Animancers

Currently, one of the stronger peoples of Avernus, the Animancers possess an unsavoury reputation of which they seem to care little. They are a people of the soul but are usually regarded as harbingers of death, with good reason as they are willing to “test” both their techniques and the strength of other Peoples with no regard to their wants.

## Physiology

Animancers are humanoid, though it is rare to see one that is completely living and so determining their natural features is difficult. It is known that under normal circumstances they have long life spans compared to other species, as well as very strong souls. Perhaps as recompense, they are not innately gifted physically compared to other Peoples, instead of relying on the powers granted by their souls.

Most are not “innate” psykers as is typically understood by either humans or the Peoples. While some can access their powers automatically they are usually rare and looked upon with pity and respect. In the Animancer’s eyes, it prohibits them from truly engaging in their faith and craft, as they are unable to use their main discipline save through one method.

Most Animancers must undergo the rituals of Awakening. These are “spirit walks” through Avernus, where the Animancer must survive various threats both native to the World and create by their own essence in order to gain a greater self-understanding and refine their personal power. Through this method, they gain access to their psychic abilities and can begin to learn the soul arts of their people. Completing more rituals are required to be taught more advanced secrets, with the rituals growing exponentially more dangerous after the first.

Compounding upon their already long life spans, Animancers typically “live” several more than normal. It seems they have long since mastered the art of moving their soul to a new body upon death, having discarded the use of surrogate bodies to instead use specially prepared clones of themselves. They see this as living “new” deaths and whether an animancer retains their memories or allows them to dissipate to “die” a personality death and allow a new being to take over is apparently a very personal choice.

The Animancers have a final state that their greatest attain, but it shall be elaborated on later.

## Powers

The core of the Animancers is the technique of Animancy, the control and manipulation of the soul. It is an immensely complex art that requires a very specific mindset to accomplish, but a successful user can use their own or other souls like a potter would clay.

Due to its difficulty, danger and potential for misuse the secrets of the discipline are revealed only as one completes the rituals of awakening, as success represents that one has the maturity and control to use animancy responsibly. As a result most Animancers only know the basics of the power, but this is usually more than enough.

The stronger the soul, the harder it is to affect and due to various unknown laws of Avernus, there are restrictions on what the Animancers are allowed to do with souls. Most of these seem to relate to others' souls, so it would seem that they are allowed to do with their own spirits as they wish.

“Pure” Animancy is primarily used for the “simple” purpose of moving the soul from container to container. As interacting with the soul at all is one of the most difficult actions that can be performed by a mortal (whereas warp beings find it rather easy). Furthermore many vessels do not make for suitable containers for souls complicating an already delicate process. However, the Animancers' incessant research and creativity have let them maximise the utility of their art.

Derived from Animancy they have created a variety of sub-specializations.

### Necromancy

Necromancy is probably the most well known to other peoples and is the art of reanimating the dead. Furthermore, it is the most widespread and simple act of Animancy that most of their people can access with their first ritual of awakening.

Under normal circumstances, a Necromancer accomplishes this by splitting off fragments of their own soul and embedding it within the shell of a dead body, which the main mass of the soul remains in control of. More powerful creatures require larger soul shards and the reanimated lose any of the innate powers they had in life beyond what is present in the flesh, as the original soul has long since departed.

In exchange they gain far greater strength and endurance in death, animated by the generally fearless spirit of a Necromancer. In addition, most Necromancers will extensively modify their available corpses, as the dead flesh is far more accepting of additions and alterations than a living being would be allowing them to create extremely potent, or specialised horrors.

Necromancers of greater skill can animate other materials than just corpses, such as stone or metal, but this capacity is rare. Bodies are well used to the spirit, most other materials are not.

Necromancers are vulnerable through their corpses animated as they are by shards of their own soul. If attacked with a soul slaying ability the Necromancer will probably not die, but they will suffer violent feedback similar to a sorcerer using Tzeench’s clone technique, with the scale of shock scaling proportionately to the size of the shard within the corpse.

Thus most Necromancers bear a soul lantern, a device attuned to their own spirit that is meant to call any shards they may have to them. Presumably due to like calling to like a soul shard that is decoupled from a corpse will seem to appear within the lantern almost spontaneously minimising the chance of being destroyed.

When the Animancers fight, their Necromancers serve as the core of their armies although the need to use their own souls prevent them from creating endlessly expanding hordes of the dead.

During incursions, as we saw recently this restriction is lifted somewhat, as the Animancers were able to use the Geomantic web to enact a Necromantic ritual that bound the souls of dead Lustrian wildlife back into their bodies, instantly reanimating them at far greater strength than their normal creations, which managed to slow even the march of the Exalted. The echoes of the ritual continue to manifest in Lustria, as sometimes bodies will rise back to their feet, eyes glowing with blue flames.

### The Soul of Things

The Soul of Things is the second sub-discipline and is considerably more difficult. In their research, the Animancers discovered that all things have “souls” (humans would likely consider these resonances) that can be changed or manipulated if one creates tools or supplies materials of their own soul.

