Sirius followed the pull of the Dark Mark to a forest clearing. Voldemort was waiting for him, sitting on a tree stump with a body lying prone at his feet. It was a muggle woman, Sirius guessed from her clothes. She was clearly under the effects of a Full Body Bind curse. Assuming she was still alive, she could probably barely breathe with her face pressed into the soggy leaf litter. He bowed. "My Lord."

"Sirius. Make yourself comfortable." That struck Sirius as an odd instruction given the Dark Lord was sitting on a rotting stump. Could easily be a kind of trap. He took out his wand and conjured a plain wooden students' desk for himself a few feet from Voldemort, with the muggle woman between them. He then stepped to the side slightly and elaborated Voldemort's stump into a lightly padded, vaguely throne-like chair before sitting down himself, on top of the desk rather than behind it. The Dark Lord smirked at him and rearranged his robes for a moment before speaking again. "Have you practiced ritual magic before?"

"A few times," Sirius said cautiously. The initial Animagus transformation was one of the very few ritual transfigurations, and he'd participated in a handful of family rituals over the years, weddings and funerals and the like. "Nothing like this. Nothing Dark."

Voldemort nodded. "And you reread the relevant chapters in Magic Moste Evil?"

"Yes."

"And finished the entirety of Rite of Blood?" Sirius nodded. "Do you understand the difference between ritual and wanded magic?"

"Er... sort of? I mean, I can repeat the obvious: rituals channel magic through your own body, through the elements, and through sacrifices, not through wands. Honestly, though, I never took Arithmancy, and the theoretical explanations in the books were pretty, ah, technical." The step-by-step descriptions of various Dark rituals and expected results were all straightforward. Disturbingly so, at times. The ritual for the creation of Inferi, for instance, was horribly simple in its design, requiring only a sacrificial victim and a cutting edge. The descriptions of why rituals worked and how to modify them on the other hand consisted mostly of complicated equations. The principle book on the Animagus transformative process, Becoming Your Beast, was similar, but he'd had James and the whole Hogwarts library to help with the math, then. And more than three days of preparation.

The Dark Lord laughed, high and cold. "Oh, you are in for a treat. Let me be clear, you have never experienced the fullness of your own power until you have performed blood magic. If you could better read the equations, you might understand. Magic performed by ritual is raw. It will feel like accidental magic. This will make you feel more powerful than you have ever felt, and at the same time, completely powerless."

"How hard is it?" Sirius asked, intentionally injecting trepidation into his voice. The more he'd read about the ritual, the less he wanted to do it. If there was a chance that Voldemort would change his mind and not teach him this, even if it meant he got to be tortured tonight, even if it meant the Dark Lord raised the dead in London himself... Except, that would be worse, wouldn't it? If he could learn to do this well enough, then he could try to limit the damage. Voldemort wouldn't. Neither would any other Death Eater.

Voldemort's eyes glinted. "As you will have read, the ritual itself is simple. A child could do it... if you could find a child who would do it." He sneered. "Even amongst my Death Eaters, there are those that balk at taking a life with their own fleshly hands." The muggle between them whimpered. Voldemort idly kicked her and continued. "They cling to their wands as if physical distance makes a difference. They are fools, of course. I do not think that will be your problem, though, not from everything I have heard about you from others. You are unusual in that way."

"I am?" He rather doubted it from the number of sadists he'd encountered in the Death Eater ranks.

Voldemort's sneer morphed back into a sly grin. "Killing a human with your hands is a great leveler. Most of my followers are ready to kill because they convince themselves that their victims are lesser. Subhuman. It is why they all start with muggles and then move up to muggleborns, and then blood traitors. Even your own cousin Bellatrix, who is the most similar to you, I think, always speaks down of those she has killed, finding ways that they 'deserved it.' And she is the prototype of a born killer, the kind that strangled rabbits in the back garden as a child. Even she has trained herself to see some people as untouchable, even if only her family. And then there is you, the one whose victims whether of 'childish pranks' or wholesale slaughter have always been human. The one who was perfectly willing to reject our ideology until your first taste of blood. The one who asks his victims' names, chases down a wizarding child, takes the head of the woman who I understand was your own ex-girlfriend in a relationship you were the one to break off, plays with the bodies of his two latest, pureblooded kills... You are under no illusions that those you have killed were not human. You may not even truly believe they deserve it, and yet you terrorize and kill anyway, because it is what you want to do. You are like a werewolf, or indeed any natural predator without moralistic conceits, though with much better control over your base impulses. I'm sure you would have just as little compunction against killing me if I eventually displeased you and you thought you could get away with it. No, the sacrifice will not be difficult for you."

