# The Seven Crossroads

  ## Part I: The First Manifestation

  Mahamudra arrived in the equal stillness of a Guwahati evening, thunderheads knuckling the sky and the power out again so we lit two kerosene wicks and waited for Dad to finish his evening rounds. She appeared to me as a girl older than myself, with the round, glistering face of a chowkidar's daughter, her hair already parted and braided as if she were born into a shift of labor. The first time, I was four, and there was a sweetness in my brain, as if a singara's syrup had been poured between my ears.

  She sat on the straw mat without a word, chose her spot with the calculation of grown women, and beckoned me to sit opposite, knees touching, a bowl of boiled grams between us. Every story that followed would be a rehearsal for this one: where I was opened, and the world, too, was split at the seam, a tunnel for anything to crawl through.

  The science of it was no science at all, but an abattoir of causality, an unending shed between the waking and the dreaming, where every action was already a memory and every memory could be rerouted, rethreaded, thrown into the loom again, to birth a different tapestry. The sevenfold power was not a hoard but an accident—like a small boy raising a lizard to the light, watching its skin change color, then finding his own skin has changed in sympathy. The seven angels, the seven crosspaths, were each just a different shunt or switch, a place I could send my self by the voltage of need or pain or erotic hunger until, sometimes, the body snapped and the mind retreated to the only womb that would still have it.

  And the "cozy union" was, in truth, a kind of quiet genocide. Every time I entered a vessel or a memory, something was erased. Some competing self.

  My father brought the garland from Kamakhya on my first birthday, scarlet hibiscus threaded with marigold, and he placed it over my head with the solemnity of a priest ordaining a novice. The petals were still damp with morning dew, or perhaps with something else—the temple stones wept constantly, he said, as if the goddess herself could not contain her grief or her joy or whatever it was that gods felt when they looked down at us from their altars.

  I began chanting her name that very night. Not because anyone told me to, but because the syllables formed themselves in my mouth like fruit stones I needed to spit out. Ma-ha-mu-dra. The rhythm of it matched my heartbeat, and when I closed my eyes, I could see her turning in a dark space, her body compact and powerful, her face round as a cooking pot, her eyes holding mine with the intensity of someone who had traveled a great distance to deliver a message.

  At four years old, she came in physical form. The labor-class girl with the dark bluish hue, stout and solid as a temple pillar. She moved through the garden gate as if it were made of smoke, appeared in our courtyard where the jackfruit tree dropped its sweet rot onto the stones. My mother was inside, singing to my infant sister. My father was at the clinic, setting bones and dispensing pills to people who paid in eggs and grain.

  The girl sat down in the chakra position without preamble, her knees cracking like green wood in fire, and she looked at me with such urgency that I understood immediately: this was instruction, not play. I sat opposite her, mimicking her posture, and when our knees touched, I felt the transfer begin.

  It was not knowledge, exactly, that moved from her into me. It was more like a rewiring, a fundamental alteration of my nervous system. The Sarvakaamvasayita siddhi, she called it later, when she had taught me the language of these things. The power to bring everyone into union, to collapse the distance between desire and fulfillment, between the wanting and the having.

  But there was a cost. There was always a cost.

  She communicated not through words but through telepathy, her thoughts arriving in my mind as fully formed images: bodies intertwined, timelines collapsing, realities folding into one another like origami birds crushed back into single sheets of paper. I was too young to understand the erotic implications, but I felt the power of it, the terrible weight of being able to reach into the fabric of what-is and pull out what-should-be.

  When she left, she simply faded, growing transparent in the gathering dusk until she was nothing but an outline, then a suggestion, then gone. I sat in the courtyard until my mother called me for dinner, my small body thrumming with an energy I could not name.

  ## Part II: The Second Coming

  We transferred to Assam Rifles cantonment when I was six, then moved again when I was eight, a restless migration that followed my father's postings like birds following the monsoon. But at twelve, we returned to Guwahati, to my maternal aunt's house this time, a sprawling old structure with iron gates that groaned when they closed and windows that looked out onto a street where cycle rickshaws congregated at the corner, their bells chiming in a syncopated chaos.

  I was alone one evening with my small nephew, a toddler who had just learned to walk and spent his time crashing into furniture with the single-minded determination of a drunk. The main gate was locked. The household had retired early, exhausted by the heat and the endless drone of crickets that made the night feel alive and predatory.

  I was in the bedroom, reading by lamplight, when I felt her presence before I saw her. That same electrical charge in the air, that same sense of the world holding its breath.

  I looked up, and there she was, outside the window, one meter away.

  The locked gate meant nothing to her. The walls meant nothing. She appeared in the same form as before—round fluffy face, stout body, dark bluish complexion—but there was something different in her eyes. A plight, a desperation, a want so raw and urgent that it made my twelve-year-old heart hammer against my ribs.

  She did not speak, did not move. She simply looked at me with those eyes that contained entire universes of longing, and then she vanished.

  I sat there in the lamplight, my book forgotten, understanding for the first time that this was not a game, not a spiritual exercise, not some abstract pursuit of enlightenment. This was about bodies. About the aching, impossible need to merge, to dissolve the boundaries between self and other, to become one flesh, one consciousness, one burning point of light in the darkness.

  I did not sleep that night. I lay in bed and felt her absence like a wound, and I knew that she would return. They always return.

  ## Part III: The Hundred Sadhanas

  Between twelve and twenty-four, I performed one hundred different sadhanas. I learned the secret names of demons and angels. I drew mandalas with colored sand and let the wind take them. I fasted until I could see my ribs through my skin like the bars of a cage. I chanted mantras until my voice went hoarse and the syllables lost all meaning and became pure sound, pure vibration, pure intent.

