Inspired by Horrortale by sour-apple-studios, I bring you... Fracture, the story of Axetale. This AU is of my own creation, with the help of my dear friend Azul. The universe is almost fully fleshed out, though has yet to be put in good order, and this is the beginning of the canon story for it all. Please bear in mind that within, you will find horror, abuse, character death in needless detail, blood, gore, cannibalism, disfigurement, body horror, mental illness, and a world almost, almost familiar.
These aren't your friends anymore, though. Remember that.
Fracture
Chapter One: The Chasm Yawns
Hospitals were always so cold, but no matter how many blankets she asked for, Edna could always feel the chill clinging to her withered bones, like so much ice on the breath of winter, despite the warmth of the sun through the shaded windows, from the many lamps and the piled, thick covers. She would tell her visitors she suspected it was the souls of the passed, awaiting her joining them in their uneasy afterlife. She would speak to the ghosts of days gone by, in the quiet hours, chatting about this and that.
She used to, anyway, before the doctors had changed her medication. 'It will make the last days easier, if you sleep more,' they had said. Bah. It only made the dreams more vivid and, at times, more terrifying.
She would bob to the surface of consciousness on occasion, drifting on bare lucidity for a moment before slipping back down into the thick waters of drugged slumber. She fought so hard, to resist the pull of the almost inescapable sleep, the soothing draw of oblivion. She didn't want to be soothed, didn't want to sleep away the last dregs of her existence. She struggled, and often, with all her might to stay awake, fearful of that chasm just below the surface, where only darkness and something colder lay.
This fated morning, she didn't have to fight. Something pulled her from her sleep with a jolt and a gasp.
Rising to the waking world with a twitch of near paralytic limbs, Edna opened her eyes to peer around the dark room she resided in, blinking blearily about in the dim light. Reading the digital clock was useless with her old eyes (was that a four or a seven?), so she turned her muddled gaze to the curtained window for aid.
Ah, no light was escaping the shades yet, parted just enough to shine the summer sun across her while she "rested" during the daytime. It must still be night, or very early morning.
Her eyelids were heavy with her diminished sleep, and breathing was a struggle, her cracked lips parted in her exertion to draw breath. It took her sluggish thoughts a moment to realize just how tight her chest was… that the beeping from the heart monitor was staggered, silent for far too long between reactions. Her fingers tightened in the crumpled sheets, her throat dry and clenched with realization.
It was close.
The old woman could feel it, the terrible, cold mist of death clutching at her heart, and she shied away, her breath even shorter and more labored.
S-she didn't… want to go… not… yet… n o, she had thought she was ready, but she wasn't...
The shadows beyond her hazy vision, dotted now with tears and the film of the impending end, shifted, startling her with their motion. She forced her eyes open, wide as she could, to try to see the creature that had come for her. All she could see was it's dark hood, in the blighted, lingering night, how it hovered over her bedside in bleak, somber silence.
She couldn't move, couldn't blink, couldn't speak to plea for it to not take her yet ; the machines wailing in the far distant background diminished, fading into the ether of her consciousness.
Nothing stopped the approach of the reaper; it's shadow seemed to stretch to the ceiling, out to cover the bare light from the bedside lamp… to engulf the very earth itself in the grasp of its icy claw. Edna choked out a gurgle of air, one last attempt to deny its approach, as she looked to its face.
It had no face, in the nightmare of her last moments, though.
It had only eyes, and they glowed , golden as the sun one moment and icy as the air suffusing her withered lungs the next; they burned down to her very soul, filling her mind with soft promises, kind assurance and a song of peace, as she felt herself begin to fade.
It reached a hand for her, thin and surprisingly small; she saw, as though through another's eyes, her own hand reach out to take the proffered grasp.
Her body grew limp the moment their hands met, and in the background, the frantic beeping of the monitors flatlined.
The nurse that rushed in moments later found Edna with her glassy eyes wide open, a glistening tear streak and a small smile on her slackened face, and the shadows gathered around her deathbed disappearing into the night.
Her window hung open, and the curtains blew on a cool breeze, the tassels of a ghost.
Boots pounded against the pavement of a small, dirty alley not too far from the hospital, the quick, resonant footsteps bouncing off the bricked walls and bent, smelly dumpsters; a long shadow grew in the shuddering light of a nearly burnt out lamp, thrown across the sidewalk that heralded the end of the alley and the beginning of the well-to-do neighborhood street it emerged onto.
It was not a large figure, imposing nor threatening, that emerged from the darkness, however, but a short, diminutive personage, clad in tattered blue jeans and a dark pink hoodie, clinging to a ratty backpack and sparking with odd suffusions of light, flickering in the wake of their quickened footsteps. They turned onto the street and, with a turn of their head to check for traffic, charged across the asphalt to the other side, again ducking into the lingering shadow of a tall fence and pulling at their hood to keep their face hidden.
The figure kept their cover, and their quick beat, until they were several blocks away from the hospital, and stopped to catch their breath behind the cover of an advert signpost, gasping and slinging their backpack around by the strap to check its contents.
