February 6, 2026

2.6.26

February’s Decks & Drafts gathering came and went quietly (no table, no commanders, no shuffle and draw). Winter has a way of doing that: slowing momentum, softening edges, asking us to turn inward. So, I found myself thinking about Aminatou, Veil Piercer.

Not as a commander on the battlefield, but as something more elusive and closer to instinct, or memory, or the quiet pull of inevitability.

Moths slip between worlds the way silences slip between words, carrying with them the faintest disturbances in fate. They are but small emissaries of Aminatou’s will, brushing against the lives of others, nudging threads ever so slightly out of and into place.

A path delayed. A choice reconsidered. A future gently rewritten.

Decks & Drafts will return. Until then, stories like Aminatou’s remain waiting, shifting, just beneath the surface. Here is an old poem about moths, polished and reworked in 2026:

Veil Psalm

Consider this body / a moving object

Waxed enchantments / plucked somewhere deep

That its vast texture / might / stifle the ridges where you breathe.

Carcass spiral bites / lights on the surface

Telling all sorts of truths / about forgotten planes

The way our dead / still / pulse / after sound eludes them.

Glimpses of rapture.

Consider this body / a graveyard

Ash swept skin / fed through tiny teeth.

Silkworms carved / into the bark on my back

Telling all sorts of truths / about otherness

The way our dead still / live inside our tongues

Whipping in communication.

You identify the / soft layers forming

Thousands of them / struggling to age

Moths gently / lifting your feet / off the ground. - Poem, Cymelle Edwards