Blood and Ash

II

You 'use' the 'save point' Flowey was talking about and your leg suddenly goes numb. The buzziness nearly completely blocks out all the pain from your injury. You don't know exactly how that works, but at least you're not hurting as much anymore. You have no clue what Flowey was going on about, so when he started to babble on nonsensically to some 'player' you just tuned him out and continued to inspect the glowing light. Through the radiance, you discover that the shape of the floating object is actually some kind of star. Because of this, you've decided to call this a Fallen Star. You highly doubt that this is an actual fallen star since it would be incredibly difficult for a star to fall into a cave like this, but nevertheless it's fun to imagine.

Flowey stops talking suddenly, and you look up to see him looking attentively to the next room. He pops up beside you in the nook where the Fallen Star is, hovering between the left and right staircases, and ushers you to hide behind the stairs. You do as he says, and a click from the next room over reaches your ears. The sound of heavy stone grinding against the floor resonates through the ground, and you press your body further into the wall behind you as you hear footsteps start to approach. Oversized goat hooves click on the stone of the stairs, followed by the torn and tattered black cloth of what appears to be a once flowing floor-length robe. The few traces of what appears to be silk that still reach the ground are covered in some kind of gray ash and dust.

Some kind of white-furred goat monster walks slowly past where you're hiding behind the stairs and into the room with the small patch of grass you had just left. In her hands, she seems to hold a sharp pair of rusty hedge scissors. After she leaves, Flowey puts a leaf to his mouth to signal you to keep quiet and waves you up the stairs into the next room. He makes quick work of the many puzzles throughout the next couple of rooms so that you can get through them as swiftly as you can with a broken leg.

You start to ask questions as you go. "Who is that?"

"That's Toriel. She's the one I've been telling you about. If she catches you, it'll be trouble for both of us. She's the strongest monster in the Ruins, and trust me when I say that confronting her isn't an option even if it seems easier than hiding and avoiding her. She's tending to the flowers right now, so we've got some time before she starts to come back. We have to hurry and find another hiding spot before she finds us."

Luckily, all the other monsters in the rooms you had been passing through also seemed to be hiding from Toriel and therefore are nowhere to be found. Though, the Ruins seem very dusty. Flowey tells you that no one really lives here anymore since it got closed off, so no one cleans much. Despite this, his voice shakes as he tells you so and he looks to the dust piles warily. You decide not to bring up the brown bloodstains all over the walls. In fact, you try to ignore them as much as you can as you continue stumbling forward on your wooden crutches. Flowey gets tired of having to dip into the earth and pop back up to guide you forward, so instead he slithers along one of his vines like a snake on the ground into a sort of trail. Like a colored line drawn on a map in a labyrinth. He slides along it like it was a conveyer belt as you move forward.

Flowey does you a favor as you go through the Ruins and solves the puzzles you run into, which is probably for the best considering all of these puzzles involve a whole lot of spikes, swinging blades, arrows shooting out of the walls, and you're pretty sure one room had some kind of poison gas trap. Luckily, Flowey broke through the door that had closed with plant power and ushered you through by lifting you with his vines so you didn't inhale any of it. Unfortunately, this act also broke one of your crutches, so now you have to lean on the one on the side of your bad leg. Eventually, you come upon a hallway that seems to go on forever. It takes you ages to get to the end what with your injury, but Flowey takes the chance to explain some things to you.