Pause at the Soothsayers Tent

“John Lemure. I see your foes sport the masks of friends as they seek to entrap you. It seems your prospects are most assuredly enslavement and sweat feminine bondage … but for a price I can pierce the veil of the future and tell see your ultimate fate,” the wizened old hag beckons you to enter through her heavily curtained entrance.

Usually you are not interested in fortune tellers, but for some reason this crone’s snaking words strike a chord and pique your curiosity. You are also vaguely perplexed how she knows your name. With little better to do you follow her into her sagging tent. Within its dusky interior a brazier smelters away and releases a pungent resiny smoke.

“Sit, relax, you are safe here, far safer than many other places in this world,” you sit amongst opulent pillows decorated with suns and moons and stars. A small table stands before you, covered with entrails and casting bones. The ancient seer sits down on the other side of the table and motions through the smoke in slow oblique movements. You blink in the haze and stare into her hooded visage. Within you see the glimmer of eyes. The eyes move about, floating queerly. One blinks shut and another winks open, like anemones in the knighted sea. It could be some simple sorcerers trick or the cloying narcotic smoke, but this hag seems to have more than two eyes.

“You said you could tell me of my future?” you prompt.

“Yesss,” she says, “for a price.”

“And what might that be?”

She chuckles and her laugh ends in a tittering little hiss. “Nothing you cannot afford. So tell me what you wish to see?”

“We must agree on the price before you show me,” you say. “Only a fool enters into a bargain without knowing the price,” you say.

“True. Then perhaps a taste to whet your appetite,” she says, “no cost. Do you agree?”