So, just finished Undertale, and wow, what a ride. I haven't gone through the genocide run yet (mostly because I'm very, very afraid of what will happen to my soul (IRL) should I kill digital dogs), but it's possible the details of this narrative are misinformed if I haven't done that run yet. Maybe when I finish, I'll come back and edit in or out some things. And though I don't really think this piece is as whimsically humorous as the original work, I thought exploring how people fell into the underworld and how their journeys differed there might be an interesting writing experience. I've also heard that canonically the souls that fell had all been children... But headcanon's gonna headcanon. Sorry about that. So here's Asgore collecting souls. The big, soft, cuddly murderer
The first time Asgore had cut a soul from a human body, it struck him as something like pitting a peach. When he plunged his triple-pronged spear into flesh, he had to tell himself over and over it was nothing more than prying a seed from a fruit.
The thought hardly helped, since in the underground, there were plenty of fruit that would protest their own pitting. Too many monsters had thrust a tool into the heart of what they thought was nothing more than a large plant, only to find themselves harshly sworn at, or worse, assaulted by a flurry of seeds.
The human boy was no exception. He did actually resemble something of a peach, and he put up as much of a fight. He had been round, pinkish, with little hair. He'd had beady, dark eyes, and despite their small size, they seemed perpetually widened in horror.
He had swung a branch at Asgore, weakly but in earnest, and it had broken against his armored knee. The king had tried to end the whole affair quickly. He could recognize cowardice when he saw it (birds of a feather, he told himself), and knew at that point it was a mercy killing. He did the kid a favor. After all, a boy so weak and impressionable could not return home from the monstrous underworld intact. It seemed, from what Asgore learned later on, this kid had abandoned all things that made him human the moment he'd realized he was no longer in the safety of his own world. He was more animal at that point, recounted the monsters who'd come across him (in Asgore's opinion, he was more of a plant, but he tried not to shoot down the opinions of his more outspoken citizens).
Perhaps he managed to complete that grisly task at all because the taste of Asriel's death still sat darkly bitter on his tongue. He derived no joy from prying the soul, oddly-colored and absurdly heavy, from the human boy. But he knew what he had to do; this was simply the first step in a long and arduous process. Six more times he would perform the same task, and all he could hope was that it would get easier each time.
He named his new prize Soul 1. He didn't know what else to call it. He had always been terribly bad at that sort of thing. But sometimes, when he plucked and preened the garden around his throne, talking to the soul, he would accidentally call it by his son's name.
The second time was no easier. He did not know how long it had been since he'd encountered the first soul, perhaps years, perhaps centuries, but he did not feel any more prepared than he had the first time.
It was a girl, dark-skinned and sporting a pair of blue ballet shoes. By the time Asgore tracked her down to Waterfall, she had been changed by the things she saw. She accepted her end with a graceful resignation—she was convinced she had already died and now wandered her way through a lengthy trial to secure her place in an afterlife (an afterlife; the thought struck Asgore as absurd and wishful, until he remembered the human soul persists outside the body seemingly without end. After all, he had seen it himself, when he pried the boy's soul from flesh and held it warm in his own hands).
It frightened him to see a creature so young so prepared for her own end. He was intrigued and saddened by the way she looked up at him with her black eyes and held her cheek when she thought about her fate. He knew humans often lived lives of cruelty and more often died in the same way; perhaps the crushing brevity of human life was what urged them to seek comfort in eternity. But it was not Asgore's place to question. He would only earn that place after he had stolen seven souls and broken the barrier that kept his people imprisoned beneath the earth. There would be plenty of time for questions when he reached the world above.
He asked the girl if she was ready (he regretted not asking the boy the same question). She lifted her head and said yes. Asgore was not.
When he brought the bluish soul back to his castle and laid it beside the other, he told himself that despite the desperate brutality of his actions, despite the unfortunate circumstances that led to the necessity of those actions, at least Soul 1 was not alone. It was now accompanied by Soul B.
