The wind blew cold and sharp through the mountain pass, and it felt like it blew straight through Crystal as well. She shivered and leaned on the polearm, and she took one step at a time. Foot in front of foot. Inch after inch after inch.
She shouldn't have been alive, really. She should've died, if only Jenny had been more bloodthirsty. She should've died, if only Jenny had been less selfless. She should've died, if only the bullet in her side had been a few inches one way or the other and had managed to actually turn some important organ to paste instead of just making her bleed for days.
It wouldn't be that bad, maybe, dying. Crystal had thought about death a lot, but mostly in the context of thinking about spirits. When she looked into the future with a Ouija board, that was supposed to be communing with the dead, right? It wasn't actually, she knew rationally. It was finding patterns, letting your subconscious guide you to answers you already knew on some level. Something like that. Maybe. But when you were sitting there, with your hand on someone else's hand on the planchette, you weren't thinking about the subconscious mind. If you were going to get anything out of it, you had to believe.
When Crystal conducted her tarot readings, she always had a skull laid out behind the cloth. It was a human skull, but it was also made out of plastic. She'd gotten it from the drugstore when she was in seventh grade, on a day in November when it was marked down to just a couple dollars on clearance. Her dad had told her it was still probably a waste of money. What are you going to do with a Halloween decoration this time of year, he'd asked. Did Crystal really think she'd remember where it was next year? Would she even still have it? Or was she paying to throw away someone else's trash? She'd thought about it for a while and decided that she did want a skull, that she'd use it all the time, and her dad had been skeptical but had shrugged and trusted her, or at least he'd left her to make her own mistakes, and she took the skull home and she still used it all the time.
But whenever Crystal was thinking about death, it was set dressing. It was fantasy, pretend. She'd mostly thought about other people dying, or had thought that if she did have to die, she'd become a ghost or something. Ghosts seemed like a good bet. If you became a ghost, you were dead but you weren't really dead. You were gone but not forgotten, and you could keep pursuing your business. You could hold on until you finished what you had to do, and by the time you managed that, the release of oblivion would be something you embraced gratefully.
Come to think of it, Crystal had never gone back and read Wraith: The Oblivion. She'd heard it was good. Melancholic. Introspective, maybe. But it was really hard to get her group onto that level, when it came to the energy they brought to games, so she didn't bother.
But maybe she was living that now, in a manner of speaking. Because Crystal had done violence and been the subject of violence, and she had suffered and caused suffering, and she was still here even though she should've been dead. From that perspective, she was sort of already a vengeful ghost, wasn't she? She was haunting this place, lingering until she could fulfill her purpose, and then she would be released. And it would be good. There would be no more pain. No more cold. No more torturous awareness of her own sins.
Being asleep wasn't so bad. Being unconscious wasn't either. When she'd been gassed, Crystal hadn't really known it. She'd been scared going under the second time, and scared when she woke up, but she hadn't been scared in between. She hadn't been anything, not anything except a body. A vessel of potential, maybe. She wished she could go back to that. Being nothing was okay. Being potential was okay. What sucked was when you had to be aware and in control.
Life was just easier when you didn't have to make your own decisions. Failing that, it was easier when you could lie to yourself and say that you were out of control, when you could fool yourself into thinking there was only one way. Crystal was pretty good at that—no, she had been pretty good at that, but it was over now. Done. Whatever Jenny said, Crystal had done nothing but waste the time she'd spent on this island so far. She'd been a coward and a liar and a killer and, and, and...
The funny thing was, Crystal had no idea where she was going. She'd set herself walking and had let the sensory input filter out of her mind. She was a speck of existence in an endless haze of white, and that her physical surroundings reflected that was coincidence.
She took a moment to inhale and exhale, and she tried in that moment to be mindful in a way that she'd practiced a lot but also frequently found difficult. She watched the water vapor of her breath twist and twirl like a dragon's smoke, and then she laughed.
Crystal was no dragon. She wasn't even a drake or a wyvern. Those were large, powerful creatures, creatures that controlled their own fates. Crystal wasn't even a knight. She served no cause, followed no comrades. Not anymore. She was cut loose to drift aimlessly, and every story she told herself failed to make sense.
She was, at least, now aware of the direction her feet were carrying her. She was moving upwards, using the polearm as a staff as she climbed the mountain. She never would've done so willingly outside of this situation, but now it seemed right. Perhaps, if she could see the whole world that remained to her from the very top of the ridge, with one side of the island behind her and the other in front, everything would become clear.
The last tarot reading Crystal did before the trip wasn't supposed to be a big deal. It was all normal. Rote. She had her setup going in front of her computer, and the webcam was on, and she was using it to teach a friend about what tarot was and how it worked. It was the sort of demo she'd frequently subjected anyone who'd put up with it to during the early days of pandemic, and the only special thing here was that it had been a couple months since the last time.
She hadn't even done it right. There was no question that she was seeking an answer to. That was the sort of thing that some of the people she followed online would be very antsy about, because it could be seen as frivolous or inviting spirits in or whatever, but Crystal thought that if something really did happen it would be cool more than anything else. She needed evidence to believe, and so far all she'd found evidence of was the value of self-reflection.
In any case, she was doing a five card spread, representing the different facets of a problem and its potential solutions. It was basic, and maybe she did it a little differently from other people, but she was comfortable with it. She could do it in her sleep—sometimes, she actually did in her dreams.
