Chapter Text
As Violet explained to her mentor during their first trip to the Tinkatink community, there were hundreds of ruins scattered throughout Paldea. Some were little more than a couple of remnants of walls, while others were almost fully intact fortresses, castle walls, and religious sites. This one used to be a fortress-cathedral to the Flamebringer before it was destroyed after a lengthy siege by El Cid's forces.
The ones which weren’t preserved as tourist sites had mostly been taken over by Ghost-type Pokémon, or by tribes of Tinkatinks and Pawniards. They often raided each other’s ruins; the Tinkatinks for metals and murder-lust, and the Pawniards for rite of passage and practice for battle. The Tinkatinks normally won, merely because hammers were more effective than daggers and swords in melee combat.
“Did you know that swords were much more rare than we’d expect back in medieval times?” Violet asked her mentor. “Too much steel to be wasted on a single weapon. Only knights and lords carried them, more for status or duels than actual fighting. Real combat was done with...farm weapons by serfs, like scythes and pitchforks. Or by maces, axes, and warhammers, which were far more effective against plate armor than swords.”
“Did they ever use metal gauntlets?” Violet’s mentor asked. An appropriate question for a boxer...or wrestler, in her case.
Violet pondered. “I never came across them in any of the books I’ve read. I imagine that using gauntlets would give you a disadvantage, due to the decreased range.”
“And when did Pokémon begin being used?”
“Do you mean in Pokeballs, or—”
“Yes. My bad.”
“No, no problem. Pokeballs first began appearing in historical records around two and a half centuries ago. There are multiple claims of how they were made, or discovered, and currently there is no academic consensus on which claim is correct. Initially, Pokeballs could only contain Pokémon, so armies would enrage or inebriate Pokémon, catch them, and then throw the Pokeballs at their enemies. This sometimes backfired, but it was enough to change how warfare was conducted. Once Pokeballs could ‘domesticate’ their Pokémon and give the Trainers control, however...well, they stopped trying to improve muskets and cannons. And castle walls and fortresses finally became fully obsolete, for a Charizard could simply fly over them and roast you in what would become a stone oven. Before, only the Draconoids from Hoenn and the Harmonias from Unova could control true dragons and wyverns, but now, any Trainer with enough skill could. First, the military was revolutionized. Then, civilian lives were too, with many humans losing their livelihoods as they were replaced by Pokémon, since the capitalists and aristocrats found Pokémon far easier and cheaper to manage than humans. That led to the Progressive and Reactionary political parties forming in the regions of Solistia. The Progressives wanted to use Pokémon to create a work-free utopia for humans, while the Reactionaries wanted to get rid of Pokémon for any use...save combat, of course. They formed revolutionary groups, which took over regions and led to the Age of Dictators, which led to the Great War, which led to the formation of the International League to regulate how Pokémon could be properly used. Thinking about it...only Paldea remained ruled by a Dictator after the International League formed. Or...that depends on your definition of ‘dictator’. You’d think the Progressives would have been more resistant to falling to authoritarianism due to their focus on equality and uplifting the working classes, the ‘proletariat’, but no, the ‘Dictatorships of the Proletariat’ just became dictatorships. I wonder why. Are all extremist political philosophies doomed to authoritarianism, or were there corrupt politicians in the Progressive parties who should have been rooted out...or maybe it is due to the time period in which the Progressive parties emerged in. Democracies were rare in Solistia then, and those which existed were new, flawed, and quite hierarchical. Maybe now, in regions like Unova and Galar, where their democracies—oh, my apologies. I only meant to talk about Pokeballs and warfare, I never meant—”
“No, please don’t apologize,” Violet’s mentor assured her gently. “The political history—that was fascinating. And besides, I like listening to you talk. You have a pretty voice, Violet.”
Both Violet’s and her mentor’s faces went a bit red as Violet returned to the topic of castles and fortresses.
Most of the castles and fortresses were erected after the fall of the Second Paldean Empire, when Paldea splintered into more than a hundred states, largely based on religious affiliation. Worshippers of the Grey Shepherd and the Flamebringer fought vicious battles for centuries, raiding, occupying, and destroying each other’s castles and fortresses again and again, until the Houses of Aragon and Castile finally united the region under the Third Paldean Empire through marriage. The Grey Shepherd claimed dominion over Paldea, and worship of the Flamebringer was banned. Though then the worship of Arceus and the Circles arrived from Hisui, continuing the religious strife.
“How different was worship of the Flamebringer from worship of the Grey Shepherd?” Violet’s mentor asked.
“The Grey Shepherd is a monotheistic religion, built around the dualities of the cosmos and how they are simultaneously contradictory yet synergistic,” Violet began explaining. “Like the Twin Dragons of the Harmonia family. By contrast, the Flamebringer is a polytheistic religion. Well, it used to. The Flamebringer used to be just one god of thirteen, though the thirteenth wasn’t officially worshipped since he was the equivalent of...well, Dis, but actually, innately evil. He was the God of Fire, Light, Growth, and Fertility. But over time, worship of the other twelve faded away, likely because the Flamebringer was the only one with a large clergy, the Order of the Sacred Flame. So by the medieval times, the Flamebringer was essentially monotheistic, unless you count the thirteenth god, though it’s...inconsistent among the sects whether he is a brother of the Flamebringer’s, or a subordinate who turned rebel. It’s the former, by the way. The later was manufactured, as part of a revisionist effort to ignore the polytheistic history of the Flamebringer, and that only increased in effort when the worshippers of Arceus arrived. Though by then, worship of the Flamebringer was on its last legs.”
