Pokemon Brick Bronze: Return of the Shadow

by 2b2tEternalLegend

After two thousand years, the Dark Lord has escaped his prison, amassing evil forces to destroy the world. His parents kidnapped, Bronze Tercano sets out on a journey to defeat Team Eclipse, a sinister organization with demonic backing. Only Bronze, his friends, and the Pokedex Holders can stop this threat by applying age-old wisdom to a modern world dominated by science. (IN-DEV)

34. Battle For Earth: Stave III

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Stave III:

The Distortion World

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Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement, there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to recreate the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

Never mind. We have reached that point, the one where the Battle of Earth took on a life of its own, and all I can do now is point here and there and hope you can bring your own order out of the general chaos.

...

At first Jake had no idea what he was seeing. There had been no warning to prelude the fleet's sudden ascent into the dark whirlpool plagued with horrors, except for the hideous clang-and-yowl of an alarm that always set off during sharp climbs or falls. For a moment there was only a brief sheen of darkness that totally obscured the frigate's windows, and then they emerged into the Distortion World.

A blast of icy cold cut across the cabin, a cold which carried a stench of death and decay. Retching, Jake clenched his fist around his pulsesword as the demonic wind threatened to make him vomit. The stench was so abominable that it would have made him collapse had not the pungent scent of Terrakion and Virizion's invisible flesh saved him as he pressed his face against the plaz window, breathing the strangeness of the place. He saw flicker-images of bright wings strike painfully against invisible wings of darkness beating at them. The angels were crying out in anguish, their clear tones in the whirling of the tempest.

They've come to save me, he thought. But then another voice spoke that was neither wholly Jake nor wholly demon. It seemed to come from another power altogether. Or be rid of me.

Suddenly the windows unfogged and his eyes could grasp something solid again. Scummy yellow light beamed through the porthole window from a sun that looked to be drenched in acid. The horizon was darkest purple. They were flying above a flat plain of what appeared to be solidified lava, although it had a faint luminosity alien to lava. The sky was covered with a flickering pink cloud. The air was acrid and seeped through the ship's filters, making him and the other Eclipse commandos cough. The cold was intense and he found himself perspiring as his uniform emitted emergency heat like a furnace.

"Where are we?" he asked Harry.

The deadish admin was looking out over the devastated landscape. A shudder went through Jake's frame when the man's eyes turned to him. There was nothing there but a blurring of grey and milky white, as if his eyes had been cut into canyons by half a dozen massive cataracts. He shared the stiff, wanting movements of his two masters, but without even the remnant vitality that kept the bodies of Emrett and Cypress able to terrify. It was obvious from these signs that Harry of the Eclipse Alliance was as objective as could be.

Harry's words trembled with stutters, like an ancient robot that has developed a mountain of errors. "We're in a space between the rest of the Distortion World and our own universe, though it is not fully formed."

"Will it be?"

"It is one of the nexuses upholding Beulah that we have been sent to destroy. Of course, our enemies will do everything in their power to keep this realm from becoming real."

Jake nodded, moved further back into the cabin. He saw the last remnants of the fleet emerging from a vortex that lay in their backtrail, a churning vertical mass that was chewing up the fabric of the sky around its borders. But the angle outside the window was sharp enough for him to see that it was not darkness that filled the gateway's center but light. Through it was a skyward view of the stadium, a white oval dotted with plumes of smoke from dozens of impacting lasers and fast-flyers, the burning arena green, and the debris-strewn lawn and walkways surrounding the superstructure. Association ships were drifting through the vortex's eye of vision like heedless ants.

"They can follow us if they want to, right?" asked Jake.

"Yes," said Harry blankly. He bit off a bit of his fingernail, something he had begun to absently do over the past month. "But they won't. They will think we need Tercano's relic to cause any harm, and by the time the Djinn shatters the pillars that uphold the Blessed Realm, it will be too late for them to follow."

"Then why all the warships?"

"The Djinn has decided to be cautious," said Harry with an unusual undertone of triumph. "You do not come to perform a public execution with only your fists. The world will see the end come, watch the qlippoth darkness descend and the sky turn into screaming horrors. The faithful, Albans, will be left. We will rule the qlippoth darkness forever as the sons of―"

"Sounds good," said Jake. He looked at the changing landscape and realized he was looking out at the most fearsome, forbidding stretch of countryside he had ever seen in her life. Huge rock formations sawed at the sky and jostled into the distance. They glistened like alien bone beneath the glare of the savage sickle sun. Away from the glare of that solar grin, lighter purple currents swirled in the sky like burning tides of algae. Amid the rocks with their broken edges and gaping crevices, a single narrow plain wound into the distance. Looking at it, Jake thought that a party would have to travel that path in single file if they couldn't fly. And they would have to bring plenty of supplies. No berries to pick along the way; no Pokemon in the land, either. And in the distance—dim and baleful, its source somewhere over the horizon—a dark violet light waxed and waned.

Heart of the Djinn's kingdom, he thought, and then: No, not that. Temple of Evil.

He looked at the pulsing sullen light with helpless, horrified fascination. Flex and loosen, wax and wane, an infection announcing itself to the sky.

"Come to me now, if you'd come at all, Jake of Roria," said Harry suddenly. "For the Temple can fascinate, even at a distance. Would you like to end your life on the sharp needles around the path that winds through the Plain of Discordia? If the Great Djinn fascinates you and tells you to jump, you'll do just that. Your bossy angel-warriors aren't here to help you now, are they? Nay, nay. You're on your own, so you are."

"Fine with me," said Jake, but felt as though his time had come at last to die. Bronze would never run his frigates into what was clearly a trap, if Bronze was the one directing the Association war effort at all. He had only heard Bronze's speech secondhand and believed that he would be distracted with the fast-flyers, too busy with protecting the cruise liners to pursue the Eclipse fleet through the rift. He was alone to wreak as much damage as he could, when the crucial moment came.

He saw the spines to the right of the dirty, distant path, huge pillars that stretched to points in the dank and somehow stony air. In a ravine at the left side of the path was a long line of darkness where the earth heaved up in serried lines. Ahead on their road was a square bastion of stone on a gently sloping mound of black rock, surrounded by crumbling stone walls. Across the walls, two towers rose high above the outer wall, but one had been shattered, as if by lightning or some powerful explosive.

"That where the castle stands is the Temple of the Djinn," said Harry. "The wall-walk of the Castle on the Abyss, once known as the Djinn's Fast. This is Giratina's province, far beyond the world you have known; this is deep in the nexus of worlds, near the place where Bronze Tercano's quest will end, for good or ill. See where the Djinn's Path ends!"

"I've read the Legends," said Jake, looking at the long winding road and the canyon filled with blackness. "How did the Temple go from Beulah to here?"

"Once the Djinn was imprisoned, it had to move," said Harry. "It would have been a black sin indeed for it to remain in the Holy Land."

