The moment before it all ends is serene.
POWERFUL opener here! I’m immediately invested with this line.
A crack slowly spreads down the stone, reaching out across the room to trace through all the chaos. Time seems to slow down as it crawls across the battle.
Oookay, I love this?? You use this crack to pull the reader’s gaze around the room, and it works so well.
Closer still. A serperior is frozen in mid-leap, every leaf on her body glowing with green light, so bright that it blots out her face. Beside her, a trainer stands, one hand frozen and outstretched, eyebrows furrowed, mouth halfway through a command. The human’s face is smeared with dust, but her eyes brim with dark flame.
I’ve said this in a previous review, but I love how this scene is frozen in time/unraveling in slow motion, without you having to explicitly say so. It’s all in how you describe the scene, and it WORKS.
The crack twists around the battlefield. An archeops rises up to meet the serperior and her human, his wings halfway down, talons outstretched. Even when still, his plumage is a feathery blur of brick red, leafy green, sky blue.
Ohhh. Coming back to this after reading ahead makes this paragraph painful. He’s now actively fighting against his old trainer. Poor Reylin. Poor Hilda. :(
For some reason, you don’t feel like the hero.
And a powerful ending line to match the opener! I’ve noticed you have a lot of one-liners that hit hard throughout the story, and this is just the beginning.
You only saw her falter once: six days ago, when you lost Amara. In the heat of the moment she was ashen; afterward, in private, she cried herself ragged. The next morning the panic was gone from her voice and you were convinced nothing would make it come back again.
A very brief but effective description of Hilda’s grief. You didn’t go into several paragraphs about how this broke her down, but you don’t have to, because these sentences do it justice.
“I can’t let you do this,” Hilda says at last. Her words are strangled.
He means it. She does not. Your poor, sweet trainer. Always fighting above her weight. Now that gods are on the table, it’s too late to turn back.
Again, reading this the second time allows me to appreciate the details a whole lot more—which is saying something, since it’s not easy to write something that reads better and better each time! Anyways, it’s very interesting to see that Hilda here is uncertain while N is very sure of himself; as the story goes along, Hilda is the one who is sure she’s right, and N is the one who is unsure about himself and his goals.
He’s not a very good human, you decide, to have waited all this time just to have a god call the shots. He would much rather take commands than give them. He’d make a much better pokémon.
N taking it upon himself to lead when it’s not really in his nature is a running theme through this story, I’ve noticed. He’s gentle and soft spoken, but to make the change he wants to see, he has to do things that contradict that.
“I’m hardly younger than you,” Hilda shoots back. “You don’t need to condescend me.”
“I wasn’t,” N says softly, “talking to you.”
OOH. A good mic drop moment.
You lost everything else. You lost them all. You can’t lose her too.
Poor Vaselva :(
You adjust the focus a little, give Markus enough time to cue up the applause track on the broadcast. The air around Ghibli shimmers a bit, which gives you a neat optical trick with soft focus while you let the suspense grow. You’re only a rotom, and a mere camera drone at that, but you understand by now how to draw out the drama.
This took me a minute to figure out we are seeing through the eyes of a camera rotom, but fortunately you don’t take too long to reveal this. The first few paragraphs were a little confusing until this point, though. Also! I love the way you describe the inner workings of the camera. Very nice details.
He’s cheerful, but aside to you, he’s terse: [“Wave, I need that shot! At least get a top-down view if you can’t get in close.”]
Agh, this frustrates me more than anything else in this chapter: the way Markus treats rotom in comparison to everything else. It speaks volumes about the attitudes humans have towards Pokémon in this world.
Alder’s unfortunate like this. His battling style leaves … a lot of collateral damage. You remember Markus’s glee when they finally banned live audiences from his matches for safety reasons—“they need us more than ever, Wave!”—and they finally got better protections for Alder and his challengers, but it’s dangerous to have anyone, even the camera rotom, in the same room when Alder starts calling out massive field-clearing attacks like this.
So everybody’s safe—except poor Wave. :(
“You would heal your friends after you let them get hurt to defend your belief that they should have the freedom to suffer? How kind. Don’t sacrifice too much for our lifelong partners, Alder.” Venom drips from his words. “Truly, your generosity knows no bounds.”
“Are you done prattling?”
“Are you done deciding?”
