Chapter 18: in the dark
Hour 0
It was an awful sensation, moving through dungeon walls. Like being crushed from every side at once. Compressed down to a singularity.
Yet all the same, it never hurt.
Bristle felt a wall of cold, open air hit her suddenly. She emerged into an open space, her legs failing her as she hit the floor, and collapsed to the ground.
And then, there was nothing.
No light. No sounds but her own breath. She existed in an empty black void, left with only her thoughts and memories.
She would have believed she'd died, if she couldn't feel the cold air nipping at her cuticle and the hard, uneven stone beneath her.
She knew what had happened, even if she could hardly believe it. She'd watched it for herself. Faith had absorbed the rift. And with no rift, there was no dungeon.
Therefore, this pitch-black space was the "true" Flak Hollows. The caverns beneath Flak Mountain that the dungeon had taken hold of.
In other words, she was potentially miles underground in a lightless natural labyrinth. Her client doubtlessly was too. And Faith, as well.
Faith... Bristle shuddered as the memories flooded back of what the former delver had done to her. That hadn't even been a fight. It was a desperate struggle just to keep her from killing anyone.
She'd never grown too close to any of Team Poise. They were cordial, of course, to Team Bunker's special seedling. But their heads were always in the clouds, off chasing the legends. The team had supposedly broken bread with half a dozen of them.
So how exactly had the friendly delver she'd once known become that unstoppable killing machine? How had she absorbed a rift?
Bristle struggled to her feet. Chills shot through her body and her limbs screamed for her to stay down.
Right. No dungeon meant she was healing at a natural pace now. She had healed off the critical wounds before it had all happened, but she was still thoroughly beaten.
That would never stop her. Ignoring her aches and pains, she dragged herself to her feet, fixing her bag around her shoulder. She opened it up and reached a short vine in, practically having to shove her whole bud into the bag to reach the bottom.
All of the best delvers knew a certain trick- to notch the surface of orbs so that you could tell them apart in the dark. But as she wriggled her vine around the bag, she started to grow alarmed.
She had never replaced the luminous orb she used against the Drapion. She had no light source.
With a groan, she shut her bag and stopped to think. She had to find Hoopa and get out of here somehow. And that meant starting to move.
Holding her bud out in front of her, she inched forward a few steps through the dark void. The ground was uneven, and littered with loose dirt and stones. Every step had to be taken at a lumbering pace, lest she go crashing face-first into the invisible floor.
After a minute, her petals smooshed up against something solid. She swept her bud across the rough surface to confirm she'd found the wall.
Okay, that was step one.
She dragged her bud along the wall, walking down the hall a bit and paying very close attention to her footsteps. She was going... down. Down was bad. She quickly swapped buds and began to walk the opposite direction.
Just follow along the wall and always keep going up. That was how she'd get out of this.
This plan worked flawlessly for all of ten seconds, before her foot hit something lying against the wall.
She prodded it with her foot again, for good measure. It was solid and somewhat cold, but far too soft to be stone.
Bristle let out a heavy sigh as she realized what it was. He really was a curse on her, wasn't he? No matter what happened, she just couldn't escape him.
Just passing him by and leaving him there was thoroughly tempting.
But it wasn't really an option, was it? It would be a death sentence for him. And her job was to save people from dungeons- even if this wasn't really a dungeon anymore. No matter how much she hated him, the job came first.
"Get up," she ordered, giving him a light kick in the butt. He slouched over a bit but stayed out cold.
With a sigh, she relented and slumped down against the wall next to the unconscious Helioptile.
Even she had to cringe at the beating Faith had given him. If it had happened outside of a dungeon, it would have almost certainly been fatal. But the rapid regeneration let Pokémon survive a surprising amount when it applied.
Short of carrying him, she'd be here until he woke up. So she waited anxiously in darkness.
Hour 1
A low murmuring beside her finally broke Bristle from her trance.
"Hey! Wake up!" she jolted back to life and jostled his face with her bud. "You've napped long enough! I've still got a job to be doing."
She kept prodding him until a claw grasped her arm below the bud. His grasp was feeble, and he made a pitiful effort to throw her arm off of him. With that, she stopped and rose to her feet.
"Good. Now come on," she instructed, stepping around him and placing her bud back onto the wall.
