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Deepwell-1
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"Bring coffee," said Ruby. He signaled with a raised hand to an aide who stood at one side near the single door to the austere rock-walled room where he had spent this wakeful night. This was the place where the Pokedex Holder took his spartan breakfast, and it was almost breakfast time, but after such a day as yesterday he did not feel hungry. He stood, stretching his muscles.
Bronze sat on a low cushion near the door, trying to suppress a yawn. Ruby had just realized that, while they talked, he and Bronze had gone through an entire night in Frostveil City.
"Forgive me, Bronze," he said. "I've kept you up all night."
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life," said Bronze, accepting the tray with coffee as it was passed in the door. He pushed a low bench in front of Ruby, placed the tray on it and sat across from the other man. Both men wore the thick furs of the mountain city, but Ruby's was a borrowed garment worn because the people of Frostveil had resented the Association red and white of his working coat.
"I must be healed before I can fight in any other battle," said Bronze, pouring the dark brew from a fat copper carafe. "We must always be moving, but pain is pain."
"Are you still struggling to walk?"
"Today's advances are hopeful," said Bronze. He drank the brew slowly but noisily. "Cobalion has made me attempt more elaborate exercises than walking. He was astonished and I was humiliated to find what things I could not do. I could not move out of a walk, I could not hold a stool out at arm's length, I could not stand on one leg without falling over."
"But what progress have you made?"
"I have found that with agonizing pains in my thighs and calves I can just lift myself to a standing position. I can go perhaps a centimeter upward in a push-up. In a few more days and a few more mealtimes, I expect to be as good as ever. But I don't plan to wait around all week while the world goes to rot."
"Cobalion thinks that you wouldn't be alive if it weren't for his healing magic."
"I'd agree with him. No other being would have saved me. Unless you stay with us, we have no Pokemon that can fight against threats from the wraithworld. Even Cobalion cannot overcome all enemies now that the enemy is throwing them at us. I would have withered into the grey wind, taking that into the everlasting. This is a great blotch in my personal reputation. My guilt has begun as a feeling of failure." He took another drink. "The good god provides many opportunities for failure in life."
"He does," said Ruby blankly.
"Is Arceus your savior yet, Ruby?"
He could detect nothing on Bronze's face, no hint of a grin or any fanaticism, however far removed. There was nothing of that sort in the eyes. The eyes were always where the soul could be seen.
"I'm as saved as saved could be," said Ruby. "At the beginning of this, I wasn't so sure about how anything actually worked, really. The things I did in the past? Stage acting. The battles in Hoenn were nothing like now. This is the real thing. I saw the devil, and realized what had been suggested to me ever since I met Celebi in Johto."
"What would that be?"
"If there is an Enemy, there is a god. I wagered that Arceus was that diety and it was better to believe in Him than not."
"The next step would be to determine if a faith based on such a wager would be admissible," said Bronze. "But drat and bother. Whoever told me Arceus can only use one kind of convert? War gives some advantages to Arceanism in ways that most wouldn't expect. We may expect a good deal of cruelty and unchastity. But we see thousands turning in this tribulation to Arceus, while tens of thousands who do not go so far as that will nevertheless have their attention diverted from themselves to values and causes which they believe to be higher than the self."
"And I one of those people?"
"Maybe. I know that Arceus disapproves of many of these 'higher' causes. But here He is merciful. He often makes prizes of humans who have given their lives for causes He thinks bad on the ground that those people thought them good and were following the best they knew. Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all an Arcean, prepared." How much better for the Enemy if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as he has trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence. And how disastrous for the Enemy is the continual remembrance of death that war enforces. One of his best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a male can believe that he will live forever!"
"So this is all good?" said Ruby, glancing a little suspiciously at the boy's brown face. "We've all seen some things that are going to give us nightmares in the years to come. How can you say these things? What about Jake and your parents? Don't you grieve for them?"
"It is plain that Arceus wants us to suffer, and suffer we will," said Bronze. "And I'd have hoped you figured out by now that I drown my feelings in words. Better that I don't think too much about what keeps me up at night. Cobalion has been training my mind. He helps me sleep."
"What about Jake? I haven't heard you mention anything more about him.
A sudden jab of red-hot memory pierced Bronze and all his speculations vanished like an ant in the mouth of a flash flood. He lowered his voice to keep it from breaking. He gripped the coffee cup and felt that he was drunk or mildly concussed. With a final glance over his shoulders to make sure that neither Tess nor Cobalion was listening, he spoke.
