Aidinza watches as Drayden returns the drampa, muttering something to it out of the corner of his mouth. Then, as the man clips the drampa's ball back to his belt, he takes a long, slow breath. His ordering outrage had fittingly come from a place of unrestrained temper, a knee-jerk reaction to Naazin's disrespect, but unlike the drampa, it seemed he was struggling to fully reign in that rage.
For a moment, his hand hovered over a visibly ancient pokéball, heavy and coated in chunky outcroppings, its paint worn and chipped. But with obvious effort, he instead grabs a more familiar pokéball, and in a flash of red, the altaria once more appears. But it was far from its first resplendent appearance, its fluffy feathers sullen and sodden, and this time, it did not glance back towards its trainer as if confused at being used at this level of battle.
No, its dark, weary eyes were very firmly set on the distant Sandile as the ground type scuffed about in the dirt. It clearly was not eager to repeat the mistakes that had led to its utter humiliation at Naazin's claws.
Unfortunately for it, and for Drayden's attempt to wrest control of the fight and his composure, sending the altaria back out was easily the worst possible choice he could have made. On the surface, it made sense; a flying type was ideal for dealing with a ground type like Sandile, forcing Aidinza to swap, ceding the advantage Naazin took from the altaria in a flurry of stone and pulsating water, or get cleaned up. Either way would stall out Aidinza's momentum and give Drayden back the control of counter-pick.
But beyond the surface level, Drayden had just sent out an exhausted pokémon against a moxie-empowered Sandile. Dominance was flowing through the desert croc's blood, fueling him with power.
It was the man's first out-and-out mistake of the fight. It was not an exploited strategy or a misplayed tactic pulled apart because the Pheyan'atho had ripped apart the gym leader's entire filmography and distilled hundreds of thousands of hours of footage into a plan to defeat Drayden.
But a mistake. Something unaccountable that Aidinza outright never expected to happen.
"Dark Pulse." Aidinza struggled to keep the excitement out of his voice, the exhaustion of the slugfest that had seen his pokémon tossed around like ragdolls time and time again slipping away in a glorious second wind.
The difference between the fourth dark pulse and all proceeding dark pulses was as stark as night and day. The distorted energy empowering it did not simply lance across the sky as a black beam but darkened the room perceptibly, a pale imitation of Tsesei's monstrous krookodile's power, but an imitation nonetheless.
The altaria threw itself to the side, the motion desperate and graceless as the dark pulse punched through the space it had just vacated, exploding against the far wall and sending chips of rock and history across the room.
The flying-type screeches, spitting out a harsh beam of draconic energy back at Sandile, but its awkward dodge gives it a terrible angle, the beam going wide.
"Sand Tomb, blind it." A plume of dust and sand explodes from the ground far underneath the altaria, losing power well before it reaches the humming pokémon but leaving a haze of debris to linger in the still air, obscuring the atlaria's sight and leaving its form silhouetted against the lights behind it.
"Dark Pulse." Aidinza watched as the altaria reacted to his voice, attempting to dodge without being able to see the attack coming for it. But it was not going to be enough. Its attempt at dodging was not just graceless but hesitant without the ability to see.
"Protect!" Drayden snaps, the frustration of the fight, of Aidinza's second wind, overcoming a lifetime of careful voice modulation. A shimmering green bubble forms in front of the altaria moments before the lance of darkness pierces through the obscuring dust cloud and slams into the dragon. The atlaria was shoved backwards, unharmed but displaced by the sheer force of the attack.
"Keep up the pressure, Sandile." Before Aidinza had even finished speaking, another dark pulse was tearing through the air, Sandile might have been oblivious at the best of times, but amidst a fight, with his dominance over another pokémon already proven, his Moxie clear to see? He was as aggressive as Aidinza's pokémon came.
The cadence of the fight continued like that for several minutes, Sandile darkening the gym repeatedly as the altaria barely managed to keep ahead or keep the Dark Pulses at bay through desperate evasion and judicious use of Protect.
It was a cadence that Aidinza and Sandile could maintain. But the altaria and Drayden could not, and Aidinza could see the moment the Pheyan'atho' leader' realised that. The altaria turned to more aggressive movements, taking sharper angles and pressing closer to the ground type. It almost abandoned its attempts to use dragon pulse against Sandile, seemingly realising the futility.
Drayden thought that Sandile was strongest at a distance.
He was falling for it.
"Force the altaria lower." Aidinza kept his voice low, trusting Sandile to both hear him over the stream of dark pulses and to understand what he wanted. Sandile's efforts immediately shifted higher, no longer forcing the altaria into sharp turns to avoid being slapped out of the sky but into steep looping dives.
"Sand Tomb." Aidinza timed his order for the deepest part of the altaria's dive, moments after another dark pulse had just sliced through the air above its head, and this time there was almost no loss of power as it exploded from the ground. The pillar of debris catches the altaria completely off guard, slamming into it from below, tearing the winds from its wings and leaving it to flounder in the air.
Leaving it a sitting duck for the next dark pulse. It catches the dragon-type in the beak, spreading down its long neck like a creeping nightmare, before exploding and spiking the humming pokémon straight into the ceiling.
And just like that, the second and fourth of Drayden's pokémon were defeated.
The young trainer felt more than heard Jha'y'zéča-den's voice, as the young Pheyan'atho whipped the crowd into a new frenzy. Not that they needed much incitement, Aidinza's newest victory was a tempo shift that even the most oblivious observers could feel, and with Drayden's own home field advantage co-opted against him, the energy was running high.
And Aidinza was running high off that energy. At that moment in the exaltation of the crowd, with blood rushing through his ears and the spectre of looming victory playing at his heart, Aidinza felt a bizarre moment where he understood Shandíín implicitly. This had to be what the bird felt whenever he was the centre of attention.
Despite himself, Aidinza looked across the field towards Drayden, his heart thumping with the energy of the crowd and eyes alight with triumph. Something… maybe arrogant twists at his lips, pulling them upwards even as Drayden's press into a thin, furious line.
"The Gym Leader's pokémon has been eliminated by knocko-." A low, terrible growl interrupts the gym trainer as Drayden both returns altaria and releases his next pokémon in the blink of an eye. The new pokémon was not as massive as the drampa, but it was built even more thickly, it was bipedal with legs like tree trunks, covered in thick blue scales that had more in common with a cheese grater than even Sandile's rough scales. Red spikes jut out from its form at random, each one jagged and chipped, hinting at a lifetime of brutal combat. Its arms would not be out of place on a Conkeldurr, thinner towards the humerus, but growing into massive forearms, each ending in three wickedly sharp, polished claws. Two rough-hewn blue wings stretch from its back, made of dozens of pinions that looked like one solid mass but with a slight flex of, revealed an equal number of tough, folded membranes.
All of it leading to its crimson head, that almost seemed as if it was made of the sharp spikes that intermittently covered the rest of its body, if not for the fact that it ended in a brutal, blunt snout. Two amber eyes glare out over the field, unlike drampa it did not even glance towards its opponent, instead setting them on Aidinza standing on the other side of the field.
Druddigon, the cave pokémon.
Something not quite a hush falls over the gym. The crowd was still riotous, or at least the mass of it was, and it took Aidinza a moment to realise why. The Pheyan'atho had fallen silent, and it was not difficult to figure out why, because Aidinza knew they were thinking the same thing he was.
There were two pokémon Aidinza expected at the end of this… mountain he was scaling. The drampa, or this very pokémon currently staring him down with savage amber eyes.
The fact it was here, with two pokémon yet to even be released… the cloying thought of where Drayden was planning to escalate this to hung over Aidinza like a guillotine. But he could not let that uncertainty show, not here, not now. Not after he had come all this way.
So, instead of letting the thought overwhelm him, he met the terribly powerful pokémon's stare with an even certainty.
