Homer gestures for us to sit on a low stone ledge of the crypt. We perch awkwardly, Germ swinging her legs like she does when she’s sitting on bleachers at a football game.

“Respect our graves!” a ghost yells at us from behind, making us jump, and Germ’s legs go still.

“So,” Homer says, folding his hands, an ominous worry settling over his luminous features, “the Memory Thief has found you. And now if you’re to escape her, you need to know some things. Things that have been hidden from you, just as you yourself have been hidden.”

Homer is about to go on when a ghost lets out a moan, and Homer shoots him a look and shakes his head.

“So far in your life, you’ve learned only the history of the seen and the living. Now, if you are to survive, you need the history of the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen.”

Beside me, Germ shivers—possibly with fear, possibly with excitement. I cross my arms over my chest. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s to be quiet and listen.

Homer lowers his head, as if thinking about where to begin. To our surprise, he starts with the moon.

“At the beginning of time,” Homer begins, eyeing us sharply, with urgency, “there were the thirteen witches and there was the Moon Goddess, all made of magic. The Moon Goddess, hidden and mysterious—who herself created our moon and many others—gathers up light and sends it down at night as a dim glow onto earth’s darkness, bringing strange powers with it: hope, dreams, imagination… mysterious things we don’t fully know or understand. The witches, on the other hand, are made of all the ugliness you can imagine. You simply can’t have a thing without having its opposite, and the Moon Goddess is so powerful, it took thirteen witches to balance out her worth.

“The goddess and the witches have been at war, always. But they fight each other in different ways. The Moon Goddess is subtle, and I guess unfathomable. She stays far away, and doesn’t meddle directly in earthly things. The witches, on the other hand, are not subtle at all. Their desire is to sow chaos, unhappiness, and discord among humans. War, despair, loss, grief, anguish… their fingerprints are on all of it. And they love it; chaos is to a witch what water is to a fish.”

Homer pauses. “Now, all living creatures die, the world churns. Darkness and light, you see, are part of nature, and neither can ever fully leave us. But the witches are always trying to tip the scales in their favor.”

His brow furrows as he goes on. “In the last hundred years or so, it seems they’ve been succeeding. They’ve sown more discord upon the earth than ever before.”