cant help you now

While you have been so hard at work, my dear Raven, I’ve been making strides in my meditation practice. The breakthrough was to stop fighting my tendency to view things through a mathematical lens. It turns out the subject matter is so deeply ingrained in me that it serves as a useful symbol set for my subconscious to speak and interact.

Seriously, I built a tulpa that was the abstract manifestation of a social graph traversal algorithm. I found one of my dad’s old schoolmates using a hint it retrieved. I was so fucking impressed with myself.

Anyway, this isn’t about that. This is about a time I thought my world was ending or had ended, but it turned out you were just fucking with me.

I was at my place. Silence and incense are very important for my practice, such as it is. I had performed a banishment and taken my time in visualising various tools I have been experimenting with. My plan was pathwork, investigating the good old tree of life because I felt intuitively that understanding the Sepirot would come to me far more naturally than the paths I knew you had taken. So once I was calm, focused, in a state of flow (to use my private vernacular) I opened myself to foundational Yesod.

There was a strange man in front of me.

There passed one of those moments where everything feels like it lurches sideways. I knew I knew him, but I’d never seen him before in my life. I knew he was powerful and dangerous from how concrete he appeared before me unbidden: vaguely piratical in blousy shirt, dark hair pulled back, subtle pattern of facial hair marking attention to his mouth in that oval face. His inclined head shaded his eyes but I felt lethal danger eminating: an intent-to-kill I’ve only really seen once before.

That should have been my hint.

He stepped into my living room from a notional distance and strode unhurriedly towards my circle. I knew with certainty that it would provide no barrier.

Feeling something wrong I did what you once advised me to do and pronounced my name. The intruder smirked and took another step.

With horror I realised that I could feel myself being drawn to him. Like he were a magnet and his pull, present right from the start, grew stronger with each step. So I drew the big guns and pronounced your name.

The only reaction was that I got to see his fangs when he grinned. “She can’t help you now.”

And that was… I cannot express to you the sense of calamity. I thought… God, I don’t know what I thought. That this man who had your eyes had done something awful. He felt like my downhill.

I launched fucking everything at him, even as he stepped over the circle. A circular tool representing infinite recursion scythed through him without interacting, though I felt its full meaning and import flow across my sensorium. I traced a circuit diagram symbol for ground, a habit from childhood I have imbued with a dispel/halt intent. Nothing. I drew on somatic reflexes of extreme violence and he merely stood right in front of me.

Fuck if I was going to give him an inch of ground, such was my incalculable, inchoate, idiotic fury.

His face, close enough to kiss, changed to an amused crooked smile that felt very familiar. “Andrew. Am I so different like this?”

I stared and stared. Slowly it clicked into place. I recalled your talking about various dualities in your soul, ages ago. I pieced it together. Why your name didn’t work. Why my name didn’t work—he already owned it. Why he was my downhill.

“You absolute… cowbag,” I pronounced. The stranger I knew so intimately laughed like he’d pulled the best prank. “You bastard collection of twatbadgers. What the actual fuck, Raven?! You gave me a fucking heart attack!”

You laughed so hard you staggered to the side, your image flickering between this male aspect I now call Crow and the familiar female aspect I generally consider myself privileged to call Raven—although at this moment I had choice other names for you too.

Seeing you relaxed something in me but I will still thrumming with adrenaline. I cracked a disbelieving smile, throwing my arms around for want of a better way to express my disbelief.

You were on the fucking ground, though, somehow managing to get out of breath even in an astral projection. “Your face!” You laughed so hard you croaked. “You should have more faith in me, Andrew!”