The High Priest and the Temple

The King returned from Yesael City, and the whole of the God-Descended City rang with cheers.

They came in their thousands upon thousands, converging into an ocean, lining both banks of a canal dozens of meters wide to welcome the King home.

Once again the King of Wisdom, Yesael, had come back from the God-Given Land bearing the revelation of the divine being.

On the fusion monster's back the King bore himself with dignity, receiving them all as they knelt and cried out, though his thoughts had long since flown far away.

Half of him was lost in memory. Half of him was turning over the future.

"My King!"

"My King?"

At his side a young trilobite man was watching the Sun Cup, which shed a dazzling brilliance beneath the sunlight. "Is this really a revelation from God?"

The boy was Yesael's grandson, born like him a holder of wisdom ability.

Whenever Yesael looked at him, he seemed to be looking at himself, long ago.

The child had plainly not thought so far. To his eyes the Sun Cup looked as though someone had snapped it off by force, and for all that it was wondrous and beautiful, it did not look like anything God had bestowed.

It looked more like something someone had thrown away.

Yesael took the child's hand. He looked at him with a gaze devout and earnest, the very gaze Redlichia had once turned on him, holding his hand in just this way.

He spoke in a tone that left no room for doubt. "Eli, you must never forget this."

"Before God there is no such thing as accident. All things are God's will."

At the end of the canal the fusion monster came to a halt, and Yesael led him down the stone bridge that spanned it, step by step.

He raised his chin, his chest thrown out with pride. "It is my own devotion that has moved God!"

Yesael believed this with his whole heart.

Two files of guardsmen lifted the Sun Cup, replanted now in a rectangular stone basin, and bore it down the broad avenue.

"It's the Divine Cup!"

"Quick, look at the color of it, just like the sun! God must have drawn this sacred thing right out of the sun!"

"It's a gift from God."

"God, at last You have sent Your revelation down to us once more!"

Throughout the city the trilobite men surged forward, wild with excitement.

But the instant they came near the Sun Cup, they stopped short.

They longed to draw close to this treasure God had given, yet dreaded that their own lowly mortal bodies might defile the glory of God.

All they could do was kneel, hands pressed to their chests, and gaze up at the radiant Divine Cup, wailing and weeping with an emotion too great to hold in.

The sight filled Yesael with joy, and he said to Eli, "Look, they all believe it. This is the revelation God has given us."

"The trilobite men believe in the great divine being as devoutly as ever, and He will surely see it."

Yesael's thoughts went to his father, and to how his father had won the favor of God Yinsai.

His father had raised a Pyramid Temple for God, and there he had presented his own offerings. Every one of those scenes Yesael had seen before, painted on the murals of his father's Wisdom Palace, and again on the stone tablet that stood before the God-Given City.

"A temple."

Yesael murmured the two words to himself.

In an instant, his eyes blazed with light.

That was it, exactly. A temple.

He would build one even more magnificent, even more towering, than the Pyramid Temple his father had raised.

He would let God know the devotion and the faith of his followers.

Yesael returned to the royal palace and summoned the ministers of the Yinsai Kingdom to lay the matter before them.

The King stood raised above them, gesturing broadly as he described what manner of temple was to be built, how tall and how wondrous it had to be, since only such a temple could be worthy of the divine's own noble stature.

Below him the ministers carved his words into stone slabs, and told him at the same time roughly how many craftsmen the work would take, and how much labor.

Among that crowd stood the Priest of God, Schlode.

When the King of Wisdom, Yesael, had finished declaring that a temple would be raised to God Yinsai, he turned his gaze upon Schlode.

"My King!"

Schlode stepped forward and knelt at the feet of the King of Wisdom.

Yesael stepped down from his place and laid a hand on Schlode's shoulder.

"Schlode, you are the divine being's first senior priest. You found the Sun Cup, and you received the revelation of God."

"From this day forth, you shall be the High Priest who serves the divine being."

"And in the time to come, the temple of God Yinsai shall pass into your charge as well."

A senior priest was any priest who, strengthened by the Sun Cup, had gained an advanced wisdom ability.

Schlode, High Priest now, felt his pupils widen with excitement. For a long moment he was stunned. Then he sank to his knees and cried out.

"My King, you..."

Yesael cut him off at once and looked him full in the face. "It is God you should thank!"

"It is God who has given you everything."

Schlode nodded again and again. "The Great God Yinsai will surely forgive the sin that lies upon us, for the sake of the King's devotion."

When it was all over, the whole palace fell hollow and empty.

Eli looked at his grandfather, sitting alone upon the throne, and asked, not quite understanding, "My King, didn't you tell me that God said He has no need of mortal faith or offerings?"

Yesael stroked his head. "God has no need of mortal faith or offerings, and yet He takes joy in them all the same."

"It is the same as a father. He has no need of anything his child might bring him, and yet when the child holds out a gift, he is glad. What gladdens him is the heart behind it."

"God is our father, and the supreme father of all trilobite men."

Eli nodded, only half understanding.

"Oh!"

Behind the royal palace stood a spacious, magnificent chamber, the very place where the King of Wisdom, Yesael, had once displayed his own carved works. He had inherited his father's love of carving.

Now, though, the splendid chamber had been cleared out entirely and turned into an indoor garden.

The people of the God-Descended City had combed the seafloor for the richest soil they could find and spread it over the whole of the ground. Here the Sun Cup was soon to be transplanted.

"Careful, now!"

"This is a gift from God. One slip, and you desecrate the divine being. There must not be a single slip."

Schlode's voice carried in from outside, and after it came a line of trilobite men bearing a rectangular planter.

Construction on the temple had not yet begun, so for the time being Schlode was High Priest in name only.

For now, his most important task was simply to nurse the Sun Cup into life.

Should this sacred object bestowed by divine grace die in his hands, he could forget the office of High Priest altogether. What he would face instead was the wrath of the King of Wisdom, Yesael.

With painstaking care, Schlode transplanted the Sun Cup into the soil.

Behind him, several other priests asked, "Is it really going to come back to life?"

Schlode had no doubt of it. "Since God has given us the Sun Cup, He will surely make it bloom here."

Whether it was that Schlode's words had come true, or simply that the Sun Cup's own life force had always been a tenacious thing, no one could say.

In the soil the broken Sun Cup burst into powerful new life. This God-given flower not only came back to life, but put out two offshoots of its own beside it.

They would blossom into the future of the priestly line, and become the wellspring from which extraordinary power would grow.

Yinsai Epic

King Yesael sought God's forgiveness, and in mercy, God bestowed upon him the Sun Cup.

Even after God had driven the line of his firstborn son from the paradise God had promised, God went on watching over Redlichia's descendants.

By drinking the divine power held within the Sun Cup, a Priest of God would receive the power of a senior priest, granted by the divine's own grace.

But this thing named for the sun was also an omen and a warning to the people of the Yinsai Kingdom. Its power was just like the sun in the sky.

It could nurture life, and it could also bring disaster.

Unfortunately, King Yesael did not understand God's mercy, or what it truly meant.