Sirius started. "My Lord, I-"

"Save it for a meeting room. I do not require your reassurances in private. I know why your loyalties lie with me, and how to retain them. It is why I appreciate your honesty with me when it comes to your own abilities and interests. I have no interest in forcing you into a position you do not enjoy just because it suits your family's ambitions for you. And rest assured, I will always find a place for one of your inclinations in the world that is to come. You will not need to turn rebel when the war is won, just to keep from being bored." Sirius could only stare at him. Voldemort let him stew in his surprise and resumed his lecture.

"Now, keeping the power released under your control and not losing yourself to it, that will be the challenge. That is what you will need to practice. The other challenge is learning how to make the Inferius do your bidding rather than mindlessly wander and attack. You have read the requisite enchantments for that of course, but will need an Inferius to practice them. Tonight, we will begin simply. You will practice the ritual in its most limited form, with only one sacrificial victim. If all goes well, you will practice placing the simplest command, to guard this clearing. We'll know if it worked if the creature is still here tomorrow."

"And if all does not go well?"

"You'll be fine. I'll break you out of the grips of the spell and take you home to recover. We'll try again tomorrow." Sirius broke out into a sweat. Great. If he didn't do it right the first time, they'd just let a rogue Inferius roam the English countryside. Brilliant.

"Right."

"Do you want to use the original Rhaetic or the Latin translation?"

"Er, I memorized both, but Professor Babbling always said I was shit at Rhaetic consonants, my Lord."

"Latin it is. The effects can be extremely unpleasant if your pronunciation is off in the first few lines before you've gathered enough magic to correct your fallible human tongue in a language you do not actually know. Practice the incantation now, paying utmost attention to the meaning. Since you're using a translation, your understanding of the words must be flawless, nuanced, and above all focused, or else your intentions with the ritual will be corrupted and yield unexpected results." Sirius recited the Latin lines, slowly. Voldemort listened with eyes closed. At the end, he nodded. "Good. Now, I don't care what Rite of Blood says, your wand counts as a cutting implement. It is by far the best tool for you to use on the Thames, so that is what you will practice with." Sirius nodded. He was starting to feel a little sick. "Then you may begin when ready."

Sirius took a deep breath, in and out. He pointed his wand at the muggle woman and muttered, "Finite Incantatem." Her rigid posture slackened. Seconds later, she surged upright in a futile effort to escape her murderers. "Imperio. Sit still. Do not struggle. And tell me your name." Do not feel your pain.

She stilled. "My name is Jessica Haywood."

"Take off your shirt." She obeyed him, of course. He did not ask her to take off her bra. He only needed the back of her neck and shoulders exposed. He used a silent cutting charm to carve three Etruscan runes into her back. She barely flinched. Since she was still alive, the blood flowed fast and free down the skin of her back. He carved a single rune into the palm of his left hand, gritting his teeth against the sharp pain. He pressed his palm into the wound on the back of her neck. He took a deep breath and began to incant. "Sanguis noster miscet. Sanguis tuus meus est. Me capiat." Our blood mixes. Your blood is mine. I take it. As soon as he claimed her blood, he felt the magic start to build, gathering at his palm. As if his words had severed some deeper artery, her blood flowed faster, pouring out between his fingers to soak his sleeve. Should have rolled it up.

"Corpus tuum meum est. Me capiat." Your body is mine. I take it. Warmth spread up his arm. He felt the world fall away, his awareness shrinking to just the sensations of the woman he was killing. The smell of the blood. The slick, wet feel of it on his skin. The deep, red color. The sound of her shallow breathing. He could feel a fast pulse pounding at his fingertips. He did not know if it was hers or his, or perhaps their hearts had synchronized with this unholy bond.

"Mens tua mea est. Me capiat." Your mind is mine. I take it. A strange, pleasurable disorientation hit him. He hadn't expected it and did not realize what it was until he noticed the recurring thoughts to sit still and not to struggle. He was experiencing Jessica's Imperiused consciousness, unfiltered and uninterpreted, unaffected by the familiar lens of Legilimency. She was not fighting the Imperius curse at all. He was very, very glad she was not really aware enough to experience her own suffering.

