Riordan blinked dumbly. “You are?”
“Seriously,” Daniel smack Riordan again, “Stop that! I really am glad you survived, even if I didn’t. You seemed like a nice guy and even if you weren’t, what sort of asshole do you think I am that I’d want you dead too just because I am?”
His smile faltered though and Daniel scrubbed a hand over his face before whispering again, “I’m dead.”
Riordan nodded, sitting with Daniel as the man struggled with that unchangeable reality. Grief was a process. Riordan had learned that the hard way. You didn’t lose something important and then just come to terms with it and get over it. You thought about it, struggled with it, made progress, and then that loss would still ambush you out of the blue all over again, even years later, even after you thought you’d accepted it. It would pass faster maybe, linger less, but true loss never really went away. It just became a part of yourself.
And a loss like this, a loss of his life, his future, his dreams, would take Daniel a long time to process.
Riordan wished he knew more about ghosts and the afterlife. Shamans dealt with spirits, the manifestations of the will of concepts and objects and other abstract things. Spirits were never truly alive and never truly died, just transformed along with whatever they were the spirit of. Ghosts though, the souls of something that had been living and then died, were the domain of death magic.
Like most things with magic, the edges of the categories were blurry. Someone with spirit magic probably could see a ghost if they practiced enough, or maybe someone with life magic, since those were adjacent categories. Truly understanding a ghost required delving into death though, into what it meant to have died. That was something that tended to drive someone who was still living insane to stare at directly. At least, that was one of the theories about the corruption from death magic. Riordan had never asked. He hadn’t wanted to know.
Now, he wished he’d asked, just so he could help Daniel understand what was happening. Most normal people turned to religion to try to guess what happened after death. Mages and shifters turned to magic, though there were still a lot of unanswered questions about what really lay beyond the Veil, the border to the realms of the dead. Perhaps that was one piece Riordan could offer Daniel.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. He could feel Daniel’s gaze move to him, though Riordan kept his eyes on the tree, no matter how disturbing that thing was.
“This isn’t the afterlife,” Riordan finally said. That seemed inadequate and he struggled to explain. “I mean, yeah, you are dead and so are most of the people here and if they manage to kill me too, I’ll probably end up here too, but this, this isn’t the afterlife, not the way people mean that.”
Daniel took a moment to respond before snorting with amusement. “Okay, that was clear as mud. Try again?”
“I, uh, sure,” Riordan shook his head at his own astounding eloquence. “So, I’m not an expert, but I know that ghosts can linger in the physical world for a while, haunting things, you know? Then they go beyond the Veil, to whatever is after this world. I don’t know what that is, but this isn’t that. We’re still on the physical side of things, which is why I can be here too. This is… something else.”
“Okay,” Daniel drew that one word out slowly, digesting what Riordan said with some skepticism, “So what? I need to look for a light and go into it now?”
Riordan picked at the rope around his wrist. He felt uncomfortable and restless, the agitation growing the longer he tried to do this feelings thing. He only seemed to have bad news and incomplete secrets to offer Daniel.
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“If you see something that looks like a path out of here, yeah, go into that. But, um,” Riordan held up his wrist, showing off the rope as explanation, “you probably won’t be able to.”
Daniel frowned, running a hand over his own ropes. “What is this place then? The ropes and the goop and the tree?”
He opened his mouth to answer and then closed it, unsure of what to say or how to say it. Riordan looked like a fish gasping for water while laying on land, trying to come up with words until what came out of his mouth was, “Magic. Bad magic.”
“Magic.” Daniel said flatly. “Seriously?”
Riordan made a gesture that was half nod and half shrug.
“So magic is real and somehow I’m supposed to believe that, after never seeing any evidence of that my whole life, I’m caught in some sort of bad magical swamp after I died?”
This time, Riordan managed a real nod, though he hunched up on himself, which looked ridiculous with his large frame.
“Okay. And you know this why?”
Riordan mumbled an answer down towards his lap and got poked in the ribs for his trouble. He startled and met Daniel’s eyes. They were still kind, if a bit exasperated. Daniel gestured for Riordan to go on and repeat himself, holding his gaze the whole time.
