They arrive as the sun is highest in the sky, following Bataille as he guides them through the shifting unfamiliar streets of a village rapidly turning into a city. One made for intrepid open minded folk seeking harder better times.
Nearly everyone in the village, man or monster, approaches with a nervous insecure need to help at the slightest glimpse of Merle’s misfortune. Bataille and Usmar intercept the good samaritans before a crowd starts forming, beckoning the villagers to find the mayor.
For better or worse, Merle is acquainted with the pain now. His eyes still water at the torture of being moved, but his mind can finally form mostly-coherent thoughts again.
And as they pass across the burgeoning, rug-market bazaar, Merle just sits and gawks in an everpresent haze of pain.
Not the monsters themselves, he’d seen his share of those in the army, but just the sheer number of them. How they move freely without cages, leashes, or whips. How the people here, outnumbered two-to-one, work with neighborly grace alongside some of the fiercest faces born to nature. Even the smallest of children can be seen playing totally unsupervised around them, rolling around the grass and wrestling with hatchling predatory beasts.
A strange, surly-looking abomination rumbles with the sound of boulders swimming through the sand. Its bright bloodshot eye catches his gaze for a moment then rolls forward with a powdery snort and footsteps he can feel through the wheels.
He gasps in surprise, wincing as his splint shifts an inch and Ulphia pats him on the shoulder with a tisk.
“We meant to prepare you a little more.” Ulphia waves at the weaver family, the bakers, the fearow messenger flock, and a group of hunters from the southeastern pyroar pride. “No one will hurt you here.”
“Well, so long as you don’t deserve it,” Odétte pipes in. “Remember that flogging last year?! Tangrowth sure are made for lashing people.”
Ulphia shoves Odétte’s face away. “Ignore her, she’s—”
“OH MY SWEET, SWEET DEARS!” Estelle’s motherly mental voice wraps their minds like a warm hug as she brushes groups of bystanders aside, sweeping the streets clean with an authoritative stride. “The night patrols told me everything! Just awful!”
“Bataille, take them to Gretta; Louka should be up from his nap by now,” she instructs, “we’ll take the other wagon from here.”
The vixen leaps like a leaf carried in a breeze and lands her paws down inside the wagon with a couple of tiny effeminate paps. “Oh, honey, you must be absolutely miserable!”
Orbs of purple flame crack to life with a tiny snap of her claws. Illuminating her long vulpine muzzle in a spooky, violet, campfire light. “Let me take the edge off for you, darling.”
“D-Delphox!” Merle yelps at the sight and scoots the other way.
“Get’chr butt back here.” Ulphia grabs the boy by the scruff of his cloak and seats him where he started. “Apologies, Sister, it’s his first visit.”
Estelle claps her paws together and an unlit oil lantern flashes back to life with brilliant indigo flames. “And what a terrible first impression!”
The fairest fox in Shaymin’s Pass smiles with her hand in her fluff like she means to draw blades and showers them all in the pretty pink petals shed from a tiny cherry-blossom wand. “Allow me to be the first to welcome you to Shaymin’s Pass. Any friend of Ulphia’s kin is a friend of ours.”
Merle stares back with eyes of frosted glass and a mouth hanging wide in mystified surprise. “I had no idea that monsters could talk,” he hisses aside, as if he didn’t know that she can hear his tired beating heart just as well as his thoughts.
“They all can, just not like us,” Ulphia lectures. “Monsters of the mind can sometimes break that rule.”
”T-thank you very much, ah…” He scratches his chin for a moment before adding. “...Maaadamoiselle?” he says, looking to his aunt for any hint of guidance.
Ulphia smiles. “That’s right.”
“Oh, no no no. It’s Madame now,” she announces with a theatrical paw pressed against her chest.
Ulphia gasps and trades tender happy kisses on the cheek with her vixen friend. “Congratulations! I hope we can meet your mate-to-be before we have to leave.”
“You already have!” she hints, waving her everlasting blooming branch around Merle’s head, and stops a moment to pat Ulphia’s belly. “And I hope to meet themsoon too. Such a beautiful thing.”
Odétte punches Merle in the shoulder, thankfully taking care not to jostle his bum leg. “Introduce yourself!”
Merle nods with a vacant stare, struggling to find the words as her flowing spellcast motions constantly capture his undivided attention. “H-hello there, miss Fire-Fur. My apologies, it’s been a rough couple days. You don’t happen to have a name, do you?”
He sputters a moment later. “N-not that you shouldn’t have one, of course."
Estelle smiles, fanning her furry skirt with a fervent courtyard curtsy, “Well met, Merlinus Merchand. I am Delphox Estelle, Seneschal of Mayor Tauron’s court.”
“Wait, that’s your name?!” Odétte cackles, letting her cousin know that she will exclusively be using his given name from now until the day his bones disintegrate to ash.
“Hey…” Merle pipes up, but ends up paying the girl no heed as he follows the fox’s wand with his eyes hanging like slakoth in the trees. “Heeey. Haaa, whatever you’re doing mussst be working.” His words slur, sloshing around his jaw like a drunken cup. “Thanks!”
