The Dream Was Good

Chapter Forty-Five

The Dream Was Good

Gray woke to pain.

Not the familiar punishment of too little sleep, too much coffee, or sixteen straight hours spent staring at badly calibrated instruments. This was something brighter and more intimate, a white-hot pressure buried behind both eyes and driven backward through his skull until it seemed to meet the place where the back of his head had struck stone. His first breath came as a wet gasp. The second brought nausea hard enough that he rolled instinctively onto one side and remained there with his forehead against cold rock, waiting for his stomach to decide whether it intended to become another problem.

For several seconds he did not know where he was.

That frightened him more than the pain.

He expected a kitchen.

The expectation arrived before memory did. Fried rice, rain against glass, his father complaining about Bastiodon saliva while his mother carried a duffel bag she had no reason to carry. Gray could still feel the texture of his father’s shirt beneath his fingers. He could remember the exact warmth of his mother’s hand against his cheek, and for one confused moment the absence of both sensations felt like waking somewhere unfamiliar after falling asleep at home.

Then the chanting reached him.

Thousands of overlapping voices rolled through the stone.

Gray opened his eyes.

White-violet light blurred across his vision. Black shapes turned slowly through it, too many to focus on while his eyes fought to agree with one another. His helmet visor was cracked from the upper left edge almost to the center, and half of the display projected meaningless fragments over reality. One neurological warning blinked repeatedly in the corner before smearing into three identical copies whenever he tried to focus on it.

The cavern returned in pieces.

Unown.

Circles.

Psychic pressure.

Darkrai.

Cresselia.

The scream.

Gray inhaled sharply and regretted it immediately.

His head pounded hard enough that his sight narrowed.

“Fuck.”

The helmet rendered the word strangely. His own voice reached him both through bone and through one surviving internal speaker, the latter distorted into a crackling imitation that arrived half a second late.

Gray lifted one hand toward the side of the helmet and found a dent near the rear casing. The impact protection had taken some of the collision, but not enough to make him enthusiastic about moving. He thumbed the external comm control.

Nothing.

Again.

No response.

The radio indicator remained black.

He switched channels manually.

Still nothing.

“Marcus?”

Static hissed once and vanished.

“Roark? Rhea?”

No carrier tone.

No relay acknowledgment.

No Sandgem.

Gray stared at the dead communication icon until the obvious answer finally pushed through the headache.

The helmet was fucked.

Probably not only the helmet.

The psychic burst that had thrown him across the cavern had also overwhelmed every electronic system sensitive enough to care. Gray could still feel the charge in the air, a pressure that made the fillings in his teeth seem vaguely aware of themselves.

He reached for the emergency hardline diagnostic clipped to his harness.

The indicator was dead too.

“No.”

He tried it twice.

Then a third time because optimism occasionally disguised itself as stupidity.

Nothing.

They were more than three hundred meters below the lower cavern, beyond reliable teleportation range, inside an unknown psychic field, with no communication to anyone above.

Gray closed his eyes.

His father was waiting behind them.

Not actually.

The image came anyway.

Gray opened his eyes immediately.

“Thirty-two.”

The words sounded ridiculous in the cavern.

He said them again.

“Thirty-two. Gray Linden. Professor. Oreburgh underground system. Cynthia came down with me. Darkrai came with us. Heatran stayed with the sleepers.”

His father did not appear.

Good.

Gray swallowed against the nausea and pushed himself onto one elbow.

The cavern spun.

He stopped moving.

There were better times to test whether he had a concussion.

Unfortunately, there were few worse places to possess one.

His eyes finally aligned enough to search the ground around him.

Cynthia was not beside him.

Panic cut through the headache.

Gray pushed himself upright too quickly, nearly vomited inside the helmet, and grabbed the wall until the worst of the vertigo passed. His tether still connected him to the descent line, though several meters had paid out during the blast. His equipment belt remained attached. Two Poké Balls still sat secured in the reinforced clips he had selected for the descent. Their indicator lights remained normal.

He did not release either.

Not yet.

“Cynthia?”

The cavern swallowed his voice.

