There was talk in Jubilife Village. News had spread that Volo hadn’t returned in some time, that no one knew what could have happened to him. Travelers from far-off lands who remembered his wares would bring him up to talk about how strange it all was, meandering through theories and unfounded gossip when business was slow. Irida had visited once to add a humble “I guess we’ll never know,” and left it at that.
No one knew where he might have run off to; when business picked up again, no one really cared, either. They certainly never bothered to find out.
But Akari did.
The way to the Coronet Highlands was well-worn, if not easily taken. Without a ride, the trek from Jubilife to the foot of Mt. Coronet was a sickening week-long investment, but she kept her plans to herself. She knew where she was going, so she knew what people would say; from the beginning, she chose to make her way to the base of the mountain alone, feigning a local Galaxy Team expedition and leaving the village on foot. She avoided the summit camp, sheltering herself even from her Pokémon. She kept them with her in case of danger, but only out of sight, tucked safely into her bag. She knew what she was looking for, and her partners were her friends, too precious to burden with the stakes of such a mission. With each tender step, the dark slab in her bag grew heavier, crushing her boots deeper and deeper into the snow. Hands clenched into fists, she breathed deep the icy air and made her way into the cliffs.
She couldn't remember how long she had been by herself. Alone and already cold, she told herself it was better this way, one foot settling in front of the other until the slopes became too sharp and the way became too rocky. The mists crept up around her again, their freezing hands clinging to her face. She could hardly see anything; without aid, she was as good as dead, and she couldn't let that happen. Not like this.
Reluctantly, she blew the Azure Flute to call Lady Sneasler to her side. She crouched against a promontory of rock to wait for her escort, tracing around the edges of the instrument. It felt especially heavy today, its wistful color stark in her hands; she remembered the look on Volo’s face when it had first transformed, and she shoved it back in her bag before she could think about anything else.
The mountain was littered with sacred artifacts and stone platforms, some kept off the beaten path and some explicitly hidden. She had trawled through the cliffs before to gather ores and learn the terrain for future trips. As she climbed onto Lady Sneasler's back, she noticed a snowy dais that she had never seen before. She promised herself that she would ask Volo if he knew anything about it once she found him and apologized.
The hours crawled by. Visibility was poor, so Akari focused on the sound of Lady Sneasler’s claws gouging the cliffs, a sign they were making at least some headway. One of her Pokémon stirred—a Gligar she had caught at the foot of the mountain—and she reached into her bag to soothe it, her gentle hand stroking its Poké Ball. She chittered to it until it calmed down, breathing a deep sigh when it finally fell silent. She tried to banish the dread in her stomach, only managing to suppress it, but that would have to be enough. For some reason, she couldn't get warm at all, but she kept going.
It felt like it had been forever since she'd last heard Volo's name—since she had heard about his most recent visit to Jubilife, the last he'd be seeing anyone for a while—but she didn't remember just how many days it had been. She chose to stop counting after the sun rose and set twice, but that had been at least a week ago, maybe longer. Each day that passed cut her chances of seeing him again by quarters, then by halves, and then by more.
Akari didn't think about how much more. After all, there were only so many times a thing could be split and split again before it was destroyed.
She hoped that she was wrong, but she knew. The look in Volo's eyes when he gave her the last Plate already told her that she was hunting a corpse.
Still, she didn’t give up hope.
Troubled by Gligar’s behavior, Akari dismissed Lady Sneasler early. She hiked for another half hour on her own; the cliffs had given way to solid ground, so she pushed herself until she couldn’t manage it anymore. She made it quite far; the ruined Temple glittered far above her, encrusted with stormy ice, visible only in the glint of the dying light. The sun idled between the sky and the distant mountain peaks as though trying to decide whether to set or to stay.
From her position, Akari could see the great valley stretching below the Temple, a yet-unknown landmark that hid behind storms and blizzards. She had only seen it one other time. It formed a naturally terraced bowl of sorts, enormous and yawning and full of secrets. She had never heard anyone else talk about it or even acknowledge it—but Volo had stared off into it the last time she saw him, thinking hard about something she couldn’t even imagine.
The winds growled, and she came back to herself, swallowing to overwrite the fear that tightened her chest. The gorge’s fog had lifted just enough for her to explore it, and she knew in her heart that that was where he'd gone. She had vowed to find him before she left, and she had no intention of going back on her word. If it took the rest of her life to do it, then that would be what it took.
Regardless, she knew Volo would have gone somewhere off the beaten path so as not to be disturbed, whatever he was up to, and she didn’t recognize the large tree she settled under—not from her map or any prior expeditions. Progress. The day wasn’t over yet, she told herself, rifling through her pack for something to eat. She leaned against the trunk, its bark split with age. A knot dug into her back, and she leaned into it with a small sigh, pressing it into a sore muscle. Her shoulders ached with fatigue and with worries that she wouldn’t acknowledge.
The air was getting thinner. She could still breathe, but she felt the difference more than she cared to admit. The wrapped provisions in her bag had all puffed up, nearly bursting at the seams. She peeled one of them open and almost dropped it as the air slipped out of it, startling her. Akari chastised herself, breaking the meal into quarters and eating it before she could lose her appetite. This wasn’t her first climb, she reminded herself, and Volo could be right around the corner. For all she knew, he was watching her right now. He did love to do that. The thought put a weak, short-lived smile on her face.
