Necromancy is the Ethical Option, Actually

  Marci stared at the bottle, gazing at her twisted, malevolent reflection in the amber-gold depths. She'd found it in the drawer of her study's desk, and had been staring at it for almost half an hour.

  It had taken the kobolds another hour after the avanche to finally get the 'Flight Engine' repaired, and with a scream of shattering ice the Shardfort that must have in dormant since before Marci had been born had heaved itself up into the sky.

  From the frosted battlements, her body still aching and battered despite all the healing potions in her system, she'd watched those who had survived her mountain-shattering spell begin to dig themselves out as the Dreadfort had begun to coast away, her old mentor's shimming warelight visible in the gathering dusk and a familiar feeling in her heart: self-loathing.

  She hated that she'd had to fight her mentor; she hated that she'd let down yet another of the people who had believed in her. Not just let down, but found herself forced to fight against because she hadn't been able to convince him that it wasn't how it looked. But why would he believe her? She was Marci, the world's biggest fuck up, who despite bucketfuls of raw talent and a silver spoon in her mouth the size of a queendom had managed to screw up everything she'd ever tried. Of course, he thought that she'd taken the easy path to power. After all, when had she ever stuck with anything difficult?

  And those familiar feelings had brought her back to where she always ended up: staring at a bottle. Had it always been like this? She'd always enjoyed a drink, yes, but… well, to begin with she had struggled a little, but after the first semester at university she'd managed to get on the wagon for a long while. And while she had been on it, the world had seemed to contain infinite possibility; she'd escaped her mother's clutches, she was riding high at the top of her css, and in her third year she'd even met a cute adventurer with the most adorable pink tail who seemed to like her.

  It had all been coming up Marci. So how had she slipped and fallen? What was it that had broken her? Made her into the useless wretch she now was?

  "Dark Mistress," came the voice of one of her hired demons from ahead of her, making her jerk in her seat. She had been so wrapped up in her own thoughts, she hadn't noticed the demon sneaking up on her.

  The conservatively cd succubus, Saoirse, stood in front of her: blonde haired, white horned, red eyed, sharp toothed, and like all succubi, very beautiful.

  "Forgive me, m'dy," said Saoirse. "But I was wondering if you had any tasks you'd like us to do?"

  "Tasks?" said Marci, tearing her eyes from the bottle and meeting the beautiful woman's red eyes.

  Task? Oh, right, tasks. Work. She needed to rescue her friends from the Saxmoor prison. Not that she had any pn that wasn't 'blow up a rge section of Saxmoor and hurt a lot of innocent people' — something even she, fuck-up that she was, wasn't willing to do. It was one thing to fight soldiers who were trying to kill you, even her mentor who had probably been the closest thing she'd ever had to a proper father figure in her life, but it was something entirely different to hurt an innocent civilian. Marci knew she was a bit… ethically deficient, but there were lines even she wouldn't cross to save her own skin.

  Yes, she needed to figure out some way to save them that didn't involve immense colteral damage and innocent suffering. She couldn't afford to just wallow in self-loathing, deserving as she might be. She took a deep breath, and then grabbed the bottle and put it back in the drawer.

  "Yes, something you'd like us to do?" said Saoirse, watching as Marci cast a level two spell, Mystic Safe, on the drawer and set a very long, and absolutely random key that she knew she wouldn't be able to remember. "You know, um, recruiting other demons to your cause? Inspecting the Kobold's work? I'd need some material to begin creating a group of undead soldiers…"

  Marci frowned, her mind grinding to a halt as the woman's st few words flitted through her head. "Undead?" she asked. "Necromancy?"

  "That was my major, yes," nodded Saoirse proudly. "I got a First!"

  Necromancy, both its use and research into the topic, was banned on the surface, in rge part because of the power of the Church. That meant that Marci had only the haziest of ideas how it functioned based on the handful of approved anti-necromancy spells that she'd learned in her wizarding undergraduate. She'd always had a morbid curiosity of how one actually took inert remains and turned them into frightening soldiers.

  "How does it work?" asked Marci. "Do you bind souls to bones? Bodies?"

  "No, that's almamancy," said Saoirse, shaking her head. "A lot harder, and… well, technically you can use the two together, and that can be very potent, but it's rare."

  Marci frowned. "So… beyond the whole defiling of remains, Necromancy… doesn't actually hurt anyone? They don't have minds or anything — the constructs?"

  The succubus looked at Marci strangely, perhaps because that kind of potential problem didn't occur to demons, or perhaps because it was not what she expected from her 'Dark Mistress.'

  "Not… really?" said Saoirse. "It taps into the symbolic echo of that being life, or beings lives if you make an amalgam construct. But there isn't any mind, it's all just an extension of the caster's will and mana."

  Marci hummed. That wasn't nearly as unethical as she'd been taught, and she could sense that the demon wasn't lying to her… "And what are the limits to these constructs?"

  "Err… they require mana to function?" said Saoirse.

  Mana.

  Like the bucketful that Marci had already regenerated in the time since her ridge-shattering bst.

  It was another line she was crossing, although compared to 'becoming a Shardkeeper' it would barely be a footnote in her growing tome of heinous deeds. And if it meant that she could save her friends without resorting to sicking an army of demons on Saxmoor, then she wasn't going to flinch at the idea of becoming an actual warlock.

  And besides, if Saoirse was correct and there wasn't any ensving of souls, then was it really hurting anyone if she just reanimated a few bones? Was it really so bad to defile the dead in aid of a good cause? Marci couldn't see any real problems, and she was a genius—unreliable and irresponsible, but still a genius. So, if she couldn't see any ethical problems, there probably weren't any.

  She squared her shoulders. Yes, she could do this. She could save her friends.

  "Saoirse," she said. "I do have a task for you: I need you to teach me necromancy."