The Generic Love Spell

After you learn the meanings of the tarot cards, you learn the combinations. This besides that means whatever. After you learn combinations you learn associations. The Knight can stand in for the King, the Ace modifies the others, and the Pages are lesser mortals than their feisty Knight cousins, or their sober Kings who rule over them. And then, one magical moment, you learn you can rearrange the cards that speak of the question you have asked. You can change the reading and turn the listening into dictation.


It takes a strong stomach to look into the future. Your lesser mortal reason will dictate outcomes, but these are the thing of common logic. Your troll boss will continue to be a troll. Traffic is bad on the morning commute. Politicians increase taxes. In the future, clearly seen, are the things we avoid in conversation. Dead, illness, accident, and madness. The good stuff is there, but you want to see that. You are seeking that out. But the crisp reality that fills graveyards and hospitals and asylums is not put aside in quiet forest groves, quiet zones, or behind walls like we try to do in the big city. This is redoubled when you start to dictate back to the Universe. There are checks and balances here in the external reality that includes physics. The language of dreams may be the language of the subconscious, but there are immutable laws of equilibrium ruling the forces you can access through your subconscious. The novice is often bitten. The older sages have a quiet cynicism to them which you will not understand until you too have a few stitches on your hand, or a lump on your head. Lucky for you if your training hurts are external.

If you could look into the future, aside from what you would see, what would you do with what you knew? You can warn people. This is a common reaction. Go ask Cassandra how it worked for her. You can prepare. Do the Deucalion thing and prepare your arc. Or, in modern terms, you prepare a bunker, and stuff it with food, warm clothes, automatic weapons, and dumm dumm bullets. A few out there, who can see into the future, and they are fewer than the voices raised in warning, and much fewer than those off provisioning retreats and keeps and baileys and donjons, are meddling.

Everybody wants the dawn to come after the night. When the sun rises over the crisp fallen snow and those who are still alive know they will stay that way. Dawn is good. So, a faction whispers, let us hurry the night. Heck, let the night come quick, and let it come dark and long. After all, having the gift of seeing the future, and the sense to prepare, these people have sturdy stone walls, a door of iron, and gunpowder a plenty to keep the forces of the night at bay. The darkness only has teeth and claws: what use are they against a Viking Jarl secure in his keep? So, let the forces of darkness thin out the lesser dwellers of the forest realm of Gaia. The cannibals will consume the addicts, the beggars, the public transit spitters, and the office farters. Then the zombies will eat the cannibals. Then the cleansing rays of the sun will set the zombies on fire, and the few forest fires will give a pretty red hue to the sunset of the first day of the new age cleansed of cannibals, addicts, beggars, spitters, and other species of primates whose heritage is more monkey than sapiens. Who needs them? Nobody still breathing needs their votes. So, say this faction, in whispers, let us hurry the night. Let us accelerate the descent, make it deeper and darker. We can watch and delight in the cleansing power of fire. The fire. The fire.


Everybody wants the dawn to come after the night. Another faction whispers, let us delay the sunset, let us shorten the night. You do not have to be a mixer of chemicals to know that these two agendas are at cross purposes, so much peroxide and cataclysmite. I can sum this up with an anecdote: I have an associate who, early in the struggle, loathed beggars for all the right reasons. You know, social spending not spent, misspent, diverted; morals untaught, subverted, un-reinforced. Blah blah blah. So, he had a boycott on handing money to beggars. He scowled. Then, a while back, there was a change. We were outside the state media offices. He handed the local beggar a twenty. He smiled like a wolf. No longer was he delaying the sunset (do not reinforce the beggars behavior) to accelerating the darkness (encourage the beggar to lurk and spread human hosted bodily insects around the state media). Now, I discover, he has a weekly budget for beggar encouragement. His circle of survivalists pool cash and delight at weekly meetings (over beer and ammunition) at the seed money subsidizing tubercular vectors and bedbug scratchers so close to the lairs of the beast. They take films for film night (after the mustard gas seminar). From delay the sunset to deepen the dark. So it goes.

The equilibrium shifts amongst those that can see the future. Twenty bucks goes a long way with a bum (you get a weeks worth of begging, coughing, and scratching), and twenty bucks is not that much when you can print them up at home for a few cents using modern banking theory. The state prints money, and that money is printed to support the homeless. So, a caring citizen can print money to do the job the state fails to do, and give that same printed money, that same fiat, that scrip, to those who are most deserving. As long as the ability challenged media (and, alas, the employment equity and now ability challenged constabulary) are ignorant of the good works of the double taxed, printer enabled triple spending tax payer, all is good. Walk past the agencies of the statists and see the scratchers, the coughers, and the spitters. There is the sign of those that want the darkness sooner and deeper. They do other things, but that is best left to your imagination, these left hand acts pushing the tapeworms of society towards the cliff. But I look into the future, and the meddling of the few to push and to pull, the changing balance between those that seek to adjust the greater balance, is now shaping the greater future. Will too many wizards spoil the soup?

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this.