Nine Omens and a Liar

Of the nine omens promised by the Founding Prophecy, the royal seer had, in eighteen years of increasingly creative divination, located exactly eight. The ninth he had invented during a particularly dull winter, mostly because "nine" scanned better in the liturgy than "eight, probably, we're working on it." No one had caught him yet. This was less a triumph of deception than a testament to how rarely anyone checked a prophecy's math.