The Necromancer's Array Ch1
It's just another Tuesday and I'm about to attempt my nineteenth experiment. The Queen (my mother) is watching today. She tries to be supportive, but can't fully hide her discomfort.
"The royal wizard can teach you how to summon a fireball," she offers with a hint of pleading.
I smile and shrug. There's no prophecy to fulfill, no plague to cure, no kingdom-ending crisis to overcome. I just want to reanimate this corpse out of personal curiosity.
Ever since I was a little child, the priests in our castle taught me the soul leaves the body upon death and can't be returned. They then proceeded to blabber about virtue and the need to donate gold to the church without taxing it, but I only focused on the soul. What does the soul do in the body? If the soul can leave the body, where is it stored? Once the it leaves that container, can it be filled with something else?
My first experiments were messy. I thought the soul might be stored in the stomach, so I engraved a kinetic spell there hoping I can control the body and make it move. After activating the spell, the muscles contracted and pumped acid all over myself. Over the following ten experiments, I learned the body is a complex system of interconnected parts individually controlling all of them would be an overwhelming task. There as also the more urgent issue of the meat rotting and smelling worse.
From there, I decided to abandon the organs - and any investigation in souls- entirely. Instead, I turned to bones. It is easier to visualize movement and bones have a strong ritualistic symbolism which somehow makes them perfect for binding spells. I even tried to do the same on a wooden doll but the spells would dissipate after a while. Bones, it seemed, were the answer.
This time, I etched an intricate magical circuit into the skeleton, running along every bone. The skull now sported a single hollow glass eye in its left socketāmy latest innovation. I layered infinitely thin mana barriers inside the eye, designed to refract, block and combine light until it reached a receptive spell at the base. This spell would map specific light patterns to commands, allowing the skeleton to āseeā and respond.
Crafting and inscribing magic has a conscious and subconscious aspect. For the mana layers, I let my instincts determine the layout instead of trying design each one. It was still painstaking work, I wonder if there is a better way to do it in the future.
I took a deep breath and began the incantation. A low buzzing sound filled the room as my magical energy surged through the circuit. The bones started rattling. The Queen lifted her eyebrow but said nothing. Even though it was a routine experiment, I started feeling tense.
Finally, the skeleton sat up and moved it's head. It scanned the room and immediately fixed its glass eye on me. It would follow me with its dead gaze whenever I movedāthe only command I had managed to encode in the bone circuit.
1. Sit
2. rotate head until you see me [light pattern]
3. hold [light pattern] in the middle of your gaze
Success.
The skeleton tracked me with its unblinking eye while I jotted down the details in my journal.
"Experiment #19 with eye system successful," I wrote. "The mana layers could be more efficient, but it works for one concept at a time. Head rotation functional. Should limit range of motion next time. Rotating head past shoulder line does not look very natural."
The skeleton had once been an old knight who had passed away peacefully in retirement. He had no family and told me he wouldn't mind if I used his body, provided the priests buried him first. I completely forgot his name. I decided to give him a new name in his new service. With his single eye, what else could I call him but Sir Eye?