Entering into this new calendar year, I was overcome with a personal mission that tugged inexorably at my fingertips, every fiber of my being itching for a return to New England’s rocky soil. Coming back to Yale’s campus, I knew what I must do: I broke into the tomb of Skull & Bones. Slipping over scaffolding in the dead of night, winding through dark tunnels and over catwalks shimmering with blood, staining my hands with the scrawled graffiti of those who had come before me and failed, I arrived at the center of the tomb, shivering wet and cold like a newborn. In the dark heart of the place I, and I alone, lit a ring of soy wax candles, sacrificing a vegan goat substitute. In the glop of its cruelty-free entrails I read these fortunes to bring you — my darling, my best beloved — health, wealth, Twitter followers and fortune in the New Year.
ARIES
Lucky you, Aries! This is a year of change and renewal. This is a year for stretching, a year for growth, a year for opening your mouth as wide as you can and swallowing all the goodness life has to offer, until your jaw unhinges and your teeth shine slick, until millions of tiny, unidentifiable black specks pour out of your throat, until they cover the floor of your bedroom making a quiet, indescribable hum, seemingly harmless, perhaps even benevolent; it’s hard to tell, they are so dark, so inscrutable and so small.
TAURUS
Have you changed your email password lately? Deleted any aberrant contacts from your phone? This is a year for taking small measures to keep yourself and your heart safe, to throw off that old self and embrace the bright and splendid new. Change your haircut, change your phone number, change the locks on your apartment, nestle inside your fortress of seclusion and safety, an empty echo-chamber of your own head, protected from all physical and emotional ills, locking, unlocking, relocking, waiting, locking, waiting, knocking . . .
GEMINI
Glory and fame await you, Gemini, if you use common sense and hold onto your head. There are good signs in the entrails for your career: in the spring, you’ll be offered a promotion to a position of power unlike any you’ve held before! It may require some sacrifices, but after the unspeakable terrors of this winter, you’ll be ready to give up almost anything for another bid at sanity and control of your own destiny, and the destiny of those who share your cursèd line.
CANCER
This year, all the things you’ve been working for will finally burst and blossom — hang in there! Keep working hard for what you love, keep fighting for your passions. Before you know it, the wonderful thing you’ve created will be brilliantly alive with its own light and fire, a beastly golem with its own soul and spark, threatening to overpower you and everyone you hold dear.
LEO
You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Leo. Now is the time to invest in a big financial future — you can do it. Talk smart, act bold, be brave, and by December, you’ll be in the middle of a windfall so uncannily large you won’t have time to think about all the ways you’ll need to wash out the blood.
VIRGO
This year you will find yourself imbued with clarity: even those three small freckles on your left shoulder are starting to shift ever more perfectly into a straight line. Stop trying to look at them in the mirror. This will come in time, as over the course of this year you’ll truly expand your definitions of flexibility, resilience, and strength, especially when one quiet night, shaving, you realize your head can spin all the way round, like an owl.
LIBRA
After months of a creeping unease and doubt, plaguing the back of your mind, you’ll find relief as the days begin to grow shorter and the air gets colder. They will come with startling, inexplicably easy bouts of good fortune. Your social media presence will thrive, fed on a steady diet of reblogs and favs and retweets. In the midst of it all, you will hum, contentedly, and begin to use the plural first person.
SCORPIO
Scorpio, you’re the sexiest of all the signs — everyone knows that. Hot and dangerous, 2014 is your year to shine. Are you more prone than normal to déjà vu? Do you often feel as though your life is an endless iteration of the one before it? Are you sometimes indescribably tired, your body fatigued from a curse whose origins you do not understand? Let it all go this year, Scorpio. Let it go and give yourself up to the Old Gods incessantly calling for your blood.
SAGITTARIUS
You’ve got an exciting year in store! In the early months, you’ll be quietly consumed by an unnameable dread, which will dissipate as the year unfurls into Spring. From May through August, dance! Dance like nobody’s watching! Like you’ve never been hurt! A scintillating, many-eyed, many-eared, many-tongued surprise will discover you in October. This will have a Name. The Name cannot be written, nor can it be texted, nor tweeted, nor sung. The Name will never be uttered as long as I am alive.
CAPRICORN
Your work ethic makes you unique among the signs, a hard worker who never gives up. This year, consider it a fresh start and an opportunity to capitalize on the things you do best. In February, you’ll find yourself moved by incredibly precise visions of your future desires — hold onto them! Listen to your dreams. Follow every instruction. Obey each one, do not make mistakes, do not step back, do not turn around, do not change your mind for it can no longer be changed . . .
AQUARIUS
You’ve got quite the year in store, Aquarius! From the soaring heights of early January to the sorrowful pits of mid-March, where each moment will feel like a quivering bloom of dark in darkest darkness, take comfort in your hyperawareness of every moment and minute of your surroundings, the permeability of your reality, the crisscrossing and interwoven strands of the universe that threaten to separate whenever you move your head too fast.
PISCES
Sometimes you feel very small in the presence of a great and terrible awe, like you alone can feel the tentacles of the universe trembling beneath the permeable surface of experience, like you are the one point of porousness in an inconceivably complex and tenuous reality. Shh. Don’t say a thing, sweet one. Don’t move, don’t breathe. The shadow across the sky will pass soon.
Illustration by Eliza Koch. See more of Eliza’s work here.
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