Elruin obediently led her dolly through the gates to the farm, then headed straight for the nearby forest to hide the creature. The first step of her plan complete, she turned right around to head back, perhaps with a lie about how she already got rid of her dolly and plans to go around the farm collecting rodents to play with and maybe her father's crossbow that he loved so well.

Plans dashed when she saw the heavy wooden gates had been closed behind her. Unsure of what to do next, and not enthused with Kasa's plan to get her dolly destroyed, Elruin began to do what she was going to do anyway, but with squirrels. She'd often heard Father and others call them tree rats, so they couldn't be much different than normal rats save for where they lived.

As it turns out, squirrels were smarter and harder to find than her usual prey. Normal rats didn't run until she got closer, and hid in places where she could still see them. Tree rats, on the other hand, liked to hide in, well, trees. Trees were alive, and that meant she couldn't see through them the way she could see through dead wood. Also, squirrels ran whenever she got anywhere near them, so even when she saw one, she never got close enough to hit the target.

Her clothes and hair covered in brambles, she gave up on her hunt. On the plus side, she found some ripe raspberries to make up for her missed lunch. It was getting late, now, and she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do when night fell.

Locked out of the normal entrance, and with nowhere to go, Elruin took the long way around to the mudslide, with hope of sneaking back into the farm. An hour of traveling through uneven, messy terrain made her even more a mess than she had already been, and when she got to the wall it was still drooping with an area she could climb under.

Save for the magical barrier backing up the physical. Though weakened by the circumstances of storm and the assault from Elruin's guardian, it was by no stretch of the imagination broken, and it had been designed to withstand assaults by forces far more powerful than an inexperienced preteen necromancer.

Using her unnatural sight, she could spot some amount of the magical flow dancing through the air, empowering the field, and it was beyond her strength. Perhaps if a few more of the defensive crystals were broken, but she could only reach those from the other side. Perhaps if they got another superstorm tonight, but that didn't seem likely.

While she prodded at the farm's defenses, both physical and magical, some latent memory awoke within her dolly. It knelt in the mud, then began to pry away at the muck with its one clawed hand. Elruin paid it no mind, for contrary to her lie to Carob, there was no threat from it unless someone attacked it while she wasn't nearby to hold the leash.

Then he pulled out a long, narrow dagger. Too long, perhaps, to be called a dagger, but still too short to be called a sword, and too thin and round to be either. Not being an expert in the finer distinctions between instruments of pointy death, the best she could compare it to was an oversized horseshoe nail. It was a pretty weapon which still possessed a sharp, silvery sheen despite its time in the mud.

As she approached her dolly, it extracted larger, blocky object from the depths. Larger than the dagger by far, Elruin at first thought it might be a small shield covered in mud, but then the skeleton set it on his lap and began wiping the dirt away. It took time, but it was revealed to be a fiddle, of better craftsmanship than any of the instruments Elruin had seen on the farm over the years.

Having set the instrument on the ground, the creature then proceeded to drag the flat edge of the dagger across the strings of what Elruin might some day learn was known as the violin. A long, sharp, but ultimately monotonous tone was drawn from the instrument by the creature; what memories were still wedged deep in the skeleton's program stopped well short of performing the music it no doubt knew in life.

Still, it gave Elruin ideas. Her song, the notes of her Requiem, could carry through an instrument just as surely as through her voice. Better, perhaps; a good instrument would be able to carry the notes further than she could by vocal chords alone. Elruin took the dagger and instrument from her skeletal ally; it didn't seem to know what to do with them anymore, anyway.

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The dagger itself surprised her when she touched it. It drained away her magic, but it didn't steal it, it stored it within the metal, inside some magical container that Elruin could not guess at how it worked. The power would remain there until... something happened. She wasn't sure what exactly that 'something' was, but it looked to her like it was waiting for something. Even so, it wouldn't be hard for her to draw her power back out if she needed to, so she could use it as a magic battery for the time being.

Now, it was getting late. The farm had not opened its gates, and she knew no way to sneak in. She began looking for a place to take shelter for the night.

Which turned out to not be all that hard to find, in the end. Furrows carved by rushing water lined the area, and created alcoves that a small child could take shelter in. With her skeleton to stand guard, she felt secure for the night.

She should not have.

Late into the night, she was awoken by deep, cruel, mocking laughter. "What do we have here?" a voice in the darkness muttered. "A child left to die," what sounded like the same voice answered back from a different location. In her tiny cave, Elruin couldn't make out much.

One huge, dark shadow passed in front of her hiding place. A glowing, red eye looked inward straight at her, through the ribs of her skeletal guardian. It stood steady, fearless and ready to protect her from any threat. Its core program compelled it to run outward, and kill the closest threat, but that conflicted with the fact that if it did so, the entrance to her hiding place would be vulnerable for another to get through.

"Oh, little child, why not come out to play?" Any attempt to sound friendly was ruined by the deep, gruff timber of its voice as well as the cackling of other noises around her.

"We're harmless puppies." "We're lonely." "So long since we've had any humans to play with." Elruin couldn't tell which of them were speaking, or from what direction. Every voice seemed identical and they all seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. When they weren't speaking like people, there was a constant stream of soft, yipping noises which made it impossible to determine how many there were, or their positions.

"I can't come out to play!" Elruin shouted out at them. "It's my bedtime." The logic of a child is an odd one.

"Oh, but you don't have a bedtime anymore." "Your parents don't care about you." "They sent you out here to die." "So many scary monsters."

"No, they didn't!" That her parents had nothing to do with her being out here was a technical truth. "I had to take my dolly to town."

The yipping laughter began anew. "Three days from here." "Alone with all the monsters in the forest." "Such a cruel, cruel fate for a child." "Better just to end it now, than to suffer such cruelty from one's own family."

"Go away!" Elruin shouted at them. "My dolly will save me from the monsters!"

"Ah, yes, the dolly." "Such a loyal monster, obedient without question." "It makes a magnificent guard dog." "Perhaps it would even be enough." "But, such would be an even crueler fate." "To think, the horrors you would witness if you lived to reach the city." "Do you know what they do to those who play with the dead?" "It would be kinder if your parents slit your throat." "Or come out, play with us." "We promise you won't feel a thing." "Never see it coming."

Through all their talk, they didn't seem interested in attacking. They just circled, over and over again in front of her cavern.

"But, siblings, she is just one little girl." "A tiny waif of a morsel." "Hardly worth the effort to chew." "I bet all the farm work has made her tough and stringy." "Barely more nourishment than her guard." "And I bet necromancers taste terrible, anyway." "But waste not, want not." "True, true, one mustn't turn up their nose at an easy lunch, even if it's a meager one." "Yet there is another way." "Do share, dear brother."

They stopped speaking for a moment, but the yipping barks continued without pause.

"If our abandoned farm girl were to help us, we could get so much more." "Oh, I see." "You always were the smart one." "All you have to do, little girl, is help us open the farm gates." "Imagine all the food!" "So many delicious cows." "And pigs!" "And sheep!"

"Yes, all the food we can imagine." "We would be so fat!" "And happy!" "Certainly, we'd have no need to hunt little farm girls, with such a feast awaiting us." "And you owe no loyalty to them." "They abandoned you." "Left you to die." "Torn apart by monsters." "Or worse, by men." "Humans are such cruel beasts." "Nothing in this world so twisted." "Sending their children to die." "Too cowardly to do the deed themselves."

"Turn the tables on them." "Open the gates." "Send them to the fate they were sending you to." "It is only fair." "It is only just." "Teach them the law of nature."

The forest went silent, waiting for Elruin's response.