"I want to say 'understandable' because I've met a lot of excellent people who shared the preference but in fact I've never understood it." He can sleep under approximately any circumstances short of 'actively aflame' but that's not the same as failing to appreciate the luxury of modern mattress technology. 

"A corpse needs no pillow," Grimgnaw says. "And what are we but corpses-in-waiting?"

Shame these people's civilization probably hasn't invented antidepressants. 

"Anything else you choose to be! Personally I choose to be someone who enjoys feather pillows." 

"What a comfortable corpse you will be. I choose to seek perfection, that my end might come once I am worthy of it."

Smirk. "But mostly I mislike feather pillows because dwarven bones are too dense for them to support. We sleep on talc, if we wish to be coddled."

"You're a dwarf? Where's your beard, you carve it off for crimes of being too interesting?" 

"You think that a dwarf with a beard is more interesting?" he wonders. "Should I have an axe? A helm? A fetish-pouch of iron ore?"

They approach the room number on the key.

"Sure. Could never grow one long enough to put beads and braids and things in myself," or more accurately shouldn't, it's manifestly unwise for any of the Roberts Gadling/Gadlen/etcetera to be visually interesting in any way, "but there's a thousand ways to do that and only one way to be clean-shaven, so, more interesting, usually, yeah. Less true of axes, they only really have like half a dozen optimal shapes." 

"The transgression of being a cleanshaven dwarf is minor, but it still amuses me to perform it. And once you have seen a thousand clan-braids, you really have seen them all."

He holds the door open for Hob.

What a fascinatingly horrible guy. 

Into the room goes Hob, taking up a polite ready-when-you-are stance. (This is a duel to the death but it is clearly a duel.) 

Well, he's going to have trouble with that, actually, because as he goes through the door an ice-cold dagger goes through the back of his neck.

rude??? 

Hob has a good enough fortitude save that this only had about a 25% chance of working. Unfortunately, he rolled a 2. 

Down goes Hob. He is very uncomfortably conscious of the fact that he cannot feel any of his limbs. 

Grimgnaw kneels beside him. "Before you die, I will tell you one thing: you were right. Death is slow, sometimes. Like your thief in the night. That is my favorite death, the gentle, agonizing slump into the grave. But sometimes..."

He stands up and stretches. Inhales deeply. Puts his heel on Hob's neck.

"Sometimes, it is very quick."

Crack.

As injuries go, a broken neck is actually a pretty straightforward one to fix. A substantial part of the reason the human body doesn't normally do that is it has a hard time regrowing nerves correctly. Hob's body has an immutable pattern it trends back toward, cell growth neatly shepherded along prelaid grooves in the fabric of causality. Compared to being shot in the head, say, and having to build a whole pile of neurons, this is a cakewalk. 

It's still not instantaneous.

In the meantime, this is a body quite indistinguishable from a corpse; its lungs stutter and stop, its heart hammers out a panicked last-ditch attempt to pump adrenaline into frozen muscles and then slows and stops. And the soul, of course, is temporarily ejected from its housing. 

"The local death gods whose toys you're playing with think I'm out of my mind letting you be like this, you know. You are a delight and I love you but why. You could have made so many different less lethal choices in the last six hours, you know that, right?" 

"Oh, sure, but what is even the point of immortality if not to experience stuff, come on. ... also, hi, I thought you were on vacation." 

"Ah. No. The Reaper didn't lie to you, mind, it's just a matter of complicated jurisdiction that is difficult to explain without saying something more misleading than that, but no. I take one day of arguable working vacation a century and it's not due for a couple years yet." 

"Respectfully, what the fuck?" 

Amiable shrug. "My task is endless and so am I." 

Snort. "Shame I don't remember most of these conversations. The resulting edited speech would probably either have caused Grimgnaw to be my new best friend or hate me somehow even more and either would have been so funny." 

"Yeah, sorry, fundamental limitation of your neurons because you're currently not attached to them." 

"Man speaking of fundamental limitations of things what is going on with the physics on this planet." 

"Actually from a broader perspective your usual planet's physics is way weirder." 

"...terrifying, thanks." 

Sunny smile. "You're welcome! See you again soon, probably, but please try to make it less soon. For your own sake. I know you've told me many times you prefer it to the alternative but you are going to have an absolutely appalling hangover."