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dinoswrites · 6 years

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Nine of Cups, Reversed

not really reversed but he have to match the naming scheme okay

The Arcana, Role Reversal AU. Pre-Relationship Asra x Apprentice.

Based off this post by @cedarmoons.

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It is no wonder that many Tarot readers refer to this card as the Wish Card as its appearance is often taken as a sign that, whatever your heart’s desire, it shall be granted in the coming days or weeks... When reversed, it suggests that you may be disappointed that your wishes are not materialising as expected. Your expectations may be unrealistic or you may not be actively pursuing your dreams, instead hoping that they will manifest with little input or action from you. [x]

After Doctor Devorak heals the stray cat, he and Mazelinka sit down at the table and speak in low voices when they think Kai is asleep, the cat curled up under the blankets at the small of her back.

“She needs to leave this city,” Mazelinka says, while Kai’s hands made fists in her blankets.

Julian scoffs. “Don’t we all.”

Mazelinka sighs, with the weight of someone dealing with a particularly dense child. “It is unnaturally cold, Ilya, and she was out there in no shoes, a terrible coat—”

“When am I supposed to go buy her things?” Julian hisses. “Half the markets were torched in the riots, and those that weren’t have been shut down while the guards investigate for magical ingredients. I’m summoned to the palace nearly every day, I have people trying to break down my door for treatment—”

Whatever he’s about to say is cut off by a yelp.

“Fool boy,” Mazelinka scolds him. “Yes, you need to take better care of her, but that is not what we are talking about right now.”

“That hurt,” Julian complains under his breath.

"There was no snow. But it was cold enough last night.”

Julian exhales, slowly. She can hear the creak of his chair as if he’s leaning back in it.

“I… there was frost this morning. She should have—no frostbite, nothing?” He pauses, as if waiting for a response, and then Kai hears his chair scrape on the floor, and his boots on the floorboards as he begins to pace. “She could have found shelter.”

“Ilya.”

“Someone must have taken her in.”

“Ilya.”

“I’ll ask around—”

“Ilya”

He stops pacing. He starts taking deep, heavy breaths, as if trying to calm himself.

“She has a great magic in her,” Mazelinka says.

Julian starts pacing again. “Today Lucio executed a fortune teller. A fortune teller, Mazelinka! They read tarot cards—badly! And he laughed the whole damn time!”

“Which is why she must leave—”

Julian stops, and then rushes back to the table. “And go where? She has no memories, and even if she did she can barely speak, let alone—let alone work a trade or earn money or—I haven’t even bought her shoes, Mazelinka. Shoes!”

He lets out a sigh, and then collapses into the chair once more.

“I can’t send her away,” he says at length. “I—I can’t.”

After a moment of silence, Mazelinka hums thoughtfully. “When did you suddenly become so responsible?” she wonders, sounding almost proud.

Julian lets out a low, harsh laugh. “When this city went to shit, and everyone decided I’m supposed to save it.”

The guards do not put her in the dungeon when they arrive at the palace. Instead, a servant stands at the gates, wringing his hands and doing his best not to look terrified.

“There’s been a room prepared for her in the guest wing,” the servant says the moment the guard and Kai dismount.

It’s strange, but he says it like the room prepared itself, without anyone actually having done so.

The guard holding her arm looks about to argue, for a moment, but then one of the others elbows him, hard, and they stand a little taller before addressing the servant. “Of course,” the guard says, and they lead her through the gates.

They escort her through the palace in a hurry, so fast that she honestly has a hard time keeping up. They breeze through the elegant, empty hallways, past rooms filled with opulent red and gold furnishings. The air reeks of fine wine and food rich with herbs and spices, and her stomach growls but she follows her escort diligently.

They lead her up a number of staircases—which are rather run down and bare, so she assumes they are for the palace staff to use—and out into a hallway with stiff red carpet and portraits of the count lining the walls.

At the end of the hall, a different servant waits in front of a large door, standing very straight in spite of her obvious age, and staring somewhere past them all without really seeming to acknowledge them as they approach.

As they draw closer, Kai sees that her pupils are pale, her eyes blinded by cataracts.

“My lady hopes you are pleased with your accommodations, honoured magician,” the old woman says, before pulling an elegant brass key from her ring and turning to open the door.

