Pirim awoke to swirling blackness. At first, it was nigh impossible to tell whether or not her eyes were truly open or shut. The dark that loomed before her stalked her like a great beast before its prey, but, vulnerable as she lay, it had not quite swallowed her yet. She stumbled to her feet, feeling her neck. It ached, but she was uninjured. She grasped for the wall. Her finger sunk deep into the cobwebbed eye socket of a skull.

Pirim found her pack against the edge of the wall. She fumbled with the latch and dug. Unfortunately, none of the stones she had brought had any luminescent properties. She dug further. Where was her wand? Then, realization struck. A vivid image of Sim snapping it in two before her. Blast!

Without a wand, she was powerless. It was a miracle she hadn’t been killed yet, slaughtered as she slept. Her legs started to shake. The dark was not usually so terrifying to her. Perhaps it was not the dark, but being defenseless.

The musty stench of the tunnels filled her lungs. Bile rose to the tip of her throat. It was suffocating, claustrophobic, sweltering. She began to feel dizzy, nauseous, and the world swam before her eyes, even though she could see none of it. She turned her head left, right, around, in search of any source of light at all. A blind rat in a maze.

There!

To her left, a ghastly blue figure shimmered. Pirim could see the faint outline of clothing on its back, and the bones of fingers grasping for her behind it. A ghost in the dark. It was a middle-aged woman with a face scarred by anxiety. The kind that raked its long claws against one’s face and dragged the skin down with it, rumpling and wrinkling it until it turned pallid. In her hands lay a baby swaddled in torn gray cloth. She tilted her head and looked down at the baby, swaying from side to side ever so slowly.

Pirim swung her pack around her back in excitement. A few stones rattled out of the undone opening, but she left them on the ground, not even bothering to close it. She jogged up towards the spirit, ankles twisting against uneven flooring, then springing back to proper position. The mother paid no notice to Pirim as she dashed up to her.

Illuminated by the blue glow of the ghost sat a rickety door. Its rusted hinges were barely intact against cracked stone and eroded bones. The door itself was made of rotten wood, and yet, up until this point, Pirim had yet to see a single door in the Catacombs. Whatever was behind it must have been something worth protecting…

Pirim ignored the ghost and grabbed the handle. In the light, she noticed how filthy her hand was. Her greying skin was now covered in dust, dirt, and cobweb. It was only a matter of time before she contracted some sort of disease, but she didn’t care. She creaked the door open anyway.

A barrage of cold air blasted her in the face. She entered the room and it smelled like death. It was a circular room, crudely dug into the stone. Instead of being smooth or adorned with ornate bone decorations, these walls were jagged and crumbling. Hanging from chains protruding from the walls were long flat wooden boards covered in straw and fur blankets. Pirim counted a dozen in total, four on every wall besides the door’s, stacked vertically. A dozen beds? Based on the orientation of the Catacombs, the area outside this room was not fit for living quarters at all, which meant this small enclosure was meant to house a dozen people.

Pirim remembered Victoria’s words. No wonder there was a ghost loitering around the door. As she surveyed the room, a flash of blue caught her eye, then another, and another. Several ghosts began to emerge silently from the wall, drifting into the center of the room. They hung suspended in the air for a moment before taking seats on random beds and dangling their legs off the edges. Pirim noticed a couple adult men, a few adult women, and many children. There was one old man who was visibly ill, his beard shedding and fraying. His face was plagued by leprosy. The man next to him let out a silent cough that violently convulsed his body.

Pirim had a thought. If the mother who had illuminated the entrance to this place was indeed the spirit of that very skeleton that Pirim had killed… that had many implications, some of which were hopeful, some of which not. Were the skeletons merely vessels for the spirits to abandon when they were destroyed or dismantled? If that was the case, then spirits should be able to inhabit a skeleton that wasn’t theirs. She gazed around the room once more, double-checking her headcount. A dozen spirits, which meant a dozen potential subjects. All she needed was an inanimate skeleton.

There wasn’t a lot of furniture in the room besides the beds, but there were the fragments of broken pots, empty packs covered in cobwebs, and pebbles. She checked underneath the lower beds, and peeled back all the blankets the others. No skeleton in sight. There were a few clumps of… something that lay strewn about the floor. Perhaps it was flesh or bone too maimed and aged to be recognizable, but just severed clumps of flesh would simply not do for her plans.

