On Runic Restoration of the Dead

There is no subject in practical thaumaturgy more burdened by bad terminology than the so-called resurrection rune. The name invites precisely the wrong image. One imagines a dead man lying upon a table while a runemaster inscribes some secret symbol over his heart, speaks an ancient word, and watches him sit upright in perfect health, understandably surprised but otherwise unchanged. This is the version favoured by melodrama, grieving heirs, religious pamphleteers, and criminals seeking investors. The reality requires considerably more table space.

What is commonly called resurrection is not accomplished by a single rune at all, but by an extraordinarily complex runic array distributed across approximately forty-seven percent of the subject’s skin. The exact proportion varies slightly with body plan, scarring, race, and the necessities imposed by the geometry, but forty-seven percent is close enough for ordinary discussion. The array is not decorative. Every line participates in a larger system of relationships so intricate that even competent runecarvers may recognise individual components without understanding how the total arrangement functions.

The first restoration is conventionally laid across the posterior half of the body: back, shoulders, backs of the limbs, and such additional surfaces as the carver requires to complete the pattern. There are practical reasons for this. It preserves the anterior surfaces for a second procedure should one ever become necessary, and it allows a restored individual to dress with comparatively little public display of the work. The second restoration, if it is performed, uses the remaining anterior surfaces. There is no third.

This has occasionally been described as a mystical law limiting each soul to three lives. It is nothing of the sort. There is simply insufficient usable skin remaining upon which to construct another complete independent array without crossing, disrupting, or incorporating the earlier work in ways no sane runecarver will attempt. The limitation is geometry, which I realise disappoints theologians.

The dead person must also be in very good condition, which is an unfortunate phrase but an accurate one. The procedure does not reconstruct a missing liver, replace a severed leg, manufacture a skull, or discover where the upper half of a body has gone. Major organs must be present and sufficiently intact for the array to act upon them. Limbs cannot be irrecoverably absent, and catastrophic destruction of the brain is generally prohibitive. Severe trauma may be repaired to an astonishing degree, but there is a threshold beyond which the carver lacks enough original structure to restore.

This distinction is often misunderstood because the array can reverse injuries that would ordinarily be absolutely fatal. A pierced heart may be restored and massive blood loss corrected. Crushed tissue may recover, provided enough of its structure remains, and damage which no surgeon could repair can, under favourable circumstances, be undone with unnerving completeness. But repair remains the operative word: the runes do not create a replacement person from scraps.

This is why decapitation has acquired an exaggerated reputation among certain criminal organisations as a method of ensuring permanent death. In principle, immediate recovery of the head and body may leave restoration possible. In practice, people who arrange decapitations tend not to leave the relevant parts neatly together for the convenience of the deceased’s employer. Fire is more reliable, and I mention this as anatomy rather than advice.

The cost of the procedure is immense. The required inlay materials are rare, the preparation exacting, and the labour can occupy a master for days or weeks depending upon the condition of the body and complexity of the case. More important, very few runecarvers possess sufficient mastery to attempt the work at all. The difference between a practitioner capable of producing reliable weight-reduction arrays and one capable of restoring life is roughly the difference between a carpenter and the architect of a cathedral, except that this comparison is unfair to carpenters and insufficiently alarming about cathedrals.

Nor may one simply pay the required sum and demand service. Runecarvers of this calibre are rare enough that most have the luxury of refusing work, and many do. The objection is religious in some cases and ethical in others, while some consider the procedure too dangerous. Others seem to believe that anyone wealthy enough to request resurrection has probably acquired enemies for a reason.

This has had an interesting effect upon the distribution of restored persons. Kings are occasionally restored. So are industrial magnates, generals, heirs, celebrated explorers, and the catastrophically unlucky children of wealthy families. One might therefore expect the procedure to be most strongly associated with aristocracy. It is not, and the most frequently encountered restored individuals belong to a rather less respectable class.

A criminal syndicate may regard a particular lieutenant, assassin, bodyguard, or collector as an investment developed over decades. Such a person knows routes, passwords, alliances, rivalries, debts, hidden accounts, safe houses, and perhaps most importantly, whom he is expected to kill without needing the matter explained twice. If he is sufficiently capable and sufficiently loyal, the cost of restoration may compare favourably with the inconvenience of replacing him. This is a dreadful way to describe a human life. It is also how criminal accountants describe it.

I have examined three restored men whose expenses were paid by organisations which would object to being called criminal principally because they object to most forms of accurate record-keeping. Two had undergone one restoration. One had undergone two.

The twice-restored man was impossible to mistake for anything else while undressed. His posterior array had faded somewhat with age but remained sharply legible over most of his back and limbs. The second covered much of his chest, abdomen, arms, and thighs, stopping and branching around the earlier boundaries with extraordinary precision, and there was very little untouched skin remaining. He joked that this made bathing tedious because strangers stared. When I asked whether strangers routinely watched him bathe, he told me I was missing the point, and he was probably correct.

The question which naturally follows is whether the restored individual is actually the same person. I dislike this question because everyone asking it already possesses a preferred answer. Clergymen ask whether the soul returns. Philosophers ask whether continuity of identity survives death. Lawyers ask whether property reverted to the estate during the interval. Spouses ask whether their marriage remained valid, and criminal organisations ask whether employment contracts resumed automatically. Only the last group has consistently attempted to answer the matter with violence.

