Prompt: Frisk, resurgence of Chara, TP ending and all never happened, Asriel has been down in the hole for a long long time, another child falls down tho :c oh no


THE YOUNG GIRL

In a country not worth naming and from a town not large enough to warrant  footnote on all but the most local of area maps, a girl no older that eight or nine years of age has run away from home. There was no cataclysmic event this afternoon, no abusive mother or enraged, alcoholic father that encroached  some undrawn line upon the child, just a chastising resulting in a furrowed brow and a quivering lip, a knapsack packed with sandwiches and a quietly opened back window.

The quarrel was innocuous enough to begin. The accusation, that playing carelessly in the front lawn had left a hefty dent and an unsightly gouge in the side of the fathers car, an accusation thrown zealously from father to child, was denied with equal fervour and created the argument upon which the young girl decided, with her mind full of child’s logic, it was high time to part ways with her parents.

But to her, that was in the past. Her face was still tear-stained and her eyes were still a tad red, but she had stopped crying, the heated discussion was a full hour behind her now, and her legs had carried her till she had grown tired. She passed the boundary of her tiny town long ago and at the moment she rested in the calm quietness of a nature reserve. If she looked behind, she might still be able to see her home, but for now she lay on her back starting at the cloudless blue sky above her.

The grass was comfortable and the day was warm and the child was in a moment of introspection that belied her years. For the moment she was marvelling at the magnificent depth of blue presented by the sky. Unmarred by clouds and unbleached by the sun, her eyes absorbed a richness of colour not offered by any television screen or photograph, and while some paintings in some galleries had certainly looked beautiful they couldn’t present the royal, glowing blue of the universe above.

The sky above  always filled this young girl with a powerful awe. It was large unlike anything else she could imagine. No matter where she stood, her vision from horizon to horizon was dwarfed by the massiveness of the sky. At the moment, though, at this exact place she happened to have chosen to rest, her vision was ringed with silhouetted trees and one craggy hillside. Her eyes unfocussed and she let the blur settle, the blue now looking like a perfect sphere, a glowing orb above her, the thing you’d look at and think of a robin’s egg.
The unfathomable might of the sky was reduced to only a small window, a fraction she could hold in her palm, because of how she looked at it. How far away it seemed, something that was only a day ago so huge and all-encompassing. This realisation meant something to her young mind, but she couldn’t quite breach the depth of the philosophy, and deigned lay back and enjoy the immense relaxation of the moment.


THE HILL
She found it ironic she’d find such beauty at the summit of Mount Ebott. The nature reserve of Mount Ebott was strictly forbidden to tread, and of course what better place to go in an angry rebellion than hiking straight to the top. Every child in town knew the most dire warnings to stay away from this hill, the danger great enough to even keep adults from visiting the place.

Those with faith in the religious or the occult would tell you of the spiritual significance Mount Ebott holds – site of powerful Godly influences, bound demons and monsters, springwells of arcane energies and ethers sought after by every magic-caster the world over. The more sceptical, conventional sort will point to the seemingly unending string of suicides, murders, and occult-linked slayings that take place in the woods. Each sides says their explanation, the correct explanation, begat the other, but both sides agree only the daring stray the paths to the top of Mount Ebott.

The other detail of the situation the child was overlooking was that she was badly, badly hurt. The girl had made a mistake. It wasn’t a coincidental resting spot, she had not chosen to lay here on tired legs, in her angry rebellion she had climbed to the very edge of the crevasse of Mount Ebott, stood there a beat, and in carelessness slipped down in. She was trapped in the depth of the mountain and lay on the floor, staring at the sky, and she was heavily concussed.

Not that she’d have known. She may have even been dying, not that she’d have known. She lay there, soaking in the pleasant relaxation, the argument long forgotten, the grass and flowers beneath her feeling more and more comfortable and bedlike, her eyes drawing heavier and heavier, a feeling of a warm blanket laying down over her, and then… she falls asleep, her brain bleeding, her heart not changing rhythm for one single beat, all of her blissfully unaware of shedding her life.

Or maybe she’d wake, maybe someone would find her. Maybe her father would come looking, or a park ranger had spotted her walking up to the woods. In town, her father and mother were already at work, combing the streets and desperately inquiring to everyone the whereabouts of their poor Emily. But the closest one to the girl laying on the floor of the cave was a Demon, sitting observantly, scant meters away from her, wreathed in the shadow.


THE OWNER OF THE WORLD
    Of the townsfolk arguing the dangers of mount Ebott, it was the religious side that was closest to correct. There was a cavern beneath the mountain wreathed in potent magic and this cavern was the domain of a demon. Now, the use of the word ‘demon’, coming up in uncountable hundreds of languages and thousands of unmarked faiths in humanity, procures images of hellfire and brimstone, pitchforks and pointed fangs, a wailing and a gnashing of teeth, but from that this story is a far stretch.

    Now, the ethers of life and tremors of power in the underground take hold of whatever they can manage. Some dominant beings took forms of the elements themselves, impossible bodies of fire or water walking. Some raised the dead, played skeletons on marionette strings. Some lowly beings inhabited the simple minds of rats and rabbits, warping them to vaguely familiar but perverted humanoid shapes, and while this is unappealing to the cultures of man by and large these beings sought life for the purpose anyone else did – to live a life well and fulfilled, and see their kin safe.

