Her dreams changed over time. She dreamed about hearing the floorboards creak. She dreamed of watching a tall shadow walk down a long, narrow hallway in the dark. The Shadow stopped in front of a thick door with runes etched across its face.

She hid behind the corner, cloaked in shadows as she listened.

There was a knock.

…There was an answer.

She had to creep closer to hear them talking. The shadow and the person on the other side of the door laughed for a bit and exchanged light conversation. But the laughter seemed to be forced and eventually it slowed to a strained trickle, then a drip.

Toriel spoke, her voice troubled and weary. “My dear friend, do you remember the promise you made me? Not long after we first met I asked something great of you.”

There was a moment’s pause before the muffled voice answered. “yeah. i remember.”

“You still plan to uphold your promise, do you not?”

“’course i do. i mean, i really don’t like making promises but i wouldn’t want to peeve off my best knock-knock joke partner, now would i? why do you ask? did you find one?”

Toriel leaned up against the door. Her answer was slow. “I may not answer for a few days. I’m going to be busy. But if I can’t stop them, remember your promise.”

“you okay, lady?”

“Yes. Yes I feel quite well. Like a weight is being taken off my chest. Just… do not worry about me if I don’t answer for a while, alright? Everything will be fine.”

She slipped away from the shadows and crept back up the stairs; keeping an ear out for Toriel’s conversation.

She crept into the kitchen and checked every drawer and cupboard. She was looking for something but it was not there.

Frustration. Anger. Impatience! It crawled across her skin like insects. If she couldn’t find what she was looking for in the kitchen then what could she use?

She turned around slowly. The firelight danced across her hair as she turned to face the solution to her problem. Ah, yes, mother had always loved her fire, hadn’t she?

She had an idea. A delicious, ironic idea.

The dream warped. Only vague impressions managed to cling to her memory for long.

The sound of metal scraping against something.

The moan of creaking stairs.

Toriel’s voice sounded again. She seemed surprised to find her awake at such an hour. Surprised to turn around and find the human in the basement. The old monster told her to go back to bed. If she still planned on leaving in the morning she would need her strength, would she not?

Rain felt her throat ache with the harshness of her own voice when she answered in the negative.

Toriel’s voice began to rise as well. She told her to go back. She had something important to do.

“I heard you talking. I know what your plan is.” She said.

There was a brief image of Toriel looking surprised and disappointed.

After that there was shouting and the familiar pain of fire burning too close to her skin.

The sound of metal rang through the corridor.

She saw widened eyes and heard gasping breath as the massive monster fell to her knees.

“I see.” Toriel whispered from the dark. “I was never protecting you from them...” Toriel lifted her hand and called upon her magic one last time.

Rage. Realization. Fury! They had been tricked! Trapped!

The ground shook.

The sky fell.

***

Darkness. All around her the world was black. She couldn’t move. For a moment she thought she was lost in the shadows again and began to panic. She called out for help but no one answered her. At least she still had a voice this time. She could still draw breath. But doing so burned her throat and made her cough. The smell of char and the taste of ash nearly overwhelmed her.

“Calm down. I got you.”

She felt her hands reach out in the darkness and press against their prison without her ever having to think about it. She could feel the cracks in the stone with her fingers. She brushed aside the sand, causing little pebbles to run down the walls and pool together in her lap as she fumbled around in the dark.

“I’ve got you. Hold on.” Chara assured once more.

Her fingers found purchase. With a strength not entirely her own, her hands moved of their own accord. She pressed her back against the stones and heaved. With a rumbling cascade she felt the prison give way.

A cloud of dust stung her eyes and clogged her mouth. She coughed violently but she could see some distant light now. Deep in her core the will to live ignited anew. A burning, frenzied desire to just hold on a little longer.

The stones dug into her back and she felt her awareness press against Chara’s in their combined effort.

The stone fell away and let the odd glow of a synthetic twilight seep down into their rocky nest. Before them was a half opened door with a crack in it.

Fresh, cold hair washed away the stale taste in her mouth. At last she untangled herself from the stones and crawled away. Stumbling, coughing and spitting out ash as she went.

“W- wha- what happened?” She wheezed. She tumbled head over heels down a pile of rubble and dragged herself through the open door; landing with a crunch in a mound of snow. She whimpered, having hit her tailbone in the fall.

Her mouth was too dry to talk so Rain resorted to thinking her message. “What the hell happened? Where am I? I don’t remember being here. Where is Toriel?”

“Toriel is dead.”

“Dead?” She blinked in surprise. She didn’t even notice that she was standing up again and limping back up to the pile of stones. She pulled a fire iron out of the heap. Its dull spear point had been sharpened.

Chara gave it the once over then pulled the door shut behind her, cutting them off from the sight of the rubble hidden away inside.

“Why? What’s going on? What happened?” Rain looked around, confused. “The last thing I remember we had just had dinner and were in the spare room talking.”

