It was four progressively more well-lit caverns, three tripped over rocks, two run into walls, and a cracked knoll covered in dead grass stumbled up in her panic before Aliza calmed enough to realize she wasn't being followed. With this blessed realization, she stumbled to a halt in her frenzied escape to gasp for air and attempt to settle the rolling unease in her belly, blind to the room she had come to a stop in.
She bent to settle the little red butterfly in her sweaty hand on the ground for a moment (Ruby glowed weakly, her bent wing flapping uselessly as she attempted to stand), the flashlight tucked under her arm right beside her, and thereafter propped her good palm on her knee, wheezing and hacking against the insistent burning of her throat, torn apart by her exertion and her own stomach acids.
She hadn't ever vomited that much, certain she had been close to heaving up her own internal organs in her illness... yet even now, thinking back on the creature she had just fled made her completely empty, growling stomach nearly turn itself inside out in disgust and fear, the bile gathering again on the back of her tongue, thick and vile.
Her watering, panic hazed eyes turned back to the path she had just charged down as she attempted to restore her fled breath. The ivy and grass strewn caverns grew darker and darker as they twisted and turned away from her (there was a curious amount of vegetation here, including but not limited to the glowing lavender mosses growing on the high, craggy ceiling above... though, she supposed, there did seem to be enough moisture here to support it), until they disappeared behind a thick rock wall, blocking her view of the tunnel that led to the room full of dried flowers, garbage, and, apparently, dead people.
She shuddered unconsciously, her nose wrinkling and her eyes flashing from gold to scarlet for a moment almost too fast to see, swathing the stone walls about her in red. She'd seen dead things before, like the baby rabbit she'd found on the side of the road and tried to keep alive, hidden away in her little room (she'd tried so hard, but it had still died in the night... she'd buried it in the backyard, had cried for over a week)... roadkill on the highway, left to rot in the heat of the sun... fallen birds in the yard when gramma got tired of the crows and went on a bender... the face of the man that had tried to hurt her, his charred flesh falling from his bones as he screamed in agony-
Aliza winced, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head, hard. She didn't need to be thinking about that right now... there were more important things to consider than something she would never be able to change.
Like Chara.
Her eyes snapped open, forcefully cleared of the tears that had attempted to fill them, as she stood fully once again, squinting hard into the darkness she had left behind. The being she had spoken to had been nothing like anything Aliza had ever seen... something beyond her experience or understanding. They had looked like a human child, and yet there had been nothing human inside them, she knew it from the foul touch she could still feel crawling up her arm, from the acrimonious cruelty in their words and their fetid smile, from the grotesque visage behind the simpering mask.
Were they a ghost? Had they died there, alone in the dark, and now haunted their tomb, attempting to scare anyone that passed by?
The numbness that had stolen over her body, the near loss of her willpower to their suffocating pressure, the dark whispers that had offered peace and power filling her mind, told her otherwise, that the creature in the forgotten mausoleum was something far worse than a spirit of ill will... and somewhere in the back of her mind, hidden among the instincts that had kept her alive her entire life, she knew this wasn't the last she would see of the strange being.
Though she knew nothing of what they were, she was more than familiar with the kind of person they were, had met many like them in her wanderings through the dark city she had called home, and knew one defeat meant nothing to them. They had been desperate to gain control over her, she'd felt their hunger for freedom clawing at her mind even as she sank under the waves of the nothingness they had promised her, and they weren't about to give up on that.
She'd have to be watchful and careful. She didn't know what the mysterious voice had been that had pulled her from her surely deadly trance, where it had come from or why it was silent now, but she didn't think it was going to work again.
They'd be ready next time.
Shuddering one last time, as though to shake off the experience entirely (she wasn't sure she would ever forget their rotted face, their sickly sweet voice wending through her blood like venom), Aliza finally turned away from the way she had come and to what lay ahead, looking over the room she had come to a rest in.
The cavern was different than the ones she had run through, and even the great cave she had fallen into... the others had borne some evidence of workmanship, ancient pillars and archways here and there to support the high ceilings of the caves, faded signs set into the walls, broken pots and primitive scrawling on the walls, but the one she now stood in was worked far more meticulously. The entire room was carved from the rocks and into a definitive shape, a courtyard of some sort. The walls were patterned bricks, the floors smooth and, though cracked with age, more even than the caves she had just left, and she stood, she realized suddenly, at the foot of a grand set of stairs, an identical copy behind her curving away from the cut floor to meet a platform some feet overhead.
The mosses above, glowing gently and evenly where they clung to the recesses of the rocky outcroppings and stalactites that formed the cave roof, cast a lilac hued light over the contents of the cavern, everything from the bricks in the walls to the evenly carved floors to the stairs themselves colored with it. The only things completely unaffected by the mosses' glow were the copious drifts of blood-red leaves laying in heaps on the floor, in the corners, gathered along the stone steps, and piled high in the recess between the staircases.
They looked almost unnatural in their coloration, incredibly stark against the soothing purplish-gray of the stone, and though they crinkled merrily at the touch of the toe of her shoe and the odd, stinking wind that moved through the caverns almost like the breath of a great beast, the noise reminding her of the first day of fall on the surface of the world, closer inspection revealed them to be covered, from tip to stem, with some sort of dust, almost like the spores of a fungus. It tingled against her bare fingertips, when she touched it tentatively, sticking to her like iron shavings against a magnet, and as more gathered on her skin, a fog began to cloud her mind, the sounds of faraway screams and the sharp scent of fresh blood filling her head.
She quickly dropped the leaf she had picked up curiously, wiping her hand on her already bloody, sick covered jeans, and stepped away from the pile of the things gathered at the bottom of the steps,
wrinkling her nose and shaking her head to clear it. The sensations faded the moment the dust was gone, her ears ringing with the sudden emptiness, her eyes watering and her tongue heavy in her mouth.
