The Ceramic Figurine's Crisis

Temple of Life

The words were barely out of Oran's mouth before Sukob and the witch alike had turned their attention on him, and both of them fell to thinking.

Both of them had caught it. Beneath Oran's words there seemed to lie something he had not said aloud.

Sukob had known Oran meant to tell the witch of the Seals of the Seven Gods of Ruhe. What he had not expected was that Oran would go a step further and invite her to stand witness at the sealing of the Contract of the Gods.

A single turn of thought, and Sukob understood.

"This is the will of the God of Desire and Alchemy."

More than that, he grasped at once what the deity intended. Yet he neither spoke up to stop it nor raised any objection.

After all, the kingdom of the God of Knowledge and Truth, and the foundation of his power, lay upon another continent.

However mighty the Ruhe Great Gods might be, surely they could not stretch their hands clear across to another continent?

And in all likelihood, once God Asai awoke, he would not lightly come running back to this continent either.

As for the chance that the contract might one day bind Sukob himself, that troubled him less still. He was a divine candidate. Naturally he hoped that none of those mighty beings could ever step onto the field at all, because if they did, the first struck down would likely be someone like him, hanging halfway between the heights above and the ground below.

So Sukob simply shut his eyes to rest, as though he had heard nothing at all.

On the other side, the Earth Witch Metel heard Oran invite the witches to stand as witnesses of the Contract of the Gods, and she knew at once what he intended. By that one stroke he would draw her into the Contract of the Gods, and the God of Earth with her, and even the Ruhe Great Gods themselves.

At the same time it would lift the witches into the seat of overseers over Ruhe Beast Island, over the whole mortal world even, and it would lock shut for good a contract that on its face carried no true binding force at all.

And the more unshakable that contract grew, the more it was exactly what God Iva, Oran, and the rest of them hoped to see.

Tempting, truly. But the witch, for all that she lived deep in seclusion and seldom came out, was not so ignorant of the world as that.

A seat like that could lift a witch to towering heights in an instant. And from heights like those, a fall could kill.

It had all begun when the God of Knowledge and Truth and the Evil God of Original Sin descended in person upon the mortal world. Their divine war erupted, and in the end the God of Earth punished them for it.

From that day, rumor had spread through the mortal world that it was the Earth Witch who had summoned forth the God of Earth, that the witches spoke for the great god, that they were the guardians of Ruhe Beast Island.

Yet whatever the world outside might whisper, Metel herself knew better. She was no guardian of Ruhe Beast Island, and she could not directly summon forth the great god's power.

The truth was simpler. This land was the Life Sovereign's back garden, and those who had run wild in the Supreme Divine Being's garden simply happened to fall under the great god's eyes.

It was the great god who had chosen to punish those two deities. Not her.

For a long while Metel said nothing, turning it over.

Then she fixed those gray witch's eyes on Oran. "I am the witch of the Earth. I am not the witch of Ruhe."

Her meaning was plain enough. There were seven Ruhe Great Gods in all, and she could not speak for the Seven Gods of Ruhe.

"And a witch is nothing more than the great gods' eyes."

"Eyes are only eyes. We pass on what we see to the gods, and nothing beyond that. Where the gods' gaze falls, and how it descends, is the will of the gods."

"The Ruhe Great Gods have no need of contracts. Faith is the reverence and the gratitude that rise in us toward the gods, out of the heart."

"Faith is not measured in numbers. It is measured in devotion."

Having said that much, Metel added one thing more. "But Ruhe Beast Island is the garden of the Life Sovereign. Let anyone dare to lay waste to the garden of the Supreme Divine Being, and the punishment will descend of itself."

The Earth Witch had refused to stand as witness to the Contract of the Gods. She did agree, however, to help Sukob and Oran with what they asked, because she truly did want the Seals of the Seven Gods of Ruhe. She wanted more witches at her side.

To turn the eyes of the Ruhe Great Gods from one pair into seven.

Seven pairs of eyes, fixed upon you all. Then let us see who among you dares stir up trouble in the back garden of the Supreme Divine Being.

