Chapter 10: Fool's Gold
Brendan's boot prints wound through the dark behind him, but ahead, the fine, pink sand lay undisturbed. By the end of the week, it would be a jumble of footprints as journalists, academics, and surveyors made their way through the temple. The floor would be swept, staked, and digitally imaged. It was only sand ... but the thought that they were changing the space forever just by walking saddened him.
He paused in the center of the room, solar lantern held high, and turned in a slow circle. The last chamber had been much bigger. The tiles shone where his footsteps had revealed them; steadying the camera atop his lantern, he snapped a few photos of his footprints, proof that, for a few moments, this had been his alone. In the preview window, the chamber looked like the surface of the moon, beautiful in its austerity. He wondered if this was how the first astronauts had felt.
Harrison and Steven were somewhere nearby, but they'd split up to cover ground more quickly. Brendan couldn't think of a time he'd been so completely alone: even after May had gone her own way, he'd always had his pokemon at his side. He would've liked their company, but he could too easily imagine any one of them trampling delicate artifacts underfoot. Indie in particular could be a menace with that tail. Time had done damage enough here already.
As he moved forward, he spotted a lump in the sand. He nudged it with his toe to reveal a few broken pieces of pottery. One looked like a handle. Brendan photographed the shards and then stepped carefully around them, taking mental note to return later with a bag. Everything would be saved and studied, each mystery prised apart … but they'd come looking for something bigger than pottery shards. He should keep moving.
If Harrison had come this way, he would be trying to figure out what this room had been for, making Brendan his whetstone while answering none of his questions.
No, that wasn't fair. Brendan hadn't forgotten what an honor it was just to be here with both Brandon Harrison, the world-famous archaeologist and Frontier brain, and Steven Stone, former champion of the Hoenn League and
Trainer Today's Man of the Year, the very image of class and power. Brendan still didn't know what he'd done to deserve their company. Really, he
hadn't done anything—it had been Steven. He and Harrison had already been poring over texts for months when he'd invited Brendan to join.
Ahead, the back wall had been carved into shelves, the upper ones lined with fat clay jugs, each thick with dust, but the lower two empty. Depleted stores? Or missing? The shards must've come from here, sometime when there had been less sand on the floors to break the fall. Had the temple been abandoned in a hurry, he wondered, a jug tumbling from hands gone clumsy with urgency? Or had it been a careless raider? He hated to think that anyone had beaten them there and stolen artifacts they wouldn't know to miss. Regardless, it hadn't happened recently, and it probably wasn't relevant to their quest.
"Birch!" Steven's voice echoed from another room.
Brendan scrambled to the doorway of the small side room. From there, by the warm half-light of the tripod-mounted lamps, he saw no one in the main chamber. They had to be farther in. "Did you find something?" he called back.
"Come see this!"
He followed the sound of Steven's voice deeper into the enormous main chamber. The layout of rooms was too linear and purposeful to be natural, but the walls were irregularly shaped, a line that wavered and folded back on itself as if drawn by a child's hand. Raising such a structure must've taken a lot of pokemon—and long before the invention of pokeballs, too. Later, he'd ask Harrison how they'd managed it.
"Where are you guys?" The uneven walls twisted Brendan's voice and threw it back at him.
"Over here!" Towards the back and to the left.
As he passed under the carved archway in the center of the room, Brendan slowed and craned his neck. The upper reaches were lost to shadow now, but when they'd first entered, Harrison's bronzong had lit it in full: the carving was a perfect copy of the tablets from the museum, the ones marked
Regirock. The image had been eyeless and maybe even headless (it was hard to tell) but had still seemed to be watching him. He felt it even now, despite the dark.
A guardian, he decided firmly.
Beyond the arch were several doors, simple cutaways in the rock. He ducked through the lefthand one. The passage was narrow, lined with more carvings that stretched floor to ceiling, depicting mountains made of simple geometric shapes, groups of robed figures, and what had to be pokemon—but he couldn't let himself linger. At the end of the hallway, light spilled from two doors engraved with glyphs. Brendan clicked off his headlamp, pulling it down around his neck, and pushed through.
The room was bright with the abundance of lanterns and pokemon, and Brendan blinked as his eyes adjusted. Steven's claydol, Mazda, floated patiently in the center of the room like a chandelier, beaming light from each of her golden eyes. Steven and Harrison crouched across from each other, their hand lanterns forgotten on the floor beside piles of sand and a stone slab. They'd uncovered something. Sankara the bronzong hovered overhead, the glow from its bell like a spotlight on the two men and the dark tunnel gaping between them.
"You don't think so?" Steven was saying, his voice excited but hushed.
