Fane quickly found some books.
Professor Snape read exceptionally fast. He first opened Smash Your Coffin, quickly flipping to the case describing the Dormant Resurrection Ritual. After skimming a few lines and flipping back and forth for a moment, he set the book down and closed his eyes in thought.
Professor Slughorn instructed Fane to copy out the section on the Dormant Resurrection Ritual from A Study of Ancient Mummy Ritual Magic, to serve as the main reference material.
Anton glanced at them, then picked up Smash Your Coffin from in front of Professor Snape and began reading it slowly.
He was a slower reader. He tended to fit useful knowledge from books into his own theoretical framework, using it as a reference while searching for points that aligned or seemed out of place, then thinking through the implications.
The Dormant Resurrection Ritual was an exceptionally complex and profound piece of magic.
And complexity often meant the odds of something going wrong increased exponentially.
It made use of one of humanity's deepest and most powerful forms of magic—death.
Its method was similar to Voldemort's way of making Horcruxes: using death to escape death.
It had several steps.
First, the wizard drank the Seypos Curse Potion and died on the spot, transforming into a pair of fish that couldn't bear to be parted.
Next, Fate would guide a man and a woman—or perhaps Fantastic Beasts—to each eat one of the fish.
Then the wizard would be reborn through the union of the pair. On the day the child was born, the parents would die that night as the price of the ritual magic.
It involved a whole series of eternal themes: Fate, love, death, sacrifice, and so on.
But Smash Your Coffin was far more interesting. It was a collection of