Quinn wasn’t sure what he’d just seen. Phenalope had been killed, which should have tipped the whole ritual over into a nuclear fallout of death magic. Without an anchor, that mass of magic had no guidance on how it was going to move, but too much momentum to stop. He’d been ready to count them all as dead. Then the spirit tree had gotten involved, which in Quinn’s experience didn’t happen without a spirit mage causing it, and Riordan had ended up at the center of the ritual. How that could happen when the man was unconscious and tied to a tree with a bleeding hole in his chest, Quinn had no idea except that it had to be spirit woojie of some sort.

That should have been it. They should have had an entirely different death magic god monstrosity to deal with, one who was also a shaman shifter. The magic certainly filled Riordan and clung to him. Quinn could literally see the death corruption building up inside Riordan like sediment. He’d been tempted to kill Riordan then and there, except Frankie was right. Riordan had done the impossible before, even if the impossible things he did were mostly thought of that way because they were dumb and inefficient and how did someone even manage to do that to themselves. Norris had taken the knife from Quinn, the same one that had been used on Riordan and Phenalope already this evening. The old man seemed no more eager to take that step than Quinn or Frankie, but Quinn had no doubt that Norris would slice Riordan’s throat just as cleanly as Phenalope’s if it came to that.

The swirl of magic around Riordan was beautiful and terrifying. The man held onto the power longer than Quinn expected, the pressure whirling at a peak. Quinn could barely stay standing. Frankie had looked away long enough to tend to Billy and to check on the others in the fierce eye of this storm. In truth, Quinn should be helping her. Billy was going to need some serious assistance cleaning the residue death magic from his system, even with the caster dead and the spell compulsion collapsing. He couldn’t do it though. All his attention was on Riordan.

And then, just as Frankie had hoped, the impossible happened. All of that magic threatening to spill over on them, to sweep them up in a flood of death and rot to contaminate the whole forest, began to vanish. It wasn’t instantaneous, but it was swift. The magic that should have gone into empowering Riordan or making a massive spell or destroying the physical realm here started flowing somewhere else, somewhere that was none of those things. Even Frankie stopped her treatment of Billy to study that strange new flow of magic.

Quinn fumbled for his spell components. He couldn’t do anything complicated quickly, especially not in the still very turbulent magical atmosphere this close to the heart of the ritual, but he pulled out a vial of powder bone and released it into the air as he chanted. The powder whirled and danced in the air on currents physical and magical before forming a strange symbol hovering before Quinn. He stared at it, his chant stumbling, and the powder fell to the ground. He’d gotten his answer first though. He knew that symbol.

The death magic of the ritual was flowing through the Veil and into the realms beyond.

“What the heck?” Quinn muttered, trying to trace the flow and feel of the magic again. He came back with the same answer. The pool of death magic tied up in the killing tree was being funneled through Riordan and into the realms beyond the Veil.

His brain started jumping about different possibilities. The spirit plane bordered several of the outer realms, including the Veil. It would be much easier to rip a stable hole through the Veil there, or at least stable enough to channel the magic through. What Quinn was worried about was if the tear was too stable, becoming permanent or even just a weakness. This place could become one of those areas that was easily haunted and otherwise leaked influence from the dead and dying, like the way a graveyard or a battlefield or a really haunted mansion. Places like that became magnets for death mages since it was easier to work the big rituals and experiments in places already aligned with that energy.

The other really shocking thing was that Riordan wasn’t dead. He didn’t even seem to be dying any more than he already had been. The hole in his chest had already stopped bleeding, though it was still raw and ragged. Dealing with the Veil was dangerous enough. It was a border between life and death, where each flowed both ways, the membrane by which one was transformed into the other, like some giant cell wall. Those mages who interacted with the Veil began to take on aspects of death over time. Sometimes that was just them becoming creepy. Sometimes it was them being more prone to health issues, like cancer or strokes. Other times they just died. Going beyond the Veil was a fast draining death. Riordan must be standing at the edge of a hole in the Veil on the spirit plane, channeling the ritual magic through it with the help of the spirit.

The spirit had to be helping. Quinn didn’t see any other way that this could be happening without massive spillover. There was only so precise someone could be when doing the magical equivalent of aiming a firehose. He didn’t know much about spirit magic, except in the places it overlapped with death magic, being similar in the interactions with other realms and entities. He could only feel the spirit because it was so present and active with the ritual--

Quinn’s thoughts skittered to a halt as yet another change overtook the magic in the clearing. Power flowed back into this place. He couldn’t see it and it wasn’t influencing anything physical, so it had to be happening on the spiritual level.

“Frankie…,” Quinn asked slowly, “what is happening?”

