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In the cloudless dark, a wispy band of green climbs towards the farther heavens, a meandering river of light writhing in languid curves. The aurora dances while the tundra stands still and silent, stretched beneath the night like a great white funeral shroud. Irida watches, transfixed, a little girl again with her mother's hand warm and weathered over hers, her voice pouring like soft silt over words she no longer remembers.
Beside her, Ingo's moonlight eyes carve haloes into the dark as he watches unwaveringly outward across the slopes cascading down to the sea. He is sick, she knows. He has been for some time.
So she stays beside him, wordless, understanding that this chance to share in his space is a blessing not to be neglected.
Words that carry Calaba's voice, strict and pragmatic in the way she had to be, remind Irida that this has always been inevitable. 'We will do what we can for him, but you must not forget that we are made for this space the Almighty Sinnoh has granted us, and he is not. There will come a day, perhaps very soon, where his body must choose whether he will survive here.'
She had not believed her healer then, far younger and naively, optimistically elated that their stranger favored by the Lady Sneasler had made the scant recovery he had. He had been so thin and pale that his survival seemed a miracle meant to denote his divine-sent status. And in the days, then months that followed, she blamed his struggles to adapt to the land that had claimed him on his amnesia. So she thought that duties as a warden would keep his idle, emptied-out life occupied, away from the lingering lethargy that she would call longing.
Ingo, unexpectedly, evokes that once-assumed longing now, so awfully quiet as he says, "When I first witnessed these lights, in what seems a lifetime ago now, I felt I recognized them. In that moment, I thought I had been mistaken all along, that I was not as lost as I felt so certain I had to be. It wasn't until much later that I realized I had switched tracks, confusing these lights for the sheets of summer lightning that would brighten the skies above my former home. Altogether dissimilar phenomena, I realize now, but I suppose I would have interpreted any detached impression of familiarity for some manner of truth, at the time."
She forgets that he had been young, too. If their estimates are to be trusted, based on the piecemeal history that he has recovered in the decade since, she is older now than he was when he arrived. It is impossible to fathom herself in his position. She wonders if she were transported by some power--as they had known for years now it had not been the mighty Palkia who delivered him to them--to the world he had come from, would his people welcome her as they had him? In her imagination, his kin and kind are all like him, patient and thoughtful, diligent and generous. It's a childish thought, perhaps, but one that has stuck. What else explains the man that had so readily dedicated himself to a clan of strangers, when he knows they would never hold him hostage to a life debt?
Then, if she follows that rationale to the notion of Ingo as a part of a community that fostered the person she so admires, how can she accept that he is never meant to reunite with them? But they had long abandoned the notion as a hopeless endeavor, after Akari had vanished. Ingo had not been discouraged, because Ingo only ever accepted his fate with his endless well of good faith. His home was with the Pearl Clan, he had assured her, as much as the world he came from had once been.
So they would have to love him enough for two worlds. And they had, hadn't they? They had.
And now Ingo is dying.
To him she says, not for the first time, "Tell me more."
He chuckles, which collapses into a fit of coughing that she feels the phantom pains of in her own lungs. Unable to watch him suffer and incapable of doing anything to help him, she glances again to the sky overhead, to the stars that flicker behind the meandering band of green light, and she wonders if there is an answer somewhere in the great expanse there. If she could grasp starlight in her fragile, human hands, would she have the power to change what is written in their constellations?
It is Lina's words now that remind her of what she's always known, back before Irida was chosen and Lina was not, when the duties of a leader were hypotheticals wielded as blunt instruments in their efforts to surpass one another. 'When our people die, when they starve and freeze and fall ill, one of us will be responsible. There will be no escape from that, no alternative. There will be deaths we can't prevent, and deaths that we should have and failed to. Will we know the difference? Will it matter? Can you face that, Irida, knowing that sometimes your choices will be the cause and sometimes nothing you can do will make a difference?'
This isn't her first vigil. If it is meant to get easier, it has not yet, no matter how desperately she steels herself. In truth, she doesn't want it to, if it means she will find herself numb in these moments, where Palkia's benevolence grants them this gift here at the end. Plenty others had died beyond their reach. There is peace to be found alone in the great expanse, she knows, but hasn't Ingo had solitude enough in the Highlands?
