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gerbiloftriumph · 5 months ago

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Lost and Found (ao3):

Grandpa’s story of the goblin caves started out familiarly enough, but as he spoke, the story started to twist and change. New friends, new conversations, and new ways to use old items transformed the tale, and the young king discovered new ways to be brave in the dark tunnels beneath Daventry.

(6/?)

~*~

Graham wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or closed. Darkness pressed around him, thicker than his own cloak and weighing a whole lot more. He blinked, but he could see nothing. He tried sitting up, but everything hurt too much. He found it best to just lie still for a minute, to try and ease his spinning head. He couldn’t tell which way was up, though, and that didn’t help him feel less woozy. His questing fingers felt wet—a water puddle or something, hopefully, instead of his own blood. Sand clung to his fingers.

“Newton?” he rasped. “Newton, where—”

Nothing.

Graham groaned and his head thumped back against the rocks again. He’d fallen in the dark. Not sure how far. Not sure how long ago. If he’d blinked out for just a second, or minutes, or hours. The air was still. Silent.

He choked back a scream, swallowing hard against his own mounting panic. Maybe it was for the best he wasn’t able to stand, or else he’d go tearing off into the shadows and just make everything worse.

Can it get worse?

Stop. You’re okay. You can handle this. Don’t panic.

He slowly, slowly, tried pushing himself up. He could feel the gritty stone floor, and he could feel stones rising around him, walls—were they too close?—but he couldn’t see anything at all. Too dark, or had he hurt himself somehow? Blinded…? Couldn’t tell, couldn’t tell, couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t—

Something glittered. He squinted. Reached out. Remembered. He’d kicked a mushroom, and the glimmering dust was still on his boot. It was nearly all faded, but there was enough there to realize he wasn’t blind, wasn’t dead. It helped ground him. He took a deep, deep breath. It wasn’t much. But, right then, there wasn’t much to be had.

“It’s okay. I’m fine. I’m fine.” His voice bounced back at him, echoing and fading into silence.

He stared at the dust, wishing it were brighter. Wishing he had Newton. Or something. Anything. But looking around revealed nothing—just that horrible dark of a cave with no light, a dark so heavy he could nearly touch it. He curled up in a ball, trying not to whimper.

He thought he heard snuffling. The wet raspy sound of a dragon, breathing sharp and deadly, and Graham bit his tongue so hard tears sprang to his eyes. Was it the same dragon? Was it back? Should he have killed the beast when he’d had the chance? It exhaled, and he thought he felt the heat of it, felt its glare on him, like it knew his weakness. His terror.

I am going to die here.

(“How can you be okay sitting in the dark?” Gwendolyn asked, her hands pressed to her mouth, staring at the mirror.

“I was very much not okay,” Grandpa said, his hand on her knee. “But I didn’t have a choice at that moment. I had to discover a different way to see. But whatever was lurking in those shadows couldn’t possibly be worse than the thoughts trapped in my head.”)

“I need a light,” Graham whispered. “I need…what do I have…I need…gods, please, I need…” His fingers brushed across the things in his cloak, desperate, unable to see, just trying to remember what was there by the shape of it. Something soft and delicate…a flower. Why did he have a flower…

“We were looking for a specific flower, for my paint dyes. It’s hard to see on a clear day, but it’s got a glowy edge to it when it gets wet, so, the rain, y’know.” Whisper and Acorn’s flower. For the dyes. It glowed blue if it got wet. Graham ripped it out of his cloak and practically flung it into the puddle at his side. And it was just water, perhaps from the same source that drenched his own cell, buried somewhere nearby in the rock. Immediately, the flower petals started to glow. Just faint, faint, the edges twinkling like stars in the darkness, but more than what he’d had before. Blue. Almost a familiar sort of blue. Almost…

Salamanders started chirping. They flared bright blue around him, sparkling and nearly blinding. They loved the color of the flower, a vibrant blue like theirs but somehow different, more attractive. They filled the cave with light. Brighter than Newton by himself. Bright and sparkly and blue and he could see. The snuffling sound must have been snoozing salamanders. Not a dragon. He swiped at his cheeks, trying to calm his panicked breathing.

Newton’s jar was half buried in dirt behind a rock. He gently picked it up and brushed the dust off. Inside, the little salamander squeaked at Graham, irritated and dim, but clearly fine after being tossed, too small and springy to have been hurt. He flared blue again after giving himself a good shake.

(Grandpa smiled at Gwendolyn. “In my head my greatest fears were real. Whether that was true for this cave, I wasn’t sure. I needed to face what was actually out there. And now, I could see. I could be brave again.”

