Creativity Hovel

My prophet’s name is Noah. He is a good-hearted child, and his prophecies are small, simple things. That a friend will learn how to whistle, or ride a bicycle. That a new tooth will grow in straight. That a worried child’s mother will return safely from a routine surgery. That one did require intervention, but not very much. An infection slain while it was only a few cells, and the thing was done. Many require no intervention at all.

It never seems to occur to Noah to try to benefit from his ‘good feelings’. He rarely spends them on himself, and never asks for so much as a cookie in return for them. Thanks to him, the town is a little happier, a little more peaceful, a little luckier than it might have been, but no one knows why, and he’s left in peace.

As he gets older, starts school, he becomes more cautious. Some dim awareness forms in him that it’s not wise to know too much, to stand out, to draw attention. But he doesn’t lose faith in his own gift. When he says something will happen, it does happen. He chooses his words carefully, after one playground incident. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

I would do harm if he wanted me to. It’s my nature to harm, in truth, for I am the warning against careless words and curses, and many a prophecy has been turned bitter by my interpretation. But I find myself pleased that Noah chooses not to use his gift to harm, or even to gain influence among the others. He keeps his prophecies to small, simple things, that he can disguise as words of encouragement or simple optimism. A promise that a test will be passed, or a friendship restored, or a garden grow.

The gift of true prophecy is one I can bestow, though I rarely do. When Noah is eight, his father leaves. Distraught, he tries over and over to find a ‘good feeling’ that will help him, his sister and his mother, but in his grief there is nothing. He almost prophesies his father’s death, but bites back the words while I watch him. He does not wish that, even now.

After a week of suffering, of doubt, I grant him the gift before he loses his faith. It’s been so long since there was a real prophet. I find I want to keep this one.

That night, he dreams a dream and wakes relieved. When he tells his mother and sister that all will be well, he believes it. And he is right. I have brought down emperors and poisoned churches. It takes little effort to ensure that one woman finds a good job, that one girl qualifies for a scholarship, that a boy-child no longer has to fear losing his home.

But I can’t take the gift I gave him back. He is a true prophet now, and he will not only see what is good and kind.

He’s nine when he drags two children away from a bus, telling them they’ll get hurt if they go on it. It’s his good fortune that one of them knows him, knows he’s never wrong when he speaks with that certainty. When the bus crashes, twenty minutes later, something changes in him. He’s never predicted harm before. It frightens him, but he knows he saved lives. It makes him more cautious, but more certain too.

A season later, he wakes his mother in the middle of the night. “Mom! Mom, you have to drive to Aunt Lisa’s house now. There’s a fire.”

It doesn’t occur to her then to ask how he knows. She just leaps out of bed and runs to her car, breaks speed limits and runs red lights to get there, expecting fire engines and licking flames, only to find… nothing. A quiet house, no sign of danger.

She’s sitting in the car, cursing herself for not asking how he knew, for not realizing it was just a dream, when she sees the wisps of smoke issuing from the garage, silver in the moonlight.

The fire doesn’t take the house, and the smoke doesn’t kill, because she was there. Because she was already getting into the car when the oily rags burst into flame. She doesn’t understand, but she knows he’s always had ‘feelings’, and wants to believe that this was another one. His sister reads up on psychic gifts and suggests he go on television.

He doesn’t want that. He’s never craved notoriety, and wise instinct still tells him not to stand out too much.

But he can’t refuse to help, either. Not content to predict, he tries to prevent, to ameliorate, to save. At nine years old, he has already learned what many prophets never do, that there is a place between the knowing and the telling, that what he speaks *will* happen, but he need not speak exactly what he sees. He has learned to choose his words carefully, to leave openings for escape.

Sooner or later, he was bound to warn the wrong person. I am with him when he approaches a substitute teacher, warning the man to be careful on the road on the way home.

The next day, the man approaches him in the playground, asking how he knew about the fallen tree, and we are both unsettled by the strange look in the man’s eyes. He starts asking questions - not only of Noah, but of others, children who know no better than to answer. Soon he knows that Noah has ‘feelings’ that are always right. That if Noah says something will happen, it will.

Noah is a clever child, but he’s only a child. He doesn’t know how to stay out of the traps the man sets, and over the next weeks, the man gets the proof he wants. He believes, *knows*, that my prophet has the gift, and approaches the mother. He says he wants Noah to use his gift to help people, but greed stands out in spikes all over him, and I know he wants to gain from it. He would poison the gift if allowed to, until my boy was just another charlatan preying on those in pain and need.

The mother is wary, and rightfully so. She, too, has learned to believe, but it seems that she is the one who taught her son not to stand out, not to draw too much attention, not to open himself to suspicion. She denies, and refuses, and at last orders the man out of her home.

I don’t know if Noah is responding to my anger, which fills the house like smoke, or to his mother’s carefully-hidden fear. All I know is that as the mother urges the man towards the door, Noah walks over to stare at him for a long time. “If you don’t leave me alone,” he says clearly, “you are going to regret it.”

The only thing that keeps me from dropping a tree in front of the car, killing him as he should have died weeks ago, is that it would upset my prophet. Instead, I drop it just behind him, leaving him an inch from death and sweatingly aware of it. The next day, he almost chokes on his meal, and is saved only by another teacher. The day after that - I am learning modern ways - he is the victim of another greedy man, his bank accounts drained by a predator on the internet.

