shatter

The air broke open around them and so too did her vision shatter.

Zora first stared at the box where Nebby was housed. It was a cage, a torture device meant to open the Ultra Wormholes she’d heard so much about. She couldn’t place it, but the Cosmog poked at the back of her brain in a way she couldn’t explain, and she knew she couldn’t abide them to be hurt.

But when she looked up at Lusamine, crowing pridefully about being the one to defend the world from this mysterious beast known as ‘Necrozma’, she stared straight into the portal beyond her.

The light hurt her sensitive eyes. The sensation was like her whole body was fragmenting apart.

Many, many different things flashed across her eyes. She felt her chest stabbed a thousand times, felt the burning of melting away. Felt the sheer pain of irradiation and lost control of her limbs, felt the distress and pain of a thousand lifetimes.

Most of all, she felt the sheer sorrow of having to hand her children off so they could be spared a world disintigrating.

She saw herself stare down a black beast and a man who held an entire planet thrall. She saw herself shifted into a furry monster like no Pokemon she had ever seen, ready to tear at the throat of a woman with four arms. She saw herself fighting her beloved mentor in a cave full of gray pools and humans in cages. She saw herself as a fusion of Zorua and human, staving off the mutated husks of beings she had never seen before.

And she saw herself, somewhere in space. A lanky teenager, watching as the ship breached the membrane between dimensions. Others went mad, she held strong.

And the Void reached out to her.

And the Void reached into her heart.

And she saw that dying universe again. She saw her and a man, holding each other close as a starry bat flew off with two babies. She saw the bat change them.

She saw Nebby.

Her daughter.

Serenity.

She embraced the Void in her heart, and took it, and turned it upon her beloved Kommo-o partner. Not realizing what she had done, where she was or that she had taken possession of her partner, she destroyed the cryopods containing the frozen Pokemon as Lusamine leaped through with the leader of Team Skull. White floor tile began to shatter under her feet.

They had tried to kill her daughter. Now they must all pay.

As the rift began to close, one more being dragged itself through. It was like her, but with a dragon’s horns and wings, who carried a solar eclipse in her horns and a lunar eclipse on the tip of her tail. With one mighty blow, she sent the possessed dragon hurtling to the floor.

Zora’s mind soon lapsed into blessed silence as the pain faded and she fell into quiet unconsciousness.