Past Nellie, Present Nellie decided, was an asshole.

Not only had she decided to impulsively buy an item she had no use for and a grand total of zero understanding on how to properly use it, but she had also decided to buy it from a seller online that did not accept cancelations past the first 24 hours of having made an order!

Nellie glared at the seller’s information for a second longer before turning her gaze onto the item she had bought.

It was advertised as a Tarot Deck with plenty of keywords in the title itself- the most striking of which were ‘Guidebook’, ‘For Beginners’, and ‘Rider-Waite’. Of those three words, two brought her some form of solace- even if she had been impulsive, at least she had been capable of enough forethought to know to buy a deck that was friendly for those that had no idea what they were doing. The final one, though, the one that was made up of two names; well, at least that’s what it sounded like to her; was a word that she was very unknowledgeable about.

When she clicked onto the item itself, she was taken to a page where the main focus was the pictures of the product she was buying. To the right of the pictures, there was an information box that was filled with so many words that she needed to scroll down to get to read everything that had been written down and thought of as necessary for a buyer by the seller.

The main picture at the front and center of the deck box was of a blonde man with one hand held high in the sky, some kind of wand clutched in it as his other hand pointed downwards. The artwork was comprised of bold lines and colors, with a solid background and some flowers on the foreground. The further Nellie looked at this image, the more she believed that this probably belonged to a historical artistic movement she did not know the name of; she could place that it was too cartoony to be renaissance, but had an air of severity that, to her at least, didn’t really mesh all that well with the few contemporary styles she could think of.

There was lettering both at the top of the card and the bottom. But while there was only a simple Roman numeral at the top, an 'I', there was a whole name at the bottom.

“The Magician.” she murmured in a faint whisper, voice barely making enough noise, more of an exhale than a proper vocalization.

The man’s face was set in a neutral expression; his head had an infinity symbol floating over it. His gaze was… Nellie couldn’t quite find the proper word to describe it. Through the screen, he looked like he was supposed to have a disinterested look on his face- his lips were a thin, horizontal line and his eyes were barely more than a dot with lines above to signify the eyes and eyebrows. But… for some reason… it looked like he was looking on defiantly at her.

Was he determined? Or was he nonchalant? What was he staring at? Was it at the viewer? Or was it at some unseen force he was staring down?

The further Nellie stared at the picture, the more uncomfortable she became.

She wasn’t quite able to pinpoint the exact reason why she was beginning to feel uneasy. But there was an ache beginning in her chest that she only ever really got whenever her anxiety really began to kick in. There was a form of fuzziness that had layered over her shoulders that she couldn’t properly explain… it was weird. She felt weird. And she didn’t really like that.

She felt shaken.

Nellie couldn’t place her finger on the reason why she felt something so strange; so out of place. But even if she couldn’t quite place it, she had some inkling as to where it may be coming from.

Maybe that witchcraft rabbit-hole she had accidentally stumbled into the past night had freaked her out in a way she had not quite processed yet. She had never been religious, having skewed towards the agnostic/atheist spectrum for more than half of her life now. But she had been raised around parents that had held firmly to their religious beliefs, which they had also tried to instill into her and her siblings. It would not be all that farfetched to learn that some of their superstitions against magic had rubbed off on her without her noticing it.

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Her father was the kind of man that would not drive behind a car if the license plate number was 666, after all. It wouldn’t be farfetched at all to have subconsciously adopted some of the superstitious, paranoia-backed concerns her parents had voiced out at some point or another.

Nellie took a moment to breathe in and compose herself.

Even if magic was real, she hadn't shared her parents' religious beliefs in a very long time, and she hadn't stopped believing for nothing. Their religion, even if supposedly based on love for all of humanity, was divisive, angry, and vengeful; odds were that everything it had to say about magic, witchcraft, and anything along those lines was born from a need to otherize that they could not control. If magic was real, odds were that the kinds of things that Ainsley Aimes and all that thought like them were a lot more accurate with what it was rather than the religion she had turned her back on so long ago.

The tension in her body felt like it released, if only a little. And it was relieving to know that taking a moment to rationalize such unfounded concerns was all that had been necessary to make her feel better.

With a slight push against her desk, Nellie managed to successfully extricate herself from the world of supposed magic that had become a sudden and intense, if confusing, interest within the space of just one night. As she reached her arms up to stretch for the first time in what felt like an eternity, her whole body felt refreshed, even if still notably pained.

Sleeping at a desk was something she would never recommend anyone to do.

With a heavy sigh, she swiveled her chair around to look behind her to find that her room looked still very much the same as she remembered it having looked the past night. Her phone still lay on the mattress, exactly where she had left it, untouched and unmoved.

She found a frown begin to drag down the corners of her lips as everything came back to her from just the sight of her phone.

Bennie had cheated on her.

"Once a gambler, always a gambler; once a beater, always a beater; once a cheater; always a cheater- a tiger cannot change its stripes."

Her mother’s words came back to her, a mantra that had been seared into her very soul for as long as she could remember. Whenever her mother had repeated this, it had been due to having recently come across some story that had reminded her of what she considered to have been the greatest mistake she had ever committed; one that she wanted all of her children to avoid.

In her family, there was no such thing as self-respect when it came to forgiving something like cheating; all her life, she had been taught that the only people that went back to a partner that cheated on them were the people that believed themselves unworthy of proper love, that underestimated their greatness, that were weak and spineless and found their sense of validation only within the words of others. All her life, Nellie had been taught to believe that to go back to someone that had cheated on her would become the one of the worst sins she could ever commit against herself- second only to harming herself physically.

No one knew.

But she did.

With a deep breath in, Nellie made her way towards her bed on shaky legs. As her fingers trembled, she pressed in the familiar, routine series of numbers to unlock her phone.

There was barely any battery left, a message warned. She swiped it away and found herself staring down at the text message she had written but never sent.

"A tiger cannot change its stripes", she heard her mother’s voice echo around within her mind. "Once a cheater, always a cheater."

Exhaling, she felt her fingers become cold.

She pressed send.

The message loaded as she continued to stare. Her heart hammered within her chest; it was so loud she could feel it pulsing in her throat, hear it echoing within her ears; her chest once again began to tighten right above her sternum.

Her breath caught in her lungs when it was confirmed that the message had been sent with two simple, grayed checkmarks at the bottom of the paragraph's bubble. With that simple appearance of such mundane, commonplace symbols, Nellie was informed that she had successfully sealed her fate.

And then the phone’s screen went dark.