Freebie Mondays: The Queen of Pentacles (Prompt Novel Chapter 4)

For 2024, I have decided to devote my prompt writing time to a novel. The twist is that the novel plot will be generated entirely by the writing prompts I chose to use for the project – which were rolled randomly using my trusty dice and a few online prompt lists. You can find the Table of Contents here.

For Chapter 4, the prompt was: “a character hears their future from a fortune teller.”

This was not the prompt I had originally chosen for this chapter. I pushed that plan back by one so that I could do some extra setup for the conflict to come. I used my actual tarot card to determine the reading for this scene, and the cards I drew were surprisingly accurate for the character’s situation. I took advantage of this scene to play around with the atmosphere a little bit as well, and I’m quite pleased with how it worked out!

If you’d like to see this chapter come together, you can watch the VoD on Youtube! I also discussed the meanings behind the cards I drew, and why I chose to use them instead of picking the cards manually by meaning.
. . .

The building was exactly what Alyial expected from a place called The Raven’s Quill. To the right of the entrance stood a massive display of crystals and polished gemstones, each with a small printed card next to it to explain its purpose. Alyial had been to enough of these places that he knew better than to read the cards – that would induce eye-rolling and, once that started, there’d be no stopping it.

Above the shimmering crystal display, a wide, judgmental eye peered from the center of a stylized hand. The symbol reminded Alyial of the Illuminati eye-in-the-pyramid though, logically, he knew it wasn’t the same.

On the opposite side of the store, past a rotating shelf of books and note cards, stood a massive display of candles. The wax was cast in every color, size and shape from barely bigger than birthday candle size to massive container apparently designed to burn for seven days without stopping.

Between the gems, the candles and the herbal assault on his nose, Alyial was ready to turn and flee from the store three seconds after he entered. And he might have done exactly that, if the curtain of beads hanging across from the main entrance hadn’t parted at that very moment to reveal a middle-aged woman with streaks of white in her mahogany hair. She was of average height, probably just a little over five feet tall, and the light creases that adorned the edges of her eyes spoke of many years of laughter and smiles.

She was an unassuming woman, yet the clearing of her throat halted Alyial dead in his tracks, forcing him to meet her gaze as she smiled and waved toward the front counter. The surface was draped in a brilliant purple cloth, which made the cash register perched at the far end feel horribly out of place, like an anachronism – a piece of a future that had had not yet arrived to this particular square of retail space.

“Is there something I can help you with?” the woman asked when she arrived behind the counter. Alyial still hadn’t moved from his perch just inside the front door, but that didn’t seem to matter. Either the woman hadn’t noticed his anxiety, or she was used to dealing with skeptics.

A long moment of silence passed during which Alyial imagined setting his hands on one of the store’s wares only to knock entire shelving units to the floor, spilling and cracking their contents – as seemed to be the norm for him whenever he tried to handle an object these days. The woman did not repeat her query, even when the silence stretched long enough to enter the awkward phase, but she did give Alyial an expectant look that demanded some form of answer.

Again, Alyial considered spinning on his heel and darting back into the hot summer sun of the day that waited outside. But if he could find his answers out there, he never would have stepped into the pleasantly chill interior of the new-age mystic’s shop. The truth was, he had tried everything else. He was getting desperate, and he wasn’t sure where else to turn.

“Um…” he managed at last and inched one step closer to the purple-draped counter. “Er…” he added helpfully, then paused to clear his throat and gather his wits. “You have a sign in the window that says tarot cards read, questions answered?”

He hadn’t meant to speak the statement as if it was a query. He knew the sign was there; he read it not five minutes before. It was, ultimately, what drew him inside this strange, other-worldly place. But the woman merely offered him a patient smile and bobbed her head.

“Yes,” she said pleasantly. “There’s an opening in the schedule, if you’d like to do it now?” The pitching of her voice upward when she spoke the last word to make the statement a question made far more sense than Alyial’s lackluster query. But somehow, the good fortune associated with the revelation made him far more nervous than if she’d asked him to come back another time.

What in blazes am I doing here? he demanded in the vaults of his mind for what felt like the hundredth time since he opened the door to step inside. He was a man of science, logic and reason. He had never once believed in anything remotely magical or mystical. The mere concept of psychics or tarot card readings had driven him to a state of ranting in the past. He wasn’t even religious. He hadn’t stepped foot in a church since he turned sixteen.

Yet, he increasingly caught himself addressing silent requests to the vast cosmos surrounding him, as if whatever beings might exist out there in the great unknown could pluck the thoughts from his very mind in order to grant his wishes. And he knew if he didn’t take the offer this very second, he would never return no matter what kind of deposit was required to secure a future appointment.

