
Speak With Dead #32: Mismatched Hands and Beating Hearts
Our next installment of Speak with Dead. Coming to you from across the cosmos tonight, our in house advice columnist, the Necromancer with the Answer, has collected a few letters from folks with death related problems. Tonight, Maxillae the Mad draws out two questions and offers her sage counsel.
Stay tuned after the article if you, too, are a fellow seeker and desire guidance, to find out how you may get in contact and Speak With Dead.
Content Warning: The Suicidal Ideation of an Undead Creature
—
To Guidance, Whatever Form that May Take,
I cast this missive into the outer planes so that it might find the person best qualified to guide me in my current struggles. I know not where else to turn, but I was always taught to try the mad long shot before the unthinkable.
I suspect I’m dying. No, I know I’m dying. There are patches of rot on my fingers and forearms, I can see a little bit of bone along the edge of one of my hands and there is a hint of blue to my nose and lips that was not there before. The question is not ‘will I live’; I have been to every healer I could think of and they all lack the skill to stop the progression of this terrible entropy.
The question is whether or not I want to continue to exist like this. Because whatever it is I have a terrible understanding deep down in the pit of my soul that if I am allowed to die of it, I will persist. But I suspect I may be able to destroy myself before it comes to that. It will be significantly harder to do, post mortem.
Do I embrace oblivion? Or do I persist, and find myself ostracized from everything that knew me in the process?
That Thing that was Once a Cleric
Dear Once-a-Cleric,
You’re right, it is significantly harder to kill something that is already dead than it is to kill someone who isn’t. But it is hardly impossible. I am not going to explain how it can be done here, such knowledge is particularly volatile and dangerous to me, but rest assured that such a permanent solution will not evade you once you have lost your pulse.
No, I would urge you to at least try it. It’s impossible to say whether you will be okay or not, one can never know the kind of undead any living person will become until they have died, and at that point returning them to a state of proper life requires at rip back through the afterlife to launder the soul of all of the impurities it’s picked up living a filthy mortal life.
No matter what happens, you will not be you anymore, the way you are right now. But I want you to consider: that would have been true as well if you were not dying. Living changes you. Unliving changes you. Let yourself be changed and guide that change into something you find worth being, or take all control from yourself and let the cards deal you a new hand.
…but I do urge you to try, first. Try to exist as this. I can hear you are disgusted and afraid of what we are, Once, but that is why you cannot trust your perspective completely on this matter. Try. And

Dirge Singer is a prestige class from 3.5 D&D found in Libris Mortis: The Book of Undead. Very fun and cool.
if it does not work I will help you dismantle your animated corpse, myself.
Regards,
Maxillae the Mad
—
Dear Max,
Do you mind if I call you Max? It’s pretty cute.
Alright, here’s the situation: I’ve got five animated hands that help me with my work and two of them are pairs that came from the same corpses but one of them I took off a criminal that had a hook prosthetic. You can probably see where this is going but I’ll explain anyway.
The paired hands are always doing their work together and the singular one just limply goes about its business. It looks left out. Dejected. Depressed! An animated hand!
What can I do to bring a little pep back into it?
Thanks in Advance,
Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right but Three Lefts Do
Dear Three Lefts,
Yes, I mind very much if you call me Max. I do not know you. If you do it again there will be dire consequences.
As for the rest of your missive, the answer is fairly simple; hands come in pairs, they are social creatures. If the other four are bonded you must simply find an unmated hand to pair bond with the outlier.
It is best if you can find the other hand of the corpse you took it from, but I understand strangely sourced bodies can be difficult to track down or find histories on. I would urge you not to simply hack the hand from a corpse that has a mate, however. You are going to want one that is truly isolated.
Preferably, it will be one that was isolated while the person it belonged to was still alive, because at that point the flesh knows it is no longer part of a unit. It will encourage the two hands to bond. They need not be a matching pair, contrary to popular belief it is only a taboo to pair bond two right hands and two left hands among the very superstitious or the very stupid.
Best of luck, for the sake of your minions.
Regards,
Maxillae the Mad
—
Do You Have a Question for Maxillae the Mad?
Please, if you have anything you would like to inquire of our resident necromancer, leave your inquisitions in the comments below. Unfortunately the avenue by which one could ordinarily tweet out ‘speak with dead’ has become corrupted with dark energies and is no longer safe to interface with, but we are at present working on a way around that.
Keep yourselves safe! Do not get mutated!
No Comments