The world had developed teeth.
Lysander remained frozen before the gilt mirror, watching his reflection move with autonomous purpose. It shuffled invisible cards with practiced ease, each gesture leaving afterimages that shouldn't exist in any rational universe. The Fool card in his own hand pulsed like a second heartbeat, its warmth spreading up his arm in symbolic tributaries.
'This is madness,' he thought, but even his internal voice sounded uncertain, as if doubt itself had become negotiable.
"Mr. Ashworth?" Blackwood's voice cracked from across the room. "Are you quite... yourself?"
The question held more weight than intended. Lysander turned slowly, noting how the solicitor pressed against the wall as if hoping to phase through it. "I'm beginning to wonder if I ever was."
His reflection laughed—a sound that emerged from nowhere and everywhere, like bells rung in distant cathedrals. When Lysander glanced back, the mirror showed only his proper image, though something in its eyes suggested barely contained mirth.
"I should go," Blackwood stammered, already edging toward the door. "The estate papers are all in order. The servants were dismissed per your mother's instructions. You'll find the house... responsive to its owner."
"Wait." Lysander's voice carried new authority, though he didn't understand its source. The Fool card flared, and Blackwood froze mid-step. "What aren't you telling me?"
The solicitor's face cycled through several expressions—fear, calculation, resignation—before settling on grim duty. "Your mother... she had visitors these past months. Shadow people, she called them. They came at dusk, left before dawn. She said they were looking for something." His eyes flickered to the mahogany box. "I believe they found it."
The temperature plummeted. Frost began forming on the windows in patterns that resembled ancient script. Lysander's breath misted as he spoke. "When?"
"Tonight, Mr. Ashworth. They always come on the third night after—"
The grandfather clock chimed, though its hands pointed to no natural hour. The sound reverberated through dimensions Lysander hadn't known existed, each toll a hammer blow against reality's foundation.
Blackwood fled, his professional dignity abandoned in favor of primitive survival instinct. Lysander didn't blame him. The rational part of his mind—rapidly shrinking—screamed similar warnings.
But the cards called louder.
He approached the mahogany box with careful reverence, aware that he was crossing a threshold from which there was no return. The Symbolum Mortis waited, each card a doorway, each image a possibility. His fingers trembled as he lifted the deck, feeling its weight shift and flow like liquid potentiality.
'We read the spaces between them,' his mother had written.
Lysander spread the cards across the desk, watching them arrange themselves in patterns that defied his attempts at categorization. The Major Arcana segregated naturally—Death, The Tower, The Hermit, and others whose names came unbidden to his lips. The Minor Arcana swirled in their four suits, each one whispering promises and threats in symbolic language.
But there, at the edge of perception, lurked something else. A card that wasn't quite there, existing in the corner of his eye but vanishing when observed directly.
The Shadow Card. Waiting for its moment.
A sound from the entrance hall shattered his contemplation—the front door opening, though he'd heard no knock. Footsteps followed, measured and deliberate, each one leaving silence in its wake rather than sound. The intruders moved like absence given form.
Lysander's hand moved without conscious thought, drawing three cards in rapid succession. Knowledge flooded through him—not learned but remembered, as if the ability had always existed beneath his architect's precision.
Seven of Swords. The Page of Pentacles, reversed. The Hanged Man.
The combination sang in his mind: Theft through transformation of perspective.
The study door opened, revealing three figures whose existence offended natural law. They wore the suggestion of Victorian gentleman's attire, but the fabric moved wrong, rippling with implied depth. Their faces were studies in almost—almost human, almost featured, almost there.
"Young Ashworth." The central figure's voice came from everywhere except its mouth. "How fortunate. We've come to collect your mother's debt."
"She owed you nothing." Lysander heard himself speak with his mother's cadence, her strength bleeding through bloodline and necessity.
"Didn't she?" The figure produced its own cards—not a deck but fragments, torn and reconstructed with materials that gleamed like processed screams. "She borrowed power. Power demands recompense. Surely an architect understands structural integrity?"
The stolen cards in the figure's hands were wrong—corrupted symbols that made reality hiccup. Lysander recognized them with inherited revulsion: cards torn from other Cartomancers, frankenstein fragments stitched together by the Collectors.
'They're going to kill me and take the deck,' he realized with crystalline clarity. 'Just as they've done to others.'
But the Fool card still thrummed in his hand, and his mother's blood sang songs of defiance. Lysander raised the three cards he'd drawn, feeling power coalesce around intention. "Then let's discuss payment properly."
