There are those who take issue with this argument, so I should clarify right at the start that I fully believe Atlantis was real and, not only the first advanced civilization, but the very first civilization. Whether it was advanced by any modern or ancient reckoning is irrelevant and probably mistaken anyway. Different people remembered it different ways. I believe the Greek story borrowed from their culture’s memories of it. I believe the Bible is trying to describe it when it talks about Cain establishing the first city, and again when Noah escapes the great cataclysm that destroyed it. I believe the Epic of Gilgamesh does the same thing, as do countless other stories from around the world. Every legend, every religion, every bit of folklore and magic and ritual in some way traces back to echoes of Atlantis. And I believe Atlantis is where we would find the very first worshipers of Hecate.

I submit that there was a single pantheon of gods honored in that place. Whether or not the Atlanteans themselves considered these entities gods is unknown and probably unknowable. But they knew the world had a spiritual component, and engaged with it in some way, and therefore knew the things we now call gods in their most primal form. And as the earliest civilization, they would have looked out on a world that was raw, untamed, dangerous and flawed, filled with people who hadn’t yet learned how to live together in peace. What they must have thought of these outsiders! These were the first people with a border; and along with a border comes the knowledge that things live beyond the border. Whatever gods or spirits or guides they knew within their ancient cities, there was one they absolutely knew: the Guardian of the Edges. The Outlander. The One Who Paces At The Border. The Gnawing Darkness Beyond. Whatever fears or hopes drew them to form a society, whatever they were walking away from when they came together, was all known to them and associated with some primeval spirit who waited just beyond their reach.

Hecate was not her first name, nor was Hathor. They almost certainly knew the liminal spirit by whatever name they spat when they talked about the days before their city was built. The wild one. The wanderer. The hunter. She was, in those days, all that they no longer wished to know. She was the spirit of all peoples, the great power they had to throw off their backs to create civilization. She may have been the first guardian of mankind as a whole, the first spirit they knew and came to fear. The old ways of mankind as hunter and gatherer died, and she was the key to recognizing what they were leaving behind. The transition required that they know her, and then turn away. And as she in later forms would guide those entering their new lives after death, so she then served as the guide to those dying to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle and entering society. If that society knew banishment, they surely understood it as giving the person back to her. So she becomes associated also with the leaving, the outcast, those who never return. I doubt she had direct worshipers, but she was known and feared. She was almost certainly part of some great duality, the wild and unknown standing in opposition to the spirit of order and knowledge that the greatest Atlantean priests extolled.

And this would mean she was there when it ended. Those who watched the city fall would know that she, somehow, was involved. She would not be forgotten. She would arise time and time again. Some people embracing her, others shunning her, but all remembering her. Then, she stood at the crossroads of mankind’s fate. Now she stands at the Crossroads of all the places we have built and all the powers we have amassed. As the liminal spaces have grown, she has grown to fill them. But what must it have been like for her? How did she take that moment, when mankind began to turn its back on her? The eyes in the forest stalking uncivilized humanity, the voice on the winds of deserts only the desperate would enter, suddenly finding form as a thing to be left behind? And then, as mankind continued to entangle her in our affairs, piling names on her, creating new liminal spaces for her to govern while only occasionally accepting her guidance with them?

​What did she want, what desire welled in her heart when she saw the first city walls erected against her? Has she ever truly wanted anything other than whatever she wanted then?

I was planning on resting for the day, and went out to finish refreshing my energy. To that end, I was out at the shore of Lake Michigan shortly before dawn, meditating. I was deep in my trance when I heard Hecate’s voice, which sent me spinning around quickly. I was expecting that she was talking to me, but I quickly realized she wasn’t. There was a faint golden hue around her, and the Hound—and Alethea, sitting next to the Hound. Hecate was huge, probably twelve feet tall, her three faces showing.

“Have you come to take me away?” Alethea asked, turning her attention back toward Hecate. I slowly stood and walked closer.