The dialogue in this chapter is brilliant. Love it.
The hydreigon obeys immediately. One mouth on each wing, and the dragon pulls, and you can’t watch—
[“Wave! Focus! I need—”]
[“Oh my god! Get someone in there!”]
—but you have to watch—
Aaaagh this hurts. Everybody else has the luxury of averting their eyes if they need to, but not Wave.
“T-that’s a hell of a Fire Blast; I can’t even recognize where that would be coming from, and—oh! It looks like Shauntal’s chandelure has found a way through the barrier?” Markus, to his credit, almost makes it sound like this is just a regular match. It’s a good act. So good you can’t tell if he’s acting at all.
That last sentence, though. Pretty telling that he’s so unruffled about it all until humans are in the line of fire. (Literally.)
[“Hilda? Hilda, please. Pick up. Something’s going on at the League, and I know you were planning on being in the area … call me back as soon as you can, okay?“]
I LOVE that Wave is picking up transmissions from outside the room so that we get snippets of what’s going on in the world outside. Hilda is coming! People are watching and freaking out!
He’s so casual how can he be so casual there are pokémon here that are going to die—
Your use of italics here really sells Wave’s panic. :(
It isn’t right. It isn’t right that Ghetsis, who called the shots, gets to walk off to trial, while the blood of his hydreigon slowly goes cold and seeps into the dirt.
And that’s the question, isn’t it? Isn’t Ghetsis a huge hypocrite by using Pokémon to prove his point? At the end of the day, isn’t he just another human using Pokémon to get what he wants? No easy answers here.
You pivot slowly on your three legs so as to better see the newcomer, who delicately picks her way into your field of view on four spindly legs. She carries herself like no pokémon you’ve seen in the caves before—she’s light on her feet, like she doesn’t trust the earth beneath. Behind her, a triangular-tipped tail hovers like a different entity, flicking back and forth through the air, its tip floating three feet from the back of her head.
Her skin, too, is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s fur-clad like the webspinners, but where they were golden, she is like a gemstone. One of your kind was born different; the rocks of his body were not the bold colors of ore and gold, but were a deep, vibrant—you aren’t sure what word to use for the color. It is between clear sky and blood. That is her color.
ROCK KITTY SHIPPING ROCK KITTY SHIPPING
In all seriousness, though, your descriptions of Tourmaline, not just here but all through the chapter, are stunning! No wonder Carnel has a crush, lol.
{The human will not understand you.} But Tourmaline is staring at you. Her eyes glitter from the depths of her face. {I learned the dialect of caves from … from a time with a previous human, who worked with many of your kin.} Hmm, yes, now that she mentions it, you can see how she pitches her sentence the wrong way. She forgets to pause midway through her sentences to ponder the end. She flicks her tail toward the other two pokémon, firs the blue and then the green. {The dewott and the simisage prefer the dialect of forests. For your language, Ico’s tongue is unpracticed but his ear is sound. Maxis is deaf to you, and likely will be for some time.} One of her ears twitches, and an edge of amusement slips into her voice. {You must forgive him; he’s a slow learner.}
Ooh, this is so interesting! I don’t think I’ve come across the concept of Pokémon having different languages/dialects before, but it makes perfect sense. I like the way you describe and compare the differences from forest dialect to cave dialect, among other languages.
{Cheren caught many boldore before he found you. If he’s kept you around this long it probably means you’re strong in the ways he wants.} There’s something infecting Tourmaline’s voice now. It reminds you of rot. {Ico says he’s … particular like that, with those of us he chooses to keep.}
Ohhh yikes. Is this a reference to Pokémon IVs in the games and how some players will cycle through until they get a mon with the “right” nature? This seems to hint that it’s a common practice in this world, too, which if so...ouch. Agh. It’s like the equivalent of people buying cats with the proper coloring to match their furniture in real life—which, disgustingly enough, does happen and is a thing. I hate what this paragraph implies and it makes me feel disgusted towards Cheren.
There’s a boulder in front of you, a little bit bigger than you. It’s different than the kind in your cave. You could find out more by touching it, but even from a distance you notice no familiar frizzle of electric energy wrapped around it. Granite, maybe. It has flecks of black crystal, and it’s half-submerged in the dirt. There’s another, smaller piece of rock next to it, and a few more scattered around the clearing.