She'd never heard of leaves that acted like mushrooms, but she also didn't know everything, nor did she have even the slightest clue what different sorts of things existed in this world of strange magic. The last thing she needed was to mess with some weird vegetation she had no knowledge of and end up poisoned on top of having her arm broken.
Speaking of...
Grimacing and steeling her nerves, the girl gritted her jaw and, finally, looked to the arm that hung limply at her side, lent nearly full sight of it and her injury by the light filling the room. Her upper arm appeared fine, a few cursory pokes along its length revealing nothing but bruises, but the lower half was a far different story. Her jacket arm was shredded and matted with drying blood around the peculiarly bent limb; several dead, brown flowers had adhered themselves to the material and what she could see of her skin, along with several strands of grass, some of her own hair (at least, she hoped it was hers), and a faded candy wrapper... and from the mess of it all stuck something long and ivory and jagged that could only be bone.
An odd sense of wonder overtook her at the sight, morbid and detached from the reality of seeing something she knew she never should have. She nearly reached out to touch it, wondering to herself at the mystery of what lay beneath her flesh, before halting her hand and blinking in confusion at herself.
Shouldn't she be horrified at this? Her arm was shattered, so badly that the broken pieces were sticking out of her skin, and she didn't know how to fix it; any sane person would be screaming, at the very least ill at the sight of their own broken bones, their mangled limb and an amount of shed blood that was certain to mean terrible things. Yet she felt like she was apart from it, like someone looking at a painting in a museum.
She had no idea what was wrong with her (was she going into shock? She'd heard the doctors and nurses talking about it at the hospital, when she spent time there looking for souls), but of all the things Chara had spouted, they had been right about at least one... she wasn't going to get far like this. Not far at all.
Sighing and staggering under a sudden bout of weariness (she was so tired: everything hurt, her head was pounding, from the ache of her fall and the closeness of the rock both, and she was starving), Aliza sat heavily on the floor beside where she had left Ruby. She carefully arranged her limp arm in her lap, resting her back against the banister of the stairs behind her, and slowly gave in to the desire to shutter her heavy, aching eyes, letting the old, abandoned courtyard fade from sight and into nothingness. She just needed to rest for a moment... just long enough to gather the courage and strength she needed to wrap her arm.
She was terrified to do so, deathly afraid of the pain that would surely break the trance of her detachment from it, and just... she just needed a few minutes to brace herself.
Five minutes, and she'd do it.
Despite her assurance to herself, though, she felt five minutes come and go like nothing, like the strange breeze that shifted the leaves on the ground and smelled so very wrong, and lingered in the
place between awake and asleep stubbornly, knowing she needed to move and yet desperate to stay. For the moment, just like this, she didn't hurt all that much, and honestly, she felt like she could slip off into sleep without even trying, the last good rest she'd had her stolen moment in her room at gramma's house.
Would just a little sleep be so bad? She was so tired...
She had no negative answer but the clamoring of her on edge instincts, easily ignored in her weariness, and would have fallen into the abyss behind her eyelids entirely, too, exhausted by fear and trauma and blood loss, if not for her companions.
Roused from where they had been hovering about the drifts of leaves between the staircases, dipping low into them occasionally as though searching for something, the white butterflies swooped back to her side to flutter about her, brushing their wings against her dirt and tear-streaked cheeks. Beside her on the ground, struggling with the weight of her hobbled wing, Ruby slowly crawled up her leg to prod at her hand, not letting up until the girl, grumbling and wincing, shook herself away from the haze of beckoning slumber grudgingly. She blinked wearily several times under heavy lids, yawning widely, and flapped her good hand at the butterflies swarming around her face to assure them she was awake.
Just a moment wouldn't have hurt, she was sure of it, but that one moment, spent in an open place only, at most, a hundred feet from where a creature that wanted to harm her resided was foolishness itself, even as tired and hurt as she was. She needed to get further away, and fast, and to do that, she needed to grit her teeth and bind her arm.
This was not going to be fun.
Sitting up fully, shifting Ruby carefully to the top step of the stairs ("I'm so sorry about your wing... I know you'll be okay, but still..."), and shrugging her backpack around her shoulder so she could rummage through it, Aliza spent a long, confused moment searching for her spare t-shirt and the roll of bandages she knew she'd brought before recalling, with a curl of nausea and a wash of cold dread, them falling from her hands and to the ground when Chara had made themselves known.
She'd forgotten all about them when she had fled, thinking of nothing but escaping their influence... and she couldn't go back, not knowing what awaited her there. Crap... what was she supposed to do now? She couldn't just leave her arm like this, it would swing around and only get more hurt, cause her more pain... maybe even get caught on something, get her stuck when she needed to escape.
There was her sleeping bag, of course... but the material was unwieldy, and it would utterly destroy the thing to try to cut bandages and a sling from it.
...she supposed she could cut up some of the clothes she was wearing, her jacket was pretty useless now with all the tears in it (plus, she was actually starting to get a little warm; it was fairly humid and temperate in the caves, maybe she wouldn't need it at all), and she didn't really need the bottom parts of her jeans...
Better than nothing, and as a cursory glance thrown around the courtyard she sat in told her, there was really nothing else to be had. So, with a grim set to her paling jaw and shaking hands, she dug her only real tool, her Swiss Army knife, from her pack and set to work, hacking one-handed at the hems of her jeans (thank the gods she was ambidextrous...) to peel them away and shred them into long, workable strips of denim.
She was left with mid-calf length, very uneven looking pant-legs and some surprisingly strong makeshift bandages in the wake of her toils, and wasn't even totally displeased with the way her jeans looked. Capris weren't terrible, after all...The larger issue was going to be getting her jacket off from around her injury.
The exposed bone jutted rather inconveniently through the very middle of one of the arms, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to stretch the rest of the arm over it... which meant awkwardly attempting to cut all the way along its length with her good hand.
