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Dawn trails behind Champion Cynthia, her steps slow and mind foggy. The battle with Cyrus stole away what little energy she had left after navigating the Distortion World, and now she’s on the verge of collapse. She glares daggers into the back of his head as he walks ahead of her, between herself and Cynthia and tied up with an escape rope she’d had in her bag. His feet are dragging, just like hers, but she can’t find any empathy within herself after what he’d put her through. His stupid plan to eradicate spirit—whatever that means—had almost gotten her killed at least twice; at Spear Pillar and during her fight with Giratina. He doesn’t deserve an ounce of sympathy.
Champion Cynthia seems to agree with her private assessment, since the woman has her Spiritomb out to push Cyrus forward whenever he slows down. If her Togekiss and Garchomp hadn’t been fainted in the fight, she probably would have just had one of them carry him, but this is the next-best solution. Dawn feels a bit of vindictive joy at that—he doesn’t deserve to get carried around after trying to end the world. Let him walk, just like the rest of them.
The edge of a platform suddenly comes into view in front of her, and she realizes she needs to jump to the next one. Cynthia and Cyrus are already two platforms ahead—the one she’s facing is tiny, just a stepping stone to get to the next big one. The prospect of forcing her aching legs to make two jumps in a row is miserable, and Dawn nearly groans out loud. Of course, her idol is standing a few feet in front of her, so the noise of protest is quickly stifled, before it can make her look like a whiny baby. She’s fourteen, not a kid, and she needs to remember that.
Fixing her eyes on her belt of pokéballs tucked away in Cynthia’s bag—the strap had gotten caught on something and broken during her panicked dodging, and since her whole team is fainted anyways, Cynthia offered to carry them—Dawn steels herself. She takes a deep breath in, exhales, and tries to summon up another bout of adrenaline to give her the energy she needs. After the day she’s had, though, she’s fresh out. That’s fine though, she can handle it. She has been handling it this whole time. It’s just two more jumps.
Dawn forces her legs to bend, then straighten, sending her forward and onto the the tiny platform separating her from the people waiting on her. Her legs meet the tough dirt—but they don’t. They keep going, through earth that fades as she watches, shimmering out of existence just a moment before she lands on it. She meets two pairs of horrified eyes—even Cyrus seems shocked, the most emotion he’s shown this whole time—before her view of them is replaced by the dirt fading back into view above her head.
She falls.
It’s terrifying for the first few minutes, the same kind of adrenaline rush you get when a rollercoaster crests a hill and starts to dive. She’d thought, before, that she had no energy left, but clearly it was just waiting for even more extreme circumstances to present themselves. The string of islands she’d traveled across grow smaller and smaller above her, before vanishing entirely. They disappear all at once, like a glitch on a television screen, there one frame and gone the next. Much later, she wonders, briefly, if they were ever there at all.
Wherever the islands go, nothing emerges to take their place. It’s as if the entire world was made up of that single string of rocks, bordered by an acidic purple sky. It surrounds her now, uniform aside from the splashes of a darker shade that ripple across the farthest horizon. There’s nothing else above or below, nor to the left or right, in front of or behind her. As she shifts around to look, though, twisting and contorting desperately in midair, even those concepts fizzle out. What was her left is her right now, and then it’s behind her, and as she flips over in midair, it’s suddenly below. She couldn’t orient herself towards those islands anymore, even if she tried.
After a while, she realizes that if she were to land somewhere, the force she’s built up by now would kill her. That idea chases away the adrenaline, the thrill of desperate need for action thwarted by the sudden rationalization that there’s nothing she can do to prevent this. It drains out of her, the ether leeching it out from where it clings to her skin. The sky wraps around her in a toxic facsimile of comfort, a shadow of a hug from someone she’d never want to imagine in this situation. It’s Barry, first. She can almost hear his voice echoing in her ears, gleefully fining her a million pokédollars for being late to…somewhere. She’s probably more than late, at this point. She must have been falling for hours.
The blonde hair she can almost see in the corner of her eye shifts, and suddenly it’s Cynthia’s arms around her, praising her for doing such a good job. Praising her for being such a good battler. Welcoming her into the Hall of Fame, where her picture will hang alongside every other Champion of Sinnoh. She doesn’t remember why she wanted it so badly. An arbitrary title, with more responsibilities than benefits. The Cynthia her mind has conjured up has dark circles under her eyes, and her pokémon turn to her with worried coos as soon as the fight ends. They spirit her away, to somewhere nicer.