"I'm in hell. I am actually in hell," he muttered from the ground below her. "How are you seriously still here?" There was a certain groan in his voice that made it obvious he was still in poor condition, even if she couldn't see his wounds.
"Because I wasted my valuable time waiting for you to wake up, so that you wouldn't die," she hissed back. "I could have just left you here."
"Why the sudden concern? Didn't you say earlier you just wanted me to be gone forever? Hell, you nearly did the job yourself with that stunt with the rock."
"Hmph. Oh trust me, I do want you gone. But I never said dead. And lucky for you, it's my job to save people from dungeons. And please, that rock wasn't going to kill you unless you didn't even try to dodge it. It was just to gain some distance."
She started walking. But his footfalls never sounded.
"And what if I didn't?" his voice echoed after her.
She stopped. "What?"
"What if I didn't dodge?" he repeated, his voice betraying no emotion beyond his exhaustion.
"Why in the world would you ever not dodge? What kind of death wish question is that?"
"Answer it," he demanded, cemented firmly where she'd found him. "What happened if I didn't dodge?"
She threw her buds up in frustration, despite knowing he couldn't see the gesture. "You died! In this ridiculous hypothetical reality where you chose to not even try survive, you died. But you don't have a death wish, so you didn't! Now that we've completed our exploration of stupid hypotheticals, let's go."
But of course, there was no scuffling of movement.
"Then what?"
"What do mean, then what? Do we seriously not have something more important to be doing than asking stu-"
"After I died. After you killed me. Then what would you do?" he cut her off firmly, his voice cooler than the air.
Bristle hesitated. Entertaining the ridiculous alternate reality for a moment, she was... uncertain. If the Helioptile had just let himself die from her attack... Well then she would have... She would have needed to rush him back for help, right? And if he was dead, dead... then...
Gah! What was the point of this right now! They were lost, alone, in the dark, and he wanted to play the "what if" game!
"It's my job to offer you help, but it's not my job to make you take it. If you want to get out of here, come with me. Otherwise, have a nice life," she growled at him. Without waiting for him to follow, she placed her left bud along the wall, and began to trace it forward again. Agonizingly, she had to walk away from him slowly to avoid faceplanting into the floor on loose rubble.
But that was all the answer he needed.
"See, that's just it: You don't have an answer," he called after her, finally letting his anger replace that cool control. "You don't think through anything you do." The words hissed out of his mouth. "Whether you meant to kill me or not, I could have died, because you have no idea how to hold back. The only reason you're not a killer right now is because of luck."
Bristle shuddered at the accusation. She knew he was right about that. Her improvised attack had been far more dangerous than she'd expected in the moment. Or had she even really considered it, in the moment?
She heard him pull himself up. And then the light pattering of claws against stone as he started to crawl after her.
She couldn't bring herself to address his point at the moment.
"I don't imagine you picked up a luminous orb along the way, did you?" she asked, trying to shake the tinge of guilt.
"Those are the ones that make light, right?" he muttered, clearly frustrated by the dropped topic. "No. Just seeds and berries."
"Mmm." She let out a sigh. "Alright, then we'll just follow the wall. Keep going upwards. Find Hoopa, and then the exit." It wasn't a glamorous plan, but it was the only one she had. Which meant it had to work.
"Hoopa?" Rex asked skeptically.
"The Pokémon Faith was after."
"...Faith? Wait- do you know that thing?"
Bristle was silent a moment, realizing she had just opened up an entirely new line of questioning. One that Rex would never relent from, and without any means for her to escape from him.
Begrudgingly, she explained Faith's background to him, as well as the job request that had led her here, as they slowly progressed along the wall. Making sure, of course, to exclude Hoopa's possible knowledge on Strife from the story.
At the conclusion of her exposition, Rex muttered bitterly behind her. "So basically, you stuck your nose into something bigger than you, and we followed you into it like idiots. Great."
His claws anxiously tapped on the stone in an obnoxious pitter-patter as he ran them along the wall. It was driving her nuts.
"So basically I was doing my job, and you followed me into me into it like idiots," she forcefully reasserted. "Believe it or not, professional delvers don't reply to requests for help with 'sorry, this is over my head, good luck with that'"
"Oh, sorry, my bad. They respond by showing up, barely improving the situation, and then nearly getting themselves killed. Five star service, really," he mocked.
