It was important to take precautions in business like this. Oh sure, the names attached to the deal were good, but the deal itself was terribly vague, and anyone with a lick of sense knew that it was easy enough to claim to be someone you were not. Wreth had been very careful: she'd chosen a small subject to possess for the task, and one who could escape easily, with good maneuverability. Of course she could not die, but being dispossessed out here in the living realm could see her just as thoroughly destroyed, if in mind rather than body.
Wreth had lived in her catacombs for centuries now, ruling over the dead and the attendants there, borrowing her subjects when she needed to visit the city-above but mainly flitting from skull to skull to give her orders and proclamations. She knew her realm from end to end, and she thrived on the gossip of its inhabitants.
But hundreds of years of near-solitude wore on her. And it was near-solitude she lived in. Her people spoke to her, but they did not know her, nor she them. She had not had a friend in four hundred years, or perhaps she never had; it was hard to remember. And she knew almost nothing of the world above.
She was here because she had dispatched a subject to place a classified ad, and a reputable necromancer, or a fraud hiding behind one's name, had responded. The terms of the offer had been vague. Her supplier had no reason to trust her, either. But they said they could solve her problem, and so she had come.
She felt the cold from four hundred years away, and it did not bother her, but still she shivered a little. If this turned out to be a lie, it would be worse than a thousand deaths.