I didn’t know pain, hadn’t for a while after my passing.

  Death took a lot, not exactly a new concept but one that didn’t seem real until it was. Couldn’t that be said about anything though? We never truly understand the reality until it becomes ours to hold close to our bosom, and I was rapidly spiralling down another tangent out of sheer boredom.

  They didn’t say much about the life of a corpse, but I’m surprised no one thought of how boring it would be. Nothing worked like it should, I couldn’t taste anything, my muscles were emaciated and somehow not rotting, my sense of touch was dampened to something informative at best.

  But emotions, I still had plenty of those to haunt me as I made my journey north. Emotions and memories. Grief apparently didn’t escape you when you died and I was…grateful for that.

  My daughter deserved so much better than what she got, so much more than a goblins teeth to her throat. Yir was still out there, but that wasn’t enough to keep her memory. So I carried it close, something so vivid and unchanging. I would’ve made my way north either way with the Call, but keeping that memory was plenty of motivation to keep moving.

  Terra was…everything I wasn’t.

  She had a bubbly and optimistic view of everything, so much that it was genuinely nauseating at points. Where I saw the hypocrisy inherent with my fellow fools, she held hope for the best to shine through all the sludge.

  It was cute, and every time I tried to teach her caution went unheeded.

  Though she’d always pretend that she’d take my words to heart, even if we both knew it was just to placate my impatience for her foolishness. Didn’t matter in the end did it? It wasn’t the cruelty of humanity that killed her, but a goblin with ears sharp as knives.

  Curious that they shared that quality with elves, despite the two being leagues apart from each other in behaviour. Strange to have the little mongrels treat me with reverence as my sorry excuse for a corpse shambled my way to wherever I was going.

  Feeling was different, but not gone.

  I could tell it was cold, too cold for a living body to last long without protection. But I wasn’t living so it didn’t matter. I mostly passed by forests and plenty of monsters. Most of them didn’t dare attack me, and the ones that did? They didn’t meet a peaceful end. I was starting to see why all those fables of undead were so adamant about leaving them alone. Though the journey north was something that wasn’t really explained.

  I would find out eventually, I could tell I was getting close to something, there was a wall in the distance afterall!

  It didn’t look like any wall I’d ever seen, made of something of pristine ivory as it stretched between and atop the mountains, sectioning off entire swaths of land for whatever was hiding behind. There was a gate, and I approached it readily enough. I say that but I was still quite a ways away.

  I’d just left the trees was all, and started walking on a dead land with nothing of vegetation to mark anything normal. One moment was birdsong and shrubbery, the next it was just dirt. And the wall.

  Couldn’t forget the wall.

  There was also a river where a cloaked man was fishing, but there was no line to the rod. He still managed to catch one and grabbed it gleefully in a hand that had no skin. He turned to look at me with a smile, and despite being so far away I could see his half-face-half-skull and the expression on it.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He nodded to the wall and turned back to his river.

  I’d walked a long way based entirely on a screaming instinct, I kind of expected to see other undead but that was just weird. I shrugged and moved over to the gate. It was a large gate. I just stood there for a while staring at it.

  Now that I had a good look at it, it seemed disturbingly similar to bone.

  Really going for a theme here, aren’t they?

  A door attached to the gate swung open on my right, and there appeared a smiling woman that looked neither alive nor dead walked over wearing a robe filled with intricate embroideries of gold and black. “Hello! You must be Rea Baker, we’ve been waiting for you for quite a while now.”

  I couldn’t talk, so instead I just raised a brow to the remarkably pale woman.

  “Of course, of course! Explanations are in order. But first!” she perked up. “Allow me to be the first to welcome you to The Land That Does Not Sleep, I am Kieris, and I’m sure you’ll be a fine addition to the horde!”

  Cooking meat just right took either talent or practice.

  It seemed simple enough, let it burn over the fire and turn it around every so often to allow for an even sear. The main problem was that fires were notoriously hard to control, even with my affinity to the element. Fine control required a layer of mental dexterity I didn’t possess, so I didn't try, instead opting to cooked the morsels I caught over a campfire, learning the perfect amount of applicable heat from the grease dribbling into the flames and the smell wafting into my nose.

  I’d learned the distance needed for certain levels of sear under certain measures of temperature, and I could measure temperature quite easily by simply talking to the fire. It usually didn’t have much to say, which was fair. On occasion it did mention something besides the heat, but those were easily ignored.

  No one seeked the flame for philosophical advice, only for burning.

  Perhaps if I had a proper stove, like the ones back home, then I wouldn’t have to worry about all this arbitrary nonsense. But as it stood, I was no longer welcome in the house of Rhombal, though I did visit their precious city from time to time.

  If only to gloat about my success in life.

  I rotated the thigh hanging over the spit, letting some of the juices flow down into the fire. I already bled the limb, so I didn't have to worry about that ruining my meal. That was one of my first mistakes when I got into the business of hunting. Tasted like iron all the way through, fucking disgusting.

  I hummed a simple tune as the birds chirped above in a decent concert of mating calls. That was a funny thing to learn. Who knew the thing that so many people adore in the morning could be meant to attract a casual bout of physical intimacy? Personally I’d always found bird calls in the morning annoying, mostly because they tended to be the thing that woke me up.

  Though there had been mornings where I’ve appreciated the call of nature.

  The meat sizzled and popped, I didn’t skin the thing before putting it over the fire. Personally I like the texture of rind, quite savoury and pleasant. Not that I’d waste any of the meat otherwise, despite how I wasted the blood. Well, had to have standards, even in the pursuit of immortality.

  It wouldn’t do to turn into a savage after all. That would be an unfortunate turn of events for me, after all that I’d done to cultivate an aura of class. Throwing it all away would just be sad. So I maintained some standards in the barbarism that was hunting.

  Particularly in the act of sharing, it wouldn’t do to eat in the presence of company without offering something.

  I turned to a woman missing a leg, cheeks dry of tears as she looked listlessly at the fire. I’d made sure to tie her tight to the tree, so that even her kind couldn’t squirrel their way out of it.

  She looked at me, eyes filled with so much despair, and I smiled.

  “Don’t you worry now, food’s almost ready. I know elves can get quite the appetite and I’ve been lacking as a host in terms of nourishment!” I chuckled. “But I’m sure you’ll appreciate the morsel I’m cooking up at the moment. I’ve got little talent for the culinary arts, but my father would always say something along the lines of practice making things perfect, and I’m inclined to agree. There are plenty of examples to the fact, but I’m sure I’m boring you now. You want to eat! And I promised to deliver, so leave me to my ministrations and everything will be just splendid.”

  The woman let out a choked sob, biting down on her gag and making a weak effort to struggle out of her binds. I shot her a cheeky grin and returned to my fire.

  Shouldn’t be long, shouldn’t be long at all.