“Where to, my dear?”

“Well, it’s...I haven’t crossed over yet, and I thought that’s what was next for me.” The Hound walked back to his mistress.

“Crossed over? Oh you poor thing, you should know by now you can’t do that until your business on Earth is complete” Alethea turned back and looked out at the lake.

“But he’s dead.” I racked my brain for a moment, and then remembered her father’s death.

“Is that all you wanted, though? Did you really stay bound to this world for so many years just to kill an old man?” Alethea rested her hands on her belly and looked down. Hecate began walking forward, shrinking as she went.

“I…well, no, but—” Hecate rested a hand on Alethea’s shoulder and knelt next to her.

“Roger was not the only man who let you down, was he?”

“How do you know?”

“I know much, my child. I know about you, and I know about John Matteson; and I know how to bring you together, if you will let me help you.” I gasped and took a step backward. She removed her hand from Alethea’s shoulder and stood, then held her hand out as if inviting Alethea to take it. The girl began to reach out, then stopped and looked up at the woman.

​“What do you get out of helping me?”

​“Is there a price too high to finally bring your child into the world, and be free of all this pain and these men?” Alethea paused, then took her hand, and they vanished. I stood in the silence for a moment, taking shallow breaths as I tried to process what I’d just seen. Hecate had been behind this? She sent Alethea to Matteson? What was her game? I knew I needed to tell Matteson what I’d seen, but not yet. First, I needed more information. I decided that I couldn’t wait. I was going to try and see the future today, and get whatever I could out of that. I gathered my things and headed straight back to the shop.

I do not think Hecate is the first name she had. I do not think that was the first people to know the Guardian of the Edges. Is it possible there were multiple different entities who slowly became one? I don’t know. I tend to think it’s the other way around, that there is one spirit who holds this office, and each culture that comes to know it only knows some part of it. I think the people of her first known tribe learned of her from somewhere else. I think, before she was Hecate, she was Hathor.

No, I don’t think Hathor was her first name, either. We’ll get to that. But think about it. Hathor is primeval, like Hecate. She is of an old guard that are eclipsed and absorbed by some body of upstart gods. And what did she look after? We know her primarily for her role in fertility and femininity, but her first worshipers did not. Not that she didn’t have those traits, but that she had others. Hathor was also the goddess who guided souls on their way to the Underworld and helped them adjust to their new existence, in the same manner as Hecate did to those souls on their way to Hades. And she was the goddess of the outside, the patron of goods coming from lands beyond the borders of Egypt.

We think of the Guardian of the Edges as the darkness beyond the light of civilization, but that’s because we’re used to her as Hecate and Trivia and the Devil at the Crossroads. Even Trivia was not so dark, though; and perhaps the Egyptians had a more natural curiosity and love for the beyond than we do. Where other cultures viewed outsiders with suspicion, Egypt praised the goods they brought. Where Mediterranean peoples viewed death as a dreary place from which no one returns, the Egyptians embraced it as a waiting friend. They did not fear the world beyond themselves. They romanticized it, embraced it, lusted after it. I submit that it is not incidental that the goddess of undeath is the goddess of fertility, that the goddess of the outsider was a goddess to be lusted after. The Greeks feared her place in the cycle of death and rebirth, as the Egyptians praised it. The Greeks looked to the darkness beyond their cities with fear, while the Egyptians looked to it with desire. But perhaps it is not that they saw something different when they looked there. Perhaps they simply had different appetites.

Hathor comes to Egypt at the edges of all they know, carrying the gifts of lands abroad, stirring the hearts and loins of the Nile people, promising them a welcome transition to their next home. The Crossroads was not a thing named, but they knew where to meet her. They knew how to trade with her. They knew she would understand their desire, their longing, and would reward it. Is this not the same mistress of the Crossroads, the same three-headed goddess who stands at the fringes of life and death and day and night, the same goddess who guards travelers as they move from one land to another, the same stranger who meets the outcast under a moonless night and grants a wish in exchange for something of equal value?

