If I just pretend to be the version of Shiloh who’s like… a Palefish student do you think I’d become her? And before any of you smart asses say Shiloh, you ARE a Palefish student, I mean technically yeah, but c’mon. Barely lmfao.

I dunno, maybe I’ll just try it.

LOL fuck this place

Today a sophomore came up to me at breakfast and told me that Lana wanted a word with me, and you know what I said, automatically, without looking up from my hash browns?

“No.”

Ichabod was sitting across from me, and choked into his tea.

“What do you mean, no?” the sophomore said. I think their name is Jordan something? I don’t know, they’re a Bellhoof student.

“I mean no,” I said back.

“…Shiloh,” Andie murmured, glancing frantically down the table because Ichabod was not the only person listening in at that point.

“What am I supposed to tell her?”

I shrugged. “Whatever you want.”

I’m such a fucking asshole. Lana will not be surprised that I refuse to see her, but poor Jordan doesn’t know that.

So poor Jordan went off to do their best to explain to Lana that I wasn’t going to answer her summons, and like 10 minutes later, Jordan came back, looking baffled and carrying a folded note.

I could feel everyone leaning closer to see what kind of punishment I was getting for just coldly disobeying Professor Sorely, but all the note said was You’re excused from the arcane practical today.

Oh, yeah, this quarter arcane sciences is split in two: arcane theory and arcane labs. We’ve only had one arcane lab so far, and it was just Lily explaining to us that for some of us it would be the closest we’ve ever come to the great mysteries of the universe.

HA. You’ll have to forgive me for not taking it all that seriously.

So it’s not like I was particularly excited for our arcane lab or anything, but the moment Lana said I shouldn’t go, I decided I absolutely had to be there.

I know, okay, I know, but fuck Lana Sorely.

Also, don’t worry, I’ve been thoroughly punished.

“What did she want?” Andie asked. Andie doesn’t know how my vendetta against Lana began, but they saw enough over winter break to understand.

“I’m not supposed to go to class,” I replied, and Rook looked up sharply.

“What?” He reached for the note, and I let him take it. Rook’s brow furrowed, and when he met my eye I could tell he was worried. “Why?”

I shrugged. I said, “It doesn’t matter, I’m going.”

Which made all three of them uneasy all the way to the labs. I could tell because Bass tried three different topics of conversation, Andie tried several ways to gently suggest I just go talk to Lana, and Rook was brooding.

SHOULDA LISTENED lol I’m just gonna throw that out there here so you know as we go forward that I’ve already seen the error of my ways.

We were supposed to be in an arcane lab, but there was a sign on it that sent us to one of the Willowa auditoriums. When we arrived there, trudging through the snow, the doors were locked so we all had to wait outside in the cold.

“Are they staring at us?” Andie asked, watching the stream of upperclassmen as they passed us on their way to the larger auditorium.

They were. Some of them were smirking. One called, “Good luck!” and was quickly shushed by his classmates. I overheard someone else say that we’d never beat the record.

The doors opened on their own and we went in without hesitating.

I am such an idiot.

Inside it was not so much an auditorium with a stage and podium, as it was a Greek theater, designed for an orator at ground level. Below us, at the center of the room, was a table, and on the table, covered by a sheet, was something that looked suspiciously like a body.

“Finally,” Andie murmured, and when I glanced at them, their eyes were burning.

“What is this?” Bass asked.

And Andie said, grinning, “We’re gonna raise the dead,” and lead the way down the steps towards seats at the front of the room.

My blood ran cold. I literally don’t even remember how I got to my seat between Andie and Bass.

We all spoke in hushed, reverent whispers as we waited.

“This is a joke, right,” Bass said. “Reversing death is impossible.”

“Of course it is,” Andie replied, craning their neck towards the doors. “But it’s an old tradition to try.”

Bass, Rook and I all just stared at each other for a moment. Then Rook said, “I mean that’s pretty twisted, right?”

Andie didn’t even look up. “Yeah, sure, of course it is. But Palefish founders figured out almost immediately that the only way to keep students from trying to raise the dead, was to make us try to raise the dead.”