For example, the “soul” of a sword contains the concept of “sharpness” in its edges. A properly trained Animancer is capable of perceiving this and can create a whetstone to directly improve this aspect of its “soul” or can permanently spend a fraction of their own soul to reinforce this concept.

The former has a lesser effect, mystically improving this aspect of the blade, but critically without changing its physical composition. The sword will cut better, but a material analysis will detect no alteration. The duration of these effects vary, sometimes with little rhyme or reason. It may be due to scale, complexity or even simplicity of the reinforced concept.

The latter alteration is always permanent and has a substantial material effect. It is essentially sacrificing part of one's own soul to empower something. The more sacrificed the greater the empowerment and the mightier the resulting object. The resulting item is always infused with warp energies to some extent and is no longer purely an item of the materium and usually taking on characteristics representative of whoever imbued their soul. As such, there is little regularity in these artefacts, save for extremely common ones like soul lanterns.

Due to the cost involved in making such artefacts as well as the sheer skill required to imbue one's soul successfully, these artefacts are extremely rare, with the greatest ones being magnum opposes where their creator literally poured their entire life force into creating them.

### Soul Arts

Soul Arts. The final sub-art and the one that has the widest umbrella of effects, some refer to it as “true” animancy, going beyond what is essentially moving the soul around to instead acting upon it directly.

Soul Arts typically exist in three categories, Healing which is considered primary, Modifications which are necessary and Death which are abhorred.

#### Healing

Healing is the most beloved of these arts and is exactly as it sounds, the practice of mending the soul from damage. While souls are apparently extremely durable and able to repair most damage on their own given enough time, the Animancers developed this art as a necessity from how self-destructive their own techniques are upon themselves.

It is a rather laborious process, which necessitates that the healer has complete knowledge of their patient's soul in order to perform safely.\* As such it can typically only be enacted on other Animancers, whose souls are examined at birth and are thus familiar.
\*It was this restriction, combined with their cultural quirks, which prevented Areatha from recommending contacting them to aid Lin. Their method of healing would require them to see his soul, which proved impossible even for Ridcully.

With this information, a Soul Healer can aid the soul’s innate regeneration, attack curses or cure more specific maladies that most psycics can barely interact with.

#### Modification

With insight into healing came the knowledge of how to Modify the soul to suit different purposes. The Animancers have few codified modifications due to how personal alterations to the soul are and even fewer are actually done. While divine beings and the like can modify the souls of less powerful beings with ease, it is far more difficult and dangerous for the Animancers.

The only modification which can be called entirely understood is that of the Death Knight. Created through the modification of those able to call upon the warp naturally, Death Knights are the elite core of the Animancers armies. The exact nature of their modifications is unclear, save that it grants them a host of supernatural abilities including access to their own potent form of animancy and physical abilities on par with if not surpassing an astartes. Combined with extensive teaching and the best arms and armour the Animancers can provide them each Death Knight is a miniature army unto themselves. The characteristic of the Knights which is best known to the Peoples is how difficult they are to kill. Should their body be destroyed their soul shall escape and will be rehoused in a new avatar to begin their battles anew.

#### Art of Death

Finally, the Art of Death is one the Animancers typically revile. In their culture, the destruction of a soul is among the ultimate sins, allowed only for those suborned by Chaos or so utterly broken that death is a kindness. The Animancers look ill upon the Sirens because of this as well, though only towards those of the Azure Isles with disgust for they alone of the Queendoms still revel in the consumption of others.

The arts of Death are similarly derived from that of Healing and are used to extinguish the soul. For the most part, they are passed down from teacher to student by a small handful of specially selected animancers for use only during Incursions where their power can rapidly turn the tides.

### Severance

Animancers who have reached the highest level of Awakening can attempt a final ritual known as the Severance. The ultimate goal of the Animancers is to ascend as close as they can to pure spirit, with the Severance almost entirely cutting them from their bodies. Their power balloons as their soul expands, no longer constrained by the flesh, tethered to the materium only by a fragment of their bodies, usually a skull and a vial of blood.

Those who successfully complete the Severance are reborn as Liches, the undead lords of the Animancers and the peak of their society.

## History and Culture

### History

A relatively young people by some standards estimated to be around twenty-fifteen million years old, for much of their early history the People who would become the Animancers were described as “listless.” They had a great deal of power but lacked the numbers and an actual art upon which to base themselves.

Some described them as similar to humans to a point. They investigated everything but never found anything upon which to focus themselves. For us, this is a great boon as we have alternatives to fall back upon and could trade for insight into other People’s techniques, but these were not options for the Animancers.

Their focus began to change first with the discovery of a People’s Legacy. A vast repository of scrolls detailing their investigations and insights into the nature of the soul and how to manipulate it further. The second was their near-death in an incursion.

In this incursion against the ever-shifting forces of Tzeench, the primordial Animancers were almost overwhelmed but were delivered from death by the intervention of the Valkyries, the ghostly servants of the Mother of Death. Their salvation combined with these scrolls was seen as prophetic by the traumatised people who delved into the nature of the soul and death, rapidly turning to fanatic worship of the Mother as a symbol of their newfound passion.

Following these revelations, they have gone from weakness and general dismissal by the rest of Avernus to wary respect, hatred and fear, turning themselves towards art that they are seemingly designed for that is simultaneously innately potent.

### Culture

As one might expect death and life are central to the Animancers, who typically see themselves as “dying” rather than living. To them dying is considered a significant event, but rarely a fatal one. Indeed it may be cause for celebration as it allows them to “see” the Mother of Death that they revere, even if for only a moment.

It is likely this comparatively cavalier attitude to death which informs many of their actions towards other Avernites as they are one of the few Peoples who have the capacity and desire to actively attack other Peoples. This is usually for the purpose of obtaining new test subjects or actively testing new techniques under live fire. As a result, they are rightly hated and feared by most other Avernites.

The Animancers for their part seem somewhat confused by this. They understand that their long lives and capacity to survive death is unique, but they see others' deaths as accelerating their ascent to the Mother’s side, something of which they are very jealous.

The Mother of Death is the other side of the Animancer’s society, as they are fanatic worshippers of the Mother which tints much of what they understand. Perhaps expectedly they have rarely if ever, interacted with the Mother directly and their religion is based on their own conceptions of her and her servants. They follow the laws Avernus has related to souls exactly because of their faith and endeavour to enter into a “perfect” state of being that can exist next to the Mother.

Their end goal is to either become a fellow Guardian race next to the Valkyries that can aid the Mother in her tasks, or grow strong enough to become her ally defacto as some of Avernus’s Ancient Empires managed.

As a result, the Animancers are constantly trying to improve their understanding of their own powers and will eagerly experiment with just about anything to accomplish this, leading to as many runaway successes as they have had failures. Notably, this does not just include their warp powers, but also material research, for example, to augment the corpses their necromancers animate. Although rather primitive by humanities standards they are still quite advanced in areas like cybernetics.

### Lands

The Animancers live within a region known as the Bonelands, on the southern tip of the easter continent. They appear to be a deadlands for numerous Avernite species who migrate to them when their time is up and die there. As such the entire region is covered in skeletons, rich in soul energy and extremely rich in more normal life, especially plants, due to millions of years of corpses fertilising the soil.

The Animancers use these bones often in their crafts and have several “mining” settlements within a few of the larger (read mountainous) skeletons and a few actual mountains.

The largest of their cities house the Liches of the Council, while a strange black citadel serves as the coordination centre for the Death Knights and the home of the Animancers ultimate warrior the Demiurge.

Smaller communities of Animancers live out nomadic lives outside the cities for a variety of reasons, often related to ceremonies like the ritual of awakening, or in search of new creatures for experimentation.

### Military

The backbone of the Animancer’s armies is the Necromancers. As long as they are active and the enemy is something that leaves behind a corpse the Animancers are almost impossible to stop as the dead rise to slay their former comrades, directed with eerie coordination.

Furthermore, elite formations of Necromancers will animate titan level entities to break through enemy lines\* with their absolute best animating stone and metal to destroy their foes.
\*As seen during the Nurgle incursion, where they reanimated behemoth sized Dread Saurians, managing to make the lizards even stronger. However, none were able to raise the mountain-sized thunder lizards.

The closed fist and tacticians though are the Death Knights, the spectral warriors acting as deadly effective line breakers and skilled generals both.

Death Knights are organised into various orders, often specialised against certain types of foes. Each order possesses its own keep, a small citadel which moves around depending on its needs.

All Death Knights ultimately answer to the Demiurge, the longest-running experiment in the Animancer’s history. In conception, the Demiurge is similar to the Phoenix Lords, the souls of the worthy and willing combining with the singular Ur-soul to increase its strength and skill. This has been done for millions of years, with the Demiurge now standing as one of Avernus’s most potent warriors, as seen with its march to Itza.

There are further formations, but in times of immense need, one of the Dead Council will step onto the battlefield in person with few beings able to match even one of these ancients.

## Relations

As might be expected the Animancers are regarded with hate, fear and scorn by the majority of Avernites. While they can respect their power and dedication, their attacks on others have earned them no friends and many enemies. The sirens, in particular, despise the Animancers who have frequently attacked them for the “heresy” of soul destruction due to their inherent nature.

However, in the past few hundred years the Animancers have severely curtailed their assaults on other peoples. According to the Peoples, they angered the Kingdom of the Remnant, the strongest Civilisation on Avernus after the Lizardmen and Guardians, who took them to task for their actions, dragging their cities to the ground before binding the council away in a prison of glass and crushing the Demiurge within its own armour.

Eventually, they were released after binding judgements were laid upon them, but the rest of the Peoples expect they shall find a way around them soon enough.

Surprisingly the Eldar have had contact with them. The Animancers were able to talk to them briefly during the Incursion, recognising them as having a great understanding of the soul and offering an exchange, seeming very interested in Ynnead, Isha, soul stones and wraiths. It remains to be seen what if anything can be exchanged between the two, but the Animancers have reportedly offered some of their Necromancers and Death Knights to the Yinnari in exchange for test subjects, as they cannot currently source them from Avernus.