Strength and The Tower

Patience against something that will not be handled patiently. Strength is the card of the closed lion's mouth, quiet mastery without force. The Tower does not negotiate. The tradition reads the pair as a person who is holding something well while the thing itself gives way, and it does not read that as failure.

Associated with somebody who has been calm and generous for a long time in a situation that ends anyway. The pair is emphatic that the calm was not wasted and did not cause it.

Steady competence during a collapse. Read for people who kept a team together through something that was decided elsewhere.

Strength is not what fails here, so do not review it afterwards as if it were. What the pair asks is what remains worth being gentle with once the structure is gone.