The Empress (Reversed): Why Sabine’s Magic Is Rooted in Grief

 “You carry the thorns.”

That’s not metaphor. That’s a magical diagnosis.

In the world of Deckbreaker Arcana, every Votrix (our emotional duelists) draws power from a core tarot card—a Dominion Card. It shapes their battlefield, defines the laws of their inner world, and determines how their trauma fights back.

It’s not always the card you want.
It’s the card that won’t let you lie to yourself anymore.

Sabine Cross didn’t get The World or The High Priestess.
She didn’t even get The Lovers.

She pulled The Empress (Reversed).
And that’s when the roses started bleeding.

🌹 What Is a Dominion Card?

In my world, the Dominion Card isn’t just magical—it’s intimate. When a Votrix enters an Aletheion (an Arcana-fueled psychic battle), their Dominion forms from memory, emotion, and soul-deep resonance with a single tarot archetype.

This card becomes the battlefield—manifesting as a warped reality built from their grief, longing, and unresolved history.

Sabine’s?
A garden grown from every secret she’s buried.

🕯️ The Empress (Reversed): Not Your Gentle Earth Mother

Let’s break it down. The upright Empress is about nurturance, creation, motherhood, sensuality, and abundance. But when reversed?

💀 Emotional repression. Mother-wounds. Fear of softness. Conditional love. Creative blockage.

Sabine isn’t warm and open. She’s brittle. Sharply independent. She bakes elaborate pastries at 3AM because sleep is a betrayal. She cuts roses not because they’re dying—but because they’re thriving without her.

Her Dominion reflects this: Briarhalo, a sentient, shifting garden full of memories she refuses to name and plants that remember too much.

Every thorn? A boundary.
Every vine? A secret.
Every root? A memory she thought she’d buried.

The Catch: Emotional Magic That Self-Cannibalizes

The Empress Reversed feeds on what Sabine won’t release. The more she represses, the stronger her magic grows. But that strength is volatile, reactive, and prone to lashing out.

This makes her powerful—but unstable.

Her power is defense-driven, but not protective. It’s repellent—keeping others out, but keeping her stuck. It isolates her, just like her grief.

Her Dominion doesn’t say, “You are loved.”
It says, “You will never be safe again.”

And the garden?
It agrees.

A Hint at Book Two: When The Lovers Reversed Comes For You

Without spoilers, let me say this:

In Book Two (The Unmade Vow), Sabine draws a new card—but it’s not the happy little union we all hoped for.

The Lovers (Reversed) shows up as a distortion—a haunting. Not romance, but ruin.

False intimacy. Mismatched desire. Manipulated memory.

And Sabine’s not the only one tangled in its roots.

In this world, cards don’t lie.
But they absolutely mislead.
Especially when they know you’re in love with a Trickster.

The Empress Reversed isn’t a punishment—it’s an emotional mirror. Sabine’s journey through her Dominion isn’t about mastering magic. It’s about reclaiming her own softness, her right to nurture herself, and the terrifying, gorgeous risk of connection.

And in a world where your power is your pain, that's the most dangerous magic of all.