"He didn't die, did he? And I'm going to find him," Bristle growled out in a voice that could kill.
"Or maybe we could focus on saving our own asses before we obsess over saving a stranger? I'm all for helping people, but in case you haven't noticed- we're in deep shit ourselves right now." That dreadful tapping grew harder and faster.
"And what? Just leave him to die?" she asked accusingly. "How noble."
The tapping stopped. And he stopped moving behind her.
"Stop playing the moral high ground here. We both know you don't give a shit what happens to him beyond you doing your 'job'. That bastard hyena was right- everything to you is business. You care because he's a client," Rex jeered. "So stop acting like that makes you the hero."
What was he even going on about now? Yes, she cared because he was a client. Because it was her job to care about clients. That was what a delver did.
She kept moving without him. If he wanted to keep stopping to fight with her, he could. But she had a client to find, regardless of what he thought about that.
Amid muttered curses, the clinking of his claws against the floor started up once more. And from that point forward, both of them were in silent agreement against conversation.
Hour 4
They continued to follow along the wall for hours with dedication. How many branches had they passed now? They could never know. For all they knew, they'd been walking repeatedly around a circular chamber with no exit the entire time.
But there was little to be said, and even less left for them to do. So they followed along this way, guided only by the wall and their trust in it.
For the first time in hours, something entered Bristle's vision to confirm they had, at the very least, been moving. A web of red and orange slowly shifted into her otherwise blank view, as if the darkness itself had been cracked.
She stopped walking, only for Rex to thud into her back a moment later. She cast a scowl behind her, before remembering he couldn't even see it.
"What is that?" she asked, her petals rustling in the silence as she pointed a bud forward. Slowly, she stepped away from the wall, careful to keep her left bud pointing towards it. She started to creep towards the strange cracks.
"Magma," he answered shortly. "Don't touch it."
Thinking about it, the pattern of cracks did resemble the layers of molten ooze that had menaced them in the dungeon. She winced and quickly returned to the wall, praying he didn't hear her step away.
"Why is it so dark then? It was lighting up the entire dungeon earlier today."
"It's probably cooled now. Dungeon bullshit must have been keeping it hot," he explained.
His voice was still tired. So tired. But it had lost most of that pained tinge. Either he was recovering, or- more likely without the dungeon's magic- he was simply growing accustomed to the pain of his injuries.
"Of course," she muttered. Of course it didn't provide light anymore. Pure spite.
She started moving again, and as soon as Rex heard the scraping of petals on stone his footfalls started too.
"Watch where you're stepping. Not all of it is going to be that visible. The glow might be really faint." His tone was purely informative at this point. As if he'd resolved not to engage with her any more than was necessary for their survival.
Which was, of course, quite fine with her.
But after another minute of silent marching, he spoke up again.
"I'm hungry. You have any food?"
The latch of her bag unclicked, followed by the ruffling of items within. Two apples, and a handful of berries. The latter were fairly small, and not too filling. And she had no idea how long they'd be down here for. They needed to ration.
"I agreed to help you out of here, not to provide snacks," she answered, latching the bag shut again.
"Seriously? It's been like, most of a day since I've eaten anything," he muttered.
"I have no idea how long we're going to be down here, and I didn't plan on being out this long. Not to mention I didn't plan on feeding two," she snapped. "If you're going to show up uninvited on jobs, at least have the decency to bring your own supplies. Ask again when you're actually starving."
The stomping of her feet said everything that her face couldn't.
Rex's grumbles to himself floated out into the void behind her. Even if he knew she was right about rationing, it was impossible not to resent every single word.
Hour 6
In the past few minutes, Rex had begun to constantly emit an agitating scraping sound. It took some time for the irritation of the sound to overwhelm her intense desire to maintain their mutual silence.
"What is making that awful noise?" she finally groaned.
"My tail," he muttered miserably. "Too tired to keep it up anymore. Stopped giving a damn if it gets filthy."
"Yes, well, have you considered keeping it up for the sake of my sanity?"
A half-hearted snort filled the darkness. "Ship has already set sail on that one."
