*Authors note: Hey everybody! Thank you so much for picking up the second episode of my serialized novel: An Ambitious Woman and Her Very Normal Pet! I hope you enjoy it, I had a fantastic time writing it! Updates will be posted every Wednesday!

Without further ado:

When I open my eyes, it’s a new day. The sunlight is warm against my cheek, and there is a glorious smell coming from somewhere nearby. Breakfast.

Breakfast?

The last time I had breakfast was… my eyes slide open and I find myself in a little room that I have dreamed about every night for the past three years…

Home. Home? I sit up and anxiety plays a tune on my ribcage.

“Sybil, breakfast is ready!”

“Yeah, come on, Syb! We don’t wait that long.”

The sounds of my coven-siblings’ voices carry through the communal house, and a little sense of doom flows over me, beginning from my lower back and stretching like a cowl over my head. I didn’t really think I’d be brought back to, well, here. But it made sense. This is the only place I knew before the war. I was brought here when I was a baby, this was the only family I ever knew. Most of us were kids leading kids. The oldest of us were Maisley, who was about ten years my senior, and then there was Ryan–but before them we had Ben and Goddard, and some others I never met. They’d all struck off on their own or passed on. Orphans still came and went through our home. There weren’t druidic churches in this corner of Led, so the duty of caring for the widowed and the orphaned came to our doorstep. After all, we had plenty of labor: which meant plenty of extra food and clothing. We weren’t rich, by any means, but we were respected.

I glance around my small bedroom. There are two twin bunk beds, all emptied of their occupants but my own. I always slept in, back before we left for good. I was on the lower side of the middle of our large family. The older siblings would wake before the sun to start on the chores, and the younger ones were roused from bed to be bathed and set to work soon after, but the middle children, like me, were often forgotten about. We could rouse ourselves from bed and get our chores done–even if it meant staying up into the night watching or caring for our constructs. That was my job, most of the time: working through the night, keeping the constructs company while they worked. I hadn’t bonded with any of the constructs currently working, but they still liked me all the same. We’d often stay up talking into the early hours of the morning.

There’s very little in this room that is mine, I realize as I look around. The thought is a sad one. Just a pair of thick stockings, my work boots, two dresses, two cotton shirts, and two linen pairs of pants. No books or keepsakes. Had I ever had the opportunity to express myself? Did I even know who I was?

“Sybil! Get up!”

Did I ever know any of my siblings, really? After all, Ryan, Fred, and Roland would betray us. They would become spies of the Cainern army, then immediately executed once the Led king knelt to the invading prince. They were rash and foolish. And they would be waiting for me downstairs. I swung my feet over the edge of my bed and plucked at the soft bedspread. How am I going to face them?

During the Great Wars, we waited patiently. Necromancy was never meant to be weaponized except in the case of grave danger. We are, for all intents and purposes, shepherds of dry bones. Guiding them, if they’re willing, into productive machines. We give them a second life. We honor their journey, their passage, their resolve. We learn what we can from the bones, and they serve us. The art of necromancy is just that: a sacred art. There aren’t many of us. That is all to say that when facing my siblings again for the first time since I watched them die–some on the battlefield with their bodies battered, some hanged for the very tradition we had honored for generations–it was so hard not to grasp them to me tightly and cry into their shoulders.

Maisley, the oldest sister of us initiates, gives me a side-look when I come into the kitchen; and an older coven-brother, Wilhem, yanks one of my braids as he passes. “Sybil, you’re staring.”

“Are you alright, Syb? Not feeling well?” Maisley asks. Lillian crashes through the front door, arms laden with a woven basket filled with carrots and celery.

“Look! Something to add to breakfast!”

“I’m alright,” I say, trying not to tear up.

War, as much as it’s caused by people, is almost a force of nature. It captures unwitting people into its furious winds and carries us to places we never wanted to see. It pushes us to be people we never meant to be. Now, sitting among them, I find it hard not to smack the back of Roland’s head, or kick Ryan in the shins (he was far too tall for me to hit him properly), or squeeze sweet little Fred’s hand a little more tightly during our pre-breakfast blessing.

I search the faces of my twelve siblings, and know that Wilhem and Maisley will sit us down in two years: tell us that the grave danger has arrived, and it was time to honor our pact with the kingdom. Ryan’s face is impassive, brown hair dirty and face smudged with dirt from the fields that morning, as he stuffs a bread roll into his mouth and reaches for an apple. Roland’s blond hair falls over his face as he tries to feed one of the babies that has recently been brought to us. Fred is still fourteen: all limbs and attitude. I feel an overwhelming grace fill my chest. I was never angry with them. Not during, and not since. Even still, I know that I don’t want to follow the same path.

Maisley’s eyes never fall from my face, though. Not through the bustling breakfast, surrounded by the only family I ever knew, and not when I clean myself up to help with the chores outside. She catches me during laundry in the afternoon. “What’s the matter? You’ve looked out of it all day.”

I look out across the green fields that trail out into the forest below. The great bulks of our constructs moving through the tall grain and rolling stones. Their bare skulls flash white in the golden light. “I think I’m ready to head out on my own,” I tell her.

She stiffens beside me.

I continue. “I’m happy here, but… I think there’s more.”

She is quiet for a long time, even as she helps me hang the linens over the clothesline. “Where would you go?”

I shrug. “I don’t know, actually. I just want to see the world.”

She nods slowly. “Like Ben?” She says his name carefully, as if it might touch on a nerve.

It does.

My fingers stall. I haven’t heard that name in many years. My heart clenches. “Yeah.”

She nods. “When do you think you’ll leave?”

I pat my hands down on my apron. “When I can. Not right away.”

“You’ll always have a home here.”

Always. I grimace and push down a desperate feeling, about how short “always” actually meant. I just nod. That's all I can do.

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