4.

The Velvet Room – The Cards Explained

Dressed down, for the still-weary Balthier, meant the rings and coat of office left aside. He was still charmed pirate-fair when the ferry left him in the city below, and more than a few eyes gave him a 'what the hell you doing down here?' squint as he stepped into busy market-morn streets. Next time, he resolved, I'll suck it up and steal a big robe from a monastic.

It wasn't the recognition he minded, exactly. It was that sooner or later the eyes would pass the question on to mouths, and he didn't enjoy making up lies unless it was part of a job. Oh, not down here for much, really. Just a few trinkets and some conversation, and, hey, how did you sleep last night? Me? Not so much. A sour expression passed across his face, and then came back to camp for a bit. It passed his notice that it was more likely he'd be asked after his health more than his presence – his eyes were darker than usual and set in pale hollows. If he'd run into Fran before slipping away from directorial duties, she might have asked him who had died.

His eyes widened, then narrowed as he emerged from an alley onto a wide part of Westfire bend. As dreamed, and as feared, there hung a fresh sign over blue velvet awning, words in curling silver script: Curios and Curiosities – Miss Seleney, Proprietress. The reality of it froze him in his step, and he blinked several times, as if doing so could make it all no more than just another dream.

The door, blue-painted and a white mask hung from a nail below its framed window, flung open and a woman in a blue robe stood on the division between shop and street. The proprietress stared across the way at Balthier, her red lips downturned into a look of impatience. She slipped back inside, the door left open for him.

He fought off an enormous urge to turn around and find a really good bar, forcing his feet across the avenue and inside a bright blue shop whose rich draperies belied the otherwise tackily-displayed knickknacks.

-----

The shop was divided in half; the storefront a repository for the proclaimed curios, but the curiosities waited on the other side of a thick curtain, which the ageless, unnatural woman parted with a gesture and waved Balthier through. The other half was elegant in its simplicity, the blue velvet draperies richer yet and some of them framing a huge painting of night's silver moon. The only other fixtures were a pair of silver-finished chairs on either side of a low table sheeted with more blue fabric. A few items lay scattered on the tabletop – some stones of black and white with one set aside, a deck of cards, but no parchment contracts, to Balthier's relief. He gave the chairs a suspicious glance; buried in the thick metal whorls and ornate curls were zodiac signs and other runes he couldn't identify.

"Miss Seleney. Quite a pun," he said, hiding his concerns in easy banter. Yigori moved from the curtain and took the chair on the other side of the table. She continued to look at him. After a few long, uncomfortable moments, he realized that not only was she not going to respond, but that she didn't seem to blink. His mind clamored for a stiff drink. He cleared his throat and went for a charming smile. "Curios, curiosities, and miscellany. Well, I do believe you've got all that covered." The smile withered before the unchanged gaze.

"Sit," she murmured, abrupt enough to jolt him. Yigori's hand flicked towards the other chair, and he took it, still feeling uneasy.

Apparently ignorant of his discomfort, she took the deck of cards into her hands and began to shuffle them with slow, ritual deliberacy. Balthier dropped his eyes to the pile of stones and noted the little zodiac icons on them, with Aries on the black one set aside. He thought back to his dream, the uneasiness blossoming into full-blown nausea.

"There is tea, for your stomach," Yigori stated flatly.

"Er." Balthier swallowed, and then decided now was perhaps not the best time for crafted pirate pride. "Yes, I think I'll have some."

"In the shop. Behind the counter. Touch nothing else." She did not look up from her cards.

He rose and slipped back through the curtain, finding a mug already prepared. A careful sniff told him of nothing overtly dangerous in it, and he shrugged and returned to his seat. Sweet liquid filled his mouth and settled his stomach as he examined the tableau before him. Twenty-two cards and four little piles, all of it face down.

"Mortals now bind prophecy to zodiac's whisper alone, and it has served mortal and immortal well. The date of birth sets a path for the chick that hatches, and so their routes are foreseen. But secrets are easily buried beneath a half-truth, and what I will show you now, you who fell, you who might yet protect, will serve you. If you will listen. If you see."

