“Got it out of your system?” Samual asked dryly as Rita quietly slipped back inside the temple of Krutus. He sat on a chair by the table he’d pointed out at the back, shuffling a pack of cards. He didn’t look like he’d made a single move to chase her.

Rita nodded in embarrassment.

Then she stumbled forward as the door behind her burst open, the man in the corridor standing there with his axe in his hand.

For a few moments, he glanced between Rita, who had her spear leveled at him, and Samual, who just skewered him with a very unimpressed glare from his seat, before slowly closing the door, muttering an apology.

“Umm, someone was in the corridor…” Rita finally said lamely once the man had left.

“You don’t say,” Samual replied flatly. “He likely had not heard that I was back yet. Or about you. Now forget about him and come here.”

Rita hesitated again. Well, she’d come this far, hadn’t she?

“Fine. But if human skin, blood or bones are involved in any way, I’m out of here, okay?” Rita relented, carefully making her way over to where he was waiting.

Samual merely rolled his eyes and held up the pack of cards in his hand, letting her see the intricately detailed fractal design on the back.

“This is a deck of Tarot cards,” he explained as he started shuffling again. “They are used for a form of crude divination…”

“I know what Tarot cards are,” Rita interrupted him as she spun the second chair around and rested her thorax on it. In her younger years she’d gone through a ‘spiritual phase’. She was just surprised that it also existed in this world… if it was even the same Tarot she knew.

Samual raised an eyebrow. “Then you know how they work?”

Rita shrugged. “I know how they were supposed to work. Tarot existed back on Earth, but I stopped believing in that mumbo jumbo years ago. Are you saying it actually works here?”

“Why don’t you judge for yourself?” Samual said and flicked the top card off the deck onto the table.

The grim visage of a hooded figure stared up from its face, a sickle clasped in his pale hand. The word ‘Death’ was emblazoned along the bottom in blocky, gothic script.

“Come on, that doesn’t mean anything,” Rita chuckled. “If this is anything like the Tarot decks back home, Death doesn’t really mean physical death. It just means an end, like the end of a relationship or a job…”

Samual flicked the next card off the top of the deck. A second hooded figure stared up at them.

“Uhh, okay, clearly your deck’s different than what I’m used to. The decks I know only had one ‘Death’ card,” Rita said. “Still, this could just be a coincidence…”

Shrugging, Samual flicked another card off the top of the deck. A third Death landed on the desk.

Rita stared silently at the three Deaths on the table. “How many of those are in the deck?” she finally asked carefully.

“Four,” Samual answered, flicking another card off the top of the deck.

A fourth Death landed on top of the other three.

There was another long moment of silence before finally Rita spoke: “Okay, I will admit, that’s a rather impressive trick. I didn’t take you for a stage magician.”

Samual shook his head sadly. “Unfortunately, it’s not a trick. At least, not by me. This always happens.”

He gathered up the cards and shuffled again, before dealing out four more.

Again, four Deaths stared balefully up at them.

Then he handed Rita the deck and with little more than a short instruction to shuffle until she no longer had any feeling for where any of the cards were, he had her also deal four cards off the top of the deck while focused on him.

Four more Deaths lay on the table.

Rita immediately checked the deck, but no. Many of the other cards were unfamiliar to her - what was ‘The Sphere’ anyway? - but those were indeed the only Death cards.

“What does this mean?” Rita asked as Samual packed away the cards, her previous apprehension forgotten.

“It means I am going to die.”

Rita just stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“When I was sixteen,” he started his story, “I had my fortune read for the first time. I was not even particularly serious about it at the time, I was merely trying to impress a girl. The result was pretty much as you saw just now.”

“I’m guessing she was not impressed, in the end?” Rita asked.

“On the contrary, she was the one who did the reading, and she loved it. I was ‘dark’ and ‘mysterious’. She informed me that I had a ‘cursed fate’ and that I had to have some kind of terrible secret.”

“Did you?”

“No,” Samual replied. “I had no idea what she was talking about. And it didn’t really matter. I was not a believer in all this fortune nonsense and promptly disregarded it. She was only a casual fling, after all. Her father was a travelling merchant and she and him moved on again after a few weeks.”

It was hard to reconcile the Samual she knew with anything ‘casual’. He was the most serious person she knew, though clearly he hadn’t always been like this.

“I completely forgot about it all until she and her father returned the next year. I had had no intention of ever seeing her again, but she sought me out and insisted on doing another reading,” Samual said.

“Now, I should point out, any form of palm reading, fortune telling, or any other form of mysticism were quite illegal back where I was from. Dabbling in them could get both her and her father banished or imprisoned. This time, no longer interested in pursuing the relationship, I was far less keen on risking myself for no reason. I told her that I wasn’t interested, but she kept pestering me.”

Clingy exes were always a pain in the backside. Rita could relate.