"Might be," Harrison answered. "But it could go anywhere."
Brendan slowed his steps, suddenly feeling like an intruder. He wouldn't have wandered off by himself if he'd realized they would be sticking together. What had they talked about without him?
But at the sound of his footsteps, Steven turned and called out, "Birch! There you are." He flashed Brendan a grin that he couldn't help returning. "Can you believe this? Secret tunnels! This place keeps getting better and better."
Even kneeling in thousands of years of dust, Steven looked like a clothing ad. He'd traded his usual suit and tie for more practical attire, but all of it was sharply creased, and the Stone family crest glinted green and silver at his breast pocket.
As always, Brendan felt shabby next to him. The nicest things he wore, his boots, had actually come from Steven.
I bought the wrong size by mistake. You don't happen to want them do you? Brendan hadn't believed him for a second—Steven Stone didn't make mistakes. But he recognized the kindness, and he also saw Steven's point; he'd worn the same pair of shoes from one end of Hoenn to the other, and it showed in the way the soles had begun to peel away from the canvas uppers.
But he'd loved those shoes and their mismatched laces, one red and one black, from when he and May had swapped. He'd tried threading the new boots with the old laces, but they'd looked even worse against the shiny, dark leather. In the end, they were just ratty old laces, and he wasn't so sentimental he couldn't throw them away.
Steven gestured for Brendan to join him and Harrison on the floor beside the mouth of the tunnel. It cut straight down. Even Sankara's light only shone so far before the darkness swallowed it up.
"It looks deep," Brendan said. He knelt cautiously, nervous that a careless step would send him falling in headfirst. "Do we know what it's for?"
"That's the question, isn't it?" Steven said, beaming.
Harrison cut in, "Few people would've known the answer to that. Probably only high priests. Some nobles, maybe." His voice was gruff, as ever, but Brendan recognized that elated look in his eyes of a late-night, coffee-fueled breakthrough. At Brendan's frown, he added, "You didn't see the markings on the doors? Like the ones outside."
In other words, intended to keep people out. The temple door was a puzzle, one that had taken them months to solve.
First, they'd had to
find the temple. Harrison had translated (and re-translated) the tablets, and Brendan had scouted out the locations Harrison identified—guesswork as much as anything else. At last, one of those guesses had brought Brendan to the cliffs bordering the Hoenn desert. Behind a stone slab that didn't match the surrounding rock, he'd uncovered both the entrance, set into the cliff and framed by intricately carved pillars, and another riddle.
The door was featureless except for a heavy stone wheel embedded in the center; spinning it did nothing but reveal an indentation the size of Brendan's fist. Glyphs marked the wheel's bottom edge, but, regardless of which way the wheel was turned, the most Harrison could make of it was, "Gods of gods? And then ... huh. A participle, best as I can tell." He harrumphed and added, "Enough goddamned gods to trip over around here.
Sounds like a temple at least."
Nothing they did to the wheel or the indentation underneath had any effect on the door. Despite Steven's wincing protests, they even tried tunneling under. But, bizarrely, not even Steven's pokemon could penetrate or shift the rock surrounding the door or the cliff. One manic week later, they were still no closer to solving the riddle. Steven had gloomily collected his things to return to civilization, saying, "Just … please do let me know if there are any updates."
One morning the week after Steven left, Brendan woke before dawn. In his dreams, he'd been following May down a wooded path, falling further behind the faster he walked. Too restless to return to sleep, he'd unzipped his tent and stepped out into the morning chill. Above, the stars of Balen the wailord still shone faintly in the sky. Not wanting to disturb Harrison and not sure what else to do, he made his way back to the door with his camera. But when he saw the door, he froze. By the dim light of the not-quite-risen sun, new glyphs shone bluish on the stone wheel, completing the circle.
Brendan paused only long enough to snap a few photos before running to rouse Harrison. He was glad that he had. By the time Harrison shuffled up the slope—his leg was worse first thing in the morning—the sun had crested the horizon, and the second set of glyphs was gone. But Harrison managed a translation from the camera display screen:
As dust from earth, so gods from gods.
While Brendan was still struggling to make any sense of that, Harrison burst out, "Dust from earth … ha!" He bent for a fistful of crumbling red soil and then pressed it into the indentation behind the stone wheel. There was a rumbling deep below their feet, and, at last, as it had so many times in his dreams, the temple door grated open.
For the first time, Brendan had felt like a real part of the team. Now, though, he was back to being along for the ride. Already, Harrison and Steven had opened an entire door without him, while his contributions had mostly been dumb luck.
Brendan turned away from the hallway door, back to Steven and Harrison, squinting against Mazda's eight slow-spinning lights. At the side of the tunnel, Harrison was staring at him, a plastic bag in his outstretched hands.
