Ravenous Corruption - Axeverse Drabbles

What Once Was - Axetale Pillowfort

Author's Note - This is from the Axetale pillow fort which as of now is still available online however this has been placed for preservation. This is not written by me and I do not claim this is by me this was written by Bananafrappe if she sees this and wants this deleted than I completely understand and will do so immediately.

"Daddy?"

Sans, standing behind Aliza with a hairband between his teeth and a pair of slightly rusty but extremely sharp barber's scissors in his hand, raised a single brow bone, tugging on his daughter's ear gently with his free hand to stop her fidgeting.

"stop moving, precious. i don't wanna cut you. what'd you need."
Aliza, pouting out her lower lip but stilling obediently, folded her hands in her lap and twiddled her thumbs, letting out a soft exhalation.

"I was wondering if there was... more to the Underground. Besides in the places I came from. I saw the place you called the Ruins, and that old city, before coming out into the snow... saw all those empty houses in the forest on the road here, and the monorail on the cavern roof. Is there other stuff out there? Other cities? Other people?"

Sans, letting out a sigh of his own but quirking a small smile at her curiosity, set aside his scissors and picked up a comb, carefully parting the girl's hair evenly.
"there's a lot more. the underground's a big place, and in it's heyday, it housed nearly five and a half million monsters. not nearly as many as there were above, but... well. the war was hard, and monsters take a lot longer to reproduce than humans do. that was after fifteen hundred years of rebuilding, and to be honest... it was a good thing we were close to escaping."

"Why?"

"we were runnin' out of space. not for monsters, but to support the economy. there wasn't always enough food in the poor seasons, when the water Above froze and the crops withered, and even when things were going well, we were only scraping by at best. there was unrest, and panic, and a significant loss of Hope... the thing that keeps monsters alive. in darker corners, there was talk of sending a monster to the capital to take one of the souls that the king was guarding and going out to find another, something another monster, long ago, had failed at, in an attempt to end our imprisonment. it never happened though. your mom came instead."

Aliza's eyes sparkled, jumping in place and upsetting Sans' careful parting.
"She saved everyone, changed their minds about humans, and helped find a new plan to escape! Right?"

Sans chuckled, smoothing her hair flat again with the palm of his hand, before sobering for a moment, reaching up to tap a single finger against the pendant of his locket.

"...right. but that's not what you asked about. you wanted to know what else is out there."

She nodded exuberantly, casting her father a sideways glance at his change in tone, but he turned her face away again with a gently curled knuckle and a shake of his head, resuming his combing as though nothing had happened.
"well. to start off with, there's four main sections of the underground, each named for its respective climate. you may've noticed by now, but the guy that named all this stuff... well. imagination wasn't really his gig. he figured it would remind people of things that they missed, Above, make 'em feel more at home. nice sentiment, but it really kind of just made the ones that remembered sad. i wouldn't know. i've never seen the surface to miss it."

Something in his voice revealed a lie, but he pressed on before Aliza could ask about it, seeming to finally be satisfied with the part in her hair and setting aside the comb to take up the scissors again.

"first is the autumn refuge. you saw at least part of the ruins; they were here before we were imprisoned here, an old, old city from an ancient civilization of humans and monsters. half the ancient city was sunken in water when we arrived, the buildings all but useless. we didn't stay there for long. after that, home, the first city we built down here. slowly abandoned, when it became far too small, remote, and, honestly, depressing to contain the growing population of survivors and their needs. across the river are the fields and farms of fallholm, where most of the food and livestock of the kingdom was grown and kept. they get bits of natural sun, from cracks in the mountain, filtering through the barrier, and its one of the few places non-magical animals will thrive. the threshold of the bulwark, a sunken human fortress from an age before even gerson could recall, lies on the border between fallholm and the snow-locked lands beyond, where we are now. it was repurposed into a trading hub, most roads through the kingdom leading to and from it. last i'd checked, it's been pilfered clean ages ago."