The future waits for no one

He found dad with mom drinking and seeming to be enjoying themselves.  Well, who wasn’t enjoying themselves?  This party was great!  All the exploring and playing games in the area.  Stones to leap off of, dig under or play hide and go seek.  Really, just sitting there drinking couldn’t be nearly as fun as all Thorn had been up to.  The familiars were really swell also, giving him these cards and explaining them.

“Alright, so the thing is,” Thorn took a deep breath, maybe a bit of an overly deep breath as he suck in as much as he could before breathing out, “you have to take a real good deep breath and imagine you’re sucking up all the magic at the same time.  Then you breathe out to get rid of any bad luck.”  Ok, so the familiars hadn’t said this part but Thorn had figured it out.  It made sense to him.

Thorn tapped the top card twice advising, “this brings the right card to the top magically.”  Thorn wasn’t sure how all of it worked but that had to be done magically if it changed depending on who it was for, right?

Thorn slid the top card of his stack, getting his toes under it to flip it over.  The card was the three of swords and was upside down.  Thorn really didn’t understand any of these important details.  He just saw three swords crossed with  heart in the middle as if pierced.  A storm cloud with rain was also in the background.  That was a cool card! It had swords in it and had Thorn's tail whipping back and forth.  See? It worked!  Right away his sword-wielding dad got swords.  Ok, it's meaning!

Thorn looked at the card, taking another deep breath as he apparently needed to breathe in more magic.  “Right, so this is obvious now.  So this future is where you give me, bramble and for some reason Dusk swords!” It was three swords so it had to be three of them.  Taly wasn’t interested in fighting but he had already seen Bramble interested in swords and Dusk charged into lots of stuff.  “The heart shows how we all love each other and protect those we love with our swords.” Thorn eyed that rain cloud, “uh, even if it's raining.”

Thorn flipped the next card over, eyes boggling, “woooah, there’s gonna be an epic battle coming up!  You need to get us those swords fast!” The image of a castle turret in flames seemed quite eager with it.  “Look at that! A powerful enemy came along and set the castle on fire.  We knew it was coming though obviously, that’s why you gave us swords.”

Thorn put his paw on the last card, looking up at dad grinning, “So, maybe the next one will show if we win the battle?  You get three cards only so sure hope so!”

"Thorn Carpathius"