Chapter 23
Ouroboros / it cannot be extinguished / Prophetess
—Aug. 25th, 128 CR
Their guide was a stout woman dressed in flannel and denim with a rifle and three pokéballs, and she had blue hair that had faded with age, leaving it a stormy sea color. She spoke a few words to them in a language Moriko dimly remembered, but she couldn't think of the right response. Matt said something back that sounded right, but the guide just did a one-shouldered shrug and started detailing the route in English.
The guide led the way with an elderly raigar and a papiliris scouting up ahead. The trails up the mountain were steep and narrow, with boulders and rockfalls all around. Periodically their guide told them to use their flying pokémon to ascend vertical rock faces to continue the route up above. Liona, Linden's flygon Myrmel, and the guide's wartinger helped them up the hardest stretches.
"Is it possible to fly all the way up?" Moriko asked.
The guide grunted a yes. "The weather turns quickly. Safer to go on foot. I have seen a man after he tumbled off and hit stone."
Moriko winced. "Our… friend went on without us. He might have gone up to the gym on his borfang."
The guide nodded, allowing this. "A princely elemental, that. It was calm this morning. I am sure they are well."
They encountered a number of dark-type sources as well, deep pits and inky shadows that lingered under the dark pines. One was a cave, a blind eye staring out of a high, sheer cliff. Liona, Tak, and Linden's weavile all used it successfully, the two flying pokemon hovering at its entrance and the weavile skittering up the rock. Moriko thought briefly of Celeste, and wondered what had happened to her, what she'd been up to after abandoning them.
Halfway up, they stopped for lunch, peanut butter and pitas, and hard cheese and water.
"Did you get the ancient pokémon notification up here?" Matt asked.
"Yes," the guide said, scratching her raigar under the chin. "Long time coming. It was an ugly summer. Always finishes with one of 'em." She made a series of signs, rapid-fire, with one hand. "Let it be the only one."
"Ugly?"
"Dead kids. Ronin. Demons. The rangers kill 'em, their bad energy goes into the earth—shamans can delay it. But the dead are down there, one way or another, and they wake up."
There was a silence, and Moriko felt tonguetied with all the questions she could ask, but hesitated at the guide's terseness and dismissal. Linden was quiet for once, listening.
"How long has the gym leader been here?" Matt asked.
"Ten years." She nodded uphill. "They've always wanted it, clans and warlords and now the league. There's power there, always has been. But the big one in the mountain isn't quiet."
"The big—? A big source?"
The guide made hand signs again, mostly the same ones.
"There are tame sources and wild ones," the raigar said in a creaky old-lady voice. "Sometimes you just find a pool in the woods and meditate. Other times, you chase them, hunt them down. But they aren't all safe. There're bad sources. Sources that use you. Need to know which are which."
The guide nodded. "She came ten years ago, lots of kids working up in the gym, working with her. They're all gone. No one stays. It's not a good place. Get your badge and leave. You can call down if you want guiding back, or pay me to wait."
x.x.x.x.x
The gym had been opulent, once, with chandeliers and thick carpet, but now everything was wreathed in protective plastic covers and a dull layer of dust. No attendants or acolytes came to greet them. There was a narrow path through the grit, footprints of various ages overlapping.
The gym leader met them inside wearing sableye-print sweatpants and slippers, her black hair drawn into a bun that was falling out of the loose hairtie.
They'd expected a little more out of tier seven.
Moriko tried not to stare. "Are you… Nocturna?"
"For my sins, yes," she said, and smiled weakly. There were bags under her eyes and it aged her, making her look older than the late thirties the league website indicated.
"Are you okay?" Moriko asked. "Should we come back another day?"
"No, it's fine. I just… look like this. I can battle fine," Nocturna said.
"Have you had any other challengers today?" Matt asked.
"Hm? No, just you guys," Nocturna answered, and fiddled with her trainer belt, walking deeper into the mountain.
They followed her. Moriko looked at Matt, and he shrugged.
Linden glanced between them. "He's not here?"
"Do you still care about the badge?" Matt asked quietly.
"I…" Moriko watched the scruffy and disheveled gym leader. "The pokémon wanted to battle. I guess since we're here… We could train with her, instead. For practice."
The only sound was Nocturna's slippers scuffing on the stones. A hydreigon shuffled out of the darkness, walking on its clawed wing edges, and it nudged Nocturna with one of its heads, which she petted in passing. It waited for them as they approached it warily, and walked alongside them for a few strides.
Moriko watched it. "Hey, I'm Moriko," she whispered. "Is… everything okay here?"
The hydreigon watched Nocturna ahead of them, and it pressed its heads together. Finally, it said, "We need help," and stumped ahead toward the gym leader.
All pokémon are prey animals, and they keep secrets.
The arena was messy, the composite floor scarred with huge scratchmarks and scorches from the seventh-tier battles that she entertained. That was sometimes a job for students to clean and polish, the old-fashioned belief that that grunt work kept you humble and appreciative.
Nocturna had no students and no referee, the latter of which might have been illegal. She had the cameras, the energy radar, and the aura sensors like usual, so they could refer to that footage for a battle dispute, but it made the arena look even emptier. There was room for a large number of spectators, sitting and standing, with hanging screens for close-ups, but it was all empty and powered down except for the bare minimum.
"So," Nocturna said, pushing back her tangled hair, "who'd like to—"
They all stopped at the discordant electronic wailing that erupted. Moriko turned her arm to see her pokédex glowing with that gyarados-head emblem again, and this time the background was flashing black and red. An alarm in the gym started up with a dopplering whirr like the old-fashioned tsunami sirens in movies, and the screens powered up to show the Pan-Regional Elemental Defense notice.
ANCIENT POKÉMON ESCAPED CONTAINMENT…CURRENT POSITION 47°23′N 146°40′W MOVING WSW 60 KN…EVACUATION ORDER 100 KM…PREPARATION ORDER 500 KM…AVOID COASTS…AVOID NON-EARTHQUAKE-HARDENED STRUCTURES…GET TO HIGH GROUND…STAY WITH POKÉMON…OBEY RANGER AND PRED INSTRUCTIONS
"Oh," Nocturna said in a little voice. "We have to evacuate." She started shaking, and the hydreigon went toward her. She leaned on its middle neck.
