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Foregone Conclusion

Dragonfree

Just me
Forsira shivered and broke the gaze.
Something seems vaguely off about the way this is worded to me - broke the eye contact, maybe? Though that sounds clunky. :/

But there was no need to wonder – she’d always known the answer.
At least lovestruck Forsira is starting to realize how lovestruck she is.

Just how high is the canopy in this forest where they live? Because it always seems to take really, really long for them to clear the canopy. o_O Or is it just that Archopy aren't good enough fliers to be able to ascend otherwise than extremely slowly? Still, with the whole added power of lighting the wing leaves, I'd have expected it to be at least a bit faster than it is if they could take off at all before. (I suppose part of it might be the upwards slope thing, but I still have a hard time visualizing how long it always takes.)

“’Course They have. Told you I could lose Them.” He stopped beating his wings so fast to chuckle reflectively.
Because in Tefirenlogic, anything that is must have always been inevitably so.

...I am now trying to think of a way to model Tefirenlogic as modal logic. :D[/computer science student]

“Don’t stop flapping!” she said desperately.

The sound of his wing-beats had already sped up to even faster than before. “Who stops flapping?” Tefiren said quickly. “I haven’t stopped flapping. Have you stopped flapping, Sira?”
There are no words for how much I adore this.

Looking helplessly down at them, this time she noticed something else in their faces behind the determination. They were afraid of her and Tefiren.
The "of her and Tefiren" feels unnecessary here - my mind wants to just end that sentence at "They were afraid". Might just be me, though.

It's fun how he keeps going "Hey! This justifies your presence!" at everything. Very possibly a sign that he's starting to enjoy having her around.

*** at Tefiren avoiding eye contact when he realized he may just have been fatally poisoned. :3

Tefiren suddenly lifted his head to stare at her like she was mad. “You can’t,” he said as if it were obvious. “They might still be out there. You’d be going exactly where They wanted. That’s…”
Risking something for somebody else?! That's just ilTefirenlogical! >:/

She saw something that could have been surprise, or wonder, or even condescension in his eyes.
Surprise: "She doesn't want me to die?"
Wonder: "...she doesn't want me to die."
Condescension: "But that's ridiculous! She's making a choice that makes no sense because of something silly like caring! I would certainly never do that!"

...or something very like that.

She dropped the berry in front of him the moment she’d landed. Tefiren grabbed it instantly and took a huge bite, his body already beginning to relax.
Is that desperation to live I see? :eek:

“Thanks, Sira,” he said, chuckling. “You know, you really are going out of your way to prove you were right about me needing you.”
Because careful Tefirenlogical evaluation has revealed that really she just did that to prove a point, because unlike the caring thing, that makes sense!

He paused for a moment, giving her that strangely puzzled look of his, before shaking his head. “No, I guess it wasn’t,” he said.
Is he starting to get that she cares about him and what significance that has? :eek: ...Or maybe he's just realizing her mind works in mysterious ways and giving up trying to understand her.

So, about that poisoning detour feeling pointless, as I mentioned on MSN. I've written and rewritten the bit on this about a dozen times by now trying to pinpoint what the problem is, and ultimately I think it's that it feels like the overarching "question" in this scene is "Will Tefiren be healed?", and the answer to that question is a rather dull, simple "Yes." Or, in other words, it feels like this scene is about Forsira's quest to find a Pecha Berry to heal Tefiren, except she knows about a nearby Pecha tree from the beginning and finds it without problems, so we never properly feel any tension about it.

Now, what is really going on in this scene is character development: Tefiren realizing for the first time in his life that he's just made a fatal mistake, Forsira saving his life, and his attempts to understand why. However, this doesn't feel like a character scene, because the writing doesn't seem to be focused around that; the writing is focused around the poisoning being potentially fatal and Forsira's urgency in finding a cure for it. She vaguely brings up that it seems almost like Tefiren is afraid, but then she just drops the thought, and outside of that the scene is mostly dialogue with subtle hints of what's going on in Tefiren's head and then Forsira running to get the berry. And because the definition of subtle is that it's kind of discreet and in the background, it's Forsira running to get the berry that ends up feeling like the purpose of the scene, even though really that's the background detail. The reader, however, isn't seeing a whole new side of Tefiren, just one that doesn't look Forsira in the eye; it doesn't grab your attention as an Important Thing.

I see two main ways of remedying this. First, you could keep Tefiren's development subtle in the background but give Forsira the main focus: for instance, you could make her not sure about the Pecha tree and spend a bit seriously worrying and thinking about what she would do if she lost him, which I think would be quite interesting in itself in addition to making the scene feel more purposeful (it would then feel like it's about Forsira confronting the fact she might lose Tefiren one day). Alternatively, you could give the focus directly to what's going on with Tefiren by paying more attention to how unlike himself he's being, the signs of his fear that Forsira notices and her concern about him - because at the moment, these things are so subtle as to be barely noticeable; I was actually surprised to find Forsira had noticed he seemed afraid at all, because from my vantage point he seemed to be doing a pretty great job of hiding it from anyone who's not itching to overanalyze everything he does.

Anyway, that was long-winded and rambly, but I hope it made some sense.

He looked up into the eyes of the older Sceptile, Brack – Zathern could never remember his rather long full name, but all his friends called him by the shortened version anyway – and saw a triumphant grin on his face.
For some reason my mind has decided Brack's name is Brachiosaurus. Which doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but I can't stop thinking it.

He caught Karsa’s eye – she’d been standing on the sidelines, watching the battle. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Still the new guy, eh?” she teased.

“There’s been a bunch more new guys since I joined,” he muttered, before brightening.
I'm... not sure I get this. How can he be "still the new guy" if more new guys have joined after him? Is she just teasing him about not being experienced enough? But does battling ability actually have any real correlation to being the "new guy"?

It's fun seeing how Zathern is pushing things out of his mind now. "Certain feelings" and all.

“I know, but still. You’re good for your age.” Tharann’s grin grew a little wider. “You obviously take after me.”

Zathern wasn’t sure what to say to that
D: Zatheern.

His mother. Zathern froze, desperately trying to shove painful thoughts and memories that had just sprung up firmly to the back of his mind.

[...]

Zathern could feel himself beginning to tremble under the weight of the emotions that were emerging from where he’d hidden them inside him. His mother and Forsira. Something was going to…
Hm, this feels a little repetitive here. We already know there are painful emotions emerging from where he'd hidden them and that they're talking about his mother and Forsira; I think we'd get the point fine if you cut that latter paragraph down to just "Zathern could feel himsmelf beginning to tremble. Something was going to...", really.

Anyway, so Germane switched sides. Not quite my theory, but I wasn't too far off. :3

Zathern twitched, but mostly managed to rein in the flickers of doubt and not think too hard about his mother.
Here again it seems you're spelling things out a little too much. The "...and not think too hard about his mother" bit feels unnecessary and a little counterproductive compared to earlier when you were successfully conveying the way he pushes those emotions away specifically by not mentioning them directly. It feels more effective when you let us draw our own conclusions about why he's twitching.

What he said summed it up, really. Zathern wasn’t going to die; he wasn’t the same as the Archopy at all. And if Germane, who was closer to an Archopy than he was, had nonetheless still switched sides, then there couldn’t have been anything wrong with the fact that he’d done so too.
Hmm. This logic feels a bit off to me; I think it's the fact he's jumping from necessity to morality in a way that seems stretched, especially since the reason he's staying there isn't that he thinks it's the right thing to do but that he's merely decided the Archopy are going to die with or without him. Why not simply have him think "Surely, if even Germane, who is almost an Archopy, thought it was a lost enough cause to switch sides, I was right in thinking they can't be helped"?

“Never mind me, though – I bet I can guess what got you to switch sides, Zathy boy,” Germane said. That smirk was back on his face; before Zathern could respond, he continued. “Bribery, persuasion, and the sudden discovery of your long-lost father.” His last few words had a mockingly-sweet tone to them.

Zathern began to nod – it had been something like that, after all – but then…

“Wait,” he said. The way Germane put it, it almost sounded like he’d always known about Zathern’s father, even long before he’d switched sides. “How did you…?”

“Whoops!” Germane said, leaping up towards another tree branch. “Gotta dash! See you around, ‘Zath’!” And with that, he darted away, disappearing through the trees.
Damn it. I want more Azma! D:

Turning to where he’d come from, Zathern headed back towards Karsa. He’d left her waiting for him, after all.
I don't really like the "He'd left her..." part; it seems to be weirdly implying he abandoned her somehow. I think this would work better as just "She was waiting for him, after all."

Forsira flapped her wings indignantly. The sea had been peaceful and serene, a welcome distraction from the constant glowing and flickering of Tefiren’s wing leaves next to her, which even the most patient Archopy wouldn’t have been able to tolerate for long until it drove them crazy.
Hm. I can't help also drawing a parallel to when she was staring out at the sea with Draern.

She folded her wings and began to drop speedily through the sky after Tefiren, mimicking his favourite landing technique of falling as fast as possible then spreading his wings at the last moment to break his fall. She crashed messily through the branches, skidding across the forest floor, not having quite figured out how Tefiren ever managed to do this neatly.
***. x3

Tefiren smirked. “You’ll have to hide better than that,” he muttered under his breath before shooting upwards and slicing a blade in the general area of the zigzag. With a strangled wailing noise, the Kecleon fell from the tree, its body becoming visible as the camouflage on its skin drained a sickly white in terror. It gazed pleadingly up at Tefiren as it struggled feebly under his claws. He simply shrugged and shook his head before drawing his blade across its throat.

Forsira took a step backwards. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen Tefiren hunt. Each time he had, he hadn’t bothered to call upon the inner predator before he made the kill. He was still himself. It was almost more unnerving than the cold gaze that she’d become used to by now.
! This is really interesting, and makes perfect sense - with his detachment from other people and the way he normally doesn't think of others as having feelings of their own, he really wouldn't need the inner predator to hunt and kill. Gems like this make it really easy to see why the other Archopy find him such a creep.

What's even more interesting is the fact that They draw on the inner predator when they kill Archopy, and Forsira knows it even as she says it's possibly even more unsettling that Tefiren kills without it - it's hard not to muse on the implicit comparison being drawn. Moreover, this draws a sick little parallel to Tharann, because we readers know him as the one other character who doesn't need the monster inside to kill.

Really, this moment was generally awesome - I actually went "Oh, wow" aloud when I read that. There is so much fascinating information implied in something like that and so many interesting comparisons to be drawn.

Tefiren frowned. “My inner what…? Oh, you mean the monster inside.”
The more you bring this up, the more I become convinced that the fact Azma seems to be the one person not to call it the monster inside is a hint towards something vitally significant about her. More Azma, damn you! ;_;

“Nah,” Tefiren said, apparently not quite getting the gravity of the question. “I just… don’t like letting it out much. I prefer to be me.”
Hmm. The fact he has an actual aversion to the inner predator is interesting, as opposed to just not needing it. Perhaps the loss of control associated with it unnerves him?

He shrugged, still seeming confused. “Well, yeah.”
His Tefirenlogic is impeccable.

Forsira sighed and settled down to eat the carcass, pushing those doubts out of her mind. It wasn’t as if Tefiren was doing something utterly taboo like breaking a promise of only battling. This wasn’t so bad, precisely; he clearly just had a different way of doing things.
Yeah, keep telling yourself this doesn't mean anything, lovestruck Forsira.

He looked puzzled. “That’s me.”
Somebody else wants to talk to him? Positively confounding.

Hmm. I don't feel like you've really set up Forsira's change in attitude towards the death of other Archopy, so it feels kind of sudden and out of nowhere when Arkesra tells her about Draern's death and she doesn't really feel anything. The last we saw of her thinking about other Archopy dying was when she felt guilty after They failed to notice her and Tefiren in the tree in the last part, and you haven't really done anything to make it feel like she's changed in any substantial way since then; we don't get the impression she's gotten detached like Tefiren at all, and thus it just comes as a bizarre surprise when she suddenly says she doesn't feel anything. Heck, she was literally just finding Tefiren's detachment unsettling - in relation to prey rather than Archopy, but still. It would have been nice to get a proper transition or at least give the impression that her attitude is changing somehow before this happens; as it was it didn't really have the impact I expected.

Forsira froze in horror, staring at the dead Archopy and then at her killer, seeing the Sceptile’s eyes lock onto hers. She would have been next if Tefiren hadn’t suddenly snapped her out of it with a frantic cry of “Sira, move!”

She moved, turning and forcing her legs into action as fast as she could, knowing the Sceptile couldn’t be far from her tail.
...yeah, I'm not sure I buy this. If she was close enough to Arkesra to be talking to her and froze for a second and was facing towards the Sceptile so she had to turn around and has a long tail and was noticed right off the bat... how can she possibly still get away? You should probably make Tefiren fire an Air Slash at Verdan right away, or do something else to delay him, in order to make this feel more believable.

Fight him?” Tefiren stared down at her with the most astonished look she’d ever seen him use. “Are you insane?” He gave another flap of his wings, shooting forwards away from her. “She wants to fight him,” she heard him mutter to himself. “She’s insane.”
Ha. Tefirenlogic has no room for facing danger head-on! You're just supposed to be evading and escaping them! (Also, that line is delightful, much like the "I haven't stopped flapping! Have you stopped flapping?" thing.)

The space between them seemed to be getting wider, more open; in fact, yes, she remembered this place from when Zathern had –
- evolved, presumably. Nice touch.

Again with the canopy thing - how can they be high enough to attack a herd of Tropius from above (aren't they reasonably big?), yet low enough for Verdan to still be a threat? o_O

Spotting it, Tefiren’s eyes widened in glee. “Oh, it’s you!” he exclaimed. “It is you, isn’t it?” He grinned at the massive Pokémon. “But I said I wasn’t battling. No rematch for you. Go away.”

“You’re not hunting, though, are you?” the Tropius replied through what might have been gritted teeth.

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not,” Tefiren said. “But I’m still not battling.” He waved an arm dismissively at it. “Go on. Wing it.”
He is so adorably, obliviously obnoxious. Also love the fact you brought this Tropius back.

Forsira had been pleased with her idea before, but she couldn’t feel quite so enthusiastic about it the other way around. “They thought you wanted to kill them,” she said. “Even though you didn’t.” She knew first-hand the terror of running for her life – while Tefiren managed to make it exciting, it wouldn’t have been that way for these Tropius. It seemed a little cruel.
Very nice thought here, as well - though if Forsira has stopped caring about Archopy who die, why does she care so much about some random Tropius being scared? Again, we really don't feel like Forsira has become Tefiren's type of detached at all.

Forsira sighed, feeling a little uneasy. “That Archopy that was killed just now,” she began. “Arkesra.”

Tefiren looked at her with that curious gaze of his. “What about her?”
Tefirenlogic simply cannot comprehend why she would be relevant to anything.

For some reason it struck Forsira that she didn’t want to pursue this any further.
Poor Forsira. I think she's afraid of what she might find if she digs too deep into Tefiren's mind.

He was unable to stifle a yelp as Tharann reached up to grab the branch he was on, dragging it down to his eye level. “Don’t **** with us, Grovyle,” he hissed, his face glaring into Germane from an uncomfortably short distance. “You know exactly what he meant.”
Yay for Precision F Strikes. (Glaring into Germane, though? Shouldn't it be into Germane's eyes, or Germane's (face), or something? Can you actually say his face glared, as opposed to his eyes? [/nitpicky ramble])

He let go of the branch, giving Germane time to compose himself again while it swung up and down before it fell still. “Yes, sorry, of course,” he said hurriedly. “I do believe there are less than you now, if I’m not very much mistaken about just how many recruits you have these days.”
Nice detail - Germane doesn't actually know that much about Them, even after supposedly switching sides.

“Ready? Wait, what does this have to do with the Azma plan?” Germane asked. “I thought you couldn’t find Forsira…”
Azmaaa. D: Please tell me there's Azma in the next part?

Something jerked horribly inside Germane. “No,” he said instantly. He choked out a laugh. “No, you’ve got to be kidding. You are, right?”
The fact something jerks inside Germane immediately tells all here: he never stopped being afraid of them and never stopped fearing deep down that something like this would happen, so when they threaten him with death his first thought really is that they mean it, with his surface confidence only taking over to deny it afterwards. :3 [/OVERANALYSIS TIME]

Germane shuddered, moving to a branch further back. “You don’t know that, though!” he suddenly exclaimed, his voice high and shaking. “You don’t know that I’m one of that lot because unless I evolve you can’t tell what I’m going to evolve into! You can’t kill me!” He grinned wildly, giving a brief, desperate chuckle.
Oh, God, he is adorable.

“Oh, but we do know,” Skorrhen said silkily. “We can tell from the parents, can’t we? We know every child on this island who will evolve into an Archopy. What did you think Verdan and the others were doing on the sunset side if they never took part in any of the killings? They’ve been watching the children.”
Ha. Nice one. Didn't think of that but it makes perfect sense, just how plot twists should be. (One-way trapdoor function twist! 8D)

...I want to quote the whole rest of the scene, but that would just take up too much space. GERMAAAANE I FANGIRL YOU NOW. D:

“None of them ever do, Germane,” Skorrhen said simply. “You’re not special. You’re just a coward who thought he could prevent the inevitable.”
I will quote this, though, because Germane has been living his whole adult life fancying himself special and Skorrhen is here cutting down into his very core. He's good at that and it's very chilling.

The last thing he saw was the twisted gleam in Tharann’s eyes.
And again, that twisted gleam that's decidedly not the cold indifference of the inner predator.

It did strike me as odd that Germane didn't attempt to defend himself on the basis that he was useful to them, nor did Tharann or Skorrhen make any derisive comments about his uselessness - it was noticeable in the earlier Zathern scene how little Tharann thought of Germane's intel and in retrospect it would have made sense to bring that up again, especially since presumably the reason they're killing him now is that he's given them the final piece of information they need (that there are more of Them than the Archopy now) and has therefore become useless to them.


Anyway! TEFIREN and GERMANE and STUFF HAPPENS and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. :3 Overall, as I mentioned on MSN, I felt this part was a pretty fascinating study of Tefiren's character; you made several very interesting points about him and overall, no matter how you felt about it, I as a reader felt it was quite focused and point-y, save for that one bit (which did have a point but just didn't feel like it because of stuff). And of course, the plot also thickens and when is there going to be more Azma damn it. ;_;
 
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elyvorg

somewhat backwards.
Dragonfree - Thanks as always for reviewing! Particularly for your explanation about the pointless-seeming part; it really did help me understand why it seemed that way.

Just how high is the canopy in this forest where they live? Because it always seems to take really, really long for them to clear the canopy. o_O Or is it just that Archopy aren't good enough fliers to be able to ascend otherwise than extremely slowly? Still, with the whole added power of lighting the wing leaves, I'd have expected it to be at least a bit faster than it is if they could take off at all before. (I suppose part of it might be the upwards slope thing, but I still have a hard time visualizing how long it always takes.)
Uhh. Quite high? I think I sort of imagine the canopy being sort of rainforesty-height, but I'm not entirely sure because I suck at realism and properly imagining my settings.

(You'll probably notice there being a severe inconcistency with the time it takes an Archopy to clear the canopy, in that it seems to take forever if they're being chased by Them, but if they're just taking off in complete safety then it takes a few sentences at most. I suck at this! 8D; )

It's fun how he keeps going "Hey! This justifies your presence!" at everything. Very possibly a sign that he's starting to enjoy having her around.
On the surface, it's probably more a way of trying to deal with the fact that he really doesn't want her around but can't just run away, by convincing himself that having her around actually is a good thing. Beneath the surface, though, who knows?

Hee at Tefiren avoiding eye contact when he realized he may just have been fatally poisoned. :3
Eee, yes. He really does everything he can to hide the fact that he's scared from Forsira - because if she notices that he's afraid, then that would make his fear real. D: (The rewritten scene no longer has Forsira vaguely managing to notice, incidentally.)

Risking something for somebody else?! That's just ilTefirenlogical! >:/
The "somebody else" doesn't even factor into it; risking something at all, for whatever reason, is what's so ilTefirenlogical. :O

Surprise: "She doesn't want me to die?"
Wonder: "...she doesn't want me to die."
Condescension: "But that's ridiculous! She's making a choice that makes no sense because of something silly like caring! I would certainly never do that!"

...or something very like that.
Yes! You're pretty much right there. You're certainly right in that Tefiren really wouldn't have done the same for her had the roles been reversed.

Because careful Tefirenlogical evaluation has revealed that really she just did that to prove a point, because unlike the caring thing, that makes sense!
Yes! Of course! Although in this case I think the Tefirenlogic is less instinctive and automatic and more a deliberate attempt to convince himself that she had another reason so that he doesn't have to accept that she cares about him.

Is he starting to get that she cares about him and what significance that has? :eek: ...Or maybe he's just realizing her mind works in mysterious ways and giving up trying to understand her.
It's the former! This whole situation caused a bit of a clash of Tefirenlogic: on the one hand, Forsira going out into where there might have still been some of Them around was positively idiotic of her, and he'd never have done something so stupid; on the other hand, he was going to die, and it's only because of Forsira's risk that he didn't, and that cannot be a bad thing, right? And because Tefiren would never, ever come to the conclusion that he should have died, the only other conclusion is that maybe it wasn't so stupid of Forsira and maybe saving his life was reason enough to make the risk worthwhile for her. But at the same time he really doesn't want to have to accept how much she cares about him because then he might start caring about her too and oh Tefiren you poor confused frightened thing. :3

Anyway, I rewrote the Tefiren-poisoning scene somewhat. I went for the option you presented that involves more focus on Tefiren, naturally, because you can never have too much Tefiren! Hopefully it feels less pointless now.

Hm. I can't help also drawing a parallel to when she was staring out at the sea with Draern.
Heh. Mostly I put in a bit of focus on the sea in these last few parts given what LE readers know will eventually happen with Forsira and the sea - but hey, unintentional Draern parallels are nice, too.

! This is really interesting, and makes perfect sense - with his detachment from other people and the way he normally doesn't think of others as having feelings of their own, he really wouldn't need the inner predator to hunt and kill. Gems like this make it really easy to see why the other Archopy find him such a creep.
Hee, I like how you found this so interesting. I never really realised quite how fun it was - I just figured Tefiren wouldn't use the monster inside so wrote it in - but now that you mention it, it does draw some slightly unsettling parallels between him and Them and specifically Tharann. Mmm. D:

...yeah, I'm not sure I buy this. If she was close enough to Arkesra to be talking to her and froze for a second and was facing towards the Sceptile so she had to turn around and has a long tail and was noticed right off the bat... how can she possibly still get away? You should probably make Tefiren fire an Air Slash at Verdan right away, or do something else to delay him, in order to make this feel more believable.
Fixed this, hopefully. In the fixed version I incidentally insisted on keeping Tefiren's frantic "Sira, move!", because I've rather loved that ever since I realised that for once this is Tefiren being real and honest and genuinely frantic - it happens so quickly and suddenly that he doesn't have time to process it through his defence mechanisms, but nonetheless his instinctual reaction is get Forsira the hell away from there, instead of just fleeing himself and worrying about her after. Which is really eeee and proves that deep down he does care about her, as much as he's been trying desperately not to. [/ramble]

Ha. Tefirenlogic has no room for facing danger head-on! You're just supposed to be evading and escaping them! (Also, that line is delightful, much like the "I haven't stopped flapping! Have you stopped flapping?" thing.)
Eee, that was one of my favourite lines of his in this part, too. Suggestions like that just cause his Tefirenlogic defences to go into such an overdrive. x3

Tefirenlogic simply cannot comprehend why [Arkesra] would be relevant to anything.
Yes! I mean, she's dead now; why on earth is Forsira still thinking about her? D:

The fact something jerks inside Germane immediately tells all here: he never stopped being afraid of them and never stopped fearing deep down that something like this would happen, so when they threaten him with death his first thought really is that they mean it, with his surface confidence only taking over to deny it afterwards. :3 [/OVERANALYSIS TIME]
:3 Nice overanalysis! I never really overanalysed Germane enough to realise this, but yes, you're absolutely right and that's absolutely him. (The one Germane part that I tended to find myself overanalysing, oddly enough, was his habit of always subconsciously choosing a branch slightly higher than a Sceptile's head height while talking to them so that he could look down on them and feel superior.)

Ha. Nice one. Didn't think of that but it makes perfect sense, just how plot twists should be. (One-way trapdoor function twist! 8D)
Naaah, it isn't. You're giving me too much credit. One-way trapdoor function, maybe, in which case I'm pleased I managed to pull that off and that it made sense, but is it really that much of a twist like a certain twist in LE was?

But yaaay at your love for the Germane scene in general, as I think I squeed about enough on MSN what with how much I enjoyed writing it in the first place.

The next instalment will have Azma! I, uh, can't quite promise exactly when I'll get it out; I still haven't actually started proofreading it properly, and tomorrow's a Saturday (8D) so you know what that means, but, yeah. Sometime.
 
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elyvorg

somewhat backwards.
Breaking

Okay. Uh, sorry for the rather long wait; I happen to be gripped by the best distraction ever right now. If there is anyone other than Dragonfree reading this, please, make yourself known! It'll help inspire me to get the last part up more quickly if I'm aware that there's more than one person who cares about this.

This part is another of my favourites (and for less Tefiren-centric reasons this time). It's also the longest.

<previous

Breaking

Azma could hear the thunder rolling in, dark clouds approaching from over the sea. The rainy season was upon them again.

She gazed wearily out across the clearing, watching the groups of Treecko and Grovyle chasing each other among the ferns and rocky ledges, engaging in battles or simply enjoying the last of the sunshine.

There had been so many new orphans recently.

Azma knew all of them by name; somewhere along the line she seemed to have become their unofficial guardian, taking in those with nowhere else to go. In some ways, though, this was the last thing she wanted. She’d had to force herself to ignore her natural urge to comfort and help anyone in need and to stay distant with the children, learning their names and keeping them safe, but little more. She didn’t want to make another Forsira out of any of them. Not when she knew what was coming.

Azma shuddered, pushing those dark feelings away. She wasn’t going to let them consume her. She was stronger than that, even after all They had done to her.

Another rumble of thunder came, louder this time, as an Archopy crashed through the trees at the top of the clearing. He glided above them in frantic circles, his eyes wide. “Alarm!” he cried out. “Alarm! They’re coming!”

Azma tensed but quickly calmed herself. Everyone knew what to do. The Treecko and Grovyle’s games stopped in their tracks the moment they heard the call, each of them taking cover under a bush or an overhanging rock, their small size allowing them to all but vanish. On the outskirts, Archopy who had been perched in the trees turned to flee away from the clearing, scattering in all directions through the forest. The Archopy who had raised the alarm circled once more and then flew off to join them.

Azma merely retreated back to her own tree and leapt into the boughs, spreading her leaves out for camouflage and keeping as still and quiet as possible. She was fairly confident that They did not intend to kill her right now. Her fate was on its way, coming closer all the time, but it hadn’t reached her yet.

So They had become brave enough to attack the clearing, had They? Azma was surprised; she’d thought They were simply content with picking off the Archopy one by one, catching individuals that inevitably went out hunting, anyone that made themselves a lone target. A full-on assault was something new. But then, that was what the alarm had been planned for – They would appear in the clearing and find no-one there save the hidden children, who were not Their targets.

Azma was quietly afraid that this wasn’t the best defence and was perhaps putting the Archopy and the children in even more danger. But nobody else had come up with a better plan – she’d felt they needed to have at least something prepared.

The wait felt longer than she knew it must have really been as she crouched among the branches, her heart beating fast, hearing some of the Treecko and Grovyle growing fidgety in their hiding places. She was beginning to think it had been a false alarm, but then she spotted a Sceptile through the trees, approaching down the slope towards them, something limp and green slung over his back. Frozen where she was, her breath caught in her throat, Azma watched the Sceptile walk into the clearing, glance around for a moment as if confused – and then he simply dumped what he was carrying and darted back away.

Remaining wary in case this was some kind of decoy, Azma spread her wings to glide out of her tree and towards what had been left behind. A spike of horror jolted through her, throwing off her flight balance and landing her untidily next to it as she realised that it was a Grovyle’s body – and one she recognised.

“Oh, Germane,” she sighed. He was on his back, a gash across his throat, his sightless eyes staring towards the oncoming dark clouds in an eternal gaze of terror and despair. “I always thought it wouldn’t protect you forever, you know,” Azma said to her old friend.

But this was more than just the random dumping of a body to spread fear. The killing of anything other than an Archopy had been unheard of up until now. The end was drawing nearer.

Azma turned to regard the Treecko and Grovyle that were beginning to emerge from their hiding places, trying not to let the dread that was rising up within her show on her face. None of the children came too close to the body of the Grovyle. She couldn’t blame them.

A couple of Archopy had reappeared and were peering tentatively into the clearing from trees on the outside. Azma caught their eye and gestured that it was safe. The two Archopy duly vanished to find the others who had fled and pass on the all-clear.

As she waited for everyone to return, Azma glanced uncomfortably towards the huddle of Treecko and Grovyle not far from her. Their gazes were confused, fearful, and above all, curious, but none of them asked her what was going on. If she had something to tell them, she’d tell them, they knew – but they’d learnt over time that Azma rarely replied when one of them tried to talk to her.

Azma was almost glad when she heard a ripple of chatter come from outside the clearing as the rest of the Archopy began to return. It wasn’t long before the place was full of Archopy clamouring to see, a nervous edge to their mutterings as they realised what lay before Azma.

“Is that Germane?” said a voice.

“Azma’s spy? Let me see…” came another.

“Wasn’t he a Grovyle?”

“I thought he wasn’t going to be…”

“Everyone,” Azma said sharply over the growing hubbub of voices, silencing them as all eyes fell on her. “Yes, this is the body of my friend, a Grovyle. But it is also something more. It is a message from Them.” Gazing around at the throng of Archopy before her, she tried to look each and every one of them in the eye, to fill her voice with as much authority and sincerity as she could muster. It was vital that they understood the gravity of this. “They are no longer restricting themselves to Archopy. Our children are no longer safe.”

A ripple of shock and disbelief went through the gathered Archopy. Azma could see those who had children edge protectively closer to their offspring. The Treecko and Grovyle themselves stared up at their parents, if they still had them; the orphans turned to Azma. Some looked frightened, but the worst were those whose eyes still held the innocent shine of someone who hadn’t yet grasped that their life was one day going to end.

Azma closed her eyes and took a deep breath before looking back at everyone, trying her best to ignore the orphans’ gazes. “I always feared this day would come,” she called over them, silencing the murmurs of the crowd. “We must no longer just sit here, waiting for our ends to draw nearer. We need to act.” She could see some of the parents nodding determinedly, while recently-evolved Archopy too young to have children of their own merely seemed anxious, fearful.

“We need to discuss this properly, of course,” Azma went on. “But there are many of Them and so few of us left. If we want this to have any chance of making a difference, we need every single Archopy on this island to come. I would be eternally grateful if a brave few could fly out to find those that they know live outside this clearing. Tell them the news. Implore them to come. We need everyone here.”

Three or four Archopy amongst the crowd nodded nervously and moved away to find some space to take off. Azma regarded the rest of the gathered Treecko, Grovyle and Archopy. All of them, especially the children, looked exactly how Azma felt: more anxious and afraid than ever before. She sighed. “Until they arrive, I suggest everyone makes the most of the time they have,” she said grimly.

Slowly, gradually, the crowd began to disperse, the parents making sure to stay close to their children, be they young Treecko or Grovyle nearing adulthood. The orphans remained in the clearing, glancing aimlessly around, their eyes clouded. They had nowhere else to go.

Azma couldn’t quite bear to look at them, so she turned miserably back to Germane, who still lay limp in front of her. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall.

- - -​

“Do we have to go?” Tefiren asked petulantly, staring up at her as he glided below.

Forsira sighed. “They’re going to start killing the children, Tefiren. That’s not something we can just ignore.”

“Sure we can!” He circled up and around, putting on a burst of speed. “We just turn around and fly back this way!”

He was flying straight at her, an expectant gleam in his eyes. Forsira refused to move, forcing him to dip beneath her at the last moment with a mumbled moan.

She had to admit, part of her understood what Tefiren was getting at and wanted to just fly away and leave this crisis to the other Archopy to deal with – after all, it wasn’t as if this directly affected the two of them, as they didn’t exactly have children. But the confrontation with Arkesra a while ago had made Forsira think. Perhaps joining Tefiren had made her too flippant about what was happening to the rest of the Archopy. It felt wrong for her to continue to ignore them now, especially with the children in danger. She remembered her own childhood, knowing They were never going to come after her, the innocence that had given her. It wasn’t fair that today’s children suddenly didn’t have that. She wanted to help them somehow.

