Nine of Wands · Wands · Fire

The Nine wears a bandage. A man stands forward on grey pavement, a white cloth bound over his dark hair, both hands closed high on a staff that leans on his shoulder and slants across his legs to the stone by his boot. He wears the colour of his own suit: red-orange tunic, pale slashed sleeves, olive hose and boots. His eyes cut sideways, wary, at something Smith declines to draw. Behind him eight staves stand rooted in green ground, five left and three right, red-brown, rough-barked, ragged in height, sprouting small leaves at the crown and down the shaft. Turquoise sky, low olive hills, a black IX above. Nothing here is attacking him. He simply will not sit down.

He has been hit already. That is why he is still watching.

Fire in this suit is will and appetite. By the Nine it has cost the body doing the work. The Golden Dawn set the card under the Moon in Sagittarius: the long aim, hauled by someone who remembers every mile.

Upright, the tradition reads resilience. Reserves nobody counted, including the man holding them. Vigilance learned the hard way, a boundary kept because of the last time it was not. The wound is in the picture, and so is the standing.

Reversed, the same guard hardens past its use. The watch kept long after the last raid. Suspicion mistaken for wisdom, weariness worn as strength, the staff never once set down. Some readers name it paranoia; others, more kindly, exhaustion that has forgotten it may stop.

Eight rooted behind him, one in his grip, green still coming off all nine. He has been at this a while.