The third human to fall to the underground (not counting, of course, Asgore's own child) was nothing like his predecessors. By then the order had made it through the kingdom; any human sighted was to be promptly captured and brought to the king. But this human came to him of his own accord, cutting his way through every monster he found, trampling whatever came between him and his route of escape.
By the time he made it to Asgore, knife in hand, he burned with the souls of more monsters than Asgore could count. The man appeared as old as the king himself, although it was hard to tell with humans. They shared a similar beard, a matching broad stature, but the man's eyes glinted with that strange, ineffable quality wholly unique to humans. He had noticed that same look in the face of the resigned girl, but he could not interpret it.
When Asgore asked him if he was ready, the man said yes. He twisted his knife in his hand and thrust at the king, teeth gritted, jaw flexed. He fought with such stout-hearted strength, with a pained grimace on his face (he could tell despite the strength the man drew from the monsters he had slain, he derived no pleasure from it. That in itself, forced a breath of relief from Asgore. He had no use for a wholly corrupted soul). The man held his own. Asgore thought he might've been a guard or soldier up above, in the human world, one of the many who were taught so well to take the lives of others. It was only after a protracted fight that the man, like the ones before him, fell to Asgore's spear.
As the king pried the soul from the body, careful not to puncture it with the tip of his trident, he briefly felt the presence of the lives the man had taken. From the dark human soul quivered the echoes of hundreds—thousands—of Asgore's denizens. The king saw in the soul the eager wags of dogs' tails, the small claws of countless felines, the dead eyes of frogs, and his heart sank. It only rose again, slightly, when after he sorted through all the dead monsters, he could not discover his wife among them. She had not fallen down, at least not to this strange, violent man.
As he put the heavy soul next to the others, he realized he did not know how to name it. If he called it Soul 2, Soul B would be without a letter partner. If he named it Soul C, the same could be said of Soul 1 (it was now too late to rename the old ones. They had been called by those names for so long (when they were not referred to accidentally as "Asriel"), it seemed a sort of betrayal to take their names from them now). Besides, he thought, it was better to name rather than number them—that way they retained at least some identity. In the end he just called it Another Soul.
The fourth human he encountered nearly drove him to ruin. It was a boy, a smiling, bright-eyed child, armed with nothing but a yellow popgun and an indomitable spirit. In his wake trailed a wagging, barking dog, white as snow and wearing a perpetual grin only outshone by that of its companion.
When the boy showed up at Asgore's door, dog in tow, he raised the popgun and pointed it between the king's eyes, smile widening.
"Just kidding," he said, lowering the gun. "I would never do that."
Asgore took a long look at the child's smiling face, so strange, so ugly compared to those of his own denizens (and there it was, that ineffable quality that made humans' gazes so compelling). He decided to ask the child if he wanted something to eat. The boy replied he did, and followed him inside.
Asgore showed the boy his garden, treated him to cakes and tea, and in exchange, the kid regaled the king with stories of his adventure.
He spoke of the strange characters he had met (both he and the dog seemed to have build a formidable list of acquaintances), all the things he learned, all the fun he had. He spoke of ghosts that danced to jazz, he spoke of rolling in the snow, he spoke of ice cream and snails and umbrellas. He talked of his brave defeat of several monsters that blocked his path, the loyalty and fierceness of his dog. He mentioned the bad times, too—the harm done to him by wayward monsters, the harm he returned without hesitation—but he did not dwell on that for too long.
He spoke of a large, caring woman he'd met in the ruins (Asgore said nothing, but recognized the description immediately. The only perceptible change in him was a slight shifting in his seat). He had nothing but compliments for her pies (Asgore remembered they were what had made her famous—he often joked that she was more well-known for her baking than for ruling the kingdom). The boy elaborated on the woman's stern kindness, on the wonderment he had felt in meeting a person so strange in a place so deep in the ground.
