Season of the Dead
In the southern wildlands of the continent known as Anima, there once stood a forest. This forest once teemed with life, far from the bounds of civilization. It was not, however, untouched by man. In this forest there once stood a small cottage, built by the hands of a woman. All she desired was a safe life far from the dangers of a world that wanted to harm her and her daughter for no other reason than the danger held in their blood.
It was a good life, for a while. It was nice, simple as it was.
Now…
Now it is desolation.
Where the forest once stood tall, bright and green, it now lays cleared. Trees burned away, small fires still burning unchecked. The remnants of an inferno that swept through the area, destroying all in its path. There is no life here, not anymore. The grass is gone. The wildlife is gone. The cottage is gone. All that remains are corpses.
Then, in the massive grave, a twitch of movement.
In the arms of a woman shrouded in white, something awakens. Consciousness flowing back into her, she stirs. Her eyes open to reveal silver orbs, and she moves once more. She looks around trying to get her bearings, and finds herself staring into another familiar pair of silver eyes.
Stumbling back, the girl looks on in shock at the figure before her. A woman crouches over her, her arms outstretched to wrap around something, as if to shield it from some calamity. To protect me, the girl realizes.
The look on the woman's face is one of love, but also pain and fear. Her eyes are alight with cold silver flames flickering in their sockets. Her skin is pale and lifeless. Her body is frozen in place. For a moment, it seems like she's just frozen in time. Then the fire in her eyes begins to die.
As they die, piece by piece she disappears. First her skin flakes away, becoming nothing more than white dust in the wind, almost like fluttering white petals. Her hands and arms crumble as her skin continues to fall away.
Tears streak down the girl's own face, but she doesn't know why. She doesn't know why looking at this makes her hurt so much.
Transfixed by the sight of the disintegrating woman before her, she does not notice as the pieces of her start flowing into her own body. Soon, all that is left is they lingering eyes of silver fire looking back at her, and her silver white cloak holding her form. As the fires fade, a voice echoes in the mind of the girl.
"Remember Ruby, I will always love you…"
"Ma...mamma?" the girl whimpers, tears freely falling down her face as she hears her mother's voice for the last time.
But it's too late. The cloak falls to the ground, the only remnant of the woman once known as Summer Rose.
So it was that in that charred and dead land where nothing lived that a small girl wept for her mother, who sacrificed her own life to save her daughter's. The girl wept for minutes, hours, perhaps even days. She wept until her eyes ran dry, until her heart had emptied out all of its feelings.
Finally, she stopped. Feeling cold and empty, she finally rose. Lost, confused, and with no purpose in life, the young girl took the one thing she had to latch on to, the silver white cloak of her dead mother. Wrapping her petite form in its warm embrace, she walked through the charred land.
All around her she saw the death in the land. She had no more tears to weep, and at this point she felt numb. After the death of the one thing she was connected with, everything else felt trivial.
She walked for days, never noticing how she never felt hungry or tired. She walked out of the dead land into the rest of the forest. Even still, she found nothing and no one. She was all alone, with no signs of life to see.
Until the day she wasn't.
It started out as every day did. The sun crept up over the hill, spreading its rays over the silent and cold land. The silver eyed girl could feel its warmth upon her pale skin and turned from the blinding bright spot in the sky. She kept up her directionless march through forest, finding no life in sight.
She saw it before anything else. It was just a hazy shadow in the distance. Anyone else would have dismissed it, but she didn't. Something tingling in her mind told her to watch carefully, something whispered in her mind that this shadow was more than just a shadow. Then the shadow
moved.
It flitted through the forest, disappearing in the trees. Anyone else would have been disturbed or unnerved by it. They would have been on guard, suspicious of some monster jumping out at them from behind them. But the young girl did none of these things. It had been the first glimmer of movement and life she had seen in days, which at this point was as long as she could remember.
