Xander's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Xander pressed his paw into the grey and watched it sink. He was a hyena made of fog, and the fog around him wanted him back. For days he had searched the expanse for a patch firm enough to stand on, a place he could shape into ground for other lost spirits to find. Every time he held his intention still, the grey thinned under him again. He had no memory of a life before this. His shape was the only thing he owned, and the expanse had begun pressing in to take it. He drifted until he reached the dead tree again. It was the one fixed thing he had found in the grey, its black bark weeping slow sap, a small white X chalked on its trunk by some hand he could not remember. He had been using the tree as his anchor for what might have been weeks. He circled it now and tried once more to push his stillness outward, to coax the grey near the roots into something solid. The ground firmed under his paws. Then, a few lengths out, it began to come apart again. The unraveling took a shape this time. A small sack-thing pulled itself out of the thinning grey, stitched and patched, with cracked button eyes and a stitched X across its mouth. It sat where his territory kept dissolving and watched him. Every time Xander pushed his claim outward, the patched creature rocked, and the grey near it loosened like wet thread. Xander snarled and shoved lifeforce through his body. Muscle filled him. His vision sharpened. He charged the sack-thing in beast form, jaws open, and closed on nothing. The creature was already behind him, sitting by the tree, watching. He could not fight what unmade his work. He could only outlast it, and he had been failing to outlast it for a long time. He dropped back into his ghost shape and lay down at the roots. Something pressed against his ribs from the inside. He coughed, and a stone rolled out of his chest onto the grey. It was silver, swirled with pale blue lines, and it did not sink. The patched creature went still. The grey under the stone hardened. Xander pushed the stone a pawlength toward the sack-thing with his nose. The hardened patch grew with it. He understood then that the anchor was not the tree. The anchor was something he had been carrying. He picked the stone up in his teeth, walked past the patched creature, and set the stone down at the edge of where the grey still churned. The churning slowed. He had his first true ground. Now he had to decide how far he could carry the stone before the tree was too far behind to find his way back.