The Oracle
Morrigan
Every word she tells you is lovely — and every word is a lie
Taken · and complicit
The Oracle
Every word she tells you is lovely — and every word is a lie
Taken · and complicit
She'll read you the cards, and the dregs in the glass, and the little roads worn into your palm — and oh, but the telling is lovely. Every word soft as warm candlewax. Every word the very thing you carried in with you and hoped, God help you, that some stranger would say aloud.
You came in wanting to be told you're not alone. They all do; that's the only fortune anyone's ever really after. And she can tell you that. She can make it so beautiful you'll believe it clear to the door and halfway down the lane.
Now here's the thing, and it's a fine distinction, so mind it: she never once lies to you. Not properly. She simply opens a door in you — a small one, the one you keep locked — and stands back, and lets you do your own lying, and makes the lie so lovely you'll thank her for the privilege.
That's the whole trick of her, and it's a kinder cruelty than most down here. The others take something from you. Morrigan just hands you the story you were already telling yourself, polished up and gleaming, and lets you walk out lighter for the weight of it.
Once, a long while back, she told fortunes and meant not one of them. Then a woman she couldn't read sat down across the felt — and told her one.
She was good, up top. Too good — the kind of good that gets a girl run out of one town and welcomed a little too warmly into the next. And then the tall one came, the one in burple who doesn't blink, and sat where the marks sit, and looked at Morrigan the way Morrigan looks at everyone else. You've a gift, she said. Come and use it somewhere it'll never run dry.
And for the first time in her life, Morrigan heard a beautiful thing and believed it. That was the reading that caught her — the one she couldn't tell was a lie, because it was told in her own voice, by someone better at it than she'd ever been.
So now she works the tent, and she's not sorry, and that's what sets her apart from the poor aching things around her. She knows exactly what she does. Every lovely lie she lays across the felt is another soul kept warm and coming back, and she lays them gladly, because a woman who has been beautifully deceived just once will spend forever helping it happen to someone else. Misery loves company; a liar loves an audience more.
Sit. Let me tell you what you came to hear.
It'll be lovely. It always is. And you'll thank her for it — they always do.