“You fell asleep. You are quite the deep sleeper. Perhaps she managed to slip something into the jam after all?” Chara mused. “Anyway, I heard the goat sneaking downstairs and when I went to talk to her I caught her whispering to someone on the other side of the door. A sentry I think. Keep an eye out. He may still be nearby.”

“A sentry? She was going to turn us in?”

“More or less. She seemed to have some kind of special arrangement with him or something.” Chara had guided them out into a new, ice-filled cavern and was testing the depth of the snow with her fire iron.

Rain realized she was not controlling her own movements and snatched control away from her partner. Chara released her hold on Rain’s body with a small degree of annoyance.

“I told you she was no good. Why do you have such a hard time believing me? That’s twice now that your naive nature has nearly gotten us killed. If it wasn’t for me we would probably be dead by now.”

“Am I just supposed to take your word for it when you say she was going to turn us in? I thought you said she poisoned the kids herself. I’m not even sure she was the murdering type, Chara!”

“When I tried to get you out of there she threatened to bring the whole tunnel down on top of us. She wanted to collapse the whole passageway so no one could ever escape again.”

“Why? Why risk herself in the cave-in?”

“When I heard her talking to someone I went to find something to defend ourselves with. When she caught me out and about I confronted her about it and tried to run. She blocked the way. I wounded her and she tried to destroy the door but I guess she lost control. I’m surprised we made it out at all. Lucky pocket in the rubble I guess.”

Rain looked down at her ash streaked hands. “Oh my god.” She stammered, stumbling through the snow. She leaned against the cold bark of a tree and dry heaved. Monster food didn’t give you anything to throw back up.

After several sickening seconds of nausea, she resorted to swishing around mouthfuls of snow. She had to get the taste of ash and dust- monster dust- out of her mouth.

“Calm down. We are ok now. We just need to find someplace warm. We will have to slog through the snow for a while but there should be a cabin or two farther down the line.”

Rain looked at her shirt. It had a big ugly hole in its side. The edges were singed and the skin was tender there. Her whole world felt like it was spinning.

“She hit me?” She yelped.

“Set us on fire. Or tried to anyway. Lucky for us I used the energy we gained from dinner to heal the worst of it. We will be fine. Now get going. The longer we stay out in the cold the worse off we are going to be.”

Rain looked back at the door. It looked like a big, cracked tombstone now.

A cold wind nipped at her through the hole in her shirt and she shivered. Even after the wind stopped, its chill continued to sit upon her chest. “I had a nightmare. Toriel was in it. It was real, wasn’t it? That was me seeing you.” She whispered, shuddering as they began to take their leave.

“Yes.”

“You were in control of my body. How? You’re just a voice. A spirit!”

“Well, everyone is a spirit, silly!” She mused. “I couldn’t seem to wake you and I was growing worried. I promised I would protect you and that’s what I did.”

“You used my body to kill someone!” Rain snapped, whirling around as if she would see Chara standing just behind her. In the end she just found herself glaring at the faint outline of her own shadow.

“I used our body to save us.” She snapped. “We made a deal. This is our body to share now and I will not let you waste it because you are too soft to kill someone that wants to stab you in the back!”

Rain open and closed her mouth several times, trying to find something to say. She wanted to recall the events in full clarity. She wanted to be sure. She wanted to know without a shadow of a doubt that Toriel had indeed been trying to do them harm. Yet the harder she tried to focus in those hazy memories the more clouded they became. The cloudier her memory became, the easier it was to patch up the holes with assumptions that favored Chara’s version of what had happened.

She touched the raw skin on her side. Something had happened to her. She had been burned. But Chara had saved her. Chara had persevered. She had been strong enough to protect them both.

She sighed. “It’s just so much to take in. There is so much I have to try and understand now. I’m so lost out here, Chara.”

“But I am here to guide you.”

“Exactly. You can guide me. But you are not allowed to just take control of my body like that! Don’t you ever do that again or I will-”

“Or you will what? Go on. Tell me your deepest, darkest plan.”

Her mouth clicked shut. She felt rage and frustration boil inside of her. She didn’t know what she could do. In truth that frightened her. For the first time since she had woken up in the Ruins she realized that she had been so busy worrying about monsters that she had been ignoring the one person who could apparently pull her puppet strings better than anyone else.

A worrying thought occurred to her but she could feel Chara circling around it like a curious hound and so she brushed it away before her shady company could read into it.

“Let’s just find someplace warm.” Rain snapped. “We can reconcile after we get out of the cold.” There was already snow in her shoes, melting into her socks with every step.

Chara agreed with a pleasant purr and the two of them began their long, miserable journey through the snow-caked cavern.

Each step Rain took was echoed by a memory.

A twenty minuet walk uphill. Thirty when it snowed.

Her nose began to run; she kept her head down and continued to imagine herself walking over to her friend’s house. That’s all this was. No monsters, no caverns, no questionable voices in her head. This was just another walk through the snow after school.

