Waking up in the glade again was getting exhausting. He was always on duty and didn’t want to be. Riordan sat in the middle of the meditation circle and sighed. He wanted to try exiting the spirit realm right away, but he should check in with Duane first, just in case something was up.

With a tired sigh, Riordan followed the twists and turns of the labyrinth pattern to leave the circle, noting that the path for him was very short and simple for such a complex design. He suspected his creation had intention infused into it on some level. Side effects. Damn it. He was getting really sick of all the side effects of spirit magic.

Thinking of that, he checked himself. He was just his human self, dressed as he’d been when he went to sleep, aside from that stupid void garden gateway in the middle of his chest. He made a mental note that he should probably avoid sleeping naked until he got the hang of things here, though his badger spirit mantle thing brought clothing with it. In fact, he reached for that feeling from earlier in the day, not seeking to trade places with his badger but wrapping himself up in its presence, becoming more fully himself.

His clothing morphed into the simple leather tunic and pants, the material in blacks, whites, and grays with decorative markings and fur trimmings. Riordan could go into the partial shift if he wanted, to protect himself further, but it felt too alien and militant for going to talk to his already intimidated ghostly pack.

A couple of the ghosts were hanging out near the tree when Riordan emerged from the pseudo-hedge maze leading to what seemed to be his spot. The rest were likely out in some of the other garden spots around the glade, taking advantage of the ability to have privacy when needed. He had noted that no one was hanging out along the path to Riordan’s labyrinth. He tried not to think too hard about it when he was already in a negative mental state. It would be way too easy to read too much into nothing or to take things personally.

Duane wasn’t in sight, which was awkward since Duane and Daniel were the only ghosts Riordan had conversed with. These guys would have seen him and heard him when he put the pack together but Riordan had been largely distant since then, tossing all the interpersonal shit in Duane’s lap and running, even if it had been necessary for Riordan to be the one handling dealings with the Sleeping Bear Pack.

The ghostly men near the tree stopped talking when Riordan stepped into the clearing, turning to stare at him. He really did stand out, a non-white muscular man dressed like some crazy fantasy adventurer and actually done up in color rather than ghostly grayscale. The only one in the whole pack who was alive, unless you counted the tree spirit. And honestly, the spirit was more nonliving than either living or dead. At least they had that diversity covered.

“Do you know where Duane is?” Riordan asked, awkward and disliking being the object of attention yet again. He didn’t want to be the oddity, damn it. He was used to it, but it was also exhausting to cater to other people’s discomfort all the time and he just didn’t have the energy to bother.

None of the men responded to Riordan at first. He stared at them. They stared back. He shrugged and turned to look at the different pathways leading off of the central clearing. “Right,” Riordan muttered mostly to himself, “I’ll just go find him myself then.”

Before Riordan got far though, one of the ghosts spoke up. “You’re him, aren’t you. The guy who did all the magic stuff.”

Riordan stiffened and stopped walking, though he didn’t turn back around. He wasn’t going to give these strangers the satisfaction of seeing him hurt if they chose to be dicks about this. Magic was a lot to take on top of being violently murdered and then emotionally and magically tortured in an unexpected afterlife state. “What of it?” he said thinly, trying to keep the growl out of his voice.

“Oh,” the voice, male and younger sounding, backed off shyly, “I’m sorry, I didn’t-- I just wanted to say thank you. You saved us.”

That hadn’t been what Riordan was expecting and he turned back to look at the group of ghosts more closely. There were actually two clusters and a few singletons in the space, all of them watching the exchange to one degree or another. Given how Riordan had changed everything for them, whether by freeing them from the swamp, bringing them to the glade, and then transforming the space for them, he couldn’t blame them for watching him this carefully.

The man speaking was standing in the nearer cluster. He was younger, college-age like Daniel at a guess, though his attire was dirty jeans, work boots, a stained t-shirt and a zip-hoodie with reflective stripes, which made Riordan suspect he had opted for working rather than further education. Black ropes wrapped up both arms and one leg, reminding Riordan that the other victims had been stuck in the mess longer and with more subtle after effects. He could see the slit wrists poking out from under the blood-stained ends of his hoodie sleeves, though they at least weren’t bleeding on this side of the tree space.

