Taking solitude in the lounge room, I’d given myself a breather to sort out the troubled thoughts I’d come face to face with. That harrowing image of Chamelis that had been an unwelcome guest in my mind had proved a fearsome combatant. An intense guilt had smoldered in my chest like a burning smoke. The thought that I could at all have formed such a disgusting image troubled me deeply.

But with patience and breath to breathe out the cinders, I’d waved it all away to diminish. Yet no matter, a remnant trace still prickles in my chest.

Taking off out and back to my day, I give my plans another once over before finding myself defaulting to rest up for a moment longer.

Sitting at my desk, it dawns on me that there had been one maiden who had been scarce in recent. One besides Juna. Although it would go without saying that Celine would doubtlessly be doting on her as ever, missing her, I go on my pay to pay her a visit myself.

Her door bears a cute decoration of ocean life wreathing about her name with waves crashing above it. I give a light rapping.

“Oh? Is that Khiron?” A joyful, airy voice answers. “It’s okay, you can come in.”

In my own conception of what her room would possibly look like, I’d easily envisioned that it would be a dimmer place. With curtains drawn shut, filled with a gloom that would be apt for sleeping. Yet now discovering it for myself, the brightness of not only the morning sun, but the cuter colors painting it are against my imaginations.

Her bed is not drab nor dreary, its covers are colored in softer pastels and the small, stuffed critters laying about it are more cute than I’d wagered that I’d be seeing. Paintings and decorations hang on the walls, making the place feel alive, lived in.

My open gawking is without a filter, given how its occupant tilts her head quizzically at my manners. But the sight of her throws me into an even greater loss.

Her skin is radiant, giving off a warm energy. The lack of tired darkness on her pale skin is unlike I’ve ever seen before. How her expression is upheld with a lively vigor is uncharacteristic for her. Her lips look like they would naturally curl into a smile on the instant, well exercised to show joy.

Her hair is fixed in a relaxed and flowing style. Her leftmost bang is swept behind her ear, giving her a more active appearance. Not yet dressed up in her usual black dress, she’s instead garbed in a cute black set of pajamas with shorts that show off the soft and smooth skin of her legs.

“Is something wrong?” She asks me with such gentle innocence.

“Ah… You just seem to be doing well today. Are you feeling better?”

“Feeling better? I suppose that I feel as fine as I usually do.” Even her tone is more spirited than the sleepiness I’m accustomed to hearing in it.

“Is that right? You just look like you’re…” I pause and let the thought drift past me as I continue to question my own perceptions. I can’t quite pin it all down and I begin to feel that my mind had been playing tricks on me, so I relent. “It’d been a while so I’d just thought that it’d be nice to visit. There hasn’t been much of a chance to see you recently.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been a bit here and there so I’ve been mostly shut in. I really should come out more often.”

“Only if you’re feeling up to it. I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself.”

In response, she offers me another lightly confused look. It fits her well and makes her look adorable. I come closer and see that she’s busy playing with strange cards on her desk.

“Playing a game?”

“Well, it’s not a game. It’s a way of reading your own psyche. A kind of divination.”

“Divination? You mean like fortune telling?”

“Something like that. But I think fortune telling sounds a bit too simple and sells it short.”

Taking a card between her fingers, she lifts it up and shows its face to me. On it is a man standing atop a cliff side. He gazes up to the sky with a neutral, almost thoughtless expression. At his side is a dog perched up on its hind legs. It and the man almost seem to be heading straight for a fall off the mountain.

“What an odd picture. What’s all of this about?”

“I’m surprised you’ve never heard of Tarot before. But you were always really focused on your work as a knight. I guess it’s probably not something you’d naturally cross paths with.”

She places the card back onto the table and peers up to me with a bright, healthy smile that makes her glow with life.

“I know! How about I do it for you and we can see what it says together?”

 

✩ ✩ ✩

 

I’d taken a seat on her bed after helping her move her desk to rest in between us. She sets the entire deck down in front of me and gestures towards it, thrilled and full of expectations.

“Shuffle it yourself and then place it down.”

“Vestil was always the gambling type and I haven’t had much experience, but I’ll give it a try.”

I fumble it a bit as I mix them together. When I get it well enough shuffled, I place it back down.

“Now cut the deck and place one half on top of the other.” I follow her instruction. She nods her head energetically, well pleased. “Alright! Now we can begin!”

She picks from its top and begins to set her drawn cards down in a single row. Three backs face towards the ceiling.

