VI. The Difficulty of Entry

Understanding why reaching the Witchwoods is difficult requires understanding the threshold-consensus. Entry into a shard realm requires being in the right relationship to its governing principle, and the Witchwoods’ governing principle is threshold: the condition of being between states, of neither fully arriving nor fully departing. A practitioner who approaches with urgency, with the fixed intention of entering and achieving a specific outcome, is presenting the opposite of threshold-state to a shard realm organized around threshold-state. The consensus does not respond well to that. The Book of Unseen Currents reflects this: forcing the pages to reveal the Witchwoods takes considerably more mental effort than most locations, and that effort increases proportionally to how urgently the practitioner wants to go there. Urgency is the antipode of threshold. The Book finds this relevant, and so does the forest.

Moria Dawnwhisper, Emissary of the Revel of Twilight’s Embrace, mentioned in her dealings with the investigators that black sand, when fed with gossamer, enables treading the Witchwoods. This is consistent with what the black sand does in other applications: it blurs the lines between realms, making permeable what should be solid. The Witchwoods, as the membrane between waking and dreaming, respond to this permeability the way all membranes respond to the right kind of pressure: they admit what presses against them correctly.

The ethical dimensions of using black sand as an entry method are left to the practitioner’s discretion. I note that the substance’s other applications have not, in general, produced outcomes that invite enthusiasm.

There is a third method of entry that the accounts document with some consistency, though it resists formulation as a method: the near-death approach. Individuals who have come very close to dying have found themselves in the Witchwoods in a state that is difficult to classify as either physical presence or dreaming. The forest, as the boundary between states of existence, also constitutes a boundary between living and whatever lies beyond it, and at the margins of life that boundary becomes accessible in ways it is not during ordinary consciousness. Several of the most detailed accounts of the Witchwoods come from individuals who encountered it in this way and returned. The quality of knowledge these accounts contain is, in some respects, superior to accounts from deliberate visitors, because the near-death approach bypasses the forest’s tendency to respond to practitioner intent: you arrive without having chosen to arrive, and the Witchwoods, which respond to intention in ways that complicate deliberate entry, have no intention to respond to.