Volk
There have been a lot of stories written about heroes who have set forth in vampire castles or mummy crypts to slay the undead, and there have been a lot of stories told about the heroic deeds of Robin Hood's attempts to steal from the rich to give to the poor. I have never seen a story about a hero who steals from the dead to give to the living. They say "you can't take it with you" - but what if you could?
In Volk's world, undeath ends up playing the social role of indefinite life extension reserved for the upper class. The wolf doesn't believe that there's such a thing as the afterlife, and unlike other undead-fighting heroes, he has no interest in finishing them off to put them to eternal rest, since there's nowhere for them to move on to. So, he figures that they might as well get what they can out of the extra time down here they have.
It's the fact that people would have spent most of History wasting perfectly good pottery, jewelry, gold, silver, stone and metal tools by burying them along with the dead as grave goods that he's never accepted, because he's never been able to stop thinking about the fact that those are all resources that could have been put to good use by the living instead. There are enough of the living who are hoarding way more resources than they'll ever need to use as it is, without even more of them being taken up by beings who need those resources even less, especially when the living are starving and the undead have no need to spend money on any food at all. People spend time, efforts and resources building monuments to the dead in a world in which there are homeless living people as far as the eye can see. And the undead have an eternity to amass more wealth than any living person could ever put together in a single lifetime, which gives them quite an unfair advantage in that department.
Volk is no Lara Croft. He's not an Objectivist who robs temples so that he can sell those artifacts to museums to make a profit so he can live in a mansion, but a rogue who's willing to get his hands as dirty with desecration as those of Renaissance doctors who dug up the dead used to do, because he thinks that there are more than one way to save lives doing so. The dead cling to their possessions for reasons of sentimental attachment, whereas the living need those same possessions to survive, and he thinks that the living deserve to be more attached to survival, that it's a more pressing concern for them to have to deal with, because the undead have an eternity ahead of them, and life is so very, very short by comparison.
Volk's adventures begin in the desert, seeing off a camel accomplice who's guided him all the way to the crocodile pharaoh's pyramid, with his well-padded, multi-compartmentalized travel bag slung over his shoulder. He breaks into the pyramid surreptitiously, disarming the traps that present themselves on his way as he goes along. He thinks back on the people with open wounds and damaged organs he saw in the desert town, on the farmers who could not only grow nothing in the desert for lack of water, but who were becoming more and more dehydrated themselves.
In the pyramid, he sees that all of the water is being hoarded by a dam for the crocodile pharaoh's private baths and swimming pools. He sees that all of the bandages are being used up to wrap the bodies of the wealthy dead. He sees that not only are the mummies keeping their own intestines, livers, lungs and stomachs in canopy jars even though they no longer need them, for no other reason than that they had 'first rights of private ownership' over them, but that they've even been collecting extra ones on top of it, simply because they've become accustomed to thinking of organs as status symbols rather than as necessities for their own daily existence.
So he stuffs as many of the canopy jars as he can in his travel bag, responds to the mummies who try to capture him with their extensible bandages in hopes of wrapping them around him by grabbing their bandages to pull them all the way off so that he can stash them in his travel bag as well, and breaks open the dam holding all of the water in, being dragged out of the pyramid by the swift current before the mummies can catch him. His camel accomplice waiting outside sees him drifting by, but the current is too fast and the wolf only manages to throw his travel bag on the shore before being dragged further off to sea. He starts thinking that he's going to drown when a ship sails near him and throws down a rope ladder from its side so that he can climb up on its deck.
He quickly realizes that he's on a ghost ship surrounded by ghostly, cutlass-wielding pirates, and questions his luck at having been pulled on board, but when he tells the pirates about what he just did, he quickly earns their sympathy for it. The crocodile pharaoh was big on enforcing the law, and it turns out that he was the one who had sent the law-enforcers who had boarded the pirates' ship to kill them all in the first place. So in return for having given them an opportunity to get back at the pharaoh through Volk from beyond the grave, they allow him to remain on their ship until they drop him off on the shore of the northern continent.
The wolf soon comes upon a graveyard, and can't help but think about the fact that a lot of the skeletons who have been buried in it probably have golden teeth that they no longer have any more use for than the living would, so he begins to dig. Sensing him doing this, the skeletons begin to dig their way out from their own end, popping up from the ground everywhere around him to ask him what he's doing there disturbing their graves and what he wants from them. He decides to try a different approach and to negotiate with them, explaining that the living probably need what they could get from their golden teeth a lot more than they need them for anything themselves, and asks if there's any service that he could perform for them that they would consider to be worthwhile compensation for relinquishing them.
So they ask him to dance with them.
At first he does a double-take, double-checks with them to make sure that he heard them right, and while he emphasizes that he's not refusing to do so, he's still curious as to why they would want him to. They explain to him that, in the olden days, their people would dig the skeletons of their loved ones out of their graves every 3 to 6 months so that they could dance with them, that it was a culturally entrenched custom among them which was supposed to help them cope with loss by remembering the dead at their best and making them come to life again. They add that since their people have all been displaced to other countries and dwindled in numbers over time, no one has come to visit them to dance with them for centuries, and that they resent that people would have thought that their affection could be bought with simple grave goods, when what they really miss most of all is their people's company.
