Pokémon krookodile tears [threeshot]

[Spiteful Murkrow]

Heya, swinging by for a story that had caught my eye in the past but I’d just never gotten around to in the past. I know nothing about this one other than that it apparently used to be part of Envy of Eden before getting spun off, so let’s just jump right in and see where things are going:

first gift

Spoiler: Line-by-Line

Also, FYI but your linked art is down and you should update the link to point to a fresh image host whenever you have the chance.

They don’t bind you when they take you to your judgment, and you’re grateful for the dignity that affords you. Besides, you know that even if you wanted to run, there’s nowhere for you to go. Without Nali you would stray from the path and quickly fall to the sun, no doubt. Without the sanhim, you would surely be able to live, but the shame would fester at your insides until the day you died.

Well, I see that our protagonist is doing well™ at the moment. Though has he been sentenced to bake to death under the desert sun, or…?

The sun had just been peeking over the horizon when your group had started, and as the grasslands turn to sand beneath your feet, the shadows grow long and the winds slow. Despite your apprehension, despite your shame, it’s impossible to see these lands as anything but beautiful. Beyond the Southern Stones where you’d been born, the river washed into the grasslands; thick marshes buzzed with life. The landscape was broken up by craggy, overturned stones, but beyond that, the land was flat to the horizon, like a river’s stone run smooth.

The ‘Southern Stones’, huh? Given the title, I wonder if we’re somewhere around Route 4 right now and if so, if that’s the place that Castelia used to be.

This far from home, the ground forms dunes undulating across the horizon, looming ever-larger as they snake into the distance. The land beneath your feet is ground to a fine, orange powder that shifts as you stumble through it. The land that holds your judgment feels softer somehow, even as shame curdles in your chest.

Whelp, I think that confirms that we’re on Route 4 right about now.

Nali croons something to the sanhim, pointing with one spike-studded arm towards the horizon. The sanhim nods and adjusts course in response to the maractus’ advice, and the two of them plod on in shared silence. You trail behind them, hunched against the bright sun. The sanhim’s ceremonial cloak is a deep red; as the grass becomes more and more sparse and the oranges of the desert are all the remain, he remains the lone flower. Your gaze traces downward, to where his staff makes circular imprints, in even sync with his footprints, and then further down the line to Nali. The maractus bobs evenly, the swings of her arms almost exaggerated, placing one stubby foot in the direct center of the sanhim’s sandalprint each time.

So our protagonist is human, or…? Though if nothing else, there’s definitely a human accompanying him right now.

Nali you have known your entire life. She’s young as far as maractus go, only fifty and barely up to your waist. You’ve been told stories of how she taught you how to walk—the bright pinks of her flowers were too tempting, and she would proudly take one step backwards and another until you finally crawled after her.

She watched you when you were young. You swallow past the uncomfortably tight knot in your throat. She didn’t have to come here today. The sanhim knows the way, even if Nali knows the shortcuts. And between you and the sanhim, you could’ve carried enough water for the both of you. But you suspect she came for you, and that knowledge gives you the strength to keep walking after her.

Okay, our protagonist is human. Though I never considered how long Maractus could live, but the “only fifty” would indeed check out with some cacti species like saguaros where they can casually live to be triple that age.

The dunes grow taller and closer; they cast long shadows and tower over you by the time you finally reach your destination. Lost in a walking trance, you don’t notice when Nali chirps something, and you crash into the sanhim’s extended arm. And then you look up. What you thought was a great dune shifts and sways, and then sand begins to cascade down its base as the peak stirs. Red shards flash silver in the sunset as the earth stirs to life, and with a lazy tailflick the biggest krookodile you’ve seen in your entire life emerges, the gap between her yawning jaws as large as you are tall.

Well, time to find out whether or not this protagonist is going to be a fakeout one, since… uh… yeah, I’m pretty sure that this isn’t a good sign for his life expectancy at this rate.

“Samira,” the sanhim says solemnly, while Nali bows low next to him. “We have brought Baku of the Southern Stones for your judgment.”

The sands around Samira’s legs shiver as well, and another krookodile emerges, staring haughtily down at you. This one is closer to regular size, its wedged head as large as your torso and its body twice your height, but your heart still catches in your throat—when you cast your gaze around the dunes, you see dozens of pairs of beady black eyes peeking back from the sand. There is a low, vibrating hiss. You can’t tell from where.

Oh, so Samira is the equivalent of an Alpha Krookodile. I didn’t pick up on that one, but I suppose I should’ve realized something was up when Samira’s jaws were described as big as the protagonist.

“His tongue is heavy and his ears are young,” the sanhim explains in response. “As such I must use the dancer’s tongue for him to understand in full, and he must do the same to be heard. Forgive us the disrespect. Were it anything but asking your judgment, we would make do without it, but I fear he will only feel like justice is dealt if his words are also heard.”

He waits for a moment. Another hiss, this one higher-pitched; the sanhim’s head tilts to the krookodile on the left. “Yes. That is likely part of why this happened. I cannot disagree.”

Oh right, there’s multiple languages that are used by Pokémon in EoE. A little surprised that the sanhim can hold a conversation in this fashion, but I suppose that N’s ability to comprehend Pokémon is a bit more widely distributed in this setting. Maybe.

I do think your paragraph is a bit dense, to the point that it likely makes sense to consider whether or not to format it as two smaller ones.

Samira does not look at you. Slowly, impassively, she turns her head to the krookodile that emerged beside her and growls something in a low, vibrating note. The smaller krookodile’s claws twitch in a short, gesticulated response, and then Samira turns to the sanhim and hisses. Nali chimes in then, and you watch mutely as the maractus waves her arms and chirrups in turn.

Finally, the sanhim turns to you. “She wants to hear your words, Baku,” he says. His face is unreadable. “She wants to hear why you did such a thing.”

Protag: “Er… I could kinda use a reminder right now.” ^^;

With trembling legs, you walk forward until you’re standing before Samira. Each of her inhalations is large enough to pull your hair forward; each exhale cloaks you in a warm, moist breeze. You manage a shaky bow.

What you want to say is, I’m sorry. What comes out instead is: “Greetings, oh great one, Samira of the Sands.” When you pull up the respectful greeting that the sanhim passed to you, your voice finally quavers.

Samira:

Protag: “... Right, of course she wouldn’t appreciate that.”

Samira blinks back, unimpressed.

Why you did such a thing.

It isn’t an answer that you’d like to admit.

On the winter solstice of each year, the peoples of the desert gather in your home in the south, along the banks of the river. From the northern foothills marches the darumaka troop; from the eastern plains comes the sonder of maractus. The krookodile must come from the western dunes, although the way they rise and vanish into the earth makes their movements impossible for you to track. The solstice is a time for coming together and growing apart: two of the desert peoples bring the relics of the Dragonmother, which they have safeguarded throughout the year; when the night is over, the relics are passed to their neighboring peoples, to be guarded for the next year. The same, too, is done with the desert’s children—those who wish to take a companion and stay in the oasis of the Southern Stones are invited to do so.

I’m going to guess that the underlined is supposed to be stuff from Relic Castle. Does that include the Tao stone that’s in there, or…?

This was your tenth solstice. You were old enough. So when the sun touched the edge of the sky and it came time for the children to gather, you stepped forward alongside the other children of your clan with pounding ears, trembling hands clutched around a berry. You waited as two darumaka toddled past, their footprints briefly glowing orange in the sunset sands, and your excitement slowly faded to dread as they paired off. Mila beamed, bending down and offering her berry to a sputtering darumaka; when the two young maractus filed past solemnly, they went to Aruno and Harana while you stood still like a statue, your unclaimed berry suddenly like a stone that threatened to pull you under. Then came the sandile—just the one this year—and you were the last child.

The other five were already sharing their meal together; there was just you left; there was no one else for it to choose. It slipped close to you, its short legs wobbling as if overcompensating for the firmness of the ground, and you saw its nostrils flare as it inhaled the scent around your hands. The sandile leaned in, dark eyes gleaming—

—And then it turned away.

Another paragraph that seems too long. Though the protag’s misdeed was catching a Sandile without its consent, wasn’t it?

You took half a step after it, but the sanhim’s hand was on your shoulder, firm. “This was her choice,” he said, a pang of regret in his words. Was that pity? “You must respect that, Baku.”

Yup, feeling pretty confident about that prediction right about now.

The rest of the celebration felt grim. You watched the familiar sight as an outsider while everyone chattered and danced and ate. Utamo, the weaving elder of your village, cracked his stern lips into a smile as one wizened hand roved over the silvered hide of a darmanitan, marveling at the new rivers that time had carved in both of their skins. Nali grabbed Harana and her newfound maractus by the hands and introduced her to the other maractus, and four of them marveled at the stack of fruits laid out on the festival table. Your aunt Livari, toddler on her hip and Mila at her side, translated the desert tongue for her daughter from the darumaka who had chosen her.

And all the while you festered, silent, while one thought crystallized: that sandile hadn’t known what it was doing. That was the only reason it hadn’t chosen you. And it had been close—it’d leaned in, after all. As the night wore on, the pit in your stomach only grew. Could you be lonely like this for an entire year? When the sun rose, your clan would return to the south, with five new children. Five, not six. Everyone was already whispering, surely, about foolish Baku who couldn’t even get a pokémon if he was the last boy in the plains.

No. It had been so close. It hadn’t known any better. If you just could make it see—

I take it that this happened well, well before the events of EoE given how much control the Pokémon have over whether or not they get trained by humans, which I understand they… uh… don’t have in EoE proper.

The courage finally filled you when they were gathering themselves to leave. You chased after it, feet pounding on the reeds by the bank. It moved with an almost exaggerated slowness through the river, trailing behind the adult krookodile; together, their scales formed a glistening streak of red that moved upstream.

“Wait!” you shouted, and then a krookodile’s head snapped towards you, beads of saliva dripping from its maw. And in that moment, despite the enormous creature in front of you, you noticed the lack of stones beneath your feet, the trampled grasses around you, and you realized what you had done.

Oh, so that’s what our protagonist’s big no-no was. Yeah, this is really different from how I understand EoE’s state of affairs to work.

Your arms fall slack to your sides now as you look up at Samira. You had miles and miles of desert to plan your defense and this is all you can think about. “I don’t have a defense,” you say quietly. “I didn’t realize I had left the Southern Stones. I didn’t realize I had set foot on the Dragonmother’s Gift.”

The words come more easily than you’d expected, once you understand what actually must be said. It had all happened so quickly: the sanhim had declared that because the lands were guarded by the krookodile, they would be your judge instead of him. The other humans you could convince, maybe, but not this ancient creature who stands before you, already older than you’ll ever be. Your only defense is the truth, and for you it is paper-thin.

This place totally is paved over in the present day because ‘Lmao, tradition, who needs that?’, isn’t it? /s

Samira shutters one red eyelid solemnly, and then the other, and then turns her head back towards the krookodile at her side—that one must be the one who found you, you realize belatedly. At one point, Nali puffs up her chest and chimes in; both of the krookodile turn to look at the maractus with ponderous eyes. They converse too quickly for you to understand, and finally, Samira straightens and hisses back at the sanhim.

The sanhim’s shoulders seem more slouched than usual. You imagine for a moment that it’s from the solstice ceremony, when the leader of the darumaka pressed the Dragonmother’s white relic into his hands. Surely the stone was so heavy that it began to press him into the earth. All that’s left is for you to wait with bated breath before the sanhim passes back the translation. When he does, it is like his face is carved from stone.

“They have heard your plea. The grasslands beyond northern banks are sacred grounds, the last gift from the Dragonmother to the desert peoples. Among the krookodile, to tread on them means death, but Samira recognizes that the old stories may have been forgotten for us in the south.”

Oh, so the Tao stone is a part of these rites. Though things are sure looking grim for our protagonist right now. Especially with how I’m sure death sentences are handed down among Sandile line ‘mons considering how their IRL counterparts deal with each other…

Your ears burn with shame: that is a kindness she assumes of you. You’d learned the lessons when you were young. The Southern Stones were for you and yours, but every child knew not to cross the river.

“That much is understood when considering what must be done next.” The sanhim swallows, and even through his stern mask you can see the beginnings of anguish. “To Samira and her kind, it is clear that we of the Southern Stones have failed in raising you to respect the ways of this land. So she proposes this: they will raise you instead, and teach what we could not.”

Oh hey, it’s like that anime episode with the Kangaskhan and that one kid raised by them, except not played for laughs.

The weight of his words crash in on you all at once, and your composure drops immediately. They will take you? But you need your home, and your friends, and—“Father, please,” you croak.

Oh, so that’s who the sanhim is here. I have to wonder how the sanhim truly feels about all of this at the moment.

The sanhim’s face wrinkles, but he does not falter. “You will be permitted to visit on the solstice, and at that time your judgment will be reassessed, but your lesson must be learned.” He swallows once again. “She will return for you at sunrise. So shall it be.”

Yeeeeah, I can already tell he feels different internally but is going along with this because “something, something duty”.

All eyes turn to you. Your eyelids suddenly sting when you blink, and the dunes blur.

“So shall it be,” the sanhim repeats expectantly.

You shouldn’t have done it. That much is clear. You want to scream and beg for your innocence, to explain to Samira that the people of the Southern Stones were not to blame. Your father, the sanhim, please, spare him the humiliation of having to return home to the people he leads empty-handed, because his own son could not follow in his footsteps.

“So shall it be,” you echo instead.

Well, that’s quite a downer opening right there.

You would later realize that Samira offered you a kindness—krookodile prefer to travel at night, when the baking sun could not pierce their scales and warm their blood. But they waited to set out until sunrise. Perhaps the kindness was for the sanhim instead, but all you know in the moment is that the two of you can spend one last night beneath the stars.

Ah yes, when kindness wraps right around into unintentional cruelty. I get the feeling that will be happening a few times in this story since… yeah, humans are a bit different from Krookodile in natural needs.

