Oracle
A Thursday Prompt story
© 2026 by Walter Reimer

Prompt: sign


The old woman lived alone, in a hut on the side of a hill deep within the forest. She was a leopard, her black-spotted yellow fur faded with age; unable to hunt for herself any longer, she kept chickens, raising them for meat and eggs. The surplus she sold in the village down in the valley in exchange for things.

But the villagers would sometimes come to her, because she could See things.

When a calf was born with two heads, they came to her.

When a twin-tailed comet was seen in the sky, they came to her.

When a stranger came through the valley, they came to her.

And every time they came to her, she would simply say, “You’ll know it when you see it.”

Some would go back to their homes and jobs.

Some would beg her for explanations or offer her treats in hope she would tell them.

Some threatened her. Those people usually went home with claw or bite marks, because despite her age, the old woman was still a leopard.

Then one day a young kitten, barely out of his first fur, saw an old man coming up the road to the village. The old man was a leopard, gray and stooped with stooped with age, bowed under a pack and supporting himself with a staff. “Hello!” the kitten said, planting himself in the middle of the road to block the old man’s path.

The old man squinted at the kitten and said, “Hello. Is there an old woman, living in the woods on the hill?”

“Yes!” the kitten said. “She knows things.”

“I’m sure she does,” the old man said. “Take me to her, please.”

The kitten agreed and led the old man up into the woods, and the sun was high in the sky, the light filtering through the spread leaves and boughs, when the kitten showed the old woman’s hut. “She’s in there,” he said, and he looked up at the old man. “Are – Are you - ?”

“Yes,” the old man said. The kitten’s eyes went wide and he ran down the hill as if his tail was on fire.

The old man took off his pack and sat ground facing the door as the old woman stepped out. “So,” she said.

He nodded. “So.”

She sat facing him.

“You’ve gotten old,” she said.

“So have you,” he said.

They sat, and waited, until the rest of the village came up into the woods, led by the kitten.

“What have you to say to us?” they asked the old man and the old woman.

The woman gestured to the man, and the leopard said,

“I have traveled far, north to south,
East to west, long weary years;
Dark are the things I say to you,
For in the north things will move;
Your village shall be swept clean
Like a writing-slate is erased;
Therefore forsake the valley, and
Move your homes and forges to
The hills, there to await disaster;
If done, reverence the gods and
Take care of one another, for the
Years afterward shall be hard.”

The villagers muttered and recited the verses said by the old man. “Is this true?” one asked.

The old man nodded. “This I have seen, with my own eyes.”

The villagers went back down the hill, gathered sawn wood and dressed stone, and bent to the task with a will. The new village was higher than where the old woman and the old man lived, and when it was done the villagers moved what they could.

Then the solid ground shook, and shook again, and from the north came a distant and growing roar and a vast wave of rocks and soil and trees and water flung itself into the valley. The waters rose and rose up the hillsides, and when it receded the valley was wiped clean of the houses the villagers had left behind.

Thereafter the village grew over the years, and prospered, but it never spread into the valley. Those strangers who came to trade would ask, and the villagers would say, “You’ll know it when you see it.”



end