The Trouble With Prophecy When There Is No Chosen One

Prophecy and fantasy have always gone rather well together.

A mysterious warning is discovered. Ancient words speak of a coming darkness. Somewhere, usually at exactly the right moment, a chosen hero appears who seems destined to stand against it.

Sometimes they know who they are.

Sometimes everyone else knows before they do.

Either way, there is usually someone at the centre of it all. The person fate or the Gods have chosen.

When I began developing The Prophecy Series, I knew prophecy would form part of the wider story of Azangrail. It’s the title of the series, after all.

Usually, a prophecy says the first-born heir or the orphaned child will find the sword, save the kingdom or something of that ilk.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of fantasy novels with this at their core, and they are brilliant stories and great reads.

But… I didn’t want a Chosen One, and that created something of a problem.

Because once you introduce prophecy into a fantasy world, readers quite reasonably begin looking for the person who is supposed to fulfil it.

Who is the hero? Who has been chosen? Who is destined to save everyone?

But the question that niggled at me was, what happens if the answer is: nobody?

And that idea interested me far more.

Prophecy without instructions

I have never wanted the prophecy in Azangrail to function as an instruction manual.

There is no convenient ancient verse telling one character where they must go, what weapon they must find, who they must defeat, and precisely how they are going to save the world.

Instead, pieces of the prophecy appear in fragments.

Snippets from an unknown scribe are scattered through the novels, sometimes saying very little on their own, sometimes perhaps suggesting something larger. And over the course of the series, they also touch on events from the distant past.

I also made a conscious decision that the reader, like the characters, wouldn’t receive everything at once. And that was important to me. Because a prophecy becomes very different when nobody is standing beneath it holding a sign saying:

This is about me. I’m the Chosen One.

Without a chosen one, prophecy stops being an instruction and starts becoming a question.

Who does this refer to?

Has it already begun?

Is someone interpreting it correctly?

Does knowing about it change what happens next?

And perhaps most importantly, what happens when people become convinced that they understand it?

The problem with certainty

That last question is probably the one that interests me most.

People like certainty. If something is written down, particularly if it has survived for centuries or thousands of years, it becomes very tempting to treat those words as truth.

But words still require interpretation.

Two people can read the same passage and understand it completely differently.

Add faith, history, fear, ambition, loyalty and power, and suddenly interpretation becomes much more complicated.

Perhaps someone sees a warning.

Someone else a promise.

Another sees an opportunity.

And somebody somewhere will almost certainly decide that the prophecy proves they were right all along.

And even better, what if several characters were to decide the prophecy referred to them, and each believed they were right?

That really excited me when I started writing the series.

That felt far more interesting to me than simply revealing who the chosen hero is. Of course, every novel has an antagonist and protagonist, but does that mean one of them has to be the person who saves the realm, or fails to save it?

Choice still has to matter

One of the difficulties I have always had with the idea of a single chosen figure is what destiny can do to choice.

If someone is destined to save the world, how much of what happens is actually theirs?

Are they making decisions?

Or are they simply walking towards something that has already been decided?

Azangrail is a world where choices matter.

Often terribly.

The characters make decisions because of faith, loyalty, grief, anger, ambition, friendship, fear and sometimes simple desperation. Some of those choices are good.

Some are disastrous. Most probably sit somewhere between the two, in that decidedly morally grey area I love so much.

I did not want prophecy to remove responsibility from them. Nobody in Azangrail gets to shrug afterwards and say fate made them do it because the future had already been written. The future may have been written about, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has been written for t

hem.

And perhaps that is where the real trouble with prophecy begins.

Not whether it eventually comes true.

But what people are willing to do because they believe they already understand what it means.

So perhaps I’ll leave you with two questions.

Which is more dangerous, a prophecy nobody understands, or one everyone thinks they understand?

And if you knew a prophecy might concern you, would you want to know what it said?