Death is bullshit, and everybody knows it.

You can go to one of the heavens, be reincarnated, or take a nice balmy vacation to the hells if you want. You can know all of this for a fact; nothing is ever gone from the world for good. It comes back around one way or another in the great big churning, whether you’d like it or not.

Death is bullshit. And sometimes, beating it is just a matter of money.

I'd never known someone who came back from the grave before. I'd always known it was possible, sure. Wizards were bullshit, and they could break nearly every law of nature imaginable. It was one thing to believe that fact, though, and another thing entirely to experience up close and personal.

Being dead felt like falling. The memories came in fragmented pieces, like a dream. I saw a great black abyss, and a red light below my feet drawing closer. Images passed by of mountains flying beneath me from a bird's eye view. I saw flashes of fungus; a sea of rot that tried to drown me. That one was not so nice.

In all of it though, I felt the sense that my story hadn't ended yet. It was the same powerful feeling that kept me from succumbing to Nalashtu, a mixture of hate and a dead certainty that I still had unfinished business. My life couldn’t be so short. Maybe other peoples’, but not mine.

Finally, as my eyes split open again, the strange world of the dead got beaten back by the living. Saying that I had been very, very dead would be an understatement. Right now, it felt like every bone in my body had been broken and mended ten times over. My head pounded with an elephant stampede.

I hadn't just died, I thought. The pressure of the ocean had turned me to paste.

As Lang came to hover over me, he smiled and cheered, "Welcome, Bogart my boy! Jolly good to see you."

That sonovabitch did it after all. “Good to see ya,” I said back. And here I thought he'd have been too cheap to shell out for the spell.

Lang had me laid on a table in some unknown office. The wizard who cast the spell of resurrection, a gnome even older and crustier, waited in the wings. He stroked his beard and nodded, "Very good results. Hmm. Now on the matter of payment…"

As I sat up and tried to get the wheels in my head turning again, Lang told the ancient gnome, "You may speak to the treasurer, good sir, but only once we are finished. I still have one and a half more pieces of work for you to accomplish."

Oh, that's right, I remembered. We threw a coup.

Lang wore the official robes of the mayor, and I had never seen him look prouder. He had his fancy ivory cane with him, and a series of gold knick-knacks woven into his grey beard. With the keys to the treasury apparently at his beck and call, it was safe to say that our money troubles had passed. We’d not just thrown the coup but won it too.

"Godsdamn, Lang," I said, looking him over in astonishment, "Those idiots really elected you after all?"

The gnome gestured to his office, and the placard on his desk which read 'mayor', although it had the wrong name. There were scorch marks by the doors where the fires of the fight had nearly come inside. But otherwise, the place looked good; prestigious.

"Indeed," Lang spoke wistfully. "After all the shenanigans last week, saving the city twice and defeating the prisoners—I must say we have some catching up to do—the people found me a most trustworthy representative. No one else scarcely bothered to run in the gubernatorial!"

"Yeah, well, maybe they were just scared shitless 'cause you’ve got the spider’s brood, the church, and the whole damn Guild on your side, right?” I said, casting a glance at the old wizard in the back.

He grimaced where he lingered and let out a “Hmph.”

"The gnomes, I think you mean, have begrudgingly accepted that we did the right thing. Most of them, anyway." Lang seemed to trail off momentarily, lost in thought. "Regardless!" he snapped back, "you should not be worrying now. Your life has returned to you. How does it feel, my boy?"

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I got up and approached the window of Lang's office, looking out on the city of Galhim from the heights of the state building. The streets ran over with water from the ocean. The storm which had been raging when I died had not stopped, apparently. It flooded the city about two feet high, damaging the architecture everywhere.

Whatever had escaped the storm’s touch, the battle made sure to wreck. I saw scorch marks from cast fireballs, acid burns on concrete, and swords embedded into solid brick. Some remaining few bodies still congregated in the alleyways like refuse caught by the side of a river.

"I'm hungry," I finally told Lang. It was all I could muster right now. The real mix of shit swirling in my head felt too dense to unpack. The longer I stayed awake now, the more of my memories returned, and the more I felt pissed off.

“Very well!” Lang shouted, so damn energetic. “We shall fetch you some grub, as they say. Immediately!” He went to his office door, popped it open, and added again for emphasis to the young female gnome outside, “Immediately. Now.”

His secretary scurried off.

