Protect Vessels
This archetype is in the minor arcana but serves as the “knight of cups”. Representing the guardian of what is acquired, integration, using discernment to make choices, and honoring your intuition before interacting with everything and everyone around you—supported by the element water.
“I protect my emotions.”
What emotions do you need to protect or listen to in order to dream a new world?
PROMPT: Imagine a planetary system where each planet sustains exactly one emotion.
Each world is biochemically attuned to a singular affective frequency:
A planet of Joy, where gravity is light and the sky refracts gold.
A planet of Grief, where oceans hold ancestral memory in saline density.
A planet of Fury, crackling with tectonic unrest and electrical storms.
A planet of Tenderness, wrapped in luminous forests and slow, rhythmic winds.
A planet of Awe, structured in impossible crystalline geometries.
Inhabitants are born on one planet and therefore metabolize only that emotion. Their nervous systems are single-spectrum. To feel anything else, they must leave orbit.
Travel is rare. Travel is ritual.
Across all planets lives a shared organism: CuZn—a vast, ancient mycelial network embedded deep beneath each world’s surface. For decades at a time, it lies dormant, threading through soil, stone, ocean floor, and mantle.
Every ten years, aligned with an acidic monsoon, the mycelium flowers.
Massive fungal architectures erupt simultaneously across the planets—ribbed arches, hollow spires, bioluminescent tunnels. These growths interlink through quantum-entangled spores, forming a temporary interplanetary transit system. For a single cycle, the network becomes transportation: organic trains grown from root and filament.
To board, inhabitants must shapeshift.
The mycelium interfaces directly with their biology, secreting enzymes that reconfigure neural receptors and hormonal glands. Bones soften or densify. Skin alters permeability. Inner chemistry recalibrates to survive a new emotional atmosphere.
A Fury-born traveler might sprout cooling dermal layers and expanded tear ducts before entering Grief. A Joy-native might grow weighted musculature and salt-adapted lungs to withstand the density of sorrow. A Tenderness-native preparing for Fury may develop conductive plates along their spine to metabolize lightning without shattering.
CuZn feeds on emotional transition. Each transformation nourishes the network. Each crossing expands its intelligence.
Design this system:
Why were emotions separated into planetary biomes in the first place? Was it survival—or containment?
Does the mycelial CuZn have consciousness, or is it an emergent intelligence shaped by centuries of travelers?
What happens to those who miss the ten-year blooming? Are they emotionally stranded?
Are there rumors of hybrid planets forming where spores have drifted—worlds of Joy-Grief or Fury-Awe?
Does the Conductor ever refuse a traveler?
Describe the moment the fungal gates rise from the ground—vast, breathing, luminous. Describe the sensation of the mycelium threading through their nervous system, rewriting what they are capable of feeling.
