A Deathly Silence (RWBY/Drakengard 3)
ApocalypticFish
Been reflecting lately.
[X] Dead Worlds
Update 471 - Last Memory
Mortifer
Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed.
- Location
- Under a rock.
[X] Fate's Divergence
What was the colour of the sky? It was impossible to tell with the black clouds that choked the sun. The shadows shifted slowly, with the occasional burst when a winged Grimm passed through the sky.
The man underneath those shadows crawled forward, his bloody fingertips struggling to find purchase in the ash and glass. He could not see any sign of life in this wasteland, in this desert. This was a place forgotten by life. He alone lived in this place.
His throat was more than parched. He could not remember the last time he had water, nor the last time he had eaten. His Aura was intact, but all of it was focused to keeping his body operational. There was nothing left to shield his body or heal his bleeding wounds.
How long had it been since he had seen anything else? It was hard to tell when the sky was always black. He had tried once to feel the sunlight through the clouds, tried to judge by the shifting heat, but there were things other than the sunset that could change that. Some great beasts in the sky, including a great beast of the ocean that dwelled within the sea of clouds. And sometimes a heat that was not the sun.
The shadows grew harsher beneath his hand. He did not need to turn back to see why. He knew well enough.
"It's been a long time." The voice of the Dark spoke from behind him. "I don't suppose you've reconsidered yet?"
He didn't answer. He couldn't trust the Dark. Her words were honeyed and poison.
Footsteps echoed out. Something similar to heels, but not quite. The shadows distorted, flowing towards the force of the footsteps and reaching out towards her. The corpselike woman stepped in front of the man and looked down upon him.
She clicked her fingers. From within her black cloak, something fell and rolled forward. A waterskin, one that came to a stop in front of his face.
He couldn't help himself. He surged forward, biting through the skin and piercing the container. The water flowed into his mouth, and he suckled in a way he had not since he was a babe.
"Isn't that better?" The woman asked. "Drink, dear Dragon. Your Soul is too strong to die from mere hunger and thirst, but you'll find life much more comfortable if you indulge."
She was right. He hated to admit it, but she was right. Already, his Aura was spreading back through his body. The blood was peeling away from his hand, the worn-down skin healing over.
He kept suckling, even after the water stopped flowing freely. He tried to look for any last drop, anything he was missing. The flavourless liquid was the god's own ambrosia. Even when his body finally realised he was done, he could not make it move. He could only relish in the feeling of hydration.
"I don't suppose you've given up this needless defiance yet?" The woman of Dark asked him. "You've had your fun, but you are trying my patience."
If spite alone was all he could do to hurt the woman, then spite would be all he needed. He crawled forward once more, skewing his movement just enough to go around the woman.
Her dark cloak expanded, a wall to block his path.
"Humour me for a moment at least." The woman scolded. "I'm rather invested in you."
"Why?" It took the man to realise that he had said that out loud. That had merely been his own curiosity, and yet…
"Because you are a Dragon and a Human all at once." The woman smiled. "Both powers to defy fate at once."
The man waited, unmoving. If the woman would merely block his way, then he would simply have to wait for her to leave.
"Fate's a curious thing." The woman continued. "There is nobody writing it, but it is there to be read. Cause and effect on a level impossible to grasp- Except for the Watchers in the Red Sky."
Something about that title put a shiver down the man's spine.
"Your lover's Semblance was always going to draw me to her, to ensure her death. You would always follow me here to avenge her. And the moment you came here, you were always going to end up like this." The woman recounted. "This is 'Fate'."
The man tried to conjure hellfire from his maw, but the smoke petered out before it could pass his feet.
"Still furious?" The woman raised an eyebrow. "But I suppose, you always would be. That's fate too, in a way."
"But fate is not set in stone."
The woman stepped forward. The shadows behind her rose up and shaped, and when the woman leaned back she came to a rest in a throne.
"It's strange, but life seems spiteful to the idea that their future is decided by their past." The woman mused. "But of course, 'Life' was created that way. Dragons hear of their destiny and declare it beneath them, declare they will fly higher. Humans hear of their destiny and declare that they cannot submit, that they will fight for something better. Pride and Hope."
The woman laughed, too refined to be a google but too brief to be anything else. The man craned his head to get a better look at the smile on her face.
"But 'Changing Fate' and 'Improving Fate' are not one and the same." The woman continued. "I only found you because of the moment of fate's divergence. In another Branch, I never would have come after you. I never would have learnt of your lover."
"She would be alive right now, if not for you."
The hellfire came to him in a way it had not for years. It erupted from his lips like a curse, consuming his very body and soul as he shot upwards. Shadows shot through the heat and light, chaining his wrists and legs and binding him in place.
"Perhaps I misphrased that." The woman continued. "Shall I explain?"
He tried to spew hellfire. Despite the roaring flames, despite the sound of his furious heartbeat echoing in his skull, he could hear the woman's voice over all the noise.
"The Watchers whisper, eternally." The woman continued. "They Sing a Song, just for me. It's a sound you can only hear when embroiled in the Silence in a way only I am. But that Song fades from focus, until it changes."
No matter how much he struggled against his binds, he could not break free. Not with how weak his body had become.
"It was some years before I found you, that the Song began to change. 'She is Dead'!, they Sang. And I heard no more from them for some time. So I searched out of curiosity. I had my Grimm follow where their Song was loudest. I was led to two things."
"To you, and to the silver-eyed girl."
An image flashed through his mind. The young woman he had fought, with hair as white as snow and eyes as silver as a blade. Her Aura had burnt red when she had been hurt. He had punched her hard enough for blood to seep from her mouth, and she had set off a grenade to drive him off.
"I lost track of the girl at some point." The woman in the black throne mused. "I wonder where she is?"
Dead. Of course she was dead. He had made the memory into a brick for the Legacy, and it was red as blood.
…But then why did the woman speak as if she was still alive?
"The power to divert fate, to the point of creating a new Branch…" The woman spoke with a small amount of awe. "I want that power. Ergo, I will have it."
The man struggled. The binding around his left wrist snapped, and his fist shot forward. It closed around the corpse woman's neck and squeezed.
The darkness flowed over his fingertips, trapping his hand in place. The woman looked right at him as she sat, with his hand in her throat.
"Oh, stop that." She spoke as if his hand was not there. "I'm nearly done."
She flicked him on the forehead. HIs body recoiled, his arm shot back. His Aura crumbled, remaining intact only by a sliver.
"As I was saying." The corpse continued. "I want you. Because you are a Dragon and a Human at once. Because you were the one to divert fate, and I would keep you as a memento. Because you are powerful, and I would have use for your power."
"Because you are ██████. Nothing more. Nothing less."
Yang opened her eyes.
Her lungs were burning. It wasn't like they were in pain or like she was hurt. It was just… She felt like she had just run a marathon. There was a pressure on her back that was only just now fading.
Her head was spinning. She was too hurt, too distracted, to really start figuring out what she had just seen. The woman from the Dark had said a lot, and Yang only really understood part of it.
But the one thing that kept coming back to her was the mention of silver eyes.
Once again, she knew that Ruin's fight with Zero had mattered somehow. That one 'Killing' blow had been important, in a way that Yang had no real grasp on. Someone had died, but Zero was still alive. So whose death was being sung? Who had died that was so important that…
What did 'Branch' even mean?
The thought was cut short by a groan from Yang's side. She looked over to see the War Chief sitting up, awake in her hospital bed.
At some point, someone had forced the War Chief's unconscious body into a hospital gown. Now that she was sitting up, Yang could see there was… Something around her wrist. A monitor of sorts.
The girl looked around slowly. Even when Yang couldn't see her face, it was obvious that she was confused. Her eyes lingered over Ruby for a moment, on the other side of the room.
Then she looked to the side and say Yang.
"Hey." Yang waved. She regretted it immediately. That was too casual. That was wrong. Her father had just died, and she didn't even know it yet.
The War Chief took Yang's hand. Yang hadn't even noticed her leave her hospital bed, not with how she had winced immediately after speaking. "Are you well?"
"...As well as I can be." Yang admitted. She sighed. "Sorry. That was too casual. We… Have to talk."
"...I don't like the sound of your voice." The War Chief admitted. "What happened?"
…Yang needed to rip off the bandage. "Your father is dead."
The War Chief didn't respond.
"...We fought for a while." Yang continued. "I was hoping hitting him with some of your Memory Bricks would maybe make him stop. I knocked him out eventually, and then…"
Fuck. How was Yang even meant to explain-
Wait, no. She had this. The War Chief, more than anyone else, knew what Yang would be talking about.
"The Dark emerged once he was down." Yang explained. "Tried to swallow him up. I followed him in and spoke with the Dark. He woke up mid-conversation, heard the Dark talking about manipulating him. So he…"
Fuck, why was it so hard to say it? Yang swallowed the sudden hesitation. Maybe being indirect would help. "He ripped out his own heart."
"Ah."
The War Chief's response was… More measured than Yang would have expected. She sounded like she just found out that a door was stuck. But…
Yeah. Of course she was underreacting. How are you meant to react to that? How are you even meant to process that?
It took the War Chief a while to do anything else. She kept her head down, her hair blocking Yang's view of her face.
"I… I was hoping." The War Chief muttered. "I wanted to hope. That maybe if I fixed him, he'd go back to how he used to be. That my Semblance could make it all better."
"Hey." Yang tried to get her attention.
"Does my Semblance even work on memory?" The War Chief asked. "Would it have fixed him? Could I have learned how to restore his memory, if I really tried?"
"Hey." Yang was a bit more forceful this time. She grabbed the War Chief's shoulder and shook her once.
"Hey." The War Chief turned to Yang. Her eyes were choked in tears. "What am I supposed to do now?"
Yang's words caught in her throat. The pain in the War Chief's tears was all too familiar.
"Nobody ever told me what I'm supposed to do now." The War Chief answered. "When… When mum died, dad told me not to think about it. We buried her and then he said not to think about it until he came back. I don't know how I'm supposed to mourn."
Her breath was hitching as she spoke, but she was speaking too fast for Yang to interrupt.
"I… I think I thought he was dead a while ago." She continued. "But I couldn't… I had to keep waiting. Because I didn't know what to do if he was dead. If I could wait for him to come back, if I could maybe one day find dad, I could… I'd still have something."
"But now it's gone. I don't have anything now."
Yang pulled at the girl's shoulder. She fell on top of Yang, and Yang closed her arms around the younger girl. The War Chief tensed beneath Yang's grip.
"You've got me, don't you?"
The War Chief was stunned silent. It took her a few seconds to start trying to push away. "We don't know each other."
"We've fought together." Yang interrupted. "And I've seen your past, the thing that drives you. If we can't say we're friends after that, when can we?"
"I don't know you." The War Chief answered. "Not… That was supposed to come later. In the courtship."
"There's still time for you to get to know me." Yang answered. "And… The Legacy is still standing. And you're still standing. So it's too early to give up now."
The War Chief didn't respond. She felt warm, Yang noticed. Kinda like Yang was hugging an open flame? Except- Well, she didn't actually know if she'd hurt hugging a campfire, with her Aura being inclined for the heat the way it was.
"I… It's hard, I know." Yang spoke low. "I don't know how to put it into words that sound genuine. I don't think there's anything people could say that would convince me that they were genuine. But… Dad died. Mum died. Uncle Qrow died. A lot of people I know died. But I'm still here, and Ruby's still here, and we're still standing."
The War Chief was sniffling to herself. Yang couldn't see her face, but she could hear her muffled voice. At some point she stopped being silent, and started shouting. Yang held her in place, let her cry out her pain.
It was only as the muffled shouting subsided, as the girl fell silent, that Yang tried talking again.
"...He left something behind." Yang spoke quickly, tried to get it all out there. "Your dad, I mean. With his Dying Wish as a Dragon, he left behind some… Strange Memory Bricks."
The War Chief looked up. The space around her eyes were red, but Yang didn't comment on it. She looked over to the bricks, and saw the phrase on the top brick.
"For My Daughter…" She read out. "It's for me?"
The answer was obvious, so Yang didn't comment on it.
The girl stood slowly, approaching the Memory Bricks like they might bite her if she moved to fast. She was tense as she reached her hand towards the top brick. Yang watched as her hand hovered an inch away from it, hesitant.
"I…" The War Chief's breath could in her throat. "Help me. Please."
Yang took the War Chief's hand. It was only at that point that Yang noticed that her hand didn't have Ember Celica on it. Of course it had been removed when she was getting medical help.
"I'm with you." Yang promised.
The War Chief's hand came down onto the brick.
"My daughter."
Yang blinked.
This wasn't how the Memory Bricks worked.
The girl was sitting in a chair, some distance away from the main memory. There was a chair underneath her, but Yang couldn't see many details in it. Nor was there many details in the world around her.
But in front of her, Yang could see Ruin and the War Chief.
They were in… It looked like the War Chief's great feast hall, with the curtained off section at the end that Yang had never looked at with her own two eyes. There was a pair of thrones, one slightly larger than the other.
One looked to have a golden frame, with the legs of the chair made of different kinds of swords that had been impaled into the ground, and with a warhammer embedded in the back. The cushion was a bloody red. It was the grander of the two, and Yang could see the War Chief's spirit sitting in it. She looked just as confused as Yang.
The throne beside it was smaller, a step back. The cushions were plain black, the throne itself silver but less polished than the gold. There were no ornaments on it. It was the seat of someone who was meant to be secondary to the one in the main throne.
And as Yang watched, Ruin stood from the second throne.
"My daughter." Ruin spoke slowly. "I wish I could remember your name, even now."
"Dad..?" The War Chief looked to her father.
"This is just a memory." The man continued. "One built with a dying wish. The 'One who died' is only hoping that this memory holds enough. I prayed to tell the other girl of the greatest secrets I ever discovered about the woman in the darkness, and I prayed for the best farewell I could give you."
"...Is this a recording, or a simulation?" The girl asked. "Can you hear me?"
Ruin did not respond.
"...I thought not." The girl's head fell. "I couldn't even have that, could I?"
The recording of a man waited a moment longer before speaking again.
"I'm sorry."
The girl looked up at him at those words.
"I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough to win." He continued. "I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough to resist. In the end, when I was on the brink of death, I prayed to live. The one who lurked in the darkness used that prayer to bind me, tied me in a Pact when I wasn't aware of it, and shaped the cost of the Pact to obliterate my memory."
Yang could only see Ruin's face from the side, but he seemed crestfallen.
"I would have preferred to have died before I ever could have been a threat to you." The elder Dragon Faunus continued. "I'm sorry I could not do that."
He paused. The shadow of a man stepped closer, knelt down to be on eye-level with his seated daughter. "But it's not wrong to want to live, whatever the cost."
The War Chief looked up at the memory of her father. She didn't say a word, waiting.
"Live." Ruin told her. "If it means abandoning your pride and your past, live. If it means giving in to the demands of beings such as her, live. Don't look at my regret as reason to choose death. Live, whatever the cost."
"I can't." The girl choked. "I… How can you-"
"This is my selfish last request, for a daughter whose life I missed." The memory had no way of knowing the girl was speaking, so it spoke on. "I don't know how you are reacting to this request. Are you making the promise? Are you rejecting it entirely? I don't know. But…"
He stood up again and turned his back on the throne.
"...If you listen to these words. If you live, whatever the cost. And then you find something you value deeply enough to throw these words away anyway? …If you valued that which you are losing, then it was a life well lived."
Yang bit her tongue. This wasn't a place for her to talk. The War Chief had asked her to come to help her, but the memory had pushed her away. All she could do was watch.
The War Chief stood from her seat. She approached Ruin from behind, shifting his wing aside to step under it. She stood under his arm in a half-embrace, the wing behind her like a cloak.
"...When I was a child, I asked my Father what the purpose of the Legacy is." Ruin began a non-sequitur. "Why are we building the tower? For what reason are we trying to breach heaven? And he never answered me. It was something I had to discover on my own, he said. I think I figured it out before he died. I never got to ask him to confirm."
"...I think I know too." The War Chief spoke as if the memory was capable of hearing her.
Both she and the memory of Ruin spoke in unison. "There is no goal. The act of construction is the purpose."
The War Chief fell quiet, Yang could see a slight smile touch her lips. It was through tears, but it was there.
Ruin's memory kept speaking.
"Every brick is a memory of someone who lived a life of conflict." Ruin explained. "It's proof of the life they lived. They were strong enough in body and heart to fight, and to be remembered. But the brick is just a formality. By the time the fight is over, they've already changed the world in some way."
"It's honouring the work." The War Chief reworded the sentiment. "So how could the work be done for the purpose of honouring?"
"It'd be tragic to lose the Tower, of course." Ruin continued. "But if the Tower was destroyed, and you still lived, then your work was not for nothing."
The girl shifted the end of Ruin's wing, toying with it absent-mindedly.
"...Even if I could no remember you in the end, I was fighting for you in the end." Ruin explained. "Moreso than your mother. The moment the woman in the Dark threatened you, I was doomed to dedicate my life to opposing her. And when my memory was lost to me, the lie she gave me was that the one in the Tower had killed my lover and child."
The War Chief's eyes widened.
—"It was my love for you, even without memory, that drove me to the end."
The War Chief looked at her father. Yang didn't need to see her eyes to know she was crying.
Neither Dragon Faunus spoke for a long time. Yang waited, and then she started counting the seconds. One minute, then two.
A puff of smoke left Ruin's mouth. A moment passed, and the War Chief followed suit. Then in unison, they let out a burst of fire.
Somehow, the memory was calm enough that Yang couldn't feel any unwanted memories resurfacing.
The girl and the memory of her father let out small flashes of fire between breaths, forming a steady and slow rhythm. Just as the thought of it being a beat passed Yang's mind, both father and daughter started to sing in unison.
"Singing too-ral-li, oo-ral-li, addity."
"Singing too-ral-li, oo-ral-li, ay."
"Singing too-ral-li, oo-ral-li, addity."
"And I'll see you again, someday."
After each repetition, the two would fall into mere humming. The flashes of flame from their lips kept the steady pace, and at a consistent pace they returned to their chorus of nonsense.
The words didn't mean anything. But for the two singing, the words meant everything.
The War Chief would be just fine.
The young woman put her hand down, the pen resting loosely against her steel purlicue.
"You're going to stop it there?" The old man asked.
"There's nothing left to record there." The young woman answered. "Yang's going to listen to the War Chief until she passes out again, and the exhaustion in her soul is going to keep her in unconsciousness until long after she arrives in Mistral. Do we need the minutiae of the way she slips into unconsciousness?"
"I suppose not." The old man seemed distracted.
"What's on your mind?" The young woman asked.
"First the Hollander, now this." The old man responded. "She's growing bolder. She appeared in person, even. I suspect I may have to take drastic measures before it's too late."
"You don't mean-"
The man paused to pluck a journal from the table. An old record, long since observed and confirmed across multiple branches. "I don't see any other options."
"...I object to this, as reference." The girl muttered. "If this goes wrong…"
"...Then I will bear the sins myself." The old man completed the thought. "As I have with Babyl."
The two remained in silence for some time.
It took a full ten minutes for the young woman to break the silence "I will record in your absence."
"Do you know what needs to be done?" The old man asked.
"I believe there are three threads to observe before Yang awakens." The young woman confirmed. "Ruby's detour, which will take her to the truth of the Arc family. The current state of Yang's enemies. And with Ruin's death, now seems to be a good time to observe the koi waiting at the bottom of the waterfall."
"Very well." The old man turned away. "Be sure to include my meeting with-"
His words died on his tongue. Somewhere far away, the world clicked. Like two puzzle pieces fitting together.
"We've overlooked something." The old man realised.
The young woman was one step ahead. "Cinder Fall. The Vraal saw her, but she did not interfere. That feeling…"
There was no further need for words. The observers resumed their duty.
Like the last leaf of autumn on the first day of winter, the corpse stepped onto the soundless snow.
She observed the area momentarily. There were bricks littering the ground, building up the tower behind her. The corpse had orders not to lay a finger on those bricks, lest she be trapped in an unwilling memory. She stepped beyond them.
In the centre of the clearing was a casket made of stone. The corpse hovered over it, her hand at the cylinder sheath by her side. The sheath rotated until it clicked onto the option she wanted.
When the corpse drew her sword, it was the same brown-grey as the casket. The Earth Dust Blade. She placed her hand against the flat of the katana, and her Semblance resonated with the Dust. The element in her soul shifted into Earth as well.
She held her hand beneath her waist, her hand splayed with her palm upraised. As she rose that hand, the stone casket shifted. The corpse of the Dragon of Mistral rose with her hand. She continued until the body was resting atop of his tomb.
The sword was sheathed once more. The sheath rotated until it clicked Fire, and the woman drew a hot red blade. It singed her hand and left a black mark when she touched it, but the moment her Element shifted back to Fire the scorch mark healed over.
The oxygen in her lungs caught. Changing her element twice within such a small span of time was taking a lot out of her. In her prime, this would have been nothing. In a fight with adrenaline, she would be able to push through this easily. But in a moment of calm, pushing her Semblance too far would kill her just as surely as…
…Hm? Where was that thought going?
Irrelevant.
The corpse-woman swung the blade in the space above Ruin's corpse, a mere inch from his flesh. Two things followed her blade. The first was the cinders that fell from the blade, lighting the lesser corpse aflame.
The second was the glimpse of the true sky.
Ruin's body burnt, and the smoke floated upwards into the portal. The greater corpse sheathed her sword and watched. The flames burnt brighter with every passing second, until there was more flame than man on the casket before her.
The distant birdcry and the crackle of flames echoed through the corpse's ears. And then the fires faded, and there was nothing but smoke and cinder.
The corpse gestured upwards. Her Aura took ahold of the heat in those cinders, launching them into the red portal. The opening sealed shut, and the last remnants of the corpse were buried outside of this world.
The corpse turned away from the casket slowly. Her hand creeped down to the hilt of her blade. Her quickdraw was slower than it had used to be, and while she was able to flicker and cut her blade in a heartbeat, it took her a long second to click the blade back into its sheath.
Once the blade was sheathed, another portal opened. This time, it had another side. This time, someone stepped through.
"You kept me waiting." The woman who stepped through observed. "You know better than to keep me waiting, my Raven."
The corpse let her hand fall away from her blade as she looked upon her master.
Cinder Fall looked across the field of snow and bricks. She stepped through it slowly, the snow around her evaporating as she moved. The corpse stayed in place and waited, as Cinder settled upon a specific blood-red brick.
"Oh dear." Cinder sighed. "It seems I cannot use Erra's Semblance upon Ruin's lingering will. I wonder what could be keeping me from the body?"
For as fond as Raven's master was of sarcasm, she had a bad habit of laying it on thick.
The woman in the red dress sighed. She clicked her fingers in front of her, and cast a deep shadow behind her.
"Cinder." A stranger's voice spoke in the shadow. "Report."
"Of course." Cinder kept her back to the shadow. "It appears our enemy has foreseen my actions. I cannot find the Dragon's corpse."
"Is that so?" The shadow asked.
"It is vexing." Cinder continued. "I took the time out of my busy schedule to act as insurance to this scheme, but Yang Xiao Long must have been one step ahead of me."
"How strange." The shadow drawled. "She seemed to me at the point of unconsciousness."
"Then perhaps it was the Tiger Champion who outwitted us?" Cinder offered. "Ruin's body is not here, and Erra's Semblance is not working through his memory bricks."
"How unfortunate." The shadow sighed.
"I will look for some time longer, in case there is some other trick I cannot foresee." Cinder continued. "Perhaps the body is being kept in stasis."
"You aren't one to waste time." The shadow had no distinguishing features, but Raven could hear the raised eyebrow. "What is it you are planning, girl?"
"In truth?" Cinder put on a good show acting embarrassed. With her, talking with the shadow, that embarrassment came through as frustration. An edge of humiliation, one that was easy to mistake for genuine. "I'd rather not return to the sand today. I have been searching for a corpse buried in the dunes for too long. One day in the snow sounds like paradise."
The shadow made a short sound, somewhere between pleased and amused. "Very well. Do not contact me again until you find the corpse. If you do not bring me the Dragon of Mistral, I shall continue to delay healing your wounds."
"Of course." Cinder bowed her head obediently. The shadow fizzled out, and the flame in Cinder's hand died without her command.
Cinder kept her head bowed for a few moments longer. A short chuckle left her lips, followed by a bellowing laugh.
