"My lord, a massive creature is descending on the city!"
"Is it the enemy?!"
Throughout Lumiose City, soldiers and civilians alike looked up at the enormous figure dropping from the sky, their faces rigid with fear.
Lucien descended slowly into the city astride Kyurem. The reports Columbus had brought back had described Lumiose as a grand and prosperous capital — but what lay below him now bore little resemblance to that description.
The marks of the recent Galar assault were everywhere: scorched stone, desolate ruins in what had once been busy districts, dark stains on the cobblestones that hadn't yet been fully cleaned away.
As Kyurem settled to the ground, a knight order closed in around them almost immediately — armored soldiers, weapons raised, faces pale but holding their positions out of disciplined fear rather than confidence.
Lucien let his gaze move over them.
"I am Lucien, King of the Unova Kingdom, from the Unova Region to the east. I have not come with hostile intent. I am here to speak with your King on a matter of great importance."
A ripple moved through the assembled soldiers. Murmurs broke out.
"Unova Kingdom?"
"Wasn't that the fleet that arrived a few months ago!"
"From the Far East, they said..."
The leading knight stepped forward, spear still raised, his killing intent dialed back but not gone. "If you are indeed a guest of the Unova Kingdom, why have you brought a monster of this size into the city? Lumiose has only just survived an assault. The people are terrified. If you cause further panic, the consequences..."
"If I had come to attack," Lucien said quietly, "Kyurem's power would have leveled this city before anyone had time to react."
As if to punctuate the statement, a faint chill radiated from Kyurem's body. The ground around its feet whitened with a thin layer of frost. Every soldier in the square took half a step back without consciously deciding to.
"I am here to fight alongside Kalos against Galar," Lucien continued, his voice carrying the particular weight of someone who meant precisely what they said. "Every moment we delay, the war moves closer to these walls. Take me to your King. I have something important to tell him."
The knight commander's expression went through several changes in quick succession. Finally, slowly, he lowered his spear.
"Please wait here, my lord. I will inform His Majesty at once."
He turned and broke into a run toward the depths of the palace, pushing past guards who tried to stop him without breaking stride.
Lumiose City held its breath. The square went utterly silent, soldiers standing at attention, not one of them willing to make a sound, Kyurem's ice-blue form radiating cold stillness at the center of it all.
Before long, hurried footsteps returned from the direction of the palace.
"My lord, His Majesty will see you."
Lucien nodded and recalled Kyurem into its Poké Ball. The collective exhale from the surrounding soldiers was almost audible.
He followed the knight through the palace corridors, and there, at the far end of a vast and dimly lit hall, he saw him.
AZ.
The man was enormous, tall in a way that seemed to belong to a different scale than ordinary people. His royal robes were dusty and unkempt, his long hair falling loose over his shoulders. His eyes were red-rimmed, not from crying but from days without sleep, and the grief that surrounded him was not the soft kind. It was the hard, immovable kind, the kind that had already made its decisions and was simply waiting for the means to act on them.
His gaze fell on Lucien and stayed there.
"King of Unova." His voice was low and rough. "What brings you to Kalos?"
"I know a way to bring Floette back to life."
The words were simple and direct. Lucien had chosen them deliberately, there was no gentle approach to a man in AZ's condition, and he wasn't going to waste time finding one. He needed to give AZ another path before the one he was already walking reached its end.
He understood, with complete clarity, why AZ had made the choices he had. If their positions were reversed, if it were Dragonite, or Serperior, or Volcarona lying still on that table, Lucien knew with uncomfortable honesty that he would not be certain of making a different choice.
That was precisely why he couldn't simply try to stop AZ. He had to offer him something else.
AZ's eyes narrowed slowly. "How do you know about this?"
"That doesn't matter right now. What matters is that the path you're currently on will cost the lives of innocent beasts who have nothing to do with this war. I'm offering you a different way, one without that cost."
"What way?"
"There is a Magical Beast in the Kalos Region called Xerneas. The God of Life. It possesses the power to resurrect the dead, truly resurrect, with all memories and emotions intact. Find Xerneas, and Floette can come back to you whole."
