A dense forest of mixed deciduous and coniferous trees rose high overhead, trunks leaning inward slightly and branches stretching out towards the tree of light in the center. Compared to the fantastical nature of the tree with its glowing trunk and gemstone leaves, the defensive forest looked mundane and real, though vibrant with a life of its own. The leaves sheltered him and the brambles mixed in with ferns and grasses in rich loamy earth. The creek was more heard than seen behind that living screen of plants, but its presence added moisture to the air and a scent of water on the breeze.

The aura of serenity included a sense of secrecy and security now, rooted in the surrounding forest. Riordan basked in it, trying to ease the shaking of his soul. He was almost finished, just needed to bring the ghosts over now, but he needed a moment to re-center himself before attempting any further actions here. Riordan really wasn’t made to be a spell caster or a shaman and he’d never felt so profoundly grateful for the fact he didn’t have any affinities beyond his core shifter one. He couldn’t imagine having to deal with this surreal, vulnerable, and reactive power on a regular basis.

He picked himself up enough to settle into a loose sitting position and tried to fall into the meditation breathing again. After having his metaphorical face shoved into the unreal and magical nature of this place, mimicking the physical action took more effort than usual but breathing in and out the raw magic came easier. The additional boost to his well recovery was welcome but not the main point currently. Slowly, his hands steadied enough that Riordan knew it was time to finish up. Even with the tracking spell down, his body was still lying vulnerable out there in the last location they had gotten from him.

Almost immediately, Riordan ran into a serious problem. His defenses guarded against intrusion from the killing tree ritual and he hadn’t thought to leave a proper path through it that he and the ghosts could use. He’d built a wall with most of the people he wanted to protect on the wrong side of it.

He could try ripping a hole through the wall, but that felt like a step in the wrong direction, creating such a weakness in their refuge. To be honest, he wasn’t even sure he could do that anyway, not with the forest being so alive, reactive, and apart from him. He’d made a sneaky wall, mostly by accident, which meant Riordan’s crude skills would probably be about as effective as taking a hammer to water.

If he couldn’t go through the wall, then Riordan had to find a way around it. Space was metaphorical here, as was the wall, so Riordan could tell that it was a solid sphere of protection despite the visual gaps. Riordan had described this place as inside the tree though, made possible by the bond forged by the ritual initially, so if he could think of those connections, perhaps there was a pathway available due to the bonds in place. The ritual connected them all, but using that as a pathway would give the death mage a link into the gate to this place.

The pack bond would be separate from the ritual and link all of them together. He’d been able to sense pathways into the ghosts and their inherent magic when forging that, because they had willingly opened to him and his working. He could feel the pack well in this place, could still draw on it, so those connections had not been cut off by the wall.

Of course, a pack bond was just a form of power sharing and communication. Using it as a spiritual pathway was outside of its usual scope, but he was dealing with ghosts on the spirit plane. Surely that opened up new options, right? The pack bond was magical sharing and hadn’t Riordan just had it shoved in his face that everything was just magic on some level here?

Riordan started with examining his body here. He was dressed as he was outside, a black t-shirt stretched over his muscles, dark gray cargo pants, combat boots. It lacked details though, more of an impression of being dressed a certain way than a perfect replica and his pockets were all fake here. The black rope of the ritual knotted its way up his left arm, almost decorative in its patterning for all the pain it represented. A new knot sat in the center of his chest, where the rope from the entangled bonds had plunged in on the other side. It was as large as a tangerine and passed through his shirt to anchor in his spiritual flesh.

He could feel his new pack through that knot, the bond stretching through him and back into the other side. Riordan could feel Daniel and his concern, Duane and his resignation, and a whole host of confusion and fear and pain from the rest that he didn’t know well enough to sort out. He could feel the tree spirit on both sides, tunneled through the space in some other manner that Riordan couldn’t decipher, like trying to figure out a wormhole by blindly patting at it. He considered himself lucky not to have lost a hand yet.

Alright, he could do this. Riordan visualized reaching down along his pack bond to every member of it and trying to do that twist he had done when bringing Duane to the glade. It wasn’t quite the same this time, since he’d done the transfer together with both Daniel and Duane instead of calling them to him. He tried it again, tried opening himself up as an anchor point and summoning them to him rather than bringing them along.

Agony lanced through Riordan as if he had been stabbed through the chest and he fell to his knees. Ghosts screamed as they were compressed and pulled through a narrow space, spilling out of his chest into the glade, a fountain of people instead of blood. They tumbled and fell, sprawling in a daze from the unconventional transportation.