Oran heard her out and pressed no further. So long as Metel agreed to the request, the aim of drawing the witches onto the field had at least been achieved.

"Then we thank you for your help, Lady Witch. On the day the Contract of the Gods is sealed, on the day the Stone Carving of The Royal Bloodline descends, I shall come to invite you myself, Lady Witch, and the promise made here today shall be honored."

In the end the witch said to Oran, "Those little schemes of yours. I would rather they were never turned upon me again."

Oran smiled. "There is no malice in it. I truly do hope that you will be the better for it, Lady Witch, and that this world will be the better for it too."

Oran did feel that he had used a few small schemes. But the end he was working toward was a good one.

In the temple's main hall stood a statue of the Life Sovereign cast in gold, and flanking it on either side stood the statues of the Seven Gods of Ruhe. Of them all, it was the God of Earth that stood nearest to the Life Sovereign.

At this very moment, the Earth Witch was praying to the God of Earth.

"Servant of the supreme Life Sovereign, great Ruhe Great God Burrowing Demon Worm, god who bears the earth and shelters life."

"..."

Three times she repeated it. And each time she came to the name of the Burrowing Demon Worm, her voice shifted into a language ancient beyond measure.

It was a cadence the throat of a Snake Person could scarcely shape, yet it reached straight through to the ancient Life Myths.

As the chant went on, light flared suddenly in the witch's eyes, and her consciousness was drawn up into the sky.

As though granted a god's-eye view, her gaze swept across the lands of the mortal world, mountains and rivers and forests sliding swiftly past beneath it.

Across the whole of Ruhe Beast Island, the witch searched for a single existence.

"The ceramic figurine."

The witch spoke the ceramic figurine's name aloud, a shard of a bronze mirror held in one hand.

It was the very mirror the ceramic figurine had once inhabited, and traces of its aura still clung to it.

The witch's gaze went first to the Ice-Sealed Plateau in the far north, then dragged onward across the Fire Demon Marsh and the Wasteland Witch Kingdom.

"Not there."

Next her gaze turned to the Thunder Marsh, the Yellow Sand Kingdom, the Endless Desert. Still she shook her head.

"Not there."

One place after another she searched, and over and over the same words came from her.

"Not there."

"Not there."

"Not there."

Sukob and Oran grew tense along with her, eager for the next words out of her mouth to be, "I have found it."

But those words never came, not even at the last, when Metel ended the ritual and rose to her feet.

Metel turned to the two of them. "I cannot find it."

"Is it no longer in the mortal world," Sukob pressed, "or no longer on Ruhe Beast Island?"

"It was there," Metel told him. "I followed its aura, and the trail ran out in the south of Suinhor."

"And then it was gone. Gone out over the open sea."

"The Storm Sea is nothing but the chaos power that escaped into it. Everything in that place is chaos. Not even I can say where it has gone to ground."

Metel looked weary. Borrowing the power of a god was no light thing.

"How long ago was that?" Oran asked.

"Something over a month ago," Metel replied.

Oran began working it through at once. "So it may still be out at sea?"

It was hardly good news, though. The Storm Sea was larger than Ruhe Beast Island itself, and larger by far.

Sukob's brow furrowed too. "Or it may have run somewhere else altogether by now. That would make this difficult."

Oran did not think so. He had watched Ray set out to sea, and he knew how dangerous the Storm Sea remained, even after the Black Storm had dispersed.

"The ceramic figurine may not be leaving at all. It may have put to sea in order to do something."

"And even if it does mean to leave Ruhe Beast Island, the Storm Sea is not so easily broken through. The Black Storm has dispersed, yes, but without the right road it is still all but impossible to find the way out."

"So there is every chance that it will turn back."

Oran turned to the witch and asked once more, "We must still trouble you to watch for it on your side, Lady Witch."

Metel nodded. "Let it show itself on Ruhe Beast Island again, and I will find it."

"I shall send word to every power," Sukob added, "and I shall put to sea myself to hunt for the ceramic figurine's trail."

