This is another one of those thousand-word numbers from the older Patreon days that should be a real short story. At least, I think so. Whether people agree with me or not is a future question.
What’s it like to be dead? I’m not sure. I kind of didn’t go all the way out.
I did go out a little, because it’s hard to tether a soul to a corpse, obviously. I kind of remember a little how distinct things felt. It was like a Hersheyan coloring book, with bold outlines around everything. Only inside everything were swirling colors. I don’t really have the words for it anymore. Or the glands. It’s sometimes harder to talk about emotions when you can only remember what it was like to feel them.But it didn’t last. I could sense the valkyrie working on my dead body, preparing the anchor points for my soul. She did the job quickly, as far as I could tell – but then, how would I know? I’ve only done this once.
Once was enough, too. I thought that I was ready for the pain of reinsertion, but there wasn’t any pain. There’s no reason for a lich to feel agony, and a lot of reasons not to. But what the spells couldn’t block was the sheer feeling of wrongness as I took command of my body again. Creating a lich is profoundly unnatural.
I guess that’s why the first undead were so difficult to deal with. They couldn’t handle the shock. But I could handle it, because it was my old body, and I did agree. It helps so much when you know what’s happening is your fault.