Priscylla slumps against her workbench, grumbling weakly into the crook of her elbow. Sometimes it’s a curse to be so familiar with the steps of prepping for a ritual; what was intended as busywork to take her mind off just gave her more time than ever to think.
She ruined everything with Wick, obviously. Years upon years of building a tenuous peace, and here she goes running her mouth and firing off dispellations without so much as stopping to say please. She’d thought herself past the kinds of patronizing abuse of her skills that got her labeled as a menace in the first place, but evidently not. Wick wouldn’t dare barge down here and call her out– much too nice for that– but Priscylla can see the writing on the wall. He’ll thank her for her hospitality, ride off into the sunset, and just so happen to never come back, and he’d be right to do so.
With a muffled whine, Priscylla rolls over, casting an eye towards her drawings on the floor. At least she was able to channel her frustrations into something productive, she muses. On one side of the room, the door is already well underway, its basic outline taking shape. Opposite that, the conjuring circle is finally finished, laid out in pristine white chalk against the basement’s dark stone flooring.
Idly, she lifts a fist-sized chunk of crystal off the table, turning it over and over in her hand. All she has to do now is dash this rock against the summoning circle, and her last four years of research and theory will be put to the test. If she did anything wrong, she’d probably be adding another burn scar to the tally, but if she did everything right… it’d mean seeing her parents face to face again.
Her thumb traces over the edges of the crystal. Smooth faces and pointed vertices.
Not for the first time, she wonders if she should be doing this today. The ritual isn’t going anywhere, after all, she could leave it to sit for days and come back when she’s ready. Maybe she could change into something nice, in case it does work and she needs to look her best, but the idea of dressing up and raising her hopes only to be met with failure is almost too crushing to consider.
The crystal glints as she raises it, refracting off her lab’s gentle lamplight.
Priscylla scoffs to herself. Ridiculous, to be procrastinating at the very last step. She just needs to get it over with. Though it takes her a few minutes to muster her courage, she finally forces herself to her feet, gently kneeling to place the crystal in the center of the drawn sigil. Quickly, before she can lose her nerve, she runs one last inspection, checking that her parents’ bo– her other reagents are in place.
She allows herself the indulgence of one last deep breath before driving her heel down, crunching the crystal underfoot.
At once, mist streams out from the shattered stone in every direction, as though Priscylla had stomped on a water pipe rather than a gem. She bites her lip, watching nervously as the mist thickens and coagulates, eventually condensing into a steadily growing bank of snow. Bit by bit, second by second, the snowdrift rises, its edges stopping firmly at the outer rim of the summoning circle.
Priscylla nods to herself, a smile creeping across her face as she steps back out of the sigil. This may be the easy part, but it does her nerves good to see that she didn’t make any obvious mistakes. Judging from how long it took Genly to form in her last experiment, she should be seeing some movement right… about…
A bony hand of ice shoots up out of the snowdrift, scattering clumps of slush in every direction. Before Priscylla’s eyes, more and more snow packs on as the hand fills out and articulates, bending at the finger joints before slamming back down into the frost, hauling the rest of the body out. For a brief moment, Priscylla can see flashes of the bones at the skeleton’s core, before clods of snow roll their way up the body’s torso to simulate muscle and skin.
The second body is slower to rise, lying down and waiting for its legs to form before hauling itself to its feet. It stumbles for a second, and immediately the shorter body is there, offering its arm to lean on. Their faces are the last thing to fill out, the last clumps of snow being absorbed into their bodies and leaving the once chalk-covered floor spotless.
The taller one pauses, lifting a hand of ice to feel at its newly-formed chin. At last the snow sets, forming the unmistakable face of Priscylla’s father. Shock clear on his frigid face, he looks down, watching the same process finish for his wife. They spend a long moment in awe, staring at one another, before he turns to look at the woman before them. “Right. Hi. Who are you?”
Proof that she can make talking undead! What a rush! The words themselves don’t sting as much as Priscylla anticipated, either. If anything, it just makes her more excited to drop the bomb. “You probably don’t recognize me,” she leads with a smile, spreading her arms for a hug. “It’s nice to meet you again. I’m your daughter, Priscylla.”
The two undead share a look. The shorter, Priscylla’s mom, whispers less quietly than she could have. “Did we ever actually have a kid?”
Her father shrugs. “Beats me.” He grimaces in Priscylla’s direction. “Sorry, miss.”
It’s as though Priscylla were punched in the stomach. Immediately, she steps back, the reunion turning to ash in her mouth. “What? No. No, no, no.” This shouldn’t be possible. Their memories should be intact. She has to have done something wrong. She has to have missed something. She has to…
Priscylla’s gaze turns back to the confused duo before her, her father insisting that her mother take a chair while she insists she can sit perfectly on the floor.
She has to run diagnostics. “Right. Can I ask you two a few questions to make sure we’re all on the same page?”
Her mom titters nervously. “I mean, we have a thousand questions of our own. Can’t we ask some?”
Priscylla opens her mouth, caught between frustration over her spell and wanting her parents to be comfortable. “...Okay,” she finally says. “I ask one, you ask one. Sounds good?”
Her mother nods, cross-legged on the stony ground. Her father takes position leaning against the workbench and gives a thumbs up, casually eyeing the spread of materials.
“Great. Okay.” Priscylla’s mind whirls. “Let’s start with something easy. Can you both tell me your names?”
Her mother frowns, ridges furrowing into the snow that makes up her brow. “Rose Tinton. Why?”
“Could be checking if our memories work. Could be trying to scam us.” Her father sets down the vial he was examining. “But I’ll play along- Nemmerle Tinton. Do you want to ask our first question, dear?”