"That's okay," Moriko said, "can your hydreigon fly? We'll fly inland with you no problem. You can fly with us, we have pokémon," she babbled, seeing the mounting distress on Nocturna's face.
"I can't…"
"Sure you can," Matt said impatiently. "Do you need help?"
The gym leader's jaw worked helplessly, no sound coming out. Moriko stared at her and thought of another person she knew who couldn't speak about what was wrong with him.
Vleridin…
I thought so, too.
Moriko felt Vleridin rise up in her body, and soul-sight overlaid her vision: the arena, glittering with stray energy; the hydreigon in dark purple-black streaked with dragon's teal; and the gym leader, swathed in black and ice-blue webs that fuzzed and distorted the boundaries of her body.
"Matt, she—"
Maia appeared, releasing herself from her pokéball, and she looked at Nocturna as well and turned to Matt. The hydreigon raised its auxiliary wings at the part-ice-type, but it was perfunctory. Its heads kept nudging Nocturna, fitful.
Moriko looked at Matt. "Could we try…?"
"Nocturna," said a new voice.
It was Celeste.
The celestiule shone in the dim arena, the flashing ancient pokémon warnings reflecting off her translucent body; she was like a skylight, her hide reflecting the blue sky streaked with rushing mountain clouds. She was taller, broader than the filly who'd pulled a disappearing act on them after Sere Island. What had she been doing? Had she been following them?
On the edge of hearing there was a song and a whispering that Moriko could not understand or recall, but it filled her with a feeling of relaxation and contentment. Through the soul-vision Moriko could see the webs falling off the gym leader, one by one until she could see her more clearly. Nocturna grew distressed and cried out before they could all be removed.
Celeste halted, and the song faded, and dimness came back into the arena.
Nocturna was breathing hard, like she'd just run a race, and she was hanging onto the hydreigon grimly. "What did… what did you do?"
"A demon has been draining your life energy for many years, Nocturna. You cannot speak of it. You cannot leave. People come here and they know it is wrong. Your pokémon know it is wrong. What say you?"
Nocturna panted, watching her, and she said, "Yes," and more confidently, "Yes! It lives… it lives down below, and—goddammit, we need to leave, the evacuation order—it's a whiscash, it could bring down the whole mountain—"
Moriko saw the webs creeping back onto her. Shortly the gym leader was unable to speak again, and she slumped against her pokémon, the bonds on her doubly galling after that brief freedom.
"Let me help you, Nocturna; let me help you, Genevieve," Celeste said, her crystalline tones ringing in the hollowness of the arena.
Nocturna looked at them, unutterably tired, the ancient pokémon siren whooping at a skull-crushing volume. "What could you even do?"
"Let me free you. Let me free you both," Celeste said, and tears flooded down the gym leader's face.
x.x.x.x.x
Nocturna led them through hallways and tunnels, deep into the mountain, and the modern-looking fixtures receded until they were navigating by mine lamp and flashlight. Eventually they came to an old construction barrier plastered with signs and lit in lurid yellow light: DANGER due to OPEN PIT, DANGER due to AMBIENT ENERGY, DANGER due to WILD POKÉMON.
Nocturna shuffled through a huge janitor's ring of metal keys and unlocked the door. Beyond it in decades-old red LED light was a pit, a mohole like in the reginant hive, straight down.
She looked at them. "…This way."
She flew down on her hydreigon with Matt; Moriko followed on Liona, and Linden on her flygon. Celeste glowed and floated down with them.
Another fall, deep into the earth, down to the roots of the mountain. Moriko looked up, and she could see a blue star, a tiny blue window far above, and she realized that the mohole went up as well, to the mountain's peak, and she wondered what appalling power had dug the tunnel.
At last they reached the floor, and they saw the demon.
The cavern was huge, but it filled up the space, its serpents' coils extending back into unseen passages. Its frosty fur shimmered in the light as it breathed, but it was otherwise still, its many limbs limp and motionless.
"There it is," Nocturna whispered. "There it is! The thing, the demon pokémon," she said, the words tumbling out, its silence on her suspended in its presence. "Oh, they told me—they told me when I took the appointment, the people of the second crossing, they tried to tell me, they knew, they knew—" She threw her arms around the hydreigon, and it patted her awkwardly with its primary wings.
Cryptidex mode activated. Aura analysis: ice- and dark-type, 70% certainty. Dark- and rock-type, 15% certainty. Ice- and rock-type, 15% certainty. No matches. Initiate full scan and upload? (Y/N) Error: No service. Scans will be uploaded when connected to pokédex service.
"We need to break its hold on you," Celeste said. "We need to free it."
Matt shot the celestiule a look. "Are you sure? Quite frankly, I think the fewer of these things there are out and about, the better. Sorry," he added to Linden, who stuck out her tongue at him.
"Our enemy is near," Celeste said. "This demon's power is much diminished, but it knows him, and it hates him. Free it, and it will free Nocturna, and it will attack the Gray Prince." She looked among them. "What say you?"
"The Gray Prince is here?" Moriko asked, startled. "Where? Are we in danger? What about the ancient pokémon? Celeste—what are you?"
"One task at a time, earth's daughter," the celestiule said. "Free this demon. All else must follow."
The hydreigon spoke up in its triple voice. "Please. Help Gen."
Moriko took in the gym leader's desperate and ragged appearance. She looked up at the vent to the outside far above them, and thought of the terrible boredom of spending years alone out of view of the sun or stars. She pitied the demon suddenly; she did not know its crimes, but surely time had been served. She doubted it could change its nature, but…
Linden was watching the imprisoned demon like someone looking at a rescue kitten or eevee.
"What do we do?" Moriko asked Celeste.
The thing in the cavern was slumped just shy of the barrier, mouth open and gray tongue lolling, its flat black eyes looking at nothing.
Celeste stepped forward. "Demon of Frost and Starlight, I call to you. Your master walks again, broken, half-formed."
No reaction, no flicker of recognition.
"It used to speak," Nocturna murmured. "Not to me, exactly, just… shouts. Commands. Pleading. It would tell me to break the barrier, and I had no idea how and neither did it. But it still wouldn't let me leave. It hasn't said anything in a while, and… I'm still stuck here."
