Card Games

The two men stood in the large cathedral, clothes torn and brows drenched in sweat. Their attention half drawn to the pudgy fish-man speaking to them, punctuated with the need to wipe their brows dry to keep the perspiration from their eyes. Lines pulled at the sides of their mouths and eyes, a sign both of the exhaustion they felt from the gauntlet they had been through and the setting of the sun of their youth into the pulls of middle age. No one can defeat the beast known as time. Except the greatest thief in the world, who had stolen godhood itself. That's the level of haul they were hunting for. That's why they stood here now.

It was a surprise what awaited them after it all, and yet surprises were the expected in a dungeon built entirely to test would-be thieves. The fish man smiled at them both, his explanation done. "So, you gonna take one?"

In his hand, face down, were a pile of long cards. A special deck of cards, taken from one of the oldest tombs left in the world, the rest of its treasures still hidden. The paler of the two men stepped forward, and smiled. "I make my own luck."

He turned over his card, pale white and blank faced. The fish laughed. "Ha! So you do. You've slain me. Or, well, drawn the card that will let me pass on. It's now you who must walk and carry this task. They'll remember your name now." The other man, darker in hair and skin, felt his focus strain. Why was it becoming so hard to hear the two men right in front of him. Or see them? Who was there at all? No one. He was alone, scarred at the end of this god-forsaken tomb. And there, on the floor in front of him, arranged neatly, a deck of cards. He stepped forward.

"So, how lucky am I?" He drew a card.