Chapter 15: Humanity’s Smallness
https://archiveofourown.org/works/20857010/chapters/62327356
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Once upon a time, there was a great mountain.
The mountain was a wonder, cutting the wide berth of the sky in
twain and dominating the landscape with majesty and power. Those that
lived in its shadow considered themselves blessed, by the bounty of food
and game that grew and thrived so well upon its slopes; they feared not
the fire that poured from its peak on dire occasion, its height so
great that the molten rock never reached their villages.
The lake that gathered the rain and glacial runoff on the
mountain’s south side provided fish and fresh water; the vast forest
surrounding its feet and climbing its side supplied wood and endless
other bounty. The villages gathered at its base never feared attack,
protected by the mountain’s reaching embrace and its curving paths and
its many, many caves.
They called the mountain mother, and worshiped her as she deserved, both man and monster.
Monsterkind was the first to explore her caverns, running deep
and hallowed through her insides; they carved from the stone a city
indomitable, unmoved by time and weathering, and put there to rest the
ashes of their heroes, human and monster alike, to be immortalized in
her grand halls, protected by her unflinching facade. They painted the
walls with their proud history, their friendship with humans and their
love of the stars, and blessed every stone they touched with the magic
of their being.
War came to the people of the world. Jealousy, hatred, and
misunderstanding divided men and monsters, and unfathomable numbers
perished, lost to blind anger and the call of battle and the words of
those that had started it all. Few remained that recalled what had
kindled the fire that burned the land to cinders… but in its wake, the
monsters lay defeated and sentenced to eternal imprisonment within the
mountain they had loved so dearly, their children sacrificed for the
magic of their souls in the creation of a cruel, immovable barrier to
keep them within.
The mountain was never the same, after the monsters vanished
beneath it. The magic was gone from the world, sealed within with no
chance to escape, and the lands about her feet suffered greatly. The
soil dried, the trees thinned and the glacier began to melt, seeping
with hidden poisons. The flames of her eruptions wreaked unholy damage
to all that dared settle too close, and the animals, once peaceful,
became rabid and violent.
Humanity forgot the monsters, as the world turned and grew
darker with each passing day, and grew instead to hate themselves, each
other and the world they lived in and the mountain that had once given
so much so freely, now a pallid, hateful mark on the horizon.
Man cursed its name, mother and giver no longer, and turned away, never to return.
Legends began to come into being. Legends that told of brave
adventurers attempting to scale the mountain, to delve into its caverns
seeking riches… to solve the mystery of its broken majesty. They never
returned, those brave souls, and many said it was because of the
monstrous people that dwelled within it, shadowy beings of hatred and
fire and malice towards mankind.
Demons that had settled within it and driven humanity away, to keep its bounty for themselves.
When a large hunting party disappeared without a trace, the
government of the city miles away from the closest hill declared it a
hazard and fenced it off, putting out of service the nearby refuse dump
and forbidding its citizens to approach it, lest more lives be lost to
collapsed mines or hungering animals or harsh climes, whatever it was
that caused so many to vanish without a trace.
They couldn’t know the truth, had put the knowledge away long
ago, in their ignorance and anger and mistrust. They couldn’t know that
every human that disappeared from the face of the mountain found their
way within to where monsterkind dwelt, alive despite the centuries that
had passed and confined them within the unmoving, unforgiving stone.
Many perished, the fall into the caverns fatal to all but the
youngest, the children that still held magic in their hearts and hope
for the world about them.
They were not better off for their survival, though.
Monsterkind held hatred in their souls as well, the war and
their slain children and the nightmare of their banishment heavy on
their minds, and knew of only one way to escape their eternal prison…
and that it would cost the innocent the most.
The great mountain, once so beloved, had become cursed with the
spilled blood of those that deserved life, with the hatred for one
another that soured the earth and staled the air, and should nothing
change, should hearts and souls never be moved to compassion and
forgiveness, would remain so.
Change would come, though.
Change spread its wings with the falling of another child into
the deep and the dark, into the world of monsters and shadows and broken
trust. The child was a being of mercy and friendship, hope and
benevolence, and with her unending determination, her sacrifice and her
pure love, she changed the heart of every monster beneath the mountain,
giving them hope for the first time in a millenia.
She spoke to them of freedom, of a way to end their long imprisonment, and they believed her.
It was not meant to be, though. There was one beneath the
mountain that no longer possessed a soul to move, a selfish being
twisted by greed and loneliness and anger, that desired more than
freedom, that desired the power that none should ever possess, and
destroyed what little hope the monsters now had, corrupting the world
itself even further with his very existence.
The selfish creature broke reality to achieve his designs, and broke the rest of the monsters too.
The mountain, without, hadn’t changed at all. But within, there
now lived and breathed a true curse, a disease that would end every life
on the surface of the earth should it be given the chance, and there
was now only one that could combat it.
The merciful human’s daughter, set on a path by fate far greater
than she could ever know, to the mother mountain, wondrous and
terrible.
Chapter 16: Too Many Eyes
https://archiveofourown.org/works/20857010/chapters/62634868
There exist in this world things beyond comprehension.
This is a statement of fact, for objects and creatures and
concepts that can have no definition, purely by their own design. Things
too dark to see, even in brightest day. Too complex to know, even with
the greatest of minds. Too rotten to ever cure, with all the medicines
in science.
