The Thief's Transformation and Prophecy — Divine Comedy

Virgil's face darkens at the broken bridge, and Dante's hope crumbles with it. Then Virgil turns back with a sweet look, like a thaw that changes the hind's outlook in a single morning. He lifts Dante up the shattered rock crag by crag, carrying him where the footing fails, until they reach the top spent. There he delivers the lesson the climb has set up: fame is not won on downy plumes; what a man leaves behind is either a mark or smoke. They cross to the eighth ditch and look down into a pit of serpents so dense and strange that Libya's legendary broods are nothing beside them. Naked thieves run through with their hands bound behind them by snakes, tails and heads knotted at the belly. One is struck at the throat by an adder and burns to ash in the time it takes to write a letter; then the dust rolls back and the man reforms, dazed as someone waking from a fit. He is Vanni Fucci, violent and bloody, known to Dante from Pistoia. What shames him is not the snake or the burning; it is that Dante of all people has seen him here. He confesses: he rifled the sacristy of its ornaments and let another man take the blame. He had no choice but to confess; Dante's presence forced it. To repay the shame with harm, Fucci delivers a prophecy: the Neri will strip Pistoia first, then Florence will change citizens and laws; a force from Valdimagra will drive like a storm across Piceno and smash the Bianchi flat. He ends: I told you this so grief may rend your heart. He uses the future the damned can still see as a weapon, aimed at the one living man in the room.