After a modest amount of sleep, Twilight and Totality woke up and resolved to eat a large breakfast before drawing blood again.

"This is it," mumbled Twilight through a mouthful of cereal. She tapped a page in the botanical grimoire. "It makes stuff germinate really fast. We'll have that moss by the end of today."

After eating, Twilight refreshed the phlebotomy supplies and they each extracted one and a half flasks worth of blood.

Totality placed the blood crystal in the center of the bloodstained bowl. Then she poured in both of her flasks until there was only an array of little points poking up from the liquid's surface.

Twilight focused on the crystal and zapped the bowl with her spell for the third time. The crystal was growing exponentially faster each time, like a snowball rolling downhill. When there wasn't a drop left of Totality's blood, she stopped casting to survey the results.

"This is perfect," declared Totality, floating the new construct out of the bowl. "Now if I'm just really efficient with the rest of the blood when I make the seals, hopefully we won't have to get the needles back out again."

"Sounds good," breathed Twilight, cracking her neck. "Let's do the moss."

Growing the cloud moss was easy. Totality kept the grimoire hovering while Twilight glanced at it one last time. Spike's soggy bones began to glow in a purple aura, then fluffy white fuzz puffed up all over them.

Twilight scratched her chin. "So that's cloud moss, huh? I guess it does look like clouds."

Totality adjusted her glasses for a better look. "On bones it just looks like mold to me. Kinda gross." Then her eyebrows shot up. "Hey, we're almost done!"

Their motivation built steam as they realized they were nearing the ritual's execution. The air became electric with a shared sense of excitement.

Twilight paced around the room anxiously. "Okay, okay. So we just need a personal effect and carbon infused water- dammit! That has to be in the middle of the room! I have to go back to town to get a big metal basin or something."

"Okay, you go do that," said Totality. "I'll start painting the floor."

When Twilight came back, Totality had moved the table from the center of the room and had created three perfect circles in chalk on the floorboards. She was sitting on the floor next to the open book, painting the inscription with blood around the chalk guidelines.

"Woah," said Twilight, setting down the new tub. "This is big. How did you get the circles so round?"

"Chalk on a string tied to a push pin at the centers like a protractor," yawned Totality. "That was the easy part. The rest, unfortunately, is going to take hours."

Twilight worked on the tub of water while Totality painted. Lunch came and Totality painted while eating. She painted until her back hurt and she had to stop for a while, but then she painted again later. She kept painting until Celestia's sun went down and she was an aching lump on the floor.

"Okay," she smirked, cheek pressed against the floor. "We're about ninety percent done with the seals and ninety-seven percent done with prepping for the ritual."

That night, they took sleeping potions.

In the morning, Totality awoke from Twilight shaking her.

"Totality!" she begged urgently. "Go do the rest of the circles! I'll make breakfast."

Totality flung off her blanket and snatched up her glasses before trotting to the stairs. Before long, Twilight brought up breakfast and she once again ate on the floor while painting.

In just about an hour's time, Totality squeezed the last drop of Twilight's blood from the brush and put it down. Then she looked up at Twilight. "That's it. We're ready."

Giddy with anticipation, the two of them moved about the room as if their manes were on fire. Twilight placed the basin of carbon infused water within the nexus of the three circles. Then she tossed in the mossy bones and Spike's favorite bowtie as a personal effect. Then she picked up the blood crystal.

"Wait, I can't put the crystal in here. It'll dissolve."

"Just put it inside any one of the circles," ordered Totality, frantically.

Twilight levitated the heart construct into the center of the nearest circle and dashed over to Totality. She covered her mouth with her hooves, wild eyed. "Is that everything?"

"That's everything! Here we go." Without any further thought or discourse, Totality's horn began to glow. There came a loud snap as an electrical arc struck the blood seal from the tip of her horn. The bloody inscription was seemingly set ablaze and the two unicorns held their breath.

The seal rapidly burned off of the floor, dispersing into the air as a flurry of red sparks. There came a sustained ringing, increasing in pitch as the blood crystal vanished and brilliant light rays shot from the basin.

Just as the two raised their hooves to guard their eyes, it was all over. A light sizzle could be heading as a thin wisp of steam escaped the basin.

Totality and Twilight exchanged slack jawed expressions before hurrying to the basin. Breathlessly, they looked down.

Curled up in the bottom of the now waterless tub was the unfinished body of Spike. His bones had reassembled in correct anatomical order. The moss had been replaced with an uneven distribution of flesh and sinew. The pose instantly reminded Twilight of the way he used to sleep in his little bed.

Totality stamped her hoof in frustration. "It didn't work!"

"But it started to," replied Twilight, pointing into the tub. "What happened?"

Totality grabbed the ritual book and began flipping through it angrily, "Ugh, so much time and blood." She abruptly stopped and took a deep breath to talk herself down. "You know what? We're closer than we were before. Let's just… retrace our steps."

