i have not done less than duty requires.

[lyseandpurge]

There is a song in the flagstones.



It resonates, high-pitched, nonverbal, and arrhythmic, between the walls of the corridors and along the lengths of the old pillars and in the hollows of the alcoves.

It comes from a windowless hallway, from a door no one has seen before whose cobweb drapery is so old it has begun to peel away.

And even then it comes: from a little outside the world, from no room, from no mouth.

From the gap in the door a light has begun to bleed, vivid and violet and pulsing like a heartbeat. The song rises with it, falls with it, and harmonises with the whistling of the wind—the smell of hot metal mingling with something sweet.

If you open the door, it is because you have heard the sound, seen the light, felt the pulse—you have traced it to its source. It hangs before you, an immortal crystal of pure light, suspended in a shining, sickly abyss with no visible beginning or end. It is wounded. It is bleeding. A steady torrent of syrupy liquid pours from roots and pipes that have been forced through the wounds in its surface, and then been severed; the ichor streams down its lower facets and falls endlessly into the emptiness.

Its voice pierces your ears, louder and more melodic than ever.

And something dark and gaseous shifts warily under the glassy skin of the cell, watching you with its single eye.

= <o> =

a change. The ancient door has been altered recently: some wary soul has carved a message deep into the ageless wood, blackening it with heat. It reads: "DANGER, POSSESSION MAY OCCUR BEYOND THIS DOOR".

ooc. || hey everyone! this is Judgement or Ammit, the all-consuming vengeance of the immortal cell! she just got here, she's just a little lost, and she would appreciate something horrible happening so she can get back into the swing of things. anything's fine, though!!

nota bene—you can only get to the cell through this door, and Judgement can't see, hear, or perceive anything that isn't close to the cell. there's a little more information on these limitations in its bio​. sorry for the restrictions!

Comments

[dustless]

Something's here. Something big. They can feel it even before they start down the hallway, footsteps echoing too-loud.

Frisk doesn't know what it is, and they don't consider fleeing for even an instant. They hear the voice--the voice? Maybe the voice? The music. It's music, it's a song, and it's entrancing in a siren (not shyren)-like way.

They open the door, slow, careful. The color's the same as a dog's eyes, and they expect to find her there, and for reality wrenching apart.

...Maybe they find that last part. They stare up at the cell, lips parted in something like awe. (If anyone asked, Frisk would answer that they've never been in the presence of a real god before.)

"Oh," they breathe.

[lyseandpurge]

ooc. || i hope this isn't too invasive a 'vision' but tell me if it is, and i'll rewrite!!

From the vast cell comes a greeting: a rich chord, a harmony that reaches to the bone. In front of Frisk's feet there is the sense of an echo. The empty air welcomes their footsteps, rippling softly with light.

The cell extends its welcome, and is asking for help.

But the cell is not alone. Judgement spews out of the cracks in its surface like an expletive, sudden and deafening. A black fog spreads out out out over the abyss, and with impossible speed completely engulfing the world.

Sensations. A flicker of eyesight, a bass tone like teeth crashing together. The cell appears directly in front of Frisk, close enough to touch, tall as a building and still as stone. Even if they haven't moved, they have the impression that their fingers are touching its white-hot surface. Then there is a feeling of muscles contracting, digits curling, claws digging in as they pry the crystal open with a strength and fury they don't possess.

Just as the cell has split wide enough that it could fit their head, the ground trembles. Out of the darkness below comes something with a bright diamond-shaped eye, whale-sized, tail thrashing, jaw unhinged, rushing, rushing, screaming like a freight train, to swallow them up.

Then the vision is gone.

The cell, in its old place, pulses rapidly, but then a little more slowly, and a little more slowly, calming down. A single black bird, shaped like a magpie but four times as large, watches Frisk intently from its perch at the crystal's apex, its single eye unblinking.

nah it's fine~

[dustless]

Darkness strangles, fingers dig in, it hurts, it hurts, but they've had worse, they were more prepared this time. Doesn't matter that trying to rip open something that burns them rather than weird rain and reddish ocean.

Except in the end, it does.

They hold it together until the last one. There's a massive void-mouth and maybe teeth, or maybe they put those teeth there themselves--they definitely put in the scent of lemons.

Frisk flings their body away, tripping and slamming onto their back with a muffled half-curse, and their head's outside of the room again. Their hands are clawing into their green scarf. "Why!" they shriek. Why that instead of words, it was bad enough with the dog. Frisk's starting to hate it.

