“They’re leaving today.”

“Really.”

“Won’t you at least see them off?”

“No.”

As tenacious as she was, Shaaca couldn’t help the tiny part of her that wanted to give in to the healers’ near tactless attempts to make her leave the shiraan, if only to escape their constant pestering and give her aching joints a break from the locked position that kept her standing. That did not mean she would submit. Just one look at Kognook’s ailing body was enough to keep her motionless, barely blinking and only speaking when an answer was truly necessary.

“But if they succeed they might find a way to cure him!” the young female healer persisted, having long since lost her instinctive fear of the imposing Aashnin.

Shaaca said nothing, instead focusing her efforts on pulling together the two sides of her as they fought bitterly over the very same situation this healer was so intent on discussing. Any chance of a fight against the Omastar had always been appealing to her in the past, but just the thought of leaving Kognook’s side was crippling, even if it was on a mission that might bring the very results he needed.

Suddenly, without giving her a chance to stop it, a huge depressed sigh escaped the warrior and her proud, straight-backed posture deteriorated into one of sagging shoulders and a drooping head.

The healer eyed her in concern. “Won’t you sit down, Aashnin Shaaca?” she suggested carefully, gesturing with especially dull scythes to a malformation that jutted from the base of one of the rocks that guarded the area.

With a non-committal murmur, the black Kabutops permitted herself a retreat to the rock and settled her weight onto its bulk as she inspected her own scythes, one as blunt as the healer’s and the other badly maintained, its once razor-sharp edge rounding away. Desperation swelled even stronger within her chest at the sight as the desire to sharpen both blades and get back out into her blood-stained element rose to new heights.

‘I never should have been a mother,’ she thought wearily, her gaze remaining fixed to her murderous glaives. ‘Here I am, yearning for the battlefield, while my only son – Haakmin’s only son - just fades away.’

Despite her conscious evasion of the word, death echoed eerily in the Kabutops’ skull and she shook herself in an attempt to silence it, oblivious to the worried glances of the healers as she turned her violet gaze to the blood red disk of the sun as it dipped behind the looming rock face of their home.

The persistent healer stepped forwards again, her sandy, coarse-textured skin transformed to mahogany brown in the dying light. The two who had volunteered to venture out towards the Omastar hive would be long gone by now, so there was no point in begging for the warrior’s attendance to the leaving ceremony, but that familiar weariness had settled into Shaaca’s eyes, accompanied by an unsettling dullness the healer couldn’t quite name.

“Shaaca,” she said firmly, for the first time daring to discard the respectful title of Aashnin, “You are tired. You are tired and emotional and many other things I am not worthy to speculate upon yet know will reduce you to a state in which you are no good to your son. You will leave this instant,” she took a deep breath, straightening her back, “Or else I shall remove you personally.”

The black Kabutops gave a condescending snort of the sort nobody had heard out of her in months before turning her angular eyes to bear on the smaller Pokémon.

“Really?”

Her voice was flat yet scathing. The healer was sick of hearing it.

She struck with a speed and precision that surprised her, although evidently not as much as it did Shaaca, who suddenly found herself on her knees after being knocked from her seat on the outcropping. The healer glared down at her fiercely, blunt blades lifted in a weak imitation of a proper stance.

“Really,” she repeated her superior’s words firmly, inwardly proud of herself.

She hadn’t enough time to draw another breath, however, before Shaaca struck back as fast as lightning, gaining her feet and slashing out with both scythes in one fluid movement. The left struck tenths of a second before the right, smacking the healer back against the wall and holding her there as its twin shot past the terrified Kabutops’ head with an audible hiss. She shivered, all righteous fire lost in the face of Shaaca’s thunderous appearance, a deep, thin white line sliced all the way along the left plane of her helmed head. The very skin that had picked her out as a healer – sandy, soft, unfit for combat – crumbled away from the cut.

Silver wings buzzing irritably at her back, the Aashnin waited just long enough for the healer to regain that healthy fear she had recently lost before stepping back and letting the girl slump to the ground.