“When I’m afraid, I find blankets provide the most protection,” Gwendolyn said, sinking down further in her little nest of blankets.

“Ha! Well, I did have my cloak with me, and it was definitely a comfort, like your blankets. Especially since it had supplied my salvation!”)

Graham cautiously bent wrists and ankles, fingers and toes, checking himself in the blue glow. Nothing broken. He’d fallen down much worse, really, like that mountain when he’d first come to Daventry. This was a few more bruises to add to the growing collection on his arms and legs, but that was fine. He stood, a little shakily, and inspected what he’d fallen down. A nice slope, properly rocky, just barely tall enough to be troublesome. “I’m not sure I can get back up there right now,” he said, sighing. It was slightly too steep, and he was still too wobbly to try it. “Well. I’d needed something new to explore, and I guess I got it. Newton, shall we look for a different way out?”

The salamander chirped, still irritated, and put his tail over his eyes.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Come on, we can’t stay here.” He bent down and retrieved the crown, which had rolled a little distance toward the tunnel exit. Undented, unchanged. Nothing about this thing could ever change, it seemed. He placed it on his curls, stood straight, and pushed onward.

(“Newton’s okay, but I think I’d want Mr. Springbottom down there with me.”)

The salamanders chittered, and familiar glowing mushrooms were growing in clumps a little ways down the tunnel, attracted to the water dripping down the sides of the wall. Being able to see even a little bit made a huge difference. Graham had explored plenty of caves while adventuring. He was fine.

…okay, to be fair, when he’d explored prior, he’d been stocked with supplies and prepared for that sort of adventure, not half starved and desperate and with the weight of his friends’ lives on his shoulders. But, still, he was fine.

He tripped on an upraised rock he couldn’t see, stumbled, clutched the lantern tight for fear it would slip and shatter, teeth clacking with impact as he jarred his knee.

Really, even with the salamanders and his lantern and the mushrooms it wasn’t bright enough. Wasn’t safe enough. Not fine.

(“There are not enough lights in this cave,” Gwendolyn said. “Creatures could be anywhere.”)

His boots shuffled in the silence. The tunnel was curvy but didn’t have any branching paths, at first. But when he reached his first crossroads, a crack in the wall spiraling off into the dark with no clear end in sight, he hesitated.

“I can’t get lost in here,” he muttered, eyeing each tunnel in turn. He knew of a way back into the prisons behind him, could get back to Daventry. Sort of. If he could scale that scree slope again, which he wasn’t entirely confident about. But, these natural paths had no guarantee. No promise whatsoever that he would escape the dark. Graham’s fingers danced through his pockets, tracing each item thoughtfully as he considered his options.

He withdrew the not-so-magic beans. He’d noticed earlier how brightly they sparkled in salamander light, and his handful was quite large. The goblins must have not trusted too much in the magic of their magic beans. They’d buried a ton of them beneath the beanstalk vines in the hopes just one would take.

“Once upon a time,” Graham recited, running a purple bean through his fingers, “there was an evil, selfish stepmother who wanted to get rid of her husband’s children. She ordered her husband to take his children into the tangled woods nearby and leave them there to be eaten by wolves, but clever Gretel left a trail behind her as they walked, so even in the pitch dark of the night, they could find their way home.” His voice filled the tunnel, warm and comforting.

There was, perhaps, nothing like a story to make the night less frightening.

(“Maybe I should try that,” Gwendolyn said. “Tell stories when I’m afraid.”

“It’s my favorite thing,” Grandpa agreed.)

Carefully, Graham began to lay a path, marking his trail only as necessary to preserve his bean supply as long as possible. He avoided the cracks, afraid of the walls growing too narrow for his shoulders and pinning him in place, forever. But he couldn’t quit, couldn’t give up, even if that niggling fear about getting lost still crept across his spine with every nervous step forward. He was desperately aware that his trail marking had a limit, that there was only so far he could go. He had to hope he found an easier way to freedom before he ran out.

(“My hands trembled at the thought of facing my friends without a plan. I wasn’t ready to go back yet, even if I was feeling stronger. I had to press onward.”

They watched the little mirror king hesitate at another crossroads, and then he chose the righthand tunnel. Which was a mistake. His foot slipped, and he went spinning down into the darkness with a perfectly horrifying yelp. This time, there wasn’t a bottom.

“Ah, that one seemed to be a dead end,” Grandpa said, laughing.

“Mr. Springbottom does not approve,” Gwendolyn said sternly, giving the plushie a squeeze.

“Let’s start that part over with a clean slate.”

“Grandpaaaa.”

“Look, this rocky situation was no fault of my own. This game of stones was simply far too violent for my taste.”