You won’t throw it. That would be rude. How could you? The rock came here for a reason. Clearly it does not want to be thrown, not if it dragged itself here and buried itself in six inches of mud.
Every Pokémon in this story has their own culture, and I really can’t talk enough about how much I love that! It’s also interesting that, by comparison, Vaselva doesn’t have the cultural heritage/lore to refer to that the wild Pokémon do, because she was raised in captivity and is most conditioned out of all of them to be a trained Pokémon. Even so, she still compares things to leaves and seeds and sunlight, due to her being a grass type. Likewise, Carnel compares everything to caves and stones because that’s what he knows.
{My cave,} you say. A big pause, so it can sink in for him better, since he seems a little slow. {This is my cave.} You let the small pebble by the entrance of the tunnel wiggle a little, and then you direct it to roll into the entrance, where the rest of its brothers and sisters are waiting. {Please let me go back to my cave.}
Ughhh poor baby. :( come on, Cheren, isn’t it obvious that he’s at least trying to talk to you and tell you something??
“Wild Charge, Amara!” the human commands.
{Hi, I’m Carnel,} you say politely, looking at her.
She doesn’t respond. By the time the words have left your mouth, she’s already tackling you full-on, her body wreathed in sparks. Arcs of blue electricity jitter up your carapace. You shy back as they explode upon your skin; there’s pain in your shoulder. One of your biotites is loose.
Nooo! He’s so sweet and polite and he’s just thrown into battle with no preparation at all. Again, couldn’t Cheren have at least tried to explain what he’s expecting Carnel to do? This whole time, all he does is talk
at his Pokémon instead of
with them. Gah.
Your biotites glow, and you firmly wiggle the pebbles at the base of your miniature cave. The pebbles there are happy because they are all sticking together. {Home,} you say slowly. {I want to go home.}
My heart, poor baby. Make it stop!!
She’s still as a statue, but all of the fur running down her spine stands to attention. {Absolutely not,} she says frostily. It’s like she has a second mane now. Fascinating. You wish you could do that.
Lol what a pure little
bean rock.
When the earth is about to fracture, she sends messages sometimes. Tremors before the quake. You sense them radiating around Tourmaline now, frustration building beneath the skin. Her next question is calm, but the earth usually is.
Another example of how you use what Carnel is familiar with—earth and stone—to describe what he’s seeing.
{None of us want to be here,} she repeats, and it’s when she changes it to us that you realize what she wants you to understand: the two of you weren’t the first ones to ask a human for your freedom.
Wow what a sad, heavy thought.
Your cave would not fit in this falsecave;
“Falsecave”, love it!
There is a phrase for her kind of request. She would not know the story, but—there was a tale once of a roggenrola that tried to climb a steep mountain. As he neared the top, he lost his footing, and rolled back to where he started—in the process chipping off some of his protruding crags. The more times he tried, the rounder he got, and the more impossible his task became.
To ignore this thought is to push yourself up the mountain. Each time you do it, the more impossible it becomes.
And again, I love that pretty much every Pokémon from this moment forward has some sort of tale or parable that they compare their current experience to. And they’re all very fitting for each type/species.
Long ago, before the age of humans, a great dragon descended to walk amongst the plains. To your ancestors, the great dragon gave spark and color. To the rest of the earth’s children, the dragon asked your ancestors to give their bodies and their protection. They were to protect those who could not protect themselves. In some places, this meant protecting the young blitzle from predators. Sometimes, your father said, explaining the story his human had once read to him, it meant fighting so that humans would not have to.
Many pokemon turned away from the great dragon, and chose to find strength on their own, strength that did not demand that they help others. In their cowardice they prospered. But the zebstrika accepted, and foreswore himself to a duty ten thousand suns in the making.
Thus the first kafara was born.
I found it very interesting that blitzle/zebstrika have such a reverence and connection to dragons, considering they’re electric types and I wouldn’t have pegged them to be the species that reveres dragons this way. But I like it! I’m curious where you got your inspiration for all these different stories and legends.
You snort anxiously. The campsite’s a sorry affair; Hilda’s wrestling with the rainfly of her tent. She’s currently shivering against the wind that’s starting to blow in—a cold front from the moors, perhaps. You wouldn’t know. You were never supposed to go this far north. This is a strange land; when the clouds gather, they do shed not rain, but ice. There is no thunder to be found here, only cold.