Because something was definitely happening. It was very like what Quinn had feared, the area becoming aligned with death energy, but this was way too fast for a leak from a weakened Veil. The large, rather ordinary tree in front of them took on a sinister feeling, looming large in a way that had nothing to do with its physical size changing but left Quinn cringing back anyway. With the draining, the strange dark winds that had roared so loudly were dying off, leaving leaves and twigs and loose broken branches scattered about, along with the injured, unconscious, and otherwise disrupted bodies from the physical conflict. And Phenalope’s corpse, but Quinn was trying to not look at that. One would assume death mages wouldn’t be squeamish, but Quinn hated looking at dead bodies. It was one part hating to see the loss of life and one part temptation to gain more power through death. Neither sensation was comfortable.

Frankie moved up beside Quinn, her sharp eyes taking in something that Quinn couldn’t see. “It’s the spirit,” she said, her no-nonsense tone mixed with a bit of awe, “It’s siphoning some of the magic from the ritual somehow to propel itself to the next tier of strength. That’s leaving it with an association with death magic, but there’s something weird about it.”

There was something weird. Quinn squashed down his nervousness, sensing deeper into the changing energies around him, trying to pinpoint what it was. When he realized it, he gasped. “Oh! That’s…”

“What?” Frankie asked tartly. “Speak up, boy.”

The sinister feeling was fading, being replaced with that sense that came with peaceful death. Regenerative death. Death that cleared away the old to make way for the new. It was something that came up in the death magic research that Quinn did whenever he was involved in clearing out some coven or another. Death magic taken from the act of someone bleeding or dying was the destructive side of death. It was the ending. This made it powerful, since that end came with a bunch of lost potential that could then be channelled into new purpose. But that wasn’t the only side of death. Death wasn’t an evil process, but part of a cycle. Things were born, lived, and then died, making way for more things. A dynamic rather than static system. The death energy that existed beyond the Veil had that potential mixed back in. Rather than potential lost and harvested in a sacrifice, it was magic holding the potential for new life to feed from the energy. Most mages never dealt with something as esoteric as the Veil and its energies, but Quinn had seen places where the Veil was weak and read research on the matter.

“That spirit is getting energy from beyond the Veil. That’s why it feels weird,” Quinn answered Frankie. “But it can’t do that!”

“Apparently it can, if it’s got the right conduit,” Frankie said with a grimace. Her hands dropped to her mage’s kit and then fell away empty. “I can’t interfere with this. It’s already too volatile. What the fuck is that spirit doing to that poor boy?”

That brought Quinn’s attention back to Riordan. The man still hung limply, bound to the tree trunk and clearly unconscious and breathing shallowly. That physical stillness was belied by a magic chaos writhing inside him. Quinn could barely tell what was happening under the net of magic and corruption that encased Riordan’s soul, especially since his senses were more tuned to the death magic than to the state of a soul, but it was extreme, whatever it was.

“Ingrid, Zeren,” Quinn whispered, backing up his call with a touch of magic. His ghost friends appeared next to him a moment later. He’d sent them away when the ritual was tearing at them and Gloria had been casting, but now things were… not calm exactly. Contained. There was a lot going on, but it was on a level that didn’t touch them directly here. Quinn glanced at Ingrid. “Sweetheart, can you tell me what is going on here?”

Ingrid possessed a dauntless child’s enthusiasm and merrily skipped closer to Riordan to examine him, cheerfully affirming Quinn’s request. Zeren followed, though they gave Quinn a dirty look that let him know he was not forgiven for sending them away earlier. He offered an awkward smile and got a cold-shoulder as Zeren focused on keeping Ingrid out of trouble, as her curiosity sometimes led her to be incautious. He clearly had a lecture coming later.

“Oh wow,” Ingrid said as she looked at Riordan, “I didn’t know spirits could do that. It's remaking his entirely magical structure and isolating the death corruption. And linking and looping everything. This is really cool!”

Okay, so Ingrid could see what was happening, but that didn’t mean she was always the best at describing it. In the end, she remained perpetually a child and a bit of a flighty one at that.

Quinn tried to focus his distractible friend. “Can you tell me why it’s doing that? With that much corruption, even isolating it won’t prevent it from driving Riordan mad in short order, especially if it’s in his magical system.”

He could tell Frankie was hanging on Quinn’s every word, even if she couldn’t hear Ingrid’s half of the conversation. She was also studying the tree using some sort of etched lens. Around them, Quinn could hear people moving, but a quick glance showed him that the other members of their team seemed to have it in order and he wasn’t about to get stabbed in the back. This phenomena was too strange and important, possibly being the key to knowing what to expect next.

“Sure,” Ingrid replied, pointing one delicate hand at Riordan. The glowing runes over her sightless eyes flared. “The spirit is draining the corruption out of him.”

Quinn startled and stared. Before his eyes, the impossible was happening. The thick knot of death corruption, that incurable terminal disorder that plagued every death mage, was literally draining out of Riordan’s body. The magical system left behind as the obstruction cleared looked like nothing Quinn had seen before.

Quinn had no idea what this was going to mean for the understanding of death magic. Or more, what something like this could mean for corrupted mages like himself.