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This story would not have been remotely as good as it is without your help.\n", "description_bbcode_parsed": "And so concludes the first book of the Silver Sage Saga.

The Mischief's Maker is the next in the series, and I'll start posting those very very soon!

    

Thank you so very much to all of my loving, supportive guild mates. This story would not have been remotely as good as it is without your help.
", "writing": "[center][b]~ SPRING ~[/b][/center]\n\n\nBataille wakes to Bladewing’s siren cry again, hoping Moltres would choose to fly half-an-hour late for once.\n\nUgh, who’s he kidding? Not a soul in creation has slept through that old skarmory’s crow.\n\nHe groans, slowly rising from the dead to a sit in his fishnet hammock hung above a tiny corner-hearth to toughen and dry. Emeline, ever the restless sleeper, greets him from the rafters with a sunny purr and pleasant churr. As his mind emerges from yet-another insomniatic haze, he stretches his linen-sleeved arms out for her to take her place against his cheek for the day.\n\n“[b][i]Good [/i][/b][i][b][u]morning[/u][/b][/i][b][i], sleepy bones![/i][/b][i]” [/i]Estelle sings directly onto his mind with a sugary operatic drone, dancing around the great-hall in a cheerful furry swirl. “[i][b]Yooou two have work to do,[/b][/i]” she chirps, and ignites the tavern lights with a bossy snap of the claw.\n\n“Mmmorning, Madame.” He flops out of the hammock like a greasy omelet from a pan, dangling from the wooden beams to drop himself down. “Who needs what and where?” he asks, binding a thick woolen cloak around his shoulders with an old marowack clasp that seems to be shrinking on him day to day.\n\n“[i][b]Surely you haven’t forgotten.[/b][/i]” Estelle pats him on the head with a smile. “[i][b]I know you remember everything, my little trapinch-mind,[/b][/i]” she coos, pinching his cheek.\n\nBataille and Emeline both smirk with a defeated sigh. “I was hoping you might have done so yourself, Madame.”\n\nEstelle chuckles with a twirl of her paw and the front double-doors open with a slam “[i][b]As long as [/b][/i][u][b][i]your[/i][/b][/u][i][b] head is [/b][/i][b][i]around, that’s a dream on Hoopa’s rings,[/i][/b]” she chimes, handing him a wide-brim wicker hat.\n\n“[i][b]Spring Sow is the single most important time in the valley, young man.[/b][/i]” She shoos him toward the doors and the scruff of his tunic lifts with an invisible vulpine claw as he lollygags just a bit too long. [b]“[/b] [b]‘[/b][b][i]Every hand shall turn the soil, for a year of feasts and song.’ [/i][/b]”\n\nHe winces as his eyes adjust to the dawnlit sky, and huffs an anxious misty column of breath he spots and follows a line of villagers reporting to the fields.\n\nIndeed he hasn’t forgotten, and of course he was only joking. Mostly. He couldn’t hide a real fib from Estelle’s third eye, even if he wanted to try.\n\nBataille hasn’t kept a plant in years, let alone committing serial mass-agriculture. But, with a hop in his step and a brand-new hat officiating his role, he charges head-first into yet another challenge they’ve set before him.\n\nOutside the walls, a massive congregation awaits instructions from the farmer-folk on where to plow and how. Hoards of monsters pocked with smatterings of human faces coagulate into amorphous dirt-churning machines that shuffle off without another, independent word.\n\nLittle Litleo, his buddy at the great-hall, finds him amidst the din of lingering Shayminites, greeting the boy with an affectionate rub of the flank. He’s bigger by an inch and it seems that just a bit of his cubbish chub has been worked into hard predatory muscle mass. “Looo~”\n\n“Hey! Let’s stick together today. Even if our patch is crap, anything’s easier with a friend,” Bataille says, petting his pal from head to toe.\n\nEmeline peers from inside Bataille’s cloak and strokes the fiery tuft of fur at the peak of his brow.\n\nTheir friend looks around with a nervous scan of the crowd however. Then he perks with excitement and scampers up to another Litleo, one that had just arrived, and hands his assignment off… for three days’ rations sometime next week.\n\n“Thanks my friend, I hope it isn’t too inconvenient. I didn’t realize you were already accounted for,” he says as they patiently wait for rolls of breakfast bread, idly kicking slushy dandelion patches poking through the springmelt snow.\n\n“Bataille! Bataille Merchand?” a broad-shouldered red-head galarian woman in a pleated dress stomps his way. “Yer that bird-brain’s stowaway, yeah?”\n\nBataille chokes on the abrasive pejorative. “Well, I wouldn’t say tha–”\n\n“Say what’cha want, lad, ya sleep in a beer hall.” She points to a group of monsters busy gaggling across the field. “I’ve received revelation from on-high that [b]you’re[/b] going to be leading a crew today. [b]That’s[/b] a them.”\n\nBataille’s hands leap between them with terrified surprise. “Aaah! Madame, I’m terribly sorry, but there must be a mistake. I’ve never led [b]anything [/b]before!”\n\n“Then sod off, ya wannabe mountainman milksop.” She chuffs, pops her neck, and turns to leave. “If’n ya wanna do what-for, go kiss’n make friends’n whatnot. A spearow’ll come’n getcha later. Lunch is bread’n cheese.”\n\nBataille’s shoulders slump and his face churns with concern. “What did I do?”\n\n“Bah, don’t worry about Gretta,” one of the Weaver men says as he passes by. “Heads’ been all twisted up since Louka turned.”\n\n“Oh…” He stands dumbfounded for a moment, then baps himself on the temple to get his nerves together. “What am I complaining about? I get to work with a bunch of monsters. All by myself!”\n\nLitleo bounces with a spirited mew, infected by Bataille’s go-getter spirit as the boy squints to counts the critters out.\n\nSixteen… aron. Weird stubbly little things that bumble around with big, shearing, grinding mouths covered in body-grown metal plates. Without a doubt he’s interested in that, the texts in the academy say packs of aron are captured and starved, then released around new colonies to find good mining spots; any metal-bearing soil they munch up, it shows on their shell. Some of the harsher counties in Kalos raise and graze them for chattel slaughter, smelting their shells like ore. Just the mere thought of [b]that [/b]process makes him sick inside.\n\nHe looks their carapaces over aaand… the southern-peaks region is rich in copper. No surprises there. Gorgeous green malachite stones seem to sprout around the valley like weeds, and the local caves are totally flush with lovely, azurite clusters. Not to mention the occasional honest-to-Arceus, proper, copper find.\n\nBataille and Litleo marvel a little bit at the social behavior on display. Each aron tackles the other in playful shoving matches, smacking heads to initiate interaction as the two of them approach the group. He figures they must be made up of members from the same nested cave as he slows to a creeping halt, meters away from thirty-two black-and-blue eyes following his gaze.\n\nThey stand all at once and orient themselves to face the newcomers in a phalanx row, growling like rattled bowls full of gravel. \n\nBataille swallows his throat down on a slow and steady approach, his hand-made moccasin shoes scrapping anxious furrows in the muddy baby patches of grass peeking up from their winter sleep. “H-hail, aron clan hatchlings!” he says, recognising a pink infantile tinge in the flesh between their plates. “My name is Bataille. Bataille Mer…channn—”\n\n“Rrrrrrooonnn…” they rumble in a leery chorus of tumbled stones. “Aaahhhnnn…”\n\nHe clutches his clasp, a regular grounding source through those winter months full of learning, failure, struggle, and success. “I… Everything is alright, I’m here to—”\n\n“Nah!” the biggest one snaps like a pair of smacked stones. “Raaah!”\n\n“You… can’t understand me at all,” Bataille squeaks, looking around the valley fields for anyone with an ear for monster words to lend him aid. These hatchlings have not yet learned the words of men, what do they think he’s supposed to do?\n\nNobody meets eyes with him, in fact the nearest bodied soul is half-a-league or more out of reach as the other group leaders are already marching off to fulfill their obligations. The two of them are left with these monsters all alone, drawing an awkward stare from their spearow guide fluttering to his side.\n\n“Spah?” the bird says with impatience in her words. “Ro, wearow po.”