A Hundred Thresholds

**CONTENT WARNINGS: MENTAL ILLNESS, SUBSTANCE USE, MENTIONS OF ABUSE, ALLUSIONS TO SELF HARM AND SUICIDE**

Between the name and the thing lies an abyss as wide as the universe.

– Marty Rubin

Names have power. Folklore says you should never tell the fair-folk your name, for it gives them power over you. Others say we’re born with two names – the one the world knows, and our true name, known to the universe and maybe ourselves. The Egyptian goddess Isis, upon learning of the sun-god Ra’s true name gained complete control over him. True names are central to religious invocation, traditions of magic, and mysticism. They say that a true name is more than a moniker – it’s something that can reveal our true nature.

Everyone has a name. It’s something we grapple with, something we mold ourselves into, or something we change to suit who we become. In the end, we’re all searching for our true natures, using any tools at our disposal: religion, philosophy, tarot cards, runes, history, psychology, astrology, numerology – the list goes on. I’ve searched, I’ve questioned, I’ve pleaded, I’ve begged. All I’ve found are more questions. All I hear is static and silence, the barest whisper of names, and the stories they write.

I. The Fool, or Genesis

Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.

– Neil Gaiman, Coraline

In the beginning, there is a name. Michelle, from the French Michel, which is from Michael, which itself is from the Hebrew Mikha’el: who is like God? Yes, the question mark and all. It carries weight, responsibility, and she doesn’t know what her parents intended for her.

What she does know is that Michael is an archangel, the leader of the heavenly army against Satan in Revelations. The patron of soldiers, for people who adhere to those beliefs. She knows it’s her father’s name, and she knows her mother would have preferred a son. She knows there’s a Beatles song bearing the same name, released in 1965. She knows this not because she likes the Beatles, but because she can’t escape the schoolyard teasing. She thinks the only place she doesn’t hear the grating lyrics that feel like they could make her ears bleed, the melody that makes her want to claw off her skin, rip her face from her skull until there’s nothing left of her to see, is in her dreams. Michelle decides in first grade that she hates The Beatles, and that her parents really should have thought their naming process through a little better.

In the beginning, there’s innocence, blissful ignorance – The Fool, a carefree vagabond with the sun at their back, one foot over the edge of the precipice of a new adventure. It’s the first card in the major arcana, the cards that represent major points on life’s journey. They’re unconcerned with, and hopeful for, the future. Michelle wishes she could be too.

She’s not afraid of heights, but she’s afraid of falling. So, she stubbornly ignores the precipice, and writes stories to cast a glamour over the world that’s waiting for her to make the leap. She writes herself into whatever she thinks the world expects. She finds solace in the silence, hidden away in her room enveloped in the comforting curls of steam, the scent of black tea and bergamot, the softness of the blanket her mother made her for Christmas. She builds forts out of pillows, defends them with a foam sword from dragons, knights and magic fire.

But every wall has cracks. The world trickles in, like water over rocks it smooths out the edges that cut through the mundane. She grows, she changes, she thinks she can venture out into reality. Then the cracks become gaping chasms, and of the flood of the world cannot be stemmed.

In the beginning, she tries to change, to mould herself into what those around her want. She can’t get it right. Every encounter she reforges herself, but she’s clumsy: the hammer and heat of the forge are not her native tongue, and she breaks all the pieces holding herself together. She falls apart. Again, and again, and again. Too much, not enough, too loud, too quiet, too fast, too slow, too strong, too weak. Never a happy medium.

In the beginning, she loses herself in a vicious cycle of changing to please people all too happy to leave her in the dust. She puts her trust in the wrong places, wrong people, and pays the price.

Forcibly.

It’s a painful downfall. A monster wearing the mask of a friend grabs her, prying what should be hers to give away from her trembling fingers and leaves her clawing at her own skin to rid herself of the crawling sensation that failed to cease when his hands left her body. She thinks she should have seen it coming. That she should have stopped it. Tears fall, hot rivulets worming their way down her cheeks in anger, frustration, fear and shame.

