The Dream Egg

The temple lay vast and hushed, and outside the pyramid, rain was falling.

Pitter-patter.

Raindrops struck the stone steps and went trickling down the seams between them.

The temple's doors and windows framed the clamorous, rain-swept world outside. On ordinary days Yin Shen loved to watch such a scene, but just now he had no thought to spare for it at all.

His eyes were fixed on what lay inside the mythical conch shell.

A miraculous shell patterned with intricate, elaborate designs, a biological machine tool that creates life.

Once it had gone nameless, but the myths of the trilobite men had since given it a name. The people of Yinsai called it the Mother Conch of All Things, believing it had brought forth every living thing in this world.

Inside the Mother Conch of All Things, beneath God's own watching eyes, a newborn dream spirit came into being.

It was unlike the other dream spirits. From the moment of its birth it had cradled an egg shell in its arms, and now the beautiful creature, robed in golden divine cloth, lay with its head pillowed on that shell, sinking into a dream.

Through the egg shell, one could look straight into its dream.

The light was soft and wondrous, without any color at all, and yet it held wonders without end.

Out of the dream the illusory light rose and shone into the waking world, pooling soft and gentle at the feet of the divine, like moonlight spilled across the ground.

"Ah!"

"Hehehehe."

"A new companion!"

"This one seems even stronger!"

"Its dream feels so real!"

A handful of dream spirits circled God, giggling, and peered curiously at the newborn dream spirit inside the mythical conch shell, heads bent together in whispers.

Yin Shen laid his hand upon the shell, which rose dozens of meters high, and the whole of it turned perfectly transparent.

The colossal shell was set into one side of the temple, so that from inside only a portion of its flank could be clearly seen.

Yin Shen was sensing everything about this dream spirit.

"Dream ability."

"Second rank."

The dream spirit had undergone its transformation.

Just as the trilobite men carried the bloodline of wisdom ability, the dream spirits too now held a second-rank authority of their own. Reaching this point had cost Yin Shen many years and no end of trying.

At last he had found the missing piece that perfected the dream spirits' blood of myth, the piece that carried their power over from the dimension of consciousness into the real world.

The trilobite men had perfected their own wisdom ability with the pollen of the Sun Cup, and so had gained a power much like mental strength.

The dream spirits, remarkably, took the egg shells of trilobite men in their infancy for their bridge and their medium, the thing through which they could reach into the real world and touch it. A trilobite man's egg shell had become the vessel where a dream spirit's dream took shape.

It was only because wisdom and consciousness existed at all that dreams could be born.

And it was only because fantasy and dream existed that the trilobite men could turn consciousness and thought into a brush, and paint their way toward an understanding of the world.

The trilobite men and the dream spirits were like two halves set together into one unbroken circle.

"Spirit who wanders between dreams, release your authority!"

God's words passed into the dream spirit's consciousness, and at once its shape began to change.

Its golden robe folded back and upward until it formed one enormous flower cup.

It passed from a humanlike form into a single vast Sun Cup flower.

The egg shell that had pillowed its head now drifted slowly upward, blazing with a brilliant dreaming light, like the dream sun raised high overhead.

The Dream Egg spun, growing larger by degrees, and wherever its light fell became a homeland of dreams.

Little by little, it spread, until it had covered dozens of meters all around.

And yet this dream was a blank, empty expanse, where nothing at all existed.

Memory was the foundation of a dream, and the food a dream spirit fed upon. The more memory it devoured, and the stronger that memory, the more complete its Dream Egg would grow, and the more powerful.

Yin Shen reached out his hand, and light streamed from between his fingers.

That faint starlight fell, dropping down into the dream spirit's Dream Egg.

If a mortal fed a dream spirit with memory, that memory was lost to him at once, and forever.

What a dream spirit took was never only a memory. It was the life that memory belonged to.

But plainly, this one dream spirit could never have taken anything at all from God's own memory. A mere fragment, the memory of snow, fell from him and became a glacier without end inside the dream spirit's world, and frost began to sheathe the Dream Egg itself. For a moment it could not bear the weight of it.

