You are listening to The Last Story for the month of February 26, issue 233 for Clark's World

magazine. Welcome to Three Fortunes on Alcestis, as told by the fraud, Baylis Shudal. It is by Louis

Inglis Hall. Louis Inglis Hall lives and works in Scotland. His stories can be found at

Clark's World, Strange Horizons, The Dark,

and Podcastle, amongst others. If he isn't writing or cooking, he might be talking about writing

or cooking at louisheul.biscay.combe.com. And we have other stories. I implore you to go back

and listen or read. For people I need you to kill before the dance begins,

the eighth pyramid,

numismatic archetypes in the year of five reagents,

and fishing the intergalactic stream.

So my dear listener, I hope that you can sit back,

relax, and let me tell you a story.

First fortune.

There are a thousand, thousand routes to divination.

I say routes because that is what they are. That is what my grandmother first taught me. We stand before an infinity of paths. They branch and jostle and compete and

finally converge at a single destination. Some routes are easier and some are clearer. Some expose

summits. Other routes conceal. Each, however, leads us to the same end.

Every part of every planet is speaking to us, each trailing meteor, each blade of grass,

all of it calling out the steps to a single universal dance. We have forgotten how to listen.

We stumble through our lives the best we can, caught on paths we cannot see, held by orbits we cannot detect. The future can be found in a desert or a grain of sand. Precious few are left who remember how to read it. There is dendromancy, the prophecy of trees, there is lithomancy, the oracle of ancient stones.

There is even alluromancy, one of my own favorites, which finds the future in a selection of

small and rather delicious cakes. The methods and titles of divination come naturally to me across

...