5: The Hierophant

His hands brush along translucent pages made from calfskin and sheepskin emblazoned with arcane sigils. Sun-starved fingertips trace the graphs and runes of endless circles and pentacles and the ornate wings of zodiacal angels. His eyes are bright, blazing with ancient knowledge compacted into leatherbound, heaven-sent tomes.
His days begin with the chiming of bells and the wafting of incense through the pores of his wooden door. His mornings are spent somewhere else, locked away inside of his mind, desperately stretching angular arms at spiritual doorways on astral planes. He tries to find the universe in handed-down mantras and chants delivered to the earth in unison by tall figures in identical, white cloaks. He makes pilgrimages to altars bearing representations of what some dead old man considered to be enlightenment.
And he revels in it, rushing breathless from one esoteric illumination to the next, his eyes shining and blooming and breaking their ceaseless racing only to rush from one assigned text to the next.
Knowledge is his sustenance. His bread and his breath and his beads of sweat. 

For his meals he consumes little, more concerned with nourishing his spirit than his body. In his mind (if it is even his) wise, holy men are haggard and emaciated, as a testament to their commitment to the divine. He does not know what strange, cosmic truths link deprivation to devotion, but he does not question it. Who has time to ponder what is bestowed when there are parables to memorize and correspondences to categorize and foreign herbs to dry and grind? No, he cannot question if he is to ascend. 

As the sun droops into the evening he retires to a window seat, so the orange light of the dying day can spill onto parchment pages he covers in black ink, regurgitating the lessons he's learned, and discovering hidden pockets of wisdom in the age-old truths. He smiles and wonders if this is what he was meant to find, if this is the piece of the puzzle that spins threads of interconnection across islands of isolated theories. The thought is fleeting, as he returns to his transcribing

When the sky is black and dotted with stars he drags heavy legs draped in rough-spun robes up winding, stone steps, to a tiny tower room. And he thrusts his skull into the cool rush of nighttime air, and affixes his eyes onto shapes found in the light of stars that will have gone supernova by the time he sees them. His eyes turn to glass, into orbs, into scrying pools of pure thought, caught and transfixed in the dark shapes between incandescent bodies of hydrogen gas. 

His bed is hard, but his exhaustion transmutates it into cloudlike meringues of silk. When he dreams it is of facts he has memorized but not comprehended, of truths he still takes at face value, of hard lines drawn on old pages.

He dreams of strange things too, somewhere in the depths of his mind, of uncertainties, and ambiguities, of the rush of moonlight on water.

For now, however, he is ruled by the sharp outlines of the sun's silhouettes, by the gnawing hunger burrowing  into his soul, by the promise that someday, someday, someday, he will know the heart of the universe. 

4: The Emperor

Armor and stone and power and stone tablets erected on the poles of the corners of the city. They flash through his dreams with the clang of sword on sword, lance against lance, all contained and pressed and pulped in the controlled panic  of a tourney. His thoughts are in orange and red and black and slate gray, in the comfort of a strong hand that claps you on the shoulder, in the lines and lines of oak trees running as pre-positioned shade along a straight path.
His throne is hewn from granite and might, roughly, uniformly decked with the sigils of Aries. His kingdom is resolute, complete, absolute, flourishing, plentiful, prodigal. He raises it up from brick and mortar, stone by stone, his hands growing calloused from the strain of the weight of the push of the people. The people surging against him, calling for a solution, for he is king, now and forever, until order and reason unravel into chaos like errant spools of thread.
So he rises up, shoulders back and head high, with the blaze of a plan in the whites of his eyes, and the will to follow through in the fields of his pupils.
When he smiles it is rare. Approving. Loving and fond and praising, upraising, uplifting like the sense of fat, little legs resting on the broad shoulders of your father. When he offers affection it is like water, like plants that aren't parched but could stand to be watered just a bit more, and when his arms clasp around yours, it is the rainstorm that revives this year's crop.
He knows this somewhere in the back of his mind, but it is muffled by the steady 1-2-1-2 march of soldier's boots and maps of plots of ever-changing, ever-shifting, ever-buzzing border lines he's trying to bring to absolute zero, muffled by the petitions of peasants and this year's river level, and hard lines, hard lines, rising up and swarming his head so he turns to logic for clarity.
His mind is a montage of felled trees for timber and risen huts for shelter and each day of his begins with the clang of the drawbridge lowering.
Such is the life of an Emperor, whose hours are capured by the growth of a kingdom, who hasn't the time for the flourishing or fluttering or clouding of his heart. He hasn't the time to show he feels more than the mere beat and blaze of the orange sun on his tanned and hardened skin.

3: The Empress

She is made from buttery yellows and rich, forest queen greens. There are cotton dandelions woven through strands of wheat-colored hair, and soft fabrics upon fabrics draping and drooping in endless folds of comfort. The woods melt into her glade, up to the base of her grass throne. Lush poppies are sewn into the seams of her gown, and the ground blooms beneath  the soles of her feet.

There are vibration of vivacity reverberetating beneath the layers of her skin, a buzzing of bees wings hovering in her ears, humming, humming, humming with life. The round skin of violet grapes bursts through the petals of her lips, along with the sugary splendidness of candied violet petals. She feasts on froths and fluffs of honey cakes, and dense morsels of golden sunlight.

She smiles a smile like the curve of a thigh, with a steady light pulsing in the depths of dark green eyes. Her skin holds the scent of apple blossoms and new milk and heady, sweet perfume.

