To say that the ritual she was looking at was heretical in nature would be an understatement. Her fingers trembled as they caressed the page of the tome while her eyes scanned the text and studied the mandala.

Thanks to [Divine Geometry], she could get a glimpse of what this mandala was for: it contained insights similar to those she had infused inside [Minor Healing], but these were about something darker, chthonic.

Lily started jotting the mandala down, drawing it, and redrawing it on paper so that she could get its shape imprinted in her mind. As she worked tirelessly on that, she suddenly heard a sound she had not expected.

[*Ding!* Divine Geometry Level 2!]

Her eyes went wide with surprise.

Was this how I was supposed to level up the skill?

But it was just a secondary thought, taking a backseat before the need to memorize the fundamental components of the spell.

The book detailed how whoever was practicing the ritual would absorb the Mut and balance that energy with their Ankh.

She still didn’t fully understand what Mut and Ankh were, but her intuition pointed toward interpreting them as Death and Life, respectively. As she kept drawing the mandala, she took a brief pause to re-read the page in full, finding out that, at the very bottom, it mentioned that while it was optimal to perform it immediately after death, it could still be used later if the caster was strong enough.

That was terrible news for Lily, but she steeled herself.

If this is like healing, with all I know about the human body... I might still have a chance.

With a furious fire in her belly, Lily continued her study, frantically redrawing the mandala over and over again, tracing out the flow of Mana with careful precision. She memorized every word, every rune, and every chant. There was no room for error. Elysium’s life, and perhaps even her own, depended on it.

Dragging herself out of the room with her eyes bloodshot and her body aching from hours of tense study, Lily approached the Templars, who stood like silent sentinels at the entrance of the library’s forbidden section.

“What time is it?” she asked, her voice cracking from exhaustion.

“Two hours past midnight, milady,” one of them replied.

She gasped. So long had passed? It felt like a mere moment and an eternity all at once.

“Thank you,” Lily said as she began to walk away, gathering her thoughts. Traditionally, a wake in the Church of the God of Light lasted 24 hours, followed by 6 hours of the Quiet, from midnight to dawn. It was a period of deep reflection and solitude when no one disturbed the bereaved or the deceased. This meant she had precisely four uninterrupted hours to carry out her plan. If she could actually make the ritual work, she would probably need much less than that.

Quickening her pace, her heart pounding loudly in her chest, she approached the library’s exit. But just as she was about to leave, a voice from the shadows stopped her in her tracks.

“You’re about to do something foolish, aren’t you?”

She froze, recognizing the voice but not daring to turn around.

A candle illuminated the gray locks that now, slightly overgrown, draped over Lumius’s face. He gently closed the book he had in his hand and got up.

“Lily,” he called her by her true name.

“Lumius, I—”

Surprisingly, he moved closer and proffered an awkward hug. However, amidst the stiffness of the boy’s chest and arms, Lily felt a genuine sense of worry exude from him. His heart pulsated strongly, audible through his clothes. When she was released from the embrace, he grimaced.

“I’m sorry about your friend. He was... pure.”

Lily, however, did not register the condolences the boy had just offered.

“What are you doing here?” She frowned. “Were you... waiting for me?”

“I asked Uncle Atticus what was going on,” he explained. “And he told me.”

“But how did you know I would be here?”

“I went and asked your father.”

Lily wasn’t sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, it flattered her that Lumius was worried about her well-being.

On the other, the devil on her left shoulder was telling her he was only worried about losing his precious little future wife with all her healing talents that would put him at the forefront of the race to becoming the next [Pope].

“I need to go—” Lily started.

“It wasn’t my family,” Lumius said as she was about to turn.

“What?”

“I asked,” Lumius said slowly. “I asked my father. It wasn’t our family.”

Lily frowned, not understanding why the boy would think that—

“I don’t want you to think I had to do anything with this,” he reluctantly offered an explanation. “It was just an accident.

“He—he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve asked that the sewers be scoured by [Templars] to find whatever monster might have killed your friend. Several dead rats with sword wounds have been found already. Your friend—Elysium, he fought until the very end... he was a fighter.”

Lily looked at Lumius with an alienated gaze. She knew that the boy was trying his best to offer her a few sweet, kind words. But all she could muster from the bottom of her heart was contempt. She felt disgusted by even talking about this, by even thinking about the fact that Elysium could actually be dead.

