V. Echoes
She Who Stood in the Flash
The Mythic Crossing
In the ancient north, the seers who sought vision did not seek warmth or comfort or the company of those who might confirm what they hoped to find. They sat alone on the platforms of the dead, in the dark, in the cold, in the particular silence of a place that has been stripped of everything except what is actually there. They were not tortured. They were simply deprived of everything that ordinarily stands between a person and their own reflection, and what remained, when all the ordinaries were gone, was the self — plain, unmediated, exactly as it was.
The flash comes for those who have stopped arranging themselves against it.
The Traveler’s Record
I stood on the flat ground and the lightning came without warning. My first impulse was to brace — to compose myself into the posture of someone being observed, to arrange the outline that would appear on the ground into something more coherent, more intentional, than what I actually was. I have been bracing for as long as I can remember.
I did not brace. I do not know why. Perhaps the charge in the air had been building long enough that the muscles responsible for bracing had simply given out before the flash arrived. Perhaps the depth itself had stripped the readiness from me before I noticed.
The flash came. My outline appeared on the ground. I looked at it for the full duration of the flash, which is to say for one breath, which is to say for exactly as long as the truth is visible before the dark returns. The dark returned. I did not revise what I had seen.
— A History of the Great Wheel and the Ten Gates
For the psychological mechanics and traps of this gate, see V. Echoes in A Wanderer’s Guide to the Gates →