SAPR

by Scipio Smith

The Father of Monsters

The Father of Monsters

"So," Yang said. "You came all this way to tell me that it was cold and windy on top of a mountain?"

Put like that, Ruby felt very small and rather foolish. So much so that she didn't feel able to protest that she had come all the way back to tell Yang other stuff as well. "I needed to see you," she said.

Yang sprawled out on the couch in the living room. Her luxurious locks were tied back in a ponytail, which suited her even while it looked really unusual at the same time. "You wanted to see me. There's a difference."

"How do you know?"

"Because you don't need me, Rubes," Yang replied. "You never did."

"That's not true," Ruby insisted. "I do need you, and…and even if it is true, then so what? Isn't wanting you enough? Isn't wanting things to be the way they were enough?"

Yang's smile was sad as a wind blew through the open window of the living room. "That's not the way it works, Ruby," she said. "And it never was."

Ruby woke up with tears in her eyes.

It was still night; the middle of the night, judging by the way that the moon was still hanging so high in the sky and everyone around Ruby was fast asleep. The only person that Ruby could see awake was Cinder, on watch, standing with her back to Ruby and the camp, as still as if she had been turned to stone, the moonlight glimmering upon the glass of her bow.

Everyone else was sleeping. They had come down off the mountain today – or yesterday, depending on what day it was – and made camp on the edge of the valley called the Goat's Cleft, which would lead them out of the mountains and into the east. Sunset hadn't looked too happy about it, but she hadn't said why; or rather she'd say that she would tell them all tomorrow, once they were rested.

Once everyone else was rested. Ruby didn't feel like going back to sleep now, or even trying to. If she closed her eyes she just knew that it would be Yang's face she saw, even more than she could see it already in her mind's eye.

She wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand, but more replaced them almost at once. They flowed down her cheeks and no matter how often Ruby wiped at eyes or cheeks there were always more of them; they just wouldn't stop coming. Just like the memory of Yang in her dream, her hair bound back into the biggest ponytail that Ruby had ever seen, wouldn't leave her own even if she wanted it to.

Never mind that she didn't really want it to no matter much it hurt. If it was the closest she could come to seeing her sister again then she didn't want to let it go.

A sob escaped Ruby's lips, and she couldn't sit still any longer. At this rate she was going to wake up the whole camp, and she didn't want to deal with that right now. She didn't want to deal with Sunset or her dad or their attempts to help her. They meant well, she knew that and she appreciated it; but Dad had his own problems to deal with and it was selfish to make him deal with Ruby instead of himself; and Sunset…Sunset didn't really get it. How could she? She'd never lost anyone like that, so how could she know?

She was lucky.

And so Ruby fled, running out of the camp before her sobbing or her crying could awaken anyone else, leaving a trail of rosepetals like blood dripping from a wound that would not heal as she ran away from the valley and back towards the mountain that loomed above them.

She came to a halt in the shade of a solitary cypress tree, less by choice than because what with it being dark and with her eyes flooded with unceasing tears she couldn't see where she was going as well as she'd like and she tripped over one of the tree's exposed roots and went flying flat on her face on the ground.

She lay there for a while, her head resting on her arms, her body wracked by sobs.

I know that that's not how it works, but that doesn't mean I don't still want you.

I miss you so much.

“None of us should wander alone,” Cinder said. “Not in this country. You least of all.”

Ruby looked up, to see Cinder Fall standing over her, one hand outstretched to help her up.

Ruby didn’t take it. She could get up without Cinder’s help, and she…she still wasn’t sure how much she trusted Cinder. Sunset trusted her, true, but Sunset…Sunset was weird where Cinder was concerned, and always had been. Sunset could forget that Cinder was responsible for everything that had gone wrong, but Ruby couldn’t; not so easily.

So she got up by herself, and said, “I can take care of myself.” She reached for Crescent Rose on her back…except that she’d taken it off to sleep and it was actually back at camp. She clasped her hands behind her back and hoped that she didn’t look too stupid.

“I never said you couldn’t,” Cinder said, her expression giving no sign that she noticed Ruby’s actions. “I meant that…your disappearance in particular would grieve more…than some others.”

“It’s not like I’m running away,” Ruby replied. “I just…shouldn’t you be standing guard?”

“I woke Sunset and asked her to relieve me.”

