The underground atrium, gathering place of the sinister skeleton legion, was amassed before a herald with bright, glowing orange eyes. He raised his voice out over the crowd and spoke with a growling tenor that was accentuated with a hiss, as if there was an evil wind accompanying half of his spoken words from the dark.

“Privy to me, you rattling rascals!”

The skeleton horde all turned together, even those mindless and shifting in place, to hear what was spoken. The thoughtful, human-minded skeleton did the same, eager to hear any voice that could give him guidance on his purpose.

“You who have recently risen and come about, raise up your arms if you understand my words!”

The skeleton newbie did so, cautiously, as the other personality-driven skeletons did the same. Then, as if mimicking them without addressing the question, the half-minded and autonomous skeleton followed suit. The crawlers, the ruined and disheveled half-made skeletons did not. One tried, but its arm dropped off.

The heralding skeleton sighed. “We’re getting less and less good ones recently,” he grumbled. No one seemed to notice his aside, except for the sentient skeleton, who turned up to him with curiosity. They met eyes, just for a flash. He looked away from the herald as another speech began.

“Now pay more attention, ye mass of bones and graven being; raise your hand only if you can answer my question - whether you have the words within you to do so or not. If you can think, then answer me this: What creature is made of three triangles, four squares, but no circles?”

WHAT!?

The skeleton was baffled and afraid. It was unlike any riddle he’d ever heard before. He hadn’t heard many riddles, outside of famous ones involving legs and daytime. He turned his head down and minded his hands as he thought and drew the shapes in the air with the twiddle of his pointed nubs.

Three triangles, four squares - what? Is this, like, a hieroglyph? Some kind of language? Or - no. No circles. That has to be a clue. What animal doesn’t have circles? What are circles? Eyes. An eyeless animal. And sometimes a mouth can be like a triangle, like on crocodiles, or birds. An eyeless bird. Are the squares its wings? One for the body, one each wing, and a triangle for mouth, and tail - or two feet?

“Right,” the herald spoke. He tapped his foot to reclaim the room’s attention. He snapped his finger and pointed down at the thick looking skeleton mingled among the crowd of outstanding members. “You, heed me.” The big boned corpse stood at attention. The herald jerked his head over to the crawler group.

“Turn them into ornaments,” he commanded. The big skeleton turned and began its new task. It walked over to a broken skeleton and stomped it apart until its many parts ceased moving. The other mindless undead did nothing and moved none. Only the apparently sentient undead, like the mindfully moral skeleton in the middle, reacted. Mostly in shock.

“The rest of you,” the herald spoke, turning to the autonomous skeletons that still had their hands up from the previous order, “enter yon crevice and begin your patrols.” He pointed to one of the dark exits from the room. The bony mass moved in step and disappeared into a thin hall in the dark that looked improperly hewn from the rock. Some of them scraped their bodies against the dirt and let the wall fall through their open chest cavities.

“Ahem,” the herald grumbled. “All is well. Now that dregs have been filtered -” he spoke over the sounds of bones breaking against thicker bones in the background, which preoccupied the sentient skeleton’s mind, “- we can proceed. You few have been elevated through your creations to serve a greatly fortuitous purpose. You shall be processed henceforth into the service of our heinous leader, the Lich Gozzpek.”

The herald paused and let the information seep into the skeletons. None of them had the same reverence for the name as he spoke, but it seemed like there was a mutual understanding.

Then, the sharp-boned one stepped forward with his arms crossed. The sound of sharp bone shearing against itself was heard as he settled into place.

“What is a Lich?” he asked, with a whispery-dry voice that carried a baritone of strength.

“Your new master,” the herald spoke.

The sharp-boned skeleton scoffed. “None are my master. I was created from the ruins to ruin. You speak of a system - a creation, one servicing towards a constructive end. To make and renovate, and add to the bulk of the overburdened world. I -.”

The herald pointed a finger and emitted a beam of piercingly bright light from it that shattered the skull of the edgy skeleton mid-speech. Fragments of his exploded head rained everywhere and left nothing but a cloud of hot dust to hang in the air.

KKKKKHHHHH!!!!!

The skeletal brute’s body slunk down to its knees and fell forward, but his brother - the one who rose before him and helped him from the dirt wall - fell to the floor first. The only one he’d known for any extent of time was gone, obliterated in an instant.

The herald held his finger up. A trail of smoke followed it, like the barrel of a deadly gun. “The Lich shall be your master,” he spoke, “and his command shall seal your fate. Defy not the Lich, Gozzpek, who is the Chosen of the Lord of All Ruin. He shall place judgement upon you and use you as tools to service the whims of the greater powers. This is what you were made for. It is all you were made for. You shall either bend to his will….or break under it.”

The other skeletons observed not only the remains of the victim’s corpse, but the state of the ground behind him. A deep black singe was left smoking in the ground far past where he stood. It narrowly missed another skeleton who had bent back far and braced himself from falling with one hand.

Two of the other skeletons went to work and salvaged the fallen one’s body. The skeleton with multiple arms threw his excess ones off and replaced them with the spur-covered arms of his comrade. Another took the legs and tied them around a belt made of scrap, holstering them like clubs. The torso was left in bits and pieces. The scarved skeleton stood over it and examined the curved rib bones carefully, but turned them all down.

It was a very calm and orderly dissemination of the body of a being that had been talking for the first, and last, time only a few seconds ago. The morally driven skeleton in the group was astonished by their incredible efficiency.