\n\nBataille bites his lip at the sudden test of his monstrous acumen, looking down to Litleo with a relieved smile and a silly smack against his own temple. “Hey, buddy, could you tell them I’m leading them today?”\n\nLitleo nods with a cheery affirmative chirp, and as Spearow stands tapping their talons with a beaky scowl, he yowls, howls, and meows them down. The group looks up at Bataille with a demeanor totally transformed, from one of hostile disinterest to that of reverent attention.\n\nBataille glances down as the cub prances back to his side with a victorious smirk. “You didn’t [b]happen [/b]to tell them that I am Valko’s apprentice, did you?” the boy asks with a suspicious squint.\n\nLitleo rolls innocent eyes around his head with a coy chirp. “Lee-lo tah,” he says, dismissing the thought like campfire smoke.\n\nEmeline glares out from a gap in his cloak with a dirty stare of betrayal.\n\nHappy that this disruption in their routine is finally finished, Spearow rustles back up into the air, beckoning them to follow her further up into the mists of the valley’s great northern incline.\n\nEver judicious in nature and nurture alike, Bataille sighs as the group follows them to their assigned patch of land, marching in a fawning ducklett line. “Litleo, many thanks, I appreciate your effort, and I guess we probably needed it this time, but I have to get things done on my own merit.”\n\nThe cub gives his friend a blushing scratch of the head, chuckling with the bit of egg left on his face, and the group starts their half-hour march up the mountain.\n\nSpearow lands as Bataille scans the area, pointing to a lonely wooden spade, then to the stakes marking all four corners of their designated plot, and takes off without so much as a squawk of instruction. Not that he could have understood a peck of it anyway.\n\n“Alright, ‘Leo, tell them to get tilling, you too,” Bataille commands, calculating the width and length of the rows that everyone wants to see furrowed through their stone-spangled straight.\n\nLitleo pulls his head aback at that, pupils wide, coughing smoke and flames with one ear crooked aside in shock. However, knowing that this is the way of the sow, in a bitter manner of speaking, and being unable to express the subtle intricacies of his dissatisfaction with Bataille’s interpretation of their task, he puts his muzzle to the grindstone, clawing up the first of many strips of piled land.\n\nThe aron do the same, motivated with naivety and awe at the fact that their first sow is spent under the guidance of a sage-in-training.\n\n[i]Well, this isn’t so bad[/i], Bataille thinks to himself as he watches seventeen scribbly diglett lines in the soil slowly worming across the land.\n\nAn hour passes like that, with his knuckles on his belt the way his father always does, before he notices just how little progress the aron are making… Come to think of it, Litleo isn’t putting his weight into the work either.\n\nThe aron chuff with wincing huffs as their jaws scrape the muddy stuff beneath their paws. Mandicating maws soaked in schmutz spray the ground with loosened gobs of loamy clay, every now and again stopping to sneeze their plated faces clean or spit nasty pebbly nuggets aside like cherry pits. Dirt-shaped work that tastes like grass and sadness.\n\n“Hey you guys,” Bataille walks over, pointing to the soil with a caring but subtle air of condescension in his voice. “You don’t need to munch, there isn’t a lick of mineral-rich stuff here anyway. Let’s just knuckle down and we can eat later, ok?” He bends over with a sylvan smile. “Can you do that for me?”\n\nThey chuff and their eyes dart around, whimpering with a sound similar to grinding sheets of shale. Then, motivated by something other than loyalty alone, they nod with crestfallen eyes hanging to the ground and punch their nubby little paws through the soil.\n\nLitleo watches the lecture with his ears slicked-flat against his skull in disappointment. Tail flicking back and forth with eyes relentlessly latched onto Bataille, he ‘works’ with a droning growl in his throat, still electing to casually till the field now and again between fits of grooming to rid his coat of any tiny flecks of filth disgracing his hide.\n\nAnother half-hour passes as the sun nearly hangs in the center of the sky; progress appears even [b]less [/b]forthcoming now.\n\nLitleo loiters up and down acre-number-one, ‘accidentally’ knocking Bataille’s canteen over in a lazy wander ‘round. The arons’ agricultural formation slowly dissolves to an ineffectual field of rabble. The one time his feline friend decides to make himself productive, he ‘unintentionally’ flings mud the boy’s way with a cheeky potty-corner scrape.\n\nThe copper plated monsters peer up at Emeline with puckered scowls as she snuggles and hugs the day away from her perch atop his shoulder. And tensions begin to flare as the committed few aron start to butt heads and fight at the tiniest perceived slights. Litleo knows about Emeline’s injuries, so he doesn’t much care about that.\n\nEstelle had told him everything about the sow, thrice over, even burned the concepts into his mind with a psychic assault or two, but only now did he really feel the daunting weight of the duty set before them. Two square acres, four in total.\n\nA man-and-mudbray team plows one acre a day, and they weren’t starting until a quarter of their sunlight hours passed away.\n\nBataille whines with fingers scraping the skin of his cheeks, bemoaning all the incompatible variables in play as he summons up the Energy Wheel from the eidetic annals of his mind. Younglings without an ounce of experience, himself included, given a patch of land to turn with nothing but a single shovel in triple time. A raucous pack of monsters born to consume metals and stone, but racked by the painfully awkward curse that wracks them with extreme discomfort at the slightest grounding touch of Arceus’ lowest form of energy.\n\nDesperate to get back onto the rails, he feeds the team meagre scraps of encouragement that become terse reminders of duty that turn to stinging lines of criticism that transform into salty frustrated jabs only Litelo can understand. In the midst of his long, insipid, managerial streak he completely misses the swooping sounds of a great peregrine shadow sweeping the countryside tp rest in a piney ridge nearby.\n\nBataille groans, pacing with deadline stress as their [b]de[/b]-ffeminate overseer stomps along her route delivering baskets full of varied berries, fluffy loaves, and curdy chunks of cheddar-cheese.\n\nThe pack scrambles to Gretta’s feet with desperate starving whines. Litleo listlessly paws to the woman’s side, nomming up his bread-and-berry share while sparing less-than-zero cares for Bataille’s offer of a friendly pat between the ears.\n\nSpicy tsk-tsk-tsks season Gretta’s assessment of this hobbled gogoat-rodeo. “A fine frillish kettle yer cook’n there, bottleboy,” she snubbulls with totally undisguised derision. “This rate’ll see ya done by summerfest ‘morn.” She harumphs. “Maybe.”\n\nThe wanna-be sage wriggles around his own skin with an unfamiliar sensation that he’s swiftly starting to despise. The feeling of failure. \n\n“W-we’re just warming up, Madame. We’ll have this plot mopped up in no time, I promise.”\n\n“Gob full’o gambles and whack,” she grunts and lumbers off, arms flexed through a-dozen wicker basket handles. “Birds uv’a feather.”\n\nBataille falls on windless wings and stamps a muddy divot with his ass to sit for a lonely lunch with Emeline, watching Gretta from the ends of his eyeballs as she feeds the neighboring plot being plowed by a double team of human-tauros pairs.\n\nThe other group seems to be struggling with the land they’ve been given too, nestled in a u-shaped hill tucked up against a sheer set of cliffs. It clearly isn’t suited to the wooden blades hitched behind the bulls’ mighty weight. The land is dense, dry, riddled with rocky tumors dressed in verdant oxidase. The cliff faces are, without a shadow of a doubt, loaded with bountiful chunks of ore.\n\nHow come [b]they [/b]get to use plows? What, was he supposed to smith and carpent all of that stuff himself as well?!\n\nThe chain-gang grumbles beneath his shadow as their task-master finishes his food to assess his team with eyes that seem, to them at least, full of empty kindness.\n\n“Hey, ah… ‘Leo, I’m going to give a pep talk, translate for me, alright?” he says with a presumptuous tint to his words as a bundle of azurite eyes size him up in a profoundly eerie and uncomfortable way.