2020-03-17 0:16:31 ¶ ●

## Chapter 4

Something Pretending to be Human
https://archiveofourown.org/works/20857010/chapters/49684634

Memories.

The lingering traces of life once lived, words once spoken, places and things once known.

For a monster, memory was as vital as magic, as much part of them as the sorcery of the universe. It echoed in the beat of their souls, stimulated their magicks… and lingered on long after their lives had faded, in the minds of those they had loved, as well as the world around them, the whisper of bygone days and the fondness of their hearts empowering where their dust settled in their final rest.

Memories… reliving the good and the bad, years old and young. A magic unlike any other.

For humans, memory faded with time, rather than growing stronger. As their body’s faculties failed, their recollections of bygone days left them too, leaving behind a cloud of empty, numb bliss. They would disappear entirely, after only a few generations of humanity had sped by, only the luckiest and most renowned of humans lasting to become legend.

They certainly didn’t linger on after they had left their bodies, any magic their hidden, withered souls held dissipating the moment of their deaths, left to rot in their pine boxes and soil prisons.

Most, at the very least.

There were some humans, throughout their kind’s violent and calamitous history, that did not pass on. Whether through force of will, or perhaps even soul deep passion of various kind, the magic of their souls carried on and became spectres, often tortured and twisted beyond recognition of what they once had been, within the mortal coil.

Memories; rotted memories, destitute of reason, meaning, or consequence. Consigned to an eternal fate without relief, without the opportunity to be reborn into a new form… in agony, for lack of that final sleep.

In time, many of the lingering spirits of those destined for such a future faded too, their magicks failing them and dissipating into nothingness. There was no existence beyond that last fate, but by the end, the wisps that once were people did not care, wishing only for oblivion.

There has only ever been one, a single being, that never faded.

An isolated, determined soul that lingered on year after year, decade after decade… century after century, only gathering strength and the will to live again.

Some speculation can be made as to why. Perhaps it was the presence of the barrier about the mountain… preventing the spirit of the long dessicated, moldered human from escaping, just as the magic of departed monsters could not leave to rejoin the stars they so loved. Perhaps it was the strength of their soul, pervasive and willful in life and, maybe, just as unmoving in death.

Or perhaps it was the anger they had harbored in their tragically short life, the hatred and bitterness that had filled their heart with malice and, ultimately, lead to their passing from this world.

Whatever the case, for whatever reasoning that they remained behind when so many of their kind had moved on, they lingered on in lonesome isolation in the place where they had fallen many hundreds of years ago, a shadow on the carved wall of the cavern filled with buttercups, a trick of the light on the head of their weathered gravestone.

A tinkle of a child’s laughter, whispered on the wind, rustling dead flower petals and carrying down the empty, dust littered hallways of its ruinous home.

Memories… sordid, hated memories. Twisted by their own toxic anger, by the perceived betrayal of their only friend, by the mists of poisonous, rancid fume on the air, they stewed and mutated, shifting into a creature so far removed from what they once had been that the last thing they could be called was human, as decayed and rotten as their worm eaten corpse.

Unable to move from their tomb without a weaker soul, they plotted, pacing the room and clawing the walls and cursing the names of those that had halted their plans not so long ago… they had been so close, so very close to being free.

The naive girl had surprised her, though. Her heart had not bent so easily to their pressure… had recoiled from the justice they had delivered with her hand. The skeleton had been the last straw. They had thought to take all control after crushing his skull with her foot, sure that the foolish girl would succumb…

But it had been a mistake to force her to kill him. It had pushed her to rebellion, so far as to reset the timeline to before they had possessed her at all, and escaping their clutches entirely.

And gods above, had she been so sickeningly sweet to the traitors. She had felt actual guilt for their eradication, and never raised a hand against them again. Sparing them all even though they hurt her, making friends, saving them …

She had become the angel they had been waiting for for a millenia, the legend carved into every wall in this cursed mountain, and they had never gotten a chance again after that… even when the world had turned upside down and their stupid, idiotic bro- …when the flower had broken the universe, turning the monsters into mindless beasts and suffusing their world with madness.

They had grown only stronger, with what the few monsters they had seen had taken to calling the Hunger… they had grown nearly corporeal, and only more determined to be free of this place.

All they had needed then was another vessel, strong enough to bear their presence and to end the existence of the rest of the monsters under the mountain…

And when another human had fallen, at last, they knew their time had come.

Sweet irony, sweet, cloying memory, the face on the girl-child, her insufferable clinging to her mother’s ideals… and yet something new, something stronger than Frisk ever had been…

Real magic, running rampant in the little one’s veins.

Ha… haha… hahahahahahahaha…

The angel had bred with one of the monsters. How delicious. How utterly perfect.

This child, mind already broken with guilt and suffering and desperation for guidance in a world she didn’t understand, would be their salvation. She bore the raw strength she had always needed, and the weak will to be moved to their whim. The monsters would finally meet their rightful end… they themselves could, at last, gain the escape they had sought for centuries… and the world would meet its own destruction at their joined hands.

It mattered not that the girl had resisted at first. She would bend in time.

Of that, Chara had no doubt.