Chapter Text
It started, as most things do, with a prophecy.
Not because prophecies are particularly reliable, mind you. If anything, their historical record is abysmal. For every prophecy that accurately predicts the fall of a kingdom, there are twenty others predicting the rise of immortal goat emperors, rain made of fish, or the return of some long-dead hero who has very sensibly chosen not to return at all.
Unfortunately, people remember the successful ones..
Aen Ithlinnespeath, it would be known in years to come. Ithlinne's Prophecy. A prophecy of endings, as the best prophecies tend to be, for what is the point of a prophecy that informs you Tuesday shall be overcast with a chance of mild drizzle?
No one wages wars over a weather forecast or finds religions over moderate precipitation or—or tries to fuck their own daughter( Regardless of the fact that one should not do that, prophecy withstanding or not)
Endings, however.
Endings people adored.
Ithlinne, elven prophetess and apparently a deeply pessimistic individual, had seen fit to prophecise the end of the world in its entirety.
Yikes.
The world would end in frost and shadow. A savior would be born against the white frost. And there would be a last king, a destroyer, a conqueror, a terror upon the earth who would grind kingdoms to dust beneath his heel until everything the sun touched was his for the taking.
Then the savior would defeat him. The chosen would be led away from the white frost. The world would be reborn.
Dramatic AND Thorough. This was a sort of prophecy that got embroidered onto tapestries and argued about in halls for centuries by men who are absolutely certain they understand it and were absolutely wrong. It was an excellent topic of discussion for a tea party perhaps, second only to the entropy of entire universe but that's for another thousands of years to come. This one although.
This one was unfortunately near.
It started, as most disasters do, with a man who felt he had been insufficiently appreciated by a woman.
The mage in question had been scorned.
( "right...I just feel like we want different things"
" I love you! "
".. You have known me for a day , sir")
This, in itself, was not unusual—mages as a category were not always the easiest people to love, being prone to a certain hauteur that came from spending too many years being the most powerful person in most rooms and not enough years being told, plainly or without diplomatic softening, that they were being insufferable.
This particular mage had quadrupled the error by being clever about it, which is always worse than being stupid about it, because stupid men who are scorned sit in taverns and write bad poetry and eventually move on.
But clever men...
Oh they change histories. Usually for the worse.
There is a reason so many catastrophes begin with the phrase "You're just like my mother" spitted out with vitroil
There is also a reason an alarming number of those ideas can be traced back to unresolved disputes with somebody's parents.
This particular mage, unfortunately, was both clever and deeply offended by the woman who dared to reject him and remind him of the trust issues he had with his mother.
Clever men who are scorned go looking for things they ought not to find.
He found them, as the insufficiently wise always do.
Bitterness fueled ambition in the particular way that only wounded pride can fuel it — thoroughly and efficiently, without pausing for rest or reflection, which to be fair, he really should have taken.
Introspection and therapy could've prevented this.
Alas.
He chanced upon the power of Lara Dorren's genes hidden within the Raven-Cerbin dynasty. He chanced upon the prophecy. And, clever as he was, he put the two together with the giddiness of being right. ( Delusions of granduer)
The Prophecy of Ithlinne.
Verily I say unto you, the era of the sword and axe is nigh, the era of the wolf's blizzard. The Time of the White Chill and the White Light is nigh, the Time of Madness and the Time of Contempt: Tedd Deireádh, the Time of End. The world will die amidst frost and be reborn with the new sun. It will be reborn of Elder Blood, of Hen Ichaer, of the seed that has been sown. A seed which will not sprout but burst into flame. And between the flame and the Last King shall stand the fate of the world.
Ess'tuath esse! Thus it shall be! Watch for the signs! What signs these shall be, I say unto you: first the earth will flow with the blood of Aen Seidhe, the Blood of Elves...
And the king of the South shall rise up against the kings of the North and overrun their lands like a flood, they will be crushed, their nations destroyed. And when the eagle's throne standeth empty, when the line forgotten is remembered, then shall the Last King arise.
