This book was entirely pre-written from December 23rd - January 4th, 2019. Please forgive the cringe that is my writing.

Everything.

These walls have never known happiness, a place where damned souls come to rot and where children wail never is. I don't have the heart to tell them that they're not the first and that they most certainly won't be the last.

Though they've lasted longer than the others and the thought sends shivers down my spine, courses through my bones and drives away the aching cold that I've grown to know these last decades as I locked myself away from the rest of the world, working tirelessly to crack the Barrier that damned the rest of monsterkind to forever fester and rot in the dark and the cold.

How did you open a door when you didn't have a key?

You tricked the lock.

Two artificially grown skeletons had proved to be the fruit of my efforts, the final product from years and years of constant research and dedication to one cause, one goal. I glanced down at my shaking hands, analyzing the two holes that had been so delicately carved into the marrow of my limbs. It was ironic in a sense. By committing myself to these experiments I was sacrificing a part of myself along with it.

I gazed through the window as the two... subjects played, fascinating themselves with a single paper airplane that they directed through the air with the magic that coursed through their veins. Though it wasn't surprising. Those of the skeleton species had always been affluent in wielding magic and strong were these two in it as well, able to commit such feats that would have left other monsters gasping for breath.

And for a moment I was back on the battlefield, where the world of the surface was at war as both humans and monsters tore themselves apart, fighting to stay alive. I remembered being on the front lines, watching as my fellow kin were slaughtered by the might of the humans, the massacre so brutal and intense that the entire ground was covered so deep in dust you though that it might have snowed.

Here these two skeletons were, not knowing that they were part of the last of the dying race. I wondered if they would have liked my house back in Snowdin and I even considered taking them there. I had two extra rooms that had never known before the presence of company and the days did often grow long and quiet.

But I had delayed too long.

These weren't children, I reminded myself. They weren't even supposed to be sentient. I had specifically accelerated their growth so that they wouldn't look such a way, and yet they babbled and mimicked as a toddler might. But that did not matter whether they could talk or not, there was still a greater task, a greater purpose at hand.

Though It would make the job much harder than I had anticipated.

I walked to the edge of the room, my hand clasped on the door knob. I did not know why I was wearing gloves or why I had put them on in the first place. Perhaps it was to cover up the two holes on my hands, where I had extracted the DNA samples from myself to create the two subjects that played in the room adjacent to this one, to make me forget that in a way... that in a way these two were my -

I must have been gripping the brass knob a little too tight for the metal had begun to crack at the surface. The notion caught me by surprise.

In fact, everything leading up to this moment had caught me completely unawares. Throughout these trials I had learned to distance myself from the subjects that were produced from the fruits of my labours, from the dozens upon dozens of skeletons that I had in vain created, nurtured in hopes that they might live only for them to die on a cold metal table a few hours later...

But when these two had shown signs of promise, survived for a day and then another, when the weeks blended into months and the faint feeling of hope returned, I began to open myself up to them, got too close...

No longer! I could not put my own selfish needs above the rest of monsterkind. If these experiments proved to be a success, if I had managed to replicate perfectly two artificial vessels capable of holding a human soul to pass through the Barrier, then perhaps there was hope for monsterkind after all. Perhaps we did not need to wait for another hundred years before another human fell, so that the king would not have to take the life of another.

Through the glass window of the door I stood next to could I catch a glimpse of the human that also played alongside their peers.

They had been the first, the very first piece of life that I had created inside these walls. In the beginning of my experiments I had hoped to grow a human from the few samples of blood that I had managed to collect from the king after a human had ventured into these catacombs and met their untimely demise. And the human had grown, developed into what they were now and the future of the Underground seemed bright.

But when I had presented them to the Barrier, the arcane magic rejected their soul, the very construct of the human itself. I supposed it was because the construct of the human was artificial, grown from a single cell and thus not a naturally developed organism.

So I had turned to making vessels, growing naturally a strong enough monster that would be capable of hosting a human soul so that they could pass through the Barrier acting as the seventh human soul. And that was the plan, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things. When the time came, when the tests would prove that the skeletons were strong enough, one of them would in turn absorb the human's soul and present themselves to the Barrier along with the other six, forever freeing monsters once and for all.

So I had kept the human alive ever since then, keeping them like a pig for the slaughter as I waited for the moment in which one of my other subjects would prove a capable recipient of presenting their soul to the Barrier.

And now that seemed to be a possible reality and I wasn't sure how to make out the torrent of emotions rushing through my mind. I felt nothing for the human, perhaps even a small bit of revulsion at the sight of them. The human had never done anything to wrong me but the mere sight of them, gazing upon their flesh and the way that their eyes seemed to sparkle with a childlike innocence, unaware of the crimes that their ancestors had committed against my species, the very thought of it was nauseating.

