Vessel Bear Lighters
This archetype is in the minor arcana but serves as the “king of wands”. Representing boundaries, holding space for transformation, an observant supporter, and honoring your ability to create and facilitate a portal for change—supported by the element fire.
“I hold a container for my power.”
What does it mean to recognize your autonomy in the form of personal power?
PROMPT: In this world, no one is granted authority, inheritance, or title until they complete the Nine-Year Pilgrimage.
At the age when others might declare adulthood, your people board a living starship and leave your home planet behind. For nine years, you travel beyond your solar system, visiting distant civilizations to study a single question:
How is power accessed, embodied, and shared?
On one world, power is grown in communal gardens—bioluminescent vines that respond only to collective breath. On another, it is carried in the body through ritual scarification, each mark signifying a responsibility accepted. On a water planet orbiting a red dwarf, power dissolves and reforms daily; leadership rotates with the tides. In a machine-governed system, authority is temporarily loaned through neural symphonies—no one holds it longer than a cycle.
You are not allowed to intervene. You are only allowed to witness.
You must document:
Who is permitted to hold power?
What initiations grant access?
What happens when power is hoarded?
What myths sustain it?
What breaks it?
By the seventh year, you begin to notice something unsettling: every civilization you visit believes their system is natural. Eternal. Just.
By the ninth year, you realize the pilgrimage is not about choosing the “best” system. It is about returning home changed—no longer seduced by domination, no longer naïve about harm, no longer afraid of responsibility.
When you return, you must design your own form of power—ritualized, accountable, embodied.
But here is the final twist:
You discover your home planet has been subtly reshaped during your absence. The elders have dissolved the old hierarchies. There is no throne waiting.
Instead, there is a question waiting for you:
After witnessing the cosmos, what kind of power are you willing to practice—and who are you willing to become to hold it?
Write the moment you step off the ship.
What has nine years of observing power across the stars done to you?
