Gathering the Lost Self

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GATHERING THE LOST SELF

• 15 motes, 1 health level
  
  

Among the Skull Diaries of the First Age there was scribed a complex ritual that involved the resurrection of the dead, not as zombies or ghosts but as whole, living and conscious people, just as they were in life. It seems a strange spell to be included within a tome of black rituals and death magic, something that could renew a life and make it whole again.

But because of the hope it offers the mourning and the desperate, it has been sought countless times over the centuries. Men have killed innocents for a chance at the precious skulls bearing the details of what is known both as Gathering the Lost Self, and as the Emigre Ritual. Twilights quarreled bitterly in the Deliberative with the nascent Crossroads Society for the rights to exclusive study of the skulls. The Sidereals have attempted several times over the years since the Usurpation to gather the skulls for the same purpose (and to take them out of Creation entirely), but the question of who should study them first has split the Deathlords Convention for so long it's almost a morbid joke. In the years of the Shogunate daimyos fascinated with the occult collected the skulls as a curiosity of Anathema magic, scattering them to the five directions.

No one is entirely certain who finally put the spell down to paper and distributed it. Sources attribute the author to any number of different savants depending on who one asks. In the Underworld, the Dowager is known to possess a copy of the scroll in her own library - as are the Lover, the Silver Prince, the Bishop, and the Crimson Marquessa Reigning in Fire and Pestilence. A handful of deathknights have attempted to use this spell, but it is thought that perhaps they were deceived into doing so by angry masters who found it more expedient than tossing the offender's monstrance into the Void and losing his shard forever.

For no man or woman who has attempted to perform this ritual has ever managed to succeed. Even the few Abyssals who have used it in the past failed in messy and painful ways, most of them destroyed entirely by the monster they inadvertently summoned. In every case, the subject of the spell turned into a powerful, terrible creature that devoured the caster as well, and had to be put down violently.

Department 137 in Yu-Shan has forbidden its use to all Sidereals studying the dark arts, pending further study. The elders who teach there insist that such magic is dangerous, flies in the face of Saturn's purview, and should never be touched, but so far no one has tried to destroy the scroll. The Crossroads Society has not gone so far as to forbid its adherents the spell, but do insist that it be learned only as an aspect of necromancy itself, and all who do so are warned against the temptation to use it. Lunar and Sidereal alike, most have resisted. A few, however, have not.

In reality, the secret to this spell is simple: it is a cruel double-edged trap.

To summon the hun of the necromancer's choosing, she must first gain access to a Fetter belonging to that person and spend one unsoakable lethal health level in the shedding of one's own, living blood. Entreating a prayer to the lords of the Setesh Calendar, opening the gates of the soul to bring the hun back into a habitable body involves committing the Essence to the vessel of choice, usually either a homunculus or the original body (though the latter is only advisable if the person has been dead for less than three days).

Unfortunately no one seems to have ever understood the meaning of a rather vague passage buried in the text: to call back a person's full soul is to tear their corpus away from the Underworld - or Lethe - and force it into a state no longer natural. Without a po to anchor the soul's passions, the hun cannot remain intact, and if there is no "conduit" as the text requires, then it is torn apart by the soul's own fear, anger, and resentment. Corrupted and destabilized by its own malice, which is in turn fed from the Void through the caster, the ghost loses any remaining consciousness of herself as a thinking, separate being, loses control over her own form, and becomes a monster. Usually the hapless necromancer is devoured, as are any number of innocents before the thing is put down itself. In its own way, it is a crueler fate even than soulforging.

In order for the spell to be successful, another ghost or a living human being must act as a sort of conduit, to supply the hun with a po to stabilize the soul complex. Unfortunately for the sacrifice himself, his own higher soul is devoured by the transferred malice and he becomes a thoughtless husk driven only by his own passions.