Ulphia nods in approval as she keeps an eye on their greenhorn apprentice working out the ropes, despite his injury and the anxiety of un-learning everything that everyone has ever taught him about monsterkind.
“Of course. It is my pleasure!” Estelle happily conducts a silent symphony in the air and playfully ruffles his hair. “Anything at all for a Merchand.”
“Heeey, I got a quessstion.” His head wobbles around with a dopey smile as the world ripples at the edges of his vision. “How doesss a Fire-Fur get married?”
Ulphia’s face screws up a bit at that question, but has to admit that she too now is curious.
Estelle considers the question for a good moment, chin in her paw, then hops with a chirp. “We don’t normally.”
“Then how do you know whose–” He seems to try and keep some horribly embarrassing questions from leaking out. “Aaah, sssorrry. Wildingz mussst have a lot of baaabies, then.”
Her head tilts, pinching the cheeks of his blessed little heart. “So many,” she says as the cherry tree twig ignites, eclipsing her paws in a foxy midnight fire.
”Oooh, thaz greaaat,” he blurbs, trying to force his mind to find anything interesting and appropriate to ask the amazing Fire-Fur that sent his pains far, far away. Or was it three of them? Or five?
He opens his mouth and stops himself again, just in time to spill an entirely different table of tea. “Ah wuz worried. Sssee, everybody saaayz Fire-Furz marry people ssso they can drink their blood at night.”
Ulphia sprays her lap with ale, coughing a hundred apologies all at once.
Estelle covers her nose with an amused giggling sound that echoes around the inside of his mind. “I prefer wine,” she says, and taps his temple with the burning-cold tip of her wand.
Cousin Merle shivers, slumping atop a stack of tattered burlap sacks like a puppet with its strings cut short.
The delphox nods at a job well done and inexplicably slides her instrument back into that fluffy pocket of fur.
“Try me next, Essy!” Odétte requests with an excited smile. “Bet you can’t put me to sleep so easy.”
“In due time, little flower, but…” Estelle flicks the girl an audacious grin and wraps them both in a breathtakingly strong monster hug. “I must address our… guests.”
“You shine with Arceus’ light, Estelle,” Ulphia blesses her friend as she’s buried in Estelle’s bushy breast-less bosom. “Thank you.”
Estelle breaks her hold and leaps out the back, showering them in long-range kisses as she falls like a feather on a still day. “I’ll catch up in a moment.”
Ulphia clears her throat, averting her eyes as the fox asserts herself through a gang of men and monsters circling their abandoned wagon. She knows what the vixen is capable of, and some things are best left unseen.
A gang of granbul finally free Brutus and Smokey from the bridle, splashing rare exotic berry mash over the fat bruises covering them from the shoulder up.
In Brutus’s place, Poppy, a very-familiar litleo-turned-pyroar, allows himself to be hitched up to their wagon. He rumbles, trading smiles with Odétte in the back as he grooms a paw with his bristly tongue.
The prison wagon’s canopy grumbles with collective criminal dissatisfaction, spitting verbal acid in the eyes of anyone brave enough to peek inside. They even try to make a break for freedom once or twice, stopped dead in their breeches by a swift and unyielding swarm of pichu still latched on as a reminder of the place they’d just crossed.
“What’a we do, Madame?” a few of the men ask, trading glances with a few monster friends carefully keeping their distance ready to pounce at a moments’ notice. The surest among them wear identical red-and-white sashes, reaching for the handles at their hips.
And yet even these worthy men and women seem uneasy as Estelle’s unhappy gaze passes over them. To anyone she knew in the valley, she could be testy, tired, downright tempestuous at times, but still always loving. The way an exhausted mother is when the house has fallen ill.
But for these people…
Estelle pulls back just enough of the flap for the man and his mongrel gang to see the glowing distorted coals of a hate-fueled furnace casting molten iron in her eyes.
In that moment Norris’ rotten hide wants nothing more than to skin itself and run for dear life.
“Take them to the guest lodge,” she says, casting her thoughts upon the outsiders’ minds. A message of maleficence so fell and horrible that the words simply cannot be forged with human lips.
“They’re just in time for supper!” Estelle’s perky, positive attitude returns, illuminated by the light of a prisoner cart turned into a sparkling, screaming, blue lantern behind her. “Ships biscuits and yesterday’s broth!” she says, skipping away with a clawtip wave.
With that nasty business done, she bounds on windswept legs and closes the distance, barging in on her friends for a second time.
“Phox!” Estelle squeaks, gesturing to Merle as she takes a cross-legged seat between her Lumierres. “I didn’t scare anyone this time!”
The ladies are reminded for a moment that laughter really is the best medicine… but, as much as Estelle wishes she could, you can set bones with a bar joke, can you?
Ulphia hasn’t been this way before, out the other side of the wall and well beyond it, to the edge of a cloistered agricultural community; of the close-knit farming sort.
She tries to remember how long it’s been since she’s spent any significant time amongst those that live so much closer to the ground than her. Years of constant dealings with the upper-merchant-crust of the southern trades has colored her view.
