Death & Bone Magic
Death and Bone magic does not restore life. It preserves what remains useful after life: Memory in the dead and Function in the role they can still perform. Its armies are strongest near the places that remember them.
The Dead Continue Their Function
Necros occupies a precise place in the Cycle: Memory plus Function. The dead are valuable not because death releases a generic dark energy, but because remains can still hold a record and be assigned a task. Bone is especially useful because Aurelion repeatedly treats it as Memory made material. A necromancer therefore does not need to recreate a person. The school needs enough preserved pattern to make a dead body, skeleton or fragment continue acting as something.
Two operations show the distinction. Raised formations turn bones into disciplined ranks - not revived citizens, but bodies whose Function is restored as soldiers. Bone-memory amulets can graft skills as if the remains still remember a technique well enough to lend it. Eastern academies push the same logic into engineered constructs, exoskeletons and predictive work with dragon bone. In all of these cases, the school is closer to archive and machinery than to resurrection.
Scale depends heavily on an anchor. A necros formation can be formidable inside a necropolis, battlefield, ruin or other zone saturated with preserved Memory and Function; away from that anchor, efficiency falls sharply. This geographic weakness explains the recurring military pattern of Aurelion's dead: enormous local depth, poor long-distance projection. The source says it bluntly elsewhere - the dead need no bread, but they need a master, and they also need a place that remembers what they are supposed to be.
The practitioner pays in temperature of the soul, emotion and dependence. Long use makes the mage cold, increasingly comfortable with remains and increasingly unable to work without the dead. The school can appear to "cheat" the Law of Price because corpses pay costs that living participants would otherwise bear, yet it still remains within Balance: death is exchanged for death, and the infrastructure required to hold an army becomes its own constraint. This is why lichdom is adjacent but distinct. A lich has made the necromantic logic permanent inside the self; an ordinary necros still stands outside the archive it commands.
