The Friendly Necromancer

Interlude: Old Growth Forest

Venusaur is a squat, quadrupedal amphibian Pokémon with bumpy, blue-green skin. It has small, circular red eyes and a short, blunt snout. Its mouth is wide with sharp flat cutting teeth in the front and heavy molars in the back for grinding plant matter. On top of its head are small, pointed ears with reddish pink insides. It has three clawed toes on each foot. The bud on its back has bloomed into a large pink, white-spotted flower which is supported by a thick, brown trunk surrounded by green fronds. A female Venusaur will sometimes have a seed in the center of her flower.

Venusaurs bask for one to two hours after dawn, using the sun's light to catalyze Grass energy, before actively foraging for eight to nine hours a day. They travel mostly in the early morning or late afternoon between resting and grazing areas. They have been observed to walk at a speed of 0.5 km/h. Upon evolving, Venusaurs depart the lowlands and seasonally migrate between low elevations, which become grassy plains in the wet season, and forested areas of higher elevation in the dry season. The same migratory routes have been used for many generations, creating well-defined paths through the undergrowth known as "sauran highways".

As a female Venusaur travels, she will grow Bulbasaur seeds within her flower and plant them along her migratory route once every five days until winter. These seeds take roughly a year to grow into an infant Bulbasaur. The timing of their maturation often coincides with their mother's migratory patterns, but any adult Venusaur with an overlapping migratory pattern which encounters a young Bulbasaur will treat them as their own young.

-----

A deep thud shuddered through the forest floor. Thud. Another. Thud. Another. Then … nothing. The silence stretched on uncomfortably. Birdsong chirped only quietly among the trees, as if the forest was holding its breath. Slowly, painfully, the silence was broken by the creak of wood under strain. And then a sudden and vicious snap, followed by a long aching low of pain.

In the forest of her mother, and her mother's mother, the great Venusaur Urskog took her last step.

-----

Urskog's first memory was of squirming through warm damp earth. Up and up and up she squirmed, pushing through the soil with her wide shovel-like claws. The green leaves of her bulb were free, somewhere up unfathomable centimeters away, basking in the light of a sun she had never seen. And she wanted that. She needed that. There was something up above that called to her, that drove her to exhaust herself shoveling aside tiny thimblefuls of earth.

The baby Bulbasaur's snout broke through to the surface, and with a gasp Urskog took her first breath. Oxygen flooded her newborn lungs and a cascade of irreversible biological processes washed through her, transforming what had been something like a tuber into a living animal. Her heart beat for the first time, the shocking sensation driving fluids through her by vascular action rather than capillary action. Inefficient anaerobic processes switched over to oxygen-fueled aerobic respiration, sending a jolt of energy through her like lightning. And deep inside her, the Grass energy that connected her to her surroundings flipped, shifting from a static and stable pool which stored energy into a dynamic flow which pulled in life from her surroundings.

Fueled by the burst of life and energy, Urskog mustered the energy to push her whole face out of the ground, blinking in the sunlight. It seared her eyes but she couldn't help but stare up at it, shocked by how it stirred the Grass energy inside of her to life. She took deep breaths, one after the other, driving away the fatigue of her desperate dig to the surface. This young, she was still the size of a small pebble, and moving that much earth had been exhausting.

A minute later, the baby Bulbasaur squirmed the rest of the way out of the ground, pushing aside green topsoil grasses whose roots had fought her climb to the surface, never once looking away from the sun. Acting on instinct she planted her four feet on the wet soil, each solidly in contact with the earth, and flexed her will. She called on the singing thrum of riotous Grass, drawing in the excess life cast off by every living thing and catalyzing it into something more with the sun above. For an hour she charged herself with light and life, banishing any hint of fatigue from herself, reveling in the heady feeling of her newly beating heart, and the rush of air through her lungs.

Fully charged, little Urskog found herself driven to fill some other need she could hardly understand. Compulsion drove her to press her face up against a blade of grass, opening her toothless maw as wide as she could. She fixed her mouth around the blade of grass, ripping and tearing until a semicircle of grass blade was in her mouth. She swallowed, shaking her head queasily as digestive juices squirted into existence for the first time, searing the previously unused linings of her intestines.

She ate voraciously, eating three whole blades of grass in her first sitting. Exhausted again by the frenzy of consumption, she turned her head back to the sun above, catalyzing Grass energy in its light, this time fueled also by the grass she had eaten. An hour later, hunger drove her back to the grass again, pushing her to eat. And eat. And eat. Twice more, the baby Bulbasaur devoured the grass in a circle around her, working all the way up to four blades of grass by the third time. She couldn't yet stand, but when she ran out of grass within reach she pushed herself painstakingly across the earth until there was more she could eat.

When the sun finally fell below the horizon and shadows lengthened into night, Urskog was filled with contented gluttony.

When she woke up the next morning, Urskog was half again as large and her jaw ached with the growth of new teeth. Tiny eyeteeth for perforating leaves, thick bladed front teeth which would eventually be used to cut wood, and heavy molars for grinding her food. The moment she woke up, Urskog put them to use. Blood stained her mouth as sore gums gave way to teeth and food, but she pressed on. She needed to grow more, grow faster, and a little pain was nothing compared to the exhaustion she'd pushed through to reach the surface.

Besides, when she drew in Grass energy between feeding frenzies, the bleeding edges of the gums healed. A little further back from her teeth each time, a little less likely to be cut up as she ate.

Three days later, Urskog towered over the grass. She crawled over to low-hanging bushes and plucked leaves from between their sharp thorns, relying on her thick skin and regeneration to push through. She moved onto berries only a day later, thrumming with excitement as their sour sugars exploded over her tongue.

Within a week the small Bulbasaur was large enough to dig her first burrow. Instinct compelled her to squirm over to an old tree filled with the slow and steady thrum of Grass energy, and once again she made use of her shovel-like feet to dig. She scooped out dirt from between the thickest roots of the tree, throwing it behind her in wide sprays with squeaking 'beh!'s of effort. When she was interrupted by a smaller root she snapped through it with her thick bladed front teeth, crushing it between her back teeth as she dug.

It took a full day for Urskog to dig the burrow. She had to pause frequently to eat, her forelegs grew sore, and as she dug herself under the tree she found herself growing sluggish. She needed frequent recharges under the sun. But as the sun was setting, she finished. It wasn't a big hole, or a tidy hole. But it would fit her five times over, a size which something inside her said was just right. There was just one last thing to do.

Carefully, Urskog leaned in to examine the roots she had snipped. Any which had scabbed over, she nipped, cutting just enough to leave them wet and sticky. She didn't understand why, but she knew it was important. Just like she didn't understand why she crawled next to one of the tree's big roots, placing two legs on the root and two on the ground. All she knew was that it would keep her safe.

Up until now, the young Bulbusaur had only called on the Grass energy inside herself to grow and to heal. But now she reached out, to do something bigger than she ever had before. She spread herself out to catch every ray of fading sunlight that she could. She drew Grass energy in with her will reflexively, just as how she drove herself to grow and heal, before catching herself. That was … wrong, somehow. She needed to reach out. So instead of drawing Grass in, she pushed.

After three tries, she figured out how to do it. She sent tendrils of Grass into the root, narrow and dense at the bark to punch into the plant and diffuse at the tip so her lifeforce blended with the tree's. Then, with her will guiding the tree, she commanded it to grow. New growth sprouted from the raw ends of the roots she had cut, green and flexible. New roots curved around the surface and entrance of her burrow, forming a mesh that would keep other burrowers out. When she was done, the burrow under the tree was enclosed in a bubble of fresh green roots.

Urskog gasped for breath, weary to the bone. Pained with exertion, she commanded the roots across the entrance to relax and become pliable. She scooted her way through the root mesh before collapsing within, using the last of her energy to command the roots back into a tight stiffened mesh. Tomorrow she would thicken the roots, make them tough and brown, harder for predators to break through and unappetizing to anything which might like the taste of new growth. Tomorrow.

For the first time, Urskog fell asleep before the sun finished dipping below the horizon.

-----

Four days later, Urskog stood all the way up and took her first tottering step.

-----

At a month old and the size of two large potatoes, Urskog was large enough that it was difficult to turn around inside her burrow. In the mornings she would call on the roots crisscrossing the entrance to soften so she could squirm through them, and in the evenings she would squirm her way back inside and call on them to harden back into a protective barrier. But squirming in and out was becoming harder day by day, and the thought that soon she might not fit at all was terrifying. Her burrow was all the home she'd ever known. But instinct warned her against making the burrow larger. When she looked at her small, cramped little burrow, her stubby legs itched. Move on, her instincts urged. Leave and find…

She didn't know what she needed to find. Only that there was something out there, and she'd know it when she saw it.

The last night Urskog spent in her burrow, she made sure she was full to bursting. There was a berry bush nearby she'd been nibbling on for weeks, drawing out how long the delicious sugary-sour lumps would last, and she gorged herself on it. She found a sunbeam piercing through the canopy and sat in it for hours, slowly following its path as the sun moved and pulling in every drop of energy she could. She tested the two thin vines she'd recently grown beside the bud on her back, stretching them out and snapping them at leaves, huffing with satisfaction when the leaves were torn from their twigs with a whap! of impact. She'd never traveled more than half an hour's walk beyond her burrow, but whatever was out there, she was determined to meet it with all her might.

The next morning, Urskog soaked up the morning sun outside her burrow for the last time. Then she breathed in deep, feeling something, a … weight in the Grass that called to her. She set off to find it.

It was time to go.

-----

Urskog shrieked as the monster lashed out at her with its two awful bone-yellow tail spikes. The monster, a horrifying worm of unnatural red on top and pallid off-white on its belly, hissed at her. "Wurrrrrrr!"

It was faster than her. For every plodding step she took, it wriggled forward twice as far on undulating feet. And when she hesitated it would lunge, squishing itself down and then launching itself forward, trying to impale her on its stubbier forehead spike.

Terror pumping through her veins, Urskog desperately snapped a vine out at the Wurmple. The whap! she'd been so proud of did nothing but jiggle its flesh. Then, terribly, it lunged again. And this time it bit down.

Uskog screamed as the other pokemon's mandibles chewed through her vine whip. Pain! Pain, pain, PAIN! It was like nothing she'd ever experienced. But she stayed on her feet. She didn't collapse. She took one step away from the monster, and then another, and then another. When it looked like it intended to follow her, she screamed again, this time with rage. She packed all the power her tiny form could muster into it, until it tore its way out of her throat as a guttural howl.

The Wurmple hesitated. Urskog continued backing up, never taking her eyes off of it. The Wurmple never took its shiny black eyes off her either. But as it chewed on her vine, devouring the part of her it had taken, it must have decided that was enough. More might not be worth the risk.

It let her leave.

-----

Urskog was exhausted. After three days, her vine had only partially regrown. She'd spent yesterday desperately trying to fend off a Starly with only one whip as the awful bird stalked her through the forest.

But the Grass weight which had called her was getting closer. It was just a little bit further. If she strained herself, she could even hear its source. A deep thud shuddered through the forest floor. Thud. Thud. Thud. Until finally she saw it. It was like her, but enormous beyond belief. A single toe was almost the size of Urskog's entire body. Its skin was thick and leathery, surely as tough as any bark Usrkog had ever seen. Its mouth was enormous, and as she watched it snapped down around a branch in its path, shearing it from its tree effortlessly and grinding the green wood into pulp between its teeth. But the biggest difference between Urskog and this creature was that atop its back was not an immature bulb, but an entire tree, short and squat and topped with broad pink petals supported by leafy green ferns. This creature was a tree that walked.

It was a Venusaur.

It was her mother.

Urskog knew as soon as she laid eyes on the Venusaur that this was her mother. It was her seed that had set root in the soil and become Urskog and now that she was here, Urskog was safe.

The baby Bulbasaur wailed plaintively, squeaking at the top of her lungs as she limped towards her mother at top speed. Her mother lowered her head and greeted Urskog with a head bump that almost knocked her over. The great Venusaur nosed Urskog back and forth, checking her baby over and licking her with the tip of a massive tongue. She snorted when she saw Urskog's partly regrown vine, careful not to scrape its sensitive end with her tongue.

Part of Urskog wanted to leap all over her mother, to lick her and prod her as well, but the greater part of her was bone tired. All the energy she'd spent surviving up to this point caught up to her, and she flopped onto her belly with a weary "buh!".

