(no subject)

[fairytalenoir]

[ A handmade cardboard sign goes on the podium: 3 CARD TAROT READING: FINAL CHANCE. The wobbly card table with a Tarot pack waiting goes in front. The Boy Detective himself, pasty white and raccoonishly hollow-eyed as ever, stands beside both table and podium. ]

What do you consider a rite of adulthood?

If you want a reading, an answer is my final price. But —

[ So generous a tone here. ]

— if you only want to answer, I won't force one on you. I mean, I'm practically dying and it might be the best reading of the rest of my life and you'd be wasting the special spiritual insight my hovering on the precipice between worlds grants me, but I won't make you.

Comments

[whitenoises]

[... ah. Things have taken a very interesting turn now. Sweeping her eye over the card, Lumis's smile broadens.]

Your cards have a way of flattering a woman, I'll tell you that.

[fairytalenoir]

It's good for business. If this were a business. Which it's not. But it could've been! The cards don't really care that I'm dying.

All right, now the final card, your future. The one card people can't argue with because the future is always still coming.

[ The Boy does not read this one until it's turned over. Perhaps he didn't know, too. A man holding a set of scales in one hand gives money to a petitioner with the other, while the other petitioner stares longingly. ]

The Six of Pentacles. A card of warning. Not as a portent, but more like a reminder of life's essential unfairness, the unpredictability of fortune. You're riding the Chariot wherever it takes you and the Six of Pentacles asks you to examine your own motivations for that. It asks you to think about what you really want, and whether that matches up to what the Chariot gives you.

And obviously, the Six of Pentacles doesn't have the same kind of drama as the Chariot, it doesn't carry the same weight, I guess you could say. It's not spelling out doom. It only suggests something which is rarely a bad idea: a pause to reassess. To think about what your life costs, and if you'd like to pay a different price.

[ The Boy shrugs as if this was all quite mysterious to him. ]