Asgore asked the boy how she was faring, and his face fell. "She seemed bad when I left her, like she was sad to see me go." The boy looked up at Asgore, eyes glinting. "She told me to watch out for you. That you were going to take my soul."
Asgore briefly considered lying to the child, but thought again. "I am."
The boy seemed quite confident to the contrary. "So far I've been okay. Even the captain of your guard is a friend of mine now."
Asgore lowered his eyes. "Are you finished with your tea?"
"Yeah."
The king stood. "When you are ready, come find me."
The boy assured the king with great confidence that he was ready.
When Asgore pulled the yellowish soul from his body, he felt as if he were pulling his own son apart. The dog scratched at the door, whining bitterly.
Asgore named the new addition to his collection Kind Soul. As he lay it down with the others, he thought of his wife, of her warning to the child. She must be at Home. He thought of Toriel in her chair, reading, the sweet smell of her cooking permeating the stale air. After he'd taken the soul, he retreated into his chamber and stared out the window, waiting to see if he could weep, but never did.
The dog was inconsolable. It padded through the castle, looking for its boy, but when he was nowhere to be found, the animal curled on the bed of golden flowers and did not move for weeks.
Asgore knew the dog had a soul much like a monster's. It was kind, soft, malleable—so the king reached for it, when it was at its worst, and nursed it as best he could. He brought the dog's head onto his lap when it whined, he scratched behind its ears, brushed it thoroughly and made sure it was well-fed. But no matter what he did, he could not revive the creature.
So he sought a different avenue. He called up the captain of his guard (back then, she was a monstrous thing, even among monsters—a huge beast, adept in both witchcraft and metallurgy). He asked her a favor, and she, like any of his denizens would (save, of course, Toriel), complied.
He took the burden of the dog's sadness onto his own heart. Every day, with the help of a spell given to him by the captain of the guard, he coaxed a little more of the regret and anxiety from the animal. Slowly, the dog's smile returned, and when it wandered the castle it was not to search for its human but to satisfy its own curiosity.
It needed distraction, it needed direction. So Asgore commissioned a suit of armor, tall as he and wider than the castle's doorways. It was absurd, and fit the dog absurdly, but it was the only suit that could fully envelop the animal's ridiculously large heart. As the dog left the castle, a glint of strength in its black eye, spear in paw, its armor clinked with glorious purpose.
"Use this to protect your sensitive heart," Asgore had told the dog.
It scratched itself behind the ear with one armored foot.
"Good luck," Asgore said. It barked, then got distracted by something moving in the corner of the garden.
Asgore considered his duty to the animal done. The dog departed, seemingly undisturbed by the death of its human. That was fine. Asgore would do the remembering for it.
He knew that sometimes, when the dog awoke at night, something would scratch at the back of its mind nearly uncontrollably (the captain of his guard said as much—no spell was perfect, especially those that govern forgetfulness). It would twitch and howl, confused at its own disquietude, but then, at the appearance of something more interesting, a stick or another dog, the creature would again forget, and fall back into happy simplicity.
The fifth soul was the strangest he had met. She had a fire inside her that seemed to propel her every limb. That inexplicable thing that made humans human, that had appeared in the eyes and actions of the others—she had an excess of it. At her waist she carried a leather pouch, inside of which lay a notebook filled with what she referred to as "the plot."
"I know how this story goes," she told Asgore. She had refused his offer of tea. "I know the score."
She did. She knew he regretted every moment of the fight; she could recognize an archetype when she saw one. She knew how to strengthen herself with the spoils of execution, she knew how to exploit the generosity and cleverness of others, she knew how to level up.
"I did everything in the script," she said. "So now I get to go home. It's how it ends. It's how all these kinds of stories end."
After Asgore took her soul and placed it next to the others, glowing purple with that interminable fire of humanhood, searched her bags and pulled out her notebooks. For three days he did nothing but sit in his chamber and read them.