\n\nLitleo just smiles with a wide roll of the eyes. “Oooh ohhh,” he coos and curls up with his shoulders toward the boy. \n\nBataille nods, accepting an affirmative response that clearly wasn’t there to begin with, hoping he can manufacture consent with a rousing mid-battle speech. “Alright you all, I know this seems hard but I know you’ve got what it takes to…” he pauses, noticing Litleo has, in fact, not decided to accept his heroic call-to-action.\n\nSo much to do, so little time. That is, of course, unless you happen to be armed with a mob of wild monsters.\n\nAnd [b]that[/b], of course, is unless the mob isn’t directed at [b]you[/b].\n\nHeaving out a long defeated sigh, Bataille watches the last scraps of aron enthusiasm evaporate away and their genial disposition shifts back to the verge of softcore violence.\n\n“Am I meant for this at all?” he asks aloud, backing away so they can return to smacking skulls and tussling around the grass.\n\nIt’s a valid question. Master Valko had insisted Bataille not call him that until he said it was so, which slapped Bataille’s mouth jerky-dry for days. The lessons Bataille received from the man, far and few between, were gratefully grasped at with rabid curiosity, geared towards survival rather than the dealings of monsters.\n\nNow, nobody could possibly get him wrong, he found everything about it deeply fascinating (and practical) which made him hunger for even more of Valko’s sagely words of wisdom. \n\nIn truth, Bataille was starting to think they were just squeezing a seasons-worth of labor from some gullible kid with a dream that’s destined for distortion.\n\nEmeline sees the light of her precious bright-eyed boy fading away and flutters up to his cheek in an affectionate panic. “Go lo ga ma!” she squeaks, finally realizing that his words from earlier had wider darker implications than she’d initially thought. “Go lo ga ma!”\n\nBataille leans into the fuzzy hug muffing his ear and swipes a despondent wetness from his eyes. “Sorry sweetie, I’m feeling kind of… worthless right now.”\n\nShe tries pulling him out of that funk for the better part of ten minutes before giving in to a growling abject irritation. She bites the floppy cartilage of his ear, smacking his cheeks silly as the boy yelps, scraping his partner-turned-savage from his face. “GO LO GA MA!” she shouts, pointing to the other group still struggling with their assignment as well.\n\nHer intention was to show that he isn’t struggling all alone. The message received, however, is vastly different, and far more effective.\n\nThat inventive sparkle she loves to see washes over his face and he dashes over to their neighbors who’ve half-chowed their lunch down already. “Hey, hey there!” he shouts, recognizing that young Weaver man from this morning, which fills him with even more hope for this last ditch plan of his.\n\n“Ah, good to see we’re not the only ones chewing rhydon leather all day,” he jests as the tauros bulls gruff with averted eyes. “Sorry Gretta’s hounding ya, don’t worry ‘bout her. We all do our best, yeah?”\n\n“See, that’s the thing,” Bataille leads with a finger stabbed toward the ground, “I think that both plots just aren’t fit for the teams assigned. Might I propose… a trade?”\n\nThe Weaver boy and his recently wedded gal give him curious tilts of the head. “A trade? Not really supposed to do that, y’know.”\n\nBataille retorts with a flippant shrug. “Yeah, well, rules that don’t work need to be broken. Let’s swap sides, nobody needs to know, and Gretta can’t complain if we end the day with a couple jobs well done, right?”\n\nThey purse their lips, looking each other over, and the young husband gives Bataille a hearty fist against the heart. “Verily! A deal it is, then! We’ll finish up and head over there. Have fun, I guess. This patch is all kinds of twisted up.”\n\nFueled with renewed faith, he runs with a rejuvenated grin carved into his face, back to Litleo. “Hey! Hey, I just swa–”\n\nLitleo hisses with forward whiskers and a mouth full of sharpened teeth at Bataille’s sudden advance, then he slowly returns to his nap once he sees that the boy is good and discouraged.\n\nBataille’s cheeks turn with the pressure of a difficult acceptance here. He has a few choice words he’d like to say to the cub, but Mère always says to save your vinegar for when you want to make enemies, not keep friends. Instead he wanders over to the aron spread all about in chaotic clumps, cringing at the daftness about to overtake him.\n\nThen he falls down to his hands and knees, giving his level-best imitation of a rolling aron throat. Emeline is left chittering confused noises directly into his ear.\n\nIf they couldn’t work with his language, he’d have to handle things in [b]theirs[/b].\n\nEveryone, man and monster alike, stops mid-motion as he scrambles over on his palms and the tips of his toes. \n\nLitleo croons his attention back around, peeking with a hazy half-interest.\n\nBataille grunts, scraping the grass with his feet, and roars at the top of his lungs, like he’d seen the hatchlings do all throughout the day.\n\nThen he barrels in a full-throttled tilt toward the biggest monster, face-first, lunging into a brazen head-butt leap. Emeline’s beloved human has gone full-ludicolo, and she’s gripped by a fit of horrified hair-clutching screams mid-arc, flapping her little wings to—\n\nCRACK!\n\nIt is then that Bataille understands precisely why a group of aron is called a ‘crash’. The crown of his skull collides with the ferrometal mask of the biggest bull romping around the group, and his body unceremoniously flops into a raggedy lifeless heap.\n\nLitleo leaps out of his cold-shouldered act, whipping around with a fully flummoxed [b]whole[/b]-interest.\n\nEmeline zips around his body, tugging his arms, ears, and pawsy locs of golden hair in the throes of a screeching sobbing hysteria.\n\nThe aron in question, being a mere foot long from tip-to-tail, stands shaken but unfazed by the boy’s sudden monstrous mimicry, but does hover over his inanimate face with concern.\n\nEmeline grabs the collar of Bataille’s cloak, yanking his head back and forth as she begs him to return to her, declaring with streaks of tears dribbling down her cheeks that she’s broken her friend. She presses her face into his chest, bawling out to any legendary beasts that will hear her pleas, saying she’s sorry and that she’ll never do it again… whatever that thing happened to be.\n\nThe Weavers sit with shifty anxious eyes, paralyzed by the sheer insanity of the thing they’d just witnessed.\n\nSomething lays in patient hiding from the darkened forest’s edge, watching with rapt attention.\n\n“Hnnggg,” Bataille groans with fluttering eyes blinking out of sync as he grips the top of his head. “What aaa thiiing, haaa.”\n\nEmeline very nearly chokes him dead again with a grateful miracle hug. \n\nBefore anyone can catch up to what might be going on, Bataille snatches that same aron up, tackling him for a rambunctious rumble and tumble, summoning every ounce of power his childish human body can spare. Emeline stands helpless by the wayside, wondering when this madness will end and her little heart can stop trying to break out of her chest.\n\nAfter a few minutes, the aron squats atop the boy with an adorably victorious roar, having body-slammed Bataille in the gentlest way he knows how. It’s all for play, of course, and the whole group is delighted to find that the sageling has a bit of fun hiding inside him after all.\n\n“Haaa! Good one,” Bataille gasps with a loopy grin, wobbling back up to his feet to walk a wide swerving circle so he won’t succumb to what he is one-hundred-percent sure is a concussion working its way through his system. “‘Leo, hey ‘Leo!”\n\nLitleo smiles at his friend's behavioral about-face, still harboring a negative thought or two, but willing to give credit where credit is due. “Leeeooo!”\n\n“We’re trading places with them, it’ll be a lot better, trust me!” Bataille says with his lungs working double duty. “Let the aron know!”\n\nLitleo gives him a sharp raise of his brow, and Bataille chuckles with a little bit of egg-whites smeared across [b]his[/b] face this time.\n\n“Ahh… please and thank you!”\n\nThe cat does exactly that, and they trade neighborly nods with the Weavers as they both cross the line into far more promising lands.\n\nBataille sees the aron rearing up to dash for the cliffs full of copper geocandy, but both he and Litleo bark for them to stay put, their pseudopsychic friendship bond seemingly restored. If they wanted to gorge themselves into a culinary coma, it would be after they’ve [b]earned [/b]the right to roll over and die happy.