Art: The High Priestess, Fountain Tarot Deck
Something-something
unmoved, unknowable, crowned in absence.
— Anonymous Hermetic Fragment, 19th-century
They arrived before dawn, as they always did, long before the first bell called the city into its quiet motion, before the canals swelled with light or the incense boys stirred their censors to life. The sky was still half-formed, a grey breath. The bridges held mist, and the water beneath them whispered of ritual.
The priests moved across the stone walkways with practiced reverence, their sandals silent on the chilled marble. The city—if it could be called a city, and not something older, heavier—stretched around them like an inherited silence. Those few visible within its boundaries—keepers of lamps, boatmen, servants on fixed paths—moved not with haste but with exactitude, as though they were part of a sequence long ago determined. Nothing rushed. Every gesture obeyed form. This was not a place of chaos, not even in grief.
The Temple rose at the city’s highest point—not out of dominance, but out of alignment. It did not tower so much as anchor. The long incline toward it was carved from veined stone and lined with silver-leafed trees, whose roots clung not to soil but to memory. At the summit, the priests entered through a narrow stone passage used only by them. The outer gates would remain sealed until light broke properly.
Inside, the temperature shifted—cool, dry, reverent. The air bore the trace of old incense: fig ash, crushed myrrh, old oils. Light did not enter directly; it moved laterally, like the recollection of light.
She lay waiting, as always.
Her body rested on the marble slab of the inner sanctum, veiled in the pale cloth of transition. This was the space between—between ritual and stillness, between witness and concealment. She did not sleep. She did not stir. But there was no doubt that she waited.
The priests moved without words. One uncovered the basin, where sacred water had steeped overnight in pine ash and fig bark. Another lit the brazier with an ember brought from the sealed lamp. The third unrolled the cleansing cloths.
They began, always, with her hair—silver, impossibly straight, and so long that it pooled like silk thread along the stone. They combed it slowly, not with affection, but with the care one gives to memory. Her limbs were unwrapped, washed. Moved only when moved. She was pliant, but never yielding. Her body felt not fragile but finished. The weight of something fully set.
When they lifted her—carefully, with the exacting gestures of men lifting a sealed vessel—they carried her in such a way that no one, not even one another, could clearly see what rested at the back of her head. Only they knew about the small, bald patch that had slowly expanded over the years. Only they had glimpsed, just once, the pale protrusion at its center—rounded, too symmetrical, neither growth nor wound.
They said nothing. They always said nothing.
They dressed her in her ceremonial garment—pale green, woven with thread so fine it barely caught air. Crescents upon crescents were embroidered along the hem and cuffs in ash-dyed thread. Vein-like lines rose from the hem in patterns that resembled both roots and smoke. At her shoulders, nearly invisible to any but those who placed it, tiny eyes had been stitched—some open, some closed. And at the throat, a golden fringe frayed delicately, as though a voice had once unraveled there.
They covered all but her face, a spill of silver hair, and the tips of her fingers. Nothing else was ever visible.
When it was finished, they lifted her again and carried her into the Hall.
The Hall was not lit so much as unveiled.
Stone columns lined the perimeter, each inscribed with texts older than doctrine. Some were funeral hymns, others instructions for the afterlife. There were fragments from lost tongues, hymns to now-forbidden gods, and prayers that had once been whispered in the mouths of other civilizations. Pagan, heretical, sacred—no hierarchy existed among them. The inscriptions curved up the walls like vines, crowded the ceiling, and disappeared into darkness, where only the Manifest God reigned in name, though even His name was never spoken aloud.
Few who entered noticed these texts. The darkness swallowed all but the center.
And at the center—she sat.
The throne was crescent-shaped, carved from pale stone, suspended at its edges by tensioned silk and ribbed support. She did not sit. She was held. Draped. Suspended in the position of sacred listening.
Behind her stood the two pillars.
To her left: Boaz, a black stone column, cracked along its length and sealed with golden resin. It bore the weight of remembered sorrow.
To her right: Jachin, white and polished, hollow-seeming, cold with the lie of mercy. It stood for the silence that denial builds.
Above her:
Ours is the Stillness
And beneath:
Ἡ λύπη φωτίζεται ἐν τῷ ἀναχεῖσθαι
Grief is illuminated in its containment.
Her face was still.
Her eyes, half-lidded, revealed not recognition—she had never been given anything to recognize—but what seemed like understanding. They did not change, not obviously, but there were moments when they appeared to shift, just barely, in shade. Like the surface of a lake untouched by wind. Like water about to freeze. Transparent. Sister-colored. Something sacred in its stillness.
The supplicants came one by one.
An old man whose son had fallen from a parapet told of the dream that returned every night, in which the boy walked back in through the door as though nothing had ever happened.
A woman spoke of the hunger that had shaped her life like weather—first at ten, then again at nineteen, then again last winter, after the fires.
A boy said nothing for so long the guards began to move—until he whispered that his uncle had started coming to his bed again.
A midwife spoke of the mother who bled to death in her arms, the child who never cried, and the father who left a perfect apple outside her door every week for twelve years.
