He had arrived... somewhere. He wasn’t really sure where. He knew he’d been working his way through a thin spot in the veil for what felt like a few days. It wasn’t long for that sort of thing, he’d seen a fellow traveler take a couple weeks to work her way across one. The stories he’d heard from others he’d met on the way suggested that was pretty normal, or as normal as returning to the world of the living could be. All he was certain of was that one moment he’d been feeling his way between the threads of one reality, slowly working his way out and into the weave of another, when the resistance suddenly vanished, and he felt himself falling.

He felt strange though, somehow indistinct, and like a part of him was stuck. He didn’t so much look at himself as direct his perception inward. He was less well-defined than he’d been on the other side of the veil, at the moment he was sort of... ethereal? He wasn’t shaped like a man anymore, he was foggy,for lack of a better way to describe it. He had a slight bluish glow as well, which he found pleasant. I suppose I would have been afraid to see something like this when I was still alive, am I a ghost now? A will o’ the wisp?

Basil pushed his perceptions outward and took in his surroundings. He recognized where he was, and he had been here before; it was the cemetery outside Mason’s Ford! He’d buried his wife here, then later his daughter and her husband. They were difficult days. This wasn’t the time to dwell on it, though.

It had been such a long time, he’d barely even thought about what it was his destination was really like in years! His memories had faded into the background as he kept going, staying focused on his goal and trying to keep himself centered, lest he end up like so many of the others he’d seen in the mists; their motivations and even identities forgotten over time, lost to the ages, until all that was left was a mad, lonely husk of a spirit. With hard work, and a bit of luck, it was a fate he’d avoided.

A bit of movement caught his attention, and he looked around his surroundings again. There were people! Two of them! The closest one was rolling around on the ground right next to Basil, with one of his trouser legs on fire. That was odd. Still, this was the sort of thing that happened sometimes when young people didn’t have a productive outlet for all their energy. Basil thought he might try to throw a bit of dirt on the flames and help the young man out, but he didn’t really have hands at the moment. Fortunately, the man’s friend was running up with a shovel, which seemed like just the thing for a situation like this. It was good this fellow had such a sensible, well-prepared individual in his life.

The unlucky man on the ground managed to beat the flames out with his hands before his friend arrived, though it looked like he’d burned them painfully in doing so. Basil hadn’t felt any real pain in a couple of decades now, but he remembered it well, and he didn’t envy the poor man. How did his trousers catch on fire?

Basil was amazed to see that the fire was him, sort of, there was a flame on the ground burning what he knew somehow was alcohol. He could feel the flame consuming the spirits, and himself getting stronger as it did. Hah, is that why they call it spirits?! He hadn’t had anything to joke about for a while, he’d missed it.

He just knew the liquor on the ground was his, someone had made an offering to him. It was probably some sort of spiritual instinct, or something like that. He noticed an earthenware jug a couple of feet away, it was lying on its side with its contents spilling out onto the ground.

It suddenly occurred to Basil that the unfortunate fellow with the burnt trousers had probably made the offering, and the source of his scorched clothing and burnt hands was Basil consuming it. Now he felt terrible!

As he was trying to figure out how to convey an apology, the man with the shovel arrived.

“What did I tell you, you stupid drunken asshole?!” he roared, then swung the shovel at Basil! That hardly seemed fair, he certainly hadn’t meant to harm this man’s friend, and he wasn’t doing him any harm now.

Basil tried to say, “There’s no call for all that, this was clearly an accident, and it’s not really anyone’s fault!” It was difficult without a real body, he could tell he was doing something wrong. He tried again as the excitable young man with the shovel swung wildly through his wispy form. He was still doing something wrong. This time he managed to produce words to convey his meaning, but his voice sounded strange and far away. Moreover, he was speaking the Grave Speech, which became the native tongue of every mortal who passed on.

The man with the shovel paled at the incomprehensible, but sinister-sounding words. He was joined by his friend, who’d managed to stand, despite what Basil could tell was an advanced state of drunkenness. They started trying to throw dirt on the flame, which was almost out of fuel anyway.

