Compared to last time, the experience was far less overwhelming than Riordan expected, if no less strange and unsettling. The tree sucked him in, trying to read all of him at once, but the safeguard spell that bolstered his power in such conversations transformed the shape of the overlap of their souls, or however the speech worked. Riordan could hold some parts back and push others forward rather than being completely at the mercy of the tree’s regard.

He could still feel the tree plucking at his thoughts and memories, surfacing a million different conversations in the background, but Riordan forced forward the image of the ghosts in their web cocoons, tormented unjustly. He wished to ease their suffering. He tried to hold the concept of moving them to the safe shelter of the tree’s inner influence while still keeping them apart from his pack. Without meaning to, he also labeled them as untrustworthy or dangerous to his pack, because Riordan couldn’t help feeling that way towards them.

The tree offered him a helpful solution, the sense of corpses buried in dirt as rich fertilizer, growing strong branches and spreading the leaves wide. It sank its roots into those ghosts in its safe glade, removing them from the ritual and keeping them separate.

Riordan couldn’t help the wave of horror that hit him at that sensation. It wasn’t just an image in spirit-speech. He felt it with all his senses, including some he didn’t possess on his own. He could feel himself as the tree, drinking strength from the death and decay of others, bringing it deep into him to reinforce his own body. It was almost enough to knock him out of the conversation, but Riordan hung on, practically yelling his refusal of that idea.

The tree was confused at his disgust. Life and death were cyclic. The living consumed the dead and then died in turn and was consumed. It had no concept of evil within it. Just as it wasn’t horrific when Riordan as a badger ate raw rodents, their hot blood slipping down his throat as they died and then fed him, it wasn’t horrific when the tree drew on the wasted shells of dead plants and animals that sank into the earth and reached its roots.

Seizing on that important distinction, Riordan tried to clarify the difference between the waste products of death, the things that didn’t harm the dead in their consumption, and the essential parts of the person that persisted past death. He hoped he had the divides right as he tried to sort out the byproducts of death. The physical shell, the corpse, was no longer needed. It could be consumed without malice, though Riordan still felt some visceral horror at the sensation of eating dead flesh as a tree did. Their magic could be consumed as death magic, but not all of it. Riordan thought of the death corruption as a poison, the elements of a person’s leftover power that was indigestible and built up in the body and soul like heavy metal poisoning in fleshy creatures.

Interrupting, or perhaps just offering commentary in parallel, the tree dismissed the concern of death corruption. Such bits of energy were disgusting to a spirit, but not poisonous in the same way it was to a living soul. Spirits, after all, were neither living or dead and had no ability to transition between those states. However, Riordan got the impression that death magic was far less desirable to the spirit, providing less sustenance than the exchanges with a living soul, since the dead drew less from the magic of the spirit realm but instead breathed in power through the permeable membrane of the Veil and the lands beyond. Plus, it reiterated how terrible death corruption tasted on a spiritual level, sharing that sensation all too clearly.

Riordan nearly vomited at the second-hand taste of death corruption. It felt like drinking in sandy oil. It coated everything, choking him. It smelt foul and tasted worse and ate away at his flesh from the inside out and no amount of gagging would remove it. He lost his conversation thread with the tree for a moment, needing to throw up a wall between their connection to recover. He staggered slightly, aware of Mark’s aborted attempt to reach for him to stabilize him, the young shaman’s hands fluttering near Riordan briefly before falling back. Riordan buried his face in the crook of his elbow a few deep breaths, trying to filter out both the shared memory and the reinforcing sensation of standing in a pool of death energy, its smell clinging to him inside and out.

“Fuck,” he whispered as he pulled back, needing a few more seconds to steel himself before diving back in to the incomplete conversation. Noticing Mark’s growing concern, Riordan offered him a shaky smile and some reassurance, “Just a disgusting conversation topic. I’ll be fine.”

Reaching out for the tree again, Riordan overrode its confusion about his sudden departure from spirit-speech by continuing his original point. Just as there were waste products from death, there were elements that weren’t waste, that shouldn’t be consumed at all. He held out the concept of the soul and the ghost, the essence of a person and the mind that is the culmination of that essence with layers of experiences, trying to impress upon the tree that these things were precious and not to be harmed. To harm such a part of a person was akin to killing a spirit.

The tree’s confusion grew. Spirits couldn’t be killed, only transformed. Suffering was another sensation, part of existence. It understood the desire to avoid broken branches and tree rot, the slow decay into death, but it also did not fear death or suffering. It did not feel pain as Riordan did. It merely resisted the death mage because she was trying to warp its purpose and deny its intention, not because it believed she was wrong or evil or needed to be punished. If the tree was freed, then it did not care what happened to the death mage.

