The camp's routine had settled into a new normal, one defined by two distinct sounds: the CLANG! of the forge and the scratch of charcoal.
Iron kept flowing. Kael, now a zealous convert to metal, worked the forge with tireless energy. With Tyla dividing her time, Kael had taken two of the youngest warriors from the Earth Team as his own 'bellows apprentices', as he called them. The Hermit's Fort was no longer a refuge; it was a booming weapons factory.
But the real change was happening to Tyla.
She was discovering that iron was easy. Iron obeyed physical rules. If you heated it, it softened. If you hit it, it changed shape. If you cooled it, it hardened. It was an honest opponent.
Letters were monsters.
"I don't get it!" she shouted in frustration on the third day of lessons, throwing her piece of charcoal to the ground. "I make the shape you teach me. 'K'. 'A'. 'E'. 'L'. But when I look at them, I don't see Kael. I see charcoal stripes!"
They were at the study wall. Tyla's hands were black and her eyes red with frustration.
"You aren't looking. You are reading," said Seiko calmly. He was sitting on a rock, watching her. Acies was by his side, motionless, watching too. "Reading isn't seeing. It is decoding. Your brain is fighting because you are asking it to ignore the shape and see the sound it represents."
"It's stupid!"
"It is power," Seiko retorted, his voice hardening. "Yesterday, in the forge, you made a mistake with the charcoal mix. I warned you. How?"
Tyla frowned. "You... left me a mark. On the charcoal pile. An 'X'."
"No," said Seiko. "I didn't leave you a 'mark'. I left you a word. I left you the sound 'No'. And you read it. And you stopped the work. Knowledge stopped you from ruining three days of ore. Is that stupid?"
Tyla fell silent. She picked up the charcoal.
"Now," said Seiko, "Try writing 'Spear'."
While Tyla struggled with the symbols, a shadow fell over them.
Iris was standing behind them. She hadn't come to observe; she had come to interrupt. Her face, usually a mask of calm, was tense with an emotion Seiko recognized from his old life: the fear of irrelevance.
"I am teaching her to think in a new way," said Seiko, standing up to face her.
"You are teaching her to forget ours," said Iris. She approached the wall, her gaze scanning the phonetic symbols. "Stripes. Scribbles. Where is the soul in this? Where is the history? Where is the people?"
"The people are in the forge, using the spears my knowledge gave them," replied Seiko.
"Iron is a tool!" snapped Iris, slapping the rock wall with her palm. "This is poison! Last night, the Smoke Team argued. Not about food, not about work. About your symbols! Rorin believed the mark for 'Fire' was an insult to the forest spirits. Tama thought it was a blessing."
She pointed at Seiko. "You are breaking my people. You gave them iron, Seiko, and they followed you. But now you are giving them a new faith, and this faith has no heart. It is just... work. And marks."
Seiko stared at her. 'Shit. She's right.'
His pragmatic mind had seen writing as the next logical step in organization. Information storage. Instructions. Efficiency.
He hadn't seen what Iris saw. He hadn't seen the spiritual void he was creating.
He had disarmed Iris's Gods and offered nothing in return, except more work.
'A religion centered on Arceus... that venerates creation and life,' he remembered his old goal. He realized his mistake. He had been teaching the alphabet of his faith, but not its Bible.
"You are right," said Seiko quietly.
Iris blinked, surprised by the sudden concession.
Tyla stopped writing, watching the two leaders with bated breath.
"I have been teaching the tool," said Seiko, "But not the purpose." He looked at the blank wall next to the alphabet lessons. "You say my symbols have no soul. That they have no history. Help me give them one."
He turned to Iris. "You are the Wise Woman. You have the memory of the People. I have the tool to make that memory eternal. Stop fighting me, Iris, and work with me."
Iris looked at him with deep distrust. "What do you mean?"
"I want you to tell me a story," said Seiko. "Not just any story. The most important one. The first one."
Seiko approached the wall, charcoal in hand. "Tell me... Tell me how your people got here."
Iris remained silent for a long time. She saw Tyla, waiting. She saw the Bisharp, watching. She saw the man who had taken her power, now asking her to share it.
It was a trap, she knew. But it was also the only way to survive.
Slowly, Iris closed her eyes, adopting the cadence of the oral storyteller, the way her mother had taught her, and her mother before her.
"Before iron," began Iris, her voice resonating with ancient authority, "Before the mountain, before even Hisui, there was the Void. And in the Void, the Great Creator dreamed. He dreamed... of Arceus."
Seiko froze. 'Wait. What?'
His meta-knowledge assumed Arceus was the Great Creator.
"Arceus was the First," continued Iris, "The Tool of Creation. Forged by a dream, shaped by a thousand arms. And Arceus, in his solitude, took the Fire of Creation and forged his children: Time and Space."
Seiko, overcoming his theological shock, began to write.
His hand flew over the rock. He wasn't writing the story word for word; he couldn't, his alphabet was still rudimentary. He was writing the key concepts.
ARCEUS = THE FIRST.
DREAM = CREATION.
TIME + SPACE = CHILDREN.
Tyla watched, fascinated. She saw how Iris's oral history became the symbols she had been struggling to learn. The letters stopped being scribbles. They became words.
"But Creation is violent," whispered Iris. "Space expanded. Time flowed. And from the shadow between them, the Reverse was born. The Balance."
Seiko nodded, his own theology (Giratina as balance, not evil) confirmed by the oldest tradition.
GIRATINA = SHADOW / BALANCE.
"And Arceus saw that the world was chaotic," said Iris, "And created the Guardians. Knowledge. Emotion. Willpower. And gave them the lakes to rest in..."
Seiko's hand moved frantically. This was the founding Story of Sinnoh/Hisui. 'Wait a minute... Iris's people really were the Celestica, but... if they were also from the Clan... what happened to them to stay in this era or form, did my family belong to the Clan or did it dissolve?'
Iris spoke for an hour. She spoke of the arrival of humans, of the original work with 'Almighty Sinnoh' (the name they used for Arceus), of the General's betrayal and the division of the world, and how a small group of Celestica fled Hisui across the sea, following a star, to end up here.
When she finished, the sun was setting. The rock wall was covered from top to bottom with Seiko's alphabet, telling Iris's story.
Iris was pale, exhausted by the memory. She looked at the wall. She saw the story of her life, the story of her people, captured in charcoal. It was... real. Permanent.
"You..." she whispered, touching the symbol for 'CELESTICA'. "It is not poison."
"It is a truth," said Seiko, his own arm aching. "It is Knowledge. Your memory and my tools. Together, we will not only survive, Iris. We will remember what was and what will be."
It was then that Acies moved.
The Bisharp had stood motionless throughout the story. Now, he approached the wall. He raised his blade-claw.
With a precision Tyla could only envy, Acies approached the first symbol Seiko had written. The word ARCEUS.
Charcoal was temporary.
The Bisharp began to carve the word into the stone.
'SCRATCH. SCRATCH. SCRATCH.'
The sound of steel carving rock filled the clearing.
Iris watched, and for the first time since Seiko had arrived, the fear in her eyes was replaced by awe.
[N/A: Sorry for the delay in uploading chapters. I've been using my free time to work on another Pokémon novel that focuses on Team Plasma and some concepts I'm developing along the way. I'll be posting the chapters I owe on Patreon. I'll be a bit inactive until Tuesday because I'll be visiting my grandparents, it's been a while since I last saw them. I hope you're all having a great day, afternoon, or night. Take care, dear readers]