He stood there, staring at the wall opposite his shop, his head resting on his palm, utterly bored out of his mind. Two more days had passed, completely uneventful.

  "B-boo?" came a sound from behind him.

  Pell lifted his head and shifted on his creaky stool. The girl was there, waiting patiently. She held a closed book pressed to her chest. With a small smile, she extended her arm and presented the book to him with a "here you go" gesture.

  "B-bo-bok," she stammered.

  Pell let out an exaggerated groan. "Alright, alright, I'll grab you another book," he muttered, dragging himself off the stool as though it were the greatest burden in the world. He walked over, took the book from her small hands, and tucked it beneath his arm.

  With a huff, Pell returned to the closet and fetched three more novels. He placed them on the table in what he considered to be an ascending order of difficulty. Not that it mattered much—none of the books in his collection were written for children. Bandit Town wasn’t a children’s book either—it just happened to have a few illustrations.

  The girl reached for the first book on the stack, gripping it with both hands. Pell rolled his eyes as he saw it was upside down. But before he could correct her, she flipped the book the right way up on her own. Well, seems like she’s getting some of her memory back, he thought.

  With a sigh, he turned and walked back to his counter and his stupid stool. He resumed his usual routine of standing and staring at the wall, his skull once again resting on his palm. Guess I’ll keep waiting, he thought, though he had no idea how long that wait might actually be.

  Everything was strange. Nothing about the situation made sense. There wasn’t even a trace of the girl’s party. No echoes of voices, no sounds of fighting, no signs of movement—nothing. Maybe they had left the dungeon to regroup or gather supplies, or maybe they had encountered some obstacle. Worst-case scenario, maybe they’d be back within the week, if they weren’t already dead.

  Pell wasn’t new to waiting. He’d been in this dungeon for four years, with nothing to do and no one to talk to. There was that other odd skeleton, but he didn’t make for much company. Besides his collection of books, there was little else to occupy him but to sit in his shop and wait. Just sitting there, hoping that something—anything—would happen to make today different from the last.

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  Behind him, the little girl began to bang the spine of the book against the table, like she was trying to smash a bug. Pell glanced over. There was no bug.

  Time crawled by, laughing at him for thinking things would get better. Like always, the second day melted into the third, and the third into the fourth.

  The little girl stayed with him, reading more and more books and picking up a few words here and there. Pell seized the opportunity to help her learn, if only to pass the time. But more often than not, it only frustrated him further, especially in the early days when she first started speaking.

  “No! Not that word, you brat!” Pell would snap at her, but all he’d get in return was her obnoxious giggling as she butchered the word "skeleton," pronouncing it “sell a ton.”

  Honestly, that one was amusing, given his profession, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.

  Each lesson became a battle of wills, with the rare satisfaction of hearing her learn a new word—or spending hours trying to get her to read her own damn name. Apparently, teaching someone to read was much harder than teaching them to speak.

  “Boo?” she asked.

  “No, not Boo. Book. Buh—ook!” Pell sounded out, stretching the syllables.

  “Ba-uk!”

  Pell groaned and slapped himself in the face.

  Despite his grumbling and groaning, there was some solace in these moments. He wasn’t alone anymore. He had Mr. Bones, the mysterious and odd, almost sentient skeleton who had led the girl here in the first place. But Pell couldn’t communicate with him, as Mr. Bones lacked the soul-flames that would have made him more than a mindless monster.

  It wasn’t easy to be trapped, to be alone, not knowing where his fate would end. The little girl became someone Pell desperately needed, though he would never admit it. He would never admit it. That was just the kind of guy he was.

  He thought about his own family. Only his father remained, his mother having passed away in childbirth. Memories of happier times flooded in. How fun it used to be. How peaceful everything was. The time before he was born, when everything was just the void. How he wished he hadn’t been born to a despicable scumbag of a father who’d kicked him out—how he wished his father had been the one to die in a dungeon and become a skeleton instead.

  Happier times.

  Behind him, the sound of something hitting the wall broke through his thoughts. Pell turned, snapping out of his reminiscence to inspect the noise. To his right, a book lay on the ground, its cover sprawled open, pages pressed flat against the floor. And in front of him—at the table—sat the pouting girl, arms crossed, clearly dissatisfied with what she had just read.

  Maybe he and the little girl had more in common than he’d thought.

  I hate that book too, kid, he thought. But goddammit, that book cost me 10 copper, you gremlin.