"When you know yourself you will know me," the woman said. As always she was maddeningly obscure as if hiding behind a gauze veil.
"Are you An Cailleach?" I asked. "Are you the witch?"
"I am who I am," the woman said.
"That tells me nothing." I was growing tired of this game. "Go away and leave me in peace."
"If I go away, you will never be in peace," the woman said. "You will never cease wondering who I am, and why I came to speak to you. You have fretted all your life, worrying who you are, Brenda Smith or Kirk. This is your time to find out when the world has torn itself asunder in war and evil has wrenched apart the gateways between worlds. Things will never be the same again."
I did not understand much of what the woman said and fastened only on one thing I knew to be correct. Th
