{where the fires began}

I’mma just drop this here real quick because I wanted to get it done before the gifting station closes because presents for friends <3

*crawls back to grader cave I’ m so sorry Smiles ilu*

[hr][/hr]

where the fires began

[hr][/hr]​

We are many, in more ways than one.

We have seen many empires come and go, so we have outlasted all of them. We were there when the first of the walkers clawed their way out of the ocean and into the mud that breathed life into us eons prior, and we watched as they were joined by more and more of their brethren. We saw the walkers work together and against one another, the many of them warring unlike the many of us, and we watched many of them fall even as many of us remained.

We existed for many thousands of suns, and we remember all of them. We were not conscious for all of them; and some of us drowsed while the rest of us watched the great ball of fire traverse the sky and marked its passage, but we remember all of them. We are ancient compared to most of the other entities on this planet, and yet we are incapable of feeling the weight of all of that time.

We are many wandering spirits, not as many as the thousands of suns we remember, but almost. Others, though, lesser, recognize us only as one, because they do not see that we are many crammed into one tiny space, spinning and spinning like a lonely top through the confines of the universe.

But we are many, in more ways than one.

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

The walkers come to our abode on feet. Feet are a woefully inefficient method of transportation, we think, but we do not comment. We only watch, with our eyes and with our minds, and observe these pitiful creatures who stumble across the sands to our home. We bob in our singular astral body, and we are silent as they struggle across the dunes like newborns.

It is frightening. We thought that we were alone, with just ourselves and the sands, who are innumerable but inanimate, and yet here are creatures that seem capable of thought.

We are confused at first, for they crawl in many bodies that each only have one mind, and we are many minds that only have one body. But we watch, and we listen, and we wait to see what the walkers will do in our abode. We take them to be friendly.

They die. We do not understand why or how.

In the harsh biome of our desert home, the walkers are hopeless. We watch from our one body as their many try to survive. It is disconcerting. But they huddle together with their little furry heads and withdraw their little legs beneath them as they gather together. For some reason, when the sun sets and the skies darken and the air turns to a palpable chill, the walkers cannot take the cold. They curl into one another like drying fruit, and many of them curl up so tightly that they never un-curl, and they are left all tiny and frozen.

The walkers do not like the cold, we realize.

We do not feel the cold. Our human manifestation is made of sand and stone; while we are tethered here to a physical body, we are unaffected by night’s sharp chill and day’s blazing heat. Our desert home may be harsh to others, but we have lived here for many, many suns and moons, and we do not fear something as simple as temperature.

But the walkers do, and we watch as they try to stay here for many moons and feebly flop around like infants.

So we give them warmth.

We must focus for a time and curl our arms inward and focus all of our many planes of existence into one as we try to distill our energy into the rawest form of energy. We must focus for a very long time, and then it happens—

Fire.

We watch it blaze to life before us, red and yellow and blue and flickering, and we slowly descend before the walkers, keeping the fire alive before us, and place it before them. The walkers stare at it in confusion, and we watch as one of them reaches out for the warmth and then retreats with a hoarse scream, clutching at its injured limb.

We do not feel the warmth, either. That is only natural.

But we watch as they overcome their confusion and finally reach around them until they retrieve large sticks of wood, which they dip into the fire to carry it away with them. And then the walkers cross into the night once more, their blazing sticks held before them to light their way, and we cannot help but wonder if we made a foolish decision to help these strange creatures who feel both the heat and the cold.

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

The walkers stay here, and we are glad. We appreciate their company, almost. We are not weak enough to feel lonely, true, but we feel something for these strange creatures with their limbs that scrabble across the dirt. Their mouths squeak with languages so elementary that we cannot be sure they understand themselves, let alone each other, and their minds are so simple that we can brush them with but a touch and comprehend the entirety of their thoughts. They are strange, these walkers, and they are many bodies while we are only one.

The walkers, though, seem as bountiful as the grains of sand. They take the gift of our fire gratefully, and they use it to carve their path through the dunes in both day and night. We watch with muted fascination as more and more of the walkers crawl through the desert to this place, drawn here by some unnatural force that seems to bring us—them and we, not just we—all together.

