And with the traces that she leaves

She will skin you out alive

The Mars Volta, Miranda

Hecate

“If the City chooses to reveal its secrets (and it must always be a gift, a form of grace, the
City’s single act of will) it’ll always be on its corners. Thus, in their hungered search for a
sign the mystes or initiated have trained themselves to stand, near invisible, on
intersections. Some of them even brave the tides of traffic to reach the very center of the
Crossroads (untouched either by wheel or foot) so as to offer the sacrifice, the required
holocaust: not to gain the City’s favors, mind, since these are inscrutable and whimsical,
but as a display of love, of selflessness, of complete and hopeless surrender —their very act
is sign, a sign from those that crave a sign.

The peculiar nature of the City’s crossroads must be emphasized. There is no permanence
in the City, there can be no permanence under the rule of the Shift. (Even today the
uninitiated speak of a center’s center; yet these are but the wild tales of the desperate.) At a
particular crossroads two streets might intersect one moment, and two different streets the
next. No crossroads is ever the same crossroads. Favorite among the initiated, however, is
the Trivia, the three-way Crossroads. It is indeed an oddity, a freak; yet it is in that
particular node (wherever and whenever it appears) that the Shift’s traces are most
perceptible: the signs hide in the cracks on the walls, the slant of the street lights, and the
warping of the cupolas and spires that crown the corner buildings. Sometimes the script
will be almost recognizable, and then someone will claim to know the code and will
joyously yell the message, hurrying down one of the lanes. But others suspect there is no
message, no code, no Gematria to crack the script...

Among the initiated there are those who’ll sneak into skyscrapers and take the staircase all
the way to the roof. Only to these is reserved the title of Readers. They sit fearless on the
edges and stare into the Horizon; they watch delighted the lanes multiplying, merging,
breaking down into myriad splinters, trickling down into nonexistence; they count the
spires and domes and skyscrapers and the blocks that separate them from the Stream; they
know that beyond that horizon there is another skyscraper and after that another one and
atop each of them another Reader who looks upon different domes and spires and
skyscrapers. They know that in a sense they are that other Reader. When they reach such
ecstasy, most of them prefer to jump.”

(Irving Washington, Devoid)