Colored enough that she wonders, for only a moment, if she really wants Merle being treated in a hut made of thatch, wattle, and daub.
But if being in that crazy place has taught her anything, it’s that things here are rarely as they seem from the outside.
Poppy’s claws crack stones stuck in the road as they bring the reinforced wagon to a stop.
“Gretta! Wounded!” Bataille dashes to the door of the biggest home, thankfully made with stone walls and a clay tile roof.
The door is thrown open, right into his face.
“Say no more, say no more!” a well-fed, broad-shouldered, red-head woman says and runs for the cart, tying her hair into a tight fiery bun.
“What’s it this time? Man or Monster? Breaks, blood, bruises?” Her voice matches her clothes; rural, foreign, unmistakably Galarian.
Bataille stops to explain exactly what happened, but only ends up talking to her shoulder as she lumbers right past and hefts herself up into the wagon.
“Oh, fock’n swell,” the lady gripes. “Bring’n more o’ them man-made accidents my way, Bataille? Thought I loved the last one so much I needed another?”
Pikachu growls, chus, chirps, and yips back at the old lady with an absolutely obnoxious quantity of sass.
The lady whips around with a jaded smile, jabbing a finger the rodent’s way. “If you broke the baddies half as much as you brag, maybe I’d get some real practice around here!”
Pikachu’s cheeks sparkle and swell with power, trying her hardest to look genuinely infuriated. “Haaa! Cha! Ka pa kee!”
“Say when-and-where, you little shit!” Gretta snarls through a smirk, thumbing her nose as she kneels with a thud to inspect Merle’s leg.
She turns and pokes the swollen disjointed flesh, thankful that he, Cresselia bless, has somehow remained asleep. “Remind me never to piss in your porridge, Stella. Care to help an old hag out?”
Estelle nods with a swish of her wand and Merle floats into the air. Then a morbid parade follows behind him as he floats out of the wagon, zips through Gretta's door, and is brought down to rest upon a wooden cot dressed in the cleanest linens anyone there has ever seen.
“Hypnosis only works so long, ‘course.” Gretta grouses as she roots through crooked stacks of shelves littered with tiny boxes, labeled clay bottles, and leather-wrapped books.
“Hnnnggg,” Merle moans, wracked with the pangs of sudden, waking pain, “gggaaa!”
The middle-aged medicine-woman turns her chin aside with a nod and gestures to the proof of her point.
“Bear with me, young’un. I gots just the thing,” she says, opening a box from underneath her bed; a copper clamp meant to grip and hold some pencil-thin object.
“What is that?” Mère asks with a genuine air of curiosity and concern.
Gretta grabs a wax-sealed jar painted with Alolan glyphs. “Seadra spines soaked in croagunk brine,” she says as her instrument snatches a dripping bony needle from an oily tenebrous ichor.
Merle winces and whines, looking away as he feels the healer pricking him with it, over and over, all around his leg.
Estelle invokes the horrible, dark, arcane magic of a cushy pillow stuffed behind his back.
He’s just about ready to throw in the towel and ask Arceus for a mulligan when he realizes that his fists and jaw are clenching for no reason. Then, with a long breath, Merle looks around at everyone by his side.
Despite the tragedy, he’s happy to know that his extended family really does deeply care about him. Enough to secure him such incredible levels of care. He also finally realizes how gods-damned hungry he is the moment Gretta hands him a powdery strip of bark to ‘soak n’ chew’ like cud.
Ulphia asks Odétte to fetch him something nice from the cart and immediately regrets sending the girl as she drops a five-pound pemmican brick into his lap.
Her cousin doesn’t balk a bit and absolutely nobody judges the young man as he hunches over, ripping krokorok-sized chunks with every bite. He takes the medicine only after he’s swallowed a dozen, greasy mouthfuls of tallow held together with dried fruit and protein string.
The ravenous munching, murmuring inspections, crackling fireplace, and the deafening lack of conversation finally brings Usmar to say something. Anything at all to distract himself from the tempest of his own gods-damned thoughts. “How bad is it, Mrs. Gretta?”
“Postwick,” Gretta corrects, “and I’ll make it clear right now, I don’t glaze my words in honey; apologies in advance…”
She turns her head around and shouts, “Louka! Mommy needs your help!”
The air rattles with an uncomfortable coughing pause.
“Ahem… Anyway, I’ll spare you all the gruesomest details and cut to the bone. You’re lucky if this heals at all. You’ll be lame for half a year at least and only half-lame years after that. If anything goes the least bit south I’ll be preparing you for the saw. You’ll never walk again…”
In complete contrast to everyone else’s macabre air of resignation, Estelle holds her fists to her cheeks in a barely-suppressed squee, anxiously awaiting the next part.
“...If you weren’t here, that is.” Ms. Postwick sets her hands on her hips and shouts toward the boy’s door just down the hall... “LOU! KA! Up’n at’m!”
“NO!” barks the hollow, echoing voice of a young child.
“What’da mean ‘no’!?” Gretta groans. “Ugh, not this ag’n… You love helping people, come out here and show them what you can do!”