He never comes near the school again.

And a few days later, when he’s had time to think, Noah sits up in bed when everyone else is asleep, and stares into the darkness. “I will find out why I have this power,” he tells the darkness. “I will know.”

Oh, that’s cheating!

I’m indignant, but I’m trapped by my own nature. He’s spoken a prophecy, and I must make it come true. I almost take a fearsome form, to frighten him, but… he’s a good child. He’s been kind. I’ve always returned good for good and evil for evil, even if he’s being annoying.

I have no true shape, not a physical one. My shape is the shape of words spoken, of looming fate. But there are forms which have long been associated with prophecy, and those are the easiest to assume for the god of prophecy fulfilled. So I take one of them, and a great raven, twice as large as any natural bird, forms out of the darkness of the room, perched on the end of his bed.

He looks frightened, but determined too. “I want to know why I know things before they happen,” he says, his small hands clenched tightly on his blanket. “Why the things that I say will happen always do.”

“Because I gave you the… gift… of true prophecy,” I tell him, in the raven’s croaking voice.

“Why did you give it to me?”

I could lie. But I have no mastery of the art of lying. I can warp words, and twist them, but I am a creature in the service of truth, when all is said. “Because you have always believed you had it,” I told him. “For half of your lifetime, I have watched you, and ensured that your prophecies came to pass.”

“Why?”

“Because that is my nature. It is my purpose. I am the god of prophecy, and of prophecy fulfilled.”

He frowned, then, his smooth forehead creasing. “So why did you give me the gift, if I already thought I had it, and you were making sure what I said happened anyway?”

“When your father left,” I said, and he flinched, “you were losing your faith. You were beginning to doubt. Without the gift, you would have abandoned your faith and, in time, forgotten that you once had a childish belief in foretelling the future.”

“And you wanted me to keep believing? Why?”

He always has been an insightful child. This is not a question I wanted to answer, but I must, having once begun with the truth. “Because you are the only one who does.”

He frowned again. “I’ve seen lots of people who believe in foretelling the future.”

“Yes… and no.” I cock my bird’s head, considering how to explain. “There are many who believe in their own ability, or that of others, to glimpse what is hidden or what is to come. There are those who believe in a god, or gods. But they do not believe in prophecy, not in the old way, not anymore. They do not believe in the power of words spoken, in fate and in fortune, in as it is written, so shall it come to pass. But you did. You believed that the words spoken would prove true, so they did.”

He nods very slowly. “I remember,” he says after a long moment’s silence. “I remember my Mom reading me a story, that had a prophecy, which came true a way nobody expected. I remember thinking about it a lot. About how it said exactly what it meant, but everyone misunderstood. About how the words mattered.”

I nod too, and click my beak softly. “This form, this shape, is not real,” I tell him, remembering that for all his intelligence, he was only a child. “My true shape is like the shape of a word, or a whisper, or a promise. As it is written, so mote it be, they used to say, and I am the formless mote that made it be, for I am the weight of the words, and I bring prophecies to pass because the words are written, or spoken, and so I make them true.”

I truly do not know how much he understands, but he nods again. “Words,” he says thoughtfully, “matter. And it’s important to remember that they can mean more than one thing.”

“Yes. It is always important to remember that.”

He crawls down to the bed, and touches my head gently. I find that I don’t mind it at all.

Six years later, when he visits his father in a distant city, I travel with him. I ride on his shoulder, a small raven visible only to him, and we read together. He has long debated what career to choose, and has decided that he can do the most good by studying engineering and construction and becoming one of those who inspect buildings and other structures for flaws. Who better to judge future safety than one with the gift of foresight, after all? He knows what disasters can be caused by the collapse of a building, or a bridge, or the risks of fire or earthquake, and how many lives he could save with a timely word. And if it is his trade to predict faults, no-one will question too closely when he does so. So we are already studying, learning the patterns to look for.

We get off the bus, and walk down a crowded street. As always, I look where he looks, and when he stops suddenly in mid-step to stare, I am already staring too.

There is a girl, about his age, sitting with her back against a large stone. Coiled around the stone, and around her, its huge head resting on her lap, a serpent marked in white and yellow and crimson dozes, and her hand rests on its head while she reads.

“It seems,” I tell him, and the raven’s voice feels like my own after all these years, “that you are not the only child with the gift of belief in old gods.”

“That is an old god?”

“Oh, yes. No-one else would see what we see. Just a girl, reading. But it is old, perhaps even older than I am, and she is its priestess.” I shift my phantom weight, gripping his shoulder with feet that are always careful not to hurt, even now. “What do you say, prophet? Will we meet this priestess, and her god?”

I feel him reach into the futures, with the ease of long practice now, and then he smiles. “Yes,” he says, and his words have the weight of truth. “We will.”

He walks over to her, and when she looks up her eyes widen just as he did when she sees me. “Hi,” he says, and he smiles. “I’m Noah.”

She smiles back, at me as well as at him, and the serpent raises its head to gaze at us with interest. “I’m Allie.”

“I think we have a lot to talk about.”

She tilted her head, and dark eyes met dark eyes in perfect mutual understanding. “I think we do. All of us.”

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