Anamnesis - The Hermit

[WickedCadrach]

Quote

Draw one card from the Major Arcana deck. This card is your Shadow and represents who you were in your past. Keep your Shadow face-up next to you. Use this card as a guide for uncovering your past. 

The Hermit

IX - The Hermit : The Hermit has associations with solitude, contemplation, and self-reflection. It is symbolic of leaving the voices of the world behind and finding stillness and silence enough to hear one's inner voice speak. He lights the way ahead by his own lantern, looking to no star or sign to guide his path. 

 

when you are ready

take a deep breath

and wake up

[WickedCadrach]

ACT I: Pentacles

First Pentacle Draw: Six of Pentacles
Prompt: There is someone at your side. Who is this person? What do they say to you?
Major Arcana: The Fool

I gasp, choking immediately on a haze of sawdust and rat feces. My eyes shoot wide, but I'm met only by darkness, and as I blink stinging particles from my eyes in a flow of tears, my hands knuckle against a plane of rough pinewood above me, unable to reach my face. The seizing in my dry throat turns to a painful, wheezing cough as my body jerks from the epileptic effort of trying to draw a single full breath from the prickling miasma filling my lungs, and in a panic, I beat the sides of my hands and wrists against the wood containing me. 

"Hold on! Oh, this ain't right. No, sir, this ain'tnt right one bit." 

Metal bites the wood and draws a groaning crackle as the pine lid pops above me. Greasy yellow lantern light leaks in. 

"Hang in there! Don't fuss, I have you!" 

I can't draw enough breath to reply, but I press my palms to my stomach as I try to steady my breath and stop myself from hyperventilating into a faint. It takes three impacts of the prybar before the flat iron bit can separate the coffin nails from their meal of rough cut pine.

The young man on the other side grabs my arm, pulling me upright into clearer, if not clean, air. He pats my back in a handful of anxious swats as if he's beating a rug, his baggy tunic sleeve flopping about his scrawny arms as he puts his pock-marked face directly beside mine. His crooked smile has a guileless innocence to it as he lets out a whooping sigh that falls through the floor into a laugh by the end. 

"Not for nothin', miss, but you did look dead. Mind I'm not the one 'sposed to check the drop and flop what come in, not on the regular anyway, but given the sir is away and left me alone—shovel and key and 'whatever will be', as it were—I feel somethin' responsible. Oh, but you are a mess." Wincing apologetically, he reaches up and plucks a jagged splinter from my matted hair. "Anyways... sorry."

[WickedCadrach]

Second Pentacle Draw: Queen of Pentacles
Prompt: You feel pain. Where is the pain coming from? What is it caused by?
Major Arcana: The Star

There's nothing there. While I retch and hack my lungs clear, the fear that kept my higher mind restrained uncoils itself from around my throat and heart enough for questions to rise. Where am I? How did I get here? But as my hands and mind both fumble for stability, neither find it.

I tumble out of the pine box and off the end of the table I was set on. With an anxious cry, the young undertaker manages to get one gangly arm around my waist to break my fall as he tosses the pry bar to the stones, a jarring clang against the murmuring quiet of the night. He lets me go as I sink to hands and knees, pressing my fingers into the flagstone floor and digging little runnels in the carpeting of wood shavings and hearth ash mucked with rain water made filthy by its journey through leaking thatch and clay tile. I feel too weak to stand yet. My body feels chill, but I'm not shivering. So I stay there. I curl my elbows to my knees and breathe, watching the shadow play of the hanging lantern's flame against the floor and the cracked daub walls where loose planks and semi-assembled coffins of the same pale pine that held me lie with stoic patience. He's fretting with a kettle and basin—the high squeak and dull thump of a rain barrel's bung being stoppered, but my lack of reply seems to have quieted his nervous rambling. 

