To this day, I often wonder to myself whether any of the past really ever happened.

          The nurses tell me I am mistaken; delusional. They erase the history of my existence as though to soothe, put to rest the ghosts of memory, tell me to calm down, go back to bed, it was only a dream. Once a week in my psychiatric appointments, I tell my doctor that I can’t forget the things that happened to me all those years ago, and all he ever does is look at me sadly and adjust my medication. He does this every time. Nothing ever works.

          Most days, I find myself believing them, mollified by their insistence. But some nights, when I lie awake staring at the pockmarked ceiling, listening to the whispering of the dozen patients in their beds surrounding mine, I wonder… And my thoughts are filled with flashes of things that might have been.

          My old dorm room with the wilting plants on the sill, their almond-shaped leaves papering the floor below. Iowa City in Autumn’s reds and golds. Logan’s captivating lessons, the smell of his cologne, his lectures on fear and love and where they intersect, the six of us swooning, captivated by his voice, drunk on the elite thrill of knowledge. Cold floors. Tarot cards. The Old Art Building at night, tall windows letting in the moonlight, ars longa, vita brevis est…

          Consider this a reclaiming of the past; a refusal to submit to the follies of false memory; a desire to revisit those thrilling events of my youth that terrify and delight me to this day. Perhaps if I write it all down, I might convince the disbelievers that what happened that year in the cold, blue heart of Iowa City, truly occurred, and changed my life for good.

          Who am I convincing, you or I? No matter; the past speaks only for itself. *

          Often, when I think about that year, I find myself thinking about that first day, long ago, in the library, when the six of us became friends—true friends, not just classmates. It was a random Friday evening that truly brought us all together outside of the classroom, solidified our relationship as more than just acquaintances, that dissolved the barriers between our individual lives so the others could slip in. That day marked the end of the life I had previously known.

          Perhaps it is unfair to resent those who offer so much resistance and disbelief of my story. I know it is bizarre. And regardless, I never told anyone much while it was happening; I called my mother every few days at first, as a brief check-in of my own wellbeing and hers, but those phone calls became more and more infrequent and less honest by the day. Sure, I told her I was fine, that I was eating well and taking care of myself, that my classes were going well and that I was getting good grades, but those were the things that didn’t matter. I never told her about the things that really did. The things that changed it all.

          One morning—our first class back after the Friday we had spent bonding in the library, and the weekend that followed, which we had spent having dinner together and taking a late evening walk along the lake, watching the sunset—we had Occult Religion and Philosophy first thing. We took our usual seats and opened our notebooks and homework in preparation.

          Theo, his hair tousled and unbrushed, was slumped over his work, his head pillowed by his arms. He had, it seemed, attended some sort of party, indulged a little too much in drink, and was suffering, queasy and lightheaded, from a wicked hangover. Faith, cooing sympathetically, ran a hand gently through his curls as he groaned.

          “Shall I ask Logan to get you anything?” she asked him softly, “A coffee or tea? Ginger ale? Fruit juice?”

          “No thanks, Faith. I’m fine.”

          “Hair of the dog?” Frankie asked him loudly, “Jell-o shot?” Theo winced; Faith shot him a glare.

          “Frankie, be quiet.”

          Ignoring her, Imani jumped in to torment Theo too, “Greasy chicken sandwich? Soggy reheated pizza rolls?”

          “Gooey oysters? Maggot cheese?”

          “Stop, stop!” Theo groaned, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, “I’m gonna throw up!” “Don’t,” Alan warned gravely, glancing up from his book, “Don’t you dare.”

          “Guys, shut up,” Faith insisted as the others laughed. Shaking my head—for I couldn’t help to feel amused by their antics—I reached into my messenger bag to pull out a piece of hard lemon candy I liked to carry around with me.

          “Here, Theo,” I said, handing it over.

          “Huh? What is it?”

          “Hard candy. Suck on it slowly. It helps with nausea. And plus, I’ve heard it’s good to have sugars to cure a hangover anyway.”

          “Oh. Thanks,” said Theo sullenly, and popped it in his mouth.

          “Good morning, class!” Logan chirruped as he waltzed into the study, “Ave! I hope you’re all ready for—What’s this?” he asked, pausing at the sight of Theo slumped sickly over the table. “Up, up, Theo, it’s not that early, is it?”

          “He’s ill,” Faith protested.