That only seemed to infuriate the potent dragon type, its amber eyes flashing with something dangerous. What passed for its lips peeled back, exposing a wicked maw of razor-sharp teeth, as the air shook with a low, terrifying growl that felt as if it pitched to directly target Aidinza's fear response.
It was all he could do to not flinch away from the sound, a feat that the Gym Trainer, used to dragon types and far from its direct attention, could not even manage; his attempt to continue what he was saying before the drake was released stuttering to a blubbering halt.
On the other hand, it had nearly the opposite effect on Sandile. He was infuriated by the attempt to intimidate his trainer, and enraged by the sheer temerity of his opponent to not even glance at him.
He roars back at the dragon, an ancient bone rattling sound, the pure distilled essence of the dominant power rushing through his veins and empowering him with every victory. The sound of a ruler of vast dry, sandy horizons, an eternal apex constant to the ever shifting harshness of the desert. It did not just demand attention, but commanded respect by dint of unchallengeable genetic success.
Druddigon's attention finally falls away from Aidinza, to Sandile across from him, its posture shifting to acknowledge the challenger before it.
Aidinza lets out a low, slow breath of still, stale air, as the attention of the powerful dragon-type passes from him. Keeping himself together, to not show weakness under the eye of a dragon like the druddigon was… difficult. But he needed to keep his wits about him, one wrong move could ruin everything he had worked for so far.
"Keep at a distance, Sandile. Dark Pulse." The room blackens as Sandile flexes the power that bringing down two dragons had earned him; the equivalent of another pokémon spending several minutes carefully gathering power to imbue themselves with incredible strength. The air snapped as it fled in the wake of the beam, dwarfing even Naazin's most powerful moves in that perfect moment of zenith, unerringly placed to catch the druddigon in the centre of its chest.
The dragon makes no attempt to avoid it, and Drayden calls nothing; Aidinza does not even see his face move, his eyes blazing with unbalanced fury and frustration. Aidinza, however, definitely sees his face move when the dark pulse makes contact. The dark-type move slams into thickly plated draconic scales of a pokémon that Aidinza had seen stonewall the most potent pokémon of seven badge trainers, a pokémon that filtered monsters from Monsters.
Sandile, dominance thundering through his veins, was in no way filtered. The druddigon stumbles, sliding back from the force as Sandile overcomes its stance and strength outright. This was not the trickery that brought low drampa, a contrivance of circumstance and traps that prevented its incredible power from ever being brought to bear. This was not tyrunt, a pokémon of conservative strength meant to weed out those who were genuinely unsafe fighting a trainer of Drayden's calibre. This was not altaria, caught out by sacrifice and counter matchup.
This was raw power.
But Drayden would not be Drayden if that was all it took. Druddigon roars again, the claws of its feet digging into the ground as it stabilises itself, slipping through dirt and earth-like water through sand. It tilts forward, powerful legs bunching underneath it and its membranous wings stretching out to stabilise it.
Then, it does not explode forward as much as bulldozes forward. Its movements were not fast so much as implacable; it ate distance with length and inevitability.
"Sand Tomb, all across the field! Do not let Druddigon get to you." All across the gym, sand and dust stirred, twitching with Sandiles' enhanced power, but held in reserve; a feat more of focus than power that Sandile's wandering, juvenile mind would usually be incapable of. All dozen of them are to be prepared for the moment the druddigon charges through them.
It did so nearly immediately, a veritable pillar of sand and force exploding underneath its feet as it stomped forward. Sand raced up the druddigon's form, grinding through and underneath rough scales with enough strength to toss a gigalith. There was a moment where it seemed like the move would give the dragon pause, unbalancing the creature before the sheer weight, momentum, and power of the dragon carried it straight through. The next waiting sand tomb did not even manage that heartbeat of uncertainty from the dragon; it simply crashed straight through.
The insane thing was that they were doing damage. Sand Tomb might not be anywhere near as powerful as Dark Pulse, but it was one of Sandile's most practised Moves, one he used as everything from a weapon to a shield to a tool. With this much power behind him, it would have been enough to put most of Aidinza's other pokémon out of commission; by the Sun, if Sandile used the move against himself, he would knock himself out; it was more than enough to inflict harm to the druddigon.
But it simply ignored it; through discipline and a masterful - terrifying - supremacy of its own body, it shrugged it off.
Aidinza's lips twitched downwards; he had been hoping that would be more effective, but it only drove home something Aidinza had already known; Moxie was letting Sandile exist in this… tier of monstrosity, but he did not belong there.
Which was definitely a problem when Druddigon was barrelling down on him in an unstoppable charge.
"Dig, get out of there." Dig was not a move that Aidinza and Sandile had used that often, despite being the first TM that they had ever owned. The sparse battles that Aidinza had on the road were never big enough to warrant the move, and his recent gym battles… well Skyla would have laughed in his face, and if he tried to have Sandile dig through Brycen's arena, he was not sure if the ground type would ever forgive him.
But there was no rust or hesitation in the way the desert croc disappeared underneath the earth, avoiding the charge by a handful of smooth inches.
The druddigon snarls as it spins, feet tearing gouges through the ground as it brings its bulk to a sudden stop. It glares at the hole that his opponent had disappeared into, and Aidinza feels a fragile moment of satisfaction. His Sand Tomb strategy might have been ineffective, but if he could keep Sandile at a distan-
"Earthquake." That fragile moment of satisfaction was shattered with brutal efficiency. The very second the first clearly enunciated syllable had rung through the air, Aidinza knew that he had fucked up.
"GET OUT OF THERE!" Aidinza was certain he had never been louder than that moment, his shout a full chested bellow in a desperate attempt to reach Sandile through the half a dozen metres of earth before that same earth was turned against the desert croc with crushing force.
There was something wickedly savage about the druddigon as it lifted its huge tree trunk-like leg up, a thrum of energy racing up its leg through the lines of its scales before exploding from the top of its knee. The explosion slammed the leg down in a violent burst of motion.
Distantly, Aidinza could hear panic spread among the audience as the building there shook and trembled with terrible force, dust shaking loose from the ceiling and scattering through the air in a thick cloud. Less distantly, he is nearly thrown from his own feet as the earth underneath him roils with the sheer power of the druddigon, cracking and buckling in three distinctive pulses of motion.
But even that he could barely pay attention to, his eyes desperately scanning across the crumpled earth for any sign of Sandile, his heart in his throat. Earthquake was a typically devastating move, a severe threat to even the strongest of opponents. But that was when the pokémon was above ground, dealing only with the earth roiling and collapsing underneath them.
When Earthquake was used against pokémon that were already underground, it became a nightmarishly potent move, as the ground they were digging through would turn into a coffin pressing into them from all sides with crushing force.
Something rings in his ear, as Aidinza realised that in one poorly thought-out order, he had thrown away everything his team had done in this fight. From Shandíín seizing victory from a counter match up, to Naazin's defiance, that led to Mawiles weakening the drampa. All that effort, all that energy… wasted.
Because of him.
The self-loathing recrimination only grew harsher as he watched with dull eyes as the Sand Tombs still held about the battlefield, just shy of a dozen wavered and collapsed; the sand scattering in the wind felt like a stone-cold confirmation of Sandile's state.
He stares at the shifting sand, feeling dizzy underneath the eyes of hundreds of people watching his folly, underneath the heat of Drayden and his druddigon's glare, at the taste of the stale…
Air.
Aidinza's eyes slide from the shifting sand to the roof above, a twisted artifice of ancient history parasitised by modernity. Steel beams and lights hanging from the ceiling hammered into the metre-thick stone, with wires visibly hung between hooks. He feels the humid air around him, the familiar, if unpleasant knowledge that it was his own evaporated sweat uncomfortable in his stomach.