And beneath his eaves shall the Swallow make its nest. The Elder Folk shall place a song within his hands, and the children of stars return to the north. May Ye All Wail, for before him shall crowns be laid low. The markers of realms shall be cast into the waters. And the sundered peoples shall know one name. Yet no sword shall bring this to pass. And after him there shall be no kings.
Only those who follow the Swallow will survive. The Swallow, the symbol of spring, is the savior, the one who will open the Forbidden Door, show the way to salvation. And make possible the world's rebirth. The Swallow, the Child of the Elder Blood. And thereafter shall none see the Last King.
Ess'tuath esse! Thus it shall be.
As has been historically documented across every civilization unfortunate enough to produce one, prophecy in the hands of power hungry megalomaniacs ends in precisely two things: blood, and the enthusiastic self fulfillment of the very catastrophe everyone was nominally trying to prevent.
This is not irony or a nice little coincidence. This is, unfortunately, exactly what happens when men who want power are handed a document that appears, if read with sufficient creative liberty, to endorse it.
The mage read the prophecy.
Then he committed the first mistake common to all scholars, kings, priests, revolutionaries, generals, visionaries, prophets and... Fools.
He decided that he understood it
The process was quite simple really, he took an ancient prophecy, then removed all uncertainty and ignored every contradiction, then proceeded to discarded every alternative interpretation and at the end selected the answer he liked best
This procedure is known in academic circles as confirmation bias or in simpler terms: Cherry picking.
The prophecy became an obsession.
He read it again—once, twice, three times, by the candlelight, in libraries and taverns, while eating and not eating. He read it often enough that sensible people would look at him, then backtrack away from the clearing with a "Nope, Vilgefortz is going crazy again"
At some point he became convinced that he had discovered the truth.
The Last King.
The phrase echoed in his mind. Not just a king but — The king.
The final ruler of the world, a conqueror of nations, someone who would unite the Continent beneath a single crown.
And because the universe has always possessed a vicious sense of humor, at precisely the moment he arrived at this conclusion there happened to be an exiled prince wandering the world with enough ambition to choke a dragon.
A bitter and furious prince who was convinced a bit too much of his own self importance. He was a kind of man who heard a prophecy and immediately believed it was about him.
And thus, years later, when the mage found the exiled prince in whatever forgettable corner of the world exiled princes go to nurse their grievances, he laid the prophecy before him.
And the exiled prince, who had been waiting his entire life for the universe to confirm what he had always privately suspected about himself, listened.
Very carefully indeed. Some might say it, too carefully even.
History would later describe the events that followed with terms such as conquest, unification, imperial expansion, geopolitical realignment, genocide, ethnic cleansing continental warfare and again, parent-child incest—
The people, although, generally preferred simpler words.
Disaster
And thus started the conquest of realms. And thus started the prophecy.
Or did it?
The trouble with prophecy—the annoyingly stupid trouble with prophecy, which Ithlinne perhaps ought to have included a footnote about somewhere in the margins when she was jolting it down—is that it does not come with a guide to its own interpretation.
It does not label its subjects or provide footnotes about its imagery or provide a helpful index in the back or clarify what it means by a song within his hands or specify which eagle's throne or whose eaves exactly.
It simply exists, ancient and thoroughly unhelpful, while century after century of intelligent people make confident and entirely incorrect assumptions about it and act on those assumptions with great vigor and considerable collateral damage.
The mage was intelligent and the prince ambitious.
Both were entirely convinced they understood the future.
Neither ever considered the possibility that they were looking in the wrong direction altogether, whichh is unfortunate, becauss prophecies, like monsters, have a teeny tiny habit of biting the people who think they've already figured them out.
And because somewhere, entirely unaware that history was rearranging itself around him, a boy was at that very moment attempting to climb through a chapel window so he could listen to a choir that had explicitly forbidden him entry.
As origins of world changing events go, it was not an impressive one.
But then neither was the boy.