jasperseevee
The Dark Pokemon Fic Vee
Hi there, I'm Jasperseevee. I normally write for A03 and a few other sites, but I found this place and I happen to have been working on something that I'm quite proud of and I think it falls well within this community's guidelines.
This is the first part of a series of stories in what I'm calling The Silver Sage Saga, two of which are completely finished and a chapter will be posted each week for eight weeks from today (four chapters each.)
If you're interested in my more... intense stuff or want to read my stuff elsewhere, you can catch me by the same name on A03, IB, FA, and FFN (safe edits only).
But, for now, I hope you all enjoy.
Hail, friend! Welcome to the Imperial Star of Kalos, where the indomitable light of man still shines in the darkness of a world ruled by savage monsters! Some hide behind the many great city walls. Others bring their fight to the wilds, for fame, fortune, and folly. But in the far-flung fields of Shaymin's Pass... they live in a very different sort of way.
Brought by the promise of a prosperous trade, a hopeful house of merchants braves the backwater lanes, landing in an impossible world that flies on the wings of a Sage.
~ SUMMER ~
“How is it that some hermit hanging off the edge of the world is filling my lock boxes with copper?” Usmar asks as the last of a hundred, tiny, sepia lumps tumbles to the bottom of a pine wood box.
An older man, broaching his fifth decade, with a bearded mane of roseli-berry hair stands like a freight loader in his prime, knuckles perched on the buckles of his belt.
“Just a few years and a couple lucky flights, I guess,” he says, winding his beard into knots with amber eyes admiring the fresh spices, bolts of weedle-silk cloth, and the crate of brand-new hammer-hardened copper tools.
“Flights? Pardon?” Usmar mumbles from his waxed-canvas pavilion. He tosses the smelts into a banded crate, patting his hands clean with satisfaction.
The hard face of the old hermit folds like a leather sheet, wrinkling with unexpected laughter. “Ah, just an expression. Glad to see some nicer things made it all the way from Camphrier. Normally the caravans are picked to the marrow by now.”
Usmar grunts. “We’ll keep these here for you until you head back to… ah… wherever you live.”
“Up there,” his guest responds, pointing up at some cliffs overlooking a tilted plain rolling down the valley.
“Right, ye did say that, didn’t you? Anyway, folks around here were real hospitable-like at first, but when I got to asking about the stream of copper trickling down my routes everyone got spooked and wouldn’t come a stones-throw near.”
Usmar clears his throat, swirling a dubwool cloak over his shoulders. “Thought my trail had gone cold until you swooped in, out of nowhere; just before I hit the gods-forsaken road, too.”
“Not to worry, Usmar friend, I’ll spread the word that you and your caravan are to be trusted by this community; that is, as long as you keep some of the finer wares aside again. Do not betray these peoples’ trust and I can ensure a steady supply of malachite melts for years to come.”
“Agreed!” Usmar blusters with a slap across the guy’s leather-clad shoulder. “Good doing business with you, ah… Pardon my excitement, but I seem to have made agreements with a face and not a name!”
The stranger buttons on a rugged rawhide vest with hardened-leather pauldrons. “Valko.”
Usmar chuckles. “A Valko, and a fine one at that. Any other Valko’s I should worry about?”
Valko shakes his head, chuckling. “Wooloomann, and it’s just me,” he says, then whistles a tune that echoes up and down the verdant rolling hills.
“A Wooloomann, casting metal on the mountainside? Not a dubwool in sight, nary a wooloo, and no egg-house to watch as far as I can see. Have you broken with your family’s good graces, Valko?”
“My flock is safe and out of sight. I am without kin, but this valley gives me all I could ever need, so long as the village-folk can work the wool as they see fit.” He looks away, then back towards the merchant with a smirk. “From whence would all these sundries come, if not for my flock?”
The air is torn by a shrill, predatory cry, splitting the hearts of any-unsheltered-one unprepared.
Usmar gawks as the peregrine screech shakes his eardrums and he falls to the ground, drawing a bronzen knife from his belt. “Predator! Skybound! Hide the children!”
Valko bellows with laughter as a massive avian beast drops her claws around his shoulders, draping him in a luxuriant cape of red and grey spots. “Don’t mind her, she’s great with kids.”
She ruffles her fluff into a comfortable roost, preening his locks with a satisfied trill. “Flaaameeee…”
Usmar coughs and sputters, wobbling back to his feet with a slow, uneasy sheathing of his blade. “Y-you’ve tamed a Predator, a…”
“A talonflame, yes.” Valko turns around with a smile on his face and a monster on his shoulders. “I’ll be back for my things at dawn. May your journeys treat you well, and Xerneas bless your house.”
“Wait!“ Usmar pauses a moment until he sees Valko hasn’t completely ignored his plea. “Oh, my, um… I’ve never been so acquainted with a Sage. If it suits your plans, might you join us for dinner this evening? My son is quite learned and has read many a Sage’s tale; he’s captivated to tears with it all.”
Valko raises his brow without a word. His talonflame turns her head completely around, staring Usmar down through an empty pair of ebony eyes.
“My wife is stewing the meats we've bought with a few special things from home. An old family recipe.” Usmar is steady now, back to his old cajoling self. “And I know a cask named sherry who’s been waiting for just such an occasion. If you would be so kind as to join us, of course.”
Valko’s shoulders slump with a tired grin on his face. “Ah, never could say no to a hatchling, could I, my dear?”
“So you’ll come?” Usmar’s face lights like a torch.
The bird strokes his cheek with her beak as his fingertips brush at her feathered brow. “As long as there’s room in your nest for a humble Woolherd’s flock.”
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.“Pépé, Pépé! Did you hear?” Young Bataille cries, dashing around the wagon in a floppy nightwear robe, grinning wide with eyes the color of cloudless skies.
“Hah?!” his grandfather caws and sticks his pruny face out from the canvas flaps. “I told you I can hear just fine, damn it all!”
Bataille overlooks the abrasive squawk with a naïve glow. “Not like that! Papa says he’s invited a Sage to the fire tonight! A SAGE, Pépé, and so far from the heartland! I can hardly believe it,” he swoons, fiddling with a marrowhack-bone clasp he’d carved himself.
The old man cackles like a Murkrow on a two corpse claim. “And I’ve got a pyroar in my pocket.” He drags a burnished-silver flask from his satchel and takes a lippy swig. “See it? Real spicy, bastard. Reckon he’ll need another talking-to soon.”
“Don’t shear the stalk before it’s reached for the sky, dear,” the boy’s grandmother says, making that old gogoat look like a same-vintage barrel that’s spoiled to vinegar right beside the fine wine she’d become. “Bataille, temper yourself. Remember that ‘dangerous predator’ your father brought home for you last year?” she asks from a split-log bench, braiding her hip-length head of silver hair by the fire.
The boy’s gaze sinks to the ground like a fog. “Yes, Mère… But the noibat they caught was amazing too!”
“And loud enough to wake a Gengar haunt at noon!” his mother balks. “Your obsession with dangerous, wild monsters is unhealthy,” she chides. “I haven’t seen you keep the records straight today either, have I, Bataille?”
“Not to worry, it’s already done,” Usmar announces, proudly marching into camp with an armful of fresh-split wood. “Our guest will be arriving any time, I suspect. It’s sundown already, Ulphia,” he says, feeding slices of log to a hungry cooking flame. “Is dinner ready, my love?”
Ulphia rolls her eyes, wringing a rope of soggy, nettle cloths in her hands. “Odétte has stirred the spirits of the pot since you let us know.”
His daughter groans. “It’s been all day!”
“A quarter-day at most, child; barely a slice of a grown-woman’s burden,” her mother hisses back.
Odétte looks up, wiping ashen muck from her cheek. “Is it true, father? Is a wizard coming?”