"I know about demons," Linden said, drawing a little closer to it. "They—"
The thing moved and they all flinched, crouched, reached for pokéballs. It raised its head to look at Linden.
Garbled, slurred speech spilled out, the words running together, melting, buzzing like interfering radio channels. Clicking and popping followed this, the sound of stones hitting stones, water, small things scuttling, and finally: "Who… are you?"
"Who are you?"
The demon sighed, as if this exchange had exhausted it, and laid down its head again, ripples passing along its length into the distant tunnels behind.
"There were temples," it said, breathily, dreamily. "Such cities as you may dream of. To the sky… Down to the roots… it would not fall.
"I was here. I was here before you came. I saw the first ones. The first invaders. I saw the worlds crack open. I was the first. I was…" It continued, quieter, and then into barely audible muttering.
"There are chains on it," Celeste said. "Chains that go down into the heart of stone, chains forged by gods-that-left and blessed by gods-that-stayed, chains eons old, and until they are broken it cannot move or pass the barrier. Help me break them."
"Chains forged by gods?" Moriko repeated. "Celeste! Why should we—"
"Time all things upends: strength for weakness, stone for sea, laughter for silence, foolishness for wisdom. They left us, and they taught us freedom. To free the prisoner you must free the beast. Throw off your chains, earth's daughter."
Make a choice, she remembered Maia saying. That choice had sucked too.
She sighed. "Okay. Okay. Where are they?"
Vleridin helped—the chains were all too obvious under soul-sight, vast black links that cut into and through the demon, that slithered away into shadow and downward below the stone.
"How do you break that? With an attack?" Moriko asked.
"Look again. The work was mighty, but time always runs."
On closer inspection the bindings were rotten, swirling with corroded-metal colors and an oily sheen. What had the meditant said to them, underground, all those days ago? Aged things fail. All these prodigious, ancient works were crumbling.
Celeste paced in front of the barrier. "The rabbit gnaws the rope. You must turn to energy, and it will be as easy as biting."
The pokémon all looked at each other, mistrustful—in energy form they would be vulnerable to permanent damage not only from the demon, but from one another. The hydreigon hissed at Maia.
Myrmel buzzed a denial. "I ain't know any of you people," the flygon said.
"I trust my group," Moriko said, intervening. "I trust Nocturna, she's a gym leader—she's not going to keep killer pokémon."
"You'd be surprised," Matt muttered.
"I will admit I am concerned," Maia said. "Especially about that… entity… coming out and goring or crushing the trainers."
Nocturna shook her head. "Nothing of pokémon—their bodies, energy, attacks—can get through the barrier."
Vleridin phased out of Moriko's body, appearing among them in a clatter of hooves on stone. The hydreigon snarled, and the mooskeg snorted at it derisively.
"Killing someone—eating someone—as energy can't be done so easily," Vleridin said grimly. "You would feel it if anyone tried. We're all healthy here. Any of us could fight back."
The hydreigon looked at her with all three heads. "And how do you know—?"
There was a deep sound, far-off, and the cave shook, setting pebbles to clatter on the rock. A hiss of sand or gravel spilled somewhere.
Moriko looked around, half-crouched. "An earthquake—"
"We need to leave," Matt said to the pokémon urgently. "This is the only way to get it to let Nocturna go. Please."
Myrmel vibrated her wings. "What do you think, L, can we trust these idiots?"
"They're cool. Also, Abram will really make you regret it if you try anything," Linden said cheerfully to the group.
"Let's get this over with then. I'mma stand over here, though," the flygon said.
In the end, it was Myrmel at one end of the cave and the hydreigon at the other, with Maia and Vleridin between them, and they turned to energy in a riot of color. The spheres of spirit rose and broadened as they whisked along the surface of the barrier, exploring like flatworms.
"This—this—" came Vleridin's voice, and her green-blue sphere was shadowed briefly by something.
They all flinched at the gunshot crack that came next, and the air was filled with the smell of ash and rot and dead things, but the shadow was gone.
A ripple went down the long, long body of the demon pokémon, and it stirred as more cracks sounded. The energy-bodies swirled around, looking for weak links and leaving glowing afterimages as they searched.
They came together, working on the less-rotted chains, and finally the barrier itself began to collapse. Something translucent seemed to bend, just visible in the light, and finally it fell with a sound like a huge breath.
The pokémon fled back, turning to matter and standing with the trainers, and the last of the chains fell and warped away. The shards of the barrier burst into glittering motes, and the demon pokémon thrashed and then sat up, rigid.
"Karaxil! I name you!" Celeste shouted.
It levered itself upward, its triangular head seeking the light and its limbs grasping like an insect's on glass, but it fell back, gasping. Black lines snaked across its fur, wider and wider until its skin burst, filling the air with shining feathers. They dissolved into sparks, winking out one by one.
It shrank, smaller and smaller until it took a humanoid shape, feminine, silvery-skinned and drawing a cloak of shadow and shimmering ice around itself. It turned its abyssal eyes on them, five pairs like a spider's.
"I am free," it said, in a voice of ice and dark water and auroras at the roof of the world. "I am leaving. You have my attention, namer. Ask of me a boon."
Celeste stood before the demon, her sky-skin grown gray and fitful, crossed by scudding clouds. "Go now and harm humans and elementals no longer. Take your place in the cycle or follow them that were and who are now not. Gather up your old soldiers. And… for your interest… your old master is near. Broken. Weak."
It smiled. "Cruel old child, to set me contradictory tasks. Do you still not realize how we live? How we must live?"
It looked at Linden and tilted its head, and the moment spun out, a moment caught in crystal, a moment poised on a knifetip.
"How we might, yet, live…"
"Yes."
It crouched, pulling its shadow-cloak around itself, and it looked suddenly tiny, dwarfed by the scarred walls of its prison. "I have slept long and long," it said, "that when I awoke I might see impossible things. What wonders lie beyond these walls? What terrors?"
"Come and see," Celeste said.
"You have dared that which few have ever even conceived of," Karaxil said. "I must, at least, equal your daring. I shall meet you on the battlefield."
