The air in the cramped stall seemed to drop several degrees as her fingers brushed the top of the deck. Outside, the muffled roar of the night market, the sizzle of fat on grills, and the rhythmic thump of ether bass from a nearby stage all seemed distant, as if the velvet curtains were thicker than they appeared.
She tapped the deck once with one nail.
"Three cards."
Arik sat down.
The chair was old, uneven, and faintly insulting, which only made the moment feel more absurd. He sat with the same poise he would have brought to a war council, one arm resting lightly against the table, the market lights catching on the loosened line of his cuffs and the hidden gleam of the brooch beneath his collar.
Noah stayed standing to the side, his jacket still over one shoulder, and his face was set in that look of contempt he always had for nights that turned into stories against his will.
Mezos stayed silent on the line. Listening.
The old woman began to shuffle.
The cards were thick and worn, their edges softened by time. They made a different sound than modern decks: less snap and more of a hushed drag. Painted surfaces sliding over each other with the slow friction of something that was made by hand and has been used too long to be beautiful anymore. Yet Arik felt it again as she moved them: that faint vibration in his channels, the strange cold tension that had first hit him when he looked at the stall.
Not ether or anything like it. Recognition of something his soul remembered but his mind did not.
He disliked that more than the cards.
The old woman split the deck cleanly.
"Your left hand," she said.
Arik did not move.
Her pale eyes lifted to his.
"If you're going to challenge old things," she said, "at least have the manners to touch them."
Noah actually coughed to hide what might have become a laugh.
Arik stared at her a beat longer, then placed his fingers on the deck, one of the flickering lights reflecting into one of his gold rings. He dragged the long, elegant fingers over the deck and cut it in two.
The old woman nodded as if some private rule had been satisfied.
Then she gathered the deck, squared it once against the velvet table, and drew three cards.
One.
Two.
Three.
She laid them face down in a line between them.
The market noise seemed to shift around the stall rather than through it. Voices blurred. Laughter thinned. Even the bright modern pulse of the district - the generators, the lantern feeds, and the cheap decorative wards strung through the square - felt farther away than it should have.
Arik's gaze stayed on the cards.
He had seen war maps opened with less ceremony.
"Past," the old woman said.
Her fingers settled on the first card and turned it over.
A figure hung upside down from a tree made not of wood but of pale, branching light, one ankle bound, the face calm in the painted stillness. Around the man's head was a thin gold halo shaped like a broken circle.
The Hanged Man.
The woman chuckled darkly. "Oh, my, oh my. A high arcana card already?"
Her pale eyes lifted to Arik's face, and the amusement in them thinned into something sharper.
"That is never a kind start."
Noah's posture barely changed next to him. A small change in weight, and the quiet alertness of a man who had been around Arik for too long to not notice when the air around him became dangerous.
Arik said nothing.
The old woman traced one finger just above the image without touching it. "The Hanged Man," she murmured.
Arik didn't say anything else; he just stared at the hand-drawn man with his golden eyes. It had blonde hair and golden eyes, and its clothes were very similar to what he wore when he was called Goliath.
Was he imagining it?
"Suspension," the old woman rasped, her thumb tracing the broken halo on the card. "Not quite dead, were you? But certainly not among the living."
She looked up, her milky gaze drifting to the white space just above Arik's head. "To be kept in the throat of time is a cruel thing, boy. To watch the world move forward while you are anchored to a single moment of betrayal. Decades of it."
Arik did not move.
The stall seemed smaller now, as if the card itself had taken up space.
Noah said nothing. Mezos said nothing. Even the market beyond the velvet curtains felt momentarily irrelevant, reduced to a distant pulse of noise and light while the old woman sat with one hand near the deck and looked at Arik as though she had just pried open a door and found something waiting on the other side.
"The Hanged Man," she said again, softer this time, but no less precise. "The fallen emperor suspended between life and death. Forced to endure desecration, betrayal, and being a helpless witness."
Her thumb tapped once beside the broken halo.
"A cruel beginning. But not the worst one."
Noah's jaw tightened.
Arik's gaze remained on the card. On the painted golden eyes. On the blond hair. On the quiet, obscene familiarity of it.
The old woman placed two fingers on the second card.
Then she turned it.
Death.