We watch. It is hard to coordinate our many movements into the one movement that our physical body seems to require, so we watch. Watching is an easy thing; we do not need to be emotionally attached to watch anything, and we are free to listen and wait and remember as the walkers come, more and more to this place.

We are impressed by their persistence, truly. Here, the sands blow across the desert even as they struggle to pin down their own tiny forms of shelter. The days are burning hot to them, and the nights are freezing cold, and still they come.

We wonder, briefly, for the first time, if the entire world is like this desert. The sands stretch in massive expanses for as far as we can see, which is quite far, and as far as we can sense, which is even farther. For many suns, we have thought ourselves alone on this planet, and we thought this planet to be only of sand, but we know that we are at least partially wrong, because the walkers have come.

For now, though, they gather. They do not freeze in the night, but we watch them burn during the day, which to them is surely too hot to bear.

And then, in defiance of all reason, they begin to shape the desert to their whims. We watch in amazement as the sands rise at their commands with their little hands, lit by the fires we gave them. They build an immense tower at the center of our desert, and we peer around the edges of it, wondering how such a structure of sand could be imagined by such tiny walkers.

We look inside one evening, in the light of the fire we gave them, and we see that the walls are inscribed with dozens of intricate scratchings in the stone. We frown as we try to make sense of the depictions we see there, for they are only carefully-carved scratches. What do they mean? Why were they carved here?

We sense one of the walker behind us, and we turn around in widening alarm, ready to float away and flee.

“Baltoy,” the walker whispers, and bows its head in reverence.

We pause, momentarily confused, and then we are able to make sense of the carvings, which show a tiny, stonier, linier version of us descending from the heavens and delivering fire to the walkers, who grovel in their picture as this walker does now.

They are thankful for our gift to them? That is comforting, but our fire was freely given. We do not require payment in return.

We float away.

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

The walkers are interesting creatures. We do not dare look as closely as we did; the fear of being intercepted again, as we were when we stumbled upon their carvings, is too great.

But they grow, and they thrive here for many suns, and we watch as they gather and dissolve, gather and dissolve, day by day. They grow and change, not in size but in numbers, and when we look at the occupants of their tiny homes in the desert, we are reminded of ourselves, of many minds in one body.

It takes them many thousands of thousands of suns, and they still grow. The tower of our reverence grows empty, but we do not mind that. We are more fascinated by the array of walkers who have come, with strange objects made of metal that belch smoke into the sky and sticks that sound like thunder and companions of indescribable variety, some of whom walk and some of whom crawl and fly and float like we.

We do not need to interfere, however, until one of the walkers enters our home in the deepest part of the desert, sunk halfway up his legs in sand, and attacks us.

We are fascinated at first by the creature by his side. We had thought that only the walkers and we populated this planet, and before that only we, but we have been wrong before. And here, we see a strange creature that looks like a black rock has enveloped its limbs and forced it to walk on four legs instead of two. The rock on its back emits a steady stream of white smoke that masks the rest of its orange body, and we know that this creature is unlike the walkers and we, and yet it stands proudly alongside this adolescent walker and seems attached to him.

“A baltoy! Wow!” the boy cries out, but his voice is full of jubilance rather than reverence like the old walker we saw back in the tower. “Maraja, try a fire spin!”

The creature is shaped like a turtle, we think. That is the word that the walkers, who call themselves something else as well, use for it. We saw pictures of it once, carvings alongside our own in the tower of reverence, where a great fiery turtle bears the world on its back, keeping it afloat from a nameless void that surely must be the heavens.

Perhaps this turtle is as old and tired as we, watching and waiting and—

The turtle erupts into flames, and suddenly it is hot, hot, too hot, and the sands are on fire and burning with such intensity that they turn to glass, and we are screaming, crying out as we are enveloped by the blaze. We shy back, defensively summoning the wrath of the sands to protect us, but the walker has shouted something else and the turtle is already running toward us on stubby legs with surprising speed, its head bowed low and then—

It hits us hard in the center of our physical being, and we fly backwards into the flaming sand once more.

We are many, unaffected by the whims of the universe, and yet our physical vessel is weak.

The walker throws something then, a small sphere that is red and white and seems bigger on the inside from what we can sense, and then we are enveloped in a void.

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

“My name is Nate!” the walker says cheerfully, brushing a shock of black fur from his head and moving the appendage that he uses to make sounds so that he shows us his teeth.

