Embalmus - Undead Servants, Undead Family
The Origins of Embalmus in Galeria
Embalmus is an old tradition originating in the Galerian Empire that was created in response to worsening ecological conditions and increased risk of magical reanimation following the appearance of the Scar. As is known, the Scar is a large landmark stretching across the northern border of the Galerian Empire, chracterized by the area it encompasses being suffused with a powerful curse which causes all dead material to magically reanimate. This effect also caused billowing clouds of poisonous dust originating from undead creatures to be blown out of the Scar into adjacent regions by natural wind patterns, which was the source of many famines and disease outbreaks. The Scar also has a lesser magical effect on neighboring regions which causes a much greater risk of individuals spontaneously reanimating or manifesting as ghosts or other undead following death, with the chances of which significantly increasing if an individual is not properly buried or if the individual died in violent conditions. The traditional Galerian tradition of burning their dead in pyres was insufficient at preventing undead outbreaks, and traditional ground burials would often result in Revenents emerging from their graves and terrorizing local populaces. Compounded with a need for a larger workforce to produce more food on the increasingly poisoned ground, Embalmus was developed, solving both the crises of undead outbreaks and the food shortage.
The origins of Embalmus are shrouded in secrecy, and I found a great deal of pushback when attempting to question Empire officials, members of the Church of Ildeas, or Empire-sanctioned necromancers on the subject. The common concensus on how the process of Embalmus originated is that through a great deal of faith and ingenuity by court mages, the process of Embalmus was created to connect families to their dead loved ones and to deliver the suffering nation from the current food crisis. I have found many inconsistencies with this narrative through my investigation. For one, there are no records I could find suggesting any large-scale research and development project on the creation of undead servants. The magic itself appeared without warning and immediately drew large levels of public scrutiny and a certain level of revolt due to the practice's infringing on Galeria's traditions. Despite the public discontent with Embalmus seeming to have quickly been approaching a breaking point at the time of it's introduction, all records of this opposition suddenly disappeared from records following a certain day, and the public became entirely complacent and endearing of the practice following this.
These inconsistencies bring me to believe that there is a certain connection with Embalmus and the Church of Ildeas, and that a certain degree of widespread use of enchantment magic or even divine intervention may be responsible for the public becoming so quickly acclimated to this new practice. My investigation on this subject is ongoing.
Aquisition and Preparation of Bodies
When an individual with known relatives passes away, their body will be brought to a local morgue for initial preparation. For families wishing for a chance to grieve their lost family member, they can pay a small fee to the morgue to hold a service for the deceased individual, in which the body will be cleaned, sanitized, and the face repaired if necessary (or possible). After the visitation period, an iron mask will be placed on the body's face and a priest of Ildeas will give a brief blessing to the deceased individual's soul, and the body will be carried away by the clergy to be prepared for the process of Embalmus. The family must pay for the process of Embalmus if they wish to recieve the deceased back, but they can also chose to not pay for the process, and instead donate the family member's body to the church. Regardless of the family's final decision, Embalmus of the body is absolutely mandatory and refusal to turn over a body to the church is severely punishable.
The actual process of Embalmus differs greatly from what public perception of the process is suggested to be. According to public information, the body is meticulously embalmed by first removing all innards and the brain, which is ritually and magically burned to ensure the individual's soul passes to the afterlife with ease. The rest of the skin, muscle, and other viscera are then digested by burying the body in a thin layer of soil and allowing reaper moth larvea (reaper moths are an insect of great religious importance to the Church of Ildeas) to consume the flesh. This stage of preparation typically takes 3-4 weeks. The removal of all possibly rotting material is done for sanitary purposes, for obvious reasons.
After this period, the skeleton is extracted from the soil and cleaned, and the bones are thatched together and then packed with clay, avoiding the joints, and then wrapped in hundreds of meters of cloth to provide the body rudimentary protection and to obscure the fact that the undead servant does not have flesh of any sort. Clothes and a robe will also be stitched onto the servant's body. Clay is packed onto the face and then a ritual mask, either carved from wood or cast from metal- depending on what the family paying for the service can afford- will be coated on the inside with an adhesive and placed on the deceased peron's face. This mask is a mass-produced magical artifact capable of animating the deceased body, and if removed or significantly damaged, causes the body to immediately de-animate. The inside of the mask is inscribed with detailed runes which will provide rigid guidelines for approved actions the servant can take, both providing limitations on its physical abilities and also possibly enabling the servant to engage in more complicated jobs or activities. The cheapest wooden masks will produce a servant that can only barely pull it's own weight, and is only capable of repeatedly performing verbally assigned tasks with acceptable efficacy. More expensive masks take longer to produce and can be made from anything from brass, silver, aluminum, or gold. The most expensive masks enable servants to engage in complex tasks, come up with creative solutions to problems without input from a living master, and are exceptionally agile with equally impressive strength and endurance.
