>>5210397>>5210390Bodies are merely meat - you could move them for gold, or by simple force. No, what you wish for is the soul, the very spirit. This is an altogether more complex art. If you cared any longer for such things you might think of the horror of it, but you think of nothing but the art, and how you may learn it. You spend weeks more poring over the grimoires of your uncle, but the old fool seems not to have had the mind for so high an art.
The basic concept is simple - beings are infused with an enriched kind of air which bears their spirits. Their souls can be turned, tuned, and played with much as their flesh can be - if only one can break their will first. You experiment with this principle - torturing rats and small birds until they break in terror of you, then commanding them to your will. Men are much harder, with wills much stronger. And, indeed, this toying with the souls of the living is not necromancy, not truly The High Art.
So your experiments continue. You find that, by killing something as you grasp its soul, it is possible to maintain a tether, a binding. It must be tied to some pure object - purified oil or a phial the ash of gravedirt taken from a corpse's mouth, for instance. But once it is so tied, the soul can be, with great difficulty, wrenched back from the hereafter and forced into a body.
Your basement littered now with the twitching, scampering bodies of terrified and increasingly undead rats, you feel you have formed a solid base for this art, but that much more time will be needed. In the meanwhile, there is the matter of the villagers. They visit to ask your advice, or at least they used to, but now they seem increasingly suspicious and fearful of you. There is a darkness about your manor that wards away the simple souls of these rustics.
>What to do with the village?>They are more nuisance than they are worth - exercise your arts and have your undead servants beat them into submission. Kill them or drag them back to be your next subjects - it does not matter to you.>They are your subjects and it is your duty to elevate them from their miserable and pointless lives. Make it clear that they will be protected - even aided in their labours, if only they serve you obediently, and offer tribute in the form of young experiments.>Something else? (Write in?) 