\n\nHe isn’t done though and gets down to their level again, spade in hand, to show them with an agonizingly repetitive pantomime how the mask-shaped dome of their faces make even better shovels than his crappy wooden article.\n\nGods it hurts his body, they’d traded their mushy sheets of mud for a practical pile of broken glass that leaves him nursing bloody blisters, blackened bruises, and dirty serrations in the skin of his limbs. Despite all of this though, the animated excavating fervor he’s managed to ignite within them fuels his own furnace just as much.\n\nStanding with his hands at his hips again, a victorious thumb stuck in his belt this time, he smiles as seventeen colors of upturned stone chisel themselves across the quad in record-setting time. “Amazing,” he says with a demolished sway in his stance, discovering that all this time the aron have been crunching any tiny snack of stone they can find, leaving spotless trails of softer soil in their wake.\n\nThey, as it turns out, were the perfect remedy for the tragedies befalling this previously worthless scrap of land.\n\nWell, worthless for growing food, anyway. He really wanted to talk to somebody about the literal copper mines they’re just sitting on, but he’d have to put a pin in that for later.\n\nAnd those things are all well and good, but there’s still one big, fat, tantruming mamoswine left to put to rest, and Litleo isn’t about to allow his friend to end a day like this in disgrace.\n\nNo matter how many different ways the boy zooms to his side or strikes a happy tune, the stubborn tom keeps their friendship locked behind a glacial apathetic stare. He digs his furrows fast and well, but he’ll scream his silence clear as crystal glass until the boy takes that long hard look in the mirror. \n\nThat impenetrable icy disposition burns through Bataille’s skin with a heat so fierce he nearly explodes in Litleo’s face. For what he doesn’t immediately know. Would he never be forgiven for his leadership fumbles? Was he still a tad too demanding? What has he done that wasn’t already fixed? Is this just petty revenge? Why won’t he stop staring at this twisted shov—\n\nBataille’s missing sense of self-awareness hits him like a catapult stone to the stomach…\n\nHis shameful human hands have yet to scrape a single solitary row.\n\nHe squats to take a clump of soil up, rolling it around the tips of his fingers with a humiliated shake of the head. All those months spent scrubbing the privilege from his soul with snow and his chest still harbors an indignancy of station that simply cannot reside within the aspiring heart of a sage.\n\nThere’s a fire building in Bataille’s face and he very nearly explodes his friendship for Litleo ruining the moment he’d finally managed to fix… but then scoffs at himself, passing stones of self-awareness dislodged with post-concussion clarity.\n\nHe hated that he hated this and that it hated him right back.\n\nIt’s such a humorous thing how he’d deluded himself into believing that study was hard work. After all, as long as he chose to push himself to the edge of his memory and focus, able to read and scribe as he burned waxy blobs of candlelight well into the lunar hours. But in reality, that was absolutely nothing when set-beside the monumental list of shit needing smeared through miles and miles of dirt before the ruthless timer in the sky judged his pathetic display at the end of the day. \n\nIt had been this way since his family packed their things and sled away. For the vast majority of his stay, Valko left him marooned in the winter gloom, trapped mastering skills suited for lesser crafting guilds. That, or he’d find himself fiddling his fingers with the peasant women, weaving on a looms or fussing with woolen spools. Every bit of clothing on this body was made by him, from shear to sew.\n\nEach day brought another tedious test of patience or some prattling stack of this-and-that needing finished before Moltres roosted at the edge of the sky.\n\nThese were the sorts of body-busting toils that his years spent trivializing the academy’s gauntlet of academic traps were meant to spare him from. To let him serve the earth in the way all of mankind is truly meant to work. It left him wanting for any kind of cerebral stimulation.\n\nIt would have been so easy to simply scream himself numb every night or sneak drinks from the cellar, hanging from his hammock in an unconscious catharsis that mutes these elitist illusions. But Bataille has the wisdom to recognize such foolishness. For he knows, from the words of a-hundred men more genius than he could ever hope to be, that it is the gibbering mathematical noise jittering around his skull that makes him human.\n\nAnd the message from that very-human mind is heard loud and clear; ‘Quit your twisting, hoist thy britches tight, and set thine tender hands to [b]digging[/b].’\n\n“Sorry buddy, I haven’t been a very good friend today, have I?” he relents with humility on his face and in his soul, stabs the shovel down with a stomp of his foot, and strikes the earth for the first of a million times. \"Let's fix that.”\n\nHe moves to the front of the line, any line would do really. Pépé always says that the truest of men lead by example and from the front, hoofing it with the lowest among anyone in his care. That he’d allowed such a vital piece of wisdom to waste away while its purpose stood staring him dead in the eyes is a lesson he’ll not soon forget.\n\nIf Bataille had thought his body hurt before, he now knows just how tired a kid can truly be. Mind-numbing hours upon hours spent shucking jagged chunks of rubble into semi-arable tracks of land. It breaks his muscles down to jiggling lumps of mush, wrapped around his bones in a savaged sweaty sack of skin. His empty canteen cries for mercy as his throat rattles silent ascetic songs, glad to have finally found his proper place again.\n\nThat well-to-do merchant’s son suddenly sees past the grit and grime as his garments fray and tear. Toiling beside his fellow living souls, his heart finally sheds that last blackened wart of pride.\n\nWhen the final strip is ripped up with Litleo’s stone-blunted claws, Bataille Merchand stakes the shovel down at the opposite corner of where they’d started, claiming victory in the name of fairness, teamwork, and friendship. The aron kits, finally relieved of their duty, stampede right past him and crash into the cliffside to binge themselves on an endless mound of metallurgical treats.\n\nThen, and only then, does he allow his battered excuse of a body to fall backwards into a fluffy grave of turned and softened earth, made ready to sprout the veritable bounties that nourish all of Shaymin’s Pass each and every year.\n\n‘Every hand shall turn the soil, for a year of feasts and song.’\n\n\n“That will do, little bird.”\n\n\nBataille’s face scrunches up into a startled spud, rolling his head around the dirt to gaze upon a blurry haze of yellows, reds, and grays. He stares up into that colorful soup of shapes shifting through the afternoon sun, hoping to divine the source of that oh-so-familiar voice.\n\n“I’m no monster, I’m a boy,” he utters, struggling to form even that incoherent slab of speech as Emeline scurries up to Valko’s feet for a tiny, respectful bow.\n\nValko Woolooman, Sage of the Southern Peaks, towers over Bataille to inspect the fruits of their labor. The ever-lovely Lailla, Queen of Shaymin’s Skies, swoops down onto his shoulders with a blustery thud. “Not yet.”\n\nThe old woolherd stamps a weathered wooden crook down, and an ivory flood of wooloo fluff spills out from the forest line, stopping at the acres’ edge with bewildered bleating faces.\n\nThe sunny circles set in Valko’s eyes shine on the boy’s prodigal field of possibilities. “You know you weren’t supposed to succeed.”\n\nBataille stirs to his arse with a zombified lurch and breaks his befuddled palsy with a bashful smirk. “I always do my best, Monsieur.”\n\nValko hoists the boy back up to his feet with a fatherly clap of the hand. “That will be ‘Master’, if you still wish.”\n\nEmeline’s eyes glow with the warmth of the setting sun, spellbound with anticipation for her partner’s reply.\n\n“Yes, Master, I would like that.” He giggles at the insane situation with an anxious fit. “Very very much.”\n\nThe Teacher looks upon his Student with pride and then turns toward the wilds. “Come with me.”\n\n“Where are we going?” Bataille asks, revived by a supernatural second-wind as Valko scans the mountainside. \n\n“Home.”\n", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "
~ SPRING ~