In just a few short sentences, talking to him had quickly become more annoying than the scrape of his tail. So she stopped replying.
Hour 8
With a dull thud, Bristle walked straight into a wall, bouncing off and falling on her rear. The patter of Rex's claws stopped behind her, and she just knew he was grinning at her.
Growling, she pulled herself to her feet and ran her bud along the wall. A sudden, sharp corner had been the cause. She traced her petals across the corner and followed along that wall, only for it to sharply curve back the way they'd came.
"A dead end," she murmured. "We've hit a dead end."
Rex's defeated sigh joined her in the void.
"Just keep following along it. Nothing else we can do," he muttered, the despair evident in his voice.
"We'd just be going back the direction we came from, though!" She smooshed her bud against the cold stone in frustration.
"Right wall rule. Or, technically left wall in this case," Rex corrected himself. "You can always find the exit of a maze by following along one wall." Then he added in a hushed tone, "If there is an exit."
Bristle had refused to consider that final possibility.
"That doesn't make any sense," she argued with him. "There's plenty of mazes where that would just get you stuck in a loop!"
"No, there aren't," he said dismissively. She heard him step around her, and then his own claws scrape against the dead-end wall. The sounded curved around and started moving back the way they'd come.
With a hiss, she followed after him.
"I think I would have heard that trick before, if it actually worked," she continued to argue. "Given escaping mazes is literally my job."
"'My job, my job'," Rex echoed her mockingly. "God, do you ever talk about anything else? I mean, I know you don't have any friends. But, what, no hobbies? -Besides hitting children, that is."
"I'm sorry I'm focused on actually doing my job. We can't all be grifters."
Rex just sighed. "Again with the avoiding the question. The answer is, no. You have no hobbies."
"I don't need hobbies."
His utter silence made the words echo through the air. And for whatever reason, it felt far more stinging than any response he could have given.
She returned to a hell shared only with the dragging of his tail and tap of his claws along the wall.
Hour 12
"We're not finding Hoopa you know."
He spoke up out of nowhere, the words harboring a latent dread.
How many hours had it been now? It felt like days since she'd last seen... anything, save for the periodic waves of orange that warned her of pooled magma. They still had to be so deep underground. They'd been turned around at dead ends half a dozen times now, forced to walk back downwards in spite of the unease that descending further put in their hearts.
Bristle was still unconvinced that Rex's left-wall strategy wasn't leading them in circles. But though she wouldn't admit it, she had no better ideas. So she followed along reluctantly.
Because it couldn't get much worse.
"We need to worry about ourselves," Rex expanded on the prior statement. "This is really, really bad."
He stated it so factually. The thing she'd been trying to take her mind off of for a few hours now. She hadn't fully understood their position at first. It was just another unlucky obstacle to overcome, she'd thought. A new sort of dungeon to escape from.
But slowly, that understanding was creeping in.
In a mystery dungeon, there was a promise of progress. With every new quadrant, you knew that you'd grown closer to the exit. But there was no such guarantee here. For all they knew, the entire web of caverns they'd traversed was an elaborate network of dead ends. Maybe they'd had to start walking deeper from the start.
Or maybe there was no exit at all.
She shook that last thought off. There was no such thing as an unwinnable situation. Not for her- there couldn't be.
But still, even with aggressive rationing, their supplies would only last a few days at most. Normally sunlight would be the first thing to get her, but if she had to split her food with Helioptile, that could be her first problem too.
She'd figure this out. This certainly wasn't meant to be how she met her end.
But nonetheless...
"We'll see what happens. It's not like we have a different strategy for finding him than we do for finding the exit," she answered.
She hated that she could hear the doubt in her own voice.
Hour 16
The doubt had continued to grow.
They had gone down as much as they had gone up by now. At best, they had climbed a little bit. But they had still no idea how far above them the surface actually was.
Tripping had become a much more regular occurrence. Whether it was because they were getting tired, or because their death march had gradually become more panicked.
The first few times one of them had hit the ground, it had invariably been met with snickers from the other. But at this point the joke was long past funny.
By the increasingly heavy drag of his tail, it was clear that Rex had grown exhausted far faster than she had. But even Bristle's feet had begun to graze the floor with each step.