His footsteps fade into the distance as she’s hurled from the precipice of the dream into the harsh sunlight of reality.

The final pieces of herself that she’s held onto – hope and innocence – shatter like glass when she lands, the sound of a thousand diamond-like shards of crystal falling to the cold, unforgiving pavement like a cacophonous chime that her ears alone can hear. The sound fades with her sense of self, the security she once held in her own body that now feels as if it has betrayed her.

The Fool has a dog at their heels, excitedly leaping towards them, ready to embark on the adventure together. It’s white: the colour of purity and innocence.

All Michelle hears is the roar of a beast in the distance. She thinks a shadow in the shape of great wings passes overhead, shrouded in a sickly yellow fog. She wishes she knew its name, but she’s hurled across the threshold before she can ask, the door slamming shut in her wake.

II. The Chariot, or Exodus

She begins to wonder at the importance of a name at all. The very idea will begin to lose its meaning, the way a word does when said too many times, breaking down into useless sounds and syllables.

– V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

If there’s anything Shae has ever been good at, it’s looking for answers. Still, this is the last place she wants to find herself, staring at painfully ordinary, off-the-Ikea-shelf artwork, and asking herself pointless questions.

Why are the walls always taupe?

Why are the chairs always a deep green, faux leather that creaks too loudly whenever she shifts slightly in her seat?

She runs through everything she knows about colours in her mind, trying to quell the anxiety that rises through trembling fingers and shaking breaths.

Green symbolizes growth, earth tones like taupe are meant to ground you.

It’s not working.

It is, however, a far sight better than the blinding white of the office walls that she’s led to after a tense exchange of pleasantries – nervous on her part, met with clipped, cold, professional greeting glossed over by a thin veneer of a smile that doesn’t reach the other woman’s eyes. Shae supposes it’s meant to be a passing appearance of sympathy and warmth.

This, too, isn’t working.

The walls inside the office are white, a symbol of purity – or at least a poor attempt at making the tiny space seem larger than a generously apportioned walk-in closet.

It’s an unlikely place to find the knowledge Shae seeks, to answer the questions she has about the shadow of the beast living in her home. She can’t tell if the chill in the air is a product of her imagination, a draft from the large windows overlooking the city from three storeys up, or if the woman across from her is actually just that cold.

Honestly? It could be all three.

The woman, in her freshly pressed skirt suit and blouse, tells Shae she’s a Rebel – capital R, Jungian archetypal, Rebel – that all she wants is to change the world and that the best thing for her to do is just to go off to university, that everything will get better when she has room to spread her wings.

Shae is very glad she’s not paying for this appointment.

They don’t see each other again. And six months later, Shae finds herself in a new place, and the amorphous, hulking shadow is still clinging to the walls of her apartment. She wonders how long it will be until the small one-bedroom flat is perpetually shrouded in darkness.

For a little bit she felt free. She could forget everything – the stifling control of her mother, the ravages of teenagers and their need to poke, and prod, and tear open old wounds all the while creating new ones to match, the nausea she’d feel every time she remembered breath on the nape of her neck, the hands that would grab and pull and send her plummeting into the abyss. She could forget that she was running, like a coward.

The Chariot is the seventh card in the major arcana. It is a force of will, forward motion, self-discipline and progress. It also signifies sacrifice. Depicted by a chariot, steered by a rider with no reins to guide the two horses that draw it. Sometimes they’re lions. Sometimes neither. They’re supposed to represent Will and Strength, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict. Shae doesn’t think she has any strength left, and her will is quickly dwindling.

She sleeps with the lights on for months. No matter how deep she goes into the bottles, no matter how many cigarettes she smokes while overlooking the city lights from across the harbour, she couldn’t escape. The smoke fills her lungs as surely as the memories fill her head, and the city lights blur into nothing but gaussian reflections on waters that, even at their roughest, were calmer than her mind could ever be.

Cold brine mingles with the wind that whips her hair into a frenzy, biting through the felt of her coat. Shae has long since lost the feeling in her fingers, replaced instead with numbness that turns her fingers white and blue. The phone she’s holding slips to the ground, but she can scarcely bring herself to care. The city is lit up before her, skyscrapers piercing the twilit horizon like a beacon calling her home. She considers throwing herself into the ocean instead but shakes the thought from her mind. The waves crash upon the pier, and she wonders where it all went wrong.

The realization begins to dawn that she had run fast, but by God she had not run far enough. She feels stifled, even when she opens the windows to listen to the wind rustling and whispering its song through the trees, letting the petrichor in to mingle with the smell of freshly brewed coffee that’s been growing cold for longer than she’d care to admit.

The vibrant green, the rolling waves, and the expansive canopies that shield her from the rain begin to lose their appeal after a year. Shae dredges up the old advice, she casts off the dust and goes off to university – transfers to a new city, a new program. Surely this will fix her, the all-knowing sage in her infinite wisdom had told her so, while looking down her perfectly carved nose with withering hazel eyes that betrayed her desire to cast Shae from the office, no better armed against the monsters than when she’d arrived.

Her exodus is not God’s deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt. She had no Moses to guide her and part the sea that threatened to swallow her if she waded out too deep. Rather, it was the flight of a startled bird, the path of a lone wolf, the vagabond who searches for sustenance and meaning in seemingly random, yet familiar, places. She returns to the forge, so long forgotten, to pick up the hammer and melt down her chains, link by link, yard by yard, until she has something she can reforge into steel bones, into scales, into claws.

She wonders if Shae is any name for a warrior.

She doesn’t wonder at the fact that the advice has failed her again.

She doesn’t flinch when it fails her through five more apartments, in four more cities, in two more provinces. It doesn’t tarnish the armour that she’s forged out of her past. But the shadow grows. It’s so big that Shae can’t believe no one has noticed it living with her, staining her walls soot black. Silver claws rake at her skin, leaving jagged, angry scars that bleed crimson. Shae wonders if one day those claws will finally tear her apart, eat her alive, armour and all. She wonders if anyone will notice then, when the shadowy wings carry her away.

So, she packs her bags, sets one foot over the crumbling threshold, and locks the door behind her.

III. The Fable of a Raven

No one knew my name, and my anonymity was at time a raw joy in my chest, freedom at its most literal, while at others, a source of paralyzing fear.

– Sheridan Hay, The Secret of Lost Things

The Raven’s wings are not made of wax, they would not melt from flying too close to the sun. But they are the glistening black of obsidian after the rain, and they will disappear into the night.

Raven symbolism is complex – an ill omen, a portent of death and loss, but also a figure of prophecy, insight, magic and the spirit realm. In the Bible they are used to convey the image of God’s provision in the Old and New Testaments. They are associated with Odin in Norse mythology, with Badb and Morrigan in Celtic mythology, in both cultures they are seen in folklore of battle and warfare. In the Qur’an, a raven shows Cain how to bury his murdered brother, Abel. In certain Indigenous cultures in North America, the raven is the Creator, as well as a trickster.

After all that, Raven still doesn’t know what she’s meant to live up to. She doesn’t know if she can. In a way, she tries to do it all – be the fighter, the harbinger of bad luck, the mystic, the selfless altruist.

Ultimately, she’s not good at any of it.

The one thing she’s got, however, is flight. Not literally, perhaps, but it’s close enough. She learns there’s different ways to fly – sometimes it’s through pulsing music that echoes in her bones, while her brown eyes are so wide, splayed open so they’re nearly black, riding waves of flashing neon lights through ancient streets that begin to feel all too familiar beneath boot clad feet. Other times, she falls through herself, so deep that she emerges on the other side and must claw her way back. Fifteen minutes that feel like a lifetime, or a week that feels like fifteen minutes.

It doesn’t matter.