In the end, he looked like an ordinary person who had been living a hard life and then got put through hell. The nervous smile he offered, shaky and full of lingering underlying repressed trauma, made Riordan dial back his growly irritation. This guy was a victim, not an attacker. Even if he was somehow one of the earlier ones who might have been targeted for domestic abuse, no one deserved the fate they had all suffered. It was just wrong.

“You’re welcome,” Riordan said finally, when he realized the silence between them was stretching awkwardly. “I wasn’t going to leave you all there to suffer if I could help it. I mean, we aren’t really free yet,” he held up his own rope-wrapped arm, “but at least this is making you safer while we try to fix it for good.”

“Yeah, right,” the man held up his hands as if to ward something off, “Don’t let me keep you. I know you’re busy. I wish we could help mor-- Oh, Duane. Duane’s at the little waterfall thing by the willow tree. Or at least he was. I get distracted sometimes.”

The ghost glanced around at the others standing with him and one of them, older and unhealthily thin even before his fatal injuries, piped up, “That’s right, Cole. I haven’t seen him come back this way since we last saw him there, so he’d either be at the waterfall still or over in that mossy space near it.”

The second ghost pointed towards one of the exits off the main clearing, more to the right of where Riordan had randomly chosen.

Riordan corrected his course towards this new exit and began to walk again, giving a quick “Thank you” as he left. He realized that some of what he was seeing in the faces of those ghosts was awe bordering on wonder or worship, which was unsettling but perhaps not surprising when he’d been the one to yank them out of hell into purgatory out of nowhere and then remaining aloof and magical. Some of the ones in the background also had fear and wariness in their expressions. That could be because of him or them or just a side effect of all the fucking trauma they were collectively experiencing.

In the end, did it really matter? None of it changed what Riordan was going to do for them.

He heard the waterfall before he saw it, though the hill it tumbled down was visible past the vines and bushes before he reached the secluded space. Duane was speaking to a group of five men there, something about keeping the peace and allocating the space. He spotted Riordan when he entered but held up a hand to ask for a moment as he finished giving his orders to the other ghosts.

Strangely, Riordan knew that if he really needed Duane for an emergency, the man would drop what he was doing to assist him. He wasn’t sure if that was a bleedover from the pack bond or just a reading on the man and his actions, but it was reassuring nonetheless.

Duane’s assistants or whatever they were gave Riordan curious looks, but still attended to Duane’s instructions and took the hint to get going on those tasks after he finished up. That left Riordan and Duane alone with at least the illusion of privacy. The plants edging this little grotto shouldn’t be thick enough to block sound--hell, they shouldn’t be fully thick enough to block sight--but like everything in this place, what something appeared as was never all it fully was. Riordan had made the screening plants with the intention of privacy and he had a feeling that carried over into more damn side effects.

“Did you have a chance to pass along my information to Vera?” Duane started, breaking the silence.

Riordan winced and shook his head. “I let Norris know I had more information to pass along, but no one sought me out for it before I got pulled into that lesson with their shaman. I’ll be more insistent that someone take the report tomorrow, even if Vera herself won’t make time.”

Duane hummed thoughtfully at that, his expression neutral, and Riordan hated that twisting feeling in his stomach that told him he was a failure and he should have tried harder to make sure Duane’s request was carried out. He was their only voice to the outside world. He had to do better.

Instead of berating him, Duane just changed the subject. “How did your lesson go?”

“Damned if I know,” Riordan sighed, shoulders slumping. He both wished he could be a confident and knowledgeable shaman for Duane and the pack and appreciated that Duane preferred the honest truth, even if that truth was that Riordan was fumbling around blindly. “She told me I had a new affinity for spirit magic after all this shit, which is both useful and personally terrifying. I have more ability to do stuff here and not enough training on how to do it without horrible side effects.”

Riordan rubbed a hand over his chest, feeling the odd bumps of plants under his leather tunic. He had a feeling that he was going to always remember the lesson about side effects with that gesture. Duane’s gaze followed the motion and Riordan knew that he was thinking about Riordan’s near death and the plant void that repaired it, even if it was hidden under his spirit clothes.