She had nothing to worry about, she said. Her jaw ached. She told herself it was just from the cold and focused on making camp for the night.
Akari pitched her tent between the cliff and the large tree. Its root system was extensive, twisting up through fissures in the frozen ground. The roots themselves almost looked like branches in their own right, as though the tree grew out of the center of the mountain. She couldn’t quite tell if it was alive or dead; nothing else grew at this altitude, but she couldn’t deny its size nor its presence. It was yet another thing she would have to ask Volo about, she decided. He had an answer for every question.
The cliffs sprawled out in choppy clusters all around her, fanning down into a sharp drop two tiers down. One ledge girdled her camp on the right side of the path, and the mountain continued steeply up toward the Temple on her left, flush against the trunk of the tree. It grew out at a 45-degree angle, shaped by cruel, decades-long storms into a corkscrew of sorts, thick branches fanning out into tiny, thin fingers. She wondered how she had never seen it before, but the fog was always so thick, and the sun rarely burned it off. She hadn't been to the Temple enough times to understand how it all worked.
The winds were mean, and the great tree offered her surprisingly little shelter. The roots made it nearly impossible to pitch her tent anywhere but one corner of the path, and even that was riddled with fallen rocks. She'd camped in similarly rough spots before, and she always put off lying down for as long as possible.
“I could keep going,” she murmured under her breath as though trying to convince herself. She was tired—exhausted—but she could keep going. There had to be better options. If Volo had come out here, he would have had to camp out somewhere too, and he had standards. Even fatigued, travel wasn't so bad as long as the weather stayed light.
Of course, it didn't stay light. The heavy clouds above the Temple emptied fierce knives of sleet onto the trails, into her eyes, and her exhaustion made her clumsy. Blinded, Akari stumbled into the wrong place; a snarled root caught her by the ankle and she tripped, caterwauling as her pack opened unbidden. The rest of her meal provisions, all stacked neatly at the top, spilled out and skittered down the sloping roots and onto the cliff below. She hit the ground with a sick thud, another root driving its way into her stomach. All the wind left her, and she clung to the roots around her, panting to catch her breath, waiting for the stars to clear from her eyes.
Groaning, she pulled herself into a sitting position and readjusted her bag. She checked her snagged ankle, relieved to find no swelling or pain. She supposed Arceus was telling her to stop for the evening, an idea that made her much less angry than the alternative—her own carelessness and inattention. She felt stupid, and she was bitter that she had to rest at all. Every second she spent lazing around was another second lost to Volo and his massive head start.
“Okay, okay!” she put her hands up in mock surrender, just like Volo always did when he teased her. “I'll take a break now. I'm sorry.”
Still, if she was stopping to rest anyway, she knew it would do her good to eat. She had berries and assorted salts and spices in her bag, but her meal provisions were vital. They were dense with nutrients and had saved her on earlier climbs and long trips through the region. She needed to get them back; if she didn't have them to fall back on, she would have to abort the climb and turn back, and she had already lost far too much time.
The cliff down to the next level was a small one, only about twice her height and webbed with great big roots, although she wasn't sure how sturdy they were. She could get down easily enough, but getting back up was going to be tough. As long as she had the Azure Flute, Lady Sneasler would be able to help her; she was a lot faster when she didn't have passengers or cargo to deal with, so Akari figured she could probably be at the camp in five or ten minutes to bring her back up—the perfect amount of time for her to gather everything she'd lost.
Comforted, she reached into her bag. She stopped. Puzzled, she rifled around again, but the Flute wasn't there.
To say that her heart sank couldn't begin to describe it. She knew the journey was going to be difficult, and she had committed to it knowing full well what it meant, but with no sign of her target, it was difficult not to feel crushed. Her spirits deflated; all her Pokémon were still safe in her bag, thank goodness, but her food and the Azure Flute were both gone. She was so tired, tired enough to curl up in the roots and sleep for days, but she couldn't rest knowing that both her food and Hisui's most precious religious artifact were stranded below, buffeted by wind at the cliffside. If she didn't move fast enough, the valley would claim them, and then she'd be in trouble. Real trouble, trouble that she couldn't think her way out of.
Talking herself out of the despair was a struggle, but she won in the end. She wasn't injured, just exhausted, but she could manage exhaustion. All she needed to do was climb down, find what she had dropped, and then climb back up. If she couldn't manage the climb, she would have the Flute, so she could call for help.
Splitting everything into pieces made it all make sense. Hauling her bag behind her, she set her sights on the small cliff, carefully lowering herself to the ground so she could slip over the edge. Who knows, she thought, half sad and half hopeful as she climbed down to the ledge below. Maybe he's waiting for me down there too.
She found his head before she found the rest of him.
The wind rattled through the cliffs as she knelt to pick up her scattered rations. So far so good; miraculously, they had all been in the same general area. She counted to make sure they were all there before tucking them back into her bag and clipping it shut.
All she had to do now was find the Flute and call for Lady Sneasler. The great tree's roots bled down over the edge, but she didn't trust them enough to use them to climb; the stone had been eroded both by wind and, she assumed, the tree, although she still wasn't sure whether it was alive or dead. The cliff itself looked like parts of it had been deliberately carved out, the roots forming a thin, ropey curtain in front of the missing pieces. She imagined Volo hiding in it, living in the mists and winds, planning somehow to return to power. To see her again. She blinked, and the illusion disappeared.
