Chapter Text
Nutmeg Tiger Cookie dropped to her knees and dug.
The rubble shifted under her hands as she shoved a slab aside. Her claws found the edge of a collapsed pillar and she pulled, and the sound it made was rough and abrasive, a grinding that went nowhere.
He is here. He has to be here.
"G-Great One... Where... are you..."
She moved to the left. Moved back. Her ears were flat against her skull and she could not make them rise. The dust was still settling and every time she thought she heard something it was just the rubble and debris adjusting, just stone finding its new position, just–
Stop. Listen.
She stopped.
The silence under the rubble was quiet in its entirety. She had listened to it before, on battlefields, in the aftermath of the Great One's work. But that sound was accompanied with that all-encompassing pleasure she never felt more devoid of in this moment.
No. You have to keep digging.
She dug again.
"Where..."
Her hands found nothing. The slab she shoved away rolled and cracked against something beneath it and the sound echoed down and she followed the echo with her fingers, pressing into the gap, feeling for heat because he was always warm, always, the air around him always carried–
"No... it can't... end... like this..."
Her voice came out smaller than she intended. She did not like how small it sounded. She dug faster. Her palms were bleeding.
He cannot be–
He is the Great One. He cannot be–
Golden Cheese Cookie brought down the whole temple and he…
She shoved the thought away and kept digging and the rubble shifted under her and her foot went through a gap that was immediately refilled with debris and dust.
Stupid. You’re being reckless.
She yanked her paw out of the crack, wincing as she shook off the pain. She had to keep searching.
Stepping back, she took in the scene beneath her.
The wreckage stretched farther than she had first realised. From where she stood atop the uneven mound of shattered marble, the ruined temple rolled outward in jagged waves of debris, as though the earth itself had split open and vomited stone across the desert. Pillars lay snapped like brittle bones. Entire walls had collapsed into heaps so dense that she could no longer tell where corridors once stood or where sanctuaries had been buried. Every direction looked the same– broken gold, fractured sandstone, clouds of dust drifting in the dying light.
An expanse of detritus and wreckage, and a sea of stone and rubble. That was the sight that met her eyes. The swelling of the enormity of her task sat heavy in her heart, racing to drown her in its icy embrace.
And somewhere beneath all of it was him.
The thought hollowed her out.
Nutmeg Tiger Cookie turned slowly, her breathing shallow. There was too much. Far too much. Even if she dug without stopping, even if her claws split down to the quick and her muscles gave way, she could spend days clawing through the ruins and still miss him by inches. A single misplaced stone could hide him forever. A single buried chamber could become his tomb.
The temple had once towered over the kingdom like something eternal, built for worship, built to outlast generations. Now its remains covered the earth like the corpse of a fallen giant. She felt terribly small standing before it. Small in a way she had never allowed herself to feel.
The sun continued its slow descent, staining the clouds amber and red. Shadows pooled between the heaps of stone, deepening every crack and crevice into black mouths she could not see into. Soon night would come, and with it the cold. The desert winds would rise. The ruins would become even more dangerous, shifting beneath every step.
How am I going to search all this before nightfall?
Her gaze darted desperately across the wreckage, trying to calculate where to begin, where to search next, but every pile of debris looked equally impossible. Every mound could be the one covering him. Every moment of silence could mean she had already arrived too late.
For the first time since the collapse, fear truly settled into her bones.
Not fear of death.
Fear that she would never find him at all.
It was under this enormity that Nutmeg Tiger Cookie, for the first time, began to believe that Burning Spice Cookie was dead.
Click.
Clack.
Nutmeg Tiger Cookie froze.
Her head snapped toward the sound before she could think, ears twitching sharply despite the ache in her head. Somewhere beneath the rubble to her right.
Click.
Clack.
There.
There!