Bass was staring at the body under its sheet now, grimacing uncertainly. “So when Benedict wished us luck, he meant…?”

“Oh, we get points based on how close we get,” Andie said, as if this was totally normal. “Bird’s year broke the record for the first time in a century. Rumor has it their corpse was fully animated by the end of their lesson.”

And before I could fully internalize that Bird and his friends had created a ZOMBIE, Lily came into the room.

“Welcome,” she called up at us. Maybe she didn’t call. We were all so quiet, she probably barely had to raise her voice. “Welcome to your first real magic practical.”

None of us spoke. We were all staring at the body under its sheet.

“The study of magic is a life-long pursuit which takes it’s students to the furthest reaches of reality. The possibilities are endless.” She paused a moment, scanning our faces. “That said, there are certain roads all of our students will be tempted to follow at some point in their magical journeys.”

And it was at that point where my stomach started to churn.

“It is natural, I think, for all of us, when faced with the wonders magic makes accessible to think that there are no longer boundaries for the human experience — that with the correct application of alchemy or sorcery, we might obtain eternal life.” She paused for gravity. “Or, perhaps, we might reverse death.”

Silence in the room.

“These are misguided instincts,” she finally went on. “Dangerous instincts, even. But in the face of human mortality, sooner or later, grief or fear leads magicians to the crossroads between life and death. Often with disastrous results. And so,” Lily went to stand behind the body at the center of the room. “In an attempt to protect its students, Palefish has a long tradition of demonstrating why death is the boundary we can only cross in one direction.”

Yeah, so we all know why Lana didn’t want me coming to class, right? My heart was absolutely thundering.

Lily very gently lifted the sheet off the body’s face, and folded it back to her shoulders.

“This body belonged to Bethany Carroll,” she said. “She was a twenty-six year old medical student who died of an aneurysm 8 hours ago.”

We all sat with the gravity of that.

“She’s survived by two younger siblings, her parents, and her fiance. She was deeply loved and is greatly missed,” Lily went on. And then, “She donated her body to science.”

I’ll let you imagine my frantic mounting horror.

“Your task is to return Bethany Carroll to life,” Lily announced and there was a rustle of alarm through the room.

Bass raised his hand. “I can’t.”

“Yeah, duh,” Marina replied before Lily could say anything, twisting in her seat to look at us. There was an unsettling hunger in her expression. “None of us can. It’s impossible, that’s the point.”

“No,” Bass replied, tightly. “I’m not supposed to try, it goes against my coven’s law.”

“You have full permission not to participate,” Lily replied. “But you would not be the first witch to attempt this challenge in this room.”

Bass’ brow creased and he tugged at the collar of his uniform.

“Most of you will not have much to contribute, we understand that,” Lily went on to the room at large. “But you will all stay. The purpose of this exercise is to learn why we have rules about attempted resurrections.”

Kiara Jones raised her hand. “Okay, but I know not to resurrect people, do I have to stay?” She was looking at the body as she spoke, and her expression was a pretty accurate reflection of the nausea I was also feeling.

Lily had the decency to at least look sympathetic. “I know it seems that way now,” she said. “But we’ve seen it again and again, over many generations. Sooner or later, we will all be tempted. It’s only a matter of time.”

LOL I have gone after resurrection twice. It felt like my secret was laying right under the surface of a pond and all any of my classmates had to do is look down and see it.

“I will remain in the room,” Lily said. “But I will not offer any assistance. You will stay in this room until you have exhausted all your ideas to bring Bethany Carroll back to her flesh. If you need supplies, you will tell me, and I will have them brought to you. Good luck.”

And then she went and sat in the front row, leaving the body alone on the table at the center of the room.

None of us spoke or moved for a long time.

“Is she for real?” I distinctly heard Wayne Muir whisper to Tucker Gowie.

“Okay but like, morally this is fucked,” Darius Paul said loudly from behind us. “Right?” he went on when no one responded. “Like…”

“It’s no worse than her head being lopped off and set in a tray for plastic surgeons to practice brow lifts on,” Marina snapped back, which at the time seemed true enough.

Marina stood up. “Listen, we’re stuck in here until we try everything we can think of, right?” No one responded. We were all frozen. “We should probably start trying stuff.”