"If it's grief then it feels like terror. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me, Tess and Cobalion and any people I can find. I dread the moments when I'm all alone. There are moments, of courst when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind everything so much, not so very much, after all. War veteran get over these things. Why do I do so badly? One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case.
"On the nightly rebound one passes into tears and pathos, fits of infantile despair. I almost prefer the moments of demonic agony. These are at least clean and honest in what I am to hate. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it? That disgusts me. And even while I'm doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent my troubles, and I hate myself for it. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I replace myself with a plastic doll to be picked apart and cried over. Thank God the memory of Tess is too strong to let me get away with it in the day.
"And no one ever told me about the laziness of all of it. Except for my efforts for survival, where everything works as usual, I loathe the slightest effort. Even shaving and eating are too much. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions, something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he'd rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It's easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.
"Meanwhile, where is Arceus? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be, or so it feels, welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?
"I have seen more angels than most men have heard of. Why do I doubt? I tried to put some of these thoughts to Cobalion earlier. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Arceus the Son: "Why hast thou forsaken me?" I know. Does that make it easier to understand?
"So the real danger isn't that I will cease to believe in Arceus. I was never in much danger of that. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'"
"Why don't you question the entire concept itself?" said Ruby. "What reason have you, except your own desperate wishes, to believe that Arceus is, by any standard you can conceive, 'good'? Doesn't all the evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have you to set against it?"
"Because Cypress said that hatred might be no more repugnant for Arceus than goodness," said Bronze, "and because Cypress lies, I must discount the possibility of a Cosmic Sadist. But sometimes I must wonder if God can forgive God. I set what He did in the Temple of Hisui against the Evil God. But how if the Son were mistaken? Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the Mystri Stage. The vile practical joke had succeeded."
"Is it rational to believe in a bad God?" said Ruby, finishing the last of his drink. "Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?"
"I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic," said Bronze. He pushed the carafe away on the table to make room for his elbows. "When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is an archetype. It links Arceus with all the wise old kings in the myth-cycles, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can't fathom. It preserves mystery and therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn't be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up there was simply the picture of a man like Cypress. Now a being like Cypress, however magnified, couldn't invent or create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But he'd never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a new universe? He couldn't make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend.
"Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme depravity hypothesis? I'll have to ask Cobalion if there's a name for it in another universe. You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing: the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact, our worst fears are true, all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It's only our depravity that makes them look black to us.
"And so what? This, for all practical purposes, throws Arceus off the slate. The word good, applied to Him, becomes meaningless: like barbarian syllables. We have no motive for obeying Him. Not even fear. We indeed have His threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from His point of view 'good,' telling lies may be 'good' too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what He calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us, or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles, what is the point of trying to think either about Arceus or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.
"I don't think any of them, Lily, Robert, or Jake are dead. I think I'll see them again if I live. I will definitely see them again if I don't. That's why I don't talk about them as if they should be blubbered about. It's what my parents, and Jake, would probably prefer. I say probably because I know nothing about how they are being treated. Being without Jake is like growing several inches overnight. Clumsy and disorienting, wrenching and confusing, if not very painful. I say a quandary to the air and Tess and Cobalion throw it back at me dead. I don't get the answer I expected or needed. My entire mental locomotion is thrown off. It's impossible to get used to. Jake isn't here anymore to talk. The starboard engine is gone, and I, the port engine, must somehow go along till I reach harbor.
"It never ends, no matter how much I pray, no matter how many false hopes and sudden remissions, no amount of Cobalion's spells. Grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. I don't know what exactly to look for or how I'll know when it happens. It gives this life a permanently provisional feeling. One Gym at a time. It doesn't seem worth starting or stopping anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I worry too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there feels to be nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. What should I be doing? If there's something new that needs to be done, and I don't know. I'd manage to do it if I knew, but I can't tell.
"Who can tell a man what lies in the time after he is dead? I know that there is nothing better for a man to do but enjoy his work and love God. But that shall not be for me. Or rather, till the journey ends. How can I know when all is done? How can I assume a harbor? A lee shore, more likely, a black night, a deafening gale, breakers ahead, and any lights shown from the land probably being waved by wreckers. Such was Jake's landfall. Such was my parent's. Such will be mine. I say their landfills, not their arrivals. We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least."
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Frostveil Gym
One day later
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Bronze had been brought into a room that gave him nothing to go on. After being brought through a flightless tunnel in the Gym's under-mountain passages, he had been left alone. He was sitting on a padded platform, a few feet off the ground. The room he was in was small, with a single door on one wall and a slatted vent overhead. The air coming through the vent was cold, and he shivered instinctively.