"Spiritus tuus meus est. Me capiat." Your breath is mine. I take it. Even as he spoke, she stopped breathing, though her posture remained perfectly upright. The river of blood slowed to a trickle. The disorientation of her mind fled as quickly and easily as it had come, as she lost consciousness. Sirius shifted slightly and realized his hand was now stuck to her back. He took a deep breath and spoke the last two lines. He barely had to think of them, the Latin springing naturally to his lips. He was now far enough along in the ritual, the magic just took over.

"Tua vita mea est. Me capiat. Tu manus mea est in aeternum." Your life is mine. I take it. You are my hand, forever. Raw force roared through him, reverberating up and down his arm and all through his body. It was like the sun rising in his chest. It was like plummeting earthward from the very edge of space. It was so much more than he had felt channeling a lightning strike during his first Animagus transformation. It was orgasmic... no, gross. He knew he was bad, but he wasn't that sick to take literal pleasure from the power of someone's death.

Nor did it quickly recede. The magic just kept building and building. The ecstatic feeling morphed to a horrible pressure underneath his skin, as if it would rip him apart. Completely overwhelmed by the intensity, he made no effort at all to figure out if he had successfully turned Jessica into an Inferius. He tried to push back against the pressure, but it was coming from everywhere, coming from within. He could not remember what he was supposed to do.

"Focus, Sirius. Focus on the limits of your own body, and lift your hand. That will complete the ritual."

Hand. He did not at the moment remember whose voice might be talking to him, but he ripped his left hand free from the burning nexus of Dark magic. The rush of power broke off and snapped back at him. He bellowed, more at the sudden loss than from pain, and he pitched forwards off the low desk to shudder on the ground. "Fucking...Merlin's... hairy arse..."

"Colorful."

Voldemort's dry comment managed to penetrate the haze of his mind. He gasped a few more breaths and swallowed, then muttered, "my Lord."

The Dark Lord chuckled. "Get up. That wasn't bad for a first attempt. It will be easier next time."

It took Sirius a minute to coordinate his rubbery limbs and pull himself back onto the desk, which helpfully transformed into a high-backed wooden armchair that, while hardly comfortable, was much easier to sit in. When he had caught his breath, he finally looked back at, well, the Inferius who used to be a human named Jessica. The ritual had drained every drop of blood, so its skin had turned almost gray. Its eyes had turned milky white, the one physical sign that distinguished Inferi from zombies and draugar. It was staring at him.

Voldemort started lecturing again. "Now, normally, you would raise more than one Inferius at a time, and we will practice that tomorrow. The ritual is slightly harder, only because you have to make sure the blood touches every corpse you wish to raise."

Sirius started to nod, then blinked and furrowed his brow. "How am I supposed to spread blood all over a river the size of the Thames?"

Voldemort rolled his eyes. "Crucio." Not at all expecting it, Sirius screamed and slid off his chair again, even though the curse lasted only seconds. "Golpallot's second law, idiot. Magical properties are not dependent on the homogeneity of a solution if the complexity factor is less than seven. The complexity of combining water with something as miscible and potent as human blood with no other additives is almost zero. We'll be practicing this in a pond before you take it to the Thames."

Fucking potions theory was worse than the fucking Cruciatus, Sirius thought. He did vaguely remember a paragraph about the advantages of raising Inferi in water, but it was one that consisted mostly of numbers and symbols. He dragged himself back into his chair yet again. He was wrung out. "Sorry. Right. Sorry, my Lord. I... I just can't think. You were right. The ritual was... a lot."

"Yes, and you'll be practicing it every day until you're able to recover rather faster than this. I'd hate for you to drown in the Thames on what should be your day of triumph."

"How? How do I do this better? If I lose awareness like that in front of a whole crowd of muggles, one of them could walk, or swim, up to me and take me down with a blow to the head, and I'd never even see it coming."

Voldemort drummed his fingers on his knee. "It's like resisting the Imperius in a way. The euphoria of limitless power is very different from that of perfect repose, of course, but the principle of exerting your own ego is the same. Focus on your goal, on your body, and on the meaning of the incantation. The words and the runes are what make the ritual more than murder, remember. The power you are channeling is that of someone else's life, but you are taking it for your own. Try to take it faster. Don't just experience the influx of power, direct it immediately to reach the state you did at the end of the ritual today, and then stop it sooner. Remember, you did succeed today, or Jessica here would not be sitting so docilly and would have long since attacked us or run off. That success is what will guide you in future attempts."

