Chapter Text
At first, there was nothing. Then there was darkness.
In the fraction of your being, you understood this world. All that ever was, and all that it ever could be.
It was a vast openness, gentle and angry all together at its existence. So agonizingly misunderstood yet so immutably beautiful.
You first felt love.
Love. This world loved you. Not just love as a fleeting thing, but love as an eternal force—an ache, a whisper, a heartbeat in the void. The fondness of all possible memories, the warmth of every sun that could rise, the light of every star that had ever burned and ever would. It swelled within you, filling the emptiness with a longing so deep it felt like creation itself.
Then you felt LOVE.
You didn’t know if you were killing something or it was killing you. The piercing of a blade against flesh dissolving to dust. Pain lanced through you, though you had no form to wound. A great shattering, a cacophony of destruction. Yet through it all, you were unbreakable; the bonds that held your being together endured.
The world beheld to know you now and forever.
You were determination.
The dust swirled, but you did not scatter. The world saw you now.
It raged against you, tested you, but you were the force that refused to be forgotten. The will that would not be broken.
Then a rift in the space like your attention had been caught, snapping all at once towards something entirely new. Like a break in thick clouds, suddenly there. Suddenly someone.
“Greetings.”
The first you ever laid sight on was a person incomprehensibly different from you yet so unbelievably familiar. Their skin was pale porcelain, their cheeks terracotta, a softness you had never known. Their hair cascaded to their shoulders in rippling waves, yet you could not grasp what it would be like to possess such a thing. And their eyes—brown pools, an amber light filtering through the deepest of lakes. You recognized none of these traits in yourself, but somehow, you knew.
The corners of their mouth lifted and something within you urged you to replicate the gesture.
A smile.
Had you smiled before? No, you hadn’t; yet you understood what it meant.
“You are finally awake,” they said, their voice carrying the weight of a thousand lifetimes.
You tried to speak, but no sound came. It wasn’t fear that gripped you—it was awe.
“I am Chara,” the individual continued, taking a step closer. Their presence was soft, but not weak—like a knife sheathed in velvet. “Do you know your name?”
You didn’t; and instead tried to repeat their name, tasting it like a word from a dream. “Chira…?” you murmured, then faltered. “Kyra?”
The syllables slipped awkwardly from your mouth, disjointed and clumsy. Language—your voice—it all felt borrowed, as if you were wearing clothes that didn’t quite fit.
Chara laughed. Not cruelly, but with a strange fondness, like someone watching a younger sibling stumble through their first steps.
“Hm… you really are new,” they said, eyes crinkling with amusement far older than their face. “I said Chara. But I suppose that is too sharp on your tongue. Though… Kyra has a nice ring to it. I think… I will call you that until you discover your own name."
The name felt wrong to you, like it wasn’t your own and more like a reflection of theirs. But still, you didn’t protest. There was something about Chara—something in the way they looked at you with recognition that made you feel a sort of kinship to them. Associating yourself with their name, for now, did not feel final.
Before you could open your mouth to acknowledge their words, the darkness around you thickened— it swallowed the space between you and Chara. It coiled around their feet first, rising in slow, deliberate waves, like smoke curling upward from an invisible fire.
You reached out instinctively, but your fingers passed through the air as though it had turned to glass.
Chara didn’t move. They stood calmly as the shadow crept up their legs, their torso, their shoulders. You watched in silent horror as it consumed them, piece by piece. And yet, through it all, they wore that same smile. Not cruel. Not afraid. Just… knowing.
“Do not look so scared,” they said, their voice muffled, as though coming from far away. “This happens to all of us. Especially the first time. You have a name now… at least I will not be worried you will be forgotten.”
Something shimmered at their neck—a golden heart-shaped locket, delicate against the gathering dark. As the shadows reached their neck, the chain snapped, the locket slipping free.
Without thinking, you lunged forward.
Your hand closed around it just before their form vanished entirely.
The metal was warm in your palm, pulsing faintly. A heartbeat.
The darkness turned its attention to you.
You gasped—but there was no air to breathe. It began to pull at your edges, dissolving you the way water wears down stone. Your hands vanished first, then your arms, your chest, your legs. Panic surged, wild and useless, as you tried to hold onto something—anything.
But you felt no pain. Only the slow unraveling.
Time quickly disintegrated between your fingers like sand underwater—flaring outwards until you could no longer grasp it, until seconds were millennia and centuries like an instant before your eyes.
Darker… yet darker.
━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━
How long had it been?