Nali has wandered off into the moonlight; you can only barely see her hazy outline, silvery and lilting against the dunes. So that just leaves you and the sanhim.

Here, in the firelight, with his cloak draped across both your shoulders, he’s just your father again. He twists his fingers around one another like he’s trying to tie a knot with his knuckles, and he stares into the fire even as you tend it with a small stick.

Yeah, I’ll just take that as a sign that daddy’s also feeling torn up over leaving his kid to a bunch of sand crocs for at least a year.

“I didn’t mean it,” you say at last. Your voice cracks. He has to know this, if nothing else. You can’t imagine what he thinks of you now, and you don’t want to, but you need him to understand: you know you shouldn’t have done it. You know you did something monstrous. You can be better. You will be better. It wasn’t his fault.

“I know, little flurry,” he says, and he pulls you a little closer. “I know.”

The fire pops and shifts. You don’t have anything else to say. Everyone knows you didn’t mean it, and yet here you are.

I mean, the alternative is being at war for a while with the desert crocs at minimum, so… yeah, daddy has some good reasons for going along with this, even if it hurts.

A weak smile cracks his lips and he says, “This is a lesson. Not a punishment.”

Samira: “No, no, just because he’s not getting the fullness of what his deed deserves and becoming lunch doesn’t mean that this isn’t a punish-”

Sanhim: “Samira, please.” >.<

You stare glumly at your knees. Even with the fire to your front and his warmth to your sides, you still feel cold.

His grip tightens encouragingly on your shoulders when he continues: “Samira is an old friend. I have known her since I was younger than you are now. She once took your aunt Livari as her companion, and journeyed across the sands into our stones each week to see her and seek her company. Did you know that?”

He’s prodding you to answer, but you can’t make the words come.

Not to be discouraged, he continues: “She will be kind to you, little flurry. She will make sure you do not melt. And she taught my sister so many things. Imagine all the sights you’ll see with the krookodile, Baku. When we meet again you’ll have so much to tell me! The dunes are a beautiful place, and you’ll have so many adventures.”

Wait, I just realized, but little flurry? Did the protagonist’s people originate from up in the mountains up north, or…?

“I don’t want adventures.” You sniffle. “I want you.”

His smile fades, and he grows silent. Then, wordlessly, he pulls you into his arms and holds you close to his chest. His chin presses your curls down tight to your head, and you grab his forearms, clutching them fiercely against you. You bury your face in the insides of his wrists, inhaling his scent with shaky gasps, and bite back tears.

Once again:

“Oh, little flurry,” he whispers huskily into the crown of your head. When he swallows, you can feel his throat contract. “Do you know when I first fell in love with your mother?”

Wordlessly, you shake your head.

“We were so young, barely your age. On the winter solstice, during the night, it snowed. It was a truly beautiful sight to wake up to in the pink sunrise that followed. Everything was so soft, and the air was so still.” Dimly, you’re aware of how he’s gently rocking you back and forth, marking the rhythm of his words between you. “I found her in the dawn with her hands cupped around the Dragonmother’s black heart, the stone covered in snow, her body angled so her shadow could hide it away from the sun. She turned to show it to me, and when she did she was so gentle that not one flake melted, or even moved. I remember the way her voice lilted when she said that the way the stone embraced the snowfall made her think the white and black could be reunited, if only for a moment.”

Even though you can’t see his face, you can hear his smile. “I was foolish even then, Baku, though as a boy I thought I was wise. I proudly asked her if she knew that the snow would melt no matter where she put it, that this stone would always be black. Instead of scorning me where I stood, she told me the story of Sun Sister and the Three Gifts. Do you remember that one?”

Oh, so that’s why the Sanhim is addressing his child as ‘little flurry’, since based off this backstory, I take it that he used to live someplace up closer to around Icirrus, which would explain the whole ‘black stone’ bit there.

Though is there a Meinfoo/Druddigon/Golett flavor of this story somewhere up north as well, then?

You remember it. You even remember when your mother told it to you herself. And you shouldn’t be wasting time on stories now, not when the time you have left is so strictly measured. But an aching part of you wants to hear the familiarity of the words, to curl up and close your eyes and lose yourself like Little Sister almost did. So instead you ask, “Could you tell it again?”

If he’s surprised by your answer, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he smiles, and begins speaking with the same ceremonial cadence with which he spins the solstice retellings. This time, the story’s just for you:

When the world was younger than you are now, Little Sister opened her eyes, and for the first time she was alone. She shivered; there was an emptiness in her side and a coldness in her palm. For as long as she could remember, she had held her twin sister by her side. Although the two of them had known nothing save for one another in the darkness before the world, she had been content, for there was nothing else she had known.

I feel as if that’s a bad sign for how Little Sister is faring nowadays given that she’s being spoken of in past tense repeatedly. Though I’m just realizing that this is essentially a much more dramatic and less willing version of the whole “10-year old going off and seeing the world” arc that’s omnipresent in Pokémon media.

But this time, she opened her eyes and saw a brilliant light in the sky. For a moment, she hesitated. If she chased this light and her sister returned while she was gone, would her sister then wander off to look for her? Was it not more pressing to find her only companion? But the light was so unlike anything that she had ever seen, and even as she took a step into the darkness to see where her sister had gone, she could now see her shadow cast ahead of her, framed by that light.

Perhaps, she reasoned, her sister would also seek out the light. And then the two of them would be together once more.

She’s dead in the present day, isn’t she?

So she braced herself, and for the first time, she began to walk with direction. Before long, she reached a vast chasm, one that she could not possibly cross. Seeing this, she hesitated. When the Dragonmother had given all the peoples of the world gifts, Little Sister had been forgotten. Her oldest sister had always protected her from the dark, and Little Sister had always been afraid to venture out of her sister’s shadow. But she could not hesitate now. Kneeling down, she dipped her head to the grass beneath her feet, and she closed her eyes, and she whispered, ‘Please hear me, oh great grass. I need to reach the light beyond you and use it to find my sister. Could you lend me your aid?’

Oh, the Dragonmother is the Original Dragon of this world, huh? Another one of those things that I’m very belated realizing right now.

The grass stirred at her words, and a great spirit emerged: Aranu, the First Maractus. Aranu smiled kindly at Little Sister and then plucked a flower from his head and threw it to the ground. Immediately, it sprouted into an enormous branch that grew and grew until it spanned the chasm, sturdy and strong enough for anyone to walk upon it. Thus Little Sister and the First Maractus planted the First Seeds.

Oh, so Little Sister is the originating figure for the protagonist’s tribe or whatever, huh?

She walked further, and the grasses guided her, and soon she reached a dark tunnel that even the brilliant light above could not penetrate. Her frail eyes could not guide her through the darkness, and though she strained and strained, she could see nothing. Kneeling down, she clasped her hands to her heart, and she whispered, ‘Please hear me, oh great warmth. I need to reach the light above you and use it to find my sister. Could you lend me your aid?’

The air rumbled at her words, and a great spirit emerged: Melai, the First Darmanitan. Melai smiled warmly at Little Sister and exhaled a puff of embers for her to cup in her hands. When she held it, it burst into a bright light that she could carry with her into the dark. Thus Little Sister and the First Darmanitan tended the First Flames.

Did the protagonist’s people migrate from Icirrus to around Route 4? Since they sure have a lot of things about their culture that vibe as Icirrus-isms, while at the same time, they have a mythos that I’m pretty sure is going to enumerate the various Pokémon that live around them in the desert and how they came into being.

So she entered the darkness, with the fire to light her way, until she came to a vast plain. The horizon seemed to stretch on endlessly, and yet the light was further ahead still, and plunging out of sight. Little Sister felt desperation fill her—if she lost the light now, all this would be for nothing. Kneeling down, she bowed her head to the earth, and she exhaled, and she whispered, ‘Please hear me, oh great earth. I need to reach the light in you and use it to find my sister. Could you lend me your aid?’

The earth trembled at her words, and a great spirit emerged: Zaathi, the first Krookodile. Zaathi smiled widely at Little Sister, and a tear slipped from her enormous snout. When it hit the ground, it blossomed into an enormous flood of water, so vast and powerful that it cut through the parched earth and surged towards the horizon. Thus Little Sister and the First Krookodile bounded the First River.

Ah yes, our first Krookodile Tear of the story. Considering the title, I can already tell that we’re going to be revisiting this tale a few more times in the future.

So she was borne, and at long last, she reached the end of the world. She had drawn close enough to the light that she had to thrust an arm up to shield herself, for it was brilliant. As she grew closer, though, she lowered her arm—the sound of her sister’s voice was unmistakable.

‘Sister?’ asked Little Sister. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I realized,’ replied Sun simply, ‘why we were made.’ And for a moment her sister’s brilliant light faded, and her form was revealed a little. Radiant white wings glowed brighter than anything Little Sister had ever seen. Sun smiled sadly. ‘You were made to do great things, and I, to illuminate you.’

This is a myth about that Volcarona that served as a surrogate sun during a volcanic winter, isn’t it? Since that description definitely sounds similar there.

This did not make much sense to Little Sister. ‘Can I stay with you?’ she asked.

‘Look at all the beautiful things you have seen and done.’ Sun pointed at the beautiful world that was beginning to form below them. ‘All of that without me.’

‘Beautiful things that I could not see without your light,’ Little Sister replied petulantly. ‘We should be together. That is how we were always meant to be.’

‘But if we are always together, how could you do so much? How could my light guide you?’

‘Come back with me,’ Little Sister pleaded. ‘We belong with one another.’

Sun:

Even if I’m going to go ahead and guess that this is going to turn into a Volcarona origin story in like two paragraphs.

Sun was brave and strong, but she never had it in her heart to refuse her younger sister. So she alighted. No sooner had her feet touched the earth than the radiance faded from her and her wings fell away. Little Sister was overjoyed, and held Sun close to her, and the two of them slept soundly.

For a few days, all was well. Little Sister was happy. But in the darkness, she heard a great cry of anguish. Little Sister looked back to where Sun slept, but Sun did not stir. The crying continued, and finally, Little Sister braced herself and felt her way back through the darkness again.

Little Sister:

Soon, she stumbled across a desiccated husk. She felt leathery bark crumble away beneath her hands, and she sensed Aranu’s presence beside her. The First Maractus mourned the dying of the First Tree; his sorrow was so great that all the grasses had withered away as well.

Melai soon joined them, although her face was shrouded in her shadow and even her gleaming eyes could barely illuminate the dark and the cold around them. Without the brilliant light above to guide her, the First Darmanitan could not produce flames.

Background Darmanitan: “Wait, what? No, we can produce fire perfectly fine without sunlight-”

Sahnim: “Shut up, you’re ruining a heartfelt moment with my son right now.” >_>;

But Zaathi was nowhere to be found. In the silence between Aranu’s cries, Little Sister could still hear the rushing of the river.

Heart heavy, she trudged home, and shook Sun to rouse her.

‘Sister,’ she said. ‘You were right. The world needs you. You must go be who you were meant to be.’

But Sun, tightly curled, did not stir. She had spent too much time in the earth’s embrace, and the darkness had sapped her strength. She still glowed faintly, but her body was like it had turned to stone. Little Sister shivered. The darkness was growing only colder, and Little Sister’s mind was numb with despair.

Oh, so this is the episode that the protagonist was referencing when he was wondering if he’d break down like Little Sister.

The thought of the river bearing her to the horizon, never faltering, ever constant, gave Little Sister strength for what she needed to do next. Sun would need to be returned to the edge of the world, and Little Sister would need to be the one to do it. She could not ask the others, who had already lent her so much.

So, with her sister on her back, Little Sister climbed across the vast chasm and felt her way through the dark tunnel. It took nearly all of the strength she had to reach the river, where her hardest task awaited her:

Arms trembling, Little Sister hugged Sun close, and then cast her into the river that led to the edge of the world.

Is this an “origin of the sunrise/sunset” story? Since this feels like an “origin of the sunrise/sunset” story.

Also, you sure have a knack for writing convincing-sounding folklore. Since if it weren’t for the namedrop of Pokémon species in Sahnim’s tale, it’d sound like an actual folktale from IRL.

“Little Sister and Sun love each other very much. Their cyclic dance gives us everything we know. In that moment where the sun embraces the horizon, the world is full of their color, their beauty, their joy. But it is not like that forever. That was when I understood why your mother cradled the snow.”

Yeah, I knew it. Though cute story there.

You choke back a sob.

Aaaaaand right back to depression-land we go. Even if a part of me wonders if we should’ve seen a little more of the protagonist’s inner thought process a bit more as the story was being told. Maybe. I can understand the argument that it might have taken us out of the whole “you are hearing a story relayed to you” vibe that the present version has.

“Little flurry, the things we love are only ours to hold, not to have,” he whispers into your scalp. “One day, we must let them go.”

I take it that this story was also meant for the Sahnim’s self to some extent since… yeah, that’s definitely also applicable for him at this moment.

In response, you clutch him tighter.

At some point, you fall asleep in his arms.

D’aww, how sweet-
Samira:

Right, time for that parting of ways bright and early the next day, huh?

When you awake, your father is breaking down the remains of your camp, scattering the burnt scrub brushes into the dunes, folding his cloak back up around his shoulders. He stoops carefully, slowly, but eventually his work is done. Wearily, he picks up his staff, and he is the sanhim again. “It’s time.”

What you want is to run away. Not even to save yourself; just anything to save your father the shame of having to accept this judgment you have brought upon yourself, upon him. You knew long ago that you would have big shoes to fill, but now with this stain you know you’ll never fill them. But that should be your shame to bear, not his.

Oh, so protag has also wrecked his chances of being a future sahnim from his earlier transgressions. We’re just piling on all the knife twists in this story, huh?

What you want to do is tell him all the things you wish a son could say. You want to reassure him that this isn’t his fault, that you’ll learn his lessons well, that one day he’ll be proud of you again. There’s a hollowness in your heart, but it can’t stop you from seeing the way the shame you created craters his shoulders.

What you do instead is echo, “It’s time.”

Cue the theme music:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoKluzn07eQ

Your face is like a mask. The rest of the morning blurs. Samira emerges from the sands. She exchanges quiet words with the sanhim. Nali throws her arms around your leg, her spines carefully withdrawn. You do not cry when the sanhim bids you farewell; all your tears came the night before.

Samira: “Was the depressing pop music in the background really necessary right now?”

Protag: “Look, can we just get this over with?”

The sanhim shakes his cloak out and wraps it around your shoulders. Your heart catches. This is a gift you are not meant to receive until you are a man. You look up, mouth cracked open in protest, before he says, “This cloak is not what makes me sanhim to our people, Baku; nor will it make you a leader to theirs. But what it will do is keep you warm, little flurry, and it will keep us with you.” He finishes arranging the cloak around you and takes a step back. “May the sands be kind.”

Well, not like it hasn’t already been obvious since the sequence with their last night together, but I suppose that’s a sign that for as painful as this all is, that the sahnim genuinely loves his child. I’m honestly impressed at how much you managed to communicate in between the lines in a relatively short chapter like this.

Samira circles in front of you, the fins on her back rippling in the sunrise. You look to the sanhim before you can stop yourself, and he jerks his chin forward in response.

You shouldn’t have asked him. Soon you won’t have him to fall back on. Carefully, you swing one leg over the krookodile’s waiting back—the gap between her fins is large enough for you to lay down in, so you kneel unsteadily on the slow-heaving scales. It’s cooler than you expected, rows and rows of rippling muscle, and then she plunges forward, halfway submerged in the sands. Her tail swishes out a low, sweeping rhythm.

You keep your back straight and your eyes straight ahead.

Hey, look on the bright side, protag, you get to be a badass sand croc rider for the next yea-

Protag: “Not helping right now!” >.<

Alright, made it to the end. Just need a moment to get some sand out of my eyes…

Okay, we’re good, let’s get right into highlight reel. The long and short of things is that I liked this piece, it’s a touching and haunting story where we see a child having to grapple with the consequences of a rash choice. Like yeah, the specific backdrop is quite alien and fantastical relative to everyday life or even the present day in Pokémon’s setting, but the actual emotions are still relatable and it’s surprisingly easy to put oneself into the shoes of the protagonist and let the second person PoV do its thing. The Unovan folklore you cooked up for this chapter was also top notch, like it feels very “yes, people would actually tell stories like this in pre-modern Unova”, and I hope that we’ll get to see more now that the protagonist is going to be spending at least a year chilling with Krookodile in the desert. I was also impressed at the sheer amount of information that you managed to communicate, both directly and in between the lines in a little over 5000 words. Also, while I might be a little biased, but I thought that your use of second person perspective for the narration was particularly well done.

Honestly, there were not a lot of things that stood out to me as weaknesses with this chapter. Like yeah, a part of it was me just getting really into things, but it was just genuinely a very polished chapter. If I had to force myself to pick things that I’d disagreed with, I noticed that there were some paragraphs that felt really, really long in this chapter. To the point that they made me question if they needed to be delivered in a big, continuous block like that, but there’s some degree of “my story, my style” to be had from author to author. A part of me also wonders if we should’ve seen more of the protagonist’s thought process in the sequence where his father is relaying the tale of Little Sister and the Sun to him, but I can understand the argument for not doing that in a second-person PoV story. While it makes the protagonist fade out from the chapter for a while, if we’re going full “the protagonist is you”, it does allow us to fill in the blanks ourselves in the protagonist’s place. I suppose it’s basically all a function of the extent to which you intended for the protagonist to exist as a distinct personality outside of the reader that’s sharing his/her eyes.

As you can gather from the above commentary, but I quite liked this opening chapter, @kintsugi . Like it’s obviously not a happy story at the moment, but it had a lot of love and thought put into it and it didn’t take particularly long before I started getting really engrossed into the story.

I honestly regret waiting this long to finally take a plunge on this story, and I hope to have the time to come back for the rest during this event. But until then, Happy Blitzmas, and best of luck with your continued writing endeavors.

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

Heya, coming back for the next part of this three-shot, since Blitz ends a bit earlier in the weekend than normal this year, and I figured that these chapters needed a bit of time to digest and get through. Though last time, our protagonist got drug off to live in the desert with a bunch of Krookodile for a year (probably, maybe, it might wind up being quite a bit longer than that), so let’s just pop in and see how they’re doing right now.

second gift

Spoiler: Line-by-Line

The krookodile live further in the dunes than you’d ever thought. You realize that Samira and her kind must have traveled much further than you and the sanhim, you realize. She rips through the desert, her tail leaving a great serpentine trail that slowly collapses in on itself as the sand rushes to take its place. In the morning, a low, crooning sound leaks from her lips, almost incessantly; by noon, she’s fallen silent and put herself headlong into the travel.

Small suggestion for a wording tweak there, since I thought that the “you realize” part sounded a bit smoother frontloaded to the beginning of the sentence where it’s used.

Eventually, you grow bored, and you lay yourself along Samira’s back. The sun beats down. By midafternoon, Samira’s back it is a rippling mass of heat. Although it’s stifling, you end up wrapping yourself in your father’s cloak to hide yourself from the scorching rays. The sky blurs by in a blue arc above. You trace over the dark embroidery in the cloak and vaguely wonder if it was red because of the krookodile, or if the krookodile trust the sanhim for wearing their colors.

Samira finally slows by nightfall. When you peek out above her fins, you don’t recognize the landscape. The dunes faded into an indescribable mess a long time ago. She rumbles something, and belatedly you wonder if she’s been trying to speak to you this whole time.

Samira: “*You’re not a particularly talkative one, are you?*”

Then, before you can do anything else, she plunges deep into the earth. You almost gasp—but then sand rushes around you, threatening to flood your lungs, and it’s the best you can do to hold your breath and wrap your arms around Samira’s fins. You hold your cloak as tightly as you can as the desert turns to darkness and a deluge of sand swallows you whole.

How on earth is that not going up the protagonist’s nose right now? .-.

You clutch. That’s all you can do, clutch and wait for it to end. An eternity inside of a moment later, the air clears again, but the light does not return. Samira shakes beneath you, sand rolling down her sides, but no matter how many times you blink your eyes you can’t make yourself see. There’s only scent and sound and feel. She’s moving again. The air here feels more damp somehow; faintly, over the sound of sand shedding from her tail, you can almost hear a trickle of water. But you can’t see. Your hands reach instinctively for a torch, but there’s nothing. Samira presses on beneath you, unfazed, and when she pulls herself to a halt her breaths echo in the darkness. She hisses something.

Oh, so they’re in the Relic Castle at the moment. Or at least I think that’s where Samira brought the protagonist, since I’m getting very ‘Relic Castle’ vibes.

The darkness hisses back. It must be an echo. Samira settles into place. You wait, feeling around on Samira’s back, but in the darkness she’s gone completely still. Minutes pass, perhaps hours. You can’t see your own hand in front of your face, and eventually you realize she must be letting you rest. But the weight of the day presses down on you like a stone; there’s nothing here but blackness and if you think about it too much it’ll rise and choke you, tendrils of worry and shame around your throat—

The air is cold down here, colder even than the night air above. Your father was right: the cloak will keep you warm. You clutch it close to you and fall into uneasy slumber.

Oh boy, I can already tell this will be utter murder to the protag’s circadian rhythms. ^^;

You awaken in the darkness. Samira is moving beneath you—not traveling, you decide; it’s not fast enough for that—and hissing fills your ears again. The echoes down here are louder than any cave you’ve ever been in.

Will she surface again? You wait for the deluge of sand, a warning, anything, but Samira slithers forward. They must have tunnels, you decide, and they must be enormous. You try to imagine how big they are based on the echoes.

Actually, now that you mention it, that makes me wonder how on earth anyone does see what’s going on in the Relic Castle in the Gen 5 games, since there really isn’t any illumination provided down there.

With your ears strained, you finally hear it—the hissing isn’t symmetric. Samira hisses something; the darkness hisses something back. It is different.

Ah, so there’s other Krookodile down here, too. I sure hope that they don’t have the same attitudes towards whether or not a peer can be on the menu since… uh… yeah, the protag is going to need a lot of help to stay alive for this year otherwise. ^^;

Your eyes widen uselessly with the realization. This must be where all of the krookodile stay, you realize. A conversation is chattering around you, and yet you have no idea what’s being spoken, what’s being decided. How many of them are even here? Eventually, Samira stills. Their words pepper the air around you unintelligibly.

I can already tell that that won’t remain the case during this story assuming that the protagonist survives past the first week or so. ^^;

“Hello?” you ask tentatively.

For a moment, the darkness hushes, and then the noise doubles.

Your heart thuds in your chest, and you clutch the cloak closer to yourself. They mean no harm, and yet. To hear a voice in the darkness with no body to place to it sets off a fear in you, one primal and ancient, one that you cannot control. If you could just understand what was being said here …

Baku: “(Seriously, how on earth is this all just okay with all of you?)”

“My name is Baku,” you say, finally, when you realize there’s no understanding what they’re trying to say.

What comes next is louder than a hiss; Samira’s scales shift beneath you and the bass vibration rattles up your bones.

Baku: “Um… I don’t know what that means.” .-.

Your stomach rumbles in response. “I’m hungry,” you say, trying your best not to sound plaintive. How long has it been since the campfire with your father? You don’t even remember, but the pangs in your chest suggest that you’ve simply forgotten about eating until now. “Could I eat?”

There is a lurching stab of movement as Samira slithers forward with you on top of her, and then a wet, slapping sound against her scales a few feet away from where you’re sitting.

“Was that … was that for me?”

Another rumble. This one trails off into a hiss.

Baku: “... Is that a ‘maybe’?” .-.

“Could you hiss twice if you’re talking to me?”

Silence.

Your fingers clench involuntarily around her fin. “Samira?”

She hisses twice.

Baku: “Oh, okay. But I don’t know what on earth you gave me since I can’t see it.” .-.

“Should I wait here?”

Silence.

You crawl forward on your hands and knees towards where you heard the sound. Blindly, you feel your way around on her back, biting back a scream as your palms collide with something soft and slimy. Curiously, you grab onto it; it doesn’t resist, and you pull it closer.

“Is this for me?”

Baku’s holding a hunk of raw flesh right now, isn’t he?

No response. It isn’t fair. You were supposed to learn the desert tongue in your own time, with your own people. The sandile who’d rejected you was supposed to teach you patiently, your father by your side to translate, all the elders of your village to guide you. Not this.

Hesitantly, you pull the thing close to your nostrils and inhale. It doesn’t smell like anything you could recognize.

That… probably is a sign that you should wait until you can see whatever you’re about to put into your mouth there. ^^;

“Samira?”

She doesn’t do anything else. You exhale slowly. In the dark and silence, you can feel your heartbeat throbbing in your ears. Even without words, you know what she’s trying to say. Your father apologized for using the human tongue with her in front of you, and you should as well. It is a disrespect to flaunt the Dancer’s tongue in front of those who cannot speak it.

Oh, so human speech is ‘Dancer’s tongue’, huh? I wonder if that’s meant to imply that it’s connected to Meloetta somehow.

“I’m sorry,” you say. “I don’t know the desert tongue yet.”

No response. You imagine it instead: Then you must learn it quickly.

You exhale shakily. This is a lesson, you remind yourself. Not a punishment.

No, this is still a punishment, just saying. Even if it’s nicer than what you rightfully deserve in their culture. ^^;

For now, your stomach growls louder than she does. You focus back on the thing in your hands. There’s nothing to lose, you suppose. Either she tried to feed you something inedible or you go to bed hungry. It isn’t reassuring logic, but it’s all you can think about as you close your eyes—stupid, despite the darkness, but you can’t help yourself—and bite.

Tiny stabs between your teeth, your gums. The taste of minerals on your tongue, quickly giving way to something softer and flaky. You chew, try to swallow, but it feels like your mouth is full of pebbles. On reflex you spit it out, and with it the coppery taste of blood—your own. It cut you.

Um… yeah, I think you have some work to do for bringing Baku up to speed if you intend for him to survive past the first week, Samira.

Not badly, you reassure yourself before you can cry, using your spare hand to clutch your father’s cloak closer to you. You aren’t hurt. The taste is familiar, despite the pain, and it takes a few more shuddering breaths for you to place it. At the solstice. This is special food, ceremony food—and that’s when you realize belatedly that perhaps it was only special in the southern stones. But before, someone must have taken the scales off of the fish for you.

I’m going to guess that that’s a Basculin that Baku just tried biting into there. Even if I wonder how on earth Samira got this in the middle of the desert.

Laying out stones in the desert to bake breads and dry fruits. Carefully harvesting from the cactus fields with Nali by your side to delicately unpick the spines from your hands when you were too eager. These are not things they would do in the dunes, you realize, thinking of Samira’s gargantuan frame and maw.

Ah yes, such are the downsides of having a crocodilian attempt to raise a human child to crocodile. ^^;

What you want to do is cry. But hunger calls louder, so silently you spit out more scales and begin carefully picking out bits of the flesh beneath the skin, where it’s softer. It’s hard to find the bones in the dark, but at the same time you know Samira would not be able to help you if you missed one. With no vision and nothing else to do, you’re able to drown yourself in the task, and your thoughts circle in a vortex as you pick the carcass clean.

Samira: “*Gee, I’d hope so. Do you have any idea how much trouble I went through to get that damn fish? I was going to get you a hunk of Blitzle, but your father insisted it’d make you sick.*”

Your father told you a story once, of a beautiful pokémon with a voice so compelling that anyone who listened would believe her. She sang so beautifully, he explained, that everyone would immediately understand what she meant, and why she meant it. And eventually, through her generosity, the Dancer’s tongue was passed on to you. That was the fourth gift that your village received, after the seeds, the flame, and the river. That one was special, because it could be shared in only one way, and only to those who listened.

Okay, yeah. The Dancer is very obviously Meloetta there. So Meloetta is the origin of human speech in this setting, or at least I think that that’s the implication there.

Can you make yourself believe that this is a lesson? Can you believe away the punishment that it seems to be? Despite the darkness you clench your eyes shut. When you open them you will have learned, you tell yourself. You have the Dancer’s tongue. With her voice, you can make your hopes reality.

Huh, interesting that’s what the “hat” of human speech is seen as among the people and Pokémon of this old-timey Unova.

You open your eyes to darkness, and a silence you do not break.

On the moonless nights back at your home, you used to go out and trace stars with your father. This one was Venent, the Watcher, with his arms outstretched. There was the Thunderer prowling across the heavens. Each star had a name, and a story, and a place.

I wonder if that’s supposed to be one of the genies there that they saw a constellation of.

If you squeeze your eyes shut, you can pretend to feel his hands on your shoulders as he carefully points your arm up to the eastern horizon. In the summer, the six stars that form Little Sister rise across the mountains. She shimmers against the milky glow of the starry river, somehow brighter than all of the stars around her; on those warm nights, she is the first to appear, and she guides her shimmering brethren on their path across the horizon.

More fantasy constellations there. I wonder if these names are based off of ones from outside Western culture, since I couldn’t obviously place counterparts with the ones that I knew.

You can almost hear your father’s voice. In the winter, she rests. This is when she holds Sun Sister close, when the skies lose their warmth. Little Sister sinks with the sun and hides behind the mountains.

You raise your hand uselessly in the darkness and count. One to six. There is Little Sister. May she journey far and return the sun to us one day.

I’m going to go ahead and guess that ‘Little Sister’ is their equivalent to the Big Dipper, since the number of stars certainly seems to match up here.

Although you know it’s foolish, you hope that halfway across the desert, your father is doing the same.

Samira resurfaces at night. You aren’t sure which night. You traced the sky, and later you’d grown hungry and she’d fed you—ten times, you reason. Perhaps more. You stopped counting.

Uh… yeah, that sounds like Baku’s been underground for a while. I assume she knows enough about humans to feed him more than one meal a day? So let’s ballpark this as ‘5 days’. ^^;

She’d shifted beneath you, stirring you from your slumber, and that was the only warning you got before she plunged bodily into the sands. You almost were washed off—you reached blindly for her tail, screaming, before you felt it smack you in the face and you managed to wrap your hands around it on reflex.

The world around you burns your eyes. The moonlight is silver and it hurts. How long were you underground, without seeing?

Baku, if you have to ask the question, you don’t want to know. Though boy this must be utterly brutal for if Samira and the gang ever surface during the daytime.

Krookodile do not mind the dark. That much you knew even before this. Most hatchlings do not see the light of day; they live safely underground in their broods until their scales harden—that is why the solstice celebration must happen at night.

You think from last night you heard three different registers: the sandile, the krokorok, and the krookodile. The krookodile are the deepest. The knowledge is hard-earned, from endless hours spent in the dark, straining, categorizing, trying to understand.

Oh, so Baku is starting to pick up on how things work with the Krookodile and their language. Though small typo there.

Now the mountains, silhouetted in the silvery glow of the moon, cut across your vision like a spear. You don’t bother saying anything—Samira will not answer you if you speak, and you don’t know what else you’d tell her anyway. Surely she must know that you are not like the rest of the brood; that your eyes were not made to piece the subterranean darkness and that when you live among them, you live blind. This was part of her lesson for you, not her punishment.

I mean, just saying, her lesson is feeling a bit indistinguishable from being a punishment there. Even if I suppose she’s displaying some baseline level of care for Baku. ^^;

You blink rapidly to help adjust. On reflex, before you can stop yourself, you try to see if you can recognize the mountainshapes here, if you feel any closer to home now that you’re above ground. You don’t, try though you might to find a familiar piece of horizon. You clutch your father’s cloak to you.

Ah, so Baku’s a long way from home right now. Duly noted.

Samira begins to move, slowly, methodically. You can tell in from the way that she travels that this time she’s doing it differently, although you can’t tell why or for what purpose—but before, she seemed to surge through the sands; now, she moves almost lazily.

You’re reminded of how you used to lounge in the river in the summertime, letting the warm waves carry you along. In time, the movement in your peripherals becomes distracting: down, in the underground caverns that the krookodile called home, the world was quiet and still. There were occasional hisses, tiny shifts in movement. Sometimes Samira would shake until you slowly climbed off of her, and then you would sit huddled in the darkness until the rasping of her scales against the cool sandstone announced her return.

So if Baku survives this stint away from his family and tribe, he’s going to be very good at picking out sounds. Duly noted.

An unfamiliar sound assaults your ears—it’s like the creek, but louder, and then all at once the dunes give way to a massive deluge of water that winds through them, white-crested rapids gleaming in the starlight. You inhale sharply. The river in the southern stones flooded sometimes in the summer, but never like this; the water seems to stretch on with no end, ripping mightily in the center and then lapping along the banks.

I’m going to assume that this is an OG area, since I can’t think of any offhand rapids around Route 4 in the games. Either that or it’s simply dried up with the ages because of climate change.

You have one moment more to appreciate the sight, and then Samira leaps into the water.

There’s no time to scream. It’s nothing like diving into sand, not for you. The water slams into your chest and flings you off of her immediately, and then you’re floating, free, sinking, tumbling—

I’ll admit, that I wasn’t expecting a Krookodile to just jump into the water there from their typing. I suppose they are crocodilians, though.

Beneath the surface the water churns. Your father’s cloak fills immediately and wraps around your limbs like rope, and no matter how much you flail you can’t propel yourself upward again. Panic seizes you when you look down and can’t even see the bottom. The river at home was no deeper than you were tall, and your father was careful to keep everyone clear if it ever flooded. You’ve never been submerged like this before, and the sensation of weightlessness combines with the massive, crushing force of the waves around you.

Cue the theme song:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yw5jkAHgME

Your lungs burn. You inhale; water floods your nostrils; you cough on reflex and water fills your throat. Overhead you can just make out the glimmering of the moon, suddenly obscured by a four-limbed shadow descending upon you. You flail desperately for her, the last bubbles trailing from your lips, but the eddy currents that she creates send you spiraling out of her grasp. Samira lunges for you but her swing goes awry; her claws rake a gash in your arm. Blearily, your throbbing vision focuses on a thin ribbon of blood trailing towards a surface you can’t reach, and then Samira’s tail collides with your ribs with bone-crushing force, flinging you upward.

Samira: “*... Right, you humans don’t have durable scales like we do. How on earth do you all even survive with bodies like those?*” .-.

The surface of the water breaks against you, and you barely manage to inhale a greedy, damp breath, desperately churning your legs to keep yourself from being forced under again. But you can’t; your strength left you long ago. You barely register the feeling of slick scales beneath you, and by then Samira is gently depositing you onto a reedy shore with her tail.

You lay on your side for a moment, curled up as small as you can before a spasming cough unfolds you. One enormous, black eye watches you with a look that you can parse as concern. A hiss cuts across your labored, damp breaths, and you startle when you realize: the sound is familiar. You’ve heard this word from Nali before.

{Alright?} she’s asking you, fixing you with a burning gaze.

Oh, so Baku is going to learn Desert tongue during the course of this story.

Baku: “I mean, I almost drowned and my arm is bleeding right now, so…”

You splutter for a moment, shaking the water from your hair.

{Alright?} she presses, and the rest of her words are unfamiliar to you. You see the hesitation burning at her; her muscles are tensed but her eyes are fixed on the bloody water that’s dripping down your arm.

You cannot answer in the Dancer’s tongue if you want her to listen. That fact cuts through even your panic and your pain. But you don’t know what other words you can say.

I take it that shaking one’s head back would similarly go over Samira’s head there, huh?

{Alright,} you respond weakly.

Samira: “*... If you say so. Come on, let’s get you back to the grounds.*”

The trip back is colder and far less wondrous. You arm throbs. The cool night air is only made worse by the dampness of your father’s cloak around you, but you hold fast to it, too tired to look at the new landscapes rushing by, petrified by the thought of it floating away in the breeze. Eventually she pulls you back beneath the surface, and you’re almost grateful for it—you don’t have to feel guilty for wasting your precious surface time on tears.

That actually makes me wonder if Samira is going to actually make Baku go through the full year living among her and her peers, since she sure vibed as being quite worried for the little human child that to her and her kind is a pest that ought to rightfully be dead.

You’re lying soggily on her back, eyes closed, sleep eluding you, when suddenly the thought strikes you and you sit upright. There’s nothing to see down here, where the krookodile gather to sleep during the day. But there’s something to hear.

You listen.

There’s a pattern in the hissing around you, if only you could figure it out. You strain to replicate that brief moment of clarity, back when you’d finally understood for a fleeting moment what Samira was trying to say, but you this time it doesn’t come. The sounds of their language washes over your ears, and eventually exhaustion overtakes you and you drift asleep.

Sounds like a reason to try and get Samira to give you a primer in how to say different things in her language, just saying.

The next sunset, Samira stirs you awake with a familiar hissing sound. You’ve heard this one before; she always seems to ask it before she moves you. Curiously, you echo it back.

She freezes beneath you, and then after a pause she repeats it. There’s something different here, something you can’t quite place or replicate—it echoes in a more sibilant way and the pauses feel less protracted.

Yeah, I figured. But let’s see how this one goes.

“Ready,” you croak. Your vocal chords twinge with disuse. “That’s what you were trying to ask me, right?”

This time you understand the difference in her response. {Ready?}

{Ready.}

I noticed that Samira just let that bit of Dancer’s tongue slide there. Guess she really is more understanding than that first night initially made her come off.

Your father was right: there are many beautiful things to witness out in the dunes at night, sights you’ve never dreamed of. You grow to crave these moments, each of them wondrous in their own way, but you treasure each of them for what you learned.

With Samira you watch the glowing red lines of a darmanitan troop steadily cross the northern plains, little more than motes of glowing light from a distance. At first you take them for stars, but you quickly learn that the orange glow sets them apart from the rest. “Darmanitan?” you query, and she repeats it back to you in the desert tongue.

Oh, so Baku is going to get a language lesson from Samira. Cute. I had a feeling that something like this might happen.

(You wonder briefly if the darmanitan have the tale of Little Sister, if in their culture the First Darmanitan is held in the same high regard as she is for you. You hope so, but when you pose the question to Samira, you must use the Dancer’s tongue, and so she offers you no response.)

I’d frankly be shocked if those stories were the same in their culture, just saying.

You fish again. This time you’re safely tucked to one side as she gathers an enormous treasure trove of fish in her jaws, and you learn many words for thanks.

Snerk. I see that Samira has her priorities straight there.

She takes you to enormous spires of sandstone, weathered into layers and with as many colors as the cloaks you used to help weave, towering even taller than you and her stacked together. There, she introduces you to the vulture queen, a young but proud mandibuzz who pecks curiously at your skull before a warning hiss sends her scooting back.

Also a snerk there.

{Caution,} she says, to both the mandibuzz and to you. And then, just to you, on the way home: {Your father’s-sister was injured in this way.}

(Aunt Livari hadn’t mentioned this, but once more you have no words to ask the question, so you bury it away for the time being).

Huh. Interesting that Samira knows things about Baku’s family that weren’t shared with him. I wonder if there will ever be a time when he can reciprocate.

In the nights you travel with Samira and see great things. Most of the time she swims through the desert, her tail churning through dried earth, you on her back. She seems to seek no destination, no company. During these times the world is peaceful; she’s so large that when she’s at her full speed, her body barely rocks, and if you don’t peer over the edge of her back you’d barely know she was moving at all. But during these times the rush of wind on her back is so loud that when you speak, she can’t hear you, and you’re left to your own thoughts as the world rushes by. You wish you could ask her purpose but you don’t have the words.

Boy, I sure hope that Baku holds tight during those rides, since falling when Samira’s going that fast sounds like a fast way to get badly injured. ^^;

During the days you rest with them underground. Samira holds council. As you learn more and more words you realize how important she is to them—she is a sanhim of sorts, although you struggle to follow the conversations. You cling to her scales in the darkness and try to guess at what they’re saying, gradually piece together a slapshod vocabulary made up of things you’ve heard them say. At first it’s slow. These words you gather and hoard greedily—greetings, ways to count fish, descriptions of traverses across the desert—but no matter how hard you try, you cannot form the question you want to ask.

Am I learning what you want?

But can they count past four or twelve? /s

Samira: “*Just saying, if you have to ask the question, you clearly haven’t learned it yet.*” -_-;

The nights begin to blur together interminably. Halfway through the summer, when the days grow long—you and Samira must spend most of your time under the sands—you find yourself longing for the sensation of harsh warmth on your skin, the tingling feeling of imminent sunburn, soft light against your closed eyelids. You miss the others, of course, and above all your father, but you’d learned to miss them in the quiet nights you’d spent alone.

You’d expected that feeling of loss, and learned to codify it, and treasured their faces carefully so that you could still hold them tight even when you went far. But you’d forgotten to hold fast to the simpler aspects of your old life, and now you can only catch the sun on the edge of each night, a red orb peering over the horizon while Samira runs further away.

This paragraph felt a bit long and like it might be worth formatting as two smaller ones. I gave an offhand suggestions for a place where it might make sense to do so.

You spend many starlit nights with Samira. She’s quite talkative for a krookodile of her age, you learn. After a few centuries, many of them simply burrow their way underground, far enough away from the young ones who still disturb the earth. And Samira certainly loves to answer your questions, so long as you ask them in the desert tongue.