The thought hadn't stopped her from trying to send him back, once she had recognized the blue that had seeped under his skin and the rattling rasp he tried to subdue with each breath. When he resisted, she had suggested and then ordered a season with Lina at the Coastlands, or a visit to the Galaxy Team's new settlement on Sandgem Flats, insisting that his skill, his track record, his accumulated goodwill was needed in an attempt to cover her increasing urgency. It had been the only time he refused her.
Now, obedience finds him again, she supposes, and he does as she asks once the coughing subsides. "My home stood at the edge of a vast desert, and I can recall that my people lived in towers of stone and brick, from atop of which one could look out over the wide flats of sand towards the seas to the east and west. In those few images I can draw to mind, there is always an ambient light pulling a haze over the night sky, but still I can see the eastern sky over the sea, faraway as it was, alive with light. It carries these impressions of oranges, purples, and sheer, blinding white, the last evening heat warm against my skin, and a longing I cannot place.
"I remember canals that ran along the length of wide roads, and the sheen of red and green lights reflected off pavement in the summer rain. I can imagine the rumble of thunder low and distant below the thrum of so much life always around me, and the roar of great machines like thunder, too, but calling from underneath my feet. But I cannot see, in my memories, the infinite sprawl of the stars above me, or the heat of a hearth welcoming me in from the cold, or the taste of spring's first harvest. Somehow, I think, I yearned for these things, even in a world where they were not. I cannot say why."
He begins to cough again, spent. At last, she settles down beside him. The snow is sharp where her skin is bare, and the cold grounds her, but bundled as he is in his old, tattered coat she knows that he must feel the chill in the ways she never had, where what makes her feel alive, present, saps his strength to leave him frail and withdrawn. But the aurora is so rare, always fleeting, that she cannot deny him the sight.
Instead, she joins him in silence, until all the words she will not say grow unbearable, heavy in her chest.
So she finds her flute and says, "There is a ballad, you know," she says, tentative, "about the aurora’s journey through the far constellations to visit us here. Would you like to hear it? The melody, that is."
"It is always an honor to listen to you play."
The flute is cold on her lips and the first notes warble as she climbs to a sharp to set the key, finding confidence as the opening movement resolves and falls into the tender, yearning melody that she remembers first practicing on a quiet night under softly falling snow. To the best of her ability--which in this, at least, is not lacking--she carries each tone into the next in sweeping phrases, leaping bounds with delicate, rolling flourishes, meaning to mimic the ribbon of light reeling on the horizon.
It is not a lament, it does not sing out with loss and longing and want, but still there is something like mourning underneath its sweeping motions. The aurora does not last, and its travels here are few and far between. The space they share is impermanent by a divine design they cannot comprehend, and though it will always return to them, any parting may be a last time. Yet it is the beauty of this impermanence that the melody lingers on, its swelling crescendos as beautiful as they are brief. When the last, soft notes disperse into the air, they seem to ask, 'Isn't it wonderful to say goodbye, if it means our paths once crossed in the great expanse of creation?'
"Bravo," Ingo rasps, voice barely there, and Irida wants to weep.
You are like a brother to me, she wants to say. You’re too young, still, to die, so I will not allow it. Will you refuse me again?
Won't you stay? This is not how it was meant to go. You were supposed to remember, and I was supposed to ask you, just once, to remain here, with us. We both would have known I would not keep you, but you wouldn’t begrudge my asking. I was meant to let you go, so that I could imagine you happy.
I was meant to imagine you happy, Ingo. Didn't you dream it, too? Don't you know that this is not how it is supposed to end?
But she can’t be so cruel. She lays her hands atop her knees, clutching the flute with force enough that her fingers tremble, and says, "Is there anything we can do for you?"
He looks to her then, tearing his gaze finally from the horizon, and something changes in him. A wild, certain earnestness overtakes the resignation that has stolen so much of the light from his eyes, the muted vacancy of his presence suddenly alive with the intensity she remembers. The difference stuns her, rendering the dying man beside her into someone from a memory.
"I would ask something of you," he says, and the life in his eyes doesn’t quite reach his voice, but he manages, this once, not to drop into another coughing fit. "But I don't know whether it is within my rights to request such things."
She hesitates. And she doesn't mean to, but left to imagine what Ingo could possibly think is beyond her willingness to provide, she wonders whether he holds himself at an arm's length from the Clan, even now. The thought must show as doubt on her face, because Ingo sags in a deteriorative instant, folding in on himself to hack into a balled fist.
