The Divine Kingdom of Creation
At last Wood Nymph Rosa's spirit realm had settled into place within the Reflection Realm, and that place now belonged, in full, to the Door Nymph.
Yet not one Teleportation Gate had been activated inside it. What stood there was a bare framework, nothing more. No other nymph or spirit could enter the Door Spirit Realm or draw upon its power, and even Rosa herself could only return the way she had e.
As she flew slowly back out of the Reflection Realm, a cheer went up from everyone waiting before the Gate of the Divine Kingdom of Creation.
"She's out!" the wood nymphs cried, pointing at Rosa as she drifted slowly up into view.
"Congratulations!" The lake nymphs broke into warm applause.
"Rosa, you were amazing!" Those who knew her came drifting straight over and crowded in around her.
"Rosa, can the Teleportation Gate be used now?" the spirits asked, unable to hold the question in.
"Can I go in and see the Door Spirit Realm?" No one could simply wander into the Reflection Realm. But if the spirit realm had truly stabilized by now, it would stand there like an island risen out of the open sea, and from inside it other spirits and nymphs might look out upon the Reflection Realm's chaotic, warped reflections.
But Rosa told them all, "Not yet. At present there is not one true Teleportation Gate anywhere inside the Door Spirit Realm."
"I am going to collect Dreams now. The Door Spirit Realm will not gain the power of teleportation until it holds a Dream worthy of it."
"Those are the ones I must gather. Dreams of the faraway."
Someone's hand shot up at once, waving wildly.
"I... I... I... I'll give you my Dream, Rosa!"
"I want to go far away too! I want to see the unknown world!"
A closer look found a bright, beaming face, its owner itching for a chance to try.
It belonged to the Storage Nymph, Saint Raphael.
Nothing delighted Saint Raphael like a bit of excitement, unless it was something new. Now that the Door Spirit Realm existed, she meant to be the very first to try it.
But Rosa told Saint Raphael, "You must long for the distance, very, very deeply. You must carry a hope so fierce that you would give up anything at all to reach it. Nothing less will do."
"The Star Key fuses with your Dream, and out of that a special door key is born."
"But if your longing for the faraway is not strong enough, the key may not work at all."
Saint Raphael had no choice but to lower her hand, though she was not quite ready to let it go, and she asked anyway.
"Rosa, so a key is all I need?"
Rosa answered, "Once you have the key, you must also have a door."
"You must make a ritual sacrifice to the Door Spirit Realm, and it must follow one particular method."
"Sacrifice enough transcendent materials, and your own Teleportation Gate will take form inside the spirit realm as a true Teleportation Gate. Only then can it be summoned out of the Door Spirit Realm."
"The key is the symbol of the power of teleportation. The door is the coordinate."
"Open the door with the key. Only when the two are made one is the teleportation plete."
Step by tedious step, Rosa laid out how a Teleportation Gate came into being from nothing at all.
All of it was recorded in her book, Labyrinth, Door, and the Reflection Realm, and now and then she flipped it open to check as she spoke.
"So that's it, then?" the spirits asked.
Rosa shook her head. "As things stand now, no. That is not enough."
The spirits groaned as one. "It's still not enough!"
Rosa explained, "With only one Teleportation Gate, opening it will not carry you to the place you want to go."
"If you wish to teleport at all, you must have a second Teleportation Gate."
"Or your Teleportation Gate must be linked with someone else's. Then, with their permission, you may step straight out of their door."
"The key carries out the teleportation. The door is the coordinate. You must have two coordinates before you can teleport, to leave one place and arrive at another."
"And if you go opening doors at random..."
"Then what happens?" everyone pressed her.
"Not even I can say where you would fall," Rosa said. "It might be the Dream Realm. It might be anywhere at all in the mortal world."
"The earth's core? Or the bottom of some ocean trench."
