The Power of the Divine Cup

The Pyramid Temple

Light poured in through the stained-glass windows, and the gauze curtains within the temple stirred and drifted. Yin Shen stood there, unmoving, for a long while.

He stood before the window, and yet what held his gaze was not the scene beyond it, but the Divine Cup resting in his hand.

He thought of Polo, and of Redlichia.

He remembered, too, a time when he still had a body of his own, when he had waved to friends and laughed through conversations that ranged over everything and nothing.

Behind him a girl held a potted flower close, never leaving his side, as though she meant to carry the scent of the bloom she loved to God's side at every moment.

All at once God spoke, and it was Shelly he was speaking to.

"Shelly, Redlichia told me I am eternal. He said that however much a mortal gains, in the end he loses it all, and that only an eternal God can possess everything."

"Then why do I still feel that I am losing it all, over and over?"

Yin Shen often spoke to Shelly this way, without warning. Perhaps only Shelly, who had neither wisdom nor a self of her own, could ever be someone he could confide in so freely.

Shelly did not answer.

She only took a step toward Yin Shen and pressed herself a little closer against him.

A faint smile rose on Yin Shen's face. Whether it came from real warmth, or from some private mockery of himself for talking to no one at all while still calling out Shelly's name, even he could not have said.

After that, he moved no more.

His consciousness slipped into a trance.

He seemed to melt entirely into the sunlight itself, becoming nothing more than a motionless play of light and shadow.

In truth, he was an overexposed blot of light in a photograph.

He drifted free of the universe and of time itself, and time worked upon him no differently than a reel of film he could wind forward or back at will.

He slowed his own perception of time, and the world outside began to flicker forward like a slideshow running at speed.

Clouds crossed paths with the moon. The sun and the crimson of dusk lingered.

Tides churned and surged. Rain and clear sky traded places, again and again.

In God's garden within the God-Given Land, where the Sun Cups bloomed without end, dream spirits grew more numerous by the day.

From a dozen or so, to several dozen, and then to a hundred.

The garden grew livelier with every passing season.

Ordinarily the dream spirits hid themselves away amid the sea of flowers, next to impossible to find. But the moment one of them let out a joyful cry, the huge Sun Cups would fold shut one after another, and a spirit would come bursting free of each.

Dream Spirit Hila came down from the pyramid, and a hundred dream spirits came rushing to gather about her, circling round and round.

They lined up obediently in rows, and Hila counted them off, calling each one by name.

Every time a new dream spirit appeared, she did this all over again.

"One... two... ten."

"One hundred."

"A hundred, at last."

A thread of joy rose even on the dream spirit's placid face. She returned to the temple with the same quiet, unhurried steps as always, and yet her body swayed faintly of its own accord, betraying just how happy she was.

She came before God, and tilted her head up to speak to him.

"God!"

"God!"

"The time has come."

That shadow, frozen in a single instant like a blot of light in a photograph, stirred.

In that single moment of Yin Shen's reverie, two hundred years had passed.

Dream Spirit Hila saw that God had woken, and went on.

"The Spirit Realm seed Lord Polo left within the Divine Cup. The hundred dream spirits now gathered. And the God-Descending Technique that Lord Polo found."

"All three conditions have now been met."

"Too few," Yin Shen said.

He meant the number of dream spirits.

Dream Spirit Hila knew she had been a little too impatient. But she had wanted so badly for God to wake sooner, and hearing him say this now left her at a loss.

But God spoke again. "Still, we can try it once."

Dream Spirit Hila nodded, and spoke to God.

"I will arrange it at once."

In the spacious temple, the divine one stood atop the Altar, and at the foot of his statue, Dream Spirit Hila slept, pillowed upon the Dream Egg.

A hundred dream spirits robed in gold stood together, the hems of their garments touching as though they held hands, singing a joyful tune.

"La la la la la!"

The power of dream radiated from their bodies, and one after another they flew into the Dream Egg, becoming lives of dream, vanishing out of reality and crossing over into dream.

Dream Spirit Hila's dream bubble grew larger.

