The Crown of Wisdom

Below a high platform built of stone the crowd pressed close, head against head, and out of it someone called a question.

"Is there really a land so wide you cannot see the end of it?"

"Will we find the Origin Site?"

"Will a miracle of God come down upon us there?"

Yesael flung his arms wide, as though he would gather in the sky and the mountains themselves.

"Of course."

"That land holds the broadest earth there is, and there we shall raise the most magnificent city ever built upon land."

"My companions and I shall be the second trilobite men to set foot on dry land, after the King of Wisdom himself."

"We shall become an epic ourselves, set down in the greatest chapter of all."

He smiled down at the crowd below the stone platform. Countless young faces were turned up to him, their eyes full of longing and worship. There was not a young person in the God-Given City who had not heard the story of Yesael, the first priest of God, the first trilobite man to venture into the sea and build a city beneath the waves.

He had gone down into trenches no one else had ever reached, and he had faced the most terrible volcanic eruptions.

He had charted the sea maps of the Yinsai Kingdom. He had drawn up its very first code of law. He had won justice for the wrongly accused.

One deed after another rang through their minds now.

In the God-Given City, Yesael was a figure as great as any hero.

He was noble, upright, humble. He had a fierce spirit of adventure in him, and the wisdom and the strength to overcome any hardship, as though every fine virtue there was had gathered together in him alone.

And now the hero was holding out an invitation to them.

"Come!"

"Follow me, and become my companions."

"Become an epic with me, and be remembered together by every generation to come!"

Light burst into the eyes of every young person there, and it was the color of dreams.

Adventure always stirred the heart, and it stirred it all the more when it meant following Prince Yesael himself.

Yesael set out once more. With him went his companion Nini and his followers, hundreds of the strongest and most agile trilobite men, streaming along behind the fusion monster as they rode the great waves deep into the sea.

So young they were, and so strong, setting off toward the far horizon with their dreams held close.

It was enough to make anyone long for it, and even to envy it.

Wooo!

Well away from the God-Given City now, the fusion monster Nini turned its head all at once and glanced into the distance. Something seemed to reach it, yet when it looked there was nothing there at all.

Not far from the God-Given City, Ense, who by rights should have returned to Ense City days before, stood in the middle of a cluster of reefs together with the second prince. Each of them was mounted upon a fusion monster, one shaped like a starfish, the other like a burrowing worm, and both lay hidden away among the jumbled rocks.

They watched Yesael set out in grand procession at the head of his host of trilobite men. Compared with Ense, the King of Wisdom's own eldest son, Yesael looked far more like the anointed King of Wisdom, the very king every trilobite man dreamed of.

Ense kept his eyes on the fusion monster Nini. "Once he comes back, he is king."

His younger brother asked him, "If you know that already, why do you not go yourself?"

Ense laughed, cold and short. "Father settled it long ago. Yesael inherits his throne. And if I went, would he choose me instead?"

"He has no love for me. His favor is all for his youngest."

Ense clenched his fist. "Some things you will never get by waiting for another man to hand them to you."

"Only what you take with your own hands is ever truly yours."

A cold light flared in his eyes, and his face was full of resolve and of a reckless, all-consuming madness.

"Father has grown old!"

"Even the Great King of Wisdom must rot and fall in the end. A new age will take the place of the old."

"But whose age it will be, that final chapter is not yet written."

"We cannot wait for Yesael to come back. Once he does, there is no chance left for us at all."

The second prince demurred. "Father holds the mightiest wisdom ability of the King of Wisdom. No one is able to betray him."

Ense laid out his plan.

"He is the King of Wisdom, but he is not king of the fusion monsters."

"We cannot go against his will. But the fusion monsters do not answer his commands. They are creatures of myth, born of the bloodline of the Mother of Life, Shelly."

The controlling brand of the fusion monsters had passed to them long ago, and the beasts answered now to their command alone.

