“Thanks for the help!” Lilia said as she released the familiar she’d used to escape the basement. Unfortunately she didn’t know of any way to get it out of the lightless chamber Master had sealed it within when it had been his thrall. The most Lilia could do for the creature was to send it back to where she’d gotten it. Wherever that was.

  As for the rest of Master’s thralls, Lilia left them alone. She felt fairly certain after months of toying with them that they had little to no awareness of their surroundings and she didn’t want to destroy so much of her Master’s work.

  “Bags, check. Stuff in the bags, check. Feuding villages set, check,” Lilia listed off. “Make sure to let me know if anything gets loose, Mr. Bearbones. I’ve got them as tight as I could get them, but it’s hard to really get them secure when I’m only working with your bones.”

  Mr. Bearbones nodded, but Lilia found his assurance unconvincing. Clever as he could be, Mr. Bearbones struggled to grasp the idea that he no longer had flesh. It might have just been denial, though. Could bears experience denial?

  “On second thought…wait, where are you, Cyclops?” Lilia looked around for her other familiar. He must have wandered off in his excitement to finally leave the basement. A glint of green from the shadows gave him away; he’d been exploring one of the unlit rooms in Master’s house and popped his head out of the door when he heard his name. “Cyclops, let me know if my bags fall off of Mr. Bearbones, okay?”

  “Mrrow.”

  “And Directions, you’ll be flying ahead to scout. Go ahead and take one last look around town and make sure the way’s clear,” Lilia instructed. Directions took off immediately, singing happily. As he flew off, Lilia tapped into his vision and shared his bird’s eye view of the town.

  After so long, Lilia couldn’t remember what Master had called this town. She’d only heard the name once. But she did remember how alive it had felt on her way through the streets. People everywhere, just going about their business.

  Looking at the town now from Directions’ perspective, there were no traces left of that former liveliness. It went without saying that there were no people walking the streets, but Lilia found no chimneys venting smoke, no laundry hanging out to dry, and no wares laid out in the market for sale. She didn’t even see any dogs hunting for scraps.

  But even so, she saw movement.

  “Right…all those undead I’d been wondering about. Change of plans, guys! I wanna take a look at the weird undead before we leave. There’s a few not to far from here,” Lilia announced.

  She left Master’s home through the front door and hung a left, heading several houses down before stopping. Here. In the backyard she could sense a cluster of small undead animals. Instead of going through the house and entering the backyard, Lilia crept around the side of the building and peered over the fence.

  A good dozen chickens sat in the dirt in front of a coop. At a glance they looked like perfectly normal birds snoozing the morning away. Around the yard, though, were signs that something was wrong.

  Seed and food scraps were scattered around the chickens, completely ignored. None of the hens were roosting in the coop, either. Bits of dried blood clung to the chickens’ beaks, too. Their feathers were too dark to tell, but Lilia felt certain there would be blood on those as well.

  Most alarmingly, their souls were wrong.

  Cyclops crept up beside Lilia, looking up at the fence. He couldn’t see through it since the planks were flush with each other, but he could likely smell the blood on the other side. Before Lilia could interrupt, Cyclops leapt for the top of the fence, alerting the chickens.

  Nearly as one, the birds erupted into furious squawking. In his surprise, Cyclops failed to grab onto the top of the fence properly. He flipped in midair, falling down heavily on his back inside the yard. Cyclops disappeared beneath the frenzy of feathers and talons.

  But the angry chickens entirely ignored him. They just continued charging at the fence, bouncing off of it over and over again in their determination to reach Lilia. As they tumbled and flailed Lilia caught glimpses of their wounds; torn necks, trailing guts, and other symbols of bird-on-bird violence.

  “Well, that won’t do. I can hardly see anything with them all hopping around like that,” Lilia said matter-of-factly, unphased by the carnage. She drew mana into one hand and released it with a wave, freeing the souls of all but one chicken. It didn’t even notice when the others all fell limp around it. “Cyclops, can you grab that one and bring it to me? Hold it still so I can take a closer look.”

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  The bobcat’s one-eyed head popped out from beneath all the dead chickens and huffed in annoyance, but he would hardly pass up a chance at subduing prey. He lashed out and smacked the remaining undead chicken to the ground, then pinned it with one paw while he got ahold of its neck.

  With the chicken in his jaws, Cyclops leapt over the fence once again—successfully this time. The moment the chicken caught sight of Lilia again it began to struggle. Cyclops pushed it down with enough force to break its thin little legs and pressed down with his weight to keep it from moving.

  “Thanks. I’ll just be a minute,” Lilia told her friend as she knelt down and examined the chicken.