The corpse of Raven Branwen waited until her master turned to her once more.
"I wonder." Cinder drew out the words, her mirth still obvious in her words. "The woman who killed my predecessor, whose Semblance negated the healing of wounds…"
"I wonder where her corpse lies."
[X] Arc en Rouge
[X] A Gallery of Rogues
[X] Beneath The Waterfall
What was the colour of the sky? It was impossible to tell with the black clouds that choked the sun. The shadows shifted slowly, with the occasional burst when a winged Grimm passed through the sky.
The man underneath those shadows crawled forward, his bloody fingertips struggling to find purchase in the ash and glass. He could not see any sign of life in this wasteland, in this desert. This was a place forgotten by life. He alone lived in this place.
His throat was more than parched. He could not remember the last time he had water, nor the last time he had eaten. His Aura was intact, but all of it was focused to keeping his body operational. There was nothing left to shield his body or heal his bleeding wounds.
How long had it been since he had seen anything else? It was hard to tell when the sky was always black. He had tried once to feel the sunlight through the clouds, tried to judge by the shifting heat, but there were things other than the sunset that could change that. Some great beasts in the sky, including a great beast of the ocean that dwelled within the sea of clouds. And sometimes a heat that was not the sun.
The shadows grew harsher beneath his hand. He did not need to turn back to see why. He knew well enough.
"It's been a long time." The voice of the Dark spoke from behind him. "I don't suppose you've reconsidered yet?"
He didn't answer. He couldn't trust the Dark. Her words were honeyed and poison.
Footsteps echoed out. Something similar to heels, but not quite. The shadows distorted, flowing towards the force of the footsteps and reaching out towards her. The corpselike woman stepped in front of the man and looked down upon him.
She clicked her fingers. From within her black cloak, something fell and rolled forward. A waterskin, one that came to a stop in front of his face.
He couldn't help himself. He surged forward, biting through the skin and piercing the container. The water flowed into his mouth, and he suckled in a way he had not since he was a babe.
"Isn't that better?" The woman asked. "Drink, dear Dragon. Your Soul is too strong to die from mere hunger and thirst, but you'll find life much more comfortable if you indulge."
She was right. He hated to admit it, but she was right. Already, his Aura was spreading back through his body. The blood was peeling away from his hand, the worn-down skin healing over.
He kept suckling, even after the water stopped flowing freely. He tried to look for any last drop, anything he was missing. The flavourless liquid was the god's own ambrosia. Even when his body finally realised he was done, he could not make it move. He could only relish in the feeling of hydration.
"I don't suppose you've given up this needless defiance yet?" The woman of Dark asked him. "You've had your fun, but you are trying my patience."
If spite alone was all he could do to hurt the woman, then spite would be all he needed. He crawled forward once more, skewing his movement just enough to go around the woman.
Her dark cloak expanded, a wall to block his path.
"Humour me for a moment at least." The woman scolded. "I'm rather invested in you."
"Why?" It took the man to realise that he had said that out loud. That had merely been his own curiosity, and yet…
"Because you are a Dragon and a Human all at once." The woman smiled. "Both powers to defy fate at once."
The man waited, unmoving. If the woman would merely block his way, then he would simply have to wait for her to leave.
"Fate's a curious thing." The woman continued. "There is nobody writing it, but it is there to be read. Cause and effect on a level impossible to grasp- Except for the Watchers in the Red Sky."
Something about that title put a shiver down the man's spine.
"Your lover's Semblance was always going to draw me to her, to ensure her death. You would always follow me here to avenge her. And the moment you came here, you were always going to end up like this." The woman recounted. "This is 'Fate'."
The man tried to conjure hellfire from his maw, but the smoke petered out before it could pass his feet.
"Still furious?" The woman raised an eyebrow. "But I suppose, you always would be. That's fate too, in a way."
"But fate is not set in stone."
The woman stepped forward. The shadows behind her rose up and shaped, and when the woman leaned back she came to a rest in a throne.
"It's strange, but life seems spiteful to the idea that their future is decided by their past." The woman mused. "But of course, 'Life' was created that way. Dragons hear of their destiny and declare it beneath them, declare they will fly higher. Humans hear of their destiny and declare that they cannot submit, that they will fight for something better. Pride and Hope."
The woman laughed, too refined to be a google but too brief to be anything else. The man craned his head to get a better look at the smile on her face.
"But 'Changing Fate' and 'Improving Fate' are not one and the same." The woman continued. "I only found you because of the moment of fate's divergence. In another Branch, I never would have come after you. I never would have learnt of your lover."
"She would be alive right now, if not for you."
The hellfire came to him in a way it had not for years. It erupted from his lips like a curse, consuming his very body and soul as he shot upwards. Shadows shot through the heat and light, chaining his wrists and legs and binding him in place.
"Perhaps I misphrased that." The woman continued. "Shall I explain?"
He tried to spew hellfire. Despite the roaring flames, despite the sound of his furious heartbeat echoing in his skull, he could hear the woman's voice over all the noise.
"The Watchers whisper, eternally." The woman continued. "They Sing a Song, just for me. It's a sound you can only hear when embroiled in the Silence in a way only I am. But that Song fades from focus, until it changes."
No matter how much he struggled against his binds, he could not break free. Not with how weak his body had become.
"It was some years before I found you, that the Song began to change. 'She is Dead'!, they Sang. And I heard no more from them for some time. So I searched out of curiosity. I had my Grimm follow where their Song was loudest. I was led to two things."
"To you, and to the silver-eyed girl."
An image flashed through his mind. The young woman he had fought, with hair as white as snow and eyes as silver as a blade. Her Aura had burnt red when she had been hurt. He had punched her hard enough for blood to seep from her mouth, and she had set off a grenade to drive him off.
"I lost track of the girl at some point." The woman in the black throne mused. "I wonder where she is?"
Dead. Of course she was dead. He had made the memory into a brick for the Legacy, and it was red as blood.
…But then why did the woman speak as if she was still alive?
"The power to divert fate, to the point of creating a new Branch…" The woman spoke with a small amount of awe. "I want that power. Ergo, I will have it."
The man struggled. The binding around his left wrist snapped, and his fist shot forward. It closed around the corpse woman's neck and squeezed.
The darkness flowed over his fingertips, trapping his hand in place. The woman looked right at him as she sat, with his hand in her throat.
"Oh, stop that." She spoke as if his hand was not there. "I'm nearly done."
She flicked him on the forehead. HIs body recoiled, his arm shot back. His Aura crumbled, remaining intact only by a sliver.
"As I was saying." The corpse continued. "I want you. Because you are a Dragon and a Human at once. Because you were the one to divert fate, and I would keep you as a memento. Because you are powerful, and I would have use for your power."
"Because you are ██████. Nothing more. Nothing less."
Yang opened her eyes.
Her lungs were burning. It wasn't like they were in pain or like she was hurt. It was just… She felt like she had just run a marathon. There was a pressure on her back that was only just now fading.
Her head was spinning. She was too hurt, too distracted, to really start figuring out what she had just seen. The woman from the Dark had said a lot, and Yang only really understood part of it.
But the one thing that kept coming back to her was the mention of silver eyes.
Once again, she knew that Ruin's fight with Zero had mattered somehow. That one 'Killing' blow had been important, in a way that Yang had no real grasp on. Someone had died, but Zero was still alive. So whose death was being sung? Who had died that was so important that…
What did 'Branch' even mean?
The thought was cut short by a groan from Yang's side. She looked over to see the War Chief sitting up, awake in her hospital bed.
At some point, someone had forced the War Chief's unconscious body into a hospital gown. Now that she was sitting up, Yang could see there was… Something around her wrist. A monitor of sorts.
The girl looked around slowly. Even when Yang couldn't see her face, it was obvious that she was confused. Her eyes lingered over Ruby for a moment, on the other side of the room.
Then she looked to the side and say Yang.
"Hey." Yang waved. She regretted it immediately. That was too casual. That was wrong. Her father had just died, and she didn't even know it yet.
The War Chief took Yang's hand. Yang hadn't even noticed her leave her hospital bed, not with how she had winced immediately after speaking. "Are you well?"
"...As well as I can be." Yang admitted. She sighed. "Sorry. That was too casual. We… Have to talk."
"...I don't like the sound of your voice." The War Chief admitted. "What happened?"
…Yang needed to rip off the bandage. "Your father is dead."
The War Chief didn't respond.
"...We fought for a while." Yang continued. "I was hoping hitting him with some of your Memory Bricks would maybe make him stop. I knocked him out eventually, and then…"
Fuck. How was Yang even meant to explain-
Wait, no. She had this. The War Chief, more than anyone else, knew what Yang would be talking about.
"The Dark emerged once he was down." Yang explained. "Tried to swallow him up. I followed him in and spoke with the Dark. He woke up mid-conversation, heard the Dark talking about manipulating him. So he…"
Fuck, why was it so hard to say it? Yang swallowed the sudden hesitation. Maybe being indirect would help. "He ripped out his own heart."
"Ah."
The War Chief's response was… More measured than Yang would have expected. She sounded like she just found out that a door was stuck. But…
Yeah. Of course she was underreacting. How are you meant to react to that? How are you even meant to process that?
It took the War Chief a while to do anything else. She kept her head down, her hair blocking Yang's view of her face.
"I… I was hoping." The War Chief muttered. "I wanted to hope. That maybe if I fixed him, he'd go back to how he used to be. That my Semblance could make it all better."
"Hey." Yang tried to get her attention.
"Does my Semblance even work on memory?" The War Chief asked. "Would it have fixed him? Could I have learned how to restore his memory, if I really tried?"
"Hey." Yang was a bit more forceful this time. She grabbed the War Chief's shoulder and shook her once.
"Hey." The War Chief turned to Yang. Her eyes were choked in tears. "What am I supposed to do now?"
Yang's words caught in her throat. The pain in the War Chief's tears was all too familiar.
"Nobody ever told me what I'm supposed to do now." The War Chief answered. "When… When mum died, dad told me not to think about it. We buried her and then he said not to think about it until he came back. I don't know how I'm supposed to mourn."
Her breath was hitching as she spoke, but she was speaking too fast for Yang to interrupt.
"I… I think I thought he was dead a while ago." She continued. "But I couldn't… I had to keep waiting. Because I didn't know what to do if he was dead. If I could wait for him to come back, if I could maybe one day find dad, I could… I'd still have something."
"But now it's gone. I don't have anything now."
Yang pulled at the girl's shoulder. She fell on top of Yang, and Yang closed her arms around the younger girl. The War Chief tensed beneath Yang's grip.
"You've got me, don't you?"
The War Chief was stunned silent. It took her a few seconds to start trying to push away. "We don't know each other."
"We've fought together." Yang interrupted. "And I've seen your past, the thing that drives you. If we can't say we're friends after that, when can we?"
"I don't know you." The War Chief answered. "Not… That was supposed to come later. In the courtship."
"There's still time for you to get to know me." Yang answered. "And… The Legacy is still standing. And you're still standing. So it's too early to give up now."
The War Chief didn't respond. She felt warm, Yang noticed. Kinda like Yang was hugging an open flame? Except- Well, she didn't actually know if she'd hurt hugging a campfire, with her Aura being inclined for the heat the way it was.
"I… It's hard, I know." Yang spoke low. "I don't know how to put it into words that sound genuine. I don't think there's anything people could say that would convince me that they were genuine. But… Dad died. Mum died. Uncle Qrow died. A lot of people I know died. But I'm still here, and Ruby's still here, and we're still standing."
The War Chief was sniffling to herself. Yang couldn't see her face, but she could hear her muffled voice. At some point she stopped being silent, and started shouting. Yang held her in place, let her cry out her pain.
It was only as the muffled shouting subsided, as the girl fell silent, that Yang tried talking again.
"...He left something behind." Yang spoke quickly, tried to get it all out there. "Your dad, I mean. With his Dying Wish as a Dragon, he left behind some… Strange Memory Bricks."
The War Chief looked up. The space around her eyes were red, but Yang didn't comment on it. She looked over to the bricks, and saw the phrase on the top brick.
"For My Daughter…" She read out. "It's for me?"
The answer was obvious, so Yang didn't comment on it.
The girl stood slowly, approaching the Memory Bricks like they might bite her if she moved to fast. She was tense as she reached her hand towards the top brick. Yang watched as her hand hovered an inch away from it, hesitant.
"I…" The War Chief's breath could in her throat. "Help me. Please."
Yang took the War Chief's hand. It was only at that point that Yang noticed that her hand didn't have Ember Celica on it. Of course it had been removed when she was getting medical help.
"I'm with you." Yang promised.
The War Chief's hand came down onto the brick.
"My daughter."
Yang blinked.
This wasn't how the Memory Bricks worked.
The girl was sitting in a chair, some distance away from the main memory. There was a chair underneath her, but Yang couldn't see many details in it. Nor was there many details in the world around her.
But in front of her, Yang could see Ruin and the War Chief.
They were in… It looked like the War Chief's great feast hall, with the curtained off section at the end that Yang had never looked at with her own two eyes. There was a pair of thrones, one slightly larger than the other.
One looked to have a golden frame, with the legs of the chair made of different kinds of swords that had been impaled into the ground, and with a warhammer embedded in the back. The cushion was a bloody red. It was the grander of the two, and Yang could see the War Chief's spirit sitting in it. She looked just as confused as Yang.
The throne beside it was smaller, a step back. The cushions were plain black, the throne itself silver but less polished than the gold. There were no ornaments on it. It was the seat of someone who was meant to be secondary to the one in the main throne.
And as Yang watched, Ruin stood from the second throne.
"My daughter." Ruin spoke slowly. "I wish I could remember your name, even now."
"Dad..?" The War Chief looked to her father.
"This is just a memory." The man continued. "One built with a dying wish. The 'One who died' is only hoping that this memory holds enough. I prayed to tell the other girl of the greatest secrets I ever discovered about the woman in the darkness, and I prayed for the best farewell I could give you."
"...Is this a recording, or a simulation?" The girl asked. "Can you hear me?"
Ruin did not respond.
"...I thought not." The girl's head fell. "I couldn't even have that, could I?"
The recording of a man waited a moment longer before speaking again.
"I'm sorry."
The girl looked up at him at those words.
"I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough to win." He continued. "I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough to resist. In the end, when I was on the brink of death, I prayed to live. The one who lurked in the darkness used that prayer to bind me, tied me in a Pact when I wasn't aware of it, and shaped the cost of the Pact to obliterate my memory."
Yang could only see Ruin's face from the side, but he seemed crestfallen.
"I would have preferred to have died before I ever could have been a threat to you." The elder Dragon Faunus continued. "I'm sorry I could not do that."
He paused. The shadow of a man stepped closer, knelt down to be on eye-level with his seated daughter. "But it's not wrong to want to live, whatever the cost."
The War Chief looked up at the memory of her father. She didn't say a word, waiting.
"Live." Ruin told her. "If it means abandoning your pride and your past, live. If it means giving in to the demands of beings such as her, live. Don't look at my regret as reason to choose death. Live, whatever the cost."
"I can't." The girl choked. "I… How can you-"
"This is my selfish last request, for a daughter whose life I missed." The memory had no way of knowing the girl was speaking, so it spoke on. "I don't know how you are reacting to this request. Are you making the promise? Are you rejecting it entirely? I don't know. But…"
He stood up again and turned his back on the throne.
"...If you listen to these words. If you live, whatever the cost. And then you find something you value deeply enough to throw these words away anyway? …If you valued that which you are losing, then it was a life well lived."
Yang bit her tongue. This wasn't a place for her to talk. The War Chief had asked her to come to help her, but the memory had pushed her away. All she could do was watch.
The War Chief stood from her seat. She approached Ruin from behind, shifting his wing aside to step under it. She stood under his arm in a half-embrace, the wing behind her like a cloak.
"...When I was a child, I asked my Father what the purpose of the Legacy is." Ruin began a non-sequitur. "Why are we building the tower? For what reason are we trying to breach heaven? And he never answered me. It was something I had to discover on my own, he said. I think I figured it out before he died. I never got to ask him to confirm."
"...I think I know too." The War Chief spoke as if the memory was capable of hearing her.
Both she and the memory of Ruin spoke in unison. "There is no goal. The act of construction is the purpose."
The War Chief fell quiet, Yang could see a slight smile touch her lips. It was through tears, but it was there.
Ruin's memory kept speaking.
"Every brick is a memory of someone who lived a life of conflict." Ruin explained. "It's proof of the life they lived. They were strong enough in body and heart to fight, and to be remembered. But the brick is just a formality. By the time the fight is over, they've already changed the world in some way."
"It's honouring the work." The War Chief reworded the sentiment. "So how could the work be done for the purpose of honouring?"
"It'd be tragic to lose the Tower, of course." Ruin continued. "But if the Tower was destroyed, and you still lived, then your work was not for nothing."
The girl shifted the end of Ruin's wing, toying with it absent-mindedly.
"...Even if I could no remember you in the end, I was fighting for you in the end." Ruin explained. "Moreso than your mother. The moment the woman in the Dark threatened you, I was doomed to dedicate my life to opposing her. And when my memory was lost to me, the lie she gave me was that the one in the Tower had killed my lover and child."
The War Chief's eyes widened.
—"It was my love for you, even without memory, that drove me to the end."
The War Chief looked at her father. Yang didn't need to see her eyes to know she was crying.
Neither Dragon Faunus spoke for a long time. Yang waited, and then she started counting the seconds. One minute, then two.
A puff of smoke left Ruin's mouth. A moment passed, and the War Chief followed suit. Then in unison, they let out a burst of fire.
Somehow, the memory was calm enough that Yang couldn't feel any unwanted memories resurfacing.
The girl and the memory of her father let out small flashes of fire between breaths, forming a steady and slow rhythm. Just as the thought of it being a beat passed Yang's mind, both father and daughter started to sing in unison.
"Singing too-ral-li, oo-ral-li, addity."
"Singing too-ral-li, oo-ral-li, ay."
"Singing too-ral-li, oo-ral-li, addity."
"And I'll see you again, someday."
After each repetition, the two would fall into mere humming. The flashes of flame from their lips kept the steady pace, and at a consistent pace they returned to their chorus of nonsense.
The words didn't mean anything. But for the two singing, the words meant everything.
The War Chief would be just fine.
~~~~~
The young woman put her hand down, the pen resting loosely against her steel purlicue.
"You're going to stop it there?" The old man asked.
"There's nothing left to record there." The young woman answered. "Yang's going to listen to the War Chief until she passes out again, and the exhaustion in her soul is going to keep her in unconsciousness until long after she arrives in Mistral. Do we need the minutiae of the way she slips into unconsciousness?"
"I suppose not." The old man seemed distracted.
"What's on your mind?" The young woman asked.
"First the Hollander, now this." The old man responded. "She's growing bolder. She appeared in person, even. I suspect I may have to take drastic measures before it's too late."
"You don't mean-"
The man paused to pluck a journal from the table. An old record, long since observed and confirmed across multiple branches. "I don't see any other options."
"...I object to this, as reference." The girl muttered. "If this goes wrong…"
"...Then I will bear the sins myself." The old man completed the thought. "As I have with Babyl."
The two remained in silence for some time.
It took a full ten minutes for the young woman to break the silence "I will record in your absence."
"Do you know what needs to be done?" The old man asked.
"I believe there are three threads to observe before Yang awakens." The young woman confirmed. "Ruby's detour, which will take her to the truth of the Arc family. The current state of Yang's enemies. And with Ruin's death, now seems to be a good time to observe the koi waiting at the bottom of the waterfall."
"Very well." The old man turned away. "Be sure to include my meeting with-"
His words died on his tongue. Somewhere far away, the world clicked. Like two puzzle pieces fitting together.
"We've overlooked something." The old man realised.
The young woman was one step ahead. "Cinder Fall. The Vraal saw her, but she did not interfere. That feeling…"
There was no further need for words. The observers resumed their duty.
~~~~~
Like the last leaf of autumn on the first day of winter, the corpse stepped onto the soundless snow.
She observed the area momentarily. There were bricks littering the ground, building up the tower behind her. The corpse had orders not to lay a finger on those bricks, lest she be trapped in an unwilling memory. She stepped beyond them.
In the centre of the clearing was a casket made of stone. The corpse hovered over it, her hand at the cylinder sheath by her side. The sheath rotated until it clicked onto the option she wanted.
When the corpse drew her sword, it was the same brown-grey as the casket. The Earth Dust Blade. She placed her hand against the flat of the katana, and her Semblance resonated with the Dust. The element in her soul shifted into Earth as well.
She held her hand beneath her waist, her hand splayed with her palm upraised. As she rose that hand, the stone casket shifted. The corpse of the Dragon of Mistral rose with her hand. She continued until the body was resting atop of his tomb.
The sword was sheathed once more. The sheath rotated until it clicked Fire, and the woman drew a hot red blade. It singed her hand and left a black mark when she touched it, but the moment her Element shifted back to Fire the scorch mark healed over.
The oxygen in her lungs caught. Changing her element twice within such a small span of time was taking a lot out of her. In her prime, this would have been nothing. In a fight with adrenaline, she would be able to push through this easily. But in a moment of calm, pushing her Semblance too far would kill her just as surely as…
…Hm? Where was that thought going?
Irrelevant.
The corpse-woman swung the blade in the space above Ruin's corpse, a mere inch from his flesh. Two things followed her blade. The first was the cinders that fell from the blade, lighting the lesser corpse aflame.
The second was the glimpse of the true sky.
Ruin's body burnt, and the smoke floated upwards into the portal. The greater corpse sheathed her sword and watched. The flames burnt brighter with every passing second, until there was more flame than man on the casket before her.
The distant birdcry and the crackle of flames echoed through the corpse's ears. And then the fires faded, and there was nothing but smoke and cinder.
The corpse gestured upwards. Her Aura took ahold of the heat in those cinders, launching them into the red portal. The opening sealed shut, and the last remnants of the corpse were buried outside of this world.
The corpse turned away from the casket slowly. Her hand creeped down to the hilt of her blade. Her quickdraw was slower than it had used to be, and while she was able to flicker and cut her blade in a heartbeat, it took her a long second to click the blade back into its sheath.
Once the blade was sheathed, another portal opened. This time, it had another side. This time, someone stepped through.
"You kept me waiting." The woman who stepped through observed. "You know better than to keep me waiting, my Raven."
The corpse let her hand fall away from her blade as she looked upon her master.
Cinder Fall looked across the field of snow and bricks. She stepped through it slowly, the snow around her evaporating as she moved. The corpse stayed in place and waited, as Cinder settled upon a specific blood-red brick.
"Oh dear." Cinder sighed. "It seems I cannot use Erra's Semblance upon Ruin's lingering will. I wonder what could be keeping me from the body?"
For as fond as Raven's master was of sarcasm, she had a bad habit of laying it on thick.
The woman in the red dress sighed. She clicked her fingers in front of her, and cast a deep shadow behind her.
"Cinder." A stranger's voice spoke in the shadow. "Report."
"Of course." Cinder kept her back to the shadow. "It appears our enemy has foreseen my actions. I cannot find the Dragon's corpse."
"Is that so?" The shadow asked.
"It is vexing." Cinder continued. "I took the time out of my busy schedule to act as insurance to this scheme, but Yang Xiao Long must have been one step ahead of me."
"How strange." The shadow drawled. "She seemed to me at the point of unconsciousness."
"Then perhaps it was the Tiger Champion who outwitted us?" Cinder offered. "Ruin's body is not here, and Erra's Semblance is not working through his memory bricks."
"How unfortunate." The shadow sighed.
"I will look for some time longer, in case there is some other trick I cannot foresee." Cinder continued. "Perhaps the body is being kept in stasis."
"You aren't one to waste time." The shadow had no distinguishing features, but Raven could hear the raised eyebrow. "What is it you are planning, girl?"
"In truth?" Cinder put on a good show acting embarrassed. With her, talking with the shadow, that embarrassment came through as frustration. An edge of humiliation, one that was easy to mistake for genuine. "I'd rather not return to the sand today. I have been searching for a corpse buried in the dunes for too long. One day in the snow sounds like paradise."
The shadow made a short sound, somewhere between pleased and amused. "Very well. Do not contact me again until you find the corpse. If you do not bring me the Dragon of Mistral, I shall continue to delay healing your wounds."
