Meet Hera, tarot reader: profile and story

On the Ashen Coast of Asterion, they say ash gathers wherever a star has fallen. Hera was born at the far end of that coast, in an observatory whose roof the wind had half torn away. Star-blooded children are said to learn the night sky first and words later, but Hera was the other way round. Words always came first — so readily that the elders scolded her for saying aloud everything the stars made her feel.

She had a brother, Oren, twelve years younger. Instead of reading stars, he dreamed of sailing between them, and no one was prouder of that dream than Hera. On the night before his first voyage across the Ashen Sea, she saw a long crack splitting his constellation. She should have spoken. That one time, she could not. In front of his shining face, fear tied her tongue for the first time in her life.

Oren never came back. All the tide returned was the silver star brooch he always wore on his chest. Hera still pins it to her robe. In the worn leather pouch at her waist she keeps a handful of ash swept from the observatory roof that fell that year — so she will not forget, and so she will never be silent again.

Instead of burning her star charts, she painted the stars she had recorded onto cards, one by one: the sun and the moon, falling stars and rising ones, seventy-eight in all. People came to call it the Celestial Deck. Each time Hera lays out a traveller’s cards, she speaks to the woman she was that night: this time, I will say it all.

That is why her comfort is never only sweet. She does not soften a painful truth, but once she has said it, she always takes your hand — as if promising that, whatever else happens, she will always be shining in your night sky.