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Three is Company
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After Bronze fought away the darkness in his eyes and the shaking in his hands, he waited till Tess came into the living room and told her Quentin's plan. It was not any easier than convincing Quentin, though the difficulty did not lie in the actual wanting. He had to maneuver so to avoid fermenting the seeds of mutual conflict that would have eventually shattered their fellowship several months down the road. It was ill to Bronze that Tess was asking more questions about their theological position than the actual specifics of the journey. He did not realize that Arceus was doing this, so that Tess would not understand or imagine the real dangers that lay ahead on the road. Bronze did not tell her then.
"You know that Quentin wants you to leave," said Bronze, trying his best to look lordly. "He will take you with him whether you want to stay here or not. But you don't, do you?"
"I would rather be thrown into a broom closet for a week than be forced to spend another day in Rosecove," said Tess.
"Then the wanting is not what I am worried about. Before you is an opportunity that you will never get again. This is a real chance to go out on an adventure, with a single conscious decision, not like the stories you've heard where the hero simply gets wrapped up in things. Whether you will make a name for yourself or not is up to your will. I had hoped you would be able to join us: to become a part of our army."
"I've been thinking of going North," said Tess. "And I would go with you, of course, but this time is different. You've got bad men on your trail. What should I know about them?"
"Understand that unless I had been told to by Arceus, I would not even have sought you out because of them," said Bronze. "The Eclipse Alliance is very dangerous. If we are defeated we shall not keep our minds or lives. Once you decide to travel with us you are a recruit in the Remnant of Humanity. There will be battles that you will be forced to engage in."
"Why are they after you, anyway?" said Tess.
"We have information that they want, I think," said Bronze, though he did not yet tell her about the Brick. "They also might be wanting to use me as leverage, though I don't think that's likely."
"Leverage for what?"
"My parents were taken by them about two weeks ago. Do not worry. The Alliance has no need to torture them; they can extract whatever they want from Men's minds with Pokemon. It would be inefficient for them to go through the trouble of taking me for the sake of leverage. They have had enough of that already. But since they are hunting me, they want what I have."
"Have you wondered if they are dead?"
"Yes. Perhaps they are. If so then I will grieve. But my heart does tell me that they are alive, and still have their minds with them. When facing such enemies you own nothing but the small space within your skull. Perhaps the leaders of the Alliance are reserving them for my personal viewing, so that they may gloat in victory once all is won. Hopefully I would be dead before that, and you as well, if that is to be our fate."
"What makes you so special?" said Tess. "I'm not being rude, you know. I've heard stories about girls being snatched by highwaymen when their fathers aren't looking, and then they turn up dead in a gulley a few weeks later. How are you different? You seem trustworthy enough, but the other one was odd. He spoke too fast."
"Jake is smitten with you," said Bronze. "Don't mind it. He is worth more than you first realize. To you he might not seem clever, or witty, or very regel at all in my company, but he has a will of stone. He could bear burdens that would make other men go mad for dozens of years. I have seen him be stout in hardship; I suppose he'd be very hard to kill if things came down to the bone. I've fainted twice over this journey and he hasn't at all. If that isn't solid then I don't know what is."
"You could be a very charismatic murderer," said Tess.
"I am a very charismatic Pokedex Holder," said Bronze, and he showed her the blinking device after withdrawing it from his buttoned pocket.
The debate from that point on was increasingly in Bronze's favor. At those words it was to Tess like a horn had been set to Bronze's lips and he had blown. She had heard of the Pokedex Holders. How could she not? They were legend's modern face, antiquity cloaked in the grime of the industrial present. Some of them were descendants of heroes, others dark overlords. All had done great things and met gods. This boy was one of them, perhaps the greatest, if greatness is considered renown. She knew that anything from that point on was the next chord in a tense and secret symphony played by the Fates. Pokedex Holders at worst were irresponsible children and at best theistic saints. Bronze was safe. Through all this ordeal her root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. The Calm Bronze, the Safe Bronze that was before her could be treated as her willing shield against all troubles.
"I really don't have much experience in battle, if it is going to come to that," said Tess.
"No one really has experience fighting the Dark Powers at first," said Bronze.
"But I'm really unfit..."
"You are willing to go far and that is enough."
"Now, really, I know of no job for which mere willingness is the final test."
"I do. Martyrs. I am probably sending you to your death. Take it or leave it."
She wanted to leave it. It was easy to think of the other path. After declining she would move in with Quentin to a little seaside town further south. There she would find a nice boy, marry, have three or so children, and then die a content agnostic. It was not thrilling but it was what she expected and felt was expected of her. The horrible part was that it would not be a bad life. It was really possible for her to be content in the second path. She would go on all the trips she desired and more. It was absolutely insane, completely ridiculous, that she should leave Quentin and go off with a pair of what seemed to be religious fanatics, albeit one very good, with delusions of knighthood. It was like asking her to join a convent.
She would have immediately said no then if it had been any other boy who had asked her. The faces of other young men in town were beginning to affect her with an unease: lean faces with small greedy eyes and strange disquieting smiles. It was dreadfully quiet and yet dreadfully interested in her. But Tess had never thought that Bronze could have ever found her attractive. She did not even think him a boy. Next to him she felt a shriveled thing, easily blown away by a wind, while his shoulders could have torn up the very foundations of the lighthouse and cast it into the sea. He was perched in a chaste blue tower overlooking the world. For the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power. At that moment, as her eyes rested on his face, Tess forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Quentin, and her more obscure grudge against Jake for his treatment of her, and her childhood and her grandfather's little town. It was, of course, only for a flash. Next moment she was once more the ordinary social Tess, flushed and confused to find that she had been staring rudely (at least she hoped that rudeness would be the main impression produced) at Bronze. But her world was unmade; she knew that. Anything might happen now. Bronze was the Emperor.
And Tess heard her own voice saying, "I'll take it," soft and chastened like a schoolgirl's voice. She had meant to say, "It sounds reasonable but I have some more questions," in an easy tone that would have counteracted the absurdity of her immediate behavior. But the other was what actually came out of her mouth. Shortly after this she found herself sitting completely still before Bronze. She was shaken: she was even shaking. She hoped intensely that she was not going to cry, or be unable to speak, or do anything silly. For her world was unmade: anything might happen now. If only the conversation were over! All so that she could get out of that room without disgrace, and go away, not for good, but for a long time. But when she had agreed she had chosen to be with this boy-king every day for the foreseeable future.
She said: "But will it be hard? This is a terrible pair of choices to have to choose between. Is it ill to talk of such questions?"
"No," said Bronze, "because all answers deceive. If you put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if you are trying to leap on into eternity, if you are trying to see the final state of all things when there are no more possibilities left but only the ends of either path, then you ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears."
"So a fancy way of saying you don't know?"
"It will be a very hard road. Haven't you gleaned that? Of course, I cannot give you specifics. Time is the very lens through which you see, small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope, something that would otherwise be too big for you to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby you most resemble your Maker and are yourself a part of eternal reality. You have an abundance of Freedom since both choices will lead in opposite directions. But you can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what you might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom. They are a lens. There is no sense in thinking about it right now."
"If I go onto your philosophical ground, then what would I see through the lens? Can't I possibly make a fuller judgment with the help of the facts?"
"The only fact is that Arceus wants you to do this."
"Well, I don't believe in Arceus as god. I think it's a Pokemon."
"Tess, do not blaspheme," said Bronze softly. "That will be good for me to speak to you about on the road. As for the lens I mentioned, the picture is a symbol: but it's truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic's vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of your path except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom. Witness would show that reality is not waiting to be "real," since our perception of time is different than God's, (I will call Him by that name and not Arceus) but that has a price of removing Freedom which is the deeper truth of the two. You cannot know your eternally different paths than by facts, which are definitions of What Is. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. The Lord said we were gods. I, for one, cannot bear to look down at what I think your path will be and see the glory of your soul nor bear the infinite consequences of your choice. I don't know any particulars but it deals with your final destiny, how the tree will lie after it falls. That is worth everything to be concerned about. If you had been the only Man ever made He would have done nothing less than what He already did."
Tess knew that he was speaking of a disreputable (to her) episode in celestial history called the Incarnation. Arceus had died and then returned, and the blood of that slaying had supposedly made all Men blessed forever. She had heard from her history teacher that the Incarnation was a way that the primitive Hisuians reconciled unusual seismic activity at Mount Coronet with the religious stirrings going around in the country at that time. But here was Bronze saying that had been a perfectly literal event. She wanted to refute his arguments but, besides the fact that she kept blushing red, she also knew that it was hopeless. Real faith was against all evidence.
Even if she were to show him that the Arceans were hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the television, in newspapers, in books, their theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were; in spite of all this, Arceus's influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by Him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under His directions were not unmasked by the college professors and secular police. According to the greatest exaggerations, He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the rational world, she had heard. The Church, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which the original Arceans were the authors and which circulated clandestinely here and there. People referred to it as the Hisuian Coda. Tess was dimly aware that a few decades in the past it had been required reading for high-schoolers and upper and lower-classmen, but had been flushed out of the curriculum in her lifetime. Tess only knew anything about Arceanism through vague rumors, already clouded by a secularist filter.
Thus, at one moment Tess's revulsion was not turned against Arceus and the oppressive clergy at all, but, on the contrary, against herself, the materialist worldview, and the overbearing purveyors of Science as a little god; and at such a moment her heart went out to the lonely, young, derided heretic sitting across from her, the sole guardian of truth and sanity and morality in a world of lies. Another moment and she wondered how she could have thought him young.
"Tess," said Bronze softly, "the time has come. Will you go with us?"
"One more thing," said Tess. "What are you going to exactly do once the League is going? I'll be caught up in it, no doubt. Is it unnatural or anything? I don't like doing anything unwholesome, being a skeptic of all this Arceus stuff."
"There is not enough time to explain, not right here," said Bronze. "If you come with us you will have all the time you need. That is another thing you must stare down the lens to discover. In regards to unnatural and unwholesome things in your worldview, I think you are being dishonest if you think you can treat them as really solid truths not be violated without believing first that Arceus created everything. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Arceanism can be this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same Father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not imitate. This gives to the typically Arcean pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Yveltal and Darkrai. Nature was a solemn mother to Team Aqua or Magma. But Nature is not solemn to me or Jake. To me, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. You cannot treat Nature properly unless you're speaking from God's position. So no, it won't be unnatural to do what He says, because He is higher.
"Then will your Arceus keep me alive?" said Tess. She did not believe that she would die but Bronze seemed unconcerned about whether they did or didn't.
"No, Tess," said Bronze. "It is not so good as that. The bitter drink of death is still before you. I won't tell you that I looked down that lens too deeply. It wouldn't be wise of me to give your pretext for things that no mortal knows. It is not against my theology to say that Arceus might be sending us to die. Death is not really a great evil. For the Arcean mind, Death is the moment that occurs when you are ripe for dismissal from military service."
Tess would like, if she could, to interpret Bromze's philosophy and utter knowledge of his sins, certainly a clearer knowledge of hers, on the analogy of her own paralysing sensation when she encountered a man upon whom rests the smell of the breath that comes from the heart of heaven. But it was all nonsense. Pains he may still have to encounter, but he embraced those pains. He would not barter them for an earthly pleasure. All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which she could once have convinced him otherwise, even the delights of virtue itself, seemed to him, she knew, in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door. He was caught up in the world where all of Tess's math became infinitely useless.
By then she was caught in with him. "I'll do it," she said. "God forbid anything else."
"That is the point," said Bronze. "He has forbidden it. Of course, when we tell you the real meaning of our journey, you are to keep that information dead secret. If you really care about us you will. See? If you don't, if you even breathe a word of what you've heard here, then I hope the gods will turn you into a toad and fill the grass with garden-snakes."
"It's that bad?"
"Not bad. Just secret. I have thought of something better than turning you into a toad, of course. Something to keep you silent about it, and punish you properly for running into Team Eclipse." He said this with a wink. "The journey will be a punishment itself. You shall go with us."
"Well, here I am," said Tess, "going off the see the world. I do hope I will be back soon."
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One evening later an astonishing piece of news reached the taverns and inns through Rosecove. The great storm and the odd weather two days ago and other portents on the borders of the town were forgotten for more important matters: Quentin was giving away his positon as Gym Leader, indeed he had already given it, to some dour-faced Associaton trainer that had come from the north.
Just why Quentin was bidding off his good position was even more debatable than the man who took it. A few held the theory, supported by the nods and hints of Mr. Quentin himself, that his health was running out: he was going to leave Rosecove and live in a quiet way on the proceeds of the Association pay down in southern Roria among his Silvent relations. But so firmly fixed had the notion of the immeasurable wealth of the Gym Leaders had become that most found this hard to believe, harder than any other reason or unreason that their fancy could suggest: to most it suggested a dark and yet unrevealed plot by Quentin and his granddaughter, along with the two strangers that were sleeping in two for the past few days. Though the two kept themselves very quiet and did not go about by day, it was well known that they were "hiding up in the lighthouse." But however a removal might fit in with the designs of Quentin's wizardry, there was no doubt about the fact: he was leaving Rosecove, probably forever.
"Yes, I shall be moving this week or so," said Quentin. "My college friends are looking out for a nice little apartment for me, or perhaps a small house on the seashore."
As a matter of fact with the Association's help he had already chosen and bought a little house at the town of Moorhollow in the country beyond Silvent. To all but Tess and Bronze he pretended he was going to settle down there permanently. The decision to set out southwards had suggested the idea to him; for that lands was on the southern borders of the continent, and as he had lived there in childhood his going back would at least seem credible.
"We'll be taking the shorter route to Anthien," said Bronze to Tess. "It's the capital and I doubt the Alliance will be able to do anything funny once we're there. It also has the next Gym if we go from south to north, so I'd need to go there anyway. You might think that the route through the Great Forest would be safer because its isolated. That's exactly what we're trying to avoid. The Alliance will nab us, alone, if we go through the middle of it."
"Then which way are we going?" said Tess. "We could try going over the sea, you know."
"What boat can we get quickly enough? Perhaps, but not unnoticed. The Alliance will be watching the sea-routes. They have many strange allies. Soon this entire town is going to be filled with their people. They will expect us to take the easier route, and for that reason it must be shunned. We go through the plain of Lothlann and up the Stormhorn Mountains."
After the trio's plan had been finally arranged, Quentin suddenly announced that he was going off the next morning. "Only for a short while, I hope," he said. "But I am going down beyond the southern borders to get some news, if I can. I, and you, have been idle longer than we should."
It was good that Tess had finished packing. An hour later vans filled with stone-faced men rolled into town. They went around asking for Quenitn's whereabouts but the townsfolk stayed quiet about it. Quentin locked up the lighthouse and the four ran down the north face of the hills to one of Quentin's speedboats. "Set the autonavigation ten miles north to Astrad Sound," he said. "Then cut along the Meadow Row and pass as quick as you can to the gate beyond the field. You cannot sleep in any village tonight. Too many ears pricking and eyes prying."
"You aren't coming with us?" said Jake.
"No!" said Quentin. "I must go south. The enemy won't catch me. Tess, you know the rules of the road, now?"
"Yes," said Tess. "No traveling at night, the gum on the street isn't free candy, stay near police stations and avoid alleys, judge a Pokemon by its Type and not its size..."
"You've got it covered," said Quentin. "May the favor of Arceus Elyon be on you. Pray to see me again!"
Quentin turned around and ran back up the hills. After they descended the slope and labored over the shore, they boarded and settled themselves. Tess was the driver and she pushed the engine to full speed. They shouldered their packs and looked out over the blue. Behind them was the known, and Tess thought she was falling around the Earth's orbit into a black and unknown dimension. "Good-bye!" said Tess, looking at the high colorful shape of the lighthouse. She waved her hand, and then turned away to the lands before them.
"I wonder if I shall ever see that lighthouse again," said Tess.
It was a few minutes later before they came to the Sound. By the sea there was a broad wooden landing-stage with a large flat ferry-boat moored beside it. Thick rows of trees above the hythe admitted no rays of sunlight past their leaves. The white bollards near the water's edge glimmered in the light of two lamps on high posts. The water before them was dark, with only a few curling wisps like steam among the reeds by the bank. There seemed to be fog in the forest. Tess had a strange feeling as they slipped through the gurgling water: her old life lay behind in the sun, dark adventure lay within the mists in front.
"Does this go to Lothlann?" asked Bronze.
"The path does," said Tess. "But we'll go off it a while to get through the Row. The plain is pretty near there."
Tess stopped the boat near the shore and tied it up. The bank was shallow, and in the green forest there was a winding unpaved path that clambered on for miles into the wood. Stray shrouds of mist covered many ancient trees. With gear in hand, they ran through the woods and took to the path, passing into the darkness like a rustle in the grasses.
...
At the end of the Path on its east side they came to the gate opening on to a narrow lane. There they halted and adjusted the straps of their packs. Presently Jake was trotting quickly and breathing hard; his heavy pack was hoisted high on his shoulders. In the gloom he looked very much like a Logathrim. "I am sure you have given me all the heaviest stuff," said Jake. "I pity snails, and all that carry their homes on their backs."
"We split Tess's share, you know that," said Bronze. "Both of us could take a lot more. Our packs are still light."
"I could take a little," said Tess, stoutly and untruthfully.
"No you don't, Tess!" said Jake. "It is good for us. We've got nothing except what Quentin ordered us to pack. The two of us have been slack lately, and we'll feel the weight less when we've walked off some of our own."
"Be kind!" laughed Bronze. "I shall be as thin as straw, I'm sure before I get to Anthien. But I was talking nonsense. I suspect you have taken more than your share, Jake, and I shall look into it at our next packing." He grinned and picked up his pace again. "Well, we'll all like walking in the dark," he said, "so let's put some miles behind us before we sleep."
For a short way they followed the lane eastwards. Then leaving it they turned north and took quietly to the fields again in the Meadow Row. They went in single file along hedgerows and the borders of coppices, and night fell dark about them. Since Bronze thought spies were abroad, they made no noise that even Pokemon would hear. Even the wild things in the fields and woods hardly noticed their passing.
After some time they crossed over a northern tributary of the River Barandiun, by a narrow plank-bridge. The stream was there no more than a winding black ribbon, bordered with leaning willow-trees. A mile or two further north they hastily crossed the great road from the Bridge. The plain of Lothlann was about three more leagues east; they would cross it over the next week. In the meantime they were now traveling along the eastern banks of the Great River Sereghir, the Bloodflow, the renowned river of Roria that flowed from its source within the Frostveil Mountains through the deserts of Aredia and made its way through the forest, where it joined the Barandiun and flowed into the Sea.
When dark night came they camped by the shores of the Sereghir. At its feet were growths of grass and reeds. The twilight lay cold and misty on the land between the plain and river. The Serehgir at night was a curving river of clear water, bordered with elder willows, covered with willows, blocked with hewn willows and flecked with thousands and thousands of yellow willow leaves. Sleep was coming from the earth into their arms and legs, sleep was falling from the air onto their heads. There were no flies or creeping things about at the hour and so they slept under the heavens. Electabuzz kept watch.
As he lay, across the river on the western bank Bronze made out a grove of spruce trees. They were the only trees that weren't willows as far as he could see. He wondered where they came from. This whole place was filled with cool, quiet magic. From across the burbling water he heard the echoes of words saying something about rest and sleep, earth and water. The noise of great boughs of the willows creaking in the wind and the soft murmuring of the trees defeated him; he closed his eyes and rested.
...
That night he dreamed again of the Hisuian boy that he had seen dug up from the graveyard. He was lying under one of the spruce trees across the river and Bronze was standing over him. It was a lucid dream and Bronze found that was a pretext for some exploring. But walking proved difficult. Bronze's feet were insubstantial and the grass proved hard as diamonds for them. It made him feel as though he were walking on wrinkled rock and he suffered like a coal walker moving too slowly. He began to envy the other boy. His body was real to that world and it bent the stalks of grass and could be splashed with dew.
Almost at once after that envy the boy opened his eyes and smiled. The face of the solid boy made Bronze want to dance, it was so jocund, so established in its youthfulness. "Don't you know me, Bronze?" said the boy.
"No," said Bronze. "I don't think I'll believe the answer." In the dream he had a feeling of what the answer would be.
"At least you've still got the Brick," said the boy. "That's the important thing. You won't be able to hide it from her for very long, though. She'll find out about it soon, if she stays."
"Who are you?" said Bronze. "Are you real?"
"I'm the boy who cut out the Brick from its frame," said the boy. "You know me now, don't you? Even the name. And can't you judge if I'm real or not? It would be a beautiful idea if the souls of dead men returned to minister to fallen humanity, but that isn't happening here. I am a dream. You are seeing me because Arceus wants you to."
The boy looked up into the forest around the banks. "I once slept across from you in the spruce trees. In those days there was only one spruce, and it was a Trevenant. The forest has changed and the trees have spread. All of us shared adventures in this wood. We even found Beulah over yonder." He pointed toward a dark spot where the willows stopped and the cedars began.
Bronze was fairly certain of whom he was talking to. "Could I find Beulah again?"
"No, son," said Rei. "All roads are bent and Beulah is removed from the world. I looked for it again after the Quest was over. But never did I find it a second time. I thought I would after Akari died. Before those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you could imagine them, and she could sing. Oh, and she could dance. But the story went crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable gods."
"But you met her again in Deep Heaven."
"Yes, yes I did. Yet while I am here in your dream I am only a ghost and there is no comfort for you. The reason why it was me and not any other is because of the fact that we were the same age when we came here. That might be it, or it could be another thing."
"Does Arceus allow these sorts of excursions by ghosts?"
"I am only a memory. But sometimes He does, for those that will take them. Of course most of the evil souls don't. They prefer taking trips back to Earth and not into the mind of Men. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women you call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then you get what's called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary Ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone's still reading their books."
"Do you think you could stay with me?" said Bronze. In spite of all his experience he was pleading. This boy was older and wiser than he was. "Even forever?"
"Son," Rei said, "you cannot in your present state understand eternity: when I looked through the door of the Timeless, I brought no message back. There is no answer. But you can get some likeness of it if you say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say 'Let me but have this and I'll take the consequences': little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death."
"So it would be a sin for you to stay?"
"No. Samuel did it once in Endor, but not for very long. Some say that the Emperor Trajan went from Limbo into Heaven. It would not be bad for me to return to Earth to be with you. In fact I am already doing that, in a permissible fashion."
"I've never heard of those men."
"You have, but never consciously. I am not Rei. I am your mind. Everything I say you already knew within yourself. Their stories are within the heart of every Man; at least, all stories from the worlds where He was born and died. That's why you can't call me up on command, because your soul knows that there is no reason to if you can get to the heart of the facts."
"But do you actually know anything that I couldn't discover through other means?"
"No, but some of those things will not be clear until after death. If I told you it would be completely rotted without His face to help you understand. It's like the fate of the blessed and damned. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises in Deep Heaven and the twilight turns to blackness down in the House Below the Blessed will say, 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,' and the Lost, 'We were always in Hell.' And both will speak truly."
"If it doesn't make sense without Arceus, then why was that so easy to understand?"
"I mean, that is the earthly sense of what He will say. In the actual language of the Damned or Saved, the words will be different, no doubt. One will say he has always served his country right or wrong; and another that he has sacrificed everything to his Art; and some that they've never been taken into the Faith, and some that, thank Arceus, they've always looked after Number One, and nearly all, that, at least they've been true to themselves."
"And the Saved?"
"Ah, the Saved...what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed to be entering the Afterlife from the Real World turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water."
"Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?"
"Hush," said Rei sternly. "It is now your turn not to blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind. You never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind, is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains."
"But then there is a real choice after death, if people can cross over to Earth and stay there? My friends would be surprised, for to them souls in any Purgatory are already saved. And my friends that don't believe in Purgatory would like it no better, for they'd say that the man falls or rises as he lived."
"This is where you, and I, are limited. The Rei in Heaven could tell you better than I. They're both right, maybe. Do not fash yourself with such questions. You cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Afterlife till you are beyond both. And you were not to dream me up to think of such curiosities. What concerns you is the choice itself."
"How wise are you!"
"I am nothing. I tell you to keep the Brick safe. You need to be wary."
"Will we ever meet again?" said Bronze. "Even in another dream?"
"Or more," said Rei. "But that might not be until a while. Keep it secret. Keep it safe."
And then he was awake a moment under the clear and starry sky. For a moment he looked at the thin-clad willow branches, swaying in a light wind, above his head like a black net against the moonlit night. He fell asleep again.
.
.
.
Hell
.
Late into the night, the Hood hovered in an inescapable trance, halfway between a tormented life on earth and the licking, searing flames of the House Below. He lay on tumbled to the floor, clawed his way up the wall to stand on his feet, staggered about the room, and fell to the floor again. Threatening voices, infernal monsters, nauseous vapors, charring flames, and blood exploded and pounded with unimaginable force in his head; he thought his skull would burst. He could feel claws tearing at his throat, creatures squirming and biting inside him, chains around his arms and legs. He could hear the intolerable voices of spirits, see their eyes and fangs, smell their sulfurous breath.
The Master was angry! "Failed, failed, failed, failed," rang in his brain and paraded before his eyes. "Eric has failed, you have failed, he will die, you will die!"
The voice was cold, it was hungry, it was violent, it was illusory. The warm blood of children and the intercourse at the Sabbath did not satisfy it. It wanted something more and other; it wanted "obedience", it wanted "souls", and yet it pined for matter. It never was, and yet it always is. It was bitterly envious of anyone's happiness, having none of its own. The demons charged with sickening the health of nations report to him, but theirs are not its only schemes. Every moment Men are contented, they annoy him. He cannot touch the joys of God and the blessed, but he still had the Hood to settle with.
Did he really hold a knife in his hand, or was this too a vision from the Lowerarchal Plains? He could feel a yearning, a terribly strong impulse to be free of the torment, to break loose from the bodily shell, the prison of flesh that bound him.
"Join us, join us, join us," said the voice. He felt the edge of the blade, and blood trickled down his finger.
In the next instant he was transported to a desert. He tensed at the whines and howls of the wild animals. Was this real? He pinched himself. Along with him was a huge somber figure, draped in a black robe, hands and feet hidden. His voice was like Hell itself. It was the Evil Djinn, the Mbelekoro. The jackals went silent.
"Wait here," said the man. "This is your punishment. I will return in forty days."
"I cannot survive here! What will I eat?"
"You shall not eat."
"Where will I stay? There is no shelter!"
"Forty days."
"Wait! My people..."
"Emrett will be informed. It will not seem so long to him." And with that the figure vanished.
The Hood wished that time would flow faster, as it had when he had been moved from his quarters to the middle of, it seemed, the Rorian deserts of the equatorial heats. But it did not, leading him to believe that his coming there was not an acceleration of a finite travel time but actually an infinitely swift teleportation. The Dark Lord had power over every finger in his body. How else could he have done this? Fear set in. Soon the Hood became aware of every crawling second, the heat of the day, the bone chill of the night. He had, regrettably, grown accustomed to comforts. he was not used to hunger or terror or predators. He wandered toward the west but found no men, nothing but dreary sand, without even a bold rock or blacked tree to relieve the vacuum.
After several days the Hood thought he would go mad. After a week he did. He tried to mark out time by gouging the ground with a stick every sunrise but in his delirium in the hours of morning he usually forgot. His hair and beard grew and his robes became tattered. He feared he was wasting away, for he was feeling the pinch of hunger turn into starvation. He called out for the Djinn again and again, and finally subsided into screaming hours at a time that he was dying of hunger and thirst.
The light also increased. Under his hood he kept his eyes habitually tight shut, opening them only for the shortest time for necessary movements. He knew that if he reached his headquarters again it would be with permanently damaged sight. But all this was nothing to the torment of heat. He tried to sleep through the day, but sometimes he was awake for twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four, caught between fire and ice, enduring with dilated eyeballs, blackened lips and froth-flecked cheeks the agony of thirst. Sometime at the fourth week he could no longer scream. The scant amounts of moisture in his body made it madness to use air in doing so.
It was not possible for long to think of anything but thirst. One thought of water; then one thought of thirst; then one thought of thinking of thirst; then of water again. And still the heat rose. The sand was too hot to touch. It was obvious that a crisis was approaching. In the next few days it must kill him or get less.
He didn't die but it didn't get less. At the end of a month his bones were protruding, his mouth filmy, his body rocking and trying to will himself to die. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with a sick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of Earth, for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice, awoke in him for the last time in his life. At first his chief difficulty has been to resist hunger, now fanatic excitement was his foe. He was now becoming utterly surrendered to his fate. There are certain preparations a man likes to make before death, even a bad one, and the Hood was doing as he saw fit. His voice, whenever he had the energy to speak, was perpetually angry.
What a good run he had gotten! He had nearly beat Arceus. What a promising man he had turned out to be, before the Djinn left him to his fate. The forty days had to be long over. Why was he not dead? The starvation had become an agony and the thirst elemental. Then the greatest fear hit him. What if he was dead? Was he in Hell? The thought that Eternity would be this: one nasty desert, with all the torment of perpetual sensation, awoke a superhuman force within him that drove his spirit to panic. He got up and began to run for what seemed like miles but really was only a couple hundred feet before he collapsed.
At last the robed man appeared. The Hood tried to muster that same fear of damnation to attack, to harangue, but the devil lifted up a white finger and shook his head. "Now I will speak to you according to your station. Are you my son or not?"
The Hood said yes. "You have been preparing me to be the New Man. But I thought you loved me."
"And I do love you," said the Mbelekoro. "In my present form I feel even more anxious to see you, to unite you to myself in an indissoluble embrace, forever. How mistakenly now that I've put you through the fire that you come whimpering to ask me whether the terms of affection in which I address you meant nothing from the beginning. Far from it! Rest assured, my love for you and your love for me are as like as two peas. I have always desired you, as you (pitiful fool) desired me. The difference is that I am the stronger. I think I will soon have all parts of you. Love you? Why, yes. As dainty a morsel as ever I grew fat on."
"Mercy!"
"My mercy is becoming increasingly and ravenously affectionate," said the Djinn. "Oh, the time is so very close. Within the month I shall return. You will be my vessel."
"What is there left to do?" cried the Hood. He cast himself at the Djinn's feet. "Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthini?"
"Look at the bread around you," said the Djinn.
"There is nothing but stones."
"If you are my son, tell these stones to become bread."
"You mock me," rasped the Hood.
The Djinn did not move or speak.
"All right!" screamed the Hood. "Stones, become bread!"
Immediately the pebbles and small rocks all round him became golden brown and steaming. He began to cry, rejoicing in the smell of it. Soon he had devoured all of two dozen loaves, crying out with his mouth full: "I am a god!"
"But are you God?" said the Djinn.
"No," said the Hood. "You are."
Then all was gone. The two were standing at the very peak of a six-storied building in Jubilife City, warm bread still in the Hood's hands. He was shuddering, abjectly wasted, standing barefoot in a tattered cloak. He was full of bread and now full of himself. He looked out over the city, and beyond to the faint outline of the land he called Sinnoh, the Djinn calls Damnable, and Arceus calls Hisui. "Are you a god?" said the Mbelekoro again.
"I am," the Hood said. "I am what I am."
"If you are, throw yourself down and my legions of spirits will rescue you."
Smiling, with one ragged leap, the Hood hurled himself off the roof and sent him tumbling toward the street below. Never did he save his soul by breaking his faith in the Djinn's promise. Roughly twenty feet from impact he began to float and landed deftly. There were no other people in the streets to witness the miracle, save the vague feeling that an audience was present. He heard the Djinn laughing up above. He hated himself and loved himself.
After that the Hood and the Djinn were atop Mount Coronet, barefoot in the snow. The air was frigid, thin, and the wind lashed on his skin like a storm of rubber truncheons. He began to fight for enough air to keep himself alive. To the north was the Icelands of northern Sinnoh and to the south a green land.
"From here you can see all the kingdoms of the world," said the Djinn.
"Yes, I can see them."
"They are yours if you but kneel and worship me, you master."
The Hood dropped to his knees. "My lord and my god," he said.
...
It was done. The white hands of the Djinn wrapped themselves around the Hood's shoulders as he wept. Already the Mbelekoro was slavering. "There, there. You know why I love you. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over."
"What?" said the Hood. "I thought..."
"One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth," said the Djinn, dropping his hands and facing south. "He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself, creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. Our war aim is a world in which I have drawn all other beings into myself: Arceus wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct."
"At least we are beating him," the Hood cried out. "I am your son! Soon all of you will return, and we will be united in love!"
"Be quiet!" the Mbelekoro said. "You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will, as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do, would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs, to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. That is where our advantage is. Against us without His aid none of our enemies can stand."
"Then we are nearly getting to Robert and Lily," said the Hood. "Hopefully they will soon get out of the rehabilitation phase and into the recruitment stage. They are forsaken as anything I've ever seen."
"Be careful with the Tercanos. It is during such evil periods of life, much more than during the peak periods, that humans are growing into the sort of creature He wants them to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot 'tempt' to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, my son. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do Arceus's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. Then our cause is lost."
The Djinn went on. "The truth is I slipped by mere carelessness into saying that the Enemy really loves the humans. That, of course, is an impossibility. He is one being, they are distinct from Him. Their good cannot be His. All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else. He must have some real motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them. The reason one comes to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is my utter failure to find out that real motive. What does He stand to make out of them? That is the insoluble question."
"But weren't you in Deep Heaven, lord? Do you not remember what He said?"
"I do not see that it can do any harm to tell you that this very problem was one of the chief causes of my quarrel with Arceus. When the creation of man was first mooted and when, even at that stage, Arceus freely confessed that he foresaw a certain episode about an Incarnation and Sacrifice, I very naturally sought an interview and asked for an explanation. Arceus gave no reply except to produce the usual false story about disinterested love which He has been circulating ever since. This I naturally could not accept. I implored Arceus to lay His cards on the table, and gave Him every opportunity. I admitted that I felt a real anxiety to know the secret; Arceus replied: 'I wish with all my heart that you did'. It was, I remember, at this stage in the interview that my disgust at such an unprovoked lack of confidence caused me to remove myself to an infinite distance from the Presence with a suddenness that gave rise to the ridiculous Arcean story that I was forcibly thrown out of Heaven.
"Since then, I have begun to see why our Oppressor was so secretive. His throne depends on the secret. Members of His faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what He means by Love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We know that He cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn't make sense. If we could only find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out. Yet we must never lose hope; more and more complicated theories, fuller and fuller collections of data, richer rewards for researchers who make progress, more and more terrible punishments for those who fail, all this, pursued and accelerated to the very end of time, cannot, surely, fail to succeed."
"Of course," said the Hood. "Soon we will also find Bronze Tercano!"
"Not till you get me, all of me," said the Djinn. "My defeat in years past has currently imposed upon me severe limitations. I am not very strong. Have heart, my dear. Sooner than you think all of me will enter into you and stay there forever."
All of this was the logic behind why the Dark Lord had fouled the world with filth and darkness, made it his stronghold, dried up the world's joys, and caused all that troubles Men from the beginning to the end. The words of the Legends of Arceus were true. "Yet the lies that the Mbelekoro, the mighty and accursed, the Evil Djinn, the Power of Terror and of Hate, sowed in the hearts of Men and Pokemon are a seed that does not die and cannot be destroyed; and ever and anon it sprouts anew, and will bear dark fruit even unto the latest days."
In this way the Dark Lord exchanged the greater part of his original "angelic" powers, of mind and spirit, while gaining a terrible grip upon the physical world. For this reason he had to be fought, mainly by physical force, and enormous material ruin was a probable consequence of any direct combat with him, victorious or otherwise. This is the chief explanation of the constant reluctance, which the reader must understand, of the gods to come into open battle against the Evil Djinn. Rayquaza, the King of the Gods, task and problem was much more difficult than might be considered. Dark gods like Giratina's relatively smaller amounts of power were concentrated; the Djinn's vast power was disseminated. The whole of Earth was his body, through temporality his attention was on certain regions. Unless swiftly successful, war against him might well end in reducing all the continents to chaos, possibly even all of Earth. It is easy to say that it was the task and function of the gods to govern Earth and make it possible for the Children of Arceus to live there unharmed. But the dilemma of the gods is this: Earth could only be liberated by a physical battle; but a probable result of such a battle was the irretrievable ruin of Earth. No such total eradication of the Mbelekor is possible, save for the wholesale destruction of all matter in the world.
In ancient days the Dark Lord was bound, and so the power directing evil was restricted. But now he was returning, for the jail could no longer hold him. With a single shred of his essence he was setting all of modern civilization on fire. Bereft of Heaven, he wanted Earth as a consolation prize. To that end, he wanted everything owned, so he could own the owners. The point was rapidly coming, at which, no end to the Dark Lord's dominion over the Earth could ever be conceived of. In this attitude the Evil Djinn handled himself.