Riordan remembered a story he’d heard as a child. Godfrey de Bouillon had sought to lead a crusade to conquer Jerusalem for the glory of Europe. He asked the rabbi Rashi for a blessing on his venture, but the rabbi affirmed that he could not command God’s blessing in such a manner. Instead, Rashi told Godfrey his future. Godfrey would conquer Jerusalem and be its king, but only for three days. Afterwards, Godfrey would come home and his great army would be reduced to only three men by the time he returned. Godfrey, in the manner of arrogant men, ignored the parts of that prophecy he disliked and went to conquer Jerusalem anyway.
And it went just as predicted. Godfrey conquered Jerusalem and then stepped down after only three days because he missed home. His despondency on the trip home wrecked morale and discipline and he lost his army to desertion and disease, all entirely preventable. By the time he spoke to Rashi again, Godfrey was no longer arrogant, but humbled and ruined.
Standing in a moment of power, feeling on the precipice of godhood or damnation, Riordan felt that hubris keenly. One had to be careful what they wished for and how they might fulfill their own worst fears.
Magic was just energy and potential. It had affinities, but unless it spawned a spirit, it had no will. The dark power thrumming through Riordan’s soul did not care what Riordan might use it for. It merely demanded to be used. And it demanded it now.
He felt crushed under the weight of the power being funneled into him, pressing on his soul and distorting him as it compressed and stretched him all at once. Riordan had gone into this with no idea what he was really subjecting himself to. He expected some sort of heroic sacrifice, stepping up and enduring pain before somehow making the right choice on how to use the magic from pure instinct. He expected death after his task was done, possibly even spiritual dissolution, but Riordan had never considered the horror of what having his soul, his very essence, altered by death magic and then surviving might feel like.
Riordan had always known that living heroically was harder than dying heroically, but he wished the lesson didn’t taste like rot and blood.
Under the pressure of magic and expectations, Riordan tried to think but found his mind foggy. Unconsciously, he tapped into his own magic to make representations of his options when he failed to hold it all in his head.
The first path led off to one side. In it, Riordan kept the power for himself, completing Phenalope’s original intent. He saw himself, dark and terrible, a god-king upon Earth. With each step, the ground trembled. People watched over their shoulders, knowing that retribution walked among them. Riordan spread bloody justice, sinking deeper and deeper into an inky mire of self-righteous corruption, blinded to guilt or innocence and yet judging all.
He shivered, looking away from that. Even the image throbbed with seductive power. He would never need to fear again, but at a soul-shattering cost. As it was, the icy tendrils of corruption digging into his well made Riordan sick. He coughed up another mouthful of black fluid, the mess running down his chin to drip into his shadow robes.
The next path showed Riordan merely… letting go. The power swept through him, following the path of least resistance and flooding out into physical and spiritual planes. Riordan wasn’t sure what state that would leave him in, aside from being corrupted with nothing gained. A storm swept out from the tree, starting fires, crushing the life from those near the tree and raising their corpses as undead abominations. The area would need quarantine, everyone he hoped to save would be dead, and the clean up would take ages.
Not acceptable.
A third vision opened. In this, Riordan used the power for some miracle. He knew better than to wish for the dead to live again, but perhaps he could set up a magical protection zone or empower the tree spirit or something. He himself would be reduced to just another normal corrupted death mage, to be dealt with accordingly. A wish made with this power might become twisted in implementation, since it was fueled by death, but there was no maliciousness or intelligence behind the power. If he made the right wish, it could be--
“Riordan!”
Riordan’s head snapped up, breaking his vision of that future. His gaze fell on the tear in reality that was the pathway beyond the Veil. Silver threads of the pack bond ran from him into that nothingness. A shimmering shape, vaguely humanoid and distorting with every movement, rapidly drew closer and then emerged before Riordan could do more than brace for danger.
Daniel popped out of the Veil, looking back over his shoulder into the void and panting like he had run a great distance, saying, “Riordan! Everyone is through the portal. We have to close it! Something is coming this way, fast!”
The Veil stood open before Riordan and suddenly he saw it snap into place as another vision, another option, if he could only grasp it. Around him, Riordan felt the magic trembling, seeping into him and held in place by the branches of the tree in which Riordan was still entangled. He couldn’t think. He could barely move. But Riordan stepped forward, his shadow robes trailing behind him, dripping rot. Then he stepped forward again and again. He could fall apart soon. He just needed to get to the other side first.
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Daniel finally turned to look at Riordan. He yelped and backed away. Riordan could only imagine how he must look to his friend right now. Worse, Daniel was right to be afraid of him. Riordan felt increasingly numb and unpredictable. The distance to the Veil felt far longer than it looked. Absently, Riordan realized the struggle came from moving the center of the power with him, shifting the whole balance of the system one step at a time. He had no doubt everything would come tumbling down around his head if the tree spirit wasn’t holding the balance point for him.