"Yes, my Lord."

"Now pay attention. When we do this again tomorrow, the Inferius created from your living sacrifice is a different kind to the one created from a corpse." He gestured to the creature sitting silently between them, still staring avidly at Sirius. "She is your avatar amongst the horde. If she is destroyed, they all are. Therefore, while today you will practice placing commands on her alone, tomorrow you will learn to give one command to your avatar, and another to the rest. When you do this in earnest, while most of your Inferi will rise up to attack, your avatar you should command to hide in the riverbed. Or avatars, for you may need more than one depending on how large an area you need to affect. Or more to the point, how much water volume."

"Audrey's researching it with muggle maps and depth measurements."

Voldemort inclined his head. "Now, let's go over the spells to make her guard this place. Can you remember them, or do you need me to remind you, since you can't think?" he said dangerously.

"I remember them," Sirius said quickly. "Spells for vision, hearing, boundary definition, ally and foe recognition, optional concealment, and instruction for injury versus slaughter."

"Correct. Let us begin."

Sirius stood in a niche in one of the few intact arches of Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, hiding from the steady rain. He fidgeted in place, wishing he could think of a better spot for this. The whole country seemed to be sodden today. An abandoned barn or shepherd's hut probably would have been better shelter from the precipitation, but he didn't know where any of those were to apparate to. He was fresh from his latest tutelage with Voldemort, which left him both physically restless and mentally exhausted. This whole week he almost felt like he had on Fleamont's pain and calming draughts, rocketing up to a euphoric high while Voldemort coached him through each piece of magic, and then crashing into a half-sick low when the feeling wore off. He shook his head, stopped dithering, and took out his watch.

"I'm alone," he said to Moody's portrait.

"About bloody time," Moody said, straightening up and moving to the foreground of the portrait. "There's a hell of a lot to talk about."

"Nothing's really changed since the meeting last week. I thought you said you heard all of it."

"I did. And I also heard you talking to Audrey yesterday and know you're still determining the scale of what will happen in London, but we do need to talk about these things."

"Well, pardon me for prioritizing not setting too many Inferi loose in Yorkshire and not ticking off the Dark Lord by failing to do homework while he personally tutors me," Sirius said irritably.

Moody hesitated. "Fair point. What I've heard of it doesn't sound fun. How is that going? I missed today's lesson."

"You'll be pleased to know all of yesterday's crop stayed put, this time. Hence why I'm here with you instead of studying more."

"Good. Is there anything new or urgent on your end?"

Sirius shrugged wearily. "The Dark Lord is conducting practice drills this week to try to figure out the best team structure for the raid, but he doesn't want me participating until he's satisfied with my ability to raise Inferi quickly and control them well. Rodolphus did implement my suggestion to raid funeral homes for corpses, so there shouldn't be quite so many deaths, but you also won't be able to track the numbers at all. We'll have to wait for the tally at next week's meeting to know how many Inferi we'll be dealing with. I haven't been looking for or reading about horcruxes because of everything else going on. Oh, and if this doesn't work to get Crouch Senior, I think the Dark Lord will move on Crouch Junior somehow, maybe even while he's still at Hogwarts. Rodolphus was over talking to Richard about him the other day. That, or he'll take Bella's suggestion and storm the Ministry."

"I'll make sure Dumbledore knows. Now, a few things from our end... first, based on auror records, it is extremely likely that Tom Riddle stole a magical cup created by Helga Hufflepuff and a locket belonging to Salazar Slytherin back in 1961. They are almost certainly now horcruxes."

Sirius almost dropped the watch, he was so surprised. "You're joking."

"No, myself was able to confirm the authenticity of the objects through a routine inspection at Borgin and Burkes and valuation statements from Gringotts that were cited in the theft reports. The case was never solved, at the time."

"He made horcruxes out of fucking Founders' objects?" Sirius hadn't even known any relics of the Founders existed other than the Hogwarts Sorting Hat.

"Very probably. Myself even reviewed a memory of the objects from one of the family members that was archived with the rest of the file. There's no way to show it to you, obviously, but I have the descriptions. The cup is small, a goblet about four inches in height, made of solid gold with finely wrought handles. There is a badger emblem engraved on the side, and a black freshwater pearl set in each handle. The locket is also solid gold, of oval shape about the size and weight of a galleon. It has emeralds set into the front of it in the shape of an 'S.' It appears to be magically locked and impossible to open without the key, which is lost to history."