We know that many of the other creatures of our desert consider this a threat, but the walker’s—Nate’s?—intentions seem harmless enough.

He reaches out for us, and we shy back a little, uncertain.

{I am Maraja,} a second voice says, and we fully prepare to bolt when we see the flaming turtle that attacked us from before. It doesn’t seem to want to attack as again, but we voice our fears in the only way our physical body knows how, and we trill at it while waving our stony arms in alarm.

And we would flee at once, but we take note of where we are, and we are confused. The ground is covered not in sand, but in fuzzy, soft, green things, the likes of which we have never seen before. And although we do not care for the changes in weather, we know that it is cooler here than it was earlier in the desert, and in the distance, there are immense brown pillars that are too dark to be sand or stone, and they, too, are topped with fuzzy green things that are so vibrant they must be alive.

We had, foolishly, assumed that since the desert was all we knew, and we knew much, that the desert was all there was, and we were many, but this is no desert. We stare in amazement and spin a little to take it all in. The world is immense and green and so very unlike the sands we know that we do not know how to continue on from here.

“Ozymandias,” the walker who calls himself Nate says at last, and we realize that the world is strange and new, and also that the walker who calls himself Nate has given us a name.

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

We do not know how to describe what our time with Nate is like. He is vibrant and full of energy, as life-filled as the strange ground that we float above that is not sand is. And although we spend only a fraction of our days spent on this planet alongside Nate, these feel different, as if we have graduated from simply watching and observing to something altogether more complex.

Grass, we learn. The strange ground is called grass, and it is made up of plants, and it is not sand.

Nate is eager to teach us things, and we are amazed that a walker has any knowledge to impart with us. We watched his ancestors crawl out of the mud and struggle to survive, and yet he seems to disregard all of that as he takes us and the fire turtle around with him on an adventure to see the world.

Maraja is far more subdued, although the fires on her back flicker in response to threats and we know better than to cross her foul side. We do not understand why, but this fire turtle is fiercely protective of Nate, and she wishes to watch over him and keep him safe from harm. We do not know what emotion drives creatures to put others before themselves, but we find it fascinating.

And the days pass, and it is just us and Maraja and Nate as we travel the world and see that the planet is more than just desert.

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

“Careful, Oz, you’ll knock it over,” Nate cautions us, and we are confused. The case is only glass; surely it will not mind being knocked over, if it has any thoughts at all?

{It’ll break,} Maraja clarifies for us, apparently noticing our befuddlement. {Humans do not like it when their things break.}

We do not quite understand that either, but we do not know what it is like to break. Our physical vessel is hard and unyielding, and we have no possessions to speak of save for our minds, which are as unlikely to crack as our body.

But we oblige, out of some sentiment of respect for Nate, who seems excited enough.

We are grateful that Nate is not like the others. Apparently, many of the walkers enjoy raising creatures like Maraja and us to fight one another, as if to fulfill some burning desire to conquer and destroy and subjugate. We do not feel that urge, and we are content to wander throughout the world and bask in its wonder alongside Nate and his fire turtle, and we are glad that combat is not in our blood.

“Oz,” Nate says, snapping us out of our many thoughts, “take a look at this!”

So we bob over across the tiny room and near him, careful not to knock him over. His body is fragile and we are afraid that it would shatter if we came too close. But we lean in, gently, gently, so as to not shatter the glass box that captures Nate’s attention either, and we are perplexed.

We see rocks. They look like rocks to us, and when we reach out with our minds to see what they hold, they are still nothing more than rocks. Old rocks, older than we, but even we do not claim to be the oldest beings in the universe.

“Claw fossils,” Nate says, his breath fogging up the case because he is so close to it that he may as well be touching it. “Aren’t they cool, Oz?”

We tilt our head to one side and try to understand. We only see rocks.

“It says here that these fossils are over one hundred and fifty million years old,” Nate continues, shocked. “And when they were alive, the pokémon from them looked like this!”

He points to something on the wall, and we realize that this is a more complicated version of the scratches that we once saw in the tower, and a depiction of a strange creature with huge, buggy eyes peers out at us from the confines of the picture on the wall.