"Of course." Cinder bowed her head obediently. The shadow fizzled out, and the flame in Cinder's hand died without her command.
Cinder kept her head bowed for a few moments longer. A short chuckle left her lips, followed by a bellowing laugh.
The corpse of Raven Branwen waited until her master turned to her once more.
"I wonder." Cinder drew out the words, her mirth still obvious in her words. "The woman who killed my predecessor, whose Semblance negated the healing of wounds…"
"I wonder where her corpse lies."
~~~~~
Which of the three interludes shall be recorded first?
[X] Arc en Rouge
[X] A Gallery of Rogues
[X] Beneath The Waterfall
Mortifer
Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed.
- Location
- Under a rock.
And with that, I'm done with this arc.
Gonna call another hiatus here for a while - Want to clear up some time in my schedule a bit in a way that consistent updates wouldn't let me do, and need time to make sure I'm prepared for the next arc. There's a lot of plates spinning for Mistral and I don't want to overlook anything.
Though this is the sort of interlude hiatus again where I'll work at these interludes when I have time and post them as long updates to try to make up for the wait.
In case it's not fully obvious: Arc en Rouge is the Ruby stuff to keep her promise to Jaune (With some extra stuff, this'll be where you get a glimpse at how Weiss is holding up for instance), Beneath The Waterfall is the Dragon stuff, and the Gallery of Rogues is gonna give you a quick glimpse at Yang's enemies.
Not gonna put a timer to how long this hiatus will be or how long it'll be between interludes, I'm gonna improvise a bit there.
But since I'm gonna be leaving the story off here for a bit, I'm curious and going to fish for comments here - How's the recent story stuff been, for you guys? Things you find interesting? Things you think I should take time to focus on a bit more? How many complaints about how long its taken to get to Mistral because dear god this trip took too long I wish I could post faster and had a better grasp of pacing it's been so long since the first step of the tournament arc
Gonna call another hiatus here for a while - Want to clear up some time in my schedule a bit in a way that consistent updates wouldn't let me do, and need time to make sure I'm prepared for the next arc. There's a lot of plates spinning for Mistral and I don't want to overlook anything.
Though this is the sort of interlude hiatus again where I'll work at these interludes when I have time and post them as long updates to try to make up for the wait.
In case it's not fully obvious: Arc en Rouge is the Ruby stuff to keep her promise to Jaune (With some extra stuff, this'll be where you get a glimpse at how Weiss is holding up for instance), Beneath The Waterfall is the Dragon stuff, and the Gallery of Rogues is gonna give you a quick glimpse at Yang's enemies.
Not gonna put a timer to how long this hiatus will be or how long it'll be between interludes, I'm gonna improvise a bit there.
But since I'm gonna be leaving the story off here for a bit, I'm curious and going to fish for comments here - How's the recent story stuff been, for you guys? Things you find interesting? Things you think I should take time to focus on a bit more? How many complaints about how long its taken to get to Mistral because dear god this trip took too long I wish I could post faster and had a better grasp of pacing it's been so long since the first step of the tournament arc
[X] A Gallery of Rogues
I wanna see what the villains are up to, we haven't seen some of them in a while
I wanna see what the villains are up to, we haven't seen some of them in a while
Takoe
Dad
- Location
- Xehafort
- Location
- Washington
[X] Beneath The Waterfall
Just catching up, I'm at 53 right now, but I had an important question. Is Mortifer secretly Yoko Taro? The suffering train never ends. Poor Pyrrha and even Blake for that matter, while Ruby Rose is the most obvious intoner ever, oh god this is going to end in fire. What exactly did I expect from a Drakengard 3 crossover, one even titled A Deathly Silence other than 90% of the cast dying horribly after immense suffering anyway?
I do wonder though, was initial character selection secretly a race selection, with Pyrrha as a cyborg, Ruby as an intoner, Yang as the most obvious dragon ever (Xiao Long, small dragon), and Blake as the mandatory normal human option?
I mean, some people hypothesized that Fargo (PMMM) and it's sequel was written by Stephen King, because it follows an oddly similar style of writing and word choice. It's my personal headcanon, anyway.
I do wonder though, was initial character selection secretly a race selection, with Pyrrha as a cyborg, Ruby as an intoner, Yang as the most obvious dragon ever (Xiao Long, small dragon), and Blake as the mandatory normal human option?
I mean, some people hypothesized that Fargo (PMMM) and it's sequel was written by Stephen King, because it follows an oddly similar style of writing and word choice. It's my personal headcanon, anyway.
Update 472 - Under The Waterfall
New
Mortifer
Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed.
- Location
- Under a rock.
[X] Beneath The Waterfall
The sterile halls were poison to the War Chief.
The clean steel was like a weapon being drawn from its sheath. If she let her eyes linger on it for too long, she would start anticipating the moment the steel was stained with blood and mud. Each reflection of light in the corner of her eye was the glint of a weapon. It was in essence the opposite of jumping at shadows, but the spirit of it remained.
The halls were small, far smaller than any Mistralian hall that the War Chief had been in. It might have just been the case that the War Chief had mostly entered buildings by breaking through the walls or the rooftop, but the walls around here felt like they were closing in. She had tried crafting her wings of light for comfort earlier, but they cut at the edges of the wall. The roof was far too low for her liking.
The War Chief had never realised how much she needed open air before. There were confined parts to her family hall, but they were transitory places she knew well, and never had to think about. Even if this was also a transitory hall, the War Chief had never been 'here' before.
She wasn't too sure where 'here' was.
It had been a few hours since Yang had briefly regained consciousness. A few hours of the War Chief alone with her thoughts. A doctor and an armed guard had been in shortly afterwards, and everything the War Chief knew was based on the description they had given.
While the War Chief was unconscious, she had been rescued by a Mistralian airship and then transferred to an Atlesian one. That description alone told the War Chief little. What she knew of the Kingdoms came almost entirely from Memory Bricks. The only thing she knew of Atlas was that it was far away, and the airships that came from there felt like coffins.
But this specific airship belonged to someone important. Somebody who wanted to speak to the War Chief now.
The warrior woman tried to focus on that. The one she was going to meet must have been akin to a warlord themselves. She knew that the one she was approaching was a leader, and commanded respect. And they held some authority over Yang, the one the War Chief was bound to by honour.
If only the War Chief knew more than that. It was hard to pick the right script when she lacked information. She'd just need to leave herself open to change tracks as she moved forward.
What were, in general, the likely points of this upcoming conversation? The first was that the one the War Chief would meet wanted merely to know about what had happened with her father. That would be difficult, but the War Chief had no secrets. She would speak honestly of them.
The second was that the conversation would be about Yang, and the War Chief's abduction of the woman. There was no malice in the act, but could the War Chief convince another of that? Moreover, what if the conversation turned to the War Chief's raids? She was a criminal, even if she had never acknowledged the government who had decided that.
There was a third possibility, but it was unlikely. Perhaps when the War Chief reached her destination, the one waiting for her would congratulate her for maintaining the Tower as well as she had, and reward her by helping her figure out how to approach her relationship with Yang. That would be a nice thought. The War Chief allowed herself to be optimistic, but then returned to the task at hand.
The War Chief was not good at speaking. She had walked into her first conversation with Yang with confidence and had quickly learnt that it was undeserved. The Memory Bricks only contained fragments of conversations around conflict, but they were the only thing the War Chief had to act off of. They had been the foundation to the scripts the War Chief had prepared for speech, alongside memories of her childhood that were weaker than they should have been.
Her ability to improvise was nonexistent. Her ability to act out her scripts was limited to the pre-existing circumstances that existed within the Bricks. Her only advantage was that she was Dragon, and she was strong. People had to respect her capacity for violence.
The War Chief did not feel as if she was capable of violence right now.
She had no intention of following that thought any longer. She clasped her hands together behind her back, right beneath where she would craft wings, and sang syllables without words. There was no way she could avoid thinking about what happened, so she wanted to think about it on her own terms.
That song brought her to a door on the top floor of the airship. She held her voice as she stood outside of it. It would be nice to prepare herself, but if she waited until she was ready she would be waiting for the end of time.
The War Chief raised her hand to knock on the door. A voice spoke from the inside before her knuckles could make contact.
"Enter."
The girl froze.
"There's no need to knock." The voice from within explained. "I heard you approaching."
A hearing Semblance?
The War Chief pushed the door open. It only occurred to her as she did so that every other door on the airship was automatic.
The room the War Chief entered into was rather large. She could see a collection of machinery folded against the wall which she couldn't even begin to guess at the point off. There was a lot of wide open space, and then there was a small desk at the centre of the room, and then there was a second even bigger space behind that desk. If the War Chief eyeballed the distance, she'd guess that this one room covered at least half of the top floor of the airship.
The desk itself was covered in holographic screens. Sitting behind the desk was a stoic-looking woman. She had white hair, white clothing, red eyes, and a numeral marking her forehead.
"War Chief." The woman's voice ran down the War Chief's spine, forcing it straight.
"That is I." The Dragon Faunus declared. "Behold, my-"
"Bound for the Bay, was it?" The woman interrupted.
The War Chief paused. "Excuse me?"
"The song you were singing as you climbed the stairs." The white-haired woman explained. "Too-ral-li oo-ral-li. That's Bound for the Bay, is it not?"
The War Chief struggled to adjust to the topic. "I am unsure of the name. It was something my mother taught me."
"I suspected as much." The woman continued. "The tune comes from a folk song of the Atlesian exports, when companies were forcing Faunus overseas for cheap labour. It only just predates the Great War. Too young for your own culture unless it was convergent evolution."
The War Chief moved her mouth a few times in unsuccessful attempts to speak. "You did not call me to this place to discuss a song, did you?"
"It sounded like it had some meaning to you." The woman with red eyes tilted her head. Those eyes demanded the War Chief's attention, held her head in place and forced her to meet that gaze.
"It does." The War Chief agreed. "But if that is your highest priority, I would like to return to Yang."
The white-haired woman swept her hand over a few holographic screens and pushed them away.
"Did Yang tell you who I was?" The woman asked.
"Yang was not able to tell me much about herself before we were interrupted." The War Chief explained. "And my memory is preoccupied."
She clicked a script into place. "Sing your epithets, oh muse."
The woman considered it for a moment.
"My name is One." The woman declared. "Second of the Intoners. Acting head of the Schnee Dust Corporation. Friend of Dragons."
One snapped her fingers, and the roof parted.
The War Chief felt a second of sunlight before a shadow passed over her. She looked upwards to see dark wings and black scales.
A Dragon true fell from the heavens and into the empty space behind One.
The War Chief could do nothing but gape.
"So this is the runt?" The Dragon stuck her head past the desk and sniffed. The War Chief was standing some distance away, but it mattered not to the lords of the sky.
Wings of light spread behind the War Chief.
"Oh sit down, young'un." The black Dragon opened her wings. A gust of wind caught the War Chief's wings and shattered them. "I'm not a dumb predator that'll see spread wings and get scared and think you're a giant."
"Be nice, Gabriella." One tidied her ruffled hair. The black Dragon pulled her wings back closer to her body.
The War Chief stood.
"A true Dragon." She mused. "I've never met one of your kind."
"I'd call you a Neet or whatever Five was yapping my ear off about last time we met." Gabriella mused. "But I guess you share that with the rest of my kind. Hard to run into each other when you claim a cave to be your castle and never leave it, huh?"
The War Chief had left her mountain home many times actually. She chose not to comment on that. Gabriella didn't fit into any of her scripts. She spoke freely, like a jester in the court of a King, but she demanded the awe of the sublime.
The warrior girl could feel her knee twitching as if ready to bend. But at the same time, her hand drifted close, the shadow of a fist.
Submit or fight back, fight back, climb-
"I suppose you should introduce yourself as well, even if I know who you are." One continued. "Rituals and traditions. People appreciate them."
Right. The War Chief clung onto that idea. She had a script for this.
The girl spread her arms and put fire in her voice. "Welcome to the Hall of the- Wait fuck no."
She wasn't in the Hall of the War God, wrong script.
Uh. Hm. Surely she had another one in her head? That was her only script for a peaceful hyping up…
Well, she could just pull out the speech she uses when she hypes herself up before a fight and then she just doesn't do the part where she jumps into violence. She should do that quickly, because the black Dragon was laughing at her.
"I am the War Chief." The girl declared. "Heritor of a timeless Legacy. Generations of blood and steel have culminated in I. I have claimed trophies of-"
"Fifteen Hunters, ranging from fresh recruits to seasoned Knights to a single Veteran of the Great War." One interrupted. "At least, as far as known and confirmed trophies. Those who can craft their own weapons will just replace it rather than reporting a humiliating defeat, often."
The wind was taken from the War Chief's sails once more.
"We have much to discuss." One decided. "About what happened, and what is going to happen."
The War Chief narrowed her eyes. "You gave me titles, but I still know you not. Who are you to Yang?"
"Yang is her own woman." One answered. "But her adopted sister is my niece by blood. I have reason to look after her, even if she was not so metaphysically important."
"Do you claim authority over her?" The War Chief asked.
"No suggestion I have for her future shall ever be made without her approval." The woman who described herself as Intoner promised. "I'm unsure what to make of you. You abducted her in battle, yet you care so much about her?"
The War Chief felt a weight in her throat.
"You seem unsure." One observed. "But I am afraid I must insist. From the reports I have obtained, I want to know everything I can about the situation."
That weight was not lightened, but the War Chief knew she had to speak regardless.
If this was truly someone Yang trusted, then the War Chief only had one path to stay close to her.
And so she spoke.
It was not an easy story to tell, but she told it as best she could. Everything from the moment Yang defeated her in the village to the moment the War Chief lost consciousness. She had wanted to hold her tongue on the nature of her Semblance, but she had no choice if she was to explain why she had fainted.
The woman in white and the black-scaled Dragon were silent until the War Chief finished speaking. That silence hung in the air once she was done, threatening to choke her if it was broken carelessly. It was like the paralysis of nightmares.
The War Chief couldn't bring herself to move even as the Intoner stood from her desk. She approached the War Chief at a measured pace, with confidence. Warrior instincts urged the girl to go for the throat, but the weight of her grief and the weight of silence bound her.
One stopped within arm's reach of the Dragon girl. "You've been through a lot, haven't you?"
Huh? What was that tone? It wasn't within the War Chief's expectations. It sounded…
Her thought was interrupted as the Intoner stepped forward once more. Her arms wrapped around the War Chief and pulled her closer. The Dragon Faunus was the taller of the two, but the unexpected pull swept her off her feet. Her head landed on One's shoulder, and the Intoner held her in an embrace.
"It was hard to recall it all, wasn't it?" The Intoner spoke softly. "I'm sorry I asked it of you. But you don't need to be strong if it's hard on you. You've done good work."
—"You should be proud."
Something inside of the War Chief broke. She cried.
Some part of the girl resented that. She had already shown weakness to Yang, and now she was showing weakness to a stranger?
But those words kept echoing in her mind.
She should be proud? Even though her father was dead, even though she'd only made things harder by trying to heal him, she had done good enough?
The War Chief couldn't help but cling to that praise.
She couldn't say how long she stood there crying. 'Stood' wasn't even an accurate word for it. She was held up by One's strength alone. The woman may have been short, but she had strength enough to be leaned on.
Eventually, as the tears began to dry themselves, a gloved hand tapped upon the War Chief's back.
"If you are able to, we need to discuss your future." The Intoner spoke softly. "Are you ready?"
The War Chief nodded into the Intoner's shoulder. She waited for a moment, then tried to stand.
Once the War Chief was no longer dependent on her to stay upright, the Intoner turned her back to return to her desk.
"Gross." The black-scaled Dragon snorted. "Listen girls, I'm not here for emotional support. If you wanna paint your nails and talk about cute boys or whatever, save it for when I'm-"
"I would never." The War Chief felt some of her fire return. "Why would I talk about boys when I have a lovely fiancee?"
…How did her fire come back to her that fast? She was still grieving, and now-
"I suppose we should start there." One mused. "You understand that I cannot allow you to claim Yang unless she consents?"
"Of course." The War Chief answered. "I haven't even begun courting rituals yet."
"I would recommend avoiding terms which imply an accord that doesn't exist." One advised. She watched the War Chief closely, then relaxed in her chair. "Now tell me. What do you think about the towns you've raided, War Chief?"
"They were battlefields and I won." The War Chief answered. She found herself watching One closely for a reaction, but the Intoner had none.
"You don't have any regrets?" One asked.
The warrior girl shifted in place. "...Should I?"
One pursed her lips. "I suppose not. It just complicates things."
"You're a criminal, girl." Gabriella declared. "One's trying to figure out how to circumvent justice for you, and you being unrepentant is makin' that harder."
"It's no concern." One spoke quickly, before the War Chief could interject. "It just means that putting you before a court would be complicated. I might need you to lay low until a crisis."
"What do you mean?" The War Chief asked.
One looked over to a hologram next to her desk. The Dragon spoke in her place.
"You humans have a shared delusion of justice." Gabriella explained. Something about her tone made the War Chief want to punch her. "A lotta people lost their homes because you went raiding, a lot of fear. If we send you with your self-declared lover and you end up in the public eye, people are gonna cry and scream and pretend they care about the victims."
The Dragon shifted her wings, stretching even as her body pressed deeper into the airship beneath her. "But if we hide you away until a crisis? Throw you at the White Fang or a big Grimm or whatever? Then you're a hero. Humanity likes a hero more than they like a victim, so nobody's gonna listen to any complaints against you once you help save the day."
The War Chief scowled. "Why don't I just duel anyone who has a problem with me being near Yang?"
"See that? That's why."
What did she even mean?
"If the two of you will calm down." One interrupted. "I think I have an understanding of what to do."
The War Chief stood to attention. The Dragon looked towards her lazily.
"This is depending on what Yang wants, when she awakens." One clarified. "But she carries the Power of Dragons within her. I was already hoping to ask you, Gabriella, to help her understand those powers."
"I don't like where this is going." The black-scaled Dragon muttered.
"There will be some time before the Strongest Under The Heavens Tournament begins anew." One observed. "I am hoping to leave the War Chief in your care until then, Gabriella, while you train Yang Xiao Long."
"I ain't no babysitter." Gabriella snorted.
"I do not ask this lightly." One stopped her. "You know what my ultimate intentions are."
That gave the Dragon pause. She mulled it over for a moment, then sighed. "I'll consider it."
"I don't understand." The War Chief interrupted. "What is the point of this?"
"My primary objective is keeping you out of the public eye." One explained. "If the Mistralian Government knows where you are, then someone could leak that information. The best place to keep you out of the way would be the mountain you came from, but that place is currently under active investigation."
One flicked a few of the holograms around.
"Once the Tournament begins, the Kingdom of Mistral will want to focus their force within the capital." One continued. "I'll take control of the operation at that time to permit your return. Until then, I wish to keep you with Gabriella."
The War Chief wasn't sure about a lot of what was being said here. What was this about the government investigating the Hall of the War God? Why should she submit herself to another before she was permitted to return home?
But the War Chief couldn't ignore how mere moments ago, she had been weeping into the Intoner's shoulder. The woman had given her enough comfort in that moment that the War Chief's instincts couldn't write her off as an enemy.
And…
"I have two questions." The girl began. "First. What is Yang's part in this?"
"It depends on her." One answered. "I imagine she'll want to be involved in some of the events in Mistral. There's a few people looking to reunite with her. But if she wants to train the Power of Dragons, she will need to train under Gabriella. The two of you will be together then. How often that is and how long the training lasts will depend on her."
That was good enough. But more importantly…
"That goal of yours." The War Chief continued. "It wouldn't happen to involve killing the bastard who took my father from me, would it?"
One remained silent for some time.
"The Dark hollowed out my father." The girl closed her fist. "Turned him into a weapon not just to kill me, but to spite him. My Father's final Memory was to ask me to live no matter what, but as long as the Dark is out there…"
What if the evil in the darkness came for her again, to spite her father even through death?
What if the War Chief turned down all help, but fell to temptation and pursued vengeance in spite of her father's wishes?
No, she couldn't let that happen. But she didn't know if she could stop herself. But if she wasn't the only one…
"I need more information before I can say for sure." The Intoner answered. For a half-second, the War Chief felt disappointed. "But what I have heard from you and from Six has been persuasive. If Yang's statement tells me what I'm expecting to hear, then your enemy and mine are one and the same."
The War Chief felt the edges of her lips twinge. "If you can promise me the Dark's head, I'll follow you."
The Intoner smiled. "I am glad to hear that, War Chief."
"I just want to be here when Yang's awake again." The War Chief continued. "Until then, I don't want to go anywhere."
"Of course." One nodded. "I would want to speak with her before I let you out of my sight regardless. You seem trustworthy, but I will not accept any risks when it comes to Yang Xiao Long."
…Well, that was fair enough. The War Chief bristled under the implication of untrust, but she bit her tongue. She could understand. In a world where not even your own father can be trusted to be an ally when he returns, the threat of treachery wasn't one to take lightly.
"My sight is metaphorical in this case." The woman in white clarified. "I would allow you privacy in a room I have set aside for guests. But before you leave, I would like to ask about those Memory Bricks you mentioned."
The War Chief raised an eyebrow. "Hm?"
"I will not touch the one your father addressed to you." One continued. "That is yours alone. But those other two Bricks have very particular labels. If your father was warning us of the dangers he encountered before he lost his memories, then I would like to observe his warnings."
The War Chief stiffened. Her muscles tensed, and her eyes darted from One to Gabriella rapidly. It took her a moment to realise what her instincts were doing. She did not know One enough. The thought of showing another the Memory Bricks when they were not Yang was…
"I will not force the issue." One interrupted the thought. She must have seen the way the War Chief reacted. "I simply believed that the information within those Bricks may prove decisive in our future planning. The enemies of mankind are many and strong. The sooner I can integrate that information into my counterplans, the more effective that information will be."
She was right, but…
One's expression softened. "Besides. I do not know if you are prepared to witness more of those Memories."
…Damn it, she was right.
The War Chief let out a long, drawn-out sound. It was somewhere between a sigh and a moan emotionally. "I don't want to give them to you."
One waited.
"...But I don't know if I can look at them." The War Chief forced herself to finish. "And if those Memories are important, then they should not be forgotten."
The Dragon Faunus steeled herself to meet the Intoner's gaze. "If you make me regret this, I will hunt you. But you may have them."
And the Intoner smiled in return. "I shall see to it that you do not regret it."
There was a half-moment of silence, just long enough for the War Chief to start wondering if she should ask if she could leave or if she should wait for One to dismiss her. But Gabriella shifted first, and drew attention to herself.
The War Chief turned to the Dragon as it opened its maw, ready to hear words.
The black-scale Dragon roared.
The sound was deafening. It echoed through the steel coffin and into the open sky above. The sound felt like it was pushing the War Chief back. The Intoner was unmoving, but her hair was billowing as if exposed to the wind.
Something within the War Chief sparked, and she roared back. It wasn't merely a roar from her throat, but from her heart. Flames danced from her maw without focus, and wings of light spread to the greatest size the War Chief could muster.
When Gabriella stopped roaring, so too did the War Chief. The Faunus's breath was laboured and pained, but she glared at the Dragon all the same.
"Just as I thought." Gabriella muttered. "Jeez, this is gonna be a headache."
"I'm afraid I don't speak roar." The Intoner kept a level voice as she fixed her hair, but the War Chief could sense annoyance from her. It wasn't in her face, but it was there. "Would you care to clarify your discovery?"
"I would like to know too." The War Chief muttered.
"Well I can't help it if you can't feel your own heart." The black Dragon came to rest on the ground once more, head resting to the left of One's desk. "Don't think it took much for you to get competitive with me, and I know your kind ain't getting past awe and fear that fast. Don't you feel it?"
Her words gave the War Chief pause. And from that pause, she felt something.
It was in her heartbeat, ringing in her ears. It was in the heat by her lips and in her lungs. Her horns were electric. There was a pressure on her soul, faint until she acknowledged it. Like a great weight of water breaking on her body.
"What…" The girl ran her fingers over her horns. "What is this?"
"The human-born Dragon of Mistral is dead." Gabriella answered. "Didn't lose the title to another Dragon, didn't reincarnate. The power was there, and now it's gone."
"I understand." One spoke. "The power needs an heir, and the War Chief is a candidate."
