arabesque

When she was little, Toriel wanted to be a ballerina. When she was very little. (Don’t laugh. It’s silly – it seems so silly now, but – don’t laugh).

There weren’t any ballerinas in the underground – they were a thing in old books that came down from the human world, and they were magic to her. She knew monsters who could breathe fire, monsters whose touch turned things to ice, but those girls in those floofy pink skirts, their delicate ankles, their perfectly bent wrists… They were foreign and lovely. It didn’t matter that the covers of the books were torn and the illustrations smeared from their travels, those girls shone out, perfect and neat and beautiful and so small.

But then she grew up and realised there were no ballerinas who looked like her, and that she had two left feet besides.