They breathe, staring up at the shadows of the hallway's ceiling, petting their scarf's threads and moving to their shirt stripes. They're in the castle. It's weird, but it's real, and so's their heartbeat, and so are they. It's real, and they're being watched, they've got to do...something. The music asked. They think?

Slow and careful again, they shift, sitting up on the floor in front of the doorway.

"Sorry," they say. "Didn't mean to yell." They don't know if the bird they crane their neck back to see cares, and...admittedly, they're not super sorry, but it feels better than not saying anything. They don't like that their own noise overpowered the harmony, at least in their own ears.

<3333

[lyseandpurge]

The bird stares blankly at Frisk for a moment, as if expecting something more from them, a movement, a threat, an attack. Then it spreads its wings,

with impossible speed completely engulfing the world

(everything except the door frame wiped away)

sensations. a bass tone like

their muscles contracting, their digits curling, their claws digging into the crack

and this time, a pang of impossible and undeniable hunger inside them.

Instead of simply ripping the cell open, Frisk feels a contortion of their neck, as if crane-like they had struck at the cell, and cracked it with a beak they do not have.

And they are dipping their long long something inside, greedily gulping down the purple light, the liquid, the heat, and it is sliding down their long throat and it is pooling in their belly and they are swelling up, so hungry—and the tone, they can barely hear the tone, the cell, its song shrill: it is screaming like torn metal, screaming like an animal in pain, and they are gulping it down, all of it, inside them.

(they do they would they will.)

Then the ground trembles,

the darkness below, anguished, enraged, whale-sized, rushes up

to catch them, to tear them away, to swallow them.

The vision, fully repeated, evaporates in an instant.

Now two birds are perched on top of the cell, watching Frisk, but only one of them has an eye.

in return, feel free to message me if their responses aren't enough to go off of~

[dustless]

Frisk folds up, teeth gritting hard enough that their jaw aches.

They just had...a meal. Before. Lunch? Maybe. The problem is time. Time, just like when they were sick, is suddenly questionable. And they're not really hungry.

And. Doesn't matter if they were, their stomach's churning hard, lemons are mingling with the hideous bitterness of buttercups from memories they shouldn't have.

But there's more meaning this time, something they can put together, puzzle pieces--the door's right behind them, they can leave if they want, if they have to. They might have to soon, in fact. It's only been a couple minutes and they're already losing their grip on everything. Were there always two birds there, did they just not notice the one without an eye?

"...Can't break that. 'M a tough kid, but I'm not that tough. Or..." They let one hand flop towards the nothingness beneath the diamond...thing. "...fly. I don't have wings."

[onetrackdrifting]

Pulse.

Somewhere, a stopped metronome starts ticking again. Somewhere, sand starts falling through an hourglass with a sussurrus that sounds like static.

He can feel it. The feeling of something aligning in him, like a nameless iron filing suddenly spinning to point due Pole at the force of domain. A hand to his chest, and a familiar itching burn at the back of his throat, and a curled-forward stance.

It's... if he hadn't experienced it before, and moreover experienced what he didn't realise until too late, now, was it's absence, he'd have no idea. It feels like the silence of a seal in Central.

He was done. The dog was wrong, and how was he so certain of that? He's been to the Edge, traversed in it's entirety. There's no escape here (not that there is anywhere, not while it festers inside him). Which means...

He draws his sword, and carefully checks it over before holding the as yet bladeless hit and dashing through the halls, a macabre game of hot and cold, a siren song. He has no choice.

There's a door. Rectangular, rather than square, and it opens on a hinge rather than dividing in two, but it might as well be that door, his vision already feeling like it's fuzzing around the edges.

He goes to meet the Cell.

He goes to face Judgement.

[lyseandpurge]

Drifter's Judgement waits for him as seas wait for valves to be opened—hardly at all.

There is a terrible inrush of air towards the doors as he approaches them. The pressure mounts, the wind screeches through the hallways, and the doors creak, tremble, and buckle inwards.

Within, the cell is visible for a split second, burning, bleeding from every orifice (and it is wounded in all the places that burst when the Drifter drove his sword into its apex). Its heartbeat is a roaring earthquake, and the light strobes faster and faster and faster with every second, and it is blinding.

And nothing comes—there is only the wind rushing inwards and the shrill screaming of the cell and the heartbeat. The doorway remains open, and the Drifter's path clear. The void will bear his feet, as it always has.