Pirim did find a rusted blade inside one of the packs. It was hardly usable, but it would have to do. She crouched down in front of one of the beds, pushed away the blanket and the straw, and began to hack away at the edge of the board. The chains that held it up creaked underneath the pressure. Pirim grit her teeth as she tasted excitement in the back of her throat. Adrenaline, even. She continued to madly stab away until the chains suddenly gave way and clattered to the ground, the part of the wall holding them in place crumbling along with it. The board hit the floor with a thump, sending dust flying into the air. Pirim coughed, but simply shook her head, scrunched her face, and continued.

Eventually Pirim was able to get a large chunk of the board separated from the main bed. It splintered into two parts, a thinner part and a longer part, which she separated. From there, she took her rusted blade and made a V-shape depression in the middle of the longer board. She took a twig and, using it as a spindle, began to spin it against the depression. Her hands were grimy and sweaty from the previous altercation, so it took an agonizingly long time for embers to finally form. Her heart lifted when she saw the sparks of a tiny flame. She took the thinner board and brought the flame to the tip. Not the most sustainable torch, but it would at least give her enough light to work.

Ah, that’s right. She had just the perfect material right inside her pack – Yuka’s skull. Of course! No need to search for a skeleton outside in the dark, she could simply use her skull to test the possibilities. Her wand may have been broken, but she kept a few small pieces of red chalk in her pack for emergency situations. She drew out the skull and the chalk, placing it on the board with one hand and holding the torch with the other hand. She sat herself down by the board and leaned over it, shifting the skull towards the center and drawing a crude ring around it with her chalk.

“It’s been such a long time since I had to draw these out by hand,” Pirim mused to herself. Yes, that was why her hands were shaking, fumbling with the chalk and even dropping it on one occasion. It was also why she chose to ignore the gnawing pang in her abdomen. The strain of remembering how to draw a witches’ circle by hand was what spawned her throbbing headache.

It was still tender where Sim had hit her, but she couldn’t dedicate her hand to massaging the bruise, so she let it ache. How annoying, she thought. It was like the world itself was trying to stop her from defying its laws. Like hell she would let it. A small voice inside her head worried that she had gotten a concussion. She silenced it immediately. After completing the letters and connecting the necessary ones to each other, she sat in anticipation. Something was stymying her breath. Whatever, this was much more important. She stared at the skull until it began to split into two. She was staring, but she was not seeing, for her headache was too great to concentrate.

She silently begged the spirits to come closer, to react to the skull in any capacity, and yet they made no movement. They could not see her written incantation at all. They were still stuck within the past, the day where they had lost their lives. Pirim debated removing the skull and forcefully shoving it inside a spirit, but that would most likely break the spell if she tampered with it.

That small voice piped up again, asking for food. Pirim realized that she had no way of telling how much time had passed since she had been abandoned by Victoria and Sim. When was the last time she ate? Did that matter? If she turned away to dig in her pack for scraps of food, she might miss something important. If her concentration was not absolute, if her gaze was not fully trained… ah.

The small voice disillusioned her with a biting accusation. There was no certainty that Pirim would make it out of this labyrinth alive without a map. She had seen the marked tunnels with Sim. That was why food did not matter, nor did her concussion. That was why she had given up, though she denied it. Snap out of it, that small voice screamed. Snap out of it! What if Yuka saw you like this?

A flash of movement startled Pirim out of her thoughts. There it was, a faint blue light glowing from inside the skull. She gasped and took it within her hands, pulling the skull from its place on the witches’ circle. The light immediately faded. Then, Pirim began acutely aware of a stinging sensation at the tips of her fingers. She brought them into view. They were on fire. She shrieked and dropped the flaming torch right onto the board. She shook her fingers violently to no avail, then resorted to hitting the rock wall to put out the flames. The embers died down, but the stinging sensation remained. She spat a curse and turned around. The board was aflame.

“No, Yuka!”

Pirim lunged through the flames and scooped up the skull, cradling it in her arms. The warmth permeated her ragged clothes. It was a few degrees short of burning, but she did not falter. She took her boots and began to stomp out the flames. It took a few minutes of muttered curses and repeated impacts for the fire to die down completely. What remained was a blackened, uneven board and no trace of the chalk it had donned. Useless.

