Chapter 167: Prophecy
The vision came to Sister Vaelissa on the first night of Scorchend, in the Dreamhaven Temple of the Shimmerfields — the province of illusion, festival, and curated truth.
Vaelissa was a Revist priest — a follower of Cassiriel, the Dreamshaper, the vassal goddess whose nature shaped the Shimmerfields into the kingdom’s most visually spectacular and most epistemically unreliable province. Revist priests occupied a particular niche in the kingdom’s religious hierarchy: they were the Crucible’s propagandists, festival designers, and — in rare cases — prophets. Cassiriel’s blessing occasionally produced visions in her most devoted practitioners, and those visions, while filtered through the goddess’s illusionary nature, had a historical accuracy rate of approximately seventy percent.
Seventy percent was high enough to take seriously. Thirty percent was high enough to question.
Vaelissa’s vision arrived as a dream that she knew, with the immediate certainty that Dream domain visions provided, was not a dream. The distinction was important: normal dreams were the mind processing experience. Dream-domain visions were the domain providing information. The sensation was different — like the difference between remembering a memory and being shown a photograph. One was internal. The other was external. Vaelissa had experienced twelve visions in her thirty-eight years of service. This was the thirteenth, and it was the most vivid by several orders of magnitude.
She saw the Ashwall.
Not from the ground — from above, as though she were floating at an altitude of perhaps five hundred meters. The fortification line stretched below her, thirty-four kilometers of stone and iron, and the territory south of the wall was green. Not the green of grass or forest — the green of divine power, a living viridescence that pulsed with the rhythmic cadence of a heartbeat. The green was the Rootmother’s domain. The green was Demeterra. And the green was moving north.
The Ashwall resisted. She saw the defenders — thousands of them, specks against the wall’s massive architecture, fighting with the desperate competence of soldiers defending their home. She saw fire — Pyreist flames along the wall’s battlements, creating a barrier of divine heat against the advancing green. She saw shields — Minotaur tower shields, interlocked, absorbing impacts from below. She saw the Storm Severance flashes — lightning-quick blades moving through gaps in the green tide, cutting and withdrawing, cutting and withdrawing.
And she saw the wall crack.
The crack began at the base — a fracture that propagated upward through the stone with the horrifying speed of structural failure, splitting the wall’s face from foundation to battlement in a line that was not random but *deliberate*. The earth beneath the wall was moving. The foundation — eight meters of bedrock-anchored stone — was being pulled apart by forces that operated at the geological level. The green pulsed, and the wall split wider, and through the breach she saw an army that stretched to the horizon. Not thousands. Not tens of thousands. An ocean of soldiers, blessed combatants, divine creatures, and at the center — a presence that she could feel even in the vision, a weight of divine authority that pressed against her consciousness like deep water pressing against a diver’s lungs.
Demeterra.
The vision shifted. Time compressed. She saw battles — multiple, simultaneous, occurring across a front that extended from the Pale Coast to the Cinderlands. She saw cities burning. She saw the Frostmarch attacked from the north — a second front, two armies converging on the kingdom from opposite directions. She saw a figure on the battlefield — a man with a blade that burned like a fallen star, fighting through ranks of enemies with the inhuman speed of someone whose legend preceded them. She saw him fall.
She saw the kingdom’s flag — the Burning Hammer — lowered from a city wall and replaced with green.
And then the vision stopped being sequential and became *fractured*. Futures, plural. Not one outcome but many — branching, diverging, colliding. She saw the flag raised again. She saw a sphere of light — the Fragment, though she didn’t know the word — pulsing with a power that reshaped the battlefield’s geometry. She saw a god descend — iron and flame and the weight of two centuries of construction embodied in a figure that walked the earth and remade it in his image. She saw choices — moments where the outcome balanced on a decision’s edge, where the future split based on what one person did at one instant.
***
Vaelissa woke screaming.
The temple attendants found her on the floor of her cell, convulsing, her eyes open but seeing nothing in the physical world. The vision was still playing — not as images now, but as sensations: the heat of the burning cities, the cold of the northern front, the particular *wrongness* of a future where the kingdom fell and the particular rightness of a future where it didn’t, both futures equally vivid, equally possible, equally real within the Dream domain’s prophetic architecture.
The vision faded over the course of three hours. When Vaelissa could speak coherently, she dictated to the temple scribe — a meticulous Gnoll named Ferrek whose primary qualification was that he could write faster than anyone in the Shimmerfields and whose secondary qualification was that he did not editorialize.
The dictation took two hours. The vision’s contents filled twelve pages of dense script, covering the military events, the divine interventions, the branching futures, and the specific details that the Dream domain had provided with the visual precision of a map and the temporal uncertainty of a prophecy.
The report was transmitted to Cassiriel, who examined the vision with the analytical detachment of a goddess who understood that her own domain produced both truth and illusion and that the challenge was distinguishing between them.
"The vision is genuine," Cassiriel transmitted to the Sovereign. "The Dream domain conveys subjective probability, not objective certainty. What Sister Vaelissa saw represents the most *likely* outcomes given current trajectories — modified by divine intervention, mortal decisions, and the particular chaos that war produces. The future is not fixed. The vision is a warning, not a prophecy."
"A prophecy requires fate. This does not. Preparation begins now."
***
The vision’s strategic contents were extracted by the Ministry of Whispers, stripped of mystical presentation, and distributed to the War Cabinet as an intelligence supplement — categorized not as prophecy but as "Domain-Enhanced Strategic Assessment (Dream)."
The supplement confirmed three elements that the existing intelligence picture had already suggested:
First: The Ashwall would be breached. The earth-shaping attack on the wall’s foundation was not a theoretical concern — the vision depicted it as an operational reality. The breach would occur at a single point, the earth beneath the wall pulled apart by Demeterra’s concentrated divine effort. The existing defensive strategy needed to account for breach containment, not breach prevention.
Second: The northern front was real. The deep-range patrol that Gharrek Fenward had deployed would confirm what the vision had shown: a second attack, coordinated, from the north. The two-front war was not a contingency — it was the plan.
Third: The outcome was not determined. The vision’s fractured ending — multiple futures, branching at decision points — indicated that the war’s result depended not on the balance of forces (which favored the Accord) but on specific strategic choices that had not yet been made. The sphere of light — the Fragment — appeared in the positive-outcome branches. The falling warrior appeared in all branches. The god’s descent appeared in the branches where the kingdom survived.
"The Dream domain shows probability, not certainty," Vrenn told the War Cabinet. "What this assessment tells us is that the current trajectory — defensive posture, intelligence operations, coalition fracture — has a positive-outcome probability that is not zero but is not dominant. The trajectory can be improved by specific interventions. The Fragment is one. The Sovereign’s personal involvement is another. The warrior’s fall —" He paused. He did not say the next words, because the next words required identifying the warrior, and the warrior was a figure the War Cabinet could already identify from the vision’s description: a blade like a fallen star, inhuman speed, a legend.
Kael Verenthis was going to die in this war. The Dream domain said so.
The question was whether his death would serve the kingdom or merely cost it the most dangerous warrior it had ever produced.