“Aww, come on, Sira!” Tefiren complained. He was now flying upside-down beneath her, flapping his wings in a lopsided, backwards sort of way to stay in flight. The corners of Forsira’s mouth twitched up into a smile, but she tried not to let him see that. “It’ll just be a bunch of people talking! Talking’s boring, I keep telling you that. It’s not like they’ll need us!”

“I’m going, Tefiren,” Forsira said firmly, reaching down to jab him out of his topsy-turvy flight. He yelped and tumbled indignantly through the air before righting himself. “Azma, the Archopy in charge of this,” she went on. “I used to know her. She’d want me to come.” She gazed pointedly down at him, but her sincerity seemed to just bounce off him; he still mostly looked miffed at being forced back the right way up. “I can’t make you come with me. But it would mean a lot to me if you did.”

Because it would prove that Draern had been wrong about him. That Tefiren wasn’t a sick bastard like the late Archopy had said. That, deep down, he really did care about the rest of the Archopy, even if he didn’t show it.

Tefiren huffed and pushed energy into every other one of his leaves, flapping the oddly-shaped, half-glowing wings to rise up and draw level with her again. “Fine,” he mumbled, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. “But seriously, Sira, you’re being boring. We’re doing something fun after this.”

Forsira nodded vaguely. She wasn’t entirely sure there would even be an ‘after this’, but she said nothing, looking ahead through the dark clouds and the rain. The clearing that she remembered so well from her childhood was just coming into sight over the horizon.

In the corner of her vision, a bright green light glowed and flickered. His wings normal again, Tefiren was staring intently at them, making one leaf on its own shine and morph into a blade before extinguishing it to light a different one at random, each time accompanied by a faint hiss as the energy turned the raindrops to steam. Seeing her watching, he grinned at her, that twinkle of discovery in his eyes, although she wasn’t quite sure what was so important about him having figured out a way to keep their leaves dry when they were already waterproof enough.

Forsira shook her head, trying to hide her amusement. The clearing was almost below them by now; she could see it filled with the figures of Archopy, many of whom were looking up at the skies, waiting for them. Forsira tilted herself downwards to descend slowly towards the rest of her kind. Tefiren didn’t follow. For a fleeting moment she was afraid he wasn’t going to come after all, until he suddenly appeared in the air next to her, spreading his wings to slow his speedy descent and narrowly avoiding a crash-landing in the ferny undergrowth. Forsira couldn’t help but smile; he’d just waited so he could drop out of the sky the way he liked to.

She suddenly became aware of the number of eyes on the two of them – aside from the Archopy, there were a multitude of Grovyle and Treecko there too. Tefiren seemed uncomfortable with the attention; without acknowledging any of them and without so much as a glance at the children, he slunk to the edge of the clearing and scampered up a tree. After nodding tentatively at those she vaguely recognised from when she’d been here last, Forsira moved to join Tefiren on the outskirts.

From among the branches, Forsira could see Azma at the highest point of the clearing, standing at the base of the tree she remembered sleeping in as a child. Her former surrogate mother caught her eye and gave her a small smile of gratitude.

“I believe those two are the last to arrive,” Azma said in a strong voice that travelled out across the whole clearing. “Welcome to Forsira and… and to her friend. Since we are all here now…” Azma paused, surveying the gathered people. Forsira did too; it seemed worryingly like there were fewer Archopy than there were Treecko and Grovyle huddled nervously among them. In fact, even with what was meant to be every Archopy on the island, Forsira was almost sure there were fewer than there had been back when she’d lived here, when only a fraction had used Azma’s clearing for safety. Had that many really been killed while she’d been gallivanting with Tefiren?

“I’m sure you all know why we have gathered,” Azma’s voice rang out. “They have sent us a message – They will no longer stay away from our children. The next time They strike, it might not be you but your son or daughter who takes the fall. Until now, we have been dully, miserably accepting our fate, but no more. We have to act, before They wipe us out entirely.”

Her words were met by nods and murmurs of agreement across the clearing. Forsira could see those Archopy with children beside them edge protectively closer to their Treecko or Grovyle.

“Pfft,” Tefiren snorted from beside her, quietly enough that no-one else would have heard. “What’s with her? Does she even have kids of her own?”

Forsira shot him a glare, memories of Zathern stinging painfully inside her. Tefiren tilted his head, seeming puzzled, but backed down.

“What’s the big deal?” came a voice from among the Archopy. “Why is this such a big change? Can’t the kids just start running and hiding now, like we do?”

Fearful muttering started up among the Grovyle and Treecko below.

“What? There’s no way we could…”

“They’re too scary, They’d catch us…”

“I don’t want to have to hide…”

Seeing how afraid all the children looked, it struck Forsira for the first time how lucky she’d been during her own childhood, not having to feel that. Apart from knowing Zathern, she’d never thought there had been anything lucky about her childhood before.

“Indeed,” Azma said, her strong, calm voice silencing the nervous chatter. “That would never work. The only reason we Archopy can flee with some success is because we match Them in speed and we can fly. Our children don’t have that. They wouldn’t stand a chance. We have to protect them somehow.”

That glowing and flickering had started up in the edge of Forsira’s vision again, distracting her. She turned to Tefiren; he was making his leaves glow one by one again, an intent focus in his eyes like this was far more important than what was going on down below.

“Psst,” Forsira hissed at him.

He looked up from what he was doing, flashing her a brief grin. “Bored!” he whispered, before turning back to his wing leaves.

She knew that wasn’t it.

“I’ve got an idea,” said another Archopy in the crowd. “A Sceptile’s child looks just the same as an Archopy’s child, right? So if we could just bring some of the Sceptile children over to this side and let them mingle with ours, They wouldn’t know which ones to kill, would They?”

There were mutters among the crowd. Ignoring the continued flickering of light in the corner of her vision, Forsira looked at Azma. She seemed thoughtful.

“That’s not a bad idea…” Azma began.

“Yeah, not a bad idea,” one of the other Archopy butted in, “except that do you really think any of the Sceptile will just happily lend us their children? I went over to the sunrise side once when I was a kid. The ones who aren’t Them still don’t give a damn about what’s happening to us. They’d never put their own children in mortal danger just to help us.”

Forsira remembered her own visit to the sunrise side as a Grovyle, the Sceptile she’d met who’d insisted that the Archopy’s plight was none of their business. She couldn’t help thinking that this Archopy was right.

Azma sighed. “Unfortunately, this is true,” she said. “I was also going to add that I wouldn’t be surprised if They have some kind of a contingency plan for that, anyway. They must have been planning to target our children for a long time. I’m sure They have figured out some way to identify which are ours and which aren’t, if it ever came to that.” She looked sadly at the Archopy who’d brought this up. “I’m sorry, Natrene. It wasn’t a bad idea, but this world just isn’t kind enough for it to work.”

“So then what do we do?” Natrene asked helplessly.

More mutters from the gathered Archopy. They were glancing at each other, as if they all knew what was coming next, but none of them had the courage to speak up.

“There is nothing else for it,” Azma said eventually. “We will have to fight Them. All of us.”

There was a rustle of leaves beside Forsira as Tefiren suddenly jerked up in his perch, staring at Azma like she was mad.

“I thought it would come to this,” Azma went on. “That is why I had every single Archopy come here. The only way we stand any kind of chance is if all of us fight. There are likely more of Them than us by now, even with all of us here, but we must try.”

Tefiren was shaking his head, still staring at Azma in disbelief. “She’s insane,” he whispered to himself. His voice was wavering.

Down among the others, Forsira could see many more of the Archopy looking anxious, worried. Those who were parents had a certain determination about them, but they too seemed nervous.

“I know this is a frightening thought,” Azma said, her voice somehow still managing to sound completely calm and confident. “It’s entirely likely that we won’t succeed. But if we don’t even try, we are certainly doomed. We must try. This is no longer about individual survival – this is about survival of the whole species. If our children are killed, then Archopykind will be wiped out for good.”

Forsira shuddered. She’d never really considered the full extent of what was happening – could the Archopy species really be going extinct? She couldn’t quite get her head around the thought of a world without Archopy in it.

Beside her, Tefiren was still fervently shaking his head.

“We cannot let this happen!” Azma called, her voice rising high, ringing out across the clearing. “We cannot let ourselves be lost! We cannot let this become a world where future generations of Pokémon live on oblivious, not even knowing what an Archopy was!” She looked around the gathered Archopy, Grovyle and Treecko. Everyone’s attention was fixed on her. “I understand that this is a big ask for those of you who don’t have children of your own,” she said, more quietly. “But don’t think you will be fighting for something that isn’t yours. You will be fighting for our future, and that belongs to everyone here. That is something worth fighting for.”

Forsira heard Tefiren spit out a hysterical sort of half-laugh.

“For too long we have been running and hiding, waiting for our deaths to catch up to us!” Azma continued, her voice growing stronger again. “For too long we have just sat back and accepted this fate that They have decided to deal us. But no more! I implore you, Archopy, for once in our lives we need to show our courage and fight!” A rumble of thunder crackled overhead as if underlining her words.

By now, there was only nodding among the Archopy below. Even the non-parents had an air of determination about them. “For our future!” someone who might have been Natrene shouted.

“For our future!” someone else agreed, and before long, more joined in the cry, the spirit of sudden bravery and resolve despite hopeless odds uniting them all. Forsira found herself nodding, feeling the urge to join in the chant that had begun to build – Azma was right, they needed to take a stand…

“They’re insane,” Tefiren muttered from beside her, his voice high and shaking. “They’re all insane…”

Forsira turned to him helplessly. “Tefiren…”

His head suddenly jerked around to face her, something desperate in his gaze that she’d never seen before.

Then, faster than anything, Tefiren turned and leapt from the tree, spreading his wings to flee away from the clearing.

The sight almost left Forsira feeling betrayed. Torn, she looked back to the rest of the Archopy, some of the nearer ones breaking off the chant as they noticed the runaway. Soon it had died down entirely, and a whole clearing full of accusing gazes was fixed on her.

Forsira caught Azma’s eye. The old Archopy merely looked disappointed. There was a question in her eyes, but not an angry one, as if she was simply asking Forsira if she was going to run, too.

Forsira looked back towards where Tefiren had fled.

She couldn’t leave him.

With the briefest of apologetic glances at Azma, Forsira spread her own wings and followed Tefiren in running away from the approaching storm.

- - -​

He came into sight as she cleared the canopy. Her partly-glowing wings flapped hard to catch up to him under the rain, his own wings plain and dull as he flew frantically into the distance. There were no tricks or gimmicks to his flight now. Forsira had seen him escape Their clutches countless times, but this was the first time it had ever seemed like Tefiren was running away.

“Tefiren!” she called ahead desperately.

He faltered in his flight for a moment – so he must have heard her – but he didn’t respond. Tefiren always responded. Even if it was with a crazy bit of nonsense, he always said something.

Forsira beat her wings even faster.

The gap had barely begun to close before he sped up too, soaring further away across the island, still not acknowledging her. He didn’t stop, not even as he flew over the ridge, the highest part of the island, and on towards the sunrise side.

This was unheard of for Tefiren. He’d never, ever flown above the Sceptile’s side of the island before. The very notion of it would have been unthinkable to him.

Forsira smothered the tremor of anxiety at the thought of entering Their territory and threw herself onwards. The most important thing was that she caught up to Tefiren and found out what on earth was going through his head.

It wasn’t long before the cliffs of the sunrise side came into sight below. Forsira had never seen them herself, but this must have been what Zathern had described – huge great crags of rock beyond which the land just ended, dropping straight down into the water. Tefiren had reached the edge of them, but still he didn’t stop, flying on over the sea and beginning to descend.

A small, sensible part of Forsira was beginning to warn her to go back, that this was stupid, but she’d never really listened to that sensible side ever since she’d joined Tefiren, and she certainly wasn’t about to start now. Dropping down after him, she saw with some relief that he’d circled around, silencing her irrational fear that he was just going to fly into the sea. He was heading back towards the cliff face, vanishing into a hole on it, and Forsira realised. This cliff contained caves – caves that could only be reached by flying. The ultimate hiding place.

With a decisive flap of her wings, Forsira pointed herself towards where Tefiren had gone and soared towards it. A couple of Wingull flapped their way out of the cave and past her, but she paid them no heed, landing on the slippery wet ledge of rock at the entrance and making her way inside.

Tefiren was crouched at the far end of the space, his back to her.

“You followed me,” he said, still not looking at her, his voice anxious. “Why did you follow me?”

Forsira took a step closer to him in the gloom. “Why did you leave?” she asked evenly.

“I had to,” he replied immediately. “They were going to fight. They’re insane.”

“We had to take a stand, Tefiren,” Forsira said. “For the children. And for our species’ future. Couldn’t you see that?”

A pause. Then, in a small voice, “Of course I could.”

Forsira frowned at him. “And yet, you still just left? Do you even care what happens to –”

“Please, Forsira,” Tefiren cut her off, his voice shaking. “I can handle everyone else on this island thinking I’m a sick freak, but please, not you.”

All of the anger that had been building inside Forsira dropped away in an instant. She could see Tefiren looking back at her out of the gloom; he suddenly seemed incredibly vulnerable, so unlike the Archopy she knew and admired. She moved closer to him almost instinctively, her heart filling with pity.

“Why?” she asked. “If you know what it made you seem like, then why?”

“Because I don’t want to die,” he said simply. Beneath the tremble in his voice there was an echo of that tone he always had when he made something sound like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

And now that Forsira thought about it, saw the way Tefiren looked pathetically back at her, she realised that of course it was. No wonder he could come up with so many brilliant escape tactics when they were what would keep him alive. No wonder he took such glee in escaping Their clutches if it stopped him from thinking about what would happen to him the one time he didn’t. Of course he tried to avoid caring that the rest of the Archopy were being killed – because the same thing would happen to him one day.

Suddenly he wasn’t such an enigma after all. It all made sense with that one, simple reason. She’d thought Tefiren made the life-or-death chases thrilling and exciting because he was just that fearless, but in fact it was the opposite. He did it because he was the most scared of them all.

Without a word, she moved up next to him and laid a wing comfortingly over his trembling body.

He was avoiding her gaze again. “You should go,” he whispered shakily. “You wanted to fight, I could tell. You shouldn’t let me stop you.”

“Then I’d just be killed with the rest of them,” Forsira said, feeling him twitch as she said it. “You’re right about that. And I couldn’t just leave you.”

“Why not?” Tefiren turned to stare at her, something in his gaze reminiscent of that puzzled look of his, like he couldn’t comprehend why she’d ever want to stay with him.

Forsira sighed, smiling almost pityingly at his look of confusion. “Because I love you, Tefiren,” she said.

She could hardly believe he’d never noticed that until now. It would have been obvious to any other Archopy – but then, Tefiren wasn’t any Archopy, and that was why she loved him. Even learning that he was only so crazy and exciting because he was this flawed on the inside didn’t change how she felt. If anything, it made her all the more determined to stay by his side. He needed her.

Tefiren was shaking his head, backing away from her, still looking afraid. “No,” he mumbled. “Don’t say that. I don’t deserve that.”

“Of course you do,” Forsira told him. “You’ve saved my life so many times.”

“Only because I was saving my own!” he protested.

“Not every time, though,” she said. “There were times when you could have just flown on and let Them catch me, but you risked your life to help.”

Tefiren let out a mad, broken sort of cackle. “Risk?” he said incredulously. “I never risked anything! You know what I’m like, Forsira. Do you honestly think I would have done something if I thought it would put me at risk?”

Forsira remembered how Tefiren would laugh off some suggestions she made as mad, as ‘giving Them too much of an advantage’.

But then…

“You let me join you,” she said. “You thought that was a risk.”

“But I never wanted you to!” exclaimed Tefiren. “That night just after you found me again, when you thought I was running away. That’s because I was. I was running away. I didn’t want to risk being with you.”

So her suspicions had been right that night, after all. “But you never tried to run again,” she pointed out.

“Because I couldn’t,” he said despairingly. “You’d just have stopped me again.”

Forsira shook her head. “No, Tefiren. I don’t believe that you didn’t ever want me around. Even after the Vileplume, when you admitted that having two of us was a good idea? Even after everything else?” She edged closer, lowering her head to gaze softly at him. “Even now, do you still want me to leave?”

“You should,” he muttered, crouching low and pressing himself against the back wall. “You wanted to go and fight. The rest of them deserve your help. I don’t.”

She sighed and smiled sadly at him. “That’s not what I asked, Tefiren. Do you want me to leave?”

He looked up at her from where he was, something about the look in his eyes making him seem so small and pitiful. “No,” he whispered, shaking his head ever so slightly.

Forsira put her wing around him again. “Then I’m not going anywhere.”

She could feel that he wanted to relax, but he didn’t, shifting uncomfortably next to her. “No,” he muttered feverishly, “but you’re just like the others. You’re going to die someday, Forsira. I can’t…”

Despite all of her concern, Forsira somehow produced a light-hearted laugh. “Really, Tefi?” she said. “I thought we’d established that as long as I’m with you, They’re never going to catch me.” She smiled at him, her face right next to his.

Tefiren managed half a grin, but his eyes were still pained. “No, but that’s not… That’s not true. You know that. Even I’m… even I’m not going to…”

He was beginning to tremble beside her again. She ran her claws lightly over his crest leaves, calming him. “Hey,” she whispered softly. “Don’t worry about that. Whenever that comes, it won’t be today, and it probably won’t be tomorrow either. I know you. You live for today.”

So close to him in the gloom, she saw the moment when something clicked inside him, the usual glint of his snapping back into his eyes – a little desperate, but it was there. The tension began to flow out of him, and he pressed himself closer in to her. “Maybe you’re right, Sira,” Tefiren murmured. “Let’s live for today, shall we?” His nose nudged gently against the tender skin on her throat, sending a pleasant tingle through her, as her tail entwined itself around his.

Inside the small cavern up on the cliff, all thoughts of peril and death and the fight that would soon be playing out on the other side of the world were forgotten. Outside, the rainstorm continued.

 
Last edited:

elyvorg

somewhat backwards.
Breaking [continued]

...continued

Zathern stood in a small clearing amongst hordes of other Sceptile, some he knew, some he didn’t. There were so many of them that it could easily have been every Sceptile ever to have been recruited by Skorrhen or Tharann, and it probably was. It almost made him feel insignificant, just one face among the crowd. But then, none of the others in this gathering were the son of one of the two Sceptile standing atop a fallen tree at the front of the clearing, head and shoulders above the rest. That made Zathern matter. It had to.

Karsa caught his eye and smiled from beside him. It helped; he mattered to her, at least.

“My fellow Sceptile,” Skorrhen said, his commanding voice travelling out over all of them. “For a long time now we have been carrying out Nature’s wishes in eliminating the species of Archopy from this world. But it’s been happening so slowly. For every one we kill, another evolves from a Grovyle. We need to be faster. We need to eliminate them from the bottom up. I am here to tell you that the Treecko and Grovyle of the sunset side are now just as much our targets as the Archopy.”

Something lurched inside Zathern. The children. They were going to kill the children now.

With all the practice he’d had, he pushed that feeling back down, crushed it, smothered it. He still couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy. Looking around at the rest of the Sceptile, some of them seemed to be fidgeting uncomfortably. Even Karsa showed a flicker of doubt beneath her confident gaze.

“I understand that this discomforts some of you,” Skorrhen went on, raising a hand to get everybody’s attention. “It’s no wonder it does – their children look exactly like ours. But you needn’t think of them as the same. They aren’t, after all – their eventual fate to be an Archopy is marked in them from the moment they are born. This alone makes them nothing like a Sceptile’s children. You needn’t worry about being unable to identify them, either. My friends Verdan, Gartane and Elthorn here –” he indicated three Sceptile standing near the front of the group, all of whom Zathern vaguely recognised from his childhood – “have been sacrificing a lot of their time over on the sunset side for us. They know all of the wingless Archopy by sight.”

Across the crowd, the unease was beginning to fade. Skorrhen’s words were having their usual effect. Zathern used them to quiet the remnants of his doubt – of course the children weren’t the same. They’d been destined to die, too, ever since they’d been born.

“The only problem with this,” said Skorrhen smoothly, “is that the remaining Archopy will no doubt try to stop us. This is only natural of them; it is their children at stake. But what is also natural is that they will not succeed. There are too few of them now for any kind of last stand to have the strength to overpower us. We have already won.” He lowered his head to look over the crowd of Sceptile, looking each of them in the eye in turn – he seemed to smile a little as he caught Zathern’s eye, which Zathern wasn’t sure whether to be proud or unnerved about. “We will spend the rest of today in training,” Skorrhen said. “Tomorrow, we move out over to the sunset side, every one of us, and claim our victory.”

He nodded to his fellow Sceptile and stepped off the fallen tree, indicating that they were dismissed. Everyone began to disperse, with Verdan, Gartane and Elthorn selecting a number of Sceptile each and leading them off in groups, presumably for the training Skorrhen had mentioned. Tharann remained standing on the fallen tree – he’d stood beside Skorrhen throughout the whole thing without saying a word – watching as the rest of them left.

Not having been taken away in a group yet, Zathern hung around with Karsa, unsure what to do. “So,” he said to her vaguely.

“I guess this is it, then,” she said. “The big one. Probably the last one, too.”

Zathern nodded. He couldn’t deny that a large part of his mind, a part that he hadn’t been allowing any say recently, would be incredibly glad once this was over.

Karsa turned him around so that he looked her in the eye. That concern of hers was there again. “I’m worried about this, Zath,” she said. “Worried that you’ll struggle with it, like you did at the beginning, you know?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I’ve been getting much better at it. I’ll be fine.”

“Still,” she insisted. “This is much bigger than anything else. Just… just promise me you’ll let out the monster inside as early as possible once tomorrow comes, okay? The longer it’s out there, the further back the real you will be.” She gave him a sympathetic look. “I know you, Zath, and this won’t be as easy as you think. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“Yeah,” Zathern said. He hadn’t really thought too hard about what part he’d be playing in tomorrow and how he’d be playing it, but Karsa was right. “Yeah, I will. Thanks, Karsa.”

They smiled at each other for a moment and then glanced around the clearing. Most of the other Sceptile had gone by now. Tharann was still there, though, atop the fallen tree. He caught Zathern’s eye and hopped off it.

Karsa looked at him then back at Zathern awkwardly. “Um, anyway, I should be getting off to training,” she said, already moving away. “Good luck tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he called vaguely after her. She was already out of sight by the time Tharann reached him.

“So, Zathern,” his father said, grinning down at him. “I was thinking you could come along with me tomorrow. Fight beside me and all that.”

Zathern shrugged. “I suppose,” he muttered. Perhaps it would help if he fought alongside his father. Destroying the other side would be easier if he reminded himself how he had everything he wanted over on this side. “But won’t we all be doing pretty much the same thing anyway?”

“Not all of us,” Tharann said slyly. “I mean, most of them’ll just be killing the children – Skorrhen and Verdan are heading that lot – but I’ve got a very particular task in mind. And I need your help for that, Zathern.”

“Really?” Zathern tried not to show it, but he couldn’t help feeling a glow of pride. His father needed him. “What task?”

“That would be telling,” Tharann said with a thin smile. “Think of it as a surprise.”

“Okay,” said Zathern, a little confused. He wasn’t sure if he’d be capable of being surprised while in the grip of the monster inside, but it didn’t seem like Tharann was going to tell him any sooner. It didn’t matter, anyway – his father had come and asked him, specifically, for help with this. That was what counted.

Tharann patted his son on the back. “I’ll see you tomorrow then, ‘Zath’!” he said, before turning and walking away.

- - -​

Azma sat on the beach, gazing out over the turbulent sea, raindrops sliding off her leaves. The rest of the Archopy community – or what was left of it – was behind her, ranged around the edge of the clearing, facing outwards to protect the huddle of Treecko and younger Grovyle in the middle. The older Grovyle close to evolution stood among the Archopy, having been called upon to fight as well. Everyone was quiet, tense, waiting for the enemy to come, knowing it could happen at any moment. They’d been waiting a whole day.

Azma had retreated to the beach for a moment alone because the waiting had become almost unbearable.

This would be it. Everything would be either won or lost in this battle. But Azma knew that the chances of them winning were so minuscule that they were barely worth considering. She couldn’t deny that there were too few of them left, that those who remained were too young, too inexperienced to stand a chance against the entire might of Them with all Their years of practice at fighting and killing Archopy. There was no hope, really. It was too late.

Guilt clawed at Azma with greater fervour than ever before. It was her own fault that it was too late, she knew. Long ago, she’d fought actively against Them, inspired others to join her efforts to convince Them that They were wrong, to galvanise the peaceful but oblivious Sceptile into helping. If only she’d kept on fighting that fight. Maybe then this last stand would have come sooner. Maybe then the Archopy standing behind her would have been stronger, more prepared, not all scared out of their minds at the thought of a battle they knew they were going to lose.

If only Azma hadn’t been so afraid herself, back then, when They’d broken her spirit, causing her followers to lose all hope as their leader simply gave up. It had worked just as They had planned; had They killed her, it would have inspired her comrades to fight with even greater vigour in retaliation, but this way, the resistance had been quietly snuffed out. Azma knew that it could have happened differently, that the fight could have gone on – but she’d just been so scared. After what They’d done to her, it was all she could do simply to raise Zathern, trying her best to make him someone she could be proud of. She hadn’t even managed that, in the end.

But that wasn’t the only reason she was still alive. Certain members of Them had been so angered by her defiance once upon a time that They had decided simply killing her wasn’t enough of a revenge. They intended to destroy everything she cared about and leave her with nothing before giving her the release of death. She’d known that all along, ever since Zathern had hatched and rekindled a spark of light in her life. And the thing that terrified her the most was the knowledge that, in all likelihood, this fate of hers was coming up over the ridge towards her. She could hope otherwise, but hope had never got her anywhere.

The waiting was driving her insane.

Thunder rumbled behind her. As soon as it died down there came the sound of someone crashing frantically through the trees. Azma turned to see Natrene, the Archopy she’d put on sentry duty, flying in tight, panicky circles above the clearing

“They’re coming!” he screeched. “Every single one of Them! They’re all here!”

Azma saw the looks of pure undisguised fear on the faces of each Archopy and Grovyle at the edge of the clearing, all of them looking around frantically at each other and at the empty space where she was meant to be. Anxious mutterings started up, and she could imagine what they were saying: was Azma not there because she knew it was hopeless? Had their leader abandoned them again?

Not this time, she told herself. No more time for self-pity. Her kind needed her. Azma heaved a huge breath, summoning up the remnants of the Archopy she’d once been, ready for one final stand. No matter how hopeless, they’d fight to the end.

“Everyone!” she called over the rain, racing up through the clearing, around the huddled Treecko and Grovyle and towards the protective ring of Archopy. She reached her space just past the tree she’d always slept in, her fellow Archopy on either side of her, facing determinedly out into the forest. “Do not despair! There may be more of Them than us, but we have so much more to fight for! They are fighting out of some tiny, meaningless prejudice. We are fighting for our futures – and for our children!”

“For our children!” echoed a scattered but determined cry across the line.

Somewhere back in the dark areas of her mind, Azma only hoped that her own child would not be coming anywhere near this clearing today.

The first of Them became visible through the trees ahead, darting forward, purposeful and predatory. Another came into sight, and another, and soon there was a whole line of Sceptile advancing through the forest towards them, stretching out for as far as the eye could see on either side. Her heart twisted in terror, but Azma stayed steadfast, not backing down, not showing weakness. She pumped energy into her front leaves. Her fellow Archopy did the same.

In a flash, They were upon them. Azma darted forwards, spreading her wings to deliver strikes to two Sceptile on either side of her, blocking their way through. They instantly rounded on her, both of them, blades scything towards her, but she leapt back out of the way, parrying their weapons with her own.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw an Archopy turn into the clearing and throw herself at a Sceptile who’d managed to get past. Elsewhere around the edge, other Archopy and even the older Grovyle were bravely locked in combat with the Sceptile, forming a barrier of blades, bodies and sheer desperation that They could not breach.

As the two Sceptile whose strikes she’d been parrying leapt back to regroup, Azma allowed her heart to soar in hope, just a little. It wasn’t over yet, at least.

Between her two opponents, she saw a pair of Sceptile a short distance away who hadn’t joined the fray yet, apparently just hanging back and waiting. The larger of the pair caught her eye, and before she could react he’d shot at her with frightening speed and power, pinning her to the tree.

Azma let out an involuntary shriek of fear, her breath coming fast and shallow in her throat as the Sceptile loomed over her, his sheer strength rendering her helpless to move. She forced herself to look up into the face that had been in her nightmares for so long now. Unlike the rest of the Sceptile, his eyes were not taken over by the monster inside. They didn’t need to be. He was a monster already.

“Hello, Azma,” hissed Tharann in a voice of pure malice, sending a horrid shiver down her spine. “Long time no see.”

Azma fought down the uncontrollable trembling that threatened to overwhelm her. Even after how long it had been, even after how much she’d tried to move on, Tharann still reduced the rational parts of her mind to that of a terrified child. But she refused to let him win so easily. With a huge effort, she pushed herself up from the tree just slightly, enough to catch sight of the other Sceptile standing there behind him, even as she knew with a heavy heart that she really, really didn’t want to see who it was.

Tharann gave that horrible smirk of his and shifted to give her a proper look at who he’d brought with him.

The echoes of screams and frantic shouts from the battle around her barely registered with Azma as she stared at the Sceptile. He was gazing at her with an empty sort of hunger in his eyes, buried so deep behind the monster inside him that almost nobody would have been able to recognise who it was.

But a mother always knew. Azma slumped back against the tree, letting out a faint moan of anguish. The Sceptile standing before her had once been her son, until Tharann had taken him and twisted him and crushed all the good out of him like he did with everything else.

And yet, as her heart plummeted and despair rose up to claim her, Azma couldn’t pretend she hadn’t been expecting this. It didn’t surprise her at all.

- - -​

Gazing through the rain at the Archopy, the Sceptile was hidden so far back behind a mask of ruthless, predatory hunger that the real Zathern wasn’t quite registering what he was seeing. It was like he was looking at it through thick, dense forest. The pain and despair in his mother’s eyes – he knew it was there, but he couldn’t quite see it properly.

Zathern tilted his head, trying to get a better look. Some vague part of him wanted to push forward to help her, but all the rest of him saw was a nameless, faceless Archopy. Just another victim. And it was easier, seeing her like that. So much so that he couldn’t and didn’t want to pull free of the monster inside. It was protecting him from the pain that this might bring. Wasn’t that what it was meant to do?

“Why, Zathern?” he heard the Archopy – his mother – say. It took him a moment to realise that she was asking him.

“It’s easier,” he said distantly, not quite meeting her eyes. She still looked mostly like a target, so long as he didn’t look too closely at her.

“No,” she said, with what might have been incredible anguish in her voice; he couldn’t really tell. “Killing is never easier! You must know that. Please…”

“It is,” he replied simply, although Zathern wasn’t completely sure if he agreed. Hadn’t he had to fight to convince himself he wasn’t doing anything wrong every day?

But that had got easier. Like now, with his mother here about to be killed and it didn’t even hurt. Not really. That was why he’d left the sunset side in the first place. So it didn’t hurt. This just made sure of it.

“No, Zathern!” the Archopy insisted. “That’s the monster inside you speaking! You were only ever meant to let it out while hunting. I had to teach you, but I never meant…”

Still pinning the Archopy lazily against the tree with one arm, the other Sceptile – Tharann, his father – chuckled. The Archopy slumped.

Zathern remembered that now. He remembered his mother teaching him to let out the inner predator for hunting, making him promise only ever to do so when he needed food. So what was he doing with it here?

But he couldn’t push past it. This would be so painful if he let the real him back out, saw this with his own eyes like he should have done. He didn’t want it to hurt that much. It didn’t have to. She was going to die anyway, no matter what he did.

“It’s not just that,” he said vaguely, shifting his gaze to look at the other Sceptile. “My father. I found my father.”

“No,” his mother moaned. “Please don’t tell me you were lured in by him. He may be your father, but he doesn’t care about you at all!”

Zathern felt a twinge inside him, some kind of inkling that this might have been true. “But you lied to me,” he said to the Archopy quickly before he could think too much about it. “You never told me about him. You never told me my father was a Sceptile.” There was anger entering his voice, although he wasn’t sure why; did he really believe this? Hadn’t there been a time when the thought of his mother lying to him would have been unthinkable? “You lied,” he said again, more forcefully.