She was left sweating and panting with both exertion and pain from how often she had to jostle the injury to get the jacket cut off around it, her fingers and arm cut in several places when the awkwardness of the blade's angle caught at her skin. Eventually, though, the deed was done, left with a one-armed, terribly stained coat, the shredded, blood-covered remains of the removed arm, and the full reality of her injury, far worse than it had looked lost among the material of her jacket.
A total of three bone shards extended from the mangled, broken skin, the longest and thickest connected to her limp, slightly bluish hand and streaming with a steady trickle of dark red blood, and Aliza paled further at the thought of attempting to straighten any of them with the simple bindings she had, if any of them could be bound at all.
She didn't know anything about the exact science of mending broken limbs, much less the approximate guesstimation of it... but she had a bad feeling that this was something that not even her healing abilities could completely cure, a feeling that was slowly but surely draining the hope from her heart. Frustration and despair were quickly welling inside her, in the absence of both her dogged surety and her blood, and she let out a quiet, choked sob that echoed emptily around the stone courtyard, unable to hold it back any longer.
Was... was she going to die here? Before she had accomplished a single thing, bleeding out from a wound she hadn't been prepared for?
Forgotten and rested at her side while she surveyed the shattered limb, her uninjured hand tingled as something crawled over it, and she was only kept from shrieking and accidentally throwing Ruby across the room by her long acquaintance with the insect. She looked down with alarm and a quickened heartbeat to the straining, weary butterfly tapping patiently at her knuckles with her forelegs. She looked as worried as a butterfly possibly could, her antennae drooping and her wings dim, but the bare touch and her presence at her side gave Aliza the morale boost it always had, a surge of restored confidence rushing through her to bolster her flagging soul.
She still felt weak, she still felt incredibly small and incapable and alone (her mother had thought far too much of her... how was she going to do this by herself?), but she was able to smile down at the injured insect encouragingly, shifting one finger to brush her fuzzy back. Ruby flickered in response, raising her antennae, and Aliza let out a quiet chuckle, sniffling and sitting up straighter against the backdrop of the stair banister behind her.
"It... It'll be okay. I'm a quick healer, and... it could be a lot worse," she assured the butterfly and herself both (she thought again of the flashlight she had left behind in Chara's room, shattered into pieces on a jagged rock, and how it could have easily been her head instead), and dragged her makeshift healing items closer.
It was going to be extremely difficult to do this one-handed, but there was nothing else for it, and after carefully unsnapping her prized bracelet from her limp wrist to stow safely in her pocket, with a churning stomach and a gritted jaw (she recalled, suddenly, seeing something on one of gramma's drama shows about biting down on something to keep from biting your tongue off, and ripped off a thick piece of denim to dig her teeth into), she finally touched the spires of bone extending from her skin.
Simply touching them seemed to be relatively painless, though any amount of pressure on the largest sent red hot pokers of agony jabbing into her arm, and soon revealed that the two smallest pieces of bone were what appeared to be shards of the larger, stuck into her skin like splinters. It was a torturous process to pull them out, as both were dug fairly deep, but with some manipulating, they were removed and, with closed eyes and utter disgust, thrown into the large pile of leaves beneath the grand staircase.
Out of sight, out of mind, she told herself... and there was no point looking at them any longer, nor in keeping them. It's not like she could put them back together...
Around the remaining bone, protruding horrendously above the gaping, torn flesh that lined the inside of her arm (she barely held back a retch while inspecting the wound for debris, carefully and wincingly pouring water from the bottle in her pack across it to wash dirt, grass, and flower petals away), she carefully wrapped the cleanest section of her butchered jacket arm, in the hope that it would keep the bleeding to a minimum and spare her arm any further injury from how tight she was going to have to wrap the bandages.
At the very least, the bindings could act as a sort of... what had the word been... torniket. Something to help stop bleeding from large wounds.
With the foundations laid and one end of her makeshift bandage clenched between her teeth, Aliza, at last, began the arduous, sure to be excruciating process of pushing the bone of her arm back where it belonged. Just the touch of the loop of denim she had wrapped around it sent jolts of ragged pain through her body, tears streaming down her face and whimpers escaping around the material in her mouth. Her hand was already shaking with strain, fear of what was coming washing over her entire body in a cold wave of misery and apprehension.
She had to do it, though, she had no other choice, and with a mighty wrench of her arm and a jerk of her head, she pulled the denim bandage tight, her arm snapping straight with a twitch of her pale, limp fingers-
She nearly passed out. She was certain that she would have if her own horrible scream hadn't snapped her back out of the choking haze of it, of the absolute agony that had darkened the room around her into almost complete shadow. She could feel herself sobbing miserably, her body fallen sideways onto the ground beside her and clenched into a ball of rigid wretchedness, but, by some miracle, she hadn't let go of the material, her good hand a vice around it, her jaw locked as though determined to never part again.
She lay there immobile for some time, panting and gagging on further attempts by her body to rid itself of all its insides (what more did it want... she had nothing left to give up) and weeping inconsolably. Eventually, though, the rawness of the pain dwindled enough to allow her to breathe, to slowly regain her sight from the encroaching darkness enough to see her butterfly companions panicking. Ruby was hugging her nose, quivering and covered in teardrops, and above them both, the white butterflies buzzed about like agitated wasps, and she, with a further gritted jaw and the last bit of strength she possessed, double knotted the bandage to keep it in place, dropping the ends to the ground in blessed finality thereafter.
It was messy, blood was already starting to seep through the jacket material and her arm was definitely not completely straight, saying nothing of the entire job looking like something done by a blind, backwoods doctor... but it would do. She could work with this, she could continue on, and she let out a croaky rasp of a laugh, blinking the beads of her tears from her lashes as best she could and smiling, open-mouthed and panting for breath and with utter relief, at the butterfly clinging to her face.
