"There are so many people."
After breakfast, David brought his Pokémon down to the shore — and stopped almost immediately, looking out at the beach.
The entire waterfront was packed. Shoulder to shoulder, stretching as far as he could see in either direction. Even in the cold of early morning, with the sun not yet over the horizon and the wind off the water carrying a sharp bite, the crowd had turned out in full.
He reminded himself that this wasn't a casual beach event. The opening ceremony of the Sea God Festival was closer in character to a formal offering — a ritual blessing addressed to Lugia, the guardian of the sea. That kind of occasion drew people who genuinely meant to be there.
Still. This many people at five in the morning was something to see.
David looked toward the water's edge, where the shallows met the shore. Yesterday that stretch of beach had been empty. Now a large altar rose from it, assembled overnight — an impressive feat of construction by any standard, but perhaps unremarkable in a world where Pokémon could be called on to assist with heavy work. What made the altar striking wasn't its size. It was its shape.
The whole structure looked like it had been built from wreckage. Beams from broken ships, panels from collapsed walls, posts and planks of mismatched wood fitted together in a patchwork that shouldn't have held up and somehow did. It looked, at first glance, like a ruin someone had tried to reassemble without quite remembering the original plans. The only thing that placed it unmistakably as an altar was the statue of Lugia mounted at its peak, wings spread wide, surveying the water.
Several figures stood on the altar's upper platform. Men and women, different ages, but all dressed in the same style — deep-layered robes that David recognised as belonging to the middle period of the ancient Eastern Empire, several hundred years removed from the present day. In front of them, arranged on the altar surface, were offerings: wheat-flour pastries, pickled seafood, fresh fruit. Simple things. Common foods, not rare ones. David looked at them, puzzled.
Before he could give the question much thought, an elderly figure moved to the front of the platform. He held a scroll in both hands and began to speak in a carrying voice — proclaiming, for those who hadn't heard it before, the origin of the Sea God Festival and its connection to Belon City.
The story went back several hundred years. At that time, there was no city here. There was only a small fishing village on the eastern coast — a quiet place, ordinary in every way, where people rose with the sun, worked the sea, and returned home before dark. A simple life, and a stable one.
That stability ended in a single day.
Roughly a hundred kilometres offshore, for reasons that were never fully understood, two ancient powers that had been rivals since before recorded history awoke at the same time and turned on each other. The battle they fought shook the sea to its floor. No one on the coast could see what was happening out on the water, but they didn't need to — they could feel it.
Groudon's power drove the earth into convulsions. Earthquakes radiated outward from the battle site in every direction, reaching the coast in waves. Every dormant volcano along the shoreline erupted simultaneously, as if commanded. Kyogre answered with walls of water — tsunamis that rolled toward land one after another, and above them a downpour that turned the sky black and showed no sign of stopping.
The combined force of those two was beyond anything the Eastern Empire, even at its height and at its centre, could have brought to bear against them. Out here on the coast, in a village of fishermen with no walls and no defences, there was nothing to be done at all.
Ships capsized. Houses collapsed under the tremors. The downpour was relentless. Volcanic fires spread through the lowland brush. The people ran, and kept running, with nowhere particular to go.
And then Lugia appeared.
It came from the sky — a vast, pale shape descending through the smoke and the rain — and it looked at the people below. A moment of stillness. Then it beat its wings. Three times, slowly, deliberately.
With the first beat, the earthquakes stopped. The tsunamis flattened and withdrew.
With the second beat, the storm clouds tore open. Sunlight came through the gap — not much, but enough to see by, enough to breathe against.
With the third beat, the remaining moisture smothered the volcanic fires, and the wind that followed swept the smoke and its toxins out over open water.
The disaster ended.
The account, David was aware, was the kind that passed through centuries of retelling — shaped by the people who survived it and the ones who came after, filled in where memory failed. But the core of it was there: under the protection of Lugia, the village had come through the catastrophe with far fewer losses than anyone could reasonably have expected. By the odds of that day, most of them should not have survived at all.
What followed was immediate. Before the smoke had fully cleared, the survivors began pulling timber from the wreckage — planks from overturned boats, beams from collapsed walls — and built an altar from what was at hand, because there was nothing else to build it from. They brought the most valuable things from their homes and laid them at its base. Not luxury goods or rare items. Just their most precious ordinary things, gathered into a collective offering, because that was what they had.
The practice stuck. The altar was rebuilt from salvage every year, in the same style, in honour of the original. The offerings stayed simple, in honour of the sincerity that had gone into the first ones. The ceremony was timed to sunrise, because that was when Lugia had broken through the clouds and brought the light back.
The location was here, in Belon City, because this was where Lugia had landed.
David listened to all of it, then glanced around at the crowd. Most people had the same look he probably did — present, attentive, somewhere between moved and slightly cold and quietly waiting for the ceremony to reach its conclusion.
Eventually it did. The solemnity lifted. A longer, lighter atmosphere took its place — the actual festival beginning, a shift in mood that was almost audible.
David exhaled.
The story had been worth hearing. The standing around afterward, less so. He had been on his feet in the predawn cold for a while now, and his patience for standing still had its limits.
He made his way through the crowd to a festival registration table, gave his name for the afternoon fishing competition, and then turned away from the altar toward the rest of the beachfront.
The morning's scheduled events were sea races — fast, active, not really his thing to watch. The fishing competition didn't start until two in the afternoon, which gave him several hours to wander, look around, and see what else the festival had going on.
That seemed like a fine way to spend a morning.