The narratives amused him, saddened him, made his heart jump—at least, when he could make out her handwriting. She wrote about the creatures she had met and overcome, she wrote about the ones she had befriended, the ones she had killed. She wrote of Toriel, and seemed to view her as a well-intentioned but ultimately misinformed character. A "typical mother-figure," as she put it.
Toriel had tried to make the human stay Home. She had lied to the girl, telling her there was nothing beyond the ruins, but the human had seen through it. She had heard this story before. She had written this story before.
She had written many stories, but they all ended the same way. They all ended with the protagonist living on, having succeeded in his or her task. She had tried her best to live up to the expectations of her narratives—she had put up quite a fight, but a worn journal could not fend off the swipes of a sharp trident.
He called her soul Writer's Block. Then he thought that might sound a little mean-spirited, so he renamed it Newest Soul.
It stayed the newest for a long time (or at least for what Asgore could reckon was a long time—it was hard to tell in the underground).
He thought he would dread the day he would have to add another one to his collection, but when that day arrived, he felt strangely calm. It might've been because he had gotten used to this routine, or it may have been the almost overpowering quietude of his newest human guest.
The woman was old, older than he imagined humans could live. Her skin was browned and wrinkled, and she walked hunched, as if the weight of her soul pulled in her body toward its center of gravity—it seemed a heavy thing, rich in experiences (Asgore considered himself something of a connoisseur of human souls at this point).
When he offered her tea, she smiled, dimples appearing at the edges of her mouth. He could tell that by human standards (at least from what his own human child had told him), she was quite beautiful, irrespective of the deep wrinkles and white hair. He a human aged differently from him, but her silvered mane and cloudy eyes struck him as strangely eternal. There was such a strong resilience in her soul—a soul he could almost feel just by looking at her. This was the sixth time he had encountered such a quality (though admittedly there was little of it in the peach boy, his first victim), and he decided he would find out what it was.
She sat and took her tea with grace. He could tell she had enjoyed thousands of teatimes before, and was quite comfortable raising the china to her lips, sitting across from a monster. She seemed remarkably unconcerned with her situation.
"Do you know why you're here?" he asked her.
"Well, there's little chance of me going home now, isn't there?" she asked. Asgore shook his head. "So you're going to take my soul. That's fine with me."
Again, Asgore's heart sank. This was the second human who had fully known their fate and accepted it without opposition.
The woman finished her cup, and asked for another. Asgore complied, unwilling to deprive her of any simple pleasure, should he be capable of providing it. She looked intensely into the cup as if gazing through the liquid, past the saucer, into something deeper. He had heard of those who could tell the future by gazing at how leaves of tea arranged themselves on the bottom of a cup, but he had never put much stock in that method himself. There were many things he could not predict—that he was sure no one could. The weather, for example (which was impossible to see under all this barren earth), or whether one's adopted child would turn out to be just slightly nuts.
"I have seen many things," the old woman said. "And I have lived long enough. You may take my soul, if it suits you. I suspect it will not, though, when you consider the future."
Asgore did not argue with her. He did not even know what she meant. She just gave him an oracular smile before finishing her second cup.
It struck him as odd that a woman this frail, this elderly, could've made it this far. He did not know how a person like her could survive a fall through the barrier, much less without injury. He did not know how she could've navigated her way through a world strange and hostile to her; he knew enough about the souls he had collected to be sure none of them had had an easy time making their way through his country.
So he asked her. To assuage his fascination, he persuaded her to tell him about her journey. She acquiesced, requesting another cup in exchange. She did not seem to be in a hurry, nor did she seem to want to delay the inevitable. She accepted time as it moved, she would accept her fate as it came.
She had woken up in the ruins, as they all had. She had been looking for flowers on the hillside with her granddaughter, when all of a sudden her world had reduced to the size of a pinhole. A cold darkness had consumed her, and she barely realized she had fallen through the earth before she lost consciousness.
