FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

by Quincy Connally, originally posted at https://archiveofourown.org/works/20919452

The mountain path leveled off, and just over the crest of the hill I got a view of the Yellow Sand Labyrinth from above. It was funny how the winding paths, which seemed so vast and confusing when I was in the thick of them, melted into the mountains and sand dunes in a scene that was almost serene. The midday sun felt like it was slow-cooking me in my thick coat, and layers of sandy dust had worked their way into my fur all the way to the follicles, making me feel prickly all over. I wasn't, and never would be, adapted for this environment, yet here I saw a little reminder as to why I couldn't stay away.

My partner, Brush, came up the path beside me, annoyingly spunky and full of energy as always. I wasn't sure if her being a fennekin made her more able to withstand the climate or if that was just her natural buoyancy. "There," she said. "Now that we're a little higher up, we should be able to get our bearings."

That seemed unlikely. The paths ahead of us looked even more gnarled and impenetrable than the ones we'd just made it through, and if there was a way through up into the mountains beyond, I couldn't discern it from where I was standing.

"Right," I said. "Get our bearings. Because we're totally not lost."

"You can't really be lost_in a place that hasn't been _found_yet," she replied. "We're not lost, we're _exploring. That's our whole reason for being here, remember? We'll explore this area for as long as we have to, until we find our way to the next area so we can explore that."

That didn't really inspire a lot of confidence. Brush spread our map on the ground in front of her, then set down an inkwell, dipped one claw in, and carefully sketched our path into the blank space. The area we'd come through looked like a tangled pile of string on the paper, a mess of paths looping back on themselves, and dozens of dead ends. While she was busy with that, I took down observations in my notebook about our surroundings: the type of stone, the type of sand, plants, pokémon, elevation ... When we returned these would become raw data for the Expedition Society, groundwork for future expeditions, like the first impressions of science.

It had been Brush's idea to take this job. A baltoy had stumbled upon the passageway to this hitherto-unexplored part of the labyrinth, and further in he swore he saw a beautiful spring, possibly the source of one or more of the rivers flowing west toward the sea. The Society wanted to find this source and complete our knowledge of the rivers, but it was impossible to do so by going up the rivers because of the many impassible waterfalls along the way. So on receiving this rumor they decided to send one team--that's us--to find the spring if we could, then follow the rivers from there down to the sea, where our lapras friend would be waiting to ferry us around the southern coast of the continent back to Sahra Town. When Brush saw the job, she practically bolted with excitement. With our past experience in the labyrinth, she argued, we were perfect for it--she didn't seem to remember or care that that last job had been a trap, and we had barely escaped with our lives. But danger is a matter of course in this profession, so we prepared well for the trip, and off we went.

"Okay, I think I've got it for now," I heard her say. "Let's push on and check out the area below."

I packed up my things, and as I did I checked over our supplies, the bunches of fruit, berries, and seeds that were at once our provisions, medicines, and weapons. We were already starting to run low after some encounters with wild pokémon.

We descended the path back to the sandy floor of the desert. I kept my ears open for attacks as we walked. I heard slithering and skittering from creatures just out of sight, watching the intruders in their midst, deciding whether to hide or defend their homes. They were staying away, for now, but somewhere close I heard something larger, something four-legged, just beyond the rocks ahead. I cautiously peered around the bend and came face-to-face with a poochyena, teeth bared, stalking me through the sands and ready to attack.

I leapt up and clawed him across the snout, then as he was recoiling, I headbutted him in the shoulder and sent him sprawling to the ground away from me. Another poochyena was close by, about to jump in the fray. "Brush!" I called, and she was beside me, heat blaring out her ears and flames blazing from her mouth. But then we stopped. The one I'd hit was sitting up on his haunches and gingerly pawing his nose while the other examined him. "Why'd you do that?" the wounded one said. "Argh, I'm bleeding, ooooowwwwww ..."

Of all the things they could have done just then, that was probably what I was least prepared for. I glanced sideways toward Brush, and I did not like the look she was giving me back, like I'd dumped a pitcher of sitrus cider on her date at the tavern.

"Why?" I said back, sternly. "You attacked me, didn't you?"

"Um, I don't think so? I was just sniffing around. You raised claws first."

