Coldness swept over him, digging into him in a sensation very reminiscent of the way that the ritual had been draining Riordan before, eating the color from his very soul as he died in increments. To his surprise, Phenalope’s tattoos flared slightly and then the colors of his soul inverted with that of the tattoo, leaving Riordan looking like a grayscale translucent ghost with a vibrant tattoo of living flowers and vines. As soon as the change settled over him, the oppressive deadly atmosphere of the land of the dead became comfortable and comforting. If Riordan wasn’t still literally wearing a mountain of magic, he would have wanted to kick back and take a nap, which was not what he would have expected from the world beyond the Veil.

That mountain of magic was making itself urgently known. Having dragged the center of the ritual not only a few figurative feet away from its planned balance point, but now having dragged it into a whole other fucking realm, it wasn’t balanced anymore. The pile of magic wobbled and began to pour through Riordan like water out of a bunghole.

For a moment, Riordan tried to fight it. He wasn’t sure if it was just because fighting was his initial response to most things or if this was something he should be fighting. Either way, it hardly mattered. Fighting that tide now that it was moving was like bailing the sea with a bucket. The most Riordan could do was try to get out of the way before all sense of self was swept away in the flood.

Riordan knew he was a fighter and a survivor. How did you fight the sea? How did you survive drowning in corruption? Giving over control and trusting that he’d done everything he could was one of the hardest things Riordan had ever done. Riordan felt himself slipping, even knowing he had to let go and let it happen.

A hand grabbed his. Riordan opened his eyes, unaware he’d even closed them, and turned a blackened gaze upon Daniel. His friend held onto Riordan’s paw-hand with a grim determination. A strange wind blew around them, both hot and cold and full of terror, sorrow, and relief.

“F-feels weird,” Riordan growled out. His werebadger form wasn’t exactly conducive to human speech, though at least he wasn’t breathing out liquid corruption now.

“What’s happening?” Daniel asked, not letting go even though the nothingness around them was taking on strange qualities.

The Veil was an actual boundary from this side, reaching up and down infinitely in a texture like a loosely woven cloth. Like a burial shroud. Distance had even less meaning here than in the spirit realm, which disoriented Riordan terribly. He saw figures in the distance, standing beside the Veil but turned towards him. They were featureless figures with holes where there should have been eyes. Or maybe normal people. Or a hundred flickering interpretations all at once.

In the space closer to them, there was still a tear in the Veil, leading back into the spirit tree’s glade. As more and more of the death magic poured into and through Riordan, the vibrant tree of light dominated that view, a stark contrast to this place of peaceful oblivion.

Well, it had been peaceful oblivion. Now the space around them was filled with a sense of purpose and action, though Riordan couldn’t have said what that purpose was. Death magic didn’t look black and ominous here. It was still a dead energy, not alive or growing, but in this place, Riordan could see how death was the other side of life. The loam upon which the seed drew. The meat upon which an animal sustained itself. The touch of sunshine made possible by the felling of a great tree. Pouring out death here didn’t feel like destruction, but the preparation of a garden before planting.

Riordan had no idea what to make of that.

What he did know was that the strange relief and peace of this place was doing a damned lot to help him relax enough to be a conduit. Where this energy would have been destruction in other realms, it became creation here. Riordan had no words for how beautiful it was or how awed he felt to be part of this. Somehow, being witness to this transformation of potential energy outweighed the potential of being a god. Power did not bring understanding. Riordan wasn’t sure he understood more than a sliver of what was truly happening, all filtered through sensations and imagery his brain could handle.

Or mostly handle. There were layers to this that Riordan could feel like a whisper of a touch or a phantom limb, present but ungraspable. It wasn’t even the overwhelming surreality of the spirit realm. This plane was simply too alien on some levels for Riordan to comprehend it and remain human at the same time. Only death and an abandonment of worldly attachments could purchase a ticket into those mysteries. Riordan was content to wait to learn those secrets, though he knew he would never view death the same way ever again after this.

Even so, Riordan felt ephemeral and floaty around an ice-cold core that was growing larger and larger with each second. He looked inside himself and saw the thick sludge of death corruption contaminating his personal well of magic. Absently, he wondered how he hadn’t exploded with that internal pressure, his own magical reserves being condensed to make way for this contamination. He felt like the filter in a vacuum, so clogged with dust to have become useless. The corruption bled from his well down into his core. The already overtaxed core ached with icy fire, a touch so cold it burned.