Akari sighed, turning away to look for the Azure Flute. She didn't think it would be hard to spot. It was heavier than her rations by far, and its rich color stood out against everything. The snow would be no exception.
She made sure to tread carefully, unsure of her footing in the powdery snow. A few yards away, she could see a single slab of rock jutting up from the edge of the cliff, a natural safeguard against falls. It was about four and a half feet tall, maybe five, and at least twice as wide. The wind sent streams of snow sizzling through the air. Flakes caught her eyelashes, so she struggled to make out the shape pressed against the base of the wall. It was dark, but the sun was starting to fade, so everything was dark. She rubbed her head, red gloves pressing circles into her icy face. This leg of her voyage was almost over, she promised herself. She just needed to push on a little bit longer.
Something against the stone looked like it could be the Flute—oddly shaped, standing out against its surroundings—so she approached it, scattering salts from her supply pouch to make the way less dangerous. She carefully balanced herself with her arms as she crept down the frozen path, persisting onward until she was close enough to get a better look.
At first, Akari didn’t know what she was looking at. There was something else against the slab that she hadn't seen from afar, whispy and almost gray in the evening light. She crouched and squinted through the puffy snowflakes that fell across the mountain, shielding her eyes with her hand.
It clung to a craggy clump of rock. She thought it might be a creeping shrub, hardy and clinging to life. But another step closer stopped her in her tracks, and her heart froze in her chest.
At long last, she had found him. She held herself steady, thin arms curving over her chest in a desperate hug. Her arms and head felt dreadful, inescapably heavy and light all at the same time. A terrifying sensation rushed through her; it was like nothing else she'd felt in all her life, nothing else she'd seen. The first trace of Volo she'd discovered since the village gossip was a cut of meat taken from the jaw up. At once, she realized that what she thought was the Azure Flute was a bruised mess of guts and shredded muscle—the viscera that she realized should have held his body together.
He faced away from her, saying nothing, and she hoped more than anything that she was trapped in some sort of psychic nightmare, a sadistic hallucination. Anything but reality. Anything but this.
Akari shrank to her knees. She reached forward, fingers shaking, and she hesitated. The edges of her vision ran dark. It wasn't a shrub. His hair was still blowing in the wind.
There’s no way, she told herself. It can’t be him. Nothing could do this to him.
“…Volo?”
The wind swept his hair up, and her eyes followed it back to the boughs of the giant tree. A braided rope was tangled in the cloudy branches, looped at the end and stained with something dark. Akari’s stomach lurched, blood pounding in her ears. Everything clicked for her all at once, and a strangled cry tore its way out of her throat.
She couldn’t help but turn away. Her body sank into the fresh snow. The very idea of what she saw was too awful to bear, but she couldn't get away from it. She clasped her hands together, knuckles rushing into white as she prayed for the world to be somehow different, for it to go away. She squeezed her eyes shut, counting first to ten, then to fifteen, but the image stayed with her, frozen behind her eyelids, and she couldn't escape.
It was all too clear what had happened to him; maybe he had gone into it expecting asphyxiation, a broken neck, but the force of the drop and the rope's composition together had cut his body into two pieces. It was a simple truth, one that made perfect sense given the evidence, but the gears in her mind couldn't turn, couldn't progress past the image of his open neck. No matter what happened around her, she couldn't move. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't think.
Akari's pulse pounded in her ears. She felt like she was spinning in freefall, like she was hanging upside down in a dark room with her eyes open. Her body was all feelings and sensations, and nothing made sense even when she looked around and cataloged her surroundings, counting the shapes in front of her, clinging to any trace of light. Something loud heaved and scraped around her, petrifying her. The panic made her senseless. It had been so quiet only a moment ago! Only after she held her breath, digging her fists into the snow, did she realize that it came from her, a bestial, heaving, tortured sound, the sound of a maiden's heart twisting like a gutted eel.
The thin, snowy wind hurt to breathe. She couldn't get enough air, but any air was too much. She pressed her face into the snow in a desperate attempt to get back to herself. It stung like needles against her eyelids, against her cheeks. It burned her lips, which—she now realized—were covered in spit and drool. But it sank her back down into herself like a stone through a lake, if only for a second, and she drained the pain out of her mind, placing it piece by piece into a faraway corner of her heart until she could bear to look up again.
Trembling, she turned around and reached for him. Her fingers brushed the back of his head through a twisted piece of hair, and her whole body shook. She fantasized constantly of meeting him again, of running to him—of grabbing him, holding him, sometimes even of trying to shake or push him, although he was much too strong for her to get away with that. Every time she shut her eyes, she dreamt of his face, of his voice. Memories of the way he smelled would drift back to her in slow, undulating waves, and she would talk to him about anything and everything, sometimes in long, automated streams of gibberish. The higher she climbed, the harder she found it to think, even in her dreams.
She would tell him about the mountain, that she was coming for him. And he would listen, sometimes play-acting his feelings the way he used to, and sometimes staring back at her like he had at the Temple. She never got to touch him. She wished for it every night before she went to sleep, tracing shapes and letters into the stars above her tent. She prayed for it more times than she could count, eyes to Heaven, hands steepled into a perfect mirror of themselves. With a contrite and pure and loving heart, she had begged to find him, to put her hands on him if only for a single moment. After so many fruitless attempts, she told herself that it would be her reward for finding him—the simple pleasure of getting to hold him. But not like this. Never like this.
