Nishi sent me something. I tap on her message, and an image of a half-starved man trapped in the coils of an enormous winged serpent beams out. Loose flesh hangs from his skeletal frame, and he seems to be screaming in agony—it’s clear the serpent is winning.
Her message scrolls out along the bottom in bright blue text: Ophiuchus’s glyph was a staff with two serpents intertwined—the caduceus. On Capricorn, there’s an old kid’s story about a famous alchemist and healer named Caduceus who was banished by Lord Helios for a terrible crime. He’d dared to discover a way to conquer death.
Holy Helios.
Nishi doesn’t think Ophiuchus is a group of people from the Thirteenth House.
She thinks it’s one man—and he’s immortal.
? ? ?
I’ve lost track of time.
I’m still in the lecture hall, lying on the floor and gazing up at the holographic stars. The map’s evanescent light nearly fills the small room. Its constant motion lulls me.
Mathias says we can’t perceive Psynergy directly, only the trails it leaves in space-time. He says the Ephemeris transcribes Psynergy into visible light. Transmuting the metaphysical into the physical sounds a lot like alchemy. . . .
I raise my bare foot, and a million stars wash over my toes. My crown and heels are resting next to my Wave, beside me on the cold floor.
Mathias’s training helped me realize that the instinct that informs my reads in the Ephemeris is my brain interpreting the Psynergy it’s picking up in the Psy. When I did Yarrot early on in life, I tuned in to the innermost version of myself, and at such a young age, I was mostly ruled by my needs, whims, and instinct. So when I applied the same method to the Ephemeris, I began to read the universe that way, internalizing its moods and imagining scenarios to go along with my reads—sometimes wrongly.
Centering myself for the hundredth time, I feel my soul soar up, toward the glowing light of Cancer.
Eyes crossed and mind floaty, it’s hard to tell apart the things in my brain from the portents in the stars. It’s like diving deep underwater, where sunlight never reaches, and seeing the strange and fantastical creatures that lurk there. Everything seems half-real, half-imagined.
I guide the Psynergy where I want it to go—Cancer. Home is where I’m focusing my read. I feel the energy congregating around the planet’s orb, making it glow brighter than the rest of Space. Once I’m as Centered as possible, I fuse my mind with the Psy, and I listen for the sounds of Cancer, opening my mind to messages carried by Psynergy.
In the Collective Conscious, I pick up fear, worry, depression. I feel shivery and cold, and I realize the glow around our planet is fading . . . like it’s losing health. Next to us, one of the Gemini twin planets starts to dim, the same way as Cancer. I think it means illness has moved into our House . . . and it’s going to spread. I’ll need to alert Dr. Eusta so he can diagnose it properly and contact House Scorpio for inoculations.
Out over the Cancer Sea, I pick up our marine species’ distress, their migration patterns off, their internal sensors confused. I try digging deeper, to use the Psy to access the actual land, to commune with the planet’s core—but all I get for my troubles is a migraine.
I pull back and take a wider view of the Zodiac, surveying the twelve constellations as a whole. The Fire Houses—Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius—are lit up, the glow of Psynergy engulfing them like a blazing flame.
War is coming.
A light wind seems to brush past me, and in my gut I know it’s heralding more storms. Not just for Cancer.
I touch my Ring and close my eyes. Immediately, the swirling lights are replaced with gloomy shadows, and the whole room seems to plunge into a deeper night.
I’ve never asked the communal mind a question before, but tonight I feel like I can. I’m not sure when the confidence crept in—when I took the sacred Guardian’s oath, when I learned Dad and Stanton are alive, or when I told my Advisors about Ophiuchus. But it’s there.
While confidence doesn’t change anything real, or turn me into a better Guardian, it’s no less powerful a drug than Abyssthe. It makes me feel larger and more capable than I am—which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Is the Thirteenth House real or make-believe? I ask the Psy.
The network awakens. Thousands of intellects come alert, and composite ideas whisper and churn like waves in a deep ocean. Short stories, lullabies, and poems emerge—the childish chronicles from every House—not as words on a screen, but the same way I read the stars. The essence of the words—their meaning itself—fills my mind.
More brains join the fusion, completing and complicating the picture in my mind. The Collective Conscious is literally building an answer to my question in the Psy. The process is like constructing anything else—a house, a ship, a weapon—only here, it’s the creation of a concept.