The first card she drew was the Six Of Patterns. That was a card that wasn't in a normal tarot deck, because Crystal's favorite deck was actually a piece of roleplaying game tie-in merchandise. It was based on Mage: The Ascension, which was a game older than Crystal was, and the deck sold for a whole lot of money online if you were getting the original one, but luckily they'd made a print on demand version that anyone could get any time for like thirty bucks including shipping, and that was what Crystal had.
The suits were not normal tarot suits, though they did have direct symbolic analogues. Patterns in the Mage deck was Pentacles in a traditional deck. Questing was Wands. Dynamism was Swords. Primordialism was Cups. People who took tarot super duper seriously often scoffed at decks like this, and Crystal understood it, she really did. Novelty decks actually kind of annoyed her too, but mostly because they were lazy. They missed the point, or ignored the symbolism, and just didn't offer anything. But this one was different. It hewed close to tradition while offering its own spin, and the truth was that Crystal knew its ins and outs far more than she did the source material.
The Six Of Patterns depicted a man in a suit leaning over to let six golden coins fall before a woman in purple. The man wore a prominent lapel symbol, but whether it was a flower or a brooch was unclear. The scene was urban, an alleyway between two brick walls, and the cracks spiderwebbing the nearer wall evoked an almost floral vibe.
Today, the Six Of Patterns was upside down.
"That's called being 'inverted' or 'reversed,'" Crystal explained. "It changes the meaning."
Her fingertip brushed over the card, tracing the falling coins.
"Normally, this card is about giving. Like, generosity, but also a gift exchange, sort of? It's a community thing. Everyone gives help and everyone receives help sometimes, and you might be on one side now, but later you'll be on the other.
"But, reversed, it's about that breaking down. It can be a reminder to, to not burden yourself with doing all of the work, all of the giving, but it can also mean taking too much. It might be that, um, that you owe someone for something that you haven't paid back, or maybe you can't pay back. Someone gives you some incredible precious gift, and you don't know how to even the scales.
"As the first card we place it's about, um, the present," she said. "So if we'd asked a question, this would tell us something about the situation we're facing. So we'd want to think a little, and to ask ourselves: have we been giving too much?
"Or have we taken on an incredible debt?"
Jenny had given Crystal her life. Jenny was dead, and Crystal was alive. There was no way to undo that, and so it wasn't worth fantasizing about. Rather, it was important to decide what that meant.
That was the operative word: decide. Crystal had to make a decision. She had to decide where she was going and what she was going to do, and what she would spend the little time remaining to her on.
She sat on a large slab of rock, chewing on some bread. It was probably Jenny's bread, from that first day, when Jenny had given it to her rather than fight. Crystal was trying to be conscious about eating it, but that was hard.
Crystal tended to get into her head when she ate, or if not that, she instead would watch YouTube or something. And then she would just shovel everything in front of her into her mouth.
It wasn't that she didn't enjoy food. She liked food a lot. She liked sweet things especially, but she found sour or spicy things interesting too, much of the time. In theory, Crystal was aware that people were supposed to sit there and chew their food thoroughly before swallowing it, that this was good for digestion and also good for signaling to your body that you had eaten and were full. But this was incredibly hard for Crystal to do.
It was like gum. Gum was tasty for a couple minutes, and then you were just squeezing a blob between your teeth. Crystal hated that. You weren't supposed to eat gum—she knew it didn't actually sit in your stomach for three years or whatever her friends in elementary school had told her, but all the same the idea of it just passing through her system was repulsive to her, so she didn't eat it. She didn't really chew gum at all. But normal food was like gum you could swallow, and she'd chew her food just enough to hit the point that she could swallow it. Then, to keep the flavor up, she'd take another bite.
She'd tried to learn to not do that. She'd tried counting in her head as she chewed, but somehow it felt forced and artificial and like she was just gumming pulp. She'd heard about how it made you eat less, and she'd tried things like counting in her head, and it just had not come to anything, ever. She had a much easier time simply giving herself a limited amount of food, so that after she scarfed it down there was no more, and she had to sit there feeling empty or else get up and actively make herself another serving.
It was sort of different here, because there wasn't that much food, but there was also no reason to be stingy with it. It wasn't good food, so it didn't really matter if she failed to properly prolong the experience, and yet the origins of the food felt important. There was some meaning to it, some symbolism. Crystal knew enough about Christianity to know that there was a whole thing about the body of Christ being represented by bread, and it wasn't like that. It was more, Jenny had given her a number of things, but Crystal couldn't figure out how to appreciate the big stuff.
Life? That was complicated. She didn't know how to use it. Bread? Easy. Chew slow and think. Think about the bread. Every bite.
Bread actually could've tasted much worse. That was the first thing Crystal was struck by. Even a little stale and stiff and squished, there was a subtle sweetness to it that filled her mouth and told her she was at least eating something, and that helped her ground herself in the moment and focus on it.
On the other hand, bread could've tasted much better. She never really thought about the botanical aftertaste of grain until just now, mostly because the only other times she'd ever eaten bread on its own it had been some kind of fancy French bread her mom had gotten as a side dish, or else it had been earlier during her island experience when being conscious of the process of eating bread had been the farthest thing from what she'd wanted to do. She'd just tucked away as much as she could without thinking about it, and that had kept her going, more or less. She'd mostly been eating the bars, which were at least meant to be eaten on their own.
Half a slice in, the bread was actually getting really hard to keep down. Whoever said you had to chew something fifty times or whatever had never eaten bread on its own. After maybe twenty chews, the bread had just turned totally to paste. Then she was just swirling bread paste in her mouth, while the aftertaste became more and more overpowering and her desire to swallow became less and less. She looked at the bread in her hand, the little crescent that was left, less than half a slice even but it was going to be four or five bites and she wasn't sure how she felt about that. Four or five bites could take forever. It could take the rest of her life. The rest of her life, measured in four or five bites of bread. Maybe if she wadded it up, she could do it in one? But the thought of having to strain her jaw muscles on it was repulsive in its own right.
