Casting Omens, Reading Cards by Lferion

Casting Omens, Reading Cards

Maglor read the cards too well; the people seeking answers from cards or runes or auguries of any kind he read and understood far too well. Too well for comfort. Too well repeat or lucrative (for the shop — his own needs were simpler) custom. He knew he had no real foresight, but that didn't matter, when he could read the present so piercingly clearly. Eldar eyes were more curse than blessing in these days of seeming rejection of the unseen, the a-rational. What, after all, was too small for an electron microscope, too big for the Hubble telescope to see?

No coincidence then, that people hankered after what they were told they should not, could not have, did not exist, had faded, been expunged, vanished from the world long, long ago, had never existed, and yet called out to them: fairies in the garden, omens in the storm, cards that told the future that might be. But too often he could read the seeker's hearts too well, hear the thread of Music in their need, and once a deck (rune-set, ogham-sticks, any tool of augury and perception) had been his an hour, it would fall true to what he saw.

He would no longer read for others, no matter what he saw. He would not take their coin, their barter, not even their songs — though he would make music with the other itinerant players, readers, wanderers, sharing songs was not payment, it was what bards did, from time before time even unto this so-rational age. He would busk, wash dishes, play unexceptional wallpaper music (not often that, though: too many 'coincidental' pieces too apropos to company or occasion, telling truths preferred untold), running setup crews and roadying. And sometimes he would sit in the corner of a cafe, not-reading cards.