“I didn’t lie!” his mother insisted. “I would never have lied to you. I just didn’t tell you the whole truth because I was afraid… I was afraid this might happen. But I never lied.”

Something about this sounded familiar. Zathern’s gaze shifted to Tharann again. “He… he said that too,” he muttered. “About him being my father. That he didn’t tell the whole truth but he never lied. He said the exact same thing…” He looked back at his mother, confused. Who was he meant to believe?

“No,” said Azma, strongly but with a waver in her voice. “He must have lied.” She glanced at the Sceptile looming over her. Zathern could see the huge amount of fear in her eyes. “What did you tell him?”

Tharann grinned that same grin he always did, the one Zathern usually took to be friendly. “Oh, that it just happened by accident one day while I was over here, that I was incredibly ashamed of myself. I mean, that was what happened. Wasn’t it, Azma?”

The Archopy shrunk for a moment as she looked into his eyes, but then turned urgently back to Zathern. “No!” she said. “Zathern, you mustn’t believe him. He was already one of Them – I was fighting so hard that They thought they had to stop me. He thought he had to stop me.” She paused for a moment, closing her eyes as a shudder went through her – seeing his mother like that almost made him shudder too. “He raped me, Zathern.”

Zathern’s gaze jerked towards Tharann as he felt something finally shove its way through the haze of the monster inside – disgust. “You did what?”

Tharann smiled again. His smile no longer looked friendly – in fact, Zathern was beginning to think that it hadn’t ever been friendly at all. “Oh, come on, Zathern, do you really want to believe her? She’s lying!”

“She’s not,” he said simply. Tharann bristled in irritation at the same time as Azma’s eyes lit up in hope.

“Zathern,” she said quickly, frantically, her gaze reaching out to him. “You’ve got to stop this. Come away from Them. This is what Tharann was trying to do to me all along – if he could take my son and turn him against me, he’d have won. But you’re still in there, Zathern! Please.” Through the steadily thinning forest of his mind he was sure he could hear her voice breaking. “Please, come back to me.”

He could see how much pain his mother was in, and it hurt. “No,” he said, fidgeting, trying to retreat back behind the inner predator again. “You’re going to die. Even if I do, he’s still going to kill you. I can’t.” He shook his head, taking a step back. “That was why I left. I can’t watch you…”

“Please, Zathern!” Azma begged. “Yes, I’m going to die either way, but you don’t have to give him what he wants! Don’t let him win!”

Zathern suddenly saw something there he could latch onto, a way out, and he took it. “Win? Let him win?” He stared at her, trying to feel appalled. “Is that all I was to you? A game between you and him to see if you could raise me to be good?”

He could see Azma desperately shaking her head, but it didn’t hit him quite as hard as it had a moment ago. “No!” she cried. “No, that’s not it!”

“All the way through my childhood, everything you taught me… you were just trying to beat him?” Zathern’s gaze moved to Tharann – the Sceptile was glaring at him, but he didn’t care – and then back to his mother. “Did you actually care about me?”

“Of course I did!” Azma insisted. The despair was back in her eyes again, but Zathern refused to let it hurt as much as it should; if his mother hadn’t properly cared about him, then he didn’t have to properly care about her. “Of course I cared about you! I love you, Zathern. I’m your mother.”

Zathern glanced at Tharann again. “But you didn’t want to be,” he said.

Azma’s fearful gaze moved to the Sceptile. “I…” She seemed to sag in his grip. “Maybe I didn’t, not at first. But then I met you, and I changed. I do love you. Please, Zathern, come back.”

Zathern backed away, feeling himself shaking as raindrops fell all over him, sliding off his scales. “I can’t,” he said quietly. “Please. Don’t try to make me.”

As Azma looked straight at him, her eyes softened, filled with pity. She understood. “Oh, Zathern,” she said. “I’m so sorry this world’s done this to you.” She looked up at Tharann bitterly and then wrenched herself out of his grip. “Looks like we’re done here, then,” she hissed at him. “Congratulations. You win.”

She turned back to her son. He could see tears glistening in her eyes and forced himself not to care. “Goodbye, Zathern,” she said, her voice shaking in total despair.

Then the emotion was gone, her gaze growing cold and empty as she gave herself over to the monster inside. The Archopy that had once been Azma lit one of her blades, stared at it dully for a moment, then turned her back to him and raised it to her throat.

Zathern realised what she was about to do just in time and twisted desperately away, screwing his eyes shut. He heard the sound of a body slumping lifelessly to the ground and flinched. He was shaking all over.

Tharann walked into his line of vision, smiling that same smile of his. Zathern looked disgustedly into his father’s eyes – no, not his father’s; Tharann had never really been a father to him – and then turned and ran away from the battle, from the sounds of dying Archopy and their children, as fast as his uncontrollably trembling limbs could take him.

- - -​

He only came to a stop when it felt like he couldn’t run any more. Zathern collapsed onto the ground, still shaking, his breathing coming in heavy gasps. He was still on the sunset side, he dimly realised as he stared around through the rain. But it wasn’t like it mattered now. No-one else lived here anymore.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, staring emptily into space and trying not to think about anything at all as the shaking within him slowly subsided. The next thing he was properly aware of was the sound of someone approaching behind him.

“Zath?”

He turned around. It was Karsa. She was giving him that concerned look of hers.

“Hey, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” He didn’t respond. Her frown grew. “What’s wrong?”

Zathern continued to stare emptily just past her as she sat herself down next to him. Her arm leaves were covered with blood.

Karsa noticed and hastily wiped them on the ground. “Really, Zath,” she said. “Tell me. I saw you letting out the monster inside this morning like I said, so you should have been fine. What happened?”

Zathern fixed his gaze on the ground in front of him. “My mother,” he said hollowly.

Karsa paused, awkward. “I know your mother was one of the winged lot and everything, but… I thought you were okay with that? That’s why you came over to our side, wasn’t it? So it wouldn’t hurt, so you could forget.”

Zathern snorted bitterly. He supposed he probably would have been able to forget if Azma had been just another face in the fight, just another member of the losing side. He probably wouldn’t even have been nearby when she was killed.

“Tharann had other ideas,” he muttered.

“Oh,” said Karsa. It sounded like she understood, but her voice was suddenly somehow heavier, almost guilty. “Oh, of course. Tharann and Azma. I remember now. That’s why you were here.”

He rounded on her. “That’s what? Why do you know that?”

Karsa sighed, not quite meeting his eye. “The plan to get revenge on Azma for fighting so hard. I… I guess you know about that now. Just before he brought you in, Tharann told all of us exactly why he was doing it, to make sure none of us would say anything that might turn you away. That’s why I didn’t tell you exactly what we did straight away, remember? It was because Tharann wanted to recruit you – because he needed you to destroy Azma.”

“So you knew?” Zathern found his words coming out more forcefully than he’d meant them to. “The whole time, you knew exactly why I was here, what he was trying to do to my mother, and you never told me?”

“I forgot!” Karsa protested. “Well, not actually, but I made myself forget. You know how it is. You do it too. It’s easier if we just forget anything we don’t like about this. I like you, Zathern. I didn’t want to remember the real reason you were here. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t.”

Zathern backed away from her, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “It does. That time you came after me to convince me to stay there – was that all part of Tharann’s plan, too? Has everything you’ve been doing to ‘help’ me stay been Tharann’s orders?”

“No!” She was frantic and defensive for a moment before she deflated, looking guilty. “Okay, yeah, you were right. That time I came after you, I was ordered to by Tharann. He’d seen us getting along and he thought I’d be the best way to keep you here.” She held up a hand before he could reply. “But that didn’t change the fact that I meant everything I said. I did want to help you. It didn’t matter that Tharann had told me to. I might have done it anyway even if he hadn’t. I probably would have.”

Zathern sighed and looked resentfully away. “If you cared, you could have told me what was going to happen to my mother. Then she might… then this might not have…”

Karsa edged tentatively closer to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Zath,” she said, with genuine sympathy in her voice. “I probably should have, you’re right. But that’s not how I work, is it?” She gave a dejected sigh, staring at the ground. “I find something I like, then I hide from and forget the things about it that I don’t like. I was only ever in this for the power it gives me, you know. I’ve… I’ve never been in control of my life like I am during the hunts. I need something like that. I can’t help it. So I just forget everything else about it that makes it bad. Like today. Today I overpowered a bunch of children. They were younger and weaker than me; of course I did.” She let out a mirthless chuckle. “So what was that really going to prove? But I went and did it anyway.” Karsa looked desperately at him. “Three. I killed three children, Zathern.”

He shuddered and turned away from her. “I don’t want to know, Karsa.”

“Well, exactly!” she exclaimed. “Neither do I! And I’ll probably be pretending it never happened and getting back to the usual routine by tomorrow, because that’s what I do.” There was a sort of pained despair in her eyes as he looked back at her.

“Wait,” Zathern said. “‘Back to the usual routine’? It’s not over yet? I thought… I thought we’d…”

“You thought we’d killed them all now,” Karsa finished for him. She shook her head slowly. “No. Some of them ran for it when they saw it was hopeless. I heard there was one, maybe two, who weren’t even at the battle in the first place. Skorrhen’s not going to stop until every one of them is dead.” She sighed. “Neither am I, Zathern. Being part of this lets me be something. I can’t leave. I can’t go back to being nothing again.”

“You’re not nothing,” Zathern said quietly.

She looked up at him in surprise.

“You’re not,” he said again, more strongly. “You’ve helped me so much. Your way of forgetting about things – it might not be the best way, or the right way, but it works. It makes things easier.”

Karsa tilted her head, frowning at him. “But you never had to…”

“But I did, though, didn’t I? Tharann would never have given up trying to recruit me. He and Skorrhen would have just kept manipulating and bullying and forcing me until I gave in. If you hadn’t been there to convince me, everything would have hurt so much more. But you made it painless.”

His mother’s final moments were still running through his head: the monster inside taking over her eyes as she lit her blade, the thud of a body hitting the ground. He shuddered, trying to push away the pain the memory brought. He didn’t want to feel it. And he knew he didn’t have to.

“Help me forget again, Karsa,” he said in a small voice, shifting nearer to her. “I don’t want to remember any of this.”

Karsa gave a sigh, and it sounded like all her misery was flowing out of her with it. She put an arm around Zathern, holding him close. “You’re not the only one,” she said. “How about I help you forget if you help me forget?”

Her claws ran lightly around the seeds on his back, and he shivered at her touch. It fleetingly occurred to him that right now there was nowhere else he wanted to be other than here with Karsa. “Yeah,” he murmured, leaning in closer to her. “That sounds good.”

 
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Dragonfree

Just me
Azmaaaa! :D

They would appear in the clearing and find no-one here save the hidden children, who were not Their targets.
Hmm, I'm pretty sure that "here" ought to be a "there" - it's referring to "the clearing", and since it's named as a particular place, even if she happens to be there at the moment, grammatically it seems (at least to me) you should use "there" for it.

The Treecko and Grovyle themselves stared up at their parents, if they still had them; the orphans turned to Azma. Some looked frightened, but the worst were those whose eyes still held the innocent shine of someone who hadn’t yet grasped that their life was one day going to end.
D:

All of them, especially the children, looked exactly how Azma felt inside: more anxious and afraid than ever before.
I don't really like that "inside"; just "looked exactly how Azma felt" should suffice.

“Do we have to go?” Tefiren asked petulantly, staring up at her as he glided below.

Forsira sighed. “They’re going to start killing the children, Tefiren. That’s not something we can just ignore.”

“Sure we can!” He circled up and around, putting on a burst of speed. “We just turn around and fly back this way!”

He was flying straight at her, an expectant gleam in his eyes. Forsira refused to move, forcing him to dip beneath her at the last moment with a mumbled moan.

[...]

“Aww, come on, Sira!” Tefiren complained. He was now flying upside-down beneath her, flapping his wings in a lopsided, backwards sort of way to stay in flight. The corners of Forsira’s mouth twitched up into a smile, but she tried not to let him see that. “It’ll just be a bunch of people talking! Talking’s boring, I keep telling you that. It’s not like they’ll need us!”

“I’m going, Tefiren,” Forsira said firmly, reaching down to jab him out of his topsy-turvy flight. He yelped and tumbled indignantly through the air before righting himself. “Azma, the Archopy in charge of this,” she went on. “I used to know her. She’d want me to come.” She gazed pointedly down at him, but her sincerity seemed to just bounce off him; he still mostly looked miffed at being forced back the right way up. “I can’t make you come with me. But it would mean a lot to me if you did.”

[...]

Tefiren huffed and pushed energy into every other one of his leaves, flapping the oddly-shaped, half-glowing wings to rise up and draw level with her again. “Fine,” he mumbled, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. “But seriously, Sira, you’re being boring. We’re doing something fun after this.”
He can be so delightfully childish. x3

Also, I like the callback to "talking is boring". He doesn't want to talk about this. And afterwards he wants to do something fun and stop thinking about it.

Because it would prove that Draern had been wrong about him. That Tefiren wasn’t a sick bastard like the late Archopy had said. That, deep down, he really did care about the rest of the Archopy, even if he didn’t show it.
You can almost hear Forsira silently pleading that he'll come.

In the corner of her vision, a bright green light glowed and flickered. His wings normal again, Tefiren was staring intently at them, making one leaf on its own shine and morph into a blade before extinguishing it to light a different one at random, each time accompanied by a faint hiss as the energy turned the raindrops to steam. Seeing her watching, he grinned at her, that twinkle of discovery in his eyes, although she wasn’t quite sure what was so important about him having figured out a way to keep their leaves dry when they were already waterproof enough.
***, I love how his mind is always on making observations on how better to evade Them. I'm not sure yet how he's going to apply this trick, but I don't doubt it's going to be something fun.

Tefiren seemed uncomfortable with the attention; without acknowledging any of them and without so much as a glance at the children, he slunk to the edge of the clearing and scampered up a tree.
Aww, look at him all determined to avoid looking at the kids he knows are going to be killed.

I think part of why this really, really gets to him is that when he was a Grovyle (and probably Treecko too) he was completely carefree and if They had made this decision earlier, Verdan could have easily snatched him up without warning sometime when he was paying him no notice.

Forsira did too; it seemed worryingly like there were less Archopy than there were Treecko and Grovyle huddled nervously among them. In fact, even with what was meant to be every Archopy on the island, Forsira was almost sure there were less than there had been back when she’d lived here, when only a fraction had used Azma’s clearing for safety
That should be fewer Archopy, not less (less refers to quantities of uncountable things).

Had that many really been killed while she’d been gallivanting with Tefiren?
I like the word "gallivanting".

“Pfft,” Tefiren snorted from beside her, quietly enough that no-one else would have heard. “What’s with her? Does she even have kids of her own?”
Ouch. (Nice job discrediting her like she doesn't know what she's talking about and what she says has no meaning, Tefiren.)

That glowing and flickering had started up in the edge of Forsira’s vision again, distracting her. She turned to Tefiren; he was making his leaves glow one by one again, an intent focus in his eyes like this was far more important than what was going on down below.

“Psst,” Forsira hissed at him.

He looked up from what he was doing, flashing her a brief grin. “Bored!” he whispered, before turning back to his wing leaves.

She knew that wasn’t it.
***. Forsira's starting to understand a bit of how his mind works. (I like how you say "distracting her". It's definitely distracting - it's just that he's really distracting himself.)

“There is nothing else for it,” Azma said eventually.
For it? I've never heard this wording before, but correct me if I'm wrong.

“We will have to fight Them. All of us.”

There was a rustle of leaves beside Forsira as Tefiren suddenly jerked up in his perch, staring at Azma like she was mad.
"She wants to fight them. She's insane."

...that aside, yeah, that idea must scare the bejeesus out of him. What does she mean, he can't run away from everything anymore?!

Tefiren was shaking his head, still staring at Azma in disbelief. “She’s insane,” he whispered to himself. His voice was wavering.
Oh, poor frightened Tefiren. Your entire worldview is being challenged and Forsira is probably going to agree with it.

“We cannot let this happen!” Azma called, her voice rising high, ringing out across the clearing. “We cannot let ourselves be lost! We cannot let this become a world where future generations of Pokémon live on oblivious, not even knowing what an Archopy was!”
Hello there, dramatic irony!

“I understand that this is a big ask for those of you who don’t have children of your own,” she said, more quietly.
A big ask? o_O

Forsira heard Tefiren spit out a hysterical sort of half-laugh.
"Everyone here? You think I'm going to risk myself for them?"

“They’re insane,” Tefiren muttered from beside her, his voice high and shaking. “They’re all insane…”

Forsira turned to him helplessly. “Tefiren…”

His head suddenly jerked around to face her, something desperate in his gaze that she’d never seen before.

Then, faster than anything, Tefiren turned and leapt from the tree, spreading his wings to flee away from the clearing.
Frightened Tefiren is delightful.

There was a question in her eyes, but not an angry one, as if she was simply asking Forsira if she was going to run, too.

Forsira looked back towards where Tefiren had fled.

She couldn’t leave him.

With the briefest of apologetic glances at Azma, Forsira spread her own wings and followed Tefiren in running away from the approaching storm.
Awwww. D:

He came into sight as she cleared the canopy. Her partly-glowing wings flapped hard to catch up to him under the rain, his own wings plain and dull as he flew frantically into the distance.
I love this. He's too frantic to even remember to turn his wings on, while Forsira, the one who always just followed him with the fancy tricks, is clear-headed enough to use it.

Forsira had seen him escape Their clutches countless times, but this was the first time it had ever seemed like Tefiren was running away.
Powerful sentence.

He didn’t stop, not even as he flew over the ridge, the highest part of the island, and on towards the sunrise side.
...whoa. I have to admit I actually have no idea what's going on in his head now.

The most important thing was that she caught up to Tefiren and found out what on earth was going through his head.
...and I see Forsira shares my thoughts.

Dropping down after him, she saw with some relief that he’d circled around, silencing her irrational fear that he was just going to fly into the sea.
So that's where she got that idea.

He was heading back towards the cliff face, vanishing into a hole on it, and Forsira realised. This cliff contained caves – caves that could only be reached by flying. The ultimate hiding place.
...ha. How did he find that, I wonder?

Anyway, this clears up what he was thinking: running away to huddle in the safest place in the world where nobody can try to make him fight anyone.

“You followed me,” he said, still not looking at her, his voice anxious. “Why did you follow me?”
He probably doesn't really want her to see him like this, does he?

A pause. Then, in a small voice, “Of course I could.”
Aww, his defense mechanisms are breaking. :3

“Please, Forsira,” Tefiren cut her off, his voice shaking. “I can handle everyone else on this island thinking I’m a sick freak, but please, not you.”
Awwwww! :3 He's adorable. (Breaking news.)

“Because I don’t want to die,” he said simply. Beneath the tremble in his voice there was an echo of that tone he always had when he made something sound like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Because how could you want to die? How could you stay and fight and get yourselves killed as if the idea of dying isn't the most utterly terrifying, chilling, petrifying thing in the world?

When you said you liked this part for less Tefiren-related reasons than the last one, I thought that meant Tefiren wasn't going to be very interesting in it! But I'm glad to be wrong. :D

And now that Forsira thought about it, saw the way Tefiren looked pathetically back at her, she realised that of course it was. No wonder he could come up with so many brilliant escape tactics when they were what would keep him alive. No wonder he took such glee in escaping Their clutches if it stopped him from thinking about what would happen to him the one time he didn’t. Of course he tried to avoid caring that the rest of the Archopy were being killed – because the same thing would happen to him one day.

Suddenly he wasn’t such an enigma after all. It all made sense with that one, simple reason. She’d thought Tefiren made the life-or-death chases thrilling and exciting because he was just that fearless, but in fact it was the opposite. He did it because he was the most scared of them all.
Tefireeeeeen!

I would hug him, but it seems Forsira is going to do it for me.

He was avoiding her gaze again. “You should go,” he whispered shakily. “You wanted to fight, I could tell. You shouldn’t let me stop you.”
Because that's totally the only reason you don't want her there comforting you, Tefiren.

“Why not?” Tefiren turned to stare at her, something in his gaze reminiscent of that puzzled look of his, like he couldn’t comprehend why she’d ever want to stay with him.
Oh, Tefiren, you're so cute and oblivious.

Tefiren was shaking his head, backing away from her, still looking afraid. “No,” he mumbled. “Don’t say that. I don’t deserve that.”
Oh dear. A relationship with attachment and bonding and caring is the last thing he wants right now.

Tefiren let out a mad, broken sort of cackle. “Risk?” he said incredulously. “I never risked anything! You know what I’m like, Forsira. Do you honestly think I would have done something if I thought it would put me at risk?”
I think we need a new Tefirenword for Tefirendenial. Or maybe Tefirationalizing.

I like how it's really coming out that Forsira's actually been quite perceptive of Tefiren's behaviour, even if she needed this final prompt to put the pieces together - even while being lovestruck and dismissing them, she did notice all these things and now that everything has clicked into place she understands him perfectly.

“You should,” he muttered, crouching low and pressing himself against the back wall. “You wanted to go and fight. The rest of them deserve your help. I don’t.”

She sighed and smiled sadly at him. “That’s not what I asked, Tefiren. Do you want me to leave?”
He's so adorable when dodging questions. And again, I love how Forsira gets it now, perfectly.

She could feel that he wanted to relax, but he didn’t, shifting uncomfortably next to her. “No,” he muttered feverishly, “but you’re just like the others. You’re going to die someday, Forsira. I can’t…”
...get attached to you.

Tefiren managed half a grin, but his eyes were still pained. “No, but that’s not… That’s not true. You know that. Even I’m… even I’m not going to…”

He was beginning to tremble beside her again.
He's so broken and scared and vulnerable and aaaa and even now he can't bring himself to voice aloud the fact that They're going to catch him eventually! :3

Inside the small cavern up on the cliff, all thoughts of peril and death and the fight that would soon be playing out on the other side of the world were forgotten. Outside, the rainstorm continued.
I like how you bring the scene back outside and to the fact the other Archopy are going to be fighting for their lives here.

This is already my favorite part so far.

It almost made him feel insignificant, just one face among the crowd. But then, none of the others in this gathering were the son of one of the two Sceptile standing atop a fallen tree at the front of the clearing, head and shoulders above the rest. That made Zathern matter. It had to.
Why so adorable and tragic. D:

Something lurched inside Zathern. The children. They were going to kill the children now.

With all the practice he’d had, he pushed that feeling back down, crushed it, smothered it. He still couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy. Looking around at the rest of the Sceptile, some of them seemed to be fidgeting uncomfortably. Even Karsa showed a flicker of doubt beneath her confident gaze.
Poor lonely Sceptile who had nowhere else to go and had no idea what they were getting themselves into. D:

“My friends Verdan, Gartane and Elthorn here –” he indicated three Sceptile standing near the front of the group, all of whom Zathern vaguely recognised from his childhood – “have been sacrificing a lot of their time over on the sunset side for us. They know all of the wingless Archopy by sight.”
I like how he says they've been "sacrificing a lot of their time for us". Be grateful to them! Look what they endured for our sake!

He lowered his head to look over the crowd of Sceptile, looking each of them in the eye in turn – he seemed to smile a little as he caught Zathern’s eye, which Zathern wasn’t sure whether to be proud or unnerved about.
D:

Zathern nodded. He couldn’t deny that a large part of his mind, a part that he hadn’t been allowing any say recently, would be incredibly glad once this was over.
Awwww.

“Still,” she insisted. “This is much bigger than anything else. Just… just promise me you’ll let out the monster inside as early as possible once tomorrow comes, okay? The longer it’s out there, the further back the real you will be.” She gave him a sympathetic look. “I know you, Zath, and this won’t be as easy as you think. I don’t want to see you hurt.”
This is such creepy advice but she's giving it because she sincerely cares and aa. D:

“Not all of us,” Tharann said slyly. “I mean, most of them’ll just be killing the children – Skorrhen and Verdan are heading that lot – but I’ve got a very particular task in mind. And I need your help for that, Zathern.”

“Really?” Zathern tried not to show it, but he couldn’t help feeling a glow of pride. His father needed him. “What task?”

“That would be telling,” Tharann said with a thin smile. “Think of it as a surprise.”
D: He's going to use him against Azma, isn't he? Oh God. And poor oblivious Zathern has no idea.

Tharann patted his son on the back. “I’ll see you tomorrow then, ‘Zath’!” he said, before turning and walking away.
Brr. Even his nickname is creepy when Tharann says it. (With the single quotes, it makes it sarcastic and sneering.)

If only Azma hadn’t been so afraid herself, back then, when They’d broken her spirit, causing her followers to lose all hope as their leader simply gave up. It had worked just as They had planned; had They killed her, it would have inspired her comrades to fight with even greater vigour in retaliation, but this way, the resistance had been quietly snuffed out. Azma knew that it could have happened differently, that the fight could have gone on – but she’d just been so scared. After what They’d done to her, it was all she could do simply to raise Zathern, trying her best to make him someone she could be proud of. She hadn’t even managed that, in the end.
Azmaaaaaaaa. ;_;

The waiting was driving her insane.
Since this is an exact repetition of a sentence from just a few paragraphs ago, it feels a little off. I'd reword it.

Somewhere back in the dark areas of her mind, Azma only hoped that her own child would not be coming anywhere near this clearing today.
DDDD:

Azma let out an involuntary shriek of fear, her breath coming fast and shallow in her throat as the Sceptile loomed over her, his sheer strength rendering her helpless to move. She forced herself to look up into the face that had been in her nightmares for so long now. Unlike the rest of the Sceptile, his eyes were not taken over by the monster inside. They didn’t need to be. He was a monster already.

“Hello, Azma,” hissed Tharann in a voice of pure malice, sending a horrid shiver down her spine. “Long time no see.”

Azma fought down the uncontrollable trembling that threatened to overwhelm her. Even after how long it had been, even after how much she’d tried to move on, Tharann still reduced the rational parts of her mind to that of a terrified child. But she refused to let him win so easily. With a huge effort, she pushed herself up from the tree just slightly, enough to catch sight of the other Sceptile standing there behind him, even as she knew with a heavy heart that she really, really didn’t want to see who it was.

Tharann gave that horrible smirk of his and shifted to give her a proper look at who he’d brought with him.

The echoes of screams and frantic shouts from the battle around her barely registered with Azma as she stared at the Sceptile. He was gazing at her with an empty sort of hunger in his eyes, buried so deep behind the monster inside him that almost nobody would have been able to recognise who it was.

But a mother always knew. Azma slumped back against the tree, letting out a faint moan of anguish. The Sceptile standing before her had once been her son, until Tharann had taken him and twisted him and crushed all the good out of him like he did with everything else.

And yet, as her heart plummeted and despair rose up to claim her, Azma couldn’t pretend she hadn’t been expecting this. It didn’t surprise her at all.
This chills to the bone. D: Mostly I'm struck with how well Azma's trauma comes across here, the sheer power of the grip the memory still has on her.

I'm guessing the reason she doesn't call the inner predator the monster inside is that it reminds her of the perpetual monster that is Tharann.

Tharann grinned that same grin he always did, the one Zathern usually took to be friendly. “Oh, that it just happened by accident one day while I was over here, that I was incredibly ashamed of myself. I mean, that was what happened. Wasn’t it, Azma?”

The Archopy shrunk for a moment as she looked into his eyes, but then turned urgently back to Zathern.
wrgaergarhiegoaiæhrg he is so evil and it's so ridiculously heartbreaking seeing how much power he still has over Azma. D:

She paused for a moment, closing her eyes as a shudder went through her – seeing his mother like that almost made him shudder too. “He raped me, Zathern.”
It's been pretty (very) heavily implied already and I'd strongly suspected it since pretty much the beginning, but D:

Tharann smiled again. His smile no longer looked friendly – in fact, Zathern was beginning to think that it hadn’t ever been friendly at all.
OF COURSE IT WAS NEVER FRIENDLY HE IS EVIL. D: SNAP OUT OF IT ZATHERN I KNOW YOU WON'T BUT DO IT ANYWAY.

Zathern suddenly saw something there he could latch onto, a way out, and he took it. “Win? Let him win?” He stared at her, trying to feel appalled. “Is that all I was to you? A game between you and him to see if you could raise me to be good?”
argh that is so desperate. ;_; Really he's turning the whole thing around - a game to make him into one of Them and break Azma was all he was to Tharann, but seeing it that way would just be too painful at this point and all he can do is project it onto Azma instead.

“Of course I cared about you! I love you, Zathern. I’m your mother.”

Zathern glanced at Tharann again. “But you didn’t want to be,” he said.
Ah. Now he's found what seems like relatively solid ground to stand on. I don't think he's coming back now. ;;

As Azma looked straight at him, her eyes softened, filled with pity. She understood. “Oh, Zathern,” she said. “I’m so sorry this world’s done this to you.”
;_;

Zathern realised what she was about to do just in time and twisted desperately away, screwing his eyes shut. He heard the sound of a body slumping lifelessly to the ground and flinched. He was shaking all over.

Tharann walked into his line of vision, smiling that same smile of his. Zathern looked disgustedly into his father’s eyes – no, not his father’s; Tharann had never really been a father to him – and then turned and ran away from the battle, from the sounds of dying Archopy and their children, as fast as his uncontrollably trembling limbs could take him.
;_______;

Her arm leaves were covered with blood.
D:

“I forgot!” Karsa protested. “Well, not actually, but I made myself forget. You know how it is. You do it too. It’s easier if we just forget anything we don’t like about this. I like you, Zathern. I didn’t want to remember the real reason you were here. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t.”
You are so horribly misled, Karsa. D:

Karsa edged tentatively closer to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Zath,” she said, with genuine sympathy in her voice. “I probably should have, you’re right. But that’s not how I work, is it?” She gave a dejected sigh, staring at the ground. “I find something I like, then I hide from and forget the things about it that I don’t like. I was only ever in this for the power it gives me, you know. I’ve… I’ve never been in control of my life like I am during the hunts. I need something like that. I can’t help it. So I just forget everything else about it that makes it bad. Like today. Today I overpowered a bunch of children. They were younger and weaker than me; of course I did.” She let out a mirthless chuckle. “So what was that really going to prove? But I went and did it anyway.” Karsa looked desperately at him. “Three. I killed three children, Zathern.”
And so confused.

He shuddered and turned away from her. “I don’t want to know, Karsa.”

“Well, exactly!” she exclaimed. “Neither do I! And I’ll probably be pretending it never happened and getting back to the usual routine by tomorrow, because that’s what I do.” There was a sort of pained despair in her eyes as he looked back at her.
And so tragic.

Really, though she feels in control during the hunts, she is actually completely powerless. She spends half of her life doing things that horrify her because she has nowhere else to turn to and the rest of it trying to force herself to be okay with it. The only time she ever feels in control is when she's explicitly relinquished her control of herself and run away from her responsibility from her actions. Really, she is yet another character who does nothing but try to run from her problems, in yet another different way.

Yeah. Saddest thing ever is right.

So in short this was the best part so far and this fic is amazing.
 
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elyvorg

somewhat backwards.
Dragonfree - Thanks as always for a delightful review. :3 (If there are any closet readers who aren't coming out of the woodwork because they're intimidated about trying to match up to Dragonfree's long strings of comments, please don't be! Your thoughts will still mean a lot to me, even if they aren't this long and fangirly.)

He can be so delightfully childish. x3
Hee, I found him adorable at the beginning of that scene, and I hoped you would too. :3 (Another one of my absolute favourite lines in the fic: the insensitivity and wrongness of his gleeful "Sure we can [ignore the children dying]!")

Hee, I love how his mind is always on making observations on how better to evade Them. I'm not sure yet how he's going to apply this trick, but I don't doubt it's going to be something fun.
This one? It shouldn't be too much of a spoiler to tell you that he has no future use for it whatsoever (at least, none that is shown). The idea is that he's just trying so hard to distract himself from what he's flying towards that his mind's gone into "make discoveries!" mode a little desperately, such that he doesn't notice that this "discovery" of his is completely useless.

Aww, look at him all determined to avoid looking at the kids he knows are going to be killed.

I think part of why this really, really gets to him is that when he was a Grovyle (and probably Treecko too) he was completely carefree and if They had made this decision earlier, Verdan could have easily snatched him up without warning sometime when he was paying him no notice.
Hmm, that's an interesting thought! I'm not sure that would have consciously occurred to him, though. His whole outlook on life changed so suddenly and drastically in that first scene with him, so much that I'm not sure he'd ever have looked back at his life as a Treecko/Grovyle (except for getting ideas for escape tactics). I don't imagine he'd want to think too much about the time in his life when he wasn't inevitably going to be killed.

