Glass Dominion

Chapter Twenty-Five

Vanya

My heart felt as if it wanted to turn inside out or was already doing so. The air that I breathed seemed to thicken, coating my lungs in a thick layer of the sage that burned.
I sat crisscrossed on the floor of the cottage that the Helunai used. My third client of the day sat across from me with a short table between us. It held my burning sage, tarot cards, a chart of the stars, notes, and crystals.
I held my client's hand, tracing the lines in his palm as we both meditated with our eyes closed. Kellen was one of my regular clients, he was a huntsman, though. We had private sessions together to protect his reputation, or else his fellow huntsmen would never let him live it down.
As we were meditating, I had a weird sensation that someone's eyes were trailing across my skin, so I opened mine, and I was right.
"You're supposed to keep your eyes closed," I told Kellen.
His beady brown eyes immediately shut. "Right, my bad."
"Well, you can open them now," I said hastily with a sigh and dropped his hand to pick up the
deck of tarot cards.
He observed as I shuffled the deck, whichever way I felt I needed to.
"You're a Sagittarius, correct?" I asked, and Kellen nodded in answer.
I then picked three cards from the deck, laid them out in front of us, and took a well-needed sip of my delicious homemade herbal-infused tea.
When I began reading, I did so slowly, considering how nervous Kellen looked. I then reminded myself that he always seemed nervous, making me wonder how he made such a good huntsman.
"You got the hermit, the tower, and judgment." I flipped the cards one by one. "The hermit is a seeker of knowledge that essentially comes from within. He walks through the dark night of his unconscious, guided only by the low light of the northern star, with his destination being his home, his self. The tower represents change in the most radical and momentous sense. The old ways are no longer useful, and you must find another set of beliefs, values, and processes to take their place. Judgment signifies that you are coming close to a significant point in your life where you must start to evaluate yourself. To see this card can also indicate that you are in a period of awakening, brought on by the act of self-reflection."
Kellen stared blankly at the ground in front of him as if honing in on every word I spoke, noting it in his mind.
"Thank you," he said as he got up to leave. Either something supernatural just happened, or he was shocked by how keenly that reading applied to his life. My bet was on the second.
"Do with that information what you please, but the fault is not mine if your decisions are stupid," I explained loudly, for he'd already exited.
He must really have had something he needed to take care of after his reading. See, I'd never believed that readings applied perfectly to one's life in some Helunai way, but people always found a way in which they coincided with certain aspects of their lives.
I began to clean up the area, getting ready for my next client to enter. It wasn't a great income, just a few extra Irja to help the three of us get by. With Nolan and Amelie being off—the gods know where—sure we missed them, but it was two less people to take care of, two less mouths to feed.
"Hey, Vanya." Quickly, I glanced up at the sound of that voice.
"Hey, Bertram," I couldn't help but smile, matching that infectious, ever-present grin across his lips as he approached, taking a seat across from me. "What are you doing?"
"I'm your next client," he said, like it was the most common thing ever to escape his mouth.
"Really? What happened to, I don't believe in that voodoo shit?" I asked, mocking what he'd always claimed about Helunai.
He only shrugged, brushing it off. "I thought I'd give it a try."
I nearly gawked at the optimism in his voice. He was always the happy and go-lucky kind of person, but he'd seemed different lately. Like there was something missing, but he just wasn't sure what. And neither was I.
Bertram was dressed warmly today, with insulated boots and an oversized coat, due to the nearing of Grassheen's first snow, which we all knew was well on its way.
"Alright." I accepted his new spontaneity and started the process by letting some of the sage smoke blow onto him, cleansing the space of any impurities that may have followed him.
I then took his freezing cold hand in mine as we began to meditate. The lines in his hand were deeper and more defined, his palms were filled with callouses, and his fingernails looked to have been chewed off. I tried not to laugh about that part or how much smaller my hands were than his, considering it was a somewhat serious matter.
I dropped his hand once I'd done all the feeling and meditation I thought was necessary and began shuffling the tarot cards deck.
"You should become one of those fortune tellers on the streets of Valamire," said Bertram with a smirk.
I glared up at him. "We both know those people are either scammers or just bat-shit crazy."
"And which of those categories do you fall into?"
"Oh, hush." I couldn't help but laugh as he was doing the same.
Having to force away the laughter, I put my seriousness back on. I began to lay out his three cards, sipping my tea once again before continuing to read them.
"Your cards today are: the devil, the sorcerer, and the moon." I began, feeling the intensity of Bertram's focus. "The devil symbolizes powerlessness and entrapment, enslaved and unable to control your own willpower, and you are unable to shake the feeling. The sorcerer is a representation of pure willpower. With the power of the elements and the suits, he takes the potential innate in the fool and molds it into being with the power of desire. And lastly, the moon card is the existence of illusion. Some hidden truth must be discovered, for what you are seeing now may just be a trick. Hidden forces must be unraveled."
I read it carefully, feeling a deep sense of familiarity in the words. It was like I wasn't reading them, they felt as if my own unconscious mind was producing them.
Once I met Bertram's eyes, he had the same look on his face or a feeling stirring inside that he couldn't shake. I was beginning to question whether this was a reading for him, myself, or if it was for either of us at all.
"Hidden forces must be unraveled," Bertram repeated, his expression bemused.
"I wonder if..." It was on the tip of my tongue but would not come to my mind, and the harder I tried, the more faded it got.
It felt like I'd just walked into a room with the purpose of doing something but forgot what the purpose was, and no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn't resurface in my mind. But like most things, I tried not to think too deeply about it, maybe it would eventually come to me.
"Guys?" The distant voice of little Niko approached the cottage, and as the responsible caretakers we were, Bertram and I jumped up and rushed out to his aid.
Niko looked surprised at our immediate response. "What are you doing?" he asked. And now it was our turn to reflect the shock, wondering where he learned to use such a tone.
"Is everything okay?" Bertram asked him as if he knew I'd have a lot more to say than that.
"Yeah...?" replied Niko. I knew he was probably thinking about reciprocating the question. "You guys are weird,"
"Hey—" I started, but Bertram cut me off quickly by grabbing my arm. "What do you need, Niko?" I lightened my tone.
"I was just wondering if you guys know where Nolan is? He never came home yesterday, something might be wrong." Niko explained.
Bertram and I both looked at each other in confusion. I knew the name sounded familiar, but not familiar enough as if it'd just slipped my mind.
"Nolan?" I asked once our eyes were back on Niko.
Niko looked as confused as we were. "And what about Amelie?"
I felt utterly confused, and Bertram did too. He stood close to me, and I wasn't sure why. After looking at each other, trying to decipher what the others' expressions were saying, Bertram turned to Niko.
"Their fine, Niko," he assured him. "Why don't you go find your friends." He didn't have to tell him twice, for he was off in a heartbeat.
Something had begun to stir inside of me, a familiar feeling, but I couldn't quite put a finger on it, with no clue where it was coming from. It was a strange feeling, a hum in the back of my mind with some kind of hazy vision. It was a hazy vision projected by a hazy feeling of something to come.
Like some kind of layered voice, something deep inside of me began to speak. I felt it, the chaos, the pain, the betrayal... All of it that was to come.
I felt Betram's hazel eyes narrow on me. "Hey, what is going on here?" he asked with an urgency in his tone.
"Bertram," looking up at him, I managed, "something is wrong. Something is really wrong." It was all I could do to keep my composure.
That was all that I could tell him, not only because of the horrendous way it felt, something that wasn't easily described, but also because I knew I couldn't tell him that I'd felt the future—and the nightmare that was to come.