From within, they pulled a capsule shaped container, seemingly made of glass and shining, silvery metal, no bigger than their forearm and filled with fluttering, oddly cartoonish hearts, glowing in different colors and floating ethereally in the space within the capsule. The hearts, bumping against each other almost intelligently, cast a warm, multicolored illumination across the person's face, beneath their hood, for the first time not buried in shadow.
It was the face of a young girl, no more than fifteen, with a button nose, pale, chapped lips that reflected the thinness of the rest of her body, round cheeks that did not, and light brown hair, cropped sloppily to her shoulders, that hung in her eyes perpetually, in seeming spite of her efforts to brush it behind her ears.
Her eyes were the most striking thing about her appearance, almond shaped and sparking with latent power her lithe form would not betray, glowing oddly with, at the moment, a vivid, electrically blue hue, though they flashed bright red when a car drove through a puddle nearby, her gaze flashing to the disturbance and then immediately back to her quarry.
Her name was Aliza, and she had just collected her last soul.
The aforementioned soul, a reddish-orange heart beating vigorously with it's all too recent life, tapped insistently against the glass encasing it, trying to escape to take its rightful place in the universe, and she smiled at it regretfully, inspecting it for cracks or dark spots before, upon finding none (Edna had been a strong, brave woman in life; she'd come to visit her often, before she'd been secluded to the ICU), sliding the container back into her backpack and zipping it back up.
She wished she could tell the souls in her possession that they wouldn't be trapped for much longer. They never seemed aware of her, or her words of comfort… but the journal had said as much. The only way to truly know or communicate with them would be to absorb them, and that was a dangerous road to travel.
There was no way she could chance such a thing when the risk of insanity was apparently so great. She could barely handle her own magic.
Aliza, shaking her head at her musings and again shouldering her pack, sent a glance behind her, to the far off helicopter pad on the top of the barely visible hospital, verdant trees and the peaked roofs of a hundred houses obscuring the rest from her sight.
She had been lucky to get away so cleanly, with how much of a fuss Edna had made. Gathering souls from the hospital was always risky, given all the cameras and staff, but it was the easiest way to get them. The nursing home had far more security (they'd kicked her out enough to know that), and the souls had dispersed by the time the bodies were taken to funeral homes or graveyards.
She certainly wasn't going to kill anyone to get them, that was for sure … and they had to be collected. Depressing, harrowing work that it was, it was necessary.
Aliza, with a sigh, settled her backpack more securely and slid her hands into her hoodie's pockets as she inspected the skies (the stars were fading, the space between them lightening into shades of blue and grey; it would be dawn soon, she needed to make tracks), tossing her head to shoo the trio of insects that floated aimlessly about her head away.
The nearly see through, ivory butterflies scattered, disturbed by the motion, before flocking together again around the larger, less ethereal wings of the crimson butterfly settled on the top of the girl's hood, clinging to the material and raising its head to the coming sunrise.
To the casual observer, the bugs flitting around Aliza constantly appeared as wisps, cotton on the breeze, flecks of light thrown from a passing mirror… perhaps even fireflies; no one had ever seen them for what they were, paid mind to their obvious sentience. Humans, the journal had told her, were either completely unable to see magic, or simply unwilling to accept it, though. That certainly seemed the case, judging from the general ignorance her familiars (a name she had plucked from a movie she'd rented, about Merlin, she wanted to say) were treated with.
She didn't mind. Not like she needed the extra attention. Her own magic and oddity got her enough of that.
"Come on, guys. We gotta go. Lay low for me."
The butterflies dimmed obediently at her words, and fluttered behind her to drift about her ankles more discreetly as she resumed her long, hurried stride, glancing up and down the still mercifully empty street before ducking again into the cover of her hood, making her way to the bus stop just at the edge of Main.
She made the first pickup just in time, slipping through the doors just as they closed and dropping a handful of change into the bin before shimmying between the bus seats; not a lot of people were up this hour, the only ones on the way to graveyard shifts further uptown, so it was no struggle to find her favorite seat at the back, next to the window with all the hearts drawn onto it with Sharpie. The driver gave her a passing glance, unused to seeing children out at this hour, but said nothing, as did the other three passengers, too tired and unconcerned to give much notice.
Small blessings. She hated the overbearing grandmothers that tried to sit by her and clean her face, only to shy away at the strangeness of her eyes, the static that always seemed to pop from her fingers, the simple oddity of her existence.
Some days she resented it, being so different. In the wake of her victory that morning, she couldn't be happier.
Her leg jiggled in excitement and anticipation as she looked out over the waking town of Ebott as the bus pulled away from the curb and onto the mostly deserted street, her palms itching with the impulse to look through the journal, to read again the plan that had been set out before her, but hesitated in lieu of prying eyes, picking instead at an old, patched hole in her pack instead, barely able to hold back her smile.
This was it. She was finally ready! She had found the container, gotten the souls, all seven of them, had followed the journal's instructions to the letter; it had taken years, years of deciphering the scrabble of insane letters, scrawlings, etchings, and scribbles that comprised her one connection to her sordid, lost past (it was hard enough to read regular books on their own, the way the words swam all over the place), years to figure out how to successfully harvest souls (so many had broken in her hands, falling to pieces and swirling away into magic unknown)... and now there was only the last step left.