“I need to go,” Lily tried again, but this time, Lumius grabbed her arm.

“What were you doing in the Forbidden Archive?” He asked. “Why were you there?”

“Let me go!” She snarled.

“Where? Let you go where?”

“I have somewhere to be,” she said, giving him a long look.

“I thought so,” he muttered, clamping her arm harder. “Did you get the skill?”

“What skill?” She asked, confused.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Lumius looked around before hunching closer to her and whispering into her ear, “Have you learned [Death Magic]?”

“What?!” Lily recoiled, and Lumius immediately heaved a sigh of relief.

“In His Glow,” he muttered, visibly more relaxed. “You can’t perform Necromancy, Lily. He’s gone. What you want to bring back... he would not be Elysium anymore.”

Lily scrunched her face in an affronted manner now that she understood what he was hinting at.

“I’m not going to raise him as an Undead!” She hissed.

“Then, what were you going to do, and why were you in the Forbidden Archive? If you don’t give me a good answer, I’ll not let you go until your friend’s body has been Reconciled.”

Reconciled, Lily knew, was a fancy term for ‘cremated.’

“Lumius,” Lily tried to calm down even though the time she thought she had was slowly melting away, “I don’t want to raise him.”

“Good,” he said, still not letting go.

“I—I...” She didn’t know how to explain herself.

“You can’t act crazy. Not now,” he said. “Not when my uncle is finally loosening the leash, Lily.”

Perhaps he was right; she had gone crazy. But she couldn’t just stay still. Not now. Not like this.

“Do you trust me?” She asked.

Lumius hesitated before nodding slowly.

“I just want to try something. It’s not Death Magic. I just... just give me this one thing, please. I need to go.”

“Tell me what you want to do,” Lumius said, but his voice cracked slightly with hesitation.

“I can’t,” she said candidly. “I can’t. But I promise I will come back. I am not going anywhere.”

Lily put her hand over Lumius’s, “Elysium was my only friend, Lumius. My only friend until I met you.”

Lumius seemed taken aback, and his face blushed slightly in the darkness of the library.

“Are you sure you won’t use Death Magic and get yourself burned on a stake?” He asked, his grasp slowly relenting.

“I don’t know any Death Magic,” Lily said truthfully. “It’s going to be fine. I promise.”

Feeling that he was close to letting her go, this time, she initiated a hug, whispering, “It’s fine. I’ll be back. The [Cardinal] offered me the Holy Flame, Lumius.”

The boy’s eyes went wide.

“What?!”

“Yes,” Lily explained. “And I want to accept. He wants me to take a [Vow] on it to make sure I go through with my commitment to the marriage, but in exchange, His Holiness would bestow the Holy Flame upon me.”

“That’s—” Lumius’s face went through several complex emotions—the first one was marked by a large, unusual smile. Then, shyness. “If that’s what you want.”

“Yes, it is. But I need to try something first,” Lily pushed.

“Ok,” Lumius let her wrist go, and Lily injected some [Minor Healing] into her arm as a bruise was already forming.

The third son of [Pope] Ennius had been trained in subterfuge and politics and was a skilled manipulator. However, none of his training registered in his head as he saw the tall, skinny girl run out of the library. Only long after she had left, a nagging suspicion made its way to him.

However, it was too late to change his mind.

...

Around two in the morning, she had sneaked inside the small church through the back entry from where the [Priests] would usually enter. The small cathedral door let out a pained and mournful cry as it slowly creaked open and split the silence apart. No one, however, was there to hear it. Not even the Guardians of the Wake were allowed inside during the Quiet.

Disturbing the Quiet was perhaps the second greatest taboo there was—and what she was about to do was the very first.

She didn’t take long to make her way to Elysium’s casket.

At the altar lay Elysium’s small body, still covered with the pristinely white sheet. Lily moved closer, her heart pounding, the silence of the church amplifying every beat. With a trembling hand, she pulled the sheet back, her eyes landing on Elysium’s face. A gasp escaped her lips as she took in the horrifying sight.

His once vibrant and lively face was a pale, swollen, lifeless mask. There were traces of terror etched into his youthful features. Elysium’s lips had always been a lively red, but now, they were a ghastly purple.

His locks were matted with dried blood and grime, the remnants of the sewage filth that ended his life.