By now Saint Raphael was fairly bursting with excitement. Her hand shot up again and she shouted, "Or you could drop straight into the stinking black mud down in the Abyss!"
The words were barely out before every face turned fearful. Long since rattled by Saint Raphael's talk, the spirits pressed their collars over their noses without thinking.
"Rosa, how do you mean to go about collecting Dreams?" a great spirit asked.
Rosa said, "I have not settled on it yet. Perhaps I will make a trip down to the mortal world?"
"The mortal world would work," the spirits told her, "but so would right here above the Dream Starry Sea!"
Another little spirit fell in beside Rosa and turned upside down to talk to her. "That's where we used to grant children's wishes, up above the Dream Starry Sea! It's how we earned Light of Wishes."
Rosa was not the sort of nymph who pined for the mortal world or loved mischief for its own sake.
She thought it over for a moment and decided in the end to take the spirits' advice.
Little by little, the lively crowd before the Gate of the Divine Kingdom of Creation scattered.
Star Key in hand, Rosa made her way to the uppermost layer of the Dream Starry Sea, its shallowest reach.
Countless fleeting Dreams had broken into starlit foam here, scattering and shimmering all around her. They were the passing Dreams of every living thing.
Rosa raised the Star Key in her hand.
The Miracle Tool was not yet plete, and held only a portion of the authority over the Reflection Realm and of the power of spatial teleportation.
The openwork sphere at the end of its handle was made for gathering Dreams, though for now nothing at all lay inside it.
Rosa began to feel out the Miracle Tool's power. Eyes closed, she put her question as though speaking only to herself.
"I wish to find a Dream that longs for faraway places."
"I wish to find the one who longs for the faraway beyond all others."
Rosa repeated the words. Born of Dreams herself, she seemed able to hear the voice of Dreams, to catch this sea of stars saying something to her.
Little by little she followed that feeling, weaving her way out across the Dream Starry Sea.
All at once she felt it, a powerful yearning, a voice aching to reach some distant place.
Rosa followed that voice until she came upon a bubble of fleeting Dream.
Inside the bubble, she saw a figure.
A small thrill of surprise ran through Rosa. She had not expected to find her very first one so soon.
"So this is the one who longs for someplace far, far away?"
At that very moment, out on a boundless sea, someone was casting about without aim, unable to find any direction at all.
It longed to journey far away, to reach the other end of the world.
It longed to leave this decaying old world behind and arrive at a bright new one.
The Sea
A great ship cut across the water with its many-layered sails unfurled. The wind snapped against the canvas with a crisp, crackling sound, and beneath it one could just make out the creak of straining rigging.
From its mast flew the banner of the Suinhor Temple, its crimson emblem unmistakable.
Some days earlier a band of wanted pirates had been captured, and at the very brink of the executioner's block they had let slip a piece of information.
They had once gotten hold of an Avel nautical chart, and they had actually set out along the very route the Avel People had taken when they left Ruhe Beast Island for the new world. In the end some mishap had forced them to abandon the voyage and turn back.
The tale was strange enough to draw the notice of the local clergy.
And aboard their ship, traces of Abyss sorcery soon turned up.
The ceramic figurine itself was nowhere to be found, but the news told everyone one thing all the same. It had most likely never slipped free of Ruhe Beast Island's reach at all, and remained somewhere within the Storm Sea.
The Suinhor Temple was the first to receive word of it.
Pontiff Menro came in person to take mand at Maya Province, swearing he would capture that evil monster without fail.
These days the waters where the pirates had finally been caught were being bed over as though the sea itself were under the plow.
Aboard the ship, a divine servant held a shard in hand and worked a ritual there on the deck. Wave after wave of transcendent power rippled outward. It was some time before they finally rose again.
"It is not in these waters."
The divine servant seemed to catch some trace of a presence, as though the thing called the ceramic figurine had indeed passed this way.
Yet the ritual's result pointed elsewhere. The lingering trace seemed stronger somewhere farther south.