"Well, I can't say I've seen either of those lying around, but I guess I'll keep an eye out from now on," Sirius said doubtfully. Honestly, although he was excited by the tangible progress, there was no way that he would just trip across either of these in a Death Eater household. "You do realize emblems of the Hogwarts Founders are too recognizable to be put on display where some guest is bound to ask unwanted questions about them, right?"

"Oh, definitely. They'll have to be locked away out of sight from any but their keepers. Myself is working on a warrant to review the ledgers of known Death Eaters' Gringotts vaults, in case they're stashed down there. The goblins don't report the movements of stolen goods, but they still record them."

"I thought Gringotts never released its confidential records, not even to aurors."

"Depends on what the warrant says it's looking for. Like I said, they don't get involved with stolen goods and non-tradeables, but they have to cooperate with us a little bit if it's for a murder investigation. Any heirlooms that went missing after a murder could conceivably be considered in evidence if found."

"Does a warrant like that extend to vaults belonging to the Sacred Twenty-Eight?" Sirius asked skeptically.

"...Sometimes."

Sirius sighed. "I bet there's a special fee for the goblins to look the other way. You can bet Abraxas would have warned the Dark Lord about those kinds of loopholes. If there's a horcrux in a Gringott's vault, it's in one the goblins won't share the ledger for."

"You might be right, but it's still worth checking. And it's not our only lead, either. Myself is following up another one as we speak. But we need to talk about what's going to happen on the 24th."

"All I can tell you is that there will be over a hundred thousand muggles at the waterfront either for regular business or watching this boat race thing. We're not aiming for all of them to have to be obliviated, since only those in the spectator boats and along the banks right where I attack will be able to see much, at least if I can keep the Inferi confined to the area. Audrey's researching ways to scramble the muggle cameras, so we won't have to worry about the telly vision audience."

"If she figures it out, let me know. The obliviators need new tools for that very problem."

"Well, she says the amount of magic I'm going to be releasing will fry all the nearest muggle electricitish devices anyway. So there's that. I still don't know how many Inferi I'll be raising, but it'll be a lot."

"More or less than a hundred?"

"More. A lot more. The Dark Lord was speculating we may even end up raising skeletons of muggles who ended up in the river years and years ago. It's going to be really bad. That's why I'm trying so hard to learn to control them well. If I'm stuck with the basic 'walk in a straight line and kill anything that moves,' the death toll will be horrendous. And the Dark Lord doesn't care about minimizing muggle casualties this time, because he expects the aurors to be fighting even if the obliviators end up with barely anything to do." He'd started having nightmares of a thousand Inferi prowling the streets of muggle London, more and more blood draining into the River Thames to raise more and more corpses. It didn't actually work that way - the ritual was not self-sustaining, thank Merlin - but that didn't stop him from dreaming about the nightmare scenario. What if some cemetery had flooded and washed into the river, depositing the bones just where he happened to perform his ritual? Or what if he happened to be over top of a bunch of Medieval shipwrecks?

"We have a plan to help with that, actually."

"Er, you do?"

"The squib's idea. We're going to set fire to the river."

"Aren't rivers are made of water and generally inflammable? I don't think cursed fire that can burn water is going to be very helpful."

Moody laughed drily. "That's what myself said. But it turns out, muggles are fair hands at setting rivers on fire, ever since their Industrial Revolution. All it takes is enough oil and a spark. Apparently, there's some river in America that's caught on fire a dozen times or something."

Sirius still did not understand how a large conflagration was supposed to help; it would reduce the Inferi numbers, but not casualties. "So your plan is to have everyone on the water burn to death rather than killed by Inferi?"

"No, the plan is to set fire to the river banks, only a little bit will be in the water. The fire will contain the Inferi, keep them from getting out of the river where they'll endanger more people and maybe be able to escape our perimeter. It'll also drive away a lot of the spectators before they can get hurt or see enough of what's going down to require obliviation. And there will already be muggle crowd-control officers, so we won't have to worry about a stampede. Our squib says the larger boats should be able to outrun the blaze too, at least long enough for rescue teams to get to them."

"The race is between rowed boats."

The portrait hesitated. "Correct me if I'm wrong, Sirius, but you'll be killing at least one rowing team yourself."

Sirius looked away, out over the cliffs to the sea. "You're probably not wrong," he admitted. "The only way to reduce the number of sacrifices is to use witches and wizards, since their blood releases more magic. But that's a higher risk operation from our perspective, even if it saves time."