His eyes reached the point where the Djinn's Path ended. Above the castle's turrets was a cloud pregnant with bolts of lightning and thunder. The road spilled into a wide cobbled forecourt that had once no doubt been guarded as assiduously by the Evil Djinn's demons as the walls of Atun-Kaah had been by the soldiers of the Logarian Emperor. Shadowed against the background of pulsing purple light was the giant sigil of an eye that had faded only slightly over the years. Its massive wrought-iron skeleton was painted in violet. From the upper levels of the Temple itself, one could only see the eye from looking out a parapet window, but from the ground, Jake guessed, the eye would dominate the view of the sky.

Same damn thing's probably sculpted at every other point of the compass, too, he thought.

They came closer to the Djinn's Fast. The frigates turned in synchrony till they had formed a kind of semicircle around the castle, the vortex miles away to their south, or whatever passed for south. Jake felt that this pseudo-world's sense of direction wasn't too keen, though he was certain that the old temple was north and the vortex southward. Everything else in this part of the Distortion World, Discordia, could be up for interpretation. They had landed in one of the more stable parts of the dimension, its coherence perhaps held together by the constant pull of the Temple like a warped kind of gravity.

The castle beyond the inner courtyard that he could glean from a sideways view (and the caged river of black water which here served as a moat) was indeed of tan sandstone blocks that had darkened to near-black over the years. Towers and turrets burst upward from the castle proper, swelling in a way that hurt the eye and seemed to defy gravity. The castle within these gaudy brackets was sober and undecorated except for the staring eye carved into the keystone arch above the main entrance. Two of the overhead walkways had fallen, littering the main courtyard with shattered chunks of stone, but six others remained in place, crisscrossing at different levels in a way that made him think of turnpike entrances and exits where a number of major highways met. As with the scattered growth of crooked houses along the courtyard walls, the doors and windows were oddly narrow. The front gate was open, its massive brass doors half-dislodged from their sockets, and led to a pool of darkness.

"HEEEYAHHHH!" a voice screamed. "WE'VE MADE IT, YOU PRETTY BASTARDS! WE'VE DONE IT!"

The door to the frigate cabin swung open with the considerable might of the Un-Cypress's shove, its hands held up before its eyes in clenched and trembling fists, its eyes slitted, its teeth bared. A vein pulsed alarmingly in the center of its forehead; another stood out on the column of its throat.

It screamed again, then stunned the room by saying: "I need a chair. Get me a chair!"

The Un-Cypress rarely sat anymore. It was known not to have eaten or slept in three or so months, persuading loyalists it was the true and living Djinn's Savior, and confirming to his enemies that it was indeed the Anti-Arceus. Its rage was legendary. But no one had seen a weakness or physical frailty in it. And now it needed a chair?

Harry grabbed one from by the window and slid it behind the Un-Cypress, who shakily sat. Psuedo-Cypress tore at its collar and unbuttoned its shirt, feebly fanning itself with one hand.

"Allow me, my Lord," said Harry, and began fanning the Un-Cypress his own hands. Normally Pseduo-Cypress would quickly tire of such obsequiousness, but it actually appeared panicky and grateful. Jake was sure that the creature would execute its own admin for such a breach of etiquette, but it appeared to have hardly noticed. The Un-Cypress was in trouble. A robot finally got a glass of water in front of it,, but by now its hands were at its sides and its countenance had paled to gypsum white.

Harry grabbed the water and held it to pseudo-Cypress's lips. It could barely manage to open its mouth with water sloshing down its chin. "Get the med-spirits in here!" yelled Harry. "Get them here now!"

Sweat trickled down Jake's back. The temperature was rising after the heating kicked in to combat the cold, almost as if there was a fire below the iron shell of the superfrigate. Eclipse sentries fell into attention, were put to ease by Harry, and wiped their brows, tugged at their shirts and jackets, and traded looks as if to ask what was going on.

...

Jake turned and leaned out the entry-door to hear the sound of shouting from the rooms beyond. Whatever this chaos was, it was widespread. And suddenly, he heard the sound of the Rapidash stables being embroiled in insanity. Unfettered Pokemon broke free from their handlers, neighing, spooking each other into a stampede that had nowhere to go. Stablemen tossed lassos but found themselves pulled off the ground when the steeds reared, and then thrown to the ground when they took off, horses jostling horses, fighting for space to get through into the hall.

Men and women were trampled, some to death, but when a shortsighted soldier fired into the air, things only got worse. More than a hundred full-size Rapidash were manic and terrified. Jake knew that such breeds were trained to bear the demons and their minions, but their hold on sanity was fragile. Now it seemed to be shattering. Following their instincts, they tried to flee, crushing anything in their path, including each other. Jake ran down the hall, looked through the door's porthole. He saw great equine shoulders ripped open as Rapidash were crushed against the stone walls. He heard legs snapping, saw Pokemon nipping and biting each other, and soon it was a free-for-all.

"Where's the fire?" a sentry shouted. Many must have heard only "fire," for it was repeated and repeated, soldiers screaming it all over the frigate's middle level. Jake saw no flame, and smelled no smoke. But he heard "Fire! Fire! Fire!" and like the rest, his instinct was to head for the escape pods.

Then for an instant he was unobserved and knew what to do. His pulsesword came out, sliced open the stable door's keypad. It exploded into a confetti of sparks. Another stroke busted the pistons that opened the door; now the terrified horse tamers were really trapped, unless someone opened the loading dock. But the blast doors would only lead out to open air, filled with presumably poisoned gases over the Plain of Discordia. Perhaps he had sealed the doom a hundred, maybe more, soldiers, all without blowing his psychically cultivated cover. Good work for the day, certainly more impactful than several fuel lines and changing out padlocks, though maybe it hadn't beat the time he laced the base canteen's rations with mite poison.

The exultation of his own continued life sometimes made him take such risks, but still he waited for another chance, a better way to destabilize the Alliance than sabotaging the frigate's engines and killing himself and everyone onboard. It had not always been so, but he wanted to live. In all other worlds he ought to be dead, executed for treason during the Battle of Crescent Island, a heinous collaborator and heretic who had slipped through the cracks of Objectivity Training and conspired to release valuable prisoners and kill dozens of soldiers. Yet he was kept alive, surrounded by the imprints of angels. Whatever divine purpose there was, it was preserving him for some great deed. The thought excited him into a barely restrained bloodlust.

He thought to try to somehow sabotage the bay doors also, but a commander nudged him back into the cabin with the barrel of a nuclear submachine gun. "There is no fire!" he announced. "Every soldier in this room has a job, and that is to protect the Eclipse Lords. That is what we shall do. No one enters; no one leaves."

"But the stables―" began Jake.

"Leave it," said the commander, opening the cabin door for him. "The leaders like you, boy, but I rank above the privileges you've been given. Get in."

"Permission to speak, Commander," came from a corner.

"Granted."

"What is causing the heat?"

"No idea, but let everyone else kill themselves trying to escape a fire that doesn't exist. You're not going to best a twelve-hundred-pound Rapidash that wants your space anyway, so stay here and do your job."

"What's wrong with the Supreme Leader?"

"How should I know?"

"Are the para-spirits coming?"