The only other thing in the room was a small screen next to the door connected to a speaker. He approached it and bent down to look at it closely. The screen was dark, displaying a slowly spinning red circle and Poke Ball: the Association seal, with a glowing red point at its center. As he drew closer, the red point pulsed. A voice crackled through with an eerie tinniness.
"Bronze Tercano, we are going to play a game. I am the Gym Leader, Bronze. The Gym Leader. I know everything there is to know about you, Bronze. I know where you were born. I know where you grew up. I know about your mother and father, and your friends, and everything. I know how many breaths you've taken in your life. I know how many times you've blinked."
"Why do you waste my time by telling me all this nonsense?"
The voice laughed. "Because I know you think this is some righteous mission you are on. To cleanse the world of evil. Jonathan Rowell Cypress, believed that, too, but you and him and all of you are flawed. You are not pure. You are not righteous. Yours is not the voice that should decide the fate of the world."
"Of course, I have made and will continue to make mistakes," said Bronze. "But I serve the one who makes no mistakes, the one who devises infallibility. If He will not help me than I am in the dark."
"You are waging an ideological war based on a dubious claim to a kingdom passed down by a hereditary succession with questionable legitimacy, a kingdom that committed terrible atrocities and rightfully collapsed. You have been told several times that you are misguided, that your path is not founded in reason but in hate and ignorance. All this, and still you push forward. You have moved past the point of naivete, Bronze Tercano. You have no moral footing. You are dangerous."
The speaker went mute, and on the screen the rotating icon disappeared. Next to him, he heard the lock on the door click. Bronze looked at it for a moment, and then slowly opened the door and stepped outside.
He was standing in a long, dark industrial hallway, lit by dim incandescents hanging from the walls. He could see one end of the hall near him: a panel of lights and switches behind a steel grate. At the other end he could see a bend in the hallway and a light, so he began walking towards it. From somewhere deep beneath him, he could feel something humming. He recognized that this hallway was eternally sundered from Tess, from eternity. He was forgotten by all but the voice. Why was this challenge quite different than all the others?
Bronze exited the hallway into a tall, dark, narrow chamber with pipes running up its entire length. At the end of the chamber he could see an elevator. An overpowering foeter of rotting flesh made him gag. He took a step forward, and as he did lights opened up overhead, and he saw that the walls of the room were lined with tall cylindrical tanks full of a brackish green fluid. Inside them he saw shapes, humanoid shapes, large and small, some floating frozen in the throes of agony and others hanging limp by wires running into their skulls. He followed the tanks up, and realized that there were hundreds, if not thousands of tanks stretching up towards a ceiling he could not see.
The high iron of terror filled him. Charizard and Magnezone were ready and his dagger was drawn. "Who dares defile the holy mountain of Athras with sorcery?" he cried in a cold voice.
"I brought you here, Bronze, because it is time for your journey to end. I am graced with perfect reasoning, perfect awareness, and perfect understanding. The All-Seeing Eye has judged your intentions and found you lacking. For this, and for your crimes, the punishment must be death."
"If anyone is accusing me of crimes, let them be yielded up!"
Suddenly the room was full of a loud buzzing, and from ports in the walls came drones, each armed with a gun trained on his Pokemon. A blistering ray of light scorched the air near them, and he saw the charred wreck of four robots hang in the air for a moment before collapsing into dust. The room around them hummed. Magnezone's lightning arced across the room towards another drone cloud, which caught it in the chest and burst into fire.
Charizard whipped around, and in its tail's wake followed a dazzling trail of blue fire in six concentric rings, and with another flick of its tail they danced into the air and out towards the drones. The drones caught in the path of the flames burst into pieces with shimmering explosions of sparks, and those too close to the explosions destabilized and fell. More gunshots came across the room, and Magenezone turned around towards them. A full-length glittering shield materialized in front of it, and Bronze scurried behind a glass cylinder as more bullets wore down the Reflect shield's integrity.
"Enough. Enough. Enough." the voice said, echoing throughout the shaft. "I have had enough. No more tricks. No more drones. No more."
Bronze heard the room spooling down. The screaming of gunshots stopped. The fluid tanks hissed and went down into the floor. Wall ports re-opened and the drones flew away, following their migratory programming. The elevator doors opened and Bronze saw that he was obliged to enter. He passed through the forest of tanks and into the elevator, which began descending by itself. Tinny elevator music began playing overhead.
