Resurrection in Aclas (Glåugust '26)

Powerful clerics of the Maker can seek out a departed soul in the Astral Sea and, in a sense, “weld” it back to the original body. This can only be done if the cleric reaches the body of the deceased within about an hour of their demise, and only done if the body is more or less in one piece. Those returned in this manner only live for as long as the cleric who revived them does - when that cleric departs for the Sea, they bring everybody they revived along with them. The souls of those revived in this way are faint, emberlike things, barely burning.

A cleric’s resurrection is not something that happens every day, or even every year, but occurs enough such that terms like the vernacular “half-alive” have developed. More politely, they might be called the “deferred”, the “spared” or the “preserved”, though that last one has fallen out of favour as the term has applied more and more to things like canned food. In scientific terms, they can be referred to as a “reconstructed duality”, or a “bounded psychospheric echo”. In less polite slang, they get called “church-dead”, “life-debtors” or “second chancers.”

 

Acting in imitation of this, naturally, are wizards, who hate to allow any power to be outside of their hands. People have assumed it’s the dream of any wizard king or magocrat, but only a few have pursued the practice. Indeed, Yvaine the Great, most famous modern incarnation of that particular class, actively disdained the idea for religious reasons.

The most famous and luridly discussed method of resurrection is Total Indefinite Comprehensive Psychohylic Reconstruction, a spell written by the famous necromancer Avrendus - it is more commonly called “True Resurrection.”

It works. Perfectly, on anyone, no matter how long they’ve been dead. If you have even a scrap of flesh, a chip of bone, or a tooth (it doesn’t work with a lock of hair, alas) you can reconstruct them to prime health.

However,

The casting is laborious. It’s classed as a 9th Level Spell, in textbooks of theoretical necromancy. The casting is time-intensive - a full 24-hour ritual. Avrendus, an old-fashioned wizard who didn’t blink or sleep so much anyway, found this quite easy, but for a modern sorcerer used to feather beds and chamomile tea, it might be too taxing. The ritual requires, really, a whole dedicated chamber, and an entire laboratory setup for the various steps.

These are the practical issues. Then follow the moral ones. Firstly, a large pit of around a ton of fresh meat is required, of which at least ~10% must be sourced from the genus of the target of the spell. In theory, a more intact body requires less meat, but the exact tables for calculating this sort of thing were lost in the Forbidden Archives Fire of 1641, so the modern necromancer must alas overdo it, for the sake of surety. Secondly, the requirement of an anchor, who must be present for the entire casting - this must be a living person with a strong mutual attachment to the deceased. If the spell fails, the anchor is in danger of suffering a soul-damaging and possibly fatal event - recorded examples exist of failed True Resurrections killing the anchor, or even inverting their soul and turning them into a vampire. Thirdly, the pain.

The first recorded appearance of the spell was the resurrection of Oblate Kiln Carritho, a priest of the Church of the Maker, who had unsuccessfully tried to kill Avrendus and been split into multiple pieces. Avrendus resurrected him as a simple demonstration of the process, after having his wife kidnapped. Mr. and Mrs. Carritho were then returned to their home in Kelos, unharmed (in the long run), and were left untroubled for the rest of their natural lives. Later on, Carritho developed a reputation (fair or not) for developing a strange sympathy for Avrendus.

After this, things began to be called “Carrithine Dilemmas”, or a Carrithine Fallacy - that which purely appeals to power or practicality.