^ "Heavenly Love" (10-13-2020)

—

LIOR

"It is a lovely place," Titus rumbled. "Coming here is like going back to an older age."

"It is from an older age," Phinebas said thinly. "If by that you mean the Era of the Kingdoms. One of the last remnants of life from that bygone time. These walls have stood since before my great-great-grandmother was but a passing thought in the mind of Arceus."

Lior studied what lay before them from where he floated behind Enos, with the rest of the Army couriers. "Lovely" wasn't exactly the word he would've chosen to describe the place — it was...well, it was a ruin. The Ruins, as Lady Tirza called them.

They'd emerged out of the trench the Kyogre Clan now called home, and found that their old abode lay in a similar concavity in the seafloor, albeit shallower, allowing for swaths of sunshine to ripple over the barren wrinkles in the seabed here. At the top of this gray cliff, the ravine punched down into a chute that went about fifty feet, and hiding beneath the jutting lip of a shelf of conglomerate, Lior could just make out the walls of a structure that had long since been eaten away by the hungry waves of the ocean. Buttresses, columns, maybe even a staircase... They were all just barely visible from up here, and only if you stopped to study it for more than a moment.

Titus appeared to agree — fifty or so soldiers and support staff had accompanied him for his "demonstration" today, and floated with Phinebas and some of the other clan members at the head, peering down into the chute where the Ruins lay. "It would appear that the original architects were skilled in their construction," he remarked. "However, I can't say that I'm surprised that you have been forced to abandon your home — my scouts have told me that a human city lays less than half a day's march from here. It's a miracle that you haven't had trouble with them before now."

Phinebas's wrinkled upper lip twisted a little. "Things have changed, I'm afraid," he growled. "There was once a time when this area was quite dangerous — the humans declared these as protected waters in order to safeguard the various reefs that used to blanket the area, and these reefs attracted water-type Pokémon and hungry Gyaradoses and Sharpedoes.

"But in the passing years, pollution has caused these natural safeguards and the reef itself to decay, and in the wake of the exodus of water-type Pokémon and their predators, human traffic and recreational activity has become more common and harder to avoid. And..." Phinebas's lip wavered again. "Here we are."

"And there they are," General Mattathias said, pointing. Lior looked up and saw long shapes approaching in the distance, moving across the water and leaving a frothing wake in their path.

Phinebas hissed. "Arceus's sake."

Titus raised a brow at him. "Like clockwork?"

"Close enough. Scholars, or some such — they come nearly every day, bringing their strange instruments with them. It would appear that they're making a study out of the area."

"How close have they come to the Ruins?"

Phinebas pulled up his hood and backed away. "Too close."

"Then let's make today their last day." Titus glanced behind him to some of the other clan members, and his eyes stopped on Tirza Mari. "Have you located Lord Kygriss-Mari?"

"No," she said softly. "Reuben is searching high and low for him, but..."

"Why aren't you with him?" Phinebas snapped. "I thought I told you both to look. You are his retainer — your place is at his side. Or has your illicit jaunt around the globe made you forget?"

Her hands clasped together. "Reuben has always been better at finding him. And I wanted to help—"

"Arceus knows you've done your fair share of acting out of turn," the Dewgonga spat. "Yet you still see the need to try my patience? Who has taught you this insubordinate behavior? Was it Dion?"

"Enough of this," Titus said before Tirza could respond. He looked irritated, but more at the fact that Lord Kygriss-Mari was not present than anything else. "She is here, and she is willing to assist us. What does it matter?" He lifted his hand, indicating to his solders. "Take your positions."

A group of twenty or so soldiers rose up and passed over in a wave, descending into the rocky valley of the Ruins. A cluster of Army Pokémon — Nightlight was not among them — followed them down, and Lior watched as they disappeared from sight behind rocks and inside shadows.

Crossly, Phinebas said, "Your candor is commendable, Commander, but I would ask that you not overstep your bounds. Ours is a well-ordered community, and I'm sure you can appreciate the need for order and obedience."

The Commander directed a hard eye at Phinebas, which the older, wrinkled merman returned uncomfortably, and then lifted a muscular shoulder in a shrug. "As you say." He gestured behind him, and Enos drifted forward, wraith-like. "My couriers are at your command, Phinebas, and have been briefed on your aim. But are you certain that you wish to do this? I wish to reestablish boundaries, not retract them."

"Yes." Phinebas's voice was heavy with disdain. "For now, at least. I have an idea of what you plan to do, if your words be true, and I wish to hedge my bets, should the worst come about."

Titus's smile was thin. "For the leader of a clan who upholds the old ways and protects one of the Kin, you certainly do have little faith in us."

He waved, and the rest of their conversation became lost as Enos drew the couriers away, over to a slope, where Tirza Mari and the other members of the Kyogre Clan were waiting for them. One, a ghostly-pale, bald, serene-faced Jeager, led them down the hill and into the speckled shadows of the chute. Tirza Mari waited to the side until Lior passed, and then fell into step beside him. He looked at her; her face was drawn.

"Are you okay?" He reached out and touched her shoulder, and she gave him a weak smile.

"Drained," she said, "but what did I expect?"

"What he said—"

"He'll say a lot more. It's what I deserve, Lior, and while it hurts, it could also be much worse. As he said, we're a tight-knit community, and if it hadn't been for this confusion with the Commander's Army on our doorstep, I could be suffering a lot more."

He swallowed, but didn't ask how, though some sadistic part of him wanted to know. Instead, he said, "When we get down there... Will you help show me around?"

