The Vengekeep Prophecies Read Online Free

He peeled his gaze away from us long enough to consult with the scholars in a raspy whisper. He was clearly angry, and from their body language, the scholars were doing their best to convince him of something.
    Finally, Jorn snorted, turned, and hobbled over to us, his face a mask of contempt.
    â€œI was nearly rid of you,” he snarled. “I had the order of exile drafted and ready to sign. So close …”
    He pivoted on one foot to face the room’s centerpiece—indeed, the very reason for the room’s existence. A large tapestry, as tall as Ma and three times as wide, woven with threads of varying brown shades, hung from a shiny copper frame, suspended from the ceiling by thick cables. Jorn regarded the tapestry for a moment, then spoke over his shoulder to Da and me.
    â€œIt’s a shame you missed the Unveiling last night. I’m sure you’ll agree the Twins had a very interesting message for us this year.”
    He motioned with his cane to the tapestry. I looked to where he was pointing, but Ma and Da, doing their best to appear deeply interested in what the Castellan had to say, never took their eyes off the portly man.
    Everyone in Vengekeep knew the story of the Twins. Powerful seers who lived almost five hundred years ago, the Twins had visions of Vengekeep’s future that they wove into a series of tapestries. They wove a tapestry a day on enchanted looms, each tapestry representing a forthcoming year. And because the Palatinate believed it was dangerous to know the future too far in advance, the tapestries were sealed in glass tubes, marked with the corresponding year, and locked away in the catacombs beneath the town-state hall.
    Every new year, the town-state threw a massive festival in honor of the Twins. At the end of the weeklong celebration, the Castellan and our town-state mage would unlock that year’s tapestry, unveil it to the city, and then hang it in the Viewing Room for all to see. Scholars would spend hours interpreting it and then prescribe a course of action to the Castellan.
    When I was eight, the tapestry warned of a drought, allowing the town-state council to create water reservoirs. In the nearly five hundred years that Vengekeep had been relying on the tapestries for guidance, they’d often predicted as much good as they did bad and most of the bad they predicted was avoided. And none of it was ever terribly bad.
    Until now.
    I studied this year’s tapestry. It was a familiar mix of pictograms and sparsely worded passages. And while I was no scholar, even I could tell that Vengekeep’s future looked bleak. Crudely rendered dead animals suggested some sort of livestock plague. Stick figure people were covered in flames. Squiggles that looked suspiciously like monstrous vessapedes burst from the fountain near Hogar Square. Most disturbing, a flock of winged skeletal creatures dominated most of the tapestry. They looked like nothing I’d ever seen: massive, clawed, and fanged. In the pictogram, they seemed to be tearing the town clock tower to shreds. Other disasters—heavy rains, earthquakes—were mentioned in brief sentences around the ornately decorated borders. In the center of it all sat four additional stick figures, standing at all points of a four-pointed star.
    â€œWhat do you think of that?” Jorn demanded, tapping the tapestry with his cane.
    â€œI think we were safer back in gaol,” I said, wide-eyed. I thought I heard Nanni snicker.
    Ma stared intently at the weaving, taking it all in. “What could it mean, Castellan?”
    Jorn approached the tapestry and pointed to the words directly underneath the four stick people near the star that read, “The star-marked family alone shall be the salvation of Vengekeep.”
    As the words sank in, a chill tickled my toes. I stared so hard at the passage that I’d missed Jorn sidling up beside me. He yanked at my vest and shirt, exposing my right shoulder.