Tarot Decks and Playing Cards
The world, once — and even now, when for the most part the world has shrunk to her retinue of two — thought of the princess herself as a figure of paramount power, and the spire as a mere instrument at her disposal. The truth, of course, is that the spire is the power, and the princess is just a component. Skilled labour, not simply a stoker shovelling fuel, but nonetheless a mere inautomable gap in the system's control routines, bridged with human work.
Even the protraction of the royals' lifespans, easily mistaken as the clutching grip of privilege, was in truth a simple, desperate reduction in the spire's dependency chain. They knew doom was coming, that the spires' stopgap mission would never be superceded by obsolescence, and planned for everything to slowly fail. Bought time, time for the spires to fail last, for the last human lives to play out outconcerned in their lee.
Last of her kind, the immortal princess is just a long-MTBF drop-in replacement for the traditional technologies of flesh.
The remaining lifetime of the world plays out in the slow deal of cards from a deck, a finite set of elements, completely known, returning endlessly: clubbed hearts and the joker. The minimal set of human dependencies on which she operates: her knight's eternal, unconditional devotion, and the Fool's rough, antipathetic care.
With the intrusion of another tower's immortals, she feels the ancient creak of unused machineries beneath the endless churning water of her daily duty to the tower, which swallowed all else. Deception. Malice. Intrigue.
She is less prepared for sudden conspiracy among her own. Abrupt changes in a relationship as eternally cemented as is hers to them; as much expect the stars to dance as the knight to allow desire to hold any sway on the clockworks of her routine. Her own Ser knight has been constant and committed and a creature of iron-hearted compartmentalisation for ever: any wants of her own, any bend from steel-spined duty, crumbled in the mills of discipline and discarded as dross.
To see her rise to the Fool's hand is a startlement. To see her Ser knight—
She is not jealous. Not jealous, not exactly. But to recontextualise her own eternity as not, perhaps, having been the fulcrum on which the three of them turn, as had always been assumed apparent beyond the need to examine—
When one has drawn for ever the well-worn cards of a playing-card deck, it is an unfathomable shock to gaze upon The Tower.
