The maples have shed their leaves. Bright yellow windfall clumps on pavement and lawns, a defiant contrast to the gloom of the afternoon sky. As I walk from the bus stop down the street, a cold, light rain begins to fall. I pull my coat closer to my body.

His apartment, which is part of what used to be a large, sprawling house before it was divided into separate units, is at the end of the street. Some of the other people in it have turned on their entrance lights, the way many of the houses on this street have, for the trick-or-treaters. He isn't passing out candy this year. His paycheck didn't stretch far enough to allow for both candy and rent. Maybe after tonight, when the candy goes on clearance, it will be another story. We do both like chocolate.

I reach the apartment building, enter, and walk up a flight of stairs to his door. A single ear of corn hangs from it as decoration.

He looks at me thoughtfully. "It's interesting," he says. "There's something about you – some kind of inner presence. You have a certain untouchable, virginal quality about you."

"Really? After all this?" I smile. "I don't see how that's possible. I think the only part of me that's still inviolate is my left nostril."

"No, no, you know that's not what I mean. I refer to your self-containment." He pauses. "You're unusually self-possessed. Also, you also seem to have a sort of regenerative tendency. I've noticed that you always grow yourself back, somehow, should an event happen in your life that cuts you down – losing your family, losing your ability to attend college, losing your wealth – nothing has ever broken you. It's a very good quality to have. I think we'll be glad of that tonight."

If he's trying to cheer me up, it's not working.

"Do you still want to do this?"

"It's not a matter of want. I still need to do this. You know that."

I smile nervously, pick a few seeds out of the sliced pomegranate that sits on the kitchen table, pop them in my mouth, and go back to my reading, of which there has continued to be a ridiculous amount. It's all been related to the initiation I'll be going through tonight. He wants me to be well-prepared. It seems like every week's reading list was longer than the one from the week before it.

I've even helped him write the ceremony. Well, I helped him write some of it, namely, the parts of it that aren't meant to surprise me – which would be less than half of it. What I did contribute, though, was important in its own way.

I remind myself of extremely common elements of rite-of-passage rituals and shamanic and magickal initiations that won't be part of tonight's experience because they were among the things I specifically listed as personally unacceptable when I gave him an inventory of my absolute limits: Mutilation, either performed on myself by myself, or by my initiator. Prolonged fasting. Poison ingestion, to trigger hallucinations, purge impurity, or simply to test endurance. Burial alive. I'll be spared all these things. I could almost say I'm getting off easy tonight.

Making me complicit in the terms of my ordeal was critical. I know this. I cannot go through with this without having crafted my explicit consent well in advance.

Terror and dread are meant to be part of the experience, too. He had me suggest possible material that he could add that I found frightening. Who better to know the measure of my own Shadow than myself?

Bastard.

We've pushed furniture aside in the living room to provide extra space, and he has me cast circle to seal and consecrate the area we will use. When it's just him, or when I'm only helping, he goes through an elaborate spoken ritual that involves calling the archangels, using formal language, and he has specific postures that get used, a ritual robe that he sewed himself by hand, and other details that help him focus. My own methods are simpler. I cleanse the area using my hands to pantomime scouring, and I put a bit of frankincense on the brazier, mostly just because I've always liked the smell of frankincense, ever since I was a child. Then I draw the circle by walking it, stopping at each compass corner point to imagine the element it corresponds to and to summon that element in. I must be silent when I do this. I found that being under imposed silence while working with energies made silence one of my primary tools for focus, and we both agreed that if it worked for me, I should continue doing things the way I did them.

In silence, I use my raw will to seal the circle, and then I face him.

"Open up, doorman, open up. I am all alone and I want to come in."

"Who are you?" Magister intones, using the words we scripted.

"I am myself. I seek entrance to the Underworld."

"Then come."

I approach him and take a deep breath. I am wearing special clothing tonight: a shift made of white silk gauze, cinched at the waist with a long, glittering scarf; a veil covering my head, made of the same gauzy material as my shift; a copper circlet set with a smooth oval of lapis lazuli. The circlet came from a catalog of occult books and accessories; I assembled the rest by hand from fabric I got at a local fabric store. It cost me about half my weekly paycheck. I'll be cutting my daily ration of ramen and canned peaches in half for a long while after this.

And of course, I'm wearing the black scarf on my right wrist.

He removes them all.

"What is this?" I ask.

"Be satisfied, seeker, a divine power of the Underworld has been fulfilled. You must not speak out against the rites of the Underworld. The Seven Gates are barred against you, seeker."

"I would enter."

"Those who would enter must surrender. If you would pass, you must lose your pride. On your knees."