"That's what we guessed," the portrait said gently. "You have our sympathy."

"I'm not the one who needs your sympathy," Sirius said bitterly. "The twelve people I've killed in the last ten days are. The people who are going to die next week are."

"We know that, and I've listened for each of their names so myself can give some closure to their families."

Sirius breathed in, slowly. "Are you coordinating with the muggle authorities on this burning river thing?"

"We can't, not ahead of time, not without giving you away."

"Then give me away, damnit!"

"You know what will happen if we do that. Maybe we get lucky and You-Know-Who fails to identify you as the spy. But maybe we don't, and he kills you, then raises up the Inferi himself in revenge, on a day we won't be prepared."

Sirius breathed. "I know. I know."

"Myself will be ready to share stratagems with the muggle government as soon as it is apparent what is happening. We will take care of the risk mitigation this time, Sirius, as much as is possible."

"I'll do what I can as well. I'm already planning to get them to 'injure' rather than 'kill,' for what good that will do leaving muggles bleeding out where they land. If I get good enough though, the Dark Lord will show me a way to retain flexible control over a portion of them rather than rely on fixed-command enchantments. That will be a huge advantage if I can make it work." Voldemort had brought up the technique as something to aim for because Sirius would also be able to reclaim and redirect the dark magic into his own curses during the raid on the Crouch residence if he needed to. The Inferi he drew from would become inert if and when he did. Several of the Inner Circle were trained in the technique as well, but only Bella, Dolohov, and potentially Sirius were currently trusted to use it. Yet again, the Dark Lord cursed the loss of Abraxas and Lord Yaxley (still in prison), and he muttered about whether a raid on Azkaban would be worth it after this.

"Good. Now, there's one more thing we need to discuss. After much debate, Dumbledore and myself have agreed that You-Know-Who's concern about the Imperius curse is advantageous. We would like to feed those fears and make them real. We want this raid to fail badly, so that he doesn't feel justified in using a mass Inferi attack as a distraction like this again."

"Sounds good to me. Who are you going to curse?" He'd try not to stand next to them.

"That's just the thing. No one in the Order of the Phoenix or in the Auror Department actually has any practice in placing long-acting Imperius curses. The most any of us have done is short-term practice placing it on each other or in five cases using short-term curses as a de-escalation technique in combat, within the directives of the current law."

Sirius could see exactly where this was going. "So you want me to curse somebody, is that it?"

"Yes. Someone who will be part of the raid on Crouch's residence. Have them attack their fellow Death Eaters, just as You-Know-Who suspects might happen. Are you willing to do it?"

Sirius had to laugh. "Are you kidding me? Of course I'll do it! Serves him right." Sirius remained a strong believer in keeping the death counts as equal as possible. Whether it would do anything to convince Voldemort not to use Inferi was another question entirely, and one he didn't feel he would be able to answer until it was too late.

"If you could make your... target attack in such a way that would be both unexpected, difficult to counter, and have a chance at derailing the mission right away, it would be appreciated."

"I'll see what I can come up with. Depends on who I pick."

Author's note: first time the Order is actually sanctioning Sirius' use of violence and Unforgivables ahead of time! And apologies for my undoubtedly appalling Latin grammar. That was pretty much pure google translate... I thought about trying to put it into a pseudo-Etruscan so it matched the runes, or some other runic language, but I think it's more fun for long incantations like this to be in a language that has enough overlap with English/other modern IndoEuropean languages that my readership can muddle through it themselves. Otherwise, it would just look like gibberish. Incidentally, Rhaetic is another ancient European language (from the Alps) in the same family as Etruscan. In my headcanon for ritual languages in this story, there's only so many degrees of separation that rituals can go through in terms of translation and substitutions before they stop working entirely and have to be redesigned from the ground up. If the Inferi ritual is from a Rhaetic culture that appropriated the Etruscan alphabet for its writing system, it could be translated into Etruscan fairly easily without messing up the effects of the ritual, and to ancient Latin with a little more difficulty because Latin was influenced by the Etruscans, even if it's a different language family. Translating to modern English or switching the runes to Elder Furthak or even the Latin alphabet would have been too significant a change to produce the same results without drastically changing other components of the ritual as well, especially if you factor in the concept of incanting in a dead language actually bringing more consistent results than living languages, because the meanings of the words are completely static. Ridiculous tangent concluded.

Thanks for the reviews, and we'll continue Saturday updates.