The Banished People of the Abyss

"Who is there?" Tito had lost his eyes, but his hearing had grown far sharper for it.

"A dying old man." That was the answer the aged Person of the Abyss gave him.

The old one wore a stone helmet. Call him, then, Old Stone Helm.

Old Stone Helm took out the weathered cup. Even now there was nothing about it that looked the least bit special.

"Your thing."

"Can you tell me why you care about it so much? Or does it hold some special meaning?"

"Maybe, once I know, I'll let you go."

The other had probably been watching him a long while before coming up to him at last.

Tito lifted his head weakly. "Who are you, really?"

Old Stone Helm answered, "I am an old man who was driven out. A monster who happens to have wisdom."

The other had wisdom ability. Tito could be a fool at times, but never fool enough to take him for an ordinary person. "Are you a Person of the Abyss too? Why call yourself a monster?"

Old Stone Helm's words carried a certain indifference. In truth, it was the wisdom that came from a life weathered hard.

"Because when I was born, I was nothing but a monster out of the abyss."

"They're different. By the time they were born, they were already People of the Abyss."

Tito gave an answer that could have meant anything at all. "This is the thing that gave me my calling, and my guidance."

The other set Tito down and gave him water, and some food as well.

Tito finally caught his breath.

He rested through the night in a shaded corner beneath the island, and slowly began to recover.

He took the Divine Cup back from Old Stone Helm's hands, and the instant his fingers touched it, a single beam of light lit up his world of darkness.

The Divine Cup's guiding light was still there, even though he could see nothing else at all anymore.

He got to his feet.

He listened to the tide roll in and out, listened to the wind howling and echoing between the stone pillars.

Strangely, with his eyes gone dark, he found he could think more clearly about everything in his life.

Why had he come here at all?

What did he truly want?

In the end, he decided to set out once more.

He packed the Divine Cup carefully back into his pack, lost once and found again, along with a few broken bone tablets and his own carving tool.

Old Stone Helm watched him, and asked.

"Even in the state you're in, you still mean to search for the God-Given Land?"

This Person of the Abyss was curious. What, exactly, was driving Tito to go this far?

Where did his persistence come from, his effort, his fearlessness?

Tito's guard went up at once. "You know what I am looking for?"

Old Stone Helm laughed. "Every word you said to that little brat, I heard all of it."

Tito turned his head toward the voice. "You know the lord of the Sal Domain."

Old Stone Helm replied, "He's my great-grandson."

Tito froze in shock. "Then why were you driven out?"

The other paused a moment, then laughed heartily and spoke.

"People of the Abyss aren't like Yinsai. We worship strength, and we despise weakness."

"We breed fast, but there's only so much food in the sea. We're nowhere near as good as you people of Yinsai at raising Ancestral Fish, and on top of that you hold the richest coastal waters, the very places best suited for Ancestral Fish to thrive."

"An aging Person of the Abyss is of no more use. Once they reach a certain age, they leave their home of their own accord, and go out into the sea to live or die on their own."

"And if they won't go, they're driven out of their home regardless."

Tito said, "So you were exiled? By your own people?"

Old Stone Helm said, "In this cruel world, staying alive is never an easy thing."

Old Stone Helm clearly had no wish to go on with that subject. He studied Tito instead, and his interest was plain.

"You still haven't answered me. Why must you go looking for the God-Given Land?"

"You've even lost your eyes. Why hold on so hard?"

Tito thought for a moment. "Do you understand what it means to have a calling?"

Old Stone Helm blinked, caught off guard. "Not really, no."

Tito laughed, and there was mockery in the sound of it for the person he used to be.

"In truth, I did not understand it either. Before this, I was only ever saying pretty words."

"Only, say pretty words often enough, and you start to believe them yourself."

"Shout loud enough that everything is fate, that everything is God's own guidance, and in the end you really do end up laying every mistake, every failure, at the feet of the divine."

"I longed to become a greater poet. I longed for the cheers of other people."

"I longed to see my own name written into history, longed for every person in every age after me to know who I was."

Old Stone Helm pressed him. "Then what is a calling, really?"

Tito found himself asking the same question. "What is a calling?"

This time he gave an answer, and it was meant as much for himself as for the other.

"A calling is not some supreme glory. It carries no guidance from God at all."

"It is only that I want to do this. I believe I should do this."

"I did not understand that before. I believed, without question, that everything in this world was fated by some unseen hand."

"But the moment I lost everything, I understood, all at once."

"And at last, I understood something else too."

"Why God said those words to Redlichia."

Old Stone Helm listened with real relish. He seemed genuinely fascinated by such things. He too was lost, after all, searching for an answer just as Tito was.

"Which words?"

Tito turned to face the sea, and shouldered his pack once more.

"God said to King Redlichia, I am the God who created you, and you alone are their king."

"God created all things and all life, and yet He gave wisdom to the trilobite men alone. Because wisdom is the very power to break free of fate. Wisdom is the miracle that creates everything there is."

"From that very moment, God let go of every bond holding the trilobite men's fate in place."

"From that time on, God let go entirely. He told King Redlichia that history would be the trilobite men's own to make."

A smile settled onto Tito's face. In truth, it was simply relief.

"Only, we could not let go in turn. We could not bear that God had let go of us. We did not believe we were capable of making history ourselves."

"Because we... were simply too small."

"But God believed that we, small as we were, could still create miracles."

Tito stepped forward, one step and then another, out into the sea, and the water rose to swallow his footsteps.

"I no longer long for anything. I no longer wait for fate's arrangement, or for God's own guidance."

"Because I am making history now, making a history that belongs to me alone."

"That is my calling."

Old Stone Helm listened to Tito's words, and all at once something shook in him that he could not name.

There was no fervor in it and no stirring rhetoric, only a plain, flat statement, and it struck straight at the heart all the more for that.

He sensed that the answer he had been seeking himself lay right here.

He rose to his feet, watching Tito's back recede, and called out.

"Tito, do you believe... that there is truly a God?"

Tito gave no answer. Old Stone Helm hurried after him instead.

"Let me come with you!"

"I want to see for myself what the kingdom of the divine really looks like."

"I want to know too, whether we were ever the firstborn of the divine ourselves."

Tito still said nothing, but Old Stone Helm would not let it go.

"Where you're going, you'll have to pass through the Demon Abyss Kingdom's royal capital, what was once Yesael City."

"Without my guidance and my help, there's no way you'd ever get through that place."

Tito turned back toward him. "Are you certain you want to go to the God-Given Land? God may not welcome a sinful person setting foot in His paradise."

Old Stone Helm said, "That's my business."

Tito dove into the sea, and the old Person of the Abyss, whose origins no one knew, followed close behind him, out toward the deeper waters.

One aged and failing sinful person forsaken by God, and one poet who had lost both his eyes.

Two such strange companions, bound to each other now, and together they set out on the journey to search for the God-Given Land.