At the Crossroads, in a clearing where the forest breathes with strange life, he encounters an imp offering a pact. Five vessels suspended in the air, pouring wine from two, rich and red as blood; and water from the other, clear and cold as the veins of the earth. The streams fall into a single vessel below, where it mingles into something new.

The man knows without being told that this cup is an offering and a binding. To partake is to accept the intermingling of life and death, pleasure and pain, memory and forgetting. It is a pact not written but enacted through the body. The thirst within him moves his hand and the liquids are consumed.

Time moved on. The Crossroads stood empty now, the two figures vanished, their choice sealed. The dirt path forked beneath a darkening sky, one road veering left, another right. No footsteps marked the ground, no witness remained to tell what had transpired. Yet in the still air lingered the echo of that choice, a faint residue of will the Crossroads had claimed. And farther on, down one shadowed branch of the path, another space waited.

The path leads to a garden. It is in this place that the pact made is revealed. Here he learns the nature of the path he has chosen: not a descent toward death alone, but a deeper calling to become its keeper, its intermediary, its speaker. Here, in the Garden, the man becomes a necromancer.

By tending the soil, by learning the slow language of root and bone, he undergoes the transformation. No crown is given; no title bestowed. The earth itself marks him. His hands, once clean, now carry the memory of the dead. His breath moves in rhythm with unseen currents beneath the soil. The pact is now fully known and fully accepted.

Beyond the Garden’s far edge, stone columns rose from the earth, a temple long hidden, its doors now standing open.

The man now bears the weight of earth in his limbs, the knowledge of cycles in his breath. He has become a vessel of what the Garden has taught.

In the chamber of initiation, beneath vaulted arches, he offered the severed head of a ram blood still fresh, tracing lines down strong forearms. This was no simple sacrifice. 

Through the high window of the temple, a single star burned against the dawn, the Morning Star, bright and watchful. A sign that what was offered here was seen beyond the mortal eye.