It’s unnatural, and you don’t like it.
This does get glossed over in most fics, doesn’t it? The fact that wild Pokémon are captured and taken very far away from home, often forced into situations and climates that are the exact opposite of what they are made for.
First Reshiram, now this. You stamp your foot. Sparks fly from it, and you have to quell your anger before you draw attention. But you needn’t have worried. Hilda’s huddled against herself, eyes held captive by the flames.
Even Hilda seems very disconnected from her Pokémon. It sounds like she’s at least more in tune with them than Cheren is, but there’s definitely still a gap there.
But Vaselva wouldn’t get that. She has bold words for one who was raised in a cage, where the cycle never applied.
Oof, very interesting to see these two clash with their different beliefs and backgrounds.
{We journey alongside one another so we can all grow. It is difficult, but so is life. A seedling that knows only fertile soil and ample rain will wither away under the summer sun. At some point you must not trouble yourself with the why. A plant does not need a reason to flower. Growing strong means you do not doubt.}
Perhaps for a tree. But in the herds, you must always question. Even your father, and his story of a zebstrika’s purpose—you must question this as well. A foal that runs in a straight line is a foal that runs to certain death. {I am no plant.}
Again, very good use of their vastly different cultures to explain how they think.
Your father had never taught you a song for when a kafara’s sacrifice goes ignored by the rest.
Oh, ouch, poor Amara. She’s just trying her best.
But humans pick the strongest. If you grit your teeth through a broken leg, if you remain impassive through a barrage of flames, you are more desirable. You become their rock. Strength will protect you from liepard and make you vulnerable to human hunters instead.
Oh a very good point. Being strong in the wild means survival, but being strong among humans means being subject to more suffering.
When the first zebstrika received his spark and his color, the power was too much. It coursed through his veins and nearly tore him apart. The fracture lines are woven into all of your skins now. Pain is inextricable from sacrifice.
I like this bit about the first zebstrika!
You don’t care. You bowl through them, scattering them to the ground. N’s staring at the stone in his hand, too stunned to give orders. Not that he’d give them anyway. He’s a liar, and an indecisive human, and you were a fool for ever believing he’d be any different.
You bray in frustration, letting out all of the electric charge out at once, and the resulting thunderstrike is so bright that it washes out the tower. When it clears, N is still standing. The klinklang is smoking. One set of gears is jammed together where the heat melted the teeth away.
Ohh boy, she mad. It seems she’s more angry that N was (seemingly) wrong, and thus her hopes are shattered, than she is about him opposing Hilda.
The archeops emerges, his wings flapping wildly. He soars over the chaos and blinks twice. You watch his eyes fasten onto N. The archeops swoops towards the ground, too low for a proper dive, and when he emerges there’s something red clutched in his talons.
The flash of metal catches your attention. His pokéball. He’s grabbed his pokéball.
“Reylin?” Hilda asks, but too slow. The archeops rockets towards N. He grabs N’s shirt in his beak, uses his talons to shove the pokéball into the N’s hands. Reylin shouts something urgently in a language you can’t understand, but you see a faint flicker of understanding in the human’s eyes.
Reylin! :( I can’t imagine what this must have felt like for Hilda.
She was given Vaselva. But you were the first one she chose. So while the serperior gets Hilda’s hopes, you get her fears. When she lost her first gym battle in Nimbasa and almost lost her sponsorship for it; when she received that letter from her father; when the strange boy she thought was a friend was shaping up to be her greatest roadblock. She confided in you. You were her lighthouse, the one on her team that showed no pain or hesitation, guiding her through her storms.
You snort and lean in close, exhale a hot puff of air on her snow that lines her jacket. She reaches out and wraps her hands around the back of your neck, presses her forehead against your own, and sobs.
At least Hilda doesn’t pretend to be a hero.
Powerful stuff. We learn a lot about Hilda in these paragraphs, and about how much Amara really does care for her, despite everything. Which just hurts when you know what happens later.
“Yes, hello.” Pause. “Burr.” Another pause. “B-U-R-R. First name Mina. Yes, it’s nice to talk to you too.”
Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir?
Trainer usually sped through phone conversations at record speed, so it’s almost soothing to see her nodding patiently, biting her lip while the person in the phone talks back to her.
