The Circular Ruins

3 ideas

1. The sorcerer who dreams a son

   A gray man comes ashore at a ruined circular temple of a fire god and sets out to dream a man whole and impose him on reality. His first attempt, dreaming a lecture hall of students, fails. He succeeds only by dreaming a single beating heart and then building the body organ by organ over many nights. The fire god animates the phantom, and the sorcerer wipes the son's memory of his making and sends him downriver to another temple. When fire later engulfs the ruins, the flames do not burn the sorcerer, and he understands with relief and humiliation that he too is an appearance someone else is dreaming.

2. The creator who is himself created

   Whoever makes a being and hides its origin from it may be in the same position, made by someone and unaware of it. The sorcerer's one test for his son's unreality, that fire cannot burn him, turns out to be true of himself. The sign he used to tell the made from the real becomes proof that no one stands outside the chain of dreamers.

3. Creation succeeds from the core outward

   He succeeds when he starts from one small, living element, a heart, and builds outward slowly with patience and rest. Making something complex and real needs a stable seed and gradual accumulation, not a single grand act of will.

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