The old woman's mouth curved with a wicked grin.
She drew the next three cards without shuffling them, as if the present were a machine already in motion, indifferent to whether Arik was ready for it.
She flipped the first card.
Ten of Pentacles.
The image was a stark contrast to the dark, high-stakes misery of the past. It depicted a sprawling estate, gold coins woven into the architecture, and generations of a family standing beneath a massive, archaic crest. It radiated something Arik rarely acknowledged: stability.
Arik's gaze rested on the card a second longer than he intended.
The old woman studied the image with a low hum of approval. "Well," she murmured, "that is a very expensive present."
Noah, still looming at Arik's shoulder with his jacket slung carelessly and his patience in open decline, glanced down at the card and exhaled through his nose. "Finally. Something less deranged."
The old woman ignored him.
"Ten of Pentacles," she said. "There is a structure already standing behind you."
Her finger traced, without touching it, the painted crest crowning the estate. "You do not walk alone, boy. Whatever ghosts you dragged through the door with you, they are not all that stands at your back."
Arik said nothing.
The card was almost offensively straightforward. Wealth evolved into permanence. A machine large enough to withstand the failures of the people within it.
Agaron.
His name.
His blood.
The old woman's pale eyes lifted to his face. "There is an empire behind you," she said. "A family and a throne that did not simply welcome you but made room for you and adjusted itself accordingly."
Noah's mouth twitched. "That is one way to describe the disaster."
"That is the accurate way," the old woman said.
Then she turned the second card.
King of Swords.
The figure on the card sat on a throne of jagged steel, a heavy, double-edged blade resting across his knees. His expression was that of a detached, terrifying intellect. He wasn't swinging the sword; he was simply holding it, his eyes fixed on a distant point with unwavering clarity.
"Control," the woman murmured. "You've traded the raw scream of the soul for the cold edge of the mind. You are the master of your own restraints now. You calculate the wind, the ether, and the political rot as if they were nothing more than lines of code." She looked at Arik's hidden brooch. "You wear the leash because it's a tool, not because it holds you. You are the architect of the very cage you're standing in."
"Well, that is something defining you, Arik." Mezos said through the line.
Noah let out a quiet, humorless breath. "I preferred her when she was calling you haunted."
Arik didn't look away from the card.
King of Swords.
That one was less irritating than the others.
The old woman watched his face with the reluctance of someone who realized they were standing in front of a beast.
"You have made a discipline out of survival," she said. "Her nail hovered over the steel throne. "You learned to read every weakness in the room before anyone realized they were being measured."
Arik's gold eyes lifted at last.
Her own did not waver.
"You do not merely endure the leash," she went on, her gaze flicking once to the hidden brooch beneath his collar. "You absorb it. Account for it. Turn it into another variable to be solved around." A faint smile touched her mouth. "You are most dangerous when caged, because that is when you start designing the lock from the inside."
Noah's expression changed, not quite to amusement, but close enough to bruise. "That," he muttered, "is unpleasantly poetic."
"It's also true," Mezos said through the line, voice low and dry.
Arik ignored them both.
The old woman's fingers moved to the third card and turned it over.
Two of Wands.
The card depicted a man standing on the battlements of a high tower, holding a globe in one hand and a staff in the other. He was gazing out over a vast, uncharted horizon, his back to the safety of his castle.
"And here is the truth of your evening," the woman said, lowering her voice an octave. "Expansion. You didn't come to Wrohan just to see it burn. You came because you are already planning what comes after the fire. You're standing at the edge of the world, weighing it in your palm, deciding which parts are worth keeping."
The tone of the stall had changed. The immediate, suffocating danger of Arik's hatred had given way to the quiet, overwhelming pressure of his ambition. He wasn't just a vengeful spirit; he was an emperor-in-waiting, backed by an imperial machine, already mapping out the next century of history.
"An empire behind you, a mind like a razor, and a gaze fixed on the horizon," the woman summarized, leaning back. "The present is a very quiet kind of war, isn't it?"
Mezos's voice hummed in Arik's ear, the tension in it replaced by a dry, professional satisfaction. "Twenty seconds. The drone is moving on; it's flagged the ether spike as a faulty vendor generator. Your 'King of Swords' act is working, Arik. You're boring the sensors."
Arik let out a humorless laugh, his long fingers tapping the watch still resting on the velvet of the stand.
The old woman's gaze dropped to the watch.
For the first time since he had laid it there, she looked at it not as temptation, but as something already half-earned.
"Careful," she said. "That almost sounded like praise."
"It wasn't," Arik replied.
Noah, beside him, let out a quiet breath through his nose. "No, that was his version of public surrender. Distinctly worse."
Arik ignored him.
His fingers tapped the watch once more against the velvet, the metal making a soft, expensive sound beneath the lantern light. Then he stilled his hand and looked at the old woman with that same cold, level attention he gave court ministers, enemy generals, and rare problems he had not yet decided how to keep.
"Nothing wrong so far," he said. "Which means you are either very good at this, or very good at building the shape of truth out of generalities."
The old woman smiled in that dry, ancient way of hers, as if men with titles and money had been trying to reduce mystery into categories for longer than she had been alive, and she had long ago stopped respecting the effort.
"There is not as much difference between those things as proud men like to pretend," she said.
Arik's mouth shifted faintly at that.
Then he leaned back into the old chair, crossing one leg over the other in a lazy manner that only highlighted how much of him remained under control. The current spread remained open between them, clean, cold, and imperial in its own way.
"And now the future," he said.
His fingers brushed the edge of the watch and nudged it forward across the velvet by a fraction. An offering. A threat. A wager settling deeper into place.
"This," he said, "will be yours."
Noah's head turned sharply. "There are moments," he said flatly, "when I truly understand why empires end violently."
"Only moments?" Mezos asked through the line.
Noah did not dignify that with an answer.