The bigger picture logistics were starting to become a serious concern. How little could they eat and keep moving? Would they need to sleep? And of course- that last one she had somehow forgotten until Rex spoke up.
"I'm thirsty."
It was the first thing he'd muttered in hours. And it was said with an alarming void of vigor, as though the life had been entirely sucked out from him.
Water was... not something Bristle had considered. Usually the juices from their meals were enough to handle a delver's thirst for a dungeon trek. But if they were going to eat as little as possible...
"Aren't Helioptile desert dwellers? Shouldn't you be able to hold off a while?" she probed.
"Beats me," he muttered. "But I'm thirsty, and I'd like to not die of dehydration."
Bristle sighed. Even if he could hold off, she had realized now that she was rather thirsty as well.
But she had no good solution.
Her back scraped against the wall, and a quiet thump broadcast to him that she'd sat down against it. With the click of her bag unlatching, and the rustling of items, she brought out one of her apples and cut it half with a large thorn.
Figuring it out from the crisp sound of an apple breaking, Rex slumped down too, and patted the ground to find where she was. Running his hand upward, he found his apple-half and grabbed it.
"Thanks," he mumbled. His voice was a bit slurred. She assumed the grim circumstances had gotten to him.
The eager crunching of apples became the sound of the void for the next few minutes. But discontentment filled the space afterwards, as they each lamented their still-growling stomachs, and their still-dry throats.
"Do you not have any water?" he asked.
She shook her head. And then immediately corrected herself. "No."
Silence for a moment. Then the sound of him rising to his feet. Wordlessly, his claws began to trace the wall again.
In lieu of any other options, she joined him.
But now that he'd broken her trance, she really was so thirsty. Her leaves and her petals longed for a rejuvenation.
Hour 20
She'd been unable to think about anything but water for most of the past few hours. The apple slice had helped a tiny bit, but it felt like they'd been trapped down here for a week.
Her fatigue was growing impossible to ignore. She hadn't had a good rest in over a week, even before today had happened. And in that exhaustion, she was growing hypnotized by her every discomfort.
Even still, it took her an hour to admit it when she came up with a solution.
"There- there may be a way we can get a bit of a drink," Bristle confessed anxiously, rubbing her buds together in anxiety.
His walking stopped. She could feel the slightest shift in the cool air as he quickly turned to face her. "Why didn't you say so earlier?" he asked. The question felt like a demand, but the delivery was deadpan.
"I... didn't think of it until just now," she lied, grateful he couldn't see the embarrassed look on her face.
She lowered her bud down to what she assumed was about face-level for him. Quite redundantly, she closed her eyes, took a deep breath as she recalled a source she barely used.
Water was a source she had expected to have trouble with. Water, as a source, was often described as like following a stream. The associated frame of mind was one which could follow that invisible flow, without resisting or fighting against it. So naturally, stubborn little Bristle had been expected to fail miserably at that one.
But against Thorn's expectations, and her own, Bristle had picked the source up quite easily. Her skill with the move itself, however, was another matter.
She felt Rex's claw touch her petals skeptically, which made her instinctually snarl. Begrudgingly, she let him dig his claw deeper, wetting it with the light coating of viscous dew now lining the insides of her bud.
"Is this... dew?" he asked, attempting to rake some off with his claws, only to find that strategy ineffective.
"Life dew," Bristle explained. "It's... not really meant for drinking. But desperate times call for desperate measures," she muttered.
Suddenly, she felt Rex jam his entire face into her bud. Her eye twitched as he desperately lapped up what little water was there.
Every instinct she had was screaming to shove him off and smack him upside the head for good measure. She tried to push them down with the reminder that she was ultimately going to do the exact same thing next- but reason rarely did much against tempests of emotion.
After a moment of him getting his fill, she wrenched her bud back. With a thud, his claw hit her foot as he fell off balance.
"That's enough," she said self-consciously, glad he couldn't see how flustered she was. She replenished the dew and took an unsettling sip from the tips of her own petals as he got back to his feet.
Living this one down was yet another reason she couldn't wait to be rid of him. They continued, the hush sealing their agreement to never discuss this again.
Hour 24
For once in her life, Bristle admitted defeat.
Things were looking about as up as anything could possibly look in the featureless, black void they now lived in. They had been ascending for a long while now without hitting any dead ends. Somehow, Rex's wall trick seemed to be working.
