Gnaws and the four grissials that accompanied him were ‘escorting’ them through the woods. Gnaws himself was relatively chatty, although everyone present was ignoring him, including the other grissials. Senna was kneading her right hand, the one she’d used to do whatever she’d done to the mage. Harrin wasn’t avoiding Senna. Just… staying out of her way.

He had a lot of questions about himself, and most of them had to do with Senna. It was one of the complications of being raised from the dead.

The shame he had felt from his cursed resurrection had diminished, which worried him. There was supposed to be shame. Undeath was a cowardly state of being, a method of backing out of natural death to continue living. Especially for a knight, to be raised… It was a perversion of the knight’s code.

Or at least, he thought it was. Shortly before the grissials arrived, he’d realized that he didn’t remember the code. It was a fuzzy impression floating on the outside of his memory, providing only the slightest of inclinations towards one decision or another. It was a deeply unsettling feeling. What was he fighting for, aside from Senna? What made him draw his sword?

Most concerningly, why had he slain the mercenaries?

He couldn’t remember what part of his thoughts had brought him to that conclusion, that their deaths hadn’t been an option, but a necessity. The only reason he could think of was that Senna had demanded their deaths, but he felt no unnatural compulsion to follow her commands.

...Unless he wasn’t able to notice the compulsion.

He was reasonably sure he’d never thought much about undead while he’d been alive, and he definitely hadn’t since his undeath. It would have been nice if he’d had at least a passing interest in his forgotten history, but then again, he’d been a knight. His priorities had been more in line with discovering the fastest ways to kill undead, as opposed to how thoroughly they followed the commands of their necromancers.

He glanced up at Gnaws-On-Bones. The grissial was animatedly talking to one of his companions, a hideous many-legged amalgamation of a lizard, a centipede and a boar. The monstrosity didn’t seem to be listening, but Harrin could hardly read its facial expression. Like Gnaws, it lacked all features barring its mouth, a three-cornered maw with even more teeth.

The one thing the grissials had in common was that they all had a lot of teeth.

The grissials were another point of concern for Harrin, but not in the way he’d expected. They were extremely dangerous, and he was worried about that, but his own concerns about himself had raised some frustrating thoughts about the grissials’ autonomy. If they could speak and think for themselves, in much the same way as he himself did, were they still the weapons he remembered them as? Or were they more akin to a race of dragons, a threat only to those that disturbed them?

Morality as a whole had been grayed for Harrin. In every scant memory he possessed of combat, the enemy had been undoubtedly on the other side. The question he now had was which side was the right one, if either. He was an undead, which automatically meant he would be hunted by the Church. But he still held - or at least he was trying to hold - the moral code of knighthood and all that it supported. His existence was an abomination, but his self-given purpose was right, as far as he knew.

Which side was he on?

Was there even a side?

Senna poked Harrin, and he glanced down at her. She looked… worried. Ashamed, perhaps? “Harrin, I - well, the mage was-” She paused, staring at her feet.

Harrin patiently waited for her to continue. They continued walking for another minute or two before she blurted, “I’m sorry.”

If Harrin had still possessed his eyebrows, he would have raised one. As it was, he simply stared at her, which only seemed to make her more nervous.

Pulling at her fingers, she quietly said, “I didn’t tell you how I know necromancy, but…”

Harrin’s interest spiked immediately and sharply, although he tried to avoid giving any hints to the fact. He’d been immensely curious about how and where she’d learned a forbidden magick.

Senna took a deep breath, lowering her voice. “There was a grimoire back in Craikdam.” She barely flinched at the name, but he still saw it. “It was called the Book of Grail. It… most of the Words in it were already read, but there were a few that were still covered.”

Harrin’s thoughts stilled briefly. Grimoires were absurdly expensive to make, requiring at least half a dozen Lorists to properly inscribe the Words of magick into its pages. Each and every Word had to be covered, and since they couldn’t be taught from mage to mage, they could only be read once. It was traditional to put several duplicates of the same Word in a grimoire, but that meant its uses were limited. That Senna had found a grimoire with any unread Words in it seemed unlikely to say the least.

She was staring at her feet once again. “I couldn’t use most of them at the time. I-I probably should have just given it to…”

Concerns temporarily pushed to the back of his mind, Harrin placed a hand on her shoulder. Despite the tears welling in her eyes, she somehow managed to bring herself under control. “The spell I used on the mage helps keep my Font full. It makes it a little larger. Which… well, I can help you stay alive. For longer. Without me, I mean. Not that I want you to leave!”

Harrin patted her shoulder again before her anxiety could get the best of her, and she fell silent.

He was still concerned about his own motives, and equally worried about Senna’s plans for the future. Her contemplation shortly before the grissials arrived was fresh in his mind, after all.

But at the moment, he found himself willing to protect her, and what little he remembered of his code had little issue with that.

“You keep it alive?”

Harrin nearly dropped his sword from shock. Gnaws was standing right behind them. Somehow, the massive grissial had made it from the front of the group all the way to the back without making a sound.

His head was cocked, mouth aimed at both of them in an eyeless stare. “Interesting.”

With that, Gnaws moved between both of them, heading further up the group. Before he could make it up to the point of the rough spearhead formation, the six-legged grissial with the three spines nipped at one of Gnaws’ hands, and Gnaws sighed. “Okay. Here.”

So saying, he proceeded to tear his own throat out with the talons on his legs. Senna made a small noise, a sort of choked squeak. Harrin could only stare.

Tenderly, Gnaws handed the eviscerated chunk of flesh to the six-legged grissial, who then mashed it into its own throat. The new piece shifted, sinking into the grissial’s neck and melting beneath the surface without a trace.

The six-legged grissial turned to face Harrin and Senna with a horrific grin. “It’s my turn to talk,” it said in Gnaws’ voice, albeit slighter in a slightly higher pitch.

Senna coughed, holding a hand to her stomach. Her face was rather green. As for Harrin, he was simply relieved he didn’t have a stomach.

Slowing to accompany their pace, the grissial fell to a comfortable lope beside them. “I am Too-Many-Backs,” It happily announced. “Is it true that you are unable to speak?”

In lieu of any appropriate reaction, Harrin nodded, and Backs imitated the gesture. “Delicious!”

It frowned, ignoring their sudden worry. “No, that’s wrong. Interesting? Interesting!”

Harrin took a step away in spite of himself. Gnaws had been manageable, mostly because he’d had a voice of his own that Harrin could associate with him. Even though the grissial looked nothing like a human, the fact it talked like one was enough to associate it with one.

But now, it looked like that voice wasn’t even Gnaws’ own.

Backs swallowed, a terrifying action consisting of its throat oscillating until the section of flesh that contained its new voice settled. “We’re almost there, by the way,” It added conversationally.

Harrin glanced at it, as did Senna. “What?”

“We’re almost there!”

Without any further explanation, Backs moved back up to the front of the group, occasionally prodding at its throat to move the new flesh around.

Senna gave Harrin a worried glance. “What do you think that means?”

They found out only a few moments later. A wall abruptly came up before them, a mess of stones lashed together by vines and ropes, with a shoddily crafted wooden gate at the center.

Gnaws walked up to it and knocked loudly. It opened without password or preamble, revealing yet another grissial. This one, a lanky bipedal, took in all seven of them and the piles of bodies, an anxiety-inducing strand of saliva dripping from the corner of its mouth. It gestured for them to continue, and Gnaws firmly placed a hand behind Harrin. Backs flanked Senna, giving her a noticeably less sincere smile. “Keep moving!”

Without much choice in the matter, they acquiesced.

Harrin stopped dead the moment he saw what was behind the wall.

It was an entire village of grissials.