Velinaer Dax'Taxu watched the sun rise, sitting on a rock. It took him a moment to realize that he was able to stare directly at it without pain or injury, but the knowledge brought him no real solace. His zombies, swaying slightly, gave the impression of being awed by the spectacle but were in fact not remotely sentient.

To say that his current mental stability was precarious would be a vast understatement. In addition to the perfectly normal stresses of lying down for an illicit on-duty nap in the executive tomb and waking up an unknown period of time later as a living corpse in what appeared to be the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, he was currently also subject to the tribulations of having his cognition adjust to significantly stranger operating conditions than its initial design had presumed. The manufacturers of the sarcophagus had thoughtfully included a pamphlet preparing the user for such effects and suggesting an adjustment period of two to four weeks before returning to work, but unfortunately it had mouldered away to dust centuries ago. His thoughts kept getting interrupted by random disturbances from astral schemata, and he was constantly having trouble adjusting to the sensory inputs of at least three new senses and the disorienting absence of most of the others. He'd fallen over a lot before finally coming to terms with the fact that liches didn't have inner ears.

While Velinaer, or Veli to his few friends, had been a mage in his previous career, he'd have been the first to admit that he hadn't been a very good one. He'd graduated with average grades, gotten a boring job at a teledemonics firm, and had accumulated a sizable collection of disappointing performance reviews. His work ethic had been poor, his spellwork competent at best, and his customer service skills abysmal. The only area of his vocation in which he had excelled had been his design expertise -- when it came to building and maintaining networks, he'd been second-to-none. This fact had allowed his employers to overlook both his abrasive personality and his various obsessions with entertainment media, which had constituted most of his personal life. But this was not a particularly useful skillset for his current set of circumstances, and he was not dealing with it well.

Though he appeared stoic to outward observation, this was mostly an artifact of his current physiological circumstances. Lacking such things as tear ducts or an autonomic nervous system, he was not at all capable of crying, collapsing in despair, or throwing a feet-kicking tantrum. In fact, moving at all required an effort of will, and he suspected he would be spending the vast majority of his future being perfectly still. It explained a lot of stuff from shows he had watched in his childhood, at least.

After a while, he began to notice that his zombies were scooping dirt into something resembling a parody of a throne. That was a bit odd, since he hadn't commanded them to do any such thing. He seemed to recall something about some type of class-four undead being linked to their progenitor's unconscious desires, but he wasn't sure if that was supposed to be zombies or wraiths. Still, no sense guessing now.

He stood up with some difficulty, stumbled over to the dirt chair, and sat in it. Well, that seemed to help a bit. Apparently he'd had some kind of desire for a throne, for some stupid reason, which had now been satisfied. Maybe he should build some type of lair, like a dungeon or something? Liches were always building dungeons in the shows. Seemed like a big pain in the ass, though. He felt vaguely nauseous, which he attributed to his mental state since he no longer had any stomach to be upset. Moping around in a field with some zombies personifying his id was probably not a great long-term plan, and doing so in a dungeon of his own design would likely be even worse.

With reluctance, he concluded that he probably needed to go find someone and get help. He'd definitely be in deep shit for taking a nap on the job and apparently making illicit use of a liching sarcophagus, but he probably wouldn't get fired and maybe they could reverse the process, or something. The only problem was that he had no idea what direction to start off in.

After a couple of embarrassing attempts to recreate half-forgotten wilderness survival rituals for determining magnetic pole orientation, he hit upon the revolutionary idea of checking the sun's arc for the East-West axis and determining North from there, which seemed like as good a direction as any. After all, what's the worst that could happen?

***

Tebes' grunt of annoyance, eloquent in contrast to his usual sullen silence, cut through Linduin's moping with remarkable alacrity. Looking up, he noticed that the terrain had changed considerably; the lush forest they had been hacking and shoving their way through for the last hour had given way to a less inviting area. Healthy trees had been replaced by rotting black trunks, and the ground had turned into a sort of soupy, watery gravel. As if this were not foreboding enough, a thoroughly unpleasant miasma tinged the air as well, which Linduin mentally classified as somewhere between "rotting cheese smeared on the behind of a dead goat" and "sulfurous toilet bog full of stink-fruits". "What's this? Some kind of bog?" he coughed out, mentally bracing himself for the reeve's response.

To his surprise, Tebes didn't answer immediately. After a long pause, the reeve spat and switched his walking-stick to his other hand. "Wasn't here before," Tebes grumbled. "Supposed to be coming up on another crap-heap farming village, not a damned fen." The two of them continued onwards, occasionally stepping in noxious puddles, for another half-hour before finally emerging from the trees into a field.

Or at least, something that had once been a field. Bloody-looking water, thick with spilth, filled the rows where seedlings had once been planted, and a thick, smoky pall hung in the air despite the absence of any evidence of fire. Linduin gulped, trying not to wet himself, while Tebes paused for only the briefest of moments before striding forward towards the distant clump of buildings. Even the sun seemed dimmer and redder, despite the lack of clouds; it was almost as though something vital had been burned out of the very space the village occupied.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

At first, the village merely seemed deserted, but the intensifying stench as they approached the village center soon disgorged the truth. Linduin likewise soon disgorged his breakfast, while Tebes surveyed the massive knot of twisted corpses with an expression of critical appraisement, as though determining what grade he should assign. "Well," he remarked, "at least this one has a good excuse for the tax shortfall." Linduin's only response was another choking cough and spurt of vomit. Tebes, in an uncharacteristic display of compassion, waited a full twenty seconds before roughly kicking Linduin in the ass. "Well, go on. They won't be needing their coin now."

