Xenoverse origins / R-020
Elowen ValeOrigin story
The oracle who pruned the evidence
The tree showed her several futures. She selected the one with the best accommodation.
Read the origin ↓
Placeholder artworkElowen Vale tended an orchard whose oldest tree sometimes flowered before events that had not yet happened. A white bloom might precede a wedding, a split fruit a quarrel, a bare branch a departure. The signs were inconsistent. Elowen’s explanations were not.
Her Xenoverse origin begins when an uncertain gift becomes a dependable income. People paid for clarity, and she learned to supply it. The trouble with being an oracle was never that the future refused to speak. It was that it often said several things, including ones the customer disliked.
Prophecy becomes remarkably flexible when the patron owns the guest room.
From the dossier
Chapter 01
The blossom in the wrong season
The orchard had belonged to an old keeper who recorded every sign, including those that meant nothing. Elowen inherited his notebooks and found them disappointingly cautious. A page might describe a flowering branch, three possible interpretations, and a confession that rain had probably caused it. She preferred a sentence with an ending.
Her first successful prediction concerned a flood. The tree shed pale leaves into a dry channel; days later, water crossed the lower fields. Elowen had also noticed storm clouds upstream, but the story improved when she omitted them. Visitors arrived. She began receiving them beneath the oldest branches, where filtered light made hesitation look contemplative. The notebook acquired fewer alternatives. Her rooms acquired better blankets. Neither development appeared sinister from the chair in which she sat to explain the future.
Placeholder artworkChapter 02
A patron purchases certainty
A wealthy landowner wanted to know whether his planned expansion would prosper. The tree produced blossoms and rot on the same branch. Elowen could have described the ambiguity. Instead she emphasized the blossoms. The landowner offered her a permanent position as his household oracle, with a salary and a room overlooking the orchard.
She trimmed the rotted section before his ceremonial visit. It seemed a minor intervention, almost gardening. But the cut exposed a hollow running deep into the branch. Elowen covered it with ribbon. Below, workers prepared a platform for the landowner’s announcement. She told herself the tree had survived storms for decades. It could surely survive one speech. This was less a prediction than a request submitted to the universe with no evidence that the universe had received it.
Placeholder artworkChapter 03
The future arrives from overhead
During the ceremony, the landowner announced that fate had endorsed his purchase of the adjoining fields. Elowen stood beside him, listening to her qualified private remark become a public guarantee. She considered interrupting, then noticed the household steward holding the contract for her new position.
The branch cracked before she signed. It fell across the platform, pinning her ceremonial robe and depositing rotten wood into the landowner’s lap. The audience scattered. Nobody died, but the incident supplied an interpretation too clear for even Elowen to improve. A farm worker cut her free while she lay beneath a branch she had declared auspicious. The ribbon remained visible around the concealed hollow. Several witnesses recognized her knot. Prophecy had become a physical exhibit, and the exhibit was making an extremely unflattering point about its interpreter.
Placeholder artworkChapter 04
The pages she had left out
The landowner withdrew his offer and blamed the oracle. Elowen deserved part of that blame. She refused the rest by producing the notes he had asked her to simplify. The dispute cost both of them followers, which was an unusually balanced outcome for a quarrel involving money and destiny.
Back in the orchard, she read the old keeper’s notebooks from the beginning. Their uncertainty no longer looked weak. They preserved what the tree had actually done, separate from what a frightened person wanted it to mean. Elowen copied her own omissions into the margins. The work made her feel smaller than tending a prophetic tree ought to feel. That was probably its value. She could not undo the falling branch. She could stop pretending that the correct lesson was to choose stronger ribbon next time.
Placeholder artworkChapter 05
An oracle with an unfinished answer
Elowen Vale continued reading the orchard. Some visitors stopped coming when she began offering several possible meanings. Others stayed because the alternatives helped them prepare. She discovered that uncertainty could be useful when it was explained rather than dressed as wisdom.
Her origin leaves her susceptible to comfort, admiration, and the temptation to make a complicated sign sound clean. Those weaknesses remain available to the Xenoverse’s less scrupulous patrons. What changes is her recognition of the price. A prediction can become a permission slip for someone already planning harm, especially if the oracle wants a room in their house.
She kept the fallen branch beside the entrance. Asked what it foretold, she said it usually predicted a conversation about evidence. Children climbed over it while adults waited for something more impressive. The tree flowered irregularly above them, under no contractual obligation to explain itself. Elowen recorded the dates and resisted the urge to make them agree.
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