Then, all of a sudden, something came back to Oran.

"The ceramic figurine is Xiao's servant, after all. If it truly means to hide itself away, that will be trouble indeed."

"If we turn up no trace of it at all, I can write to Ray and ask to borrow a certain tool from him."

"With that tool in our hands, we will find what we are looking for. Of that I am certain."

Sukob and Metel turned to Oran as one.

It was the first time Metel had heard the name. "Who is Ray?"

Sukob was no less curious. "What manner of tool could find someone even a witch cannot?"

"Ray is an ancient puppet Demon Spirit," Oran told them, "a student of the God of Demon Spirits, and one of the divine race come down out of the previous era."

"In his hands is the Miracle Tool called More Than Just a Compass, a treasure the God of Demon Spirits holds dear."

"But Ray wished to sail out and seek the place where the sun rises, and so the God of Demon Spirits lent that treasure to Her own student for a time, so that he would not lose his way beyond the world."

"The Miracle Tool has no power to attack with. But it carries a single property so strong that it verges on the miraculous."

"When you wish to find something, or when your heart longs for something deeply enough, it points you to where that thing lies."

Sukob and Metel stared at Oran, stunned. A tool like that existed in this world?

And a Demon Spirit had already left Ruhe Beast Island to search for the place where the sun rises?

There seemed to be no end of stories and legends folded within those words.

"Would he be willing to help us?" Sukob asked.

One of the divine race from the previous era, and a god's own student. If Ray was unwilling, there was nothing they could do about it.

Oran nodded. "Ray and I are on good terms. And everything we are doing holds some benefit for the God of Demon Spirits as well. He should be willing to help us."

"But he has already left Ruhe Beast Island, so a Rainbow Tree letter is the only way I can reach him."

"What I do not know is where he is now, whether the letter can reach him quickly, or whether there is a Rainbow Tree anywhere near him at all."

And so the three of them divided the work between themselves.

As for whether the ceramic figurine could be found, all three of them now held a measure of confidence.

The Thunder Kingdom

Inside the kingdom's temple, this generation's Chief Divine Servant stood alone in what had once been the private chambers of the "witch" Lise, a letter in hand.

Head tilted back, they stood gazing up at the replica of "The Lost Kingdom."

In the painting, the lake lay flawless as a mirror, the clouds heaped themselves into mountains, and the divine kingdom hid beyond the sky.

But what rose in the memory of Thunder Temple's Chief Divine Servant was a scene from years past, and the "witch" who had melted away into that sea of clouds.

"Witch Lise!" the young Chief Divine Servant breathed.

The farce of those days had not been a clever one.

Some had already seen through it. Among them was this generation's Chief Divine Servant.

But no one dared to expose it. Worse, new tragedies were still being staged.

The temple and the king had proclaimed that Lise had become the Sky Witch, that she had entered the Kingdom of God and become a true Lady Witch. But all of that had passed into memory, and now they needed to prove their holiness all over again.

Once a lie is told, countless more are needed to patch it over.

The hole grows ever larger, and the lying never ends.

The new king and every Divine Servant of the temple were preparing to choose a second Lise, to proclaim her the reincarnated body of the Sky Witch, and then to keep her hidden deep within the temple, until the day came to send her into reincarnation in her turn.

It was true enough, in its way. Every so often, Life Ability users passed through a reincarnation.

The Earth Witch, the Trilobite Symbiotes, the kin of the great gods hidden away in every corner of the world. It was so for all of them.

Recently, though, a letter had reached them, sent from the Temple of Earth by the witch, Lady Metel.

The Temple of Earth had given notice to every power that kept faith in the Ruhe Great Gods. Find a monster that bore the name of ceramic figurine, and the six remaining paths to becoming a witch would be theirs to grasp.

To the powers who kept faith in the Ruhe Great Gods, it was nothing short of a light of salvation in the darkness.

And to the Chief of Thunder Temple, it was no different.

Raising the letter in hand, the Chief read its final lines once more.

