The porridge Nan had made for breakfast was warm and comforting, and I didn’t realize how hungry I was until it was in front of me. I had two bowls before I was finally able to relax and talk, with Sergei and Nan patiently waiting. I started telling them what I saw, and they were very excited to hear about my brief stop at my wedding. Sergei asked when it was, so they could plan a vacation, but I didn’t actually know. But when I got to the part about The Two, they both went silent and listened intently.

“So she put the thread in your eye?” Nan asked. “Is that what the new gold flecks are?”

“Seems so.”

“And it isn’t going away?” Sergei asked.

“I saw the same flecks in the eye of every future version of myself I’ve met.”

“But nothing more,” Nan pressed, “this isn’t becoming a habit, you doing things to your eyes?” I chuckled.

“As far as I can tell, this is it.”

“If things do not change,” Sergei said, wagging his finger.

“I don’t think they can change.”

“Of course they can! Time is not stone, it moves. It changes! It can change.”

“We’re talking about fate, dear,” Nan said, resting a hand on his knee.

“Pft. Fate. Is nice word, but time changes.” She rolled her eyes.

“The Two said they’d seen it all before!”

“And they said they had to keep things same. Which,” he held his hands out and shrugged, “is chance for it to not stay same.”

“I think I’m going to try and stick to the script, if you don’t mind,” I said, setting the bowl down and picking up my drink.

“But you choose that. This is what matters,” he said, turning to Nan, “is that she chooses.”

“Of course, dear.” She patted his knee and then turned her attention back to me. “But you didn’t get the answers you were looking for?”

“I got some,” I said, “and I suspect, over time, I’ll realize that I got more than I know. But I couldn’t have gotten anywhere without your help. Both of you.”

“Well, we’re not done.” Nan walked to the other side of the room, grabbing some papers off a shelf. “Sergei had some more detailed theories for you, but had to write them in Russian. I translated them for you.” I flicked through and found pages detailing various forms Sergei believed Hecate had taken over the years, beginning with…

“Is this Atlantis?” I asked. Sergei nodded enthusiastically, and Nan sighed.

“Yes. It’s a pet idea of his. You can do what you want with the ideas. They’re theories—”

“Correct theories,” Sergei added.

“—that you can take, and decide for yourself how useful they are.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But shouldn’t the store be open by now?”

​“Is time,” Sergei said, waving the question off, “it changes.”

When my eyes opened, I was facing the ceiling and the sky; both of them, juxtaposed over each other. I felt the couch under me, but as I looked around everything was a blur of motion. The walls were being built, they were built, they were being destroyed. Nan, Sergei, and a few dozen other people I didn’t recognize were everywhere, all occupying the same space, but drifting through and past one another in perpetual motion. They aged and resumed their youth, they left and never returned while they entered for the first time. I stood and stumbled across a floor that was there on one step and gone the next, the carpet shifting and changing, the structure built or missing, everything in flux, everything changing around me. I grabbed my head and felt my hair growing as I tried to soothe the ache. I tripped over something—it was impossible to know what, with so much furniture coming and going—and crashed hard onto the floor. I felt a hand on my back, warm but fleeting, and a cacophony of voices overwhelmed me. I rose to my knees and screamed, the pain in my head growing more sharp and everything breaking down around me.

Then I felt something pulling at me. From every direction, a total of eight points of tension pulled at me, holding me in place. My surroundings began to slow and meld, stabilizing ever so slightly. I looked around, trying to make it out, and saw the lines leading away from me, each to a person. There was Matt, and Jacob, and the six other people who took part in the ritual in their apartment. All around me, they were keeping me in place, fighting against the pull I was still wrapped in. I closed my eyes and focused, chanting. I remembered the shard in my pocket and grabbed it, pulling it out of my pocket and holding it with both hands. I narrowed my mind on it, then held it up and looked through it. In the lens I could see Nan and Sergei’s apartment, stable and unmoving, with Nan kneeling in front of me and trying to soothe me. I tried to block out everything else. I tried to remind myself of what was important.

I have the magic to do this.

I have Nan and Sergei waiting for me and trying to pull me back.

I have friends helping me, supporting me, holding back as much of this chaos as they can.

I have people back home who need me, people I want to see again, people I will see again.

I am never alone.

My breathing slowed into a steady rhythm and my vision began to close in, as if a tunnel was slowly absorbing everything else. I saw where I needed to go. I knew how to get there. I closed my eyes, whispered one more incantation, and shattered the shard in my hand. I heard glass breaking everywhere around me, the visions shattering and falling away. The cacophony ended. The feeling of being pulled stopped. I opened my eyes and looked directly into Nan’s. She smiled.

