Undersong

You woke up. You looked around. You groped at the darkness.

But there was nothing to be felt.

You sat back and scrutinized your surroundings more closely. Darkness surrounded you on every side. A small disc of light was set beneath you, the only illumination in the entire room. Its gentle glow brought out the colors in your clothes and the odd pallor of your hands. You checked your chest and felt the beat of your heart beneath your fingertips.

More importantly, you were alone and devastatingly so.

“Is it fun yet?” asked Flowey from behind you. “Is it liberating to be stripped of all compassion? Is it freeing to be forced against your will to be bound up here while a monster uses your body to kill your friends?”

“You’re not real,” you said, not looking back. You wrapped your arms around your legs. “You died a long time ago. We both did.”

Flowey popped up in front of you. “Maybe I’m just a memory. But do you want to sit here by yourself moping for the rest of your life? Or do you want to stand up and find a way to fight back?”

“I’ve tried everything... Do you know how many times I reset before coming here? Countless hours, eons of wasted time running through the same story again and again. No permutation led back to the Pacifist Path. I even destroyed the world and brought it back. After the fiftieth time, Sans stopped talking to me. I don’t know what he saw in my face, but his attack pattern never changed. I could dodge it all perfectly.”

“So, are you just going to give up? Is this the end?”

“Sometimes, when the existential burden of my life came down on me, when I was too broken to do anything else, I’d just hang out.”

“Hang out?” he asked.

“I’d sit somewhere. Sometimes alone, sometimes with someone else. But wherever I was, I’d always try to take in every detail. If there was anything I hadn’t noticed before, I memorized it. Even for people I’d do the same. I got to know them all, each one. I discovered everything I could about them, down to the floor of their soul. And I remember every detail.” You reached out a hand and touched Flowey’s petal. “Even you.”

He swatted your hand away with a vine. “So you’re just going to sit there and feel sorry for yourself, then?”

You didn’t say anything else.

Then you felt the extraordinary pain splitting apart your chest. You gasped and clutched at your chest, where a huge hole had appeared. Flowey’s face was fading fast. The darkness came in closer, and you hardly had time to feel the wet running down your hands.

No...

You struggled against the darkness. Your heart had cracked, but it was still intact. You reached out and touched on something hidden amid the murk. A familiar feeling washed over you. You saw the rainbow alight on your soul. Once more it re-fused. The pain went away, and you were revived and alive.

“W-what was that?” you stuttered through ragged breaths.

The sweat dropped off my face and into the grass below. I tried to smirk, but my face’s usual facade had fallen. “You got me,” I said, clutching at my chest. “Too bad that it didn’t work.”

Discord stood before me, his mouth taut and his eye peeved. “You’re just going to cheat your way through this battle? Really?”

“Cheating is such a strong word.” I stood up and dusted off my hands. “I like to think of it as an unorthodox tactic.”

He sent another barrage of chaos spears at me. They struck me, sending me back and sticking me to a statue. I tried to keep the pain from appearing on my face. The rainbow light came again, dissipating the spears. I fell to the ground, still glowing.

Skin, sinew, and bone covered up the holes. My wounds were healed. I recovered quicker this time.

“So,” I said, picking up my spear. “There’s only one way that this can end, and you know it.” I struck the ground several times in point, gashing the earth and sending blades of grass into the air.

Discord held out his clawed hand. He reached out his palm and then closed his fingers tightly together. A facsimile of his hand, though much larger than the original, came out of the ground and gripped at me. I rolled out of its reach, its claws tearing into my clothes and causing my skin to bleed beneath the tatters.

“Then it’s simple,” he said. “I won’t let it end.”

I sighed, then smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that.” I lunged at him, swinging wildly. He dodged out of the way, slithering into another part of the garden and sending an array of obstacles in my path: his clock, a potted plant, a complete china tea set, a glass of chocolate milk, at least a dozen varieties of pie, and a small white dog.

I broke the clock on the shaft of my spear, dodged the potted plant and tea set as they landed with a cacophony of crashes, slashed at the glass (which split apart instantly, spilling its liquid-like glass on the ground and leaving two halves of solid chocolate to thud on top of it), weaved between the pies, and saw the small dog floating far away.

When I caught up to him, I rammed the spear at his side. He squirmed away with the fluidity of air, and my spear was caught firm in a stone crevasse.

Discord took this opportunity to tear me apart.

One ripped up your back, another caught your ankle and made you fall over. A hole gaped in your shoulder, and drops of blood fell down from it to the ground, bright red against the unnatural darkness beneath. You cried out to the power that was your health and wellness throughout this ordeal. It came on your call and cured you.

“I-I don’t know h-how much more of this I can take,” you told Flowey. “I can’t, I don’t—” You lurched forward and lost your lunch. After wiping off your mouth you said, “This is sickly sadistic, even for...”

Flowey frowned.

“Nevermind.” You tried to catch your breath. “Look—” You held out a shaking hand to Flowey. “Let’s make a deal.”

I was flying through the air again. Chaos energy surrounded me. Its sharp ripples and waves cut into me from every side, blowing apart my body bit-by-bit until I was nearly only the nub of my soul.

