Walter opened his UI and began searching for his Inventory. Before finding it, an Unread item in one of his logs caught his attention.

  “You have stored in your Inventory an item both larger and heavier than you,” he read aloud. “You have gained 3 points of experience in Innovation.” His smile broadened, relieved to have the trunk safely out of the picture and encouraged by his continuing mastery of the game. “We’ll now, look at this. You have applied the Colony of Choice Skill to non-anthophile organisms,” he read. “You have gained 5 points of experience in Innovation.” He smiled. “Watch out up there at Level 16, Reeve,” he said to himself, “I’ll be catching up to you pretty soon.”

  Leaf walked into view between UI windows, slipped her cudgel back into her robe, and pulled back her hood before bending at the waist to consider Walter.

  “You disappeared the trunk,” she said.

  “Your hair is gone. Again.” Walter said. “I’m sorry. It was beautiful.”

  Leaf ran one hand over her blackened scalp, brushing off as she did ash and the shriveled and curled remains of half-burned hair that drifted down through the air around her, visible to Walter in the darkness only when they passed in front of her pale skin or reflected weak light from a distant star or castle torch. “Regrowing it will be less of an ordeal than was rising from being Fallen,” she said.

  Some of the stars winked out, and Walter turned his head fractionally and found that the missing stars formed the silhouettes of Bunce and Nyx.

  “They seem particularly attentive,” Leaf said, her eyebrows raised and her tone inviting explanation.

  “I…,” Walter said slowly, “accidentally used my Apiculturist’s Colony of Choice Skill to form a colony—maybe a pseudo-colony, to be fair—out of those, well, eligible non-anthophile organisms in my immediate vicinity. By accident.”

  “Colony?”

  “It was a misunderstanding.”

  “The honey badger and cheetah are now in a colony? With you?”

  “The more I think about it, the more I think pseudo-colony would be appropriate in this situation. And…” Walter sat up and stared at the flattened, blackened grass around him.

  “And?” Leaf said.

  “Remind me again the name of this place?”

  “Morbeet?”

  “The whole place. The country?”

  “The realm? Neecrus.”

  Walter nodded in the darkness. “The, uh, Necrustians—“

  “—Neecriots.”

  “—the Neecriots, they’re also in the colony.” Walter swallowed, his tongue rough against the roof of his mouth and his throat burning worse with every word he spoke.

  Leaf looked around the quiet bailey. “Neecriots?”

  “In the trunk.”

  Leaf looked down at the top of Walter’s head. “The Neecriots in the trunk?”

  Wanter nodded.

  “The army of undead Neecriot guards Reeve transported to Thhia? They are in your colony?”

  Walter nodded nearly imperceptibly.

  “And you put their trunk in your…Inventory?”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “I was afraid they were going to break their way out to join the colony, and I wasn’t ready for that. So…Inventory.”

  “I am reminded uncomfortably of the bees from Helia’s camp,” Leaf said.

  “I, too, am reminded of that,” Walter said almost inaudibly.

  Leaf let out a slow breath. “The bees did serve a purpose when the time came.”

  “I do not want a time to come when the best option I have is to pull an army of…”

  “Undead guards.”

  “…of undead guards from my hammerspace.”

  Leaf watched Walter for several seconds. “This colony of yours—colony of choice—it does not sound like it was a choice for most or all of its members,” Leaf said.

  Walter looked over his shoulder. Nyx’s snout was less than a foot away, and she stared at him with what he was fairly certain was feline hostility, though hostility might not have been a strong enough word. Bunce was standing next to Nyx, her head raised so that she could lick soot—unless it was actually charred skin—from the side of Nyx’s furless, disturbingly wrinkly face. “No, no it wasn’t,” Walter said.

  “Hello?” A high voice called from down the bailey.

  “Be you friend or foe?” A much deeper voice said.

  For a moment, there was only silence as Leaf and Walter looked at each other.