"She's a carp swimming at the bottom of a waterfall." Gabriella nodded. Her chin scraped a cut into the steel floor below. "The guy Yang beat to get the title had gone around beating up a bunch of other strong people with Dragon names to get our power. Probably a lot of carp in that pond looking for their chance to climb."
The War Chief looked at her hands.
Her father's power…
The power that the Dark coveted too.
"There are others who would claim it?" The War Chief asked. "Give me names. I will earn it or see it buried forevermore."
"You are not capable of it." One answered.
The War Chief raised an eyebrow. "Oh? And why is that?"
"Because if a name is enough to qualify, then I know of at least one candidate for the Power of Dragons." One answered. "And if Yang was capable of breaking your Aura, then you stand no chance of defeating him."
The man named Draigwyn was alone. His sword was light in his hand.
That was a curious thing. The man had been very particular about how the sword felt in his hand. He swung it at air experimentally and found that it swung no differently. He willed it to move, and he had to build momentum before it could be moved easily. He willed it to stop, and the weight made that difficult to do instantly, but it stopped.
Such was the nature of the sword Pendragon. It could not be moved thoughtlessly, and once it was moving he had to think to stop it. The metaphor added something to the sword. It felt lighter now, but it still took the same amount of effort to move. What a strange feeling.
The man swung his sword again. This time he struck a training dummy. He cleaved it in half as easily as he always did, but he could feel a difference that wasn't showing itself in any real way.
The man closed his eyes. He tried to reach for that feeling.
It fell upon him like a waterfall. An immense pressure, as if the sky was weighing down on him. Was his sword only lighter, because the rest of the world was heavier?
He focused on the weight of his sword. Whatever this phenomenon was, his sword was the first thing he had felt. He grasped that weight, tried to focus his entire mind upon it. But that was an impossible task. The more he focused on the lightness of his sword, the more he felt the pressure falling upon him. But so be it. He focused on that contrast.
He couldn't think too much about swinging his sword with how much attention he was paying to the contrast. But nobody reached his age in combat if they had to think to swing. The man let that instinct guide him. If his mind was consumed by the light sword and the heavy pressure, then where would his instincts take him?
The answer was rather peculiar. He didn't merely swing his sword. His Aura rippled and his Soul roared. His blade cut a vacuum of the wind, and his soul filled that vacuum. For a fraction of a second, the light bloomed through closed eyelids.
When that light faded, the man opened his eyes.
His Vacuum Blade technique had stages. At a base form, he could simply cut like he could in melee at range. He could enhance it with his Aura or with Dust to make it stronger. But his Sacred Vacuum Blade was the strongest he was capable of, and he had felt it in his instinct. If he had used it in the training room, then he would see a hole in the far wall.
The man opened his eyes, and the far wall was gone. He could look through it, deeper into the private hold he called home.
And if he looked left or right, he would see the same.
"What in the world?" He spoke aloud to himself.
"What indeed." Replied a deeply familiar voice.
The man spun around where he stood. He almost didn't need to. If it wasn't for the part of her that could change mid-sentence, he would have the woman behind him burnt into memory.
Morgan Gwynarian stood in the shadows, some distance away from the man.
"Arthur." She spoke his first name as if enchanting a spell. "I see you've already noticed."
"You know what this is?" Arthur Draigwyn asked. He slipped his sword Pendragon into its sheath, and clicked a switch to transform it. The mass redistributed itself as it interlocked with the sheath, the same machinery that permitted transforming weapons letting him ensure the blade was never drawn casually.
"I suspect you may know as well, and you simply lack information." Morgan answered. "The Council received word from the Intoner One. The Dragon of Mistral is dead."
That gave the man pause. "Truly?"
"She has yet to clarify the details." Morgan turned away. Her silver-grey hair fell neatly behind her back. Arthur made sure to observe the hue. Unless she had reason to deceive you, there was a lot you could tell from Morgan's hair. "The Hunters she borrowed for the rescue force have yet to report in. I came to inform you first not because it was easier, but to verify her word."
The woman approached the wall and ran a hand along it. "I suppose I have my answer."
"That's dangerous." Arthur clicked his tongue. How many Faunus in the White Fang bore traits that could become Dragon? How many carps, lizards, and others of their ilk?
"Indeed." Morgan mused. "I would daresay Mistral is the worst place for an absence of Dragons. We paint them in our emblems and on our shields. We carry the names. Even if power is a prerequisite, ours is a Kingdom filled with young dragons."
She paused, and then tilted her head back. She looked over her shoulder to stare at Arthur.
"Or were you thinking of the Faunus first?" She mused. "The White Fang are our enemy, after all. It's so easy to forget the dangers closer to home when there's an outsider to hate instead."
Her words struck true. There was far more than just the White Fang to worry about when it came to men becoming Dragons, but his thoughts had only concerned them. Arthur looked away.
"How difficult was it?" Morgan asked.
"Immensely." Arthur answered. "I would not be able to do it in battle. Not yet."
"A shame." Morgan mused. "You may want to change that. You're going to want that power very soon indeed, I suspect."
It was difficult to talk with Morgan. There were too many ways for Arthur to remember shame. His father's sin. His own ignorance and its consequences. The future that was to come.
"There's something else you want." Arthur changed the subject. "Else you wouldn't be here."
"Oh?" Morgan asked. "Are you not going to ask about how to control this power?"
"I've read much about it already." Arthur Draigwyn answered. He had sought the title of Dragon himself, once. It was before he knew it had power for certain, when it was a fairytale that he pursued for glory, but he knew of it. Words had power. Names had power. If you backed up that power through feats of strength, you became worthy of the power in that name.
The easiest path to ensure the Power of Dragons did not fall into the wrong hands was for Arthur to take it himself, he knew. Challenge the others in the Capital to duels to prove his own superiority, and then go on a pilgrimage to find any that remained. But he had sworn an oath when he had founded his own Order of Knights. His blade would not be swung without reason. Even if the Power of Dragons was reason enough, it would draw eyes if Arthur suddenly started challenging his countrymen to duels.
"I will consider who is worthy of the power and who is not." Arthur decided. "And I shall decide how to act once that has been decided. This may be a matter for all of my Knights, and not just me."
Morgan closed her eyes and turned away again. "So be it. You're right, of course. I was preparing to speak with you before the Intoner contacted the Council's office."
Arthur waited for her to continue.
"My child has had enough of cursing her own weakness." Morgan decided. "She is demanding power herself. If I do not give some to her soon, she will not wait for me."
This was about Mordred? "Do you want me to speak with her again?"
"I cannot risk it." Morgan refuted the idea. "With this many eyes on Mistral, moving that child near the Capital would be dangerous."
The witch's hair shifted as she turned back to Arthur. For a second in transit, as the light from the damaged wall fell over her hair, it looked almost gold.
"Tell me, Arthur." She addressed her fellow Councillor. "Do you know of any Pact Beasts of note?"
The question was met with a long silence.
The first thought Arthur had was to question Morgan on why she was asking him. Surely, she knew a greater number. But then he considered that she may be considering her options, and his next few thoughts were of answers. The Living Steel, if you want something she can control. If you want raw power, perhaps a true wyvern. An Undine or a Salamander wouldn't suffice. Even if she's pure enough for it, the Unicorn is too powerful to-
Those were all the thoughts of the split second he had hearing the question. Then his mind processed the question enough to place it in context, and he stilled.
"Mordred? A Pact?" Arthur asked. "Are you really willing to risk it?"
Morgan raised an eyebrow. The fleeting gold in her hair had faded, returning to a steady silver-white.
"Don't pretend you don't know." Arthur frowned. "You've gone through great lengths to hide your secrets. Are you going to let Mordred discover that one so easily?"
Morgan considered her words carefully. "There are Intoners in Mistral. The White Fang grows impatient. It is far too late to worry about my silly little secrets."
Arthur raised an eyebrow in turn. "Does that mean you're going to tell her about M-"
A hand closed around his throat. Arthur choked on his words and under that hand.
Before him, his companion looked on in fury. Crimson fell from her head like an inferno, like the fire in her eyes as she glared at him.
Arthur didn't try to resist. It would just make her angrier. A few seconds of submission were enough for the crimson to partially recede, and for the woman to let go of his throat. The Knight fell to his knees, rubbing a space that would have bruised had he not had Aura.
"You forget yourself." The woman spat out.
"I do." Arthur admitted. "I overstepped."
The woman had no argument to that. She paused for a moment, long enough for Arthur to see that the only speck of red left was a single strand hidden behind her ear.
"The Living Steel would be my recommendation." Arthur concluded, between laborious breaths. "Unless you have a better idea for one she could sneak into a City-"
The end of his sentence went unheard. The woman had heard enough, and was moving to leave.
"Wait!" Arthur called. This was not an ending he was willing to accept. Enough conversations had ended between the two of them with anger and bitterness. He wanted it to continue at least a little longer. "Are you sure about this? The path you have chosen?"
The woman stilled for a long time, long enough for that last fleeting crimson to fade from her hair. Morgan turned back to him with tired eyes.
"You speak of my goals once again, as if I have not told you before." There was no anger in that thought. The woman was simply resigned to her fate. She brushed hair out of her eyes as she spoke. "And I will say what I have told you before. If you have any objections to how I act, you may act against me. Reveal my goals to the Council and reclaim your honour. But do not forget."
She stepped forward once. Her gaze was ironcast.
"This is already a compromise." She intoned. "If you take that from me, then the consequences are on your head."
The City of Mistral was built between mountains, natural barriers against the unnatural threats of the Grimm. Or rather, the seed that was the heart of Mistral was built between mountains. Humanity grew as kudzu across and beyond those mountains.
Where Mistral was seeded was a metropolis. As you walked towards the mountains, the surface grew progressively more barren. But that was merely the surface. The mountains had been the homes of nobility once, hollowed out to build fortresses and serfs living upon the hillside. The grip of nobility had faded over time, and some families didn't survive the Great War. Their holdings had become public land, clusters or urban and suburban life.
The land around the mountains was similarly a contrast. If you were to walk from the heart to the coast, you would find a second metropolis built around a cove. Those who travelled by boat would find the best the Kingdom had to offer the moment they stepped onto shore. As you strayed away from the coast and circled the mountain, you'd find farmland and forest and very little housing.
And at the exact opposite end from the coast was the rain shadow. It was not a desert, but the grasslands were dry. Controlled burns were a necessity, lest a stray fire consume an entire region.
It was in the rain shadow that a girl stood alone.
There was a weight on the girl's back. A pressure washing down on her, breaking upon her. It was an electric feeling, one that made the girl alert. She was almost paranoid, with how her body urged her to eye every shadow. And yet that electric feeling was almost euphoric.
She didn't need to question what it was. She knew what it was as well as she knew the sun in her eyes.
"Talk about bad timing." She muttered aloud to herself. She looked out the window to see the start of the rising sun. "A bit hard to apply the scientific method now, isn't it?"
Her Scroll was on a bench nearby, positioned atop of a paper towel that was itself placed upon an old water stain. She opened the Scroll to double check her plan for the day, then folded it away and hid it in a pouch on her waist.
"It's too late to cancel that variable change." She continued. "And now we've got another? If it works this time, I'm not going to know what it is."
She paused, then looked over her shoulder. Behind the head of her bed was a chest locked with chains.
"...Well, I suppose I may as well go all-in."
It took her a moment to grasp the chain, tug on it to pull the chest free. A moment longer to pull the chains aside without breaking them. The lock on the chest was already broken, after all. She pulled it open and reached for the treasure inside.
A pair of bracers, coloured bright crimson. She slipped them on until they were snug, and then straightened her left arm. Her right hand closed upon the bracer and pumped, activating the transformation and covering her outer elbow in steel. Her thumb scratched the inside of her elbow in the process inadvertently. She repeated the process on the other side, taking a moment to scratch her inner-elbow for symmetry.
The hooded jacket she put on had long enough sleeves to cover the bracers, as well as her head. Her medical mask quickly followed. The hood mussed her hair, but that was no matter to her.
The disguise was important, the girl reminded herself. She didn't want people bothering her. As barren as the rain shadow was, it was not empty. The girl lived in a cheap apartment in a big street, parallel to a river that came from the mountains. The girl's destination was at that mountain, where the river was a waterfall. The land had been developed there as well, a township with a grocery, a police station and a Hunter's outpost.
This more isolated street was one thing. It was out of the way, built in the ruins of a bombing in the War. Anyone here would recognise the girl, but they'd leave her be if they saw the determination in her step. But she couldn't guarantee that it would only be locals here, and there would definitely be tourists in the township by the base of the mountain.
And that's why the girl needed a disguise. If a tourist saw her, they'd think her a delinquent or a moody teenager. Nobody would think she was someone worth talking to.
Nobody would know that she was representing Mistral, for the Strongest Under The Heavens.
Maybe the girl could get away with it. The other three representations for Mistral were a lot more impactful. Taiga Takeda, currently the most famous tournament fighter in Mistral. A Ghost Warrior, who's anonymity on his identity made him an anomaly. The Reaper.
And then there was the girl. Little Liyu Long Men. She was young, closer in age to the champions from Vale than the others from Mistral. She wasn't a known tournament fighter, she wasn't repping a known movement, and she wasn't a legend.
Not yet, at least.
But no, she was still from the tournament. People would know her face, might recognise her form. An ill-fitting hoodie that hung loose on her form and baggy tracksuit pants went a long way to preventing that.
It was a long walk to the waterfall.
The area around it was a bit courtyard, lined by stone gardens and zen statues. The waterfall itself was a curious thing. The rock formation on the mountainside above formed in a strange way, with something like a slope upwards but with a thin slit in the rocks letting some water in. The end result was that there was a big, loud waterfall that fell heavy against the river beneath, but also a smaller, calmer waterfall a metre or so behind it, hugging close to the wall.
In that metre of space was a curiously calm span of water. It was a lot shallower than the rest of the river, like less land had eroded beneath it or however rivers worked. People treated that metre of empty space like a wishing fountain, throwing old coins into the water for good luck.
Wasn't like too many places still accepted coin lien anyway, these days. Not when lien cards were so much more resilient, not when Scrolls could transfer carelessly anyway.
"Used to come down here all the time, y'know." Liyu said out loud. "Waterfalls were always good for meditating under. The calm one, at least."
There were footsteps behind her. Liyu's ears twitched as she tried to identify how many sets of feet.
"Tried meditating under the rapids once." Liyu continued. "I was like eight. The water kicked my ass. The Hunter on duty pulled me out of the river and spent an hour hammering in how close I was to drowning afterwards."
The footsteps drew closer slowly. They were fanning out, circling around her.
"Haven't tried it since." The girl clicked her tongue. "Don't really feel the need to. I'm too busy with metaphorical waterfalls, these days. And I'm not satisfied sitting under them anymore."
The footsteps finally stopped. Liyu pulled back her hood, letting dark hair fall as she turned back to face her guests.
Four humans, two Faunus. Even split on male to female. Sword, sword and shield, bo staff, nunchaku, sword and handgun, bare fists. Six people itching for a fight.
"Can I help you?" Liyu asked.
The one holding a sword and handgun stepped forward. Human, female. "You've pissed someone off, girl. Someone wanted you humbled so bad, they're burning thousands placing a hit, first-come first-served. Someone wants to see you beat, and they don't care who does it."
And who had answered that hit? The attackers wore basic balaclava's, but no masks. Definitely not a White Fang Mask, so it wasn't them. There were Faunus among them, so that ruled out the Coinguard and a dozen other groups beside. If the Students of the Fourth were answering the call for a beating, there'd only be one of them. That one in particular was disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. This hit had been non-lethal, after all.
Likely not a big name as far as gangs went. Could just be delinquents who wanted a paycheck, for all Liyu knew.
She turned her back on them, looked back to the waterfalls.
"Don't think you can win a one-on-six just because you were in a tourney." The woman at the lead of the pack sneered.
"I wouldn't consider the tournament showing I had all that impressive, true." Liyu conceded. "I fell short again. I climbed higher than I ever had before, but I got swept away before I got there."
The footsteps resumed. The gang were circling her again, this time for tactical advantage rather than intimidation.
"I went in with nothing but my fists and my soul, and it wasn't enough." She continued. "It wasn't that it was too easy, it was that I didn't bring enough. So I'm thinking-"
Somebody charged. Liyu didn't look back to see who. She raised her arm and cocked her elbow.
"...Maybe my mistake was going unarmed."
From the back of her elbow, the shotgun fired.
There were loud cries from behind Liyu. Swearing. The sound of the pellets ripping through Liyu's jacket, and then striking weapons and striking Aura. Then it was all lost to the rush of wind in her ears.
The shotgun was designed for movement first and combat second, in all honesty. Liyu had to brace herself to stand still when firing. If she wanted to fire to open an ambush, she didn't get to brace herself the way she needed to. The shot threw her forward.
She collided with the waterfall.
It was a rush of thunderous might against her back. An intense passion trying to crush her. But the pressure was nothing compared to the mysterious force falling upon her. For one thing, the waterfall was temporary. It washed her into the river beneath.
Liyu had learnt from her near-drowning as a child. She kicked against the ground, and a touch of Semblance helped the process along. She shot out of the river, and landed on the concrete above. One of her attackers had moved to peer into the river, and Liyu kicked him in before he could react.
Her hair was ticking close to her skin. She raised her hand to her forehead to slick back what hair was there. Not as stylised as she'd like, but good enough.
"We're humans." Liyu let a grin split her face. "And I'd forgotten what that meant."
The woman with the nunchaku ran forward. Liyu fired the shotgun on her left arm to fling herself forward, and positioned her right arm near a right angle. When she fired that weapon, she launched herself up to bury her fist in the woman's cheek.
Adrenaline rushed through Liyu's veins.While the airborne woman was distracted, Liyu spun in the air to kick the woman into the river as well. She landed on the concrete a second before the woman landed with a splash.
"We're not animals who fight without tools." Liyu continued. "We are more than the flesh and soul. When we fight, we fight with steel!"
Liyu ripped off what was left of her jacket. It had been torn apart by the first shotgun shot, and she had fired twice more since then. It was easy to cast it aside.
The skin underneath was painted in ink. The full image was partially obscured by the bandages she wrapped around her chest, but there was no denying what it was. A complex tattoo, depicting an ornate mountainside framing a waterfall.
And at the base of it all, a small red carp.
Liyu cocked the crimson shotguns that closed around her arms.
"No more holding back!" She declared. "If I am to climb, then I fight with everything!"
The remaining four fighters attacked all at once. A gunshot echoed out, and Liyu tilted her head to the side to avoid the bullet. She stood still, waited for her enemies to come to her. The bo staff had the most reach, so it was the first weapon to fall upon her.
Liyu caught the staff, then fired the shotgun on that arm. The sudden jerk ripped the weapon free from her opponent's grip, and Liyu threw it backwards without looking. Then she rushed forward, and struck her fist into a steel shield.
Rare to see shields these days.
The blow sent the shield bearer backwards, their feet digging into the concrete as they were pushed back. Liyu turned her attention away just in time to parry a fist before it caught her nose.
And for a moment, Liyu let herself play with fisticuffs. Her opponent was punching fast, and Liyu could feel the power behind each of those blows. Liyu parried by pushing her open palm against the arms and fists to push them away, make them just barely miss. And as she fought, she let her body sway.
The element in her Aura was charging up. The moisture in the air was rising around her, as was the temperature. She swayed and parried, and she felt the faint disturbances in the air slowly take a more apparent form. She shifted in place, and left white vapour behind in her wake.
And then she struck forward.
She didn't get a chance to see how well she had hit the man's Aura. Another gunshot echoed out, so Liyu fired the shotgun on her right arm to move. The pellets struck at someone trying to sneak up on her, and she launched forward with enough speed to clothesline her stationary opponent.
As she moved, she looked to the side to spot the gunslinger. Sword-and-gun was strafing, trying to cover their friend as they recovered the bo staff that Liyu had thrown aside. Liyu fired her left arm's shotgun to redirect her momentum and surged towards them.
She was trying to reach for the handgun, but the distance was too great. Sword-and-gun had time to move their hand away. Liyu settled for the sword instead, closing her palms around the flats of the blade and using that grip to disarm her opponent. Now they were none-and-gun.
She spun and flung the sword towards sword-and-shield. They raised the shield to prevent the hilt from striking their head, but it left them open for Liyu to charge in low. She swept her leg and tripped up sword-and-shield, and that gave her purchase to rip the shield from their grasp too.
Flesh, soul and steel. Those were the three weapons of humanity in war. You couldn't break the flesh without breaking the soul, and the battle was over once the soul was broken. If you wanted to weaken an enemy you couldn't outright beat, you needed to take their steel from them.
Couldn't do that with the unarmed warrior. They were charging at Liyu again. She threw the shield at them like a frisbee, and they just caught the shield and threw it back. Liyu knocked it away and stepped towards this opponent. The first first came flying at her, and Liyu ducked under it.
A cloud of vapour formed around her, heavier and heavier by the moment. Liyu kicked forward before her opponent could turn to face her. A gunshot echoed out and parted the vapour, and Liyu had to fire her shotguns at an angle to jump back in time to dodge it.
"Enough of this!" The swordsman without a shield shouted while standing. He flicked the hand holding the sword, and both flesh and steel were coated in thunder. He raised his sword to point it at Liyu, and lightning struck towards her.
Her body swayed, and the heavy cloud of vapour caught the lightning. It bent around her, following the curve of her torso before blasting off towards the one with the gun-
Who was also cloaked in lightning.
It didn't suit them. Liyu could see their Aura clashing against the electric power they held. And they were pointing one hand at the swordsman while pointing the gun at Liyu. A copycat?
The projectile that they launched was exactly the same as the one the swordsman had fired, and the projectile Liyu had deflected into them was enough to break their Aura and send them into the ground. The second projectile was also caught in Liyu's afterimage as she swayed, and she launched it towards the one with the bo staff.
The unarmed warrior was closing in on Liyu again. The young girl looked towards him, but all of a sudden he felt too distant for her to acknowledge.
That euphoric sensation had never faded. The heavy pressure, that electric joy. The complicating factor in Liyu's little science experiment. But it was growing more and more, the sound of water breaking suddenly deafening in her ear. That roar had never felt so close, the sky above the waterfall-
A fist struck Liyu in the cheek. She was broken out of her delusion by the pain. Her Aura rippled, and the blow knocked the heavy vapour out of her cycle. It solidified as it fell away from her, painting the ground behind her as it became liquid.
But her flesh did not move.
Liyu Long Men struck as an ambush hunter. Sudden, unstoppable, and lethal. Metaphorically speaking. The swordsman clutched the throat where he had been struck even as his Aura broke. Liyu stepped behind him and struck him in the back of the head.
The one with the bo staff was trying to stand again after being struck with lightning. Liyu let them be, for the time being. She turned instead to the swordsman, who flinched back as she turned her gaze upon them.
Her body moved as rhapsody. The swordsman kept trying to launch lightning at her, but the sway of her flesh and the afterimage of her soul threw each bolt to the heavens. The steel on her arms fired, and she fell upon her prey.
The swordsman's aura was thick. Too often, groups like this consisted of people who had too little Aura to keep Liyu entertained. The swordsman endured the blow without breaking their Aura, but they stumbled.
And so Liyu struck again, and again, and again. A flurry of fists that may look like mindless flaying to an outsider. Her punches were not full power at this speed, but they were strong enough to keep her opponent disorientated.
Strike again and again and let that delusion fall over her again, let the vision fill her thoughts and strike and strike again. Let her flesh be violence and her soul be delusion. Two of the three.
An instinct urged her to pull the trigger. Her shotgun fired aimlessly behind her, propelling her fist forward. Flesh, soul and steel.
With a great roar, the vapour around her fist contorted and roared. There was a blinding light at the moment of impact. For a single glorious moment, her form was perfect.
Her heart, and the swordsman's body, was flying.
And then there was one.
What did the bo staff wielder see, when Liyu Long Men looked back? With the power of her Aura so heavy that it distorted her silhouette, with her rapture distorting her lips painfully into a grin? When the last foe standing stared in shock, were they staring at an overwhelming champion? A deadly enemy? Or a wretched horror?
Liyu liked that third idea. She cradled the thought close to her heart.
She met eyes with the bo staff wielder, and they weren't able to bring themselves to look away.
"Boo."
