Work Text:
A open letter of complaint from [Redacted] to the Royal Court of the Kingdom of Fife,
Delivered in 1192 by Royal Courier,
Archived in the Dundonian Archives in 1208
As a long-living scientist of great knowledge and powerful responsibility, I find myself often called upon for the application of unique skills in almost any corner of the great and gargantuan kingdom of Fife. Despite preferring the seclusion and peace of my caves, I am for better or worse widely travelled and intimately familiar with various races and cultures, and I can say from personal experience that petty local officials are universally suspicious and ill-informed of the nature of my practice and study, despite having been the ones to request my presence in the first place.
“We’ll have none of your magical so-called science disturbing our dead!”
I am unable to properly describe how often I am subjected to some variation of the above, or at least unable to do so without employing several choice terms from ancient dialects of long-forgotten languages. These uneducated panjandrums lack any conception whatsoever of distinctions between the fields of science and the arcane arts. In their worldview, any being of science is just waiting for midnight before shulking off to the cemetery to animate the corpses of their ancestors for the purposes of overthrowing the local government.
Nitwits. Simpletons. BUREAUCRATS.
Now, it is true of course that much of my scientific work involves the study of dead bodies, as my expertise is most often requested when local issues develop into the fatal-for-mortals category of troubles. It is also true that, as part of my public work as well as my personal research, I examine various parts of dead bodies to determine the cause and chronology of their demise, as well as how the mortal body reacted to various types of trauma that occurred both before and after its expiration. However, to infer from this that all scholars of science are de-facto necromancers aiming to raise armies of the undead is false, misleading, and slanderous.
That said, it is true that I am or had once considered myself a wizard. It is also true that I had once studied necromancy in the past to find the weaknesses in the spells cast by the Dark Wizard, and that I had once resorted to its use to aid undead unicorns in finding peace. It has been many years and my memory of the early first few centuries of this era is inexact, but it is also possible that, as a young and foolish apprentice with too much power and not enough reason, I had once tried casting a reanimation spell of my own -- but never on a corpse of anyone I knew, or at least not anyone I knew well, and never for long.
Regardless, I had long since changed my research focus to be science more so than any of the arcane arts. Just because I continue to study dead people does not imply any intention to use necromancy to reanimate your dear old gran. Have some faith.
So, at any rate, I know whereof I speak when I say to you: science and necromancy -- there IS a difference.