“Did you tell her why?”

“If I had she would have come out here to you herself,” Cinder said. “I didn’t think that was what you’d want.”

“I wanted to be alone,” Ruby said pointedly.

“I’m sure you did,” Cinder said. “But as I said, that isn’t a good idea for anyone.”

Silence descended between the two of them, like one of those death-trap walls with spikes sticking out that you saw in cheesy movies; only there was no last minute escape from this death trap, instead Ruby felt impaled upon the spikes, unable to get away from Cinder even though she kind of – and more than kind of – wanted to. And the wall from which the spikes were jutting rose between them high and stout and impenetrable, preventing any words that the other might have said from reaching the other, so what was the point? There wasn’t one, to Ruby’s mind; she doubted that she would ever understand Cinder and she didn’t think it was possible for Cinder to ever understand her and why would they want to understand each other anyway? What would they get out of it? What would she gain from understanding the person who had brought about all the things that had led to Yang’s death and the break-up of her team? Who had helped to break the world the way she had? And how could someone who had done all those things understand somebody like Ruby? She sometimes thought that, as much as she tried and as much as she cared, even Sunset didn’t really get her, so what chance did Cinder have?

But all the same, despite the pointlessness of attempting to communicate, Ruby couldn’t leave; it was as though her feet had been stuck to the ground with ice dust.

She was trying very hard not to show it, but Cinder seemed to feel the same awkwardness that Ruby felt, the same sense of being trapped with nothing to say. “That…that’s a new outfit, isn’t it?” she said. “You weren’t wearing that at Beacon?”

“I thought it was time for a change,” Ruby said quietly.

“And you wanted to look more adult,” Cinder said. “For your father? So that he’d see you as a grown woman, and not a child that he needed to take care of? The woman of the house, not the little sister. Or were you trying to look a little more like her?”

“What?” Ruby said. “I don’t look anything like Yang.”

“There are one or two similarities.”

“So?” Ruby demanded. “Did you need a reason to change?”

“That old thing was getting a little worn out,” Cinder replied. “Not to mention…filled with some unpleasant memories. I’m guessing that’s another reason you wanted to change into something new.”

“Stop it,” Ruby snapped. “Just…just stop, okay? You don’t know anything about me so…so what are you even doing here? What are you doing here? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” She sobbed, her stomach hurting so much that it almost made her want to double over on herself. Unbidden, the tears returned to her eyes as fiercely as they had flowed just a few moments before. “You…you…you ruined everything,” Ruby said. “You turned Sunset into a monster, you brought the grimm and the chaos and the discord. You drove Amber insane, so that she didn’t know who she could trust and ended up running to Salem for help. Everything that happened at the end of the year happened because you started it; everyone who died was killed because of you! Yang died because of you and why…why is…what are you still doing here when Yang is gone?”

“Do you think that I haven’t asked myself that?” Cinder said. “Do you think that I don’t ask myself that every single day?”

Ruby looked up. Cinder stood with her profile to the other girl, looking up at the broken moon in the sky above them.

“Do you honestly think,” Cinder said. “That that question, and others like it, are not constantly uppermost in my mind: why am I repaid for my machinations with a second chance? Why do I deserve life, still less Sunset’s affections? What am I, now that I am no longer the Fall Maiden, no longer Salem’s right hand-“

“You were never the Fall Maiden,” Ruby growled. “You were only ever a thief.”

Cinder was silent for a moment. “Perhaps you’re right,” she admitted. “Hard as it is for my ego to admit it. I’m not sure whether that makes it worse or better. Probably neither. It neither helps nor hinders the question: what am I now; what do I want now?”

“I don’t know,” Ruby said.

“Of course you can’t answer that question for me,” Cinder said. “Can you answer it for yourself?”

“I know who I am,” replied the blood-crowned girl. “I’m Ruby Rose.”

Cinder nodded casually. “And what does Ruby Rose want?”

“I want the same thing I’ve always wanted,” Ruby said. “I want to do the best I can.”

“How vaguely laudable of you.”

“What do you want me to say?” Ruby demanded. “Why do you even care?”

“Because you’re right,” Cinder said. “It is unfair that I’m here when others are not; others whose deaths I connived at, others who died as a result of my machinations. Others who died as a consequence of all I set in motion. I’m not sure yet what I want but I think that I have no choice but to do…the best I can in consequence of doing the worst for so long.”