So instead of running away, she ran toward it. She ran and ran, never tiring, never faltering, just an endless steady pace of running. She could see the shadow in the distance, moving away from her. It was too far to see what it was. Even worse, it was faster than her.
She could see it leaving her behind with a contemptuous ease as if it didn't even notice her. She panicked as she envisioned losing the one and only sign of life she had ever met.
"Don't leave me!" she cried out futility, tears welling in her eyes as the thought of being alone rose again.
"Wait!" she yelled, liquid trailing down her face as her fear of being alone, the only thing she had left to feel, tore a hole in her heart.
And yet, despite all that, the shadow never faltered, never slowed, never noticed her.
No! She wailed inside, not wanting to lose out.
I have to be faster! She thought, pumping her legs even harder.
I can't lose them!
I don't want to be alone again!
And with those thoughts, she felt something inside her build and grow, becoming something powerful. The more she wanted to catch up, the more it grew. The more she willed herself to go faster, the more she could feel it develop.
Then she just felt something inside her snap into place, and like that, it happened.
Everything suddenly blurred around her and she felt a sense of vertigo. Suddenly, it all came to an abrupt halt. Unable to cope with the sudden change in velocity, she tripped over her own feet and fell to the ground. Shaking the leaves from her head, she looked behind her in confusion.
Behind her lay a clear trail in the leaves, with several ghostly white ashes falling in her wake.
What was that? she wondered, distracted by the unusual phenomenon.
She was pulled from her thoughts by the sound of leaves being crunched under foot. Turning slowly, she found herself facing a hoof. Attached to the hoof was a leg, black as night, that seemed to rise high into the sky. Tilting her head up, she saw a horse joining the leg. But it was no normal horse.
For a normal horse doesn't have bone white plates covering its head like a skull; a normal horse doesn't have a human-like torso sprouting out of its back.
The entire creature had the same jet black skin all over it. At the same time, calling it skin didn't appear entirely accurate. She could see dark veins and muscles that seemed to blend in with its exterior, all pulsing and throbbing in tune with itself. In some places, over top of this, were several bone like plates, in some ways looking like armor. The horse head had a horse skull-like bone-plated growth around it, leaving its burning orange eyes glowing out of the skull sockets. It breathed loudly, a black smog pouring out of its nostrils with each breath, but it quickly diffused in the air.
The human torso had more bone plates on it, but its head and arms were far more notable. Its arms were plated in more armor and spikes than most of the rest of its body, save the skull. The long, spindly but muscular arms ended in two human-like hands, covered in bone plate like clawed gauntlets.
Its head resembled a human skull, though warped and twisted into a demonic and dark version of itself. Two horns sprouted out of the forehead of the creature, curving up and backwards as went. The face was stuck in a grim toothy stone-faced look, the teeth looking noticeably more sharp and savage than a normal human's. Just like the horse head, two burning lights burned in the sockets of the human skull, filled with an inhuman rage and hunger. However, they also held something else.
Intelligence.
The girl could see an intellect and wisdom of a creature older than countries that feared it. She could see those eyes focused at her, investigating and analyzing her.
It was at this moment that something in the back of her mind rang out with words she couldn't truly remember hearing before. Despite having never seen it before, something inside her knew what it was.
This was the horseman of death, pestilence, famine, and war.
This wasn't just a Grimm, his was one of the Ancient Grimm.
This was the Nuckelavee.
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For the first time in an age, so long that it could be considered a new feeling all over again, it felt something strange. It was a foreign feeling, one unnatural to it and its kind.
Standing, or in this case sitting, before it was something it had never seen before. This feeling wasn't entirely new, as it felt much the same when it encountered humans with guns and flying machines for the first time. There was something almost unique about this time, however.
This time, it didn't know what to do.
