Necromancy is such a misunderstood art.
Personally I blame the media. They’re obsessed with reporting bad news; they never give people the right idea about all the things we have achieved. Turn on any of these crap TV channels nowadays and all you get are zombies, virgin sacrifices, vampiric killing sprees and the walking undead. It genuinely makes me angry whenever I see necromancers portrayed in popular culture as cowardly, bloodthirsty or with a funny limp, as if ligature failure is something to be mocked! In point of fact the training is extremely long and taxing, and most necromancers I personally know–and I like to keep my finger on the pulse–are very hard-working individuals with an advanced understanding of organic chemistry. Decay is important. Death is important! Society needs undertakers and butchers and men who pull the guts out from fish, and in the same way I believe society needs its necromancers, to study the mystical aspects of decay and death. Because, frankly, this is a shockingly underfunded area of research, and someone needs to take responsibility for it.
Naturally, in such a poorly regulated area, accidents do happen, and I’m not pretending they don’t. But consider the sacrifices we have to make in order to achieve results! I’ve been practising necromancy for a hundred and ten years and I’m not even eligible for a pension. Benefit fraud, they said down the local office. Benefit fraud! I had to get the birth certificate of a younger man to avoid the authorities, and keep his head in my freezer so that when they asked awkward questions I could just whip it out and pop a fifty-pence piece under the tongue and peel off the masking tape from the eyes and get it to…
Well, never mind what I got it to do, but you have to remember! With a severed head in the freezer, that’s no frozen peas in your diet. You’re not keeping ice cream, there’s no handy loaf of bread to come back to after a long holiday in hot weather. And of course there’s the odours. I have such trouble keeping up appearances. Dinner parties have become impossible. Ever since I used the bile of the basilisk to slow my metabolic rates I’ve had fantastic bone density but a terrible problem with these pustules underneath the crook of my…
What I’m saying is, it’s hard to be a necromancer.
People never think these things through.