"It's good that you're not crazy, Cter."
"Yup."
"And it's good that you're not feeling anything weird after forcing yourself out of the magical influence of the Monster Royals."
"Yup."
"Because Boss Monster magic is quite different from normal monster magic. That you know, yes?"
"Yup."
"And forcibly ejecting said different magic out of your soul would run the risk of some side effects, won't you agree?"
"Yup."
"But nothing with you?"
"Nope."
"Because Idyll said you weren't?"
"Yes."
Priestess Frioke's long ears deflated like a wet rag drooped over her head and shoulders. Her conjured candlelight began to elongate itself into a question mark, casting shadows upon Cter's face that made her stretched smile come off as ominous rather than overly unconcerned over the day's events. While she'd gotten stellar evaluation from both Queen Toriel and King Asgore, there was something about Cter's demeanor that rubbed Priestess Frioke the wrong way.
Like being given a sandwich by a stranger who promised it would solve all the worlds problems before running away guiltily.
"Summon some fire in your hand for me, please?" Frioke asked the smiling Monster Mage sitting with her hands pushing down on her lap, rocking slightly back and forth. "I want to feel your aura." She put her inked quill down onto the empty paper to make some notes just in case of–
The ink reservoir stood next to the un-noted paper crashed and spilled all of its contents across the table, dripping down thick, black dots onto the otherwise-clean floorboard below. Not that it was its fault that it spilled over. The fault lied with Frioke knocking it over as she jumped back from the sensation of Cter's aura. Her shadow on the disturbed bookcase behind her grew and sank with each of her hurried and shocked breaths. Her stuck gaze flew over the mess on the table onto the sleeved hand of Cter. In it was a fire convulsing in on itself, inverting and flaring with licking flames that had the intensity to reach through the roof, but were yanked back into the inverting vortex of streaking red and orange.
The tortured inferno was as quiet as it was before Cter summoned it though. Only the dripping of the spilled ink was heard within the Monster Priestess' study. Even through her slumped ears the slow dripping was audible.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Even as the fire began to reach up Cter's sleeve and coax itself into her magical lines like fiery tubes inserting themselves into her arm the dripping continued.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
"You want some ice instead to freeze the ink?" Cter offered friendly, seemingly unaware of what was about to consume her entire left arm. "Evaporated ink smells so potently bitter." Just as invasive as the fiery tubes burrowed into Cter's sleeve, an icy blue shock reverberated from her sleeve into the flames. For a moment they were suspended in time like stasis, giving of a static glow that looked otherworldly, before shattering into fluttering embers, revealing veins of dark ice where the flames had just been.
Despite the seemingly primal and violent display of magic, Priestess Frioke exhaled a sigh of welcomed relief. Her ears licked the back of the books displayed in the bookcase her body was fearfully leaning onto, to finally flick up without worry. "Singe my soul," she cursed with equal relief while her blue hand ran front to back on her head, pushing her recently flicked ears down to then spring up yet again. "Okay, I think I understand now." Her candlelight illuminated the alleviated scales on her face as she took some initially shaky steps back to the table.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
"And the ink?" wondered Cter as her ice magic began to move as if melting, but with still very much the dark texture and jagged shapes as it was conjured with. She pointed down to the dripping spot.
"Yes, please."
Drip.
Dri...p.
Dri–
The long, black icicles formed by Cter's cold magic didn't hang long underneath the weathered study table before they were knocked off by Idyll's knee as she sat down again. "Do you feel a bit different?" Frioke questioned the Monster Mage bending down to cast stasis magic on the broken-off icicles. "Like...your soul is more accessible to you?"
Cter's neck protested as she bent it up while her torso was bent horizontal to her side. "What do you mean, Priestess?"
"Before you begin with your stasis," Frioke halted at the sight of the purple glow beginning to form in Cter's spiraling lines. By that point it was too late to catch the falling inkcicles. "I want you to think back to how you just summoned your fire." She spun her hand backwards. "Just think back to how you felt. Did it feel kinda...stuffed, in a way? Like trying to breathe through your nose during a cold?"