The Venusaur huffed fondly and gently wrapped a vine around Urskog that was almost as wide as she was. She lifted her baby slowly and deposited Urskog on her back, sheltered beneath the wide leaves of her tree. Urskog accepted the lift tiredly, letting her whole body go limp in her mother's grasp. It had been a long few days and she relished the opportunity to close her eyes.

But then … "Bee?" A voice chirped from Urskog's new resting place. The tiny Bulbasaur twitched, trying to draw up the energy to fight if she had to, throwing her eyes open-

And was greeted by two matching pairs of eyes, wide and curious, from two other baby Bulbasaurs.

-----

In her mother's shadow, Urskog played with her siblings. They gamboled and frolicked and played tug of war with their vines. They ate the grass as they traveled, nibbled the young bark off of branches their mother snapped with her passing, and gobbled up fruits she plucked from the higher trees with her vines. And never, not ever, did they stray beyond the reach of her vines.

Urskog mewled angrily whenever she saw a Wurmple. Her brother flinched whenever a shadow passed overhead. And their sister was quiet as a grave, unwilling to make even a single sound. As they traveled, Urskog watched her mother plant seed after seed after seed. And yet they were never joined by another sibling. It was only the three of them.

As much as they loved to play, they knew better than to do it beyond their mother's protection.

-----

When winter came, Urskog was as fat as any little Bulbasaur could hope to be. She had grown many times taller, to the point where she towered above the flowers which had once loomed overhead. And yet she had not just grown tall, she had grown wide as well. She did not walk, she waddled. It was glorious.

Winter tested those reserves though. She and her siblings huddled for desperate warmth beneath their mother's boughs. Her mother sang through the Grass to coax unripe fruit and berries from hibernating plants, but in the depths of winter even her mother's power had limits. Urskog's chubby cheeks grew lean before the end, and it was only her mother's steadfast surety in the coming of spring that kept Urskog's hope alight through the worst of the blizzards.

Even her mother trembled during one blizzard though. When the snow was shrieking sideways in the storm, and it had been so dark for so long that Urskog didn't know if it was night or day, something roared in the distance. The guttural sound paralyzed the Bulbasaurs and made their mother quake. But she didn't back down. Instead their mother pulled up all her courage and raised herself off the ground and lowed back, letting loose a deep and resonant sound that proclaimed, "I am not afraid."

The thing in the snow answered with another roar. And then… there! Only five lengths of the Venusaur's tentacles away, Urskog could see the shape of their predator. Its fur was an almost invisible white against the backdrop of the blizzard, and it looked like nothing she had ever seen before. It towered on two long legs, with two long arms dangling by its sides. And at its core was Ice. The tiny Bulbasaur could feel the hated bite of the cold inside that predator, a terrible void that would steal her heartbeat if she let it have even the slightest foothold inside of her.

But her mother lowed again. She snapped her whips against the ground, unleashing a vicious crack that even the blizzard couldn't swallow entirely. The old Venusaur looked death in the eyes and told it that if it ate her children, she would go to the grave making it pay.

As predator and prey stared each other down, the wind howled. An unearthly sound that rose in pitch and fury until it felt like the air itself would tear apart.

Death decided it had better things to do. It turned away and vanished back into the snow, seeking easier prey.

-----

By the end of the spring trek down to the lowlands, Urskog had put back on all the weight she'd lost in the winter and then some. She grew up and up, until she was taller than any Wurmple. She grew in other ways too, blossoming as she feasted on the lush grasses and delicate flowers of spring. The closed green bud on her back unfurled week by week, revealing the curled pink petals of a flower. She had begun the process of evolving into an Ivysaur.

In particular, she felt her connection with Grass blossom. She put down deeper roots than ever before into the riotous surging energy of excess life, learning first how to amplify her natural regeneration and then to change what she grew back. With effort she could change the pollen forming inside her bud into that of a flower which had once made her drowsy or even the dust Spinaraks shed on their poison webs. She learned to over-regenerate as well, filling her bud to bursting with soporific or lethally paralytic pollen and then releasing it in a defensive wave.

She also learned the hard way that she needed to slowly build up her immunity to such poisons before using them like that, after a disastrous experiment which laid her out for days while her mother and siblings nervously watched over her. An overdose of the sleeping pollen had left her too weak to even stand, and her heart beating with such weakness she'd thought it might stop. But by the end of spring she could unleash waves of pollen when threatened and her siblings could not, so she thought of her trials with the dangerous substances as a victory.

But all of her growth and accomplishments left her feeling small when she emerged from the forest onto the grassy plains for the first time. The trees fell away one by one, leaving a world so wide and open that she flinched back to her mother's shade. She wanted to stop and root herself with tendrils of grass twined around her legs so she wouldn't fall up into the great open sky. But her mother didn't stop and so Urskog didn't stop. She scrambled after her mother, into the unknown.

-----

Urskog met other Ivysaur and Venusaur for the first time on the lowland meadows. Venusaur lumbered across the landscape, followed by smaller Ivysaurs just like her. When they met, her mother would snuffle the other Venusaur and exchange greetings while she and her siblings hesitantly warmed up to the new faces. Each time they ended up frolicking with the other Ivysaurs in the end though, playing with each other without a care in the world as their parents watched over them. With each new meeting there was less hesitance too, and Urskog became quicker to leave her mother's side.

Until one day, as her family walked along the coast, Urskog spotted a group of Ivysaurs approaching them, with no Venusaur to guide them. They were larger than any Ivysaurs she'd seen before, every one of them taller than Urskog. Some of them were half the height of a Venusaur! They were raucous too, jostling one another and lowing loudly and cracking their vine whips overhead. They flooded the Grass with their noise as well, spraying JOY! LAUGHTER! LIFE! into the world around them. Flowers bloomed and wilted in their wake, and a flock of Hoppip - small pink pokemon with feathery green leaves growing from their head - floated above soaking it in.

The sight of the older Ivysaurs was intoxicating. They were so … so … so much!

Urskog didn't even realize she was drifting towards them until she felt her mother's vine pushing against her back, encouraging her to go even further. She looked back. Her siblings were nervously sticking to her mother's legs, too overwhelmed to follow. And her mother-

Her mother's expression was complicated. Fond, happy even, yet sad. A feeling struck Urskog in a flash, as sure as her instinct to find her mother had been. If she left to join those Ivysaur, she would never come back. This could be the last time she saw her mother or her siblings.

It didn't feel like a bad thing though. Sad, but … alright. It was the same as how she'd felt when she'd outgrown her burrow.

Urskog backtracked to her mother and nuzzled her as hard as she could. She hugged her brother and sister with her vines, holding them close as hard as she could.

And then she left.

The adolescent Ivysaurs welcomed her into their roaming herd with affectionate headbutts and rough head rubs with their vines. She leaned into it, headbutting them back with as much strength and enthusiasm as she could. Still, she looked back with every step, keeping her mother and siblings in view until the last possible moment. But when the gentle dips and rolls of the lowland meadows finally took her family out of sight, she didn't turn back.

Her heart ached, and it felt like growing pains.

-----

Seasons as an Ivysaur blurred by. The summers were times of play and growth and the exuberant whirlwind of creation and mischief only a herd of unsupervised adolescents could get up to. They grew and wove grass into braided mats, creating tough springy roads across the lowlands which could walk on when the rains turned the ground to mud, and made the braids as complicated as they could for no other reason than to show off. They forced fruiting plants to grow great bounties for them, and learned restraint when those plants were dead the next year. They grew the branches of bushes into traps of tensioned twigs that thwacked birds which landed to pick at their berries. Partly to keep the berries for themselves … and partly just to mess with the birds.

Many of the Ivysaurs had bad memories of Starlys and Staravias from their time as Bulbasaurs. Sometimes the traps were less playful and more vengeful.

The older Ivysaurs had long ago learned to moderate their pranks though, and the younger ones learned the hard way to follow their example. When an over-tensioned branch killed a Starly, the herd found itself stalked by a fully evolved Staraptor for a week. The herd lost three members before the aerial predator decided it had driven the lesson home. Urskog had been close to all of them.

Winters were in some ways harder in the lowlands than in the forest. The grass wilted and the berry bushes became nothing but bare twigs. The only food to be found was tubers hidden in the hard earth. But even so, the Ivysaurs knew better than to brave the forest as the Venusaurs did. The Spinaraks and Ariadoses came out in force in the winter. And even if the spider pokemon weren't brave enough to attack a full herd of Ivysaurs head on, a careful Ariados could pick off individual Ivysaurs in the night as they slept. One of the older Ivysaurs had a horrible scar on her chest and a bad lung from just such an attack which she'd barely survived, when one particularly bad winter had driven the herd into the forest to chew on its branches.

But the good times in the summers made the hard winters worth it. Even when Staraptors rose on the thermals or dark shapes lurked on the coasts, it was worth it. Urskog's new family grew by leaps and bounds in size, in strength, and in love.

-----

One day, Urskog was the biggest Ivysaur in the pack. She couldn't call to mind exactly when it had happened. But one spring morning as she woke up and drank in the sun, she realized she had been leading the pack for years. Most Ivysaurs didn't get as large as she did. Some died young. Some stagnated in size, failing to meet some critical threshold of nutrition or Grass absorption.

She hadn't. She grew taller. She grew wider. Her skin became bumpy and thick enough to serve as armor. Compared to some of the others she was a giant; the last time a freshly evolved Ivysaur had joined her pack they'd barely come up to her knees. She was the one the others looked to during the winters, to make the decision if food was so desperate they needed to brave the forest or not. She was the one who sheltered the others beneath her leaves when a Staraptor circled overhead. It was just the way things were.

But by the time Urskog finally realized it, it was already time for her to leave. Her bud blossomed that spring, opening up into a wide pink flower sitting atop a stubby tree on her back. And inside that flower rested a seed. It was time for Urskog to plant children of her own.

Following instincts shaped by her evolution, Urskog brought her pack up to a specific spot on the boundary of the forest. They paced the border of the lowlands and the forest's dangers - dangers which Urskog would soon be facing - and waited.

Whenever another Venusaur came out of the trees, Urskog led her pack to them and nuzzled snouts with them, introducing herself to them. Some of them nudged baby Ivysaurs towards her pack and it broke Urskog's heart to take them in. They were so small and she was going to have to leave them, hoping against hope that the rowdy young Ivysaurs she led would be enough to take care of them.

Was this what her own mother had felt, sending Urskog off to make her way?

Worries and heartache dogged the new Venusaur's days as she waited by the forest's edge. Until one day, Urskog heard a familiar low in the distance. Underlying the sound, a resonant thrum carried waves of power through the earth and Urskog knew them.

With a pulse of her own power, Urskog raised a border of thickened grass around her pack. She waved with her vines for her pack to stay there and then, only pausing a moment to make sure they listened, raced off into the forest. But Urskog had lost speed growing up and even more evolving into a Venusaur, so it was slow going for her. She lowed back, eager and nervous and crying out at the top of her lungs that she was coming home.

There was a long pause before she heard an answering call, as if disbelief had stolen the other voice. But then Urskog's mother answered, and her cry was filled with the same eagerness and nervousness Urskog's had been. Urskog answered again, and heard another answer in turn, and the two of them called to one another and kept calling, each call closer and closer, as Urskog made her way through the forest on the same path she'd once come out of it on.

Even rushing as fast as they could, the sun had moved noticeably in the sky before Urskog caught sight of her mother. Strong and durable Venusaurs might be, but quick they were not.

Urskog saw her siblings first. Two little babies straddling the line between Bulbasaur and Ivysaur gamboled out of the bush, running ahead of their mother. They hesitated when they burst into view, staring at the massive Venusaur in front of them, the second they'd ever seen. But even as they shied back from Urskog's bulk their vines stretched out in front of them curiously.

Something in Urskog's chest clenched. She hadn't considered that she'd have siblings other than the ones she grew up with. Who knew how many walked around, how many still lived, how many had made it to become Venusaurs. Maybe none. Maybe it was just her. Life could be harsh for pokemon like them and even thinking about whether these tiny siblings would grow up to be as big as her made Urskog flinch.

That didn't stop her from reaching out to them. Each of her vines stretched out, holding just beyond the reach of her siblings until they relaxed and came closer. She pet her nervous siblings, stroking a vine over each of their heads, over their immature grass buds, and gently over their own vines. Had her vines ever been that fragile and thin?