"Anything," she insists at once, not waiting for the fit to subside and whatever doubt he may now feel to take root. "Ingo, please, you only have to say the word. What do you need?"
When, eventually, he recovers, he hums a low acknowledgement and stares at his hands, folded in his lap. Silence stretches between them, thin and taut like drawn wire, and she does not press even as guilt gathers, thick, in her throat. The lights in the sky begin to wane, the last brilliant lashes of green winding overhead before fading back into the night. She lifts her hand as it departs, feeling the cold air rush between her fingers, and welcomes the farther stars as they reemerge in the dark distance.
Then, with a rattling breath, Ingo turns towards her again. "I am not afraid to die. I have lived a life, here, that I am proud of. I have done my duty to you, to my Lady, to our clan. The routes through the Highlands are safer than ever before. I have conducted battles like those I remember, and have seen how relations with Pokemon have flourished as a result of new partnerships forged. I believe that, even as I cannot know for certain, I have honored the person I was before my arrival here, as much as I have strived to honor our clan for your kindness and generosity."
You do not have to prove yourself worthy, if that's what this is. You already are.
Irida stays silent.
"Death is but another destination, however remote, and while I am sad to find myself at the end of the line, I do not fear my last stop. But--"
He cuts off, not to cough but to draw himself inward, cupping his hands over his face. She can see the wisps of his breath white in air, seeping between his fingers and evaporating into the dark.
"But I find myself haunted," he whispers, hoarse, into his hands, "by the thought of my grave."
She stills, and feels abruptly scrutinized in the light of his eyes. There is the realization, sour in her stomach, that she had never considered that he might know his own customs, when it comes to this. When she could bear to imagine it, the plan had been a given, and he would be buried under their rites at the grounds near the Heart's Crag, as any member of the Pearl Clan would be. And she can't help how her heart rebels at the thought of anything but.
If Ingo notices her reservations on her face, this time he is undeterred. "I am…seized with this certainty that I am not meant to rest, forever, in the cold. The certainty, rather, that I cannot--I will not--you must understand me, I would not ask this of you otherwise, but I fear what's left of me, this part of me that will not rest, will delay here long after I have departed. I don’t want that. Not for you. Not for me.”
Irida thinks of the stories of lingering spirits attracting ghosts for the promise of a meal, of spirits with strong enough tethers to whatever keeps them to become ghosts themselves, of family rendered so unrecognizable and wild that they become something--some one entirely new, often vicious and always hungry. And she thinks of Ingo, who had once opened, for the first time, eyes that glowed with a hollow, haunted light, and rumors spread that something possessed him out in the wastes, wearing his body to use their compassion as an opportunity. She had fought for him then, unwilling to let one of her first acts as a leader be to turn away a stranger to die.
Now it is as if he is asking her to turn her back on him, after all this time.
"Oh, Ingo," she whispers, finding his hand and slotting it in hers. He looks away.
"So I would ask that you burn me, after. Knowing that--It would do a great deal to put my mind at ease. But know that I understand if you cannot."
There are reasons she could conjure. The resources expended in labor and lumber, for one. The curious Pokemon that would be attracted to the warmth, and the disapproval of those among them already wary of how many traditions had transformed in the years since Palkia had been revealed to them and the accord with the Diamond Clan that followed. Would there be those from Jubilife, Ingo's former students and his friends still, that would want to attend his rites? What message would a pyre send? Would the Lady Sneasler understand his wishes and not see this as a choice to single out her beloved warden, who she had chosen first?
But his hand is cold in hers, and his weathered fingers shake with fatigue or emotion or both. There is no version of this where she denies him anything. In a fairer world, a kinder one, where he had the blessing of a long life and a life remembered? Then, well, she wouldn't have been asked to make this choice to begin with.
It is not that world. The decision is hers. She knows he will not ask again.
So she says, "Okay. Okay. You don’t need to worry anymore, Ingo. I promise.”
Her words fog in the winter air, rising to dissolve into the night, and there is nothing left to say. So there they sit, hand in hand, unwilling to linger on what's to come and not yet ready to let the moment end. When it passes, as she knows it must, she hopes that it will go fondly, and Ingo can forgive her if she holds on too tight, too long, to what she has been given. He was never meant to be here, she knows, but what luck that he is, so she can sit here by his side.
