"I... whoa..." Luka, being less resilient to epic tales than Valda, was a bit more awed. It was one thing to hear about familiar tales, like the Hero's eternal fight against the Monster Lord, but the talking skeleton had spun a story of a completely new world, enrapturing the boy like someone caught reading an engrossing book.
So instead of him speaking, the water in his glass began to swirl, eventually leaving its confines altogether and morphing into the form of a small, almost hand-sized woman who seemed to be constantly shifting, her liquid blue hair caught between shades of sea green and her teal body lacking the fine details of a human.
"Why are you still moving?" she asked the skeleton.
"Undine, what are you-?"
"Quiet, boy," she snapped. Luka immediately shut up.
"I am an elemental spirit who has made a contract with this fool of a Hero," she said. "I've existed for thousands of years, and in that time picked up a thing or two about Necromancy, Raised One. Your story speaks of impossibilities. The art of animating bones or a dead body is not unknown to us, and amateur necromancers can easily call up the spirits of the deceased, but even the greatest cannot do a perfect, binding resurrection. A plague that causes deceased to rise would be impossible without a magical component, and even then an average person's mana supply would only be able to sustain their form for a day or so, which certainly isn't enough for it to be any use in a protracted campaign."
Luka was getting paler by the second, but Undine ignored him and his feeble protests, continuing to speak.
"The greatest necromancer in our world once turned herself into a zombie, and she only lasted for a scant hundred years before her emotions faded and she became little more than one of her own constructs. This is without mentioning the several people's worth of mana that she had to consume every day to keep herself animated. You should be starving for it more than the sealed goddess over there, but you're rolling in the stuff."