The Dream World

Hum~

The temple's heavy metal doors swung fully open, and Yin Shen's translucent form walked out from within.

Outside, the flames held aloft by the trilobite man statues along both sides of the stairway kindled one after another, spreading down from the very top of the pyramid, and their golden glow lit the whole path.

Yin Shen raised his head.

He looked out at the world beyond.

This was no longer the ocean of reality. It had long since become a realm where illusion and reality crossed and intertwined.

Nor did the God-Given Land lie close beside the sea any longer. It floated now within an unknown void, a great island suspended entirely on its own.

At Yin Shen's side walked Dream Spirit Hila, following God step by step down the pyramid.

Yin Shen came to the edge of the God-Given Land, and drew out the dream artifact, the Divine Cup.

The grime on the rust-mottled Divine Cup flaked away bit by bit, and patterns of sun and starlight slowly emerged beneath it, delicate and magnificent.

Yin Shen cupped it in both hands.

All at once, the Divine Cup burst into a radiance like the sun itself.

The light washed over Yin Shen, so blinding that the dream spirit could not help raising her robe to shield her eyes. Little by little that searing light swept on across the sea of Sun Cups, and across the God-Given City.

At last, it shone down upon the Pyramid Temple itself.

The whole of the God-Given Land was bathed in sunlight once more, turning from darkness into day.

The sun slowly drew free of Yin Shen's hand, and rose into the sky of dream.

Its light spread across the whole Spirit Realm, and as the sun rose the sky itself turned azure, clear as though freshly washed.

The dream had settled into something wholly stable. So long as the Divine Cup remained unbroken, this Spirit Realm could endure forever.

"Polo, you really are the sun!"

God said this with a smile, and yet the dream spirit heard no real mirth in it at all. If anything, what she felt was sorrow.

The Spirit Realm was strange in the very way it was put together.

One might call it illusion, and yet the lives within it, the sea of Sun Cups, the island of the God-Given Land, the Pyramid Temple, could all just as easily be called real.

One might call it real, and yet everything else within this domain was illusion all the same. Even the domain itself could be called illusion.

Truth and falsehood crossed and tangled here. What was real could become false, and what was illusion could become real.

Dream Spirit Hila spoke to God. "God!"

"What should we do next?"

"The power of the Spirit Realm does not appear out of nothing. Not unless the dream spirits are allowed to leave the kingdom of God, so that the trilobite men may come to hold the power of dream."

"Without the memories of the trilobite men to sustain it, this Spirit Realm will struggle to grow any stronger."

Yin Shen shook his head, and told the dream spirit that there was another way to accomplish it.

Slower, perhaps, but no less certain to succeed.

"A dream belongs to no one person. Every living being that holds wisdom can hold a dream of its own."

"Dream is born of wisdom, and wisdom, in turn, becomes the garden bed where dream grows."

Yin Shen raised his left hand, and drew the Crown of Wisdom from the middle finger of his right.

Ding!

At a snap of his fingers, the ring spun and began to grow, larger and larger.

The crown gave off a cold, silver radiance, and at last, before Yin Shen and the spirit both, it transformed into a full moon.

The dream-sun in the sky above slipped out of sight, and the moon climbed slowly up into the heavens.

The sky, once azure, grew deeper beneath the moon's silver light.

The two divine artifacts, the Crown of Wisdom and the Divine Cup, held up the whole of the Spirit Realm together.

"The sun and moon of dream."

"Then next, there ought to be stars."

Yin Shen raised a finger and touched it lightly to the sky.

At the touch of his fingertip, radiant stars truly began to appear, one after another, in the deep night sky, circling the moon above like an honor guard.

The stars adorned the sky, and with it, this whole world of dream.

The dream spirit cried out in surprise. "They're the dreams of the trilobite men!"

One had only to look closer at any of those stars, and it became clear that each star was the dream of one trilobite man.

Through the power of the Crown of Wisdom, the Spirit Realm was now bound to the dreams of every trilobite man. Whenever one of them dreamed, a faint star would kindle in its sky.

But when they woke, the dream could not be carried back with them. It remained behind, forever, within this world.

This was precisely why every trilobite man's dream felt so real while it lasted, and why on waking they so often forgot what they had dreamed, left with nothing but a formless blur.

That was because the memory of their dream had already become nourishment, feeding the growth of the Spirit Realm.

Hila cheered at God's idea, and felt more awe at the wisdom that had let him foresee it all long before.

"This is wonderful!"

"This way, so long as the trilobite men endure, the Spirit Realm will only grow stronger and stronger."

From this point on, the Spirit Realm was divided into three layers.

Mortal dreams, these made up the endless sea of stars overhead.

Dream bubbles, these were the Dream Eggs of the dream spirits themselves. The moment one was born, it opened an illusory door between the sea of dream-stars and the deeper Spirit Realm below, and this same door served as the entrance from the real world into the Spirit Realm.

Dream fragments, these formed once a dream bubble had consumed enough memory and dream. The bubble would fuse part of some real existence and pull it down into the Spirit Realm, turning it into a dream fragment poised between illusion and reality.

For example, the God-Given Land, as it stood now, was itself one enormous dream fragment.

The Sea of Sun Cups

Dream Spirit Hila sat at the very center of the flowers, telling a story to a cluster of little dream spirits, when one of them suddenly turned to ask her a question.

"Lady Hila."

"What's the world of the trilobite men like? Have you ever been there yourself?"

Dream Spirit Hila smiled at them. "I've never been to the world of the trilobite men myself, but I can take you to see what it looks like."

A corner of Hila's robe arched out, caught hold of the little spirit who had spoken, and carried it up into the air along with her.

One dream spirit after another joined hands, gathering into a circle, and spun upward together toward the sky of the Spirit Realm.

"Look!"

"This is the world of the trilobite men."

Every fleck of dream-stardust scattered across that sky revealed a glimpse of the trilobite kingdom.

Some of that dream-stardust had only just been born, while other flecks held dreams from long, long ago.

The dream spirits drifted through that sea of stardust, cheering and delighting in it, their eyes wide as they gazed upon the dreams of the trilobite men.

"Doesn't their world have metal?" asked the dream spirit with a beautiful metal pendant at its chest.

"Don't they have pretty scarves like ours? Can't they make pretty hats?" The dream spirit in a scarf and hat was seeing the trilobite world from its own angle.

"Can't they use fire?" The dream spirit holding a lantern had spotted a difference of its own too.

Dream Spirit Hila told them, "These are all gifts from God, sacred things we drew out of the dream of the divine being."

As she walked among the sea of stars, Hila suddenly caught sight of a colored bubble.

A dream unlike any other dream there, a splendid, beautiful dream belonging to a dream spirit.

The scene within the dream turned out to be the halls of the divine, and herself as she had been two or three hundred years before, that same unformed, innocent self.

It was a dream she had once had herself, a memory that belonged to her alone.

Even now, she still dreamed of it often.

The innocent dream spirit stood at the feet of the divine, and told him the name she had just chosen for herself.

The divine asked her, "Hope?"

"Why call it that?"

The dream spirit answered, "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."