“Preposterous,” I objected. “How would anyone know if any of it were true?”
“If such a loom were made, and such a tapestry of predictions woven, not for a few years, but for tens of hundreds of years, after a time it could be shown that it presented a surprisingly accurate foretelling. Bear in mind that those who keep these records are another race, an exceedingly long-lived one. A pale lovely race, that occasionally mingled its bloodlines with that of men. And then! “ He spun in a circle, suddenly fey, pleased insufferably with himself. “And then, when certain ones were born, ones marked so clearly that history must recall them, they are called to step forward, to find their places in that future history. And they might further be exhorted to examine that place, that juncture of a hundred threads, and say, these threads, here, these are the ones I shall tweak, and in the tweaking, I shall change the tapestry, I shall warp the weft, alter the color of what is to come. I shall change the destiny of the world.”
He was mocking me. I was certain of it now. “Once, in perhaps a thousand years, there may come a man capable of making such a great change in the world. A powerful King, perhaps, or a philosopher, shaping the thoughts of thousands. But you and I, Fool? We are pawns. Ciphers.”
He shook his head pityingly. “This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man’s fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man’s whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.”