They continued on through the cave, this time a bit more cautiously than before. They weren't so cautious to refrain from a whispered conversation. "If I turn into a zombie," Dominic said, "you should burn me to make sure every inch of my body is actually permanently dead and the zombie spell is completely broken. And then scatter my ashes at sea."

"Why at sea?" asked Didi, maybe a bit more sharply she'd intended. Dominic recoiled a bit at her tone. She hadn't meant to sound accusing, but the sea was their mother's idol. It was the only thing their mother couldn't control, Didi supposed. And because it was greater than her, she sought to draw power from it, as though it was her own personal well. That's why she frequently sacrificed people to it.

Didi would not want to be buried at sea.

Dominic only said, "I like water."

The cave narrowed into a linear path, though it was now tilted sharply downward. They had to move very slowly to avoid slipping on the damp ground, and frequently the pebbles they kicked began tumbling downwards. The echoed moaning, which had quieted but not stopped after Dominic froze the zombies, had started to rise in volume again. There was also another light source ahead, Didi noticed; the one behind them had faded into nothing. This one was brighter but smaller, and looked almost more like a candle on the ground right in front of them than something large in the distance ahead.

Dominic had closed most of the gap between them, and kept bumping into her. "Back off a bit," Didi said, when he still hadn't had the sense to do so himself after the fifth collision.

"Sorry!" he said. "I just can't' see you very well."

"Well, I don't think we're that far from the light now." A pause. "What do you think is down there?"

"I dunno, maybe, more zombies and an evil necromancer?" He said it in the same tone of voice one might use to say "duh."

"Do you think the other adventurers might still be alive?" Didi asked. If they were, this might be the night Didi actually accomplished something heroic. She could call herself a hero after that. Officially.

Dominic didn't answer her question. Didi began to plan her strategy for her next zombie encounter, but that soon faded into a daydream about bursting in to the evil necromancer's experimentation room just in time to find the necromancer about to carve into the boy with the braids. Didi would rescue him just in time, and take the boy and his less-handsome friend home to Red Larch and comfort him about the death of his friends and then they would fall in love.

As the light grew bigger, though, Didi and Dominic had the sense to slow down and proceed with caution. The light was coming from an opening in the ground just ahead; the hole was small but the light was so bright it was as though the sun was shining through that opening. As they neared, the low humming sound picked up, but so did other sounds: something half melodic, half a screech, like a newbie's attempt at playing the violin beyond their ability.

Didi and Dominic exchanged wordless glances and advanced while pressed against the cave wall, Didi keeping her gaze straight and Dominic watching their rear for enemies. When they reached the source of the light, a hole which came up to about Didi's knee length, she shot Dominic a glance to confirm he was keeping track of their surroundings, then ducked down to peer inside.

But her long hair saw the light before she did – and something inside took the chance to grab her by it, yanking her down. At the same time, a shadowy figure fell from above; Didi barely glanced it falling on Dominic as a skeletal hand yanked her into the cave. She had no choice but to follow the pull on her neck, but she grappled for her spear in the meantime.

The light, as well as the forceful tug of her head, was dizzying. She glimpsed a high cave ceiling, blindingly bright floating orbs arranged in a line midair, and several more humanoid creatures at various stages of decay ambling towards her. She smacked the skeleton's hand with her spear and its hands fell crumbling to the ground, just in time for her to leap to her feet before two other zombies nearly grabbed her by the arms. The violin sound continued at a faster pace, and Didi got the impression it was no longer intended to sound pleasant.

"Gate crashers! Gate crashers!" The shrill male voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. Didi tried to scan the cavern for the source, but the zombies tugging at her arms were a bit distracting. "Scoundrels! Trying to sneak in without a ticket!"

A gust of icy wind burst through the cavern entrance, pelting her with hail. Most hit her armor, but one hailstone the size of her nose hit her square in the forehead. She yelped and tried to spin around to face her new attacker, but she heard Dominic call out, "Sorry!" and realized it had been him, aiming at the zombies. The distraction did not seem to affect them, though. As though the hailstorm was not there, they dragged her along the borders of the cavern. When the hail stopped hitting, Didi turned back to see Dominic attempting a different spell, but a few other zombies tried to grab him, too, and he was forced to abort his casting and focus on them.

The zombies holding her stopped abruptly, though they maintained their grip. Didi's first instinct was to try to jerk away, but as she drew back she noticed something. Above her, embedded into the cavern wall that stretched towards the surface, was an opening; from which protruded a slight ledge. On the ledge was a human man, clad in tattered robes. On his head was no wizard hat; no, only matted hair, but he held a wand, which he was currently waving in a manner reminiscent of a conductor.

