Please, sighs my specter again. Damn thing is never happy. I get as far as finishing the cigar before I’m calling on the old ways again, the power coming eager and exultant, a pup on its first hunt. And this time, it sings, pure as silver, as it travels my veins. Like it already knows there won’t be a focus, won’t be a totem, no physical thing to constrain its joyous kinesis. “I’ll decide once I know what we’re facing,” I tell the emptiness. The ghost shudders in acknowledgment. The world skews, splits into fractals of possibility, an endless concerto of maybes and may-have-beens, every
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