Chapter 16

The next thing Hayden knew, he was on his back in the sand, staring up at a glass ceiling. Everything hurt, but some parts more than others. Something blocked his vision at first, and he reached up to brush it away. Long strands of something pink, hanging in front of his eyes. His hair had changed!

"L-Liz?" he whimpered, reaching for her. The voice was wrong—it sounded like the one from his vision. That made his heart start to race, and panic flood into his chest. "Liz, where are you?" Had Camael somehow taken her away?

A light weight landed on his chest, then pressed up against his hand. He felt her warmth, the softness of her fur. There were burned patches, tender spots along her body. But she was there, alive. And bigger than he remembered. She didn't quite fit in his hand anymore. "We're okay," she whispered, reassuring as best she could. "We made it!"

"Camael?" Hayden asked, slumping his head back on the sand. It still hurt too much to move. Everywhere felt tender and bruised. But why did his voice sound so strange? There were other things just as strange, but his mind was too scrambled to place them yet. "Where is he?"

"Gone," Liz said. "He flew away before you woke up."

Hayden groaned, then finally tried to sit up. His body responded, though moving only made his pain more intense. His lower body was the worst, worse than any time he'd been on the losing side in a street war. Maybe that was why his voice sounded so weird. 

"I'm too… heavy," he muttered, shaking his head once. But whatever was clinging to him didn't come off, and he still felt the weight. He reached up to find it, but his hand found only soft pink hair. It extended down his head and past his shoulders, far enough he had to tug it with his fingers to finally find the end. "Is that a mew thing? Long hair?"

"Still not as long as my tail," Liz answered. She hovered beside him, hanging vertically in the air. Her whole body sagged, radiating as much exhaustion as he felt. All that really mattered to Hayden right now was getting out of these soaking wet clothes, then finding somewhere dark and quiet to sleep for a few days. He could figure out everything else after.

The strange dress slipped off one shoulder—probably it had come loose while he was blasted with energy. He put it back, but it wouldn't stay until he tightened the silk holding it together. Were his clothes bigger than before?

"Now the hard part… how do we get down?" He crawled towards the edge, then looked down. Fifty feet of open air waited for him. The shrine wasn't empty as it had been before. Two people waited there—Eleanor, and Lady Gracidea. The latter sat in a meditative position, silent and still. Eleanor had no such discipline, and paced about energetically, constantly glancing towards Hayden. She was the one who saw him.

"Hayden! You're alive!" Loch transformed in an instant, becoming a brown bird pokémon Hayden hadn't seen before. He flew up towards them, but couldn't make it all the way before curving back down.

He nodded, waving weakly back. "T-technically." He blushed, yelling did not make his voice sound less weird. He did so anyway. "C-can… someone help me down?"

Lady Gracidea opened one eye, squinting up at him. Even from fifty feet below, Hayden sensed her emotions then—a wave of incredible relief, transforming instantly to satisfaction. "I can come to your rescue, mew!" she yelled. "But you should not need me! I see the change. Even if you do not feel confident enough to fly, your daemon could lift you easily."

Hayden started shivering. The pain of his return and strange transformation had kept the cold at bay for a short time. But the more awake he felt, the more aware of his incredible discomfort he became. Liz wasn't wet, but she started shivering too, in sympathy. "C-can you get us down?" he asked. "So we don't have to…" 

He didn't have to finish. So we don't have to trust her. The pain they'd felt here wasn't Camael's fault. In ways Hayden didn't understand, he was bound to obey the call of Shaymin House. It was Lady Gracidea who had made the call, apparently a decade sooner than was proper. We lived anyway.

"I think so." Liz circled around Hayden, rubbing against his cheek as she passed. As she did, the weight pressing him into the sandy platform vanished, and he started to drift as she did. His hair expanded from behind him into a disheveled mess, his wet clothes stopped clinging to his body. 

He didn't panic. Instead, a feeble grin appeared on his face. "This is how it feels?"

She nodded. Her expression remained focused, but with far less life-and-death desperation than the last time. She wasn't on the edge of collapse from holding him up. "You should… learn too. Then we won't be stuck on the ground!"

The excitement of that possibility would've demanded he go straight up and explore, on any other night. Just now he was shivering with cold and ached with pains he didn't understand. The exploring could come later.

He slumped forward off the platform, and didn't fall. Not until Liz shoved on him, and the two of them angled down. Hayden had to hold the silly dress down to stop it from going everywhere—the pants he wore last time would've been much more practical.

Then he touched down. Liz's strength failed at almost that exact moment, and gravity reasserted itself in a flash. He sunk into the grass, hair a tangled mess and breathing heavy from Liz's exertion. 

He caught her in both hands this time, so he could hold her close without the mew getting wet. He stared weakly up at the ceiling, as the two members of Shaymin House stared down at him. 

Eleanor dropped down onto her knees beside him, brushing his hair out of his face. "What did the Guru do to you, Hayden?"