Bataille wakes to Bladewing’s siren cry again, hoping Moltres would choose to fly half-an-hour late for once.

Ugh, who’s he kidding? Not a soul in creation has slept through that old skarmory’s crow.

He groans, slowly rising from the dead to a sit in his fishnet hammock hung above a tiny corner-hearth to toughen and dry. Emeline, ever the restless sleeper, greets him from the rafters with a sunny purr and pleasant churr. As his mind emerges from yet-another insomniatic haze, he stretches his linen-sleeved arms out for her to take her place against his cheek for the day.

“Good morning, sleepy bones!” Estelle sings directly onto his mind with a sugary operatic drone, dancing around the great-hall in a cheerful furry swirl. “Yooou two have work to do,” she chirps, and ignites the tavern lights with a bossy snap of the claw.

“Mmmorning, Madame.” He flops out of the hammock like a greasy omelet from a pan, dangling from the wooden beams to drop himself down. “Who needs what and where?” he asks, binding a thick woolen cloak around his shoulders with an old marowack clasp that seems to be shrinking on him day to day.

“Surely you haven’t forgotten.” Estelle pats him on the head with a smile. “I know you remember everything, my little trapinch-mind,” she coos, pinching his cheek.

Bataille and Emeline both smirk with a defeated sigh. “I was hoping you might have done so yourself, Madame.”

Estelle chuckles with a twirl of her paw and the front double-doors open with a slam “As long as your head is around, that’s a dream on Hoopa’s rings,” she chimes, handing him a wide-brim wicker hat.

“Spring Sow is the single most important time in the valley, young man.” She shoos him toward the doors and the scruff of his tunic lifts with an invisible vulpine claw as he lollygags just a bit too long. “ ‘Every hand shall turn the soil, for a year of feasts and song.’ ”

He winces as his eyes adjust to the dawnlit sky, and huffs an anxious misty column of breath he spots and follows a line of villagers reporting to the fields.

Indeed he hasn’t forgotten, and of course he was only joking. Mostly. He couldn’t hide a real fib from Estelle’s third eye, even if he wanted to try.

Bataille hasn’t kept a plant in years, let alone committing serial mass-agriculture. But, with a hop in his step and a brand-new hat officiating his role, he charges head-first into yet another challenge they’ve set before him.

Outside the walls, a massive congregation awaits instructions from the farmer-folk on where to plow and how. Hoards of monsters pocked with smatterings of human faces coagulate into amorphous dirt-churning machines that shuffle off without another, independent word.

Little Litleo, his buddy at the great-hall, finds him amidst the din of lingering Shayminites, greeting the boy with an affectionate rub of the flank. He’s bigger by an inch and it seems that just a bit of his cubbish chub has been worked into hard predatory muscle mass. “Looo~”

“Hey! Let’s stick together today. Even if our patch is crap, anything’s easier with a friend,” Bataille says, petting his pal from head to toe.

Emeline peers from inside Bataille’s cloak and strokes the fiery tuft of fur at the peak of his brow.

Their friend looks around with a nervous scan of the crowd however. Then he perks with excitement and scampers up to another Litleo, one that had just arrived, and hands his assignment off… for  three days’ rations sometime next week.

“Thanks my friend, I hope it isn’t too inconvenient. I didn’t realize you were already accounted for,” he says as they patiently wait for rolls of breakfast bread, idly kicking slushy dandelion patches poking through the springmelt snow.

“Bataille! Bataille Merchand?” a broad-shouldered red-head galarian woman in a pleated dress stomps his way. “Yer that bird-brain’s stowaway, yeah?”

Bataille chokes on the abrasive pejorative. “Well, I wouldn’t say tha–”

“Say what’cha want, lad, ya sleep in a beer hall.” She points to a group of monsters busy gaggling across the field. “I’ve received revelation from on-high that you’re going to be leading a crew today. That’s a them.”

Bataille’s hands leap between them with terrified surprise. “Aaah! Madame, I’m terribly sorry, but there must be a mistake. I’ve never led anything before!”

“Then sod off, ya wannabe mountainman milksop.” She chuffs, pops her neck, and turns to leave. “If’n ya wanna do what-for, go kiss’n make friends’n whatnot. A spearow’ll come’n getcha later. Lunch is bread’n cheese.”

Bataille’s shoulders slump and his face churns with concern. “What did I do?”

“Bah, don’t worry about Gretta,” one of the Weaver men says as he passes by. “Heads’ been all twisted up since Louka turned.”

“Oh…” He stands dumbfounded for a moment, then baps himself on the temple to get his nerves together. “What am I complaining about? I get to work with a bunch of monsters. All by myself!”

Litleo bounces with a spirited mew, infected by Bataille’s go-getter spirit as the boy squints to counts the critters out.

Sixteen… aron. Weird stubbly little things that bumble around with big, shearing, grinding mouths covered in body-grown metal plates. Without a doubt he’s interested in that, the texts in the academy say packs of aron are captured and starved, then released around new colonies to find good mining spots; any metal-bearing soil they munch up, it shows on their shell. Some of the harsher counties in Kalos raise and graze them for chattel slaughter, smelting their shells like ore. Just the mere thought of that process makes him sick inside.

He looks their carapaces over aaand… the southern-peaks region is rich in copper. No surprises there. Gorgeous green malachite stones seem to sprout around the valley like weeds, and the local caves are totally flush with lovely, azurite clusters. Not to mention the occasional honest-to-Arceus, proper, copper find.

Bataille and Litleo marvel a little bit at the social behavior on display. Each aron tackles the other in playful shoving matches, smacking heads to initiate interaction as the two of them approach the group. He figures they must be made up of members from the same nested cave as he slows to a creeping halt, meters away from thirty-two black-and-blue eyes following his gaze.

They stand all at once and orient themselves to face the newcomers in a phalanx row, growling like rattled bowls full of gravel.

Bataille swallows his throat down on a slow and steady approach, his hand-made moccasin shoes scrapping anxious furrows in the muddy baby patches of grass peeking up from their winter sleep. “H-hail, aron clan hatchlings!” he says, recognising a pink infantile tinge in the flesh between their plates. “My name is Bataille. Bataille Mer…channn—”

“Rrrrrrooonnn…” they rumble in a leery chorus of tumbled stones. “Aaahhhnnn…”

He clutches his clasp, a regular grounding source through those winter months full of learning, failure, struggle, and success. “I… Everything is alright, I’m here to—”

“Nah!” the biggest one snaps like a pair of smacked stones. “Raaah!”

