Nevin closed the book with a snap, staring at it in shock. This was… Exactly as he had feared it would be. The log of a madman who was performing necromantic experiments. Nevin had nothing against the art personally - he thought it would be rather hypocrite of him if he did - but what appalled him was the lengths the man had gone to.
Human experimentation. Worse, he had sacrificed one of his own companions, the man who guided him in necromancy, to do it! That was unbelievable - to kill one of your companions simply because you were doing an experiment? If Nevin didn't already know the depths that people could sink to, this might have stunned him more. As it was though, it just disgusted him.
There was something else there, too. Something that was in that almost entry was bothering Nevin, but he couldn't place what it was or why he was perturbed. Unsure of why he was unsettled - aside from hey, a guy cut up someone who probably thought of him as a friend - the alchemist began taking down other journals, flicking through them. His dark red eyes scanned back and forth along the pages, quickly taking in the information.
These texts were much drier and had none of the personal ramblings that the first one had had. They were almost clinical in their discussions of dissections and the attempts at revivification that the writer was performing on a regular basis. The writer seemed to be primarily focusing on restoring the lungs to life - but the necromantic arts were rarely that precise. Somewhere along the way there was a set of notes dealing with bringing oneself back to life after death, with ‘Lich’ written several times in a hasty scrawl before being crossed out.
Nevin shuddered - Liches were destructive forces. Something about crossing the gap between life and unlife seemed to unhinge them, and they almost all ended up bent on creating empires for themselves, or on becoming living nightmares, blights upon the world. Thankfully whoever was working here had decided against going down that route from what he could find.
Then he found the section in one, near the end, that made him pause. ‘I need to replace my staff. They're growing too suspicious. Cheap alternative - zombies. I now have the knowledge of how to create them, cobbled together from my experiments on bringing lungs back. Kill servants, make them into zombies. Simple. Then they can't judge me any more, can't see my spiral into worse health. Rikson first, I can attempt to use his lungs,and he has outlived his usefulness to me.’
Nevin closed the book with a snap and threw it back onto the shelf, suppressing a shudder as he turned around to look at the three tables with black sheets draped across the prone figures on top. He took a step closer, reaching out to examine one, and peeled the sheet away to reveal a mottled corpse, of a rather rotund man. The alchemist looked down at the sheet in his hand - the corpse was not as decayed as it should have been after years, and -
Oh dear Crimson. Those were necromantic runes on the sheet. Nevin’s eyes shot back to the cadaver in time to see its eyelids shoot open, revealing hollow sockets that glowed with pinpricks of a baleful light. The corpse tried to get up - the zombie tried to get up - and fell off the table. This would have reassured Nevin, if in its fall it hadn't ripped another sheet off of another corpse, revealing a middle aged woman with hair hanging in limp strands. This corpse too awoke, but when she stood up, her movements were more fluid than the first’s. Those hateful eyes locked onto Nevin, and a terrible moan rasped out of its lips as it began to move towards him.
