The Messenger Who Walked Out of the Realm of Gods

Borne on wind and wave, a golden figure came across the surface of the sea from somewhere far beyond the horizon.

He drifted over the reefs, skimming low across the water.

And came to land on a rooftop within the God-Descended City.

In the early morning the God-Descended City had the look of someone only just waking from sleep.

People streamed out of their homes and into the streets. The city gates stood open, some passing in and others passing out, and the crowds grew thicker and noisier by the moment.

In the marketplace, buyers and sellers gathered amid all manner of novel wares, and that was what caught Polo's eye.

"La la la!"

He drifted through the street and the crowd like a golden flower-winged butterfly, and not one of the people there could see him.

Only when he wanted to be seen could anyone see him at all.

He was a strange sort of life, one that could walk freely between dream and illusion.

In the marketplace of the God-Descended City, the people and merchants of the Yinsai Kingdom traded in a special stone currency stamped with the Crown of Wisdom and its scepter.

The market sold dried fish, hyoliths, dried seaweed, and food of every kind, along with carefully worked tools of bone and stone, rare treasures pulled up from the sea, and any number of strange and curious things.

Polo stopped before a group of people penned inside a stone cage, and studied the filthy, gaunt trilobite men within with open curiosity.

These trilobite men were shut inside a cage too low and too small for them. They could not stretch out their bodies or spread their arms, and it was plain to see how much they suffered for it.

"Have they committed some kind of crime?"

"Why are they shut up in a cage like that?"

The slave trader had his back to Polo, twisting cord out of some kind of seaweed. He answered, "They're slaves."

"Their ancestors committed the unforgivable sin. Blasphemy against the divine being, offense against the King of Wisdom. So King Yesael condemned them to slavery."

"How about it?"

"Want to take a few home? Children born to slaves are slaves as well. Buy a few healthy ones now and your family won't be short of slaves to order about for generations."

Polo looked at the trilobite men and their dull, lightless eyes, and clicked his tongue.

"You trilobite men are awful. You enslave your own kin like mindless bizarre shrimp or ancestral fish, and you won't even let their children's children go free."

The slave trader turned around, looking rather amused.

"Us trilobite men?"

"The way you put that, anyone would think you weren't one your... self?"

"Huh?"

A moment ago someone had plainly been talking with him from behind. Yet he could see nothing there at all.

Polo went wherever he pleased, with no goal and no destination in mind.

Everything in this world held something of interest for him. Even a few trilobite children roughhousing and laughing by the roadside could hold him fascinated for half a day at a stretch.

He came upon a line of trilobite men filing out of the city in neat procession. They were old, and they knelt before the city wall and called out toward the sea, their voices weathered and heavy, their faces full of reverence, so that the cry itself carried something sacred about it.

Within the city, still more trilobite men had gathered to watch. Some pressed both hands to their chests and closed their eyes, murmuring the very same words along with the procession.

"There go the old folk again, off on pilgrimage to the Sky Temple."

"If you can't be buried in the God-Given Land, the foot of the Sky Temple isn't a bad place either."

"They say His Highness Eli has no love for the Sky Temple's high priest? Word is the two of them have come to open conflict lately."

"Who doesn't know that? High Priest Schlode devoured a thing God had given, and the divine punishment and the curse took King Yesael down along with him. Even the Crown of Wisdom went into the Demon Abyss over it. How could His Highness Eli not hold a grudge against the Sky Temple?"

The voices dropped lower and lower, as though the speakers feared being overheard.

After Yesael's passing, the throne had gone to Eli's father, and the loss of the Crown of Wisdom had weakened the royal authority at its very root. The old king, too, was well on in years, and no longer had the strength to hold the kingdom together.

Eli had taken hold of the army, along with the three fusion monsters King Yesael had left behind, and become the most powerful man in the kingdom, its true master in all but name.