But her energy was entirely spent. She was stumbling in a forward motion more than she was walking at this point. And by the erratic clattering of claws which had become Rex's footsteps, and the heavy trawl of his tail, it was clear he felt the same.
Yet he refused to be the one to call it.
"We need to rest a bit," she confessed, stopping her forward march.
Rex didn't stop moving until he heard her hit the ground with a thump. The scratch of his claws against the stone stopped. But she never heard him sit.
"We can't," he said flatly.
"We haven't used half of our food yet. And if I recover some energy, I can... " With a squirm, she relented, "I can create life dew again."
"We can't," he said again in a murmur. It sounded almost as flat. But in the blackness, she could pick up so much more than she normally would. She could hear the fear underneath it.
She sighed. Wasn't he the one who complained about her overdoing it? She could tell he was just as exhausted as she was. It was a strange reversal of positions. But she was far too tired to waste energy berating him for it.
"We don't need to sleep for long. Just enough to get some energy back. We won't survive this if we collapse from exhaustion down here."
Survive...
For the first time, it dawned on her that Hoopa wasn't even crossing her thoughts anymore. Somewhere along the way, this had become about her own survival.
But with his response, she realized that her survival was not the most immediate problem.
"If I sleep, I won't wake up," he whispered, the words quivering with dread.
Fear grasped her heart as it finally dawned on her.
Rex needed sunlight. Even more than she did.
While she might last a few days more, Rex was wandering through this darkness into the precipice of death.
"H-hey, just keep going, okay? Just keep moving and it will all be alright. We're keep walking," she choked out, air rushing past her as she quickly stood back up.
No matter her opinions of the Helioptile, she had never wanted him dead. Even if... even if her actions yesterday had been a bit shortsighted, it was an accident.
Death was... it was a surprisingly rare thing for a delver to come up against. Dungeons were, ironically, rather safe in that regard. You could fight for your life, struggling against an overwhelming foe, fall to defeat, and then... wake up, rescued from the dungeon's confines, days later.
Outside of chasing particularly vile outlaws, delving was rarely a fatal affair, for anyone involved.
And when delvers did brush with death, it was the symbol of ultimate failure. It was a delver's duty to protect people. To fail that duty in such spectacular fashion, so much had to go wrong.
...So why was she staring into death's face now?
Undeniably, so much had gone wrong.
But where?
She had come here on the legitimate request of a client. She hadn't invited Rex to come with her. And Faith... Faith was a wild card she never could have predicted.
Surely none of this was her fault? Had she really come to this point purely by bad luck?
The thought of him dying reinvigorated her. If she fell here, with him, it wouldn't just be her life she'd lost. It would be the most disgraceful death she could ever receive- lost and forgotten, in the company of only the corpse of her final failure.
She stormed past him, taking her place on the wall in front of him. She reached her right bud back behind her.
"Hold my bud," she instructed him. Silently, she felt his claw grasp around her outer petals. It was faint, but not without any conviction. He still had some fight left in him. Her crippled vines reached out and curled around his claws.
Together, they started moving again. His arm tugged back against her vines as they walked, sapping from her already sparse energy. But right now, he needed that energy more.
"Would it help keep you awake if we talked?" she asked desperately.
They walked in silence a moment before he formed his low reply.
"It might."
Hour 30
Bristle was not equipped for small talk. She had done her best, but Rex was not in the position to lead any conversations, and her topics quickly devolved into the only thing she had to offer- banal retellings of prior delving expeditions. If nothing else, she hoped it stimulated his brain enough to keep him from falling asleep.
But as these critical hours creaked by, one by one, the acrid atmosphere of death hung heavier and heavier. His weight on her bud grew stronger and stronger as his strength to carry himself diminished.
And nothing was changing.
They'd been going up for how long now? She was certain they had to be within the mountain proper. There was no way they had ascended so far and not broken above ground level.
Or perhaps they had. How deep had those caverns run beneath the mountain? It could have been miles. They were entirely in the dark, far more than just literally.
And then, something did change. Like a miner unearthing death itself, her bud collided with the wall. She quickly ran it across the new surface to strike another. A dead end.