The final plunge, in every sense.
Her stomach twisted in anxiety, doubt eating at her in a moment of clouded clarity. Her fingers drifted to the only other relic she had of the journal's author, the priceless, fine trio of platinum chains around her wrist and the sapphire gem strung on them, hidden from view under her dirty, tattered sleeve. She stroked her fingertips over the gemmed charm, but the sense of calm and peace that both it and her animal guides, settled on her torn jeans and gently flapping their wings with the sway of the bus, always gave her just wasn't coming.
It was a fragile thing, her confidence. She didn't have the… the… she didn't know the word for it. Strength, she supposed? The strength the author had had. The wherewithal to press on despite all odds. She had done so much, for a race of people all others would have shunned, at the mere age of eleven. She had intended to do more, and lost her life because of it.
Aliza herself had brought an end to that legacy with her birth.
She dropped her head into her hands, closing her eyes and rubbing her temples. It helped nothing, thinking like this, but it was all she had ever been told. That she was nothing compared to the woman her mother could have been. Smart. Kind. Caring. And so strong… she was nothing like her. She had been a leech on her belly, unwanted and worthless. A burden. A menace. A murderer . Not even teachers had been able to handle her, much less her grandmother. Unloved. Unneeded. Useless.
What had made her think she could do this?
A flash of red sparked in her lap, drawing her attention away from her inner struggle and to her knees, to where Ruby, the large, crimson butterfly, sat, wings still and multifaceted eyes directed up to her. Aliza sniffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand, before holding out her hand and letting the ghostly insect crawl into her palm.
The calm she had been looking for in reaching for her mother's bracelet swept over her as the butterfly settled in her hand, flapping its iridescent wings slowly; she couldn't understand what it was trying to communicate, never had and likely never would…
But she knew, at the very least, that it meant some level of comfort for her, and even that modicum brightened her heart, and something more inside that she now knew as her soul, and she smiled down at the butterfly wetly, wiping the remainder of her tears onto the shoulder of her hoodie.
"Thank you," she whispered, and ran a gentle fingertip over the insect's antennae, giggling to herself at the warm glow it let out in response, and spent the rest of the bus ride watching the sun rise, drumming her fingers on the windowsill.
It wasn't a long trip, unfortunately, and where the bus dropped her off, just a few feet away from a graffitied 7-11, she was going to have to walk the rest of the way. Seven miles, through a maze of run down neighborhoods, trashy businesses, and partially along the side of a busy highway. It wasn't the safest path to travel so early in the morning (or any time, honestly, but the morning crush was in full sway now, and coffee high businessmen weren't the most conscientious behind the wheel), but she'd done it many times before.
She walked quickly and with purpose, alert for any vehicles, or people, giving her undue notice. She had a Swiss Army knife on her, right in her front pocket for easy access, but it was hardly necessary. Her hands, balled in her jacket pockets, sparked with magic, beginning to heat as she spied a pair of hooded figures across the street watching her pass. She clenched her fingers into even tighter fists, ready to pull them out at a moment's notice to defend herself (please don't set her jacket on fire again, please don't, she liked this one)...
But the moment passed, they didn't move to follow or harass her, and she passed by unmolested, breathing out a sigh and trying to calm her thundering heart.
Her fiery hands didn't quell, though, singing the insides of her pockets and sending her butterflies into a mild panic, and wouldn't defuse until she turned into her neighborhood, finally wicking out in two very suspicious curls of smoke, simmering from her pockets in a stream in her wake.
Just another reason she had no desire to absorb the souls herself, despite her mother's insistence that her progeny would be capable of wielding them. Magical though she certainly was, she had little to no control over her "powers", which liked to spring into life at their own whim and wont. Fire seemed to be the most prevalent of her sorcerous talents (her element, she assumed, though it too came and went as it pleased), but trying to control any of her magicks was like trying to grab a fish from a waterfall while wearing a blindfold, anything more than handling human souls just out of her reach.
She'd ended up teleporting herself onto just as many roofs as she had frozen her bathwater and set her own hair on fire.
Last year, however, her powers had cruelly redeemed themselves when someone had tried to mug her during her scavenging for paper products behind the Dollar Tree. She could still hear his screams. The scorched flesh, where she had touched his face, where his clothes had burnt away. The writhing, gory, half dead creature on the pavement that had writhed in and choked on its own blood. It had been horrifying .
She had been sick every time she thought of it, locked herself in her bedroom for a month and stewed in despair and petrified guilt when she had heard that the man had died from his wounds. It had been months before she had been able to go out to find more souls, incapable of facing down death again in her state.
Aliza tugged at her hood, the wind picking up as the sun rose higher in the brightening sky; it was strong enough to nearly pluck her hood from her head. She picked up the pace, ducking her head to avoid the curious gazes of the housewives watering their lawns, passing by houses and cars and fences and bent mailboxes that might have been nice fifty years ago, before the wear and tear of the highland clime.
Her grandmother, Eloise, had inherited a house from her own grandmother here, and hadn't felt the need to move anywhere else since. The house was falling apart, an ancient, termite riddled, weather beaten monstrosity of a thing, painted a dusty pink long faded into ambiguity and draped with broken, greenish shutters, and Aliza hated it more every time she went back to it.