I like the word "gallivanting".
I liked that word too when I came up with it. x3 Gallivanting is definitely what one does with Tefiren. *nodnod*

Ouch. (Nice job discrediting her like she doesn't know what she's talking about and what she says has no meaning, Tefiren.)
Yess, because Azma really has a point about how they need to protect the children - but Tefiren can't deal with that so this is him trying to convince himself that he doesn't have to listen to her.

For it? I've never heard this wording before, but correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm fairly sure it's right. At least, I know that "there's nothing for it but to [do something]" is a valid phrase, so I assume it can still work on its own without the latter part.

"She wants to fight them. She's insane."

...that aside, yeah, that idea must scare the bejeesus out of him. What does she mean, he can't run away from everything anymore?!
What does she mean, she wants him to choose to put himself in a situation where his death will be inescapable and imminent and today rather than sometime off in the vague, undefined future? The latter thought he can just about deal with, but the former would terrify him to hell and back.

A big ask? o_O
Is it just the wording you're questioning? Because I'm pretty sure that's also a valid phrase.

Frightened Tefiren is delightful.
Truer words have never been spoken.

I love this. He's too frantic to even remember to turn his wings on, while Forsira, the one who always just followed him with the fancy tricks, is clear-headed enough to use it.
Heh. His wing thing is essentially just another of his defence mechanisms, and they're not quite working properly right now.

He probably doesn't really want her to see him like this, does he?
He really doesn't! 'Cause at the moment he's in no state to dodge her questions and pretend that his life is awesome, and if he's not able to hide his fear from her then he won't be able to hide it from himself, either. This conversation is something Tefiren has been desperately trying to avoid ever since Forsira found him again. Although, even though he gets across that he's afraid of dying in this scene, the one thing he still can't bring himself to properly articulate to Forsira is exactly why he's so afraid of getting close to her.

Because how could you want to die? How could you stay and fight and get yourselves killed as if the idea of dying isn't the most utterly terrifying, chilling, petrifying thing in the world?
Eeeee, yes. Behold the most fixed, inherent, incontrovertible piece of Tefirenlogic there is.

I would hug him, but it seems Forsira is going to do it for me.
x3. (If you want to hug him, you'll have to get in line behind me first. D: )

Because that's totally the only reason you don't want her there comforting you, Tefiren.
Of course. But even despite that there is still an element of how he hates himself for being a coward who runs away from doing the right thing because he's too scared, so he really doesn't think he deserves someone like Forsira who gets him and cares about him and wants to help him because someone as selfless and caring as Forsira should be on the other side of the island doing the right thing, not here running away from it with him.

Oh dear. A relationship with attachment and bonding and caring is the last thing he wants right now.
Yesss. That declaration of just how deeply Forsira cares about him scares the hell out of him because it makes him think about what would happen if he cares that much about her, too.

I like how it's really coming out that Forsira's actually been quite perceptive of Tefiren's behaviour, even if she needed this final prompt to put the pieces together - even while being lovestruck and dismissing them, she did notice all these things and now that everything has clicked into place she understands him perfectly.
Mmm, yeah, I see what you mean. I don't think I ever consciously did it, but now that you mention it I can think of a number of moments when it briefly crossed Forsira's mind that there's something not quite rational about Tefiren's behaviour... but then she dismissed it because it's amazing that he can treat this situation with such optimism and glee and that's totally all that matters.

He's so broken and scared and vulnerable and aaaa and even now he can't bring himself to voice aloud the fact that They're going to catch him eventually! :3
Aaa, yes, because if he voices it out loud, that makes it real!

I like how you bring the scene back outside and to the fact the other Archopy are going to be fighting for their lives here.
I'm glad you liked that. I wasn't sure if the "zooming out" during the lovey-dovey fade-to-black would be seen as a slight violation of the fact that this is meant to be Forsira's POV, so it's good that it wasn't jarring after all.

I like how he says they've been "sacrificing a lot of their time for us". Be grateful to them! Look what they endured for our sake!
Haha. Skorrhen did that on his own, too. He scares me sometimes.

Since this is an exact repetition of a sentence from just a few paragraphs ago, it feels a little off. I'd reword it.
It does? I'd made them deliberately the same for what I hoped was effect, but now that you mention it it does seem a little awkward. I'll see what I can do about it.

I'm guessing the reason she doesn't call the inner predator the monster inside is that it reminds her of the perpetual monster that is Tharann.
Hmm. Although that might be part of it, that's not quite it. Azma still thinks of it as the monster inside and calls it as such in her inner monologue; the only time she ever called it "the inner predator" was when she was teaching Zathern and Forsira how to hunt. She'd always known what Tharann intended to do to Zathern and was so scared of it happening that she did everything she could to protect Zathern's innocence, even going so far as to have him know the monster inside by a less chilling name, because she was irrationally afraid that if Zathern thought of it as the monster inside then he might think there's nothing wrong with actually being a monster while in the grip of it.

In some ways Zathern isn't actually wrong when he accuses Azma of seeing him as just a game with Tharann - of course it was so much more than a game to her, but still Azma spent his entire childhood obsessing over protecting him and sheltering him in any way she could to stop Tharann getting at him. And in the end, it was probably because he was so sheltered, much more than most Treecko/Grovyle, that Zathern snapped and ran away when Raphyn died, making everything from then on inevitable. Really, Azma is just as tragic a character as everyone else.

(Also, remember back when Zathern was a Grovyle and met Tharann over on the sunrise side while Raphyn was with him? Take a wild guess why Raphyn was killed almost immediately after he became an Archopy.)

argh that is so desperate. ;_; Really he's turning the whole thing around - a game to make him into one of Them and break Azma was all he was to Tharann, but seeing it that way would just be too painful at this point and all he can do is project it onto Azma instead.
Regardless of what I said above, though, yeah. I'd actually never really noticed that myself, but it is entirely likely that Zathern is doing something like that and aaaa. D:

Really, though she feels in control during the hunts, she is actually completely powerless. She spends half of her life doing things that horrify her because she has nowhere else to turn to and the rest of it trying to force herself to be okay with it. The only time she ever feels in control is when she's explicitly relinquished her control of herself and run away from her responsibility from her actions. Really, she is yet another character who does nothing but try to run from her problems, in yet another different way.
Eeee, yes. I doubt I could have put it better myself. Karsa is adorable.
 
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elyvorg

somewhat backwards.
Huge apologies for the unforgivably long wait! I had exams and distractions and laziness and short version I am a terrible person at keeping to any kind of schedule. I hope any other hypothetical readers aside from Dragonfree haven't forgotten this exists despite the massive gap. If there are any closet readers lurking, since this is the final instalment, this will be your last chance to let me know you've been reading, so please come out and give some kind of comment, even if only a little one! It would be greatly appreciated. :3

<previous

Losing

“Missed again!” Tefiren called out gleefully. Trees and branches rustled and crashed behind him, the sounds of a horde of Sceptile fighting to reorient themselves.

Breathless laughter forced its way out of Forsira as she ran alongside him, shaking her head in incredulity. Even she couldn’t quite get her head around what he’d just done. Sometimes it was almost a shame that he never did the same thing twice.

She could hear footfalls from behind as They began to take chase again. It almost made her chuckle. The forest ahead was thinning out, sloping downwards; between the trees she could see sand, and beyond that, the sea. They didn’t stand a chance of catching the two of them this time. There was nothing They could chase them into.

Forsira caught Tefiren’s eye, seeing a wild gleam there. He hadn’t spread his wings to take off yet, so neither did she.

The sand tickled their feet as they ran out onto the beach, heading straight towards the ocean. She could hear Them behind, crashing through the last of the trees, but They were too late. Barely a wingspan away from the shoreline, Tefiren spread his arms, pumping energy into alternate leaves and flapping powerfully to lift off the ground. Forsira followed suit only a moment later, her feet brushing the water’s surface before she beat her wings to rise into the air over the waves, leaving every one of the Sceptile stranded on the shore.

Tefiren was whooping with unrestricted glee in front of her as he rose into the rainy sky. Forsira flapped a few more times, flying up to join him. He glanced at her over his shoulder and his eyes widened in surprise.

“The leaf thing!” he said, nodding at her wings. “You did it!”

Forsira smiled at him. She’d managed to get every other leaf on her wings to glow, just like he always did. “Of course,” she said. “It is the best way to take off, after all.”

It had taken her an awful lot of practicing while they’d been sitting around in various hiding places with little else to do. But she’d persevered; Tefiren had kept insisting that They’d catch her one day if she couldn’t do it, and while it had seemed like light-hearted joking on the surface, she’d known that deep down he really was worried.

Tefiren grinned the same grin he always did, but she could tell that something about it looked relieved.

There was nothing ahead of them but open sea, so they wheeled around to face the island and saw the row of Sceptile ranged along the edge of the beach. There were so many of Them that it almost made her stop short. That was what she and Tefiren had just escaped from? It had seemed easy a moment ago, but now Forsira suddenly felt that they’d been lucky to get away.

She was too far to properly make out their faces, but Forsira could imagine the predators’ gazes, just watching, waiting for their prey to come back to the land.

Tefiren let out a half-chuckle. “They don’t give up easily, do They?” he said, the cheeriness in his voice sounding a little strained. “That’s the thing about this game. We can win for a while, but it never lasts. Even if we find the perfect way to lose Them, They’ll be back again later.”

Forsira flew a little closer to him, nudging him playfully. “Hey, who wants this game to stop?” she said, trying to think like he did. “You’d get bored, surely?”

He managed a grin. “Of course I would.”

She flapped her wings a couple of times to ascend. “Come on. Let’s focus on losing Them first. Live for today, remember?”

Below her, Tefiren glanced around the rain-filled sky, a hint of nervousness about him. “But… how can we lose Them?” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

Forsira chuckled. “Oh, come on, Tefi!” she said, almost admonishingly. “I thought you’d know this one! Rainclouds!” She looked pointedly upwards to the dark clouds pouring down on them.

Tefiren rose to join her, looking up with her. “But we can’t do that one,” he said, as though it was obvious. “We’ve done it before. It’s predictable. They’ll be expecting it.”

Forsira wheeled around to look at him head-on. “Even if They’re expecting it, They still can’t see us in a cloud, can they?” She glanced up again. “This one isn’t even a thundercloud. So it’s even safer.”

Tefiren snorted. “Safe is boring,” he muttered, but nonetheless he followed her up.

With a few more flaps of her stripily-glowing wings, Forsira rose higher and into the belly of the cloud. She shivered in surprise as she suddenly became soaking wet all over, blindly making her way through the dark watery mist. With a small smile, she thought back to the first time she’d been inside a cloud, the day Tefiren had swooped into her life and –

Wheeee!” she heard from below, twisting in alarm as a vaguely glowing shape zoomed at her, only dodging out of the way at the last moment before it crashed into her. Tefiren grinned from up close through the haze and then began wheeling around in wild twists and loops until he was merely a whizzing, glowing blur in the distance, giggling all the while.

Smiling to herself, Forsira shot away after him, chasing down the shining light and gleeful laughter that she knew was his, following his crazy paths until she finally managed to catch up to him. She reached forward and smacked him playfully on the tail with one of her blunt leaves. “Gotcha,” she said.

He turned to look at her through the haze, pouting.

She laughed. “What has got into you?”

“I have no idea!” he replied, his eyes twinkling manically as he wheeled in a tight loop around her. “We could stay up here forever, and They’d never be able to find us! They don’t have a clue where we are!” he declared, a singsong quality to his voice. With another giggle of glee, he gave a huge flap of his wings and shot away near-vertically up through the cloud.

Grinning, Forsira flew up after him, but she almost stopped flying in surprise as suddenly she wasn’t in the cloud any more. The dark mass was still below them, but there they were, covered in raindrops and gliding across open, clear sky.

Tefiren flicked his head cheekily, sending drips flying at her from his crest leaves.

Forsira didn’t respond. She was still staring in wonder at the cloud they’d just flown out of. “I never realised there was anything above a cloud,” she murmured.

“Neither did I!” Tefiren said excitedly, circling closer to her and looking down as well. “Good, isn’t it?”

“It’s almost like the island isn’t there,” she said. There was barely anything but cloud as far as the eye could see, blocking out her view of the ground below. The island on which she’d lived all her life, the island that was her whole world – it was so strange not being able to see it. Only the ocean was visible around the edges, off in the far distance. “It’s like we could just fly away and go and live somewhere else.”

Tefiren had been following her longing gaze out towards the sea, but at this he laughed. “Live somewhere else?” he said as if the thought was mad. “But that would be so boring!”

Forsira sighed. “You’re right,” she said. “We could never fly out that far. And we can’t stay up here forever, either.” She looked evenly across at him. “We should go back down. They won’t know where we are any more.”

“Neither do we.”

She grinned at him. “Doesn’t that just make it more fun?” With that, she let the energy out of her wings – it was beginning to get tiring to keep it there, anyway – and folded them to drop through the cloud. She closed her eyes as the water ran over her, then opened them as she felt the whipping and scratching of branches, spreading her wings frantically to slow her descent before she hit the ground. Tefiren’s method of landing was fast and all, but there was something to be said for having some kind of control over where she was going.

There was a huge kerfuffle of leaves as Tefiren crash-landed in a pile of undergrowth behind her. Forsira turned to him, unable to help smiling. He looked back at her, half-covered in shrubs and twigs and fallen leaves.

“Looks like you’ve found a good hiding place already,” she said cheekily.

He pulled his way out of it, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No, that won’t do. It won’t hide us well enough. We need to find a better one.”

Forsira took in the forest around them. There wasn’t anything else nearby that struck her as a potential hiding place – and she’d become good at spotting those over her time with Tefiren. “It might take us a while to find one,” she pointed out. The risk of staying out in the open for too long had increased severalfold recently, ever since the battle they’d fled from. It seemed that They were growing ever more relentless, determined to flush out the last few.

Tefiren’s eyes lit up nonetheless. “Not if we make one!” he said. “I can dig, remember?”

Forsira remembered the Linoone burrow; this wasn’t a bad idea. Tefiren had already turned to the pile of undergrowth he’d landed in and was scrabbling away rapidly at the soil. Not having the same mastery of digging as he did, Forsira stood by to keep watch – she always had to assume that They might be just over the horizon.

There’d been a time when Tefiren would constantly stop, tense and look around no matter what he was doing, regardless of the fact that Forsira was already keeping an eye out. But now he remained engrossed in his burrowing, leaving the task of lookout entirely to her. He trusted her.

After a tense wait with nothing to distract Forsira from the ever-present threat of Their sudden appearance, Tefiren wriggled back out of the hole he’d made and indicated that it was ready. It wasn’t the comfiest of holes, she thought as she crept inside – the soil was soaked through from the constant rain, making the whole thing rather muddy, added to which it was almost completely dark within – but at least it would be safe. Tefiren crawled in after her, scrabbling at some of the undergrowth above ground to hide the entrance.

Forsira stood up too high in the hole and bumped her head into the ceiling, feeling the wet soil give slightly above her. This was not encouraging.

“Are you sure this is safe?” she asked Tefiren.

“Probably,” came his voice from somewhere beside her in the darkness. “We’ll just have to find out.”

Forsira still wasn’t convinced. “What if it caves in while we’re sleeping?”

“It won’t,” Tefiren insisted, fidgeting next to her. “Look, Sira, we don’t have time to go and find a different hiding place now. They could already be on our trail. We’ll just have to stick with this one.”

Forsira looked at Tefiren, just able to make out the shape of his face as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, and wondered if he actually didn’t mind the thought of a cave-in. Perhaps he’d prefer to die quickly and quietly in his sleep, as opposed to the alternative.

She snuggled closer to him in the cramped space. “We can’t run forever, you know.”

She felt him twitch beside her. “What? Of course we can. That’s exactly what we are doing, and that’s exactly what we’ll keep doing. What are you talking about?”

“There’s so few Archopy left,” Forsira said. “We might even be the last two, I don’t know. They’re never going to give up. I just sometimes wonder whether it might be easier to…”

“No,” Tefiren said fervently. She was so close to him that she could feel his heart beating faster. “I don’t care if it’s easier, we can’t do that. We can’t just let it end.” His voice became more pained. “Please, Sira, don’t talk about this. You know I can’t…”

Forsira sighed wearily. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Forget about what I just said.” She closed her eyes and leaned into him. “Live for today,” she murmured.

She felt Tefiren nod and shift his arm to stroke along her crest leaves. “Today.”

- - -​

The Sceptile known as Zathern raced through the trees, his female companion at his side, his fellow hunters darting from branch to branch ahead. He was fixed solely on their prey, the lone Archopy that was fleeing from them all, out of reach for the moment but soon to be within it. More of his comrades lay waiting in the trees ahead; it was being chased into an ambush. The prey may have been spreading its wings, trying take off, but it would never fly high enough to escape in the time it had left.

Two Sceptile suddenly shot to the ground in front of it, their weapons readied. The Archopy let out a squawk, flailing its wings as it wheeled around to flee from the new threat that had just appeared in front of it. It didn’t seem to have realised that this merely took it back towards its original pursuers; in its blind panic, the prey was rushing straight at him.

Alarm sparked somewhere within him, but he ignored it. He knew what to do. His blades already lit, he slashed at the Archopy, once, twice, as it went past. It didn’t get much further before collapsing to the ground, wounded and bleeding. In an instant, he leapt onto its back, holding it down and rendering it immobile as his female companion walked calmly around to the front of their prey to deliver the killing blow. Her eyes were cold, hungry, the same as the rest of his fellow Sceptile as they gathered behind him to watch, he knew.

His hand shaking slightly for some reason that was unknown to him, he grabbed hold of the Archopy’s crest leaves, yanking its head up to expose its throat to his companion.

“No,” it mumbled desperately, its voice revealing it to be a male – not that it mattered. “No, don’t, please…”

“Don’t talk,” the Sceptile told it flatly. He wasn’t sure if he was saying that because talking couldn’t help the Archopy now, or because it made this easier for him.

A hint of a grin passed across the female Sceptile’s face as she knelt down in front of the prey, her blades lit. He closed his eyes just before he felt the Archopy go limp underneath him. There wasn’t any particular reason why; he just happened to close them briefly at that moment.

The deed done, he stepped off his fallen prey. The rest of the Sceptile were still watching him, something other than cold hunger beginning to return to their demeanour, but he couldn’t recognise their expressions in his current state. Without acknowledging them, he turned and walked away. Only his female companion followed; where the rest went, he didn’t particularly care.

After he had been walking for a long time, he finally stopped and sat himself down on the damp, muddy ground. There he began shaking his head furiously to clear the monster inside from his mind, to let the real Zathern out again.

It was a while before he’d managed it. Feeling as though he’d been suffocating, Zathern took a deep breath, blinked and glanced around the forest. Karsa was there, smiling sympathetically. She seemed to have been waiting for him.

“You okay?” she said, sitting herself down beside him.

“Yeah,” Zathern said flatly. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“That was almost the last one, you know,” she said in what might have been an effort to cheer him up. “They reckon there’s only those two that are really annoying to catch left. We’ll get them eventually, too.”

“Yeah,” Zathern said again. And then there would be no Archopy left. They’d have won. If you could call it winning.

They sat in silence for a while.

“You still haven’t actually killed any of them yourself,” Karsa said eventually.

He turned to her sharply. “And that’s a bad thing?” he asked, some force finding its way into his voice.

“No, it’s not, but… well, you could have done by now. That one just now ran straight into you – you could have been the one to kill it, but you left it to me.”

“So?”

“Well, it’s nothing, really,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter if you don’t. But I’ve seen Tharann looking at you – this time, he looked… sort of disappointed. Or annoyed.”

“What does Tharann have to do with anything?” Zathern spat. “He’s got what he wanted from me already.”

“I don’t know,” Karsa said. “He might still want something from you. I wouldn’t put anything past him.” She shuddered, before continuing more hesitantly. “But besides, Zath… don’t you want to try it, just once? Aren’t you even a little curious as to what it feels like?”

“Not particularly, no,” Zathern muttered. “And fuck Tharann. I don’t care.”

Karsa sighed. “Oh, Zath,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder, making him face her. “What happened to you? You were so much more… alive when I first met you. Where’s all that enthusiasm gone?”

Her words sparked something in Zathern, and for the first time in what felt like forever he thought back to his childhood. He looked around the forest – they were still on the sunset side. The pattern of surrounding trees was vaguely familiar, reminiscent of a friendly battle, perhaps, or a hunt – a proper hunt – he’d had when he was younger.

Suddenly he found himself choking out a mirthless laugh. “You don’t have a clue.”

Karsa frowned. “What?”

“Enthusiasm? Back when I first met you? That wasn’t even the half of it.” He laughed again, without being able to stop himself. “You should have known me when I was a kid. Living over here. Everything was fun and exciting, and nothing bad was ever going to happen.” Zathern realised he was glaring at the ground, shaking with emotion. “But then They happened. You lot. Us. We ruined it. Everything would have been fine if we hadn’t…”

Karsa had her arm around him. “Hey, Zath,” she said softly. “You shouldn’t think about that. There’s nothing we can do to change it. Just forget.”

“No!” he protested, breaking away from her. “I don’t want to forget that! Not the times when life was good, when I really enjoyed myself.” He looked at Karsa emphatically. “This right now isn’t good. This is just making the best of a bad life. And all this time I’d forgotten that life used to be good – really, properly good – and I didn’t even realise what I was missing. Don’t you dare tell me to forget that again.”

He held her gaze firmly, a little surprised by his sudden outburst.

Karsa paused for a moment. She seemed to be thinking. Then she stood up, pulling him up with her. “Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s try to bring back a little bit of that. You always seemed to like our training battles – I take it you battled even more when you were younger?”

Zathern’s face twitched into a hint of a smile. “Loads more.”

Karsa moved to position herself across from him. “And you really enjoyed it?”

He nodded. “Absolutely.”

She was beginning to bounce on the balls of her feet, reminding Zathern of the enthusiasm of his younger self. “I don’t suppose you ever used to be one of those careful, tactical fighters? I bet you always just threw yourself into it.”

“Definitely,” Zathern said, chuckling.

She grinned. “Thought so. Right, then!” Karsa pumped energy into her leaves and positioned herself into a battle-ready stance. “You’re on the sunset side, your home. Nothing bad has ever happened and nothing bad ever will. These here are perfectly blunt, harmless blades – remember them? This isn’t training for a hunt or anything of the sort. It’s just a normal, friendly battle. Zath! I challenge you!”

Zathern couldn’t help but smile. “Why are you doing this?” he asked her.

Karsa shrugged. “I want to help you,” she said simply. “And maybe my way of dealing with things isn’t the best way for you to deal with them, so I’m trying something else. Anyway!” Her grin returned. “Do you accept my challenge?”

Zathern channelled energy into his own leaves, forming them into blunt weapons. He couldn’t recall the last time that tingle of deadly sharpness had been absent. He needed something like this, he realised. He really needed it.

Karsa was still across from him, looking at him expectantly, and Zathern had never been more glad that she was here. He nodded at her, feeling surprisingly enthusiastic, more than he had in a long, long time. “I do!”

With that, he leapt straight at her, ramming one of his blunt blades into her chest before she could dodge out of the way.

Sure, there were still two Archopy left, and that wouldn’t just go away, but he’d have to face up to that when it came. It wasn’t anything worth worrying about right now, in the midst of a battle with his best friend.

- - -​

“See, Tefi?” Forsira smiled at Tefiren, banking around him in tight circles. “I said we should get out and fly around more often.”

The sun was out again, warming the backs of her leafy wings. They’d made it through the rainy season – Forsira had felt they should enjoy the sunshine while it lasted.

“Yeah,” Tefiren muttered, not quite sharing her enthusiasm, “but…”

“Oh, come on!” Forsira said, leaning in to poke him so he had to flap hard for a moment to stay in flight. “You just wanted to sit inside hiding places all the time, but where’s the fun in that? Honestly, Tefiren, you were almost becoming boring.” She grinned, daring him to join in her playful mood.

He matched her grin. “Me, boring? Never!” And with that, he made a lunge at her tail through the air.

Shrieking in surprise, Forsira pushed energy into alternating leaves and beat them hard to curve upwards and over in a loop-the-loop, coming down right behind Tefiren and grabbing for his tail instead. He yelped and flicked it to smack her in the face with his tail leaves before zooming up and away into the sky.

“Hey!” laughed Forsira, flapping fast to shoot up after him. He zigzagged teasingly from side to side ahead of her and then dipped to the right, rolling all the way over in midair. Forsira tried to copy his movements, but she wasn’t as agile and ended up flailing around in a tangle of leaves and wings as she tried to right herself. Tefiren soared above her, looking down and chuckling.

Forsira mock-glared at him and then gave three huge, powerful wing beats, rising up to his level. She reached out to tap his tail, but before she could, Tefiren flashed her a grin and suddenly folded his wings, dropping swiftly back down towards the canopy below.

Indignantly, she folded her own wings to fall after him. He’d already started gliding again some way above the canopy; Forsira waited until she was just a bit lower and then twisted in midair, spreading her wings to fly upside-down. It was a lot harder than Tefiren had made it look, but with a bit of awkward, backwards flapping she managed to make her wobbly way through the air until she was flying underneath him, grinning up at him teasingly. His eyes widened in surprise.

Then something grabbed her tail.

Her first crazy thought was that Tefiren had somehow done it, but he couldn’t have – he was still above her, his surprise turned to sheer panic.

Forsira’s insides lurched as she felt herself being pulled down through the branches, saw a Sceptile clinging to her tail and realised her mistake – she’d been flying too low, too close to the canopy. Tefiren would never have been so careless.

Screeching desperately, she flailed wildly with her wings, but she couldn’t fly for two; the Sceptile was too heavy, dragging her inexorably down to earth. She threw a helpless glance up through the canopy, seeing the receding shape of an Archopy shooting upwards and away, before she crashed to the ground.

Cold, merciless predator’s gazes pierced into Forsira from the countless Sceptile that surrounded her, blocking any chance of escape. Their stares only lasted a moment before one of them leapt onto her back, crushing the breath from her as it pinned her down.

Her heart pounding hard in her ears, her mind racing in too much terror to think, Forsira gazed around at the gathered Sceptile – this had to be every single one of Them, all here to witness her death. She’d known it was coming, but not yet, not today. She wasn’t ready.

Closing her eyes helplessly, she found, of all things, that her last memory of her parents flitted to the forefront of her mind. Her mother, snatched out of the tree by Them – and then her father, frantic and afraid though he’d been up to that point, leaping down to defend his mate.

Opening her eyes in sudden hope, Forsira stared straight up at the canopy.

There was a chance she could still be saved. She just wasn’t sure if she wanted it.

- - -​

Tefiren had shot upwards on instinct the instant he’d seen the Sceptile. But he couldn’t go any further. There he stayed, circling at a safe height, unable to take his eyes off the treetops he’d seen Forsira dragged through. The mass of leaves and branches now blocked her from view – but it didn’t change that he knew she was down there, with Them.

He should have been fleeing. He wanted to, needed to flee, to get out, get away and put as much distance between himself and Them as possible before They caught him too. It was what he’d always done. It was the only thing to do.

But They had Forsira.

It was stupid of him. It had been such a foolish move. Despite his best efforts to avoid it – it shouldn’t even have been hard in the first place – somehow, somewhere along the way he’d grown to care about her. He’d given Them an advantage over him, someone whose death was just as unthinkable as his own.

But that was just the way things were now, and although it was ridiculous to think it, part of Tefiren wouldn’t have had it any other way.

He loved her. He couldn’t just let her die.

They’d already won.

But he didn’t have to do this; nothing said he had to. He could fly on, keep the game going. It was supposed to last forever. He’d always thought it would last forever.

Except it wouldn’t, would it? If not today, then another day, someday, he’d lose, and Their blades would be waiting for him. Tefiren had always known that – he’d just done everything he could to run and hide from that terrifying truth, the foregone conclusion that was his eventual death.

But why did it have to be today?

Forsira was still down there; he still hadn’t taken his eyes off that spot in the trees where he knew she was. His wings were shivering so much he could barely keep himself in flight, the energy in his leaves flickering and threatening to go out. He knew he had to do this, but he still couldn’t bring himself to move. It was too much, the thought of those ruthless blades scything towards him and all of it just ending, right there and then.

But that was what Forsira was going through right now. He’d hesitated so long that he could have already killed her. He had to act, before it was too late.

He had to.

A huge, horrible scythe of terror cut through him at the finality of his decision. There would be no going back from this. Closing his eyes and drawing in a shuddering breath, Tefiren pointed himself downwards, forced energy into every single one of his wing leaves, and fell.

- - -​

The first thing Forsira heard was a wordless, desperate scream. Tefiren was falling towards her, his wings glowing with such intense brightness that she couldn’t even make out his face. He spread his shining leaves just enough to slow his fall, swooping forward in a frantic swipe at the Sceptile on her back. Blood splashed over Forsira; the Sceptile roared in pain; then it was off her and she could move.

She scrambled to her feet, turning to Tefiren. He was shaking; there were tears in his eyes as his gaze found hers.

“Run, Sira,” he said in a broken sort of whisper before turning and lunging at a Sceptile behind him with a strangled roar.

Barely able to take in what was happening, Forsira somehow managed to force her body into action. None of the other Sceptile seemed bothered that she might escape, not now that they had Tefiren. She backed away further, scrambling up a tree, but there she halted. She couldn’t leave, not with Tefiren fighting for his life below her.

Desperation lent him strength as he swung the huge glowing blades that were once his wings at his attackers. Sunlight shone on his crest leaves, which blazed with such intense light for a moment that it hurt her eyes to look at him, before a searing beam of energy blasted into a Sceptile’s chest, shunting it backwards. But there were too many – even as several Sceptile jumped into the fray, dodging Tefiren’s frantic swipes to land blows when his back was turned, several more of Them simply stood around, watching.

It was unnerving, the confidence with which They knew he would eventually give in. They weren’t even paying any attention to Forsira. It was as if, now that They had the one that was so hard to catch, she wasn’t worth Their effort – she could be dealt with easily at a moment’s notice. She’d learnt more from Tefiren than They gave her credit for, enough to last a good while on her own, but even knowing that, even knowing Tefiren wanted her to save herself, she couldn’t bear to flee and leave him there.

He was weakening now, wounded all over, his wings dimmer and his lunges slowing, his screams and yells coming out even louder and more desperate as he swung around at any Sceptile that came near him. A blind swipe managed to hit someone in the throat – the victim gave a strangled scream that sounded female and staggered backwards – but as Tefiren let loose a broken laugh of triumph, another Sceptile took the opportunity and leapt onto him from behind, shoving him to the ground. He cried out in pain, his leaves finally flickering and giving up. His feeble struggles came to nothing as a second Sceptile simply joined the first in pinning him down.

The first Sceptile grinned, something about him seeming familiar – Forsira realised that this was Verdan, the first of many to fail to catch Tefiren, and now the first and last to succeed. “You have no idea how much you’ve been getting on my nerves, Archopy,” she heard him hiss, leaning close to Tefiren. “In fact, I still don’t trust you not to suddenly escape.”

Tefiren didn’t even seem to register who this Sceptile was or what he was saying. There was a despairing finality in his eyes, and Forsira knew that Verdan was wrong – he would not be escaping from this.

Even as Verdan’s claws began to dig into his wing leaves, Tefiren merely found Forsira with his broken gaze, tears running down his face. “Please, Sira,” he begged. “Why haven’t you run?”

Forsira shook her head wordlessly. It tore at her heart more than she could describe to see him this helpless and afraid, and it was all she could do not to leap down in a frantic, suicidal attempt to save him somehow. She couldn’t leave him, not even knowing how much he wanted her to. There was some kind of fascinating horror to it all, keeping her watching.

“Like to see you try and escape now,” Verdan hissed into Tefiren’s ear. The Archopy’s pleading gaze remained fixed on Forsira, and Verdan bristled as he continued to be ignored. He’d torn Tefiren’s wing leaves to shreds, leaving him a shadow of the elusive, uncatchable Archopy he’d once been. There was nothing Tefiren could do now.

“Okay, Verdan, you’ve had your fun,” said another Sceptile impatiently – Forsira saw that he was one of the only ones with no trace of the inner predator in his eyes. “Let’s get on with this.” He knelt down to Tefiren’s level. “See, there’s still one of us left who hasn’t yet drawn blood. It would be such a shame for him to miss out, wouldn’t it?”

