Hisui was teeth and fog and breath. Pines leaned over black water. Mist crawled off the sea each morning and never quite left. Somewhere out there, a storm-sized dragon slept under the waves. No one had named it yet.
On a strip of pebbled shore, a girl picked through the tide line like a hungry Murkrow.
Akantha crouched low, bare feet numb where the surf licked them. The air tasted of salt and metal. Her fingers—narrow, almost clawed—flipped stones and weed-tangles aside, quick and sure. She wasn't looking for pretty things. She was looking for things that stained.
She found a chunk of charcoal driftwood, black all the way through. Good. That went into the bark basket at her hip.
A little farther along: broken shell. Not the thin, chalky kind. Thick. Ridged. Still faintly purple.
"Shellder," she whispered, touching the inside where the color clung. The creature itself was long gone, pried out and eaten by something with better teeth than her clan, but its shell still held pigment in its heart.
She chipped strips of the shell free with a stone and dropped them in with the charcoal. The pieces clicked together softly.
Waves sloshed around her ankles. Out past the shallows, something long and heavy rolled just under the surface—only a flash of pale belly, the shadow of a fin. Not close enough to be a problem. Not yet.
Behind her, the line of the coast curved away into fog. Behind that, hills, caves, and the little hollow where her people lived stacked like a nest of clay bowls. She'd walked that distance alone at first light while the elders still muttered around the firepit. No one had stopped her. By now they'd all accepted that if Akantha vanished at dawn, she'd come back with something useful and a new question they couldn't answer.
She straightened, stretched her back until it popped, then jogged toward the river mouth where fresh water braided into the sea.
Here the Pokémon were more obvious.
A school of Basculin sulked in a deep channel, red-striped bodies shivering in place against the current. Their eyes followed her like she might steal the river out from under them. On the opposite bank, a group of squat, moss-backed things basked on a rock, algae riding their shells. She'd seen them uproot entire lily beds with one lazy bite. Later she could ask her father if he wanted that particular green.
Not today. She had a list in her head.
Down by a cluster of reeds she spotted what she needed: a patch of berries crushed into the mud where some careless Pokémon had stomped them. The juice ran dark, almost black-purple. She scooped the stained earth into a clay cup, humming under her breath. Berry-skin mixed with soot made a color her father liked for eyes.
"Greedy little hand," a voice said behind her. "That mud is going to stain all the way to your bones."
Akantha didn't flinch. Only one person in the world sounded like that—half amusement, half warning.
"I wash before I touch the walls," she said, without looking back.
Her father snorted. "I remember the last time you said that."
She twisted around and grinned at him.
Up close, the family resemblance was obvious: same sharp cheekbones, same dark eyes that weighed everything. His hair was bound back with a strip of tanned hide; dried scales and beads hung from it like trophies. He carried a spear over one shoulder more out of habit than caution, and a smaller basket for whatever she handed him.
He crouched beside her and dipped his thumb into the berry-mud. When he pulled it out, a thick streak of purple-black clung to the pad.
"Good," he said. "This will hold. The Basculin on the wall keep looking at me like I painted them with river water."
"You did," she said.
"Exactly," he answered, as if that proved his point.
She laughed and passed him the cup.
Together they worked the shore for a while. She broke off more Shellder shell and poked around for the chalky stones that, when ground, made white bright enough to pick out teeth. He scraped charcoal from a log that had burned and drowned at the same time. When the baskets were heavy and the sun had lifted a hand above the far hills, he tapped her shoulder.
"Enough," he said. "Your mother will want you before she throws me out of the fire circle."
"She never throws you out," Akantha said.
"Not where anyone can see," he replied, deadpan, and that made her snort hard enough to inhale a bit of sea-mist and cough.
They climbed back toward the caves.
Inside the hollow, smoke braided with the smell of meat and herbs. Pokémon bones—long and clean, drilled through the ends—hung in a clacking curtain by the entrance. Akantha pushed them aside with her shoulder and stepped into the warm dimness.
The family firepit roared today. Someone had built it big enough to scare off anything that got curious. Basculin skulls, Shellder shells, and carved driftwood ringed the half-circle of stones. Her mother knelt by the largest clay pot, hair tied back, sleeves rolled.
