Clarkesworld, February 2026
Baeliss Shudal is the last of a once-revered lineage of seers on the pastoral world of Alcestis, but she harbors a devastating secret: she’s a fraud. The gift of divination that her family claimed for generations died long ago, if it ever truly existed. Baeliss survives through tricks, reading people rather than futures, providing comfort through theatrical prophecy to shepherds and townspeople alike.
Her deception takes a catastrophic turn when soldiers bearing the Ducal crest arrive and escort her to meet Duke Ernestid Arkady, ruler of the vast Ducal Fold. The dying tyrant, obsessed with his legacy and how he’ll be remembered at the end of time itself, demands an unprecedented reading: cladomancy, divination through planetary destruction. He has already ordered the annihilation of Kalliston, an inhabited world, and forces Baeliss to watch its death on a delayed feed, expecting her to read his future in its ruins. Despite her confession that she’s a fraud, the duke refuses to believe her. She watches helplessly as Kalliston crumbles, knowing the planet died before she even entered the room.
War inevitably follows the duke’s atrocity. The conflict engulfs the Fold and eventually reaches Alcestis itself, destroying the embassy and the peaceful river town Baeliss called home. After the duke’s death and the battle’s end, Baeliss emerges from her prison beneath the ruined embassy to find her world transformed into a devastated battlefield. There she encounters Hanne, a dying soldier from Kalliston, trapped in the rubble with catastrophic injuries.
In this moment of profound despair, Baeliss discovers something unexpected: the power to create prophecy through sheer will and compassion. She performs bellomancy, reading Hanne’s future in the battlefield’s chaos, promising survival, a big house, and a child. This time, her lies are born not from fraud but from desperate hope—a refusal to let another person die alone because of her failures. When help arrives, Baeliss ensures her prophecy becomes reality.
Years pass. Alcestis recovers slowly, and Baeliss abandons fortune-telling to help rebuild through honest labor. But one day, inexplicably drawn to the distant hills, she finds Hanne—now an al-gulaal herder with a prosthetic leg, living in Alcestis with her baby daughter, Braela. The prophecy has manifested.
Baeliss performs one final divination using osteomancy—reading bones cast upon a table. But these are special bones: the finger bones of Duke Ernestid himself, which she retrieved after his death. For the first time in her life, reading Braela’s future, the bones speak clearly. The patterns are no longer random chaos but an open book revealing the child’s destiny.
Having finally touched genuine prophecy born from love rather than lineage, Baeliss completes her journey by casting the duke’s bones into the river Sur, releasing both his legacy and her own fraudulent past into the infinite dark.
Louis Inglis Hall is a writer of speculative short fiction. His work appears in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons and The Dark, amongst others. Louis lives and works in Edinburgh.