He played the Seven of Swords first, and the study's shadows sharpened into blades. The Collectors shifted, suddenly wary, as darkness developed edges that whispered against their almost-flesh.
The Page of Pentacles, reversed, followed. The solid mahogany furniture began to flow, wood grain becoming liquid possibility. The desk stretched and warped, forming barriers that existed in more dimensions than three.
"Impressive," the lead Collector admitted, producing a card of its own—something that might have once been The Emperor before corruption transformed it into autocracy given form. "But parlor tricks won't—"
Lysander played The Hanged Man.
The world inverted. Up became down, but more than that—perspective itself flipped. The Collectors, so terrifying when viewed from human angle, became revealed in their truest forms: parasites. Symbolic leeches that fed on the reality others shaped, unable to create, only steal and corrupt.
They screamed in harmonics that shouldn't exist, their almost-forms trying to adjust to the new perspective and failing. One stumbled into the shadow blades, its essence unraveling into component thefts—a dozen stolen cards fluttering free like freed birds.
But the leader adapted faster, playing three corrupted cards in rapid succession. The study groaned as competing realities warred. Wallpaper peeled away to reveal crawling symbols. The floor tilted at angles that Euclidean geometry wept to contemplate.
Lysander felt the toll—memories hemorrhaging with each card played. His first architecture award. The taste of Christmas pudding at age seven. His father's rare smile. Each reality manipulation demanded payment, and the Symbolum Mortis collected eagerly.
'I'm going to lose myself before I learn to win,' he realized.
That's when his reflection acted.
The gilt mirror exploded outward—not in shards but in possibilities. A dozen Lysanders stepped through, each one holding different cards, each representing paths untaken. They moved with choreographed purpose, playing cards in combinations that created cascading reality failures around the Collectors.
"Impossible," the leader snarled, but uncertainty had entered its voice. "You're untrained. Raw. You can't—"
"I can't," the original Lysander agreed, understanding flooding through him as his reflections continued their assault. "But we can. Every choice creates branches. Every card played splits possibility. You came for one Cartomancer. You found legion."
The reflections played their cards in perfect symphony. The Tower brought structural collapse to the Collectors' stolen reality. Death, properly applied, severed their connections to their pilfered power. The Star, inverted, denied them navigation between dimensions.
The Collectors' forms began to discorporate, their thefts finally catching up. As they dissolved, the stolen cards they'd carried scattered across the study—fragments of other Cartomancers' power, finally freed.
"This isn't over," the leader managed as its form wavered. "The Arcanum Society knows you've awakened. They'll come. And unlike us, they won't underestimate Eliza Ashworth's son."
It played one final card—something so corrupted Lysander couldn't identify its origins. The study convulsed, reality trying to tear itself apart. But the reflections moved as one, each playing the same card simultaneously:
The Fool, reversed. The infinite potential of unbecoming.
The Collectors' final gambit unraveled, taking them with it. They dissolved not into death but into never-was, their thefts undone, their existence reduced to cautionary memory.
Silence descended like a curtain after catastrophe.
Lysander stood alone among the wreckage, his reflections having retreated to whatever space between mirrors they inhabited. The study slowly reformed, reality stitching itself back together with the patience of natural law. But changes remained—subtle alterations that marked where impossible had become briefly real.
He looked down at the cards scattered across the floor—his mother's deck mixed with fragments of the stolen. Each one called to him, offering power, demanding price. The weight of inheritance pressed down like atmosphere before a storm.
'Mother, what have you left me?' he thought, gathering the cards with shaking hands.
As if in answer, one card turned itself over without his touch. The High Priestess, depicting a woman whose face was hidden by veils of shadow. But the eyes were visible, and they were his mother's, holding secrets and sorrow in equal measure.
A new message had appeared on its surface, written in script that existed only when observed sideways: Trust the girl who speaks in threes. She comes with Thursday's rain.
Lysander sank into his father's old chair—his chair now—and contemplated the ruins of his rational world. Outside, London's gaslight struggled against fog that had grown teeth. The Symbolum Mortis pulsed in his hands like a living thing, eager and patient.
He had survived his first true drawing. But survival, he was beginning to understand, was only the beginning of the game.
In the gilt mirror, now reformed, his reflection shuffled cards with practiced ease. It smiled that not-quite-his smile and mouthed a single word:
Soon.
Thunder rolled across London's skyline, though no storm had been predicted. But then, Lysander reflected as he began to sort his mother's legacy from the stolen fragments, prediction assumed a stable reality.
And that assumption, like so many others, had just been revealed as comfortable fiction.
The Cartomancer's education had begun.