Something is waiting, though hardly at all. Something is hiding. Something will not be killed as easily as before.

aaaaaaa it's fine!! i'm just hoping to get the hang of this muse... also noooo frisk D=

[lyseandpurge]

The one-eyed bird cocks its head, perturbed, at the child huddling on the ground. It caws silently, its beak opening and then closing, as if asking a question. Then—

Sensations. The texture of glass-smooth ground. Motion, winding motion, weight pressing on countless rows of ribs. Frisk pushes forwards onwards towards the light of the cell, inexorable, a monster; coils upon coils, the excitement of hunger, they could swallow the cell whole.

Darkness. Something from below. Rushing, jaws opening, it rips them away from the cell and drags them into the air, gashing them with its teeth. And it wrestles with them and struggles and jerks until it tears them into pieces.

The vision ends.

Sensations. Their heart beating beating beating as they scramble across the ground, legs like motors, away from the cell and its heat and its churning blood.

Feelers waving waving touch cold stone, and there is a torrential rush of air behind them, and the door is gone, and they are gone, and the cell is safe

The vision ends.

The bird on top of the cell is alone again. It stares at Frisk, as if hunting for something hidden there.

Finally, it opens its beak, and this time a strangled noise comes out.

wh a a

It tries again, gaping, its beak growing larger and changing shape.

whaaaa t t

Its head collapses in on itself like a crushed egg, and then reforms into something else.

"What are you doing?" demands the voice of Toriel, crystal-clear. "What are you proving this way?"

Then the goat-faced bird suddenly dissolves.

The black liquid it was composed of splatters against the surface of the cell and slowly rolls down its sides.

[onetrackdrifting]

Air rushes past Drifter, and it's all he can do to lower his weight and center himself against it, clothes fluttering madly forwards and one hand on his helmet. This close, the distinction between reality and vision becomes meaningless.

(Is it any wonder it took so long to believe?)

Wounded, but not destroyed, he sees it, even for that brief moment. He failed at the last hurdle. His heartbeat is racing, synchronized to the drum of the core of things, the way that strong bass or the bang of fireworks can go into the chest and stay there. It's the same way the pulse of the terminals moved through him, but oh so stronger.

He shields his eyes with his upper arm, squinting - bright light is not pleasant to them. When he lifts it there's nothing but void and howling wind, blackness extending into the Tower.

There's no dog beside him, but he steps forward into it all the same, and a blue blade lights up in the darkness.

[lyseandpurge]

A blue blade lights up in the darkness, and the fog in the air glistens thickly in the glow of it.

At the same time, the cell pulses—for a moment it is visible, a blurry shape some few hundred metres away, shrouded in a purple-sickened nimbus.

At the same time, Judgement, suspended perfectly still just above the door, comes crashing down on the Drifter.

She is almost human-shaped, although four times larger than any human. She is a skeletal monster with bulging shoulders and two jagged horns and the broken, fragmented beginnings of legs, and no sooner have her arms struck the invisible ground with a sound like lightning striking wood than she darts, insect-like, back into the air, and then (hunting the Drifter's light) slams down again, and again, each time making the ground shudder with palpable force.

[onetrackdrifting]

His helmet tilts as he scans the darkness, back and forth, and he falls prey to a common flaw.

No one ever looks up. The pulse of the cell is an apt distraction as he turns towards it instinctively, sword in the barest motion of starting to lift when her fists come crashing down on him, a split second jerk at the movement being the difference between utterly crushed and knocked prone - he rolls without choice, getting to his feet on a leg that rattles and wavers only to have to immediately dash thereafter, again, and again, and again.

His heart's in his chest. There's very little room to breathe. She didn't ambush him before - she's learnt, and therefore is so, so very more dangerous. He dashes as far into the darkness and away as he dares (who knows if he could get lost forever or fall into some unseen hazard, and it's a good thing she glows.)

He sheathes the sword and draws a gun, in one smooth motion. The muzzle flares angrily as it fires a charged beam straight at the icon on his long-time tormentor's head.

=w=b

[dustless]

No. No, no, no, they're done with this, the rending is nothing compared to suddenly being gone even though they're still there, still watching, still feeling--

--and Toriel, Toriel melting, the Amalgamates were one of the only Underground things that still scared them and she should never, ever, ever remind Frisk of them.

They choke on nothing, and they've got better to do.

They're gone before they even remember getting up.