"I did it Ruby... it's gonna be okay..." she whispered, so happy to, at last, have some sort of achievement under her belt, and rested her head fully on the ground wearily, giving herself a few more moments to recover her strength, to brace herself for just a little more pain. Before long she would need to push herself back up and finish the work she had begun, to wrap the rest of her arm and make some sort of sling out of the remains of the jacket she had hacked apart, but for now... she just needed to catch her breath.
She was gonna need to sleep for a week, once she found a safe spot to do so. She'd never been this tired.
Thankfully, the rest of her self-healthcare was far easier work than the binding had been, even weakened and aching as she was now. The sling did give her some trouble (she really should have thought to make it before she'd straightened her arm), but she eventually settled her now bandaged and secured arm against her chest, fitted into the folded and knotted body of the jacket, the remaining arm slung around her neck to keep it in place. She was actually rather proud of it, and preened to herself while Ruby walked across it busily, seeming almost to inspect her work.
"There. That should hold-" she began, carefully tucking her other hand into the sling to keep it protected (she was finally starting to get some feeling back into it, though it was extremely painful to attempt to move her fingers), but was interrupted by her stomach growling loudly enough to resonate around the courtyard. She'd forgotten almost completely about her hunger with the work she had needed to do on herself, and in the wake of it, it had come roaring back with almost a will of its own.
She began reaching for her pack almost unconsciously, her mind set on the boxes of granola and energy bars she had stashed at the bottom, before she stopped herself, furrowing her sweat streaked brows and shaking her head. She couldn't eat again already, not until she'd gotten her bearings and made a little progress; she'd run out of food before she even found the monster she'd come down here looking for at this rate.
Nodding resolutely, she reached for her pack again, but instead of plumbing its depths, she instead started loading it up with the things she would need to keep, her flashlight, her Swiss Army knife, and a remaining strip of the cut denim littering the stone floor piled inside for safekeeping. She waved to the souls, nestled securely inside the coil of her sleeping bag (they didn't acknowledge her, as ever), glancing longingly at the foil wrapper of a health bar reflecting the purple light back at her, before instead withdrawing her journal and zipping her bag closed again.
She would need it to navigate the tunnels ahead, Frisk's scribbled maps and notes the only clues she had (some made no sense, like "Don't pick on Loox", "Only 3 out of 4 rocks like to be pushed", and "Compliment Blooky's hat", but most were very informative and were still very neat, in comparison to some of the later ones), and flipped through the carefully preserved pages to where the sprawling networks of tunnels were recorded, near the back of the volume.
The one where she most certainly was at the moment, entitled the Ruins (possibly in reference to all the ancient stonework here, though there did seem to be a fairly large city in the middle of the tunnels as well, noted to be called 'Old Home'), began in a round, remote cavern called only the Flower Room ("Don't linger here- they're waiting"), and meandered a short ways through a few other natural tunnels and caves to a square room with stairs, a clear rendering of the room she was currently in.
The map seemed to indicate that there was a relatively safe path through a doorway at the top of the stairs ("Watch for traps"), but that first she should record her progress using something Frisk quite often called 'Save Stars'. If such a thing had really existed, though, not just some whim of her more and more degraded mind (or a facet of the woman's own magic Aliza didn't possess), it wasn't there anymore. The place it was supposed to be was now completely occupied by those disconcerting, dusty red leaves, and if it was in there somewhere... she wasn't about to brave their depths to dig it out.
She'd get covered in the dust that was all over them if she did, she was sure of it, unaided in extra protection from it by the short sleeves of her pink and white striped polo, and she was fairly certain she'd had enough odd visions filling her head and strange substances on her skin for one day. That, and she'd spent enough time here as it was.
She needed to get moving before she started putting down roots.
She chuckled wryly to herself at her own joke, carefully slinging her pack back onto her back and heaving herself unsteadily to her feet, grasping desperately at the banister behind her for stability as she rose with a series of pained gasps and stiff groans (the floor had been much harder than she'd noticed while laying on it for so long...). In time, and with great strain, she was standing again, and, stuffing the thick book of notes and maps and sketches of skeleton monsters under her good arm for a moment, patted her pants' pocket to make double sure the bracelet she had stowed away was still there.
She could lose just about everything else she had, barring the souls, and not miss it too much, even the journal itself. The bracelet had been very special to her mother though, a gift to her from the Sans she was down here to find, and had been in her care since she'd found it as a young girl. It was surely a little crusty right now, considering everything they had both gone through... but she'd wash it as soon as she was able.
Assured of its presence by the hard lump in her pocket, Aliza nodded firmly, winced at the crick in her neck that joined the complaining of her other various wounds, and took the book in hand again. Making sure Ruby was settled safely on her shoulder, she began the only slightly arduous climb up the stone steps she had lain beside for longer than she cared to consider, marveling at the neat, nearly whole craftsmanship of them as she climbed.
They must have been here for a very long time, bowls worn into them from use and wind and water, but they were uncracked and smooth and expertly cut, one blending seamlessly into the next as they marched up to the landing above. They were littered here and there with those leaves, shifting in the foul breeze with an odd rustling that sent a chill up her spine, but they were easy enough to avoid and step over. She reached the platform unbothered besides a slight pant to her breath (her injuries had taken more out of her than she'd realized... her head was pounding a little bit from the exertion), and raised her eyes to the sight of what was meant to be the entrance to the sprawling byways and back roads of Old Home.
The doorway Frisk had written of, and the windows flanking it, though, were not how she had described them... they were completely obstructed by thick, snarled, vines, grasping at the ancient stone so firmly that cracks had sunk into the facade of the entrance, some pieces breaking away from it to litter the landing. A carved greeting, cracked through its center by the encroaching vines, stretched above the blocked passage, welcoming newcomers 'Home' in rudimentary but neat lettering, but there was no welcome for her here.