Ingo dies a month later. It is quiet, as he was never, and after long days spent watching the healers tend to his increasing delirium, his long-unspoken language spilling hoarse from dry lips, Irida hates herself for the instant of relief that arises, unbidden and unwanted. The feeling passes, but the thought of it sits with her, and she excuses herself at the earliest opportunity to stand knee deep in the snow at the far side of the Temple to sob herself breathless.
Then, as always, she gathers her composure and reemerges a leader again.
With the warning they had, the preparations are brief. The community swells with the rare presence of all her wardens, and travelers from Jubilife and its settlements arrive with haste on the wings of flying Pokemon in the style of Lord Braviary, to the evident, if subdued, notice of her people. Even Diamond sends Warden Melli, accompanied by none other than Adaman, out of not only respect but in genuine mourning.
Gaeric and Lian--and, mighty Palkia, he's grown--build the pyre at the foot of Lake Acuity's falls. There, Lady Sneasler descends from the glacier terrace to watch their progress, silent and impassive as her presence deters nearby Pokemon from approaching to investigate. It is quiet work, and Irida does little more than silently monitor their progress between welcoming visitors and presiding over the last efforts for the ceremony.
By the turn of evening, it begins to snow. A meal shared, rites performed, and stories of Ingo's life in Hisui recollected, it comes time to carry him to the shores of the river where his pyre waits.
A peaked structure of timber lies under Lady Sneasler's vigilant watch. It stands still and dry in the snowfall that carries thick in the eastward wind by the time their procession arrives, flanked as it is by great plinths of stone called up by Ingo's Gligar, who hovers with the rest of his team at the riverbank. Irida does not know what to make of their distance, when the departed's companion Pokemon traditionally take an honored seat in the funerary celebrations alongside other close family. And the Lady had not been so remote at her last warden's funeral, and not for any lack of care between them. It seems to Irida that the Pokemon refuse either to mourn with them or to mourn outright, and this stark separation between them cuts through the somber quiet of the gathered, whispers rising from the back.
Irida ignores this, bowing her head in muted deference to the Lady before casting her arm toward the pyre, sending the bearers forward. Snowflakes melt as they land on her forearm, and she steadies her focus on the ends of her fingertips where they meet the current of falling snow. In the blur of her peripherals, a body is hoisted into the hollow made in the base of the timber and fuel. A perfect snowflake catches the edge of her fingernail and perches there, crystalline and ephemeral.
Without needing instructions, Flareon pads forward, brushing soft, warm fur against her leg as he approaches the pyre, knowing his part. The heat gathering in his body lifts the snowdrift into plumes of steam and coaxes others to follow, Lord Arcanine's kin, Melli's Skuntank, and the Typhlosion that once belonged to Akari all joining his approach.
Here, Irida turns away.
The sky is shrouded in a wash of gray and white, dark clouds like a smear of spilled ink pooling eastward over the horizon. When it catches, the wood splintering at heat's touch, a flood of warmth billows outwards as the flames surge with sound. Guarded by Gligar's stone shields, the pyre burns like a great furnace, smoke pouring, distant, into her field of vision as she keeps her eyes fixed on the horizon.
There are words caught in her throat, buried as they were beneath the speeches she made for Ingo. The absence of tradition, here, leaves her hands idle, wanting for grave dirt to toss and offerings to lay to rest. They aren't meant to linger, to wait and watch, but Ingo has given them no choice and she had promised , knowing what he asked. It is unfair all the same, to part like this, unable to watch him go.
But it's not about her, is it?
But these things aren't so simple, and all she wants for Ingo is peace. Rest.
Flames lick at the far corner of her sight, a red glow bright in the otherwise gray foreground beneath the spilling tide of storm clouds swarming above Acuity's falls. Smoke mingles with the snow, acrid and heavy, but the air only smells of ozone. The pyre roars like something alive, timber snapping, crackling, like something ancient and giant standing vertebrae-by-vertebrae to its full height.
Rest, reiterates the voice in her head, less a wish and more a command. Then, desperate and uncertain: Rest, please.
Murmurs gather nervous in the crowd behind her as the fire spits and hisses, and she knows this has gone wrong, it had been wrong from the beginning, but she is rooted to the spot, fixated on the darkening sky overhead. Fur, both warm and frigid, brushes against both her legs, and she feels her own hairs stand on end in time with her companions’ raised hackles. In the distance, sheets of light flash in layers between the mass of clouds piling ever closer towards them. Thunder follows, low and distant, but it is as if the flames themselves answer with a rush of fire gusting upwards, heat yearning towards them in waves enough to stagger her, stinging at the skin of her cheeks. The slabs of stone--presumably, for she still refuses to look--groan, crack, and then crumble, the ground beneath her feet stuttering with the force of their fall.