The crowd of Sceptile shifted, parting to reveal one of their number who was standing near the back.

“Sira,” Tefiren mumbled again. “Run, please…”

But Forsira still couldn’t. Her gaze was fixed on the Sceptile at the back of the group. A fresh wave of despair was beginning to overtake her as she heard him muttering desperately, saw him leaning over the unmoving body of the female that Tefiren had struck in the throat.

The voice was familiar. The face was familiar. She hadn’t seen him in such a long time, but she knew who this was.

What on earth was Zathern doing here?

- - -​

“Karsa…” Zathern murmured, staring down at her lifeless form. The monster inside had been jolted out of him the moment he’d seen her get hurt, but as he took in her body and the gash across her throat, he still felt chillingly numb. He could barely comprehend it. Her final fixed gaze towards the sky wasn’t a cold gaze like that of the monster inside. She simply looked afraid. And now she’d never talk or battle or do anything ever again.

He dimly became aware that everyone else had parted around him, leaving a clear path between him and the Archopy that Skorrhen and Verdan had pinned down.

And suddenly it didn’t matter that this Archopy looked just as frightened, if not more so, than Karsa had in her final moments.

He’d killed her.

Slowly and shakily, Zathern stood up and stalked towards him. He pushed energy into his blades, feeling the tingle of the deadly sharp edges even without the help of the monster inside. Tharann was one of the last Sceptile he passed; Zathern saw him grin unnervingly but simply glared back. This had nothing to do with him. This was about Karsa. The one who’d been there for him, helped him forget the bad things and remember the good – he’d needed her. And now she was gone.

Zathern knelt down in front of the helpless Archopy, whose terrified gaze went straight through him. He didn’t seem to have realised just what he’d done.

Zathern raised his blade but was suddenly stopped in his tracks.

“Zathern, no!”

Another Archopy – and even though he’d never heard the voice in his life, he knew straight away who it was.

His blade flickered into nothing, all the cold fury and desire for revenge draining out of him as he looked up at where the voice had come from and saw, clinging to a tree branch not so far away, his old best friend.

“Forse…” he whispered hoarsely.

Never mind the feeble echoes of the good times in his childhood that Karsa had been trying to evoke. Here was Forsira, the one he’d really had all those times with, the one he’d first meant something to – and her gaze was begging him to stop.

Zathern looked down at the Archopy he was supposed to be killing. He suddenly didn’t know what to do.

“Zathern,” Forsira said again, her voice high and pleading. “Please don’t hurt him. He’s my mate. I love him. You can’t…”

Her words ignited a flare of anger within Zathern. “She was my mate, too,” he snapped, jerking his head back towards where Karsa lay. “I loved her. And he killed her.”

“He didn’t mean to!” protested Forsira desperately. “How could he have known?”

Zathern saw the glazed look of terror in the male Archopy’s eyes and couldn’t deny there was no way Karsa’s death could have been any kind of calculated move. Forsira’s mate had simply been desperate not to die. Zathern knew in his gut that he’d have done the same, if he’d been an Archopy, if he’d been one of the ones marked for death.

The Archopy’s eyes met his, connecting with him for just a moment. “Don’t hurt her,” he whispered. “Please.”

Zathern looked back up at Forsira, feeling a pang of horror at the suggestion that he’d ever do that. “I don’t want to hurt her,” he said numbly. “Or… or you.”

But he had to do something. The rest of the Sceptile were still around him, waiting. He could see some of tilting their heads, their monsters inside confused as to why he would hesitate so long when the prey was right in front of him like this. Tharann sighed impatiently.

Shakily, he moved towards the Archopy again.

“Why?” Forsira suddenly called from her tree. “Zathern, why are you even here? What happened?”

Zathern stared up at her in confusion, realising for the first time that he didn’t really know. Seeing Forsira’s new face reminded him of her as a Treecko or Grovyle, back when he’d drag her around everywhere and they’d have the greatest of times. What on earth had happened for him to be standing here now?

“It’s easier,” he found himself saying, almost automatically, the same thing he’d kept telling himself ever since he’d come here. “It doesn’t hurt as much, like it would have if I’d stayed with you, after Raphyn… after he… You were going to die, Forsira,” he told her, almost pleadingly. “I had to leave.”

But had he really had to leave?

“And my father!” he said hastily before he started thinking too hard. He glanced at Skorrhen, still holding the Archopy down. “And they kept persuading me – they made it sound so easy and I couldn’t… I couldn’t refuse.”

But those weren’t the real reasons he’d stayed, Zathern knew. The real reason lay dead a short distance away, killed by the scythe of this Archopy before him. Karsa. She’d been the one who’d made everything bearable. He’d stayed so he could be with her.

The feeble flare of anger that tried to rise up in him was extinguished again as he looked at the fear in the Archopy’s eyes. He didn’t want to die any more than Karsa had, and Zathern really, really didn’t want to kill him.

He closed his eyes and forced energy back into his blades anyway.

“No!” Forsira said again. “Don’t!”

“If I don’t,” Zathern said slowly, not opening his eyes, “someone else will. He’s going to die anyway.”

His words elicited a whimper from the fallen Archopy. “Please, Sira,” Zathern heard him mumble, his voice broken and pathetic, “you have to run…”

At least it wasn’t like Zathern would be killing Forsira herself. It could have been worse. He remembered his mother begging him to come back to her even though she‘d have been killed either way. And in the end, what had it mattered that he hadn’t? It was the same here. Someone was going to kill this Archopy; it didn’t make a difference who. But Karsa was dead because of him. Surely Zathern had the most right to?

He took a deep breath, trying to stop himself from trembling. His eyes were still screwed shut; his blade still didn’t feel lethally sharp.

“He killed your mate,” Tharann’s voice said, almost in his ear, mocking, tantalising. “What are you going to do about it, ‘Zath’?”

In one blind, red, furious moment, Zathern wished it could have been Tharann who was pinned down in front of him and at his mercy. The deadly sharpness took over, and before he even knew what he was doing, he’d lashed out at his father, his blade lunging forwards to where he wanted the Sceptile to be.

It was Tharann’s cruel chuckle of satisfaction that jolted him back into the reality of what he’d just done.

- - -​

The life faded from Tefiren’s eyes, and it was like Forsira was watching everything she’d ever cared about fade away with it. The terrifying savagery with which Zathern had struck – she didn’t want to believe her old friend could have done that, and yet…

Zathern was backing away, shaking, the light gone from his leaves. “I didn’t mean to do that,” he said as he watched Tefiren die. “I’m sorry.” He took another step back, still staring, wide-eyed. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, as if that would somehow reverse what he’d done. “I’m sorry!” He looked helplessly at Forsira with deep, terrible guilt in his eyes. “Forse…”

She ignored him, too fixated by Tefiren’s body and his horribly empty gaze, utterly devoid of that gleeful twinkle of his that she loved so much. All that was left was a glassy terror, the fear that had always been there but that he’d worked so hard to hide from, now fixed on his face forever. Tefiren was gone.

It dimly registered with Forsira that she was crying; she wasn’t sure when that had begun. Everything seemed so unreal.

Then the two Sceptile who had been pinning Tefiren down stood up off his unmoving form and turned to look at Forsira. There was an odd familiarity to the experience, snapping some sense of reality back into her. She had nothing left to lose – those hungry stares weren’t nearly as frightening any more, she observed in a strange, detached way – but Tefiren had wanted her to escape. He’d given his life for it. So she turned and fled from Them, just as she had done so many times with him at her side.

As she heard Them take chase, Zathern gave a sudden cry of “No!”, and the sounds of a scuffle reached Forsira’s ears. He was buying her time to escape – the thought made her heart rise, ever so slightly. Her wings already spread and glowing in Tefiren’s pattern, she beat them shakily but powerfully, rising into the air. Zathern must have been holding his ground against Them, for she managed to break through the canopy without any trouble. Tefiren would have called this one boring.

Fighting off the choking feeling in her throat, Forsira focused on flapping harder, flying higher until she was completely out of reach.

There she circled, the joy of escape made empty by her grief.

Tefiren had done what he’d set out to do. He’d saved her life by sacrificing his own. Forsira’s emotions suddenly overtook her, and she let the tears flow freely, sobs shaking her whole body. Tefiren had actually died for her, even though death was the one thing that terrified him more than anything else. She had never imagined that she would mean that much to him, that he would be that brave in the final moments of his life.

But what was she supposed to do now? Continue his eternal game against Them?

She knew she couldn’t. Everything would feel so hollow without Tefiren to share it with. With him gone, she’d only last a few days. Her death was just as inevitable as Tefiren’s had always been – They’d catch up to her in the end.

Taking a few shuddering breaths to calm herself, Forsira flew on aimlessly a little further. The sunlight sparkled off the ocean’s surface ahead of her; she was a lot closer to the sea than she’d realised. It brought back a memory of something Tefiren had said a while ago as the two of them had escaped together over the waves: that they could win against Them for a short time, but it would never last, because They never gave up.

But what if she really could win forever? What if there was a way that she could avoid ever dying at Their hands?

The ocean ahead of her was so calm and peaceful. It seemed to go on endlessly.

Letting the extra energy out of her wings, Forsira turned to the sea and began to glide calmly towards it.

She’d always loved flying. She wanted her final flight to last as long as it could.

- - -​

The waves lapped at Zathern’s toes as he sat at the edge of the beach, watching the shape of an Archopy receding ever further into the distance. He wanted to call out to her, to tell her to stop, but she was too far away to hear him, and even if she could, why would she want to listen to the one who’d killed her mate?

Zathern knew she wouldn’t ever be coming back. This was the last time he’d ever see her.

He supposed it was for the best. This way, she’d die peacefully, almost naturally, not murdered at the hands of the group that he was part of. Having taken her mate’s life was horrible enough; he wouldn’t have been able to bear seeing her killed, too.

But memories of the two of them as children, battling, exploring, talking – mostly him doing the talking, he had to admit – kept running through his mind; damn it, he just wanted his friend back. He wanted everything back to how it had been before things had fallen apart. Even Karsa’s echoes of the good times would have been something – but Karsa was gone now too. Nothing could bring her back, the same as Forsira, or his mother, or anyone else, even… even Raphyn. There was no-one left.

Everything that had been building inside Zathern for so long finally burst out of him, and, stupid though it was, he curled up on the sand and cried.

The world shouldn’t have been like this. It was just so unfair.

It took a while for his sobs to die down, but even once they had, he didn’t move from where he lay. It wasn’t as if there was anyone else to see him like this; the rest of Them had retreated back to the sunrise side as soon as they’d figured Forsira wasn’t coming back. They were probably over there right now, congratulating themselves on a job well done. Part of Zathern bitterly wished he was with them, that he could be as casual and apathetic as They’d always been able to be. But it hurt, and he couldn’t hide from that any more.

If Karsa were still here, she’d have helped him forget this pain. They could have started afresh together, and it would be like none of this had ever happened –

– like none of the Archopy had ever existed?

Zathern sat up, feeling a horrible jolt inside him. He was probably the only one left who cared what had happened to the Archopy. The rest of the Sceptile had always been so oblivious, and They wouldn’t give a damn – that just left him. And now he wanted to forget about them, too?

No. They deserved more than that. They’d been his friends, his family, his home for half his life – the only half of his life that had really been worth living. Someone had to remember them. It was the only way that they could live on, in a sense, the only way that Skorrhen and the others could have been thought to have not quite completely succeeded in wiping the Archopy out.

Drawing in a shaking breath, Zathern stood and turned back towards the sunset side. His heart was heavy with loss – it would be every single day, he knew – but he had to start facing up to that if he wanted to remember his friends. He wasn’t going to run and hide from it any more.

With new resolve, Zathern began to walk into the forest, the trees that had once been home to the species of Archopy.

He wouldn’t forget.
 
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Dragonfree

Just me
I am so way late. D: Sorry! At least this time I got through it without bawling my eyes out.

The forest ahead was thinning out, sloping downwards; between the trees she could see sand and beyond that, the sea.
I'd put a comma after "sand".

Forsira caught Tefiren’s eye, seeing a wild gleam in his.
The "his" makes it seem like you're talking about his eyes as opposed to hers, but that doesn't make sense since the only eye actually mentioned in the sentence is already his. This should probably be reworded somehow.

Tefiren grinned the same grin he always did, but she could tell that something about it looked relieved.
This is just heartbreaking, considering what's about to happen. D:

Tefiren let out a half-chuckle. “They don’t give up easily, do They?” he said, the cheeriness in his voice sounding a little strained.
Nervous Tefiren. :3

Forsira flew a little closer to him, nudging him playfully. “Hey, who wants this game to stop?” she said, trying to think like he did. “You’d get bored, surely?”

He managed a grin. “Of course I would.”
D: Defense mechanisms!

Tefiren rose to join her, looking up with her. “But we can’t do that one,” he said, as though it was obvious. “We’ve done it before. It’s predictable. They’ll be expecting it.”

Forsira wheeled around to look at him head-on. “Even if They’re expecting it, They still can’t see us in a cloud, can they?” She glanced up again. “This one isn’t even a thundercloud. So it’s even safer.”
It's fun how utterly ingrained all his methods are in him, so it doesn't even occur to him to break his "rules" even when they don't really apply.

“I have no idea!” he replied, his eyes twinkling manically as he wheeled in a tight loop around her. “We could stay up here forever, and They’d never be able to find us! They don’t have a clue where we are!” he declared, a singsong quality to his voice. With another giggle of glee, he gave a huge flap of his wings and shot away near-vertically up through the cloud.
Aww, he just wants to run away forever and be safe (and here he was just proclaiming that safe is boring).

Tefiren had been following her longing gaze out towards the sea, but at this he laughed. “Live somewhere else?” he said as if the thought was mad. “But that would be so boring!”
...but he can't comprehend the idea that it could actually be possible to go and live somewhere else, either. It's too integral a part of everything he is today that he's constantly running for his life. Or that's what I assume is going on, at any rate.

There’d been a time when Tefiren would constantly stop, tense and look around no matter what he was doing, regardless of the fact that Forsira was already keeping an eye out. But now he remained engrossed in his burrowing, leaving the task of lookout entirely to her. He trusted her.
Awww. :3 Such a small thing but so sweet when you know how Tefiren is.

Forsira looked at Tefiren, just able to make out the shape of his face as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, and wondered if he actually didn’t mind the thought of a cave-in. Perhaps he’d prefer to die quickly and quietly in his sleep, as opposed to the alternative.
D: That is so depressing.

Forsira sighed wearily. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Forget about what I just said.” She closed her eyes and leaned into him. “Live for today,” she murmured.

She felt Tefiren nod and shift his arm to stroke along her crest leaves. “Today.”
They are helpless and adorable.

Why aren't they just hiding in those cliffside caves on the sunrise side, though? Those are completely safe hiding places, and then they'll only have to be in danger when they hunt, really.

His hand shaking slightly for some reason that was unknown to him, he grabbed hold of the Archopy’s crest leaves, yanking its head up to expose its throat to his companion.

“No,” it mumbled desperately, its voice revealing it to be a male – not that it mattered. “No, don’t, please…”

“Don’t talk,” the Sceptile told it flatly. He wasn’t sure if he was saying that because talking couldn’t help the Archopy now, or because it made this easier for him.

A hint of a grin passed across the female Sceptile’s face as she knelt down in front of the prey, her blades lit. He closed his eyes just before he felt the Archopy go limp underneath him. There wasn’t any particular reason why; he just happened to close them briefly at that moment.
Zathern is the adorablest participant in genocide ever.

“I don’t know,” Karsa said. “He might still want something from you. I wouldn’t put anything past him.” She shuddered, before continuing more hesitantly. “But besides, Zath… don’t you want to try it, just once? Aren’t you even a little curious as to what it feels like?”
D: No don't be a little sadistic Karsa you're just confused.

“No!” he protested, breaking away from her. “I don’t want to forget that! Not the times when life was good, when I really enjoyed myself.” He looked at Karsa emphatically. “This right now isn’t good. This is just making the best of a bad life. And all this time I’d forgotten that life used to be good – really, properly good – and I didn’t even realise what I was missing. Don’t you dare tell me to forget that again.”
D:

She grinned. “Thought so. Right, then!” Karsa pumped energy into her leaves and positioned herself into a battle-ready stance. “You’re on the sunset side, your home. Nothing bad has ever happened and nothing bad ever will. These here are perfectly blunt, harmless blades – remember them? This isn’t training for a hunt or anything of the sort. It’s just a normal, friendly battle. Zath! I challenge you!”
Karsaaaaaa and her ideas of dealing with things. D: This isn't hers specifically, but it's just another type of pretending nothing's wrong when everything is horribly wrong.

Zathern channelled energy into his own leaves, forming them into blunt weapons.
He couldn’t recall the last time that tingle of deadly sharpness had been absent. He needed something like this, he realised. He really needed it.
Aaaaa. D: That should probably either be two line breaks or none, though.

I still feel that here, after this scene, the pacing of this part would come out better if you added in one Forsira/Tefiren scene and then another Zathern/Karsa scene. This is mainly because as it is this part is missing something really showing us exactly how much friendly battling with Karsa helped Zathern. You also reveal later that the two are mates by the time Tefiren is killed; since at the end of this Zathern scene she's described as being his "best friend", that compounds the feeling that we're missing some pretty significant time for Zathern. I also feel it would simply add power to the whole thing, not that it's lacking that as it is: getting more than that little taste of Zathern finally finding some measure of joy in his life again would make it even more heartwrenching to see it torn away from him with Karsa's death and give us a deeper understanding of his feelings in the aftermath.

That isn't to say an additional Forsira/Tefiren scene would be pure padding; I also felt that both their capture and the change in Tefiren in that scene - the fact he's implied to have gotten paranoid enough to avoid flying - feel rather sudden. Another scene building up the fact they're the only ones left and Tefiren's mounting paranoia more would really enhance the pacing of this part, I think. (Picking up on that build-up with the beginning of the next scene - emphasizing with emotion how long it's been since they've really flown freely in the open and had fun like this, rather than just having Forsira state it - would also be appropriate.)

I do really like the stark, cold surprise of having Forsira's tail grabbed in a joyful scene while playing around with Tefiren, however. It is delightfully cruel.

Closing her eyes helplessly, she found, of all things, that her last memory of her parents flitted to the forefront of her mind. Her mother, snatched out of the tree by Them – and then her father, frantic and afraid though he’d been up to that point, leaping down to defend his mate.

Opening her eyes in sudden hope, Forsira stared straight up at the canopy.

There was a chance she could still be saved. She just wasn’t sure if she wanted it.
This I really don't like as much. I think it's the fact that this is framed as her hoping Tefiren comes back to save her, rather than despairing because it looks like Tefiren isn't coming back. After all, she saw him swoop upwards to flee, and she knows better than anyone how deeply cowardly Tefiren is - shouldn't it in a way surprise her more than anyone when he does come back? (That also seems to rhyme better with the way Forsira has throughout the fic reacted to people appearing to be leaving her - by desperately grasping for them to stay, not by waiting and hoping they just come back.)

Furthermore, regardless of how likely Forsira is to think about it this way, I feel this lessens the impact of Tefiren's choice on the reader. Tefiren's whole arc is about building up just how significant it is that he makes the choice to turn back and help Forsira rather than running away as he's spent the whole fic doing - to have Forsira here go "but maybe he'll come back to save me!" undermines that setup by casually telling the reader in advance that actually it's perfectly plausible he might return.

I do like that she thinks of her parents, though. Ultimately I think this would work best if she thought of her parents and this were contrasted with the fact Tefiren is running away, with any actual hope on Forsira's part that maybe Tefiren will do what her father did kept to a subconscious level. (She's hardly in any mental state to consciously reason about the chances of Tefiren returning, anyway, and "my father helped my mother when she was taken, therefore my mate might help me" would require something of the sort - I'd imagine her mind would be too filled with the fact she's about to be killed and to the best of her knowledge Tefiren just ran for it.)

In other news, Tefiren is adorable and although I'll refrain from quoting everything he does, just know that I want to.

I can't help feeling a bit strange about why Forsira isn't doing more to help Tefiren during his last desperate struggle - she's sort of just there watching, not even attempting to fire an Air Slash or two at Verdan or anything. There are good reasons for her not to try to fight back - it's pretty obvious she couldn't possibly hold all these Sceptile off long enough for him to escape by this point, and to attempt it would just draw attention to herself and make Tefiren's sacrifice all for nothing - but they should probably be properly brought up in the narration as reasons, or the reader starts to get the odd impression that it just doesn't even occur to her to help him.

Her final fixed gaze towards the sky wasn’t a cold gaze like that of the monster inside. She simply looked afraid. And now she’d never talk or battle or do anything ever again.
Heh. This passage reminds me a lot of that one bit in chapter 53 of TQftL.

Zatherrrn. D: Okay, I want to quote everything he does too.

“No!” Forsira said again. “Don’t!”

“If I don’t,” Zathern said slowly, not opening his eyes, “someone else will. He’s going to die anyway.”
;__; Even now he still retreats into the same arguments Karsa taught him to cope with the whole Them thing! You break my heart.

“He killed your mate,” Tharann’s voice said, almost in his ear, mocking, tantalising. “What are you going to do about it, ‘Zath’?”

In one blind, red, furious moment, Zathern wished it could have been Tharann who was pinned down in front of him and at his mercy. The deadly sharpness took over, and before he even knew what he was doing, he’d lashed out at his father, his blade lunging forwards to where he wanted the Sceptile to be.

It was Tharann’s cruel chuckle of satisfaction that jolted him back into the reality of what he’d just done.
ZATHERN NO. ;_______; THARANN YOU EVIL SCEPTILE. YOU NEED TO DIE.

She had nothing left to lose – those hungry stares weren’t nearly as frightening any more, she observed in a strange, detached way
D:

As she heard Them take chase, Zathern gave a sudden cry of “No!”, and the sounds of a scuffle reached Forsira’s ears. He was buying her time to escape – the thought made her heart rise, ever so slightly.
Zathern! DDDD:

Zathern must have been holding his ground against Them, for she managed to break through the canopy without any trouble. Tefiren would have called this one boring.
;_;

The ocean ahead of her was so calm and peaceful. It seemed to go on endlessly.

Letting the extra energy out of her wings, Forsira turned to the sea and began to glide calmly towards it.

She’d always loved flying. She wanted her final flight to last as long as it could.
And thus is the end of Forsira. It's nice and poignant; I really like that here in the final moment you manage to make her suicide feel a little like a victory, as she finally takes control of her own fate in her hopeless situation. It gives the story more closure and power.

But memories of the two of them as children, battling, exploring, talking – mostly him doing the talking, he had to admit – kept running through his mind; damn it, he just wanted his friend back. He wanted everything back to how it had been before things had fallen apart. Even Karsa’s echoes of the good times would have been something – but Karsa was gone now too. Nothing could bring her back, the same as Forsira, or his mother, or anyone else, even… even Raphyn. There was no-one left.

Everything that had been building inside Zathern for so long finally burst out of him, and, stupid though it was, he curled up on the sand and cried.

The world shouldn’t have been like this. It was just so unfair.
;_______________;

If Karsa were still here, she’d have helped him forget this pain. They could have started afresh together, and it would be like none of this had ever happened –

– like none of the Archopy had ever existed?
I love this moment of realization. Zathern had earlier realized he didn't want to forget his old life, but it became all about distracting him from the reality of it, not really remembering and honoring the memory. Here it finally occurs to him just how confused he's been.

With new resolve, Zathern began to walk into the forest, the trees that had once been home to the species of Archopy.

He wouldn’t forget.
Of course, tragically enough, by the time Lost Evolution happens, the Archopy really are forgotten. D: At least Zathern kept their beacon alive for some time, and with that line you've beautifully brought his development full circle - he ran away from things by forgetting, but now he's not going to forget again. You've left it open what he's going to do now exactly, but we know he's finally changed and that's enough.

Anyway, this is the most heartbreaking fic ever and you are amazing.

I am probably going to write a lengthy ramble about the characters and themes in this story at some point but right now I have other things I need to do.


EDIT: So! I promised you a lengthy ramble, and here it is. Happy birthday. :D

This is a story about how characters cope with the unspeakable horror of a genocide, and each character in it accordingly represents a somewhat different way of dealing with things.

Forsira lost her parents at such a young age that she basically shut down when they were gone; she had not developed any drive to live on independently and without them, and for the rest of her life she continues to cling to others as a lifeline in this terrible situation. Throughout the story, she lives in a constant fear of being left behind again (whether figuratively or literally) - on the sunrise side with Zathern and Raphyn, when Zathern was about to evolve, when Zathern actually did leave, when Azma told her to act like she didn't know her, when Tefiren refused to let her follow him, when she was caught by the Sceptile... However, at the end Tefiren doesn't leave her behind, and perhaps that's part of what gives her the strength to run away on her own and achieve a sort of victory in defeat when there is no one left she can latch on to.

Azma tried to be defiant - but that only gave Them the determination to break her. Left with Zathern, a constant reminder of what Tharann did to her but also a vulnerability through which They might hurt her further, her only way of continuing to fight back was to try to raise Zathern in such a way that They could never get to him. Unfortunately she went about it the wrong way by trying to shelter him from the truth - in trying to make sure Zathern didn't learn about his father's identity or her real concerns, she left him oblivious to how dangerous Tharann was, where if he'd known the truth he would never have joined Them. Azma was stuck on trying to keep Zathern innocent, out of a paranoid fear that somehow even knowing of the evils of his father could corrupt him - she didn't dare even tell him the name of the monster inside or why he would become a Sceptile when the other Grovyle on the sunset side were all becoming Archopy.

She says to Forsira in "Learning" that nightmares of the past fade, but it's nightmares of the future that one needs to worry about. That just about sums her up: while the nightmare of her past faded, she was set on by nightmares of the future, specifically Zathern's future, which caused her deep-set paranoia about Zathern and ultimately became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Which brings us to poor sheltered Zathern himself. Thanks to that sheltering, he grew up a sociable, happy-go-lucky Treecko within his own bubble where the genocide was only an abstract outside thing, but after he and Forsira grew out of Azma's care, he was really a ticking bomb - it was only a matter of time before reality would hit him like a brick. He could never really identify with Forsira's first-hand experience with the killings, and he wanted so badly to just be able to evolve into a Sceptile and be happy and have everyone be happy with him like his life with his mother had led him to think things were going to be - but as one by one, first Forsira and then more of the Grovyle and Archopy turned out to be unable to decouple his species from Them, it became more and more apparent to him that he couldn't just pretend there was no genocide anymore. With the final straw of finding Raphyn dead and having a first-hand experience of his own at last, however, the fact he was different from them became all too apparent - because ultimately this wasn't his fight; he didn't share their plight or their inevitable fate, and he could have the happy-go-lucky life he'd wanted if only he didn't care so much about the Archopy. He ran away not just because of what he was leaving behind, but also because he could run away whereas the Archopy couldn't.

So he left, trying to force himself to stop caring and convince himself he belonged on the sunrise side with the other Sceptile; he latched onto the realization his mother hadn't been entirely truthful with him as justification; he focused on finding his father or Tharann when his attempts to integrate with the Sceptile in general had gone poorly, because surely with them he'd have a replacement family and wouldn't need to think about Forsira or his mother anymore. He joined Them out of sheer loneliness and wanting to be part of something, and stayed after finding out who they were because he couldn't stop them anyway. For so many sympathetic yet horrifying reasons, he became one of the monsters who were killing the Archopy, simply because it was the only place he could go, with the only friend that he still had - Karsa.

(Karsa, who didn't belong anywhere and felt small and lonely and insignificant, so once Skorrhen had roped her into it, a sick part of her relished the brutality and sense of power in killing Archopy; Karsa, who dealt with her feelings by making herself forget about all the things that horrified her about what she was doing, because it was easier that way; Karsa, who had convinced herself so thoroughly that joining Them was for the best that she even convinced Zathern of it too.)

And they probably weren't the only ones, either. They are a group for outcasts who don't belong, who are then slowly manipulated, coerced and brainwashed into accepting the cause, first looking past the killings and eventually participating in them themselves. A few sick individuals like Skorrhen and Tharann can amass an army of frightened, impressionable youth who are just looking for a place and companionship, and goad them into committing unspeakable horrors.

Meanwhile, we have Germane, who fancied himself clever and felt superior to both sides - he referred to both of them as 'you lot' - for discovering a loophole that was supposed to make him immune - but deep down retained a flicker of doubt, a small fear that perhaps, because he was of Archopy blood, Tharann and Skorrhen would change their minds one day. He convinced himself the Archopy deserved what they got, because they were stupid enough to evolve - only to then find out first-hand that They never regarded him was one of them and would dispose of him as soon as he had stopped being useful.

And then, finally, there's Tefiren, who's so terrified of dying that he can't deal with it at all except with layers of defense mechanisms that mask his fear completely from the surface. When he was a Grovyle his playful arrogance was natural and genuine, and he could simply ignore the killings as something that didn't concern him, but when he evolved he was suddenly confronted with immediate danger, and in order not to simply break down, his mind had to twist everything into a game - a game where only he and Them exist, where he will never get caught because They are stupid and incompetent and his tricks are invincible, where other individuals are classed as irrelevant so their deaths mean nothing to him, where every narrow escape was easy and inevitable. He spends his life running away, not just from Them but from the horror of what is happening, from any sense of responsibility, from attachment, from every frightening reminder that he's fighting a losing battle. He manages so thoroughly to stop identifying with others that Forsira simply puzzles him, even as his terrified, lonely, self-hating deeper self slowly realizes that she doesn't hate him like everyone else and even grows to care for her - enough to finally overcome his terror and sacrifice his life for her, if ultimately in vain.


At the end, Forsira figures out Tefiren, getting through to his vulnerable core, but they go on to employ his defense mechanisms together - living for today, in an unspoken agreement to pretend it's all a game and that running for their lives is exciting - because it's the only thing they have left. Meanwhile, after Zathern has retreated ever deeper into the monster inside where his mother's death doesn't have to hurt as much, Karsa does something similar for him, reawakening the simple childhood that Zathern never wanted to leave. When Karsa has been killed and Forsira sees Zathern among Them, we haven't really noticed that Forsira and Zathern's sections of the story have been completely separate since Zathern left in "Changing"; it just suddenly becomes achingly clear now as Forsira, clueless about everything that has happened on Zathern's end, asks him why he is there, and Zathern just breaks apart as all his justifications and excuses become feeble next to the fact he loved Karsa and now she's dead. It's a tantalizing step back from everything - we've been following Zathern's development so closely that the sheer overall magnitude of what has happened to him doesn't quite become obvious until suddenly Forsira is there to remind us that seven chapters ago they were two Treecko and Zathern was telling her he didn't get why They wanted to kill people's parents and that it was stupid.

For this ramble, I ended up rereading the whole fic from beginning to end, for the third time. I cried again in the last part, this time during that whole final confrontation scene.


There are two elements to what makes this fic so powerful. The personal tragedies of all these characters, who are so flawed and conflicted and yet all sympathetic in their own ways, are a huge part of it. But perhaps even more than that, I am in awe of the utter emotional perfection you achieve in the writing of so many crucial scenes - scenes that wrench and tear and twist at my heart because of the words you picked and the way you piled them into sentences that just pierce, driving home every facet of those tragedies. In the end, this is one of the absolute most emotionally charged works of fiction I have ever read.

Thank you for writing it.
 
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yiranY

New Member
I made a Serebii account for this story. It's that good. Anyway this both contains very self-centred thinking and constructive advice.

In case some readers didn't notice already, this contains massive spoilers. If you haven't read the fic yet, stay away from this. :x

I'll start on the relatively bad parts to get it out of the way. You have my assurance it's awesome so you won't be offended, right? :x

I don't like the concept of the inner predator. I originally expected it to have a role in the future of the story when it was first introduced, but it doesn't really do anything except for one of the reasons to justify the Sceptile somewhat. It isn't particularly effective at that, either. I still unconditionally hate the non-Zathern Sceptile. (Yes, including Karsa, because I'm apathetic towards "wanting to be in a group" justifying genocide. ;_; Well, maybe not unconditional hate, but I still dislike her.) Speaking of which, I don't think the fact that Pokémon enjoyed battling is needed either, but that's from canon so I can't really blame you.

