Time to see what's in the cards...

[legacydeck]

Who: Clow and Felix
What: Divination and discussion thereof
When: Monday, October 1st
Where: Chimera workrooms
Rating: PG at most.

This was, rather decidedly, not how Clow would have liked to do this. Between not having his own cards to do it with - and that was a deep irony, right there - and the week's events had been, as he had told Felix, inauspicious. But he had the unfortunate sense that the castle was not going to let up - and trying to organize more than one or two mages together for something was generally about as easy as herding cats. Or getting Keroberos and Yue to agree to anything. So it might as well be now, and if he was particularly lucky, he'd know where his own cards were after this. For now, a tarot deck would do - it was one of the methods he'd learned, and they had, in a way, been a precursor to his own cards. So the slow shuffle, his magic pouring through them, was a familiar exercise as he waited for Felix to arrive.

Comments

[lord_wizard]

The finesse of Clow's hands was another reminder to Marvortian, though he didn't handle them with the same obsessive nature, since this deck, newly acquired hadn't collected the near magnetic pull the Sibylline had.

He frowned and leaned forward, his lips thinning as he scanned the designs. All colorful and varied and unique, like the trumps he remembered, but almost none exactly like them.

"Only two." He paused to point them out in turn. "Death, and the Wheel."

/exposits forever

[legacydeck]

Clow hummed thoughtfully at that as he sorted the trumps. If coincidence had a meaning, he wasn't sure what it was - not right now, anyway. "Well, I'll go through them in order, then." He pulled out The Fool. "This is the first card, and in some frameworks, also the last card. The Fool is openness, new beginnings - it can become anything."

He queued up the next few cards on the table in front of him. "The Magician comes next - creativity, initiative, one's own talents. I've always thought that rather fitting, myself. The High Priestess - serenity, mystical knowledge, intuition. The Empress is the idealized feminine - motherhood, beauty, sensuality, fertility. It's companion card is the Emperor - idealized masculine. Fatherhood, authority, stability, tradition."

He paused, shuffling those cards aside and readying the next batch. "...I should add, these are the general consensus on meaning, and the lands that formed them are perhaps not the most liberal or forward-thinking. I don't necessarily agree with all interpretations, though any reading is filtered through the experiences of the reader anyway.

"The Hierophant, which is usually thought to be the companion card to the High Priestess - knowledge, institution, respect. The Lovers - which can be a little misleading, as it can signify romance and pleasure, but also union and balance. The mating of yin and yang, as it were. The Chariot - perhaps unsurprisingly, a card of domination. Willpower, self-control, conviction, victory. Justice - which, like the Lovers, can represent the idea of justice itself, or the things that are related to it - objectivity, rationality, intellect. The Hermit - solitude, but also inner searching, reflection. The Wheel you know - cycles and changes. Strength - self control, patience, discipline.

"The Hanged Man - inaction, but also surrender and new points of view. It's tied to a number of myths of god who sacrificed something in order to gain greater knowledge of the world. Death - both loss and change, the ending of one cycle so another can begin. Temperance - harmony, balance, joining forces. The Devil - lust, egoism, anger. One of the few overall-negative cards, followed by what's generally considered the most negative - The Tower. The Tower is sudden catastrophe, chaos, downfall. It's follow-up isn't as bad, though - the Star is calmness, hope, and faith.

"The Moon is next - it can be a deceptive card, a card of uncertainty and illusions. It's companion is the Sun - optimism, vitality, enlightenment. Judgement is... well, judgement, but also forgiveness and reconciliation - a new beginning. It can get somewhat weighed down in religious baggage, though. And then the last card is the World - fulfilment, success, wholeness."

He stacked the cards he'd gone through back into a neat pile. "These are the sorts of things that scholars and readers alike will argue for ages about. My best advice is to let intuition guide you more than the meanings other people claim."

:P

[lord_wizard]

Felix considers these carefully, doing his best to remember any similarities to these cards and the Sibylline, though it was hard, having not had them in hand for almost two years. It occurred to him that perhaps he should write down what he remembered. At the time, he'd been trying to forget the castle had chosen to take them away from him.

There were commanilties, though, despite the differences in the card names. His eyes were drawn most notably to the Moon card - recalling the The Dead Tree and the fate that was tied to it.

He drew himself out of revelation as Clow started to stack the cards.

"Yes, well, that's the nature of symbols. They have power in their invested meaning but also subjectivity and flexibility. It's what makes them both useful and very confusing, especially to those who seek rigid definitions of everything," he said, thinking of Cabalines and all the science-minded people he'd encountered here.

"Where shall we start then? You're after something, I assume, other than entertaining me."

