You wake, blissfully warm, curled against the two legendary wolves Zacian and Zamazenta. Fighting a yawn, you gasp, feeling your young squirming in your belly—the pups you bear for Galar’s legends. A happy blush kindled in your cheeks, you rest a hand pleasantly atop your taut tummy, feeling the pups tumble within; a gift from the legends to you.

When it had all started, you never would have pictured this for yourself—packed with pups, lover to legends. And yet here you are…

It all started innocently enough. A researcher with a modest grant to study the Slumbering Weald. Your “expedition” was little more than yourself and an intern setting up shop in the quiet town of Postwick, a few locals paid to assist you.

The Weald has a reputation—that of a forest, noble in its quiet and solitude, with very little to offer passers-by… and of a haunted place, echoed with curtains of eerie fog and the howls of distant wolves.

It is the seeming incompatibility of these two masks, the fact that the Weald is both forgettable and fearsome, that spurs you to investigate its depths.

When you first step under the shadowed boughs, the fog rushes in like water in a streambed—holding close, impeding every step of the way. You’ve heard of places where every step seems to lead you deeper into the unknown, have even set foot in the infamously labyrinthine Glimwood Tangle, where fairies are said to prey and play with those who wander… but this is different. It feels deliberate, as if something doesn’t want you there. You swear you see eyes gleaming at you in the dark, and when you find yourself walking back into Postwick despite your best attempts otherwise, you shiver, though there is no cold.

Zacian and Zamazenta… the others in Hammerlocke University mocked you for your focus on these legends, but after so many other myths have proven to be real (did your cohorts forget the rise of the titans in Hoenn? The way that Ho-oh roosts above a tower in Ecruteak?) you cannot want but to prove it true. They have to be real, you think. They have to be!

The legends are fragmented and incomplete, sometimes contradictory—were the two wolves human knights cursed to a new form for defying a corrupt king? Stalwart allies who defended the weak? Siblings? Rivals? The common thread is that they were once intimately connected with humans of the Galar region—but no longer.

Why did they leave, you wonder? And could they be made to trust humans again?

After your initial failure, you return to the Weald. You get further than last time, though the sense of being watched is even stronger than before, and you see shadows in the far reaches of the wood. At one point, the shadow coalesces into a pair of shapes; your breath catches, remembering storybook legends.

“It can’t be,” you whisper. “Zac—”

The foremost shadow howls balefully and your mind spins, and when your head clears, you are back in Postwick once more.

Perhaps others would have given up or been frightened away. And this is as close to a confirmation as you can get—the legends [i[are[/i] real. There is something in the wood, and you could easily turn even this experience into a career-builder.

But you don’t care about your career, not really. Ever since seeing a painting of the wolves in a book of childhood tales, you have obsessed over them—both of them. They’re real, and clearly not malevolent, for they could have attacked you outright instead of just turning you away.

You have to do this.

Preparing yourself, you return to the Weald a third time.

The fog swirls about you, the howls are insistent and forceful, but still you do not turn back, devoting all your willpower and intellect towards not being turned away—and then the fog clears, exposing a quiet altar in the middle of a secluded pond, the two wolves looking at you warily.

They are noble and grand in the way of a tree that’s been growing for millennia. One’s coat is magenta, its mane scruffy and pulled into an approximation of a topknot; the other is cyan, with long braids. Both are scarred, missing parts of their ears.

Both of them, too, are canine in more than just their snouts and paws and tails. From where you are standing, you can see the sheaths between their legs, and though you have never looked at pokemon that way before, you find yourself strangely enticed by the sight.

For a moment your words fail you—but then you approach them cautiously, hands raised. “Please,” you say, “I know you are keeping away from humans, but I… I’ve always idolized you… they say you’re Galar’s heroes.” The words spill from you like water: your adoration towards them, your desire to come close to them, to prove that humans can be trusted, and through it all, the wolves watch with those ancient, noble eyes. Is it just you, or is their wariness starting to fade?

Finally Zamazenta turns away, but Zacian approaches slowly. Your breath catches as she brushes her snout against your side—and at her touch (for she is a she; the sudden conveying of information between you two indicates that beyond any doubtfulness, no matter what lies between her legs) you instantly see visions of the past, of the two being celebrated and feted after driving back hordes of Dynamax pokemon, of the celebrations fading, turning sour, of the wolves being driven out by the ungrateful descendants of those they saved. Stepping back and fixing you with a gaze, Zacian departs after her brother.

The following day you are back again, and your heart glows with pride at the fact that this time, there is no fog to obscure your way. When you return to the altar, they are waiting there for you.