The demon morphed again, its body stretching up and up, and in a flurry of limbs and silvery feathers and midnight blue fur it rushed up the cavern entrance where they had come in, and further, chasing the daylight it was long denied.
Celeste looked at them, and she turned into light, turned into a star, and she shot after it, up and up.
x.x.x.x.x
"How did you know? How did you know about me, about this, about demons—whose pokémon is that celestiule—"
They ran along stone corridors, and Moriko and Matt gave the gym leader an abbreviated version of their journey. Nocturna made sharp inhalations at mention of the Gray Prince, and the Black Queen and how she'd helped them.
"Of course—of course this would happen with the ancient pokémon here too—" Nocturna said, furious. "And me! Cooped up here! Useless! What was I thinking—"
"How long have you been here?" Matt asked, as they passed through key-carded doors to Nocturna's rooms, stirring up dust. "Did the league know about that thing? Did they know what it was doing to you?"
"Right? I can't—" Nocturna gestured, touched her forehead. She went on, more contemplative: "You have to understand—I was good, I was fine for a long time. And I had a duty, I have a duty as a gym leader to protect and to teach. The demon is a weapon under its own power, or under a demon master's influence. And I'm only one person—let one person suffer—and I wasn't suffering, really, until a year or two ago, perhaps. It was my duty to keep it out of dangerous hands."
"How could—how could they do that to you—" Moriko said, aghast.
"I have a lot of freedom, as a gym leader," Nocturna said, a note of pride in her voice. "A lot of power. Bad gym leaders abuse that power and privilege. I always tried to give something back. I took responsibility. In the old days the clan leaders stood as wardens against demons and evil powers. So do I." She hesitated. "But I've been a prisoner a long time. And… I don't think I was thinking clearly."
"I talked to Belladonna in Porphyry a few days ago," Moriko said. "She said the elites and the gym leaders were getting together to fight the ancient pokémon, or should have been."
"That's right," Nocturna said, looking through her cabinets more decisively. "That's where I should be. Let me—let me pack up everything important. Read me the PRED notice, here—"
They checked Nocturna's pokédex as she threw items into a backpack and a duffel. She looped a second and a third trainer's belt around her chest like a gunslinger's bandoliers.
"It's still out to sea," Matt said. The gyarados-head emblem stood out in stark black on the map of the Lacuna Sea. But it was closer than it had been, and now it was heading for the mainland.
"Okay. Okay okay okay," Nocturna muttered to herself, pulling out a sheaf of paper documents—fine paper, with gold leaf seals here and there—and shoving them into a folder in her backpack. "Shit, shit, what am I forgetting—"
"Pokéballs, pokédex, chargers, powerpack, keys, medicine, toiletries, shoes, socks—" Moriko recited.
The gym leader grabbed a few more things and hefted the bags. "What about you, did you leave things in town?"
"No, we're good. The guide left too, we didn't know how long this would take."
"Good, don't even try to get on the train, just go to—shit, you're short a flying pokémon." Nocturna massaged her eyes. "I need to—I should be with the rangers, fighting, I've been"—she pushed her lank hair back—"I haven't left the gym in a year, in—shit, in two years. But you all—"
"We'll go with you," Linden said eagerly. "We'll make sure you get to the other gym leaders okay."
Matt shook his head. "I think we need to get inland. We'll walk down, I remember most of the route and took pictures. I don't think there were any really tricky areas once you're aware of the drops—"
Moriko's pokédex beeped with an incoming call.
It was from Russell.
Fucking finally. Moriko answered it, and the call connected and resolved to—
Purple eyes in a sunken, pale face wreathed with steel-gray hair.
No—
The Gray Prince smiled.
"Hello, is Matthew there, please?" the gray man said, in perfect broadcaster tones.
"Where is Russ?"
The words hissed; they tore out of her lungs. She felt vertigo, felt the bottom drop out of her stomach and fall forever.
"Russell is spending the day with us. We're having a wonderful time and we hoped you'd join us, too. You and Matthew are invited." He grinned. "We haven't been introduced, but I so wanted to meet you."
"Where is Russell?"
The Gray Prince looked away; the camera shifted, the picture whirling—forest, sky, stone, scrub—to show a clearing.
Russ was sitting against a tree, slumped over, with the Wandering Fire standing over him, and another figure to one side.
The camera whisked away.
"It would be rude to bring uninvited guests," the gray demon said. He smiled again, pleasant. "I will kill him if you bring anyone else—rangers or other trainers or especially my enemy. I'll see you soon."
Moriko watched the call drop. She shoved her pokédex into a pocket and strode out of Nocturna's apartment.
Someone grabbed her wrist.
"Let me go, Matt—"
It was Nocturna, her pale hand surprisingly strong, her eyes wide and hair wild.
"Do not go," Nocturna said. "This isn't the movies. The Gray Prince will kill everyone who shows up. He will kill you and eat your pokémon. You escaped because the mystic—the Black Queen—was there, and she's not near or she'd already be fighting him. It's what she does. I was told—I was trained—we have to keep them away from people, away from cities. A leaf can survive a hurricane only because it goes unnoticed, and you have been noticed."
"Russ—"
"Your friend is bait, and if he's not already dead he will be, and you along with him. He wants you for revenge or humiliation or both. Come with me to the rangers, and if he comes looking for you at least you will be with the strongest trainers and pokémon in the region."
A tremor, to punctuate.
Moriko turned to Matt, and she must have looked ghastly because he flinched a little, he who had stared down a berserk svarog and who had fought demons. He looked back, beseeching.
"We can't do anything," Matt said softly. "We had an army of wild pokémon last time and we—maybe—hurt the Fire when Celeste did her thing. There's just us now. Celeste is gone.
"We'll die. The pokémon will die."
Moriko swayed. A thought came and etched itself into her mind with a terrible gravity: if he's dead I should be too, final destiny, final judgement.
But it was wrong.
She owed Russ so much—her only friend, her only confidant for so long, kind to her beyond deserving even if it had ended—but she could not go. She thought of her pokémon, and she knew it was wrong to take them there, to all but throw them into the devil's jaws.
She saw Russ in her mind's eye, alone on the cold ground. She thought of Sylvia, and she thought of his parents, and she knew she had to leave him there.
