CUPS
The Court of Cups are about healing. The Court of Cups are about heartbreak. This is not the contradiction it seems. Only the living know heartbreak; every time we shatter, we prove ourselves alive once more! Celebrate that moment, prize it, then heal that heart up so it can break again - that is how the Court has reconciled itself to its geas.
It all comes back to tears. The Courtiers savour tears like mortals savour wine, and you can bet they know their vintages and have well-developed opinions on their preparation. The Court’s members and vassals play a wealth of different roles in the harvesting, storing, distillation and tasting of tears shed in woe - mortal tears primarily, but immortal heartbreak has its own flavour.
Suspicious folk may consider these connoisseurs of misery cruel. They are often accused of precipitating the very heartbreak they crave. You are most likely to find a Courtier of Cups waiting in the wings on two occasions. The first is when you have reached the very depths of sorrow. The second is when you are at the very apex of joy, right before cruel fate sends you tumbling down into the abyss.
Look at the hands that pulled you out of your mire of misery when you thought nobody else could reach you. Are they the same hands that raised a toast as you tumbled down, down, down from a pinnacle which you would never attain again? Then those, my friends, might be the hands of Cups.
Make no mistake - Cups know the value of suffering, and there is healing to be found in their concoctions. Take a sip from one who has suffered a legendary woe, and your own suffering is put in a very different perspective. Or just shed your own tears. Mortals are often surprised that having a good cry, far from causing their heart to break further, actually helps to sooth it. That’s the gift Cups has given them, in return for tears lifted invisibly from passion-inflamed cheeks.
If you need a shoulder to cry on, the Courtiers of Cups have the most soothing shoulders of all. If all you ask of them is to hear your story and take away your tears, you’ll come away stronger and happier for it. That barfly who’s so easy to talk to in that dimly-lit joint that you only consider stepping into when you’ve just had a hard breakup… maybe they’re just a kind mortal. Or maybe they’re a Courtier gathering in the harvest. Those of Cups can often be found loitering in the playground of the broken hearts.
Come to them with your heartbreak. They will take it from you, and maybe that will be all. But should there ever come a day when a greater, sweeter heartache would arise from further tragedy, and that dreadful tragedy does indeed come to pass… then you might wonder.
Wonder if that Courtier has been following you all this time, building you up just for the joy of tearing you down again. Wonder if they had genuinely forgotten you, until they were passing by again, just now, and saw a possibility too tantalising to resist. Wonder if they genuinely want you to be happy - and they see that your greatest happiness lies beyond another heartbreak, greater than the one that brought you to them in the first place.
Come to them for healing of more than just the heart, if you like. Broken dreams, broken fortunes, broken vows, broken bodies, broken minds; they are all about repairing the damaged and the discarded. But beware if you seek this flippantly. There must be heartbreak. That is, after all, the geas. If you aren’t carrying it with you when you come to see them… if you haven’t suffered it by the time you leave them… you can be sure it will come in the future. Often, it will be just when you think you’ve gotten away with it.
For each individual who insists that they would not be here today without the Court’s healing gift, you can find someone who insists that the Court bestowed upon them the worst sorrow they have ever known.
More often than you’d think, they are the same person.