Frankie’s voice froze him in place. Riordan wasn’t sure if it was because of habituated respect for pack shaman or actual magic on her part. His mind whirled and his body literally shook with restless energy needing to break free. Riordan had tried to exhaust himself through physical labor to avoid just this sort of distress, but he felt almost feral now, wild and unchecked by anything but the thinnest veneer of humanity.
“Sit down,” Frankie repeated, pointing imperiously at his vacated seat.
Riordan growled, his body painfully tight with tension. He managed to grind out in a barely understandable voice, “I can’t.”
“And I can’t let you leave in your current state,” Frankie countered right back, her tone giving no quarter. “You are a magical time bomb, boy. Every side is pressing on you and you don’t have the understanding to handle it. We aren’t solving everything today, but there are safeguards I can set in place to help you.”
“Help me?” Riordan laughed bitterly, the sound almost half sob as the emotions roiling in him boiled close to the surface. He wanted to rip into her, turning the social and emotional threat into a physical one, even if she’d kick his ass. “You don’t give a shit about me. You just want to protect your pack when I inevitably fuck up again and explode.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Riordan. What role do you fulfill in your pack?”
That question was out of the blue and surprised Riordan enough that he looked back over his shoulder at the shaman, his gaze flickering between her and Daniel still standing nearby, the ghost representative of an invisible pack. “...What?”
She repeated herself more slowly as if Riordan was a particularly stubborn child. “What role do you fulfill in your pack?”
Riordan rolled his eyes, finally turning his whole body back towards her in a single sharp motion, muscles still shaking with suppressed emotion. He remained at the edge of the stone circle, close to Daniel. The ghost’s presence helped ground him in a way that all the neutrality of the circle did not. “We’re not a proper pack, Frankie. It’s a bunch of dead humans and me and a spirit, all clustered together out of desperation. We hardly paused to pick out roles.”
“Are you the pack leader?” Frankie challenged in turn, raising one wispy silver brow. Her dark eyes bored into him, seeing way too much.
“No,” Riordan answered almost instinctively, “Duane--”
He cut off, surprised at himself. Duane was the pack leader. The burly man listened to concerns, delegated tasks, and managed the group of ghosts that Riordan hadn’t had the energy to even engage with. If there was an issue that dealt with his pack as a whole, Riordan knew he would bring Duane into it, even if he didn’t always like or trust the man. Because he truly was the pack leader.
“What does the pack turn to you for, Riordan?” Frankie continued to push him, her voice steely, not letting Riordan run from her question. “What duties do you fulfill for them?”
“Magic,” he whispered, freezing even as small tremors ran through his body. “They turn to me for anything involving magic. And I do my best to solve it for them.”
Frankie pointed at the seat cushion again. When she repeated her command this time, it sounded different, more equal and respectful if no less forceful. “Sit down, Shaman. I have safeguards to place to help you, one shaman to another. It is not only my pack I do this for.”
Without another word, Riordan moved back to the seat cushion and collapsed onto it bonelessly. He looked at Frankie, his expression a mix of desperation and terror. “I don’t want to be a shaman,” he whispered, one last all-body tremor shaking his body as this revelation shook his core.
For the first time since she’d brought him into her magical workspace, Frankie’s face softened into sympathy. “It’s a shit job. Everyone avoids you when things are going well and latches onto you whenever magic becomes involved. You have forces pulling you in all sorts of directions, some malicious, some inhuman, some most definitely human and utterly stupid. At the end of the day, you stand as a barrier for your people against any magical threat. I can see not wanting to take on all of that bullshit.”
The sympathy passed and Frankie transitioned back to her hardass teacher voice. She gestured broadly and admonishingly as she spoke, “However, the fact that you are a shaman won’t disappear, nor will the fact that you are the only shaman in your unconventional pack. If things change later, you can consider other pack roles-- head pack shaman isn’t the only role for a shaman, just the most common-- but you must survive the current crisis before then. So you will suck it up and learn how not to make things worse.”
“You trust me to use this power wisely?” Riordan asked, unsure.
Frankie burst out laughing, the sound raucous and amused. “Not in the least. You are currently a magical idiot. However, the spirits like you and you keep getting entangled in magic. Therefore, it is my duty to teach you how to be a safe idiot.”