The elevator stopped and opened up onto a platform stretched across a massive shaft that stretched upwards as far as he could see. On a wall near him were the words DEEPWELL-1 in white, and all around the concrete walls were tubes and lights, hoses and switches, flashing and writhing and all connected down to a smooth cylindrical machine in the center of the platform. On its side was another Association monitor. The sound that Bronze had thought was industrial machinery humming now sounded more like a beating heart.
...
Part of the steel exterior of the cylinder opened and out came a man. He wore slacks, and had recently been wearing a jacket. His white shirt was stained with blood on the chest and sleeves, and dark lines ran down his face. Something was lying next to him, something wrapped in the man's piled jacket that Bronze couldn't quite make out. He took a step towards this man, but the man didn't move.
"Are you the Gym Leader?" he said.
"I am," said the man. "My name is Aaron."
"Good to meet you, Aaron," said Bronze, feeling an angry, clammy chill on his neck. He had the distinct and unsettling sensation of his entire being, heart, body, blood, and nerves, being inspected by something considerably larger than he was. "But if you do not explain yourself and your conduct, I will have to detain you and take your badge."
"No, no, no," said Aaron. Bronze wondered how the man was so drowsy. "Everything you saw was my Zoroark's illusion. I could have made you see the open sky if I wished. The drones were harmless. Now you understand what this Gym is. I'll scare you so much that you won't be able to fight. I've gotten hundreds of challengers and only a few make it through. Hardly anyone gets through me, and I wanted to give you the worst of it."
"For what reason?"
"You are supposed to be the emperor, after all. There lie two Gym Leaders before you. Myself, and B. After Arvin died in Flouruma and we heard from the Chairman that you were heading to Frostveil from there, I thought you were responsible. But I changed my mind."
Aaron wiped some of the blood off his shirt. "What did you have to consider?" said Bronze.
"I heard that you wanted to gain support to become the Emperor. At first, I thought you were merely power-hungry. The Rorians want the king to return, but Logaria fell for a reason. Yet then I learned how you fought, what you did. Your resolve is every bit as strong as Cypress's, maybe stronger, and here you are, standing exactly where he stood, making those same mistakes."
"You speak of things beyond your understanding," said Bronze. An unwanted pride had awakened in him and it seemed amplified by the evil in the room. "You cannot know the things you speak of. I am an heir of Silmathrim's kin, son of Tar-Castamir, who was of the line of Tar-Elrosi. I am not like my evil forebearers. They betrayed Arceus for the power that Djinn-worship could give them. They wished for a golden throne in Deep Heaven and everlasting life."
"The ears of the Gym Leaders in Roria are never idle," said Aaron. "If you are not worthy of the kingship, your path will end with me. And I will make it so. Oh, you will rule justly, at first. No doubt Roria will prosper. But then you will scorn the advice of your friends, thinking of how much you could accomplish without them holding you bound. The chains that hold you back are chaff. Then comes the night."
"I am scion to Logaria," said Bronze, crying out to rebuke the thick air of the monstrous chamber as much as the words of Aaron. "Gods walk beside me. The Lord of Light leads me on sure footing. I am Named."
"Not for long." The cylinder lit up, and in the dim light of the shaft the red lights danced against "I'm going to stop you here, Bronze Tercano, but not because I hate you, or because I'm afraid you'll usurp the Association. It needs to be changed, but not by you. I'm going to beat you because I'm afraid that your will now is too strong to be stopped. I'm going to beat you because if you beat me, you are going to be standing one step further to destruction, and you will be even stronger."
"How can you know these things?"
"The All-Seeing-Eye is always open," said Aaron. "You've probably guessed that I'm a psychic. So were my parents. I had been fated to die as a sickly child to an uncaring god, but they saved me. They snipped my spinal cord in a certain way and gave me new sight through the All-Seeing Eye. They gave me a new life. Ever since then, I've been watching."
"No man can see the future," said Bronze.
"It's not like I can see them," said Aaron. "More like hearing them. What I see is an unstoppable force meeting and unmovable object. Do you know the answer to that paradox? Which force wins?"
"A universe with an unstoppable force can't have an unmovable object," said Bronze, seeing that a thin mist was rising from the shaft's abyss. "And the same goes the other way. So whatever thing exists first wins. I suppose you'll say that you're older than me?"
"Right. Conviction and revenge have led you here. There isn't anything left to say, Bronze Tercano. Either your convictions will be broken today, or mine will, and one of us will fail."
Bronze nodded. "Let's finish this."
...