Power burst from the Crown of Wisdom on Yin Shen's finger and reached out to bind itself to the dream spirit.

The dream's light erupted abruptly, spreading in an instant a hundredfold, a thousandfold.

The light kept spreading outward, bursting from the temple, bursting from the pyramid.

It swept over the whole of the God-Given Land.

In its sleep the dream spirit murmured, then cried out, "Snow!"

"So cold."

But something even more wondrous was happening outside the temple.

The endless drifting rain had turned all at once to a sky full of frost and wind, and white snowflakes came floating down to settle upon the earth.

Step by step, Yin Shen came out of the temple.

He reached out his hand, wanting to catch the falling snow.

But the snow passed straight through God's hand and fell to the ground.

Shelly copied him, caught a single snowflake, cupped it in her hands and held it up before God.

That whole crowd of dream spirits had never once seen such a sight. Cheering, they rushed outside to meet the falling snow.

Yin Shen drew back his hand and lifted the snowflakes with his mental power. The tiny diamond-faceted crystals spun upward and hung suspended in midair.

"When a dream shines into reality, it can bend reality itself."

"It truly is a wondrous power."

As the Sun Cup's bud folded closed once more, the great bubble spun and shrank little by little back inside it.

It woke within the dream, and descended into the waking world.

The dream spirit flew out of the Mother Conch of All Things, facing God's back.

"My creator."

"Great Creator God, Supreme Yinsai."

"Thank You for bestowing life upon me."

God nodded, and said nothing.

A second-rank dream spirit with a Dream Egg gained an ability much like making dreams come true, though the ability had its limits.

It could turn sand into stone or gemstones, for instance, but it could never turn sand into gold.

It could turn water into snow or ice, but it could never turn water into oil.

It was less a matter of changing the substance itself than of reshaping and refining it.

Every dream spirit had a name of its own, and this newborn one was no exception.

The dream spirit told God, "God! I've decided!"

"My name is Hila."

It meant light and hope.

This newborn dream spirit was not as lively and playful as the other dream spirits. It preferred to dream, wandering freely through its own spirit realm.

But in one thing it was no different from the others. It kept the same innocence, the same simplicity.

"Hope?"

"Why call it that?"

The dream spirit Hila told God, "I like the word. And more than that, I hope my birth can bring hope and light into this world."

"Just as the divine brought wisdom and life into this world."

God told her, "The world will not care that I created life and wisdom. Still less will it care whether you can bring it hope and light."

"The only ones who care about such things are people themselves."

The people he spoke of were humankind. They were the trilobite men.

And they were Hila and Yin Shen as well.

Yin Shen granted Hila certain things out of his own memory, the memory of smelting metal, the memory of firing clay into pottery, the memory of refining lamp oil, the memory of crafting gemstones, and others like them.

Hila's Dream Egg grew stronger and stronger, and the reach of her dream grew wider and wider.

She slept cradling the Dream Egg beneath the altar of God, and little by little her dream came to cover the whole of the pyramid, an illusory light blooming across the kingdom of God.

The Pyramid Temple, worn and aging after all these many years, was made new again within Hila's dream.

Bit by bit, the broken stairways and the old, faded murals grew clear and sharp again.

No filth, no dust, could ever settle here again.

One thing after another came to adorn the halls of the divine. The temple gained towering, weighty doors of metal, and gemstones of every kind were set into its domed ceiling.

Every manner of metal ornament appeared throughout, and lamp after lamp took its place along the pillars and stone walls.

The bare, drafty windows were fitted with panes of colored glass.

And at night, the temple came to have its own golden lamp fire.

The radiance the ornate golden lamps cast caught and refracted across every dark-gold, richly wrought vessel, until the temple, once dark and silent, blazed resplendent with gold.

The dream spirit Hila had built the God-Given Land into a true kingdom of the divine, and in this moment the hall of the gods had truly become a sacred and holy place, untouched by the dust of the mortal world.