If you're still doing prompts, could you do one for zedaph? I'd like to know what he's seeing in that one fic you wrote where everyone's basically seeing their worst nightmare. But if that's too spoilery anything with his death stuff would be awesome!! (like what does he see? What do regular people rank as if the more off hermits set off his death sense, how does his death sense work with players when they have respawn?) I think your concept for him is very cool.
Of course he is. Heās a human being. A human being who likes to dress up in costumes and wants to implant horns into his skull, but a human being nevertheless. And humans are always alive.
The undead arenāt human. Anymore, that is. Toast isnāt bread, even though it comes from the same bag; itās the same with the undead. Chuck it in, watch them die, press the lever, and up they pop- defiled corpses with ill-gotten souls wrenched from the hands of the reapers who were snoozing on the job.
When Zedaph looks at Cleo, he sees her in all her glory, yes- a resplendent woman, violently railing against the natural order. But he also sees the shadow she casts; a long trailing stain on the ground she walks. Starlight sparkles in her wake; the spurned stars of the afterlife she crassly cast aside.
Zed wouldnāt dream of reaping her. The longer that black stain grows, the greater pride he takes- he wants to see how long itāll get. For science.
Mumbo is different. Sickly and lost, itās obvious that the decay is fresh. Or at least, fresh relative to Cleo. It burns to look at him, to see the ashen face and the gaunt cheeks, to see the obvious symptoms everyone else so blatantly misses. Even Mumbo himself, looking at his reflection in a gold-backed mirror, obliviously convincing himself that silver just doesnāt like him.
Zedaph wouldnāt dream of reaping Mumbo. Not now. Not ever.
But the black stain on the ground grows as he walks, indelible footprints worn into the soil that will never, ever wash out.
Zedās made a game of counting them. Seeing where Mumbo and Cleo go. Itās fascinating, counting the paths. The thousands of footsteps clustered around their beds, crafting tables, furnaces.
Keralis is on the brink. He dances with his stain, spits on it, laughs at it. Like a child let loose in a marble kitchen with a pack of permanent markers, itās almost like Keralis knows his stain is there and revels in vandalizing the world around him with it.
He drags it around like a brush loaded with paint- sometimes Zed will find a smiley face sketched into the earth in black, dripping footprints, fading back and forth out of existence. Because Keralis is nothing if not an infuriating fence-rider- his ill-gotten shell trapped on the brink, but the person inside? Heās alive.
And he will never, ever die.
No matter what Zedaph tries to do.
So the sun sets, and he sleeps, and when it rises again, theyāll be there. The stain sinks deeper into the earth, like an oil slick on fertile farmland. The aura of death radiates from them, his mental Geiger counter screeching at the proximity. His fingers itch to summon his scythe from the broom closet itās been banished to, reeking of Windex and mop water. To swing it, and finally send the three of them to the great beyond.
And what is life if not one long struggle against the reaper?