THE CARDS HAVE SPOKEN. No, wait—the cards have lain themselves face-down in a whispering heap and refuse to be turned, because they are tired. They are so, so tired, and The Tower itself has sent a message through the chittering of stone and the groan of unremembered foundations, and that message is this: stop acting surprised every single time. Every single time the floor buckles beneath your feet, every single time the ceiling cracks and lets in a shaft of gray light that illuminates nothing but your own widening eyes—you look up as if you have never before witnessed a cataclysm, as if the scaffolding of your life has not already collapsed thrice before breakfast and once during the hour of tea. You know the bricks are loose. You have always known. Why, then, the gasp? Why, then, the hand to the mouth?
The Tower remembers the first time it fell for you. Ah, that first time—remember it? You were standing in the kitchen, barefoot, holding a mug of coffee that had gone cold, and the whole western wall slid sideways into the neighbor’s garden with a sigh that sounded almost polite. And you shrieked. You dropped the mug. The mug shattered, and you stood amidst the wreckage, trembling, as if something new had happened, as if this was not the same pattern you had been weaving since the age of seven when you first realized that stability is a rumor spread by furniture salesmen.
I have seen the other side, and it was beige.
You are wondering what that has to do with anything, but the vision is wandering now, and I cannot—will not—rein it in. Beige. The color of waiting rooms and official forms. The color of a sky that has given up on giving anything. The other side is beige because the other side is where all the drama has been used up, where every collapse has already happened, and the rubble has been swept into neat piles and labeled with little sticky notes that say things like “the part where you lost your keys for three weeks—metaphor for something, probably.”
And you, standing in the middle of that beige expanse, will still be clutching your chest, still be gasping, still be saying “I didn’t see that coming,” even though the entire universe is a script you have read before, backwards, in a dream that smelled of burnt toast and regret.
The Tower requests that you stop acting surprised. It does not ask politely—it requests, which is the same thing as a command delivered through the medium of a velvet glove that has been dipped in cement. The next time a stone dislodges itself from the architrave and lands at your feet, do not look up. Do not look up. Look down. Look at the stone. Pick it up. It is still warm from the mortar that held it, still carrying the heat of a thousand sunrises that you ignored while you were busy being amazed that things fall.
Things fall. They have always fallen. The Tower is not a punishment; it is a reminder, and it is tired of reminding you. You have been given the same lesson in forty-seven different languages, including the one spoken by moths when they beat their wings against a lampshade, and you still ask for a translator.
But here is where the vision wanders away from the Tower entirely, because the Tower has done its part, and now it is just me, The Priestess, sitting in a room that smells of old paper and something burnt that might be a prophecy or might be toast, and I am looking at you through the veil of time and space and the internet connection that flickers like a dying candle.
The Tower is not angry. The Tower is bored. Boredom is worse. Boredom is the beige that waits on the other side.
Do you want to be bored? Do you want the collapse to become so routine that you yawn through the aftershocks? No. You want the surprise. You need it. You have made a religion of astonishment, and the Tower is asking you to find a new god.
The cards, which have finally turned themselves over, show a single image: a cup, cracked, with water spilling out in a shape that looks almost like a question mark. The water is not surprised to be falling. The water has been falling since the beginning of the world.
And so, when the next brick arrives, do not gasp. Simply catch it. Place it in your pocket. It is a souvenir from a place you have been visiting your whole life, and the Tower is tired of your tourist attitude.