This story seems to be far more realistic than idealistic. That is, having things happen as they are rather than some unrealistic outcome that would be more preferable. For instance, the fact that Germane does't suddenly evolve and escape (heh, the unreasonable fantasies of my mind), or that the Archopy loses in the big fight against the Sceptile despite Azma's inspiring leadership, or that Forsira doesn't miraculously survive the ending. (After reading Lost Evolution though, I realise it has to happen, but whatever I'm treating this as a separate story.) But there are plenty of coincidental events that detach me from the realistic outlook somewhat. How Forsira's parents have time to speak to her before their death, where in later scenes the Sceptile almost just kill them instantly. How Forsira bonds with the single Treecko that will grow up to be a Sceptile in the Archopy community. How they are the ones which find Raphyn's dead body alone which culminates in Zathern leaving and becoming one of Them. How Forsira just happens to run into Tefiren the first time she is hunted by Them. How Verdan killed Arkesra instead of Forsira (in case you forgot about your own story Arkesra is Draern's mate) when they are right next to each other. How Tefiren manages to kill Karsa out of the rest of the Sceptile. Yes, some are necessary for the plot, but others aren't and if you removed (or rewrote) the ones that aren't necessary it would've been more believable. Still, it's written well which makes most readers overlook it. I'm just picky.

I also think some action scenes are slightly long, such as Tefiren's introductory sequence. I guess that's just me wanting plot a lot more because I've almost never heard anyone else have a problem with action scenes.

There are other minor details that make me ask questions. Leathra just resigns to her death without any attempt to escape. And I don't get why the Sceptile dump Germane's body in the Archopy's clearing, because I don't think there would be a need to remind the Archopy that they're now killing children. Also I don't get how Azma is (was) safe, because (kinda squicky here) if Tharann is able to rape her sufficiently to impregnate her, wouldn't she be at his, if not other Sceptile's, mercy? I have the feeling I'm missing something here but I couldn't find anything after skimming through it again. Also, why don't Forsira and Tefiren stay in the caverns on the cliff after the rest die? They wouldn't need to evade any Sceptile unless they're hunting which I don't think would be that hard. But eh, me being picky again, because I never thought of these while I was reading the actual thing, but rather afterwards when I was thinking about it.

Now for less critical and "what could have been better" stuff.

You could have literally put more "what could have been" thoughts into the characters. What could have been if Zathern and Forsira were in a world without Them. (Zathern did still have feelings for Forsira, deduced from the line where the narration says "so she had someone else now". The other way is more ambiguous though.) What could have been if Forsira and Tefiren evaded the Sceptile long enough to have children (adorable <3). What could have been if Azma didn't stop the resistance after Zathern was born. Well that last one is touched upon but still I think it could have been (!pun!) a lot more emotional if the characters thought about this stuff.

Also at the part where Tefiren gets killed Forsira saying something to Zathern would probably be more emotional than simply staring at him then flying away. It can range from anything, really, such as from "I forgive you" to "Bye, Zathern" to "You killed him" to "Enjoy the rest of your life". Granted some of them are way out of character but I still think it would have been more emotionally riveting if something is said. Maybe it's just me, though.

The Sceptile's attitude towards Archopy is also a bit overboard. I mean, I guess they are the antagonists, but the other Sceptile's antagonism (mind the pun) towards the Archopy is a worse than the Archopy's attitude towards the Sceptile, despite the Archopy having more of an excuse to hate Sceptiles. It's not glaring but if you put some more anger at the Sceptile from the Archopy side (said, not just thought in Forsira's mind), it would be more balanced.

Um, I can't think of any more bad stuff. So onto the good stuff. Or should I say amazing stuff.

This story's plot, setting, characters, description, dialogue, paragraphing, etc etc etc are simply amazing. (Yeah I know it's not plot focused but uh, things still happened.) Urgh, I need some organisation as to in what order I'm going to write everything otherwise you'll just get a jumbled mess of words.

So let's do it in the order of the story. And I'll be first analytical then EMOTIONAL BOMB.

Forsira is one of the most sympathetics characters ever within one paragraph and that beginning, whilst not gluing me to the screen (no openings do that, at least no original (setting and character-wise) openings), made me want to read on. The identity of Them is established fairly mysteriously but also justified through Forsira's terror. Stuff like "so thin she might just disappear" and "half of the world" is really, really childish and therefore very effective at showing how naive the characters actually are. The former's also an extension on trying to avoid the thought of dying (or I'm just reading too deeply and she doesn't know about starvation).

Zathern's timely appearance brings her out of her grievance over her parents. We now see a source of what possibly establishes Forsira's personality – the fact that her parents died at a young age makes her less cheery and open like Zathern (who is a great foil). Zathern's cheeriness also has a source, which is Azma's overprotectiveness. Speaking of which Azma is introduced to the reader differently (because let's admit it, they don't buy the excuse "she's my mum") as a mysterious character who has quite a lot of secrets. Which makes the reader want to read more, obviously.

The exposition continues in the next chapter with an adventure which not only establishes some world facts but also the characters' attitudes towards the situation. Forsira contrasts clearly from the two males within the group, likely because of her parents. Zathern's enthusiasm can be just from his personality, and it also subtly notes his like of the Sceptile community. Raphyn doesn't have justification but he's a minor character so the readers can just assume he has some random offscreen stuff.

The chapter also provides a time for the characters to grow (read: evolve). It is spaced out well and is anticipated by the readers which further heightens the interest.

And then the story suddenly becomes even darker. Zathern leaves. Raphyn dies. Azma fears. As she says it, everything is falling apart. Which shows this story's true colours – it's not about recovering from the parents' death. It's about dealing with dying yourself. (Remember I'm still placing this as an individual story) And Forsira, despite never being a cheerful character, starts to become angry and bitter.

So tragic. Which is what makes it so emotionally engaging.

Part One isn't as good as Part Two but it is still amazing and I loved it. The exposition was done very well mixed with plot and character development. Speaking of which, the characters are just so realistically portrayed and sympathetic. At first I couldn't understand Zathern's desire to leave, but then I put my head out of Forsira's viewpoint and it made sense. Azma has still yet to unravel her secrets. And now Forsira might die.

Which brings us to the even more amazing Part Two. Tefiren is my favourite character even though he has much less development than Forsira and Zathern simply because of his attitude – it's a game, so he didn't need to worry about anything, right? Anyway, back on less self-centred stuff, The introduction with Tefiren is well done as it's placed at the start which allows readers to see that things really are going to change, and that it isn't just a personal involvement with Forsira. This is further strengthened by the fact that a dead body is brought in immediately.

Zathern's scene is also well done, because I was losing sympathy for him until I read his internal thoughts (it's the first segment where it's Zathern's POV). The fact that his father is a Sceptile is nicely revealed and foreshadowed somewhat.

Forsira's meeting with Tefiren is amazing. The emotions are all in-character and Forsira's infatuation with Tefiren is also done well (like "she couldn't keep the approval out of her voice"). It's just so sweet… which makes the readers forget that they're really in a life-and-death situation. The effects of Tefiren. :3 Until the chase ends and Forsira is dragged back into reality. Forsira's development towards Tefiren's attitude is enhanced by the denial of Draern. It's what infatuation does to you, it makes you unconditionally like someone (although the infatuation is probably rooted at Tefiren's personality anyway).

But see, character development! Forsira's dependence on Zathern and Azma at the start is because she has nowhere else to go to. This time, she chooses to be dependent on Tefiren (even if it is because of infatuation). So there's the spark of independence that will eventually make her have the courage to fly out into the sea.

Okay, Zathern. The readers do care about him so they won't mind the sudden turn in perspective. (And I guessed correctly that Karsa would become Zathern's mate! Erm, we're not at the emotional bomb part yet.) Tharann is a foreshadowed character which is good. The way Karsa introduced the reason for the "hunts" is quite realistic and sympathetic (although I still don't sympathise with her).

Back to Tefiren! :D :D :D Who is just finding any excuse possible and is no match for our sudden debating master (due to infatuation) Forsira. Which is just adorable (I think I'm descending into emotional mode again). Anyway Tefiren's want for isolation is expected and the subtle infatuation like "Forsira found herself agreeing almost automatically" and "he meant [the smile], he must have done" is very neat. And then her pleading is just so ador- I mean, very realistic and very convincing, like someone desperate. No wonder Tefiren eventually agrees. The introduction of Air Slash (or is it Air Cutter?) is also done well and is a reasonable justification for how Tefiren is so skilful at evading Them. Oh and Tefiren starts to show signs of… not infatuation, but caring towards Forsira, like "a hint of franticness" when she thinks he is running away.

I like the fact that Zathern crosses Forsira's path, even without interaction, because it reminds us that they are living in the same world and not simply separate.

It is actually quite obvious to the reader that these hunts are of Archopy (and Skorrhen was mentioned in the first chapter), but the obliviousness of Zathern (and the way the Sceptile talk about him) is just heartbreaking. His agreement to joining them and revelation of his father is, as Dragonfree said it, THE MOST TRAGIC THING IN THE WORLD. D: Seriously, it is. You've done it so well that I still feel a great deal of sympathy towards Zathern, even if he is supposedly one of Them.

Yay large amounts of Tefiren! :D Their escape seems less urgent but rather something like a slice-of-life, which is completely accurate if you're around Tefiren. The Vileplume stuff is just so… crazy, like what people would expect from Tefiren. Basically, Tefiren's presence changes the mood drastically. Then Forsira is dragged back to reality again by the fact that Tefiren is poisoned, possible dying. Then we see more signs of independence of going into the dark woods alone to retrieve the berries.

And the sympathy for Zathern is just starting to slip away with him forcing down thoughts of his mother and Forsira. It's entirely justified and well-written, but the sympathy's still slipping. Then the sympathy creeps back again with the line "There. Forsira had someone else now, too. Zathern didn't have to worry about her one bit." Despite what the line's actual meaning is, it shows that he actually can't let go of Forsira.

Draern's death is delivered, and Arkesra dies saying the word dead. Both of them not understanding Forsira. Or do they? Forsira has a question of her identity which isn't developed due to her desire to stay with Tefiren and the fact that she was so close to death, next to Arkesra. When she confronts it she is so reluctant to disagree with Tefiren she pushes it out of her mind.

And Germane dies, while the Sceptile reveal that they will kill children. If they weren't evil, they are now. And more sympathy for Zathern of not knowing. (For some reason I feel little sympathy for Germane. Possibly due to his superior attitude. And probably because there's only that one single segment that's narrated from his view.)

And more terrifying revelations and how the Archopy deal with terror and Azma! which is then immediately contrasted by Tefiren's ignorance. And Draern is brought back as a motivator, that Forsira isn't heartless. And then at the meeting, Forsira is revealed to know that Tefiren is just trying to censor his own fear by ignoring things, rather than being simply heartless. His denial clear in his fervent shaking of head. And Forsira leaves, still not independent enough to stay and fight. Which turns out to be a good thing because everyone dies.

And (I need to stop starting paragraphs with that) Tefiren is forced to confront his fear, due to not wanting to be viewed as a "sick freak" from Forsira. And then the conversation culminates into a flattering debate which ends in Forsira staying. Alive. Living for today.

Which is clearly contrasted by the horror of the Archopy being murdered, which includes the horror of Zathern trying to latch onto any excuse to make his mother's death more painless. Which is just so tragic and heartbreaking and aaa. And I start to feel sympathy for Karsa who can't really control stuff,

And Tefiren is back to his usual self and Karsa sincerely tries to help Zathern and Tefiren saves Forsira and HEARTBREAK I CAN'T WRITE THIS

(Another amazing point about this story is that it brings so much emotional impact in with just a premise as simple as "The Sceptile kill all the Archopy". The individual character traits help a lot.)

Everything is just so tragic and I want to hug everyone in the story (well, not Tharann and Skorrhen and Verdan), but especially the ones that have no in-universe characters to hug them, like Azma. It's just how the world works, isn't it? Nothing's ever fair. Nothing ever will be. Everyone just falls to what is a hatred of another race. Not the playful Raphyn, not the determined Azma, not the cunning Germane, not the righteous Draern, not the adorable huggable terrified Tefiren. Forsira and Zathern are left now that have any Archopy heritage, like old times. Only nothing will ever go back to the old times, not after all that bloodshed. You can just feel the sadness in Zathern by his little line of "Forse…" that he can't forget. He can't let go. And Forsira, is just, so, tragic, oh my god. Emotions do really become less intense if you have nothing left to lose, and that just makes it all the more heartbreaking. And Tefiren, who is so, so terrified of dying, was the one that sacrificed his life for her. And the realisationthat Zathern, her childhood best friend, is the one that killed her mate.

What was she supposed to do?

Fly off and die in grim satisfaction, revelling as much as she could in emotional victory. It was her final flight, anyway.

And ultimately Zathern becomes the last one. And he wouldn't forget. But the power of one being is only so much against the colossus that is history. Which just makes it even more tragic.

And now. I understand the fact that you had to kill of the characters, and I think it is indeed beneficial to the plot, but now you can't write anymore about the characters? I am not exaggerating at all when I say this is the most amazing thing ever. I spend like half of my time fantasizing about what Zathern would do if Forsira was killed by his father, or if Forsira survived and had children, or if Forsira suddenly knew Perish Song and killed all the Sceptile. Ugh, I'm just too imaginative. And this is just too amazing. Too amazing.

Forsira is just tragic and just so sad and just so "WHY DID THIS HAVE TO HAPPEN". Zathern is about the same, but he gets to live which is worse because he has to carry all the burden of the memories he had. He said he wouldn't forget. Tefiren is just so terrified he's terrific and really sad and adorable and I'm just repeating adjectives here. Basically all the good characters are adorable and sad and tragic while all the bad characters are evil and they suck.

Well that was a short emotional ramble.

For some inexplicable reason I keep on relating Portal to this. Like imagining that secretly an Archopy was Still Alive and singing a twisted version of that song. Or the two species putting differences behind them for science. You monster. o_o Yes I'm crazy.

I use too many brackets.

In short, this story is the story that I have enjoyed most reading. Not "one of the", "the". You are amazing. WRITE MORE PLEASE ASGHASDKSDGKJ

(Oh and thanks to Dragonfree/Butterfree/antialiasis for reccing this. BOTH OF YOU CHANGED MY LIFE. I really don't think I'm going to forget this until I die. Even then I might not forget it.)
 

elyvorg

somewhat backwards.
Well. Finally showing up in here to do some review replies because yiran's utterly wonderful review motivated me to do so!

But first, another reply that is way, way late:

Dragonfree - Belated thanks for the last of your awesome reviews!

Aww, he just wants to run away forever and be safe (and here he was just proclaiming that safe is boring).

Hee. Exploding with such complete glee when he entered that cloud was something Tefiren did entirely on his own while I was writing that scene, but then I figured out why and it really is delightful. Normally, he's constantly set upon by the nagging, subconscious fear that maybe one of Them can see him right now and knows exactly where he is - but here in the cloud, he knows that can't be the case, and the sudden lack of that constant fear sends his mind a little bit loopy. :3

...but he can't comprehend the idea that it could actually be possible to go and live somewhere else, either. It's too integral a part of everything he is today that he's constantly running for his life. Or that's what I assume is going on, at any rate.

Yes. Although, by now, I think it's less that he can't comprehend it and more that he doesn't want to comprehend it; he'd really love to live somewhere else where it's safe, but as that's not actually possible, it hurts too much to imagine it. (Forsira's reply of "You're right; we could never fly out that far," shows that she knows exactly what he was really saying there.)

Why aren't they just hiding in those cliffside caves on the sunrise side, though? Those are completely safe hiding places, and then they'll only have to be in danger when they hunt, really.

Hahaha I don't actually know. D: Or, at least, I didn't remotely consider that while I was writing, but since both you and yiran wondered that, I came up with a reason, which can be found in my reply to yiran. (It involves Tefirationalising.)

I still feel that here, after this scene, the pacing of this part would come out better if you added in one Forsira/Tefiren scene and then another Zathern/Karsa scene. This is mainly because as it is this part is missing something really showing us exactly how much friendly battling with Karsa helped Zathern. You also reveal later that the two are mates by the time Tefiren is killed; since at the end of this Zathern scene she's described as being his "best friend", that compounds the feeling that we're missing some pretty significant time for Zathern. I also feel it would simply add power to the whole thing, not that it's lacking that as it is: getting more than that little taste of Zathern finally finding some measure of joy in his life again would make it even more heartwrenching to see it torn away from him with Karsa's death and give us a deeper understanding of his feelings in the aftermath.

As I think we've discussed on MSN at some point, I think you're right that a couple of extra scenes here would be a good thing. I will hopefully get around to doing so sometime in the vague future (you know what I'm like with getting extra scenes done for this thing D: ).

As for Karsa becoming Zathern's mate... that was supposed to have happened at the end of the final scene in Breaking. D: I guess I was too light on the lovey-dovey fade-to-black there. She was described as his "best friend" in this scene here because it's still true and it seemed the most relevant thing for Zathern to think in the situation, regardless of the romantic undercurrent to their relationship. Yeeeaaah I should probably edit this somehow as well sometime.


I also definitely should rewrite the end of that scene of Forsira's so as to not lessen the impact of Tefiren saving her, preferably sooner rather than later. Thanks for pointing out that it does that; I can't believe I never realised that was a bad thing on my own. I'll be sure to keep her parents in it, though. Glad you liked that aspect of it, at least.


Also, I'm happy to hear that the whole climax in general brought you to tears. Perhaps because I'm the one who wrote it, I've barely ever cried at this fic, so I sometimes forget just how hypothetically capable of doing that to other people it is. It's good to know it's been successful in that regard. :3

And thanks again for your long, epic ramble, too! That was an awesome birthday present. You noticed so much stuff and you understand the characters so well and you even pointed out a few things that I never really noticed and aaaa. =D


yiranY - Like I said in PM, it absolutely made my day when I saw your review. Dragonfree had mentioned on Twitter that she'd got someone else to read this and linked me to your post about it on TCoD, to which I was all "aaaa this person is awesome I want to talk to them more about what they thought of it but I can't D:", so to see that you'd made a Serebii account for the sole purpose of posting a review, and one this long and epic? Wow. Thank you so much. :3

And I can't even express how happy I am that you love my story so much. I mean, every now and then a fictional work, be it a game, film, TV show, whatever, will manage to take over my mind for several days, and such works are always the best things to me. To think that my own story managed to do that for someone else is just amazing.

(Whenever my mind gets taken over by something, I generally spend my time looking up everything about it I can possibly find, which... doesn't seem too inaccurate a description of your reaction to this, right? So, while I can't really show you much else right now that isn't horribly unfinished, have a Tefiren. :3)

Thanks for all your criticism, too! It might sound in the following replies like I'm somewhat brushing off what you're saying because I probably won't ever get around to rewriting this, but you made a lot of good points that I'll definitely keep in mind and hopefully learn from for all the writing I do in the future.

Then your rambly summary of the story is just fun. :3 I haven't replied to much of that, because it's hard to find responses to things which are largely exactly what happened, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy reading it. It's always interesting seeing other people's reactions and insights on your own stories.


I don't like the concept of the inner predator. I originally expected it to have a role in the future of the story when it was first introduced, but it doesn't really do anything except for one of the reasons to justify the Sceptile somewhat. It isn't particularly effective at that, either. I still unconditionally hate the non-Zathern Sceptile. (Yes, including Karsa, because I'm apathetic towards "wanting to be in a group" justifying genocide. ;_; Well, maybe not unconditional hate, but I still dislike her.) Speaking of which, I don't think the fact that Pokémon enjoyed battling is needed either, but that's from canon so I can't really blame you.

Really? I mean, I guess that's your opinion and that's fine, but the inner predator/monster inside is a pretty important element in quite a few character moments later on in the story. It's more than just somewhat "justifying" what the Sceptile do - it gives Zathern and Karsa and many of the other Sceptile who were bullied and pressured into it a way to help them deny the horrific reality of what they're doing so that they can cope with it, using the excuse that it's not really them carrying out the killings (much like how other characters deny the horrific reality of what's happening in other ways). Without that concept, I honestly don't know how I'd have got Zathern to become one of Them like he needed to for the story. It also allows certain implications to be made about the few characters - namely Tharann and Tefiren - who don't need to use the monster inside to kill. Then it's a pretty integral part of Zathern's mindset and emotion in the scene where Azma dies, such that again, the entire scene would have come out completely differently if it weren't for that. I guess if you just personally didn't particularly appreciate its use, that's fine, but I do think the concept gets a decently important role in parts of the story. I came up with it fairly on the spot during NaNoWriMo while writing the first hunting scenes, but I'm glad I did because I really don't know what the fic would have been without it.

Also, while again I don't mind if you don't personally like Karsa, I'm intrigued as to why you don't see wanting to be in a group as reason enough to justify things in her case when wanting to be in a group is also pretty much why Zathern joins Them, and you clearly still sympathise with him. Not accusing here, just genuinely curious: what makes Karsa's situation any different, to you?

(and I'll agree that the battling wasn't necessarily that important to anything, but I put it in because yeah, it's pretty much canon. That and I wanted to be able to write a wider variety of battles than just between Treecko-line members.)

But there are plenty of coincidental events that detach me from the realistic outlook somewhat. How Forsira's parents have time to speak to her before their death, where in later scenes the Sceptile almost just kill them instantly. How Forsira bonds with the single Treecko that will grow up to be a Sceptile in the Archopy community. How they are the ones which find Raphyn's dead body alone which culminates in Zathern leaving and becoming one of Them. How Forsira just happens to run into Tefiren the first time she is hunted by Them. How Verdan killed Arkesra instead of Forsira (in case you forgot about your own story Arkesra is Draern's mate) when they are right next to each other. How Tefiren manages to kill Karsa out of the rest of the Sceptile. Yes, some are necessary for the plot, but others aren't and if you removed (or rewrote) the ones that aren't necessary it would've been more believable. Still, it's written well which makes most readers overlook it. I'm just picky.

Haha, you are totally right. I'd never really noticed it much before, but this story is just full of coincidences, isn't it? But like you say, pretty much all of them are important to the story, so I don't know if there's much I could do about it. I think that, despite what you said about parts of this story being realistic rather than idealistic, "realism" wasn't really what I was going for when I wrote it so much as "whatever makes an interesting story", which sometimes led to the realistic result happening, and sometimes required unrealistic coincidences. I guess that's just the way I write, heh. But I suppose it could have been possible to write those events in such a way that it makes them come across as less of a coincidence, so I guess that's something I can try and keep in mind in future.

I also think some action scenes are slightly long, such as Tefiren's introductory sequence. I guess that's just me wanting plot a lot more because I've almost never heard anyone else have a problem with action scenes.

You may also be slightly right here - part of it could be down to the fact that this was written for NaNoWriMo and therefore writing action scenes becomes all FREE EXCUSE TO GET DOWN LOTS OF EXTRA WORDS GO GO GO. But hopefully most of the action scenes also showcase important things about, for example, Tefiren's character, since that's what I was going for in a lot of them.

Leathra just resigns to her death without any attempt to escape.

Leathra is brave enough that she didn't want Forsira to see her as a terrified broken wreck like she did Resten. However, that totally doesn't excuse the nonsensicalness of the opening scene that both you and Dragonfree pointed out in that there is really very little reason for Leathra and Resten to not try and run for it, since they know Forsira won't be harmed. So, yeah.

And I don't get why the Sceptile dump Germane's body in the Archopy's clearing, because I don't think there would be a need to remind the Archopy that they're now killing children.

I'm not really sure how much of this was clear, but: Skorrhen always thought that starting to kill the children might finally spur the Archopy into actually trying to fight back again, which is why he deliberately left it until there were more of Them than there were surviving Archopy (as he learned from Germane just before killing him), so that such a last stand would fail. He didn't necessarily need to dump Germane's body, but doing so got the message across more clearly and quickly than otherwise, making it even more likely that the Archopy would be spurred into their hopeless last stand - a last stand Skorrhen actually wanted to happen just because it would get everyone in one place and get things over with sooner.

(I think that at least the first sentence of that explanation should hopefully be fairly apparent from the story. The second part, not so much, but understanding that hopefully also isn't quite as important.)

Also I don't get how Azma is (was) safe, because (kinda squicky here) if Tharann is able to rape her sufficiently to impregnate her, wouldn't she be at his, if not other Sceptile's, mercy? I have the feeling I'm missing something here but I couldn't find anything after skimming through it again.

I'm fairly sure this should be clear from the story. Just before Azma dies, she explains to Zathern that converting her son into one of Them was always what Tharann was trying to do to her and begs him to come back to her side because then at least she won't die in total despair. In the scene after that, too, Karsa reveals that everyone else in Them knew all along why Tharann wanted to convert Zathern - to break Azma. It's not that Tharann or another one of Them couldn't have killed Azma sometime earlier, it's that Tharann is a sick enough bastard with a big enough grudge against her that he didn't want her dead until she'd been completely and utterly broken. Azma always knew this, which is why she was always pretty sure no-one was going to kill her for as long as her son was still hers. (Even near the beginning, when it's still a mystery, Azma does always phrase it as "They won't kill me", not "They can't kill me", which I guess could act as a subtle hint that she's being actively spared for some reason.)

Talking about this incidentally reminds me that there's a short extra scene I started writing ages ago but still haven't finished, which features Azma shortly after Zathern is born and goes into more detail on what I've just been talking about. I guess this means I should really get around to finishing that scene sometime and then maybe post it in this thread since you and others might be interested in reading it. D:

Also, why don't Forsira and Tefiren stay in the caverns on the cliff after the rest die? They wouldn't need to evade any Sceptile unless they're hunting which I don't think would be that hard.

Heh. Dragonfree asked this as well, and it is a very good question which I somehow utterly failed to consider an explanation for while I was actually writing the story. Any explanation I give here would be made up after the fact as justification, but I guess it comes down to Tefiren's massive case of denial - he wants to be able to pretend that he never felt as openly scared and vulnerable as he did in the cave, that the children were never murdered while he ran away, that evading Them is still just as "easy" and "fun" as it used to be because nothing's changed at all, really! (Except for the fact that he and Forsira are now mates, but he would have also convinced himself that this is totally the way things were always going to be!)

...okay, so I may have made that up on the spot, but I'm pretty convinced now that that really is why they never used those caves again and it's just that Tefiren never told me that. He writes himself. :3

But it's good to know that all of these things I just provided explanations for were pretty much just fridge logic and not glaring enough to distract readers while they're immersed in the story.

You could have literally put more "what could have been" thoughts into the characters. What could have been if Zathern and Forsira were in a world without Them. (Zathern did still have feelings for Forsira, deduced from the line where the narration says "so she had someone else now". The other way is more ambiguous though.) What could have been if Forsira and Tefiren evaded the Sceptile long enough to have children (adorable <3). What could have been if Azma didn't stop the resistance after Zathern was born. Well that last one is touched upon but still I think it could have been (!pun!) a lot more emotional if the characters thought about this stuff.

Also at the part where Tefiren gets killed Forsira saying something to Zathern would probably be more emotional than simply staring at him then flying away. It can range from anything, really, such as from "I forgive you" to "Bye, Zathern" to "You killed him" to "Enjoy the rest of your life". Granted some of them are way out of character but I still think it would have been more emotionally riveting if something is said. Maybe it's just me, though.

You may be right in that some of these things could have added more emotion. The reason things aren't that way isn't because I actively chose not to include such thoughts, it's just that it never really occurred to me to do so - if it had, then maybe I would have done. But then it's possible that the reason it never occurred to me was because it never occurred to the characters, either, given that I was essentially thinking through their minds most of the time I was writing this. The various "what could have been" situations might indeed have been interesting for Forsira or someone to have thought about - but I think that she quite possibly sees the way the world is as such an utterly fixed, inherent thing, sad as it is, that it doesn't even occur to her to consider that things could have been different. (I guess this notion goes along with the title of the fic: it's all a foregone conclusion and every bad thing that happens was always inevitably going to happen all along.)

The same pretty much goes for Forsira's lack of final words to Zathern - it's not that I actively chose for her to say nothing so much as she just didn't end up saying anything because she was in so much shock and horror. Then she suddenly had to run for her life again before she had time to really process what had just happened, and by the time she might have wanted to say something to Zathern, it was too late to. Her saying something may indeed have given it more emotion, but in the end that just wasn't what happened.

The Sceptile's attitude towards Archopy is also a bit overboard. I mean, I guess they are the antagonists, but the other Sceptile's antagonism (mind the pun) towards the Archopy is a worse than the Archopy's attitude towards the Sceptile, despite the Archopy having more of an excuse to hate Sceptiles. It's not glaring but if you put some more anger at the Sceptile from the Archopy side (said, not just thought in Forsira's mind), it would be more balanced.

Mmm, that's also a good point. The Sceptile's antagonism towards the Archopy probably seems so great because we barely see any Sceptile that aren't Them, so it's not possible to tell whether or not all of the not-Them ones are as obliviously racist as that one female who tells Zathern his father must be a Sceptile. As for the Archopy, now that you mention it, I probably could and should have shown a bit more antagonism from them towards Sceptile, since there's bound to be some distrust and animosity towards the entire species as a result of the fact that almost the only Sceptile any Archopy will ever encounter are murderers. There's less of that from Forsira because Azma is insistent on not blaming the innocent Sceptile and she learnt that outlook from her, but most other Archopy (or sunset side Grovyle or Treecko) wouldn't necessarily have felt the same way, and it might have been good to give a glimpse of that in the periphery of Forsira's worldview.


["so thin she'd just disappear"] is also an extension on trying to avoid the thought of dying (or I'm just reading too deeply and she doesn't know about starvation).
Haha. In my mind that line was always just because Forsira is so young she doesn't understand that starvation leads to death, but that alternate interpretation of yours is a very fun one!

Which shows this story's true colours – it's not about recovering from the parents' death. It's about dealing with dying yourself. (Remember I'm still placing this as an individual story)
Oh, don't worry, I think of this as an individual story, too, and it definitely is meant to be about dealing with death. I'd had various details of it in my head for a long time since beginning Lost Evolution, but it's only after I thought about it enough to realise that it could make a really interesting story in its own right that I decided I wanted to write it. Plus, it stands entirely on its own in-universe, in that none of its events are influenced by anything that happens in Lost Evolution, whereas Lost Evolution itself is influenced somewhat by the events of this. (Of course, out-of-universe this is influenced by LE in that I had to stick to the details thought up by my horribly-biased, unskilled beginning-writer self, leading to a quite a few of the coincidences that you pointed out earlier, but that can't be helped. xP)

Tefiren is my favourite character even though he has much less development than Forsira and Zathern simply because of his attitude – it's a game, so he didn't need to worry about anything, right? Anyway, back on less self-centred stuff,
Eee! As you will undoubtedly have noticed if you've read my replies to Dragonfree's reviews, and which you might have gathered even if you hadn't, Tefiren is my favourite character too - in fact, he's my favourite character I've ever written full stop. So it makes me incredibly happy to see that other people really love him too! =D You should not remotely try and restrain yourself from opinionated squeeing over him - I will only nod and squee with you, after all. =P (Collective squeeing over Tefiren seems to be a large proportion of mine and Dragonfree's reviews/replies. If you haven't read them, you may enjoy doing so, since you like Tefiren so much as well. :3)

And then her pleading is just so ador- I mean, very realistic and very convincing, like someone desperate. No wonder Tefiren eventually agrees. The introduction of Air Slash (or is it Air Cutter?) is also done well and is a reasonable justification for how Tefiren is so skilful at evading Them. Oh and Tefiren starts to show signs of… not infatuation, but caring towards Forsira, like "a hint of franticness" when she thinks he is running away.

(stop preventing yourself from describing them as adorable I know exactly what you mean and am happy that I got you to think so)

Caring? Hmm - I'm not entirely sure Tefiren does begin to care about her as such this early on. His hint of franticness is because he doesn't want to have to admit the reason why he was running away - that he's afraid of getting attached to her. That's also why he eventually gave in and agreed to Forsira's persuasion: because the only excuse he had left to give was the true reason he doesn't want her there, and his defence mechanisms would never let him admit that.

And yeah, it's Air Slash, not that it would really matter to the story if anyone misinterpreted it as Air Cutter.

And now. I understand the fact that you had to kill of the characters, and I think it is indeed beneficial to the plot, but now you can't write anymore about the characters? I am not exaggerating at all when I say this is the most amazing thing ever. I spend like half of my time fantasizing about what Zathern would do if Forsira was killed by his father, or if Forsira survived and had children, or if Forsira suddenly knew Perish Song and killed all the Sceptile. Ugh, I'm just too imaginative. And this is just too amazing. Too amazing.

Ha. About that!

You're not the only one who's been thinking about various alternate scenarios within this story. Aside from the (canonical) Azma thing I mentioned earlier that I begun writing and will totally get around to finishing sometime eventually, I've also got a couple of alternate-universe scenes in the works in varying stages of I-will-totally-do-this-someday incompleteness. Both involve Tefiren, naturally.