Later, long after they left the hall and collapsed in a patch of sunlight streaming through windows, they notice their hands are stinging. Their palms and fingers are scraped raw, like they'd dragged themselves out rather than just stood and ran. A kitchen's raided for its sink, not its food, leaving them to soak their hands and arms in a full basin until it gets cool and their hands' flexing assure them that they're not pretend.

What was that?

Guardian said something about a dog, a white-and-pink diamond too. Those things. They hadn't really told Frisk much about them. Now that both (all?) of those things are here, they're regretting not pursuing the subject.

They leave the kitchen.

...Not unexpectedly, their feet lead them back to the dark hallway, peering at the color pouring light and casting shadows. Curiosity killed the cat pops into their head, but there's something a lot worse about losing their own self than just being killed.

It's been a few hours.

Frisk creeps their way back. The Worn Dagger is held tight in their left hand--not for attacking reasons, for reassurance; it's very strange for a comfort object, but that doesn't make it less of one. The solidness of its form is better than just touching fabric.

They stand in the doorway, breathing heavy.

They call out in a whisper. "...Hello?"

[lyseandpurge]

The cell pulses once again, its purple light washing through the world, as Judgement takes a railgun slug to the face.

It blows a hole right through her head, and she jerks and shudders—but only for a split second. Her eye is still whole, superimposed over emptiness, and it snaps to the source of the shot.

Her claw-like arms reach up to the hole in her head, dig in, and peel open the black coating that covers her, peel and peel and peel until

She darts out like a bullet of her own, bright and burning, too fast to see. Halfway to the Drifter she strikes the ground and erupts in an enormous splatter of white-hot flame that covers everything around him.

Then the flames shrink inwards as if they are being sucked into a vortex and when they are gone, Judgement stands there, still and whole.

<3

[lyseandpurge]

The cell is there, just where they left it. It is beating. It is bleeding. Its feverish breath washes over them.

For a split second, something obscures its light: a massive thing, whale-sized, swims in front of it, cast in silhouette.

It passes overhead with a sudden rush of air, and then a brief flash of pink is visible as it darts by in the void beneath Frisk's feet.

The cell beats with light.

Frisk's Judgement rises slowly from the depths. It is something aquatic, with skin like segmented plates of metal and a cavernous mouth, lined with intricate, interlocking teeth, behind which a single diamond-shaped eye glowers without expression. Its four enormous fins twist like propellor vanes as it spirals gradually to a halt, just beneath where Frisk is standing, and its four-fluked tail sweeps forward. The light of the cell glistens on the rivets and joints of its enormous head, dented and riddled with the blades of rusted swords.

It watches Frisk in perfect silence, and makes no response at all.

[dustless]

Something so huge, moving so fast--Frisk probably won't be able to dodge that, and they're tense enough to ache already.

...That doesn't mean they can't see. The creature is terrifying, but as soon as it stills, Frisk sees that it--they? she?--is actually sort of pretty. To them, at the very least.

Except...

There's a chapel somewhere in the castle. They've only found it once. There's an image in the stained-glass windows of a dragon being impaled with a sword. They felt uncomfortable just seeing that, and seeing it real and up close is quite a bit worse.

In spite of blood roaring in their ears, they make a decision.

With slow, jerky movements, Frisk draws their dagger back and slips it into a belt loop, like a certain Chara does with their stick.

(It's not a big thing--they're not a big thing, they probably couldn't do much damage if they tried wholeheartedly, but they're used to seeing themselves as the most powerful thing around in most ways.)

"Please don't...eat me again?"

[onetrackdrifting]

Drifter knows it can't be that easy (not when the thing can shake off a bisecting sword-slash and come back stronger), but still feels the brief satisfactory triumph of a hit well landed. And then the eye focuses on him and he can only brace because something is coming in return.

What Judgement does is unsettling enough he's taken off guard - and she moves fast enough that maybe being en guarde would not have made a difference. He throws up his arms and tries to dash out of range as the flames catch him, his clothes, he rolls, burning and silently screaming as the movement fails to tamp out the clinging flames. Worse than stepping on an Eastern grate at the wrong time.

The flames pull at him, at what feels like the very meat of him as they themselves are pulled, and he as he gets to his feet stumbles, fighting against the slide before it stops and there she is, whole and no doubt very, very angry. He jams a medkit's needle into the crystal at his throat in a hurry, coughing on smoke. His clothes and helmet are oddly scorchless.

He remembers the pulse of the diamond in the dark, throwing everything into pink highlights like stained glass. He draws his sword again and makes a chain-dash for it, for where he remembers it to be.

