The Crossroads

"Please." I begged with tears running down my face and and choking the back of my throat. Sinking both hands into the dirt, I let it pour back out between the fingers of my clenched fists, "Please! I'll give you anything! Please! Please!"

I knelt there in the dust for hours, at the crossing between Brillkurk and Auriston, pleading with the empty road beneath a moonless sky.

On my hands and knees I begged until my tears ran dry and and my voice went hoarse.

Then, having abandoned what last shred of hope I had, I rose and turned to leave.

"I can do it, you know." Announced a voice and I spun back to find a Ruellan woman standing at the center of the crossroads. With a flick of her wrist and a clack of metal she lifted a tiny flame to the tube of paper hanging from between her lips. The sudden light framed her face with ominous shadows as she looked at me over the brim of dark spectacles and let out a long, rich curl of smoke.

"I can do it." She said again, her lips curling at one corner into a wry, vulpine smirk. "But you're not gonna like the pricetag."

Tidus Ala
Secret Confessions

Kneeling in the Dark

There is no one, true way to contact the Crossroads. Sometimes it involves kneeling at a specific crossing of two paths, others it's a ritually prepared token buried at any crossing at all, still other times a person merely sleeping next to a crossing receives a visitation in their dreams. All that we know for certain is that in times of desperation, a man can always go to the Crossroads - and that no man should ever be so desperate as to do so.

Not even the most learned wizards in the Vennican Order, nor the great professors of Ruelle, nor even the Lich Queen of The Siegenthal herself can say what, exactly, the Crossroads is. Some think it is a powerful, fiendish lord, a dark god, or even something from beyond the confines of reality. No matter Their nature, the Crossroads are always willing to help for a price.

The full power of the Crossroads appears to be truly limitless, capable of returning the dead to the living or even elevating a human woman to near deific status, but the cost of their assistance is usually enigmatic and always steep.

Perhaps they will make a barren woman fertile, in exchange for her shadow. Maybe they will grant a man the ability to walk again, so long as he returns each new moon to drink a bottle of honey wine.

In either case, the poor mortal likely believes they've come out ahead of the bargain but will soon discover that the true price is so much greater than they could have ever imagined. The woman's shadow will haunt her sleep until she's gone mad and the man's wine will reduce him to a gutter-lush. The wishes granted by the Crossroads always hold true, often even to the spirit of the wisher's request, but the price is invariably much greater than it will initially seem.

Ghosts of the Crossroads

Even worse, once a mortal has made a bargain with the Crossroads, his soul is marked.

When he dies, the Ferrymen will not come for him. His only reward is oblivion - and his face added to the Crossroad's collection.

These "Crossroads ghosts" are not true ghosts, not the real, salvageable souls of the dead and lost. They are facsimiles of the Crossroads' previous petitioners, now used to enact Their indecipherable will. These are the faces the Crossroads use to barter and negotiate, to tempt those in need to seek Their services and pay Their prices and while an "individual" ghosts may be more cunning or charismatic or imperious than another, they are all, at the end of things, extensions of the Crossroads Themselves.

A wise man will never speak to a dead woman standing in the crossing of two roads on a moonless night.