“Eventually, she revealed to me that she’d tried to do readings for me several times without my presence,” Samual went on. “I hadn’t known this, but apparently it’s possible to do so, though much harder. She told me that the only time it had ‘felt right’, she had again drawn four Deaths.

Finally, to shut her up, I let her do another reading. Then another. Then a third one. Each time the result was the same: Four Deaths.”

“My first thought would be that she was stacking the deck,” Rita remarked.

“So was mine,” Samual agreed, nodding. “I accused her of cheating. I accused her of being obsessed with me and using parlour tricks to manufacture some reason to stick around. The argument grew heated and, in the end, she handed me the deck and told me to try it myself.

“Did you?” Rita asked.

Samual nodded. “After some more argument, I did. The result was the same.

I was about to accuse her of cursing me, but right at that moment, with the deck still in my hand, my father walked in on us. The noise of our argument had apparently not gone unheard by the rest of my family.”

Rita chuckled. “Well, I assume you were both at least clothed, right? When I was still at school, my dad once walked in on me and a guy…”

“Rita, I don’t think you understand,” Samual interrupted, his face even more serious than usual. “My family is… very conservative. If he had caught us fucking, he probably would have chased her home and I would have gotten a stern talking to about the evils of intercourse before marriage.

But he didn’t catch us fucking. He caught me performing evil, diabolical, dark magic, with the deck in my hand and four Deaths face-up on the table before me.”

Rita paused. She could see how that could be misconstrued. She remembered the crazies back on Earth that could twist every fad into somehow being satanical, from Pokemon to Harry Potter.

They were oddly quiet about Twilight, though. Strange, that.

“What happened?” she asked.

“When all was said and done, we were both banished from the village,” Samual replied.

Rita blinked. “Wait, what? They banished you, just for that?”

Samual shrugged. “I told you, my family was very religious. And according to their religious tenets, if anyone sullies themselves through the sin of consorting with dark magic, they had to be cast out.”

Rita shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe it. For holding a deck of cards? What kind of fucked up religion is that?”

“Guess,” Samual deadpanned.

Rita stared at Samual silently for a few moments, then her eyes bulged. “Your family was Mitlan?”

He nodded.

So much suddenly made sense. Like how he could speak that weird Mitlan language. How he was able to quote Mitlan scripture at a freaking Inquisitor.

“And what about you?” she asked. “Were you religious? I suppose not, if you were willing to mess about with Tarot decks.”

“I went through the motions, but I never cared much for religion or gods. I still don’t,” he added shooting a glance over to the big, skeletal statue at the other end of the room.

“But… what about…?” she asked, gesturing all around them at the room. “I mean, you’re a god’s chosen champion or something!”

“As I said, it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. Nothing more, nothing less,” he stated. “We have an understanding. But believe me when I say Krutus’s gifts are near enough a curse on their own.”

Rita took a deep breath. “Okay, but nevermind that for now. What about the four Deaths-thing? I mean, you still haven’t told me what it means! Do you even know?”

Samual nodded. “After I was banished from my home, I travelled the land and as I did, I sought out more skilled diviners. They used somewhat more advanced techniques than a simple, crude deck of cards and found that no, the meaning is actually rather straightforward. I am simply going to die.”

Rita refrained from mentioning that technically, everyone was going to die. It was one of the only certainties in life, along with taxes and shitty boyfriends.

She frowned. “Do you know how?”

Samual shrugged again, leaning back in his chair. “I have no idea. None of the diviners could tell me. I simply will. That’s part of why I undertook the journey to the Tree: it reveals secrets if you pass its trial. Which I did, thanks to you.”

“Thanks to me?” Rita asked, momentarily taken aback.

When had she…? Oh, right, she saw him there in the Tree from the weird walkway-thing and had shouted the odd phrase at him that she’d seen there. Something about pain. It had only been a week and change, but it felt like a lifetime ago.

“That actually helped?” she asked, surprised, as recollection stirred.

“Indeed. Once I figured out the nature of the challenge, I realized that if I had kept trying to overpower my opponent through brute strength, I likely would have killed myself,” he explained. “It drew power from pain, and dipping into my patron’s power is excruciating. The deeper I drew, the stronger it became.”

“Excrusiating? You mean that thing you do where you get all crazy strong is painful for you?” she asked, aghast. “And you still do it?”

“Yes,” Samual replied. “The power of the gods was not designed to be channeled through mortal bodies. That’s why you don’t see the lowliest clerics smiting archwizards. The gods might have power aplenty, but us mortals can only use the tiniest fractions of it, otherwise...” He lifted his hand, miming an explosion.

“The Mitlans seemed…” Rita started, but Samual cut her off.

“Mitla is different,” he said, shaking his head. “Many gods shield their followers from the most harmful effects of tapping into their power, either restricting what they can use or somehow preventing them from hurting themselves too badly.