"I don't know how they'd get here. But you can bet no one else will get in. If this is a plot against His Excellency, it stops right here. Now come to attention! Weapons at the ready!"

Jake had never liked being in the stuffy cabins, but up till now this foray had not brought on claustrophobia. The sheer size of the area had given him room to move and breathe. But now, outside the only room where everyone remained still, pandemonium reigned. In the stables that he had locked would be no escape, no freedom, no daylight, no air, no lessening of the heat, even if he opened fire and killed inside and made a break for the outside. What was happening inside the horse stalls dwarfed mass tragedies due to fire in crowded buildings. Even without an actual fire, this was going to be catastrophic.

With his safety turned off and his firing finger on the trigger of his chandler pistol, Jake fought to maintain his composure, remaining at attention, staring straight at pseduo-Cypress, sweat running freely now inside his uniform.

The creature looked wasted. Its formerly full dark crown of hair appeared somehow sparse now. Its clear, insane eyes were bloodshot and droopy. Its face was sallow, and though it made no sense, Jake believed he could see veins spidering across the creature's face, framing his hollow eyes. The Un-Cypress's fingers looked thin, its skin papery, its shoulders bony. It was as if the body had lost fifty pounds in minutes. Its pale, bluish lips were parted, and its yellowish teeth and chewed-away gums showed like the mouth of a dead man.

"You must drink, Excellency!" the robot whined.

"I am spent," said the Un-Cypress, and though Jake ould barely hear it, the sound was clearly not the voice he had come to recognize. Its words seemed hollow, faint, echoey, as if he spoke from a dungeon far away.

"Hungry," it said flatly. "Exhausted. Dead."

No doubt it meant that last as a figure of speech, but to Jake it did look dead. Were its skin any worse it could have passed for a decomposing corpse. Even its ears had lost color and appeared translucent.

In the next instant, Jakefound himself on his knees, shielding his eyes from the brightest light he had ever experienced. It reminded him of a science experiment in school years before where he and his classmates wore heavily tinted goggles as they ignited magnesium strips. Bronze hadn't been with him to help then, and he wasn't with him now. Jake was going to this next horror alone.

He peeked to find that he was not the only man on the ground. Most soldiers had pitched forward onto their stomachs, weapons rattling to the floor. Whatever the source radiating from the middle of the table, it lit the room like the noon sun. He saw that the robot was dancing blindly, the dark blue electric eyes in its steel face darkened. A gigantic siren immediately went off. Jake felt that if he listened to it long, he would be deafened.

"I HAVE BEEN BLINDED," the robot bellowed, still in its absurd mewling accent. "VISION ZERO, I NEED HELP, CODE 7-1, HELP..." Then its endless cycling blat was cut off when a rain of thin electric bolts launched from its eyes, decommissioning it.

"Beautiful! Beautiful!" people whispered, ignoring the scrapped bot and watching the light, interlaced with the soft sighs associated with fireworks displays. All the resting soldiers had thrust their chairs back from the cabin's table and covered their eyes, peeking through fingers to gaze on this magnificent appearance, whatever it was.

Jake pushed himself up and rocked back on his haunches, his eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the initially blinding radiance. As he squatted there, hands on his weapon again, it was clear why so many thought this apparition was so striking. It seemed to hover inches above the floor, directly in the room's center, such a bright gold-tinged white that you could not take your eyes from it. It shone with such brilliance that no detail was clear, from the bottom to the top of what appeared to be a roughly six-foot human form. There was no way to tell whether it—if it was a humanoid being—wore shoes or clothes or was naked.

Gradually Jake realized he was looking at the back of a being that faced the Un-Cypress and Harry. Flowing, ruddy hair came into view, but it appeared that the rest of the body would remain a mystery to the human eye. He could hear the commander moaning in ecstasy on the floor. Harry was also on the floor, head buried in his hands, rocking, weeping.

The Un-Cypress had fallen forward in its borrowed chair, its cheek on the floor, arms outstretched, palms flat. "Oh, my lord, my god, and my king," his death-rattle voice repeated over and over.

From outside the room Jake heard the awful, terrifying sounds of death. Panic, screams and screeches, pleading, bones being crushed, air pushed from lungs, horses snuffling and caterwauling as other, smaller creatures might do. Pitiful, lonely cries could be heard. "Save me! Oh, God, save me! I don't want to die!"

And yet die they did. Without even being able to see, it was clear to Jale that the carnage behind him in the stables would be gruesome beyond anything he had yet encountered. Shooting began, and he could only guess it was he few remaining soldiers putting horses or comrades out of their misery and trying to pave themselves some macabre exit route to the hallway door over dead bodies, only to realize with horror that it was broken, and they had no Pokemon that could beat it down.

The Un-Cypress raised its shriveled head, its suit hanging as if on a cadaver. "My Lord," he managed in that rasping, hollow voice, appearing to squint into the eyes of the being. "My lord king, why have you forsaken me? Why have you withdrawn your spirit from me? Have I not given myself wholly to you, to serve you with my entire heart and being?"

"Silence!" came the response in a voice so phantasmagorically piercing and awful that it made Jake recoil and want to cover his ears. "You disgust me! Look at you! You dare suggest you have anything to offer me besides your pathetic body? You are drunk with a power whose source is far beyond your own! You are merely a vessel, a tool, a jar of clay for my purposes, and yet you parade yourself as if you had a shred of value!"

"Oh, my king!" gasped pseudo-Cypress. "No! I—"

"You do not even understand the meaning of the word silence! You are nothing! Nothing! You had no power to rise from the dead! You were a carcass, stiff and decaying. Look at you now. Aside from my grace, you would return to the earth, ashes to ashes and dust to dust."

"Spare me, oh, my lord! I love you and long to serve you! I will do anything for—"

"Oh, you spirit of nothingness, you mere speck of my imagination! I will borrow your otherwise worthless skeleton yet again. But you must know, and if you cannot fathom it, I must myself remind you who you are and who you are not. You are not me! I am not you! You are mere inventory, goods and services. You are a piece of equipment, and you must never dare imagine otherwise."

"I have never, divine one! Never! I am humbly at your service."

"I am the lord your god, and I will not share my glory!"

"Absolutely," said the creature, panting. "O king of heaven and earth."

"Do not think it was by accident that my Adversary, in His own words, acknowledged that I dwelt in heaven and called me the Bright One, the Great Djinn, the Holy One, the Evening Star! Do you not know, as He knows, that it is I who have weakened the nations? That I have arisen from the darkness of two thousand years? That I have created the greatest war machine to ever have existed? I, not you, not anyone else in all of the evolved world, am the one who shall ascend into heaven. My throne will be amid the stars." Then softer: "Yet my Enemy claims I shall be brought down to Tophet."

"No, lord, no!"

"He claims that those who see me will gaze at me and consider me a wretched thing. He says that Anointed One, the Last Emperor of Logaria, will crush my neck and I will bite his heel."

"May it never be so, my sovereign!"