That was when Urskog's mother pushed her way through the bush. And now it was her turn to feel small.

When Urskog was small her mother had been a giant. Now a Venusaur herself, her mother was still a giant. Twice as long from nose to rump as Urskog was, her mother was as large as any Venusaur Urskog had ever seen. And every gram of that mass was barreling down on her with no intent to stop. Urskog's mother crashed into her as fast as a Venusaur could, crying out with love and joy.

Urskog, at long last, had made it home.

-----

It felt strange to be following her mother into the unknown again, because of how familiar it was. Urskog had spent two and a half seasons with her mother and more years than she could count living with other Ivysaurs. Yet she fell back into it like she'd never left.

Urskog followed her mother all the way to the shore, where hundreds of Venusaurs gathered in a massive herds. Males trumpeted up and down the beach, filling the air with colorful clouds of pollen as they showed off. Each of them had dragged a plant from forest to the shore, some mere bushes, some saplings, and a scattering of elders had even dragged full trees with them. Each of them rooted their plant in the earth and sang to it through the Grass, willing it to grow and blossom in wondrous patterns. Urskog gaped in wonder at an elder, as large as her mother, who rooted his tree in the lowland soil and made it rain sweet fruits and beautiful petals.

But size and raw power weren't the only things the males were showing off. The more confident a Venusaur was in his skills, the closer to the ocean he rooted his plant. As soil gave way to salty sand, it became more difficult to create lush and verdant creations. The slightest lapse in focus could lead to a stunted plant, too weak to sprout even a single petal. Indeed Urskog passed more than a few failed attempts as her mother led her across the beach, the products of young males close to her size who gambled on risky moves and failed. Those Urskog's mother walked past quickly, curling up her fronds to keep their pollen out of her flower, and Urskog followed her mother's example.

Not all gambles were failures though. One male near her size had woven a lengthy vine into a patterned mat covered in delicate white petals, so close to the ocean that the tide lapped against its edge. It was a small thing and without fruits. Urskog's mother walked past it without a second glance. Urskog paused. She walked up to the male and nuzzled him, passing him her encouragement, and lent his demonstration some of her own power. Carefully, so as not to disrupt his masterpiece. Just enough to lend it some longevity. She let her fronds open too, instinctively rippling them in a way that brought turbulent swirls of his pollen over her flower.

Ultimately, following her mother, Urskog spent most of the breeding season on the shore soaking in the pollen clouds of Venusaurs who had managed to build large and impressive monuments at the point where soil and sand became a muddied definition. But for at least a little time each day, she stole away to the younger Venusaur and his flowering mat of vines. If she was lucky, she thought, at least one of her seeds would be pollinated by him.

-----

It was the trailing end of summer when her mother returned to the forest. Urskog followed. The familiarity of walking in her mother's footsteps had lost some of its strangeness over the summer season but even so, taking those first steps back into the forest was profoundly disorienting for her. Watching her mother step over a large upturned root, Urskog was struck by the ridiculous urge to scramble under it. Her snout wouldn't even fit under that root!

And yet.

Birdsong which she'd been long used to on the plains made her want to scamper beneath her mother's fronds. Tiny baby blades of grass made her want to whine at her mother, so she would stop and Urskog could nibble. The shifting shadows beneath her mother's bulk made her heart ache for the chirping of tiny Bulbasaurs, for her siblings who were not there.

Then, on their third day in the forest, they came upon a Wurmple.

Fear boiled in her blood. The sight of the monster which had once almost eaten her, that horrifying worm of unnatural red on top, pallid off-white on its belly, with its two awful bone-yellow tail spikes raised, sent panic racing through Urskog's every nerve. Her vines stretched out in a defensive posture, her flower brimmed with toxins, and she pulled Grass into her bones to kickstart the regeneration she would need for the fight. She rumbled a threat deep in her chest. If the monster approached her or her mother, she would fight.

Her mother turned ponderously to give Urskog a concerned look. The Wurmple in front of her hissed and raised its tail spikes. Urskog's mother looked at the Wurmple, then back at Urskog. Urskog's mother snorted and then, without any hesitation at all, stepped over the venomous caterpillar.

The tiny pokemon hissed aggressively- no, defensively. But it did not dare to lash out at the behemoth above it.

Urskog's mother lumbered on, leaving the younger Venusaur staring down the nightmare of her childhood. It was smaller than her leg.

Slowly, exercising caution, Urskog reached out with a vine and then - as quickly as she could - brushed the Wurmple off the trail her mother had made through the forest underbrush. It hissed again and kept its tail spikes raised, but made no attempt to fight back or retake its position.

Urskog and her mother passed the Wurmple by.

-----

From her mother, Urskog learned how to find sheltered spots to plant seeds. There were more factors to consider than Urskog could have imagined. A seed spot had to be both exposed to the sun and yet not obvious to hungry eyes. It had to have good drainage and soil composition. There needed to be a nearby nook a baby Bulbasaur could shelter in, and yet also no shelters which an opportunistic predator might make a home in. It was bewildering trying to learn it all from her mother, when all she had to go on was her mother pointing out good locations and holding Urskog back from ones which didn't meet her standards.

It was a struggle for Urskog. Even after months, well into fall, she didn't have her mother's careful eye for planting seeds. What if this spot's drainage was too poor and her seed started to grow but then drowned in a spring rain? What if a Starly spotted her seedling digging up from the earth through a gap in the trees and ate it? What if the spot she picked was too shaded and it never lived at all?

Worries about her own seeds plagued Urskog so much that she didn't even notice the tension that had been winding its way into her mother's frame, until it rushed out of her mother with the sound of a tiny "Bee".

"Bee!" The underbrush peeped again. Then insistently and with a note of frustration. "Bee! Bee!"

A little Bulbasaur, no bigger than a potato, triumphantly pushed its way past the offending branches of the berry bush it had been caught in. It overbalanced in the process though and rolled tail over bulb to crash at the feet of Urskog's mother. "Beeeeee", it whined.

Urskog watched as her mother, the bulwark of her childhood, melted in relief at the sight of one of her children. She watched as her mother knelt down to gently butt the baby Bulbasaur with her snout and then nuzzle it until it protested giddily. That was when it sunk in for her. She'd been worried that her seeds wouldn't be planted well enough because she was a novice at this. But her mother had been doing this for more years than Urskog could count, planting seeds every five days like clockwork. And yet they hadn't seen a single one of her children until well into fall.

A Wurmple had almost killed Urskog as a baby. Spinaraks and Ariadoses made the forest a dangerous place even for Ivysaurs. How many more hazards had silently passed Urskog by as a baby? The thought struck Urskog like a blow. There was a reason she had been one of only three siblings, the year she sprouted.

There was a reason only Urskog stood by her mother today.

So when the baby Bulbasaur toddled over to Urskog, cheeping a demand to know who this other mother was, her heart welled up with a tender awe of what its life meant. This little Bulbasaur had defied the odds just to get here, peeping happily before them. Urskog knelt as she'd seen her mother do, just as her mother had once done for her, and butted heads with her little sibling.

She would watch everything her mother did to care for this precious child. Because next year, if the forest was willing, if Urskog and her children were lucky, she would have young of her own to care for.

The world was a dangerous place. She couldn't fix that any more than her mother could. But she would fight tooth and vine to protect what family she could.

-----

There would never be words for the first time Urskog saw one of her own babies rush towards her.

-----

There would never be words for the first time Urskog lost a child.

-----

Ten years had passed since Urskog's mother took her back to the forest. There was a normalcy to her new life, a seasonal rhythm which was comfortable in its routine. Urskog watched her and her mother's babies wobble their way through the world on slowly steadying feet. She caught them with her vines when they stumbled and rumbled encouragingly when mustered up the courage to explore out from under her bulk. She and her mother demonstrated how to better harness the Grass energy around them, anchoring and quieting the riotous noise of life flowing around them so their children could hear it better. Then each spring they brought the new Bulbasaurs - on the cusp of their evolutions - down to the lowland plains.

It never felt like enough, as each summer they hardened their hearts and let their children go to join the roving herds of Ivysaurs. Every time, Urskog watched them until they vanished into the lowlands. Her hopes and dreams were carried with them, leaving her to nurse the fear of what their lives might hold. Her mother was better at keeping a brave face, but after sending their last child off, Urskog's mother would always root herself in the ground and spend a day or two staring at the sun. Urskog leaned against her mother during those days, reminding her that in the end, at least one of her daughters had made it home.

After the emotional rollercoaster of parenthood, the yearly pilgrimage to the mating grounds was almost anticlimactic for Urskog. Nevertheless, she looked forward to it. She was a fan of a particular male who liked to root his creations as close to the ocean as he could, working with the edge of what was possible. The years his creations flourished, Urskog would lose herself in them. She would bask in his pollen and trace the subtle biologies of his work in the Grass. She couldn't help but love the way they preserved in spite of harsh conditions. Of course he didn't always succeed. The years he failed, Urskog would give him a nuzzle and spend a short time with him, but eventually move on to other males' displays. Her back itched while spending time around a dead display in mating season and there were other beautiful creations in bloom, if none quite so bold as his.

Each fall Urskog and her mother carried their fertilized seeds back into the forest, planting them and collecting their freshly sprouted babies from the previous year. Where they could be found. Every fall was a mix of wonder and heartbreak, as they learned which seeds had made it and which had not. Some inert seeds Urskog dug back out of the ground, trying not to wonder if it had been a defect in her planting or herself which caused them not to grow. Some had clearly sprouted, but the baby Bulbasaur was nowhere to be found. And of the ones she found, it was a rare child who made it to her intact. Most were missing vines or covered in scratches, and one year the only child she found was even missing a forelimb. Occasionally there were runts, and some of her children seemed to struggle to open their eyes.

She tended to each and every one of them. She healed what she could. She cared for what she couldn't. When a baby couldn't walk, she carried them on her back. Some of them would survive to see summer. Some would not. She buried those and sang a sapling out of their remains. Some of her struggling children, those who lived, would be accepted by Ivysaur packs. Some would not. She grew berry bushes for those, as many as her power could manage, before moving on to the mating grounds.

As the years crept on, Urskog and her mother became something closer to partners. Urskog still followed her mother's long-worn trail through the forest, but at her own pace. Sometimes she trailed behind her mother and sometimes she overtook her. Whoever was in the lead would mark good seed spots for the other. Whoever took up the rear would sometimes find Bulbasaurs who hadn't made it to the other before they moved on. Whose child the Bulbasaur was didn't matter. They raised who they found, and shared the burden when they needed to.

During winter, they needed to.

Winter was when the monsters came down from the mountain.

-----

Urskog shoved her babies beneath her mother with one vine and lashed out with the other as she trumpeted in rage. Her mother rooted herself in the earth behind a large tree and lashed the snow-buried trees around her to her will, commanding them to grow a thicket of thorns around her. Anything which wanted to get to their babies would have to push through a tangle of razors.

The beast at the eye of the storm didn't look like it would care.

It stood on two legs and was covered in frost-coated bristles. The only features Urskog could make out through the blizzard surrounding it were its heavy claws and its mouth full of yellowed teeth. But what she could feel, through the Grass, was a tapestry of horror. Grass shone from the thing's bones, as dense and old and bright as her mother's. But where Grass flowed through the Venusaurs, the life inside the abomination threatening them was frozen. The cold of winter warped and twisted the Grass, turning it from the song of all that was lush and blooming into a relentless howl of hunger and need.

The Abomasnow roared, an earth-shattering sound which weakened Urskog's nerve. Usrkog had slashed its chest with a thorn-studded vine, but already the wound had healed. The terrible frozen tendrils of Grass within it had plunged into the earth and drunk the soil dry to fuel its healing. Now only droplets of frozen ruby blood showed it had ever been injured. The wound had only made it angry.

This wasn't an enemy a Venusaur could beat. If it attacked it would kill her, crack her bones, and eat her marrow. All Urskog could do was try to convince it that she and her mother weren't worth the fight. They wouldn't make the fight easy for it and they could hurt it. If it hunted Venusaurs every winter, eventually one of them would get lucky and land a lethal blow. And - Urskog spared a glance at her children and siblings huddled beneath her mother - they cared far more about the outcome of the fight than it did. They only needed to convince the thing hunting them of that.

But it was a small monster, by Abomasnow standards, and that was a terrible thing. The older monsters knew better than to hunt Venusaurs. They might posture and try to provoke a flinch, probing for weakness, but they'd lived through enough fights to know their luck would run out eventually. This young beast still thought its recent evolution made it invincible. It roared again and bent its legs as if to charge, to Urskog's horror.

The wind howled around them. And something in it made the young monster hesitate. Underneath the wind's howl, something new added itself to the cacophony. An unearthly shriek that made its head swivel and its shoulders hunch. The shriek increased in volume, going from an undercurrent beneath the wind to the only thing which could be heard. The sound rose and rose and rose in pitch as well, far beyond what Urskog should have been able to hear. It rose until the sound felt like it was scraping the air thin to the point of tearing.

Something in reality gave. The air frayed and purple light poured forth to stain the snow, carrying with it a surge of deathly Grass that smelled of rotting mulch. The Abomasnow staggered. But Urskog didn't. She took a deep breath and felt … safe. This wasn't the scent of septic blood or leaking pus. It was mulch. Where the storm was a terrible frozen thing, sinking deep enough to kill even seeds, this was warm. It lay atop Urskog as a protective blanket, blunting the blizzard's bite. This was death not as an inert and frozen thing, but death as new life, composted to renew the soil for the next season's sprouts.

Whatever else was in the storm, it was on her side. Behind her, Urskog's mother rallied, and bellowed a defiant cry. Urskog added her own voice to it, singing in harmony with her mother and the dead thing of rot and rebirth.

With a final roar, the young Abomasnow took a step back, hesitated one last time, and then turned tail and ran. A rush of warm air pushed at Urskog from behind as the smell of warm rotting wood followed their would-be predator, chasing it back up into the mountain.

The blizzard faded slowly. Minute by minute the wind died down, until the small flakes of snow falling from above blanketed the ground rather than lashing it. Urskog caught her breath. Her mother comforted their children. One heartbeat at a time, the family pulled themselves back from the brink of death.

Eventually Urskog's vines stopped shaking and she could shed the thorns coating it without them growing back. She touched her children and her siblings all over with her vines, checking for injuries her mother had already checked for, and reassuring herself that their hearts still beat. That had been too close. Urskog hoped that the young monster learned its lesson, and that next winter it would still have a healthy fear of whatever had driven it off. Whatever that was.

As Urskog was wondering what had driven their predator off, it returned. The smell of warm mulch flowed through the trees. Sourceless purple light limned the white snow, making it glow a soft pink. The tree her mother had hidden herself and her babies behind groaned; its branches flexed, causing its bark to creak and crack. The extra thorny growth which had been forced from the trees sagged, going soft with months of decay and then falling off entirely, revealing shiny new bark beneath. The rotted detritus shifted over the ground like a living thing, coalescing into vines laced with old but still-sharp thorns that extended from the tree's roots.

The children startled and cried out and Urskog swept them underneath her bulk. But when her mother bellowed at the tree-thing, it was a bugle of love. She took three ponderous steps towards it, building momentum, and crashed into it with a joyful THUD of a headbutt.

A red glow burst to light in one of the tree's knots, which swiveled to Urskog's mother as if it were an eye. The entire tree bent, animated by some otherworldly force, and wrapped its branches around Urskog's mother.

Urskog was torn with confusion, caught between staying with the children and stepping forward to protect her mother. As happy as her mother was and as helpful as this thing of warm rot seemed to be, she didn't know what it was. Until it - until she - let out a cry of her own.

The sound the tree made was a Venusaur's low. The same one Urskog's mother used whenever she greeted her daughter. Urskog's mother placed her head beneath a large branch and rubbed up, just as Urskog rubbed the top of her head under her own mother's chin. She waved her vines at her children and grandchildren, beckoning them to meet …

No. It couldn't be. Was that thing her mother's … mother?

Urskog stared up at tree-thing - at her grandmother - as the children, one by one, overcame their fears and darted out from under her leaves to mill about beneath her boughs.

Slowly, old memories stirred to life. Urskog remembered her first terrible winter and the bipedal monster which had threatened her mother. She remembered the wind howling around them and the monster backing off. She couldn't remember much else. She had been young and events as far back as her first evolution were flimsy, hazy things.

But as she cast her mind back and thought hard about what had happened afterward, she thought she might just remember huddling with her mother and her siblings underneath a strangely warm tree.

She looked up at the thing which had taken over a tree. For a moment she was still hesitant to approach it. Whatever it was, it was clearly dead. But Urskog had seen her fair share of dead trees nourishing saplings as rot, worms, and beetles broke down them into food for the forest floor. So maybe it was not such a strange thing after all, that the dead could look after the living.

Urskog stepped forward to meet her grandmother.

-----

There was something new in the forest, which walked on two legs.

The first time Urskog saw one of them she raised her vines and bellowed. She flooded the air around her with toxic spores and menace and it ran. Despite its flight, the encounter left Urskog disturbed. She'd walked the same path for decades and almost never saw something new. The only break in her and her mother's routine was that once every few years they would call upon her grandmother for protection.

Urskog almost considered calling for her grandmother on principle. Nothing good walked on two legs.

But Urskog's life was slow. She had time for measured thought.

The creature had been mostly hairless and colorful, unlike winter's monsters. She could smell no Grass on it, nor feel Ice's cold bite. And it had fled from her spores, so it was unlikely to be a threat to her. Its kind may still be a threat to Bulbasaurs though, so if she saw another she would watch it carefully and keep her children close.

-----

She did see another. Its coloration was starkly different, a mottled camouflage pattern broken up by a rectangle of bright visible orange over its center. There was another pokemon next to it she'd never seen before, a quadruped with four long legs, curling horns, and a ruff of leaves around its neck and along its back. It was strange seeing another new thing so soon, but it didn't worry her. She could feel the Grass in the quadruped, the slow undercurrents and sharply honed attention which told her that this was an herbivore, and not an aggressive one which would contest her territory.

The two legged thing though…

It saw her. It looked down carefully, not meeting her eyes but also not taking its eyes off of her. It reached a hand out to the other Grass pokemon and scratched its ruff. The bipedal thing scratched its companion's neck and murmured softly to it. The Grass pokemon leaned into the touch and bleated, "Gogooaat!" At first it seemed content to be pet. But then it nudged the bipedal thing and bleated again, "Gogoat!!" The Gogoat nudged the bipedal creature once more, growing insistent enough that this nudge was less a prod and more of a ram.

The thing which Urskog had initially been so wary of was almost bowled over by its companion. It protested and its gaze darted between the Gogoat and the giant Venusaur, but when it saw that Urskog wasn't reacting to the bleating it took its eyes off her to focus on the Gogoat. It pawed at the folds of its camouflaged skin and eventually pulled out nuggets of dry food from flaps of skin. The Gogoat ate them with relish and the other creature sighed.

Urskog watched the exchange and became less concerned by the moment. Whatever these creatures were, their personalities didn't read as threatening to her.

The bipedal creature looked back to her, keeping its gaze low. Though when one of Urskog's babies stepped out from under her and into its field of view, it very conspicuously glanced up at Urskog and then looked aside. Whatever it was, it also knew better than to eye a Bulbasaur like a morsel while a Venusaur was around. Good.

With a gratified huff, Urskog continued on her way. The new creatures could stay for now.

-----

The humans built shelters, almost like a baby Bulbasaur. The first one Urskog saw was a tall wooden box on stilts that rose above even the tallest trees. It was like some ridiculous bird had decided no tree was high enough for its nest and grown its own tree.

The human in the box, another example with paradoxical camouflage coloration and a camouflage-defeating orange rectangle over its torso, waved an arm to her as she passed through a clearing from which the top of the shelter could be clearly seen.

The shelter was still there the next year and the human waved to her that year as well. Urskog - having considered the matter over the past seasons - raised a vine and waved back.

She decided that the human's startled yelp and subsequent chirping, something between a low chest-rumbling exhalation and a Rowlet's clicking, were cute.

-----

There were more humans in the years after that. They built more shelters, these ones squat and close to the ground, though still enormous by the standards of any shelter Urskog was familiar with. Some of them were along the shore, where Urskog could see them from afar, but a cluster of them were also built along the fall arm of the migratory path that Urskog and her mother followed. She hesitated before approaching them, the first time she saw them. Even the most placid herbivore could be roused to violence if its den was approached. Especially if its children were with it, and that tall shelter Urskog passed each year in the woods looked awfully nest-like.

But Urskog's mother had been leading for the day and Urskog could smell her mother's fading scent cutting between the shelters. If her mother had passed through safely, Urskog could as well.

Besides, none of the shelters were directly on the path. If anything it looked like they may have been deliberately spaced to ensure they didn't obstruct the Venusaur's route.

Urskog lumbered between the shelters. She made sure to shepherd the one child she'd found this season squarely beneath her bulk, and kept her vines studded with long razor-sharp thorns. Nothing accosted her. A few of the humans watched from a distance, in a dazzling spray of colorations. A few of them waved to her. Urskog also spotted a few other pokemon among the shelters, including a Snom sitting on a human's shoulder. That helped ease her worries. If a prey pokemon could walk unharmed among humans, they probably weren't a threat to her child.

When Urskog had reached the end of the shelters and the stress of walking through another's den had eased off her shoulders, she turned around. There were still a few of the humans watching her, including a pair who waved to her as she left.

Urskog waved back.

-----

The shelters multiplied. The humans adorned them and colored them, and before long there was a stretch of Urskog's yearly migration that was as riotously colorful as the humans themselves. They must be some type of Rock pokemon because they worked stone into their den as well. They covered the earth with it in most places, though not the path Urskog took. They left that considerately clear, which left Urskog feeling vindicated about not poisoning the second one of the bipedal creatures she'd seen. These things clearly understood the first rule of the forest: Don't stand in a Venusaur's way.

Until one year, when Urskog found her path rudely cut by a wide patch of black squishy stone. She placed a leg on the stuff and when she placed her weight on it, the awful stone gave. Not much, but still! Stone wasn't supposed to do that! It was spoiled!

There was also an expansive tunnel beneath the black squishy stone. It was filled with moss and had trailing vines draped across the entrance, and smelled of no occupant more offensive than a Furret. Which wasn't a pokemon Urskog would leave a Bulbasaur alone with, but the thought of a Furret attacking a Bulbasaur accompanied by a Venusaur was ridiculous. It was an inviting tunnel.

But it was also not the path Urskog had walked for the last half century of her life. So no! She was not going to go into the tunnel!

She also wasn't going to go over the squishy black stone! No! It was spoiled! Spoiled! They had spoiled stone!

Urskog bellowed angrily. There were unusually few of the humans in view, only a few peering out from inside their shelters or standing on top of them. Two of the camouflaged humans - without the usual bright orange squares, oddly enough - stood a ways away on top of the spoiled stone. They made no move to approach.

Urskog angrily protested the awful indignity. She wasn't about to attack the humans over it - not if they fixed this and removed the spoiled rock, at least - but she was going to make it clear she was unhappy about it. Loudly. And at length.

Some of the humans watching from on top of their shelters winced and put their limbs over their ears. Good! Maybe now they would fix her path!

Urskog's mother was following a couple hours' walk behind her with their children, and by the time she got her, this had better be fixed!

The spoiled rock was not, as a matter of fact, fixed by the time Urskog's mother caught up to her. However the camouflaged humans had gone and gotten a large round and pink pokemon with an egg pouch, which sang rather beautifully. So beautifully, in fact, that it felt rude to interrupt. Not as rude as the presence of the stone in her way of course. But still, rude enough that Urskog quieted down. The pokemon was very nice too. It waddled closer over time, until eventually it was close enough to lean against Urskog. It was a very nice pokemon, cuddly and soft as a dream, and Urskog leaned back against the lovely thing. Maybe she didn't need to bleat while waiting for her mother. The humans knew her grievance and would fix it.

If they knew what was good for them, at least.

When Urskog's mother arrived, Urskog bellowed about the presence of the spoiled rock. For a moment anyway, before the jarring discord of her noise cutting through the pink pokemons' song. "Blissey!" it admonished her, and Urskog whined an apology.

No matter. Surely with her mother here, and all their children stuck unable to continue on their path, something would finally be done about this spoiled rock business! Together they would grow roots to break the stone if they had to!

That was what Urskog believed right up until - to her horror! - her mother walked up to the still-singing Blissey, nuzzled it, and then continued right on to the tunnel. The tunnel! Not the path they'd used for all their lives, but a tunnel!

