Written for "Journal of Ancient History" by Semer Kaah-Shev, translated by Illia Kamyshin

Preface

Necromancy was always regarded as a respected school of arcane study, accepted by advanced cultures and many archaic groups. However, to understand its development, one must look to a time long before the magic was even discovered: to the origin of the concept of death itself. The cognitive capacity for sapient societies to personify their own mortality emerged far earlier than any arcane art.

Death, as a principle, preyed upon the world from its very beginning, an ever-present threat that holds a supreme, unassailable position in the sapient psyche. Even deities must contend with it, for its domain usually lies beyond the boundaries of any comprehensible model. One cannot escape the idea of Death, and even immortal beings must exist under the oppression of its eventual, if distant, possibility. This inevitability is grimly illustrated by the "Infinite Monkey Theorem," which, in one formulation, states that an abstract device generating random sequences for an unlimited time will eventually produce any predetermined text. From a probabilistic standpoint, this means the likelihood of any event, no matter how improbable, approaches unity as time tends towards infinity. Applied to existence, this suggests that even for an immortal, the unique, improbable event that could cause their cessation will "sooner or later" occur.

To contend with this burdensome knowledge, the first sapient peoples developed sophisticated cultural frameworks to distort the reality in their favour. They assigned Death personified traits, fooling themselves into believing it could be defined, apprehended, or even negotiated with. They imagined realms for the deceased and crafted reasons for their departure. Dogmas were constructed around the end of life, attempting to structure it to fit the logic of a comprehensible reality. These structures, given their irrational and superstitious beginnings, were often inherently contradictory and varied, differing not only between distant cultures but even within a single ethnic group. A brief survey of the thanatological beliefs of early dominant cultures illustrates this profound diversity.

Death and afterlife beliefs before Necromancy

The Aro humans are a group so diverse and conflicting that the term "meta-ethnicity" was invented to describe them. While beliefs sprawled widely, a core set of ideas remained relatively stable. These humans typically believed in many gods; Death, curiously, was often among the less revered of the key gods, serving as a mere functionary -- a delivery service for mortal souls bound for divine realms. For instance, the early Hadaganians, heavily influenced by southern Aro tribes, believed in Yerleg. This entity was depicted as an infernal being sent by the gods of the Firmament to collect the dead. If the deceased was faithful, their soul ascended. However, Yerleg was seen as flawed and corruptible; he could be tricked, negotiated with, or even worked for to "earn" access to the Firmament. In contrast, the beliefs of the Kanians (and thus the pre-exile Hadaganians) were far more pessimistic. Their figure of Death was ultimately detached from "humanness" -- a silent, indifferent psychopomp. It possessed no name, gender, or realm, its sole mission being to "reap" lives and guide souls to either a world of goodness or a world of misery, standing entirely outside any godly hierarchy.

In stark contrast to the Aro, the humans of the Džun Empire maintained a complex religious system where Death was a central figure, revered above most others. Džuns believed each individual possessed at least two Sparks, each facing a different destiny upon the body's demise. Their god of Death, Mictlan, had a wife, and together they ruled an underworld realm of Mictlan, where most souls were tortured for eight Džunic years before vanishing into eternal oblivion. This grim worldview was typical for a warlike nation like the Džuns, and their worship involved bloody rituals and cannibalism. It is notable that the lizardfolk, long enslaved by the Džun Empire, are the only known people in Sarnout who carry the true remnants of the old Džunic religion.

Orcish beliefs, which remained preserved to this day, adhere to a complex pagan system of White and Black spirits. For the orcs, Death was not a single being but the consequence of intricate divine interventions. Death could be summoned as a weapon by an enemy shaman, or bestowed as a curse on an entire family or clan, or be the tricks of detrimental spirits. It could be warded off, at least for a time, and some shamans even claimed immortality, asserting that their soul would return to inhabit another mortal, an object, or become a spirit itself.

The elves never really believed in Death as an unstoppable, universal force to be feared and reckoned with. They believed in reincarnation and that death was not an end, but merely a beginning. In death, which they viewed as a natural, beautiful stage of life, one was blessed to rejoin the Light of Genesis that encompasses all Being, there to witness the beauty of true creation.

Finally, we come to the humans of Hikut. In our old world, Death was the central figure. Nih was her name, and she underwent a series of drastic metamorphoses in our theology. At first, she was a saviour god who had chosen to die for our flawed being, only to rise again as an undead deity, spurned by dei otiosi and imprisoned in her own realm of souls. She could confer upon her devotees the gift of immortality, and the faithful saw in Death a promise of eternity. But then came the Great Extinction of the Džun Empire. This event shocked our civilisation to its core. We began to fear Death. From that moment, our theology shifted: Death now meant Oblivion for everyone. In the face of this absolute and inescapable oblivion, life itself lost all meaning.

The advent of Necromancy

These varied theologies all shared a foundation of speculation, attempts to describe the unknown and define the unfathomable. The advent of necromancy shattered this paradigm. The art provided empirical, replicable evidence that the boundary of death was mutable; it proved the soul and body were separate, tangible components to be manipulated. Death, as a concept, was thus dragged from abstract philosophy into applied science.

