"Okay, let's try this again," I said, and immediately fell painfully onto my ass.

I was not particularly having a good time, although it was a long one. Before me was yet another one of those tile puzzles, this one without any walls to block me at all. There was, however, a large field of ice all around them. Very, very, very slippery ice, so slippery I was struggling to stay upright. It was probably what it felt like to ice-skate for the first time, not that I'd ever done that. In fact, I had little experience being on ice to begin with.

Of course, I could have just sat down and pushed myself across with my hands, thus keeping myself steady and affording much greater control, letting me sidestep this whole painful learning process, but I didn't, for one very important reason:

That would be lame.

So here I was, trying to learn from scratch. Scratch, in this case, referring to all the ones I was getting from trying to learn.

This… might take a while. Thankfully, I'm a very quick learner

WHAM. "Ow."

Many, many, many, many, many, many, many attempts later, I was gliding elegantly- I was gliding gracefully- I was gliding without adverbs along the ice, hitting the tiles with relative ease. Heh. Relative ease. Kinda sounds like a language, doesn't it? Relativese. The secret language of identical twins. But I digress. The ice rink was conquered. The Xs were Os. The button was pressed. The Is were dotted. And I was desperately trying to make sure I didn't slip on the very thin ice covered cliff that was the only way forward, because the ones who designed this pathway were nutcases bent on my demise.

Not that such a descriptor narrows things down in the slightest down here, mind.

Faced with a fork in the path, I made the right choice, and headed down a little ways to a lower cliff. There, that shorter skeleton was standing in wait, teleporting stalker that Sans is. I gave him a mildly baleful stare, which he answered with a casual "What's up?".

I continued on to see… Sans again, standing casually at the other end of the path. I looked back. Sans was still standing back where it was. I turned my head again. Still there. Two skeletons? Or… I kept my gaze locked on the second Sans, and then began to carefully walk backwards. In a moment, I had returned to just in front of where the first Sans was. I grope blindly behind me, and sure enough… nothing.

The skeleton's grin almost seemed to widen. That teleporting weirdo was vanishing as soon as I turned my head, purely to make me think there were two of him! Or maybe just to annoy me. I gave him an exasperated sigh, and pushed past him to where the cliff narrowed, turning into a dark cave and… wait a second. A cave? I was already in a cave. Can you have a cave inside of a cave, or is it just a narrower part of the same cave?

…Well, I stepped through the opening in the cliff and walked into the dark area inside, treading across a pathway covered in ice of thankfully minimal slipperiness. I soon encountered a locked door, or possible just one blocked on the other side. Either way, it resisted opening, and I hadn't thought to bring a full set of locksmith's gear along with me on my trip through the wilderness, more fool me. I had brought a couple things… but if that door had a spring plunger, it was one that was out of reach of a spatula or knife or even that flexible little number I had for getting around inconvenient wooden blocks and extruding frames.

And here I was hoping I'd be able to take shelter here from the cold for a bit. Oh well.

I gave the door a few more kicks, and turned my gaze toward the bioluminescent mushrooms that were lighting up the area. They didn't look, familiar, and I wondered if they were natural or a product of the strange magics down here; either seemed plausible. I carved off a small chunk of one, and began to chew on it. As the flavor hit my tongue I nodded in satisfaction. "yes," I thought to myself. "Definitely poisonous." I turned the chunk over in my mouth a few more times, contemplating the flavor, before swallowing and drawing out a bag from my pack, which I soon filled with the bounty of mushrooms around me.

And then I was back out in the cold, ready to move onward once again.

Eyes.

There were holes in the cliff face above me. Holes filled with eyes. Eyes watching me. Four eyes in each hole, arranged in a strange pattern and blinking all at once. I stared back for a long moment, as they opened and shut and opened and shut and opened and shut and…

My focus was broken suddenly as heavy footsteps rapidly approached. Without hesitation, I threw myself to the side, as a large antlered beast charged through the space I had been only a half-second before. It skidded to a stop long before it reached the cliff edge with a practiced grace. It turned to face me, its deerlike appearance belied as its jaw… I'm not sure I have the words to describe it. It… well, split open along a vertical line, is the best way I can think of to phrase it.