"But I ... You ..." I could hardly believe the position I was in. I could still clearly remember the snarling teeth coming to attack me, but I admit it happened pretty fast. Now the two of them looked about as menacing as tulips. The hit one looked actually pretty pathetic, holding his nose with both paws and whining in pain like a puppy. Argh! Trust me to be the first-ever explorer to be made to feel guilty for hitting a wild pokémon first!

Brush advanced a step. "What my partner means to say is, sorry about that. We've already had a few scraps today, and we're a little on edge, that's all." She reached into her satchel and pulled out a cloth napkin, which had been holding a bundle of berries before we used them. She offered it to the poochyena.

"Anyway, nice to meet you!" Brush went on. "I'm Brush, and this is ..."

"Luna," I said."

"We're from the Expedition Society!"

"Expedition Society?" said the uninjured one. "I've heard of them, but never seen any out this far."

"Well, yeah, you wouldn't have seeing as we're the first to come out here, _exploring_and all. We're the preliminary expedition! Boldly going into uncharted territory! Blazing a trail so that others may follow!"

While she was going on, I crept closer to the injured one. "I really am sorry," I said "How's your snout?"

He pulled the bloody napkin away. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, at least. "Not too bad. I've had worse," he said, and he gave me a little smile.

I smiled back, before I heard Brush say to the other one, "Anyway, what are _your_names?"

"I'm Copper," said the one she was talking to. "That's Shale, my brother."

"Your brother! Nice!" she said. "Which of you's older?"

"We're from the same litter," Shale said. "We left our natal clan about a year ago, but ..."

Copper picked up: "We haven't really found, um ..."

"Much success, on our own," Shale continued, "like, finding our own range and stuff."

"So we're sticking together, for the time being anyway."

"Aw, that's sweet," Brush said. Then a bolt of inspiration seemed to pass through her. "Wait! You guys are _from_here, right? So you must know the way to the spring! Could you take us there?"

"The way to the what now?" Shale said.

Brush took out the map again and spread it on the ground. "We're here," she said, pointing. "Over here there are rivers flowing west to the ocean, but we don't have them fully mapped yet. We heard about a spring around here,"--she circled a part of the blank space with her claw--"that might be the source of one or more of these rivers, but we're having some trouble getting to it."

Copper and Shale huddled over the map, staring at it like they were trying to figure out what it was. After some moments, Copper pointed and said, "We're here?"

Brush nodded.

Then he pointed to the blank space and said, "And you're trying to get here?"

"Yep! Can you help us?"

"Well, we haven't been to that exact spot ourselves yet ..."

Shale said, "I think I might have heard something about a spring?"

Brush said, "Do you think you could find a way?"

The poochyena studied the map even more closely. "Well I wouldn't go this way," Copper said, pointing to the part of the map that represented the area just west of us. "That leads into the valleys. There might be a way back up the mountains through there, but you could be wandering around for weeks trying to find it."

I shot Brush a glance, but she didn't seem to notice.

Shale pointed to a spot a little further north. "Maybe we could take the path here?"

"That goes a little further around the mountains," Copper said.

"Yeah, but we could turn onto this path here, and ..." and I couldn't hear the rest as they huddled in close, jabbing the paper and arguing back and forth in hushed voices. Brush and I sat quietly, letting them go on for a while before she decided to interrupt.

"So, what do you think?"

Copper looked up, then abruptly cleared his throat. "Um, yeah, sure. I think we could get there, one way or another."

"Great!" Brush said, leaping to her feet. "Let's go!"

Copper and Shale exchanged a nervous glance, but a moment later we all rose to our feet. Brush picked up the map, and we were off, our new guides leading the way.

We walked through the corridors until we reached a path leading up into the mountains. There were more wild pokémon along the way, fraxure and quilladin and typhlosion and such, but most didn't bother to attack a group of four healthy-looking adventurers, and the few who did we were able to fight off together. But as our path opened up over a wide mesa, I noticed someone watching me from a ledge higher up. It was another poochyena, and another close by him, and another. In fact there were dozens of them, poochyena and mightyena, watching us from among the rocks in all directions. I leaned in close to Shale and whispered, "These wouldn't happen to be friends of yours, would they?"

He looked at our observers, and then to me with a face that was the opposite of reassuring. "Yeah, um, about that ..."

That was when they all started moving in. They cut off our way forward, standing tall with ears cocked and manes bristling. They showed no teeth, but I could hear low-pitched grumbling from deep within their throats. We tried to back up, but we saw that others had come up behind us.

