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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45838
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The easiest way to accomplish this is to imitate the style of real-word mythology. There are various different sources, which all have different styles and different symbolism.

In the Western world, probably the most well-known stories are those of Greek mythology, Nordic mythology, and of the Old Testament. Given that you have an oracle as part of your story, Greek mythology would probably be the closest to your example. You can easily find sources online and try to imitate the style. Some general aspects that I would try to look out for are these:

- Myths often start relatively quickly, sometimes even _in medias res_, i.e. right in the action. The story does _not_ start as the ancient ruler sets out to see the oracle or as he contemplates what kind of sacrifice to make. It starts like this: _Once, an ancient ruler came to the oracle to ask for its wisdom for the coming war. "Grant me a vision, o wise Oracle", said he, "for I have brought you rich sacrifices"._
- Emotions are more extreme than in other stories. People "cry out in anger" and they "weep bitterly".
- The moral of the story is said relatively explicitly by one of the characters in the story. There is no real subtlety. It's meant to teach the audience a lesson, after all.
- Try to emulate the rhetorical devices that were popular back then. Rhetorical questions are a big one: "Why are you angry, wise ruler? Was it not you that put the false sacrifice on the altar? Was it not you who thought to give bloody venison to the goddess of wisdom?" Then there are parallelism and antithesis ("the error was human, the punishment was divine"), alliteration ("With cosmic clarity the preacher prophesied a dreadful dream"), ... one of my favorite ones is the one where the sentence is specifically designed to have a specific sound, as in the Metamorphoses by Ovid when some characters get turned into frogs: "[...] quamvis sint sub aqua, sub aqua maledicere temptant [...]" As the characters try to speak, they can only croak like frogs, and the text actually imitates it: "sub aqua, sub aqua" basically sounds like "qua, qua", which is what frogs sounded like to the Romans. 

Generally speaking, these stories are relatively short anecdotes that are supposed to teach you something, and they come from a background of oral tradition in which subtlety is not really a thing - these stories are meant to be _performed_. Even so, there might be interesting symbolism in the stories, and the language is often quite poetic with cool rhetorical devices. The language is of course kept quite old-timey so that the gravitas and importance of the story come across.

Imitating an existing style is only one way of doing it. The advanced way would probably be to really think about your culture, about the way these stories got told in the past and who would appear in these stories. Maybe in your culture the stories are more light-hearted, so that they always have to have a good ending where the character has learned their lesson. Maybe the story is actually quite long, because your culture lives in a place with long, cold, dark winters where stories have to be long to keep people entertained. In that case, the character would only listen to one small part of the story, and this part would be quite dragged out (repetition would likely be even more important in this case). It is probably more interesting and more fun for the readers to get an insight into a really unique culture this way, but it will be a lot of effort for a relatively short scene. After all, if you imitate a well-known style, the readers will get it instantly - if you don't, the story might seem awkward.

Original score: 12