This is an early draft of the first chapter a book I am unlikely to ever write. I dunno if it is any good, but I know I have seen worse on Amazon. If you like it mention that on my Facebook. No way I’m opening the discussion boards here, am way too lazy for that noise.
Anyway here it is – Prophesy Defusal Squad – Faith and Fire. Chapter 1.
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I suppose anyone could have told me it would not end well. My name is Thane Degrado, and for 3 years I worked in a team that pitted human ingenuity against the fates; we almost won. Now all I have to show for it is a story that should never be told. The hell with that. I’ll tell it anyway; there is worse they can do to me and it will not be worth it, but we tried and they deserve recognition.
When it began I was already touched by prophecy. I may tell you of that but it’s not important. Heh, not important.
I was in the inn with Alan and Alaria. We were setting the world to rights after a hard week’s work. I was a city guard, coarse and jaded, Alan was a bookbinder, erudite and an ass, and Alaria, dear Alaria, an alchemist with the knowledge and impressively hideous upper body and lower facial scars to prove it. I don’t remember the exact words we exchanged, we had already had a few jars, but the sentiments are about right.
The subject had turned to prophesy and I said, “If you try to go against a prophesy you just end up helping it happen, everyone knows that.”
Alaria replied “a hundred years ago everyone knew prophesy was a myth”
Alan jumped in with “Ad synonym! Comparing different things is not a valid argument.”
“I don’t think you can just change Atlantean words round and call that a kind of logical fallacy”
“Ad aequivocationem”
Before it got recursive I stepped in with “Seriously, though, that’s the only thing we know about prophesy, everything else is opinion.”
“What’s your point?” said Alaria.
“What if that’s the only thing that’s true about it?” I asked.
“Ad -” Alan did not get to continue before we both interrupted him, me with “Shut it” while Alaria went with
“Oh for Goodness sake, stop. What do you mean by only thing?”
“What if you can make a prophecy come to pass but in a different way?”
“Sounds idiotic. Why would you want to do that?”
“Well you know the classic curse; You will kill your father and marry your mother?”
“Bad taste to say that out loud,” she replied.
“Ad – ” Alan paused when he saw our expressions and continued, awkwardly picking his words “- justing to the fact you are prophesied doom is difficult. Many have tried yet maternal intermarrying is almost traditional in unpopular royal families. It’s not like patricide is that uncommon anyway.”
“What if instead of trying to stop that happening you just made sure it happened on your own terms?”
They both looked at me blankly, “Eh?”
“So you take your doomed kid, and say, errr…” I may have drifted off there a bit “…look you can try to escape your prophecy but that ain’t gonna happen, so instead you are gonna get married to your mum as her 2nd husband and when your dad is verrrrry old and verrrry sick you are going to give him the gift of death.”
Alaria looked annoyed “There’s no way that would work.”
“Has anyone tried it?” I replied.
“Of course not, it would never work.”
Alan brightened up, thought for a bit, then seemed disappointed and said “Begging the question? Circular reasoning? It at least seems worth trying.”
“We have known prophesies to be inevitable since the fall of Atlantis, surely someone must have tried that before”
“Argument from imagined evidence. Maybe they have and didn’t tell anyone”
Alaria winced as a worrying thought crossed her mind, “Maybe they have and didn’t live to tell anyone. You don’t play with aqua regia, pyroglycerine or prophets.”
Nobody said “you would know” but a few more pints and I might have. For my trouble I would have woken up days later short some teeth and much dignity; She liked me. Anyone else saying that may not have woken up.
Instead there was an uncomfortable silence, broken by the susurrus of other conversations and the supping of pints.
Alaria broke it; “The final arbiter is observation”
“Well do you know someone with the curse who would be willing to try it?”
“What about you, Thane?”
“My dad is already dead, I didn’t do it, and I know my mum well enough to know she won’t re-marry”
“Yes but you do have that prophecy about you.”
“Well, yes, but it’s not like it’s ambiguous in any way, there isn’t really much room for interpretation”
“What if you use it to your advantage, get a job where it’s a useful attribute?”
“No way; even if I did find a job where it was useful, it wouldn’t stop me being bad at it. I can only think of spy or assassin where it could help and being bad at those things is a death sentence.”
“He has a point, Alaria, maybe we need a more specific prophecy to work with.”
There are turning points and sometimes they are not obvious. The first pebbles falling that become a puff of dust or a landslide, the arguments that become a riot or a revolution. Looking back I can’t remember who said these words but they set something in motion.
“Jack Sniff?”
“The loser?”
“What if we set it up so he wants to lose?”
The next day found us searching the usual haunts for Jack. Poor guy had a thing for “find the maiden”. He lost so reliably that people would often join in to show him how it was done.
We found him outside the market, still losing the maiden, before we had decided how to approach him. Alaria jumped the gun a bit there.
“Hi Jack, can you help me with an experiment?” She simpered at him. Any sane man hearing that from a face like hers would have made polite excuses, ran away screaming, or both.
“No.” Jack turned back to his game without another word.
I could see Alaria’s ire raising, and as she opened her mouth to say something impolitic I put my hand on her shoulder and said loudly “Never mind, we’ll ask someone else”. Then, sotto voce to her ear “The experiment worked, follow me.”
I walked her briskly to a shaded bench with Alan trailing like a confused puppy.
Once there I sat us down, glanced conspiratorially left and right, and cutting Alaria off before she could get her voice up asked “If you can’t ever win anything, including an argument, how do you avoid becoming a slave to the whims of others?”
She got it straight away. “You can never argue, or even discuss, anything.”
Alan naturally had to chip in, “Of course! That’s why he was so abrupt! …How does that show the experiment worked, though?”
“My captain always tells me: ‘Follow the money.’ Where could a natural loser get enough money to play ‘find the maiden’ every waking hour?”
“Good question.”
“He’s a shill. I’ll bet a stack of coin that every time a high roller picks what should be the right card he matches their bet.”
“We are whispering about this because?”
“2 reasons. First if he realizes we know he may consider taking action against us. Second, find the maiden is about the least harmful way he can make money. It only dents one person’s wallet. If he expanded his repertoire to betting on whether we live to see another day for instance…”
“Oh. Crap.”
“Well, that would be playing with the fates of others, Pauli’s Inclusion Principle states ‘The largest effects of prophesies are always on the people or places specifically mentioned in them.'” Said Alan.
“We discussed this; we don’t know that, and on top of that we don’t know if he knows that. But what if he just bets we all still have a job tomorrow.”
“Nobody would take that bet.”
“His ‘find the maiden’ friends may.” I sighed “Are we all on board with why annoying this guy may not be wise?”
“Sure but why did we not think of this earlier?” Asked Alan
Alaria and I almost spoke over each other, but I stopped first. “Because yesterday he was an idiot, today he is a criminal mastermind.”
We decided Alaria would ask a few other random people if they could help with an experiment in the hope of putting him off their trail, then tabled the subject and went back to work the next day. The thought was there though – it is possible to play prophecy to your advantage.