"And what is more, father has moved the power of the royal authority of Wisdom into the Crown of Wisdom itself. When Yesael returns, he will set that crown on Yesael's head with his own hands. He has decided it already."

"He has grown weak past all measure. He is no longer the strong and wise king he was."

"Whoever lays hands on the Crown of Wisdom is the supreme King of Wisdom."

The second prince asked the question the two of them feared most of all.

"Then, what of God?"

At the sound of that name Ense trembled from head to foot. But he spun round at once and said loudly to the second prince, "Have you ever seen God?"

"Have you ever seen God walk out of his temple?"

"He is nothing but a being trapped inside that temple. He cannot leave that lofty pyramid."

"God is nothing more than a stone statue standing atop an altar."

"Believe me."

"I have seen God with my own eyes."

"Take the royal authority of Wisdom, and the God-Given City is nothing but one insignificant island. The whole of the land and the sea belongs to us."

He clenched his fist and cried out, "Let the city the divine gave be given back to the divine, and let Him stay here forever!"

"Everything else in this world will be ours to command."

The second prince felt a stirring. They too held greed and ambition for the royal authority of Wisdom.

If Ense could raise a hand against the royal authority of Wisdom, why should they not do the same?

"What do you want me to do?"

Ense leaned close to their ear and said just one thing. "I want your fusion monster. And its power to burrow through earth."

Without warning Ense's fusion monster struck, and a single tentacle punched straight through the second prince's chest.

The second prince stared at their brother in shock and reached out a hand toward him. Then, beneath Ense's cold and resolute gaze, the fusion monster Ense commanded tore him in two.

Ense dug the bone out of the center of his own younger brother's brow and pressed it into his own mouth.

Set into it was a round brand shaped like an eye.

Bit by bit Ense chewed the blood-stained bone to pieces, and a mad smile spread across his face.

"Do not blame me."

"This is the price of wanting to be king."

The second prince's fusion monster, the one shaped like a burrowing worm, let out a roar, and in the end it could do nothing but bow in submission at Ense's feet.

Rebuilt again and again, the Wisdom Palace had grown into a keep more than twenty meters tall, and at its very top stood a structure like a lighthouse.

Inside the tower lay a kind of stone found near the undersea volcanoes. Every night it blazed with brilliant light, guiding trilobite men out at sea to find their way home.

As the sun rose, Redlichia climbed the spiraling stairway of the stone keep alone. Step by step he rose from its lowest point toward the heights, until he stood atop the lighthouse at the very peak of the God-Given City.

He looked down over everything he had created, and a smile of quiet satisfaction came to his face.

He spread his arms wide, and in a voice grown old and dry he spoke the same words that had once rung, in his youth, with all his pride and spirit.

"I am Redlichia."

"King of Wisdom over every living thing."

Power burst forth and light came surging out.

Every trilobite man who stepped outside that morning saw a strange and wondrous sight.

Countless points of glimmering light poured out of the lighthouse. They took the place of the stars and blanketed the sky above the God-Given City.

At last every point of glimmering light fell back down into Redlichia's body and sank into the crown that marked him, there upon his head.

"Wisdom is the mightiest myth in all the world."

"God bestowed wisdom upon me."

"Today I lay wisdom upon this crown. May whoever wears it bathe in the glory of God, hold dominion over wisdom, and shepherd all living things in God's stead."

The crown atop Redlichia's head had been a dull, ashen gray. Little by little it turned pure black.

Then it fell away from his head.

In that instant Redlichia seemed to age all at once, far more than before.

He cupped the crown in his hands, and a smile crossed his face.

"The Crown of Wisdom."

His own part was nearly finished. But his will and his ideals would live on, carried forward within this crown.

And so was born this supreme divine artifact of the path of wisdom, one that would rule over the trilobite men for generation after generation, and over countless civilizations and races of wisdom still to come.

It was called wisdom, and it was royal authority.