A Lullaby for Gods: 221135355411354223312134343143

Hello! So, I know ALFG is not supposed to be updating, but it's April Fool's! And it's not even a proper update, so I'll be posting this chapter up, and be warned it's not really your usual ALFG chapter. Is this fic canon? Who knows. Is it fun? It might be. Is it informative? Very.

I'll be including hints in the bottom of the chapter so if you want to take a crack at the codes yourself, please don't scroll down after the word 'Coward' and the first string of ciphers!

Without further ado, let's go, and no, this is a post, not a PDF this time.

 “Walk with me,” says the Heir of Doom.

There's about two things Karkat does when he has nightmares - run for his life, or get rescued by the Heir of Doom or their borrowed ravens. He doesn't like either option, but he doesn't like this new one presented by the Heir either. 

He shifts on his feet, and the Heir reaches out a hand and smiles. 

“Walk with me.”

Karkat does nothing, and still the landscape changes. It shifts, from the battlefield, to a forest, to a city, to a home; and Karkat realizes that the story will steamroller on whether or not he chooses to put trust in the Heir or not.

The Heir smiles still, unblinking, and Karkat, figuring he can fight this small, fragile, tired Heir, or outrun any Heir of Blood and all his bloodleeches, takes that small, cold, human hand. 

The land breathes. 

-

This is what Karkat’s dreams look like. 

-

“What am I seeing?” Karkat asks, as the scenery changes with every step he takes. 

“Sessions,” the Heir of Doom says. Both their left feet step into an ocean and their right feet step into a desert. “Some alive, some dead.”

“Did you destroy them?”

The Heir stops and turns to him. Around them, the waterfall continues to thunder on. It is dark, as there is no moon or sun in sight, and the pendant hanging from the Heir’s neck shines blue. 

“What makes you think that?” the Heir asks. 

Karkat feels the hand holding his.  It's small, and corpse-like, and ridden with so many scars from knife cuts and accidents and war wounds, probably pre-ascension. But it's alive, and it's somehow still comforting. Tired eyes look at him and Karkat sighs. 

“I don't think that,” he says. 

“Thank you,” the Heir says.  “That's very kind of you.”

Karkat continues to walk along with the Heir. They pass by lands of endless bone and sand, of vast fields with eerie whispers, of never-ending oceans and rain. 

“How did you find these places?” he asks instead, stumbling over as his foot sinks into snow, letting go of the Heir's hand as he tries to catch himself. 

The Heir helps him stand up when he falls forward. “I didn't.”

“The Heir of Blood did?” Karkat asks. 

A pause. “Yes,” the Heir of Doom eventually says. “I followed him here.”

“Ah,” Karkat says. He gets it. “How long have you been following him?”

The Heir of Doom breathes out a heavy, heavy sigh. “I don't remember.”

“How old even are you?”

“I don't remember.”

Karkat studies them for a moment, but knows it's futile as godtiers stop aging at the age of ascension. The Heir has been ascended for a long, long time. 

“Do you even remember anything before the game?” he asks. He straightens and brushes the snow from his sweater.

The Heir just laughs. “Come on,” they say. “We have things to see.”

Karkat mutters a complaint under his breath but follows anyway. “Where are you taking me?”

“To sightsee.”

He stops in his tracks. “Seriously?”

“Field trips are educational, Karkat,” the Heir says, and motions around them. “What do you see here?”

“Snow,” he says, and kicks a foot to send a bit of it flying. “Lots of it.” The place tickles a memory but it's probably just somewhere similar. 

The Heir's look softens, like they know. “It's not the Land of Frost and Frogs, no. But somewhere similar. It belongs to a friend.”

“This is a planet?” Karkat asks. 

“Yes. Now come with me.”

He tries his best to, but being unable to fly isn't helping a lot with him trying to match speed with the Heir. 

There is a hill up ahead, overlooking a cliff with sharp points of ice dotting it. If Karkat falls off the edge, he'd be skewered, so he tries to stick to solid, even land as he walks.  The Heir chuckles, but doesn't seem too worried. 

“Do you hear it?” they ask. 

Karkat frowns. “Hear what?”

The Heir of Doom smiles and puts a finger to their lips. “Listen.”

Karkat tries to. There's nothing. 

He tells them as much.

The Heir hits their head slightly. “No, just listen, you fool.”

So he does. He closes his eyes and tries not to think of anything else. Just tries to listen. 

There is a sound, not unlike drumbeats, beneath his feet. 

“Where are we?” he asks, when he opens his eyes to catch up to the Heir, as they appear to have started flying off again. 

“A friend's land,” the Heir says, and motions up the hill, where there's a tree that's still somehow bearing its leaves, which are a deep rust red. 

There's a figure underneath the tree, Karkat realizes, with grey skin, and large horns curving over her head and up to a sharp point.

