The waiting was gruesome—not the visuals, but the agony of waiting for reanimation to fulfill. All people, bodies, and species were different, and in time-sensitive moments such as this, all I could do was pace about and kick random corpses. It was when I looked up at my new imp once more that from Belot there burst the grimmest consecution of cries. No less the sounds of the shores of Hell, in this discord was concentrated a hatred in life ripened one thousand fold through death, and by treacherous events of the trip to and back from those shores.

“What causes thee wakening of the Great Denoreyph Belot?” the grizzly skeleton wailed, rising to meatless feet.

“You were always so lousy with components,” I said. Belot’s skull cocked back in a sign of recognition. “Laying them about the room, labeling them in that thick gaudy ink, like a man going blind.”

“For thissss, you summon me? To reminisce about dead lyceum days, and the women who juiced my bed next to your celibate cot?”

The skeleton, draped only in charred flesh, stepped closer, ribs stuck out and balled, bony fists cast back. In Belot’s eyeless sockets, I saw the immaterial glimmer.

“Where is the blue hand?”

“That’s no concern to me now,” Belot hissed. “Let us ask our dear friend—Oh, Gormorster. Oh, look—he’s dead, deader than I.”

“If he still has it, I’ll get it from him. We both know it,” I said. “Professor Fryte did it with that stitched-up fuck she had locked up in her closet. We both were there. You remember. You may be,” my smirk broadened, “excuse me, used to be an overrate, labeling your childish jars and cheating on tests, but you know how usurpation works.”

Belot blew out a laugh that paralleled his recent cry back to life in both its volume and hysteria. “That may be. But I always remembered to close my windows.” Everything in the parlor that could move stared at a lone open window. “My old freights looking a wee light there, Irion.”

“What are you saying?”

Belot erupted in cackles. “Toadly is goooone, Irion.” No, Toadly was laying on the table. Yet as I listened to Belot hiss, practices that I’d heard of but had never seen myself began to encroach my mind. Casting one’s essence into another form was a feat Toadly had been persecuted over and heralded for. It would have taken time to weave, but in my savoring of the fire, I had given him such a vital commodity. I looked once more at the stack of corpses below the open window. “Ah, yes, yesss. Good, Irion. Toadly is now,” I heard Belot saying. There had been a body there, one that was there no longer. It had been—Belot’s words then seeped into my ear, finishing my dreadful thought: “a babe.”