She was tempted right there and then to use her burned fingers to punch the wall. She balled them into shaking, stinging fists and readied herself, but reconsidered. She collapsed onto the floor, with too much frustration and too little strength to express it. She started to dig inside of her pack, but her hands were too numb to be of any use. Instead, she pushed it over and dumped all of its contents out onto the floor. She found a piece of stale, hardened bread and stuffed it into her mouth. The tears dripping down her face and into her mouth gave the bread the flavor it needed. She did not withhold herself; her desire was too great. She rummaged through the spilt contents for every morsel she could find and gorged herself on them all, leaving none for the rats and none for tomorrow.

She was licking her fingers when the skull on the ground began to glow once more. Pirim’s eyes opened wide as she noticed that the glow was not blue, but a deep green. She got to her feet, taking the skull and quickly holding it up to welcome the new arrival. What she did not notice was that all of the spirits that loitered around the room were still intact, still in place. She did not notice that the inhabitant of the skull was not of this world.

Pirim almost dropped the skull when it unhinged its jaw and groaned. She fumbled with it before hastily laying it on one of the beds. She backed away, searching for her wand that was no longer there.

“Uooooaarrrghhh!”

The skull roared to life before swiveling around, taking in its situation. Then, it locked eyes with Pirim. Though its eye sockets themselves were empty, there was a green orb of light within the empty cavity. With a monstrous voice that could be described as neither male nor female, it sputtered out several vocalizations that Pirim could not discern as telepathic or spoken. It did not move its jaw as it spoke. Pirim’s ears rang with the incompressibility of this otherworldly language. No human mouth could make these sounds; they were unrecognizable. A series of short, stuttering noises escaped the skull, which Pirim desperately tried to put a pattern to before gasping. The skull was laughing.

“For someone who intentionally tried to reanimate a spirit, you sure seem surprised to see one,” it said in that same monstrous, androgynous voice. It sounded like if metal tried to talk. Yet, the strangeness of this spirit’s voice could not obfuscate its clear personality. “That is what you were trying to do, correct?”

Pirim could only nod. This was not how the spell was supposed to go. Even if she had somehow managed to briefly bind a spirit once again to a worldly object, it should not have been able to talk without vocal cords.

“Well, let me just say that whatever references you used for that attempt are wildly inaccurate and not at all how we – I – do things around here. That’s not how you do necromancy, not in the slightest.” There it was again, that strange, guttural guffaw that filled the room and made Pirim’s lungs quake.

“You’ve piqued my curiosity, you know. Usually, I don’t show myself to humans, but that’s simply because they’d attack me on sight if I did. Instead, I just watch from the walls, learning how to speak their language. But you, you went out of your way to do a practice that’s a demonic specialty. You tried necromancy in the necromancer’s domain, so it makes me think you want to see me. Am I right?”

“Who are you?” Pirim managed to get out. She was overcome with a sudden feeling of disgust. What was this demon doing in her Yuka’s skull? It was laughing at her. Yuka would never do such an insufferable thing.

“Oh? I was wrong, it seems. My name is-” the demon proceeded to make an assortment of irreplicable noises, then laughed again. “-but you can’t say that, so how about I use one more fitting for the human tongue? How about… Phylaris? Yes, that sounds memorable enough.”

“Now, I’m certain you wanted something out of attempting necromancy here. I’m here to find out what, because I may or may not have a deal in mind. What are you here for, friend?”

Pirim shuddered at being called a “friend” by some eldritch being. Eldritch beings and demons from hell were not exactly her enemies, but simply means to an end. A pure business relationship. She hadn’t even thought they were capable of understanding the concept of a friend. Phylaris’ familiarity with human concepts both intrigued and appalled her. Despite her misgivings, she answered it.

“I’m looking for a way to… revive someone close to me.”

“Describe them.”