    But the demon that owned this lot, the Undergound here, he did not rule over it. In terms of brawn, he was in fact almost rather powerless compared to some of the other denizens. He didn’t sit on the throne and demand his will obeyed to the others here, his life was lived stuffed in a field flower. A fucking garden weed, one that if you were out on a stroll and weren’t paying attention, you might well pluck him up for a short smell, then discard him again. His tenuous influence warped the bulb to some level of recognisable visage and this is how he lived amongst the populace. A bottom feeder of all bottom feeders, the one that owned the universe they all lived in.

    It was paradoxical, and it was also his punishment. In this underground, the demon had so far lost count of the billions of years he had lived. For, of the beings here that could snuff his life out with a handwave, he alone had the ability to rewind the passage of time, and every time one life ended he would awake the very first day he was banished to this place. A Sisyphean purgatory with every day ploughing him towards insanity, but, no one else could claim they could perform that feat and the fact spelled to him that he was of immeasurable supremacy. He had to be. He owned the Underground, or it was at least constructed for him, and that was the only explanation.

    And lived it again and again he had. The billions of lifespans he’d passed had revealed every secret to be seen in this world. He knew every creature in this damp shithole, their every worry and ambition and love and fear. In one lifetime he’d befriend every creature in earnest love, and in the next he would systematically murder every breathing man, woman and child that existed here. Some mornings he woke to strangulate himself immediately, some mornings he sat and waiting to witness the heatdeath of the universe.
And if he had witnessed the collapse of the universe once, he had witnessed it a hundred times over, and a thousand times over again he was sure. How many uncountable trillions of lifetimes had he spent banished here? How much time had actually passed on the surface world, progressing freely of his prison?

    He had done something horrible in his past life, he knew. He didn’t know what, but it was all that made sense to him to be deserving of this fate. In honesty the demon could only remember two lifetimes – his current terrible existence, and one faintly of life as a living, breathing child, also here in the underground. But he was once powerful, he was sure of it. He was a powerful, unimaginably destructive force that committed some heinous crime and was left here as recompense.

    The demon lurking in the shadow went by one of two names. One of which was a simple moniker he introduced himself as, one befitting his miserable existence in the underground today. The other given to him by his parents in the life just prior to this one, and though his true name of his life or lives before that escaped him, this name was still for some reason deeply reverent to him and thus a scarcely uttered secret; “Asriel.”



THE MEETING

    The demon sat in the corner of the room with Emily was, thoroughly and completely, mad. A deep psychosis had flooded his mind several thousands of years ago. Asriel patiently waited in the dark, watching the child burble to herself, savouring the tangible importance of the situation.

    Something was finally different. Something had finally changed.

    Over the time he spent here there had been seven humans that had tumbled down the hole and every facet, every memory of their visits were captured in his mind like a photograph. The breadth of his power controlling the timeline here did not extend to a human soul. He couldn’t bring them back or revert them, play with and inspect and investigate them like he could any other aspect of this place. They came down, he had them for that lifetime, they died, he grieved deeply his next sleep would return him to normality and he carried on.
Perhaps the relief and withdraw of change was the most dastardly part his torture here. The jarring reminder of a world outside this one that he could never, ever reach. But that quandry didn’t cross his mind right now. The last visit was several thousands of millennia ago and his mouth salivated watching the soul flickering before him. He smelled deeply the aroma. He drank the energy the human brought with it.

    He had time. There was a guardian in these parts, one that roamed the caves to keep an eye out for defenceless creatures in trouble. Not a powerful construct sworn to keep watch over this land, nothing so dramatic, just an old, motherly sort with earnest good intentions and a powerful arcane might behind her. But she had only just walked past here, and she would be returning to her home until her next stroll. The child was his and there would be no interruptions.

    In a land like this, to beings forged wholly from quivering wisps of arcana, to hold a human soul was an unfathomable treasure. And it was his. In all seven previous instances they escaped his influence and this time it was delivered directly to his lap… figuratively. The extensions of his vines trembled and reached slowly for the child. He could watch himself consume this little one. Whisk her up by an ankle and open her throat with a quick draw of his thorned limb and drink her life as sweet as wine. Plunge himself deep into her heart and rip her soul from her living body, and consume, oh God, gloriously consume this human delicacy, body and life-force, this gift so mercifully bestowed upon him, so stupidly she had  fallen in to his home, and it was his, and now his alone, for this one lifetime, at last, let him have it, please, please, for this one lifetime, let him,

    And the last thought stopped him with his jaws quivering. In the heat of the moment he dropped every pretense of amicability and reverted to a sordid maw of jagged teeth and hateful, burning eyes moving in on the helpless prey before him. Still not a being of terror inhabiting the body of a flower, but even still. Certainly enough to scare a child, which he suddenly and without doubt did not want to do, his mind suddenly flooded with vivid images on how to savour this generosity, rather than a moment of voracious indulgence.

    Asriel's vegetal appendages snaked forth and cradled the child’s head, and he sincerely checked over her for any serious injury.
    “Little one, can you hear me?” he spoke aloud, the girl rousing a little.
    “You’ve taken a fall. You’ve been hurt. You will be okay, here, come with me to my home. I am a friend, I will help you. My name is Flowey- Flowey the flower.”