Sure, everyone claimed they would do anything to bring back a deceased loved one, but that was because they failed to imagine the ramifications. Unless one had no sense of smell, or a penchant for the stench of decay, undead rarely made satisfying company in the long term. “But, oh,” the people would say, “I never meant for them to return as undead. I meant for them to be alive exactly as they were before.”

Too bad.

No matter how hard anyone wished, hoped, or prayed for a loved one to come back to life – to be truly alive – the best a corpse could ever get was a little less dead than they were before.

And that’s where Sikras “Catseye” Nikabod came in.

Necromancy certainly wasn’t the noblest of professions in the kingdom of Nyllmas, nor anywhere in the whole of Siaphara. If Sikras were brutally honest, necromancy was less a “profession” and more an illicit opportunity for magic wielders with questionable moral compasses to make a living by ripping souls from Enos and stuffing them inside corpses, much in the way one shoved cubed bread into a hollowed-out game hen.

But it paid the bills. Illegally. People could balk and wail and organize all the protests they wanted, but for every townsperson who cried about “dead men’s rights,” two or three people would be at Sikras’s doorstep, begging him to resurrect Grandpa.

For that reason, when Sikras smelled the familiar odor of dried blood and rotting flesh outside his mansion’s ornate door, he wasn’t surprised. That meant one of two things: either a strangely independent undead minion waited on his stoop, or he had a new client.