I drop.

"Why are you here?" he asks, then nudges my left thigh with his foot. "Legs open," he murmurs.

That last part wasn't in the script.

"I crave wisdom," I reply; my mouth sticks on the ritual words.

"Do you?" His voice is soft and gently remote. "Then pass the gates, but know this: for as long as you are in the Underworld, you belong not to yourself, but to the Underworld, and the laws of the Underworld are absolute. I will have your sight, now." He takes a blindfold from the altar – it is dark, and silky like the scarf I wear for him, but it seems to have some kind of decoration on it, tassels, maybe; no, feathers, they're feathers – and ties it around my eyes. "I will have your voice, your throat, and your mouth. They are no longer your own. Open," he says, and I feel his fingers on my lips, gently but firmly prying my mouth open. "You will stay this way until I say otherwise. Your mouth is mine." Then I hear a movement of fabric, and his hand is on the back of my head, and it's not his fingers that I have in my mouth anymore, and for a time the only sounds in the room are the sounds of my tongue, my jaw, and his increasingly hoarse breathing. He keeps his hand in my hair, moving me with him, and it's all I can do to breathe, myself. After what feels like an eternity, he finally spends himself in my mouth and relaxes his grip.

He doesn't completely release me, though. He caresses me for a moment, then moves behind me to sit at my back, and wraps his arms around me. I lean into his embrace, hungry for reassurance even though I know it won't be there.

"If you would gain the wisdom of the Underworld, your resolve must be weighed, and not found lacking," he murmurs in my ear. It occurs to me that he has never once raised his voice to me, not in all the months that I have been his partner. "I would weigh your resolve."

And then that arm that is wrapped so gently around me moves ever so slightly, and his fingertips trail to a place just under my collarbone, and he grabs and twists.

I'm in so much pain that I forget how to scream. I writhe, gasping.

When he releases me, it's all I can do to keep from crumpling on the floor.

He takes a deep breath. "Are you sure that you still need to go through with this?" he asks.

I wish I wasn't. I don't know quite what he has in store for me, because everything after the circle casting was drawn up in sketchy terms only, but it's not going to be pretty – descents into Hell rarely are – and it's only going to be safe, sane, and consensual by a bare technicality.

We have already established, though, that while I don't want to go through with it, I do absolutely need to go through with it. There is no way around it. Even my uncertainty is an indication that my studies have reached a mental block, and the only way around that is to break through that block via initiation.

"Yes," I hear myself reply.

"Very well. Alea iacta est." A long silence follows. I think his voice is shaking. It's probably my imagination. "Please forgive me for what is to come," he whispers, and gets up.

I hear a rustling and a clinking from the general direction of the altar. When he comes back, I feel his fingers against my nipples, hardening them, and then a sharp, pinching bite. These clamps don't screw on. They don't need to. Compared to what he just did to the nerve endings under my collarbone, the sensation is almost bearable, but not by much.

"I didn't say you could close your thighs," he says, forcing them open again with his hands. "Also, I'm not done adorning you, yet." There's a steely quality to his voice, now; most often these days, when he's doing things to me, his voice reminds me of a particularly luxurious and decadent velvet, but not now. "Because you have willingly entered the Underworld, and become its captive and its property, you will wear this for as long as you remain here." I feel something go around my neck. It's wide and heavy, and it smells like leather. He fastens it in back, slips a finger underneath – it's loose enough for that, so, loose enough for me to breathe and swallow, I suppose – and gives it an experimental tug from the front. There must be a ring there.

And then I feel a hood descend over my head. A hood, or a mask. It, too, is heavy, and from it I feel a cloak of feathers brushing my shoulders. The air has become stale around me.

"You may be a seeker of mysteries, but you are in the realm of Death now, and nobody returns from this place of darkness. This is called the House of Darkness for good reason, and whoever enters here, magistrate or warrior, king or shepherd, milkmaid or goddess, can never return. Whoever enters this house has no more need of light. Dust will be your bread and mud will be your meat. Your dress will be a cloak of feathers. The Gates are already bolted behind you, my lady." He slides his hands under the hood and places his fingers on my neck, above the collar, knuckles brushing my ears. There is an odd pressure against my eardrums. It feels like something wants to explode out of my head; I begin to tremble. "This is the last, the Seventh, Gate: you forfeit your will. There are no safewords in the Underworld. You are mine, and I will use you as I see fit."

And then he does something sudden and sharp with his fingers that pushes in and squeezes at my neck, and agony seizes me, and I am taken by stars and nausea, and the world goes black as I fade out of consciousness.