Necromancy
Often considered a fate worse than death, undeath is the resulting state of a soul being dragged back into its lifeless body after it had already been untethered from it. The origins of Undeath can be traced all the way back to the source of all evil itself: The Cosmos, from which its countless Demonic hordes came upon Auria with the intent of striking down mortals and sowing chaos in the fabric of an ordered reality. Though for the most part it remained as such, a select few Demons would find a way to further the ideals of the Cosmos by striking at the fine cycle of life and death itself, using Necromancy magic to pull the souls of those they kill back into their bodies to turn them into the undead.
When Voi'Runil became corrupted by the Cosmos, the Veryn were created to directly combat it there and to act as its jailers. Unfortunately some Veryn would not be able to resist the sweet whispers of power coming from the source of chaos and would ultimately fall prey to its influence. These Veryn would stray from their true purpose to spread uncertainty and destruction among mortal numbers, making use of Necromancy to create armies of undead to challenge the mortals. The most prominent of such cases would come from early Luxfordia where the Human King Vandrash Aspectum Luxford and those that resided in his closed-off castle were slain one by one by these rebel Veryn and raised into undeath using Necromancy, Vandrash ultimately becoming the Phantom King, a Lich-like being who sits atop his throne to this day.
When the art of Magic became clear to Mortalkind, it would not come as a surprise that some of them would seek power in the darkest corners of existence and in turn find themselves practicing the powers of Necromancy itself. Seeing the art as worshiping the dark forces that plague mortalkind since the dawn of time, most nations look down upon Necromancers and their magic and act with hostility towards them.
Technicalities
Necromancy fixates upon the manipulation of the cycle of life and death for selfish gain or glory. The most common use of Necromancy is the aforementioned raising of the dead which is done by pulling a soul back into its original body to give it a new falsified life which the Necromancer can then bind to his or her control, though the quality of a raised corpse varies based on not only the skill of the caster but also how long a soul has been distanced from its body, with higher levels of skill and experienced needed to detect and pull the correct soul from the Afterworld if it has already made its way there.
A key component in Necromancy is the soul of the being the caster wishes to raise. In Auria, and most likely other galaxies as well, a Soul is a condensed force of Ether that effectively powers a body and gives it life. Souls can vary greatly based on what deeds they have done and how experienced they have become. Normally in the cycle of life and death, a soul begins a journey to the Afterworld following the death of its body to be split into two halves by Perisha, the Goddess of Death. One half becomes the Spirit of the person who the soul represented, the deeds they had done and the personality and memories they held which holds a great amount of Etheric value which would be allowed to reside in the Afterworld for eternal rest, their being granting sustenance to the realm so long as they exist there. The other half become a blank soul, an empty case some would describe, that returns to Rengrown, the God of Life, to be used to encase a new Soul inside. Necromancy disrupts this cycle by pulling a soul back into its body before it could reach the Afterworld, if it is a recently deceased, or from the Afterworld after it had already been judged and harvested by Perisha, which requires the Necromancer to create a blank soul for it to be encased within.
Both novice Necromancers and expert Necromancers make use of a unique art which creates blank souls to inhabit bodies which can be used without pulling a preexisting soul from its rest, though using blank souls like this results in less effective and shorter-lived undead over those with valuable souls stored within. Expert Necromancers use the art of blank souls to create a swarm of undead fast, often using really old and decayed bodies which do not hold any importance.
