Change is good. It’s evolution. It promotes growth and bolsters strength in the wake of adversity. A lot has changed, and perhaps too quickly.

Change is not benign and not always gentle. It can tear you apart, leave you shattered, a fraction of yourself while you scramble to make sense of it and put the pieces of your soul back together again. Sometimes, too much change can be devastating.

Some say there are six stages of grief, but it all just feels the same in the end; Hollow.

That’s how she feels when she looks out over the splintered wood and unrecognizable remnants of what used to be her home. It hadn’t been her home in a long while, but it’s the only one she’s truly had since moving to Hoenn all those years ago.

She sighs, swallowing the painful lump bobbing in her throat, “Hello, Matias,” she doesn’t smile. She takes a wide step over a charred beam to stand beside him, “Are you alright?”

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MATIAS SILPH

Her gaze dances back and forth from the debris to the profile of Matias before she decides that she believes him. He seemed to change, finding a way back to the Matias she knew before Groudon. The one she fell in love with, “That’s good,” the words bleed into a sigh as her shoulders relax and she continues to take in the devastation around them.

“I’m fine, I guess,” language’s universal answer to ‘no, but I don’t want to talk about it’.

She takes her hands out of her pockets to help balance herself as she steps over a beam towards something beneath the soot that catches her eye. She reaches down and lifts a stained picture frame. Glass dully bounces off the wood as she extracts a partially burnt photo.

“I never really came to get all my stuff, did I?” she reflects on the realization for a moment, just now realizing she left with no real closure. She left a part of herself here and it burned with everything else. Just another part of her she’ll never get back, doomed to feel hollow for eternity.

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MATIAS SILPH

Dark soot stained the picture entirely It’s impossible to know what it once memorialized. She lets it drift back down to the debris as her hand falls back down to her side. There doesn’t seem to be anything salvageable, so what is she doing here?

She turns back towards him at the sound of his voice. Oh, that’s why.

“Then you didn’t know me at all.”

It’s a sobering thought, because if he doesn’t know her, who does? Is she really that alone?

She never stopped fighting for him. If he didn’t see that, maybe he’s just blind.

“What will you do now?”

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MATIAS SILPH

Her gaze shifts from him to the ground. There’s nothing in particular that catches her eye. It’s simply the weight of the insecurities and grief she still carries when he asks the inevitable question.

She says the same thing she does to everyone who asks, “The time for peace was over,” she shrugs lightly, “They needed something, someone . . . more for what was to come,” the persistent theme arises again: Eva just isn’t enough.

What they need lives in freya morningstar’s blood. Draconid is simply something Eva will never be, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It just simply is.

“It would have either ended with my death or when I had served my purpose. It just so happens the latter came first.”

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MATIAS SILPH

His disbelief comes as a surprise to her, so she pops her gaze back up to him with furrowed brows of confusion.

“Believe it?” she almost laughs. There’s nothing more true, more factual, “You can see it,” her arms gently wave as if she gesturing to the vision of Mega Rayquaza and a mutilated freya morningstar in front of them, “I don’t think I would have survived the transition.”

She became more convinced of that the more she studied the phenomenon as a whole. All the work she put into unlocking the dragon’s potential had manifested in the torture of someone she loves. Fate has a twisted sense of humor.

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MATIAS SILPH

Honestly, she’s not sure if she has survived worse. Emotionally? Probably. But what Freya goes through is straight torture. Painful, agonizing, but powerful all the same. She should be happy for Rayquaza, that it was able to finally reach its full potential, something she worked towards for years at their side. It’s shameful to feel a tinge of jealousy but it’s there . . . just buried down deep.

“No one deserves to die like that. She won’t and you won’t. I’ll make sure of that,” it’s a promise she’s made before and plans to continue to keep.

But his comment prompts the question, “Then how should I die?” If not dying for something bigger than herself, for a purpose greater than her, what should she die for? It would be a tragedy to live a life like theirs just to die heartbroken, alone, and for nothing.

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MATIAS SILPH

Eva’s lips curl down into a frown. Instead of just glancing back at Matias she shifts in the pile of rubble to fully face him.

“Everyone dies, Matias,” Death has been chasing them for years but they’ve somehow, against all odds, have managed to elude it. It started in Kanto. Death followed them here on the wings of a blood red R. It’s evolved since then, transforming itself into dangerous allies in the form of gods. This is the closest it has come to stealing them away.

“I don’t want to die anytime soon, but when I do. . .” she lets the word linger for a moment while she gathers her thoughts, “It’s not the how, really, that matters. I would want it to be for something, you know? Something bigger than myself. I won’t live forever but I'd like to create something that will,” Peace, hope, a lasting ideal that can not be killed. Something truly immortal.

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MATIAS SILPH