When a spirit’s time has ended it suffuses into a form even less substantial than before, unable to effect any change at all, or if royalty, its essence settles into the land itself and strengthens the bones. This shade of a shade is too real, too present, something from which the mortals would shudder with even more terror than from the Nothingness that claws at their sleeves in the presence of ordinary sprites.

The gaze of the thing which used to be his father the king drags him to his knees; “Speak,” Hamlet rasps out, “I am bound to hear.”