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// The Death Of Prophecy 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS137

This I had from the celebrated 'Lieutenant Hey You', whose Hydromel militia-company aided a Company scratch force in defeating a rebel probe into her province a few years back.  These days, she answers to “brevet-Captain Anise Liquor', and she was heading to raise her portion of the IV Hydromel Regiment when she returned to Pythia's Fell about a week after the grand militia conference at the Palisades.

The brevet-captain found a town in anticipatory mourning, as they gathered in murmuring clusters and clots around the great oracles'-bastion upon a slight,  rocky rise which had given the town its name.  The old jenny prophetess was dying, was the news that had brought the town to its now-fitfully-beating-heart.

Within the quarters of that temple - whose holy of holies was not, as usually is the case in temples and churches and tabernacles, a shrine to the godhead or the sacred word or the alicorns, but rather a humble little cell with a humble little cot - the oracle's acolytes were closing her eyes, and lifting her body from her death-bed.  They took her into the ritual bathing chamber, and began cleaning the corpse for the tanners, who would then convey it to the pyre, as was the practice in that district.  What wasn't the practice, was the cleaning of the corpse.  No time ought to have been wasted in bringing the body to the tanners, who knew how to deal with what happened next.

In the midst of weeping and wiping away of filth and the selfish mourning of the former oracle's personal assistants, the corpse began to twitch.  And it rose again, prompting screaming and far-too-tardy expressions of regret and alarm.

“Be. Silent. You. Inexpressable. Fools," ground out the dead thing, like the sighing of a precarious pile of gravel reaching critical slope over an edge and giving way to gravity's embrace. “You. Are. Dismissed. Find. You. New. Paths. For. Prophesy. Hath. Come. To. An. End."

The oracle's corpse stood as the living donkey had not in six months of agony and misery. And it shuffled for the open door of the washing-chamber, and headed outwards.  Its dead eyes met each employee of the oracle-temple where they stood upon its route, and the brevet-captain said that later, they described it as a moment when the beliefs and principles of a lifetime broke, instantaneously, irrevocably.  It was the exit of holiness, the end of resolution.  The end of things was the revenant corpse of a great prophetess, wise and revered in her time, walking, no, shuffling through a centuries-old establishment of prophets and prophetesses, and whisperingly, groaningly dismissing the whole as the wind-blown dead leaves of the past.

The former acolytes of the Pythian confession left Pytha's Fell one by one, surreptitiously, shamefully.  A few were caught and interrogated as they fled, but the brevet-captain found enough to bring me this story of how the Pythian revenant rose, and left, denouncing its once-living shell's life, inheritance, and work as nothing but vanity and dead words.  The former acolytes fled once again, to tell the world their own stories, of which I wot not.

The crowds formed around the shuffling revenant as she descended the rocky path from the former temple, its eyes burning as it ground out a hymn of finality to the world.  And this is the substance of those stories those crowds told, filtered, no doubt, through the aesthetic of that crowd and their expectations of their beloved oracle.

'That which the Truth can destroy
Ought, should, and shall be
Wiped out, expunged, extirpated
Taken by Time lifeless to
The lime-pit and the potter's field
Its dross washed into the gutter of
The rest of the filth of the
Mayfly world that wafts before
Our traitor eyes like the rising
Mists of a false and gloaming
Morning that, lit by a lying
Counterfeit orb, its spark having
Spilt, is swallowed once again by
The vast and lifeless abyssal dark.'

So saith the foolish child. So saith the acolyte of despair!
Fools!
Fools all!

'There is no future, there is no past,
There is only this hour and it goes fast,
Hurry, hurry, this is the last,
This is the last,
This is the last.'

This is the Death.
This is the death of the world that was ever dying.
This is the death of the world that held death in its rotted heart
And had no room for wanderers and wonder.

Walk, ye dead things that know not that you walk past your appointed time
Walk, ye dead who hath not the sense to lay down in your appointed graves!
Walk, and search, and seek, for that which will show you the appointment-book
And seek for that which has written your number and your name
Which you hath, in your stubbornness and ignorance, ignored
As prophesy hath ignored you and what you once were!

Your life was not a prophecy
Your existence was not dictated
From a book of an imaginary life
You were not a story told by a dead tongue.

Now, thy flesh shakes and shuffles, and seeks
Without thee, without thine own self, soulless
Come and see the mockery of that which was!
Come and see the dead hoof of prophesy!

You in the first rank, take up your rocks,
And stone that which dares walk before you
And your true life, your soul ensconced within
Living, unstoried flesh!

Drive the false prophet from her home-town
Wherein she in life was far too honoured
To be anything honest or straight-forward!

The brevet-Captain said that a few wayward pebbles flew from the hooves of foals and the usual joker or two you can find in any crowd, but in general, the crowds were respectful of the revenant, and followed it to the edge of town.

As it stepped out of the town precincts, it turned about, and addressed the towns-folk.

If thou wilt not tear down that monument to false prophecy, I charge you – Find a better!  There will be a song for the living world upon the foaling-bed!  Find you the equine that even now is singing the world reborn!

And the old jenny's revenant left what had once been Pythia's Fell, to find an honest grave.