​Hecate was Hathor. And before that? I think she may have been known even farther back.

The Devil at the Crossroads is a case study in how modern mythologies take the elements mankind has always known and revisit them with a different angle. There is no real origin to the idea of meeting a dark spirit at the borderlands between two places, or the not-space past the walls, to make a deal with a steep cost that seems acceptable—maybe even sensible—at the time, but proves to be too much. That this being becomes the Christian Devil probably has more to do with Faust than any specifically Christian belief about that Devil. Perhaps it is taken from his attempts to tempt Jesus, where on his final try he offered the whole world in exchange for a moment of worship; but there is little else he does, at least as my Russian Orthodox parents described him, that sound much like bargaining.

The Devil at the Crossroads has all the makings of an old world myth being draped in Christian imagery in the new world. This is incredibly pronounced in African-American folktales, where slaves brought their stories with them and then clothed those stories in elements from the Christianity they began to accept over later generations. He is the wandering spirit of the land just out of reach, offering his wares for a great price. I do not know much mythology from Africa, but I have trouble imagining they did not have such concepts in the stories they brought, and calling him The Devil some centuries later follows a known pattern.

Whatever true name the Queen (or King) of the Crossroads originally had, they have acquired numerous titles and names and faces ever since. Hecate is almost certainly not her original name; her basic function—guardian of the edges, great magician, the cycle of life and death tainted by the fearsome undeath—would almost certainly have become a necessary spirit the moment people began to have edges and recognize death and seek power. This would have happened well before humans reached Asia Minor. Petitioning that being is older than history, magic predates writing. Maybe it had something to do with wandering traders, people from ‘outside’ meeting a community at the edges and bringing them exotic things. Maybe it’s just because some early people felt there was something powerful in the dark and wanted to reach out to it rather than run from it. We will likely never know; the point remains, when people first went to the limits of their known pocket of the world and called out for an audience, something was there to receive them. And century after century, when people from some new land went out to the forest, or the crossroads, or the sunset, or the graveyard, they were received anew, and gave the thing that welcomed them a name they understood.

​The Devil at the Crossroads is just this, again. Robert Johnson walks away from the community that knows him, and when he returns he brings with him a gift of music no one could explain. His community seeks an answer, and they look to the edges. And the thing they see lurking there, the eyes in the darkness, has acquired a name. A name associated with the first musician, even. Satan, the one whose voice once echoed through heaven with the tones of instruments mortal and divine, cast into the darkness where he now draws people to their doom. This Devil, Johnson’s community decides, must have welcomed a wayward soul and given him some of that music. Oddly enough, it is not the one who seeks the Thing at the Edges that names it, but those who stay behind and seek to warn others not to follow that path. We don’t know if Johnson even did make such a deal—I suspect he did not—but if he had, I wonder what name he called his patron. Would we know the Devil at the Crossroads as a devil at all, if we had learned of it from someone who cried out to it, and was embraced by it, rather than those who feared to seek it?

The big picture for Sergei’s theory begins some time before the rise of Greek culture. He tried to describe what time frame he was talking about, but didn’t know the English name for it and for all I know he never knew the Russian one either, so it was only after I searched online and asked if he was talking about the Minoan civilization, and he vaguely agreed, that I decided to just go with that and move on. But the broad sweep of his theory had a few major sections.