“You… can’t understand me at all,” Bataille squeaks, looking around the valley fields for anyone with an ear for monster words to lend him aid. These hatchlings have not yet learned the words of men, what do they think he’s supposed to do?

Nobody meets eyes with him, in fact the nearest bodied soul is half-a-league or more out of reach as the other group leaders are already marching off to fulfill their obligations. The two of them are left with these monsters all alone, drawing an awkward stare from their spearow guide fluttering to his side.

“Spah?” the bird says with impatience in her words. “Ro, wearow po.”

Bataille bites his lip at the sudden test of his monstrous acumen, looking down to Litleo with a relieved smile and a silly smack against his own temple. “Hey, buddy, could you tell them I’m leading them today?”

Litleo nods with a cheery affirmative chirp, and as Spearow stands tapping their talons with a beaky scowl, he yowls, howls, and meows them down. The group looks up at Bataille with a demeanor totally transformed, from one of hostile disinterest to that of reverent attention.

Bataille glances down as the cub prances back to his side with a victorious smirk. “You didn’t happen to tell them that I am Valko’s apprentice, did you?” the boy asks with a suspicious squint.

Litleo rolls innocent eyes around his head with a coy chirp. “Lee-lo tah,” he says, dismissing the thought like campfire smoke.

Emeline glares out from a gap in his cloak with a dirty stare of betrayal.

Happy that this disruption in their routine is finally finished, Spearow rustles back up into the air, beckoning them to follow her further up into the mists of the valley’s great northern incline.

Ever judicious in nature and nurture alike, Bataille sighs as the group follows them to their assigned patch of land, marching in a fawning ducklett line. “Litleo, many thanks, I appreciate your effort, and I guess we probably needed it this time, but I have to get things done on my own merit.”

The cub gives his friend a blushing scratch of the head, chuckling with the bit of egg left on his face, and the group starts their half-hour march up the mountain.

Spearow lands as Bataille scans the area, pointing to a lonely wooden spade, then to the stakes marking all four corners of their designated plot, and takes off without so much as a squawk of instruction. Not that he could have understood a peck of it anyway.

“Alright, ‘Leo, tell them to get tilling, you too,” Bataille commands, calculating the width and length of the rows that everyone wants to see furrowed through their stone-spangled straight.

Litleo pulls his head aback at that, pupils wide, coughing smoke and flames with one ear crooked aside in shock. However, knowing that this is the way of the sow, in a bitter manner of speaking, and being unable to express the subtle intricacies of his dissatisfaction with Bataille’s interpretation of their task, he puts his muzzle to the grindstone, clawing up the first of many strips of piled land.

The aron do the same, motivated with naivety and awe at the fact that their first sow is spent under the guidance of a sage-in-training.

Well, this isn’t so bad, Bataille thinks to himself as he watches seventeen scribbly diglett lines in the soil slowly worming across the land.

An hour passes like that, with his knuckles on his belt the way his father always does, before he notices just how little progress the aron are making… Come to think of it, Litleo isn’t putting his weight into the work either.

The aron chuff with wincing huffs as their jaws scrape the muddy stuff beneath their paws. Mandicating maws soaked in schmutz spray the ground with loosened gobs of loamy clay, every now and again stopping to sneeze their plated faces clean or spit nasty pebbly nuggets aside like cherry pits. Dirt-shaped work that tastes like grass and sadness.

“Hey you guys,” Bataille walks over, pointing to the soil with a caring but subtle air of condescension in his voice. “You don’t need to munch, there isn’t a lick of mineral-rich stuff here anyway. Let’s just knuckle down and we can eat later, ok?” He bends over with a sylvan smile. “Can you do that for me?”

They chuff and their eyes dart around, whimpering with a sound similar to grinding sheets of shale. Then, motivated by something other than loyalty alone, they nod with crestfallen eyes hanging to the ground and punch their nubby little paws through the soil.

Litleo watches the lecture with his ears slicked-flat against his skull in disappointment. Tail flicking back and forth with eyes relentlessly latched onto Bataille, he ‘works’ with a droning growl in his throat, still electing to casually till the field now and again between fits of grooming to rid his coat of any tiny flecks of filth disgracing his hide.

Another half-hour passes as the sun nearly hangs in the center of the sky; progress appears even less forthcoming now.

Litleo loiters up and down acre-number-one, ‘accidentally’ knocking Bataille’s canteen over in a lazy wander ‘round. The arons’ agricultural formation slowly dissolves to an ineffectual field of rabble. The one time his feline friend decides to make himself productive, he ‘unintentionally’ flings mud the boy’s way with a cheeky potty-corner scrape.

The copper plated monsters peer up at Emeline with puckered scowls as she snuggles and hugs the day away from her perch atop his shoulder. And tensions begin to flare as the committed few aron start to butt heads and fight at the tiniest perceived slights. Litleo knows about Emeline’s injuries, so he doesn’t much care about that.

Estelle had told him everything about the sow, thrice over, even burned the concepts into his mind with a psychic assault or two, but only now did he really feel the daunting weight of the duty set before them. Two square acres, four in total.

A man-and-mudbray team plows one acre a day, and they weren’t starting until a quarter of their sunlight hours passed away.

Bataille whines with fingers scraping the skin of his cheeks, bemoaning all the incompatible variables in play as he summons up the Energy Wheel from the eidetic annals of his mind. Younglings without an ounce of experience, himself included, given a patch of land to turn with nothing but a single shovel in triple time. A raucous pack of monsters born to consume metals and stone, but racked by the painfully awkward curse that wracks them with extreme discomfort at the slightest grounding touch of Arceus’ lowest form of energy.

Desperate to get back onto the rails, he feeds the team meagre scraps of encouragement that become terse reminders of duty that turn to stinging lines of criticism that transform into salty frustrated jabs only Litelo can understand. In the midst of his long, insipid, managerial streak he completely misses the swooping sounds of a great peregrine shadow sweeping the countryside tp rest in a piney ridge nearby.

Bataille groans, pacing with deadline stress as their de-ffeminate overseer stomps along her route delivering baskets full of varied berries, fluffy loaves, and curdy chunks of cheddar-cheese.

The pack scrambles to Gretta’s feet with desperate starving whines. Litleo listlessly paws to the woman’s side, nomming up his bread-and-berry share while sparing less-than-zero cares for Bataille’s offer of a friendly pat between the ears.

Spicy tsk-tsk-tsks season Gretta’s assessment of this hobbled gogoat-rodeo. “A fine frillish kettle yer cook’n there, bottleboy,” she snubbulls with totally undisguised derision. “This rate’ll see ya done by summerfest ‘morn.” She harumphs. “Maybe.”

The wanna-be sage wriggles around his own skin with an unfamiliar sensation that he’s swiftly starting to despise. The feeling of failure.

“W-we’re just warming up, Madame. We’ll have this plot mopped up in no time, I promise.”

“Gob full’o gambles and whack,” she grunts and lumbers off, arms flexed through a-dozen wicker basket handles. “Birds uv’a feather.”

Bataille falls on windless wings and stamps a muddy divot with his ass to sit for a lonely lunch with Emeline, watching Gretta from the ends of his eyeballs as she feeds the neighboring plot being plowed by a double team of human-tauros pairs.

The other group seems to be struggling with the land they’ve been given too, nestled in a u-shaped hill tucked up against a sheer set of cliffs. It clearly isn’t suited to the wooden blades hitched behind the bulls’ mighty weight. The land is dense, dry, riddled with rocky tumors dressed in verdant oxidase. The cliff faces are, without a shadow of a doubt, loaded with bountiful chunks of ore.

