The Year of the Snake

The problem with studying the ancient prophecies was the language. Nobody spoke those languages anymore. They had all fallen to time. They translated by tracking backwards from modern language to what they replaced to what they replaced to what they replaced to eventually the ancient language the prophecies were written in.

Basically a game of telephone timed over a millenia.

You can see how difficult this made accurate translation.

Then once you got the prophecy translated you had to determine what exactly they meant by certain words. Over time commonly used words were replaced with other words. Words were dropped completely out of vocabularies and new words were dropped in. And now, as in any time of great change, words moved quickly in and out of usage. She used to imagine a time in the future where a scholar tried to determine just what exactly a landline was.

So when you studied ancient prophecies you were basically guessing.

But nobody liked to hear that.

They would point at the ones that had come to fruition. Completely accurate.

She rarely had the heart to tell them that the really accurate ones were really accurate because they were studied after the event had occurred. It was easy to fit a prophecy to an event. Much harder to see an upcoming event based on a prophecy.

But still she tried. It was her life's work after all.

And sometimes, sometimes there was that moment where you hit upon the translation and it all fits and it's amazing and clear.

This morning was one of those times.

She had been struggling with one word. Just one. The closest anyone had ever been able to come was pearl. But this morning she had found a text that used the word they had decided was pearl and it was not describing a pearl, but the world. She had quickly pulled up other texts where they had used pearl and substituted world and they all made sense. More sense. Maybe less poetic at times, but world was the word.

She had been incredibly excited. She was the interpreter of a new prophecy. Or, well, not new, thousands of years old, but new to the community as a fully translated text.

She had been excited.

Then she typed out the prophecy as a whole and cross referenced it to other prophecies that might tie together. And then did a quick search of the NASA website.

And there it was. A newly discovered asteroid.

The year of the wood snake.
A ball of fire from the heavens would arrive.
Wood fuels the fire.
The snake eats the world.

Well fuck...