The undertaker's shadow falls on me and I flinch, though I don't know why. But he only sets the basin beside me, a rag hanging over its lip and slowly drawing the mostly-clear water. I take his meaning. As he said a moment before, I no doubt look 'a mess', and while he settles the kettle on a stone stove in a far corner of the room, kept swept and clear of the incendiary detritus around me, I reach for the rag. 

Kneeling, I lift the little scrap of fabric between my fingers and wring it out, cool water flowing over my wrists and drizzling into the basin. My fingers and thumbs begin to prick and prickle but I pay them no mind, pushing the rag over my face and feeling the grime lift as I drag it from the corners of my eyes and over my nose. Refreshment. Renewal. I feel the terror of the coffin draining from me as I dip the rag again.

The pins and needles sensation in my hands sharpens as my fingers reach the water. I wince in discomfort passing the rag to one hand as I flex my fingers. It's sharp now—a million tiny ants biting into each digit, and I take a sharp breath, a feverish mewl escaping as the same sensation blooms in my face. Each pore is on fire—the intensity growing, burning! The water on my flesh feels like scouring lye melting my skin from my skull as I begin to scream. 

The young man turns in surprise, the kettle falling from the stove with a clang as he rushes to me. Crouching, he grasps my frantically shaking wrists and tries to meet my eyes, his gaze wide and staring while his cracking voice asks over and over 'what's wrong?'

Throwing my body to the floor, I kick out at his chest, scrambling like a rat in the dirt as I scurry away from the basin. I take fists of loose saw dust, dried mud, and whatever else lies between the flagstones, scouring my face with rough scrubbing sweeps of my palms. I feel the clinging droplets dry, absorbed and pulled away by the brown and ash clinging to my skin... my smooth, uninjured skin... and the burning fades.

[WickedCadrach]

Third Pentacles Draw: The Four of Pentacles
Prompt: When you look over your body, you notice a tattoo on your skin. What is this tattoo? Where is it located?
Major Arcana: The Devil

The young undertaker gives a faint nod, a worried smile ticking on his cracked lips as he passes a polished bronze shaving basin and a small bottle of mildly fruity smelling oil through the doorway. His eyes flicked down, and I know the simple white shift I was casketed in does little to cover my figure, even in the oily light of the single lantern. The most urgent of danger past, I can tell his uncomplicated mind is now free enough to realize there is a woman—dirty as she is—standing in his home in only a single thin undergarment, and given his unfortunate, pox-scarred face, a type of garment he may only have seen in red lantern light as the doxies hawked him from open windows and curtained doors. Nevertheless, he swallows and manages a final, stumbling offer to be there in a hurry should I need anything. And closing the door, I hear him in the work room, loudly humming a meandering tune that feels like it might be familiar, if only it were in key. 

I give the simple wooden door a final look, eyeing the way the lantern light seeps through the cracks and beneath the ill-fitting sill at its foot, the shadow of the young man passing once more as I hear his humming cross the room beyond. It strikes me as odd to find someone so full of life working among the dead. The boyish innocence of his compassion, aid he's freely given, tugs at my heart, begging me to stay close to him. Even in his artless stare as he takes in the rose of my nipple, turned pink by the threadbare shift's white... he's warm, like a puppy sniffing closer as he tests whether it's safe to cuddle against you. When he speaks, his tumbling, charmless voice seems to echo with a dozen generations of peasantry who turned the earth, laughing and drinking with faces cracked from the sun baking their pained smiles into their eyes. And while a faint, mad desire to open the apartment door and invite him in whispers in my aching chest, I know it isn't to be. That is not for me. I know this in my bones... in my flesh, whatever flesh it is that burns at the touch of clean water. Whatever I am, I am not formed from the same clay of the earth as him. 

The small apartment around me contains little. A chest. A straw mattress and blanket that shows a want of regular cleaning. A stool and small table for the undertaker to take his lonely dinners. And now a small candle stuck by its own wax to that cracked tabletop. Rain pelts the roof and spatters the walls in sheets, old ghosts in the darkness beyond railing against the workshop apartment as if venting their fury that I'd slipped that final catch that had taken them all, and shivering free of my reverie, I settle the shaving basin upright on the table, leaning one end on the wall behind. It's a simple mirror, but effective enough. 