“Yes,” he said at last, and the word felt like an explosive sigh as it escaped his lips. “Very good. Let’s dive right in.” His cheeks caught fire as he spoke the last. He could hardly believe he was agreeing to do something so foolish! But at least he hadn’t said, let’s get this over with. The last thing he wanted to do was insult the woman he hoped would solve all of his recent problems.

With another easy smile, the woman behind the counter turned and made her way back through the curtain of beads that separated the storefront from whatever happened in the back room. The beads tinkled lightly as they came into contact with each other in the wake of her passage. Most were made from wood, thick shapes carved into spheres, oblong ovals, stars and moons. But a few were made from plastic, giving the sound they made an oddly rain-like sensation.

When several seconds passed and Alyial did not follow in the woman’s wake, her hand reappeared from the back room, gently parting the beaded curtain to create a passage for him.

Alyial took one last hesitant look around the room and tried his hardest not to think of where he was standing right now – nor what his colleagues would say if they ever caught wind of the fact that he came into a place like this.  Then he scurried forward, shooting through the beaded curtain before he could think better of his actions.

The beads were set swirling in his wake, smacking so hard against each other, they momentarily reminded him of coconuts banged together to create stage sounds. But they either settled quickly, or the sound passed into the back of his mind as he glanced around the room he entered.

Like the store front, the reading room was exactly what he pictured in his mind when he thought of what it would be like to visit with a mystic. Thick, heavy fabric printed with intricate dark designs hung from the ceiling and draped across the walls, hiding every surface. The bright purple, blue and pink folds evoked the idea of a circus tent, and Alyial felt as though he had just stepped out of the real world into something out of a faerie story.

The space must have been large; somewhere there had to be a store room or an entrance to a back office where the administrative portions of the business were managed. But the fabric had been draped in such a way to make the space feel small and intimate, as well as concealing the entry to whatever other rooms might lurk back here.

In the center of the fabric drapery sat a small, round table. In the center of the table was a thick, heavy crystal ball. Candles and incense were arrayed on either side of it, and Alyial detected a hint of old, stale smoke in the air – as if these instruments of relaxation had been recently snuffed.

Without a word, The Raven’s Quill’s proprietor settled in the chair on the far side of the table and motioned for Alyial to settle in the chair closer to the door.

His first instinct was to look over his shoulder and make sure the exit that led back to the store hadn’t vanished.

But that was foolish; this was just a cleverly designed trick of design to make him feel as if he were getting the full mystical experience. No doubt the people who regularly patroned places like this enjoyed such spectacle.

So he steadfastly resisted the instinct that urged him to take just a wee peek over his shoulder and moved woodenly forward until his hand closed over the back of the chair.

He felt no less awkward or out of place once he finally sat down, and it took a great deal of effort not to purse his lips or frown as he watched the mystic light the candles and incense arrayed across the table’s top. She worked in silence, paying Alyial’s nervous glances no heed.

When she had finished, she plucked the crystal ball from the table and tucked it into some half-concealed cabinet behind her workspace. She replaced it with a stack of cards that she arrayed across the table as if she were getting ready to deal a round of blackjack.

“Have you ever had your cards read before?” she asked. It was a pleasant question, without connotation or expectation, but it still made Alyial squirm.

“No,” he admitted and settled for folding his hands tightly in front of him so he wouldn’t wriggle every which way in his seat. “Is there anything special I need to know about it?”

The woman flashed him another calm smile. “Just relax,” she suggested. “Clear your mind. Or focus on the problem that brought you to me today. That way the cards will know what kind of message to offer.”

She lifted the cards off the table, gathered them into her hands and cut the deck. Then, with the same expertise as a casino dealer, she shuffled the cards, pausing only every now and then to run them through the gentle smoke released by the incense sitting next to the candles.

Alyial had never even seen the front face of a tarot card before. He half expected he would soon see a nine of diamonds and a seven of clubs sitting in front of him. The entire process struck him as both pointless and dull, not as mystic or mysterious as conversations about these sorts of things had led him to expect.

As his mind wandered, so too did his eyes. He noted that the hanging tapestries were not bare of decoration. Several small picture frames had been hung over them – or perhaps the fabric had been folded around them to accommodate their display. One of them pronounced in brightly painted letters, the witch will see you now, another stated, my other car is a broom above a stylized painting of an old-fashioned broomstick.

The soft clearing of a throat drew his attention back to the table, and he noted the mystic had set the pile of tarot cards in front of him.

“Cut the deck, if you will,” she suggested with an encouraging nod toward the pile.

Frowning, Alyial grasped the top portion of the deck, allowing the cards to separate wherever they desired. He set the new pile beside the first, then glanced uncertainly at the woman sitting across from him.

“Just the once?” he asked uncertainly.