"I was hoping they wouldn't spot us," Copper said.

"Hoping who wouldn't spot us?" I snapped. "Who are they?"

Shale spoke up next. "Yeah, so, we might have forgotten to mention that this route takes us through Phacelia's clan's territory."

"Who's Phacelia?" I said.

Copper gestured his nose straight ahead at a mightyena standing tall at the head of the pack. "Phacelia. She's the head of this clan, and this is their range. It's a pretty big range, though, so there _was_a good chance no one would be here when we came through ..."

Brush sidled up to me slowly. "With a boost from you, I might be able to make a big enough flame to dazzle at least some of them. That could give us the edge we need to fight through or escape."

I didn't like our odds. We'd fought groups before, and there were four of us, but this was a _lot_of opponents. Still, I bared my teeth along with Brush to let them know we wouldn't go without a fight.

Suddenly, Copper and Shale leapt in front of us. They crouched low, practically onto their knees and elbows, and looked up at our aggressors with ears and manes flat. All was quiet. I stood frozen where I was until I felt Brush nudge me in the side. I glanced sideways to see her signaling me to follow their lead. We crouched low and flattened our ears and fur.

Phacelia, flanked by some other larger females, approached Copper and Shale. She put her nose close to theirs, looking down on them as she sniffed, but they held their ground and kept their noses extended toward hers. After what seemed like forever, she gave a disdainful snort right in their faces, then with a sharp grunt-laugh she turned her back and walked away. The others followed, slinking back into the rocks like water draining from a basin.

Brush and I could hardly have been more flabbergasted. Alone again, we rose into our natural stances, and Copper said, "Let's get out of here."

"How did you do that?" Brush said incredulously.

Copper and Shale glanced to each other, like they didn't understand the question.

"What do you mean?" Copper said. "We just told them we weren't worth the trouble, and they decided not to bother with us."

"Oh, right," said Brush, "of course, why didn't I see it? You told them. Without a single word. You _told_them."

Poor Copper and Shale looked more confused than ever. They didn't respond, but I think I understood. They'd used the nonverbal signals of their kind, messages understood by instinct between one another. It occurred to me that I'd never once met another of _my_kind. What was our instinctual language? Did I know it, buried somewhere deep in the part of my brain that had once been wild, sometime long ago? If I came face to face with a wild eevee, would I be able to speak to him without speaking to him?

We passed over the mesa as quick as we could. By then the sun was setting, so when we felt we'd put enough distance between ourselves and Phacelia, we started looking for a place to settle for the night. We found some caves in the side of the mountain, just big enough for the four of us to stretch out a bit. Brush immediately rolled onto her back, splayed her limbs in all directions, and went to sleep. Copper lay just beyond her and slept with his head on his front paws. But I was still awake. The moon was out, and the great expanse of sand and rocks before us took on a silver glow. Hundreds of pokémon roamed and slithered and hunted across these hills, but they were quiet now, at peace, and I felt, not for the first time, that I was an interloper in this world, and that made me sad for some reason. Shale fidgeted somewhere behind me. He rolled over, yawned, and smacked his chops, and when he saw that I was still up, he crawled up beside me.

"Hey," I said. "I don't know if I said it already, but thanks for saving our hides today."

"Oh. It was nothing," he said, and he looked like he meant that.

"Also, thanks for guiding us through the Yellow Sand Labyrinth. We'd probably still be lost in the valleys if it weren't for you."

"Yellow Sand Labyrinth? Is that what you call this place?"

"Yes? What, you don't call it that?"

"We don't really have a name for it. It's just ... here, you know? It's our whole world. A labyrinth sounds so ... treacherous."

"But ... it _is_treacherous, isn't it? It's full of traps and pitfalls and pokémon who attack us on sight. Whenever we come here we have to prepare carefully, and even then explorers get lost or injured sometimes."

"Hm. Well, I've been here my whole life, and I never really thought of things as particularly difficult or dangerous. We know how to find food and water, and all the ways to get by and stay safe. Sure, we have troubles, but so do you, don't you?"

"I suppose," I said. I felt a pang of guilt. Even though I _knew_that he and plenty of others lived here, the more I got to know him as a pokémon I could sit and have a conversation with, the harder it was to imagine him going to sleep in a den every night, drinking from a dirty watering hole, scrounging for every single meal. It seemed like a life of such constant danger, yet I couldn't account for my feelings as I watched the moonlit horizon, like an indecipherable longing for something I couldn't name.