She would shiver and hold her breath when she passed by the old burned down husk of a cabin that served as the half way marker between their two homes. The old charred house and its surrounding property had been inherited by her father but no one had ever bothered to do anything with the land. So the blackened shell continued to rot and stare at her with the vacant eyes of shattered windows every time she trudged passed it.

She always got so cold on the way over to his house. Her winter clothes were old and faded in color and ended up cold and soggy by the time she she rapped her sore red knuckles against Daniel's door. He would always be there waiting for her with that goofy smile of his. The fire would be going and the air would smell like fresh baked cookies…

She ate bits of snow along the way to ease the burning in her throat. Her mouth still tasted like bile and ash. She took great care not to look back at the stone door.

He would ask for help rolling the next patch of dough into cookies then chide her about eating more than she ever bothered to put on the tray. He warned her that one day the raw eggs were going to make her sick but they never did and she always talked him into licking the bowl with her in the end.

The cold made her skin itch. Her bones started to ache. The snow was up to her shins and her sneakers provided little protection from the slush that got packed down against her socks where it slowly began to melt. She retreated deeper into the memory for warmth.

She would convince him to watch horribly dubbed anime with her. She thought it was an art- he thought it was awful. But he would suffer through it anyway. Then they would play games together. Tabletop, video, computer. He always used cheat codes and mods while she insisted on doing everything the hard way.

The wind was nipping at her now. She couldn’t feel her nose. Her hair was wet with slush.

The forest was eerily quiet. The closest thing to another living creature that they encountered was a strangely shaped lamp with a silhouette that gave them a heart attack. There was also an empty sentry station with nothing worth taking- just a bunch of half frozen condiment bottles.

Eventually Rain began to talk again just so she could hear something other than the strange howl of the wind playing against the distant cavern walls. “Chara, why is there snow down here? And wind? We are underground.”

Chara made a thoughtful humming sound. “My guess is magic. They need to keep things cold up here so they can make ice to send to a place called the Core. If they didn’t the Core would overheat and explode or something. But even before that I think this place may have always been cold- perhaps because it’s so close to the top of the mountain? As for the wind, well, I don’t know. It’s a large cavern; maybe they use it to circulate the air or something. I don’t think it’s important.”

“Why not just make it cold around the Core itself?”

“I don’t know. Too much work to maintain? Counterproductive? I’m not the engineer, how should I know?”

“You know more than I do. You have been down here longer.”

She rolled her eyes at this. “Sleeping mostly. Forgetting things.”

“How many children did you meet?”

Chara thought for a moment, struggling to recover old memories half eaten by time. “I don’t remember how many were strong enough to wake me up. I don’t remember how many fell through the same hole as you. Some of them may have come in from the river along with the rest of the trash. What I do know is that I have gone on this journey twice before in different bodies.” Chara though for a moment. Rain could feel her existence tapping its finger against her imagined chin in thought. "Yes. I remember two distinct faces. A boy and a girl, both young. Long dead by now.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“No.” This did not seem to bother her.

Rain’s teeth were chattering now. She was beginning to worry about the cold. Would she be able to start a fire if she needed to?

“If no one has managed to escape yet, why are you so sure I will be any different?”

“Well everyone who has ever fallen down here has been a child. I think your friend was the oldest person to get stuck down here aside from yourself. Humans are stronger than monsters but children have not reached their full potential yet, so children are easier for monsters to kill.”

Rain was suddenly presented with the internal image of a brooding shadow crossing its arms as Chara spoke to her. “I tried to guide them to freedom anyway. I had hoped to finally feel the true sun on my face again if I could just get them back safely. But they were too small. Too afraid. Too blind. The Underground eventually broke them. They hurt too much and they eventually gave up and I couldn’t keep healing them. In the end I was always forced back into a dreamless sleep where my memories fell away like rot.”

Chara brightened, her cloudy existence seeming to become much more cheery all of a sudden. “But you? You are stronger. Better. You're still scared, I can feel it. But I can teach you. And as you learn to do the things I teach you, I will grow stronger too. I will be able to remember more. Then we can finally see the sunlight again.”

A tentative smile managed to manifest itself despite Rain’s chattering teeth. The thought of warm sunlight seemed nice right about now.

She didn’t really know what she would do with herself after all this but if she could make it through this then all those surface problems she had been running away from wouldn’t seem as insurmountable as before, right?

“That’s right!” Chara encouraged, “Mundane human problems don’t seem so bad now, do they? When you get back you will be known as Rain: the woman who fought monsters and won! Everything else will seem like child’s play after that, wont it?”

Rain’s smile grew a bit more. She managed to endure the cold a little easier now. It wasn’t so much that the cold didn’t touch her; she just didn’t let it stop her. Chara wouldn’t let it stop her.

They were determined to survive.