The thing before it was a girl, small and young. That wasn't a problem, it had killed many children, infants both within and outside the womb, without an inch of hesitation. She was also a silver eyed one. That was an issue of concern, but it had dealt with them before. Granted, hers were active, in a way. Still, it knew she was likely too young and inexperienced to know how to use them properly, let alone actually being capable of fighting in some meaningful manner.
No, the issue was none of these things. Instead, it was something quite peculiar.
She was dead. The silver eyed little girl lying on the ground, wrapped in a silver white robe, and staring up at it was dead. et, she was also alive,n a way.
She had undoubtedly used her semblance to catch up with it, meaning she had an aura and as such still had her soul. She had also tripped and fallen, then turned to it when she recognized its presence. And she was most certainly staring up at it with wide silver eyes, taking in its full form.
But despite all of that, the girl was dead. It knew this for a fact, it could sense the way the girl's spirit was untethered to the earth. It knew that the girl's body was cold as a corpse, and her heart still as stone.
Mother's decree was to kill all humans, it thought, tilting its head in consideration, Unused to the action, its spine was loudly creaking and cracking all the while.
And yet, this one is already dead...but not.
It also considered the fact that it's creator, its mother, didn't want it to kill all humans, just the "heathens" as she called them. The "corrupted" and "lost".
Come to think of it, mother had quite a lot of names for them, it made note.
Refocusing back on this issue, it remembered several examples of humanity she permitted to live, and even a few it was supposed to protect. She especially kept an eye out for those she considered valuable or containing that "special spark".
Perhaps this is what she meant? it pondered.
Eventually, it shook its head, unable to come to a decision. Its job, its role in life was to spread death and decay. Usually there wasn't much issue with the task, but sometimes things got interesting. This, however, was far from its area of expertise.
In its younger days, it might have just killed the girl again, just to be sure, but it had since learned that its mother valued those humans with a "special spark", and considered them indispensable. Not to mention, it was one of the ancient ones, hardly a youngling. She would it was old enough to be able to restrain itself and not kill everything it didn't understand.
So with that in mind, it decided to head towards its creator in search of guidance. The sound of leaves crunching under ivory hoof rung out again as it slowly turned in the direction of her home, before it began trotting onwards.
"Wait!" the girl said in a desperate plea from behind it.
It ignored her calls, disregarding her importance as it did with most humans.
Suddenly, it felt an impact on its back. Spinning around and expecting an attack, it found, to its surprise, that the girl had managed to jump upon its equestrian back and latch on. It stared at her for a moment, and she stared at it. Burning red met cold silver as the girl waited fearfully for it to retaliate whilst the Grimm tried to discern what she wanted.
In the end, it did what could be considered a shrug, and left her to her own devices. She was young, and no real threat to it. Sure, the active silver eyes might have been dangerous, but she was too young and inexperienced for it to really be a danger to something like it. It could kill the girl anytime it wanted, should she become too much trouble. In addition, it sensed no ill intent from the girl, only fear and loneliness.
Fear and loneliness indeed. The girl could hear some part of the back of her mind calling the Ancient Grimm before it a monster, saying that it was dangerous. Under normal circumstances, she might have heeded them, but here and now, she was lost and desperate. She had nothing, no one, and no path.
Here before stood something she could finally connect with. Something alive, something somewhat human, something the deep depths of her mind found familiar even as it warned her to stay away. Those were the distant whispers of a dead people, and under these circumstances, she found them easy to ignore. A habit that would only continue to grow as she walked her path in life.
So it was that the young girl lost and stuck between life and death latched onto Ancient Grimm, old and patient enough to allow her to.
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A/n: This is an old Collaboration project between me and Luna, or whatever they go by on SV.
I'm posting it now because I just recently remembered it was sitting in Google docs, and I figured why the fuck not? I'm not horrifically embarrassed by it.
Still, I'm not overly passionate about it. This is a project I worked on purely for fun, with numerous things done soley because I wanted to do it. I've got a few additional chapters sitting around for it, but it's dubious how much I'll keep writing this.