Ruby snorted. “You think that if you talk to me it will make everything better?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cinder said, sounding incredulous that Ruby could actually believe that she was so naive or clueless. “But I think that, if I didn’t talk to you, I might not be able to claim to be better. Not when I might be the only person here who understands what you’re going through; except for your father, but you don’t want to burden him unnecessarily, do you?”

“I don’t need your help.”

“You need help,” Cinder replied. “Help that you can’t get from Sunset. I can see how much it pains her to be unable to help you with this.”

“So that’s why you’re doing this? You’re helping me so that you can help Sunset?”

Cinder smirked. “Would you rather think that? Would it make it easier for you to accept my aid if you could tell yourself that I had an ulterior motive?”

Ruby was silent for a moment. “It would be easier to understand than trying to think of you as someone who cares.”

Cinder chuckled. “I am not your enemy, Ruby Rose.”

“Maybe not any more,” Ruby replied. “But you aren’t my friend.”

“No,” Cinder agreed. “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand you. They never found my mother’s body either. We buried an empty coffin in the cemetery.”

Ruby stiffened, her back straightening involuntarily. Her eyes began to dry up, and so did her throat. “Don’t,” she said.

“I’m not trying to…” Cinder paused for a moment. “We’re not so different, you and I. I am perhaps a living father and a loving sister away from becoming a great hero, a shining light to inspire the world; and you might be the absence of those things away from being a monster fit for nightmares. Or perhaps the real difference is that I turned my back on everything my mother had fought and died for you…but you embraced it with both hands.”

“I want to help people,” Ruby said. “You only wanted to help yourself.”

“I needed the help,” Cinder said. “The point is…the point is I know what it’s like to have the heart of your world ripped away from you; twice. It makes a hole, a void. An emptiness that has to be filled up with something. Nature abhors a vacuum after all.”

“I don’t feel as though I’m full of anything,” Ruby said. “It still feels pretty empty to me.”

Cinder nodded. “I didn’t say that it would happen at once. But it will happen. It happened to me. My empty voids filled up with anger, and hatred; after my father died…the only two people that I loved were gone, the anger and the hate was almost all that was left.”

“The only two?” Ruby asked. “You never had any friends?”

“A few, in Argus,” Cinder said. “But we left them all behind when my father moved us back to Mistral. They all moved on without me, in ways that I could not.”

Ruby nodded. She closed her eyes. “There are times…I want to get to Mistral, and see Jaune and Pyrrha again but there are times…there are times when I think of them there, together, and I think about how happy they are and I get so…so angry,” Ruby said. “Like why do they get to be happy when everything else feels like it’s falling apart?” She frowned. “And then I feel like a terrible person.”

“No, just a human like the rest of us,” Cinder said. “And here I thought you were some kind of alabaster statue brought to life.” She paused. “Although when I allowed myself to become full of anger and hate at least it was directed towards people who deserved my hatred.”

Ruby’s eyebrows rose.

Cinder shifted uncomfortably. “Alright, perhaps not all of them,” she admitted. “But my stepmother and stepsisters deserved all the malice that I bore them and more.”

Ruby continued to stare at her.

“I will not say that I regret their deaths, or even that I was the one who murdered them,” Cinder growled. “Much I will admit that I did wrong, but their deaths are nowhere near my conscience.”

“And you wonder why I don’t trust you.”

“I know why you don’t trust me: because you hold those around you to impossible standards of nobility you hold for yourself,” Cinder said. “Standards that not even you can meet.”

“I can,” Ruby said.

Now it was Cinder’s turn to raise an eyebrow. She looked very much…she looked sorry for Ruby, far sorrier than she had seemed just a moment ago in the discussion of grief and loss. It was as if she was now doubting what she had said just a moment ago, about Ruby being human after all. “Be careful of what comes in,” she said eventually. “It will determine who you become, and what you want. I let the hate, the anger and the fear come in and so I became a monster, I wanted death and vengeance and the power to ensure that I could never be hurt again. Is that the path you want to walk?”

“Of course not!”

“Then let something else in instead,” Cinder said. “You still-“

She was cut off as the ground began to crumble beneath their feet, splitting and cracking and bucking underneath as though there was a tremor that only the two of them could feel ripping through the earth.