"When the new witches have appeared, we shall gather together at the Mountain of Life's Origin, and in the holy land of the Supreme Divine Being we shall convene a Witch Council."

"The great gods are the guardians of the Sovereign Deity's garden, and we are the eyes through which the great gods watch the mortal world."

Expectation kindled in the eyes of the young Chief Divine Servant. "A Witch Council... and will a true Sky Witch stand among them?"

They turned and headed for the door. "This farce and all its lies. It is time they came to an end."

The whole of the Thunder Kingdom stirred into motion at once.

"Send word to our fleets, and to every one of our people upon the sea."

"Tell them this. Bend every strength they have to finding a monster called the ceramic figurine. It must be found!"

The Yellow Sand Kingdom

It was a country that drew little notice and less attention still. The other gods seemed never to have spared it so much as a glance.

And so nearly everyone here was a believer of the Desert Giant God.

At this moment, the people of the Yellow Sand had gathered in great numbers in their capital, holding a rite of sacrifice to the Desert Giant God. The style of it still carried the savage stamp of the old blood sacrifices, though the offerings were beasts of every other kind.

When the sacrifice to the god was done, the chieftains and Divine Servants of the Yellow Sand, come from every quarter, fell into a storm of argument.

"Whatever the cost, we must be part of this!" someone shouted in excitement.

"Is it true, what the Earth Witch says?" Several men crowded in around the king, king in name at least, eyes on the letter from the witch Metel in the king's hand.

"Lady Metel has no reason to deceive us. She is an apostle of the Ruhe Great Gods, an apostle who belongs truly to Life." The king's faith was absolute. King in name they might be, but in the eyes of the people of the Yellow Sand they were more like the greatest of their city lords and tribal chieftains.

"We should have a Sand Witch of our own! A Lady Witch of our own!" others took up the cry.

"But we have no fleet. How are we to go searching the sea for this ceramic figurine?" one of the Yellow Sand men said, rising to face the others.

"There are plenty of others hunting for it already. We could just let them do the finding," someone offered. It was a suggestion of the "clever" sort.

The king of the Yellow Sand Kingdom struck the idea down on the spot, and turned a furious glare on the speaker.

"And if we have not one deed to our name, what claim do we have on being recognized in the end? What claim do we have on getting what we want?"

"And when the day comes that the Sand Witch appears in some other power, some other nation, what does that make us?"

Whether or not to join, it seemed, was no longer a question worth discussing at all.

"We could pool every strength we have and build a Divine Artifact ship. If we build one, we build the finest there is. Then we take on hands, raise an elite crew, put to sea and make our name, and sail in company with the Alchemists' fleets." The proposal was to build the costliest of ships and join the White Tower Alchemy Alliance at sea. That way they would win both the appearance of glory and the substance of it.

"A ship we must have, one way or another. Look how rich the White Tower Alchemy Alliance is. Isn't that all down to their ships?" What the people of the Yellow Sand saw most in their daily lives were the Alliance's ships arriving from every port. Of the workshops and academies within the Alliance itself, they had hardly any notion.

"We could ask the Demon Spirits for help. We could even hire them into our fleet." Someone had thought at once of the Demon Spirit race. Those fellows were formidable makers of Divine Artifacts in their own right, and so long as there was money in it, the Demon Spirits were more than happy to lend a hand with work of the technical kind.

"That won't come cheap." Some of the chieftains and lords winced at the thought. The Demon Spirits were no fools. At some point, no one knew quite when, they had begun keeping remarkably exact accounts, and every favor they did cost dearer than the last.

"This is no time to be counting coppers! We'll all put up the money together!" a burly man declared loudly.

Nor was it the Thunder Kingdom and the Yellow Sand Kingdom alone.

Moonlight City in Suinhor, the believers of the Lava God in Maya Territory, even the ascetics who wandered the wilds chasing the tracks of the Star Night Mountain Range, one after another they all began to move, for every one of them had heard the name of the ceramic figurine.

"The ceramic figurine?"

"The servant of the Evil God of Original Sin?"