Bataille scoffs in that way every older brother must when their younger sister insists on knowing less than them. “A Sage, Dot, he’s called a Sage!”
“If you insist, young man, though just Valko will suffice.” Everyone leaps from their linen skins as the stranger slinks in from the inky edge of the firelight’s glow, eyes twinkling like tavern windows.
Bataille whips around and melts into a pool of starlight that reflects the image of a backwater roughneck standing like an armored king. “H-hello, monsieur!”
Usmar’s eyes shift with concern at the number of guests arriving. “Oh, so good to see you! Welcome to our humble corner of the village wall. Was your… friend unable to join us?”
Odétte gasps as her mother leaves a whisper in her ear and scrambles for an obsidian-glass cup brimming with ornery drink. “For you! Glass and all!”
Valko takes a spot equally distant from everyone and plops down, hands clutching the cup as he brings it up to his eyes with childish wonder. “Well, it’s impolite to walk upon the warmth of another’s hearth without a commensurate gift in hand. I’ll be chewed by a chesnaught before I’d ever consider spurning your good nature, dear merchant!”
Usmar’s face screws with confusion, but his son interrupts as he is about to press further.
“You speak so well, Sage Valko!” Bataille says he hears the man’s voice more clearly. “From whence did you land in such a humble place?”
Valko laughs again. “These very blades of grass, hatchling.”
“As Latias lies!” Bataille’s grandfather mankeys his way down from the back wagon ladder. “Little Galarian Lords swarm the edges of the Heartland like cutieflies on a corpse!”
Usmar just about chokes on his in-law’s indignant tongue as his little girl hands Valko a heaping helping of Pika-Skrelp Gumbo in a turned wooden bowl.
“Don’t mind Pépé, he’s been drinking.” Odétte nearly drops the ladle as her head catches the back of her mother’s palm, then giggles as her mother receives a matronly smack in turn.
“Whip not the righteous lip, child,” the platinum-haired woman says, then gestures to their honored guest. “Young man, my apologies. Welcome! I do hope you enjoy. It’s an old favorite from the rivers up north.”
Valko bows with humility as he accepts his share from the littlest lady of the hour. “It smells divine, Madame. And I do hope you enjoy our gift too…”
Usmar looks up into an endless sea of stars as he catches the sound of a talonflame crying in the night. An unnerving experience, as they hunt in the morning as a matter of course. “Say what no-”
THUD!
The limp, lifeless body of a lickitung smacks the ground and rolls a stop against a well-worn conestoga wheel, its still-salivating tongue strung across the camp like a flung seaman’s rope.
“Distortion!” their old man squawks.
Valko smiles as everyone stares at the corpse in stunned silence. “Perfect timing, my little flame! Hail!”
Ulphia’s head slowly turns from the carcass in terror. “My lord, won’t this anger the hills?!”
Bataille and Odétte look up with moonlight in their eyes as Valko’s Talonflame swoops down in a flash of leaves and soil, perching upon his shoulders to cloak him in her ashen wings.
“Hardly. The creature I offer upon your table has eaten no less than one of our own young.” He closes his eyes and nods with imperial decree “ It is the kindest judgment I could pass upon a killer of children.”
Their spines shake like gossamer chimes in the wind.
All except grandmother’s, who smiles with a cool nod. “Rightly so, Valko, Sage of the Southern Peaks. We are grateful for your hospitality.”
Valko pinches his chin, looking up. “I quite like that one. I think I’ll take it, m’lady!”
The old woman grabs a gnarled cane and stamps it into the foot-trodden grass, pointing to her daughter with a stern, matronly air. “We’ve been given an offering of incredible value, Ulphia. Do not dawdle.”
The once iron-shouldered woman ducks her head, beckoning Odétte to follow. “Yes, Mère…”
Valko smiles, knocking back the bowl of gumbo with glee as amber sparks giggle across his lips. “Unfathomable bounties of flavor!”
Bataille drinks from the talonflame’s gold-ringed eyes. “I’ve never been so close to one so furious!”
He turns to the boy and winks in return. “You’ve not the slightest clue.”
The eldest among them knocks back a fiery flask, gobbling his earthly share of liquor. “Alright, you. Just where do you hail from?” he enquires as Usmar serves ladles of stew around the fire. “You’re too damned smooth for a bumpkin.”
Usmar stumbles on his own tongue, searching for the right words of atonement before promptly shutting his mouth as a pair of stern, patronly eyes glare him down. Instead, he performs an impressive social vanishing act as Pépé rises from his addled stupor, scrambling to a seat nearby.
Valko raises his vessel with a sly smile. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
The split, wrinkled lips of an old miser turn up as a stark sobriety returns to his eyes. “Verily! Forgive this old spoiled egg for stinking the air. Tell us your story, for as long as you desire. Every word is a blessing upon my line!” he declares, clearly seeing something his son-in-law has overlooked.
Valko smirks. “I’m no divine creature, sir, but I am blessed by a great many friends, to be sure,” he says, brushing work-hardened hands along his Talonflame’s beak.
Bataille slips his tender fingers out from his cloak and clutches the clasp again, transfixed. “Will you tell us how you became a Sage, monsieur?” he asks with blunt curiosity.
The old drunk spits with a cough. “Bataille! Gods!”
Valko peers into everybody's eyes, finding a happy barrel of fools inside, and shrugs. “I would be nothing without my bond to Arceus and her creatures. I could think of no better tale to tell.”
The young man’s spirits explode with joy. His father sits in complete bemusement. His grandfather gurgles in his seat, defeated but clutching at his social consolation prize, happy with it all the same. Odétte peers around the corner as her mother soaks up all that she can amid the waterfall of monster guts spilling from the kitchen wagon’s sides. An old woman, wizened by six decades of hard life, smiles in patient surprise.
“Please, tell us!”
Valko’s gaze wanders into the blackened sky with an amber glow on his chin.
“How is it that the light of a generation always passes like a new moon?”
Grandfather nods sharply. “Too many hours seeking supple pounds of flesh, I guess.”
Grandmother smirks with fluttering eyes. “Or was it the shine of silver kalancs?”
The old man huffs like a flustered bull. “Didn’t blind me to you, now did it?”
Valko chuckles at that. “In my humble valley, the sight of a silver coin is as rare as Arceus’ shadow cast against the sun. But that other thing… yes, we’ve cared for our women wisely, indeed,” he says, less with brow-waggling letchery and more like a gardener admiring his crop. “But no, that’s not it…
“Perhaps, it was the joy of the moment that pulled the wool over my eyes for so long… but I certainly didn’t miss the moment everything changed.
“It was a summer of vengeance, brought on by a spring of suffering, planted in the snow of a winter everyone wished we’d been blessed without. The White Woozy comes as quickly as it vanishes. Oh, how right the old crones were who say the bodies fall like flakes of ash from a wild forest fire.
“We, my brother and I, lost our father and our mother then. When the soil softened from the cold, we buried them together beneath a freshly planted row of Citrus Berry vines. It was what Father said was best, even as he rolled with fever through the night, refusing broth and bread. Our mountain plains, once a place of sure seasons and plentiful pastures, had become the final turn of a book filled with empty pages.”
Odétte quietly gasps at the news, looking at her own mother and father in horrified contemplation.
“However, we carried on, as you do. A quenched fire certainly doesn’t light itself, now does it? We shored up our trusty old mudsdale and readied for the hardest years of our lives.” Valko smiles with a wink. “For we would need to marry, and no nesting lady lays her eggs in a mangy den.” He chuckles, lost in thought. “I was fifteen summers, just two years my brother’s senior.”
Odétte’s mother raises her chin in approval at Valko’s words. “A tender time to come of age, Monsieur, no matter the place.”
“Were we too young? Yes, but nature left two budding bucks with no choice but to bloom before the snow had gone, and you don’t argue with nature, no sir… Especially when she’s not yet done scolding you for what it was you didn’t know.