He was thrown backward into the ether. Bronze crashed into dirt and heard another object do the same. When he stood up he saw that they were standing in what might have once been a field of grass, but the vegetation had long since died off. In fact, he realized with morbid amazement, that it didn't seem like there was anything alive at all except for him and one of Aaron's Bisharps. The sky was overcast and there was a storm rolling by a distance away, but they heard no birds, no insects, and nothing man-made.
The swords on the Bisharp's hands flashed, and with a dull roar the creature tore across the plain towards where Bronze and Electavire stood. His Pokemon jumped backwards, knocking the Bisharp away with its crisscrossed tails, sending a shower of sparks cascading across the ground. Bisharp pulled up and spinning blades flew out from its arms and legs, forcing Electavire to bury itself in the ground to avoid them. It swung its fist, the blow barely missing the Bisharp as it danced away from the end of the outflung arm.
Electavire swung low, another blow just narrowly missing the Bisharp's left thigh, and its momentum carried it forward slightly. Off balance, it caught a glimpse of the flaming red steel falling towards it and hit the ground, rolling to dodge the attack as Bisharp buried its arm into the ground. With no shortage of effort, Bisharp lifted its blades again and brought it down again, and again, and again, each time forcing Electavire to scramble backward with incredible deftness. Soon Bronze found an opening, and Electavire quickly scrambled to its feet. Standing and rearing back in the moment before Bisharp brought its arm back around, it loosed a blast of thunder.
The air grew tight suddenly, and there was a low, dull sound that seemed to pull all other noise out with it. A moment later there was a bang, and the blast had buried itself in the field, leaving a blackened crater that sent jagged lines through the dirt around it. Bisharp looked down at its arm and saw golden blood: the blow had nicked it as the thunder passed. It turned back towards Electavire, who was also staring at Bisharp's arm. Without hesitating, it pulled its right sword-arm to the left and a keen shine of dark energy leapt from the edge of the blade, billowing around like a curtain drawn over Electavire's body. It leapt and rolled to the side and avoided it, but Bisharp was upon it again, drawing up for a final blow. In desperation, Elecavire threw out a hand to stop the blade from falling on it.
And then the Logarian dagger was back, tiny in Electavire's huge hand, catching the glowing blade as it crashed down onto it. The ancient blade's spells held back the blow. Bisharp, surprised, hesitated in drawing back again. Electavire's pushed up with both hands, knocking Bisharp backwards and giving it the opportunity to swing the razor end of the small blade, charged with arcs of lightning, around at its enemy from the side. Bisharp ducked, and then caught the next pass with its arms, sending sparks cascading across the ground.
But it was too late. Already the ground was rent and pitted with craters. Bisharp tried to roll away, got caught in a hole. As it righted itself hastily it turned to block Electavire and heard the sound of a crashing locomotive as the fist and blade soared towards it. Bisharp brought its arm down towards it, and on the moment of impact the shining steel glistened and then shattered. The blow caught Bisharp in the chest and threw it across the field. The broken fragments of the sword-arm fell and scattered over the ground.
Golden blood streamed out of Bisharp's body in thin rivulets. It croaked and slumped against the ground before disappearing in a puff of ozone. Bronze crouched down on one knee, returned his tired Electavire for Charizard, and looked up at the sky. "It's over. Now that you're done I can move on."
"When I am done, you will," said the voice of Aaron, coming from a drone that buzzed by overhead, its motor the only sound to pierce the silence except for a light wind. "But I have more Pokemon."
Then there was a flash of light on the horizon. He and Charizard both stopped to look, and in the far north a towering mushroom cloud was forming, a fireball that stretched into the heavens. They watched it rise and rise, and then saw with horror an approaching wall of heat and death. Charizard two steps and then leapt into the sky with Bronze riding, and they were gone again.
...
They did not land immediately. As Bronze clung to Charizard for dear life, he saw images of places as they passed. He saw a dark facility where three girls watched them with blind eyes as he came in and out of their existence. He saw a sky with seven moons and an arched golden gateway. He saw an Association site covered in snow, one he did not know, with a multitude of doctors pouring out of it. He heard a piercing screech, then a blast of blue light, and then the site was gone.
When he opened his eyes, Bronze was again in the Aredian desert. The night's moon, an oblate silver coin, hung well above the eastern horizon. Beneath it, the jagged cliffs of the Frostveil Mountains shone like parched icing through a dust haze. To his left, the lights of Aredia City glowed in the haze, yellow, blue, white. Wind came across his face. But it was not true desert wind, for it carried some of the water richness of the coastlands. He remembered that this was an illusion, and he needed to be on his guard.
