The Isekai Ritual

Fiona stood waist deep in the swamp, hammer slung over her shoulder and wearing naught but her underwear. “I didn’t think I’d see either of you again! This is out of the way for the likes for you both, why’d you come out here?”

Kari elbowed Abagail, who finally pointed at Meredith.

“Oh, did she hire you guys too? Dunno why Kari would take the job, I thought she was supposed to be getting ready for being wed to Prince Dumbass. One second.” The swamp ogre reemerged from the reeds he’d been thrown into, roaring at Fiona. She roared back and spear-tackled him back into the reeds.

With the sounds of struggle just out of sight, Meredith smiled. “It’s great to see you’ve made all these friends! But am I right in hearing your friend is supposed to be getting married?”

“Well, yes,” said Kari. “I was supposed to marry Prince Demerius.”

The corner of Meredith’s mouth twitched. Abagail dove for cover in an instant, throwing the book she’d been holding into the air and flopping face first into the swamp. When she came back up she was covered in mud.

Kari stressed, “I no longer intend to do so.” She deftly caught the spellbook and held it out for Meredith. “We had some questions about this book’s contents.”

Meredith took the offered book with a smile. “I was wondering where this one went! Moving is always so chaotic, things getting lost and misplaced.”

“Yes, but Abagail said there was a certain spell that caught her eye.”

Meredith’s perky energy was still there, but shrank in the face of that assertion. She seemed to know what was coming and called out into the distance. “Hey, Fi!”

Fiona was in a headlock, struggling to move herself and the swamp ogre towards Meredith. “What?” she choked out.

“I know you’re having fun, but please wrap it up. We’ve got new and more pressing business.”

“Fiiiiiiine.” Fiona tripped the ogre over her own leg and brought her elbow down on his face, knocking him unconscious and freeing her from the fight. “Spoilsport.”

----

The four of them floated across the swamp, with Fiona clutching to the side of Meredith’s moss beast.

Abagail was using her want to force the mud to shed itself off of her clothes as much as she could, switching between water spells and small bursts of wind. The ice raft was no longer powered by her own spells, but tethered to a rope trailing from the moss beast.

As she poured the water out of her shoes, Abagail asked Fiona the obvious. “Didn’t you have an entire crew rolling with you?”

“I still do!” Fiona pulled herself up on the moss to get a better look at Abagail. “Just not as many. Those who’re still with me are back at the forest. Can’t say I blame the ones who left. They just punched their ticket to a better life.”

The moss beast drifted to a stop before a large, half circle of reeds and dried mud nestled into the roots of a mangrove forest. “You like?” Meredith smiled. “No neighbors to bother me, just me, myself, and my experiments. Except for that swamp ogre. ‘His swamp’, he says. That jerk came here five years ago. I’ve been here longer!”

The group disembarked, piling in through the door and into a small dining room. Much like what had happened to Kyle’s one-room cottage, Meredith’s homely swamp hovel was bigger on the inside. It made Kari and Fiona realize that Abagail wasn’t the one who’d invented that trick.

Without prompting, Meredith flipped through the pages of the book and stopped on the ones that had caught her presumptive daughter’s eye. “Never thought I’d see this spell again,” she whistled. After taking a moment to compose herself, Meredith focused on the matter at hand. “Where did you want to start?”

Abagail pointed her wand at the corner of the page closest to her. “It says here you cast it on Prince Demerius.”

“I did.” Meredith kicked up her short legs as she recounted the story. “Him and his friends decided it would be a good idea to spook someone while they were riding a horse. Well, it worked too well and the horse didn’t just throw the poor guy off, it started bucking wildly all over the place. Demerius took a hoof to the head and didn’t wake up.”

“Hold on.” Fiona interrupted. “You humans are fragile. That should kill him.”

Meredith smiled. “Correct.”

Kari gasped. “Then how is he ruling over people? Are you a necromancer?”

Meredith laughed so hard that she wheezed. “No! No, I would… never… do that,” she said a bit too quick. “I cast the Isekai Ritual. It asks the gods to give the dead or dying a second chance at life. If the gods show mercy, the patient makes a full recovery.”

“If the situation was that dire,” asked Kari, “why not call upon a professional healer? There are spells that can return the recently deceased to life. It would not have been difficult for a family of his standing to acquire the necessary ingredients.”

“He took a hoof to the head,” Meredith reminded him. “If that boy ever woke up, he was never going to be the same unless you’ve got one of the best healers in all the land. And they didn’t. His father came to me… Of course, the ritual has its side-effects. He was never the same, even after it worked.”

Fiona leaned in. “Side-effects?”

Meredith shrugged. “Of course. It’s not a true resurrection spell. It can’t properly restore someone’s soul to their body. As best as I can understand it, the gods bring in another soul from somewhere else to anchor it back into place. Then they wake up and no one’s the wiser.”

“New soul?!” Abagail couldn’t fathom what she’d heard. “So is Demerius… not Demerius?”

“Nope! That hoof to the head emptied out all of his old memories. When he woke up, it was like having to teach an amnesiac that never remembered who they were! He had an entirely different set of memories, and kept asking about things like ‘cell phone reception’ and ‘stock prices’.”

Fiona looked positively horrified. “Kyle…”

“Of course, usually the person you cast it on still has some of their mental faculties,” Meredith continued. “That way they still remember everything else they did in this life. But the point is that you cast it on someone who’s already got one foot out the door.”

Kari and Fiona glared at Abagail, who was uncharacteristically chastened. “What if you cast it on someone who’s healthy?”

Meredith pooh-poohed the idea. “Then it wouldn’t work and you’d have wasted the reagents for nothing. I can’t imagine the gods approving such a thing on a healthy person.”

“Yeah, about that.” Abagail coughed. “I might have been casting that ritual by accident for a while as a standard divine blessing.”

“…” Meredith laughed. “Oh, that’s an amazing scam! I mean, the ingredients aren’t cheap, but you can more than make that up with some high-end customers! No one gets hurt!”

Abagail cleared her throat again. “Um. So. What if the gods did approve the Isekai Ritual. On someone who was completely healthy.”

Meredith tilted her head. “That wouldn’t make sense. You’re sure he didn’t have cancer or something?”

“He looked fine to me.”

“Hm…” Meredith clapped her hands together in excitement. “I think I need to meet this ‘Kyle’. I’ve never heard of a someone like that getting approved for the ritual.”

Abagail held up her hands. “Oh, no no no.”

“What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Do you remember what happened to the last guy who I showed interest in?”

“He recovered! …Eventually…. After a few years.”