The Arcana: King and Queen of Hearts are two semitranslucent figures that rise from a tarot card laid on a stone altar when a game turns serious. They are not invoked; they rise by themselves.
| Type | Concept |
| Spanish entry | Arcanos: Rey y Reina de Corazones |
Appearance
- Queen of Hearts: a young woman with Korean features, black hair gathered up, long dark plate armor with a red heart on the breastplate, a delicate filigree crown.
- King of Hearts: a red-haired man in a long red cape, wearing the crown of Asmodeus, a large red heart on his breastplate, the look of one who knows what the next act will cost.
- Candelabra with lit candles flank them; skulls lie at the altar’s foot. The wax drips slowly in both directions, like small water clocks.
Summoning
Their appearances coincide with cosmological arbitration, games that decide more than the cards on the table:
- Host Poker in Uchronic Paris, on the eve of the Revolution.
- Tables of the Deck of Many Things in side seats of the Schism; a minor manifestation occurs when the Hearts card leaves the pack.
- Certain Atlantean rites that hasty doctrine took for a draw of cards and patient doctrine recorded as a cosmic apportioning.
Card key in Les Libertateurs
Les Libertateurs fix the hearts correspondence:
- the otario (“the sucker”, Oratiol) = King of Hearts, the red-haired figure with Asmodeus’s crown;
- Kimchi Princess = Queen of Hearts, the Korean queen;
- Horatio = the Ace: “he invented poker”.
The source calls the three hearts arcana three masks of the same anagram and his lover.