Suddenly Charizard's flight stopped with a jolt, and Bronze was in a tumbling storm of white talons and blazing wings. A pointed stone the size of a hovercar had struck Charizard on the neck. The impact point erupted into ichor and dust and the creature howled and roared. Stone Edge, thought Bronze as he sheathed his blade, worried he would lose it.
They crashed into a divot of tortured stone, one way of the gorge going up the cliffs and the other looking out on the open flat. Crescent dune tracks on the desert side spread shadow ripples toward the horizon and, running through them as a level line stretching into the distance, came an elongated mount-in-motion, a cresting of sand. It reminded Bronze of the way a big fish disturbed the water when swimming just under the surface, the way that Steelix had distrupted the desert earth.
While his attention was out looking at the erg, a Krookodile erupted from a billow of dust and sand to place its porcelain teeth around Charizard's wounded neck. They went down in a whirlpool of sand flecks and bursts of howls. A second later the dust began to settle and Krookodile's outline was visible above the wreck of Charizard. Bronze returned the fallen Pokemon, sent out Magnezone, swung up on its body, and gunned for the hills with Krookodile running up the dusty gulch behind.
Krookodile was fast but Bronze had a lead of a few seconds. It would have to be enough. He heard the creature running behind him, clambering up rock and gravel, almost near enough for him to make out heavy breathing. The not-dry-enough wind was in his face and he felt Magnezone exerting a mild electromagnetic field to keep him from flying off and into Krookodile's jaws. It was groaning in a horrid, foul agony. As Magnezone floated higher and higher the sound behind and below Bronz got less and less and the cliffs came nearer and nearer.
He stopped on a ledge and saw the plume of dust trailing Krookodile gaining with alarming speed. Presumably, Aaron's Pokemon knew the illusion, and that had to count for its endurance. His ears searched and found only sounds he could expect; a tiny spill of sand, an insect brrr, the patter of a small running creature. He crouched in learned Aredian stance and waited with Steelix's capture device in hand.
Krookodile came closer, nearly soundless. A dust devil had gathered in its wake and was moving out to the sand flat far below. When Bronze saw a glimpse of its red flesh moving up the slope, he made his move. Before Krookodile could come within leaping range, its eyes bulged and retracted, hissing with confusion. Above it the titanic Steelix was barreling straight down the cliff. A gigantic bubble of carbon dioxide was forming deep in its open throat, heaving outward in an enormous "blow" with a dust whirlpool at its center.
Krookodile felt the blast it, felt its golden blood and the dust whirlpool engulf it, dragging it down into cool darkness. For a moment, the sensation of coolness and moisture out of the sun's light was a blessed relief.
...
He heard a bellow of static and Aaron's scream of fury. Then he was in a tunnel devoid of light or sound. He heard the whipsnap of Steelix's body moving in the dark, crashing into walls he could not see. Magnezone got an electric light going and he saw what was about him. The clanging echoes, the dead air, the very smell of the place, all confirmed his suspicions that this was a submarine cave. The floor was made of small pebbles and the middle was a luminescent pool that smelt of rot. The domed cave had walls with black tunnels like a honeycomb: wherever Magnezone's light did not reach, the darkness concealed many portals from where enemies could come.
But no attack came. Steelix's echoes stopped as it slithered back to the cave through the boreholes. Although the air was not very good Bronze supposed that his prison must be supplied with air from somewhere, if the illusion followed any natural laws at all; but whether from any aperture that he could possibly reach was another matter. He and his Pokemon began to explore the tunnels. At first it seemed hopeless, but the conviction that caves may lead you anywhere dies hard. Very cautiously with Magenzone he took a few steps down one of the gaps like anthills. His right foot touched something sharp. He whistled with the pain and went on even more cautiously. Then he found a vertical wall of rock, smooth as glass and higher than he could see. He turned to his right and found another tunnel that went in the direction that he had come.
Almost at once again he stubbed his toe. After nursing it for a moment, feeling the shiver of his injuries returning now that his adrenaline was diluting, he went down on hands and knees. He seemed to be among a tunnel filled with boulders, but getting through the rocky ruin ahead was practicable. For ten minutes or so he made fairly good going, pretty steeply upward, sometimes on slippery shingle, sometimes over the tops of the big stones. Even in the strongest of Magnezone's lights he could not see the end of the upward passage. There were many other branching tunnels, but Steelix was right behind him to mark the way back with its body. He hoped he was not merely climbing up toward a roof.