Desperate to find him, she turned him over, immediately regretting it. Her eyes were savagely cruel, she thought, to make her see into his face. Although warped and discolored, his features were present, recognizable, but there was nothing left in him; no signs of life, no evidence of a struggle for survival. She had arrived too late. Volo was gone.
She knew she had to find the rest of him. If she did that, if she reunited him with his body, then maybe he could be whole again. Maybe, she thought, ignoring the ice crusted into his neck, it wasn't too late to save him.
She didn't have to look very far.
Initially, she didn't want to believe it was him, but even without his head he was a few inches taller than she was. The way he was positioned scared her; his corpse had fallen on its front, slumped oddly against the face of the cliff—not far, she realized in horror, from where she first climbed down. Somehow she felt like she could see blood everywhere, but there was nothing left in the snow around him. Even the rocks were clean. He had been dead for a long time. She had missed her chance.
Heart pounding, she reached down and squeaked in fear as she flipped him onto his back.
She couldn’t mistake the body for anyone's but his. He flipped over with a heavy, lifeless slap, sliding down to level ground. His flesh was oddly dry and yellowed by the sinking sun, distended in some places and strangely flat in others. His clothes were filthy and soaking wet—it must have rained again before she found him—and his neck was cut at a messy angle. In horror, she noticed pieces of fiber frozen between the bones in his neck. They matched the color of the noose.
Unsure of what to do, her eyes fell on his dead face again. The expression left there was uncanny and disturbing, a mix of contempt and conviction and unspoken regrets; guiltily, she tried not to look at it, and tried even harder to forget what it had looked like when she first saw it. His eyes had weakened from exposure to the ice and collapsed in on themselves, their clarity and intelligence lost. There was no relief or peace on his face. He had been just as determined to leave her as she had been to find him.
Both of them had seen their missions through to the end, she supposed sadly, but only one could be called a success.
It seemed that Volo had dressed himself specially in preparation for death; his new robes were more modest than the chiton he had worn for their battle at the Temple, wrapping his legs from the ankles up and covering his arms, but they were made of a more humble fabric, hand-spun and mournful against the snow. The pattern was complicated, and she couldn't imagine how he had bound himself without aid, but she cared to imagine someone else's hands on him even less. The cloth had an ancient smell to it, almost like it had been kept in some sort of crypt or cave that she had yet to find. His feet were covered in what looked like hand-treated skins, wrapped and tied off in a solid knot on each side. The cord used for their laces looked like soft leather, although she couldn’t tell what kind. It was starting to split and crack.
In her old life, before the fall, she had seen slides of similar garb in museums and on weekend television programs. For something so old, it somehow felt nostalgic, dear to her future-past self. It had a mysterious quality to her. Back then, no one could ever explain where it had come from. It felt like her mother’s couch in the late afternoon, and it smelled like Volo’s corpse.
A straight-cut piece of linen covered Volo’s chest and legs down to his feet, but it was torn and soaked with blood that Akari tried not to look at. She couldn’t escape it, though, eyes burning the shape of the stain into her memory. His side had been gouged by something wild long before she found him; a dark, ropey mess of tissue spilled out from below his ribs, covered in ice crystals. His clothes were torn, but ultimately left intact. Whatever discovered him hadn’t wanted to feed for very long.
The center of his belly had been ripped open too, leaving behind a jagged gash girdled in purples and reds. The edges were too blunt to have been made by teeth or claws. Looking around, Akari realized he must have hit one of the sharper stone bluffs on his way down.
It took little effort to imagine what he might have looked like as he fell. The image assaulted her as she stared down into his wounds.
All along, she had known what happened to him. All along, she had tried to assuage the dread of knowing. She just hadn’t been able to prove it, so she had lied to herself to stomach the climb. The whole way up, she had played scenes in her mind envisioning his rescue; discovering him before he could do it, saving him in the middle, or returning to Jubilife after all was thought lost to find him chattering to someone at the gate. In the latest days of her journey, she imagined scolding him for worrying her so much, for making such a stupid mistake—for leaving her alone at all.
She thought of the chapel in Hearthome City, its arrested stillness and quiet. She remembered her old family, a loose assortment of strangers she now barely knew, and she remembered Volo watching her under troubled red skies, silent and purposeful and sane. Perhaps he had been the only sane person left in a frenzied and ugly world, surviving—not living—in a strange land so different from the one he had grown up in. Just like her, Volo had come from somewhere else, fated never to return and forced to adapt to something twisted and wrong—an outsider trying to blend in with the flock. But she knew nothing about his world, his discipleship, or his heart, and now it was too late to ask.
Akari dug her gloved fingers into his scalp. Irida’s voice played in her head again, all too clear under the waning moon.
I guess we’ll never know.
Something in her cracked. Like a child, she slumped down into the snow and cried.
Night came, but Akari couldn’t remember falling asleep. She didn’t think she had; thin shrouds of rain had settled over them, hardening the top layer of the snow, and the sound of the wilds raged around her. Even if Volo were still with her, awake and upright and whole, she wouldn't have let her guard down enough to rest.
She turned onto her back, wincing at the way the snow crunched under her spine. The smell of Volo’s dry, yellow skin clung to her, even stronger in the humidity and freezing rain. Her mind felt empty; she thought she might have blacked out.
