Sculptor or swimmer, letting go proved more difficult than anything else. Part of you was always dimly frightened of it. Your fellow necrosaint-in-training now bragged that she could do it near-instantaneously: like closing her eyes, she always said. You had never found it natural. Your mind you dug out of your meat, and you drove it downward—always downward, somehow—and pushed with your awareness until you felt underfoot the dagger-sharp rocks of that grey and unimaginable shore beneath that grey and featureless sky. Then a step into that icy water, and another, until you were waist-deep and might open your eyes. You could see where the planet’s soul was thrashing. The ghosts had parted as though promptly combed away from that turbulent whirlpool churning. A Minor Beast. No Resurrection Beast, of course: this newborn ghast would need a thousand years of malign intent to become anything close to a true Beast. Or so you were told. You’d still never seen a true Beast. The great two-handed sword was in your hands, now light as forgiveness. You hauled yourself up to stand upon the face of the churning grey waters, and, wet through with filthy, bloodied spume, you began to walk toward the maelstrom.

You knew without venturing a look over your shoulder that Mercymorn the First stood on the shore, watching critically, the hem of her pearlescent Canaanite robes wet through. She was probably making faces at the growing stain. In the River her hurricane eyes were scouring, widening curlicues of ruddy grey, excruciating to look upon. You were glad that Mercy would see your facility with the spirit, a skill you were killing yourself trying to perfect. Nonetheless, you were also glad she was not close enough to distract you as you approached the jerking, squirming soul: a nightmarish mess of the organic and the inorganic, all of it a false mirage of spirit-stuff. It was a mass of bloody, crumbling rock faces; it was a hexapod with hairy insect legs, bristling with clay-covered spines. It was primarily grey, but a gory, slimy, sandy grey, organically seething yet still somehow stonelike. And it made a break for it.

Mercymorn hollered from the shore, her voice a muffled shout in the wind and the creak of the grinding waves: “It’s getting away!!”

You sheathed the sword and dived. Better to stay alongside the creature than to deal with importunate ghosts. The surface of the water parted for you, murky and oily—smelling like blood, and tasting like effluent. You opened the back of your wrist and worked needles of bone from your distals, and from them you formed a cluster of long, ragged harpoons. You told the pain that it was not truly pain, not truly your wrist, not truly your bones, only your mind’s excellent approximation thereof. You tied your perceived tendons into sinewy ropes. You raised the first harpoon. You judged. You threw.