“If that’s what feels right,” she replied without concern. “Or, if you’d like, you can separate it into three piles. We’ll flip the top card from each to give you the answers you need.”

The answer I need is to simply accept that there are no answers for a life turned so suddenly and completely on its head, Alyial thought as he eyed the deck skeptically. But there could be no harm in having some small portion of the universe confirm that.

Reaching back toward the main stack of the deck, Alyial plucked another pile free and set it beside the other two. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do then, if he was supposed to shove the deck back across the table or simply let them lie, but the woman solved the problem for him by retrieving each of the piles and aligning them carefully in the center of the table.

“The first card will represent your past,” the woman announced without any form of preamble. “Likely this will reveal the problem that brought you to me in the first place.”

Alyial was about to interrupt and ask if she wanted some form of context, history or information about his conundrum. After all, she had yet to ask what brought him in here or why someone so obviously unfamiliar with things like this had entered her shop. But the mystic didn’t give him a chance to speak before she flipped the first card.

“The Ten of Wands,” she declared, then made a soft, thoughtful sound.

Alyial arched an eyebrow, wondering what divine meaning had been granted to the woman sitting across from him when she beheld the art etched onto the thick cardstock sitting in front of him. The image depicted a young woman wearing a long, flowing cloak struggling to mount a wall topped by ten tall staves driven into the hard ground and barring her path. It seemed a man stood on the far side of that wall with his arms crossed and a smug look on his face.

“Struggle,” the oracle declared after a moment to survey the card in front of her. Then she lifted her eyes to meet Alyial’s gaze. “I shouldn’t be surprised. A person like you doesn’t enter a place like this for anything less than the most challenging of struggles. I see loss in your recent past, possibly a severe one and on the tail end of a great deal of effort.”

How does she know? Alyial’s mind screamed even as his jaw fell open and he stared in absolute shock at the woman sitting across from him. He hadn’t said anything, and surely none of his behavior pointed to something so specific. He hadn’t even dropped anything or knocked a display from its shelf.

Or is she simply so good at reading people that she recognizes generic struggle on every new patron that enters her store?

The oracle’s eyes glimmered as she met his gaze, and the barest hint of a smirk tugged at the edges of her lips, as if she were reading his very thoughts and had every intention of countering them.

“This card usually represents a series of difficult events. But that does not make it bad. Far from it. For every state of being must eventually come to a natural end.”

Again, without waiting for any form of response, the mystic shifted her hand to the next pile and flipped the card that rested atop it. This time, a spectacular wheel spread across the entire center of the card. Half of it was rendered in white with gold filigree and the other half was rendered in dark black with silver filigree. Symbols moved along the outer portion of the wheel, but none of them made sense to Alyial’s whirling mind.

He was still stuck on the series of unfortunate events and how someone could know about them just from looking at a card.

“The Wheel,” the oracle declared, her tone suddenly soft and hypnotic, making it seem as if she spoke from the far side of a dream. “Major Arcana. A very powerful card.”

It almost seemed to Alyial as if the woman’s eyes blazed when she lifted them to gaze in his direction again, as if the small orbs were momentarily lit by some inner fire. The image lasted for only the briefest of seconds, but it stuck in Alyial’s memory, causing him to blink several times as he regarded the woman sitting across from him.

“The wheel is always in motion,” she explained, her voice still possessing that dream-like quality. “That it appears in the present position represents a change of fortune. A shifting of cycles. Now is an opportunity for you to move forward. Or,” and the woman’s voice took on a dire hint of warning, “slide backwards if you are not careful.”

Alyial’s heart suddenly hammered wildly in his chest. It seemed to him that the wheel of fortune could represent ill-tidings as easily as good. Perhaps the cycle that had ended for him was the one containing a normal, complication-free existence. Perhaps bad luck simply clung to him now, and he would have to learn to live with it – to work around it if he ever wanted to succeed or survive.

But he wanted to believe the simple painting sitting in front of him represented the end of his woes, a chance to return to a day-to-day life that did not involve exploding every computer part he set eyes on or constantly destroying the code he had spent the last several years of his life crafting.

If I don’t soon find a day where I can sit at my desk unhindered by this never-ending parade of disasters, I’ll be kicked off the team! He was somewhat shocked it hadn’t happened already. He expected Nala to be the first to lose patience. But she was so steadfastly opposed to the concept of a curse or even luck that she adamantly refused to look at the situation as anything other than a series of faulty parts foisted on their struggling team.

Though how she rationalizes all the clumsy mistakes is beyond me. Perhaps she thinks I’m merely a simpleton.

Alyial swallowed hard and found the mystic staring at him, perhaps waiting for some form of response.

“How do I affect this change in fortune?” he asked hesitantly, his voice escaping his lips as barely more than a whisper. “What does the next portion of my cycle look like?”

