Lily held her sword out, her heart racing as the ominous feeling enveloped them. Elysium and her sweated profusely, awaiting the worst.

Lily felt her hands tremble and, for a moment, wished that she had learned one of those [Death Ray] spells she had read about in the Forbidden Tomes her father had her study to learn about the enemies of the Church.

Seconds trickled by and turned into minutes as the ominous feeling finally receded, and the two children looked at each other wearily.

“We should call it a day,” Lily suggested, still shaking.

“Ok,” Elysium said, trembling a little himself. “What do you think that was?”

“A big rat?” Lily cringed. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. But whatever it was, it was scary.”

...

“You worry too much,” Elysium said as Lily cast [Cleanse] over his clothing. It was a convenient skill one could learn as a part of the Light Magic specialty. She had decided to learn it to clean up any evidence that she had been up to no good.

“I don’t worry too much,” Lily replied. “You worry too little! What was that creepy thing that snuffed out my [Light Orbs], huh?!”

“Something weird,” Elysium shrugged. “It doesn’t mean it was dangerous or that we couldn’t have killed it.”

“How do you reach that conclusion?!” Lily was starting to lose it.

“You need danger to level up,” Elysium stated matter-of-factly. “If we killed bigger rats, we would increase our chances of getting cool classes and stronger skills! I could get many more levels than you! You’d stop out-leveling me!”

“UGH!” Lily balled her fists in frustration. “You have got to be kidding! What if one of us dies?! What are levels good for then?!”

“My dad said it’s part of having a fighter Class or a support one like yours. Sometimes, people like us die.”

“You have no idea what you are talking about,” Lily snapped. “No idea!”

“Whatever. Let’s just go home; I need some sleep.”

…

Lily sat on her bed with the mysterious book her father had given her placed in her lap – the Book of the Dead. Calling this tome weird would be an understatement. She could only browse... one page.

Yes, that’s the extent of pages she was able to turn. There was a very detailed explanation of a ritual written in a minuscule font with several illustrations of a...

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

What’s this called?

Lily looked at a very complex diagram with its name just on the tip of her tongue.

A mandala!

She looked at the mandala penned with black ink, so complicated that the lines were almost indistinguishable from each other. She kept reading for several minutes until she straightened up and confirmed exactly the same thing she had read several times by now.

This is a ritual to resurrect the dead.

...

Ok, not exactly to resurrect the dead. The Book of the Dead’s first and only accessible page detailed a ritual that would be able to resurrect a fresh corpse by using one’s own body as a vessel to absorb the...

Lily frowned as she lay down on the bed back at her house, thinking about that word; she had expected Death Magic to be mentioned somewhere, but it wasn’t. Instead, there were two words that she didn’t know. One of them was Mut. The book detailed how whoever was practicing the ritual would absorb the Mut and balance that energy with their Ankh. Lily had never heard those words before in her life.

Lily had been reading many of the tomes that the Forbidden Archive, the guarded section of the Papal Library her father had granted access to, held on Death Magic.

Death Magic is not unlike Light Magic, Lily thought. Since the day she had started studying it, she had found it rather weird how the ‘opposite’ of Death was Light. She didn’t fully understand how that worked. She knew that concepts were imbued into the major divisions of magic so that Death Magic already contained Necromancy, Curseology, and extremely destructive physical specialties for classes. To make things weirder, ‘Dark’ Magic didn’t seem to exist, and the same for ‘Life’ Magic.

It wasn’t straightforward at all.

Lily rested her face on her fist, bored. She had postponed reading the accounts on wars, what a [Necromancer] could do, how casting any type of Healing Magic on the Undead dealt direct damage instead of healing them, and so on. Truth be told, it was all stuff she had memorized two years ago. Not having much to do besides training and reading quickly made all that knowledge redundant.

She let her head rest on the soft leatherbound cover of the Book of the Dead and closed her eyes for a quick snooze.

…

Lily currently sat at the small mahogany desk in the Archive, browsing through heaps of information on Death Magic.

Not even the Forbidden Archive contained books on how to actually learn Death Magic. However, there were numerous theoretical tomes about it, like the one in front of her. She looked around and then back at the rather slim book that had in-depth information on how Death Magic worked.

I need to see if I can find anything about those Mut and Ankh things in here…

With a gulp of anticipation, Lily turned the pages. What she found fascinated her. The book was divided into several sections, from theoretical principles to practical applications of Death Magic. There were sections on Curses, Shadows, and even Necromancy. Lily found herself gravitating toward the latter because of the ritual she had found in the Book of the Dead.

Maybe it’s a common thing for [Necromancers], she thought.

Yet, hours later, she had found no mention of any resurrection spells. Nothing came even close. She knew the Church would have labeled anyone suggesting such a practice a heretic, but how could tomes on Death Magic not mention it at all?

She had never been so torn before. Death Magic was taboo in the Papal State. Yet, here she was, fascinated by the very thing they feared. The idea of being able to bring back the dead, to give someone a second chance at life, appealed to her in a way nothing else did.

Gosh, I need to study this better… this… it feels like it’s the missing piece of a puzzle. If one can use Death Magic to resurrect a person, what else could be possible with it?

As Lily perused the tome, a voice suddenly boomed from behind her.

"I see the shadows have whispered their secrets to you."