"Here. Take a look. We collected these from the floor."
Inside were more pottery shards. A layperson would've taken the scattering of dots as some kind of decorative pattern, but Brendan recognized it as writing. Not that he could read any of it. Harrison was one of the few scholars who could make any sense of the ancient writings, and even he wavered on his interpretations. Once, Brendan had broached the idea of learning, but even the simplest of the "constellations" had baffled him. Though, turning the bag, Brendan spotted a pictogram he did recognize—
"Trapinch," said Harrison. "The ancients most likely saw them as protective totems. I'm surprised we haven't found any nests in here yet."
Sensing a lecture coming on, Brendan cast a helpless look at Steven, who was contemplating the hole in the floor, his head tipped to one side; clearly he'd already heard the speech.
Brendan surrendered to the inevitable. "What is it?"
"It's a clay seal," Harrison answered in a tone that almost sounded scolding. "Or part of one. It could've been another barrier to entry, or it might've simply alerted priests that the door had been tampered with."
"So someone did break in." Thinking of the pottery shards in the other room, Brendan added, "I hate to think what they might've taken."
"Don't worry. He didn't get very far."
Brendan turned in the direction Harrison pointed, and—
skeleton. He'd been so focused on Steven and Harrison when he entered that he hadn't seen it against the wall. It lay on its side, one arm reaching toward the only door. The skeleton still wore wireframe glasses and a few strips of frayed cloth, but sand spilled from between the exposed ribs and grinning jaws.
Harrison clapped a steadying hand on his shoulder. "Relax. He's already dead." And had been for a very long time, considering the state of decay. There was little in the way of moisture and wild pokemon in the temple to help break down a body.
"But he died
in here." Looking around with fresh eyes, Brendan noticed for the first time a stone lectern against the wall. Scrapes in the sand marked where it had been recently dragged from the mouth of the tunnel. At one point, someone had wanted that trap door to stay shut.
"What if there's—?" He couldn't help it: his eyes went to the cane resting against Harrison's good leg, the handle carved into a leering cofagrigus. Brendan tore his gaze away, but not quickly enough.
Harrison took the clay seal back from him, scowling. "If there are vengeful ghosts around, there's no point worrying about which room you're in, boy."
No, walls didn't matter much to ghosts, not even walls of thick stone. It wasn't a comforting thought.
Steven cut in cheerfully, "I think if there were any danger, Mazda and Sankara would've let us know by now."
"No, I know," Brendan said, sitting up straighter. He forced himself to look again at the skeleton. It wasn't really so different from any other artifact or mineral he'd handled before, right? "Just surprised me."
Steven smiled mischievously. "Time to find out where this tunnel goes."
They anchored their ladder to Delorean, Steven's metagross, one loop around each of its front legs. Steven leaned down and tugged at a rung. "Seems sturdy enough to me. Thanks, Del."
The metagross shifted its weight, and the aluminum rungs jangled all the way down the dark shaft. Brendan shivered, but when Steven caught his gaze, he forced a smile.
"I don't mind going first," Steven said, switching on the headlamp hanging around his neck.
"Floor might be unstable," Harrison warned. "Take it slow."
"Of course. I'll be careful." In one smooth motion, Steven took hold of the golden cross curving up from Delorean's jaws and swung himself down onto the ladder. He paused to rap his knuckles on the metagross's foot. "One for luck." He winked, an eclipse of one blue eye before he dropped below, the beam of his headlamp jouncing with each step.
Watching made Brendan's stomach seize up, so instead, he stood to look around the room again.
No one but us has seen this room in hundreds of years, he reminded himself. The worshippers and priests were long gone, but this place still felt holy. And it was beautiful. The dust couldn't hide the fluted pillars or the engraved altars under half-domes of stone tracery. So he busied himself with his camera, listening all the while for sounds of distress from down in the tunnel. Not that he could do much if ….
It's fine. He's fine.
Harrison's grumbling made Brendan pause and look up from the viewfinder. He'd brought out a collapsible camp chair and was easing himself into it, massaging his bad leg. "Sankara, c'mere. I need more light."
"You're not coming," Brendan said, the thought somehow occurring to him only then.
Harrison gave a derisive laugh as he pulled a tiny notebook from one of his many pockets. "Come on, kid."
Brendan's face colored. "No, I know. But I mean ... couldn't Sankara—?"
"I try not to get into any position I can't get out of by myself."
He had a point. The opening was too narrow for either of their pokemon to fit through. Steven had recalled his claydol on the chance there would be room to release her again somewhere below. But if there wasn't, Harrison could be stranded.
