“Any research needs results to show. A research without results is nothing more than a daydream.” - Malik Hornswoggle, famous alchemist, circa 201 FP.

“I was wondering where they went, so you took them along with you, huh?” said Aideen as she watched the four towering undead constructs that were at the moment vying for her attention by rubbing their heads – or maybe skulls were the more proper term – affectionately against her. The four were naturally the same four undead constructs that had once belonged to her mother Aoife, which were passed on to Mimia and Èirynn after her death.

They were also utter oddities in that they harbored their original souls within their undead bodies, something that was practically a myth amongst necromancers, a feat thought only the Bone Lord himself achieved. These four – or maybe nine since there were six souls within Trí? – were exceptions that gave a boost to those who believed that it might be possible to achieve immortality by merging one’s soul with an undead body.

Not that centuries of experimentation and research so far had given any concrete result in that front, though.

Compared to the last time Aideen saw them, when only Haon had a body that resembled a sculpture made from pieces of bone, all four now possessed bodies that could have fooled most at a glance. Their shapes and the way they moved just looked very life-like, though their bodies were still in practice, a massive jigsaw puzzle made from myriad pieces of bone joined together.

Haon’s shape was similar to when Aideen last saw him, albeit more refined and life-like. His body took the shape of a massive wolf that was easily two meters tall at the shoulder with what looked like massive folded wings on his back. Of course, Aideen knew that those “wings” would unfold to reveal a half dozen bony limbs with scythe-like blades at their ends when needed instead.

Dó still had a body that was reminiscent of a large crocodile, albeit one with eight spider-like legs that ended on needle-sharp points extending from the sides of her torso, which gave her gait a rather unnerving scuttle-like quality. Her tail remained reminiscent of a scorpion’s one, albeit one that was longer than most and was rolled up into a circle by its base when not in use.

Trí looked almost like an armored Death Knight, albeit one that was four meters in height, with a dozen arms. Her eight double-jointed shield arms were more slender, looking almost like empty husks of armored sleeves from the outside, while the four larger triple-jointed arms looked more human-like, other than the existence of the extra joint. Her six heads looked rather small compared to her huge body, but Aideen noticed how Èirynn had lovingly crafted those heads to closely resemble the puppies and kittens Trí had been in life.

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On the other hand, there was nothing that recalled Ceathair's original form as an ape other than his tail. The body that Èirynn had created for him took closely to the form he had before when under Aoife’s hand, but stylized such that it reminded Aideen of fierce-looking totems she had seen amongst the orcs before. Ceathair’s six-armed three-meter tall figure struck an imposing look, especially when his “angry” face was set forward.

Celia had nearly jumped in fright when she first saw the four of them, but she quickly came to learn that the four were harmless to those they considered friend when she saw how Ceathair flipped his faces around to put the smiling one forward once Eilonwy prodded his leg with one of her small hands and played with her.

They were juvenile animals when their souls were bound to their undead forms back then, and while they had learned and matured over the centuries, some part of that juvenile playfulness never disappeared from their souls. Mimia and Èirynn naturally noticed that tendency and realized that it made the four imposing undead constructs that would have given many of the strongest warriors around a tough fight excellent playmates for their children.

And that was indeed the role they played, happily, at that.

For others it might have been an unnerving if not worrisome thing to watch a trio of young children playing with a quartet of undead monstrosities, each of which looked like they could easily eviscerate an adult with a single blow – which was indeed something that was well within their capabilities – but neither Mimia or Èirynn, or Aideen for that matter saw anything odd about it.

After all, she had seen Èirynn herself play the same way with those four when she was that age, too.

It took a bit longer for Celia to bring herself to see the sight she saw in front of her as a normal thing, though, but then again, she likely needed time to get used to a lot of things that were normal in the Lichdom anyway. Another thing on top of that wouldn’t hurt her either way.

Aideen introduced Celia to Mimia and Èirynn partly because Mimia was the one soulweaver she knew best out of those in the Lichdom – she had a few others she was quite friendly with, but those had passed on in the century she had been away – and Aideen thought that soulweavers like Mimia might be better versed when it came to dealing with things like remnants of mental trauma like what still plagued Celia.

On Mimia’s side, she admitted that such cases were not her specialty, as she focused primarily on the research on how to link a soul to an undead form, but she also mentioned that she had some friends in the soulweaver circle who would be better versed with such issues, and that it would be no problem to introduce Celia to them when they have some free time.

Rather than decide on her own, Aideen asked Celia whether she would be willing to go along on the matter. She knew that it was a difficult subject for the younger woman, probably that one last stumbling block that kept bothering her even after so many years, and she was uncertain how Celia would have reacted to the suggestion.

Fortunately, Celia had apparently had enough of being haunted by her past and readily agreed to the offer.