An involuntary yawn broke Lilia’s focus, snapping her out of the meditative state she’d been in since shortly after descending into Master Orkis’s basement. Just as he’d instructed, Lilia had been working on subverting his control of the thrall that controlled the entrance to this room.

  She still didn’t quite understand what a thrall was. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Granted, she’d never seen any undead but her own friends, which Master had called familiars. His explanation had made little sense to Lilia. She wondered why it ever would have occurred to someone to put something else’s soul into a body in the first place.

  When she’d first encountered her bird friend, Directions, Lilia had immediately been able to sense the emptiness inside him. But in addition to that, she’d also seen a connection. Thin, but present. It had seemed obvious to her that all she needed to do to restore him was use that connection to reel his soul back in. What were other necromancers doing if they couldn’t understand something so obvious?

  But that was why examining Master’s thrall was so interesting. Lilia’s friends needed little more than a connection to her in order to function. She sent them the extra mana they required to maintain their bodies without a working digestive system. But Master’s thrall had been bound up in all sorts of spells that defined its actions and prevented other people from manipulating it.

  Even after hours of examination Lilia had yet to unravel even a fraction of it all. Since Master hadn’t returned yet, though, she would just need to keep trying. He’d told her to continue until he came back. He must have been quite busy to have left her down there so long.

  Lilia stood up and stretched, taking another look around the unfamiliar room as she did so. It was bigger than her entire house back home. Calling it a “room” seemed wrong, but she didn’t have a better word for it. She was in a little corner dedicated to living space. From her perspective it seemed rather extravagant, with a bed big enough for three of her, a couch, two armchairs, a long table, a dresser, and even a large mirror.

  The dresser was empty. Lilia had decided not to fill it with her belongings since she was only here temporarily.

  Most of the room was dominated by mountains of crates. She’d taken a peek into a few of them and found them packed full of food. It was a mystery to Lilia how none of it had spoiled since none of it was preserved in salt or stored in the form of flour. One box had been filled with bread, every loaf as soft if fresh from the oven. Another held fruit that looked like it had just been picked.

  After grabbing a loaf of bread and a peach Lilia returned to the couch and began to eat. Her bobcat friend, Cyclops, sidled up and sniffed at her food before remembering he didn’t need to eat and sauntering away. Mr. Bearbones plopped down in front of Lilia and stared intently at the bread until she tore off a piece and handed it over, but it predictably ended up on the floor. His head was rather too skeletal to eat, even if he’d yet to accept that.

  Once she’d finished eating, Lilia decided to poke around a bit more. There was one other room connected to the main one, but it was just a bathroom. Lilia wasn’t quite sure where the water for the bath, toilet, and sink came from since there were no pipes connected to any of them. She didn’t really have much interest in such things anyway, so she’d spent little time puzzling over it. As long as the facilities worked then that was all that mattered.

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  It took Lilia a good half-hour to conclude that the boxes really did contain nothing but food. Then it took her a half-hour more to determine there were no hidden doors. She did find a drawer in the big table that she hadn’t seen at first, but she wouldn’t call it hidden. Inside was a box. Seeing as Master hadn’t told her not to open it, Lilia unlatched the clasp and opened it up.

  A number of black and white pieces poured out across the table and floor. Carved into the inner surfaces of the box was a grid pattern—ten by ten, Lilia counted. She picked up one of the pieces and examined it, deciding it looked a bit like a fence post.

  “Any idea what these are?” Lilia asked Mr. Bearbones. He shook his head. “What about you guys?” Lilia offered the piece to Directions and Cyclops, but the bird only tilted its head while Cyclops yawned disinterestedly. “Hmph. Well, fine. I’ll just make something up myself.”

  Saying that, Lilia put the fence post back down and picked up another piece.

  “This one looks like a horse…and this one looks kind of like those towers dad went to when it was his turn on lookout. This guy’s got a robe like Master’s. A mage? I don’t know what this tall one is supposed to be, but it looks kind of important. Like the village chief! Except it can stand up straight. And this one looks kind of like a dog…” Lilia monologued to herself as she sifted through the game pieces.

  While Lilia had played board games at home, this one looked much more complex than anything she’d seen before. She was used to polished stones or crudely-carved wooden tokens. The finely-shaped figurines were new to her. But Lilia had made up many a game to play with her friends while her parents were busy, so it wasn’t long before she had a set of rules forming in her head.

  “Alright, Mr. Bearbones, you’ve got the closest thing to fingers, so you’re up!” Lilia declared. A living bear’s meaty paws would have been far too clumsy for a task like this, but Lilia had spent years teaching her friend how to finely manipulate his toes with mana. At her prompting, Mr. Bearbones lifted one big paw and carefully picked up a little horse between two of his claws.

  Well used to Lilia’s whims by now, her familiar followed along as she placed pieces on the board. He placed his own pieces on his side of the board across from her own. Once the board was set, Lilia began teaching the undead bear the rules. Considering that she was in the process of coming up with them herself, they were learning together. It wasn’t lost on her that teaching a bear to play board games was out of the ordinary. Mostly because it had baffled her parents when they’d first found out, though.

  Lilia had never met a living bear before, but she had a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Bearbones was smarter than the average bear. All of her familiars seemed to be smarter than the farm animals she’d met, if nothing else. She’d thought long and hard about why, and the best she’d been able to come up with was that it had something to do with organs.

  A village girl like Lilia knew only slightly better than nothing about anatomy. But it didn’t take a noble’s education to understand that an undead creature had no need for organs. After all, Mr. Bearbones had no organs at all. If he managed to be just as smart as Directions and Cyclops, and all three of them were smarter than living animals, did that mean being dead had freed them from some kind of limitation placed on them by their bodies?

  No matter how much Lilia thought about it she knew she’d never figure it out on her own. Part of why she had gone along with Master was that her parents managed to convince her that he’d have answers to the incessant questions she always asked them. It was a shame she’d been sent to the basement as her first lesson, but that just meant she had to pass Master’s test and figure out how to open the door.

  Just as soon as she finished this game. Mr. Bearbones had that arch in his neck that always meant he was thinking deeply about something. Lilia couldn’t leave him alone after getting him invested like that.