"And I've got plenty of work already." He tapped on the camera hanging around his neck. "I could be here all week translating what's in the main room alone. Cynthia'll shit herself when she sees some of these." At that, Harrison chuckled, but it sounded hollow to Brendan.
Steven's voice rang out, distant and echoing, "I've reached the bottom!"
Brendan secured the camera to his chest harness and crept to the edge of the opening. "Everything seems alright?"
Far, far below, Steven's light was like a tiny, trembling firefly. "There's a tunnel! Looks like it bears south!"
Brendan exchanged looks with Harrison, who rolled his eyes. He smiled. "Alright. I'm coming down!"
Tipping his head back, Brendan met Delorean's impassive gaze and felt a prickle down the back of his neck. He wouldn't be trying Steven's trick. Instead, he grabbed one of the ladder's aluminum crosspieces, steadying himself against the stone lip of the tunnel. Then, with a deep breath, he gingerly lowered one foot into the hole until he finally caught on a rung. The ladder swayed as he put his full weight onto it. For a few moments, he hung there, simply breathing until the ladder stilled.
"Birch." Harrison said it like a command, making Brendan stop short of taking the next step down. "Don't let him do anything stupid down there."
Right. As if anyone
let Steven do things.
"I'll do what I can," he said, and let the darkness envelop him.
The climb was long, and soon Brendan began to lose his sense of scale. He couldn't shake the sensation that beyond his headlamp beam was an empty void, that he was floating. For a moment, the uncertainty was so powerful that he had to stop and reach a hand towards the opposite wall. His palm met rough stone before he'd even extended his arm all the way, and he breathed out in a rush.
Steven's voice startled him, closer than Brendan had expected: "You're almost there. Just a few more feet."
He moved down a few more rungs—and then jolted at two quick smacks on the back of his calf.
"The bottom is right here. Four more and you can jump down if you want."
He didn't. Steven's light moved along the wall under his own now, but Brendan climbed the rest of the way down, rung by rung. His leg still tingled where Steven had touched him, a welcome reminder that he existed in space and all his limbs were attached.
"Nicely done, Birch."
Buoyed by those small words, he managed, "That wasn't so bad."
The bottom of the shaft was no wider than the opening, and the entry into the tunnel was barely bigger. Crouching to keep from brushing against the ceiling, Steven had stepped back into the tunnel to avoid coming nose-to-nose with Brendan. There was definitely no room for Mazda—or any of their pokemon.
"Are you alright to continue?" Steven asked. "Do you need a moment?"
"No, no, I'm okay. I don't know why I got so spooked. Stupid." Laughing nervously, he tried to catch Steven's eyes—
But Steven was already cupping his hands around his mouth. "Harrison! You still there?"
The tunnel entrance was a dim square that looked no bigger than a postage stamp.
After a pause and some grumbling came a reply that sounded terribly far away. "Of course I am! You think I've got something better to do?"
"We're going to follow this tunnel as far as we can! If we're not back in a few hours ..."
"I've got the ranger station on speed dial."
"Beautiful," said Steven, laughing. "Del, you alright up there?"
The metagross answered with a horrendous grating that vibrated the walls until sand came hissing down.
When all was quiet again, Steven said in a low voice, "Shall we?"
Brendan's heart was still skittering from the climb down, but he returned Steven's grin. His boyish excitement was infectious.
Steven led the way, his pale hair luminous in the gloom. The tunnel was cool and smelled of damp earth, and sand muffled their steps. The bare walls were close, always within the headlamp beams; being able to see the walls and ceiling so clearly made Brendan very aware of the many thousand tons of rock overhead.
In the temple above, only traces of life remained. But this tunnel had
never been a place for humans.
Brendan wanted badly to touch something living. When Indie was still a treeko, he'd been small enough to perch on Brendan's shoulders, tail curled around his neck. Maybe he should've let him stay that way.
It didn't matter. None of Brendan's pokemon did well in the dark anyway. They thrived in sunlight.
What would happen to them if he never made it back to the surface? How long would their pokeballs hold them in stasis? Five hundred years from now, would some enterprising archaeologist discover them among Brendan's bones?
Steven had slowed to a stop. He turned halfway towards Brendan, the headlamps cutting his face into harsh shadows. "Birch, will you do me a favor?"
"Of course," Brendan said reflexively. Then, "What is it?"
"Would you turn off your headlamp for a moment?"
Brendan swallowed. "Sure."
The very moment after he switched off his light, Steven switched his off, too.
The darkness was complete. It was nothing like the nights he'd spent on the road with May. Even on the darkest nights, the stars and moon had shone overhead, and the air had been alive with lotad and zubat calls. In the tunnel, there was only dead air and dust. He couldn't even hear Steven's breathing.
