Three of Swords

The Three of Swords is the plainest card in the deck: a red heart pierced by three swords, under gray clouds and rain. It's heartbreak, grief, the news you can't unhear. There's no person on the card at all, just the wound.

Copidosoma floridanum lays its egg inside the egg of a moth, so the caterpillar hatches already carrying it. Then the single egg does something astonishing. It divides, over and over, into about three thousand embryos, all of them identical twins of one another. Most become ordinary larvae that will grow into wasps. Some become soldiers, with no future of their own. Which is which depends on whether an embryo inherits the cells that make eggs and sperm. Soldiers never get them, and they never reproduce. Their job is to kill invaders, and when a rival wasp lays its eggs in the same caterpillar, the brood makes more soldiers fast. They're also most aggressive toward larvae that are least related to them. They fight hardest for family.

The caterpillar, meanwhile, goes on eating, carrying a whole army that began as one egg.

Here's the riddle. The heart on the card has no body around it, and the three swords come from nowhere we can see. Grief works like that. It arrives from inside, out of something that began as one small thing and multiplied. The soldiers give their lives so their siblings can live, and they don't get to choose it. The heart is the host, and it goes on beating.

The Three is not a card to explain away. When it appears, it usually means something has already happened. Let it rain. Grief is love that has outlived its address, and like the soldiers, it fights hardest for family. You don't have to fight it. Carry it and keep eating, and let the people who love you in.