Oh, so she’s the equivalent of an old gossip, huh? :V

{Do you have many …} you trail off. “Children?” you ask. “Hatchlings?”

{We call our young hatchlings,} she says in response, carefully churning through a dune before plunging the two of you down. Tonight there is a soft, warm breeze. {And yes. I have many. All of them are older than you.} She pauses to consider. {Most of them are older than your father.}

Oh, so Samira had many children, but she hasn’t had a whole lot of them lately.

You struggle to think of the right phrasing. {Is that uncommon?}

{Perhaps. Krookodile have children when the desert can bear it. We live long. It would not do if there were too many of us.}

That actually makes me wonder how on earth they determine whether or not “yes, there’s room for more children” from their surroundings, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into how Samira and her peers themselves are aware of their role in the local ecology and how they proactively attempt to work around it.

You think that through while she swims through the sands. {What is that word you call me? What is its … meaning?}

A low rumble shakes her, one that you’ve come to associate with amusement. {I forget how quickly hatchlings become distracted. Always something new for you. Very well. Your name is hard to pronounce without the Dancer’s tongue. Because of who we are—we take great care to ensure that there is never more or less of our number each year—our names are passed down. When we lose one of our own, the new hatchling takes that name. Thus we remember our burden, and what our burden is to the desert.}

Oh, so they have their own version of population planning. Though that makes me wonder whether or not they have a conception of a ‘census’ given that they would need a way to enumerate how many children they can have to replace those of their number that died off in the intervening year.

It does make me wonder how they handle larger-scale dieoffs, since you’d think that while rare, there would be situations where they simply couldn’t have enough children to replace all the losses they took in a preceding situation.

You understand where Samira’s going with this. {But whose name would I take?}

{There was not one for you. There was not one for your father’s-sister, either. I named her Fangkeeper, for she had teeth like us, though they were not in her jaw.}

Oh, so Baku’s being added wholecloth into their society, huh?

{My father had a name for me. As a parent. To make me feel like I was his.} The sentence is difficult; Samira has yet to teach you the words you would need to encompass those feelings. You understand Baku has no translation, but you try to string together the words: {Small Snow. You could use it if you want.}

Oh, so this is the equivalent of the ‘Little Flurry’ name that the sahnim called Baku last chapter.

{Small Snow.} She rolls it around, thinking, and then she rumbled the word she’s called you before. {Your father’s name is one he made for you. I will not steal it from him.} She chuffs the sound that you think is your name again. {So I made one. You are so named because you have no fangs.}

You wait expectantly.

{Never in my life have I had to name something. This is new to me. I consulted the other krookodile and they thought this name fit you well.}

“Nofangs?”

So wait, Baku is going to be called ‘No fangs’? ^^;

{Precisely.}

Well then, duly noted.

Samira: “*I was also considering ‘Toothless’, but it didn’t fit quite as well and the others said it was unoriginal for some reason.*” ^^;

In the weeks before the solstice, you finally remember to count the days—the nights are long again, and even though the underground was never warm in the summer, now the chill has settled into your bones. But you’re used to it now, and you’ve learned to sleep like a sandile, curled safely under Samira’s foreleg where her warmth can protect yours.

{My aunt,} you begin. {Fangkeeper. How did she become hurt?}

Ah yes, it’s storytime.

{She looks unhurt now,} Samira observes, which you realize doesn’t have the intonation-hiss for an answer. An observation instead. {I forget how quickly your kind heals. We live much longer, and hold our pain for longer as a result.}

I’ll admit, I didn’t see that one coming. So physically harming a Krookodile is SRS BSNS, huh?

{You warned me to be careful,} you remember. {Or else I would be like her.}

There’s a dull rumbling sound behind you, and you realize it’s Samira’s tail lashing across the floor. Anger. Instinctively, you recoil, before she asks a question of her own. {How did your father tell you the First Mandibuzz lost her crown?}

Oh, so that’s what the head feather and bone are called in Samira’s language.

You rack your brains, but you don’t remember. So Samira tells you:

Mandibuzz was one of the First Peoples as well. Her name was Nekya, and she had a long, beautiful crown of feathers on the top of her head. The feathers were a gift from the Dragonmother herself, plucked from her wings to protect Nekya from the harsh talons of Death. For Nekya had a solemn duty: when someone died, Nekya was to descend upon their body and devour their heart, so that it would be freed from the corpse and be born once more.

Well, scratch that, we’re getting into mythology now. Though I wonder if Nekya looked more like a bearded vulture appearance-wise.

This was the cycle that Nekya knew, and she served the Dragonmother faithfully. Though she was kind, many of the First People’s still feared Nekya shadow overhead, for they knew what happened when she drew near. Only the Dragonmother did not shy from her, because the Dragonmother could not hate her children.

So the Taos are seen as the local creator deity. Duly noted, there.

For this reason, when it came time for the Dragonmother to pass, Nekya hesitated in her duty for the first time. The Dragonmother curled up and entered the eternal slumber; the desert waited for her to be returned to life. But Nekya descended; seeing her mother in such a state, she wept.

The peoples of the desert pleaded with Nekya, but it was too late. The Dragonmother’s heart had turned to stone.

Oh, so that’s how they parse the Tao rocks in-setting.

At this, the desert burst into chaos. The First Darmanitan and the First Maractus began to squabble, each unable to decide who was responsible for the fate of the sands now. But then Zaathi, the First Krookodile, burst forth.

{Fix this,} she commanded of their sister.

Nekya refused, saying, {I cannot.}

Nekya: “*Seriously, it’s a rock now. Do you just expect me to gulp that down?*” >v>;
Zaathi: “*Yes, because you have a gizzard.*” >.<

So Zaathi seized the mandibuzz in her jaws and thrust her into the sun. Nekya’s crown burst into flames and fell in ashen lumps to the ground. But Zaathi did not have it in her to kill her sister, so before Nekya could burn, she withdrew them both and threw Nekya to the ground.

{Fly beyond the horizon, sister, and pray that we never see you again.} Samira finishes the story for you in a low, dramatic hiss.

You wait.

{My aunt flew into the sun?} you guess at last.

Samira:

{She forgot her role,} Samira says cryptically, and no more.

Huh, I wonder what that one is meant to imply.

The solstice arrives before you know it. Your father is there, welcoming the clans as they arrive one by one at the oasis. You see him stiffen when the krookodile arrive, but you’re already leaping off of Samira’s back, the ground weirdly firm beneath your feet as you pelt towards him and bury him in an embrace.

“Baku!” He picks you up and swings you onto his hip, almost staggering under your weight. {Were the sands kind?} His smile is so wide it threatens to cleave his face in two.

{The sands were kind,} you reply proudly, your heart almost bursting.

Huh, I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting these two to already wind up meeting each other again. Even if I’ll take the under on Samira letting him go just yet.

His eyes twinkle, and the pride in his voice when he responds in the desert tongue makes you feel like you could run a thousand miles. {You must tell us all that you have learned,} he says, setting you back down onto the ground. {And look how much you’ve grown!}

He puts you down and places his hands on your shoulders, and for a moment you can’t help but revel in the feeling of soft, unscaled skin. How long has it been? You hold him close, suddenly aware that over the year your hands have turned leathery, chafed to callouses from the scales, and yet even in the moonlight you can see how much paler you are than him, sun-starved as you are.

Another paragraph that feels like it could work better formatted as two smaller ones.

“I missed you,” you whisper into his chest.

For a moment something in his face crumbles, but he turns triumphantly. “Come, Baku. Tonight we sing for you.”

And they do sing. The Dragonmother’s relics are passed from the humans to the darumaka, and from the maractus to the krookodile. Your father presses a plate full of food into your hands and triumphantly steers you to the fire. You can’t help but notice that Haruna’s grown taller in the past year; she’s unfolded like a sapling and stands a full four inches over you. Her maractus, a new flower bloomed on his forehead, introduces himself as Aji. Mila wears a cloak you’ve never seen before; her darumaka peers out anxiously from its folds. You watch, mostly, while they chatter. Has it really been a year since you heard the human tongue?

Uh, well, apparently so, it sounds.

Mila is halfway through explaining a joke—for your benefit, you suspect; those of the southern stones already know—when the sensation hits you all at once: they’ve moved on. They missed you, but they’ve moved on. An entire year passed while you lived under the sands. Suddenly the food tastes like dust in your mouth. The evening begins to blur and pass you by.

I mean, life before industrialization was kinda time-consuming just to make it from one day to the next, so what did you really expect, Baku? [joltyshrug]

Later you drift. Your father is speaking to Samira in a hushed voice. Both of them look up when you draw close. At ten feet away you can see the arched trepidation ingrained in Samira’s spine, even if in the soft moonlight you can’t make out the expression on your father’s face.

“Please,” you begin, although you aren’t even sure what you’d ask for. The second judgment crept up on you throughout the night, and yet you know—the stones Samira and the sanhim needed to decide here were cast long before this moment. But you can’t help but be a tiny bit desperate. You think about how Mila spoke in stuttering, halting words to her darumaka, how much smoother your own response was in kind. {I’ve learned. I’ve grown}

“You have learned much,” he says at last. “And yet you have much to learn still. Samira will teach you for another year. So shall it be.”

Yeah, I knew that Baku wasn’t getting away with going home this quickly when there was a third part.

You want to be angry at both of them. At Samira, for keeping you even though you’ve struggled so hard. At your father, for not protesting. It stings. They’re acting out of love, you remind yourself, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. It isn’t fair. If you’d known that this would be your fate, you would’ve never done it. But that isn’t the lesson they want you to learn, you know.

You want one of them to protest. You want to protest. But—

{So shall it be,} you echo.

The desert tongue is heavy on your lips.

Well, it was a nice party up until now. Guess you should try and enjoy the rest of the night, huh, Baku?

When you return to the circle of human children for your farewells, you’re sure that you look like a stranger to them. Even in the moonlight you can see how you’re so much paler than the rest. You get a change of clothes, but your father’s cloak is tattered, cut nearly to ribbons from the constant beating it’s received in the past year. It’s tattered. You let that happen. It’s tattered and it’s irreplaceable.

Truthfully you hadn’t even thought of your cloak until you catch Livari’s eyes lingering on it. She looks away guiltily before you can say anything, and she hurriedly brushes hair over her face so you can’t see her expression, but not before you see her upturned brow, her parted lips with the words dead upon them. Livari had been kind to you, and promised one day to teach you how to tend to the field of wheat that she raised. It would be your duty as the sanhim to know these things, she’d explained proudly, shifting her weight from her bad leg, but she shook her head and smiled as Mila pulled you away to play Stacking Stones. One day.

Right, since Baku will never be a sanhim thanks to the stunt he pulled in Part 1. Though yeah, that must sting to take in on how you’ve not longer just been moved on from, but your old friends all no longer see you the same way.

Self-consciously, you pull your cloak more tightly around your shoulders, painfully aware of how threadbare it has become. This cloak is supposed to last until you are a man, old enough to make a cloak to guard a child of your own. Your father began spinning the threads as soon as your mother realized you were growing inside of her; together, they dyed the flaxen strands to match the winter sunrise. Standing in the shadow of your home, for a moment you’re struck with a memory you never had—the sensation of the two of them tracing their fingers over the freshly-woven fabric, discussing in soft voices the patterning of the golden grass stitched into the border, their hands drifting to the swell of your mother’s belly as they imagined the world they’d show their son.

To be fair, I don’t think that your people’s tradition covers “raised by Krookodile for a year and counting”.

Was that world full of plunging into dunes, of raging rivers, of krookodile scales? Had they woven with extra care, to ensure it could withstand the chafing of Samira’s back? Or had they expected you to hold tight to them, to stay protected in their visage in a world they’d always known?

It’s almost a relief when you clamber onto Samira’s back at the end of the night.

Once again:

Especially seeing how a year of separation has also caused Baku to grow distant to his old world that he left behind.

On the way back, you almost wish Livari had looked scornful or judgmental when her eyes lingered on you, on your cloak. Instead, she’d just looked sad, the corners of her eyes tinged with the shame you’d forgotten to feel until this moment.

Thus the first year passes.

Baku: “Wait, first year?! Just how many more of these am I supposed to go through?!”

Alright, made it to the end. I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting us to zoom through an entire year of Baku’s life in the span of 6200 words, but the story did a good job at selling a sense of progression without things feeling obviously rushed in spite of large chunks of time flying by in a matter of sentences. Once again, the worldbuilding is the star of the show here, with layers of different mythoses and cultures all rubbing up against one another, which makes for both painful moments like Baku’s first night amongst Samira and her people, as well as heartfelt ones as it becomes obvious that Samira genuinely cares for Baku and respects him to the point of wanting to name him as she would one of her own peers. The emotional range is also fun, if with a generally bittersweet trend. The festival scene at the end is the main standout as it goes from being lighthearted to just crashing down into bitter disappointment both from realizing that Baku’s time in the sands aren’t done, and that he’s drifting away from the world and people he once knew.

I don’t have too much to point out in terms of nitpicks for this chapter. There were a few isolated typos and words that didn’t quite fit here and there, along with a couple paragraphs that I felt ought to have been formatted in more digestible pieces. Other than that, this was really smooth and polished, so good work there.

Pleasure coming back to this story @kintsugi . It’ll be a bit of a lift, but I’ll be looking forward to squeezing in the very last chapter in Review Blitz’s ending days that as of posting wasn’t here on TR. If it’s anything like the first two, I’m sure it’ll be quite the experience. ^^

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

Heya, swinging by to round out the last of this story. At the time of posting, the last chapter wasn’t hosted here on TR but on FFN, so if there are any graphical glitches from using the text from there as a base to mark things up, sorry in advance.