The staff user recoiled so hard that they fell to the ground. They didn't move again after that. Liyu hadn't seen their Aura break, but they sure looked unconscious…
Liyu stepped away. Didn't matter. The fight was done. That thought felt like pulling a rug out from under her own feet, like a gaping pit in her stomach, and she didn't want to unpack that in public. She didn't have any more reason to stay here-
"Going somewhere?"
Liyu froze. Shit. She knew that voice.
Liyu turned around. A shadow was standing over her, a warrior in black. He was unarmed, but she could see the over-engineered blade on his back. There was a corkscrew shape just past the holster, before the rest disappeared behind the shadow.
"Sheriff." Liyu nodded her head.
"I have a name." The Sheriff answered.
Liyu looked towards the people she had knocked out. "I get the feeling you're here on business."
"I'm supposed to be on break, actually." The Sheriff answered. "But Hunters don't really get days off. What happened?"
Liyu turned her back on the man. She took a moment to pull the Scroll from the pouch on her waist, unlocking it and going through a few messages.. "Flesh, soul and steel. I needed all three to climb as high as I did. But I still didn't get there. Even with that weight, I couldn't get there-"
"What are you talking about?" The Sheriff interrupted. "What were these people attacking you for? The dipshit pretending to be unconscious with a bo staff is wanted for mercenary work, so if they got hired to go after you-"
Liyu threw her Scroll backwards at the Sheriff. "Have a look."
The Hunter took a moment to look over the Scroll. "...What is this?"
"Proof of payment." Liyu answered. "Scientific method got messed up a bit, but I wanted to experiment. I made the final sixteen for Strongest Under The Heavens and didn't climb as high as I wanted. Maybe the issue was that it was a sanctioned match, that I knew everything that was coming to me. So I wanted to mix it up a bit."
—"I hired these guys to fight me."
There was a bolt of movement from the allegedly unconscious bo staff wielder. Liyu ignored it.
"You…" The Sheriff began, but he wasn't sure where to go with it.
Liyu turned back to snatch her Scroll back out of his hands. "New variables mucked that up, but wanted something I couldn't predict. Put up my tournament winnings on an anonymous request site. Those six weren't good enough, but they're about to be filthy rich."
"You're paying people to try to attack you now?" The Sheriff asked. "I knew you were a menace, but-"
"Still wasn't enough, even with the new variables." Liyu continued like the Sheriff hadn't spoken. "Guess I need to dig deeper. Find a site that does assassination. Maybe the threat of death is what I need to climb the waterfall-"
A large hand closed over her shoulder. "Listen to yourself! You're talking about hiring killers to go after you next! Why don't you stop for a second and think about what you're doing?"
Liyu considered, for some time, how she should respond to the touch. She discarded the thought of breaking the Sheriff's leg with his own sword. Breaking his Aura would take too long to be cathartic. She settled for grabbing his hand and pulling it off her shoulder. She squeezed, once, hard enough to make his Aura flare.
"I should thank you." Liyu observed, distantly. "You're just concerned about me, and I appreciate that. I like the idea of someone looking out for me. And I remember what you've done for me, too. I won't forget that you were there, when I lost everything else. But I've already committed to this path."
She looked over her shoulder, a poisonous glare towards the Hunter.
"I will climb that waterfall." Liyu Long Men promised. "I shall become Dragon. And I'll prove I never needed her to start with."
She threw the Hunter's hand away. Against anyone without his training, it would have unbalanced them enough for escape to be easy. As it was, Liyu needed a little extra. Her fist closed and struck her own chest.
"Goodbye, Sheriff."
With the activation of her Semblance, Liyu left an old friend behind.
Throughout the Kingdom of Mistral, carp await their wings beneath the waterfall. One bearing the name of Vale sits among them, a champion of a contest she entered at the last second. An empty throne awaits in the Kingdom of ice and steel, yet unfilled.
And on the outskirts of Vacuo walks a failure whose wings were taken from him.
The sky was black, lit only by pale moonlight and the faultlines burning red. In a desert such as this, it was easier to walk at night. The sun was hot enough to drain Aura for those unfit for it. For the failed Dragon, his Aura laced with water, that heat was enough to make his very soul evaporate. The cold of night was easier to manage.
Just a short time ago, the heat would have been nothing to him. He'd simply tap into a deeper power, and the evaporation of his soul would fall short against a near-infinite wellspring. But that spring had been taken in combat, and Yi Xing Shenron was dragon no longer.
His soul could remember the sound, but the Dragon's Roar was gone. He could recreate its shape, but it was the phantom pain of a missing limb. The ten-year journey had come to an end, and it was time to begin anew.
He couldn't stomach Mistral. In another life, the tournament could have been his victory lap. First he'd become Dragon, and then he'd become Strongest Under The Heavens. He wasn't worthy of beholding such a sport with envious eyes. Even if the true Dragon of Vale was not there, Yi Xing Shenron could never step there.
He couldn't stay in Vale either. Putting aside the pain of loss, he would be chasing old shadows there. He needed a new beginning if the Dragon within him was to be reborn. But it was impossible to put the pain aside in earnest. Vale was unbearable to him.
That left just two Kingdoms and the wilderness, and the wilds between were transitory places. Atlas was a Kingdom he disliked for several reasons, and while it was home to a born Dragon, the scholar had no idea of knowing where to even begin looking for his peers. It was too cold for him besides.
And then there was Vacuo. The place where the first Dragon of human birth had arisen. There was no question of where Shenron would go.
It was on the same continent besides. He wouldn't need to cross an ocean. All he needed to do was walk.
…Well, not just walk.
For the third time since midnight, there was a screech through the sky.
The scholar closed his eyes to let the sound echo in his mind. The sound wasn't echoing the way the last two had. His foe this time was in the broken sky, then.
He looked up to see the wyvern descending upon him, a diving hawk in form.
Perhaps Shenron was a wyvern now. A simulacrum of a Dragon with none of the power or legacy. He had more of a mind than his foe, but how much did that matter in earnest? They were both wandering the desert in the dark, with neither companionship nor purpose.
Their forebodies were similar, with their wings and claws attached to the same limbs. But for a wyvern, the limb count stopped there. Shenron would call them worms, but they were far from being Wyrms. 'Winged Serpent' was more dignity than they deserved, but it avoided the threat of mishearing.
It was insulting enough that the Grimm mimicked these Beasts. It took far more for a Grimm to mimic the form of a Dragon. Shenron only knew of one, and the Battle of Fafnir demonstrated the difference between that and this.
One heavy boot fell against the sand, throwing it into the sky as a makeshift smokescreen. A flap of wings told the scholar of the Beast's reaction. Just as planned.
The original plan was for the Beast to tackle him into the sand, and with its bulk and body shape be in a better position when they were both on the ground. It had to fold its wings and make itself narrow to do that. With the smokescreen up, Shenron had a lot of room to move undetected. If the wyvern wanted to hit him, it had to open its wings.
That was going to slow it down a lot. If Shenron got hit, he was going to hurt less. And it was going to give him more time to react.
The smokescreen wasn't too big. Unless the wyvern was a child, its wings would be enough to cover the whole smokescreen. It'd hurt less, but it'd be able to crush anywhere in the smokescreen. And if Shenron ran out of the smokescreen too soon, the wyvern might be able to redirect its movement.
So he waited unmoving.
It was too dark for him to see through the smokeline sand, even just to see silhouettes in the light against it. His eyes had adjusted to the pale moonlight and the fainter yet red, but not enough to work with a smokescreen. But the wyvern wanted to see him too, and was beating its wings. The sand was scattering.
The moment the wyvern saw Shenron, it screeched at him. He refused to call it a roar, not when he knew what a Roar really was.
It was bigger than he expected. Bigger than any wyvern he had seen before. But it wouldn't be an issue. It hadn't changed its trajectory, but it had slowed itself down a bunch. And Shenron was far from slow.
His open palm at his side fired a jet of water hard enough to crack stone. It was the kind of technique that anyone specialised in an element would learn eventually. If he wanted to stay on his feet, his Aura would make that easy. And if he wanted to use it for movement, he just had to go with the flow.
The jet of water threw Shenron aside, out of the range of the wings. It was a close call with how big it was, but he was home free. Once his feet touched the sand again, he just needed to aim that hydraulic jet into a space between scales.
Shenron had fought wyverns before. If he put his all into it, a jet between scales was more than enough to kill. His body was already relaxing on reflex before he even saw the blood.
It wasn't until the tail whipped him in the chest that he realised his mistake.
The wyvern screamed and thrashed, but it did not fall.
Every other time Shenron had fought a wyvern, it had been a hunt. He hadn't always gone in prepared, but he had at least gone in fresh.
Now? He'd been wandering the desert since the sun set and been in several fights besides. The only water he'd had to drink in the last few days is the water he could make himself, and the food he'd scavenged in the desert was barely enough to sustain him. Against the lesser Beasts he had fought earlier, it wasn't noticeable. But against a wyvern? Even a fake Dragon had to be respected.
And while it likely hadn't influenced this encounter at all, Shenron couldn't help but think once more about what he had lost. The Power of Dragons had occupied his mind and soul for ten years; It's absence defined him now.
But he had no time to hesitate. He leapt forward and crashed his boot into the wyvern's spine, right between its wings. The Beast screamed again, but didn't miss a beat before taking flight.
The first thing they taught you during wyvern hunts was how the false Dragons dealt with this exact situation. First thing they would do is try to throw you off.
A spear of water formed in the scholar's hand. It took more out of him here, with how little moisture was in the air, but it would only really matter if he tried to create spears at a distance. He stabbed down through scales as the wyvern began to spin, and the impaled weapon kept Yi from falling. It tried the barrel roll three times, but Shenron merely had to barb the tip of his crafted spear to keep it stuck in flesh.
Then it started ascending in earnest. It's snout facing the heavens, it flew straight up.
Yi Xing Shenron drove the spear further into the monster's back. This was going to be problematic. The moment the wyvern was dead, it was going to fall. The learning strategy Yi had learnt in school had depended on his long-range spears, and the desert had taken that from him. He could ride the wyvern's corpse down if needed, but the higher it was the more that was going to hurt regardless.
Closing his eyes to focus, the scholar gathered his Aura at the tip of the spear of water. He adjusted the barbs on the end, shaping it into a second speartip that met the first like a crucifix. If he had a hand free, he would've reached for the flute at his side. The extra focus would have made this faster. Instead, he had to achieve something close to meditation.
Displacement. It wasn't a trick he had to use often, because in these last few years he had rarely fought Beasts of this size. He rarely needed to use it when he could conjure spears in the air. But if he created a second spear that perfectly overlapped the first, the constructs would displace each other.
He had already given the displacement an out. A speartip to the side just waiting to extend. One shot, and he'd pierce the brainstem of the wyvern. He just needed to focus.
Before his work was complete, the wyvern peaked its ascending arc.
What went up must go down. The wyvern tucked its wings and fell.
The speed was enough to break gravity's hold on Yi. His feet were dragged behind and above him as the wyvern spiralled down, building speed in a corkscrew spiral. Its opening gambit had been to tackle him into the sand, and now its final gambit was going to be a repeat. Either the wyvern crushed him under its own weight at this speed, or it forced him to jump and suffer the gravity of this fall regardless.
With a snarl, Yi poured his soul into his spear. The second one flickered into existence in place of the first, and the displacement occurred instantly. The wyvern didn't even have time to scream.
But even if it couldn't put any more thought into ending Yi's life, the wyvern had done left him with a trial to overcome. He looked to the wings of the wyvern. They were the primary way he had to slow the corpse down. He couldn't reach for them while holding the spear, and if he let go of the spear he'd be flung from the body.
If only Yi could manipulate water in another's body. It was a rare talent for water manipulators, and it was not something he was blessed with. He could pull moisture from the air or from a plant to assist his own generation of water, but the water that had belonged to a living thing was beyond his limits.
Water introduced once it was a corpse was within his domain, but he'd need to introduce it himself. He'd need to crawl through flesh without damaging the wings at all. It wasn't feasible, not under time constraints.
…What was the difference between life and death, regardless?
Instinct and impulse were old friends to a Hunter. When the thought came into Yi's mind, he clung to it. His soul knew something his mind did not.
What was the difference between giving a man a cup of water, and pouring the cup down a corpse's throat? Why would only restrict him and not the other? Or, for that matter, what was the difference between giving a man a cup of water and stabbing him with a spear?
Or a wyvern, rather than a man. The man would be safe in either case because of his Aura. But why could Yi control the spear in the flesh of a Beast, but not water in its stomach or bladder?
Because his soul was in the spear already. The water in the body had been claimed by something alive, even if it's soul was gone.
Soul
Aura.
Risking everything, Yi reached for his belt. The fingers remaining on the spear were slipping already. He would only have a few seconds to try.
Putting the flute on his lips, Yi called for the memory of Power.
What was the Aura, but the constant claim of a soul on a body? Many things in truth, but that conceptualisation remained one Shenron could believe in. And if the Power of Dragons could bypass the claim of Aura to mark the property of the soul, then could it be used to bypass a claim that lingered through death?
The note that Yi played was not the Roar of a Dragon. It was crude and unrefined, a whelp snarling to hide its fear in the face of a predator.
But he was snarling at a corpse. It had no sentience to defy his claim.
With a thought an, Yi Xing Shenron spread the wings of the false Dragon.
For a moment, the scholar felt elation. He could taste victory over death. The wings caught against the pull of momentum and gravity, and the speed of descent was reduced enough that he was in no danger of being pulled free.
Then he looked down.
Before he could process the closeness of the sand, the wyvern struck down. The sudden stop tore him from his grip on his spear, spiking him into the ground hard enough for his Aura to shatter instantly. A feeling of instinct told him that had he not succeeded when he had, the force of the impact would have broken his spine as well.
But as darkness danced across his vision, Yi Xing Shenron wondered if it would make a distance. He tried to calm his mind, but the unmistakable feeling of fear crept in.
If he could feel it, then the Grimm could feel him. If he passed out, he was dead.
But the light was fading from his eyes.
"No…" Shenron forced himself to speak. It made the world just a bit more real. "If I was going to die like this… Then that man should have killed me ten years ago."
In the distance, he could see a shadow come over a hill of sand.
A Grimm? No, it was shaped too much like a man.
Perhaps it was a hallucination. Perhaps it was, miraculously, help.
Yi chose to believe the second. As he lost his hold on consciousness, he thought that it'd be better to die with an optimistic thought.
He couldn't quite say when the darkness took him.
He could only note his surprise upon awakening.
The ground beneath him was sandy, but the only light was from a nearby fire. He was in a cave, he realised. He pushed himself up slowly, resting against a rocky wall behind him.
"You're awake."
Yi Xing Shenron turned to the one who had spoken.
His saviour was an old man, but one with impeccable form. His hair was merely greying, his face too hard to wrinkle. He looked remarkably in shape, despite the age in his eyes.
"I was worried you wouldn't survive." The man noted.
"So was I." Yi Xing Shenron answered. "I wasn't expecting to find another person out here."
The old man looked away.
He was wearing what looked like an old white suit. His Aura kept it clean even through all the sand. An odd choice, this far from the border of the Kingdom.
"What were you seeking to achieve?" The man asked of Yi Xing Shenron.
"Why do you want to know?" The scholar asked in reply.
"Most men who walk these stands are looking for death." His guest answered him.
Yi raised an eyebrow, but left the obvious question unstated.
"I'm on my way to Vacuo." Yi answered. "I have a journey to start over, and thought the old legends of this land would help."
"And you walked instead of taking an airship?" The old man asked. "Do you have something to prove?"
The question gave Yi pause.
"I suppose I do." He answered eventually. "Are you familiar with the Power of Dragons?"
It was meant to be a rhetorical question, but the old man nodded. "I'm familiar with it."
Fascinating, Yi thought, but he kept that to himself.
"My name contains the title Shenron." The man explained. "From an ancient language, derived from 'Shen Long'. Long meaning 'Dragon.' And I'd studied for much of my life on the power of names."
The old man nodded again, but this time only to prompt the scholar to speak on.
"I'd fought for ten years to win the Power of Dragons." He explained. "My last opponent was at the tournament. Strongest Under The Heavens, Vale branch. The daughter of the man who put me on the path, though he knew it not. And… I lost."
Yi reached for his flute, but found it missing. In a panic he looked around.
The old man reached out his hand. "Here."
The flute in his hand was cracked. The impact had damaged it. That stung more than Yi had expected it to.
"Ten years of a journey that ended in failure." He continued. "So I suppose I did have something to prove. I didn't think it before I left, but perhaps if I reach Vacuo on foot, it proves that it wasn't for nothing."
The only sound in response was the crackling of flame.
"I owe you my thanks, stranger." Yi Xing Shenron sighed. "Is there any way I could repay you?"
"None that would be worth what it takes from you." The old man responded. "I'll be dead soon."
Yi blinked. "You don't look it."
"My Aura is healthy." The old man smiled while rapping a knuckle against his chest. "It's kept my body the same way. But when you get to my age, if you know as much about Aura as me, you can feel the clock. I have less than a month left."
He pulled out a cigarette, igniting it with the campfire.
"These are likely to blame." He noted. "That and the misspent youth. I've been in a lot of fights past the point my Aura broke. My body only had so much to give."
"My condolences." Yi Xing Shenron bowed his head. "Then this is a Last March?"
"Of a sort." His saviour replied. "I said my goodbyes to those I hold dear. Resolved my unresolved business. Now I'm here to fulfil an old promise."
Yi raised his eyebrow, but didn't ask. As it turned out, he didn't need to.
"It's not that I need to do anything." The old man continued. "It's just the fact that I'm here."
"I see." Yi answered. "I suppose I'll leave you to it, then. My own life won't be resolved until I've reclaimed what I've lost."
The old man took a puff from his cigarette. He made sure to blow the smoke away from Yi.
"How much have you really lost?" The old man asked. "I heard that note you played as the wyvern died. It's what called me to you."
"A crude simulacrum." Yi shook his head. "I almost had it. I could call upon it. And I can feel it's absence now. The Power of Dragons has abandoned me."
The old man closed his eyes and nodded.
Then he moved.
Yi flinched as the foot shot at his face. Like lightning it cracked through the air, and the fire was extinguished from the movement. His Aura burnt to life before the blow was even struck, and on reflex he closed his eyes.
But the force that touched him was a mere feather against his nose.
Slowly, Yi Xing Shenron opened his eyes. He could seed nothing but the bottom of a boot, and that pulled away to reveal darkness. A flick of a cigarette later, and the old man used an ember to reignite the campfire.
For a moment, Yi wondered if he had been fooled. But a moment later, another thought occurred to him.
He touched his nose and found the skin at the tip scuffed. It was faint, but he could feel it. The boot had left a mark on him.
And it had done so through his Aura.
"How…" Yi looked up. "I can't even feel the Dragon's Roar…"
"I told you I am familiar with that Power." The old man noted. "My body remembers it well."
The realisation set in like a lightning bolt. "You're-"
"-Just an old man, now." The other interrupted. "I erased my name when I resolved the last of my business. I don't need it anymore. But I am who you think I am, yes."
Sitting down against the opposite wall, the man who had once been the Dragon of Vacuo took another puff of his cigarette.
"The Power of Dragons was hard fought." He noted. "But in truth, I possessed it only for a single night. I wanted to leave the life I lived behind me, so I surrendered it the moment it was mine."
Another puff, and then a sigh. The old man looked down at his feet, resting near the campfire.
"But it turns out that you don't get to decide when the world is done with you." The old man continued. "I had to fight again, and again, and yet again. I needed the strength to protect what I held dear. There weren't any other Dragons there for me to overcome, but my body remembered the power. I just needed to train it again."
He looked back up to look Yi in the eyes.
"The title is a fleeting thing." The old man declared. "But the power is yours. You just need to learn what the title made natural."
Yi didn't know what to say. His mind was struggling to process the truth before him. Part of him wondered if he had died after all, and an angel was saying the exact words needed to welcome him into heaven.
The old man simply watched Shenron's eyes for a second longer, then pushed himself to his feet.
"Alright." He decided. He took one last puff of his cigarette before throwing it into the fire. "I've seen enough in your eyes."
He stepped around the fire as his cigarette burnt up.
"You're not gonna stop, even after nearly dying." The old man closed his eyes and spoke like he wasn't just speaking to Yi. "And whether it was fate or coincidence, you've found me."
He opened those eyes, and reached a hand down to Yi.
"I have time enough left to teach you." He declared. "Are you willing to learn?"
There was no need for it to be a question. There was no need to even think about it.
Sitting once more at the bottom of the waterfall, Yi Xing Shenron reached for the Dragon before him.
A few hours walk from Shade Academy was an unmarked grave.
No tombstone had been set aside for it, no statue or cross. The corpse had been rewarded as a traitor and given only a simple coffin. It was buried in a forest that was meticulously maintained by the Academy, in a location forbidden to students without permission from the Headmaster. The soil had been smoothed over, and an application of a Semblance had forced the growth of a tree. If you were not there when the corpse was buried, you would have no way to know what was there.
There was one exception to this. Buried in the v-shape of a branch union was a single rose, cut from a stem.
It was alone in the sea of brown and green around it, the only red flower in sight. Even wilting, it was unmistakable.
It used to be that the flower was replaced once a week, but the one who tended to this flower would be gone for much longer than that.
It used to be that the flower left behind was not a rose, but a rare flower as white as the moon.
Beneath the tree, the corpse of a carp lay waiting.
And atop the waterfall, the red crack in the blue sky seemed almost like a smile.
[X] Arc en Rouge
[X] A Gallery of Rogues
The sterile halls were poison to the War Chief.
The clean steel was like a weapon being drawn from its sheath. If she let her eyes linger on it for too long, she would start anticipating the moment the steel was stained with blood and mud. Each reflection of light in the corner of her eye was the glint of a weapon. It was in essence the opposite of jumping at shadows, but the spirit of it remained.
The halls were small, far smaller than any Mistralian hall that the War Chief had been in. It might have just been the case that the War Chief had mostly entered buildings by breaking through the walls or the rooftop, but the walls around here felt like they were closing in. She had tried crafting her wings of light for comfort earlier, but they cut at the edges of the wall. The roof was far too low for her liking.
The War Chief had never realised how much she needed open air before. There were confined parts to her family hall, but they were transitory places she knew well, and never had to think about. Even if this was also a transitory hall, the War Chief had never been 'here' before.
She wasn't too sure where 'here' was.
It had been a few hours since Yang had briefly regained consciousness. A few hours of the War Chief alone with her thoughts. A doctor and an armed guard had been in shortly afterwards, and everything the War Chief knew was based on the description they had given.
While the War Chief was unconscious, she had been rescued by a Mistralian airship and then transferred to an Atlesian one. That description alone told the War Chief little. What she knew of the Kingdoms came almost entirely from Memory Bricks. The only thing she knew of Atlas was that it was far away, and the airships that came from there felt like coffins.
But this specific airship belonged to someone important. Somebody who wanted to speak to the War Chief now.
The warrior woman tried to focus on that. The one she was going to meet must have been akin to a warlord themselves. She knew that the one she was approaching was a leader, and commanded respect. And they held some authority over Yang, the one the War Chief was bound to by honour.
If only the War Chief knew more than that. It was hard to pick the right script when she lacked information. She'd just need to leave herself open to change tracks as she moved forward.
What were, in general, the likely points of this upcoming conversation? The first was that the one the War Chief would meet wanted merely to know about what had happened with her father. That would be difficult, but the War Chief had no secrets. She would speak honestly of them.
The second was that the conversation would be about Yang, and the War Chief's abduction of the woman. There was no malice in the act, but could the War Chief convince another of that? Moreover, what if the conversation turned to the War Chief's raids? She was a criminal, even if she had never acknowledged the government who had decided that.
There was a third possibility, but it was unlikely. Perhaps when the War Chief reached her destination, the one waiting for her would congratulate her for maintaining the Tower as well as she had, and reward her by helping her figure out how to approach her relationship with Yang. That would be a nice thought. The War Chief allowed herself to be optimistic, but then returned to the task at hand.
The War Chief was not good at speaking. She had walked into her first conversation with Yang with confidence and had quickly learnt that it was undeserved. The Memory Bricks only contained fragments of conversations around conflict, but they were the only thing the War Chief had to act off of. They had been the foundation to the scripts the War Chief had prepared for speech, alongside memories of her childhood that were weaker than they should have been.
Her ability to improvise was nonexistent. Her ability to act out her scripts was limited to the pre-existing circumstances that existed within the Bricks. Her only advantage was that she was Dragon, and she was strong. People had to respect her capacity for violence.
