Mori checked everything once more, looking back towards Oloa, “Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, I have to kill you for this to work,” Mori said, glancing around the room. While none of the necromancers nor Natalia showed any movement, Mori had a suspicion that they wanted to roll their eyes at her.
“I understand, Madam,” Oloa said, “To become undead means that you must be dead first,” she chuckled, “But even if this does not work, I trust the gods with my soul…” Mori stared at the woman for a moment, then nodded; she decided that, if anything went wrong, she would ask the gods for their souls back.
With no other way to stall, she began the ritual. Ritual would have been the wrong word for what she was doing. To most mages, a ritual was a spell cast by multiple mages with the goal of creating a single effect. What Mori was doing was closer to casting a spell with runic assistance.
First, Mori told Oloa that she may feel pain, which the necromancer ignored almost as soon as it was said. Sighing, Mori moved onto the next step, which was removing the soul from Oloa’s body. To do such a thing, Mori switched to her soul sight and stared at Oloa’s soul. Mori knew that the soul was in the brain for all living things, but she did not expect Oloa’s soul to be as large as it was. It was just as large as Fara’s who, while not being a mage, was quite powerful after her gifts from the gods.
Seeing Oloa’s soul, Mori took a moment to focus, then summoned her Sentient energy. She had tested using her odd S. energy to Connect with Unio before, so she knew that she could take Oloa’s soul without ripping into her skull like a madwoman. To take the soul, though, she needed to Connect with Oloa. It was not difficult, but Mori chuckled when the woman yelped in surprise. After a moment of acclimation, Mori lifted her soul from her body. The newly-made corpse went limp and the room was so quiet that she could have heard a pin drop.
Then came the hard part. Mori summoned a shell of black mana and wrapped Oloa’s soul in it, not letting any of the bundle go. There was a moment where Mori thought about her own resurrection, which was far more complicated than she was doing at that moment. The sequence flowed through her head again. Spark red. Spark black. Spark green. Spark purple. She realized with a start that each part was a step in the spell. Red was encompassing her soul, black was covering it in mana, green was crystalizing it, and purple was putting it into her body.
She wished she knew a bit more about each mana type, because she had a suspicion that having those mana types could have been useful, but she did not waste time on could-have-beens.
She put her focus back onto Oloa, whose soul had the telltale mark of an absent system. There were, however, a few runes still lit within her soul. Mori had the impression that the gods were watching her, ready to take Oloa back in case something went wrong.
Believing that the gods were watching, however, did nothing to dampen her resolve. In fact, it only strengthened. Knowing that the gods were watching her only made her want to prove her capabilities. With that in mind, she went on to the next part of the spell.
She summoned forth a shell of crystalizing mana, something she was able to lift from her group sessions with Fara on the mana of the light crystals. The shell wrapped around Oloa like a snug blanket, wrapping her up tightly. She then activated the crystallization mana. The death mana crystalized quickly, turning into a soul gem, just like what her own once was.
Seeing the gem, Mori smiled, and switched back to normal sight. She looked around for a moment, watching her audience watching her with rapt attention. With a smile, she took the gem into her hands and plunged a hand into Oloa’s body, right next to her heart. There were a few gasps, but none moved to stop her. With a place open, Mori placed the gem directly into Oloa’s chest and shot a spark of mana through the gem, activating the resurrection.
*=====*
Oloa never thought her life would bring her to where she was. Once upon a time, she was a lowly street rat in the slums of Gribnik proper, scrounging for food and anything to sell to the local gangs; noblemen and noblewomen threw out a lot of clothing, after all. That all changed when she found a dead body in an alleyway. She was tempted to take a nibble, if only to stave off the hunger, but she knew better than to. Luckily for her, a passing necromancer took notice of the body and, mistaking the man for her ‘victim,’ offered to take her aboard his skiff. He did warn her, however, that murder was not appreciated around him. The man did not believe her when she told him that she only found the body, but that was alright.
From there, she became a necromancer through years of training, meditating, and understanding death and what it meant to defy that concept. She loved it, but she aspired to more. The necromancer who took her in saw that, and brought her to the guild. At sixteen, she thought of it as a found family, one that did not care that she was once a street rat, one that taught her everything they knew about necromancy, and one that protected her as fiercely as she wanted to protect them.
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Ten years later, she could yet remember the loving looks her family gave her every day. In that moment, though, she was about to surpass them all, surpass every necromancer that came before her, and become a lich. The offer was almost too good to be true, really. She could leave Archlich Athanatos and go back to her life of hiding her guild in the shadows because people did not like others messing with bodies.
