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Sundown found the shedding-skin woman at noon. The rock before her split with a terrible ringing and a person tumbled out from the crevice. A moment later the rock sealed again.
"Don't see that everyday," she told the woman and was met with a confused stare. But that wasn't much of a problem, not when a komala was clinging to Sundown's right arm. She tapped the pokemon's nose and repeated herself, and he squeaked obligingly, "Don't see that everyday."
The shedding-skin woman responded with a babble the komala repeated as, "Why is it bright?"
She'd first thought the woman was confused because she was from under the rock and explained to her of the sun. It turned out the woman was familiar with it but it had been night a moment before.
"Time is strange," Sundown agreed. "If you don't know why you're here, perhaps we'll find out. What's your name?"
The shedding-skin woman explained she didn't have one. "Only 'of my father's name, of my husband's name'[1], and to leave I left also all claim to that behind."
"Shedding-skin woman it is, then," Sundown told her. The shedding-skin woman said it was clothing and Sundown nodded and said, "So ridiculous to be all wrapped up in vast sheets of it like that[3]. Have you ever seen when a seviper gets lost in its own skin, ends up slithering in circles?"
"Oroboros," the woman said, and despite Sundown tapping the komala and even repeating the sounds to it, the komala offered no clarification.
Sundown gave up on the translation and just continued, "You put me in mind of that, like you'll get lost under it all."
And then the woman had asked about the lycanroc lurking at the edge of the horizon. She didn't know of them.
"Ah, well. It's said we brought them here with us, long ago, and we must have, for how else could stones cross an ocean[4]? Once we were terribly close, and even today our children are still kin to each other. But there's been some falling-outs since then and often all we are to one another is a meal."
The woman looked dismayed by this, so Sundown clarified, "Here in the day, he would not win such a fight. And at night, well, he is another one then, and that one does not yet wish to."
For all her concern, the woman collapsed asleep as soon as they stopped, and too deeply to wake when the lycanroc came close.
It was the nature of that one, the one who was a reflection of her as the moon was a reflection of the sun, to respond like to like, and so she stayed sitting on the ground and waited as he sat as well, his hands in his lap as her hands were in her lap.
"Your pet steps with cracked feet, Human," he said finally. "The two of you cannot outwalk me."
"I know, Lycanroc," she agreed, because there could no more be the familiarity of names between them. "But we will not harm each other, and I will reach the ocean and my cousins."
"We do not harm each other yet," the lycanroc said. There was want in his voice, but it was the wanting of wanting. He desired that he could desire to kill her. The him of the noon was made of reason inexorable as lava flowing, but the him of night was made of emotion. He would not act first.
It was not long before she and the shedding-skin woman reached the river. "Ah, ah," said the woman. "So there are forests here. Is yellow their color here?"
"There are trees in many places," she agreed. She gestured to the komala on her arm. "This one, he eats from the most common of trees, and the poison of their leaves burns the flesh beneath his skin black and keeps him asleep[5]. He will wake when he's been starved for some time, and only then will he share what he's discovered in his dreams. And then something can be done about the color of the trees."
The river was shallow but there were still some fish to catch. "Back in the beginning," she says, "this was only a tiny stream[6]. A grand hunter of my people traveled down it, searching for his wives, when for the first time appeared a wishiwashi, greater than any you've ever seen. As he fled the spears of the hunter, the thrashing of his tail dug out the stream into a river. Here at this bend is where the hunter threw one spear and he twisted the river in dodging, and then he swam and swam in a frenzy until he reached Sweetwater Sea. There, the hunter sank his spear into the wishiwashi's heart and pulled the body to the shore. He cut out the brain and it became the first bruxish, cut out the testes and they became basculin and set to fighting, cut out the swim bladder and it became wailord, cut out the kidney and it became rivamudii[7], cut off the tail and it became alomomola, cut off the lower fins and they became luvdisc and feebas and magikarp, cut off the upper fin and it became dokuprik[8], cut out the intestines and they became huntail and gorebyss, cut out the eyes and they became lenslet[9], cut out the stomach and it became manaphy, cut out the spleen and it became remoraid. Then the muscle he sliced to pieces and threw them into the water as well and now today wishiwashi are small. They still remember that they were once one creature, though, and keep trying to come together again, but they haven't the rest of themself."
When the lycanroc came in the night, he said, "You break the rules, trying to feed her. Those are not for you to cook. Let me eat her. Then you will be safe from us both."
She gave him the half of the wishiwashi she had saved instead. He snapped it up, crunching the bones. "It is only prohibited if I were seen by a human man, and there's only a lycanroc man and human woman here."
As they traveled along the river during the day, Sundown pointed to the crocky[10] lying hungry in the shallow mud and told the shedding-skin woman the story[11]
"There was a girl once," she said. "An ugly girl, her skin all rough and cracked, hair every which-way."
The shedding-skin woman nodded in understanding. That was most of the tale right there, wasn't it.
"This girl, she wasn't like the rest of the children. All she did was cause trouble. If she wasn't causing trouble with the little girls, she was causing trouble with their mothers, if she wasn't causing trouble with the little boys, she was causing trouble with their fathers."
"She was allowed to talk to the men?"[12]
"They'd sure have liked it if she wasn't, but ah, what did she care? Certainly the men, they told her mother, your daughter always makes trouble. If you don't stop her, something terrible will happen. But such an ugly girl, the other children had only to look at her face and say she was only more hateful by the day. A girl like that, she's never going to keep out of trouble. Now, she did grow up, of course. But when it came time for the elders to partner men and women, she was given to no one and no one was given to her. And that was no solution to the problem, so of course she only grew worse. Fed up, the men decided she must be punished. So they struck her and rolled her all over the ground, but she managed to get loose. She ran howling to all the spirits of the world to change her so she might revenge herself upon her people, and when she jumped into the mud of the river to escape the men she became a crocky. Now, when she gets the chance, she sinks in her teeth to drag us to the ground and roll us over and over in the mud."
The shedding-skin woman considered the pokemon below in the mud. "I never bit," she said after a while. "And all I cried was to run further." And she did not climb down.
The lycanroc crept up to Sundown in the darkness.
"I will reach the ocean."
The lycanroc barred his many fangs. "Would you rather die to their teeth than mine?"
"I would pick the teeth that have no complaints about my cooking."
The lycanroc laughed and the howl of it woke the shedding-skin woman. "Be calm," Sundown told her. "I have fed him so he cannot bite unless he is bitten."
"A scrap," he retorted.
"A scrap is enough. Under the stars, there'll be no biting until famine can take hold of your jaws from you." That was less true for the shedding-skin woman than it was for Sundown, of course, but so long as the woman was by Sundown's side, Sundown would be in the way of any bites and he knew it.
"And under the sun?"
"Even if I start to stagger, it's against all reason to fight by the river. I'll roll right into the mud if it comes to it and you know it's true. Cousin Crocky's another one who's said nothing against my cookfire, and she'll just as gladly chomp you down."
When they reached the Sweetwater Sea, she told the shedding-skin woman, "The great hunter, the one who cut apart the wishiwashi, he wandered about and still had not found his wives. But then, he smelled wishiwashi heating on a fire and knew they must be close, and he was very angry now, because it was forbidden for women to cook them or to eat them."
The shedding-skin woman was at first perplexed. "In this story, didn't wishiwashi only just appear?"
Sundown laughed. "Didn't I tell you, time is strange? A husband both his wives flee from, he's not the sort to care when and why, about whether people were ever told."
And the shedding-skin woman nodded in understanding.
"Now, so angry he is that he abandons his camp and his canoe, but the wives hear him coming and they build a raft of grass trees[13] and reeds and float from one side of the Sweetwater Sea to the other."
When the woman drank, she said, "There is bitterness to this."
And Sundown nodded. "That's why I'm here. When the river flows well, it goes from sweet sea to the bitter one. Now so little water comes from the land, so low is the sweet water, that the ocean flows down into the land."
"Can you change something like that?"
Sundown rubbed the head of the fussing komala. He'd begun to bite and blood marked her arm. "I'm bringing him to my cousins the anchorage[14]. He'll tell them of the world above, in waking and dreams. And the anchorage speak in turn with the serpents at the bottom of the world, who have such a power. "
In the night, the lycanroc accused, "You're no runaway wife."
"No," Sundown agreed.
"You'll be devoured," the lycanroc told her. "One way or another."
"I've told you, Lycanroc. It won't be your teeth."
In the day as they walked along the shore of Sweetwater Sea, there was a haze of heat in the distance, and they walked toward it. She told the shedding-skin woman, "Now, the wives went across the Sweetwater Sea, but sweet waters are all ringed by land. And what sort of great hunter would the great hunter be, if he would give up so easily? So he travels around the lake. He gets up to this and that, quite a lot really. He finds no sign of his wives for some time and, in a rage, he spears a sealiognite[15] who cannot flee because she is birthing her child. Back then they were of the water and the plants, but the blood runs down the sand and stains the rest of the sealiognite, kindles a fiery fury inside them, such that now they're of fire and water instead."
And the shedding-skin woman looked at the sealiognite barking and crying together on the shore with longing, but she said, "I never kindled."