We do not quite understand, but we try to think it through. These creatures are remnants of the ancients, so old that the only trace that remains of their existence is a small imprint of their bodies in a clump of mud, but long ago, they used to rule the earth.

They are older than we, we know, because this creature used to swim in vast oceans that once covered the planet, and yet all we ever knew was a world of sand.

We take the time to wonder, briefly, what our impact on the world will be like, if we will one day be studied like a clump of mud by an inquisitive child and his fire turtle and a creature as lonely as we, or if we are destined to fade into dust and be forgotten. Surely this fossil was not the only of its kind, and surely many thousands more that lived so many millions ago existed but were not fortunate enough to be preserved.

Perhaps preservation is not as cheerful as we think, though. It feels like a prolongment, lasting longer than our time, and we wonder if that is our fate as well, for we have lived so long already and yet show no signs of slowing.

Perhaps we knew even then that our impact of the world will never be a fossil, for we are destined to be.

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

Nate grows. We briefly wonder what it is like to grow taller, for we have inhabited this body for as long as we remember and yet we have never—

One day, there is a flash of brilliant light, and we feel ourselves expanding and changing, limbs stretching outward as energy courses through our physical form and we fear for ourselves, torn apart by the energy as we are and struggling to hold ourselves together, for this power is too great even for we, who are many.

And, almost too ironically, we have grown too, in a new body that is larger and rounder and still just as prone to spinning. We have many more eyes, and that is strange to get used to, for we must look around and watch even more, and our arms have detached and can whiz around us from tiny suggestions of our psychic energies, which is fascinating in itself. Our physical vessel feels stronger in this new form, and yet we find ourselves struggling to care, for we are still many minds in one body.

Nate told us once of the concept of a soul, and perhaps we are more than just minds in a body, like pebbles in a jar. He and Maraja, who could hold the earth, tell us that every living creature has something inside of them, something magical, that gives them life and animations and love, and we cannot help but wonder if we are many souls in a body instead of just minds. There is a delineation to be made there, for we do not actually know if we are souls or just minds, and we have no way of finding out.

For we do not feel warmth or cold, like the walkers and Nate and Maraja do, and yet they have souls, so we do not know if we have a soul. Do we need to freeze and be aided by a greater entity in order to feel for a soul? We do not know.

We know, though, that we have started to feel for this strange boy, to love him, to want to protect him just like Maraja has. Perhaps caring for someone very much means that we have a soul as well, and yet we still feel like that definition is incomplete.

We do not understand.

For Nate later adds that a soul is the remnant of something when it dies, and that soul lives on and travels to a beautiful land beyond the stars where everything is safe and there is no more pain, and that is where a soul spends the rest of its time in awe of creation.

We do not even know if we can die, for we are many, and we have not done so yet. We are old, yes, but not dead, and if we cannot pass on from this world, do we even have a soul?

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

We do not understand. We do not understand.

We spin, our many eyes watching, but we do not understand. More walkers come for Nate and take him from his too-soft abode away from us.

{Stop,} we whisper then, our disembodied arms spinning around us, our eyes blinking, spinning and spinning and spinning as the room becomes a blur. {Do not take him from here.}

{Calm yourself, Oz,} Maraja hisses at us, and the steam that billows out of her shell erupts in volumes, so much that there is a small storm brewing above her. But we can see through her tricks, and we always have, and we know that she is one mind in one body that she is trying to make look more intimidating.

We retaliate, levitating the objects in the room to the height of our eyes, just to show that we see what Maraja is doing and we will not tolerate her attempts at aggression. How can she betray Nate like this? How can she let the walkers take him from us? We swore to protect.

He is only cold, after all. He is only cold.

We do not feel the cold or the warmth or the love or the sorrow that these frail walkers and their feathery companions do. We are many, but even as many we are incapable of processing who and when and why and where Maraja can tell us that Nate is to be taken from here.

We do not feel the warmth or the love, and yet we care for Nate; we do not feel the cold or the sorrow, and yet we feel like something bad has happened now that he is endangered.

{They are not our enemies!} Maraja growls, standing between us and the walkers who have finally noticed what we are doing and are gawking, as walkers always do when they see us, and still they leave their paws on Nate, whose skin is silver like Majara’s scales. {Let them do their duty.}

{Let us do ours,} we hiss back, all eyes ablaze and furious as we spin, faster and faster, spinning forever unlike the walkers who grow cold. Our duty. We swore to protect.

