You take out a few books that present a simplified view of enchanting from the shelf, and sit down at a table to read them. The first is a look into warding enchants, like the ones on the personal armour you're wearing. It is divided into ten practical rune combinations that might be useful for children to know, each requiring its own arrangement and orientation of the magical symbols.
The introduction to the book states that enchanting is an simple and fun process that, with practice, can be done with great ease. It warns that a misdrawing of a rune could result in grievous bodily injury, so it is best to have parental supervision while attempting to inscribe runes. These runes can be inscribed on anything, but as a general rule, the bigger the object being enchanted is, the stronger and more plentiful the runes have to be to have their full effect. Also, runes may have a effect which differs slightly or drastically when inscribed on a living being. Living enchantment is not to be attempted except by those of advanced skill in enchanting.
The basic process of enchanting consists of inscribing the desired rune on the item to be enchanted, and then clearly saying the name of the rune soon after. If the inscription and the pronunciation were accurate, the rune should start to glow visibly in the colour associated with the enchant. These colours are somewhat arbitrary, and are not necessarily unique from enchant to enchant, but the effect combined with the colour can prove helpful with the identification of an unknown runic inscription.
If the rune is not inscribed properly at all, or the pronunciation of the rune's name is clearly incorrect, the enchant will fail and nothing will happen. If either the rune or the pronunciation is close, but not right, there is a threshold within which enchanters should take caution, as the arcane energies binding to the site of the rune will fail to bind, soon before they normally would infuse the item with magic. That is, the energy would build up to a high level, but be rejected at the last moment, and cause a violent reaction that can be damaging to the item in question, or even to the individual enchanting if it is a powerful rune with higher magics imbued in it.
Also, if a rune is misdrawn to resemble, even by accident, another, more potent or harmful rune, then the "arcane whiplash" that occurs will be more potent or harmful, respectively. As such, it would be best to practice acquired runes on drawing paper before attempting them on the actual item to be enchanted, so as to be sure to inscribe the rune correctly when the enchantment counts, and also to examine the effects on the paper itself and be assured that the rune you have drawn is desirable for your chosen item.
You realize that this book must be for some darn bright young children (the chemistry sets children used to play with come to mind), and that enchanting could be potentially dangerous if you aren't careful. The book goes on to outline its 10 basic protective enchants, but now you want to take a look at the book you picked up on necromancy.
This books clearly states at the beginning that necromancy is an abominable application of magic, and is never to be attempted by those of the legal or righteous persuasions, and thus that efforts must be be made to combat those who use it. Necromancy, in fact, is not a resurrection of the dead to become living, but merely a reanimation of the corpse, meaning that necromancy is not so much a dark revival as the ultimate violation of the sanctity of death, made convenient by the strong thought impressions left throughout the body during life, which can then be turned towards the efficient animation of the decaying dead. The impressions are linked through a runic flow to the bones, which means that a spellcaster can cast a spell initiating a flow of arcane power which contains the patterns of runes required for the necromancy, and thus the dead can be reanimated without actually coming into contact with the corpse.
Before runic flow spells were discovered (though even now these are limited to only some of the most skilled spellcasters in practice, so those who are not as skilled must resort to the method below), an enchanter had to actually carve the correct animation runes on all the bones to be animated from the corpse, a very messy and inaccurate process that left all the bones in the body uncovered. Out of some respect to this tradition, modern necromancers often strip away the flesh from the dead they reanimate to reveal the bone, even when this is no longer a technical necessity.
As necromancy is a complex and intricate magic, and the runic flow link is actually quite fragile, the reanimated are quite vulnerable to magickonegative signal interference -- that is, the flow can be disrupted by any sudden spike in arcane energies around the "undead", as they are called. Thus, offensive magics are proven to be highly efficient in dispatching the reanimated dead, and defensive magics also prove themselves damaging to the integrity of the runic transmission driving the magic, so each time the undead meet with a defensive spell or enchant, it can "wound" them, and make them easier to dispatch, as the forces holding them together weaken.
You put the book aside for a moment, and consider that this weak point could prove very useful to you. The frost runes you picked up were probably a wise choice after all. The runes could easily provide a spike of arcane energy and knock out the runic flow to the skeletons. The dead would be put to rest.
(Cargo pants are fun, useful, and look fine, but they're not the height of fashion.
(Oh, and you're not allowed to do necromancy. It's evil and unlawful, and people would hate you for it. And it's very complicated as spells or enchants go, and there are no books that would teach you how to do that. So, no, you can't reanimate a skeleton for your purposes. You can disanimate [not to be confused with deamination...
... bad science joke] skeletons, but you lack the skills, resources, and moral bankrupcy to redo the necromancy)
(Yeah, I know that was a lot of information, but magic is a science, after all.
)