My lady? Kai wonders. But, there is no lady of this palace, not since…

The guard shoves her inside the moment the door is open, and then reaches in and slams it closed behind her. Through the door, she can hear them say, “You can’t go around saying that shit, what if the count overhears you?”

“Well,” the old servant replies, tersely, “since he’s hardly creative in his punishments, I won’t have to wonder very long.”

They must step away from her door and continue to argue, as she can hear the sounds of their voices but not make out the words. She runs a hand through her hair and sighs, heavily, before looking around at the room before her.

It is large, easily as large as the part of Julian’s clinic set aside for living in. There is a bed she’s sure could sleep four people, crammed in, with a massive canopy and the softest looking cushions she’s ever seen in her life. It takes her a moment to realise that nothing in the room is red—everything is in shades of blue, purple, or vibrant whites, interspersed with dark stained wood floors and trim, with silver finishings instead of gold.

On an oak table off to the side rests a single place setting, covered with an elegant but tasteful silver lid. There is a white wine on ice beside it, and a small loaf of bread next to a little silver dish that holds a generous amount of softened butter. Kai approaches, frowning, and seeing no obvious trap she lifts the lid.

Steam wafts off a delicate filet of fish—Kai sees and smells spices on it that she does not know the name of, but she thinks they are Prakran in origin. It rests on a bed of stewed vegetables, with yogurt on the side.

To her credit, she considers that this might be poisoned for half a heartbeat. But then her stomach gurgles again, and she sits down in the chair and tucks into the meal without a second thought.

She’s scraping the last traces of sauce off the plate when she hears a commotion in the hallway—and before she can even register that, Julian bursts into the room, ignoring the protests of the two guards apparently stationed outside, and then slams the door behind him as fast as he can.

“Doctor!” she says, standing so quickly that her chair topples over.

He doesn’t answer her—he hardly hesitates a moment before opening his jacket, and a small black streak of anger tears out of his coat, rakes a single angry trail over Julian’s face with his claws, and then launches himself at Kai.

“Cinis!” she exclaims, kneeling to sweep the small cat off the floor and into her arms. He purrs as loud as he can, burrowing his face under her chin as she pets him and makes soft, soothing nonsense noises.

“Yes, yes,” Julian says, buttoning up his coat. Kai looks up at him, and the angry red scratch all down his face is already beginning to vanish. “You’re welcome, you ungrateful little match stick.”

“Thank you,” Kai says to Julian, and then looks down at her cat again. “Are you hungry? Poor thing, must have been so lonely.”

“Poor thing,” Julian parrots. “He didn’t just run the length of the city with an angry ball of death shoved down his jacket.” He smooths out his jacket, runs a hand through his hair, and then says, “Alright, Kai, don’t panic, I’m going to get you out of this mess.”

“What?” Kai blurts. Meanwhile, Cinis tries to burrow deeper into her neck. He starts kneading her collarbone with his sharp claws, and she winces but does not deter him.

“I’m going to—I’m going to send you to Mazelinka, alright?” He goes to the window and opens it, leans outside so dramatically that she thinks he’s going to plummet right out before he swings back in onto his heels and slams it shut again. “Sheer drop. No good. Wait, how many sheets are on that bed—”

“Doctor—”

“And—and I haven’t had time to talk to her about this, no I decided to smuggle a demon cat into the palace instead—and you’re going to tell her what happened, and that you need to get as far away as possible from this cesspit of a city—”

“Doctor!”

He starts throwing pillows off the bed, and Kai has to actually duck one almost hits her square in the head. She starts skirting around the room to avoid the soft missiles in question, until she stands by the window.

“You have a trade now, sort of, you’ve been assisting me for a year or so, now, and you’re an excellent study, I’ll write you a glowing letter of recommendation, it’ll be ten—no—fifteen pages long, no one can turn you down with that sort of reference.”

She opens the window and peers down, curiously—and sees nothing but a long, long drop, directly into a courtyard.

Cinis turns to look as well—and makes a small chirping noise of protest.

Kai looks up again—but the only view her window offers is that of one of the palace’s towers, reaching up into the sky.