If he wants to win, his best bet is to strike at the heart of the matter.

[lyseandpurge]

Judgement is still for too long. Seconds, seconds—until the cell flashes again, and she pulses with it, light bursting from her eye and dancing across her rippling skin. It dances on the Drifter, too, and a purple halo shines from the end of his sword like a beacon.

And he is already halfway there again, already almost to the cell. He is getting too close.

He is always getting closer, always moving faster than she does, indefatigable and impossible to predict, her only weakness—

Judgement's eye closes and she disappears.

The world goes dark, for a moment. Then: one, two, three, four tiny, diamond-shaped lights shiver into existence around the Drifter, fixed at the periphery of his vision. With a blink they come loose and become physical objects, floating here and there, nearer and further from him, trailing behind his step but meandering slowly in his direction.

Then: five, six, seven, eight more fragile little lights.

Nine, ten, twelve, twenty, fifty, one hundred—so that even in their motions they begin to form patterns and shapes, spirals and helixes, as if carried by currents in vaster and vaster circles around him.

Then there is a sound like a thunderclap, and all of them fall to the ground and there is a scream that rises into the inaudible, a sudden white flash that goes through everything, and a simultaneous blast of sound and force and heat.

In the wake of it, among pillars of pink flame feeding upon themselves, merging and dancing, a fist the size of a boulder comes crashing down on the Drifter. Then another. And Judgement's single eye comes into view—her torso flutters in the wind like a rag, and the black is pouring from her face, and from her two overgrown fists the black is sloughing off, and as she finds the Drifter one more time she spreads them wide, palms open, and brings them together on him.

They explode, black droplets flying outward and splattering on the ground and slowly evaporating. Black liquid rains up into the sky.

Finally, Judgement's head, still solid, rears up and slams the Drifter against the ground face-first. Once, twice, thrice.

[judgement voice] did you say something about not eating you because i'm gonna quickly open my mouth

[lyseandpurge]

vmmmm

vmmm

vmm goes the cell, three heartbeats passing, each a little slower and gentler.

Judgement's eye stares at Frisk, fixed. Then its mouth opens, the teeth parting and retracting like a complex portcullis, slowly, slowly.

And the rhombus eye widens, slowly, slowly, growing in all four directions until it is no longer an eye any more—until the inner light of the immortal cell is clearly visible, shimmering and roiling within it.

This pink light flows out from the portal of the eye in liquid form, filling the mouth of the beast up, and up, and up, as it rises, rises, rises until its teeth just barely break the invisible floor of the room within. And the fountain of pink fills it all the way up until it dribbles down Judgement's sides, and then stops. It levels out just below Judgement's teeth, bubbling, then rippling, then stilling, a pool of sickness and strange energy.

Something white and crystalline leaps out of the middle of it, and lands, and bobs for a little bit before settling. It is a cube, almost too large to fit in Frisk's hand, with a tiny pink light flickering in its centre.

It feels exactly like a SOUL.

[frisk voice] why is my life this

[dustless]

Frisk rocks back immediately, a scream strangled into a moan in their throat.

Panic leaves everything a pink-black blur, and it takes a moment for them to really see what's going on--is it...

...is it crying?

It really looks like that eye is either spilling tears or bleeding all over itself. Neither which is good, though one far less horrible than the other. And they're not being swallowed, which is...nice, although they still need to spend time to regulate airflow and steel their own reserve to stay.

Frisk watches the cube bob as it appears, the feeling from it striking something deep and strange in a way the worse energy didn't, a way even the music hadn't managed.

They don't know what to do with it. They're certainly not going to attack it, and they don't think they should touch it, because who knows what that might do?

They probably need to do...something, though. That's not just turning around and leaving.

Careful, they crouch, trying to look at it closer and ignore the massive jaws in the meantime. "I don't know what that is."

frisk i am sorry

[lyseandpurge]

Judgement's radiating fins twitch just barely as Frisk approaches, their footsteps sending pale ripples across the invisible floor. The floating cube stills, motionless, in the pool of liquid, and then rings with resonance as the cell begins to sing again, doubling its amelodic voice.

Then this tiny fragment of the immortal cell lifts, vertex first, out of the liquid and into the air. The fragile little pink light inside it mimics the pulse of the cell, flaring with its beat and vibrating with the same bone-heating hum.