[legacydeck]

Clow grinned. "If you understand that much of symbology already, you're leagues ahead many of the mages I knew. I find with divination, trying to force conscious order on the symbols is particularly unhelpful - it's better to let your sub-conscious find meaning freely. Intuition, rather than logical thought - which is more difficult for mages of some schools than others."

He gathered up all the cards, and started shuffling them again, letting his magic run through them as he did so. "And yes, I did have a few questions I'd like to ask about this place - and one Howl requested. Did you have any?"

[lord_wizard]

Felix waves the compliment away with a smile. The reasons he was open to the interpretations was mostly as a result of being fortunate enough to encounter people that could teach him to alter his ways of thinking - people like Iosephinus and Thamuris.

"Maybe. Can I ask what you were after, in the likely event that our interests coincide?"

[legacydeck]

"Good point," Clow said, grinning. "I'm hoping to find out a little more about the castle - and if possible, what's happened to our 'losses'. These cards may serve well enough for divining, but they aren't my cards, and I'd feel more comfortable knowing someone wasn't misusing them."

[lord_wizard]

"Fair enough," he said, though he wasn't sure how wise it was to delve into the castle's motivations - he knew that dissuading Clow would be next to useless. It would have, had their positions been reversed. And it was just divination. The answers weren't solid. It might be open enough that it could give them a clue.

"I admit I have quite a few questions, but most of them are based on guesses. Do we ever truly go home? Why does it choose the people that it chooses? Did this world exist before it did, or is it part of the world? Where does it's power come from?"

A wry smile spread on his lips.

"But perhaps we should start easy."

[legacydeck]

Clow chuckled. "I think we'd better, yes - best see if we can get anything at all before starting in on two many specifics." He cut the full deck into three stacks with one hand, and then stacked them back up in a different order.

"Do you have a particular spread you favor, out of curiosity?"

[lord_wizard]

"I've typically employed a nine card spread in a cross, as was taught to me by the original owner of the cards, at least when using the full deck. I actually found it was more useful to me to work with a three card spread with just the trumps, when divining for stronger symbols. Marvortian would probably call me something uncharitable for employing something that simplistic."

He smirked to himself as he watched Clow's hands work.

[legacydeck]

Clow laughed. "That sounds like most of the diviners I know. For people supposedly so open to the patterns of the future, they can be terribly close-minded about the methods used to scry it. The trumps alone are a powerful set of symbols, and three-card spreads are plenty adequate for some sorts of work. If it gives you good results, stick with it."

One final mix, and he dealt one of his usual spreads, a pyramid three cards tall on it's base. He set the remainder of the deck face-up on the table, looking at the bottom card first. He gave it a wry grin, and then flicked it out so Felix could see as well.

"Seven of pentacles, reversed - impatience and suspicion. I suppose I should be glad this deck knows me that well already."

The top of the pyramid came next, revealing the ace of cups. "The background knowledge for our problem - that of the losses. Inflexible wills... that could be commentary on the castle, or on my own stubbornness on not letting the matter drop. Hard to say as it stands."

He skipped the second row, and moved to the third. Four of swords, nine of pentacles, and The Star, inverted. He frowned, and then a vision took him, his eyes rather abruptly seeming to look at nothing at all. It was brief, just a glimpse - his book, sinking into a darkness that seemed nearly living in the way it coiled around it - but a glimpse was enough. When it passed, his lips thinned.

"I don't think I like that one bit."

[lord_wizard]

"That's odd," Felix said, casting a concerned frown at the other wizard over the table.

"It's a conflicting reading, that's for certain. The Four of Swords. Meditation and respite from conflict. A reassurance that we're safe, or a warning, maybe, that this is our time to prepare for a battle. The Nine of Pentacles. Material wealth and comfort. Material reward. The representation for your cards, maybe? But this..."

He prodded the Star card with a finger and felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. "An inverted Star. The opposite of a future. There is no hope..."

[legacydeck]

Clow nodded. "I don't think there's any way to interpret the reading positively, even from the cards alone. And... I sometimes get glimpses of precognition, usually in dreams, but occasionally waking. It's rare that it's deliberately triggered while trying to do some other form of divination, but it happened now."

And even just the memory of what he'd seen is enough to spark a twist of fear - a rare feeling for him - and make his displeasure clear on his face. "I saw my cards being swallowed by darkness."

[lord_wizard]

His brows knitted together in sympathetic worry.

"Yes, I see what you mean."

He swept the spread of cards into a pile again, uncomfortable with looking at them all of a sudden.

"I hope that fate is only temporary. For both our sakes."