That response clearly surprised Frankie. The shaman sat back on her cushion, evaluating Riordan and his request. The spell forms pulsed slightly as they rotated in front of her. After a moment, she raised her other hand and appeared to crush three of the spells. Riordan could feel her re-absorb the magic used for them. She poured a bit of something from a new bottle into the dish, mixing it with the remnants of the first liquid, before sketching out two new glowing spell forms.

“The alternative shield will slow any external effect applied to you, giving you time to analyze and counteract it. Assuming your skill is sufficient. For the other, instead of preventing spirit-speech, this will boost your own spiritual presence, making such speech more controlled. Don’t expect it to help for greater spirits.”

“Great,” Riordan said, his nerves showing through again. He clenched his fists to keep them from shaking. “How do we do this?”

“A skilled shaman would breathe the spell forms into their core--”

Riordan hadn’t meant to do it, really. Frankie said breathe and his tired, drained body slipped into the meditation breathing. He’d set the rhythm of it to carry him through crisis, habitual if not yet automatic. He didn’t think about the fact that this breathing had been taught to him by a shaman. He didn’t think about how much of spirit magic was based in intention and shifter magic in instinct. He fell into the pattern, drawing in air. Then he drew in the magic around him, pouring it down into his well.

If Frankie had held onto the spells with her will, Riordan was sure he couldn’t have moved them from her grasp. Her intention was tempered with over a century of experience and knowledge. Her habits were also trained though. She had spells prepared for a shaman to take from her into their own self. A shaman, the intended shaman, sat in front of her breathing in magic. The spells flew from her hand to Riordan.

Kwaku had been the shaman of his mercenary team. The young man and his twin sister had been from Ghana, a pair of striped hyena shifters. His religious beliefs underlaid the foundations of his shamanic practices. He had mixed Buddhist practices over traditional African beliefs. The mundane world and the sacred world were intertwined, each influencing the other. The dead, usually one’s ancestors, bridged the gaps between the worlds. Riordan hadn’t understood it. He hadn’t really tried, just as he had let the Jewish traditions of his birth pack and the Hindu traditions of his father wash through him without acknowledging their worth.

He knew spirits existed, but doubted gods. He knew the dead persisted after death, but doubted any religious afterlife. He knew magic was real, but denied all sense of wonder. In a world full of diverse beliefs, he had chosen atheism and then done poorly at that as well.

An atheist could be the most moral person, choosing good for themselves in the absence of all external code or reward or pressure to do so. So people took solace in nihilism, that there was no greater meaning, which meant that the world was a blank slate for them to choose their personal meaning.

Riordan had just run from it all. He’d chosen failure to absolve himself of the difficult choices.

All of that flashed through his mind as he breathed in both the ambient magic and the safeguard spell forms. They flowed in through his nose with the air, feeling like he’d snorted a lightning bolt. That left him with the question of what to do with that bolt now that he had it.

Frankie had said the spells went in the core. Riordan wondered if that was synonymous with his well, but that didn’t seem right. His lungs ached as he held his breath and the spells with it, trying to figure out where to put them. No, the well wasn’t right. That was a chaotic place, magic constantly flowing in and out. The spells needed some place stable, but still contained. There had to be such a place inside his soul. Riordan had just never looked for it.

He couldn’t hold it any longer, a burning sensation spreading from both his lungs and head. In desperation, Riordan decided to keep the spells moving through him until he found the right place for them to settle. A memory floated up of his father’s resonant voice leading Riordan and his siblings through a series of slow movements, a salutation to the rising sun that warmed the body with the warming day. He spoke of the position of the body, the interconnectedness of emotion with body, of the physical manifestation of inner phenomena. Kwaku had brought up chakras as well, from the Buddhist perspective.

Riordan couldn’t remember any of the chakras, of greater and lesser points of power flow in the physical, but he remembered that such things existed and that the physical form interconnected with the spiritual form. Chakras went up the spine. Energy flowed with air and blood. It was enough to start.

His knowledge of biology was about as shaky as his knowledge of spiritual anatomy. He’d learned enough to patch a team mate enough to get them to a real medic or, after he joined the all-shifter mercenaries, to give them time to regenerate. Some of it came back to him, but it had been far too long since his formal science education. And he was also sure that science had come a long way in the fifty years since his secondary schooling.

Still, he tried his best. Air went to the lungs first, so the spells moved along that line. From there, he imagined it moving to his heart to be pumped out to the rest of his body. His breathing fell back into the meditation pattern, filling him with movement. The spells burned as he moved them around his body, moving them with the beating of his heart. He swept them up into his head and mind, but that’s not where they belonged. His arms and legs followed next, making loops back to his heart, not because he thought those were likely, but because he wasn’t sure what sort of pattern worked for his torso. Did he think about it as a physical shape or a spiritual one and what did either look like?

Just before he panicked, he felt a warm hand press to his lower belly. It would have been a surprisingly intimate touch in other circumstances, but he could feel the clinically magical nature of the touch. He felt like a beacon had been lit and he swept the spells downward. It felt like he passed them through his well before dropping to something below it, connected but not swirling with constant motion. Like a sheltered river bend, it wasn’t swept along with the current of magic, but still fed in and out at a slower rate.

