After running away from home, Jerry wandered the forests, feeling more alive than ever before. For the first time in fifteen years, he was fully conscious, and that was an amazing feeling.

For water, he drank from streams. For food, he dined on animals. After his initial outburst, he avoided killing altogether, but only reanimated the corpses he found as guardians and scouts. Some, he ate as well; he was immune to disease, apparently. He knew this. Magic whispered it to him.

One thing he discovered was that, when not refusing his magic, he had full control over it. Not killing was easy, and controlling his reanimated guardians was easy as well. Their little group of undeath was peaceful, even if seriously intimidating.

This brought a lot of things into perspective; why was necromancy evil?

It is disgusting, sure, he thought, watching a half-rotten boar struggle to walk, but why evil? I mean, I can control them just fine. The Curse is evil, yes, but it’s the fault of a single necromancer, not everyone! So why is necromancy evil?

Jerry did not know. What he did know, was that he enjoyed this newfound freedom of his. He also discovered the joy of experimenting.

When the stumbling boar collapsed, Jerry realized that he could actually reanimate just its skeleton. Watching the bones slash their way out of the meat was gruesome, but traveling without the rotting flesh was far more aesthetically pleasing, and much more convenient as well. After all, even if parts of the boar had been chewed off or rotten away, the skeleton was pretty much in pristine condition. After washing in a nearby stream, it was even pleasant to look at.

Following this discovery, all of Jerry’s undead companions became skeletons. It was just a much cleaner approach. Flesh was messy.

However, his experiments did not end there. The undead were fat blobs of magic in his foggy magical perception, but there had to be more than that. Jerry thought for hours, pondering on what made the undead tick—or the living, as a matter of fact. With his nascent sense of magic, he probed his creations, looking for the something he could not see. He deanimated and reanimated a boar repeatedly until he was exhausted, observing each change with as much attentiveness as he could muster. It yielded nothing, but he pressed on.

He repeated this process day after day, becoming so engrossed he was practically obsessed. Most necromancers would choose to simply use this gift without delving into the specifics, but not Jerry. He wanted to know, and he was determined to ram his head against it until he found out.

And as the weeks passed, his magic sense eventually became clearer. He could now vaguely sense that the undead weren’t just blobs of magic; they were bodies held together by magical tethers, or bonds, that crisscrossed inside them and connected each part of their body to something central—the soul?

Apparently, Jerry’s magic could create these bonds instinctively, allowing him to raise undead without understanding what he was doing. But as he grew sharper, as he began to sense the bonds connecting each limb to the soul, he became able to alter the effects of his magic.

Thus, he experimented. He began to raise undead missing certain bonds, resulting in parts of their body remaining dead and immobile. He created more bonds towards a certain limb compared to others, leading to increased control over that limb—though the increase was fairly insignificant.

However, this manual process granted him better control overall, allowing him to create bonds even where there weren’t supposed to be any. This led to Jerry’s first great discovery:

He could combine the bones of different animals to form a completely new skeleton!

By creating a fixed magic bond between two different bones, he could make them stick together without having to actually graft anything. This would theoretically allow for much greater diversity in his creations, though he failed spectacularly at first.

Turns out, forming a functioning skeleton was more difficult than it seemed. There were so many bits and pieces to work with, and there also needed to be load balancing, weight distribution, enough density to allow movement, and a fluid transition of larger to smaller bones.

Overall, it was a lot of work, but Jerry relished in the task. Having been semi-conscious for fifteen years, he was used to time flowing effortlessly. Months passed in the blink of an eye. In this period, Jerry lived as a forest hermit, hidden away deep in the Eldren ridge. Humans, he had seen none, but he did not mind the solitude.

In fact, his mood steadily rose, and every day he found himself transitioning from morose to jovial.

With time, his first success eventually came. One cloudy afternoon, he created a massive boar skeleton, combining two individual boar skeletons. He took a step back, looked over his creation for the tenth time, then poured magic into it. The behemoth shook, then stood.

Jerry threw his hands in the air, screaming with excitement, “It’s alive!”