The Fourth Monster Mage sat herself upright again with a quick swipe of her brow to push away her hair. "Like a cold?" she repeated while looking down at her sleeved hand. "Now that you mention it..."
She could breathe normally through her nose.
And it felt as if she'd forgotten how it was to breathe without hindrance.
"Oh.." Cter realized with eyes widening only to begin blinking. "It felt like there was a layer of something just outside my soul, now that you mention it, Frioke. Like...a shell. A shell of someone else. Of..." Her blinking stopped abruptly. "Of King Asgore and Queen Toriel." Cter closed and opened her sleeved hand as if trying to stretch the weird feeling out of it, but there was still a slight, ghostly presence of her wearing a glove that was someone else's hand.
Oh it wasn't pleasant at all!
"I don't like it," said Cter while shaking her head with an increasingly discontent look on her face. "Don't like it at all." It wasn't echoing in her like flu as it had done previously with her soul. No, it was more like a stuffy cold like Frioke mentioned. Being wrapped in a blanket that someone else had wrapped around her without her knowledge or permission.
"Akin to the hangover I experienced the morning after I discovered Prince Soulay's magic?" Frioke suggested. "That stuffed, drained, almost evacuated into a bay of hale with great prejudice sensation?"
Why Frioke let Cter experience that part of her memories too Cter had long questioned, but strangely it became relevant. "Kinda?" she answered to the Priestess' similarity. "There's a bit of a different heat to it though. A bit like how you felt when that Hjearta general invited you to dance and then grabbed you tight around your waist before dragging you in for a–"
"I see!" Priestess Frioke interrupted very loudly, unsettling some of the books in the many large bookcases in her study. "You experienced that too..." she said silently to herself with a girlish blush to her blue cheeks that she tried to hide by moving her candlelight away from illuminating her face. She was forced to accept the blush though as the implications of it meant more than the embarrassing memories of her younger days' fraternization. That the Hjearta general dragged her in closer so that he could blow some dandruff off the top of her left ear must have struck a rather-pleasant accord with the younger priestess. "Anyways, yes," Frioke said after clearing her throat to regain some of her supposed formality that came with her title as the Monster Priestess.
However she wasn't really the Monster Priestess yet when she danced with the Hjearta general, was she?
Frioke shook the excuse out of her head before she found herself too deep into it. "That must be the warmth of the love the Royal Couple share between one another." Had Frioke shaped her candlelight into the silhouette of her in the arms of the Hjearta general it would've still not been a bigger admittance as what she said. She'd own up to it though.
After all, she was the Monster Priestess. Her duty lay with the troubles of magic, monster and human.
"Recall, please, of the magical duel between Queen Toriel and King Asgore," Frioke asked of Cter with a gentle, inviting motion of her hand over the frozen ink on her study's table reflecting her magical candlelight. "My thinking is that because of your rejection of the Monster Queen and King's memories from being absorbed by your soul their magic became separated within you. A layer on top of yours, so to speak." She gestured whipping batter in a bowl. "Instead of blending together they became like when you let water and oil be which then separate into distinct layers. Two ones instead of one out of two. Your magic and emotion was pushed through the layer of Boss Monster magic. Sunlight through a dirty window."
Priestess Frioke had to pause for a second to reflect that she just referred to her king and queen's magic as dirty. Then she had to pause a bit more.
Cter got the gist of it though, without any of the treachery to the crown included. The magical duel between the Monster Royals affected her more than she could notice. She did insist that it wouldn't when they asked her multiple times if it was okay, so it was all on her when it inevitably did affect her.
Guess she was crazy despite Idyll's reassurance.
Or more monster.
One or the other.
