Prescient

Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery–as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.

It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whaleboats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east.

Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality, The spiritual-prescient face, the always welcome common benevolent face, The face of the singing of music, the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges broad at the back-top, The faces of hunters and fishers bulged at the brows, the shaved blanch’d faces of orthodox citizens, The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face, The ugly face of some beautiful soul, the handsome detested or despised face, The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face of the mother of many children, The face of an amour, the face of veneration, The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock, The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face, A wild hawk, his wings clipp’d by the clipper, A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs and knife of the gelder.

Zaal, as ever, showed himself capable of being chief, prescient and active in all concrete preparations.

But now his questing intelligence met other accounts of the Famine Times and the Scattering, the no-chambers and no-ships that could not be traced, not even by the most powerful prescient minds in their universe.

The wondering rivals gaze, with cares oppress'd, And chilling horrors freeze in every breast, Till big with knowledge of approaching woes, The prince of augurs, Halitherses, rose: Prescient he view'd the aerial tracks, and drew A sure presage from every wing that flew.