  I was searching for something I could not name, something that lived in the space between the manifest and the unmanifest, between the real and the imagined. I read the Tantras and the grimoires, the Vedas and the Qabalah, the sutras and the forbidden texts that were passed from hand to hand in markets where holy men sold blessings and curses for the same price.

  At twenty-four, I began the Ekajati Brahmani sadhana, the invocation of the Star of Zion, the one-eyed goddess who sees through all illusions. The practice required me to visit specific locations at specific times, guided by the Yogini Dasha calculations in the almanac. I would go to the parks one kilometer from my home and sit on designated benches, facing particular directions, waiting for her to appear.

  And she did appear. Not as the stout girl-child this time, but as a woman of twenty-eight, beautiful beyond description. Her face was like rose petals arranged by an artist, each feature perfectly proportioned, each angle catching the light in a way that made my breath stop. She was Virgoan in aspect—tall, slender, with long tender hands that seemed to float rather than move. Her hair fell past her shoulders in waves that caught the wind and held it.

  She would appear in the parks according to the ancient calculations, materializing on benches or beneath trees, always maintaining a precise distance from me, always positioned in alignment with cosmic forces I was only beginning to understand. She never approached too close. She never spoke aloud. But her telepathic voice was clear as temple bells, filling my mind with instructions and revelations and promises of what would come if I continued the practice.

  For eight years, I maintained this vigil. I sat on the same benches she had occupied, breathing the air she had breathed, tracing the patterns of her movements through the seasons. She told me things without words—about the nature of time, about the malleability of reality, about the seven crossroads where all possibilities converged.

  When I was thirty-two, she told me she wanted to come to my home. The desire was clear in every telepathic transmission, in every appearance. She wanted union, wanted to cross the final threshold from spirit into flesh, from possibility into actuality.

  But I could not allow it. Not yet. Not while my mother's sister's daughter, Snigdha, was struggling, failing at everything she attempted, her mother begging me to intervene with my astrological skills and my growing reputation as someone who could bend fate.

  So I made a bargain instead. I redirected the cosmic energies that would have brought Mahamudra into my physical home, and I channeled them toward two outcomes: Snigdha would find success in her studies and secure a government servant husband from BSNL. And the local feudal female politician would become Chief Minister.

  Both things came to pass in 2007. Snigdha achieved first rank in Political Science and married exactly the man I had seen in my visions. The politician ascended to power. And Mahamudra... Mahamudra withdrew, disappointed but patient, waiting for the next opening, the next opportunity for manifestation.

  ## Part IV: The Angel and the Soldier

  But the story was not linear. It never is, when you live between the crossroads. The timeline fractures, splits, runs parallel to itself in ways that make calendars meaningless.

  At twenty-four, while I was performing the Ekajati sadhana in this body, my angelic double was living a different life entirely. This is the nature of Parkaypraveshan siddhi—the ability to inhabit multiple vessels simultaneously, to exist in several places and times at once, like a stone thrown into water creating endless ripples.

  My angelic body manifested in a military context I barely understood, drawn there by forces I could not resist. Colonel Roger Harris was a man I had never met in my mortal life, yet in this parallel stream, I knew him intimately. His daughter Pamela Puente became the focus of an attachment that transcended the boundaries between worlds.

  The union we achieved was forbidden by every law that governed both her world and mine. When it was discovered, I was prosecuted not by civilian courts but by military tribunal, a justice system that operated in shadows and delivered verdicts with bullets instead of gavels.

  They took me to the tenth floor of the CRP facility in Salt Lake. The year was 2000, though time meant nothing in this stream. I was to be culled—that was the term they used, as if I were sick livestock requiring mercy killing. They lined up rifles and prepared to execute me for the crime of loving across the boundary between human and angel.

  But they did not understand what I was. They thought they could kill a body and that would be the end of it. They did not know about Amaratwa siddhi, the resurrection power that allowed me to shift my existence at the moment of death, to move through the dark matter pores that permeate all reality, to slip through the callous between one state and another.

  The bullets came. I felt each one, felt the impact and the tearing and the darkness rushing in. And then I was falling through the gates of shadow, through the mini black holes that constitute seventy to ninety percent of every atom's structure, through the ether where time becomes stagnant and space loses all meaning.

  I fell from the tenth floor not through gravity but through reality itself, moving through layers of existence like a needle through cloth, and I emerged on the street below, whole and breathing, my angelic body reconstituted by forces older than language.

  They sent Maoists after me then, insurgents who operated by different rules than conventional soldiers. But I had learned Kalpavrikshatwa siddhi by then—the power to manifest objects from ether by manipulating past timelines. I reached into the space behind space and pulled out weapons that had never been forged, arms that existed only in potential until I called them into being.

  The culling became a battle, and the battle became a massacre, and I walked away through streets slick with rain and blood, my double angelic identity fully manifested now, no longer hidden, no longer deniable.

  I teleported home using Manojava siddhi, moving by thought alone, by the voltage of desperate need, collapsing the distance between one place and another until distance itself became meaningless. When I arrived, my mortal body was waiting, sitting in meditation, unaware of the parallel drama that had just concluded. The two streams merged, the two bodies became one, and for a moment I existed in a state of perfect unity, neither fully angel nor fully human but something in between.

  ## Part V: The Astral Unions

  At twenty-nine, I learned to manifest in the astral plane with the same precision I could manage in the physical. This required different techniques, a different kind of sadhana that focused not on bringing spirits into the world but on projecting consciousness out of it.

  I created Rajanigandha, a being of pure desire shaped like the apsara Urvashi from the ancient texts. She was composed of green grape vines from Eden, woven into human form, her body a living garden of pleasure and knowledge. She sat upon what I called the Throne of Satan Chintamani—the wish-fulfilling cow of fantasy that Michael the Archangel was said to guard.