"What kind of place do you come from?" Shale said.

"Well I _come_from the Grass Continent, but now I live in Sahra Town. It's a nice little town. It's got cobblestone streets so we're not walking on sand all the time, and buildings made of stone, bricks, or wood. We can get supplies at the general store and coffee at the café before we take a job and strike out on an expedition like this one. You can just walk around and not have to worry about rival clans coming out from the rocks to attack you. It's a place to rest and replenish between excursions into ... into the wild."

"Sounds nice," he said. "I heard there used to be a corsola colony there. They were driven away when the first lapras arrived."

I had no answer to that.

"So, what's with this spring you're trying to find, anyway? Why's it so important? Is your town low on water or something?"

"No, nothing like that," I said. "We have plenty of water. We're just trying to increase our knowledge of the continent. If we can follow the rivers from the spring all the way to the coast, we could add a lot of data to our maps."

"And ... then what?"

"And then--I mean--" I wasn't prepared for the bluntness of the question. It was actually kind of galling, and I was frustrated by the roadblock my thoughts came to trying to think of a response. "I don't know. And then we'll know more about the world we live in. That alone is worthwhile, isn't it? Knowledge is power, as they say, and our mission--the Expedition Society, that is--is to gather as much knowledge as we can. We don't really have an end goal, we just keep on doing it."

"Yeah, okay," he said. "Just doesn't strike me as the most ..._immediate_reason to brave all the perils of the labyrinth, fight savage natives, and suffer to walk on sand instead of nice cobblestone streets. In my case, there'd at least have to be a chewy bone or something at the end to incentivize _that_kind of journey."

I couldn't help but laugh along with him. "Okay, but seriously. You've never felt that urge to just go out and learn something? Find someplace you've never been before? Curiosity, the call to adventure?"

"What? Oh, yeah, all the time. You can't live in a place like this and _not_see new stuff every day. New places to get shade or fresh water, new places to build dens, sleep, hunt ..."

"Come to think of it, it's kind of funny that I'm out here risking my neck to explore this place you've been exploring your whole life. Like we could just ... ask you, or something, but that wouldn't be enough. We need to see it for ourselves."

He stopped and stared into the moonlight for a while. I didn't know if he wasn't sure what to say next, or if he just didn't feel the need to say any more. I wondered if I should say something. Probably something about how it was late and we needed to get some sleep. But I didn't really want to. I was enjoying this moment, just Shale and me, and the quiet landscape before us.

Eventually we did sleep. The next morning we came down from the mountains and out onto the windswept dunes. With less shade and fewer sources of shelter, the sun became a cruel burden as it climbed into the sky. By midday we were sweltering, so as we came to a rocky ridge we stayed along it for what little shade we could get. We came to a split in the rocks, and we saw that it lead into a narrow valley, open to the sky yet surprisingly cool at the bottom.

"This should come out further west," Copper said. "We can cover some ground and stay out of the direct sunlight for a while."

It was certainly a relief after the distance we'd crossed in the open. We made our way through the narrow passage, but as I looked off to the side I saw the glint of a pair of yellow eyes, peering at me from behind a rock. It was an ekans, not moving, but his gaze was locked on me. I hurried up to Shale to whisper an alert, but he, Copper, and Brush had already seen the dozens of other snakes sprawled in various positions around the valley floor.

"You did not lead us straight into a viper's den," I said.

"Not on purpose," Shale said.

"Got any more tricks to make them leave us alone?" Brush said.

"Not exactly," Copper said. "But they're down here cooling off, same as we are. I bet a lot of them are still digesting their morning catches. They're not looking for a fight. Just walk slowly, don't get too close or make any loud noises or sudden movements, and we should be fine."

So we went, slinking through the corridor of venomous fangs as quietly as we could. I felt my fur stand on end as we passed one motionless snake after the other; I could feel those fangs sinking into me at any moment. Most of the ekans seemed to be asleep, and they didn't move or look at us at all, but a few followed us with their eyes as we went by. Brush, ever curious, wandered up to one, poking her nose at it. It hissed and rattled, and she darted back and pressed herself into my side.