She is the earth, and it wraps itself in her, running roots through her clavicle and leaves in her womb. She is full and soft and when she sings, the desert blooms. She is the whooshing of wind through goldgreenred apple trees, and the scent of new baked bread caught from the window breeze. She is the comfort of fleshy arms and honest charms, and lilies curling like daffodils, and she is the swell of sunlight that fills and fills.

And she is forever the Queen.

2: The High Priestess

She watches from behind the two-way mirror, atop the throne cloaked in a waterfall. The moon is perched atop her head and caught beneath her feet in a shallow thrash of sea water. The ocean puddle pools at the soles of her feet, faded from the billowing bottom of her robe, whose folds contain darkness and lightness and enlightendness, all sedentary and stationary and stiller than a mill pond.
Secrets swirl in the concave conclaves of her subconscious. 
So she sits, she waits, shoulders pressed firmly back in a nonchalant display of regal clairvoyance. Her eyes reflect in the endless halls of the scrying pool, deep and dark and dappled in mirrors, as within her, the light of foresight glimmers.
To kiss her is to taste pomegranate seeds and frankincense, to gape in awe at the sudden realization of your own ignorance. For she is the Lady of the Lake, the Oracle at Delphi, she is Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. She knows and she sees, and her wisdom is bound in the whirlpool of her mind. It is there that the pas, present, future all melt together like water and ice in the sun.
She sees all, and she contemplates, and is bound by pillars of balance beside her. Never interfere, that age-old-maxim-of-the-all-knowing.
Knowing is one way of putting it. She views, it is true. The lines of connection and coincidence beam across to her like slats of moonlight through a murky window. She watches, through the crystal ball, through the lines of fate on pinkish palms, through the shapes that ooze out of cracking eggs, and the memories left behind by gulped tea. She observes, through the orbs of happenstance that stain themselves into constellations. She sees and she whispers and her mind whispers back, gnawing at her from the inside-out.
Always thinking and whirring and whizzing along, with the thoughts of her mind zooming from neuron to neuron at breakneck, slow-as-a-passable-stream speed.
The moon shows her silvery pathways, gleaming with possibility and lust and sensation and pain. And the moon bars her from them, trapping her in the oceans' gravitational, eternal ebb and flow. She is bound and gagged, seeing all and knowing all, unable to make sense of it.
So she sits. And waits. And watches. Forever.

1: The Magician

His mind is a knife, is a sword, is an athame, surging through the air to cut his thoughts into the pockets of the universe. The elements, he thinks with thrust-back shoulders and puffed-out chest, belong to him. It's the other way round, but everything is relative.
The earth is steady on his altar, humming firmly within the solid confines of the pentacle coin. Fire resides there as well, raging through the wood of the wand without burning it. Cackling and licking the air, but only to strike a spark. Water flows within the chalice, responding effortlessly to the beads of humidity caught in the folds of the troposphere.And the air is analyzing him, wrapped and bound within the sword. It is the clarity of thought slicing across his mind.
One must keep a clear head, you see, when trifling with the might of the universe.
Determination blazes in his eyes, ceremonial robes draped across his arms in a pompous display. All the possibility of the word is whirring just above his head, invisible to him, and so he tries to summon the power  instead.
Unaware, unaware, roaring with intent and purpose, with knowledge garnered from leather-bound books that smelled to him like arcane truths. Still so very much a Fool, cloaking his innocence in the vitality of crimson cloth and overwhelming incense.
The wind whistles as he summons the East, humoring him. When he beckons the West, droplets of water vapor caught in the air condensate on the baby-fine hairs of his head. With the invocation of the South comes a sudden burst of sunshine through cloud-caps. It burns into his sophomoric eyes, and he revels in the harshness. Finally comes the North, the earth, which merely hints of the stirrings of deep-rooted life, both ancient and fledgling at once.
The Magician stands tall, ablaze in glory, Above and Below meeting in the mountaintops of his mind, the universe just barely out of reach, just over the horizon.
He mutters a memorized chant beneath his breath, ignorant of just how far the horizon is.

0: The Fool

He was pink faced with spindly legs that had never walked a mile, and tearless eyes who'd never seen the curve and pitch of the sky. He was blind in the way of a youth, a blindness that appears long before cataracts and red veins along strained whites. To call him an Ingenue would be to oversell his cunning.
The hollow pole that held his airy belongings bore deeply into his shoulder, and the smooth bottoms of his feet grew weary within minutes of striking the ground. A thoughtless smile was etched deeply into the contours of his face, a smile which would later inspire wrinkles but today merely hints at radiance.
Eyes closed and the cliff is drawing near to him, beneath smooth, new shoes and the slight weight of the petals in his hand.
Drawing nearer now, nearer, rocks curling and cracking away beneath his feet, and his smile grows wider at what he feels freedom to be.
He stops, half a second away from empty air and broken bones, innocence still intact. Dumb luck, some say, thought they all had it once. Fools are prone to good fortune, after all. It's their consolation prize from the universe. A pat on the back to offer comfort before you thrust their insubstantial forms from the cliff face.
So the Fool wanders on, playing the game of the vagabond, along the dusty, darkling road that to him only brings out the stars. The fool wanders on, singing his song. Sill such a trifling, little bird unaware of the pain he'll soon endure. The pain he's been living, again and again, since the start of it all, and will continue to until time folds in on itself like so many burnt souffles.
But for now, he is the Fool. He is the Fool, he was the Fool, he will be the Fool, wandering along an endless road forevermore, with all of us watching, pitying, pretending we don't envy what we once were.