Her face brightened. "I would like that very much."

The task was simple: while Titus was doing...whatever he was going to do with those approaching boats, the couriers and clan members would descend and retrieve supplies from the Ruins, to be taken back to their new home in the trench. Apparently, provisions there had been dwindling due to incessant human boat traffic in this area, and they hadn't been very good in the first place, as the Clan had had to evacuate the Ruins in a hurry sometime two weeks ago. Now that they were under the protection of Titus's Army, they could restock, and perhaps erase their presence from this place altogether, if humans happened to come diving down.

They reached the bottom of the chute, and the entrance to the Ruins swelled open before them, a broken mouth of a cave surrounded by four smooth, splintered pillars. On the soaring wall of rock above were symbols and pictograms etched directly into the rock — most of them looked like intricate squiggles to Lior, but some of them approached recognizable shapes, like waves, stalks of kelp, and a giant, undulating creature with two long, front limbs that looked a little like paddles.

The bald-headed Clan member repeated what Enos had told them forty-five minutes earlier at muster: the couriers were to assist in bringing out foodstuff, medical supplies, and as many tomes and documents as they could manage in the forty-five minutes that Commander Titus had allotted them. Documents, Lior thought again as they swept past the pillars, into the cave entrance. Underwater? How could that be?

Darkness swallowed them, and Lior followed the vibrations of Lady Tirza's fluke, expecting it to go on, as it did in the cave of the trench. But they rounded a bend, and he was shocked by sudden light: a pillar of it, coming down through the dark like a perfectly-straight bolt of lightning. It illuminated small chamber stacked floor to ceiling with scavenged, chipped, and cracked pots, each of them bearing a bounty of sea flora: waterwheels, anemones, sea whips, brain coral, kelp... They all undulated in the light current, and some had begun overgrowing their containers, spreading across the floor in a multicolored, fluffy carpet.

Rising out of the center of the jungle was a large stone, flattish on top, with roughened sides. Atop it was another piece of scavenge: a modified silver candelabra, fixed to hold a simple jar of sparkling sand... And something else. Something strange and silt-colored that looked like the root of a tree or a white fungus.

"Lightning," Lady Tirza said to Lior's curious gaze. At his visible confusion, she said, "An interesting thing... Sometimes when lightning strikes sand, it creates a sculpture such as this in the perfect shape of itself."

Lior thought back to that one Drought, the one he'd spent with Father, and how they'd stood out in the rain, watching a heaving sea and furious sky unleash their rage. There had been much lightning on that day, but he didn't remember any of them looking like this strange, twisted thing. "Why is it in a bottle?"

"It is sacred lightning, from a bolt that struck down during one of King Kyogre's great storms. This was during the Cataclysm."

Lior's eyes bulged. "Really?"

"So Phinebas says. My grandmother had not even been born during the time, mind you." She gestured. "Come."

The rest of the group had ascended...into the light. Lior followed, shading his eyes, and they passed a hole in the ceiling and kept going. It was only when Tirza pulled him out of the blinding light that he began to better understand his surroundings: there was a chute not just outside, but inside the Ruins as well, a vertical channel that punched directly up through the rock of the shelf and opened into sunlit waters. All down around that pillar of light was a honeycomb of grottos large and small, just as there had been in the caves in the trench. Only here, warm light dappled the walls, and the pressure wasn't nearly as egregious.

One of these caves swelled into a large worship chamber, where an altar had been carved directly out of the far wall. Just like the entrance to the ruins, symbols and hieroglyphics swarmed the walls here, and the floors, and stacked at either end of the room were salvaged blankets and pillows, for ceremonies, Lior guessed. Some were still spread across the floor—maybe they'd evacuated during a sermon?

At any rate, it was here where Enos began dividing them up, and assigning them tasks. He paired Lior with a courier named Jokim, and tasked them with clearing out one of the upper libraries.

"Have a care," Enos said softly. "I have been informed that many of these tomes are delicate, and quite old: handle them as you might glass. If not, I may see fit to take restitution out of your hide. Understood?"

"Sir!" Lior and the rest of the couriers shouted, saluting sharply.

They broke up and went to work. Clan members floated about, directing the couriers to different chambers. The bald clan member gave Tirza a hard look, but didn't stop her when she flocked to Lior's side, and directed him and Jokim back up into the pillar of light. They drew close to what was the true ceiling of the underwater hive, a jagged hole cutting through a plate of rock which let in the light, and then diverged, sweeping into a narrow, winding tunnel that emptied into a smaller grotto.

Lior had the general idea of what a library was — a place of study, as Father had posited when telling Lior stories of Cheber the Man-of-War — but what he found in the small place still came as some surprise.

Despite being several bends away from the main shaft, this room was sunlit, thanks to a series of holes in the ceiling letting in light from higher waters, and they illuminated another jungle, just like the entry chamber. Only instead of plants, here there was an abundance of furniture: desks, four or five of them, low to the floor and covered neatly in tablecloths of varying shades of blue and red. Tapestries hung at the walls, great squares of dyed seaweed and kelp chords woven together in vibrant patterns and skillfully sewn images. The bare rock wall between them was covered in more etchings, some of them detailed and quite grand — on the ceiling was an image of that giant, paddle-armed sea creature again, stretching from one end of the chamber to the other like a giant flying-type Pokémon.

