The Death Tarot

I should have known.

Sorry, I should be more precise.

I did know. The attacks of nausea, followed by a sporadic burst of seemingly unrelated imagery. I had written them off as just side effects of Bridge Mode. But Diane had pulled me aside, purposefully told me in confidence, to not tell anyone else. Why wouldn’t they have been important?

Actually, fuck her. It wasn’t my fault. Why didn’t she tell me these were premonitions of a near future? She had remained silent, like always. It was so much like her, to engage in cryptic ruses right up until the end.

And now, she was gone.

My mind swam in an ocean of… I don’t know. But it was dark, with trailing images and memories dancing before me. I felt suspended in the air, like a brief calm before the plunge. It felt too cognitive, too real to be a dream or coma.

I reached out to the memories with my hands and snatched one of them. It was a picture of me from the graduation ceremony at the academy. There was this bright smile on Elaine Greymoor that I almost didn’t recognize. I remembered I wanted to take this picture alone, without Arthur or anyone else.

I looked so self-assured in the photo, like I knew all there was to know. Even a few weeks ago, I probably thought the same thing. Part of me wanted to believe that it was still true.

The next memory came to me, a picture of an underground lab. There were books from the Infinite Library strewn over a desk. Peter had already named them before. Books on gene-splicing, on cloning. The secret of House Greymoor was on full display. Human experimentation. The sons and daughters of House Greymoor were survivors of a rigorous process to create the perfect human, the kind that could marry into the imperial family.

That process drove my nature, I suppose. If you were to survive in the labs below the mansion of House Greymoor, there was no room for doubt, no room for mistakes.

“Find what you’re looking for?”

A voice breathed into the darkness. The sound birthed the silhouette of a woman.

“Diane,” I said.

“Before you ask,” she said, “no, it’s not really me. It’s a bit of a cliche, and I apologize, but if you’re seeing this, then I truly am gone.”

“Then who are you?”

“Residual neural feedback from Bridge Mode,” she explained. “I’m the equivalent of a lucid dream or a flashback. I don’t even know how I died.”

“Uh huh…”

“Which,” she grinned, “brings me to the first question of what will be a short-lived conversation. How did I die?”

I didn’t know how else to put it.

“You killed yourself.” I said.

“A bit grim,” she pouted. “That doesn’t sound like me.”

“We were escaping from somewhere,” I said. “Right before we escaped you just… stopped. Like you were entranced or in some kind of daze. How am I supposed to know? You just stood there and let yourself be killed.”

“Are you sure you’ve provided all the details?” she asked. “What’s that around your neck, then?”

I looked down. My translucent body had gained a bit of form. Diane’s pendant hung from my neck. The red eyes of the horse etched onto the card shone in the darkness.

“You tossed this to me,” I said. “You threw it at me and said you could go no further. What is it?”

“It’s a tarot card,” she said. “Superstitious ritual from the Terran days. You would arrange the cards a certain way and it would predict your future. There were lots of these cards, mine is just one in a larger deck.”

“And what does yours represent?”

“My card is the thirteen Major Arcana,” she explained. “Its name is Death.”

“So you did just kill–”

“Now hold on,” Diane’s visage sighed. “Before you jump to conclusions, the Death Tarot does not mean literal death. You have to consider the orientation in some traditional interpretations, but the card is meant to represent a broader change in one’s life trajectory. And besides, this is all superstition. I hope you don’t think that I died to fulfill some supernatural rite.”

“You’re speaking to me as if you’re a ghost, what else am I supposed to think?”

“That card is one of many keys, Elaine,” she said. “It will open new doors for you. It’s not some magical relic; it’s the real deal. If I passed it to you, then I simply believed you were ready for the next part of your journey.”

“Next step?”

“All will be revealed in time,” she repeated that stupid phrase. “When Ulysses brought you before me, I knew then that it was time to relinquish command of Nightwing, to pass the torch to someone else. To you.”

“You’re telling this to me now?” I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because you can do what I never could,” she shrugged. “If I’ve handed you the Death Tarot, then you must also now know the truth. Everyone aboard the Nightwing was killed during the Siege of Caerleon. Emiko. Vladimir. Stephen. Myself. By some miracle, we were fetched from death and brought here.”

“And using the Chalice means returning to the point where you all die.”

“Quite right.”

“Do the others know?”

“They have their suspicions. They know we’ve jumped forward in time, but nothing more. Emiko likely suspects everything, but you already knew that.”

“I’m still not sure what you want from me,” I said.

“The Sunless Fleet has one aim,” she explained. “Procure the Chalice of Time and return everyone home. Many, Ulysses himself included, would much rather die near the shores of his home than here in the middle of nowhere. It is a respectable position. But I cannot bring myself to send my crew back to their deaths. And there is also the Chalice to consider. Why has it brought people here and not elsewhere? What are its goals? One must never preclude the possibility that the Chalice of Time itself harbors motives, for good or for ill.”

“You want me to find the Chalice for myself,” I realized. “But you could have done it yourself. I told you so many times. You could have made a run for it.”

“Don’t be silly,” Diane laughed. “My hands have always been tied. Do you remember the wandering pianist? That bastard, Mephisto? He wasn’t wrong when he said that I had debts to pay. They would have come to collect before the end. No, it was impossible for me, Elaine. But in you, in your stubborn, annoying little ways, all that I dreamed of might be possible.”

My body felt weightless. It began to fall.

“Looks like our time is up,” Diane said.

“This is Bridge Mode, isn’t it?” I asked. “There are fragments of you here.”

“IFA graduates really are the best and the brightest,” Diane smiled. “I’m not here, not truly. At the end of the day, I’m nothing more than an echo, signal noise in Bridge Mode’s neural cloud. But humans can’t tell the difference. Or at least they refuse to.”

“You make it sound like you’re not human.”

“Not anymore, Elaine. Not anymore.”

It felt the same as a free falling dream. My body hit the floor and I snapped back to reality. The lights of a medical bay hung over me. There was an object lying above my chest. My hands clutched Diane’s pendant. The eyes of the skeleton and the red-eyed horse pierced through me like a spear.