The Omen Machine

She shuffled over to him, paper in hand. She tapped it with a finger as she gazed up at him. “It says, ‘People will die.’”

Richard studied her eager face a moment. “That happens all the time, Lauretta. Everyone dies, eventually.”

“Yes, so true,” she said with a chuckle as she returned to a teetering mound of paper to start her search anew.

Richard didn’t see any more use for her prophecy than he saw in most prophecy. “Well, thank you for—”

“Here’s another,” she said as she read a paper hanging out from a stack. She pulled it free. “It says, ‘The sky is going to fall in.’”

Richard frowned. “The sky?”

“Yes, that’s right, the sky.”

“Are you sure you didn’t mean that the roof was going to fall in?”

Lauretta consulted the paper in her hands. “No, it quite clearly says ‘sky.’ I have very neat handwriting.”

“And what could that mean?” Richard asked. “How can the sky fall in?”

“Oh dear me, I have no idea,” she said, snorting a chuckle. “I am only the channel. The prophecy comes to me and I write it down. Then I save it, the way you’re supposed to save prophecy.”

Nathan gestured at the papers all around. “You have no visions about these things, these prophecies that come to you?”

“No. They come, I write them down.”

“So then you don’t necessarily know what they mean.”

She considered a moment. “Well, if the prophecy is for rain, I admit I have no vision to go with that, but it seems pretty clear, don’t you think?” When Nathan nodded, she went on. “But when it says the sky is going to fall, I can’t begin to imagine what that could mean. The sky can’t very well fall in, now can it?”

“No, it can’t,” Nathan agreed.

“So,” she said, holding up a finger thoughtfully, “it has to have some hidden meaning.”

“So it would seem,” Nathan agreed. “And how does a prediction like that one come to you, if not in a vision?”

She frowned as she looked up while she tried to recollect. “Well, it comes to me as words, I guess. I don’t see a picture in my mind of a sky falling in or anything. It just comes to me that way, that the sky is going to fall in, like a voice in my head saying it, so I write it down just the way it comes.”

“And then you store it in here?”

Lauretta glanced around at all of her precious predictions. “I suppose that future generations of prophets will have to study all of this in order to make sense of it.”

Richard could hardly contain himself. He struggled to keep his mouth shut. The woman was harmless enough. She wasn’t trying to drive them crazy. She was the way she was and he wasn’t going to argue her out of her nature, or her lifelong obsession. It would be pointless and cruel to say something that would only end up making her feel bad.

“Oh,” she said, turning suddenly to shuffle to the back of the room, “I almost forgot. I have another that came to me just yesterday. Came to me quite unexpectedly. It was the last of the prophecies that came to me for you, Lord Rahl.”

Lauretta pulled at papers, reading them quickly and then shoving them back where she’d found them. Finally, she came across what she was looking for. Richard found the fact that she could find a single piece of paper she was looking for among all the thousands and thousands stacked everywhere to be more remarkable than anything she was writing down.

She hurried back, holding the paper out for Richard. He took it and read it aloud.

“‘Queen takes pawn.’” He looked up with a frown. “What does that mean?”

Lauretta shrugged. “I have no idea. My calling is to hear them and to write them down, not to interpret them. As I said, future prophets will have to do that work.”

Richard glanced over at Nathan and his grandfather. “Any clue what this means?”

Zedd made a face. “Sorry, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Nathan shook his head. “Me neither.”

Richard took yet another deep breath. “Thank you for passing these along, Lauretta. ‘People are going to die,’ ‘The sky is going to fall in,’ and”— he glanced down at the paper again to read the words—“‘Queen takes pawn.’ That’s it, then? Do you have any others you want me to see?”

“No, Lord Rahl, that’s all of them. When they came to me I didn’t know their meaning, but I did know for certain that they were meant for you.”

“Do you usually know who the prophecy is meant for?”

Her brow creased as she considered the question. “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t recall ever knowing who my prophecies are meant for, or about.” She looked up at him. “But you are said to be a very unusual man, a wizard of great power, so I suppose that had something to do with it.”

Richard glanced at the teapot with the candle under it. “You know, Lauretta, in appreciation for bringing your prophecy to my attention, maybe I can do something for you in return.”

She cocked her head. “For me?”

“Yes. I think that all of these prophecies should be in their proper place.”

Her brow creased. “Proper place?”

“That’s right. They don’t belong here, hidden away. They belong in a library with other prophecy. They should take their rightful place in a library.”