Pokemon Yarroh

Chapter 1: When The Voices Are Silent

There was screaming. Screaming all around her. The world was falling apart.

Her mother grabbed her by the arm, pulling her from the house as the storm tore through the building less than a second later, ripping the house to shreds. Her mother passed her to her father, yelling something to him as they tried to run away.

The rain poured down in sheets, thunder and lightning striking around them, and she screamed, clinging to her father's hand as they sprinted towards the small cave at the edge of the clearing.

"Go!" her mother screamed. "Get her in there!"

Her father gestured for her to get in. "Go! We'll be right behind you!"

She gasped, the rain stinging her face like darts as she scrambled into the cave's entrance, reaching her hand out for her father and her mother so she could pull them in.

She was barely a second too late.

In a single moment, her mother and father were swept away from her, the storm tearing them from the ground. She shrieked and slunk back into the cave, her body shivering from the cold.

"Please..." she prayed. "Please, Arceus, if you're there...make it stop..."

She began to sob, curling into a ball in the cave as she whispered the same prayer over and over again. The storm raged outside as she clamped her hands over her ears.

The screaming was still in her mind. The screaming of everyone she'd loved was still in her mind, tearing apart her consciousness, making her heart pound faster and faster and faster, praying over and over and over, her mouth moving in silent repetition. "Please, please, please..."

Her heart was beating so fast she felt like it was going to explode. She had to calm down. She needed to calm down.

She passed out some time later. The stress had ended up pushing her body past its limits and it had forced her to sleep.

When she woke up, her entire body felt horribly weak. Her stomach growled.

She crawled out of the cave and stood up. Her eyes widened and she felt her knees shake, threatening to buckle under her, to send her crashing to the ground.

To join everyone she ever loved or cared about, laying there in the destroyed village. Dead.

"No, no, no..." She rushed forward as she tried to find someone, anyone she knew.

She tried to find anyone alive, checking pulse after pulse. But she knew it.

She knew she was the only survivor.

She collapsed to her knees in front of the shrine of Arceus at the edge of town. Bodies littered all the way up to it, like a trail. It was the only thing that had remained unharmed throughout the entire storm.

She felt pain. And rage. So much rage. It was coursing through every vein in her body, every single atom alight with fury and anger and pain.

"WHY?" She screamed as she raised a fist and slammed it into the shrine. The wood shattered under her fist. "WHY DIDN'T YOU DO ANYTHING?"

She began to sob as she raised her other fist and slammed it past the wood and into the stone of the statue. "WHY?! I PRAYED TO YOU! WHY DIDN'T YOU SAVE THEM? WHY, WHY, WHY?!"

Her knuckles were bleeding as she threw her fists against the statue over and over and over, but she didn't care, not at all, not when this stupid, stupid god had let everyone she ever loved die. Her mother, her father, her aunts, her uncles, even her older brother. How could he? He could have saved them! Why didn't he save them?!