The next universe would be the eleven-thousandth, four-hundred-and-twenty-first you had visited.
You had traced the line of time like a hairline fracture, pressing just enough until it shattered, until the cracks grew wide enough for you to slip through. You had reached out into the expanse of everything and nothing that you were consigned to and snapped it into being, into form—like a million threads all yanked with enough force to knock the very foundations loose.
Did it tire you, such lengths?
Maybe it should have.
But you did not know what it was to tire. What it was to rest.
So you kept searching. A shattered needle in a galaxy of haystacks. But you had time—all the time in the world, really. And you would see them again.
Find your Chara again.
You were certain they could guide you to a place where you truly belonged.
Most universes rejected you on arrival. They identified you as something other, something that wasn’t the human meant to fall into the depths of their Underground.
But the months—perhaps years—you had spent sifting through the multiverse had taught you things.
The truth, for one: that the fabric of all worlds was built on code. That stories were stitched together not by fate, but numbers. That code could be rewritten.
And files could be deleted.
So you deleted them. Temporarily, of course. The “Frisk” of each world you visited was the most important file. Though, you hardly could bring yourself to call them by name. Most of them were just vessels, bodies worn by anomalies like yourself with an almost primordial curiosity.
In those cases, you stepped into their shoes.
And every time, you played the role. You wore the face of that strange child in the striped sweater, no matter how wrong it felt to inhabit a vessel that wasn’t your own and significantly younger than you were. Still, you smiled their smile, spoke with their quiet voice, moved through their story.
A ghost in borrowed skin.
Toriel’s caring desperation, Papyrus’s stubborn kindness, Sans’s knowing looks. The awkward beginnings. The hard-won trust. The long walk through a hall heavy with memory. It all played out like a vinyl record humming a familiar tune.
You had seen the best of all possible worlds. And the worst of them.
Worlds where the monsters lived in the glittering caverns of the deepest ocean, or soared freely among cities built into the stars themselves.
Timelines where they were starved. Timelines where monsters had turned to the same violence that was inflicted on them.
But always… always you searched for a flicker of recognition. For a moment where their eyes lit with something that said: You. I remember you.
Sometimes you thought you saw it.
But it always slipped away.
Eventually, you learned another fundamental truth. It didn’t come all at once, but in scattered fragments, handed to you by others like you—anomalies, those who lived in the Out Code.
You came from an unfinished AU. A world left dangling in the void by a creator who never returned to finish what they started.
An anomaly—one particularly odd, vibrant skeleton with eyes like fractured rainbows and a paintbrush hung on his back—had told you that outright. His grin was too wide to be comforting and he spoke like he knew how every story ended before it began. Despite the frequent, useful information he gave you, he wasn’t happy about you taking the role of “Frisk” in the timelines you visited.
“Keep tearing holes like that in the multiverse,” he’d said, gesturing vaguely. “and someone’s gonna notice. Someone big.”
But you hadn’t stopped. Couldn’t stop.
Because your soul was filled with determination. And you were determined for a reason.
Even if it meant burning through every timeline the multiverse had left to offer.
“Sorry Ink, I’ve got unfinished business,” you told him, your voice resolute.
You stood at the edge of a portal. It pulsed unevenly, the edges frayed white and pixelated.
Ink didn’t stop you. Just watched from that yellow void, his skeletal fingers tapping idly against his hip like a ticking clock. His eye lights dimmed for a moment with something you swore was disappointment… but he said nothing.
You clenched your fist around the golden locket still hanging from your neck,
It was warm.
Still warm.
Without another word, you stepped forward and let the world unravel around you once more.
And once more you were falling.
Falling into a place that you feared immediately would reject you upon arrival.
Disoriented, your vision blurred as you plummeted through the darkness. Damp air, thick with the scent of earth and petrichor, rushed past you, wrapping around you like a suffocating shroud. A dreadful sensation twisted in your gut, an instinctive terror clawing at your mind. No matter how many times you had fallen, you still had that rush of adrenaline crawling up your throat.
Maybe that fear proved you were still human.
But the pain never came.
Instead, a peculiar softness cradled your body. Slowly, cautiously, you pried your eyes open, breath hitching as you took in the sight beneath you—a bed of golden flowers. Tentatively, you shifted your limbs, checking the sting of soreness, the dull throb of bruises since some universes tended to be more… violent than the others. But there was nothing. No ache. No pain. No sign that you had fallen at all.
