The shamans’ workroom sat still and quiet at this time of night. Frankie was a bird at heart, her blue heron longing for sun, water, and sky. She worked best during the day. Lucinda and her black bear were more flexible, but had adapted to a combination of Frankie’s preferences and that of human society to be more diurnal.

Porcupines were naturally more nocturnal. Mark seldom slept well at night and his difficulties with waking up in the morning were a source of amusement to many in the pack.

Perhaps that was why his nightmares and dwindling amount of sleep went unnoticed.

Mark sighed, sitting on the cold stone floor of Frankie’s shielded work area, feeling adrift. Earlier in the afternoon, he had seen Riordan in here, toiling away at some internal magic work. Mark could sense it was something to do with magical circulation, but Riordan’s spiritual obfuscation kept Mark from understanding the specifics.

What he could tell was how much endurance Riordan possessed, pushing his limits like a madman. Mark suddenly understood why Riordan could do what Mark would consider impossible. Riordan had no sense of self preservation.

Meanwhile, Mark was all too scared. He’d told Riordan he’d be fine with seeing Daniel’s corpse. He’d been stubborn about fulfilling his duties, about keeping Riordan safe from the agents if needed, and about doing something nice for Daniel.

He wasn’t fine.

Puking his guts out in the forest was bad enough, but now Mark couldn’t close his eyes without adding another image to his nightmares. He remembered the feeling of kissing the washed out ghost of Daniel in the spirit realm, wanting to reward the man’s courage for risking his existence by jumping into danger to save Riordan. Only now, that memory was overlaid with the memory of the corpse, muscles and bones beginning to break down and getting floppy, but also still stiff, especially after Quinn repaired the worst of the damage.

A body, empty of all the vital energy of life. Of the spark that had been possessed by that ghost.

Mark felt so weak, unable to just get over it. To grow up and be all wise and centered, able to handle all of this. Wasn’t that what a shaman was supposed to be able to do?

A soft sound startled Mark out of his sulk. He glanced over to see Frankie plopping a cushion down and joining him inside the stone shielded area.

“Couldn’t sleep, kid?” she asked, her tone devoid of judgment.

Mark sighed. He wanted to sulk and deny it, but what was the point? Frankie would see right through him anyway. “No. Sleep and I haven’t been friends lately.”

“Mmm. I can see that.”

Which was a singularly unhelpful statement, in Mark’s opinion. He waited to see if she’d say anything further, but Frankie appeared content to sit here with him all night if needed. He stared at his hands, thinking he actually preferred Riordan’s approach.

Finally Mark offered into the silence. “Riordan told me I shouldn’t see Daniel’s corpse today. I should have listened.”

“Why didn’t you?” Frankie asked.

He shrugged. “Same root cause as all my problems, I guess. I want to be ready to be a shaman and I’m not. It’s frustrating, especially since I can really help right now if I could just grow up and do it, you know?”

“You can really help even without taking on tasks you aren’t ready for,” Frankie pointed out. “There’s enough work to go around.”

“Yes, but there’s a lot of work that needs a shaman or someone with official rank. Not everyone can do those tasks, but I can.”

“You have the potential qualifications; that doesn’t mean you can do the task. Yet.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Mark threw his hands up in the air. He was normally a calm person, patient and self-aware and cheerful. He hated this version of himself, all messed up inside and unsure. He wanted to be done with it.

“Do you want to feel better?”

Frankie was annoying when she got like this. Mark managed not to roll his eyes at her and forced himself to actually consider the question.

“I want to be better,” he finally answered. “I want to learn from this and grow so that if I run into these challenges again, it doesn’t hurt so badly and I’m able to keep going, the way a proper shaman should.”

Frankie nodded acknowledgment of his statement without indicating approval or disapproval. “You have always wanted to be a good shaman,” she allowed, “You work hard.”

“Not hard enough,” Mark muttered, thinking of Riordan and his afternoon training.

Frankie reached out and smacked Mark upside the head. “You work hard,” she repeated. “Don’t try to emulate other people to find your path, especially not Riordan. His methods are effective but risky. He’ll either exceed all expectations or break.”

Mark pondered that. “Why do you let him do it then?”

“Because he doesn’t have time to be any other way,” Frankie sighed. “That man is a trouble magnet and has tied himself to a thorny path. It’s a good thing he seems to enjoy bleeding.”

That was another visceral image Mark didn’t need in his head. He’d seen Riordan tied to a tree, blood drying from where a death mage had stabbed a dagger into his chest. Mark had also seen Riordan get into a fist fight in the spiritual realm, too stubborn to back down.

He shook his head. “He gets things done though.”

“So do you.”

“I keep messing up,” Mark confessed. “Lucinda and Riordan could have gotten away from Helena on our scouting without a fight if I’d stayed far enough away. Instead I got cursed and needed Quinn to fix me. I could barely help when we went to back Riordan up in the spirit realm; Zeren, Quinn’s ghost, did most of that. And then I spent most of the fight trying to stop the ritual curled up in a ball, trying not to get trampled.”

