“I was a fool to pine for something that didn’t exist and never would.”

-Isaac Gennari

Rebecca’s letters had been lost in the mess of Savio’s atelier, and any spoken word failed to pass through a veil of grief. The Gennaris had no idea that she hoped to protect her students from disease by sending them away from the Maquette school. By a sad stroke of luck Isaac came down with consumption on the way to Turin and died alone in the back room of a train station. It was a different youth that the Gennaris raised from the dead as a screaming lunatic who couldn’t stay in ‘his’ own flesh. At the same time the real Isaac clawed his way out of the mass grave and into a world where he could now see the dead. Ghosts took out their wrath on him numerous times, and every single time Isaac woke up within three days hale and whole. He managed to reach Turin with the help of a bored, lazy ghost who had seen him fall, then rise, then fall and rise again.

Isaac and Avery found Rosalind as she was cleaning up the last traces of the failed resurrection. In her eyes Isaac was one of the many walking corpses brought forth by that failure and nothing more. He pleaded with her to recognize him, and the more Rosalind turned a deaf ear the more Isaac became angry with himself. He had spent his whole life hoping to get his parents’ attention, fighting Rebecca Ansolm’s expectations, being denied a knight’s career path by Hilda, and learning that his best friend had never been on his side. He’d wasted every last day of his so-called life and wasn’t going to waste a second more. In spite of herself Rosalind panicks at the sight of Isaac leaving and she rushes out blindly, sending herself straight to her death at the hands of walking corpses.