“Get out of here, you damned dead bastard! Go back to The Pit! I’ll have nothing to do with you!”

Basil was a little offended. He’d seen the sorts of things that crawled out of The Pit, and he didn’t appreciate the comparison.

“Oh, when I get done here I’m going over to that mausoleum to beat that damned witch to death with this shovel, just you see if I don’t!” The man was waving the shovel around a bit slower now, and beads of sweat were running down his forehead. The offering fire went out, but he didn’t relent. Basil’s incorporeal mist began fading from visibility. For his part, Basil didn’t feel himself going anywhere, if anything he still felt that “stuck” feeling that had been bothering him since he arrived.

Since negotiations were going nowhere, and he was beginning to tire of the fellow’s insults, Basil tried to “walk” over to the mausoleum and see what this business about a witch was. He managed to float a distance equal to two strides from where he’d been, before he couldn’t go any further. It was like he was on the end of a tether, he just stopped.

“That’s right, try and get away! See what good it does you!”

Basil ignored the panting man and drifted back to where he could feel the “stuck” feeling originating from. This time he noticed the headstone. It had his name on it! Of course, this is where he was buried!

He lowered himself to the ground as the last of his ethereal form faded from view. He was stuck to something below him, he could feel it. It wasn’t his grave as a place, there was a material object. No, more than one. A bunch of them?

“Hah,” panted the pudgy man with the shovel, bending over and breathing heavily, “back into your grave, whoreson!”

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Basil decided he didn’t care for this fellow. He had a shifty look about him, in fact, they both did now that he was over the novelty of seeing flesh-and-blood human beings again. What were they doing in a graveyard in the middle of the night, anyway?

The man with the shovel sat down heavily. “Whew,” he breathed, “teach that spooky blighter to bother me! I’m going to rest for a few minutes, then you’re coming with me to separate that witch from the others and kill her. I’m not fighting ghosts twice in one night!”

The drunkard stared at him with wide eyes. “A fuckin’ ghost lit me on fire!” he said. His companion put his face in his hands and muttered something inaudible.

So they have some woman locked up and they’re going to kill her? Not if Basil had anything to say about it. He reached out to the stuck bits with his mind and pulled. He felt some of them shift, but they didn’t come all the way up. Not even close. He was confident he could work them all up eventually, but it would take hours, and the young woman in the mausoleum didn’t have that much time. Is she a young woman? Compared to me I’m sure she is, I must be over a hundred by now. It had been hard to keep track of time in the fog.

He needed something to get himself “unstuck”, or run these scoundrels off, or get that poor woman out of here.

The last one didn’t seem feasible if he was still stuck himself, so that was out. If they didn’t run off from seeing a ghost, he probably wasn’t going to scare them easily. This was ridiculous, he would have been terrified when he was their age if he’d seen a ghostly mist and a strange fire. Fire...

He reached out with his senses. The earthenware jug was still lying on the ground where the drunk had dropped it. Don’t mind if I do...

Jens was reeling in shock from the events of the last few minutes. His hands and leg stung from the burns, and his pants were scorched all the way up to the knee. He only had two pairs! Now these were going to be at the rag-picker woman’s place for most of a week while she sewed a new lower leg on.

Worse yet was that Osgar had been right. Now he’d be completely unbearable! He could see their next argument already; Osgar would say something, Jens would say something else, Osgar would remind him about the one time with the ghost when he’d been right, Jens would have to admit defeat. Repeat for eternity. He was miserable just thinking about it!

The jug was lying over there, it hadn’t gone far when he’d dropped it. There was probably still some in it, no sense in letting it go to waste.

Before Jens could even reach for it, the liquor caught fire. “Shit,” he cursed and jumped back, eager to avoid a repeat of the night’s events. The jug cracked as the flame climbed higher, burning hotter than it had before. All the remaining liquor was consumed in a couple of seconds. Osgar didn’t even have time to get to his feet and start swinging before it was gone and the fire burned out. The mist rose from the grave again, forming a column about the size of a man. Jens heard a noise, then was hit in the face by flying dirt as something burst out of the ground. He wiped the dirt from his face, blinking away the tears from the bits that had gotten in his eyes.

