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Tharan Prophetic Codex

Collation

The Tharan Codex was produced in the early part of the reign of Ronard the Shorter, by a traveling monk-prophet with more vision than foresight. The Tharan Prophetic Codex is a collection of every single prophetic text still extant during its creation. The names of the authors of these assorted prophecies are largely lost to history, though the name of the Codex's fabricator, the notorious Tharan the Collator, remained a household name for many centuries.

The Codex

There are approximately two hundred and seventeen thousand assorted individual prophetic texts contained in the Codex -- each of which has been manually copied by a swarm of specially-trained mantises. The words of the texts themselves are so small that they can only be read under the highest powers of magnification. Nonetheless, possibly because of the inclusion of such monstrously long texts as Higarber's Paen of Mystic Truths, and Bigby's Monotonous Litany, the Codex occupies one hundred and fifteen relatively large volumes.

The books themselves are made of dyed leather of unknown origin. The first fourteen books are bound in one of the one hundred and fourteen shades of Elemenstated Blue, while the fifteenth is bound in a brilliant admixture of the hundred and fourteen preceding colours; it simultaneously partakes of all shades of blue, and also of none.

The Prophecies

While accurate data on the thousands of prophecies contained in the Tharan Codex has never been compiled, some scholarly attempts to decipher the most promising of prophecies have been made. Most notably are, as mentioned, the incredibly long Higarber's Paen of Mystic Truths and Bigby's Monotonous Litany, but some scholars have also done extensive research on such texts as Cliveling's Exceptional Accuracies and its counterpart Everything Cliveling Says is Nonsense (author unknown).

Of the prophecies contained in the Codex, no fewer than one hundred and seventy-five thousand of them refer to Champions of The Ending Times. Usually, this Champion is described as a one-eyed prince who was born a fig-plucker (or, possibly, a fig-plucker's son). However, in Cliveling's Exceptional Accuracies it is explicitly stated that the Champion will be born to the last scion of the Magic Sword Kings and that he will be neither a fig-plucker NOR a fig-plucker's son. It further says that the Champion's youth will be largely occupied with not realizing his great potential. Higarber's Paen of Mystic Truths asserts that the Champion will actually be a woman, who will not have one eye but three.

As a general rule, the more specific the prophecies are, the less accurate they tend to be. The exception to this is Bigby's Monotonous Litany, which has proved to be both as accurate and as detailed as it is monotonous. The Litany concerns itself almost entirely with the most mind-bogglingly mundane subjects, and few scholars have devoted more than a decade to its study. As an example--two hundred years after the Codex was compiled, it was determined that the Litany had successfully predicted the precise number of feet on every single rabbit caught in the county of Daarth during the last two years of Ronard the Shorter's reign. This was made especially impressive because four of the one thousand, nine hundred, and sixty-five rabbits had only three feet--presumably having lost them to predators or traps.

For excerpts see:

Signs of The End