He wrote for six hours the morning after.
He wrote everything the Baron had told them — the traditions' shared terminology for the crossroads space, the ways that Hecate's trivia and the Ghede's crossroads were the same function in different divine vocabularies, the historical moments where the two traditions had touched in the Americas during the centuries when enslaved people brought the Yoruba tradition into contact with European divine bloodlines and the contact produced something new.
He wrote the specific thing the Baron had said about the coming work: not a war, not a crisis, but a convergence. The divine world reorganizing over the coming decades toward a structure that could no longer operate in separate traditions because the mortal world had stopped operating in separate traditions. The internet. The diaspora. The specific quality of the twenty-first century in which the traditions were no longer geographically contained.
He wrote the Baron's framing of Kael's specific role: not the Greek demigod, not the Greek-adjacent tradition's operative, but the person who stood at the crossroads between the traditions by birthright and by choice. Son of Hecate, threshold deity. Working with a Vodou practitioner. Living in New Orleans, which was the place in the Western hemisphere where the traditions had been intersecting longest. Living in New York, which was the place where all traditions currently met at maximum density.
He wrote: The Baron did not command. He named. He named what I am and what Cece is and what the work is. He was right in every particular.
He wrote: I knew that Phase 2 was different from Phase 1 without having a clear picture of what it was. Now I have a clearer picture. Phase 1 was the Greek tradition's work — the camp, the battle, the structural repairs. Phase 2 is the inter-tradition work. The bridges. The convergence.
He wrote: This will take decades. I am seventeen. I am fine with this.
He went to find Cece. She was at the eastern woods' edge, sitting on the root of the old oak and writing in her own notebook with the focused attention she had always brought to things that mattered.
He sat down beside her. They did not speak for a while. The camp moved around them in its summer morning way.
She said: 'We're going to be doing this for a long time.'
'Yes,' he said.
'The Baron said — when he said it was not a crisis, not soon — he means years. Decades.'
'Yes.'
She closed her notebook. She looked at the camp, at the cabins visible through the tree line, at the summer sky. 'I'm not afraid of the long work,' she said. 'I have been training for the long work my whole life. But I want to name something clearly.'
'Name it,' he said.
'This is not going to be your work and me as a resource for it,' she said. 'This is going to be both of ours. Equal. The Greek side and the Vodou side are both necessary and neither is the frame that contains the other.' She met his eyes. 'I want that to be explicit between us.'
He thought about this. He thought about all the ways he had, across the years, been the person at the center of things and the ways that the centrality had been appropriate because the work was his. This work was not only his.
'Yes,' he said. 'You're right. And I agree. And I want you to hold me accountable to it — if I start treating this as mine with you as the resource, say so.'
'I will,' she said. She looked at him with the directness that had always been hers. 'We're going to be good at this.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I think we are.'
The oak tree communicated, at the ambient level that Witch's Tongue made available to him, something that was not quite words but was the quality of approval — the specific warmth of a very old living thing that has watched generations of things happen and has concluded that this one is good.
He thought: yes. This one is good.