Milo Mavis stared down at his niece, holding back a grimace. Pollina had always been a special girl. From a young age, she’d shown herself to be intelligent, kind, and dignified. Almost the complete opposite of the raving madwoman using Soul Wrack on a zombie before him. In between chants of the spell, she hurled obscenities, all the while clutching a piece of burnt fabric. No explanation had been forthcoming.

“I shouldn’t have taught her the spell,” Milo said guiltily to himself.

When she’d come to him all those years ago, seething with hurt and anger, he’d been happy to redirect her emotions into the family business. The Cult of Harhaz was not an evil death cult. Principally, they were academics trying to understand what lies beyond the veil of death. Milo believed at the time that Pollina’s intellectual curiosity would drown out the hysteria and anguish that had dominated her. After all, necromancers spent a lot of time alone with nothing but the peace of the dead to keep them company. Then there was the fact that death was the ultimate mystery—an allure that few with her cerebral mindedness could easily ignore.

How could it have all gone so poorly?

For a couple of years, he’d even allowed the indulgence that his choice had been a good one. Her growth had been astonishing. Pollina hadn’t looked unhappy, only focused. And for Milo, that was good enough.

Then, he’d found out about what the Strain girl had done to her. The sheer lengths of her cruelty were almost unbelievable. His own rage at the mistreatment of his niece had been so fierce that he thought up and discarded a hundred revenge plots of his own. Unfortunately, he’d left those thoughts in the realm of fantasy out of fear of upsetting the nobles.. In the end, only Pollina had the strength to attack a major house like House Vandergast. The will to get justice for herself. So, when she’d asked him to learn the spell Soul Wrack, it had been his own shame that forced him to give her the knowledge she wanted.

The spell did nothing but cause grievous pain to a being's soul. Damage from repeated castings would spiritually heal, but often the psychic trauma would drive the subject insane. Still, despite how horrible the spell was, the conditions for use made it limited at best. It could harm only spirits and souls under the direct control of the caster. Never did he think the once sweet little girl that used to play board games against him for treats would abuse another person like this. The situation had gone beyond justice and well into the territory of derangement.

“Pollina, we need to talk,” Milo whispered in his wise sounding way. A tired smile accompanied his words, but it was a waste. She ignored him to focus on the writhing Strain girl. Milo tried to avoid looking at the zombie, whose fate he had sealed.

When Pollina finally ran out of mana, she spoke. “He’s dead,” she said simply.

“Who?” asked Milo, internally praying that her answer would make this all make sense.

“Oran.”

“Oran Farrow?” Worry pinched his face. He knew how much that foppish boy meant to her, but she hadn’t brought him up in years. Surely that was long behind her? After all, his own family had already given up on him for being coreless. That said, House politics always spelled trouble.

Pollina nodded, and Milo saw the tears streaming down her face, blazing a trail through the dirt caking her cheeks.

After giving her a few moments to regain some composure, Milo asked, “Who killed him?”

“House Vandergast. Their demon cult.”

Milo started at that. Of course, he knew that House Vandergast was bad news. If their financial expertise and holdings hadn’t been so vast, the other houses would have done away with them long ago. But to accuse them of demon worship?

“What’s this about demon cults?” Demon cults were a big deal. Just as bad as discovering one of the more evil death cults. They had a tendency to recruit and bolster the coreless and cored alike. With enough time, they’d threaten anyone with sheer numbers if not power.

Pollina wiped the tears away with the sleeve of her robe, then turned to face him. The hurt in her eyes drove a spike into his own heart.

“When I caught Lovina, she told me things…” Pollina trailed off, and Milo became more concerned. None of this behavior was normal for her.

Pollina seemed to come back from wherever she’d gone and continued, ”They made a pact with the Archdemon Alrinath. Lovina’s father is the head of the cult. She and her cousin Graham are members, and a few others in the house. Some of the minor houses have members too. I’d thought that, since I’d given her short notice to prepare for the Ossuary, and since I was the only one that knew the route, they couldn’t find us down here.”

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“But they did?” Milo asked, looking back over his shoulder at the pile of corpses in the summoning circle.

“Yes, and I don’t know how,” Pollina said, trembling with emotion.

Milo understood what was unsaid. She’d led the demon cult down here and they’d killed Oran Farrow—who, for whatever reason, was down here with her. She blamed herself. He reached forward and pulled her into a tight embrace, letting her wail into his chest.