His eyes fall to the shifting sand.
Just as it ceased shifting and began moving. At first, there were just shy of a dozen streams of sand, each as thick as a man's waist, with a serpentine length to rival the beguiled drampa. But soon, they began melding and melting together, merging into a single writhing mass that slowly circled the druddigon in the centre of the field.
The druddigon's attention fell away from Aidinza, its eyes weary as it watched the sand erratically spasm about the field. It seemed it, too, had realised that the battle was far from over.
"Earth-." There was a note of uncertainty in Drayden's voice, it was clear that like Aidizna he had thought that catching Sandile out with Earthquake while he was underground would decide the battle outright. But it had not, and that made Drayden hesitate.
And that hesitation cost him.
The ground underneath the druddigon, already shattered and uneven, explodes upwards and with a feral, ruthless snarl, Sandile lunges out of the hole, his eyes alight with wild anger. It was easy to see why the desert croc had not escaped the earthquake unharmed; Aidinza saw that entire sections of his rough scale had been shorn away, his back left claws had been crushed into a jagged mess, and a sanguine imprint of his own teeth had been shaved into the side of his own jaw. But that was all he managed to see before the sand circling about the arena ruptured.
Sand blasts in every direction, all at once, in one heartbeat it hung like a thick yellow haze over the arena, and in the next it was twisting and swirling across that same arena in thick sheets of sand. A maelstrom in the air itself.
A Sandstorm.
Aidinza can not help the grin that splits open his face despite the sand and grit that catches on his teeth, his own position engulfed in moments by scouring sand that scratched at his skin. Sandstorm was by itself not the most damaging move, though it did require power in spades, but it was a move that invariably changed the dynamics of a fight. It brought before its enemies the fury of the desert and challenged them to fight when the very air scratched at their throats and blinded their eyes.
Perhaps, needless to say, they were conditions that the sandile line thrived in.
As if to confirm Aidinza's thoughts, a pained roar pierced through the harsh, lilting rasp of sheets of sand scraping against the ground and itself. One that went unanswered as the sound of force crashing against nothing followed, the only hint the average observer could parse of the fight within the maelstrom haze of yellow.
Even Aidinza, well used to the fury of his Mother Desert, could make out little more than blurry shapes backdropped against the raging Sandstorm, leaving him little more than a passive bystander to the fight.
Maybe if the Sandstorm was more controlled, it would be easier to see through, but there was nothing controlled in this wild maelstrom; this was Sandile throwing all of the power his victories thus far had earned him around with wild abandon.
But, of course, that came with a cost; Sandile was substituting skill and ability with power and stamina, burning through both at a breakneck pace. It had been barely half a minute since Sandile had erupted from the ground and unleashed his Sandstorm, but already it wavered around the edges, thick sheets of sand splattering across the ground, left impotent.
And as sheet after sheet of the Sandstorm was peeled away, the fight that had been hidden within grew clearer and clearer. The intensity of which would have been evident even only in the aftermath. The ground was pockmarked and scarred with deep gouges ripped and burnt into it; with sand settling in from the fading sandstorm, it turned the already treacherous underfoot into something truly perfidious.
But the two fighters were oblivious to the dangerous underfoot; the druddigon's weight reshaped the ground with every step, and Sandile's ceaseless feral assault seemed uncaring for whatever ground he found underfoot, solely concerned with how he could use it to close the distance with his foe as quickly as possible.
Or that was how it seemed on the surface; a longer look revealed the truth of the fight, and both fighters were flagging terribly. Druddigon's left eye had begun a slow process of swelling shut, and its heavy stance belied the real weight on its limbs, it's every movement sluggish and slow; its defeat by a hundred thousand grains of sand far from total but evidently draining. Sandile, on the other hand, no matter his ferocity, wore the consequences of stepping toe to toe with a pokémon nearly three times his size and many times his weight openly. The devastating injuries from Earthquake had been joined by innumerable bruises, split scales and a pronounced limp on his front leg that not even his feral rage could mask.
The two of them had pummelled each other, ripped and tore at each other under the raging Sandstorm until both of them had been put on the precipice of defeat.
One big push was all that was needed.
The druddigon catches Sandile with an errant swing of its arm, and it was not so much a matter of impact as leverage that flung the desert croc several metres away.
An opportunity for the trainers to step in and give that big push.
"Draco Meteor!"/"Power Trip!" Aidinza snapped the moment he realised the state of the battle, but Drayden was faster still, the benefit of experience… of probably being in this exact situation before.
But Aidinza had made the call, and all he could do was trust that Sandile was fast enough.
Sandile, clawing himself to a stop, pauses for what might be the first time since he had erupted from the ground. He straightens up for a moment, his maw curling, and despite the disparity of height between the two, he seems to look down upon his opponent. His opponent's posture also shifts, lowering its stance as its head tilts towards the ceiling, leaving only one eye to glare across at Sandile as a thrumming orb of orange energy coalesces at the end of its snout.
Sandiles' battered body shivers as the energy of Moxie is focused and intensified, and his weary muscles tighten and visibly flex as he stares across at the druddigon, as orange supplanted white as the primary light source of the gym.
Then he explodes forward, the limp that not even his feral anger could suppress nowhere to be seen as he skitters across the distance between him and his opponent.
The druddigon twisted its body, looking like it was physically straining to move the meteor that was burning in the air above it.
Sandile throws himself forward, his pounce cracking the ground underneath him.
The Draco Meteor falls.
Sandile snarls.
Orange light replaces white, as half a heartbeat before Sandile could wrap his teeth around the druddigon's neck, the Draco Meteor blossoms, splitting into innumerable incandescent petals mere centimetres from Sandile's form.
The explosion of force was devastating, lifting even the druddigon off its feet and sending it hurtling backwards. The crash of Sandile into the earth would have been equally as devastating, if Aidinza had not returned him before he could even touch the ground.
He had known what was going to happen from the very moment he had been second to seize the opportunity.
But he also knew he had to let Sandile go to the end; the desert croc was fast approaching his evolution, and while defeat was a bitter thing for a krokorok to taste, humiliation was unconscionable.
"The Challenger's pokémon has been eliminated by knockout! Challenger, choose your next pokémon!"
But that still left Aidinza down to his fifth pokémon, while Drayden was still only on his fourth. Aidinza's hand falls to his second last pokéball, fingers tracing over chilly steel as his eyes trace over the distant battered druddigon.
The dragon was beyond its last legs. It had thrown everything it had left into that last Draco Meteor, and that had been scraping the bottom of the barrel so deeply that there were wood chips digging underneath nails.
Aidinza might have been on his second to last pokémon, but… well, the position he was in was better than he could have possibly anticipated. The drampa had been dealt with, and the druddigon was on the verge of falling over, and he still had two entirely fresh pokémon.
One that was uniquely suited to closing out this fight.
"Challenger, choose your next pokémon, or forfeit the battle!"
There was a part of him telling him that he should back out. The same doubts and fears that plagued him when he fought Clay, that reared its head in the crushing aftermath of the druddigon's earthquake…
"Challenger, final warning. Choose your next pokémon, or forfeit the battle!"
Aidinza's fingers tighten around cold steel, and a moment later, the gleaming ice blue form of Nihanlo appeared on the field, her stocky frozen body unassuming against the devastation of the gym battle, reshaped by the errant power of first the drampa, then the focused power druddigon.
"Keep at a distance, Nihanlo. This is not going to take much." Aidinza warns the bergmite and resists the urge to glance towards Drayden. "Powder Snow." The sound of cracking ice fills the arena as the bergmite's hyperactive shell growth strains against the movement of her flesh and blood body.