She downs the pills and doesn’t have to feel like her, doesn’t have to feel like she’s dying with every breath. She swallows the alcohol and can feel numb, can feel free.

A first century scholar believed that the raven released from Noah’s Ark is a symbol of vice.

Raven thinks the entire Bible thing is bullshit, but maybe Philo of Alexandria got this one right. She hasn’t come down in three days and it’s the closest she’s gotten to any of the symbolism of her namesake. And she plunges headlong into it. Day turns to night as she takes another drink, another drag of the cigarette, another line of white powder, and finally she spreads her wings. She’ll take to the night like she owns in, letting the colours and the music wind around her like a gentle caress. These roads she walks are familiar to her, it’s all easy smiles, empty promises murmured under strobing lights. The night feels alive, and she drinks it all in. There’s only the slick black dance floor beneath her feet, the drug-fuelled fire racing through her friends, and easy companions that will come and go as easily as the wind.

She plummets to earth as the sun rises, the aches in her bones not comparing to the ones in her soul and all Raven wants is for the moon to rise again so she can numb everything. Looking at the pastel smeared sky, she wonders if it would be better to find a more permanent solution.

She figures it’s better this way, lying on her bathroom floor, the cool tile doing little to combat the fire that races through her veins, with a two-six of rum and a bottle of pills. If she’s a portent of death, it might as well be her own.

Somewhere in the distance, a door opens. Maybe death will come tonight. Maybe it’ll take her mind, her body, her form, her soul. Maybe it’ll just take her name and nature. Maybe she’ll find one of the gods her namesake has always been bound to. Maybe it’ll be just as simple as never waking up.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe she doesn’t actually want to leave.

Something cold and rough coils around her neck, the shadows darker than her wings had ever been. Raven thinks it’s scaled, like a snake, a reptile. A tail. The beast hasn’t left after all.

It brings her back down to earth, and all she can feel is the world shifting around her in a kaleidoscope of colours, the cold tile pressing into her cheek as she lies helpless and alone on the floor, and it’s like she’s standing a million miles outside her own body as darkness claims her.

The Raven’s wings are not made of wax, they will not melt from flying too close to the sun. The feathers and bone, however, will not hesitate to burn up in the atmosphere when they come crashing back to earth.

IV. The Fable of a Spider

A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name.

– Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

This time, she didn’t so much step through the door, as collapse across the threshold. Honestly, she can’t even be sure she’s alive. Allegra just goes through the motions, the hollow emptiness begging to be filled. Sometimes she gives in, but not today. Today she’s content to sit inside, watching the snow pile up in fluffy drifts around her house as she sips tea and loses herself in the fantasy she weaves on the pages strewn across her blankets. She’s tucked her feet beneath her, forgoing her desk to stay instead on her bed. She could have been here for days. She doesn’t remember the last time she stepped outside. There’s no reason to anyways. Without school, without a job, she’s adrift. Out to sea without an anchor, it’s only the four walls of her room that keep her grounded. How long can one continue like this, she often wonders, before they go insane? Or has she already lost touch with reality?

Most days, Allegra feels like she moves as a puppet on strings. On the days when she can’t get out of bed, she feels like she’s trapped in a spider web.

She thinks she might be the only one who realises just how ironic this is. A shaman pulled a card for her once. Well, at least they interpreted the card she pulled from the deck. A spirit animal, and every time she remembers, Allegra wonders if she could really have one at all – they were not her traditions, not her beliefs, they didn’t belong to her nor she to them. But she pulled the card anyways.

It had been a spider.

To the shaman that offered her the deck the spider is the one who gifted their people with language, with writing.

Allegra stares at the notes in front of her, the pages of tight, neat script, and supposes the shaman might have been right.

It doesn’t mean she likes feeling trapped in the web.

That night, not for the first time, she wonders if this web is the Universe’s doing – not God’s because there’s no way He exists, not in her life (“God and I had a disagreement,” she’d told her pastor bluntly) – or if she’s simply trapped herself in the fear, the lies, the anxiety.