Riordan’s muscles locked up, his body shaking and his mouth open in a silent scream of his own. He couldn’t stop the pull, too much momentum built up as his pack of ghosts flowed through the bond and through him to bypass the wall. The speed picked up as the hole inside him ripped wider with their passage and then something huge clogged the flow, stuck and pressing at him as it tried to suction its way through the too-tight tunnel.

In horror, Riordan realized that he’d summoned everything in the pack bond, including the tree spirit. Now the bulk of its spiritual form was trying to pass through his soul.

He tried to close the connection, to reject its passage, but it was already inside him, wedged in tightly. Riordan gasped raggedly, unable to breathe as his whole self became compressed and stretched around the spirit traveling through him. It oozed through, inch by agonizing inch, and Riordan realized his scream was no longer silent but echoed around the terrified gathering of ghosts in the sheltered glade. His eyes locked onto Daniel’s and whatever the wide-eyed young man saw there spurred him into action.

Daniel was yelling and gesturing, but Riordan couldn’t hear it over his rushing blood and cracking bones, his scream running on to use the last of his air. Suddenly, several of the ghosts clustered in front of him, directed by Daniel, grabbed something in front of his chest and pulled.

The spirit was dragged out of Riordan’s soul like a cork out of a bottle, the force of it breaking free sending all the ghosts sprawling. That weird connection Riordan had felt between the tree spirit on the ritual side and the tree spirit here twisted into a closed loop, even all that visually happened was a bright flash of light spilling out to blind them all. When their vision cleared, nothing had changed, except everything felt just more. More solid, more powerful, more itself.

Riordan stared down at his chest, at the gaping hole ripped all the way through his body, at the blood beginning to pour out of it. He looked back up at Daniel, touched by the fear and sadness he saw reflected in the ghost’s face. It had been too long since Riordan had been worth that sort of concern and with his soul literally bleeding all over, he felt like maybe he’d earned it for once.

His strength left him and Riordan toppled over, falling right out of the spiritual space and slamming into his physical body.

To his surprise, Riordan woke up, gasping in pain and laying in the dirt just past someone’s backyard. His hand flew to his chest, equally shocked not to find the huge bleeding hole. The injury hadn’t translated to his physical body, despite the pain wracking him from the inside out. He tried to stand but the pain sent him tumbling back down, face in the dirt. A small whimper tore free and he curled up into a fetal position, trying to hold himself together.

Riordan could feel himself bleeding magic everywhere around him. He’d punctured a hole in his personal well of power, which masked whatever other effects the damage had done. There was no way in hell he’d be able to shift and his body felt weaker than it ever had as the unconscious magical strengthening of shifter magic faltered. He’d been born a shifter. To be without that magical support felt like he was dying.

Hell, he might be dying. Riordan had no idea what would happen if he kept bleeding magic like this.

“Riordan!” A familiar voice called out and then Daniel was there in all his grayscale, transparent glory. The ghost fell to his knees beside Riordan, hands hovering over him like Daniel was afraid to touch in case he hurt him. Daniel turned his head, speaking to someone near him, “What do I do?”

“Darn it,” Duane muttered, joining Daniel next to Riordan to examine him. “If this was a physical wound, aside from the fact he’d be dead already, I’d say try to stop the bleeding, keep pressure on it, and get him to a hospital. What that means for this, I couldn’t say. Is he conscious?”

“His eyes are open. Riordan? Dude, can you hear me?”

With effort, Riordan nodded, trying once more to get a hand under himself. His movements felt weird and jerky.

Daniel turned back to Duane, “Yeah, he’s conscious.”

“I can see that now, kid,” Duane said, though his tone sounded fond. Duane was nicer to Daniel than he had ever been to Riordan, but then again, Daniel inspired kindness. Riordan inspired a punch to the face.

Nonetheless, Duane also stripped off his flannel overshirt and began wrapping it around Riordan. The shirt and Duane’s hands passed easily through the ground as he reached under Riordan, but caught on Riordan’s wound. The contact sent another jolt of pain through Riordan and he cried out softly, barely managing to keep his voice down lest he wake the neighborhood. The large man wrapped the shirt over the hole in Riordan with efficiency, his hands as gentle as could be in the situation, and the pressure slowed the bleeding.

Duane rocked back to survey his work with a sharp nod. “That’s best I can do right now without risking making it worse. I get the feeling that messing with magic stuff without proper understanding is how we ended up with this situation in the first place.”

Riordan snorted. “Sounds ‘bout right,” he ground out thinly, trying again to get to his hands and knees, with more success this time. He paused to breathe through the new wave of pain before adding, “Shaman might help.”

“Right!” Daniel interjected, looking around like he might find a shaman in sight if he only looked, “The shifters can help.”

“Maybe. Just,” Riordan paused, panting, “Just gotta get to them first.