Pirim paused. She envisioned Yuka’s figure – a strikingly beautiful woman. A silhouette. She brought her mind closer. What color was her skin? Her hair? Her eyes? She pondered. Had it really been that long? What did she wear? It couldn’t have been nothing. Did she wear a dress? No… that didn’t seem right… but pants didn’t bring to mind any vivid memories either. Pirim tried a different tactic. Her voice, Pirim knew, was beautiful enough to outshine any bird’s song. How deep was it? Soft? Loud? Nothing. What had her personality been like? Pirim started to sweat, cheeks flushed with embarrassment. It was on her to keep Yuka’s memory alive. It was up to her to preserve her image for the right moment. Her personality… only one word came to mind. Beautiful.

But Yuka had been so much more than beautiful, right? Pirim had not come all this way for a woman who was nothing but beautiful. So why was that all that she could remember? Was that all that Pirim deemed important enough to remember? No, no, that couldn’t be true. The deer skull was important, too. It was related to Yuka. How? It wasn’t hers… how was it related to Yuka? Pirim could not, no matter how hard she tried, ascertain the reason why. Her throbbing concussive headache did not make things easier. She grimaced as pain shot through her skull.

“Can’t do it? That’s fine. I should still be able to find them eventually and bring them to this world once again.”

At these words, Pirim immediately sprung up, ignoring her migraine’s protesting reaction to her sudden movement.

“Can you? What do you need?”

“Well, to do that, I will need to have their spirit. If you’ve forgotten their appearance, it will take a long time for me to find them, but I can as long as I have their name.”

“Yuka,” Pirim blurted with no hesitation.

“That’ll do. Now, I believe in quid pro quo, and thus, for me to bring your person back, I’ll need a vessel. But I don’t want this to be any old vessel. You’ll have to give me what I want in return, and what I want is a vessel that matches my appearance back in my old dimension. We can kill two birds with one stone, and use that vessel for both your human and myself.”

“How does it know so many human idioms?” a small voice said from the inner trenches of her mind, but Pirim paid it no mind.

“You’ll be sharing a body?” Pirim said instead. That was… an unfortunate complication.

“Yes, and that is not negotiable.” said Phylaris. No further elaboration.

“And what if I refuse?” Pirim ventured.

“Are you really going to refuse a demon’s deal in the middle of said demon’s domain? Not very wise, I tell you.”

Pirim instantly got flashbacks to how Victoria had coerced her into joining her team, only for her to leave her for dead in an instant. If a human was capable of that, what was a demon capable of? Neither would let her make her own decisions. She felt spite slowly rise until she could taste it on her tongue. She would agree, for now, but this time she would not be betrayed. She’d find out Phylaris’ weaknesses, for it had to have weakness if it was begging a human for help. Then, she’d be the one had it at her mercy.

“Hmm… I sense a group of people nearby. They’re not the ones you were with earlier, though.”

“You were watching?”

“Of course I was.”

Pirim paled. If Phylaris was indeed behind all the reanimated skeletons in the Catacombs, that meant that it knew what Pirim had done to the skeleton mother. Phylaris looked at Pirim’s face and laughed.

“Don’t look so serious! That was my creation, yes, but it was only another attempt at practicing connecting spirit and body. I do it all the time. Once I’m finished, I send them out into the Catacombs. You and the other humans can do whatever you want with them. I don’t mind. It’s not my undead that you need to worry about. From what I’ve gathered, for one reason or another, your own kind doesn’t like you very much.”

“Victoria’s some sort of zealot. Not all humans are like that, most just ignore me or look away.”

“If you say so,” Phylaris said in a singsong voice. Pirim pulled her hood further over her face to hide that she was grinding her teeth. She scooped up the skull. It was warm; whether that was due to Phylaris’ possessing it or due to her previous failed ritual was unknown. She drew her cloak over the eyes of the skull, which emanated light from Phylaris’ green spirit. Now the light was constrained to the insides of her cloak and would not be noticed by the people she was about to tail. Pirim bent down and peered through a crack in the door.

“Hey, did you notice it’s a little colder around here?” a female voice whispered. It was close.

“Yeah, stay close to the torch. It feels unnatural,” said a different, lower female voice.

Pirim breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Sim nor Victoria. However, she would still need to hide herself, assuming that they were also members of the guild assigned to patrol the Catacombs. They must have been one of the other two teams.

Pirim waited until the torchlight passed by her. She could see the yellow-orange glow against the walls, and could barely make out the moving shadows of the people behind the door. She counted two of them, walking hurriedly past. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed the door, or had and were taking measures to avoid it. Pirim waited a few seconds, then slowly pushed open the door. She cursed underneath her breath as it made a conspicuous creak.

