Xander's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Xander stood on his patch of hardened grey with the silver stone under his paw. The dead tree was three body-lengths behind him. The stone had held the ground firm since he set it there, a rough disc of cracked slate veined in blue light. He had been about to test how far he could carry it. Then the grey shifted. He felt it in his ribs before he saw it. A cold pull, like the expanse was leaning toward something. A shape drifted out of the fog to his left. It was tall and thin, a spirit of pale mist with long arms trailing wet strands. Its face had no features. It was already coming apart at the hem, the mist below its body unraveling into the grey. Another lost spirit. The first one that had ever come this close. This was what the ground was for. Xander barked once. The spirit turned its blank face toward him and drifted closer, slow, tilting. Its arms thinned as he watched. He had minutes, maybe less. If it crossed onto his hardened ground it might hold. He did not know if that was true. He only knew the grey could not eat what stood on the stone. He stepped off the disc and pushed toward the spirit. The grey took his paws to the ankle. He shoved lifeforce through his body and shifted. Muscle filled him. His vision snapped clean. In beast form he lunged, caught a trailing strand of the spirit's arm in his teeth, and dragged. The spirit came with him like wet cloth. Xander hauled it three lengths back toward the stone. Halfway there the patched sack-thing pulled itself up out of the grey in his path. Cracked button eyes. Stitched X mouth. It sat and rocked, and the ground under Xander's front paws went soft. He did not stop this time. He jumped it. His hind paws punched through the softening grey and he lost a breath of speed, but he cleared the sack-thing and skidded onto the hardened disc with the spirit still in his jaws. He dropped it on the stone. The spirit sank to its knees on the slate. Its edges stopped fraying. The blue veins in the stone brightened under it, then dimmed. The mist of its body drew inward and held. It lifted its blank face to Xander. It did not speak. It stayed. Xander shook back into ghost form, panting without lungs. The patched creature was gone. His hardened ground was smaller than before, a hand's width eaten from every side while he was busy. The stone had cost him to use it that way. He had saved one. He had proof the ground could hold another spirit. But the disc was shrinking, and the spirit on it was watching him, waiting to be told what came next.