Admittedly they did sometimes go around fallen trees or displaced boulders when necessary, but this was different! This was spoiled rock! It needed to go!

Urskog's mother apparently did not agree. She shepherded their children into the softly mossed tunnel and expected Urskog to follow along.

As she stood there fuming in her appalled rage, Urskog swore the Blissey looked smug. Not that that was a reason to do anything to the gentle thing of course. All it seemed to want to do was sing its beautiful songs and cuddle. But it was a sign of how infuriated Urskog was that even the lovable pink pokemon upset her.

In the end, Urskog followed her mother into the tunnel. It was … a nice tunnel. The ceilings were lit by softly glowing molds and the space was more than wide enough for even Urskog's mother.

When they came out the other end, Urskog found that the humans had multiplied. They covered the tops of their nearby shelters, including a large group of small humans - probably children - clustered around a trio of fully evolved adults. And to her surprise, when she had finished exiting the tunnel, the humans cheered.

The children were especially raucous, jumping up and down excitedly and pointing at the tunnel, at the Venusaurs and their Bulbasaurs. Even some of the camouflaged humans, who normally acted much more reserved than their counterparts, let out a few whoops of their own.

It was too much noise. Urskog bellowed her agitation and the humans shut up. Urskog's mother admonished her for the sudden roar with a gentle pap of her vine against Urskog's nose, but Urskog noticed that her mother seemed a little relieved at the relief from the humans' noise. A couple of the human children let out a few more cries of excitement, but were shushed by the adults with them.

The path continued. After the tunnel was the same grassy path through the humans' colorful den that Urskog was familiar with. In the end it wasn't such a great interruption, and each year Urskog and her mother would duck beneath the spoiled stone through the tunnel the humans had dug for them.

Which is not to say that Urskog didn't hold a grudge. Each year at the mouth of the tunnel, she would let out one earth-shaking bellow.

It was her path after all, and it wouldn't do to let the humans forget that.

-----

Urskog's mother heaved her bulk down off a boulder, and that was when her foreleg snapped.

The sudden bellow of pain from her mother behind her was like a flash of fire on Urskog's back. On instinct, she transformed the grass all around them into blades and swept the one Bulbasaur they'd found that season under herself before she was even finished turning around.

Unable to hold her weight on the broken leg, Urskog's mother plunged off the boulder. It was only two stumps high, but Venusaurs never stopped growing. If Urskog's mother decided she didn't like a particular tree growing alongside their path, she could simply throw her bulk against the tree and that would be that. And now all of that weight drove her shoulder into the ground, with her other foreleg at an awkward angle beneath her.

The air filled with the sound of crackling bone. Urskog bellowed and her baby shrieked in alarm.

Urskog scooped the Bulbasaur up in a vine and lunged forward as fast as her heavy legs would carry her. Her mother was crying out in agony, which was a good thing. A mature Venusaur could regenerate from almost anything if they had a moment to channel Grass. Urskog had seen her mother regrow an entire vine in a heartbeat once. If she could still scream, she would be fine.

She would be fine.

Urskog slammed to a stop beside her mother and drove her snout under her mother's flank. With a roar that was louder even than her mother's cries, Urskog poured power into her legs and heaved. Her own legs creaked under the monumental amount of weight she was lifting and she heard another awful snap from inside her mother's chest but she did it. For one heartbeat, then two, then three, she lifted her mother's whole front off the ground.

Above her, Urskog could feel her mother opening herself up to the sun. Grass blazed through her like a bonfire, burning away damage to make room for the new. Bone cracked again to shift back into place, turned to powder where it couldn't, and grew anew where it needed to. Blades of grass twisted into fractal shapes and sprouted lumpy tumors as the terrible amounts of power being channeled overflowed and spilled into the plant life around them. Urskog's mother moaned but never stopped channeling Grass. She had had worse injuries, she knew how to focus through the pain.

Urskog had never held so much weight before though. She groaned. Her whole skeleton creaked like a tree in a storm. Her mother could heal, but only if her broken limbs weren't being pressed into the ground. With two forelegs and her shoulder shattered, she could only do that so long as Urskog held her up.

So Urskog held. And held. And held.

When the burn in Urskog's muscles could no longer be ignored and she finally collapsed, her mother could hold her own weight above her.

The baby was still crying, screaming in terrified incomprehension, and needed to be cared for. Urskog and her mother gratefully turned to him and nuzzled the poor thing. It gave them something to do other than think about what had just happened. They tended to him, Urskog checked over her mother, and eventually the three of them moved on.

Later, when their baby Bulbasaur was sleeping the cried-out sleep of the exhausted on Urskog's back, Urskog was finally forced to think about what had happened. She had seen the ginger, careful steps her mother had used as she picked her way down slopes, after her fall. Her mother tested her weight carefully before committing to each step and flinched whenever a branch snapped beneath her feet. And more damningly, Urskog could think back and notice just how long her mother had been walking with pain in her steps.

Venusaurs never stopped growing. That fact made them behemoths as they reached old age. The oldest Venusaurs were undisputed masters of the forest. But their size came with consequences. Urskog had seen this happen before with the oldest Venusaurs at the mating grounds. They grew so large that their bones could no longer hold their weight. A tree could only grow so tall before wind and gravity tore it loose from its soil, and bone could only hold so much flesh before it gave way.

Today it was the shock of a sudden step down that broke one of her mother's legs. But eventually the shifting weight of even a simple step on flat ground would be enough to do it. And all of the regeneration in the world wouldn't be able to fix that.

It was the beginning of the end.

-----

Urskog tried to stay ahead of her mother's decline. She cleared debris from their path, shaped wood into ramps, and washed restorative Grass through her mother's joints each evening. She forced her mother to slow their migratory pace, even though her mother growled irritably and her own instincts protested. She held her mother up and forced them to take more breaks when that wasn't enough.

Her mother was stronger than ever, but all that strength wasn't enough when her own body was the enemy. They started moving later in the day, so her mother could draw on more sunlight to strengthen her joints. They were late to mating seasons. Urskog worried that with their slow pace they might not be making it to some seedlings in time. She lived with the fear of that every day. She was torn between going on ahead to call for seedlings who might be looking for their mothers, and staying behind in case her mother had a bad break.

The end had been coming for years. It shouldn't have surprised Urskog when it arrived. She should have been ready.

It did. She wasn't.

One morning her mother tried to stand up. She crumpled. Usrkog tried to lift her. She had to stop when she heard multiple ribs break above her snout.

Her mother healed herself as best she could while sitting down. Urskog helped nose her mother's legs into a position where her knees could heal. She did her best to brace her mother as she healed her ribs.

It wasn't enough.

Her mother's breathing was laboured. Her chest rose and fell as best it could, but Urskog could see that it was a losing battle. Something in her ribs hadn't healed properly. And unless she could stand up and take the weight off of them, they couldn't be rehealed.

Urskog nosed her mother's side desperately, doing her best to take the weight off her mother's ribs without breaking them further. She whined for her mother to get up. No matter what she did her mother only lay there breathing unsteadily. She didn't even try to get up!

In desperation, Urskog screamed for her grandmother. She reached into the decaying parts of Grass where death was food for life and let out a bellow laced with rot.

Her grandmother was slowing down as well. It took more to rouse her ghost these days. When she came, Urskog sometimes found her still inhabiting the same tree a year later. Urskog needed help to lift her mother though so Urskog screamed for her again, and again, and again, and-

Blades of grass wilted, flowers fell, berries liquified, and mushrooms sprouted from the remains, as three Treavenants took ahold of the nearby trees. A red glow burst from a knot in each of the trees they took as they looked out onto the living world. She could identify the feel of her grandmother in one of them, though the other two were new to Urskog. She didn't care. More help was more help. She whined to her grandmother and the other Treavenants and motioned as if to lift her mother with her vines.

They did their best.

Dead logs floated off the forest floor and heaved Urskog's mother up to her feet. Urskog wrung her vines and shifted her weight back and forth, anxious to get close after her clumsy attempt to help had broken her mother's ribs. The elder Treavenants were stronger than her though and had more limbs than her to work with. They successfully bore her mother's weight while she healed herself. So slowly though, Urskog had never seen her mother heal so slowly before. And when they relaxed their hold her mother still groaned in pain, unable to hold herself up. The ghost of her mother's mother had to let her down slowly, turning a lethal crash into a controlled descent.

Urskog whined. Her mother panted heavily. She could clearly breathe better now, though Urskog could see breathing with all of her weight pressing her chest into the ground was still difficult. But that was okay! Her mother always had some trouble breathing these days. If they just waited for the sun to rise a little higher, she'd be able to stand up and they could move on.

The sun was fully over the horizon.

Urskog swallowed more whines. She could wash Grass through her mother's joints as the Treavenants lifted her again. They could try again. They had to try again.

The two unfamiliar Treavenants laid branches on her mother's head. Their presence thrummed through the Grass and as one they began to sing. Their voices were the wind in the trees, and they sang with impressions of days and seasons gone past. The sun is bright, they sang. But in the end the sun goes down. And when it leaves, the ground is left cold.

Then her grandmother began crooning a lullaby, and Urskog, finally, began to cry.

-----

For three days Urskog stood vigil with the Treavenants over her mother as they sang.

Every morning she woke in a panic, terrified her mother had stopped breathing in the night. During the day she broke off green branches and dragged them to her mother by the bunch, barely pausing to heal the wounds that left on the trees. She plucked fruits and berries with her vines and willed more to grow. Day by day, she kept her immoble mother fed.

It couldn't last forever. She could already feel the strain on the land. Two adult Venusaurs staying in one place would strip the vegetation bare eventually, no matter how much she twisted the flows of Grass. Their fat stores would hold out for months after that, as they did in winter and more briefly during mating season. But Urskog didn't expect her mother to last that long.

At dusk on the third day, the Treavenants stopped singing.

The temperature in the clearing dropped. At first it was as if a cloud had passed over the sun, though it had already passed below the horizon. Then the wind sighed through the trees, carrying the breath of winter with it. Frost formed on the edges of leaves and crusted blades of grass. Sap popped and crackled within trees and the Treavenants creaked under the strain. Urskog shivered and her petals curled instinctively to protect the seeds within.

Then came the true cold.

The air froze. Urskog didn't know how else to describe it. A cloud plumed out from between the trees and where it passed air turned to ice. A steady breeze flowed into the cloud and white dust fell out of it, coating the thoroughly dead grass beneath it in … snow? Whatever it was boiled with white fog of its own.

Out of the cloud floated a ghost. It was as tall as Urskog, though it hovered a stump's height above the earth. The spirit appeared as though it was carved from bleached white bone, with a toothless skull set above a hollow curved tube and two thin skeleton arms anchored at the temples of the skull. Curving wings of feathers carved from ice swept back from each forearm and a band of orange horn wrapped around its middle, which protruded two flat and unmoving orange wings on its back. Within the toothless skull lay a rippling cloud of purple smoke and two piercing blue eyes surrounded by yellow sclera. As Urskog watched, an empty slit opened beneath the bone mask and another plume of air-freezing cold plumed out.

Urskog gasped. Her own breath steamed in the freezing air. The spirit radiated Ice, moreso than even the Abomasnows which came down from the mountain in the winter. But in this spirit, it wasn't a devouring thing. It didn't seek warmth on which to feed. It simply was. The spirit existed and the air froze and killed the plants beneath it, as certain as the winter snows blanketing the ground each year. Inevitable, lethal, and as much a part of the seasons as spring. Besides, Urskog could already tell. It wasn't here for her.

The spirit stopped two body lengths away from her mother. The edge of its frozen breath sprinkled flakes of frozen air on her mother's snout. It stared down at the prone Venusaur. Over long moments, something passed between them. And as it did, Urskog's mother slowly, finally, relaxed.

Urskog hadn't realized how much pain her mother had been carrying in her frame, for how long, until she saw it leave her.

The spirit turned its toothless skull to look at Urskog. She met its eyes and there she saw flashes of the same voice the Trevenants sang with, of days and seasons past. Trees died, it said. Their own weight would bring them crashing to the ground and tear a hole in the forest with their passing. And then life would fill them again. Rot would hollow them out. Fungi and mold would, in time, transform even the mightiest stump into nurturing mulch. Their hollow remains would shelter and feed insects. For another span of seasons the trees would live, even in death. Not forever, it promised. Eventually the last stubborn root would return to the earth. But their deaths would last long enough for other saplings to replace them, grown in their shade, fed on their decay, and protected from the harshest wind and sun.

It was time for Urskog's mother to join her grandmother.

The spirit lifted its eyes from Urskog and freezing air rushed back into her lungs. It raised its skeletal arms and at its signal the Trevenants resumed their song. But this time their song did not mourn. They challenged. They screamed, Urskog's grandmother loudest of all, that they would have one more day. One more day, to see their children grow. In death they lived again, to protect the forest against those that would take too much from it. They would continue fighting so that their seedlings, their seedlings' seedlings, and all the seedlings of the forest might live.

From her deathbed, Urskog's mother drew in a last rattling breath, before joining her voice to theirs in a scream. She was not done! She still had her baby to protect! Spirit! she screamed through the Grass, give me one more day!

Granted, the spirit spoke.

The Trevenants' song rose to a crescendo. Such an old and powerful soul was too much for any one spirit to bear, so they would help the Ice spirit's work. They wove a web of life and death from the forest's heart, to catch the soul of their newest fellow and bear her weight. She would protect the forest in death and so the forest would shelter her as she passed. The Trevenant's work was beyond Urskog's understanding of Grass, rooted in death as much as life, but Urskog raised her voice in a cry and added her strength to it as best she could.

She was still singing when the spirit bent down and laid a kiss on her mother's snout.

Her mother died. Her body froze in an instant. And then in a burst of riotous defiant life, she lived again. The ghost of Urskog's mother burst from her body as a roaring column of black smoke which streaked into the air and then plunged back into the earth through her old body. In spite of the deadly cold, an explosion of mushrooms erupted from every surface the smoke touched. Within seconds the hide of the old Venusaur was covered. The smell of rot, warm and full of life, filled the air.

And then she was gone. Plunging into the mycelium that bound the trees together, off to do work beyond Urskog's ken.

The Trevenants' song reached one last triumphant note before falling silent. Urskog's grandmother stroked her head kindly with a trailing branch. Then one of their red glows winked out. The other as well. Finally, with one last kindly stroke, Urskog's grandmother closed her eye and Urskog was alone with the Ice spirit.

It looked Urskog in the eye again. In its eyes she saw others like it, Froslasses, come down from the mountains to answer the Venusaurs' calls. One day, the Froslass promised, they would be there for her.

Then it too left, and Urskog was alone.

First, Urskog cried.

Next, she dragged branches to cover her mother's body. The shade and the trapped heat would help the mushrooms do their work. She found flowers as well and delicately planted their seeds around the mound. With luck, there would not be a corpse when she passed this way next year, but the growth of something new and beautiful.

Lastly, she moved on. There were still babies fumbling their way through the forest, both hers and her mother's, barely sprouted and vulnerable to all manner of predators. If she hurried she might still be able to find some of them in time.

-----

The next time Urskog fought an Abomasnow, her mother punched it with a fallen tree.

She got to have one day with her mother after that, who stayed in the tree she'd possessed long enough to meet this year's grandchildren. It was good, even if her smell was different under the warm rot and her bark wasn't anything like her old hide. Her mother was still her mother, even as a ghost.

But then Urskog moved on and her mother stayed behind in the tree. She was alone on the path again, with only baby Bulbasaurs for company.

Her mother was still with her. Her mother was still gone.

-----

Five years later her grandmother stopped waking when called. She possessed a young tree, less than a hundred years old, growing out of a mushroom circle along their migratory path. There was one just like it, still a sapling, growing out of the spot where Urskog's mother had died. Her grandmother's tree still stirred when predators came close and it refused to let Spinaraks lay webs among its branches, but the inner light had gone out. The ghost within could no longer hear her descendants' calls.

Urskog stood vigil while the ghost of her mother grieved.

Later, when she touched her grandmother's bark to string flower-studded vines from her branches, she tried to not sense how many rings there were inside her grandmother's trunk or what that might mean for her mother.

-----

A small herd of Bulbasaurs accompanied Usrkog through the forest. They gamboled and leapt on top of one another and squeaked as they rolled through the grass. They plowed through piles of fallen orange leaves at top speed and cheeped with glee as the leaves went flying every which way.

One of the babies kept pace with Urskog under her belly. Its bulb was torn and scarred from where some predator had gotten to it and it was still too nervous to go out and play with its siblings. Urskog was wondering if it would be best to encourage it to go out and play with the other, or to encourage its siblings to come here to play with it, when the whole world went white.

Urskog blinked in surprise, wondering what had just happened, when the pain hit her eyes. Pushing down shock, she moved into defensive mode. Even as she was blinking through the flash blindness, her vines shot out to where she remembered her children being and yanked them beneath her. As soon as she had them safe she blasted an indiscriminate wave of mutative Grass through the landscape, turning every petal, leaf, blade of grass, and branch around her into a cutting razor. Only then did she wash restorative Grass through her eyes, clearing away the pain of the brilliant light.

Her children were squeaking in protest and pain but Urskog tuned that out for the moment, turning slowly in a defensive circle. The only thing she knew of which could create flashes like that were Volbeats. The tiny bug pokemon weren't threats, merely nuisances, but that had been much brighter than any Volbeat she knew of could create. It was best to be cautious until she knew what…

Urskog stared.

She'd turned around far enough to see the island's central mountain. And more importantly, the raging line of fire tearing its way out of the mountain's side. It jutted in a perfectly straight line out from the mountain - where there was now a massive crater and a plume of ash and rock - all the way into the clouds. As she watched, air rushed into the line of fire, feeding it and distorting it. The line boiled and twisted, blossoms of fire erupting out of parts of the line as other parts collapsed into coiling smoke.

Then the sound hit.

The world throbbed like a drum. Pain pulsed through Urskog's ears. The blast of noise tore her razor leaves off the trees and they sliced at her thick hide. Her babies cried out again and Urskog dropped on top of them, doing her best to cover them from the cutting debris and shield them from the noise without crushing them.

Seconds passed and then Urskog heard the scream that would haunt her nightmares for seasons. Full of rage and despair and helplessness and so much pain, the voice carried a wave of alien power that smashed through the Grass - through everything, somehow - like a tidal wave. Urskog blacked out.

When she came to her babies were cheeping in pain beneath her - good, that meant they were still alive - and the sky was lit up by another column of fire. More debris fountained up from the mountain, even as the first plume came crashing down as a hammer of half-molten rock that stripped the mountainside of life.

With the world coming to an end around her, Urskog hunkered down and protected her babies as best she could.

There were more flashes of light and throbbing hammers of sound. One of the columns of fire lashed across the sky vaguely in Urskog's direction and the heat blasted her skin raw, popped her eardrums, and made blood leak from her ears. Somewhere in the distance she could smell smoke. Through it all, that terrible wounded voice screamed. It roared pain and hurt and terror and all the while the sky filled with fire.

Urskog was trembling, sure that the next blast would be the end of her, when her mother arrived. A possessed tree tore itself from the earth, heedless of the damage to its roots, and slammed down around her. Branches grew and petrified in seconds, sealing gaps and locking Urskog into a protective dome where the light and sound didn't tear at her with such overwhelming power.

She barely had a moment to be grateful before the red light of possession in one of the tree's knots winked out and her mother moved on. There were others to protect and a forest that was burning.

Sheltered inside her mother's wooden dome, Urskog mustered what shaky control of Grass she could to fill the air with sleeping spores. Slowly, between moments of earth-shaking thunder, her children's screaming quieted into sleepy peeps and quiet snores. She ran her vines over each of them to check that their injuries weren't life threatening, letting out a desperately held breath when she couldn't feel or sense anything immediately dangerous. Then she breathed back in and got to work.

The flashes were bright and loud enough to still be felt even inside the tree's shell. The wood lit up with orange inner light every time a beam lashed out, and a trunk's worth of wood trembled like a fragile egg with each following blast. Urskog shivered inside the dome with each crash of thunder but she did her best to keep her head and add her own protections. She hardened the wood. She grew thick shock absorbing moss into every crevice. She grew water-fat vines over the outside of the shelter, in case the forest fire which surely must be spreading reached them. She channeled Grass even through the reality shaking screams outside, until she had nothing left to give.

Then she waited.

For what felt like hours, as the beams became less frequent and the world-shaking cries grew hoarse and then quiet, Urskog waited. She sat there in desperate silence after the last roar died down, sure that there would be another. When the ringing in her ears had gone on long enough that she finally believed it was over, she waited to see if the wind would blow a forest fire her way. She waited until she heard the rain coming down, as slow heavy droplets at first, and then in a raging torrent. Only then, when she knew she was safe, did she sleep.

-----

Urskog never knew why the island had been torn apart, but she learned its consequences in bitter detail.

She saw the scar left on the mountain every day. The mountainside had a gaping hole torn out of it, a crater of melted rock half-buried by landslides. She couldn't see how much of the island had been burned from where she plodded along low to the ground, but she could smell the smoke for weeks. Pokemon she had never seen before darted across her path, driven out of their homes halfway across the island by the fires. Most of them she let go with a warning rumble, but a few of the predators lingered and stared at her children with eyes set in gaunt hungry faces. Those she sent on their way with volleys of razor-edged leaves.

The worst though, was the weather.

It rained for days after the fires and the water came down wrong. Puddles were chalky and ashy, unfit to drink, and Urskog could feel the curdling bitterness of it as plants drank it up. There was slow death in the rain. Urskog did the best she could to trick the plants she passed into thinking it was drought, so they wouldn't glut themselves on poison, but she could only help the small length of forest she walked through. She hoped her mother and grandmother, and the other Trevenants of the forest, were able to do more than she could.

Then came the snow. It was brutally early for snow, but even after the rain had stopped the sun stayed clouded by a dull orange smog. Warmth leeched out of the land one day after the next, until when fall's next rains came they came as snow. Urskog had seen frosts this early in the seasons before and it was always bad news, and that was when it was just a short frost early in the year. This time the snow came and it stayed. It stayed from one snowstorm to the next, until the whole island was buried and Urskog was burrowing a path to her winter resting spot as often as trampling it.

The Venusaur had fat reserves she could fall back on, but her baby Bulbasaurs were small and needed to grow. She fed them every green shoot she could pluck or grow out of the landscape at her own expense, but it wasn't enough. Their bulbs shriveled rather than growing plump for their upcoming evolutions. Their vines hung limp and they didn't gambol about burning off excess energy.

She made it to her winter resting spot, a clearing that Urskog, her mother, and probably her grandmother as well had tended for centuries. They cultivated fall fruits, collards, tubers, roots, and every other plant which could provide food during the winter snows, and grew buckwheats each spring as they left to renew the soil. It wasn't enough to feast but most years it was enough to get two Venusaurs and a few Bulbasaurs through the winter without losing crippling amounts of weight.

This year none of the fruits had grown during the unseasonal fall snows. The collards were small and the tubers had shriveled. And her babies were already hungry. Urskog leaned almost entirely on her fat reserves and fed what was meant for two Venusaurs to a handful of small Bulbasaurs. It was barely enough.

The Abomasnows were worse that winter as well, a nightmare Urskog was almost too tired to be as afraid of as she should be. They came in twos and threes, something Urskog had never seen before, moving slow and watching each others' backs. Urskog had to call on her mother every time they came because only the presence of a Trevenant was enough to drive them off. Urskog even called for other Trevenants twice, called in desperation when one guardian ghost wasn't enough.

Her shy Bulbasaur with the torn bulb didn't make it through the winter. It took sick after one of the storms the monsters brought with them and didn't wake the next morning.

Staring down at the unmoving body she couldn't nudge awake, Urskog felt as though it had taken her heart with it. There was a hollow space in her chest that grief was meant to fill and a scream rising up inside her like a tide. But she didn't have time to mourn. There would be more deaths to come. Her children needed her. And if she felt every loss she would simply lay down and die.

-----

Her children made it through the winter.

They died in the spring.

Winter stayed late and that was bad enough. But then Urskog's migratory path took her through a section of forest which had been burned down to its roots. Green shoots were already beginning to grow, but the sprouts struggling out of the soil tainted by last fall's ashen rains were as much poison as they were nourishment.

Urskog was thin and gaunt by the time summer came, but she made it to the lowlands. Her children did not. She left them one by one along the path, along with the pieces of her heart.