“One of the simplest readings you can do would be the past, present, future arrangement. It’s just three cards but reading from left to right you’ll be able to see where you come from, where you are and where your life is headed.”

“Alright then. Sounds simple enough, I’ll bite.”

She takes the first card to my left shoulder and overturns it. Now revealed for me is a somewhat unsettling image. At its center, standing out from the pitch black background, is a monster. Its horns stand tall and it holds a torch towards the ground while its other hand raises to point to the sky. Standing at either of its shoulders are two people. A man and a woman chained to him yet their collars are loose. Loose enough for them to slip through should they try.

“The Devil?” I read the writing on the card as it stands before me.

“It may look scary – some of these cards may look scary – but their meaning is nothing to be afraid of. A lot of people think there’s bad cards, but all are neutral and deliver to the same end.”

She calmly explains the idea to me. With great excitement, she begins interpreting what I’m seeing.

“This card can mean that someone is overindulgent at its worst. But it can also mean that someone has made a willful contract or agreement and has the drive to see it through to its end. It can symbolize diving so deeply into something that you are committed to it rain or shine.”

“If that’s the case, then it doesn’t sound all that bad. So this would be the past card?”

“That’s correct. Maybe it’s about your hard work training to become the Celestial Knight?”

Moving to the central card, she flips it to face me. Now revealed is the sight of a grand tower being struck by a furious bolt of lightning which splits the sky. It too is contrasted by the pitch black backdrop that clashes against the gray building.

Falling, fear on one’s face, a blank expression on the other, are two people dressed in blue. The person with a neutral expression wears a crown all the while another more mighty and large has been smote from the top of the tower and is soon to join them in their descent.

“How interesting. The Tower.” She remarks, her fascination tightly held to the card. “This card denotes a radical change of predicaments. Imagine that something that was held so near, a lifestyle is being dismantled and altered. With this change all that can come from it is a new beginning. What we held with high esteem, as having power over us, is now being removed from our lives. What you knew is changing.”

“And so this would be the card representing my present?”

“Precisely. With whatever is going on now, it’s making way for a new way of being.”

I let my eyes rest on the image of that long and tall standing construct. Its gray stone coaxes from me the remembrance of a dream.

“Now promise me, Khiron. Promise me that you won’t give up. You’ll solve the mystery of that tower.”

“A tower… A tower in the present.”

“This one too looks pretty scary, but it really isn’t. I think all of these meanings are good. It’s all up to your outlook and how you choose to move forward. If you’re afraid, then it’ll likely be negative since fear always directs us towards misfortune.”

Thus we continue on to the final card. She twists it about and a most frightening image stares into my eyes.

A knight in black armor hoisting a flag bearing a five petaled flower on its black face. The armored man is not of the living. Their face and hands reveal their skeletal body and they ride upon a white, pale steed with eyes as red as blood. Before him, all about him, are beggars pleading to him. A man lays still at his side, the crown that he wore now tarnished in the mud of the earth. Perhaps it has been stepped upon by the horse’s hooves.

“Death…?” I read its name aloud.

“Oh… That’s a bit more than I was expecting.” Even she is tripped up with this final piece added to the puzzle.

“The most obvious answer seems to be obvious, but what does this one mean?”

“Death is a card about change. Death doesn’t necessarily mean literal death. It can mean that we lose the old to bring in the new. But as you see, Death, the horseman, doesn’t spare anyone on its path forward as it moves forward. Not king nor pauper.”

I take a closer look and pick out the illustration of two towers raising into the heavens in the horizon. The sun ascends between them, giving a small golden light to challenge the apathetic gray skies.

“Towers?”

“Oh! So you’ve noticed the towers! Those towers are a part of The Moon Tarot as well!”

With a fervor for show and tell, she turns over the deck in her hands and gives it a hurried search before bringing up the card in question for my appraisal. With a full smile, she presents it.

Up in the pale blue skies is a moon shining with light like the sun yet crescent and full all the same while a somber face fits in the center of its circular body. Fifteen falling lights descend from it and it is framed by two tall towers, each bearing a single window.

A mountain pass lays beneath the moon and in the very center of the two towers with a road leading down to a small body of water from which a crustacean rises towards the land where two dogs howl towards the night sky.

“You could say that this card is linked to the tower in The Tower and Death cards. Towers often represent strength and what has been built. The sun rising between them in the Death card could show that there is renewal and hope, even when death is near.”

“But is the sun rising or setting?” I ask her, pensive.

“Who knows. It could be either. It could be an ending, it could be a new beginning. It all depends on what you think.”