Ouroboros / it cannot be extinguished / Prophetess
—Aug. 25th, 128 CR
Their guide was a stout woman dressed in flannel and denim with a rifle and three pokéballs, and she had blue hair that had faded with age, leaving it a stormy sea color. She spoke a few words to them in a language Moriko dimly remembered, but she couldn't think of the right response. Matt said something back that sounded right, but the guide just did a one-shouldered shrug and started detailing the route in English.
The guide led the way with an elderly raigar and a papiliris scouting up ahead. The trails up the mountain were steep and narrow, with boulders and rockfalls all around. Periodically their guide told them to use their flying pokémon to ascend vertical rock faces to continue the route up above. Liona, Linden's flygon Myrmel, and the guide's wartinger helped them up the hardest stretches.
"Is it possible to fly all the way up?" Moriko asked.
The guide grunted a yes. "The weather turns quickly. Safer to go on foot. I have seen a man after he tumbled off and hit stone."
Moriko winced. "Our… friend went on without us. He might have gone up to the gym on his borfang."
The guide nodded, allowing this. "A princely elemental, that. It was calm this morning. I am sure they are well."
They encountered a number of dark-type sources as well, deep pits and inky shadows that lingered under the dark pines. One was a cave, a blind eye staring out of a high, sheer cliff. Liona, Tak, and Linden's weavile all used it successfully, the two flying pokemon hovering at its entrance and the weavile skittering up the rock. Moriko thought briefly of Celeste, and wondered what had happened to her, what she'd been up to after abandoning them.
Halfway up, they stopped for lunch, peanut butter and pitas, and hard cheese and water.
"Did you get the ancient pokémon notification up here?" Matt asked.
"Yes," the guide said, scratching her raigar under the chin. "Long time coming. It was an ugly summer. Always finishes with one of 'em." She made a series of signs, rapid-fire, with one hand. "Let it be the only one."
"Ugly?"
"Dead kids. Ronin. Demons. The rangers kill 'em, their bad energy goes into the earth—shamans can delay it. But the dead are down there, one way or another, and they wake up."
There was a silence, and Moriko felt tonguetied with all the questions she could ask, but hesitated at the guide's terseness and dismissal. Linden was quiet for once, listening.
"How long has the gym leader been here?" Matt asked.
"Ten years." She nodded uphill. "They've always wanted it, clans and warlords and now the league. There's power there, always has been. But the big one in the mountain isn't quiet."
"The big—? A big source?"
The guide made hand signs again, mostly the same ones.
"There are tame sources and wild ones," the raigar said in a creaky old-lady voice. "Sometimes you just find a pool in the woods and meditate. Other times, you chase them, hunt them down. But they aren't all safe. There're bad sources. Sources that use you. Need to know which are which."
The guide nodded. "She came ten years ago, lots of kids working up in the gym, working with her. They're all gone. No one stays. It's not a good place. Get your badge and leave. You can call down if you want guiding back, or pay me to wait."
x.x.x.x.x
The gym had been opulent, once, with chandeliers and thick carpet, but now everything was wreathed in protective plastic covers and a dull layer of dust. No attendants or acolytes came to greet them. There was a narrow path through the grit, footprints of various ages overlapping.
The gym leader met them inside wearing sableye-print sweatpants and slippers, her black hair drawn into a bun that was falling out of the loose hairtie.
They'd expected a little more out of tier seven.
Moriko tried not to stare. "Are you… Nocturna?"
"For my sins, yes," she said, and smiled weakly. There were bags under her eyes and it aged her, making her look older than the late thirties the league website indicated.
"Are you okay?" Moriko asked. "Should we come back another day?"
"No, it's fine. I just… look like this. I can battle fine," Nocturna said.
"Have you had any other challengers today?" Matt asked.
"Hm? No, just you guys," Nocturna answered, and fiddled with her trainer belt, walking deeper into the mountain.
They followed her. Moriko looked at Matt, and he shrugged.
Linden glanced between them. "He's not here?"
"Do you still care about the badge?" Matt asked quietly.
"I…" Moriko watched the scruffy and disheveled gym leader. "The pokémon wanted to battle. I guess since we're here… We could train with her, instead. For practice."
The only sound was Nocturna's slippers scuffing on the stones. A hydreigon shuffled out of the darkness, walking on its clawed wing edges, and it nudged Nocturna with one of its heads, which she petted in passing. It waited for them as they approached it warily, and walked alongside them for a few strides.
Moriko watched it. "Hey, I'm Moriko," she whispered. "Is… everything okay here?"
The hydreigon watched Nocturna ahead of them, and it pressed its heads together. Finally, it said, "We need help," and stumped ahead toward the gym leader.
All pokémon are prey animals, and they keep secrets.
The arena was messy, the composite floor scarred with huge scratchmarks and scorches from the seventh-tier battles that she entertained. That was sometimes a job for students to clean and polish, the old-fashioned belief that that grunt work kept you humble and appreciative.
Nocturna had no students and no referee, the latter of which might have been illegal. She had the cameras, the energy radar, and the aura sensors like usual, so they could refer to that footage for a battle dispute, but it made the arena look even emptier. There was room for a large number of spectators, sitting and standing, with hanging screens for close-ups, but it was all empty and powered down except for the bare minimum.
"So," Nocturna said, pushing back her tangled hair, "who'd like to—"
They all stopped at the discordant electronic wailing that erupted. Moriko turned her arm to see her pokédex glowing with that gyarados-head emblem again, and this time the background was flashing black and red. An alarm in the gym started up with a dopplering whirr like the old-fashioned tsunami sirens in movies, and the screens powered up to show the Pan-Regional Elemental Defense notice.
ANCIENT POKÉMON ESCAPED CONTAINMENT…CURRENT POSITION 47°23′N 146°40′W MOVING WSW 60 KN…EVACUATION ORDER 100 KM…PREPARATION ORDER 500 KM…AVOID COASTS…AVOID NON-EARTHQUAKE-HARDENED STRUCTURES…GET TO HIGH GROUND…STAY WITH POKÉMON…OBEY RANGER AND PRED INSTRUCTIONS
"Oh," Nocturna said in a little voice. "We have to evacuate." She started shaking, and the hydreigon went toward her. She leaned on its middle neck.