Everything hurt, and life was terrible, and Crystal was upset about eating bread.
Everything hurt, and life was terrible, and Jenny and Donovan would never eat bread again.
"Why are you pathetic?" Crystal said, and it caught her off guard because she hadn't even realized she'd been thinking it until it came out of her mouth. The bread was now lying there on her lap, little crumbs caught in her clothing, no more eaten than when last she looked.
"You suck," she said. Her voice was weak and quiet. She was sitting on a wide rock halfway up the mountain, shielded by a turn in the trail, and it kept the wind from blowing too hard. She hadn't really been thinking about where she was for a while. Kind of hard to, when she was floating in her head. Focusing on the bread was about all she could muster, and she hated it now, but it just made her need to focus on it all the more.
"You're stupid," she said. "You're—"
Then her fingers snatched the bread and she took three big bites out of it and she couldn't talk anymore because her mouth was full. The bread tasted worse than ever. It was dry and pasty and she had to dig a water bottle out of her bag and take big swallows from it, and her face scrunched up. Her brows pulled in and she turned her head side to side, writhing with the overpowering taste of the bread, and once she'd swallowed it down the aftertaste was worse than ever. She rotated her head like she was drawing a circle with her chin, as if that might in some fashion wash the taste away, and it didn't.
There was still a corner of bread left, irregularly shaped, like a puzzle piece.
She really was stupid, huh? This had been about positivity. About honoring Jenny's sacrifice as best she knew how. But she'd corrupted it, or messed it up, and now she was just tormenting herself, sticking to the plan—eat the bread consciously, take nothing for granted—even in the face of compelling evidence that it had become untenable or counterproductive.
There was more crust left than center. Crystal had always thought that the crust was the worst part of bread, but really bread was the worst part of bread. The crust was not substantially worse than anything else. It was a little firmer, which meant it lasted longer, but also that it degraded less quickly.
Two bites of bread. One if she squeezed it.
Then another slice. And another. And another.
Maybe she should just starve herself. Maybe it was bad to be eating, with the gunshot wound and all. Her side was hurting pretty badly now, she realized.
Crystal's cheeks were wet.
She forced herself to eat the bread.
Forced herself to chew long and slow.
The second card was also reversed.
It was the Page Of Dynamism, and depicted a shadowy figure in blacks and blues and greys. The figure wore tight pants, displaying skinny legs at odds with its bulky upper body. It wore a leather jacket with the left sleeve missing, with a print of a left hand outlined in red on the bottom. It wore a gas mask and a helmet, and wings unfolded behind its head. It held an axe, and the brilliant silver head of that axe, etched with runes, was the brightest part of the illustration. In the background, a city sprawled, choked in dark clouds or dark smog. Around the figure's feet were what looked like corpses or spirits.
"This one departs more from the traditional imagery," Crystal explained, as she set the card to the left of the Six Of Patterns. "In most decks, this card is a lot more, um, positive. Kind of. Brighter colors."
She shrugged and laughed.
"The Page is youthful energy and inspiration. It's about being really into something, but also about finding new things, new ways to do things and new interests. Here they're showing that with the, well, the getup. This guy looks really tough, but in a kind of tryhard way?"
She held the card up to the camera briefly, then frowned and flipped it right side up for a moment, before returning it to its proper spot in the spread, to the left of the Six.
"So, how we're doing this one, this position is the past. It's for the things that might have led us to where we are now, the causes of the predicament or problem that we're doing a reading for. Which is, uh, nothing in this case."
She shrugged.
"But, um, anyways, the Page means something different when reversed. It still has that youthful energy, but here it's more about taking action rashly, and kind of thinking you know what you're doing even though you actually don't. Being hasty, you know. Or, or sometimes it instead means that you can't really back up what you're saying, that you're boasting or have an unrealistic assessment of what you can accomplish.
"So, in our purely hypothetical situation here, we might have given too much, or we might have taken on a debt. And the reason this happened is that we didn't think things through well enough. We were too hasty, or too... too arrogant, or just unrealistic. Or sometimes the Page also means something about not externalizing your thoughts, so maybe you—we—didn't communicate when we really should've?"
She scratched her head.
"If we were doing this properly, it'd be easier because we'd have, um, a specific question or situation to center around, and that would help a lot with the interpretations. Because, you know, we'd know what we were digging into. But this is fine. For an example.
"Basically, what matters is that the predicament is the result of being rash, or of not being able to put your money where your mouth is."
Trudging forward again, Crystal was thinking back to the bar, and how everything had gone wrong. She was asking herself: had she been too hasty?
Her suspicions had been correct. There had indeed been a conspiracy in place to kill her, by the very people she'd thought were planning it. But could she really claim any credit for being right? Crystal had thought everyone was scheming, or if they weren't scheming then she'd thought they would either die or inevitably turn to scheming as time wore on.
Regardless, she'd forced the issue. And to what end? She hadn't been killed in her sleep, but there were other ways she could've avoided that, right? The group was shattered. People were dead. And for what? What had lain behind all of it?
Was it pride? Control? She really didn't know.
Crystal was the sort of person who liked to have a plan. It let her feel like she had some control over her life. But sometimes, there were situations no plan could ever possibly cover, and this was certainly one of those. She'd sought agency by telling herself that things were going how she wanted them to, but she hadn't had the first idea what she'd wanted, had she?