Rose shrugs. “Sure, but it’s a pretty obvious one. Are we dead?”
“Yes, but also no. It’s…” Priscylla winces. “Let me start over. You, the original you, are dead. Wherever your souls are now, I couldn’t say.”
The lines on her mother’s brow deepen. “Then how are we…”
“Getting there.” Priscylla takes a long sip of water. “Think of yourself, as you are now, as… a copy of your mind, taken at the last second before you passed.”
“Fascinating,” Nemmerle breathes. “How long have we been gone? The idea that this kind of magic is commonplace now…”
“Oh, no, it’s not at all,” Priscylla interrupts. “I’ve, er. Invented it from scratch.”
Rose laughs openly at that, slapping her knee. “Holed up in some grim middle-of-nowhere lab and making up death magic? I’m convinced. You have to be Nem’s kid!”
Nemmerle rolls his eyes good-naturedly, looking back to his daughter. “So if we’re test subjects for a new kind of ritual, we really should let you get on with troubleshooting. I think you’ve banked up a couple questions to ask us, yes?”
“Absolutely,” Priscylla answers evenly. She’d been worried the grief would come back at the sight of her parents joking around like this, but this feeling is… much stranger. As though she’s six years old again and yet older than she’s ever been at the same time. “What year did you two get married?”
“Oh, hm.” Rose purses her lips. “I want to say 6289, right? We got married in front of the one waterfall…”
“I remember,” Nemmerle muses. “I also recall you wanting to make your entrance astride a griffin. They changed the game laws in ‘90 because of us.”
Rose pauses. “A griffin? Are you sure? I don’t remember that.”
“No, he’s right,” Priscylla cuts in, pulling up some parchment to take notes. “You yourself told me about the griffin when I was little. Anyway, next question… where were you born?”
Rose rolls her eyes. “Barehill West, same town I died in.” Her brow furrows again. “That feels weird to say.”
“And I was born in Bluehaven,” Nemmerle adds.
Priscylla frowns and makes another note. “That’s… not right, either. You moved to Bluehaven when you were two, but you were born in Walle.” A few more seconds of scratching her notepad. “I think I’m seeing what went wrong– no big singular mistakes, but a leakage of information here and there. I’d just need something to seal the gaps…”
“Do they still make phosphor extract?” Nemmerle chimes in. “Hard to get a hold of, but that’s always been my go-to for runic leaks.”
Priscylla just smiles and hefts a massive jar onto her workbench, halfway full with glimmering red powder.
Nemmerle claps and points. “That’s my girl!”
“So you do buy it, then,” Rose muses. “That she’s our daughter.”
Nemmerle shrugs. “Why wouldn’t I? She clearly knows about us, and now that I get a good look she looks exactly like you.”
“What, just from that?” Rose rolls her eyes as she rises to her feet. “Not from how she looked like she was about to cry when we said we didn’t know her?” Turning back to Priscylla, she opens her arms. “Come here.”
Priscylla takes a second to realize her mother is talking to her. Every single “she” and “our daughter” has been another firework in her chest, shock and warmth blooming in equal measure. Carefully, as though one wrong move would upend the dream, she steps forward into her mother’s arms. The hug is cold and clammy– how could it not be, with a body made of snow– but she nestles in close all the same.
“Pri-scyl-la.” Nemmerle sounds the word out slowly, testing the flavor of it in his mouth. “Fascinating name. I think I like it.”
“Thanks, I picked it myself.” The joke comes to Priscylla’s lips automatically, but then the panic hits. “That is! Not that there was anything wrong with the name you gave me in and of itself, simply that it’s–”
“Oh, please,” Rose chuckles, resisting her daughter’s efforts to pull away. “We’re not that sentimental. If we give you something broken, we trust you to throw it out.”
“Within reason,” Nemmerle adds hastily. “I can see you’ve got my old astrolabe stocked in the corner, and I know its hinge is stuck, but as a collector’s item it still has… value…” Seeing the look on his wife’s face, he clears his throat. “Right. Sorry. Hugs.”
Priscylla just laughs, and leans in. It’s not a perfect match– she’s taller than her mother now, and her dad doesn’t rub her back the way he always used to– but it’s close enough. It’s all close enough. There were so many questions she wanted to ask about her childhood, so many mistakes she wanted to apologize or demand apology for, but now…
“Oh,” Rose murmurs, “I think I’m melting a little bit.” Indeed, a tiny pool of condensation is beginning to form under the three of them. “Is that supposed to happen?”
“Right. Hells.” Priscylla steps back, panic rising again. “I realized that trying to make the summoning permanent was causing issues, so I changed the rune structure to make it temporary.”
“Eh, no big deal.” Nemmerle just shrugs. “I don’t think us sticking around would have been healthy for any of us, anyways. If you need us that badly, you can just summon us again, can’t you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” Priscylla runs a hand through her hair. “It’d be hard to scrape together enough of your remains to do this again, but not impossible.”
“Then let’s make this time count,” Rose says resolutely. “How long do we have left, do you think?”
“Twenty minutes or so?” Priscylla waggles her hand.
Rose takes her by the hand and pulls her to the bench. “Then we want you to tell us everything you can. Give us the story of your life.”
Priscylla snorts, wiping at her eyes with her free hand. “The same way you told me stories from your own lives before bedtime?”
“We were egotistical enough to brag about our adventures to our own daughter?” Nemmerle asks with a laugh, sitting down opposite them. “Actually, no, that sounds just like us. Carry on.”
“Alright. Alright.” Priscylla beams a shaky smile, snowmelt dripping off her fingertips. “Where to start… Mm, how about a story about a necromancer and a wandering hero.” She leans back. “Other than the one about you two, I mean.”