“You see, when one herds wooloo, for shearing and for meats, you come to know the wilds around you. You must come to peace with them, become one part of a landscape that lives forever instead of a post that crumbles with time. We knew every sudowoodo patch, bulbasaur pack, and ferrothorn tangle as far as a single sunrise lit around the pasture, and they in turn knew us.
“Until that day our harmonious tangle made for mutually beneficial life. But those relationships were forged by my grandfather and passed to my father, whose cloak I still couldn’t fill. So the wilds had lost their faith in our family’s brass… so very fast…
“There was a pair of talonflame inhabiting the caves atop the mountain peaks, watching over the whole valley. They’d never bothered our flock, so long as we kept to our own side, even left us with clean carrion when their fill was had from time to time. It was a comfortable arrangement.”
Odétte tugs at the hem of her mother’s dress. “Mama, the clerics say that feasted bodies are cursed.”
Ulpha pets her daughter’s silky blonde hair. “This is a different place, child.”
Valko stands with his arms out and his partner spreads her feathers twice as wide.“But as soon as we spotted their brilliant red wings taking off and landing in the morning, noon, and night, we knew something was wrong when we heard fits of uneasy calls coming from the cliffs. Not long after, that was when the freshly-hatched of our flock started going missing.”
Bataille shifts with his jaw clenched, eyes wide as skipping stones as the talonflame’s claws wriggle around her master’s shoulder.
“I was sanguine at first, for we knew that the world took her due, and gave in time. The commotion on the mountain would pass and so would the pain; but Griffe… he couldn’t stand it as we returned to our flock every single day to find another head or two missing. Some younger, some older, some he liked more than the rest.
“He grew furious, especially as we brought the wooloo to our own home, where we could watch them sun or moon. It was then we caught a glimpse of the villain dragging a blood-soaked ewe away, wreathed in hungry flames.
“ ‘Oh, how I’ll pluck those feathers and feast upon him in turn!’ he’d say, night and day, with eyes drowned in shadow. How could I blame my brother? Half the flock was gone by summer’s end, and the nubs of our last rope were fraying fast.
“I had thought the male of that nest was smaller than the one we chased away with slung stones, but I had only seen it from afar, and it had most certainly had its fill of fine mutton. I’ll never forget that quiver in my gut as I saw the meadow lit like midday, with feathers burning like the sun…
“...and that long, hungry cry.”
Everyone jumps from their wooden stumps as talonflame ekes a teeny-tiny squawk.
Valko chuckles and polishes dried specks of blood from her beak. “Everything terrible seems so small when it’s so far away it fits the palm of your hand.”
“Surely a woodsman as capable as your father had a bow and quiver!” Usmar says after a long, hard swallow of his wife’s wonderful stew.
“Surely he did, but my father’s bow was not your normal recurve fare. It was granted to him by his father, who served in the great war so these grasses stayed free from trampling of Galarian boots.”
Bataille’s grandfather hoots with a raised flask. “I knew you had good roots, mmhmm.”
“He was the best of men. He’s the reason our Woolherd name began in these mountains. By the empire’s light this is ours, to shear and serve long as the royal Lumierre line lasts. I was barely able to string the mighty thing with my brother’s help, let alone draw it under my own power.
“But, the old man had another heirloom to give… and in my exhaustion I failed to notice its golden shimmer missing from above the mantle of the fireplace.
“I had heard of flock-keeping traditions further north,where pit homes were dug for the livestock, connected by little tunnels. I thought my Brother listened when I said to keep the thing at bay with the stones we’d piled the night before. It was a big project, and I needed something to keep my mind off the winter racing behind my back; to do something that may keep us all safe. I heard my brother yelling outside, and kept digging, thinking he was out of the flaming thing’s reach.
“Like a fool diglett, I dug and dug… and fell asleep…”
The children’s chests fill with a terrified wind as their parents bow their heads in solace and their grandparents’ cheeks tighten with grim resignation.
Valko balls up his fist, eyes towards the sky as his talonflame lights the night in bloody flames. “If only I’d listened to our mudsdale’s terrified whinnying. Instead, my lungs heeded the smoke smothering my dwelling as I broke from its burning thatch and bolted down the hill.
“…but I was too late. Our mudsdale was left curled up with a charred smoking face, like a dropped hock of torchic in the coals… and there my brother was, wielding my grandfather’s long-spear, lunging for the tiercel’s gut…
His voice shutters with glistening eyes. “Griffon, you glorious fool, you got the bastard good, didn’t you…”
Everyone leans in as Valko takes a long breath and they slink away as he exhales just as slow.
“...I’ll never forget my baby brother’s dying shrieks as his body burst into flames and the spear burned to cinders in a grip that dripped with fat, like cuts of meat in a hearth. I tried to save him. I wanted to pour my canteen over his crying face and clear the blackened crusts away, like I would when the springmelt mud got caked to his cheeks as a babe…”
All the men of the camp suddenly regret their curiosity as this powerful enigma of a man begins to fall before them.
“...but the evil thing’s wings beat me back and I rolled into mudsdale, who bucked me square.” He points to a pronounced divot in the temple of his brow. “She did me a favor, really. I can barely sleep as is. The next morning I inspected the top of my thatch hut and saw the roof was half-seared away; and knew that Griffon had saved me as I slept.
“I’m sure our Father is proud of him… I could only hope for a death half as noble as that.”
“Here here!” Pépé shouts and takes another swig.
All the grown folk down a burning gulp of the good stuff as Valko plays with the flames rippling through his partner’s plumes“ The next morning I wrapped our mudsdale’s ruined face with a bandage soaked in Rawst Berry wine and prayed that she would make it through the week. I looked upon the charred ruins of the Citrus-Berry fields we’d planted together since my little hands could furrow, and laid my brother’s blackened bones between mother and father’s still-rotting bodies. The cinders of my brother’s final stand.”
Bataille bunches up against his father’s side, terrified of the creature so calmly snuggling against the Sage, knowing now the horrors it could bring at a moment’s notice. “W-what did you do then, Monsieur?”
“...I went and found the bronze-leaf tip of my grandfather's spear…”
Ulphia coughs as she cleans a long string of entrails. “Gods on the mount, no!”
Valko nods the woman’s way and pats the spot on the log between him and young Bataille. He smiles as the boy cries out as his talonflame flutters down beside them, cooling everyones’ bowls with a heady gust of wind.
“Griffon’s fires lit a forge inside me. The hatred was so strong my vision went thick and red, like a ruddy tub of afterbirth. I broke the head from Father’s spade and set the spear upon it. It was heavy, had barely half the reach, but I’d be distorted if it would not do.”
Bataille peeks into talonflame’s empty eyes. “What did you do, Sage Valko?!”
Grandfather twists up in a knot as his flask runs dry. “No man worth his soil could let such a thing go unpunished!”
“I would climb the cliffs and settle the scales. All the mutton jerky I’d made from the bodies we could save from the talonflame mates would suit me well. I took weeks of provisions far too many, but I didn’t know how long I’d be gone.
“With fingers numb from the mountain’s cold midsummer night, I stabbed them into crack after crack and slowly climbed, knowing one fool’s slip would mean my brother died for nothing. Time after time I’d thought I might have been caught, bearing witness to that same ruckus we’d heard for months prior, but never did the birds flying in and out of the nest notice my presence.
“Gods I hated every moment, slipping on fresh layers of egg-white shit laid from above, like a castle’s guard tossing tar on the faces of a siege. It took hours, and only as the sun rose did I finally manage to drag my sorry arse up over the lip of their lair.”
Bataille chuckles as little Odétte gags from her mother’s lap.
“And as dawn crested the peaks I scurried into a tiny hole where I could gather my strength, confident that they’d notice me only half as much as the droppings they’d dressed me in… all the better, for between my exhausted slumbers I prepared myself for the end, if things didn’t go my way.”