Was that why she'd tried so hard to delegate responsibility? Had that been the real plan?
She was back in the bar, in that moment. Counting. Readying herself. Decided.
As Crystal prepared to lurch to the side, Danya's finger tightened on the trigger once more.
But that was a lie.
As Crystal prepared to lurch to the side, Crystal's finger tightened on the trigger once more.
It was always Crystal's fingers, always her hands. It was her hand with the hole in it now, not Danya's.
Oh, she wasn't fooling herself. She hadn't been all wrong to think that Danya had turned them into weapons. But he wasn't some Game Master controlling them as a cast of NPCs. He was, rather, like a kid shaking a jar of bugs to see what would happen. And if they chose to take the bait, to lash out at one another, that was on them and them alone.
Jenny had never intended to kill Crystal. Even when she'd been actively plotting against Crystal's life, she had done nothing to put that plot into action. If she had been a weapon, it had been the sort that killed with blows to confidence, not to the body. Jenny had left Crystal wounded more deeply than the bullets had, in that her comfortable stories had been torn to shreds, and now she was forced to grapple with things as they were instead of as she wished that they were.
So where did that leave her?
Currently, crouched down by the side of the path, watching as up ahead a shape moved nimbly over the uneven ground. Its movements were quick, inhuman, and for just a moment Crystal thought that some pale monster had been released to hunt them, a spirit of this place on the prowl, or the soul of her victim conjured back for revenge, but as she squinted and forced herself to focus she saw that it was just a goat. It jumped from stone to stone, and it didn't seem to doubt itself, even though at any moment a wrong step could send it plummeting down the slopes.
Did goats ever trip and fall, Crystal wondered, or were they evolved in some way that stopped that from happening? Did they have some ability to calculate what every little movement might do, which rocks were stable and which were loose, how tightly-packed the dirt was?
Not all animals had things like that. Crystal had watched many compilations of cat videos in her time, and one thing that stuck in her mind was how cats approached leaps of faith. They'd pause. Think. Back up a little. Start to move. Stop. Reconsider. Back up again. Tense, readying their whole bodies for that effort.
Then they'd bounce a little and plop off the sofa, nowhere near anything, and the camera would shake as the person holding it laughed and laughed.
If goats didn't have that problem, then Crystal was more cat than goat.
She shivered, and coughed, and she was abruptly made aware that she hadn't coughed in a while because the pain lanced through her suddenly and unexpectedly. It radiated out from her side, rippling up her ribs and down her hip and deep inside, and she almost laughed. It was worse than when she'd bumped into that wall yesterday.
She'd bumped into that wall yesterday, hadn't she?
Or was it today?
Or was it farther back?
The sun was setting, and she couldn't remember when the last time she'd seen that happen had been. Couldn't remember when she'd noticed it at all, really. She was too caught in her own head all the time.
That wasn't going to change. She couldn't afford to let it. Not now.
Not when the inklings of purpose had finally, finally started to come clear.
The Page Of Dynamism was followed by a card bearing the value of X—ten in Roman Numerals. There was something ominous about it, but it took a moment to figure out what.
The card was also inverted. Upside down, it seemed broadly more abstract than the others. It was warmer in color, with rolling, red-brown clouds hovering in an orange sky in the background, up above sharp grey peaks. In the foreground, what looked to be a red ridge was pierced with ten syringes, seven vertical and three horizontal. One of the horizontal syringes had a symbol on its plunger, a hand, the same as the one branded on the Page. A rune similar to the one on his axe was scrawled in the peach-colored earth.
Closer inspection revealed that the red ridge was in fact the torso of a corpse. Its desiccated face lay half-buried in the dirt.
"Okay, um," Crystal said, laying the card on the opposite side of the Six from the Page, "this one's the future. It's the problems and challenges ahead, basically. We know the situation, more or less, but this is complications arising from it. Things we may, um, not have considered yet."
She shrugged.
"And, uh, if you're wondering, it's not that uncommon to have them all reversed like this. I mean, it's a little uncommon, but, well..."
She held up a finger.
"It's math. The odds of any, any given card being reversed is fifty percent, or one in two. Assuming the deck was shuffled properly, which, you know, I did. I think."
A second finger joined the first.
"The next card is also one in two, but the odds of it happening twice in a row is, uh, less. It's a one in two off a one in two. So that's one in four."
A third finger. Just her thumb and her pinky were down now, forming a circle against her palm.
"Third card, another one in two. One in eight, then."
She drummed her fingers gently against the top of the deck, careful not to dislodge the stack of cards.
"But," she went on, "that means that for the next card, if we were talking at the start, it would be a one in sixteen chance that it would also be reversed. I mean, that all four would be. But now, it's only a one in two. Because the other stuff, the one in eight to get to that point, already happened."
She looked to the side, and for a moment her eye was drawn by the flickering candles, and she didn't speak as she tried to compose her thoughts.
"I like to remember the math," she finally said, "because it's all part of this. And it's easy to, to forget that this is just a tool for self-reflection. And thinking of it in math helps with that, I guess."
Actually, Crystal liked to forget sometimes—oftentimes. The turn of cards was arbitrary, but in a way that made sense to her. It was a finite array of options, each one interacting with those next to it, and while the number of possible paths that could be derived from it was incalculably large, or at least incalculably for her in her head while trying to explain something out loud, it still had a definite endpoint. Life didn't work like that, and she had to squint sometimes and try to pretend that it actually did. But this wasn't something she felt like she could say, and she got nervous and went off script because of the triple inversion, and tried to make herself sound cool and disaffected and not as woo-woo as she really was in the privacy of her own head, and now she was flailing. Falling. Drowning. Lost in second-guessing herself and her own awkwardness and...