The War Chief did not feel as if she was capable of violence right now.
She had no intention of following that thought any longer. She clasped her hands together behind her back, right beneath where she would craft wings, and sang syllables without words. There was no way she could avoid thinking about what happened, so she wanted to think about it on her own terms.
That song brought her to a door on the top floor of the airship. She held her voice as she stood outside of it. It would be nice to prepare herself, but if she waited until she was ready she would be waiting for the end of time.
The War Chief raised her hand to knock on the door. A voice spoke from the inside before her knuckles could make contact.
"Enter."
The girl froze.
"There's no need to knock." The voice from within explained. "I heard you approaching."
A hearing Semblance?
The War Chief pushed the door open. It only occurred to her as she did so that every other door on the airship was automatic.
The room the War Chief entered into was rather large. She could see a collection of machinery folded against the wall which she couldn't even begin to guess at the point off. There was a lot of wide open space, and then there was a small desk at the centre of the room, and then there was a second even bigger space behind that desk. If the War Chief eyeballed the distance, she'd guess that this one room covered at least half of the top floor of the airship.
The desk itself was covered in holographic screens. Sitting behind the desk was a stoic-looking woman. She had white hair, white clothing, red eyes, and a numeral marking her forehead.
"War Chief." The woman's voice ran down the War Chief's spine, forcing it straight.
"That is I." The Dragon Faunus declared. "Behold, my-"
"Bound for the Bay, was it?" The woman interrupted.
The War Chief paused. "Excuse me?"
"The song you were singing as you climbed the stairs." The white-haired woman explained. "Too-ral-li oo-ral-li. That's Bound for the Bay, is it not?"
The War Chief struggled to adjust to the topic. "I am unsure of the name. It was something my mother taught me."
"I suspected as much." The woman continued. "The tune comes from a folk song of the Atlesian exports, when companies were forcing Faunus overseas for cheap labour. It only just predates the Great War. Too young for your own culture unless it was convergent evolution."
The War Chief moved her mouth a few times in unsuccessful attempts to speak. "You did not call me to this place to discuss a song, did you?"
"It sounded like it had some meaning to you." The woman with red eyes tilted her head. Those eyes demanded the War Chief's attention, held her head in place and forced her to meet that gaze.
"It does." The War Chief agreed. "But if that is your highest priority, I would like to return to Yang."
The white-haired woman swept her hand over a few holographic screens and pushed them away.
"Did Yang tell you who I was?" The woman asked.
"Yang was not able to tell me much about herself before we were interrupted." The War Chief explained. "And my memory is preoccupied."
She clicked a script into place. "Sing your epithets, oh muse."
The woman considered it for a moment.
"My name is One." The woman declared. "Second of the Intoners. Acting head of the Schnee Dust Corporation. Friend of Dragons."
One snapped her fingers, and the roof parted.
The War Chief felt a second of sunlight before a shadow passed over her. She looked upwards to see dark wings and black scales.
A Dragon true fell from the heavens and into the empty space behind One.
The War Chief could do nothing but gape.
"So this is the runt?" The Dragon stuck her head past the desk and sniffed. The War Chief was standing some distance away, but it mattered not to the lords of the sky.
Wings of light spread behind the War Chief.
"Oh sit down, young'un." The black Dragon opened her wings. A gust of wind caught the War Chief's wings and shattered them. "I'm not a dumb predator that'll see spread wings and get scared and think you're a giant."
"Be nice, Gabriella." One tidied her ruffled hair. The black Dragon pulled her wings back closer to her body.
The War Chief stood.
"A true Dragon." She mused. "I've never met one of your kind."
"I'd call you a Neet or whatever Five was yapping my ear off about last time we met." Gabriella mused. "But I guess you share that with the rest of my kind. Hard to run into each other when you claim a cave to be your castle and never leave it, huh?"
The War Chief had left her mountain home many times actually. She chose not to comment on that. Gabriella didn't fit into any of her scripts. She spoke freely, like a jester in the court of a King, but she demanded the awe of the sublime.
The warrior girl could feel her knee twitching as if ready to bend. But at the same time, her hand drifted close, the shadow of a fist.
Submit or fight back, fight back, climb-
"I suppose you should introduce yourself as well, even if I know who you are." One continued. "Rituals and traditions. People appreciate them."
Right. The War Chief clung onto that idea. She had a script for this.
The girl spread her arms and put fire in her voice. "Welcome to the Hall of the- Wait fuck no."
She wasn't in the Hall of the War God, wrong script.
Uh. Hm. Surely she had another one in her head? That was her only script for a peaceful hyping up…
Well, she could just pull out the speech she uses when she hypes herself up before a fight and then she just doesn't do the part where she jumps into violence. She should do that quickly, because the black Dragon was laughing at her.
"I am the War Chief." The girl declared. "Heritor of a timeless Legacy. Generations of blood and steel have culminated in I. I have claimed trophies of-"
"Fifteen Hunters, ranging from fresh recruits to seasoned Knights to a single Veteran of the Great War." One interrupted. "At least, as far as known and confirmed trophies. Those who can craft their own weapons will just replace it rather than reporting a humiliating defeat, often."
The wind was taken from the War Chief's sails once more.
"We have much to discuss." One decided. "About what happened, and what is going to happen."
The War Chief narrowed her eyes. "You gave me titles, but I still know you not. Who are you to Yang?"
"Yang is her own woman." One answered. "But her adopted sister is my niece by blood. I have reason to look after her, even if she was not so metaphysically important."
"Do you claim authority over her?" The War Chief asked.
"No suggestion I have for her future shall ever be made without her approval." The woman who described herself as Intoner promised. "I'm unsure what to make of you. You abducted her in battle, yet you care so much about her?"
The War Chief felt a weight in her throat.
"You seem unsure." One observed. "But I am afraid I must insist. From the reports I have obtained, I want to know everything I can about the situation."
That weight was not lightened, but the War Chief knew she had to speak regardless.
If this was truly someone Yang trusted, then the War Chief only had one path to stay close to her.
And so she spoke.
It was not an easy story to tell, but she told it as best she could. Everything from the moment Yang defeated her in the village to the moment the War Chief lost consciousness. She had wanted to hold her tongue on the nature of her Semblance, but she had no choice if she was to explain why she had fainted.
The woman in white and the black-scaled Dragon were silent until the War Chief finished speaking. That silence hung in the air once she was done, threatening to choke her if it was broken carelessly. It was like the paralysis of nightmares.
The War Chief couldn't bring herself to move even as the Intoner stood from her desk. She approached the War Chief at a measured pace, with confidence. Warrior instincts urged the girl to go for the throat, but the weight of her grief and the weight of silence bound her.
One stopped within arm's reach of the Dragon girl. "You've been through a lot, haven't you?"
Huh? What was that tone? It wasn't within the War Chief's expectations. It sounded…
Her thought was interrupted as the Intoner stepped forward once more. Her arms wrapped around the War Chief and pulled her closer. The Dragon Faunus was the taller of the two, but the unexpected pull swept her off her feet. Her head landed on One's shoulder, and the Intoner held her in an embrace.
"It was hard to recall it all, wasn't it?" The Intoner spoke softly. "I'm sorry I asked it of you. But you don't need to be strong if it's hard on you. You've done good work."
—"You should be proud."
Something inside of the War Chief broke. She cried.
Some part of the girl resented that. She had already shown weakness to Yang, and now she was showing weakness to a stranger?
But those words kept echoing in her mind.
She should be proud? Even though her father was dead, even though she'd only made things harder by trying to heal him, she had done good enough?
The War Chief couldn't help but cling to that praise.
She couldn't say how long she stood there crying. 'Stood' wasn't even an accurate word for it. She was held up by One's strength alone. The woman may have been short, but she had strength enough to be leaned on.
Eventually, as the tears began to dry themselves, a gloved hand tapped upon the War Chief's back.
"If you are able to, we need to discuss your future." The Intoner spoke softly. "Are you ready?"
The War Chief nodded into the Intoner's shoulder. She waited for a moment, then tried to stand.
Once the War Chief was no longer dependent on her to stay upright, the Intoner turned her back to return to her desk.
"Gross." The black-scaled Dragon snorted. "Listen girls, I'm not here for emotional support. If you wanna paint your nails and talk about cute boys or whatever, save it for when I'm-"
"I would never." The War Chief felt some of her fire return. "Why would I talk about boys when I have a lovely fiancee?"
…How did her fire come back to her that fast? She was still grieving, and now-
"I suppose we should start there." One mused. "You understand that I cannot allow you to claim Yang unless she consents?"
"Of course." The War Chief answered. "I haven't even begun courting rituals yet."
"I would recommend avoiding terms which imply an accord that doesn't exist." One advised. She watched the War Chief closely, then relaxed in her chair. "Now tell me. What do you think about the towns you've raided, War Chief?"
"They were battlefields and I won." The War Chief answered. She found herself watching One closely for a reaction, but the Intoner had none.
"You don't have any regrets?" One asked.
The warrior girl shifted in place. "...Should I?"
One pursed her lips. "I suppose not. It just complicates things."
"You're a criminal, girl." Gabriella declared. "One's trying to figure out how to circumvent justice for you, and you being unrepentant is makin' that harder."
"It's no concern." One spoke quickly, before the War Chief could interject. "It just means that putting you before a court would be complicated. I might need you to lay low until a crisis."
"What do you mean?" The War Chief asked.
One looked over to a hologram next to her desk. The Dragon spoke in her place.
"You humans have a shared delusion of justice." Gabriella explained. Something about her tone made the War Chief want to punch her. "A lotta people lost their homes because you went raiding, a lot of fear. If we send you with your self-declared lover and you end up in the public eye, people are gonna cry and scream and pretend they care about the victims."
The Dragon shifted her wings, stretching even as her body pressed deeper into the airship beneath her. "But if we hide you away until a crisis? Throw you at the White Fang or a big Grimm or whatever? Then you're a hero. Humanity likes a hero more than they like a victim, so nobody's gonna listen to any complaints against you once you help save the day."
The War Chief scowled. "Why don't I just duel anyone who has a problem with me being near Yang?"
"See that? That's why."
What did she even mean?
"If the two of you will calm down." One interrupted. "I think I have an understanding of what to do."
The War Chief stood to attention. The Dragon looked towards her lazily.
"This is depending on what Yang wants, when she awakens." One clarified. "But she carries the Power of Dragons within her. I was already hoping to ask you, Gabriella, to help her understand those powers."
"I don't like where this is going." The black-scaled Dragon muttered.
"There will be some time before the Strongest Under The Heavens Tournament begins anew." One observed. "I am hoping to leave the War Chief in your care until then, Gabriella, while you train Yang Xiao Long."
"I ain't no babysitter." Gabriella snorted.
"I do not ask this lightly." One stopped her. "You know what my ultimate intentions are."
That gave the Dragon pause. She mulled it over for a moment, then sighed. "I'll consider it."
"I don't understand." The War Chief interrupted. "What is the point of this?"
"My primary objective is keeping you out of the public eye." One explained. "If the Mistralian Government knows where you are, then someone could leak that information. The best place to keep you out of the way would be the mountain you came from, but that place is currently under active investigation."
One flicked a few of the holograms around.
"Once the Tournament begins, the Kingdom of Mistral will want to focus their force within the capital." One continued. "I'll take control of the operation at that time to permit your return. Until then, I wish to keep you with Gabriella."
The War Chief wasn't sure about a lot of what was being said here. What was this about the government investigating the Hall of the War God? Why should she submit herself to another before she was permitted to return home?
But the War Chief couldn't ignore how mere moments ago, she had been weeping into the Intoner's shoulder. The woman had given her enough comfort in that moment that the War Chief's instincts couldn't write her off as an enemy.
And…
"I have two questions." The girl began. "First. What is Yang's part in this?"
"It depends on her." One answered. "I imagine she'll want to be involved in some of the events in Mistral. There's a few people looking to reunite with her. But if she wants to train the Power of Dragons, she will need to train under Gabriella. The two of you will be together then. How often that is and how long the training lasts will depend on her."
That was good enough. But more importantly…
"That goal of yours." The War Chief continued. "It wouldn't happen to involve killing the bastard who took my father from me, would it?"
One remained silent for some time.
"The Dark hollowed out my father." The girl closed her fist. "Turned him into a weapon not just to kill me, but to spite him. My Father's final Memory was to ask me to live no matter what, but as long as the Dark is out there…"
What if the evil in the darkness came for her again, to spite her father even through death?
What if the War Chief turned down all help, but fell to temptation and pursued vengeance in spite of her father's wishes?
No, she couldn't let that happen. But she didn't know if she could stop herself. But if she wasn't the only one…
"I need more information before I can say for sure." The Intoner answered. For a half-second, the War Chief felt disappointed. "But what I have heard from you and from Six has been persuasive. If Yang's statement tells me what I'm expecting to hear, then your enemy and mine are one and the same."
The War Chief felt the edges of her lips twinge. "If you can promise me the Dark's head, I'll follow you."
The Intoner smiled. "I am glad to hear that, War Chief."
"I just want to be here when Yang's awake again." The War Chief continued. "Until then, I don't want to go anywhere."
"Of course." One nodded. "I would want to speak with her before I let you out of my sight regardless. You seem trustworthy, but I will not accept any risks when it comes to Yang Xiao Long."
…Well, that was fair enough. The War Chief bristled under the implication of untrust, but she bit her tongue. She could understand. In a world where not even your own father can be trusted to be an ally when he returns, the threat of treachery wasn't one to take lightly.
"My sight is metaphorical in this case." The woman in white clarified. "I would allow you privacy in a room I have set aside for guests. But before you leave, I would like to ask about those Memory Bricks you mentioned."
The War Chief raised an eyebrow. "Hm?"
"I will not touch the one your father addressed to you." One continued. "That is yours alone. But those other two Bricks have very particular labels. If your father was warning us of the dangers he encountered before he lost his memories, then I would like to observe his warnings."
The War Chief stiffened. Her muscles tensed, and her eyes darted from One to Gabriella rapidly. It took her a moment to realise what her instincts were doing. She did not know One enough. The thought of showing another the Memory Bricks when they were not Yang was…
"I will not force the issue." One interrupted the thought. She must have seen the way the War Chief reacted. "I simply believed that the information within those Bricks may prove decisive in our future planning. The enemies of mankind are many and strong. The sooner I can integrate that information into my counterplans, the more effective that information will be."
She was right, but…
One's expression softened. "Besides. I do not know if you are prepared to witness more of those Memories."
…Damn it, she was right.
The War Chief let out a long, drawn-out sound. It was somewhere between a sigh and a moan emotionally. "I don't want to give them to you."
One waited.
"...But I don't know if I can look at them." The War Chief forced herself to finish. "And if those Memories are important, then they should not be forgotten."
The Dragon Faunus steeled herself to meet the Intoner's gaze. "If you make me regret this, I will hunt you. But you may have them."
And the Intoner smiled in return. "I shall see to it that you do not regret it."
There was a half-moment of silence, just long enough for the War Chief to start wondering if she should ask if she could leave or if she should wait for One to dismiss her. But Gabriella shifted first, and drew attention to herself.
The War Chief turned to the Dragon as it opened its maw, ready to hear words.
The black-scale Dragon roared.
The sound was deafening. It echoed through the steel coffin and into the open sky above. The sound felt like it was pushing the War Chief back. The Intoner was unmoving, but her hair was billowing as if exposed to the wind.
Something within the War Chief sparked, and she roared back. It wasn't merely a roar from her throat, but from her heart. Flames danced from her maw without focus, and wings of light spread to the greatest size the War Chief could muster.
When Gabriella stopped roaring, so too did the War Chief. The Faunus's breath was laboured and pained, but she glared at the Dragon all the same.
"Just as I thought." Gabriella muttered. "Jeez, this is gonna be a headache."
"I'm afraid I don't speak roar." The Intoner kept a level voice as she fixed her hair, but the War Chief could sense annoyance from her. It wasn't in her face, but it was there. "Would you care to clarify your discovery?"
"I would like to know too." The War Chief muttered.
"Well I can't help it if you can't feel your own heart." The black Dragon came to rest on the ground once more, head resting to the left of One's desk. "Don't think it took much for you to get competitive with me, and I know your kind ain't getting past awe and fear that fast. Don't you feel it?"
Her words gave the War Chief pause. And from that pause, she felt something.
It was in her heartbeat, ringing in her ears. It was in the heat by her lips and in her lungs. Her horns were electric. There was a pressure on her soul, faint until she acknowledged it. Like a great weight of water breaking on her body.
"What…" The girl ran her fingers over her horns. "What is this?"
"The human-born Dragon of Mistral is dead." Gabriella answered. "Didn't lose the title to another Dragon, didn't reincarnate. The power was there, and now it's gone."
"I understand." One spoke. "The power needs an heir, and the War Chief is a candidate."
"She's a carp swimming at the bottom of a waterfall." Gabriella nodded. Her chin scraped a cut into the steel floor below. "The guy Yang beat to get the title had gone around beating up a bunch of other strong people with Dragon names to get our power. Probably a lot of carp in that pond looking for their chance to climb."
The War Chief looked at her hands.
Her father's power…
The power that the Dark coveted too.
"There are others who would claim it?" The War Chief asked. "Give me names. I will earn it or see it buried forevermore."
"You are not capable of it." One answered.
The War Chief raised an eyebrow. "Oh? And why is that?"
"Because if a name is enough to qualify, then I know of at least one candidate for the Power of Dragons." One answered. "And if Yang was capable of breaking your Aura, then you stand no chance of defeating him."
~~~~~
The man named Draigwyn was alone. His sword was light in his hand.
That was a curious thing. The man had been very particular about how the sword felt in his hand. He swung it at air experimentally and found that it swung no differently. He willed it to move, and he had to build momentum before it could be moved easily. He willed it to stop, and the weight made that difficult to do instantly, but it stopped.
Such was the nature of the sword Pendragon. It could not be moved thoughtlessly, and once it was moving he had to think to stop it. The metaphor added something to the sword. It felt lighter now, but it still took the same amount of effort to move. What a strange feeling.
The man swung his sword again. This time he struck a training dummy. He cleaved it in half as easily as he always did, but he could feel a difference that wasn't showing itself in any real way.
The man closed his eyes. He tried to reach for that feeling.
It fell upon him like a waterfall. An immense pressure, as if the sky was weighing down on him. Was his sword only lighter, because the rest of the world was heavier?
He focused on the weight of his sword. Whatever this phenomenon was, his sword was the first thing he had felt. He grasped that weight, tried to focus his entire mind upon it. But that was an impossible task. The more he focused on the lightness of his sword, the more he felt the pressure falling upon him. But so be it. He focused on that contrast.
He couldn't think too much about swinging his sword with how much attention he was paying to the contrast. But nobody reached his age in combat if they had to think to swing. The man let that instinct guide him. If his mind was consumed by the light sword and the heavy pressure, then where would his instincts take him?
The answer was rather peculiar. He didn't merely swing his sword. His Aura rippled and his Soul roared. His blade cut a vacuum of the wind, and his soul filled that vacuum. For a fraction of a second, the light bloomed through closed eyelids.
When that light faded, the man opened his eyes.
His Vacuum Blade technique had stages. At a base form, he could simply cut like he could in melee at range. He could enhance it with his Aura or with Dust to make it stronger. But his Sacred Vacuum Blade was the strongest he was capable of, and he had felt it in his instinct. If he had used it in the training room, then he would see a hole in the far wall.
The man opened his eyes, and the far wall was gone. He could look through it, deeper into the private hold he called home.
And if he looked left or right, he would see the same.
"What in the world?" He spoke aloud to himself.
"What indeed." Replied a deeply familiar voice.
The man spun around where he stood. He almost didn't need to. If it wasn't for the part of her that could change mid-sentence, he would have the woman behind him burnt into memory.
Morgan Gwynarian stood in the shadows, some distance away from the man.
"Arthur." She spoke his first name as if enchanting a spell. "I see you've already noticed."
"You know what this is?" Arthur Draigwyn asked. He slipped his sword Pendragon into its sheath, and clicked a switch to transform it. The mass redistributed itself as it interlocked with the sheath, the same machinery that permitted transforming weapons letting him ensure the blade was never drawn casually.
"I suspect you may know as well, and you simply lack information." Morgan answered. "The Council received word from the Intoner One. The Dragon of Mistral is dead."
That gave the man pause. "Truly?"
"She has yet to clarify the details." Morgan turned away. Her silver-grey hair fell neatly behind her back. Arthur made sure to observe the hue. Unless she had reason to deceive you, there was a lot you could tell from Morgan's hair. "The Hunters she borrowed for the rescue force have yet to report in. I came to inform you first not because it was easier, but to verify her word."
The woman approached the wall and ran a hand along it. "I suppose I have my answer."
"That's dangerous." Arthur clicked his tongue. How many Faunus in the White Fang bore traits that could become Dragon? How many carps, lizards, and others of their ilk?
"Indeed." Morgan mused. "I would daresay Mistral is the worst place for an absence of Dragons. We paint them in our emblems and on our shields. We carry the names. Even if power is a prerequisite, ours is a Kingdom filled with young dragons."
She paused, and then tilted her head back. She looked over her shoulder to stare at Arthur.
"Or were you thinking of the Faunus first?" She mused. "The White Fang are our enemy, after all. It's so easy to forget the dangers closer to home when there's an outsider to hate instead."
Her words struck true. There was far more than just the White Fang to worry about when it came to men becoming Dragons, but his thoughts had only concerned them. Arthur looked away.
"How difficult was it?" Morgan asked.
"Immensely." Arthur answered. "I would not be able to do it in battle. Not yet."
"A shame." Morgan mused. "You may want to change that. You're going to want that power very soon indeed, I suspect."
It was difficult to talk with Morgan. There were too many ways for Arthur to remember shame. His father's sin. His own ignorance and its consequences. The future that was to come.
"There's something else you want." Arthur changed the subject. "Else you wouldn't be here."
"Oh?" Morgan asked. "Are you not going to ask about how to control this power?"
"I've read much about it already." Arthur Draigwyn answered. He had sought the title of Dragon himself, once. It was before he knew it had power for certain, when it was a fairytale that he pursued for glory, but he knew of it. Words had power. Names had power. If you backed up that power through feats of strength, you became worthy of the power in that name.
The easiest path to ensure the Power of Dragons did not fall into the wrong hands was for Arthur to take it himself, he knew. Challenge the others in the Capital to duels to prove his own superiority, and then go on a pilgrimage to find any that remained. But he had sworn an oath when he had founded his own Order of Knights. His blade would not be swung without reason. Even if the Power of Dragons was reason enough, it would draw eyes if Arthur suddenly started challenging his countrymen to duels.
"I will consider who is worthy of the power and who is not." Arthur decided. "And I shall decide how to act once that has been decided. This may be a matter for all of my Knights, and not just me."
Morgan closed her eyes and turned away again. "So be it. You're right, of course. I was preparing to speak with you before the Intoner contacted the Council's office."
Arthur waited for her to continue.
"My child has had enough of cursing her own weakness." Morgan decided. "She is demanding power herself. If I do not give some to her soon, she will not wait for me."
This was about Mordred? "Do you want me to speak with her again?"
"I cannot risk it." Morgan refuted the idea. "With this many eyes on Mistral, moving that child near the Capital would be dangerous."
The witch's hair shifted as she turned back to Arthur. For a second in transit, as the light from the damaged wall fell over her hair, it looked almost gold.
"Tell me, Arthur." She addressed her fellow Councillor. "Do you know of any Pact Beasts of note?"
The question was met with a long silence.
The first thought Arthur had was to question Morgan on why she was asking him. Surely, she knew a greater number. But then he considered that she may be considering her options, and his next few thoughts were of answers. The Living Steel, if you want something she can control. If you want raw power, perhaps a true wyvern. An Undine or a Salamander wouldn't suffice. Even if she's pure enough for it, the Unicorn is too powerful to-
Those were all the thoughts of the split second he had hearing the question. Then his mind processed the question enough to place it in context, and he stilled.
"Mordred? A Pact?" Arthur asked. "Are you really willing to risk it?"
Morgan raised an eyebrow. The fleeting gold in her hair had faded, returning to a steady silver-white.
"Don't pretend you don't know." Arthur frowned. "You've gone through great lengths to hide your secrets. Are you going to let Mordred discover that one so easily?"
