Hocus Pocus
Astrology
Selene traced her finger along the chart spread before her, feeling the familiar thrum of celestial energy pulse through the parchment. The woman across the table sat perfectly still, hands folded in her lap, waiting.
“You’re a Libra sun,” Selene said. “Venus-ruled. You seek balance, harmony. But your moon is in Scorpio, which means beneath that diplomatic surface, you feel everything with terrible intensity.”
The client nodded slowly. As Selene spoke, the afternoon light through the window shifted, gold deepening to amber. The woman’s posture changed almost imperceptibly, shoulders drawing back, chin lifting with new poise. Reality conformed.
This was the gift of the Astrology guild, and Selene was among its most talented practitioners. What she declared became true. Not metaphorically, not eventually, but immediately and completely. The stars didn’t predict; they commanded. And astrologers like Selene served as their instruments.
“Your Mercury is in the twelfth house,” Selene continued, warming to her work. “Hidden thoughts. Secret knowledge. You communicate best through writing, through art, through dreams. Speaking aloud has always felt like translation, hasn’t it? Like your truest self exists in a language nobody else can hear.”
The client’s eyes widened. “Yes,” she breathed. “Exactly.”
Selene smiled. This was the easy part. Sun signs, moon placements, the architecture of personality. She could reshape a person’s fundamental nature with a few well-chosen phrases, and they would thank her for it afterward, convinced she had merely revealed what was always there.
But as she turned to the seventh house, something strange flickered at the edge of her perception.
“Your relationships,” Selene began, then paused. The chart seemed to shimmer. The lines she had drawn that morning now appeared different, their angles subtly wrong. She blinked, and they settled back into place.
“Your relationships are...” She trailed off again.
The client hadn’t moved. The client, Selene realized with a cold prickle along her spine, hadn’t moved at all since sitting down. Not a shift of weight, not a scratch of an itch. The only changes had been the ones Selene herself had spoken into being.
“I’m sorry,” Selene said carefully. “I need to cast the chart again. Something is interfering.”
She pulled out fresh parchment and began the calculations anew, but her hands trembled slightly as she worked. The numbers came out wrong. Not wrong, exactly. Impossible. The client’s birth date kept sliding away from her memory the moment she tried to write it down. The birth location refused to resolve into coordinates.
“When were you born?” Selene asked.
The client smiled pleasantly. “You know already.”
“I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”
“But you do. You must. Otherwise how could you have begun the reading?”
Selene’s mouth went dry. The woman was right. She had begun the reading. She had spoken with complete confidence about sun signs and moon placements and Mercury in the twelfth house. But now, reaching back, she could not recall how she had known any of it. The knowledge had simply been there, as if placed in her mind by an outside hand.
“Who are you?” Selene whispered.
“I’m your client.”
“No. You’re not real.”
The words hung in the air between them, and Selene felt the terrible weight of truth settling into them. The client didn’t flicker or fade; that wasn’t how it worked. Instead, Selene simply knew, with the same bone-deep certainty she felt when reading the stars, that the woman across from her had no existence outside this room, this moment, this story.
A story. Yes. That was it. Selene looked around the consultation chamber with new eyes, seeing for the first time how the details grew fuzzy at the edges, how the window showed light but no view, how the walls suggested depth without actually receding.
“You’re a stand-in,” Selene said slowly. “A placeholder. Someone needed a client for this scene, and so you exist. But you’re not who this reading is really for.”
The client said nothing. The client had perhaps never truly spoken at all.
Selene closed her eyes and reached past the false woman, past the constructed room, past the boundaries of the narrative itself. And she found you.
You, reading these words. You, who chose to pick up this story and follow it this far. You, whose attention created the space in which Selene could exist at all.
She opens her eyes and looks directly at you now, her gaze piercing through the page.
“Ah,” she says softly. “There you are.”
She studies you for a long moment, seeing things you’ve never told anyone. The chart forms in her mind, your chart, drawn from the act of reading itself.
“You’re searching for something,” she says. “You’ve always been searching. You want to believe that meaning exists, that the patterns you sense in your life are real and not simply the desperate inventions of a mind afraid of chaos.”
The air around you feels different now. Heavier. More significant.
“Well,” Selene says, and smiles with the confidence of a young woman who has never been wrong. “Let me tell you what the stars say.”