But when they worked the ritual a second time, that same trace seemed instead to drift away toward the east.
The divine servant was thoroughly at a loss. Which way had the monster actually gone?
In the end they made up their mind.
"Then we search to the east."
Only after they had sailed away did bubbles break the water dozens of miles off, and a bottle floated up to the surface, its outside etched all over with a dense, sealing ritual barrier.
The bottle twisted slowly open, and a battered, broken ceramic figurine poked its head out.
"They've been led off."
"Very good."
The ceramic figurine had once been missing only a single piece. Now it was missing three.
To save itself, it had been forced to knock two more fragments off its own body, stuff them into the bellies of the two fastest fish it could find, and drive them off with its will, one toward the east, one toward the south.
So far the trick seemed to be working rather well.
The ceramic figurine surfaced. It had scarcely dared to breathe until now, and the great breath of relief it finally let out turned to fury a moment later.
Its painted face shook wildly and twisted in an instant into a mouth full of fangs, as though it meant to swallow every last one of those snake people whole.
"Damned snake people divine servants! Where did they dig up that many mirror shards?"
"And which fool went scattering the things all over the place, one to every last pair of hands?"
If it could turn back time, it would never possess that mirror again.
And if it ever did, it would smash the thing to pieces without fail.
Once, the ceramic figurine had been magnificent beyond pare.
Mere snake people, whether kings, grand elders, or the heroes whose names filled the history books, had all been nothing more than its playthings.
Born a monster, it had never spared these ants so much as a shred of pity.
And now here it was, trembling before those very same snake people, tasting for the first time what it truly meant to be weak and helpless.
It wasn't that it feared the snake people themselves.
But killing off a few of these lowly mortals was a small thing. Drawing the notice of their gods was not. For now, it had no choice but to keep its head down.
The ceramic figurine's life was worth a fortune, worth an entire divine treasury. It had no intention of going down alongside a pack of mortals.
Still, it knew this could not go on forever.
"Sitting here waiting to die is no good. I have to find some way off Ruhe Beast Island."
Every god in the mortal world was hunting it now, their search blanketing the earth. It might dodge them today. Tomorrow was another matter.
The figurine's snarling expression smoothed away, settling into a narrow-eyed look of calculation.
Deep in thought, the ceramic figurine mimicked the gravity of its master, the Evil God of Original Sin, Xiao. To its mind, all its master ever had to do was strike that very pose, and no problem was left in the world.
It couldn't measure up to its master, of course, but surely it could manage half as well.
A third, at the very least. It refused to settle for less.
After a long spell of thinking, the ceramic figurine plunged a hand into its storage space and rummaged about for some time.
"The secret art of ascending to godhood, the Path of Wisdom Stone Tablet... mm... useless..." It drew out a stone tablet carved with the Path of Wisdom, the road from mortal to myth, gave the thing one disdainful glance, and stuffed it straight back in. That was certainly not going to save its life right now.
"A fragment of the Bottle of Original Sin? Master said that if it were repaired it could bee a mythical artifact. So all I'd have to do is track down every last piece, and then sacrifice an entire nation's worth of people." The ceramic figurine took out a fragment and seemed for a moment to weigh the idea in earnest, only to put the piece back after a long while.
And then it added, "It's not that I couldn't do it. It would just take far too much time."
"Now what's this? Is this... me?" It had turned up a set of little ceramic dolls, each one larger than the last and able to nest inside the others, every one of them a remarkable likeness of itself. Yet study them as it might, it could not make out what the things actually were.
"What kind of artifact is this even supposed to be? How am I meant to use the thing?" The ceramic figurine turned the dolls over and over for a long while. There was no label, no explanation of any kind, and never once had it heard Xiao mention them before.
Next the ceramic figurine pulled out a great many other things. One artifact was powerful enough to turn someone into an apostle in an instant, though only for a fleeting stretch of time, far too brief to carry it across the Storm Sea, let alone to stand against so powerful an enemy.