They obey only their own basest nature, as a starving animal
attacking without provocation, an insect invading another’s body to
raise its young… darkness falling in lieu of day. They cannot be called
evil, though the mind is given to attempt to name them, to put at ease
the fear it cannot understand but knows to be true.
It could be argued that the creation of what now dwelled in the
darkness of its own mind had been evil, that what brought rise to the
desecration and destruction of the world of monsters had been hardness
of heart and cruelty unbound. Loneliness and fear can turn a heart to
stone, after all… bring about acts both unthinking and malicious.
Perhaps it would even be right, to say Flowey had been evil, to desire the conquest and power that he did, to whatever end.
But the creature that remains, all that is left of his foolish
lust for control, is not evil. The fiend with a thousand eyes is naught
more than another beast clawing for existence in the muck and grime of a
world once good and loving and whole. He is a wreckage, devoid of much
of the power he once coveted so dearly, and a horror to look upon, all
majesty he might have born molded and decayed.
He had hoped to become a god. And with the power of the souls he
had stolen, he had ascended… but into an amalgamation of what his
twisted desires had made him into, a mind of metal, unfeeling and cold, a
pile of vegetation both prickly and vile, an abomination that saw all
but learned nothing from it.
As he slowly rotted in the prison of his own making, his form
only twisted further. His hunger was unending, and his savagery a
monstrosity to behold. Yet the more victims he took, the hungrier he
became, and the more he was polluted, the stench of bloated corpses and
fetid meat enshrouding his gargantuan, wilting, rusted facade. His mind
was just as spoiled as his body, both a temple to his own vile glory and
a black hole of self-hatred, perpetuated by both of the people he had
once been.
The flower within him screamed unending
for vengeance, for the death of the human that took his power in the
first place but had escaped him… for the pain of his existence to end at
last. The prince cowered and wailed for his mother, for his best friend
and for someone, anyone to save him.
All he had wanted was to feel. And now, all he wanted was to never feel again.
His very existence was a crime, an unholy
being that persisted despite all reason. His hunger was unfathomable,
and defied every attempt to assuage it. His mind was a trap of the worst
kind, all knowledge but pain and hatred and starvation and fear escaping it.
He craved the end as fiercely as he clung to life. He hated his existence as ardently as he loved it.
He called for help, in the desperate misery that he had created himself…
And no one came.
hE rEAllY WaS An iDIot.
Chapter 17: Too Many Teeth
https://archiveofourown.org/works/20857010/chapters/62735791
(A reminder: this is the last Axetober I will be writing. Anything else I add to the fic on Ao3 will be free formatted shorts of my own choosing)
There’s nothing like staring into a mouth bristling with teeth to ruin your day.
It’d
been a miscalculation on her part. An error in judgment, too much
curiosity. Sans had always warned her, don’t follow any sort of trail
back into the woods, food, gold, or otherwise. Papyrus had told her not
to follow the whimpering cries or the path of blood droplets, as well,
oddly sober and hesitant, at the edge of the treeline.
Dad wasn’t
going to forgive her for leaving him alone there, or for getting herself
into this mess. She knew, if she survived this (looking less likely by
the moment), she’d get the talking to of a lifetime. She could only be
grateful he wasn’t the same kind of guardian as gramma had been…
Though a belt whealed backside was the least of her worries now.
The
dog monster before her towered over where she had fallen into the snow,
easily the size of a bear. His once white coat was matted with twigs,
leaves, clumps of ice, and gore, the rusted remnants of armor clamped
tight around bulging limbs and a torso as thick as the ancient tree
trunks surrounding them. His eyes were glowing with madness and hunger,
blood red and pinned to where she lay, foot caught in the bear trap…
but his maw was what truly held her attention.
She had never seen
so many teeth in one mouth. It wasn’t able to contain them all, spilling
over to litter his drooling, blood saturated jaw; some had broken off,
and were entwined in the thick fur on his neck. It was a horrifying
sight, made no less terrible by the haggard, panting growls the beast
was rumbling with, and it was all Aliza could do not to let out a
bloodcurdling scream when he took a step closer, struggling at the end
of the trap’s chain.
The pain of the steel biting into her leg was
nothing to what the animal would inflict on her. She had to get away,
she had to do something, but she couldn’t call out for help and make this worse.
Another monster could hear her, and come to see what the commotion was.
Aliza
jerked again at the chain holding her in place, the stake frozen into
the ground and the jaws of the trap too rusted to part with her own
paltry strength; she tried again to call to her unstable, untrained
magic, to teleport away, to start a fire, anything. Nothing came.
She begged, as the beast fell to all fours and charged, for some sort of miracle.
And
when the axe sliced through the chain as though it were butter, sending
her sprawling into the slush, she knew it had been answered.
Sans
didn’t so much as glance at her, though his skeletal hand was tight in
the hood of her sweatshirt, dragging her up from the ground and behind
where he stood, stance wide and magic flared. His attention was fixed on
the now halted monster, his own teeth bared and chest rumbling with a
territorial growl.
His hand was more gentle, in pushing her back,
away from what was now to be a battleground, but still he had no
attention to spare her.
This would be no quick, easy fight against
a Snowdrake, an ambush on a monster trapped in one of his “puzzles”.
This was Greater Dog, trained in combat and as fast as he was ferocious.
The beast had been encroaching on his territory for months, leaving
warnings and challenges in the trees to show his intent, and now he had
finally gone too far.
No one would take Aliza from him. Not even an old friend.
“mine,” he snarled savagely, and rushed forward to meet the beast in combat.