Tarot Creativity Challenge

My friend John is doing this thing whereby he picks out random tarot cards from the deck and then encourages people to respond to them in some way. He describes his project here:

http://networkedblogs.com/p29731415

I don't know much about tarot. I am fantastically ambivalent about magic in all its forms, respecting its power to channel psychic energies but being very scornful about its capacity to affect objective reality or reveal future events or communicate with entities whose existence is empirically unverifiable, et cetera (and by psychic energies I mean emotions and ideas, rather than any kind of spoon-bending telekinesis). But I do know I like prompts. They channel my psychic energies, focusing that great haze of vague, undifferentiated impulses and half-formed narratives that floats ever at the back of my brain, routing that cloud into a useful condensation. Prompts, for me, are a kind of magic. And so, and because John is my friend, I am participating in this project, even if I definitely feel like the odd person out in the Mind on Fire community. And here is my first day's result.

The Knight of Swords

The battle fought, the battle lost, the death birds outnumbering now the living men, he arrives. The only struggle now is that of the feeble injured, limbs twitching and mouths making empty sounds as enemy men in orange doublets raise up pale throats for the cutting.
He observes. He draws his sword. He makes his sword naked. He wants to wrap his sword in red robes to hide its shame.
He hopes for the hopeless fight. Let there still be time to die. The universe could not be so cruel as to deny a man his chance to be transubstantiated into tragedy.
The horse exhibits a sane fear of death. The man does not. Its eyes roll back as though its body could follow. He spurs the beast on. Come carrion, come carnage, come corpses.