"Oh yes, my Enemy derides me! He claims all the kings of the nations, all of them, die in glory, everyone in his own grand tomb, but that I shall be cast out of my grave like an abominable branch, like the garment of those who are slain, thrust through with a sword, who go down to the stones of the pit, like a corpse trodden underfoot. I will be buried like a common soldier killed in battle?"

"Never! Never! Not as long as I have breath!"

"Are you so thick you do not understand? It is I who give you breath!"

"I know! Yes, I know!"

"And what shall be your contribution, thou Judas, when the Enemy attempts to make good on His promise that no monument will be given me, for I have destroyed my nation Dor Daedeloth and slain my people? He taunts me that my son will not succeed me as king."

"Oh, let me be your son," cried the creature. "And you shall be my father!"

"But no! The Enemy derides me. He says in the Coda to the Golden Company, 'Slay the children of this sinner. Do not let them rise and conquer the land nor rebuild the cities of the world. I, myself, have risen against him,' and He speaks as if he were the commander of the Host of Heaven."

"But that is you, O great star! It is you alone!"

"He has already destroyed my beloved Dor Daedeloth, but He will not be content until He finishes the eradication of my knights of freedom, my barons of righteousness. He will sweep the land into ruin like dust before a broom!"

"We shall never let that happen, Your Grace."

"But He has taken an oath to do it! It was said long ago that this was Arceus's purpose and plan. He decided to break the Logarian army when they trespassed on the marches of Beulah, and said 'My people shall no longer be their slaves.' And now the senile old fool raises up Logaria to rule in his favor again! He rests his hopes on the two kingdoms, Hisui and Logaria, those jagged and treacherous reeds that cut the hand of whoever leans on them."

"But His power is nothing compared to yours, conquering king! We will prove it even today, will we not?"

"We?"

"You! You, exalted one!"

"Who are you to speak? What have you to offer me when the Enemy, who calls Himself the Original One, has spoken? Who can change His plans? When His hand moves, who can stop Him?"

"You can, all-powerful one. I believe in you."

"I can. And do not forget it. Who does He think stood against Hisui?"

"He knows. I know He knows!"

"Of course He knows! It is I who have gone to and fro in the earth, walking up and down in it. It was I who tested Berothrim to nearly abandon and curse his quest. When Yellow fought Lance in the presence of Lugia the Angel, it was I who stood at her right hand to oppose her. And it was I who tempted Bronze Tercano in the Pass of Anshan."

"And you nearly succeeded."

"Success comes today."

"I believe it, my lord. Your power is not His. Nor mine, prince of the power of the air."

"Yes, I am the lord of the air, even if brother Rayquaza disputes it. Even if Arceus has sent him to oppose me from the land of Hoenn."

"He was a fool."

"But I did not bow to any elohim either."

"And you never will."

"I never shall."

"May it ever be so!" said pseudo-Cypress.

"Oh, the Original One knew well that when men heard His message, it was I who came immediately and took away the word that was sown in their hearts."

"That has always been your strength."

"It was I who entered Cyllene and made her doubt the Original One! Cyllene the High Elder, who was numbered among Arceus's apostles! And it was I who sifted Volo liked wheat. He was so weak that night when I indwelt him."

"I will not be weak in your hour of need, master."

"I do not need you! I will not be weak! You, sad one, are unteachable."

"Forgive me, lord."

"It was I who filled Selim the Nurian's heart to lie and keep his treachery to Aredia and Shah Orodes alike to himself."

"A masterpiece!"

"Silence! I am wearying of you. I am preparing for battle with the One who calls Himself the Lord of Hosts and all his princes. I am the one who takes advantage when men are ignorant of my devices. I am the god of this age, able to blind the minds of those who do not believe—as I do not—in what my Enemy calls the White. I am more than His image. I am His superior and shall be His conqueror. I was crafty enough to deceive Tor and Embla, His most beloved creations. Am I not up to this task?"

"You are, and the new universe shall sing your praises and call you blessed."

"You have well said that I am the prince of the power of the air. I am the spirit who now works in the lords of disobedience toward the Enemy. I work among them to fulfill the lusts of their flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. None shall stand against my wiles. They do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against my principalities, against my powers, against my rulers of this age, against spiritual hosts in the heavenly places. It was I who made Lian the Apostle write those words."

"That is you, O blessed one."

"I have fiery darts that cannot be quenched."

"Amen and amen!"

"I hindered even Lian the Apostle, thwarting his plans time and again. And in his absence from his followers, I tempted them from their faith. I was their adversary, and they referred to me as akin to a roaring lion, seeking whom I might devour."

"Today shall be a feast for you."

"The Enemy who calls Himself ARCS Elyon decreed that He manifested Himself to destroy me and my works."

"Blasphemy!"

"He called me the great dragon, called me that serpent of old, called me the Crimson King and Satan, and acknowledged that it is I who deceives the whole world. But He erred when He cast me to the earth before the Elder Days and my angels with me. He erred when His servants bound me for two thousand years. I have waited and brooded and planned all this time. I have evolved. It is time."

"He made an eternal blunder, lord. How excellent is your name in all the earth! Be exalted above the heavens. Let your glory be above all the earth. You, my lord, are high above all nations, and your glory above the heavens. Who is like unto you who dwells on high?"

"I have need of your shell again for a brief season."

"I am yours," the creature said.

And with that the light disappeared and the Un-Cypress stood, chin lifted, arrogance restored. Its color returned as it buttoned his shirt and straightened its clothes. It was as if it had come back to life a second time, its voice again crisp and sure.

"Return to your seats, ladies and gentlemen, please. Admin Harry, please. Lieutenant Albans." It deliberately moved the chair Harry had provided for it and held it as the admin awkwardly disentangled himself from his uniform's garments and stood, then sat.

"Sub-potentates, generals, assistants, sit, please. Soldiers, return to attention."

It was plain to Jake that the room was full of shocked and shaken people. Their eyes shone with fear. Their bodies were hesitant and unsure. They returned to their places fearful and stunned. "Your discomfort will soon cease," said the Un-Cypress. "When you are all in place, I shall tell you what you just witnessed and what you will remember."

A Johtorim raised a hand, consternation on his face.

"Please hold all questions, just for a moment."

An Alolan stood, hand also raised.

"Please honor my request, sir," said pseudo-Cypress. "I will get to you in a moment if you will extend this courtesy."

The Alolan sat, clearly troubled. Others looked at each other, eyes narrow, shaking their heads.

"Ladies and gentlemen and soldiers," began the creature, but it was interrupted by a man at the door. "What is it?"

"Because of the carnage outside, my Lord, we have been unable to find a para-spirit unit for this room."

"Thank you. No longer needed."

"And, Your Grace, neither have we been able to determine the source of the heat that caused the stampede."

"I believe that issue is moot now, is it not? Anyone uncomfortable?"

"Not from the heat," an Orreian said, "but I have some serious questions about what just—"

"I shall ask you too, sir, to hold all questions and comments for another moment. Thank you. And, sir?" it added, addressing the one in the doorway. "Would you mind staying as I offer an explanation?"

