Dedicate Your Death To Me

“Dedicate your death to me,” the necromancer whispers. “Be mine to move and use, now and forever.”

She pauses to listen for an answer. Corpses don’t speak, of course, but she hears their answer in the slow flux of fungal rot and the chewing maggots, and so her army grows.

Thick, slimy marrow drips down from spongy calcium. The corpse is long past needing it, and the dirt is always hungry, and so it must be purged of life’s unnecessary remains.

It’s the necromancer’s least favorite part. There’s something sickening about the way the bone splits around her chisel.

Death is wet and squishy, full of squirming parasites and bubbling gas, vibrant oozing pustules blossoming from unnoticed wounds. It is life’s uneasy twin, more alike than not.

Undeath, the necromancer’s beloved curse, glistens as sweetly as any peach—but the pit at its heart is cold and dry.

Corpses do not eat, but the necromancer tells them that what she does feeds their undeath. She fortifies their bones with molten lead, drips gold into their cracks and wraps them in carefully preserved leather. It fits as well as their skin ever did, even in the parts that she could not preserve.

Perhaps they appreciate that she tries to keep their parts together. Probably they do not. Death clarifies and occludes: so many things will never matter again.

There are other things that she does, that she calls feeding. Her corpses cannot care about them, just as they cannot feel how rough their leather wrappings are against her calloused hands and too-soft belly, nor the way her flesh parts around the hard angles that are all that remains of their rot-purged bodies.

The dead cannot do many things: they cannot feel breasts pressing against bare ribs, nor can they taste the hunger of parting thighs, nor can they hear the things the necromancer whispers and screams in those secret moments—but above all else they cannot give her what she craves, which undeath has forever robbed her of.

And they cannot know their own deficiency.

Perhaps we should envy them for that.