The Price of Necromancy
Every necromantic spell requires damaging the caster's geomantic interface and tapping their necromantic core. The geomantic interface is responsible for the immortality that the land gods maintain for every individual. Damaging the interface in order to cast from the necromantic core induces decay, which is the primary price of necromantic spells. Necromancers eventually stop healing correctly, and even begin to age and die!
Does the price of necromancy still apply to Sacred Necromancy?
Yes, it does. In fact, it is the price of necromancy that must be paid by reproducing couples. Not only do necromancers who grant fertility blessings advance their own slide towards undeath, the heavy price that is paid to avert universal infertility is a form of necromantic price. (See Universal Infertility & How Reproduction Proceeds Regardless)Can the price of necromancy be averted?
Truly skilled necromancers learn a lot about healing, and they can tenuously use the necromantic core to heal themselves. Yet this self-healing is a tenuous process indeed, and while they can avert death for centuries like this, by their fifth century necromancers are almost always some form of undead. This of course presumes that they do not suffer a true death during the transition from life to unlife! Necromancers who rush for power to do not always survive the transition. It is strongly encouraged in necromantic academies that living necromancers pace themselves carefully and heal themselves for as long as possible in order to practice the self-animating magics that permit undeath to proceed indefinitely thereafter.
Do necromancers grow stronger when they are undead?
A necromancer who has successfully passed from life to unlife finds thereafter that maintaining the semblance of life with a badly damaged geomantic interface is much less tenuous and much more stable, so that undeath proceeds then to last nigh-indefinitely with much easier access to the necromantic core. However, necromancers of the most ancient kind nevertheless eventually grind their remaining geomantic interface to a kind of spiritual dust, at which point they are no longer capable of animating a corporeal form. This transition is another one that can theoretically end a necromancer, but by then they are usually very excellent at binding themselves to "life" in Theoma, and so the resulting incorporeal undead is known as a ghost.
In such a form, there is no known terminus to the state of undeath, and no further transition which can be failed. The ghosts of necromancers have (spiritually) exposed necromantic cores and can draw freely upon their own necromantic potential to become (typically) the most powerful known necromancers. Despite this ostensible advantage, it is a commonplace among ghosts that almost none of them consider the loss of corporeality to be worthwhile. There is also a final pricetag to being a ghost: the land gods (who are rarely fond of necromancers or their creations) are renowned for detesting the incorporeal undead most of all. For ghosts do not exist in the weave of Fate at all, and are nearly imperceptible to land gods!
Is it true that Gnarlen are immune to the price of necromancy?
No, it is not. This is a widespread misconception on Theoma. The truth is that Gnarlen still have a geomantic interface and they do still damage it when they cast necromantic spells. However, they decay and grow fragile much more slowly than other beings in the setting, so their geomantic interface can take a lot of damage before anything critical is ruined. They also can't reach their own geomantic interface very well, limiting both self-damage and the capabilities of their necromantic spellcasting.
Necromancer gnarlen typically reconvert themselves into new bodies (which is a very reparative process) fast enough to outrun the price of necromancy that they don't know that they're still paying. In theory, a gnarlen who destroyed their entire geomantic interface would no longer be capable of fluidly animating stone, but would sieze up and fall out of the body as a ghost. Yet the early symptoms of such a thing feel so much like bodily damage that necromancer gnarlen reconvert themselves whenever the issue begins to arise!
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