Slipping from my shift, I work the oil between my fingers, still prepared to feel the burning sensation the water had left despite the reassurance of a few testing drops the undertaker had dripped on my open palm earlier. I don't have much. I have to make it count. Rubbing the oil between my fingers, I slide it over my face, and I feel the rough particles of dust and filth lifting. With the aid of a clean rag, I work the oil down my chest and beneath my arms. I don't know how I came to be floured in ash and mud, but as each layer lifts and I move to comb the freeing oil through my hair, I stare into my own reflection. I'm bruised, marks like oils spills on my legs and arms, some yellow and others a rich burgundy, though I don't feel the pain of it. My fingertips catch on the bumps of scars as I run my hands over my arms and down across my stomach and hips, and I wince as a fingernail blindly hooks a thin black scab on my inner thigh, a runnel of bright red trickling down to my knee before I press my finger to stop it. Something happened to me. Something I don't remember. And whatever it was, it happened over and over...

Blinking, I run the rag over my eyes and take a sharp breath, turning my back to the basin as I look over my shoulder. My back is no better, a crisscross of markings fresh and old stop shy of my shoulders. And pushing my hair aside, I see a great black welt on the back of my neck.

No. Not a bruise or welt at all. It's intricate, symmetrical. I hold up the basin, looking into the polished bronze as I try to make out the design in the curved metal. A strange, esoteric sigil is inked into my flesh, curves, lines, dots and triangles aligned within a circle of black, tattooed chains. The symbol means nothing to me, and yet as I stare into it, I feel my breath coming faster... my heart beginning to tumble and fold as my stomach clenches. 

I don't care when I realize the young undertaker has stopped humming or that the light under the poorly sealed door has gone dark. In that moment, I feel a chill loneliness frosting on my bared limbs as I stare at the mark on my neck and wonder what kind of monster or demon I am... and the only thread keeping me from collapsing is the knowledge of the man beyond the door, gazing through the cracks at me in the simple way a man gazes at a woman. 

Edited August 15 by WickedCadrach

[WickedCadrach]

ACT II: Swords

First Swords Draw: Seven of Swords
Prompt: You find yourself walking through a market. Which stall are you drawn to?
Major Arcana: The Wheel of Fortune

The rain has stopped. Through a gauzy haze connecting the grey clouds above to the fog swirling in little eddies around my ankles, I can see the pale light meekly dividing the day from the night. The undertaker spared me a couple yards of corpse linen for a crude cloak after I refused his offer to stay the day with him. There is too much about him that burns. His words, his expressions, his gentle touch. All of it is too warm and leaves me with the wincing, sharp feeling under my skin of having come in too suddenly from the cold. 

Following broken cobbles, wheel ruts, and the murmuring commotion of voices in the mist, I find a plaza. The space is alive and respirating with colors that feel flat and paled by the dewy air. Grey wood like exposed ribs hold aloft striped stall canvas while men and women with shrewd eyes and insane grins motion to those shambling between to inspect their wares. There's a desperation in the air that leaks out between the boisterous laughter and chirping calls, and the small space makes my stomach turn as an image rises in my mind's eye of a dead hare lying on bare, dusty ground while ants teemed over it. Closing my eyes, I draw a breath that's half a sob as I wonder if the image is a memory or merely an impression conjured by the spirit of the market. 

The merchants ignore me or cast suspicious looks as I pass through the rows. It's clear I have no money, and so even the false smiles disappear. At best I am just some animal that is taking space where a real human with coin to spend could be standing. At worst, I am a thief here to take what I did not pay for. And that is the greatest crime in the market. The one who does not exchange, who takes but does not give, is little more than a ghoul deserving of death. Just as the one who gives without taking is a traitor, a treasonous pirate who steals from every vendor at once by valuing something more than the coin... one deserving exile. 

