Prophecy Generator

What a prophecy does in a story

A prophecy is a promise made to the reader before the story has earned it. It tells them what will happen and leaves them to wonder how. That tension is the reason to use one: the reader watches the characters walk toward the words, knowing the words are true and not knowing what they mean.

A good prophecy is also a trap. It should be possible to read it two ways, and the wrong way should be the more comfortable one. The famous failures in fiction come when a character takes the words literally, or takes them to be about someone else, and the plot pays them back for it. Each result here is built from images that could stand for several things, which is exactly what you need.

Deciding the hidden meaning

The generator does not tell you what a prophecy means, and neither should the prophecy. Before you use one, write the meaning in plain language on a separate page. Who is the youngest of three sisters? What does it mean for the salt tide to climb the mountain stairs? If you cannot answer, change the image until you can. A prophecy with no meaning behind it feels like decoration, and readers can tell.

Then make the plain reading unlikely. If the verse speaks of a king without a kingdom, the obvious candidate should be wrong, and the right one should have been in the story since the first act. The fairest prophecies hide nothing: the reader could have worked it out, and does not feel cheated when the truth arrives.

Letting characters get it wrong

The prophecy is only half of the device. The other half is who knows it, who translates it and who profits from a particular reading. A priest who rewrote one line in a copy three hundred years ago, a ruler who needs the verse to mean war, a child who hears only the last two lines: each of these gives you a scene. Prophecy is most useful as a source of conflict between people who want it to mean different things.

Finally, decide what fulfilling it costs. If the hero can succeed without losing anything, the prophecy has made the story smaller. If it can only come true through a choice nobody wanted, it has made the story necessary.

Ten example prophecies

• Doom When the last grey heron crosses the dry river, a stranger who casts no shadow will open the door that was bolted by the first king, and the crown will pass to a hand that cannot hold it.
• Doom The oldest verse in the archive reads: on the night the old oak bleeds, the heir who was never born will sit upon the empty seat at the end of the table, and the walls will fall inward and not outward, but none will speak of it after.
• Doom A bell-ringer with silver hands will break the chain that holds the gate; when the sea gives back what it took, the fires on the hills will go out one by one.
• Doom When the dead are counted and one is found too many, the second son of a second son will wake what the mountain has kept asleep, and the dust will settle on the king's table.
• Doom Whispered by the last oracle: once the seventh seal is broken by a left hand, the last ship will leave without its captain, and the child who counts the stars wrong will cross the black water and not look back.
• Hope When the well in the market square tastes of honey, the youngest of three sisters will bring the two houses to one table, and the lost will find the road home.
• Hope It is said in the north: after the spring that does not thaw, a pilgrim who walks backwards will carry one flame to the bottom of the world, and the long winter will break like a dry branch, though the first to cross will not live to see the other shore.
• Hope A maker of locks and of bridges will build a bridge from both banks at once; when two suns share one morning, children will cross the border to play and nobody will call them back.
• Hope When a child counts seven stars where there are six, the widow of the last true king will lay the crown on a table and walk away from it, and a city will be built with no walls.
• Hope Carved over the door of the abandoned temple: the one who keeps the final lamp will light the lamp that was left unlit, and the sun will rise on a country that has no name for its enemy, though the whole of it will be forgotten by the next generation.