When she turns back to Julian, he’s yanked back the blanket and started pulling at the sheets. “Yes, count on Lucio to stick you in a tower like some kind of—dragon or evil wizard or, something, this metaphor is getting away from me but—yes, this is plenty, two sheets is plenty to scale a palace wall, right Kai?”

Before she can even answer him, he curses. “No, that’s stupid. Here,” and he starts charging over to the wall, “there’s all sorts of secret passages in this miserable place, maybe if I just pull on the right—”

“Doctor!”

He yanks so hard on a candelabra it comes right off the wall. “—fixture—”

“Julian!”

He nearly trips over some of the pillows he threw as the candle holder comes clean off the wall, nails and all. He does, however, snap his mouth shut, and turn around so Kai can see him properly. He’s blushing furiously, as he always does when he gets carried away like this.

“Ah,” he says, softly. “Sorry.”

Kai deposits Cinis on the table so he can lick her plate, then grabs the bottle of wine from the ice and, finding it uncorked, takes a swig. It’s slightly sweet, with a taste almost like lemons to it that she supposes is meant to compliment the fish, but honestly it’s wine, and so after she’s had her drink she hands the bottle to Julian.

He takes it, thanks her softly, and then takes a long, long swig. Then he passes it back, looking contemplative, and Kai takes another swig herself.

“If he wanted me dead,” Kai says finally, “He’d have shot me in the street with that guard.”

Julian makes a strangled noise low in his throat. “He shot a…” he trails off, then says, softly, “Kai—I wish you hadn’t seen that—”

“I’ve seen plenty of people die,” she snaps. Worse deaths, too, than being shot in the head.

But… the other guards just leaving him there…

He sighs. He drops a heavy hand onto her shoulder and says, “I know.”

She closes her eyes, and—and in spite of her words, she leans into his touch a little.

He squeezes her shoulder reassuringly, and after a moment lets her go.

“Okay,” he says, now obviously trying to remain calm. “So—I imagine you won’t be able to escape from this room. But—if you get your chance, even if you have to—I don’t know, stab someone—promise me you’ll take it. Alright?”

Not that her chance worked out well for her the last time. But she nods anyway, and Julian finally smiles a little at her in response.

“Now,” he says, going through his pockets. “If—when you get your chance, the best place to lose Lucio is the city, during the day. Take any tight side street you can—he’ll come in on that ridiculous warhorse of his and he’ll have a hard time going through crowds. And when you think it’s safe, you’re going to—here it is—follow this map.”

He hands her a folded piece of paper. She takes it curiously, and unfolds it.

“Julian,” she says, “this is blank.”

“Yes, yes, you’re very smart. I just have to remember the—what the hell was it—and he used to accuse me of dramatics—aragma.”

In her hands, deep purple lines appear on the yellowed piece of paper, as if seeping out from within.

Kai nearly drops the thing in horror. “Julian!” she hisses, clutching it to her chest. “This is—”

“I know,” he hisses—but he grabs her hand and makes her look at the now fully-formed map. It shows a part of the city close to one of the now-closed city markets—a part of the city badly burned by the riots after the Countess’s death.

She stares at it until the map begins to fade, and the paper slowly becomes blank once more. She… she can’t believe Julian had this. His mark is one thing, but…

“If you were caught with this,” she starts to say, but he’s rifling through his pockets again.

“If Lucio hangs me—and we both know how well that would go—the rest of his precious city will be lost to riots,” he replies. “Or the plague, it could go either way at this point. Once you get to that house—”

“Half of that district burned to the ground, Julian.”

“Only half. Once you get there, it will be heavily guarded—believe me, I’ve checked—but you can jump the back wall when no one’s looking and get into the garden. But only if you have—this key.”

He produces a small, unassuming brass key, and presses it into her hand.

It’s warm. Warmer than it should be, even from being in a pocket—and as she closes her hand around it, it almost feels like it’s… vibrating, a little.

“Use this to get in the house, and then stay there. No one will be able to follow you in, no one can burn it down—nothing.”

She tucks the key and the map into her pocket. “And how long exactly am I supposed to stay in there?”

Julian stares at her, and then keeps staring at her.

“I… haven’t figured that part out yet.”

She runs a hand through her hair. “Of course not.”