          “He’s hungover,” Alan groused. With a snap, he shut the heavy cover of his hardback, tossing it into his backpack with a hearty thump.

          “Who pissed in your oatmeal?” Imani whispered to him.

          “The same piss-drunk idiot who threw up in my bed last night,” he muttered back. The apples of Theo’s cheeks went red; I knew the two were roommates, but he was apparently, in Alan’s eyes, not a very good one.

          “Alright, shall we get started?” asked Logan. Reluctantly, Theo lifted his head and rested his chin heavily in his palm. His face was pale and green with the remnants of nausea, his big round glasses lopsided and muddled on one lens with fingerprints, but at least he didn’t look two seconds away from puking up his guts.

          “Today,” announced Logan with a dramatic flourish, “We begin talking about the father of all Occult religions: Hermes Trismegistus, the founder of Hermeticism. Now. What did you all learn about Hermeticism from the reading this weekend? Hm?”

          “Karmic retribution,” Alan said, “Ira deum.”

          “Ah, yes. Good, good, what else?”

          “It’s not just holy wrath,” I added, “The entire philosophy rests on a cosmic give and take. A sort of quid pro quo between God and man.”

          “Excellent, yes!” Logan cried, “The concept referred to as ‘as above, so below.’ Essential to the practice of Hermeticism. Very good.” Despite myself, I preened under his praise. “What else?”

          “I dunno,” Theo croaked weakly, “Tarot cards?”

          “Very astute, Theodore,” Logan praised, “Tarot reading is indeed a staple of Hermeticism. Can anyone tell me which Tarot card specifically represents the ‘as above, so below’ philosophy? Hm? Anyone?”

          “The Hanged Man?” asked Faith, her long, pale fingers flicking softly through the textbook pages. Alan, head bowed over her own text, shook his head.

          “Justice, more like.”

          “It’s—” I hesitated to correct them, fingers tangling anxiously in the chain of my locket necklace, but Logan, nodding pleasantly, encouraged me on. “It’s the Magician.”

          “Excellent!” he cried, “Yes, it’s the Magician. Notice the hands—one pointing to the Heavens, the other downwards to Hell—and the powerful altar before him, connecting the two halves. The Magician symbolizes the entire idea of this give and take, where the events of one of the three realms—Heaven, Hell, and Earth—impacts another. Now!” He clapped his hands together definitively. “With this philosophy comes another—the belief in something further than simply equality. The idea of oneness.”

          At this point, we were each leaning forward in our seats, captivated—even Theo—entranced by Logan’s every syllable. We hung upon his words like a lifeline, our breaths bated, our eyes wide and unblinking as he commanded the energy of the room. His presence in that moment was Godly. He held the beating of our hearts in the palm of his hand.

          “Oneness,” he continued, “is one of Hermeticism’s essential philosophies: God as the All. God is the creator of the Universe, of the Cosmos, of the great Everything. Everything in existence exists only because of divinity. Creation is the root of eternity. And yet, there can be no God without the All; all created things pre-exist God; He is the both father of the world and the offspring of His own creations. He is Creator; He is Creation; He is Created. God is in Everything. Everything is in God.”

          “Everything?” Theo whispered, a tenuous ribbon of breath weaving through the hushed air.

          “Everything.” Logan confirmed. “This table is God. This chair is God. The very air, the sunlight within it, the dust floating over it, all of this is God.” Leaping up, Logan ran to the flower box and plucked off a young, satiny green leaf. “God is within this leaf; in every cell; in every molecule. And yet—he could not exist without it. There is no God without this leaf. If this leaf had never existed—” His eyes snapped to mine, wide and sungold like ichor, ringed with dark blue, “there would be no Great Divinity.”

          “And us, Logan?” Theo asked, “Is God in us?”

          “Yes! God is in every one of you—every one of you is God—every one of you created God! Don’t you see?” Every breath of ours was that of wonder. “You transcend Everything. You are holy, down to your very core.”

          For a moment, everything was still—our eyes, our surroundings, down to our very heartbeats. We sat in pure wonder as Logan gazed upon us all, emblazoned by passion, overwhelmed by the intensity of his own emotion. The profundity of the lesson was electrifying. We were prophets of wisdom and awe.

          “Come on, get up,” Logan said suddenly, snapping us out of our stupor, “Come out with me, let’s go. We need to experience God for ourselves.”

