The Prophets Who Refused to Speak

The road to prophecy was paved with silence.

We'd been walking for three days through the Ashen Hills, following paths that memory insisted existed but eyes could barely trace. Once, these lands had thrummed with divine presence—moon cults and oracle groves, temples where the future leaked through like light through cracked doors. Now only husks remained, and even those seemed eager to forget what they'd been.

The trees had no leaves. Not dead—worse. They'd chosen barrenness over bearing witness to what grew in the world. Their branches reached up like prayers that had given up mid-gesture, and when wind moved through them, they made no sound. Even nature had learned to hold its tongue.

"There." Dorian pointed to a cluster of standing stones, their tops just visible through the silver haze that passed for sky here. "That matches the map."

The map we'd bought from a trader who'd crossed herself three times before taking our coin. Who'd wrapped the parchment in black cloth and warned us that some knowledge preferred to stay lost.

As we climbed the hill, we passed the first of the statues. Once, she might have been beautiful—a goddess carved in local stone, arms raised in blessing or beckoning. But her face was ruined. Not by time or weather. The damage was too precise, too deliberate. Someone had taken chisel to stone and removed her mouth with the careful attention of a surgeon removing cancer.

"Look at the others," I said, though my voice came out thin.

Every statue we passed—dozens of them lining the old pilgrimage path—had suffered the same mutilation. Mouths chiseled away. Some still showed tool marks, fresh as yesterday though the dust suggested years of abandonment. It wasn't erosion. It was erasure. Deliberate. As if even stone didn't want to remember what once spoke prophecy.

The temple crouched at the hill's crown like something trying to sink back into earth. Vines had claimed it, but not with the wild abundance of nature reclaiming civilization. These grew with purpose, weaving through doorways and windows in patterns that looked almost like language. Almost like warnings.

I reached for a cluster blocking the main entrance, and the moment my fingers touched green, I smelled blood. My blood. The vines wept red sap that steamed in the cold air, and I jerked back, heart hammering.

"Let me," Dorian said, but when he reached for his knife, the vines retreated. Not far—just enough to create an opening exactly wide enough for us to pass through single file. As if the temple itself was deciding whether to admit us or devour us.

Inside, darkness had weight.

Our torches pushed it back reluctantly, revealing a circular chamber that might have once held hundreds. Now it held only silence and what silence left behind. At the center, three figures sat in meditation pose, facing inward toward—

My breath caught.

They were perfectly preserved. Three oracles in ceremonial robes, hands folded, heads tilted back. But their mouths were open in screams that had crystallized into permanence. Not mummified by time—frozen in the moment of seeing something that had broken their ability to speak it.

A fourth chair sat empty in their circle. The dust on it was undisturbed, had been undisturbed for years, but I felt it pulling at me. An invitation. A warning. A space kept vacant for someone who hadn't arrived yet, or had arrived too many times.

"Aria." Dorian's voice was careful. He'd found something near the wall—a silver bowl, the kind used for scrying, shattered but not scattered. The liquid inside hadn't evaporated. It rippled when I stepped closer, responding to my presence like iron filings to a magnet.

I knelt beside it, tried to do what I'd done before. To read the space, to feel the threads of time and possibility that must have been woven thick in a place like this. But the moment I reached out with that other sense, everything went... blank.

Not empty. Blank. Like trying to read words that were being unwritten as I looked at them.

The threads wouldn't tangle. They simply unraveled before I touched them. The past erased itself rather than be witnessed. The future turned away like a child hiding its face.

"They don't want me to see," I whispered.

"Who doesn't?"

"Any of it. The temple. The prophecies. Time itself." My hands shook as I pressed them against the cold stone floor. "It's like the future is being redacted in real time. Like something is editing out every path that leads to—"

To my child. To what grew inside me with its silver eyes and cosmic certainty.

A voice that wasn't mine, wasn't the child's, scraped against the inside of my skull: "We saw what comes. We saw you. And we chose silence."

The weight of it crashed over me like a physical force. My knees hit stone, and I doubled over, pressing my palms against my ears as if that could shut out the truth.