"Who art thou?" cried the human man; the same voice as before, Didi realized, the acoustically-ideal cavern was giving it a resonant quality, making it sound almost divine. "Who are ye? More critics seeking to besmirch my name! Begone, slanderers! I've no need of your calumny!"

At a loss, but finally able to look about now that her zombie captors were no longer dragging her anywhere, Didi threw a glance back towards Dominic. But close combat was not his strong point; he, too, appeared subdued. Four zombies held him; one by each hand, one by a foot, and one by the ponytail. He struggled to remain balanced on one foot. Didi cast a glance around the rest of the cavern. More zombies. Most, she realized, were inert, pressed against the cave's walls and turned towards the center as if watching something. Then she noticed the center, how there was a slight dip in the very middle as if this were the world's slightest amphitheater, occupied by two zombies in crudely-sewn, soiled formal wear. The female, in a state of heavy decay, twirled on tiptoes, her feet swollen to an extent that surely would have caused a living person to feel excruciating pain if moving in the same way. The male was fresher and, though wearing different clothing, familiar. It was the adventurer with the braids.

She was too late, Didi thought, but her regret was quickly replaced by fear over the sheer number of zombies in the room.

"We're not critics!" Didi called, looking up at the angry necromancer. "We're fans!"

"Fans, are ye?" the man called back down. "But not fans enough to pay for a ticket!"

"We couldn't find the ticket booth!" Didi called out, thinking fast. "I have the money for a ticket in my pocket!"

The necromancer's brow furrowed. "Security, search her!" Another zombie came out from the crowd by the entrance to the chamber, ambling towards her with awkward thumps. Didi's eyes flickered at Dominic, who was now struggling so hard to remain upright that his leg was trembling, and then up at the necromancer. For each movement the zombie made, the necromancer waved his arms. Like a conductor, Didi thought again, or maybe more like a puppet master. She noted that he hadn't had to move his arms in such a way while the zombies initially attacked them – perhaps those zombies had a spell prepared in advance to attack trespassers.

Not that this knowledge would be much use. As far as Didi could tell, they were in big trouble as soon as this came to blows. There were just too many of the undead enemies.

Her best option now, she supposed was to stall. "You might get more ticket sales if you had better advertising!" Didi called. "It wasn't easy to find this place!"

"It's not meant to be easy!" cried the necromancer indignantly. "This is art! True art takes effort to appreciate!" He finished his last statement by emphatically drawing down his hand, causing his zombie to step onto the ground so hard its shoe exploded and began leaking body fluids. Dominic, seeing this, seemed to be struggling to hold in his own body fluids.

Didi ignored her own queasy stomach and focused on stalling. "I guess you'd know better than me! You're the true artist here! Very... uh, avant-garde! No one could ever accuse you of being a sell-out!"

The necromancer only grunted as the zombie dubbed as "security" approached her. The necromancer jabbed his hands out and downwards, and the zombie, in turn, jabbed her in the hip so hard one of its fingers snapped and began to dangle uselessly from a very thin layer of skin. Didi pressed her lips together tightly, trying as hard as possible to keep a straight face. Several more times, the zombie, controlled as if by a (not very competent) puppetmaster, jabbed at her while fumbling for her pockets. But the necromancer's magic certainly was not intended to give its zombies fine motor control. The necromancer showed very little concern that its zombie was punching her in the thigh instead of grabbing her coin purse off the belt to which it was tied, but when the zombie accidentally punched the inner elbow of one of the zombies that was holding her and caused it to break away, Didi took the opportunity to grab for her own supply belt. "Here, I'll get it!" Didi said, and before the necromancer could object, she added, "don't worry! I have enough - I counted every copper twice! Let me count a third time. One, two..."

She counted on, stalling for time, eventually switching to her native Elvish so as to reserve every last bit of her processing power to think of strategies. The necromancer at first seemed hesitant, then resigned to the fact that his security zombie wasn't cut out for counting change.

She needed to get away from the zombies. If she couldn't, she needed something that could hit a lot of them at once. There were too many. She was reminded of how many there were by a dissonant hum that kept getting louder; now that they were no longer being mobilized to attack, they seemed to be returning to their instinctual behavior, which apparently included moaning. The acoustics of the room amplified this sound, just like it had amplified the necromancer's voice, and with the horrible violin doubling as an alarm...

Terrible noises. She could do something with terrible noises, she realized. There was a spell, one she'd been studying at home. Only when she was alone in the training room, though, with her only victims being glass objects. She'd never practiced it on a person, let alone a zombie. And it had been so long since she'd had any space to practice that kind of spell without harming bystanders. She didn't know if she'd remember.