Most of the creatures I'd encountered so far in this icy land had been bizarre, but this… this was uncanny. Its proportions were all wrong: its antlers, which were wrapped in some strange string-like objects, ended in strange treelike protrusions covered in leaves, and seemed larger than its head; a head that already seemed as though it should that slender neck holding it up; its limbs seemed more like tendrils than real legs; its ears were in completely the wrong place, and seemed shrunken and tiny on a head that size. It would almost seem, as the frog things did, like it was a creature out of a child's drawing of a deer, but taken together, along with that grotesque jaw, lined with irregular outcrops of teeth, which could never seem to fully close (as though it were made for something with a different sort of face entirely), and those eyes…

It's as though there was some malign intelligence twisting the world into deranged and incoherent shapes. There is method in the wild corruption here. It bears a form both wretched and malevolent.

Maybe that's why I'm here.

I drew my knife as it charged again; a little slower this time, a little more careful. Its head was lowered, no doubt seeking to tear me to pieces with the crude approximation of antlers atop its head. I stood at the ready for a moment as it approached, shifting to its left side so I could more easily strike at its head with my main hand. Right before it approached, it shifted its head so it would be out of my striking range. But I had already dropped, ducking the antlers and sliding along the packed snow surface, and scoring a glancing blow along its side as I passed. It kicked out with its hind legs, but I had already rolled to the side.

I sprung to my feet, throwing a rock from the floor with my other hand at its head, which it deflected with its antlers. It approached again, much more carefully this time. It seemed to have given up on running me down, and now it sought to overwhelm me in melee with sheer bulk. It hounded me at a steady pace, swing its head as it tried to rip me to shreds with its antlers. Strange white ring-shaped objects flew across the cliff as the antlers shook, and I deflected any that came close to me with the flat of my knife, for I knew better at this point than to let one touch me.

It backed off slightly, seemingly to catch its breath after its vicious movements, still watching me warily. Except… it wasn't looking at me. It did a good job of pretending, helped by the façade of unblinking eye-shaped objects on its face staring dead ahead, but its true eyes were looking… behind me. A feint? No, if it wanted me to follow its gaze, it would be a little less subtle about it.

I spun around in a half instant, seeing a set of what appeared to be boxes with oversized lids and some sort of soft-looking fabric tied around them in a bow. Three of them, two white and one… teal? No, aqua. They shuffled around each other for a moment more, the aqua one flashing between blue and white, before launching themselves at me. Dodging them wouldn't be too difficult, but I couldn't keep my eyes on them and that abomination behind me at the same time, and I was sure he'd have already planned for how to cover the obvious directions I could dodge into.

Well then. If I couldn't go around, I'd just have to go… through.

As the boxes approached, and hoofsteps thundered behind me, I began to step to the right, making ready to lunge to the side… And then I charged directly forward, and lashed out in a lightning movement with my knife, slicing the aquamarine box in front of me into two rapidly disintegrating pieces. The gamble I'd taken had paid off: these creatures' attacks were even more insubstantial than they were. It's a good thing the box was only aqua; if it'd been teal, the strongest color, I might have had more trouble.

The deer-thing behind me, already moving to flank me as I dodged (interestingly, on my left side, which means it had expected a feint. Clever, but not clever enough), rapidly skidded to a stop, far out of position to strike at me. I cursed my lack of ranged options; when I got out of here, I'd take up slinging practice as soon as I could.

Regardless, its little ploy was spent, to no avail. It had abandoned subtlety now, and began simply sending barrages of boxes and those little white projectiles at me whenever it felt like, trying to create openings so that it could barrel down on my and gore me to death. I dodged and weaved, but the sheer projectile spam was hard to keep track of. But finally, I seized a small opening in the storm, and my knife struck out in a flash, gouging out one of the creature's false-eyes.

I grinned in triumph, and stepped back quickly to avoid a counterattack… and tripped over a box just behind my foot, falling halfway to the ground before I could catch myself. The creature immediately charged forward to take advantage of my almost prone state, and without time to dodge I could only lash out with my scarred offhand and grab the creature by the antlers to try and stop its charge.

There was a terrible flash of PAINPAINBURNINGPAINBURNINGBETRAYALPAINPAINBURNINGBURNING for a long moment, and then the deer-thing recoiled back, my scarred hand still clutching half of its right antler.

An antler scorched nearly to cinders.