  At this range Lilia could observe even the most minute details of the undead bird’s soul. What she saw confused her greatly. The creature’s soul had become almost entirely detached from its body at the skull, but the conduit at its mid-spine remained pristine.

  “It’s built like you guys, kind of .That’s definitely the original chicken’s soul there, and there are no spells carved into it. But how is it even moving…? The upper connection is hanging on by a thread,” Lilia told Cyclops, who understood none of it. “Actually, wait…the lower one doesn’t even look like it ever separated.”

  Comparing the chicken to Cyclops, Lilia could easily see the difference between them. Cyclops’s soul, despite Lilia’s talent for reattaching souls, looked like a patch job to her soul sense. Some of the mana generated by Cyclops’s soul constantly leaked through imperfections in the conduit and it would be easier for Lilia to sever the connection if she needed to.

  If Lilia didn’t know any better she might think the chicken was still alive. Its soul conduit still carried mana from its soul to its body without losing any in the process. Almost like a perfect familiar; one that could maintain its own body without a necromancer to provide supplementary mana. Whatever regulated that flow had been broken, though, so mana flowed through the conduit at a constant rate. Like debris in a dammed river, mana accumulated on the chicken’s spine.

  “Why does that mana look so thick? It’s so much denser than I can manage,” Lilia noted. “Cyclops, there’s something weird right here.” Lilia tapped the chicken’s back above the blockage. “Can you get it out, please?”

  Cyclops hardly needed to be asked twice. He released the chicken’s neck only long enough to reorient his jaws. Then his fangs sank into the bird’s back. Spine firmly gripped, Cyclops wrenched his neck upwards and tore every vertebrae from the bird’s pelvis to its ribcage out of its body. He spat it onto the ground beside the chicken, which continued to struggle from its freedom.

  Lilia stomped on the bloody mess Cyclops had left behind. The dense concentration of mana she’d spotted crumbled and dissipated. At the same time, the chicken went limp.

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Its soul is still attached, so why did it stop moving? What was that thing?” Lilia asked herself. She glanced at the other chickens. They remained motionless even though they still had mana inside them.

  It all meant…something. Lilia wasn’t sure what yet. Had a necromancer far more skilled than her done this? Why, though? Lilia had raised and released her fair share of unfortunate wildlife over the years, but she couldn’t see why anyone would resurrect a dozen chickens in the middle of town and just leave them there.

  They hadn’t behaved like the familiars Lilia knew, either. Usually they acted like they were alive again. Sometimes they seemed to realize they didn’t need to eat, drink, or breathe anymore, but some were like Mr. Bearbones and never did. Never had Lilia seen a familiar act so feral, though.

  In that instant, Lilia became convinced. That clump of mana had replaced the chicken’s mind. It seemed obvious in hindsight.

  The chicken’s soul was fraying where it connected to the head.

  Cyclops acted like a normal bobcat.

  Mr. Bearbones had almost nothing left of his body.

  Both had souls which were fully tied to their bodies.

  If she put it all together, it meant that the reason the soul had to be connected in two places was that one carried mana and the other carried thoughts. Without mana, the body starved and died. Without thoughts, the body couldn’t move.

  Souls. Mana. The first produced the second. The second could affect the first. Both were intangible and normally had no physical form. Was there any reason mana couldn’t think?

  The clump of mana had been like a new mind-to-body connection, but it didn’t actually lead to the soul. Whatever flowed from it was not thought, but pure insanity. A mental cancer. What little remained of the true connection to between body and soul had been just enough to let that false mind operate the body.

  “They’re not undead. They were never dead to begin with,” Lilia concluded. There were a lot of holes in her theory and she felt like she’d probably skipped a few steps somewhere, but she knew she was right. Just like she’d known she could put a soul into Directions’ body the instant she laid eyes on it. Having determined that these creatures weren’t undead, though, Lilia immediately lost all interest in them. If she was meant to be a necromancer, Lilia couldn’t go fooling about with living beings.

  Lilia stood up and dusted herself off.

  “That was neat. But we really do need to be getting home, don’t we?” Lilia asked Cyclops. She turned back the way she’d come to find Mr. Bearbones gnashing a chicken’s corpse between his teeth. “Oh, that reminds me.”

  Like an afterthought, Lilia severed the last chicken’s soul conduit. Even if she’d decided it was alive, it felt like the merciful thing to do. Just this once. Then she started walking.

  “Remember what Master said! I can’t let anyone know I’m a necromancer. So if anyone spots a person coming, hide!” Lilia reminded her companions. “Directions, lead the way!”

  It had been a long time since Lilia had been home. She wondered what her parents had been up to in her absence.