Once there was a powerful wizard.  He had studied ancient and arcane forms of magic, and had mastered them.  Rather than use his powers for light, however, he used the darkest of secrets to gain him power, wealth, and dominate the lands.  His mastery of arcane power extended over life and death itself.  His undead hordes defeated entire armies that tried to stop his mad lust for power.

  All was going quite well for this necromancer.  Until the day he learned that a small group of adventurers had dedicated themselves to his downfall.  And as we all know, a small group of adventurers can accomplish the impossible with relative ease.  An evil wizard could not hope to stand against such.

  So this Necromancer, being wise in such matters, devised a plan to cheat fate of his defeat.  He would slay himself using the proper rituals and rise and an omnipotent Lich!  He set his plan in motion as the adventurers routed through his armies of the undead.  He had but one problem, he needed a good grave for his body to rest in for the time it took to rise once more.  Luckily, he had arranged his burial plot long ago with a very well known grave keeper.  The finest in the land, in fact.  His short eternal slumber would be the best his ill-gotten gold could buy.

  As the adventurers reached his tower, the freshly sacrificed corpse of the Necromancer was hurried out the back by his lackeys to the graveyard the wizard had purchased his plot.  The adventurers razed the wizard's tower to the ground, declared victory and headed off to a pub to celebrate and tinker with all the trinkets they had looted, not even noticing they had never actually encountered the evil wizard said to reside there.

  A moon later, when the new moon hung lightless in the night sky, the grave of the necromancer began to stir.  The time for the Lich to rise to once more to wreak havoc upon the lands had arrived.  As the half decomposed body made its way out of its grave, the freshly born lich came across an opponent he had not bargained upon... The gravedigger.

  The grizzled old man held his shovel in a menacing fashion, and grumbled aloud how he had never lost a resident, and wasn't about to start now. This grave keeper was the best in the lands, and took great pride in his work.  It simply would not do to have residents up and leaving.

  The fresh Lich, still young and weak, could only scoff.  No old man would be stopping its rise to power and glory!  The Lich lunged for the old man, thinking to simply knock him out of its way and shamble on to do its evil work, but the old man proved more of a challenge than that.  The gravedigger stepped aside and used his shovel to knock the lumbering corpse to the ground.

  The old man spit at the corpse, and told it to get back in its grave before he got rough!

  The lich rose, hovered, actually, back to an upright position and fired am evil spell at the old man... Which was deftly deflected by the holy shovel used to dig the consecrated graves.  The Lich, fearing a bit, uttered some arcane chants, and some more "residents" started to sprout from the holy grounds.

  The old man scowled, and began to leap about, quite spry for an old man, and used his shovel to chop the rising corpses into bits.  The gravedigger twirled his shovel about like a martial artist would with a staff.  It seemed as if the old man had some experience in this area during his lifetime.

  The Lich was through playing around.  He readied the magic of Aiseirgh, the power of life and death itself, to fire at the old man, and end this nuisance once and for all.  As it did so, however, the gravedigger flung his shovel through the air.  It landed squarely on the mark, decapitating the lich mid-cantrip.  The old man was soon on top of the lich, chopping its fresh body into little bits, shouting about how when he buried someone, the were going to stay good and buried!  Old world craftsmanship, the gravedigger called it.

  By dawn, the body of the lich was buried under holy flames in a dozen different locations on the hallowed ground.  The recently unearthed residents were all placed back into their places of rest, and the old gravedigger sat down to a good pipe, content in the quality of his work.  That troublesome resident would rise no more.  Sets a bad example for the others, the old man mused as he contentedly puffed away.

  It seems the Lich had planned his rebirth with but one flaw. He paid for the best place of eternal rest, and received a free lesson with his purchase:

Be wary when you strike a bargain, you may get exactly what you paid for.