17. The Ruins

    “Explain your presence here, human.”

    I froze.  The words were ice.  They gripped my senses and resounded in my ears long after they had been spoken.  Even stranger, the speaker was absolutely not human… but the words were not Pokéspeech.

    Behind me.  That’s where the voice had come from.  I’d have to look sooner or later.  No matter how much I didn’t want to.  My movements dragged like mud as I forced myself to turn around.  My eyes fell on the speaker.  And my heart instantly jumped into my throat.

    A slender beast stood atop the stone archway at the entrance to the ruins.  Diamond-spotted cobalt fur covered a lithe frame with muscles poised to strike at any moment.  Twilight glinted through crystalline antlers, casting sea-green highlights across the stone floor and making the ruins feel even more unreal and out of place.  But the weirdest thing was how its violet mane and ribbon-like tails constantly billowed through the air… like it was surrounded by its own personal whirlwind.

    I’d only ever seen pictures… but it was unmistakably Suicune.  The Legendary Beast of the North Wind.

    It felt as though the air had gone from my lungs.  I wasn’t sure it hadn’t really happened.  Suicune.  Right here, right now.  Not across a clearing, being hunted by Rockets.  Standing right in front of me, focusing on me and only me.  Why was a Legendary focusing on me? I was nobody.

    Except I was a nobody who happened to be standing here right at this moment, in a place I obviously wasn’t supposed to be.  What could I possibly say against that?

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