"That's okay," Moriko said, "can your hydreigon fly? We'll fly inland with you no problem. You can fly with us, we have pokémon," she babbled, seeing the mounting distress on Nocturna's face.
"I can't…"
"Sure you can," Matt said impatiently. "Do you need help?"
The gym leader's jaw worked helplessly, no sound coming out. Moriko stared at her and thought of another person she knew who couldn't speak about what was wrong with him.
Vleridin…
I thought so, too.
Moriko felt Vleridin rise up in her body, and soul-sight overlaid her vision: the arena, glittering with stray energy; the hydreigon in dark purple-black streaked with dragon's teal; and the gym leader, swathed in black and ice-blue webs that fuzzed and distorted the boundaries of her body.
"Matt, she—"
Maia appeared, releasing herself from her pokéball, and she looked at Nocturna as well and turned to Matt. The hydreigon raised its auxiliary wings at the part-ice-type, but it was perfunctory. Its heads kept nudging Nocturna, fitful.
Moriko looked at Matt. "Could we try…?"
"Nocturna," said a new voice.
It was Celeste.
The celestiule shone in the dim arena, the flashing ancient pokémon warnings reflecting off her translucent body; she was like a skylight, her hide reflecting the blue sky streaked with rushing mountain clouds. She was taller, broader than the filly who'd pulled a disappearing act on them after Sere Island. What had she been doing? Had she been following them?
On the edge of hearing there was a song and a whispering that Moriko could not understand or recall, but it filled her with a feeling of relaxation and contentment. Through the soul-vision Moriko could see the webs falling off the gym leader, one by one until she could see her more clearly. Nocturna grew distressed and cried out before they could all be removed.
Celeste halted, and the song faded, and dimness came back into the arena.
Nocturna was breathing hard, like she'd just run a race, and she was hanging onto the hydreigon grimly. "What did… what did you do?"
"A demon has been draining your life energy for many years, Nocturna. You cannot speak of it. You cannot leave. People come here and they know it is wrong. Your pokémon know it is wrong. What say you?"
Nocturna panted, watching her, and she said, "Yes," and more confidently, "Yes! It lives… it lives down below, and—goddammit, we need to leave, the evacuation order—it's a whiscash, it could bring down the whole mountain—"
Moriko saw the webs creeping back onto her. Shortly the gym leader was unable to speak again, and she slumped against her pokémon, the bonds on her doubly galling after that brief freedom.
"Let me help you, Nocturna; let me help you, Genevieve," Celeste said, her crystalline tones ringing in the hollowness of the arena.
Nocturna looked at them, unutterably tired, the ancient pokémon siren whooping at a skull-crushing volume. "What could you even do?"
"Let me free you. Let me free you both," Celeste said, and tears flooded down the gym leader's face.
x.x.x.x.x
Nocturna led them through hallways and tunnels, deep into the mountain, and the modern-looking fixtures receded until they were navigating by mine lamp and flashlight. Eventually they came to an old construction barrier plastered with signs and lit in lurid yellow light: DANGER due to OPEN PIT, DANGER due to AMBIENT ENERGY, DANGER due to WILD POKÉMON.
Nocturna shuffled through a huge janitor's ring of metal keys and unlocked the door. Beyond it in decades-old red LED light was a pit, a mohole like in the reginant hive, straight down.
She looked at them. "…This way."
She flew down on her hydreigon with Matt; Moriko followed on Liona, and Linden on her flygon. Celeste glowed and floated down with them.
Another fall, deep into the earth, down to the roots of the mountain. Moriko looked up, and she could see a blue star, a tiny blue window far above, and she realized that the mohole went up as well, to the mountain's peak, and she wondered what appalling power had dug the tunnel.
At last they reached the floor, and they saw the demon.
The cavern was huge, but it filled up the space, its serpents' coils extending back into unseen passages. Its frosty fur shimmered in the light as it breathed, but it was otherwise still, its many limbs limp and motionless.
"There it is," Nocturna whispered. "There it is! The thing, the demon pokémon," she said, the words tumbling out, its silence on her suspended in its presence. "Oh, they told me—they told me when I took the appointment, the people of the second crossing, they tried to tell me, they knew, they knew—" She threw her arms around the hydreigon, and it patted her awkwardly with its primary wings.
Cryptidex mode activated. Aura analysis: ice- and dark-type, 70% certainty. Dark- and rock-type, 15% certainty. Ice- and rock-type, 15% certainty. No matches. Initiate full scan and upload? (Y/N) Error: No service. Scans will be uploaded when connected to pokédex service.
"We need to break its hold on you," Celeste said. "We need to free it."
Matt shot the celestiule a look. "Are you sure? Quite frankly, I think the fewer of these things there are out and about, the better. Sorry," he added to Linden, who stuck out her tongue at him.
"Our enemy is near," Celeste said. "This demon's power is much diminished, but it knows him, and it hates him. Free it, and it will free Nocturna, and it will attack the Gray Prince." She looked among them. "What say you?"
"The Gray Prince is here?" Moriko asked, startled. "Where? Are we in danger? What about the ancient pokémon? Celeste—what are you?"
"One task at a time, earth's daughter," the celestiule said. "Free this demon. All else must follow."
The hydreigon spoke up in its triple voice. "Please. Help Gen."
Moriko took in the gym leader's desperate and ragged appearance. She looked up at the vent to the outside far above them, and thought of the terrible boredom of spending years alone out of view of the sun or stars. She pitied the demon suddenly; she did not know its crimes, but surely time had been served. She doubted it could change its nature, but…
Linden was watching the imprisoned demon like someone looking at a rescue kitten or eevee.
"What do we do?" Moriko asked Celeste.
The thing in the cavern was slumped just shy of the barrier, mouth open and gray tongue lolling, its flat black eyes looking at nothing.
Celeste stepped forward. "Demon of Frost and Starlight, I call to you. Your master walks again, broken, half-formed."
No reaction, no flicker of recognition.
"It used to speak," Nocturna murmured. "Not to me, exactly, just… shouts. Commands. Pleading. It would tell me to break the barrier, and I had no idea how and neither did it. But it still wouldn't let me leave. It hasn't said anything in a while, and… I'm still stuck here."