When he looked up again, a femur was floating in the column of mist. It rotated slightly, a few feet off the ground, like a compass needle getting a bearing. Then it dropped to the ground.

Jens and Osgar traded perplexed looks. The bone remained where it was. Osgar carefully reached out with the shovel and poked at the femur, but it stayed where it was. Jens stood up slowly, and cautiously took a few steps back, away from the grave. Osgar edged over to join him, not turning his back on the bone lying on the ground. He held the shovel in front of him, and Jens finally remembered the big knife in a sheathe on his belt. He drew it and winced as he squeezed with his blistering hand, then glared at the femur, like it was some jackass who’d picked a fight with him in a tavern.

The column of mist swayed, and then a torrent of bones came flying out of hole left by the first, clattering down around the grave in a disorganized jumble.

Jens was reasonably sure he knew now which direction this was heading in, and he didn’t particularly care to stick around and watch how it ended. He dropped his knife, turned, and ran as fast as he possibly could.

It felt much better to have his bones out of the dirt. That uncomfortable “stuck” feeling was gone, and Basil would have smiled if he could. The lanky bandit dropped his knife and ran, and Basil wasn’t sorry to see him go. He wasn’t sure how he was going to win a fight against one of these fellows, so evening up the numbers was encouraging. The other bandit had a grip on his shovel like it was a greatsword, and he was inching closer, his eyes wide. Basil didn’t think it would be good for him if this scoundrel smashed up all his bones, so he reached for them again with his mind. It was easier now that they weren’t buried, and they came freely as he pulled. They flew to where Basil felt his “center” was, rattled against one another for a moment, and then fell to the ground in a heap. That was almost right, I just missed something, I’m sure of it!

The chubby brigand had leaped backward with a shout when Basil moved his bones, but now he was inching his way closer again. I’d better hurry up, Basil thought to himself. He knew that the bones would move when he wanted them to, and he knew what shape he wanted them in. He focused on an image of an assembled human skeleton, then pulled on the bones again.

This time he got what he wanted, and bones flew out of the pile and stacked themselves atop one another until a skeleton stood on its own two feet in the grass beside the gravesite. Desperate now, the man with the shovel roared and charged at Basil, swinging his improvised weapon with both hands in a horizontal arc, about at shoulder height. Basil didn’t quite have the hang of this whole thing yet, so he pushed his bones down to duck under the attack. The shovel passed through empty air as the skeleton disassembled itself by violently hurling all its bones to the ground at once. Expecting to meet resistance, but receiving none, the bandit lost his balance and staggered. Basil quickly yanked his bones back together, took an awkward step toward his adversary, balled one hand into a fist, and swung! The man with the shovel had turned in time to see the punch coming, but too late to avoid it. It caught him square on the jaw, and then completely came apart, with finger and knuckle bones flying in every direction as they bounced off the man’s face.

“Owww!” he shouted, stumbling back from the impact with a bit of blood dripping from a cut on his chin. Basil turned his skull toward the empty air where his right hand was supposed to be. His jawbone lolled crookedly open, and he made a raspy groan that would have been swearing, if he’d known what he was doing.

“Tougher than you thought, eh?” the sweaty bandit asked as he resumed a fighting stance. He was holding the shovel across himself now, sort of like a quarterstaff. This was actually more difficult than Basil had imagined in the years he’d spent traversing the wastes between here and the Twilight Shore. He knew that’s not what his opponent meant, but it was true nonetheless.

He wasn’t just the bones, he occupied an area around them as well. He needed to move the bones to move himself, but they were more something he was bound to than something he was. He recalled the marionette shows that had come through the inn occasionally with a bit of mirth.

Basil reached out toward the scattered finger bones and pulled them back into place. The furthest ones would tumble along the ground for a bit before leaping into the air and flying into position. The closest ones simply leapt. He flexed his reassembled hand as the bandit gave him a fearful look.

First one step, then another. His gait was uneven and bowlegged, but it was good enough for now. Doing his best to maintain his focus, Basil raised his arms and made a pair of fists.