She'd be rid of it soon, though, and never come back. She had a fate bigger than this place, bigger than anyone that had ever put her down, she knew it, and completing her mother's work was only the beginning.
The abysmal carapace of her grandmother's house, set on a wild, untamed plot of land far larger than the home itself, came into view with the street's next turn, but Aliza made no move to approach the cracked, paint chipped double doors the stood ominously in shadow beneath the crumbling second story balcony, instead rounding the side of the house by way of a well trodden path through the weeds and briars to one of the back windows, hopping a short, rusty garden fence as she went.
She slipped inside with practiced ease, the pane greased to allow her completely silent entry, and closed it after her, casting a wary eye around the interior of the outdated, filthy washroom as she did so. Her nose crinkled habitually from the smell of body odor, mildew, and old food that permeated the room, and the house beyond, but she paid the source little mind as she let herself out of the water closet and tiptoed to the stairs, glancing at the sagging entryway to the living room before mounting them, avoiding piles of clothes, balled up paper, ripped boxes, and crusty dishes as she went.
The home had turned into something of a landfill since her grandmother had gone… more than a little mad (the doctors had called it… alls heemers? Eloise hadn't bought it, though, and had refused to pay for the medications or treatments or even consider paying for a facility). She had tried to clean it up, tried again every few weeks, but no matter how hard she tried, or how subtle she attempted to be, her grandmother would always catch her and beat at her with that stupid cane and scream at her until she went hoarse.
" You don't know what's trash and what's good, you just throw everything away! Don't touch my stuff, you ungrateful maggot !"
Her butterfly companions rested on her shoulders, flapping languidly and throwing glowing shadows across the peeling, yellowed wallpaper, as she wearily trudged to her room, where it was much cleaner, fresh laundry and herbs lingering in the close air of her small, dingy space. She shut and locked the door as quietly as possible behind herself, trying her best to keep from disturbing her grandmother as long as possible (she didn't ever wake up this early; it was better she didn't, to be honest, the last thing Aliza needed was the old bat snooping into her business again), before crossing to the dresser set below her little window, the shiny bits and baubles of her collection of little treasures (glass marbles, an old Christmas ornament studded with false crystal, tin figurines) catching the new light of the rising sun.
Ever so carefully, she removed the soul filled canister from her backpack and set it on the sun speckled surface, its inhabitants bobbing up and down in what little space was left, crowding each other to seek out the warmth. She wished idly, as she rubbed her thumbs over the glass, counting the heart shaped souls obsessively, that the other six containers had survived the years as well as this one. All the others had broken though… she supposed she was lucky this one, vacuum sealed and nearly pristine but for a few chips here and there, had lived out the years in her grandmother's care so well.
She sighed, a smile pulling at her lips as she watched the cartoonish hearts twist and beat in the golden light.
Seven, at last . She was finally ready. She only hoped things went as well in the second stage of the plan.
The butterflies, clearly aware of her thoughts, crawled and flitted down her arms to rest on her hands and on the canister encouragingly, glittering in jewel tones and exuding the tranquility she so needed. She chuckled under her breath, thankful all over again for their companionship and guidance; she couldn't have done any of this without them.
She never would have found her mother's journal in the crowded, dusty attic, crammed into boxes of old medical records and strung with cobwebs; never would have found the soul containers, the gently glowing bracelet strung about her wrist. Couldn't have handled the shattering of the first twenty something souls, in her fumbling. Wouldn't have had the patience to attempt to read the journal, once she had assembled it from the scattered pages of her mother's insane ramblings, her eyes stinging and her mind numb and aching with each new attempt.
Couldn't have survived the years of her grandmother's abuse and neglect, certainly. They were her only friends, in a world that neither wanted nor cared about her. Humans were cruel beings, that was certain. Anything different from them was to be castigated and shunned.
Perhaps, like her mother before her… she would find her place with the people underground.
Aliza was gentle in shaking the butterflies from her fingers, in her considerations, nudging Ruby's thick abdomen dotingly as it sunned itself atop the container, before she left her animal companions to rest from their adventure, crossing to her bed (a sunken mattress set on the floorboards, mounded with rumpled, balled up sheets) to dig the rest of her belongings from her pack.
Settling onto the pokey mattress and pressing her back to the crumbling wall beside it, she, with great care, dug the journal out of her bag, the yellowing pages crinkling where they stuck out here and there from under the makeshift cover (she had stolen it from an old dictionary, an attempt to keep the already water and time damaged pages and ripped folder covers and medical notes safe from more wear), along with a magnifying glass, setting both in her lap before cracking open the large tome.
She traced her fingers over the first page, scribbled ad nauseum with iterations of her mother's name (Frisk… just as beautiful as the few pictures her grandmother had of her around the house), before flipping to a worn transcript, perused many times by her own hand, describing the ritual she had labored to obtain the human souls for in the first place, the process the trapped race beneath the mountain would need to go through to gain passage back to the human world from their prison below.