The chanting did not pause.

Gray turned carefully.

She lay perhaps eight meters away.

Motionless.

Her body had come down near a low crystal formation, one leg bent awkwardly beneath the other and one arm stretched across the stone. The front of her helmet faced away from him.

Gray moved.

The first step almost folded his knees.

He caught himself against the wall and continued anyway, using the tether as much for balance as safety. His head throbbed with each footfall, and white sparks crawled through the edges of his vision whenever the chanting swelled.

Then something black crossed the cavern ahead.

Darkrai.

Gray stopped.

The Legendary was awake.

And hurt.

Darkrai struck the inner formation of Unown with Dark Pulse.

The attack spread outward in a broad black-violet wave, tearing a temporary gap through one of the concentric rings surrounding the center of the chamber. Unown scattered under the force, dozens thrown sideways without any obvious collision between bodies, their collective chant breaking across that section for less than a second.

Darkrai surged toward the opening.

The ring closed.

Not physically at first.

Psychic force hit Darkrai from several directions simultaneously. Gray did not see the attack so much as the result. Darkrai’s body jerked sideways in midair and slammed into a crystal outcrop. White-violet energy crawled over its black form. The Legendary flickered along its edges, the ragged lower half momentarily losing coherence.

Gray stared.

Darkrai recovered.

Immediately.

It drove itself off the crystal and split into six identical shapes with Double Team. The copies scattered in different directions toward the inner rings. Hundreds of Unown rotated.

The chanting changed.

A higher band entered.

Three Darkrai vanished at once.

Another distorted and disappeared.

The real one slipped between two formations, reached perhaps twenty meters closer to the center, and was hit again.

Harder.

Darkrai flew backward.

It managed to stop itself before reaching the outer wall this time, but one arm remained held close to its body afterward. Bright psychic damage marked one side of its torso where the black form seemed almost translucent.

It tried again.

Gray understood two things simultaneously.

Darkrai was losing.

And it had apparently been doing this for some time.

Fresh damage crossed injuries from the previous battle with Heatran. Its movements were no longer impossibly smooth. Every acceleration carried a brief hitch before the next correction. The edges of its body flickered continuously now, and when it gathered another Dark Pulse, the attack took visibly longer to form.

Yet every time the Unown pushed it away, Darkrai went back toward the center.

Toward Cresselia.

Gray felt a cold certainty settle beneath the headache.

Darkrai knew exactly who was there.

No more candidate list.

No more pale crescent-shaped body fragments.

No more cautiously ranked possibilities.

He had seen her.

Cresselia.

And Darkrai was trying to reach her.

A small movement near Gray’s feet pulled his attention back to Cynthia.

He swore and staggered toward her.

The dream had confused him enough that he had spent precious seconds watching Darkrai instead of checking whether she was alive.

He reached her and dropped to one knee.

Her helmet was worse than his.

A broad crack crossed the visor, though the inner transparent layer remained intact. One side of the communications housing had been crushed against the stone, and a faint scorch pattern radiated from the sensor assembly where the psychic surge had apparently overloaded it.

Gray put two fingers against the emergency pulse point built into the collar seal.

There.

Fast.

Steady enough.

He released a breath he had not realized he was holding.

“Cynthia.”

No response.

He shook her shoulder.

Nothing.

“Cynthia.”

Harder.

Her head moved slightly inside the helmet.

No waking response.

Gray’s stomach tightened.

He checked the exterior neurological status display.

The screen flickered between corrupted symbols before settling on a partial reading.

Brain activity high.

Too high for unconsciousness.

Gray stared.

Dreaming.

Of course.

“Cynthia.”

He shook her again.

Nothing.

The psychic pressure rolled through the chamber.

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Gray saw home.

Only for a fraction of a second.

His mother stood where one of the crystal pillars should have been.

Gray dug his thumbnail hard into the palm of his glove until pain replaced the image.

“Thirty-two. Cavern. Cynthia. Darkrai. Cresselia.”

He looked down at Cynthia.

“Wake up.”

No response.