I notice that I'm confused.

I stared at it for what felt like an eternity, uncomprehending. For the life of me, I couldn't seem to figure out what the things I was seeing meant. It seemed like there should be an obvious explanation for what just happened (and other pieces of evidence; other, similar events that I should be able to recall), but… it was like my mind just slid right off of the thought, finding no purchase at all.

There was a hole in my mind. Several, in fact. How had I not noticed? Was I truly so sleep deprived that I'd failed due diligence in examining my thought processes for intrusions? I could feel the shape of them now. I closed my eyes and pushed hard into them, feeling another flash of that pervasive pain, and instinctively began recoiling… and then stopped. What was I doing? I wasn't someone who ran from pain, quite the opposite. I pushed harder, and harder, forcing myself into that state of mind that eluded me.

The sting of betrayal. A wash of shame and fear. An intense feeling of burning, like every cell of my body was melting into liquid flame.

It was all so simple, now. I reached my arm deep within the sea of fire, and waved it around, collecting flame upon my hand like spider silk. I opened my eyes, beholding a great orb of pale white fire surrounding my burned hand. My mind felt strangely split, then: between a serene captivation at its rapturous beauty, and a pervasive feeling of horror and abject terror at the sight. There was a part of me that desperately screamed at me to flee from the flame, to cast it aside and plunge my hand into the snow and never think of it ever again.

But why? Yes, I knew this fear; this pain, tainted with the sting of betrayal; the shear animal panic. But that had never been a reason to flee, had it? Not for me, it hadn't. Where others recoiled, I leaned in. When things caused me pain, I sought them out, and mastered them or destroyed them. I took what made me afraid, and I ate it up and spat it out. This… cowardice wasn't like me. I wasn't some craven fool like that Toriel, hiding away from-

Oh.

It really is obvious, when you put it like that.

I stared down at the intensely red heart-shaped object that could be seen in my chest, for all that the heart shape wasn't the shape of a heart. My "SOUL"; the "culmination of your being". I'd seen something just like it, back then, only… pale white, just like the fire, just like almost all of the monsters' projectiles. More than that, I'd taken it into my hand. And then… what had happened? My mind supplied me an image of a beast's jaw shutting around a hunk of meat, swallowing the flesh and lifeblood, taking in another's quintessence.

I… I wasn't sure what a "soul" even was; even if I believed all those religious mythologies I had read, this seemed so utterly divorced from them all as to defy comparison. But it seemed… it seemed as though I'd consumed her. Consumed her utterly, not simply her flesh or form but her very being.

I stared at the fire that surrounded my hand, licking at the burn scars that wouldn't fade. That intrusive horror I felt, watching the fire cover that hand; the fear; the shame. It never was mine, was it? The foreignness of those thoughts and emotions… it was obvious, when I paid attention. I leaned into the feelings, let the pain wash over me, and a smile came over my face of its own volition. The fire stabilized, no longer licking at my flesh. With the gentlest of motions, I let loose the ball of fire from my hand, casting it at the cowering abomination in front of me. When it died down, all that was left was another pile of dust and gold, the same as any other. The half of an antler I held still remained, surprisingly; I noted that little oddity for the future in a detached way.

That burning feeling faded gradually, and a feeling of profound exhaustion replaced it. I wobbled for a moment, then collapsed gently to the ground, feeling spent. Spent, but exhilarated. I began to laugh, at nothing in particular. What a strange world I had found myself in. SOULs and magic and abominations and… and everything in the world bent on my death, and yet the world itself seems to contrive that I have just barely enough to win the day.

Eating that goat-creature's soul seemed to have granted me at least some of the strange magics that she had wielded in life, but it had come with the horrendous caveat of infesting me with some shade of the creature's thoughts and emotions, most prominently, it seemed, the ones she'd felt the moment before her death. A disturbing prospect, but I was confident in my ability to identify intrusive thoughts like those and let them pass through me without harm. And, regardless of my success or failure, I would endure. I was good at that. That was the promise I'd made.