The bulk of the volume of the room, however, was occupied by a series of chests and shelves. All of the former were closed, but on the shelves, Lior saw all manner of strange material: piles of what looked like ancient, rotting kelp, banded together by rope; cracked shells and pieces of what looked like frayed leather; jars of wadded-up cloths; and, in more abundance, flat stones, most of them square in shape, covered in scratch marks.

They were in the chests too — Tirza floated over to one and pried it open, and Lior saw that it was full to the brim with rocks. She nodded to them. "These first," she said. "We'll pile some of them outside, for Jokim to take down to the entry chamber. Then Lior will have a turn. Here." She pulled the chest from the wall by a rusted handle. "Start with this one. It's a bit heavy, so go together. Be careful."

Jokim grabbed one end, Lior the other, and between them, they managed to get it back to the entrance of the tunnel, where they placed it on a small shelf until they had enough of a pile to begin taking down to the entryway. Below them, couriers darted in and out of the pillar of light, ascending and descending carrying armfuls of blankets, cooking utensils, containers, sacks of food and grain. Back inside the library, Tirza had begun relieving the shelves of their materials, and Lior and Jokim set about helping her, taking what she put on the floor out to the central shaft.

After they emptied two shelves and removed four more chests, Jokim disappeared for a little while, working on taking the things downstairs. Lior and Tirza split up then, each working on one side of the room, migrating the great abundance of material towards the mouth of the tunnel. At one point, Lior turned, an armful of rocks and jars in hand, only to bump into Tirza, who'd been reaching for something on the shelf above him. Two stones and a small clay vase left his arms at moderate speed, and though he managed to grab the first two, the vase hit the ground with a dull crack and split off into two pieces. Lior yelped.

"No!" He put down the two rocks and grabbed the two pieces of jar, groaning. Yes, definitely beyond repair. He flashed a fearful look towards the entryway to the cave. Enos is going to have my tail for this!

"Let me see." Tirza gingerly plucked the shattered ceramic from him, and he stared at her bleakly.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"It's between us, my dear," she assured him. "If anyone asks, I bumped into something, and knocked it out of my own hands, understand? Besides, I shouldn't have come up behind you like that." She reached into the jar carefully, then smiled a little. "It's cloth anyway, so we can count ourselves lucky that it wasn't seaweed. It gets brittle in its old age, and tears at the slightest touch." She handed him the jar and he frowned as he left to place it outside for Jokim, who had carted off nearly three-quarters of the pile by that time.

When he returned, he asked, "Why does a library have jars of seaweed and cloth, anyway? I thought there would be..." He cast his mind back to Father's stories. "Tomes?"

She raised a brow at him. "These are tomes," she said patiently. "If by 'tome' you mean something on or in which information is stored." She cast her hand around, encompassing the entire cave. "And that's so, for everything in this place — the kelp, the stone tablets, the cloth in the jars, even the woven afghans in some of the chests... All of it contains information. More specifically, history. Our history."

" 'Our' history?"

"Yes. Of our race, of the merfolk."

He gazed around, and then glanced back to her arms, which carried three rocky tablets between them. Those scratches... What he thought were scratches... "So those are words?" he asked, pointing.

She nodded. "Indeed. Come look." She offered him one of the stones, and he accepted it and he took a closer look. Yes... The marks weren't as random as they'd appeared initially. In fact, there was a strange kind of order here: the symbols were squares containing clustered groups of straight lines, vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. The boxes of these scratches ran in rows across the tablet, and at the end, abruptly turned down into columns, creating progressively smaller boxes of text as his eye approached the far left corner of the stone. Tirza pointed down at the first bracket, the widest one.

" 'Thapis'," she intoned. " 'A record of discovery and settlement.'"

He jaw parted. "That's what it says? How do you know?"

"My clan has made a study of ancient languages and forms of communication. This one is lost to time, but is still relevant to the task of keeping our history."

"Who is Thapis?"

"What. An ancient city from the Era of the Kingdoms. It lay along the border of one of the smaller nations, of Thautria."

Lior squinted down at the scratches. No matter how hard he tried, he could not conceive of how these marks somehow communicated Thapis, A Record of Discovery and Settlement. All the same, curiosity bore up through him like a raging fire. Father's stories from the Era of the Kingdoms, while exciting, had been rather vague at times, lacking names and dates and specific details; not once had he ever mentioned that one of the kingdoms was named Thautria, or that there had been a city named Thapis lying along its border.

"What else does it say?" he asked.

Tirza cocked her head, peering down at the slate. "Ruled by a Kingman named Levitis," she said haltingly. "He erected a great fortress there, that eventually grew to encompass the entire city. The place became known for fending off invasive forces from neighboring Dothys, and soon it was accepted that Thautria was nigh impregnable from the eastern region in which Thapis sat."

Levitis, Dothys, Thapis, Thautria... Lior's intrigue grew, and he stared around at the library, taking it in with new eyes. "And so there's stuff like this in the rest of these rocks?" he asked. "And the...jars? And kelp?"

"Yes." Tirza peered behind him a moment, then reached for another jar, this one glass that packed a wad of tired, stained cloth. "On every stone and piece of seaweed in this place, there is a story," she said, drawing the cloth out of its container. It was wrapped tightly in a small cylinder, and she unraveled it, unveiling for Lior a torn rag covered in black markings that looked like Octillery ink, markings that were circles and triangles and squares, vastly different from what was on the tablet. "Some use the hash marks, like on that tablet. Others use these sorts of patterns, and others still clusters of holes in seaweed, in ordered configurations. It has been the duty of the Kyogre Clan, of our communities all across the seabottom, to study these languages, learn them so that we might remember our past, of our triumphs and our failures alike. We are the historians of the sea, Lior, and have been since time immemorial, since the days of the Kingdoms and long before."

