Then, as suddenly and forcefully as the torrent of liquid had started, it stopped. Isu released me from her grip and pulled her lips off mine. It was as if the liquid vanished too, absorbed in the blink of an eye into my body, with the sensation of drowning abruptly ceasing. Indeed, I now felt both lighter and stronger, my muscles seeming to swell with a new, exciting strength.
“Well, that wasn’t quite the kiss I was expecting.” I frowned. “You could have warned me you were going to do that.”
A wicked smile flashed across her face. “It wouldn’t have been nearly as fun for me then.”
I chuckled humorlessly. “Next time, the joke’s gonna be on you. So, after whatever that was, I can now raise humans the way I did with Fang?”
“You can indeed. Use this new power wisely, Vance.”
I nodded. “There’s something else I’d like to ask you about.”
“Anything for my favorite necromancer.”
“It’s possible for me to raise beasts and men, but what about gods? Would I be able to bring a dead god back to life?”
“First, you’re not truly resurrecting dead beasts or men. When you raise them from the dead as skeletons or zombies, they’re not the same as they were when they were living, when they had souls. Instead, they’re more like biological constructs, shells with shadows of their former selves, and echoes of their lost souls.”
“You’re not really answering my question.”
“If you really want to know, then yes, it is possible to resurrect—in the full sense of the word—a dead animal, human… or god. But there’s a catch.”
“What is it?”
“Only the Death God or Death Goddess can resurrect someone from the dead, soul and all. No matter what powers you manage to obtain, Vance, the power to fully resurrect someone will never be within your reach. Regardless, why are you asking me about this? Are the powers I have very generously given you insufficient?”
“My friend Rami is pretty broken up about Xayon’s death. I was hoping that you would want to do me a favor and raise her back to life.”
In response, Isu threw her head back and cackled with mocking laughter. “And resurrect that capricious creature? Ha! As if I’d even begin to entertain the idea of wasting my precious time and power doing such a thing.”
“I figured you’d say as much. So, that brings me to my next question. I know that it’s possible for mortals to become gods. How would I become the God of Death?”
She laughed again, but this time her laughter was far darker. “Why should I tell you that?”
While I’d been asking her this question, I had honed in my focus, paying meticulous attention to the most subtle of her reactions and movements. As soon as I’d asked about becoming a god, her eyes had flickered very, very briefly to Grave Oath. And when she’d answered the question, her feet had slid ever so slightly back, and a sudden wariness had come over her. Her muscles tensed fractionally, as if waiting for an attack.
The answer to my question was in my right hand.
There was no time to think, to ruminate on the consequences and repercussions of what I had to do. If I wanted to become a god, there could be no hesitation, not even a speck of it.
Chapter Eighteen
I moved with lightning speed. Isu countered almost as fast. But “almost” was never good enough when an opponent was up against me. Grave Oath was buried hilt-deep in her chest by the time her left hand was around my right wrist and her right hand was clamped over my throat.
“I knew you’d figure it out,” she whispered hoarsely, a trickle of dark crimson blood dribbling out of the corner of her mouth as her full lips curved into a tragic smile. “Welcome to the realm of the Immortals… Vance Chauzec, God of Death…”
Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and all the strength drained from her hands. She let out a death rattle, and her body fell limp against mine.
For a moment, nothing happened, and a surge of panic rippled through me. Had I just unwittingly killed all my own powers, along with the Goddess of Death? Had I just done the stupidest thing I could have possibly done, in my quest for ultimate power? Were my skeletons upstairs now nothing more than piles of dust, and Fang a lifeless, rotting corpse? Had I turned into a normal man, without the power to even raise a cockroach or mosquito from the dead?
The answer came to me in what I could only describe as 10,000 bolts of lightning all crashing into me at once. Raw power filled every muscle fiber in my body to the point of exploding. My blood was alternately boiling and freezing in split-second intervals. My insides were broiling and liquefying within me, yet simultaneously swelling with fresh strength and furious vitality.
With this intensity exploding a thousand times per second inside me, I felt my soul leaving my body. But I was sure I wasn’t dying. Actually, it did feel like a kind of death, but it wasn’t anything like that.
It was a rebirth.
A cord of anti-light kept my soul attached to my body, but once it had stepped out of its fleshly prison, a force like a gigantic catapult launched me upward at a tremendous speed. I ripped through the cathedral in the blink of an eye, passing through wood and stone as effortlessly as a ghost. Then my spirit shot up through the night sky, ever higher, until the lights of Erst and all other towns in Prand were nothing but tiny dots of light on the vastness of the dark land beneath me.
I was