"If you would, please?" Frioke asked patiently as a reminder. "Cter?" While her patience ran its course, Frioke cleaned some space on the disturbed table to fit a new piece of fresh paper for her to take notes. With one of her claws she bent loose a piece of frozen ink which she pushed into the knocked-over container. Once the container was full again she held it up to her candlelight that she let flare up with flames for a brief moment to melt the ink to a liquid again. As she sat the container back down onto the table she took the opportunity and precaution to surround it with a dark-blue field so that it would stay upright even if she were to be startled once again. "Yes?"
Cter didn't know what the Monster Priestess was talking about. "Hm?" she perked. "Yes what?"
"Recall the magical duel between Queen Toriel and King Asgore, would you kindly?" Frioke repeated for a third time with a rolling gesture to her quill-holding hand. "I'm keeping a log of the..." Its tip tapped gently on the paper, dotting it with faint dots from the ink that was left in it. "The evolution of their love and how they express it through their magical duels. It is enough to drastically infuse the Royal Garden with magic that makes it grow and be the fantastical greenery that's known throughout the world. Eventually their love is going to bear fruit just between the two of them, and documenting how their magic evolved up to that point will help us make sure that the next heir grows up stronger than their parents."
The Fourth Monster Mage's eyes moved from the illuminated, blue Monster Priestess holding her quill eagerly to the shadow-cast brown of the bookcases covering the wall. "Did you do the same for King Asgore's parents?" Somewhere among the many tales, fictional and factual, was a book detailing the private matters of Monster Kings and Queens prior. A book that Cter was asked to provide more to. In that sense, her pushing out the memories of Asgore and Toriel was a bad thing.
In all other senses though?
"Where do you want me to start?" asked Cter before giving some suggestions. "When Toriel first declared it or when they actually began?"
That Frioke didn't sneeze from her spinning the tip of the feather right under her nose was strange to Cter. "So she didn't begin directly after challenging Asgore? Was it because you were there? She didn't know?" Frioke dipped her quill in the melted ink in anticipation.
"She knew that I was there. She met Sund and Kry on her walk there and knew that I was having my evaluation with King Asgore. What she didn't know was that I was a bit...exhausted." Cter's eyes became heavy as she recalled, and the weight dragged her head down slightly. "Kry had just talked about his past with me and then I had the evaluation with King Asgore to think about. When Queen Toriel waltzed up with a swagger I'd never seen in her step before and told me that I'd be the mediator and judge for their duel, I had to refuse. Not because I didn't want to, but because I wasn't able to. My mind and soul were already swimming with emotions, so trying to mediate and judge a magical duel between the Royal Couple wasn't on the map even how much I turned and folded it."
Cter paused to let Frioke catch up with her writing. However, the Monster Priestess didn't seem to need the pause. "So why did you choose to undertake Queen Toriel's request if you did not feel up to it?" she asked while still busy writing. She slowed down for a bit though to say a thought out loud. "Or did your soul absorb the Royal Couple's magic passively while you watched?" Her guess had her brow furrow as the thought germinated within her. "How will the Royal Garden be then, I wonder?"
It was for the best that Cter shot the idea down before Frioke wasted more ink and paper. "No," she said quickly to then follow up with a proper explanation. "We had some more tea and talked."
"And then the two began?"
"Yes."
Frioke drew a thick line across the width of the paper which she punctuated by refreshing the ink in her quill. "Pray."
Did Frioke know what she was praying for Cter to tell? Some of what Cter saw and heard was quite eccentric coming form the Monster Royals. Yes, it was history she was detailing, but was it necessary for history to know every single minute detail?
The history books Cter read during her schooling sure didn't go through it with such detail.
Thankfully.
"Are these records gonna be read by anyone else but the Monster Priestess or Monster Priest responsible for the magical nurturing of the next heir?"
Frioke's cheeks filled with air that both shot her eyes wide open and snapped her ears upright as if trying to detach and fly off into the ceiling. "Oh golly!" she pushed out through her lips with a tensed raspberry. "I sure as hell don't hope so, if you excuse my vulgar language. There is stuff in there which..." A shiver reverberated through the Monster Priestess all the way up to the tip of her long ears. "Well it would dismantle the crown like a tower of sticks being hit with a fireball."
