Oleander

All dragons know the story of the Speaker, how her prophecy brought destruction to the Second Age and magic to the Third.

Yet although history heard her voice the loudest, she was not the only one who Spoke. During the darkest years of the Second Age, when the magi and the warlords fought most fiercely, prophecies sprung up like weeds in the lands of every bloodied battlefield. Soothsayers flourished, feeding on the shallow hopes and deeper fears of common folk. In each corner of Sornieth there was some hooded figure who would read you the signs in a handful of scattered stones and entrails - if your pockets were heavy enough with gold, that is. The elemental worshippers favoured trances and dreams -


Some auguries spoke of impossibly powerful machines, some of auspicious births. More than anything, they spoke of the Pillar and of dragons and of magick. Some Speakers had the Sight, some did not. But a prophecy is a living thing. Even the most empty words can come to pass if enough tongues repeat it as the truth, and bend their lifeforce towards its purpose. Even the brightest kernels of foresight can fade into darkness if they are forgotten.

As the balance of the wars tilted, a group of elemental magi feared that the days of their strength were growing short, that what they Spoke would be lost. They gathered in the forests of the west. This was a time when the mountains still stood unbent, and the aspen and birch grew untouched by magick. No, the Starfall Isles were not as they are now, but they have always been old, always been powerful. The magi knew this, and they sang their prophecies deep into the earth and the trees. They bound their visions into the vast network of roots with a terrible ritual of blood and bone. And so, when the great silence fell like a hammer on Sornieth and all else failed, the auguries endured.
The inhabitants of the Fourth Age are not so different from those of the Second as they might like to imagine. In this age, too, the whisper of prophecy has an irresistible lure. The trees grow so large in the Strand now that it is easy for a dragon to disappear into them. In the root-caverns below the ground, lit by the pulsing glow of the mycelial networks, day and night blur into one. Dragons burn the Starwood blossoms and, snouts dizzy with smoke, lean over dark pools to see the shapes of those who have been long foretold. The water magnifies the auguries like a great lens, but it also makes their seductions far more powerful. It is impossible for a dragon to gaze at the visions that dance across the glassy surface of the pools without also seeing their own mirrored image in the water. Yes indeed, a prophecy is a living thing, always seeking its way out of vision and into flesh. In the shadowed underbelly of the Starwood, it grows. Sects of dragons become consumed by the glimpse of prophecy in their own reflected features and nest together, each feverdreaming that they will bring forth the One.