Author's note - and at last the sequel to "The Hourglass" begins. Pity it had to start with a rant from Flemeth. But the old bitch just wouldn't shut up.

The Prophecy of the Architect that she quotes here is from chapter 16 of "The Hourglass" and you won't find it in the game codex. That bit was my own invention.

Flemeth speaks

Prophecy. Pah. If that word is not an obscenity in every human language, then it ought to be. The Chantry even tell us, in one of their more meandering writings, that it is "the Maker's mercy that holds down the curtain of the future." A pious piece of poetry that means precisely nothing, as with so many of their writings. But that one perhaps holds more than a grain of truth.

Did you ever wonder why so many prophets are considered mad, to a greater or a lesser degree? Did you consider that this might even be cause and effect, that there might be something in the nature of prophecy that cannot be handled by a human brain and remain sane? That poor elf that the mad old mage at Soldier's Peak quoted to the Cousland girl - well, he wasn't the first or the last to be driven out of his mind by catching glimpses of what I see all the time.

So, why wasn't I driven mad? Well, plenty think I am crazy. "That crazy old woman" they call me. Mind you, I never claimed to be sane in the first place. Or human, if it comes to that.

Oh, but where are my manners? Admittedly you perhaps should have told me your name first, but we will dispense with the niceties here. I have had many names. "The Witch of the Wilds" "Asha'bellanar" "That mad old woman who talks too much." "Flemeth". I suppose you might as well call me Flemeth. It at least has the virtue of being relatively short.

Now where were we? Oh yes. Prophecy. I was trying to explain it to you. I'm not entirely sure why, because you probably stopped listening five minutes ago. But anyway.

Let's try an analogy. Like all analogies this one has the advantage of being a pretty picture that you can form in your mind that is almost completely wrong. But this at least gives you something nice to look at while being bewildered.

Imagine the future as a tapestry. Planned and stitched painstakingly on canvas. You can see the picture develop as the stitches are applied, and you can make guesses about the picture that will emerge. You may be right, or you may be wrong. That patch of blue may indeed be the sky as you think, or it may be the sea, or it may be a fold of a mage's robe, or... Well, you get the picture. Or you don't. Probably you don't.

But until that tapestry is finished and hung on a wall the picture is uncertain. The only one who knows exactly what is there is the maker of the picture, and she may change her mind a dozen times while executing the design - she runs short of green silk and the picture becomes a golden desert scene rather than a woodland. One line just will not come right, and so she overstitches it and places a spray of flowers in a lady's hand rather than a dagger. Change upon change.

But what if you were looking at the tapestry as she was stitching, and could see every possibility? Every idea she had and discarded, every colour that changed, every line that altered, and saw them all at the same time? Without any way to judge what really was in front of you? And then someone kept asking you endless questions about the picture?

You'd probably go mad. That poor elf at Weisshaupt certainly did. By the end of it all he was trying to strangle anyone who tried to take his toy mabari away to wash it, and he was living on hard boiled eggs because people couldn't poison them. At least that's what he said. Who knows what he was seeing of the pattern by then.

And the Grey Wardens copied everything he said down faithfully. Most of it was rubbish, pieces of the tapestry long since discarded. But that piece that the Warden Commander was told at Soldier's Peak...well.

"In the days of the Dragon, thrice damned child of a seven times damned brood,

there shall arise amongst the voiceless in the darkness

one who is cursed with a voice

and he shall cry out to drown the terrible silence that only he hears.

And the Dragon shall be his companion, and the Dragon shall be his undoing

and he shall seek to lead the voiceless from their darkness

and shall make himself but the architect of their destruction

and both Dragons shall name him betrayer"

Oh, it's poetic rubbish, but he had a finger on something there. Because some of that indeed came to pass, and some of it is yet to be but that part of the tapestry is clearer and clearer.

Better than my attempts at prophecy. Very few of them haven't backfired on me in one way or another. And the worst of it is when you prophesy something that you have seen and watch men then move heaven and earth to avoid it, and bring it about just the same. Very human though.

And sometimes you only tell half a prophecy. ""Keep him close and he will betray you. Each time worse than the last" I told a young man once, whose tapestry threads could have led him either to a crown or a gallows. I didn't tell him the other half. "And if you don't keep him close, you will not live to know whether he would have betrayed you or not." Never let a prophecy back you into a corner.

I told another young man in Kirkwall something. Mind you, he didn't understand either. Do you?

"We stand upon the precipice of change. The world fears the inevitable plummet into the abyss. Watch for that moment...and when it comes, do not hesitate to leap."

No. I didn't think you would.

A pity.