The Immortalizer was quite assuredly the most complex ritual ever built.

A ritual circle worked by transcribing the effects one wanted to achieve on a surface, usually the floor. They were often used by mages who wanted to cast spells that were stronger than what they could normally manage, because a ritual could be powered by several mages at the same time, or even built in a way that it could be charged from mana crystals.

There was an issue, however. If you messed up while drawing the circle, things necessarily went wrong. Nine times out of ten it resulted in the whole thing exploding with all the force of the mana that had been put into it, killing everybody in the vicinity. This meant that only specially trained mages were trusted to do any work on rituals, and they merely built and maintained well-known and approved types of circles. Only the best and brightest in their field ever dared to invent new rituals of their own.

Walter had been one of them. He had always understood the flow and behavior of mana and had an uncanny knack for finding faults in rituals without having to power them (which was the usual way to find out if something worked or not). Had he been better at utilizing his skills for his benefit, he might have become unimaginably rich and powerful… As it was, he had been decently wealthy and well-known only in his immediate professional field. Weird Walter, the guy you asked if you weren’t sure if you were about to kill yourself or not.

There was, as was generally agreed, a limit to the complexity of a ritual. Mana had to flow from the outside through all the effect runes and end up in the middle where it would trigger the effects. The more effects were added, the bigger the circle had to become to accommodate the additional runes. Also, the more mana was needed to power the ritual, the thicker the lines needed to be. More effects, more lines, more mana, bigger lines, bigger circle, more mana. There came a point, when adding a single additional effect to a ritual would increase the size of an already large circle by half again – and with it, the cost. Magesilver, the alchemical reagent used to draw rituals, wasn’t free after all. Nor was hiring mages to supply mana.

The most complex rituals in use were city shields, built to defend against sieges. These impressive rituals had been invented hundreds of years ago, and nobody had dared to touch them ever since. Not only were they very potent and reliable, they also used a trick to compress their size to a portion of what it reasonably should have been. The trick was their shape.

Usually buried deep underground and heavily guarded against tampering, city shields were inlaid into the walls of a large spherical room, not unlike the one in Walter’s laboratory, albeit smaller. This was mostly done to channel the incredible amounts of mana that were necessary to cover a city in a shield, but it also allowed for some clever connections. When Walter was alive, he had been regularly called to do scheduled maintenance on the shield of the city he lived in. Seeing the ritual in all its glory had sparked all kinds of ideas and possibilities, and he soon realized that the ancient ritualists had only scratched the surface of what was possible.

The Immortalizer wasn’t like a city shield at all. It wasn’t drawn on the walls of his cave, covering the floor bisecting its middle instead. It didn’t need the spherical shape, because the greatest benefit of that was its ability to channel ridiculously large amounts of mana – as was needed to stop artillery projectiles and siege spells in flight. No, Walter’s challenge had been the outrageous number of different variables and effects he needed to work into his ritual circle. Usually that meant going wider and wider until he had everything transcribed on the floor. He would have probably run out of continent at some point, so that wasn’t feasible. Instead, he had borrowed the idea of three-dimensionality from his ancient forebears and improved on it in ways never seen before.

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The mana flooding out of Walter’s core reached the outside of the circle, triggering the ring of mana crystals, which lit up and added their stored power to his. Throughout the giant cavern the Magesilver inlays started to glow, then shine with eldritch light. Then, the floor moved. Ponderously at first, it split into circles that each rotated on their own axis. Some spun upwards, some sideways, and soon the room was filled with the low hum of power and the whistling of stone rings weighing several tons cutting through the air as they repositioned. There were smaller rings and ball-shaped inlays spinning in place too, some on the pieces of ground that remained immobile, some on the rings that spun seemingly randomly through the cave. The spectacle was so beautiful, it almost caused Walter to lose concentration.

If one of my teachers at the academy saw this, they’d die from a heart attack, only to come back as a ghost and stare with an open mouth. He quickly reined himself in. Walter needed to focus, or this wouldn’t work. A shudder in the flow of power told him that the ritual was in the starting position, and a spike of fear shot through him. What if he had messed it up somehow? He might be erased from existence without ever knowing what had gone wrong. Doesn’t matter. He thought. It’s too late for doubts.

He felt the energies reach out to him, and he grabbed them firmly with his mind. The ritual did all the work, but it needed guidance. So, he guided it. The crystal between his feet rose sharply, slamming into his glowing core. His skeletal body shattered instantly, shards of bone flying through the cavern and bouncing off the stone rings. That was fine. He didn’t need it anymore.

He concentrated fully on the ritual, guiding the power to do his bidding. In response, many of the smaller rings around him began to rotate, adjusting detailed effects and priming the Immortalizer. Then the energies flooded into the middle and gathered around him. From the crystal outwards, a new skeleton grew. First the spine, then the ribs, shoulders, arms and legs and finally the skull. The raw power churned around the bones, and flesh sprang into existence, covering them. A heart nestled up to the crystal in his new chest, lungs, stomach and all the other necessities of a human body joining it quickly. Tendons and muscles reached along his form, then skin stretched out to cover them. Finally, hair sprouted from his scalp. In a last heave of power, the ritual grabbed Walter’s energy core and shoved it into the crystal, now safely buried inside the freshly created body. Then the rings returned to their original positions, the glow of the inlays fading.

Edwin’s eyes shot open. He was curled up in the middle of the Immortalizer, only lit by the light crystals on the wall once more. It worked! By the gods, it worked! he thought, and started to laugh – only to struggle for air like a fish on land, flopping around uncontrollably.

When his fit was over, and he had filled his lungs with air for the first time in his short life, he rolled on his back and looked at the ceiling. “It worked.” He said, his voice strange to his ears. “Goodbye Walter. Rest in peace you gods damned genius.”