Reeve watched the heads of a man and woman, their bodies hidden behind the ocean of guards, glide along the back wall toward the platform. The man had dark skin, shaggy hair, and round features, the woman light skin with freckles and short-cropped hair that highlighted her sharply pointed ears. Both wore fine, velvety robes of purple with white fringe.

“Come! Come!” The man called, waving Reeve toward the platform.

Reeve glanced over her shoulder at Finch, who made no sign, and then started down the aisle between the two groups of guards. After a few paces, she tried to stand taller and take more confident strides. Looking toward the platform, she saw that the King and Queen were being carried to their chairs on litters that shone like silver, each borne by four undead guards.

The guards lowered the litters next to the two chairs—thrones, Reeve thought, safe to say those are thrones—and the plump king rolled himself out of the seat atop the litter and tottered to the chair to Reeve’s left. The queen rose lightly from her litter and practically skipped down the stairs from the platform to meet Reeve at its base.

“You are alive, aren’t you?” She said, squinting up at Reeve’s face.

“So far,” Reeve said, then added, “your Majesty.”

The queen giggled giddily. “Wonderful!” She clapped her hands. “Bring our guest…,” she looked at Reeve.

“Reavyr.”

“…our guest Reavyr refreshments after her long journey from…” The queen tilted her head slightly.

“Thhia.”

“…from Thhia!”

“Don’t forget to specify, dear,” the king said.

Nodding her head vigorously, the queen spun and pointed at one of the guards standing near her. “You! Your turn.”

The guard immediately gave a quarter bow and then shuffled past the platform toward a door opposite the one from which the king and queen had appeared.

“If we don’t specify,” the king said, “they all try to be the one that responds to our command.”

“I can see how that’d be a problem,” Reeve said, acutely aware of the throng of undead filling the room.

The queen gripped Reeve’s arm. “You have no idea.”

“There are definitely a lot of things about what’s going on here that I have no idea about,” Reeve said. “Your Majesty.”

“Please! You may forgo the ‘your Majesty,’ yes?” The queen said. “I am Sea Mist and this,” she gestured to the king, “is Larry. You are the first guest we’ve had in months. You do us a great kindness.” She turned and motioned toward one of the guards, who left her post, retrieved from the back wall a simple leather-padded wooded chair, and placed it behind Reeve. The queen gestured to the chair before mounting the stairs and taking her seat next to the king.

Reeve glanced back at the chair only just large enough to accept her bulk and sat with caution. “I’m surprised you haven’t had any visitors lately. I know the leaders in Thhia, and it sounds like they’ve sent messengers to try to make contact with Neecrus. They didn’t come back, the messengers.”

The king and queen looked at each other, and the joy they’d worn since entering sagged into tired frustration.

“We do apologize,” the king said. “It is likely that these messengers have become unwilling residents of our fair city.”

Reeve leaned forward. “They’re zomb—.” She shook her head, frowned nearly imperceptibly, and cleared her throat. “They have become undead guards like these?”

“Oh, oh, heavens no!” Larry said and then laughed, his mirthful expression returning. “It has been years since any of these have been created.” Larry gestured to the guards filling the hall. “We call them the ambulating undead.”

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Reeve looked between them for a few seconds, unsure if she was being had. They seemed genuine. “Great name,” she finally said with as much sincerity as her teenage sensibilities would allow. “Really nailed it. Couldn’t have done better if you’d workshopped it. But then, what happened to the messengers?”

Sea Mist frowned again. “Our guards can be extremely zealous in their efforts to protect the living from danger. And, since the lands surrounding Morbeet happen to be exceedingly dangerous—due to native creatures, extreme climate, and a sadly misguided but extremely well-armed gang of former scriveners and candlemakers—our ambulating undead guards have not let anyone leave the city in the last six years.”

“Scriveners and candlemakers?”

Larry’s voice was grave when he said, “They now commit acts most foul with nibs and scalding hot wax.”

“So the Thhians sent here are just somewhere in the city?”

“Almost certainly,” Larry said.

“Not even you two can leave?”

The couple shook their heads slowly.

“How do the living residents of the city survive?”

Larry snorted. “Survival is not the problem, esteemed Reavyr. The problem in Morbeet is that comfort is slowly killing us all.”

Sea Mist nodded in agreement. “Not only do they protect us from risks to life or limb, but the ambulating undead attend to our every need.”

As if on cue, the guard returned from wherever she had gone. She placed a short stool next to Reeve and then put upon it a large platter covered in an assortment of foods. Reeve was reminded of their reception in Helia’s camp, when Starling had brought her father a similar spread, shortly before Reeve had learned that they were captives of a regicidal rogue AI bent on real-world conquest.

“Uh, thanks,” Reeve said of the platter, feeling no interest in eating anything served by the undead.

“You are welcome,” the guard signed, before returning to her spot in the horde.

Looking back to the royal pair, Reeve pointed over her shoulder toward the guard who’d brought the food. “Did you teach them to sign?”

“One of the first things we did when we took power,” Sea Mist said, her face solemn.

“Wwwwhy?” Reeve said slowly.

Both Larry and Sea Mist looked at her with pity and understanding. Larry spoke. “You’ve never heard an ambulating undead speak, I take it?”

Reeve shook her head.

Larry snapped and pointed to the guard who’d just left the platter for Reeve. “You. What time is it? You have permission to speak your response.”

“It,” the guard said, and Reeve’s eyes widened upon hearing the voice high and reedy as though the speaker had inhaled helium, “is one and forty-four after the nooning on the twelfth day of the tenth month.”

Reeve turned back to the king and queen, who were looking at her, their expressions weary. “They all talk like that?” Reeve said.

Larry smiled wryly. “Everyone, what time is it?” He said loudly as he and Sea Mist covered their ears.

Thousands of helium-elevated voices filled the room for a quarter minute.

“Good call on the signing,” Reeve said.

Larry and Sea Mist nodded as they uncovered their ears.

“You were saying they’re killing you with comfort?”

“They do everything that needs to be done in Morbeet!” Sea Mist said. “In your travels, have you ever come upon a land where prosperity has become a curse? Our people struggle to find purpose in their lives when they need do nothing to survive. Many of them are becoming obese.” She gestured toward Larry.

“She’s not wrong,” Larry said, flicking his index fingers to unselfconsciously point at his substantial belly.

Reeve thought of every time she’d ever played a game in creative mode, and how bored she’d quickly become when there was nothing to struggle against. She and her friends would end up concocting more and more ambitious or ridiculous projects or goals just to stay interested, until finally they’d move on to another game. Then she thought of their local grocery store, the unending aisles of every food you could imagine, and she pictured half her parents’ friends, some literally dying of maladies associated with their prosperous lifestyles.

“Yeah,” Reeve said. “I’ve seen places like that.”

Sea Mist gave an abbreviated wave of the hand toward Reeve. “She understands,” she said.

“How did it end up like this?” Reeve said.

The royal pair frowned almost guiltily.

“We survived the chaos that erupted in Neecrus after the fall of Ase Thhia,” Sea Mist said. “Not by power or magic but through cunning. We needed only let the other aspirants focus on each other until there were almost none left. Then…,” she grasped Larry’s hand and smiled, her eyes distant as though reliving a fond memory, “we gave the people a glimpse of the freedom they would have under our benevolent rule, and they lifted us to power.”

“And then, well,” Larry said, “we accidentally oppressed them with our love.”

Sea Mist nodded. “The ambulating undead had been used by the necromancer overlords to control the populace. In the dying days of the unrest, we had the last necromancer revise the ambulating undeads’ fundamental purpose.”

“And now our people have no freedom because everything is given them,” Larry said.

“You had the last necromancer do it? Because you couldn’t? And now you can’t change it again?”

“Casters we are not,” Sea Mist said.

“Then I guess you’re not the ones who have been testing the boundaries of this reality?”

“Reavyr?” Sea Mist said, confused.

“We occasionally eat a bad mushroom,” Larry said.

“Yeah, didn’t think so. Never mind. Listen, maybe I can help you improve your home arrest situation here, and at the same time you could help me keep bad things from happening in other parts of this world.”