{We are doing our duty, Oz,} Maraja tells us, beady golden eyes sharpening to exquisite points as if she thinks that we accept that as an excuse. {There is no more we can do for him.}

Nate is cold. Is that what she means?

We do not accept this.

This is Nate, who told us of the world beyond the earth we know where the celestial fires were born. This is Nate, who dreams were big enough to outlast creation, so big that we thought that he would live on even if his fragile little body could not. This is Nate, and he cannot—

We do not understand. We do not accept this.

We attack then, swinging our body across the room and spinning, spinning as we always have and always will, our dozen eyes fastening on every target at once and watching as Maraja takes a few steps back, retreating a little into her shell in alarm.

{We do not accept this,} we repeat to her, and then we direct our body so that it collides with her. The momentum from our spin catches her in the front of the shell and sends her flying back, so hard that she hits the opposite wall and leaves a crater in it.

The walkers scream in alarm, and we turn to them next, reaching out for the astral blue energy that will allow us to rescue Nate from their clutches.

Maraja screams then, and there is a blast of fire that streams past us, cutting us off from Nate and the walkers trying to take him away. We struggle with the fire for a moment, but the heat is too intense even for us, and we are forced to fall back.

{Oz, stop!} Maraja’s voice is as it always is, except this time, she sounds sad. {Please! You don’t understand!}

No, we do not understand.

But we do not care. She tried to attack us. She tried to stop us from protecting Nate.

We channel all of this sorrow and hatred—for, surely, that is the most extreme form of sorrow—into a single source and force it out of ourselves so that we can better touch the world. The fabric of reality bends at our whim and crumbles, and we levitate the objects in the room once again, focusing them carefully before we can aim them all at the line of fire keeping us away from Nate, Nate, Nate, we must get to Nate—

The walkers scream, and Maraja intervenes again, crossing the room on her stubby legs with surprising speed until she manages to tackle us, sending us off-course momentarily, away from the walkers that are trying to take Nate. We struggle upright, but Maraja is already standing her ground. Her mouth opens, so wide that we can see the bottom of her throat before she exhales a thin stream of fire toward us, directed so that it just clips the top of our body rather than hitting us head on. A warning shot. Does she mean to toy with us?

{Oz, please,} Maraja whispers, even as we rise back and levitate ourselves with our power and she prepares to strike again. {There is nothing more we can do.}

We ignore her. {Nate, look out!} we cry, but Maraja blocks us again.

{Look at him!} Maraja hisses, even as she headbutts our physical body and sends us skidding back again, even with all of our combined strength. {Look at him, Oz. What do you see?}

We watch, and we wait, but we cannot explain it.

The boy has gone cold, just like those first walkers from long ago. He is cold; that is all.

They call this… death, we think. Nate is dead. So why, then will he not get up?

We do not understand.

It has been many suns and moons since Nate decided to stop travelling the world, and many more since we first met him, but we did not expect him to go cold. He who showed us the fossils in the museums that were older than he and we, he who seemed so vibrant and full of life, he is not allowed to go cold. The universe should not allow it.

{He has been old for quite some time,} says Maraja, whose scales have begun to turn silver. {And so have we all.}

We have been old before they were born, but we still do not understand.

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

Maraja leaves us many suns after.

{It is time to move on, Oz,} she says, and we wonder how she can be so cruel.

But she turns away from us on her four stubby legs and leaves us and Nate’s home where we have been guarding, even though Nate hasn’t returned and other walkers have come instead to live there, and she trots back to the mountain that she says was her home, before she met Nate. We wonder what she will do there, in the land of fire, and if our home in the sand is still the same.

{Will you come back?} we ask, and wonder if we will grow lonely, even if we are many.

{No,} she says, after a moment of consideration. {I will find a new human, Oz, and I will move on. Nate was my fourth human already, and I loved him, even as I loved the others and even as I will love the next.}

We do not know what it means to move on from this, not with Nate gone.

{It was hard when my first human passed too, Oz, but we must move on. Humans are fragile compared to us, and they do not last nearly as long.}

But you are fragile compared to the entity of we, we want to tell her, not in a bragging or complaining way but just so that she can understand what we do not. The walker’s lives are but a blink to yours, but your life is but a blink to ours, but even so, how can we move on from that?