And then, while everyone hesitantly began to get themselves together, I got up, climbed the steps to the trash can at the back of the room and threw up.

My classmates had the decency to at least not say anything about it. They must have figured I’d never seen a body before or something. Only Rook who knows I’ve seen so much worse than one peaceful dead body — remember the fog filled skin suits anyone? — seemed concerned, but I waved him off.

This is my punishment for being the stubbornest bitch on earth.

Lily was openly startled when she saw I was in the room.

“Shiloh,” she gasped as I approached her. “What are you doing here, you were excused!”

I didn’t say anything, just made an awkward face. Lily glanced around somewhat frantically. She lowered her voice. “Now you’re here I can’t excuse you without also excusing anyone else who wants to leave,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked (whined), but even as I asked, I looked around and noticed that my classmates were watching. Even Marina, who had already brought out paper and was leaning over Bethany Carroll’s body was frowning in our direction, making her calculations.

Lily’s expression was sympathetic. “Shiloh,” she began gently, and I interrupted her:

“I’m not gonna do it,” I said and I fled.

“What was that about?” Rook asked.

“Nothing,” I mumbled and he didn’t buy it at all.

The next six hours were the longest fucking six hours of my life. That’s not true, obviously lol please I wish this were the worst afternoon of my life. But it wasn’t good.

Obviously there was nothing I could contribute to the efforts. The work fell into a handful of legacy kids — Marina, Lynlea, Terran, March, even Andie. Maybe especially Andie. The rest of us just sat there listening and occasionally taking direction.

“This is some fucking evil bullshit,” Darius said as Wayne, Rook and Tucker helped lift the body off the table and set it into the ring of sigils Andie and Marina had drawn on the floor.

“You have an extra loop on your eshwin on the second turn,” Andie said at one point as they were working, which made no sense to me, but Marina checked the chalk sigil.

“It’s fine,” she said.

“No check the third depth,” Andie replied and Marina snapped twice and pointed at them.

“Good catch,” she said, and set to correct it, and I realized that I have completely miscalculated Andie and Marina’s relationship. It was like they had one mind as they set about putting together this alchemy, as if they’d been planning this for years.

Maybe they have been.

It took like four hours for Marina, Andie, March and Lynlea to draw the sigil. It took up most of the space on the floor of the auditorium, and they argued and checked each other for every single squiggle.

The plan was to reanimate the body and essentially stuff it full of… well full of ghosts lol. The same substance sorcerers use to do magic, that’s the stuff that was supposed to go into the body. Alchemy would reanimate the body. Sorcery would summon the human energy.

“I still don’t know how to make sure what comes back is… her,” Tish said, who was supposed to be grounding herself, since she was the only one of us who had studied sorcery before and it was her responsibility to call up the ghosts.

Only Marina had an answer for her: “Look, we already know this isn’t going to work, right?”

Lol. Marina was definitely right about that.

The power sorcery taps into is not the same thing that makes us alive, right? Like, ghosts aren’t human, they’re just echos of what humans experienced while they were alive. The thing that makes us alive is… something else. It wasn’t gonna work.

And that wasn’t the only flaw in the plan. Eventually Bass lost patience just watching, and said,

“Okay but even if we do get the body to animate, it’s still going to have a brain bleed, right?”

Which threw everyone for a loop, and it took like another hour for Bass to finally agree go try and fix her veins himself.

“I work with tech!” he tried to insist. “I don’t know how to heal human bodies!”

“Human bodies are remarkably like machines, if you think about it,” Andie pointed out, and Bass blanched.

“She’s dead,” Marina snapped. “What are you gonna do, kill her worse?”

Dinner was long gone and we were all starving by the time Marina and Andie finally made eye contact over their sprawling sigil.

“I think we’re ready,” Marina announced. March sat back on his heels and blew out his breath. “Tish?”

Tish opened her eyes, and though she was looking pretty pale, she nodded.

“Okay, light the candles,” Marina said.

Rook struck a match. Wayne Muir and Tucker Gowie came down from the top of the theater to watch. Even Darius and Kiara who had not participated at all shifted to watch.