Polo cared little for matters of power and rivalry. All he had caught from the talk was that these people were bound for the Sky Temple.

And that place.

Was precisely where he had been born.

"Back I go!"

He wanted to look on his homeland again, and see what had become of that beautiful God's Cup Flower Garden by now.

The Sky Temple

Within a palace built tall enough to house giants, a company of priests of God knelt before the statue of God Yinsai.

At their head knelt a trilobite woman, leading the others in prayer beneath the statue.

Her hands were clasped together and pressed to her chest, her eyes shut tight in utter devotion.

Her pale carapace bore flecks of silver like starlight, rare and lovely to behold.

When the prayer ended, the company backed slowly out of the temple, their faces still turned toward the statue.

Once outside, their faces were no longer quite so solemn.

They were young, after all. Among the pillars they crowded together, calling questions to one another, even chasing and laughing.

One of the trilobite women edged carefully over to the only one among them who was not laughing. Her face was serious as she asked.

"Star, do you think God really exists?"

Star, the only senior priest among them, answered as a matter of course, in a tone that allowed no doubt.

"Of course He exists."

"Otherwise, where would we have come from? And where would our power come from?"

"Our wisdom ability, our food, our writing and our language."

"All of it is grace bestowed upon us by God."

The other girl hesitated, as though there was something more she wanted to ask.

Star had long since seen through what she was thinking, and spoke straight out.

"We cannot see God, and that is because we have not seen God's glory."

"How could those who carry original sin ever be worthy to appear before the divine?"

"But!"

Star turned back to look at them, as solemn as her father and all her forebears before her, and spoke the divine words handed down generation after generation.

"Whether or not mortals believe in God! Whether or not mortals are able to see God."

"God is right there!"

Star's father was the current high priest of the Sky Temple, the very priest of God who had once stood at High Priest Schlode's side and warned him that something might be wrong with the Divine Cup's divine technique.

Her ancestor was Xilong, Redlichia's fourth son, a name that carried the meaning of starlight.

That her father had chosen to name her Star said everything about how deeply he loved her.

Star now served as a divine servant priest of God Yinsai, but as heir to the Xilong family, she was destined one day to take up her father's post as high priest of the Sky Temple.

And as the price for it.

She could never leave the Sky Temple. Never, in all her life, could she so much as walk down out of this God-Servant City or leave the Sacred Mountain.

Down from the heights she went, one stone stair after another, to the God's Cup Flower Garden below. She made her home right beside it.

She knelt outside the God's Cup Flower Garden, closed her eyes, and worked her divine technique.

"Projection!"

This was a divine technique she had puzzled out for herself, one that let her form a bond with another life through her own mythical blood.

Part of it drew on the divine technique of the Bestowal of Royal Power, and part on the illusory power of the Divine Cup.

It remained far from perfect, though, and any number of problems still had no solution.

Schlode had thought to fuse with the Sun Cup and explore a path of advancement for wisdom ability. Star believed something else entirely. The power of wisdom ability lay not in borrowing strength from outside things, but in the strength of one's own wisdom and thought.

A pity, then, that she did not dare say as much to her father, who had forbidden her to look into anything touching the Sun Cup's power.

That was a forbidden power. A cursed power.

She could not leave the Sky Temple and the Sacred Mountain, but she hoped that through this power she might yet borrow the eyes of some other life and look on the world beyond.

Star's consciousness projection lay just then in the body of an ancestral fish at the mountain's foot, gliding through the Sacred Lake by way of its eyes. Beside her, a figure popped suddenly up out of the Sun Cup flower bed.

"Wow!"

"What an amazing divine technique! How did you ever come up with it?"

Polo lay sprawled across the flower cups of the garden, both arms wrapped around the largest one of all, his face tilted so close it was nearly touching her.

Star spun around, her mouth falling open. She could never have imagined that someone had been hiding here in the God's Cup Flower Garden all along.

Their eyes met.

A new story.

Had begun.