His only answer was a groan of pain, which predictably sounded like someone else's voice. 

"Exactly what we all knew would happen," Lady Gracidea said. Her hair was long and flowing again, and she held her daemon comfortably in her arms. She acted so confident, so perfectly calm. "At first I feared Hayden's miracle would be useless to us. House Mew already has a male heir, and everyone knows he is meant to take the Eldest's office. That old cat grows tired of his long life, but he would never yield that seat to a fluke of common birth. Hayden was useless to us in the form we found him."

Hayden struggled into a sitting position. He was still in so much pain that the movement cost him. He fought through it anyway, his shivers becoming more frequent. Why was everything so cold? "W-what do you mean, Lady Gracidea?" he asked. "We don't… understand."

She dropped to one knee in front of him, resting her hand on his shoulder. There was something almost tender in it, if her eyes weren't still so cold. "Sweetheart, you've just saved Sinnoh. Before, you were a threat—a potential challenger to the Eldest's office, when he has promised it to another. Thanks to your Unity, you are something else now. You've become a resource, one Shaymin House will use to barter an alliance with Johto. Prosperity will return to our region."

She stood up, lifting Hayden with her. That only caused more pain, her fingers digging into Hayden's shoulders. "Before you were a stranger to Shaymin house. Now, I welcome you as a member of my family. Welcome, miracle daughter."

She hugged Hayden's limp body with both arms, apparently not caring about the moisture. Hayden had a lifetime of hugs in his memory—but he'd never felt anything like this. Not the comfort he needed after a difficult day. Her arms were a vice, closing in around him. "Mew House will guess what we have done here. Since you lived, they will applaud our foresight in preventing a succession crisis before it began."

Eleanor scrambled to her feet, gaping at her mother. "All this time you've been working him to death in the shrine—this is what you always wanted. How could you? Shouldn't he get a choice?"

When Lady Gracidea let go, Hayden crumpled to his knees in the grass. Suddenly all his strange pains made sense—the difference in his voice, his hair. The feelings under his dress. Even the dress itself—it was what the girls wore to the shrine. "Why would you… do this?" he asked. 

Now he recognized it. A girl's voice, a little like Ellie's. But Hayden was even younger, so the voice was even higher pitched. He shook, but fought anyway. "I did e-everything you asked," he whispered. "I tried to be good. Why are you… punishing us?"

"I'm not, sweetheart." Lady Gracidea's voice even sounded softer when she spoke. Now that Hayden was different, now he was worthy of her sensitivity. Not before. "The world has only one male mew. It has been this way since the beginning of time. When your Unity grew, you became like your daemon—part of that system." 

She reached down again, tried to pat Hayden's shoulder. But he pulled away, recoiling from her. She continued anyway. "This is a natural process for your kind, Hayden. This girl was always trapped within, waiting to be free. Did you really think you were destined to be the Eldest?" She shook her head. "Commoners have such a simplistic view of these things, but it is different for the chosen of Arceus. Ber and I go through something similar whenever we use our flower. You should be grateful that this pain will arrive only once."

Eleanor stepped between her mother and Hayden, shielding him. "I… should've realized. Those old clothes you gave him, that dusty old cell in the house. The renovating next to me—you're just going to use him! The heir of Mew House—you're going to marry him off, aren't you?"

"Hayden would not need them for long," Lady Gracidea agreed. She turned to leave. "All this would not be necessary if you had settled as you should, Eleanor. But you refused to grow up. You insisted on maintaining whatever shallow imagination of freedom you created for yourself. For all we know, Hayden's fate may be your responsibility. Maybe if you hadn't failed me, he would've settled as an eevee like the rest of his family. Sadly the Celebi are extinct, and we will never know…"

She walked away without another word. When the locker-room door finally shut, she started swearing, a colorful, energetic combination of words that would've made the sailor kids of Sunyshore proud. 

Finally she dropped down beside Hayden, and took his shoulders in both hands. "Can you walk?"

Hayden whimpered in response. His whole body kept shaking, and only some of it were shivers of cold. He was sobbing, too. "D-dunno. We feel so… c-cold. Everything is different."

"Can't believe her," Eleanor whispered. "Did she tell you this would happen? She wanted to make you into her daughter?"

Hayden shook his head. He withdrew into his clothes, even smaller—then he changed. It came so naturally that he barely even felt the effort. His clothes felt looser, as the long hair went from pink to messy brown, styled in the short braid that all the townie girls wore. The wet dress hung loose, but that mattered less to an eevee. They were tough little foxes, they could adapt. What was a little cold?

He couldn't feel Eleanor's feelings anymore. But he didn't need to. Eleanor changed too—she got taller, and confidence appeared on her face. She bent down, and scooped the shivering Hayden into her arms. She stood, with strength only a legendary could muster. "Don't worry, little sister. I've got you."

She carried a crying Hayden from the shrine.