Lior watched her fold the cloth back up, gently, lovingly, caring not to disturb one stitch in the tattered old fabric on which invaluable history had been printed by someone with Octillery ink long, long ago. As she pushed it back into the jar, he wondered if any of these tablets or rotting lengths of kelp contained more stories about Cheber the Man-of-War, more details about his terrible battle in the trench with the Gyarados, where he'd been faced with two bad decisions, one of which was only marginally less terrible than the other.

Then he asked, "Why does the Kyogre Clan do this?" He didn't think the idea was stupid or anything—he was amazed that this small space packed so much into it, so much... Story. So much experience. So much time, and knowledge of things had were beyond dead and buried after the Cataclysm, things that most merfolk no longer cared to remember. So no, he didn't think it was stupid... But he did wonder why the Kyogre Clan had chosen to begin inventorying the tales of the sea in the first place, why they invested so much in it.

She paused in gathering another tablet into her arms. "In the old days," she said, "the Kyogre Clan often served in the royal court, at the pleasure of the kings and queens of the sea. Members of our community were so valued because we were so learned in our past. Phinebas will say that this is why we exist: to know the past so that we might prevent our kings from making the mistakes of tyrants and other evil mermen and maids long gone.

"And though it is that, I feel that there's more: the past, however ugly, is both a metric of and a springboard for our growth, both as a species and as individual people. It is a gauge that shows us where we can go, where we should go. Without it, we are lost, because after all, how do I know where to journey next, if I don't know where I've been? You understand?"

"I...think."

She smiled and squeezed his shoulder. "Maybe you'll see when you're a bit older." Her face darkened. "But if there's someone that understands this... it is Commander Titus. That is why he is here."

A flash of cold chilled his blood. "What do you mean?"

Before she could answer, a hissing voice came from behind him: "What's this, Lior? Taking a break?"

Lior swerved to see Enos emerging out of the dark of the tunnel, with Jokim treading silently behind him. Horror, then guilt overcame him, and he barely had the mind to clamp down on a useless, Sir, I'm sorry. Instead, he crossed his arms in a salute, and tried not to brace himself when Enos gave him a hard slap across the face — he'd quickly learned that it was easier that way, and while it didn't hurt any less, it was a lot less upsetting afterwards.

"How much time have you wasted in here, mouthing off with your caretaker?" Enos growled. Only it wasn't a growl, more a dry rasp. Lior knew that this was an accusation more than a question, so he remained silent, and Enos continued, "I spotted a cracked jar among your bounty below. Your doing?"

"Mine," Tirza said quickly. "Simple clumsiness."

"Hrmph." Enos peered at her with disapproval. "My lady, it would be most appreciated if you would leave my underlings to their tasks. Elihu has need of you in the green room, at any rate." He turned his beady eyes to Lior, who struggled not to shrink back beneath his stare. "You'll utter no other words than 'yes sir', 'no sir' for the rest of our stay if you know what's good for you. Once you've finished here, help the others in the lower library. Any more nonsense, and your tail may just adorn my dinner plate tonight."

"Yes sir," Lior said and for the rest of that forty-five minutes, there was indeed no talking.

Lior and Jokim worked silently but well together, and had the upper library cleaned out and the tablets, jars, and packages of kelp hauled downstairs with fifteen minutes left to spare. As they went back and forth between the library and the lower floors, the entry chamber became packed with bodies and bounty, so much so that it was a struggle to get in and out quickly. This was mostly because more soldiers had come up from the depths to help haul stuff back to the trench caves. Cephas was also there, utilizing the Pokémon from the stalls to ferry supplies back into darker waters.

To Lior's delight, Nightlight was one of them, wearing a kelp harness attached to a small tarp on which he could carry several items. Lior wouldn't have believed that the Chinchou was strong enough to tote two empty clay jars from here to the trench, but either he'd greatly underestimated his friend, or he'd greatly underestimated Cephas — in that awful place, where squires broke their backs and Pokémon engaged in bloody brawls over food, it appeared that Nightlight was undergoing a slow but striking transformation, from someone indolent and meek to hard and decisive.

Lior casually shifted himself closer to where his Pokémon was loading up, pretending to stack a couple of tablets and jars closer together, and yes: that was his Nightlight who seemed to have ballooned in size; his Nightlight with three scars running down his back and one across his forehead; his Nightlight with a face of stone, one that told Lior he was becoming more adept at hiding discomfort, terror, pain, sadness. It was an image that was hard to reconcile, until he remembered Lady Tirza's words about history, and knowing your own. He kind of understood now — considering the timid creature Nightlight had been before, he thought the past really was a metric for growth.

Abruptly, he caught Nightlight's gaze out of the corner of his eye, and when the two soldiers loading him turned their backs, the Chinchou reached out with an antennae and gave the back of Lior's tail a small shock. Then he left, swimming strongly out of the Ruins. Lior watched him go a moment before getting back to work. Hi, Nightlight.

Soon, their task came to an end, and they mustered into ranks outside of the Ruins. The entryway had been cleared out, and the sun was still going strong in the sky, approaching noon, but the water out here felt... Chilly. Cold actually, and that unsettled Lior, because he knew why.