"I have a better idea – how about, if you can gadabout in dreams and present yourself as some all-knowing mystic before me, I just get some straight answers and we'll get this all sorted out?" As his stomach settled, his courage reformed. Mysticism was interesting enough in texts, but he cared little for it in daily life.

"No." The response was flat and unoffended. "I may not change fate. I may simply show you the paths of its passing, and you may say its course."

Abruptly, he changed topics. "Did you destroy them, the stones?"

"I did not. A fool did, and for your sin and his punishment, now all is in motion."

He swallowed another mouthful of tea. "Do I get a name at least, or will we game at that, too?" He hated the vagueness, and was beginning to wonder if the visit was to be a loss despite its auspicious way of inserting itself into his life.

"If I give the name you'll not believe me until it's seen, and if you wait until it's seen then all will become clear."

That will be a no. At least she gave some logic instead of fiddling a hand in the air and saying that would dicker with fate. He set the mug down on the table. "All right. Let's have it. What are they?" He gestured at the cards.

"Mortal soul is born from nothing and gone through life to death – the soul is the sum of the answers found and aspects claimed. A mortal toils and twines with others, seeking the pieces of itself not yet found, and in time, a soul might become whole." At this, she made a gesture and the cards at each end of the wide fan were turned. A jester grinned up from one, and on the other a snake wove in an endless circle around an androgynous figure. "At one end, the birth, the Fool, the nothingness, the clean slate. Resting at the other is the knowledge of all The World. Between them is man's road, and it is long and dreary and few walk it in full themselves – your souls are the sum of all, not merely your own."

She bent over the table and spread her hands, causing the other twenty to overturn. With less impressiveness, Yigori overturned each of the four small stacks. Those seemed more vague than the others – one stack showed a Bangaa, another a Moogle, another a Nu Mou, and finally a Viera.

"Humes don't get a stack?" Balthier ventured.

"Humes are child of all and child of none."

"Ah," he said, in tones that implied she'd explained nothing.

"This is called tarot, and few in this world remember the word except for old, ignored mystics among the Nu Mou. You might discover some texts for yourself – I will spare you much of what cursory research will tell. It is useful at present, in my hands – but only to an extent. Let me say that each card you see represents both future and flaw, alongside being a marker in the soul's journey. That there is no good or evil in the card, though a meaning might be reversed."

"Even on that one?" He reached out and tapped the thirteenth card – a figure robed in black and white, its face seen only as a skull. Death, read its label.

"Particularly that one," Yigori replied tonelessly. She began to rearrange the fan and the four stacks into a setup of pairings, save for three: Death, Fool, The World. These she placed in a triangle above the pairs. Next came the stones, paired as well. White and black Aries, white and black Taurus, and so forth. When she was done, the stone-pairs lay centered in a straight line across the table, the white above the black, and one card above the white and below the black – again, each, save for two exceptions. Virgo held one card alone, and it was the white-bordered Vagrant. The other was a single stone that was itself half black and half white, and this Yigori placed in the center of the trio. Balthier understood, by dint of exclusion, that it represented Ophiucus. The World sat above this dual-stone, and the other two as triangle's base below it.

"Death's role is twofold, and it is also Virgo's base – the Holy Seraph Ultima, though few think on it as anything other than singular. This is both true and false."

Balthier absorbed her words absently, but was busier examining Leo's pair: Above sat a card called Strength, and below, the red Sun card he remembered from his dream. Strength showed a serene-faced woman placing a soothing hand on something that looked like a nightmare's idea of a lion. He immediately saw similarities to Hashmal in the drawing, but it would be a Hashmal gentled and cowed. The Sun, on closer inspection, showed below the sun itself a tiny lion in triumphant, roaring pose, a broken body trampled into the earth beneath its paws.

"There is no good or evil, not in card nor zodiac. The Scions themselves are but named Dark and Light, and 'twas the Dark that rose against Occuria. Should they not be heroes, then?"