A moment later, she spits a stream of tinged cyan air swirling with stark white powder towards the distant druddigon. The dragon was all but limp as it struggled to deal with the damage from its feral mauling at the hands of Sandile, as well as the exhaustion in the aftermath of using Draco Meteor. Despite that, it struggles to its feet, and stumbles out of the way of the attack by miniscule inches.
"Fire Punch." Drayden's voice was flat, an exhaustion matched by his pokémon dragging on him. The druddigon lets out a noise half a growl half a huff of breath, as its claws snapped into a blaze and it forced itself into a slow tilting charge.
But even that might have been enough, Nihanlo was by far Aidinza's slowest pokémon, between her stubby legs, natural bulk, and the fact that even when moving her shell was constantly freezing to her skin, she made even Naazin's lackadaisical crawl look lightning fast.
"Rapid Spin away." Thankfully, Aidinza had a tool to mitigate that, if only somewhat. Nihanlo jerks away from the druddigon, spraying another icy blue wind in a long path. Then she begins spinning in place, stubby legs sending her from bounding twist to bounding twist. Then as the druddigon closed in with its stumbling charge, and the momentum of her spinning reached an almost self-sustaining speed, she slammed all four of her feet into the ground. Throwing herself into the air.
The torque and force carry her a few metres before she crashes down on the icy path she had just made, her spinning intensifying as she slides over the watery ice.
It was… well, Aidinza preferred to be honest in the comfort of his own mind, and he had to admit it was far from an inspiring sight. Nihanlo was not built for speed or movement in general, and watching her spin about like a dust dervish as she slid over ice on her belly was borderline comedic.
If the druddigon was not shambling over its own feet, then Nihanlo might as well have just stayed still. But the state of the dragon meant even Nihanlos' borderline goofy escape was good enough for the purpose.
"Powder Snow," Aidinza ordered again as Nihanlo reached the end of her icy path and spun to a slow stop. The druddigon, already in motion, was unable to drag its bulk out of the way. The gust of freezing cold wind washes across the shoulder scales of the dragon, shards of brittle ice forming across aching limbs.
The druddigon grunts in pain, long too exhausted to properly vent its pain in earth shaking roars. It jerks its shoulder, straining against the ice with a long flex of its limb but the ice does not snap, leaving a thick sheet immobilising the dragon's shoulder.
"Powder Snow." Aidinza orders, and held down by the ravages Sandile had inflicted upon it, the exhaustion of its own moves, and the weight of the ice, the druddigon had no hope of getting out of the way.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Once more, a mighty titan falls.
"The Gym Leader's pokémon has been eliminated by knockout. Gym Leader, choose your next pokémon."
Drayden's fiery anger seemed to have burned out of him, leaving behind only the embers of rage and exhaustion. It was clear he wanted this over with, that he had planned to have this over with long before this point.
His hand falls to his belt, and with almost mechanical motion, he releases his second to last pokémon in a flash of red.
It was a strange pokémon. Bipedal, green and clearly reptilian, it had a large black sac that was slowly inflating, connected from the top of its throat to the middle of its chest, and for a moment, its black and white-tipped tail curled in on itself, giving it the appearance of some kind of bike for a bizarre moment.
Cyclizar, a pokémon that Drayden had only recently brought into his deep menagerie of dragons. Well, recently, for the venerable gym leader, he had only been using it for a mere half-decade rather than for the half turn of a century.
Still, Aidinza knew enough to be wary. It was far from the monstrous plateaus of the drampa and the druddigon, but it was incredibly fast, and packed not just a hefty amount of power in its limber form but an impressive array of movements to dislodge even the strangest of type match ups.
It was a disastrous matchup for Nihanlo; the stocky ice type was slow and had little capability to fend off the Cyclizar, beyond just outright attacks that would exhaust the ice chunk pokémon.
"Keep at a distance, Nihanlo." Aidinza struggled to keep the waver in his voice from giving him away, keeping his face level and resisting the urge to wet his suddenly dry lips. "Powder Snow."
"Fire Fang." Drayden's voice fell upon the battlefield like the execution sentence of a tired god, and Aidinza could see him look away, first to the Pheyan'atho, who stared with bated breath at the fight and then for a moment behind him.
Drayden had Nihanlo pegged as a slow, ranged pokémon. Built to sit there, take punishment and whittle away at its opponent, much like Naazin. A sitting duck for pokémon as fast and versatile as the cyclizar.
The bipedal, green dragon raced across the field with a blistering speed that would leave Shandíín jealous, a mouthful of fire backdropping several rows of razor-sharp teeth. It was on Nihanlo before the bergmite could even manage to breathe in powder snow, and with a snarl, it sank its burning teeth into the ice type's shell.
Aidinza could not help the smile crossing his face.
Hypercryosis was a rare mutation of the bergmite lines' special ability' ice body. Aidinza, like many things about pokémon, did not fully understand it. The Opelucid City Nurse told him it had to do with unregulated hormones, atrophied prion receptors, and a specific chemical composition of a bergmite's anchor layer, the keratin weaves that bound their ice shell to their body. It resulted in a number of concerns: a specific dietary requirement for biotin, a higher risk for a number of disorders, and a requirement for constant shavings to ensure she does not freeze into an immobile ice cube, as her body was completely incapable of bleeding excess moisture.
Excess moisture like the saliva of a pokémon that had just sunk its teeth into her with a set of fiery chompers. It did not take long for the cyclizar to realise what was happening, as it attempted to jerk away from the bergmite and found that rather than its teeth sliding free of the watery holes it had made of Nihanlo's ice shell, it was instead frozen tight to it.
The dragon type tries to rear back but very quickly runs into an issue: attempting to move an object nearly half again its body weight with nothing but its teeth was a herculean task.
It scrambles against the ground, yanking at its teeth and Nihanlo's shell over and over to no avail, completely and utterly frozen; immobilised against its opponents own body.
It's opponent whose strength was physical attacks, not ranged attacks.
Drayden had fallen for the trap.
"Avalanche." Nihanlo's body glowed an icy blue, a frosty mist swirling around her before she proved that while it might be difficult to move something half again your weight with just your teeth, moving something half your weight by its teeth was a much easier prospect. The bergmite rears up on her hind legs, drags the cyclizar off its own feet with ease before she twisted around, and slams the lizard straight into the ground.
It was brutally effective; all the force of Nihanlo's weight and the potency of the ice-type Move dropped onto the dragon type's head.
Aidinza had expected to use this trap on a pokémon like the drampa or the druddigon, an absolute monster. He expected about even odds that it would be able to put down one of those pokémon. Few things could take having a hundred kilograms dropped on their head from the inside gracefully, but if any pokémon he expected to face today could, it would be them.
But cyclizar? A pokémon built for hit and run?
In a single move, Nihanlo knocked the 'mount' pokémon out cold.
Aidinza looked across the field to his opponent; in a swift few minutes, he had gone from being down to his two pokémon, staring down a gauntlet of three opponents, to entirely flipping the playing field without any fatigue worth mentioning.
Drayden's face was blank; his eyes met Aidinza's, but they were indecipherable. There was no sign of his exhaustion, or his anger, or anything at all. There was nothing. He returns the cyclizar a moment after the referee declared it unable to battle, and he has no reaction as the crowd explodes into cheers again.
Aidinza watches as he reaches towards his belt one last final time. The final moment of truth, there were very few pokémon that Drayden could send out that Aidinza was uncertain that Ninhalo could take. Most that he was uncertain about had not been used in gym battles for years at this point.
He had almost done it. He had almost scaled this absurd mountain of challenges that had been laid before him. He approached the summit.
Then Drayden's blank, emotionless facade shattered as his eyes flashed with a new surge of anger, and his hands closed around an old, weathered pokéball. With a flick of his wrist that looked far too young for the gym leader's aged body, Drayden showed Aidinza just how far away from the summit he really was.
