Regarding Death & Demons

[Jewel Thief]

Hey guys! Jewel Thief here!

Soo I've been DMing an evil war campaign with my friends for a year now and I had a character (her PC name was Mala) die the most horrific death ever: tossed into an energy obelisk prison with an oozing flesh demon that dissolved Mala's body and absorbed her flesh into its skin. I'm a mean DM.

However, the player wants Mala to come back somehow. The party has the character's evil weapon (a vicious scythe with a curse that you must kill an innocent everyday with it or you'll die). Without using a wish, are there ways a cursed item can keep a bit of your soul, so that if you die, you can come back? Are there legitimate non-homebrew ways I could revive her?

Otherwise, I was thinking they'd start seeing Mala's grinning face in the scythe's blade when they used it. Then phantom images of her, skinless, bleeding incorporeal blood, screaming. Perhaps whenever they use the scythe, the blade sucks up blood and glows while they hear Mala's voice chuckle in their heads. Maybe they have nightmares of Mala? And then, finally, maybe Mala will return as some kind of fiend (or half-fiend), and join them, only now her goals in life have been altered for the demonic.

Halp? Suggestions?

[101jir]

I don't know about ligit ways, but you could always have her come back as a spectre (or if she is fine with playing villain, wraith). Say that in a desperate struggle against the forces of evil, she managed to rip her soul from the scythe, but it is messed up somehow.