The spirit of the blackgum tree, with its gleaming leaves and branches of glittering light, was transforming. As Riordan slammed backwards into its trunk, he watched as threads of shadow braided into the light, a new balance of power. Its branches spread outwards, growing before Riordan’s eyes. Ropes, no longer black but a braided silver reminiscent of the pack bond Riordan had forged with both the ghosts and the spirit, draped over the branches in graceful arcs. Berries of shadowy black and translucent white bloomed in bunches among the leaves. The aura of serenity that Riordan had felt in the secluded glade at the heart of the spirit was out here now, chasing off the old sense of terror and oppression.

Only it wasn’t just that drugging serenity anymore. It felt like peaceful repose. Like reverentially walking through a graveyard. Like sinking into the embrace of sweet oblivion.

The tree creaked and moaned as it grew. Other plants began to grow among its branches and leaves, little microcosms to represent the sub-elements of an encompassing spiritual being. Riordan gasped, losing his grip on his werebadger form as his badger surged to the surface, leaving him rattling and growling at the tree as it drew on a portion of the ritual’s power, tinged with the alienness of the place beyond the Veil, and ascended to a greater spirit.

Spirits were a concept and a will imprint on magic. Regular spirits arose from single concepts, from single sources. Greater spirits were more. They embodied multiple related concepts as they merged into a whole. They weren’t just a single thing. They were a whole fucking archetype.

Riordan felt the spirit changing as much as he saw it. The tree remained tied to him via both the pack bond and the conduit of the ritual, though Riordan felt only the barest trickle of death magic flowing through him now. Strangely, it seemed to be coming from the Veil and towards the spirit rather than the other way around. He leaned against the trunk of the tree even as a version of the glade he had built with it began to sprout around them. The foliage was more complex, thicker and more entangled with different species. Riordan thought he saw movement in those hedges, though whether it represented small woodland creatures or shards of ghosts, he couldn’t tell from the flickers at the edges of his vision.

Looking towards the tear into the Veil, Riordan tried to push himself away from the tree. Daniel had come to him, mentioning some sort of threat that Riordan hadn’t been able to listen to because he’d been consumed by the ritual and its demands. He needed to be sure his friend was okay, even if it was just as a goodbye before Daniel finally got to pass on. Hell, all of his pack deserved that. He needed to see them.

Unfortunately, Riordan couldn’t move. The silvery braids wrapping the tree linked with vines to entangle him, holding Riordan in place. He got a sense that he wasn’t allowed to move until the ritual was fully complete. The spirit had plans.

Riordan shivered at that. Spirits were already alien existences. Adding in death magic and the imprint of the Veil to it couldn’t make it any more relatable. He had no idea what sort of spirit it was becoming. Tree archetypes in fairy tales and legends often became passageways between worlds or the source of magical fruits. Riordan glanced up at the strange berries and at the Veil and winced. He was sure that its transformation included elements of death, though he thought it was death as a clearing away or new beginning rather than death as destruction.

He leaned against the tree, trapped, unable to move forward. Riordan wondered what was happening in the real world. Or the physical world, rather. As was becoming increasingly imprinted on him, what happened in the spirit realm had very real consequences. He knew Phenalope was dead. Had Gloria and Helena died as well? Or escaped? Who had shown up to help? Clearly someone had or Riordan would have been helpless to do anything. Daniel had come with them but they’d hardly exchanged full details in the middle of this.

Riordan sincerely hoped that death was minimal on all sides. At least shifters were tough bastards.

The tree brushed the edges of his soul with its own. Riordan felt it observing him. Learning from him. Gods, what a terrible idea that was. Everyone knew Riordan was a grumpy bastard and fucking mess of a person. He didn’t need a spirit imprinting anything off of him as it turned into a greater spirit. Riordan felt a question in response to that thought, a question tinged with respect for his fire and will and his unwillingness to look away from suffering.

Riordan was hard pressed not to argue that he wasn’t that great, that he had looked away for too long, convincing himself that he didn’t deserve to get involved in other people’s problems without permission or immediate need. Once he’d been hung on the tree, he’d become entangled in the suffering of a host of ghosts, of a manipulated cult, of a threatened pack. Of tormented and insane death mages. Because those poor bastards suffered too, good intentions paving a path straight to hell.

Phenalope had wanted to stop suffering once, even if her methods were extreme and tinged with revenge fantasies. Helena and Gloria were more enigmas to Riordan, though he got the feeling that Helena had started on that path out of a desire to help her friends. And then there was Quinn, killing himself in inches because he couldn’t stay away from either the magic or the victims.

He’d be among that damned lot now. Riordan could feel the knot of death corruption sitting heavy inside of him like a cancer.

Realization washed over Riordan, coming not from inside himself but from his spiritual conversation partner. Or eavesdropper, depending on how one looked at the complete lack of privacy in spirit-talk. On the heels of that realization came a spear of spiritual energy and will, lancing right into Riordan’s soul and leaving him gasping at the invasion.

The tree spirit flayed Riordan’s soul open, examining it from every angle. His damage and markings and healing scars all lay exposed. His heartbreak and his heart. His mind that swung from insecure to stubbornly determined. His fears at not being enough. At his own impotent and continual failures. At his scrambling successes that were easily dismissed by himself as flukes.

It took in the distortions from the power of so many deaths pouring through Riordan. It probed at the taint of those lives rubbing against his inner self. It caressed Riordan’s hissing badger inside of himself. And then it turned its attention towards Riordan’s well, clogged with too much magic and with a monstrous accumulation of death corruption. With that much contamination, Riordan was surprised he wasn’t already stark raving mad, but he doubted most people gained corruption that completely and suddenly or while under the guidance and care of a spirit. The corruption would fill him with a lust for death and power soon enough.

The tree considered that unacceptable to its new mandates.

With clinical violation, the spirit reached inside Riordan. Like some horror story surgeon, it rearranged his insides. Its grasp settled on his magic, spirit and shifter alike, and on the death corruption and death magic and all of that mess, and pulled. Riordan screamed as his very well stretched and split, tearing in two inside of him. The spirit pinned those pools of different energies in place at opposite edges of his ruptured well before reaching down to Riordan’s core.

Frankie’s safeguard spells evaporated at the spirit’s touch, not designed to stand up against the attention of a greater spirit. The tree poked Riordan’s core, which was already swollen and sore from his earlier ill-advised method of disassembling a safeguard spell and from the spreading contamination from the ritual. He snarled at the touch, but couldn’t stop the tree from gripping his core just tightly as it held his well and tearing that in half as well.

If he’d been in a physical body and not a soul, Riordan had no doubt he’d have passed out instantly at the overwhelming sensation that followed. If having his well torn was excruciating agony, then having his core fractured bypassed Riordan’s limits for processing pain and transformed into some new experience for which he had no words, but left his world floaty, full of sparks and stars, and edged in white and black as his ability to perceive temporarily narrowed to that feeling of incompletion and existential trauma.

The only respite was that the spirit did not stop there, leaving Riordan’s soul vivisected and pinned open, split in half before it.

As easily as it had torn Riordan apart, the spirit began to knit him up again, stitching him up with threads of silver braid and soothing his wounds with yellow balm. It started at his core. What had once been one became two, separate but entwined, energy filtering and passing between them as the smaller cores settled into a gentle orbit where one had once sat. That change reduced the pain to mere agony, but left Riordan feeling unsettled but grounded, as if he’d been uprooted and replanted somewhere he had room to grow.

Upward it moved, stitching and shaping him like a gardener. Or like the land around which a garden formed. Riordan couldn’t breathe or think or move, trapped in a spiritual surgery he had never asked for and whose results he couldn’t predict. His well became two in line with his newly divided core. One side of the split held his natural affinities, both the shifter affinity he was born with and the spirit affinity awoken within him by Mother Bear. The other held the sludge-like mix of death magic and death corruption and who knew what else that had filled him as he served as the ritual’s conduit into the Veil.

The spirit felt pleased with this separation, though Riordan wasn’t sure how this corrected the problem beyond quarantining the contamination from the rest of his magical system.

Except then he felt it tap into the ritual as it lingered in and through Riordan, tying him to the spirit and the ghosts and now to that place beyond the Veil. It touched that connection, shaping it and moving it, separating out the strands of the braid until it plucked one free and then tied it to Riordan’s corrupted core. A strange tugging sensation began at his core, feeling like someone gently yanking at a space just to the side of his navel. Riordan hissed, hating how much the tugging unnerved him and knocked him off balance.

The spirit contemplated that for a moment before plucking another thread free and tying around his spiritual core, linking the shaman side of Riordan to the spirit realm even as the tree spirit had linked the death mage taint inside Riordan to the Veil. When the second connection snapped into place, Riordan stopped feeling unbalanced but the tugging only grew more intense.

Then like a plug popping out of a keg, the indigestible sludge of death corruption began to drain out of Riordan and back across the Veil where it belonged.