For The Touch of Death

The firstborn son of every Henrichson is cursed to live forever. I wasn’t born just to suffer with my many forefathers, who barely breathe as rotting skin and bone in our family’s catacombs. I was born to inherit the responsibility of granting our family a touch of death. As a doctor in philosophy and science, I’m certain the cure for our cursed immortality will be found in the science of death, not the worship of it. I, Levi, am the first Henrichson who hasn’t uttered a prayer.

At President Marbas University, I’m the Head Librarian of The Library of Global Rituals and the leading scholar in the ritual sciences of death and reanimation. All the rituals I know have failed to kill my father. He’s become so sick of these failed suicide/murder/sacrifice attempts that he’s surrendered to desperate faith. I wish he could see how much of a stimulating challenge this is. The sight of our physicality dying in countless ways, from dead skin cells to failing organs, while our souls and spirits remain in constant resistance is remarkable! We’re married to the everlasting ether that many mages would envy, especially the fanatics who worship the fabled elixir of life. This work, however, wasn’t about chasing legends or revering the spiritual or cultural significance of each experiential moment. Reverie and prayer failed the Henrichsons from the start and I feel I’m the only one who sees that. The being who cursed us made sure any deity of death wouldn’t hear us. So why call to them?

My father thinks of ways to kill him often, usually in the context of some new or indigenous belief he initiates himself into, as if our curse makes him a more special human sacrifice compared to anyone else. I wish his blind faith shattered a bit once my review of past and current necromantic research told him the observable truth: Out life force can’t be removed from our bodies because we’re immortal, meaning our life force is in constant flow. Our goal is to seize death force at an incredibly high volume and use it to degrade or at least disconnect the flow of life force at our soul’s core.

With disbelief in his pitiful eyes he says, “The cosmos gave us our bodies. A god has cursed our bodies because they know the cosmos. So, only a god can cure us. No mage can become a god unless a god exalts them.”

Challenge accepted.

My understanding of the cosmos is generalized for now, but here's what I've learned as a measly immortal. Death and life are etheric forces that are neither inferior or superior to all the other forces we mages have labeled over time. Ether follows the laws of the physics, chemistry, and more, but it, of course, has its own laws. In understanding the etheric laws of death, who’s to say that only chthonic gods can control death force when we lowly beings have created civilizations, technology, and countless spells to support with the ether of life?

I don’t need a godly title. My stomping ground is the Department of Reanimation where I consult and educate necromancers on ritualistic practices and their more modern (and obviously better), scientific revisions. My high standards for passing my classes is the closest I’ll ever get to divine intervention. The baseline is understanding the three fundamental laws of necromancy:

First Law: Every human death is the loss of a soul’s core, a limited form of life force that cannot be grasped unless a mage is trained to harness and repurpose it.

Second Law: A dead body culminates death force through decomposition; the longer the body is dead and the skeletal remains are mostly intact, the more death force it consolidates.

Third Law: If the soul core is trapped in a dead body or recast into a dead body, reanimation can be activated only if the life force is at a higher etheric volume than the culminating death force in a decomposing body.

I take the data from the necromancers experimental rituals as inspiration on a daily basis, especially with the help of Clara, my favorite death witch who’s sympathetic to my situation. Her team takes the recent dead hoping to repurpose them for manual labor jobs that don’t need a high level of self-awareness. I watch their team revive a corpse off the sterile floor and guide it to push buttons on a mock assembly line every week. They’re still mapping out the cognitive processes of what’s left of its brain so they can eventually take my advice and infuse the reanimation of a body with a pulse-spell that helps its spatial recognition and executive functioning. At the end of the consultation with her team, she pulls me aside with an inspiration I’ve never truly tasted.

“What if you stopped wrestling with life and death and instead went somewhere life and death can’t follow?” She inquires.

“Such a place exists?” I ask.

“It exists as a place of nothingness, and because of its ambiguity, we assume that’s where the universe was born. If the universe is born to create and destroy-“

“So can its source,” I finish as I write two words in my notebook: The Void.

Of course, I know of The Void, but the forces of life and death were naturally my primary targets. I didn’t think life and death could have any other forces that counteract them. They can’t even counteract one another. Manipulating those forces was difficult enough. How could anyone access void energy, let alone observe it?

We find a meeting room to talk privately.