“I was afraid we were losing you,” she said, running her hand through my hair. I reached up and rested my hand on her wrist.

​“I would never.” She pulled me in for a hug, and I didn’t fight it.

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 known to them all 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 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?

I excitedly explained to Sergei and Nan what had happened over dinner, how I had managed to peer backwards in time which had never happened properly before. They were excited to hear about it, and Nan took it as evidence that distance from Matteson was a good thing for my magic. It was hard to argue with her on that, but I tried to make sure she didn’t let her concern become any actual dislike of Matteson. It wasn’t exactly his fault if that was the case, and I was the one who chose to keep living with him. I could have just as easily stayed in the house on West Hill and let his influence on the space fade. Well, not just as easily; splitting the property tax with him was a smaller bill than rent would have been.
​
Either way, Nan felt she could improve my results with the right application of material components. So she started working out some ideas while I helped Sergei close up shop, and when I came down to the shop the next day she had a couple crystals set out and a few herbs in her mortar and pestle. We talked through my experience again, how I was connecting with time and what everything felt and smelled like, and she added a few more things from behind the counter and ground them up into a fine powder which she mixed with a little bit of water. She asked me to add a drop of my blood, which I did by picking at the scab from the day before, and she turned it into a fine paste which was gathered into a small bowl. She instructed me to try again, and use the paste to make my wave marking before I began, and gave me a different incense she thought would be slightly better. I thanked her, went to the meditation space, and tried again.

While Sergei and Nan worked in the front of the store, I spent some time in their meditation corner working on some of what I had learned from The Fates. After returning to the physical world, I had been unable to duplicate the results I’d had in the cave. This was to be expected; The Fates had warned me that it would be much harder to do as it was, and the impact of Matteson’s nature on my magic, even when he was away, was probably a factor I hadn’t adequately considered. But I had a new theory to work with that I couldn’t access time the way The Fates did, anyway, at least not outside of their help. The thread they gave me was a focus, but the means they used relied on their nature as spirits, which I didn’t have. After my conversation with Sergei this morning, Nan suggested that spirits have their own paths to magic, distinct from humans. And, since I relied on a type of elemental energy, I may need to reframe my attempts at time magic to something that could connect to my element.

“This,” she said, “would be very difficult for some elements, like earth, which is too rigid. But water? I think you’ll figure it out.” If that was the case, then maybe I shouldn’t be thinking of time as a tapestry the way they did. Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking about time as a thing at all. Maybe I should be thinking of it as a flow.

So I sat down in the meditative space, the thread woven into my hair, trying to commune with water and feel the flow of things not just through space, but through time. Nan had set an incense burning to help me, and I had a stone from the Ohio River in one hand and one from Lake Michigan in the other. I quieted my mind, and began seeking the flow.

I don’t know how long it took me, as I started to lose sense of nearly everything before it happened, but I finally felt something click. I opened my eyes and looked around. At first, nothing seemed different, until I turned my attention to the incense and saw the smoke frozen in place. I felt pressure building up on me, and I suspected that this was because I was trying to stand still. Here I was, meditating on flow, and when I finally slipped into it I was looking at a single moment instead of going with that flow. I tried to push backward, but the pressure was stronger that way. Going against the flow would be even harder. But I knew I could do it, if I just gave it a little more energy. I bit my thumb, hard, hard enough to draw blood, and used that bit of blood to paint waves on my forehead as I chanted. Slowly, I felt the pressure begin to ease, and I turned my attention to the smoke again. I stared at it, pushing, until the smoke started to curl downward toward the fire. It was slow going, but I was getting there. I was watching time in reverse!

I stood and continued pushing, and when I glanced back I saw myself sitting in place, eyes closed. I left myself behind and walked out of the meditative space into the shop at large, and watched Sergei walking backward toward the office while Nan pulled a crystal out of a paper bag, folded the bag, and put it under the counter under the warm gaze of a customer, who had coins floating up into her hand from a change purse. I watched, in absolute glee at the fact that it was working, before I suddenly felt the pressure hit me again and throw me forward.
​
I gasped as my eyes flew open and I dropped the stones. I checked my hand, and my thumb had a small droplet of fresh blood on it. But I was out of the trance, and it had proven that I could do this. Now I just needed to get better at 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.

My flight into Chicago landed shortly before dinner, so that evening was mostly spent catching up with Nan and Sergei. It wasn’t until morning, while we were all in the shop beneath their apartment, that I got to work. In the back room, I laid out the notes and images I’d brought, and showed them to Sergei.

“So Hecate is being bad now?” he asked, looking everything over.