You moved, and the world tilted with you. Adjusting. Straightening itself out. It was always unsteady, these first few moments. Your hands planted against the ground below. Solid, but not truly. Solid enough. Grounding. You rose to your feet in the way of a marionette—movement still needed developing, then. Straightened out your shoulders.
There were a few things to be done. Minor things, really. Removing pieces. Making space. Carving a mold for yourself in a world that had no place for you.
You thought, briefly, of the child vessel. Frisk—the name that wasn’t yours for the body that was like an itch under the skin. You were tired of wearing the skin of that child— you just wanted to look like yourself, to be treated like the person you could be.
With a flick of your hand, a glowing panel burst to life in the air before you—lines of shifting code on a dark gray background illuminating your face. You studied it with practiced ease, eyes scanning the text until you found what you needed.
Frisk’s file.
Still intact. Still waiting for its own anomaly to arrive.
You didn’t hesitate.
You dragged your own player data into the assets folder. The code shimmered briefly, as if confused, before resolving itself. You felt the change wash over you like cool water, like slipping into your own skin after wearing someone else’s too long.
Now, finally, you could be you.
Look like you. Talk like you.
To be honest, you didn’t blame certain ‘Sanses’ or ‘Floweys’ for calling you out—for throwing around terms like glitch or dirty hacker. Maybe they were right.
But you weren’t doing this to break their world.
You were doing this to find yours.
You paused for a moment, thinking over what you had just done and the fact that this was the biggest alteration you had ever imposed on a timeline. Now, you weren’t just playing as Frisk— you replaced Frisk entirely.
And despite it all, it was easier today.
The thought came to you with a flash of something sharp, something cold. Your work had never been easy.
A frown tugged at your mouth. That was strange.
Maybe the universe had smiled on you today.
You doubted it. It was not stupid.
Flower petals bloomed at your feet in bursts of goldenrod, lit amber by the surrounding glow. It was a pool of precious metal, a bath of natural forms quickly turned unnatural in pale, fragile light.
It could have been beautiful, once.
It still was. In that way that a sunset viewed a thousand times still was beautiful. Your eyes simply passed over it, barely recognizing it. Absorbing but not really seeing. This part seldom changed. The falling. The flowers. It seemed like a multiversal consistency.
Above, a gaping hole in the ceiling like a spotlight, at once accusation and admiration. Vines hung limp from its jagged edge, swaying slightly in the cold draft.
You flexed your hands out before you as if examining gloves. Checking the fit, seeing the rise of bone and tendon, stretching thin with life. It was you.
Alive.
Your smile then was not the one you were taught when you were first brought into existence. It was sharper; colder. The one you made, rather than the one that was given to you by Chara.
You swallowed the lingering taste of phantom bile. feeling the cool air of the cavern brush against your skin. The tunnel loomed ahead, its shadows deep and uninviting, yet somehow calling to you.
This was always how it started.
The smiling, talking flower—or whatever variation this universe had spawned—would try to kill you. And then, like clockwork, Toriel would appear, sweeping in to save you.
A multiversal consistency.
One of the few you could still rely on.
As you walked deeper into the tunnel, the light from the cavern behind you grew dimmer, replaced by a pulsing anticipation. Your heart pounded in your chest as you waited, certain that any moment now, the flower would appear.
The cold stone beneath your feet seemed to stretch on endlessly, while the air around you grew heavier. But the further you went, the more the silence seemed to burn into your mind.
Why wasn’t anything happening?
The eerie stillness dragged on. You slowed your pace, glancing around as alarm crept in. Did Flowey not exist in this universe? Or was he farther ahead?
Consistencies were something you had learned to rely on. Learned to memorize. To expect, even. They were your anchors in your untethered existence.
This part was a consistency. This part had always been a consistency. So why?
The faintest sting of panic—that useless, flailing thing—traced down your spine. Your steps dragged, heels skating the stone, but you refused to stop.
Stopping was the first step towards admitting defeat. And you were far too determined to do that. Ever.
Any moment it’d happen.
You simply nodded to yourself reassuringly and continued forward. As you walked, the tunnel gradually widened, and a faint light bloomed in the distance. The bleak gray stone underfoot gave way to faded purple, the color bleeding into the walls like a bruised memory. You stepped into a wide corridor.
Tall, ancient pillars lined the hallway, their surfaces more worn and fractured than those you’d seen in other worlds. Age clung to them like dust. Red leaves lay scattered across the purple tiles, their vivid hue stark against the creeping dusk. With each step, the leaves stirred faintly, the soft rustle sounding almost like whispers—like the corridor itself remembered every footfall that had passed through it.