The elves were first in Sarnout to discover and master sorcery. However, the knowledge of necromancy created a profound philosophical conflict. The elves' core belief was in reincarnation and the soul's natural, beautiful journey back to the Light of Genesis; therefore, the practical use of necromancy to bind a soul was seen as the "foulest blasphemy" and an "act of ultimate spiritual cruelty". This absolute taboo extended to the reanimation of any elfin body. While animating the corpses of other races was still considered a grotesque violation, some elfin mages justified the creation of such thralls as a distasteful, if practical, tool. For them, it was a dangerous and taboo field of academic study. Nevertheless, it was this formidable knowledge that they, as mentors, passed on to their pupils, the Džun.

For the Džun, the adoption of necromancy was a societal cataclysm. While their deep reverence for Mictlan and existing bloody rituals provided fertile ground for the art, this confirmation of priestly power sparked a massive civil war. The priesthood of Mictlan violently elevated themselves to absolute authority, purging the old order. For the victorious priesthood, reanimation became a sacred honour. The greatest warriors and priests were ritually animated, their bodies serving as eternal, loyal guardians for their ancestral houses and temples.

My people, the Hikut, learned necromancy from elven missionaries. The art initially validated our faith in Nih's promise of immortality. However, the subsequent Curse of Džuns shattered our faith to its very core. This new, profound terror of absolute Oblivion drove us deeper into our faith. We desperately appealed to Nih, using our sacral art of necromancy to find the secret of true immortality. But the art failed us. Theories abounded -- perhaps Nih refused to share the secret, or hated her folk for her own sacrifice, or simply did not wish to be left alone in her realm. Whatever the reason, necromancy provided no answer. It was only after this great failure, having lost faith in magic's promises, that we turned to a new path: the obsession with science and mechanics.

Among the Aro humans, necromancy was initially accepted as a fearful but practical art. A sharp distinction was drawn: animating a soulless corpse was a useful tool, but binding a soul to the body was seen as malevolent witchery and strictly banned. Only after the great schism between Kania and Hadagan did their views diverge dramatically. The Kanians, who viewed their psychopomp as a force of natural order, came to see necromancy as a dangerous, unnatural magic that corrupted the necromancer's own soul; practitioners were feared and often considered madmen. This did not, however, stop Kanian kings from pragmatically using undead in warfare, justifying the reanimation of enemy corpses as a necessary strategy. The Hadaganians, conversely, fully embraced it. Their dogma began as a legalistic loophole: the state only reanimated the flesh, while the soul went with Yerleg, as expected. This later evolved into the belief that their leader, the Great Mage Nezeb, had bargained with Yerleg to "lease" certain souls back, making undead service a state-sanctioned honour.

The advent of the Light and the Gift of Resurrection

The peoples of Sarnout had barely begun to culturally process the implications of necromancy, when a new, far more profound theological crisis emerged. In 911 AGC, the Gift of Tenses shook the world, an event that not only redefined mortality for the living but, as a direct consequence, brought my own long-dead people back from the Oblivion.

Tenses's intervention unleashed the new divine power of the Light, creating a 'clean' path to resurrection via the apparently engineered realm of Purgatory. The taboo against reanimation shattered. If the Light could return a soul to the body, then raising an undead is no longer a spiritual abomination.

This new acceptance varied. The Kanians and elves, while strongly favouring the 'clean' resurrection of the Light, now accepted traditional necromancy as a practical, if distasteful, tool. The Hadaganian Empire, which had long abandoned its old gods for state atheism under Nezeb, institutionalised it. They established the "undead volunteer" corps: a soldier's Spark could remain in Purgatory, accumulating military service, while their unfeeling, tireless body was used as a state-controlled necromantic asset -- expended as cannon fodder in battle, used for dangerous experiments or combat practice, or assigned to tireless labour. Distinct from this, a concept of sentient voluntary undeath also spread, where individuals would choose to be resurrected as thinking undead. This path offered freedom from pain, hunger, and sleep, but at the cost of enduring the flaws of a decaying, unliving body.

Our resurrection, however, brought a profound realisation: we recalled no afterlife. This confirmed our belief that Knowledge and Magic hold power over existence, not faith in gods or invisible realms. Ironically, this return from Oblivion was embraced by most of my people as the successful conclusion to our ancient Hikut quest for immortality. Only a heretical few reject this, believing true immortality is yet to be achieved by perfecting our old master's work, a name with which I will not sully this essay.

The "Gift of Tenses" is therefore a subject of intense academic fascination. Tenses, a mere human mage, supposedly manifested (or perhaps, merely seized control of) an afterlife system in Purgatory, becoming a "divine" engineer. This only proves our core belief: mortality is not a matter of faith, but a tangible system to be studied, engineered, and ultimately, surpassed.

The True Death

But one question remains unanswered. What happens when an individual meets a "True Death"? What lies beyond the End Gates of Purgatory? The faithful will keep inventing new realms. We Arisen, however, know the answer, as we have returned from that very void. There is nothing. The only question that really matters, therefore, is how we, as engineers, can build a better system -- one that has no End Gates at all.

Final words

We have charted our journey from comforting lies to a terrible, empirical truth. The truth, which my people alone have witnessed, is the Void. The "Gift of Tenses" is a magnificent, artificial shield against it, but the "True Death" proves that shield is flawed. We must use this knowledge to become free from the superstitions of the past and unite our minds in one ultimate, rational purpose: to surpass the flawed engineering of the Gift, and engineer a perfect system: one with no End Gates at all.