Some days she tries to take a step back, to look at the web she lives in. Allegra decides she much prefers the ones she weaves of her own will. It takes a closer look to realise she is not at the center.

It isn’t hers.

She’s merely an observer, wrapped in silk, waiting to be consumed by the monster that wove the tapestry. The bonds on her wrists and ankles are tight, the thread so thin that it bites deep into her already scarred skin. If she could only make it to the door…

The monster turns to face her, with eyes that glow like dying embers. When it grins, all she sees is the flashing row of razor-sharp teeth.

It is no spider that has trapped her in this web.

V. Queen of Swords

I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.

– Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

It’s exhilarating, setting out. Snow crunches underfoot as Autumn makes her way to the airport, the only belongings she has left packed neatly in her suitcase that leaves trails behind her in the powder. She hasn’t stopped to question herself since she started planning this move.

She can’t afford to.

If she stops to think, she’ll realise how close this is to going home – something she swore she’d never do.

When the plane touches down hours later, she breathes in the fresh island air, a smile on her face for the first time in a long time. This is it. For now, at least.

The monster flashes its teeth, beats its wings, and lashes its tail, but Autumn ignores it.

She keeps ignoring it for months. It’s easier to do with her heart walled off. Easier to simply use her head, to wield intellect like a sword. Eventually it seems to disappear, and the shadows retreat.

Maybe she should have heeded the warning in the cards: are you letting your head lead where your heart should tread instead? Are you too cold? Too calculating?

Maybe if she’d listened, she wouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t be with a man who wanted to protect her, to force her to protect herself, to make her stronger.

Is that what this is?

One moment she’s drinking, watching TV on the too-small bed, wrapped in a too-large scarf. The next, she’s hanging upside down, smelling the sharp, smoky tang of the whiskey that’s been spilled on the floor. Autumn thinks she could count the grain of the wooden floor over which she’s suspended, desperately trying to steady herself before she falls. But he wouldn’t let her, right? She tightens the grip her legs have around the man’s neck. Too trusting.

Is this love?

Hands reach up to force her ankles to loosen the hold they have, and the floor rushes to meet her. A howl of agony bursts from her throat as she curls into herself on the floor, holding her neck. The man simply laughs, before it turns into a snarl as he berates her.

The words don’t really make it into her brain, though, as the searing lances of pain that shoot from her sternum to her neck block everything else out. She grits her teeth as she sits up, a little voice reminding her she should be thankful that she didn’t break her neck when he’d dropped her on the old wooden floor. The sting of his palm makes her ears ring and the world spin as he turns and disappears to another part of the house.

She should leave. Run. Find somewhere safe, somewhere beyond his grasp. But the world hasn’t stopped spinning, and she doesn’t know where she’d go anyways.

She crawls into bed.

When the sun rises, Autumn opens her eyes, and sits up.

She regrets it immediately as the world flips upside down. She can barely lift her arms to pull on a t-shirt, but it still takes her three days to drag herself to the hospital.

Autumn tells them she fell. She doesn’t tell them she can barely move. She doesn’t tell them what caused her vertigo. She goes home and gets yelled at for going to the hospital in the first place.

She should’ve known to cut off the wristband first.

Previously, she thought the shadows were letting her be. She’d been wrong. They simply found a new ally. The next time she looks at the man – who is already deep in a bottle of vodka – she thinks she can see the traces of shadows and scales running along his flesh.

The months wear on, and the only safe place is her dreams. She finds herself wishing she could sleep forever. Autumn avoids her reflection like the plague, drowns herself in work and alcohol, and hey, did you know that opium poppies grow naturally all over the island? It takes the fog in her head the next morning to make her realise she’s lost her will, and her sword along with it.

It takes only a heartbeat for her to gather the sliver of courage to go off in search of it.

