Chapter Two

In which we meet a monk and learn of Prophecies

One crucial fact that most will overlook with regard to prophecies is that so much depends upon the interpretation and reasoning skills of future generations. Many prophets themselves ironically do not foresee this small detail (one other afterthought is a simple matter of language or linguistic barrier.). A man may have a vision of the future but not know precisely how far into the future he is looking. Even if he does obtain an accurate time frame for the proceedings, it is unlikely that he will know exactly how to communicate the happening to his perceived target audience.

A hermit in a cave with nothing but campfire to keep night at a distance would scarcely know how to begin a letter to a showgirl in Vegas hundreds of years from his own existence. So it goes with visionaries. This is why so many well-intended warnings fall unheeded into the category of commentary on recent past events. Some prophecies are so maddeningly exact as to seem shrouded in riddle form and in this way make themselves obsolete.

For example, the prediction regarding the death of the Queen reads as follows:

She who sobs in silence

And coats her dreams in honey

Will lose all strength to keep darkness away

By the bell's seventh hour

After the incident the meaning was perfectly clear; before the act took place the closest logical meaning involved a depressed beekeeper during either twilight or dawn, depending on the season. Most likely twilight in the summer months was the general consensus.

The Prophecy in general, the main prediction whose meaning was universally agreed upon was:

The Land shall fall into great peril

Fathers' war passed to sons

As one bloody Crown is passed from head to hand

The Empress will rise from the ashes of a great Queen

And soothe the soul of a torn nation

This was how the Prophecy began; originally all of the predictions had been together as one document, but not all read as easily and most seemed to nothing more than echo the beginning statement, including:

Many shall try and all will fail

To unite the fallen Kingdom

All will bow before Her

When She resumes the throne

Those who believed in the Prophecy, then, had less fear during the battles for the Crown, as they had been reassured that affairs would not remain in such a state. The predictions, however, did not reveal how long the upheaval would last, nor where the Empress would be found.

Others were maddeningly unhelpful, such as:

It shall come to pass in a green field

About midday

Half a mile from two broomsticks

Unless the rolling wheels are caught

It was usually the Interpreters who made the most progress with the predictions. Nearly glorious had been the day when Brother Marcus had been granted the epiphany that

She will tell not a soul of her identity

Nor corrupt her purpose

For an Innocent she shall be

And always will remain so

was indeed about a nun, and they should keep watch over convents and churches for any Empress-like behavior. That was, until Brother Flynn had reminded Brother Marcus of some particularly robust and semi committed nuns their Order had the pleasure of knowing (the Order of The Prophecy did not make chastity a requirement, much to the relief of many of its members.), so it may not necessarily refer to a nun.

Any conclusion reached regarding any part of the Prophecy had to be irrefutable to be written in the Book of Meaning, which had been handed down since the discovery of the Prophecy and subsequent puzzling thereafter some centuries earlier.

A lesser man, upon the refuting of his logic and conclusion may have lost heart, but Brother Marcus simply sighed and went to have a visit with the two robust nuns.

It was widely known �" at least through the Order �" that to be a successful Interpreter one must not fear criticism or arguing, for both were practiced regularly within the Prophecy Temple. At least, before the death of Queen Esmerelda it was practiced within the Temple. After it was realized that this was the Queen whose downfall would lead to great ruin (and this realization did not take long), arguments were relocated to the tunnels and larger rooms of the underground shelters in which the members of the Order now resided.

Brother Bernard was a lesser Scribe, a station below that of Greater Scribe but with more regard than that of a reader. He had been forced to join the Order by his widowed uncle who had no time for his nineteen year old nephew with incessant questions regarding life and everything in general. Bernard had come to like the Order well enough �" mainly because when he had tired of it after the first week of nonstop reading and had decided that home was the best place for him he had returned to it only to find the hut occupied by a completely different family with no indication of where his uncle may have gone. He had returned to the Order with a sheepish grin, recanting his previous statements regarding the quality of food and job description, claiming he had seen the error of his premature assumptions.

So he'd stayed on and made admirable progress from reader to lesser Scribe. This was mostly due to the fact that he became too restless as the months passed, and reading disciplines were completely wasted on a boy that was used to a farm hand's ways and the freedom of being outdoors. They finally supplied him with pen and paper (but only the cheaply made variety; there was no sense in wasting good paper on potentially faulty logic. Ironically, however, the cheaper paper could not withstand very many corrections and thus had to be either made or purchased more often. Logically, then, this may have in fact been less cost effective.), hoping that at least the movement of writing would in some way satisfy the boy.