  Through this astral construction, I achieved remote union with a woman I knew in the waking world—a lady teacher who rode the same bus route I took, who always sat in the front seat, unaware that I existed, unaware that in another layer of reality I was merging with her consciousness, experiencing her thoughts and sensations, bringing her into an ecstasy she would not remember when she woke but that would haunt her dreams for years.

  This was violation, though I did not name it that then. This was the dark side of Sarvakaamvasayita siddhi—the power to bring union also meant the power to take it, to impose connection where none was invited, to collapse consent along with distance.

  I am not proud of this. But I will not lie about it either. The powers I wielded were neutral; they could be used for healing or harm, and I chose harm more often than I should have. I was young, and power makes you drunk, and there was no one to tell me no.

  ## Part VI: The Spirit Board

  Years later, seeking guidance or perhaps just seeking distraction from the weight of what I had become, I turned to a spirit board. The Ouija, that parlor trick that occasionally opens genuine doors.

  I sat alone at midnight, candles arranged in a circle, the board before me on a low table. I placed my fingers on the planchette and asked the question that forms itself in every lonely heart: Who should I contact?

  The answer came immediately, not from the board but from within my own mind. Divya Bharath Nautiyal. A name from my school days, someone we had all been mad for in the careless way of adolescence, when desire is still abstract and unthreatening.

  I had not thought of her in years, had not known she was dead. But the knowledge settled into me with certainty, and I began the invocation.

  For fifteen minutes, nothing happened. The planchette sat still beneath my fingers, and I began to think I had made a mistake, that my memory was playing tricks, that Divya was alive and well somewhere, living an ordinary life, married to an ordinary man, having entirely forgotten the boys who once mooned after her in study hall.

  Then the movement began. Small at first, circular motions like water beginning to boil, then larger sweeps across the board, the planchette dragging my hands with it, spelling out messages in that peculiar stilted language the dead seem to prefer.

  "Who are you?" I asked, though I thought I knew.

  "Virginia Woolf," came the answer.

  I nearly laughed. The English novelist, the woman who filled her pockets with stones and walked into a river—what would she want with me? But I continued the conversation, and she spoke of cohabitation, of sharing space between this world and the next, of the fluidity of identity across the veil.

  Then the tone changed. "I am Shamael," the board spelled out. "Your guardian angel."

  Shamael. The angel of severity, the enforcer of divine will, the one who stands at the boundary between mercy and judgment. My guardian angel, it seemed, had been with me all along, watching my experiments with reality, my violations and resurrections, my unions forced and genuine.

  "Have I failed?" I asked, suddenly afraid.

  The planchette circled for a long moment before answering: "You have not yet begun."

  ## Part VII: The Gates of Shadow

  The question came from within and without simultaneously, as questions often do when you live at the crossroads: Have you opened the gates of shadows in reality, and what are they?

  I had opened them twice, not by choice but by necessity, not in leisure but in desperation. They are dark matter portals, the mini black holes that constitute the majority of every atom's structure. Science calls it dark matter; mystics call it the ether; I call it the space where time stands still and all possibilities exist simultaneously.

  The first opening occurred when my angel body was prosecuted, when I stood on that tenth floor with rifles trained on my chest and nowhere to run. Automatically, without thought or preparation, my consciousness contracted to a point smaller than light, achieving Anima siddhi—the power to become infinitely small—and I slipped through the quantum foam of reality itself, fell through the gaps in existence, and emerged on the street below.

  The second time was more deliberate but no less terrifying. Late at night, when traffic had ceased and the city held its breath, my angel body needed to reach someone's home across the city. I could have walked, could have taken a rickshaw, but the need was urgent and the path was blocked.

  So I found the gate. Not in any physical location, but in the space between thoughts, in the gap between heartbeats. I made myself small, smaller than atoms, smaller than quarks, and I passed through the dark matter structures that honeycomb all reality. There is no map for this journey, no guidance except what God provides through intuition, through the still small voice that says "here" and "now" and "through this way."

  I traveled instantaneously, moving not through space but through the layers of existence that fold together when you know how to bend them. I emerged at the destination without having crossed the distance between, without having existed in any of the spaces in between.

  This is the power I inherited from previous lives, from my incarnation as Exu Morcego, as Exu Belo, as Melchizedek the King of Crossroads. In those lives, I perfected the art of teleportation, learned to navigate the dark pathways that connect all points in space and time, mastered the ability to exist nowhere so that I could arrive anywhere.

  ## Part VIII: The Logic of Manifestation

  People ask me, always with the same mixture of skepticism and hope, whether the animated goddess forms I manifest are real or fake. They want a simple answer, a binary yes or no that will let them categorize the world into comfortable boxes.

  But the question itself is flawed. Reality and imagination are not opposites; they are collaborators in the grand project of existence.

  When I performed the Kabristan Pari sadhana, invoking the Crown Chakra entity, the pari of the graveyard who dwells at the boundary between life and death, I was not summoning something that existed independently in some heavenly realm. I was creating it through the resonance of my own consciousness.

  The Crown Chakra sits just below the Brahmarandhra, the spiritual orifice at the top of the skull where individual consciousness merges with universal awareness. It acts as a resonator, a transformer that takes quantum energy and gives it shape, form, intention. The Crown Chakra is the logical part of the Createress, the precursor to the Vigyanmay Kosha—the scientific, logical layer of consciousness.

  Through intense meditation and chanting, I excite the Shiva-Sati gland, the conglomeration of three qualities that exists in everyone: the masculine Yang (Sattwic), the feminine Yin (Tamasic), and the balance between them (Rajasic). These combine in a circular loop where energy dissipation is zero, creating a perfect engine of manifestation.