A moment of quiet, then the stony resonant sound of his voice howls through the walls. “I don't want to!”
Estelle brushes her fur with an awkward apologetic look and leaps into action. “Why not, sweetie?” she asks, laying against the door, speaking in hushed tones. “We really need you right now.”
Even more quiet, mixed with the sound of Merle’s furious mastication behind them.
“Because they’ll scream at me!”
“They’re not gonna shout at ya.” Gretta’s face softens. “These are real rugged folk, baby boy.”
“Nuh-uh, everybody does!” Louka whines, churning age-old sheets of dust with his words alone.
“Alright everyone!” Estelle begins with a spin and puts a paw to her heart. “Now, let’s all promise that we will not scream, shout, or holler out, no matter what.”
They make the oath around the room in a circle of concerned looks. The only thing on Merle’s face, however, is a wine moustache after washing down a raw brick of umami.
“See? We promise. I know it’s been tough, but these people really need your help fixing their friend.” She lays the pleases and thank-yous on like buttermilk frosting.
“...Ok.”
Everyone remains totally silent as the boy’s door flies open with an impossible gust of wind and a single, huge, crimson light peeks around the corner. “Only cuz you asked so nice...”
“Yeah, crushed femur. He’s in a lot of pain. Think you’re up to it?” his mother goads.
Two sets of gnashing wooden claws grip at the frame of the door “You bet I am. Coming, mama.”
The doorway is consumed with a shifting creaking wall of crackling bark, thrashing twigs, and two gaping splits full of oaken-fanged jowls. All swimming with inky pits of darkness.
A trevenant, the tree that sprouts from the soul of a child lost to the woods, emerges with an upbeat trundling gait. “Hi Batty! Hi Pika! Hi Emmy! Hi Essy!”
Odétte’s eyes spread wide as she hears her brother’s pet-name spoken from the mouth of a haunted tree.
Bataille and his girls greet the horror with a warm display of fraternal enthusiasm.
Ulphia’s eyes water with tragic empathetic joy, clutching her husband’s hand at the mere thought of such a thing happening to her.
Usmar’s dazed face is still as stone, despite his fingers crushing to dust in his wife’s palm.
Merle’s jaw drops into his lap and he screams as one of his worst nightmares is made manifest from his mind, stomping towards his cot.
“Aaaaaah,” the kid-sized tree hunches over with branchy fingers scrunched in shame. “Mamaaa! Stellaaa! You said they wouldn’t!” he cries as viscous dribbles of sap ooze from his eye.
Estelle huffs and growls with burning eyes. Then she snaps her wand up and slices it through the air like she means to pass it across the boy’s cheek. “Rude!”
Merle is silenced by a powerful, psychic smack that totally washes his countenance away. He stares up at the abomination, completely horrified, and all he can do is sit in a lethargic slump like a wasted candle, skin cold as his heart threatens to split his chest apart.
Mère gasps and smiles. “Madame Postwick, I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” she creeps toward Louka and puts a hand on the scaly bark of his trunk. “Louka, you amazing, brave boy!”
Everyone else is completely dumbfounded and Estelle catches the moment in her paws as if she’s had to explain this a hundred times before. “Years ago the life of a child was taken by the wilds here. We made peace with it, of course, but traditional wisdom says there is nothing that can be done once the soul is shift and bent.”
“I knew my boy was still in there,” Gretta interjects, her voice catching in her throat. “I told that bird brain but he wouldn't hear a word of it!”
Mayor Tauron sneaks through the door and strikes the room with his pounding, bass-drum voice. “But your son did listen. He brought that little phantump toys from his old home, stories of his old life, introduced him to people he loves, bit-by-bit working to remind him of who he was. When he told Estelle that flickers of Louka’s memories were coming back, we didn’t believe him at first.”
Estelle smiles with her paws clasped together in joy. “I went to check for sure and just as the pines sap I could feel the boy’s mind in the darkness. It was faint, and quiet, but he really was there! Oh my, we worked all winter pulling him back from Giratina’s grip.”
Gretta wipes painful, happy tears from her eyes. “And then one night he finally came home, all on his own.” She chokes, complaining about flu, or allergies, or anything other than emotional vulnerability. “Spooky tree monster or not, I knew it was my Louka that snunk into my room in the wee hexing hours.”
“I’m scary and it’s awful!” Louka’s leaves shift with humiliated discomfort, wanting to at least be a part of the conversation everyone was having about him. “All my friends are grown up and nobody wants to play with me anymore.”
“I bet Odétte would love to get to know you.” Estelle nuzzles Luca’s branches and whispers, “She’s friends with that florges you like so much.”
Louka peeks out through the gaps in his claws, watching in amazement as the girl’s face lights up with eager joviality.
“You have no idea! This is so beyond anything else!” Odette says and tilts her head towards their physically amd mentally broken cousin. “But we gotta get Merlinus here all patched up first. Mama would be real cross with me if we skipped out.”
“Ok, yeah!” Louka shuffles in a body-bending nod. “I know some awesome places in the woods now and it’s totally safe because nothing out there bothers us anymore,” he chatters as his roots shuffle him toward the patient at hand.