With a sigh, Riordan repeated, “Because magic is also how I survived. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Dude, I’m dead,” Daniel rolled his eyes, “Who am I going to tell?”
“It’s still a lifetime of habit, plus I haven’t exactly been welcome around other magic types for a while, so excuse me if it’s tough to talk about.” Riordan could hear the defensive irritation in his voice and winced. He didn’t want to take this out on Daniel, just because it was awkward and making Riordan feel self-conscious.
“So is there a whole magic wizarding world hiding alongside the mundane world, hidden by spells, and I just didn’t get my invitation letter via owl?” Daniel’s tone was teasing and light, clearly taking pity on Riordan even if he wasn’t sold on magic yet. “I would have totally shown you all the strange non-magic technology, like wi-fi and paintings that don’t sass you.”
Riordan laughed despite himself. “Hardly. Magic types are just humans born with the ability to sense and manipulate magic in some manner. It’s not common, so there hasn’t been much call for a global council or stuff like that, at least last I knew. It does tend to run in families, so if you got someone with shifter magic like mine, then their kids are likely to be shifters too. So you’ll get communities where family groups have come together to help each other out or you’ll get mage families who have some sort of weird specialist dynasty, but it’s all local politics. With the way technology has been changing, most of those communities are either super isolationist or have integrated in with their mundane neighbors enough that no one notices.”
“Huh, so no magical flying cars or massive schools of poorly supervised wizard kids or giant spiders?” Daniel sounded disappointed that magic wasn’t cooler in reality.
“Maybe giant spiders, but they’d probably be a type of spirit, which is a whole other barrel of fish.” Riordan paused, considering, before pointing towards the bare tree in front of them. “I think the tree is a spirit, actually, one that the people who did this used to anchor this whole spell space.”
Daniel scrunched up his face at that, as if squinting at the tree would let him see and understand what Riordan was talking about. The fog swirled around them, glowing faintly, and the other ghosts seemed to be creeping closer, even if they still didn’t react to anyone’s presence. The young man shook his head. “I don’t get it. A tree is trying to kill us?”
“No, I think it’s a victim too. I saw… something. A vision, or shared memory, that sort of thing. The tree was just doing its thing until someone showed up and bound it up in ropes and that black goop. Look,” Riordan leaned closer, placing his hand on Daniel’s shoulder and pointing towards the base of the tree’s trunk. “You see how it’s got that pulsing light underneath all that Halloween stuff? I saw a view of it that was made of those colors, with a trunk of light and leaves-”
The world squeezed and flickered, drawing Riordan into that light as he stared and pointed. He hadn’t moved, but now he was once more sitting in front of the version of the tree he’d first seen when he started this dream. Wind gently blew through the green and red glittering foliage, all lit by the branches of swirling light. The sound chimed on the air like music or laughter.
The goop was gone, as were the ghosts. Only, not quite. Riordan’s hand still rested on Daniel’s shoulder. The pair stared at each other, shocked into a moment of silence. Daniel was still washed out and ghostly, but his arms no longer bled black blood. The ropes that had tangled both legs were reduced to a single rope knotted around his right leg, present but not entangling or confining anymore. A similar rope was around Riordan’s left arm, just like it was in the physical world, knotted from wrist to shoulder but quiescent. It felt heavier than he remembered, but not significantly.
Then Riordan blinked and it was all gone. His beady black eyes blinked in the darkness of his burrow, his furry body curled into a tight ball. His muscles ached with tension, even if the sharp pains from his cracked bones had mostly faded. He sniffed the air, just smelling dirt, swamp, and his own not insignificant stink.
That dream was surreal. Part of him wanted to dismiss it as just that, a dream made up by his traumatized mind as it tried to process everything that had happened. It had felt so real though. Riordan wished he had more answers, but just seemed to get more questions instead.
With a disgruntled little snuffle, Riordan stretched and shuffled towards the burrow entrance to check how long he’d slept, thinking, Well, that was weird.
Then he froze as a voice responded, “I know, right?”