Marina brought out a knife and unceremoniously ran it across her palm, then passed it to Andie who did the same without even blinking. It was like I didn’t know them.

“Anyone else want to add blood?” Marina asked as she began to trace certain symbols in the sigil in blood with her finger. When no one moved she added, “The more blood the more powerful this’ll be.”

Bass refused, but Rook took the knife when it was offered to him, and knelt around the edge of the sigil with the others. Most of the class did.

I didn’t take the knife. I stood beside Bass and watched.

“Alright,” Marina said. “Everyone go ahead and put your cut hand down on the chalk ring. I’m going to draw the final sigil in a moment and when I do the alchemy will engage, and if we’re lucky Bethany will wake up.”

“What will happen?” Ichabod squeaked. “If she wakes up, what will she uhhh…”

“No idea,” Marina said, though I knew that wasn’t quite true. They’d been theorizing about what every individual rune and symbol would add to the alchemy for the last six hours. More than that, I think. I think Andie and Marina especially had been planning this for years.

“Ready?” Marina called and everyone who was bleeding bent over the chalk drawing to place their blood in the sigil. I noticed with a note of unease that rather than pooling any which way, their blood seemed to follow the chalk lines.

I watched Marina take a deep breath, dip her fingers into her own blood, and then draw the final rune.

The hum happened at once. It wasn’t gradual like it was when Tilly and I did that summoning a zillion years ago, it was like someone had struck the earth like a gong and we were hearing the low, deafening vibration of it. The electric lights in the room blew with a shower of sparks. The candles blazed up like brands for a moment, splattering wax before burning out. Several people screamed.

Then there was quiet again.

“It’s okay!” Marina called into the dark. “It’s okay, it just means its working. Someone light some candles.”

No one’s phone was working, but Rook still had matches and by burning them one by one we were able to find and light fresh candles. We sat or stood or knelt, holding our breathes in the flickering candle light, watching the body at the center of the room.

At first, when it moved, I thought it was just a trick of the firelight.

But then her fingers twitched. And then her eyes opened.

I felt a wave of nausea.

“No,” I said into the quiet.

It wasn’t like with Julian. This felt wrong, it felt eldritch, it felt unnatural. It felt like something was behind my eyes and under my teeth, trying to push them out. It felt like something had reached through my flesh to take hold of my bones.

“Make it stop,” I whispered to Bass, who looked about as okay as I did.

I thought Bass was going to do something but before he could, the thing that had once been Bethany Carroll opened her mouth and let out a horrible, gravelly, grating wail.

More screaming. People scrambled back from the sigil.

The thing flailed, and it’s movements were uncoordinated and jerky. It seemed to be reaching for the candles, it’s fingers straining. Tendons stood out in it’s neck as it reached, and then it sat up. Something dark and viscous pushed past its lips and dribbled down it’s chin. It wailed again, and this time it’s lips and tongue were moving, searching for words.

Andie, who was sitting opposite Marina around the sigil had drawn their knees to their chest, had buried their face in their knees, and clapped their hands over their ears.

“Make it stop!” I shouted. I whirled onto Lily. “Please, make it stop!”

I don’t know what she did, but I felt a roar and whisper of magic and when I opened my eyes again the sigils on the floor had been smudged and the thing that had been Bethany Carroll was slumped forward on the floor, as lifeless as she had been.

I cannot explain the relief I felt. You know the way a constant, high pitched sound feels, and the relief that follows when you make it stop? It was like that, but to a magnitude I cannot put to words.

We were all shaking. People sobbed. People vomited. No one said a word, until finally Lily said, in a low voice none of us struggled to hear, “Now you know.”

And she’s right. Not one of them will try that again.

“If anyone can eat there is food waiting for you in the cathedral. Otherwise, you may return to Minnow House,” Lily said, and that was that.

We left in shaky silence. I would have been happy to never speak again I think, but when we arrived at Minnow House, it was all lit up. We went inside, confused, and found most of the sophomore class waiting for us. They greeted us with a roar and put drinks in our hands and listen, it wasn’t enough to put the world back to the way it was, but they knew what we’d seen, and they were able to laugh about it, and that was a start.