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.

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.