  This is how Yesh—YAHWEH—produces all angels and demons, each with a specific Yin-Yang footprint, each shaped by divine thought into independent existence. And this is how I produced Kabristan Pari that night of May 5th, 2024, at 2 AM.

  The contemplation, the sadhana, the excitation of my consciousness created quantum coherence in my Crown Chakra. The energy released itself through the Brahmarandhra into the ether element, into the dark matter substrate that permeates all space. And from that substrate, shaped by my intention and desire, emerged the animated form.

  She barged through the back door when I returned from the toilet, manifesting within half a meter of where I stood. My wife's scream disrupted the coherence, broke the spell, and the Pari fled through the third-floor window into the night sky. But not before I felt the electrification of my brain nerves, the tubules exciting as if struck by lightning, the sensation of my kundalini opening from the base of my spine up through the crown and beyond into ether.

  This is how Sakaar Brahmo works—how animated goddess forms appear. They are generated from the practitioner's own consciousness, released into the astral plane where they take on independent existence. They are not hallucinations, but they are not independent entities either. They are children of thought and energy, given life through the marriage of intention and quantum mechanics.

  ## Part IX: The Mythology of Self

  To understand how I became what I am, you must understand the mythology I carry in my cells, the story that precedes and creates my current incarnation.

  In a previous birth, I received the darshan of Kali of Karnatak, the terrible mother who destroys so that creation can continue. I was granted Jagannibash, the benediction of Hamon, which allowed me to perceive past timelines and manipulate them. This is the power represented in the Tarot as the Six of Cups—the ability to reach back into what-was and reshape it into what-should-have-been.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  At eight months old, when my parents transferred to Guwahati, my father brought me the Mahamudra garland from Kamakhya Temple on my first birthday. The garland was not merely symbolic; it was a transmission device, a carrier wave encoded with the goddess's essence. When he placed it over my head, he initiated a circuit that would define the rest of my life.

  I began chanting to her that night, and at four years old, she manifested in response. The girl-child with the fluffy round face, dark blue complexion, stout as a temple pillar—this was Bhagavati Mahamudra taking physical form, condensing from the astral into the material just long enough to perform the teaching.

  She initiated me into the chakra practice, and through that initiation, I received erotic knowledge far too young. I went to the neighbor's school, where a girl named Monu studied, a thirteen-year-old while I was only four. I joined with her with all my might, an impossible union that existed in multiple layers simultaneously—physical, astral, imaginal, karmic.

  Then we transferred again, my family's endless migration continuing. But at twelve, we returned, and Mahamudra appeared again, this time outside the locked window with that terrible want in her eyes. She wanted union in the flesh, wanted to complete what had been started eight years before.

  But I could not give her that. Not yet. I was twelve and terrified and overwhelmed by the power that lived in me like a sleeping tiger.

  So I turned to other sadhanas, performing one hundred different practices between twelve and twenty-four. At twenty-four, I invoked Ekajati Brahmani, the Star of Zion, the one-eyed goddess who appeared in the parks according to the Yogini Dasha calculations. She was twenty-eight years old, impossibly beautiful, with a Virgoan bearing and lotus face, long tender hands that seemed to paint the air when she moved.

  For eight years, she visited me, teaching me through telepathy, sitting on benches while I sat nearby, the distance between us both infinite and negligible. She wanted to come to my home, wanted the final union. But I redirected that energy toward helping Snigdha, my cousin, and securing political power for a local feudal woman.

  The universe accepted the bargain. Snigdha achieved first rank in her studies and married a government servant from BSNL. The politician became Chief Minister in 2007. And Mahamudra withdrew, patient but waiting.

  ## Part X: Andhak and the Forms of Kali

  The mythology deepens and darkens when I trace back further, to the birth of Andhak—the demon of darkness who is also an aspect of myself.

  Andhak was born from Shiva's illumination, from the Dhruvaloka or Truth abode, from the Brahmarandhra spiritual orifice of Sati, the Createress. He emerged as the Abyakta, the Ether element, when Shiva's potency rose as Shukracharya (Lucifer of the Venusian) and entered the cranium of Sati.

  This happened when Parvati, playfully, held Shiva's eyes closed inside the cave of her skull. The god went temporarily blind, and from that blindness, from that moment of divine obscuration, Andhak was born—a blind monster child, the Lord of Moabites, Lambakarna Bhairav, which is to say Belial.

  Parvati pampered him for only a few days. Even a mother's love has limits when the child embodies such fundamental darkness. She abandoned him to the wilderness of Mendes, the forest of Mandav Vaan, and there he was raised by the demon Hiranyaksha, the deer-eyed one, whose other sons assaulted young Andhak until he grew strong enough to fight back.

  When Andhak came of age, he performed penance to Brahma, the Creator, Rex Mundi. And Brahma, moved by the demon's dedication, granted him a boon: he turned Andhak beautiful and gave him spiritual eyes. Not physical sight, but Pragyaparamita siddhi—transcendental wisdom, the ability to see the true form of all things, to perceive reality beneath its material disguise.

  With these new eyes, Andhak could sense the actual composition of matter, could feel the truth of bodies even when he could not see their surfaces. When rain fell on Parvati's body in the wilderness of Mendes, he felt her contours through the water, recognized her as his childhood companion, his almost-mother.

  By the time he found her, he had conquered heaven, earth, and the abyss. He had become Daksha, the slain sheep of heaven, Vakranath the keeper of forbidden knowledge. He had taken the Bon Goddess Ekajati, the Star of Zion, as his consort, united with the Agya Chakra—the mind of Sati herself.