Valko draws a chipped-flint blade wrapped in strings of hide. “When I rose, I readied to take the returning male as the female soared away. But something was wrong. I looked at its belly after I woke and saw not a drop of blood, no ruffled feathers, no sign of injury at all. ‘Had my brother’s courage come to nothing in this monster’s world?’ I asked myself…”
Odétte climbs around the grass, escaping her Mother’s watch, and crawls behind her brother to peek her head around the end of a sitting-log. “Oh no!”
“Oh yes!” Valko leans towards her, making her squeak and flee as he continues his story. “But I wouldn’t let it be! No, my brother saved our flock, our entire legacy, sacrificed himself so I could carry our line on. I was ready! I had no other choice.”
The talonflame turns around and rolls her eyes, watching her partner ready himself to regale the tale… again.
“I leapt upon the villain’s back, stabbing at its shoulders. By some dark inspiration my body carried me forth to kill in hot blood, but its head spun around!”
Valko’s partner twists their neck a full 180° and gazes right into Bataille’s soul.
“...they tried like Malamar haunts to peck out my eyes before sucking up a great lungful of morning wind to vomit flame across my face.”
The massive bird beside them burps a fiery cloud of smoke.
“But I had a trick in my palm. Grandfather said you could take a handful of sand with spices and blind your foe; told us a hundred times of how he broke a battle line with a fistful of Touga-Powder pounded up in bronze forge slag. We grew Tougas, dried them in the attic of the cottage, so I ground a powder on our mortar and mixed it with sand. I knew right away, as a tiny puff kissed my own eyes, that it would sour the vision of anyone, man or monster!”
“Rightly so!” Grandfather roars, spilling mead across his knuckles as he tries to fill his flask again.
“The distorted, eggless bastard reeled, painting the cliffside in fire, and I leapt down to let blood from its neck until red waters ran down the cliffs.”
Bataille looks down, searching his mind for meaning. “Eggless?”
Talonflame overhears and eyes Odétte, cooing pleasantly.
Odétte finds one of the many, freshly-snapped switches her brother used as swords in play the other day. “And you beat the bastard,” she curses out swinging and runs from her mother’s angry palm.
Valko puts a finger to his lips. “Listen, and learn, child. I looked around, seeing the home I’d just invaded. I saw eggs stomped in a soup of spilled whites, so many smashed like they’d been struck with a tiny mallet.
“Only three went unscathed, curled in the body of another male that was dead as a sun-dried treeco. Just as big… with a swollen, bloody wound in his belly.”
“Distortion! What in Darkrai’s ditch?” Usmar flusters between his third helping of stew, doing his best to keep up with the voracious appetite of their guest.
“I hadn’t the faintest! But I knew I needed to do something with the bodies if I wanted to make the most of that summer of suffering.” Valko pokes his partner in the plumage with a smile. “And I did hear that a big, mean, winged predator was a fine cut of meat.”
Talonflame burbles with a chuckle after they leave Valko reeling from a freshly pecked pinky finger.
“What did you do?!” Odétte peeps, leaving her mother sighing in defeat as she realizes her little helper has fled to the confines of her own imagination.
“Climb down, climb down!” Bataille cries.
“I sat.”
“You what?!” laments the choir.
“I was tired, can you blame me? Those birds weighed as much as I did and I wasn’t about to toss them down without a moment’s rest. The eggs were just the right size for a squat-and-ponder, sturdy enough shells, good little thinking stumps, really.”
Talonflame smacks her face with a smoldering wingtip.
“I was halfway through my plan to set the final ambush when an angry wind blew against my face, hot as the coals tempering the pot tonight,” he says as the great bird beside them huffs a powerful gust from her beak that sets the campfire roaring like a forge.
“No!” Bataille says with an excited smile on his face.
“There I was, eye to eye with the beauty of death in the sky. I was sure I was a dead man, sat like a fool atop her last three eggs… having killed one mate… and now a second in just a few days’ time… in her own home.”
Odétte runs to her mother’s blouse and hides her eyes.
Valko gives a hard look at them all. “There was no getting around it, I knew, this was the moment I would carve out my legacy, or chisel my resting slate.
“But she just stared at me, carefully looking at the bodies as I crept away with two of her dead companions tied to my back. I held my spear aloft. ‘You killed my brother, I killed your mates. A body for a body. We’re even now, so stay off my flock, you hear?!’ I yelled, hoping my shaky bravado was worth half an ounce of dick. Her pained unblinking gaze never left me as I made my retreat, and it was then I realized…
Ulphia gasps. “You saved her babies!”
“Ha?!” Grandfather belts out, spilling a fresh swig of wine from his newly-brandished, wooden cup.
“Indeed. That second male had finished what my brother started and was ready to empty the nest, that was until some angry shit-smeared redhead foiled him in the act. I thought and thought and thought as I crawled down, feeling her blazing gaze burning me from above, and realized things were not yet right.
“When the clouds of fury had cleared from my head, I knew there was one thing left to do before we were square. I’d lost one, but she’d lost two, and a few unfinished kin… So it was only fair that I gave mudsdale a long dinner on a pile of ripened berries, knowing she was soon to go from the pain and the oozing face. I sent her to Arceus with grace, in the old woolherd’s way.
“And over three days of drying out stacks and stacks of meat I could barely carry, I left everything the old mare’s body produced at the foot of the cliffs, declaring aloud that I wished the strength of my workmare’s body would give her and her hatchlings the strength to survive.
“Imagine my shock as she slowly fluttered down, meeting me eye to eye…”
Bataille and Odétte look at each other, then at Talonflame as the little boy finally bursts with excitement. “It’s like all the stories! She gave you an egg, didn’t she, Sage?”
Valko smirks. “Something like that.”
“Foolish me arrived without my trusty shovel-spear, thinking I was showing great honor to the wilds. I screamed like the frightened child I truly was as she dug her talons into my shoulders. She lifted me up off the ground, up to her den, where I was sure to die…
“...but then she just plopped me down beside the nest, now clean with the three remaining eggs tucked in a bundle of weeds. She pointed with her wing at a cushy pile of leaves and grass she’d made in the corner and flew off without a single Kalosian word.”
“I wanted to leave, confused, angry, hungry as a chained morpeko, until my brain finally caught up with the wisdom of our blessed valley’s Alpha-Falcon.” Valko brushes his talonflame’s sides as she finishes her stew and settles onto his shoulders once again. “If either of our legacies were going to make it through the winter, they would have to do it together.”
Grandmother, patiently awaiting Valko’s storytelling energy to wane a bit, smiles with a wizened nod. “Hardship forges the fastest of friends.”
Bataille bounces in his own britches. “Which one sits with us now, what happened in the winter?
Valko stands, nodding with respect to the argent crone as his partner’s feathers spread wide behind him, just like the stories of weddings made between the men and monsters of old. “That, my dear friends, is for another time. For it is very late, and I have many things calling me away,” he says and lowers his head as a great pair of wings cloaks him in the night.
The children’s faces shatter with a dashed sort of hope, devastated at the news.
“But, goodness, Sage. I, um… What if we never meet again? I would hate to go without your wisdom in such a terrible case.” Usmar bargains with an buttery smile.
Valko shrugs. “I believe you said you’d be back. Return in a few moons with more goods, and I’ll be sure to have more of my mountain’s bounty here to make the journey worth your while. All I ask is you bring affordable things, for even the least among us here.”
Pépé, Mærwine Lumierre, always lets his son-in-law make his own mistakes. This day, however, he’s pleased to see the man has stumbled in a clever way. “We’ll bring our own mountain of bounty, then.”
“The story will surely weigh on me like a leaden plate!” Bataille cries. “How can I wait that long?”
Valko’s feet rise from the ground as the grasses flutter and dance beneath his partner’s Flying gust. “A journey with a terrible weight makes a man’s legs stronger, young Bataille.”