Akari blindly reached for her bag, fishing for something—anything—to prove to herself that she could escape her nightmare. Her tent groaned in the wind above them, tilting and scraping against the trunk of the tree where Volo had died. Rain battered the crown of her head. Everything was so real, but it hurt so much more than she could fathom. Trying to digest or understand the pain was like swallowing giant blades of glass, so she shut down her mind, trying to recover herself. She wouldn't think anymore, she decided. She would let something else animate her body, something that didn't choke her on every side. It was time to let go.
Gingerly, Akari lifted Volo’s severed head out of the snow. She dusted his cheeks and neck off, trying to clear his hair but giving up quickly. It couldn’t be helped. The rain had clumped his hair into icy knots. She told herself she would try again later, expression going blank. Reality was setting in, but she couldn’t believe he was really gone. His absence was the most horrible thing she had ever felt; the two pieces of his body were tied for second.
In the absence of her brain, her heart took over. She hated herself for missing him, for wasting her chance to catch him at the village gates. Knowing him, he had probably watched her for days from between the flowers, trailing her and waiting for her to leave so he could escape her. The way he died felt so personal, a direct result of her failure to reach him. It felt like revenge. Akari blinked and saw him fall from the noose again, head separating from body in an instant, then in slow motion, then an instant again, and she felt like he might as well have done it right in front of her face.
She felt like a widower.
Something connected inside her, and all the feelings that she had shuttered away and deemed childish or irresponsible came rushing forth. Her whole body trembled as she looked down at Volo’s corpse. How could she have been so stupid? All their time together had blown by in an instant, and she had spent all of it being a useless little girl. She had a good throwing arm and quick feet, but she was pathetic. She was nothing, and she wasn't going to pretend he hadn't felt the same way. She'd never felt anything about herself like what she felt for him.
Even in death, Volo was twice the person she could ever be. He knew more than he ever could have taught her, and he was stronger in every way. She had beaten him only by divine luck, or perhaps by a power that had never been hers to begin with, a power she wished she'd never claimed.
Trembling and sick to her stomach, she set his head down in the crook of his shoulder beside what was left of his neck. Her mittens smelled foul; she had smelled dead things before, especially in Hisui’s warmer regions, but Volo’s body felt so different from that. She assumed the cold had dampened the smell; the air stank in a way that wouldn’t let go of her, but only because she was so close to him. If his corpse had been more fresh—or still in one piece—she might have been able to tell herself he was just sleeping. But his cut neck smelled like an open grave, and his limbs were twisted in a way that hurt her to look at. She pulled her scarf off her neck and pinched it between her knees.
Akari picked his head up again, quicker this time, as though she were afraid to lose it. She winced as the wind swept the sweet smell of death into her face. She bunched his hair together in her fist to keep it from whipping around, tucking it under her arm and cradling his head to her chest. Realizing that she was about to get herself dirtier, she tugged off her gloves and stowed them in her bag.
Carefully, quietly, she shuffled herself down to straddle his waist, guiding his shoulders off the ground and brushing away the snow behind his neck. The snow stung her bare hands, but the pain was a blessing; it kept her in her body. His cold face pressed into her belly as she bent down, folding her scarf in half and laying it on the snow where his neck should have been.
She paused, sheltering his head again and looking away. She didn't want to finish what she had started. It was becoming too much to bear. But she remembered the way he looked at her at the edge of the Temple, and she knew that she owed him. This, and much, much more, all debts that she could never repay.
She placed his head on an angle and pulled her scarf through itself, tightening it and adjusting the fabric behind his neck until it held him steady. Leaning back, she stared down into his face once more. She couldn't pretend he was alive; his face was marbled in darker colors, disturbing the illusion Akari was so desperate to create for herself. His head must have stayed cheek-down for a long time, since all the blood had pooled unevenly in his features as he died. His mouth was brown with foamy, dead blood, and it had frozen in a flaky smear across his lips and face. In the low light, it almost looked like mud. His face and hair would turn satiny and light again, she thought, if she could only get him to a warm bath.
She had never seen his hair so long before, not even in their final battle. It seemed like he had braided or otherwise tied it off before he died, but the intended shape and neatness of it were both long gone. She let it go from under her arm, watching it blow somber and lifeless in the wind. It had grayed from the color of wheat into dry, ashy bracken, and it looked just as brittle, like it could splinter into pieces at any second.
For all her visits to Edith and Arezu, Akari had always thought that hair was just hair. At Volo's side now, it was clear to her that, at least for him, it had meant something more, holding an energetic quality that could not stay with him after death. His body was little more than a daguerreotype of everything he had been. He was absent from it in all ways; it was as if he had aged hundreds of years in an instant, like every trace of him left behind was gone.
Akari touched Volo's hair again with her bare hands, and then her own. All at once, she felt very sick, like his deadness was contagious. Her hand found the concave wound below his ribs, trembling against him in a futile search for comfort. The bleeding mass of his guts had frozen and turned dark, ridged with ice and phantom drool from whatever had found him before she did. The thought made her ill. It wasn’t just imagining him being torn into or eaten that did it, but the incompleteness of the act; the idea that even in death he had been rejected, spat out like poison and retched into the cliffs like slime. That no one but her had really cared to find him.
Volo's lips were cold. She didn't realize she was tracing them with her finger until it struck her how rough they felt, blackened flesh peeling into frozen jags against her soft skin. Eyes blurry, fingers trailing over his mouth, she caught herself wondering if he had ever been kissed.