Anyhow, let’s see how Baku’s second year in the desert’s been going:

third gift

Spoiler: Line-by-Line

Oh yeah, that cw from your FFN version right at the top is totally a good omen for where things are going to go this chapter. Anyhow, let’s see how much of a disaster this turns out to be. :copyka2:

{Nofangs,} she calls, days later. It must be time to hunt. He still doesn't hunt, of course, and she still deposits him by the river's edge, but she brings him with her everywhere. There's nothing else he'd do on your his own, of course. Somewhere else, children his age would be spending their days stacking stones, or weaving or … no, best not to think about that. Those lazy days are why he had to learn his lesson like this in the first place.

Small pronoun choice error there.

He fumbles through the darkness and reaches out for her. {Samira?}

{Over here.} This time, she's careful to protract her words so that they echo lowly in the tunnel, and he picks his way over, pulling up short just before his outstretched hand collides with her scales. He clambers on. {Are you ready?}

Oh, huh. The narration PoV is different from the first two chapters, since I’m just realizing that we’re in a third person perspective and not second person like first gift and second gift. I wonder if that’s pointing at anything there.

An old instinct tells him to nod. Instead, in the darkness that his eyes cannot penetrate, he hisses back, {I'm ready,} and tightens his grip on her fins.

Small typo there.

He's used to the sounds of surfacing at this point. The sand ripples off of her scales in a familiar way; he's started to learn that the flows thin out when she's getting closer to the top, that the accompanying cascade of sand becomes reedy. But this time, she doesn't immediately chart a path for the river. Instead, the two of them speed even further eastward, where a half moon rises.

He stands on shaking legs, careful to keep his toes curled for balance—several times he'd been unable to sense Samira's sharp turns and ended up flung headlong into the sand—and inhaled the clear air, the cloak flapping around his shoulders. The stones turned to sand the further east you went, but he can tell even here that the dunes have somehow become even sandier. Whatever scant brush and plants littered the dunes near Samira's nest give way to enormous, undulating waves, frozen in motion until Samira cuts through them like a knife. This is closer to where the darmanitan live, among the dunes.

Couple verb tense errors that I noticed here. Also, this paragraph is long enough that IMO, it’s worth rendering it as two smaller ones.

But this time when they surface near the darmanitan's lands, there is a horrible stench, like rotting fish, but with a sharper tang of iron. When they get closer he sees that the lumps he thought were stones aren't stones at all, but instead—

In the pale moonlight they survey the valley, which has grown quiet and still. He wraps the cloak tightly into his chest. {What happened here?}

They’re dead, Dave. Though I see that that’s where our cw is coming into play here.

{Geret used to lead the darmanitan from this valley,} Samira says. Her tail lashes the sand beneath them into a riptide, but it does not cover up the footprints that he can see, the scuffles marking the dust along with the char. There's a strip of sand that was heated so brilliantly that it turned to glass. But there are no darmanitan to be seen.

His heart sinks when he sees sandalprints in the ground. The people of the Southern Stones were here. But why? {Samira … ?}

Oh boy, this is going to get awkward in short order, I can already tell.

Her voice is unyielding. {I promised to teach you, and so I will not shield you. What do you see here, Nofangs?}

There would be no reason for his people to stray this far west. More than that, there would simply be no way; to cross the mountain range would take them days that they did not have. And yet. {The people of the Southern Stones were here too.}

{I fear I have done something terrible, Nofangs,} she says in response, which doesn't feel like an answer at first.

… Wait, are they trying to get Baku back? Or…?

He tries to think of his father's hands wielding weaving shears as a weapon. He cannot. Even when the sanhim held his staff, it was with a weary sort of resignation. {Why would he have come here, and called for this?}

Samira doesn't respond with words. But she shudders beneath him, and he doesn't need to see her eyes to know she weeps.

Ah yes, thus we’re getting some titular Krookodile Tears in this story. Though this sure took a really dark turn in short order.

His hands are shaking as he clutches her fins. He needs to do something. Anything.

The hunched corpse of a darmanitan catches his eye. The scars on his hide shimmer in the moonlight; for a moment, he's in a solstice long ago, watching Utamo trace silvery rivers. He realizes what's similar about all of the other bodies here.

{Where are the children?} he asks slowly, half-hoping he'll know her response. They spared the young, and let them flee—

More like they got dragged along to be new trained ‘mons.

Samira pulls herself out of the sand and carefully walks along the dusty ground, bringing him close enough to see—he realizes she must've been able to sense the disturbance in the earth from far away, even if his eyes could not pick it out in the moonlight. But as they get closer and closer, he can see a mash of tracks running south, familiar oval imprints of sandals mixed with tiny, three-toed footprints. The trail leads south, winding away over the hills.

{After the solstice, a human girl tried to cross the river and was found by a darumaka patrol. Geret was furious when he heard, and sought to follow the lead I had set—he asked the Southern Stones for permission to raise the human and the darumaka alike. The krookodile concurred, and we assumed with our word that it would be done.}

… Oh, so Geret thought that he’d get to have the same deal as what Samira had with the sahnim and angered the wrong clan from the Southern Stones, huh?

He swallows past the lump that's formed in his throat. {But the Southern Stones disagreed this time.}

{Instead they took the ones who were young enough to learn.} Samira's voice is stiff. {Do you see what I have done now, Nofangs?}

{I do not,} he says truthfully. {How could you say this is your fault?}

Well for one, relations have clearly soured with the Southern Stones to the point where they were ready to just go and murder an entire Darmanitan troop out of existence over “hey, give me your daughter who ought to rightfully die”.

Samira suddenly tenses beneath him—a low, wordless hiss rips from her throat, almost unbidden. Without another word, she flings herself headlong into the sand, faster and faster until he's afraid he'll fall off and the ruined valley shrinks to a speck behind them. She'd never raced like this before. {Samira?} he calls hesitantly, but the rippling wind swallows his words.

He slows and marks out his breaths, and by his count an hour has passed when they pass first one rock, and then another. Further west he'd think nothing of it, but here, where the horizon is washed smooth in sand, the smallest imperfection juts out and draws even his atrophied eyes. The shadows they cast are odd as well: perfect, angular, and completely unlike the wind-smoothed stones he's accustomed to.

Oh, these are buildings, huh?

{Have we been here before?} he asks. He would've recognized the landscape, but he can't be certain if Samira took him here underground before.

{No.} Her response is immediate. {This place is.} What she says next is a word he does not understand.
{Is what?}

She swims through the sand for a hundred feet while she thinks. {Abandoned. Bad. Shameful. Evil. All of these things. More than just these things.}

Waaaaait, what is this place? Relic Castle, or…?

"Cursed?" he asks hesitantly. The Dancer's tongue feels strange now.

{No. Cursed—} as soon as she says it, he seizes the new vocabulary {—implies it was beyond our control.} She contemplates; the rumbles shake her entire body and through his bones. {This was done for a reason.}

Well, that one’s new. I wonder what the backstory behind all of it is. Though interesting to see that Baku both: A: is being allowed to speak human tongue openly in Samira’s presence, B: is starting to grow rusty from disuse.

Months ago, when Samira showed him the canyon of the mandibuzz, he'd shivered. They lived in pockets of sandstone, their caves lined with sun-bleached stones that he later realized were too oblong to be anything but bones. Samira paid it no mind, but he remembered the careful ceremony his father had conducted, how he'd solemnly borne the thing that was no longer Mother into the center of the village, how all who knew her took up a torch and offered her to the winds. Father wrapped her bones away in her cloak and buried them, gently, while only Baku was allowed to watch. To see so many there, so naked and forgotten, casually picked over and riddled with holes—that is the feeling Samira means.

Oh, so that’s why we’ve never heard about Baku’s mom the entire time this story.

"Desecrated?" he tries.

{Desecrated.} She rolls the word around a few more times. {Yes. These two are words that match.}

Usually this game is more fun, a dance that welcomes both of them to shared understanding. But he feels a chill as she sweeps them closer and closer through the rubble.

{We see this place once as hatchlings, and then we do not return except when we have hatchlings of our own, so they may see it for their first time, and our last.} Her voice is stony. {You are older than a hatchling, but you are mine, Nofangs. So it is time that you see.} She pauses, her eyes fixed straight ahead to a singular mountain in the distance. {Perhaps in time you will show this place to your own hatchlings.}

As they get closer, he realizes it isn't a mountain at all. It's too sudden, too straight. Some of it has crumbled to the ground, but what remains stands almost perfectly vertical, stones cut in a way that is too perfect to have occurred by chance. The rubble he passed on the way in must've been flung far from this one, by some force he cannot comprehend.

{Your people were not the first humans on the plains, Nofangs. Before, there were people who built ŵ̸̡̖̦̜̙̜̪̭͉̅̌̈́̀̃̐̕͝ä̵͔̹̗̟͔̤͓̝̮̞́͝l̸̢̡̨̧̫̭̘͉̻͍̟̑̈́͛̑͝ͅl̵̨̹̗̭͓̬̟̖͍̠̐̎ͅş̶͇͉̤̪̠̤̰̝̍̈͑̅̆̽.} She pulls him closer to the thing and hisses a word that he does not understand.

Oh, so this is Relic Castle, huh? Though “walls” (technically “ŵällş”) as the Zalgotext, huh? Wonder what the story there is.

But where other words seemed like they held meaning, this one ... this one feels empty somehow. He cannot describe why. {Built what?}

{People who built w̸̟̲̆̐̔ă̴͚l̸̥͂̆̔ĺ̷͇̟̟s̷̥̈́̂}.She hisses it again and it remains incomprehensible. {You see it here. I will not waste clean words on it. Name it, if you know it.} When he does not offer a word in response, she says in a stormy voice, {If it is never again spoken in the Dancer's tongue, I will not mourn the loss of knowledge.}

I take it that these old people that used to live here did not get along particularly well with the Pokémon that lived in this desert, huh?

Her anger is like the river, thunderous and inevitable, and hearing so much rage in her kills the words in his throat. This much he has learned: Samira loves teaching. To see her savage joy at condemning knowledge to oblivion fills him with the same strange revulsion that the mandibuzz canyon did. The stones and their unnatural shapes made him uneasy, but this … this makes him shrivel closer to her.

Samira continues quietly, {There were once those who learned the secrets of shaping stones and brought that knowledge here. With their hands they built great and wondrous things. At first the krookodile watched without fear. We peoples of the desert must protect one another. The sands are an enemy so great that we cannot afford to fight amongst ourselves as well. All the earth's children share one body, after all. When we tried to speak to the humans, they feared us. But who could blame them? The maractus offered water and fruit. The darmanitan offered fire and warmth. But we, the krookodile—} Samira hisses uneasily, a rippling mass of muscle beneath him, and for a moment he remembers how it felt the first time he saw her erupt from the sands. {Yes. You know the feeling, Nofangs. That much your kind has never forgotten.}

Oh, that certainly bodes well for what the history between Samira’s place and the people that used to live here is like.

A year ago he would've nodded. But underground, the krookodile have no use for words that must be seen. So instead he responds, {I do} and adds the sibilant hiss that he knows signals regret.

{I wish we'd spoken to them, so we knew why. But one day we found that the humans here had built—} She utters that word again, and this time she pulls up short. {Do you see it here, Nofangs?}

It towers above them, impossibly smooth and reaching around the horizon. It is like a canyon that only goes one way, half a mountain face, a thing that only goes up and out. Its edges are jagged and broken, but its face is smooth. He looks at it in slack confusion and realizes that, while she was talking, this thing she's taken him to witness has grown until it eclipses even the sky.

Ah yes, the dreaded Wall o’ Doom there. Even if I wonder what ultimately did these people in if their wall remained so intact.

It was made, not weathered. Even though the shape is strange to him, the purpose is undeniable.

{This is to keep people out,} he says quietly.

{They shaped the stone into other things as well.} Samira motions, and he clambers up to the top of her head so she can rear up and he can see higher. But even when she's fully unfolded, he isn't even halfway to seeing what's on the other side of the structure. {But these were their ugliest creation. Behind here was an oasis that the peoples of the desert used to share, before these humans decided it should be guarded.}

Oh, so this is occurring sometime after a civilizational collapse event. Since once upon a time, the humans of Route 4 used to be urbanized and able to dictate terms to their surroundings, but now they’re small bands that are much more exposed to nature.

He looks around. The parts of these that survived are tall, yes, and they encompass much. Nali and the maractus would be unable to climb such an immense structure. The darmanitan, even with their strength, would be unable to crush through it. But— {This could not stop you, if you did not wish it,} he says quietly to the krookodile beneath him. {Not for a heartbeat.}

{The humans here lived in fear of what we would do,} Samira says. It's full of regret, but it isn't an answer. {That fear drove them to do horrible things. They hoarded and they stole. So we echoed them, and became the thing that they feared. When we were done, we took the oasis with us. My ancestors swam back and forth across the plains until we carved out a path for a river that was too large for anyone to hoard.}

Oh, so Samira’s people genocided this ancient city out of existence, huh? That must’ve been a sordid affair given what their primary weapons were.

He realizes now why Samira was particular about which word she used here. He realizes why it would be so important for the hatchlings to see. {The krookodile desecrated this place.}

{We did.} She casts a weary eye across the ruins around them. {We have fought all peoples of the desert before, until it was recognized that we were so powerful that our peace must be upheld. But never like this. On that day we sought more than just submission, and our wish was granted. It was a horrible thing, but we agreed it had to be done.}

Whelp, feeling good about that prediction right about now. Though I’m a little surprised that Samira recognizes this as a bad thing given that they destroyed a hated enemy. I wonder if there were second-order effects that they’re still grappling with into the present day.

