We had to strike a bit of a balance in terms of who was responsible for Gravedust bringing himself and the others back. Was it the will of the cosmos, the mystics, or the cosmos AND mystics? But then, mystics are supposed to be able to speak for the will of the universe, and it’s reasonable to assume they could keep doing so even after they were dead. “Use the Force, Luke,” said the ghost.

Sorry, E-Merl, but it’s going to be quite a while before anyone bothers really answering your question, and there’s a reason for that. At this point in the story, we had a pretty good idea of Rachel’s likely destiny, and therefore we knew E-Merl might get dangerously obsessed with resurrections. So we wanted his knowledge of them to be imperfect, since that would increase the chances that he’d do something reckless. We were thinking along the lines of “bargaining his soul to black magick” or even “getting radicalized as a Cultist,” but it turned out “getting suckered into a trap” made more sense for him and the story when we got there.

On the other hand, the way Gravedust describes his greatest power and the price for using it here was not meant to sow any seeds: Chapter 41 and the events leading up to it were not even a glimmer in our eyes at this point.