So Volk agrees and he tangos, swings, flamencos and waltzes with skeleton after skeleton, tentatively at first but getting more and more into it as he goes along. He ends up telling even himself that all of a sudden 3 to 6 months doesn't seem like such a short time as he dips one lower to the ground than anyone has any right to - even when they'll have run all out of golden teeth, at that. That is when he notices that the skeletons who had been buried after having suffered from accidents in life, with only one or no bony legs at all to show for it, while they're appreciating the show for what it is, still seem to be missing out on the best part of it, and begins to ask himself what he could do for them to improve their situation, whether or not there would be any crutches or wheelchairs nearby with which to increase their mobility.
The skeletons tell him that since handicapped people used to go to the nearby cathedral to have their conditions removed by miracles performed by the staff-wielding winged snake monks who reside in it, the monks have always been unwilling to part with them, because they've put them all up on the sides of the cathedral hallways as badges of honor and as an ever-lasting testament to the debt that the world owes them for their miracles. They warn him against going there because they're worried that he'll be killed by the monks and that they will lose their dancing partner for the coming years, but he assures them that he can get into the cathedral and get as many of the crutches and wheelchairs out from under their noses as he can get his hands on without having them cause him any trouble for it at all. At first he does manage to sneak in without being detected, but when he finds the corridor in which all the crutches and wheelchairs are lined up from ceiling to floor along the wall, a monk notices him and sounds the alert.
Volk realizes that his time is running out and forgets about the subtle approach altogether, grabbing the crutches and wheelchairs to throw them right outside through the shattering stained glass windows, with some of the skeletons he'd danced with waiting outside to grab them so that they can take them back to the graveyard with them while the wolf uses his claw swipes, pounces, bites, kicks, crutch strikes and disarming sleight of hand to keep the monks occupied as they escape. But while the monks don't find out that the skeletons were the ones working as the wolf's accomplices, they're still very pissed off and hell-bent on revenge toward him for having gotten the better of them. Since they can't figure out where he ran off to, they send their best holy crusader out after him to get back at him.
While he doesn't find Volk, he does find the ghost pirate ship, climbs on board, and questions the pirates to learn that they helped the wolf, which is enough for him to condemn them for having aided and abetted a thieving infidel. The ghost pirates all gather around him and pounce on him, swinging their cutlasses around in wide merciless arcs, but even though the monk's staff goes right through their ghostly bodies, he still manages to expertly deflect all of their attacks with incredible speed and strength. As the pirate ghosts take a step back to consider what angle they should try to approach him from to get through his seemingly impenetrable guard, he intertwines his fingers, lifting his joined index fingers and pinkies as he does so, and with his features twisted by a ruthlessly vengeful expression, utters a short but deafening chant that exorcises all of them out of existence at once, leaving the ship with the pirates' pet mimic's confused and mournful cries the only sound behind him without looking back.
Meanwhile Volk, who's blissfully unaware of what just happened, has turned his attention from the skeletons who he's already dealt with to the situation of the living in the area, which is ruled over by an upper class of a select few vampire bat aristocrats. At first everyone agreed that allowing the vampire bat lords to impose a blood tax on the population in exchange for the population's continued survival was a much better deal for them than the wild, random and deadly vampire attacks of old could have ever possibly been. But the people who the wolf was looking at were pale, lethargic and anemic from blood deficiency, a few were falling down to the ground right in the streets, much too weak to work enough to be able to afford to buy back their own blood, while the vampire bat aristocrats were sitting around in their castle sipping blood in wine glasses from their nicely chilled blood cellars, bathing in their blood baths and swimming in their blood pools.
Most of the skeletons who already helped the wolf at the cathedral earlier are content to lie in their graves until the next dance, but the few of them that Volk got wheelchairs and crutches for offer to serve as his accomplices for his next big heist, because they realize that they have a unique advantage to do it over the rest of the population, since they don't even have any blood for the vampires to be able to suck out of them if they end up being caught. So he sneaks into the castle and begins to throw blood containers out of the windows so that the waiting handicapped skeletons can grab them on their way down and bring them back to the living population for the transfusions that most of them desperately need. He's already managed to do so with quite a bit of it when the vampire bat aristocrats find him, but as he runs away from them and is about to make it out the door, the winged snake crusader who exorcised the pirate ghosts on the ship is standing in the castle doorway, having finally tracked the wolf down where he's caught between a rock and a hard place.
The crusading monk tells Volk right off that he made sure all his friends would make it to the afterlife, just to lower his emotional threshold, and he can tell that it works when the wolf howls "There IS no afterlife, you heartless bastard!" But the monk tells him that he's beneath his notice now that he's found this much larger den of vile undeath and iniquity to deal with first, and before the wolf can react, the winged snake runs past him and begins to cut a swath through the vampire bat aristocrats, mowing them down one after the other with stakes, crosses, garlic and holy water as Volk watches his former pursuers die in gaping horror. He feels conflicted about it, because they were just about to catch him and probably impose a very severe tax on him just a moment before, but in his heart, the wolf realizes that he just doesn't believe in killing undead, no matter what they've done or could have done to him.
So his final showdown ends up taking place in the castle, not against the vampire bat aristocrats as he'd originally thought, but pitting his strength, skills and instinct against the monk's staff, tail whips, stakes, crosses and flying ability. When Volk finally manages to knock him unconscious and to tie his hands behind his back, the vampire bat aristocrats are initially unsure of how to react, but they at least offer to let him get away with his life in spite of having stolen from them for having saved their lives. He replies that this isn't going to be sufficient payback for him, because what he really wants them to do is to share all of the extra blood that they don't need to drink to cling to undeath with the rest of the population.
"Because if you don't, there's a whole cathedral of these guys that's going to hear alll about you, and about this little racket you've got going on right here... Is that something you really want to have to deal with, m'lords?"