They were a loaded gun.

Standing behind them, patient and calm, like sheepdogs around their flock, were the guardian spirits of Mort’s house. I had assumed them to be his spiritual soldiers, but I could see now what their main purpose had been. They, the ghosts of duty and obligation unfulfilled, had remained behind in an attempt to see their tasks to completion. They, the shades of faith, of love, of duty, had been a balancing energy with the dark power of the violent spirits. They had grounded the savagery and madness with their sheer, steady, simple existence—and the faded shade of Sir Stuart stood tall and calm among them.

I held Sir Stuart’s weapon in my right hand and half wished I could go back in time and rap my twenty-four-hours-younger self on the head with it. The fading spirit hadn’t been trying to hand me a weapon at all. He’d been giving me something far more dangerous than that.

I thought he’d handed me potent but limited power, a single deadly shot. I’d been thinking in mortal terms, from a mortal perspective.

Stuart hadn’t given me a gun. He’d given me a symbol.

He’d given me authority.

I held the gun in my right hand and closed my eyes for a moment, focusing on it, concentrating on not merely holding it, but taking it into me, making it my own. I opened my eyes, looked at the tall, brawny shade, and said, “Thank you, Sir Stuart.”

As I spoke, the gun shifted and changed, elongating abruptly. The wood of its grip and stock swelled out, becoming knife-planed oak and, as it did, I reached into my memory. Runes and sigils carved themselves in a tight spiral down the length of the staff. I took a deep breath and once more felt the solid power of my wizard’s staff, six feet of oak as big around as my own circled thumb and finger, the foremost symbol of my power, gripped steadily in my hand.

I bowed my head, focusing intently, drawing on the memories of the hundreds of spells and dozens of conflicts of my life, and as I did the symbols on the staff pulsed with opalescent energy that reminded me of Sir Stuart’s bullets in flight. Power hummed through the spectral wood so that it shook in my hand and flickered sharply, sending pulses of weirdly colored light, light I sensed would be visible even to mortal eyes, surging through the mist. There was a rushing sound, something almost like a sudden strike upon an unimaginably large and deep drum, an impact that rippled out from me and passed throughout the city and the surrounding lands. It sent a shiver of energy through me, and for an instant I felt the warmth of the southern wind, the close, muggy dampness of the air, the wet, slushy cold of the snow beneath my insubstantial feet. I smelled the stench of Morty’s burned home on the air, and for a single instant, for the first time since the tunnel, I felt the rumble of hunger in my belly.