“An ending… or a beginning…” I pause for thought before giving into my next curiosity. “What about this Moon card? What could it mean?”

Turning the card back to get a look at it, she answers me.

“This card is another that could be seen as a gloomy one. Most people agree that it’s about illusions and the subconscious mind. Either intuition or fear. But I personally think that it’s about the journey to find our own way through hardship or confusion. Between the two towers of loss and renewal, two dogs, one feral and one friendly. How we follow our own narrow road towards peace.”

Staring at those towers, I begin to see them intersect. Losing their duality, becoming one together. One fashioned of cold steel, the other of a glass like the stars. Sun or moon and then neither.

All the same tower.

And there in the sky, the moon, taken prisoner by glass along with the gleaming host of its heavens.

Stelaris.

The scar begins to shriek as I see that vision. It touches me, a peculiar feeling that almost makes me feeling as if I’m falling deeper into the mystery of it all. Yet so too do I have the impression that I’m taking one step closer to its unraveling.

As if I’m between those two towers, seeking the truth of both.

“Solus… A Tower…”

“If I were to take all of this together, as any good Tarot reading would make a story of all the cards, I think it’d be a bit like this.”

She points her finger towards the past, the beginning of it all.

“You’d made a contract which you have been so passionate, impassioned to see through to its conclusion. It was willful and it was born from your own desires you so wish to sate.”

Then she moves onto the next of the series.

“This path has lead you to where you are now. Where your old concepts and understandings are being challenged. What is unnecessary for your journey is being removed from your life. You’re bearing witness to a new reality that is incompatible with the old foundations that you’d set long ago. A new foundation must come and with it, the old is uprooted.”

And so to the final of the three. The frightening image of Death.

“And your future holds a drastic change, an ending to one story and the beginning to another. But it shouldn’t be feared, only accepted as it will find its way to you no matter what you may do. It wouldn’t spare a king, a title, and it wouldn’t spare neither an innocent, an elder nor an emotional thought. Your future will be a new life.”

“A new life?”

“You’d already died once, hadn’t you? It wasn’t that scary, was it?”

“No. If I were to say, I think that it was peaceful.”

“So you’ve gotten that out of the way, haven’t you? I’m thinking there’s a lot of good that will be coming from now on.” She comforts me with her luminescent smile.

But even if she gives her greatest attempts, a seedling of discomfort has already taken root within me. The image of Chamelis’ bloodied body returns to my mind for an instant.

A Death.

I shelve the thought once more and come to accept that these cards have only brought me to wonder even more what the future holds for me.

Putting the cards away, she stacks them together and places them back into a leather holder she’d had set aside. When she replaces them on her shelf, she returns to me and sits by my side.

“I’m sorry if I haven’t been showing my face much lately. It’s been a strange time for me too. But I’m so very happy that I can still be with you.” She’s so close that I can feel her body lightly touching mine. “I’d had a dream when you’d passed on. I’d seen you in it. You’d told me not to fear. To stay strong while you were gone. It was comforting.”

I remain in my thoughts while I listen. But I’m pulled back to the bedroom as she knits her fingers together with my own.

“…Will you kiss me?”

“That’s awfully sudden.” I feel myself humored and give into a laugh.

“But… may I?”

I answer her request and kiss her. Close, holding hands, shoulder to shoulder. At the very least, it’s a thank you for her help. Though she is ignorant of all that’s been on my mind, she’s helped me on my way to keep my promise to Solus.

And so I cherish that kiss for every second, every sensation it has to offer.

 

✩ ✩ ✩

 

“I’d better be on my way.” I stand near the door and look back over my shoulder to her.

She sits still and her face is blasted red. Unable to look me in the eye, a dainty smile yet crooking her lips. She plays with her fingers for a brief spell.

“Thank you… It was more than I was expecting, but thank you.”

True to her word, I’d ended up letting myself get a little too lost in the moment. Even to the point of having pressed her down onto her mattress.

“I’m glad you’re feeling well. For some reason… I’ve been thinking that you were sickly, but I can’t remember if I was just imagining it or overthinking it. Maybe it was some dream that I’d had and mistook for reality.”

“I’m certainly… doing well now.” She switches it up from fidgeting with her fingers to fidgeting with a lock of her hair.

“I hope that we’ll get to see each other again soon. Take care.”

I step out and shut the door behind me. Away from her view I think it all over deeply.

I could swear that she was always so sick but now she’s so bright and cheerful. Where had that thought come from?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Pardon that this chapter is latecoming. The auto upload seems to have failed.