"And anyways," she said, rallying, forcing herself back on track. The plan marched on. "That's the Ten. Uh, I mean, obviously, but it's the Ten Of Dynamism."
She picked the card up again, held it up and showed it off, turned it so it was right side up, then flipped it back and returned it to its position on the table.
"The Ten isn't really good news," Crystal said. "Normally it means, uh, that you're going to end up on the wrong side of something. Maybe you get betrayed, or lose out, or fail or something. It comes suddenly, and you don't see it coming, and that's the worst part.
"On the other hand, though, at least it's done? I guess?"
The Ten was one of the hardest cards for Crystal, normally. She didn't much care for surprises, even when they were pleasant ones.
"Reversed, sometimes people say that it's more healing, but it really depends on the situation," she said. "Sometimes it means that you're still carrying the, uh, the hurt and pain of something that has already happened, or else that it's not unexpected, that you can, you can see the bad thing coming, and you know you can't get away from it. So you need to just get over yourself, deal with it, and find a new path. That's the only way you can grow.
"Here, if we're looking at things, we acted rashly. Because of that, we owe someone, or we're carrying a burden. And there's something coming up that we know is there, and we don't want to face it, but the only way for anything to get better is to do that. So maybe it's the debt, or maybe it's what we'll have to do to discharge it."
Crystal gave a small, almost nervous giggle, and she looked at the card spread out in front of her.
"I guess it's, um, maybe good we're not doing this for real," she said. "This isn't a very good fortune so far."
Then she blinked, and looked back at the camera, but maybe her doing that was hard to make out with all the shadows and flickering of lights.
"I mean," she said, "it's not... the cards don't create your future. I mean, I mean even if you believe in them completely, they don't do that. What they do is read the future that's already there, and maybe give you tips on how to work with it or avoid the bad stuff. And that's what, what makes this such a powerful tool for self-reflection. You can look at the cards, and their meaning and symbolism, and you can figure out how they apply to your situation. And in thinking about that, in trying to figure it out, you think about what you're dealing with in new ways, and you understand things you might have been overlooking before. It's all a matter of perspective.
The bandages weren't just reddish-brown this time. They were also kind of yellow, like boogers. Phlegm, some would say, or maybe yellow bile, but that wasn't Crystal's personal brand of pseudoscience. The edges of the wound were a deep pink, and the scab was discolored, and she really did not know if that was a good sign or not.
Maybe she was imagining it. She was huddled in a nook between some rocks, and she was using her flashlight to see what she was doing even a little, and it was bitterly cold. It felt like it cut through her, like it shot her again just like Donovan had shot her, and she wished and feared that she'd just stop feeling anything.
There were some hard truths to face here.
Jenny had given Crystal another chance, but not to keep doing what she had been doing. She was no longer to prey upon others, no longer to infiltrate their groups and coast off of their might, no longer to live for herself. She had to do better, to be better, and she had to do something to make up for what she'd done.
The problem was, what she'd done was kill someone.
A life for a life had a certain appeal to it. She'd been ready, there, when she finally understood, for it to end. She'd thought that maybe she'd go alone, and it would be okay, because Jenny would go on. But Jenny had been the one to fall, and Crystal the one to go on, and she'd been lost for a long time, especially because she couldn't think of any way to help anybody that mattered.
She'd thought, maybe she would try to stop the others who were like she'd been. Maybe she'd track down the other members of the Legion, and maybe she would take them out, one by one, because then whoever lived and went home wouldn't be like her.
But Crystal wouldn't succeed if she tried that. She would lose, maybe the first time, or maybe later. They were tough and clever and probably armed by now, the ones who weren't dead, and there were others like them ready and willing to step into their place. If Crystal killed everyone willing to kill, if that somehow worked, then she would more likely than not be standing at the end faced with yet another of that ilk, and then she would go home, and it would be just like she'd schemed except bloodier and more self-righteous, and she'd be spitting upon Jenny's memory.
And besides, it wouldn't solve any problems. They were all potential weapons, every one of them here, and while it was foolish and wrong—immoral, even—to claim that any given path was just as righteous as any other, who walked away wouldn't matter in the world at large. That someone walked away was enough.
But to throw herself into making sure that nobody walked away, that would be worse. Nihilism nipped at her heels, and the thought appealed to her, but it was childish and foolish, and more importantly it was purely selfish.
So instead, she settled on a thought that appealed to her, and was childish and foolish, and was selfish but not entirely so.
She decided that she would kill Danya.
After all, who was it who brought them here? Danya.
Who was it who stood as the symbol of this atrocity? Danya.
Who was it to whom Crystal had delegated responsibility, who had been such a convenient excuse for her to exercise her own selfish tendencies? Danya.
Crystal knew that Danya wasn't the game, and the game wasn't Danya. Maybe he didn't even matter that much, really. There had to be hundreds or thousands of people in on it, from the ones who took them from the bus to others who would never have to look at the light leaving somebody's eyes, who in fact probably refused to watch the footage and told themselves they were good people anyways, just doing what they had to do. Crystal hated these imaginary people for that, and she wished she could hurt them, but she hated Danya more, and she could reach him, maybe. He met with the survivor. She could meet him. She could get within arm's reach, and she could kill him. Somehow. Any way she could. Anything it took.
Then she would die.