Mitla goes all the way. His followers don’t channel his power directly. Instead, he allows them to ask for ‘Blessings’; carefully packaged bundles of power that bestows specific effects. It’s less flexible, and the Blessings themselves can be individually attacked through magic in a way that my connection to Krutus cannot be, but it allows for far greater power to safely be used.”

Huh. That explained why the Mitlan Inquisitor that she had ‘killed’, despite being some kind of junior or trainee, had managed to go toe-to-toe with Samual, who was apparently his god’s head honcho.

“Can’t Krutus do that too? Put your power into a bunch of blessings so you don’t hurt yourself?” Rita asked.

“Perhaps,” Samual replied. “But Krutus is the god of carnage and slaughter. This is all entertainment to him, so why would he do something to make things less interesting?”

It seemed inherently unfair to Rita, that the Mitlans were getting supercharged ‘blessings’ to make them stronger, while everyone else was struggling along using the old methods. Why didn’t the other gods copy it? Didn’t they care?

It certainly explained how the Mitlans had conquered such a vast swath of territory, but she supposed most of the other gods didn’t particularly care about conquest.

“My armour used to help quite a bit,” Samual mused, glancing over at the pile of rent armour lying on a nearby bench. “Similarly to the Mitlan Inquisitor armour, it was enchanted to better channel divine power. Not exactly the same, but close. There’s an old smith here in Grailmane that fled from Mitlan lands several years ago. He knows the trick. Now it looks like I’m going to have to visit him again.”

Rita winced. “Is it going to be expensive to fix?”

“Yes. If it even can be fixed. I don’t know whether the enchantment will be able to be repaired, it might be necessary to recast and re-enchant the whole thing.”

She looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry, Samual. It’s my fault…”

“No, it’s not,” Samual stated with absolute certainty. “The Inquisitor was looking for a fight and would have engaged us regardless. Your presence was irrelevant.”

“But if I hadn’t been there, the Inquisitors wouldn’t have come at all!” Rita exclaimed. “If I hadn’t made a mess of the Tree…”

“Rita, do you want to know what the Tree told me? After I finished its trial?” he interrupted her. “Three words. ’Protect the spider.’ It told me to protect you if I wanted to survive my fate.”

“Me?” Rita asked, incredulously.

The Tree had told Samual to protect her? Why? It had promptly tried to kill Alice and turn her back into an outsider-hating, suicidally-aggressive, rage-zombie right afterwards. How was Samual supposed to protect her if she was non-stop trying to gnaw him to death whenever she saw him?

“How am I supposed to stop you dying?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” Samual admitted. “But for the first time in my life since I discovered my fate, I feel like I have a viable, potential solution. Something beyond wishful thinking. All I have to do is trust. And keep you alive.”

Honestly, Rita was sceptical. The others seemed to believe that the Tree could predict the future or something, but Rita had met the damned thing face to face. ‘Could’ and ‘would’ were two different things. It could have simply been manipulating him for its own inscrutable reasons, getting him to protect its creation. That sounded like a much more reasonable explanation to Rita than that she was going to somehow save his life. She’d seen what he could do. How was she going to make any difference?

“Your god, Krutus, can’t he just… I don’t know… snap his fingers and fix your curse?” she asked. “I mean, you have an entire church full of holy people right out there,” she said, pointing towards the door, “can’t one of them do something?”

Samual shook his head bitterly. “Every priest, cleric, divine oracle, every holy man, clairvoyant priestess and blessed child that I’ve spoken to, they all agree on one thing: there’s nothing wrong with me. There is no curse, no hex, no malignant aura of any kind.

Yet every. Single. Form of secular divination agrees: I am fated to die at the age of twenty-five.

“Twenty five?” Rita exclaimed. “How old are you now?”

“Twenty-five.”

Rita blinked. “That doesn’t…”

“Yes, my twenty-fifth birthday was quite stressful, thank you,” Samual said bitterly. “But it seems ‘dying at the age of twenty-five’ doesn’t mean ‘the moment I turn twenty-five’. It just means I will be twenty-five years old when I die. At least, that’s what I assume, based on the fact that I’m not dead yet.”

“Or this fortune telling stuff is bullshit,” she muttered. “You believe you can die at any time?”

“Correct.”

“And you still blundered into the Nightmare? What if that was where you died?” Rita exclaimed.

“What if I die from a heart attack in my sleep?” Samual cut back. “If I’m fated to die, then whatever choice I make will be the one that gets me killed. Or I will die in some way regardless of the choice I make. Either way, I’m dead. At least if I am proactive, I have a chance to do something about it.”

“So you risk your life because you think you’re going to die?” Rita asked. The words ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ floated through her head. If he’d died in the Nightmare, he would have had nobody to blame but himself.

“Nothing in life can be obtained without risk,” he said coldly. “I took the risk. It paid off. Now, no more risks are required. I can simply wait three months.”

“Three months?”

“Then I turn twenty-six and I’ve officially broken my fate.”