“Oh,” he says.

Blank white eyes stare at him. She looks nothing like Aradia, or even Damara, but bears the same symbol over her shirt. Maybe a distant ancestor. 

“Hello, - ”

She's speaking the Heir's name, but Karkat finds he can't hear it. 

“Hello, Anjye-we,” the Heir says, easily slipping into Alternian.  The honorific rolls off their tongue easily, and Karkat wonders exactly how long the Heir has been going around, learning languages out of necessity. 

The troll - Anjye-something; Karkat's not close enough with her to tack the honorific at the end of the syllables - inclines her head. 

“In case you're wondering,” she says, addressing Karkat this time, “My session’s very alive. It just appears my grandsire has the same tendency as I do to hold onto life when we don't have it.”

Ah. He’d figured.

“Anjye-we, you've been doing well?” the Heir asks. 

“Gladly so, just resting,” the rustblood says. “Have you been well?”

“Not very,” the Heir laughs. They motion to Karkat. “Helping another session, as you see.”

“This one closer to your roots, yes?”

The Heir actually flinches. Karkat raises an eyebrow. 

“Did the voices tell you that?”

“No, Baia-we did.” She laughs and hovers, the ghost that she is, and flies up to the branches to sit on one of them. 

“Ah, Ba-naha,” the Heir says, shaking his head. How involved has the Heir been to be addressing these people with titles of close friends? 

“Gifted seer, that boy,” the troll says. “He'll be coming here soon, so make your request quick.”

“We're just sightseeing, Anjye-we,” the Heir says.  “I wanted to show Karkat the lands the Heir of Blood has taken for his conquest.”

“Ah, ji-ga.” The troll tuts. Karkat wonders if it's a name or an old, old curse, the way she spits it out.  “He's still at large, then?”

“He's never stopped,” the Heir says, softly, “I couldn't - I'm sorry.”

The ghost troll looks down at them for a moment, and then says the Heir's name again, tender.  “You've done well.”

“I haven't.”

“My session is still viable for victory because of you,” she says, “I think it counts.”

“Thanks,” the Heir says.

The troll, the Megido-granddam, if she even uses that name - Karkat doesn't know how far she is up the line - hops off the branch, and takes the Heir’s face in her hands to press their foreheads together, a gesture of comfort. Karkat wants to look away.

He doesn’t, or rather, can’t, as the ghost breaks away from the Heir, and reaches up to touch Karkat's forehead. 

The world explodes behind his eyelids. 

He sees it, movie reels of events, from a session’s start to the struggles to the almost-victory and the unforeseen corruption from the Heir of Blood’s sudden intrusion. Someone shatters into a thousand pieces. Someone cries. And Karkat's screaming, screaming for his friends even when he knows they aren't his friends, because in the moment, he's not Karkat. He's reliving these memories of an ancient Witch of Time, and it hurts. 

He heaves in a stuttering breath, and doesn't even know that the troll has stopped touching him. 

“That's what he did,” she says, “To us. To countless others. I can imagine what he's starting to do to your session.”

Karkat shakily wipes at his tears, still trying to separate himself from the vision that feels more memory than vision. “He's - yeah.” He sighs, giving up on words. He’s so tired, suddenly. Like he’s lived a thousand perigees instead of his measly number of sweeps. “He's doing it again.”

“A conqueror who never rests,”  she says, “God save him now, he's trying.”

Karkat tilts his head, confused. He doesn't know if they're both talking about the same thing. 

The Heir gently tugs on his sleeve. “Karkat,” they say.  “We gotta go now.”

“Save the boy, Karkat,” the troll says. She's a small thing, even smaller than Karkat, but somehow Karkat still feels loomed over. “He'll be useful. But I fear you can't save him by your own strength.”

“The - the Seer?” Karkat asks. He remembers what the radio had said. The powerful Seer afflicted with a bloodleech. 

“The game teaches teamwork,” she says, like he hasn't said anything, “So learn it.”

Karkat looks down at his feet, at the snow, and wonders exactly what she means. 

-

They walk through fire and blood and wind and metal, and then land in another place built primarily out of ice. Karkat hugs his arms around himself and thinks the Heir's friends must have a pattern of being icy, or have an inclination for intersession conquering. 

A bit like Lord English, he supposes. He wonders if the Heir of Blood has destroyed one version of Lord English. He hopes so. That'll be the one good thing he's done. 

The… thing - he doesn't know what it is, with its cymbals for hands and its rows of razor sharp teeth - inclines its head and rasps, the sound like clashes of more cymbals, of a dissonant orchestra. “The Heir of Blood was birthed for a purpose.”

The Heir of Doom swats at it half-heartedly. Not that it's effective, because in addition to looking monstrous, the thing is gigantic, and if it decides to, it can clap its cymbals with both of them in between and crush them. 

