>>6118685>>6118724There are *some* benefits to working with flesh, which is probably why Animists keep trying. Bones are precious things. Some say they hold knowledge of your life. The soulstuff that is you seeps into them.
The theoretical idea is that if you nudged it right, the thing that used to be alive would have some of the reflexes still in it as it stands under the command of an Animist. You would not need to bind knowledge of how to fight, move, engage, interact, what affordances physics allow, imagine the savings in wards and concentration and focus, if all such things came with the horror you wrought.
The problem is that warding and binding bones and flesh and blood and all that is so terrible fragile. And once the thing thats warded degrades, the whole thing degrades. You carefully carve a sigil of command into the bones of your defeated enemies after cutting open their ribcage, they stand up, you have yourself a nice ready made army to take on the world and then four steps later they fall over because the ward grew a little hot, the bone started deforming and then the whole thing lost power and started going aberrant on you.
Incarnations bypass some of this because the benign intent of the Icon channeled into the flesh does have some understanding of the world around it. It senses through the corpses senses, it moves as it moves. It is, briefly, bound by it. The enormous power does eventually cause the whole thing to collapse but at its more reliable than fleshworking. And as at the attention of the Icon subsumes the flesh it is conjured into it grows in power. The animants burn brightest towards the end of their life, when they are more flame than flesh.
Could even try to do it with other Icons, but it's been centuries since anyone tried that trick and had it work reliably.
But look, add but a sliver of your own will to the corpse and it -- oh -- no -- that one popped like a burst dam. Hm. Get another one. And a cloth. Icarus needs to wipe his face.
Right, so, add a sliver of your own will to a vessel in better condition than that last poor guy and behold, see, the bones remember! The muscles move! It stands! It's a teetering amalgamation of bad ideas because the muscles are trying to contract without proper coordination from a functioning motor cortex and the metabolic system are not producing the energy products needed to power protein synthesis so the whole thing is actively breaking apart.
Though with the wrack crystals sewn up inside it and a few of the proper prayers, the overflow of random energy from the Other is subdued and it doesn't damage the vessel directly. Definitively lasting longer than the last one. Might be you get a minute out of this one before it falls apart.
So what if I moved *more* of my Will into it, Icarus asks?
Phridon waves it off. No, no, that's another trainee mistake. You end up incorporating *yourself* into a dead corpse? . . .
