Those who refuse the crossroads never avoid it.
They only postpone the moment of reckoning, arriving later with nothing to show for all the detours they mistook for safety.
People like to imagine that Hecate is a hunter of the lost, a lantern‑bearer who goes searching for those who wander from their path. But that is a comfort story told by those who fear their own agency.
Hecate does not chase. She does not coax. She does not drag anyone toward the life they keep insisting they want.
She waits.
And her waiting is not passive—it is a blade honed on the silence between choices.
Because the truth is simple and unbearable: most people are not undone by fate, but by their refusal to admit the role they played in shaping it. They clutch the knife still warm in their hand and insist the wound appeared on its own. They call it destiny. They call it bad luck. They call it anything but themselves.
But the road remembers.
The lights behind them dim.
The doors they ignored seal with a finality that feels personal, though it never was.
The path narrows until there is nowhere left to go but down.
And when they finally collapse at the crossroads, it is not devotion that brings them there. It is hunger. It is loss. It is the slow, crushing gravity of consequence—the kind that cannot be outrun, only met.
Hecate does not lift them.
She does not soothe.
She does not rewrite the story they authored with their own avoidance.
She simply looks.
And in that gaze, they are forced to confront the inventory of their own refusal: the steps they would not take, the truths they buried for convenience, the moments they traded becoming for comfort.
Begging is not the punishment.
Begging is the moment they finally recognize themselves.
And recognition, in her realm, is the first and most unavoidable price.