This one is my comeback chapter, and hopefully my final one. I'm back and writing again, and I'm gonna make it to the end.
If you missed it, I rewrote the previous chapter (it was a minor rewrite) to get some details ironed out and to refresh my memory before I dove into this one. Without any more waiting, let's keep going.
Chapter 51: Inferno
I could never tell how long I lay there with my face pressed against a freezing wet stone floor. There were cuts on my cheeks. The blood that oozed out must have been like sludge from being frozen on contact with the air. My knuckles had solidified into icy steel, clutching at my jacket that felt as thin as tissue. No amount of nerve could release the grip of my fingers. At a certain temperature, everything feels the same. There was no longer texture, just as there was no longer light or sound. I wondered if any creature had ever felt as cold as I did then. felt I would die...
I'm sorry, I thought. I couldn't have spoken even if I wanted to - there was nobody to hear me anyway. I'm sorry for dragging you all into this. I thought of my Pokemon. Each of them had a home, a habitat where they could survive and thrive, before I captured them and took them with me to die in a pit. What happens to the Pokemon of a trainer who dies? Are they released, or do they become inherited? Do they become research subjects, like those of Professor Oak or Giovanni, or are they forever lost as simply lines of code in some external server, never again to be pulled out for sun and food and water from the Pokemon Centers that housed their masters after long and weary days?
I thought of my mother. I thought of my brother, and wondered who he would've been if I had survived to teach him. Even to see him...to know him...They would miss me, I knew. I regretted ever leaving home.
I thought of Leaf. I wondered where she could be, whether she would feel anything, in some intangible cosmic way, when my breath would stop in my throat. Would she look away vaguely toward the horizon when it happened? Would she have a dream and wake in the morning thinking it was nothing? Would she wonder, years down the line, whatever happened...
I thought of Kanto. I had been some great promise, whether an accidental one or not. Millions had seen my face on their home television screens. Even now there must be some trying to see if I had arrived at the Indigo Plateau. What would cross their minds? Another failure. We were wrong to believe...we were wrong to care...
I started to count my breaths. I wondered how many I had left. They were slow and shallow. My heartbeat became irregular. I felt myself turning to stone...
...and then a breath, one that was not mine, brushed over me. It was warm, and faint.
There was a loud crack, like the splintering of rock.
My neurons were so slow from the cold, I did not realize at first that there was new light. Not a lot, just a crack in the wall, pulsating with a dim orange. Another breath emerged from it, lasting only a second before the cold returned.
Just let me die, I thought. I was tired of prolonging it. Freezing to death was already slow, why wait any longer? Just let me die, I repeated the willful prayer, though I didn't know who it was directed to.
The rock splintered further. The crack was brighter now, pulsating faster. The breath lasted several seconds this time. It carried the odor of cinder.
Instinctively, with the final shreds of my survival instinct overriding my despairing mind, I inched toward the crack, slowly and awkwardly like a wounded Caterpie trapped in honey. There was a new sound, like the shifting of a massive body. My heartbeat grew slightly steadier, slightly faster.
As long as this is here, I thought, with no regard to what "this" might be, I can hol-
A loud screech interrupted my thought, accompanied by the loudest crack yet. The orange glow was no longer dim, but still pulsed out of a cut in the wall that reached, what I only just now noticed, to be a high ceiling. I twisted my neck to look up and examine the gash. As the screech echoed and the warm exhale receded, my thoughts sharpened suddenly.
Egg, I thought.
The wall through which the crack shone was convex, arcing up and back on itself as it reached higher. In the light, I could see an apex to a structure, and sides, and a back. It took the unmistakable shape of a colossal egg, greater than any dome of any building that could possibly exist.
I closed my eyes for what followed, since it suddenly became too bright to see. A chunk of the eggshell toppled over, exposing a core of what I could only believe was the world's most powerful lightbulb. The shell hit the ground with a hiss, evaporating the puddles of the cave floor on contact. For as cold as I had been just a minute ago, I now wanted nothing more to move away from the monstrous birth and take off my jacket. My joints began to move in compliance with my newest wishes.
As I scrabbled along the floor, blindly, another screech accompanied the thunderous clatter of more eggshell. The hiss of steam was still audible even several feet away. The electric-white I had seen at first had now become a molten orange, but no less in intensity. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I had fallen all the way into the center of the earth. The next thought was whether I had forgotten my own death entirely and was already in Hell.