A shimmering chime catches my ear. Pausing, I see a jewelers stand beside me. The metal links of necklaces catch the little light there is, sending cold blue sparks back as the dangling charms twist on the arms of the displays. My throat constricts, my eyes widening. I feel my chest tightening as it struggles to rise against a phantom pressure that seems to squeeze the air from my lungs. My hands shake as I feel the echo of where rings weighed them down. My ears also seem to go deaf, ringing in a whine that drowns out the market as I reach up and feel the small indents where they have been pierced. I remember the weight of intricate metal around my throat. I see myself in torch light, the smell of wine and the sight of my body in a mirror, shining like a constellation as the ornaments mingle with the glistening of sweat on the bare skin emerging from my dress. 

Bundling my linen cloak against my chill body, my bare feet clap freezing water against my ankles as I hurry away from the stall. 

Edited 4 hours ago by WickedCadrach

[WickedCadrach]

Second Swords Draw: Eight of Swords
Prompt: You pass a place of worship. What is this place? How do you feel when you look upon it?
Major Arcana: The Lovers

I'm not sure how, but my feet know where to carry me. And as I cross the misty street into a stone archway, my bare foot claps against a wide step leading down. The sound of that last footstep is loud, the abrupt halt of the missed step as I stop myself from tumbling making the impact shiver in my shin. Ahead of me, the space opens up as if I'm staring into a valley, a crater that has been dug out of the middle of the town. As if sensing my stare, the mist parts and I feel an odd familiarity that makes me look closer. 

The wide stone steps are flanked by wooden benches, each row descending lower in concentric semicircles of amphitheater seating. A hexagonal stage sits at the bottom, its boards gleaming with waxy polish speckled in the ubiquitous dew. My breath catches and I find I can hardly draw another as the feeling of absolute silence wraps around me. I am on holy ground. A place of sacrifice.

Empty oil lamps add a tinny edge to the echo of my soft footsteps as I slowly descend. And turning around, I see the honeycomb of box seats edged in carvings of chubby cherubs, voluptuous nymphs, and grimacing gargoyles. People watch from them, but the individuals don't matter. It's this place. It's a temple of perception, of sense and sensuality. It's a banquet table for voice and flesh where people cease to be and toys—objects in skin and rouge,—perform their roles. To be enjoyed. To be consumed. 

Mechanically, I step onto the stage, turning to the empty boxes and ringing pews. My linen cloak slips from one shoulder, baring an upraised arm as I feel my shoulders straighten and my chin rise. Words come out of me. More than that, a cadence—portentous and bold—drives them out. 

"Lo, tis a gala night within the lonesome latter years. An angel throng bewinged, bedight in veils and drowned in tears, sit in a theater to see a play of hopes and fears, while the orchestra breathes fitfully the music of the spheres..." 

I stop. My heart is racing. I was here. I've been here. 

Stumbling back, I feel the floor give way and with a sharp cry, I stumble to catch myself. A trap door. The skylight above falls through that dark gap, past my dangling leg as I brace myself on the edges of the opening. 

Below me, half-shadowed in the sickly daylight, dozens of corpses look up at me, glassy eyed and covered in the same cool droplets that coat everything. I see their hair clinging to their porcelain pale skin, their unmoving unbreathing bodies lying with limbs akimbo around each other, discarded as carelessly as the bones of an evening meal. But that isn't what freezes me in place. Each of their faces is identical. Each of them the very same face as the one I saw in the shaving bowl mirror I used the night before. My face. 

I scurry back, the boards creaking as I regain my feet. I blink, wiping at my face and pushing away the cloying mist that has already begun to prickle and burn on my skin as if I'd been too long in the sun. 

When I open my eyes again, I see the mannequins for what they are. Blank wooden dolls piled in a heap. No more no less. And forcing my own wooden limbs to remember the blood running through them, I stiffly retreat, my footsteps setting clipping out a brisk allegro melody on the stone as I flee back to the streets.