The other side of the Veil here still bore the influences of so much spilled death magic from where Riordan had channeled the killing ritual. He wasn’t a monster barely holding together a mountain of magic this time. He looked and felt like just himself, if garbed in the simple leathers of his spirit mantle. He hadn’t even noticed he’d dressed himself that way. Doing so had merely felt natural.
As before, the world beyond the Veil felt hostile, cold, and lethal for a split second before the color drained from his body into the flowery tattoo on his right arm. Phenalope had gifted him her death and this state seemed to be a measure of that. She had given him her only invitation to the world beyond before she broke apart, letting him feel the peace of this place instead of its terror.
Glancing at his other arm, Riordan did a short double take. The black ropes were gone. With the sleeveless tunic he currently wore, Riordan could see the tattoo that had taken its place, snaking over his skin in the same knotted pattern of the ritual. The spirit may have completed the ritual, granting closure to its power and structure, but Riordan had not passed through that experience unmarked or unchanged.
He’d worried about the details of that later, whenever he actually got time to breathe. He believed he would live at this point. It hardly made sense for the spirit to do so much work putting Riordan back together only for him to bleed out. And it wasn’t like he hadn’t had enough magic running through his system to heal from whatever Phenalope must have done to him. He didn’t feel like he was fading out, either way.
For now, Riordan looked around for Daniel. His friend wasn’t anywhere in sight, but Riordan touched the pack bond between them and suddenly he appeared next to Riordan. Or Riordan appeared next to Daniel. Space was barely a proper concept here.
“Are you okay?” Riordan asked, startling Daniel, who spun to look at him.
Daniel gawped and sputtered before gesticulating wildly and ranting, “Am I okay? Am I okay? Riordan, you just walked in here, spitting up black swamp blood and dressed like some sort of edgelord king, barely able to communicate with me at all! And then you just started-- started bleeding this stuff all around, spilling out life from death or some such shit. All before getting yanked out of here before I could understand a lick of what just happened!”
Riordan blinked at that rather emphatic summary. “You seem upset.”
“Upset!?!” Daniel yelled, stamping closer, “I’ll show you upset, you jerk! I thought you died!”
At his words, Daniel paused, blinking. He took in Riordan’s current gray and translucent appearance, even with the strange colorful tattoo looking so out of place here. “...Shit. Did you die?”
“I don’t think so,” Riordan said, “but that’s about the only thing I’m mostly certain of. That and the ritual being done.”
“Done?” Daniel’s volume was coming down to a more normal level, but he still wasn’t out of his panic enough to process that. Or perhaps it was just the fact that he’d had no more time to think since this started than Riordan had.
Riordan wondered if his friend realized that meant that he was free to pass on. His eyes roved over Daniel’s ghost. The black ropes were gone there as well, though a glimpse of black on Daniel’s wrist proved that he was not the only one with new tattoos. They were free but marked. That seemed appropriate to something that changed the courses of their lives so completely.
“Let’s find Duane and the rest of the pack,” Riordan said, not liking the feeling of having to say goodbye to his first real friend in years. “I’ll explain it then, after I’m sure everyone is safe. You said you saw something?”
Daniel nodded, moving in beside Riordan. “Yeah. I couldn’t describe how it looked, but it felt hungry. Starving, to the point of eating sand just to feel a single grain of relief. Whatever it wanted wasn’t me or the others, but I think it would have snapped us up on its way to… I’m not sure where, though probably that hole.”
“That sounds like the hungry dead,” Riordan replied, grabbing Daniel’s hand and focusing on the feeling of the rest of the ghosts in the pack. He concentrated on the image of them all in one place. Reality flickered and they were beside Duane before Riordan even finished his next sentence. “Or a variant of one. I’ve heard that the ‘hungry dead’ get drawn to the Veil, but I can’t tell you much more than that they hunger for life and are really dangerous.”
Duane jumped at their sudden appearance, muttering curses to himself as he turned and squared his shoulders, putting himself back in leader mode. The lost expression Riordan had briefly seen on his face disappeared. Riordan felt pride in this man. He had the true makings of a pack leader. Even if they hadn’t known each other long and seldom got on smoothly, Riordan was going to miss Duane.
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“Hello, Duane,” Riordan started, speaking softly in the strange echoless silence of this place.
The other ghosts were clustered loosely around them, variably looking inward or outwards. They seemed somewhere between numbly shocked, hopeful, and terrified. If they had died normal deaths, it still would have been traumatic, but they could have accepted it and passed through the Veil without much fuss. Instead, they had to be trapped and tortured and confused for an unknown amount of time in a place without cycles or sleep.
