The storm hit Route Seven at 4:47 AM, which meant Ezra Cole was the only human stupid enough to be awake and outside to see it arrive.
Not see it coming—see it arrive. There was a difference, and in about six minutes, that difference would matter more than twenty-three years of League weather data.
Ezra crouched beside a rusted trail marker, headlamp cutting through pre-dawn mist as he scraped caked mud from its base. Pidgey populations, 37. Rattata burrows, 14 active. Worn path deviation, 2.3 meters east over past month. The kind of shit data that junior survey techs collected while senior researchers slept in the station three clicks back.
The wind shifted.
Not changed—shifted. Like someone had grabbed the atmosphere and shoved it sideways. Ezra's pencil stopped moving. The Pidgey that had been chittering in the canopy went silent. All of them. At once.
He stood slowly, lamp beam catching the mist doing something mist shouldn't do. It was pulling back, retreating uphill against the wind that was still technically blowing downslope. The temperature dropped eight degrees in two seconds. Ezra knew because the cheap League-issued weather monitor on his belt started beeping, then died completely, screen flickering to black.
The first wave of rain hit horizontal.
Not fell—hit. Drove. Slammed. Like someone had turned the ocean vertical and thrown it at the Kanto countryside. Ezra dropped behind the trail marker just before a branch thick as his torso crashed through where his head had been. The sound wasn't rain anymore. It was roaring. Deeper than any storm he'd catalogued in three years of survey work.
Through the chaos, something flickered overhead. Sheet lightning, except lightning didn't move like that. Didn't have patterns that repeated in sequence, like signal lights if signal lights were the size of city blocks and burned silver-white.
Ezra pressed himself against the marker, pulled out his backup recorder—the mechanical one that didn't need batteries—and held it up to the storm.
"Survey Tech E. Cole, Route Seven, grid reference—" A tree exploded forty meters away. Not struck by lightning—exploded from the inside, bark stripping away in perfect spirals. "—unusual weather event, recording for post-incident analysis."
The wind screamed. Actually screamed, high and keening, with undertones that made his teeth ache. The lightning overhead pulsed in that same sequence: three long, three short, three long.
Then the eye hit.
Silence. Complete, absolute silence in a perfect circle maybe fifty meters wide. The rain still hammered beyond the edges, but inside was nothing. No wind. No sound. The air pressure made his ears pop twice, three times. Ezra stood because his body made him, some instinct older than thought dragging him to his feet.
The ground was dry where he stood. Bone dry, despite the flood that had been drowning it seconds ago. Steam rose from rocks that looked heat-cracked. His breath fogged despite the temperature gauge on his vest reading 31 degrees Celsius.
Something whimpered.
Ezra turned, headlamp sweeping across the impossible dry circle, and found the Rockruff pressed against a shattered tree trunk. Young—maybe three months. Its blue-gray fur was singed in patterns that hurt to look at directly, geometric burns that seemed to shift when he wasn't focusing on them. Blood seeped from its left eye. Its front leg bent wrong.
The pup was staring straight up.
Ezra followed its gaze and his brain tried very hard to stop working.
There was something in the storm above the eye. Not clouds. Not a Pokémon. Not anything that should exist in weather patterns. It was massive and moving and present in a way that made his vision blur. White wings that weren't wings. A shape that was definitely there but wouldn't resolve into anything his mind could name. The pressure behind his eyes built until he tasted copper.
The Rockruff whimpered again, tried to crawl backward on three legs.
The thing above—]The Presence[—shifted. Turned, maybe, though turning implied it had a front and back, and Ezra wasn't sure it had dimensions that worked that way. The lightning patterns stopped. Started again. Different sequence. Longer. More complex.
Information. It was transmitting information.
Ezra forced himself to look away, to focus on the Rockruff. The pup had given up trying to retreat, pressed flat against the ground, shaking. Not from fear, Ezra realized. From pressure. Whatever was above them was pressing down on everything in the eye, and the Rockruff was dying from it.
He moved without thinking. Three quick steps, sliding to his knees beside the wounded Pokémon. His hands found the pup's scruff, pulled it against his chest. The Rockruff bit him, weak but desperate, baby teeth breaking skin through his survey vest. Ezra didn't let go.
"Shh. I see it too."
The Presence above pulsed. The ground cracked in radial lines from where Ezra knelt. His nose started bleeding. The Rockruff's whimpers went silent, but he could feel its heart hammering against his chest, faster than any heartbeat should go.
Then, between one second and the next, it was gone.
The eye collapsed. The storm rushed back in, rain and wind and normal, explainable chaos. Ezra hunched over the Rockruff, shielding it with his body as debris whipped past. The roaring was just wind now. The lightning was just lightning. The pressure was just barometric fluctuation from a severe weather system.