One of their people, described only by the name Sans (it was a name repeated often, almost obsessively, through the journal, often in conjunction with delusional pleas for mercy and forgiveness) and the title Keeper of Justice, would have to take the souls, absorb them into themselves, and destroy the ancient magic that surrounded Mt. Ebott, a feat she knew she was far from capable of doing herself.
It was the only way they could all be free, the only way to shatter the barrier that had kept the race sequestered to the Underground for nearly fifteen hundred years, imprisoned to a system of caves and tunnels quickly growing too small for their population... where her mother had lived for so long, among a people dubbed as literal monsters.
Frisk, or Francene, as her grandmother insisted on calling her, had gone missing for years, over a whole decade; she had run when she was just a little girl lost in the foster care system, taken from her mother for much the same abuse and neglect Aliza suffered now. Everyone had thought she had run to a larger city, or suffered much worse and simply never been found.
But twelve years after she had mysteriously disappeared, without notice or trace, she had reappeared with just as little notice, found beaten, broken, and raving in an alley behind a drugstore. She was taken to the nearby hospital, treated for her wounds and the indignity she had suffered (Aliza flinched at the thought, mind shrinking away habitually)...
And that was when Frisk had told one of the nurses about where she had been for so long, about magic and monsters and her life under the mountain. She had been frantic to leave the hospital, clinging to a glass canister filled with a fluttering light and ranting about ineffable danger; she had to find more souls. She had to return to her husband, he was waiting for her, they all were.
She had to save them, there was no one else that could.
The doctors had thought she was insane. Declared her mentally unstable, detained her and sent her to the asylum on the edge of the city. Drugged her until she was permanently damaged, and kept her insane rantings in a neat little box, dismissed as the lunacy of a mad woman.
Aliza sighed, her lips twitching in distaste for the way her mother had been treated (she had had her doubts too, when she had first found the disordered array of pages… but they had explained so much about her odd life, made so much more sense than her just being a singular oddity, that she had had to believe them), and rubbed her fingers across a sketch of a smiling pair of skeletons, one tall and skinny and one short and squat (there were many, many drawings of the shorter one; always smiling or winking cheekily), knowing that she herself was proof that her mother's ramblings had held some truth.
Truth of magic and monsters and souls, truth that no one had wanted to see, turning a blind eye to the obviously paranormal abilities and strength her mother had exhibited during her stay at the asylum. The pages had been chock full of reports of fires, bizarre powers, and "accidents" that Aliza clung to fiercely, desperate for the identifying point she shared with the woman she had never known, taken before she had even opened her eyes.
It was such a relief, to know she wasn't the only one that had been just a little odd, that had had magic and been considered different. For Frisk, it had been to her bitter end, robbed of her ability to help those she had loved so dearly by the stigma and ignorance of small minds. Aliza wouldn't let her efforts be in vain, though.
She would take up her mantle. She would bring the souls back to the mountain, find this Sans, this Keeper of Justice, and free the monster race. It was her duty, just as it had been her mother's, and it was with this fierce determination lighting her soul that Aliza settled onto her side on her lumpy mattress, shutting her eyes for a few moments to gain some much needed rest for the journey ahead.
She would wake in a few hours, with plenty to spare before her grandmother awoke. She would make her escape unhindered, and set out on the journey of her lifetime with nought at her back but the bolstering wind her heart was carried on.
She hugged the journal closer to her as she fell into slumber, and in the growing rays of the sun, the scarlet butterfly flexed its wings atop the capsule of souls, throwing a pattern of translucent reds across the dozing child's closed eyelids.
Aliza awoke, with a start and a quiet gasp, to something of a ruckus, the walls of her haven shaking and her head throbbing slightly; she quickly dismissed it as someone driving past the house playing too loud music (jerks), and rolled back over to slip back into her slumber... but before she could drift back under the waves of her strangely pleasant dream (it had been so warm, laughter and welcome and what she had always imagined family would feel like filling her heart), something tickled the end her nose.
She swatted at it lazily, suspicious of one of the dust bunnies that liked to drift down from the attic on occasion, but rather than subsiding, it instead bit her.
She jolted up with a yelp, wiping at her nose and snapping open her bleary, glowing golden eyes in her shock, to see Ruby darting frantically about her head, fluttering its wings in distress.
It took a moment of following the butterfly's path with her tired eyes, yawning and scratching at her leg, before Aliza realized what had woken her up in the first place. Heavy footsteps were tromping down the stairs outside her locked door, her grandmother no doubt giving up on her stalemate with the unmoving door and the sleeping teenager beyond to search for the spare key that no longer existed, due to some interference on a certain butterfly's part (Ruby had found and stolen it years ago).
Aliza groaned, rubbing her face and rolling out of bed as quickly as she could. She needed to get everything in order, she had way overslept; judging from the angle of the sun through her little window, it was at the very least noon. She must have been more tired than she had thought...
She surreptitiously stuffed the journal, the soul canister, her supplies, and everything else that might suggest her upcoming departure into her backpack, hiding it behind a loose panel in the wall under her window as an afterthought, before clattering through her door noisily and down the stairs as loudly as possible, to let her grandmother know she was coming. The snarling she-beast had a habit of going through her things if she wasn't placated, and Aliza couldn't afford any more setbacks.