Totality went over the book with a fine tooth comb but couldn't find any omission or misstep in the process. She set the book down and gave an exacerbated sigh. "I don't understand. We followed the instructions. We did everything it said."

Twilight picked up the book and began flipping through lazily. "Maybe the ritual is faulty," she wondered aloud. "Maybe-" She stopped mid sentence as her eyes fell upon the tiniest rough paper edge poking out from the crease between the pages. Carefully she teased the crease wider to look deeper inside. Her heart stopped. "Totality… the book's missing a page."

"I don't remember where I pulled that specific book from," sighed Twilight. "But I know I got it from one of these three aisles."

Totality nodded, "Okay. I'll start here. You start at that end. Remember to check the floor too. It could have fallen out when you picked it up." Then she muttered to herself, "It could have fallen out anywhere."

Both of them felt an intense sense of dread about searching the restricted books section again; neither of which wanted to express it to the other. If they couldn't find the lost page, it would drive them insane. If they did find it, they feared what it would say. Somehow Totality was even more doubtful than she was during their first visit.

Twilight worked through the first aisle without finding anything. When she started in the second aisle, she almost immediately noticed a suspicious piece of paper sitting conspicuously atop the bottom row of books. Her heart skipped a beat. That wasn't there last time. She levitated the page in front of her. It was an unmistakable match to the book.

Her Runic Arcana skills were remedial, but she could understand enough and she could see the diagrams. She lost her breath. Three live ponies. That was what they were missing from their ritual. Twilight bit her lip as she flipped the page over. On the other side was a possible substitution sacrifice, one live pony with an upside down cutie mark. Then there were instructions detailing how to create one by killing and resuscitating a filly before their mark appeared.

Totality, having finished searching the first aisle, came to the second and found Twilight reading. "Did you find it?" she gasped.

Twilight turned to her slowly, a devastated look in her eyes. "It's over. This project is cancelled." She passed the lost page to her.

Totality skimmed both sides, her face contorting in horror. "This is... the worst thing ever."

Twilight clenched her eyes shut, lips tight and quivering. She braced her head against a dusty shelf as she began to sob in solitude. It felt so close, but it was just a cruel mirage.

"Twilight?" This was a bad idea after all, thought Totality.

Twilight began to heave, her short, stuttering breaths almost sounding like laughter.

Totality put a hoof on her shoulder in concern. "Are you… okay?"

"Yes," choked Twilight, smiling with tears rolling down her cheeks.

Totality was shocked by her reaction. "Then why the hell are you laughing?" she asked confusedly.

"Because it just occurred to me that if we'd brought him back, I have no viable explanation for anypony why he'd be back."

Totality facehooved. "I didn't think of that either," she grumbled. "How stupid."

"We would have done it anyway," continued Twilight. "I think we were just so excited about this that we didn't stop for a minute and look and think."

"This was a giant waste of time," sighed Totality.

"No, it wasn't," sniffed Twilight. "I'm offended that you said that. I thought you wanted to do academia stuff with Twilight Sparkle. Are you saying that you didn't have any fun?"

Totality looked down at the floor. "Well, I did but… I just wanted it to build toward something."

Twilight rolled her eyes. "Ugh, Totality, are you serious?" She floated the loose page up in front of her face again. "We just figured out why your cutie mark is upside down. That's your thesis project, right there. This phenomenon should be common knowledge, but it's been lost to time and stigma. You can get credit for rediscovering it. It might get you scholarships or even put you on the map as a researcher."

"Holy shit," she breathed. "You're right."

"If we'd succeeded, you'd have realized your old dream, but you wouldn't be able to tell a soul about it and you wouldn't have this. And, and, you know what else? Your scale held up!"

"Yeah… but what about you?" asked Totality.

"I haven't touched the bottle since we started this project because for the first time since Spike died, I felt hopeful about the future and I wanted to be there to experience it."

"But you felt hopeful because you thought he was coming back… and now you know he's not."

"That's what I thought at first too, but I just realized that I actually enjoyed the journey of getting here with you just for the sake of the journey, which is how I used to feel about life. I mean it still hurts a lot, but it doesn't feel insurmountable because I'm able to feel this spark of normalcy without Spike here." She frowned suddenly. "Well, he's still sort of here. His decaying skeleton is in my bedroom and we need to bury him again, and that's also inexplicably funny to me right now, but it feels like life again. I can't define it. I can't explain it. I want this so bad and I know I could have it, but I choose not to because the price is too high, and if the price is too high then that must mean that what I still have to lose is more valuable than that pain is hurtful."

"Maybe if we sat down and made a scale for you, we could explain it," suggested Totality facetiously.

"Maybe," laughed Twilight. "But let's put the research away today and go do something easy and fun. I know the Apples are decorating their farm for Nightmare Night. They always want help. You like spooky stuff; you can help with the haunted corn maze."

"Yeah… That sounds fun… and normal and not illegal."