But it was, most likely, their only shot.

Her flute was tied to her belt. She did most of her spells with words, not music, but the flute helped focus the magic, and it was necessary for this spell. She feigned dropping a copper coin and stooped down, grabbing the flute off her belt with her shoulders hunched over to hide her actions, buy her a few more seconds. Her lips pressed to the flute, but she wasn't supposed to play it, she was supposed to channel her magic through it...

Nothing happened. She suddenly remembered those first few days after running away, a constant ache from too many botched teleports, in which she couldn't cast any spell at all. It had taken rote concentration to find the rhythm of the magic in her fractured memories; it had been almost like re-learning everything from scratch, studying her own memories like a wizard might study a spellbook. I don't have time for this, she thought desperately. How did I do it?

And then she remembered.

Sort of.

She remembered something she couldn't have possibly seen.

She thought she was alone in the library, but she was watching her.

She was watching herself.

Diana - her real name, the only one she went by back then - looked so much younger, in an orange, elven-style dress. She was practicing magic like she was supposed to be, a book in front of her on the table, her flute to her lips. Repeatedly, she stepped backwards with her left foot, and attempted to direct the spell's energy with her right, drawing her hand from her mouth to which her flute was held with her left hand, and out in front of her, palm inward and her middle finger pointed towards a glass cup on the table. Then, she whistled into the flute. It seemed the missing piece was the length and pitch of the whistle; she changed this slightly every time.

Finally, with one sharp, almost angry-sounding whistle, the magic caught on - she could sense it pulsing through the atmosphere. There was a pause, and then an angrier, sharper, louder song came in response. It bounced off the inside of the cup, the cup shattered into shards and dust. Pain in her ears, pain but she couldn't leave. And that's where the magic was, in the air with all the glass dust, she had to reach it, she had to channel it -

As if she had pulled the magic from her memory, she felt it pulsing in her fingers. She rose, stepped back, held her flute to her lips, and whistled the sharp note from the memory - same pitch, same duration. The magic surged out of her hand and she directed it towards the center of the cavern, where the "stage" was.

She'd been worried that the spell, like a few of the other tactics she'd tried, would not work on zombies. She did not have to worry long. The noise, like a church bell against her ear, echoed throughout the cavern and hit everything inside like a round of arrows. It hurt her head. It hurt Dominic. It hurt the rocks. It definitely hurt the zombies. Their moans of protest joined the ringing noise. Some of the zombies seemed to be able to shake off the initial assault, but others collapsed. Some of their heads seemed to cave in, for reasons Didi did not know but assumed had to do with pressure being released via shattered eardrums.

As the magic died out and the ringing faded, a rumbling noise entered her awareness. The thin layer of rock's that made up the necromancer's platform had crumbled; the necromancer and the rocks rolled together in a great heap were sliding down the cave wall. Didi tried to ignore the throbbing in her ears and get herself into a fighting stance. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced Dominic picking up his dropped staff with one hand, rubbing an ear with the other.

The rocks came to a stop, the necromancer rolled over them and into the middle of the zombie crowd, landing on his hands and knees. Didi rushed at him with her spear out.

The trembling man whirled around, so he was sitting on his butt with his hands behind him. Didi put her spear in his face before she could get up. For a split second, Didi registered fear in his eyes, but as he scanned the room and saw in more detail the result of Didi's attack, the fear turned to rage.

"You... you ruined my theater!" the man cried out, pitch and volume raising with each word. "What have you done? This was the only thing I could call my own! The only place I could do whatever I wanted! And you destroyed it!" With the last sentence, he tried to grab Didi's spear; she slipped it from his reach and then thrust it into his shoulder, knocking him back – it wouldn't seriously injure him, but it would make it extremely painful to move. He let out an anguished cry as he followed the spear backwards against the remains of his platform.

"Five men came to investigate this place about a week ago," Didi said, ignoring his hysterics. "You turned them all into zombies. Why?" She was pretty sure he was just evil, but she could at least give the man a chance to explain.

The anguish on the man's face twisted, again, into anger. "Is that what this is about? I should have known. You Believers refuse to leave me alone."

"You didn't answer my question."

"I don't cross into your territory; I stick to my own!" the man ranted. "I don't persecute your people; I don't source my actors from your town. And if I did, I would be great! If I wasn't so ethically stalwart, this would be the grandest theater known to mankind! But I've restrained myself. Peace with Red Larch has always been my priority! But now you Believers have gone too far! Overstepping your bounds, sending spies into my territory! I won't tolerate it anymore! I will – "

His voice cut off into a yelp as Didi twisted the spear like a screw. "You killed five people!" Didi declared, "And if you can't give me a good reason for that, that makes you a villain, and I'm going to kill you."

