The Galar Region remained largely a mystery to Lucien. Calyrex, the king of wisdom. The legendary sword and shield, Zacian and Zamazenta, the two guardian Pokémon whose power had defined Galar's identity for generations. Where were they now?
What had happened to them, that a war like this could begin without their intervention?
He had no answers yet.
As night fell over Laverre City, Lucien and Serperior stood together on the city wall, looking out at the horizon as the last of the daylight bled away. The sunset had turned the clouds a deep, burning crimson, the color of something that didn't intend to go out quietly.
The night wind moved through the streets below, carrying smoke and the fading echo of the day's cheers, sweeping them away without effort. What it couldn't sweep away was the heaviness that had settled over everyone still living inside these walls.
Behind him, the city bore its wounds openly. Civilians in torn clothing sat in doorways. Soldiers with bandaged limbs leaned against crumbling walls.
Laurent was speaking in low, grave tones to his subordinates nearby, his face carrying the particular exhaustion of a man who understood exactly what one day's victory did and didn't mean.
Everyone here knew. The Corviknight legion had been routed, yes. But in other parts of Kalos, countless towns and fortresses were still under attack. And in the capital, Lucien's jaw tightened slightly, the capital was in even worse condition.
AZ had withdrawn from the world after Floette's death, and without the king, the heart of the Kingdom had gone quiet in all the wrong ways.
Laurent climbed the wall and came to stand beside him, carrying a bowl of vegetable and meat stew. His expression was apologetic.
"Lord Lucien, I am sorry. With Laverre's supply lines nearly cut off, this is the best I can offer you."
Lucien looked at the bowl, then at the people gathered in the streets below. He shook his head. "Give it to someone who needs it more."
"My lord..." Laurent's face softened into a pained smile.
"I'll remain in Laverre for three days," Lucien said. "After that, I'll make my way to the capital and see the situation there for myself."
Kalos Region, western interior - Luminose City. The royal capital.
Deep in the night, in the lowest level of the underground royal vaults, a tall figure moved between the shelves of ancient texts, pulling volumes and spreading them open with hands that hadn't rested in days. AZ's eyes were red at the edges, his breathing uneven, his enormous frame bent over the pages with a desperate, consuming focus.
On the table beside him lay Floette. Still. The petals that had once trembled with light and color were faded now, their edges curling inward, dry and brittle. The green of the stem had gone grey.
Several days earlier, the Galar army had launched a targeted aerial strike on Luminose City, a decapitation attack, swift and brutal. The assault had killed countless civilians before any defense could be organized. Floette had died in the chaos of it.
After the first wave of it, the disbelief, the rage, the grief that had no floor, AZ had remembered something. A reference, buried deep in the oldest records kept beneath the royal city.
The texts of a civilization that had come before, that had understood things about life and death that the present age had chosen to forget.
The Life-Death Conversion Device.
A machine capable of crossing the boundary between living and dead. Of returning what had been lost, or of taking what still lived and converting it into the energy required to do so.
If I had it, Floette could come back.
His fingers pressed into the yellowed page, the paper threatening to tear under the pressure. His breathing in the silence of the vault was the only sound.
The underground ruins stretched around him in flickering candlelight, the flames guttering in the drafts that moved through the old stone passages. AZ's shadow stretched long and crooked across the frozen wall, a hunched, enormous shape, alone in a space built for a civilization that no longer existed.
He looked at Floette.
To anyone else, a Pokémon was a Pokémon. Companions came and went. The world was full of them. But Floette had been with him since before he could properly account for his own life.
She had been the fixed point around which everything else had turned. And now the iron heels and shrieking armor of Galar's army had simply, taken her. Erased her. As though she had been nothing worth accounting for.
Every time his eyes moved to her remains, something in the deep part of his chest tore a little further open.
The ancient texts spread before him were the only thing keeping him moving. Every character was a thread he could grip. The Super-Ancient Civilization had built this machine and then buried it, sealing it away with warnings that filled page after page, that it violated the natural order, that it would bring catastrophe, that no good could come from wielding power over life and death.