Interesting that bisharp calls him “Trainer” and not by his real name. Even Tourmaline, who detested Cheren, still called him by his name, so this feels really telling here.
She shifts her weight in the chair uncomfortably. “Yes. First name Timothy.”
If you hadn’t mentioned on discord that you named him Tim Burr because of his timburr, I never would have caught it. Lol I love it though
But Trainer was smart in all the ways that didn’t matter. He hit Samson when you did not obey, and the conkeldurr was soft even though he pretended not to be.
Ughhhh I hate this. Seriously, shouldn’t there be like some sort of test before you set out to be a trainer so that its known you can be trusted with Pokémon and in high-stress situations?
You don’t get to say goodbye.
Nobody considers the Pokémon’s feelings for one second in this world and I hate it. :(
She hisses something inaudible and tells the lightbox to show a different person, so it does—a green-haired man making an emphatic speech to a crowd
Gee, I wonder who that is?
The wanderer’s ending made you sad for reasons you couldn’t explain at the time, not that anyone had asked. He seemed unhappy as a wanderer, but he truly didn’t seem any happier as a king. He wandered across the entire earth to find himself a destiny that fit, but in the end the gift of his blood called louder.
LOL for some reason I got LOTR vibes from this movie. Also, I’m struggling to know how the story of the movie applies to bisharp in this scenario. Between this and constantly going back to “what good is a soldier if he won’t follow his Queen”, I think I was struggling to piece it all together.
Humans are nice. They let you rematch if you lose.
Humans are cruel. They make you rematch when you lose.
I really like the contrast of these two sentences, but they didn’t entirely make sense to me. Why would bisharp think both things right after the other?
She swears you aren’t violent; they don’t believe her. You don’t blame them. How could they believe her? How could a bisharp stop being violent?
In a friend’s fic, they touch on the topic of how dangerous it is to lump all Pokemon of a species into one generalized group. Just because a pokemon is a certain species, that does not guarantee that they will behave a certain way. Kind of like the argument for/against pit bulls in real life. So I’m glad that this chapter basically disproves this line of thinking.
Sometimes the phone calls and she doesn’t tell it anything. She lets it scream quietly in the corner and leaves the person inside without anyone to talk to. You feel bad for the phone. It’s frustrating to shout for help and have no one listen.
That last line is powerful. Ugh. Summary of this fic in a nutshell?
{What,} the Queen asks you stonily, {am I supposed to do with a sword that no longer wants to fight?}
This analogy feels more fitting than what you were trying to accomplish with the movie. But that’s just my opinion!
You don’t think you’ll miss this place, it’s true. But what comes next might be worse.
Scary and true. Pokémon have no say in where they go. They are completely at the mercy of the humans and what they decide to do with them.
It feels nice to cut the earth. The ground does not feel pain; it does not recoil from you; it does not cry. In your rank it was a bad idea, a fast way for the blades to grow dull. Cutting softer materials would let you stay sharp.
He likes being able to use his swords in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone—my HEART.
Looking closer, she has tears in her eyes. They don’t look fresh. She’s been storing them, but now she wipes them away clumsily with the back of her hand. That’s when you notice that her hand insides are raw, bleeding. You look back at the shovel, and then you avert your eyes in shame. Wounds are not meant to be witnessed. That is what armor is for.
Something tells you that this wasn’t actually about the garden.
But he went off on his own and did these horrible things to all of you, and everyone’s asking how he could do such a thing, how he could become an abuser. I don’t even answer the phone anymore; someone put my number on the internet and everyone’s been calling nonstop to tell me what a piece of shit we both are. And he’s going to be locked up for years at best; my own child; did I know.”
This chapter legitimately made me tear up the first time I read it, and it was right here that did it for me. You captured Mina’s grief and guilt so painfully well.
They share the same lips and nose, you think—face features are hard. Humans are foolish for not wearing helms. Their skin certainly isn’t strong enough to warrant going unprotected.
Haha. More fun observations on how weird humans are!
She holds herself like someone who’s already been hurt before, and has made peace with it.
:(
Last night she’d watched with tight lips and a pale face as the television announced that officials had found the escaped seismitoad that had attacked its trainer. In the ensuing fight, it had been killed.
Oh.
Oh. I don’t think I caught this the first time reading it. :(
“Look at me, talking to a pokémon. I must be going crazy.”