“I don’t know. I know she wants something from me, but I don’t know what. I think it has to do with Matteson, but I don’t know why. And I know she’s willing to threaten or endanger me to get it.”

“But you don’t know how?”

“Oh no. I very clearly remember how.”

“Okay. So what you need is…what?”

“Well, there are a couple things. But the big one I would like from you, specifically, is your theory on Hecate taking on different names across history.” He gave me the biggest smile I can ever remember seeing from him.

“Oh yes,” he said, pointing at me as he started to jog for the stairs up to the apartment, “Yes, I have you.”

“It’s ‘I got you,’ Sergei.”

​“Also that!” he yelled, vanishing into the stairway. He was gone only a few minutes before returning with his large poster, which he had made attempting to lay out the whole timeline for me. “Okay,” he said, unrolling it on the table, “we start at beginning.”

There is a significant gap in my knowledge of Hecate's history. What I can say for certain is that she is the real goddess from ancient Greece, that she did not originate in Greece, and that she was also revered in Rome under the name Trivia. The former and latter facts are well-attested, and a host of epithets for her existed in both Grecian and Roman practice. ​Of her origin, however, little is known for certain. Historians with an eye toward mythology debate a Greek, Anatolian, or Egyptian source for her cult. I am inclined to believe she is of Anatolian origin, as the Egyptian theory seems circumstantial and her personal disdain for the other Greek deities as thieves and upstarts suggests to me that she was incorporated into that pantheon some time after both she and they formed. This is difficult to argue without pointing to personal contact with her, however, so it it a matter I can only share with a limited audience.

Sergei is a member of that audience, and remains convinced that she can be traced much farther through history. He notes that some Christian sects associated her with the spirit of salvation and gave her limited dominion over the world; I have not yet managed to help him understand the limited respect Wikipedia has in the academic world, and neither of us has searched for more information on this particular claim yet. But using that, he claims that she shares traits with various minor goddesses, demons, and folklore entities around the world for centuries afterward. His certainty of each of these claims varies, but there is one he is absolutely convinced about: that Hecate is the Devil at the Crossroads that appears in folklore surrounding blues musicians. His case is well-made in this instance, and it does seem difficult for me to believe that she would allow anyone else to claim dominion over the Crossroads, even just as a term for a deal. Many of these accounts do, admittedly, view the Devil at the Crossroads as male; but I have seen her present as male before. I'm not fully convinced that she is this devil, but I also can't assume she isn't.

What I do know is that, by the time I met her, she had begun selecting witches from around the world for direct training. Her exact standards are unknown, as are her goals. I don't know how many witches she has selected or even if she is teaching us all similar material. I have met a couple others at the Crossroads, on rare events when she decided to have us there at the same time. Through these interactions and her own off-handed comments I have pieced together that she has not selected any male witches for her training. She seems to show no preference regarding trans or cis women, and at least two witches I've met at the Crossroads over the years have been nonbinary.

Her demands on me, at least, are high. She has made it very clear that she expects me to become highly skilled at seeing and passing through the metaphysical realm. The latter is a skill I have yet to learn, but she promises that under her tutelage I will be able to open portals between realms and across space, maybe even across time. I don't know why I was selected for this specific set of skills, but I am deeply curious about what I can learn of magic and the metaphysical realm by traveling in this way.

Her claims that she has authority over individual Anchors and Warlocks is of some concern. John didn't seem to have any knowledge of her, and she seemed ignorant of his presence in my apartment until I mentioned him. If she rightfully has the dominion she claims, shouldn't she know them? Shouldn't she at least be aware of them? If she doesn't have that dominion, what happens if and when she tries to assert it? I've decided to do more research on her, at least partly to find out if any previous Anchors or Warlocks appear alongside her. As much as I may doubt some of Sergei's attempts to connect her to history, it is the only list of places to look that I can access. It may be educational to explore those claims, even if only to rule them out.

She is served directly by a dog, a great hound usually with jet black fur and red eyes. She has a deep animosity for ravens and reacts strongly when they are suggested as a symbol of any of her domains. I have seen other animals in the Crossroads, but do not know how many serve her directly. She has other symbols that appear frequently in the Crossroads and our training sessions, most commonly the key and the torch.

She has three faces, or possibly three selves, that never seem to face the same direction. I have seen at least a dozen different forms that she may take; she is gorgeous in every form, and most of them retain her threefold form, her distinct musculature, and her eastern Mediterranean complexion. She is sexually active to some degree with at least some of her followers, though personal experience on the matter is limited to very few incidents. Her variety of forms prevents me from making any statement on common aspects of these incidents.

​I have not seen her since the night I asked John to shield me from her call, and at this point I'm beginning to worry that I will not see her again.