That didn’t sound so bad, if rude in that Frankie way. It was almost a relief to hear Frankie had such a low opinion of his skill level. It meant he could cut himself some slack for being imperfect while under a ton of pressure and racing to catch up on a craft that took many years to learn right.
Riordan slowly relaxed his muscles, tensing and relaxing different groups until they stopped knotting up, and took stock of himself. He was still exhausted, but the mellow feeling from his earlier physical exertion and the adrenaline rush of these new revelations had him as awake and prepared to learn as he could be right now.
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Frankie tapped her fingers against the stone floor, thinking hard and frowning. “When I’m training a new shaman, I start with spiritual interactions on the physical plane. In your situation, you enter the spirit realm regularly though no choice of your own. Therefore, I need to start with more advanced techniques to handle the dangerous aspects of the spirit realm and to equip you to operate there without further disasters.”
Reaching forward, she moved the testing stones off the dish and set them carefully into their bag, drying each as she went. Using one finger, she began to draw in the thin layer of liquid left in the dish. Glowing lines trailed in the wake of her touch. Frankie lectured as she drew, “The essential dangers of the spirit realm are these. First, the reactivity of magic. Second, the absence of reference. Third, the vulnerability of the soul. Fourth, the spirits themselves.”
Those terms meant nothing to Riordan, even if he knew the individual words. He could make educated guesses if needed, but Frankie was clearly set on giving him the basic definitions. Riordan had no doubt that each of these were complex issues, likely worthy of their own lectures if they could have spared the time. He was just as glad she was summarizing for now. He couldn’t keep his rolling breakdown at bay forever.
“You have run into all of these dangers already, even if you might not think in those terms,” Frankie sighed, rolling her eyes skyward as if asking for strength, “Magic in the spirit realm reacts strongly to intention, which means it is easy to create effects. However, if you don’t carefully craft your effects, you end up with additional side effects, either from your unconscious intentions, from the rules of the realm, or from the spiritual intentions flavoring that corner of space. You may also cast a spell before you have fully crafted it, just because intention precedes detailed planning.”
That admonition certainly hit home. Riordan was going to be spending a long time untangling the side effects of the workings he’d already done in the spirit realm. He could easily see how it would cascade into a worse and worse mess if he didn’t learn how to ease back and be specific.
Frankie lectured on, even as she raised her fingers from the dish, continuing to draw with the trailing light, only now she was adding a third dimension to the figures. “The absence of reference refers to the disconnect in the laws of space in the spirit realm compared to the physical realm. The spirit realm exists without visual elements unless something has been manifested, either by spiritual activity or a manufactured spell effect. Relative distance between the different reference points that do exist is not linear. It’s not a three-dimensional physical space, even if our minds often interpret it thus to preserve sanity. Shaman learn how to create a spirit anchor and a gateway before delving into the spirit realm. You are damn lucky that the death magic ritual happened to tie you to both the tree spirit and your physical body. Otherwise, your soul would have wandered off, too lost to return to your body. Since the physical realm is not the only realm that borders the spirit realm, the further from the physical you go, the more alien it gets. More dangerous too.”
“For the third point, in the physical realm, souls get some protection from inhabiting a physical form. Spiritual damage is reduced to physical damage, in part or whole depending on the effect. Healing from physical damage is straightforward with logical if annoying rules. In the spirit realm, that protection vanishes and damage goes straight to the soul. Healing spiritual damage has consequences.” Frankie gestured at his chest and what he had told her resided there on his soul. Riordan fought the urge to hunch up on himself, as if that would hide his damage. “There are ways to defend the soul. Shifters have an advantage since we can use our animal form as a spiritual protection. I’ll show you how to do that in a minute.”
Riordan perked up to hear that. When he’d tried to call on his badger upon first finding himself in the spirit realm, it hadn’t worked. It was interesting to know that it was possible in some manner. He didn’t know if his earlier inability was a matter of the ritual binding him or just ignorance to the proper method. He hadn’t tried again after it hadn’t worked the way he had expected.