One is about the what-if of Forsira becoming pregnant (is that the right word when it's with an egg? Eggnant?), a bit like something you happened to mention earlier - I was quite amused when I read that and saw you'd had a similar thought. =P Forsira and Tefiren are seriously lucky that didn't happen canonically, really - mating became one of Tefiren's favourite ways to distract himself from his constant fear, yet it somehow never had consequences (while Azma was raped only once by Tharann and that managed to impregnate her. Totally not contrived coincidences there! ;P). So this AU explores Tefiren's reaction to discovering he's going to be a father, which, considering that his attachment issues barely coped with Forsira joining him, is very, very fun. Forsira is also pretty adorably irrational in it, too.

Then the other AU piece is about the what-if of Tefiren not choosing to sacrifice himself for Forsira at the end - because he so, so nearly didn't, and that scene could so easily have gone the other way. And if it had, it would have resulted in Tefiren desperately trying to convince himself that he's totally not heartbroken at losing Forsira nor wracked with guilt and self-loathing for letting it happen, all while continuing his game with Them as the only one left, and long story short it would be the most fun thing ever to write. I've barely started this one, but I simply have to get around to it at some point in my life.

For some inexplicable reason I keep on relating Portal to this. Like imagining that secretly an Archopy was Still Alive and singing a twisted version of that song. Or the two species putting differences behind them for science. You monster. o_o Yes I'm crazy.

Ha. For some reason this gives me the crazy notion of Forsira somehow being uploaded to GLaDOS, going insane and carrying out an omnicidal rampage of revenge against all the Sceptile (except Zathern). Whut.

WRITE MORE PLEASE ASGHASDKSDGKJ

While you're absolutely right that I definitely should write more just in general, if you don't mind that it's not Foregone Conclusion and just want to read more stuff by me, you're welcome to check out Lost Evolution! (though that's older and I'm not too proud of the first ten or so chapters any more.) Or there's also my one-shot about a Dodrio that won the Pokémon POV contest here that some people seem to like.

Anyway, yes. You are an awesome person, and you should feel awesome.
 

IJuggler

how much words
more I's than a gaggle of spiders.

I want to go through this again and edit it together to make it more coherent, but I'm tired. Sorry :p

This is how word of mouth goes, I guess. Yiran's been nagging me to finish reading this for a while now, and today I sat down and read the last half of it.

I'll just throw most of this in a spoiler tag to save some time.

This was a great fanfic, and I doubt that I'll ever regret reading it. It's easily one of the most moving pieces of fiction I've ever read. I love the character progression, and I just can't say how impressed I am with the subtle parallels all through the story. However, I think it has one major flaw as a story; they are all too human.

Before getting to actual review, I'd just like to point out things I thought were particularly interesting without being good or bad to the story.

The Sceptile populace who weren't any of Them are kind of curious. They're actually more like how I think the species would be in a natural setting, allowing anything that doesn't personally affect them slide and not being very motivated in particular. Compared to the rest of the characters, these were the real animals, uncaring and feral; the equivalent of a neutral citizenry between two clashing forces. To think that They are just going to settle down and become like them, now that their one big conquest is over, is laughable to me; armies never truly retire.

I actually wasn't a fan of the big climactic battle of Archopy vs. Sceptile, even for the couple paragraphs we saw. It seemed somewhere in the middle of a glorious last stand and a hopeless last effort, and the two didn't feel like they meshed well. I couldn't tell you why, but something about it just felt a bit sour.

I wasn't very sympathetic of Forsira's fear of Sceptile after Zathern evolved. Yiran and I argued about this, but I still think it's pushing it to say that, despite every single person she's ever talked to (and her own experiences amongst them!) telling her otherwise, she still fears the Sceptile on an instinctual level. Yes, having parents being murdered while young is a horrible thing, and it would leave emotional scars, but I just can't see it being the catalyst to destroy a friendship almost as old as the scarring. I just feel that Forsira could've gotten over it. Although, having typed this now, I'm thinking how this could've turned into an interesting Batman-esque fic instead.

I know it's picky, and that the character's wouldve had no reason to think otherwise, but I couldn't help but thinking of how inefficient a circle was for protecting their children. The Archopy were known to attack from one diretion, and if they were so afraid from attack from the read they could've posted a couple facing opposite and had them give a signal if they needed reinforcement. Blah blah strategy

I think that your Archopy and/or Sceptile would've had no problems making and using tools. Most of ours wouldn't be useful in their case, but things like wooden spears or javelins would've been worth their weight in gold in that last battle. They wouldn't be hard to make at all, with always sharp blades on the ends of your arms, and would allow extended reach that might've saved (extended) lives. It feels like the only reason this sort of thing wasn't used was to make it easier to write, instead of keeping with the most realistic human reactions given to everything else in the story.

Azma asking Forsira to leave was pretty cold, I think, and at the time I read it it felt like artificual conflit made just to make Forsira feel even worse. I get that Azma was sad, but throughout the rest of the story she seemed to be a leader who wasn't afraid of what others thought of her, and she did many thinks despite their inherent danger. I just thought it was a bit out of character for her to do that.

Towards the end of the story, when it was just Forsira and Tefiren, I was reminded strongly of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. In one of the Wii games, one of the species is reduced to a single member by antoher, and it was really interesting noticing the symmetry between both victems of genocide and the genocidal maniacs who pushed forward. So there's that.

I think it was mighty convenient that there was a pecha berry tree right around the area where the Wurmple were nesting (and later, the Vileplume, although the greater agility of the Archopy form sort of makes this moot). Wouldn't a species want to reside somewhere where their greatest defense can't be neutralized by anything with a thumb? I only noticed this while I was being picky, but still thought it was worth mentioning.

I think there are enough reasonable justifications for Forsira and Tefiren to not just stay in the cave; it's not sustainable, with only the two of them there, the sunlight is much weaker, if they're found a guard of Sceptile could be posted around the cave in an effort to kill them when they leave, and perhaps Archopy yearn the sky and freedom just as much as any other bird. What I am wondering is why didn't the entire species move into secluded areas like these; it would be much more ridiculous to try hunting them down, when they have a safe home like this to sleep in at least. Perhaps it's overrating the tactical thoughts of Archopy, though. They didn't show very much individual planning throughout the story, evident in the reverence of the few who do, like Tefiren and Azma (who have shadow opposites in the form of Tharann and Skorrhen, who work together and ultimately win when the opposite is divided).

Because I've been noticing all these parallels in the two sides of the island, I think I can nail why Karsa is my least favourite character; she's the parallel to Tefiren, who is bright and delightful, while she is simply less glum than her environment. Plus, her only real contribution was to push Zathern over the edge (twice), and she failed to do that completely twice.

There were smaller issues that I would've just glazed over in a work that wasn't so gorgeous, but I think I'll mention them here. I know this was a NaNonWriMo submission, but I think the first three or four parts could be completely snipped, and you'd have just as strong of a story (and would only need small editing to imply more about the origins, if at all). I found the time spent as a Treecko incredibly bland to read, because it was just time for introducing the characters that wasn't really needed. I think the only things that would really be lost from this would be the foreshadowing of Verdan and pecha berries, and even then they weren't just pulled out of nowhere when they were used. I had to push through reading through the first half of the story, but the entirety makes up for the slow start.

Er, and speaking of dropping scenes. I think the first Tefiren scene, in particular, could've been dropped; it would've lent an even more mysterious background to him. And I just watched Fight Club again yesterday, and a shining beacon of spontaneity in a bleak surrounding is exactly what Tyler Durden is, except with more face-smashing. I half hoped for him to just be the realization of some aspect of Forse's mind, but I think that would be too much to ask for :p

I disagree on how your battle system works, because I think that sparing time to send an accusing glare towards the offender would be a stupid way to be caught dying in case it wasn't just a battle. With the rate of death among zigzagoons, taillow, and wurmple throughout the story, it leads me to believe that they must have the reproduction cycles of rabbits to have a hope of surviving, and I think that death being only a bite away would be an excellent deterrent to loitering after being attacked. Although I understand that this would've taken away from the story, which is why I think this is only a minor complaint.

But your Pokemon being too human stretched my suspence of disbelief too far. I think you could make this an original fiction easily, with find and replace of names and a light bit more description about each species, and instead have these animals being advanced humans instead. The emotional ranges, and reactions, and almost everything about them was human (shown perfectly, mind, but human). I understand that it makes the story easier to write, and it's definitely going to appeal to a wider audience to write a story about human-acting animals instead of animal-acting animals, but I have to mention this because it just didn't make sense to me. I don't think wild Pokemon would have the same type of society as us at all. I'll just clip this rant because it's off-topic, but this was my only real gripe with the story.

I found myself almost skimming Zathern's parts once Tefiren was introduced. Tefiren is just such an active character that moving back over to Zathern and Karsa just felt like a tease. Their relationship was very important to the end, I understand, but it just wasn't as appealing.

I think that while the conflict between what is right and what is easy was made overly complicated. Of course, being just a reader and not actually in their shoes, I can't just say that they are an idiot for not doing this or that, but I think it's obvious to the reader that the right thing is to not murder any Archopy, and to do anything within their power to protect them. Again though, I just have to mention that the parallels here are fantastic, with both Forsira and Zathern having to chose between coasting through and living easily, or doing what's right and fighting. Perhaps I was deprived through high school, because I still like thinking critically about themes like this.

I think the absolute strongest point in this story is when Tefiren is circling above the canopy. Other characters make decisions throughout based on their nature and their experiences, but int his moment, Tefiren makes a decision out of his love that defies his most defining trait of cowardice. It hit me hard right there how much these characters care about each other.

I can't praise you enough for what you did well here, although I'm in the post-reading afterglow, but the way you paced the drama and action was perfect. The ending was poetic, despite following conventions of the notoriously evil human logic, the characters were striking and likeable (even the evil ones, in a way), and the plot was entirely natural. Kudos to you.

I'm just sorry for poor yiran; he had to hear all of my complaints along the way ('why should I even care that her parents just died?' etc), and he probably even read this story in solid black-on-green. Ouch.

And if that murmur of an extra scene is added, you can be sure I'd review that too.
 

SlowCrow

Fence Crow
Guess who decided to show up.

Yes, I have been gone for a long while.

Yeah, I did this before.

No, I never did manage to find my old work.

Yes, I have to start from scratch now.

And yes, I'm totally still doing this.

Well, there are so many things that I could say (and have said, sadly) about Forgone Conclusion just about the title alone. But what it boils (boiled?) down to is that, at its very heart, this story is a character piece first and foremost. Yeah there is a plot, and yeah, there is a world, but from LE, we know the fate of this world and as such, they are not relevant. Which is perhaps the nicest, and still accurate, way I can put two of the main weaknesses of your works without sounding like a picky jerk that keeps picking at the same scab over and over again.

And know that I will be picking at the same scab over and over again. Much love.

Anyway, what is relevant is the story of one little green dinosaur, one very torn, but still fragile in both body and spirit, that managed to fly a rather small distance, but managed to end up much, much, much farther from home than she bargained. The ironies behind that in of itself are for another time and another fic.

But for now, you bring us, the readers, backwards from an event we all know must happen and give us another two flavors of irony: one of innocence, the irony of not knowing enough about the world, and one of tragedy, the irony of knowing just a bit too much about it. And for the latter flavor, I must say that I must congratulate and shame you; thank you for the experience and condemn you of it all the same.

I must congratulate you on the basis that while this fic is a character piece, the story is not about a single one. Rather, it is how the story of many, different creatures play into the context of our main protagonist, each of which having their own personality and motives that add to the story rather than simply existing to move the plot along. That alone is an achievement.

As for the condemning, you must be aware that it is cruel thing you did to us readers. You create a slew characters we will care about with the full intent of eventually-- well I rather not say, for the sake of visitors who have not read the fic yet. But you know what I mean.

After all, what kind of Pokémon fic would this be if it didn't rely on the theme of the journey being greater than a simple destination?

See that brick of text above? Yeah, imagine that for forty pages and you would basically get what I originally wrote the first time I read the fic. And all of that is lost. You can guess how thrilled I am right now. ಠ_ಠ

No use crying over spilled milk, I suppose. I'll save that for the fic.

So here is how it is going to break down: rather than go bit by bit, quote by quote, and action for action like I did in my other reviews, I'm going to take a slightly wider scope. Okay, a vastly wider scope. I will give each scene (yes, scene) a broad analysis, and on points where I feel like I should explain on certain things, I'll use quotes and examples like I did before. I'll still try to do so from the perspective of a first time reader for the sake of pointing out cohesion errors that come with the territory of being a writer who both already knows what is happening in her head as well as only having the space of a month to put it all into text.

Sound good to you? No? Too bad, I do what I want. Like a spoiler library. :<

The introduction to any work, no matter where you go, has to both, one, quickly capture the reader's attention with something compelling, and two, introduce some of the more exciting, and possibly harder to swallow, parts of the story's setting and rules upfront.

This is not to say that you failed to accomplish these things. It is quite the opposite, actually; you successfully introduced the tone, creatures, and conflict of the story in a manner where none of them will feel out of place when reintroduced later on. Without it, I don't think the fic would be able to feel quite right when things really start ramping up. Think of it as the supporting pillar of the structure that is your fic, the tether and point of reference when it comes to anything that happens later on in the fic: this shows how far the fic is willing to go when it comes to the more dramatic/horrific scenes as well as its focus within said scenes. Everything that the fic will ever say is said in the 1,600+ word block. Everything. You had only the faintest of ideas when you wrote this thing in November, trying to figure out how precisely you were going to go about this. How you were going to get this 'greatest-idea-ever' onto a physical medium, this indescribable feeling onto paper. Then it was time. You had your first go, your story explodes onto the keyboard, however fast or slow that might have been. This one scene is the result. This is the result of the raw emotion you wanted to inspire with this fic, the first, purest, and briefest look of what you wanted to write. No matter how unskilled or masterful someone is at expressing themself in a medium, their first attempt will more or less always stem from one single goal: I want to make this that will be like this. No matter how rough that comes out, that first shot at capturing this abstract thing they feel is always important and always condensed. Every last detail is critical to see the creator's strengths and weaknesses, no matter how neat/sloppy it may be, and as such, is the best time to get into the creator's head. You have to see past what is merely on the medium of choice, and instead look at what a certain element was attempting to inspire, and once you found that, you have found the one purpose of the entire work.

So yeah. This scene is kind of important in the grand scheme of things, even outside the story.

As such I will probably take way too much time dissecting it. Not as a way to undermine it as to, well, mine the gems from something that could be seen as less than what it is really worth. But, before I can praise you any more (and I will eventually. A lot. I swear.), I must point out a couple of minor and subtle problems when it comes to the narrative for the first few scenes.

The scene itself has several things going on in it, but before I touch upon any of that I must inform you that there is a slight disconnect that will be present when new readers come along; something they will see but not yet be able to wrap their head around. Once you know about the cause, I'm sure you'll at most raise an eyebrow or shrug, but it may play a bigger part than you might think. It's a silly little thing and is an extremely small hump to get over, something that may not even be a problem in a certain light. The best way to encapsulate it in a single word? Archopy.

Archopy. Archopy. Archopy.

Strap yourself in, I'm going to pick so many nits.

The way that that this fic, and most fics on this board really, are written (which is to say, almost completely off the cusp) makes it so that it is almost guaranteed for a writer to fall into the pitfall that what would otherwise be a perfectly good intro: misplaced scope. Writers have an idea where they want the fic to go, but they don't know what they should say or describe since the material that relies on said details don't exist yet. But that's not your problem, you avoided that particular part of it quite nicely, however accidentally or purposefully. No, where you missteped was not in feeding the reader the vitally important details about the world, however small they may be.

This is one of the first flags that indicate that you were not entirely in the right focus when it comes to targeted reader groups. In other words, while it is reasonable to assume that readers of this fic will be familiar to the concepts of Pokémon, talking Pokémon, and their attacks, it is not as reasonable to assume that they would be familiar to what an Archopy even is. Is it a Pokémon? Is it a tribe of humans who are named as such? There are only vague hints to the answers of these questions. And with the way you have them interact with each other, it complicates the process of determining the characters' species even further since they all have mannerisms which are very much in the way of human.

On top of that, you have these characters all in a tree and have their limbs glow bright green before the previously mentioned vague hints could be presented to the reader, leaving him/her confused as to what is supposed to be happening. You mention wings, arms, and leaves before that, but the reader has no idea as to what an Archopy's morphology is supposed to be yet, making the whole up-on-a-tree-branch setting seem a rather odd choice of setting, at least at first.

Now, I would understand if you said the reader wasn't supposed to know what an Archopy was at this point, as it was in the middle of the night and at most you would only see are the silhouettes of the characters. But then you have all these sight-reliant events, such as, uh, the whole family scene on the branch, where you have them look at each others' faces/eyes quite a number of times; something that you cannot do in complete darkness. On top of that, it would be quite strange to, all of a sudden, see a Treecko be the main protagonist when most signs pointed to something that wasn't necessarily a Pokémon.

When you really look at it, this all means that you simply have to inform the reader that these creatures are indeed Pokémon. The rest will be much easier to follow for new readers if you do so. Not a particularly big problem, right?

Well, it kinda is. I'm going to cheat a little and talk about how misplaced scope affects the whole experience of the first few scenes to readers.

You know what the events described in the fic will eventually lead to. Butterfree knows. I know. Your readers who have not read Lost Evolution, however, do not. And I think the heart of the problem of not having as many people read/review this fic as you would probably like is rather simple: what it looks like from the outside.

Think about it for a moment. We have fake Pokémon, a parental murder followed by a rather lighthearted narrative shift, and nothing really compelling that follows the intro up. These uninitiated readers have no idea where the plot will go nor do they have any particular reason to continue reading; it's not a trainer fic, or a one shot, or PMD fic, and so on, so they have no prestablished plot points in mind to look forward to. So when they see the somewhat cliché event of a parental murder followed by a focus on the survivor, they might see it as a half-hearted attempt to gain the reader's sympathy instead of the plot point you and I know it is.

(And very quickly here, [No time to sympathize with/characterize characters] + [Sad things] =/= [Readers' sympathy], but seeing the rest of the fic, I know that you know how to rectify that. Effectively. Ruthlessly. And repeatedly. ;_;)

You know what would provoke reader interest more than a murder? In a not very ironic fashion, it's the prologue of Lost Evolution, i.e the forgone conclusion of Forgone Conclusion. Funnily enough, I recall that one of the posts predicted that LE would be the reverse chronological story of the narrating character in Forgone Conclusion, but ended up being something completely different. Now that said fic exists, why wouldn't you want to make it the prologue? Because knowing what happens would damper the effect of the fic? Look at Butterfree: she beta'd this and has read LE but still turns to goo as she reviews this fic, so why do you think a newcomer would be less reactive? I argue that not having said prologue only hinders the fic's effect, since it changes the overarching mood from one of a hopeful (but futile) dread to a more upbeat affair overall. This fic isn't upbeat; any instances thereof if will simply be converted into heartbreaking emotional leverage later on. You know this. Butterfree knows this. I know this. Newcomers don't.

This, and the following few scenes, are fine if you already know the conclusion and the driving force behind it, but drag on and on if you don't. This is why you see childhood flashbacks happen during the more intense moments in other works: the audience already knows the context, the conflict, and the irony of the flashback, so they only have to see a brief flash of it to get the effect. From what I gathered, you were leaning towards a purposeful inversion of a happy, if not troubled, childhood to a more "omg-no-whyyyy-:(((((" adolescence and adulthood, with hints of what was going to happen sprinkled throughout.

The problem you have inadvertently created by presenting the childhood phase upfront without the LE prologue, once again, is that you are giving uninitiated readers nothing to hold on or look forward to. There is no mystery. There is no looming drama. There isn't even a unique setting relative to other Pokémon fics. No incentive to keep on reading whatsoever. But you know otherwise, as does Butterfree, and as do I.

There is meat to this story, and all of what is happening will be relevant later on, but there are simply no flags to convey that to new readers. If you are going to exempt the titular forgone conclusion, you might as well add a some sort of significant-looking-but-not-really secondary conflict for the first chapter to keep them around long enough to see the second phase of the fic. It's sort of a weird thing to bring up, but you know how relatively dry the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book read compared to the rest of it? There were tons of hints of what was to come not only in that book but in the entire series, but the real hooks that would keep readers reading all happen later on; that pretty much captures the essence what I'm trying to say here.

You unconsciously wrote this fic from the perspective of someone who has already read LE, but you presented it as a standalone story, and it shows. It doesn't destroy the fic, of course, but it doesn't do too much in trying to catch a passerby reader's eye. The intro, once you know about Them's(Their?) plan, is quite important and actually imparts another emotional layer to everything that happens in the next two chapters, pretty much making the reader see every event through Azma's eyes: fearful and sorrowful of what is to come, but silently, if not counterproductively, hopeful. Now that is a hook.

Well that was a bit more painful than I would have liked it to be. Let's talk about what makes these chapters good now, eh? So yes, that is to say even more pain. :)

Okay, I'm going to cheat one last time. Knowing what happens later in the fic, I can't help but notice that there are quite a number of events, however small, that are echoed later on. Looks, hopes, and self-delusions found later in the fic can be found here in a compressed format, having very familiar wording to boot. I'm not sure if it was something that you did on purpose, as I only get a strong sence of deja-vu from reading this again; not because I know what happens in this part of the fic as much as it is that I know what happens later. The effect is so subtle that I didn't notice until my second time reading from the start. It is strange, if not fitting.

Anyway, onto the murder.

Now, I'm sort of torn about what I should be focusing on here. This scene's purpose has two meanings depending on how you are approaching it; in a metanarrative sense, this pretty much tells us how the second two thirds of the fic are going to go without directly stating so, while in the more nonabstract sense, this scene, as I said before, comes off a bit more hollow than it should. Since I already rambled on the former, I'm going to ramble about the latter.

This scene is at odds with itself, while it is not strictly about inflicting an emotion onto the reader, it still portrays an event that even readers would expect themselves to feel something: the murder of two parents in front of their daughter. As I said before, this scene is important due to how it foreshadows events and even emotions that occur later on in the fic, but the fact that the audience has no context for this particular event diminishes its effect. How it ends up working out, the audience has more sympathy for Forsira than her parents, and seeing how we don't know either of them, the parents end up as objects to be slaughtered and Fosira is something to be 'daww'ed over. That's not to say you have failed in the latter, but the fact that two characters were basically eviscerated and the audience's feelings about them could be summed up as "eh" is definitely not a plus.

Now I would be tempted to say that you should delay this event until the audience got to know them a little more, but them this scene would lose traction and significance in the process. This isn't the last murder in this fic, so having another cycle of 'get to know these guys okay they're dead now' before the fic even gets into full swing would make things a bit more roundabout/tedious than it would need to be since you have certain characters form similar relationships later on in the story. Also, not having this as the intro would kind of betray the looming sense of doom that is at the fic's core; you can't name something "Forgone Conclusion", have it open up happy, and then suddenly violate the audience's expectations since that would go against having it be forgone, i.e known ahead of time, now wouldn't it?

I don't know. I'm not helpful. I suppose, you could try extending this scene's beginning a bit, having a slow decline from an upbeat, cheery mood to the impending doom and gloom you have now to (hopefully) cause the readers' reaction mirror Forsira's. That is to say that the readers will go from "nononono, this is a happy fic, a happy fic, this can't happen" to ":(((((", which would still have the effect that you were going for and as a bonus, if you decide against putting the LE prologue here, it could possibly instill a degree of paranoia into your audience, causing them to think that every happy event will lead to the same brutal outcome. Oh, how irrational. ;)

Okay, enough with the pointing and "Y U NO"s, let me make something very clear.

You've probably noticed this by now, but I have been talking about the stuff that was not in the story rather than what was. That's mostly because I want to see this stuff improve, rather than just sit here clapping my hands and saying 'yay' and 'nice job' all the time. All I've really done in my previous reviews is jest, and joke, and complain; few times have I put your work under the microscope and say something about it. Buterfree is usually the one that does that, and those are just the times you really botched it, and your work has improved from it. This fic is great stuff, and I love it dearly; it's severely overlooked. But it also isn't flawless all throughout. In places, but not throughout. So rather than pointing out where you do things wrong, I'm going to do my best and try to point out places where you have a great underlying core and ways you can/do capitalize on that. That's not to say I'll get it every time, or will need to, but I feel like it'll be for the better. (Plus, this fic's tone makes it really hard to make jokes that are not in extremely bad taste, so that throws my usual reviewing style out the window).

So. Let's actually talk about the scene, hm?

Butterfree has already pointed out, and you've agreed, that this scene becomes a little less than cohesive when you stop and think about it. The driving force behind the scene itself is propelled less by the characters more by what needed to happen plot-wise, causing a noticeable rift in the former's logic. Seeing how characters are your strength, this simply will not do. After some thinking about, I think the crux of the problem is Leathra.

In this scene, Leathra is the one driving the narration for the first half of the scene. She's the one who engages almost all of the dialog; everything she says causes or is a reaction to what Forsira and Resten say. She provokes the conflict by going out on a limb (and here I am thinking I wouldn't be able to make puns in this fic), causing Them to strike first and Resten to follow her shortly then after. All this dialog and decisive action says that this raptor is the strong supporting pillar of the family, and yet, there is something in her affect that isn't quite right.
“You’ll be okay. You’ll find someone else who’ll look after you and you’ll have a great life without us.”
Her mother closed her eyes. “I wish we didn’t have to.”
Leathra shook her head. “There’s four of Them. They’ve surrounded our tree already. We’d never stand a cha –”

“We’d stand more of a chance than if we –”

“Resten.” Leathra stared firmly at her mate. “You’re not helping.”
She, for some odd reason, is so sure of her imminent death she speaks of it as a fact, even going far as dismissing anything that says otherwise, yet is the same character who fights to her last breath against that very threat. I may be mistaken or misinterpreting these actions, but these seem to be conflicting mindsets. With how doomed she feels, you would think she would go out without a fight, but she ends up doing the exact opposite.

Remember how I said I wasn't going to cheat again? I lied! :D

So for reasons you're probably well aware of, Leathra exudes some of the same gloom and doom Azma does with quite a bit less guilt. That's character. That's you. Use it. Use that baggage to somehow to find a way to explain in-story why she felt the urge to put herself at peril rather than wait where she was for the inevitable. You need to find a way to make these two opposing states of mind seem like one in the same, which is a rather simple task when you think about it; it would mirror Forsira's policy on it waaaay later in the fic, and it would make for a nice echo/callback when we do get there.

As for the reason why they didn't try to run is...perplexing. Leathra knew this day was coming, yet she had no plan to speak of when it came to what she would do with Forsira. Leathra tries to comfort Forsira by assuring her that she will find someone else, as if the Sceptile themselves would make that arrangement, but no, Forsira is left all alone in a tree. So now to fix that. To patch this one up requires a tiny bit of administrative effort, since you both have to find a way to address that fact that Forsira's parents know this murder was eventually going to take place but still have no plan concerning what they will do when it actually happens.

Good thing you are quite practiced in the following by writing LE, or I would have my doubts. :p

A scenario which I see this happening, but not requiring a whole rewrite the scene, is one where Leathra's actions were supposed to serve as a distraction while Resten and Forsira tried to get somewhere safer; both of which go terribly wrong when the Sceptile are the first ones to make their move, swatting both of Forsira's parents out of the tree, leaving the poor little Treeko alone. Of course, you'll have to alter the exchange between the parents to be about why Leathra has to stay behind while the other two run rather than about the futility of running itself. And if I may be a little more backseat-writer about this, as they trade final goodbyes, right before Leathra goes to make her move, everything goes horribly, horribly wrong and the plan falls to pieces. Y'know, the usual. It'll be a bit more shocking, since most heroic sacrifices usually pull through, and a bit more heartfelt, since doing so would make these characters look more like mates, rather than a defeatist and a coward stuck in the same tree. No offence, but really, Leathra's and Resten's discussion on running away boils down to:
"You are going to die and you are going to like it."

"But--"

"Like it."
I really don't have to tell you this, I mean really don't as you gain a very firm grip on this later on. But. Remember at all times, when you are writing a character piece, let the characters advance the plot, not the other way around, or else you'll get moments where they act as pawns rather than the beings we want to sympathize with. It's not a trap you really fall into all that often, but has reared its head a few times. Just a heads up for any future endeavors/fics you might do and are a bit too focused on the concept rather than the characters that execute it. Because this fic can be used as testament to the fact you know otherwise.

SO LET'S TALK ABOUT FORSIRA AND WHY YOU CHARACTERS ARE YOUR STRENGTH AND I AM SO JEALOUS.

When it comes to characters, you really get into them; that's simply the way you write them. Their mindset bleeds into the narration, without having it be explicitly first-person, emulating how an individual experiences reality in a slightly warped manner with or without their knowledge. And other times, the character is knocked clear out of the narration as the world around them punches them in the gut, and quite possibly in the heart, with the twists and turns that happen around them. It is so close to the characters, but not quite in their heads; it is far from them, but not so much so that it becomes omniscient. And when despair meets narration, you do not pull punches, the world does not care about what they think or feel; things just go wrong. That last little umph is so vital to not only characters in general, but the characters in this fic, which intensify the scenes where this happen quite a bit. Without that factor, the characters would not be able to grow, and the fic would have absolutely no teeth. But you deliver, each time with greater force than the last. That is why I love the way you do characters. That is what gives this fic power.

I'll be sure to extend that ego trip when other characters are introduced, but now let's talk about one little green raptor, the reason why this fic exists in the first place, okay? Okay. :p

The objective? Make the reader care about Forsira in a relatively small timespan. Result? I would say that there was not a single reader who scoffed at/callous about her by the end of that scene. So that is to say a success. But keeping this so is an ongoing process, which is a bridge I'll cross when I get to it. For now, I'm going to point to things you already know and expand upon them and how they play into the reader's experience.
Forsira instantly wished she hadn’t looked and turned away, clinging to a tree trunk and screwing her eyes shut, trying to forget that this was happening. The cries from below weren’t really the sound of her parents dying. That terribly bright green light that still found its way through her eyelids wasn’t the light from the weapons that were murdering them. If she stayed here long enough and kept her eyes shut, maybe it would all turn out to have been a bad dream.
Up until this point, Forsira acts like any child being forcefully separated from their parents, as such, she doesn't quite yet stand out in the reader's mind. At this moment, however, the reader gets to see Forsira in her own unique light. The invisible scene of horror starts to work its way into her mind, and she tries to defend herself in the only way an unknowing child knows how to: by being irrational, ludicrously hopeful, and full of denial. This may sound like I'm saying that there was really only one way to act, but that's not what I'm getting at, quite the opposite really. This is the first time we see Forsira make a choice, although a reflexive one: she chooses to hide. She could have looked on and cried out, tried to actually stop Them, or any number of things, since they all follow the same vague criteria, but she decided to simply curl up next to the trunk. Forsira is passive. Incredibly obvious, I know, but you have no idea how hard it can be to get readers to sympathize with a character they cannot get a bead on. No, seriously, you have no idea since you never had this problem, all your characters stand out, sometimes without saying a single word or just simply a few.

The important thing to note here is that you have implicitly established that because she is a child, she is unable to help or in any way prevent this event from happening even if she wanted to. Here you have established a motif, probably accidentally, that we'll come to time and again as the fic progresses: the regression of characters into a childlike state. Helpless. Hopeless. Scared. When the world becomes too much, expect this scene to show up, in essence, throughout the story. It's kind of redundant to say that this scene wins the readers' sympathy, since, one, pretty much any character the reader can become partial to has one of these moments, and two, it's pretty much impossible for the reader to feel anything but sympathy since the core of it is really 'aww-I-wanna-hug-u-so-bad'. You can have quite a wide spectrum of character types and alignments in this huggable zone, since said reversion requires that whatever facade or persona said character has/had to melt away, revealing something less than invincible. As we will see later on, it's pretty much impossible for a character to have one of these moments and not win some sort of sympathy from the reader; just know that particular statement has the precondition of you being the writer and could easily be mishandled into something quite a bit more eyerolling by those with less experience with characters due to reasons that I will go into later.

