SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the finale (episode 9) of Agatha all the time.

Perhaps the real true covenant was the friendships forged along the way. Coven two, however, is a lot more complicated.

The penultimate episode of Agatha all the time ended the many miles of tricks and trials of the Witches’ Road, but it left viewers with many questions about the reality of what happened and who ended up where.

Episode 8, titled “Follow Me My Friend / To Glory At the End,” suggested that the road itself was all in Billy’s mind. Episode 9, the show’s finale, titled “Maiden Mother Crone,” expands on this idea and also tells the history of Agatha, her son Nicholas Scratch, and what Rio did to make Agatha hate her. Deadline’s episode 8 recap will refresh viewers’ memories before heading into the finale.

The finale opens in a lush green expanse of forest as women sing in the background. A hooded woman rushes through the forest in a purple robe. It is 1750 and the woman is Agatha.
She is pregnant and, from the looks of it, in labor. She cuts a lemon against a tree and bites it to start the process. She looks up and Rio, wrapped in greenery, is waiting for her at the edge of a lake with a flower in hand.

“That can’t be true,” Agatha tells her. “That must be the case,” Rio replies. “If you do this, I will hate you forever,” Agatha says, begging Rio to let him live. This harkens back to when Death said she betrayed a woman she loved, becoming her scar.

I can only offer time, says Rio. Agatha asks how much time. Rio disappears and Agatha gives birth to the baby. “I didn’t cast a spell, I didn’t say an incantation,” she says, calling him Nicholas Scratch – made from scratch.

A mist envelops Agatha as she hugs her son close and the episode jumps forward a bit. She is walking with him through the woods as he cries when she comes across a group of women singing around a cauldron.

“Sister come forward,” an older woman asks. “Is the little one okay?” The woman places Agatha in a circle of stones while the blue veins in it glow yellow, but she looks at Agatha suspiciously beforehand. “We haven’t eaten in days,” was Agatha’s excuse. Agatha sucked away all their power.

Six years later, an older Nicholas sits at the foot of a well. He steals a bell—which looks suspiciously like the one Agatha rings before she and her makeshift coven begin singing—from a witches’ stall and lures them to Agatha’s hut while she siphons their power.

“Mom, why are you killing witches?” he asks. “To survive,” she tells him, and he asks, “Can’t we stay with the witches and survive with them?”

Agatha says no and tells him to get used to the feeling of being alone.

“Walk, walk, walk the road / I walk the windy road,” he sings in an early version of the Ballad of the Witches’ Road.

“I cannot heal you, I cannot protect you from what is coming,” she tells Nicholas when one day he asks her to make him food, knowing that Death will return for her young.

Agatha and her son slowly composed the lyrics of the Ballad of the Witches’ Road and called it the Windy Road.

RELATED: ‘Agatha All Along’ Release Schedule: When Will New Episodes Come?

Nicholas then sings the song as Agatha sneaks through the distracted audience. She pays him and encourages others to reward him too. A red-haired witch asks where he found the curious song. Nicholas looks ill and as he is offered a hot meal he says, “Thanks, but no.” My mother needs me at home.”

“Tomorrow we can kill more witches,” he says, coughing, as darkness falls in the forest. As they fall asleep singing the song, Nicholas wakes up in Rio with a green flame, while Rio holds the torch and waits for them in the dark. She beckons Nicholas, who picks up something from the blanket as he leaves with her. Agatha wakes up to find him dead.

“I want more time,” she sobs. She buried her young under stones with a bushel of lavender and sang the song with new lyrics. “I buried my own heart, here with you, my child,” she sings.

“Then you must know the way,” says a blonde woman to Agatha, who, according to the ballad, suspects that she knows the way to the Witches’ Road. “I am in great distress,” says the young woman after telling Agatha about the path that offers a prize worth the danger to witches who are brave and faithful. “Can you show me the way?” the young woman asks.

“You ask in good faith, so I will respond in kind,” says Agatha. “I know it by heart. First we need to gather a coven.”

‘Where’s the door? Pathetic, embarrassing,” Agatha shouts at a group of women she brings together to map out the rumor trail. They then try to destroy her with their magic, which she drains from them, leaving them dead.