          With that, he dashed swiftly out the door, leaving us to scramble to our feet and follow him, worshippers trailing blindly after their Lord. He thundered down the rickety stairs and out the back door once again, but this time, crossed the uncut grass of the small backyard and barreled, headfirst, into the treeline beyond.

          Not one of us even considered hesitation. Without a word of discussion, or even a glance amongst one another in silent communication, we followed Logan into the woods behind Dey House. Sunlight slanted into the trees, falling gently, dappled, over the undergrowth like so much spilled gold. Logan’s broad back was thrown into sharp relief by the dramatic shadows of his shoulder blades. I followed him without looking down at my feet. Often, I stumbled over tall, uncut patches of grass, or nearly tripped headfirst over gnarled, veiny roots, but I never looked down. My eyes were trained on him.

          Eventually, we walked so far into the woods that a glance in the direction from which we’d come would determine that the Philosophy Building was well out of sight. The trees in every direction looked identical; tall, craggly slopes reaching out with grasping fingers to the sky, fuzzy with creepings of moss. It was then, and only then, that Logan slowed, and came to a stop.

          “Lay down,” he said. Without protest, we all sank gently to our knees, then onto our backs in the grass. For a long moment, there was no sound but for our own heavy breaths in our ears.

          “Relax,” Logan ordered, “Let go. Let everything go. Just lay there and feel.”

          Letting out a deep exhale, I forced myself, consciously, to let go. Tension seeped out of my body like rainwater, melted from my limbs drop by drop until I sank, boneless, into the dirt. The heart shape of my locket was a cool, gentle weight on my chest. Moving it almost imperceptibly up and down, my breathing slowed and evened. Eventually, I could barely hear the steady thump, thump, thump, of my own heart.

          Far above my head, the treetops yawned, spreading their arms wide in the late noon sun. Their verdant canopy dappled the world in a grassy glow, and all the world seemed a meadow. The cicadas buzzed incessantly in our ears. Warmth, smooth and easy, blanketed our skin. Grass tickled the back of my neck and the soft skin of my inner palms, but I paid it no heed, admiring instead the robin’s egg blue of the vast expanse of sky, and the fluttering of distant leaves in the gentle breeze, shifting against one another with the rhythm of the wind. Far above, a bird soared across the gaps in the canopy, then glided gently out of sight.

          “Do you feel it yet?” came a disembodied voice somewhere to my right, a barely recognizable, deep-throated rumbling, as natural as the Earth, “Do you feel Everything yet?”

          The cicada song grew. The music of the Earth filled my ears. There was warmth and light and sound, and I felt so small and so large and my body melted away and I was God in that moment, in that afternoon, I was God in the face of the exposed, Known Universe, I was God and if I were to just inhale, I could breathe in the entire world.

*

          On another occasion, Logan introduced us to something he called ‘the three Hermetic wisdoms of the Universe.’ These were Alchemy, Astrology and Theurgy.

          Alchemy was an easy beast to tackle; we made shitty homemade alcohol in the teachers’ lounge in the Philosophy Building and drank it all, cringing and coughing, so late one night that we were forced to fashion beds out of desk chairs and winter coats.

          Astrology was straightforward enough; there was no bullshit about Alan’s Scorpionic anger, or my Piscean sentimentality. Rather, we spent more nights at the Philosophy Building, climbing onto the roof and watched the changing of the skies day by day, listing into one another with fatigue and hunching over steaming mugs of hot cocoa Logan made for us as we sat there, shoulder to shoulder, struggling to stay awake, watching the stars.

          Theurgy, on the other hand, was its own monster.

          “Theurgy,” Logan said to us loftily one day, “Is the study of the operation of the Gods. Now, the theory of God in Hermeticism is—?”

          “The concept of the Divine All,” I replied.

          “As above, so below,” Alan chimed in.

          “Yes, yes, exactly,” Logan acquiesced, “Very good. Now, Theurgy is defined, literally, as the Science or Art of Divine Works. It is a form of pure, divine magic, which draws on the powers of angels, archangels, and God Himself.”

          “How do you use it?” Alan asked. He was leaning forward on his elbows, fingers tented against his lips. His eyes were fixed intensely on Logan’s.

          “There are rituals,” Logan explained, “They rely, primarily, on a mixture of Alchemy, Astrology—stars in the right position and all that—and then, of course, religious readings and chantings from the Corpus Hermeticum.”