Gray grabbed the emergency access tab on her suit and found the stimulant control. It was intended for field collapse, not psychic dream entrapment, and administering anything after a head impact was not something he particularly wanted to do without proper monitoring.

He tried physical methods first.

Shoulder shake.

No response.

Pressure against the upper arm.

Nothing.

He tapped the side of her helmet.

Then harder.

“Cynthia, if you make me explain to the League that their Champion slept through the discovery of Cresselia, I am going to be extremely annoying about it.”

Nothing.

Gray leaned closer.

“Garchomp will judge you.”

A twitch.

Gray froze.

“Cynthia?”

Her fingers moved.

Gray grabbed her shoulder again.

“Come on. Wake up.”

Her breathing changed.

A sharper inhale.

Then another.

Her head shifted.

Gray shook once more.

“Cynthia.”

She woke violently.

Her entire body jerked. One hand came up between them before she seemed to know what she was doing, catching Gray’s chest hard enough to shove him backward onto one hand. She inhaled with the desperate force of someone surfacing from deep water.

“No—”

The word broke.

Gray stayed where he was.

“Cynthia. It’s Gray.”

Her eyes were open behind the cracked visor but unfocused.

She looked past him.

Not at the cavern.

At something that was not there.

Gray recognized that expression because he suspected his had looked the same only minutes earlier.

“Cynthia.”

Her gaze finally found him.

For several seconds she stared without speaking.

Then awareness returned.

Not gently.

Her expression tightened.

She looked around.

The Unown.

The rings.

Darkrai striking the inner field again.

White-violet light.

Cresselia hidden behind thousands of moving bodies.

Cynthia shut her eyes.

When she opened them again, she looked older than she had before the descent.

Gray understood.

He helped her sit up against the wall.

“Helmet comms are dead. Mine too. Hardline isn’t responding.”

Cynthia lifted one hand to the broken side of her helmet and tested the controls herself. The effort appeared to make her headache worse; she stopped after two attempts and rested the back of her helmet carefully against the stone.

“How long?”

“No idea. I woke maybe three minutes ago.”

She looked toward Darkrai.

Its Dark Pulse broke another gap.

The Unown closed it.

Cynthia watched Darkrai get thrown backward and winced.

“It’s trying to reach her.”

“Yes.”

The pronoun came naturally.

Neither needed to discuss identification.

Cresselia was no longer a theory.

Cynthia looked toward Gray again, and something in her expression made him realize she was still not fully present.

“You dreamed.”

It was not a question.

Gray nodded.

“My parents.”

Cynthia’s eyes closed for half a second.

He continued because talking kept the images from returning.

“I was twenty-four. Home for the weekend from university. Bastiodon licked my father. We ate dinner. They asked about school. It was…” Gray swallowed. His head hurt more when he tried to hold the memory and reality simultaneously. “It was good.”

Cynthia watched him.

Gray looked down at his gloves.

“That’s the problem.”

Her expression changed.

He continued slowly, trying to put structure around something that had not possessed any while he was inside it.

“It wasn’t a nightmare. Not until I understood. It kept giving me good things. My parents alive. Pokémon I lost. Future memories where they were still there. Every time something changed, I lost the previous version and got another one. I knew enough to notice eventually, but not enough to get out. The more confused I got, the harder it tried to give me something else I wanted.”

Cynthia looked away.

Gray waited.

The chanting rolled through them.

Eventually she said, “Mine was similar.”

He did not ask what she saw.

That mattered.

Cynthia took several slow breaths before continuing. “Different details. Same structure. Every time I began questioning something, the dream changed into another answer I would have preferred. People were there who should not have been. Things that never happened had memories attached to them.” She pressed two fingers against the side of her helmet as though she could somehow reach the headache beneath it. “I knew something was wrong near the end. Knowing did not make leaving easier.”

“No.”

“For a moment I did not want to.”

Gray looked at her.

“Yeah.”

That admission settled between them more heavily than either dream description.

Good dreams were not harmless if waking meant losing them.

Gray looked toward Cresselia.