We walked closely around a set of low rocks, and as Shale placed his left hind foot by one, he stepped directly onto a skorupi who'd been resting unseen in the sand. The startled creature buried its stinger in Shale's flank. The sound that escaped him was unreal. He fell on his back and shook his legs frantically, but the scorpion held tight with the pincer-like claws on its tail, the rest of its body flailing in the air like a toy on a string. We barely had a moment before we looked back to see the ekans, who didn't look happy to have been disturbed.

Flames erupted from Brush's mouth, like a wall of fire in front of her as she charged to meet the pouncing snakes. I lent her my helping energy, making her flames even brighter. Charred serpent corpses bounced off her fire wall, incinerated as she tore through their ranks, but she couldn't keep it up. She spit fiery embers frantically to keep the waves of scaly flesh at bay, but the purple tide was slowly overtaking her. I jumped and flipped in the little space I had, and my star-like projectiles beat them back, giving us a little more crucial space. Copper, meanwhile, was tending his brother. He bit savagely through the skorupi's tail, severing its body from its stinger, but the stinger, even brainless, remained clamped in Shale's leg and wouldn't be dislodged.

Another ekans nearly sank its fangs into my eyeballs before I ducked it and sent it flying with a takedown. Then Brush shouted, "Luna, we need to get out of here! Time for some artillery!"

I didn't hesitate. I dug my snout into my satchel and pulled out a blue orb. I took it in my paws and threw it out in front of me as hard as I could, and there was a flash, and all the ekans stopped, frozen in their mid-battle positions like fierce statues. I yelled back to Copper and Shale, "Come on, before it wears off!"

Copper pushed his head under the whimpering Shale and slid him up onto his back, and we bolted through what was left of the valley as fast as we could. Once we were in the open again, we ran along the ridge until we were far enough to set Shale down. Copper looked absolutely panicked, sniffing at the stinger still reflexively pumping poison from its venom sac. Brush came up to him, and together they each hooked one canine tooth around one of the pincers and pried in opposite directions. Shale cried out piteously, but in a moment the stinger snapped, and pieces flew in three different directions. The wound, however, wasn't any more reassuring to look at. It was strangely lumpy, and sickening shades of purple and black.

"What do we do?" Copper said, beside himself.

Brush and I had dropped our bags just a little ways back. I dashed over to mine, pulled out a bright pink berry, and brought it to Shale. I offered it to him, held gingerly in my teeth, and it was only as his nose came close to mine that I caught myself, pulled back, and placed it on the ground in front of him. He snapped it up and chomped it messily in his jaws, making wet smacking noises and dripping berry juice down his chin and neck.

We all held our breath, but by degrees Shale seemed to calm, and soon he was able to stretch out his limbs and wiggle his toes. It was still a nasty sting, but the color was already returning to normal.

Copper came up close to his brother and said, "Y'alright, pup?"

"Better now," Shale responded.

Then Shale started to laugh. It was a peculiar, unsettling sort of laugh, a yipping noise that started small and then seemed to overtake his whole being. I thought for a moment that the poison was affecting his brain, but then Copper joined in, and the two of them were rolling in the sand together, completely given over, like creatures possessed. Brush and I just watched them. I was nearly certain they'd gone crazy.

"I'm sorry," Shale said, when at last he collected himself. "I'm just ... I was absolutely certain we were done for!"

"You two are really incredible," Copper said.

Brush seemed aglow at the praise. "Well, it's a good thing for you we explorers come prepared for everything," she said.

"No kidding. What was that thing that made them all stop? That was amazing!"

"Oh, that?" I said. I hadn't thought about it at the time, but I guess they wouldn't have anything like orbs out here where explorers hadn't been yet. "It wasn't really anything special. Just a Petrify Orb."

"Well, your 'nothing special' sure got us out of a nasty situation. Do you have more of those? Could you freeze _me_right now if you wanted to?"

"For a few seconds, yeah," I replied with a smirk.

"We do have a few more," Brush chimed in, "but they're pretty expensive, so we only like to use them when we're in a tough spot."

Copper was still pretty excited, so while Brush kept indulging him, I walked up to where Shale was licking his flank with his rough tongue. "I'm glad you're not dead," I said.

"Me too," he said. We smiled, and I felt myself drawn closer to him. I touched my nose to his, just for a moment.

Then I caught Brush in the corner of my eye. She was watching me, with an unsettling grin on her face.

She walked up to Copper and rubbed her body against his, curving her spine all around him. "Well, now that the life-threatening danger is out of the way," she said, "how about we have some fun?"