          “But why—Why would you even bother?” asked Theo, “I mean, what’s the point?”

          “Of convening with the Gods?” Alan asked him incredulously, “That divinity? That higher level of understanding? Are you kidding me?”

          “Why does anyone want to talk to God?” Logan prompted, “It can be for any number of reasons. Peace. Clarity. Purpose.”

          “Knowledge,” added Alan, “Power. The Divine Consciousness.” Logan inclined his head to him.

          “Indeed. Yes, it could be any of those reasons. At the heart of it: intelligence. Reason. Thought. Understanding.” Then, with a flourish, “The ever-elusive nous.”

          At this, we were hooked again, as we almost always were when Logan lectured like this. This concept, this idea of a higher form of knowledge… A better understanding of the world… An intelligence beyond comprehension… So elusive, and despite that—or perhaps because of it—so alluring to the lot of us that in that moment, we might have done anything to achieve it. As it were, we were on the edge of our seats, nearly salivating at the thought of something more than this.

          “Are we going to do it?” Alan asked, “Perform the ritual?” Logan, of course, grinned. The sight of his pearly whites brought a smile to my face.

          “Well, of course we are.”

          “When?” Alan demanded.

          Logan, shrugging and leaning back in his chair, turned it to us. “You tell me.”

          At that demand, the six of us fell upon our books like vultures, tearing through star charts and Hermetic lore to try to figure out when in the world a ritual like this was supposed to happen. We peered over huge, fold-out maps of the Heavens, combed through anything in our texts related to rituals and time, talked through theories and built hypotheses off one another’s findings and ideas. All the while, Logan watched on contentedly, leaning back in his chair with his fingers intertwined behind his head.

          God, how I miss those moments, even now! All those little instances of overwhelming joy, indescribable pleasure at the simple hunger, the basic thirst for knowledge! I was consumed by the desire to know more. Curiosity bit into me, demanding satiation, gnawing and clawing at my skin for satisfaction. How beautiful life was when it was built on the desire for knowledge! How captivating is the pursuit of more!

          Finally, we determined the right time and date to perform the ritual: the stars were aligning that Sunday, in the wee hours of the morning just before dawn. Pleased with our good work, Logan decided that we would meet up late on Saturday night to perform the ritual, congratulated us all on work well done, and dismissed us early from class that day.

          “Remember!” he called after us as we left, “As the Gods decreed, self-denial is the key to holiness! Meaning…?” The rest of us glanced at one another, confused. “No sex or alcohol on the day of the ritual!” Jokingly, he wagged a finger at us like an old schoolmaster at a gang of rowdy children, narrowing his eyes. “Be good, you little rascals! Vale!”

*

          Saturday evening rolled around, long awaited, and rich with anticipation.

          The Philosophy Building always looked ethereal in the nighttime. Stars, woven brilliantly across the tapestry of the clouds, shone in the glimmer of every window. Already, Frankie and Imani were on the porch, chatting leisurely together. Faith, a few paces ahead of me, was approaching them, too.

          “Hey!” I greeted them, bounding up the steps.

          “Hey, Addie. Ready for this?” I grinned at Frankie.

          “Been looking forward to it all day.”

          “Me too,” he replied, smirking cheekily, “God knows what a struggle it is to go a day without sex!”

          “Oh, my God.”

          “All those girls—”

          “Don’t!”

          “—just falling all over me—”

          “Frankie, do not!”

          “—begging for me to take them—”

          “Shut up!” I laughed, and he too, broke and joined me.

          “Come on!” Imani urged, pulling us inside by the arm, “Come on, enough, let’s go!” Laughing, the four of us rushed through the building.

          “Logan!” Faith called, “Logan?”

          “Back here!” came a voice from the backyard. We made our way to the back porch together, spilling out into the cool night air, where Logan was already there, lounging on a deck chair with Alan, who looked surprisingly relaxed and cheerful.

          “Ne timeas, amice,” Logan was saying quietly to Alan, clapping a large, warm hand on his knee, “Invenies quod mox. Omnia bene.”

          “Gratias tibi, care.” Alan gave him a rare, soft smile as Logan got to his feet, clapping his hands together once decisively.

          “Alright! Shall we get this party started?” Exchanging excited glances, we cheered—I could barely keep myself from bouncing excitedly on the balls of my feet—when suddenly, Logan stopped us. “Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Where’s Theo?”