Tired of all the "I'll explain it later"s? I want to actually have stuff to talk about for the rest of the fic, thank you very much. Remember, I'm still talking about the first scene here! So give me a break. Not another one of your heartbreaks, just a regular break. But really, I want to talk more in-depth about these concepts as they happen so I can get a solid handhold and common point of reference to communicate what I want to say and how important it is without room for misunderstanding or allusions. That is to say I want to make these walls of texts even bigger. And now back to the the review.
“No,” said another voice from down below. “You know how it goes. We don’t kill the children or the adolescents.”
I've always felt this to be the weakest part of the scene; an 'As You Know' moment. It's jarring; it comes out of nowhere, uses up a few lines for solely the benefit of the audience, and then it ends almost as quickly.

Those lines don't even register with Forsira; she assumes that her parents somehow stopped them from murdering her. So now there is no in-universe reason for having it in here, which increases the chance that that reader will pick up on how unusual the event is. You at least prevented this exchange from doing any noticeable damage to the scene's flow by ending it as quickly as possible and having both of the Sceptile being rather frustrated with each other, but if you didn't, you could have ruined the scene's emotional momentum by taking the focus off of Forsia and onto exposition. This is the second time that a character feels like a footnote incarnate rather than a character. And that's horrible.

I know you have to establish why Forsira, as exposed and as defenseless as she was, wasn't killed. The most convenient way to do that (without changing POVs) is have Them talk amongst themselves, which reveals info that Forsira/the reader do not know. But. The fact that all of the Sceptile involved should have already been aware of this and yet repeat it, however briefly, confuses the reader on contact. There is a way to have your cake and eat it, though. You can simply have one of the Sceptile allude to the fact that she won't be killed just yet; a simple ominous "One day," or "You'll see us again," will do. Not overtly evil, nor goes against the plan's purpose in the end, nor does it clash with the, uh, knowledge that only Archopy are targets (from the perspective of everybody involved in the story, including the reader), so it's a win-win-win. On top of that, this proposed solution only requires a couple of rewritten lines to work. Odd how the biggest problems in the scene are resolved just by a few words of text.
“You know what Skorrhen said,” the second voice insisted. “Leave it.”
And this is a horrible, horrible pun whether you intended it to be one or not. :mad:
She didn’t know. She couldn’t think. Her parents – surely her parents couldn’t just be gone. She opened her eyes slowly and forced her shaking body to turn around and look down at where they’d all been fighting. Maybe, now that They had left, her parents would stop pretending and wake up?

She peered through the branches and saw her father lying face up on the ground. His face was fixed in a glassy expression of terror, a pool of blood streaming from the gash across his throat.
This is an example of you integrating the narration with the character's perspective. You started this scene with this technique, but this is where the reader gets the first glimpse of the no hold switch to reality I talked about several paragraphs ago. The moment comes quickly, clearly, horrifically, and interestingly enough, with no trace of Forsira's voice in the narration describing it. No slow reveal. No 'terrible feeling' before she looked. The body is just there, no frills. It perfectly encapsulates how off guard she was, bypassing any sort of mental filtering she may of had, twice mind you, telling the readers what follows is not at all partial to having the characters' feelings in any way be reflected in the world around them. Of course, the reader may not be consciously aware of that, but going onwards, they may proceed a little more shaken than they had expected themselves to be.

They have no idea.

Also, the last paragraph of the scene reminds me of another facet of your 'uncaring world' approach to handling scenes. This fic forgoes the Rule of Drama, meaning that while there are scenes that are emotional, they don't go over the top and bend the rules of the story's world, having events play out like they would in real life rather than having them play out poetically just because. An example of this? Having Forsira clumsily make her way through the woods instead of having her pick a direction and just run uninterrupted, because forests don't work that way.

No, you are not hallucinating. That one scene had an analysis about four times its length. Don't expect them to be this long until Ignorance or when something else major happens. You're welcome.

By the way, scared, sad, lonely Forsira trying (and failing) to even hide herself is both adorable and hug-zone triggering. Having her cry herself to sleep was also not fair. :(
Feeling winded already? There is still quite a bit more fic to go! Don't wimp out now! This one will be shorter than the last one. Promise. :V

The next three and a half scenes are...odd. They have a weird dynamic; important to the story in the sense they need to have happened, but strictly speaking, never needed to happen in front of the reader to work. Well, some of it anyway. Ugh, this is really hard to get into words. Okay, the following scenes provide the reader with narrational space, context, and perspective which are critical to understanding what comes ahead, but not all of it is as streamlined it can be. The most frustrating thing is that, for what each of these scenes are supposed to do, they do them quite well, yet they are not as strong as the rest of the story. They, by their nature, seem to be innocuous events that are not leading to anything in particular, which is both their strength and weakness. I'll break each of these three(four?) scenes down with this in mind, hopefully showing you just what the hell I'm talking about.

I might as well take this moment to talk about this oh so ominous sounding strength and weakness of the first few scenes upfront. I have gone over this, but now that we're actually in the offending(?) material, I could expand upon it. So prepare for redundancy. These scenes are made with one intent: establish the childhoods of both Zathern and Forsira. For part two, Ignorance, to really work, you need a point which you can leverage the reader's emotions, something they can look back on and feel a guilty pang about, all doing so without allowing the readers to emotionally brace themselves for the ensuing drama. So how do you do that? Simple: Innocence. You show the readers what appears to be a story simply about an orphaned Treecko trying to overcome grief, but in reality is also a vehicle to sow seeds of woe for you to reap and relish while your reader can do nothing but writhe in pain. (Hmm, now why does that plan sound familiar, you morbid, morbid sadist? :p) But in you effort of doing so, you created an odd, emergent rift that only becomes apparent in hindsight. Let me run you through it. Innocence only goes over only the moments which will be relevant later on, pretty much leaving out anything that isn't. Of course, cutting out fluff is a good thing since no one in their right mind likes padding, but what is left behind, in the eyes of new readers, is a series of events that play out with no apperant relation to each other. They kind of just happen. This makes sense from the viewpoint of everyday life; people like you or me don't know which of the many things we do will be even remotely important years down the line, so why have a story about one phase of life seem structured in any way, shape, or form? You meant for the true meaning behind this stuff to be retroactive, so you feel the impact of Ignorance almost the same way the characters do, something that would be diminished with any kind of forewarning. Yeah, I said to put the LE prologue in the fic before this scene and now I'm basically giving out reasons why you shouldn't now, but let me tell you the core reason why I suggested doing so. Again. The uninitiated need something to hold onto for the first few scenes, and Forsira's plight can only go so far in that regard; there is only one real incident which deviates from her slowly forgetting about her parents, and even that is dismissed rather quickly. By doing that, you've interfered with newcomers' internal plot compass; the only thing keeping the narrative together, from their point of view, was how Forsira came to terms with the murder of her parents, so now that that has been diminished in importance, so what's left to root for? And to compound all that, the battling. Oh dear lordy, what the battling does to this dynamic. I'll get there, however briefly.

Before I start to dissect this scene, let me talk about how much I like Forsira's first encounter with Zathern. You see, what could have easily happened was that the story could have gotten stuck in this dark, dreary mood and kept going that way the entire length of the fic, but it doesn't. Suddenly, things are happy. There is sunlight. There is kindness. There is more to the world than what we just saw. The fact Forsira started this scene in a soon to be familiar depressive, defeated state and is suddenly shown that, hey, she can keep on living is a refreshing, and also soon to be familiar, spin on the narrative (even though a first time reader would not be aware of this yet). What they would be aware of, however unconciously, is that this fic is capable of emotional range, which prompts the reader to go in just a little bit further.

Okay okay okay, one more thing before I bust out the scalpel on this thing.

Speaking of range, what I also love about this shift in mood is that it was so sudden, even Forsira is confused by it; she looks at Zathern as some sort of anomaly, not sure what to make of his actions. She doesn't simply forget what happened to her the night before, and she projects that experience onto everything. And it is by doing so that you solidify Forsira as her own character with her own motivations and personality, not merely as an object of endearment. So yay for characters with depth! Speaking of characterization, Zathern sure is a Keet, isn't he? He's exactly what Forsira (and the story), needed, but his presence doesn't come off as contrived; he has to actively try to help, as awkwardly as he does. The narration, rather Forsira, needs to be persuaded to let this strange creature into the story her life, and still questions him all the way through. What makes this exchange feel so genuine is that Zathern is simply trying to be friendly, not act in a way to move the plot in any particular direction, and even then there is that previously mentioned resistance. That is how you use characters to move the plot along in a piece like this: have the story progress via emotional encounters, not just events that kind of happen around the character. No idea why I just said that since you are almost a mistress in that department, but eh, never hurts to point out.

Nothing really to complain/postulate/ramble about say here except the incredibly obvious. The reader meets the calm, patient, nurturing, and somewhat mysterious Azma, who only takes a few lines and an apparent tolerance of Zathern to establish this much. Nice work, but far from the most interesting aspects of her character. Forsira is silently inducted into Zathern's family, and we are introduced to the sun. Hi, sun. Which reminds me; I find it a nice touch that you note the sun only at certain turning points in Forsira's life, next to the rainy season, which comes later. It shows that you're growing as a writer; you hardly ever used literary techniques such as pathetic environment before and are not only using them, but using them effectively, enhancing the story you've written. I also find it kind of morbidly amusing that the Archopy, the species which is the target of small scale genocide / ending of a species, is on the sunset side of the island, the side where the day "ends" so to speak. No idea if you did this one on purpose. I'm guessing you had to be doing some of these things on purpose, because there are way too many instances of you doing really cool, but subtle, references like this throughout the story.

Seeing (sea'ing?) how you slowed down time to describe the sunset, I have the feeling that the ocean was going to play a bigger part in this fic than it did. It's pretty obvious as to why to anybody who has read LE, but I feel this is one of the few artifacts of the initial writing stage that never really was explored. It comes back into play near the end of the fic, of course, but I find it awfully strange that it just serves to close chapters on a moody note. I guess it's vital in the sense that it stops the Archopy from simply leaving the island, but I can't help but feel you could have done something a little more with it. There must be some reason you chose to have this seaside resting place for Azma in the first place, after all. Maybe it's just me. :p

And, much like an itchy cat against your leg, here is the rub as softly as I can put it. Ready? No you aren't, you liar. Take a deep breath. Deeper. Deeper. Okay, now go get a drink and come back. Comfy? Sure? Having too much of a good day? Then walk away. Right now. You're sure you want to know? Fine. Here goes. Every single thing in this scene is mild enough in magnitude to allow readers to assume it happened; having it told to the audience in the form you did is a bit of a waste. It just feels like you could have summed this all up in a few lines of text, but at the same time, I know that would go against the metanarrative reason for this scene's existence. Having an emotional event like this, especially where a character like Forsira needs to have her life turned upside down, must be taken slowly and avoid as many timeskips as possible. By expanding events into whole scenes, the fact that the reader has to take the time and read said scene over a longer period of time allows for a status quo to be constructed in their head, making change feel genuine when it does happen. You can't really get readers to sympathize with characters that just they just see in accelerated time, it just feels impersonal. Yet in the same stroke, you did just that in the first scene, condensing all of the 'good times' Forsira had with her parents before they died into a few lines of narration. By the time the scene was over, the reader only comes out feeling sorry for Forsira and not her parents since the reader, being the invisible and intangible entity in the story that they are, was 'next' to Forsira the whole time. One of the last things you want to do, especially in this fic, is make the characters feel expendable.

Seems like I'm sending conflicting signals here, huh? Condense this. Fast forward that. Don't do that, but do do that. It's yet another one of those finicky quirks that stem from the dual-purpose of these scenes; expand because this will become important, but condense because, at the time, it doesn't seem to be at all. This would be the fourth time I point this out, but new readers both need to be and need to not be aware of what these scenes are really about. They need to know so they actually stick around to see Ignorance, but not know so the scenes' actual purpose can come out of left field and hit hard like it's supposed to. It's not to say these scenes are bad in any way, shape, or form, far from it, but you never seem to quite give new readers a solid reason as why they are reading and keep doing so. Your characters are great, but what do they do? What do they fear? What do they want? The answers for almost all of these questions are relayed to Changing at the earliest; only a few hints of conflict appear in Learning and Growing, so even your first and last tentpole of these scenes is, sadly, kind of shaky. This hurts so much to say, since you absolutely ace this stuff from the start of Ignorance onwards and these scenes gain retroactive strength once we get there. I mean, this stuff here is almost as potent as some of the scenes in Ignorance once the reader makes it that far. But until then, I have to basically stab myself to say this stupid, stupid thing that I know to be true about these next few scenes and yet so, so, so false:

They are boring.

That is as flatly as I can put it. And yet I know this is a vicious, vicious lie all at the same time and I should apologize because I'm terrible and picky and :((((((. But no matter what I feel, I know that this is the case. I've tried to dance around it as much as I could until I simply had to address it, and it's not the greatest feeling in the world now that I'm here.

What's worse is that I don't have the slightest clue how you can go about fixing this without a major rewrite. But these scenes don't need that rewrite because they're solid and heartwarming and adorable and tragic and multifaceted and adegvrkmnjcxgkj

God damn it elyvorg, how does your fic make me cry even when I'm talking about its freaking mechanics. How?! ;___;

I'm going to need a moment to get myself together here. Wait. I still have to cover battling and all that entails, don't I? Man. I thought analyzing the first few scenes was going to be the painfree part of these reviews, not the other way around. Oh well, meet you next spoiler tag. I guess. Don't hate me because this gets really really good and I need to gush about it when I get there but I'm seeing this and can't help but point it out but that has a flip side I swear and it's going to be so so awesome~. Just don't feel bad, kay? :<
 

SlowCrow

Fence Crow
Okay, moment over. But what is to come is probably one of the more painful things I've had to do so far. Good news is that this is the last scene where the aforementioned problem of misplaced scope rears its head. Bad news is that it is also the scene where it becomes the most pronounced. I would of started by going over some of my favorite character interactions from the scene, but the thing is, the characters become kind of static except for the encounter near the end, and even then it feels kind of...flat. We learn nothing new about them, really; the scene's focus is actually on the events themselves. By the end of the scene, the one opportunity you had to give meaning to it all just disappears. No weight. No tension. They key word? Dismissal. Here goes.

So the scene starts with two compressed events: the invitation of Forsira to Azma's/Zathern's tree and the ensuing nightmares, and Zathern's tour of the island. The latter's compression is not really important; after all, Forsira can only vaguely remember what happened and, even then, she wasn't really involved in any of it (except for noticing that something was off about the Archopy that she saw, but that's pretty indirect). But what bothers me is the former; not only because it compresses a phase of Forsira's relationship with Azma, but how it washes over Forsira's nightmares and feelings in favor of instead focusing on her first battle. Of course, I'm well aware that the next scene is about this so called 'washed over' part, but the fact that it gets swept to the side at all in exchange for something that isn't quite as insightful is kind of a bummer. Why? I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this is a character piece, and as such, the events that get the most attention are ones that develop character rather than ones that are traditionally seen as exciting. Said events are not usually mutually exclusive since one augments the effect of the other, but here you have, oddly enough, neither.

Once you look at the battle's purpose, you can see why this is so. From the perspective of the first time reader, it has none. At all. Even with the knowledge of what comes next, not even I can readily see the reason why this battle happened in the first place. I can count the number of battles this fic has on one hand, and what stands out about all of them, barring this one, is how they complement the character's then current situation or the character's, well, character. The only relevant fact we learn is the following: Forsira fought a Zigzagoon. That's it. Every attack and tactic she used, learned, or avoided had neither consequence nor importance to the story, which makes it an oddity in the sense that it is narrative fluff. That was a compliment, I swear. The whole point of Innocence is to found and foreshadow Ignorance, and everything before and after this point has done an exceptional job at doing just so, hardly wasting a word in its writing. But then, suddenly, Zigzagoon. The more I look at it, the more I am convinced that you were too struggling with this scene; you even interrupted yourself by dropping Verdan in there for reasons unknown. Yes, Forsira has flashbacks to this event a few times in the fic, but only to the fact that this little scuffle happened at all, not to anything that happened during it.

There were so many things you could have explored here: the inner predator, fighting makes you forgeeeeet~, or even that these furballs are just like them in a way, since you touch very briefly on all of these subjects. (Okay you didn't quite come up with the inner predator yet but it's just an idea)
But after more prompting from Zathern, some kind of inner drive overtook her and she leapt out of the tree, falling towards her foe.
But after more prompting from Zathern, some kind of inner drive overtook her and she leapt out of the tree, falling towards her foe.
She hadn’t felt even the slightest pang of grief at her parents’ death while she’d been battling. She’d been so focused on her opponent that it had all just gone.
. . .Forsira was startled; she hadn’t realised the wild Pokémon could talk.
But, probably due to the fact that you haven't yet solidified quite everything you were going to do with the fic yet, you really couldn't follow up on any of them. Still doesn't change how useless this one battle is. Really, if this one scene is your biggest failure in the fic, then it shows how much nuance you have as a writer; you only really failed because you forgot to infuse the front end narrative with something engaging while you were simultaneously composing much more potent material under the hood, and even then, the 'flimsy' front end stands on its own. It just kind of wilts when compared to the metaphorical narrative jungle around it. </metaphors>

So there is that dismissal I was talking about earlier. It seems like every time the fic seems to have the smallest hint of something dark happening, it, like an overprotective mother, comes on over to tell you everything is all right. Playing with the same creatures that we eat is sure messed up, eh?:
“Nah,” Zathern said. “They’re only food when we want them to be. . . .
“We just battled two Zigzagoon,” she muttered, not sure why she was saying it. “Now we’re eating one.”

“Did you tell them you wanted to battle first?” asked Azma.

“Zathern did,” said Forsira.

“Then there is nothing wrong with that,” said Azma.
I'm going to accidentally instill pure terror in this creature!:
The mammal turned to him with an indignant yelp, looking almost a little worried by him.

“Hey,” Zathern said to it. “Battle?”

The worry left the Zigzagoon immediately, and it grinned.
That Zigzagoon is not moving, omigosh did I kill it?!?:
Forsira instantly knew that this wasn’t the same as the horrific, empty gazes of her parents. “It’s not dead, is it?” she asked Zathern.
You don't give the reader a chance to worry, or even wonder about the darker implications of this predator-playmate relationship. Seriously, "they're only food when we want them to be". Do you have any idea how creepy that is? That on someone's whim, your life can just end based solely on whether or not they are bored? That any of the creatures around you think want to play are in fact scoping you out for dinner? That day or night, you are never truly safe? That you have no say whether or not you get to live see tomorrow? That's horrible. And familiar.

I'm rather surprised that, in the course of this entire fic, that you never drew upon this parallel with the Archopy. Not even once. At most, you indirectly did so with the whole concept of the inner predator, but you never had a character even offhandedly wonder about this. Wait, that's a lie; you do but waaaay later on in the story, and even then it only applied to prey Pokémon. I feel that exploring this chilling reality would add another whole layer of emotion and even philosophical depth to the fic, both of which you, however unconsciously, sidestepped. Either way, you at least make the audience identify with Forsira and Zathern about this in Growing, sharing the extremely unnerving experience that is murder, so no harm, no foul, in the end.

Speaking of ends, I still find Forsira's complacency in eating the Zigzagoon rather unnerving. You would think she'd be a little more shaken about this now that she knows that there are other being that can think like her. It's also kind of inconsistent with her attitude later towards hunting Pokémon, where she becomes noticeably more hesitant. This one is a rather simple fix, instead of having her "push the worries out of her mind and focus on eating her fill.", have it make the end of the scene sound a bit more hollow, more ambiguous as to what Forsira is feeling. After all, Growing is coming.

Ohgodyes we're finally here. Now I get to actually start consistently praising you without restraining myself or alluding to the problems in this, beautiful, beautiful story. So since scene 4 is so short, I'm going to go on a quote filled squee-spree, if that's okay with you. And from then on I swear the walls of text will be about how good you are. Even when you do it on accident :3

But what about Verdan?
F*** Verdan.

Azma was making her way towards Forsira, coming to sit next to her on the branch and join her in watching the stars.
You gotta love this. There is no better indicator of Azma becoming more of a mother figure, and Forsira accepting so, than doing the opposite of what Forsira's mother did before she died: go towards her. It's a simple thing really; chokes you up when Forsira inches closer to her a few lines in.

“Nightmares of the past,” she said out of nowhere. “They don’t last forever. Over time, they begin to come less often. They fade.” She let out a long, tired sigh and looked sadly at Forsira. “It’s nightmares of the future you should worry about.”
It was at this point where Azma starts gaining her layers of depth. That she's more than a mother figure; she's a creature with a history and regrets. There are a multitude of possible reasons why she decided to do this. Is she projecting herself onto Forsira? Is Azma doing this in memory of Forsira's mother, who she knew in the past? Or does Azma want the catharsis of telling someone something that still tortures her to this very day? It could be all of them. It could be none of them. Who knows? Did I mention I love your characters?

This was also where, during my first read through, I first suspected Azma having some sort of deal with the devil in the past, although I didn't guess quite right, now did I? ;)

“Azma,” Forsira asked quietly after a while, “why do They want to kill us?”

Azma gazed solemnly out towards the other side of the island. She didn’t answer for a moment.
When a character as enigmatic as Azma pauses when she speaks, you just know there are a million thoughts going through her head. One could only imagine what she is flashing back to as she gazes over the Sceptile side of the island, probably nothing pretty. Did I mention I love how you don't forget to put subtle character actions? Because I do. 8D

“They won’t kill me,” said Azma darkly, in such a way that Forsira knew she utterly believed that. “Not for a long time.”
And when she's sure, you better believe it's the truth. You gotta love how much power some of these lines can have.

“Why?”

Azma seemed uncomfortable, not quite meeting her eye. “I’m sorry,” she said after a strained pause. “I shouldn’t have said all this; I shouldn’t have made you worry. You should be with your parents, not me.” She shook her wings out awkwardly and retreated up the branch. “I’ll leave you to sleep. Good night, Forsira.”
And when she apologizes and flees, you better believe she almost let the cat out of the bag. Man, how can you make this scene so pointed by only having two characters speak about what seems, to one of them anyway, nothing?

This is what I was talking about way back in the first scene: having implications to what a characters know appear in dialog is a more compelling way to feed the reader info than an As You Know dialog exchange. This was interesting, revealing, and even worrying to an extent. The reader is informed about more of the plot than they have since the beginning of the fic, and yet it seems perfectly natural, not an info dump. On top of that, you close the scene on a character note rather than a narrative note. That is to say while you could of switched scenes as soon as Azma said good night (since the scenes purpose was accomplished by then), you instead opted to have Forsira close it by idling about adult minds, a show of innocence. Of course, that won't be the first nor last time you do this ("only half of the world", "she's my mum", etc), but it's worth noting here since you closed the scene with it.

Okay, break's over, back to the walls.

Scene 5; the last scene that I would be tempted to call 'weak'. It's not, when you look back at it after finishing the story, but with the blah blah first time reader blah blah nonsense I keep bringing up, it is. After all, nothing really happens in this scene, even according to itself, as it states in the beginning paragraphs how battles like these are common for Forsira and Zathern. So what's keeping these soon to be beguiled readers reading? Well, the same thing as always: the characters, and, unlike the previous battle, you make this an opportunity to set up some future conflict in both the short and long term. So overall, better battle, better base. So let's break this last one down, eh?

And lo and behold, more compressed events; one I don't mind and one I do mind. Take a wild guess as to which one irks me. Just guess. Yes, I know this isn't a real time conversation, but humor me at the least. Got your answer in your head? Correct; it is the one involving Azma. Considering the scene before was one between Azma and Forsira, I feel that having a few lines that pretty much tell the audience directly the status of their relationship is a missed opportunity, really. You already had the emotional momentum, as well as the opportunity, to really show this to the audience in perhaps a fleeting thought, a touch, or even a short little blurb by one of the two. Like I said, if you want the reader to get attached, you want the reader to get involved, and that means expanding little moments between characters to include those subtle 'aww' moments whenever you can. Remember, Innocence's only hook to new readers is its characters, and, seeing how that is very much up your alley, you should waste no opportunity to capitalize on that. Funnily enough, you also use compression much more effectively in the next paragraph. How? Well, first, it acts more of a lead in rather than a bunch of info thrown at the reader in an effort to get to the next scene, and what is in that lead in matters. It basically skims over events that may have had [i/]some[/i] emotional significance, but would also had to have a number of miscellaneous details and Zigzagoonish filler to naturally convey it to the reader. If that expanded route was taken, then the chapter's pacing would have taken a severe beating, and fortunately for the reader, you were aware of this. You cherry picked what was important, and left everything that wasn't. So A+ for your narrative cognition; we would all be dead without it. :D

Then the scene finally begins proper, with Zathern preparing to eat his words and Forsira showing that her spine is made of pure Raptola. Luckily for her, you at least gave her a somewhat solid debating skill, something that will come in handy much later. And with that, the battle begins. And then it ends. Being so short, I can't really say anything about it except that I like that one sassy Wurmple, who just rolls its eyes before engaging (who you amazingly keep track of, turning into the Cascoon who gives Forsira yet another look); side characters having traits like that is something I also adore about your characters. What is more important is the fact that we have some character development(!) from Forsira, who is shown to have gained a fair amount of battle prowess, and possibly a bit of confidence, since that Zigzagoon encounter; kind of refreshing, since the whole 'dead parents' thing was defining her a bit too much before this point, as moonlighting pointed out. You are also quite efficient in this battle, considering its length; you not only develop Forsira, but you set up a conflict with Zathern in the very near future, hint at an event that happens way in the tail end of the fic, and set up yet another conflict with Zathern which happens at the end of Innocence! Why can't you always do this? Why did you Zigzagoon when you could do this instead? Oh wait, you do, never mind. :3

Don't worry, I'm not going to simply skim over the Wurmple evolution lead in conversation, considering not only how important it is, but how much narrative sense it makes. Innocuous in presentation, but vital in details, this shows the core of what Innocence is really about; how something so young and naive can see all the signs of horror, distress, and grief of the future, but have absolutely no idea of what any of that entails. Out of all the moments you have in this first chapter, only this conversation and scene 4 really channel this; scene 3 was a big miss in this department, due to how it both acknowledged and dismissed the ethical ramifications of killing other Pokémon, scene 1 was more about losing it, and scene 2 was runner up since it does try to reestablish innocence, but doesn't pack as much soon-to-be-tragic information as it could of. The clever part about these moments is that they reveal this information to the reader but it also uses the characters' POV, focusing on what is happening in front of the characters as a ploy to not discuss what is distinctively off about the whole situation. Zathern's actions are what makes this little chat work; he knows he's going to evolve into a Sceptile, but is only concerned with how cool the blades are, knows that his mom knows why he will involve into a Sceptile, but chalks up that one to Azma being an adult, knows that Forsira could evolve into an Archopy, but thinks the most important fact about that is that she will be able to fly around, all while ignoring the very likely event of her being hunted and killed after she does so. That is innocence, and that is what had to be driving this first chapter the entire time through. That is not to say you outright failed in doing so, but sometimes I felt like your attention drifted to other things that weren't as important, such as the sea in scene 2, the Zigzagoon in scene 3, or the whole Peacha berry incident that comes out of nowhere this scene. I understand that you were simply setting up emotional kidney punches with some of these scenes, but what happens when you aren't doing so is that you end up only focusing on Forsira's development, which in of itself is pretty slow at this point in the fic (but will pick right up relatively soon). This by no means was a bad first outing, far from it, but the purposeful switch in mood to something quite a bit more laid back and peaceful might put off some readers who think that said mood will continue to the very end and not have any tension like there was in scene 1. But really, all of this criticism is only a drop in the bucket as it only possibly effect some of the new readers; to anyone else who pushes on through, they will find this fic's heart. If you ever decide to rewrite this for some, bizarre, bizarre reason, I know you'll have more than enough notes to work with. That and I believe in you as a writer, as...pretty much anything that follows this chapter will show.

Oh and before I go: why oh WHY do you not use more parallels to prey Pokémon like you did in this scene anywhere else in the fic? I mean really. C'mon, that Wurmple stuff was brilliant.

And THAT covers Learning. Funny how I wrote about two pages worth of text the first time I reviewed it, but I managed to hit the eighteen page mark now that I'm doing it over. I guess it comes with the territory of it being my second third readthrough. Hopefully I didn't do too much damage saying the things I said here, since all of this was made with the best intentions; this thing fic is severely under-read and needs compensation for the low, low reader turnout. So here I am. Hopefully the thread necro will be enough to get another curious passerby to read up.

Now that I won't be having an intro to turn inside out, expect the next review to be a fair bit shorter. That and for what I actually say to be helpful; I think I need to do a better job at outlining the core of some scenes the next time around. Whelp, there's still seven more chapters to go! See you in some undisclosed amount of time! :p

Keep on writing!

-__________________- Kaw.
 

Ruby the Flygon

New Member
Ramblings

Wow. Just wow. That was one of the very, very few Pokemon fanfics I truly enjoyed. (I'm very picky, so thank you for writing this.)

Anyway, I frequent Bulbagarden, and there is very interesting column on Bulbanews called the origin of species, written by the wonderful George Hutcheon. One of the entries is on (guess who?) Treeko and its evolutions. Basically, he talks about different types of Geckos, which may be part of the inspiration for the Treeko family. What stood out to me was this paragraph:

Ptychozoon is a sister genus to Uroplatus, and the geckos in this group are known as flying geckos, or parachute geckos. 'Flying' may be a bit of an exaggeration, but they can certainly glide: upon jumping into the air, the flaps of skin along the sides of the body allow them to glide through the air, and control the speed of their descent. Both Grovyle and Sceptile's Pokédex entries make note of its agility and ability to leap from branch to branch; Grovyle's even describes this as 'flying'.

Yep, there are the Archopys. I thought that was something you'd appreciate. Honestly, I really hate Sceptile in terms of design. Yes, it's supposed to be faster, but Sceptile doesn't have the same sleek-ness as Grovlye and Treeko. Especially Sceptile's tail. And it's mega. Archopy is far better, in pretty much every way. Design, battle prowess (Grass and Flying! Squeee!!!), and just awesomeness in general. Too bad all the Sceptile got jealous.

But that's not the only thing that really made your fic stand out. Your thing with the "inner predator"/"monster inside" was just made of pure awesome. This has migrated into my personal headcanon on Pokemon.

This was truly an amazing piece of fiction, and it's inspired me to write my own fiction - I didn't want to write about a trainer, because the main series of the game, while making me fall in love in love with Pokemon in the first place, grew old after I stopped liking the new Pokemon (I'm looking at you, Gen V and VI). What really holds me to Pokemon are the series' namesake: the Pokemon. I really enjoyed Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, and if you're looking for a really dark, Pokemon-centric story (the dev team got of lot of dark stuff past the radar, like suicide and actual death), I highly recommend it. Plus the music's really good.

If you'll excuse the slight rambling (It's 1 a.m.), I'd like to wrap up this not-really-a-review. I may or may not read Lost Evolution, depending on how much time I have, but please keep writing!

Best of luck!
Ruby the ;330;
 

AmericanPi

Write on
Best fanfiction I’ve ever read, honestly. I can’t believe this doesn’t have much recognition - when it was being updated it literally only had one and a half readers (Dragonfree and a reader who disappeared halfway through). And sadly enough, elyvorg, the author, doesn’t even go on SPPf anymore, so I don’t know how to contact her and tell her how awesome her fic is. :(

But this fic is so EMOTIONAL, the writing style is so AWESOME, the characters are so COMPLEX, and the fact that you know what’s going to happen in the end doesn’t detract from the enjoyment at all. In short Foregone Conclusion is about how the species of Sceptile committed genocide on and succeeded in wiping out the entire race of Archopy, an evolution of Grovyle. The fic is absolutely heartbreaking in that you get attached to these characters and start really rooting for them, only for everything to end tragically.

The only negative thing about this fanfic is the way it portrays Sceptile as a race of evil, elitist, genocidal killers. The only sympathetic Sceptile are the ones that were born to Archopy parents. (Only a mother and father Archopy can have Archopy young; if a Sceptile mates with an Archopy, the young will eventually become Sceptile.) Obviously it won’t sit well with Sceptile fans. You do get a feeling that elyvorg was trying to convey her dislike for Sceptile (which is also apparent in her other fic, Lost Evolution) through this fic, and as someone who thinks Mega Sceptile is really cool (regular Sceptile is meh to me), I was a little uncomfortable throughout.

But still, Foregone Conclusion is an awesome fic. I knew that this was good (mostly from Dragonfree lol), so I decided to check this out for FFQ Edition 5′s Blast From The Past. The fic FAR exceeded my expectations. The way the fic is so good while being a foregone conclusion makes everything BETTER. Seriously, if you haven’t read this already, go read it.
 
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