Defying Equilibrium: Book II

Chapter 2: Death, the fourth card

Madame Jade shuffled the cards in her weathered tarot deck, clearing the deck after a reading she had just done for a customer. Business was quiet these days, and the shop felt awfully silent without her two granddaughters creating a racket. She prayed that Liana and Sansu were safe, and she knew that she had entrusted their care in good hands with Ahmed, but that didn't stop her worrying. She flipped the shop's sign over so that it read closed and then groaned as she made her way up the stairs from her shop to her home above it. Her old bones didn't move like they used to, and she ached as she reached the top of the stairs.

She looked outside her window at the darkening street. Today a fierce wind blew, bending trees and causing buildings to creak with strain. It was a lot like the day that Ahmed had come to see her, the day before Liana had been taken. The weather had been exactly like this, bitterly cold with a fierce wind. She knew who had come to visit that day before the bell on her shop door had even rung. She could always tell when Ahmed would pay her a visit.

She had never told him what his destiny was. His ultimate destiny card, the fourth card, she revealed only to herself. For she did not want him to see what she had seen, what his destiny was to be. The card that she had turned up fourth was Death.

Death, a Greater Arcana, the card picturing the lord of death himself atop a white horse amid a battlefield. The card signifies end, mortality, destruction, corruption.

Madame Jade did not know whether the card signified Ahmed's own death, or the death that he would see, or maybe even the death that he would cause. Regardless, it was a bleak future. And Ahmed had seen more than his fair share of death, too much for a single lifetime. Admittedly though, Ahmed's lifetime wasn't like others.

Her thoughts inevitably turned back to her granddaughters, to Liana and Sansu. They weren't her real granddaughters, not by blood, but she had cared for them ever since she had found them as small children, lost and alone in the city. What happened to their parents, she did not know, but when she found them they were starving and freezing, almost knocking on death's door themselves. And so from that day forward, she raised them like the grandchildren she didn't have.

But as much as she was worrying for her granddaughters, he thoughts kept returning to something else. The day that Ahmed had come to visit her.

It was good to catch up with old friends. Jade had known Ahmed for years and years, and she knew everything about him. Not because she had looked into his past, but because he had told her. He had confided in her, many truths that he did not share with others. She was just an old woman, but he respected her wisdom and her insight. And he needed someone that he could trust inside the city, someone who observed and listened for him.

She had read his cards, told him his past, present and future, and now they sat around the round table, deep in discussion. When Ahmed wanted to know something, he didn't bother with pleasantries, nor did he try to word his request politely. He just asked.

“Madame, do you know of the old folktales? The lore tales?”

She shrugged. “Of course I do. Who doesn't? Most of us were raised on those stories, and a fortune teller like me? I'm more familiar with the tales than anyone.”

“Then you know that they are more than stories.”

“Of course. Based on truth,” she looked at him slyly, “Or so I've heard, anyway.”

“Truths of what has been and what will be, yes. And I presume you know the tale that I am here to speak to you of?”

She smiled at him sharply. “My tale, or yours?”