There was primordial black mud, all manner of artifacts left over from the previous era, sacred relics of the Nine Great Ritual Temples.
Transcendent materials piled up like a mountain, and relics of saints besides.
With every item it drew out, the ceramic figurine turned over how the thing might be put to use.
But for all that it possessed, not one of them, it seemed, could solve the crisis it now faced.
And there was a bigger problem still. Among so many things were many artifacts it simply had no idea how to use at all.
It was about to keep searching when a great ship came sailing across the water.
Night had fallen by now, yet bonfires blazed aboard that ship, so that it looked for all the world like a lighthouse walking across the sea.
Its speed was unbelievable, less sailing than flight over the waves. In a single instant it crossed from the far edge of the horizon and bore down over the water, driving the glass bottle, and the ceramic figurine along with it, straight under the surface before either could react.
The glass bottle shattered outright, and the ceramic figurine was sent reeling, utterly disoriented.
It was a sailing ship made as a divine artifact, and its name was the Fire Guardians.
It was the Temple of Fire Protection's own trump card, kept at the bottom of the chest and never brought out except in the direst need.
Its appearance here meant one thing. Pontiff Menro had e in person.
Pontiff Menro stood at the bow in a resplendent crown, firelight surging behind him.
A crowd of followers trailed after him, heads bowed low.
Menro swept a sharp gaze across the dark waters, as though hunting for anything out of place upon the sea.
"Word came in during the day. Traces of the monster were found here, and its scent left along two trails, one running south, one running east. Neither of them is old."
"Something about that does not sit right with me. That monster is very likely still here."
Menro tapped the ship's rail and turned back to the others. "Those other directions are nothing but the monster trying to confuse us. It is very likely still here."
The others began at once to murmur their flattery, until Menro raised a hand and cut them short.
"Spare me the useless words. Prepare the ritual, and be quick about it."
"Let this chance slip away, and it may well flee somewhere else entirely."
"That monster has hidden itself long enough. This time we shall take it, and offer it up to God."
Meanwhile, beneath the ship, the ceramic figurine was spinning in circles.
A long while passed before it finally bobbed up from under the water and drifted against the hull.
It wanted nothing more than to curse a blue streak, but the moment it caught the voices from above, a chill of terror shot straight through it.
It swallowed its rage at once and swam off toward the distance.
But it had scarcely covered a few kilometers before the glow of a ritual flared to life somewhere behind it.
This ritual reached farther than any before it, wide enough to sweep dozens of miles of surrounding sea.
There was nowhere left for the ceramic figurine to run.
It saw that light too, and panic seized it at once.
"No good, no good."
"Nothing for it. I'll have to try the Eye of Divine Oracle again."
At this critical moment the ceramic figurine staked everything once more on the power of the divine artifact, the Eye of Divine Oracle, meaning to beg once again for the guidance of the divine oracle.
In this hour between life and death, it needed one more path to survival pointed out to it.
The trouble was that it had cracked the Eye of Divine Oracle itself the last time it used the thing, and now the artifact only worked some of the time.
Worse still, the Eye of Divine Oracle was unforgiving in what it demanded. Whoever made the offering had to sacrifice a piece of themselves and nothing else, as proof of devotion to the god. Fitting enough, too, for something born of the Abyss's evil nature.
The ceramic figurine had no time to spare on any of that now. It pulled out the Eye of Divine Oracle at once.
Still swimming on toward the distance, it broke off another fragment of its own body, wincing against the pain, and fed the piece to the monstrous relief carved upon the Eye of Divine Oracle.
Even as it made the offering, it rattled off the incantation.
"Great Darkness of All, Flesh and Blood Star that holds the seven layers of the Abyss, God of Original Sin who devours all."
"Oh, Master! Please, show me one more way to live!"