I stared up at the trees that seemed to spiral above me. Come to think of it, it was a day not unlike this one when I made that promise, under a black and starry sky. A moment not unlike this: with me laying beneath a thick blanket of branches, bleeding and exhausted from battle after battle after battle after battle. It wasn't the same, of course. The crystals above were a poor replacement for stars; my battles were with nature itself rather than a vicious evil force out to get me; and the trees… they weren't some rinky-dink white firs, oh no. Oak. Ash. Thorn. That was what surrounded me, when I laid there amidst the spiraling branches, and made my promise. My deal. My… heh. My OATH.

I'd been brutalized, and scarred, and hammered by so much of what the world could send against me. And yet, even laying there, bleeding and battered… I knew I'd live through it all. That was not the day that I'd die. Maybe there never would be one. That was what those woods were trying to tell me, there. That was the pact it made with me that day. That I would keep moving, never giving in to despair, doing anything and everything I possibly could, for nothing less than survival at any cost.

In turn, the world might give me uncountable suffering, grueling trials; it might turn all against me and crush me under its weight. But I would survive, as long as I had the will to. And that was enough. Where there is life, there is hope. And hope might be the first step on the road to disappointment, but any suffering the world could hand me was infinitely preferable to being severed from it entirely. Anything, ANYTHING, was preferable to that.

Maybe none of this was true. Perhaps that was all just a clever self-deception, devised to keep me going when I might have laid down and died in despair. But either way, my course was clear: keep moving. Forever, if I can.

I'd been ruminating for long enough. It was time to get up, and keep moving onward. Onward. Always and forever, onward.

I rose to my feet again, with some difficulty. The rush of fire in my veins (perhaps literally, in this case) had staved off the effects of sleep deprivation for a moment, but as it faded the fatigue returned with a vengeance. My eyes ached and my vision fluctuated for a moment as I stood. Oh well. Nothing I could do about it now.

I returned to the path above, arriving at a field full of large mounds of snow, as if someone had tried to make a snowman but gave up very early, and then repeated that process about half a dozen times. They were really quite large… large enough for a small creature to wait in ambush! I began rolling them one by one off the side of the cliff, just in case.

Was that last one a good bit heavier than the others? Did I hear a distant barking sound as it fell? Who could say?

Finally, I came to a very, very long, narrow bridge. It, like the others, had no obvious support structure, and the stakes that held up the ropes alongside it weren't even pounded into the ground, but simply hung there. I stomped one foot down on a plank. It held firm… and let out an odd sound from the impact.

"Hold on," I thought. "Is this… all stone?" I scratch at the bridge with my knife, and flakes of paint come off. Now that I was looking closer, I realized there was no connection point between the bridge and the cliff. It was all one continuous rock formation, painted to look like wood, with rope strung alongside it. Why? That question was beyond me. Papyrus, that's why.

And speak of the devil. I peered across the long… well, I suppose it would still be called a bridge, just a naturally forming one. I peered across the long rock bridge, and saw in the distance that pair of bozos waiting for me. Before them, to either side of the bridge, was some sort of mechanism that had an array of ropes and chains suspended within it. It didn't look like it had been activated yet, but mayhap third time would be the charm.

"Human!" Came the cry from Papyrus as I came close to his side of the bridge. "This is your final and most dangerous challenge!" That was certainly setting the bar low. "Behold!" the walking insult to life itself exclaimed, "The Gauntlet of Deadly Terror!" With a wave of its hand the mechanism activated, unspooling the many ropes and chains it held, dangling all manner of things above the bridge; from spears, to spiked balls, to cannons, to flamespitters, to… a medium sized dog. Because Papyrus.

"When I say the word," it continued, heedless of the fact that it technically just did, "it will fully activate! Cannons will fire! Spikes will swing! Blades will slice!"

"And the dog?" I interjected. Papyrus stopped short, looking at me with a puzzled expression for a moment, before looking up with exasperation on his features at the dog that was suspended above him. He pulled out a bone from… somewhere, and tossed it at the rope, slicing through it like It wasn't even there, sending the dog plummeting down as it let out a long whine that slowly faded into the distance.

"Each part will swing violently up and down!" He continued speechifying without explanation, as though that interruption hadn't happened. "Only the tiniest chance of victory will remain!"

"Well, that certainly sounds fun," I thought. "Not the most cerebral of puzzles, more of an obstacle course, really, but at least it sounds like it'd be thrilling. I wonder how he's gonna manage to screw it up this time."

"Are you ready!? Because! I! Am! About! To do it!" He shouted, and then paused dramatically.