Though there were other religions. Even now, one can still find shrines to Desna, Goddess of Luck, Travel, and Dreams, on rarely travelled paths. And one cannot neglect to mention the worship of Kelemvor, God of Death, who was responsible for sending the souls of the departed to their proper fates in the afterlife. There weren’t nearly as many ruined temples of Kelemvor as there were of the Flamebringer, largely because they had been converted by either the Grey Shepherd or Yveltal.
One example of such a site was the Ossuary, located just north of Cascarrafa.
Though the Ossuary is not well-known, not even in Paldea. While the temple to Kelemvor above it had survived the formation of the Third Paldean Empire, being converted first to a gravesite and then to a temple of Yveltal, it had been torn down during the Dictator’s reign, with a cathedral to the Grey Shepherd built on top of the ruins.
Violet had visited the cathedral during one of her History courses in the second semester of her first year, HIST 333: Religions Of The Solistia Continent. The purpose of the field trip was to compare the different styles of architecture between cathedrals for the Grey Shepherd built in different historical periods. Cathedrals built on the Dictator’s command were relatively simple and undecorated compared to older ones, but they were massive, unnecessarily so, so that they would cow the citizens and remind them of the Dictator’s strength. They were like huge, ugly bricks which defiled the environment around them and mocked your inability to get rid of them.
As is usual, Violet drifted off from the group of students while in the cathedral, preferring to explore on her own. The students didn’t mind, as they disliked Violet.
And then Violet spotted an unimpressive wooden door. Curiosity sparked in her mind, and she tried to open it, expecting it to be locked.
It wasn’t.
It should be.
“Mew,” Isla whispered, encouraging his roommate to enter despite the 'DO NOT ENTER' sign above the door.
Violet sneaked inside, took out and turned on her flashlight, and proceeded down the stairs, with Isla watching from behind to see if anyone would notice. No one did. Waiting below was another door, this one with an emblem of scales above it. The symbol of Kelemvor. Violet tried this door too, and it was unexpectedly unlocked too. So she entered.
There was no source of light inside, with ancient Light Stones having exhausted their elemental radiant energies long ago. But Violet’s flashlight showed her what covered the walls and even the ceiling of the corridor before her:
Human bones.
Only the stone floor remained uncovered. There were bones of all kinds, and if Violet had bothered to remember human anatomy from Biology class, she may have been able to recognize them. But it took no effort for her to recognize the dozens, no, hundreds of human skulls packed in the walls, all of them facing out, examining her with dead-eyed stares.
The stares were too much. Violet had always struggled with eye contact, finding the act of looking into another’s eyes to be far too intense to maintain for long. But everywhere she looked, eyeless sockets maintained contact with her. She found herself having to stare at the floor.
And the silence. The silence was deafening. It threatened to expand in her ears and cause her entire head to explode, so she began speaking loudly: “Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?”
And then, as some sort of divine prank, her flashlight shut off. She just bought it a couple of weeks ago and seldom used it, so the batteries couldn’t have run out.
Isla, who had thus far encouraged Violet’s trespassing, was now meowing for them to leave. But Violet found her legs frozen in the pitch darkness. There was nothing but suffocating blackness all around her, threatening to close in and crush her, or even try and enter her—
“See me?”
A skeleton with the wings and head of a Corviknight approached. No, no, this can’t be real, Violet tried to assure herself. I’m hallucinating. The brain can’t accept total darkness; it creates images—
“We see ourselves as you saw us,” the voice continued, though it seemed to come from the hidden skulls rather than from the skeleton. “You see all ends here.”
“Are you down here, you idiot?”
Light raced down the corridor, dissipating the darkness and the skeleton with it. Standing at the door was Professor Lucia Chive, with her own working flashlight.
“Professor?” Violet asked.
“No, it’s the Grey Shepherd Himself,” Chive snarked. “Yes, it’s me. Of course I should have expected you to wander off and discover something. Maybe I should have left you here as a lesson. Curiosity kills the Espurr, Violet. Do you want to know how many idiots have gone missing in the Lumiose Catacombs?”
“I apologize, Professor. It’s just—”
“Save your apologies for the others. They’re stuck waiting for you above. I’ll expect a three page essay on the worship of Kelemvor as punishment. Now, let’s go. I don’t want any Ghost-type Pokémon to eat us. Though likely any down here would have starved long ago.”
...
“That must have been terrifying,” Violet’s mentor noted.
“At first,” Violet admitted. “But once I got over it, I wanted to learn more. Professor Chive was oddly accommodating, and she took me back there a couple of times. She even helped me fill out the forms requesting the Paldean League to recognize the ossuary as a historical site. That request is still...pending.”
“An...ossuary?”
“Right, I forgot to mention that. Ossuaries are places made to hold human remains. The largest in Solistia are the Lumiose Catacombs. Most ossuaries were built and maintained by devotees of Kelemvor, before the clergy of the Grey Shepherd and Yveltal replaced them. According to Chive, the ossuary we uncovered...it was likely constructed some nine centuries ago. Around a century before Uva was opened.”
“We should get back soon,” Violet’s mentor noted. “But please continue.”
“...I wonder how many more hidden ossuaries there are in Paldea, and if there are even larger ones. How many deceased humans wait to be discovered once again. What their stories were. And how we can honor their lives. Their histories.”