A curtain of fire protruded from the now vacant wall of the egg. A rush of hot air buffeted me. The ground dried to parchment almost instantly and the cuts on my face seared as if they were being peeled back by invisible fingers. It was brighter now in this underground cavern than I had ever seen
A final screech. The eggshell, which I only now came to realize was solidified magma, disintegrated.
It was impossible to tell at first the shape of the creature. Its entire body was engulfed in fire. Staring at it long enough to inspect could have easily led to permanent blindness. The most delirious side of me could not be sure that I had not just witnessed the birth of a winged sun - the most reasonable side could not be sure this was not the case either. The bird lowered its wings until they touched the ground which looked like rivers of lava pouring from its back. Its serpentine neck was craned so as not to strike the ceiling. The only part of its body that did not burn like a star was its eye, one of which inspected me with a black glassy stare of absolute emptiness.
I squinted through the cage of my fingers over my eyes and watched as its plumage changed. Red and orange, yellow and pink danced around the creature's neck and breast. Flashes of blue and green flew out of its shoulders whenever it shifted its wings. The tips of its wings looked white-hot. Although its eyes were featureless, i could tell it did not think of me as much a splendor to behold as I regarded it to be.
Without knowing what else to do, I kneeled, and bowed my body, almost kissing the ground and exposing my back to the fire-bird. Nothing happened then, although it sounded as if it may have cocked its head slightly.
"Did you save my life on purpose?" I finally asked, feeling stupid and unbearably hot.
Still nothing happened.
"I don't want to die here," I said.
The fire-bird chirped slightly. It was an oddly melodious sound to come from such a massive and imposing creature. There was a shudder as it stepped toward me, its golden talons pulverizing the remainder of its old enclosure into dust.
"I still have more to do," I pleaded. "I can't die here." I looked up from my prostrate position and my eyes met the birds. It screeched once more, this time prolonged and horrifying, as if it were intending to wake the dead (Although, in a way, I thought, it already had), and spread its wings wide to brush against the walls on opposite sides of the chamber. It crouched.
Instinctively, I lowered my head again, and covered it with my hands.
The bird rocketed upward, crashing through miles of rock situated precariously above it, cawing with the effort of its ascent. I had expected an unrelenting hail of all the stone above to pelt me and bury me for good. Instead, the bird had vanished.
"What in the...", I swore in disbelief. The room had gone dark again, though no less warm than it had been a moment earlier. A number of large gouge marks remained in the floor from where the fire-bird had launched itself, straight into the ceiling. I looked up to see a pipe, just wide enough around to accommodate the creature's size. Above, I could see its writhing flare-like form ascending at rapid speed, digging with its gold talons into the side of the chimney which beelined toward the surface. Rocks crashed down, and I narrowly escaped their landing zone.
No soul in the history of the world had ever been less fortunate than me, I told myself as the avalanche began to cease and the screeching could no longer be heard. But neither was any soul in the history of the world more fortunate than me either.
I looked up the chimney. A speck of sunlight looked back down.
The abomination rested quietly in its cold crystalline cave. Its whole existence had been torture, from the moment its DNA had been ripped from its unwilling mother, to being raised in tubes and glass walls, trained to hate and murder and fear, to twisting the world around it now to its will just to survive, and now condemned to freeze to death, alone.
But today it smiled. For the first time in months, it had felt warm.
You ever wonder why Moltres is in Victory Road in the original games anyway? What does that place have to do with fire? Surely they could've made some sort of fire location for it in the world, right?
The legend of the Phoenix is a pretty remarkable one, not only for its metaphoric significance but for its startling consistencies across many world cultures. It's always been amazing to me that so many major civilizations needed a way to symbolize the cycle of life and death and rebirth, both literal and figurative, and they all chose to do so with a bird that lives and dies and lives again in fire. I've never believed it to be an accident that Moltres was in Victory Road, where the trainer is tested to their limits before the final confrontation and is expected to almost literally travel through the underworld to emerge on the other side reformed and reborn, stronger for having endured their trial. There has never been a better phoenix metaphor in the entire Pokemon series than with Red's travel through Victory Road - beats your average volcano dungeon by a million miles as the place you would meet the literal phoenix, doesn't it?
I'm gonna keep writing. Thanks for sticking with me so long. You'll never know how much it means to me, trust me.
Stay awesome,
-Curse