The rest of the day was spent picking through the remains of the villagers and their homes, taking anything of value they could find. At first, Linduin had to force himself to steel his nerves before touching each corpse, but after a few hours he had become numb to the horrors of mortuary salvage. Unfortunately, most of the corpses bore little, with many completely unclothed and fleshless, and as the sun began to set they had only accumulated a pittance. Tebes, clearly in a foul mood, began stalking back and forth throughout the town square as Linduin combed over the remains with increasing desperation.

Just as he was beginning to fear that the reeve, lacking other targets, would take his frustration out upon his carcass, Linduin's eye was jabbed by a crimson flash of light -- the setting sun, hanging low in the sky, had glanced off of some shiny object in a nearby field. Signaling Tebes, he stumbled over to it, as the reeve followed ill-temperedly.

"Some kind of... metal box?" Linduin pondered. The box was half-buried in the mud, but oddly clean; it smelled faintly of heat, like a recently-used cooking stove.

"Maybe one of these dung-brained farmers hid their stash in it," Tebes sniffed. "Go on, get it open."

Initial, rather desultory attempts to find a hinge or other opening mechanism met with predictable results, and only a concentrated session of bashing with Tebes' walking stick proved sufficient to induce the box to yield its contents. Tebes, who had been expecting a handful of copper coins and perhaps some moonshine, gawked at the spidery gold thread packed within. "Well now."

Linduin, on the other hand, felt nebulously apprehensive. "I don't know, Tebes. It seems... a little strange? All these people dead, and this box..."

Tebes nodded. "Strange enough. But gold doesn't lie, whelp. Into the bag."

Linduin hesitated, earning himself another backhanded slap and a kick for his trouble. When Tebes raised his walking stick pointedly, Linduin whimpered and acquiesced, tentatively spooling the thread into his pack. The thread pricked and stabbed his fingers, but there never seemed to be any blood.

At last, when all the contents of the box had been stowed, Tebes grunted approvingly and unrolled the vellum sheet which had been serving them, rather poorly, as a map. "One more village, and then we'll head back to drop off our take." Linduin, sore and sullen, could only mumble noncommittally. As they strode away, the slithering wisp of blackness which escaped the broken husk of the box went unnoticed.

***

Velinaer paused, feeling very awkward, and pulled the arrow out of his left eye-socket. Whatever he had expected, this hadn't been it.

He wasn't sure if the sarcophagus had malfunctioned, but however it had happened, he was clearly not in his typical geography any longer. He'd been at least as astonished as the man he'd found hitting plants with a stick upon their first encounter, albeit for rather different reasons, and his initial attempts to wave and ask for directions had been met with exceedingly rude shrieking and jabbering in some chirpy, guttural dialect he wasn't familiar with. He'd held out hope for a little bit longer when the fellow seemed to be leading him somewhere, admittedly at an uncomfortably rapid pace, but he'd done his best not to presume. Arriving at some sort of collection of mud-huts had been quite a shock, however, and in comparison the motley pack of people clad in boiled cow skins who had launched a volley of pointy sticks at him was almost anticlimactic at that point. He wondered if he'd committed some sort of faux pas.

"Listen, I'm very sorry," he said, doing his best to sound contrite and not let his increasing frustration seep into his voice, "but I really do need to use your communication facilities. It's very important, and I apologize for whatever I've done to offend you, but --"

The lead militiaman, already terrified out of his wits by the unanticipated advent of a tar-covered skeleton with three zombies in tow, shrieked at the evil-sounding invocation coming out of the monster, and leapt forward axe-first towards his foe. Velinaer, quite startled, jerked back and fell over for the hundredth time.

As he hit the ground, a burst of annoyance escaped him, and his zombies surged forward, slavering and howling. Mortified, he managed to get control of them fairly quickly, but not before one of the militiamen was lying on the ground with most of his brains inside two of the zombies' mouths and another was screeching and flailing about on the ground, blood spurting from a jagged stump where his left arm had previously been in residence. The remaining militiamen broke and fled, screaming.

In a kindler, gentler universe, Velinaer might have been able to cut his losses and merely flee the village in embarrassment, but unfortunately he was only halfway to the tree line when the corpse of the dead militiaman arose and began attempting to feast on its former comrades. Guiltily, he began to run back, which the villagers naturally misinterpreted as another attack. Things went increasingly poorly from there.

Several hours later, sitting in the smoldering rubble of the village, Velinaer hung his head -- well, skull, anyway -- and sighed. It wasn't easy without lungs, but he managed it. He'd done his best to sort the problem out by himself, and look where that had gotten him; at this rate, he really was going to get fired. Resigned, he drew a few sigils in the air and booted up a standalone interface. They'd deduct it from his paycheck for sure; he could plead ignorance for the sarcophagus, but not for activating field nodes. Still, it might be worth it if he could contact his supervisor. Stringing together a symbol set for a broadcast ping, he traced the execution sigil. A very long time from now, he would come to recognize this as the moment where things had really gone downhill.