Cassandra eyed Viktor wearily, the fervor behind his words casting long shadows over her expression. The undertaker’s relationship with death was markedly more intense than her own, and though she’d long since surrendered herself over to the pitfalls of her banshee nature, a darkling she was not. Death no longer intrigued her, not when it’d spent a lifetime looming in the shadows of her world, taunting, a beast with sharp teeth and far-reaching claws. She would entertain it with showy displays, glittery tributes, and the occasional reach into the great beyond for the sake of a satisfied customer, careful never to let herself be pulled under. But anything more was asking for trouble. Viktor could keep his violent revolutions and then loot what was left in Death’s bloody wake; she knew better than to play with dead things.
“Oh, Viktor…” she tsked, leaning in to tuck the strand of hair behind his ear like a finicky mother. An elegant flick of her wrist spurred the cards to action and they flew in in sudden synchronicity, arcing out across the space between them. Suspended in mid-air, they began to shuffle themselves. “One day you’re going to look Death straight in the eye, and you won’t like what’s looking back at you.”
The cards settled back onto the wooden table, cut into two decks. With slow deliberateness Cassandra began fanning them out, facedown, into a set of dual arches. Her hand brushed up against their familiar, smooth edges, wading through a sea of differing energies that swirled all around her, calling out her name in the faintest of whispers. They pulled and tugged from every direction and Cassandra’s eyes fluttered to a close, her senses descending on the spread of cards laid out before her. Vampires. What do you suppose it means?
Grudgingly, she leaned into the centuries old magic clinging to her fingertips and listened as their echoes traced out the beginnings of yet another story she’d been condemned to tell. A tug on her wrist brought Cassandra’s hand to a stop. She opened her eyes to find it hovering over a card. With a sharp intake of breath, she turned it over. “… The Tower…”
She peered into the card’s face, an uneasy dread washing over her. A high spire consumed in fire; a massive lightning bolt striking the top of the tower; people flinging themselves out windows. Torment. Destruction. It seemed it was to be Viktor’s lucky day, after all. “… There’s been a sudden disruption to the established order of things. An upset of some kind. It’s left the vampires reeling. They’ve – they’ve been exposed. The Council… they’re scrambling to pick up the pieces but even they were built on shaky foundations and now the cracks are starting to show.” Cassandra lifted her hand up off the card, lips thinning at the sight of the little figures jumping to their deaths. “The vampires are the roll of thunder to herald the coming storm. The crash before the burn. They’re only the beginning. Destruction will soon follow. Chaos. Everything must fall before we can rebuild… and everything will.”
Viktor had always been such a troubled little thing. From the gangly boy who’d haunted the shadowy halls of the Fontaine family home, besmirching that fine family name with his fascination with the dark to the teenager who’d set fire to his family reputation and been spat out into the world at large with the label of necromancer plastered across his name.
Oh, how ashamed his parents had been, how quickly they had distanced themselves from their monster of a son and how swiftly the rest of his family had followed suit. Loneliness had been the only friend he’d known for so long that Viktor had begun to wonder if it simply wasn’t his lot in life to be misunderstood. He had been looking Death in the eye since the moment he was tall enough to see his own reflection in the bathroom vanity. It looked an awful lot like him.
Still. No need to go distracting Cassandra from her reading.
His smile broadened, veering from unsettling into outright eerie as he watched the dance of cards between her fingers with the fascination he usually reserved for the dead. He loved magic in every single one of its forms, the more elusive the better, and prophecy was an art that he’d never been able to get a grip upon.
Exposed. His head tilted curiously, considering every aspect of that very particular word as he rocked forward in his chair, eyes pinned to the spire that dominated the card in question: a menacing obelisk at the centre of a storm. “Very curious,” he hummed happily aloud, fingers hitched on the edge of the table as if resisting the urge to spider towards the card itself, “What more do you see? Is it the vampires who bring destruction or is it—”
Rumors, rumors, rumors. He shouldn’t talk out of school. “Is it something else?”
Theodard Fontaine would roll in his grave if he heard his great-great-great-great-grandson ever so much as mention that word but it slid off his tongue with the kind of reverence that suggested Viktor would revel in the prospect. “I had heard this very peculiar rumour that Scourers had been reported in action again.” His fingers wiggled erratically. “What do the cards say to that?”
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
dededos
