"And Grandmother died in the Holocaust."

"I'm sorry."

"We're alive. That's what can be salvaged, I guess."

"Being alive is important," Harry agrees. "It's not the only important thing, but it's necessary for the rest of them."

"Yeah. It's all the people who aren't that are the problem."

“Yeah. That’s not one that magic can solve, unfortunately."

"Damn."

"A lot of people have done a lot of terrible things trying to bring back the dead. I did some pretty stupid stuff, myself. It's better to focus on what we can do."

"What qualifies as stupid, here?" Emily wonders. 

"...made some deals I shouldn't have, with beings I shouldn't have been talking to, and caused a lot of problems for myself and everyone else in the process. But I got my soul back eventually, which is the important part. A lot of people aren't so lucky."

"Yeah, selling your soul sounds like a pretty obvious bad idea," she agrees. 

“Congratulations, you’re smarter than I was when I was 14 years old.”

"Probably when you were fourteen you had spent less time honing your survival instincts than I have."

“That’s certainly true. I was a kid, I had just learned there was a world outside my foster father’s house, and my... friend had just died, and I thought ‘people have been lying to me my whole life, maybe these new people are lying about whether she can come back.’ It turned out they weren’t.”

"Are you sure? I mean, um--playing with lightning will get you zapped, but now we have electronics."

"I'm not sure it could never happen. I'm sure the price would be high - too high."

"How do you know? --I mean, that's an honest question, I'm not saying I don't believe you."

"Don't worry, I got it. I've talked the subject over with a lot of other magic-users, most of whom are smarter than I am. Circe, the head of the Mystic Arts department, once proposed an entire lecture series on arcane calculus and the patterns we've observed in magical limits - the version that I actually understood is that as you attempt to break a magical law, the amount of magical energy you need to expend rapidly approaches infinity. In theory, if you could produce enough energy to start with, you could shatter the barrier, but the backlash would be... are you familiar with the concept of a 'sonic boom'?"

"I am familiar with the practice of a sonic boom."

"They're great fun, aren't they. But this magic-backlash version would be... instead of air being compressed, it's ambient magic. Instead of broken windows, magical havoc. And that's not even getting into where you'd get the energy, which is its own problem with many bad solutions and not a lot of good ones."

"Why would not being able to raise the dead be a magical barrier? Is it--about soul stuff, or brain stuff."

"Soul stuff. We don't know where souls go when people die, or where they come from when a child is ensouled, but they're intensely energetic, complex, and connected to several different planes of existence, which combined make them impossible to replicate. If someone finds the afterlife at some point, maybe the calculus will change and death will be a revolving door. Somehow I doubt it'll be that easy."

"So it's not possible to bring someone's soul back, but it might be possible to reconstruct their brain? And then maybe they could get a new soul the way children do if you do it right?"

"People have tried a lot of things, but in order to get a body from 'corpse' to 'living human' you need a soul, and so far no one's managed to coax one out of wherever they come from or wherever they go to. -well, okay, it's not strictly speaking that straightforward, a human can be alive without having a soul and there has been one recorded case of someone without a soul being ensouled, but that's getting into even weirder, more abstract theory that even Circe doesn't fully comprehend."

"I wasn't necessarily thinking of starting with a corpse..."