The Moon, chapter 43: Void

The last thing Susie wanted to do was inspect further. In fact, she wouldn't be opposed to forgetting this had happened entirely. She knew who she was, though, and she knew her morbid curiosity would win out in the end. The ash shifted below her feet as she stepped closer to the body, an uneasy feeling filling her throat like bile as her breaths grew short. As her left knee hit the ash below, she bent down and got a closer look at the masked figure. More accurately, she attempted to determine what the mask was covering up. She didn't have to unmask the body to know this though. Through the eye holes, she saw exactly what she suspected. Dull, gray, lifeless eyes staring back at her. The worst part, perhaps, was the fact that she couldn't tell her eyes' reflection and the body's apart.

Susie got back to her feet and stumbled backwards a little before she felt the clasp of a hand around her ankle.

She gasped in surprise, immediately readying her knife and looking down at her assailant. But what met her eyes was another, more deteriorated version of herself. The grasp gave way easily as Susie fully viewed what had grasped her. The top half of a barely recognizable Susie clone pathetically clawed across the ground towards her. Her usual dark purple skin had lost its color to the point where it nearly blended in with the ash that surrounded her. There was nothing past the bottom half of her torso but a broken spine that jutted out and laid across the ash behind her like a tail. She wasn't wearing clothing, and her skin had been tautly pulled across what bones were left in her body. Her left arm was completely missing, and she weakly dragged herself across the ash with her right hand, more resembling talons now. The right half of her skull, along with anything that resembled hair, was missing entirely, and leaked a dark tar like substance from her mouth.

The haunting corpse in front of her shuddered with every weak attempt at a crawl towards her. Susie wasn't sure if there was anything she could say. Visions of Suze rushed to her mind. Another life she couldn't save. She knew there was nothing to be gained from staying any longer here but painful regrets and future nightmares, so she backed away and started towards the pit in the ground. Even an abyss was more welcoming to her than whatever rested beneath the dunes of ash that blanketed this place. She reached the part of the room where the ash began to sink deeper into the ground, until all that was left was the depths of the void. It only took one unlucky piece of wood jutting out of the ground for her to trip, sending her into a tumbling fall into the pit of the unknown that lay before her. The blurry mess that consisted of her vision did nothing to improve her orientation, and before long she felt no ground beneath her at all. She felt everything in her body seize up in an all encompassing fear as she watched the light of the room above get smaller and smaller. Any ambient sound that pervaded in the room above was gone now, and only silence remained. And though she knew she was falling, she felt no wind or air as she fell.

After a while, the light in the distance disappeared entirely, leaving her in a black she had only been exposed to in dreams. An impenetrable, inconceivably viscous darkness. In the fall, she had let go of her flashlight, but managed to hold her knife tight. Now, she was left with only a fragile excuse of a weapon, and what remained in her backpack. After an amount of time left uncounted to Susie, she felt her weightlessness cease as she softly landed on a dense, hard floor. This floor, however, was just as black and invisible as everything else in the area. Everything besides, oddly enough, her. She could see herself and her belongings clear as day, if nothing else. This only escalated the feeling of her not belonging here. She was not supposed to be here. Never did she belong in this place. But here she was.

Observing her surroundings, or rather the lack thereof, Susie began to wander rather aimlessly through the darkness that surrounded her. She wasn't sure how she would navigate this place until she remembered something she was ashamed she hadn't earlier. Her backpack made a small thump as it hit the floor, which echoed for what felt like a full minute. The same happened with the sound of her unzipping it. There, she saw the strange purple lantern she had pondered on the purpose of in her subconscious. If this didn't work, she wasn't sure what would. Taking the handle in her hand and holding the lantern in front of her, she began to turn the dial clockwise until it was turned as far as it could.

Below her feet were black bricks, now illuminated by her light which stretched out about a dozen feet in every direction. Packing her backpack up again, Susie began to wander through the flat area, her footsteps making not a single sound. Sound itself didn't seem to be consistent in this place, but she let go of the notion that conventional physics were unbreakable a long time ago. The knife in one hand and the lantern in the other, Susie walked the void for minutes upon minutes, looking for any sort of landmark to guide her. It was when she saw a faint flicker of light in the distance that she began to find any semblance of hope again. Susie ran briskly towards a faint blue light until she recognized what it was she was actually running towards.

Susie stepped into a long hallway, lined with pillars on both sides, with the left side interspersed with large windows. The hallway stretched far upward, at least ten times her height, and stretched forward for what looked like about a mile. As she walked further and further into the hallway, sound began to return. Looking out the window, she could see and hear hundreds of shooting stars of all colors flying past outside, all being backed by a starlit night sky, and an ever bright light blue moon that served as the only lighting the hallway had. The stars made a sort of twinkling, high pitched whistling noise as they fell past the windows, and the entire scene would almost be considered beautiful had Susie not walked further down the hallway, and noticed what all of the slumped over purple and black figures were that lined the hallway as it continued.

Piles of corpses and bones littered the floor and sides of the hallway as she walked further and further to the hallway's end. All wearing gas masks and wearing similar clothing as herself. All with a purple or pink complexion. She didn't need to expect further to understand what they were, but the sheer amount of bodies was something she simply wasn't expecting to have to deal with. Some were decapitated, others had puncture wounds and holes the size of her arm in their stomachs and backs. All of these puncture wounds came in threes, in a straight line.  As the hallway came to a close, she saw a large, hulking figure that faced away from her. Something large with white fur and golden hair, and wore a tattered purple cape. There was also a sound emanating from the creature that sounded like a sort of crunchy chewing noise. Susie walked a step closer, and the creature turned its head.

Three glowing white eyes and a mouth dripping blood stared at her as a malformed Asgore turned to face her. Perfectly circular white eyes replaced his normal ones, along with another on his forehead. His body had been malformed to the point where his form was so starkly dissimilar to his normal version that one almost couldn't recognize it as him. He had a much more slim torso, but his arms were long enough to reach the floor without having to bend his torso over, and his hands had grown to twice their size, growing additional golden talons on the ends of his fingers.

His entire body turned around as he threw a bloodied and disfigured body from his right hand. In his left he carried a scarlet colored trident, which loudly crashed against the floor as he turned his body around. For a split second, she saw something in the darkness behind him. Beyond the hallway's end, in a black and formless void, she saw a pulsating orb of flesh and machinery that she could barely see in the short time it wasn't covered by his cape. Could she be at the core? What else could it be? What else would this horrid semblance of Asgore be so hell bent on defending from Susie's clones? Was this the reason she was given this knife? Asgore chattered his teeth and breathed heavily as he looked over what Susie assumed was a fresh victim to him. And Susie could do nothing but stand frozen in her place. Hundreds of versions of herself had tried to pass him before. What would make her think she would be the one to succeed? What if she was destined to be nothing but another failed so called “chosen one”? She knew she was being fed lies from the puppet. He must have known about this.

The monster in front of her crawled closer on his hands and feet. There was no way she would be another failure. Not with all of her friends on the line, not with everything she ever knew in the balance. Susie didn't even have to defeat him necessarily, just needed to pass him and stab the heart. He seemed slow enough, but she assumed there was something up his sleeve. If the clones were half as smart as she was, they would know this too. All she could do was wait for it to make a move.

But Asgore simply stood there, idling, waiting for her instead. This was the last obstacle. Even if she died here just like all the others, if she stabbed the heart, she would have died happy knowing that she would at least have given the creators of these tests hell to pay. Just one stab was all it would take.

Her survival was secondary.

It was time to break the cycle.