Losing the fifth soul from a deep crack in it had been setback enough. She couldn't afford any more, not when she was so close to leaving.
She bounced on her toes on the last step down the stairs at the thought, giddy and ecstatic.
Leaving .
She couldn't wait.
Aliza found her grandmother in the kitchen, standing on a quickly collapsing box and tearing through the knickknack filled cabinets, and cleared her throat to gain the vulture's attention, pausing in the doorway and standing stiffly in place while Eloise, starting at the noise, turned sharply to glare at her, looking over the edge of a pair of cracked, dirty reading glasses that had slipped to the end of her nose through beady, bloodshot, sludge brown eyes.
"Why wouldn't you open the door?" she barked as she clambered down from her improvised stool, rounding on the girl and propping her hands on her bony hips. Her graying, feathery, thin hair flew about her head in a wispy cloud of agitation, and Aliza tried not to stare at it, keeping her face straight as she shrugged her shoulders stiffly, opening her mouth to answer but, unsurprisingly, finding herself talked over, her grandmother charging on without pause.
"What if I had needed you for something important? And what were you doing? You shouldn't be sleeping this late! I bet you heard me. You heard me and didn't open the door. I'm going to find that screw driver and take off that damn knob," the older woman muttered, and turned to look at the counters as though she would find it peeking through the mounds of refuse piling the surfaces, going to the nearest rubbage heap and sifting through it while Aliza, rolling her eyes and sighing gruffly, deflected as best as she could.
"I'm sorry, I was up late reading and I guess I couldn't hear you."
Technically true. She had been reading the journal last night while she waited out Edna's last breaths.
The butterflies, perched on the doorway and Aliza's rumpled hoodie's shoulders, sat at still attention, wings sharply posed, while Eloise scoffed, swiping a pile of trash from the counter and onto the already cluttered floor.
"Like hell you couldn't, I could have been having a heart attack and you would have just slept on through- but I guess you would want that to happen wouldn't you? I could die on the couch and no one would know. Suit you just fine, you wouldn't care," she choked on her words, tears running down her cheeks as she stomped away from the counter to shove past Aliza violently, letting herself into the living room to collapse dramatically onto one of the cluttered, dusty couches.
Aliza, eyes flashing red as she caught herself on a pile of boxes in the wake of her grandmother's temper, followed at a distance, expression fixed and carefully empty. She said nothing, letting the woman have her tirade. She went through this cycle nearly every day, damning her for her neglect of her own family, how uncaring she was of her poor grandmother and the state of her health.
She would care more if she didn't know better. There was nothing wrong with the woman's heart. What she needed was mental care, but she still refused it.
Eloise, weeping inconsolably on her lounge, wiped the back of a spidery hand across her eyes, glaring wetly at the girl lingering in the doorway of the cloistered nest of a living room.
"You should know better, Aliza! You're sixteen, you have to be more responsible. If you lost me you'd be thrown into the foster system. You don't want that, do you? A girl your age, no one would take you, especially considering how lazy and selfish you are."
Fifteen , she corrected within, but kept that to herself, knowing better than to talk back with her in this state. She just needed to ride this out... placate her grandmother, keep up the whole step and dance of calming her down.
Yes, yes, of course she would leave her doors unlocked for now on. Of course she promised to come to her aid. She would do better. She did care. Yes, she was right. So selfish and self centered. How dare she.
Fifteen minutes of consoling, of long, exhausting assurances and lies, and at last the screaming stopped, subsiding into tearful huffing and the lit end of a cigarette, Eloise sniffling from her perch and dabbing at her nose with a soiled handkerchief.
"Maybe you should sleep down here again, like when you were little. Remember that? You used to cling to me. You should sleep on the pull out, with my heart the way it is. You'd never hear me upstairs," she simpered as she puffed on her cigarette, her eyes growing distant and sentimental, with an addled sort of detachment that Aliza had come to know well.
"Yeah, I'll think about it."
"You and I would travel everywhere, wouldn't we, Francene? It would be like the time we went camping in that van. Maybe we should go camping…"
They had never gone camping. They had never traveled in a van. They'd certainly never had any good times that Aliza could remember, but it was useless to claim such things. Eloise was obviously far more contented with her false memories, calmed by the days long past.
She would get like this, sometimes, especially after they had been arguing. She would start calling Aliza her mother's name, insisting they had done things that they never had, recalling memories that had never happened, such as burning pancakes, or going on bike rides around the park. It was very uncomfortable, but whatever she needed to be happy, she supposed.
Outside her ruminations, Eloise seemed to snap back into reality and sighed around her cigarette, inspecting her dirty seat cushion with a chagrined set to her lips.
"We shouldn't fight, we're all we have left, yeah? Just like… just like your mother and I. Us against the world. You're a lot like her. Spitten image, and just as willful and stubborn."
Aliza sucked in a breath, raising her eyes to her grandmother, their irises a sparkling blue. Such sentiment from her was fleeting and scarce. Just as fleeting fondness bubbled in her heart, a swell of emotion and pride for the rare compli-
"We never fought, though. She wasn't the type. But I guess it's not your fault, it's probably from your father's side. Just like those ugly, ugly eyes."
