smelting -
Giratina opened his eyes.
Weariness clutched at his sinews like ice, and gray specks of vision swam in his eyes. After some time between wariness and sleep, his breath regulated, and he lifted his head.
The Reverse World, his old friend and conniving enemy, stared unabashedly back at him.
A heaving waterfall tumbled upward from the deepest black below him to the highest zenith of sky, curving with the vertical horizon before a sprawling swirl of confused green and purple sunset hues, smoky clouds, darkly glowing anti-stars. A landscape of glorious wrongness.
Gira heaved himself upward. His ribs and knees ached, as if he'd been thrown onto the ground by force. After rising to his knees, it occurred to him that that was exactly what had happened.
Only last night – or a minute ago, or weeks ago, or however long it had been before he'd lost consciousness entirely – the Alpha had stripped him of nearly all of his power, and forced him through a wormhole. All sense of gravity and realness had fled from him, and he'd slipped down, down, ever deeper into blackness… until his eyes had adjusted to the inverted colors, his lungs to the lack of air pressure…
Once again, I am here.
He felt ready to scream, but his lungs seized up like rubber, and there wasn't enough oxygen in the air to produce a scream without exhausting himself anew.
Shakily, he bent his fingers and flexed that intangible muscle inside his mind. A strange lightheadedness came upon him as he felt air rushing toward him, oxygen gathering into a breathable concentration. Good… I can at least do that. He didn't dare take everything from me…
As his strength returned, so did his mind. The steely green of Arceus's eyes. The iron resolve of the Alpha's jaw as he said the last words Gira would ever hear from another living being: "I can do no more for you."
"Gah!" he shouted, clawing at the air around him, sending dizzy sparks of dark matter in every direction – which fizzed out of sight almost instantly. The fabric of space was belligerently firm, like invisible stone, and he could not rip it as he once could. It mended itself instantaneously, flashing back into transparentness. He could hardly disturb it, let alone shape it to his command…
You knew the law and willfully broke it. You attempted to kill my son, Dialga; he would be dead were it not for my interference. Even ignoring your crimes against humans, the murder of a Legendary is the most grievous sin in existence, and as such I am bound to inflict upon you the most grievous punishment. You are damned. I can do no more for you.
Not that the old creature had ever done a thing for him.
In an effort to distract himself from losing his temper like a stupid child, he stepped aimlessly forward.
The waterfall before him used to be a pillar of ice – by his own doing, he recalled. He'd sculpted it, once, in his youth, trying to learn how antimatter worked; what laws it obeyed. After a few years, he'd cracked it. Antimatter liked to be contrary, just for the sake of being contrary. You had to melt anti-water to make it ice. You had to burn it to solidify it, like smelting bronze.
Fire had never been his strong suit, but he inhaled, summoned seismic heat in the pit of his chest, and rushed forward, flicking his wrist like a flintstone, sending all of the heat from his body into the waterfall, remembering how he had once flattened entire battalions, reduced entire forests to desert, in his days of glory…
A flicker of fire, a passing shimmer of snow… and…
"Nothing," he muttered. "Of course; what else. You were kind enough to let my wind-magic remain, gave me means to sustain my own breath, but you wouldn't dare give me means to hurt anything, Alpha – heaven forbid…"
His voice hardly carried, for there were hardly any molecules in the air to conduct sound waves. The sound was death-dry, like his throat. The waterfall hardly even whispered. There was no life. No birds or insects, no wind, no spirits, alive or dead… nothing.
He'd been angry for so many years that his heart was empty now, and all he wanted to do was sleep. Sleep for a thousand useless years; forget the Alpha, forget God, forget heaven and earth, and disappear gracelessly into the nothing.
Mey She practically had to haul her sister over her shoulder, like a sack of depressed, psychic oats, into the farmer's market on the Wednesday afternoon.
"Nobody will even notice us," she affirmed under her breath, squeezing Xi's hand as she nodded hello to a redheaded watermelon vendor across the street. "We're just two young women buying groceries. Just take a deep breath and relax, or I'll… um…" Mey wasn't terribly experienced with making threats.
"I'm fine, I'm fine!" muttered Xi, closing her eyes and setting her jaw. "I'm… fine. Let's just do this quickly."
The January afternoon was bleak; only a fuzzy cotton blanket for sky, with occasional raindrops every minute or so. Snow was a foreign concept to her balmy Georgia village, even in the dead of winter, but rain wasn't a far-off possibility today. And despite her general dislike for getting water in her face, they were out of flour. And numerous other things…
"Howdy, Madeline," called a portly, mustached man under a striped cloth veranda. "Haven't seen you in a week or two! Who's your friend?"
Ah! We forgot to think of a name for you! "Hey, Bob. She's m-my sister… Lily," Mey blurted, smiling. "She's here on vacation. Got any good veggies today?" She set a cloth bag in Xi's hands and motioned for her to grab whatever she liked. For the gumbo tonight, I was thinking celery and onion… and of course we'll need to make tamato paste…
Mey looked up. Xi, hunched over and willowy, was slowly loading tamatoes into the bag with a faraway look in her eyes. She was thinking about Giratina again… as always. Her brain was like a wagon wheel that kept turning the same direction. After everything Mey had tried, she couldn't snap her out of it…
"So, where're ya from, Lily?" the man was asking, but Xi didn't answer. Bob looked sideways at Mey. "Distracted by my gorgeous produce?"
Mey blushed. "Sorry, Bob, she's not much of a talker..."
"I came from Hokkaido, Japan," replied Xi suddenly, looking up. "Pleasure to meet you, Robert. We have all we need." With that, she turned away, toward the dirt road back to the cottage.