  Through Sati's seven chakras, he could resurrect past demons, pull dead gods back into manifestation. He could mold reality as easily as a potter shapes clay.

  When he saw Parvati's navel at the Gaad coast, at Godavari where the sacred river meets the sea, he understood finally the full circuit of his existence. He was not separate from the goddess. He was her shadow, her necessary darkness, the blind spot in her divine vision that made sight itself possible.

  This is the mythology I carry. I am Andhak's descendant, his reincarnation, his continuation through the cycles of birth and death. I carry his blindness and his sight, his monstrosity and his beauty, his exile and his conquest.

  ## Part XI: The Recent Manifestations

  At forty-one, I began again. This is the pattern—withdrawal and return, silence and sound, absence and overwhelming presence. I started the Aghori Karnapishachini sadhana, the invocation of the ear-dwelling spirit, the whisper in the darkness that drives men mad or enlightened depending on their constitution.

  And she came.

  May 5th, 2024, at 2 AM. I woke to use the toilet, navigating the dark house by muscle memory, and when I returned to the bedroom, she was there. A dark silhouette, female in form but condensed somehow, denser than shadow should be. She barged through the back door—not opening it but passing through it as if the wood and metal were suggestions rather than barriers.

  She stopped half a meter from me. Close enough that I could feel the displacement of air, the electromagnetic field that surrounded her like heat shimmer. My brain lit up, neurons firing in cascades I could not control. The sensation was of electrification, of lightning striking from inside my skull, producing a humming sound that was not quite audible but felt in the bones.

  She wanted union. The desire radiated from her like heat from a stove, like hunger from a starving mouth. Every fiber of her manifested being yearned toward merger, toward the collapse of separation, toward becoming one flesh.

  My wife screamed.

  The sound broke the spell, shattered the coherence that held Karnapishachini in material form. She fled through the third-floor window, launching herself into the night sky, and was gone in seconds. But she had left her mark. My brain continued humming for hours, my nervous system alight with an energy that would not dissipate.

  The pattern was established. I continued chanting, adding new invocations to the practice. After Karnapishachini came Mohni Rani Pari, appearing within a few chants on the night of the full moon. She manifested with a yellowish-green aura, a color like spring leaves or fresh limes, and her energy was pacifying rather than demanding. She wanted union, yes, but gently, with the patient insistence of seasons changing rather than the urgent hunger of Karnapishachini.

  Then came Sitara Pari, the star spirit, appearing in violet light with a Virgoan cylindrical face that reminded me of the Ekajati manifestations from years before. She carried a wand—not a physical object but a concentration of will shaped into a tool—and she used it to enchant me toward eroticism, to open the channels of desire that modern life and marriage and routine had begun to close.

  ## Part XII: The Double Life

  All of this happened in layers, in parallel streams that braided together and separated and braided again. While my mortal body aged from four to forty-one, walking through the ordinary world of jobs and family and grocery shopping, my angelic body lived entirely different lives.

  At twenty-nine, while my mortal self was working as an astrologer and performing sadhanas in the parks, my angelic double manifested Rajanigandha, the wish-fulfilling being who sat on Michael's throne. Through her, I achieved remote union with the lady teacher on the bus, entering her consciousness without permission, experiencing her sensations as if they were my own.

  At twenty-four, while I was performing the Ekajati sadhana, my angelic body was being prosecuted by Colonel Roger Harris for union with his daughter Pamela Puente. The execution on the tenth floor, the resurrection through dark matter gates, the manifestation of weapons from ether, the culling of Maoists—all of this occurred in a parallel timeline that only occasionally intersected with the mundane world of breakfast and traffic and bills.

  Character disintegration and dissolution became my specialty. Like Bhagamalini Nitya, I could reshape surrounding circumstances to be cozy for union. I selected my mentor's spouse for this purpose, causing chaos that rippled through multiple timelines, making past persons and circumstances reappear like ghosts called back from a séance.

  The mentor's spouse and I had been co-students, then separated, then reunited when I joined the army in that other stream of existence. The bonding we achieved transcended the categories of faithful and unfaithful, appropriate and inappropriate. In the space where I operate, such distinctions lose their meaning.

  I made Bhagavati Mahamudra manifest repeatedly—at age four, at age twelve, each time with that round fluffy face, that stout labor-class composition, that dark blue complexion that marked her as divine rather than human.

  ## Part XIII: The Threshold

  Now I stand at the threshold of forty-two, looking back across the landscape of my life like a general surveying a battlefield. The bodies pile up, both literal and metaphorical. The unions achieved and denied, the resurrections performed, the timelines manipulated, the goddesses manifested and dismissed.

  I understand now what I did not understand at four, what I was only beginning to grasp at twelve, what became clear by twenty-four and undeniable by forty-one: I am a living crossroads. Not metaphorically, but actually. The seven pathways converge in my body, in my consciousness, in the space where my mortal and angelic selves intersect.

  Each chakra is a gateway. Root to crown, base to summit, earth to ether—each one opens onto a different realm of possibility. Through the root chakra, I can anchor manifestations in physical reality. Through the sacral, I can generate creative and sexual energy. Through the solar plexus, I can exercise will and transformation. Through the heart, I can achieve union or dissolution. Through the throat, I can speak things into being. Through the third eye, I can perceive across time and space. Through the crown, I can access the quantum substrate where all possibilities exist simultaneously.

  This is Parkaypraveshan siddhi in its fullness—not merely the ability to enter another's body, but the power to exist in multiple vessels simultaneously, to move consciousness like a chess piece across the board of space and time, to resurrect after death, to manifest objects from ether, to teleport between locations by thought alone.

