The Instrument of the Great Working

There are families in the Runelands that carry the gift of prophecy -- entire bloodlines blessed (or cursed) with the Sight. Of course there are also diviners by training and by inclination, but those born to the blood have a different experience. In the tiny prophetic kingdom of Vad Kevram, among the touched noblefolk of the Hidden City, even in the demon caravans of Kyoinotomi? Among these diviners, there is a different myth.

The Runelands, those born to the sight say, wish to show those poor souls within the way. Deep in the heart of the world there is a story that would be told, and there will come to exist the mechanism of its telling. They call it the Instrument of the Great Working, and there is significant argument over the form it will take. In Vad Kevram, it is seen as most likely to be ancestors' casting bones or perhaps a divinatory deck of some kind. The Hidden City speaks of coins, or of the runes for which the world has been named. In the demon caravans, the seers whisper of the unending flock always available for bloody haruspication, or the sacred smoke of divinatory incense.

Some few, as the Wheel has turned, have realized the great secret of the Instrument: its form does not matter. What matters are the will and the inspiration of the diviner that sets out to build it. There is little all agree on save this -- the Instrument is not a single purpose-built oracular piece, but one that must be assembled from disparate parts. The Instrument's Diviner, then, is no court seer or fashionable fortune teller, but instead a ragtag misfit, pulled hither and yon for their art, drawn by the Great Working itself to build the Instrument through which it may speak.

The Instrument's Diviner is something of a mythical figure among the legends of the seers. For a group so well-versed in the color and shape of the future, one so opinionated about the shape of the Instrument itself, they have little to say about the Diviner. No shape or size, no name or creed -- nothing is known about the Instrument's Diviner. The entire population of diviners waits with bated breath for them to emerge.