Tea Leaf Reader

The Tea Leaf Reader is a curious lady, called Tassea Veilinger.

She is inspired by the divinatory art of tasseomancy: the practice of reading the traces left at the bottom of a cup. It originated in the Ottoman Empire and gradually spread across different places and cultures over time.

Her story is set in the Victorian era, when this practice became quite popular.

✒ Lady Tassea Veilinger was the only daughter of a lineage of tasseomancers from the high society of some place in the Old Continent. Her great-grandmother had possessed the gift, as had her grandmother, her mother, and all of her cousins. Yet despite her social rank and noble titles, she never quite fit in: to everyone, she seemed strange.

Not because of her gift, which was something widely accepted in those days, but because she had never wished to marry.
She led a solitary life—though she had one foot in this world and another beyond it, and such a life is never truly solitary.

She paid little heed to what people said about her, yet the intensity of their gazes unsettled her still. So much so that, rather than strolling through the bustling streets, she preferred to wander through the endless corridors of her old family manor, where she sometimes dreamed of getting lost.

Days passed quietly among tea leaves from distant continents and her tinkling collection of teapots. Occasionally, she received a few neighbors—curious visitors who consulted her about the most tedious matters, only to leave murmuring about her absent, distant expression.

One spring afternoon, she vanished, leaving no trace behind but her tea dregs. No one ever knew what augury Tassea saw the last time she read her fortune. Many said it was exactly what she had chosen, while others claimed there was something sinister about the whole affair, as though a spirit had finally drawn her away to another place. What they never concluded was that, perhaps, both explanations were nothing but one and the same. ✒

She is now part of my private collection, but her watercolor portrait is available Here