“You are an apprentice, Mark,” Frankie stressed. “You were thrown into circumstances that a full shaman would struggle with and fought anyway. You are not at fault. If anything, I’ve pushed you too hard.”

Mark squared his shoulders and glared at Frankie defiantly. “You didn’t push me too hard. I’m fine.”

“Are you?” Frankie challenged, gesturing at the dimly lit room in which they sat instead of sleeping. “Just because a wound does not kill you does not mean you do not have scars.”

As true as that may be, Mark hated hearing it. It felt too much like an echo of his own self condemnations for being too weak. A stronger person, like Frankie or even Lucinda, would have come through that ordeal without any issues. At least, Mark didn’t see them having issues.

“I’m going to get myself sorted out,” Mark promised stubbornly. “I’m not broken. I just have some things to process.”

Frankie sighed. “I didn’t say you were broken, Mark.”

He felt broken. Maybe he just wanted her to tell him that he was flawed and broken and terrible so he could finally argue the other side, but that wasn’t Frankie’s style. She always spoke the truth as she knew it, for better or for worse.

“I wish I could see ghosts,” Mark sighed, looking away.

“Why?” Frankie asked, her voice sharp.

“Nothing bad,” Mark rolled his eyes. “I just… want to see Daniel. As he is, not as his corpse was. It sucks to know he’s around and not be able to interact with him. Zeren and Ingrid too, though they’ll leave whenever Quinn does.”

Mark hadn’t realized that was something he wanted until he spoke it out loud, but now that he was talking, he couldn’t seem to stop. Words kept tumbling from his lips like sand through his fingers. “I keep seeing death and danger every time I close my eyes. I keep seeing that night or Daniel’s corpse or the feeling of death magic spreading through my body. I can’t shake it. I just want to remember that it’s not all bad, not all evil. We went to the tree spirit’s clearing today and…”

Now his words faltered. The rambling energy still filled Mark, but he opened his mouth, helpless to find words to capture what that afternoon in the forest had felt like. Following Riordan through the barrier creeped him out, trapped in a maze of haunted illusion, but the clearing itself…

He’d thought he’d die there on the night of the ritual. Cultists, driven mad by their own death mage’s curse, piled up on him like a zombie horde, crushing him and each other. Trapping Mark with their own dead and dying. Mark had faced his own mortality that night and it cracked him open, spilling existential terror everywhere.

That was the negative side of death. The dying part. The loss part. The terror part.

But now that same clearing was literally the only place Mark had felt at peace since his sense of security shattered so irrevocably. It was peaceful. There was no rush there. Everything happened at its own pace, all part of one great whole. The aura of death pressed into every part of that clearing, but it was death for the dead, if that made any sense. Rather than that moment of transition from life to death or the grief of the living who had lost someone, it was the embrace of death welcoming the dead to their rest.

An end as a new beginning.

Mark hadn’t even realized that this feeling had been driving his restlessness tonight, lingering behind his trauma and his new exposure to death in the form of a friend’s corpse. He wanted to be able to bottle that feeling, to replace his existential terror with that welcome acceptance.

He just didn’t know how.

Frankie hummed, watching him carefully, and then spoke slowly, “When I first met Mother Bear, I remember feeling awed. I still do. Greater spirits exert influence over the world. As shaman, we feel that influence more keenly. You should meditate near the Sleeping Bear again. It’ll clear your mind of that influence.”

And replace it with a different influence, Mark gathered. He’d never really thought much about the symbiosis between a place of power, its spirit, and the mages who gathered there. Shifters and shaman had a more intimate relationship than most, given spirit magic was such a part of their culture, but all mages were drawn to places of power.

So much about their culture that Mark had always taken for granted became clear. That draw explained how mages first gathered together and how they managed to make safe places for their existence, despite the turbulence of living in a world where non-mages drastically outnumbered them. The Sleeping Bear Pack ranged between one hundred to one fifty members, but their territory had thousands of people living in it and even more thousands of people lived in the space between them and the next pack.

He’d grown up inside the culture, never alone and always surrounded by a community large enough that Mark wasn’t close with everyone. It was sometimes easy to forget that mages were rare, proportional to humanity as a whole.

The thought made Mark feel even more small and fragile than before.

“You never told me how to see ghosts,” Mark finally said.

“It’s too soon for you to learn that sort of skill. You are building good foundations, but that skill requires you to exercise your magic for a purpose outside of its primary scope.”

Mark knew that it was possible to mimic some aspects of death magic with spirit magic, such as seeing the ghosts, but it really sucked to hear it was impossible for him. “I really want to talk to Daniel directly,” he said softly. “I think it would help.”

“Hmm.” Frankie studied Mark, considering this request. “Meditate near Mother Bear tomorrow. Then we’ll see.”

It wasn’t much, but Mark would take it. He nodded, trying to pull himself together, and rose to his feet. He should try sleeping again if he was going to prove to Frankie that he was ready tomorrow. He smiled at his teacher. “Thank you.”

As he left, Mark heard Frankie mutter softly, “Don’t thank me yet.”