"Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds." Franklin D. Roosevelt
Asleep in her small, abandoned fisherman's cottage in Zeltiva, the Konti named Avari lay dreaming.
In her dream, she was sitting in the parlor of her grandmother's house in Mura. It was a beautiful room, decorated in hues of rose, violet, and alabaster, with deeply stuffed sofas, plump settees, and low tables scattered with careless elegance around the polished pearl-white floor. The silver clasps on the high, stained-glass windows were unfastened, letting in a soft, salty breeze and the distant murmur of the sea. Sunlight suffused everything in a blinding glow, gilding every exquisite object in the room with its own special radiance, rendering everything almost too bright to look at for long. There was so much brightness in that room, such purity and perfection in the white-bordered walls, the gleaming floor, and the white marble of the house beyond the parlor.
All of it gave Avari a headache.
She sat on the edge of the amethyst-colored couch, as tense and ramrod-straight as a soldier on duty. Without knowing how she knew, Avari understood that the doors to the parlor were locked from the outside and that beyond the open windows yawned a drop of a thousand feet into sharp, jutting rocks that lined the seashore. There was nothing for her to do but sit here and wait, shielding her eyes against the blinding brightness of the sunlight and the parlor.
Somewhere in her mind, Avari hazily remembered that her grandmother's house did not stand upon the edge of the island, nor should there be a thousand-foot drop beneath the parlor windows. The memory was too vague, though, as if it came from a dream. She shifted restlessly on the couch and dismissed the thought. What she knew right now was that she had no way to leave this room, or this house, or the life that she had lived within it, a life so full of brightness and tranquility that it made her want to scream.
It might have been only moments later, or hours, or days, when she heard a click at the door. Heralded by the whisper of silk and the fragrance of steaming tea, Grandmother Eunoe swept into the parlor. Her breathtaking presence made her entrance feel like a powerful physical impact. She set the tea tray on a low table and smiled warmly at Avari, beckoning her closer.
"Would you like me to read your fortune?" Grandmother Eunoe asked. Her voice, like her smile, was as warm as the sunlight pouring through the windows and just as glorious.
"Yes, Grandmother," she answered formally, her own voice thin and feeble in contrast.
Her grandmother bent to shuffle her tarot cards. Their backs, ornately painted in silver and blue, flashed in the light as she rearranged their order and spread them wide on the low table.
Avari found herself holding her breath as Grandmother Eunoe turned over the first card. It was blank. Slowly, her grandmother turned over the next two cards. Both of them were blank as well.
Suddenly frightened, Avari reached toward the cards and flung them across the table, turning the entire deck over with a single convulsive movement. Beneath their colorful backs, every tarot card was blank. She looked up to meet Grandmother Eunoe's eyes, seeking an answer. Her grandmother smiled calmly.
"This is your future, Avari," she purred. "Nothing. Emptiness. Forever."
Avari sprang to her feet, knocking the low table over. Grandmother Eunoe remained seated, sipping a cup of tea and not even blinking as her cards flew all over the room.
"No!" Avari shouted, trembling and terrified. "This isn't my life! That isn't my future! You can't make me!"
Her voice echoed off the walls, sounding senseless and childish even to her own ears. She spun on her heel and ran toward the doors, pulling and wrenching at them furiously with all her strength. The doors groaned and buckled, but they held. Behind her, Grandmother Eunoe took another leisurely sip of tea. Avari whirled around again and ran across the room, her boots leaving ugly scuff marks on the smooth white floor. She began banging desperately on the walls, looking for any escape, anything at all.
Unexpectedly, a door swung open beneath her pounding fist, and she ran through it, grateful beyond words to escape that parlor and those awful blank tarot cards. Avari pelted down a hallway that looked familiar, but when she reached its end, she found herself not in the library she had anticipated, but in yet another hallway. This one reminded her of the corridor that led to her tower room. Halfway along it, she saw another door, and she hurried for it quickly, as though she feared her grandmother -- or her fate -- was right behind her.
When Avari tore at the doorknob in her haste to open it, though, all she saw was a stairway. Glancing from right to left, she hesitated only a moment and ran up the stairs, her feet striking the steps like the sound of hammers. At the top of the stairs, Avari found herself deposited in a twisting, meandering hallway, completely unfamiliar to her and yet, with its white, flawless interior and artistic décor, exactly the same as every hallway in every part of Grandmother Eunoe's house.
At the end of the hallway, a Konti woman stood waiting for her. Just like with the hallway, Avari didn't recognize her in the slightest, yet she looked like every Konti woman that she had ever known, with the exception of K'Sondra. Pale, slender, and lovely, she glided down the soft-carpeted hallway toward Avari with horrible, inexorable slowness, like an automaton. She held out her arms and gave a horrid parody of a smile, with no feeling behind it and no warmth at all.
Avari screamed.
She turned around and ran back down the stairs, which spiraled downward and inward into the house. Sometimes they were marble stairs, and sometimes they turned into wooden stairs. She continued running down them, convinced that she dared not turn into any of the inviting-looking doors along the way, for fear that she might run into another Konti woman or, even worse, Grandmother Eunoe. She would not be locked into that parlor again, to contemplate the blank horror of those tarot cards of her future. She would not be held prisoner like that again. Running was better than any of that, even if the breath seared in her lungs and her legs felt like heavy iron with her exertion.
What gave her hope and strength was the cool darkness at the bottom of the stairs, so unlike the surfeit of brightness that illuminated every other chamber in Grandmother Eunoe's house. That must be the cellar, she thought. Even the word cellar had a dark, shadowy, and comforting sound to it. Though her feet ached and her lungs felt like they were on fire by now, Avari forced herself to scurry down the stairs even faster, almost tripping over her own feet in her haste.
Down there, in the darkness, she could find a brief escape from the light. The white women and white cards could not find her there.
