The Returning Wanderer

Tito looked toward the friend the sea of flowers had swallowed, and could not name the feeling rising in him.

Sorrow was in it, and regret, and yet a kind of gladness for Old Stone Helm as well.

"To find the answer he had been seeking, and to find it in the very last moment of his life."

"That, too, is a kind of good fortune!"

Only once the sun's last light had faded below the horizon did he turn and set out toward the temple.

Old Stone Helm had found the answer he wanted, but Tito had not yet completed his own calling.

He walked on down the broken stone path as the darkness settled in around him, bit by bit.

"La la la la la!"

"La la la la la!"

From somewhere in the distance came a sweet, lilting song, clear and bright as wind chimes stirring in a breeze.

Spirit after spirit, each draped in a resplendent golden robe, drifted in on the wind across the sea of flowers and settled around Tito.

They carried little lanterns, lighting the way ahead for him.

"Who are you?" Tito asked, looking at these beautiful creatures.

Their appearance was so close to that of the Divine Messenger Polo that the poet had a fair idea at once of what they were.

"We're dream spirits, the guardians of the Garden of the Divine!"

"God sent us to meet you, honored guest from afar, Tito, poet of Yinsai!"

The spirits had never once seen anyone come from outside, and they circled the poet in curiosity, dancing and spinning about him.

Tito was stunned. "God... actually knows of me?"

The dream spirits giggled. "God knows everything!"

With the dream spirits at his side to guide him, Tito passed through the ruined city amid the sea of flowers and came at last to the foot of the pyramid.

There he saw a statue of Redlichia, crafted by the hands of His Highness Yesael, the second King of Wisdom himself. Redlichia, that Great King of Wisdom, stood eternally at the foot of the divine pyramid, forever guarding the passage that led to the halls of the divine.

Tito tilted his head to gaze up at the statue, his face awash with awe, and climbed the steps one by one.

A massive dream bubble enveloped the entire pyramid, and the moment he passed through it, he felt as though he had crossed into another world entirely.

He drew his gaze away from the statue, and found that he had already stepped into a realm of dream.

Countless rainbow lights spun across the surface of the bubble, mirroring dream after beautiful dream.

There was snow.

There were waves of wheat.

There was a forest in the summer night.

There was even a leap across a sea of clouds.

All of them were magnificent dreams the poet had never once witnessed, dreams that belonged to no mortal.

He looked up toward the peak of the pyramid. Along both sides of the stairway stood statue after statue of trilobite men, each raising a lamp fire aloft to light the path toward the sacred.

Step by step, he climbed the pilgrim's road.

This was the road King Redlichia had once walked, the road King Yesael had once walked.

And now he walked it again.

At last he stood before the temple. Carved into its stone pillars were patterns even he could not read, like some fantastical vision drawn from an altogether different world of gods.

The temple's towering metal doors threw back a golden light. The whole palace seemed to flow with a rich, noble dark gold, and about it hung the weathered air of ancient years.

He cradled the Divine Cup in his hands and crawled his way into the temple, advancing on his knees.

Only once he had reached the center of the temple did he slowly raise his head and look around him.

Upon the Altar sat the Mother of Life, who commanded the Mother Conch of All Things. She was Shelly, King of Beasts, said in legend to wear the very face of the divine.

The instant he saw her, a shudder went through him that he could not control. She looked, for all the world, like a harmless young girl, yet the terrible presence that towered over every great beast alive had long since been branded into the bloodline of every trilobite man.

To the right of the Altar lay a dream spirit of surpassing loveliness. The beautiful living being reclined upon a resplendent white couch, cradling a Dream Egg against her chest like a pillow, adrift upon an ocean of Dreams.

He beheld the power of Dreams, thing after thing born out of Dream itself, as though she had inherited the very power of the divine to create all things.

He saw as well a stone statue kneeling at the side of the Altar. It was King Redlichia, their first ancestor, the very origin of all wisdom.

Just as the accounts passed down by word of mouth described, Redlichia had died at last before the divine, and here in the temple he kept eternal company with God Yinsai.

Last of all, he saw the power of stars eternal cast down from atop the Altar, and the light spilling from it alone was enough to make him feel the weight of all the ages, as though time itself had halted here at the will of the divine.

He dared not look any longer.

He was afraid that the instant he looked the divine full in the face, he would utterly break apart.

"O Great God Yinsai, please accept the faith of the humble people of Yinsai!"

"Your Messenger, Polo, returned to eternal silence upon the shore of the God-Descended City, amid the shattering of his Dream."

"Following that divine messenger's guidance, I set out upon the road back to the God-Given Land."

"And now, I have finally come before You."

God raised a hand. The Divine Cup that Tito held high aloft rose into the air and drifted down onto the Altar, to rest gently in the hand of the divine.

God drew the Divine Cup back to himself, though he seemed to pay it little mind.

Instead, he looked at the poet Tito, and spoke a single line.

"Tito, do you still believe in fate?"

Tito was struck speechless in that instant, as though the words had pierced straight through his heart.

That single question seemed to tear him open, utterly and completely, and God's gaze looked as though it saw straight through everything he was.

He thought for a moment, then bowed his head to the ground and spoke.

"I do."

"Because fate lies in our own hands."

"And so I no longer wait for fate to descend upon me. With my own hands I carve out the fate that is mine."

God smiled.

Yet it was a smile that filled Tito with a boundless sense of peace. It was the supreme Yinsai's approval of him.

Once Tito had left the halls of the divine, God took up the Divine Cup, and after a long moment let out a single sigh.

"Polo."

The divine permitted Tito to remain a while longer in the God-Given Land, and he used that time to complete his own myth.

At the foot of the temple, in the God-Given City abloom with Sun Cup flowers, he searched with painstaking care for whatever traces history had left behind.

On the stone tablets, he found stories from ages long past.

In the ruins, he found still more facts that bore out the old legends.

And above the very first Ancestral Fish Swamp, he saw more clearly how the divine's blessing, given so long ago, had truly let the trilobite men forge a future of their own.

He stood before a collapsed palace. "Is this the Wisdom Palace of old? The royal palace that fell to ruin over Ense's crime of patricide?"

A few dream spirits stayed at his side, guiding his way even as they searched for someone interesting to play with.

"Yes!"

"Yes!"

Amid the ruins of that collapsed palace, he searched with painstaking care, and to his astonishment found a fragment of Redlichia's inscribed stone tablet.

The poet was so overjoyed he could hardly stand still, dancing about like a child who had just been handed the most precious treasure in the world.

"It's an inscribed stone tablet."

The dream spirits, meanwhile, thought the poet had gone mad, and clustered together to whisper among themselves.

"It's just a broken rock!"

"And he's treating it like some kind of treasure."

"He's gone mad, he's gone mad."

"He's definitely gone mad."

To the innocent, uncomprehending eyes of the dream spirits, these things were nothing but broken stones. They understood nothing of the trilobite men's history, or the glory they had lost.

They could never understand what it meant to Tito, and to every trilobite man, to want these things found again.

Tito knelt before the Wisdom Palace, clutching the broken tablet of writing tight against his chest, and tears fell from his blinded eyes.

He was moved. He was full of regret, too.