You would think that Copper had stepped on a tack for how instantly alert he was, his ears and his fur all standing on end. I was doing the same. Brush?_I thought, loudly, as though she would hear. _What the hell do you think you're doing?

But Copper responded to Brush's advance. He crouched low, flattened his fur and ears, and looked up at her, teeth bared but in a way that seemed more inquisitive than aggressive. He made a sort of low grunting growl and flicked his tail back and forth. Brush encouraged him with inquisitive flicks of her ears and tail, standing on her hind legs with her nose out toward him.

I looked over to Shale. He was wearing the same dumbstruck expression I probably was, the two of us glancing back and forth between our partners and each other. As I looked at him, a powerful desire coursed through me, spreading from my heart through my veins out to every capillary. Yet at the same time, terror gripped me so hard I couldn't breath. Disjointed thoughts raced through my head--Here? Now? With him_?_--but the desire threatened to possess me. I took a step toward him, and the instant I did, he seemed to transform before my eyes. He wasn't simply Shale, our friendly guide in an unfamiliar land. He was a wild animal, in his natural habitat, speaking his native language, driven by instinct rooted in him over millions of years. He crouched low. He flattened his ears. And he showed me his teeth, and I heard those low-rumbling growls.

I could hardly have stopped what happened next. I flicked my ears and tail, and before I knew what I was doing, I turned around. I faced my backside toward him and pushed my tail to one side to present him my rump. He sniffed my rear, pushing his cold nose into me--then I felt his tongue. Each lick sent a wave of pleasure through my body, and I started to slicken up. It wasn't much longer before he pounced. The excitement as he mounted me was like nothing I'd ever felt before. His claws scratched my back and shoulders as he came down on top of me. He set his paws on the ground beside my shoulders, and I felt his energetic jabs into me. The tip of his spear started to come loose from its sheath, and with a few more thrusts it found its home in the folds of my slit.

He didn't slow down for a moment, passing his length in and out of me, all the way down to his knot hitting my lips. I could still hear his low growling just in my ear. He bit down on my neck--not hard enough to really hurt, mostly he just got a mouthful of my thick scruff fur, but I could still feel the power of his jaws through his vice-like grip, pulling my fur and skin ever so slightly, clamped so tight it would have been impossible to get away. It sent tingling sensations all the way down my back, through my limbs, into the tips of my toes. My face and chest were pressed into the sand, and still he growled more and more excitedly into his mouthful of fur, pumping into me faster and faster.

My front claws splayed in and out, digging troughs in the sand in front of me. The pleasure built to a peak, and that's when he pushed his full length into me, and with a final shove, slipped the knot inside me with a pop. The ring of muscles just inside me grabbed him, and pleasure crashed over me in waves, my body pulsing rhythmically in time with his while he filled me with warm seed. Never in my life had I felt so full.

He let go of my neck. We both started to catch our breath, and soon we were back to reality. He was Shale again, our friendly guide, on top of me, tied with me. I thought I should say something, but all I could manage was, "Wow, that was ... Not like ... Anything, before ..."

He was abashed all of a sudden. "I'm sorry, I guess I got a little, um, caught up in the moment. Should I not have ..."

"No!" I said. "No, it's ... Thank you. That was really great."

"Oh," he said. "I'm glad."

He nuzzled me affectionately in the neck, and I licked his jowl in response. I caught a glance of Brush, truthfully just then remembering she was there, but almost immediately I looked away again. She was tied with Copper, but she was looking at me, and something told me she had been for a while. Forget her, I thought. Even she couldn't spoil the bliss I was in.

It seemed like forever, yet when the knot shrank enough to pull out, it felt like it had been too short. He sat on the sand to clean himself--I didn't do the same. Brush made a loud moan as Copper pulled out of her, and she laid on her back looking extremely pleased.

The four of us just sat for a while, not saying anything, until Copper said, "We should probably get moving. I think we're almost there, and we might be able to find your spring before, um, before dark."

The sky was just starting to redden when we crested a hill and saw green, and in the middle of that, blue. Brush leapt with excitement. "That's it! The spring!" She danced around Copper, Shale, and me. "We found it! Yes! I knew we would!"

"And there's the river," I said. "Shouldn't take long to reach the coast."

I was smiling, gratified to have reached our goal, and when I looked at Shale, he looked like he felt the same. But there was a bit of something else mixed in.