“Kai,” he says, this time reaching out and putting both hands on her shoulders. “We’ll… we’ll figure it out, alright? Mazelinka and Portia and I, and even that ridiculous bird, we’re all going to help you. Okay?”

He looks so earnest, so desperate, that she manages a little lopsided smile for him.

He lets out a breath, and then messes up her hair a little. “That’s the spirit,” he says, almost sounding like he believes it.

Kai does not sleep particularly well that night—but when she does, her dreams are filled with the sound of flowing water, the brightness of sunlight coming through tall, tall windows, and the smell of jasmine wafting in the air. She dreams of a tall woman with long hair, who speaks urgently to her—but though she knows the woman is beside her, her voice is too far away to make out the words.

She wakes to another grey Vesuvia morning, with a deep and foreboding sense of dread.

Then she is summoned by the count, and he tells her in front of the entire court what he wants her to do.

“It is time the magician Asra faced justice for his crimes,” Lucio drawls, as if reading from a script he thinks too long, but has somehow been convinced is necessary. “Normal methods of investigation have proven inadequate—so it shall be that we use his own magics against him. In lieu of the regular sentence for witchcraft, this crown charges you with finding him and bringing him to us before the Masquerade begins.”

She catches a glimpse of Julian, standing ramrod straight off to the side of the dais the throne sits upon. His expression hard as a rock, though she does catch it waver a moment.

He looks, for half a heartbeat, utterly at a loss.

She is immediately shuffled away after the sentencing, flanked by guards on either side who bring her through the palace at an exhausting pace. A scribe of some sort walks briskly in front of them, undaunted by the speed of their travel.

“The magician Asra kept nothing here at the palace,” the scribe recites off a scroll he holds before him. He must have it memorized, as its fluttering in the breeze does not seem to give him pause. “Aside from some few belongings, that is. But those have been confiscated and burned already, so they would not taint the palace with their evil magics.”

Kai struggles to keep up—her bag is unusually heavy, as small as the cat crammed into it is. He’s being blessedly still, though she wonders if anyone else can feel the rage radiating from him at being so confined, or if it’s just her.

“We discovered shortly after the murder of the Countess a dwelling associated with him in the city, which has through some dark power escaped damage in the riots. That same dark power has prevented us from entering and tearing the place apart for clues—perhaps a witch will have more luck than we did.”

He rolls the scroll up just as the guards stop, and Kai takes the welcome reprieve to catch her breath. They are standing just outside the gates, where a carriage waits. It is large, black, and there are bars on the windows—she has seen them before on the streets, transporting prisoners to the Coliseum. A pair of skinny brown horses have been hitched to it, and they paw at the ground restlessly while the footman holds their reigns too tight.

“Well,” the scribe says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Good luck, I suppose.”

He doesn’t particularly sound like he means it.

The carriage interior was certainly not made for comfort. She bounces around on the hard wooden bench the whole ride—though she is grateful for all the noise it makes rattling on the cobblestones, because it hides Cinis’s complaining that starts the moment he gets out of the bag.

It’s… a long ride. Cinis finds a dead mouse under the seat to amuse himself with, and Kai steadies herself by lying across the bench and bracing herself with her feet and one hand, while she pulls the scrap of paper out of her pocket with the other.

“Aragma,” she whispers, and watches as the lines bloom on the blank paper. She’s pretty sure she memorized it last night, but a little review never hurts…

By the time the carriage begins to slow, Kai’s been staring at the damn paper so long she feels like her eyes are crossed. Cinis has given up on the mouse and is taking a nap on her stomach. She manages to convince him to get back into the bag before they stop, and a guard swings the door open and yanks her out by the arm.

She stumbles on a wide street. On either side there are charred remains of buildings, with some small effort made to clear the road but nothing done for the piles of burnt lumber and debris. The spaces between the cobblestones are caked with mud and flakes of ash, as if the rain still hasn’t washed all the memory of the riots way from this place.

In the middle of it all stands a single shop, totally absent of any sign of the riots in the streets surrounding it. It has an unassuming front, a single sign hanging over its door with a snake wound around a mortar and pestle. There is a stone wall looping around the back, and she can see the branches of a tree rising from the garden it encloses. Full of healthy green leaves, branches heavy with fruit.

