Fifth Law of Magic

## **The Fifth Law**

### *Never Reach Beyond the Borders of Life*

 Necromancy has all sorts of applications, from keeping someone from crossing over death’s door (or pulling him back from just stepping across the threshold), to reanimating a host of corpses as your bodyguards, waking the ghosts of the Civil War for one last assault, or wrapping ectoplasmic flesh around the bones of a dinosaur and taking it for a ride to save the city. It’s all bad news, and most of it clearly breaks the Fifth Law. This is all about preserving the natural order of things. To everything there is a season, right? When magic is used to confound death, the cosmos sits up and takes notice. The things out in the world that want the natural order disrupted are sure to come knocking and bring all the baggage that comes along for that ride; after all, when nature is confounded, the reality mortals call home gets just a bit weaker, and what’s not to love about that?

The Fifth Law marks the beginning of the section of the Laws of Magic that addresses the mortal desire to confound the conditions of mortality itself. In a word, death sucks, even if it is a part of the natural order—ironically, it’s only natural to want to do whatever you can to avoid it. While the first four Laws essentially address the rights of the victim, the Fifth Law and the ones beyond it are basic “that’s just wrong” principles.

Undeniably, death itself contains an incredible amount of power thanks to the significance of the ending of a life (the bigger the life, the more power it offers—dead wizards make powerful ghosts). But ultimately it’s power that belongs to the dead. While it’s true that, in general, “you can’t take it with you,” the power of your own death is something you can take with you into the afterlife. And when some upstart necromancer like Kravos (or worse, an experienced one like Kemmler) comes along to snag some or all of that power for himself, what does that mean for you, the dead guy? No one really knows for sure, but clearly when the big nasties of the supernatural world get all excited and positive about mortal spellcasters trying such a thing, it’s probably a phenomenally bad idea. Call it a hunch.

And like breaking any other Law of Magic, breaking the Fifth puts a stain on your soul, changing you for the worse. This could be anything from taking on an exaggerated arrogance about your power over life and death (think of it as a medical doctor’s God complex with the dial turned up to eleven) to taking on the belief that death is a better state of things than life (with the side benefit that the more death you soak in, the more power you can draw from it). Necromancers’ opinions on the power and value of death energies run the gamut of possibility. Unfortunately, they have proven to be some of the White Council’s most dire and tenacious adversaries.

### **Dead Brains Part Two**

Earlier, we talked about reliving the last moments of someone’s life in order to get an idea of how she was killed. Was that a violation of the Fifth Law?

It certainly might be argued that way. By reaching into the echoes of that final experience, lifting the sensory information out of the victim’s brain and circumstance, it could certainly be phrased as “reaching beyond the borders of life.” But for most purposes of the application of the Fifth Law, this is not a violation. Death itself is not being undone; at the end of the day, the victim in question remains an inanimate, inert corpse. No mind, no soul. If the victim’s last experience was gotten at by making her sit up and have a conversation with the spellcaster, that is a case of violating the Fifth Law, not to mention pretty damn likely to be no use whatsoever. While you might be able to pull out enough information about the victim’s last experience in order to relive it yourself, actual reanimated dead brain meat isn’t likely to be very good at the whole remembering thing.

### **The Fifth Law and Ghosts**

Another area that might seem ripe for Fifth Law violations would be reaching out to talk to the ghosts of the departed. But in the end, that’s just the appearance of reaching beyond the borders of life in order to contact the dead. Ghosts aren’t actually the dead themselves—they’re imperfect echoes of a life that once was, creatures of ectoplasm and random spiritual energies that coalesced at the moment of a potent personality’s passing. While ghosts may be evidence of the power of death in action, they are merely a side effect of the process; as such they only touch on matters of true death tangentially. As a result, the Fifth Law doesn’t even come close to this matter—a potential source of relief for many a nervous ectomancer.

So as long as you’re just talking and interacting with ghosts, you’re probably okay. Consuming ghosts for their power—that’s a grey area.