Thoughts on Undead

Jul 19, 2025

Long ago, in an age forgotten, Death itself was killed.

We forget that once there was a shepherd for those who were killed in battle, or lost at sea, or starved in their own homes. A guide for those who perished in dungeons at the hands of cruel men, or victims of monsters in the night.

No matter the cause, the first to greet the newly dead was Death itself.

Death was not a kind harbinger, but an indifferent one. They had no motive besides that of a transitory warden, a protector of the path between the mortal world and the world that lies beyond.

But now, that shepherd is gone.

The reason matters little, for what do mortals know of the grand schemes of gods?

The path to the world beyond remains, but it is overgrown, forgotten, choked with weeds and wandering spirits. And in the absence of a guide, many do not reach the end of the road. They may turn back out of fear, only to become lost.

Or worse—they linger, never setting foot on the path to begin with.

These are the Undead.

They are not creatures in the way that most would understand—not truly. After all, they are not born, nor do they live. They are remnants—wounds in the fabric of the world, places where the illusion was torn and never mended.

Some undead are aware of this. They know they should not be. They were once people who had hopes, fears, lovers, children. They remember their names, at least in the beginning.

Others have long since forgotten. They claw at the walls of their coffins and rise with empty eyes, driven by hungers they cannot understand.

Some betray life and seek undeath to further their machinations. These are the worst of the undead. The ones who forsake their birthright for ambition—trading their first and most precious gift for power.

Magicians and scholars (fools, all) maintain that necromancy, when “properly” used, is simply another school of magic, no different than conjuring faeries or transmuting tin to gold.

That raising a skeleton is a tool.

That speaking with the dead is a form of reverence.

But it is not reverence to trap a wayward soul and bind it to your will. It is not utility to stuff a corpse with salt and sigils and call it “servant.”

It is desecration. Puppetry. Slavery.

Every undead is a failure. A failure of courage, of closure, and of trust in the old ways of the world. And they are contagious. Not like a disease, but like the propensity of violence in a mob.

The presence of the undead is a reminder of death’s absence. And with death’s absence, every battlefield is haunted. The passing of life once called for water, earth, and silence to remember them.

Now it demands fire, silver, and words to banish them.

The undead know this.

Unless they are mindless or ravenous, they evade this end by finding places anathemic to life. Places where the world grows thin. Old empty keeps, buried cities, the bellies of broken gods.

Dungeons.

Once, they were mortal places. But too much suffering has soaked into their flagstones. They have become thresholds—liminal wounds along the path between the world and what lies beneath it. And just as a wound festers, so too do the dead gather.

They are drawn downward, always downward, to the pulse of the underworld—itself undead like those who answer its clarion call.

There they persist—lantern-eyed skeletons, the weeping shades, the hollow priests. Tomb-queens and ghoul kings who remember only the betrayal of time and the living. They make their kingdoms of unlife in dark halls and forgotten tombs.

Some wonder why the treasures of the living—coins, gems, paintings, tapestries—end up in these places. After all, what use does a ghast or zombie have for copper coins and woodblock engravings?

The answer is obvious to those who frequent these places; the vagabonds and cutpurses and criminals who have no other options in their meager attempts to eke out an existence in a world with fates worse than death:

The treasures are bait.🟦