She hasn’t been to the forge in years, it’s not easy to go back, to pull out every knife in her back, every barbed word, and every link of chain the world had used to bind her, to try and smelt it down into something useable. When she’s done, her bags are packed, eyes glistening but dry – she doesn’t have anything left. What she’s left with is more of a dagger than a sword, but it’s a start.

Autumn sets out without a word, and if she continues to walk down the street with furtive glances over her shoulder for another year, no one mentions it.

The Queen of Swords: intellect, independence, insight, reliability. A suit governed by air. Autumn thinks it’s fitting as she takes a deep breath – it doesn’t hurt anymore. She dumps all of the liquor in the house down the drain on her way out. It’s probably spite, since she knows it won’t fix him. But that’s not her job anyways.

She wonders if that beast of shadow and blood awaits her beyond the next door, or the one after, or the one after that. Maybe the next time she sees it, she’ll have the courage to look it in the face.

VI. Temperance

Names are strange and special gifts. There are name you give to yourself and names you show to the world, names that stay for a short while and names that remain with you forever, names that come from things you do and names that you receive as presents from other people. If your name is true, it is who you are.

– Michael Dorris, Morning Girl

Temperance. The fourteenth card in the major arcana. Balance, moderation, art. Healing. Normally Sen would laugh at something that sounds too much like wall-art that a suburban soccer mom with bottle blonde hair, a white picket fence, and two and a half kids would put above her designer sofa. But laughing now would probably just trigger the anxiety attack she’s barely keeping in check as she looks out over the dusty hills, as a sagebrush rolls comically across the road. Besides, if she were being honest with herself, those were all things she strived to have, to become.

The sky is red from the fires and smoke, even in the dead of night. It’s unsettling, and unsettling familiar. She’d tried so hard to quash down everything from her past, and yet… here she was.

Home.

She still knew every street, every turn.

She remembered where her best friend used to live, where she’d run to when bullied and betrayed, where she’d sit to daydream of a land far away. If she wanted to, she could find her way to the waterfall where she’d had her first kiss, or to the house of the man that had robbed her of innocence and autonomy.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

She tried to focus on the changes instead of the sameness. When she’d left this place the first time, it had been a bad break. It had healed badly. The wound had festered in fear, in flashbacks, in an impossible quest to regain what had been taken from her.

Coming back was the only way to set it right – to break everything all over again so she could heal properly this time. She’d accepted she couldn’t get back what that man had taken from her. She couldn’t take back the hurtful words and insults hurled at her teenage self. She couldn’t undo the damage she’d thought herself too weak to prevent, nor could she regain the years lost to a drug-fuelled haze. She couldn’t mend the hearts she’d broken, or the rifts she’d torn open.

But she could try again. She could get it right.

Sen might not believe in herself, or her ability, or her future, but she did believe she owed it to herself to try.

It takes a year and a half, at least, but slowly the world begins to right itself. She’s finding the balance point. No, scratch that, they’re finding the balance point. After all, Sen had never been wholly one thing or the other, always existing in shades of grey instead of black and white. Why should their gender be an exception?

A smile cracks chapped lips. It’s the first certainty they’ve had in years. It’s the first time the shadow that lies beyond the door doesn’t give them any pause at all. There is only darkness beyond the threshold, but within the abyss they finally see what they’ve been running from this whole time.

Sen stares, and the dragon stares back.

It has been waiting all this time, after all.

VII. Judgement

But we aren’t defined by the names we carry or the religion we practice, or the nation whose flag flies over our heads. I know that now. We’re defined by who we are in our hearts, who we choose to be on this earth.

– Kristin Harmel, The Book of Lost Names

Darkness always makes them start to look back, to revisit the past. But looking back is painful. It comes to them unbidden, in waves of emotions, words ringing in their ears. So, they hide themselves behind new names that become new masks.

They can’t keep on like this.

They know.

They must face their judgement and discard the masks that keep them chained to the past. They always thought it was armour. Perhaps instead it was the cage they built for themselves.

So, they face the abyss, the feelings, and ride the tide of memory that threatens to overwhelm them.

