Six of Swords

Blue Passport into the Nest

Phengaris rebeli (long called Maculinea rebeli), a large blue butterfly, the suit's one guest who isn't a wasp or bee

The Six of Swords shows a ferryman poling a small boat across the water toward a distant shore. A cloaked woman and a child sit huddled in the bow, and six swords stand upright in the boat with them. The water is rough on one side and smooth on the other. It's the card of passage, of leaving something hard behind and crossing over, carrying it all with you.

This card's organism is a guest, a butterfly in a suit of wasps, kept here on purpose. The caterpillar of Phengaris rebeli starts life eating the flower buds of a gentian. Then it drops to the ground and ends up inside the nest of a red Myrmica ant. It smells like an ant larva. It sounds like a queen. The host ant's queens make distinctive sounds that earn them extra care, and this caterpillar makes sounds closer to the queen's than to the workers', so the ants treat it like royalty and feed it mouth to mouth. It doesn't need to eat the ant brood. It just gets fed. That pays: a single ant colony can support 4.7 times as many of these "cuckoo" caterpillars as it can of a related species that eats the brood. The price is total dependence on one kind of ant.

Scientists estimate there are around ten thousand species of social parasites cheating ant societies like this. And there is someone waiting at the far shore. The wasp of the Judgement card can find these caterpillars even in the nest, by setting the ants fighting one another.

Here's the riddle. The ferryman doesn't ask the passengers for anything but their passage. The caterpillar's passport is smell and song: it gets carried across the border of the nest by sounding like the person in charge. And the six swords in the boat are cargo. You can leave a place and still bring everything sharp with you.

When the Six appears, think about your crossing. What do you have to sound like to be let in? And what is coming with you in the boat?

Scene: a small boat crossing gray water at dusk; a red ant at the stern poling it along with a blade of grass; in the bow, a fat blue-tinged caterpillar wrapped like a child in a cloak; six slender swords standing upright among them; a gentian on the far shore.

Prompt: Write about a place you had to leave. What did you carry across with you that you didn't need to?