So nothing held back then.
Right...
"After I moved away the table with the tea and bread on as well as the chairs, Queen Toriel and King Asgore walked to place themselves at the ready. Once they waited for me to place myself where I felt where I should stand, the two began." Before Cter continued though she had to make a footnote. Whether or not Frioke wrote that footnote down or not was up to her. "They didn't explain to me what they expected me to be judging with their duel before they began. Neither how I was supposed to mediate. I guessed that I was supposed to step in if they were about to kill each other, but that they wouldn't even get close to though, right?"
Frioke's exhale mixed with an unsure chuckle snapped that theory in half like a dry twig. Her amusement didn't instill a lot of calm in Cter, who's eyes again began to wander across the numerous backs exposed in the bookcases. Frioke's reaction implied heavily that there should've been a book which was either burning up or shaking violently as it was unable to contain what had been penned on its pages.
Weirdly enough Cter didn't find such a book.
Oh well.
"Queen Toriel took a powerful stance while beginning to move her arms in independent circles. Her palms began glowing more and more orange as her aura began to focus like stars around her. With a determined smile she threw down her arms down to her sides, igniting her focused points of aura into floating flames that hovered around her menacingly."
The quill stopped. "Menacingly?"
The word echoed deeply despite the room not allowing for it.
"There were symbols forming around her too," Cter continued as she leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed. "Strange ones," she said with a furrowed shake of her head. "Have never seen them before."
"Could you describe the symbols in detail?" Frioke pried while drawing a hollow square on her paper. "Shape, color?"
"Imagine an open mouth seen from the side gaping to the left. With its lower lip looking like a lip and its upper lip being more like a sharp overhang of sorts. At the top right of the symbols were two vertical stripes."
The Monster Priestess nodded along to Cter's description. "Were the stripes similar to a '?'"
How the hell did Frioke pronounce that?
How the hell did Cter manage to hear it like that?
"...Yes," dripped off Cter's tongue. "That's how it looked like."
"Purple in color and vibrating?"
"You've seen the symbols before, Priestess?"
Frioke nodded again. "I have. It's been popping up during magical duels between the Monster Royals before. We haven't managed to figure out why exactly. It's not consciously conjured by either the king or the queen, so it could be just a consequence of their Boss Monster auras. We do not know exactly why, just that it is there, and that neither the king or queen remember the symbols existing there during their duel. Exclusively ambient for the observer, perhaps?" She finished off the drawing of the symbol how Cter described it and moved her hand down for the next line.
"King Asgore met Queen Toriel's determined smile with a shove down of his right arm and shoulder that manifested his red trident as if it had slid out from inside his armor. He didn't raise it against Toriel though, instead he walked with his gold-plated pauldrons swinging wide and rhythmically. His left hand was in his pocket, as if not recognizing Queen Toriel as a threat at all."
Cter opened up her arms as if grabbing a large, invisible sphere from underneath. "Queen Toriel found that amusing, and spread her arms out like this, with her flames moving with her arms. She chuckled, clearly impressed." It took a couple of hard swallows before she felt that her voice could match the drastically different tone Queen Toriel's voice changed into. "Golly, golly! You're approaching me? Instead of accepting that I've surpassed your magic, you're approaching me instead?"
Another round of coughs and hackles passed for Cter's voice to sound at least somewhat close to Asgore's voice. "I can't dance with you unless I'm closer."
Even though she began tasting blood, Cter still twisted her vocal chords back to Toriel's grandiose and dramatic tone. "Oh ho ho? Then come as close as you want, Monster King."
With that though Cter had to stop and look for something to help her throat to not overflow with blood. Had her body been monster it would've been even coarser with dust, so she had going for her, at least. Her hand massaged as best as it could, but it was only so much she could do from the outside. She briefly thought about using some ice magic to cool, but that would've just given her a cold later on. "P...Priestess?" Cter forced out with discomfort. "Wa...ter?"