There are guards standing a respectable distance away from the shop—in the middle of the street, next to some overturned crates and scattered playing cards, as if they dropped them to stand and salute the guard dragging Kai around by the elbow.

As she gets a better look at the streets, at the way they curve, at the layout of the intersections…

She bites the inside of her cheek so she doesn’t say it out loud: Of. Fucking. Course.

“At ease,” he tells them, pulling Kai closer to the shop. The one she has a key for in her fucking pocket. “This won’t take long.”

“Five silver says she bounces all the way across the street,” the carriage driver quips.

“Ain’t seen that in years. Nah, she’ll just get knocked flat on her ass, we’re outta here in five minutes, tops.”

“Enough,” says the guard holding her. “Alright, girl, go ahead and try the door so we can all go home.”

He shoves her toward the shop. She stumbles until she catches her footing, and resists the urge to glare over her shoulder at him. She can feel the key buzzing in her pocket now—and it’s strange, but it feels excited.

And her heart races, like it’s infectious.

She hesitates—but she can feel Cinis stirring in her bag, impatiently, so she takes a deep breath and walks toward the shop.

She knows the moment she reaches through the barrier because she can feel it—it rushes over her, like a sheer curtain parting at the slightest touch. It feels like a cool breeze on a hot day, tousling her hair playfully as it goes, and it leaves her heart… warmer, for having passed through it.

She reaches up to shove her bangs out of her face, biting her lip to disguise the smile she can’t contain even if she can’t explain where it comes from.

Behind her, someone says very softly, “Holy shit.”

She reaches the door and presses her palm flat to it—the key is so warm she can feel it through her clothes, but she’s not entirely certain she wants these people to see her open the door with it. They will report back to Lucio, after all, and if he finds out that Julian helped her…

Instead, she keeps her hand on the wall, and starts to walk the perimeter of the shop.

It feels a little dumb. But maybe it looks impressive, because she can hear the guards speaking in hushed voices behind her. But she pretends to focus as she goes, walking at a deliberately slow pace, as if she’s searching for something.

Cinis, excited by the atmosphere, jumps out of her bag. He starts ahead, running around the corner, and just after she loses sight of him he starts to chitter, excited like he’s seen a bird. She walks a little faster until she catches up to him—just in time to see him wiggle a little, and then make the impressive leap to the top of the stone wall. He scrambles a little bit at the top, before turning around and sitting, letting his tail hang over the side as he grooms his ears.

He looks so pleased with himself that she can’t help her grin now.

There are a few gaps in the stonework, here—just big enough for hand and footholds, and she suspects from the look of them that this wouldn’t be the first time someone’s climbed over this garden wall. She wonders for a moment who, and when, and why—amuses herself with the thought of young lovers before remembering the reason she’s actually here. She shakes her inexplicable daydream away and reaches up to start climbing.

“H-hey!” one of the guards shouts. “You can’t—hey!”

She swings her legs over the wall and drops to the other side.

She lands on her hands and knees, and soft grass cushions her fall. She curls her fingers in it, marveling at its impossible softness, before standing and taking a look at her surroundings.

She stands in a quiet, secluded, and more than a little overgrown garden. There are plants growing here she’s never seen before, twining around each other, growing over or under one another in a kind of… chaotic harmony she doesn’t understand. As if some magic is keeping them from choking one another out, but they are still growing unchecked, regardless.

Peering out from under the plants are small stone figures, covered in varying amounts of moss. They watch her with friendly, if a bit sombre, expressions, their eyes following her as she moves throughout the garden.

There is a pump for water by the house, shaped to look like a great sea serpent holding an overturned urn. Kai pumps it several times—and to her astonishment, clear water pours out onto the soft stones below. She manages to catch some in her hands, and greedily drinks her fill.

It tastes clean. She gets the whole front of her shirt soaked and doesn’t even care.

In the center of the garden is a round pool lined with stones. Its surface is strangely still, so reflective she nearly mistakes it for a mirror when she leans over it, but for the little ripples made as Cinis drinks from its edge.

Her reflection stares back at her—wide-eyed and a little awestruck.