"I don't want to be her." The words ripped from my throat, raw and desperate. "I don't want this. I don't want to birth something that makes prophets choose death over speaking—"

I was sobbing now, great heaving things that shook my whole body. The child inside me stirred, responding to my distress with movements that felt like questions. Like concern. Like a baby reaching for its mother even from the womb.

Arms came around me. Dorian, pulling me against his chest, holding me through the shaking.

"If loving you means watching the world end," he said, voice steady as stone, "I'll still choose you. Every time."

The words anchored me. Not to hope—hope was too fragile for what we faced. But to presence. To the simple truth of being held by someone who'd seen me at my most divine and most broken and chose to stay for both.

"The oracles," I said against his chest, voice muffled but needing to speak it. "They saw. Whatever's coming, whatever I'm carrying—they saw it and chose this. Chose to scream themselves into stone rather than speak it into being."

"Then they were cowards," he said simply.

I pulled back to look at him, saw fierce certainty in those gold eyes.

"They had the chance to shape it. To speak prophecy that might have guided, might have softened, might have helped. Instead they chose silence." His hand cupped my face, thumb brushing away tears. "You're braver than they ever were. You're staying. You're speaking. Even knowing the cost."

"I don't want to be the mother of an ending," I whispered.

The words had barely left my lips when one of the mummified oracles crumbled. Not gradually—instantly. One moment a perfectly preserved corpse, the next a pile of dust that might have been centuries old. As if my denial had finally given it permission to complete its death.

The symbol on my belly flared hot enough to make me cry out. I pulled up my shift to see new lines branching from the original mark, spreading like veins of light across my skin. Not tattoos—living script. Prophecy writing itself into my flesh because it had nowhere else to go.

The child inside me turned, and I felt its awareness like a second set of eyes opening. Looking out through my skin at this temple of silence, at these prophets who'd chosen muteness over truth.

They were afraid, it whispered in that voice that grew less human each time it spoke. But you're not. That's why I chose you.

"I didn't choose this," I said to my belly, to the temple, to the dust that had been an oracle who'd seen too much.

No, the child agreed. But you're choosing to stay. That matters more.

Dorian helped me stand, and I saw my own fear reflected in his eyes magnified tenfold. He'd followed me through transformation and transcendence, through humanity and its opposite. But this—carrying something that made prophets choose silence over speech—this was testing even his legendary patience.

"We should go," he said quietly.

I nodded, but paused at the entrance. The fourth chair still sat empty, still pulled at me with its terrible patience. Waiting for an oracle who wouldn't scream. Who wouldn't choose silence. Who would speak the unspeakable into being simply by carrying it to term.

The vines parted again as we left, and this time I noticed: they grew in patterns that looked like the symbols spreading across my skin. As if the temple recognized its own language being written in flesh. As if it knew I was becoming the prophecy it had tried so hard not to speak.

Outside, the Ashen Hills stretched endlessly under their silver sky. The mouthless statues watched us go with their carved eyes, and I wondered if they envied the oracles inside. At least the oracles had found a way to stop seeing. The statues were condemned to witness in silence forever.

"What do we do now?" Dorian asked as we made our way down the treacherous path.

I touched my belly where new lines of light were still writing themselves, where the future was being carved into my skin one symbol at a time.

"We do what they couldn't," I said. "We speak it into being. Even if it ends everything. Especially then."

Because that was the truth the prophets had died to avoid saying: some endings were also beginnings. Some destructions were also creations.

And some mothers had to birth apocalypse before the world could learn a new way to live.

I stopped at the edge of the temple grounds, where sacred met profane, where silence gave way to the possibility of sound. The child pulsed agreement against my ribs, and I felt the weight of what we were choosing. What I was choosing.

I drove my fingers deep into the ashen soil.

The earth responded immediately—not with growth but with recognition. It pulsed beneath my touch, once, twice, like a vast heart remembering how to beat. Silver light traced from my fingers into the ground, spreading in veins that mirrored the marks on my skin. For a moment, the entire hillside glowed with buried starlight, with possibility, with the promise of words that refused to stay unspoken.

When I pulled my hands free, they came away clean. But the earth held the imprint of my touch, glowing faintly, stubbornly. A mark that said: Here. This is where silence ended. This is where a mother chose to speak.

Together, we walked back into a world that had forgotten how to speak our names.

Soon, it would remember.

Whether it wanted to or not.