"Find it, and the secrets of the witches can be found?"

At the start the rumors held close to the truth. Before long they had become something else entirely.

"Find it, and you find the treasury of the Evil God of Original Sin!"

"The ceramic figurine carries the god's hidden treasures on its body!"

"Find it, and you will learn the greatest secret of this world?"

"The ceramic figurine carries a divine artifact!"

For a time the whole world of Ruhe Beast Island was thrown into an uproar over a single name, and the fame of the monster called the ceramic figurine spread into every corner.

Everyone was hunting for it.

Mortals, Divine Servants, kings, and even gods, all of them were searching for its trail.

Warships put to sea with descriptions of it posted aboard. Pirates who ran wild across the waves carried its portrait in hand.

In the mercenary guilds the bounty on it climbed to unprecedented heights, and countless savage mercenaries and demon hunters stopped before the notice to stare, mouths falling open.

Great Serpent Road, City of No Guilt

The evil-doers of the Abyss Cult had gathered in a crowd, convening a grand assembly.

The cult's Fallen High Priest pounded the table like a madman, face twisted past all reason.

"What is going on?"

"Were we not the only ones hunting the ceramic figurine?"

"So what is this? Why is the whole world hunting it now?!"

The Fallen High Priest was in a fury. Someone, he was certain, had sold the secret.

"Who was it?!"

"Who leaked it?!"

Snatching up a sheet of paper, the Fallen High Priest glanced at it once and flung it down on the table, raging aloud over the news that had come in from outside.

"And now there is a divine artifact as well? Why is this the first I hear of it?!"

The Fallen High Priest's cursing flayed the gathered cultists raw, and none of them dared so much as breathe too loudly.

This was no gentle place. In the Abyss Cult of the City of No Guilt, it was nothing rare for a Fallen High Priest in a rage to kill them, or even to swallow them alive.

Once the storm of his anger had passed, the Fallen High Priest stared them all down in silence, deeply displeased.

Then the cult leader's palm came down upon the table once more. Bang!

The hardwood table jumped, and every heart in the room seemed to jump with it.

"What are you all still standing here for? Get out there and find it! My divine artifact..."

"No. The divine artifact of the great Abyss King is about to be snatched away by somebody else!"

The Storm Sea

The Black Storm, death's own emblem, had dispersed, but these waters still could not be called safe.

The Ruhe Great God called the Sele Sea Spirit had drawn its power back beneath the waves and sunk into the trench of the northern ocean. The power that had escaped was gathered in once more and joined to the waterways of the Ice-Sealed Plateau, and so became the water cycle of Ruhe Beast Island.

As a result, in the northwest of Ruhe Beast Island one often met vast whirlpools that ran down to the deepest reaches of the seafloor.

Their pull pierced the very clouds, carrying a cold that froze all things.

A fleet that met one was destroyed outright. Even what flew overhead was dragged down, and everything around it was locked at once in ice.

In the Thunder Marsh the Sky Beast God had drawn in its aura, yet its power still drank endlessly at the water of the sea and the clouds, raising the rains that fell across the whole of Ruhe Beast Island.

So the east of Ruhe Beast Island knew no end of thunder and storming rain. Strange signs filled its skies one after another, threaded through with the great god's power, and the kin of the god prowled there.

In the southern sea lay an archipelago beyond all prediction. The islands seemed forever to be trading places, and fleets that lost themselves among them often never came back.

These were only a few of the dangers that were known.

Beyond them waited unknown terrors past counting and past describing.

The sea walked always with the unknown, with death, and with terror.

When the Avel people left Ruhe Beast Island long ago, they had the Door of Truth to sense, to foresee, and to plan the way. The first wave of the brave now daring to leave Ruhe Beast Island and explore the world beyond still groped through the dark, hoping to feel out a proven sea road.

Out on the open water a fleet of three ships ran under sail, and every soul aboard was a sailor out of Suinhor.

The sailors swabbed the decks and traded talk as they worked. "Our luck's not bad at all. Looks like that sea chart is the real thing."