Brendan stepped forward and reached for the wall, anything to keep him from drifting away into the endless black. He gripped his headlamp hard, not sure how much longer he could stand—
Steven whispered, "Amazing."
Brendan snapped his light back on. He had to cup a hand over it to protect his eyes from the sudden brightness.
"It's like the rest of the world doesn't exist! No emails down here." Steven laughed, his smile a white crescent. "Turns out the secret to inner peace was right under our feet all along. How long do you think it would take for them to hunt me down and find me here?"
Right. No reason to be afraid. But he didn't relax until Steven switched on his light and started walking again. Brendan followed with a fast-beating heart.
As they walked, his legs began to ache from crouching. He imagined they had to be halfway to Mauville by now. The sand gradually sloped higher and higher up the walls. At first, Brendan thought he was imagining it, but before long, his boots sank with each step, the sand dragging at him. Where had it all come from? As the level of the sand rose, Brendan had to bend lower and lower.
Then Steven gasped and came to such an abrupt stop that Brendan nearly ran into him.
"What? What is it?"
Steven had to lean to one side for Brendan to see around him. The passage ended in a pair of doors, blocked by a tall pile of sand. Brendan didn't understand what had so startled Steven until he squinted and realized what was sticking out of the sand halfway between them and the doors: a skeletal hand.
"Gods," Brendan breathed. "What do you think happened?"
"Maybe a cave-in?" Steven offered, sounding actually concerned for the first time. But when they aimed their lights at the ceiling ahead, the stone was still smooth and unbroken.
"Huh." Steven considered the doors and adjusted his sleeves, though the fold was already immaculate. "Well, seems alright now." He started forward.
"Shouldn't ...?" But Brendan trailed off, unsure how to even begin trying to turn Steven Stone away from something he'd set his mind to.
Steven paused and smiled winningly over his shoulder. "Don't you want to find out what's on the other side?"
Brendan didn't have to look back to feel the dark pressing behind him. Ahead, Steven's profile was like a blade cleaving the shadows. "Yeah, alright."
Steven edged along the sides of the passage, but he couldn't avoid the skeleton completely. Sand slid off it as he passed, exposing the top of the skull and a bent knee. When his turn came, Brendan couldn't help staring. It had to be hundreds of years old, he reminded himself, noting the desiccated flesh gone black with age. Had the skeleton been buried after death, he wondered, or had he suffocated under all that sand? It would be a horrible way to die.
"Help me with this." Steven had waded through the sand and stood beside the doors, alternating between shoveling sand out of the way with his hands and tugging the door open a few centimeters at a time. "If you dig, I'll pull."
"Should we go back up for the shovels?"
"Let's see what we can do without them first. I'd hate to have to double all the way back now."
They turned sideways to fit beside the doors, each bracing his back against the wall, but it was impossible for Brendan to keep from knocking into Steven as he worked, shoulder hitting thigh and knuckles striking knuckles. As Brendan scooped at the sand, his fingers met something hard hidden underneath. He caught it just as Steven gave out a cry of effort and triumph, wresting the door open far enough to squeeze through.
Brendan lingered on his knees in the sand to examine what he'd found, tilting it in the light. It looked like the broken clay seal Harrison had shown him, but instead of a trapinch, it bore the image of a vibrava. He shook his head and pocketed the clay fragment. Sliding, he climbed to his feet and then slipped between the doors behind Steven.
The moment he was through, he knew immediately by the quality of the sound that they'd entered a much bigger space. There was finally room to stand straight again.
Several yards away, Steven turned in a broad circle without his light striking a wall, and when he craned his head back, the headlamp beam stopped short of the ceiling. His footsteps echoed. Satisfied, he sent out his claydol. A few moments later, her light revealed a large, high-ceilinged room, utterly bare except for another set of doors set into the far wall.
The elaborate carvings on the doors were the first real sign that the tunnel had any relation beyond proximity to the temple above. Like the other doors they'd passed through, these were built of thick stone covered in glyphs—and they were firmly shut, a strange lock laid over the seam where they met.
Steven laid a hand on the carved glyphs and groaned. He pushed, but, of course, the door didn't budge. "We're
so close. I can feel it."
Brendan unholstered his camera, secretly relieved. Without Harrison, they had no chance of getting this door open today. They'd have to turn back now.
When the flash went off, Steven startled away from the door. "Ah, I'm in the way, aren't I?"
"Just a little," said Brendan, cracking a smile. "Probably making Harrison's job harder, but at least you look good."
He froze, watching for Steven's reaction. What on earth had made him say that? In his head, it had sounded funny, maybe, but out loud ...