Surprisingly, the spiritual funnelling of the tree spirit kept the corruption out of Riordan’s body. Well, out of his soul, which acted as his body in this space. He doubted the damage to his magical system was any healthier or better for his future than the corruption anywhere else, especially since Quinn showed that corruption to one area such as the body still led down the slippery slope of death magic, though the angle could be shallower when compartmentalizing it.

He remembered that Daniel had asked a question. “Draining the ritual,” Riordan muttered, barely intelligible. “It’s not hurting anything here.”

“Draining-” Daniel frowned fiercely, “Tell me you aren’t meaning draining it through yourself.”

Riordan laughed softly. “I could, but it would be a lie.”

“Riordan!” Daniel smacked him lightly on the shoulder with his free hand, even as his hold on Riordan’s hand tightened. “You promised not to die!”

“Not dying,” Riordan assured his friend with more certainty than he felt, “Just… doing things that are just as bad. This is fucking up my well.”

Daniel nodded like he knew what Riordan meant by that. Riordan couldn’t remember what he had or had not explained to Daniel about magic by this point, or how much of what he had explained Daniel had actually retained. This past week had been hell, which tended to fuck with memory. Plus, who knew how being a ghost affected learning.

Gods, what was his life. Riordan started to laugh, the sound more than slightly hysterical. The world tilted and moved. He blinked at it absently, wondering what had changed before realizing he’d sunk to his knees. He couldn’t stop the sound of laughter spilling out from him any more than he could stop the stream of magic pouring through him.

Everything was out of his control except his own stubborn desire to survive this shit. He’d promised. He wanted it.

Riordan knew that surviving this would be problematic. He wondered if he’d end up as a regular death mage or something else. Everything about this was so twisty and tangled in with spirit magic and outer realms, just to make things all the more messy. If he wasn’t a death mage when this finished, he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist becoming one, not with as much corruption as was making a home inside him.

Consciousness felt increasingly fuzzy, which was a truly unique experience as a living soul. Riordan wondered if he was shutting down sensation to be able to avoid trauma. He’d stopped being able to feel the flow of power through him, though he still felt the grip of the tree spirit on himself and the shape of the funnel leading into him.

What was self? What was a soul? What was that inextinguishable, unalterable thing that was the spark of one person and not another? Riordan wondered if he’d be himself still if he changed so much. If he had already changed so much that he could not be himself. What was he? What would he be?

What did he wish for, on the other side of this sacrifice, in this place of death and rebirth?

Riordan didn’t even know. He emptied himself out of desire and filled himself up again with only fierce determination. He would survive. It wasn’t a wish. It was a fact. Whatever shape he was in after all of this, Riordan would pick up his pieces and carry on. If he could survive moping around as a drifter for twenty years, punishing himself for his past and mourning the necessary deaths of his pack, surely he could survive this weakass shit. This was only a crisis that had sent him so far outside of his comfort zone that he couldn’t even see it anymore. Sometimes when something was so ridiculously much, so completely alien, it wrapped around to being easy to accept again.

What was the point of trying to understand that which could not be understood by anyone?

Serving as a conduit wasn’t like bleeding out, for all that both were a flow that left Riordan feeling increasingly numb. The magic burning through him had left damage, stretching and burning and contaminating him, but wasn’t pulling him down further than this strange timeless trance. The flow slowed without cutting off and then began to slosh back and forth between the spirit realm and the Veil like a channel between two equally full pools. Though, Riordan wasn’t sure how that feeling of balance made sense. Where would the magic be going in the spirit realm?

Suddenly, a surge of power flooded forward, pushing against the capacity of Riordan’s soul as a conduit. He threw his head back, hysterical laughter becoming a rattling snarl as Riordan clung to the pieces of himself with teeth and claws.

Fuck no.

He. Was. Stronger. Than. This.

The plug of power paused inside him for a split second, stuck in the bottleneck, before spilling through him. Just as suddenly, a backwash from the surge hit Riordan, sweeping back through him and into the spirit realm. Frantically, Riordan scrambled to contain it, fearing it would break out of the ritual and cause some of the damage he’d been so desperately trying to avoid.

As soon as Riordan touched the power flowing through him, he realized it wasn’t splashing backwards. It was being drawn backwards. And Riordan went with it, his soul dragged out of the beyond, through the Veil, and back into the embrace of an increasingly familiar tree’s branches.