The man moved past Jake and stood behind those seated at the far end of the room from pseudo-Cypress.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the Un-Cypress began in its most mellow, persuasive tone, slowly scanning the room and looking briefly but directly into the eyes of everyone. "Do not feel obligated to look away this time. I am choosing to connect with you visually. You have just been privileged to enjoy a unique experience. You were present when I left this mortal body and took on my divine form. I charged you with all the rights and privileges that attend your station as loyal followers and encouraged you in the battle to come.

"You shall become aware as we leave this place and mount up to ride into our glorious victory that the enemy spirits have succeeded in penetrating the ground above, essentially our ceiling and Rapidash pens. I divinely protected myself, you included, but they caused a stampede that has caused many casualties among our troops and our Pokemon, which, as you know, we value as highly as our human resources. But do not be alarmed. Do not fear. Our resources are limitless. I shall lead you up and out, and there will be enough mounts for all the cavalry divisions. Now, there were some comments and questions?"

The Johtorim stood, bowing. "I just wanted to thank you, Excellency, for the privilege you have extended to me and my party. To have been here for this most momentous and historic moment will become the memory of a lifetime, and we are most grateful."

"Thank you. Yes, sir?"

The Alolan stood. "I would like to echo that sentiment, your holiness, on behalf of my staff. You are most worthy to be praised, and we look forward to joining you in your ultimate victory, after which the world shall see you for who you truly are."

"Thank you, also," said the Un-Cypress. It turned to Harry. "How's the air outside?"

"Breathable," said Harry, "but only just. Our scientists believe, Your Grace, that there are other regions of the Distortion World that are entirely unsuitable for organic life at all."

"But this isn't one of those regions, is it?" said the Un-Cypress. "No? Then load up and get the Breakers ready, by the Djinn! Tercano is mighty clever and he may guess what we've planned."

...

The exit to the surface through the stables was surreal. The men and women were led and followed by contingents of the soldiers, giving Jake a perfect view of their response to what had befallen everyone else. The place was worse than any war zone. Hundreds of horses and even more men and women lay dead in hideous repose, broken, trampled, crushed, torn to pieces. The stench of the stables was nothing compared to the steaming entrails of human and beast, and yet the men and women from the meeting room stepped on and over the remains as if traipsing through a meadow.

No one made a face, held his nose, or had a comment. It was as if they could not see the slaughter that soaked their shoes and caused dirt to adhere to the blood. As they reached the surface they blithely stamped their feet and thanked the soldiers for their assistance. The mood was festive as great steeds were moved into line for them and each was helped into the saddle.

Bound for landing shuttles, they smiled and laughed and chatted as if on their way to a day at the races. Jake noticed for the first time that day that puffy, purple clouds had begun to dot the sickly sky. The sun was still visible, turning greenish on the horizon. All he wanted was to slip away and be with Bronze and Tess when the time for war came.

.

.

.

The Eclipse fleet vanished and none followed, except a handful of telemetry probes. So it was that the Emperor of Logaria and his generals pitched camp on the green lawn amid the stadium's shadow, on the last week of the Great Era before the Great Wrack and End of Days. And so it was that the Emperor closed the eyes of the body of the Chairman when it was brought to him, carried somberly among the Hisuians, before it was set aside to be buried.

"I would've seen him burned," said Tess, feeling the bruises the man's hands had left.

"If he had not been noble in the beginning, your wish would have been honored," said Bronze. "We reap and sow. So it goes."

Then turning to an attendant Cobalion he said, "Did you see Jake?"

"No, though I came so near I heard his breathing," said Cobalion. "If he is alive, let that be a shallow comfort, though there are many things worse than death. Terrakion and Virizion have gone across the rift to shepherd him and may bring useful news. If Darkrai does not subdue them first."

Roderick and Theophilus bent their knees to the grass and clasped their hands with Bronze. "Hail, Southstar, and accept the oath that was made by Kamado in memory of the North-kingdom's glory, and honor the vows that were made in the sight of the gods and the Original One."

"And I accept it and will not forget the oath of Logaria," said Bronze. "Never has any people such as the Hisuians been more noble, or more fortunate. May neither one of us fail the other." Then he released the Hisuian's hands and cried:

"Hear now Tar-Tercano, all you people that would fight against the Enemy! As my forefather Adunakor did before my days, I vow in my own honor and titles and on behalf of the Hisuians in the North that between they and the Rorians of the South that former friendship will be maintained and strengthened forever, their foes shall be our foes, their need shall be our need, and whatever evil befalls them we will fight to the utmost end of our strength. I honor this vow by the duty of my line, such that it will follow unto my heirs and bondservants, all such Free Peoples in Logaria that may come after me. Let the Hisuians and Logarians keep this alliance as we have done before, unless the Darkness should fall on our hearts again."

"Then you are not the same Logarians that betrayed us thousands of years ago?" said Yanase.

"No, not the same," said Bronze, and he motioned for the Hisuians to stand. "Similar, in many ways, but changed. You may call us the Logarians of Adunakor and Berothrim, and not of Castamir. That seems strange, I see. Applying characteristics to something wholly apart from their genesis."

"You understand, then, our concerns."

"Yes, I think I understand," said Bronze, "but these are different times. Hisuians and Logarians are gathered on the field again. It is a sign that the world may no longer be moving on, and maybe is moving back."

"Not if the Alliance can help it," said Diamond bitterly. "They've gone to the Distortion World."

"When the probes return with their measurements, we'll be certain of that," said Bronze. His voice was level but his arms were trembling.

"But I'm already certain of it," said Diamond. "This is the fourth time I've felt it, you know. Been exposed to it. Realities are stacked, that's what the science says. It's why anomalous things that we can't explain are leftover relics from realities where they are explainable. And that vortex leads to the Distortion World."

"The fourth time?" said Tess. She knew from Bronze about the battles in Sinnoh against Team Galactic over a decade ago, and how the final stand had been in the broken islands of the Dark Otherworld, and that Giratina was banished. "I've only heard that you went there once."

"Oh, it's the fourth," said Diamond. "You know nothing of what Team Galactic had meddled with. They researched Pokemon and talismans that were associated with space and time, made demonic machines that the Alliance has no doubt perfected. One of them was an accidental discovery. It emitted a kind of wave, not a rift, that brought organic matter to the Distortion World, or at least a specific region of it."

"How are Paka and Uji doing?" said Pearl. "They're clever, but neither strength of cleverness can save anyone during these times."

"God, you could just call them!" said Platinum. Bronze heard her nervous voice and wondered how Moon could be related to her. Except it was very easy to know, wasn't it? They looked like each other.

"They were alive last I knew," said Yanase, "though it shows that things are rather sorry when the bar we have for determining if someone is doing well or not is if they are still breathing."

"Yes, the fourth time," resumed Diamond, taking the interruption as if it was a common dynamic. He scratched his temple. "The machine took them away, you hear. Paka and Uji. The second time was at Spear Pillar. The third was in the dimension itself, after I died, and the fourth time is when I felt the evil that emits from that vortex."

"You died?" said Cobalion. "But you still have mortal flesh. Few exceptions to the law of death come my way, unless there is some new law in heaven that I have not yet heard."