First, that Hecate predates the Greeks. He believes basically all the Greek gods predate the Greeks as a culture, in fact, but that’s not the point here. Sergei pointed to an idea that Hecate is originally from modern-day Turkey, near the coast on the southwest, though he seemed somewhat unconvinced of the specifics. I have no idea how they came to that specific location, but Sergei said it was a specific temple and I decided to look it up later. By this theory, the people who originally worshiped Hecate would have been monotheistic, serving their dread goddess with no rival or distraction. I asked how a society could function if their sole moral ideal was a goddess of undeath and magic, and he noted that monotheistic faiths don’t have gods of anything. They have a single god of everything, and what we pagans see as foci are just personality. For instance, there are these claims that the Jewish god was just a Babylonian sky god who got his own spin-off series, but Sergei believes it would be more accurate to say that the Jewish people had this one god, and the Babylonians may have adopted him into their pantheon and relegated him to the role of sky god because there was an opening there he seemed to fit. I asked if he thought all polytheistic beliefs started this way, as a collection of monotheisms merging together, and he said it was probably at least similar to that. At any rate, this would have put a tribe of people in southwestern Asia Minor as a monotheistic cult serving their goddess, Hecate. He believes everything worth knowing about her begins here, which is a shame because we know almost nothing about what this period of her life would have looked like.

The next phase would be the one we already know pretty well. The tribe worshiping Hecate gets conquered and/or Hellenized, Hecate is absorbed into the Greek pantheon and relegated to a position suiting her personality and available job openings, and the stories we know of her come to be either created, or altered into their known form. But the thing is, my studies of the Matteson family library suggest that the metaphysical realm and the physical realm do not have an equal exchange of influence. Henry clearly believed that the physical realm is nudged to a certain degree by things that happen in the metaphysical, but that the metaphysical is fundamentally defined by things that happen in the physical. If he’s right, any changes made to her character by introduction into the Greek pantheon would have changed who she actually was on a basic level. Sergei noted that was a significant ‘if,’ but if it was true, it wouldn’t change the importance of her first existence as a solo deity. Everything the Greeks used to define her would have already been there; they only changed her role in the universe relative to other gods, but not who she was. This, he felt, was not a difference important enough to straighten out for now. I’m not convinced it’s that minor, but I’ll have to consider that on my own.

This bleeds into the next phase, when the Romans absorbed the stories of Greek mythology and associated their own gods with the Greek gods. Here, Hecate becomes Trivia, a strange goddess who held sway over her own mystery cult (like Hecate would have before becoming part of a pantheon) and was occasionally described with traits that seemed to blend her with other gods, especially Diana. But while much of what defines her here is identical to things that defined Hecate, it is in the Trivia stage that she comes to be associated with crossroads. I noted that her function as Queen of The Crossroads seemed a pretty integral part of Hecate’s nature, so why would it only pop up here? Sergei stated that maybe it became part of her nature as Trivia, or maybe it was always a part of her nature and the Romans were just the first of her worshipers to find roads important enough to list them.

After this, things get murky. Most of the Roman gods fade into cultural obscurity or are overshadowed again by their Greek counterparts in the public mind as time goes on, but the spirits who received that praise almost certainly continued on in some form. Sergei notes a rise of she-devil queens in European Christianity, sometimes borrowing from Jewish sources (such as Lilith), sometimes from pagan ones. He believes Hecate spent some time as one or many of this latter sort, but there are not enough surviving records to his knowledge for us to piece together who or when. And, he said, that relies on assuming she remained a woman. It’s not like spirits are generally bound to a gender, and Sergei believes he knows at least one instance where Hecate was, in fact, a man.

​Sometime in the 1900s, the idea arose in the southern American states that people could go to the crossroads and make a deal with the devil. This apparently really took off with a blues singer. But while there is little information to tie the Christian Devil to such behavior, Sergei claims the descriptions of this Devil at the Crossroads suits Hecate well. And, he notes, the stories of this devil only begin to fade once neopagans begin to arise with the advent of Wicca, once the name of Hecate becomes relevant again to a group of people seeking power. This, he claims, is where she is now; having stepped away from the position of Devil at the Crossroads and leaving no one to continue making those deals, the stories of that being would slow to a halt while the stories of Hecate appearing in her mythic form to young witches would rise.