As my father might have been, had he not wanted reins of power for himself. He bit his lips, recalling, and with the recollection came a bit of doubt. That was not entirely true, and he heard bitter words at Sun-Cryst's end: "Such high hopes I once had, but you ran, and ran, and they with you! Alas, the hour of your return is late!" He reached out a suddenly unsteady hand for his tea and took a slow, deliberate drink while rallying his thoughts. "I have seen the dark scions let loose from little glyphs and released from stones of power. They were not gentle."

"No?"

Doubt continued to grow. There… had been a strange moment related to him by campsite's fire, in the hated, dire future. Apparently life to a girl's brother had been restored by stone's whim and without possession taken of the remade body – not an evil act.

"Dark scions might be better said to be incomplete and angry, denied by their creators. Their light twins are complete and powerful, serving blindly, and so were named holy by their Gods, but does that make them holy for you?"

He began to understand. "Not then. But perhaps if the matter had been… reversed?" This gave him a genuine smile, the first, and eyes unblinking crinkled with a second's gentle approval.

"Gods and men and masks between all. I give you a word – Persona." She smiled quickly, like a knife. "The man is a soul, and on the soul is a mask, and the mask and soul might change and grow… the soul manifested when mortal thoughts subsumed. Between many souls who might see this mask is a chance to heal what has gone awry – but to do so brings disaster close enough to kiss before the weave can be unmade."

He took a moment to translate through what he had heard so far, a lifetime's worth of bored perusing of philosophic and symbolic texts come to use at last – Each zodiac could be said to have a light and dark scion, or symbolic 'personae' attached, and each person that lived was connected to the zodiac. That it all balanced out to the light and dark elements of known Espers – the Dark and Light Scions of legend - sounded like a mythology manufacted and promoted by Occuria for some sort of controllable use. In a moment of duress, in a world where there were no chains on the scions, some people might be able to tap the scions' power for themselves. At the cost of their dominant self. "The shattering of the stones?"

She smiled again. "It released the idea you realize – an idea forged by others vexed before, and now struggle to not be vexed again. A simple idea, a plan set for this eventuality, a meme created for the minds of mortals. Can Fate, once unleashed, be rechained and bent to 'godly' will?" As she finished, he saw the flaw put in place by the end of a war and chased it down, distracting himself from other paths of thought.

"Occuria, who forged Scions and set loose the faiths we use and the patterns and… personae we follow would want fate back in their hands, no matter the cost. I think I'm getting this. But with the Sun-Cryst broke they do not walk."

"They can. They do. You know it."

He did, he realized with sudden shuddery horror. Drafts. The rumors of ghosts in his laboratory. He swore to himself. "Still, they can't possibly manifest whole, just… just distant shades."

Her hand reached out and caressed the Fool. "They could, if there were a carrier."

-----

Yigori had fallen mostly silent after her dire statement that the Occuria were back. Balthier tried to prod her back into discussion with pointed questions about what card symbolized what, or even if anyone had found these 'personae' within themselves yet, but only received the briefest answers. He had learned that she called the strange red night the 'Dark Hour,' though she did not give him an answer as to why it had come or what its purpose was. He got the sense it was to be a nightly occurrence, however, and that the persona link would be more easily accessible then.

Balthier had finally left, mentally exhausted by trying to dig for more, and stopped by a book dealer to see if they had any books on 'tarot' in their stock. There were a few, mostly old and crackpotty, but he took one for study anyway. Balthier thumbed through it while taking lunch at the inn on Windspear, a pair of sibling Hume dancers gamely entertaining the mealtime crowd. Balthier held an opinion that the male's heart wasn't in it. He looked tired.

A few things I might infer, Balthier thought while staring at a list of traits found in the Lord Priest card. First, that I was not the only one awake last night, and those of us awake might be bound by this zodiac pattern. Second, if I discover how someone can deliberately pull out a 'persona,' mine is currently Hashmal, as much as that vaguely nauseates me. And to a third… I think something is to happen at the full moon. She was so adamant that I would come to the Room before then.

Frustrated, weary, and still feeling obligated to show up and do some nominal work at the Laboratory, Balthier shoved the book under an arm and dropped some coins in the dancer's kit, feeling more than a little sympathetic for the man's dark-ringed eyes.