Morgan considered her words carefully. "There are Intoners in Mistral. The White Fang grows impatient. It is far too late to worry about my silly little secrets."
Arthur raised an eyebrow in turn. "Does that mean you're going to tell her about M-"
A hand closed around his throat. Arthur choked on his words and under that hand.
Before him, his companion looked on in fury. Crimson fell from her head like an inferno, like the fire in her eyes as she glared at him.
Arthur didn't try to resist. It would just make her angrier. A few seconds of submission were enough for the crimson to partially recede, and for the woman to let go of his throat. The Knight fell to his knees, rubbing a space that would have bruised had he not had Aura.
"You forget yourself." The woman spat out.
"I do." Arthur admitted. "I overstepped."
The woman had no argument to that. She paused for a moment, long enough for Arthur to see that the only speck of red left was a single strand hidden behind her ear.
"The Living Steel would be my recommendation." Arthur concluded, between laborious breaths. "Unless you have a better idea for one she could sneak into a City-"
The end of his sentence went unheard. The woman had heard enough, and was moving to leave.
"Wait!" Arthur called. This was not an ending he was willing to accept. Enough conversations had ended between the two of them with anger and bitterness. He wanted it to continue at least a little longer. "Are you sure about this? The path you have chosen?"
The woman stilled for a long time, long enough for that last fleeting crimson to fade from her hair. Morgan turned back to him with tired eyes.
"You speak of my goals once again, as if I have not told you before." There was no anger in that thought. The woman was simply resigned to her fate. She brushed hair out of her eyes as she spoke. "And I will say what I have told you before. If you have any objections to how I act, you may act against me. Reveal my goals to the Council and reclaim your honour. But do not forget."
She stepped forward once. Her gaze was ironcast.
"This is already a compromise." She intoned. "If you take that from me, then the consequences are on your head."
~~~~~
The City of Mistral was built between mountains, natural barriers against the unnatural threats of the Grimm. Or rather, the seed that was the heart of Mistral was built between mountains. Humanity grew as kudzu across and beyond those mountains.
Where Mistral was seeded was a metropolis. As you walked towards the mountains, the surface grew progressively more barren. But that was merely the surface. The mountains had been the homes of nobility once, hollowed out to build fortresses and serfs living upon the hillside. The grip of nobility had faded over time, and some families didn't survive the Great War. Their holdings had become public land, clusters or urban and suburban life.
The land around the mountains was similarly a contrast. If you were to walk from the heart to the coast, you would find a second metropolis built around a cove. Those who travelled by boat would find the best the Kingdom had to offer the moment they stepped onto shore. As you strayed away from the coast and circled the mountain, you'd find farmland and forest and very little housing.
And at the exact opposite end from the coast was the rain shadow. It was not a desert, but the grasslands were dry. Controlled burns were a necessity, lest a stray fire consume an entire region.
It was in the rain shadow that a girl stood alone.
There was a weight on the girl's back. A pressure washing down on her, breaking upon her. It was an electric feeling, one that made the girl alert. She was almost paranoid, with how her body urged her to eye every shadow. And yet that electric feeling was almost euphoric.
She didn't need to question what it was. She knew what it was as well as she knew the sun in her eyes.
"Talk about bad timing." She muttered aloud to herself. She looked out the window to see the start of the rising sun. "A bit hard to apply the scientific method now, isn't it?"
Her Scroll was on a bench nearby, positioned atop of a paper towel that was itself placed upon an old water stain. She opened the Scroll to double check her plan for the day, then folded it away and hid it in a pouch on her waist.
"It's too late to cancel that variable change." She continued. "And now we've got another? If it works this time, I'm not going to know what it is."
She paused, then looked over her shoulder. Behind the head of her bed was a chest locked with chains.
"...Well, I suppose I may as well go all-in."
It took her a moment to grasp the chain, tug on it to pull the chest free. A moment longer to pull the chains aside without breaking them. The lock on the chest was already broken, after all. She pulled it open and reached for the treasure inside.
A pair of bracers, coloured bright crimson. She slipped them on until they were snug, and then straightened her left arm. Her right hand closed upon the bracer and pumped, activating the transformation and covering her outer elbow in steel. Her thumb scratched the inside of her elbow in the process inadvertently. She repeated the process on the other side, taking a moment to scratch her inner-elbow for symmetry.
The hooded jacket she put on had long enough sleeves to cover the bracers, as well as her head. Her medical mask quickly followed. The hood mussed her hair, but that was no matter to her.
The disguise was important, the girl reminded herself. She didn't want people bothering her. As barren as the rain shadow was, it was not empty. The girl lived in a cheap apartment in a big street, parallel to a river that came from the mountains. The girl's destination was at that mountain, where the river was a waterfall. The land had been developed there as well, a township with a grocery, a police station and a Hunter's outpost.
This more isolated street was one thing. It was out of the way, built in the ruins of a bombing in the War. Anyone here would recognise the girl, but they'd leave her be if they saw the determination in her step. But she couldn't guarantee that it would only be locals here, and there would definitely be tourists in the township by the base of the mountain.
And that's why the girl needed a disguise. If a tourist saw her, they'd think her a delinquent or a moody teenager. Nobody would think she was someone worth talking to.
Nobody would know that she was representing Mistral, for the Strongest Under The Heavens.
Maybe the girl could get away with it. The other three representations for Mistral were a lot more impactful. Taiga Takeda, currently the most famous tournament fighter in Mistral. A Ghost Warrior, who's anonymity on his identity made him an anomaly. The Reaper.
And then there was the girl. Little Liyu Long Men. She was young, closer in age to the champions from Vale than the others from Mistral. She wasn't a known tournament fighter, she wasn't repping a known movement, and she wasn't a legend.
Not yet, at least.
But no, she was still from the tournament. People would know her face, might recognise her form. An ill-fitting hoodie that hung loose on her form and baggy tracksuit pants went a long way to preventing that.
It was a long walk to the waterfall.
The area around it was a bit courtyard, lined by stone gardens and zen statues. The waterfall itself was a curious thing. The rock formation on the mountainside above formed in a strange way, with something like a slope upwards but with a thin slit in the rocks letting some water in. The end result was that there was a big, loud waterfall that fell heavy against the river beneath, but also a smaller, calmer waterfall a metre or so behind it, hugging close to the wall.
In that metre of space was a curiously calm span of water. It was a lot shallower than the rest of the river, like less land had eroded beneath it or however rivers worked. People treated that metre of empty space like a wishing fountain, throwing old coins into the water for good luck.
Wasn't like too many places still accepted coin lien anyway, these days. Not when lien cards were so much more resilient, not when Scrolls could transfer carelessly anyway.
"Used to come down here all the time, y'know." Liyu said out loud. "Waterfalls were always good for meditating under. The calm one, at least."
There were footsteps behind her. Liyu's ears twitched as she tried to identify how many sets of feet.
"Tried meditating under the rapids once." Liyu continued. "I was like eight. The water kicked my ass. The Hunter on duty pulled me out of the river and spent an hour hammering in how close I was to drowning afterwards."
The footsteps drew closer slowly. They were fanning out, circling around her.
"Haven't tried it since." The girl clicked her tongue. "Don't really feel the need to. I'm too busy with metaphorical waterfalls, these days. And I'm not satisfied sitting under them anymore."
The footsteps finally stopped. Liyu pulled back her hood, letting dark hair fall as she turned back to face her guests.
Four humans, two Faunus. Even split on male to female. Sword, sword and shield, bo staff, nunchaku, sword and handgun, bare fists. Six people itching for a fight.
"Can I help you?" Liyu asked.
The one holding a sword and handgun stepped forward. Human, female. "You've pissed someone off, girl. Someone wanted you humbled so bad, they're burning thousands placing a hit, first-come first-served. Someone wants to see you beat, and they don't care who does it."
And who had answered that hit? The attackers wore basic balaclava's, but no masks. Definitely not a White Fang Mask, so it wasn't them. There were Faunus among them, so that ruled out the Coinguard and a dozen other groups beside. If the Students of the Fourth were answering the call for a beating, there'd only be one of them. That one in particular was disappointing, but perhaps not surprising. This hit had been non-lethal, after all.
Likely not a big name as far as gangs went. Could just be delinquents who wanted a paycheck, for all Liyu knew.
She turned her back on them, looked back to the waterfalls.
"Don't think you can win a one-on-six just because you were in a tourney." The woman at the lead of the pack sneered.
"I wouldn't consider the tournament showing I had all that impressive, true." Liyu conceded. "I fell short again. I climbed higher than I ever had before, but I got swept away before I got there."
The footsteps resumed. The gang were circling her again, this time for tactical advantage rather than intimidation.
"I went in with nothing but my fists and my soul, and it wasn't enough." She continued. "It wasn't that it was too easy, it was that I didn't bring enough. So I'm thinking-"
Somebody charged. Liyu didn't look back to see who. She raised her arm and cocked her elbow.
"...Maybe my mistake was going unarmed."
From the back of her elbow, the shotgun fired.
There were loud cries from behind Liyu. Swearing. The sound of the pellets ripping through Liyu's jacket, and then striking weapons and striking Aura. Then it was all lost to the rush of wind in her ears.
The shotgun was designed for movement first and combat second, in all honesty. Liyu had to brace herself to stand still when firing. If she wanted to fire to open an ambush, she didn't get to brace herself the way she needed to. The shot threw her forward.
She collided with the waterfall.
It was a rush of thunderous might against her back. An intense passion trying to crush her. But the pressure was nothing compared to the mysterious force falling upon her. For one thing, the waterfall was temporary. It washed her into the river beneath.
Liyu had learnt from her near-drowning as a child. She kicked against the ground, and a touch of Semblance helped the process along. She shot out of the river, and landed on the concrete above. One of her attackers had moved to peer into the river, and Liyu kicked him in before he could react.
Her hair was ticking close to her skin. She raised her hand to her forehead to slick back what hair was there. Not as stylised as she'd like, but good enough.
"We're humans." Liyu let a grin split her face. "And I'd forgotten what that meant."
The woman with the nunchaku ran forward. Liyu fired the shotgun on her left arm to fling herself forward, and positioned her right arm near a right angle. When she fired that weapon, she launched herself up to bury her fist in the woman's cheek.
Adrenaline rushed through Liyu's veins.While the airborne woman was distracted, Liyu spun in the air to kick the woman into the river as well. She landed on the concrete a second before the woman landed with a splash.
"We're not animals who fight without tools." Liyu continued. "We are more than the flesh and soul. When we fight, we fight with steel!"
Liyu ripped off what was left of her jacket. It had been torn apart by the first shotgun shot, and she had fired twice more since then. It was easy to cast it aside.
The skin underneath was painted in ink. The full image was partially obscured by the bandages she wrapped around her chest, but there was no denying what it was. A complex tattoo, depicting an ornate mountainside framing a waterfall.
And at the base of it all, a small red carp.
Liyu cocked the crimson shotguns that closed around her arms.
"No more holding back!" She declared. "If I am to climb, then I fight with everything!"
The remaining four fighters attacked all at once. A gunshot echoed out, and Liyu tilted her head to the side to avoid the bullet. She stood still, waited for her enemies to come to her. The bo staff had the most reach, so it was the first weapon to fall upon her.
Liyu caught the staff, then fired the shotgun on that arm. The sudden jerk ripped the weapon free from her opponent's grip, and Liyu threw it backwards without looking. Then she rushed forward, and struck her fist into a steel shield.
Rare to see shields these days.
The blow sent the shield bearer backwards, their feet digging into the concrete as they were pushed back. Liyu turned her attention away just in time to parry a fist before it caught her nose.
And for a moment, Liyu let herself play with fisticuffs. Her opponent was punching fast, and Liyu could feel the power behind each of those blows. Liyu parried by pushing her open palm against the arms and fists to push them away, make them just barely miss. And as she fought, she let her body sway.
The element in her Aura was charging up. The moisture in the air was rising around her, as was the temperature. She swayed and parried, and she felt the faint disturbances in the air slowly take a more apparent form. She shifted in place, and left white vapour behind in her wake.
And then she struck forward.
She didn't get a chance to see how well she had hit the man's Aura. Another gunshot echoed out, so Liyu fired the shotgun on her right arm to move. The pellets struck at someone trying to sneak up on her, and she launched forward with enough speed to clothesline her stationary opponent.
As she moved, she looked to the side to spot the gunslinger. Sword-and-gun was strafing, trying to cover their friend as they recovered the bo staff that Liyu had thrown aside. Liyu fired her left arm's shotgun to redirect her momentum and surged towards them.
She was trying to reach for the handgun, but the distance was too great. Sword-and-gun had time to move their hand away. Liyu settled for the sword instead, closing her palms around the flats of the blade and using that grip to disarm her opponent. Now they were none-and-gun.
She spun and flung the sword towards sword-and-shield. They raised the shield to prevent the hilt from striking their head, but it left them open for Liyu to charge in low. She swept her leg and tripped up sword-and-shield, and that gave her purchase to rip the shield from their grasp too.
Flesh, soul and steel. Those were the three weapons of humanity in war. You couldn't break the flesh without breaking the soul, and the battle was over once the soul was broken. If you wanted to weaken an enemy you couldn't outright beat, you needed to take their steel from them.
Couldn't do that with the unarmed warrior. They were charging at Liyu again. She threw the shield at them like a frisbee, and they just caught the shield and threw it back. Liyu knocked it away and stepped towards this opponent. The first first came flying at her, and Liyu ducked under it.
A cloud of vapour formed around her, heavier and heavier by the moment. Liyu kicked forward before her opponent could turn to face her. A gunshot echoed out and parted the vapour, and Liyu had to fire her shotguns at an angle to jump back in time to dodge it.
"Enough of this!" The swordsman without a shield shouted while standing. He flicked the hand holding the sword, and both flesh and steel were coated in thunder. He raised his sword to point it at Liyu, and lightning struck towards her.
Her body swayed, and the heavy cloud of vapour caught the lightning. It bent around her, following the curve of her torso before blasting off towards the one with the gun-
Who was also cloaked in lightning.
It didn't suit them. Liyu could see their Aura clashing against the electric power they held. And they were pointing one hand at the swordsman while pointing the gun at Liyu. A copycat?
The projectile that they launched was exactly the same as the one the swordsman had fired, and the projectile Liyu had deflected into them was enough to break their Aura and send them into the ground. The second projectile was also caught in Liyu's afterimage as she swayed, and she launched it towards the one with the bo staff.
The unarmed warrior was closing in on Liyu again. The young girl looked towards him, but all of a sudden he felt too distant for her to acknowledge.
That euphoric sensation had never faded. The heavy pressure, that electric joy. The complicating factor in Liyu's little science experiment. But it was growing more and more, the sound of water breaking suddenly deafening in her ear. That roar had never felt so close, the sky above the waterfall-
A fist struck Liyu in the cheek. She was broken out of her delusion by the pain. Her Aura rippled, and the blow knocked the heavy vapour out of her cycle. It solidified as it fell away from her, painting the ground behind her as it became liquid.
But her flesh did not move.
Liyu Long Men struck as an ambush hunter. Sudden, unstoppable, and lethal. Metaphorically speaking. The swordsman clutched the throat where he had been struck even as his Aura broke. Liyu stepped behind him and struck him in the back of the head.
The one with the bo staff was trying to stand again after being struck with lightning. Liyu let them be, for the time being. She turned instead to the swordsman, who flinched back as she turned her gaze upon them.
Her body moved as rhapsody. The swordsman kept trying to launch lightning at her, but the sway of her flesh and the afterimage of her soul threw each bolt to the heavens. The steel on her arms fired, and she fell upon her prey.
The swordsman's aura was thick. Too often, groups like this consisted of people who had too little Aura to keep Liyu entertained. The swordsman endured the blow without breaking their Aura, but they stumbled.
And so Liyu struck again, and again, and again. A flurry of fists that may look like mindless flaying to an outsider. Her punches were not full power at this speed, but they were strong enough to keep her opponent disorientated.
Strike again and again and let that delusion fall over her again, let the vision fill her thoughts and strike and strike again. Let her flesh be violence and her soul be delusion. Two of the three.
An instinct urged her to pull the trigger. Her shotgun fired aimlessly behind her, propelling her fist forward. Flesh, soul and steel.
With a great roar, the vapour around her fist contorted and roared. There was a blinding light at the moment of impact. For a single glorious moment, her form was perfect.
Her heart, and the swordsman's body, was flying.
And then there was one.
What did the bo staff wielder see, when Liyu Long Men looked back? With the power of her Aura so heavy that it distorted her silhouette, with her rapture distorting her lips painfully into a grin? When the last foe standing stared in shock, were they staring at an overwhelming champion? A deadly enemy? Or a wretched horror?
Liyu liked that third idea. She cradled the thought close to her heart.
She met eyes with the bo staff wielder, and they weren't able to bring themselves to look away.
"Boo."
The staff user recoiled so hard that they fell to the ground. They didn't move again after that. Liyu hadn't seen their Aura break, but they sure looked unconscious…
Liyu stepped away. Didn't matter. The fight was done. That thought felt like pulling a rug out from under her own feet, like a gaping pit in her stomach, and she didn't want to unpack that in public. She didn't have any more reason to stay here-
"Going somewhere?"
Liyu froze. Shit. She knew that voice.
Liyu turned around. A shadow was standing over her, a warrior in black. He was unarmed, but she could see the over-engineered blade on his back. There was a corkscrew shape just past the holster, before the rest disappeared behind the shadow.
"Sheriff." Liyu nodded her head.
"I have a name." The Sheriff answered.
Liyu looked towards the people she had knocked out. "I get the feeling you're here on business."
"I'm supposed to be on break, actually." The Sheriff answered. "But Hunters don't really get days off. What happened?"
Liyu turned her back on the man. She took a moment to pull the Scroll from the pouch on her waist, unlocking it and going through a few messages.. "Flesh, soul and steel. I needed all three to climb as high as I did. But I still didn't get there. Even with that weight, I couldn't get there-"
"What are you talking about?" The Sheriff interrupted. "What were these people attacking you for? The dipshit pretending to be unconscious with a bo staff is wanted for mercenary work, so if they got hired to go after you-"
Liyu threw her Scroll backwards at the Sheriff. "Have a look."
The Hunter took a moment to look over the Scroll. "...What is this?"
"Proof of payment." Liyu answered. "Scientific method got messed up a bit, but I wanted to experiment. I made the final sixteen for Strongest Under The Heavens and didn't climb as high as I wanted. Maybe the issue was that it was a sanctioned match, that I knew everything that was coming to me. So I wanted to mix it up a bit."
—"I hired these guys to fight me."
There was a bolt of movement from the allegedly unconscious bo staff wielder. Liyu ignored it.
"You…" The Sheriff began, but he wasn't sure where to go with it.
Liyu turned back to snatch her Scroll back out of his hands. "New variables mucked that up, but wanted something I couldn't predict. Put up my tournament winnings on an anonymous request site. Those six weren't good enough, but they're about to be filthy rich."
"You're paying people to try to attack you now?" The Sheriff asked. "I knew you were a menace, but-"
"Still wasn't enough, even with the new variables." Liyu continued like the Sheriff hadn't spoken. "Guess I need to dig deeper. Find a site that does assassination. Maybe the threat of death is what I need to climb the waterfall-"
A large hand closed over her shoulder. "Listen to yourself! You're talking about hiring killers to go after you next! Why don't you stop for a second and think about what you're doing?"
Liyu considered, for some time, how she should respond to the touch. She discarded the thought of breaking the Sheriff's leg with his own sword. Breaking his Aura would take too long to be cathartic. She settled for grabbing his hand and pulling it off her shoulder. She squeezed, once, hard enough to make his Aura flare.
"I should thank you." Liyu observed, distantly. "You're just concerned about me, and I appreciate that. I like the idea of someone looking out for me. And I remember what you've done for me, too. I won't forget that you were there, when I lost everything else. But I've already committed to this path."
She looked over her shoulder, a poisonous glare towards the Hunter.
"I will climb that waterfall." Liyu Long Men promised. "I shall become Dragon. And I'll prove I never needed her to start with."
She threw the Hunter's hand away. Against anyone without his training, it would have unbalanced them enough for escape to be easy. As it was, Liyu needed a little extra. Her fist closed and struck her own chest.
"Goodbye, Sheriff."
With the activation of her Semblance, Liyu left an old friend behind.
~~~~~
Throughout the Kingdom of Mistral, carp await their wings beneath the waterfall. One bearing the name of Vale sits among them, a champion of a contest she entered at the last second. An empty throne awaits in the Kingdom of ice and steel, yet unfilled.
And on the outskirts of Vacuo walks a failure whose wings were taken from him.
The sky was black, lit only by pale moonlight and the faultlines burning red. In a desert such as this, it was easier to walk at night. The sun was hot enough to drain Aura for those unfit for it. For the failed Dragon, his Aura laced with water, that heat was enough to make his very soul evaporate. The cold of night was easier to manage.
Just a short time ago, the heat would have been nothing to him. He'd simply tap into a deeper power, and the evaporation of his soul would fall short against a near-infinite wellspring. But that spring had been taken in combat, and Yi Xing Shenron was dragon no longer.
His soul could remember the sound, but the Dragon's Roar was gone. He could recreate its shape, but it was the phantom pain of a missing limb. The ten-year journey had come to an end, and it was time to begin anew.
He couldn't stomach Mistral. In another life, the tournament could have been his victory lap. First he'd become Dragon, and then he'd become Strongest Under The Heavens. He wasn't worthy of beholding such a sport with envious eyes. Even if the true Dragon of Vale was not there, Yi Xing Shenron could never step there.
He couldn't stay in Vale either. Putting aside the pain of loss, he would be chasing old shadows there. He needed a new beginning if the Dragon within him was to be reborn. But it was impossible to put the pain aside in earnest. Vale was unbearable to him.
That left just two Kingdoms and the wilderness, and the wilds between were transitory places. Atlas was a Kingdom he disliked for several reasons, and while it was home to a born Dragon, the scholar had no idea of knowing where to even begin looking for his peers. It was too cold for him besides.
And then there was Vacuo. The place where the first Dragon of human birth had arisen. There was no question of where Shenron would go.
It was on the same continent besides. He wouldn't need to cross an ocean. All he needed to do was walk.
…Well, not just walk.
For the third time since midnight, there was a screech through the sky.
The scholar closed his eyes to let the sound echo in his mind. The sound wasn't echoing the way the last two had. His foe this time was in the broken sky, then.
He looked up to see the wyvern descending upon him, a diving hawk in form.
Perhaps Shenron was a wyvern now. A simulacrum of a Dragon with none of the power or legacy. He had more of a mind than his foe, but how much did that matter in earnest? They were both wandering the desert in the dark, with neither companionship nor purpose.
Their forebodies were similar, with their wings and claws attached to the same limbs. But for a wyvern, the limb count stopped there. Shenron would call them worms, but they were far from being Wyrms. 'Winged Serpent' was more dignity than they deserved, but it avoided the threat of mishearing.
It was insulting enough that the Grimm mimicked these Beasts. It took far more for a Grimm to mimic the form of a Dragon. Shenron only knew of one, and the Battle of Fafnir demonstrated the difference between that and this.
One heavy boot fell against the sand, throwing it into the sky as a makeshift smokescreen. A flap of wings told the scholar of the Beast's reaction. Just as planned.
The original plan was for the Beast to tackle him into the sand, and with its bulk and body shape be in a better position when they were both on the ground. It had to fold its wings and make itself narrow to do that. With the smokescreen up, Shenron had a lot of room to move undetected. If the wyvern wanted to hit him, it had to open its wings.
That was going to slow it down a lot. If Shenron got hit, he was going to hurt less. And it was going to give him more time to react.
The smokescreen wasn't too big. Unless the wyvern was a child, its wings would be enough to cover the whole smokescreen. It'd hurt less, but it'd be able to crush anywhere in the smokescreen. And if Shenron ran out of the smokescreen too soon, the wyvern might be able to redirect its movement.
So he waited unmoving.
It was too dark for him to see through the smokeline sand, even just to see silhouettes in the light against it. His eyes had adjusted to the pale moonlight and the fainter yet red, but not enough to work with a smokescreen. But the wyvern wanted to see him too, and was beating its wings. The sand was scattering.
The moment the wyvern saw Shenron, it screeched at him. He refused to call it a roar, not when he knew what a Roar really was.