“What’s happening?” Ruby asked.

“I don’t know,” Cinder said. “Get back to camp, ru-“

Too late. The ground opened upon underneath, revealing a gaping black maw beneath the earth into which the two of them were falling, falling, falling down into the darkness.

…

They hit the ground with a solid crunch that Ruby felt through her aura, which she could tell without having to look at her scroll must have taken a pretty nasty hit. She opened her eyes, to find that it was not nearly as dark at the bottom of this pit – or whatever – as she would have expected it to be. It had been dark during the fall, so dark that she couldn’t see Cinder at all and didn’t expect that Cinder could see her, so dark that – since Cinder did not yell as she fell, keeping silent for some reason; perhaps she was too proud to cry out as she was falling down what felt like a bottomless pit; perhaps she was afraid that Ruby would think she was weak if she did anything as human as shout – she didn’t even know if Cinder was still there or if she had hit a ledge or the hole that turned into a pair of tunnels and Cinder had fallen down a different one or…or anything.

But it wasn’t so dark down here. While it had been dark further up, down here at the bottom of wherever it was they found themselves, down here there was a light; a dark purple light, faint at times and pulsing on and off, but enough light to see Cinder lying on the ground with her feet closest to Ruby.

“Cinder?” Ruby groaned. “Are you-“

“Yes,” Cinder growled, cutting Ruby off as she climbed to her feet. Once more she offered a hand to Ruby, and once more Ruby refused it and scrambled upright by herself. Once more Cinder didn’t comment on the snub. “Do you have your scroll with you?”

Ruby nodded, as she pulled it out of the pouch at her belt; she didn’t sleep with Crescent Rose fastened to her back, but she did keep her belt on and everything within the pouches, trusting that things like her scroll were tough enough to survive her rolling onto them; while on the other hand the lumps that she felt from said pouches weren’t that much different from the lumps of stones and roots and uneven ground, and certainly no worse. She pulled open her scroll, and first checked the aura management app to see that it was about what she’d expected: she was in the yellow already.

From the back of Cinder’s scroll Ruby could see that she was in the same position.

Ruby scrolled to the call app, her finger racing across the transparent surface of the scroll. “No signal,” she said. “You?”

Cinder’s answer was to snap her scroll shut and put it away in disgust. She studied their surroundings, prompting Ruby to do likewise.

It didn’t look like a natural hole in the ground, a really deep sinkhole or anything like that. First there were the pulsing purple lights, or course, but also the fact that those sickly lights were coming from thin, spike rocks or crystals or something jutting up out of the soil or emerging from out of the walls. And they weren’t the only things coming out of the walls: when Ruby looked more closely she could see, not too far away and illuminated by the purple glow, what looked like a metal face, like an old-fashioned helmet with a face-mask but the man who wore that helm must have been a true giant, the size of an ursa at least. Who would have worn such a thing, and were they still buried inside their armour?

Nor was that all. The more Ruby’s eyes became accustomed to the low light, the more than she could see that the giant’s helm was not the only piece of armour – at least she kind of hoped that it was armour – scattered around them: helms, solid and boxy cuirasses, giant vambraces, greaves and armoured boots combined littered the ground, illuminated by the purple light from the crystalline spikes.

The masks of the helmets had faces on them, forged into the design when they were made, although Ruby didn’t know why any armourer would craft a mask with an expression of pain or horror, nor why any warrior would want to have such a mask made, let alone want to wear it into battle. And yet they were all like that, these masks frozen at the forging into contortions of agony, as if their maker had wanted them to depict their masters’ last moments instead of their best.

“Where are we?” Ruby asked. “Is it…is it a tomb?”

“What kind of tomb leaves those entombed within scattered about so idly, ripped to shreds,” Cinder replied. “This is a mass grave after a battle. It may not even have been on purpose, time itself might have buried these men.”

“Men?” Ruby said. “What kind of men could wear armour like this? These cuirasses…you’ve have to be…twelve feet? Sixteen? Maybe twenty feet tall to wear some of these, maybe taller. What kind of men could wear armour like that?”

“I don’t know,” Cinder admitted. “Nor do I really care. I’d rather not be here long enough to find the answers.”

Ruby frowned. “I wonder where their weapons are?”

