"....that's apropos."

Smile. "It usually is. Your conscious focus is being represented by the Seven of Wands here. It represents conviction and defiance in the face of forces that may be greater than yourself. Your unconscious focus is being represented by the Nine of Wands, which represents perseverance, suggesting that you know on some level that the journey before you will be difficult and arduous."

If it were not the 1930s, and if "called out" were in Mordred's lexicon, it would be the label he would give to this feeling. Unfortunately it is not.

“Your immediate future is represented by the Ten of Wands, which represents struggle and difficulty, again suggesting that the path ahead of you will be difficult and burdensome. It actually specifically represents taking on more challenges than you can shoulder alone, and a strong risk of overextending yourself. Your past I am stuck on, which I suppose I should be unsurprised by, not knowing much about you. The Queen of Cups represents someone with a mature relationship with emotional matters, someone patient, loving, and empathetic. They're moving away from you, suggesting they'll be less central to your world in the days to come. Anyone that might describe? Anyone you're worried that might describe?"

"Gale," he says immediately. "A -- friend."

There is a very specific inflection that he puts on the word "friend."

She nods knowingly. "And not a part of this mess. I can see how you'd worry it'd come between you."

"Honestly I'm more worried it'll kill one or the other of us than that it'll come between us, he's. A bit like me, in that he'll fight the things that need fighting, and I haven't been keeping anything from him."

"Oh, I see. Well, sometimes it's good to just have something to chew on for a bit, and think about what you'd like to have done if your fears there do come true."

Nod.

"You yourself are represented by the King of Cups. Like the Queen of Cups, the king is focused on emotional matters. But his focus is outward, active, and masculine; he takes care of others, is calm and diplomatic under pressure, and offers wisdom and tolerance to those around him. I think those are qualities that have been called on, recently, to the extent that you have them. The other - could be anyone you have a relationship with, or an amalgamation of many people, or the world as a whole - is represented by the Hanged Man. He’s an important card - one of the major arcana. There’s no reason to go into the details, but we’re supposed to pay special attention to him. He symbolizes sacrifice, or a loss of control over one’s circumstances; someone who must accept whatever happens to him. Who does that bring to mind in your life?"

ahahaha. "My brother. Or maybe Lev, depending. I -- would really, really like to have something better to say to him than 'yes, I know I am probably going to die doing this, and I am going to do it anyway, and I'm sorry about the nightmares' but in fact I do not."

"Yeah. The cards that represent you and the the other people in your life are often supposed to be read as a pair, so - I guess I would read this as suggesting that your relationship with these people is going to demand a lot from you, emotionally, and maybe even more emotional maturity than you have. I don't mean that dismissively - I don't know your brother, but Lev, at least, is in a really difficult situation, and one that might take a really remarkably high degree of emotional competence to have a positive effect on. Maybe it's something that's worth thinking over, whether there's anything else you can do for them? Or just chewing on it, for a bit, so that when you're a little older and wiser your mind comes around to that problem first thing. Unfortunately there isn't an answer to the problem here today. Sometimes we have to come up with those the hard way. The Nine of Pentacles represents your hopes and fears. It symbolizes discipline and self-reliance, which can be positive or negative. After all, sometimes you need to rely on yourself, and sometimes you need to be open to relying on others, right?"

"Right. I should... probably come up with some way to deal with being worried they're going to target Gale or my brother in a way that's more constructive than just worrying about it."

"Yeah. That sounds like - at the moment you don't have a way of taking care of them, and you're not taking care of yourself, either, if it's just eating away at you."

He looks like there's something he's going to say, and then he doesn't say it. Instead he says something else, which is "How are you doing? Which on one level is kind of a stupid question, a sorcerer set you on fire and obviously none of us are doing great, but it feels like someone should ask."

She smiles, warmer than before. "Kind of terrible, actually. Figure no more terrible than anyone else is. Burns're healing. Books are - piling up, at any rate. Some of them even have useful things in them, only some of which later turn up in my nightmares. But - coping. I guess that's one of our jobs in this group, right now. Coping."

Warm is good. (There are a very limited number of things he is capable of doing at the moment and any amount of helping is good.) "Coping's good. I'm sorry about the terrible, to whatever extent it makes sense to be."

"I figure it's the price of admission. Couldn't - go back to what I was doing before, at this point. Wouldn't be much of a collector of the strange, telling people about stone-children and ignoring - whatever all this is. Hopefully we'll figure it out." She looks at the spread. "You have one more card."

It's Death.

Ahahahahaha. That's ominous.

"Your outcome - your far future - is represented by Death. I should tell you that the Death card is usually read as a metaphorical death. Often the Death card merely represents the end of something, or a transformation into something else. But in this line of work - " shrug. "I think you should be prepared for it."

Agravaine was joking, he reminds himself. "Well. I am trying to be."

A few days later--

Still in a brightly lit room because the last person who needs to be creeped out right now is Oswald.

He is feeling nervous and simultaneously doubtful about this process and kind of emotionally exposed, which is a weird combination, but Anemone is at the very least incredibly competent at saying words and achieving results and he is putting some amount of faith in that.

The first card she draws is Death. (She does not seem at all concerned about this.) It’s crossed by the Eight of Pentacles. Above it is the Five of Cups, and below it is the Two of Pentacles. To the right is the Seven of Swords, and to the left is the Ten of Swords, all stabbing into a dead body. To the side there’s the staff - Knight of Cups on the bottom, Five of Wands above it, and then the Page of Wands, and finally the Page of Cups

"Dark, but not darkness we didn't already know about. In the center - the heart of things - we have Death, which symbolizes not just literal death, but all endings, and all transitions to new states of being. It’s crossed by the Eight of Pentacles, which symbolizes diligence and knowledge, or total dedication to a task. The heart of what’s going on for you, then, is the intersection between these things - the parts of your life that have come to an end for you, and the new knowledge you’ve gained. Or perhaps one of the things that came to an end for you was what you thought you knew, or was the task you’d been devoting yourself to."

"...I mean. That sounds... accurate. So the death is, it's, that night at the mansion? Or it's not -- that was just the, the moment that--" He frowns and shuts up.