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This is the third and final part of the Legends of Pokemon trilogy. It concludes the myth-canon of which Legends of Arceus was the first part, and Brick Bronze the second, but can be read on its own.
Sword and Shield takes place fifty-two years after the event of Brick Bronze.
It is a partial adaption of the Sword and Shield arc of the Pokemon Adventure manga, though with a heavily edited story. The first part concerns the Gym Challenge of Henry Sword and Casey Shield, and the War by Bronze Tercano against Macro Cosmos, and how Eternatus rose again.
The second part tells of the Typhoon Struggle at the End of Days, how the Battle of Har Meggedon came to pass, and the coming of the Typhoon Struggle. That terrible battle is the end of the Legends of Pokemon trilogy and the grand finale of the War against Darkness.
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This story is dedicated to all those who eagerly await His return.
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The Annals of the Sword and Shield
The Rise and Fall of Eternatus
And the Ruin of the World
(a novel of Earth's last days)
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An Introduction to This World
by Bronze Tercano, chief scribe of the Kingdom of Beulah
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It is said that in the beginning Arceus created the Heavens and the Earth. This start of the cosmological cycle also includes Arceus making the Elohim or Powers (plainly called gods) to be His regents over the creation He had made. But then the one among them called the Evil Djinn became evil, desiring nothing less than the mastery of the whole universe. He was the Mbelekoro, the first Dark Lord, and was the mightiest of all living things in the Earth.
The story then swiftly moves to Men and Pokemon, the Firstborn and Followers. They fall quickly under the Mbelekoro's influence and for the most part become his slaves. Yet there are in particular two groups of Men that escape the Shadow, and they were called the Hisuians and Logarians. The Hisuians settled in the North and the Logarians in the North of the continent of Roria.
After the Great Quest of the Golden Company and the War of the Plates, the Evil Djinn was bound, and thrust out of Creation, never to take incarnate and physical form again while that era of the world lasted. Then the Hisuians and Logarians enjoyed their Golden Age, ere a cloud of corruption came across Logaria at the height of their glory.
The reasons for their fall were possessiveness regarding their marvelous crafts and the fear of Death, wishing to leave Life on their own terms, and not waiting on the hope entrusted to them by Arceus. And so the Logarians became fierce Men of War, and the fear of them stretched from the Southern Cold to the Grinding Ice in the North. But two lands remained safe from their influence. The first was Hisui in the north-east, which was guarded by the Northmen and their Pokemon. There the Logarians feared to come, for the Hisuians fought bitterly against their sundered kin.
The second was Galar, or Gar-Dena in the Hisuian tongue. The Men there had two gods that guarded their land, and their names, it has been revealed, were Zacian and Zamazenta. All around Galar they wove an enchanted Girdle, and maintained and strengthened it, so that all the waters around Galar were filled with storms and whirlpools, and the ships of the Enemy would find their crews lost by webs of deceit, or drowned under the violent waves. In that way Galar remained hidden, a fastness of peace in the Wild, and when Logaria was cast down by Arceus and drowned under the waves, Gar-Dena remained untroubled.
Yet Galar was unknown to the Hisuians, and in the long years that came after the Fall of Logaria, it remained unchanged in wealth and wisdom, while the rest of the world grew their possessions and invented many new things. Zacian and Zamazenta departed for the Slumbering Weald because of the counsel of Arceus. Yet even without their presence, so strong was the enchantment in the Girdle that it spurned the sight of even orbital satellites.
In time and with many strange years the Evil Djinn escaped in part from his prison, and returned to the World, greatly weakened, though ever were there Men and Pokemon that would listen to his counsel, and upon their own consent become his servants. Often he tried to destroy the world and cast it back into the ancient darkness, yet Arceus raised heroes among children to do battle with him and those who had fallen under his dominion. These boys and girls were called Pokedex Holders, for the sign of their renown was a Pokedex, and they became mighty among Men.
Yet when twenty years had passed since the return of the power of the Dark Lord in the world the Prison Bottle, his ancient chain, was found. Then the Eclipse Alliance, his servants in Men at the time, led by the two cruel lords Cypress and Emrett, made war upon the Pokemon Association. The Bottle was broken and the Enemy returned with the power that he had lost of old. There was battle in Roria, and in the Distortion World, and night came in forms dreadful and terrible to many lands. Yet again there were valiant Men who resisted with their Pokemon, and they fought the Eclipse Alliance and defeated them. The Anti-Arceus and False Prophet, Cypress and Emrett, were destroyed and their spirits were sent to Sheol. The Dark Lord was bound once more, and it is said that he will not return until the Last Battle at the End of Time.
There were some among the Association and free peoples that thought that evil was destroyed forever. But it was not so, for there were many survivors and renegades coming from the Eclipse Alliance, and the demons that were corrupted by the Mbelekoro had not been removed from Earth. Darkness was alive in well, though it took different forms. That brings me to myself, Bronze Tercano.
I was among the chief of those who fought against the Evil Djinn, and soon rose in stature to be the head of the Pokedex Holders. By many plots and wiles I came to be the Chairman of the World, and those who made war on me were defeated. When the first stirrings of the End of the World came I was sixty-six years in age, and the master of the fates of Earth, the Emperor of the Second Logarian Empire. I was feared by many and hated by no few.
After the Evil Djinn was bound again, the wanderings of the Pokedex Holders Ruby and Sapphire had come upon Galar during their battle against the Eclipse Alliance. Soon emissaries were sent to the tribesmen who lived there, and taught them the ways of the modern world, gave them technology, and, I think, treated them well. It came upon me to make two new Pokedex Holders for the region, fifty-one years after it was discovered. This was because of my folly regarding the strength of my foes and the danger of appointing new Pokedex Holders.
Fifty-two hard years had passed since the events of Brick Bronze, and turmoil was raging. The demon lord Eternatus, a being of Heaven tainted by the Dark Lord, was growing in strength. Defeated in ancient days by Zacian and Zamazenta, and unknown to all but a few, he was being nursed back to full strength, and also to the evil that the Dark lord had seeded within him. Though the dangers of the old days of magical antiquity had seemingly passed away, in truth those threats had not died, but were waiting only for a change of fortunes and days. Often evil from one age crosses into another.
At that moment, there are now two new Pokedex Holders. The Galarian Pokemon League is preparing for its fiftieth year of games. Chairman Rose of Macro Cosmos plots his own rise at Bronze Tercano's expense. Bronze Tercano seeks to put down this "usurper" in a shadow war and makes a web of policy and strength to destroy his enemy. Evil is everywhere. A new Dark lord is rising. And above all, Arceus sees that the time until the End of Days is running out.
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Part I
Birth Pangs
by Bronze Tercano
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"But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."
-Second Peter 3:10, the King James Bible
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It was eight in the morning and Henry Sword's mind was on a woman he had never touched. It was a bright and frigid day in April, and already the clock inside the recreational camper was awakening Professor Magnolia and Casey. Henry was outside, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the plasteel door of the RV, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The central hallway of the RV smelt of boiled soup and old tires. At the back end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about sixty-five, with a grim brown beard and ruggedly handsome features, with figures of indistinct Pokemon carved around him in a blue background. The poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall at him. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. All Hail the Emperor, it said.
Inside the RV a fruity girl's voice was yelling out a list of figures which had something to do with the amount of operations on a computer. The voice came from an door covered with a dull mirror. Henry moved over to the mirror and he saw looking back at him a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the red shirt which he regularly wore. His hair was very brown, his face naturally calm and sanguine, his skin white and smooth but dry from the rumor of approaching winter in the southern hemisphere.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked bright but cold. Down in the grassy meadow little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in the grass, except the wildflowers that grew everywhere. About a fifth of a mile away to the west was a grassy cwm cloven in the Galarian cliffs. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed above the fields, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was a Macro Cosmos drone.
The woman he was preoccupied with was his mother. He had not seen her since he was a child. He must, he thought, have been one or two years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent dark hair. She had been swallowed up, his father said, by the Machine Purges of the Rorian Jihad. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and helpless to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. The reason why would presently become clear.
A girl from the room on the other side of the mirror-door left, accidentally smashing Henry's nose. He cried out, seeing his current companion scramble to shut the door (for some reason bolt it) and ask if he was alright. The girl was Casey Shield. Casey was attractive and vivacious enough, a pleasant fifteen to Henry's fifteen. Circumstances had forced them together. But lately, Henry had found himself repelled by her obsession with religion. It was all she could talk about, he thought, as he clutched his wounded nose.
Arceus was settled fine with Henry Sword. Henry even enjoyed the colorful Galarian church whenever Magnolia had dragged them over there. But since the old professor they were traveling with had given Casey instructions to a small church with a smaller congregation and was into weekly theological studies and assemblies every Sunday, Henry became irritated. He had other priorities. This Arcean church, which they sometimes had to cross all of Galar to arrive at, was not a church where people gave you the benefit of the doubt, assumed the best about you, and let you be. People there had actually asked him, to his face, what Arceus was doing in his life.
"Blessing my socks off," had become the smiling response that seemed to satisfy them, but he found more and more excuses to be busy on Sundays. They were easy to find with all his training for the Plan.
Would it fade, Magnolia and Casey's preoccupation with the end of the world, with the love of the Original One, with the salvation of souls? Lately she had been reading everything she could get her hands on the End Times as featured in the old Hisuian myths.
"Can you imagine, Henry," she once exulted, "everything ending, just like that? The trumpets blowing and the Gates of Heaven swinging wide?" This was all said with a shout. There were few times when Casey was not shouting. Even her attempts at a very low whisper ended up being conspicuously audible across a whole room.
"Yes, disasters of incredible proportion," said Henry. "Real wrath-of-god type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and lakes boiling! Forty years of darkness, earthquakes and volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, Purugly and Yamper living together, mass hysteria! That would certainly kill me."
She was not amused. "If I didn't know what would happen to me," she said, "I wouldn't be glib about it."
"I do know what would happen to me," he insisted. "I'd be dead, gone, finis. Nada, goose-eggs. But you, of course, would fly right up to heaven."
"Maybe you shouldn't act so cocksure about everything," said Casey.
Henry shrugged. He wanted to say, "Good for you," but he didn't want to make a sour situation worse. In a way he had envied her confidence, but in truth he wrote it off to her being a more emotional, more feelings-oriented person. He didn't want to articulate it, but the fact was, he was brighter; yes, more intelligent. He believed in rules, systems, laws, patterns, things you could see and feel and hear and touch. If Arceus was part of all that, then the deuce. A higher power, a loving being, a force behind the laws of nature, fine. Let's sing about it, pray about it, feel just bursting happy about our ability to be kind to others, and go about our business.
"Sorry, Henry!" cried Casey. "Oh bother, is your nose broken?"
"I'll be fine," said Henry. His face had turned scarlet and the water was running out of his eyes. "I shouldn't even need a bandage. Really, it's alright."
Casey glanced at the poster of the bearded man. Her face fell at the odious sight. For a moment it seemed to stab their hearts with one lance from each stern eye, the face seeming to advance, huge and terrible, seeming to spring out of the surface of the fabric. Henry involuntarily flinched. These spasms were slight but habitual, about a blink's time in duration. He would often get them when looking at the image. Then the ominous feeling melted as the actual face of the figure set in their heads, black-haired, solid-jawed, full of power and mysterious calm, so vast that it filled up his whole mind's eye.
It was Bronze Tercano, and he was the Emperor. The World Chairman formally, but the Emperor in all other realms of usage; the World Chairman on official political documents, but the title of Emperor was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs: to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance relating to Bronze Tercano.
The glory days of Bronze, Emperor of the Kingdom of Logaria, had passed decades before Henry was even born. He had grown up since he was small with the Chairman in his life. In Galar one generally loved or hated Bronze. Smearing the Emperor's name was not illegal (nothing was illegal in that regard, since there were no longer any laws against slander toward government officials), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by a fine, or at least by a few months of community service. He had heard stories of criminals being executed at the Emperor's feet if they insulted him in his presence, though he was skeptical of these tales.
Henry had two Pokemon. One was a Sir'fetchd named Lancelot after the knight of the old tales, and the other was a Grookey that Casey called Twiggy, and Henry called nothing at all. The commands "come here" and "fetch me this or that" were usually enough. Lancelot was valuable in helping with Henry's smithing work, a field that Henry had learned from his father. The polishing and reforging of iron and diverse metals, the shaping of stone, and the mending of weapons and tools were Henry's greatest skills to his name.
The next moment the burning in Henry's face died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He noticed Magnolia coming from the driver's seat at the end of the hall. The old woman was one of those physical specimens that baffle physicians, that a sixty-year-old woman should possess the mental faculties of a scholar one-half her age. Through her glasses she looked at Henry, and then Casey. "Your nose has gone bloody red, Henry," she said. Magnolia took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked Rorian Ladies and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the synthetic tobacco, harmless to the lungs and throat, fell out onto the floor. With the next she was more successful.
The RV was properly named the Magnolia RV, and the main living-room was located in the back left. Magnolia went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the holographic telescreen. From the table drawer she took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a green back and a marbled cover, in which she began to write her observations. "Well, it's about time for lunch. Come on and sit down."
The three had buttered biscuits and tea. During lunch Casey talked about the Galarian legends. "It's really wonderful," she said, "how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like the ones we have now. You've noticed how there are two sets of characters? There's Guinevere and Lancelot and all those people in the center: all very courtly and nothing particularly Galarian about them. But then in the background, on the other side of Arthur, so to speak, there are all those dark people like Morgan and Mordred, who are very Galarian indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses. Merlin too, of course, is Galarian, though not hostile. Doesn't it look very like a picture of Galar as it must have been on the eve of the Logarian invasion?"
"How do you mean, Casey?" said Magnolia. "There are multiple versions of the hero that beat back the fabled darkness. The narrative with one hero is the type of tale where you get King Arthur. Sometimes there are two heroes. What do you mean on the eve of invasion?"
"You know there would be courts ruled by real old Galarian kings. One can imagine that Arthur would be a man of the old Galarian line but also an Arcean and a fully trained general with Logarian technique, trying to defend his whole society against some threat and succeeding."
"I have heard," said Henry, "that Arthur would have lived over a thousand years before the Logarian invasion."
"It depends on the timeline you accept," said Casey.
"And what about Merlin?"
"Yes! He's the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fall to pieces after Arthur's death because Merlin also died? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He's not evil, yet he's a magician. He is obviously a druid, yet he knows all about Arceus. He's 'the devil's son'; but then Arthur goes out of his way to tell you that the kind of being who fathered Merlin needn't have been bad after all. You remember, 'There dwell in the sky many kinds of wights. Some of them are good, and some work evil.'"
"It is rather puzzling. I hadn't thought of it before."
"I often wonder," said Magnolia, looking up from her writing, "whether Merlin doesn't represent the last trace of something the later tradition has quite forgotten about; something that became impossible when the only people in touch with the supernatural were either white or black, either priests or sorcerers."
"What a horrid idea," said Casey, who had noticed that Henry seemed to be preoccupied with his meal. "Anyway, Merlin happened a long time ago if he happened at all and he's safely dead and buried under the Slumbering Weald as every one of us knows."
"Buried but not dead, according to the story," corrected Magnolia. "From what you two have seen in the Weald, you ought to acknowledge that it could be possible. The two might be guarding his body."
"Ugh!" said Casey involuntarily, but Magnolia was musing aloud.
"I wonder what they will find if the Association starts digging up that place for the foundations of their planned village," she said.
"First mud and then water," said Henry. "That's why they can't really build it there. But the Chairman seems to be in for it. I wonder why. If those two show up there in the Weald again..."
"So you'd think," said Magnolia. "And if so, why should they want to come there at all? A man like Bronze Tercano is not likely to be influenced by any poetic fancy about Merlin's mantle having fallen on him!"
"Merlin's mantle indeed!" said Casey.
"Yes," said Magnolia, "it's a rum idea. I daresay some of his more mystically inclined set would like to recover the mantle well enough. Whether they'll be big enough to fill it is another matter! I don't think they'd like it if the old man himself, or any other bogies, came back to life along with it."
"Oh, it's too ridiculous," said Henry.
"Not as ridiculous as our plan to get in the League."
Magnolia then turned the telescreen on. Immediately an image appeared of Champion Leon Aurelius and the Chairman of Macro Cosmos Applied Mercantile Solutions, Rose Venport. They were on some early show with Leon taking an interview and Rose giving the questions. Rose was a solid man, with dark hair and large, humorous eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
"You know, Leon, I heard that the Association is making a new dictionary," said Rose. "Do you know how it's been getting on?"
"I've heard they're on the adjectives," said Leon. "The World Chairman let me see some of the work. It's fascinating. Bronze also said that he hoped to be the one to edit it himself, like with the other books he's gone over in the past..."
Magnolia had brightened up immediately at the mention of the dictionary. She pushed her plate aside, took up her hunk of biscuit in one delicate hand and her teacup in the other, and leaned across the table.
"They say at the laboratories that the Thirteen Edition is the definitive edition," she said. "Bronze is trying to get the language into the shape he wants. You think, I dare say, that his chief job would be inventing new words. But not a bit of it! He's destroying words, scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. He's cutting the rebellious elements of the language down to the bone."
Henry remembered that the word "free" once meant, at least properly, to be unrestrained. Now the dictionaries said that "free" meant being "clear" of something, for example, "this lawn is free of leaves." The old definition was still very much the common usage, but there was definitely a slipping toward annihilationism in the common vocabulary. Henry supposed that it was to narrow the range of thought.
"Don't you see Bronze's plans?" said Magnolia angrily. "Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. He's trying to get to that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. His rule will be complete when the language is perfect."
"That doesn't seem like something Bronze would do," said Henry. He had heard of a far-off time when the Pokemon Association was democratic, when votes mattered in global elections, and there was no Logarian Emperor. Of course, the common narrative was that there had always been a Logarian Emperor, hiding in the wild after the first Fall and then returning to power under Bronze. There were still elections, of course, but Bronze received a hundred percent of the electoral votes, if not the popular. Despite all the protestations from the World Chairman himself, sincere or not, he could do whatever he wanted. Bronze could wipe out all dissent before you could say knife. Yet he didn't. He let his enemies live, and gave them all autonomy possible as free citizens.
Magnolia leaned more against Bronze than for him. "With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all of Tercano's civilization," she said. "Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have a usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. Her mother may bid her bind her hair, for that is a natural authority; but the Emperor of the Planet shall not bid her to cut it off. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down; and not one hair of her head should be harmed."
Once Henry had seen a telescreen broadcast a few months ago where a man was delivering a venomous attack upon the doctrines of Empire and on Bronze's character, an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself (being a stable and rational citizen, Henry supposed), might be taken in by it. He was abusing Bronze's wife, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Emperor, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of the exploration of space, he was condemning Bronze's restrictions on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought. He was crying hysterically that the precepts of the Pokedex Holders and the original Association had been betrayed, and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of Bronze's own public oration.
Henry had tentatively identified this man as the Pokedex Holder Sun. He had a lean face, with a great fuzzy aureole of grey hair and a slight stubble; a clever face, and yet somehow unfortunately despicable, with a kind of corrupt silliness in the blue eyes. After Bronze's ascension to the position of Logarian Emperor the Pokedex Holders had either sided for or against him, with various degrees of neutrality in between. Sun was the renegade and backslider who once, some decades ago, had been one of the leading figures of Bronze's personal cabinet, almost on a level with Bronze himself, and then had engaged in illicit activities, had been condemned to trial by the Emperor, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.
He was the primal traitor, one of the earliest defilers of the Rorian Empire's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Empire, the most orthodox fanatics said, stemmed from Sun. Currently he was spouting his vitriol from Aether Paradise, operating his trade empire, where Bronze let him be. Some said it was out of the Emperor's kindness, pragmatism, or grief. Henry thought he was but one critic among millions. There were many who were afraid of, and even hated, Bronze Tercano. While the man was alive they could do nothing, but after his death these rebels would tear down the world. Henry reflected that during his lifetime the most powerful men in the world would simply burn the green earth black just to feel the fire's warmth.
The real rebel, Henry suspected, was Chairman Rose of Macro Cosmos. Outside of the loyal regional governments, Rose was the only one on Earth who could pose a serious threat to Bronze's current political order. He was actively disloyal and sometimes publically spat on Tercano's policies and administrative decisions. There was an accepted narrative among the senior Macro Cosmos employees that Bronze was actively bent on their destruction. Rose, Henry knew, had his own plans beneath his chesire smile.
The three of them would meet Bronze Tercano soon enough. They would shake his hand before entering the Galarian Pokemon League, which both Henry and Casey were to enter, complete their own purposes, or fail in the doing. This was what brought them into this story.
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Somewhere near Wyndon
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Outside of the shuttle, the hills were lying mangy with melting snow which reflected wet blueness from the sky. By the landing field Rose met Oleana of Macro Cosmos. They went into the levitating craft nearly arm to arm. In his company Oleana, a handsome woman, had that curious sensation that most married people know of being with someone whom (for the final but wholly mysterious reason) one could never have married but who is nevertheless more of one's own world than the person one has married in fact.
As they entered the shuttle's living quarters they met Bronze Tercano's personal bodyguard, who was a short forty-year-old named Rellus. "Why, Rose, fancy meeting you!" he cried with honest pleasure. "I was told that the Emperor was expecting your company, but not this early."
"Yes, Rellus," said Rose. "We are bringing news he will want to hear. Things are beginning to move. We must see Tercano at once. And his his wife about?"
"He's ready, though resting," said Rellus. "And both the wife and Tessa Woodhall are here. She'll keep you out of mischief, all right!" He gave a hearty sailor's laugh at this. Rose had a sudden vision of smashing in his face with a flagstone.
"Hold on," said Rellus at last. "This woman Oleana has never actually met Tercano face to face? There are certain things which you ought to know about the Emperor before you see him. He will appear to you, Miss, to be a younger man than you thought: younger than fifty. You will please understand that this is not the case. He is nearer sixty than fifty. He is a man of very great experience, who has traveled where no other human being ever traveled before and mixed in societies of which you and I have no conception."
"That is very interesting," said Oleana, though displaying no interest.
"And secondly," said Rellus, "I must ask you to remember that he is often in great pain at this time of day. Whatever decision you come to, I trust you will not say or do anything that may put an unnecessary strain upon him."
"If Tercano is not well enough to receive visitors, then we will leave," said Rose, his bold features converging into a mirthless smile.
"You must excuse me," said Rellus, "for impressing these points upon you. I am a doctor, and I am the only doctor in our company besides Miss Woodhall. I am therefore responsible for protecting him as far as I can. If you will now come with me I will show you to the living room."
Before he let them inside he radioed to the inner rooms. "They will see him," said Rellus. "Is he in much pain this morning?"
"It is not continuous," said a voice on the other end, "but it is one of his bad days."
The shuttle door opened. "Be careful," Oleana thought. "Don't get let in for anything. All these long passages and low voices will make a fool of you, if you don't look out. You'll become another of this man's female adorers." The next moment she found herself going into the craft's living room. It was light: it seemed all windows. And it was warm: a fire blazed on the hearth. And ebony and scarlet was the prevailing color. Before her eyes had taken it in she was annoyed, and in a way ashamed, to see that Rellus was bowing to a pair of women that stood in the middle of the room.
The pair could have been sisters. They were very similar on all levels except raw genetics. One was a tall, dark-haired beauty, splendid in her trappings of white fur and white slippers. Gold buttons glinted at her ears. She did not carry herself with an aristocrat's hauteur, but something in the absorbed smoothness of her features betrayed her true age of sixty. But she appeared to be a young girl, twentysomething years old. Oleana looked at her for an instant and her world was unmade. It was Moon Berlitz, the damnable wife of Bronze Tercano, Oleana thought.
Beside her he was a bold-looking woman, seeming about twenty-seven, actually sixty-six, with long hair, a white face, and slender, precise movements. She was dressed in the green robes of her special station. A narrow golden sash, the odious emblem of the Order of Bibliographers, was wound several times around the waist of her robes. Oleana had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. She knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of computations and friendship with the Emperor and heroism with a touch of machine-mindedness that she managed to carry about with her. Oleana paradoxically disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Empire, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
But this particular woman gave her the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed into the room she gave her a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into Oleana and for a moment had filled her with black terror. The idea had even crossed her mind that she might be able to kill her with a single strong flash of eye contact. That, it was true, was very unlikely. Still, she continued to feel a peculiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility, whenever that woman was anywhere near her. She identified this frightening creature as Tessa Woodhall, one of Bronze's oldest companions and friends from childhood.
"Here they are, sir," said Rellus to a shape lying on a couch.
Oleana looked, and her world was unmade again.
...
On one of the long windows of the shuttle a tame Rookidee was walking up and down. The light of the fire with its weak reflection, and the light of the sun with its stronger reflection, contended on the ceiling. But all the light in the room seemed to run towards the brown hair and the brown beard of the young man on the couch.
Of course he was not a young man: how could she have thought so? The fresh skin on his forehead and cheeks and, above all, on his hands, had suggested the idea. But no boy could have so full a beard. And no boy could be so strong. She had expected to see an invalid. Now it was manifest that the grip of those hands would be inescapable, and imagination suggested that those arms and shoulders could support the whole house. Moon at her side struck her as a little old woman, shriveled and pale, a thing you could have blown away.
The sofa was placed on a kind of dais divided from the rest of the room by a step. She had an impression of massed hangings of blue (later, she saw that it was only a screen) behind the man, so that the effect was that of a throne room. She would have called it silly if, instead of seeing it, she had been told of it by another. Through the window she saw no trees nor hills nor shapes of other houses: only the level floor of mist in the Galarian dawn, as if this man and she were perched in a tower overlooking the world.
Pain came and went in his face: sudden jabs of sickening and burning pain. But as lightning goes through the darkness and the darkness closes up again and shows no trace, so the tranquillity of his countenance swallowed up each shock of torture. How could she have thought him young? Or old either? It came over her, with a sensation of quick fear, that this face was of no age at all. And as she saw him the landscape of the room had become different, though with a difference none of the senses would identify. The light was bright, the air gentle, and all Bronze's body was bathed in bliss, but the world where he stood seemed to be packed quite full, and as if an unendurable pressure had been laid upon his shoulders. Oleana realized that the pain was coming from his legs, which seemed to have failed him.
She deduced that Rose had not wanted her to see this. This Bronze was so far from the megalomaniacal dictator of rebellion's popular culture that it nearly shattered all of her preconceptions about the order of things in the world. She could imagine nothing less like a tyrant. For the first time in her life she really tasted the word Emperor, and all its equivalent associations of power, sovereignty, shepherding, judgment, and love. She had (or so she had believed) disliked bearded faces except for old men with white hair. But that was because she had long since forgotten the Imagined Arthur of her childhood. King Arthur: for the first time in many years the bright solar blend of king and lover and magician which hangs about that name stole back upon her mind.
Of course, her defenses were not completely overtaken. There was a darkness in Bronze, she knew, in all Men, probably. It was a beast he kept chained. Ordinary men have to keep the chains strong, for if they let the beast loose then civilized society will turn upon them with fiery vengeance. As for Emperors, who is there to turn upon them? So the chains are made of straw. It is the curse of kings that they can become monsters and they invariably do.
"Thank you, Rellus," said Bronze. "Is this Miss Oleana?"
And the voice also seemed to be like sunlight and gold. Like gold not only as gold is beautiful but as it is heavy: like sunlight not only as it falls gently on Galarian walls in autumn but as it beats down on the jungle or the desert to engender life or destroy it. And now it was addressing her.
"You must forgive me for not getting up, Miss Oleana," said Bronze. "My legs are hurt."
"Would you like me to leave, sir?" said Oleana.
"No, I don't think so," said Bronze. "You may stay. Thank you."
"And now," thought Oleana, "it's coming, it's coming, it's coming now." All the most intolerable questions he might ask, all the most extravagant things he might make her do, flashed through her mind in a fatuous medley. For all power of resistance seemed to have been drained away from her and she was left without any protection. Instead, Bronze turned to Rose.
...
For the first few minutes after Bronze had begun the council, Oleana hardly took in what he was saying. It was not that her attention wandered; on the contrary, her attention was so fixed on him that it defeated itself. Every tone, every look (how could they have supposed she would think him young?), every gesture, was printing itself upon her memory; and it was not until she found that he had ceased speaking and was apparently awaiting an answer, that she realized she had taken in so little of what he had been saying.
"Little service, no doubt, can I render to one so great," said Rose to Bronze. "But I need funding for this plan."
"I was saying," said Bronze, "that you already have done me the greatest possible service. We knew that some danger was coming to Galar, perhaps one of the most dangerous attacks on the human race ever. We had an idea that Dynamaxing and Galar Particles were somehow connected with it, but we were not sure. That is why your information is so valuable. It does pose a great difficulty in overcoming it, but I am sure we will find the answer."
"But what about my plan?" said Rose.
"Rose, it cannot be done. You say that the crisis will be in a thousand years. There is no benefit to such a solution."
"A thousand years before all the energy is gone, yes, but the actual point of crisis will be far sooner, perhaps in a century. When the sons and daughters of the next generation grow old, Galar will be in chaos. The economy will be liquidated. We will regress to primitivism. I will do anything to stop it, no matter the cost. It's for a greater good."
"That troubles me," said Bronze. "I am not allowed to be too radical, Rose. I am not allowed to use dangerous remedies until dangerous diseases are really apparent. Otherwise I would become just like my enemies, breaking all the Moral Laws whenever I imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity in the remote future."
"You mean this is a moral quibble?"
"I mean nothing we need be afraid to speak of freely. I mean that, in the circumstances, your plan and my plan cannot possibly work together. From the way you talk, Rose, anyone could be lured into thinking that the danger is right on top of us. Your plan and its astronomical building costs exceed the budget of the Empire and Macro Cosmos combined for more than a century. There are better uses for that money. I could put it into building cathedrals or making hospitals or funding new colonies in the Solar System. Europa is quite nice this time of year. This will not pass as a bill. I shall ensure that."
"But it is at least worth trying," cried Rose. "Things will get worse before they get better."
"Will it?"
"Yes. I suppose so. But already I have sufficient wisdom to perceive the threat that comes from where you do not look."
Rose turned his dark eyes on Bronze, and now Oleana saw a likeness between the two, and he felt the strain between them, almost as if he saw a line of smoldering fire, drawn from eye to eye, that might suddenly burst into flame. Rose looked indeed much more like a great Emperor than Bronze did, more kingly, beautiful, stronger, not kindly but powerful; and older. She supposed that against Bronze everyone might be considered old. Yet by a sense other than sight Oleana perceived that Bronze had the greater power and the deeper wisdom, and a majesty that was veiled beneath his youthful jocundity. And he was older, far older. "How much older?" she wondered, and then she thought how odd it was that she had never thought about it before. What was Bronze? In what far time and place did he come into the world, and when would he leave it? The records said he was sixty-six years old, but that could not be possible, it seemed. And then her musings broke off, and she saw that Rose and Bronze still looked each other in the eye, as if reading the other's mind. But it was Rose who first withdrew his gaze.
"I understand your concern," said Rose. "It would not be my place to, er, interfere with your private judgment. Understand that I sincerely wanted to hear your answer in private."
"My researchers are working on a solution," said Bronze. "We wish to help you. As to your coming here, that may admit of some doubt in your own power to resolve this. For the present, I must send you away. You can come out and see us later. In the meantime, talk to your scientists and I will talk to my authorities."
"When will you be seeing them?"
"They come to me when they please." Bronze struck a little button beside his sofa which was almost immediately answered by a servant. "I think," said Bronze, "I should like my lunch now, if you please. They will give you lunch downstairs, Rose, Oleana; something more substantial than mine. But if you will sit with me while I eat and drink, I will show you some of the amenities of this shuttle."
The servant presently returned with a tray, bearing a glass, a small flagon of red wine, and a roll of bread. He set it down on a table at the Emperor's side and left the room.
"You see," said Bronze, "I live like the simple kings of old. It is a surprisingly pleasant diet." With these words he broke the bread, said a prayer, and poured himself out a glass of wine.
"I have never heard of Rose's plan," said Moon.
They talked of Rose's theories regarding a huge supercollider to generate Galar Particles a little while Bronze ate and drank, but presently he took up the plate and tipped the crumbs off onto the floor. "Now, Rose and Miss Oleana," he said, "you shall see a diversion. But you must be perfectly still. I hope you are not afraid of mice." With these words he took from his pocket a little silver whistle and blew a note on it. And Oleana sat still till the shuttle room became filled with silence like a solid thing and there was first a scratching and then a rustling and presently she saw three plump Rattata working their passage across what was to them the thick undergrowth of the carpet, nosing this way and that so that if their course had been drawn it would have resembled that of a winding river, until they were so close that she could see the twinkling of their eyes and even the palpitation of their noses.
In spite of what Bronze had warned Oleana did not really care for mice in the neighborhood of her feet and it was with an effort that she sat still. Thanks to this effort she saw Rattata for the first time as they really are not as creeping things but as dainty quadrupeds, almost, when they sat up, like tiny kangaroos, with sensitive kid-gloved forepaws and transparent ears. With quick, inaudible movements they ranged to and fro till not a crumb was left on the floor. Then he blew a second time on his whistle and with a sudden whisk of tails all three of them were racing for home and in a few seconds had disappeared behind the coal box. Bronze looked at her with laughter in his eyes ("It is impossible," thought Oleana, "to regard him as old").
"There," he said, "a very simple adjustment. Humans want crumbs removed; such Pokemon are anxious to remove them. It ought never to have been a cause of war. But you see that obedience and rule are more like a dance than a drill, especially between men and women where the roles are always changing.
"How huge we must seem to them," said Rellus.
"Size does not matter to them," said Bronze. "Even the least among their number does not fear death. For what is hugeness but mere threat?"
"Well, that was a show!" said Rose as he clapped his hands. "But we must be off. It's hard work getting through the constraints of the current market to find good scientists for hire."
"Then you may leave me now," said Bronze gently.
...
After the two had left Bronze's demeanor changed. Something tonic and strong and cheerily brutal, like a stinging sea breeze, had come over him. A sudden relaxation had produced upon him somewhat the effect of being outside the pale of the law, even of the law of charity. Bronze, calm, his body almost upright, his voice vibrating, was one of those men that produced astonishment in the physiologist. His era had many of these men, proportioned to the epoch. In this old man one was conscious of a man put to the proof. Though so near to the end of his span of years, he preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something calculated to disconcert death, even as it approached through his legs.
Celebi, the Hisuian angel of the sepulcher, would have turned back, and thought that she had mistaken the door. However Bronze seemed to be dying it was because he willed it so. There was freedom in his agony. His legs alone, of all of him, were motionless. It was there that the shadows held him fast. His feet were cold and dead, but his head and body survived with all the power of life, and seemed full of light. Bronze, at this solemn moment, resembled the king in that tale of the ancient times who was flesh above and graven stone below.
"I understand that Rose said to you, Rellus, that he had news," said Bronze. "But he said nothing that did more than systemize the information I already possessed. But I know, without a doubt, that his plan is madness. He could not do it even with my help."
"But he will act," said Moon.
"Yes, he will act," said Tess. "His amity is a mask. Rose hates you, Bronze, because he would rather rule the world than be subordinate. How he will save Galar will probably destroy it."
"Does Rose not understand that I am far more subordinate to far more powerful regents than he?" said Bronze. "The spirit of perdition has gone into his head and tempted him. As one who stands at the heights of power, I can tell him that it is not to be desired. The troubles of a ruler are legion and the rewards are few and hollow. He ought to be content."
Like lust, power disenchants the whole universe, Bronze thought. His very ambition itself and every other sensation appeared to have been mere gas and vapor, toys for children, not worth one exhortation of the will. The infinite attraction of Power sucked all other passions into itself: the rest of the world appeared blanched, insipid, useless, exsanguinated. The serpent of desire, when faced with the true dragon of responsibility, had become a declawed worm. It was idle, Bronze knew, to point out to a perverted man the horrors of his deeds, because that very lechery was the spice with which he consumed the evil. It had been long since beauty and goodness had grown too weak of a mover. So it was with the great dictator.
"Rose is planning something," said Rellus. "That's what we do know. We don't know what, or how, he will cause any real harm. What do you think he can do, lord?"
"Do not call me Lord," said Bronze. "I am His servant just as you are. As for Rose, sooner or later a broken man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world, you know. For most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic, a sort of art for art's sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most literal sense, to sup on horrors."
"He has gone that far into depravity?"
"We cannot be sure," said Moon. "I do not think so. There is, or once was, a good man in Rose. But he will never reveal his hidden designs. And we could not get them from him, save by force, which would break his mind. Neither psychic or physical interrogation will be much use. Rose is trained in certain fields of mental resistance, he has placed barriers in his mind that we cannot penetrate. If we take him publicly, the cries of adulation from his supporters will drown out our reasoning. They will litigate. We will be delayed, and Macro Cosmos will know that we have rumor of which hand holds the knife. We must wait."
"Plans within plans," said Bronze. "It is like the old days when Cypress gambled with me and lost. Everywhere we turn in Galar, Rose's power will confront us. Perhaps there is a way to probe his weaknesses, a part of our conspiracy that we have yet overlooked."
"Pokedex Holders," said Tess. "Our plan requires more co-conspirators, more machinations, more leverage against Rose. He must reveal what he intends to do with Galar. Let us not assume that children could never be of use to the Association. We all once were. A League victory in the name of Bronze and the Association by a Pokedex Holder will trounce Rose's defenses. He should be put out of reckoning. We will force his company's board to yield him up to us. Magnolia is our ally."
"But I am not sure about the boy and girl in Galar," said Bronze. "I will not bend them to my power."
"Surely they will consent," said Rellus.
"Our own plots are transient in the face of the darkness that I fear," said Moon. "That basic fear brought this meeting together. We must see the dangerous limitations of our shields that we have thought long secure. We shall be ruined if we chance upon what we do not understand."
Bronze rose. It was slow and tremblings went over his whole body, but he rose. Then a veil was lifted, and a new spring came, and he walked from his seat unbowed. Rellus marveled to see his legs filled with new vitality. Bronze took a simple prop, unadorned save for a knob of hazel wood, and rested upon it. As an old man finds the energy in himself for a final race or a dying boy the strength to rend apart steel bars, not far removed from that uttermost frontier of power was Bronze in his effort to stand upon his wounded legs, striken with cold death in a battle long ago.
"I will go to Leon," he said. "Henry Sword and Casey Shield must become my pawns. The board is set and we must stick to the pieces we have. The enemy's armies are already moving."