Many suns pass, and we ponder.

[hr][/hr]

The world is born anew in sand. We watch, slowly, as the temperatures rise and the winds roar and all of the achievements of the walkers and their companions slowly crumble to dust. We return, sometimes, to the ancient relic where we first met the walkers and later met Nate, and we watch. It was always a desert there, but as the suns rise and fall across the sky, the desert begins to spread.

The walkers die again. We do not feel the warmth of the sun, and we fear it no longer, but the walkers do. These are not the same walkers whom we watched shiver away and grow cold in our desert home so many suns ago, but they still suffer before our eyes. This time, the burn instead of freeze, and we watch as they and many of their companions perish.

We understand some. Extreme joy is love. We did not understand what extreme sorrow felt like until now. We took it to be hatred, the will that drives us and all others to fight, but that is not the case.

It is not hatred. It is something else, and we feel that now as we watch with our many minds in our one body as the walkers come and go and rot away.

We are not sad anymore. We were never sad. We are more than that. The walkers are frail and pitiful and like newborns, and no matter how hard we try to save them, we can at best prolong their lifespans and at worst give them hope.

And the walkers are no different. To them, we are many and mysterious and immortal, and we have seen ages pass.

We do not understand what these warm creatures do when the blood that courses through their veins turns still, but we know enough that they will not return to us, just like Rico, who only recently turned cold beneath the blazing desert, will not return to us, just like Nate will never return to us. We are tops, shaped like toys in the eyes of those who appear to us like children, and all we know is to spin, slowly, for all eternity.

We watch as the ancient God we once fought rises from Her slumber, Her red scales glinting in the burning sun as She emerges from a lake of fire. The magma runs off of Her body, burning it cherry red except She does not feel the fire, and we can only watch in amazement as She rises and roars. The force of Her is enough to send spurts of lava into the air, landing far from Her and burning into the sands.

We watch in fascination as one of those lumps of lava slowly turns cold, as if the rock is dying too.

She is Groudon, though, and we know that something has gone terribly wrong. But She rises still, no matter how much we think that this is not right, and She begins a great trek across the lands, trailing deserts that sustain us in Her wake.

And the walkers wither away and die even faster, and their companions do too.

We think, briefly, of Maraja.

We are Ozymandias, but Nate did not know how fitting that name would be. We, who have weathered the fall of empires, watch now with the ultimate form of sorrow: indifference. For that is all sorrow really is—a disconnect from all others, a feeling that we who are many have been feeling since we first learned what it meant to feel, feel, feel, and yet we never could.

The warm creatures and the walkers cry out to us as the oceans of sand rise up like water and drown them all, the dunes coming back as the earth reclaims her own. And we watch, as we always have, in complete indifference, for we cannot save them. The relic sinks back into a sea of desert and vanishes beneath the waves, and we watch the world end as it began, in blistering sand.

Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair.

[hr][/hr]

We are alone again, but this time, we can feel it. The ground has been shaped back into a flat, burning wasteland, and what we vowed to protect has long since withered away into nothingness. And still we wait here, we spin, we spin, we spin, for we are many and we are eternal.

And eventually, we know, it will be too harsh for even us to bear. It is as if the sun has turned against the world, determined to engulf this tiny, barren rock in flames.

We do not feel cold or warmth, but we can certainly feel this. The nights are freezing and the days are ablaze, and we who have endured everything can no longer endure this. We are many, but we are not enough to outlast a sun that has turned against us.

Even the Groudon, in all of Her magnificent glory, passes. We watched Her return to this land, panting and weary, as if the very sun She called for has destroyed Her and She wishes for the clouds that She banished long ago. She collapses in the sands that She birthed across the planet, which we now know only to be expanse after expanse of desert, and still we watch.

The sands continue to blow, and they pick Her bones clean.

It is too much for us to bear alone, and yet we know for certain that there are no more on this planet. This planet, which welcomed back Nate into the sands that define it entirely, whom we swore to protect, can no longer sustain life. There are only a handful other than ourselves who are left, and soon they will live here no longer.

We were never living, though, so what does it matter?