From the standpoint of observable behaviour, the restored person possesses continuity substantial enough to make simplistic claims of replacement untenable. Memory survives to a remarkable degree, and language, skills, and personal recognition remain with it. A restored machinist remembers machinery. A restored husband recognises his wife. A restored debtor remembers, regrettably, his creditors. Yet the person is never quite unchanged, and this is one of the few points upon which every serious case series agrees.

The changes vary enormously. Some are subtle enough that only close relatives notice them, while others are obvious within minutes. Temperament may alter, and tastes change. Long-established fears disappear or new ones emerge, and emotional attachment may weaken, intensify, or shift strangely in character. Habits vanish and new compulsions sometimes appear. Memories may remain factually accessible while losing the emotional significance they once carried. A man may remember loving a particular song and no longer understand why, and a woman may recognise every detail of her childhood home while feeling as though she is remembering someone else’s house. These are not universal outcomes, but neither are they rare enough to dismiss.

The second restoration appears to magnify the problem. Evidence is sparse because twice-restored individuals are themselves rare, but behavioural change after the second procedure is generally more pronounced than after the first. Whether this represents cumulative disruption of the nervous system, interference between arrays, some poorly understood effect upon memory, or something genuinely metaphysical remains unknown, and anyone who claims certainty is selling either religion or services.

There is a popular expression that a restored person “leaves something behind.” This is poetic and therefore useless, and unfortunately it is also difficult to improve upon. One case particularly illustrates the difficulty. A Human man restored after being shot through the heart returned with intact memory, normal speech, preserved professional competence, and no measurable cognitive impairment. His wife nevertheless insisted within a week that he was different. When asked how, she could not initially explain. Eventually she said that before his death he had always touched the doorframe when entering their home, and that after restoration he did not.

This habit had never possessed any significance that either of them could identify. He himself remembered doing it and was surprised to learn he had stopped. One might reasonably call the matter trivial. His wife did not, and identity is constructed partly from trivial things.

The procedure therefore occupies an uncomfortable place between medicine and metaphysics. If a surgeon repairs a damaged heart and the patient awakens irritable, we do not usually conclude that a different soul has entered the body. If a runic array restores a dead man whose personality alters significantly, the temptation to do exactly that becomes much stronger. There is no experimental method by which I can test whether a soul has returned. I can test memory and cognition, examine the nervous system, and compare behaviour before and after. None of that tells me whether the metaphysical occupant is original, which has not prevented several philosophical societies from reaching firm conclusions. Philosophers possess a useful immunity to missing data.

One fact deserves particular emphasis: restoration does not confer immortality. The restored individual continues ageing according to the ordinary biology of his race, and he can still become ill, be injured, or die naturally. The array repairs the condition of death at the time of activation; it does not place the body permanently beyond mortality.

Nor does the existence of a second possible restoration mean the first should be treated casually. A man who knows he can be brought back may become reckless, but only if he is an idiot. The procedure can fail. The body may be rendered unrecoverable, or the required carver may not be available. The employer who promised to pay may also reconsider the expense once the employee is dead and therefore temporarily unable to complain, an occurrence more common than the heroic literature suggests.

I have interviewed men who performed exceptionally dangerous work under contractual promises of restoration should they be killed. Several carried notarised agreements. One carried a prepaid letter of credit. Another arranged for his sister to receive the funds directly so that his employer could not quietly decide that resurrection had become uneconomical. When I asked whether he trusted his employer, he said, “Of course not. That’s why I have a contract.” This seemed a thoroughly modern answer.

The psychological consequences of living after restoration are similarly underexamined. Some individuals become intensely cautious. Others become less so, apparently having crossed death once and discovered it less final than expected. A few develop obsessive attention toward preserving their remaining unmarked skin, as though every scar represents a subtraction from the possibility of another return. In the twice-restored this anxiety may become extreme, there being no third array waiting, and the man who has died twice possesses a relationship with ordinary mortality which the rest of us can only approximate.

One twice-restored enforcer I met had survived his second return for eleven years. He refused railway travel, avoided balconies, employed a food taster, wore armour beneath ordinary clothing, and would not enter a room without first identifying two exits. This might be described as cowardice. He had been stabbed to death once and shot to death once, and I am inclined to permit him caution.

The strange irony is that this most miraculous of runic achievements has become associated less with saints, monarchs, or legendary heroes than with hard men employed by wealthy people to perform ugly tasks. Runecarving does not favour criminals. Criminals simply happen to possess three qualities rarely found together elsewhere: extraordinary wealth, employees exposed routinely to lethal danger, and a willingness to spend obscene sums preserving useful personnel.

One might consider this degrading to so profound an art, and runecarvers themselves often do. Several refuse syndicate work categorically; others accept it, mastery of ancient magical geometry not having conferred mastery of ethics. This, too, is disappointingly consistent with every other profession.

The fairy tale version of resurrection is simple: magic reverses the death and the beloved returns. Reality is less generous. It requires a preserved body, a master who can be found, a fortune, and nearly half the skin given over as the substrate for an array no ordinary practitioner could reproduce.

The dead may rise. But the person who opens his eyes afterwards will carry the event upon his body for the rest of his life, and those who knew him best may spend that life wondering which parts of him came back. A second death can be answered once more. After that there is no untouched canvas left, and mortality is enforced, for perhaps the first time in recorded thaumaturgy, by lack of room.