The innermost Unown rings hid most of her body, but pale portions became visible whenever their formations shifted. He could see the arc of a crescent wing. Pink. Yellow. The pale blue of her lower body.

She was real.

Her power filled the cavern.

And Gray understood the sleepers differently now.

He had endured minutes.

Maybe less.

He had emerged furious, confused, grieving, and briefly uncertain which version of his own life was real.

The Fire-types above had endured centuries.

Perhaps roughly a thousand years.

Gray felt sick.

“They’re not having nightmares.”

Cynthia looked toward him.

“Not exactly.”

Gray pulled one knee up, using the position to steady himself against another wave of dizziness.

“At least not the way we thought. Maybe some become nightmares eventually, but the mechanism…” He looked toward the rings. “Good dreams. One after another. Maybe constantly. You get something you want, then the dream changes and you lose it. Maybe you wake inside the next dream thinking the previous one happened. Then that ends too.”

Cynthia’s face tightened.

“And if enough memory carries across…”

“You know you keep losing things.”

Gray thought of the photographs in the hallway.

His parents aging through lives they never had.

Butterfree alive again.

Scizor.

Dustox.

Every impossible gift becoming another loss.

“The Quilava wakes terrified because actual waking is the only escape.”

Cynthia stared at the sleeping-population data displayed uselessly on her damaged wrist unit as though it might somehow still tell her something.

“And Darkrai suppresses it.”

Gray looked toward the Legendary.

“Yes.”

Darkrai attacked again.

This time it used Double Team first. Copies spread through the outer formation while the real Darkrai dropped low, nearly touching the cavern floor. It crossed beneath one ring and rose between two others.

The Unown chant shifted.

Darkrai’s body stopped in midair.

Not slowed.

Stopped.

Hundreds of Unown rotated toward it.

Darkrai shook violently under pressure Gray could feel from where he sat.

Then Dark Pulse detonated outward.

The nearest ring broke.

Several dozen Unown scattered.

The central psychic pressure changed.

Gray felt it immediately.

The headache eased.

Not much.

Enough.

He looked at Cynthia.

She had noticed too.

Darkrai advanced.

The Unown reorganized.

The pressure returned.

Gray stared.

“Again.”

Cynthia understood.

They watched.

Darkrai struck another section.

The ring distorted.

For approximately two seconds, the chant in that region lost synchronization.

Gray’s headache dropped from unbearable to merely vicious.

Then the Unown re-formed.

The pressure climbed.

Cynthia shifted forward despite her obvious pain.

“When Darkrai disrupts the formation…”

“The field weakens.”

“Temporarily.”

Gray nodded.

That was evidence.

Not interpretation.

Not mythology.

A direct human response to measurable disruption.

The Unown formation deepened Cresselia’s field.

They still did not know why.

They did not know whether the Unown intended harm.

They did not know whether breaking the network completely would free Cresselia, kill her, destabilize the cavern, awaken hundreds of sleepers catastrophically, or release a thousand years of accumulated psychic energy into half of Sinnoh.

But the relationship was no longer abstract.

Darkrai broke a ring.

Pressure fell.

The ring re-formed.

Pressure returned.

Cynthia looked toward the center.

“Cresselia.”

Gray nodded.

“Has to be.”

“Darkrai knows her.”

“Yes.”

“And has probably known she was here the entire time.”

Gray looked at Darkrai differently.

The awkward pointing.

The frustration with Heatran.

The repeated attempts to reach the fracture.

The way Darkrai had stabilized sleepers.

The ancient fight.

The supposed nightmare Pokémon had spent perhaps a millennium associated with a disaster it had tried to stop.

And now, after finally reaching the chamber, it was throwing itself repeatedly against thousands of Unown to reach its counterpart.

Gray felt something dangerously close to anger on Darkrai’s behalf.

He did not trust the emotion enough to make decisions from it.

“Stay awake,” Cynthia said.

Gray blinked.

His eyes had closed.

Only for a second.

That was enough to frighten him.

“Right.”

He pushed himself to his feet.

The cavern tilted.

Cynthia stood more slowly beside him.

Gray spoke aloud immediately.

