No, it wasn't. It was absolutely worthless to be the king. Oh, they got me set up with this nicely decorated throne room and a throne made of still-living pieces of human flesh that still pulsed and bled with bits of life, but when you got down to it, I was a figurehead. Because none of the several hundred Deadites down in the cave actually had anything to do.
The little skeleton guy, who turned out to be named David, was my link to the Deadite world. He explained everything to me, and he passed my orders on to everyone. But what orders could I give? It wasn't like we needed to get food or drink or even worry about sanitation. We could just mill around underground forever. I would have been content to just do that, except for two things. Both of them were lust.
There was the lust for human blood and flesh. My Deadites had a constant hunger for people, or parts of people. Unfed, they were restless and grouchy, like kids on a car trip who've decided they're hungry just after passing the sign NEXT EXIT 50 MILES. Often, a Deadite would come in for an audience with me, and spend the whole time bitching and moaning about not having any people to hurt and really really wanting to hurt people. I started to feel bad about leaving all these poor little Deadites hungry. And I was getting a pretty bad jones for people meat myself.
The other lust was, as far as I knew, mine alone. I lusted for my body, for the feeling of being alive. It might have been short a hand, it might have had a bunch of scars on it, it might have had crappy vision and a weak knee, but it was home. Besides, the body I was in at the moment had some drawbacks of its own. I was really starting to miss food. And sex, and sleep. Even taking a crap was starting to be a nostalgic memory. Also, I was rotting. My joints creaked, a lot of my hair had fallen out, and my skin had turned a nasty shade of brown and become as fragile as a wet paper towel. I had bone showing in places. And as I spent days, or weeks, or years underground, with no way to tell time and nothing to do, I wanted to be human again.
I couldn't even go up to the surface, though. As creations of the Naturan Demanto, we were bound to its words; we could only walk upon the earth when someone living had heard the words in the book. As soon as everyone who had heard the words was dead, the Deadites were banished back underground. And nobody but me had heard the words, and I was dead and didn't count. And the book had been destroyed. Basically, we were fucked.
I don't know how long I stayed underground. I know that eventually I stopped rotting, and just sort of stayed in a gorpy sort of half-rotten state, so I couldn't even tell time by my decomposition. I know that I went around and talked to every Deadite around, and found that none of them were terribly good conversationalists. Braaaaiins this and swallow your soul that. Only about twenty could even put a sentence together, and they still didn't have much to say.
"So. Still dead?"
"Yup. You?"
"Same here."
I didn't completely just sit around being bored. I did my best to keep things interesting. I organized a basketball tournament! That didn't work out, though, because we didn't have basketballs, so we had to improvise. Turns out skulls don't bounce.
Soccer went pretty well, though I had to ban some of the less humanoid Deadites from playing or it wouldn't have worked. Sure, technically it's not use of hands if you pick the ball up with your tentacles, but I still don't call it fair play. The final result of the First All-Cave Round-Robin Tourney was a resounding 5-1 victory for the Hideous Horror Hags, with the Rotten Appleheads a distant second. Okay, so it wasn't really ordinary for me to be referee, tournament bookie, and center forward of the Hags all at the same time, but who was going to stop me? I was king.
There wasn't anything to win anyway; all the bets were placed in bones and there's really only so many bones you can collect before you realize that bones aren't actually good for anything. I just ended up putting all my winnings in a big pile in the corner of my throne room and handing them out free to anyone who stopped by. Sometimes I'd chew on an arm bone, but all the bones we had around were pretty old and didn't have much flavor left in them.
Usually, though, I didn't play sports or anything. Usually I just sat in my throne, eyes closed, doing something that wasn't quite sleep but couldn't be waking. I couldn't sleep, and that was the curse, because I was stuck with my thoughts. I'm not much of a thinker normally. But with nothing to do but sit on that fleshy throne and stare at the closed door of my throne room, I thought, and it stung. I thought about what I was missing. I dreamt of greasy dinners at Denny's, of Linda's sweet tits, of the company of my old idiot friends. And then I'd open my eyes, and I'd still be alone and rotting in that quiet tomb of a throne room.
Things went on like that for a while. I didn't see the sun and I didn't sleep, so I have no idea how long. It had to be more than days, but it probably wasn't years.
Then someone read the words.