Merle is unable to move or even express the level of terror still shaking in his guts. “Please don’t hurt me.”
The trevenant’s big singular eye glows through the darkness of its trunk, inspecting the break. “Don’t worry a wink, Monsieur. I know it looks bad, but everything is gonna be fine.”
His long knobbly fingers split and spread apart into a cobweb of wriggling strands, weaving themselves into a band around his leg; then a cuff, then a cast, all the while Ingraining white hair-like roots through his skin and deep into his ruined flesh.
Merle looks away, unable to stomach watching this disturbing necromancy at play, catching the eye of Bataille and his two partners nearby instead.
Bataille smiles and lets Emeline pull his tunic sleeve up, showing off an arm of work-hardened skin scarred with tiny burrows of freshly-healed scars. “Trust him.”
A soft teal glow catches Merle’s attention and an inexplicable soothing sensation starts climbing up the deadened nerves of his leg, assuring the rest of his body that things are under control. The wrap of wooden cloth fills the room with verdant light and Merle’s jaw clenches as he can feel things rooting around his leg like weedles in a fallen log.
The boy-made-monster’s eye flickers and flares with a rustling, creaking echo that rides on a nonexistent wind. “There, that’s a lot better, huh?”
“W-what is this?” Merle shudders, stunned with pallid fixation towards the leg he’d taken for granted all of his eighteen-or-so years of life. “I… I can feel stuff moving around in there.”
“I dunno.” Louka shrugs and then whips his head around as a ball of light shifts up and down the cast, like a lantern seen through the wall of a tent. “I sure am good at it though, right Mama?”
Seeing a huge menacing stalker of the woods looking up at an aging human woman with absolute love and deference is a fantastical sight, both wonderful and horrible in equal measures.
“The best, sugar,” Gretta says, combing her fingers through the leaves on his branches. “It was Louka’s dream to be a great healer one day; I like to think his strange new body could feel that and it changed too.”
“I’d say he’s achieved his lofty goal.” Estelle projects to everyone with a confident smirk. “Because I know no man, monster, or tree that can do this,” she finishes, gesturing to Merle’s shattered limb.
A cast of wood-woven fibers encases Merle’s leg, humming with a final spritz of the young trevenant's spectral breath as the light continues to strengthen and fade in steady rhythm with Merle’s heart.
“There. All done!” Louka pulls his claws away with the crackle of stretching snapping strands, like cockleburrs torn from a fresh pair of hose. “It sure was a mess in there, Monsieur!” he says with woody, verdant mist rolling down his fangs.
Merle’s horror is overcome by a great burst of urgency. Was he… healed? His leg looked and felt like it was together and he really wanted to be away from the craziness. If only to simply digest his head full of buzzing thoughts. “Haaa! Thanks, that’s incredi—”
“A-ah!” Gretta snaps, shoving him back down into the cot. “Yer not goin’ anywhere anytime soon. Loukas’ a miracle maker but you’re still human, hear me?”
“How long?” Bataille and Usmar say, jynxing one another.
“A week?” Louka says, side-eyeing his mother for assurance.
Gretta nods, ruffling his leafage. “Based on all the priso— I mean guests we’ve patched up.”
Estelle nods with an exuberant grin, gently poking Merle on the nose with her claw. “A week of me taking good care of you. Hungry still?”
“Uh, well… Yes.” Merle looks up at her, feeling a lot less terrified of the immolating beast he’d only seen from illuminated manuscript pages.
After all, he had just looked a trevenant in the eye and lived to tell the tale. “If it’s not too much trouble, that is.”
“Good.” She pats him on the cheek and plants a kiss down onto his head with her paw. “You’re staying with us, mister. Tonight is onion soup with cheese baguettes to go with all the questions we’ve got.”
“Yes, right…” Merle says with a slow consensual nod as her matronly mental voice makes it sound nice he doesn’t really mind so much anymore. “Sorry, Uncle Usmar.”
“Do not apologize. It’s a bit longer than we expected to stay but considering the circumstances I’m sure our associates will forgive the delay,” Usmar hums. “Our family is humbled by your friendship and generosity, now more than ever before. And it will be nice to catch up with our eldest.”
Bataille smiles at that, but then it turns into a despondent frown as he looks away.
Tauron trades eyes with Estelle, brushing shoulders as she leaves. “Thank you, beautiful. I’ll take over from here.”
“Don’t be too long,” she says, hanging on the words. “Soup might get cold.”
“Oooh, I’m all coiled-up jealous,” Odétte prods Merle as she walks over to her brand-new arboreal friend. “Not even teasing, Estelle is great! But me and Louka are gonna paint the woods red, ok?” she says without consulting anyone but herself. “I wanna see the deep woods! Batty and Valko can’t hog it all for themselves forever!”
Louka, just tickled to tears that someone wants to do something with him at all, shakes his trunk up and down, shedding leaves that his mother starts to collect and preserve for later. “Oh yeah! I know so many good spots.”
“Well, if you’re heading out, make sure one of those ‘spots’ is the Icy Rock. The path should be thaw–” Gretta is interrupted by a flurry of powder snow blowing the door wide open to shower the room in a glitter of frightened snowflakes.
“Glay! Glaaay!” Noël the glaceon cries, frantically searching the clinic for the most important thing in the world.
“Frou!” Apicot howls as her puppies yip and yap, one with welcome, the other with bashful anxiety.
Glaceon finally spots Apicot and mists the room in a long frosty breath of relief.
He hops up, licking her face, and nuzzles cheeks with Mistletoe. Then he’s frozen still as ice when the smallest ‘frou shrinks behind her mother, barely daring to glance up at the Glaceon that just stormed in.
“Ga-lay?” Noël asks, pointing a paw towards the pup and then back at himself.
Apicot nods with a proud, stoic look. She reaches around to snatch Holly up by the scruff with her teeth, and places the pup down for her mate to inspect.
“All is well, Noël.” Mère walks over, wanting to kneel beside him, but her aching bones demand she remain standing. “Her name is ‘Holly.’ ”
Noël hums his approval and sits alongside his mate after all the long lonely nights without her, body curled around his second child with care. “Ceee. On-a-glee.”
“Oh, Gods…” Tauron clears his throat and scratches the back of his scalp. “Sincerest apologies, my friend. You were on patrol and, well… Gah, I should have sent someone to fetch you as soon as we knew.”
Glaceon shakes his head with a dismissive wave of the paw. “Cee cee cee…,” he sighs, nibbling knotted chunks of fur from his baby’s coat.
Ulphia releases the breath she’d been holding for two whole days with an arm wrapped around her swollen belly. “All together again, safe and sound.”
“Thanks in no small part to you, young man,” Tauron says, approaching Merle with a silken bundle held in both hands.
Cousin Merle clears his throat of just enough embarrassment to say, “I appreciate your kind words, but I was just another box of cargo being rescued in the end.”
“Bunk and bosh! Your courage eased the burdens facing those that charged in behind you.” Tauron gives the boy a stern all-to-familiar officer’s stare. “Had the scoundrels numbered half-a-critter more Bataille might not have returned to us; told me himself, and I believe him.”
Taron hands the red silk wrap out to Bataille with a single, sturdy, ursaring grip. “Your honor to give, son.”
That wild leather-clad boy walks forward, lowers his head below his cousin’s knees, and holds the gift aloft.
“Thank you so much, cousin,” Bataille says as Pikachu and Emeline finish showering Merle in jittering chittering accolades. “I am no warrior and the family needs one now more than ever. After all these years, of all the people that could have slipped into those shoes, I’m glad that it’s you who's worn them.”
The room bids him to open the package, and he does, carefully unrolling its luxuriant scarlet wrap to avoid adding a single scuff or stain of his own. What lies now in his arms is a pair of blades sheathed in vermillion lacquered-leather scabbards. One long, the other short, he draws them both and his breath freezes in his chest as a golden glint blinds his eyes.
Supple feather-shaped blades. Balanced light as a fallen swanna’s molt. Ivory hilts shaped and smoothed into ergonomic works of art. “These can’t be…”
“Bleeding Wings, skarmory-feather blades made twice-a-year.” Bataille continues. “A gift granted by the mountain, worked with care in honor of your sacrifice.”
“Given only to those who’ve spilled and shed blood protecting our people,” Tauron booms with his arms folded at the back of the room. “May you wear our colors with pride; you are always welcome here.”
Merle glances over at the younger, smarter, seemlier cousin currently knelt before him. That favored prodigal son, once slated to take the family’s reins, ultimately fated to waste his graces on a half-baked sage from some gods-forsaken hinterland hole.
“Bataille… It…” He slowly wraps the blades up and clutches them against his chest, fighting back the final dying tears of an old jealousy hidden deep inside him. “It is my honor to serve.”
Usmar kisses his wife on the cheek and signals the Merchands to make their leave. “Let us not impose upon Madame Postwick’s home any longer. She is a busy woman.”
He nods to the good healer. “I am humbled and astonished by your mastery. And your hospitality. Merle, be polite, and please relax; you’re safer here than anywhere else.”
Merle finds it impossible to deny that his uncle is right. “Yes sir.”
Uncle Usmar grunts, turning to his long-lost son. “And you, young man…I wish to hear all about– Ah, say now, is something wrong?”
Batialle folds his hands behind his back and kicks a tiny stone that someone had tracked into Gretta’s home. “It’s. Ah, well…”
Pikachu scoffs, rolling her eyes, and prods him in the neck to dislodge the words trapped in the young man’s throat.
Ulphia winces. “Pikachu, stop, that looks like it hurts,” she says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong, baby boy?”
Bataille flushes at the infantile moniker, stuffing himself up with even more frustration, but eventually Emeline joins in the jabbing and he just can’t take the pressure anymore.
“I can’t go with you.”
Everyone turns around, stopped dead in their tracks.
No one makes a sound, and so he stands with his shoulders straight, preparing for an unwelcome bout of public speech. “Master Valko’s conditions are clear: I am to live and work amongst the wild things, spend as little time in the village as possible, and separate myself from family until my time here is done.”
