The Great Poet and the Bone Book

Beneath the castle was a vast cavern.

A band of fierce trilobite men, weapons in hand, moved slowly forward, drawing closer and closer to the thicket of Sun Cups, and all the while their breath came faster.

These were men who had never known fear, veterans of a hundred battles, and yet in this moment they were as tense as raw recruits setting foot on a battlefield for the first time.

Their hands gripped bone spears and stone hammers tight, and they swallowed again and again, glancing back at their companions with every step, their eyes meeting as though to trade silent encouragement.

They were drawing near the greatest secret the Yinsai people possessed. They were drawing near the resting place of the last saint ever to set foot within the domain of the divine, the great poet Tito.

They were lifting the veil of mystery from what the great poet Tito had left behind, hundreds of years before.

More than that, they were exploring a secret that belonged to God himself.

All of this set their blood racing, and yet at the same time, they felt a deep unease, an anxiety, even fear.

Their eyes were level with the golden flower-cups.

Deep within the underground cavern, they caught sight of a small courtyard, a dwelling hidden away behind the Sun Cups.

The Sun Cups had spread outward from within that very courtyard, phosphorescence flowing from them like a river of living light.

It was, in fact, the very cottage where Star and Polo had once lived.

Everyone held their breath, and looked to their leader.

"It's real! It's really here!" said a tall trilobite man gripping a bone spear, pointing at the building amid the sea of flowers.

"We found it. We're going to be rich!" A battle-hardened soldier shouldering a stone hammer could already see their own wealth and glory ahead of them. Perhaps, through this, they might even become a noble themselves.

The caravan leader was plainly no ordinary man. He knew far more than the rest.

His pupils dilated in an instant, and his expression went slack.

His mouth fell open of its own accord, working for a long moment before he finally spoke.

"This is the very place where the Divine Messenger Polo and Queen Star breathed their last. A ruin out of myth itself."

"And where Saint Tito first set out upon his pilgrim road. The Hymn of the King of Wisdom was born here."

The caravan leader turned back, and spoke to his men with a smile.

"Everyone, welcome to the place where myth and epic were born."

Amid their cheers and excitement, their footsteps quickened.

But the thicket of flowers before them began to sway in answer to their movement.

Those beautiful Sun Cups suddenly split open into great, gaping maws and lunged at them, and in an instant the beautiful, tranquil scene became a riot of writhing demons.

The caravan leader, in the lead, had already come prepared. He drew out a specially made bone powder and scattered it over himself and his men.

In that instant the Sun Cups began slowly to grow still, as though they could no longer sense the men at all.

They passed through the thicket, and came to the archway before the courtyard, stepping through the stone gate and into the space beyond.

Their hurried footsteps stopped at once. Every one of them froze before the garden, staring into its depths, not one daring to take another rash step forward.

They saw the remains of the great poet Tito.

He lay at the center of a great cluster of Sun Cups that crowded close around him, and behind him rested a boat that caught and threw back a silver light, its once-white sail long since gone dark with grime.

And yet that only deepened the air of age and hardship it gave off.

Even the men themselves could feel a sacred power encircling the thicket of flowers, pressing down on the heart of every trilobite man who had dared trespass into this forbidden place.

The poet leaned quietly against the hull of the boat, his head tilted to one side, sunk into an eternal sleep.

Cradled in his arms was the final chapter he had ever written.

The instant the Bone Book came into view, it drew every eye.

For two hundred years now, legend and speculation had circulated among the Yinsai people.

Everyone had been searching for the great poet's final secret, and in this very moment it was confirmed at last.

"The great poet Tito."

"Saint Tito."

"The last man ever to set foot in the God-Given Land and stand before the divine, the saint acknowledged by the Divine Messenger and the divine both."

"What he holds in his arms is the Final Chapter itself."

"The Bone Book of legend."

No one could help it. They all cried out together, each voice louder than the last.

"And look, the Divine Boat!"

"Don't you see it? That's the Divine Boat!"

"The Divine Messenger himself bestowed it. They say he drew it straight out of a dream. There's no treasure in the world above it."

Someone even began reciting a story they had heard since childhood. "The great poet rode the wind through the Demon Abyss Kingdom, and not even the sinful people dared bar his way."

Everyone there dissolved into a clamor of noise, and yet not one of them dared step any closer.

At last the caravan leader crept forward with great care, until he stood before the Divine Boat and the great poet himself, and knelt in reverence at the remains.

"Great Saint Tito!"

"Forgive my trespass. My sin cannot be pardoned."

"But our kingdom needs the secret you left behind. It needs the power spoken of in legend."

"All of it, so that we might return to the light of God. All of it, so that we might restore God's own glory."

He did not dare look directly upon the great poet Tito's sacred remains. He lowered his head, and with his hand raised higher than his head he reached for the Bone Book, meaning to draw it out of the great poet's arms.

But the instant his fingers touched the Bone Book, something happened that he had never expected.

The great poet Tito's remains crumbled to ash in an instant, and the drifting ash was caught up by a nameless wind.

The whole thicket stirred as one, and every Sun Cup released its pollen up into the sky.

A vision took shape in the sky above.

It was a mythic being robed in gold, with a face touched by the divine, cradling a trilobite woman in his arms, lying together within a swirling vortex like a river of stars.

Everyone raised their heads, even the leader kneeling on the ground.

The leader knelt where he was, tilting his head back to look up at the vision above.

"It is the moment the Divine Messenger Polo and Queen Star breathed their last. I never dreamed the great poet Tito held this scene to his dying moment, and branded it into the Sun Cups themselves."

In that moment, the nameless wind that had carried up the ash suddenly took shape as a phantom image of the great poet.

A voice drifted through the air from nowhere, sorrowful and ethereal.

"Ah!"

"So it was my dream."

"It woke."

The shadow of poet Tito followed the turning river of stars, drifting after the Divine Messenger Polo and Queen Star, and together they dissolved into the air above the thicket of Sun Cups.

Everyone was struck speechless by this beautiful, staggering sight, and the whole underground cavern fell into utter silence.

Rumble.

With a thunderous crash, the whole cavern collapsed.

A great wave surged in, seawater blotting out the sky as it spun and swallowed everything, smashing everything to ruin.

Amid the great wave and the whirling water, the caravan leader seized hold of the Bone Book.

He turned back in a panic, looking to the other precious treasure.

"The Divine Boat."

The caravan leader knew exactly what the Divine Boat meant. It was an object passed down out of the God-Given Land itself, a treasure without equal anywhere in the world.

No one knew whether it still held some other secret, whether it carried some power or purpose none of them yet understood.

But in this very moment, all he could do was watch, helpless, as the Divine Boat, that treasure out of the domain of the divine, was swept away, and watch as the silver boat was drawn by the great wave into the far side of the passage and out into the depths of the sea.

On the ground above, Tito Town, silent in the dead of night, was jolted awake by that same thunderous roar.

Seawater burst up out of the ground, turning into fountains that jetted skyward.

Townsfolk and craftsmen, startled from sleep, came rushing out one after another, staring toward the castle.

"What's going on?"

"What happened?"

"Look, quick!"

"It's coming down!"

"It's coming down!"

The great towering castle, as the ground gave way beneath it in a thunderous roar, collapsed into a field of ruin.

It had taken the Tito family more than a hundred years, generation after generation of steady expansion, to build a castle as magnificent as this.

And yet its ending took no more than a single instant.