I couldn’t tell how long I was in the cave, since we were too deep to see the sun and we were fiddling with my sense of time. But we tried again, with the same point on the same thread, a couple dozen or so times. Each time I would get a little closer to clarity, and then pass out, have some food and drink and time to rest once I woke up, discuss what I was seeing with the Fates, and then try again. I was starting to understand why they didn’t tend to teach others how to do this, and appreciate that they were taking the effort to teach me.

During the downtime, when I was recovering from one attempt and preparing for another, they would give me tips on ways to ignore certain kinds of things, and how to navigate once I was in, and occasionally slip into their versions of various Greek myths. They told me that once I had a proper understanding of how to see within a person’s thread, I would have to learn for myself how to access those threads from beyond the cave. They could do it, of course—they said that it was as easy for them as breathing was for me—but they were not skilled in magic and did not know what it would take for a mortal to access that same skill. I explained my understanding that magic was just the act of connecting to one side of reality and using it to influence the other, and they seemed to think they might have an idea for me before I left.

By this point I was getting some sense of what I was looking for. By filtering out so much extra information, I was able to piece together that I was peering into my own thread, probably somewhere in my past. By focusing on those things I now knew, I was making much faster progress at getting a clear view of what I was being shown. It was still a few more tries before I was able to actually see the scene. Finally, after so much trouble, I saw me, my face blank, my body raised above the ground. I still felt a certain resistance, and when I pushed through, everything changed.

I was no longer on the outside, looking at my face as though through a window. I was standing in the moment, in the Crossroads, and the Fates were standing there with me. The Crossroads looked different, though, and sat in a vast empty plain. Millions of little paths stretched off from it in every direction, some even going straight up into the sky and others directly into the ground. In the center of it all sat Hecate, as I had never seen her, her faces showing both vitality and death, youth and old age, wisdom and desperation. She sat on a throne of animated bone, at least twenty feet tall, holding her hand up toward me. I was floating such that my eyes were at the same level as hers, and she looked to be mid-sentence. From behind her, the ravens were entering the space, but seemed to be coming from the space itself rather than any of the roads. I don’t know how I knew that, but it seemed so obvious somehow.

“Is this what the Crossroads really looks like?” I asked.

“Well, no,” Clotho said. “This is just your mind trying to make sense of what it sees. But it is more like what the Crossroads truly looks like than you have ever seen.”

“Why?”

“Because you are not really here, so it is not reacting to your expectations or comfort,” Lachesis answered. I walked around, taking everything in, while the Fates waited and watched me.

“I thought this was going to be somewhere in my past.”

“It is,” Atropos said.

“Why don’t I remember this?”

“Perhaps,” Clotho offered, walking over and resting her hand on my shoulder, “you should try to see the scene in action.” I remembered that they said I would need to learn how to manipulate the flow of events. I considered how I would do that, and without consciously deciding it, I reached out with my hand and began to turn it counterclockwise like a dial. Hecate’s mouth moved as slowly as my hand turned, and the ravens began to move backward and melt back into the scenery. I watched as I was lowered back toward the ground. I turned my hand the other way, a bit faster, and saw everything continue moving forward at the new rate. I backed up again, and then pushed my hand forward as though pressing the dial.

I watched the whole scene play out. I watched as Hecate told me to lead Matteson to her. I watched as she commanded me to forget the encounter, and I paused it again as the ravens took human form and I was leaving. I took some deep breaths, trying to calm down, and felt the weight of time on the scene pressing into me a bit again. It took a few minutes of focus to push that aside again, while I paced quickly through the Crossroads.

“What is this? Why would she do that?” I asked, to no one in particular.

“The Hecate you know is not the Hecate we know,” Lachesis said. “Your experience of her has been limited to what you want from each other. But there is so much you do not know about her goals, and her methods, and where all of this leads.”

“Will I know?”

“Yes,” Lachesis answered, “you will see the ultimate end of her thousands of years of work. It will be painful, and difficult, but you will be there when she makes her move.”

