March 2020

Chapter 3

The majesty of a toppled kingdom has little compare.

 The ruinous vestiges of what was once great can be brought no lower than its empty halls, the dull and broken panes of windows, the abandoned throne. Echoing rooms, grand but bare, cracked marble and ashen, once fine silver.

 It bears witness yet to a proud and mighty heritage, forgotten by its people but preserved in stone and carapace, tapestry and carving.

 The castle upon the hill was just the same, looking down on the wartorn, blood stained city below with the empty, staring eyes of a lost civilization, yet with the same majesty as the day it had been built; the stone was unmoved even by the clinging vines and the unholy denizen it housed, resisting the change in the air that moved the souls of every monster it touched without flinching.

 It was mere rock, many would claim. Uninhabitable, through the fetidity of the fell winds that haunted its halls… empty of all but the most twisted of corpses and the unblinking, ever watching eyes of the creature the palace had created. Ignored, by those that could see it through the clouds of poison mist… forgotten, by the rest.

 By all but one, the last remaining of a long line of rulers… awakened by the same diseased mists that had put to sleep the morality of his kin and kind. Felled many years ago by fate unkind, remembered only in stony effigy and fond legend, in the memories of those slain and tortured by that same cruel destiny.

 Preserved as a statue, to honor his legacy, and spread with the remaining dust that hadn’t littered his beloved garden… the king of monsters.

 Toppled years before by the rampaging of the unholy creature, shattered and untended, Asgore lay among the dry and withered blooms of his garden, watching over the home he had built with his own two hands from his prison of granite, incapable of anything but weeping silent, black tears and willing the world to turn, for the suffering of his people to end.

 He could hear their screams and howls echoing through the empty halls of the palace, the all too familiar sound of warfare and pain resounding in the caverns that should have been respite and      home    .

 The agony of his failure, of his inability to save his people from their unjust end, would have broken any monster’s soul into shards. Beyond life, beyond death, he could only watch, and wait, and beg the stars, the absent, silent universe, for peace and hope for the monster race.

 The stars did not respond though… not now, and not once over the fifteen years he had been forced to bear witness to the end of his kind.

 Another tear streaked the unmoving, stained stone, dripping from the end of a carved snout and onto the saturated petals below. Leaves rustled in an unholy breeze, carrying the toxic fumes of disease and malice from deeper within the palace, and far above, the innumerable, staring eyes followed the path of a single, withered bloom, swept along in the path of the ill wind.

 It came to a halt in a pile of broken glass just within the doorway, settling with a quiet tinkling… before a spiked vine the thickness of a tree trunk swept from the shadows, crushing it, the glass, and the stone tile below it into dust.

 Maniacal laughter shook the palace like an earthquake, mouths lined with razors and shattered glass opening along the walls and ceiling to shriek with unholy laughter in accord, and far below, gripped tight in a viney embrace of his own, Asgore shed yet another tear, the last, faint trace of hope left in his shattered soul dissipating into nothing.

 There was no salvation from their fate.

 There was only death, and the hunger that ate at the stomach he no longer had.