Gravemore raised his first corpse when he was six.
It was a sparrow. It had flown into his mother's kitchen window and broken its neck, and he had cried over it so hard that something in his chest opened, and the sparrow got up. It hopped twice across the windowsill, looked at him with eyes that weren't seeing anything, and fell over again. His mother screamed. The neighbors, when they heard, nodded wisely and said the boy would grow up to be either a great necromancer or a very short story.
That was the Western Continent. Fog nine months of the year, a graveyard in every village bigger than its market square, and children who played with harmless little specters the way children elsewhere chased fireflies. Almost everyone there was born with some dark mana in them. Most of them did nothing in particular with it.
Gravemore did everything with it.