“You will not tell me what to do,” Shaaca snapped, taking one last glance at Kognook and storing the image carefully in the back of her mind, “Although I appreciate the attempt at humour. I will see you first thing tomorrow, understood?”

The healer, quaking from her place on the ground, barely had a chance to nod numbly, her brain still processing her good luck, before Shaaca swept out of the shiraan with nothing but the fading whine of her wings and the scrape of claws on rock to mark her departure.

“She… left?” she squeaked, looking to her fellow healers for confirmation, which they gave in the form of a few confused nods.

“A-amazing.”

Outside, Shaaca was not feeling amazing. Whatever terrifying fierceness she had conjured up in an attempt to salvage the remains of her pride and reputation had left her as soon as she set foot back onto the cool stones of the beach, leaving her with her depression, weakness and that infuriating itch in the blunt edges of her scythes that begged to be relieved. Dragging her feet all the way back to her niche in the cliff, she had barely forced herself inside before she collapsed into her ka’aan, curling up tightly. Despair was something she sometimes felt she knew better than she knew herself, but it was the overwhelming sense of sheer incompetence that really swamped her. It seemed that every move she made was the wrong one, as though she had been built to stumble and waver and ultimately fail. The healer was right, she had no place in the shiraan, she had no place by the side of that gloriously innocent child. She was never meant to be a mother, or a mate, or even a companion or friend.

She buried her face in the sand as though trying to hide from her own accusations, wings flicking warm grit over her shining obsidian armour as she closed her eyes and wished herself to be oceans away. Perhaps if she wished hard enough… Perhaps she could live the rest of her days without wondering if her son would still be there in the morning. Perhaps all this suffering could finally end.

* * *

“So… remind me again why we leave in the evening?”

Raahn the Kabuto resisted the urge to release a particularly concentrated hydro pump into the face of his less than satisfactory ride as he balanced carefully on the broad head of Zetaahn, peering out through the growing gloom for a good, sheltered place to stop for the night.

“I mean, it hardly makes sense to leave then, ‘cause we can only reasonably travel for ‘bout an hour before we have to stop again ‘cause it’s so dark,” the Raakin continued, set on generating some sort of conversation with the snooty Kabuto if only to preserve his own sanity as his Kabutopian eyes lost their aptness in the dimming light.

“It’s tradition,” the smaller creature ground out, clicking his yellow needle legs on the left side of Zetaahn’s head as he spotted a promising accumulation of fallen wood in that direction.

“Oh,” he fell silent for a second, then continued, as though he had been the first expedition member to be chosen, “And why did they send you with me anyway? I mean, what are you? Twenty?”

Raahn, who had dropped down into the humus and other forest floor debris to get a closer look with his superior night vision, whipped around and buried his front scythes into the bigger Pokémon’s leg viciously.

“For your information, it has been three-hundred and twenty-seven years, six months and twelve days since I was born,” he snapped at the squealing Kabutops. “Just because I haven’t evolved does not mean that I am your inferior, clear?”

Zetaahn, his eyes watering as blood dripped down his leg, nodded meekly, squeaking out, “S-sorry!”

“Hmph, you will be.”

Releasing the snivelling Raakin from the tips of his claws, Raahn left him to whimper over his superficial injury and shuffled about the timber, his glowing red eyes narrowing beneath the protective brim of his shell as a probing claw proved it to be rotten. Still, wreathed in moss and other small plants, the shafts covered an adequately deep dip in the ground where they could hide fairly successfully. It was more than he had expected, and he indicated to the taller Pokémon that this was the spot with a few quick clicks of his talons.

Zetaahn hesitated for a second but, seeing that the scout he was meant to guard wanted him, the so-called warrior, to enter first, scuttled forwards and ducked into the natural shelter. Inside the air was moist and full with the pungent scent of rotten leaves, soil and faeces, but there was no sign of anything dangerous so the inexperienced junior fighter nodded humbly to his elder, allowing him inside.

Raahn, although calculating and intelligent in theory and strategy, knew full well his shortcomings when it came to experience and glanced at the pile of dung with a suspicious eye.