This slow uphill trek through almost pitch-darkness lasted so long that he began to fear he was going around in a circle, or that he had blundered into some gallery which ran on forever in the illusion. Why indeed did he think that Aaron could not control the geography? It was possible, if not horrible probable, that he was supposed to be trapped here to die of thirst and hunger, while in the real world he would have been ambling in the same path endlessly, all while Aaron commanded his Zoroark to pull on Bronze's marionette strings.
By a curious confusion of mind he found it impossible not to imagine that the slope he walked on was not merely dark, but black in its own right, as if with soot. He felt that his feet and hands must be blackened by touching it. Whenever he pictured himself arriving at any light, he also pictured that light revealing a world of soot all around him. And then a terrifying thought occurred to him: if he died in the illusion, would he die in the Seen World? If not, what tortures could be reserved for him here? He pictured, accompanied by a feeling like a snake was coiling around his ribs, the way behind him closing, his Pokemon suddenly separated from him by walls of regenerating stone, and him suffocated or driven insane in a little compartment in the earth.
This nearly defeated him, but he found himself imagining why he presumed this illusion was made by a Zoroark. He knew because Aaron had told him. From what he knew about Zoroark, it would have to be close to create such a good mirage, not immediately beside him, but within a quarter-mile at the most. But if he began to attack blindly it would only attack him from the very walls of the cave itself. There was not yet any indication of where it was or how he could dispatch it.
The starvation for natural light became very painful. He found himself thinking about light as a hungry man thinks about food, picturing summer hillsides with milky clouds racing over them in blue skies or quiet circles of lamplight on tables, pleasantly littered with books and pipes. Along with his fear of falling he added claustrophobia. One time he became so desperate ordered Magenzone's light to be turned off. The tunnel was relatively accommodating and the darkness enforced its lack of perception. While in this fugue, he did many things during his climb that, to an outside observer, would have seemed at times unbelievably reckless or unnecessarily cautious.
Eventually he reached the top. The roof was low enough for him to touch with his hands outstretched, but the cave was very broad indeed. There was a pool of water that went into a stream that continued on into another tunnel. In that featureless place it was some sort of company.
It was shortly after this that he began to be worried by the noises. The last faint booming of the echoes in the little hole whence he had set out so many hours ago had now died away and the predominant sound was the gentle tinkling of the stream. But he now began to think that he heard other noises mixed with it. Sometimes it would be a dull plump as if something had slipped into one of the pools behind him: sometimes, more mysteriously, a dry rattling sound as if metal were being dragged over the stones.
At first he put it down to imagination. Then he stopped once or twice to listen and heard nothing, but each time when he went on it began again. At last, stopping once more, he heard it quite unmistakably. Could it be that the Zoroark had been hunting him and was getting closer and more audible? But that seemed improbable, for he thought its whole plan had been to drive him to insanity. It was not so easy to dispose of the other possibility: that these caverns might have been designed to have malevolent inhabitants. Then it occurred to him that if some creature were following him up the stream it might be well for him to leave its banks and wait till the creature had gone past. But if it were hunting him it would presumably hunt by scent or following his light; and in any case he would not risk losing the stream. In the end he went on.
Soon he saw a light ahead. His eyes had been mocked so often before that he would not at first believe it. He shut them while he counted a hundred and looked again. He turned around and sat down for several minutes, praying that it might not be a delusion, and looked again.
"Well," he thought, "if it is a delusion, it's a pretty stubborn one." A very dim, tiny, quivering luminosity, slightly red, was before him. It was too weak to illuminate anything else and in that evil world he could not tell whether it was five feet or five miles away. He set out at once, with beating heart. Thank Deep Heaven, the stream appeared to be leading him towards it.
He was coming toward a kind of funnel. The stream fell sharply at its end and a flickering red light was visible on the stone wall in his vision. Behind him he saw a sight that almost made him run. First from the blackness what looked like seven or eight spots of light, irregularly grouped like a constellation. Then a tubular mass which reflected the red glow as if it were polished. His heart gave a great leap as the dotted lights became the many teeth of a shell-helmeted head and the mass that followed it was revealed as a large roughly cylindrical body. Horrible things followed; more bodies, and presently, when he thought the whole body was in sight, a second body came following it and after that a third. The thing he could see was in three parts, united only by a kind of wasp's waist structure, three parts that did not seem to be truly aligned and made it look as if it had been trodden on: a huge, long, quivering monster, standing just behind him so that the horrible shadow of its segments danced in enormous and united menace on the ceiling of rock behind it.
Steelix came into the light and the terror stopped. Something in his brain told Bronze that the Zoroark was trying to frighten him. It had made this great earth crawler be preceded by thoughts so evil that it could have come straight out of the Enemy's will. The knowledge that his thoughts could be thus managed from without did not awake terror but a combination of disgust and rage. How demented was his enemy to use such techniques? When he found Aaron he would rip him apart. If only Zoroark would show itself!
"You think I'm going to stand for this?" he cried. "Get out of my brain. It isn't yours, I tell you! Get out of it."
Images and words came to him in chaotic, disjointed fashion. Down the river to the light, he knew, was a long shaft open to a subterranean fire-pit on one side and a terrible place where clouds of steam went up forever and ever. He felt a dark wind blowing from Heaven knew where, filled with dust that covered his face. A familiar presence had descended into the cave complex, not bound by it, but still firmly in realspace: perhaps that was why he felt it in the solid earth beneath him and not in any place that corresponded to the artificial geography.
"I am sorry I did not come sooner," Cobalion thought to him. "It is on your right, by the entrance of the tunnel. When you are out of the illusion, you will have only seconds to disrupt it permanently. Three, two, one..."
Once the countdown was over he had Steelix shoot a torrent of sparkling light straight at where Cobalion had said, a place where the shadows weighed heavy and from which his thoughts tried to bend away. There was a wild scream, and a spasm in the darkness now illuminated. A cloudy form struggled and withered as its skin was scorched, before falling into crimson ribbons.
...
Then he found himself out of the river and back in the command shaft. The listless body of a Zoroark lay on the walkway. Sputtering and coughing he saw the central cylinder, sitting on a plinth made of metal grating. Steelix cast the tip of its tail into the machine's control panel, piercing it and coming out the other side. Inside a man yelled for him to stop.
Bronze grabbed underneath Steelix's tail and directed it, as sirens began to blare and red lights flashed all around him. He heard something like rushing water, and his arms and legs bulged from the effort. With one great heave, he and Steelix hefted the tail tip upwards and the steel exterior of the cylinder slid away, useless and dented. Using both hands, he pushed the tail further up, and the sheath fell off the top of the cylinder and onto the ground.
In its place was a glass tank covered in small electrical panels and blinking lights. Through the glass he could see something floating in the liquid within, something shriveled. It was Aaron, but bloated and writhing, wearing a diving singlet. Some arcane tattoo had been printed on his forehead. Aaron's oxygen mask was attached by wires and hoses to the machines encompassing him, and as soon as the steel exterior had come loose his eyes opened and cleared. He looked at Bronze and swam over quickly, pounding on the glass for him to stop.
Bronze grabbed the Logarian dagger and slammed it into the glass, then again, and again. On the fourth effort, the glass cracked and splintered, and the brackish yellow fluid within rushed out onto the ground. All that remained was Aaron, gasping on the ground and fumbling with his oxygen mask. Bronz tore the glass back with his bare hands, until nothing separated them.
"Hold on!" cried Aaron. "You've won! Now get away from the..."
Blind with rage, Bronze cast the knife aside, reached through the opening, and grasped Aaron by the neck. He pulled Aaron toward him so that the man's head was through the plastiglass and the rest of the body was still flailing in the tank. Bronze, my legs," he mumbled through clenched teeth, "I can't feel my legs. I can't feel my legs goddammit, I can't feel them."
"You think you can play with me like that?" Bronze screamed. "I ought to kill you!"
"Don't you know what you're saying?" said Aaron sharply, suddenly lucid. "You've beat my Pokemon and destroyed my focus chamber. I won't be able to take in challengers until I get it repaired. Your skill is proven. I did everything to make you break, and now you would kill me. But if you do, you'll never be able to win, never be able to become Emperor. The Association will hunt you till you die, and I will be right in thinking you were no king."
Bronze dropped the man's neck and stumbled backward. Cobalion was there for him to fall into. Lying stunned for a while beside the god, he hardly noticed Aaron cleaning away the glass and reattaching severed tubes. Aaron came over with a badge in hand.
"Will you give it to him?" said Cobalion.
"Yes, thanks to you, I assume," said Aaron.
"I helped," said Cobalion, "but only because the Lord does not think highly of you and would not have Bronze be defeated. Your powers could be better used than this feeble trickery..."
Cobalion kept speaking but Bronze heard little of it. The river tunnel was covering his eyes and he was riding it, feeling the slippery clay under him. He thought that even if he escaped being battered to death against the walls of the channel he would presently plunge along with the stream into the pit of fire. But the channel must have been very straight and the current was less violent than he had supposed. At all events he never touched the sides. He lay helpless, in the end, rushing forward through echoing darkness. It lasted a long time.