The rooster's crow pierced the ashen dawn. Church bells tolled as a flock of white doves soared into the azure sky. The town's main street gradually swelled with activity, while knights and guards who had rampaged all night now dozed against walls.

  Eileen's soldiers stood assembled before the inn at daybreak. Attendants flanking her, she mounted her white steed and flicked a silver coin to the innkeeper before leading her retinue southward through the bustling thoroughfare.

  In peacetime, evil's shadow dissipated swiftly—particularly when no lives were harmed. The incident had become tavern mockery by morning, with conspiracy theorists even speculating that demons and liches were ecclesiastical fabrications.

  The lich Adam had vanished after midnight. Now, only glory-hungry knights remembered the neighboring hill's transient undead resident.

  Vendors arranged their stalls. Market matrons shrieked over trifling shortages. Farmers toiled in fields. Children chased the few knights still drowsily combing for Adam's traces, their laughter rippling through alleys.

  Oddities lingered like stubborn stains: the blacksmith puzzled over missing armor, uncertain whether delivered, lost, or forgotten during drunken haze; a persimmon vendor wailed over his sunshade crushed by Adam's hayloft tumble; the bookseller remained oblivious to both the pilfered Knight's Ascendant Manual and his kicked-in door's mysterious lack of theft.

  By sunrise, serenity had reclaimed the town as if the lich's commotion were but a fleeting gust.

  ……

  A kilometer beyond town, Adam and his skeletal steed emerged from underbrush, dragging a mangled black cat.

  "Let's determine our next course," Adam declared, flipping through the manual with bony fingers.

  "What we urgently require... is a veterinarian," the cat wheezed, multiple bones fractured.

  "We've departed civilization. No veterinarians here."

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  "Then locate one!"

  "Troublesome. Superior solution: terminate you, reanimate as osteofeline. Veterinarian obsolete."

  The cat's pupils dilated.

  "No sustenance or excretion required. Efficient, is it not?"

  "NO! I'm PERFECTLY FINE!"

  "You appear moribund."

  "FALSEHOOD! RETRACT THOSE PHALANGES!"

  Adam's ocular flames dimmed. "Regrettable." Resuming his study: "Subsequent step: pledge fealty to a liege lord."

  The cat and skeletal steed stared mutely.

  "The manual decrees: knights must have lieges."

  "What lord would accept a lich's oath?"

  "We shall inquire! Additionally require weekly chapel attendance."

  "A churchgoing lich. Delightfully innovative," the cat deadpanned.

  Adam's jaw clattered excitedly. "Precisely! Such ingenuity ensures anonymity!"

  Crash! The skeletal steed collapsed into scattered bones.

  ……

  "How distant is Salted Haven?" Eileen inquired.

  "Nightfall shall bring sea air, milady," answered Adjutant Abros. Beside him, Sergeant Hols slapped his helmet, muttering: "Where hides that accursed bonesack..."

  ……

  "Which bearing?"

  "South," the cat groaned from within Adam's helmet. "Cities contain nobles... and chapels."

  Thus the lich, cat, and reconstituted steed lurched southward. Within three paces, Adam tumbled off, clambered back up, and endured the steed's withering glare.

  ……

  The sun ascended incrementally. They traversed mountains, forded streams, crossed fields. Birds twittered overhead, hares bolted from their path. Felt-hatted farmers leaned on hoes, observing them warily as meadow grasses swayed.

  Adam's riding posture mutated through grotesque phases—first upright, then reversed, finally prone across the saddle like a grain sack.

  The cat drowsed fitfully while Adam vibrantly leafed through the manual, even chuckling aloud.

  "Superior to spellbooks!"

  "Then peruse it silently!"

  "Have you glimpsed the Eight Knightly Virtues?"

  "I shan't..."

  "But discussion requires your—"

  "Silence! Must you deny me both physician and repose? By the heavens, are you demonkind?"

  "I am lich."

  "Certitude! Skeletal steed! Articulate reason!"

  "GLORIOUS TOMáHTO SHALL BATHE IN DAWN'S—"

  "CEASE YOUR RAVINGS!" The cat's voice fractured. "Desist movement! I entreat you—grant me slumber, if only to awaken from this nightmare!"

  "Very well. Immobility commences," Adam conceded with palpable resignation.

  ……

  At dusk, Eileen's dust-covered party glimpsed Salted Haven—a crescent-shaped port city glowing amber under sunset. Fishing boats unloaded their catch as gulls circled warehouses. Children darted between homeward-bound laborers.

  At the gates stood Adam motionless astride his steed, the cat snoring in his helmet.

  Eileen raised her gauntlet. Shields clanged into an iron bulwark.

  "Sir Knight," she called, frost edging her tone. "Are we acquainted?"

  "Unlikely."

  "Why obstruct our passage?"

  "I await."

  "Await what?"

  "My cat's nap-cycle completion."