They just took him apart! His head exploded and they’re just taking his pieces! It - he’s not even cold! Literally! There’s still smoke rising out of his head!

“There have been enough delays,” the herald spoke up. “And now there are even fewer of you than what was once too few.” The herald walked to the edge of the platform and waved his hand. At his gesture, the ruins beneath him rearranged themselves and formed a slope of stairs out of the unsettled brickwork of the floor. “Follow me. You shall be processed, and placed within the labyrinth proper.”

The skeletons all followed in their own time. The body-hoarder picked up a few extra ribs and layered them between his own to form a fully solid carapace of ribs. Another took the pelvis and rolled it around his wrist like a small bracer until it clattered and flew off. All of them followed, except for the one who was still thinking like a human.

He turned to the body of the gruff and unkind skeleton he once knew. Dick though he acted, it seemed like it was driven by an inherent personality, the same way he was. There was an eerie similarity he couldn’t get past. The fallen may have even had a name that went forgotten. Nothing was left of it. The light inside his skull that reflected aggression in his eyes was gone.

Before he went into a proper state of mourning, the stomping skeleton came over and finished the job, smashing the remains of the blasted skull into dust and dregs and wispy fragments. It wordlessly huffed as it moved across the floor and looked for something else to smash. Then, it looked down at the only skeleton left.

KKKKKHHHHH!!!!!

He got up and ran to follow the rest and rejoined the procession at the tail end, behind the lingering scarved skeleton.

“Careful,” the low, secretive voice spoke behind the scarf. He drew the skeleton’s attention and curiosity.

“Huh?”

The scarved skull nudged his head down the dark hallway where the rest had gone. “They don’t take kindly to tardiness.”

“Oh, yeah,” he replied. “Or….anything.”

“What else they don’t like,” he said, “is expression. Disobedience. Unaligned morals.”

The late skeleton grew nervous. He tried to gulp, but nothing happened, so he made the noise inside his head. “But then….why us? Aren’t we….the most likely to express ourselves?”

The stranger shrugged. “You’re questioning your own cracks,” he said as he tapped on his skill, right against a long hairline crack that ran clean from his temple halfway up his skull, then folded inward and crackled out like discharging lightning toward the middle. “You should just be glad you’re being kept together.”

“Y-yeah,” he agreed.

Just go along with it and be happy I’m not extra-dead. Or mindless. If I knew there’d be this much pressure I might have just pretended to be half-brained. They all just got to leave. Now I’m -.

“Did you figure it out?” the stranger asked.

“Wha-?”

“The riddle,” he said. “How far did you get?”

“Oh, uh,” he answered, “something with no eyes, and triangle, like a beak. I didn’t really….what is the answer?”

“Hmph,” he scoffed. He sounded amused, or perhaps glad to hear it. He turned and started into the hall. His nervous comrade followed until they were caught up with the group.

Their long march in the dark continued until, at last, they emerged into a new room, a fancy and formal crypt staffed by the same hooded and robed figures as their guide. There was an abundance of light, and therefore, an abundance of revelation.

The hooded figures were not starch white or eggshell tinted. They were crimson, red-stained skeletons with a glossiness that seemed eternal, like candles that were just about to drip but never did. Their features were not obscured by any flesh or living remains, and the uninviting orange glow deep within their eye mimicked the flickering of the great flames that rose from the braziers mounted along the wall. Braziers made from pelvises and rib cages.

“Step forward,” the herald spoke, “one of you at a time, and be judged by the council who are chosen by Gozzpek to watch over his great domain.”

There were five of those priestly figures and eight remaining skeletons who had some higher level of thinking to them. The human-minded skeleton, the stranger, and an unspeaking skeleton with a deep hunch from too many vertebrae were left to wait as the others were inducted in some fashion.

“I hope,” the humpbacked skeleton began, “I will serve alongside the great avatar Gozzpek in the inner sanctum of the tomb!”

“Is that the best job here?” the dignified one asked.

The stranger shrugged. “Depends on what you want out of your existence. What your calling is.”

“My calling?”

The stranger tugged on his scarf, revealing that half his jaw was missing, which did not impede his speech at all. “Scavenging. I take what is left behind by the living who invade this place. It was as natural to me as walking. The one we left back there, hole in his head, had the calling for battle, but got conceited too early. When you were created, pried from the dirt and loosed into the halls, what was your first uncontested, unclouded thought?”

“Uhh,” he groaned. What wasn’t my first thought? Not knowing where I was, what happened to me, how I died, who I am, why I’m here - Oh God, what’ll they do to me if I don’t have a calling? Will - am I going to get torn apart? Can I lie? Is lying something I can get away with? I don’t - how could they tell if I’m lying if they can’t look in my eyes?

He looked into the stranger’s eyes. The lights within them were cool and minty-green, rimmed - or hidden - by a much brighter corona of yellow. The hunched skeleton had reddish eyes, but of a softer tone than the sharp-boned fighter, less like blood and more like fruit - a kinder red.

“What color are my eyes?” he asked.

The stranger tilted his head to stare deeper. The lights of his eyes seemed to squint as he did. “Blue.”

“Does that mean something?” he asked. “Like, is that the color of a….hero? Type of thing?”

The stranger stared at him, straightened up, and turned away. He seemingly gave up on reasoning with his new friend entirely and acted as if he wasn’t even there.

I guess not….