“Old, is it?” he inquired, not wanting to move any closer to the heap.

“Of course,” Zetaahn responded quickly, trying to redeem himself in the Kabuto’s eyes by being the closest to quick and efficient he could manage, which included a lot of quick and not much efficient.

Raahn skittered over to the corner furthest from some creature’s toilet and settled down.

“If you’re sure,” he relented.

Proud that he had satisfied the temperamental genius, Zetaahn lay down on his side, wishing that the soil beneath him was the warm sand in his ka’aan as the cold dampness pressed against his armoured body. Repressing a shiver self-consciously when he felt the chill begin to seep into him, the Kabutops shut his dark eyes and attempted to speed up his descent into sleep by willing serenity to spread out through his mind. On the verge of sleep he started once, some phantom movement registering in his consciousness, but he was not used to travelling so the tiny distance they had crossed that day had worn him out. With one twitch of his long, curved blades, Zetaahn dipped into the deepest realms of dreamland.

* * *

Shaaca awoke with a start, the ghost of a nightmare momentarily conning her into the belief that she had been captured by enemy Omastar before she remembered that she had retired to her home. The realisation did nothing to force the strange twisting sensation in the pit of her stomach, however, and the mutant warrior clambered out of her ka’aan, feeling the results of a good few hours sleep return the spring to her powerful legs as she blinked in the darkness.

Her wings fluttering, the Kabutops carefully made her way towards the few glittering stars beyond the mouth of her cave. Outside the sky was clear, pale moonlight illuminating her path as Shaaca made her way back to the shiraan out of pure instinct. Sweat began to seep from between the gaps in her armour despite the cold air that flowed over her body, turning her flustered breath into a plume of icy white. Urgency nipped at her heels and she broke into a run, hindered by the uneven stones beneath her feet until she hit the rock path that wound along the base of the cliff towards her son.

By the time she reached the gap in the standing stones Shaaca’s silver wings were little more than a blur, emitting a high-pitched scream that echoed across the bay. As her gaze swept the silent shiraan, however, finding every last medic missing, the Aashnin’s wings fell silent against her back. For a second she stood stock still in shock, dread coiling up inside her to grasp at her fluttering heart with an icy grasp, before she gained enough control to slowly advance towards the ka’aan that held her offspring.

Inside, Kognook’s tiny form lay motionless, the pits of his eyes devoid of that warm red glow they had held even when closed. His small silver blades and many yellow legs hung limply from a shell that had not changed at all beyond twin circles that blemished the back, marks near invisible in the light.

Shaaca felt not even the faintest tingle of surprise.

Once again she was immobilized, bent slightly over the lifeless body of Kognook, her own personal time freeze broken only by twin droplets of water as they trailed their way down her angular face and splattered into the sand. She had expected this, she desperately reminded herself, she had known that everyone touched by the disease withered away in a devastatingly short period of time, she never should have even hoped, she should have prepared...

“I came as soon as I heard,” a voice told her, its owner having inadvertently crept up on her.

Tziir watched his Aashnin carefully, fully aware that the grief she displayed so potently over her dark features could very well trigger any number of reactions. The three missing medics cowered guiltily behind their tall king, varying degrees of self-hate brewing inside each of them.

The Kabtaar cleared his throat before continuing with his face carefully blank, “I’m sorry for your loss-”

Shaaca spun suddenly to face him, her violet eyes now gleaming passionately as she glared straight into his own fathomless blue irises.

“When did they leave?” she demanded, aware of yet indifferent to the tears that dribbled down her face.

Tziir blinked, struggling to keep up that emotionless mask, “How do you m-”

“The group,” she interrupted sharply, “When did they leave.”

“Six hours ago,” he responded with a slight inclination of his head, “Why, have you had a change of heart?”

Shaaca didn’t even hear his words - they were inconsequential. She was already running, fleeing the corpse of the last member of her family as the grief that had filled her body to the brim began the ugly descent into desire. Desire for revenge.