Silence.
AZ stared at him from the throne. In those crimson eyes, something moved, despair, then a flare of something fragile and fierce, like a flame in a cracked lantern.
Then he laughed.
It was not a pleasant sound. It was the laughter of a man whose grief had curdled into something jagged, and it shook dust from the rafters.
"Xerneas." He slammed his hand down on the armrest. The impact rang through the hall. "You come here, to my city, and offer me a legend?" His voice cracked on the last word, rising into something raw. "Where was your God of Life when Galar's army marched through my streets? Where was he when my Floette..." He stopped. Forced himself to continue.
"If gods exist, tell me why they stood aside and watched."
He rose from the throne, his enormous frame unsteady, his robe slipping from one shoulder.
"You want me to wait for a god that has never once appeared when it was needed. And in the meantime, I should do nothing?"
Lucien waited until AZ had finished. Then he spoke, slowly and clearly, each word placed with care.
"Whether you believe it or not, Xerneas exists. And Xerneas alone can bring Floette back the way you actually want her back. Not as something salvaged from death. Truly alive, with everything she was before."
The hall went still.
AZ's body stilled with it. The wildness in his eyes receded, slowly, replaced by something far more complicated, fear and longing and the desperate, fragile shape of a man who wanted to believe something and was terrified of what it would mean if he did.
"Your Majesty AZ." Lucien's voice was quiet and final. "You have two paths before you. If you choose to sacrifice the lives of innocent Magical Beast to activate the Ultimate Weapon, I will stop you, I want you to understand that clearly. But if you choose to trust me and seek Xerneas, I will stand beside you every step of the way."
The silence that followed was long.
AZ sank back slowly. His eyes closed. When the tears came, he didn't try to stop them, they ran down the deep lines of his face and fell without sound onto the stone floor.
A long time passed.
Then he opened his eyes, and looked at Lucien with an expression that had moved past grief into something quieter and more exhausted.
"The last time your fleet came here, that captain, Columbus, told me a great deal about you." His voice was hoarse but steady. "That you earned the trust of a God Dragon. That you ended a war with your own hands and unified your region. That you built a nation where people and Magical Beast live as one."
He paused.
"You have Magical Beast companions of your own. If you were in my position, if they were the ones who had been taken from you, what would you do?"
Lucien was quiet for a moment.
"I wouldn't let that happen," he said.
AZ looked at him for a long time.
Then, slowly, something in his face settled.
"Good." His voice was rough and quiet and entirely certain. "I'll trust you. Once."
He straightened in the throne, and when he spoke again, his voice carried the weight of a king's word, however worn down by grief that king had become.
"Kalos will ally with the Unova Kingdom. Galar's ambitions, we will face them together. And Floette's resurrection, I will entrust that to you as well."
"We fight together."
AZ's eyes hardened suddenly, a cold and dangerous light entering them. "But understand this, if you deceive me, I will bring all of Kalos down around you and take you with it."
Lucien kept his expression steady.
At which point the Ultimate Weapon's blast would presumably reach the Unova Region as well.
"AZ, I, Lucien, swear it here." His voice carried through the dim and ancient hall, clear and unhurried. "I will return Floette to you. And I will stand with you to protect Kalos's peace."
Outside the tall windows, the darkness had deepened fully. The mist pressed against the glass.
A covenant that would change the fate of the Kalos Region had been made.
Late that night, Lucien rested in the chambers AZ's staff had prepared for him. His Pokémon settled around him quietly. He sat by the window, looking out at the fog-covered sky, and let out a slow, slightly rueful breath.
Should he have involved himself in the conflict between Kalos and Galar at all?
The answer, when he examined it honestly, was never really in doubt. He couldn't stand by and watch innocent Pokémon be consumed by the Ultimate Weapon, millions of living things sacrificed for the resurrection of one, however beloved. That kind of equation didn't balance, no matter how you tried to make it work.
And yet he understood AZ. That was the uncomfortable part.
