How to Bring Your Lover Back from Death

==Introduction==
Salutations, reader! If you’ve come across this book it’s safe to assume you’ve not done so through mere curiosity, but rather because you yourself wish to revive someone-- as the title implies, most likely the recently-deceased love of your life. And while this book does contain the details necessary to do so, it does not mean that it will be easy, perhaps not even possible, for you to go through with it.
I encourage you to read this book, not hopeless, but with tempered expectations.
And, for those who can’t escape the feeling of hopelessness, I advise you read to the end of the book.
==Part One: The Heart==
Most people will assume the first and only step to bringing anyone back to life is to simply heal the body. And, while it is indeed valid as a first step, it is far from a standalone solution, and equally far from simple. But, let’s work from this as a foundation.
Let’s assume your lover died from, say, a stray bullet to the heart, bleeding out in the cold. This means their body sustained considerable damage, not just externally, but on the inside in many unseeable ways. Bringing them back to life in this state will only kill them again, as they die from the same wound-- so, obviously, this must be dealt with before revival.
When a body lacks life, it won’t heal on its own. On top of that, when a body lacks life, it starts to rot and decompose, meaning that any method for healing you have in mind must be done in a timely manner. While medical tools may help with some small wounds, anything devastating enough to kill someone can’t easily be dealt with using easily available tools.
An easy solution to this problem, one would imagine, is to learn healing magic-- and from that, one might begin to think “Aha! Giajya’s domain is life, if I become a follower of hers then healing spells should come easy!” And, in a sense, you would be correct-- becoming an official follower of Giajya and learning healing magic through that is incredibly easy, however, many points of this journey require allegiance to other deities or even rejection of faith altogether, and the church won’t look kindly upon you should you vacillate so quickly. A much easier method may be seeking out other ways to train yourself in healing magic, or acquiring the help of someone else who can assist you in this single step.
(Side-note: if your lover is not yet dead but currently dying, healing magic may be the only step you need to invest to save their life. If this is the case, put this book down now and get on it!)
After your lover’s body has been returned to full health, true progress on revival can begin. Your lover, though fully healed, is still a lifeless corpse at this point, and must be reanimated. The easiest methods to do this is either to learn advanced magic from the church of Giajya-- the kind which they don’t teach to any old outsider-- or to become a follower of Kao (or, as mentioned before, get someone else who is). While other reanimation magic exists, it is much more limited and obscure in comparison-- likely as a result of how situational it is and how easily accessible it comes to those who follow Kao. Following Kao is, as such, the advised method for this-- you’re unlikely to need to switch allegiances to any other deity after this, and the churches of Kao are much more lenient when it comes to certain tasks you may need to perform in the future.
Once you’ve learned necromantic reanimation, you can use your magic on your lover’s healthy corpse. But heed well: you are not done yet. Your lover’s reanimated body will not be the lover you knew. It will be a shambling form, emotionless and unresponsive. It will move and act only by instinct and reaction. If you somehow didn’t read this entire paragraph, or otherwise heard about healing and reanimation and tried it on your own, you may respond with soul-crushing despair and stupefaction upon seeing the image of your lover in this way. But do not lose heart. Although you are not done, you have at least progressed a crucial step into reviving your lover. Now your lover has a physical vessel with which to inhabit, and her corpse will no longer decay as you spend time trying to revive her.
Now, move on to the next chapter.
==Part Two: The Soul==
The soul, or spirit, holds the essence of a person-- their essential characteristics. If you were to describe someone’s personality, you’d most likely be describing the traits of their soul. With this step, we seek to get your lover’s soul-- and, if you did what was directed of you in the previous chapter, to put it back into her heart.
However, for the most part, souls are invisible and difficult to contain. This chapter will detail what to do if you have any questions.
Some lucky few may have a lover who became a ghost that haunted them after death, and so, your journey may have ended in the previous chapter when you restored their body. If you did so properly, they should return to it immediately and continue living their life. However, in some rare circumstances, you may have a ghost lover with a completely unsalvageable, destroyed body--in which case, you may be less lucky than previously thought. If this is the case, you should seek to create a suitable body for your lover. If you’re fine with non-biological material, any sculptor worth their stone can make kaolinite statues which are ideal houses for lost spirits. Mechai architects claim to be able to make suitable bodies out of rubber and metal, however, the veracity of this is something I was unable to confirm-- approach this possibility at your own risk. If you prefer a body made from biological material, there are many options available to you if you choose to learn bio-alchemy-- choosing this path and learning from experts will give you much more information on the topic than I know myself, so I’ll cut myself short here. However, be warned: if you return your lover to a body that is not their original body, their personality may change slightly. Statues lack hormones, after all!
In other rare cases, you might have a lover whose soul is trapped in the physical world. Soul cages are, as the name details, people or items that can trap souls. If someone was with your lover when they died and started acting more like them, they may be trapping your lover’s soul within them. It is advised that you do not kill them in an attempt to retrieve your lover’s soul-- not only is it cruel and unnecessary, you may inadvertently fuse their souls together. In the case of the soul cage being an item, this may be more difficult to parse-- but, if your lover died near a kaolinite object (or something made from some unknown, mystic substance), then you have a likely match for a soul cage. To remove a soul from its soul cage is easy-- use soul-altering magic, something often taught as advanced magic to followers of Giajya, Ukron, or Kao. Or, if it’s within an object, you can always try breaking the object-- just make sure you have something else you actually can and want to put the soul inside.
