The lexicon

The game does not have many words, but each one designates one thing and one only. Here they are in alphabetical order, with the part where they live for good: this lexicon reminds, it does not teach.

• Action — what you play when an attempt is uncertain: two poles stretched, the coin cuts, and a card may explain it afterward. It is played once.part 5
• Actor — a presence that wants: someone who will come back and weigh, where the Backdrop is forgotten. You anchor him on the standing page in one line.part 7
• Anchor (to) — to enter an actor on the standing page: not for what he is, for what he wants.part 7
• Backdrop — what you come across and forget: pure color, nothing to note. A Backdrop becomes an actor the day you notice that it wants something.part 7
• Bond — what an actor seems to expect of you, written in his portrait and never crossed out: you stack, you do not correct.part 7
• Bridging question — the one question you leave open in closing a scene and that does not go to the standing page: the next scene answers it, and it is what frames that scene.part 8
• Coin — the oracle of closed questions: heads the first pole, tails the second. It is what resolves an action (part 5) and fate (part 6).part 1
• Compass (the bearings) — the four suits taken as directions, on the day the page empties: what to turn toward when you no longer know what to do.part 12
• Court cards (the) — the Page, the Knight, the Queen and the King of a suit: the cards that show someone. They call up a meeting, a known face, or your character at this moment.part 4
• Deck — a single pack of 78 cards, majors and minors mixed, reshuffled at the opening of every scene.part 2
• Desire — what your character wants. No mechanism, no count: it orients what you play.part 11
• Draw for / draw against — a card read on the side you already know to be true. It no longer says whether, it says what — and the side must be true before the draw.part 2
• Enduring fate — the form of fate where your character cannot act: two worlds stretched beneath the major that it alone could give, and the coin says which one arrives.part 6
• Everyday (the) — what plays out when you have kept a minor at the opening: fate has not come in, nothing is put at stake.part 4
• Facing fate — the form of fate where your character can act: the two clauses of the wager are played on what he obtains or misses, and the coin cuts.part 6
• Fate — what comes in when you keep a major at the opening, and by no other door: the moment stops being ordinary. It resolves with the coin, never with cards, and what it closes, only it can open.part 6
• Fate’s mark — what fate has closed, noted on the standing page in one line: you can slip free of it in the fiction, it stands otherwise, and only a new wager under a major wipes it out.part 6
• Lead — a scene declared to make a wait or a stake move: no new gesture, only the intention changes.part 8
• Major Arcanum (called a major) — one of the twenty-two named cards, from The Fool to The World. It does not answer: it names, and it weighs.parts 2, 4, 6
• Meta note — what you know and your character does not, kept aside. It is often that which strings the story tight.part 8
• Minor Arcanum (called a minor) — one of the fifty-six cards of the four suits, from Ace to King: the matter of the everyday.parts 2, 4
• Opening (the) — the gesture that begins every scene: three cards, you keep one, you give up the other two. The only draw where choosing costs, and the only door of fate.part 3
• Poles (the two) — the two worlds you set down yourself before tossing the coin: never a yes and empty air. It is by them, too, that an action is resolved.parts 1, 5
• Populate · mood · widen · hook · probe — the ways of asking: who is there and how he is (coin) · the weather (card) · what exists just beyond the frame · what is off · staying with the answer that has already fallen.parts 1 and 2
• Portrait — what you write about someone, actor or character: a name, what he wants, his suits, and what he carries when that says who he is. Without any count, and never corrected — you write a fresh one, further on.parts 7, 11
• Raising (the) — the world scene by which a stirring is raised, far from your character.part 10
• Scene — the unit of play: you open it, you play it, you close it.part 3
• Stake — an open question on which somebody else is making progress: it does not forget itself, and it does not ripen on its own.parts 8, 10
• Standing page — the page that keeps what is pending: living actors, waits, stakes, desires under way, fate’s marks. There is only one, and it replaces the previous one.part 8
• Stirring — the gesture that brings a stake to life: drawing through to a major, then playing a raising.part 10
• Suits (the four) — Wands/Fire, what cannot wait · Cups/Water, what comes back · Swords/Air, the line that separates · Pentacles/Earth, what remains. They say a card’s matter, and how you acted.part 4
• Surroundings (the) — three cards drawn mid-scene to populate a place in one stroke: you play one, the other two stay on the table. No giving up, no fate. They are also drawn under a question, put on the place and not on yourself.part 7
• Table (the) — the surface in front of you: the cards drawn stay in view on it for the length of the scene.parts 2, 7
• Thread — the tension running from one scene to the next: what stays open when a scene closes, and calls up the following one.part 8
• Wager — what fate can take, named in two clauses at the height of the scene, just before you toss the coin: what it takes, what happens if it does not take it. What is forgotten by the next scene is no wager of fate.part 6
• Wait — an open question that nobody else is looking into: it belongs to you, it ripens, it has the right never to close.part 8
• World scene — a declared scene in which your character is not present: the world advances behind his back. After three scenes played at his side the floor is the world’s; never two in a row, and fate does not come into it. It moves forward what pends, or it merely lives — a breather.part 9