The clouds moved oddly in the sky. They slid along geometric patters, and when one particular configuration was achieved, snow, rain, or thunder would result. The section of land beneath would be subject to a harsh freeze, or a flood, or be struck with lightning until nothing but ash remained. Animals were running rampant, and their trampling rooted up the plants and made large swaths of land a muddy mess.

He was causing far more damage than I could hope to achieve. But, then again, that wasn’t my goal. No, what I really want...

Rainbow light with the will to live lit up my vision. My body returned to me and with it came excruciating pain to break apart my reverie. My momentum was not enough to sustain the flight of all this new mass, so I descended rapidly and started skidding along the ground. The dust settled a few seconds after I stopped.

I picked myself up and puffed. “No fair. Now my spear is way over there.”

I moved just in time to watch it zoom past my head. It landed at least half a foot deep in the soft soil behind me.

“Not bad. Have you ever considered a career in the Olympics?” I turned around and took up the spear in my hand. “You’d make a great field-target!” I reared back and sent the spear straight forward, directed as best I could at his evasive center.

He didn’t dodge it. Instead, a bubble of energy rose up to stop the spear. When it struck, both the shield and the spear shattered. The spear’s shaft fell to the ground in small pieces. Light shards littered the ground before disappearing in a glow of stardust. From the cloud of wreckage came a single glint flying toward me.

I caught the spearhead in my hand. Its blade sliced across my fingers, but I managed to keep hold of it at the small portion of the shaft that had remained attached to it.

“I’m tired of this,” I told him. “I thought that fighting you might at least be fun, but no. All this is just tedium.” I held out the spearhead. “Perhaps you will call me a cheat again. But I don’t see how ending this now would be any worse than dragging along a pointless fight that you had no chance to win in the first place.”

I searched out that boundless energy. I found it residing within me, and I concentrated on bring it out and into my hand.

The spearhead glowed bright white. Specks of light floated around it. They coalesced on the tip and started building upwards, until a long sword of white light sat in my hand.

Discord raised an eyebrow at me.

I ran forward, bearing my saber. I covered much ground. When I got to his position, I jumped up and jabbed with both my hands at his heart.

Flecks of light surrounded us. I felt the energy within me overflowing. Auras swirled between us two.

My attack landed, and I smiled with a facade of satisfaction. My mask of emotion broke when I saw what I had hit.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” said Asriel Dreemurr, blood dripping down his mouth. He held the blade between his hands. The tip had hit his left side, had punctured his heart.

“That’s impossible,” I told him. “You’re dead.”

The blade disappeared in a burst of energy. Without its support, Asriel stumbled forward, still spilling blood on the ground. He fell to his knees. His furry hands held onto my pants.

I took the inert spearhead and touched its tip to his throat. “And if not, I’ll be sure to make it so.”

“I-I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said. “Not if you want to stay alive.”

“What are you—?” Then I saw your soul as it burned brightly red against the colors on his chest. “What?!”

His wound closed. When it had been healed, the light from your heart faded away. He struggled to get up. “A monster’s essence lives on in things that his dust touches. I was holding your body when I died. But more than that, a monster’s life lives on in the hearts and minds of those who loved him. With enough determination, and with help from this strange new magic, I can be reincarnated.”

My hands fell to my sides. The weapon fell from my fingers. Tears refused to fall from my eyes.

“So, are you finally going to kill me? Can you prove that you’re strong enough? Or will you give in to weakness again?”

“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” said Discord from behind us. “You’re upstaging me at my biggest moment! After defeating the menace of Equestria, the ponies will be so glad that they’ll once again accept me as their benevolent-but-insane ruler. Though, now that I think about it, they’ll have to do so anyway, since there aren’t many options left at the moment.”

“Can you give us a moment, please?” said Asriel cordially. “I’m trying to have a heart-to-heart with my friend.”

Discord looked down on him with his mis-sized eyes. “As you will,” he said, turning away and waving his paw at us. “But don’t expect me to be the one to clean everything up once you two are done.” A Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses dropped down on him. He picked up a suitcase from the ground. After throwing it open, he packed up his broken clock, his statue’s dust, and the little white dog that had been floating around aimlessly for the past twenty minutes. “All this work has exhausted me. I’m going on vacation.” He snapped closed the suitcase. “Bon voyage! My check better not be late like the last one!” He stepped through a portal and was gone.

He held out a hand to me. “Let’s go home.”

I turned my head away. “I can’t.”

“Together, we can load your SAVE—”

“That’s not the point!” I glared at him. “I don’t have a soul. There’s nothing for you to save.”

“I mean, we can just...”

“And if you leave me here, I’ll just keep killing. There’s no point in living anymore. Death is the only option.”

“I don’t believe that.”

I sighed. I fell to the ground. “Only the unfettered will to continue keeps me alive. There’s nothing that means anything to me anymore.”

He knelt down beside me. “But you mean something to me. That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Look at this world,” I told him. “It’s a mess.”

“Would making it dirtier make you feel any better?”

“No.”

“Then? Would making it cleaner make you feel any worse?”

“No...”

“Then how about we clean it up, together?”

I watched the clouds float through the sky. Without the discordant magic that had directed them before, they traveled freely. The sky shown with shades of pink and purple. The horizon showed something dawning beyond the land below.

“Okay,” I said, and we stood up together.