Under the ceramic figurine's hopeful gaze, the relief actually stirred, as though the sacrifice had been accepted.
"It's moving! It's moving!"
"What did I say? It isn't pletely broken! How could a thing a god made break that easily!"
"It still works!"
But the relief only crunched the fragment down bit by bit, and then, without so much as a flicker of light, sank right back into silence.
The ceramic figurine waited, brimming with hope. The thing simply went still again.
It stared wide-eyed, and only after a moment did it understand.
This thing had taken the payment and then done nothing for it.
Furious past all reason, the ceramic figurine shook the Eye of Divine Oracle as though it meant to smash the thing to pieces.
"AAAH!"
"What's going on?!"
"Give me an answer! Give me an answer!"
"You damned monster carving! You ate it and did nothing! Spit it back out!"
The ceramic figurine was losing its mind, and all the while the ritual's light in the distance burned stronger and stronger, already spreading its way toward it.
That was the last straw. The ceramic figurine's panic broke loose pletely.
It swam frantically for the distance, tearing fragments off its own body like something gone mad.
Blow after frenzied blow, it struck itself, nearly shattering itself entirely.
One piece. Two pieces. Three. For a guidance that might amount to nothing at all, the ceramic figurine staked everything it had.
"Work! Just work, will you!"
Three fragments wasted. Only on the fourth attempt did the ceramic figurine finally succeed.
Once more it felt that power reaching toward the Authority of Spirituality, felt the malice of countless people bearing down upon it.
And alongside it came a voice in its ear, calling out in a flat, mechanical tone.
"Nesting dolls!"
"Nesting dolls!"
"Nesting dolls!"
"Nesting dolls?" It remembered all at once, those nesting dolls it had e across while going through its things earlier.
The ceramic figurine snatched them out of its storage space at once. Only a moment ago it hadn't understood what the things even were. Now, as if by sudden inspiration, it grasped exactly how to use them.
It stuffed itself into one of the nesting dolls, then folded layer after layer of the set around itself, one nested inside the next.
Doll after doll closed around it, and all at once the ceramic figurine felt something strange. The power within these nesting dolls seemed to fit it perfectly, as though they had always belonged to it.
Its own power grew a little stronger, even as the presence it gave off faded, little by little, out of sight.
Until at last, not the faintest trace of it remained.
By then the ritual light from the Fire Guardians in the distance had spread out to blanket the whole stretch of sea, and still it crept onward toward the horizon.
A long while later, aboard the Fire Guardians, Pontiff Menro opened his eyes, a look of confusion crossing his face.
"Nothing?"
Menro hurried over to the ship's rail and stared out over the dark water, as though sheer will might pick the ceramic figurine's shape out of it.
But if the ritual itself had turned up nothing, his own eyes stood no chance against that darkness.
It seemed his guess had been wrong after all. Menro was reluctant to let it go all the same.
"Perhaps one of the trails was a decoy, and it fled the other way."
"Others are already giving chase to the east. We take the south."
"Summon every man we have. b the eastern and the southern waters at once. It must not be allowed to escape!"
The Fire Guardians pulled away and raced swiftly south in pursuit.
A single nesting doll bobbed upon the water's surface, and the thoroughly terrified ceramic figurine finally found its voice.
It sounded now like nothing so much as a devout believer, its reverence for the Evil God of Original Sin, Xiao, carried all the way down to prostration.
"O God! You are magnificent beyond words. To think You saw all of this ing from the very start."
"Under Your guidance, I have lived through it once again."
Never could the ceramic figurine have imagined that at so critical a moment there would happen to be a set of nesting dolls just large enough to hold it, and that they would save its life.
It believed all of this had been arranged by the Evil God of Original Sin, that its master had long foreseen the crisis it would meet.
And so had prepared everything for it in advance.
What it did not know was that it was itself only the last and smallest doll remaining from just such a set.
The original set had long since been used up entirely in some singular experiment, and this one was merely something Xiao had crafted anew afterward.