“I hope to see you all again, safe and sound, around the fireside. Adieu.”
This is the first part of a series of stories in what I'm calling The Silver Sage Saga, two of which are completely finished and a chapter will be posted each week for eight weeks from today (four chapters each.)
If you're interested in my more... intense stuff or want to read my stuff elsewhere, you can catch me by the same name on A03, IB, FA, and FFN (safe edits only).
But, for now, I hope you all enjoy.
Hail, friend! Welcome to the Imperial Star of Kalos, where the indomitable light of man still shines in the darkness of a world ruled by savage monsters! Some hide behind the many great city walls. Others bring their fight to the wilds, for fame, fortune, and folly. But in the far-flung fields of Shaymin's Pass... they live in a very different sort of way.
Brought by the promise of a prosperous trade, a hopeful house of merchants braves the backwater lanes, landing in an impossible world that flies on the wings of a Sage.
~ SUMMER ~
“How is it that some hermit hanging off the edge of the world is filling my lock boxes with copper?” Usmar asks as the last of a hundred, tiny, sepia lumps tumbles to the bottom of a pine wood box.
An older man, broaching his fifth decade, with a bearded mane of roseli-berry hair stands like a freight loader in his prime, knuckles perched on the buckles of his belt.
“Just a few years and a couple lucky flights, I guess,” he says, winding his beard into knots with amber eyes admiring the fresh spices, bolts of weedle-silk cloth, and the crate of brand-new hammer-hardened copper tools.
“Flights? Pardon?” Usmar mumbles from his waxed-canvas pavilion. He tosses the smelts into a banded crate, patting his hands clean with satisfaction.
The hard face of the old hermit folds like a leather sheet, wrinkling with unexpected laughter. “Ah, just an expression. Glad to see some nicer things made it all the way from Camphrier. Normally the caravans are picked to the marrow by now.”
Usmar grunts. “We’ll keep these here for you until you head back to… ah… wherever you live.”
“Up there,” his guest responds, pointing up at some cliffs overlooking a tilted plain rolling down the valley.
“Right, ye did say that, didn’t you? Anyway, folks around here were real hospitable-like at first, but when I got to asking about the stream of copper trickling down my routes everyone got spooked and wouldn’t come a stones-throw near.”
Usmar clears his throat, swirling a dubwool cloak over his shoulders. “Thought my trail had gone cold until you swooped in, out of nowhere; just before I hit the gods-forsaken road, too.”
“Not to worry, Usmar friend, I’ll spread the word that you and your caravan are to be trusted by this community; that is, as long as you keep some of the finer wares aside again. Do not betray these peoples’ trust and I can ensure a steady supply of malachite melts for years to come.”
“Agreed!” Usmar blusters with a slap across the guy’s leather-clad shoulder. “Good doing business with you, ah… Pardon my excitement, but I seem to have made agreements with a face and not a name!”
The stranger buttons on a rugged rawhide vest with hardened-leather pauldrons. “Valko.”
Usmar chuckles. “A Valko, and a fine one at that. Any other Valko’s I should worry about?”
Valko shakes his head, chuckling. “Wooloomann, and it’s just me,” he says, then whistles a tune that echoes up and down the verdant rolling hills.
“A Wooloomann, casting metal on the mountainside? Not a dubwool in sight, nary a wooloo, and no egg-house to watch as far as I can see. Have you broken with your family’s good graces, Valko?”
“My flock is safe and out of sight. I am without kin, but this valley gives me all I could ever need, so long as the village-folk can work the wool as they see fit.” He looks away, then back towards the merchant with a smirk. “From whence would all these sundries come, if not for my flock?”
The air is torn by a shrill, predatory cry, splitting the hearts of any-unsheltered-one unprepared.
Usmar gawks as the peregrine screech shakes his eardrums and he falls to the ground, drawing a bronzen knife from his belt. “Predator! Skybound! Hide the children!”
Valko bellows with laughter as a massive avian beast drops her claws around his shoulders, draping him in a luxuriant cape of red and grey spots. “Don’t mind her, she’s great with kids.”
She ruffles her fluff into a comfortable roost, preening his locks with a satisfied trill. “Flaaameeee…”
Usmar coughs and sputters, wobbling back to his feet with a slow, uneasy sheathing of his blade. “Y-you’ve tamed a Predator, a…”
“A talonflame, yes.” Valko turns around with a smile on his face and a monster on his shoulders. “I’ll be back for my things at dawn. May your journeys treat you well, and Xerneas bless your house.”
“Wait!“ Usmar pauses a moment until he sees Valko hasn’t completely ignored his plea. “Oh, my, um… I’ve never been so acquainted with a Sage. If it suits your plans, might you join us for dinner this evening? My son is quite learned and has read many a Sage’s tale; he’s captivated to tears with it all.”
Valko raises his brow without a word. His talonflame turns her head completely around, staring Usmar down through an empty pair of ebony eyes.
“My wife is stewing the meats we've bought with a few special things from home. An old family recipe.” Usmar is steady now, back to his old cajoling self. “And I know a cask named sherry who’s been waiting for just such an occasion. If you would be so kind as to join us, of course.”
Valko’s shoulders slump with a tired grin on his face. “Ah, never could say no to a hatchling, could I, my dear?”
“So you’ll come?” Usmar’s face lights like a torch.
The bird strokes his cheek with her beak as his fingertips brush at her feathered brow. “As long as there’s room in your nest for a humble Woolherd’s flock.”
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.“Pépé, Pépé! Did you hear?” Young Bataille cries, dashing around the wagon in a floppy nightwear robe, grinning wide with eyes the color of cloudless skies.
“Hah?!” his grandfather caws and sticks his pruny face out from the canvas flaps. “I told you I can hear just fine, damn it all!”
Bataille overlooks the abrasive squawk with a naïve glow. “Not like that! Papa says he’s invited a Sage to the fire tonight! A SAGE, Pépé, and so far from the heartland! I can hardly believe it,” he swoons, fiddling with a marrowhack-bone clasp he’d carved himself.
The old man cackles like a Murkrow on a two corpse claim. “And I’ve got a pyroar in my pocket.” He drags a burnished-silver flask from his satchel and takes a lippy swig. “See it? Real spicy, bastard. Reckon he’ll need another talking-to soon.”
“Don’t shear the stalk before it’s reached for the sky, dear,” the boy’s grandmother says, making that old gogoat look like a same-vintage barrel that’s spoiled to vinegar right beside the fine wine she’d become. “Bataille, temper yourself. Remember that ‘dangerous predator’ your father brought home for you last year?” she asks from a split-log bench, braiding her hip-length head of silver hair by the fire.
The boy’s gaze sinks to the ground like a fog. “Yes, Mère… But the noibat they caught was amazing too!”
“And loud enough to wake a Gengar haunt at noon!” his mother balks. “Your obsession with dangerous, wild monsters is unhealthy,” she chides. “I haven’t seen you keep the records straight today either, have I, Bataille?”
“Not to worry, it’s already done,” Usmar announces, proudly marching into camp with an armful of fresh-split wood. “Our guest will be arriving any time, I suspect. It’s sundown already, Ulphia,” he says, feeding slices of log to a hungry cooking flame. “Is dinner ready, my love?”
Ulphia rolls her eyes, wringing a rope of soggy, nettle cloths in her hands. “Odétte has stirred the spirits of the pot since you let us know.”
His daughter groans. “It’s been all day!”
“A quarter-day at most, child; barely a slice of a grown-woman’s burden,” her mother hisses back.
Odétte looks up, wiping ashen muck from her cheek. “Is it true, father? Is a wizard coming?”
Bataille scoffs in that way every older brother must when their younger sister insists on knowing less than them. “A Sage, Dot, he’s called a Sage!”
