Sometime in the early morning on Friday, Kit casts a Mana Barrier on herself, sustains it and heads to the Cannery and into Roland’s van. Finding what she was looking for, she hurries back home to her lodge.

She summons a low-force spirit of air and asks it to assist in her work. She lays a blue cloth over her workspace and sets down a couple of lapis lazuli stones on either side of an abalone shell. Inside the shell she places a small disc of charcoal, and next to it, the strand of Roland’s hair she’d found in his van. Kit opens a shopping bag and takes out a small ball of resin. She presses it gently onto the charcoal and lights it. The air spirit forms a small spiral above the workspace, and the earthy, piney-smelling smoke from the myrrh resin drifts gently into the spiral and dissipates.

She says a few words under her breath and keeps her astral image of him in her mind. That, together with the blue cloth and the lapis lazuli, both representative of the throat chakra, helps her direct her well-wishes to the spirit she knew as Roland: a man of words and song.