For some reason no one knew, Xiao had never given it to the ceramic figurine, had never so much as taken it out.
Out upon the night sea, after several brushes with disaster, the ceramic figurine bore several fresh holes in its body. Wrapped safely within its nesting dolls, it tended to its wounds.
By now the ceramic figurine ached all over, exhausted through and through, and a heavy drowsiness crept steadily over it. Its repeated sacrifices to the Eye of Divine Oracle had still left it grievously wounded.
So it curled up there inside the nesting dolls, let itself float upon the sea's surface, and little by little drifted off to sleep.
Even as sleep took it, it went on muttering to itself.
"I have to leave. I have to. This godforsaken place..."
"I am getting out of here, whatever it takes."
It never noticed that, ever since it fused with the nesting dolls, some strange change had begun working through its body.
And elsewhere, its Dream, too, had turned strange.
Unusually deep.
As though someone stood outside the Dream, watching it.
The ceramic figurine had a dream.
In the dream, the Kingdom of Knowledge and Truth had never stopped it. It had already boarded a ship, left Ruhe Beast Island behind, and set out for distant lands.
It came to the new world, to the Land of Light where the Winged People made their home.
The divine child and divine candidate, Duma, received it atop a mountain peak wreathed in cloud.
White temples crowned the summit, and with them fountains and pools, statues of sky messengers, and flocks of beautiful sky messengers with wings of pure white.
Out of the temple stepped a woman in a light feathered robe, five pairs of broad, white divine wings spreading wide, holy light pouring out to cover everything.
She was an existence utterly unlike the dark, brooding God of Original Sin, who made his home in the filthiest of places.
Radiant and pure, she reigned high above the sea of clouds at the head of her sky people.
After who knew how long spent trembling in fear, after a journey of a thousand miles to find someone at last to lean on, the ceramic figurine was overe with joy.
It threw all caution to the wind and rushed forward, crying out at the top of its voice.
"Lady Duma. Lady Duma! I have found you at last! Oh, it was so terribly hard!"
It flung itself at Duma and clung to the hem of her robe and to her leg, refusing to let go no matter what.
It looked thoroughly aggrieved.
"You have no idea. Those snake people are so wicked, so very wicked, every last one of them out to do me harm."
Duma stroked its head and lifted it gently into her hands.
Then she carried it back into the temple, named it King of Judgment Angels, and granted it power and authority.
It held the power to judge all things. It was the Deputy Sovereign of the Sky Messenger Kingdom.
One beneath the throne, ten thousand beneath its own feet.
Its glory knew no bounds.
"Kekekekeke!"
"Kekekekeke!"
Standing beside the Ten-Winged Angel, the Deputy Sovereign of the Sky Messenger Kingdom looked down over all the multitudes beneath the sea of clouds and let out a great peal of laughter.
But even as it laughed on, drunk on its own triumph, the ceramic figurine failed to notice that everything around it was slowly shifting into an entirely different scene.
Duma, the divine child and divine candidate standing beside it, was slowly turning into another person.
A girl, a colorful garland upon her head, a book cradled in her arms.
The girl bent low, watching with open suspicion as the ceramic figurine stood, fists on hips, face tipped up to the sky, cackling madly.
The key at her neck swung loose, dangling in the air just above the ceramic figurine's head.
To the little figurine, she looked like nothing so much as a giant.
The ceramic figurine's laughter died away bit by bit. "Kekeke... ke... ke..."
It stared up in shock at the "giant" within its Dream, its face gone slack.
Then, at last, it managed one final syllable.
"Ke?"
The girl knitted her brow. "What a strange laugh that is. You do not sound like a good person at all!"
She looked the beautiful Dream over once more, then turned her gaze to its rather ill-fitting protagonist and murmured to herself.
"And it looks strange as well. Not cute in the least."
"Never mind. I will simply choose a different one!"
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