Enos appeared, along with Tirza Mari and the rest of Kyogre Clan that had accompanied them, and they went up the hill. As they ascended towards the sun, the water grew continually colder, until it began to go down strange across Lior's gills, and he began to see tiny chunks of ice drifting through the sea like floating rocks. He spotted Titus and Phinebas at the top of the hill, and it was almost as though they hadn't moved since the couriers had descended into the shadows. Perhaps they hadn't. But something had changed, as they now floated in a shadow that had not been there before.

Lior looked up, and above him, he saw a boat.

It was smaller than the trawler, a grimy thing with a pointed prow and a wide rear, white save for a red stripe down the middle, with something scrawled through it, something in the human language that Lior couldn't read. And even if he had been literate, he would not have been able to decipher it, for it was upside down — the whole boat was, facing downward peculiarly, as though the sea was the sky.

And floating in this sea-sky were several bodies: three, four, five, Lior counted, all of them grown humans. Some floated lifelessly on their backs. Others stared down at Lior with twisted expressions or horror or agony. All fed blood into the water, creating a bronze cloud between them...and other things. Lior quickly turned away before he could get a good look at the...stuff that was coming out of the stomach of one human man: giant red worms, it looked like, but he knew better. He focused on Phinebas as they lined up; the old Dewgonga's face was pulled tight as a cord, and looked to be going to great pains to keep from spitting at Titus.

"Is it not plain to you, what you have done?" he demanded.

"It is," Titus growled. "I have relieved you of a headache that will pain you no longer. Are you not grateful?"

"No!" Phinebas exclaimed on a disbelieving laugh. "And why should I be? You are a long-lived man of the sea, and yet you seem to know nothing of the ways of humans. Else you would not have kicked open this nest of Beedrills."

"If you would have preferred subtlety—"

"I would have preferred sense!" Lior stiffened in horror as Phinebas's voice rose onto an angry peel. Titus's face darkened, but the old Dewgonga wasn't finished yet: "What have you done? Drowned a boat, killed the humans aboard it, in a horrifying fashion. Do you simply expect that the mainland will ignore this? Chalk it up to bad weather? Hungry Pokémon?"

"Yes," Titus growled.

"No," Phinebas snapped. "The weather is too fine, the area too barren of sea life. The humans will see this and grow suspicious, and soon, where there were two boats jetting around, there will be five, ten, trying determine how this might have happened. Humans are an intrusive and hardheaded species, Commander: they must know, and they never leave well enough alone. Free us of a headache? You may have just replaced it with a plague of humans!"

Lior saw the muscles in Titus's throat flex, but he otherwise appeared unruffled. "So let them come. Let them investigate. Those that do will drown too, and any that come after. I will baptize these waters in their blood, and soon they will begin to fear what is here, though they will not know what it is. They will fear it, and they will let well enough alone. And then your peace will be everlasting."

Phinebas stared at him incredulously. "Unbelievable. Do you hear yourself? Are you mad? Or just..."

"Weary," Titus supplied, raising a dangerous brow. "I suspect that the Kyogre Clan is too, those too cowed to speak out against you. In fact, I would wager that most of our species is weary of ducking beneath humans, fleeing where they tread. I was once the same, and paid greatly for it, until I realized a simple truth, one that everyone here knows well." He gestured to the soldiers arrayed behind and around him, and said, "Those who do not shirk the abuse will always feel its bite. If you do not fight to breathe, you suffocate. If you do not fend off invaders, they will poke at your borders until they find a way in. If you do not go for your foe with the intent to kill, he will kill you. It is the same, time and time again... And it is time that the merfolk remember this, and make it the mantle they live by."

A light came to Phinebas's eye, a light that was shrewd, amazed, and alarmed at the same time. "Are you saying that we should fight the humans? Kill them, and drive them from our waters? We are a hundred among billions of them, and yet you would dare ask that of me?"

"Never," Titus growled. "You have your purpose and my army and I have another: every one of us here has suffered under the hands of humans in one way or another, and we know that such an order cannot go for much longer. And so as your task is to remember...ours is to fight."

Lior's face began to crumple, and his stomach spiraled in a flux of pointed apprehension. Fight? He closed his eyes a moment, suddenly dizzy, and inside, his thoughts seemed to drip with oil, bringing a filthy taste to his mouth. Fight the humans? Was this what Titus had meant in that talk after the Army had rescued Reuben?

Phinebas turned away from Titus. "If that is what you mean to do... Then why are you here?"

"You know why."

"No! Lord Kygriss shall have nothing to do with you and your insanity."

Titus spread his hands wide. "Nothing of what I've said is insanity. You have seen what the humans have done to your waters: dying reefs, fewer Pokémon, more pollution. You feel my truth. And you know the history of the Kin, perhaps more than I do. What does it say about the times we live in when there are two living Kin?"

"Only two," Phinebas hissed.

"And that in itself is a miracle. And that we are both here in the same waters..." Titus shook his head. "Do you believe in providence, Phinebas?"

The old Dewgonga glowered at him, his eyes shining harshly. "I believe in good and evil, Titus, and right now, I can't say what group you belong to. I can sympathize with your aim, but fighting humans, killing humans, like this..." He gestured to the bodies floating in the water. "How does that make us any better than them?"

"How else do we counteract this imbalance, Phinebas? Tell me."

Another cold stare. "How do you plan to? Will you keep overturning boats, and draw more attention to our underwater world? Or..." His mouth tightened. "Do you plan to raise the King himself?"

Titus said nothing, and Lior shivered a little in the chill. Raise the King?

