"It is not connected to my life force in any way. Though, if I were to die, the little guy would attempt to go on a murderous rampage. My dad could have about a dozen running around at once? From how long it takes you to resummon your minions from nowhere, he could make them faster than you can, but needed corpses to do it, so uh. Tradeoffs."

"It sounds like they could be combined, anyway. Nowadays I just passively absorb dead things' life forces, it's not even a conscious thought anymore, but I could stop doing that and try to reanimate a corpse."

She nods. Her sad and twisted little minion finishes falling apart and finally expires. "I can cast it again on a newly dead golem, if you'd like to see if you can learn it and then work your way up to better minions? That was not the only minion type ancient times had to offer, it's just the uh. Only one I can make."

"I think running up a volcano is probably not the best time to try to rederive ancient minion summoning. I'm curious about your other spell, though." And he summons another flesh golem out of thin air.

Giggle. "Fair enough."

She waits for the flesh golem to die, then quirks a smile and says, "Hey, James. I actually can teleport."

Then she casts the spell consume corpse, and she turns into a black shroud and disappears. A dark form bursts from the flesh golem's corpse, then regains its colors to reveal his girlfriend, who looks unhappily at the results of bursting from a corpse on her shoes.

"Useful. But gross," she asserts, carefully stepping out of the blackened and twisted corpse goop.

"Ohkay I just had some flashbacks here, don't mind me."

"Uh? Shit, darling, I'm sorry. Should I have explained a bit better what I was going to do before I went and did it...?"

"No, no, it's fine," he laughs. "There was just this terrible minion master in Orr, once, when we were first going through Orr to kill Zhaitan. He loved using this spell, he was such a pain to kill."

She pauses.

She considers how many minion masters regularly used that exact spell that she learned from her father.

"... Did he, perchance," she says delicately, feeling a little bit sick, "summon, uh. About a dozen minions. That he then made explode?"

"Uh, yeah. Common tactic in Orr?"

"Did he have an, an aura of doom thing going on, and regularly summon two minions from one corpse? Have all of the minions swarm one unlucky person who he then made explode? About, uh." She winces, then holds her hand to about her father's height. "About yea tall?"

"Uh."

"... So I think that was my dad," she says, in a clinical and detached tone. "W-who almost certainly would have. Thanked you for. You know what, I need a hug now please."

Yeah okay gloves off shoulders off in a practised motion and he can hug her with no spikes involved.

Glomp. She can cling to him and shake and attempt to put words together.

"Good. Good job? Thank you? It is a good thing he. Died that second time? He, he's back in the Underworld now and he has forever to be fine, and did you happen to also fight someone in Orr who set lots of things on fire, she would also have been very memorable and probably an absolute pain to fight."

He shakes his head into her hair. "No fire risen, not that I've encountered."

"See I shouldn't be happy about that, because that means that she might still be trapped in her own corpse, which is distinctly not better than, than what would have hopefully happened if you'd met her, but—this was a lot easier to handle when I did not have real actual proof that the people I loved were—I—did dad stick around as a ghost after you killed him the second time, say anything, or, I'm actually maybe having some kind of breakdown maybe just hold me."

He just holds her. "He was gone, I'm pretty sure, very shortly after I killed him, but he stuck around for a couple of minutes to thank us and give us some temporary boosts. I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to be sorry for, I am very glad you killed the, the mockery of him that he got shackled to by an evil dragon. You did the absolute best thing you could have done and he thanked you for it, I, just." She squeezes him and whines. "I love him, I, I consoled myself in the Mists with the idea that he and my mother would be okay and, that. Turned out to be incorrect."

He nods and keeps hugging her, the world around them forgotten.

Serves the world right, for being so terrible.

But: they are on something of a deadline, vague and nebulous though it might be, and she doesn't really want to try and untangle her feelings with it hanging over her. Because she does not want to explode.

"Okay," she murmurs. "So I think at some point in the near future I'm going to go to Orr, and. Probably hunt down and kill my undead mother, and get myself some kind of emotional closure and get her some not being trapped in a horribly tortured existence closure. But exploding islands first, because the dragons are important and I'm already here. Sounds like a good plan?"

He nods. "Yeah. She might've already been, you know, the Pact has been progressively killing all of Orr's undead."

"I will be immeasurably happy if she was, but I think I might need to check."

He nods. "We can go to Orr after making sure the island won't explode. Or, I suppose, if something else calls for me, you could go on your own."

"Yeah. Though depending on the emergency I, um. If it would be extremely useful to have me along, my priority would be keeping the world safe? My mother is an exceedingly practical woman. She would be terribly annoyed with me if I ran off to save her when I could help deal with an Elder Dragon. Especially considering how long she would have been, ah. In the state of being undead."