It was pretty much the only way this could go, right?
Danya wouldn't be alone and unattended. Even if he was, there would be someone nearby, close enough to hear if nothing else. She'd be in whatever place they lurked at, and there would be no way out, and best case they would kill her quickly and relatively painlessly. Worst case, they would make an example out of her. Torture her. Maim her. Do something like what Westley threatened in The Princess Bride, and trot her mangled and mutilated form out in the future as an example of what happens when you try to escape your fate.
Crystal told herself she was more or less okay with that.
She'd been running from death her whole time here, in one way or another. She hadn't even let herself think too much about it. And where had that gotten her? Shot, deserted, betrayed by herself. And it was still inevitable.
Cinderblock or whetstone? The promise of death was both, maybe.
All she wanted now was for her death to not be a waste. All she wanted was something adjacent to absolution.
Crystal got tired of alignment debates pretty easily when she played D&D. Still, she sometimes thought of life in those terms. It was an easier way to reckon with things, but when she made her own characters she almost always made them True or Chaotic Neutral. They were good alignments (if not Good alignments), allowing room to figure things out and adapt to situations and not be held back by always doing the right thing.
Up until Jenny tumbled over that ledge, Crystal had let herself believe that what she was doing could be Neutral. She was watching out for herself, taking from others only when doing so was to her direct benefit. She had not reveled in pain and suffering, and had taken some steps to mitigate it. And, the real kicker, she'd had somebody else to blame. Danya, the one pulling the strings, the Evil behind everything, and the only one who could truly be held responsible.
That's how Evil worked, though. It whispered that you weren't so bad, that you had no choice, that it was someone else's fault.
Danya was just a symbol, but in giving up her ill-gotten gains, in plunging screaming into the mouth of the beast to rip its throat to shreds from within, Crystal thought perhaps she could scour away the taint she had allowed herself to take on. Maybe she could call herself Neutral with a straight face with her last breath.
Maybe even say she did something Good.
When Crystal turned the next card over, she was so ready for the one-in-two (or one-in-sixteen) probability to come true that she was legitimately surprised to find it not reversed. She blinked, and squinted, and tried to make sense of the image by turning it upside down in her mind's eye, and that was actually sort of easy because the shape had a stronger vertical composition than most of what she'd drawn so far. But then she saw the X at the top, and she blinked. Cleared her eyes. Cleared her head. Saw.
It was the Ten Of Questing, and like most of the cards in the deck it was rather ominous. In the background, red-tinged flames crested with black smoke billowed against a dark brown sky. In front of this inferno, an iron cage hung suspended by two hooks. Ten bars of the cage were visible, six in front and four more as shadows. The cage was occupied by a muscular man with a warm skin tone. His arms were threaded through the bars, and he held the wrist of his right hand with the fingers of his left. Two flaming symbols inched towards his arms, casting a bright yellow glow on them—brands, they looked like. The man's face was hidden behind a spiked mask, with blank red eyes and a zippered mouth. It was difficult to say whether it was torture equipment or fetish gear.
"...right," Crystal said, as she took the card away from where she'd held it in front of the camera and set it down in front of herself. "This is the Ten Of Questing."
This was one of the cards in the deck that diverged most drastically from the more traditional Rider-Waite imagery, which was a fascinating choice that mirrored differences seen in some other decks but was also way too much to get into when giving somebody a quick overview. So instead, Crystal took a deep breath, and she tried to be succinct.
"This card usually has to do with burdens," she said. "Heavy ones. It's about, uh, about piling too much on yourself. Too many expectations, or just more than you can manage right now.
"Symbolically, in this instance, you're made a prisoner in a prison of your own devising. If you look, you'll see that, you know, the man's hands are free. He could open the zipper and speak, or maybe even take off the mask, but instead he's passive, awaiting whatever will become of him. We can't see the bottom, so we don't even know how trapped he really is. But it doesn't matter, because that's his self-perception."
Crystal took a deep breath.
"I'm, um, saying 'you' a lot here because, because this spot," she said, laying the card in front of her, the bottom point of the cross, "that's your spot. Er, mine. Whoever's asking the question, if we'd, you know, asked a question.
"So this basically means, in the context of everything else, that we're taking on a lot. Probably too much. We acted rashly, and we incurred a debt. There's an inevitability ahead of us, that we don't want to face, but we have to. But maybe this whole thing, all of it, is self-inflicted. Maybe it's all just stuff we've taken onto ourselves, maybe without even realizing it, you know?"
She shrugged.
"It's not exact, um, especially with no question. But this one's a little personal to me, because I often end up like this. It's, you know, I start something and then I feel like I just have to keep going, because I started it, and it's like a trap, and..."
Crystal trailed off and looked at her hands, ran them over the purple velvet of the cloth, and watched the candles flickering, and then she shook her head.
"Sorry," she said, "oh my god, I'm sorry. That's, uh, way more personal than I meant to get."
It was dark, and Crystal shivered, Somewhere in there, she had made it to the point where the upwards slope became a downwards one, she thought, and had looked out over the island.
She had seen nothing.
It was night, and it was cold and windy, especially at the top of a slope, and it actually wasn't so high at all, and even with the polearm as a staff she had stumbled and staggered. She couldn't say how long she'd been climbing. Hours? Days? Her entire life? But she'd made it to the top, and there'd been nothing, and then she'd thought to herself: how does this get me closer to killing Danya?
