Let Go!

Yesael had never imagined that leaving that one time would mean a final farewell.

He had achieved the dream he once held. He had conquered the sea and set foot upon both the continent and the Origin Site, and yet he had not been there to see his mother one last time before she died.

Together with his father, he watched the queen's stone coffin lowered into the burial ground.

From here the sea could be seen. This was the oldest district in all the God-Given City.

Redlichia had built this place with his queen long ago, and every brick and tile here bore some trace of them both, though most of the old friends and companions of those days had already passed on.

Only now did Yesael ask his father, still hardly able to believe it.

"King of Wisdom, was it truly Ense and Boon?"

Redlichia neither confirmed it nor denied it.

He only said to his son, "The road to becoming king is not gain alone. More often, it is loss."

Redlichia turned and walked away from the burial ground.

"Follow me!"

Yesael asked, "Where to?"

Redlichia looked toward the pyramid at the far end of the road, and a smile came over his face, touched with ease.

"To see God."

Yesael's body went rigid. He had already sensed what was about to happen.

Walking ahead of him, his father did not need to turn around to feel what his son felt.

"Do not be afraid."

"Yesael, you will do better than I ever did. You will surpass me and become an even greater king."

Out along the God-Given City's great stone-paved avenue, every one of its people left their homes of their own accord and stood along both sides of the road.

They watched Redlichia lead his son by the hand toward the pyramid, his guard close around them.

As Redlichia and Yesael passed before them, the people on either side dropped at once to one knee, bowing their heads and pressing their hands to their chests.

The two of them seemed to walk a road paved with blessing and devotion both. Everyone there knew this was the hour when the old king gave way to the new. They worshipped the old king, they grieved his failing age and his coming death, and in the same breath they blessed the wise, just new king.

Redlichia led his son up the stairway, and behind them a company of men carried two stone coffins up toward the temple as well.

The former came before God to inherit the authority of the King of Wisdom. The latter were sinners who had disturbed and profaned the divine, they and their descendants both.

Inside the stone coffins lay the King of Wisdom's two sons, Ense and Boon.

Ense had been the mastermind, but Boon too had once agreed to his brother's plan, and none of it could be hidden, not before the King of Wisdom and not before God.

The old king and the new stepped into the temple, while the sinners were left kneeling outside its doors.

Within the temple, Yin Shen was waiting for Redlichia.

He was looking over the carved images Redlichia had once made for him, and it all seemed as though it were only yesterday.

The newly created Redlichia had carved stone statues within the temple, mimicking Yin Shen's own tone as he practiced the divine words.

His accent was strange, comical, wildly overdone.

"Time, it really does go by so quickly!"

Redlichia looked at God's back, at the shifting light that drifted like fabric, as though the hem of God's robe had brushed past his own face. From where he knelt, that tall silhouette of light seemed impossibly vast.

It was exactly as it had been the first time he ever saw God, not the slightest bit changed.

"I thought that in the last moment of my life I would stand before You in pride, and hand You an answer I was satisfied with."

"I never imagined that in the end I would let You see me at my most wretched and powerless, that You would witness this ugly farce of father and son slaying one another."

Yin Shen looked at him.

His body was old and bent, his carapace grown brittle as sandstone, and both alike foretold that he had come to the very end of his life.

Only his eyes remained, still as devout as they had been in the days of old.

He reached out a hand. "Redlichia, what more do you want?"

He even glanced toward Shelly, who stood before the pillar like a lifeless doll. The powers of their two bloodlines were at odds with one another, and yet Shelly's unique life ability, her deathless immortality, might perhaps be enough to draw Redlichia's life out a while longer.

So long as Redlichia asked it of him, Yin Shen was willing to grant it.

Redlichia seemed to see what Yin Shen meant, and he shook his head.

"God, it is time to let go."

"It is time for me to let go, and it is time for You to let go as well."

"I could not bear to let go, and this is the bitter fruit of it. In the end I killed my own eldest son, Ense, with these hands."

"I too am Your eldest son, and the favor I have been given is already more than enough."

Yin Shen lowered his hand and said nothing more.

"It's your decision!"

A smile spread across Redlichia's face, guileless as a child's. God favored him still, just as he always had, even now that he had defied God's own wishes, even though his own thoughts and will were foolish beyond all reason.

"Yesael, come here."

He looked to his son and drew him close, until the two of them knelt side by side before the altar, level with one another.

Yesael knelt at God's feet, but his eyes were fixed on his own father.

"My king!"

But Redlichia said, "Here, I am no longer your king."

In an instant Yesael's voice broke, and tears slid without end from the corners of his eyes. "Father."

Redlichia smiled, well pleased, and raised both hands to grasp the crown atop his own head, lifting it slowly free.

Then he set it upon Yesael's head.

"From this moment on, you are king!"

"The second King of Wisdom of the Yinsai Kingdom."

Yesael wept until he could not get a word out, and his shoulders shook and shook.

He was Redlichia's youngest son, a prince raised up on hope and favor both. His father's attention and love had stood over him like a great mountain, sheltering him from wind and rain, giving him the courage and the strength to chase down every dream he held, and letting him face any hardship at all without fear.

But now, this mountain was about to fall.

Helpless, he said, "No!"

"You are the king. You will always be King of the Trilobite Men, King of the Yinsai Kingdom."

"The eternal King of Wisdom."

Redlichia laughed, and at the same moment his eyes slowly closed.

"Only the divine being is eternal."

"However much we gain, in the end we will still... decay, and lose it all."

Even as he spoke these words, Redlichia closed his eyes completely.

He never opened them again.

The last of Redlichia's will and strength poured out of his body, took shape as a faint, glowing outline, and sank at last into the Crown of Wisdom.

The black crown joined with Yesael's own carapace and bound itself to his bloodline.

In that instant Yesael could feel the will and consciousness of every trilobite man alive rise up within his own mind. His consciousness became like a river of stars, and every star in that river was the consciousness of a single trilobite man.

He was the king who stood above that river of stars, and he alone could command its flow.

From Redlichia, the most ancient king, he had inherited the power of the King of Wisdom, and with it his father's will and his father's ideals both.

And Redlichia, who had lost everything, began to turn to stone from head to foot, until at last he became a statue, kneeling before God.

Just as he had once promised.

He would stand guard over the divine being here, forever.

Until the day the sun itself goes dark, until the end of time.