((Melva haz becomez Undead. Action, mah minionz!))

It was difficult to say what happened after that. Dead people, even the ones who don't lie down and accept the inherent quiescence of death, do not generally forge new memories, at least not in the sense that live people do. Later on, Melva would learn of the terrible carnage that came in that long darkness between death and unlife. But in that darkness, she hung suspended, her mind only aware that there was nothing to be aware of. Her thoughts, slow and few though they were, generally revolved around The Light and the Beyond. This was no sort of haven for eternal peace. Was this empty nothingness a punishment, then? Had she done so poorly in life as to be left in this vast prison? Or was this what happened when you became an undead creature bent to the will of another? What, then, when that zombie died, slain by adventurers or other monsters? Did the soul pass on to the reward the human had been intended for? Or did their actions as a fiend determine what happened after their final death? What if, instead of being killed, they simply rotted apart? Would she be released, or would she be trapped in this timeless limbo forever? Would it matter? Did anything? What if this really was all that happened when people died? What if The Light had simply-
Melva woke up.

-n-
She was in a crypt. Not the temple crypt. Another crypt. It was filled with bodies. Some were old, skeletons, from long before the plague would have dragged them back to their feet. Some were fresher. It was dark, but there was a light. Melva dragged herself to her feet and froze. There was a strange clattering noise from somewhere on the floor. She took another step and heard the noise again, sighing in relief when is occurred to her she was just stepping on something- loose stones or scattered bones. She hiked up her skirts to look and collapsed with a thump that was really more of a click.
Her feet were gone.
Well, they weren't gone gone. The bone parts were there. It was the flesh part that was gone. Her hands were bony, too. And her knees. And her elbows. She felt at her face, swallowing a scream as the tips of her flesh-less fingers touched her skin- which was there. Mostly. The sores were still there, places where the flesh was worn away to show the bone beneath. But mostly, she was still there. Still whole. Still alive. She looked around the crypt. It was filled with death. She looked at the light. It was a torch, burning at the top of the stairs. From somewhere behind and to the right, a grim voice whispered. She turned her head, but there was no one behind her, and the voice moved. She turned, slowly, in a full circle, listening to the voice move with her. There was no one else in the crypt with her. No one alive, any way.
No one Undead, Melva thought. There's no one alive here at all. She tried to shudder, but her shoulders wouldn't cooperate. Apparently, she was going to have to work on that. The smell in the crypt was stifling, and from the stairs came a faint breeze. It smelled like rain.
The choice seemed simple enough.
The stairs were harder to get up than they had been before. She was clumsy, and slow, but the more she moved, the better her control got. She turned, awkwardly, at the top of the stairs, and found herself looking up another flight. But there was no torch at the top of this one. There was a square of sky, and fresh air spilling down onto her rotted face. The world had never smelled so clean. There was a man standing at the top of the stairs. His lips had rotted almost completely away, and he was carrying a rake in one skeletal hand. He laughed when she staggered out into the open.
"We didn't think you were going to wake up! We were going to toss you onto the pyre later today. Good to see you out and about. Head on down the hill and into that building there. They'll give you something to do." He wandered off among the gravestones without another word, raking away leaves and righting tipped over candles. Melva blinked. That seemed- awfully cavalier. Then again, perhaps being dead had given him a somewhat skeewed world view. One in which telling someone you had been planning on burning them later that day and shipping them off into service in the same breath was a perfectly rational statement. There was just no telling. Lacking better instructions, Melva stumbled along the path down into a small town. It was in a state of hideous disrepair, much like its inhabitants. A cluster of guards whistled and catcalled as she went past. She stared at them, baffled. She hadn't been any great beauty before most of her rotted off.
The building the grave keeper had pointed at was a church, although it was in the sorriest state Melva had ever seen one in. The roof and walls were rotting away, and the stained glass windows were shattered. The pews had been dragged out, and the room was filled with undead, and one small goblin-looking little creature. Many of them were deep in conversation, and in one corner an aggravated man was demonstrating a spell for a student, who looked absolutely befuddled by the intricate latticework of flames in his teacher's hands.
"Who were you?" She spun around, and saw hidden behind the door, clinging to the shadows, another undead. He wore the robes of a priest, a Brother of no little consequence, but they were tattered and stained, and the holy symbol on his chest was nearly obliterated.
"Oh, Brother, you-"
"NEVER CALL ME THAT!" The room fell silent as they turned to stare at the screaming man. Melva quailed, cowering under the force of his wrath. He struggled to regain control, glaring at the audience.
"Go about your buisness, you nosy bags of bones!"