The pyre will go out, she realizes, a little inanely, as someone's hand wraps around her bicep and hauls her back.
Legs caught, clumsy, in the snow drift, she goes to look over her shoulders and catches instead a brief sight of the flames, red and orange and too bright, too high for the fuel they laid there and the dense, heavy snowfall. Two hands--Lina's, she knows--hold her by the shoulders before her tangled legs can pull her to the ground. And Lina is saying something, low and frantic, but Irida is certain in that moment that something made of shadow and dark at the heart of the fire moves and cannot hear anything other than the rush of blood in her head, roaring like flame.
All at once, the sky ruptures as a knife of void-light shunts into pyre's peak, two jagged flashes of blinding white searing into her vision and sending her reeling backward. Thunder crashes an instant later, its echo reverberating in her clenched teeth. She buries her hands into Lina's tunic and her face into her shoulder, the skin on the back of her exposed neck rising with static bumps that climb down her spine.
For a moment, all Irida can hear is her own breathing, rapid and reedy, and the immediate, incessant drone of her thoughts insisting that she pull herself together. When the rest emerges, it folds in on itself in layers, the hiss of a fire refusing to die within the crackle of a persistent static current within the mass murmur of voices in various stages of realization and dread.
One voice--Rei, she thinks, from Jubilife--cuts across the noise, fear and uncertainty cleaving two syllables into distinct, broken halves: "Ingo?"
Irida, with short, stunted breaths failing to reach her lungs, drags her lip fitfully between her teeth and wonders if she can be brave.
For Ingo? Her first warden? Her first real judgment call?
Her friend?
She must. She will.
Rising to her feet, Irida brushes the snow from her clothes and casts a glance first across the gathered, satisfied as an anticipatory silence falls amongst them.
Only then does she turn, expecting a spirit or something there to haunt them, but finds instead Ingo, solid and real and haloed with white-hot electricity coiling around his arms, his neck, his fingers. The clothes they dressed him in this morning are only half-burned, glowing with edges of red-gold embers, and where the sleeves of his well-worn, scorched jacket reveal the lengths of his arms, patches of the skin there are coated black with what appears, at first, to be deep burns that flicker with static in a pattern reminiscent of the overlapping of angular scales.
There he stands in the heart of the flames, his face cast in shadows except for the familiar glint of his eyes, silver with irises that now run blood red, reflecting the firelight. With one hand extended, the fire licks at his charged fingertips, and he regards them almost impassively as they catch alight.
When he speaks, he addresses the fire burning his hand, and his voice is layered, their language over top the language he used to speak over top something deep and resounding that she does not recognize, and she can only catch the words, "I remember you."
Irida ventures forward, freeing her arm from Lina's grip. "Ingo?"
She isn’t expecting his attention, and his resultant stare bears down on her like the sights of an alpha. And then he softens, imperceptibly and then all at once, still circled with electric discharge and alight with the fire of his own funeral pyre but smiling with the same, soft smile of her dear friend.
Hope floats in her chest and she knows not to trust it, but knowing is no match for the full force of her belief. Would she be the only one to call this a miracle? Perhaps. But it wouldn’t be the first time. He never should have survived his first night.
He steps forward, steaming, into the snow, extinguishing his fingers with an absentminded wave of his hand. This time, as he speaks, his layered voice is clearer now that she knows who to listen for, " Ingo. Yes, that is one of my names. He is not all I am, as I am also the Hero’s Dragon, the Deep Black One, Idealbearer, Zekrom . " He pauses, thoughtful, to take a slow, heavy breath, force enough to displace the snow and smoke swirling in the air around him. " But I am Ingo. I have been derailed long enough."
The fire finally dwindles in his absence, and the pyre collapses into itself with a final hiss, leaving them in a dark lit only by the light arcing off Ingo's unburned skin. He watches her, at once foreign and familiar, his eyes bright and keen and lucid, and Irida wonders if this is who Ingo has always been or if dying had awoken something inside of him. And with three voices, the thing that Ingo was, is, and has become turns to the southern horizon, Coronet looming in the distance, and says, "And I am going to find the truth."