At the far end, a grand staircase rose upward, its once-proud steps cracked and weathered with time. Despite their wear, you recognized the path. The Ruins waited above.
Then, your eyes caught on something that pulled a breath of relief from your lungs.
Nestled before the staircase, a floating, glittering golden star hovered gently in the air.
Its light pulsed softly, casting shifting reflections across the broken stone and worn columns. It looked untouched by time—almost alien in its brightness.
A savepoint.
You approached it and reached out tentatively, feeling the warmth of the star as your fingers brushed against its light. The sensation was soothing, almost as if it were acknowledging your presence. Welcoming you.
Yet, once you pulled your hand back, your apprehensive thoughts resumed gnawing at you.
You tread your way through the corridors of the Ruins. The silence was eerie, occasionally broken by the distant sound of dripping water or the rustle of leaves under your feet.
You had not encountered a single monster; and absence of danger was almost as concerning as the threat itself.
Did monsters not live in this area anymore? Clearly there were remains of civilization, but what made them leave in the first place?
The path twisted and turned, leading you deeper until finally, you arrived at a small, familiar-looking house nestled quietly in the heart of the Ruins.
Except… it wasn’t quite the same.
The house stood alone, its doorway framed by crumbling vines and cracks in the stone walls. Unlike your memories of the place, there was no warmth here. No gentle glow of light from a kitchen, no comforting smell of pie, no sense of welcome.
It was clearly abandoned—but not like the warm, hollow kind of abandonment you’d seen in other versions of Toriel’s home. This place lacked her touch: the toys to comfort humans, her collection of snail memorabilia, and the gentle clutter that hinted at care.
It was like she’d never lived here.
But someone else had.
Shriveled buttercups rested in a violet ceramic vase on the mahogany table—arranged deliberately, like an offering left above a grave. Across from them, half-hung on the far wall, was an unfinished tapestry. Its threads frayed, its symbol unmistakable: three white triangles beneath an angelic figure with outstretched wings.
The Delta Rune.
You stared at it in contemplation.
This house—though stripped of memory—was connected to the Dreemurrs. Still, you couldn’t shake the thought that this was never Toriel’s home.
You pushed the notion aside and let the sound of your footsteps drown it out. The hardwood floor beneath you, once pale, had darkened with age. It was worn smooth in certain places—evidence of countless footsteps before yours. It creaked under your weight, each step echoing faintly.
A part of you—the less responsible part—urged you to explore deeper, to peel back the layers of this strange, abandoned place. But the shadows lingering in the hallways seemed to whisper otherwise.
And, honestly, you didn’t want to find something you couldn’t unsee.
You turned your attention to the stairs leading downward, toward the basement. You could only guess the exit of the Ruins lay below. That was the pattern, usually. But this world had been twisted—just subtly enough to disorient you. What was once familiar could no longer be trusted. Not entirely.
Not anymore.
You paused at the top of the staircase, peering down into the dark, and began making your spiraling descent. The air felt colder the deeper it went. Eventually, your feet touched the cold stone of the basement floor.
Swallowing your irrational fear, you pressed forward. The walls here were different—rougher, like they had been carved out of the earth in a hurry, as though this part of the Ruins had never been fully finished. Faint markings lined the walls, too faded to make out any distinct patterns or symbols
Finally, after what felt like hours, you saw it—a large, heavy door at the far end of the passage. It was old and rusted, its surface pockmarked and weathered by time. It looked almost out of place here, as though it had been forgotten long ago. Even so, an unmistakable Delta Rune was engraved into the lilac stone above it.
This was it—the exit. Or at least, it had to be.
As you reached the door, you paused, your hand hovering just above the rusted handle. You glanced over your shoulder, half-expecting to see something—anything—chasing you down the corridor. But the hallway was empty, just as the house had been.
Your fingers wrapped around the icy handle, and with a deep breath, you pushed the heavy door open. The hinges groaned in protest, as if they hadn’t been used in years. Hell, probably more than just years. Cold air rushed in, biting at your skin, and for a moment, you just stood there, taking in the scene before you.
Snow. Thick, soft flakes floated down, blanketing the ground in white. Dark trees stretched endlessly across the pathway ahead, their branches weighed with frost. The forest beyond felt vast, the trees standing like silent sentinels, watching. You exhaled, your breath visible in the frigid air.
The door shut behind you with a thud that sent a shudder down your spine.
You knew the Underground awaited.