Her voice deepens. {Our Great Mother, who gave us our shape and formed us from clay, tasked us with protecting the desert while She rested. Some of our kind think differently, but I believe on that day, though She slumbered, the Great Mother wept when She heard what we had done, what we had forgotten. So now that it is my time to be Mother to our people, I remember this place always.}

[ ]

{When you first joined us, I heard you asking many times why we travel the way that we do, why we pick the routes we choose. I knew no other way to explain our purpose than to show you what we show our hatchlings.} She rumbles lowly. {Forgive me, Nofangs. At the time I did not think I could speak in a way you would understand. With our strength and our bodies we carve rivers, break stones, crush earth so that others can tend it and make it grow. We enforce the solstice peace, and pass the Great Mother between Her children so that we all remember what divided Her.}

[ ]

{There will only ever be as many of us as the desert can bear. This is our punishment. One day, the Great Mother will be proud once more of what we have done and She will reawaken, instead of hiding away from us and our shame.}

I kinda wonder if this one paragraph ought to have been formatted into multiple smaller paragraphs versus the big wall o’ text that you presently have.

He doesn't say it, but he realizes it then: when Baku crossed the river, on that night that felt so many lifetimes ago, Samira probably saw more humans than just him reaching for something to have.

{This was a lesson, not a punishment.} His voice rasps with the same cadence of a statement, but in his heart it feels more like a question.

{Perhaps.} She sounds unconvinced. {Now each solstice we send our children to guard you. Now your people have no word for what they once built. But I fear, Nofangs, that despite everything we did in the aftermath to help them, they never truly forgot what we could be. And I fear above all that they were correct to remember. We have grown complacent in the dunes, and believed that our power would be enough to keep the desert balanced the way we saw fit.}

Oh, that bodes poorly for how the people of the Southern Stones and Samira’s bask are going to get along in the rest of this chapter.

Perhaps he shaped the not-question the wrong way. Samira had learned much from him, and him from her—perhaps a lesson for some can be a punishment for others. Perhaps one forms the other. He wants to say that but he's transfixed by the sight before him. But he can't look, either, can't focus on the way that the moonlight has turned everything to a pale greyscale. {My father is different from the humans who lived here, though. He shouldn't … wouldn't have allowed us to do this again.}

I mean, the fact that those Darmanitan got slaughtered would seem to point towards your father having gotten turfed out of power.

{Your father has not been sanhim since the day I passed judgment on you.} Her voice is like stone. {In taking you, in codifying your guilt, I took your birthright, and with it his lineage. That is the price he and I decided on that day, Nofangs. That is the judgment I chose to pass.}

The cloak is suddenly heavy on his shoulders, so heavy that he fears it'll rip him and Samira both into the sandy abyss. {He never told me that.}

{Do you see now why I fear I have done something terrible?} She slowly crouches back down to all fours; the stone structure towers even higher above them now. {And yet when I asked for you I could not have known, right?}

Good going there, Samira.

{And yet you could not have known,} he echoes back. But he senses he means it even if she does not. His heart feels like it has sunk to the bottom of the desert. {Please. We must go talk to the Southern Stones. Even if they won't listen to me, they'll have to listen to you.}
He thinks of Mila, and Haruna, and his father, of their gentle smiles. He can't imagine them with stern faces and hands clenched around the haft of a spear, turning the darmanitan to corpses, leading the young ones away.

I mean, given that Samira created a power vacuum by taking you from home, are you sure that those three were even in a position to get involved, Baku? ^^;

{I raised your aunt the Fangkeeper once. In her year our sandile did not want to live among the Southern Stones, and she respected that choice, so I offered to live alongside her for some time. I always feared she would see me as a replacement, and herself as unworthy, though I learned to see her as a sister,} she says quietly. {I spoke with her on the solstice, asked her to justify her daughter's decision. I do not recognize Fangkeeper now.}

Oh, so this is the doing of Baku’s cousin? So this really is some sort of revenge ploy or something.

Now he has the words to ask the question, but he doesn't have the heart for it. There are bigger issues than just his family. {There are reasonable people among them! They'll take your side.}

{Nofangs,} she says quietly, turning away from the stones even as he's transfixed by the sight. The image burns its way through his bleary eyes and into his mind, interposed with the scattered ruins of Geret's home. {If anyone witnessing this thinks there are two sides to choose from, then the sands will be plunged into war. And then we have all lost.}

Oh, so it’s the end of an era of relative peace between humans and Route 4’s Pokémon, huh? Or at least I think that’s where this is going.

Samira is reluctant to approach the Southern Stones, so he walks there alone. The ground here, she explains, is already carefully softened. If she tried to swim through it she might destroy the place. That is what she tells him. The journey back on foot feels shorter than the journey out did, though it still takes him many suns. Perhaps he's grown.

On the way back he sees small green stones clustered in the sands; when he draws close, they glow. {Greetings, traveler. We serve. What business do you have with the Southern Stones?} one asks.

Oh, are these Golett, or…?

He stops respectfully. {I am here to speak with the sanhim.}

No response.

He stares at them in confusion, and then he realizes—if these are for the humans, then … Baku clears his throat. "I am here to speak with the sanhim."

This time, all of their eyes glow in unison. They are silent for a moment, and he suspects that there is a conversation beyond his understanding even here. {You may pass,} says one of them. {Welcome home.}

… Or they could be Elgyem, even if I don’t know if I’d have characterized them as ‘stones’

He passes, but once he does so, he can't help but see the oversized hands, the enormous eyebrows. The image of Utamo tracing his fingertips across a darmanitan's hands fills him with an aching familiarity, and when he looks back he knows without knowing what happened to the darumaka the Southern Stones stole, the horrible stonecrafting magic Samira spoke of. Did she know it could be used like this?

The question takes a long moment to form, and when it does, his ears burn with shame: "Are you … are you happy here?"

{We serve.}

Oh, nevermind, it’s Zen Mode Darmanitan. It took me a while to pick up on things there.

"But is this what you wanted?"

{We serve.}

"I—"

{You are wanted in the Southern Stones,} one of them repeats, a sense of urgency slipping into its voice. {And we are wanted here. So shall we both serve. May the sands be kind.}

Baku: “Uh… that didn’t answer my question, but…” .-.

Numbly, he echoes back, {May the sands be kind.}

The rest of the trip feels much longer.

The people greet him warmly when he arrives. Livari draws him into a hug; he senses curious eyes peering out from the tents. By now he must be thoroughly foreign to them, and yet not wholly different enough to be one of the krookodile.

I can already tell that this heartfelt reunion is going to wind up crashing and burning in like a scene.

Perhaps Livari knew he was coming, because she's barely finished embracing him before she begins speaking.

"You've come back to us. She's finally let you go, right?" Livari's smiling pleadingly but he knows she can't actually mean it, not with the tears in the corners of her eyes. "Welcome home, Baku."

{They—} he begins, and then finds himself stumbling: {They were just teaching me, Livari. I … I wanted this.}

Her smile evaporates against his skin, like river water. "Did you? The whole time? You wanted to be their diplomat?" she asks coldly. When he doesn't respond, she continues, "Your father always spoke so highly of the lessons you would learn. But when you finally came back and you seemed smaller, paler, sadder."

Yeah, I had a feeling that things weren’t going to stay hunky-dory. Especially since there’s been a general motif of Baku getting further and further away from his fellow humans emotionally as he spends more time with Samira and her bask.

Beneath her words she asks a question he's never been able to answer, even to himself on those quiet nights spent alone in the dark. How could he answer it here? There were times he wished things were different, but wasn't that an experience everyone shared? He searches her face for any sign of deception, of doubt. He finds nothing.

{Where's Awaze? And Nali?} he asks instead. At her side, her hand extends from beneath her cloak to grip the staff that marks her as the new sanhim, but the maractus who chose her is nowhere in sight. The humans will be cruel, but surely there are others in the village who would caution reason.

I don’t think that that one’s going to work, Baku, since it sounds like Livari’s going full ‘iron fist’ in her leadership right now.

Livari points her chin up defiantly. "The maractus all but left us once they saw the extent to which we were willing to defend ourselves. We will defend them as well if it comes to it, but for now they are no allies to us." Her voice softens. "I defended you, Baku. I told your father he was a fool to offer you up to their whims. Your father is like a brother to me, and I held my tongue in public so our people would not have to see him questioned, but oh, how we fought.”

[ ]

“He claimed that this was necessary to keep the peace, that our children needed to learn—instead they came for my Mila because she did not hold her tongue, and Geret saw that as an offense. I saw what they did to you. I saw what losing you did to your father. When the time came for him to pass—" She wraps her hands around his, and suddenly he grows cold when he realizes what she's saying. "—for him it was fast. I was there. But I wish you were, too. I knew you wouldn't have wanted him to be alone. But we had no way of finding you, so without asking, Mila went north—"

Oh. Oh. I suppose that explains a thing or two about why there’s a new sahnim now. And also why Livari was insistent enough that Mila get brought into the desert enough to slaughter an entire Darmanitan troop to keep her.

Grief washes over him like a wave, and he's suddenly drowning again. He wants to reach for Samira's back but there's nothing, and there's no one, and then he's standing stiffly while she has her hands wrapped around his quavering shoulders.

This is a lesson—

There is nothing to be learned here. That anger sparks him upright. This is senseless, and he could spend the rest of his life trying to understand it. There will be time to mourn later. {Livari. If you fight the krookodile, you'll lose.}

Uh… yeah, if Samira’s lesson about the ruined city was remotely accurate, then Livari really, really does not want to get into a fight with the local Krookodile.

"But if they fight us, doesn't that mean we were right to defend ourselves to begin with?" she asks stiffly.

He's reminded of dropping a stone down a cavern, of the way the sound reverberates louder and louder. First one child is taken, then many, then slaughter, then war. But what makes the sound fade away, and what makes it grow instead? And how can he make them understand?

{What you did to the darmanitan wasn't defense,} he says at last. That much he can be sure of.

[ ]

"Perhaps your father was prepared to lose you to earn their trust, but I was not. I know Samira," she says in a harsh voice, fire reflecting in her eyes. For a moment her voice grows low, and powerful, and ancient. {Fangkeeper, she called me.} "For my fierceness and my strength. I was so flattered then that I was blind to why she would want me, why miraculously none of the desert's children would choose me that night. Your father chose to stay blind, because he never wanted the responsibility of sanhim to be equated with power—" She cuts off suddenly. "What did she call you, Baku?"

It might have made sense to show off more of Livari’s reaction there since her mood is very obviously meant to take a harsh turn there.

{Nofangs,} you reply uncertainly.

{Because you have no fangs,} Livari says slowly, the understanding forming between each word. "I was to be molded. But you ... you were leverage."

[ ] It's easier to answer her in the desert tongue. {Samira wouldn't.}

I wonder if Baku’s reaction to Livari accusing Samira of holding Baku over his father’s head would’ve worked better shown off in more details.

"Did she show you her wonders? Did she promise you the world? She told me I was receiving a gift, and I believed her. A chance to leave the Southern Stones and see the world for what it really is like—a chance none of our people would get otherwise. But one day I grew tired, and I wanted to return home. She refused, so I began to walk. When she caught up to me, she broke my leg."

Livari's hands clench around the staff. "She told me I was strong enough to bear it, so I did. But I was young. I was stupid. I am strong, but it is of no thanks to her. You're strong too, Baku, to survive what you have but …"

Then she softens again, and she looks so much like the woman who used to skip stones with him and Mila in the creek. Her smile grows even more watery. Her knuckles whiten on her staff.

"It's okay, Baku. You can come back now. We've made—we're strong enough to make sure they can't take you. They'll think twice once they know what we can do."

I like how it didn’t even register to Samira that doing this would make Livari bitter and resentful at her. I guess that’s one way to show how Samira’s culture is different such that leaving an injury is seen as “no big deal, it happens”, which I’ll admit I’m a bit surprised at from the remark last chapter about how Krookodile are slow to heal from wounds.

He wants to feel some reaction to her truth, to floor him the same way learning of the sanhim's death did, but he can't bring himself to do so. Livari hadn't learned her lesson. Instead he thinks of Nekya, who turned from her duty. And Little Sister, who tried to hide from hers. Both times it was inevitable—the krookodile came, and so did the river.

{They won't think twice. And I don't want to come back.} The surety of his response shocks both of them, but it surprises him more than it surprises her. As soon as the words leave his lips, though, they feel true—this isn't his home. These people aren't his family. And they haven't been for a while. {But I don't want us to fight.}

Yeeeeeah, I knew that the happy reunion was going to come crashing down. Even if this is precisely the wrong tack to be taking as a way to try and convince your cousin, Baku.

"Wanting something isn't the same as having it, Baku," she says softly, and he wishes she knew how right she really was.

Whelp, I can already tell this is going to end horribly. TBD if it’s the Southern Stones or the Krookodile that wind up getting off worse between them.

He rejoins Samira before sunrise. She dives them deep into the earth to wait out the day. He hugs the cloak to himself and wonders what he could've become. If they hadn't taken him. If he hadn't strayed too far. Would they have gone to war if he'd learned faster? If he'd answered Samira's questions in one year instead of two? Would Livari have listened if he'd spoken better?

I kinda doubt that given that she was really obviously driven by both fear and lingering resentment there, but at the very least, you could’ve offered to stay had Livari backed off and looked for a way to try and make amends to the Darmanitan.

Samira doesn't even ask what happened when he walks back to her. She can tell just by looking at him, he tells himself.

But that thought clears away as the dirt runs through his hair, and he knows: she hadn't expected anything different to begin with. That was the difference.

{They will come for us if we don't do this, Nofangs,} she says quietly. This isn't a cavern he's used to; it was hurriedly made. So her voice echoes in strange ways that make the intent harder to understand. {Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps not the day after. But someday soon. I want to make this clear to you: we will desecrate once more, before the peoples of the Southern Stones are allowed to hurt anyone else.}

[ ]

{This year it is the krookodile's turn to carry the Great Mother's dark heart, so I feel Her burden even more. But I know your loyalties are divided. I do not ask you to understand what we must do, just that you do not try to stop us. I do not want you caught in this conflict. I … feel I have already forced you too far too many times before.}

Oh, so Samira’s already moved straight onto “whelp, time to wipe out Baku’s people”. That’s… more than a little worrisome as to how quickly she just comes around to that for the sake of keeping the present order in the desert. .-.

