>>6118607You find a problem, Phridon.
The problem is your fellow iconotheurges.
They're collectively up to no good.
>>6118685>>6118724Icarus has busied himself with the fallen Windsworn. Most of them were taken off of the field and others have been buried beneath crystal growths. We were going to hold funeral arrangements for the five or so Windsworn dead left on the field available to us, but two of them have been turned to bits as stray iconotheurgic energy overloads the squishy meat and a third one is currently lying slice half open on a ward draw in its blood (purer resonance) with jagged shards of half-active wrackslivers hammered into auspicious points on their body (theoretically sound deep-binding Junctures, but Icarus seems to have missed two of the Open Gates and destroyed a third by slamming a stud of wrack crystal through it, though the carefully inserted rods that connect to the shoulderblades is fine, precise work).
It's going to make funeral arrangements a little more difficult, though funeral arrangements might have to wait anyway. In an auspicious display of ambition, Icarus has performed a Rat Crime (against the body), a Hound Crime (against loyalty) and a Raven Crime (against Will) all at once, which in distant Pyther would invoke censure from the curious law enforcement organs of that hallowed, holy city but out here in the Leviathan Sea has mostly meant his fellow warding specialists have been giving him plenty of space to work.
Look, we've all re-animated a body or eight in our time. Making animant puppets is the first thing any animist does. Usually a beloved pet that died too early or a little humanoid figure that serves as a useful reservoir of soulstuff.
That's how you learn the truth of the law. Bound by the Flesh, but free in the Soul.
Meat-puppets never last long. The material is too porous, the structures to loose, the whole thing is under constant unending entropic assault from without and within, joints stiffening, blood coagulating, insects and worse thing turning the very material you are working on into their own food source. You try to imbue Motility into failing heap of decaying matter but unless you're sourcing human grade soulstuff the whole thing has layered muscle memory that wars with your Engravings.
Most animists graduate to using proper materials quick. Clay or other earth. Terrene is reliant and resilient. Fire, from the high Empyreal is easy to shape. Metal is rigid and holds a form and fears neither the sting of bacteria or the gradual destruction from thermal irregularities.
But meat? Meat is so . . . gauche. It's porous, leaky, squishy matter to work with.
Bet half the reason he's smeared two corpses all over the fields is he tried to get them to stand up under their own power, the bindings took fine, but the impulse delay of having to send signals through dead flesh made the things tear themselves apart as they stood up . . .