The boar oinked. And thus, Jerry’s first true companion, the double-boar, was born.

Boars were very common in the Eldren ridge, making them his prime subject of experimentation. Larger predators were also present in the mountain forests, though they absolutely shat bricks at the sight of his skeletons. Killing them might be out of the question, but Jerry wasn’t going to say no to their involuntary boar offerings. What was he, rude?

After the massive double-boar came a new skeleton, a combination of fox and, well, boar. Boars were really good at running straight ahead and ramming into stuff—though this verb was mildly insulting to boars—but not much else; when they had to turn around, they were as nimble as ships. To combat that weakness, Jerry added some fox leg bones to the boar’s skeleton. As a skeleton was much lighter than its fleshy counterpart, the extra maneuverability could be exhibited with relative stability.

The only drawback was that fox bones were too fragile to hold a boar’s weight, and so were quickly worn down and broken after some time.

With zombie boars, which he also reluctantly experimented with, the same combination failed. The boar simply tumbled to the side, too heavy to handle the sharp turn. Perhaps nature had its reasons for turning them into meaty arrows.

But the most interesting experiment, by far, was adding a tusk to a fox skeleton. It seemed counter-intuitive, because what was the fox supposed to do with a tusk it could barely even lift, but it had a surprising application.

The fox skeleton climbed trees and simply fell on its prey tusk-first. As simple and un-fox-like as this sounds, it was surprisingly effective, and Jerry found it funny every time the fox got itself lodged atop a skeletal boar that ran around in fright—he had his creations experiment on each other instead of torturing live animals.

Of course, Jerry wasn’t specifically trying to create deadly minions, per se, as he had no intention of killing anything. It was just that animals fought a lot, and battle was the only testbed he’d found for his creations.

That, and extra protection was always a plus.

However, sometime in early August, Jerry exited his shoddy wooden shack and took a look around. The forest was bright green, but a chilly breeze reached him through the leaves. The breeze was uncharacteristic for this time of the year. At that moment, he realized it was time to go.

Therefore, with the double-boar and a normal fox skeleton as companions, he once again set off.

Days passed, though by this point Jerry was numb to the passage of time. He simply walked. One night, he idly wondered where exactly he was headed.

Anywhere, basically, he answered himself, by now used to speaking alone. Or maybe I could find a different place to settle down for a while. Humans would be nice.

A pang of desire burned through his heart at the thought. He didn’t really miss his family, but having some human companionship from time to time would be nice.

Months spent in peacefulness had made Jerry an optimistic and decisive man. Therefore, from the moment the desire sprung forth, it took all of two seconds for him to settle on a decision.

Alright then. I will go find a village that doesn’t mind a necromancer too much, and then I will settle close to it. If the first village doesn’t want me, I’ll go to the next. If they don’t want me either, I will try the third village. Eventually, it will work.

It did not work. For weeks and months, Jerry journeyed, passing through lands unknown and living off the earth. While necromancy wasn’t outlawed, it was extremely frowned upon, and all the villages he ran into practically chased him away with torches and pitchforks.

After the second month of aimless wandering and the ninth village, Jerry was beginning to doubt his plan’s eventual success. The weather was growing colder as well, and soon he would have to find a place to settle down. Winter was coming, and skeletons, for all their bony might, could not protect him from the cold.

One more village, he promised himself. If they refuse me, I will find some abandoned building or cave and spend the winter there. Preferably with a lot of wood around. That would be ideal.

Therefore, with his two skeletal animals in tow, Jerry paced forth, still aimlessly following the forest paths. The double-boar skeleton—he had decided to call it Boboar—and the skeletal fox—he had decided to call it Foxy—still remained in pristine condition, with any and all animals wetting their hind legs at the sight of the walking skeletons.

Besides being convenient, the fact that the skeletons still stood was weird.

Jerry had long discovered that zombies deteriorated with the passage of time. Why, then, didn’t skeletons? He didn’t know, but given that the latter were generally weaker than their fleshy counterparts, he thought it was a fair trade.

Some more nights passed and the days were getting shorter. Generally speaking, it was a peaceful little walk. Until it wasn’t.