Perhaps that was exactly why Floette, after being resurrected by the weapon in the original timeline, had chosen to leave. Not because AZ hadn't loved her, but because of what that love had cost everyone else.
He pushed the thought aside and focused on the immediate problem.
Xerneas. Where are you?
Zygarde would know. Zygarde was the ecological overseer of the Kalos Region, the silent warden that monitored every corner of this land, maintaining its balance. AZ's actions, if allowed to proceed, would tear that balance apart beyond recovery. Which meant Zygarde had every reason to cooperate.
"Kyurem," Lucien said quietly. "Can you locate that green Pokémon from earlier today?"
Kyurem's response came immediately, settling into his thoughts without words.
It's outside.
Lucien rose and followed Kyurem's awareness out through the corridors and into the castle grounds, where he found it quickly, a faintly luminous green cell nestled in an unremarkable flowerbed near the outer wall.
Small enough to overlook entirely. But Lucien knew what it was. Zygarde's cells were scattered throughout every corner of Kalos, each one a node in a vast sensory network, feeding everything it witnessed back to the whole.
He cupped the cell gently in both hands and carried it back to his room.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, the softly glowing cell resting in his open palm, and took a moment to simply look at it. Then he spoke.
"I know it's you, Zygarde."
His voice was quiet. The cell didn't move.
"The Kalos Region is facing a threat serious enough to destabilize the entire world's ecological order. The King of this nation has lost his most important companion, and in his grief, he intends to activate a weapon that would drain the life force from millions of Pokémon, sacrificing them to reverse death itself.
If that happens, this land will be hollowed out. The Pokémon living here may never recover." He paused. "I don't think that's an outcome you're willing to accept."
The cell flickered faintly.
Lucien continued.
"I have made a pact with AZ. No Ultimate Weapon. No innocent lives sacrificed. Instead, we find Xerneas, the God of Life, and use the pure power of life itself to bring Floette back. Properly. Completely." He let that sit for a moment.
"After Floette is restored and the invaders are driven out, I will work with AZ to build something new here, a Kalos where humans and Pokémon live together as they should. Where the land is protected, not consumed."
"But to do any of that, I need your help. Tell me where Xerneas is sleeping, and I give you my word, I will do everything in my power to preserve the ecological balance of this region. I will help you protect what this land is supposed to be."
The room went silent. Outside, the night breeze moved softly past the window. Moonlight broke through the cloud cover and fell across his palm, and the small cell resting within it.
Then it came, not in words. A vast, ancient, entirely impersonal consciousness flowing into his awareness like deep water finding its level.
Images.
A tree. Enormous, ancient, its canopy spreading over a sea of flowers that stretched in every direction, colors too vivid to be entirely real. The light there was different, softer, older. And within the blossoms, resting in the form of a great tree, perfectly still and perfectly at peace, Xerneas slept.
Lucien closed his eyes and held the image until he was certain he had everything he needed. When he opened them again, his expression was settled and resolved.
Zygarde had agreed.
"I understand." He extended his hand slightly, and the cell raised itself, a small, deliberate movement, unmistakably a gesture of acknowledgment. Then it dissolved into a faint thread of light that drifted out through the window and disappeared into the dark of the Kalos night.
Far away, deep within a cave system, Zygarde's primary form, vast and serpentine, opened its eyes in the dark.
Its gaze fixed on the distance, still and measuring.
The answer to the question of Xerneas's location was one Zygarde had chosen not to withhold, not because the creature from the distant region had asked for it, but because events had already been set in motion that made concealment pointless.
Kyurem's appearance over Kalos had sent a resonance through the region's entire ecological field, a power unlike anything native to this land, ancient and absolute.
That resonance had already reached Xerneas and Yveltal alike, stirring something in both of them that recognition alone couldn't fully explain.
They were already moving.
Not toward Lumiose City. Toward the source.
Zygarde watched through a hundred scattered cells as the two most fundamental forces in the Kalos Region converged on a single point, drawn there not by any summons, but by the simple fact of Kyurem's existence. A Dragon of that order, in their territory.
They were coming to see for themselves what had arrived on their land.