“What is all of this about?”

​“You have learned all we have to teach you,” Atropos said, firmly, and with a snap of her fingers we were back in the cave, with no sign of the Crossroads or even the tapestry. “Be mindful, dear mortal. As you search the unknown, never forget that there is far more of it than you can ever expect.”

The road gradually changed, and after maybe a half hour of walking it had become a dirt path at the base of a cliff overlooking a dark and motionless sea. The path tilted up, and soon we were climbing back and forth along outcroppings of the cliff until we came to a dark cave far above the water. I looked up, but was unable to see anywhere the cliff ended. Hecate later told me this was the base of Mount Olympus itself, and there was no path that high available to mortals.

The cave was long and winding, digging deep into the mountain. There was a fork in the road, one path leading deeper down and the other curving back up. We took the latter, and finally emerged into a chamber bustling with activity. Three women worked quickly here; one spinning thread, another measuring out its length, and a third cutting it. The Fates, the Greek pseudodeities who were believed by their culture to determine the destiny and duration of every life, glanced up and smiled as if expecting me. And, of course, I suppose they were. It didn’t seem to much matter whether or not I held to the religion of the ancient Greeks. The Fates exist, whether as a distinct set of people or as but one manifestation of a deeper concept, and by existing they must have at least some insight into the destinies of individuals.

It made me wonder, as I revisited the topic later, about the nature of Hecate herself. She is Hecate, and she is also the Mistress of Magic, and the Queen of the Crossroads, and the Goddess of Liminal Spaces. But are those titles for a single being called Hecate, or is Hecate a title for a single being who is fundamentally the Goddess of Liminal Spaces? The name is easier to work with, and a recognizable form, but that doesn’t mean that is her true identity. I may have to revisit Sergei’s ideas about the many faces of Hecate through the ages. This idea was bolstered later by the Fates themselves, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was brought before the Fates, and Hecate informed them that I was interested in learning the secrets of time. Clotho, the first woman, explained that theirs was not the whole of time, but the allotment of an individual’s portion of time. Atropos, the third, pointed out that this gave them insight into the past and future, and therefore could teach me to use that insight, but it would only be part of the whole if I wished to truly master the flow of time itself. I explained that it was my desire to understand, and therefore insight seems the most natural place for me to begin.

“She will see how it all began,” answered Lachesis, the woman measuring the thread. “Her destiny includes sight of the past and future, and witnessing the rise and fall of the eternal.” Hecate rested her hand on my shoulder, and when I turned back to look, she was smiling.

“Very well,” she said to the three, “I leave her in your hands. The Hound will wait outside and see her home when you are done with her.” With that, she left, and the Hound made its way outside the cave.

“Thought she’d never leave,” Clotho grumbled.

“No you didn’t,” Atropos said, and they all laughed.

“Come come, sit down,” Lachesis said, waving a hand to me without turning her focus away from the thread. “There is much work to be done.”

“What did you mean, that I would see how it all began?” I asked, moving forward and sitting on a large, smooth rock. “Am I really going to see that far back?”

“Back?!” Clotho shouted with a laugh. I must have shown my confusion, because Atropos gave me a comforting smile.

​“The beginning has not happened yet, dear,” she said, calmly. “You will find time to be more complicated than you realize.”

It had been a long day, and I was ready to crash for the night. I got up to my bedroom a little after 11, and as soon as I closed the door I saw the Hound sitting next to my bed.

“Don’t you usually wait til I’m asleep?” I asked. It cocked its head, then stood and turned around. The wall behind my bed folded out into a forest path overlooking the sea, and the Hound began walking. I yawned, stretched, and followed.