"I know about demons," Linden said, drawing a little closer to it. "They—"
The thing moved and they all flinched, crouched, reached for pokéballs. It raised its head to look at Linden.
Garbled, slurred speech spilled out, the words running together, melting, buzzing like interfering radio channels. Clicking and popping followed this, the sound of stones hitting stones, water, small things scuttling, and finally: "Who… are you?"
"Who are you?"
The demon sighed, as if this exchange had exhausted it, and laid down its head again, ripples passing along its length into the distant tunnels behind.
"There were temples," it said, breathily, dreamily. "Such cities as you may dream of. To the sky… Down to the roots… it would not fall.
"I was here. I was here before you came. I saw the first ones. The first invaders. I saw the worlds crack open. I was the first. I was…" It continued, quieter, and then into barely audible muttering.
"There are chains on it," Celeste said. "Chains that go down into the heart of stone, chains forged by gods-that-left and blessed by gods-that-stayed, chains eons old, and until they are broken it cannot move or pass the barrier. Help me break them."
"Chains forged by gods?" Moriko repeated. "Celeste! Why should we—"
"Time all things upends: strength for weakness, stone for sea, laughter for silence, foolishness for wisdom. They left us, and they taught us freedom. To free the prisoner you must free the beast. Throw off your chains, earth's daughter."
Make a choice, she remembered Maia saying. That choice had sucked too.
She sighed. "Okay. Okay. Where are they?"
Vleridin helped—the chains were all too obvious under soul-sight, vast black links that cut into and through the demon, that slithered away into shadow and downward below the stone.
"How do you break that? With an attack?" Moriko asked.
"Look again. The work was mighty, but time always runs."
On closer inspection the bindings were rotten, swirling with corroded-metal colors and an oily sheen. What had the meditant said to them, underground, all those days ago? Aged things fail. All these prodigious, ancient works were crumbling.
Celeste paced in front of the barrier. "The rabbit gnaws the rope. You must turn to energy, and it will be as easy as biting."
The pokémon all looked at each other, mistrustful—in energy form they would be vulnerable to permanent damage not only from the demon, but from one another. The hydreigon hissed at Maia.
Myrmel buzzed a denial. "I ain't know any of you people," the flygon said.
"I trust my group," Moriko said, intervening. "I trust Nocturna, she's a gym leader—she's not going to keep killer pokémon."
"You'd be surprised," Matt muttered.
"I will admit I am concerned," Maia said. "Especially about that… entity… coming out and goring or crushing the trainers."
Nocturna shook her head. "Nothing of pokémon—their bodies, energy, attacks—can get through the barrier."
Vleridin phased out of Moriko's body, appearing among them in a clatter of hooves on stone. The hydreigon snarled, and the mooskeg snorted at it derisively.
"Killing someone—eating someone—as energy can't be done so easily," Vleridin said grimly. "You would feel it if anyone tried. We're all healthy here. Any of us could fight back."
The hydreigon looked at her with all three heads. "And how do you know—?"
There was a deep sound, far-off, and the cave shook, setting pebbles to clatter on the rock. A hiss of sand or gravel spilled somewhere.
Moriko looked around, half-crouched. "An earthquake—"
"We need to leave," Matt said to the pokémon urgently. "This is the only way to get it to let Nocturna go. Please."
Myrmel vibrated her wings. "What do you think, L, can we trust these idiots?"
"They're cool. Also, Abram will really make you regret it if you try anything," Linden said cheerfully to the group.
"Let's get this over with then. I'mma stand over here, though," the flygon said.
In the end, it was Myrmel at one end of the cave and the hydreigon at the other, with Maia and Vleridin between them, and they turned to energy in a riot of color. The spheres of spirit rose and broadened as they whisked along the surface of the barrier, exploring like flatworms.
"This—this—" came Vleridin's voice, and her green-blue sphere was shadowed briefly by something.
They all flinched at the gunshot crack that came next, and the air was filled with the smell of ash and rot and dead things, but the shadow was gone.
A ripple went down the long, long body of the demon pokémon, and it stirred as more cracks sounded. The energy-bodies swirled around, looking for weak links and leaving glowing afterimages as they searched.
They came together, working on the less-rotted chains, and finally the barrier itself began to collapse. Something translucent seemed to bend, just visible in the light, and finally it fell with a sound like a huge breath.
The pokémon fled back, turning to matter and standing with the trainers, and the last of the chains fell and warped away. The shards of the barrier burst into glittering motes, and the demon pokémon thrashed and then sat up, rigid.
"Karaxil! I name you!" Celeste shouted.
It levered itself upward, its triangular head seeking the light and its limbs grasping like an insect's on glass, but it fell back, gasping. Black lines snaked across its fur, wider and wider until its skin burst, filling the air with shining feathers. They dissolved into sparks, winking out one by one.
It shrank, smaller and smaller until it took a humanoid shape, feminine, silvery-skinned and drawing a cloak of shadow and shimmering ice around itself. It turned its abyssal eyes on them, five pairs like a spider's.
"I am free," it said, in a voice of ice and dark water and auroras at the roof of the world. "I am leaving. You have my attention, namer. Ask of me a boon."
Celeste stood before the demon, her sky-skin grown gray and fitful, crossed by scudding clouds. "Go now and harm humans and elementals no longer. Take your place in the cycle or follow them that were and who are now not. Gather up your old soldiers. And… for your interest… your old master is near. Broken. Weak."
It smiled. "Cruel old child, to set me contradictory tasks. Do you still not realize how we live? How we must live?"
It looked at Linden and tilted its head, and the moment spun out, a moment caught in crystal, a moment poised on a knifetip.
"How we might, yet, live…"
"Yes."
It crouched, pulling its shadow-cloak around itself, and it looked suddenly tiny, dwarfed by the scarred walls of its prison. "I have slept long and long," it said, "that when I awoke I might see impossible things. What wonders lie beyond these walls? What terrors?"
"Come and see," Celeste said.
"You have dared that which few have ever even conceived of," Karaxil said. "I must, at least, equal your daring. I shall meet you on the battlefield."
