#liches

Here's the thing though: Those bodies have been prepared. All of the 'legal' liches we see in game have been stripped of flesh, a process that several folks on Tumblr have pointed out is NOT a quick thing. In the real world you need several hundred dermestid beetles and a period between a few days and a few weeks to clean -A- skull. Boiling a skeleton free of its flesh also takes a couple days (again best case scenario) of slow cooking, and a few more of scrubbing, and soaking in degreasing and bleaching agents to get the clean bone we'd see in game. And that's with your Watcher helpers flaying a lot of the flesh away. I think for the sake of 'eternal' preservation, that corpse NEEDS to be cleaned properly so the human soul isn't being housed in a greasy, shambling heap susceptible to deterioration. I think that's A. Why a lich candidate's soul needs to be so robust. and B. Why Hezenkoss failed.

While all of this flaying, sous-viding, and cleaning is happening, the soul needs to be on standby. You can possibly start the process while the person's alive... but well... they're gonna fucking die at some point ala Saint Bartholomew (which I think is the case because Emmlich mentioned blood in a way that goes beyond a quick slice of the carotid).

So you're talking (best case scenario with magic) MANY MANY HOURS or DAYS of this soul enduring outside the body without heeding the call to the Other Side. That takes discipline and fortitude. Maybe there's a chamber or series of secret wards that keep the soul in a kind of stasis, but its natural inclination once severed from the body is going to be to 'move on'.

I think Hezenkoss A. Didn't have the fortitude for this and B. Maybe didn't have sufficient outside help to prepare her body, so her process had to be aborted. Her soul had to get crammed back in her dead, partially decaying body or risk it shooting off to the Great Beyond. ANYWAYS, THAT'S JUST MY MUSING. (And maybe my Rook's too)