-----

Rebuilding began at the mating grounds.

Urskog had lost too much fat for her flower to blossom that summer. Even with unburnt grassland to graze on, the poison rains had taken their toll. The sour yellow grass which grew that spring wasn't much help and she couldn't put on enough weight fast enough for her seeds to grow. She wasn't the only Venusaur in such a state either. When she arrived at the mating grounds hardly any pollen drifted off of the males and the females each had two or three seeds at most.

But they weren't there for mating displays. Not this season.

The males worked further back from the shoreline on fertile soil, even the daring male whose sand-rooted creations Urskog loved so much. What they grew was not their usual artistry, but simple and to the point. First they grew weeds that would soak up the poisons in the earth. And then they grew food. Berry bushes, small fruit trees, edible vines and bulbs, anything and everything that could grow quickly with enough Grass.

Driven by an instinct she had never felt before, Urskog set off with the other females. They each walked loops around the lowlands, lowing for their children and their children's herds to join them, and led them back to the mating grounds. Urskog found some of her own children when she ventured forth, Ivysaurs who had grown up so much that they hardly looked like the Bulbasaurs she had raised. They introduced her to their herds and Urskog winced at the half-healed scars cutting across their hides. Not all of winter's monsters had been stopped in the foothills by their elders this year.

But herd by herd, Urskog brought the Ivysaurs back to the other Venusaurs. And there, they did what they hadn't been able to do since the mountain was torn apart.

They fed their children.

-----

Mating displays didn't resume for years. Every Venusaur had weight to regain and paths to rebuild. Tracts of abundant food cultivated through the forest for generations were poisoned and ravaged by fire. The abnormal winter had shocked many of the perennial fruiters, which had to be coaxed back into bloom. And even as the Venusaurs worked to restore their forests to how they had been, the forests changed around them.

Every year the Abomasnows ranged further down from the mountains and in greater numbers than they had before. They brought snowstorms further into the forest, where they stifled new growth and killed life that had previously only contended with light frosts. Some of them were even followed by herds of small snow-covered ambulatory trees, which sank their roots into the ground and drained the tubers dry which fed Bulbasaurs during the winter.

Ariadoses vanished from the forests, which Urskog considered a welcome change at first. But they were replaced by more Spinaraks than she ever could have imagined. Their webs lay thick over the forest and some seasons Urskog was even stalked by swarms of gaunt spindly Spinaraks, never brave enough to confront a Venusaur but hungry enough to dream of it. They even ranged out of the forests now. Each spring she saw Ivysaur herds with members covered in puckered scars where they'd been stabbed by venomous horns.

Each spring the herds were smaller.

When Urskog was finally ready to plant seeds again, the forest she took them back to was unfamiliar. Her old planting spots were all altered. She planted her seeds one fall and the next fall she couldn't find a single Bulbasaur. Not a single baby called out to her from the brush. She tried again the next year and with no more success.

Fall after fall she tried, and each spring she walked back to the lowlands heartbroken and alone. And her fellow Venusaurs had no more success. Each year the Ivysaur herds grew even smaller. Sometimes because they grew up. More often because they did not.

One summer Urskog walked across the lowlands to find a gang of Wurmples feasting on a berry bush the Ivysaurs had once cultivated. Without enough bodies to cover all the lowlands, this patch of land had been ceded to the same poison bugs that almost ate Urskog in her first evolution. Enraged, Urskog drove them off. But she knew that when she left they would be back.

She couldn't understand why it wasn't like that for Bulbasaurs.

-----

It was a human who gave her hope.

Ten winters after the mountain was torn apart, she came back to the tunnel the humans had built under their awful, squishy, spoiled black stone. She dredged up the energy to roar, as she always did to remind the humans that she was still offended by their change to her path. Though it felt hollow now to complain about such a change when every part of her path was so different.

And then she smelled something.

It was almost like a male's pollen. Not quite but … close. It was strange, but not a bad smell. She sniffed the air more deeply and followed the smell to its source.

Nestled into the wall of the tunnel, just inside its entrance, was a small ball with a red upper half and a white lower half, split by a black line and a smaller white circle on one side. It was a strangely perfect ball. No blemishes, not even any real texture. And it smelled almost like a male's pollen.

Urskog looked around suspiciously. There were a few humans around, watching her from a healthy distance on the other side of the spoiled stone or standing on top of shelters. One of them, a camouflaged human, waved at her. After she waved back, it pointed enthusiastically at the ball.

The humans had been strange and their spoiled stone was aggravating, but they had never hurt Urskog or any of her children. The ball was confusing, but if it was a human thing it wasn't a threat.

Probably.

The forest had changed. Maybe the humans would too.

Urskog poked the ball with a disposable vine instead of her snout. It was so smooth. Like a river rock but even more so. She poked it again. She tried to move it, but it was fixed to something stuck in the ground. With a grunt she wrapped her vine around it, prepared to yank it out of her ground with all the strength a Venusaur could bring to bear.

But as she did her vine pressed down on a small circle on the front of the ball. It sank inwards with a click and a red light glowed from the small circle.

Urskog whipped her vine back and bristled, growing thorns and cutting leaves from the tips of both her vines. She took a step back as the ball flashed and illuminated the tunnel for a moment with a bright red glow. Then it popped open with a chime and Urskog decided that was enough surprises. She snapped a vine and sent a cutting leaf hurtling into the ball.

And into the ball it went. The leaf shot between the opened red and white half-spheres and … kept going? It didn't hit the other side of the open ball, it just kept going in. Urskog tilted her head to get a better view of whatever just happened and the shift in perspective made her eyes water.

There was something inside the ball. She shifted her head back and forth to get a look at it and whatever was inside moved … but without moving. She pulled back and flinched as it felt like whatever was inside rushed towards her and got smaller at the same time … but still without moving.

Urskog was more than a little bit nauseous and getting close to lumping the round thing in with the humans' black spoiled stone. But part of her was still curious about where her leaf had gone. So she took a deep breath and a long look at whatever the thing was.

It was a sphere of … stuff, slightly smaller than the red and white ball it rested within. The stuff shone with a nice warm yellow light. And if Urskog squinted and leaned in, looking at it from above, she thought she could make out details of the stuff. There was loose soil covered in the tiniest grass she had ever seen. There were a few scattered berry bushes, also the tiniest she had ever seen. And her leaf! Her cutting leaf was embedded in one of the berry bushes and it was also tiny!

Urskog pulled her head back and twitched with nausea as the 'stuff' in the sphere swung wildly. It rushed towards her without moving, so now she could only see a smaller - and disorientingly larger-seeming - slice of the … place? Was there a place inside the ball? Before she'd seen grass from above, now she saw a slice of grass as if from the side, along with a miniature tree and a sky. A sky! There was another sky inside of the ball!

Some very awkward and nauseating shifting allowed Urskog to look at the place-sphere from lower near the ground, and yes, there was another sky inside the red and white ball. There was even another sun! One which Urskog could very faintly feel catalyzing the Grass inside of her.

She tentatively reached out to it with a vine, trying to touch it from above. And reached. And reached? She kept reaching and somehow her vine didn't reach it! It only got … smaller?

With a mix of frustration and curiosity, Urskog shoved her vine down at full extension and was rewarded with the sensation of hitting grass and loose soil. Perfectly ordinarily sized grass. She couldn't see her vine inside the place-sphere though, not at first. It was like it curved around nothing as it shrank down and then vanished. It took more nauseating shifts of her head, but eventually she found an angle looking down from above where the vine didn't vanish and instead shrank to a very small little tendril touching the equally small grass.

With her vine fully inside the tiny-place, Urskog could feel the second sun within more fully. She drew on its light to catalyze Grass within her vine, enjoying the feeling as she would a sunbeam. It wasn't as strong as the true sun, but it was clearly a sun. What a strange ball. Urskog had encountered many odd things in her lifetime but this was the strangest of them all.

She spent her time feeling around the inside of the place, first with one vine and then with both. It was empty as far as she could tell. There were some small insects and with her sense for Grass she could feel a few worms among the roots of its grasses, but there wasn't anything bigger than a small beetle. There were no pokemon in there at all. No Wurmples, no Spinaraks, no-

Urskog froze, stunned into stillness.

Slowly, her body thrumming with a hope she could barely let herself feel, Urskog pulled one of her vines back. She reached into her flower and pulled out a seed. Then she reached back into the twisted tiny place inside the red and white ball. She felt around for the tree she'd seen earlier and buried her seed at its base, where it would be shaded from the harshest rays of the ball's second sun and nourished by the fungal network laced into the tree's roots.

Then, vines trembling, she pulled away from the ball.

With a careful shift of her head, Urskog could see the miniature tree's roots. Fixed in place, she stared into the tiny place inside the ball.

Eventually, startling Urskog out of a stunned reverie, the small white circle on the ball glowed a dull red and the ball closed. It snapped shut with a click. Urskog continued to stare at the ball. Hesitantly, she pressed the circle on the front again. It flashed bright red, illuminating the tunnel, and popped open with a chime. Inside it was still the tiny place that wasn't tiny. If she narrowed her eyes, Urskog could even see the tree and the disturbed soil where she'd planted her seed.

It was still there.

-----

Urskog never rushed down her path as fast as she did the next fall.

The ball was still there, nestled against one wall of the tunnel. It still smelled of not-quite-pollen, though much more faintly. And when she pressed the white circle on the front with a vine, it still flashed her with red light, chimed, and popped open.

A distant, quiet peep sounded from the inside of the strange space within the ball. It was so quiet that Urskog couldn't even be sure she heard it and she froze in place, trying to make as little sound as possible.

"bee"

But it sounded again, slightly louder, and then again louder still, until abruptly Urskog's view of the moving wrongly sized space inside the ball was replaced with a face. The pudgy-cheeked green face of a baby Bulbasaur stared out at Urskog from within the ball. Its miniature face back and forth, looking faintly nauseous and making Urskog faintly nauseous with how it distorted as it moved. But despite all the strangeness of the space inside the ball, Urskog saw her baby and it - curious as could be and utterly without fear - saw her back. It opened its mouth wide and shrieked with delight-

"Beeeeeeee!"

Urskog reached into the twisted space with both her vines, wrapped them around her baby, and pulled it out into the world with all her might. It cheeped with wild abandon as she pulled it into the air, "Bee! Bee! Bee!"

Urskog threw her head back and roared, "VVVVVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!" Flowers bloomed, trees fruited, and moss inside the tunnel flashed through rippling colors. Urskog stomped about the tunnel with her child, spinning it around and around and around, roaring back at every glorious, wonderful, perfect peep her child made.

It was alive. Her baby was alive. It had no scars, no sign of going hungry, nothing! It was the healthiest little baby she'd ever seen!

Her baby - her baby! alive! - eventually peeped to be set down, and Urskog reluctantly did. It wobbled for a bit, getting its feet underneath it, then darted for the nearest patch of multicolored moss. It slammed nose first into the tunnel wall behind the moss, a setback which did not slow its curiosity at all.

Urskog hovered over it, unwilling to let her child out of her sight for a second. Her baby, unused to anything but the restricted contained space of the red and white ball, took that as a challenge. It ran around the tunnel. It ran out of the tunnel. It ran up to one of the human's shelters. After Urskog pulled it away, it ran back to the humans' shelters again. And again and again and again, until Urskog finally let it lick the side of a shelter. It took a nibble too, decided it didn't like the taste, and ran over to the spoiled black stone over the tunnel.

That, Urskog did not let it touch, no matter how much it peeped and eventually wailed. No child of hers was putting that human travesty in its mouth. Though, thinking of humans-

The humans were giving her and her baby a particularly wide berth. That was as it should be. Urskog was grateful beyond measure for what they had given her but if anything had approached her baby in that moment she would have smashed it into mulch. A ways down the spoiled stone though, standing advisably far away, was a camouflaged human. It waved and Urskog waved back.

Keeping most of her attention on her child and its horrible attempt to eat rotten rock, Urskog nevertheless glanced back at the human. Something about it felt familiar.

Her baby had finally moved on from trying to stuff unnatural abominations against nature into its mouth and had moved on to mere pebbles - which she still kept away from its weak baby teeth - when recognition came. It had been a camouflaged human who pointed out the ball to her last year. She turned to face it. She'd never bothered to identify individual humans before but … she waved with a vine again. It waved back and this time the gesture felt definitely familiar.