Or she could swear eternal fealty to a liege who considered their feelings just as important as her own and become a lich. The decision was not difficult.
She did not regret her decision even to the very end, when she felt something Connect to her soul and lead her away from her body. It was not as violent as being torn from her body, which she was happy about, and she loved the fact that she could feel the warmth surrounding her as she floated in a red limbo. It was like a hug from the former guild master. Warm, and loving.
To her senses, time moved far too slow and far too quickly all at the same time. It was an odd feeling. Then the red, warm feeling was removed, and she was left in utter darkness. It was not a silent, uncaring void, however. It was alive, roiling with its own machinations, even. It was like a disease that healed instead of killed, like a blade that sewed instead of cut, or like a poison that gave men and women a high instead of laying them low. It felt contradictory. Life in death.
With that thought, something gripped her prison and compressed it, froze it into a shell around her soul. She tried touching the shell, but she felt… lacking. Something was missing, like an arm she never had but felt that she needed.
She stayed like that for a few moments, waiting, before something happened to her prison. Its roiling, still present in its crystalized form, went into overdrive. Everything felt so alive that she felt addicted to the feeling. It was wonderful.
That was when she woke up.
Her body felt numb, like she had just woken up, but she still felt the roiling energy in her soul. She basked in it for a long moment before turning to look around. She was sitting on the table she had laid upon for her raising, surrounded by her former guildmates. They all stared at her, unblinking. “What?” she asked in a husky voice. She closed her mouth in surprise, eyes wide. The last times he sounded like that was when she almost died of heatstroke in the desert when they ran out of water.
“Huh. You kept your skin and flesh,” a divine voice said. Oloa turned to see her new mistress, Mori, standing there with a smile on her mask. Something throbbed in her soul, like the love she felt for the old guild master and his fatherly attitude. After a moment of staring, the mistress gave Oloa a hug, “Welcome to the land of the dead. How is it? Are you feeling any different?”
Oloa looked down at her body. Nothing was very different, save for an fist-sized hole in her robes above her heart and her slightly-gray skin. She touched her skin, seeing her fingers with the same color, and pinched herself. She felt it, sure, but it barely affected her. She knew it happened, but it did not hurt her. And she was happy about that fact. She looked up to her mistress with adoration, “I feel amazing… thank you,” she said, jumping forward and giving the strongest hug she could manage.
There was a bit of creaking metal, which was not what Oloa expected from a simple hug. She lurched back, the mistress sighing, “Yep, should’ve expected that. Alright, let’s get you up to date on your abilities,” she said, reaching out to the side and staring at her hand. A familiar red energy coalesced into a knife in her hand, sharper than she expected, and the mistress showed her. “First, regeneration,” she said, making a slow, small cut on her arm.
It was slow enough that Oloa knew that she could have stopped it if she wanted, but she did not want to; it was a demonstration, and she did not want to get in the way of that. As the mistress said, the cut bled for a moment, then began to stitch itself back together. The blood turned to dust and returned to her flesh, the wound sealing right up afterwards. “Woah…” Oloa muttered, “I didn’t even feel it…”
The mistress chuckled, “That’s good. Next,” she said gently, taking Oloa’s left hand, “Lich’s finger. It’s our ring finger, the one for marriage. I think. Depends on what you do in this world,” she said, pushing a small bit of mana into her finger. Instead of it simply being absorbed by her finger, it was pushed back out, becoming the roiling death mana in her soul. “Finally, your soul. You can feel it, right?” she asked, Oloa nodding fiercely, “Good. Protect that. At all costs.”
Oloa nodded resolutely, “I won’t let you down, mistress,” she said, the adoration reaching even her voice.
“I… meant to say that you need it to live, but… sure. Thank you,” the mistress said, giving her a smile and a pat on the head, “Alright, who’s next?” she asked, turning to the crowd. There was a silence before they all tried to be the next person to become a lich. The mistress chuckled as Oloa hopped down from the blood stained table.
She walked over to the doorframe, surprised to see a one floating eye, three zombie women, one gelatinous creature hanging from the ceiling, three human-like people, and a lizard-like zombie all standing right behind the door frame, watching the single-lichess ritual happening. Oloa stared at them for a moment, “Hey,” she said, flinching as they all snapped their attention to her, “How’s it going?”
She was suddenly flooded with a deluge of questions about the spell from all of them, including the slime person on the ceiling somehow. She answered them the best she could, but eventually just let them watch the ritual happen; even if they did not find what they wanted to learn the first time, there were still fifteen more rituals to go after her own. They could see it then.