You wonder sometimes, as you pass by the offices of fortune-tellers wedged underneath restaurants or dingy grocery stores in the city or operating from within unassuming mass-produced suburban family homes, who the psychics within work for. Their target demographic, their customer base. People who would, impatient as they were, want their fates dictated to them through varying levels of abstraction — in the immutable striations on their ruddy palms, or in the glow of Hollywood crystal balls, or perhaps in the glint of gold coins and iron swords.
Fortune-telling is an odd thing. Here in the twenty-first century, we as a species like to believe we've collectively outgrown or awakened from the superstitions of our past — and yet they remain, these divinators, these mystics who seek truth in cracks and echoes. For aches and pains, your friends might recommend a treatment based on the wisdom of a ghost. Our quirks and defining traits are attributed to the movements of the planets and stars. Workers search for flaws in water pipes by consulting the movement of metal rods ever-so-slightly shifting in harmony with invisible veins of spiritual energy. We cling to placebos and rituals and things we know to be untrue in hopes that our years of experience are wrong, that in some undiscovered crevice or right under our fingertips a kind of unheard-of magic yet exists.
And so the fortune-tellers persist from generation to generation, their ears attuned to invisible currents beyond this world, finding a truth beyond our understanding within our own contrivances. Working for those of us who yet believe that mankind can reach beyond and tear their fates from the grip of eternity.
What is this?
Anthology 2023 is a continuation of last year's SCP Anthology — an event on the SCP Wiki headed by S D Locke during which a roster of talented authors posted horror SCPs every day over the month of October.
This year, the project will span both the SCP Foundation and Wanderers' Library. Each author has been assigned a Tarot card at random and tasked with writing a piece of horror webfiction based on its divinatory meaning — anything from SCP articles and short stories to poetry and interactive fiction.
Logo design by EstrellaYoshte. Card back design by
daviiid.
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