A rumble from within that shakes them to the core. The dragon is laughing. It’s all they can do to stare at the beast, and they realise that it’s the first time they’ve really done so. After everything they’ve been through together – curled up next to each other under the covers, on the cold bathroom floor, in the throes of ecstasy where reality begins to slip from one’s grasp into the neon night, in the darkness where claws rake with unwanted touch and a simple breath burns the very skin it touches – they’ve never really looked at the eyes smouldering like coals, the black scales streaked with deep crimson and glittering gold, the blood on its silver claws, the long tail and rows of glittering, razor-sharp teeth.

They think the being is actually kind of beautiful.

The more they stare, the more they relax. The more they understand. Two and a half decades in a battle of attrition and all either of them wants is peace. There is nothing to fear anymore. No need for swords, or magic, or cages. Because as much as this dragon knows them, inside and out, so too do they know it. And knowing is their greatest blessing.

“I don’t want to fight you anymore,” their voice is smaller than they wished.

The dragon approaches, bowing until its head is level with theirs, “What, then, will you do? You have tried it all, have you not? Fighting, escaping, destroying yourself to rid yourself of me, all of the drugs to make you forget. What is it you want?”

Its voice is a deep, melodious hum, like hundreds of voices chanting in an abandoned cathedral. It sings in their very bones. When they speak, they feel that the dragon already has the answer.

“I’m here because I wanted to sleep forever. To never wake up. To never cross another threshold. To never have to make another choice. To never feel like I’m something that doesn’t belong,” tears threaten to spill as the words pour forth, “But that’s not really true, is it? Deep down, I’ve always wanted to live. But I wanted to live without knowing you. So now I’m here, to know the truth of who you are. I’ve searched for your name, tried calling you so many different things …”

“Do you really not know my name?” the beast seems almost amused.

They shake their head, “I’ve always known, haven’t I? Trying to live without you is like living with only half of myself.”

The dragon doesn’t have to answer.

The wings stretch out into the void, and they can pick out thousands of pinpricks of light against the leathery canopy. Staring up at those tiny stars, all of their masks shatter.

VIII. The Fool, Reprised

You never wanted this, no. But I’m afraid you absolutely did choose it. In a hundred ways, at a hundred thresholds, you pressed on. You sought knowledge relentlessly, and you always chose to see. Our world is made of choices, [...] and very rarely do we truly know what any of them mean, but we make them nonetheless.

- Elias Bouchard, The Magnus Archives

In the beginning, there was a name. There were many beginnings that followed it. Many endings, some nearly more final than others.

Maybe we don't always want the life we live. Maybe what we choose is unconscious more often than it's conscious. But we can choose to stop at the end of a chapter, at the end of a story. Or we can choose to keep writing, even without a destination in mind. There's always another threshold. Another door to open that may lead to more than questions than answers.

I'm not afraid of opening doors anymore.

I'm not afraid of the story I'm writing, nor all the ones that came before.

I'm not afraid of the dragon, because that is what has allowed me to fly.

Sometimes, when I meditate, I find myself in a room full of mirrors. The faces that look back at me are the same, with only the slightest differences to distinguish them. There was a time when I wanted to bury them all, leave them in the dust or lock them away, bar the door and throw away the key. I was ashamed. I was scared. I didn’t know what to tell them. Now, finally, I think I do.

“I’m not going to run anymore,” my voice is steady, calm, “I’m not going to bury the past. I didn’t think I’d make it to today, and I know you all didn’t think I would either. But we did. Despite our best efforts. Despite the world’s best efforts.”

A deep breath.

“The dragon isn’t a beast to be feared. I’ve made my peace with it. I’ve made peace with myself. And I forgive it, and you, and myself. We’re finally free.”

It is a small comfort, but it is enough.

The dragon is quiet, small enough to curl its unfathomable weight around my shoulders. One day, beyond many more thresholds, it may grow too large again. But I will face it, and like the voice that beckons me into the uncertain future, I will call it by name.

“Elias.”