17th of Fall, 512AV
One of the wonderful things about Animation that many people didn't realize was just how versatile it could be in the right hands. For example, with a little skill and patience, one could have an army on their hands... A horrible, unstoppable, undead army.
Ignotus was going to make such an army here, and now.
The first step, of course, was recruitment. That part was easy. After a bell's wandering, he found a delightfully sizeable flock of pigeons. At least three dozen in total. Standing a few yards from them, he began to hum an old Zeltivan lullaby. Soon the happily relaxing birds started to get drowsy. An open tap in Ignotus' aura was pouring calm and sleepiness into the birds. Of course, he couldn't do them all at once. Only three or four at a time. Still, once a handful of them had decided to kip, the rest decided to stick around and wait. After two more bells of methodical, and exhausting Hypnotic work, the entire flock was fast asleep. After that came the boring but necessary bit.
Traveling in a spiral from the edge of the flock to the center, Ignotus methodically, systematically wringed each pigeon's neck until all of them were dead. All but one. This one was important. It was quite simple really. He didn't know how to fly. Pigeons did. Therefore, he would need to use one... At least at first.
Drawing his old dagger from its sheathe, he carved as perfect a pair of Animation circles as he could in the soft dirt, as well as the glyphs Tock had shown him when she first taught him. Guiding Glyphs along the link, two Focus glyphs at the center of each circle, and Barriers around them.
He placed the live pigeon in the source circle, and one of the pigeon corpses in the destination. Then he steeled himself and pricked his finger with the dagger, squeezing a drop of ichor out onto the circle. In a few ticks, his eyes were
aglow with Djed.
Gathering his concentration, Ignotus began the transfer from the sleeping pigeon's soul to the corpse's. A faint blue rope of Djed began to flow out of the sleeping bird, slowly coalescing into a perfect sphere just above the corpse. This time, the process only took forty two chimes. A slight improvement. He didn't have to deal with strange abnormalities, either. It wasn't time to lower it into the bird just yet, though...
Into the Soulcore Ignotus etched three Directives:
One was to obey him, and obey him always.
Two was to attack anything that moved on command, save for its fellow pigeons, and himself.
Three was to preserve itself from threats.
The messages burned themselves into the sphere in Nader-Canoch, and once they were all there, Ignotus lowered the finished Soulcore into the bird's body. Then came the trickier part.
The sleeping bird's memories were flooding into him, but the only important ones were the ones related to flight and attack.
Small snippets of Djed flitted from the sleeping pigeon to the dead one. Memories of flight. The understanding of simple commands and flock mechanics. How to peck and scratch... The words "stop" and "follow," among others, and how to flee. In short, everything he needed for the pigeon to be able to do. That was to be able to follow him and disperse, to attack, to stop, and to fly as part of a collective. The whole process only took another twenty chimes.
Finally, with the sleeping pigeon's muscle memory uploaded along with its mental ones, Ignotus took the Animated bird for a short test run by making it flap its wings for a few ticks, and hop a couple inches back and forth, then awakened it, the Djed stream snapping off and racing into the dead pigeon like a slurped strand of spaghetti.
The fresh undead stood up shakily and looked at Ignotus with dead, obedient eyes.
Only seventy nine more to go.
