# Symbols If an object shows up twice in this world, it's on the payroll. The apple means what the apple means in every song, video, and piece of artwork it lands in, and most of these things belong to one of two hands: [[Sir Lucius]], the sharp, protective mind that got cut off from the heart, and [[Roy]], the heart in question. Learn the small kit below and half the catalog starts talking to you. ## The basic symbol map Two characters, two kits. Same five slots, opposite jobs. | | 🍏 [[Sir Lucius]] carries | 🕊️ [[Roy]] carries | |---|---|---| | **The bird** | [[The Crow]]: Mercury's clever, scavenging mind | [[The Dove]], named Cygnus: love descending, the kind that gives you light and then lets you go | | **The blade** | a dagger, the close-in cut | [[The Sword]]: the clean cut the heart chooses | | **The mark** | [[The Green Apple]]: knowledge picked before it's ripe | [[The Rose]]: the heart revealed | | **The ink** | [[El Roi]] on the throat: *"the God who sees me"* | [[El Roi\|El Roy]]: his signature, the same ink pointing the other way | | **The breath** | a cigarette | the song he arrived with | And one line for [[Mary]] 🌙: she carries [[The Moon]], borrowed light for the dark, and she is the wound and the blessing at once, which is a lot, and she holds it. A field tip: when a post signs off with a dagger and a green apple, you know whose hand it came from. A fair amount of Roy's column is worn in real ink on a real person; [[Roy's Tattoos]] gives the tour, including the rose written forwards and backwards around a cross. And the split itself, how one mind and one heart ended up at separate addresses, has its own page: [[Concepts/Heart and Mind]]. ## The rest of the shelf The kit gets you started, but the world keeps more images than two characters can carry. Each one below has its own page and one steady job. Yes, one of them is a banana. Stay with us. - [[The Mirror]]: the device that lets the self be seen, only ever as something *other*. Faithful only as long as it remembers it isn't the source. - [[The Mask]]: the face you wear to survive. Wear it long enough and it's just your face. - [[The Rabbit]]: the soft, searching self from before the split, and the clown-makeup rabbit it becomes after. - [[Fire]]: the double flame. The same fire that refines and reveals can become the wall you can't cross. - [[The Banana]]: Lucius's favorite prop. The offering turned into a microphone; a sterile clone that carries light but can't pass it on. - [[The Thread]]: the line that makes the maze survivable. Most likely feeling itself, the one thing you're not allowed to trade away. - [[The Moon]]: borrowed light for the dark. Mary's symbol, the wound and the blessing held at once. - [[Roy's Tattoos]]: the whole man written on the body, inked twice and resolved by a single cross, with the rose running forwards and backwards around it. - [[The Colors]]: the palette is on the payroll too. The ladder of colors the board climbs, and who in this world wears what. ### Deeper cuts Nothing down here is required on a first visit. It'll keep. - [[The Fool]]: Tarot's Key 0 and Roy's *"I'm no-thing"* in one breath. The empty traveler who makes the leap anyway. - [[The Wheel]]: the circle once it starts spinning. Aimed at a center it's prayer; without one it's just vertigo. - [[The Prop Room]]: everything smaller, shelved in one room. The well, the halo, the gun, the crown, the raised hands, and the rest. - [[Beth]]: the one Hebrew letter the videos actually printed on screen. The house, the second letter, the container that holds. And if you wandered in sideways and none of this rings a bell yet, the front door is [[So You Found Jagwar Twin]].