“Power got its perks, huh?” I asked. Even though food was coming, I didn’t feel like waiting. I started on my way out of the office, passing a small army of clerical workers in the halls.

Lang rushed behind me, and the ancient wizard trailed us both at his own pace. “Best to take it easy, you know! That resurrection spell did not come cheap. I expect you to take good care of your health from now on. No ifs, ands, or buts!”

“Don’t go acting like I owe you any favors,” I said, dodging around another young gnome carrying a mountain of papers. “You mighta freed Bradley and the others but I wasn’t no slave. And bringing me back from the dead was the least you could do, on account of, I’ve made the sacrifice play twice now. Fuck me, am I right? Speaking of-” I got cut off again by another near crash.

Lang hissed at the worker and shooed them to make way. “My apologies,” he said, “and I meant nothing by it. As you can see, we’re very dreadfully busy right now. Why don’t you come with me to the dining hall? It’s a little rough around the edges still, but…”

I looked at the calendar they had hanging up over the rows and rows of desks tucked into the hallway. As the gnome had said, it’d been a week. “That’s why you let me collect flies for a while, huh? You been busy,” I said. No wonder I was starving.

The new mayor did not seem pleased with my attitude. “Where you are from, perhaps, a leader may simply step into power when his rivals are dead, but we gnomes do things the proper way. There are thousands of years of legal precedents we must rectify with the recent events in order to make my office legitimate. We work very diligently, do we not!?”

Suddenly the army of paper pushers—the most young gnomes I’d ever seen in one place—all replied at once. “Yes, mayor!”

I kept going down the hall, finding the stairway which led to the foyer and the big doors out.

Lang got in front of me before I could leave, asking, “Are you not pleased to be here, Bogart? Far be it from me to hassle a man back from the dead, but you’ve not shown a hint of gratefulness, I dare say! We’ve won, my lad! Is that not enough for you?”

“Look,” I snapped, “I’m just tired… Sorry. Wait, no wait, shit. I ain’t apologizing to you.” I remembered the last time I’d said sorry, just before I left Freya with the crown of iron still in her skull. Left her to die. “Where is Freya, anyway? I gotta talk to her. Lang?”

His face fell. I knew instantly what he was about to say. “She is lost to us, my lad. You acted bravely, but there was nothing you could do. Casualties are a natural part of war.”

“Oh, fuck that,” I said. Part of me knew from the moment I woke up, but I’d been holding out hope. It ate at me now that I knew for certain. “Of course, she’s dead, but nothing natural about it. You got that?”

I had promised Freya we could win. No compromises. No casualties. A goblin could have it all, right? That was what I was supposed to believe. Now all I felt was guilt.

Whatever this conscience thing was that I had started developing, I didn’t like it. Worse still, Lang’s eyes widened. He could see right through me and my anger. “No, truly, I am sorry,” he said, and put a hand on my shoulder. The pity made me wince. “I should have seen. For me there has already been time to accept what’s happened and to look forward to the future; but for you, it’s just been yesterday.”

“I just don’t get it.”

“Well, it’s not all drear and gloom, my boy. You will be most happy to know that I am on my way right now to revive Bradley. Perhaps you’d like to come along, hmm?”

That made me perk up. Last I’d seen of the situation, we got our asses handed to us by the cultists, almost half the party turned up dead or gone, and a dark god had his slimy tendrils in my brain. It still had me on edge, but I could feel the tension slowly passing. There was just one thing still bothering me.

“If you went all the way down to the Deephold to get my corpse,” I said, “How come you couldn’t get Freya’s, too?”

Lang shook his head. “That is the troubling thing. We did not go down to the seafloor. Magic informs us the Deephold is a ruin now beyond trespass, guarded by the strongest monsters of the deep. It’s as if a curse lies upon it by nature herself. No, my lad, we found your corpse on the altar of Kaelum. Simply lying there in repose.”

“Kaelum got me out?”

The big man chose me, I thought, and not his own cleric. That didn’t make any damn sense.

“I agree, it’s perplexing,” Lang said. “We do not know the truth.”

The ancient gnomish wizard caught up with Lang and me at the courthouse door and kept on hobbling along. He complained loudly for both of us to hear, “The god of purity favoring a goblin, you say? A bankrupt necromancer for mayor? A Pelioran to sit on the throne? You know what I say, the whole world’s gone fucking mad!”

Hell, he had a point. And it was only just starting.