There is a silence in death that cannot be faked.

Camelia heard it once, and never again.

At twenty-five, a fever bloomed from a scratch.

Her skin blackened. Her breath stopped.

Her family mourned.

The Church arrived too late, yet declared her resurrection divine.

She awoke on cold stone, gagged with incense-soaked cloth, surrounded by kneeling priests.

They named her “The Woman Who Denied Death” and paraded her in white and gold.

She was fed scripture, not truth. Her village vanished. Her parents forgotten.

But she remembered the stillness, how peaceful death had been before it was stolen.

Something had touched her beyond the veil.

It whispered in her bones, and she listened.

The voices of the dead came first as murmurs, then as commands.

In the Church’s reliquary hung a skull, bound in prayer-ribbons, pulsing faintly.

They called it holy. She knew it for what it was, a prison. A soul.

One night, she broke the glass. The chains climbed her arms.

Her eyes turned black.

Two beasts crawled from her shadow, one flame, one smoke, and tore the sanctuary apart.

She fled to the old cemetery, where she now conjures, protects, and punishes.

Camelia is no saint.

She is the Dark Summoner.

And she remembers everything.

Lore Story written by Anzym