A girl said she could no longer speak. That it had been taken from her by something she couldn’t describe. That she no longer dreamed in words.
A woman said she saw her dead husband’s face in other men. Not all the time. Not clearly. But enough. Enough for her arms to start lifting before her mind stopped her. Enough for her to call out his name and be struck. Enough to ruin a quiet life with a mistake made by a grieving body.
They cried. They broke. Not because she moved. But because her eyes—those still, translucent eyes—looked at them.
They felt seen. And being seen, at last, was like fresh water after thirty days of thirst.
Not salvation. But something elemental.
She was carried back.
The ceremonial robe removed, replaced with a plain, pale cotton garment. The only adornment: a hem of garnets, glinting like dried seeds, like blood suspended.
And beneath that cloth, her body was revealed.
The ribs pressed too tightly against the skin. The spine curled and pressed outward in unnatural loops. Her knees bent in ways that defied symmetry. Her limbs were sharp, angular, difficult to fold. Her body was all sharpness, all bone. And worst of all—beneath her belly—something moved. Slowly. Not twitching, but shifting. A presence that had no form.
She was not a body.
She was a slab of flesh, at best.
A thing without self, only structure—
Roots without a tree,
an architecture of obedience and stillness.
She was no more sacred than a well-maintained ruin.
The two priests stood in her chamber, quiet now, as the lamplight dimmed. They had been in service for as long as they could recall. One was younger, more anxious, often glancing twice where once might suffice. The other was older—more reserved, and if he was uneasy, he had long since learned how to hide it.
Her robe—the plain one—lay across her strange frame like a hush. The garnet hem caught what little light remained, casting no shimmer, only suggestion.
Her bones were not pliant. They jutted and twisted in directions that made no sense. Angles where there should have been curves. Edges that scraped beneath the skin like iron filings. There were too many of them—some in places where no human anatomy permitted bones. A second ridge beneath her collarbone. A pointed fold in her thigh that felt like a fin or a blade.
They looked into her eyes.
Open. Unfocused. Clouded. Like the film on the skin of a rotting apple. Something looked… turned off. As though what resided there in the day had been folded back inward.
“Her eyes… it can’t be, can it?” the younger priest said.
A long pause. Then:
“I wonder though.”
Neither spoke of the flicker. That brief, furtive gleam. Like something deep behind the eye had twitched and vanished. It was nothing more than that—a flicker, like a nerve firing beneath dead skin.
But both had seen it.
And both were afraid to ask aloud what it meant.
They feared the answer. Because to answer was to confirm.
Both were thinking of the plain garment hemmed with drops of blood. Suspended, mid-fall. Yet… the blood-like essence in the stones breathed. It coiled, almost imperceptibly. It shifted, writhed, and—which was somehow even worse—waited.
He was sitting in his quarters.
The candle had burned low.
The walls had not moved—yet they pressed closer.
He rested his elbows on the modest wooden table, the one with the shallow carvings no one had ever explained to him. He leaned forward, cradling his brow in the cage of his fingers.
He had not spoken aloud in hours. He had not needed to. The thoughts—like the city—moved with purpose. His work was done. Until morning, when the incense would burn again, and the familiar majesty would unfold: the garments, the symbols, the movements that cloaked terror in reverence.
But he could not stop thinking of her eyes.
And then—
Something in the floorboards creaks,
Something in the High One speaks,
Something-something stirs and shrieks…
It came like a whisper behind the ear. He didn’t recognize it. It had no source. And yet he knew it.
It looped.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
The voice became his own. He found his lips moving with it.
something-something–stirs and shrieks
something-something–stirs and shrieks
He clenched his fists. The candle shivered.
And then—
He sat up.
The thought struck him like a knife pressed into wood.
He didn’t move at first. Then he stood, too quickly, knocking the back of the chair against the stone. His mind—stalled. Repeating itself. Repeating something, repeating nothing. He took two steps away, then returned. Sank into the chair again, as though his own body had betrayed him. Sat there, bent forward like a penitent, like a failed scholar, like a man who had been given the wrong riddle.
And now, following what he now realized, the first terrible thought came.
Not just that no one asked her anything.
Not just that no one wondered what she might carry in her, deep down beneath the silks and veils and performed silences—
But that no one wanted to ask.
No one dared to wonder. Because to wonder meant to risk a revelation.
She was not seen. Not truly. She was witnessed, yes—but as one witnesses a mirror. A thing that reflects. A thing to be used to understand the self. Her gaze became a medium through which others saw their own suffering clarified, made sacred. They fell to their knees before the reflection, but never once did they bow to her.
Perhaps, he thought—perhaps she had always known this. Perhaps it had once confused her, then wounded her, then hardened her into what she now was. And perhaps—perhaps over time, too much time—something in her mind warped beneath the weight of all those reflections. Perhaps it split. Perhaps it dried into something worse than madness.
And if she was wrong? If some of those who looked had been honest, and not only seeking themselves?
It didn’t matter anymore.
It was too late.
Then came the second thought.