When she regained it, she lay in a stupor, back aching (as it usually did), vision blurred (as it usually was). She had called out for her granddaughter, but found she was alone. Until Toriel happened upon her.
The old woman (as well as Asgore) suspected Toriel had been searching for her. The way Toriel paraded around the perimeter of the ruins, the way her keen eye passed over every shadow, the way she held herself and spoke of other people that had made the fall below the mountain—these all marked her as someone who did not simply accidentally discover these humans. She had taken it upon herself to be a gatekeeper, of sorts.
"She tried to save all of them, you know," the old woman told Asgore.
"I know," he said. He hadn't known, not really, but he could guess as much. Toriel had always been strongly opposed to the idea of collecting human souls. He was not sure if he could find fault with that.
Toriel had tried to convince the old woman to stay. While the queen could not treat the woman as a child, she could at least try to entice her into staying Home as an honored guest, as a friend. But the human had an old, wise soul, perhaps older than her body. A child like Toriel, regardless of the centuries under her belt, could not keep this human cooped up. The old woman had places she must go—she had a grandchild to care for, she had bouquets to arrange, quilts to mend, gameshows to shout at.
Toriel could not resist her. She had always had a deep reverence for the aged (perhaps that sentiment came from agelessness itself—unless Asriel reappeared into the world again, or Toriel birthed another child, she would stay as she was: young, beautiful, kind, perfect in every way). The old woman walked from Home unencumbered, unchallenged. As she emerged into the underworld, drawing her crocheted shawl tighter around her frail shoulders, she felt refreshed. She had to admit to herself that something this exciting hadn't happened to her since the War; but she said she didn't want to talk about the War. Those were dark times.
She found the crunch of snow beneath her shoes motivating, the chill invigorating. She said she had felt something rise inside her, a sort of momentum that pushed her through the dark forests into the snowy plains beyond.
It was not fast going. Her legs were old, tired, frail. Her gait was that of a woman who had made many trips, through snow and sand, through mud and across paved, lamplit streets.
It was this slowness, this tired gait that ultimately spared her from the enthusiastic haranguing of the indefatigable Doggo. As she approached him, slowly, her hair and shawl still in the windless day, he narrowed her eyes at her suspiciously. This was not the first strange creature she encountered, and the last one had been friendly enough, so she called out to the dog. Doggo barked furiously at the snowflakes falling past her, snowflakes which seemed to be talking to him. He exhausted himself as the old woman stood still, trying not to shiver, trying not to laugh hysterically.
Eventually a slight breeze carried her scent to Doggo's eager nose, and what he smelled pleased him. The woman said that all dogs adored old people; they could not help it. So she left Doggo confused in the snow, with a tickled ear and a small stick she had found in the ruins.
The dog who had belonged to the boy found her next, and she had left him in much the same way. He had been quite eager to wrestle affection from her—Asgore figured it might've been a residual habit of his life with humans. Doggo, for certain, did not operate under such pretenses.
The old woman passed through Snowdin without incident. After hearing that beyond the town lay a pleasantly warm cave, shimmering with water, she folded her shawl and left it beneath a tree, as a gift to any chilly passers-by. Within minutes someone had taken it.
In Waterfall the woman met a guppy who tried to murder her with a frying pan. It demanded her surrender, in a wavering, watery voice which dried too quickly in the air. It had not been a successful fight, since the little fish had not developed its arms yet and boasted only two stumps for legs. The guppy wielded the pan with one foot and attempted to stand on the other, wriggling its finned tail for balance. Despite its best intentions, it was overwhelmed by the inertia of swinging the frying pan, and did nothing but roll and flop on the ground. The old woman helped the guppy from the mud, her bones creaking, but the creature was slippery and surprisingly cold. It slid through her fingers and bounced along the road, landing on what the old woman assumed was its back (she claimed it was about the size of a basketball—whatever that was—and similarly shaped, so it was hard to tell if it even had a back).