That small, sweet feeling crumbled and darkened into acid, poisoning the pit of her stomach. She tasted ash and bile on the back of her tongue, her throat glued shut and her mouth filled with venom, unable to form the words to describe her building rage, her utter loathing.
How d a r e she mention that man, that disgusting, vile -
She was done.
"I'm going to pick up some soup and beans from the store."
Her voice was cold and emotionless, hollow as she felt inside, in the wake of such a terrible insult. She stood up and walked out the front doors before her grandmother could offer any rebuttal, slamming them after her and glorying in the rattle of the old, cracked windows in the carapace of the corpse of a house.
Her feet ached and protested, tingling with sparks of magic that pulled at her flesh, tempting her to attempt a jump, but she marched across the wild lawn and vaulted the peeling, broken picket fence nevertheless, needing the air and time that a walk would give her. The grocery store was a mile away, plenty of time to breathe and calm her furious reaction.
Her familiars floated about her, brushing her cheeks with the tips of their wings in an attempt at comfort, but she ignored them, pulling her hood back over her head, stuffing her hands into her pockets, and lengthening her already quick stride, her eyes flashing a dangerous red as she stewed and steamed and growled under her breath, kicking cans in gutters and glaring at passing cars.
She had wanted to fight back, scream her own accusations in return for the low, pathetic blow. To cry at how insensitive it was. But she couldn't. The tears wouldn't come, like they had when she had been younger. No, there was only anger now, anger and absolute fury for the repeated offense of being so degraded for so long by someone who had no room to point fingers.
How was it conceivable to still try to blame her for the manner of her own birth? She hated the man that had done that to her mother too. She hadn't asked to be conceived like that. She wouldn't have wished her mother's fate on anyone.
She hadn't wanted to be a rape baby any more than Frisk had asked to be violated in that alley.
Aliza stayed in the small grocery store for hours, looking over everything and picking out things she might need (she honestly had no idea how big the Underground was, how she was going to find the Keeper of Justice down there, so the extra boxes of granola would likely come in handy), before trudging back to her grandmother's house under the rising curve of a crescent moon, long after the old woman had given up on her and gone to bed.
All that was left was to fetch her pack from her room. She packed her newly acquired supplies into it, stowing her little pile of shiny treasures and the compass she had found within as well, before, without a backwards glance, Aliza crawled out the loose window for the last time, setting out into the night with purpose and intent...
And Mt. Ebott rose in the distance, beckoning her to the greatest adventure she would ever experience.
The lonely mountain peak wasn't hard to get to, despite the barbed wire fences and the legends surrounding it (it was only another short bus ride, a few questioning glances, and a moderately arduous hike away); it stood as it always had, just at the edge of the town that had been named after it, stark against the wide sky and encapsulated with a ring of thick clouds around its apex, forested with century old trees and exuding a presence of both menace and majesty with its face alone.
It was finding the entrance to the Underground itself that was proving to be something of a feat.
Aliza and her butterfly companions had been wandering the mountainside for almost two days now, swatting at gnats and fighting through overgrown brambles and consulting the sketchy, vague map her mother had drawn on a torn, stained piece of notebook paper, often wandering in circles multiple times without realizing. The mountain had changed with the years, landmark trees felled in deforesting attempts and rockfalls blocking paths or completely altering the face of the landscape; the only thing that had kept them on a steady climb up the hillside had been her familiars, floating before her and leading her around the worst of the landslides, through the thickest grouse copses and the most winding, back turning of paths.
They had seemed to become almost entranced the moment they had climbed over the first of the chain link fences around Mt. Ebott, leading her down hidden paths and along impossibly concealed byways that she had hoped would lead their little party in the right direction. The ghostly insects would get frustrated when the path they had chosen was too overgrown, or when the ground itself had eroded away from flooding, but always seemed to find another way, floating on through gusts of wind and even a torrential rainfall with dogged resolve.
They seemed almost to know where they were going… as if something were pulling them forward. Aliza wondered often, as they again led her out of the thick coverage of the treeline and back onto the climbing path, if they had been here before.
If they were as anxious to return to the Underground as she was to get there.
At long last, as the sun was beginning to set over their second day stumbling up the mountainside, the butterflies fluttered together into a frenzy, pulling her gaze away from her introspective inspection of the city far below (it was so far away… they had come so far, and she'd never been prouder of something she'd accomplished herself) and to their crazed antics in the heavy evening air.
"Woah, woah! What is it? Did you find it?!"
They swooped off as one towards a cave just off the path up ahead, set on a grassy plateau bobbing with heavy headed, yellow buttercups (a strange, ominous feeling dropped out the pit of her stomach at the sight of them, pulling her lips into a frown), and Aliza turned on her heel to follow immediately, edging around the flowers as her quick walk broke into a run, attempting to keep up as the butterflies disappeared into the dark mouth of the cavern, their light swallowed up by the sheer blackness of its depths.
"Wait! Wait for me!" she called out, stumbling over her loose shoelaces and a scattering of gravel at the mouth of the cave, then let out a shrill shriek as she was about to step inside herself, flailing back when she nearly into a massive hole in the cavern's floor, yawning nearly to to encompass the entire cave.
