This fic exists due to a challenge on Wattpad, which, well, had some issues. I was told to write it myself if I cared so much.
Sundown found the shedding-skin woman at noon. The rock before her split with a terrible ringing and a person tumbled out from the crevice. A moment later the rock sealed again.
"Don't see that everyday," she told the woman and was met with a confused stare. But that wasn't much of a problem, not when a komala was clinging to Sundown's right arm. She tapped the pokemon's nose and repeated herself, and he squeaked obligingly, "Don't see that everyday."
The shedding-skin woman responded with a babble the komala repeated as, "Why is it bright?"
She'd first thought the woman was confused because she was from under the rock and explained to her of the sun. It turned out the woman was familiar with it but it had been night a moment before.
"Time is strange," Sundown agreed. "If you don't know why you're here, perhaps we'll find out. What's your name?"
The shedding-skin woman explained she didn't have one. "Only 'of my father's name, of my husband's name' (1), and to leave I left also all claim to that behind."
"Shedding-skin woman it is, then," Sundown told her. The shedding-skin woman said it was clothing and Sundown nodded and said, "So ridiculous to be all wrapped up in vast sheets of it like that. (3) Have you ever seen when a seviper gets lost in its own skin, ends up slithering in circles?"
"Oroboros," the woman said, and despite Sundown tapping the komala and even repeating the sounds to it, the komala offered no clarification.
Sundown gave up on the translation and just continued, "You put me in mind of that, like you'll get lost under it all."
And then the woman had asked about the lycanroc lurking at the edge of the horizon. She didn't know of them.
"Ah, well. It's said we brought them here with us, long ago, and we must have, for how else could stones cross an ocean? (4) Once we were terribly close, and even today our children are still kin to each other. But there's been some falling-outs since then and often all we are to one another is a meal."
The woman looked dismayed by this, so Sundown clarified, "Here in the day, he would not win such a fight. And at night, well, he is another one then, and that one does not yet wish to."
For all her concern, the woman collapsed asleep as soon as they stopped, and too deeply to wake when the lycanroc came close.
It was the nature of that one, the one who was a reflection of her as the moon was a reflection of the sun, to respond like to like, and so she stayed sitting on the ground and waited as he sat as well, his hands in his lap as her hands were in her lap.
"Your pet steps with cracked feet, Human," he said finally. "The two of you cannot outwalk me."
"I know, Lycanroc," she agreed, because there could no more be the familiarity of names between them. "But we will not harm each other, and I will reach the ocean and my cousins."
"We do not harm each other yet," the lycanroc said. There was want in his voice, but it was the wanting of wanting. He desired that he could desire to kill her. The him of the noon was made of reason inexorable as lava flowing, but the him of night was made of emotion. He would not act first.
1) The Romans (2) were an intensely misogynistic people, though largely not as bad as their predecessors.
2) Perhaps best known for the "Roman empire", which stretched across almost 4% of the world, making them the twenty-fifth largest empire we know of, and judged historically, they would be ranked as the sixth largest empire up to that point in human history. (Bearing in mind, of course, the difficulty in estimating empire size in the Americas.)
3) The Romans, like a large number of primitive cultures, had various superstitions revolving around women's status as men's property and the idea that beholding any part of them could steal or damage that property. As such, she is veiled.
4) Rockruff and lycanroc, as Alolan pokemon, would be of the Asian/island dog subgroup, which is the same line the dingo came from. The fact rockruff run off as they reach maturity is particularly fitting, as many dingo could not be kept past childhood.