In a flash of red, Haxorus took to the field.
Almost immediately, that flash of rage disappears, and in stark contrast with the far too young flick of the wrist, for a moment, Drayden looks far too old, as he stares almost as if confused at his own pokémon.
Haxorus did not announce its presence with a roar like druddigon, attempt to glare Aidinza into submission or question why it was being sent against a petty fighter. No, the Behemoth simply was. Its presence spoke for itself, an oppressive air of power informing every single person in that room that they lived by sufferance of inaction.
It was beyond labels of apex or predator, king or emperor; it was an incarnate of power itself. The dual gleaming crimson blades jutting out of its jaw, immaculate and unscarred despite the better part of a century of combat, spoke to that just as intently as the fist thick plates of burnished gold armouring its form, or the muscles to put a conkeldurr to shame that stretched underneath those plates.
The druddigon and the drampa had been monsters. In a tier of their own, that Aidinza could only pretend to approach with tricks and wits, but they were a pallid representation of the real power Drayden could bring to bear.
Aidizna did the right thing.
"I am withdrawing Nihanlo, and the rest of my team from combat." There was no fight or struggle to be had here, there apparently never was. Aidinaz returns Nihanlo in a flash of red as he feels the crowd stare at him, but despite that Aidinza did not feel any stirring of shame.
Despite how much weight there was on this fight. Despite how much effort the Pheyan'atho and Aidinza and Jha'y'zéča-den put into planning it, no matter the sleepless night, the fundamental truth going into this was that there was never a victory to be had. Drayden was meant to be beyond Aidinza, the pinnacle of Unova's Gym Leaders.
But he had taken the man to his sixth pokémon, taken down two pokémon that spelt the end of the eighth gym battle of countless trainers seeking the glory of the Unovan conference. He had gone the distance, and he had forced Drayden to play his final hand.
To admit that he was only going to beat Aidinza with pure, overwhelming force. That was what releasing Haxorus was an admission of.
Aidinza looked across the field, and as Drayden lifted his hand to return his pokémon, the Ya'an-ah boy knew that the Phayen'atho' leader' knew it too. The man continued to stare at his own pokémon’s back even as the referee declared him the winner, a grim realisation of what he had just done dawning on his face.
This was not Aidinza's defeat to taste like ash in his mouth.
Haxorus disappears in a flash of red, leaving the gym feeling strangely empty, a deep silence had taken the room. Struck dumb by the presence of one of the most powerful pokémon in Unova or by the inglorious ending of the fight, Aidinza did not know.
Drayden was the first to break the silence after several long moments of its oppressive weight. "I have determined that the challenger has demonstrated capabilities worthy of the Legend Badge and have elected to award him with the badge despite the outcome of the battle."
He pauses for another moment, and it seems like he is about to say something else before turning away. Despite his head being held high, his posture as proud as when Aidinza first saw him; it looked like a fragile, weak facade.
The gym leader leaves through an exit behind him and disappears into a shadowed hall nearly immediately.
Aidinza clips Nihanlo's ball to his belt before unclasping it as the referee of the battle approaches with an uncertain look in his blue eyes. "Usually, Drayden would give you the badge, but…" He glances at the doorway on the other end of the field before shaking his head. He holds out a gym badge shaped like a dragon's head, clearly expecting Aidinza to take it.
"Keep it." Aidinza rejects the badge, glancing to the side to see Jha'y'zéča-den approaching. He takes his belt full of his pokéballs and tosses it to the other native boy before stepping past the referee.
The referee took a long moment to even register Aidinza stepping past him, standing there gormlessly with the badge held out in front of him. But when he turns and reaches to stop the Naisho'h boy, he finds Unkethila interposed between them, the old man's gnarled withered hands closing the referee's hand around the badge.
But Aidinza ignored that; instead, he followed Drayden through the distant door. Drayden was not getting out of this that easily.
Beyond that door was a long corridor lined with intricate carvings and torches, though all the torches had long since burnt out, and the ever-present string lights parasitising the walls ended only a few metres deep into the corridor, leaving it difficult for Aidinza to see two steps in front of him, much less the detailed carvings muralising the walls. Thankfully, the corridor only led one way, and he was not forced to stumble around a maze in the dark. Instead, minutes later, he found himself standing in front of a door only slightly ajar, backlit by a dim electric light.
The boy does not hesitate to push through the door, finding himself staring at Drayden's back as the man stands hunched over a desk.
"You should have taken the badge." His voice was inflectionless, not quite dead, but very carefully neutral.
"It did not feel right to take the spoils of a victory I only had one-third hand in." Aidinza takes a few steps into the room, glancing around for a brief moment. It was larger than he expected, with the pale light hanging from the ceiling, unable to even begin lighting the edges of it.
"One-third?" An outside observer might have been forgiven for putting the word casual to Drayden's tone as he responded, but the slowly tightening line of his shoulders told the story about the edge the Gym Leader was on.
"The Pheyan'atho planned it; my team and I obviously fought it, and you fell for it." There was a part of him still marvelling at that, one that wanted to revel in the fact he had pushed Drayden over the edge.
"So you're here to gloat." There was something almost hopeful about Drayden's tone, his shoulders relaxing. Aidinza being there to gloat would be a comfort for the older man.
"I'm not." Just like that, the Gym leader's shoulders draw back into a tight line, and he falls silent, staring down at whatever it was on his desk.
"Then why are you here, Uŋmaŋ." His voice was low, roiling with a coiling threat. Like a cornered cat preparing to lash out.
"Answers. You know why I am here, Itaƞcaƞ wicaṡta otokahaƞ. Ah-na-Ghai Dra'khíza-ide'en, I have earned them." Aidinza's words hang heavy in the air for what feels like an eternity as Drayden goes as still as a statue, and Aidinza bores a hole into the back of his head with his stare.
As it slowly becomes clear that Drayden is not going to respond, Aidinza turns to the rest of the room and slowly walks to the edge of the light. There was a display case, and inside, there were two skulls, one obviously draconic in life, the other human, and both suffering obvious violence in death. They were cracked and fragmented, with entire sections of bone just missing.
There was something inscribed on the front of the case, but Aidinza could not properly make out the words, so he reached into his pocket and drew out a pack of matches. He had a flashlight in one of the pockets of his poncho, but something about this felt… right.
He strikes the match, fire lighting up his face and the inscription. The writing itself was in Pheyan'atho, but Aidinza could make out three dates.
05/08/0124 - 28/05/0131 - 26/03/0135
"Veh'a'hača-den was born in the summer of the hundred twenty-fourth calendar year, and his companion Sunka’čikala, a Noivern hatched in the spring of the hundred thirty-first calendar year. He led a succession rebellion against his older brother, succeeding and uniting the Pheyan'atho after two years of fighting before both were slain in a duel by his youngest cousin." Drayden spoke without moving an inch from where he was hunched over the desk, his voice carrying the cadence of bone-deep rote memorisation.
Aidinza pursed his lips and walked deeper into the darkness. There were more display cases and even some entire skeletons of what Aidinza guessed was Haxorus remade, though they paled in stature to the dragon that had just ended his fight.
He pauses on a skeleton a few rows deep. It was a different skeleton from the others, lacking the bipedal structure of the others, far larger, and perhaps most obviously with three neck structures.
A hydreigon.
