Proverbs and Destiny

Redlichia set aside the royal authority of Wisdom. Seated within the palace, he lifted the crown in his hands, and joy glimmered in his clouded eyes, as though he were looking upon the most beautiful masterpiece he had ever made.

He closed his eyes, and the mythical power within the crown stirred to life. Across its black bone, tiny flames seemed to burn, etching their marks into the surface.

Hiss, hiss!

Too fine for the naked eye to make out, the lines crossed and interlaced over the crown into a pattern. Yet anyone who held wisdom ability and lifted the crown would be able to see the words written there.

"God said."

"I am alone, and so are you."

"The human race has not yet been born into this world, and you are the only trilobite man."

"Because of loneliness, God created Redlichia, the King of Wisdom, and because of Redlichia's loneliness, God created the trilobite men."

"Thus, the race began, and the kingdom was established from this moment on."

"..."

"God said."

"I am the God who created you!"

"And you..."

"You alone are their king."

Onto the crown Redlichia set down the words God had once spoken to him. They were the dialogue between himself and God, and they were fate's own guidance to him as well.

Gathered together, all those words became the covenant between the trilobite men and the divine.

Once all this was finished, he would need only to brand his will as the bloodline's progenitor forever into that bloodline before he died, and this perfect masterpiece of his would be complete.

It was more than a supreme treasure. It was the final answer of Redlichia's entire life.

Redlichia grew ever more elated, pouring his whole spirit into the treasure.

"God said to me."

"The chasm of desire is never filled, however much you pour into it. The mountain of resentment never wears away, however much kindness you show it."

Just as he carved these words into place, a rumble rose from beneath the earth, and the whole God-Given City could feel that violent tremor.

Rumble!

Redlichia stopped what he was doing at last and looked outside.

Then, puzzled by the tremor, he walked out of the palace.

"What was that sound?"

"Could a volcano have erupted somewhere nearby?"

Outside, throughout the God-Given City, the laboring trilobite men stopped their work one after another and looked about them.

And then, with their own eyes, they witnessed the most terrifying sight in all their memory.

In an instant the towering, magnificent Wisdom Palace collapsed into a field of ruin.

Wooo!

Amid the swirling smoke and dust, a giant worm more than twenty meters long tore through the earth and the buildings upon it, and roared up at the sky.

A fusion monster had burrowed up out of the ground. Its snail-like eyes swiveled wildly in every direction, and they happened to catch Redlichia, the King of Wisdom, stepping out of the palace before the ruins at that very moment.

Without the slightest hesitation it turned straight toward Redlichia and struck.

Shock left Redlichia's face blank, tinged with disbelief.

In the very moment he carved those words, God's admonition to him had come to pass.

As though it had been fated all along.

Dozens of guards came running out of the corridors on either side toward the Wisdom Palace, and wounded men crawled from the ruins and charged at the fusion monster's terrible shape.

"Protect the King!"

"Protect the King of Wisdom!"

Clearly the God-Given City had never come under attack before, and never before had the King of Wisdom faced assassination or assault.

The guards inside and outside the palace scrambled about like headless flies, with no way to reach the king in time and pull him out of the danger he was in.

One glance told Redlichia that the monster had come for him. He recognized the fusion monster at once, and he called out the name of its master.

"Boon?"

It was the name of the second prince, and it meant the repaying of a debt of gratitude.

Yet plainly, in this moment, the great worm beast beneath the second prince had not come to repay any kindness. It had come to kill him.

"Boon, I command you as the King of Wisdom, make it stop this instant!"

The voice rang in the mind of every trilobite man alive, even those far across the sea in another city entirely.

But Boon, plainly, was not the one behind this.

Their very existence had already vanished from this world, and Redlichia's command had no effect on them at all.

"It is not Boon."

"Then who is it?"

A name surfaced in Redlichia's mind, and with it came the very words of God's admonition he had just carved.

But it was already too late.

It all happened in the space of a lightning flash. The hidden schemer struck like a thunderbolt, and Redlichia had no chance to say another word.

The fusion monster's massive jaws were already closing on Redlichia, its terrible mouthparts descending upon his head.

A pitch-black shadow swallowed him whole, and the King of Wisdom's own mythic, epic journey of a life was about to end.

"Is he dead?"

Far across the sea, Ense stood gazing into the distance at the uproar in the God-Given City, and in that same moment he heard the words the King of Wisdom had cried out with the power of his royal authority behind them.

"Boon, I command you as the King of Wisdom, make it stop this instant!"

The words and the cadence were painfully familiar. The voice was as commanding as ever, only far more hurried.

Plainly his father had run into some dire crisis, one that left him no time for composure.

Ense, of course, knew at once what his father had run into, and tears spilled suddenly from his eyes.

His father, the Great King of Wisdom, was truly about to die.

Ense worshipped him. His father was the King of Wisdom who had created their civilization and opened the way for it, the one who held wisdom ability itself.

He was great, merciful, wise.

In Ense's eyes he was a mountain, one Ense could never hope to climb over.

But he was also unfair. Ense was his eldest son, after all.

God had given everything to his own firstborn son. Why, then, could Redlichia not give the throne to his own firstborn?

Ense buried his face in his hands and sank to his knees.

Tears streaming from his eyes, he cried out again and again, "It was not me."

"It was Boon who killed Father."

"It was Boon, that creature swollen with ambition. They wanted the royal authority of Wisdom for themselves, and so they murdered Father."

"I am... the King of Wisdom my father chose."

"I was always the one meant to inherit that throne!"

And just as everything was hurtling unstoppably toward its worst possible end, the divine stepped out of the temple.

He stood before the temple and looked down at the farce unfolding below.

Beneath the vault of the sky, atop the peak of the pyramid, he raised his hand.

"Stop!"

A single short word, and everything truly did stop.

Everything within sight froze at once, and the whole world's time was locked in place by Yin Shen's will alone.

To an outsider this would seem an unimaginable power. To Yin Shen himself it was nothing so miraculous. He could not change the flow of time across the whole universe, but he had only to let go of his own synchrony with the universe's time and the years would simply stop, from where he stood.

He could not change the universe. But he could change himself.

He was a wandering spirit beyond the universe entirely, an observer time itself could never bind.

He beckoned once with his hand, and in that instant the terrible burrowing worm monster died, on the point of turning back into a mere egg.

Redlichia had stood on the very edge of life and death, and in that same instant he was freed from danger, though with time itself frozen he never even noticed.

And then Yin Shen turned to look toward where Ense stood.