Steven flashed him a polite smile but did not meet Brendan's eyes. "Well, better not give him additional reasons to complain. All yours."
"Right. Gods forbid we annoy him," Brendan said, too earnest by half. He ducked behind the camera like a squirtle tucking into its shell.
Once he'd taken a few full shots of the door, he sidled up for a better angle on the lock. It took him a moment to realize why it looked familiar: it was another clay seal, this one intact. "He'll be happy to see this thing in one piece, though."
Weird to use something so fragile as a lock.
Brendan lowered the camera to look at the seal with his own eyes. Clay filled the crack between the doors—it looked like it had been hard-fired in place afterward, probably by a pokemon—and gathered into a pokeball-sized knot at eye level. A flygon had been etched into the surface in surprising detail, bookended by more dots. "I wonder," he said, "what was stopping someone from just smashing it." Curious how solid it was, he reached to tap a fingernail on the surface—
—And it exploded. Scattering fragments. A burst of light. A wavering, almost melodic whine.
He didn't know when he'd ended up on his back. Ears ringing, he squinted against the flying sand. A dust devil spun above him, humming, and from out of the sand rose something solid and large with a lashing tail, two wings, and eyes like stained glass. A flygon.
"Birch, move!"
A dome of purple light flared over Brendan's head. Sand peppered the shield, then sprayed against it, sloughing off noisily. He scuttled backward and then, still one-handedly clutching the camera, lurched to his feet. The room had gone to shadow again with Mazda diverting her energy into light shields and attacks. She hovered between him and Steven, shielding each of them. A fusillade of violet bolts, sparking like fireworks, shot out from the claydol and then disappeared into the dust devil. The air was so thick with dust that Brendan could hardly see Steven and his cradily a few yards away, lit intermittently with purple light. He couldn't see the flygon at all anymore—until it ripped past Steven, slapping the cradily down with its tail.
He had to help. With one hand, he jammed the camera into its harness, and with the other, he reached towards his belt. Definitely not Henry—the sandstorm would rip his wings apart. Indie? He'd be vulnerable waiting for the flygon to come close enough to hit. Then there was only—"Walton, we need you!"
His ludicolo spun in a circle and shivered, making an unhappy sound.
"I know, I know. I'm sorry," Brendan said distractedly, peering into the gloom. He was grateful for the light shield, but it made seeing into the dark even harder. At a glimpse of green, he pointed. "There! Ice beam!"
Walton moved sluggishly but fired a blue beam in the direction Brendan pointed. The wind caught the gust of ice, drawing it up into the vortex of sand until the blue light was gone. Brendan wasn't sure if it had actually hit the flygon at all.
"Again!"
Between the sand showering the light shield and the keening wind, he couldn't hear Steven's commands, only that he was shouting, too. Brendan could hardly see anything except the occasional swoop of movement and bursts of violet lights. Green fire lanced at Steven's shield, then into the air, and then at Brendan, hot on his face even through Mazda's shield. Walton teetered out of the way and then sent a retaliatory blast of ice in the direction the fire had come from.
A scream tore the air, the humming died out, and something thumped to the ground. They crouched behind their shields and waited, but no further attacks came. Slowly, the dust began to settle.
"Lotus," Steven said to his cradily, "Give us light." The light welled up in a spreading ring, pink-hued like her, until it washed over the fallen flygon.
With a sigh of relief, Brendan turned to check on Walton, who let out a plaintive whine. The ludicolo was breathing hard. His fur was full of sand and singed on one side, but he seemed okay. "I know, I'm sorry. I didn't warn you," he said, brushing sand from Walt's fur.
A metallic creak and a thud made Brendan jump. When he turned, Steven was scratching his skarmory under the chin. Brendan hadn't even realized he'd sent it out. The skarmory held out one wing at an odd angle, ice crusting the green feathers—
"Oh gods, I didn't mean to ... is he okay?"
"Oh, Thunderbird has seen worse. I'll give him a rest, though." He recalled both his cradily and his skarmory and then rounded on Brendan with a grin. "And you said you weren't much of a trainer."
Brendan flushed with pride. "Oh, I ..."
He was spared having to answer by Walton grabbing a handful of his shirt, yanking until Brendan, staggering, began to pet him and make soothing sounds. "It's probably too cold in here, right? Poor guy. I'll see you outside." Brendan recalled him and said, "We do alright. But you make it look so ..."
Steven had already drifted away, towards the narrow opening between the doors. "This is it," he said breathlessly.
"You think it's here."
Steven gestured, rings gleaming in the light. "One way to find out."
"What about the flygon?"
"It's not getting up anytime soon."