“If you insist, young man, though just Valko will suffice.” Everyone leaps from their linen skins as the stranger slinks in from the inky edge of the firelight’s glow, eyes twinkling like tavern windows.
Bataille whips around and melts into a pool of starlight that reflects the image of a backwater roughneck standing like an armored king. “H-hello, monsieur!”
Usmar’s eyes shift with concern at the number of guests arriving. “Oh, so good to see you! Welcome to our humble corner of the village wall. Was your… friend unable to join us?”
Odétte gasps as her mother leaves a whisper in her ear and scrambles for an obsidian-glass cup brimming with ornery drink. “For you! Glass and all!”
Valko takes a spot equally distant from everyone and plops down, hands clutching the cup as he brings it up to his eyes with childish wonder. “Well, it’s impolite to walk upon the warmth of another’s hearth without a commensurate gift in hand. I’ll be chewed by a chesnaught before I’d ever consider spurning your good nature, dear merchant!”
Usmar’s face screws with confusion, but his son interrupts as he is about to press further.
“You speak so well, Sage Valko!” Bataille says he hears the man’s voice more clearly. “From whence did you land in such a humble place?”
Valko laughs again. “These very blades of grass, hatchling.”
“As Latias lies!” Bataille’s grandfather mankeys his way down from the back wagon ladder. “Little Galarian Lords swarm the edges of the Heartland like cutieflies on a corpse!”
Usmar just about chokes on his in-law’s indignant tongue as his little girl hands Valko a heaping helping of Pika-Skrelp Gumbo in a turned wooden bowl.
“Don’t mind Pépé, he’s been drinking.” Odétte nearly drops the ladle as her head catches the back of her mother’s palm, then giggles as her mother receives a matronly smack in turn.
“Whip not the righteous lip, child,” the platinum-haired woman says, then gestures to their honored guest. “Young man, my apologies. Welcome! I do hope you enjoy. It’s an old favorite from the rivers up north.”
Valko bows with humility as he accepts his share from the littlest lady of the hour. “It smells divine, Madame. And I do hope you enjoy our gift too…”
Usmar looks up into an endless sea of stars as he catches the sound of a talonflame crying in the night. An unnerving experience, as they hunt in the morning as a matter of course. “Say what no-”
THUD!
The limp, lifeless body of a lickitung smacks the ground and rolls a stop against a well-worn conestoga wheel, its still-salivating tongue strung across the camp like a flung seaman’s rope.
“Distortion!” their old man squawks.
Valko smiles as everyone stares at the corpse in stunned silence. “Perfect timing, my little flame! Hail!”
Ulphia’s head slowly turns from the carcass in terror. “My lord, won’t this anger the hills?!”
Bataille and Odétte look up with moonlight in their eyes as Valko’s Talonflame swoops down in a flash of leaves and soil, perching upon his shoulders to cloak him in her ashen wings.
“Hardly. The creature I offer upon your table has eaten no less than one of our own young.” He closes his eyes and nods with imperial decree “ It is the kindest judgment I could pass upon a killer of children.”
Their spines shake like gossamer chimes in the wind.
All except grandmother’s, who smiles with a cool nod. “Rightly so, Valko, Sage of the Southern Peaks. We are grateful for your hospitality.”
Valko pinches his chin, looking up. “I quite like that one. I think I’ll take it, m’lady!”
The old woman grabs a gnarled cane and stamps it into the foot-trodden grass, pointing to her daughter with a stern, matronly air. “We’ve been given an offering of incredible value, Ulphia. Do not dawdle.”
The once iron-shouldered woman ducks her head, beckoning Odétte to follow. “Yes, Mère…”
Valko smiles, knocking back the bowl of gumbo with glee as amber sparks giggle across his lips. “Unfathomable bounties of flavor!”
Bataille drinks from the talonflame’s gold-ringed eyes. “I’ve never been so close to one so furious!”
He turns to the boy and winks in return. “You’ve not the slightest clue.”
The eldest among them knocks back a fiery flask, gobbling his earthly share of liquor. “Alright, you. Just where do you hail from?” he enquires as Usmar serves ladles of stew around the fire. “You’re too damned smooth for a bumpkin.”
Usmar stumbles on his own tongue, searching for the right words of atonement before promptly shutting his mouth as a pair of stern, patronly eyes glare him down. Instead, he performs an impressive social vanishing act as Pépé rises from his addled stupor, scrambling to a seat nearby.
Valko raises his vessel with a sly smile. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
The split, wrinkled lips of an old miser turn up as a stark sobriety returns to his eyes. “Verily! Forgive this old spoiled egg for stinking the air. Tell us your story, for as long as you desire. Every word is a blessing upon my line!” he declares, clearly seeing something his son-in-law has overlooked.
Valko smirks. “I’m no divine creature, sir, but I am blessed by a great many friends, to be sure,” he says, brushing work-hardened hands along his Talonflame’s beak.
Bataille slips his tender fingers out from his cloak and clutches the clasp again, transfixed. “Will you tell us how you became a Sage, monsieur?” he asks with blunt curiosity.
The old drunk spits with a cough. “Bataille! Gods!”
Valko peers into everybody's eyes, finding a happy barrel of fools inside, and shrugs. “I would be nothing without my bond to Arceus and her creatures. I could think of no better tale to tell.”
The young man’s spirits explode with joy. His father sits in complete bemusement. His grandfather gurgles in his seat, defeated but clutching at his social consolation prize, happy with it all the same. Odétte peers around the corner as her mother soaks up all that she can amid the waterfall of monster guts spilling from the kitchen wagon’s sides. An old woman, wizened by six decades of hard life, smiles in patient surprise.
“Please, tell us!”
Valko’s gaze wanders into the blackened sky with an amber glow on his chin.
“How is it that the light of a generation always passes like a new moon?”
Grandfather nods sharply. “Too many hours seeking supple pounds of flesh, I guess.”
Grandmother smirks with fluttering eyes. “Or was it the shine of silver kalancs?”
The old man huffs like a flustered bull. “Didn’t blind me to you, now did it?”
Valko chuckles at that. “In my humble valley, the sight of a silver coin is as rare as Arceus’ shadow cast against the sun. But that other thing… yes, we’ve cared for our women wisely, indeed,” he says, less with brow-waggling letchery and more like a gardener admiring his crop. “But no, that’s not it…
“Perhaps, it was the joy of the moment that pulled the wool over my eyes for so long… but I certainly didn’t miss the moment everything changed.
“It was a summer of vengeance, brought on by a spring of suffering, planted in the snow of a winter everyone wished we’d been blessed without. The White Woozy comes as quickly as it vanishes. Oh, how right the old crones were who say the bodies fall like flakes of ash from a wild forest fire.
“We, my brother and I, lost our father and our mother then. When the soil softened from the cold, we buried them together beneath a freshly planted row of Citrus Berry vines. It was what Father said was best, even as he rolled with fever through the night, refusing broth and bread. Our mountain plains, once a place of sure seasons and plentiful pastures, had become the final turn of a book filled with empty pages.”
Odétte quietly gasps at the news, looking at her own mother and father in horrified contemplation.
“However, we carried on, as you do. A quenched fire certainly doesn’t light itself, now does it? We shored up our trusty old mudsdale and readied for the hardest years of our lives.” Valko smiles with a wink. “For we would need to marry, and no nesting lady lays her eggs in a mangy den.” He chuckles, lost in thought. “I was fifteen summers, just two years my brother’s senior.”
Odétte’s mother raises her chin in approval at Valko’s words. “A tender time to come of age, Monsieur, no matter the place.”
“Were we too young? Yes, but nature left two budding bucks with no choice but to bloom before the snow had gone, and you don’t argue with nature, no sir… Especially when she’s not yet done scolding you for what it was you didn’t know.