"Haven't I a greater claim to your bones?" the lycanroc demanded that night. "You told your pet. When lycanroc and human no longer hunt together, we hunt each other."
Sundown said, "Our peoples will hunt together when this is done," though she knew that was not what he meant.
"I'm no longer a rockruff."[16]
"I know."
The komala's eyes were fluttering in the daylight. She headed along the shore, the shedding-skin woman following.
"The hunter kept traveling along the shore until he heard his wives. They were laughing and playing in the ocean's waters and had not heard him approach. He bellowed and his wives fled in terror along the beach. He followed at their heels. Now," said Sundown, pointing into the water, "in those days this was a peninsula[17]. The wives fled onto it. And he shouted to the ocean to rise up and return them to him so they could be punished, and the ocean swelled and rose in a great tide that swept them back. They swam against it until they could swim no further, and they sank beneath the waves."
The shedding-skin woman looked over the choppy waters, the sharp fins.
"And they became the anchorage," Sundown finished. "Who eat what fish they like and more besides, but will never return to land."
The shedding-skin woman stared out at the ocean and then stepped into the surf. Sundown followed, the water lapping at her feet. The woman pulled off the layers around her, revealing skin light as the sand[18], and she dropped them to join the foam of the waves. She held out her arms and Sundown handed her the waking komala. And she walked into the ocean.
In the night, there were no stars.
The lycanroc came for her in the morning. He bowed, jaw against the sand, and she nodded in return. "The air is wet," he told her. "The clouds circle."
"How good it is we did not eat each other, Brightsong," she chided him as he padded up on four legs to lie by her side[19].
"How good it is, Sundown," he agreed with the calm of day. It would not be until nightfall he could weep at what they had come so close to and she, at last, would do the same.
Before then, well. They were hungry. Together, they began to hunt.
1 The Romans[2] were an intensely misogynistic people, though largely not as bad as their predecessors.[return to text]
2 Perhaps best known for the "Roman empire", which stretched across almost 4% of the world, making them the twenty-fifth largest empire we know of, and judged historically, they would be ranked as the sixth largest empire up to that point in human history. (Bearing in mind, of course, the difficulty in estimating empire size in the Americas.)
3 The Romans, like a large number of primitive cultures, had various superstitions revolving around women's status as men's property and the idea that beholding any part of them could steal or damage that property. As such, she is veiled.[return to text]
4 Rockruff and lycanroc, as Alolan pokemon, would be of the Asian/island dog subgroup, which is the same line the dingo came from. The fact rockruff run off as they reach maturity is particularly fitting, as many dingo could not be kept past childhood.[return to text]
5 Eucalyptus trees contain a variety of toxins, some so flammable they can spontaneously ignite.[return to text]
6 Based off the story of Ngurunderi.[return to text]
7 Rivamudii: Barramundi + river + mud. A pokemon based off what's now known as the Queensland lungfish. The fish currently referred to as the barramundi, ironically, does not appear to be one of the fish the word was meant to apply to.[return to text]
8 Dokuprik: dorsal + kuparu + prick. A pokemon based off the fish known in English as the John Dory, called kuparu by the people who live on what's now known as New Zealand. A flat fish with a pronounced dorsal fin. Doku is additionally poison in Japanese.[return to text]
9 Lenslet: Eye lens + Agassiz's perchlet/-let suffix, a diminutive. Partly transparent and so sometimes called glass fish, but not as transparent as the glass fish common to the aquarium trade.[return to text]
10 Based on the scrapped early pokemon kurokii.[return to text]
11 Based off the story of why the crocodile rolls.[return to text]
12 See [1].[return to text]
13 The lack of a comma is not an error. Grass trees are a subfamily of plants found across Australia.[return to text]
14 Based on the scrapped GS beta pokemon, ikari (anchor/anger).[return to text]
15 Based on the scrapped GS beta pokemon, bomushikaa (bomb + ashika, sea lion). Sealiognite: sea lion + gelignite, an explosive.[return to text]
16 Dingo are better considered "tame" than "domestic". Like many wild animals, they can retain family bonds they make as puppies but will not make new ones as adults.[return to text]
17 The peninsula disappeared due to rising sea levels around ten thousand years ago. These and other stories referencing submerged land are currently considered to be the longest known preservation of historical information by oral tradition.[return to text]
18 The idea of the Romans as "white" is rather like the idea of Jesus as white, a convenient way of cleaning up history into a single line of civilization that a single race can be credited with. It also serves to erase their actual descendants.[return to text]
19 Overall, the relationship between humans and dingoes is a complicated one - practically kept for food and warmth, but nursed at the breast as puppies, revered for their help in hunting game and sniffing out water, and spoken of in stories in the same way as a separate tribe of humans might be.[return to text]