          We stopped. Glanced around. Where was Theo?

          “Alan?” Logan asked, but the boy, now straightened up and looking prepared, only shrugged. Logan, seemingly disappointed, turned back to us with a frown. “Well. Let’s get everything set up, shall we? Let’s hope he joins us later. Sound like a plan?” I smiled.

          “Sounds like a plan.”

          Together, the six of us set up the ritual: Logan collected a small drum from inside the building, which he had filled with dry wood and bits of previously charred tinder; Faith and I were tasked with grabbing Logan’s box of chalk from the study; Alan, who had, of course, brought his textbooks, was to pull up the Latin words.

          Upstairs, I said quietly to Faith, “Do you know what’s up with Theo?” But all she did was shrug. “Come on!”

          Downstairs on the deck, Logan set up the drum in the middle of the porch, lighting the wood on fire with the flick of a lit match. Faith and I, consulting Alan’s text, carefully drew the symbols across the wooden planks, giggling at our screw-ups and steadying one another’s hands as we constructed them, a fairly simple construction of geometric shapes all contained within a circle, the makeshift bonfire at the center. Frankie, lounging sideways on Logan’s deck chair, was chewing on a candy bar and heckling Alan playfully.

          “So there’s no one? Nobody? Really?”

          “Sure.”

          “Wait what? Seriously?”

          “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.”

          “Who the fuck is that?” At Frankie’s outburst, Alan glanced up at him, rolling his eyes.           “Have you ever opened your textbook for this class?”

          “Oh my God. I meant a real, living person. There’s no girl in your life?” “No.”

          “No girl?”

          “No!”

          “No boy?”

          “Frankie!”

          “Okay, okay boys, that’s enough,” Logan laughed, “Alan, is the passage ready?” “Yes. Right here: Corpus Hermeticum, IX, On Thought and Sense.”

          “Excellent. Come, let’s get started, shall we? Everybody ready?”

          “Wait!” cried a voice from within Dey House. Startled, we whipped around to look. Dashing breathlessly towards us from the dark, shadowed depths of the unlit dining room, was a figure, flush-faced and messy haired, waving at us to stop. “Wait for me!”

          “Theo!” Imani cried, “What took you so long?”

          “There you are, my boy!” Logan exclaimed. Stumbling to a halt on the deck, Theo beamed at us all. His cheeks and nose were bright pink, as though he had sprinted all the way from some frat party. His dark brown eyes sparkled begin the thick lenses of his glasses. Imani playfully tousled his hair.

          “We were supposed to meet up earlier!”

          “Sorry!” To Imani, he stage-whispered, “I’ll tell you about it later.”

          “Alright, alright,” Logan calmed them, reeling us all back in, “Now are we ready to begin?”

          “Ready,” we all chorused—all of us apart from Alan. I glanced over at him; it confused me to see such a dark look overtake his face as he watched Theo and Logan interact. There was a tension in the way he held himself in that moment, like a coiled viper about to strike, building up the energy to surprise its prey and rip its throat—but then Logan nodded sharply, his shoulders squared and eyes furrowed in determination, and the moment was gone.

          “Alright. Hands, everyone.” Standing around the little bonfire, we held hands in a little circle—Faith’s long, pale fingers in one of my hands, Frankie’s bony palm the other, his nails bitten down to the quick. Alan, who needed both of his to hold the textbook, stood just outside the circle. “Alan? You can begin.”

          A reverent hush fell over the group. The night was cool and the air was still. Heat from the bonfire warmed my skin, flames spitting sparks of molten gold into the blackness up above, as though at war against it. Between the crackling of the fire and the distant cry of cicada song, the world sang a perfect backbeat as Alan slowly began to read the ritual in his low, steady cadence.

          “Sermonem perfectum dedi heri; hodie rectum puto, quod sequitur, per punctum sermonis de Sensu.” Alan’s velvet baritone, usually so mellow and gruff, swelled as his confidence grew; it almost seemed as though his first tongue was Latin, not English, and the foreign words were like music to my ears. A shiver ran through the group. Taking a deep breath, he continued. “Sensus autem et cogitatio differre videntur in hoc quod illud est materiae, hoc autem est substantiae.”

