Free Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls by Mark Teppo Page B

in the margins originally, as if it was being sucked out of my finger, a vampiric leech drawing out my blood.
    The Chorus stormed, strands of white fog twisting into a tight nexus. The sound of their voices climbed in volume and pitch, growing louder until I was sure the sound was leaking out my ears. Without warning, the balloon of noise popped.
    Splitting like a piece of rotten fruit, the Chorus vomited a flood of images. My headache increased, as if all of these memory shards had weight and presence. As if they were cutting and slicing their way through my gray matter. I ripped my finger off the card, and the external world went fluid on me, receding like a camera lens pulling back. Everything became distant and indistinct. Contrails like stretched taffy hung in the wake of all moving objects, as if I were slowly falling through time. In my mind's eye, I was under assault by a barrage of images, a viral download of sensations from Philippe's memory. Nothing visual; this was all emotional and tactile memory. In that burst of data, I learned the extent of his pain, and not only did my head ache, but my left leg did as well. It felt like I had been burned.
    Philippe's cancer.
    We all have a part to play in this . His voice drifted past me, like a satellite orbiting my head. Yesterday seemed like such a long time ago. Already the memory—bifurcated by his point of view overlapping my own—seemed distant, as if it were already crossing the horizon. Every point between now and then seemed to be both equidistant and part of the present. There are no Witnesses, he sighed. There are only participants. We are all part of the design .
    I saw him holding up his hands, nine fingers raised. Like the Nine of Swords. We are all part of the same pain. We all pass through Yesod.
    With a physical pop, I snapped out of this vision. The liquid in my coffee cup quivered, and a bus coughed as it crossed the nearby intersection. A bird flew in front of the sun, and I was dazzled by the flicker of shadow and light.
    The Nine of Swords lay on the ground, face-down, and without turning it over, I picked it up and shuffled it back into the deck. The back of my neck was cool with sweat, and my hands shook slightly.
    While in Seattle, I had become friends with Piotr Grieavik, an old Georgian seaman who had floated into the Puget Sound region a few decades ago. He did tarot readings out of his Airstream, and his silver trailer moved in concert with the flow of energy in the city. He was good, a True Seeing reader, and he saw the cards as a means to clarify our location and vector on the morphic fields. I wasn't sure if the fluidity of Philippe's cards would fascinate or terrify him. There was a difference, he had told me once, between interpreting the future and influencing the future.
    When my hands stopped fluttering and my heart calmed down, I cut the deck and looked at the two cards. The Fool and the Magician. "You're funny, Old Man," I muttered, and the Chorus slithered through my brain like oil across water. I put these two on the table, face up, and then buried them beneath the rest of the deck, like a layer of fall leaves covering the seeds planted for spring.
    I took a sip from my cup, and glanced at the traffic and people walking along the sidewalk. All so normal. All so mundane. A normal day, late in the season; life moving toward spring again, getting ready to bud and grow another year.
    When I dug up the Fool and the Magician, they had changed into the Ten of Pentacles and Ace of Cups.
    The Marseille Ten only shows the coins, and there is no background on it like the gate and magician that crops up in the Rider-Waite deck. Nor is there the re-arrangement of the coins into the positions of the Tree of the Sephiroth. The Marseille Ten is just a field of coins, but the meaning is the same. This is the realization of spiritual wealth in the death of the gross body. This is the breath of resurrection that is the reward for those who have