Ree brushed aside the linen wrappings, letting them hang rough across her hands. She stared down at the gleaming tablet now revealed. Heavy in her hands and gleaming in her sight. The Great Resurrection was a ritual engraved on a slate of pure gold, as if it were treasure or a trinket to display in some adventurer’s grand hall.
Smythe and Usther crowded her on either side.
‘The Great Resurrection.’ Ree could practically hear Usther wrinkling her nose. ‘Rather presumptuous, considering nobody has ever been resurrected.’
Ree bit her lip. ‘Until recently, we thought nobody had ever traveled in time, and that therianthopy was only a legend.’
Usther sniffed, but had no answer to that.
The tablet didn’t feel evil or powerful. It didn’t have the musky character of a book, which Veritas claimed had tangible souls. It felt like cold metal, weighty but dead.
‘Let’s set it down and look at it properly,’ said Smythe. ‘Your arms must be getting tired.’
Ree flashed him an annoyed look. She was an archivist; she’d carried plenty of heavier things than this, and more awkward too. But he didn’t seem to mean anything by it, so she sat down and placed the tablet carefully on the floor.
For a moment, they all crowded around it on hands and knees. Emberlon stood in the corner, his eyes sad.
‘This is older than Old Antherian,’ Usther said. There was a crease between her brows, like she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at. ‘I can read some of it —’
‘I can read the first two lines —’ Smythe cut in eagerly.
‘It’s Ancient Antherian,’ said Ree calmly. She felt a weight in her chest. ‘And I can read nearly all of it.’ She looked up and met Emberlon’s bleak grey stare. ‘It’s not good,’ she said.
Smythe tapped his lips. ‘An exchange of equal parts,’ he said, running his hand along one of the lines.
Usther’s gaze flicked at Ree, then back down at the tablet. ‘A rift … or maybe portal must be opened.’
Smythe, ‘And there’s a line at the end that reads —’ he stopped and paled.
‘And so let it be done.’ Ree’s words echoed around the stone tombhome. Wordlessly, she extended her arm and bared the mark carved there in flesh and blood.
‘It’s a sacrifice ritual,’ she said. ‘I can’t translate the cadence properly, but it amounts to: “To raise one city, the other must be cast down. Cut a rift through the eighth plane, and scry in a bowl of golden oil. The reagents are crysstone, blood, and fire. A hexapentath around the rift. Those spared must be marked on their brow with the same hexapentath. And the rift will pull inward that which lives, and push outward that which once lived, and that which once was will be restored, and that which is will be dust.” The last two lines are the incantation. And then —-’
‘And so let it be done,’ Smythe said quietly.
‘It would sacrifice the entire town,’ Usther said. Her lip curled. ‘And likely would fail in the attempt.’
‘A dangerous ritual to have in the wrong hands,’ said Ree quietly.
Emberlon spoke from the corner: ‘Or any hands.’
Smythe had been following her hands as she translated, his eyebrows pinched together. ‘And that which once was will be restored, and that which lives now will be dust,’ he murmured.
Ree sat back and rubbed her hand on her chest. ‘Still think this will be easy to circumvent?’ Ree asked. She knew the bitterness in her voice was unfair — none of this was Smythe’s fault — but she couldn’t stop herself from doing it. Her chest was growing tight and her head faint.
‘I know it looks bad.’ Smythe spoke quietly, deliberately, with none of his usual quaver. ‘But I remain optimistic. One way or another, we will deal with this.’
But Ree felt sick. ‘We don’t even have a proper translation,’ she said bitterly. ‘It’s a language that was spoken hundreds of years before even the version of Antherian most of the Craft uses. A translation from me is worthless if we’re looking for loopholes.’
Smythe shrugged. ‘We have to try.’
Ree shook her head and scooted back into a corner. She huddled there, drawing her knees to her chest. It was not a time to be exposed, when she felt already that the universe had looked down at her and found her wanting.
Death, her mother had told her many times, was not to be feared. It was a transition, a lateral move between planes that necromancers merrily played between every day. But nothing changed the fact that death was final, nor that Ree had no idea what the deathly planes would be like. She closed her eyes against the sting of tears and wished she had managed to fly.
The crow skin was in a pouch hanging from her belt, folded with magic and careful fingers. Though the skin itself weighed less than a bird, it still felt heavy against her leg.
The day passed Ree by in a dull stupor. Usther and Smythe argued semantics of the translation and Emberlon brought them books in Ancient Antherian to test their translation against. Usther thought the key to finding a loophole in the Oath was in the ritual itself but Smythe insisted it was in the Oath.
‘Intention matters,’ he argued, as if it would make any difference at all. ‘If we attempt the ritual — even if we don’t complete it — it should prevent the full consequence of a broken Oath.’
But the conversation moved in circles, and every time Usther tried to clarify the translation, Smythe dismissed it, and every time Smythe suggested they start the ritual just to see what happened, Emberlon stepped in and said he couldn’t allow it.
She wasn’t sure how long she stayed like that, huddled in the corner while her friends argued against a fate impossible to prevent. But at some point, she felt a touch at her shoulder and blinked with bleary eyes up at Smythe. ‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said quietly. Usther was nodding over a spread of open books; Emberlon slept flat and peaceful on his back, the tablet hugged to his chest.
‘How can it?’ She croaked the words. It was hard to keep her eyes open. ‘Veritas said the Oath never takes more than seven days to resolve. We’ve already used almost six of them, and we’re no closer to a solution.’ Her eyelids fluttered. ‘I want to go to the tower again, tomorrow.’ Her words were breathy and slurred now with tiredness. ‘I want to shift, just once. I want to be a mage.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Smythe. ‘You will.’
The last thing Ree remembered was the sight of Smythe’s dark eyes behind his glasses, and the curl of his hair, and the feel of his thumb sweeping across her palm. When sleep took her, she dreamed of the wind rippling across her feathers.