The Oracle of Grenthollow lived at the edge of the tilled earth, where the valley’s barley fields gave way to thickets of hawthorn and scrub oak. Her hut was nothing like the villagers imagined a seer’s home should be. The roof leaked, the stone walls leaned, and smoke stains blackened the hearthstones. The air smelled of onions simmering in a pot, damp wool drying by the fire, and dust that drifted through the open shutters.

Yet people came—always people came. Farmers with caps in hand, wives with baskets of eggs, shepherds with fleeces heavy on their backs. They spoke her name as if it were more than mortal. Oracle, Wise One, Teller of Fate.

On this morning, three farmers shuffled inside, bowing so low they nearly clattered their heads on her shelf of clay jars.

“Oracle,” Harran, the eldest, said with reverent gravity. “We seek your guidance. Shall we plant barley this year, or hold back?”

The Oracle—a woman with a gray braid, tired eyes, and knees that ached in the damp—set her ladle down. She had answered this question every spring for twenty years. They never listened. They never remembered. She rubbed her temples.

Slowly, she rose from her stool and let her voice drop low, stretching out each word with deliberate weight.

“You come,” she intoned, eyes closed, “seeking the hidden patterns of the year. But know this: where tender shoots rise, the hungry shadows stir. Where the golden harvest whispers, teeth are waiting.”

The men gasped. One clutched his chest as if the words had pierced him. They began murmuring to each other.

“The teeth! Wolves, perhaps?” said Joric, the youngest.
“Or brigands,” guessed another. “Devourers in the shape of men.”

The Oracle sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. The act drained her faster than chopping wood.

“No,” she snapped, dropping the mystic tone. “Not wolves. Not brigands. Goats. Your neighbor’s goats. They broke through the fence last week—half the posts are still leaning. If you scatter barley without fixing it, you’ll be fattening his herd, not yourselves.”

Silence. Then, outside, as if fate enjoyed a cruel joke, came the bleating of goats carried on the wind.

The men blinked at one another. Joric coughed. “Ah. The… goats. Of course. A warning most wise.”

The Oracle sat back down, her knees cracking as she lowered herself. “A warning most obvious,” she muttered. She ladled herself a bowl of stew, the steam carrying the smell of onions and lentils.

But as the farmers left, whispering with awe, the story was already growing in their mouths. By the time they crossed the fields, it had doubled in size: The Oracle has spoken of shadows with teeth, of hidden hungers. Beware the goats.

She blew on her stew, staring at the doorway they had just left through. For once, she didn’t bother correcting the story. Let them dress her words up in grandeur. It seemed that was the only way they’d ever listen.