The old woman eventually hoisted the creature to its feet again, nudging it back toward the water. It cursed her for her condescension, but under its bubbling, ranting fury, she heard it clearly express its earnest desire to become stronger.
"The creature didn't even know I was human," the old woman laughed. "I told her to come here, that I had heard of a great king who granted the requests of all his subjects. I told her you could help her grow stronger." The old woman glanced at Asgore over her shimmering cup of tea. "I hope I am not mistaken."
Asgore shook his head.
"Very well. I expect as soon as she grows her legs she will pay you a visit. I don't know how long that will take, but I suspect I'll be gone by then."
Asgore said nothing. So the old woman took a sip of tea and continued her story.
She had stomped through the fields of echo flowers to the lava flows, stopping every once in a while to take in the sights. She said she had never seen anything as magnificent (Asgore had a difficult time believing the sights and sounds of the upper world were underwhelming compared to those here, but humans appeared to be jaded creatures). She wished to keep the memories of this weird escapade with her before she died (she briefly harbored the hypothesis, much like the girl with the ballet shoes, that her soul was already on its journey into the afterlife, and was simply undergoing some sort of bizarre trial. Asgore wondered what sort of person would subject a human to such an adventure, and under what pretenses. It bewildered him to no end, but it seemed to be a common theme among humans—someone was behind all this, someone was testing these people and judging them based on their behavior and performance. It all seemed a little megalomaniacal for Asgore's comfort).
The old woman had found a small lizard-like creature with a leg stuck under a rock, and freed it. It led her to the stairs to the capital, limping slightly, silent. The old woman said she swore she could recognize a blush on the creature's face, and the only time it spoke to her was to ask her that if she was a turtle, where her shell had gone. The old woman had laughed, figuring the tiny monster was merely shy, and more than a bit awkward. It was a forgivable offense, in her book.
"To be honest, there were certainly times when I felt as if I, too, wanted nothing more than to slither under a rock and hide," said the woman. "At times I almost did. I'd see something large and intimidating lumbering toward me on the road, and I'd have to keep myself from hobbling behind a rock or tree." She chuckled. "Then I remembered I am a grown woman. Cowering is simply not an option for me. So I kept going. And going, and going. And here I am." She had finished her final cup of tea.
There was something so strange, something indomitable and even frightening about the look in her eyes. It was the same with the others. Something about the way they held their heads high, something about even in their worst moments, when their hands covered their faces and the tears came to their eyes, they did not break. They did not fall down without getting back up eventually.
It struck him almost like a blow to the face that all he had to do to unravel this mysterious thing that drove humans—this thing that had plagued and intrigued him for years—was ask.
"What is it that keeps you together?" Asgore said. "What is it that led you here?" She titled her head at him, as he had seen the dogs of Snowdin do when confronted with a confusing question. "What has kept you alive for so long?"
The old woman closed her eyes, brow furrowing, as she thought deeply. After a few seconds, she looked up at Asgore with a smile. "Luck," she answered.
Asgore knew she had lied. When he pulled her soul from her body, he could not believe that she had any luck at all (after all, here she was, thrown into a strange world, slaughtered by a stranger's hand). There was something else to her, something entirely separate from external influence, something endogenous that could only be extracted from her innermost being.
Asgore held her soul, lingering with it a while before depositing it in an elongated jar for preservation. But whatever it was that lived inside the old woman pulsated against his hand, the same way the heat of a fire might warm his skin in comforting beats. The weird strength that emanated from it confused and emboldened him.
He named the soul Grandmother. And he thanked it profoundly, as he did the others, for its contribution to the betterment of his people.
One more. One more burst of that hideous strength—one more iteration of this mad cycle, and he would break out of this prison. He would take his people with him and send the souls of the humans to whatever resting place awaited them.
He would be kind, and merciful, when that day came. But he could not afford mercy until then.
For now, he had to wait, spear ready, resolute. Determined.