“Gray Linden. Thirty-two. Regional Professor. Parents dead for three years. Bastiodon is upstairs at the staging point. Heatran stayed with the sleepers. Darkrai came with us. You’re Cynthia.”

She gave him a tired look. “Thank you.”

“Grounding.”

“I know. Your final fact was unnecessary.”

“It was important.”

Cynthia steadied herself against the wall and answered in the same spirit, her voice measured despite the strain. “Cynthia. Sinnoh Champion. We are more than three hundred meters beneath Heatran’s lower cavern. Our communications are dead, our helmets are damaged, and Gray is currently using annoyance as a medical intervention.”

“Effective.”

“Unfortunately.”

Gray felt the edge of a smile.

Good.

Humor anchored too.

The pressure shifted.

Gray saw his mother near the chamber entrance.

He looked directly at Cynthia instead.

“Your turn.”

She understood.

“Cresselia is in the center. Darkrai is awake and injured. Thousands of Unown are maintaining some form of coordinated psychic network around her. We do not know their motive.”

Gray nodded.

His mother vanished.

“Good.”

Cynthia looked toward the inner rings. “And we need to decide whether helping Darkrai is more dangerous than doing nothing.”

There it was.

The actual problem.

They had no contact with Rhea.

No Moriyama.

No Roark.

No League.

No external review.

Whatever decision they made would be theirs.

Gray hated that.

He had spent years imagining field autonomy as freedom.

In practice it often meant nobody wiser was close enough to stop you.

Darkrai struck the Unown again.

A gap opened.

Cresselia became visible through it.

Only part of her.

Her body hung at the center of the formations, suspended above a broad crystal platform. She did not appear bound by rope, stone, or anything physical Gray recognized. The restraint was psychic. Unown occupied concentric rings around every axis, their formations passing above, below, and beside her.

Cresselia’s head jerked.

Her eyes opened.

Darkrai saw.

Everything about it changed.

The Legendary stopped attacking blindly.

It surged directly toward the opening.

The ring closed before it reached her.

Psychic force hit Darkrai hard enough to drive it to the floor.

Gray took one involuntary step forward.

Darkrai rose again.

One arm shook.

Still it turned toward Cresselia.

Cynthia spoke quietly. “It will keep doing this until it can’t.”

“Yes.”

Darkrai was already injured badly enough that Gray doubted it could sustain many more direct hits.

The Unown did not seem exhausted at all.

Thousands shared the load.

One Legendary did not.

Gray looked down at his belt.

Two Poké Balls.

He had not brought his full team.

Neither had Cynthia.

That had been deliberate.

A vertical descent through unstable terrain did not reward carrying every partner simply because emotional attachment made the idea comforting.

Gray touched the first ball.

Blissey.

Medical support.

Durability.

The second held Absol, chosen specifically because the entire expedition involved an ancient disaster with psychic anomalies and Gray trusted Absol’s instincts more than most instruments when something felt wrong.

Cynthia carried only two as well.

Lucario.

Spiritomb.

Garchomp remained above because the route had not safely accommodated her all the way down, and Gray’s Bastiodon waited with the staging team.

They had options.

None were designed for fighting thousands of Unown inside Cresselia’s psychic field.

Gray looked toward Cynthia’s belt.

She followed his gaze.

“Lucario.”

“For defense?”

“Mostly.”

“Spiritomb?”

Cynthia hesitated. “Psychically resilient. But introducing a Ghost-type into an unknown collective field around Cresselia could complicate things.”

Gray nodded.

“Blissey could keep us upright.”

“She could also fall into the dream field.”

“Yes.”

“Absol?”

Gray looked toward Darkrai.

“Maybe warning and mobility. But this is beyond anything she’s ever dealt with.”

Cynthia nodded.

Neither reached for a ball yet.

That restraint mattered.

Pokémon were not tools to throw at uncertainty until something worked.

Darkrai attacked again.

The ring broke.

Gray’s headache dropped.

Cresselia’s central signal—visible only through the corrupted remnants of his wrist monitor—fell with it.

He froze.

“Look.”

