Elruin ignored Carob's warning; her dolly was no threat to her. Carob tried to slow his horse, to help his addled sister, but the animal ignored his efforts. Death was all but literally at its heals, and instinct alone commanded the beast.

Her dolly ignored her as if she weren't there, or was already dead. If she wanted to save her family, she had to sing.

And so she did.

Chaos erupted throughout the farm as animals fled from the song, the women hiding in the homestead shouted in fear, and the horse which carried Carob and the farmhand stumbled into the dirt and mud. That it had ran this far through the rough, muddy ground was a testament to its strength, but it was still just a horse, and it had reached its limits long ago.

The skeleton froze in its tracks, held by the power of Requiem as Elruin picked through what passed for its mind; it looked like her instructions to build the wall were still there, and in a scenario where it was left alone, it might have continued working mindlessly forever, finding stones and piling them until the wall had ceased to be a wall, and had become a mountain.

Beneath that, if it were to complete its task, it had to protect itself. If her brothers and their employees had left the dolly alone, it would have ignored them. They must have attacked it.

She was distracted from her exploration of the underpinning nature of the undead when her brother approached them, wielding a splitting maul he no doubt took from the tool shed as a weapon. Trembling, he worked his way around, to sneak up behind the monster while it seemed immobile.

She could let it happen, but she also wanted to save her dolly. She did what she'd been trying to do all day, and lied again. "Please stay back. I could lose control if you get too close." Ingrained habit and the structure of their language had her phrase it as a request, rather than a command or warning.

Carob hesitated; he wasn't a mystic or a scholar. What little knowledge he had of magic was enough to tell that Elruin was doing something with magic, but he had no idea what or how. He could see that the horror had stopped moving, which was better than he and his men had accomplished. Perhaps it was like dealing with an animal; she was keeping the thing docile somehow, but even a docile animal could be dangerous if spooked.

He did understand that right now, Elruin was outputting more magical energy than he had ever seen of anyone save the occasional Reclaimer that had come through, and that the energy unsettled him almost as much as it did the animals. He wouldn't admit it, even to himself, but right now he feared his sister more than he feared the monster. "Okay, you know what you're doing." I hope.

"Three above, four below!" Othsa gasped after having come out to see the commotion. She may not have recognized the corpse, but to her eyes the armor was unmistakable. Despite having been buried for over a decade, it still glimmered as if it had been shined and polished just yesterday. "No!" She fell to her knees. "It can't be."

Her exclamations devolved from shouts to incoherent sobbing and gibberish in a matter of seconds.

Carob wanted to go to his mother, to comfort her, or at least beg her not to make a bad situation worse by breaking down in public, but he was now the official man of the house. Kasa broke away from the cluster of eight girls; with Mother inconsolable, it now fell on her and her brother to run the household. There would be time enough later for her tears.

She looked to her brother. "How do we save the farm?" Despite wanting to be strong, she choked on her words; they were an admission that Father was dead, granting permission to Carob to take Father's role. For the purposes of social convention, he was Father, now. She stamped down the stray thought that at least Carob liked her favorite suitor better than Father had.

For his part, Carob couldn't meet her eyes; all the same fears tore through him as well, and the sight of almost half his family butchered was fresh in his mind. "We can't."

Kasa reached out to him. "No!" Breaking protocol, but now was no time for protocol. Until Mother got better, she'd be taking the role of the woman of the house and that meant she didn't have to be subservient to her brother. "There must be a way, you just have to try harder."

"All the men are gone." Not completely true, but there were only four remaining where they needed at least ten to complete just the daily chores. "And we can't..." he took a glance at the blood-soaked monster not too far from them. "Nobody will want to come here, not after today." They couldn't afford to pay them if they would, anyway.

Kasa couldn't find an argument to that. Instead, she took the other approach to fix the more immediate problem: that thing standing in the path. "Elruin, how long can you control that thing?"

"I... I don't know, but as long as I can sing it'll be fine." Elruin offered.

"Tonight, tomorrow at the latest," Kasa decided. "We have until Elruin gets tired to destroy that thing."

A clear goal helped Carob think. "We won't find a Reclaimer by then, but if we head for town, we should be able to find a priestess. They'll be able to send for an exorcist." Magical conventions weren't his strong suit, but everyone knew at least something of the religious orders and their general practices. "On the plus side, they won't charge us, not to deal with this. And if we get lucky, we may even find an Ecrosian who'll help with... everything else. On the other hand..."

He trailed off; he couldn't imagine that the priests would treat Elruin well.

Kasa took to the other concern. "Everyone will know there was an outbreak. We might have to abandon the farm, and nobody will buy anything from us, even if the priests say it's safe." She left out that 'anything' included the people. She had a hopeful fiance to consider, her sisters, too, had potential futures for themselves. A farmer's daughter wasn't worth much on the market, but it was still enough to marry a farmer's son and have a future.

If this news became public, their futures were limited to grave digging for the men, and prostitution for the women. Under no circumstance could she accept that. "Elruin, I want you to take that... thing... head north along the road, let nobody see you and especially nobody see it. You'll find a place with a wall like ours, only a hundred times bigger, with houses that are made of stone. When you get there, send that thing at the walls. They've got real mages and knights there, it won't even get within throwing distance."

Carob held his tongue; no good came of questioning his sister's suggestion in that regard. It would take care of the monster in a way that protected the farm, at any rate. "And the dead? The wall?"

"Burn them all." Fire was a good way to cleanse just about any magical energy; except fire itself, of course. Water was another good choice, but less useful in this situation. "If asked, say it was a dragon that killed them. If they don't believe you, I'll say I saw it and describe a Chimera. They don't get much larger than a bull, but most of them do breathe fire. I've read about them in some books, and no two ever look the same, so it'll be believable enough. We'll have to watch after that, make sure no other necromantic taint pops up and do our best to get an Ecrosian priestess out here to make doubly certain when possible."

"And... the farm?" Carob knew his little sister was smart, but he hadn't realized how ruthless she could be.

"I..." she hesitated. "I don't know. If we can keep it going just a couple more years, that's enough time to get all our sisters married off. It's still a good chunk of land, and in an okay spot. Maybe someone will want to buy it? We can sell a lot of the animals, if we're desperate enough. We can't take care of all of them now anyway. Or... if we have to... we could turn it into a commune town..."

A commune wasn't an ideal choice, but there was always more people than there was land safe from monsters. Reclaimers made themselves rich driving out monsters long enough to build the defensive barriers, then selling the property that they owned by Right of Reclamation. Promising a place to build a home would bring many young men, and later young women hoping to marry a landowner.

It would mean giving up control of the property, of a legacy started by their great-great grandparents, but they could retain some control by living as what amounted to petty lords, collecting rent for a time, which would keep them going long enough for the family to find a graceful place to take shelter from the fallout.

Meanwhile, Elruin listened to their discussion and hummed to her enslaved minion; she wasn't forgotten, but she wasn't welcome in their plans, and she had her own goals to consider.