          As Alan spoke, something in the air began to change. The bonfire, before a steady pulse of rippling flames, began to dance, as though agitated, sparking and spitting with more vengeance with his every word. Again, I shivered. The air, which had been deathly still before, began to stir, cool against my fire-warmed cheeks and creeping along the exposed slope of the back of my neck. A sudden chill swept in and began to threaten at the edges of our circle. Faith squeezed my hand tighter; I gripped tighter back.

          “Mihi autem videtur et unum esse et non différé, in hominibus dico. In aliis vitas sensus at-tinet natura, at in hominibus cogitationis.” The wind became more violent. I met eyes with Logan over the pitifully flickering fire, and he looked pale, stricken suddenly with terror, and the sight of him so visibly shaken made my blood run cold. A cold rush of air began to whirl around us, subtle at first, then faster and faster, more and more powerful, angrier and angrier, until it was screaming in my ears.

          “Tantum autem animus a cogitatione differt,” Alan continued, voice bold as brass, his heavy brows lowered in concentration as the building wind threatened to violently flip the page, “quantum Deus a divinitate. Nam illa divinitas a deo fit, et mente cogitatione soror verbi and inter se instrumenta.”

          The wind grew more and more wild, adopting a panicked frenzy as violent as the painful thump-thump-thump of my racing heartbeat. Where was it coming from? What was happening? I squeezed my eyes shut against the sudden growing gale, my hands a death grip on those palms tight against mine. My skirt flapped viciously around my knees, my hair whipping violently around my head. For a moment, the cyclone surrounding us was so intense, I thought I might die. My God, I thought I might die.

          “Neque enim verbum!” Alan was shouting now to be heard over the screaming gale, his voice a roar of defiance. “Sine cogitatione reperit enuntiatum nec sine verbo cogitatio manifestatur!”

          The air exploded around us in a rush of wind spiraling upwards in a freezing blast. The bonfire was white hot, a scalding line of lightning behind my eyelids. It was as though the Heavens had opened up and was sucking up cosmic lungfuls of air, which whooshed upwards, threatening to drag us up with it; only our death grips on one another held us down, tethered firmly to the ground.

          In a split second, the rush of wind was gone. The light had ceased. The bonfire was dark and cold in Logan’s little metal drum.

          The ritual was over. The world went silent but for a distant, steady, ringing noise, growing fuzzy with static, then gray, then finally, an all-consuming black.

*

          To this day, I still don’t know the truth of what happened that night. What was that terrible gale? What was that inexplicable wind? Were we really in contact with the Hermetic Gods? Did we truly tap into the power of the Universe, convene with the deity of Knowledge, gain some ethereal higher level of understanding? Did it even happen? Was any of it real? Was it a miracle? Or a mirage?

          I ponder that moment sometimes, imagining, behind my eyelids, the light that cut through the darkness of it all. I wonder if I’ll ever achieve brilliance like that again.

          When I came to, the rest of my classmates were sitting around the empty bonfire in a daze. Logan shakily helped me up into a sitting position, steadied me, and pressed some sugary fruit drink into my hand, which I sipped gratefully to void myself of the fuzziness between my ears. In increments, the world slid into focus again I could see Faith, her white-blonde hair mussed by the wind, gaping dumbly at the dead bonfire flames. I could see Frankie, muttering what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck to himself under his breath. And I could see Imani and Theo, staring at each other in utter awe, before suddenly—ridiculously—bursting into laughter.

          The rest of us looked at them in stunned bewilderment for a moment, watching as they began to laugh, then howl, then fall over one another absolutely shrieking with mirth. The sound was infectious; eventually, they had us all laughing and giggling along as well.

          “Now that,” said Logan, wiping away a happy tear, “Was a lesson for the books.”

          Looking back on it, it is only now that I realize that as soon as the ritual was over, Alan alone had left our ranks, his moonlit figure absent, stalking alone into the night.

 

About the Author: Amritha Selvarajaguru

          I have always been a writer, from as long as I can remember. It has been my deepest passion my entire life, and I hope to continue pursuing that passion and passing it along to others as a future English teacher.

          This piece is part of my 2021 Nanowrimo story, which centers around a young woman attempting to recall the fantastical events of her college years, where she and her peers studied occult religion and philosophy. In this chapter, the friends learn about the tenants of Hermeticism, and get swept up in their studies. Things seem just fine for a while, but perhaps their obsession might get a little out of hand...

          Full of fantasy, ideas of religion, mystery, and maybe even a little bit of love, this work satirizes the dark academia genre and questions what it truly means to have a love for learning.