Klein read slowly.
He had a particular quality when he read aloud in this space — unhurried, precise, each word given the weight it deserved, nothing rushed. The gray fog absorbed the sound and returned it somehow fuller, the way certain rooms have acoustics that treat speech generously.
The others listened.
Steven listened too, and did something slightly different with what he heard.
The page described a pathway — its characteristics, its trajectory, the way its nature expressed itself differently across sequences. Klein's voice moved through the details with the attention of a man who understood that every word in Rosselle's diary had been chosen deliberately, that nothing in these entries was decorative.
And then: the Hunter pathway. A specific note. About what its nature produced in its practitioners at certain sequences — the way transformation expressed itself differently across different bodies.
*Sequence 4,* Steven thought, half a second before Klein reached it. *Female practitioners, at Sequence 4—*
"—at the fourth sequence," Klein read, "female practitioners of the Hunter pathway transition to a male physical form—"
"Yes," Steven said.
It came out quiet. Not triumphant. The specific register of someone confirming something to themselves, a sound that had been meant for the inside of the chest and had escaped slightly further than intended.
Several pairs of eyes moved toward him.
Klein paused. Looked at him. Looked back at the page. Continued.
The diary moved forward — through questions Rosselle had carried, through the edges of knowledge that even a seeress with extraordinary sources found difficult to fill. Steven tracked the words with the attention of someone reading a map they had studied before in a different medium.
Rosselle had a question about the pathways. About the hierarchy of names — the way certain titles at the highest sequences carried weight that announced something about the nature of the pathway itself. Most of them had grandeur. A resonance that matched the scale of what achieving that sequence would mean.
And then there was the Red Priest pathway.
*She's going to ask why it doesn't sound like the others,* Steven thought.
Klein read it.
The entry continued — Rosselle bringing her question to a gathering. An organization with old roots and careful membership. The Twilight Hermit Order. A man there, answering her question — explaining what the Red Priest pathway's name was pointing toward.
*He's going to say—*
"Hermes," Klein read.
Steven exhaled.
Rosselle's mind, working the way it always worked — following a thread past where most people would release it. The language. The history underneath the name. And then the vote. The decision about her membership.
*Majority voted yes,* Steven thought.
"—the vote was taken, and the majority were in favour—"
He kept the satisfaction inside this time. A small, clean pleasure, private and sufficient.
---
It was Audrey who noticed first.
She was looking at the arrangement of cards — the familiar configuration that had been there since before Steven arrived — and something in her expression shifted. The attention of a person who has spotted an absence where a presence should be.
"Mr. Fool," she said. "The Black Emperor card."
Klein looked at the arrangement.
"It has been replaced," Justice said. Measured. Observational. The voice of someone stating a fact before forming a conclusion from it.
"Yes," Klein said. "That card belongs to an outer deity."
The silence that followed had layers.
The Hanged Man was quiet with the specific quality of rapid internal processing — the careful, methodical mind updating its models, revising assumptions upward.
*I was already recalibrating,* he was almost certainly thinking, *when the Fool introduced someone from the Forsaken Lands of the Gods. But an outer deity's card. An outer deity's pathway. This is a different order of thing entirely.*
Audrey looked at Klein with the earnest curiosity that was fundamental to who she was, and said: "What does the outer world look like?"
Everyone at the table looked at her.
She seemed to register, a moment later, that the question had perhaps arrived at an unusual angle. Something in her expression adjusted — a person realizing they may have overreached.
Klein, with the patience of a man who had extensive practice at managing unexpected conversational directions, said: "It is referred to as space. Imagine a page — entirely black. That is the closest approximation."
Steven heard this and thought: *Not quite complete, but not wrong, and it's the best available description from the sources he has, which are fragmentary, which is the condition all of them are operating under.*
He kept his face still.
And then — because the thought had been sitting with him since the diary reading and had reached the point where it required address — he said:
"I need mythical creature blood."
The table looked at him.
Justice said, carefully: "I'm sorry?"
"Mythical creature blood," Steven said. "I need some. Whoever at this table can source it — I'll give them the name and formula for their next sequence in exchange."
The silence this time had a different quality entirely.
He watched them move through it — *is he serious, he appears to be serious, what does it mean that he is serious* — at different speeds, different expressions, the table processing as individuals rather than as one.
The Fool's voice arrived through the World's channel with the careful precision of someone selecting words: "The Tarot Club is not a venue for commerce."
"It's an exchange between members," Steven said. "Those are different things."
A beat.
"The purpose of this meeting—" Klein started.
"Is not a joke," Steven said. "I know. My offer isn't either."
Justice looked at him steadily. "If I offered payment instead?"
"I'll earn money through other means. Pathway names and formulas have a specific value that payment doesn't replicate." He paused. "If I need funds urgently, I'll revisit. Right now I need the blood."
The Hanged Man said nothing.
His silence had shifted — from calculation to something that might have been, in a person with a less controlled exterior, something close to reluctant appreciation.
*The offer is structurally sound,* he was almost certainly thinking. *I simply don't have the blood. And I do need the money. And this is not the meeting I expected to be in today.*
Other conversations moved through the table — the ongoing business of a group that had its own rhythms, its own outstanding threads. Steven let them move past him and thought instead about the beyonder characteristic sitting in his inventory. About the formula on the card. About what S8 required.
One beyonder characteristic — Sofia had given him that, and he hadn't even looked at it yet.
Mythical creature blood — still outstanding.
*It'll come,* he thought. *Stay in motion. These things come when you stay in motion.*
Klein brought the meeting toward its close with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned to read the table's energy. One by one, the presences around the fog's table began to withdraw.
Steven was the last to leave.
He sat for a moment in the gray fog after the others had gone — alone with the vastness of it, the stillness, the particular quality of a space that existed outside ordinary rules.
He thought about the X card. About it sitting where the Black Emperor had been. About what it meant that an outer deity's marker was now part of this table's arrangement.
He thought about Klein reading those pages, and about every guess that had been right, and about sitting with people he had spent years knowing through glass — through pages, through the safe distance of a reader from a story — and now knowing from the same side of the glass they were on.
*This is real,* Shivani thought, from the quiet place behind Steven's eyes. *All of it. Actually real.*
She stayed in the fog one more moment.
Then she returned.
---
*End of Chapter Thirteen*