PART THE FOURTH: The Cards We Are Dealt With
Kurt was sitting on the sandstone steps of the dais, his long legs were stretched out fully and he was resting upon one elbow as his free hand played with some brightly coloured cards. He had eaten well and some of the colour had returned to his face and his playful demeanour had returned somewhat.
Magik looked down at her brother from her throne at the top of the dais. She had wedged herself into the vast and elaborate chair sideways and her bare feet dangled over one arm. In her hand was a golden goblet filled with blood-red wine. Her courtiers had retired for the night, even Kurt's enthusiastic nursemaid Vitchen, and they had the room to themselves.
Magik, her long blonde tresses finally freed from her stifling helm snaking down her back and shoulders, closely regarded her brother of sorts as he tried to build a house of cards upon the rough hewn floor. "Kurt, why don't you tell me what is wrong? You don't have to suffer alone. Tell me what ails thee?"
Kurt laughed out loud at this turn of phrase from Amanda, who had clearly been trapped in the realm of the mythic and the impossible so long that it had such an effect on her speech, "Why, you sound like you have been taking diction lessons from Thor. What ails thee, indeed! I know what ails thee, 'tis too long in a hornéd helm, sweet lady Magick, for it has cooked thy brain i'faith until I cannay tell it twixt a fine broiled gander" Kurt was unable to hold back his laughter and his laughing filled the high roofed chamber.
Amanda was less than amused, "Kurt, be serious! I found you unconscious and covered in blood in the middle of your church. I'm worried about you, Kurt, and yet you have told me nothing in the whole time you have been here in Limbo."
"Perhaps there is nothing to tell." Kurt turned his head to look into his sister-lover-friend's green eyes, "Perhaps I really am going insane. Perhaps I am just going to join our brother in the care-free realm of the lunatic. Perhaps I should die now, before they gain full control. I always wanted to be just like Stefan, and now perhaps I am. I am brave, I am courageous, I am doing what I believe in, and I hear and see things that others do not." Kurt's pointed teeth glinted in the firelight as he smiled a joyless smile as he absent mindedly placed the brightly coloured cards in an inverted cross on the worn stones before him.
"Kurt! Don't talk like that! Please, don't," there was a tone of desperation in Amanda's voice as she realised that she faced losing another brother as she did her first, losing him in the inky depths of madness, a warm and comforting sea into which mariners throw themselves to drown in its ecstasy, "Kurt, who are they? Are they demons? Or voices? Listen to me, Kurt, I want to help you, I want to save you... Oh God, O dear sweet God..."
Amanda had noticed the tarot cards in Kurt's hands as he placed them down upon the red stone floor swaying from side to side as if listening to some distant music.