Brendan glanced back at the narrow, sand-choked tunnel they'd entered from. "It won't be able to get out. It's trapped here."
Steven shrugged. "I didn't bring any extra pokeballs. Did you?"
Oh, of course. Brendan patted his pockets, grinning when he finally felt one tucked in a pouch of his camera harness. He moved closer, wary even though the flygon lay still. It was smaller and paler than the ones he'd seen before, the antennae more pronounced. Maybe they had spent more of their lives underground when the temple was built. He tapped the pokeball on the flygon's head, and it was swept inside without resistance. "I'll release it when we get outside."
"Sure, good idea. Now could you please help me with this door? It's quite heavy."
Together, they pushed the door until it creaked open to admit them. With Mazda hovering ahead to light the way, they stepped inside.
The air here felt thicker, older. Four sets of stone steps ran down to a square pit. And there in the center was Regirock, standing upright but motionless.
Steven didn't even pause, taking the stairs at a run, but Brendan froze on the top step. "Is—is it real?" He felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. After everything, he hadn't expected to open a door and find it just sitting there. As much as he trusted Steven, he hadn't even been sure he believed it existed.
He had assumed the tablets were a crude representation of the real thing, but the hulking form before them was as advertised, not like a thing carved from the earth but like something made by smashing rocks together until the remaining pieces were vaguely human-shaped. It was massive, easily a story tall, even sunk one flight of stairs down. Glyphs marked the space between its shoulders, in the middle of what might generously be called its head. Cupped in its fingerless hands was a huge, perfectly round and perfectly polished red stone.
Brendan raised the camera to his eye—only to discover that the lens had splintered in the fight with the flygon. The preview window had cracked, too, a jagged line running from corner to corner. An awful thought seized him, and he scrambled to open the side panel. Inside, the memory card was still whole and undamaged. He let out a sigh of relief.
"Hello!" Steven called up to the stone titan. "My name is Steven Stone, and I've come to set you free."
A lump rose in Brendan's throat, but he stood still and watched.
"You've been sleeping for a long time. Now, I'm calling on you to serve once again." Steven waited several long moments and then reached to touch one of its marbled legs. There was no reaction at all. "Regirock, can you hear me?"
Mazda drifted to investigate the corners of the room.
Steven began to circle the inert Regirock, calling out to it with less and less conviction. Then he shrugged off his rucksack and pulled out a pokeball. Oh, of course, he'd been saving his. Steven drew back his arm, and then in a perfect arc … the pokeball bounced off the rock face with a hollow
tok.
As Steven picked up the scuffed ball and examined it, Brendan made his slow way down the steps. As if remembering for the first time that Brendan was there, Steven glanced up at him and said, "Well, I hardly expected to catch it on the first try, but …." He smiled, but his tone was affronted. "The ball didn't even open."
"Maybe it's not the real thing?" Brendan offered. "Maybe it's just a sculpture. Like an altar?"
"With that level of security leading up to it? No." Steven shook his head, looking pained. "There must be a way to wake it up. Something we're missing." He turned and, catching his own eyes reflected on the surface of the red orb, broke into a smile.
Beside him, Brendan blanched. "Maybe we should wait for Har—"
Reaching up, Steven laid hands on either side of the orb. "It's warm," he said, surprised. Then he easily lifted it off and brought it down to eye level.
There was no noticeable change in Regirock. Brendan thought perhaps he felt a tremor in the floor, but it was gone so quickly he decided he must've imagined it. Steven's only reaction was a slight frown.
"The clarity really is amazing. You can practically see through it." His face brightened then, and he knelt to tuck it carefully into his rucksack. "I'm sure Harrison will have plenty of thoughts on this."
"Whether you want them or not," Brendan agreed.
Steven smiled, and some of the tightness eased from Brendan's shoulders.
"Let's see what he has to say about some of these markings. Take some time to clear our heads." Brendan waited a moment and then added gently, "No one expects you to figure out everything right away. I don't think the big guy is going anywhere."
"No, of course. You're right. We should go back before Harrison gives us up for dead."
"Definitely," Brendan said, more forcefully than he'd meant to.
They started back up the stairs, Brendan taking the lead and Steven trailing after with his head hanging. In the middle of the staircase, he stopped and cast a longing look back at Regirock. "You know," he said, "there is one more thing I could try. You don't have a pocket knife, do you?"
Brendan reached for it automatically, pausing to wonder why he wanted it only when it was already in his hand. Steven's expression was so expectant that Brendan couldn't deny him.
"Perfect. Thank you, Birch."
With methodical calm, Steven descended the steps one more time, his back straight and his head high. He knelt between Regirock's feet, and for a long time, he simply stared up at it. Then he flicked open the blade and wiped it carefully on the hem of his shirt.
