Unable to Become King

Ense felt no more than a flicker before his eyes, and in that instant he was no longer where he had been. He knelt now at the foot of the pyramid's stairway, and that stairway ran so long it seemed to climb straight into the clouds.

"The temple?"

Ense started so violently that he toppled backward and sat sprawled on the ground, terror written across his face.

"What is this?"

"How am I here?"

"How am I here?"

He bowed his head at once, not daring even to look up toward the top of the stairway.

He feared that his own gaze might disturb whatever presence waited at that highest point.

It was not the sudden change alone that frightened Ense. What frightened him more was the temple at the pyramid's peak, home to some vast, mysterious presence beyond all fathoming, dwelling amid the divine.

"Go!"

"Hurry, go!"

"I must get away from this place."

Trembling from head to foot, he tried to crawl his way back down. At that very moment a beam of light fell across the stairway.

The light spread slowly downward from on high, like quicksilver pouring across the ground.

The light blazed white, and it was no sunlight at all but something pure and holy, as though it were power blooming up from the very depths of the heart.

Every trace of expression drained from Ense's face, and he turned to look.

The light soaked into the whites of his eyes and into his pupils, until they too turned a pure, blank white.

He lifted his head, and within the light he saw a silhouette.

A being standing above time and above the passage of years alike, an eternity that nothing bound and nothing touched.

He knew exactly what it was.

Ense's shoulders sagged, and his arms fell limp at his sides, as slack as noodles.

All the strength seemed to have gone out of his body. He knelt there on the ground with only his head still raised high, staring up at that star-like silhouette above.

"God Yinsai!"

It was the first time he had ever seen God, and it would be the last.

God was no unmoving block of stone, nothing at all like what he had seen as a boy, the first time his father led him into the temple.

He never stepped outside the temple, but not because the temple held him captive.

It was that the universe itself rejected him. Wherever he might stand, it made no difference at all.

"So this is what God is!"

Ense raised his hand toward God, as though reaching to embrace the light itself.

"God, will You punish me?"

The divine towered high above the hall, and his voice seemed to fall from beyond the clouds.

"Son who would kill his own father!"

"Your life and your death are your father's to choose, and your guilt is his to name."

Yin Shen looked at Ense just once, then drew back his gaze and returned into the temple.

The light drew back from the top of the stairway, and Ense collapsed, every last shred of strength gone out of him.

Limp as a heap of mud, Ense had barely crawled his way down the pyramid's stairway when a ring of tall, powerful trilobite man guards closed around him.

"Pin him down." Several trilobite man guards seized Ense and dragged him up onto the main road.

Ense did not resist at all. As he was dragged away he turned his head for a single glance at the great statue of the King of Wisdom that stood at the foot of the pyramid, the one Yesael had dedicated to his father.

Crowds of the Yinsai Kingdom's people lined both sides of the God-Given City's main road, staring in disbelief as the eldest prince Ense was marched past under guard.

"That's Prince Ense?"

"How can that be Prince Ense?"

"There's no way. He's the King of Wisdom's own son!"

"What on earth is this about?"

Under the crowd's uncomprehending, stunned stares, Ense was dragged before Redlichia and forced to his knees on a stretch of broken stone.

The palace that had towered so magnificently was nothing now but a heap of shattered rock, and buried beneath those stones lay the bodies of trilobite men, one after another.

Amid the ruins, Redlichia's gaze bored into Ense without wavering. Looking at his son, his eyes held incomprehension, fury, sorrow.

"How dare you do such a thing?"

"Kill your own father? And profane the divine as well?"

"You are a priest of God. And you turned the very power God granted you upon your own king, to murder him."

Before Ense could answer, Redlichia lifted up the egg, hard as stone, and demanded an explanation.

"Speak. How did your younger brother Boon's fusion monster come into your hands? Where has Boon gone?"

Ense hid nothing. Not a trace of regret showed in his eyes, and he said, as though he could not care less, "You tell me."

"Great King of Wisdom, surely a mind as wise as yours has no trouble guessing what I have done?"

Ense's words set Redlichia's fury fully ablaze, and he roared at his son, "But I want to hear you say it."

Ense turned his head to one side. His words remained defiant, but he still did not dare meet his father's eyes.

"I killed Boon, then dug the bone from the center of his brow."

"I ate it, and naturally his fusion monster fell under my control."

"As for his body, it is out there in the sea."

Hearing this, Redlichia began to shake from head to foot.

"You unfilial wretch."

"You are asking to die."

Just then the queen came rushing out from behind them and caught hold of her husband.

"Do not kill him!"

Redlichia looked at his queen, his eyes brimming with fury.

"He killed his own brother, he killed Boon."

"And he meant to kill me too, kill his own father."

"Boon was your son too."

"Why should I not kill him? Should he not pay the price for what he has done?"

The queen looked at Redlichia, pleading. "We have already lost one son. Let us not lose a second."

She threw herself down and clung tightly to Redlichia. "And more than that, I do not want you to kill your own son with your own hands."

"That would be the most tragic thing in this world. Please, do not let it happen."

"Banish him somewhere far away instead, and never let him come back."

She turned to her eldest son. "Quickly, beg your father's forgiveness!"

But Ense only laughed aloud. Kneeling there with a look of utter contempt on his face, he said, "I have done nothing wrong."

"I am your eldest son. I am the one who should be the next King of Wisdom."

"How am I to accept that I am not king? How am I to bear it, if the one seated on that throne is not me?"

"Even if you do not kill me today, one day I will kill Yesael."

He looked straight at his father and said, in a voice clear and precise, "If I cannot become king, I would rather die."

Plainly Ense no longer meant to go on living.

At these words the fury that had burned in Redlichia a moment ago was gone, and nothing remained in his eyes but a cold, icy look.

He climbed down step by step from the ruined palace, and as he walked he said, "Ense, if you truly must be killed, let it be by my hand, your father's."

"Not your brother's."

The sharp lower end of the scepter drove through Ense's chest, and blood ran down the carved patterns of the shaft in an unbroken stream.

Redlichia killed Ense with his own hands. Lying there in the pool of blood, Ense heard his mother's voice break as she wept and screamed, and still his eyes never left Redlichia.

Whether he was looking at his father, or at the crown upon his father's head, no one could say.

Until, at last, all consciousness left him entirely.