After countless hours of uninterrupted ascent, they had reached another dead end. They would have to go back lower once more.
Rex must have heard the series of bumps. Because with a heavy thud, he fell to the floor behind her, the sudden weight tugging his claw free from her vines.
"What are you doing?" she demanded frantically. "We have to turn around! We're- we're getting close now. I'm sure of it."
"I'm done."
His resignation announced itself through the blackness, leaving only cruel silence in its wake.
"What do you mean you're done?" she shrieked, losing her cool not at him but in sheer panic. "You have to get up! Right now!"
"Bristle," he barked her name with a firmness she hadn't heard in hours. "I am going to die. I cannot keep moving. And frankly, I'm tired. I just want to stop fighting," he surrendered, the lethargy attempting to conceal the sadness in his voice.
She couldn't accept that. If- if he gave up, then...
Then she'd have to admit that she was going to die too.
She couldn't die. Not here. Not now. Not like this.
She still had to finish what she'd started in Solemn Meadow.
She still had to show Thorn she wasn't a failure.
She still had to show everyone that she hadn't failed them.
"P-please... Helioptile... " she practically pleaded. "You have to get back up. We're going to get out of this."
Her vines coiled around his arms and she tried to pull him to his feet. But in her exhausted state, and with crippled vines, his dead weight was far too much.
Tears flooding her eyes, she struggled in vain to drag him to his feet. He merely groaned at her doomed attempts to make him move forward.
"Enough!" he finally grew frustrated enough to demand. "Even in the end, you can't just let go!" he snarled, the usual Rex breaking through the exhaustion for a moment. But she heard him quickly slump back down against the wall. "Just... let me have this peacefully."
Her heart begged her to keep going- keep fighting. But slowly it filled up with despair. She couldn't make him move again.
Which meant she had two choices. Accept her own defeat here or leave him behind.
She wouldn't die just for him. But defeat had already claimed her spirit. While her head kept demanding otherwise, she knew deep down that if she left him, she'd just die alone, somewhere else.
There was no escaping this natural maze. There never had been.
The sound of her weight collapsing to the floor carried a horrible reminder: she would likely never stand again.
Hour 32
"I expected it to be faster," Rex's low mutter emerged from the darkness. "But I guess I can't really let go."
Bristle wished she could break the awkward silence that followed. But she had no idea what to say.
"It's not painful. I just feel... tired," he explained. "Like I'm drifting in and out of sleep."
Bristle shuffled anxiously. She had to change the topic. Ease the dread in the air. Let them both forget.
"I figured it out. Your wall thing," she offered blankly.
But the empty quiet next to her left no indication whether or not he was curious.
"It only works if the exit is along the walls. In a dungeon, the exit can be in the middle of the maze. But someplace like this... you were right. You can follow the wall to the end," she explained.
She realized too late that this was only a reminder that if they had kept moving, maybe they would have lived.
There were a few moments of silence before Rex finally responded.
"Huh. I guess so."
There was no more victory to be earned in winning the argument.
Hour 34
Rex had wanted to just die in peace. Not fighting any more. And finally, Bristle understood.
She couldn't escape the thoughts raking at her brain like the talons of a Staraptor.
It had finally, truly hit her. She was going to die here. Slowly, painfully, and alone.
She was going to die a complete, and absolute failure.
They had lied to her.
Hour 35
"Do you know what it's like to die of sunlight deprivation?"
Bristle broke the silence with a whisper.
He didn't reply, but she could still hear his breathing beside her. Her constant reminder that he was still with her.
She continued anyways.
"For you, it will be like falling into a deep sleep and never waking up. Almost peaceful, I imagine.
"But for a grass type like me... the process can take a week. It will start in my buds. My petals will start to wilt. I- I think they already are."
She pressed her buds lightly against her arm to confirm and shuddered. Her petals felt far too soft and malleable.
"They'll start to fall off, as the entire bud dies. My roots will begin to decay next. I won't even be able to walk. I'm probably... I'm probably not too far off from that starting."
The emptiness in her voice was the only thing that could mask the terror.
"Your limbs wilting... I hear it's like being burned. Only it never stops. Every inch of your body just screaming out for relief. The pain never really dulls until they're fully atrophied.