"Do you expect me to beg for my life?" cried the necromancer. "I won't. You've already destroyed my theatre; what else do I have to live for?"

Didi's lip curled. "Fine, then," she muttered. She tugged hard on her spear to free it from the man's flesh, producing another moan of agony. She felt nauseous. She didn't want to kill the necromancer, she realized. She'd come to save, not to kill. This necromancer was clearly evil, apparently a serial killer, and had attacked them first. But she still didn't feel right about it.

It would be her first time killing a person, she realized. She'd seen people die plenty of times before. Her mother killed casually, reciting incantations in monotone, all her attention directed at the sea – almost none on the lives of her victims. A pillar of stone had been built over the natural rock formation that hung over the sea near their home; just high enough to carry out the ritual, but low enough that waves would eventually lick the surface and carry the victim's blood out to sea; eventually too, the body. She was used to watching humanoid bodies decay. She was used to watching people struggle and try to twist away from the knife, until gradually their thrashes would weaken into twitches, then nothing. She'd never liked it. But she'd never had too strong of a reaction. Why did she feel sick now? Where was this empathy coming from; why was it directed at a villain? She wanted to be a hero; heroes killed villains.

The necromancer took advantage of her hesitation, and began moving his hands again to control the zombies. Didi thrust the spear into his heart. He twitched once, then went slack - as did all the zombies. The sound of dozens of zombies hitting the floor resonated through the cavern, then a hushed silence as the moaning ceased.

"Rest in peace," Didi said under her breath.

Dominic, who had been in place behind her, ready to attack at a distance, came running to her side. She shook her spear free, trying not to look at how the necromancer's body shook along with it. He helpfully stepped on the necromancer's chest.

"You okay?" asked Dominic.

Didi stumbled backwards a bit as she gave her spear a final yank. She tripped over a zombie limb and stumbled even more before finally catching herself. "Yeah!" she said when she caught her balance. "Are you?" He didn't look harmed, but she didn't know how badly her spell had gotten him. It was probably worse on someone who wasn't expecting it.

"I'm fine. Just covered in body fluids that had been fermenting for way too long." He grimaced. "Let's get out of here."

"You go ahead." She noticed he looked a little green. "I have to do something first."

Stepping over the bodies as lightly as possible, she made her way to the center cavern, where the braided boy's relatively fresh corpse was now laying on the ground. She wished she could have said he looked peaceful, but he just looked dead.

The necromancer hadn't let him keep his weapons, but he was still wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing the day Kaylessa hired him. In his coat pocket, she found what she was looking for - a sack of coins. The part Kaylessa had paid him in advance. She took it and ran out, not wanting to spend any more time there than she had to.

The walk back was long and mostly silent. The excitement of adventure was gone. She may have killed a villain, but she was not yet a hero, either. She hadn't been able to save anyone.

"Dominic," she finally said, breaking the silence, "I've never killed anyone before tonight."

A long pause. "Might as well get used to it. And that guy was probably spell-mad or something; he was obviously a danger to others. It was for the best."

"Yeah. I know." Dominic had killed someone just days ago. She hadn't thought much about it. "You'd never killed anyone before either, right? I mean, before those bandits?"

A very, very long pause. Finally he said, near inaudibly, "Mother made me do a lot of things."

And Didi's heart broke. Suddenly she was home again, in the hall, in that year after their mother found out about their escape attempt, the year that Dominic had his free will taken away. It had been some variation of domination spell, she knew, but she didn't know much more than that. Dominic hadn't liked talking about it. All she knew was that she had lost Dominic that year. Every time she walked past him, she had smile, in hopes that finally, finally, he would smile back; and to every smile he returned a stare of glass.

His eyes were similarly blank now. Lifeless. No wonder he'd reacted so strongly to those zombies. They were puppets with no will of their own – but unlike his, their torment would last their tormenter's lifetime.

Dominic had not been around much, that year he'd lost his free will. Their mother kept sending him off on errands. Didi had never asked him what those errands were. Dominic had never brought it up. He'd never so much as hinted at what their mother had been using him for. Until now.

Didi touched his arm. "Hey. You know nothing she made you do is your fault, right?"

He grimaced and sidestepped away from her. "I know." He fixed his gaze straight ahead. "Please don't touch me until you bathe."

That's the last update for a while; next month, NaNo time. 

Question-of-the-chapter: What are you dressing up as for Halloween?