Altered Bonds Extras
Side Tales 1 — Musing Matriarch
(Best read after Chapter 18)
(Canon? — Yes)
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Night. Or a facsimile of night. Ariados was used to the odd, not-quite-right sky with its dotted stars and an always full moon hanging overhead. Did it make her sleep any easier?
No. It didn't make any of the others sleep easy either. As was her habit these days, she gazed from the hillside next to the exit of the dungeon of Stringed Forest, a giant tree at one end of her village with a knothole leading to the outside, and took in her home. A cozy settlement surrounded by a circle of large, thick trees in a forested environment, with buildings of wood and stone and clay, all decorated with webbing and dyed threads and pieces of silky fabric. Buildings unable to fall, being dungeon-made as they were. Buildings that would never fall again.
Structures that could never break apart, collapse into themselves, be torn by rifts and things—
Don't.
Ariados chided herself, cursing her lapse. The matriarch's eyes wandered around, all the way to the other side of the dungeon-encased village where another giant tree with a knothole resided. The entrance to their warped sanctuary. Floor seven, or as the dungeon fog invading her head would insist, Stringed Forest Village.
How kind of the dungeon to recognize what it had gobbled up.
Even in the night, she would spot the occasional villager going around. There was Galvantula, doing her weaving work outside her yard. The Grubbin family were cozying up on their little porch. Masquerain and Larvesta were chatting again, if with a hint of trepidation. The trepidation that everyone felt these days.
Well, especially now, of course. Nobody would just forget what happened just yesterday—
Accursed human girl.
Yet another thought Ariados immediately forced herself to quell. Too many bad circumstances. What would she do with her? The ill omen? The fated, too-nice destroyer of their realm? What could she do, darn it all?
But she'd made her promise already. Butterfree, her old friend, had insisted, and so Ariados would keep it. No more worrying about the human.
Sighing, she reached into herself, into her soul. And she pulled. Her left foreleg, the one that hadn't been so terribly injured by the human's Lucario guard dog, glowed and rippled before a shard materialized into its clutch. Ariados held it with absolute firmness, head tilted to inspect her shard, dark blue with red-purplish veins and with shadowy ooze that engulfed the object. It distorted ever so slightly in her grasp, afterimages left behind as it shifted and wriggled side-to-side.
Her altering shard. The one thing that let her have any semblance of control over this blighted Mystery Dungeon that had the nerve to swallow her home, to break her people's spirits. When Stringed Forest had first formed, shattering the village and twisting it into a hostile labyrinth filled with voided tears and things watching from the other side, grabbing this strange shard had been the only thing to save them all. It had allowed her to become a master of the dungeon, forcing it to reshape to her will and bring back her home.
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Even with that, however, it wasn't enough to keep her people together. Many had fled in fear, not willing to risk life inside the grasp of a distortion that might pull the rug from under them anytime. The rest, more afraid of leaving behind what remained of their homes and community, or paranoid that they'd move to another village only for another dungeon to form on top of them, had stayed. Their home was a former shell of its old, humble glory.
And even that had nearly been stolen from them yesterday. By the lich.
Ariados really, really couldn't stop herself this time, her head tilting skyward as if seeing him hovering right over there, claws pricking her abdomen. The Aerodactyl of broken bones and shadow. The fiend who had played a role in the breaking of a local dungeon. The crazed Abhorrent mutant who would've taken everything dear to her—
And of course, she'd been spared by the human of all things. Noble thing. She hated it. But she couldn't bear to hate.
Too many other thoughts dared to drown her, Ariados shooing them all away with a wave of her leg and a silent hiss. The shard in her grasp reacted to her subconscious, her leg flaring up as it struck the earth, and red-purplish mist scattered in its wake and condensed into Spinarak and Joltik constructs. The matriarch of Stringed Forest Village stared briefly at their existence, the Pokespawn staring back with vacant, lifeless eyes.
Summoning dungeon constructs in a moment of aggravation. And here she'd thought she was more than proficient enough to not accidentally do that. "Begone," Ariados said in a dull voice, making the Pokespawn vanish into red-purplish mist that rose to the sky and dissipated.
She reabsorbed her shard, a pained gasp leaving her as it turned into red-purplish energy that washed all over her. An exhale left her as she let her gaze drift back to her village, a broken home that somehow refused to break into splinters entirely, despite the Calamitus-like doom that had hung over their heads. Still hung, perhaps, if the human lived to fulfill her curse. Or alternatively, if the monstrous Abhorrents were left unchecked in their rampage. They had a Mew amongst them, a Mew! Who knew what horrors were possible, if the mutants had the Dungeon-Plagued aid of a Mew?
But no. She was no warrior, nor an explorer. She was a matriarch, and ironic as it was, her village had been too paranoid for its own good, saying things to others that should never have been said. She had to keep her people in line, for the greater good. She would leave the world-ending threats to the professionals.
As she promised with Butterfree. Odd, how near-disasters could rekindle a sense of companionship between former friends. Ariados felt her mandibles form a bug-like smile at the thought, before growing wistful as her head moved to the side. Her eyes barely could see the black-wired fencing, but her vantage point still saw a few of the tombstones.
Ariados took in the graveyard, rebuilt after the dungeon had torn up the old one. She thought she could tell, at this point, which one was the Beedrill's who had perished when the dungeon had formed, crushing her—
Rest in peace, little Dandelion. We live and remember you for another day.
—and which one was Webwill Ariados's. The former matriarch.
Would you have done things differently, Mother? Would you have dealt with the human better?
Funny. Eira, the human girl, could probably relate. It bothered Ariados, the thought of her and the girl having something in common. A parent deceased in their youth, with their child forced to handle challenges foreign to them in the aftermath. Though of course, her circumstances as a once-unprepared child, thrust into the role of a village chieftain, paled to a girl marked for either destruction or death.
It rankled her. Not the girl, not anymore, but fate itself. Fate that had compelled this girl to somehow bypass all the protections of Haven Archipelago against humanity, to begin the chain of events that would lay ruin upon their civilization. Fate that refused to buckle, to compromise, to bargain with her.
But fine. Ariados faced her village once more, the entirety of it laid before her eyes, a village that had survived against all the odds, and decided she could spit in the face of fate one more time. The dungeons going haywire, being able to swallow up Pokemon villages when they shouldn't be able to? That had been a preclude, a taste of the incoming horror that had fueled her fears, haunted her nightmares. It had made her scared witless of what would come next. But fate had made a terrible mistake.
It had shown her the might of the Abhorrents. And it had proclaimed the existence of an ill omen, rubbing it right in her face. Doom was perhaps all but assured—
And that meant she had nothing to fear anymore.
Try me! she yelled at the world, maddened glee overcoming her. I've faced my greatest fears and lived! You'll have better luck dangling your threats of certain death in front of the undead husk of a Paras!
The universe would break first, she decided, before she and her village did.