She stumbled over broken stone toward it, scrabbling on loose debris as she dropped to her knees again, finding purchase within the smaller rocks. Her claws scraped against the fractured temple floor as she shoved aside chunks of marble, smaller ones first, then larger slabs that tore against her palms as she forced them away.
“Great One!”
No answer, but heat.
Her hand plunged into a narrow gap between two collapsed beams and warmth flooded against her skin instantly, unmistakable and burning.
A sound escaped her throat as she gasped, and suddenly she was digging with both hands, frantic now, no care for the way the rubble cut into her claws or crushed against her wrists. The debris shifted violently beneath her efforts, stones tumbling deeper into unseen crevices as she clawed downward toward the heat.
She coughed and waved away the dust that floated upward from the ruckus, letting the loose stones roll over the mountain of rocks she’d unintentionally built, rolling and falling and shattering at the mountain’s base.
She seized him immediately, fingers locking around his forearm as she braced herself and pulled. The surrounding rubble groaned in protest. Stone slid somewhere beneath them.
The edge of an arm beneath the dust.
She pulled harder.
For one horrible second, nothing happened.
Then everything did.
THUD!!
The collapse gave way all at once. Chunks of shattered marble slid free in a sudden avalanche and he lurched from the wreckage with the terrible momentum of something long buried. Nutmeg Tiger Cookie fell backwards with him against her chest, the impact knocking the breath from her lungs as dust exploded around them in thick choking clouds.
She tightened her grip instinctively.
Warm.
Breathing.
Alive.
The heat rolling off him came in heavy waves against her arms and neck, so familiar it nearly hurt. Her entire body shook with the force of her relief, violent trembling she could not suppress no matter how tightly she clenched her jaw. Dust swirled around them so densely she still could not see his face.
...heh...
The sound startled even her.
...heh heh...
Her shoulders jerked once.
Then again.
Ah...
A laugh spilled out before she could stop it.
“Heh... ha... ha ha...!”
It came out breathless and uneven, bordering on hysterical as she clutched him tighter against her.
“Yes...”
Another laugh broke from her throat.
“Yes, I knew it...! Ha ha ha!”
Dust spilled upward in heavy gray-yellow plumes as the rubble finally gave way around him. Chunks of fractured marble slid from broad shoulders blackened with soot and ash, striking the ground with dull cracks before crumbling apart entirely from the heat radiating off his body.
The first thing she saw was the glow.
Not light exactly, but the deep smouldering orange-red beneath fractured dough, like magma trapped beneath volcanic stone. It pulsed faintly through the cracks running across his arms and chest, each slow flare accompanied by a wave of heat that rolled outward through the settling dust.
Then came his grand antennae.
Jagged and curved violently backward from his head, their silhouettes cutting through the haze like broken blades. Ash drifted from them in thin streams as he moved. His hair hung wild around his face, trailing behind him, matted and darkened with debris and powdered stone, though streaks of ember-orange still burned through it where the dust could not cling for long.
The rubble around him hissed.
Small fragments touching his skin blackened and split apart from sheer temperature. Smoke curled lazily upward from beneath him as though the earth itself struggled to contain him.
Burning Spice Cookie inhaled, a low, rough sound that seemed to reverberate within her ears.
For a brief, terrible instant beneath the ruins, she had imagined silence instead. Imagined cooling skin. Imagined the impossible.
But no, of course not.
This was the Great One.
Destruction itself did not die beneath falling stone.
The dust thinned enough now for her to finally see his face fully, sharp, severe, streaked with dirt and dried cracks through his dough where the collapse had struck him. His eyes remained closed for only a moment longer before slowly opening, molten gold cutting through the haze with horrifying clarity.
His mouth split into that of a terrifying grin, baring his teeth in a wide smile of triumph.
Nutmeg Tiger Cookie lowered her head immediately before the relief threatening to split her apart could show itself again.
"Great One," she said instead, because orders were something she knew how to do, orders were solid ground for the foundations that seemed to have been destroyed by that filthy Ancient.
"What are your orders?"