough. By the time she’d blanked out half the spells on the outer layer the first ones she’d touched were already regenerating. Grunting in frustration, Lilia attempted to siphon even more mana from her own soul conduit, only to lose control.

  She watched helplessly as her mana scattered into the air. Mr. Bearbones slid the clay tablet across the table; Lilia picked it up and read the message he’d written for her.

  “Problem?” Lilia read. She gave a huff and collapsed onto the couch. “Isn’t it obvious? Ugh. I’ve never had to use that much mana at once before. And the more I try to use, the harder it gets to draw more out, so I have to focus even more on that instead of holding onto what I’ve already got…”

  Unfortunately, Lilia didn’t know what she could even do about that. Her lack of education was hindering her once again. Intuition had gotten her far, but she couldn’t reinvent the entirety of necromancy on her own in a basement.

  In the first place, the only reason she could control her mana was that she’d been able to sense it leaking from her soul. A lot of trial and error had gone into figuring even that much out. Since she’d known it was there, though, it had only been a small leap to trying to interact with it. But she’d never given any thought to manipulating large amounts of it or drawing out more of it at once. She didn’t even know how to start.

  But Master had told her to take control of his thrall as her first lesson. That meant he believed she could do it, right? Her parents had told Lilia to trust Master and follow his instructions. To treat his word like their own.

  Giving up would be out of the question. Lilia was a good girl; she always did what her parents told her to, and that meant she needed to figure this out just like Master had told her to do.

  “That was just the first try. If it didn’t work the first time, all I have to do is try again. If it still doesn’t work, I keep trying until it does,” Lilia told herself. Her stomach interrupted her with a growl to rival Cyclops. “…but first I should get something to eat. All this magic practice is making me hungry.”