Etched on the first page in beautiful cursive is a note from my ancestor.Resurrection is a complex ritual that requires a personal sacrifice from the Mortemagi. When his human lover died, Damas, the God of Luck and Treachery, begged the God of Death for a favor. In exchange for half of Damas’s soul, Death brought her back as the first Mortemagi, the ghost reads aloud, and for a moment I forget that I cannot see her and look over my shoulder.Pathetic story, she adds.
“Who broke your heart?” I ask.
The state of the world.
I ignore her, letting the pages guide me to what the book wants me to know. There must be a way to connect the missing cuff and book to the heirloom relics. “You don’t happen to know anything about relics, do you?”
I know a lot about relics, the ghost scoffs. I didn’t mean my question as an offense.
“Why would someone collect heirloom relics?” I flip through pages and pages about the lifeblood and the cost of resurrection. Yet another reminder of my stupidity. If I had bothered to do my own research instead of hanging on to every one of Victor’s false promises, I wouldn’t be hanging on to life by a meager amount of lifeblood right now.
As awful as it sounds, my only consolation comes through the blotched ink in the margins, as if someone had been crying over the page. Ifeelthe shattering realization of the mage through the shaky handwriting. I’m not the first mage who resurrected someone without knowing the consequences.
This book confirms that the only abilities that do not cost lifeblood are speaking to ghosts, listening to the dead’s last words, and leading ghosts to the Underiver. If I so much as attempt to take over a puppet’s threads like I did Mara’s, I could die.
Does Gorhail no longer teach?
I roll my eyes. “I didn’t… attend Gorhail.”
Still, you’re a Corvi. Yet you are nothing like your ancestor.
“I chose a life free of magic.” I close the book, moving on to a different section.
The ghost laughs, then the soft timbre of her voice melts into sadness.You never gave it a chance to begin with.
The one time I gave it a chance, I cleaved my life in four. Don’t mind me if I never want to have anything to do with it anymore. “Will you tell me about the heirlooms, or will you guilt me to my death?”
She sighs.Heirlooms have many uses: personal collection, resurrection, entrapment, reforging. Perhaps even more uses now than when I was alive.
Killing people for a personal collection of heirloom relics seems extreme, so does reforging. Who would reforge heirlooms from dead lines? Resurrection bears too high a cost for anyone in their right mind to sacrifice themselves. Still, I ask as I pick up another book, “What would resurrection with heirlooms entail?”
The usual Mortemagi recipe: a bloodline sacrifice, the heirloom relics, and more lifeblood than a person has. In short, it is improbable.
Improbable? I think it’d be impossible. This leaves me with entrapment, where souls are trapped into a relic so they can never become ghosts and never move on to the Underworld. “Entrapment…” As I muse aloud, the answer comes to me clear as day. It’s not a copycat we should be worried about. The poachers are collecting everything to resurrect Grimm.
I slap the book shut. “What do you need to release a soul from entrapment?”
The blood that seals, and the relic.
I distinctly remember Beau saying two of the founders—Azgar and Telam—did not have any descendants, so there goes my theory. “I need your help,” I finally concede. “Mages are being murdered, their heirlooms stolen. Faro’s Cuff is missing, andThe Founder’s Book of Relicsis also missing. How are all of these connected?”
For a moment, she goes quiet.Are the lines being killed?she asks.
I nod.
Dead lines, she mumbles,tell no lies.Then after a moment, her voice grows distant.Killing lines is personal, Viola.
Tilda, perhaps consider upholding curfew. Gorhail students were at a bar in Riverview in the wee hours of the morning.
UNOFFICIAL LETTER FROM PRIYA PARRISH TO MATILDA RHODES, NOVEMBER 1939
thirty-two | sylas
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 1939
The atrocious dark green carpet leading to the library is as hideous as it was six years ago, the last time I set foot in here. Nothing about this place invites knowledge. From the black candles staggered on either side of the never-ending hallway to the wrought iron grill in front of the black double doors, it might as well be the path to the Underworld.
Gryff is recovering at the infirmary, and he refuses to speak to me. On Lyria’s advice, I decided to leave him alone for a bit, but I don’t blame him. As I was sitting there this morning, waiting to be treated, I learned that Wren was getting married in two weeks, and one of the dead Mortemagi had just had their first baby. Now someone’s lost a wife and another a parent. All these lives stolen, because of my recklessness and blind rage. How many more will die because of me?