"When the Magician appears in a spread, it points to the talents, capabilities, and resources at the querent's disposal to succeed."
The blind woman brushed her fingertips against the purple cards in front of her, her head moving side to side in an unheard rhythm. Her murky white eyes shook in their sockets like voltage surged through her body as she pulled free a card and slammed it in front of the Gamemaker, startling the woman.
With a yelp, Yvonne Gaius regained her composure and looked at the card before her. A rather gruesome image of a young girl with her eyes and mouth wired shut. She road two undead horses that skellington features seemed to crawl out of the image. What does it mean?
"The chariot, crossroads, confusion-" the woman leaned forward, gripping Yvonne's slender face between her fingers. "The inability to move on, stuck in the driver's seat with little control, the false idea that you can decide your own destiny."
The Gamemakers mouth hung agar for a moment before she quickly pulled herself together, a smirk forming on her lips. She looked at the card again and shook her head. With one swift movement, she grabbed the money that lay by the woman's hand and rose to her feet.
"Of course a Gamemaker does not have much control, you really did you research on that, didn't you?" she sighed as she pushed her chair under. "To think I trusted you just because you were blind-"
Yvonne was interrupted by a loud bang on the table, the yellow-haired women turned sharply on her heel to see another card facing her direction. She slowly approached the table until the image came into view.
On the card was a girl. A young, round, plump girl with glossy ginger hair and freckled covered skin. Unlike the girl in the previous card, her brown eyes stared up at Yvonne, her mouth hung in a snarl. Her limbs were torn, bones shattered and poking out of her skin like shards of glass.
"It hurt," the blind woman mumbled, her voice no longer her own, her voice twisted into the voice of a child gargling on blood. The woman stumbled up from her seat, her large frame swaying. "They wouldn't stop, bite by bite they hurt me-"
"Stop it-" Yvonne was cut off when the woman's eyes darted over to her like they could see through the mist that consumed them.
"You let them," the woman said through a gargle, a tiny drop of blood trickling from the sides of her crusty, thin lips. "It hurt!" the woman barked, throwing herself across the table so she was inches away from her face. Again and again, she repeated, like a repetitive drum. Blood started to stream from her eyes, coating her aging, blotchy skin until Yvonne let out a screech.
"Stop it she bellowed!" slamming her hand onto the desk, shutting her waterlogged, gold eyes shut. However, when she opened them, everything was back to normal. The psychic was now back in her seat, not a drop of blood on her, the guards seemed more concerned for Yvonne's safety than the events that just happened and when she looked at the card, it was the same girl from the chariot card hung upside down.
Without saying another word, Yvonne turned on her heel and headed for the door, her body shaking as she moved to the safety of the guards.
"Wait!" the psychic called as Yvonne stood in the doorway to her shop. The Gamemaker turned to the woman, her eyes wide with fear. "This gift you have...do not use it for this." Yvonne quickly shook her head and exited the shop. "Nothing good can come of this idea-" the woman's words fell on deaf ears, the thick, amber door bringing an end to the conversation and the reading.
Yvonne woke to the sound of a sharp, quick dripping. At first, as she awoke from the shallow slumber, her mind jumped to the sound of a tap. However, it was never the tap. It was the sound of something dripping on a hardwood floor.
As she did every night for the past year, she shot into a seated position, reaching for the lamp by the side of her bed. Yet, as the switch clicked, the lap sparked and popped, dying with a hiss and sending the woman once again into complete darkness.
Like a vacuum, the room fell silent, even the sound of Yvonne's own terrified sobs silent as the dripping bounced off the wall of her suite. With each drop, the sound morphed into water dripping into a puddle. However, she knew better by now, it was never water.
Like her body was controlled by someone else, her body started to turn towards the sound, even though she tried to run for the door. To change the chain of events that plagued her. Yet, as always, she turned slowly to the bathroom door.
The dim light from the colourful city outside the frosted window lit the large room up. The light shattering off the white bath that overflowed with a dark, thick liquid that flooded the tiled floor. The puddle spilled into a series of small footprints that lead away from the bath, out of the door and towards her closet at the corner of the room. A corner where the dripping sound had now been accompanied by the sound of choking, broken up by wild gasps for air.
Not responding to herself screaming to just go back to sleep or call her guard in, she turned towards the corner, her eyes falling on the small shape that stood, their face illuminated by the moonlight.
It was the face that followed her everywhere, even in the psychic shop. The torn, broken face of Sindy Turner. A twelve-year-old from District Nine that had died the previous year. Torn apart by mutts sent by Yvonne herself.
The girl still looked the same. Her bottom jaw was gone, the wound it left behind being jagged from the violent manner it was torn away. Her nose hung on by a strand of gristle and where her body wasn't broken or torn, she was soaked in blood.
She looked back at Yvonne with her brown eye, the one that had not been torn from its socket, looked at the woman who killed her. With an instance, her spluttering stopped as she cocked her head to the side to better look at the woman. Then, as expected she spoke. Asking the same question she asked the Gamemaker every night.
"Why?" She asked with a shriek, showering blood, coughed up from her torn throat onto Yvonne's face.
With a jerk, Yvonne awoke, in a well-lit room, the bathroom door closed and her room littered with guards. After a year of having the same nightmare every night, Yvonne has learned not to scream, her troubles being nothing more than a pain to the people who protected her. So with a sigh and watery eyes, she pushed herself up from her silk covers, placed a wooly gown over her body and moved over to her desk.
There she looked over the plans, rubbing tears and sleep from her eyes. She looked at the new additions to the blueprints, for the best considering they were due for hand in today. As she looked at the well formed text and made a few final wording adjustments. Once she was satisfied, she pulled free the post-it note about that year's twist. However, as her hand crushed the note, her eyes hovered on the Arena plans, her mind drifting to what the blind woman had said the day before.
About using her gifts to punish other people.
With a grunt, Yvonne pushed the thoughts to the back of her mind and threw the note in the bin.
She needed these Tributes to suffer the horrors of her life, just so she was no longer alone in this world.