The moment before he raised his hand, Mazda cried out in alarm.
Steven turned up his left palm and carved a line across it as if he were drawing a picture. By the time Brendan made it down the stairs, the cut was welling up. Steven squeezed his fist over one of Regirock's stone feet until a trickle of red hit the dust.
Brendan and Steven both held still to watch for signs of movement. For one wild moment, Brendan half-expected Regirock to groan and extend its arms down to Steven.
When it was clear it wouldn't, Brendan dropped to Steven's side, fumbling in his pockets for something to stop the bleeding. "I can't believe you did that. I hope it doesn't get infected."
"The first aid kit is in my backpack," Steven said. When Brendan moved for it, he added, "I can get it."
In silence, Brendan watched him take out cleansing wipes and gauze, wincing as he wrapped the injured hand. Finally he said, "Steven … why'd you do that?"
Steven wiped the blade clean before snapping it shut and handing it back. "Well, now I can say I tried everything, can't I?"
—
Brendan had never been happier to feel sunshine on his face. Sprawling on the rocks, his pokemon soaked up the morning's first rays. He smiled to see Walton in particular looking more relaxed, tucked against Henry, his tropius. But Brendan couldn't help sneaking glances at Steven, who leaned in the shade with his phone to his ear, nodding and frowning. The cliff loomed many stories above him, unremarkable and unwelcoming with the doors shut and the rock slab back in its original place.
"What do you think happens next?" he asked Harrison. "Is this the end of our little treasure hunt?" It was a sad thought, but at the same time …. Even at a distance, he could see the white of the gauze wrapped around Steven's hand.
He needs a break.
Harrison didn't answer, utterly absorbed in his laptop screen, where he'd pulled up the pictures Brendan had taken of that final door.
With a sigh, Brendan turned his eyes toward the red sand stretching to the horizon. The dunes looked flat except for the odd bit of scrub or stone, but he knew that, below the surface, dozens of trapinch churned the sand, creating worlds of their own. And below that … Regirock still waited.
Steven wanted to wait to reveal their discovery to the press. Harrison had grumbled, but Brendan was privately pleased to keep it their secret for now. Maybe Regirock would be waiting for another five hundred years. Maybe it should.
Brendan touched the new ball on his belt, wondering if the flygon felt a difference between that stasis and waiting inside a clay seal for what must've been several thousand years. He'd decided to release it when they were ready to leave; he wanted to be far away when it came to. And at the same time …. He wondered how much the desert landscape had changed while it had waited deep below the earth. Would it awaken to a world it still recognized?
"Groudon's eye," Harrison burst out.
"What?"
"The orb, that has to be it. That's what it says. Right here." He held up the laptop, but the thing was more rubberized armor than screen, and Brendan couldn't see the details from where he sat. Besides, by now he knew better than to get too invested in Harrison's first translations.
"If it has a name, there are bound to be other texts that reference it," Harrison continued, but Brendan tuned him out. Steven was coming back, a thunderous look on his face.
"Are you okay?" Brendan asked.
"They attacked Ridge Access. They couldn't have picked a worse time to make a mess of things."
"What? Who?"
"ORCA, Magma—it doesn't matter. They're all a bunch of thugs." He dropped onto a rock with a frustrated sigh. "I'll never understand some people."
Brendan looked to Harrison, whose expression was unreadable. "Wait, so … what does that mean?"
Steven said flatly, "I have to go back to Rustboro. The media is having a field day with this, and someone has to smooth things over. I'd rather stay here, but …." He thumped his uninjured fist on his leg. "It feels like every time we make a little progress, something like this happens."
"Just as well," Harrison said. "This stuff doesn't translate itself. And I need some sleep in a real bed."
"Maybe … rest would be good for all of us," Brendan said. "As much as I hate to leave without knowing …."
Steven turned toward him with such sudden intensity that Brendan stopped short.
"But I've got you as my eyes on the ground, right, Birch? I'll make sure you and Harrison get whatever equipment you need, of course. But we can't give up, not now that we're this close."
When Brendan opened his mouth, his protest not yet fully formed, Steven spoke in a softer voice. "Brendan. Why do you think I chose you? You're an explorer, like me."
It wasn't true. Brendan had been
scared down in that tunnel. He would be alright not knowing the answers if it meant not going back there.
But Steven must've seen something else in him. Brendan had once watched him pick geodes from among the ordinary rocks, knowing which to leave and which would split neatly to reveal a glittering core. Steven was looking at him now like he could see what was written on his heart, and he smiled in anticipation of Brendan's answer. Whatever he saw, that was who Brendan wanted to be.