Then it desynchronises, just a little: it comes a little fast—and then a little faster—and the little pulse speeds up until it exactly matches Frisk's own, a synthetic echo of their heart hovering just centimetres from their face, vm-vmmm, vm-vmmm.

It sings wordlessly with the cell, and wordlessly, Judgement waits.

[dustless]

The world is made of so many, many sounds.

Their blood is roaring through their veins, the sound of it is echoing in front of them. It shouldn't be doing that. They shouldn't be hearing that.

The creature is beautiful, the cell is beautiful, the music is beautiful, the light is beautiful.

Distantly, they're still aware they can leave. They walked over the nothingness without a thought, and they can walk back with some; they don't think they're locked up, and staying is their choice. Even if it's terrifying, even if half of them is still trembling with every beat run, run, run. But they don't always do the smart thing. (There's a reason Undyne's one of the monsters that killed them the most.)

They shouldn't touch it.

Frisk lifts their hands.

They shouldn't touch it.

Their fingers curl.

They shouldn't touch it.

They press their palms against the bottom, cupping it, as if they're afraid it'll tumble back down if they don't.

[onetrackdrifting]

He's a little off-course when the Cell pulses, and he corrects towards it, focusing on the rhythm of the dash because he knows he can't afford to slow down with what's behind. Even when the light of it fades, the gaze of Judgement washes on him from behind.

And then vanishes.

Drifter skids to a halt as a familiar diamond manifests in front of him, almost running into it. He slashes at it automatically while it's still - three strikes and it's out - and then turns to the three others.

More than three others, and this goes from something handleable into something he must pour every ounce of skill he has into just to survive - he's going into this blind in more ways than one. He dashes in and out, knowing he can't hope to get them all by the time they're triggered but thinning the numbers as best he can while trying to herd them together so that when they do he has space-

They scream and he chain-dashes as far as he can, the roar of flame chasing at his heels and a diamond sigil once more blazes out of the darkness before him and this time he

can't stop

in time.

Palms slam together and he's trapped between them like a fly, and while their liquid nature saps off some of the force as they break like waves on him he feels something snap inside him that stabs further when his breath hitches involuntarily at the pain of it. He falls forward to his knees, unsupported.

Judgement's entire face smashing into him from above doesn't help this matter, especially since this time there's more solidity to it. There's an audible crunch.

She rears back, and he drags himself out of range of the second strike by the barest inch, pink blood staining what might be ground. She corrects for this with the third, but this time he has gathered himself enough to dash, and dash again, and jam the second needle, resisting the urge to sigh as the pain dulls and wounds snap back into alignment. There's no time for that here, and he's two down and little to show for it.

Judgement isn't going to let him get physically near the Cell, alright. The next time it pulses and fades, he takes a shot in the dark.

The railgun charges, and fires.

I DON'T KNOW. /keeps digging

[voidster]

Well.

Curiosity is stupid, it gets you killed, erased. But this is 'home' now, where he is stuck alongside so many others. Most of them children. The least he can do is try to learn more, enough to warn others. He's thinking castle strangeness, something terrible, not person at all.

So he opens the door and glides inside, back into the abyss.

Oopsie poopsie.

i'm finally doing this!!

[lyseandpurge]

The cube,

she,

is heavy, surprisingly so—but weightless. It slides against Frisk's fingers, then settles into their grip, not as if falling, but as if drawn to their touch like a magnet.

It is smooth as glass and its edges, though sharp, have no tangible sensation against their skin.

It beats, beats, beats, every pulse a vibration radiating through the phalanges of Frisk's fingers.

Then, as if certain of its security, it pulls gently towards the centre of their torso, towards the heartbeat that it echoes; not with any real force, but as if letting go would cause it to float slowly towards them. The light within seems to shift in place, pushing against the crystalline walls of its enclosure.

With a loud gurgle, the pool of pink liquid begins to drain into Judgement's mouth, a gentle vortex disturbing its descending surface.

here we go!

[dustless]

It comes nearer and nearer, and they shouldn't have touched it.

Maybe. Maybe. It doesn't hurt, it's just...there. Its noise, its music, it's resonating, reaching.

They think of Toriel's face on the bird's head, they notice the abyss beneath their feet, and they just listen and wait for their fate.

...No. Not fate. They're doing something. They're doing something, them and--and--(her?), together.

The squirming light, their own hands, they both guide the thing against their chest. The noise gets louder and louder and louder, through their skin, through their bones, through their everything, through something

(that reaches back)

red.






Frisk falls.

A shape wraps around their SOUL.