You grate out a response. {I’m listening.}
So even
talking to a Pokémon is considered weird? Do people not realize they are perfectly capable of understanding, or do they just not care??
You run your blade deeper through the furrow in the ground, deep enough that the exposed ground is damp again.
She looks at it, frowning.
{For you,} you repeat. {For your seedlings.} A pause. She’s staring at you quizzically. You point one blade inward. {For me.}
Mina looks at the trough you’ve made. “Is this for my garden?”
You tap the shovel. Point at her bloodied hand. Nod.
A smile creases her face. The first one you’ve seen from her so far.
So beautifully bittersweet. This chapter gives me hope that maybe the world
could figure things out, like Hilda hoped.
A windstorm came by last winter, she tells you in a guarded voice, and knocked the rawst bush over, nearly tore out all its roots and flung it halfway across the yard. She points it out to you now, how she’s helped it twine around a trio of sturdy wooden stakes that help keep it stable while it grows back into the earth. She left it to root in the spot where it landed, where the winds had stopped blowing it; the oak tree in the center of the garden will shield it from the next storm. It’s coming along quite nicely now. Soon, she says, you won’t even be able to tell; she’s sure that come summer, it’ll blossom just as vibrantly as it always has.
What a beautiful anecdote that also gives a message of hope: torn, destroyed things can heal, and eventually blossom as they were always meant to.
“But they’re growing towards something, and we’ll help them get there. Even damaged leaves still need sun.”
Strands of sweaty hair hang in her face, and the aroma of damp earth is everywhere. She’s got her neck bent over the row of mint that she’s planting, but even still:
Something tells you this wasn’t actually about the garden.
Never was about the garden. 💔
You don’t really understand how people can drink trees. The garden is mysterious indeed.
Lol “drink trees”
The humans tell rumors about you. They whisper that Ghetsis beats his pokemon to keep them in line, that his hydreigon hates him more than anything else in the world.
in one sentence, we know who we’re hearing from this chapter!
Ghetsis is many things, but he is no fool. He understands the hearts of dragons. Sometimes he holds himself with the same reckless abandon. There is an accord between you. You give him what he wants. You protect him from his foes, let his reputation stretch before the two of you like a dark shadow. He gives you what you want. Power. Strength. Vengeance. A bit of coaching. A strange disc that holds the secrets of how to create fire. A wide berth. A warm bath.
It is partnership in the most basic sense. He will never seek you for counsel and you will never seek him for love. But that is not why anyone would ever choose to raise a dragon.
Hmm. Pretty rough, business-like relationship here. It makes for a very interesting foil to N’s relationship with Zahnak.
The door to N’s chambers cracks open. You occupy his room while he’s away, not for any particular reason. You could have your own chamber of the castle, furnished to your liking—but it would be empty. You are a dragon. You have no need for human comforts, least of all this one, but—
lol the tsundere vibes are strong here. Is Zahnak secretly a cat?
No. There is pity in his eyes when he sees your injuries, when he mistakes your scars for weakness. He is no dragon, but he wishes he had the fire in his heart to be one. That is his struggle, you decide. That will always be his struggle. You will not make it your own.
I like the tough love angle here, but it feels like Zahnak switches a lot from tough love to antagonizing to encouraging a lot, and it made me want a little more consistency in his interactions with N.
Six pairs of eyes glitter back at him as you share the truth he already knows.
Six
pairs? Do you mean six eyes?
He doesn’t answer at first. You didn’t expect him to. He doesn't want to admit that Ghetsis is a necessary evil. He is the bitter root that cures a deeper poison. You do not love him, but you understand his use. You will endure the flames that lick at your scales so long as they burn away the rot.
Ah, yes, the good old “the ends justify the means” argument.
{And do you know what Sagaris did, N?}
He starts, surprised at the interruption. After a moment to consider, he says, “She agreed, and sought to befriend this pokémon?”
{No. She remembered that the blood of dragons coursed thick and hot through her veins, and she seized the leader’s tusks and tore them from his face. She named herself clan leader, and the people discovered that she was already compassionate, brave, determined and strong; that what the clan leader sought to make her prove was there all along.}
Haha this did not go at all like I expected it to, but it’s a very fitting tale, considering it’s well-known amongst dragons.
He tilts his jaw up towards you, the first and last human to look you in the eyes and defy you, a dragon.