  “Gods! What happened to the larger of your cats?” The higher of the voices said, closer now.

  “No one is going to like that mistake,” Walter said to himself and glanced at Bunce and Nyx.

  Leaf offered him a hand and, as soon as he took it, pulled him to his feet. She raised her inky hood, pulled her cudgel from within her cloak, and turned in the direction of the voices.

  “You really look fine,” Walter said quietly. He squinted into the darkness but could not find the voices’ owners.

  “I care nothing of my appearance, but I do prefer that any who approach with unannounced intentions know as little of me as possible. We find ourselves with few advantages, let us not squander them.”

  “You are from Thhia?” The deeper voice said.

  Walter’s attention was drawn to two figures appearing from the deepest shadow along the inner wall. One was a shaggy-haired, plump fellow, and the other a thin woman with freckles, short hair, and pointy ears that reminded Walter of parts of Reeve’s character, the twins, and Leaf. Both of the approaching figures had on some sort of tight-fitting clothing that looked to Walter like undergarments.

  “You are allies of Reavyr?” The man said.

  Leaf lowered her cudgel. “Yes, we were in Thhia with the one called Reavyr until we came under attack and were trapped here when our portal collapsed. You are the rulers of Neecrus whom she mentioned?”

  The pair were drawing close enough that Walter could see they looked frazzled and unkempt but otherwise in good health.

  “You too came under attack?” The man said as they stopped only feet from Walter and Leaf.

  “Too?” Leaf said, looking up at the wall and listening to the quiet of the night.

  The woman followed Leaf’s gaze. “That’s just it,” she said, “you see that no one is there? No sooner had the last of the volunteers left for Thhia than our guards began deserting their posts. For years, we haven’t been able to avoid their attentions, and now, in a trice, they are all gone by both uncertain intent and means. Our remaining citizens followed. ”

  “I’m Reavyr Two,” Walter said.

  Leaf and the man and woman turned to Walter, who realized formal introductions might not have been the most pressing issue on their minds.

  “Leaf,” Leaf said, gesturing curtly at herself with a twist of her cudgel.

  “Sea Mist,” the woman said.

  “Larry,” the man said.

  “Walter,” Walter said reflexively, hooking one thumb into a suspender. “Uh, well, but as I said, I’m also Reav—”

  “Not now,” Leaf said.

  “Come, we will show you,” Sea Mist said, gesturing toward a corner of the bailey, where stairs led to the top of the battlements.

  Sea Mist and Larry set off quickly, followed by Leaf. Walter grimaced as he broke into a lopsided jog to keep up with them.

  “They,” Walter said to Leaf, his words interrupted frequently as his breath caught from the pain and exertion, “must be, you know, the same type of AI as you and Dawn and Dusk—“

  “—and Thomanji’yheri, yes, I noticed their lack of response to your charismatic wiles,” Leaf said.

  “They seem nice enough, though,” Walter said as they reached the stairs. Finding that his right knee was stiffening from one of the traumatic events of the last few minutes—which one, he was not sure—Walter used his left leg to mount each step, pulling his right up after. The others quickly left him behind, and by the time he joined them and stood on his tiptoes to peek through one of the grooves in the top of the wall, they had been standing in silence for almost half a minute.

  “Where is everyone?” Walter said.

  The capital city of Morbeet stretched before them, one- and two-story stone buildings with terracotta tile roofs tinted gray under the night sky. No dogs barked in the alleys. No horses neighed in their stalls. There was no motion.

  “Someone has stolen the people of our realm,” Larry said, and his previously booming voice was subdued.

  “We fear a new necromancer has risen,” Sea Mist said.

  Leaf slid her cudgel into her robe and then pulled back her hood, exposing her newly scoured scalp. “Necromancers can control only the dead.”

  Larry nodded. “We fear that this is no normal necromancer.”

  “They left the city moving south, toward Thhia?” Leaf said.

  “No,” Sea Mist said. “They traveled north, toward the snows of Wyste.”