Realizing herself, she jerked her hand back, squeezing her eyes shut in embarrassment and pain. Ashamed, she turned away as though he could read her thoughts, like a corpse could somehow still judge her transgressions. Her fingers idled, streaked with brittle hair, and she shivered, although somehow the air didn’t feel as cold as it had before.
It wouldn’t be the first time she had asked herself such things. All the other times, though, he had been distant, intriguing. He had still been alive.
She hadn’t stopped straddling his hips.
Her eyes lingered on the collapsed space under his ribs where he had hit the rocks as he died. She wondered if it had hurt somehow, even though he’d already lost his head, and she found herself skimming her chilly fingers over the wounds. The cliffs were sharp and they had cut his clothes to ribbons as he fell. What kind of pain could he have been in to do something so awful? What had she done to her only friend?
Akari slipped her hand through his tattered robes and shuddered as it met bone.
Everything hit her again all at once. When she left the mountain, she realized, she would never see him again. She couldn’t carry his body back with her. His head alone was almost unbearable to look at, and she couldn’t stand the idea of what might happen to it when the weather warmed on the way back to the village.
What would you even do with it, she thought to herself, keep it?
Akari stared down into his frozen face. Her eyes wandered again to his lips, dark and alluring under all the blood, and she swallowed hard.
She wanted him to be there with her. She wanted him to know how she really felt, but he was gone. At least this way, she thought, she could no longer hurt or disappoint him. Here, under the howling Coronet winds, she could confess her true feelings; she could cry and scream without incurring his wrath; she could be pathetic, unworthy, or unreasonable—and she could do unreasonable things.
It wasn’t just her, she thought. She hadn’t noticed it on earlier trips, but even the ground beneath them felt possessed by something bizarre and sick. Akari knew little of its history, nothing like he would have, but the mountain felt unsteady under her feet. All the stone beneath them was solid, but she was so dizzy, like her body knew the ground could shift under them at any time.
Anything could happen; Volo, who said he would wait for centuries to meet his target, who had seemingly lived forever before her, was dead beneath her knees. Anything was possible. Anything could happen.
The death in the air dragged her down, heavy like lead, and she dipped her head to his lips and kissed him.
Her first impression was that he tasted awful. The blood—and whatever else had dried on his lips—was somehow even worse than the smell, but she couldn’t bear to spit it out. She swallowed it down, taking all of Volo’s corruption into her body and internalizing it. She tasted him against the backdrop of his frozen lips, which were somehow both stiff and slack against hers. Maybe, just maybe, her mouth had softened his after all, had begun to warm him back to life. The thought sent a trembling heat through her core. She kissed him again.
She was chaste with him at first; she was still pure, timid with her body, but she grew bolder and more delirious with each small kiss, each taste of the filth he left behind. She curled her mouth into his, tentatively prodding his bottom lip with her tongue. She felt his icy teeth against her upper lip, and she found herself wishing right away that he would give her more. She shifted back on her hips, testing the messy style of kissing she remembered from the TV back home. The taste of old blood and dead bile slathered her soft tongue; it was indescribably vile, but somehow she was starting to enjoy it. Her free hand cupped his jaw as she sucked his lips clean, her crystal moans rising in clouds between their faces.
It wasn't the same as the real thing. Objectively, and perhaps intuitively, she knew that this wasn't how sex was supposed to feel. She had a sense regardless that if he was alive he would want it differently, that maybe she wouldn't like it as much. The humming rage she had seen at the Temple was surely only the beginning of the depths his anger. She knew, at least marginally, what Volo was capable of.
At the same time, she thought that she would like the real thing even more. Alone in her futon at night, she had always imagined his hands would be warm, handling her with practiced expertise. The naïve girl inside her still trusted him, still wanted him to decide what was best. It was hard for her to know where to put herself, and contemplating her position made her sick. Thinking about anything at all made her impossibly sad.
If she closed her eyes, though, and was careful not to disturb her scarf’s delicate grip, she could imagine most of the painful parts away. Her spirit thrived on imagination, on secret escapes, and she retreated just enough from what was really happening to transform it into something else. She sat up and drew her hand out of his robes. Her fingers still tingled with the blood from his ribs, and she slipped them under her shirt and coat. Her breath caught in her throat as she touched her breasts, and she shut her eyes. Her hands were just cold enough—numb enough—that she could pretend they were his.
Her lashes fluttered. Amateurly, she rolled her hips down into his groin, doing her best to steady herself aboard him. He was so much bigger than her that her knees didn't quite touch the ground on either side of him, so she braced herself with one palm against his abdomen. It caught the wound in his belly, and she felt something shift, collapsing under the weight of her hand. She yelped and pulled back as if she’d burned herself, terrified of breaking the illusion—of breaking him.
Thinking better of herself, she crawled off him and settled into the snow beside him. It crunched under the weight of her body, but she didn't stay still for long. The frozen snow stung her palms, so she crawled with her knees and elbows to sit between his legs, admiring the hem of his clothes as she lifted them off his waist. She knelt between his thighs to kiss him through his funerary garb, tongue solemn in her mouth as she pressed her face into the junction between his leg and his groin. The connective tissues in his leg didn't resist her, caving gently to the pressure from her forehead. She leaned over and kissed him again, the back of her head resting against a leg that she dimly realized was broken, transfixed by genitals that would never respond to her.
She slid her fingers up his leg and touched his skin, exploiting a tear in his clothes near his inner thigh for access. Dizzy with anticipation, she slipped her fingers into the spot where her mouth had just been.
