Chance

There is a bag of dice, wrapped in dark blue velvet cloth, that go from hand to hand, from dim taverns to a soldier’s tent, aboard a merchant ship to a rich noble’s house, from where they disappear one night and wander through back alley slums, clackering on muddy pavement, taking stops in children’s games, until they’re passed on. It is customary that the very last bet of the night are the dice. Whether you’re down to your last shirt in the middle of winter, or won all the night’s bets, whether you’ve collected the dice yesterday or have been carrying them with you in your bag for a month.
They are made of bone, sometimes, from iron and wood and starlight. Old and weathered, and sharp and new.
Sometimes it’s a deck of cards instead, or a box of tiles, but you know when it’s them. They tingle, like fine chain flowing over your fingertips, they’re Chance weighing your soul, and choosing their next hands.

The sun is rising over the shivering sands, and Kattalin flows down the cart steps, she smells the metal tang of cold, like chewing on a fine chain, but she does not feel it, not since four-hundred-something years.
Throwing these dice means to wager your soul on them, and Kattalin’s fingertips burn, she throws the dice like old friends (they are, she meets them every duodecade or other) with no soul left to wager, the dice never choose her, but you throw the dice when you’re sitting at their table.
The brass taste of magic layers over the silver of cold, and Kattalin wonders if the thing she has been betting all these years was not her soul, but her Chance at a successor. The girl with the brass taste around her looks like she had just grown out of the sand with her dark skin and green clothes, and Kattalin wonders if this one will be different.
Not quit two hundred years later the sun rises over she shivering sands, and Kattalin’s fingers sting from old and wooden dice, and the brass taste of magic wafts through the silver taste of frost, and there is another with dark skin and green clothes, who breathes magic like air and speaks it like words, and Kattalin wonders if this one will be different.

The room is small like a closet, and Damien’s head almost grazes against the ceiling, his hair snagging on bolts, his robes snagging on bone hooks and rope ends he overlooked in the dim, yellow light hanging over the table. There’s a pack of cards, worn soft and smelling like oil, with strange pictures, but the cards tingle, like a fine chain running across his fingertips, and it’s a familiar feeling.
He is in a strange place, far under the horizon he lived above for all his life, a place of steel and glass and gears where magic is ground to fuel the city another day, but Rillanon with her steel limbs and sharp tongue has not ground him up yet. By the time they have left, Rillanon has won his life story and how to weave and speak and breathe magic, and a chance to travel the world above the waves, and they leave the cards with a group of passing merchants with colourful wagons and giant beasts of burden, and both of them are alive.

All white and black and grey around her, a pier on a still lake, the smell and taste of wet dust in the air from the mist covering the shore. Even the blood and guts dripping from her stomach are grey.
The ferrycrone looks at her from her pitch boat, and says: “Show me your fare.”
The one on the pier fingers around her collar, and pulls up a sole coin dangling from a fine chain that tingles across her fingertips as she removes the coin, and flips it into the air.