With a start, Mey wrung her hands and rushed toward Bob, pulling out her purse. "B-but we haven't paid yet, Lily!" Hastily searching through Xi's short-term memories, she counted the vegetables Xi had picked… twelve entire tamatoes, for just two people? Was the girl batty? She quickly grabbed a few other veggies and herbs, handed the man twenty dollars, whispered, "Keep the change," then ran after Xi, who was already out of the market.
"We still need flour," Mey sighed, catching up with her. "And sausage, I just realized. What's wrong with you?"
"Too many minds," Xi murmured, staring off into the near-featureless landscape. "Too much to listen to. It hurts my head."
"Well, you just have to deal with it, Yuu Xi! You're a psychic! How do you think I feel, constantly listening to your brooding?"
Oh… no.
Xi clutched the grocery bag to her chest with both fists and walked swiftly down the road, toward the sweeping grey hills and sleepy sky.
Mey felt a rock hit her stomach. She stumbled after her. "No, no, no, Xi… I didn't mean it, I'm sorry. Please!"
Well, of course you meant it; I can read your mind. I already knew you'd been feeling that way, Mey.
"Xi-xi, I know it's hard for you. I should be more understanding. You're going through a lot. I – "
Xi turned around and looked Mey in the eye. There was an unusual stiffness to Xi's light-brown eyes, like hardened amber. "You're the Being of Emotion. You are the most compassionate creature in existence. If I'm too much for you to bear, it means that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way I'm living my life, and I need to fix it." She spun around and continued on.
An ink-red ledyba flitted through the air and landed on Xi's shoulder as she walked, but the blond girl paid no heed. Mey listened to Xi's thoughts for a second, then picked up her pace and came up next to her. "What… are you going to fix?"
"Everything, of course," her sister stated matter-of-factly. "Firstly, I need to finish that wretched book. Once all my thoughts are on paper, they'll be out of my head, and I will be able to be me again. Secondly, starting tomorrow, I will subject myself to no less than one hour per day amidst normal civilization, and get myself used to being around people again. I will increase the time by one-hour increments every week. No – every two weeks. Thirdly – "
Xi-xi, emotions don't work that way. You're thinking of it too mathematically –
"Thirdly, I will take up employ as a professor again, and I will study Legendary Pokemon. I will write a book about each one of us, since I know the most about us, after all. I'll be a Historian of the Legendaries, in fact!"
Mey stopped in her tracks. The ledyba flew away, and a few raindrops spattered across Mey's forehead, but she hardly blinked. "You… what?"
Xi looked back over her shoulder and smiled. "I've wanted to do that since the day I became human. Haven't you picked up on that by now? Come on; let's make some gumbo."
"But – but, we still don't have any flour, you slowbro!"
Xi stopped. "R-right." She turned around, staring back at the bustling market, the people of all shapes and sizes milling about. "I… suppose I forgot about that detail."
Mey held out her hand. "You just need forty more minutes; then you'll hit your hour quota. That's enough to buy flour and sausage, and maybe some pretty lilies for the vase on the table. I guess I've been thinking about lilies lately…" The rain was accumulating, and Mey cringed. "…But, maybe let's take a bit less than forty minutes, because I think we're about to get a storm."
Xi took in a deep breath in and out. "I did not anticipate that it would be so difficult to endure an onslaught of human thoughts again, after being a hermit for ten years…" She stepped forward. "Let's say… how about… thirty minutes?"
"Thirty it is."
Arceus was not a dragon, but he had the stamina and the power of one. It is little surprise that folk depictions of him often portrayed him as a dragon, even though he is more of an enormous horse. Giratina saw him, in terms of physical might and magical prowess, as a peer.
…Or rather, that was his wishful thinking.
In truth, Arceus is, and was, much more than Giratina could ever hope to be. It enraged him, of course – he would settle for nothing less than being the best.
At first, however, they were friendly to one another. Arceus showed him the lands of northern Asia that he had originally called home. He taught Giratina air and water techniques, and Giratina passed on to Arceus what little he possessed in rock- and ground-magic that Arceus had not already achieved.
It became clear to Giratina, quite early, that this creature was not ordinary.
Chief among Arceus's flaws – in Giratina's perception – was his excessive preoccupation with human civilization. He would often stop mid-hunting to rescue a human from falling off of a cliff, or from being eaten by an ursaring, or from being crushed by a falling boulder. He treated them like darling little cubchoos, as if he were their doting mother. It boggled Giratina's mind.
But he let the white-maned creature have his little fun, so long as it allowed Giratina to continue learning from his bewildering magical genius.
Until the day that Giratina found himself particularly hungry, and chased down a small flock of human hunters, armed with nothing but bronze daggers and kneecaps. He had killed two of them, and was about to kill the last one when something heavy knocked the wind out of him, and a horrid roar echoed through the air. He looked up to see two enraged, emerald-green eyes boring into his, challenging him. "Do anything else to the humans," they said, "and I will do unto you as you do unto them."
Feeling rather frustrated, he lashed out at Arceus, which rewarded him with a scratch to the face. A thrill of fury came through him, and the first battle between two Legendary Pokemon known to history commenced.
Arceus bested him, but not easily. They traded blow for blow, countering rock with water, water with air, air with rock. The time they'd spent training one another came to a head as they attempted to outsmart one another, catch the other off guard. Giratina took risks, trying to remember things he'd learned from observing other species – spells of fire, poison, and ice – and was only mildly successful, for the time he spent distractedly trying to pull things out of the back corners of his mind backfired as the Alpha pinned him to the ground, one pointed hoof above his trachea.
The surviving human had escaped long before the battle ended, and as soon as Arceus realized this, he released Giratina at once and jumped up, leaving the dragon bewildered, angry, and bruised.
He looked at the two dead humans lying on the ground, and then looked into Arceus's eyes.
The friendship had ended.
