FLOOD [Pokémon]

Chapter 28

LIOR

The days after they put Father in the ground were...hard.

Lior knew Tirza Mari. He knew the Commander, sort of. The rest were strangers, and there were many of them. He remembered the Commander taking him to see them, and being struck by their sheer numbers. Dozens...maybe tens of dozens, too many to count. They covered the plain that they camped on, them and their cloth dwellings, their companion Pokémon, their equipment, their daggers and their spears and their hard shirts and their strange tail coverings. Even more incredible: the Commander called them an army. An army. Just like from one of Father's stories of Sea Knights and the old kingdoms. Lior had never imagined that such a thing was possible now. Father had always told him that the merfolk didn't like to gather in groups.

The Commander oversaw the army. He told Lior that his name was Titus. "But you must refer to me as Commander," he told Lior. "It confers respect. That is the way things are done here."

He asked Lior to join them, and in that moment, the emptiness subsided and a traitorous flash of excitement struck through him. He almost likened it to being asked to join the Sea Knights, to become a member of the Man-of-War's legendary ranks.

But the exhilaration was quick to fade. He realized why later, after he'd accepted and Commander Titus assigned Lady Tirza as his caretaker: choice, of which he had none. This wasn't a tale of whimsy, where the young merboy joined the army in pursuit of glory and gold. Here, now, with his parents gone and his home and way of life destroyed, this was quite literally life or death: death on an empty, barren plain in the middle of nowhere if he refused, and a strange kind of life, amongst strangers and strange customs, if he accepted.

Time passed, he didn't know how much. For the longest, he felt like...well, like he was underwater, but in a different way, almost like he was human. Drifting in a liquid fog, he came into focus only every now and then when he surfaced. He remembered getting his broken arm bandaged, tightly bound into a stiff sling that made it ache, but not too badly.

He remembered being made to change into different clothes: a rough tunic with a longer skirt, a strange leather harness, a tighter tail sheath with an assortment of pockets.

He remembered Tirza Mari sleeping with him in his tent, braiding his hair into a long white snake in the morning and then prying it loose with gentle fingers at night. He remembered moving, constantly moving, helping Lady Tirza put up the tent at night, tearing it down in the morning, and moving dozens and dozens and dozens of miles in the time in between, the whole army, in one long, undulating column. Where they were going, he didn't know — he couldn't focus enough to care.

Every now and then, he saw Commander Titus — some days it was in the morning as the army took down their tents. Sometimes it was at night, as Lady Tirza was combing out his hair. He would ask how Lior was feeling, and Lior would say fine, even though he didn't feel fine, he felt like he was dead — or half-alive. And sometimes it felt like Commander Titus knew that, could see it in his face, but he never said anything, just gave a curt nod and left.

Often, he had nightmares: of Lael, of his parents, of that black hell where he drowned in oil... They shocked him awake in the middle of the night, leaving him too afraid to drift back off, even when Nightlight tunneled into his side or Lady Tirza awakened and sat beside him, singing a sweet lullaby to carry him off. His Pokémon's presence was good, and Lady Tirza's voice was kind, but... It wasn't right. It just wasn't right. He knew whose voice he needed. He knew whose strength he needed. But they were both dead, and the shadows under his eyes grew darker and darker with each passing day.

This, too, Commander Titus noticed — one evening, some long stretch of time later, he appeared in their tent again, and this time he stayed. Lior and Lady Tirza had been winding down for sleep — she'd done his hair, and now she was doing her own, releasing from her cowl a waterfall of white so long and lush that it moved like a living creature in the light current. Lior lay in the space where they slept, holding a dozing Nightlight against his chest and staring up blankly at the ceiling. He wouldn't have noticed Commander Titus if not for his bone-rattling voice: