This and other worldbuilding resources are gathered in my Codex Directory for you to explore.
Find more prophetic poetry in my Portents Directory.
In Part 1 of this series, I discuss the cultural reasons why I always use an /s/ to spell the word prophesy. The elusive merfolk publish their prophetic verses into books of epic poetry, known as story books.
The story book Portents of Mother's Gate should be considered a contemporary publication of the merfolk, released after the events of Book 2 in the saga, but prior to the events of Book 3. Therefore, the portents sequenced early in the story book have already reached fruition, and their events have already occurred.
Conversely, the portents listed later in the story book have not yet come to pass, and foretold events coincide with novels that have not yet been published in the Tales of the Known World saga. While these portents are certainly riddles, they do by nature contain spoilers. You have been warned.
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For the prophetic merfolk, portents that have not yet come to pass are considered unpassed prophesy. While they have been tattered and interpreted, the events they predict have not yet occurred.
However, unpassed prophesy is still fully understood, and in many cases, scholars have determined the precise dates these events will come to pass. But these future dates are traditionally withheld from the public, to protect the sanctity of the timeflow.
In prior eras, the merfolk discovered that sharing the precise dates of future events tempted certain people to try to change those events. All of these attempts have been unsuccessful, and ironically many of them were crucial to the actual fruition of the events they were trying to subvert.
Regardless, scholars now avoid the entire issue by simply withholding the exact dates of unpassed prophesy from their story books. Within a story book, these portents are still arranged in correct story order, using the precise dates that scholars have deduced after their intensive process of tattering and analysis.
But instead of providing an exact date for each tatter’s fruition, the annotation VA is used. This VA note is read Vyanni Ari, short for vyehvyannilu songyoari, which means Approximate Day of Seeing.
For a thorough explanation of prophesy dates and approximations, see Appendix IV in the Prophesy Appendix below.
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The merfolk culture is built on the prophetic Gift. Nearly all men produce a portent every twenty days, and they devote their lives to interpretation. For more about the role and inner workings of prophesy, check out the Prophesy Appendix above.
The use of VA is very common when tattering prophesy, especially in the early stages when interpreters are focused on dividing their latest portents, called raw prophesy, into disparate tatters.
Once divided, these tatters are then sequenced relative to each other, and the open-ended VA annotations are assigned approximate dates, which are adjusted as interpretation ensues.
When interpretation is completed, the approximated fruition date is converted into a verified dateline, and the tatter’s position in correct story order is finalized.
Portents then graduate from raw prophesy to unpassed prophesy. They are considered ready to publish into a story book, though their official dates are withheld from publication.
For a thorough explanation of prophesy tattering and annotation, see Appendix V in the Prophesy Appendix above.
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