Well, here's a story, the best horror stories don't have a conclusion, leaving it up to the audience to imagine the consequences...
Calcifist the Liquidator
Let me tell you of Calcifist the Liquidator, a Liche of middling skill in formal magics, however of extreme capability in the studies of Alchemy. Perhaps it is not known, but there is a friendly competition amongst all of the Master Undead older than 5 centuries in creating the “perfect” minion. Calcifist was consumed by the need to show that Alchemy as a science, as a method, was superior to all other forms of augmenting the basic skeletal undead.
Calcifist’s primary goal, was to develop an alchemical solution that when exposed to hard boney tissue, would in essence render the bones themselves indestructible. He had found that the primary method of the “Living” of disposing of undead was to damage the constructs integrity itself, and not to attack or drain the magics allowing animation of the undead directly. This in addition to the tendency of all undead to be destroyed by the rays of the Sun, led him down the path of reinforcing the construct itself.
In order to perform “research” on this issue, large amounts of boney material were needed, preferably already intact and in the proper configuration for efficient movement. The restoration and reconstruction of skeletal warriors was more of the Boneshaper’s thing, and you just don’t step on other Liche’s things. So using the minions created and improved by his alchemical factory, Calcifist either mined graveyards from underneath, stealing the already interned remnants of loved ones and the forgotten, or …. If there were insufficient resources for his needs, would go capture living specimens.
His alchemical factory consisted of many large vats of mysterious liquids, which would give off a noxious gaseous atmosphere. This gaseous waste would slowly corrupt the surrounding plant and animal life, similar to desecratory magics, but would be resistant to cleansing unless the factory was destroyed or otherwise eliminated. Living specimens would be caged, and slowly lowered in to the rendering vat, where all soft tissue would be slowly, painfully dissolved, and slough off to be used in the engorgement of the Monstrous Maggots. The bones, picked clean, would be evaluated as to their functional worth, and potential for absorbing the alchemical fluids, and would be shunted to one of several experiments.
Other than the consumption of organic debris from the flesh removal vats, to feed the Monstrous Maggots, Calcifist had no need of fleshy constructs. The organic goo was just used to feed the maggots, which grew to horrific size. Mindless devouring machines of biomatter, Calcifist uses these fleshy abominations to consume and mine under grave yards, leaving steaming sinkholes, or to randomly attack concentrated groups of the living from below. The maggot’s acid filled gullets are capable of rapid consumption of dirt, stone, flesh and metals.
His experiments yielded at least two stable variants of undead. One, was a form of skeleton that had been soaked in a vorpal solution that acidically attacked the calcium deposits within the bone itself, and at the same time partially converted the stuff of the bone itself to a shock sensitive material, which when struck, had a significant chance of detonation. This type was cheap to produce, weak and fragile, however created destruction wherever they were destroyed. Seeing this as an interesting diversion, some variants in the color of the explosion and strength of the detonation were developed, but Calcifist’s fascination with exploding undead, resulted in a powerful need for raw materials.
The second variant was a corruption of the process of Truesilvering structures and items. By covering/plating/converting bone to metals, perhaps steel, or iron, skeletal constructs could be made that were immune to the effects of sunlight and were much hardier in combat. Alloying materials to the bones themselves, a relatively brittle structure, increased the resilience of the metal skeletons exponentially. This type was found to take much more time to produce as the plating/conversion process HAD to proceed slowly, otherwise accumulation of nodules of material in joints and other flaws would render the construct unstable, or incapable of movement. However these constructs were immune to lesser physical blows, and would tend to channel offensive magics back into the earth, as per a lightning rod, making them somewhat resistant to spells as well. By the same token, however, they could not channel magic effectively, resulting in Calcifist continuing to research for an appropriate method of improving Himself as well.
Recently, some headway has been made in creating indestructible bones based on magical creatures, such as Ogres and the like. It appears that once the flesh is removed from their corpses, while they are alive, the remaining material has been rendered receptive to further augmentation, with a correlation of greater improvement based on the base magical characteristics of the donor victim. Calcifist, and his minions have been found searching in areas of historic deaths of dragons, demons, and other cataclysmic foes. What could he possibly create with bones of such potential?