He saw one of the ghosts who had been crushed in the cocoons by Phenalope. He barely managed to look human again, which was progress. Even terrible people deserved to be able to move on in death peacefully. Riordan wanted desperately that redemption was a possibility up until the last.
Fortunately, Duane interrupted Riordan’s train of thought before it got further. “Riordan. So you’re dead too then. What happens now?”
“I’m not-” Riordan started and then sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Can you gather everyone? I think I only want to give this speech once.”
“Sure,” Duane said, surprised. Something about Riordan’s demeanor told him that there was a lot more going on than it seemed.
In short order, the efficient woodworker had all the ghosts, pack or otherwise, gathered up around Riordan. Looking around, Riordan wished he had something to stand on, to be seen or heard better. No such thing appeared, this environment much less reactive than the spirit realm, but Riordan also realized it didn’t matter. The funky relative space between them meant that it felt like Riordan was standing right next to each and every ghost in this crowd.
They all looked at Riordan with such faith. Sometimes it was tempered with wariness or dulled by trauma, but they trusted Riordan to at least know what the hell was going on and to share it with them. They might not always like or understand him, but when it came to magic, he was the one they turned to.
He was their pack shaman.
That responsibility settled over Riordan’s shoulders. He hated it, but he wasn’t going to run from it now, especially since this was the end anyway.
“First,” Riordan began, “the ritual is over. If you check your ropes, they appear to have changed into tattoo markings instead. Please check and let me know if this isn’t the case for anyone.”
That spurred a brief flurry of activity as the ghosts looked at themselves and each other, affirming that none of them were bound up in knots of black rope anymore. Most were marked, some severely so. A few didn’t seem to have any noticeable tattoos left. Riordan assumed that it had something to do with the impact of the ritual itself on them, but hell if he really knew.
He kept talking, partially because he didn’t want to lose his momentum. Riordan knew he was due one hell of a down time after this to process the upheaval that was his life and whole self now. “The death mage behind the ritual is dead. I don’t know about the other death mages or the cult in general, but there were people coming to deal with them.”
Riordan glanced at Daniel for that one and the ghost nodded, adding, “The shifters like Riordan here that have been helping, and those agents, came to help. They’re taking care of things on the physical side.”
Hearing the Sleeping Bear pack described as “like Riordan” made him twitch for a couple reasons, but he still smiled. Since he couldn’t influence the physical side of things, Riordan just leaned into that confidence in the others and hoped it wasn’t entirely unjustified. After all, he was mostly trying to give these poor souls closure.
“We’ll make sure that your deaths are known and justice is done,” Riordan said, “If you have any last requests regarding who should be told about your death or about what should be done with your bodies or anything else that might make you feel unwilling to pass on, please tell me privately after we’re done here.”
When Riordan said “pass on,” he could almost feel the ripple that ran through his audience. They had been stuck so long, both magically and in the mental space of crisis mode, that it had just occurred to most of them that it was over. They couldn’t come back to life, but there was nothing stopping them from moving on now.
Riordan cleared his throat, drawing attention back to him, even as he rubbed the back of his neck and felt really awkward. Still, he knew he’d regret it if he left it at that. Riordan already had enough regrets in life without adding one more.
“This next bit is for me,” Riordan started, “so please bear with me. I… wanted to say ‘Thank you.’ And that sounds really horrible, given what we went through together and part of me feels like an asshole because I’m pretty sure I’m going to survive this, even if I’m a bit fucked up, and you all don’t get that chance. I wish I could give it to you. I really damn well wish I could have saved you all before it got to this point. But I also know I did my best, which wouldn’t have been enough on my own. So, I might have managed to save you from the ritual, but all of you saved me too. So… thank you.”
He was blushing, the dark smear on his dark skin even less noticeable in grayscale but still evident in his body language. Not wanting to see how his speech was received, Riordan reached inside of himself instead. A touch of fear or worry crossed his mind as he pulled up the braid that represented the pack bond he had forged out of desperation. He had woven their willingness and need into this pool of power and unity of purpose. Without the ritual, it wasn’t needed anymore.
It was time to let them go, even if it meant Riordan was alone again.
With that thought, Riordan willed the pack he had woven together to unravel. The braid loosened and shimmered before fading out. A gasp rose from the ghosts as he set them free of that one last lingering connection. Several disappeared immediately, going… somewhere. Wherever it was they belonged in this place, no doubt.
He didn’t look around to see if Daniel had left. Riordan felt lonely enough as it was, whispering, “So this is goodbye.”