The pumping of a pulse, my heartbeat… Darkness envelops everything. A pained scream echoes through my mind, the lure of the abyss… I don’t know… Can’t see… My breathing sounds, so strained and irregular. My throat - if that is what it is - is coarse as if I had swallowed a thousand razorblades. The pain… Her voice, it screams, it screams from the other side of an invisible wall. “Sara,” I yell, but no sound reaches my ears and blood stream forward… Then, I fall…

…and wake up bathed in cold sweat and tears. A cut can be felt on the left temple. Before me, the remains of my ritual stares at me as if to shame me back into the abyss. I grasp my face with my hands, only to realize… that I don’t. So, the sacrifice went through? I should have known based on the amount of blood and flesh lying inside the iron-dusted circle. I stand up using the arm I still have left, and with a golden flash I stem the bleeding from my left shoulder. Then, I stumble forward. Her corpse is right there, silent and still very much dead, a testament to my failure. I try to apologize but as the words reach my mouth, my lips start trembling furiously. I fall back to my knees, the tears playing a soft lullaby on the floorboards. Then wrath takes hold of me, I grab the nearest book and slam it into the dead flesh, forever ruining the knowledge within. I start hulking. The healer in me knows that grief is the first step to acceptance, but the necromancer that shares its space will not allow it. There must be a way to truly bring back the dead once they have joined the spirits? If I can summon wraiths and raise the undead, why shouldn’t I also be able to return a soul to its cannister and revitalize the flesh? Grief gives way to desperation and that to frustration, and the endless cycle that I have found myself in for the past seventeen months continues.

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I reseal the body inside its enchanted coffin to prevent it from rotting away. The enchantress hadn’t asked any questions when I had brought her the schematics, a sentiment that I am grateful for. The less I am forced to say, and the fewer rumors that start circling about the village wizard, the better. The last thing I need, is an outraged mob that doesn’t understand my work. That doesn’t understand my grief. That doesn’t understand my love. I push the coffin back into her room and close the heavy door. The deep, resonating sound invites a silence that I dread. Despite my profession, or maybe because of it, I fear the darkness and death. No, I hate it with a passion as cold and silent as the graves I dig and reopen.

A whisper sounds from the study, breaking my reflection. I enter carefully, for a necromancer’s doorstep invites guests from both sides of the Veil. A faint, green light greets me. I curse and start conjuring a binding mist, the only known way to pacify a wraith. As I step from behind the doorframe, I raise my hand and the grey, arcane fog follows it. The aberration tries to fade away, but my effect has already taken hold. I then pull my hand back, focusing on the tendrils of life that flows inside the creature, and unleash. A flash of black light follows, but I see the lines that start unraveling the wraith from within - my will made manifest.

That is when I its face.

It is her.

My ritual worked. She was summoned. But she wasn’t bound…

As the wraith is destroyed for good, its spectral body reabsorbed into Vaft’s magical flows, I realize that my work is finally over.

She is gone.

I breathe deeply and regularly.

Then day breaks over the Valisian sky.