The little king reappeared on the mirror, and he chose the lefthand tunnel as though nothing had happened at all.)

Graham couldn’t be permanently lost in the walls. He couldn’t be. There had to be more to this. Right?

He placed another bean. But as he placed it, he looked more carefully at the tunnel itself. The natural rough hewn walls seemed to have a slightly different cast to them here. Like they’d been chiseled, not just formed naturally. Like there was, maybe, signs of life.

He scrambled forward, delighted, and the natural tunnel turned into an intentional one, one made by human (or goblin, more likely) hands. He wasn’t lost, he was going to find help, a way out, he was going to find—

He rounded the corner and smashed nose to nose into a grinning, leering face. White gloved hands outstretched. Grabbed. Caught.

Graham shrieked and stumbled back and his assailant tangled up with him, pinning him, and they both went down in a heap, and it was still grinning and unblinking with huge black eyes, the weight of it strange and the form of it stiff and its teeth bright white and sharp and Graham kicked and wailed and punched and his assailant rocked backward and sprang forward again and smashed its face into Graham’s and—

He froze, but the assailant kept shaking back and forth, back and forth, bumping into him with less and less force each time. Like it was on a spring. He stared into the black eyes inches from his own wide ones, and realized these eyes were painted onto wood.

A jack in the box. Wooden. Fake.

A huge one, life sized and leering. A clown. Carved smile, painted eyes, wooden hands hidden under patched and stained white gloves. A floppy jester’s cap had slipped off its head and was lying on the dusty floor nearby.

It had strings on it, dozens of them, like yarn or thin cords, that disappeared into the darkness above them, to hold it upright like an oversized marionette, to help move it through some scene. That were now tangled around Graham’s hands and wrists and legs and reminding him horribly of the goblin’s bindings.

Goblins. Moving a doll through a scene. He groaned with realization, sinking back. This was a prop, discarded in the dark. A way to tell a story. Some story the goblins had gotten bored of for one reason or another, and they’d decided to dispose of it in some storage room far from the main stages.

(Gwendolyn had yanked the blanket over her head, and was muttering, “It’s only a story. It’s not real. I’m fine. Yep, fine. I sound fine, right?”)

Graham kicked out, and the jester rocked again, its nose bumping into Graham’s shoulder, as the king struggled to free himself from the impromptu restraints. The weight of the wood was strange and stiff and didn't give. He was able to roll onto his side, the jester’s face pressed into him. He pulled at the ropes, his scream still burning his throat and his heart still hammering and his hands still shaking. They wouldn’t give, growing all the more tangled the more he fought, apparently endlessly long. In a fit of flustered frustration, Graham yanked hard, and they snapped off the jester, breaking the too-thin hooks they’d been tied to on the articulation points.

(“Ugh. Fuel, meet nightmare. Guess I won’t be sleeping tonight,” Gwendolyn said grumpily, peeling the blanket off her head as the mirror king started peeling the cords off his arms. He spooled them up and shoved them in his pocket instinctively, and struggled to stand, pushing the jack in the box aside. “I liked your stories better when they were silly and filled with dragons.”

“Oh, there might be dragons in it yet,” Grandpa said, smiling. He waved at the mirror, at the dozens of forgotten puppets of all types lining the wall. Including a little dragon toy.

“That one doesn’t count!”)

Graham crouched and inspected the horrible jester. It had a little tin soldier tucked into its waistcoat pocket, half melted and sad. It had only one leg. “Ah, Steadfast Tin Soldier,” Graham murmured. “Right, I remember that one:

“Once upon a time, a little boy received a magnificent gift of tin soldiers, but one was incomplete, for the metal spoon it had been made from had been used up before finishing the soldier. In the boy’s toy room, there was a jack in the box, with the spirit of a goblin trapped in it, and the jack in the box fell in love with a paper ballerina, as the paper ballerina and the tin soldier fell in love with each other.” A naughty goblin, Graham thought, who tried to melt the soldier and win the ballerina’s heart. A pretty solid choice for a fairy tale retelling by goblins. He wondered why they’d chosen to throw this prop away, why they’d gotten bored of it.

He inspected the rest of the space—the storage room, truly. He wanted to find abandoned weapons or something, not abandoned stories, but what weapons he did find were firmly attached to the hands of knights or farmers, and they were chipped, thin pieces of wood which would snap under use anyway.

More than abandoned props, though, this room itself seemed like it had been forgotten. In his struggles, Graham had kicked up a lot of dust, and more dust and grime dulled the puppets’ paint. The room had that stale sort of feeling, a space that hadn’t been touched or thought of for a lifetime. Somewhere lost in the walls, perhaps when (if?) this place had been something other than a prison.