Without even glancing down, the woman set her fingers on the card that rested atop the final pile and flipped it. What lay beneath was a spectacular arch decorated with flowers and backed by a flowing waterfall. In front of it the same two people from the first card seemed to stand side by side, each clutching a fine golden chalice that they lifted toward their lips.

The mystic’s only reaction was to arch an eyebrow.

“The Two of Cups,” she murmured. “Interesting.”

“What does it mean?” Alyial demanded, mystified and totally enraptured by the spectacle that surrounded him.

“Great love,” the oracle murmured, and her voice was full of gentle teasing. “Though it could be any type of relationship – a friendship, a work partnership. Whatever it is, it will require great commitment.”

Alyial wanted to scream. Up to now, it seemed as if the cards – and by proxy the woman reading them – knew exactly what was happening in his life. Foolishly, he had allowed that to kindle hope within his chest that he might find hidden here the hint he needed to break free of this wretched rut.

He had no time in his life for romance! This was a pointless waste of his time!

He was about to push back from the table and stand. Angry words were on the tip of his tongue.

The mystic must have noticed because she reached for the central pile of cards and pulled the one that sat at its base.

“Death,” she hissed as she flipped the card and held it in front of her face.

The moment she spoke, the lights surrounding the small table seemed to flicker and die. As darkness enveloped Alyial and he wondered if there was some sort of light switch under the table, the candle flames flared. It was impossible, a trick of the light playing with his brain, but it seemed as though the candle flames now towered as high as the tiered candles themselves, forming pillars of bright heat  along the center of the table.

In the bright flicker of warm illumination sat the image painted on the Death card – a solitary skeletal figure wrapped in a cloak of deepest black, bearing with it a wickedly curved scythe. The painting was both delicate and intricate. Every gap in the ribs revealed a new wrinkle of dark cloak, and tiny finger bones wrapped around the haft of the scythe – the tip of which seemed to glint in the newly blazing light.

Alyial wanted to lift his head and scan the room surrounding him for an exit. He felt as though he had been swallowed by a dark void and only the light of the candles revealed existence beyond his own.

The oracle sat across from him, as serene as she started. It seemed as if she didn’t notice the lack of light or the flaring of the candles. Her eyes were downturned as she gently shifted the cards free of their piles.

The smoke from the incense wafted across each of the images as they came to rest in the center of the bright circle of light. Then it seemed to wreath the oracle’s wrist as she lifted one last card free of the piles Alyial had formed.

“You asked how you could break free of your cycle,” she said, and her voice almost seemed to flow from far away. Yet it struck Alyial’s ears with clarity and vibrancy, as if amplified by a hidden microphone.

Alyial struggled to swallow against a mouth gone suddenly sandpaper dry. He tried to wet his lips with his tongue but, as usual, the oracle didn’t wait to offer her explanation. She flipped the card she held and raised it between two fingers so he could see the image.

“The Queen of Pentacles,” the bold, soft voice of the oracle declared.

The woman depicted on the cardstock was regal. She wore the regalia of a queen, her dress a rich brown color and the vest that adorned it a striking navy blue. Her face was young, her cheek bones prominent and her chin pointed. A mass of black curls framed her face and draped over her shoulders. Her crown was made of gold and each spire that rose from the central portion was adorned by a small, five pointed star that seemed back by a golden disc or coin.

As Alyial stared at the image, it almost seemed as if the woman came to life. She lifted one hand from the side of her throne and used it to beckon to the man sitting across from her.

“To break your cycle you must find the Queen of Pentacles,” the voice announced. But this time, it seemed as if it flowed from the card, as if the painting herself spoke the command instead of the oracle sitting across from him.

Alyial’s mind reeled. For a moment, he couldn’t focus on anything – not the darkness or the pillars of flames or even the woman he had just been told to locate. The smoke produced by the incense filled his nose, tickling his nostrils and making his eyes water.

He blinked hard several times, trying to clear both is vision and his head. He had so many questions, he didn’t even know where to start.

When at last he managed to focus again, the woman sitting across from him was patting the tarot cards back into a singular stack.

“That’ll be twenty-nine ninety-nine,” she declared as pleasantly and as casually as if she had just commented on the weather.

With a start, Alyial realized that the lights had come back on. The candles had been doused to tiny rivulets of steam emitted by the wicks, and the last ashes of the incense shook free of the stick to land on the small tray beneath.

He blinked again, but all sign of the strange darkness and the odd quality of the woman’s voice was gone. He wanted to believe he had hallucinated it, but he could still see the Queen of Pentacles commanding him to find her.

“Right,” he murmured as he pushed shakily to his feet. “Let me just grab my wallet…”