Raised Corpses

Overview

Necromancy does not bring back the dead. It works with what death leaves: the body, its stored motion, its habits. A raised corpse is a dead body given enough temporary structure and direction to move under orders: the plague worker's bier-servant, the ossuary's domestic dead, a column of the fallen hauling the wounded behind a gate, a single severed hand turning pages. Nothing in it is alive and no one in it is awake. It is a tool made of a person, and that is why some peoples use it gladly and others forbid it.

Appearance

A raised corpse looks like what it is: a dead body in the state the body is in. The newly dead are pale and slack-faced, the lips grey, the eyes half shut or fixed; old bones are yellow and bound with cord or wire. All move with the same fault. The walk is level and slow, the feet set flat, the arms swinging a beat late; the head does not turn to look but faces where the order points. Hands grip coarsely and let go all at once. A corpse makes no voice, only the creak of stiff joints, the scuff of feet, and the wet sounds a body makes when it bends.

Habitat and Range

They are made, used, and laid down where necromancers work: in plague trenches, on battlefields at the end of a fight, in mortuaries and city colleges, and in ossuary monasteries whose lower halls are kept by hereditary corpse-servants. At the Blood River necromancy is possible but risky, since the river may claim the reanimated.

Behaviour and Temperament

A raised corpse has no temperament. It does what it was told, as simply as it was told, until the order or the binding runs out: carry this, walk there, tend these lamps. It has no initiative, does no fine work, and cannot speak. The newly dead obey better than old skeletons. A corpse given too many tasks drifts: it begins to imitate the life it no longer has, opening a door it has no reason to open or sitting at a table, and those who see it rarely forget it.

Abilities

Raised corpses differ by the working. A Wakeful Bier walks one corpse under simple orders for a short while or a day's labour. A Last March moves dozens at once, briefly, and collapses if the bodies are too damaged. A House of Still Servants keeps a fixed set of domestic dead at narrow work for years with daily upkeep, and a Borrowed Hand wakes a single limb. Sanctified light and invocation break the bindings.

Uses and Dangers

Raised corpses carry the contaminated dead without exposing the living, haul the wounded off a field, and keep crypt halls clean. The dangers are collapse and misuse: a command that fails drops its corpses where they stand, careless work agitates the remnants of the dead (see Hostile Remnants), and the same craft that carries plague dead can be turned on the living. A related deception in Blood Magic forces warmth and pulse into a dead ruler for one last appearance; it is no resurrection either.

Lore and Belief

Where necromancy is a sacred funerary art, a corpse-servant consented to by its own order is a gift the dead give the living, and the ossuary monks honour theirs by name. Where it is a labour system it is simply work; where it is a crime, any walking dead body is desecration, and some societies forbid corpse animation outright. Many believe a raised corpse holds its owner's ghost, trapped and suffering. It does not, but careless raising does stir the dead's lingering traces, which is why the decent necromancer quiets the grave afterwards.

Battle tales tell of a siege where a necromancer raised the defenders' own dead against their walls, and of the garrison that sang the names of the dead from the parapets until the corpses stopped climbing.

Where It Appears

• Necromancy
• Sanctified Magic
• Blood Magic
• Dark Magic
• Biological Affinity
• The Blood River