Cynthia came closer.

The display was damaged, but one local sensor still functioned.

When Darkrai disrupted the Unown formation, the psychic intensity around Cresselia decreased.

Not only around the humans.

At the source.

The formation re-formed.

The signal climbed.

Cynthia stared.

“That is enough for me.”

Gray nodded slowly.

Not enough to justify destroying the entire structure.

Enough to justify disrupting it carefully.

“We make a corridor.”

“Not a general attack.”

“No.”

“Darkrai leads.”

“Yes.”

“We keep the Unown off it long enough to see what happens when Darkrai reaches Cresselia.”

Gray looked toward the central rings.

“If Cresselia’s condition worsens, we stop.”

Cynthia’s expression hardened. “And if the field destabilizes?”

“We retreat.”

“With no communication.”

“We still have the route.”

“And if we get knocked unconscious again?”

Gray smiled without humor.

“Then we get another nice weekend.”

Cynthia stared at him for half a second.

“That was awful.”

“I know.”

“Your parents?”

“Yeah.”

She looked toward Cresselia.

Gray could see the question she chose not to ask.

He appreciated that.

Another scream began.

They both turned.

Cresselia’s body arched.

The sound struck Gray with even more force now that he could see its source. Her head pulled backward as the innermost Unown rings tightened, the chant rising around her until the individual calls merged into a single layered psychic resonance.

Cresselia screamed through it.

Darkrai froze.

Then attacked with a violence Gray had not yet seen from it in the chamber.

Dark Pulse erupted outward, wider and darker than the previous attempts. The outer ring shattered across nearly a quarter of its circumference. Unown spun away through the air. Darkrai used Quick Attack immediately afterward, crossing the open space before the formation could close.

A second ring waited.

Darkrai hit it.

The psychic field threw it backward again.

This time Darkrai did not catch itself.

It struck the ground and rolled.

Gray swore.

Darkrai remained down for several seconds.

Cresselia’s scream weakened.

The Unown chant continued.

Darkrai moved.

Slowly.

It pushed itself upward.

One arm did not respond correctly.

Still it faced Cresselia.

Gray had seen enough.

“Blissey.”

He released her.

White light filled the space beside him.

Blissey emerged and immediately reacted to the psychic pressure. Her body stiffened, eyes widening as the field struck her awareness. Gray put both hands against her sides before she could move farther into the chamber.

“Stay with me.”

Blissey looked at him.

Then Cynthia.

Then Darkrai.

Then the center.

Her expression changed.

Gray had seen Blissey become upset over injured Pokémon before.

This was different.

The cavern contained suffering on a scale she could not possibly understand from one glance, yet her instincts needed no explanation.

She moved toward Darkrai.

Gray caught her.

“Not yet.”

Blissey made an angry sound.

“I know.”

Cynthia released Lucario.

The Steel/Fighting-type appeared beside her in a flash and nearly dropped to one knee.

Aura sensitivity had been either a brilliant or terrible reason to bring him.

Possibly both.

Lucario caught himself against the stone.

His eyes went wide.

Then narrowed.

He looked toward the center.

Cynthia put one hand on his shoulder and spoke close enough that he could hear despite the chanting. “We are not attacking the Pokémon in the center. We are not trying to defeat the Unown. We need an opening for Darkrai, and we stop if this becomes too much.”

Lucario looked toward Darkrai.

The Legendary had risen again.

Barely.

Darkrai noticed the two newly released Pokémon.

Its eye moved toward Gray.

Gray pointed toward Cresselia.

Then toward Darkrai.

Then traced a narrow line between them.

Darkrai stared.

Gray repeated it.

“Narrow opening. Not all of them.”

Darkrai looked toward the rings.

Then back at Gray.

For once, Gray wished desperately for the sort of magical telepathy bad research accounts loved inventing.

Darkrai moved.

Not toward Cresselia.

Toward the humans.

Gray tensed.

It stopped several meters away.

Darkrai looked at Blissey.

Blissey looked back.

No one moved.

Then Darkrai pointed toward one portion of the outer ring.