"Arceus above," Phinebas murmured. He shook his head harshly. "No. That is not the way."

"But perhaps that is what must be done. And perhaps that is how it should be done. How long will our fellow seafolk continue to suffocate on plastic and drown in oil because the humans outnumber us, because they overpower us? Groudon was a man-made abomination, but King Kyogre is a god. They will quake and break before his might."

"But at what cost? Your life? Lord Kygriss's?"

Titus raised a surprised brow, then hardened his face. "If that's what it takes."

For a long time, Phinebas remained silent. Suddenly, he seemed unsure—there was still that fierce defiance in his eyes, but his mouth turned in a way that broadcast doubt.

"You cannot ignore these signs, Phinebas," Titus said softly. "All I want is to speak to Lord Kygriss."

"He is too young to give consent for such things," Phinebas growled. "Especially for something with these implications."

"From what Lady Tirza has told me, you due his intelligence little credit."

"Tirza does not speak for him!" Phinebas roared.

"And neither do you. You cannot shield him from these things forever. He is Kin, and it would benefit him to understand his responsibilities long before he becomes a man."

Lior expected for Phinebas to burst out about that, but to his surprise, there was a sullen agreement on the old merman's face. They all watched him chew his lip and grind his teeth for a few moments longer, and then he spun around.

"This once," he growled. "I shall allow an audience this once. And then you will vacate our waters, and satiate your self-righteousness by some other means."

"As you say," Titus said mildly. But as he gave the order and they marched back off for the trench, Lior got a look at Titus's face once more, and what he saw there told them that they would not be leaving the Ruins anytime soon.

***

The work day continued when they returned to the dark, heavy waters of the Kyogre Clan's new abode. For the couriers and many other soldiers, it involved taking all that was brought back into the tunnels. For others, it was business as usual: training, mostly, errands, foraging, scouting.

For a small handful, it was finding Lord Kygriss-Mari.

Reuben reported to them when they returned, and told Phinebas and Commander Titus that the boy still hadn't been located, and he'd searched the caves as well as the water column top to bottom. Apparently, this was not news — Lord Kygriss-Mari had a habit of running off when it fancied him, stargazing and spelunking and exploring the seafloor's various crooks and crannies, and he had a myriad of holes and cracks he slipped through, unnoticed by his caretakers.

This did little to improve Phinebas's already terrible mood. "The next time this happens, you'll get the strap instead of him," he threatened Reuben. "Find that useless Tirza, and bring him back screaming if you have to."

Slightly pale, Reuben went off to do his bidding, and Titus send a group of ten soldiers with him to help. By Phinebas's glare, Lior was sure that the old Dewgonga wanted to snap at him for overstepping his bounds again, but didn't — likely he just wanted to locate and bring Lord Kygriss back before dark.

While all of this was going on, Lior and the couriers were busy moving the things from the Ruins into the caves — it was quite a lot of back and forth, up and down, but it occurred to Lior after a few hours of work that he was nowhere near as tuckered out as he'd expected to be. It seemed that five months of running around camp, doing everyone's bidding, had helped him build up some muscle and endurance. Titus, however much he hated it, had been right — a little more of this, and he would be ready to join Cephas as a squire.

He still couldn't determine if he was looking forward to that upcoming change of pace, or dreading it.

At one point, Enos caught Lior when he was coming out of the caves for more bounty. The Head Courier had set up a small workspace right outside, which consisted of a small desk, a record book, and a small pile of satchels. It appeared that he was in the process of switching couriers over to other tasks.

"You are to deliver messages to two captains under General Carys, one lieutenant under Oren, and to the sanitation staff," the wraith-like merman rasped. "They are as follows." He slowly dictated the messages, and their recipients; like Lior, most of the boys who worked under Enos were illiterate, and had to rely heavily on memory and small cues and reminders to deliver messages. Luckily, most of these appeared quite simple: summons to Titus's pavilion for council with Phinebas for the two captains, a reassignment for the lieutenant, and a meeting about a trade of cleaning supplies with the Clan for the sanitation staff. "Repeat," Enos growled when he finished.

Lior did, nearly word-for-word — luckily, memorizing messages like this was one of the easier tasks of his position.

"Upon delivery, you are to collect outgoing messages and bring them here to be recorded," Enos said. He waved at him. "Dismissed."

Lior saluted and took off, though not at the aggressive pace that he would normally take for message deliver — perhaps Nightlight wasn't the only one shedding his naiveté, because he was shrewd enough to see that Enos was cutting him a bit of a break. It was not anywhere near dusk yet, which was the deadline for most messages to be delivered and collected, and he had only five under his belt today — normally, he rode heavy under ten or twelve at a time, and had to constantly talk to himself as he went, repeating them under his breath as not to forget them.

He caught another break with his first three messages: both of General Carys's captains were meeting in her pavilion when he announced himself and saluted, and the lieutenant under General Oren's command was not much farther away, being attended to in the medical ward by Reuben for a long scratch during war games earlier this morning.

"Lior, I'm assuming you haven't seen hide nor hair or Lord Kygriss either?" Reuben said dourly.

"No sir." The last time Lior had seen the young boy was last night at their initial introduction; before Tirza had taken him back out to their tent, Reuben had wrangled the young lord into the dark, trying to get him back to bed, despite his protestations; Lord Kygriss had really wanted to play a game with Lior which still sent a nostalgic thrill through him. It seemed an age since he'd last played a game.

"Well, keep half an eye peeled, will you?" Reuben groaned. "For me. I need every eye I can get — I'm lucky enough that Titus sent some of your comrades out to give me a break in the first place!"