"Giratina stabbed me through the body, and I was eleven," said Diamond, leaning back in his fold-up chair. "What do you think was going to happen? That I'd get stitched up at the care center and go to fight again? No, I died. And when I woke up in the chaos-realm, I'd have thought it was Hell, unless I knew better."

"I know we're short for time, but tell us what exactly happened," said Tess. Bronze had never told her about any of the Pokedex Holders dying. As far as she knew, the war in Sinnoh had mostly been a few comic kiddies traveling with a younger, spoiled Platinum out of duty and in need of a paycheck. Then those small children, younger, but like Tess herself, got mixed into events that weren't too large for them after all.

Yeah, but Cyrus was small fries to Cypress, said the voluble self. Cyrus of Team Galactic had a thousand soldiers, Cypress had millions. Cyrus had one atomic bomb, Cypress had dozens, maybe pointed at us right now. Cyrus had one or two frigates, Cypress has an army. It doesn't even out, Miss Woodhall. If Bronze and his highway band are strong enough to stop the Dark Lord, then it's lights out, victory for Hell.

"There will be rejoicing in Hell," she remembered Cobalion to have said. That had been in the desert, when she learned that Cobalion would have killed himself. Why had Arceus been so strict? Would he have really done it, if the demon Quentins had been a little more cunning, or she had less of a good eye and sharp mind?

Nothing turns out as we expect, Tess, Cobalion thought to her. I once said that I had not felt a single feeling, but you know that wasn't true. And we have more than a highway band gathered here. There are mighty names among us that make the Dark Lord shudder.

"Old history," said Diamond, setting his hand down. "I'll tell what I can, then. If it helps you, Bronze, then good; though I don't see how it can. But maybe the demons will leave me and enter you."

...

Sinnoh, ten or eleven years ago. The battle with Giratina had been going for only minutes, ever since the old devil has pushed himself through the fabric of the worlds and into Diamond's. Heatran had entered the battle. Pearl was there to see what Diamond missed, saw Giratina dive into its own shadow like the most tenebrous inkblot running down a piece of black paper, enter the ground and then rise up again.

He sees the black claw and knows sudden horror. It is him, Giratina the Cruel, rising from a Shadow Sneak. Diamond turns his face away with the last of his strength as the dark magic enters him. Somewhere a man named Charon is laughing. He sees his own hand trailing on the rubble-caulked pavement, small, white, shapely. He has never bitten his nails. Looking at his hand, Diamond dies.

His body disappears and enters another world. The world beyond flashed and swirled formlessly for a moment, and then its pink vapors opened like curtains. Diamond saw what was there, and lost himself within it.

"Diamond."

He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling penitent somehow; walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, listening to the call to prayer in the Muzzelin towns he travels through.

"Diamond of Hisui."

This voice, which he almost recognizes; a voice so like his own that a psychiatrist would say that it was his voice, the voice of his subconscious, but Diamond knows better; Diamond knows that often the voices that sound the most like our own when they speak in our heads are those of the most terrible outsiders, the most dangerous or blessed intruders.

"Diamond, son of Steven."

His vision has taken him to Platinum at the Battle Resort and to his mother's house, and he would see more of what is happening there, but then it takes him away—calls him away in that strangely familiar voice, and he has to go. There is no choice because, unlike Paka or Uji, he is not entering the Distortion world to observe and flee the demonic creatures that inhabit it; he is becoming one with Dark Otherworld, last realm of the Djinn, a part of its endless violet storm.

"Diamond, come. Diamond, see."

And so the storm whirls him first up and then away. He flies across the battle-scarred city where Giratina made its entrance, rising and rising through stacks of air first warm and then cold, and he is not alone in the violet storm which bears him up according to the will of Arceus. Pearl flies past him, his blond hair brushed back on his haid; he is singing something at the top of his lungs as his fingers plink piano keys that are not there—transported by his tune, Pearl doesn't seem to realize that the storm has ripped his piano away. Diamond didn't know that Pearl could play the piano.

"Diamond of Hisui, take heart, dear one."

The voice says—the voice of the storm, the voice of the keeper of death; and Diamond arrives. The city flies by him, glassy eyes blazing with pink light. A scrawny man in a mechanic's red overalls goes flying past, his bicycle helmet flying out behind him. "Life for you," Rad Rickshaw says—something like that, anyway—and then he's gone. Next, spinning like a weird windmill, comes an bronze knife (to Diamond it looks like a torture device), and the Pokedex Holder thinks the Emperor of the South without knowing why.

Now the pink storm is carrying him over blasted mountains, now over a fertile green delta where a broad river runs its oxbow squiggles like a vein, reflecting a placid blue sky that turns to the pink of wild roses as the storm passes above. Ahead, Diamond sees an uprushing column of darkness and his heart quails, but this is where the storm is taking him, and this is where he must go.

I want to get out, he thinks, but he's not stupid, he realizes the truth: he may never get out. Death has swallowed him. He may remain in its stormy, muddled eye forever.

I'll fight my way out, if I have to, he thinks, but no—he has no Pokemon. He is naked in the storm, rushing unguarded toward that virulent violent-black infection that has buried all the landscape beneath it.

And yet he hears singing.

Faint but beautiful—a sweet harmonic sound that makes him shiver and think of Platinum: birds and muscular fish and the soft remnants of Hisui.

Suddenly Platinum's Rapidash goes past, galloping on thin air with its eyes as bright as firecrakers in the storm's whirl of heat. Then it is gone. Diamond plunges into the black, and suddenly his breath is gone. The world around him is noxious darkness; the air seems to creep on his skin like a layer of bugs. He is buffeted, boxed to and fro by invisible fists, then driven downward in a dive so violent he fears he will be smashed against the ground: so fell Kyogre and Groudon.

Dead fields and deserted villages roll up out of the gloom; he sees blasted trees that will give no shade—oh, but all is shade here, all is death here, this is the Distortion World, where some dark day he will come, and all is death here.

"Pokedex Holder, this is the End-World."

"End-World," he says.

"Here are the unbreathing; the white faces."

"The unbreathing. The white faces. "

Yes. He knows that, somehow. This is the place of slaughtered soldiers, the cloven helm, the rusty halberd; from here come the pale warriors. This is the Distortion World, where clocks run backward and the graveyards vomit out their dead. Ahead is a tree like a crooked, clutching hand; on its topmost branch a man has been impaled. He should be dead, but as the violet storm carries Diamond past, he raises his head and looks at him with inexpressible pain and weariness.

"Look ahead, Diamond—see your destiny."

Now, suddenly, he knows that voice—it is the voice of Dialga.

He looks and sees a brilliant blue-gold glow piercing the dirty darkness of the Distortion World. Before he can do more than register it, he breaks out of the darkness and into the light like something coming out of an egg, a creature at last being born.

"Light! Let there be light!"

the voice of Arceus cries, and Diamond has to put his hands to his eyes and peek through his fingers to keep from being blinded. Below him is a field of blood—or so he thinks then. This is the blood that has flowed out of the Temple of Sinnoh and was spilt for the payment of sins, he thinks. This is the blood of Arceus the Son.

