08/12/2026
The Black Face of the Coin
You don't meet her clean.
You show up with your hands already emptying—
dropping the name you used to answer to,
dropping the version of the story where you were the hero,
and that long, rotten certainty you kept around
way after it stopped being true.
She won't take an offering she didn't first make you lose.
Nobody warns you about thresholds.
They're narrow.
Nothing whole gets through.
You leave a piece of yourself on the dirt on the far side—
not because she's cruel,
but because the door is only as wide
as what you're willing to finally set down.
The dogs know before you do.
Somewhere far off, the barking starts.
That's just the sound of the veil remembering it's a veil.
The moon goes black on purpose here
not because it's gone, but like a held breath,
the dark side of a coin still spinning in the dirt.
She has three faces because grief has three faces:
the one looking back at what used to be,
the one staring straight at what's now too terrible to name,
and the one that hasn't even turned around yet
to see the thing coming down the road.
Don't ask her to make it easy on you.
She isn't the goddess of ease.
She rules the exact space where you're no longer who you were
and not yet who you're going to be—
and that space doesn't have any light of its own.
That's why she's holding the torch.
Not because the dark isn't real, but because it is.
She's walked it enough to know how to stand still.
So just come to the crossroads empty.
Mourn the person who wouldn't have survived this turn anyway.
She's waiting where three roads meet and not a single one is marked.
The mystery isn't what happens next.
The mystery is that you're still standing there at all,
blinking into the dark,
still holding out your hands
asking for the fire.
Rev HP Elder Sage Edward F Kimble
Edward Kimble
