For the nerds and geeks amongst us

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This one is for those of us who read Swords & Sorcery (fantasy) novels.

I recently wondered where the "prophecy" in so many of these books came from. So, I decided to find out. Here's what I learned:


The quill scritched across the parchment leaving a trail of ink in its path.

“I don’t see why you have to write it down.”

“Yeah, well I don’t really, but it helps me to better organize my thoughts, yanno?”

“I mean, it’s not like you’re not omniscient or anything like that. You’d think perfect recall would be enough.”

“True, true, but I also like doing it. It makes me feel more, eh, connected somehow. I know they’re gonna write it down too. So when I write it down, well, nevermind.”

“Connected? Ew. Just knowing they exist is bad enough. Why on us do you want to get closer to them, I do not know. I still say it was a mistake in the first place. Get rid of it.”

“It amuses me. You have yours, I have mine.”

The quill scratched. Several pages were already haphazardly piled on the corner of the desk. The feather never reached out to touch the well, but the level dropped imperceptibly with each line laid down.

A smirk scorched across the room.

“How’s this sound?
‘The light shall fall
‘Darkness will rise
‘But within the wall
‘Rests the key to conquest.’”

“Yes. Quite brilliant. Such a prophecy that will last throughout the ages and inspire great deeds of valor, heroes will sacrifice themselves and villains will have villainous plots, all trying to find out exactly what ‘the wall’ is.”

A sheet of clean parchment curled, blackened, turned to ashes and vanished.

“I have to keep it simple. Every time I send the message to them, they screw it up. They misunderstand, don’t hear me correctly, write it down wrong, think it needs ‘editing’ and in general make it a void lot more obfuscatory than it ever needed to be. Why in the null they have to bugger it up so much…”

The quill continued to leave its fast-drying footprint. A few lines before the end of the sheet, it stopped. It went back in the inkwell. The stack of parchments and the last sheet wavered and vanished.

“And another one done. Now, let’s see how long they take to unravel this one.”

A gentle smile, accompanied by a lightly shaking head, and two settled to watch the most recent prophecy of the eternal battle in side one v. side two be played out in one tiny corner of the multiverse.

"You take far to much enjoyment from this."

"It's what I do."