Erebus — unlife sentences and undead forced labor

Necromancy is the school of magic subjected to most taboos and prohibitions in the known world. The concept of controlling death, dying, and the dead unsettles most people and elicits instinctive repulsion and fear. But even more troubling are all the deep philosophical and theological questions it arises and the perversions it can lead to. How do souls work, especially now that there is no more afterlife? What is the relationship between the soul, the mind, and the body?
For this reason, necromancy is usually under the purview of spiritual orders: clerics, priests, shamans, and other religious figures manage the manipulation of corpses and the communication with the departed, keeping it sacred.
The Holy Infernal Empire is a partial exception to this mindset, and necromancy is more common and trivial there than in other parts of Axam and Uxali.

The divine purpose of the Devil, bestowed to them by the Demiurge, was to condemn the wicked souls. Everyone who disturbed the divine order and caused unjustifiable pain had to be punished fittingly. But, with the Collapse, the afterlife was gone: no more Hells or Havens, no more place for the souls, and no eternal condemnation.
While everybody had faith that the Demiurge would eventually fix everything, there was the issue of awful people left unpunished until the promised return. Executing murderers seemed merciful compared to an eternity of torture, so the Archdevil created the zombies to extend their torments beyond death.

All living things have the Life Force, a tiny sliver of divinity that contains willpower, creativity, ability to change themselves and the world. It’s called in different ways in different cultures: aether, spark, soul’s light, the sun within… but the concept is universally known and accepted.
When someone dies, the life force quickly vanishes, leaving a dead body and the Shade, the soul’s imprint in the Mana Field. In a short time, the Shade will unravel, and the mana field will react to the dead as it was always an object, without traces of it ever being sentient and alive.
A necromancer can create a simulacrum of the life force using mana and stop the unraveling of the Shade.
A knot of indigo mana, the “meta-mana” that reacts to magical energies, channels the green mana of vitality to imitate life force. This slows corpses from decaying and allows them to reinstate some functions of the necromancer’s choice, usually mobility and the senses. The “reanimation” can supersede damages caused by rotting, to a degree: the undead are not particularly agile or strong. But zombies can be functional even with some muscle missing and, if created masterfully, they can be almost skeletal, with just some tendons keeping them together, being pulled as strings in a puppet to make the limbs move.
Pieces of the mind can be preserved, usually the ability to understand orders and little more. Since there is no life force, they have no willpower: zombies will comply with any order.
It’s unclear what degree of sentience the zombies have: they clearly understand something, but can they think? Does the reanimation process trap the soul in the body or create a copy of the soul? The answers are a question of faith: Diabolism says it’s the person’s soul trapped in the dead body and they are conscient but unable to do anything, spectators in their ugly and undignified unlife.

All spells, to keep working, need life force: at the beginning, it’s the wizard’s own, but then it needs an outside source. Dying release life force in the mana field that can be then harnessed for spells to last and be cast (it’s the same reason sacrifices can work as fuel for magic). If a zombie kills something, it will fuel the magic knot in its core, keeping it stable. Plants are useless: their life force is too feeble and diffuse, but even small animals can work as a nutrient. Worms, maggots, and other saprophagic vermin, on the other hand, can be the undead “diet”, with the occasional live mouse, chicken, or even pig added in for some extra “nutrients”.

Zombies, on paper, are the perfect workers: never gets tired, able to do most things a human can, won’t object to orders, and can “live” off some rotting trash and the occasional farm animal (a rabbit would suffice for a week). The problem with undead workers is that they need a necromancer to create and manage them. A wizard must be near any zombie activity to keep them “tuned” and to fix any problem that, if not dealt with promptly, could lead to tragedies. Magic is inherently unreliable and distortion in the core knot can happen for seemingly no reason: such “hiccups” could make the zombies stop or act randomly. Even worse, a zombie could go on a homicidal feeding frenzy and, if it kills someone, it can spread its savage hunger to other undead.
Wizards must spend years and years training, and using them as a glorified jail warden seemed a waste. For centuries zombies were created by the clergy as part of the justice system: having some tireless worker was just a nice side effect of the course of justice.
In the last 30 years, with a bigger focus (and trust) on magic as a science and a technology, secular necromancers became more common and the creative process became simpler, cheaper, and more reliable.
Now, many nobles, mainly from Erebus and Maladomini, are pressuring the judges to sentence more and more people to unlife to have a cheap and obedient workforce.

All zombies have a sign with their name, the name of their father or surname, the place where they are from, and the crime they committed.
The is also the year of the start of their sentence and the time it will end, which is “never”.
The Zombie forced laborers are assigned to mines or fields, often alongside regular criminals whose sentences are made harsher by living with the undead. The constant siphoning of green mana, while not causing real magic effects or actual life force draining, can cause subtle malaise: a constant sense of dread and impending doom, for example, or becoming prone to colds and herpes-like sores.
People are encouraged to treat zombies rudely, offending them and roughing them up: it’s part of their punishment. Some Zombies, if their crime fit, are dressed in ridiculous clothes, like dunce caps or joker outfits, to inflict further humiliation.
A common game among kids is to go and throw rotten fruits at a working zombie. They also challenge each other, in a test of bravery, to go and read the sign hanging from the neck of the undead, to know their crime. It’s common to bet candies on what crime the zombie is punished for but to be sure no one it’s lying all has to eventually go near and check.