It was not sharp. It was slow, settling, like something decayed sinking into water. It did not announce itself as revelation but arrived with the unbearable heaviness of something already known.
She had not merely been denied love or movement or voice. She had been made into an object.
And not even an object of violence—that would have at least acknowledged her capacity to suffer. She was instead made into a holy thing, a thing precisely: handled with reverence, touched with studied hands, not affection. She was washed, anointed, dressed, carried, undressed again. Each action performed to perfection. But not for her. Never for her.
She was not nurtured. She was not feared. She was engineered.
Everything that kept her alive—if it could be called life—was calculated. The way her body was arranged in the mornings, how her limbs had to be bent with exacting symmetry. How her ceremonial robe was folded around her. How the priests had to clean her after she soiled herself. How they held her mouth open and tilted small spoons of soft mixtures into her throat—her jaw slack, her breath shallow. Everything was done to her. Without asking. Without deviation.
And the terror was not just in the ritual. It was in the knowledge that it would never stop. That there was no escape clause. No breaking point.
She was never looked at. Not truly. Only witnessed. Only seen the way one sees a surface—polished, functional, symbolic. She had become the instrument through which others sought clarity. Her presence was sacred not because she was human, but because she was still. Because she could not object.
And she had known it. For how long? How long does it take to understand that no one will ever really look into your eyes—not to see you, but you?
And she had known, too, that no one ever would.
Her mind—what remained of it—was not clear. It had not been for a long time. Thoughts came infrequently, and when they did, they were overtaken by feelings. Unruly, cumbersome, indistinct. Emotions blurred together, and often, there was no voice left to hold them. Just a pulsing awareness of being inside something that others saw, but no one entered.
And within that silence—deep, below the surface of her skin—she felt her true bones. Not the sharp, angular bones that jutted outward like cracked branches, but the impossible bones no one could see. The bones that did not belong to flesh at all.
Her bones were made of onyx.
Dense, cold, dark, immovable. She felt them every time her arms were lifted, every time the robe was fastened around her. A weight that was not muscle, not fat, but stone. Stone in place of self.
She was all onyx.
And in that weight, that knowing, the second thought fanned outward: she would trade all of it.
Not for escape. Not for speech.
But for pain. Her pain.
She would trade it all for someone to say her name—not as a relic, but as a person. She would trade it all to wake in the middle of the night with her hands pressed against another’s back, just to feel the motion of breath. Just to be cold and held. Just to exist in someone’s arms with nothing demanded but being.
And more than that—she would take any of their sorrows.
She would take the man’s recurring dream, the hunger that became a weather system in a woman’s body, the girl who lost her voice in a room she never left, the midwife who buried her failures under rotting fruit, the boy who watched the door and never saw it open, the woman struck for loving the wrong shadow.
She would take any of them.
Because even in their suffering, they had been able to act. To cry. To remember. To grieve.
To be.
If her body had allowed it, she would have become feral. Unrecognizable from the thing they carried each day. She would have howled in the wind like an animal that refused naming. She would have kissed dirt and dug with bleeding fingers. She would have built a shrine of trash and cloth and ash, called it her altar, and screamed to whatever gods listened to beasts.
She would make herself ugly. She would smear herself, rubbing moist clay and much worse all over her thinning flesh.
But her arms would not lift her. Her legs would not carry her. Her mouth would not form words if given the chance.
She felt things sometimes—flashes of memory, hunger, anger, yearning—but they never lasted.
And most days, more and more days now—
There was nothing at all.
Usually it was
nothing at all.
The priest sat frozen.
And beneath that savagery was the molten core: wrath.
Not hot, not loud. Not theatrical.
But cold. Precise.
The kind of wrath that waited. That could wait. That had waited for years, maybe centuries. And yet—wrath that could wait no longer. Wrath that burned not like fire, but like ice pulled slowly across the skin. It burned because it would never stop. Because it did not need justification anymore.
It was not theoretical.
It was not general.
It was personal.
And it was not indiscriminate.
It had a name.
It had his name.
Because he had seen. Because he had dared to wonder.
Because he, in his quiet, priestly, sacred way, had engineered her life.
And that made him—made him, in her eyes—
The most loathsome creature on earth.
Maybe even in the eyes of the God he served.
He thought of her hatred. It was not the hatred of noise or flame. It was not wild or passionate or screaming.
It was not with passion, not with noise,
but with that vast, glacial, inhuman permanence
that cannot be undone.
And she would hate him
for as long as he lived.
He wondered—horribly, feverishly—what she would do to him, if she could.
Would she enjoy it?
Would she tremble?
Would she cry?
Would she laugh?
Would she say his name?
Would she say nothing?
Would she press her face against his and whisper something ancient?
Would she weep as she tore him apart?
Would she kiss him when it was over?
Would she pray?
Would she smile?
Would she scream?
Would she bury him with flowers?
Would she leave his body for the dogs?
Or would she feel nothing?
Now he knew.
She would hate him.
And after him, there would be another. And another. And another.
He wondered, suddenly, horrifyingly,
if anyone else had ever known this.
Maybe they did, long ago.
And if they had—
He wondered how they lived on.
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