I love the glimpses we get into N’s infernal strength here. He may be soft and gentle, but he is not weak.
And this time, the smile is truly not a real one. N looks up with his emotions frozen across his face, barely able to meet your eyes. It’s like he’s afraid that if he looks too long, you’ll shatter. “Surely you hate me by now, Zahhak? For all I have failed to do for you?”
The frills on the back your neck fold close to your head; unbidden, a deep rumbling sound comes from your throat.
Of all the things the little dragon had to ask you, it was this.
Ohh sad. :( the fact that he refers to N as “the little dragon” just makes this hurt more.
The room suddenly feels heavy and still. You lean down and press the cool, dry scales of your snout against N’s forehead. He flinches back, and then he squeezes his eyes tight and throws his arms around your head, buries his forehead into your scales, runs his soft palms against your scarred jaw. He’s warm. So warm.
If you could both just stay here forever. If Dragonspiral Tower didn’t beckon, echoes of a lost song in the back of both your minds. If the world didn’t demand to be right again.
You close your eyes as well, and in that moment you can pretend you’re both smaller again. He’s just a snot-nosed child, chubby and doddling along on unsteady legs, pulling your unscarred tail, asking for stories. The little freak and his freakish handler, both of you too blind to see how everyone stared. If you don’t open your eyes ever again you can stay like this forever.
Perhaps he truly is the best one to call to the heart of the White Dragon after all, if he could so easily find his way into yours.
That last line!!
My freaking HEART, kint! Why are you doing this to me?! I seriously have tears in my eyes while typing this. So bittersweet, and it’s made worse by knowing how things end for Zahnak. AGH.
{Forgive me, dear sibling,} he says, in the dialect of dragons. It makes your heart stop to hear him invoke it, twists a tiny pang of fear that’s altogether different from how you normally feel when he adopts your tongue. He is small for a dragon, after all. Too small to share your tongue and your fate.
But the tragedy of the nocturne lament was not in the words, but in the choosing of them. In understanding the insignificance of your sacrifice and making it anyway. If he can stomach even a little of that burden, perhaps there is hope after all.
He chanted the nocturne lament like a prayer. The words rolled off his lips so quickly that he almost doesn’t notice they’re there, not until you return the other half to him, make it a promise the two of you share:
{This is all I know how to give.}
This is so cool, that N can speak the tongue of dragons—it seems to solidify how close these two are, since I can’t imagine a dragon would teach just any old human their language.
I will leave you outside of your pokéballs for as often as I possibly can, and if you do not return, I won’t ask why. It’ll be your choice.”
Wait, N uses Pokeballs? Or are these Pokémon he has liberated from their trainers, and thus they have their pokeballs with them? But how would he have obtained their Pokeballs without the trainer handing them over?
He’s gathered all six of you here. The thunderlegs, the stonesinger, the steelseed, the fossil, him, and you; and now he’s posed this very interesting problem that he needs your help solving.
love the names that Spur gives all of them.
And just like that, half your team is gone.
Hm, but does Spur actually
think of them as a team?
If you ventured deeper into the cave, you would find your fellow gearlings once more. Your life would be as it was before, with a multitude of gearlings. One day, a cog in the service of a greater machine. This is the most optimal design.
Of all the chapters I’ve read so far, this one might be my favorite in terms of how you write through the Pokémon’s eyes. Klingklang is so methodical, mechanical, and it’s so fitting!
N chews on his lip. Is he trying to subsume it? Horrifying. You look away until he finishes.
This made me laugh out loud xD
Oh no. No, that’s not what you meant at all. Leader stops abruptly. Follower, shocked, grinds to a halt—it’s not like you had a choice in that.
He flinches back. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Grind grind grind. Follower needs to get back in line. No. Leader needs to lead correctly, not disappoint the soft ones with poor logic. No. Both need to reconsider.
I love this, very good way of describing how a machine can become “upset”.
No, wait. This is when you see him truly get what you were trying to say, because he goes perfectly still, as if the gears inside of him are finally at odds with one another and the paradox reveals itself. What he wants is something he cannot get. He is a gearling that does not mesh with the rest of the world. He will search across every corner of Unova for his follower and will not find it.
Hmmm. This strikes you as unfair.
I like that this shows Spur’s process and how he decides to stay with N, simply because he cares for what N cares about.