Odétte makes a mirthfull, coughing laugh. “Well you sure screwed the poochyeena there, genius.”
Bataille sighs, looking away in shame. “Yeah, I hope I’m not in too much trouble.”
Tauron cackles, clapping the boy’s other shoulder. “Well, it’s fortunate that this little mishap has left us all in such a forgivable state. For you see…” his eyes glisten, like he’d been waiting an eternity to speak the words, “Valko has told me this: when your family has returned to us next you are all to reunite with him as soon as possible.”
Bataille, Pikachu, and Emeline’s faces burst into three totally different flavors of shock.
Emeline gushes with congratulation and chokes her beloved human, nuzzling his ear with squeaks of ecstatic joy.
Pikachu’s face goes blank as fresh-pressed parchment, like a student that’s forgotten to study for some pivotal final exam.
“You mean I’m…” utters Bataille, simply blind-sided with surprise.
Tauron smirks, unwilling to confirm or deny. “Shall I send Bladewing forth?”
“No!” Bataille’s eyes flash with a glimmering, childish whimsy. “I wish to send us forth.”
“You don’t mean?” Mère asks, looking up towards the mountain’s peak in the north through an open shutter.
He whispers something to Pikachu and she bounds off between their legs. “But I do. I’ve thought of this moment for many days and nights. It might be the only time you get to see, and my master never says it aloud to the human folk, but he loves company more than anything else in the whole world.”
Tauron peeks past the door, checking the position of the sun in the sky. “It will be a long trip, Merchands. If you leave now you can make it half-way by sundown. You’ll need to leave the wagons behind though. You’d be walking them back even if you tried.”
Ulphia’s breathing hastens as her hands rest at her belly and back. “But how will your Mère and I make such a journey without a saddle or a wagon?
Bataille gestures to the door. “Don’t worry, Mama. We’ll sort that out.”
Odétte groans with displeasure. “Aaaugh! The one time I get to see Valko’s crazy, hermit, wizard cave and I’ve already got plans…”
She glances over at Louka and is stabbed with pangs of guilt as his woody grin pinches shut at her words. “Hey, Louka…”
The kid sighs and wads himself up into a tumbleweed of disappointment, ready to be turned down and thrown aside again. “Yeah?”
“Have you ever been to Valko’s place?”
The trevenant child stands in silence for a moment as the words sink in, then he sucks a sharp lungless breath of excitement. “N-no! Well, once I guess, but I couldn’t remember anything so that doesn’t count.”
She hits Louka with a playful punch in the, well, wherever she thinks his kidney might be. “Then you’re my plus-one, then.”
“Can I go, Mama? Can I?” he pleads, hopping around, threatening to shake everything down from his mother’s shelves.
“No,” she blurts with an instantly viscerally emotional reflex.
But then she sees the desperation in both childrens’ eyes and slowly loses her nerve.
“Ohhh, distortion,” Gretta sighs with burly folded arms. “Very well, but only if it’s allowed, and don’t you forget to scrape that Ice Rock on your way back, younguns.”
Odétte and Louka bounce with cheer, throwing their arms and branches around each other in total glee.
Usmar grinds his beard around his fist like a quern. “That could be a problem. Some of us will need to stay behind to keep stock of the merchandise.”
Tauron’s laughing rattles the roofing tiles. “Good merchant, surely you know by now there isn’t a single soul in this valley that would dare cross you and your kin. But, just to ease your nerves, I’m sure that Noël is loath to leave his family’s side at the moment.” He turns to the furfrou family reunion going on behind them. “Care to lend a hand, Brother?”
Noël is practically intoxicated with the affections of his mate and their two, rambunctious, insatiably playful pups. He does manage to catch the request through that haze of happiness though, and nods with agreement. “Cee-lay gaion.”
Mère bows in gratitude to the icy stud with a melted heart. “What a handsome father you turned out to be.”
Noël makes an embarrassed huff, choosing to ignore the gushy compliment and just keep on loving on.
“Apicot...” The old breeder thinks and thinks and in that moment makes a very difficult decision. “How would you and your pups feel about staying here?”
She fights herself; those old, greedy, human instincts that even she works so hard to keep at bay. “...for as long as you like.”
Apicot’s head stops grooming Noël’s cool turquoise fur and raises like she’d heard a warning call. “Ruff?”
Ulphia gasps. “Mama, Apicot is our most seasoned girl!”
“My kennel has never once suffered the crack of a whip or the strike of a switch.” Mère sighs with a wry, difficult smile. “But for far too long it has endured the collar and leash.”
“I run a kennel, not a barracoon.” Mère walks toward Apicot and kneels down, running her bony wrinkle-wrapped fingers through the old dog’s fur. “You’re free to do as you wish. Same goes for the rest of the girls back home; I just thought you should be the first to know.”
Noël isn’t sure what he’s hearing, but Apicot is absolutely stunned to tears.
