In a small herb garden, planted outside a natural cave, a hermit kneels, watering and weeding. Two travel-stained pilgrims stand nearby, faces alight with yearning for wisdom, for answers.
The hermit just looks tired; and then, with a single incautious question, her expression slowly transforms into something fraught.
"The Many-Angled?" She shakes her head. "No. Yes and no. Of course it's after she visited the temple that I foresook my vows, left to live in the wilderness. And of course none of it would have happened if she'd not — but it gives the wrong idea to say that."
"Your pardon," the pilgrim murmurs, bobbing his head, too eager for contrition to ring true.
The hermit touches the back of her hand to her face, sits back on her heels. "I'd spent my entire life honing my ability at haruspicy," she says. "The art of looking into the guts of things. Through the guts of things, as a lens. Other people claim to do the same with leaves or stones or cards, but — it seemed different to me. Charged. To do the same with the flesh, with the stuff of life, with death."
"They say you don't eat meat, any longer," the other pilgrim offers.
"No," the hermit says. "No, that became hard to stomach. After."
"Holiness," the first pilgrim says, "there's no proper account of — after what? What happened?"
"I boasted to her," the hermit says, in a dry and faraway voice. "I boasted that what I did was to look through a lens at the structure of the world. And she liked that; said that in that case, she hardly thought I was working with the best tools, and how well I'd be able to see if she made a lens for me, instead of crudely constructing one with the sacrificial knife. What if, she said, what if I could read the future in living guts, with no need to pull them out? What if I could see them as I needed to, still living?"
"She did something to the sacrifice?"
"No," the hermit says, and laughs, strangled. "No. I never needed to kill another animal for it. Because she was right; the tearing-out and the letting-fall of the entrails is just another part of the lens, but if you can move that focal part into the mind of the haruspex, you can leave the guts in situ. I could look at a goat, a rabbit, a bird, still living, and learn to see them the way they'd be, dead and disemboweled and legible to the art I'd staked my life on. But she's a genius, damn her; it wasn't enough."
"What did she do, Holiness?"
"Suggested that I needed no animals at all because I, too, am made of guts. That she could teach my eyes to see via myself, as if I were some orb-gazing wizard, to see my own entrails figured across the dimensions like constellations, and through them — more. That I could perfect my dim fumblings into the future, with the highest quality instrument."
The pilgrim fidgets. "Did it work, Holiness? What did you see?"
"Too much," the hermit says. "Too, too much. I saw that I'd been a fool to hope she was correct. A life of reading enough of the what's-to-come to say: don't pick that day for your wedding, inauspicious somehow. And then, in a single glance, I saw the entirety of my life, birth to death, in all detail, and understood it, all the ways in which I did and could, and did not or could not, shape it myself. All that, without trying, as if my eyes were still focusing in the first instant after opening from sleep."
She pulls a weed.
"If I were a wizard," she says, weary, "I would remake my entire self around it. If I were a monster, I would use it to remake the world around myself. Be a fount of prophecy. Make and break kings, armies, empires, worlds."
"Holiness," the pilgrim says, "could you tell us—"
"I've known this to the second, ever since," the hermit says. "No, no, put it away. Your friend behind me does it with his knife. It's sharper, and he knows better where to use it; it won't pain me at all. I can't tell your order anything about the Many-Angled at all, that you'd like to know."
"You could," the pilgrim in front of her says, sweatily gripping a bronze knife. "You could help us. Help seal her away—"
"It doesn't happen," the hermit says, and turns her face up to the afternoon sun, closes her eyes, and waits for only a few seconds more.