0.The Fool : The Child of the Glen
They say the Whispering Glen is older than memory. Some claim it was carved by gods, others by sorrow, others still by the great face of stone who watches over its waters in silence. But on one night, when the moon was new and the stars restless, the Glen offered not whispers, but a child.
She was found there, barefoot among the wildflowers, her laughter rising like song.
The air trembled with her joy, and the blackbirds circled overhead, weaving through her hair until it seemed she wore them as a crown.
Where her feet touched the earth, moss brightened; where her breath touched the air, fireflies stirred. She did not speak, but the Glen spoke for her.
Fireflies flocked next, gathering like living stars, spiraling around her hands as she spun. Even the trees leaned inward, their branches creaking as though straining to watch the child who danced beneath their roots.
No cradle bore her. No family claimed her. She belonged wholly to the wild — to the stone face that watched, to the river that shimmered, to the birds that bent their wings to follow her dance. To see her was to feel that she had always been there, waiting for those who had the courage to notice.
The night should have swallowed her — yet instead, it bent around her. That night, an image emerged from her dreams... from the air itself, as if the Glen had decided to give her a gift. A shimmer of light bent between the trees, folding and turning until it hardened into a rectangle of painted mystery.
She blinked at it, uncertain, but when her fingers closed around it, it felt warm, alive, humming with the same rhythm as her own heartbeat.A girl at the edge of a cliff, hair loose, eyes open wide to the horizon, holding nothing but faith itself. The path before her was unseen, unwritten, yet she stepped forward as if she trusted the air to carry her.
A single raven feather slipped from her hair and touched the card’s surface, fusing its story to hers. That night, she became the Ravendancer. She named it The Fool. For that was her beginning — a child of no one, carried forward only by faith and folly, stepping into the unknown with the whole of nature at her side, and with the shadow of prophecy forever at her back...