In The Hour of The Sun, On The Day of Surgat, the Moon a Crescent:

On Sunday morning I got up early, before the sky had begun to lighten, and set down Artie's bowl for the morning. I put on my shirt, jeans, and my hiking boots and packed my backpack with a water bottle and the gardening shears. I walked out of the cabin, locked the door behind me, and set out towards the deep woods behind my house.

After living here and exploring them so often the paths and turns of the dark woods were almost like the veins and arteries of my body. Even in the dark of early morning where only the pale blue sky was visible between the twisted dead branches of the trees, I knew to make my way across the straight path into the deeper forest tiled in stones and pocked in orange fungus. As I walked every few meters, squirrels and birds fled from the path into the foliage at my approach. At the glacial boulders that sat at the end of the long walk in I turned a bend up a steep hill with a dead tree trunk at its peak. As I crossed the hill, the claws of the trees raked my cheeks and after that I descended onto a riverbed that bubbled placidly into Echo Lake.

Then I hiked up some more hills until I reached the great swamp. Thankfully the mosquitoes hadn't begun to swarm as they would later in the morning. I jumped across a few trunk bridges laid over streams by fellow wayward explorers and I trudged through the muddy path at the other end, thankful to be in my heavy boots.

Past the swamp the path opened up to a grotto of pine trees, circles of glacial boulders and toadstools so giant that I had always imagined this place to be the valley of the elves. The way the golden rays of the afternoon sun would peek through the swaying trees always seemed to me like something out of a fantasy novel or some fairytale picture book.

When I passed through the valley I came to the crossroads where I would sometimes leave offerings for Hekate. To go left would bring me to a sunny meadow that ended in a small pond where I would often see enormous herons and eagles come to linger. Today, however, I went right, which drew me deeper into the forested woods towards the mountains.

I first walked down along the long winding road, paved sporadically with boulders sunk as cobble stones past a crumbling stone wall by the side of the path. Someone must have lived here a long time ago, but I had no idea when or who it had been, and I had never found the remains of any house in the area when I wandered off the path. Finally as the trail began to climb into the mountains, I arrived at my destination: The Grand Altar

I called it "The Grand Altar" because that's all I could imagine when I would see it. It was a great, roughly rectangular boulder, around the size of a small bedroom and twice my height. Its roof was a pure flat square of smooth rock and its shape left the impression that it was not natural, as it surely must have been, but hewn by some unfathomable masonry in days immemorial. The Grand Altar loomed in a shadowy ravine by the mountain path that seemed foreboding, as if you were being watched the entire time you lingered there. It was hard for the sinister landmark not to conjure up images of blood sacrifice and black sabbaths.

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Of course, I was not here to visit the ominous stone, but to harvest from the foliage that grew around it. I found the cluster of hazelwood shrubs I had picked out on an earlier sojourn and took hold of one of the long, whip-like branches, bearing a row of round heart-shaped green leaves along its upper length.

There, running my fingers through the thin branches, I called out the orison of the hazelwood wand: "Lady Qlepoth, you are sly and farseeing, lend to this wand your whispers! Lady Qlepoth, offer to it your foresight and your prophecy!"

I held out the proper length of the branch and centered the blades of the shears around its nape, and the moment when the sun surmounted the mountain and a sheet of yellow morning light came flooding down the side I severed the arm from the tree!

Just then, in that moment of triumph as I held up the hazelwood branch in my hand, I saw it standing up there above me on the slope. At first my eyes just caught the black contours of its thicket-like antlers in shadow amongst the treetops, against the shining dawn sun that cascaded down the mountainside. Then as I squinted, and my vision adjusted to the light, I recognized that I looked upon the shape of a man. A man garbed in a long black coat, who wore the grinning skull of an elk for a face.

For some time I just stood there, frozen in fear at the realization that something had been watching me. Something had heard my words. Some other's thoughts gazed through the dark, cavernous eye-sockets that were fixed upon me.

Then he took his first stride down the slope towards me. An instinctive and overwhelming terror sunk in my stomach. The realization ran cold through me that I was so deep in the woods that, if I was to be attacked, no one would hear my screams.

I bolted holding the shears in one hand and the hazelwood branch in the other and I ran and ran down the paths, across the streams, over the hills, and finally back to the door of the cabin. I had crossed the thirty minute hike in what seemed like five minutes. My heart was pounding and I had lost all my breath as I struggled desperately to find the key. I finally found it, opened the door, and slammed and locked it behind me.

Artie greeted me with the same sweet and sleepy demeanor as if nothing had happened. I chugged a great deal of water, set the branch and my pack on the workbench, and took some relief that at least the final component of the ritual had been gathered.

Taking a rest before I began to work I tried to place who it was that had been watching me out in the woods. Plenty of people hiked those trails on the weekends, but that early in the morning? Did I have a stalker, or was the danger going to be more mundane? Was I going to be getting a fine from woodland management? No, don't be stupid. Nobody cares about this sort of thing that much.

I tried to dispel these worries and set about to preparing the hazelwood wand. Just as I had the Elderwood, I stripped off the twigs and leaves that protruded from the long branch and carefully set about whittling the thin bark and sanding the exposed surface. The wood this time was not hollow and naturally thinned at its end, making the wand appear like a long, bony finger.

Finally I carved the seal of Qlephoth with great care and diligence onto the wand's center. The seal's long interwoven spiral lines gave the impression of the unspooling of fate's thread. The hazelwood wand was to be used for divining and oracular insight, as Lady Qlepoth was, of course, a spirit of clairvoyance.

I held the wand aloft over the lit mace, frankincense, and aloe wood and took a sigh of relief. There would be no more skullduggery. All the materials for the working had been procured.