There exists many a myth about creatures and apparitions who are "living dead". Be it ghosts lurking in the darkest dungeons, spirits haunting above the wasteland where their blood was spilled, or corpses climbing from the graves, seeking to stalk down the one who had them laid there far too prematurely. These stories hardly hold any credibility. Perhaps, in the Overland, it might be a somewhat plausible notion that the dead might want to return to life simply because in the Overland, life is peaceful. But in the Underland, where death is the long-awaited peace that is never possible in life, it seems strange that anyone would like to return. If there is an afterlife, it must surely be calmer, even if it is the bottom of the Waterway where the debris of all corpses eventually ends up.

Solovet is not one for such superstition. She follows the prophecies when they suit her, and bend them to her will when they do not, but beyond this, beyond what is useful, she will not bother to waste her time on hardly tangible creatures of tortured minds.

But what is shared for all such creatures is this — they are creatures that ought to be dead, that we know for certain should be dead, but that, inexplicably, are not.

One such man crouches amidst the vines, side by side with a hisser, a ball clutched in the callused hand he holds towards the warrior boy's sister.

He has not looked at them at all.

He has not spoken to them at all.

He does not even appear to notice that he stands but a stone's throw from his parents.

He is dead. He is meant to be dead. But it seems that he is only dead to some people.