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The Fallacy of Undeath

by Idaron Jemane

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Those who seek power over life and death will find themselves master of neither and slave to both.

The shambling creatures of the Gray Host cry out in agony, this truth learned too late. For what is a vampire, but a thing that walks forever and hungers without end? Not alive enough to feel the reprieve of food and drink, nor dead enough to know true rest. An accursed existence. One that is better left in the decrepit tombs from which they crawled.

Zombies are little better, save for the fact that they seem blessedly unaware of their condition. Still, their plagued corpses spew pestilence wherever they tread. Death only begets more death.

And what is the point of these necromantic endeavors? To live forever? To achieve some knowledge or power unattainable to mere mortals? What is lost on practitioners of necromancy is the mystery of death itself. A vampire could never comprehend the journey of a soul to Aetherius, when their Nirn-bound shells are driven only by thirst and their lust for power.

Unending life is no life at all. Without death, life has no meaning. The Crypt of the Exiles is testament enough to that. The creatures that reside there could hardly be described as thriving. Undead, true, but not alive enough to enjoy their existence. Even the necromancers who claim power over death through the raising of others—rather than their own unholy transformations—can create only a facsimile of life. Zombies and skeletal servants do not live and breathe as they once did. They may not be threatened by their own mortality, but serving as a necromancer's puppet could hardly be called true life.

The obsession with death, or undeath, robs necromancers of the precious life they have been given. To fear the end, to try to avoid it at any cost, is to lose what power they had. That is how one becomes susceptible to the fallacy of the Gray Host, and the false promise of undeath.