“Anyway,” Riordan continued, trying not to let either of them dwell on that, “she cast some safeguard spells on me to help keep me from fucking up too badly. Unfortunately, they will also take some getting used to and make it harder for me to do useful stuff too until I get the hang of it. And I can’t be sure if that was part of her intentions or not, even if she swears that she truly wants to help me as one shaman to another. I have no idea if I am really a shaman or not, depending on the definition. I mean, right now, I have both spirit and shifter magic, which is the minimum requirement for shaman, but it can also refer to the training and pack role and all the stuff that goes around having those affinities.”

“Are you saying that because you are actually worried or just because you want some reassurances?” Duane asked, his question startling Riordan. He realized he didn’t know much about the man. He wondered what sort of job he’d had before he died.

Riordan started to answer, stopped, and considered it more carefully before saying, “A second opinion would be great. I’m usually good at reading people, but my emotions are fucked all to hell right now and I might be projecting just because I’m desperate for help.”

He appreciated that Duane seemed to give that some consideration as well. The man stroked his bushy beard as he thought. “I haven’t seen much of these shifters myself yet, but Daniel makes sure to update me. He’s been poking around a bit, though keeping it cautious with a shaman there and all. My impression is that they are usually pretty complacent, content with their small corner of the world, but they also take the threat of the death mage seriously. They might not be letting you see it since you are an outsider, but the panic is there behind closed doors. Fortunately, it sounded like Vera’s call to those Department of Magic people went well and a specialist is on the way.”

That was a relief to hear. Riordan had pinned his hopes on the shifters and when they hadn’t been confident on dealing with this either, it had taken the wind out of his sails a bit. He half-expected the pack to be like his old team, but there was a huge difference between a community of people living normal lives and a group of mercenaries, even if both used magic. He shouldn’t be disappointed when they weren’t badass commandos, ready to go and crush evil wherever it sprang up.

“That’s, I’m glad,” Riordan managed to say, “Anyway, I mostly wanted to touch base with you before I try leaving here to see if it will let me actually sleep. Is everything going okay?”

It was Duane’s turn to sigh as he cast his eyes out at the garden and the ghosts hidden beyond. “It’s hard, but nothing that can be fixed as long as the ritual holds us here. I think most of us just want to be done, you know? Like, if we’re dead, we just want to move on to whatever is next, instead of being forced to linger here and having the lives we’ll never get back shoved in our face. There’s also a lot of anger about being murdered and fear over how the other tree place had been. An eternity of that would break us pretty quick. Some of these guys really are broken already.”

He turned back towards Riordan, putting his hands on his hips. “Still, there’s nothing to be done about it until there’s an actual response team put together to handle the people who did this. Go to bed, Riordan. However you can manage that.”

Riordan took his dismissal with a nod and tried to exit smoothly rather than feel like he was fleeing the truth and responsibility of the raw suffering left in the wake of one death mage’s descent into power-hungry corruption. He gave a polite wave to the ghosts still in the main clearing as he passed, but didn’t stop until he was back in his meditation circle.

Since he felt like he was about to vibrate out of his skin with repressed desire to do something, Riordan took a minute to do some breathing and relaxation stretches before he even attempted to leave. It wouldn’t help anyone if he did get out of here and then was too worked up to sleep. Plus, he needed the calm to remember all the fiddly hand motions Frankie had drilled him on. It was all, twist your wrists like this and stick your pinky out but also curl it but not too much. He hated it, but if it worked, Riordan was on board.

He ran through the motions once without intention behind it, just to be sure he remembered them all. The last thing Riordan wanted was to be part way through an active spell and then get stuck, even if nothing bad had happened when he’d fucked this up during his lesson. Riordan didn’t have Frankie to bail him out at the moment. With a deep breath, Riordan repeated the spell once more, backing it with purpose this time.

As before, the dark tendrils unfolded from his chest, making Riordan feel like he was sharing his body with some eldritch horror, especially as the key took on the shape of an animal again. He got a clearer look this time and decided the stylized form made of woven shadow really was a badger, even if it had a whole forest growing out of it like Mother Bear had. The mix of his animal with the land reminded him uncomfortably of his current state, though that might have been the truth of the form.

When the last motion finished, the badger raced around Riordan, wrapping him in starry shadows and dragging his spirit down into blissful unconsciousness.