"Nothing is destined," he mumbled to himself. "Nothing should be destined. Ever." He looked at Lorrel again. "Did you ever consider alternatives to fighting it head on by yourself?"
"We didn't need any help. That was plain as day to everyone."
Lorrel laughed – a pained, absurd sound.
"There was never any doubt that we would triumph. And look – we did. The meteor was nothing to me."
It was true. Lorrel had swatted it from the sky like a fat, slow housefly. It would be easy to imagine the young god asking ordinary 'mon for aid, and sounding like he must be
joking. What help could anyone have offered him? Him, and his equally powerful partner, whose wings brought summer wherever she went.
"Was there another way?" he asked. "Another way instead of just standing back and letting the meteor hit?"
Powehi grunted, folding his arms.
"There is always another way. Many paths, and countless variations upon them."
He glanced at his bright counterpart, his eyes a contradiction – at once stone-hard and yet so, so soft.
"He should have been mortal. The odds should have looked steep, not laughably trivial. He should have had to work for his strength, appreciated the value of earned power, learned restraint and contingency. He should have tasted failure, and come to know that it is real. He should have become familiar with the world, and its frailty, so that he might see the towns evacuated and petition the aid of other heroes and divinities."
Dark Matter's eyes creased as he held back some fathomless, black sorrow.
"And if he should have come close to failing, I would have been at his side. I would have sheltered his soul. But now he is ablaze with Radiance, so much that I can barely stand to look at him. In guaranteeing the effortless destruction of that meteor, he let his light loose upon the waters, and frenzied Leviathan who slept beneath. On some other path, she could instead have helped him..."
“How should someone be able to meet you, normally? Maybe it won’t work, but we have to try it.”
Auriga's depthless light burned into Gladion's vision. If this was her phantasm, how blinding would the real thing be?
"There is a way. If I did not summon you, then I will not have the power to speak to you directly. I live in the aura of all this planet's life. I am ten thousand-thousand and more whispers under the skin of all 'mon. Only my champions can hear me truly, and there are limits even then. It is my nature. What you see before you is an impossibility. Unreal. I spoke with my shadow in the Astral Plains, not upon the steppes of Taleska. Yet there is a way."
The ground beneath Gladion rushed away from him, as if he were being pulled by some deity's hand across a thousand or more vertigo-inducing miles. For a moment, he glimpsed a temple of marble and wood, a brazier with a golden flame, pokémon in linen robes, the sun high in the sky—
"Go to the place where I come closest to the waking world. Go to my temple in the country that knows the secrets of the soul. Go to Auranosa."
"Lorrel," he began softly, "what is it that you did want?"
The Victini met Steven's eyes, and shuddered weakly.
"I wanted... to stay with her. With Amida. My old life, as a human... was nothing special. Why go back? I'd only miss this place. I'd miss everyone in it, her most of all. I'd miss being me, being Victini Lorrel, someone important. Someone useful."
He laughed again.
"I thought if I could live up to this... I'd get to stay."
"I could never allow an offworlder's essence as powerful as yours to integrate into the soul-stratum of Forlas," uttered Powehi, in a voice like granite.
"You wouldn't be able to stop me, old man," whispered Lorrel.
True or not, he sounded like he believed it.
