## **
Thursday arrived wearing rain like a burial shroud.
Lysander hadn't slept since the Collectors' visit. Instead, he'd spent three nights mapping the Symbolum Mortis, creating careful diagrams that dissolved the moment he looked away. The cards resisted cataloguing, their meanings shifting like smoke through fingers. Worse, gaps in his memory had begun to manifest as physical spaces—rooms in his mind where recollections should live now stood empty, their contents paid as toll to reality's manipulation.
He could no longer remember his first dog's name. The taste of his grandmother's tea had vanished. An entire Christmas—age nine? ten?—existed only as absence shaped like celebration.
'The price of power is the self,' he wrote in his journal, watching the ink rearrange itself into symbolic patterns. 'Question becomes: which self can I afford to lose?'
The estate had grown strange around him. Doors opened onto rooms that hadn't existed in the blueprints. Shadows fell at angles that suggested additional dimensions. The servants' quarters, supposedly empty, echoed with footsteps that walked in circles, never arriving or departing. Mrs. Whitmore, the groundskeeper's widow who delivered groceries, now left them at the gate rather than risk the threshold.
"The house dreams, young master," she'd whispered yesterday, crossing herself with fingers that trembled. "And its dreams have teeth."
Now rain hammered against windows that sometimes showed London and sometimes showed elsewhere—cities of brass and shadow where symbolic architecture defied physics. Lysander sat in his mother's study (when had it become hers rather than his father's?), practicing simple drawings. The Three of Cups to purify water. The Two of Pentacles to balance contradictions. Safe, minor manipulations that barely taxed his dwindling reservoir of memories.
The doorbell rang at precisely 3:33 in the afternoon.
He felt it more than heard it—a reverberation through symbolic space that made every card in the deck flutter. The High Priestess turned face-up on its own, his mother's painted eyes holding warning and encouragement in equal measure.
Lysander descended the grand staircase, noting how the portraits of his ancestors now watched with eyes that tracked movement. The Ashworth line stretched back through centuries of hidden knowledge, each face holding secrets that oil and canvas couldn't quite contain.
He opened the door to find paradox made flesh.
She couldn't have been older than nineteen, dressed in a governess's attire that belonged to no single decade—Victorian collar, Edwardian sleeves, modern buttons that hadn't been invented yet. Rain fell around but not upon her, each drop describing perfect arcs that avoided her form. Her hair was the color of twilight, neither black nor purple but something between.
But it was her eyes that stopped breath—trifocal, like a cat's, but with three distinct irises nested within each other. Past, present, and future collapsed into a gaze that saw too much.
"Once for courtesy," she said, her voice a chord rather than a note. "Twice for certainty. Three times for the binding of things. Lysander Ashworth, I am Thrice-Named Theodora, and your mother saved my life."
She stepped across the threshold without invitation, and the house *recognized* her. Doors that had remained stubbornly locked swung wide. The symbolic architecture settled into more stable configurations. Even the rain's pattern against the windows shifted from chaotic to purposeful.
"You're a Cartomancer," Lysander said, though it wasn't quite a question.
"Was," she corrected, producing a deck from her sleeve—but the cards were blank, their surfaces mirror-smooth and empty. "Will be. Currently am not. Time plays tricks when one reads the Chronicle Cards without proper grounding. I exist in temporal flux, speaking truth in triads because singular statements slip through causality's fingers."
She moved deeper into the house with disturbing familiarity, leading him to a room he hadn't discovered yet—circular, with windows that showed three different times of day simultaneously. Morning, noon, and midnight London sprawled beyond the glass in layered contradiction.
"Your mother mentioned me?" Theodora asked-stated-questioned, settling into a chair that existed in all three temporal states.
"Only that I should trust you. She said you'd come with Thursday's rain."
"Did. Do. Will." Theodora's smile was tired and young and ancient. "Eliza pulled me from the spaces between seconds when the Arcanum Society tried to erase me. They dislike those who read tomorrow's cards today. Consider us cheating at their grand game."
She gestured, and her blank cards arranged themselves in a pattern that hurt to perceive directly. "Which brings us to why I'm here. The Society mobilizes tonight. The London Convention gathers at the Penumbral Club. They've decided you're too dangerous to court, too valuable to kill."
"So they'll do what?"
"Bind you. Break you. Bottle you." Her three-fold eyes shifted, each iris focusing on different temporal threads. "They have a Hierophant—one who speaks in symbolic law. He'll decree your reality into submission unless you learn the third lesson before midnight."
Lysander frowned. "I haven't had a first or second lesson."
