It's moving fast, weaving and dipping erratically without ever quite hitting any of the trees. It doesn't seem like a faerie but it's so wide and agile that it might be a bird...but no, it's a piece of paper, sheathed in plastic, a little bigger than Sophie's hand. It seems like it's heading toward Sophie, but then another gust catches it and it flutters to the right.

She wants to try to catch it, but she can't leave Emily, can she? She'll reach toward it a little, that's as far as her instincts can take her.

As Sophie reaches out, the paper spins upward in mid-air, caught between several breezes.  Finally one of them wins: it swoops back toward Sophie, suddenly tilts up a bit, and slaps her full in the face.

She closes her eyes reflexively, but not quite in time.

Nico's interpretation of this card is similar to the Rider-Waite: five figures, struggling in a five-sided contest with heavy staves interlocking in no discernable pattern. But his background is more elaborate: the fight is happening at the rim of a caldera, with the open volcano still visible in the far distance. Reversed, the figures seem to plummet toward a sea of fire, still fighting one another as they fall.

Yes, that's right, isn't it.

Sophie wants to fight. She wants to see her rivals crushed. Everyone who's ever challenged her should lie broken at her feet, gazing upward with helpless and unwilling awe. Myra Stiles from kindergarten, that substitute teacher, Kyle's grandparents: all of them should face her now, so that she can grind into them the utter futility of keeping her from anything she chooses to take. Her whole mind is fire, cleansing and irresistible. Beneath it her will piles up like lava, building and building under terrible pressure, ready to erupt...

Although.

Wait.

Doesn't she usually think about this differently?

She does.

There's something Else in here with her, isn't there?

I want to be strong.

That time, the thought feels like hers. Sophie likes giving advice, and one thing she likes about it is that she doesn't have to do anything herself. Telling Joanna to talk to whats-his-name was easy; telling Kyle she liked him was hard. Rewarding -- she has a sudden, vivid memory of just how rewarding -- but hard. Standing up to go after Emily was hard. Helping her -- God! It's been the hardest thing she's ever done.

The storm is still out there, that thought vaguely reminds her, away from the fire that's kindling in her brain.

OVERWHELM IT

Yes. I want that.

If she keeps her mind on it, Sophie can remember that she doesn't have rivals she wants crushed, not really. But there are still things I want to overcome. That part of the strange thoughts that she and this other Thing had together, that part could have been pure Sophie.

What are you?

CONFLICT

This isn't like the bear. Those are all Sophie's thoughts, made in Sophie's brain, just...in a different key than usual. At a different angle. Something.

Sophie's eyes are closed, but she can still see the picture on the card: five people, genders not quite clear, falling to their deaths and still fighting anyway. She saw it for a fraction of a second and it left an afterimage in her brain, only it's not fading. She's never stopped thinking about it, this whole time.

That's where this is all coming from. It's all this new Thing, sustained in her own thoughts like a wave in a lake, just foreign enough that it doesn't, quite, feel like her. But that's a trick.

I'm making You right now, aren't I? Out of me. Out of pieces of me that I didn't know I had, or didn't know how to use. Out of pieces that are precious to me.

It isn't a different person. That's wrong on several levels, Sophie sees that now. But it might as well be: even if it's using Sophie's thoughts, it's using them very differently than she ever did. It's more like...a twin sister. Perfectly like her in some ways, profoundly different in others, and irrevocably part of her life.

Wait. Irrevocably? Could she stop thinking about it?

Would she want to, if she could?

Sophie has learned a lot, lately, about how to welcome another person into her life without being overwhelmed by them. It's part of growing up, she thinks, because you can't learn it from your parents, only from a peer.

Whatever this Thing is, it isn't a peer. Each one of those thoughts had a crushing weight to it, an unfathomable depth.

Yes, it's deep. But it's narrow, too. It's a Thing of few words. Of few concepts.

Maybe she can teach it more, in return for whatever it's trying to give her.

Yes. Stay. I have a place for you. We can work together. We're not going to do everything your way, but it won't be bad. You'll see.

And the fire roars upward.

Hey Nico, one of your cards just stopped moving. It's not paying as much attention to you as it was, but it's a lot more present than it was a minute ago.

That's...Nico doesn't know what that is. Good or bad, definitely one of those. We're in uncharted territory here, that was the whole point.

How close is it? Within easy walking distance? Better question, is it still under the trees, or would he have to play dodge-the-thunderbolt to get to it?

Probably not more than a mile? You've got a good sense of its direction but only a slight sense of distance. As for the rest, you don't know this area well.

True enough. It was a silly question, really; what was he going to do, not follow it?

When you come back to yourself you're lying down, a little distance from Emily. You feel fine. Better than fine, you feel ready to get up and run a dozen marathons. But as you get up, you notice that the clothes you had on before are missing. Instead you're wearing...it's sort of like a t-shirt, you guess, made of soft red fabric, but long enough to reach your knees. It's got a belt with a simple metal buckle. There are sandals on your feet, open in the toes but with leather wrapping all the way up the calf. It sounds cold but you're not: you feel like you're standing before a warm fire.

As you stand, you come to realize that there's something important, something your new Friend is paying close attention to, back behind you up the hill a ways. It's not a compulsion, just a steady draw, like a compass in your soul.

The rain doesn't touch you. About two feet away from your skin it starts to hiss like it's boiling, and it billows away from you in little wisps of steam. Just enough makes it through to warm the space around you a little, like being in a room where someone just took a hot shower. It's pleasant.

And one more thing: looking around you, seeing the trees and shrubs in the dark moments between lightning flashes, you realize that you're glowing a little.

Yes. This feels right. Later she'll examine that feeling; right now she wants to ride it as far as she can.

She feels powerful, but is she? She'll squat down and try to gently pick up Emily, taking care not to jostle her head or spine.

She'll grab on to the card, too, before it gets blown away.

It somehow got blown into a pocket on your tunic. How convenient!

Picking up Emily is as easy as thinking about it. You could pick up three more kids just like her. There's something slightly off about how it goes, though. Nothing bad, just not quite what your subconscious expected.