“Hmm?”

“There’s lots of armour,” Ruby said. “But no weapons. Do you really believe that they could make armour like this but they fought with their bare hands?”

“Maybe the armies took the weapons with them,” Cinder said. “Left the armour to the fallen as a sign of respect. It really doesn’t matter. Unless you want to stay down here.”

Ruby shook her head. She looked up. The moonlight was a spotlight high up above them. Very high. “I can’t make that jump.”

“I wouldn’t like to try climbing, with our aura levels as they are,” Cinder said. “We wouldn’t have many falls in us. But they must have heard the earth breaking, it won’t be long until Sunset comes to get us. I’m sure it will be simple for her to teleport us out.”

A noise startled both of them. It was coming from one of the tunnels leading away from the cavernous chamber into which they had plunged – the presence of those tunnels was one of the other reasons Ruby didn’t believe they were in a natural hole – somewhere in the darkness beyond the reach of the purple glow from the shards of rock.

There it was again, a kind of slithering sound from somewhere in the dark.

They weren’t alone down here.

I really, really wish that I had Crescent Rose with me right now.

I kinda wish that one of these…bodies had a weapon that I could use.

Cinder’s bow appeared in her hand, and she turned to face the apparent source of the noise, drawing back the string as a glass arrow appeared, nocked and ready.

“Stay behind me,” Cinder hissed.

Ruby looked for a weapon, searching by the light of the- of course! She technically stayed behind Cinder, or at least in the region behind her, as she rushed to the wall of the…whatever this was, and seized one of the purple rocks in both hands.

It burned at her. It was as though there was something alive within these crystals, something that, while it might not have liked her touch, was excited by it nevertheless. She could feel something squirming within the rock as she pulled at it, she could feel it warm to the touch of her hands and she guessed that if she didn’t have her aura she would be in real pain right now. And yet she didn’t feel her aura draining because of it, or else she would have let go. It – she didn’t know of any better way to think of it, even though it couldn’t be alive; it was just a rock, how could it have anything living inside it? – might not like her, but it didn’t seem to want to hurt her either.

And yet she felt something almost like pain when she snapped off the glowing shard to use as a club. The glow faded almost completely, leaving only a pale, dying glimmer of light within her makeshift weapon. The stump that was all that visibly remained seemed to glow brighter in consequence, pulsing angrily at what Ruby had done.

It was weird, but she couldn’t give it too much thought right now. She had more important things to worry about.

Cinder scowled. “Wherever you are, come out. I tire of waiting.”

It emerged from the darkness, half bull and half snake, with serpent’s fangs descending from the mouth of a bull, the hooves of a bull held before it and a snake’s tail wriggling as it crawled along the ground. It was like nothing that Ruby had ever seen before, but she could have handled that if it were just another weird grimm.

But it was no grimm, it wasn’t black and it had no bleached white bony plates anywhere to be seen. This thing was green, with an amber belly and horns in two shades of grey, and its eyes were yellow, not red.

This was no grimm, whatever it was, but as it advanced upon Cinder, hissing like a cobra, it was definitely hostile.

Cinder’s smouldering eyes widened but she didn’t hesitate to let fly with her first arrow, striking the bull-snake square in the chest. The glass arrow shattered upon its aura – it had aura too? – but it did seem to make the creature hesitate as Cinder retreated, another pair of arrows appearing on her bowstring.

The creature didn’t hesitate either. It lunged at her, taking the hits of her two arrows upon its head without flinching from the damage to its aura as it ploughed into Cinder, smashing through her glass bow and slamming into her midriff, bearing her backwards with a winded exclamation of pain before it lifted her up and slammed her down into the ground. It reared up on its snake-like body, hissing and spitting as it prepared to trample her beneath its hooves.

Ruby charged, yelling as she smashed the creature across the face with her improvised club. It wasn’t Crescent Rose by any means, but it gave her enough leverage to hit the thing so hard that its head was twisted around with a grunt of pain. She raised the club to hit it again, but the creature was prepared for her this time and parried her downwards stroke with its horns, grappling with her crystal weapon as it tried to wrest it out of her hands. Ruby struggled against the monster’s strength as they each pulled upon the purple rock, the monster’s body wriggling on top of Cinder’s prone form as it strove with Ruby.