"Haven't you?" Theodora produced a pocket watch that ran backward. "Check your reflection, Cartomancer. Count the cards you've truly played."
He turned to a mirror mounted on the circular room's wall and saw his reflection shuffling cards with inhuman speed. But more disturbing were the gaps—spaces where Lysander should exist but didn't. Holes in his being where memories had been spent.
"First lesson learned through loss," Theodora intoned. "Every card costs essence. Second lesson learned through survival: will shapes symbolic space. Third lesson..." She trailed off, her temporal existence flickering like a candle in cosmic wind.
"Tell me," Lysander demanded, feeling urgency claw at his chest.
"Cannot. Will not. Must not." She stood, her form beginning to fragment at the edges. "But I can show you where to look. Your mother's laboratory—behind The Tower card. She hid her greatest work there. The reason the Collectors came. The reason the Society fears."
"What reason?"
Theodora's existence condensed into a moment of perfect clarity, all three aspects of herself aligning. "Eliza Ashworth discovered how to create new cards. Not stolen, not corrupted, not borrowed from the original deck. True creation. Symbolic parthenogenesis. The birth of unprecedented possibility."
The implications staggered him. If true, it would shatter the Arcanum Society's monopoly on reality manipulation. No wonder they'd marked him for binding.
"How do I find this laboratory?"
"Play The Tower. Pay the price. Pass through destruction to reach revelation." Theodora was fading now, her temporal anchor failing. "Remember: the Shadow Card chooses its moment. When it does, you must—"
She vanished mid-sentence, leaving only the scent of rain that fell in three different centuries. Her blank cards remained, scattered across the floor in patterns that suggested messages without meaning.
Lysander gathered them carefully, feeling their emptiness like a wound in reality. Whatever had happened to Thrice-Named Theodora, she'd paid a price that made his memory losses seem trivial. To exist in temporal flux, speaking only in triplets, unable to maintain consistent presence...
'The third lesson,' he thought, 'must be about consequences beyond the personal.'
Thunder rolled across London, but when Lysander looked through the tri-temporal windows, he saw lightning strike in past, present, and future simultaneously. The storm was symbolic as well as meteorological.
He returned to his mother's study and drew The Tower from the deck. The card showed a spire struck by lightning, figures falling from its heights, crown and cornerstone alike reduced to rubble. Destruction, revelation, necessary endings—all the traditional meanings flooded through him.
But beneath those surface interpretations, he felt something else. A keyhole made of catastrophe. A door that opened through demolition.
'She hid a laboratory behind this?' He examined the card more carefully, noting details that shifted when observed peripherally. The falling figures weren't random—they formed symbolic patterns. The lightning wasn't destruction but transformation. The tower itself...
Was his house. Ashworth Estate, viewed from an angle that didn't exist in three-dimensional space.
Lysander took a deep breath, tasting ozone and possibility. Outside, Thursday's rain intensified, each drop a liquid reminder that time was flowing toward midnight and the Arcanum Society's intervention.
He had perhaps eight hours to discover his mother's secret, master the third lesson, and prepare for a confrontation with those who wrote reality's rules. His reflection watched from every mirror, shuffling cards with increasing urgency. The stolen fragments from the Collectors pulsed with borrowed power. And somewhere in the space between heartbeats, the Shadow Card waited for its moment to emerge.
'Well then,' Lysander thought, raising The Tower with hands that only trembled slightly. 'Let's see what apocalypse reveals.'
He played the card.
Reality screamed.
The world exploded inward—not the house, but his perception of it. Walls became suggestions. Floors transformed into probability matrices. The very air revealed itself as symbolic construction, every molecule a letter in reality's alphabet.
Through the collapsing framework of normal perception, Lysander saw it: a door that had always existed, hidden in the angles between angles. His mother's laboratory, sealed behind The Tower's necessary destruction.
But as he stepped toward it, paying memories like coins to a ferryman of cosmic demolition, he felt something else stir. The Shadow Card, responding to reality's unraveling, began to manifest.
It emerged not from the deck but from the spaces between spaces, a card that existed in negation. Where others built, it unbuilt. Where others created, it uncreated. The anti-thesis of symbolic manipulation made manifest.
And it was reaching for him with fingers made of un-becoming.
'The third lesson,' Lysander realized as he dove through the laboratory door with reality collapsing around him, 'is that creation and destruction are the same force, viewed from different angles.'
Behind him, The Tower fell forever. Before him, his mother's secrets waited in a room built from revolutionary impossibility.
The clock struck 4:44, and somewhere in London, the Arcanum Society began to move.
The game's middle phase had begun.