He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move at all.
My gaze jerks to the crowd.
Every single face turned toward me is perfectly still.
A woman’s scarf is frozen mid-flutter, fabric caught in the gentle breeze like a picture. A man’s mouth hangs open around a gasp that never lands. One child’s fruit-filled hand is locked halfway to his lips.
The entire world has stopped.
I stumble backward, sweat beading along my hairline. “What—what’s going on?”
Tendrils of smoke curl in the torchlight, the flames and I the only things left moving. It softens the world into a dream while the tarot card pulses against my clammy palm.
A woman steps from the shadows like she’s been waiting there all along, and I feel it again, that same low hum beneath my ribs that I felt when she and I first met. Her hood is lowered, casting shadows across her face so deep I can’t make out the contours of her appearance. Copper threads are braided into the long chestnut coils of her hair draped over her shoulders. The hem of her robe trails through the sand behind her like a brushstroke.
“It’s you.” My mouth is dry, but I manage to push out the words. “Fortune.”
The flames from the torches at her back lean toward her presence, crackling louder, brighter, licking the air like they recognize their maker. She stops short of the stage. Her shadow-darkened face lifts, and her eyes, still the only features I can see through the shadows, lock onto mine like hot coals.
My grip on the card tightens as it finally sinks in—Towerfall’s magick is real.
“It is a shame.” She’s not loud, but her voice slides through the space like molten glass. “I thought you would be ready.”
The flames ringing the stage respond before I can. They leap high and wild, burning orange flares of heat that sear the air and snap hungrily at the sky.
I flinch, instinctively shrinking back, from the fire aswell as the certainty in her voice and the disappointment she doesn’t bother to hide.
“I wonder then,” she adds, head tilting slightly, “why the Tower chose you now. It should have waited.”
“The Tower…tarot card? Is that what you’re talking about?”
Her vibrant eyes flick to the card clenched in my hand.
I swear it pulses harder, as if it feels her watching.
“The wheel is preparing to turn,” she says, her voice dipping to a whisper. “Remember, or it shall not be gentle.”
“Remember what?” My chest heaves, breaths rough and uneven. “I don’t know what you want me to remember. I don’t know what I’ve forgotten or what any of this means. I don’t know why I’m here.”
Her gaze burns through me as she lifts her right hand. From fingertip to elbow, it’s encrusted in rubies. Embedded like scales, they shimmer when she moves, catching the light like a living torch.
Heat radiates from her palm in slow waves, warping the air between us. The space crackles. The scent of singed dust and something older—iron, ozone, scorched earth—fills my lungs.
My skin prickles, flushed and burning. Sweat slides down my temples.
The Wheel of Fortune hums, a low, vibrating thrum against my palm like it’s answering her—like it knows what’s coming.
For a heartbeat, I think she’s going to touch me. Leave some mark. Pass ancient and irreversible magick—realmagick—into my bones.
I don’t mean to lean in, but I do. Drawn to her like a moth to flame, like a lost thing hearing its name for the first time. Something inside me, something buried and aching, pulls taut in her presence. As if her stillness speaks a language my chaos has always longed to understand.
The heat of her outstretched hand flares so close to my cheek my skin threatens to blister.
My breath hitches. Tears sting my eyes.
And then she withdraws.
The heat vanishes with her, a candle snuffed.