But we must be living, for it hurts so much to continue. We feel the sun baking our stones into shape, and while we are many and unaffected by things as trivial as heat, our physical body is still vulnerable.

We watch as the yellow and white wishmaker whom Nate once spoke of rises from the planet one night. We can see Him, and we can sense Him, and above all we can sense His overwhelming sorrow as the wishmaker flees from this land as well. In the vast expanse of the night sky, he barrels upward, ablaze from the heat and yet still rising, rising, a brilliant pillar of light in a sky that no one but we will ever watch.

We remain there, our many eyes pointed upward to heaven as we see the wishmaker leave, and we do not need to reach out with our many minds to understand that now, we are truly alone.

We accept death. We will burn up here, just like the wishmaker did in the skies, but we will do so in our own quiet way, all of our minds extinguished at once as our physical body finally vaporizes and then grows cold, just like everything else we have ever known has done so long ago.

It seems simple enough. We were shaped out of this sand, surely, and we will return to the sand when we pass on, just like the Groudon did. The wishmaker chose His death in fire, but we would rather turn cold like Nate than burn.

Many more suns pass before it occurs to us to wonder if maybe the wishmaker was trying to go somewhere. We remember all, and we remember the legends that Nate once told us, about how the wishmaker comes from a land beyond this planet, and we start to wonder. We reach out with our mind beyond this barren planet of fire, and we wonder.

We have sensed the rotation of this floating hunk of rock as it hurtles through space, spinning quiet circles around a ball of fire that heats these sands. The ball of fire, in turn, spins circles around a great center of nothingness well beyond our ability to sense, but we can see the stars turn in the night sky as we spin around them, too. And surely that center of nothingness spins around something, too.

And all of these celestial bodies spin as we spin, many minds in the body of one, spinning because that is the only way we know to find our center.

But there is a land beyond the stars, and we believe in it. Nate told us about it once, we remember, when we—he and we—sprawled out on the grass that can exist no longer. Nate pointed out the stars to Maraja and us, and he told us about the worlds in the skies that are full of infinite possibility and jest.

We swore to protect Nate, but our many millions of suns of watching has taught us one thing: that we must let him go. Nate is here no longer. His bones have dissolved into dust like the Groudon did, and his soul has leapt into the stars like the Jirachi did. Nate grew cold long ago, and this planet grew too hot for him or any of us, and now it is time.

We have watched and spun for far too long on this planet, and it is time for us to move on. All things pass in time, even empires and gods and us, and our age ended long ago alongside this planet. So we will leave this barren rock full of the sand that made us, and we will journey, spinning, into the void.

And one night, when even the darkness cannot hide us from the heat of the sun any longer, we burst upward, channeling all of our energy into flight. The heat from the friction threatens to light us ablaze, but we are many, and we overcome.

Should any lone travelers come to this planet, they will only find a vast sea of sand, a world choked by the very essence that created it. If they look carefully, though, they may find a spot in the immense desert where we once stood, where a crudely-made, scratched drawing of a boy and his claydol lie in the protective depths of a rock made of magma that was born at the rise of the god and the death of a planet.

But they will not find us. We are gone, spinning lonely but hopeful through the vast expanses of the universe. We will watch and wait no longer; now, we will search, and we will search until we find that spark of life.

The fire, we know, is not our enemy. It is the source of the love that sparked us to give warmth to the walkers when we first saw them in the desert, freezing. The fire is both the ending and the beginning, and although it ended us here, we can continue spinning until we can find the place where it creates a planet rather than destroys it. Nate told us about those mystical fires in the sky, and we will find them, and we will make sure that all of the memories of this planet are gone but not forgotten.

And so it will be for many more suns, and so it is fitting.

We hurtle through the cold and hot universe, feeling all of our many souls at once, for we are searching.

Searching then, searching now, searching still, for the place where the fires began.

[hr][/hr]

Spoiler

attempted captures: baltoy (medium), torkoal (hard)
character count: 36,711


This was going to be a fun story about Murica, the loud, brash, obnoxious rufflet, and Britio, a withdrawn, tea-loving, proper baltoy with a penchant for monocles and tophats. They would go on gentlemanly adventures together, many historical caricatures and horrible puns would be made, and Murica would basically be the Bruce Wayne to Britio’s Alfred. Basically, it would be cheerful and badass and awesome, and, well.

