Bones were a lot more fragile than people gave them credit for. Comparatively, they were stronger than skin and muscle, but in the grand scheme of things, there was a reason nobody built tools out of animal bones when they had other, better resources on hand.That was before magic came into play, however. Human bones were nothing special. Animal bones, no matter how large they got, were never useful as more than ornamentation. But monsters had a tendency to get so big that normal bones couldn’t support them, and that meant they needed mana to reinforce their bodies. Humans did the same thing with invocations, but not on the same scale, and not indefinitely.The early necromancers had studied those monsters in an effort to reinforce the skeletons they controlled, and while it was largely agreed that it just wasn’t worth the effort for an entire army, the research had given rise to a line of necromantic minions known as the death knights. A lot went into the raising of a single death knight, and one of those investments was in creating a skeletal structure as hard as diamond.Liches took the process even further. With no base skeleton to modify, their bodies were made wholly of crystallized mana. Every inch of bone, every scrap of flesh or muscle—when they bothered to make such disguises at all—was pure mana given form. Their existence was the culmination of thousands of years of research in how to advance from stage nine to stage ten, to become a perfect mana being.We’d pretty much all agreed that lichdom was a dead end. It worked, after a sort, but the changes were too radical and, even otherwise ignoring the state of the caster’s soul, the loss of the ability to generate mana, to become completely cut off from the Astral Realm, was far too great a handicap for any self-respecting archmage to ever accept.Some lesser mages disagreed, of course. There were those that were desperate, at the end of their natural or unnatural lifespans, (...)