But the two skeletons, could I really bring myself to force them down the road I had paved for myself?

My mind wandered back to the reports with Asgore, long lists of food shortages and an ever-draining supply of materials that promised that the end of civilization in the Underground was drawing to a close. Soon the power would run out, the farms would run barren without food and our kind would forever rot in the dark and in the cold.

So if it came to it, with the lives of the two skeletons and the human compared to the millions of lives that rested upon the success of this experiment, I chose the latter. My concerns and hopes for a better future for myself were nothing compared to the suffering of those around me. I knew what others would think of me should the truth come out. Some would call me an abomination, a horrendous creature that was forever deserving to burn in the afterlife.

But those were the lucky ones, those who could stand on their high hills and look down upon me and sneer. They did not understand the desperation of my situation, how I and the team of other scientists had spent countless years laboring to come up with a solution, to try and devise a plan to life the dying monster race out of our tomb of stone.

This was the last measure, the last resort and it was a path that I was taking alone. What I was about to do, what I had to do, it was not the first option but it was certainly the last. Though brutal, though horrendous in nature, it served as the only means of our escape. The monster race was dying, starving in silence and it was my duty to fix that in any way that I could.

I opened the door slightly, stepping out of the room as the three turned to look at me, expressions of great curiosity plastered across their features. I thought that the human trusted me the least of the three for they had been around the longest, watched as skeleton after skeleton, subject after subject walked through these walls only to inexplicably vanish the next day. Though they never learned the truth behind my actions, I was certain that a pool of doubt and confusion had manifested inside their primitive mind.

I went to close the door when my spine stiffened, realizing that I had forgotten something. Carefully, I moved back towards the desk inside the room I had once been standing in, allowing my fingers to clamp around three plates of metal each carved with their own unique symbols and words.

There would be no going back after this moment, when I drilled the metal into their hands and let the sound of the machine drown out their screams. Once I crossed that line, once I shattered the feeble understanding of trust that had managed to manifest inside their young minds, I would have taken the first step down a long road whose only means of travel was to continue onwards, no resets, no taking anything back.

"Hello!" The tallest of the skeletons beamed at the sight of my appearance. He was the strongest of the two skeletons, whose test results indicated strong potentials for magic. I had thought that of the two, he would eventually be the recipient for the human's soul, the one chosen to carry their soul across the Barrier in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice to free the rest of the monsters trapped Underground.

I did not reply to the skeleton's greeting and earned a look of distrust from both the shorter skeleton and the human. The shorter skeleton was the weakest of the free, with an unexplainable condition that rendered his health at a mere point, neither faltering nor strengthening. A cut would be enough to wither him into ash. I made a mental note to remain delicate with him when I began the first round of experiments.

"That in your hand?" The taller skeleton continued on with his speech. I hated it when he spoke, the way his voice rang with innocence. It made them sound like children.

"It is not of your concern," I snapped and felt a hint of sadness well inside me at the sight of the skeleton recoil from my words as if I had whipped him. But it was for the best in the long run. There was no point in getting sentimental now, not when the line was about to be crossed, not when I was about to commit such an act that would forever alter how the three of them saw me.

I set the three plates of metal onto the table and plugged the drill into the nearby outlet, watching as the machine hummed to life, not caring about the crime it was about to commit this very day. "But there is something you could do for me," I replied, careful to keep my voice steady, to prevent any emotion from betraying my thoughts.

The taller skeleton brightened at the thought of helping another individual. I was curious as to how he had inherited such a trait of kindness when it had never before been shown to him. The human and the shorter skeleton behaved as expected, wary and cautious all the same, never trusting and never fully understanding. But this skeleton, the way he brightened when I entered the room, desperate for any kind of affection, the way he acted like a child...

"What's a 'help'?" The skeleton asked. I forgot that their vocabulary was limited.

"It means that you must assist me with something," I replied and it seemed that the skeleton finally began to comprehend the meaning of the word.

"I like to help!" He agreed.

With a heavy sigh, I looked down upon him, bracing for what was about to come next, terrified of the road that I was forcing myself down. This was the final moment, the last chance I had to go back on all of this and perhaps give them the life that I had so hoped to show them the second that they stirred inside their test tubes. But once the words left my mouth, the four words that would forever alter their worlds and mine as well, there was no going back.

A brief moment of silence followed before I finally forced the sentence from my mouth, the sentence I had been dreading for so long.

"Give me your hand."