Pushing myself up from the crouching position I had been in, I looked across the ritual circle I had laid out one more time. Drawing it had been exhausting, quite a few of the details were fiddly, while others were supposed to be placed in such a way that I had to carefully move across the previously drawn lines to get to them. To make matters worse, I had decided to use a combination of bone dust and blood to make the lines, a combination that was rather prone to disturbance, forcing me to be extra cautious.

But with a few days of effort, I had managed to complete the circle and, hopefully, the ritual would allow Sabrina, Silva and me to contact Hecate and baptise Sabrina in Her name. From what I understood thus far, the ritual would normally call for a devout of the deity to perform the baptism but there wasn’t really one. The closest thing to one we had was Silva and while I well and truly loved my canine companion, she lacked certain necessary abilities to perform in this manner. Mostly, the ability to speak in a language Sabrina could understand, making any communication between the two of them rudimentary. I had little doubt that both would be able to communicate with Hecate, simply because deities had to be able to communicate with their followers, regardless of the form they took, but I wasn’t sure if a deity would want to play translator while inducting a follower.

Thus, I had altered parts of the ritual, not that there was a lot of the original left anyway, in an attempt to include me, as one Blessed by Hecate, in addition to the Silva, who I considered a follower of Hecate. The ritual itself was a bit of a mess, simply because I had taken a large part of a baptism ritual from the Grandmother’s book, added parts of the communication ritual I had used to get the book in the first place and rounded things out with a few patterns I had come across on Mundus before following my instincts to connect it all together.

The only reason I was somewhat confident that it would work was quite simple. Namely, I doubted the ritual was truly necessary to connect us. There had to be a relatively simple way for deities, or even beings who wanted to ascend to godhood, to get into contact with new followers, in order to get a new congregation started. If new congregations could only form due to missionary work, the spread of a deity’s following would be fairly difficult, to say nothing about the initial following. Unless Road to Purgatory, and the way it had introduced people to the system and the Asgardian and Olympian deities, was the norm, there had to be some way for new followers to contact them.

Sadly, I had come across nothing that would tell me either way during my journey on Mundus, but I had a feeling that was to be expected. I doubted any religion would want such information lying around, partially to keep people awed by the power of their deity and partially to keep the mystery going. Why worship a God if you know that the God simply had a lot more time to walk down their Path and thus knows more? You might look to them as an example to emulate, you might see them as a teacher to learn from but to worship them? Some people might do so, but I doubted it. Most would simply turn away, maybe look for a ‘real’ God to worship. Something unexplained and unexplainable, allowing the people to push responsibility for things outside their control onto that God. Thus, giving them an agent to appease if things went wrong in their lives, allowing them the illusion of control.

“Silva, Sabrina, it’s time,” I called out, after going over the ritual circle one more time. Soon, the first waning moon would rise, a time of new beginnings, with the darkness still holding prevalence but the moon and its light gaining prominence. It was, to my reckoning, the best time to hold the ritual, uniting both major components of the lunar that were important to Hecate.

Both my companions appeared, Sabrina looking a little tired while Silva briefly sniffed the ritual circle before carefully stepping into her position. Given that I hadn’t actually told her where to go, nor completely explained how I had set the ritual up, I felt that her understanding was a good sign. If my ritual was coherent enough for her to decipher, it might just work as I intended it to, even without the need to brute-force things.

All three of us sat down in the circle centred around an image of Hecate I had made. Given that she was the Goddess of Magic, I had formed the statue out of conjured Ice, trying to make it as dense and hard as possible. Doing so had been a rather curious experience, while I had an image in my mind when I began, the final result didn’t quite match the image. It wasn’t so much that I hadn’t been able to form the Ice according to my will but that it had felt as if the image I had in mind didn’t quite fit. I had felt similar sensations of rightness before, but only when it came to magic. There were ideas and images that just seemed to click, mostly when trying to create runic formations or manipulating my magic directly to do something. Never when it came to the image of something external or something as complex as a three-faced statue. Sure, a runic formation could be highly complex but it was a different sort of complexity. No, there had been something odd going on when I created the statue, something I couldn’t explain rationally but I had a suspicion what it might have been.

Divine Inspiration, quite literally, which made me both intrigued and somewhat scared.

If a deity could nudge me into producing a more fitting image of Her, what else could She do to me? I didn’t like the loss of control, minor as it had been, but at the same time, I was fascinated by the potential there. Hopefully, the inspiration I had received would mean the statue would allow the ritual circle to work as intended.

One after the other, the three of us took our positions with only minimal fidgeting on Sabrina’s part. Each of the small circles we were in was set between two faces of Hecate, mine was between the face of the Mother and the Crone, Sabrina was situated between Maiden and Mother and lastly, Silva sat between the Crone and the Maiden.

On my signal, all three of us started to channel Astral Power into the circle, working steadily in an attempt to have our power mingle together, so the circle’s power would be made up of all three of us. At the same time, I reached into myself and searched that faint sensation I had experienced when feeling Silva’s power, the divine power she borrowed from Hecate. The same power that had given me my blessing of the Moon, allowing me to withstand some of the Sun’s cursed light.

Finding that power, I gently nudged at it, trying to form some of my Astral Power into that same pattern, just like I knew Silva was channelling some of the Divine Power she borrowed from Hecate into the circle. The idea was that the power would serve as a beacon, allowing us to connect with Her, or maybe to connect Her to the image I had created.

Feeling for the power within the ritual circle, I waited until it reached the point of saturation, allowing the circle to activate and hopefully to work as intended.

Around us, the air seemed to freeze as the power we had channelled into the circle reached out, infusing the idol I had created. Chanting in as steady a voice as I could, I called upon Hecate, beseeching Her to speak to us.

For a long, seemingly endless, moment nothing happened.

And then, it was as if the world blinked, suddenly, the idol in the middle of our circle wasn’t just Ice any longer. I could still faintly feel the Astral Power I had used to create it, but it was no longer my Astral Power.

No, it was something more, something far beyond anything I could create, something easily equal in power to the greatest and most terrifying things I had ever experienced on Mundus. A being that, despite lacking any physically intimidating features, was easily as scary as the Bound Titan or the gigantic form of the Nidhögg.

Before us, clad in impenetrable shadows of the endless void, glowing with the faint light of the waning moon, stood a Goddess. Looking at me with a mischievous gaze, eyes shining with the mysteries of untold ages, lips curled into an amused smile, stood Hecate.