Alchemical Note

After simple work with straw and clay, the writer's greatest success was reanimating a hanged young cutpurse: bird anima drawn into his heart, and a sacrificed hare to stir his limbs, made him shamble rigidly for three days before he collapsed in spasms — a far happier result than the exhumed skeleton tried a week earlier.

Two conclusions follow: the more recent the death, the likelier the inscriptions take effect; and oddly, it is simpler to grant movement to the lifeless — a straw doll, say — sooner than to a human corpse — perhaps because the flesh still grips the soul that had once dwelt there and refuses an alien spirit. The note breaks off as the writer ponders this.