RELATED: ‘Agatha All Along’ Recap: Lilia’s Shocking Backstory Leaves Many Questions as Coven Faces a Tarot Trial

A montage unfolds in which Agatha appears in different ways in different time periods and takes on more and more power, eventually catching up when she did it with Alice, Sharon Davis, Jenn and Lilia. She is completely shocked when a door appears, but she knows it is Billy.

Flash forward to Billy from Episode 8 and say, “It was me.” The evil laughter was indeed Agatha, but she appears as a GHOST with gray hair in an outfit like she appears in the comics.

“Besides, I didn’t sacrifice myself for you. I took a calculated risk,” she tells him. “I’m still figuring out the rules.”

“Did I make the way?” Billy asks her.

“Unlike your mother, sorry Wanda, you did something interesting with your power. It was just a scam. The song doesn’t mean anything. That never happened,” she tells him. “The road wasn’t real until you made it real.”

“If I’ve completed the road, that means it’s me,” Billy concludes. ‘I killed them. Are they ghosts too? I am a murderer.”

Agatha says she killed Alice and Lilia chose to die.

“My spirit killed them,” he tells Agatha, who says, “Don’t give yourself too much credit. If you actually do the math, you’ve saved a life.” Cut to Jenn crawling through the sand back to the border of Westview, near the sign. She flies away with her newly restored pink powers.

RELATED: ‘Agatha All Along’ Showrunner Unpacks Lilia’s Trial, Rio’s Reveal and More Ahead of Final Two Episodes

“I wanted to kill them all in my basement on day one,” says Agatha. “If you want to be a witch, get used to this feeling”

“I’ll never get used to this,” Billy says, to which Agatha replies, “We’ll see.”

Billy visits Agatha’s – formerly Ralph Bohner’s – all boarded up with her purple mushroom grave still in the backyard. He goes into the basement, where the pentagonal door with a blue glow behind it awaits him, as does Agatha’s ghost, who says he took something from her and wants it back.

“Give me what I want and I’ll come,” she says to Billy, who draws a petagram crayon and places a few candles around the edge, performing analog magic in Agatha’s eyes, or not.

He looks eerily similar to Wanda as she takes dream walks with similar materials. Suddenly his black notebook jumps from behind Agatha into his hands. He takes out her broach as he finds a page in the spell book where an incantation can be recited to banish her.

“Time to step into the light, or Rio’s toxic embrace, or where you deserve to spend eternity,” he says. “It really doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

“You think you can just send me to the afterlife with an incantation and a personal item?!” Agatha asks Billy, who says, “It worked on Wanda’s spell.”

“That wasn’t you,” Agatha says, laughing. “Okay, maybe you loosened the pot.”

“Five seconds ago you guys were all out of shape about killing witches!” she says to Billy.

“You’re already dead!” he fires back at her.

Her translucent form flickers as he repeats the words. ‘Why are you still here? Why don’t you just die?” Billy asks Agatha, who shouts, “Because I can’t face him!” which means Nicholas, as Billy deciphers. She had knocked her brooch to the ground, and she can pick it up by touching it to her chest where it is stuck.

“I’m sure he would forgive you for whatever you did,” Billy tells her.

“See, that’s when you say things like that,” Agatha tells him. “That you remind me of him.”

“You picked it up,” Billy notes.

“I’m a fast learner,” she says.

Billy says that maybe being a ghost would be something for her – “Ghost as my guide,” to which Agatha says, “We could make a good team, you and me.”

“Coven two?” Billy says as a tear rolls down his face. They then realize that they both have a tendency to kill their coven members.

RELATED: ‘Agatha All Along’ Showrunner Tells Billy’s Backstory, Evan Peters’ MCU Return and What’s to Come on The Witches Road

Billy looks at the floor and pulls up the box he made, labeling the stone tile of the floor with the names Sharon Davis, Alice Wu-Gulliver, and Lilia Calderu in the center of the pentagram.

“One door closes,” says Agatha.

“And another one opens,” Billy finishes her sentence and a staircase opens up in white light.

Then Agatha says, “Let’s go find Tommy.”

So viewers have reached the end of the path Agatha all the timebut hopefully not the last we’ve seen of Agatha Harkness or Joe Locke’s Wiccan, aka Billy Maximoff, aka William Kaplan.

RELATED: Who Is Joe Locke’s Mysterious ‘Teenager’ in ‘Agatha All Along’? All clues so far