0036/11/04 - 21/12/0818 - 7/09/0841
"Unk'khíza-dyn the Conqueror. Born on the coldest night of winter and the eve of yet another civil war among the Pheyan'atho. She was hokšiyopašni; her parents were the failed rivals of a man known as Lord Jha'y'zéča-den, one of the many claimants of to the title of Itaƞcaƞ wicaṡta otokahaƞ. She and her siblings were taken as thralls, as khízawičháša. She earned glory for her name across years and mantled her lord's walls with scales. But days before the elders would bend the knee and declare him Itaƞcaƞ wicaṡta otokahaƞ, she slit his throat in the night, throwing the Pheyan'atho back into civil war. But not for long, as the once khízawičháša walked into Caġaṡakehaƞska Caƞtaƞka and emerged with the fealty of the Oyúspa, a hydreigon from the time of wičáka." Drayden's voice trails off for a moment as Aidinza strikes another match, holding it up to the bones. Deep regular holes had been dug into the remains, winding around the limbs over and over.
"When she returned, she was uncontestable, though many tried. In mere months, she ended the civil war and was declared the Itaƞcaƞ wicaṡta otokahaƞ. Then she turned her gaze outwards, first to the phežíwičháša, then to the čháǧawičháša… the Tly'an-yen. She washed across Unova, unifying it underneath the Pheyan'atho, conquering lands untold since the time of the He'cetu and the Yupiya. Until-"
"Until the Hosh'halgai." Aidinza interrupts, his eyes tracing over the holes in the bone. "I know the story of Undine the Scourge. She threatened the walls of the Relic Castle itself, and so Chʼóhjil-yééh and the Hosh'halgai bled her to nothing but bleached bones." It sounded so easy to put into words, but Chʼóhjil-yééh had struggled against the Pheyan'atho for years, even after every other tribe of the Ya'an-ah was subjugated. Before her cacturne managed to drag the great scourge down before the steps of the Relic Castle itself, entombing the massive dragon and its rider in a cocoon of thorned vines that had dug into every inch of the attempted desecrator. "The Mother Desert never came closer to being lost to us."
Drayden does not continue when Aidinza finishes, as a pointed air takes the room. Aidinza feels something stirring in his stomach, an inkling at just what Drayden was trying to get at growing.
Aidinza walks back into the hanging light of the middle room, snuffing out the match in his hand as he stands there staring at Drayden's back for a long moment. Words were distant and slow to form on his tongue, the story Drayden was painting, the conclusion he was ushering Aidinza towards…
Something in Aidinza refused to entertain the thought.
"She's one of many." Drayden breaks the silence, and for the first time since Aidinza entered, he straightens up from his hunch over the desk. With his head bowed low, he gestures at the rest of the room. "The Pheyan'atho are born for war."
And there it was. A thought plucked out of Aidinza's own head, a refrain that had echoed throughout Unovan history. The reason he was even standing here, in what it seemed like more ways than one.
"And they've proven it over and over. All throughout Unova's history, they've produced nothing but warlords, violence and death." Drayden spits out, voice dripping with toxic venom as he whirls on Aidinza, eyes alight with frustration. "You want your why, Uŋmaŋ? Do you want your answers? Look around, Uŋmaŋ at the centuries of artifice revering war. You want to know why I reject the boys Haŋhépitúwe? You faced the trials of Caġaṡakehaƞska Caƞtaƞka, froze beneath its dark pines, and suffered under its brutal mercies." Aidinza feels a chill rattle down his spine at just the reminder of that place. Drayden sneers, a knowing look in his eyes. "We feed our children to that forest like fertiliser, only wrenching their frostbitten corpses from its clutches to tut at them for not being strong enough, and those that do make it back to us learn nothing but the forest's hate and anger. Why should that exist, Uŋmaŋ? Because some doddering old snake thinks that there's something worth salvaging?"
Drayden stared down at the young Ya'an-ah, and for a moment, he felt like he was languishing underneath the presence of the Haxorus as the weight bore on his shoulders, pressing him for his own response.
It takes Aidinza a few seconds to find words to respond, choked underneath the attention of Drayden. "So that's it?" The boy managed to get out with more surety and confidence than he felt. "You're scared of a forest, so you're just going to throw out millennia of history and culture and people?"
"A culture of violence, a people of war, and a history of terror. You are Ya'an-ah are you not, Uŋmaŋ? You of all people should rejoice in the sun setting on the villains of Unova." The pinnacle of Unovan Gym leaders spoke with such weighty gravitas and finality, as if he was penning the last strokes of the footnote of history that the Pheyan'atho would become in that very moment. A foregone conclusion.
Aidinza could not help but wonder if this was the same thinking that saw the Ya'an-ah draw deeper and deeper into the desert. Self-delusion about villainy replaced by the silent neglect of the Sun? The boy felt a stirring in his chest, and it took a moment for him to place it.
Hate.
He hated that thinking, his lips curling into a sneer and his eyes flashing as he straightened up to his full gangly height. "And you think you get to make that decision?" The man goes to speak again, but Aidinza cuts him off. "Villains of Unova? Are you even listening to yourself speak? Acting like the Pheyan'atho have sole dominion of what is wrong and violent?"
Aidinza scoffs at him, contempt writ all over his face. "You condemn your people with one breath, but in the next you prove you embody all their worst traits. Bullheaded, stubborn, and self-obsessed with your own importance. You decided that there is nothing redeemable about the Pheyan'atho, so you decide to consign them to history, and those that will have to live with the consequences of your decision."
"If not me, then who, Uŋmaŋ? If the decision is not made, who lays claim to the consequences of that inaction? When the next Itaƞcaƞ wicaṡta otokahaƞ takes up the arms of his father, blood in his teeth, and war in his heart, who will be blamed for the destruction he wreaks?" Drayden spoke with fire and fury, every word dripping with venom. But it was undercut by something, a desperate timbre that rattled in the back of his throat just at the suppressed edge of every word.
"There it is. You made a choice, and so all other choices become invalid; it's either your path or nothing." Aidinza bit back, squaring up underneath Drayden's glare and digging at the man.
"Don't act like you know me, Uŋmaŋ." The gym leader's voice lowers, becoming deep and pointed as his glare becomes something genuinely choking.
"Why not, Ah-na-ghai? Who you are is evident in every fight, in every victory and every defeat." The boy let the word linger in the air as he studied the other man, and he could see that hint of uncertainty in Drayden flare, even as he maintained his glare. "Keep at a distance." Aidinza's words lost the biting edge just for a moment, taking on the air of a focused, pressed command. Drayden flinches, breaking his glare, to look to the side. "So convinced you had it figured out, no time for hesitation or a second thought. Because you know the right thing to do, and it cost you, it will always cost you."
"I- Al..." Drayden struggles for words, his eyes growing distant and all his fury and bluster bleeding from his face. There was an artificial control to the way the Gym leader turned away from the boy, leaning onto the desk once more, hiding his face from view. But even in the dim light, Aidinza could see the way his fingers turned bone white as they clutched at the desk and the still way he stared at something in the dark beyond it. "It's… it's not that simple."
"What's not that simple?" It was the non-sequitur more than the abrupt shift of demeanour that threw Aidinza off balance, his brow furrowing. He eyed the gym leader's back as it rose and fell rapidly, and just before he could ask if the man was alright, the man whirled back around.
His eyes were distant but wild, pupils dilated to pinpricks, and his face caught between something slack and something ferocious. "We need to-." He starts, his voice a queer nature of domineering, chilling, and nakedly forlorn as it booms. Then he pauses, his chest still heaving uncontrollably, his eyes searching for something, and with a start, Aidinza realised Drayden was not looking at him, but just slightly above his head.
After a few moments of desperate searching, his eyes clear and his breathing calms. His attention fell to Aidinza, his usually sharp eyes lost and blurry, and for the second time today, he… looked old. Despite his stark white hair, and the lines carved into his skin, Drayden usually merely seemed distinguished, not old. The weight and authority that hung in the air around him gave him an almost timeless figure, one that he maintained even in the depth of rage and petulant indignance.
Both of those were gone in this moment, or rather, they seemed to be twisted against the man. The unspoken weight that hung in the air about him now weighed heavy on his shoulders, and the authority that made him seem so larger than life bore down on him like a wretched cage.