Frioke pointed an ear across the dimly lit room. "Should be some left in the middle bookcase there."
Middle bookcase?
After a few long seconds of Frioke not admitting that she wasn't joking, Cter stood up with a baffled shrug from her chair and made her way towards the bookcase Frioke was pointing towards.
"Third shelf down. Somewhere in the middle titled 'Hjearta Glaciers'."
It was a very perplexed finger that ran across the old books stood cramped waiting to be read. In the dim light from Frioke's candlelight the weathered titles were hard to read, the problem exasperated by Cter having to close her eyes with each painful swallow. Eventually her finger scraped the dented lettering of the book she was looking for. With an awkward grip she tugged the book out, causing its neighbors to slam together, but only at their tops.
There was something else in the vacant hole she made as she tugged the book.
A...chalice?
Not wanting to stick her fingers in the tensile and barely stable hammer and stead of the bookshelf, Cter instead wrapped stasis magic around the chalice. Like a marionette, she wrapped the purple fingers around the chalice by motioning the same with her own. Once she had a good grip on it, she tore it out quickly. The two adjacent books slammed together like the clap of thunder.
"Ah, you got the drinking vessel too," commented Frioke while still focused on her writing. "Figured you'd be able to get that one as well. Turn to page...eighty one, I think? That's where the sample is."
With her brow lowered, Cter leafed with her thumb until she reached the stated page. Unlike the other ones, page eighty one wasn't yellowed with age. It had just as fresh a color to it as the one Frioke was writing on.
The paragraphs at the top proudly boasted about the quenching power of the Hjearta glaciers and how her people enjoyed fresh water even during summer without worry for stagnation due to large storage of ice blocks that were bought and kept cold with the help of human magic. Human mags traveled across the country during late winter and early spring to both sell glacier ice to those that could afford, and to use their magic to preserve homegrown ice with magic for those that couldn't.
The bottom of the page was painted a bright blue that sloshed when Cter…
Wait.
Paint wasn't supposed to slosh around.
"Just pour it into the chalice, Cter. It's drinkable, I promise."
Pour it into…
"Just out the bottom right corner. Rip it open."
So it was a magical page. That made sense. What kind of magic though? None of the Royal Mages in Hjearta would be able of such magic.
When a bright, white light emerged from the tear she opened on the page's corner flashed into her eyes it dawned for Cter, quite literally. "Barricade magic?" she asked as the water began to trickle into the chalice. "Is this Sund's doing?" It was only after Cter spoke that she remembered that her throat was hurting real bad. Before she coughed blood all over the book backs, she took a swig of the glacier water.
It was surprisingly refreshing even disregarding that she was parched.
"He brought the book back from his first visit to Hjearta as the Third Monster Mage after he'd discovered his own magic." Frioke made a short pause to refill her quill with a snappy flick of her wrist. "We kept the book outside of the bookcases until we were sure that his barricade magic could hold for long periods of time lest it vanishes and the entire bookcase gets drenched in glacier water. A test of his claims about his self-discovered magic, if you will. As to why the Hjearta court commissioned the book we believe was to stir up some more business with Monster Country about buying their ice. Perhaps even Xoff was given a book too, but we haven't really asked them about it."
"That why the new Royal Mage visited earlier to freeze the wine cellar?" Cter guessed after a deep swig of her chalice. "To promote glacier business?"
"Yes. I'm sure he would have asked to travel with the ice transports you and Kurant escorted had it not been for him finding better quote unquote diplomatic purpose by helping out with the epidemic in Noitaidarr."
"Huh..."
Cter let her third swig linger in her mouth for a bit to really savor the flavor. It had a different tang to it than the ice from her home village. Not necessarily tastier, but different.
It was quite a long time ago she did taste it though.
But that was about to change.
As it was just a week left until she set out for Hjearta.
And Romrom.