The vines seemed almost purposefully impenetrable, lined with wicked barbs and oozing here and there with sickly black slime... as though they had grown in this place specifically, as grotesquely as possible, to keep intruders at bay.
Maybe the monsters had feared the creature residing in the Flower Room just as much as she did...
A curiosity likely to never be assuaged, and one Aliza honestly didn't have the time to ponder. She now had to face the reality that her planned route, the same one her mother had taken on her journey, was completely inaccessible to her, the vines a sort she knew perfectly well she wasn't going to be able to cut through with her tiny little knife or pull apart with her one good hand. A note of panic rang through her mind, wondering if she was now trapped here with no hope of escape (she couldn't exactly climb back out the way she'd come...), but she tamped it out before it could take hold, looking instead back to the book still open in her hands, the many paths through the tunnels and halls and caverns winding across the paper like snakes.
There had to be another way. It would be foolish for the monsters to potentially trap themselves outside their city in the case of a cave in... there must be another tunnel, somewhere along the path she had run blindly in her panic. She must have missed something... though her cursory look around the map wasn't exactly encouraging. She couldn't seem to spot anything along the way she had come, though it was, of course, possible Frisk had never gone that way, or had simply forgotten to include it, in her dementia.
Something in her wanted to believe the latter, that all hope wasn't lost and that her toils thus far hadn't all been for naught, and Ruby seemed to be of much the same mind, crawling down from her shoulder to tap at the way she had come, the drawing smudged in such a way that it may very well conceal another path.
It could be nothing, a vain hope at best and a fool's errand at worst, but it was worth trying, and with a new resolution in mind, Aliza turned back to descend the staircase, wincing and furrowing her brows with each step as the motion jolted her arm. She was almost halfway down, helping Ruby clamber back up to her shoulder, when something shimmering in the light of the luminescent mosses caught her eye, scattered among the leaves below the stairs.
"What's that...?" she wondered aloud, blinking to ensure that it wasn't some optical illusion her woozy mind was playing, and from her shoulder, Ruby's wings shot straight up, flickering brightly.
Curious and mystified, she leaned over the railing to get a better look, and at the same moment, the trio of white butterflies, which had been settled almost peacefully on her pack, took to the air to swarm around the leaves again. They swooped at what appeared to be thick shards of broken glass, golden against the stark redness and sparkling oddly, almost as though they were creating their own light.
An immeasurable sadness washed over her, sudden and inexplicable, as she looked down on the shards scattered among the leaves, unknown but stringent and pervasive, and Aliza quirked her lips to the side, leaning heavily on the stone railing.
"That must be the save star mom was talking about... that's really sad. I wonder who broke it," she whispered, throwing Ruby a glance from the corner of her eye (the butterfly had immediately sagged at the sight, possibly reflecting her own cryptic emotions), but there was no time to dwell on the strange feelings roiling in her heavy heart, nor to contemplate the oddity of the broken star. She needed to press on, and as such, she sent the shattered glass one last, sad look, pushed herself away from the railing, and continued on her way, storing the occurrence away to consider another time.
She took her retracing of her path much more slowly and carefully than her last sojourn, looking carefully around the tunnels and caverns as she traversed them in search of a way forward, following a scattered trail of her own drying blood on the stone. The caves looked, for the most part, unremarkable, more and more dimly lit walls and floors dripping with condensation and greenery, a piece of trash fallen from above littered here and there, the occasional column. She saw nothing to indicate any sort of alternative path, however, until the very last room before the Flower Room, her every step back towards it filling her with inexorable dread.
Nothing moved, in the yawning, dark doorway at the head of the room as she entered it, no sound escaped the shadows beyond the arched stone, but the silence was almost worse than the leering face she had only just fled. Aliza, shivering and breathing far more rapidly than she knew was healthy, felt along the dark, ivy draped walls desperately, unwilling to remove her gaze from the doorway, lest she be snuck up on.
It was harrowing simply to be there, fear of a known enemy filling her mind with paranoia (she nearly shrieked when a drop of water fell from the ceiling of the cavern and onto her head), and it was with unspeakable relief that, halfway along one of the curved walls, her hand fell into a gap in the stone, a recess beyond the curtain of vegetation swallowing her arm and nearly sending her stumbling. She wanted to leap into it without a moment's hesitation, unwilling to linger so close to where Chara dwelt even a minute longer, but Frisk's notes spoke often of traps, and it wouldn't be wise to jump straight into one and possibly injure herself again.
So, with a little more impatience than was likely necessary, Aliza yanked at the ivy between herself and the hole in the wall, pulling the thin, flowering strands of greenery from the stone unforgivingly. They gave way easily, falling about her feet in drifts, and before long, she was craning her neck backwards to take in the surprisingly large culvert she had stumbled upon.
It was another carved, arched doorway cut from the stone, the tunnel within trailing a few feet forward before dipping down and to the left, but unlike the other carvings she had seen thus far, seeming to use the known common tongue, the lettering around the tunnel mouth was unknown to her, best described as runic. She could make no sense of it, squinting through the darkness with her already poor eyesight... but looking on them, even without understanding their meaning, gave her a sense of calm that all but completely dismissed the dread of lingering near the Flower Room, that eased the pain in her arm and soothed the rumbles of hunger in her belly.
She was drawn towards it, in a way far different from the draw she had felt to the false numbness Chara had proffered, than the need to feed that had moved her hand without her will, than the sleep that her weary mind nearly demanded. It was like the beckoning steam from a warm bath, like being called into the embrace of... well.
What she assumed being welcomed by family would feel like.
She was used to dismissing the sting of her loneliness, though, accustomed to shrugging it away by her years spent with only herself and her butterflies for company, and squared her shoulders, smiling with as much excitement as her weary body would allow to her insect companions before, with one last, hard stare towards the Flower Room (the empty doorway stared back, seeming to grow even darker), she stepped over the threshold of the unknown.
