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    I died, certainly. And yet, that was not the end.


    Silence filled the collapsed tomb when I next gained ‘consciousness.’ The only pathway out had collapsed. A narrow vertical shaft dead center in the chamber had also collapsed. That would cause problems with the air supply eventually, though just as I thought this I noticed a lightness in my chest.


    There was nothing there. I looked down to discover a wound in my chest, all blood having long-since flown out or coagulated. A trail of dried blood led over to, then underneath, the throne. The throne itself jutted out and aside, revealing a small crawlspace.


    I pulled myself over with my arms, noting a rather numb feeling and no sense of fatigue in my muscles. With no clue how much time had passed, I was trying to use my dying breath to ensure my friends and allies made it out of the barrow.


    Within the crawlspace, there were two still-beating hearts, as well as the remains of the she-lich rapidly crumbling to dust. She’d taken the liberty of removing my heart from my body and using it to replace her own within an elaborate magical interface. She held her own heart – smaller and with a grey coloring to it, in her remaining hand.


    Though the she-lich was mostly bone dust, an apparition of the lich as she once was presented itself in front of me. It was of an almost human woman with a thick and furrowed brow. We still had stories of these ‘other’ creatures, long since extinct, who had villages and communities in the valley before our forefathers had come in and bested them with stone tools.


    “For untold centuries, I have ruled the crypt.” The lich spoke a barbarous tongue, but within my mind, it assembled itself into something legible. “To provide a burial and testing grounds. But my people have not been seen in this land in ages. To be immortal is to become a relic. Your people, your tools, are far more advanced than those with which I first built this dungeon. Bond with the dungeon in my place. Expand it, dangle treasures in front of outsiders to lure in new meat. Rule in my place. Lord over this barrow through the ages, until those arrive with tools strong enough to best you.”


    With that, the vision of the she-lich faded. I was left alone, watching my own heart beat lethargically at the center of this barrow. I could reasonably puzzle out that the buried chamber was impossibly, unsurvivably cold. But the cold didn’t register for me anymore.


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    Long before I discovered the extent of my confinement to this place, I had to master the art of shaping the barrow.


    With nothing but time on my hands, I spent untold days sitting on that throne. I found, through much trial and error, that I could shape the basic paths and chutes through the barrow in an act of pure concentration. I’d been trying to think about how to escape – before I realized the particulars of my predicament. I thought of trying to force my way through that narrow vent dead center above my new abode. The more I thought, the more the collapsed trestles and supports brought themselves back into serviceable order.This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    A faint breeze flowed through the chamber once more, not that I could feel its touch on my skin, nor had any need for fresh air any longer.


    Once I realized that I could shape the air shaft via pure will, I got to work on clearing open a path through the barrow. This took days – which I could now measure by the cycling of the faintest trickle of light through the air shaft.


    I sat there, watching, as the barrow tunnels ever-so-slowly reassembled themselves. Tressels came back into place. Dirt physically scooped itself up and packed itself into the walls.


    Perhaps with some manual labor, I could renovate the premises further. But the army of barrow wrights had disintegrated to dust, decay of ages catching up to them now that their mistress was gone.


    A week passed, as judged by my limited timekeeping abilities. But through an act of pure concentration, I had bent the barrow’s tunnels back into working order.


    With the path clear, I took my first steps out of the central chamber in some time. I walked through the halls, which were now cleared free of much of the refuse and even traps that had plagued our path to confront the lich.


    I walked through the winding halls – I could straighten them with a few weeks more concentration, but this seemed a waste of effort at the moment. What I found was that my consciousness began to wane some three hundred paces away from the throne. Not even within view of the barrow entrance. I was tethered here. Permanently.


    At the very edge of my limited range, I discovered that which I feared most. The collapsing barrow had tripped every trap in the tunnel. There, at the bottom of a spiked pit, were the corpses of Yona and Gavrin.


    Scuffs on the pit’s edge indicated where they’d fallen, held on to the lip, tried to help themselves back up. Yurt couldn’t have been too far ahead – he must have abandoned them, even as they called for help. His own sister, left to fall into the spikes, buried with the dungeon. Buried with me.


    No tears flowed from my dead, dried tear ducts. Indeed, there was some intellectual sense that I should be sad. Devastated, even. But my heart just wasn’t in it. Take that literally; it was still back in the throne room. Every reaction was numb.


    Months had passed since our confrontation with the barrow mistress and my allies’ attempted escape. Their corpses were decayed. Had I not known what gear they were wearing, the club and knives down in the pit with them, I would’ve had trouble recognizing them.


    Instincts inherited from my predecessor urged me to act. I lifted my left hand. The air in the hallway grew still, then swirled with a faint breeze.


    A greenish haze emanated from my hand. Lich magic. I found myself muttering in the old she-lich’s tongue, and the haze surrounded Yona and Gavrin’s corpses.


    Two dissected dungeon victims rose out of the pit and were placed daintily back on their feet. The corpses stood, hunched over.


    I looked into Yona’s eyes. There was nothing left.


    There would be no spirited conversation with these new wrights. No reminiscing about old times. Reanimation was not resurrection. Indeed, my first two barrow wrights were mere extensions of my will. As I could alter and repair the dungeon, so too could I order them to patrol areas of the dungeon where I could not tread, or to hold down a hall or chamber while I was busy back in the throne room.


    Perhaps there was some solace to be had in the fact that their bodies were not forgotten down in that pit. My predecessor’s wrights were gone – all disintegrated into bone dust that still caked the floors. These shades of my former friends were the only minions I would have, for the moment.


    Mentally, I ordered the pit to close itself off. It would happen glacially. Renovation would be required to bring this paltry barrow into ship-shape. That would require practice.


    And so, I returned to the central chamber, two new bodyguards in tow, ready to while away the days learning just how much control I had over my tomb, abode, and home.


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