Necromancy

Necromancy is the magical discipline concerned with death, the dead, and the boundary that separates the living from the departed. Its practitioners command corpses, commune with the spirits of the fallen, and bend the raw energies of death to their will. The practice is as old as mortal fear of dying, having grown from a means of speaking with the departed into a craft that commands them. Mordekaiser represents its apex. A brutal warlord of a bygone epoch, he has died and returned across more than one lifetime, refusing to pass on when his body failed and instead carving a kingdom within the death realm itself. Through occult knowledge gathered across those lives, he binds the souls of the slain into eternal servitude, raising an army that needs no rest, food, or morale, and building entire realms beyond the veil. On the Blessed Isles, necromancy took another shape. The Ruination that shattered those isles birthed a new death energy that blurred the line between the discipline and the Black Mist. Yorick, a gravedigger of that ruined land, wields necromantic power reluctantly, marshaling his Mist Walkers to heal the Shadow Isles rather than deepen their curse. Karthus, by contrast, was a living mage so enthralled by death that he embraced undeath willingly. The discipline surfaces far beyond Noxus and the Shadow Isles. During the Sisterhood of War, warriors of the Navori Brotherhood turned necromancy against the runesmith's hunters on the fields of Ionia. When their dead were dragged back into the ground, nothing remained but a pale, sickly fog and the cries of the unquiet dead. For all its power, necromancy is feared and reviled wherever it is practiced, forcing its wielders into isolation. It depends on proximity to death, drawing strength from battlefields and graveyards, and it is countered by living magic and the power to heal. It also exacts a quiet toll, for constant communion with the dead erodes a practitioner's empathy for the living.