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Lavenza’s fiery glare will not release the card trapped between her fingers, nor the ultramarine bouquet in the vase on her tea table. Even with her elegance and dignity as Igor’s youngest and hardest-working assistant (for their current guest, anyway), her mind boils a concoction of anger and frustration.
Or rather, it stirs together anger, frustration…and yet a curiosity that, like Ren Amamiya on the day Lavenza was revived as her true self, refuses to lay down all defenses and be sacrificed to the oblivious embrace of nothing.
She remembers her barely-simmering excitement as she received her card from Igor. Oh sure, she would’ve been content with not having a card of the tarot to claim as her great new journey in life (or whatever her family’s equivalent to the human “life” is). She’d warmly applaud and commend her brother and sisters for their own journeys, and she would heartily carry her own weight.
All things considered, the Aeon should be a very exciting card to have drawn. Some of their guests’ most alien, yet evocative companions in history were of the Aeon Arcana: a beautiful woman of man-made matter and inorganic, yet pure-hearted mind; and Margaret’s own alleged “apprentice,” until the rude and abrasive brat was recalled as a goddess, and then moved out to live on her own in Inaba.
But that’s exactly what roils the pouting little lady. What does that make of her as a being? The Velvet Room’s esteemed faculty might not be completely human, but they are human enough. They each have enough qualities in character and aura (not just appearances) to be strongly tethered to mortal humanity.
But as far as Lavenza’s been told by her sisters, Aigis and Marie of the Aeon Arcana were distinctly inhuman. They would eventually transmogrify their soul, if not their bodies as well, to be human—but they initially were anything but.
It leaves Lavenza with a cruel disquiet that the broilings of anger, frustration, and curiosity might only mark the mere beginnings of.
“Does something trouble you, Lavenza?”
Her heart spasms in terror as the familiar, lovely croon of her master wafts in from the door to her right. She silently screams for herself to maintain composure—
“There, there.” Even though he seldom leaves his desk, Igor ties his hands behind his back and saunters over as though he tirelessly walked kilometers daily. “You’re my assistant, and that’s exactly why I must attend to your questions. Do not fear me as those twins feared my evil imposter.”
As she was born to uphold, Lavenza releases her tension to the air at the sound of Igor’s request.
“The Aeon Arcana,” she begins aloud, fresh tarot still in hand, “though also the bluebell flower, but to a lesser degree. I cannot leap to the conclusion that my existence is hideously warped with their patronage to me. However, I am not sure what exactly to feel from them.”
Speaking of, her gaze turns back to the bouquet on the table. Humility, constancy, gratitude, and everlasting love, the bluebells’ symbolism is articulated as ever-so benevolently. It’d be a less unsettling sign…if not for the rude clashing against the tellings of Aeon.
“Perhaps I need to meditate further on its meaning for me,” Lavenza sighs, feeling foolish to have been excited, then angered, and so on.
“Is that not what you’re doing already?” Igor ponders, his smile never, ever wavering (as expected of him). “Maybe it’s the guidance of a friend or outsider you seek instead. Its revelations for you are beyond my knowledge, but that’s a separate matter from conversing about what it could mean for you.”
She…hadn’t quite considered that yet. Perhaps the twins’ memories of the malevolent Yaldabaoth lingered in her faintest apprehensions.
Putting them aside, therefore, she nods to her master.
“We must always remember,” Igor continues, “that for us, our guests, and their own links and confidants, all is revealed within the Arcana—but it’s not always of a single lifetime, or even of a small fraction within it. Even the…’parallel’ Wildcards of Makoto Yuki and Kotone Shiomi passed onto the Aigis of each their worlds when their shared, certain fate came to pass.”
Lavenza’s hand flies over the small gasp from her mouth. As exciting as it is to recall of her Aeon counterpart’s story…surely then, Ren wouldn’t meet the same fate as—
“Oh, dear Lavenza,” Igor chuckles, patting his assistant’s head, “don’t fear that you and Ren Amamiya would be forced to tread the same steps. He and Yu Narukami, after all, continue their journeys as bearers of the Wildcard, even as our time with them has concluded…for now, anyways.” He kindly returns his hand to the other behind him. “So do Todo-san, Suou-san, and Amano-san, all having taken their own journeys many years ago.” His voice is nostalgic yet optimistic, when a sharp glint in his eyes tells Lavenza to listen close. “As does Marie, also bound to the Aeon Arcana like you and, still in some way, Aigis.”
Lavenza lets a pause linger a moment longer, when the question becomes clear instead of the answer.
“Then what does it mean,” Lavenza ponders, “for the Arcana to stay present after the initial journey?”
Igor lets another pause linger, though he’s gracious to stop it from polluting the inquisitive, yet calm air. “Perhaps, that’s for you to find out, after all.” Somehow, his impregnable smile gleams brighter than ever. “In no way do I mean to send you down a crude rabbit hole with this, my dear lady. I truly mean that, regardless of one’s patron Arcana, its calling for them does not end with that of the journey that first awakens them. It continues with them—and its revelations can be added to, or modified. Even completely changed.”
Lavenza feels as though she’s in reach—but something’s missing. She gladly receives her master’s words, but there’s yet—
“Perhaps that is what Aeon advises you to study.” Now Igor strikes at something within his assistant’s heart. “In learning of humanity and our guests from the Velvet Room, you may grow as the Arcana foretells of you.”
Lavenza looks back at the card, absorbing the way her unique deck translates the Egyptian god Thoth to its red-and-black, macabre aesthetics.
Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom, made relevant in the Velvet Room’s tarot after centuries of being a relic in a rarer deck…the Aeon is not an outlier to scoff at.
“In a sense,” Igor continues, “every individual person—and even every group of them with a primal, core objective—takes on the ‘Fool’s Journey.’ It’s only been our lineage of Wildcard guests—from Todo to Amamiya—whose paths we bear full witness to.”
Lavenza takes a long, reflective pause. “In other words, Master, you’re saying I should seek out individual ‘journeys’ to study that of my own.”
Igor sagely nods. “And you may come and go from here as you wish. You might find it wisest to request Ren Amamiya’s assistance at any point in the day for now. He and his friends would prove a remarkable few ‘leads.’ I surmise that your journey lies within those of the people that make up the collective unconscious we know so well.”
The tendrils of her shimmering white hair follow her turn from the card to the vase of bluebells to her side.
Lavenza pledges an optimistic smile—and a glimmering sparkle brings her back to the Aeon card.