Now that Exquisite Corpse #2 is underway, I figured I'd jump in here with a Steem Monsters #fantasy fiction post before I announce the winner of the Redfish Steem Power Delegation giveaway contest.

For those of you on the edge of your seats, we're just days away from the next #farmpunk contest, so stay tuned.

Back to Steem Monsters. After winning my third contest (or was it the fourth?), and snagging several runner-up positions, I decided to take a break. Now I only enter the contests for character cards that truly inspire me. Usually, those are red team and black team cards. In this case, it's the Animated Corpse.

Image from original contest announcement.

This is probably not my best work, but I wanted to enter this one anyway. Good luck to all the other writers doing the same.

Join us in the Speculative Fiction Writers of Steemit Discord group where we get weird, horrific, scientificky, and fantastic in strange and beautiful ways.

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Animated Corpse: A Life of the Undead

I know not when, or where, it happened. I care not how or by whom. All I know is I was dead, now I'm not so, what many would call an undead being. Neither alive nor a holder of that state of finality men call death. I am an animated corpse.

My journey was short, but a journey no less.

It began with that moment of elapse that all mortals eventually come to know. I was a fallen comrade, a being no more. They sent the medic but the medic had no tools for me. So they sent the priest. All he had was prayer. Then they sent the undertaker to carry me away.

Over hill, through forests and wood, across meadows, down valleys, and between the passes of the mountain peaks so high, they carried me as far as I could be carried. I, in my sleepless sleep, was unaware. Yet my memory, my bones, my being whispers details I cannot possibly know, the math of my journey, the nouns and verbs of my travail. They filled my soul with liquids that smell of the putrid stench of unlife, pulled out my eyes and my hairs, wrapped my body in cloth.

Into the deep they carried me, lowered me into a ship's dusty hull. Across the sea and to another land, a land of not many dreams. Upon reaching my final destiny, I was lifted onto a cold stone slab, rolled toward a temple and into a dank corner of closed sarcophagus to be blessed. Or was it cursed? My life now is as it was not.

I awoke to a flame only to fall asleep again. Then I awoke, and slept again. Water filled my nostrils. I could not breathe. Not that, being dead, I needed to. Then another flame. And a breath from some strange otherworld filled my lungs until I thought they would pop. A warmth overtook me. A coldness prevailed. Pain rose up from the tips of my toes and scoured the fullness of my body wrapped in cloth expelling itself from my crown like a burst of heat from an oven. And the crackling, yes, the crackling of the bones from within made me think I'd never walk again. Every bone crackled, not breaking, but bending like a rubber plank until they felt as if waterlogged with some heaviness of liquid steel.

At the end of this ordeal--the timeline alludes me--my eyes opened. I walk silently in the night. Days are filled with motionless waking. A being like me never sleeps.

I need no food. I need no drink. I need only the life that can be lived by a void, a leaky drip of nothingness from all substance. If you see me clawed or limbless, or maybe both, or walking limply like a creature without bones, or ambling like a brainless crow that has lost its branch and limb, run for your life. I shall steal your soul and send it to the vaccuum of the underworld where beings stronger than myself feast upon them from night until eternal night.