She wobbles back up to her feet, prancing over to old Madame Laurie with a pair of wide, watering, puppy-dog eyes. “Fffrou?!” She tugs at the leash around her neck, feeling that cushy strip of suede and brass grow a hundred-times heavier all of a sudden.
As Mère unbuckles the clasp, Apicot’s eyes run to the floor as she feels a huge piece of her very being tearing away. She reaches up to her neck, catching it against her throat before the old woman can take it away for good. “Frou! Fur Frou!” she barks, head shaking as she holds the thing in place with her paw.
The proud alpha bitch sits and cooks in the heat of deliberation, weighing the choice as her muzzle sways back and forth. Between Laurie and her lovely little family.
She starts babbling at Bataille with a barely-coherent monster-speech salad, dressed in desperation.
“Oh?” Bataille murmurs.
Mère had expected it to be an easy transition and the tension is starting to show on her face. “What… is she saying?”
Bataille listens to Apicot frantically baying between him, Noël, her pups, and herself. “Apicot is proud of who and what she is. She doesn’t want to give it all up and leave. But she also wishes to live here, where she and her hatchlings can be with their father every day. She doesn’t want to choose.”
“Silly girl…” The old matron’s face starts watering the floorboards too. “You’ll always be a Lumiere,” she coos, planting a long wet kiss on Apicot’s forehead. “Our house will always be there to welcome you with open arms, however and whenever you wish.”
Apicot’s face goes slack as her master’s— no, her grandmother’s —words sink in. She fights her own mind to find that which is most right, then her muzzle turns up in a relieved smile. She lifts her paw and the jingle-bell collar she’d always known falls to the floor with a final unforgettable clink.
Eyes wet with happy terrified tears, Apicot hops up on her back legs and licks Laurie’s face for the first time in decades.
Mère just hugs the girl tight, kissing her cheeks again and again, and then finally lets her go. “Don’t be a stranger. The young pups could use a pint of wisdom now and again. That is, if you can spare the time.”
Apicot is joined by Noël, who walks right up to the human woman his mate holds in such high esteem, and takes a low slow bow.
Mère wipes her face of bitter happy tears. “May Arceus bless your nest, wherever it may roam.”
Bataille snuggles Emeline, who is busy fighting back an ugly cry at the timeless moment shining in her eyes. “This is amazing, Mère; I think that makes yours the first all-volunteer kennel in the world. It really is unfortunate Pépé couldn’t make it this time to see.”
Everyone goes quiet, but grandmother knows when swifter softer words can smooth a situation over for a better moment later. “He’s probably in his chair, taking a drink or two for all of us, my sweet.”
“He should drink a little less, though. Gretta says it’s bad for the energies,” Bataille says. “She’s got a book on it. I made a copy for him, but it looks like I’ll be delivering that in person after all!”
Mère hugs Bataille, daring to catch Pikachu and Emeline up in the embrace. “She’s a wise woman. Let’s get going, if I must travel on foot I would prefer I did so bathed in Moltres’ light.”
Finally managing to escape Gretta’s clinic, Bataille exchanges wild words with the pyroar being freed from their wagon’s straps. “If it suits you, Mère, Poppy says he’ll take you and Mama there. Pépé’d whoop me crooked if someone didn’t carry you both every step of the way.”
His grandma looks into the massive eye-level stare of their friendly, neighborhood, man-eating predator and pets his nose. “To think you were the same little cub that burned Valko’s britches that night,” she reminisces, earning a hearty smoking chuff as he crouches down for her and Ulphia to climb on.
“Rightly so, son,” Usmar lauds. “Let’s grab the camping gear.”
“Paaah!” Pikachu barks at the man. “Chakapa, pi cha ku,” she says, lifting her paw with pride.
“Huh, is that ok?” Bataille asks, allowing his cherished ball of cuddles and pain to leap into his arms.
Odétte breaks the silence as everyone else acts like they totally understood out of polite habit. “We speak Kalosian, Bush Boy.”
He chitters back and forth a moment with his partners and then nods as they both come to a clear understanding. “Do not burden yourselves with all that. Pikachu says you are all welcome to stay in our home tonight.”
“Your home?!” his family blurts out in unison as Usmar and Ulpha blush at the intimate implications.
Bataille nods with a cheerful grin. “Yes! Pikachu is a trusted leader of the nest; her word has weight. And I’m sure Vivienne wouldn’t mind a surprise visit from her business partners, besides.”
“We’re not concerned about having tea with monsters, slowpoke,” Odétte quips and yipes as her mother’s palm kisses the back of her skull.
“Rude. Slowpoke are fine folk,” Ulphia chides, but gives Bataille an uneasy look besides.
Emeline notices his mother’s uneasy gaze and whispers something into her human friend’s ear.
Bataille cringes at his own gaffe. “Oh! I’m so sorry! Come, everyone, let us trek. I’ll explain along the way.”
A family changed forever finally meets their prodigal son again, but five years is a long, long time when a million things are happening in the blink of an eye.
How will they handle bearing witness to all the ways he has altered the world, or all the ways the world has altered him?
How will they react as they watch their bright-eyed fair-skinned boy lay down the silver-and-scales to take up the crook and walk his path as man?