{What would you have me do instead?} His heart twists when he thinks of it again—the soft lilt in Livari's voice when she explained that his father had died, waiting. There's a yawning cavern in his chest that hasn't even begun to heal. He can't—he can't do that again, stumble upon Samira lying still and overturned—

{I could take you far from here. I could leave you here when the night falls. The maractus could look after you, or even the mandibuzz; I fear this conflict will spread and you'd be safer if—}

{I don't want to be safe. I want to be with you.}

Well, being away from his people for two years really has shaken up Baku’s allegiances there given that he says this even after Samira openly brings up that she’s ready to potentially wipe his home people out.

In all the time they've spent together he's never cut her off, but at the same time, he's never had reason to.

Back when his father had held him tight, on that last true night they'd both had together, he hadn't realized what would happen to him. He's quite sure of it now. When he tries to think of that child's face, it doesn't match who he is now—it isn't the bags around the eyes or the pale skin or the calloused feet. Beneath the desert sands, across the lonely nights, the boy who had desecrated sacred land and lived in fear of the punishment he was about to receive had turned into someone new. Someone who understood now what would be coming, what it would mean to stay.

No, you really don’t, Baku. Though the thought’s dawning on me that Baku is essentially N from a bygone age. I wonder if he was referenced at all in the main plot of EoE as like a parallel figure or something like that.

{Can I tell you a story?} he asks, and he isn't quite able to name the feeling that pounds against his ribcage when she agrees, the way his voice hitches as he clumsily translates the late sanhim's version of Sun Sister and the Three Gifts.

When he's finished, she hums carefully. {We also speak of a sister like your small one. In ours, she asks a stone to carry her through the sky, although it is her fate never to find that which she seeks. Sometimes she loses sight and goes dark, relying on faith to keep her moving; sometimes, the light is strong and she sees the bright path before her.}

{The moon?} he asks.

{Perhaps.} Samira laughs quietly to herself. {Although I always thought of the two of them as the Great Mother's hearts, chasing one another through the peoples and across the sands.}

Samira: “Though where are you going with this, Baku?”

Before he has time to ponder that much longer, Samira adds, {We have a similar story to your Small Sister, although it ends differently. Would you like to hear it?}

This time, in the quiet of a cavern miles underground, there's no one else to hear. He can't help but wonder if things would be different if this had been one of stories retold at the solstice. But this time, again, the story's just for Nofangs:

It starts the same, although the names are different. The timid sister chases the bright one into a newborn world. But in this one, she is not brave enough to return Sun. Small Sister was selfish, and held Sun close to her, even as the desert wilted, and its children suffered. Without Sun, Aranu could not grow his seeds; Melai could not reflect her fire. They pleaded with Small Sister, but Small Sister refused.

The ending of this one is going to turn out very different from Baku’s native story, huh?

Zaathi watched. Her heart betrayed her. For Zaathi loved Small Sister, as all the people of the desert did, and it hurt Zaathi to imagine meting punishment on Small Sister in particular, who was her favorite. For a time she watched, and that was all she did—she did not need Sun, after all. But Aranu and Melai's cries were too hard to ignore; the night stretched on with no end. Finally, the First Krookodile surfaced before Small Sister.

{You must let her go,} Zaathi growled. {Sun must be shared, or we will all suffer.}

Yeeeeeeah, I figured that things would wind up going in this direction.

But Small Sister pretended not to hear.

{You must,} pressed Zaathi, and again received no response.

Heavily, Zaathi hardened her heart and reached forward. Small Sister was even smaller in the claws of the First Krookodile. It lasted only a moment; she sundered; then, Sun was free once more.

Well, that’s certainly a “victor writes the history” ending there. Though I suppose it makes sense given that to Samira and her peoples’ perspective, it is their role to uphold the balance of the desert, including by lethal means.

The first peoples of the desert rejoiced at the first sunrise, but in her corner at the edge of the world, Zaathi wept bitterly. Her tears came so furiously that they could not be stopped; the dried lands of the desert transformed, and blossomed into something flowing, something new.

Thus Small Sister and the First Krookodile bounded the First River.

I actually wonder if this is a mythologized version of the destruction of that ancient city, since the overall sequence of events in it doesn’t feel that different from what Samira recalls of what became of it.

In the darkness they share, he's left with only his thoughts once she falls silent.

{This is the story of the desecration,} he says at last. {Of the humans who were before the Southern Stones.}

Yeah, I knew it.

{One day you will tell the stories of what happens here,} Samira says solemnly after a long silence. {That was the hope that your father and I shared when I took you, although we never thought it would be like this. And sometime after that time, your people will be more powerful than mine. When that time comes, and your people are fully grown, I hope you are kind to us. But if your children's children are as cruel to us as we were to you, so shall it be.}

So shall it be.

- peeks over at the rest of EoE -

‘So shall it be’, indeed.

The traditional response is almost out of his mouth before he can stop himself. It shouldn't be that way. It wouldn't be fair. This can't be the only option. But these are the only pieces they were given.

He curls up on her back instead, and lies awake even as she eases into fitful slumber.

I mean, you could take Samira’s offer of just bailing and allowing the chips to fall where they may. Even if I suppose that would just be a different flavor of pain.

The rest of it unravels so quickly.

The adult krookodile have many words for war. He does not know these words, nor did he realize how many he didn't know, until this moment, when their low calls rumble through the earth to announce their arrival and all he hears is the groaning of the ground beneath him before Samira propels herself forward. Her claws rake an opening in the ground for sunlight to stream through, and then he's in the center of his—the village.

He watches as another krookodile emerges twenty feet to his left and plunges itself straight through a tent before he realizes that his bravery last night wasn't bravery at all, but foolishness. He shouldn't be here. He can't watch this. He closes his eyes and sinks onto Samira's back, but he can't make himself not hear. Someone screams wordlessly. It sounds like Mila. He's heard the sounds that follow next: once, Samira encountered an enormous pillar of stone that blocked the path of a river the krookodile wanted to make. She called her fellows and together they swam in the earth beneath it until it turned to sand, and the stone sank under its own weight. The groaning is quieter here, but it seems to last an eternity.

Well then. I take it that Baku’s going to have second thoughts about staying with Samira from this point on.

When he cracks his eyes open, the village isn't fully sunk; it was never heavy enough for that; there's uneven gouges in the earth that have cut the land into stairs, huge slats of earth that almost look like w̵̢͝a̷̢̅l̴̠̉̎l̵͐̓ͅs̷̞̋́,.

That’s because they are walls, Baku. Just short ones.

"Sigilyph warriors, to me!" someone is shouting, and then Livari is overhead, flying like the mandibuzz. He glimpses widespread wings, painted more colors than he's ever seen at once, and then there's a harsh crack as the earth beneath Samira's feet shatters and a blast of wind sends him tumbling backwards. As he crashes down her spine his world is a multicolored blur; when he finally catches himself on a fin he sees that the sky is blotted out by rainbow wings.

Oh, well. That one is new.

Samira hisses and lurches beneath him, swiping out with one claw at the nearest one and slamming it into the ground. It shatters upon impact, shards of clay scattering. More stone magic? But he doesn't have time to figure it out, because their eyes glow in unison and then Samira is coiling up and plunging underground and it takes all his focus just to hold on.

She reemerges outside of the line of sigilyph, and he has just enough time to see a human clutched behind each of them, their eyes glowing blue as well, before Samira lunges forward and grabs the nearest one in her jaws. Two more lash out with their wings and Samira's too slow to move out of the way of the cutting blades of wind that follow; enormous gouges open up on her right flank and red scales and blood fly into the air. {Fangkeeper!} she snarls.

Well, that all went straight to hell in short order.

"The desert is not yours," Livari says, turning. But she doesn't command the sigilyph to finish them off. The sanhim's cloak flaps around her shoulders. "It may have been once, but it cannot be forever. You cannot shape us as you see fit."

{You cannot do the same to others.} Samira's jaws snap at a sigilyph that strays too close, but she flings it away from herself rather than shattering it and its rider on the ground.

"Because you did it first? Look around you, Samira of the Sands. Tell me your justice is fair. Tell me we would do any worse if we ruled in your stead."

I suppose that would depend on who you asked there, but it’d definitely be worse off for the Pokémon that live here. ^^;

He doesn't feel Samira move beneath him. But he looks around, and he sees the village—his village—and Baku can't look away. The crop fields are torn asunder, enormous trenches carefully dug through to ensure that there will be nothing left by harvest. Stones litter the ground where the tents once stood. Someone has plowed through the brook and spilled it across the plains; its contents burble a miserable, pale red. When he saw the darmanitan ruins he didn't realize how much they'd look like his own.

Baku:

{Please,} he begins. He isn't even sure who he's talking to. {I'll go back. I'll stay. Just stop.}

"This is beyond you, Baku," Livari says. She almost sounds regretful. Her hand is outstretched, and at first he thinks she's reaching for him. But then his heart sinks: she's holding the white half of the Dragonmother's heart.

Oh, hello, Light Stone.

It had gone to the darmanitan this year, he remembers distantly. They must've …

Well, that would explain a thing or two about why Samira was so quick to go full “kill ‘em all” about Baku’s village. Even if I wonder why she didn’t bring this up earlier to try and sway him. Or at least be acknowledged as having been about to tell him something, but faltered.

{We committed atrocities.} Samira shifts back when she sees what's in Livari's hand, but she doesn't falter. {We have never tried to deny it. But it was in the name of a better future for all of our children, and so I believe in fighting again.}

… Which is precisely the same reason as why Livari is committing atrocities right now, so…

"There will always be people like you," says Livari in response, "and people like us to rise to fight you."

In the next instant, the Dragonmother's dark heart awakens. Samira roars alongside another. Blackness darker than any night he spent beneath the sands eclipses his vision. The scent of ozone chokes his nostrils, hot and thick like the heaviest summer storm. Wings unfold and blue lightning fills the air.

Meanwhile in the background:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf_Rlv-VO_U


Oh, hello, Zekrom. Though I wonder if Reshiram will also react to this as well.

His father's words ring hollowly through his ears as the remains of his village are dispersed into sparks and scraps of shimmering red fabric—

Little flurry, the things we love are only ours to hold, not to have. One day—

It's too much. He loses his grasp on Samira and goes tumbling back.

The last thing he remembers is seeing an enormous pillar of fire erupt from the stone in Livari's hands.

Well, that’s an

to everyone within a couple miles of Baku’s village there.

Royal Archaeological Expedition of Castelia Desert, Day 16

Our second night in this larger section of the ruins was even stranger than the first. We found out what was bothering the stoutland: this place is teeming with ghosts! Webb says not to make much of it, and that all ruins tend to attract ghosts, but Parker thinks it's bad luck, and I can't blame him. It certainly makes the stoutland harder to corral.

Yeah, I’ll bet that place is teeming with ghosts there considering the way that everyone got peaced.

One of them has taken to following me around at night. Curious little fellow. I was whistling a tune once and I could've sworn I heard it echoing, but that might've just been the stones. I can't get a good glimpse at it, since it's always hiding from my torch. It scared the devil out of me the first time I saw it though—this one clutches at this strange gold mask, and if you don't look carefully (which it's hard to do at night, of course) it looks like the face of a little boy. Webb's trying to get a specimen to study, but they all seem fiercely protective. I don't want to antagonize the ghosts any, since if there are big ones we aren't going to be able to fight them. The stoutland are good for those blasted sandile, but they aren't worth a damn against these spectral types. Webb seems convinced that these masks are a clue to the people who used to live here, and … well, he doesn't seem wrong about that.

The one that follows me seems friendly enough that I'm hopeful we won't have any issues. I might even take it home with me.

Oh, the one that follows this author around is Baku, huh?

thanks for reading my journeyfic about adventure and family!

this story was brought to you by the letter N. and also the "it sure is weird that unova has a castle full of the ghosts of crying dead children and this is all treated as normal and you can actually take as many children as you like; this franchise is weird but it's kind of insane that it boiled the frog all the way up to owning actual (ex-)humans; if you don't think they're people you're probably not going to think any of them are people but it's worth a try" crew.

Yeeeeeeah, that’s one of those things that feels best handled in a non-iffy fashion as “lalala folklore”, but I suppose Game Freak gonna Game Freak

And made it to the end, let’s have a summary of this story’s end:

And how since this chapter hurt to read, a lot. At the same time, it didn’t exactly feel unearned, since it did a good job at taking all the bits and pieces of the story we’d learned so far and recontextualizing them. Like it did a good job of showing how people, both human and not, have a way of blundering or rationalizing their way into increasing levels of cruelty, and how seemingly thoughtless actions can yield butterfly effects that produce unforeseen consequences, much in the same way that Samira’s fateful decision to take Baku and raise him as one of her own ultimately results in the death of the sanhim, and sets Baku’s people under Livari’s guidance off towards conflict with the desert’s Pokémon and ultimately self-destruction. Like it’s a pretty well-characterized portrait of characters who by their own stubbornness, paranoia, and past hurts and resentments, wind up setting their world on fire even though they never intended to. All the story’s prior strengths are also present in this one too, with the mythology being fun to soak into as always, and the characterization of the cast as being conflicted beings animated by competing impulses making the ultimate resolution hit all the harder.

For whatever reason, this chapter seemed to have more typos than I recall being in the first two chapters. I also thought that you had a few paragraphs here and there that were really long and text-dense, to the point where I thought that they’d have benefitted from being formatted as a few smaller ones instead. There might have been more, but I was honestly too transfixed at watching things start to spiral out of control in the plot, which I suppose is a testament to the strength of this story and your writing.

Kudos, @kintsugi . I don’t know if you’ll ever bring the third part of Krookodile Tears here to TR, since it’s a bit old at this rate. But for what it’s worth, I hope you do since it’s a very memorable and well-done tragedy of a story.