“Don't tell him that,” they say, “He's not supposed to know yet.”

“Ah. Building a narrative here, are we, - ” There it is again,  the Heir's name, but Karkat can't hear it. Why is he the exception, when all the people the Heir has helped know their name? 

“Yes,” the Heir says. “But you know how some things have to be carefully timed and revealed.”

“You've learned,” the thing says, “How's the Bard?”

“Ever busy,” the Heir says. “I tell him to wind down, but he doesn't listen.”

A passing entity, with odd appendages that stick out every which way at angles, stops to laugh. “Kiss him on the neck.”

The Heir frowns. “No.”

“I wasn't gonna tell you to rip his throat out,” the thing says, reaching over to tap the Heir’s cheek with a sharp claw. It’s a knife, Karkat realizes, a blade with hinges for joints, intricate markings all over the flat metal.

“I think he’d appreciate keeping his throat seeing as he needs it,” the Heir says, “And I quite like his singing.”

The angled creature and the one with the cymbals look at each other as if to say, Hah, Bards. 

There’s a high-pitched sound from up ahead, resounding pleasantly all over the icy terrain. Both creatures turn towards it. Even Karkat harkens. It’s beautiful.

“Ah,” the Heir says, “Time to get back inside?”

The creature with the cymbal-hands clashes its instruments together. “Yes. See you later, -  ”

Karkat’s getting really sick and tired of never hearing this kid’s name. 

“He made that, you know,” the angle-thing says. Karkat takes a moment before he realizes he’s the one being addressed. 

“The Bard?” he asks.

“Yes,” it says. Then it flies off into the huge castle in the distance, made of ice and snow.

Karkat wonders what they even are, and what version of the game they’re even playing, if they were playing at all and this wasn’t horrorterror country. 

The Heir sneezes and sniffs. “They’re not human, obviously.”

“What are they?” He’s not even going to ask how the Heir had known what he was thinking. 

“Something,” the Heir says, “That you have no business knowing.” Then they grab Karkat’s arm and start pulling him through the knee-deep snow. Off in the distance, Karkat sees something that appears to have green leaves for hair flying towards the castle. He decides maybe he really has no business knowing these things.

“I get it, you know,” he says. “The Heir of Blood is evil and takes over sessions like the Condesce takes over planets. You stop him. I get it.”

“Do you, Karkat?” the Heir asks. They let him go and turn to face him. “Do you really?”

“Yeah,” he says, hugging his arms around himself, not out of the cold. “I get it.”

The Heir touches his hand, and their necklace pendant flares a bright blue. In the next blink, Karkat is standing outside the castle, and he tries not to fall over.

“Do you get it, Karkat?”

The Heir is pointing up to the top of the castle gates. The gates’ bars are made of ice, standing tall and proud over them both, and as Karkat raises his head to look at where the Heir is pointing, he notices the crusted blood on some of the bars.

And then he gags, and clutches at his stomach.

On the very top of one of the bars of the gate is Jack Noir’s head, impaled, brain matter and blood staining the ice red.

“Do you get it, Karkat?” the Heir asks again.

Karkat turns away from the gates and doesn’t say anything. 

He hears thunder rumble overhead. The Heir straightens and puts a hand on his shoulder. “We have to go.”

When he doesn’t answer, still trying to clear the image of an impaled head from his mind, the Heir shakes him. “Karkat, we have to go. You need to get out of here. You need to wake up. They’ve sounded the alarm already. This is not a good place to be anymore.”

“What is he?” Karkat asks. The thing earlier had said that the Heir of Blood had been birthed for a reason. The Heir of Doom is trying to tell him something without saying it outright, maybe to avoid catching the attention of things they shouldn’t be talking about, what with how the Heir of Blood had reacted when the Seer was showing him and his friends the vision of Skaia’s ‘death’. “What is he, Heir - ”

“Karkat.”

Karkat looks up. The Heir of Doom slaps a hand on his forehead, and his vision flickers and blackens out as his eyes roll to the back of his head.

“Wake up.”

He does. He wakes up in cold sweat, in his new room at Stark Tower, where the lights are off, and there’s nothing in the shadows, but he feels like he’s being watched anyway.

He falls back onto the mattress and huffs out a breath. Damn the Heir of Doom.

(coward) 

frqqhfwkhlusuhvxpswlyh.wxpeou.frp

vljqdwxuh flskhu: srobelxv

gr brx jhw lw gr brx jhw lw gr brx jhw lw gr brx j h w l w

HINTS

• The string of codes above are Caesar ciphers.
• The number code in /missing is a Polybius cipher, missing g.
• The number code in the title is also a Polybius cipher, missing g.
• The random words when you hit Bard, Mage and Knight aren't random at all! They're also ciphers. Namely, ciphers we'll be seeing from these characters as the story progresses.