The harmonious calm of looking on the ancient runes seemed to extend into the air itself along this path, as she walked carefully along the slowly descending, slightly slippery tunnel (rivulets of water trickled across the craggy floor, forming puddles here and there, and she nearly fell as she turned a corner, barely catching herself against the rough stone wall and scraping her cheek raw), dismissing all but the very worst of her pain and her worry.
The gnawing, persistent bite of her hunger left her entirely, only the familiar emptiness of momentarily denied food left in its wake, and as the stony walkway led her further, steadily downwards, the darkness around her fled as well. Clumps of lavender, glowing mushrooms, gently frilled like jellyfish, began to grow on the walls soon after entering the tunnel, and cast a comforting, cool light across the stone, reflecting in the water and humming a quiet song to themselves. The breeze was different here as well, cool and wet but seeming like it was encouraging her forward, rather than blowing hot into her face like the breath of a ravening beast.
It was almost like she wasn't on a dire mission to save an entire race of people, as she walked along to the whispered song of the dripping water and the glowing mushrooms, like she didn't have the crushing weight of a mountain putting pressure on her ears, or a horrendously broken arm, or a mission that she wasn't sure she could accomplish. For the first time that she could honestly recall, she actually felt at ease, almost peaceful, and Aliza, allowing herself a small smile, hugged her mother's journal to her chest, simply sighing and taking in the reprieve.
She had a feeling it wouldn't last forever... might as well enjoy it.
The tunnel took her further and further underground as time passed on, growing steadily more damp the further she traveled downwards, but just as she was beginning to worry that it would never end, that the path would take her all the way under a lake that she wouldn't be able to traverse (she had never learned to swim, gramma hadn't cared enough to bother to teach her, while she'd been able), it flattened out abruptly, her toes bruising in her boots as she kicked the suddenly even ground. It went on a few more feet, ten at most, before opening into a wide, open aired seating area, almost like a receiving room. The walls were lined with more clumps of mushrooms, the water rotted remains of wooden tables, and intricately carved stone benches, any cushions they had borne degraded long ago by the clime...
And over a railing at the end of the seating area, set up on a high platform and flanked on both sides by pillars that stretched all the way to the ridiculously high cavern roof, stretched a vast city carved straight from and into the rocks, extending into the distance far beyond what her poor sight and the little light the mushrooms offered could reveal. A vast majority of it seemed to be sunken into the same water that had dripped down the tunnel she had just left behind, the large lake swallowing up all but the highest buildings and the series of platforms that climbed down from the seating area she stood in.
Aliza, cast adrift by wonderment at the sheer size of the city, saying nothing of the cavern that held it, could only stare, blinking and shaking her head.
"W-w... what is this place...?" she whispered, any sound above that feeling like sacrilege (just standing there, looking down on the city from her perch, felt like an insult to its memory, like she was invading on a private funeral, trodding on sacred ground), and turned again to the map she had dog-eared in the journal as she had walked, searching the entirety of her mother's scrawlings for some indication of its existence. She even checked the back of the page, yet there was nothing there that mentioned, even in passing, a mysterious, waterlogged city.
She wondered, for a moment, if something had happened to this place the same as it had to the door that she had tried to go through, only to find it blocked, if things hadn't changed drastically since Frisk had been Underground, and that the city of Old Home had flooded. Something told her otherwise, though. She'd heard it was very easy to lose your bearings and directions in caves, but if anything, she felt she had a better grasp of where she was than when she had been wandering the woods Above, and she knew, somehow, that the direction she had traveled, along with the depth she had descended to, ruled out the possibility of this city being the same one on the map.
So it was a new place, somewhere she had no help whatsoever available in navigating... but she somehow didn't feel too worried.
She'd been in worse situations, certainly, and it wasn't like it was a terrible place to be... she felt unwelcome, as though she'd stepped into an incredibly well-preserved tomb; the buildings below, even mostly submerged, were to a one, as far as she could see in the gathering darkness, intact, curiously so, in fact, and looked as though families could still live in them, if they desired and could breathe underwater... but she had enough light to go on, granted by the quietly humming mushrooms, she wasn't in egregious pain at the moment, and there were a few levels of buildings that weren't below the level of the water that she could explore.
She couldn't ask for too much more than that, shifting her pack on her back to stabilize it, and made her way to a set of the stairs that led down from the landing of the seating area. They led her down to a stone brick terrace, lined with the remains of once carefully tended, potted bushes, tall, mostly dark street lanterns (some of the mushrooms seemed to have taken it upon themselves to begin growing in the neglected lanterns, casting light from the posts yet), and crowned with a towering statue of... she wasn't sure what to call it. It looked like an armadillo with a big, flat tail, wearing a wizard robe and holding aloft a roll of parchment.
Was... was this one of the monsters? The journal had said monsters came in all shapes and sizes, some familiar and some not, but that all possessed magic, and bore souls filled with kindness and love, powered by hope and capable of great things. It was certainly a strange thing, to see a creature so often wandering wild in the woods standing on its hind legs and wearing clothes... but its face, or what she could see of it from far below, was incredibly wise and bore a pleased smile, its eyes, even cast in stone, bearing witness to an intelligence that a mindless beast, as Chara had claimed monsters were, would not have.
She had read many times of the fondness Frisk held for monsterkind... but this was the first time she could honestly claim to feel the same sort of affinity for them. They... they really were just another kind of people, even if they looked different.
Pleased with the discovery, Aliza patted the large dais the statue rested on, attempting to read the runes inscribed along the bottom (still made no sense... damn), before walking around its base to look further down into the flooded city, a double set of stairs curving down from the terrace into what appeared to be about waist-high water.
A no go from there. She didn't want to have to try to ford the water if she didn't have to, and turned back to choose a different line of attack, eyes sweeping over the rows of buildings cut straight into the cavern walls as she attempted to pick one to begin her searching... before her gaze was seized by a familiar sight glittering in the near darkness at the end of one of the unsubmerged pathways.