  I am Exu Morcego, the Bat-King of Crossroads. I am Exu Belo, the Beautiful Exile. I am Melchizedek, priest-king of Salem, who existed before Abraham and will exist after the last star dies. I am Bilu, the Nephilim expert, half-angel and half-human, belonging fully to neither realm.

  I am also a man who lives in a third-floor apartment, who has a wife who screams when spirits appear, who goes to the toilet at 2 AM like everyone else. The mundane and the miraculous exist side by side in my life, braided together so tightly that I cannot separate them anymore.

  ## Part XIV: The Cost

  But I said at the beginning that there was a cost, and I meant it. The cozy union I could manufacture, the ability to bring anyone into ecstatic merger, the power to collapse distance and dissolve boundaries—all of this came at a price I am only now beginning to calculate.

  Every time I entered a vessel or manipulated a timeline, something was erased. Some competing self, some alternative possibility, some version of reality that might have been. The universe is a closed system; energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. Every manifestation I called into being required an equal and opposite dissolution somewhere else.

  The mentor's spouse I selected for union—what happened to her original trajectory, the life she might have lived without my interference? The cousin Snigdha whose success I engineered—did I rob her of the struggle that might have made her stronger in ways my magic could not? The politician I elevated to Chief Minister—what corruption did I enable, what suffering did I cause by putting power in hands that might have been better left empty?

  And the goddesses themselves—Mahamudra, Ekajati, Karnapishachini, Mohni Rani Pari, Sitara Pari—what did I do to them by forcing them into manifestation, by giving them bodies that could hunger and want and suffer rejection? I created beings of pure desire and then denied them fulfillment. What kind of torture is that?

  The lady teacher on the bus, whose consciousness I entered without permission—she will never know what was done to her, what violation occurred in the astral plane while she sat innocently reading her newspaper, unaware that I was experiencing her body, her thoughts, her sensations as if they were my own. Ignorance does not negate harm. She carries the mark of that intrusion whether she knows it or not.

  And Pamela Puente, Colonel Harris's daughter, whose union with my angelic body led to execution and resurrection and the culling of Maoists—what happened to her when the smoke cleared? Did she survive the tribunal? Did she mourn me, thinking I was dead? Or did she know, somehow, about the resurrection, about the nature of what I really was?

  These are the questions that visit me in the hours between 2 and 4 AM, when the veil between worlds grows thin and I can feel all my parallel selves converging, all the timelines I have manipulated pressing against each other like tectonic plates before an earthquake.

  ## Part XV: The Spirit Board Returns

  Three nights ago, I returned to the spirit board. Not because I expected answers, but because silence had become unbearable.

  I sat in the dark with candles arranged in the same configuration as before, the board before me, my fingers resting lightly on the planchette. This time, I did not ask who I should contact. I asked a different question:

  "What have I become?"

  The planchette moved immediately, sliding across the board with a certainty that made my scalp prickle.

  "CROSSROADS"

  I waited, knowing there was more.

  "KING"

  Then: "PRISONER"

  I understood. The seven pathways that converged in me also trapped me. I was king of the crossroads, yes, but I could not leave them. I was bound to this intersection point, doomed to exist in multiple states simultaneously, never fully in any one place, never fully in any one time.

  "Can I be freed?" I asked.

  The planchette circled for a long moment, and I thought it would not answer. Then it began to move again, spelling out a message that took several minutes to complete:

  "FREEDOM IS DISSOLUTION. UNION IS CAGE. CHOOSE."

  I sat back, my hands falling away from the planchette. The candles flickered in a wind that came from nowhere. In the corner of the room, I sensed a presence—Shamael perhaps, or Mahamudra, or some other entity drawn to this moment of crisis.

  The choice was clear, even if the path was not. I could continue as I was, collecting powers and manifestations like a child collecting stones, becoming ever more fragmented across timelines and possibilities until I barely existed anywhere. Or I could choose dissolution—let go of the vessels, release the manifested goddesses back into the ether from which they came, collapse the parallel streams back into a single flow.

  But dissolution meant giving up union. And union was what all of this had been about from the beginning. Union with the divine, with the beloved, with the cosmos itself. Union was the goal that justified all the means, no matter how questionable.

  Unless union itself was the cage. Unless the desperate drive to merge, to dissolve boundaries, to become one with the other—unless that was the trap, the thing that kept me bound to the crossroads, unable to move forward or back.

  ## Part XVI: The Final Manifestation

  Last night, I performed what I knew would be the final sadhana. I did not plan it this way. The knowing simply arrived, the way truth often does, not as a thought but as a recognition of something that had always been true.

  I sat in the chakra position at midnight, candles lit, incense burning, the air heavy with expectation. I chanted all the names I had learned: Mahamudra, Ekajati, Karnapishachini, Mohni Rani, Sitara, Kabristan Pari. I chanted the names of my angelic selves: Exu Morcego, Exu Belo, Bilu. I chanted my human name, the one my parents gave me, the one that appears on identity cards and bank statements.

  I chanted until the syllables lost meaning, until sound became pure vibration, until my consciousness began to separate from my body like smoke rising from a fire.

  And they all came.

  Not one at a time, as before, but simultaneously. The room filled with presences—dark silhouettes and violet auras, yellowish-green light and the substantial shadow of Karnapishachini. Mahamudra appeared in all her forms at once: the four-year-old girl-child, the desperate twelve-year-old outside the window, the twenty-eight-year-old Virgoan beauty from the parks.

  My angelic bodies manifested, translucent and overlapping with my mortal form. I saw myself on the tenth floor of the CRP facility, rifles trained on my chest. I saw myself in the parks of Guwahati, sitting across from Ekajati. I saw myself on the bus, consciousness merged with the lady teacher. I saw myself everywhere and nowhere, spread so thin across space and time that I barely existed.