Except.
Except the burns on the Rockruff's fur were still there, still geometrically perfect, still shifting when he wasn't looking directly at them. Except his nose was still bleeding, and when he wiped it, the blood had an oily sheen that reflected colors that shouldn't exist. Except the ground where they'd knelt was fused into glass, a perfect circle of melted earth that the rain couldn't cool.
The storm passed as fast as it had come. Total duration: eleven minutes, sixteen seconds according to his mechanical watch. By 5:00 AM, the only evidence was the destruction—fallen trees, dead Pidgey, the glass circle—and the shaking Rockruff in his arms.
Ezra sat in the mud beside the melted ground, holding the injured Pokémon, watching the sunrise paint everything normal colors. His recorder had captured eleven minutes of dead air. The expensive League equipment at the station would show a severe but explainable weather anomaly. The report would list wind speeds and rainfall measurements and barometric pressure.
Nobody would write down what had been in the storm.
The Rockruff stirred against his chest, let out a weak growl that might have been gratitude or warning. When Ezra looked down, its eyes—both of them now, the injured one having somehow opened—were looking past him. Up. Watching clouds that weren't doing anything unusual anymore.
"Yeah," Ezra said quietly. "I saw it too."
He stood carefully, cradling the Rockruff, and started the long walk back to the survey station. He'd file his report. List the data. Mention the unusual pressure phenomena if pressed. He wouldn't talk about the thing in the storm, because that would get him a psychological evaluation and a transfer to a desk job.
But he'd remember. He'd remember the sequence of lights. The perfect burns. The way something that massive had looked directly at them—had seen them—and then left them alive.
Three hours later, sitting in the station's medical bay while a bored Nurse Joy treated the Rockruff and bandaged his bite wounds, Ezra filled out the standard incident report. Weather event, severe but brief. Minor injuries sustained during survey work. One wild Pokémon rescued, claiming rights pending medical clearance.
He didn't write about how the Rockruff wouldn't let anyone else touch it. Didn't note that its fur patterns had already shifted three times, the burns rearranging when nobody was watching. Didn't mention that when he'd washed the blood off his face, the water had swirled with those impossible colors before going down the drain.
The senior researcher, Hansen, skimmed the report and grunted. "Hell of a storm. Lucky you found shelter."
"Yeah," Ezra agreed. "Lucky."
Hansen initiated the report, filed it into the system where it would become one more data point among millions. Storm on Route Seven. Intensity level 3. No casualties. Pattern consistent with seasonal variations.
Except patterns weren't consistent. Ezra had been mapping Route Seven for eight months, and storms didn't come from that direction. Didn't form that fast. Didn't leave glass circles and geometric burns and survivors who'd looked into something that shouldn't exist.
The Rockruff made a soft sound from the medical crate, eyes fixed on Ezra through the mesh. Its tail twitched once. A question, maybe. Or a recognition.
"Things like that don't happen twice," Hansen was saying, already moving on to the next report. "Once-in-a-decade storm. Back to normal tomorrow."
Ezra nodded, said the right things, filed the right forms. But that night, in his bunk, he pulled out his personal notebook—the one that wasn't League property—and started writing. Drew the burn patterns from memory. Sketched the lightning sequences. Wrote down the exact temperature of glass that shouldn't exist.
The Rockruff, officially his as of 17:00 hours, slept curled against his leg. Every time it breathed out, the air shimmered slightly, like heat distortion if heat distortion could happen at room temperature.
Things like that didn't happen twice, Hansen had said.
But Ezra had been watching patterns for three years. Had been seeing the things other people dismissed as noise. The migrations that started two days too early. The wild Pokémon that avoided certain areas for no reason the League computers could identify. The way some storms felt different from others, even when the data said they were the same.
He drew another pattern in his notebook, this one from memory of something he'd seen two months ago. Different location. Different intensity. But the underlying structure...
The Rockruff's eyes opened, reflecting his desk lamp in ways that weren't quite right. It watched him work, pupils dilated despite the light.
"Yeah," Ezra said quietly. "I think they do happen twice. I think they happen all the time. We just don't usually survive to compare notes."
He closed the notebook, turned off the lamp. In the darkness, the Rockruff's fur gave off the faintest glow, geometric patterns shifting like breathing.
Tomorrow, he'd go back to Route Seven. File normal reports. Collect normal data.
But he'd also look for glass circles. For trees that exploded from the inside. For patterns in the noise that nobody else thought were worth documenting.
Because something had been in that storm. Something had seen them. And Ezra was pretty sure it would happen again.
The only question was when.
And whether anyone would believe him when it did.