It was bigger than he expected. Bigger than any wyvern he had seen before. But it wouldn't be an issue. It hadn't changed its trajectory, but it had slowed itself down a bunch. And Shenron was far from slow.
His open palm at his side fired a jet of water hard enough to crack stone. It was the kind of technique that anyone specialised in an element would learn eventually. If he wanted to stay on his feet, his Aura would make that easy. And if he wanted to use it for movement, he just had to go with the flow.
The jet of water threw Shenron aside, out of the range of the wings. It was a close call with how big it was, but he was home free. Once his feet touched the sand again, he just needed to aim that hydraulic jet into a space between scales.
Shenron had fought wyverns before. If he put his all into it, a jet between scales was more than enough to kill. His body was already relaxing on reflex before he even saw the blood.
It wasn't until the tail whipped him in the chest that he realised his mistake.
The wyvern screamed and thrashed, but it did not fall.
Every other time Shenron had fought a wyvern, it had been a hunt. He hadn't always gone in prepared, but he had at least gone in fresh.
Now? He'd been wandering the desert since the sun set and been in several fights besides. The only water he'd had to drink in the last few days is the water he could make himself, and the food he'd scavenged in the desert was barely enough to sustain him. Against the lesser Beasts he had fought earlier, it wasn't noticeable. But against a wyvern? Even a fake Dragon had to be respected.
And while it likely hadn't influenced this encounter at all, Shenron couldn't help but think once more about what he had lost. The Power of Dragons had occupied his mind and soul for ten years; It's absence defined him now.
But he had no time to hesitate. He leapt forward and crashed his boot into the wyvern's spine, right between its wings. The Beast screamed again, but didn't miss a beat before taking flight.
The first thing they taught you during wyvern hunts was how the false Dragons dealt with this exact situation. First thing they would do is try to throw you off.
A spear of water formed in the scholar's hand. It took more out of him here, with how little moisture was in the air, but it would only really matter if he tried to create spears at a distance. He stabbed down through scales as the wyvern began to spin, and the impaled weapon kept Yi from falling. It tried the barrel roll three times, but Shenron merely had to barb the tip of his crafted spear to keep it stuck in flesh.
Then it started ascending in earnest. It's snout facing the heavens, it flew straight up.
Yi Xing Shenron drove the spear further into the monster's back. This was going to be problematic. The moment the wyvern was dead, it was going to fall. The learning strategy Yi had learnt in school had depended on his long-range spears, and the desert had taken that from him. He could ride the wyvern's corpse down if needed, but the higher it was the more that was going to hurt regardless.
Closing his eyes to focus, the scholar gathered his Aura at the tip of the spear of water. He adjusted the barbs on the end, shaping it into a second speartip that met the first like a crucifix. If he had a hand free, he would've reached for the flute at his side. The extra focus would have made this faster. Instead, he had to achieve something close to meditation.
Displacement. It wasn't a trick he had to use often, because in these last few years he had rarely fought Beasts of this size. He rarely needed to use it when he could conjure spears in the air. But if he created a second spear that perfectly overlapped the first, the constructs would displace each other.
He had already given the displacement an out. A speartip to the side just waiting to extend. One shot, and he'd pierce the brainstem of the wyvern. He just needed to focus.
Before his work was complete, the wyvern peaked its ascending arc.
What went up must go down. The wyvern tucked its wings and fell.
The speed was enough to break gravity's hold on Yi. His feet were dragged behind and above him as the wyvern spiralled down, building speed in a corkscrew spiral. Its opening gambit had been to tackle him into the sand, and now its final gambit was going to be a repeat. Either the wyvern crushed him under its own weight at this speed, or it forced him to jump and suffer the gravity of this fall regardless.
With a snarl, Yi poured his soul into his spear. The second one flickered into existence in place of the first, and the displacement occurred instantly. The wyvern didn't even have time to scream.
But even if it couldn't put any more thought into ending Yi's life, the wyvern had done left him with a trial to overcome. He looked to the wings of the wyvern. They were the primary way he had to slow the corpse down. He couldn't reach for them while holding the spear, and if he let go of the spear he'd be flung from the body.
If only Yi could manipulate water in another's body. It was a rare talent for water manipulators, and it was not something he was blessed with. He could pull moisture from the air or from a plant to assist his own generation of water, but the water that had belonged to a living thing was beyond his limits.
Water introduced once it was a corpse was within his domain, but he'd need to introduce it himself. He'd need to crawl through flesh without damaging the wings at all. It wasn't feasible, not under time constraints.
…What was the difference between life and death, regardless?
Instinct and impulse were old friends to a Hunter. When the thought came into Yi's mind, he clung to it. His soul knew something his mind did not.
What was the difference between giving a man a cup of water, and pouring the cup down a corpse's throat? Why would only restrict him and not the other? Or, for that matter, what was the difference between giving a man a cup of water and stabbing him with a spear?
Or a wyvern, rather than a man. The man would be safe in either case because of his Aura. But why could Yi control the spear in the flesh of a Beast, but not water in its stomach or bladder?
Because his soul was in the spear already. The water in the body had been claimed by something alive, even if it's soul was gone.
Soul
Aura.
Risking everything, Yi reached for his belt. The fingers remaining on the spear were slipping already. He would only have a few seconds to try.
Putting the flute on his lips, Yi called for the memory of Power.
What was the Aura, but the constant claim of a soul on a body? Many things in truth, but that conceptualisation remained one Shenron could believe in. And if the Power of Dragons could bypass the claim of Aura to mark the property of the soul, then could it be used to bypass a claim that lingered through death?
The note that Yi played was not the Roar of a Dragon. It was crude and unrefined, a whelp snarling to hide its fear in the face of a predator.
But he was snarling at a corpse. It had no sentience to defy his claim.
With a thought an, Yi Xing Shenron spread the wings of the false Dragon.
For a moment, the scholar felt elation. He could taste victory over death. The wings caught against the pull of momentum and gravity, and the speed of descent was reduced enough that he was in no danger of being pulled free.
Then he looked down.
Before he could process the closeness of the sand, the wyvern struck down. The sudden stop tore him from his grip on his spear, spiking him into the ground hard enough for his Aura to shatter instantly. A feeling of instinct told him that had he not succeeded when he had, the force of the impact would have broken his spine as well.
But as darkness danced across his vision, Yi Xing Shenron wondered if it would make a distance. He tried to calm his mind, but the unmistakable feeling of fear crept in.
If he could feel it, then the Grimm could feel him. If he passed out, he was dead.
But the light was fading from his eyes.
"No…" Shenron forced himself to speak. It made the world just a bit more real. "If I was going to die like this… Then that man should have killed me ten years ago."
In the distance, he could see a shadow come over a hill of sand.
A Grimm? No, it was shaped too much like a man.
Perhaps it was a hallucination. Perhaps it was, miraculously, help.
Yi chose to believe the second. As he lost his hold on consciousness, he thought that it'd be better to die with an optimistic thought.
He couldn't quite say when the darkness took him.
He could only note his surprise upon awakening.
The ground beneath him was sandy, but the only light was from a nearby fire. He was in a cave, he realised. He pushed himself up slowly, resting against a rocky wall behind him.
"You're awake."
Yi Xing Shenron turned to the one who had spoken.
His saviour was an old man, but one with impeccable form. His hair was merely greying, his face too hard to wrinkle. He looked remarkably in shape, despite the age in his eyes.
"I was worried you wouldn't survive." The man noted.
"So was I." Yi Xing Shenron answered. "I wasn't expecting to find another person out here."
The old man looked away.
He was wearing what looked like an old white suit. His Aura kept it clean even through all the sand. An odd choice, this far from the border of the Kingdom.
"What were you seeking to achieve?" The man asked of Yi Xing Shenron.
"Why do you want to know?" The scholar asked in reply.
"Most men who walk these stands are looking for death." His guest answered him.
Yi raised an eyebrow, but left the obvious question unstated.
"I'm on my way to Vacuo." Yi answered. "I have a journey to start over, and thought the old legends of this land would help."
"And you walked instead of taking an airship?" The old man asked. "Do you have something to prove?"
The question gave Yi pause.
"I suppose I do." He answered eventually. "Are you familiar with the Power of Dragons?"
It was meant to be a rhetorical question, but the old man nodded. "I'm familiar with it."
Fascinating, Yi thought, but he kept that to himself.
"My name contains the title Shenron." The man explained. "From an ancient language, derived from 'Shen Long'. Long meaning 'Dragon.' And I'd studied for much of my life on the power of names."
The old man nodded again, but this time only to prompt the scholar to speak on.
"I'd fought for ten years to win the Power of Dragons." He explained. "My last opponent was at the tournament. Strongest Under The Heavens, Vale branch. The daughter of the man who put me on the path, though he knew it not. And… I lost."
Yi reached for his flute, but found it missing. In a panic he looked around.
The old man reached out his hand. "Here."
The flute in his hand was cracked. The impact had damaged it. That stung more than Yi had expected it to.
"Ten years of a journey that ended in failure." He continued. "So I suppose I did have something to prove. I didn't think it before I left, but perhaps if I reach Vacuo on foot, it proves that it wasn't for nothing."
The only sound in response was the crackling of flame.
"I owe you my thanks, stranger." Yi Xing Shenron sighed. "Is there any way I could repay you?"
"None that would be worth what it takes from you." The old man responded. "I'll be dead soon."
Yi blinked. "You don't look it."
"My Aura is healthy." The old man smiled while rapping a knuckle against his chest. "It's kept my body the same way. But when you get to my age, if you know as much about Aura as me, you can feel the clock. I have less than a month left."
He pulled out a cigarette, igniting it with the campfire.
"These are likely to blame." He noted. "That and the misspent youth. I've been in a lot of fights past the point my Aura broke. My body only had so much to give."
"My condolences." Yi Xing Shenron bowed his head. "Then this is a Last March?"
"Of a sort." His saviour replied. "I said my goodbyes to those I hold dear. Resolved my unresolved business. Now I'm here to fulfil an old promise."
Yi raised his eyebrow, but didn't ask. As it turned out, he didn't need to.
"It's not that I need to do anything." The old man continued. "It's just the fact that I'm here."
"I see." Yi answered. "I suppose I'll leave you to it, then. My own life won't be resolved until I've reclaimed what I've lost."
The old man took a puff from his cigarette. He made sure to blow the smoke away from Yi.
"How much have you really lost?" The old man asked. "I heard that note you played as the wyvern died. It's what called me to you."
"A crude simulacrum." Yi shook his head. "I almost had it. I could call upon it. And I can feel it's absence now. The Power of Dragons has abandoned me."
The old man closed his eyes and nodded.
Then he moved.
Yi flinched as the foot shot at his face. Like lightning it cracked through the air, and the fire was extinguished from the movement. His Aura burnt to life before the blow was even struck, and on reflex he closed his eyes.
But the force that touched him was a mere feather against his nose.
Slowly, Yi Xing Shenron opened his eyes. He could seed nothing but the bottom of a boot, and that pulled away to reveal darkness. A flick of a cigarette later, and the old man used an ember to reignite the campfire.
For a moment, Yi wondered if he had been fooled. But a moment later, another thought occurred to him.
He touched his nose and found the skin at the tip scuffed. It was faint, but he could feel it. The boot had left a mark on him.
And it had done so through his Aura.
"How…" Yi looked up. "I can't even feel the Dragon's Roar…"
"I told you I am familiar with that Power." The old man noted. "My body remembers it well."
The realisation set in like a lightning bolt. "You're-"
"-Just an old man, now." The other interrupted. "I erased my name when I resolved the last of my business. I don't need it anymore. But I am who you think I am, yes."
Sitting down against the opposite wall, the man who had once been the Dragon of Vacuo took another puff of his cigarette.
"The Power of Dragons was hard fought." He noted. "But in truth, I possessed it only for a single night. I wanted to leave the life I lived behind me, so I surrendered it the moment it was mine."
Another puff, and then a sigh. The old man looked down at his feet, resting near the campfire.
"But it turns out that you don't get to decide when the world is done with you." The old man continued. "I had to fight again, and again, and yet again. I needed the strength to protect what I held dear. There weren't any other Dragons there for me to overcome, but my body remembered the power. I just needed to train it again."
He looked back up to look Yi in the eyes.
"The title is a fleeting thing." The old man declared. "But the power is yours. You just need to learn what the title made natural."
Yi didn't know what to say. His mind was struggling to process the truth before him. Part of him wondered if he had died after all, and an angel was saying the exact words needed to welcome him into heaven.
The old man simply watched Shenron's eyes for a second longer, then pushed himself to his feet.
"Alright." He decided. He took one last puff of his cigarette before throwing it into the fire. "I've seen enough in your eyes."
He stepped around the fire as his cigarette burnt up.
"You're not gonna stop, even after nearly dying." The old man closed his eyes and spoke like he wasn't just speaking to Yi. "And whether it was fate or coincidence, you've found me."
He opened those eyes, and reached a hand down to Yi.
"I have time enough left to teach you." He declared. "Are you willing to learn?"
There was no need for it to be a question. There was no need to even think about it.
Sitting once more at the bottom of the waterfall, Yi Xing Shenron reached for the Dragon before him.
~~~~~
A few hours walk from Shade Academy was an unmarked grave.
No tombstone had been set aside for it, no statue or cross. The corpse had been rewarded as a traitor and given only a simple coffin. It was buried in a forest that was meticulously maintained by the Academy, in a location forbidden to students without permission from the Headmaster. The soil had been smoothed over, and an application of a Semblance had forced the growth of a tree. If you were not there when the corpse was buried, you would have no way to know what was there.
There was one exception to this. Buried in the v-shape of a branch union was a single rose, cut from a stem.
It was alone in the sea of brown and green around it, the only red flower in sight. Even wilting, it was unmistakable.
It used to be that the flower was replaced once a week, but the one who tended to this flower would be gone for much longer than that.
It used to be that the flower left behind was not a rose, but a rare flower as white as the moon.
Beneath the tree, the corpse of a carp lay waiting.
And atop the waterfall, the red crack in the blue sky seemed almost like a smile.
~~~~~
[X] Arc en Rouge
[X] A Gallery of Rogues
Mortifer
Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed.
- Location
- Under a rock.
So um
I suppose I should explain myself, considering its been over a year. This is I think the longest hiatus this story has ever been on.
A lot has happened since the last update. Among other things I ended up writing an entry in a writing contest that took up pretty much all my writing time from November to the end of January and while I'm proud of my work there, it did burn me out for a long time.
After that it just got really hard to get back to this for reasons I can't fully articulate. The above interlude was written in chunks that were often months apart and I feel kinda bad about how long it took to put it out. Some of it was definitely written with the idea that you'd be more fresh from the last update.
But it's done. I've gotten it out. Hopefully I'll get the next one out Soon, but I can't guarantee anything there. It'll be soon compared to the last wait, I refuse to let it take that long again, but beyond that we'll just see how it goes.
I so desperately want to go back to the every-fourth-day update schedule but I'm not sure if I'm back to being that consistent about writing yet. I've been thinking about this quest a lot since the last update and trust me, nobody wants me to be able to get back to this consistently more than me. I just need a bit more time to lock in.
Anyway now that I've updated again I'm gonna go do other stuff for a few hours, give myself time to maybe piece together that the long wait has lead to me putting in some kind of inconsistency I missed because it's hard to remember everything going on in this quest, and maybe at some point I'll reply to that last non-me post which had some high praise, which I meant to answer but put off for a while and then felt too embarrassed to address without an update accompanying it
I suppose I should explain myself, considering its been over a year. This is I think the longest hiatus this story has ever been on.
A lot has happened since the last update. Among other things I ended up writing an entry in a writing contest that took up pretty much all my writing time from November to the end of January and while I'm proud of my work there, it did burn me out for a long time.
After that it just got really hard to get back to this for reasons I can't fully articulate. The above interlude was written in chunks that were often months apart and I feel kinda bad about how long it took to put it out. Some of it was definitely written with the idea that you'd be more fresh from the last update.
But it's done. I've gotten it out. Hopefully I'll get the next one out Soon, but I can't guarantee anything there. It'll be soon compared to the last wait, I refuse to let it take that long again, but beyond that we'll just see how it goes.
I so desperately want to go back to the every-fourth-day update schedule but I'm not sure if I'm back to being that consistent about writing yet. I've been thinking about this quest a lot since the last update and trust me, nobody wants me to be able to get back to this consistently more than me. I just need a bit more time to lock in.
Anyway now that I've updated again I'm gonna go do other stuff for a few hours, give myself time to maybe piece together that the long wait has lead to me putting in some kind of inconsistency I missed because it's hard to remember everything going on in this quest, and maybe at some point I'll reply to that last non-me post which had some high praise, which I meant to answer but put off for a while and then felt too embarrassed to address without an update accompanying it
ApocalypticFish
Been reflecting lately.
[X] A Gallery of Rogues
Dream Logic
An offseason swallow
- Location
- In transit
Glad we're back.
I had accepted it was probably done, but am happy to be wrong.
...now to actually read the update.
I had accepted it was probably done, but am happy to be wrong.
...now to actually read the update.
Dream Logic
An offseason swallow
- Location
- In transit
As ever, I remain a contrarian for this quest specifically.
Bit worried about the amount of names and scale, but we've gone this far on the odyssey. Who can protest a few more steps?
[X] Arc en Rouge
Bit worried about the amount of names and scale, but we've gone this far on the odyssey. Who can protest a few more steps?
[X] Arc en Rouge
Last edited:
Mortifer
Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed.
- Location
- Under a rock.
Probably not a great sign on how quickly I'll be back to a quick update schedule that I put off doing replies for so long
It is pretty good to post for this quest again. Didn't realize how much I missed it until I hit post on that update.
Honestly I get it. I've been thinking a lot about the scope of this quest, both before and during the hiatus. I do think, objectively speaking, the smartest thing to do with this quest would be to start culling plotlines and setups and move up the endgame a lot.
But like. A huge part of me writing this quest is that I've had a bunch of ideas that I want to dig into and explore a bit. The setting being a sandbox with setups I want to poke at is part of the appeal, to me.
Which isn't to say there's not been culling - Off the top of my head, the next time Sun appears I'm gonna have to fill in a lot of blanks where there used to be a few more plot hooks with what he was doing, and I've had to sort of come to terms with the fact that a lot of the plot hooks I have set up in Vacuo are gonna have to be a bit more railroady than originally planned to keep it from sprawling infinitely - But I'm also definitely writing in such a way where I can understand the concerns about the scope.
Anyway while I'm here, time to get around to replying to an old-old post.
It's interesting how it's come out this way, though that wasn't really the original intent there. The amount I've gone into the dragon stuff wasn't set in stone by the start of the story. Even as it stands now, I really wish I'd set it up better with how much I decided I liked it and wanted to go into it. Yang's selection that I had in mind going in was that I wanted to invest in the idea of the Branwen's being a sort of druid family and giving Yang the option to spec into magic gimmicks in addition to brawling.
Pyrrha, meanwhile, wasn't locked into the cyborg route - There was from memory a vote option back in Pyrrha's first gaiden arc which would involve either Mordred or Pyrrha staying behind while the other went to get help, with the one who stayed behind getting captured by Three. Surprisingly one of the most impactful single votes in the quest, because things could've been rather different if Pyrrha had been the one doing the rescue mission.
The actual secret selection I had in mind behind the character selection would've been the first Intoner met, and while less intentional it also would've skewed how long it would've been before the Intoners revealed themselves to the readers.
Ruby probably would've had the quickest quest-start-to-Intoner rate with Five making a kidnapping attempt really early, though if the players had chosen to start as Ruby I think I was planning on giving them a chance to escape. Was a while ago so not sure. The plan with Pyrrha would've had the quest go through every fight in the tournament bracket, and that might've complicated the details on how the abduction went there, but the initial gaiden arc and kidnapping lines up with my plans for Three from the start.
And Blake was probably the most divergant of the starting options since the pre-quest idea for what would've happened if she won the vote would've been to start in her childhood and pseudo-montage things a bit. One of the Blake POV chapters has a dream/flashback thing to Blake meeting Adam for the first time that was a scene I had in mind for that version of the quest. That would have inevitably led to Four interrupting a White Fang thing, though depending on how that theoretical version of the Quest went it could've been anything from the explosive appearance she made in the version of the Quest that exists, to a more personal one-on-one encounter.
And since I just kinda used this comment as an excuse to take a trip down memory lane and talk about some of the old-ass original plans, I'd also like to bring up that while she wasn't a choice for POV character, the fact that Weiss would've been immediately paired with One was in my head sort of the same thing. And the reason Weiss wasn't a choice of POV character was my thought at the time that with how One handles things, Weiss likely wouldn't be quite as active as she was in RWBY canon, and likely would've been too passive a character to follow.
I think vaguely I also considered it a bit of foreshadowing that there was something up with the part of the world Weiss lives in if the rest of Team RWBY is a potential playable character but Weiss is replaced with Pyrrha but I might be misremembering that.
It is pretty good to post for this quest again. Didn't realize how much I missed it until I hit post on that update.
Honestly I get it. I've been thinking a lot about the scope of this quest, both before and during the hiatus. I do think, objectively speaking, the smartest thing to do with this quest would be to start culling plotlines and setups and move up the endgame a lot.
But like. A huge part of me writing this quest is that I've had a bunch of ideas that I want to dig into and explore a bit. The setting being a sandbox with setups I want to poke at is part of the appeal, to me.
Which isn't to say there's not been culling - Off the top of my head, the next time Sun appears I'm gonna have to fill in a lot of blanks where there used to be a few more plot hooks with what he was doing, and I've had to sort of come to terms with the fact that a lot of the plot hooks I have set up in Vacuo are gonna have to be a bit more railroady than originally planned to keep it from sprawling infinitely - But I'm also definitely writing in such a way where I can understand the concerns about the scope.
Anyway while I'm here, time to get around to replying to an old-old post.
It's interesting how it's come out this way, though that wasn't really the original intent there. The amount I've gone into the dragon stuff wasn't set in stone by the start of the story. Even as it stands now, I really wish I'd set it up better with how much I decided I liked it and wanted to go into it. Yang's selection that I had in mind going in was that I wanted to invest in the idea of the Branwen's being a sort of druid family and giving Yang the option to spec into magic gimmicks in addition to brawling.
Pyrrha, meanwhile, wasn't locked into the cyborg route - There was from memory a vote option back in Pyrrha's first gaiden arc which would involve either Mordred or Pyrrha staying behind while the other went to get help, with the one who stayed behind getting captured by Three. Surprisingly one of the most impactful single votes in the quest, because things could've been rather different if Pyrrha had been the one doing the rescue mission.
The actual secret selection I had in mind behind the character selection would've been the first Intoner met, and while less intentional it also would've skewed how long it would've been before the Intoners revealed themselves to the readers.
Ruby probably would've had the quickest quest-start-to-Intoner rate with Five making a kidnapping attempt really early, though if the players had chosen to start as Ruby I think I was planning on giving them a chance to escape. Was a while ago so not sure. The plan with Pyrrha would've had the quest go through every fight in the tournament bracket, and that might've complicated the details on how the abduction went there, but the initial gaiden arc and kidnapping lines up with my plans for Three from the start.
And Blake was probably the most divergant of the starting options since the pre-quest idea for what would've happened if she won the vote would've been to start in her childhood and pseudo-montage things a bit. One of the Blake POV chapters has a dream/flashback thing to Blake meeting Adam for the first time that was a scene I had in mind for that version of the quest. That would have inevitably led to Four interrupting a White Fang thing, though depending on how that theoretical version of the Quest went it could've been anything from the explosive appearance she made in the version of the Quest that exists, to a more personal one-on-one encounter.
And since I just kinda used this comment as an excuse to take a trip down memory lane and talk about some of the old-ass original plans, I'd also like to bring up that while she wasn't a choice for POV character, the fact that Weiss would've been immediately paired with One was in my head sort of the same thing. And the reason Weiss wasn't a choice of POV character was my thought at the time that with how One handles things, Weiss likely wouldn't be quite as active as she was in RWBY canon, and likely would've been too passive a character to follow.
I think vaguely I also considered it a bit of foreshadowing that there was something up with the part of the world Weiss lives in if the rest of Team RWBY is a potential playable character but Weiss is replaced with Pyrrha but I might be misremembering that.
[X] A Gallery of Rogues
We are so back
We are so back