Chapter Text
SELUNE
🌙
You find yourself in the center of a forest clearing you don't recognize. The varieties of trees and the ferns and flowers growing beneath them feel familiar, but you couldn't place yourself on a map, and you're fairly certain you've never been in this particular clearing before. Still, you feel a strange sense of calm here, unconcerned by the fact that you're apparently lost.
The sky above you is pitch black, a starless void that you feel you could fall into if you leaned your head back a little too far. It strikes you as odd, at first, but then, hasn't the sky always been this dark? You can't remember ever seeing stars, just the deep velvet dark of the sky and the watchful eye of the moon. You can see it now on the horizon, beginning to peek above the tops of the trees.
There's a sound in the forest in front of you, the sharp snap of a twig beneath the weight of a step, and your eyes dart along the edge of the clearing, the growing moonlight nearly blinding your night vision for a moment before you see it.
A creature stands at the clearing's edge, dappled forest shadow falling across pure white fur. It looks like a deer, at first, until it lifts its head toward you and you see a familiar face, hazy like something from a half-forgotten memory, with eyes like liquid silver and a halo of moonlight so bright it hurts to look at. Its horns are strung with strands of silver and pearls that chime softly as it takes a step toward you and opens its mouth as if to speak.
You wake before you hear what it's trying to tell you.
SÉAGHDHA
🍀
You dream of your father for the first time since you left school. He doesn't look at you as he packs his bags and dons a new uniform, his shadow long in the warm evening light. You're grown now, but in the dream you still feel small next to him.
He asks you something. You're not quite sure what he's saying; everything sounds muffled, underwater, and that's how you know it's a dream. You answer anyway, the same thing you said when you were young and he was leaving for the first time, following the memory like a script. He looks down at you and smiles.
"Watch the skies, lad," he says, clear as day, and suddenly your ears are ringing. That's not how this story is supposed to go.
You look out the window. The sun outside has set and the sky is full of stars you've never seen before. Shifting iridescent auroras dance before them in spiraling fractals leading off into the darkness, a pathway to something grand and unknown. The door to your childhood home swings open, as if it has a mind of its own, and the light spills in on you like a waterfall.
You turn back to your father, but he's already gone.
ANASTASIA
🤲
Someone is holding your hand. Your eyes are squeezed shut tight, but you can hear footsteps somewhere nearby, and your own heart, beating too fast in your chest.
"Where'd that little brat run off to?" someone is muttering. The words don't sound right, the language clipped and foreign, but you understand them anyway. You squeeze the hand in yours a little tighter. The person holding your hand squeezes back.
You look toward them and open your eyes only to find your own face staring back at you from the darkness. Your hand is not your own.
JANJAK
🃏
"Lookin' for answers to somethin', Shonni?" Damita asks as she sits down next to you on the bench in the mess hall, brushing her shoulder against yours. You shuffle her deck of cards in your hands, the movement clumsy, and a card slips loose from the deck onto the table in front of you. Damita snatches it up before you even get a chance to see which card it was.
"Hey!" you protest, but she looks at the card, smiles, and tucks it into the breast pocket of her coat with a wink, like she knows something you don't. "Lemme do that," she says, holding out a palm, and you hand the deck over without a second thought. Her shuffling is much more fluid, practiced, and you zone out for a minute just watching her hands and the blur of the cards' edges.
"Awright," she holds out the deck to you when she finishes, "take a card."
Your hand hovers over the deck for a moment before you lean toward her and pluck the fallen card from her pocket. She grins at you.
"Right answer," she says, and this time you're sure she knows something you don't. You look down at the card in your hand just before you wake from the dream: the six of swords, reversed.
FOTISMÉNOS
🎭
Your dreams are the same as they always are. Screaming darkness rushes past you and tears at your skin like ice in a snowstorm, burning your lungs if you dare breathe in. Despair overwhelms you; you're a window, you think, an eye, a crack through which the darkness flows into this world as water through bedrock, cold and eroding. You're certain that there should be something at the end of all this, beyond the darkness and the neverending storm, if you could only reach out and touch it. You picture it as another window, bright starlight on the other side, but all you've ever felt is the wall.