The Codex

Each night, name what you seek and draw from the dark — one card at first, and deeper spreads as your vigil lengthens. One rite a night — no more, no re-draws. What the cards leave behind is yours to inscribe.

The draw is not theatre. Tonight's card is a deterministic function of a Quai block hash: the same night, the same seed, the same card, for everyone who cares to check.

Every reading is written by hand, card by card — no AI — and set in order by your three choices, the seats and turns of the cards, and tonight's sky. The same draw always reads the same, and a kept reading is never rewritten afterwards.

The reading is shaped only by the choices you make before the draw: topic, purpose, and subject. An optional private note is kept for your reflection — the cards never read it, and it never leaves your keeping. Journal writing, birth data, and the private narrative are excluded from public share links.

Astrology is context, never the verdict. Moon and optional Sun-sign resonance may qualify a card relationship, but they cannot replace the cards, override a spread position, or make an outcome fixed.

Before your card is dealt, the rite commits to a future Quai block and publishes that commitment. When the block is mined, its hash seeds your draw. Because the commitment was pinned before the block existed, no one — not even us — could have chosen your card after the fact.

The commitment and the block are both public on the chain, and the arithmetic from one to the other is fixed before your card exists. Fairness by arithmetic, not by promise.

Return night after night and your vigil lengthens — the count of consecutive nights kept. The Grimoire holds every card drawn and every line inscribed, a durable record of the watch.

A Ward, forged from $TALLOW, holds your vigil through a single missed night — the one mercy the dark allows.

$TALLOW accrues off-chain for keeping watch, derived by the server from facts it can prove (a real draw, an inscribed line, the true moon phase) — never asserted by the client:

• · 2 for turning the card
• · 1 for inscribing a line
• · 5 for your very first night
• · 3 under a new or full moon
• · milestone gifts as your longest vigil crosses 3, 7, 30, 100, 365 nights

Accrued $TALLOW is settled on-chain through the Reward Distributor, a cumulative Merkle claim: you sign, you pay the gas, the coin is minted to your own wallet. Self-custody, always.

You spend it by burning it through the Sink — 12 to forge a Ward, 20 to unseal a deeper spread, 60 for a new deck, 7 to mint a card you drew. Every spend is a real on-chain burn.

Marks are soulbound seals earned only by doing — a first night, a kept fortnight, a full-moon draw, the whole Major Arcana. They cannot be bought or traded.

Your Reader Sigil is your soulbound signature, inscribed on-chain and deepening as you go. Both are yours alone, non-transferable by design.

What you draw, you may make your own: mint a card as a transferable relic, or equip a collectible deck back. You'll find it under Relics in the menu. These are ordinary NFTs — they never buy fate. The draw is always free, always fair; relics are only remembrance.

Play anonymously as long as you like — the rite never demands a wallet. When you want your grimoire to follow you across devices, bind a Quai wallet: Pelagus on desktop, or Blip on mobile. Binding is durability, not a toll.

Started in a browser and want to keep reading inside a wallet app, or on a new phone? Under You → carry your vigil, make a one-time code on the old device and enter it on the new one.

No AI. Every passage was written by hand, for this deck, in this voice.

Never paywalled. The nightly reading is free, whole, and ad-free, and it will stay that way. Nothing you have is ever taken back behind a price.

Money never buys fate. Tallow and relics change what you can collect and practise — never which card you draw or what it says.

Every card of the Haunted Plate — upright and reversed, what is visible in each plate, and where it comes from. Read the deck →

The Channel

The voice that speaks to you through the cards, and the act of drawing itself.

You open it each night with “Open the channel.”

Vigil

Your count of nights kept in a row.

Draw once a night. A missed night resets it — unless a Ward holds it.

Grimoire

The book of every night you have kept: the card, the reading, your line.

Every kept night is written into it, exactly as it appeared.

Mark

A soulbound seal for something you did — a first night, a full-moon draw, a finished suit.

Earned only by practice. Never bought, never traded.

Grade

Your rung on the ladder: Latent, Neophyte, Initiate, Adept, Diviner, Magus, Oracle, Hierophant, Ipsissimus.

Climbed only by nights kept — 1, 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 100, 365.

Tallow

The wax your vigil leaves behind: the rite's own coin, $TALLOW.

Gathered for turning the card, writing a line, the moon's nights and long vigils. Spent on Wards, practices and decks — never on fate.

Ward

One missed night forgiven.

Forged from Tallow. It burns in the dark so your vigil holds.

Sigil

Your mark in the ledger — it deepens as you keep watch.

Yours from the first night. Bind it to a wallet to carry it anywhere.

Relics

The cards and decks you chose to make your own — the Reliquary.

Collected from nights you drew, with Tallow. Found under Relics in the menu.

Reckoning

Your month in cards, read on the dark moon.

It gathers once you have kept a few nights in a lunar cycle.

The Haunted Plate

The deck you read with: 78 engraved plates, lit by candle.

Every reader holds it. The Sanguine deck is a second hand you can take up.

Nothing here is hidden. Every contract is on the Quai chain (id 9), open to inspection on Quaiscan: