“I can’t believe it. You’re back, Mother. You’re back!”

Then the dead woman opened her mouth wide and screamed.

It pierced the air and sliced through Morrígan’s soul; it gripped her heart and pulled the air from her lungs. But she did not balk.

“Don’t worry, Mother. It’s over. The troll is gone. You’re back now.”

Morrígan reached up to her mother’s chin and raised her head until their eyes were level.

“See, I’ve grown. I’m almost as tall as you, now, and I can use magic and….” Tears began to fill Morrígan’s eyes. “Oh, Mother, there’s so much to tell you. So much has happened!”

Morrígan embraced her mother, but the corpse did not respond.

“Don’t you remember me?” she asked, looking up at the woman’s blank expression, her dead eyes shimmering against the candlelight.

“Morrrrrrrrr…,” responded the living corpse. “Morrrr….”

“Yes, yes, Mother. You can do it. Morrígan. I’m Morrígan.”

There was another scream, lower, and laced with more agony than the first, but it didn’t come from her mother. Yarlaith, his eyes wide with fright, howled with a burrowing terror unlike any Morrígan had witnessed. The woman suddenly collapsed to the floor in a heap, as dead as she was on the morning of her daughter’s birthday.

Yarlaith stopped yelling and held his face in his hands.

“No,” he sobbed. “I… I was wrong. I was wrong….”

Morrígan looked down at the trembling little man. “What are you talking about? It worked!”

“No… no, no, no. Not like this. It wasn’t meant to be like this.” He rocked back and forth. “I was wrong about Necromancy, Morrígan. I was wrong about everything.”

“What does it matter? You brought her back!”

Yarlaith looked up at her, the whites of his eyes like tiny crystals in the darkness. “Don’t you see, Morrígan? The Church was right. They were right to outlaw and banish magic as black as this.” He brought himself to his feet, struggling and shaking. “I was wrong to do this, Morrígan. We were both wrong.”

He stepped over the corpse and began walking towards the trapdoor into his house.

He spoke over his shoulder. “Come sunrise, I’m burning the bodies and tearing this place down.”

“What?”

“If the Church found out we were practicing Necromancy—”

“But that didn’t stop us before!” Morrígan stepped forwards, her heart raging in her chest. “We’ve done it! It’s over! Why stop now?”

“Because Necromancy is not the simple manipulation of flesh, Morrígan,” he whimpered. “I believed it was before but… it’s the manipulation of the soul.”

I don’t care, Morrígan wanted to say. She’s back. She’s no longer dead.

“What difference does that make?” she said. “Yarlaith, we’re about to change the world!”

Yarlaith gasped. “Don’t you understand? What we’ve been doing hasn’t been breathing life back into the dead. We haven’t been undoing something natural but doing something unnatural, something far worse. We’ve been tearing souls down from Tierna Meall and binding them to our own, but I did not know until now. The voices, Morrígan, the voices you hear when you grasp at a limb belongs to the soul that once dwelled inside.”

Morrígan glanced down at the corpse. “No,” she said, heat boiling in her heart. “I don’t care about the technicalities, Yarlaith. You must bring her back!”

The old man shook his head. “You might have seen your mother stand and walk, but I could see into her heart. She screamed, Morrígan. She begged me not to keep her trapped inside her lifeless body. I didn’t stop at first, because I felt myself grow powerful. Far stronger than I ever felt in my youth. This is why the Church has been purging Necromancers, for magic is the power of the soul, and if even a single mage learns how to harness the power another soul then—”

Morrígan balled her hand into a fist. “Then they’d be a braver man than you’ve ever been!”

Yarlaith sighed. “I was wrong, Morrígan. I need to rest. It’s over.” He went to leave, but she stepped in front of him.

“We’re not done, Yarlaith. It’s not over. I thought you were braver than this, but you’re just a coward. Afraid of the mages, afraid of the Church. Afraid of the very power we’ve worked so hard to uncover.”

“Morrígan, you don’t understand—”

“I do understand! Those other Necromancers, Earl Roth, Callaghan the Black, they were bad men. The problem with you, uncle, is that you’re scared! You have the intellect and the power to change the world, but you don’t have the courage to fight for what others might not think is right. If we could just convince the other villagers that all this—”

“We are not having this conversation.”

Morrígan paused. She stepped to the side while the defeated white mage hobbled past her, slowly ascending the rope ladder.

It’s not fair! We’ve sacrificed so much. We’ve come so far.

Before following her uncle, Morrígan considered her mother again. She was no longer laid out on the slab like a princess, but now on the cavern floor, useless, like the rest of the corpses that hung disembowelled from the ceiling and walls.

I’ll show him. Morrígan walked through the workshop. On one of the wooden tables sat a pile of bones mottled with dried blood, some with hands and slender fingers still attached. The torso of Mrs. Mhurichú lay decapitated on the adjacent workbench; her arms and legs removed and hung up on the wall beside her severed head. A pair of cold eyes seemed to watch Morrígan as she passed.

With Geomancy, Morrígan opened up the secret entrance to the cave.

We took so much care in making sure we were never discovered. But was it all for nothing?

Coming towards the lake, Morrígan heard the familiar trickle of running water overhead. She recalled the first time she had seen the workshop.

I was so afraid at first, but now it all seems so normal.

She clicked her two flint-rings together, and a flame burned in her hand.

I’ve changed so much. I couldn’t even light a Pyromancer’s torch back then. The village had changed, too, but she hadn’t spent enough time above ground to appreciate it. The realisation that she would have to go back to a normal life slowly dawned on her. Without the hope that her mother might be alive again someday, even going off to the Academy was no longer an exciting prospect. An empty, numb feeling ached in her heart, as if her mother had just died all over again.

“It’s not fair,” she whispered, walking through the winding tunnels. Most of the coffins that used to fill the cairns along the walls had been removed for their research.

There must be a way to convince him….

Although she considered going ahead alone, she knew there was no way Yarlaith would sit by as she took on the work herself. Working elsewhere in secret wasn’t an option either, as no other place would be as perfect as these caves for such endeavours.

She toyed with the flame between her fingers, wondering what the others would think if she told them.

The soldiers would murder us, but the others….

She knew Darragh would be scared, of course. Sorcha might understand, but she probably wouldn’t be too happy with the role her mother played in their work. Then there was Taigdh….