“How much do you even know about the void?” I ask.

“As much as the primordial force tells me.”

I scoff. “Does this spirit speak plainly or do you get a dose of cryptic passages at every meeting?”

She pulls out an analog mobile phone and slides it over to me. “Divination has upgraded to technomancy. Give them a call and see for yourself. I had this phone made for you anyway.”

I want to be grateful, but I just glare at the phone. “Why are they like this?”

Clara looks puzzled. “Like what?”

“Why are they, those forces, spirits, gods, or whatever, so uninterested in us, no matter how loud we cry, until their interest is piqued?”

“Call and ask.”

I hold the brick-shaped phone in my hand with a firm squeeze. I bet my anger alone could crush it. “My family has called out for centuries to whomever or whatever is up there. Why would I do the same? I won’t beg for help like my fathers before me. It’s pathetic.”

“Then give it back.”

Clara holds out her hand and I immediately recoil, possessively bringing it to my chest.

“I won’t plead,” I say. “But I’d never leave a stone unturned.”

Gradually, rationale replaces my frustration. Technically, contacting a spirit isn’t a form of worship. I do it in rituals all the time and like Clara says, it’s simply divination. While the phone rests on my chest, it jingles. On the screen is the phone company’s brand logo etched out in pixels. Then a message appears: Press Call.

I do so, and the meeting room vanishes. Clara is gone. I’m standing instead of sitting. The phone is no longer in my hand. Darkness surrounds me, but I can see my hands and the rest of my body clearly, but there’s no light source above or around me.

“Are you the companion of our ward Clara?” Says a voice that feels dangerously close to my ears and also disembodied by distance.

“I am,” I reply, trembling. Why am I trembling?

“Her service and devotion has granted you a single request for guidance. Speak.”

The direct tone is refreshing. One chance to pick the consciousness of a primordial being.

“I need to harness enough death force to erode an immortal soul core.”

A pause, then the voice licks my ear again. “Harness death? Your physical, mental, emotional, and etheric properties cannot hold death of that volume…unless…”

“Unless?”

“You make a part of your essence one with me.” The word “me” reverberates in endlessly different tones, languages, pitches, and frequencies. “Your life force…your shared life force is tethered to etheric life that flows in many forms. You are not capable of quantifying them with your limited amount of consciousness.”

“Many forms?” I ask. “Many, but not all?”

“Many. Not all. Life and death can never take my form. I birthed ether and it returns to me in destruction, rebirth, or suspension, even while life and death are designed to create, destroy, and transform in their limited ways. Suspension is what you want. Suspension with collection. Consolidation. You want to collect etheric death at a volume that rivals your inherited chain of immortality, this chain of etheric life you’re bound to. What you want is an ability that is mine alone. If you agree to be one, I will guide you.”

This voice, this being, speaks plain truths to me, truths I thought I knew and have never known. It’s terrifying and validating. The words and their tones tones touch me with facts of my limitations and powerlessness, causing desperation, or perhaps a type of surrender, to rise in me. I think I’m trembling because of this incomprehensible contact high in nothingness. I don’t like to submit to this type of vulnerability, but without eyes, the void sees through me. It knows I need to succeed.

“Exactly!” I scream. “Let me be one with you!”

There’s an excruciating pause. I try to speak, but my voice is gone. I grab at my throat and my mouth as if my voice fell somewhere I could pick it up and put it back where it belongs. There’s something on my mouth… A cover? More of a mask over my mouth, jawline and the upper part of my throat. Where did it come from? I want to take it off. It sticks firmly to my skin. A few more tugs and it lifts off of me. Immediately, I scream.

Something in the mask exposes the muscles around my mouth and my jaw to a cold, painful air that slices between my teeth when I breathe. Several muscles pluck out of place reaching for something far away. My flailing strings are rooted in the red of my blood, but as they reach further out, they turn black, blending with the surrounding darkness.

“You will do as I do," The Void says. "Consume. Consume death, and I will harness it for you. Consume life and I will shift it to death. Put your mask on to control the urge to devour.”

As I press the mask to my face, the tendrils return to their place before the mask completely fuses with my skin again. The overwhelming pain decreases gradually. It hurts to smile, but I can’t help it as I hear of The Void’s instructions.