Frankie brought her other hand to the dish and the light shapes she was sculpting there, gently disentangling lines from her first hand. “Spirits are the most unpredictable element of the spirit realm. They aren’t human. They aren’t the objects or concepts that they arose from. They are magic that acquired intention. That intention doesn’t need to be malicious to be harmful. As a rule of thumb, the further removed from humanity the spirit is, the less you should interact with it. A rock spirit isn’t going to understand why you need working biology. Some of the consequences you are dealing with comes from the fact you worked with a tree spirit, adding plant elements to your animal soul. If it wasn’t at least the spirit of a living thing, I promise that you would be dead right now.”
Her lecture ran down and Frankie removed both hands from the flat dish, leaving four glowing shapes there. They had started as two-dimensional symbols drawn in the liquid, but rose into complex three-dimensional forms as Frankie had worked. Riordan recognized them as stable spell forms, an entire spell crafted visibly and held until the caster was ready to let it loose, but he had never seen spells that complex made so smoothly. Frankie’s skill ratcheted up another level in his estimation.
Frankie flicked her right hand upwards and the symbols floated out of the dish to rotate in the air over her palm. She held them out for Riordan’s examination as she explained, “These are the safeguard spells. One artificially forces you to use words and gestures to cast in the spirit realm, reducing reactivity and limiting the scope of your effects. That’s slower and less powerful but a damn sight less accidentally dangerous. Next is a spiritual marker for your physical body, giving a backup beacon for exiting the spirit realm in case the ritual stops providing that effect. Eventually you will be able to create your own. The third is a spiritual shield spell. It deflects external changes or attacks against your soul until it hits its limit and breaks. The last prevents spirit-speech. You can still talk to a spirit or ghost, but they can’t force the spirit-speech state on you. If a spirit can’t communicate without that, then they are probably more alien than you can handle.”
All of those spells sounded horrible and great at once. Riordan considered the offered safeguards carefully. For once, he had a chance to actually think about the consequences of magic before he took it into himself. The safeguards would keep him from interacting naturally with the spirit realm. He’d have to work harder to do both harm and help. After a moment of thinking, Riordan realized he was going about this wrong. The expert in these spells was sitting right there, waiting for him.
“I have some questions,” Riordan started cautiously, awkward in this attempt to ask for even minimal assistance.
Frankie immediately grinned at him, her weathered face showing strong wrinkles that nearly hid her eyes, and he realized he’d passed some sort of test. “Go on,” she urged.
“Do I have to accept all of these at once? Can I add some later? Can I end the effects early without needing your help?”
“No, yes, and probably yes.”
“Probably?”
Frankie shrugged. “You would need to be able to find the spells inside of yourself to break them. Normally that kind of internal scrutiny is an advanced skill, but I get the feeling your experiences have given you a head start on that.”
Riordan wasn’t sure he had that much faith in himself but he carried on. “Are there alternative safeguards? How will these spells interact with the other effects on me?”
“Yes and hmm,” Frankie frowned in careful thought, her dark eyes studying him again. Or, he suspected, studying the effects on him. He wondered how the changes to his soul manifested to her magical sensing, given his soul was sheltered on the physical plane. His soul felt the same to him since it was his own damn soul, which mostly meant it felt like a confusing mess. Frankie continued, “The spells sit in a part of your soul that is separate from the effects you performed. They could interact with the killing tree ritual, as the other spell cast upon you externally and one that affects your soul, but the enclosed nature of that ritual keeps it separate.”
Riordan let that information sink into him, feeling out inside himself if that fit with his own impression of his fucked-up soul. It seemed plausible at least, so he decided to trust the expert on that one. Still, he wasn’t comfortable with adding too much more magic into his current mix.
“I need the reactivity limiter, as much as I hate it,” Riordan started, trying to sound more confident about his choices than he felt, “Being able to break the limiter in case of emergency makes a big difference. I’ll skip the anchor for now, since I rather learn my own version rather than accept more foreign magic. For the shield and the spirit-speech, are there versions that are more warning systems than flat barriers?”
Frankie raised both brows at that request, though her tone was neutral as she asked, “Why?”
“Because,” Riordan paused, hating how hard it was to express his feelings verbally, even just magical ones, “I want to have time to make conscious decisions, not have more decisions taken from me. There is a death mage out there, one who specifically wants me dead. I have the right to choose to do something dangerous if it is also necessary to stop her.”