I wasn’t sure whether it was simply because I was going to the Crossroads physically for the first time, or if I had really changed so much that my experience of the Crossroads had to be completely redesigned, but the path seemed much more real than it ever had before. It was partly the senses; the smell of Central American flowers and ocean air, the feel of the ground under my feet, the sound of birds lilting through the trees. But there was something else, something that felt much more surprising: the path no longer looked magical. Before, it had always had an air of mystery to it, a sense that it couldn’t possibly exist in the real world, and of course it couldn’t, not with the ocean hovering overhead and the path forming and disappearing in response to my steps. But this, this felt like home, a home of which I only had very sparse, fleeting memories, from so many years ago.

What was Hecate playing at?

She didn’t behave as if she noticed the difference in the realm when we reached her, and she certainly didn’t present herself any differently in reaction to context. It was strange, looking upon a Greek goddess standing tall in a wilderness half a world away from the mountain her kind called home, carrying herself as if this was her own personal temple. And, well, it was. Whatever the Crossroads looked like to me, it remained the Crossroads, and that made it hers. But the effect was jarring, and my new doubts about her intentions after negotiating with my life prevented me from simply dismissing that incongruity.

“Jacqueline,” she said, her voice dripping with honey. I bowed.

“Mistress.”

“I’ve been thinking about you, you know.” She sat on her throne, which hadn’t existed before and looked like black marble carved by Aegean sculptors. I stood upright. “About your skill for magic and desire for knowledge. You, my dear, did not stop developing and studying when I stopped calling on you.”

“I don’t see why I would have.”

“You’d be surprised, child. Everyone has their own goals, and those whose goals truly center on me lose their way quickly when I give them space. But others, they truly believe in something. They truly desire something, something I am happy to give in exchange for their service. I think it only right to offer you new knowledge, in honor of your development so far and as a sign of good faith as we continue.” The Hound was sitting by her side by now, and she gracefully slipped her hand down to scratch at the back of its neck. I stood silent for a moment, processing.

“What new knowledge did you have in mind?” She smiled broadly then, baring teeth that seemed to be just a bit more sharp than I remembered.

“What would you like, dear?” My breath caught for a second. I could choose? Would she accept anything I chose? I briefly considered my options, before a common trait of all of them came to mind. I straightened my posture and met her gaze.

“I want knowledge of time magic,” I said, firmly. “I want to know how to see the past and future, and ultimately, how to travel between them.” She chuckled and leaned back into her seat.

“Are you sure? Time is a complicated thing.”

“I’m sure.” She considered me for a moment, then clapped her hands together and stood.

​“Very well! Come, come, let me show you the way.” She turned toward one of the other roads leading away from the Crossroads, and it suddenly seemed like there were hundreds of them. As she walked, the Hound rose to join her, and I began to follow.

Work was progressing in Columbia Theatre, and today we were working on updating and expanding the fly system. I was standing on a scaffolding, running lines through the system in the ceiling and trying not to look down. Backstage, Marz was testing the lines that had already been finished and helping determine what we needed for counterweights and if we would need to order more. Neither of us was here when the pulleys were mapped out and installed, so it was also taking extra time for us to figure out where everything was supposed to be. We had been warned that some of it was not actually ready for our work yet, and we had taken some guesses about which parts of the system were affected based on the notes left for us. The possibility that we had been mistaken on some of those guesses suddenly occurred to me when I heard a crack, and then a snap, from my right.

Before I could react to the noise, a fly passing in front of me stopped in the air, its wings stuck mid-stroke. I breathed heavy and looked around, and found a heavy metal pulley that had broken off the ceiling and stopped in place about a foot away from my neck. I knew, immediately, that if it had continued on its arc either I would have died; either from the initial impact, or from the unavoidable fall that would have followed it. I swallowed hard and tried to step aside, but found that I could only move my head. I turned to my left again, and saw the Hound sitting on the scaffolding and watching me. I opened my mouth to speak, but a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye drew my attention away again. As I turned to look forward, I found Hecate. She was standing on the stage, but so tall that her eyes were level with my face. I took a deep breath. Why now, after all this time?

