In my early days, I was definitely neck-deep in the High Weird. Which, as I understand it, is pretty typical of people who start practicing magic that young. The years 1997 to 2002 were particularly weird. On the same Halloween night in 1998, mere days before my 18th birthday, when my spirit guide Daemon Wolf made a public appearance in my then-favorite coffee shop, another spirit also appeared to me.
This second spirit was tall and dark and distinctly feminine, appearing to be dressed in ragged layers of cloth that in no way detracted from her regal bearing. Her skin was dark, almost black, and her wings were even darker. She radiated power and poise. She appeared suddenly and spontaneously from … elsewhere*, and upon appearing, immediately reached out to me and formed a … bond of some sort.
I was in awe. I was terrified. I panicked.
I reached back out, myself, and created a similar bond. Each line of power — hers to me and mind to her — was largely one-directional, meant to exert influence rather than to share anything. She was as surprised by my reaction to her as I was by her appearance, and we had a brief stare-down.
The spirit wanted something from, and perhaps for me. My older and more experienced friend, Medeia, identified the spirit as a “dark elf” – a taxonomy that stands suspicious at best, now, though it made more sense in the mid 1990s and in the context of her stories about the elves that interacted with her Druid grove. I had no idea what to do. Ultimately, the spirit and I agreed that I would let go of her, and she would let go of me, and we would both get on with our lives. She let go. I let go. She vanished.
Now, even in that moment, even as a wee faun of a mage, I knew that there was something (everything) about that encounter that I had not quite comprehended and had (probably) handled improperly. But I had no idea, at the time, what else I could have done. The encounter weighed on me for some time. Years later, during my time with the WPA, I used one of our Ouija sessions as an opportunity to reach out to that spirit, though the results were far from conclusive.
I have considered reaching out to the spirit again, but enough time has passed that I can no longer recall the psychic taste of her. As I ponder the operation now, I am moderately certain that I could journey for a sigil, or produce one by automatic writing. But I am not entirely certain what purpose such an experiment would serve, except to satisfy a decades-old curiosity.
*At the time, I understood “elsewhere” exclusively in terms of the astral plane, but that is another conversation entirely.