The person had the power to predict the future. Sadly, it usually only worked when it was predicting disasters. Yet, each time they warned a village, or city, or kingdom of it, they were usually laughed at and told to go away. Only to be blamed when the disaster struck. Why won't people listen? It always broke their heart. -- Anon Guest
Cassandra Syndrome: The condition of exact prognostication, with the inherent curse of not being believed about it. -- The Multiversal Encyclopedia of Baffling Blessings and Curses.
Wandering beggars generally wander for a reason. Some, like the Hellkin, are routinely driven out of places where they once had succour. Some are oathbound to walk in search of things to mend. Some seek fortune. Some seek luck. Some are harried. Some are mad. One... sees the future. Accurately.
What Madsen Darsk was seeking was one place that was not doomed in one way or another. Or, failing that, a fucking cure for having imbibed an entire bottle of a vile beverage called Green Mist. It was a part of her tragic backstory that some idiot who assaulted her poured the smoky green beverage down her throat and it was swallow or die. Now she could see what was going to happen. Anywhere.
Green Mist, she learned after she escaped, was generally taken by the drop. Seers used it to augment their visions. If a regular mortal wished a self-divination, they would imbibe as much as a shot, and perhaps regret that for a week.
A whole bottle of the stuff did not wear off. There were horror stories about it. A student mage who wanted to one-up their teacher and saw how every mis-cast spell would strike back. A king who accidentally downed a bottle whilst on a bender, and could see how each of his allies and enemies would die.
And now there was her.
Madsen Darsk.
Victim. Survivor. Seer.
What she saw were ghosts of incoming disasters. Natural or not. Playing over the real world with an inevitability that she could not alter. She saw the faces of the dying, especially. She saw where they would fall.
She couldn't stop it. She could never stop it.
That didn't stop her trying.
At this village, she paid for a bowl of stew with the words, "Shore up the south wall. Gobelliin are going to break it with a trebuchet."
She left in the middle of the night because the phantom images of the dying were not even one day older than that day. Halfway through the next morning, the refugees nearly hanged her for being right.
Those very same people had laughed at her for her prediction, the night before.
She never saw her own disaster. Just other people's dooms.
The survivors always haunted her with the same question as they hunted her. Blaming her. "Why didn't you tell us?"
But she had.
She couldn't have told them any plainer.
She found a travelling band of Hellkin. Another patch of misfits on their way from exile to exile. Currently holed up in a cave and waiting for one inevitability or another. They were wary - as they should be - of a Human. But when she pointed to the boulder in the ceiling and warned them that it was going to fall... a miracle.
They listened.
They chopped down trees to shore it up and spent an hour making positive that it would stay. They didn't wait. They didn't blame.
They gave her extra bread, and a corner in a caravan to sleep, since that was all they could spare. They gave her company and comfort.
They sent her ahead with the scouts, and used her senses to find a place with the least disasters happening, and then did everything they could to hold that disaster off.
Then they found The Valley. It was such a forgotten space that the mapmakers had no other name for it. If it featured on a map at all, it was just scrawled in as valley and nothing more.
There was a small town in it called Bendihollow, but the Hellkin were too skittish to go near it. They settled in the other end of the valley. Far from anywhere interesting.
They put up walls anyway. They put up guard towers anyway. Because any settlement of Hellkin expects trouble like most places expect the sun to rise. Even though no disasters came.
They named it what all of them had always wanted. Paxhaven.
[Photo by Andrew Coelho on Unsplash]
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