Today's Stichomancy for Will Wright

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale:

You would not heed it, dear, For now you must not listen, And then you could not hear.

TESTAMENT

I SAID, "I will take my life And throw it away; I who was fire and song Will turn to clay."

"I will lie no more in the night With shaken breath, I will toss my heart in the air

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum:

named Necile. She was closely related to the mighty Queen Zurline, and her home was beneath the shade of a widespreading oak. Once every year, on Budding Day, when the trees put forth their new buds, Necile held the Golden Chalice of Ak to the lips of the Queen, who drank therefrom to the prosperity of the Forest. So you see she was a nymph of some importance, and, moreover, it is said she was highly regarded because of her beauty and grace.

When she was created she could not have told; Queen Zurline could not have told; the great Ak himself could not have told. It was long ago when the world was new and nymphs were needed to guard the forests and to minister to the wants of the young trees. Then, on some day

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell:

confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves in the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds, the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people. After confessing to these things they had been pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given

1984

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce:

Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be -- Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth, With a record of unreason seldom paralleled on earth. While I looked he reared him solemnly, that incadescent youth, From the coals that he'd preferred to the advantages of truth. He cast his eyes about him and above him; then he wrote On a slab of thin asbestos what I venture here to quote -- For I read it in the rose-light of the everlasting glow: "Cloudy; variable winds, with local showers; cooler; snow."

Halcyon Jones

The Devil's Dictionary