My upbringing was, to put a fine point on it, ignoble. My mother made her living on her back and only the gods know who or what my father might be. I was a miserable little cuss, a boy who wasn't, so I begged, borrowed, lied, and stole to survive; by the time I was knee-high to an Elf, I had learned the finer points of coat-teasing and cut-pursing, and I conned, charmed, and pickpocketed for everything I ever owned. When I was old enough and my mother no longer around to say aught, I joined a gang and learned all the hard lessons a lad with nobody to back or protect them learns in the company of criminals and derelicts too poor, too stupid, or too cruel to join a guild, however tantalizing that too-distant fruit might be for many of us.
Of course we envied the guildsmen. Even the Thieves' Guild, full as it is of people who act more like spoiled, entitled gentry than the common criminals they are, seemed to us to possess a set of privileges we could scarcely imagine having. Access to food, lodging, and training. The miracles of attunement and magic and the various otherworldly powers that augment them. Platinum flowing through their fingers like water. Death and reincarnation on a whim. What is commonplace to them was and is ungraspable and unthinkable to me and mine, and their abundance is displayed with an air of blithe excess that approaches vulgarity. For all this, my mana blindness, illiteracy, and poverty created in me the perfect melange of a nobody that no guild would touch, and thus was the story for most of my companions, though the specifics may change from telling to telling.
These facts used to create in me a certain amount of bitterness before my eyes were opened, but being a lamb hiding among wolves for the first time in my life has given me a new perspective on the matter: contrary to the narrative of the self-made hero the guilds sell us, the greatest threat to common men after the gods themselves are in fact guildsmen. Truly, there is very little difference when you're staring up from the bottom; to a commoner a Warrior Mage might as well be a god after all, wielding thunder and fire, demanding tribute and treasure, killing indiscriminately.
A moment of reflection makes plain their guilt. There isn't a single act of senseless violence indulged by any Philosopher that your average Barbarian hasn't matched and beat. Our most refined transcendental magic can't come close to the shapes an Empath can torture flesh into and their dissenters become less than a memory. Clerics mutilate souls, shredding the very core of personality and identity without thought or respect for the beauty of the unique and sublime embodiment of selfhood in every man. Moon Mages accuse us ignorantly of meddling with demons while they casually manipulate hostile planes and have committed themselves to performing what I can only term as extraplanar genocide without so much as batting an eye. To enumerate all the crimes of guildsmen would frankly take more ink and paper and breath than I have. There is no language strong or broad enough to condemn it all.
The irony of my condemnation isn't lost on me of course. However we might pretty it up, we are still and always Necromancers, a word that justifiably provokes equal measures disgust and fear in the average man, a word that is not wholly unfairly synonymous with monster. So it's not that I reject the epithet of murderer, or even mass murderer, it's that everyone around me is so much better at it so as to render the categorization meaningless. This is not to draw a precise equivalency, but rather to say that setting aside all those niggling theological objections, there are remarkably few depravities any Philosopher pursues that you don't find reflected in guildsmen. "But zombies," I hear you mewl. If damnation wasn't such a steep price to pay for the privilege, I have no doubt we would bear witness to all manner of new horrors sculpted from undead flesh and married to otherworldly powers at the hands of far, far more creatively malicious minds than ours.
Guildsmen don't hunt us because their gods or their decency bid them to; they'd spit in Dergati's third eye if they thought they could wring a new shiny trinket out of it. They hunt us because finally, finally, their malicious and violent will has found an acceptable outlet through society's loathing and the Immortals' wrath. They may murder and be praised for it, rather than regarded, correctly, as monsters themselves which slaughter and enslave their supposed lessers.
The point I've taken my time to get to is this: a look at the guildsmen and the society they have helped build for us shows us a perfect microcosm of the heavens and Elanthia, where those whom sit at the top are those few privileged and greedy that have eked out power for themselves and who grind down upon those below them, inflicting suffering beyond measure and whose obliviousness to these facts manages to surpass malice in its senseless cruelty. Necromancy is merely rebellion against these systems of power, a means of seizing the means to change the world from those who would wield their power against us, an act of defiance against a system set up to force us to be too poor, too ignorant, too weak to do anything but fail. The ultimate defiance, and perhaps the only.
I tell you truly: guildsmen are a blight on the world, and the world will know no peace, no serenity, no parity, and no justice until they are eradicated.