I, uh, things did not go quite as planned.

Iunno, maybe there’ll be some incarnation of the humorous rufflet later, but for now the baltoy ended up in this mess, and then I went on a diatribe about creation, so torkoal because World Turtle, and then this happened. Enjoy. Was pretty swept up in the new Megas and stuff, and Hoenn confirmed woooooh ^^

 

Le claim. Grade up by the end of next week, but likely before Friday 'cause SMASH 3DS YOOOOOOOO.

 

Did I say by the end of the week? I meant in a couple days, my bad. :0 Fellykins wants them grader wages, yo. @Elysia;

Introduction
Okay, not gonna lie, I legit thought this story was going to be about zombies and stuff 'cause walkers, and my mind immediately jumped to Walking Dead and then I read on, and oh hey, Fellykins is wrong!!! Totally not a bad thing, but I just wanted to make that comment, haha.

So on to the actual grading bit of this. It's actually pretty interesting. I like how the story was in Baltoy's point of view, basically, seeing the world around it and all of that stuff. Learning and discovering and realizing that the world isn't all desert, that there's grass and life and death and all that cool stuff. And then they learn and grow and all of that stuff. It's a really cool story!

Detail
Detail is on point!!! Nothing negative really caught my eye, to be honest, but I do want to drop a positive note (or maybe two, I dunno if my other note is positive, haha) for you just to add some depth into this section and it's not just "yo, ely, your detail is on point!" I liked how the Baltoy were multiple entities in one body, or that's how I looked at it since you referred to them as "we" and similar words. Makes sense given that it's a Psychic type and all. Also, this is probably just me being dumb, but I totally didn't catch on that that was a Torkoal until I saw what you were attempting to capture. Probably because I don't know Hoenn Pokemon that well, I dunno. You described it well, I just don't know what a Torkoal looks like off the top of my head. :0 I just knew it was a turtle like thing, and the only turtles I could think of were Water types and Grass types. tl;dr felly dumb and don't know what torkoal looks like but we good now.

Detail still on point after that paragraph, so moving on!

Grammar
Grammar is pretty solid, so there's not much for me to say here either. Just one caught my eye, and this grade needs more criticism, so I'm gonna go ahead and comment on it. Also because if I just leave it at that, this would be a pretty crappy, not helpful grade, so let's have some criticism!

Specifically the bolded part. It might just be me, but I read over it a couple times, and it just sounds super awkward. Just the whole "...that is not sand is" bit sounds super awkward in my head when I read it. The rest of it's fine, but maybe you have an extra "is" there at the end? I'm not sure. Maybe it's supposed to be there, but it sounded really awkward when I read it, so I figured I'd point it out. (I probably didn't need to bold as much as I did, but oh well.)

I was going to point out the thing where you don't capitalize Pokemon nouns unless they're at the beginning of a sentence since my mind wanted to make it seem like that was a consistency error, but I stopped myself since that's a stylistic choice. :3 It's an interesting one, I admit, I think you're the only person I know that does that. (Or maybe you just forgot to press shift, who knows. :0)

Climax
Wai Nate, wai. Wai u gotta get old and go away liek dat?!?!?!

And then Baltoy learns about death. Except it knew about death before, but it never realized it, having watched the other walkers die too. I just liked how Baltoy actually learned about this concept it had seen before numerous times, and then when someone it actually cares about passes away, it freaks out and attacks the walkers taking Nate away, learning rage. (It's like learning Pokemon moves! :0) Basically Nate and Torkoal helped make Baltoy the Pokemon it is at the end of the story, by showing it that there's more to the world than just the desert it originated from and that it actually does have emotions and doesn't have to just sit and watch and all of that stuff.

Conclusion
Length is a nice 36741 in characters, which is 30 over what you got, but these character counter things are never consistent ever. Silly character counters. You're in that range for a Medium and Hard though, so no complaints here on length.

All in all, I liked the story, and I didn't really have much negative to say, I'm sorry!!!! :c Well, there was that one awkward bit in grammar, but yeah. It was pretty much on point. Gonna go ahead and leave it at that since I'm not really sure what else I could say here other than Torkoal and Baltoy captured! Gift station's over now, sad face, but at least you got the Pokemon now rather than never? :0