The most disturbing sight, however, was his eyes. Or rather, where his eyes used to be. Instead of his glowing eyes, two gaping, vertical holes stared back at her.

If Lily had eaten anything, she would have just emptied her entire stomach. However, she forced the bile down and made herself to keep looking at him.

“If I had gone with you, you might have still been alive,” she grabbed and squeezed the little boy’s hand. She had always thought he would grow up to become a great [Templar] with a heart of gold one day, not… this.

There’s no time. I need to try.

If there was any hope to resurrect Elysium, it was hidden in what she had been studying all night in the Book of the Dead. In fact, she took out the tome from the small pack she had hidden between her cloak and her shoulder guard.

She perused the information again under the dim candlelight and the moonshine that came through the stained-glass windows of the church.

It all hinged on absorbing the Death Energy that swarmed inside a fresh body, and – with a touch of luck – that was the key to bringing back the dead for long enough to stabilize and save the body. Healing would be another key part of it—Lily hoped she had enough Mana, but she had also brought some high-quality potions that had been given to her by the [Cardinal] himself.

He’s been dead for too long, said Lily’s inner demon as she made her preparations. You can’t bring him back.

It had been nine years since she had last heard one of those ominous thoughts.

“It doesn’t matter, I have to do it,” she steeled her gaze and spread her hands out.

She dug deep within her soul and tapped into the essence of her magic, slowly composing the mandala she had seen in the book over the altar. This action started drawing forth obsidian strands of death energy from the corpse that coiled and pulsated around her like serpents in the pale light of the flickering candles.

Lily took a deep breath and stretched her hand out, connecting to the latent energies inside Elysium’s body. Slowly, the shadowy mandala, not bigger than her body, emerged fully from her friend’s body.

Lily began to chant, her voice carrying the archaic words of power through the air. As she chanted, her senses acutely attuned to the shifting energies around her, she began to feel an overwhelming torrent of death energy pulsating from Elysium’s body.

The ritual included forming a core of Ankh at the center of one’s soul to protect oneself against the overwhelming strength of death energy—or Mut, as the book called it. She called upon the Light Magic inside her to shield herself. However, while the death energy inside a regular body was usually nothing that the living couldn’t handle, Lily felt like this was different.

Fear clawed at her as icy dread spread within her, and she realized this was not just Elysium’s death energy – this was the remnants of his struggle, his fear, his pain… his death.

Briefly, she saw a frightening vision of an elongated, dark figure from Elysium’s last moments.

The realization hit her like a cold slap to the face.

This is too much!

It was far too much for a child of her size and power to control, even with the soul of an adult!

The death energy began to erode the boundary of her defenses, chipping away at her very soul like a relentless tide. The core of her Light Magic was barely holding on, turning dimmer and dimmer under the onslaught of the black tendrils.

With every passing moment, the death energy grew stronger and her defenses weaker. In a desperate attempt to regain control, Lily tried to sever the magical conduit, to cut herself off from the dark maelstrom she had so recklessly tapped into.

But it was too late.

Just as she tried to pull back and retreat, the ritual backfired. Instead of a controlled flow of energy, a blast of raw, uncontrolled death energy surged through the connection, barreling into Lily.

Her body convulsed, incapable of withstanding the swarm of death energy.

This is too much! Why is there so much?!

That was Lily’s last thought before the ritual failed.

The church was suddenly filled with a deafening silence, and the candles flickered and went out, plunging the room into darkness. The only light left came from the moon still shining through the stained glass, casting a grim light over the scene.

Lily, paralyzed by pain, fell to her hands and knees, black veins pulsating on her face and neck as her scream-less mouth hung agape, and her eyes were so wide they were about to pop out.

Then, she heard a stream of notifications.

[*Ding!* Skill – Mana Sense level 54!]

[*Ding!* Skill – Mana Sense level 53!]

…

[*Ding!* Skill – Mana Sense level 13!]

[*Ding!* Skill – Mana Shaping level 34!]

[*Ding!* Skill – Mana Shaping level 33!]

…

[*Ding!* Skill – Mana Shaping level 5!]

[*Ding!* Skill – {Master} Minor Healing level 1!]

[*Ding!* Skill – Minor Healing level 95!]

[*Ding!* Skill – Minor Healing level 73!]

…

[*Ding!* Skill – Minor Healing level 1!]

[*Ding!* Skill – Minor Healing Removed!]