“Mistress,” I whispered, my voice unsteady. She smiled.

“Am I, still?” I furrowed my brow and tried to formulate a question about that, but nothing coherent came out before she smiled and continued. “I saw how you handled that ghost, and cleaning up the park afterward. You seemed confident in your ability to proceed without invoking me.” She looked to my left, and I followed her gaze to the pulley. “Yet you do not seem so confident now.”

“I had not heard from you in a year, Mistress. I didn’t know anymore if you were even listening.”

“I suppose I can understand such fickleness from mortals, a year must seem like such a long time to you. But you must know better than to believe that about me. Besides,” she blinked, and her eyes were replaced by the sight of me in Chicago, laying on that couch in John’s arms. “You clearly wanted some space from me. Am I not free to give my mortal instruments what they desire?”

“I’m sorry. I was recovering from a moment of weakness and just…” I sighed and lowered my head. “I’m sorry.”

“Will you show me?” Her eyes returned to normal, or what passed for normal from her.

“What?”

“I want to see that you are sorry, not simply hear it.”

“How?”

“I have a job for you to do. But not yet. For now, it will be enough for you to swear to me that you will do it. And your continued usefulness, of course, is a great encouragement to keep you around.” My eyes widened as I realized why I couldn’t move the rest of my body. I was being given a choice between power and death.

“I swear, Mistress.”

“Very good. I shall call on you when I am ready.” I felt my body unfreeze as she and the Hound vanished, and I quickly shifted around the pulley to stand behind it. As soon as I was in the clear, the pulley snapped back into motion and crashed against the wall, sending scraps of wood and drywall flying. I was breathing heavy, and the noise of the impact had left my ears ringing for a moment before I heard Marz calling to me. I pressed my hand to my heart, exhaled hard, then peeked down.

​“I’m okay. But I think we should take a break.” They gave a few quick nods, and I began to climb down.

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There is a division between the physical and the metaphysical realms, though the exact nature of it seems to vary. I've only had to interact with it in Chicago, where it is thick and dark. But Abuela said that back in Honduras it was thin and airy, bright and covered in flowers. She told me stories from before the Europeans arrived, when the division between realms was like the surface of water, when the only thing really keeping a mage from diving too deep or dwelling too long was not the difficulty of crossing, but of staying.

This claim raised a number of questions for me, so I began to study other concepts of the division from around the world. Sometimes called a wall, or a veil, or any of a number of other such concepts, I have come to understand it as a hedge. This is partly because it was the manner in which I had always known it through Abuela's descriptions, but I was also convinced that no other title adequately described the variety of its experience or the fact that it seems to be alive in its own way. The living, changing nature of it is part of what I think explains the history I was taught. My best guess is that the Victorians are to blame.

The first thing to note is that the metaphysical realm itself is not static. Whatever else may be true of it, it is a dynamic realm where the thoughts or emotions of human beings seems to leave a direct impact. Nan's study of auras suggests there is something more to them than a revelation of what people are feeling, and Abuela said that our dreams and fears and memories walk alongside us on the other side of the hedge. Hecate taught me that seeing what was really happening in the metaphysical realm requires a still and disciplined mind, as any fluctuations I bring with me will change both my perception of the realm and the realm itself; but she also taught that strong connection to one's own emotions aids in accessing the power of the realm for other forms of magic.

The only conclusion I can draw from these notes and my own studies and experiences is that the metaphysical realm is fundamentally reactive, that its very nature is to reflect what is poured into it. It is the astral plane where minds meet, and the realm of dreams, and the great pool of human memory and desire and terror, and the abode of spirits. Are minds inherently connected? Did we create the realm? Was it created alongside us? Is it possible that there was a time before the realm, and that something bound all of mankind to it? Is it any more, or any less, possible that it existed before us and that somehow we either connected to it or arose from it? If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, is it connected to the realm, or to their own version of it, or not at all?