The demon morphed again, its body stretching up and up, and in a flurry of limbs and silvery feathers and midnight blue fur it rushed up the cavern entrance where they had come in, and further, chasing the daylight it was long denied.
Celeste looked at them, and she turned into light, turned into a star, and she shot after it, up and up.
x.x.x.x.x
"How did you know? How did you know about me, about this, about demons—whose pokémon is that celestiule—"
They ran along stone corridors, and Moriko and Matt gave the gym leader an abbreviated version of their journey. Nocturna made sharp inhalations at mention of the Gray Prince, and the Black Queen and how she'd helped them.
"Of course—of course this would happen with the ancient pokémon here too—" Nocturna said, furious. "And me! Cooped up here! Useless! What was I thinking—"
"How long have you been here?" Matt asked, as they passed through key-carded doors to Nocturna's rooms, stirring up dust. "Did the league know about that thing? Did they know what it was doing to you?"
"Right? I can't—" Nocturna gestured, touched her forehead. She went on, more contemplative: "You have to understand—I was good, I was fine for a long time. And I had a duty, I have a duty as a gym leader to protect and to teach. The demon is a weapon under its own power, or under a demon master's influence. And I'm only one person—let one person suffer—and I wasn't suffering, really, until a year or two ago, perhaps. It was my duty to keep it out of dangerous hands."
"How could—how could they do that to you—" Moriko said, aghast.
"I have a lot of freedom, as a gym leader," Nocturna said, a note of pride in her voice. "A lot of power. Bad gym leaders abuse that power and privilege. I always tried to give something back. I took responsibility. In the old days the clan leaders stood as wardens against demons and evil powers. So do I." She hesitated. "But I've been a prisoner a long time. And… I don't think I was thinking clearly."
"I talked to Belladonna in Porphyry a few days ago," Moriko said. "She said the elites and the gym leaders were getting together to fight the ancient pokémon, or should have been."
"That's right," Nocturna said, looking through her cabinets more decisively. "That's where I should be. Let me—let me pack up everything important. Read me the PRED notice, here—"
They checked Nocturna's pokédex as she threw items into a backpack and a duffel. She looped a second and a third trainer's belt around her chest like a gunslinger's bandoliers.
"It's still out to sea," Matt said. The gyarados-head emblem stood out in stark black on the map of the Lacuna Sea. But it was closer than it had been, and now it was heading for the mainland.
"Okay. Okay okay okay," Nocturna muttered to herself, pulling out a sheaf of paper documents—fine paper, with gold leaf seals here and there—and shoving them into a folder in her backpack. "Shit, shit, what am I forgetting—"
"Pokéballs, pokédex, chargers, powerpack, keys, medicine, toiletries, shoes, socks—" Moriko recited.
The gym leader grabbed a few more things and hefted the bags. "What about you, did you leave things in town?"
"No, we're good. The guide left too, we didn't know how long this would take."
"Good, don't even try to get on the train, just go to—shit, you're short a flying pokémon." Nocturna massaged her eyes. "I need to—I should be with the rangers, fighting, I've been"—she pushed her lank hair back—"I haven't left the gym in a year, in—shit, in two years. But you all—"
"We'll go with you," Linden said eagerly. "We'll make sure you get to the other gym leaders okay."
Matt shook his head. "I think we need to get inland. We'll walk down, I remember most of the route and took pictures. I don't think there were any really tricky areas once you're aware of the drops—"
Moriko's pokédex beeped with an incoming call.
It was from Russell.
Fucking finally. Moriko answered it, and the call connected and resolved to—
Purple eyes in a sunken, pale face wreathed with steel-gray hair.
No—
The Gray Prince smiled.
"Hello, is Matthew there, please?" the gray man said, in perfect broadcaster tones.
"Where is Russ?"
The words hissed; they tore out of her lungs. She felt vertigo, felt the bottom drop out of her stomach and fall forever.
"Russell is spending the day with us. We're having a wonderful time and we hoped you'd join us, too. You and Matthew are invited." He grinned. "We haven't been introduced, but I so wanted to meet you."
"Where is Russell?"
The Gray Prince looked away; the camera shifted, the picture whirling—forest, sky, stone, scrub—to show a clearing.
Russ was sitting against a tree, slumped over, with the Wandering Fire standing over him, and another figure to one side.
The camera whisked away.
"It would be rude to bring uninvited guests," the gray demon said. He smiled again, pleasant. "I will kill him if you bring anyone else—rangers or other trainers or especially my enemy. I'll see you soon."
Moriko watched the call drop. She shoved her pokédex into a pocket and strode out of Nocturna's apartment.
Someone grabbed her wrist.
"Let me go, Matt—"
It was Nocturna, her pale hand surprisingly strong, her eyes wide and hair wild.
"Do not go," Nocturna said. "This isn't the movies. The Gray Prince will kill everyone who shows up. He will kill you and eat your pokémon. You escaped because the mystic—the Black Queen—was there, and she's not near or she'd already be fighting him. It's what she does. I was told—I was trained—we have to keep them away from people, away from cities. A leaf can survive a hurricane only because it goes unnoticed, and you have been noticed."
"Russ—"
"Your friend is bait, and if he's not already dead he will be, and you along with him. He wants you for revenge or humiliation or both. Come with me to the rangers, and if he comes looking for you at least you will be with the strongest trainers and pokémon in the region."
A tremor, to punctuate.
Moriko turned to Matt, and she must have looked ghastly because he flinched a little, he who had stared down a berserk svarog and who had fought demons. He looked back, beseeching.
"We can't do anything," Matt said softly. "We had an army of wild pokémon last time and we—maybe—hurt the Fire when Celeste did her thing. There's just us now. Celeste is gone.
"We'll die. The pokémon will die."
Moriko swayed. A thought came and etched itself into her mind with a terrible gravity: if he's dead I should be too, final destiny, final judgement.
But it was wrong.
She owed Russ so much—her only friend, her only confidant for so long, kind to her beyond deserving even if it had ended—but she could not go. She thought of her pokémon, and she knew it was wrong to take them there, to all but throw them into the devil's jaws.
She saw Russ in her mind's eye, alone on the cold ground. She thought of Sylvia, and she thought of his parents, and she knew she had to leave him there.