"I bet they'll be telling stories of the trail you blazed for generations," he said, with a slight chuckle. "So, I guess this is where we leave you."

And then I felt it too, something quite like sadness in the pit of my chest.

"Thank you so much for your help!" Brush said, perfectly cheerfully. "We never would have made it without you."

"It was nothing," Copper said. "It was a ... fun couple of days."

"It certainly was," Brush said.

I looked to Shale and said, "This doesn't have to be it. Why don't you come with us? See Sahra Town! I bet you'd love it!"

"Yeah, I bet we would," Shale said, but I could see from his expression what his answer was going to be without him having to say any more. I could see the longing for his home and the apprehension at leaving it. That's when a strange thought occurred to me: could I go the other way? All I had to do was not go down the river, and I could stay with him forever, melt into this life, and have that maddening, unknowable _something_I so desperately wanted that was the reason I trekked into the wilderness in the first place. My every nerve, every muscle, every instinct ached to walk away from the spring ... and it was the most terrifying thing I'd ever experienced, like I was staring over the edge of an abyss, the blackness threatening to suck me in, and if it did, my very soul would be swallowed--and here I was contemplating whether to take the lifeline or jump.

"Still, we may see each other again," I finally said.

"Yeah," he said. "This wasn't your last expedition, right? Maybe you'll come back sometime. If you do, we could find each other. We'll definitely keep an eye out for you."

"Yeah. I'd like that."

"All right, we gotta get going if we want to reach the coast before night," Brush said. "Bye! We'll miss you!" She gave Copper a sultry wink before she turned away. I turned away as well, but gave one last look to see Shale looking back at me, only for a moment before the two of them disappeared back into the wild.

When I turned my eyes forward again, Brush was sitting in front of me, with the most _infuriating_ear-to-ear grin on her face.

"You like him!" she said.

I was overcome with the urge to smack her stupid snout, but instead I dug my claws into the sand and muttered something like, "Just leave me alone."

"You do!" she went on. "You're _totally_in love with him, and you wouldn't have done _anything_if I hadn't done it first! You, of all pokémon--fallen for a wild boy! I can't believe it!"

"Why don't you stick your head in a geyser, Brush?" She shut up for a bit, but kept chuckling to herself as we walked. "And what about you, huh? If I recall, _you_were the first to make a move, weren't you?"

"Yeah, but I was just having a bit of fun. You, on the other paw, are hopelessly infatuated, yet so tangled up in your inhibitions that you would have let him pass you by without a little push. Really, you should be thanking me."

I dug in my claws again and tried to ignore her.

"Are you gonna come back?" she said. "And see your wildboyfriend?"

Was I? We had made those promises to find each other again, but truthfully it seemed unlikely. This was a big place, a long way from home, with many dangers in the way. Would I go through it all again, just for the frankly slim chance of seeing him? Yet I also couldn't bear the thought of _not_coming back. Maybe I would keep an eye on the job board, ready to snatch up any future expeditions into the Yellow Sand Labyrinth.

"Maybe," I said, and that sent Brush into a new round of laughter.

"Come on," she said. "I don't know about you, but I could sure use a dip. Race you to the spring!"

She took off before I could respond, and I was soon after her. We reached the banks and plunged into the cool water. It felt marvelous after so long in the sun, and we were both in need of a good cleaning off, and not just for the obvious reason. The sand and dust caked deep into my fur diffused and flowed into the water, like the weight of the journey washing off me. Refreshed, we stepped back onto shore and shook ourselves dry, then started down the river. We made quick progress, and although we had to carefully descend the cliffs along the way, with rope it wasn't nearly as tricky as climbing up would have been. We reached the coast shortly before dark, and thankfully our lapras was waiting.

"You sure took your time," she said. "Another day and I'd have gone back to report you missing. You get a little lost along the way?"

"More than you know," Brush said. "But we found it! It's all in our notes, so we can hand it into the Expedition Society first thing tomorrow."

The lapras took us around the southern coast, and it was late in the night when we set foot back in Sahra Town. We said our goodbyes and parted ways.

I shut the door behind me, plunging myself into the darkness of my home. I was among my familiar trappings at last, safe and comfortable, and not to mention utterly exhausted. But as I sank into my warm, soft pillows, I felt like the stillness of the room was stifling, and the walls were holding me in like a cage. I curled myself tightly around a pillow, buried my face in it, and cried for a good, long time before I finally slept.