In my personal experience, I was able to obverve the afformented process, but I have also obverved that in many cases this process is completely forgone in favor of a much more crude method. As might be expected, putting as much care described before into each and every body would become extremely resource-intensive, so for poorer individuals who can't afford to pay for higher-grade masks, a cheap and dirty Embalmus process is employed instead. Unbenownst (or unacknowledged) by the public, empire-sancitoned necromancers are extensively employed in the process of Embalmus. Bodies will be brought to secret "factories" where necromancers will raise the bodies as undead en-mass, give each zombie a carving knife, and then ferry them into individual rooms. The necromancers will measure the body's height and note any abnormalities on the zombie's skeleton, and then instruct these undead to cut away at their bodies unti nothing but bone remains. The zombies are left to cut away at themselves for around 8 hours, before the necromancers collect them. Often times zombies will accidentaly kill themselves in the process of removing their own flesh as a result of breaking too much of the underlying bone. Rather than repairing these bodies and then reanimating them again, the necromancers will discard these bodies, and they will be dumped in a mass grave, along with the rest of the flesh these zombies cut from their bodies.
The zombies that manage to remove their flesh successfully will be ferried to a storage chamber, instructed to lie down, and then systematically de-animated through radiant spells to ensure that the zombies don't go berserk as a result of not being constantly enchanted by a necromancer master. Common maggots are spread across the bodies of the storage room and left to sit for 3-4 weeks to clean the bodies of any remaining filth. After this necromancers will once again reanimate the bodies, and dozens of previously completed embalmed servants will proceed to clean the bodies of any remaining residue, pack them with clay, wrap them in cloth coated in adhesive, then stitch clothing onto the completed servant. Finally, the necromancers place the masks on each body, magically binding the servant to the instructions of the mask provided.
About 20-30% of bodies are discarded for a variety of reasons during this process. The most common cause is zombies causing too much damage to themselves in the process of removing their flesh, but often times bodies are immediately discarded due to skeletal defects that would otherwise inhibit the servant's ability to work. On certain occassions, the lingering curse of the Scar will cause bodies currently fallowing or bodies buried in mass graves to spontaneously reanimate in large numbers, which requires the concentrated effort of all necromancers and undead servants present to subdue these outbreaks. The risk of these outbreaks is considered an acceptable risk in exchange for the production of more servants, and these production facilities are built in mind specifically to prevent such outbreaks from getting out of hand.
Most families will not recieve their actual family members back after they have undergone Embalmus. Bodies are organized by height and frame rather than identity due to the sheer volume of bodies that flows through these facilities, so the service that these families pay for often ends up being nothing more than payment for the delivery of a random servant who's true identity was lost when they were commanded to carve off their own face. In the case of nobles, they are more often aware of the actual nature of Embalmus, and are capable of paying for the legitimate, clean version of this practice and will recieve their deceased back clad in higher-quality fabrics and a metal mask to boot.
Risks and Controversy of Embalmus
As I outlined in the previous section, Embalmus comes with the great risk of triggering a mass undead outbreak in the facilities where it takes place. While these facilities are veritable prison fortresses for any undead that might manifest there, a single moment of weakness or complacency could result in catastrophic loss of life in both the facility and the surrounding regions. Another risk is the failure of the magical masks that subdue these undead servants. Undead creatures are cursed to be perpetually opposed to all life, and even with the restricting power of magic items to prevent these undead from taking such hostile actions, the impulses still exist. While I have not found any evidence of these undead servants ever managing to break their enchantments and go berserk, it is not a particularly uncommon occurrance for individuals to die under mysterious circumstances at the same time as the retiring of their servants, and the context behind these deaths are always shrowded in misinformation and secrecy. The Church of Ildeas and the Galirean Empire has a lot to gain by maintaining this dangerous practice, and they have deemed avoidable deaths as a result of faulty products to be an acceptable cost.
Another issue is the inability of most families to pay for Embalmus. While a family member being able to serve the church of Ildeas is considered an honor, Embalmus is more commonly touted as a way for families to recover both emotionally and financially from the death of their family member. Despite this, upwards of 40-50% of families are either unable to pay for the cheapest cost of the service, or are forced to sell their servant in public markets or to the Church of Ildeas within the first year of recieving them to avoid poverty. These servants are then brought to work in the most dangerous jobs, in unstable mineshafts, ambitious construction projects, or other dangerous workplaces. While the export of undead servants is strictly illegal, some empire officials have been accused of being involved with attempts to smuggle these servants out of the country to line their own pockets. Overall, the way the economy of Galirea evolved around its undead workforce seems to have completely invalidated the original goal of providing support for poorer families, who are often forced to sell of their servants just to make ends meet.
I cannot personally attest to the most outlandish rumors of undead servants being utilized in experimental combat units, or of of people being captured and killed for the sole purpose of creating more undead servants, but given the dirty method most Embalmus is conducted, there would be little to no way of stopping bad actors from doing this. The black market for undead servants in Galirea is lucrative, and if any unsavory groups managed to crack the magic behind Emblamus there would be no stopping them from using the process to secretly dispose of their enemies and then make profit off of their corpses. In any case, regardless of the benifits Embalmus has had for Galirea's workforce, the magic used is dangerous at best and the practice itself invites far too much abuse of the recently deceased to be considered ethical on a large scale.
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