The edge was draped with thick vines, heavy with waxy leaves and imposing thorns, but they wouldn't have halted the plunge she would have taken had she not stopped in time, and Aliza, panting and wide eyed in the coming dark of the evening, pressed a hand to her chest, attempting to ease her pounding heart.
"Oh gods , that was so close," she breathed, her pulse hammering in her ears as she considered the hole at a safe distance, toeing at a clump of vines with the tip of her tennis shoe; the cluster of butterflies, emerging from the dark at her oath, twirled over the massive chasm with evident glee, throwing gentle luminescence across a draping of stalactites scattered across the cave's ceiling. The craggy, clearly deep hole almost seemed to breathe, whistling with quiet winds and dripping with rivulets of shining dew from the recently passed thunderstorm; the stone Aliza scooped from the ground outside the cave's opening and dropped into it made no sound despite her long wait, evidencing it's obvious depth.
This was it, just like her mother's sketches… the entrance to the Underground, the most direct path to the land of magic and monsters. It was deeper than she had thought it would be, though she supposed she should have suspected it to be quite extensive; Frisk had said in the journal that she had fallen what felt like forever, when she had tripped inside as a young girl.
She'd just thought she was exaggerating.
Aliza, after a moment of thought (her rope wasn't going to be nearly long enough to make it to the cavern floor below), slid her pack over her shoulder and unzipped it to remove her paracord and head strap secured flashlight from within, considering the texture of the stone walls of the chasm as she ran the rope's length through the old, but sturdy, leather belt she had wrapped around her middle in early preparation.
Perhaps she could climb down the rest of the way… the walls looked pretty rough. She kind of wished she'd spent the money on the climbing pick like the salesman had suggested though, now...
Shaking her head and shrugging (she'd manage just fine; she had pretty strong hands, for an unassuming looking girl. Years of climbing fences and brick walls had given her a lot of added strength there), Aliza found a thick, sturdy pine tree near the plateau outside the cave mouth and tied her rope around it, knotting it over and over until she deemed it secure enough. She again approached the edge of the massive hole and, copying the climbers that she had watched on Discovery channel, edged herself over the precipice, nervously releasing the vines along the side and beginning her slow descent into the Underground.
Her progress down the steep tunnel was slow, inch by careful inch. She was nowhere near as confident as the rappelers on the tv had been, every motion painstaking and deliberate; her limbs quickly grew numb with cold and stress, her entire body shaking and her eyes straining to pick anything out of the darkness swallowing her. With dread unease, she watched the light of the surface disappear above her, first a gleam, then a pinprick, then sheer nothingness, the only illumination afforded her spilling from the flashlight atop her head and from the fluttering wings of her butterflies, flapping about her in the pressing, freezing dark.
Perhaps even more distressing was the silence, the weight of the stone about her echoing back only the scrape of her shoes against the walls, the gasp of her clouded breaths and her grunts of exertion; she had never felt more alone, and it was starting to get to her, the trickle of her near frozen sweat alarming her more and more often as the hours slipped away, as time ceased to mean anything in the long, lonely dark.
She began to fear she wasn't moving at all, paranoia and nerves clenching in her empty stomach, when she reached the literal end of her rope.
The knot she had made at the end jerked to a halt in the confines of the belt, worn smooth and a little hot by the friction of her descent, and Aliza jolted, alarmed by her sudden stop. She peered about her in the darkness, squinting at the still identical walls and the just as sheer blackness around her feet for any indication that she was near the end of her climb, spots swimming in her gaze and specks of moisture flecking onto her face from the perpetually dripping walls.
She couldn't tell. She couldn't see the ground below, if there even was one. It could as easily be another twenty feet as it could be another thousand.
She inhaled sharply through her nose, the frigid air stinging her already tight and aching lungs, glancing to her shoulders, where the butterflies had landed to rest over an hour before.
"No going back now, huh?"
She gripped at the rock wall, quickly finding hand and footholds to slot herself into (good… this was good), and, with a trembling exhalation, fumbled with the belt around her waist to separate herself from her lifeline, letting it and the rope free with a shaking hand a moment later.
It swung away from her in the dark, dangling just out of reach against the wall beside her, and Aliza sent a last, fearful look at it before reaching her foot below her in the darkness, feeling for another foothold with the toe of her sneaker and biting at her cracking, chapped bottom lip in concentration.
She found one, too, and another below it in quick succession; she felt a bolstering of spirit, her soul surging with confidence and excitement at her success…
Until, all at once, her handholds broke away from the stone wall, crumbling in her fingers and leaving her scrambling for purchase she simply couldn't find. Gravity grasped at her with inescapable claws, pulling her away from the wall with a rush of what felt almost like inevitability, and with a ragged shriek and a sinking in her stomach, despite the rushing of her butterfly companions attempting to push her back up, Aliza fell into the clutching, complete dark of the abyss, the scarlet glow of her eyes disappearing into the shadows swiftly.
It swallowed her and her screams whole, and all that remained of her passage was the rope swinging gently in the unearthly breeze as it swept through the tunnel, silent as the breath of the grave.
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