Larger and larger.

The edge of the dream swept past the stairway, past the God-Given City, and reached all the way to the shore.

At last it swept over the whole of the God-Given Land, drawing it entirely within.

This dream bubble had grown complete. Across its shifting, rainbow-colored walls drifted visions of every splendor, and it was on the verge of ascending from a mere dream bubble into something else entirely, a fragment of the Spirit Realm.

But all of this still needed a vessel to carry it, something to give it anchor. Without that vessel, without that coordinate, every dream would remain nothing but illusion, duckweed with no root.

"Are you ready?" Yin Shen asked.

The spirit sleeping pillowed upon the Dream Egg nodded, still deep in dream.

Yin Shen closed his hand around the Divine Cup, and unleashed its power in full.

Rumble!

The whole of the God-Given Land, wrapped within the dream bubble, began to warp and twist, dissolving little by little into nothingness beneath the power of dream.

At last, it vanished.

The dream bubble sank into the Divine Cup, merging into the Spirit Realm seed Polo had left behind, and out of it, a Spirit Realm was born.

This was the power of the Divine Cup.

It could draw every ripened dream fragment into the Spirit Realm, calling down one dream after another the way a coordinate summons them, and so build up an illusory realm of dream.

The God-Given Land was gone. It had become part of the Spirit Realm, an existence now suspended somewhere between illusion and reality.

The dream spirits who had only just vanished from reality appeared once more, hand in hand, circling in the air within the temple, still singing that same joyful tune.

And atop the Altar, the shadow of the divine one called out.

"Projection."

"Descent."

Yin Shen's shadow grew real by degrees. Its outline, once no more than illusory light and shadow, blazed brighter and brighter, until the whole temple turned to searing white.

A celestial body like a star itself pressed in from beyond the universe, and his power grew ever more manifest.

Time began to stall, and then to unravel into chaos.

In some places it lurched violently forward, in others it even began to run backward.

The whole Spirit Realm rumbled with a violent, thunderous noise, as though it might collapse at any moment.

Just as it reached the point where it could bear no more, the blazing light pouring from the Altar began to fade, slowly.

Yin Shen abandoned the descent.

"Still too soon."

Yin Shen spoke the words plainly, and yet some disappointment clung to them.

He had been looking forward so much to setting foot within the Spirit Realm.

Even if he could never set foot in the real world, even if it could only ever be within the world of dream.

To feel the wind for a moment, to feel the rain for a moment, to smell the flowers.

That alone would have been enough.

But the whole universe rejected him, and not even so strange a domain as the dream, poised between illusion and reality, could hold his will long enough for him to descend.

Dream Spirit Hila knelt before Yin Shen. "God!"

"It was Hila who was too impatient."

Yin Shen knew the fault was not hers. He, too, had wanted just as much to try.

"It is not your fault. There is no need to hurry, or to be afraid."

"Hila, one day it will succeed. It's only ever a matter of sooner or later."

Hila tilted her head up to look at the divine one. "Have You already seen the future?"

Yin Shen lowered his head, and looked at Hila as he spoke.

"There is some advantage to being eternal after all. So long as a thing holds even the possibility of success, I can wait for it without end."

"Even if it takes until the very end of time!"

Yin Shen spoke the words lightly, as though they cost him nothing at all, and yet they left Dream Spirit Hila trembling down to her very bones.

God felt no fear, no dread at all, and yet she herself had glimpsed a darkness and despair beyond all measure.

It was a sorrow she could neither imagine nor put into words.

Dream Spirit Hila spoke to God. "It is because the Spirit Realm is still too weak to bear the weight of God's will."

"The power of dream needs the memories of living beings to grow strong."

"Let the dream spirits leave the God-Given Land, and grant the power of dream to the trilobite men!"

"A gift from God would make the trilobite civilization grow ever stronger."

Yin Shen looked at Hila. "Power can carry civilizations toward greatness, just as easily as it can carry them toward ruin."

Dream Spirit Hila answered him. "God!"

"I believe the world and its civilizations are certain to move toward something better."