“Open your book, Lazarus.
“You can bring her back. You have the power. Use it.”
My hands trembled. Slowly, I lowered Amara back onto the earth. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, her lips parted, blood dark against her throat.
My breath came shallow, jagged, my heart a broken drum inside my ribs. “I’m a Shadow Lord,” I whispered, voice hoarse. “I have the power to do anything.”
I lifted my book. The leather burned hot beneath my palms, alive, pulsing, waiting.
It opened by its own will, bleeding shadow, its pages sighing as if waking from slumber. Black ink slithered across the parchment like veins filling with blood, twisting into shapes I had never seen before.
The air thickened, heavy and alive, as the words carved themselves into the page.
Reincarnation of the Soul
The letters shimmered in the dark, their light silver—the same as my tears.
And for the first time since I had become a Shadow Lord, I felt something like hope.
But hope in the hands of the damned was a dangerous thing.
Step I.
The shadows cannot return what is lost—they can only rehouse it.
When love defies death, a soul may be drawn again into the world of living flesh through the womb of another.
The unborn, untouched by time or sin, becomes the vessel; and within it, the lost may take breath once more.
A keepsake of the lost must be bound to the ritual—a lock of hair, a drop of blood, something that once belonged to the soul. The shadows follow what they remember.
This is not resurrection. It is a reincarnation.
Reincarnation.
The word trembled across my tongue, fragile and sacred.
Amara lay beside me, her skin still warm, her lips parted as if she might wake if I only whispered her name the right way.
The torchlight brushed her face and made her look alive again, cruel in its mercy.
If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear her breathing—imagined, merciless.
Step II.
The mother must be with the child in her first months, when the soul within is still soft and unformed.
The lost one is guided toward that life, their essence twined with the new heart still learning to beat.
If the unborn’s own soul grows too strong, both souls shall tear each other apart, and the shadows will feast upon the destruction.
My throat closed around the words.
She had been a healer—her hands mending what the world broke, her touch gentle where mine had drawn blood.
Now, I was reading how to twist life itself, to turn creation into theft, only to see her breathe again.
The shame burned deeper than the grief.