He stumbles back, colliding with the desk behind him, and looks down at his hands as they shake violently, his breathing alternating between unsettlingly still and uncomfortably uncontrolled.
"Are you…" Aidinza stepped forward, reaching out to the gym leader for a moment, not really certain what to do. He had steeled himself to deal with the full fury of the strongest gym leader of Unova, the Itaƞcaƞ wicaṡta otokahaƞ of the Pheyan'atho.
Not… whatever this was.
Drayden swallows and visibly gathers himself. His face twisted into something carefully neutral, and his eyes sharpened to the fine steel point that Aidinza had come to expect, but as he pushed himself off the table, his arms trembled. "You haven't answered the question Uŋmaŋ, who bares the fault when blood bares true, and the skies burn under ambition?"
The man's voice was a biting steel, and as his arms crossed in front of him there was so little indication of what had just happened that Aidinza for a brief, insane moment wondered if it even did. But despite Drayden's outward appearance it still lingered in the air, maybe it was an unnoticeable shift in Drayden's stance, or maybe the Naisho'h boy’s perception of the man had just irrevocably changed.
Either way, he struggled to pull together the same fire that he had just moments ago. So instead of snapping out a cutting response, Aidinza takes a moment to think, as his eyes drift unbidden to the remains of Undine the Scourge's beast.
"Why are you so certain that it will?" His voice was soft, as he turned away from the gym leader. He calmly walks over to the edge of the walls, a distance that passes in silence, as he finds what he had been looking for. A torch that was sconed to the wall, unlit.
"Because I've seen it before, Uŋmaŋ, in person and all throughout history. It is in the nature of peoples, no matter how you stamp it out or beat it down. The naġí will always prove true in the end." He trails off as he watches Aidinza spark a match and hold it up to the torch.
It only takes a moment to light it up, casting a proper light over the skeleton of Undine's beast, revealing what the meagre light of Aidinza's matchstick failed to encapsulate. "If that's true, then why even deny the Caġaṡakehaƞska Caƞtaƞka of Jha'y'zéča-den? What's even the point?" His eyes traced over the skeleton, taking it all in. It was mangled; the thorns that had dug so deep to pierce bone were hooked, and the bone around the joints was snapped and jagged. Aidinza could only imagine what it would have looked like before thousands of years had stripped away its flesh and felt a pang of pity, despite knowing its history, for how terrible its final fate ended up being.
"What do you do with a fire, Uŋmaŋ? Feed it? Ignore it? No, you smother it. You give it nothing, and you separate it from everything it can burn." Aidinza hummed; there was a part of him, a little part certainly, but one nonetheless, that was starting to understand, if not agree. Drayden feared what the Pheyan'atho had been and feared what they could become again if given the chance. It almost made sense in that circumstance to make sure that no Pheyan'atho would ever have a tribe to support their ambition again.
But Aidinza refused to accept the idea that a people could never change, and as he stares at the corpse of a monster that had nearly driven the Ya'an-ah to total subjugation, he finds himself lingering on the history of the tribe that defeated that monster.
"What do you know about the Hosh'halgai, Drayden?" Aidinza does not glance over to the gym leader. Instead, he shakes out the matchstick in his hand and stares up at the bones that, even in death, dwarfed him. "They're a tribe of the Northern Dunes, where the Tkoh basin doesn't reach, and the western mountains deflect rain away. Their land is dry, drier than anywhere else in the Ya'an-ah Desert, but despite that, they were always close with the Cacturne; it's what Hosh means, cactus." Aidinza pauses, shaking his head as he shares the piece of trivia. "Which meant that despite having so very little water to go around, they desperately needed water the most. One of the Mother Desert’s many cruel jokes." Aidinza keeps walking around the room, lighting torch after torch. "They could have moved or requested water from the Hataałii'diyin; no Ya'an-ah would deny another moisture. But the Hosh'halgai were proud, and while they were Ya'an-ah, they were distant. Their lands might not have had water, but they had access to the lands that would become Nimbasa and the scattered people that lived there."
He pauses as his match flickers out, fetching another match and sparking it to life. "Cacturne… the Mother Desert is not soft on those picky about what is necessary for life, and the Cacturne earn their dark typing well. They reaped their toll on the Nimbasan plains for years, growing mad and bloated on blood, until finally they declared an Ałneʼííʼáázh, abandoning the Sun and declaring themselves Ya'an-ahda. There was only one possible response to that, and the Hataałii'diyin declared that the Children of the Mother Desert must be made one. An Ah-na-Ghai was declared, and Hetakh-ye led the tribes to war."
"I will not compare suffering to suffering, but the Mother Desert was left drenched in blood; it was meant to be a war of reclamation, to bring to right a lost flock. It quickly became a war of extermination, with access to… moisture." Aidinza lingers on the word, something uncomfortable stirring in his stomach, referring to the bloodletting of the Nimbasan plains as 'access to moisture'. "The populations of cacnea had exploded, and though the Hosh'halgai were fewer in number, they knew their dunes, and every step the Ya'an-ah made into those sands was met with thorns. It took eight years to put a definitive end to the fighting, the Hosh'halgai's elders and children taken, their pokémon trapped."
"The tribes called for the Hosh'halgai to be Forgot, to let their history disappear into the shifting dunes. Those old enough to want to remember would be declared doo yildiní, left to wander the desert alone." For the first time since he started his tale, he looks back over to Drayden. The gym leader, despite the circumstances, paid rapt attention. Maybe Aidinza should have expected it, but it was clear the man had a passion for history. "A death sentence. The desert is not a place for the lone man, and any attempt to band together would bring the wrath of the Ya'an-ah down upon them."
"The Hataałii'diyin agreed, Ah-na-ghai Hetakh-ye… did not. Against the wishes of the tribal elders, against the wishes of the Shamans of the High, Hetakh-ye declared that they would be Biye'ke-hooghan, a tribe sheltered within tribes." Aidinza pauses, taking a moment to watch Drayden. The man stood there like a carved statue, for all his silence and attention could be taken for keen attention; his body language gave no such hints. Likewise, the signs of his… episode, the uneven gait of his breath and the slight tremor to his bones had calmed and disappeared.
Which Aidinza thought was probably for the best. But he shakes his head and continues regardless. "It was not a popular decision. Cacturne… they are not kind eaters; living prey suits them. The heart pumping blood makes extracting it easier, and the brain flooding the body with adrenaline makes it richer… they're not cruel; they're pragmatic. But in the desert, it is difficult to make a distinction between the two." Aidinza himself had seen an cacnea eat exactly once in his life, watching as it wrapped its entire body around a durant, a limpet of terrible consequence. He remembered watching as the durant thrashed and struggled, slowly growing more and more desiccated, visible even through the steel type's steel carapace.
He remembered its eyes… usually so red and inhuman, monstrous in its hive-driven purpose. But as it was fed on, there was something uncomfortably individual about them until the cacnea's vines sought even the moisture of its eyes.
Aidinza feels a shudder pass down his spine. He loves the Mother Desert, in all her beauty, but it was a deeply cruel beauty. "The Ya'an-ah were furious. They did not just call it a mistake, but an action that is only worthy of jidizhah… what do you know about what spit means to the Ya'an-ah Drayden?"
If the older man was surprised by Aidinza's question, he did not show it. Instead, after a long moment, he responded. "Spitting on someone is seen as good as declaring someone too incompetent to live."
