Happy Wednesday, everyone!!

I hope you enjoy this one! I love when stories start to pick up, and regular cast members are introduced!

The first thing I do is sit with the bones. Henry comes up to the farm when he knows Maggie is well out of sight and joins me. We sit side by side, Henry with his unending stare keeping watch while I cast my awareness into the ground below. I commune with them. I get to know their different colors and flavors. Unique sensations fill my mind with each new individual that returns my gentle reach. They have names, each one, and they’re pleased to share them with me. All of them are eager to meet me, to finally have someone to talk to after so long buried beneath the surface.

Was this a graveyard? I ask through my mana, spreading it out wide to capture the greens and blues and oranges and yellows that reach up to capture my light.

No, I feel, rather than hear the response of all the voices chiming in, thrumming against the lacuna in my skull. There was a necromancer a long time ago who brought them here from other places. He had faltered at some point, they tell me, and their magic had worn down. Not fully returned to their rest, only hovering in awareness until they could be brought back to animation or released for the final time.

Many of them want the former; some of them want the latter, and I stand up to find a shovel to do just that. The ground is still cold from the early spring and years of disuse. It surprises me, just a little, that a necromancer once owned this land. How long ago? I wonder, but I know I won’t have an answer. Seasons, the bones had told me in my questioning. Several seasons. It told me basically nothing. It could have been years or decades, I reckon. I carefully dig each and every bone from the earth. Many are under just a few layers of sediment, and yet still are tucked deep within the gentle embrace of the earth. I line like bones with like bones, until I have seven working skeletons. I’m truly excited to find that they are mostly in-tact, down to the metatarsals and phalanges. They are extremely well-preserved. I pick up an ulna from one such individual and hold it up to the afternoon light. A small sigil is etched there, just against the surface. “Do all of you have this?” I ask, now that they have all been birthed from their most recent holding.

Some, this one, a blue, shining energy identified as Willard, tells me. Many of us. It helped us move more easily.

I nod, admiring the handiwork of the crescent crossed with a line. It was a simple cut, but effective. Clean. It’s what my sisters taught me when I was young. I pull an athame from my belt and ask Willard. “Do you mind?”

Not at all, he assures, and I begin my own cut. A downward V and a circle, two punctured dots, and my purple-green magic flows through my fingertips and into the dry bones.

I replace the ulna with its brothers and stand, pulling the energy from the ground through the bottoms of my feet and pushing it out through my palms. “I ask thee, Willard the Blue, to join me. As friend, as helper, so long as my feet tread this ground. I will be kind and protect you until you are ready to return to the earth.”

Yes, please. I serve and protect, until the day I fall to ash. Willard’s voice is eager in response, and his bones rattle together, joining at empty joints. The fingers and vertebrae snap together on the ground beneath my hovering palm. The sensation is warm and prickly against my skin.

“This day I have formed you, Willard of the Blue, but you are not beholden to me. You bear my sigil, though it does not bind you.”

The magic flashes between us and the skeleton’s legs flex backward and it leaps to its feet. “Boy, I haven’t had this much energy in years!” Its jaw moves, and the voice I hear is mostly magic, even still it makes me smile. Willard bows over his arm, flicking out his wrist behind him and taking my hand to press against its teeth. “I’m honored to serve, Lady Sybil.”

I blush and pull my hand from his, “Thank you, Willard.” I’ve animated many corpses, but none so ecstatic as this.

“What shall I do first?” He rubs his phalanxes to crack together. “Why, I think I could run for miles.”

I grin. His enthusiasm is contagious. “I suppose if you want a task–”

“I do.”

“You can start taking the rocks out from that area.” I point to the edge of the field closest to the little home that is now mine. “Only if you’re up for it, though.”

“Lady Sybil, I was born for it.”

And Willard takes off in that direction, and I can’t help but smile. Born? Rebirthed? Reanimated? I wonder what Willard was like in life, and whether the echoes of his former life were still deeply embedded in the lumen of marrow.

The next bones I come to are siblings–whether in their previous life or that their souls had bonded as such after death, I wasn’t quite certain. She was yellow and he was blue, each with their own relaxed sort of energy. “Are you ready?” I ask them, sitting down onto my haunches and hovering my hands over them, trying to feel where they might feel right being marked.

Here, love, she told me, I don’t mind my sigil anywhere as long as it isn’t on my skull, but Roderick, well…

I do not, the man grumbled, I don’t think I care very much at all. Let Miss Sybil mark us where she wishes.

He doesn’t mean that, she chuckled, he’s just too nervous to say otherwise. Mark me here on my clavicle, and get his third vertebrae.

I… well… Roderick started to protest, but then assented, Yes, that is where I prefer.

I chuckled, enjoying their light banter and scribed the same sigil with the athame onto their preferred bones, performing the same ceremony as I had with Willard. I hesitated when I got to hers, “I didn’t catch your name.”

Her magic swelled bright around mine like a gentle embrace, That’s alright dear, I’m Amelia.

“It’s so nice to meet you, Amelia.”

It’s my utmost pleasure, Sybil. We’re going to be great friends.

I believed her with all of me.