It was metaphorical, maybe. Overcoming adversity. A spiritual journey. A vision quest. Crystal didn't play knights in D&D. She always went more esoteric than that. She played fairies and elves, fae and fortunetellers, and the power she wielded was soft and mercurial. A weapon wasn't potent because of its physical force, but because of what it symbolized, the wrinkles of meaning and implication and spiritual resonance, or something.
The gun held its power because it looked powerful. Crystal had never held a gun before coming here. She barely knew how to use one. When she'd fired it, she'd done more harm to friend than foe. And yet, it had killed. It had killed, and it had protected her, but only for a time, and ultimately it had caused strife, and had seen her injured. She'd clung so closely to the gun, and for what? Really, everything about it had been bad.
This was what Crystal told herself as she leaned over the edge of the path, looking down into the unending darkness, squinting into the night and still not able to see where it might have ended up when she accidentally dropped it.
It was okay. It was fine. Everything was going how it should, because she didn't need the gun. She didn't need to kill, now, or to scare others. Just to hang on until the end, not waste what Jenny had given her, and then kill Danya. And she had a better weapon for that.
The polearm had been Jenny's, It served as a staff. It had a purpose besides killing, and it was the sort of weapon a knight might use. Crystal could don her armor, and climb onto her horse, and hold out her hand, and her squire would hand her the polearm and she'd ride away to do battle with the dragon, and it would be good and right and proper. That was something a gun would never have.
She didn't really know if she was crying, or her eyes were watering, or she was sweating, or blood was coming from somewhere. She felt hot and cold and her side ached, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd changed her bandages. Had she been keeping up with that? It hadn't seemed so important, but now she was getting a little worried. She'd been shot. The bullet was still floating around in there, and while it wouldn't matter in the inevitable long run, it had some more pressing short-term implications.
She fumbled with the bag, and got out the first aid kit, and popped the lid open, and bandages and plastic gloves and antiseptic and all sorts of things tumbled out, falling between her fingers, vanishing away into the dark in the wake of the gun.
The final card was upright again, but that wasn't a surprise anymore. The pattern had been broken.
The card bore the Roman Numerals for eleven—XI—at the top, and it depicted a bald figure in a martial arts gi, kneeling on a mat. In his right hand, he held a katana, pointed upwards. His left hand made something like a finger gun, pointed downwards at a yin-yang symbol. The background was flat brown wall panels broken up by darker beams, with rectangular signs with characters on them. Crystal didn't know if they were Chinese of Japanese. The man's eyes were closed, and he seemed peaceful, serene or resolved.
The card was captioned: JUSTICE.
"Okay," Crystal said, holding the card up to give the camera a nice long look. "This one's eleven but it's, um, not any suit. It's one of the Major Arcana, which have their own numbers. You probably know about those, at least a little, because, uh, because that's what most people know about tarot. It's what makes it different from, you know, just some regular deck of cards. They have names, and they're sort of the famous part, so a lot of media that uses tarot mostly just uses these.
"Anyways, this one's Justice."
She laid the card down at the top of the cross.
"This is for the outcome," Crystal said. "So, so it all ends here. This isn't set in stone, of course, and it might change, or more likely is that it might come true but not in a way that you think it will. That's, well, that's the thing about fortunetelling, in all the stories: you get your message, and you get to peek at the future, but it's hazy. That doesn't mean that you can't see anything, but it means that what you do see can be very misleading. And, you know, trying too hard to prevent something from coming true has this strange way of calling it into reality. Self-fulfilling prophecies. Like, uh, like Oedipus. That sort of thing."
She looked at the card for a while, with her lips pressed tightly together.
"Justice is sort of self-explanatory," Crystal said after a time. "I mean, at least compared to, you know, things like Death, which isn't actually about death.
"Justice is about facing the consequences of your actions. It's about right prevailing, the, the proper order of things. The truth comes out, and it can't be denied anymore.
"This can be good, but it isn't necessarily. It's not about punishment. More a, uh, a sort of cause and effect thing, but with a righteousness to it."
Her fingers were running over the velvet cloth.
"It's a little like the word 'doom,'" she went on. "I don't know if, uh, you've read a lot of Tolkien—"
She hastily continued speaking, because most people had not read Tolkien at all, just watched the movies, and most of the people who actually had read Tolkien had done so with an eye primarily towards the action sequences (few and far between though they were) and had probably not bothered to look up the words that were difficult, let alone put substantial thought into the evolution of language over the years, even though that was probably more along the lines of what Tolkien himself had been interested in. Crystal had read the appendices. Crystal had not entirely understood the appendices, but she had read them, and while the phonetics of Elvish and the precise regional distinctions in usage between their iterations of the rune system and those of the dwarves was baffling, what was perfectly clear was that there was an incredible amount of thought devoted to such matters, and that in some ways the story everyone loved was more or less an excuse for the author to write an essay about a fictional translation from a fictional language. It was like The Princess Bride, except it didn't admit it until the very end, and it wasn't played as a joke.
"—basically, 'doom' nowadays, when you say doom, it's got this very ominous, negative aura of association to it. You never say you're doomed and have it be a positive thing. But back in the day, what it meant was closer to 'destined,' only maybe a bit weightier than that. It connoted—um, it had associations with judgment. And now we only think of the negative ones. Justice is sort of like that."
She took a deep breath, and gathered her thoughts, and ordered them more or less. Her eyes trailed over the five cards in front of her, flickering in the candlelight, and she considered the story that they might tell.
"So, for us," she said, "what this means is that the end of our journey, or mission, or whatever it is, it'll be what it should be. We owe a debt, and we take on a burden, and maybe that's because we were careless or rash, but either way there's something inevitable waiting at the end for us. There's a doom upon us.
