When you die or fall in battle, your character enters a downed state and begins a death timer of 60 seconds. Corpse inventories are available for looting during the downed state.
How it works
Death does not reset your character. While the timer runs your body stays where it fell, and anyone who reaches it can loot your corpse, worn equipment included. When the timer completes, your inventory and the gold you were carrying are gone, and you wake in a roughspun tunic and rags, temporarily debuffed.
You wake at one of the Halls of the Dead, catacombs, Houses of Arkay or graveyards of Skyrim. The pool is ranked by distance from where you fell and drawn from the far half of that ranking, so you come back a long way from the thing that killed you.
Gold in a bank account or a treasury is untouched by any of this (see The Public Bank). Stored chests, property, horses and written works persist as well (see Character and Inventory Persistence).
If you carry an active blessing from one of the Divines, the same countdown returns you to that Divine's temple sanctuary instead of a Hall of the Dead. Priests subscribe to vigil alerts for fallen worshippers with /temple duty, and the priesthood medic service that lets a priest reach you before the countdown ends is being built on that subscription (see Civic Factions: Temples and Stables).
Permadeath is separate from ordinary death. When a character falls for the last time their page locks, eulogies can be written, and the Annals keeps the record.
Commands
/blessing shows your current Divine blessing and the time remaining on it./respawn returns you through the death respawn flow, or through the temple sanctuary flow when you are blessed./kill enters the death countdown when your character is stuck and there is no other way out.
/respawn and /kill are handled by your client rather than the chat server.