How come they get to use plows? What, was he supposed to smith and carpent all of that stuff himself as well?!

The chain-gang grumbles beneath his shadow as their task-master finishes his food to assess his team with eyes that seem, to them at least, full of empty kindness.

“Hey, ah… ‘Leo, I’m going to give a pep talk, translate for me, alright?” he says with a presumptuous tint to his words as a bundle of azurite eyes size him up in a profoundly eerie and uncomfortable way.

Litleo just smiles with a wide roll of the eyes. “Oooh ohhh,” he coos and curls up with his shoulders toward the boy.

Bataille nods, accepting an affirmative response that clearly wasn’t there to begin with, hoping he can manufacture consent with a rousing mid-battle speech. “Alright you all, I know this seems hard but I know you’ve got what it takes to…” he pauses, noticing Litleo has, in fact, not decided to accept his heroic call-to-action.

So much to do, so little time. That is, of course, unless you happen to be armed with a mob of wild monsters.

And that, of course, is unless the mob isn’t directed at you.

Heaving out a long defeated sigh, Bataille watches the last scraps of aron enthusiasm evaporate away and their genial disposition shifts back to the verge of softcore violence.

“Am I meant for this at all?” he asks aloud, backing away so they can return to smacking skulls and tussling around the grass.

It’s a valid question. Master Valko had insisted Bataille not call him that until he said it was so, which slapped Bataille’s mouth jerky-dry for days. The lessons Bataille received from the man, far and few between, were gratefully grasped at with rabid curiosity, geared towards survival rather than the dealings of monsters.

Now, nobody could possibly get him wrong, he found everything about it deeply fascinating (and practical) which made him hunger for even more of Valko’s sagely words of wisdom.

In truth, Bataille was starting to think they were just squeezing a seasons-worth of labor from some gullible kid with a dream that’s destined for distortion.

Emeline sees the light of her precious bright-eyed boy fading away and flutters up to his cheek in an affectionate panic. “Go lo ga ma!” she squeaks, finally realizing that his words from earlier had wider darker implications than she’d initially thought. “Go lo ga ma!”

Bataille leans into the fuzzy hug muffing his ear and swipes a despondent wetness from his eyes. “Sorry sweetie, I’m feeling kind of… worthless right now.”

She tries pulling him out of that funk for the better part of ten minutes before giving in to a growling abject irritation. She bites the floppy cartilage of his ear, smacking his cheeks silly as the boy yelps, scraping his partner-turned-savage from his face. “GO LO GA MA!” she shouts, pointing to the other group still struggling with their assignment as well.

Her intention was to show that he isn’t struggling all alone. The message received, however, is vastly different, and far more effective.

That inventive sparkle she loves to see washes over his face and he dashes over to their neighbors who’ve half-chowed their lunch down already. “Hey, hey there!” he shouts, recognizing that young Weaver man from this morning, which fills him with even more hope for this last ditch plan of his.

“Ah, good to see we’re not the only ones chewing rhydon leather all day,” he jests as the tauros bulls gruff with averted eyes. “Sorry Gretta’s hounding ya, don’t worry ‘bout her. We all do our best, yeah?”

“See, that’s the thing,” Bataille leads with a finger stabbed toward the ground, “I think that both plots just aren’t fit for the teams assigned. Might I propose… a trade?”

The Weaver boy and his recently wedded gal give him curious tilts of the head. “A trade? Not really supposed to do that, y’know.”

Bataille retorts with a flippant shrug. “Yeah, well, rules that don’t work need to be broken. Let’s swap sides, nobody needs to know, and Gretta can’t complain if we end the day with a couple jobs well done, right?”

They purse their lips, looking each other over, and the young husband gives Bataille a hearty fist against the heart. “Verily! A deal it is, then! We’ll finish up and head over there. Have fun, I guess. This patch is all kinds of twisted up.”

Fueled with renewed faith, he runs with a rejuvenated grin carved into his face, back to Litleo. “Hey! Hey, I just swa–”

Litleo hisses with forward whiskers and a mouth full of sharpened teeth at Bataille’s sudden advance, then he slowly returns to his nap once he sees that the boy is good and discouraged.

Bataille’s cheeks turn with the pressure of a difficult acceptance here. He has a few choice words he’d like to say to the cub, but Mère always says to save your vinegar for when you want to make enemies, not keep friends. Instead he wanders over to the aron spread all about in chaotic clumps, cringing at the daftness about to overtake him.

Then he falls down to his hands and knees, giving his level-best imitation of a rolling aron throat. Emeline is left chittering confused noises directly into his ear.

If they couldn’t work with his language, he’d have to handle things in theirs.

Everyone, man and monster alike, stops mid-motion as he scrambles over on his palms and the tips of his toes.

Litleo croons his attention back around, peeking with a hazy half-interest.

Bataille grunts, scraping the grass with his feet, and roars at the top of his lungs, like he’d seen the hatchlings do all throughout the day.

Then he barrels in a full-throttled tilt toward the biggest monster, face-first, lunging into a brazen head-butt leap. Emeline’s beloved human has gone full-ludicolo, and she’s gripped by a fit of horrified hair-clutching screams mid-arc, flapping her little wings to—

CRACK!

It is then that Bataille understands precisely why a group of aron is called a ‘crash’. The crown of his skull collides with the ferrometal mask of the biggest bull romping around the group, and his body unceremoniously flops into a raggedy lifeless heap.

Litleo leaps out of his cold-shouldered act, whipping around with a fully flummoxed whole-interest.

Emeline zips around his body, tugging his arms, ears, and pawsy locs of golden hair in the throes of a screeching sobbing hysteria.

The aron in question, being a mere foot long from tip-to-tail, stands shaken but unfazed by the boy’s sudden monstrous mimicry, but does hover over his inanimate face with concern.

Emeline grabs the collar of Bataille’s cloak, yanking his head back and forth as she begs him to return to her, declaring with streaks of tears dribbling down her cheeks that she’s broken her friend. She presses her face into his chest, bawling out to any legendary beasts that will hear her pleas, saying she’s sorry and that she’ll never do it again… whatever that thing happened to be.

The Weavers sit with shifty anxious eyes, paralyzed by the sheer insanity of the thing they’d just witnessed.

Something lays in patient hiding from the darkened forest’s edge, watching with rapt attention.

“Hnnggg,” Bataille groans with fluttering eyes blinking out of sync as he grips the top of his head. “What aaa thiiing, haaa.”

Emeline very nearly chokes him dead again with a grateful miracle hug.

Before anyone can catch up to what might be going on, Bataille snatches that same aron up, tackling him for a rambunctious rumble and tumble, summoning every ounce of power his childish human body can spare. Emeline stands helpless by the wayside, wondering when this madness will end and her little heart can stop trying to break out of her chest.

After a few minutes, the aron squats atop the boy with an adorably victorious roar, having body-slammed Bataille in the gentlest way he knows how. It’s all for play, of course, and the whole group is delighted to find that the sageling has a bit of fun hiding inside him after all.

“Haaa! Good one,” Bataille gasps with a loopy grin, wobbling back up to his feet to walk a wide swerving circle so he won’t succumb to what he is one-hundred-percent sure is a concussion working its way through his system. “‘Leo, hey ‘Leo!”

Litleo smiles at his friend's behavioral about-face, still harboring a negative thought or two, but willing to give credit where credit is due. “Leeeooo!”

“We’re trading places with them, it’ll be a lot better, trust me!” Bataille says with his lungs working double duty. “Let the aron know!”

Litleo gives him a sharp raise of his brow, and Bataille chuckles with a little bit of egg-whites smeared across his face this time.

“Ahh… please and thank you!”