Lior promised he would and then moved on, finding a sanitation staff member a moment later and relaying the message about the cleaning supplies to him. Then he headed back to Enos, muttering the outgoing messages under his breath, and when he arrived, recited them to the Head Courier. He was rewarded with seven new messages to deliver, and a package as well: a gauntlet from Adiah to General Mattathias, newly repaired after getting cracked in training.

He decided to deliver that one first: he didn't like any of Titus's generals very much, but Mattathias least of all. Something about the merman was just a little...slimy. In what way it was hard to describe, but Lior didn't like the way the man looked at him, or anyone, like he was plotting something dreadful. Lior figured that if he could get this delivery over with first, he could breathe a little easier on the rest of his run.

The problem was, he couldn't find General Mattathias anywhere: he was not in his pavilion, or anywhere in his quadrant, or General Carys's — the two were close friends, or so Lior observed, but he didn't find him in her chambers either. He approached a lieutenant and another officer, inquiring after him, and one told him that Mattathias was in council with Titus, the other that he'd gone scouting out that nearby human city with a small patrol earlier in the afternoon.

Growing frustrated, Lior rose higher in the water column, hoping that he might be able to pick out General Mattathias from afar, but no such luck: too dark down here in the trench, and too many moving bodies that all looked the same besides. I guess I'll save that one for last after all.

He was just about to do just that he spotted something moving a little ways up the wall of the trench: a Lumineon, its giant, wing-like fins beating the water rhythmically, pushing itself along. But not just that: a long tail, disappearing into a wall in the rock face that that been hidden by the gloom. It looked like a Huntail...

Or a Jeager. He made to turn away, then hesitated. Isn't Lord Kygriss-Mari a Jeager?

So? That's not your business. You have errands to run.

But Phinebas and Titus are both looking for him. And Reuben told me to keep an eye out for him. He glanced upward — he couldn't really see the upper water column, but he figured that he still had enough time to investigate this hole and deliver his seven messages before dusk. Just a quick look... And if it's nothing, no one will know. Right?

He kicked over to the trench wall, angling towards the spot the Lumineon had left behind on its journey across the rock face. The shadows here were continuous and thick, and for a moment Lior was sure he'd lost the place where he thought he'd seen the hole. But when he cast his hands about the chilly stone, he found a depression that went in deep. How deep, he didn't know: he squinted in the darkness, but it was useless. It was indeed a hole, but he could see little to nothing of what lay in it.

Should I...? Going in seemed like a stupid idea, especially if it really was a Huntail that had gone in here: the teeth on those square jaws of theirs weren't just for show. But what if it really was Lord Kygriss-Mari? He worried his lip for a moment, and pulled himself into the hole. Just a little bit: a few feet, then back out, and back to work...

The hole was pitch-black and narrow, a pinprick in the wall of the trench: had a full-grown merman like Reuben tried to push his way in, his shoulders would've been caught early on by the tunnel's restrictive diameter. As it was, Lior was barely skinny enough to worm his way inside, and a couple of times, the rugged walls of the tunnel clipped at his shoulders, making his breath freeze in his lungs. Am I stuck? Alone, in this small, dark place?

But no — just when he thought the tunnel was tapering, it abruptly terminated, and ballooned into a rather large space. One he could see: bioluminescent flora carpeted the walls and ceiling, giving the place dimension, and he saw that besides being overgrown, it was also both long and flat, and mostly empty, save for rubble, a giant hole in the far floor...and Lord Kygriss-Mari.

I was right! Lior felt an intense relief at that — relief that if someone discovered him here, he would at least have an adequate excuse for not delivering messages. But Lord Kygriss-Mari looked less than pleased to see him — he whipped up from the floor of the space when Lior crawled in, nearly cracking his head on the low ceiling.

"What are you doing here?" he snapped. There was such rage on his face and venom in his voice that Lior's smile vanished immediately.

"S-sorry," he stammered, and for some reason he found himself saluting. "U-uh, Phinebas and Commander Titus are looking for you. They want to talk to you, and—"

"Don't care." Lior could scarcely comprehend the look on the boy's face — after the shine of excitement in his eyes from meeting him last night, he could only describe the way he now looked as black, with something dark and terrible in his eyes. "I don't wanna talk to him or anybody else. Leave me alone." He went back down to the floor and then glared up at Lior. "And don't you dare tell anybody else that I'm here. Or I'll...I'll bury you. Got it?"

Bury me? Lior didn't see how that was possible, but he turned nonetheless. I guess I'll just tell Titus where he is... Even though for some reason, Lord Kygriss-Mari clearly didn't want to be found, and he wondered why. Hesitating, he glanced back at the young boy, taking a closer look. It was hard to see anything in this gloom, but his lateral lines were picking up minute vibrations coming from Lord Kygriss-Mari — he was shaking, and as he watched, he saw the boy rub at his eyes with his sleeve.

Tears? Impossible to tell, as they would be invisible, but Lior could feel it for a certainty. Had he not wiped at his own eyes constantly in the same fashion after they'd put Father in the ground on that beach? He followed Lord Kygriss-Mari's gaze, to the other side of the narrow chamber, where stood a small stack of stones, with a shiny piece of scavenge on top. It was not as tall or carefully-made as the one Reuben had made for his brother several dozen marches ago... An in its imperfection, Lior felt a pang of sympathy.

"Um," he said, "did you make this...?"

