Second Life

"Reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose."

War often means two things: lots of dead people & disregard for human rights; be it pre-death state or after. And during the Great War, the most violent conflict to this date, this was driven to the extreme. This gave to the rise of necromancy and other generally frowned upon magical techniques, which in turn showed exactly how sinister they can become. The term "second life" was generally used by the military officers of the Empire to address the growing use of corpses as a fuel for various rituals and machines. Thousands of people and their remains were completely lost to these things with no chance of identifying them and giving the remaining relatives some closure after the conflict was over.

Reduce

The less corpses remain lying on the battlefields, the more could the Empire skew the media and news reports about the loses in their favour. While they didn't try to completely hide all the victims, we might never know how many people exactly lost their lives, be it soldiers or civilians. Soldiers were usually the ones who remained lying on the ground, waiting for someone to bury them, while civilians were hidden and used to their very last bits, should they be so unfortunate as to get caught in the crossfire.

Reuse

This is were the necromancy comes in. No matter your specialisation as a mage, should you be conscripted into the army, sooner or later you would be faced with the task of "putting these things to good use, before they stink up the place". Re-animation is a mentally and physically draining ritual with many unforeseen side effects. Many biological components are needed to bring just one single body back to movement. This has driven many magicians to suicide during or after the war. Reused second lifer were used as bait for traps or as a camouflage tactic or generally to confuse the enemies as where the true alive soldiers are hiding and waiting to strike.

Recycle

All the bits and pieces that were no longer useful for any magical contraption were used as a fuel in the more traditional sense. Dried up corpses were a popular way to get the steam engines and trains moving, other remains were used to poison water supplies and other generally nasty things.

Repurpose

The reports of empire soldiers eating their fallen comrades are usually brushed of as sinister rumours, but the desperation of war can be immense.

Type

Biomaterial