Quote Originally Posted by Batcathat View Post
In sharp contrast to the barely polite disinterest he had made abundantly clear for most of the meeting, Rufus was intently studying what was happening. It was not a form of magic he was familiar with, but he made sure to memorize every word, every gesture, every single thing he could observe, while making qualified guesses about what he could not.
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Indeed it is quite unfamiliar, but not indecipherable. You don’t recognize the language invoked, but its syntax is natural rather than carrying the mechanical structures of an arcane language. Put another way: the words appear to be more of a focusing mechanism or prayer, rather than containing power in themselves.

The symbols that she traces in the air are another matter: You can see two repetitions of a character that you know for a fact signifies ‘life force.’ Adjoined after it is one that you have seen employed in spells for trapping entities. Following it is another modifier, and another…

It takes you a second to piece together the nature of the spell, though there’s a few ‘phrases’ that elude you: The spell binds the life force of its target to their physical form. While that’s the natural state of most humans, some entities in your research are purported to take jump their soul to other bodies after death, or manipulate their soul around their body. Others still burn souls for nourishment. The spell does two main things. 1) Binds the soul to a vital center in the body. This limits its ability to influence things like healing across a creature’s whole form. 2) Maintains that bind by force after death.

There are many theories about the transmigration of souls, but one purports that resurrection is impossible, or nearly so, because inhabiting a corpse for an extended period of time causes it to self immolate without incoming life energy. This is given as an explanation of why many undead crave the flesh and blood of the living. If that hypothesis is correct, then the spell works by isolating the the soul in a vital center so that it may be treated like a living creature. Destruction of that location then forces the soul to experience death as normal rather than escape. Other binders in the spell seem to speed up this process, overcome specific workarounds… it reads like spaghetti at a certain point, as though it has been modified over time as new situations arose.