The jester was among the worst of the carved faces, but others didn’t seem particularly nice: evil eyed witches, or sharp clawed wolves. They leered from the walls, sagging in marionette ropes or crumpled on the floor glaring up at him. Maybe it was too hard to move these puppets around when it was so much easier to wear a costume and act it out more personally. The weight of these toys, and the length of the ropes needed to direct them, was surely too complicated.

He wandered, inspecting faces and hands, and he found a barred door similar to his own cell—mercifully unlocked, though it creaked loudly enough to wake the dead. Or wake a stagnant puppet? He glanced uneasily over his shoulder, but he couldn’t see a thing behind him. Newton’s light just didn’t reach that far, and shapes blurred into nothing just a few paces back, hands and arms and ropes reaching mindlessly. Anxious, he slipped into the hall, and the door scraped shut behind him, echoes fading into dead silence.

More props and toys and costumes. Piles of things, left to rot in the dust and gloom. Dozens of ballet slippers with holes ground into the heels, cracked and broken glass shoes that still managed to catch the gleam of his salamander’s light beneath the grime.

(“That’s even more shoes than my mom has!”)

“With one of those, I could possibly make one of those goblins a princess, and maybe I’d get something helpful in return. And what did the goblins need all those spinning wheels for? The things Acorn could do with treasures like those...so many fascinating things, forgotten. I tried to find things that weren’t broken, but I was not so lucky. Buckets, barrels, boxes...dirty and dark and empty of anything useful. Although, I did find an entire room filled with frogs galivanting in an underground lake!”

“I wanna pet them all!”)

The frog room had been the most unsettling yet. The dark ripples of the water, the echoes of each drip, and dozens of eyes glaring at his light. They called to each other in grave tones and scampered away. If a splash could sound disdainful... Likely this hadn’t been full of so many frogs originally, but no one had bothered the creatures for so long they’d just started their own froggy kingdom. They probably had a Frog Queen to rival Princess Madeline’s rule. He wondered, a little hysterically, if he should have sent them a coronation invitation, too. Best to not mention this place to Chester.

He slipped past more detritus. Costumes, dummies missing their heads, torn dresses and stained jerkins and so many stories of every type. But despite it all, Graham wasn’t at all sure any of it would be of any use to him here and now, and he reluctantly wandered deeper into the labyrinth of dust and rust and narrow rock, feeling all the more unsure he’d find anything relevant down here. Well, not entirely true--he did find three tarnished gold coins, with a queen's profile that he did not recognize at all. If he'd bothered to pay attention in the Hall of Faces Portrait Hall in the castle, maybe he'd know, could guess when this place had last been used, but for now, this little golden face meant nothing except a promise that he would get his bow, finally. If he could get out of these rooms.

One of the coins had been in a corner pinned by a dusty, forgotten spider web. One of those horribly sticky ones he’d run into upstairs. Graham had studied it, checked it from every angle to make sure it wasn’t an active house for an active spider—imagine knocking over someone’s house, but instead of giving you a firm talking to, the inhabitant bit you and poisoned you and ate you—but it seemed fully abandoned. He was still loath to stick his hand blindly in the web, though, remembering how horribly sticky and sturdy they were. He used the mop he’d been given to sweep up goop to twirl the threads like pasta to clear the web, and he shoved the mop, with its now sticky threads, back in his pocket. Six found coins clinked cheerfully in his pocket, three generations of royalty chatting to each other. Which made Graham wish he had someone to talk to, too—it was much too quiet down here for him.

(“To keep myself company, I began to talk out loud. I’m the best conversationalist, you know. I know, right?”

“I think I’ve heard Dad make that exact same joke. Do you guys have the same jokebook or something?”)

Graham kept retelling the fairytales he’d found, just to fill the emptiness. Little scraps of dialogue, fragments of thoughts. “I know I’m talking out loud, but it’s oddly calming,” he said vaguely, waving at the air. “Studies show this is a perfectly normal coping mechanism. Yep. We’re good. So good. We’re not scared at all. That jack in the box is not following me. Nope. We’re good.” He placed another bean, noting that his supply was nearly out, but he’d still not found a way out.

As he crept forward, though, he paused. Stiffened. Listened. In the distance, snuffling again. And not the salamanders this time.

No, this was someone crying.

#fic'ing #ch2 #we're off the rails and off the track and we're still following subtitles but not in ways you expect #there's some concept art that looked very circusy at one point so i'm quietly ref'ing that while still fitting it in the fairy tale theme #in your mind's ear imagine the game devs used the same soundbyte of josh mandel shrieking his heart out in kq5 when he falls

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