“What was that?” the first female whispered. She stopped and brandished the torch. Pirim, who had just slipped through the doorway, gasped and turned her back. Thankfully, her cloak was the same color as the rocks. She felt the heat of the torch upon her, and the light illuminating her peripheral vision. She silently begged Phylaris not to make a noise.

“Hm. Could just be the spirits trying to scare us,” the female said.

“We can’t be distracted by any random noises,” the other whispered. “We have to get back to the surface as soon as possible. Just ignore them.”

“Mm, if you say,” said the first.

Pirim sat with her heart in her throat until the light of the torch finally swung away from her back. She slowly rose to her feet, following the reflection of the glow on the far wall as its source turned the corner. Pirim felt an odd vibration at her midriff and realized that Phylaris was laughing again, this time quietly enough that only Pirim could hear.

“Cut it out!” she hissed.

“You were so scared back there, weren’t you?” Phylaris said back. Its voice echoed within Pirim’s mind – telepathic in nature, perfect for tormenting one person in particular with everyone around them being none the wiser. “Humans really are curious creatures. So afraid of the smallest things, things that don’t even matter in the end.

Pirim bit back a scathing retort. It would be unwise to bicker with a monster from beyond. Though, something about Phylaris’ lax nature both confused and alarmed her. Eldritch beings were supposed to be incomprehensibly horrifying, not mocking and… annoying. Part of her thought that Phylaris might even enjoy bantering with her, sick as that was. Phylaris was indeed incomprehensible, just in a different way, she supposed.

Phylaris had almost distracted Pirim enough for her to lose track of her bearings, but thankfully the echoes of footsteps among the Catacombs pointed her in the right direction. She scampered around the corners, placing each foot slowly and deliberately on the ground as to disturb the bones as little as possible. As she approached a long hallway, she caught sight of the adventurers she was tailing.

The first had long braided blonde hair and an odd black hat, fit with a dark cape and a pack strapped on top. Because her outfit was black, it highlighted the sheen of gold in her pockets, around her arms, and dangling tantalizingly from the pack. The second had dark black hair with an unnatural shade of deep violet blended in. She was a little taller, and carried with her ancient, rusted weapons and artifacts strapped onto a large belt at her waist. Together they possessed numerous trinkets, curios, and jewelry – loot from the expedition – a fact that Pirim could use to survive. Now that she was supposedly dead and Victoria would have likely told the villagers that she was an occultist here to study and raise the unworldly, it seemed that she would have to resort to theft to live day-to-day.

Pirim briefly considered how robbing these poor souls would be immoral, but it would be a worse affront to let herself die instead. She wanted to live, and thus, she wanted their gold. It was an overpowering desire, a mixture between a hunger and a compulsion.

She stalked them like a beast for an hour until they finally arrived at that rusted iron ladder that heralded freedom. A dim light shone on the duo and illuminated their faces – though it was clear that this light did not come from the sun; it was too silvery in color. They cautiously began to ascend, taking care not to let a single precious artifact drop or scrape against the sides.

Of course, the artifacts by themselves were of no use to Pirim. Selling stolen artifacts, especially unidentified, was bound to raise a few eyebrows. Instead, she planned to steal from their strongbox.

Pirim waited until she heard the distant screech of the grate slamming closed, then determined it was safe to exit. As she placed one hand on the first rung, a sudden flash of blue caught her off-guard. The mother was by her side again, child in tow. Was she aware of her? Pirim paused. She saw the spirits, yes, but she had never really seen the spirits, acknowledged them as equals or even conscious beings. They were mere passersby on an endless ethereal highway, but something was different about this spirit in particular.

The mother comforted her child and stood in the middle of the hallway. Her eyes were unreadable – a less observant person would have noted her eyes as emotionless, but Pirim saw in them emotions she could not comprehend, as flummoxing as Phylaris’ true nature. The mother stared at her. Not through her, but at her. She said nothing, did nothing, but she knew everything. Pirim hastened her climb, scrambling up the rungs like a cornered rat. The mother did not follow; she did not need to. Pirim felt a slumbering beast awaken inside of her. Its name… guilt.