: I love the explanation but I have to ask: how does the
: undead-withering property of the Mandrake roots factor
: in to this?
Wow, good question. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest nobody did this before the fall of Muirthemne. Most likely some Jman, trying to be compassionate, went to a captured thrall and said, "let me heal your rotting body, brother" and, well, poof, there it is. Suddenly the Light has a new weapon...
As for why it works, I have no evidence whatsoever (as usual). My feeling would be that the body does not want to be undead, that undeath is a condition similar to paralysis or stoning in that it is a subversion of the normal physiological processes, so the body thinks of it as a disease or a wound. Then when the healing is applied, the body's immune system kicks in and flushes out the mana that the necromancer imbued it with (thereby making it undead), and the body returns to the state it should have been in all along, i.e., falling apart dead. The root can heal most wounds but the really serious ones, like stoning, take all of its power and leave nothing for renewed vitality--that's why when you heal a stoned unit, their health is still so low, and that's why when you heal an undead unit, you don't bring them back to life, just back to death.