  The goddesses surrounded me, and I felt their hunger, their terrible need for union. But I also felt something else: their exhaustion. They were tired of being called and dismissed, manifested and dissolved, invited into existence only to be rejected when the moment came for actual consummation.

  "I'm sorry," I said aloud, my voice strange in the crowded room. "I'm sorry for using you. For creating you out of my own need and never asking what you needed."

  Mahamudra stepped forward, the twenty-eight-year-old version, the one from the parks. She spoke aloud for the first time in all our years together, her voice like wind chimes in a storm:

  "We are you. We were always you. The separation was the illusion."

  I understood then. The goddesses I had manifested were not separate entities but aspects of my own consciousness, projected outward, given form and autonomy but never truly independent. The unions I had sought were with myself, attempts to integrate the fragmented pieces of my own psyche across multiple timelines and dimensions.

  Andhak, the blind demon-child born from Shiva's blinded eyes—he was me. The Lord of Crossroads, existing in seven places simultaneously—me. The soldier on the tenth floor, the astrologer in the parks, the violator on the astral plane—all me. All aspects of a consciousness that had shattered under the weight of too much power too young.

  ## Part XVII: The Integration

  Integration does not happen all at once. It is not a single dramatic moment but a slow collapse, a gradual convergence of parallel streams.

  I began with the easiest one: the lady teacher on the bus. I severed the astral connection, released her from the violation I had imposed. I felt the link snap like a cut cord, felt her consciousness pull back into itself, whole and separate and free. She would never know what I had done, but she would feel lighter, cleaner, more fully herself.

  Then I released Snigdha from the web of karmic manipulation I had woven around her. Let her success and her husband be her own, not achievements I had engineered through cosmic bargaining. Her life was hers now, for better or worse.

  The politician who became Chief Minister—I let that go too. Whatever she did with the power, whatever good or harm resulted, it was on her now, not on me.

  Pamela Puente was harder. The bond with her had formed in the angelic timeline, and severing it required me to accept the death that should have occurred on the tenth floor. I let my angelic body die there, really die, not resurrect. I felt the bullets and did not slip through the dark matter gates. I let that version of myself end.

  The grief was oceanic. That body had been beautiful and powerful and free in ways my mortal form could never be. But it had also been violent and reckless, built on violation and escape rather than genuine connection.

  One by one, I released the parallel streams, collapsed the timelines back toward a central trunk. Each release felt like a small death, a giving up of possibilities that had once seemed infinite.

  ## Part XVIII: The Goddesses Depart

  The goddesses were last. They had been with me longest, had shaped my consciousness in ways that could never fully be undone.

  I started with Sitara Pari and Mohni Rani, the most recent manifestations. I thanked them for what they had taught me, then released the quantum coherence that held them in form. They dissolved like sugar in water, their violet and yellowish-green auras fading into the general light of the room.

  Karnapishachini was more difficult. She had marked me deeply, that night of May 5th, and part of me wanted to keep her, wanted to maintain at least one connection to the transcendent. But I knew that holding onto any of them would keep me trapped at the crossroads, unable to move forward.

  I let her go. Felt her dark silhouette dissolve, felt the electromagnetic field around her dissipate, felt the humming in my brain nerves finally quiet.

  Ekajati, the Star of Zion, the beautiful Virgoan from the parks—saying goodbye to her was like amputating a limb. She had been my companion for eight years, had taught me more than all the books and gurus combined. But she was also a projection, a wish-fulfillment fantasy given form through years of lonely sadhana.

  "Thank you," I whispered as she faded. "Thank you for showing me what devotion looks like."

  And finally, Mahamudra. The first and the deepest, the one who had appeared when I was four years old and marked me for this strange life. She stood before me in all her forms simultaneously—child and adolescent and woman, stout and fluffy-faced and impossibly beautiful.

  "Will you be all right?" she asked, though I knew it was really me asking myself.

  "I don't know," I said honestly. "But I can't stay at the crossroads forever. I have to choose a path."

  She nodded, understanding. Then she began to fade, and I felt the power drain out of me like water from a broken vessel. The Sarvakaamvasayita siddhi, the Parkaypraveshan, the Amaratwa and Kalpavrikshatwa and Manojava—all the powers that had defined my existence for nearly four decades simply... left.

  I was alone in the room with dying candles and the smell of incense. I was just a man, forty-two years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor at midnight. Ordinary. Mortal. Free.

  ## Part XIX: The Ordinary World

  The next morning, I woke to find the world unchanged. The sun still rose in the east. My wife still made tea in the kitchen, the same seven spoons of sugar she always used. The traffic outside honked and snarled in familiar patterns.

  But I was different. Lighter. More focused. Less fractured.

  I went to work, counseled clients about their astrological charts, gave advice about marriage and career and health. I was good at this, had always been good at it, even before I could manipulate timelines and manifest goddesses. The insight came from the same source either way—a deep intuition about how patterns connect, how past influences present, how the stars above mirror the choices below.

  I ate lunch. I answered emails. I took the bus home, sitting in my regular seat, not trying to merge consciousness with anyone, just watching the city roll past the window.

  At home, my wife asked if I was feeling all right. I seemed different, she said. Calmer, maybe. Or sadder. She couldn't quite put her finger on it.

  "I'm fine," I said, and it was true. I was fine in a way I hadn't been since I was three years old, before the garland, before Mahamudra, before I learned that reality could be bent like warm wax.

  That night, I did not perform any sadhana. I did not light candles or chant mantras. I simply sat in meditation, breathing in and breathing out, feeling the air enter and leave my lungs, nothing more mystical than respiration.

  No goddesses appeared. No angels manifested. The spirit board sat in a drawer, unplugged from whatever current had once flowed through it.