As much as he loved his niece, his thoughts turned to the preparations he was going to have to make.

There would be a war in the Catacombs for the treasure at the center of the Ossuary.

⬲

When I first lost the ability to walk, I’d just been a teenager. The doctors hadn’t known or fully understood the degree of deterioration that would later come, and had filled my head with false hope. Full of the confidence that only came with a good, supportive upbringing, and friendships that hadn’t yet unraveled in the unease that my tragedy evoked, I’d believed them.

The future had felt bright.

I’d sit in the physical therapy wing, between sessions of fruitlessly trying to work my ever weakening muscles, watching crappy daytime television. This older lady, who’d spent a couple of unpleasant months with me after breaking her hip, had this penchant for making me watch classical movies with her.

One day, after we saw Gene Kelly tap his way across a rainy street, she’d given me a bright smile and said, “That’s gonna be you soon.” Fool that I was, I agreed. I promised her, and myself, that I’d learn to move just like that legendary dancer when I was better.

Despite it all, I’d never quite given up on that hope. And Mama didn’t raise no liar.

“Annn ungh, anng a dhooo…” I snapped my fingers in time with my counting, sounding more like a meaty thwack than a pop.

A one, a two, a one, two, three, four.

Using my bone cane, I shuffled to the left twice, before heel stepping slowly with my right three good times. Then I made a wide turn, pivoting my left foot on the toes while pushing my way around with the right. After the complete 360, I pointed my bone at Handy Davis Jr. to “lay down some leather”.

My ghoul claw snapped and clacked in precise motions, somewhere between a showgirl and a tap dancer. Kicking its fingers furiously while I slowly shuffled from foot to foot in an offbeat moaning accompaniment. Together, we did another rotation in opposite directions.

Our audience, a lone ghoul, only watched the rhythmically rocking bone in my hands with its head tilted sideways. Eventually, that must have gotten too insulting, or maybe it had just been hungry, and the rotting horror launched itself at me.

My Spring Forward enhanced foot caught the ghoul’s mid-section, sending it flying backward. To its credit, the ghoul returned to its hands and feet at a sharp speed, but not before Handy slashed into the back of its left calf muscle.

The ghoul screeched in surprise, if not pain, and batted my dance partner away with a shooing thrust. That pissed me off. So, I stuck the sharpened bone it wanted so badly into its throat. Falling to the ground with a gurgle, the ghoul tried to weakly swipe at my legs, but I was having none of it. I pinned the arm with my boot, then brought down my dagger in the center of its forehead.

And got a weak ass trickle of mana for my efforts.

That must have been the fifteenth or sixteenth ghoul that I’d slaughtered after becoming a full zombie, and I’d felt barely a difference at all in advancing. Going by my gut, I’d say around 10 to 15 percent of a tier!

It was an outrage!

My best guess was that these monsters weren’t ghouls at all, they were ghoulings. Which meant that they were the same level as me. It was the only theory I had to explain why the mana had dropped off so sharply. Before, I had been punching above my weight.

Now, the good thing about killing them was that it was pretty safe. I’d yet to take any damage from simply walking up, using Degenerating Touch, and then murdering them in their face.

The bigger problem was that while relentlessly searching for them in the dark, twisting, crawl-hole filled cavern, I got lost. Disoriented after going in what felt like circles for hours on end, I’d finally given up on making sense of things and practiced tap dance.

On the surface, that seemed like a witless move. However, in pursuit of personal happiness, I discovered that my dexterity was not as limited as I originally believed. A portion of the mana that was put aside for my level three spell trickled back into my body after I selected it. Making my tier two physicality just a smidge better than it was at tier one.

Moreover, the mana that went to enhance my spells seemed to increase all of them, and not just the new one. Reanimate Hand was much stronger than before, able to do little leaps into the air and grab heavier stuff.

Nearly as good, the sound of my amateur stepping brought the ghouls straight to me!

Or it had for a bit.

This most recent one was the last one I’d seen in a while. I suspected the ghouls knew to avoid an area where too many of them had died. Kind of like how ants release a pheromone, alerting the others when crushed.

So, I picked up my dagger and bait-bone-cane, leaving my mace tucked into my waistband, and decided to keep on dancing forward until I found something interesting.