"The withering spreads inward until your entire body is crumpled and useless, and your mind is trapped within a corpse. It's at least a day like that before you die. If you're lucky."
A tense silence hung between the two of them for what felt like an eternity.
Was he contemplating? Too tired to respond? Apathetic?
He finally spoke up.
"Do you want sympathy?"
His voice carried a seed of his resentment out from the true Rex, still trapped within.
Bristle let out a sorrowful sigh and leaned back against the wall.
"...No."
Hour 36
"I'm sorry."
Bristle's tearful whisper interrupted their peace.
Maybe she shouldn't have. But this was her final chance. Soon, there'd be no one left to hear it.
She heard him adjusting upright in the blank space beside her, for the first time in hours.
"What?"
"I'm sorry, alright!" she cried out, no longer caring how obvious her sobbing was. "I'm a failure! I took everything everyone did for me, I took all of the opportunities I was given, and I wasted them all! I was- I was just a waste of everyone's time. And there's no fixing it- because it's just who I am. Up until the end. A failure."
She had expected some immediate response. Some reinforcement that she was, in fact, an utter failure. But instead her own sobs were the only thing filling the space that followed.
And when he did reply, it was not what she expected.
"Are you fucking kidding me?" The tiniest gleam of anger accented his otherwise dry tone. "Is that seriously what you've taken out of this?"
Now it was Bristle's turn to be confused.
"What do you mean?" she asked between sniffles, trying unsuccessfully to get herself composed again with the weight of her dying apology still on her heart.
His rediscovered anger seemed to have granted him a final reserve of strength.
"Do you seriously think that's why everyone hates you? I didn't know what the hell 'delving' was when I met you. I had no expectations. I don't hate you because you're a shit delver. I hate you because you're an awful person," he hissed.
Bristle's body froze over like morning frost.
What?
"I- I don't understand," she muttered.
That just seemed to piss him off more. "What is there to not understand? You treated me like shit. You treated everyone like shit."
She had always done everything in her power to treat her clients properly. Just as she'd been taught.
Perhaps... perhaps she had been a bit rude to him and her other coworkers, unjustly, at times. But a bit of rudeness didn't cause this kind of vehemence from him. This kind of vehemence from... everyone.
"I don't understand," she repeated in a daze. "I've... I've treated my clients respectfully. And I- I've tried to always do my best job. I know I've messed up some- but I've tried to fix it. I've tried so, so hard to fix it..."
"Clients... do your job..." he muttered. "I finally get it. You're not civilized. You're a feral with a job."
"What does that mean?" she asked, the question bleeding with desperation.
"You have no idea how to interact with anyone who isn't part of your job. You're like if they took a wild Pokémon out of the woods, and trained it to be a delver."
The charged whisper echoed through her mind.
At any other time, it would have just made her angry. She would have brushed it off. Never even considered such a ridiculous jab.
But in her vulnerable moment, so desperate to understand where it had all gone wrong, it sung through her mind like a mantra. A feral with a job...
It was true that she had never quite... understood anyone else. But that had just been because she was so far above their level. That was what she had thought, at least.
But clearly that was far from the truth. If anything, her pitiful death here proved just how far below them she was.
Was it possible that she'd been the one, all along, who'd never understood? That for all of her struggles to fix her mistakes- to regain their praise- she had been chasing a ghost? Fighting so desperately without ever understanding the problem in the first place?
"I just... I don't understand..." she echoed one final time in defeat. Her head bowed low in shame.
There was an agonizing stillness for a minute, as her thoughts ate away at her, wilting her mind far faster than the dark could wither her body.
"Help me understand. Please."
Her fearful plea broke the silence once more.
"Help you understand what?"
"What went wrong. I- I don't want to die without understanding what I did wrong," she sniffled.
He let out a heavy breath beside her. "You want me to spend my final breaths roasting you?"
"Yes," she practically pleaded.
To her surprise, he let out a faint chuckle. "I can't think of a more fitting end," he mumbled bitterly.
"Alright, let's hear it then. From the beginning. How did you end up here? Hopefully by the time you're done, I'll be dead."
Bristle sighed, feeling a strange sort of relief. It was too late to fix her life- but maybe she could at least pass with the peace of understanding it.
With that, together in what they were certain would be their eternal darkness, she began her tale.