"I said leave me alone," Lord Kygriss-Mari snapped.

"Sure," Lior said uncomfortably, not quite certain of what he was saying. "But, uh..." He stared down at the rubble scattered across the floor and picked up a random pebble. "Can I pay my respects?"

Lord Kygriss-Mari glowered at him, and Lior couldn't fathom how a boy younger than he was could possible look so savage. "Why? You didn't know him. He was my retainer."

He tried to bury a feeling of intrusiveness as he said, "But I heard what happened to him." Lior didn't know much more about plastic sickness than what he'd been told, but if it was anything close to drowning on oil... He shuddered. "It's horrible." He indicated the stone. "May I?"

Lord Kygriss-Mari said nothing, so Lior took that as assent. Slowly, he placed the rock among the others marking Dion's grave. Staring at it, he suddenly felt like he was back on that beach, sitting beside his father's corpse, watching the waves. He remembered that deadness he'd felt inside, a well of bottomless blackness, remembered how certain he'd been that time would stop — that time couldn't possibly go on, that he couldn't possibly go on, without Father and Mother by his side.

But it had. It surely had gone on, as time always coldly, cruelly does, one second at a time, without a thought as to who is broken and who is not. And somehow, though he'd not thought it possible at the time, Lior had survived time's pitiless forward march, one he'd thought he would spend sinking deeper and deeper into sorrow. And now, in this place and time, though things were hard and sometimes bad...

"I'm all right, Father," he whispered.

"What?" Lord Kygriss-Mari sniffed.

Lior let out a breath, closing his eyes a moment. Though thoughts of Mother and Father no longer drove him to tears as they might have more than a year ago... They still strongly stirred the waters inside, and brought the phantom taste of oil to his mouth. "Nothing," he murmured.

"Did you say 'Father'?" Lord Kygriss-Mari asked, rubbing at his eyes again.

"Yes..." Then he smiled uncertainly, and went for a light joke: "Though I guess it was more like...I was talking to his ghost."

A spark of interest: "You can talk to ghosts?"

"No," Lior said hastily. "But I wish I could. It's been a long time since I talked to my father. He's..." Inside, the waters stirred faster, filled with biting rocks that hurt.

"He's in heaven," Lord Kygriss-Mari said morosely. "Like Dion?"

Lior looked down at him, at the blackness on his face. Yes, this boy had a well of darkness going down in him too, and it looked like he was beginning to drown in it, just like Lior had... Before Titus had reached down and dragged him back to the surface. "Yes," he said softly.

Silence. There was a light current here, and it tugged at the bioluminescent plants crowding the walls and ceiling and corners, making the pale shadows ripple across Dion's grave marker. Lord Kygriss-Mari's shoulders were shaking, and Lior felt the sudden urge to reach out to him, to wrap an arm around his skinny shoulders and comfort him. Comfort him as he had never had the chance to comfort Lael.

Instead, he went down to the floor beside Kygriss-Mari and said, "What do you think they're doing there, in heaven?"

Lord Kygriss-Mari didn't respond, and Lior thought he'd gone and annoyed the boy again. So he said, "My father liked hunting. I mean, he had to, to feed me and my mother, but he liked it as a sport, too. My mother used to tell me that before they had me, he would go out every now and then and try to hunt down something tricky or rare — a Gorebyss, maybe, or a Crawdaunt. One time he brought back a Relicanth, can you believe that? She said it gave her a tummy ache, though."

Silence.

"Or maybe he's crafting something cool," Lior continued, wondering whether or not he should stop. "He liked building things, too. And I liked decorating them. When..." He swallowed. "When my mother was expecting my sister, we made up a place for her in our home. We lived in a boat wreck, and there was a small nook where we usually put stuff for storage. But Father decided that he would make this into a living space for—"Sweet Lael—"my sister when she got older, and he made her a bed out of an old wood box, and a small shelf for all her toys and things, too. And I decorated it with some rocks, and even made a banner of brown algae for her... I think she would've liked it too, if..."

Silence, and Lior could hear the ocean — the ocean inside him, spun up into roaring maelstrom. Stop it, he thought as hot tears beaded his eyes. Stop it right now. That's over now. And it was, over for more than a year, yet it still hurt all the same, as bad as it had in the days after Lael's death, the days after the oil, and Lior wondered: would it ever not hurt?

"Are they all there?" Lord Kygriss-Mari whispered. Even so, his words felt loud in this small, dark place, away from everything else.

"Yes," Lior said, staring at the grave marker.

"They sound nice," Lord Kygriss-Mari said. "I..." A sniff. "I hope Dion's with them. He was so dumb... And clumsy. And he got lost a lot, and all he liked doing was sticking his nose in those tablets, and in those old rags in the libraries. He was terrible at Tail Sketches, and Lord of the Line... And he didn't like exploring, neither." Chuckle. "He's probably wandering around heaven lost, so I hope he finds your father, and mother, and sister. Maybe they can build a house for him, keep him safe."

Lior smiled at him. "Sure," he said. "I think they'd be very happy together."

And when Lord Kygriss-Mari burst into tears, he did reach out to him this time, and draw him close. Both for the boy...and for himself.

--

Author's Note

There you go. A super long chapter for you!

Credit where credit is due: many of the ideas for how the merfolk preserve their underwater documents and their various written languages came from a world building forum I found online. Some of them are my own ideas, but I wouldn't have been able to write this chapter without the forum's help!

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59791/what-could-an-aquatic-civilization-use-to-write-on-with/59805