"That's not all to it, but yes. The Ya'an-ah would never deny another water needed for survival, and to spit on someone is to meet that obligation in the worst possible way. Hetakh-ye did not chance into becoming the Ah-na-ghai of the Ya'an-ah. He was well respected, both in peace and battle. Wise enough that even before being declared Ah-na-Ghai, the Hataałii'diyin would seek his experience." The Ya'an-ah history was an oral one, their records kept by an ever-shifting network of the wise and elders. It was effective for what it was, but it was mutable and subject to a lineage of biases, though Aidinza supposed all histories were. But it still spoke to the sheer respect that Hetakh-ye had commanded, that despite his fall from grace, he had not been retroactively denigrated to a wastrel lucking into the position of Ah-na-Ghai. "But such was the magnitude of how inept the Ya'an-ah considered the decision that for the rest of Hetakh-ye's natural life, the only succour even his own tribe would give him was the spit from their mouth. And why wouldn't they? It was so obvious what should have been done. The Hosh'halgai had shown their colours; they were a people tainted by evil and heresy. They had killed what should have been their brothers and sisters in faith by scores of hundreds."
Was Aidinza being heavy-handed by pausing to glance around the room, slightly less cast in darkness with a few of the torches flickering merrily? Probably. But Aidinza had been struggling with subtlety recently.
"But they obeyed. They spat on the sand in front of Hetakh-ye and expected him to slurp it up; they grumbled and declared that he had placed a festering infection in the very heart of the Ya'an-ah, that would one day need to be burned away by the sterilizing light of the Sun. But they took the Hosh'halgai in, young and old, separate but raised as the Hosh'halgai they were." There was a part of Aidinza that always wondered if that was part of the problem. The Ya'an-ah were not keen on expected responsibility. Blood had no obligation to blood, tribesmen had no obligation to their tribe. It gave the decision to stay all the more weight. "Mere decades later, the Ya'an-ah watched with bated breath for what they thought would be inevitable, as the Hosh'halgai took the fledgling steps into the world as a rerealized tribe. For them to show their true colours and for vengeance, a fool had denied them to be justified."
"But nothing happened. The Hosh'halgai roamed their dunes, they reconnected with their piece of the Mother Desert, they traded with other tribes, and joined their festivals despite paranoid eyes watching their every move." Aidinza shrugged; he was simplifying things. Brushing past tension and incidents, the absence of the Hosh'halgai for so many years had seen the Nimbasans encroach upon their dunes, and the Ti'an-oi had begun drawing on one of their few oases. But such things were not the return to glutenous bloodletting that the Ya'an-ah as a whole expected.
"Where are you going with this Uŋmaŋ? I made no aspersions against the Ya'an-ah or the Hosh'halgai." It was a weak defence, and Aidinza did not even give it the merit of a response, merely staring silently at Drayden. The gym leader scoffs and shakes his head. "Even if I was to entertain the thought that it is equivalent Uŋmaŋ, it can just as easily be spun against you. The Hosh'halgai's tendencies ripped out over decades of being raised by other tribes, kept from power by a suspicious eye so their true nature would never be revealed."
"Except we both know that last part isn't true." Aidinza turns to look once more at the corpse of Undine the Scourge's horrible beast. "She got unlucky, you know? The Ya'an-ah… we'd fought you before with the Tly'an-yen. But no one had been arrogant enough to threaten the Mother Desert or the Holy Relic Castle before. We weren't ready. We knew our dunes, and our oases, and our caverns. But she figured that out soon enough. She knew all she had to do was drive us long enough until the dunes, the oases, the caverns, the mother desert were no longer ours. She turned the isolation of the Ya'an-ah, even amongst ourselves, against us. We fought for as long as we could, but when our greatest strength was taken from us, it was inevitable that we would fail."
"Except the Hosh'halgai weren't isolated like the rest of the Ya'an-ah; they had been raised all across the Mother Desert. No matter how far the Pheyan'atho drove them, they walked familiar sands, and their attempts to drive the Hosh'halgai from their hiding places left your people scattered and overextended." Aidinza makes a gesture at the wounds of the Oyúspa, pockmarked by thorns. "You know how that ended up, and in the settling sand, there was only one power left in the Mother Desert. So, by your logic, their true nature should have revealed itself. They should have clasped an iron fist across the throats of the scattered Ya'an-ah and revelled in the nightmare of bloodletting."
"Except that didn't happen. They drove the Pheyan'atho from the Mother Desert, helped the scattered tribes reunite, and returned to their northern dunes. Because people change, because their true nature isn't that clear cut, Drayden. I know that, thousands of years ago, Hetakh-ye knew that, and he knew that letting a people's identity… their connection with the land, their culture die because they'd been misled once was wrong. Knew it so strongly that he ruined his life to do the right thing. His belief against the fury of his people and the wisdom of the shamans of his and my god." A contemplative silence falls over the two men as Aidinza finishes his piece. Aidinza ruminated on his own words and the idea of challenging Hataałii'diyin, a concept that even to someone born long after the last had been chosen, seemed absurd. Drayden's thoughts, however, were more inscrutable, his eyes distant, lost to time that was far from now.
"A man acting against the wishes of his elders and his people sounds almost like my situation." Aidinza gives Drayden a strange look as he breaks the silence with what almost sounds like a joke to the young Ya'an-ah. The gym leader breathes out slowly from his nose and runs his fingers through his beard, ruffling the immaculately groomed hair. "Answer me this, Ya'an-ah… why are you bothering? This isn't your people. This isn't your fight. Why spend hours arguing with a stubborn old man? You can't seriously think that this unimportant moment with some wet behind the ears Uŋmaŋ will convince me."
Aidinza takes a long moment to answer, his hand falling to his waist, only to remember with a start he had given his belt to Jha'y'zéča-den to get his team healed. He opens his mouth, his brow furrowing and unfurrowing as he considers the question and all the reasons he had to be here. Then he looks up and meets Drayden's blue eyes. "Because a friend asked me to, because a desperate old man was willing to sacrifice everything for it, because I think it's the right thing to do, and because I think this moment could be important if I make it important… but more than because I'm scared if the Pheyan'atho disappears, what will that mean for the Ya'an-ah? The most established of the tribes crushed under the weight of history, what does it mean for the least? Look around. You're surrounded by examples of your history that will last millennia… the Ya'an-ah don't have that. If your history, your culture, what makes your people Pheyan'atho is so easy to forget, what does it mean for us?"
Aidinza feels something prickle at his eyes, and tries to blink it away, he was not going to bawl over the fate of his people in front of this man. "So I'll argue with you for hours; I'll beat my head against this rock over and over if I have to. Just for the chance that when I stand in front of my elders once more, that I… could have the slightest hope that it's possible to stop the Ya'an-ah from isolating themselves into nothingness."
The Naisho'h boy looks away from Drayden, unable to keep the blur in his eyes or the tightness in his throat at bay and his head held high. A moment later a warmth spreads over his shoulder, and when he looks he sees that Drayden has walked away from his desk, and lain a hand on him. He swallows down the tight in his throat, and looks at the gym leader, expecting him to say something.
But he does not; instead, the man seemed poleaxed, awkwardly patting at Aidinza in some vague approximation of comfort, with the rest of his body as stiff as a board. Drayden looked like he was on the verge of panicking.
The sight was absurd, and Aidinza snorted. What was he doing? He had come into this filled with such fire and bright indignation, and this was how he ended up?
"I think it's time for you to head to the pokémon centre." Drayden's voice was almost soft behind the uncomfortably gruff pitch. Aidinza nods and, with a rough rub of his face, walks towards the door.
But before he leaves, he pauses one last time and looks at Drayden as the man stands in the middle of the room, staring at where Aidinza had just been. "And the last reason, Drayden, was because I think I knew it would work. I know you; you always do what you think is the best thing, and now you know there was someone out there who did better than you… you're not going to be able to rest until you fix that."
Aidinza does not spare Drayden another glance as he leaves, but as the door closes behind him, he hears a scoff from the older man.
It sounded resigned.