…

The pause lingered long past the point of being dramatic. Papyrus stayed frozen in place for an uncomfortable amount of time.

"So, uh…" I said, breaking the eerie silence at last. "Any year now would be good."

"Of course!" he exclaimed, a hint of nervous energy entering his bombastic demeanor. "I'm… I'm about to activate it now!"

…

"Yup, that sure looks activated," I replied after many more moments of dead silence. "Mmhmm, really, really… alright, what the hell are you waiting for, Christmas? Do you want me to just walk right through again? Because I can do that!" And I took a step forward.

"Well!" Papyrus said quickly, and I stopped moving again. He opened his jaw wide, as if about to make another grand proclamation… and closed it again, seeming to deflate a great deal. "…You're probably just going to make fun of it. You'll breeze right through it, and find some way to ridicule the whole thing, and it won't be any fun at all."

Wow. When he puts it like that… I don't feel bad for him at all. "You know what this is?" I said, raising my hand up in front of my face and rubbing my thumb and index finger together. "It's the world's smallest violin playing a sad song just for you. In case you've forgotten, I didn't exactly ask for you to shove your crummy puzzles down my throat. I was just going along trying to find a way out of here, and you come in and ambush me with your terrible excuses for puzzles, then have the audacity to expect me to play along? What rot!"

"Bah!" Papyrus replied. "Clearly my puzzles are simply too incredible for your feeble mind to comprehend! …But perhaps you are right. Perhaps I should stop ambushing people like you with my puzzles. Perhaps my puzzles simply need a more appreciative audience!"

"What? No, that's not what I'm saying at all!" I retorted. "Well, the 'not ambushing people' thing is, but the rest of it… well, to be honest, Papyrus, your puzzles really suck. I don't know about this one, but the rest were either mediocre or outright terrible. And that's nothing to be ashamed of: everyone starts somewhere. But, while I'm sure you'd be able to find people willing to tell your that your puzzles are great as they are… they'd only be doing a disservice to you by doing so! That way lies STAGNATION!"

The skeletons watched In stunned silence as my voice grew into a passionate fervor, and my body language grew more and more animated as I spoke. "What you really need are people, as many as you can find, that are willing to go through your puzzles AND willing to criticize and pick apart every flaw they find, without having too much consideration for your feelings to sugarcoat things! You should seek out the acerbic, like a knife seeks out the grindstone! And seek out as well those who have their own insights and expertise in the field, and do not simply accept their wisdom but learn from it, and test it yourself! Only then, when you have sharpened your mind against all that which you can, and rebuilt it where it was flawed, can you truly call yourself a puzzlemaster!"

I stood there for a long moment, catching my breath, as they two of them stared back at me. "Or…" I said, between breaths. "Something… like that, anyway."

Papyrus scratched his chin bone thoughtfully. "You have given me much to think about," he exclaimed, seeming to reinflate a bit. With a gesture, the dangling objects retracted back into the mechanism above us. "Until we meet again, human! Nyeh heh heh!" And with that, he confidently strode away.

"What a strange fellow." I thought to myself (although, who else would I be thinking to?) "If he wasn't an abominable parody of life, he might almost be tolerable."

I walked past, eager to be off of this narrow bridge. As I passed onto solid ground once again, Sans spoke up at last. "I don't know if that was good advice, kid, but Papyrus sure seemed motivated by it, and that can't be a bad thing." He winked at me. "Say, I've been thinking."

"A dangerous pastime," I said, dryly.

"I know," He replied. "Anyway, seems like you're gonna fight my brother pretty soon."

"Am I?" I asked. "Oh right, he's a fanatic, you said. I'd rather hoped he'd be done bothering me after all this, or at least distracted enough by my little challenge for him to better himself. Ah well, hope is the first step on the road to disappointment."

"You don't know the half of it, kid," Sans retorted. Did I detect a hint of bitterness in that tone? Maybe I was just projecting. "Here's some friendly advice: if you keep going the way you are now…" His eye sockets closed, a movement that still baffled me, and then opened again, the sockets now pitch black voids, devoid of those strange lights that they held before. "…You're gonna have a bad time."

A blink of the eye later, by the time my knife swung through the place he was standing, he was already gone.

Speaking of abominable parodies of life…