Akari gasped as she pressed her fingers between his legs. For a moment, she couldn’t believe what she was touching; the shock almost made her laugh, but she didn’t stop. Her palm brushed his groin and she flushed red, somehow more sensitive about the way she touched him and the shape of his body than the fact that he couldn’t respond. He was long gone from her, jaundiced and slack and cold, but she could almost trick herself into sensing warmth at the places where her flesh met his. They were so much more alike than she thought; she wished that he could have been there to realize, to understand with her, that they were closer than he imagined—that there was something twisted inside of her too.
She stumbled away from him on hands and knees, adrenaline washing through her head. She trembled as she looked down over his battered corpse. The sight of him still pained her, but in the mouth of all her suffering, she needed him more than ever. She needed him to be there.
She needed him to touch her.
She felt herself buckling under the pressure, the pain, and she made her decision.
It hurt to think about what she was doing, so she didn’t. Akari hooked herself diagonally over his body so as not to put too much pressure on his core. She buried her face into his shoulder, into her scarf, into the smell of death—that awful, perennial smell—without which she could have convinced herself that her fingers, living and warm beneath their surface, could still impart something meaningful to him, could soften and heat him through. But he was so cold, colder than dirt, colder than the world that had spurned him, and she hated that death could touch him—that anything else could touch him but her.
His fingers were hard and leathery, more bone than flesh, but she wanted him, so she told herself that she had no other choice. She needed to feel him the way that she always imagined, if only for a little while. Carefully, Akari slipped his hand into her pants and whimpered as his icy fingers met her clit. The cold was uncomfortable on such a sensitive part of her body, verging on painful, but she had waited for this moment for so long. The rest of her body was already so cold. She could handle a little more—as long as it made Volo feel good.
She knew he wanted to be inside her, she told herself, angling his waxy fingers to stroke her pussy. Akari flushed, all the blood rushing to her head as his fingers skimmed over her pubic hair. She imagined the same comments she always hoped he would make; how soft she was down there, how happy she was making him, how long he had waited to touch her like this. She whispered that she wanted it too, that she had always hoped he was watching from afar when she touched herself—that one time she swore she saw him pressed against her window late at night—and she squeaked as the tip of his finger pressed inside of her, worn and dead and cold as ice.
It didn't feel good at all. Volo's fingers were still broad and heavy despite how the cold had dried them, and she had misjudged how sensitive she was between her legs. She was just wet enough that his skin didn't tear inside her; he stayed in one piece, but she was fresh, tight, never yet invaded by another person, and he was so cold it almost left her raw. Still, she bit her lip, spreading her legs open wider to accommodate him, savoring the way his icy fingers felt inside of her. After all, she thought, they were his fingers.
Spreading her thighs helped mitigate the pain, if only a little bit. She lifted her free leg and pinned it to her ribs, making herself available to be used. Akari blushed as she heard his voice so vividly inside her mind, breath shuddering as she imagined every salacious remark. He was smart, too smart; he said everything at just the right moment, voice smug and ravenous and laden with triumph as he claimed her, fingers pressing into her favorite spot. Akari moaned, ready to scream, licking a warm spot into his cheek and pressing tiny kisses to it. She braced herself into the snow with her free arm, squeezing her eyes shut in pain. It felt so much better than her fingers. It felt better than anything she had ever known.
She steadied his wrist against her clit as he fucked her, moaning into his cold face. She clenched around him, panting hot swirls of breath into the whirling snow. She had never felt more grounded, more in touch with another person. She was so happy to have saved herself for him, to have kept her body pure until he was ready for her. The ecstasy was unbearable, unlike anything she had ever dreamt or imagined, and all at once her mouth was on his and she was cumming on his fingers, moaning into his waiting lips. Finally, she panted hard, she was warm again. Finally, she was free.
As she came to her senses, her frenzied orgasm seeping away like oil into dirt, she realized what she had done—and she realized that it was over. All of it. It was finished.
No, she shook her head as clarity rushed over her, breath running ragged. Akari wanted to throw up, but her body felt hollow. Alone, truly alone, she felt worse than ever. She had underestimated the consequences of her actions—her feelings for him had only grown from what she’d done, flourishing from love into anguish and just as quickly back again.
They were still coupled. Akari couldn’t bring herself to separate from him, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to ignore the pain between her legs for much longer. She couldn’t find a single place in her body that didn’t hurt. After much grief, with a small sound of pain, she pried her hips away from him, whining as he left her. She thought she had felt empty before, but the sensation only grew more intolerable—like all the life was draining out of her, like she had died too.
She looked into his gray face, dim eyes still turned away from her. It looked like he was staring toward the Temple. His voice drifted down to her, a memory in Arceus’s high shadow.
Then perhaps, he had said between the columns, the day will come when you will suffer and agonize as I do now…
An awful feeling seized control of her, like she couldn’t stand to be in her body for a second longer, but she was too numb for the cold to save her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered tearily, and then she hated herself more. Akari swore she could feel him scowl at her, hear him ask in that simmering voice what, exactly, she was so sorry for. What was she supposed to say? She covered her ears. They had long gone numb from the wind.