She’s alone again, after that. She spends a long time with only dread for company, the black shroud of death wrapped around her shoulders and offering her no warmth. She can’t feel herself falling anymore. Does that mean she’s dead? People always say they want a painless death, but the question of whether or not it’s over feels worse than the agony could ever be. But the dread is still there, lurking in the shadows she can’t cast across the violet skies, and surely it would have vanished if the fear that sustained it had come to fruition. She’s alive then. For now.
The sky remains unchanging. With no sun or moon to mark the passage of time, it undulates and swirls, crossing back and forth over itself. It passes, then turns back, then treads the same path it’d just abandoned. The world is empty.
Even the dread fades, eventually. Nothing replaces it. There’s a hollowed-out space inside her, where emotion once made its home. It’s abandoned now, and the loss aches in a way that’s nearly a replacement. She clings to that ache, pulls it into herself and lets it spread through her body to bring feeling back to the limbs she’d forgotten she had. Emotion is important, she knows. Spirit is important. She can’t let it be taken away. But as it rushes through her stagnant blood and pushes itself against the confines of her skin, the ether pulls it out of her. It worms its way free of her confining form, escaping bit by bit. She doesn’t notice until it’s gone.
Loneliness tries to settle into the hollow in her chest, but the space has shifted and torn in its disuse, and nothing fits it anymore. It pushes and pulls, trying to force itself into the empty space, but when that fails, it only digs its claws in harder. Urged on by the looming purple sky, it grasps her desperately, and as its grip begins to slip, memories tear away with it. The flashes of a green scarf and black jacket melt together and slip away, phantom arms locked into a cage around her as the pieces of her mind drip out of the hollow in her chest. It’s a slow, measured form of torture, and the more she clings to a name or an experience, the quicker it dissolves into a corrosive violet acid that eats away at what’s left of her insides.
The poison tears through her body, seething and writhing, forcing its way into every part of her form. Once it’s hollowed her out, some indeterminable amount of time earlier or later, it slithers out of her through that same empty hollow, leaving behind a shell of a person.
The dread, the last thread of emotion, is long gone by now, fear of loss torn away with everything there was to lose. Without it, there is nothing but the stagnant purple skies left. They press in on every side, all that remains of anything. Everything is still.
The stillness persists. She is here, but not really. The skies surround her always, all there is, and eventually, she loses her awareness of them. There are the skies, and there is nothing.
Nothingness remains forever, until something appears. Shadow, blotting out the purple skies, even though there is nothing to cast a shadow of or on. And within the shadow, glowing eyes. They’re brighter than the skies, blinding, and she shies away from the pain instinctively despite having no instinct left.
A mournful croon from the shadow, reverberating around her. It shakes and echoes through her limbs—because she has limbs again, has a body, can feel it trembling at the shadow. It stares back at her, with the same glaring, blinding eyes, and when she turns away from it, it lets out the same rumbling keen.
She can tell, somehow, that the shadow is not harmful. She still doesn’t like it. It must understand her fear, because the eyes retreat into the shadow, and the shadow folds in on itself, and for a moment, there is nothing but the sky again. The part of her that had forgotten how to feel begins to ache again.
Then, spreading from the place where the shadow used to be, comes a blinding light. It lances through the purple skies, even brighter than the shadow’s eyes, and sheds cracks around her, all widening and spreading and splitting until the skies are gone and there is only the blinding light. It tears at her eyes and her skin, the way the purple used to when there were still parts of her to tear, and she closes her eyes and curls tighter in on herself. She can still see it through her eyelids, an all-encompassing glow, until it fades.
It doesn’t vanish entirely. It settles into pinpricks of unbearable glow, speckled across a sky that looks almost like the purple skies should, but a deeper, foreign color. This sky isn’t uniform, dark splotches covering it and small, light particles drifting downwards from them. The tiny pieces of sky, each a more muted version of the light-specks dotting the not-purple skies above her, fall and meet the bigger whiteness lying in an undisturbed circle around her. There are other things outside her circle—conical structures jutting spiked tops into the foreign sky, and smaller figures between them, unmoving for the moment—but none of them are as ever-present as the tiny pieces of sky.
She extends a hand from the body holding her together, and a sky-piece falls on it. When she draws the hand, and the sky-piece, towards herself, it reveals itself to be a collection of fractals, endlessly spiraling outward. Unbidden, a word pulls itself free from the depths of the purple still lingering in the empty spaces of her shattered mind.
Snow.