And so it went until I was magically spent. In addition to Amelia, Rod, and Willard, I also met and raised three others: an older soul who carried themselves as though they feared the oncoming rain named Jun; a spirited young person named Lasis; and a young woman who simply called herself Samantha. By the time I finished raising Samantha, my hands were trembling and my body felt heavy. I hadn’t done such a large raising since… well, the war, and I hadn’t even developed the stamina in this second life yet. Even still, the bones did not protest. I had set aside the ones that wanted the commitment ceremony, but knew I could only do them one at a time the following day. They were patient about it, but I still couldn’t fend off the small thread of guilt I felt for not getting to them sooner. I couldn’t very well leave bones out in broad daylight, either, so I put my helpers to work gently moving and covering the remaining corpses.

“Mistress Sybil, go get some rest, we’ve got it from here,” Amelia placed a bony hand on my shoulder.

“I need to make you a shelter,” I grimace and Henry, who has stood watch this entire time, sits on their haunches behind me and shakes their skull.

“I think they’re telling you it’s time to rest. We can take care of the rest.”

“If the townsfolk see you?”

Amelia made a frustrated noise and pushed me toward the little shed as the sun careened into the horizon. “We’ve done this a very, very, very long time, Miss Sybil. We’ll make ourselves scarce once we’re done.”

Henry nodded emphatically and led me to the door.

“Are you sure?” I ask, though my eyelids are already too heavy to bear.

“Go,” she all but growls at me, and I hide a smile. She pauses when I step into the house and catches the door with her hand. “Do you have a blanket in there, my lady?” Her voice drops into a gentle, worried tone.

I hadn’t thought of that. I glance up at the loft and its rotted ladder and wince. There’s no way I’m getting down from there in one piece. Amelia follows behind me and before I can register what she is doing, she hoists me up using my armpits onto her shoulders. “Can you see now?” She asks from below me, skull angled up, and I can swear she is looking up at me expectantly.

I peer into the loft. There’s a small straw bed in the corner on the floor with a threadbare blanket draped over it. It looks extremely uncomfortable, but I can certainly make use of the old blanket, if it’s not entirely moth-eaten. “Yes,” I tell her, “I think I see one.”

A sound startles us and we look over to see Henry trying to fit themselves through the doorway.

Amelia chuckles. “You’re no use to her if you can’t fit in the doorway,” she scolds them, not unkindly. Henry visibly deflates and sits on the ground, waiting for further instructions. Amelia helps me climb up onto the old wood and I inch carefully across the floor and snatch the blanket from the bed. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maggots, maybe. Lice. Bed bugs. Some half-eaten corpse of an animal. I would have known, though–even in my exhausted state. The dead spoke to me louder than anything living. Even still, I was surprised that nothing was underneath the blanket.

“Everything alright up there?”

“Yes,” I call down, wrapping the scratchy purple fabric underneath my arm.

“Step onto my shoulder–there you go, for goddess sakes, woman, use my ribcage it doesn’t–ooh, actually, that hurt.” I clamber down her body awkwardly and freeze when she exclaims. She chuckles and pats my back, “I’m joking, love. You know I don’t have nerve-endings. There’s nothing to hurt. Down you go.” And then I’m standing on the floor, safely, if not completely embarrassed.

She takes the blanket from me and snaps it open. A plume of dust and straw twigs explode in the small space and I cover my mouth. It’s too late, though, and I double over into a coughing fit. Amelia doesn’t pause though, just surveys the blanket with what I can only assume is a critical eye. “We can do better than this.”

“Yes, I imagine you can, but–”

“Jun!”

The old skeleton hobbles to the door, arms laden with logs for the stove. “I’m here.” They start a flame in the small wooden stove, using a dash of magic from our bond, but not so much that I feel any worse than I currently do. The warmth will help bring some life back into my own weary bones. Jun seems to know this well enough. I rub my eyes sleepily. This is quite an independent crowd I’ve raised, I realize. Pretty self-sufficient and… caretaking. “This is absolutely abhorrent, is it not?”

Jun grasps the fabric in their fingers and shakes their skull. “No, this won’t do.”

“That’s what I was saying.”

“Amelia, leave her alone, Lady Sybil needs to rest. We’ll all be goners otherwise,” Rod called from the door.

“Yes, guys,” I murmur, gently taking the blanket from Jun’s hand. “I am really spent. There are some clothes in my pack I can fashion into a pillow. This will be fine for tonight.”

Amelia’s jaw opened, but I held up my hand to silence her, “I promise to both of you, to all of you,” I stare at the empty orbital sockets that have all crammed into my door frame to watch after me. “That I will go into town tomorrow and get a proper bedroll and blanket. Fair?”

Amelia sighs as the others nod. “You are the boss.” She claps her metacarpals together and leans in excitedly. “Something green would really suit you–”

Roderick bows to me as he enters and unceremoniously drags his sister away as she continues chattering about what sort of blanket I should buy and what material of the bedroll would be best for my neck support and… I rub my temples and Jun takes my hand, guiding me to the makeshift bed they’ve made from my belongings in my pack, set up near the stove. “Let’s get you some rest, mistress,” their voice is gentle and mahogany, silky smooth and comforting.

I couldn’t deny her that. Henry shooed off the rest of the skeletons, all eager to serve their new master–even to her utter exhaustion. As tired as I am, as I settle against the mound of clothing and feel the warmth of the fire wash over me, it feels nice to be taken care of like this. Jun moved carefully around the small kitchen space. They must find a broom somewhere, because as I’m falling asleep, I hear the gentle scraping of its bristles on the floor. It’s such a comfortable rhythm that it effectively does all of the work for my body, lulling me into a deep and dreamless sleep.