However, what is most likely is that your lover was taken to the Separ Dimension, which houses the many different realms of the afterlife. Determining which realm your lover was sent to may be difficult in and of itself, but with a healthy knowledge of your partner, some educated guessing, and perhaps a lucky informant, you may be able to discern where their soul resides. Each realm of the Separ has its own unique method for travelling, but each one is, compared to what you’ve done already, relatively easy and achievable by the normal person (I advise reading Separ Travel For Asshats by Auralius Garfort for more details). 
While some realms within the Separ such as Herat or Purgatory operate on a completely random basis, Heaven and Hell are extremely organized, rewarding or punishing their inhabitants on hyper-specific conditions. If your lover died not too long ago, they are likely easier to find-- probably not being too deep into the realm. Although Hell is the only realm you may find particularly inhospitable, each realm has one line of defense that will antagonize you indiscriminately-- the psychopomps. They are the ones tasked with bringing souls to the afterlife in the first place, and as such, become provoked when they sense someone trying to take a spirit back out. You may have to dissuade or even fight off anywhere from one to a few dozen psychopomps-- and be warned, some of them can’t easily be dispatched with just a gun.
To take a spirit out of the Separ, take an object you can use as a soul cage with you (such as a hollow kaolinite sphere) and carry it out the same way you entered.
With your lover’s soul now in the world of the living, reunite it with their heart using the methods mentioned earlier to remove a soul from its soul cage.
However, even still, your job may not be finished. And while the previous tasks may have been physically demanding, the future holds an even more daunting journey.
==Part Three: The Mind==
Even when you reunite your lover’s spirit with their body, they almost definitely will not be the same person they were before. While the heart houses the instincts and physical traits, and the soul the essential characteristics of a person, the mind is equally valuable. Everyone is shaped by their memories and experiences-- however, the mental aspect of an individual is destroyed if the link between body and spirit is severed. This is the true cost of death-- even if bodies remain and spirits retain, something must be destroyed. That’s why they say “death is final,” after all.
The next step, should you choose to press forward, may be to attempt to revive your lover’s memory.
Unless your lover was literally created to be with you, when you bring them back and suddenly can’t help from embracing them, they will be incredibly confused, and possibly scared and upset. To them, they’ve just been born into the world as a fully grown adult, and another fully grown adult is sobbing all over them-- not the best way to wake up. Should this moment serve as a foundational memory for them, they may end up being disgusted or uncomfortable with you, and in an emotionally vulnerable moment like this, rejection from the one you love and have endeavored so greatly for may be far too much to handle. It is highly advised you DO NOT disclose the depth of your feelings until your lover fully understands and accepts the situation. Steel yourself for this-- it may be the most difficult part.
Even then, rejection may be unavoidable. As mentioned, memory and experiences shape everyone, and it’s possible that your lover’s compatibility with you may have been predicated on specific and unknown moments in their life before meeting you. Equally likely is the possibility that their love was built upon a foundation of understanding and being familiar with you-- something that is no longer true for them. 
At best, you may have to wait and perhaps meticulously expose them to many of the things that formed the person you knew. However, depending on your own moral views and the circumstances at hand, you may not wish to force the issue other than informing them of what you can and hoping everything works out alright. If this is the case, I can only wish you’re the golden-hearted sort who can feel joy just knowing the one you love is living in the world happy and safe.
No matter what happens, there is one fact you must accept: your lover will likely never be the same. Even if you perfectly recount everything you knew about them, it will be from your own lens. They may lose happy experiences they simply never got the chance to share with you, or the perspective they brought to every situation which differed from yours. 
The only exception I could imagine is if you had a way to store memories and consciousness beforehand, and later a way to transfer them into living beings-- and, if you were that prepared for disaster, you likely wouldn’t be reading this book. But, if you’re one of the prudent few reading this book for a dying lover instead of a dead one and didn’t stop to go learn healing magic, then seek this as a backup option. Certainly not as the first, as it seems a fruitless quest compared to learning to heal, but as something in case it all goes wrong.
If this all seems impossible, please stick around to the afterword.
==Afterword==
As you may have surmised from reading what you have, I don’t write this lacking personal experience in the subject. Though I shall keep sparse on the specifics, I lost my lover at one point, and this book details everything I learned on my quest for revival. I was studious in my pursuit, I made a lot of mistakes, and probably learned more than what the average layman could spending a decade of time trying to find. But I didn’t just write this book in order to share this information for those in need of immediate answers.
I had failed, myself. Although I know it’s possible, success eluded me. But out of every tool I have at my disposal, my wit and pen are perhaps the strongest and most ever-present. And so, I wrote this book. Putting it all into writing was cathartic, and did wonders to help me resolve everything I’ve been to.
I write this final passage to give a final message: even if you are unsuccessful, it’s possible to live and be happy once again. Though no journey following the death of a loved one will be easy, all of them are, technically, possible.
I wish you the best, reader.
Category:Stories
Category:Saga Timeline