“You see, when one herds wooloo, for shearing and for meats, you come to know the wilds around you. You must come to peace with them, become one part of a landscape that lives forever instead of a post that crumbles with time. We knew every sudowoodo patch, bulbasaur pack, and ferrothorn tangle as far as a single sunrise lit around the pasture, and they in turn knew us.
“Until that day our harmonious tangle made for mutually beneficial life. But those relationships were forged by my grandfather and passed to my father, whose cloak I still couldn’t fill. So the wilds had lost their faith in our family’s brass… so very fast…
“There was a pair of talonflame inhabiting the caves atop the mountain peaks, watching over the whole valley. They’d never bothered our flock, so long as we kept to our own side, even left us with clean carrion when their fill was had from time to time. It was a comfortable arrangement.”
Odétte tugs at the hem of her mother’s dress. “Mama, the clerics say that feasted bodies are cursed.”
Ulpha pets her daughter’s silky blonde hair. “This is a different place, child.”
Valko stands with his arms out and his partner spreads her feathers twice as wide.“But as soon as we spotted their brilliant red wings taking off and landing in the morning, noon, and night, we knew something was wrong when we heard fits of uneasy calls coming from the cliffs. Not long after, that was when the freshly-hatched of our flock started going missing.”
Bataille shifts with his jaw clenched, eyes wide as skipping stones as the talonflame’s claws wriggle around her master’s shoulder.
“I was sanguine at first, for we knew that the world took her due, and gave in time. The commotion on the mountain would pass and so would the pain; but Griffe… he couldn’t stand it as we returned to our flock every single day to find another head or two missing. Some younger, some older, some he liked more than the rest.
“He grew furious, especially as we brought the wooloo to our own home, where we could watch them sun or moon. It was then we caught a glimpse of the villain dragging a blood-soaked ewe away, wreathed in hungry flames.
“ ‘Oh, how I’ll pluck those feathers and feast upon him in turn!’ he’d say, night and day, with eyes drowned in shadow. How could I blame my brother? Half the flock was gone by summer’s end, and the nubs of our last rope were fraying fast.
“I had thought the male of that nest was smaller than the one we chased away with slung stones, but I had only seen it from afar, and it had most certainly had its fill of fine mutton. I’ll never forget that quiver in my gut as I saw the meadow lit like midday, with feathers burning like the sun…
“...and that long, hungry cry.”
Everyone jumps from their wooden stumps as talonflame ekes a teeny-tiny squawk.
Valko chuckles and polishes dried specks of blood from her beak. “Everything terrible seems so small when it’s so far away it fits the palm of your hand.”
“Surely a woodsman as capable as your father had a bow and quiver!” Usmar says after a long, hard swallow of his wife’s wonderful stew.
“Surely he did, but my father’s bow was not your normal recurve fare. It was granted to him by his father, who served in the great war so these grasses stayed free from trampling of Galarian boots.”
Bataille’s grandfather hoots with a raised flask. “I knew you had good roots, mmhmm.”
“He was the best of men. He’s the reason our Woolherd name began in these mountains. By the empire’s light this is ours, to shear and serve long as the royal Lumierre line lasts. I was barely able to string the mighty thing with my brother’s help, let alone draw it under my own power.
“But, the old man had another heirloom to give… and in my exhaustion I failed to notice its golden shimmer missing from above the mantle of the fireplace.
“I had heard of flock-keeping traditions further north,where pit homes were dug for the livestock, connected by little tunnels. I thought my Brother listened when I said to keep the thing at bay with the stones we’d piled the night before. It was a big project, and I needed something to keep my mind off the winter racing behind my back; to do something that may keep us all safe. I heard my brother yelling outside, and kept digging, thinking he was out of the flaming thing’s reach.
“Like a fool diglett, I dug and dug… and fell asleep…”
The children’s chests fill with a terrified wind as their parents bow their heads in solace and their grandparents’ cheeks tighten with grim resignation.
Valko balls up his fist, eyes towards the sky as his talonflame lights the night in bloody flames. “If only I’d listened to our mudsdale’s terrified whinnying. Instead, my lungs heeded the smoke smothering my dwelling as I broke from its burning thatch and bolted down the hill.
“…but I was too late. Our mudsdale was left curled up with a charred smoking face, like a dropped hock of torchic in the coals… and there my brother was, wielding my grandfather’s long-spear, lunging for the tiercel’s gut…
His voice shutters with glistening eyes. “Griffon, you glorious fool, you got the bastard good, didn’t you…”
Everyone leans in as Valko takes a long breath and they slink away as he exhales just as slow.
“...I’ll never forget my baby brother’s dying shrieks as his body burst into flames and the spear burned to cinders in a grip that dripped with fat, like cuts of meat in a hearth. I tried to save him. I wanted to pour my canteen over his crying face and clear the blackened crusts away, like I would when the springmelt mud got caked to his cheeks as a babe…”
All the men of the camp suddenly regret their curiosity as this powerful enigma of a man begins to fall before them.
“...but the evil thing’s wings beat me back and I rolled into mudsdale, who bucked me square.” He points to a pronounced divot in the temple of his brow. “She did me a favor, really. I can barely sleep as is. The next morning I inspected the top of my thatch hut and saw the roof was half-seared away; and knew that Griffon had saved me as I slept.
“I’m sure our Father is proud of him… I could only hope for a death half as noble as that.”
“Here here!” Pépé shouts and takes another swig.
All the grown folk down a burning gulp of the good stuff as Valko plays with the flames rippling through his partner’s plumes“ The next morning I wrapped our mudsdale’s ruined face with a bandage soaked in Rawst Berry wine and prayed that she would make it through the week. I looked upon the charred ruins of the Citrus-Berry fields we’d planted together since my little hands could furrow, and laid my brother’s blackened bones between mother and father’s still-rotting bodies. The cinders of my brother’s final stand.”
Bataille bunches up against his father’s side, terrified of the creature so calmly snuggling against the Sage, knowing now the horrors it could bring at a moment’s notice. “W-what did you do then, Monsieur?”
“...I went and found the bronze-leaf tip of my grandfather's spear…”
Ulphia coughs as she cleans a long string of entrails. “Gods on the mount, no!”
Valko nods the woman’s way and pats the spot on the log between him and young Bataille. He smiles as the boy cries out as his talonflame flutters down beside them, cooling everyones’ bowls with a heady gust of wind.
“Griffon’s fires lit a forge inside me. The hatred was so strong my vision went thick and red, like a ruddy tub of afterbirth. I broke the head from Father’s spade and set the spear upon it. It was heavy, had barely half the reach, but I’d be distorted if it would not do.”
Bataille peeks into talonflame’s empty eyes. “What did you do, Sage Valko?!”
Grandfather twists up in a knot as his flask runs dry. “No man worth his soil could let such a thing go unpunished!”
“I would climb the cliffs and settle the scales. All the mutton jerky I’d made from the bodies we could save from the talonflame mates would suit me well. I took weeks of provisions far too many, but I didn’t know how long I’d be gone.
“With fingers numb from the mountain’s cold midsummer night, I stabbed them into crack after crack and slowly climbed, knowing one fool’s slip would mean my brother died for nothing. Time after time I’d thought I might have been caught, bearing witness to that same ruckus we’d heard for months prior, but never did the birds flying in and out of the nest notice my presence.
“Gods I hated every moment, slipping on fresh layers of egg-white shit laid from above, like a castle’s guard tossing tar on the faces of a siege. It took hours, and only as the sun rose did I finally manage to drag my sorry arse up over the lip of their lair.”
Bataille chuckles as little Odétte gags from her mother’s lap.
“And as dawn crested the peaks I scurried into a tiny hole where I could gather my strength, confident that they’d notice me only half as much as the droppings they’d dressed me in… all the better, for between my exhausted slumbers I prepared myself for the end, if things didn’t go my way.”
