With Isu’s soul in one spiritual hand and pure sunlight in the other, I whipped my hands back down to earth. They rapidly shrank, moving from gigantic to so small, they were invisible to the natural eye. Isu’s soul and the sunlight shrunk with them.
I shoved these two key elements into the core of Isu’s dead heart. One element, the vital third piece, was missing though, and I realized why resurrection was such a rare thing: it required some of my own life force. Reaching inside myself with my spectral hands, I dug deep into my own beating heart, where there was a ball of pulsing energy. I grabbed a handful of this energy and yanked it out. Weakness overcame me, and I almost dropped to my knees, feeling as if someone had sucker-smacked me in the head with a mace. I pushed past the loss of strength and persisted with my task until I finally inserted my own life energy into Isu’s heart.
There was a blinding flash of light, accompanied by a scream of terror, a distinctly feminine scream. Isu was screaming out of her physical lungs, her physical throat, her physical mouth.
She sat bolt upright, her eyes looking as if they were about to pop out of their sockets, her chest heaving as she gasped for breath. I knelt beside her and noticed right away that the breath now coming out of her nostrils and mouth was warm and humid, like the breath of any other living creature.
Lord of Light be damned. I’d done it. I’d resurrected a dead body, fully and completely. And not just any old dead body. A dead goddess.
“I’m alive,” she finally managed to gasp. “Physically alive. I haven’t felt this way for thousands of years.”
“And I’m the God of Death now. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this,” I said with a smirk. “Weird how things work out, huh? So, tell me, Isu, how does it feel to have our roles reversed?”
She chuckled dryly. “I always suspected it would come to this, so I’m not entirely unprepared.”
“You could have told me to do it when I first saw you. But then, I suppose you wouldn’t exactly want a rival Death God on your hands, would you?”
Isu gritted her teeth. “Now that you’ve resurrected me, I’m in your debt, until you release me from this debt.”
“In my debt?”
She stood, dusted herself off, and rolled her eyes. Where Grave Oath had entered her chest, just above her left breast, there was now a faint scar.
“I have to serve you,” she muttered. “Until you officially release me from your service. That’s how it works when you resurrect someone.”
“And if I resurrect Xayon, the Wind Goddess, will she have to serve me as well?”
Isu snorted derisively. “Do you know how much of your life force you just used to resurrect me, Vance? It took more than you realize. If you tried to do it again with another god or goddess, it’d kill you—for now, at least.”
“For now?”
“Yes, for now. Don’t get too big for your boots, Vance. You’re only a minor god for the time being. Barely above a demigod. You need to accrue many more souls before you can think about resurrecting another deity.”
“Well, I intend to become a major deity then. As quickly as possible. I’ll resurrect the Wind Goddess for my friend. And you’re going to help me do that.”
She scowled but didn’t protest. She couldn’t refuse now that she was officially indebted to me.
“Fine,” she hissed through clenched teeth, clearly unhappy but powerless to do otherwise.
“We’re going back to the cathedral.” I turned toward my skeletons, who’d remained in silent vigilance during my transcendence from mortality to divinity. “On second thought,” I said to Isu, “you should stay here. I’d prefer to explain to the others what happened before you show up.”
“As you wish.” Isu wore a mocking smile as she bowed her head.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I said, unable to keep the grin from my face.
“Such as?”
“Master, perhaps?”
A growl escaped from Isu’s lips. “Master,” she managed to let out through gritted teeth.
“Keep an eye on her,” I told my skeletons as I moved through them. I wasn’t sure how powerful Isu would be, but I doubted that she still had the same kinds of abilities as before.
Brimming with satisfaction, I headed up to the cathedral. Things had gone way better than I could have imagined. But my quest wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. And neither was Rami’s.
I couldn’t help strutting the instant I stepped back into the inner sanctum. I was walking with such a swagger that even Rami started smiling, the glumness leaving her beautiful face for a while.
“Guess who’s not just a mere mortal anymore?” I beamed an ear-to-ear grin.
Elyse stared at me in confusion. “Not just a… huh? What in the Lord’s Luminescence are you talking about?”
“I may or may not have just become a god.”
“Become a what? You can’t be serious.”
“If you died, I could resurrect you. Seriously.”
Elyse folded her arms across her breasts, a maneuver that almost made them pop out of her new dress. “I don’t believe you.”
“You want to try? It’ll take a fair bit of my life energy, but you’re not a goddess, so resurrecting you shouldn’t kill me.”
“Are you insane? What really happened down there? Did a coffin fall on your head?”
“I am a god now. I killed the Death Goddess with Grave Oath, and in doing so, I became the God of Death. It’s all pretty straightforward, really.”
Regardless of what Elyse thought about what I was saying, it seemed that Rami had no qualms about taking me at face value.
“Vance,” she gasped, staring at me in awe, “is it true? Are you really the God of Death now? Do you wield the power to resurrect the dead?”
I grinned at her rather than answering.
“Then we need to find Xayon’s body,” she said. “If you can bring her back to life…”
“It turns out I’ll need to take a few more
