Page of Cups

The Page of Cups is the youth holding a cup with a fish sticking its head out, a messenger startled by a feeling. The Cups court follows one liver fluke through its whole life. The Page is its childhood, and like most childhoods it's brief, hopeful, and badly underfunded.

A fluke egg lands in water with a sheep's dung. What hatches is a miracidium, a swimmer smaller than a grain of sand and covered in beating hairs. It has no mouth that works. It can't eat. It has a few hours, maybe a day, to find one particular kind of small freshwater snail by following chemical traces in the water, and most never do. The lucky one bores into the snail and turns into a sack that makes more of itself. That's success. That's the dream it was swimming toward.

This is the card of first errands and first loves, where everything depends on reading faint signals quickly and well. The Page is all senses and no armor, which is its charm and its whole risk. It doesn't know what it's for yet. When it finds out, it will be inside a snail. If you draw it, act on the small promising signal before the window shuts, and keep one eye open for what "home" is going to mean once you get there.

Little swimmer, the lantern is a snail.