"Not bad, you call it?" another said.

"Our luck's been flat-out miraculous. We slipped clean past the ghoul disaster. Think how many poor devils went down in that calamity."

"But our backers are finished, every last one of them," said a sailor tying off a line. "Everything we'd built up, seized. And now we're wanted as pirates on top of it. We've nothing left to our names."

From the lookout high above, a Snake Person leaned down and bellowed at them.

"What's the good of all that gloomy talk?"

"If this voyage succeeds, we'll have everything!"

"Fame, fortune, standing, women! Every last one of them, easy as reaching out a hand!"

They had once been a fleet in the service of the Hunter Family of Red Earth Territory, running the family's trade and now and then moonlighting at a warship's work, or a pirate's.

Then they came back from one long voyage to find, against all expectation, Red Earth City and the Hunter Family both gone.

Overnight they became duckweed without roots. Their luck was to have missed the disaster and lived. Their misfortune was that their old sideline of piracy came to light, and worse, the fleet they had once robbed belonged to those nobles of the City of Fire Protection.

In an instant they were wanted men, their names blackened everywhere.

What happened next, though, verged on the fantastic.

While they were hiding wherever they could, fallen at last to outright piracy, the captain came by a sea chart in a pirates' tavern. A chart from several centuries past.

A sea chart of the Avel people, and marked upon it, the Avel people's destination. The new world.

It was by this very route that they had left Ruhe Beast Island in that distant age, found the new world of legend, and left behind tale upon tale.

It was said that on the night the captain came by the chart, they dreamed of a god pointing the way out beyond the sea.

Driven to the edge of ruin, they set out just so, carrying their longing and their hope.

Up at the helm on the high second deck the captain stood with a spyglass raised to the distance, then checked what they saw against the chart.

Then the captain came rushing down in high excitement, shouting to the crew, "Lads! It's true! The chart is true, there's not a doubt left in it!"

"We've well and truly skirted the deadliest waters, and we're bound for the new world!"

"No one has ever come this far. No one but the Avel people!"

A cheer went up at once. Weary as they all were from the long voyage at sea, their spirits ran high.

The captain slid the chart into a wooden tube, tucked it into a sleeve, and turned to face them all. "The new world! The Avel people sailed out by this very road all those years ago. So can we!"

"By the chart, two months more and a little over, and we make the same far shore the Avel people once reached!"

"So put your backs into it! Find the new world, and the king's pardon is ours. We'll be made nobles!"

"Our names will go down in the histories!"

The captain thought again of the god in that dream, pointing the way onward toward this very place.

"A god is watching over us! Luck carried us past the disaster, and luck will carry us to the journey's end!"

The Avel people had set out from the City of Avel in their day. These sailors had set out from Red Earth City.

To reach this course they had swung a wide circle, and it had cost them no little time.

The one comfort was that their ships were better than the Avel people's, and faster too.

If they truly found the new world of legend, having their names set down in the histories would be the least of it. Wealth and standing beyond imagining would be theirs, and they might even stand before the king to receive titles of their own.

Every soul aboard burned with excitement, as though a fever had taken the whole fleet.

And at this very moment, down in the cargo hold, a certain existence was listening to the captain's feverish shouting.

In a chest packed with plundered treasures of every kind, a strange ceramic figurine lay lounging among the gold coins. All at once it twisted its head around, and the painted face upon it changed.

It became a clowning grin, and with it came a voice full of mockery.

"Foolish mortals."

Sea chart indeed. It was the ceramic figurine that had given them the chart.

As for the god watching over them, that was not exactly wrong either. An evil god's favor is favor all the same.

All of it, every last piece, was the ceramic figurine's doing, and all for one purpose. This ship would carry it away with them, out of Ruhe Beast Island and free of it.

The ceramic figurine was still basking in its own cleverness when its face changed without warning, the painted expression dissolving into a scatter of question marks.

"What is this?"

The ceramic figurine gave its own belly a pat. The mark there had suddenly come alive, and its little hand slipped through a vortex, as though reaching down into its own stomach.