AZ had read all of those warnings.
He had turned the pages past them without stopping.
Just let her come back.
He closed the scroll, rose to his feet unsteadily, and stood alone in the vast dark of the underground chamber.
In the city above, the aftermath of the Galar strike had settled into an eerie quiet. The army had not stayed, they had pushed on into the interior of Kalos, leaving Luminose isolated, its external communications severed, its civilians living in sustained dread.
The nobility gathered daily in private rooms, debating whether to flee. The royal guard patrolled the capital's streets in tight formation, braced for a second assault that had not yet come.
And AZ had issued his final instructions to his ministers and stewards, and then stopped attending to the war entirely.
He had begun requisitioning. Equipment. Raw materials. Every craftsman and scholar remaining in the capital. He worked without sleep, without pause, ignoring the pleas of those around him, ignoring the fear in their faces, ignoring everything that was not the machine taking shape in the darkness below the royal city.
The metal framework rose slowly, piece by piece. Ancient crystal was set into the critical joints, cold light pulsing faintly from within each one. And gradually, over days of obsessive, single-minded labor, a structure began to emerge from the underground chamber.
Vast, towering, its silhouette not unlike the shape of an eternal flower rendered in steel and crystal and the knowledge of a civilization three thousand years dead.
AZ stood before it.
The resurrection device, rebuilt by his own hands, from records that were never meant to be followed.
All that remained now was activation.
But here, for the first time since Floette's death, AZ hesitated.
Because the records were clear on one point that could not be read past or reasoned away. The machine did not run on mechanical power, or elemental energy, or anything that could simply be gathered and fed into it.
It ran on the life energy of Pokémon.
To resurrect Floette, he would need lives. As many as could be gathered.
"Your Majesty..." The craftsmen and ministers around him spoke with trembling voices.
AZ closed his eyes. Held his breath for a long moment. Then opened them.
"Send the army into the forests surrounding the capital. Round up every wild magical beast you can find and bring them here."
"Your Majesty, please, you cannot..."
"Anyone who disobeys will be executed." AZ's voice was flat and absolute, his bloodshot eyes moving over the room without seeing any of it. He did not hear the trembling in his subordinates' voices. He did not hear the distant sounds of the city outside.
The whole world had narrowed to a single withered shape on a table, and a single sentence that had burned itself into the deepest part of him.
Bring her back.
The price didn't matter. History's judgment didn't matter. Whatever punishment heaven or earth saw fit to deliver, that didn't matter either.
If bringing Floette back meant exhausting every resource Kalos had left, meant bearing eternal condemnation, meant stepping off an edge from which there was no return, he would step.
"Wait a little longer," he whispered to the still figure on the table, his voice barely carrying in the dark. "Very soon. We'll be together again very soon."
Three days passed quickly.
During that time, Galar scouts probed the area around Laverre City twice, and both times, catching sight of Dragonite circling the perimeter from a distance, turned and withdrew without engaging. The patrols alone had been enough.
Inside the city, Laurent had driven recovery with focused, tireless efficiency. Debris cleared. Walls patched and reinforced. A reserve force assembled from soldiers and able-bodied civilians, drilling in rotation from dawn to dusk. Laverre City was not whole, it would take far longer than three days to be whole, but it was standing.
Lucien knew it wasn't enough, in the wider sense. But it was what could be done here.
"Lord Lucien." Laurent and his men gathered at the gate as word spread of his departure. The city lord's expression carried more feeling than words seemed adequate for. "Thank you. For everything."
Lucien gave a small nod. He didn't say much. He mounted Dragonite, turned toward the interior of Kalos, and they rose.
The wind was constant at this altitude, pressing cold against his face. Below, the landscape moved past in long green stretches, forests, hillsides, the thin lines of roads. Lucien sat upright on Dragonite's back, eyes forward.
The royal capital, Lumiose City, was already visible on the horizon. But as they drew closer, something changed in the air. It wasn't gunpowder smoke or the aftermath of battle. It was something else, a quality of wrongness, a sensation of something being taken that wasn't meant to be taken.