Gray felt absurd relief.

“Good. Great. We’ve invented tactical briefing.”

Cynthia almost laughed despite everything.

Lucario watched the indicated section.

Several dozen Unown rotated slowly through it.

Cynthia crouched beside her partner and spoke in a continuous low voice, giving him the shape of what they intended rather than barking individual battle commands. “You’re protecting us first. If their psychic force turns toward Gray or me, interrupt it. Do not chase anything out of formation. We want that section open, nothing more.”

Lucario nodded.

Gray turned toward Blissey. “Same idea. We stay awake, we stay standing, and we keep Darkrai from getting thrown into another wall if you can help it. You are not going into the center.”

Blissey looked deeply dissatisfied with the final sentence.

Gray knew the expression.

“No.”

She made a sound.

“No.”

Another.

“You are not negotiating.”

Blissey stared toward Cresselia.

Gray softened.

“I know you want to help her. So do I. We don’t know enough yet.”

Blissey finally looked back at him.

Accepted.

Barely.

Darkrai began moving.

Lucario went with it.

The Unown noticed immediately.

The chanting changed.

Gray’s headache surged.

Blissey grabbed his arm before his knees could fold.

“Thanks.”

Cynthia braced against Lucario’s shoulder.

Darkrai gathered Dark Pulse.

This time Lucario struck first.

Not the Unown themselves.

The psychic force forming between them.

Aura flared around his paws and drove into the space where the collective pressure had begun to gather. The collision produced no conventional explosion. Instead the air distorted violently, the Unown formation wobbling as dozens of individuals lost alignment.

Darkrai fired.

Dark Pulse tore through the weakened section.

The ring opened.

Gray felt the psychic pressure collapse across that arc.

“Now!”

Darkrai surged forward.

The second ring rotated.

Unown closed toward the gap.

Lucario moved with them, not attacking bodies so much as striking the psychic structure whenever it condensed strongly enough for his aura senses to find it.

Blissey followed at Gray’s pace, one arm around him whenever the cavern tilted.

The headache became enormous.

Cynthia stayed beside them, Lucario several meters ahead.

Darkrai reached the second ring.

Double Team.

Five Darkrai split apart.

The Unown hesitated.

Only for a fraction of a second.

Enough.

The real Darkrai passed through.

Gray saw Cresselia.

Fully.

No probe camera.

No partial crescent through glare.

Cresselia hung suspended at the center of the chamber, surrounded by concentric Unown formations so dense that their black bodies resembled moving script around her. Her pale blue body looked terribly thin beneath the pink crescent structures sweeping from her sides. Yellow ornamentation caught the crystal light. Her eyes were half-open but unfocused.

She looked ancient.

Not physically old in any simple sense.

Worn.

Gray had no better word.

Darkrai stopped.

Everything stopped with it.

For the first time since Gray woke, Darkrai did not attack.

It simply hovered beyond the broken second ring and looked at Cresselia.

Cresselia’s head moved.

Slowly.

Her eyes found Darkrai.

The chanting continued.

But Cresselia stopped screaming.

Gray felt the change before he understood it.

The central psychic field dropped.

Not vanished.

Dropped.

Cresselia stared at Darkrai.

Darkrai stared back.

Counterparts.

The word came to Gray from old mythology, stripped now of every simplistic story people had attached to it.

Not good and evil.

Not pleasant dreams and nightmares.

Two ancient Pokémon whose powers touched the same part of existence from different directions.

Darkrai moved closer.

Cresselia tried to move toward it.

The Unown reacted.

Every innermost ring contracted.

Thousands of voices struck the same note.

The psychic pressure exploded.

Darkrai vanished behind white-violet light.

Lucario was thrown sideways.

Blissey caught Gray before he left the ground, but the impact still tore both of them backward several meters. Cynthia hit the stone on one knee and grabbed Lucario’s arm before he slid farther.

Cresselia screamed again.

The sound was worse from this close.

Gray heard no mystery in it.

No myth.

No Legendary grandeur.

Only pain.

And through the blinding psychic pressure, Darkrai forced itself forward anyway.