Golden light, out of place among the violet cast of the fungi spread over the walls of the cave, sparkled daintily across the stone, almost seeming to beckon her towards it playfully.
Aliza let out a tiny gasp, her eyes flying wide and glittering a bright blue, before she all but ran back around the statue and along the brick-paved street along the terrace's edge, following the overlook railing to the end of the walkway. She was a little out of breath from her quick jog, her arm aching in protest, but the light, shimmering like coins at the bottom of a fountain, stole any acknowledgment of the pain from her mind.
It was a save star, whole and unbroken, and she stood in awe of it, watching the almost ethereal light as it floated in place midair, perhaps a foot above a fairy circle of mushrooms crowding around its base. She was suffused with a feeling she knew well, and yet was completely foreign to her, the longer she stood looking on it in wonder, as though she'd had the light all along and never known it... as though it had been calling and she'd never heard it.
Not until this very moment, where it all came crashing in upon her like an ocean wave, drowning her in golden light.
"It's so pretty..." she breathed, and on her shoulder, unseen and unacknowledged, Ruby glowed bright as a flame, watching the save star with the same intensity as her companion.
It felt... powerful. It felt hopeful, and it felt right, and it called to her, she felt it tug at the soul in her chest with the gentlest of hands, singing a sweet harmony with the hum of the mushrooms and the lap of the water below and the sweet breath of the breeze that ruffled her lank, dirty hair. It was a call she couldn't have resisted if she'd tried, as golden as the star's luminescence and promising to restore her in every way, both body and soul.
She didn't know what it meant, what the light was or what it intended for her, but her hand reached out to hold it in its palm before she could even think, sinking her fingers into it's radiance with a desperate need.
And... it was everything and nothing at once. It was warm, like a thick blanket and hot soup and confidence made into light. She could feel that something within the light, that nameless thing always at the edge of her mind that pushed her forward and told her that all would be well... she could feel it trying desperately to take hold and take away all her doubts and her fears, to fill her with its light and the courage to do what needed to be done, but it couldn't quite reach, something in her simply beyond its grasp.
It sighed, that something that hid in the golden light, and drew back, and as it did, it whispered, "Not enough, not enough."
It was a terrible feeling, to be rejected by the light, to feel it withdraw and dim almost in disappointment, and Aliza pulled her hand back as her sense returned to her, rubbing her tingling fingers and frowning at the glittering star, a little offended. She had no idea what she had just been denied, what sort of power the light held that she wasn't allowed, but it had felt important, and a sinking feeling of wretched helplessness threatened the momentary surge of confidence she had been granted.
She shook it away impatiently, though, angrily blinking a mist of slighted tears from her sight, and turned her back on the star. She didn't need it's magic, she had her own, and she could find her own way, hard as it was. She snorted irately, setting her jaw and pushing away the sting of rejection (it was familiar, far too familiar, would she ever be enough-), and looked busily about the silent, empty buildings, forcing herself to think of other things, to decide on her path.
Ruby tickled at her ear as she did, trying to get her attention, but she was in no mood for interaction nor comfort, still trembling with the light's offering of power and its subsequent withdrawal of it, and made no move to answer the butterfly on her shoulder, shaking her head and clenching her lips hard enough to flush them white.
She'd find out what her companion wanted in a second. She just... she just needed a moment.
Ruby would not be ignored, though. She flapped unsteadily into the air from her shoulder, able to do little more than glide to the ground with her bent wing, but made it to the top step of the building the star rested in front of, the open, pillar flanked doorway lit bright red with the glow of her wings. Aliza, forced from her melancholy, watched her path, and the determined circles the little butterfly walked on the stone step she had glided to, with a set jaw, confused but wearily accustomed to following the insect's lead.
She honestly hadn't even looked at the building until now, far too distracted by the light of the star, and took a moment to look it over, her before furrowed brows rising in surprise at the size of it. The building rose all the way to the cavern roof, laid into the wall and stretching as far as she could see off into the city, where it also descended towards the waters below, by far the largest building within sight range. The runes inscribed around the doorway radiated a taciturn, grave somberness, even moreso than the city itself, but unlike the rest of the city... it felt darker as well, as though something within was not as it should be.
It felt broken, and wrong, and she really, really didn't want to go inside, the sense of dread that she had left in the caverns far above slithering back into her gut like a venomous snake at the very thought. She attempted to scoop Ruby back up and onto her shoulder, to move them both along to try to find another route to explore, but the butterfly refused to be picked up, skipping surprisingly nimbly away from her fingers and flapping her wings almost angrily.
Aliza let out an unhappy snort the third time she tried, and failed, to recover her companion, kneeling on the top step of the building and propping her good hand on her hip.
"Ruby, stop it. I don't want to go in there, it doesn't feel right," she snapped, holding out her hand demandingly in the hope that her companion would finally acquiesce, but the butterfly ignored her, walking herself fully into the building and perching herself there, beyond easy reach. The girl sighed angrily, scrunching her eyes shut and rubbing her palm against her temple... before lowering her shoulders in defeat, squinting up at the building's silent, strangely threatening facade once more.
She really didn't like it, all of her instincts were screaming at her to stay away, but Ruby hadn't steered her wrong yet. She'd just have to trust her.
As such, Aliza stood herself back up from the ground, her neck twinging uncomfortably as she did (it was starting to ache again, as was her arm), and, with a monumental effort, forced herself to step inside the entryway of the monumental building, bending to invite Ruby to, at last, crawl into her palm to be returned to the safety of her shoulder.
"Happy now?" she grumped at the butterfly, rearranging her sling to better support her injured arm, and Ruby glowed briefly in nonverbal retort as she settled in. Aliza let out a soft snort of both annoyance and affection in response, shaking her head and blowing a too long strand of her bangs from her eyes, before turning her attention to her immediate surroundings, tense with disquiet and misgiving.
She was immediately reminded of a church, by the décor and the solemn piety of the place; she hadn't been to them often, but she knew the feeling from the times she had ducked into food bank lines.
She had stepped into what appeared to be some sort of worship room, small and quaint but lined with the same stone benches that had stood above in the seating area, set in neat rows before a collapsed, rotted pile of wood that may, at one point, have been a pulpit. Vases and urns that may have contained flowers stood around the walls, the destroyed remnants of books lined collapsing bookshelves, and at the head of the room, once sturdy wooden doors, fallen from their grand, rune lined doorway, lay on the flagged stone beyond it.
A fume of something like heavy incense and floral perfume spilled from within in a noxious cloud, a cold, wavering light illuminating the narrow passage beyond the fallen doors, and a feeling of creeping, familiar misery and ill washed over her. Aliza shuddered, watching the doorway ahead with trepidation and concern (there was a whispering, within, too poignant to be just the wind...), and looked again at the stone seats, set before the rotted lectern not in worship... but in sorrow.
This wasn't a church.
It was a funeral parlor.
She'd been to a few of those, in her wanderings, hopeful that a few souls would be lingering there, but even if they had been, the sheer amount of death, decay, and ash the places held within their walls was beyond her ability to withstand. The copious flowers and fresheners hadn't been able to hide the smell from her, reminding her constantly of the corpses hidden behind the face paint, stored below in freezers, melting in incinerators. Her head would ache with cold and darkness for days after leaving the places, her hands numb and her soul aching with the emptiness of it all. Graveyards were little better, generations of bodies left to rot in wooden boxes just below the soil... but at least outside, separated from the rot by the ground, she hadn't been able to smell it.
She could smell it here, where she stood. The same scent that had so overpowered her in the Flower Room, wafting from Chara's fetid breath, spilled from beyond the collapsed doors ahead, faint, almost overpowered by the incense, but it was there. A deep, pervasive terror threatened to take hold of her as she looked upon the guttering light reflecting off the stone, a soulless purple compared to the brightness of the fungi in the cavern just behind her.
If this was the place monsters had come to mourn... then ahead was the place they took their dead. She didn't know how she was so sure of it, but she was, and knew, with a soul-deep surety, that she did not want to see it.
"Ruby..." she whispered, trembling despite her best effort to remain strong. "Are... are you sure this is the way?"
The butterfly's mute glow of affirmation did nothing to assuage the worry eating at the inside of her belly, poisoning her breaths and speeding the beat of her heart. Aliza swallowed at a lump caught in her throat, hugging at her injured arm and doing her best to block out the dark things her imagination was summoning to frighten her with, forcing herself to laugh aloud, a panicky, high pitched thing, at the idea of the shambling undead.
Zombies. Honestly. If there were any here, they were more likely to hug her than want to eat her, if she could glean anything from her mother's notes.
She laughed again, remembering all the sketches of the smiling skeletons her mother had done, and the burst of humor in such a place, echoing back at her from the damp, bleak walls and disturbing the dust that lay on the benches, was honestly the best thing she could have gotten. It lightened her mood considerably, the sting of rejection from the star and the fear of the tombs ahead fading in the wake of a burst in the tension, and with a fierce nod, Aliza sat on the edge of one of the benches, setting the hefty book in her arms down beside her.
She had never added to her mother's journal herself before, feeling like it was some sort of dishonor to her memory, but slung her bag around her shoulder despite the nagging of her conscience, digging for one of the pens she had brought along in the front of it. She was just going to be adding to the maps, after all, and in an effort to keep herself from getting lost. She'd been wandering for what had to be a few hours at this point (she thought to check her watch, suddenly, recalling all at once that she was wearing one, but found its face shattered and the hands unmoving; damn, broken), beyond all recording that Frisk had done, and it would be good to know what paths she had taken, in case she took a wrong turn.
A burst of confidence had swelled in her, but that was bound to change, especially walking further into the unknown. It would be good to be prepared.
She nodded again to herself as she withdrew a marker from within (she'd found something wet inside as she'd dug, scared for a moment, but had found it to be only ink from a broken pen; could be worse, though her fingers were stained blue now), and, with a wince and a murmured "Sorry mama", she ripped the map of the Ruins from its bindings. A small part of something called 'Fallholm' ripped from the page, stubbornly refusing to be removed from the larger book, but it was well out of the way of everything she would be adding to.
She carefully shut and stowed the book back in her pack with an apologetic pat to its cover (it would be far easier for her to just draw on a single page, considering the single arm she was working with), zipped it back up and slung it onto her back, and set about crudely drawing out the path she had taken. It wasn't nearly as good as Frisk's rendering, her own drawing skills far inferior to her mother's, but it made sense to her, at least, her tongue held between her teeth as she crowded the watery city behind her into one corner of the map.
Part of her wished she knew the name of the city, so she could label it... but she contented herself with leaving notes alongside her mother's ("Sharp vines, no touchie", "Broken star and some pieces of my arm here", "Hidden path next to mean ghost room") and with sketching out the beginning of the path she was about to head down. Ruby seemed to nod along from her shoulder, clearly approving of the tactic, and before too long, she was done, reaching up to slide the marker behind her ear and clutching the folded piece of paper in her good hand as she stood from the bench.
Looking on the path ahead, flickering with ghostly light and promising nothing but unease, Aliza firmed her jaw, rearranging her arm in its sling, and rounded the stone benches with purpose, wrinkling her nose against the smell but set on her destination.
She'd gain nothing by cowering in the little lost city, mutably peaceful as it was. She'd come here with a purpose, and this was, according to her nearly infallible guide, the way forward. What had the guy on gramma's tv show said-
It was time to gut up or shut up, and so she went.