Mothette's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

After Mothman left, Mothette gathered her deck and stepped out into the swamp light. Dusk was hours away. She had time for one trial — one reading on a living person who faced real risk — and she needed it before she sat across from Mothman again at the falls. If she froze then, he would go in alone with nothing but her silence at his back. She knew where to find the Frogman. He walked the roads at odd hours, hood up, watching things no one else watched. She found him crouched at the edge of a culvert, staring into the dark pipe as if it owed him an answer. He was smaller than she expected up close — a green figure in a torn brown cloak, hands folded in front of him like a monk who had lost his church. "Frogman," she said. Her wings shook. "I need to read for you. A real reading. Something you're actually afraid of." He turned his big round eyes on her. He exhaled slowly. "People ask me for luck," he said. "You're asking for the opposite." "I'm asking for the truth. I need to practice telling it." He sat down on the wet grass. "Eleven years ago I saw something under a bridge. I go back every week. I want to know if I should stop." Mothette knelt and spread her cloth. Her hands wanted to shake. She let them. She shuffled the deck slowly and laid three cards between them. A figure carrying too many staves. A hooded shape at a threshold. A single coin, half-buried. Her mouth opened to soften it. She stopped. She looked at the cards again and made herself see only what was there. "You're carrying more than the thing under the bridge," she said. "The second card is a door you keep standing at. You haven't gone through. The coin says something small is still owed to you — or by you. I can't tell which." She swallowed. "The cards don't say stop. They say you haven't finished." The Frogman was quiet a long time. "That's closer than anyone's gotten," he said. "I thought you only did good omens." "I'm trying not to," she said. He stood. He touched the top card once with a webbed finger. "Go do whatever you came to practice for. You're ready enough." She walked back through the reeds with the deck warm in her hands. Her breath had steadied somewhere during the reading and had not come loose again. She had spoken plainly to a stranger about his own life and he had not flinched. She could do it again at dusk. She could sit across from Mothman at the falls and turn the cards and say what she saw, even if what she saw was him not coming back. The sun was already lowering. She started for the falls.