Who was there left to apologize to? Everything she had rehearsed on the climb was useless. Volo was dead. He had chosen to abandon his body like trash. It only held its shape because of the cold; given the timeline, she didn’t think she would have found him if he had died anywhere else, and he kept nothing with which to identify his remains. The way he had dressed himself for the act was peculiar, but no one would have tied his clothes to his Guild persona. For weeks she told herself that he wanted her to find him, but that was obviously a lie. She was the last person he would have wanted to see, a trespasser on stolen land, the girl who had taken everything from him.
All words were useless and cheap, so she shut them out of her mind. She reached into her bag and pulled out a heavy slab wrapped in thick satin—Giratina’s Plate, the last and only thing that she could offer him. For all she knew, that dubious bond might have been Volo’s only sense of companionship in life. It certainly hadn't come from her.
Akari unwrapped the fabric and stowed it back in her bag, offering a meek, quiet prayer that her gesture would somehow reach him. She knew she was still making assumptions, guessing at what he wanted or needed just like always; she only hoped that this time they were compassionate instead of selfish.
Plump flakes of snow skittered across the Plate, clinging to it briefly before bouncing off into the night. Akari flipped it over, fingers finding its worn inscription. She traced a set of two runes that looked familiar, trying to remember the few meanings that Volo had taught her on their travels. She was able to make out ‘world’ and ‘other,’ but everything else was lost on her. She turned it back over, unable to look at it any longer.
At last, she arranged Volo’s arms into a more peaceful position, wiping herself off of his fingers before sliding the plate into his weather-beaten hands. She wouldn't need it where she was going; she had the Legend Plate, after all, and Arceus's favor. She had even more than that—God's blessing, God's whims, had carried her to this point, and she couldn't understand why. Why me? she thought, fingers quavering against the Plate, not yet ready to let go. Thinking of death, she asked herself, Why not me?
It felt cruel, and at once Akari thought she finally understood Volo's disgust for worldly things, for the world itself. After all, it had taken him from her. It had destroyed him from the inside out in ways she could never hope to understand. In order to learn them, he would have had to be the one to tell her. He had the answers for everything. He always did, but she would never hear him speak again.
Perhaps she misunderstood him even now, looking back at him from the other side of the rift between them formed by death. Maybe he had other reasons. Maybe there was nothing that broke him more than her interference with his plans. Either way, she would never get to ask.
The world had abandoned him, and then he had abandoned himself. Tears slicked her face, and she knew that she couldn't be like either of them—she couldn't leave him behind. Volo might resent her for their differences, for her stupid idealism and tactless choices, but walking back down the mountain and carrying on with her life as though nothing had happened between them was impossible. It just wasn't something she could do.
Looking back, they both had sinned against each other; it was only natural, she thought, since they were both human. Perhaps the greatest of her sins had been that she was different from him, that she couldn't be a part of him, another limb with which he accomplished his goals, the arm with which he saved himself. It wouldn't have been as interesting to get to know him if they were so alike, but she knew that thinking that way was selfish. Her sin was a human one, something she was helpless to, but it was sin nonetheless, the great destroyer. She thought about the snow, about how two different mounds of it could melt and join into water, and she thought about him. She never stopped thinking about him.
She hadn't met him when he needed her most, and now he was gone. In leaving himself, he had left her behind too. She supposed, in a sense, that they were even now.
In the end, I was alone, Volo had said between the broken pillars. But not you. My story ended when I lost to you.
But the end had come and gone, and here she was.
No, she thought, twisting his hair in her fingers. She settled down into the ice. I'm the same as you are. You just didn't get to see it.
She didn't say it out loud. She had said enough, and anything else would be lost to the snow, which had turned first to sleet, then back to rain. She was soaking wet now, but somehow she didn't feel cold anymore; her mind was calm. The mountain and the Temple were silent, conjoined in total solitude. He had said far too little, enough for her to know that she would never get an answer back, but the silence helped her pretend, his voice ringing from behind her mind.
The breeze was warm against her face, freezing her tears to her cheeks. Akari stripped off her winter jacket, feeling claustrophobic and hot inside it, and offered it to Volo, smoothing it over his wounds. He really did look like he was sleeping now, and she knew he needed the coat more than she did. She still remembered how cold his hands had been against her.
She curled into his wounded side, using her body to hide the last of his injuries. When morning came, she would figure out what to do next. But she was warm, at last, and Volo was with her, and that was enough.
It was over, she thought, and yet he looked so peaceful when he slept. It was a privilege to see, a privilege that she wished would continue. Akari was tired from her journey too, eyes sagging shut even as she fought to keep them open. She shivered against the crook of his arm, falling in love with his smell.
Fog crept across the sullen mountain peaks. All across Hisui, the sleeping earth was wet. She held him, closer than she had ever held another person, and she closed her eyes.
"O you, who at the world's far-off end dwell; I know your wish—it is my wish as well.
My own beloved is now gone from me, departed to a place I cannot reach.
My old companions have left me behind, their faces faded into days gone by.
Still to my breast I clutch this hopeless dream, a futile wish for us once more to meet.
O you, who at the world's far-off end dwell; I know your wish—it is my wish as well.
But ours are cold and endless winter days, warmed only by memories locked away."
—Old Verse #2
[*] Annapurna may refer either to (1) Annapurna I, the world’s deadliest “8000er” mountain peak, or (2) Annapurna, a manifestation of the (reincarnated) Sati and a figure venerated in Hinduism; in one myth, Sati kills herself as part of a religious agreement, and her husband carries her corpse away as it is cut into pieces.