Foreclusions

Temporal distortions in Voivodja very occasionally result in situations where outcomes precede the actions that caused them by several days. For example, a Dragoon Lieutenant may find herself in command of mercenaries that have not yet been hired, or a man may be sick on account of a custard he has not yet eaten. These premature events are known as foreclusions and can be immediately identified as such because they are accompanied by a quick moist crackling sound, as of batter frying.

Once a foreclusion occurs the foreclusion itself cannot usually be undone, but the presumed cause of the foreclusion (which will not yet have happened) can be prevented by making it impossible for the original presumed cause to occur and organizing a new causal event which would result in the same foreclusion--or at least one matching every observed property of the foreclusion.

  For instance, in the second example above, the gentleman's actual custard could be stolen before he ate it and he could be cursed so that whatever came out of his mouth turned into semidigested custard when exposed to air. If one discovered a foreclusion featuring a child crying over her dead mother, one could prevent the death by ensuring the mother's safety and then simply telling the child her mother died.  If the foreclusion featured the child explaining she'd seen her mother drown, then one could still stymie fate by protecting the mother and then dressing some otherwise unuseful woman convincingly in the mother's clothes and a wig and drowning her after inviting the child to watch.

From the upcoming A Red And Pleasant Land
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