The Third Birth of Giratina (ca. 2650 BC)

Rij awoke with a fragmented mind.

He knew not that he was a ghost, or even that he was once human. He only knew that he was a dragon, and that he had awoken from a terrible night of bloodshed and pain.

I have amassed knowledge regarding a great many things, but ghosts continue to elude me. As all psychics do, I struggle to read the minds of both ghosts (the spirits of the dead who linger in the mortal plane) and dark-types (living creatures who possess the ability to shield their minds from onlookers). Thus, I will provide what information I have gleaned from my limited interactions with ghosts, and with my conversations with Giratina himself.

When a creature dies, its spirit is presented with two paths. It may ascend to the afterlife, of which I have no knowledge; or it may remain on Earth, disembodied, neither dead nor alive. I do not know whether Rij's spirit had intentionally chosen to remain on Earth, or whether the choice was made for him. But his spirit stayed, and became a ghost.

Now, once a ghost exists, its time is limited. Disembodied spirits are frail, and will soon pass on to the afterlife - unless they possess a host.

When a ghost possesses a host, it is "reborn." It takes on that host's body and mind, and coupled with its own spiritual energy, it becomes quite a bit more powerful than it was in its mortal life. Reborn ghosts are truly frightening to behold, difficult to defeat, and extremely long-lived. I have even heard of reborn who have lived up to five hundred years before their final death. Though, the average lifespan of a reborn seems to be nearly two centuries.

I have had many a close encounter with a ghost, attempting strenuously to read its mind, only to suffer a brutal attack and retreat with only major wounds to show for it. However, I have divined enough to know this: most ghosts, when reborn, completely forget their former lives. They take on the memories of their hosts, and those memories become their own. Thus, Rij became the dragon in both body and mind. His human memories were only a confused blur of faces and sounds. The only truly human thing left of him was his intelligence. But the dragon's memories were forever his.

The dragon remembered that a pack of human men had dismembered his parents and siblings. Blood had pooled upon the rocky undergrowth, making him sick with fury. He remembered a small human striking at him, and pain seizing his body like death. His memories ended there, but he now felt more alive than he ever had… and hungry for revenge.

Propelled by rage, the dragon burst into the human settlement and killed several men before he was chased off. As all reborn are, he was much more powerful than his original host had been. In addition, ghosts seem to have the uncanny ability to attack not just a living being's body, but to cut right to their spirit. If a ghost is well-practiced enough in their craft, they can inflict almost instant death.

And so it was with Rij - or, he who was once Rij. He became the terror of the land, the devil of folk stories used to scare children out of wandering too far from home. The humans attempted to appease him with sacrifices, which amused him somewhat. However, his fury towards humans remained. Any human who strayed too close to him would meet their demise.

After decades or perhaps centuries, the dragon could not help but be impressed by the humans' persistence in trying to kill him, as well as the other deadly species of the Indian subcontinent, despite their pitiful lack of natural defenses. He invisibly ventured farther into the human cities of ancient India, curious as to what made them so insistent upon survival.

What he saw while invisible both disgusted and surprised him. Humans were not only keen upon killing other animals, but killing each other. They were perpetually locked in wars between factions and kingdoms, never content with their current borders, always hungry for more. As he thought about it, he realized that humans were not so different from dragons, in a way. They did not possess claw or wing, but they had what all dragons had: ambition.

One of the most successful civilizations of humans lived along the Indus River, near modern-day Pakistan. The ghost-dragon found himself attracted to their kingdom of bronze, copper and gold. He admired their architecture and weapons, though their inventions of metal could not hope to hold up against his own destructive power. He watched them for many years until he discovered something rather peculiar: their ritual burials.

Whenever he, another creature, or the creeping of time, killed one of the humans, their families would mourn and bury them in a cemetery filled with flowers and statues. They not only honored their dead, but worshipped them. Their likenesses would be carved into metal, and songs sung about them for years to come.

It puzzled Giratina. Why mourn the dead, when their spirits so often lived on as ghosts? Of course, those spirits would go on to either pass into the next dimension or to possess the body of an unsuspecting pokemon - either way, those spirits would never be human again - but in the dragon's eyes, there was no true death. There was only the passing on to another form, as he had experienced after dying at the hands of a human boy. Another birth, another life.

He had not yet realized that he himself was that boy, of course.

At the crown of one of the humans' largest cemeteries lay the Girasol. This was a small, but powerful opal that shone pale gold with the image of a red fire flickering at its center. It was embedded in the face of a mountain above their cemetery, untouchable due to the heat that radiated from it. At noonday, it was pale gold, almost white; at dusk, it exploded in orange fire and blood red; at night, it pulsed with the blackness of death. The face of the mountain had melted into platinum metal around it; distorted by its power and heat.

All who touched it, died instantly - just as with the other shards of Arceus' cradle. The Indus civilization believed that this stone had been sent by the gods, as a way to guide their spirits home to heaven after death. The ghost-dragon did not know this, of course, but he knew this stone was special, and housed more power than any human or creature could ever possess. And, as one might have predicted, on one fateful day, he reached out and touched it.

This stone was one of the most powerful remnants of Arceus's meteor: the stone of antimatter. Within its crystallized structures was held a power that baffles physicists to this day. It enveloped Giratina immediately and tore the atoms of his body apart.

His soul was shocked by searing pain, and as his mind began to fray into death, he held stubbornly to his own consciousness and willed himself to live. Only a ghost could have survived the power of this stone for even three seconds, and only the most determined one of all could have survived through the culmination of its metamorphosis. The stone transformed his mind first, opening his eyes to the swirling mess of antimatter that swam between the atoms and molecules of his native dimension. As his bewildered mind attempted to make sense of it, he then remembered who he was… and willed himself back into existence.

His dragonesque body reappeared, stronger and larger than before, as the godly power coursed through his bloodstream. His new Altered Forme possessed wings as large as roofs that blotted out the light of the sun, and thick muscular legs that could crush stone. He lay motionless for an unknowable amount of time, but when he fully woke, Giratina knew immediately that he had become a god.