The cat does exactly that, and they trade neighborly nods with the Weavers as they both cross the line into far more promising lands.

Bataille sees the aron rearing up to dash for the cliffs full of copper geocandy, but both he and Litleo bark for them to stay put, their pseudopsychic friendship bond seemingly restored. If they wanted to gorge themselves into a culinary coma, it would be after they’ve earned the right to roll over and die happy.

He isn’t done though and gets down to their level again, spade in hand, to show them with an agonizingly repetitive pantomime how the mask-shaped dome of their faces make even better shovels than his crappy wooden article.

Gods it hurts his body, they’d traded their mushy sheets of mud for a practical pile of broken glass that leaves him nursing bloody blisters, blackened bruises, and dirty serrations in the skin of his limbs. Despite all of this though, the animated excavating fervor he’s managed to ignite within them fuels his own furnace just as much.

Standing with his hands at his hips again, a victorious thumb stuck in his belt this time, he smiles as seventeen colors of upturned stone chisel themselves across the quad in record-setting time. “Amazing,” he says with a demolished sway in his stance, discovering that all this time the aron have been crunching any tiny snack of stone they can find, leaving spotless trails of softer soil in their wake.

They, as it turns out, were the perfect remedy for the tragedies befalling this previously worthless scrap of land.

Well, worthless for growing food, anyway. He really wanted to talk to somebody about the literal copper mines they’re just sitting on, but he’d have to put a pin in that for later.

And those things are all well and good, but there’s still one big, fat, tantruming mamoswine left to put to rest, and Litleo isn’t about to allow his friend to end a day like this in disgrace.

No matter how many different ways the boy zooms to his side or strikes a happy tune, the stubborn tom keeps their friendship locked behind a glacial apathetic stare. He digs his furrows fast and well, but he’ll scream his silence clear as crystal glass until the boy takes that long hard look in the mirror.

That impenetrable icy disposition burns through Bataille’s skin with a heat so fierce he nearly explodes in Litleo’s face. For what he doesn’t immediately know. Would he never be forgiven for his leadership fumbles? Was he still a tad too demanding? What has he done that wasn’t already fixed? Is this just petty revenge? Why won’t he stop staring at this twisted shov—

Bataille’s missing sense of self-awareness hits him like a catapult stone to the stomach…

His shameful human hands have yet to scrape a single solitary row.

He squats to take a clump of soil up, rolling it around the tips of his fingers with a humiliated shake of the head. All those months spent scrubbing the privilege from his soul with snow and his chest still harbors an indignancy of station that simply cannot reside within the aspiring heart of a sage.

There’s a fire building in Bataille’s face and he very nearly explodes his friendship for Litleo ruining the moment he’d finally managed to fix… but then scoffs at himself, passing stones of self-awareness dislodged with post-concussion clarity.

He hated that he hated this and that it hated him right back.

It’s such a humorous thing how he’d deluded himself into believing that study was hard work. After all, as long as he chose to push himself to the edge of his memory and focus, able to read and scribe as he burned waxy blobs of candlelight well into the lunar hours. But in reality, that was absolutely nothing when set-beside the monumental list of shit needing smeared through miles and miles of dirt before the ruthless timer in the sky judged his pathetic display at the end of the day.

It had been this way since his family packed their things and sled away. For the vast majority of his stay, Valko left him marooned in the winter gloom, trapped mastering skills suited for lesser crafting guilds. That, or he’d find himself fiddling his fingers with the peasant women, weaving on a looms or fussing with woolen spools. Every bit of clothing on this body was made by him, from shear to sew.

Each day brought another tedious test of patience or some prattling stack of this-and-that needing finished before Moltres roosted at the edge of the sky.

These were the sorts of body-busting toils that his years spent trivializing the academy’s gauntlet of academic traps were meant to spare him from. To let him serve the earth in the way all of mankind is truly meant to work. It left him wanting for any kind of cerebral stimulation.

It would have been so easy to simply scream himself numb every night or sneak drinks from the cellar, hanging from his hammock in an unconscious catharsis that mutes these elitist illusions. But Bataille has the wisdom to recognize such foolishness. For he knows, from the words of a-hundred men more genius than he could ever hope to be, that it is the gibbering mathematical noise jittering around his skull that makes him human.

And the message from that very-human mind is heard loud and clear; ‘Quit your twisting, hoist thy britches tight, and set thine tender hands to digging.’

“Sorry buddy, I haven’t been a very good friend today, have I?” he relents with humility on his face and in his soul, stabs the shovel down with a stomp of his foot, and strikes the earth for the first of a million times. "Let's fix that.”

He moves to the front of the line, any line would do really. Pépé always says that the truest of men lead by example and from the front, hoofing it with the lowest among anyone in his care. That he’d allowed such a vital piece of wisdom to waste away while its purpose stood staring him dead in the eyes is a lesson he’ll not soon forget.

If Bataille had thought his body hurt before, he now knows just how tired a kid can truly be. Mind-numbing hours upon hours spent shucking jagged chunks of rubble into semi-arable tracks of land. It breaks his muscles down to jiggling lumps of mush, wrapped around his bones in a savaged sweaty sack of skin. His empty canteen cries for mercy as his throat rattles silent ascetic songs, glad to have finally found his proper place again.

That well-to-do merchant’s son suddenly sees past the grit and grime as his garments fray and tear. Toiling beside his fellow living souls, his heart finally sheds that last blackened wart of pride.

When the final strip is ripped up with Litleo’s stone-blunted claws, Bataille Merchand stakes the shovel down at the opposite corner of where they’d started, claiming victory in the name of fairness, teamwork, and friendship. The aron kits, finally relieved of their duty, stampede right past him and crash into the cliffside to binge themselves on an endless mound of metallurgical treats.

Then, and only then, does he allow his battered excuse of a body to fall backwards into a fluffy grave of turned and softened earth, made ready to sprout the veritable bounties that nourish all of Shaymin’s Pass each and every year.

‘Every hand shall turn the soil, for a year of feasts and song.’


“That will do, little bird.”


Bataille’s face scrunches up into a startled spud, rolling his head around the dirt to gaze upon a blurry haze of yellows, reds, and grays. He stares up into that colorful soup of shapes shifting through the afternoon sun, hoping to divine the source of that oh-so-familiar voice.

“I’m no monster, I’m a boy,” he utters, struggling to form even that incoherent slab of speech as Emeline scurries up to Valko’s feet for a tiny, respectful bow.

Valko Woolooman, Sage of the Southern Peaks, towers over Bataille to inspect the fruits of their labor.  The ever-lovely Lailla, Queen of Shaymin’s Skies, swoops down onto his shoulders with a blustery thud. “Not yet.”

The old woolherd stamps a weathered wooden crook down, and an ivory flood of wooloo fluff spills out from the forest line, stopping at the acres’ edge with bewildered bleating faces.

The sunny circles set in Valko’s eyes shine on the boy’s prodigal field of possibilities. “You know you weren’t supposed to succeed.”

Bataille stirs to his arse with a zombified lurch and breaks his befuddled palsy with a bashful smirk. “I always do my best, Monsieur.”

Valko hoists the boy back up to his feet with a fatherly clap of the hand. “That will be ‘Master’, if you still wish.”

Emeline’s eyes glow with the warmth of the setting sun, spellbound with anticipation for her partner’s reply.

“Yes, Master, I would like that.” He giggles at the insane situation with an anxious fit. “Very very much.”

The Teacher looks upon his Student with pride and then turns toward the wilds. “Come with me.”

“Where are we going?” Bataille asks, revived by a supernatural second-wind as Valko scans the mountainside.

“Home.”
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