The gyms are easier buildings to be in. You don’t like how you can’t see the sky there either, but at least the only cries of pain are your own.
Oof. Sad noises.
His words. His words. Nostalgia washes over you, drenches through your feathers and all the way down to your skin, and you’re just staring at him, eyes wide, those familiar syllables echoing in your ears. None of Hilda’s pokémon sounded like that. None of them knew what to say so you could understand them.
Poor, poor baby. Being carted around, forced to do things you don’t want to do, and unable to speak to anyone. :(
“Oh no, not all of them. I haven’t really picked up the sea dialect as much; it’s a bit harder to meet a native speaker, of course. At first I thought Zara was just using a more obscure dialect from there, maybe a deep-sea one, but then we tried talking to a basculin for a while, and she definitely didn’t know what was happening.”
“N.” Hilda sighs heavily. One of her hands snakes out from her crossed arms so she can rub her forehead. “You came back to Mistralton just for—never mind. What do you want me to do?”
LOL N is such a sweetheart. Would love to see a more lighthearted fic of N just traveling the region for all sorts of wholesome shenanigans and Hilda shaking her head at him from behind.
N swallows. He stares at his shoes while you count three of his breaths. His tongue snakes out and runs across his lips, and then he bites the bottom lip, and then, finally—“He says … if you didn’t like your family so much, why didn’t you just leave?”
Hilda turns to stone. You watch her shoulders freeze in place, raised up defensively around her ears like twin spikes of armor.
Mistake. {I didn’t mean it like that!} you chirp, but she’s not looking at you. Her smile is frozen, curdled on her face.
Yikes, I guess even with a translator, communication is still not the best.
You might think you do, you might think that one kid with a shit dad can recognize another, that you understand, but you grew up with so much that I didn’t. You don’t know the first thing about peasants like me, Lord N.”
Very curious to learn more about her dad, but I’m sure we will in later chapters?
My dear sister, Kobo told you once, I have learned a terrible secret.
Kobo broke your pack’s rules, and with that breach came a terrible price. There wasn’t punishment from the pack, for the truth he learned was a horrible one—the world had punished him enough. But it didn’t punish him swiftly, didn’t stop him from spreading his secret to you.
??? Oh? Did you edit this since I last read it? It seems different!
you hear a scream, and then a pop, and you turn just in time to see a gas cannister strike a scolipede in the thorax. The cylinder lodges between the chinks in its reddish armor, and then it begins seeping burning-hot gas while the scolipede shrieks in pain, bucking around wildly.
HOLD UP, is this the burned scolipede mentioned at the beginning of last chapter? If so...ugh. Nooo. :(
{You can drop that now,} the liepard says lazily after the girl closes the door, and you find yourself in a dimly-lit room with grungy walls and short ceiling. Ahead of the two of you, the girl fumbles her way against the bed in the center of the room—she has poor night vision, you remember belatedly—before she manages to turn on one of the lamps on the bedside table.
{Drop what?} you ask innocently.
{Skinchanger, I have met no herdier that speaks the forest’s tongue like you do.}
{We can’t all fawn around humans,} you smirk, and you watch as the hairs running down her spine stand on end in response. But you don’t drop your illusion, not around friends like these.
This seems new to me, too! I think it’s been a minute since reading this chapter so I can’t be sure about all the changes, but overall I think it reads a lot more smoothly! I think Inari is written more consistently this time around.
The girl emerges from the back room, juggling a series of weirdly shaped plastic objects in her arms. She tosses something white to Tourmaline, and then a cylindrical lump lands in front of your herdier illusion. Scentless, too-white, weirdly smooth. What is this?
{The top is weak,} Tourmaline explains before stabbing her claws in through the lid. When her paw emerges, it is covered in pale blue mud, which she languidly begins licking.
Took me a minute to figure out this was yogurt, lol
{How does he—}
{He listens,} Tourmaline answers simply, and bounds away.
Are we ever given an explanation for why N can understand Pokémon? I know he was raised by them, but I wonder if there’s more to it. Sad that he’s the only one who ever learned to listen to Pokémon well enough to understand them.
Phew!! That was a lot. I might be back to finish the story later today, but we’ll see what I’m able to manage!
(Skipped chapter 7 because I’ve already left an in-depth review on that one)