"Diamond, look—look there."

Yes, there it is, a dusty gray-black mass rearing on the horizon: the Djinn's Fast, the place where all of this world's points of power, all lines of force, converge. In its spiraling windows he sees fitful electric blue fire and hears the cries of all those pent within; he senses both the strength of the place and the wrongness of it; he can feel how it is spooling error across everything, softening the divisions between the worlds, how its potential for mischief is growing stronger even as disease weakens its truth and coherence, like a body afflicted with cancer; this jutting heap of dark gray stone is the world's great mystery and last awful riddle.

It is Rei's Temple of Evil, rearing to the sky, and as Diamond rushes toward it in the violet storm, he thinks: I will enter you, me and my friends, if God wills it so; we will enter you and we will conquer the wrongness within you. It may be years yet, but I swear by all I love that it will be so.

But now the sky fills with flaggy clouds which flow out of Hell, and the world begins to go dark; the pulsing light from the Temple's rising windows shines like mad eyes, and Diamond hears thousands of screaming, wailing voices.

"This Temple will make your friend kill everything and everyone he loves," says the voice of Dialga, and now it is a cruel voice, cruel and hard, "and still it will be shut against him."

Diamond draws in all his breath and draws together all his delirious force; when he cries his answer to Dialga, he does it for the generations of Bronze's blood as well as his own. "No! It will not be so! When I come here in my body, it will not be so! By the name of Arceus and the White, IT WILL NOT BE SO!"

"Then die," the voice says, and Diamond is hurled at the gray-black stone flank of the Tower, to be smashed there like a bug against a rock. But before that can happen...

"I woke up in the Distortion World," said Diamond. "Things went their own course from there, as Bronze knows, but I'd forgotten the vision for years. It's come back in fragments, usually in recurring dreams. They started when I reached fifteen, sixteen. I've never made anything of it. That's the story of when I died and went to another world."

Throughout the story Bronze had been watching Diamond with increasing concern. With no trace of amiability, he stood and muttered something to Mohaim, then nodded to Rombur and turned several crystal-screen monitors on, crouching to operate them on their low-legged tables. "We'll be able to compare notes here and now. The telemetry got back.

.

.

.

The footage came in from the scouting probes and Bronze saw the Distortion World, a deep branch of the Abyss, the shoot of the rotting Qlippothic tree, the Pit of Benthos' Hell...

The sun looked like rusted iron pocked with eyes of sickly fire. The drone hovered a moment over an endless canyon that spewed out septic smoke and glistening ooze. They saw a tiny stream of dark water that flowed backwards from a blackened hill-side and filled a little bare pool, from which again it spilled, and vanished then under the barren stones. Shards of bone and the corpses of dragons stuck out of the plain's gasping dust. Over the audio, Bronze heard a faint thrumming of despair and pain.

Yellow was surprised to see a road that went over the Plain of Discordia to the Temple, impassable as it was and scored with deep ghylls. Perhaps the length from the vortex's leperous influence to the Djinn's Fast was all of thirty miles, hours of a weary, stumbling trudge over a poisonous land before being faced with the stronghold of the Djinn's might.

But what she saw around the Temple was not any more encouraging. The Eclipse fleet had taken up strength around the out-walls and were already disembarking. The upward slope of the hill between Discordia and Djinn's Fast had steadily dwindled as it climbed upwards, and the inner ridge was now no more than a shelf for the steep walls of the Dark Lord's ancient shrine; but to the east (or what they could reckon for east) it fell as sheerly as ever down into a swamp of rent and pitted stone, ashy islands of churned-up rock skirting around pools of deepest void. The cameras focused further north beyond the castle, seeing that the rock shelf came to an end in broken steps of rock; for beyond the Fast sprung a high barren spur, thrusting northward like a wall.

To meet it there stretched out from the grey and misty northern range of the Distortion World a long jutting arm; and between the ends, there was a narrow gap beyond which lay a deep dale that made up the northernmost provinces and then bled out into the Lands of Everlasting Chaos beyond. In that dale behind the mountain pass were the tunnels and deep armories that the forgotten servants of the Djinn had made for the defense of the Temple of their land; and there now their Lord was gathering in haste great forces to meet the onslaught of the Logarian Empire and the servants of Arceus. Upon the out-thrust spurs of the castle and stone hills beyond, forts and towers were built, and glowglobe lights burned, and all across the moat and plain a palisade of earth was being raised, and a deep trench delved that could be crossed only by a single bridge or flown over.

Tess looked up at the Temple, and was horrified: an emotion engulfed her that mingled repulsion and fear, disgust and loathing, all tinged with shock. She wondered how the Dark Lord had maintained and fed his armies, trained them for such an envornments. Yet armies he had. As far as her eyes could reach around the Temple, there were camps, some of tents, some ordered like small towns. One of the largest of these was right below the gates. Barely a mile out into the plain it clustered like some huge nest of insects, with straight dreary streets of quickly built durasteel huts and long low drab buildings. About it the ground was busy with soldiers and robots and demons going to and fro.

Neither she nor Bronze knew anything of the great slave-worked factories that Cypress had hidden in islands, beyond the eyes of the Association by the dark sad waters of the Sea of Orre, nor of the great smuggling roads that ran away from Eclipse refineries to assembly ports, from which the soldiers of the Alliance brought long shipments of goods and booty and fresh slaves. On Crescent Island had been the mines and forges, and the hasty operations of a long war that the Djinn had not planned to fight; and here on the Plain of Discordia was the Dark Power, moving its armies like pieces on the board, gathering them together. Its first moves, the first feelers of its strength, had been checked. For the moment it withdrew them, and brought up new forces, massing them about his beloved stronghold for an avenging stroke against creation itself. And if it had also been its purpose to defend their position against all approach, it could scarcely have done more.

Demons do not build. They are parasites and scavengers, eaters of carrion. The Temple they call the Djinn's Fast is something they found in Beulah, long ago, but did not make themselves. No one knows (if anyone human ever knew) what kind of creatures it was that made those buildings, who shaped the rock with tunnels and towers, but it is certain that no one but the demon-folk could have wanted to stay there, or even to approach that place. It was said among the wise that the Djinn himself built it, though none know now, not even the angels; for the Djinn himself has forgotten from where it came but not that it still stood.

She could see that all of the angles of the Temple were wrong—that the walls sloped crazily, that it was every nightmare she had ever endured made into a place, like a huge mouth of jutting teeth. It was a temple that had been built to be abandoned in the abandonment of reality, in which all the fears and madnesses and revulsions of the creatures who built it were made into stone. The demons had found it and delighted in it and called it their stronghold, though they did not know the secrets and hoarded experiments that their master hoarded there.

"We've come to a dead end," said Mohaim, pointing at the Eclipse fortifications. The camera lens zoomed in to show thousands of hurrying construction drones heaping the blackened earth in a great wall. "If we go on through the rift, we'll only come to fight at that demon-castle, but the only road to get there, land or sky, is that road that goes over the plain toward the enemy. We can't go back. We can't skirt around westward or eastward. We'd be in range of their gunnas either way."