The spell forms dropped into that space and settled in, spinning in slow motion around a center point that Riordan couldn’t sense. Instead of feeling something there, it was more noticeable by the absence of magic he sensed there. He didn’t have long to dwell on that thought before a slap to his face brought him out of his trance.

“What the hell was that?” Frankie yelled at him. With her standing and him sitting, even her short height and slender build was enough to loom intimidatingly, especially backed by the force of her personality. “I have never met such as stupid student as you. You say you want time to make conscious decisions and then pull that shit!”

In a moment of clarity, Riordan saw that her anger came from a place of kindness. Frankie saw how close he was to destroying himself with his unstable foundations and did not have time to coddle him. Not that her personality was much inclined towards coddling in the first place.

“I’m sorry,” Riordan said simply, “and thank you. For showing me how to finish that.”

She stared at him with fury and skepticism and then let it all go with a huge huff of air. Frankie stomped back over to her cushion and flopped back onto it, one leg bent and the other sprawled out in front of her. “You are,” she said flatly, “hands-down the worst student. You have enough understanding of magic to be dangerous without enough to be skilled and more power than you expect to back that up. You are old enough to have bad habits and too young to have gotten over yourself.”

He took the lecture without a word, meeting her gaze this time. He had scared her. He’d earned her ire. His acceptance of her displeasure took the wind out of her sails though and Frankie threw her hands up in the air.

“Bah!” she muttered, “Spirits forfend and save me from fools. Let me show you how to enter and exit the spirit realm intentionally and how to call on your badger there. Then I’m done with you for the day.”

Frankie straightened back up into her teaching pose and rummaged through her satchel quickly as she began this new lecture.

“Entering the spirit realm requires a gateway. These do form naturally. Most are too small for a human spirit to use without exceptional skill. Therefore, a shaman usually draws the spirit from the spirit realm to the physical realm rather than the other way around. If they do need to go to the spirit realm themselves, they either need to find a natural gate of a correct size or use a spell that either temporarily or permanently enlarges one of the many small gates. The advantages to the created gates is that a shaman can also create keys to them to prevent just anyone from using them and anchors to be sure they open to the same place every time.”

She pulled out a stylized statue of reddish stone that was about twice the size of her hand. It took Riordan a moment to recognize that the figure represented by the statue was Frankie herself, combined with a definite bird theme. He hadn’t thought about what her shifter animal would be, but the idea of her as a bird fit both her physical and mental traits. It lent credence to the theory that animal form either influenced the human form or that the human aspects of a person influenced the animal they became. Given there was some sort of genetic factor to the animal forms, Riordan leaned towards the first option. He’d certainly demonstrated the tough, defiant nature of the badger his whole life, even if the exact manner shifted with time and circumstance.

She set the statue on the stone floor between them. “This is my key for the gate I can access from this circle. I will demonstrate its use. You may not be able to enter it due to your currently bound nature in the spirit realm, but you will see the gate from this side. Watch my gestures and the magic around the statue.”

Frankie slowly performed a series of hand motions, fingers pressed or contorted in deliberate patterns. With each gesture, the dormant magic enchanted into the statue unfurled, blooming into a figure of a soaring bird, its beak pointed up towards the sky. The apparition was pure magic and stylized, which meant Riordan wasn’t completely sure of the type of bird, but it had a long curving neck and long legs, wings spread wide from a narrow body.

With the last gesture, the bird took flight, leaping from the statue into the air and piercing through some invisible barrier. It disappeared through the hole it made, leaving a swirling nothingness suspended next to Frankie. A cord of magic ran from the statue into the gateway. Riordan wasn’t sure he could explain what he had just witnessed, but a strange sense of wonder mixed with the fear he always felt when watching active magic.

“The bird becomes a statue on the other side, serving as a key from that side linked to the physical one here,” Frankie explained, “Paired keys are stable, allowing you to maintain a guide cord while restricting access through the gate, but make sure no one breaks either side or the spell falls apart. Since you are leaving your body behind too, security on the physical side is a concern for shaman.”

Riordan remembered the fear he felt when the tracking spell had ripped his soul to the spirit realm, leaving his human body lying in the dirt for his murderers to pick up at their leisure. He definitely got the point.

“The other thing that throws off beginning shaman is stepping out of their body while still on the physical plane. The sensation is similar to stepping back to let your animal form take over. Instead of stepping back into that place where your animal resides, you step forward out of the body entirely. Then the soul can move through the gateway while the body remains behind. You try it.”

Riordan had been a shifter for his entire life, his honey badger a constant presence inside him. His new experiences helped him understand the shape and flavor of his soul as a separate thing from his physical vessel, but arising from it and connected to it. That matched what he knew of the barrier between physical and spirit. The two things were distinct but entangled.

He held his body still and cleared his mind, reaching for that state that was will and intention. It came more slowly, the limiter safeguard having some effect even in this realm, but he felt himself as he had when Mother Bear had shown him the land. When she’d shaken up his soul and jammed it back into his physical vessel all willy-nilly.

Riordan stepped forward.