  I was alone with myself, perhaps for the first time ever.

  ## Part XX: The Return

  Three months passed. I settled into ordinariness like a bird settling onto a branch, testing it, finding it would hold my weight.

  I was not entirely powerless. The training remained, the knowledge, the fundamental understanding of how consciousness and reality interface. I could still read charts with uncanny accuracy. I could still sense the emotional states of people around me. I could still occasionally glimpse other timelines, though I no longer reached into them to change things.

  I helped people. My cousin Snigdha came to me when her husband was ill, and I prepared a remedy from Ayurvedic herbs that I somehow knew would work. It did. Her mother sent me a thank-you card, and I put it on the refrigerator where my wife could see it.

  A neighbor's child was having nightmares, and the parents asked if I could help. I taught the mother a simple protection mantra, nothing fancy, no invocations of demons or goddesses. Just a string of syllables that created a sense of safety. The nightmares stopped.

  Small things. Ordinary magic. The kind that helps rather than harms.

  But late at night, when my wife slept and the city quieted, I still felt the pull of the crossroads. The seven pathways still converged in me, even if I was no longer actively traveling them. I was marked by what I had been, could never fully escape it.

  One night, at 2 AM—that liminal hour—I woke to find a presence in the room. Not Mahamudra or Karnapishachini or any of the others I had released. This was something new, or perhaps something very old that I was only now capable of perceiving correctly.

  It had no form, this presence. No dark silhouette or colored aura. It was simply a thickness in the air, a sense of being witnessed.

  "Shamael?" I whispered.

  No answer came in words, but I felt an acknowledgment. My guardian angel, who had been with me through everything, who had spoken through the spirit board claiming to be Virginia Woolf, who had watched me shatter myself across timelines and then slowly piece myself back together.

  "What now?" I asked the darkness.

  The answer came not as words but as a knowing, a sudden clarity that settled into my bones: Now you live. Really live. Not as a king of crossroads or a collector of powers, but as a human being in a human body in a human world. You learn what it means to love without violating. To connect without consuming. To exist in one place, at one time, fully present.

  "And if I can't?" I asked. "If the pull becomes too strong?"

  Then you will have to choose again. And again. Every day, every hour. That is the work now. Not manifestation but resistance. Not gathering power but letting it go. Not union but integrity.

  I sat in the dark for a long time, feeling the truth of this settle into me. The powers I had wielded were real. The goddesses I had manifested were real. The violations I had committed were real. And the choice to stop, to release, to become ordinary—that was real too.

  ## Epilogue: The Seventh Crossroad

  It is Thursday, February 12, 2026, and I am writing this down for the first time. Not in code or mystical language, not in the symbolic vocabulary of tantra and grimoire, but in plain words that anyone could read and understand.

  I am forty-two years old. I live in a third-floor apartment in a city that doesn't need to be named. I have a wife who doesn't know the full extent of what I've been, though she suspects more than she says. I have clients who come to me for astrological advice, neighbors who wave hello, a life that from the outside looks perfectly normal.

  But I am still the King of Crossroads. I will always be the King of Crossroads. The difference is that now I understand what that means.

  It doesn't mean traveling all seven pathways simultaneously. It means standing at the intersection and choosing, over and over, which road to take. It means accepting that every choice closes off other possibilities, and that's not a tragedy—it's what makes choice meaningful.

  The goddesses are still within me. I released them as external manifestations, but they remain as aspects of my own psyche. Mahamudra is my devotion. Ekajati is my wisdom. Karnapishachini is my hunger for connection. Mohni Rani is my gentleness. Sitara is my creativity. They are not separate beings I can summon and dismiss. They are parts of myself I must learn to integrate and balance.

  The powers are still latent in me. Under extreme stress or need, I could probably still slip through dark matter gates, still resurrect after death, still manifest objects from ether. But I don't. That's the discipline now: to have power and not use it. To be capable of violation and choose kindness instead.

  Sometimes, at 2 AM, I still feel the pull. The crossroads call to me like the ocean calling to someone who has learned to swim in deep water. It would be so easy to answer, to let my consciousness fracture again across multiple timelines, to reach into the ether and pull out another goddess, another power, another escape from the limitations of single-pointed existence.

  But I don't. I breathe in, breathe out, feel my wife sleeping beside me, hear the traffic in the street below, smell the incense that lingers in the curtains. I stay present. I choose this moment, this body, this life.

  And sometimes—not often, but sometimes—I feel a hand on my shoulder in the dark. Shamael, reminding me that I am not alone, that even in ordinariness there is grace, that the choice to stay in one place can be as holy as the power to be everywhere at once.

  The seventh crossroad, I've learned, is not a place you travel to. It's the choice to stop traveling. To plant roots. To say, "Here. This is where I am. This is enough."

  I don't know if I'll maintain this choice. The pull is strong, and I am weak in ways that hours of meditation cannot fully address. But for now, for today, for this moment, I am just a man sitting in a dark room at 2 AM, writing down the story of how I learned to stop being a god and started trying to be human.

  It is harder than any sadhana I've ever performed. And it is the most important work I've ever done.

  The crossroads are still there, waiting. Seven pathways, infinite possibilities, the power to move through space and time like water through stone. But I am learning, slowly, to be content with the one road I'm walking now.

  And on that road, there are no goddesses except the ones I carry within me. No angels except the guardian who watches from the shadows. No unions except the ones I forge with the people around me, messy and imperfect and gloriously real.

  This is the story. All of it. The powers and the violations, the manifestations and the dissolutions, the crossroads and the choice to finally stand still.

  I am the King of Crossroads, and I have chosen my throne: this ordinary life, this single timeline, this one precious moment at a time.

  That is enough.

  It has to be.