[Tokkihopp]

It was the witching hour in Final Frontier, and the Church of Heavenly Blossoms was silent, save for the gentle creak of the hatch to the top floor crying out for oil as a young Felinae crawls up onto the roof on the anniversary of her birth. She was sixteen now - goodness, how the days in the last few months had crawled by to this long awaited time. As she closed the hatch behind her, making sure she had privacy at the peak of the tower, she gazed upwards towards the stars.

The skies were clear, as she foretold they would be.

Gala's near-infinite creations twinkled back at her from the skies, an array of dazzling lights each in their own right. She thought back to her youth, where her parents would spend many such nights teaching her the names of the constellations and the stars within, never chastising her for making errors of memory, but always imparting the importance of the lessons.

But she was not here simply to sight-see, for on this eve she moved with purpose. She sat on the cold ground of the tower, and reached into her travel bag to produce the two halves of her tarot deck. The first was the half she'd been using since her parents gave it to her when she was eleven. It was a collection of all of the gentle, cute, or beneficial cards, and was supplemented by a series of loose-leaf sheets - custom cards she'd created to compensate for the cards that were removed to form the second pile of cards. These were all quite trivial matters, and lacked greater meaning, cards of the sort you'd imagine a youth to create. The second pile of cards, were those scary, or misfortunate cards she'd been told to remove and set aside until her sixteenth birthday.

"They'll give you nightmares, dear" Her parents had said.

Yet Aoki had long since stopped being the naïve child she was in her youth - she knew that the real reason they had been isolated was to prevent Aoki from being able to read a negative fortune, for all negative elements had been expunged, and she would always turn the remaining cards right-side up.

Deliberately, Aoki began the process of correcting her deck. She removed the cards of her youth, and replaced each with a card set aside. 'Unicorns' was removed, 'Death' was inserted. 'Bed times' was removed, 'The Devil' was inserted. 'Ten of Cookies' was removed, 'Ten of Swords' was inserted, and so on she continued, exchanging childlike mirth for grim realities - symbolic of her turn towards adulthood, she thought.

Her deck now properly re-assembled, she would shuffle the old, weathered cards first used by her parents before her, and begin to deal them out on the stone floor of the tower, drawing forth her fortune in full for the first time since her parents had revoked the menacing cards from her, five years ago. She focused on thoughts of her future, and her path before her, noting what she believed each represented.

Several of the cards made clear and perfect sense to her - that she was the fool, young and beginning a journey. That her state of mind would be the hermit, asking questions, investigating as she had been. That her future would be the three of wands, reflective of her growth into adulthood. Yet other cards paint a starker picture.

The Ten of Swords - challenged by pain, agony, betrayal.
The inverted Five of Cups - that she was advised to accept it, to find peace
The inverted Wheel of Fate - that her unchangeable environment was poor fate and fortune
The Seven of Cups - that her greatest hope was the ability to make a choice
The Six of Pentacles - that the result of this path would be giving unto others

She knew well what was entailed by this, for though she had failed to find a teacher for the art of divining the future, she had spent now many years with her cards, and knew they could be a window into Gala's Grand Design. She concluded that she was to endure great pain, agony, perhaps even her own death, in order to give to others - perhaps she was to be a sacrifice of sorts, she considered, and that this was an ill-fate bound to her by Gala's Design - her environment. 

Still, her hands moved to draw forth one further card, the Felinae's ear's twitching as she gazed down at the Five of Cups. Its position represented what she should do, what advice the Tapestry had for her - and it spoke that she should accept her path, yet... If she didn't... She flipped another card overtop of the Five of Cups, as if challenging her own Fate.

An inverted Devil fell upon the Five of Cups, and the Felinae understood the nature of the choice before her, but was not sure if she had the strength it would require.

As dawn broke, she collected her cards and ventured downstairs to the sermon being delivered today - perhaps it could help grant her perspective on this newly-found path.