She looked closer and there, protruding from the human's hip, were more of the red and white orbs.

Oh.

Realization and gratitude slammed into Urskog like a falling tree. The emotion was absolute and so intense that her knees trembled under the weight of it. She looked around, spotting another camouflaged human atop a nearby human shelter. It had the same balls on its hip. Smaller than the one in the tunnel, but the same! She looked around wildly. A few more brightly colored humans were watching from atop other shelters, or from further beyond the camouflaged human on the ground. Not all of them had balls, but some of them had one or two!

Urskog staggered under the weight of what she owed to them.

Her baby peeped and the sound sent a lance of joy through her. They'd brought her babies back to her. They'd brought her babies back!

Urskog drew a deep breath, raised her head to the sky, and roared again. "VVVEEENNNUUUSSSAAAUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!" Earlier she had poured her power into an undirected riot of wonder and joy, creating and altering life however the Grass might please. Now she reached deeper, for something lasting. She reached for the deeper cycles of Grass, seasons and greater cycles of life and weather with periods of years, to build something which would still be here when she was gone. She poured herself into it and trusted the humans who had sheltered her baby to not take advantage of her weakness.

An errant seed deposited by wind or a careless eater caught her power and became a conduit. It sprouted tendrils, found soil and water. More water was drawn to it by the Grass as nutrients in the soil were replenished by microbes and natural processes accelerated beyond anything nature could achieve alone. Air rushed in as the seed consumed it, locked it in place, and made its bones from solidified air. Roots grew thick and fast in a ring about the tunnel entrance and plunged deep into the earth. A trunk grew and pressed up against the spoiled stone above the tunnel entrance, but in deference to the humans did not crack it. Years passed in mere hundreds of heartbeats as Grass bade the world to remember what it was like for a tree to grow and to make it happen with supernatural speed.

The tree was only twice as tall as herself by the time exhaustion forced Urskog to stop. She was drained, all the way down to reserves she maybe shouldn't have spent. This was work meant to be paced over days. She would have to eat even more diligently than usual for this winter.

But its roots went deep. The buds of a few autumn fruits already poked out of its thickest branches. It would be strong and healthy when she wasn't there. And next year she would grow it larger, and the next year larger still, until it could bear enough fruit for every human in their den to taste.

It was the least she could do.

They had given Usrkog her babies back.

-----

Urskog found more of the spheres along her path before winter.

-----

The next year they dotted her entire autumn path.

-----

She came back to the plains with new Bulbasaurs every year now, better than it had been even before the calamity. Other Venusaurs did too.

It wasn't all sunshine and berries. The Ivysaurs continued to suffer. Many of their herds were too small to stay safe and the new barely evolved Ivysaurs were hardly enough to stem the tide of predation. Urskog held little hope that she would come back from her migration anytime soon and find an evolving Ivysaur waiting for her, just as she'd waited for her own mother.

But little hope was still hope. Year after year, there was hope.

-----

Decades crawled by and piece by piece the island put itself back together. Not quite the same as before, but it didn't fall entirely apart.

The Spinaraks still swarmed the forests in numbers beyond anything Urskog remembered from her youth. But camouflaged humans accompanied by terrible massive pokemon made of rock which Urskog had never seen before patrolled the boundaries of the lowlands. Terrified of crossing the massive pokemons' territories, Spinaraks became more hesitant to prey on the lowland Ivysaurs. They didn't stop, but the bleeding slowed.

The snows still came further down the mountain each year, but the bipedal terrors of ice and snow found a line they struggled to cross. One year when Urskog was attacked, a human came to her defense. A human accompanied by a white-furred Ice monster of its own, larger and better fed than any Urskog had ever seen. Yet the human spoke and it listened! The Abomasnow with it roared only at its own kind and never once looked at Urskog's children! Its presence alone was enough to drive off the monster which had attacked Urskog, which slunk off back up the mountain.

Everywhere humans patrolled with companion pokemon, putting the tattered ecosystem back together again as best they knew how. And it was good that they did, because Urskog and the other Venusaurs needed the help.

The Treavenants were fading.

The one thing the humans couldn't help with was their ancestors. Year by year the ancient ghosts slowed down. Even the specter of Urskog's mother, a relatively young such ghost, was flagging. Urskog could see the same decline she had once witnessed in her grandmother. An increasing slowness to respond and a bone deep weariness Urskog could feel in her presence. The Treavenants had too many fires to put out. They were slow things of a seasonal scale of time, and were worn down jumping from place to place protecting their children and their children's children.

And worst of all, there were no new Treavenants.

Urskog didn't notice for decades, until one summer she saw an elder male collapse on the mating grounds. His sons sang for him. They called their grandfather into their father's own mating display, a beautifully twisted oak rooted right up against the tide line. They sang and sang and sang, their mourning song adding a bittersweet note to the celebration of new life. Urskog herself raised her voice with them at times to call down from the mountains the Ice spirit who had walked her mother past the borders of death. It wasn't common for a Venusaur to die on the mating grounds, but on the rare occasions it happened it was a glorious thing to witness all assembled sing for them in their final moments before the Frosslass claimed them.

Only it never came.

Urskog didn't know how long they sang. Weeks, at least. But she left for her migration before they found any resolution.

She came back the next summer to find the bleached white bones of a Venusaur lying on the beach. It was horrible. Wrong. Venusaurs didn't rot. Not until their spirit came home to the trees which grew out of their bodies. Not until that tree lived a full life, not until there was nothing left of the Venusaur but bark and wood to feed the worms! Their bones fed the forest!

Yet there it was. A skeleton naked on the beach. A profanity. The elder's sons covered it with vines as best they could, but it wasn't enough. They weren't rooted in the bones, not life of its life. It was a mockery of what should be.

Urskog left the beach early that summer.

-----

The skeleton was still there the next year.

-----

Year after year, everything else improved. Where they didn't actively get better, humans still slowed the decline and gave Urskog hope that the island would yet heal. That hope blossomed anew in her heart with every seedling she plucked from their miraculous spheres. She raised new Bulbasaurs and passed them on to the care of their peers, hoping that one of them would follow her footsteps one day, even if she was gone by then and they had to find her path by instinct and dim memory.

But one thing didn't improve. Even as Urskog's joints began to ache, even as her growing weight forced her to be more careful where she stepped, one aching sore spot found no resolution. When Urskog called for aid and a Treavenant other than her mother answered, it was never new. Each decade they grew older, slower, and no new blood replaced them.

Because the Frosslasses never came back.

-----

A deep thud shuddered through the forest floor. Thud. Another. Thud. Another. Then … nothing. The silence stretched on uncomfortably. Birdsong chirped only quietly among the trees, as if the forest was holding its breath. Slowly, painfully, the silence was broken by the creak of wood under strain. And then a sudden and vicious snap, followed by a long aching low of pain.

In the forest of her mother, and her mother's mother, the great Venusaur Urskog took her last step.

-----

In the forest of her mother, and her mother's mother, the old ghost Skogstjarn watched her daughter starve.

The great tree the Trevenant inhabited creaked. Its branches bent back and forth on themselves to the point of breaking as she stood helplessly over her daughter. She bid the branches of other trees to fall off, and softened them with decay to make them easier for her daughter to digest. She carried them to her child as her child had once fed her on her deathbed, when her own injuries of age left her unable to walk.

But this time no spirit of the mountains would be there to usher her baby to the other side.

Skogstjarn had seen it too many times with the children of other Trevenants, in recent years. A Venusaur would reach the end of their life, weighed down by too many decades of growth for their bones to bear. A bad break would lay them low. They would call their ancestors and settle in for the end. The Venusaurs would last for months, sometimes even a year or two, on fat reserves and what they could reach and grow from their surroundings. Desperate Trevenants, hoping against hope that if they held out long enough the Froslasses would come, would range out for food to carry back to their children.

But Venusaurs were not meant to settle. If the break didn't go bad, the land would. A fully grown Venusaur was a giant with a giant's appetite and the land could only bear so much. Eventually, they starved. They would rot and their bones would stand naked under the sun.

Skogstjarn uprooted herself, damaging the roots of the tree she possessed in the process. One more thing to fix. She stroked her daughter's head with a branch and winced at the pain which colored her daughter's low of affection. It was a struggle to make herself leave her daughter, but the nutrients in the clearing's soil were already strained. She had to range out to forage and grow fruits for her daughter. The longer they could avoid depleting the soil entirely, the longer Skogstjarn's daughter could last.

Because Skogstjarn still had hope. She had to have hope. If she and her daughter could only last long enough, maybe the Froslasses would come back. They had to come back.

As she walked away from her daughter, Skogstjarn raised her voice in song. She had sung every day since her daughter was laid low, with only one message to be heard. She sang as the wind through the trees, willing her voice to be carried up the mountains.

Please, she sang.

Please.

Please.

Please.

Come back.

The forest needs you.

My daughter needs you.

Please.

Please.

Come back.

Please.

-----

Diya woke up with a jerk, limbs caught in its sleeping bag. It was crying. Tears poured down its face and it felt the need to- to-

The dream slipped away like morning fog. Heart still pounding and chest heaving, the young ghost trainer pulled itself out of bed. It pulled its sleeping scarf - covered in Piplups - tight over its mouth and slipped outside of the tent.

It was still dark out. Only the faintest streamers of dawn lit the sky. The dull flicker of campfire Bashak was prodding provided more light.

The much larger boy turned his head at Diya's approach, surprised at their early rise. He hummed a welcome to the fire and gestured to a metal tin amid the coals. "Coffee?"

Diya shook their head, still too out of it to even think of navigating drinking liquids.

Bashak eyes sharpened. He took in the tear tracks on Diya's face and immediately let out a softly worried "oh". When Diya sat next to the fire, Bashak immediately shuffled closer and pressed their shoulders together. "You okay?" he asked.

It shook its head, then hesitated - it still felt indescribably soulsick, as though it was a Shuppet again and it had swallowed a grief too immense for it to process. But that was just from a dream, nothing for Bashak to actually be worried about. It wobbled a hand back and forth to ameliorate its previous response and reached for its pokedex to type out a more complete answer- then remembered it had left it in its tent. It sighed through its nose and left it at that. It could think about words later.

Though it should at least get its pokedex before its alarm went off. The alarm was relatively gentle music, but if June was roused by any sound she couldn't get to and she had to rush out into the cold to fix it, she would be grumpy the whole day. Diya couldn't ask for a better friend, but a morning person June was not.

Bashak, always comfortable with silence, let Diya's answer wait for later. He leaned companionably into Diya with one arm and pet his Herdier Greta with the other.

Diya though, despite the companionship, found itself feeling unaccountably lonely. Isolated, even, as it was all alone in the predawn darkness of the forest it and its companions were traveling through.

While it grappled with the feeling, wondering if something was wrong, Diya found itself staring off into the distance, its pink eyes always drifting to the same point in the forest. There was something there. Not where it was staring but … past it. Far past it. Then a puzzled rumble from Greta drew Diya's attention and as it looked down, it noticed that she was staring in the same direction. Off into the forest, at something far out of sight. Curious, Diya pulled down its scarf to just beneath its mouth and pulled in one slow measured breath through barely parted lips.

It was grief. Fresh and present and yet old in a way Diya had rarely ever tasted before, only ever when older residents of Ledos Village thought back to the mining disaster on the mountain. It called to Diya, the slowing drumbeat of a heart just on the edge of hearing, now that Diya knew to look for it.

Bashak followed Diya and his pokemon's gazes. His posture changed and a waiting coiled motion built up in his limbs. "Do I need to wake June?"

No. Diya shook its head. It wasn't that close and it wasn't about to drag Bashak and June into the woods to find it. Leader Ahmad had warned them all very thoroughly not to stray off the path between Canopy Town and Zima City. The road was safe during the winter, he had told them, but not the forest beyond it.

Whatever it was calling out for its sorrow to be heard would have to wait. Diya could write up a report for the rangers later in the morning, after it had talked the experience over with June and let her try to make sense of it.

But even as Diya tried to pull its gaze back to the fire and its attention back to the here and now, it knew. Something out there was mourning. It was in pain. But worst of all, it was forsaken. It needed someone and they weren't there. It was a wrong the Banette knew on a level that was soul-deep.

Diya would talk to June. It would write its report for the rangers and it would finish its trip to Zima City with its friends.

And then it would come back.

Because no one should grieve alone.