Riordan occasionally heard stories of shamans dealing with the dead while in the spirit realm. They weren’t common tales, but they spoke about shamans speaking to the dead near the Veil or summoning a ghost from the places beyond the Veil. Riordan couldn’t remember if they crossed the Veil in those stories. Frankly, he had no fucking clue what was about to happen, except that death magic belonged past the Veil. If he was going to spill this sacrifice out upon the world harmlessly, then the land of the dead was the place to do so.
“...Riordan?” Daniel whispered, looking increasingly uneasy.
Riordan realized he hadn’t replied to Daniel. He tried to speak but that just triggered him coughing up more of the foul death corruption that was pouring through him. How could it taste so foul still? Apparently soul tongues didn’t go numb the way physical ones did when overexposed to a taste. He managed a shaky smile for Daniel’s sake and slowly pointed towards the tear into the Veil, taking another step.
This close, Riordan could sense the edges of the tear trembling. The death that had opened it had passed and the wound between realms tried to heal. Something held it open still. Looking more closely, Riordan saw the yellow flickers of spirit magic winding around the boundaries of the portal like vines. What’s more, the braid silvery threads of the pack bond ran from Riordan and out into the void of the beyond. That connection made closure more difficult. Riordan had a feeling that if the tear snapped shut on those bonds, it would sever them cleanly, as death always did.
Walking was hard. Daniel reached out as if to steady Riordan, but Riordan shook his head, warning his friend off. He had no idea what touching the spillover of the ritual coating his soul would do to anyone. He certainly wasn’t going to let his friend take a risk with finding out.
Riordan stood before the gateway to death and his steps faltered. It was one thing to say that he was okay with any outcome, so long as it worked out for the greater good. It was another to follow-through on that knowingly, at a speed slow enough he had time to think.
The weight and pressure on Riordan didn’t ease up, but it stopped hurting somehow. It was like how he could still feel pressure against a limb that had fallen asleep, even if the normal sense of touch was numb. No pain. No pleasure. Just pressure and presence all around him. Holding him. Holding him back. Pushing into him. Riordan was tempted to spread his arms wide and just fall into that sensation. To let it take him to some new place within himself. To reforge himself into a god. Death couldn’t touch him then, surely.
He’d promised Vera that he wouldn’t die. He’d made promises to Daniel and his pack as well. To Billy too. To so many people over these last few days. Riordan knew that his word wasn’t worth anything since he always acted as felt right in the moment, regardless of those promises. Gods, he was a fickle person and a terrible friend. He just couldn’t give a fuck about anyone else but himself when it came down to the wire. And sure, it wasn’t in a “save himself above all others” sort of way, but that he would do what he felt was right at the time, no matter whether it was wise or, hell, even actually right.
Riordan remembered his Abba’s words at that moment. According to Hindu beliefs, every person had three phases of mind: instinctive, intellectual, and superconscious. He wondered if it was the instinctive physical-emotional feedback he leaned into at moments like this or the spiritual superconsciousness. Was he an animal or a god? A smile crossed his lips. As his Abba liked to remind him, every human was both an animal and a seed of the divine, both in one instance. Shifters were only more so than most, given that they had a spiritual animal inside them.
With a flex of will, Riordan called on his badger. He’d let the spiritual mantle slide as the pressure of the ritual crushed him into a new shape. Fine. Riordan was a shifter. He knew how to change shape. But he was going to do it his way. Fuck anyone or anything else.
He didn’t call on a fancy shaman mantle this time. It was cool and useful and probably more efficient, but it wasn’t who Riordan was at moments like this. Instead, Riordan threw his soul into a partial shift, blending his human and honey badger halves into one pissed off whole. His face distorted, elongating into an anthropomorphized badger head. Fur sprouted on his body and his hands took on paw-like qualities without losing their human shape. A tail pushed out and his legs bent. He looked like a Hollywood werewolf, only badger-striped and even angrier than a werewolf.
The representative robes of the ritual changed with him, subjecting themselves to his will for that moment. Instead of some sort of fancy emperor’s garments, all ornate and modest and shit, the shadows moved around him to become modern tactical gear. He reached up, grabbed the stupid crown, and crushed it in one paw-hand. The glowing ghost tattoos on his right arm shone through his clothing while the black ropes on his left arm lay knotted atop of everything. The swirling void in his chest shone through, vibrant with life in a way that the portal into the Veil was not.
Daniel watched the whole transformation with wide-eyes, gawping with all the dignity of the gangly college student he was. Riordan shot him another smile, this one more of a toothy grin, and took another step forward to cross the threshold of the Veil.