There are bushes nearly as tall as she is, with an abundance of berries that she doesn’t know the names of but all of them are plump, juicy, and just looking at them makes her mouth water. There is a small, twisting tree, its branches drooping with heavy red fruit. One has fallen to the ground and split open, and she realises upon looking at its seeds that it’s a pomegranate. The tree she’d seen from the street towers above it, though some of its fruit-bearing branches are low enough she can reach. The fruit is small enough to fit in her palm, and the ones that have fallen to the ground reveal soft, deep red flesh.

There’s enough food in this garden to feed… oh, she can’t tell how many families. All of it just sitting here, waiting to be eaten.

After a moment’s hesitation, she gives into temptation, and fills her scarf with berries, some of the strange red fruit, and pulls a single pomegranate off a drooping branch. It’s surprisingly heavy for its size.

Because… really. No one else is eating it.

She ties her scarf with a knot so she won’t lose her stolen food, and tries to get into the pomegranate with her nails a few times, but the skin proves too tough. She sticks it in her bag, and while Cinis searches under the overgrown herbs for mice to chase, she finally approaches the shop itself.

The back door is, unsurprisingly, locked. With a glance up at the walls—and she realises, now, that she can’t hear a single sound coming from the street—she fishes the key out of her pocket and uses it to unlock the door.

Inside the shop it is still and quiet. The windows are all covered with thick curtains, casting the interior in strange dark shadows. She’s entered what appears to be the back room, for storage she assumes. There are wooden boxes on shelves against the wall, and she opens one to find jars inside, cushioned with straw, each one filled with something different and labelled in fine, looping cursive.

“Dried marigold,” she reads aloud, while Cinis pokes his nose into the box to smell it. “Salt from an inland sea. Lichen from an ancient, towering tree. Water from under a new bridge.”

There doesn’t seem to be any organizational method at all. Not one that she can understand, anyway. She replaces the lid on the box and tucks it back on the shelf, while Cinis wanders into the next room, his tail held high in the air.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” she warns him, and he mrrs cheerfully in reply.

She’s just opened up the next box when she hears Cinis chirp, like he’s seen a bird through a window, and she thinks, oh no, and slams the lid closed before darting after him.

The next room is small, windowless, with soft curtains hanging in the doorway that shimmer when she moves them. There’s only a table in the middle of the room, low enough that there are cushions instead of chairs for sitting on. On the table is a deck of cards sitting next to a pouch presumably meant to hold them, a brightly coloured bag, and her ridiculous cat, who has noticed one of the cards sitting aside from the deck and bats at it with his paws.

“Cinis!” she scolds, rushing forward.

He chitters back at her, all bravado, and knocks the card off the table before she gets there. She shoos him off, enduring his annoyed chirps, and bends to pick up the card, turning it over in her hands.

It’s a tarot card.

She nearly drops it in surprise. And then it occurs to her that—well, she’s already been arrested for witchcraft, how much worse is holding a tarot card going to do her in, really. So she holds it, and examines the back, and turns it over once again. In the center is a fish with broad, elegant fins, surrounded by cups.

“Nine of cups,” she says, softly, running her thumb over the number at the bottom of the card.

It grows pleasantly warm in her hand.

She… gets the feeling that it’s saying hello.

There’s magic in you, Asra had said.

Her breath catches in her throat. She puts the card down on top of the others, face-down.

She checks the bag—it’s strangely, irrationally dark when she tries to peer in it, but when she reaches in her hand closes around a leather-bound book, bigger to her touch than the shape of the bag lying against the table would indicate. She pulls it out—and the bag settles exactly as it had before, as if she had removed nothing at all—and examines it closely. It is old, the leather cracking around the spine, and the same symbol that sits outside the shop adorns its cover, well-worn by time and the touch of many hands.

She opens it slowly, mindful of the spine. Some of the pages have come loose of their binding and they nearly slip out before she tucks them back in.

The Tarot, is written in a neat, precise hand on the first page.

Directly below it, in a slightly messy but still legible scrawl, is written, Someone once gave this to me when I was first starting out. Give it a read—the salamander upstairs will help you make some tea, if you ask nicely enough.

There is no signature, but she knows who it’s from all the same. She snaps the book shut and turns it over, as if glaring at the back will solve her problems.