Valko draws a chipped-flint blade wrapped in strings of hide. “When I rose, I readied to take the returning male as the female soared away. But something was wrong. I looked at its belly after I woke and saw not a drop of blood, no ruffled feathers, no sign of injury at all. ‘Had my brother’s courage come to nothing in this monster’s world?’ I asked myself…”
Odétte climbs around the grass, escaping her Mother’s watch, and crawls behind her brother to peek her head around the end of a sitting-log. “Oh no!”
“Oh yes!” Valko leans towards her, making her squeak and flee as he continues his story. “But I wouldn’t let it be! No, my brother saved our flock, our entire legacy, sacrificed himself so I could carry our line on. I was ready! I had no other choice.”
The talonflame turns around and rolls her eyes, watching her partner ready himself to regale the tale… again.
“I leapt upon the villain’s back, stabbing at its shoulders. By some dark inspiration my body carried me forth to kill in hot blood, but its head spun around!”
Valko’s partner twists their neck a full 180° and gazes right into Bataille’s soul.
“...they tried like Malamar haunts to peck out my eyes before sucking up a great lungful of morning wind to vomit flame across my face.”
The massive bird beside them burps a fiery cloud of smoke.
“But I had a trick in my palm. Grandfather said you could take a handful of sand with spices and blind your foe; told us a hundred times of how he broke a battle line with a fistful of Touga-Powder pounded up in bronze forge slag. We grew Tougas, dried them in the attic of the cottage, so I ground a powder on our mortar and mixed it with sand. I knew right away, as a tiny puff kissed my own eyes, that it would sour the vision of anyone, man or monster!”
“Rightly so!” Grandfather roars, spilling mead across his knuckles as he tries to fill his flask again.
“The distorted, eggless bastard reeled, painting the cliffside in fire, and I leapt down to let blood from its neck until red waters ran down the cliffs.”
Bataille looks down, searching his mind for meaning. “Eggless?”
Talonflame overhears and eyes Odétte, cooing pleasantly.
Odétte finds one of the many, freshly-snapped switches her brother used as swords in play the other day. “And you beat the bastard,” she curses out swinging and runs from her mother’s angry palm.
Valko puts a finger to his lips. “Listen, and learn, child. I looked around, seeing the home I’d just invaded. I saw eggs stomped in a soup of spilled whites, so many smashed like they’d been struck with a tiny mallet.
“Only three went unscathed, curled in the body of another male that was dead as a sun-dried treeco. Just as big… with a swollen, bloody wound in his belly.”
“Distortion! What in Darkrai’s ditch?” Usmar flusters between his third helping of stew, doing his best to keep up with the voracious appetite of their guest.
“I hadn’t the faintest! But I knew I needed to do something with the bodies if I wanted to make the most of that summer of suffering.” Valko pokes his partner in the plumage with a smile. “And I did hear that a big, mean, winged predator was a fine cut of meat.”
Talonflame burbles with a chuckle after they leave Valko reeling from a freshly pecked pinky finger.
“What did you do?!” Odétte peeps, leaving her mother sighing in defeat as she realizes her little helper has fled to the confines of her own imagination.
“Climb down, climb down!” Bataille cries.
“I sat.”
“You what?!” laments the choir.
“I was tired, can you blame me? Those birds weighed as much as I did and I wasn’t about to toss them down without a moment’s rest. The eggs were just the right size for a squat-and-ponder, sturdy enough shells, good little thinking stumps, really.”
Talonflame smacks her face with a smoldering wingtip.
“I was halfway through my plan to set the final ambush when an angry wind blew against my face, hot as the coals tempering the pot tonight,” he says as the great bird beside them huffs a powerful gust from her beak that sets the campfire roaring like a forge.
“No!” Bataille says with an excited smile on his face.
“There I was, eye to eye with the beauty of death in the sky. I was sure I was a dead man, sat like a fool atop her last three eggs… having killed one mate… and now a second in just a few days’ time… in her own home.”
Odétte runs to her mother’s blouse and hides her eyes.
Valko gives a hard look at them all. “There was no getting around it, I knew, this was the moment I would carve out my legacy, or chisel my resting slate.
“But she just stared at me, carefully looking at the bodies as I crept away with two of her dead companions tied to my back. I held my spear aloft. ‘You killed my brother, I killed your mates. A body for a body. We’re even now, so stay off my flock, you hear?!’ I yelled, hoping my shaky bravado was worth half an ounce of dick. Her pained unblinking gaze never left me as I made my retreat, and it was then I realized…
Ulphia gasps. “You saved her babies!”
“Ha?!” Grandfather belts out, spilling a fresh swig of wine from his newly-brandished, wooden cup.
“Indeed. That second male had finished what my brother started and was ready to empty the nest, that was until some angry shit-smeared redhead foiled him in the act. I thought and thought and thought as I crawled down, feeling her blazing gaze burning me from above, and realized things were not yet right.
“When the clouds of fury had cleared from my head, I knew there was one thing left to do before we were square. I’d lost one, but she’d lost two, and a few unfinished kin… So it was only fair that I gave mudsdale a long dinner on a pile of ripened berries, knowing she was soon to go from the pain and the oozing face. I sent her to Arceus with grace, in the old woolherd’s way.
“And over three days of drying out stacks and stacks of meat I could barely carry, I left everything the old mare’s body produced at the foot of the cliffs, declaring aloud that I wished the strength of my workmare’s body would give her and her hatchlings the strength to survive.
“Imagine my shock as she slowly fluttered down, meeting me eye to eye…”
Bataille and Odétte look at each other, then at Talonflame as the little boy finally bursts with excitement. “It’s like all the stories! She gave you an egg, didn’t she, Sage?”
Valko smirks. “Something like that.”
“Foolish me arrived without my trusty shovel-spear, thinking I was showing great honor to the wilds. I screamed like the frightened child I truly was as she dug her talons into my shoulders. She lifted me up off the ground, up to her den, where I was sure to die…
“...but then she just plopped me down beside the nest, now clean with the three remaining eggs tucked in a bundle of weeds. She pointed with her wing at a cushy pile of leaves and grass she’d made in the corner and flew off without a single Kalosian word.”
“I wanted to leave, confused, angry, hungry as a chained morpeko, until my brain finally caught up with the wisdom of our blessed valley’s Alpha-Falcon.” Valko brushes his talonflame’s sides as she finishes her stew and settles onto his shoulders once again. “If either of our legacies were going to make it through the winter, they would have to do it together.”
Grandmother, patiently awaiting Valko’s storytelling energy to wane a bit, smiles with a wizened nod. “Hardship forges the fastest of friends.”
Bataille bounces in his own britches. “Which one sits with us now, what happened in the winter?
Valko stands, nodding with respect to the argent crone as his partner’s feathers spread wide behind him, just like the stories of weddings made between the men and monsters of old. “That, my dear friends, is for another time. For it is very late, and I have many things calling me away,” he says and lowers his head as a great pair of wings cloaks him in the night.
The children’s faces shatter with a dashed sort of hope, devastated at the news.
“But, goodness, Sage. I, um… What if we never meet again? I would hate to go without your wisdom in such a terrible case.” Usmar bargains with an buttery smile.
Valko shrugs. “I believe you said you’d be back. Return in a few moons with more goods, and I’ll be sure to have more of my mountain’s bounty here to make the journey worth your while. All I ask is you bring affordable things, for even the least among us here.”
Pépé, Mærwine Lumierre, always lets his son-in-law make his own mistakes. This day, however, he’s pleased to see the man has stumbled in a clever way. “We’ll bring our own mountain of bounty, then.”
“The story will surely weigh on me like a leaden plate!” Bataille cries. “How can I wait that long?”
Valko’s feet rise from the ground as the grasses flutter and dance beneath his partner’s Flying gust. “A journey with a terrible weight makes a man’s legs stronger, young Bataille.”
“I hope to see you all again, safe and sound, around the fireside. Adieu.”