"And I think Justice here means it's right that we can't escape it."
The sun was rising on the horizon, which meant that Crystal had to be facing east. It cast an orange glow over the ocean far below, stretching along in a flaming line that could be the border of some new world. The rays of light caught the houses of the town, and somewhere down there were the church and the bar, places that had meant something to Crystal, either directly or because of the things she had experienced there. She tried to figure out which was which, but she couldn't. One roof was like another. Or maybe she was too tired. She should be able to pick out the steeple, shouldn't she? Was she too far? At the wrong angle? Just imagining the whole thing? She was still near the top of the lower pass, but that was more like midway up the mountain.
This felt like a bigger deal than it probably was. She closed her eyes and tried to center herself. This would be an important day. Every day would be an important day. Every moment was important now, because she finally knew what she was doing. She had a plan again, and it was a right and just plan. A Good plan. It would make up for the bad things she had done. It would make up for her carelessness. It would show that she wasn't a waste. There probably wasn't an afterlife, so Jenny probably wouldn't think anything at all, but maybe the people who had cared about her would think that it hadn't been a waste. Crystal wouldn't have wasted her life. She wouldn't have wasted her time on selfishness. She wouldn't have messed everything up. She wouldn't.
So she had to focus. There was something she'd been planning to do, something else important. She was going to kill Danya, but she had to make it there. She was sitting, leaning back against a big rock, and the polearm was at her side, standing upright, towering above her. She didn't think it had to do with whatever it was that she had to do. It was a walking stick as much as a weapon. Weapons were weapons, but they could also be tools, solutions to problems, and that was what Crystal was going to do now, right? She was still a weapon, but she would be a tool, and fix things, and—
She had to change her bandages. That's what it was. She was confused and muddled and had almost forgotten, and the deep pain in her side and her hand was something she was almost used to now. She hadn't ever expected it to be like that. Nothing in her life had ever hurt like this, but now that everything hurt like this it lost novelty. So that was why she'd forgotten. She'd been planning to change her bandages and then she'd gotten distracted.
Crystal couldn't find her first aid kit. She was tired, and it felt like everything was taking much more work than it really should've. It took several attempts for her to open the bag, and then when she looked inside it was just full of bread and crackers and things like that. There was ammunition there, too, for the gun, and she realized suddenly that she'd lost track of where the gun was and was not holding it.
That sent a spike of anxiety through her. Her whole time here, she'd been holding onto the gun like she'd die if she let go of it, and now she had no idea where it was, and that was enough for her to stir and start to stand up. The polearm pressed against the ground, and she gripped it as hard as she could and began to pull herself to her feet, and then there was a moment of recollection.
She'd dropped the gun. At some point yesterday (was it yesterday?) she'd lost her grip and the gun had tumbled over a ledge. It was gone now, but that was alright. Tool or weapon, it had been wrong for the job, and really the polearm was what she needed, so it was okay.
It was actually a pretty big relief that she didn't have to get up and do anything. Just trying to stand up had been oddly tiring, and sinking back down to the ground Crystal felt the energy leaving her. Her side was hurting even more now, but maybe she'd pulled something when standing up.
It was sort of weird, because things felt hot and cold at once, but also like no particular temperature at all. She was feeling blank again, like she'd felt yesterday (was it yesterday?) for a while. That was strange, now that she knew what she was going to do.
How far had she come from where she and Jenny had struggled? She couldn't really remember exactly where that had been relative to where she'd ended up. She didn't actually quite know where she was. It probably hadn't been a good idea to force herself on such a long walk, but it had felt important, even though she couldn't remember why.
Right. It had helped her figure out what she was doing. She was going to kill Danya.
It had been a while since she'd eaten, Crystal thought, looking at the slice of bread lying on the ground in front of her. It was probably important to eat. She needed energy, even if forcing down a whole slice of bread and nothing else had ended up being one of the most horrible culinary experiences of her life. She couldn't waste things. She couldn't waste Jenny's food, so she should eat that bread instead of just leaving it lying there to be picked up by a goat or a bird. But when she leaned forward towards it, her side was pierced with pain again, so she leaned back instead.
Down below, the little town was illuminated now. The sun was entirely visible beyond the haze, rays sneaking below the thicker clouds hanging higher up, a nice gap between it and the sea, and she thought it had just started peeking up a few moments ago.
Had it been a long time since Crystal slept, or had she just woken up?
She couldn't remember, but she was very tired, so that was a point in favor of not having slept in a while. She'd been so careful, but she'd pushed herself too hard.
Sleeping had felt scary. Vulnerable. Like someone would sneak up and kill her. But she hadn't seen anyone since Jenny, unless animals counted, and somehow she felt now like if she just closed her eyes nobody would find her for a while. Maybe she was fooling herself. Maybe she was just finding some new way to pass responsibility while doing what she wanted. But she was tired, and her head hurt, and her side hurt, and her eyes were already closed.
The fingers of the hand that was still whole wrapped around the shaft of the polearm, and she felt a little more secure because of that. She was armed. If someone stumbled across her, she'd jump up, and she'd do what she had to, because she had a plan again, and it was okay now, and it wasn't a waste. She'd get some rest and then when she felt better she'd get moving.
It was funny. Usually when Crystal closed her eyes in the day, she would still see an orange-red glow, as the rays of the sun shone through the lids and illuminated the blood vessels. But here and now, it was the deepest black she'd ever seen.
She wasn't really sure what to make of that as she drifted off.
S093 – CRYSTAL HENDERSON: DECEASED