She gathers up the cards, the little pouch for them and the strange bag that no matter how she holds it she can’t see what’s inside. She inspects the rest of the shop, but finds it full of things she can’t identify—jars with the same handwriting as before, though notably different from Asra’s.

By the time she’s gotten tired of trying to figure out what anyone could possibly use trimmings from roots dangling off a cliff for, Cinis is meowing at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for her to follow.

Upstairs, curtains have been pulled back from windows, letting in the grey Vesuvia daylight. There is a small kitchen immediately at the top, with a table and two chairs and a small, yet comfortable looking couch in the center of the room. Behind a beaded curtain and around a corner is a single bed, and a dresser full of clothes in a wide variety of colours, all of them impossibly soft yet strangely sturdy.

Much of it looks like it’ll fit her, so she tries to stuff a pair of pants in the borrowed bag—and finds that it vanishes within, the outside of the bag and how much it weighs utterly unchanged. She reaches in, and her hand closes around the pants, and she pulls them out again.

She hesitates only a moment before stuffing a drawer’s worth of clothing into the bag.

On top of the dresser is a small, ornately carved box made from a pale wood with streaks of orange-red running through it. The carved lid depicts a fox, darting between trees, a red flash in a pale forest.

She opens the box and finds a small collection of gemstones—some on rings, some on necklaces, some on their own. She’s half tempted to shove the whole thing in her bag, and somehow get it to Portia to sell. But she’s not certain she’ll ever manage it, or who even would buy something like this, these days.

There’s a lavender-coloured one, set on a thin silver necklace. On a whim she takes that, slips it over her neck and tucks it under her shirt.

Satisfied she’s gone through everything, she returns to the kitchen and opens up the stove, looking for a place to light it.

And comes face to face with a small lizard, glowing like a hot coal.

It trills when it sees her—wiggling in place, broad back spines fanning out as it smells her with its tongue, and then it turns in place several times before it begins to glow brighter, and brighter, and the wood in the stove begins to catch fire.

“Uh,” she says, blinking curiously at it. “Thanks?”

It trills happily.

Beside the stove is a small basket of wood, so she puts a few more pieces in the stove before closing the door. And then, after a moment’s thought, she opens it again and offers the lizard one of the red fruits from the tree—it makes more delighted sounds, so she tosses it in with a smile.

There is a plain kettle waiting on the stove, and as the salamander builds the fire she heads back down to fill the kettle with water from the yard. It’s quiet and peaceful, still, not a sound coming from the street past the walls.

After putting the kettle on the stove, she peers out one of the windows to see the guards standing outside, huddled together in the streets. They appear to be… drawing strings?

She watches the one who apparently drew the shortest run full-tilt towards the shop. He bounces off an invisible barrier and goes flying backwards across the street, out of view.

For what feels like the first time since this whole mess started, Kai laughs.

Cinis chirps happily in reply. She turns from the window to see him sprawled out along the back of the couch, his tail swaying lazily over its side.

When the water is boiled, she finds a heavy cast iron teapot with koi fish swirling along its sides, and a tin of… very smoky black tea. She makes a face at first, but it’s the only one she can find, so with a sigh she gets the pot brewing while she looks for a cup.

She eats one of the strange red fruit, and finds it delightfully sweet-sour. The rest of the fruit and berries she gets in a bowl, though by the time the tea has finished brewing she’s eaten half of them.

Once the pot is rinsed out and drying—Mazelinka would tan her hide if she left tea leaves in a pot—she sits down on the couch with her cup of tea and her bowl of fruit, and waits for Cinis to slip down off the back of the couch and into her lap. He kneads her for a moment, purring happily, before curling up and settling down.

Kai pauses a moment to smooth out his fur, to scratch behind his ears and to let his closeness soothe her. He is warm on her lap, the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes rhythmic, and as always she finds her thoughts less scattered, her worries farther away with him near. She takes a sip of the tea and, while it is very smoky, she also finds it earthy and rich, like food cooked over Mazelinka’s little fireplace.

So calmed, she opens the book on tarot, resting it on the armrest as she begins to read.

#The Arcana Game #the arcana fanfic #asra x apprentice #julian devorak #role reverse au #probably going to be more like snippets in the future #not interested in another long ass project right now #setting it up was important tho

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