Charubel's image for the sign's midpoint returns to the ascendant with an instrument rather than a star: a hand with a sword in it, just rising in the ascendant, a halo of golden light envelopes it. That sword is not for indiscriminate slaughter. It is to defend the right. The sword rises rather than descends, appearing at the ascendant the way the fixed transcendental sun did four degrees earlier, again crowned in golden light, so the image echoes that earlier glory while replacing pure radiance with a weapon held inside it. Charubel's own commentary, unusually explicit for this catalogue, insists on the distinction that matters most, that the blade's purpose is defence of the right rather than slaughter without discrimination, a moral qualification attached by its own recorder rather than left for later interpreters to supply.
Read at the fifteenth degree of Pisces, the sign's exact midpoint, the picture answers a real anxiety the sign's gentler degrees can raise, whether compassion this total can ever actually protect anything, and the sword rising here, gold lit rather than blood stained, says that Pisces's vision includes a genuine capacity for defence, exercised specifically and only in service of the right rather than as an instrument of general violence. A sword held rather than sheathed at the ascendant is a stance of readiness, not of attack already underway, mercy that has not surrendered the capacity to act when the right genuinely requires it. The shadow readings are a sword drawn indiscriminately despite the image's own caution, and a sword left permanently sheathed from a mistaken belief that gentleness forbids all defence. On a natal Mars, Sun or Neptune this degree's counsel is exact: raise the sword only, and always, for the right.