Mostly he drew.

He did this when there was not a superior monk present in the room of reasoning. The room of reasoning in the Temple was a large hall full of long tables and the sound of pens alternating from scribbling furiously and then impatient tapping, punctuated by the sound of thin paper being torn or crumpled in frustration. Underground it was a low, cramped room made smaller by the presence of the long tables and for some reason nearly always smelled strongly of beets.

Currently Brother Bernard was staring at a scrap of paper which read:

The man with the bees

Shall journey forth and find her

So long as he knows not his path

And heads in the correct general direction

This prophecy had been passed back down to the lesser Scribes to puzzle over as soon as it became apparent that the bit about the Queen dying had nothing to do with a beekeeper. They hadn't known quite what to make of it before her death either but up to that point it had seemed to belong with something, at least. Brother Bernard had been staring at the same lines for months, ever since he had moved into scribing. He wrote on it only when a superior monk passed by or glared at him, and even then it was mostly more random words strung together. He hadn't the slightest idea what bees had to do with royalty, or why anyone should set out looking for someone with no clear plan.

Truth be told, Brother Bernard doubted whether or not the Order even served a valid purpose. Most of the prophecies that were figured out were proved wrong after events had already transpired, and the only one that was universally agreed upon would put them out of business once it came to pass. It seemed to him that they were all just passing time in puzzles and debates until some woman came along to magically set everything right again.

The only thing that proved to Brother Bernard that the Order was not a complete waste of time was the Tracking Glass. It was a great hourglass, located in the underground Great Room. It had been discovered along with the Prophecy, and no one knew quite how it worked, only that it did. It was made from a thick, unbreakable glass and stood from floor to ceiling in the great cavern. Three men standing on each others' shoulders could not reach the top. In place of sand the hourglass held precious gems and stones in varying colors, each easily the size of a man's hand. Each time a prophecy came to pass one gem would fall from the top to the bottom. There would then be a flurry of activity as seekers were deployed to set forth and gather information from the outside world. (Brother Bernard had appealed to become a seeker, but those in charge were in doubt as to whether or not he would return with the horse.) There would then be days of agonizing anticipation until someone came back with news.

There would then be more activity as prophecies and the Book of Meaning were scoured, and heated debates as to which prophecy the event applied, for the event did not always make it clear. Sometimes there was no news to be reported at all (or worse yet, word-of-mouth that had been skewed unbelievably out of proportion), and that made for even more intense arguing.

When Brother Bernard was feeling particularly despondent and grew weary of drawing hives and writing down meaningless words he would sit in the Great Room, watching the thin light as it passed through the glass and the gems, a weak flicker cast from the torches that made it nearly impossible to count all of the stones inside. It was presumed that there were as many gems as there were prophecies, but Brother Bernard had counted them often �" or at least attempted to �" and had come up with one extra. He concluded that it must have been a trick of the faulty light source and thought upon it no more. (He was in fact correct, although the extra stone was not a stone at all; it was an egg.)

For Brother Bernard there was nothing as satisfying as the magnified *plink* as a vision occurred and sent a gem on its way to triumphantly join the pile below. He had personally witnessed five gems fall in his time with the Order, more than many of the members had witnessed, apart from the Glass Watcher. It was not a common custom to sit for long periods before the Tracking Glass, as there was already a man stationed before it to monitor its activity. Thus it was considered a waste of time, time that could be spent thinking and debating. Brother Bernard would hide himself along the wall nearest to the Tracking Glass, concealing himself behind a curtain to bask in the reassuring multi-hued glow of the great hourglass. It made the Order seem like it had a real purpose, that they were more than just bumbling idiots skilled in reading and shouting.

Then there came a day when not even the mighty presence of the Tracking Glass would comfort Brother Bernard. He had become restless even in the Great Hall, twitching behind the curtain so much that he had nearly given away his hiding place. He decided on that day that the Order indeed was no place for him. If he were to do something of value, it must be out in the open air and not so far below where sunshine could not follow.

That night he crept from his sleeping mat fully clothed with nothing but his few previously owned possessions along with his Order-issued pen and thin paper in a rough sack. As he strode out into the moonlight breathing in the clean air he decided that West seemed like as good a direction as any.

In the Great Room a ruby clattered to the bottom pile and a frenzy ensued.

Author's Note

Thank you for reading!