Then he saw it.
In the forests and meadows and open fields surrounding the capital, Kalos soldiers moved in teams through every patch of green. Ropes, nets, specially reinforced cages.
They swept through the undergrowth in groups, flushing and chasing and cornering with the systematic indifference of men following orders they had stopped thinking about.
A Fletchling burst upward in a panic of wings, caught immediately in a thrown net, dragged down. A Bunnelby bolted for its burrow and was speared out of the entrance, hauled into an iron cage. Even Bidoof, the most docile creatures in any forest, were being seized and shoved into dark transport carts without ceremony.
The cries carried upward, helpless sounds of animals that didn't understand what was happening to them.
Lucien went still on Dragonite's back.
"Stop."
Dragonite understood. It dropped its altitude and opened its throat, a thunderous roar that rolled across the forest and fields like a physical force, stirring a shockwave of compressed air in every direction. Every soldier in view froze. Tools dropped. Legs buckled. Heads snapped upward to find a colossal Dragonite descending from above, its cold dragon eyes moving across them with an oppressive, crushing weight.
The Dragon-type's Intimidate radiated outward and the entire area went silent.
Lucien landed cleanly and faced the nearest officer.
"What is this?"
The officer's voice was shaky but defiant by instinct. "Who are...we act under His Majesty's direct orders. These magical beasts are being collected for the Royal City. Anyone who interferes..."
"For the Royal City." Lucien's gaze moved to the transport carts. Through the bars, eyes looked back at him, small and wide and frightened. He understood immediately.
The Ultimate Weapon needed Pokémon life energy. AZ had ordered the sweep. These animals were going to be fed into the machine.
"To power the King's device. That's what they're for."
The officer's remaining composure cracked. "My lord, we don't know the details. We only know that anyone who refuses the order is killed. We had no choice."
Around him, the other soldiers had stopped pretending. Some stared at the ground. Some were shaking. None of them looked like men who wanted to be here.
Lucien looked at them for a moment. Then he reached for the Poké Ball at his side.
"Release all of them."
"My lord, this is a royal command, we cannot..."
The Poké Ball opened.
The cold arrived before Kyurem was fully visible, a wave of it, instant and absolute, moisture in the air crystallizing into fine ice particles that drifted downward in silence.
Then Kyurem itself emerged: vast, glacial blue, its blade-like wings spreading wide, its ancient eyes moving across every soldier present with the unhurried calm of something that had existed long before any of them and would exist long after.
The ground whitened beneath it. Frost spread outward from its feet in a slow, silent ring.
"ROAARRR—!"
The sound was not loud in the way thunder is loud. It was deep, and it moved through the chest rather than the ears, and every person who felt it understood instinctively that there was nothing in this forest that could answer it.
The officer's legs folded. He hit the ground and didn't try to get up.
The other soldiers were already moving, not fleeing, but scrambling for the cages, hands working frantically at the locks, prying iron bars open with whatever they had available. Cages swung wide one after another.
Fletchling. Bunnelby. Bidoof. A Skiddo. A Gogoat foal. Each one paused for a fraction of a second at the open door, some glancing back at Lucien and Kyurem with wide, uncertain eyes, and then ran. Into the undergrowth, into the treeline, gone.
In moments, the carts were empty.
Lucien recalled Kyurem and turned his gaze toward the capital.
He didn't look back at the soldiers.
In a patch of undergrowth nearby, a small green Zygarde cell watched in silence as the last Pokémon disappeared into the forest.
And far away, in two very different places, two ancient beings raised their heads at the same moment.
In the depths of a forest where the light fell green and deep through centuries-old branches, a creature like a great stag lifted its head from still water. Eight branching antlers, dark green shading to black, caught the filtered light. Its eyes, ancient and alert, fixed on a direction.
In a barren valley where nothing grew and the air itself seemed reluctant to move, a massive bird-shaped Pokémon with deep crimson wings stirred from stillness, its head turning toward the same point on the horizon.
Xerneas. Yveltal.
Both of them left their places and began to move.