Plea From A Soul Not So Unlike You
Do not mistake me for undead. I was never dead. My component parts belonged to previous souls, were parts of their various forms, and those forms did die yet never have I, as a single original soul and gestalt body, known death.
Often have I been called a zombie simply because some of my limbs have the pallor of death, visible wounds, and traces of sorry rot. Zombie is not the correct term for all bodies that were once dead and now move with post-necrotic verve—it is the correct term for zombies. Vampyr are not zombies, the truly resurrected are not zombies, ghasts are not zombies. It is not a synonym for undead except among the ignorant.
So I am no zombie. Neither am I vampyr or ghoul, raging revenant or raw skeleton, yet for each of these I have been mistook. So I know something of how such things are treated. I know something of their woe.
I am quite like you. I did not choose my body or my parentage. Yet your kind treats me like I have met Death, dallied with him, and escaped his grasp or been set loose for some wicked purpose. I hunger as you do—for knowledge, for love—not for blood or viscera. My heart, though it has not always been mine, beats like yours. My bones ache. My skin swells and stings. My breast rises with my breath. My lips long to speak and sing and kiss.
Yet I have known the suffering and intolerance of the undead. I have known the violence and hatred of the traditionally living. You have brandished crosses to drive me away, doused me with holy water and garlic, aimed rifle and pistol at mine head, and come toward me with stakes and torches aloft. I am alive, this night, only because you have failed—not because I have any special power to defy death.
Now know that your hatred comes with a cost. Your kind perpetuates division and war, driving me and others like me to pick sides on a battlefield of fear, enforcing tired and dangerous notions of personal identity and invariable condition. The undead cannot take breaths simply to please your tired definitions of good and evil; they cannot choose what will keep them alive. They are as they are. And if you force me to pick sides in this war you wage, I must choose theirs, for you have driven me away from you and indeed from any neutrality or middle ground.
I live. Yet I am not some weak thing, not some common man. My soul is like yours—I know ire and fury, grief and glory—but my body echoes with the might of a dozen bodies, the insight of four-fold brains, and senses activated by lightning and fire. Fear me who would be your enemy and do it now while it is not yet too late. We can know peace between those who have never known death and those who have achieved escape from it. Harmony.
Keep an eye on the zombies, though.
