Pisces Rising's Arc

Chapter 4 of 6

After Aries Mars left, Pisces Rising stood alone in the chamber. Her hands still tingled from the vision she'd shared with him. She walked to the lattice beside the table, the one that hummed when she whispered to it. Her mother's voice echoed in her memory—gentle but firm. She reached toward the prism's surface, fingers trembling an inch away. The rainbow light danced across her translucent palm. She remembered the garden where she'd been twelve years old, touching the wall where prophecies appeared. The vision had torn through her so fast she couldn't breathe—futures collapsing into a single unbearable truth about a neighbor's death. Her mother found her collapsed beside the shells and pearls scattered in the nest, hands bleeding light instead of blood. "Never touch them directly," her mother had whispered, folding a paper into an airplane and writing the warning across its wings. "Always speak to the lattice first. Let it filter what you see." Pisces Rising pulled her hand back now. She'd broken that rule with Aries Mars—touched his palm directly, let the full weight of his future crash into her without protection. It had worked. He'd believed her because she'd seen everything, unfiltered and raw. But her hands still shook, and the chamber felt too bright. She could offer visions this way to every skeptic who came through her doors. Prove her gift was real by touching them all, one after another, until no one doubted. The thought made her sick. She pressed both palms against the lattice and whispered the old words. The prism hummed, refracting her voice into colors that spread across the walls. The vision came slower this time—gentler—showing her the same future she'd seen in Aries Mars but wrapped in metaphor instead of brutal clarity. The lattice had always protected her from drowning in what she saw. She lifted her hands and stared at them, steady now. She would prove her gift was real, but not by destroying herself to do it. Tomorrow, when the skeptics came, she would teach them to whisper to the lattice too. Let them see what she saw, filtered through safety instead of pain. It would take longer. Some might not believe. But she would still be whole when it was done.