Except, even as it shared those thoughts with Riordan, Riordan shared his own pain back to the tree. For the first time, the tree spirit was forced to face what it meant to be in agony. Riordan shared the aches of his wounds, drawing forth his memories of his cracked skull and slit wrists before sharing his current sensation of spiritual damage and the way he had bled out magic when he’d punched a hole through his soul. He shared his sense of helplessness, unable to save Daniel, unable to stop Mark from getting hurt, unable to stop the death mage before more victims were killed. He shared his despair and self-doubt, wondering how someone as worthless as he was could even hope to fight something this large and powerful. He shared his anger, the fury at such selfish waste. It was killing to eat to glut, Phenalope gorging on death until she became ill and still not stopping.

It was the tree’s turn to recoil from Riordan, but he did not let it break the spirit-speech, pressing his very human, very living, pain into the alien spirit. Riordan screamed his mental defiance, forcing the spirit to look and feel and understand. If it wanted to be free from the death mage’s influence, free to be the natural spirit it was meant to be, then Riordan wanted to end the suffering that same tree had dismissed as inconsequential. He wanted to free the ghosts and stop the death mage and to throw himself into pain and danger so that no one else had to.

Riordan howled and snarled, breaking the connection as the tree spirit buckled and shifted and then acquiesced. A place opened for these ghosts in the glade. Down in the roots, sheltered and asleep as seeds rather than food. If Riordan could make the pathway open, the tree spirit would welcome and shelter these ghosts too. He could feel a shift in its identity, in the manner it regarded the ghosts of Riordan’s pack, in the way it saw Riordan himself. The cost for making the tree care, for adding that to its sense of self, was that he could no longer be free of its care.

Shivering, Riordan drew back, sucking in deep heaving breaths. He would pay that price if that was what it would take to meet his goals, but he couldn’t imagine how it was going to manifest.

“Well, that went well,” Riordan muttered, turning back towards Mark. “I have a place to take these ghosts on the other side where they’ll be out of the way but safe and not suffering.”

Mark’s eyes were wide as he stared at Riordan. “That was a good spirit-speech conversation? You practically threw up and then you looked like you were about to tear someone to shreds. Frankie never looks like that when talking to a spirit.”

“She probably saves the truly unpleasant conversations for private,” Riordan guessed, moving away from the tree trunk towards one of the dangling ropes. With a soft sigh, he made a sharp gesture, summoning a more limited version of his suppressive aura, this one focused on his hands and feet. With luck, that would be enough to keep the web from entangling him long enough to transport the ghosts. He grabbed the rope with his right hand and then tried to use his left. The much-abused limb refused to cooperate. Riordan growled in frustration again and turned towards Mark.

“Give me a boost up?” he asked reluctantly. “I need to talk to the ghosts and see if I can move them.”

Fortunately, Mark didn’t make a big deal out of Riordan asking for assistance, letting both the fact that he needed it right then and that he’d managed to drop his attitude enough to ask slide for the moment. Riordan was definitely glad that it was Mark and not Lucinda that had come to help, even if she probably had more experience in the spirit realm. She would have needled him enough that he would have just tried to climb it himself anyway. It hurt much less getting up into the web with Mark’s boost, the bookish young man using shifter strength to practically launch Riordan upwards despite their difference in apparent mass.

After all that fuss, actually moving the ghosts was surprisingly easy, if highly disturbing. Riordan crawled across the webbing, fighting off clinging ropes and gritting his teeth through the aches of his overtaxed soul. At each cocoon, Riordan pried the entwining ropes back enough to find the faces of each ghost. Or what remained of their faces, dissolved and crushed and bloody after their torture. He shoved aside the horror of their state, forcing himself to meet their eyes and to speak to them calmly. Then, as soon as he felt the slight connection with each, an echo of acknowledgment, Riordan opened his gateway for each, swallowing them down through the hole in his chest to sleep peacefully beneath the roots of the tree. The sense of nausea and existential horror that came with watching dark tendrils unfurl from his soul and slurp ruined ghosts out of their bloody shells grew with each one, but Riordan added it to his list of trauma to deal with later.

Once the last was safely buried, hopefully to rest and heal as ghosts seemed capable of, Riordan dropped out of the ropes, landing in the muck with a splash. He was filthy, exhausted, and soul weary. He let the glow of the suppression spell fade, wobbling with the fatigue of low mana on top of everything. Stoically, Riordan joined Mark beside Zeren.

The patchwork ghost appeared done with their thinking. They nodded to acknowledge Riordan, but otherwise continued a conversation with Mark.

“I dislike the option, but the proxy ghost will need to exit via the entrance we used, which means bringing it with us. I am limited by my orders in how I can accomplish that and you are even less capable of moving a ghost. Therefore, I’ll just have to deal with it and hopefully we can move quickly,” Zeren’s lips twitched down at the corners, the smallest wrinkle of a grimace showing on their face. “Then it can be Quinn’s problem.”

“Which option?” Riordan asked tiredly.

“Ah, good, you are done,” Zeren said first, looking over the disgusting horror space of the ritual around them. Riordan took pride in the fact that despite how much power was left stagnating here, waiting for Phenalope to access it somehow, he’d managed to wrest control of all the ghosts from her. “That means we can move out as soon as I eat the proxy.”