"Then we must take the road," said Antarah. "We must take it and chance our luck, if there is any luck in Hell. We might as well give ourselves up than debate any more any more, or try to go back. Our morale won't last and they'll only get stronger. We've got to make a dash for it!"

"If I had known you'd give the Emperor such poor counsel, I'd have shot you myself!" said Brynn. "We can't fight like that, not even if we had twice our numbers. We'd be killed by their artillery and never known what struck us."

"And they need my relic," said Bronze, his hand curled into a fist under his chin. "They can't win without my relic."

"There is no time," said Cobalion, snorting out a chuff of glassy steam in his impatience. "The demons are routed and have followed the backtrail of their masters. We can enter the rift unhindered. If what I think is true, my words in the past about the Brick are useless."

"What is that supposed to mean?" said Lily.

"Hear me, I beg. We knew that the way to unmake this reality is to destabilize it at Beulah. I had thought that the Brick was a lost component of a lodestone or kind of marker, something the Djinn could use to make the junction of premodern and modern merge into a horribly destructive force. But it may not be needed for the Djinn. All he needs is the Temple. As Diamond knows, existence is an infinitely complex tapestry of realities, each neatly aligned above and below the other. But the Djinn's dark magic and corrupted science can fray the edges, and things might begin to leak through."

"How do you know this?" said Tess.

"I have seen it. Jonathan Cypress saw it, in the moment before his soul was cast into darkness. That vortex is the entrance and the thing preventing another reality from seeping into ours. The Djinn can exacerbate this; how, I don't know. Whatever operation or ritual he's planning, the borders will disappear entirely, and this world, just like all worlds that neighbor us, will become a pandaemonium of clashing realities competing for relevance over each other. This world will die. The Djinn's new world will die. They will feast on each other as they suffocate and then they will die. This is not a hypothetical; it is God's greatest fear and His warning to us."

Red paused, said presently, "You are certain of this?"

"Beyond any doubt."

"How long do we have before this occurs?" said Yellow. Tess marveled at how much older she looked. At Anthien giving her an age seemed like a facetious formality, so young and ethereal she had been, but now her biological age was turning from an indeterminate number in the early twenties to a definite year in the late.

"I couldn't tell. Perhaps a day or a week, depending on how the Djinn breaks the stabilizing influence of Beulah, though I have some theories. Arceus has kept quiet on that. But each tiny tear puts pressure on the whole system. They will continue to grow until the boundaries give way, and the moment the cascade begins the fate of creation is decided. It will be unmade, and it cannot be undone. Not for the dead, perhaps, not for all universes, but an incomprehensible loss of life will follow. The living will see a sky of nightmares before they die."

Before we die, thought Tess. How long before everything ended? And how would it end? Would they hear the vast rumble of those enormous slate-colored clouds as they fell? Would the sky tear open like a flimsy piece of cloth, spilling out the monstrosities that lived in the qlippoth darkness? Would there be time to cry out? Would there be an afterlife, or would even Heaven and Hell be obliterated by the fall of Beulah?

"So our way out is to kill every last one of them," said Ruby. "To stop them from destroying these realities."

"Are we capable of doing this?" said Crystal. "What is our way out?"

"We stand and fight, as we always have," said Bronze. "Many of you will lose your lives, but if Arceus is willing, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. None of us are so important that we cannot die for what we love. Our loved ones protected from the encroaching darkness, children free to live lives that do not end in horror. An end to your perpetual struggle, an end to darkness, the freedom to live in the light. It's what Logaria should stand for. When Order is enthroned at Atun-Kaah, things will be right over the sphere of Imbar."

"They'll destroy us if we enter," said Rombur. "I don't know of a single time in history where a numerically inferior force has successfully destroyed a larger one by charging over a fortified plain or river. It's a plan so insane it's excruciating to hear. We can't get it. There's no way across that I can see. And our fleet couldn't cross all that open country crawling with enemies, even if we did get halfway over the plain."

"We'll blind them," said Bronze. He looked at the clouds and saw how the horizon had darkened. "A storm is coming in its own time and pace. Bring me Lance of Kanto."

"Is he here?" said Yellow, suddenly losing the bend in her back. Her eyes flashed golden. "Where?"

"Hold your tongue, and I'll let you speak to him later," said Cobalion. "Better I go to him and Giovanni than any of you. He'll be able to—"

Before he could finish, a deep rumbling came from the earth. The camp suddenly began to rise and fall like a boat on a heavy sea. They could hear the tent supports groaning. From the army kitchen came the sound of rattling dishes like chattering teeth. Gabite raised its head and whined. Its sharklike face was comically startled. A radio microphone fell over and shattered.

For a moment the shaking intensified. A window shattered as its frame was twisted out of shape. There was a crump from another tent. Tess assumed correctly that it was the privy, now falling down into ruin completely. She was on her feet without realizing it. Bronze was standing beside Robert, gripping his wrist. Robert had drawn his gun and now they both stood as if ready to begin shooting and stabbing.

There was a final grumbling from deep in the earth, and then the ground settled under their feet. At certain key points in the world, people were standing still and looking around, dazed. In the streets of one Ectruteak City, a few car alarms were going off. The following day's papers would report a minor earthquake sidelined under the larger headlines: broken windows, no reported casualties: a little shake of the fundamentally sound bedrock. They would soon have larger things to report.

"It was an earthquake, wasn't it?" said Aaron. "I felt one in northern California once, but never since coming to the Calla."

"It was a hell of a lot more than an earthquake," said Gold, and pointed. Over in the eastern horizon was lit by silent artillery bursts of purple lightning. They were already diminishing, but Bronze knew that they were the same sort of thing they'd find in the Distortion World, and the Court of the Evil Djinn, and, at the end of his quest, the gateway room of the Temple itself.

"No," said Cobalion, "a first crack. The Djinn's meddling has caused part of our reality to snap, just let go."

Tess saw Yellow's face lose its color. She crossed herself. "A fracture? Harm in Beulah itself? Say no! Say not true!"

"I can't," Cobalion told her, "because it is."

"How many of these fractures can we withstand?" said Mohaim.

Cobalion shook his head. "All I know is that whatever bit of creation was annihilated, it wasn't on earth. If it had been, nothing within a hundred thousand miles of it would be standing." Or maybe within a million miles. Who could know? "The very birds would have fallen flaming from the sky."

"You speak of Armageddon," said Bronze in a low, troubled voice.

Cobalion shook his head, but not in disagreement. "I don't know that word, Bronze, but I'm speaking of great death and great destruction, sure. And somewhere, perhaps in the area connecting the dual star system of Lyra and Bega, that has now happened."

"Are you positive this is true?" asked Tess.

The god nodded. He turned to Bronze and sent a single thought, as clearly as he could, Lance is the one who needs to help us. He will give us the storm's wrath.

And one came back, filling his mind with cold comfort, thought comfort served cold was better than no comfort at all: If he can.