“So, I can just consume the life force of my forefathers and you can make it into a force of eternal death?” I ask and laugh. “It’s too easy!”

My laugh dies in another pause.

“Do not bother consuming the life force of your forefathers, for their life force is altered by a being that disconnected it from its interdependence with death.”

Defeatedly, I ask “Wh-what do you mean?”

“All etheric properties can be altered to be interdependent, codependent, or independent of another, but regardless of its properties, ether is perpetually transforming, which makes its original and evolving forms temporary and limited. I created life and death to be interdependent. They are entirely different forces when they are independent of one another. If a life force has properties that make it independent of a death force, then it will not interact with death. Thus, the immortal life force alchemized by that being is pointless to consume. The death force you seek is in the many-layered fabric of etheric flow. Etheric life and death are hardly unilateral.”

I can’t speak.

Then the voice says, “Have you not studied how these forces alchemize in variance based on their interactions and properties?”

All of my knowledge combined with the void’s truth shatters another part of me. Finally, I relate to my father. Through many rituals I have seen our immortality repel any all conjuring of death force. I think…I think I kept seeing death force as just a single force that will always be repelled from us and assumed that if death force could be contained at an etheric volume great enough to at least disturb our immortality–

“And what is the etheric volume of immortality? Are you so certain your consumption of death force will have the same volume and velocity of immortality’s flow? Will your hunger for death be enough?”

I’m back in the meeting room. Clara sits in front of me. The phone is in my hand. The text on its screen reads “Call End.” The phone turns itself off.

“How long has it been?” I ask.

“WHAT THE HELL IS ON YOUR FACE?!” Clara screams.

I tell her everything. Apparently, only a second passed when I spoke to The Void.

“Are you okay with this? Is this really what you wanted?” She asks with concern and the morbid fascination that made us friends.

I nod. “It’s not ideal, but it’s a chance.”

Clara sighs. “I was hoping The Void would give you guidance that was more of a knowledgeable nudge in the right direction. Not…that.” She gestures to my mask.

“Oh no, I was given that too,” I say. “The void gave me hope and killed it all at once with the laws of truth. You’ve helped me, my friend. I don’t regret giving a higher being a moment of my faith, for once. Don’t think for a second I’m going to start praying though”

She laughs. “Leave the prayer to me. Maybe I’ll earn you another favor soon enough,” she says. “So, what now? How will you…consume life and death…legally?”

I slide the phone back to her.

“I didn’t get a chance to ask.”

She picks it up and tests the power button. It bothers her that it's not working.

“But I’m not concerned about legality," I continue. "I’ve been thinking about the last words The Void said to me: ‘Will your hunger for death be enough?’“

Clara keeps quiet, still pressing the power button. I watch her, never breaking eye contact.

“The hunger has never been enough. Neither have my studies, my theories, and every damn death ritual created by the ancestors who wasted my time rambling about spirits who never gave a shit about them, then their predecessors have the audacity to say the modern wave of arcane science erases their culture! Minds like mine have only made their customs better!”

She scoots her chair away from me. “Don’t be an asshole now. My traditions gave you that phone call.”

I grip Clara’s hand. She finally gives up on the phone, knowing The Void has officially declined her call.

“Traditions or not, I am a Henrichson. We will do anything and everything for the touch of death. The Void has refined my hunger and my purpose thanks to your compassion.” I’m trembling again.

“Let me go!” Clara yells as she pulls out of my grasp.

“How many years?” I ask.

“What?”

“How many years does a death witch extend their reanimated life when they die and come back during their initiation?”

Tears stream down her face. “Please, don’t do this.”

“I’m… so hungry… I have to learn more. There’s so many kinds of etheric forces in the form of life and death,” I say as my whole body grumbles.

“The 500 years I have won’t come close to combating your cursed immortality you pathetic bastard!” Clara’s hands circle around one another to conjure a spell of attack.

“You’re right,” I say. “500 years isn’t nearly enough.” I lift my hand to my mask. “But I work at The Department of Reanimation and I’ve got time.

I pull down my mask and taste the exotic flavors of Clara’s reborn soul holding the properties that allow its shift from life to death seamlessly. Her deceptively youthful body, turning instantly decrepit, tastes like someone who had 52 more years to live.

Fourth Law: A soul core with a lower etheric volume than the death force of a corpse is delicious.