Akantha clocked the ingredients in one glance: chunks of red-backed fish, dark leafy greens, strips of root, a splash of fermented berry wine for sour, a handful of mushrooms she knew better than to taste raw. Pokémon and not-Pokémon, all stewing together until their boundaries blurred.
Beside her mother, lying with its head on its paws, was the clan's oldest partner.
It looked a little like the paintings Akantha had seen of wolves, if wolves had been carved out of ember-light and patience. Its coat was deep orange with darker bands along the sides, thick fur around the chest like someone had wrapped it in smoked wool. When it yawned, she caught a flash of sharp teeth and the soft glow of heat behind them. The air around it always smelled faintly of singed pine needles.
The elders called it "fire-dog" in the old tongue, nothing more poetic than that. Akantha had heard traders from farther south use a different word that stuck in her teeth: Growlithe. She rolled it around in her head sometimes. Growlithe, fire-dog, ember-hound. Whatever the name, the creature thumped its tail once when it saw her and huffed a greeting that puffed a little warmth across her bare shins.
"You're late," her mother said, not turning.
"I brought you color," Akantha said, unbothered. She set her basket down carefully out of tail-range. "And I washed my hands. Before you ask."
"You say that." Her mother reached back without looking, seized Akantha's wrist, and checked anyway. Satisfied the skin wasn't completely stained, she let go. "Help me pick bones."
Akantha slid into place on the other side of the pot.
The stew had already gone cloudy with fat. She could pick out Basculin flesh by the color—dark, almost black once it cooked through—and the paler strips from something else. Maybe the bird that had tried to steal their grain yesterday and lost.
Her mother passed her a carved bone scoop. "If you find any Shellder bits, put them in the small bowl, not the discard pile," she said. "Your father will steal them for his wall, and I'd rather pretend I planned to share."
"Already have some," Akantha said, nudging her basket with her foot. "These ones might have salt left, though."
"Then split them. Half for eating, half for drawing. The wall doesn't get all the good things."
The fire-dog huffed agreement and rolled onto its back, legs in the air, roasting its belly in the heat. Akantha snorted and flicked a droplet of hot broth in its direction. It snapped it out of the air with a lazy chomp.
They worked in comfortable noise: stew bubbling, bone spoon clinking against clay, the distant tap of stone tools deeper in the caves.
Her father came in after a while, set his basket of pigments near the wall, and paused beside them.
"You're stealing my shells," he told her mother.
"Your shells tried to choke me last time," her mother replied. "We made a bargain."
"I don't remember a bargain."
"That's because I won," she said, and that made Akantha grin down into the pot.
Her father ruffled Akantha's hair as he passed. "When the stew is done," he said, "come see the wall. The new Basculin need eyes."
"I brought better purple," she said. "They'll see everything."
"Good," he said simply, and went to his tools.
After they ate—fish and roots and the last of the wild onions, stew so hot it made her ears ring—Akantha washed her hands properly this time. The fire-dog followed her to the painting cave, claws clicking on stone, tail sweeping slow arcs.
Inside, the air cooled and smelled of old smoke and wet rock.
The wall already carried a river.
Basculin shapes leapt along it, painted in rough streaks of dark color. A long serpent coiled in the upper corner, scales suggested with broken lines. Birds wheeled in white arcs above, each one an idea more than a true wing. Her father sat on a flat stone, grinding the new pigments she'd brought in a shallow bowl.
He handed her a thin stick chewed to a point.
"Show me," he said.
Akantha dipped the point into the berry mix, then into the powdered shell. The purple that came out was different than before—deeper, richer. She caught her breath, then climbed up onto the ledge she always used and leaned close to one Basculin's blank face.
One dot for the center. One thin stroke to imply the ring around it. Just enough white around the purple to make it feel like wet, living eye.
The painted fish looked back at her.
She shivered, pleased.
Outside, Hisui went on being huge and wild. Pokémon hunted and were hunted. People tried not to get eaten. No one had written anything down yet. No one had invented the word "Professor."
But a girl with clever hands and a half-remembered word—Growlithe—had just taught stone to remember a river full of teeth.
That would have to count for now.