Cinder stretched out her hands and the shards of glass returned to her, forming not a bow but a pair of curved scimitar-like blades with which she stabbed upwards into the bull-snake’s belly.

It’s aura broke with a dark green ripple as the blades struck home, the glass burying itself inside the creature’s belly. The bull-snake roared in pain, doubling over and writhing in place.

Ruby wrenched her club back from out of the monster’s horns, reversed it in her grasp, and drove the pointed end into its chest.

The monster howled in pain, and this time it succeeded in wrenching the club away from Ruby, but only in its death throes as Ruby lost her grip upon the crystal shard now thick with blood as the snake-bull hybrid crawled unsteadily away from Cinder and Ruby, leaving a trail of blood behind before it collapsed a few feet away, groaning softly in pain.

After a few moments even the groans had stopped.

Ruby offered Cinder a hand up. Cinder got to her feet without taking it.

“What was that thing?” Ruby asked.

“You think I know?” Cinder replied.

“You did…used to be evil.”

“Salem is the mistress of grimm,” Cinder said. “Not mistress of bizarre chimeras. Wherever that thing came from it wasn’t from her.”

“At least it’s dead now,” Ruby said. “Unless there are-“

The monster roared.

Cinder whirled around to look at it. Ruby stared too as the snake-bull – a purple glow rising from it – got up onto its snakey tail once more.

A purple light suffused the monsters as the crystal shard that Ruby had driven into its chest melted into its chest, like cheese under the grill melting into a crumpet, turning to liquid before their eyes even though it was cold down here. The creature glowed with the light that had once been in the rock or…no, it couldn’t be a rock since it was, y’know, melting, but whatever it was the light was filling up the monster, as its eyes turned purple and random metal parts began to sprout from its body: a ridge of glowing purple spikes running down its back and jutting out of its bull legs.

They could see the purple glow coming out of its mouth as it hissed at them.

Cinder roared in anger, her scimitars glinting purple as they caught the glow from the crystal shards as she leapt at the monster before it could leapt at her, slicing diagonally downwards with both swords in a stroke that cut deep into the creature’s flesh, drawing blood and a causing more of that purple glow to issue from the wound. The creature snarled, but Cinder snarled right back at it as she drove one of her blades up through the bottom of its jaw and into the top of its head. The monster hung there, a grotesque puppet, trying to move its mouth as Cinder sliced and sliced with her free blade, cutting off both hooves and hacking at the monster’s neck until its headless trunk dropped to the ground at her feet, leaving only the head stuck on her sword.

Ruby stared. “It…it didn’t have any aura.”

Cinder tossed the head aside. “It wasn’t really alive. Not after we killed it the first time.”

Ruby blinked. “You told me that nothing could bring back the dead.”

“You call that coming back?” Cinder asked harshly.

“No,” Ruby whispered. “No, I don’t.”

“And besides,” Cinder said, her tone softening a little. “I’d never seen anything like this when I told you that.”

There was another sound, a scuffling sound this time but unmistakably the noise of something else approaching, another possible enemy bearing down upon them.

“We can’t stay here,” Cinder said. “We need to move.”

“But Sunset-“

“Will have to find us,” Cinder snapped. “You’re unarmed, and neither of us is at full aura after that fall.” She breathed out firmly, as she combined her blades into a bow once more. “So long as you’re alive you can win,” she said. “But once you’re dead you’ve lost for good.”

Ruby nodded, albeit reluctantly. “So we run?”

“Yes,” Cinder said. “We run.”

And run they did, as more monsters emerged out of the dark.

---

Cinder turned and fired off a glass arrow at the creature – some kind of wild boar, albeit a very large-looking one – that pursued them. The arrow landed at the boar’s feet, before blowing up in its face. Cinder took a degree of satisfaction from the animal’s howl of pain as she turned and followed Ruby down the underground tunnel.

She didn’t know where they were going, and Ruby didn’t know either. At present their only objective was to stay alive; they could worry about where they were or how to find their way back later, after they had shaken off this pursuit.

Cinder growled wordlessly. She would not die down here, in this place, to these things. She might have relinquished destiny and grand ambition, she might have repented of her dreams of sovereignty and power, but that didn’t mean that she was going to lie down and die in an underground warren in a valley on the edge of the eastern wilds with a name like the Goat’s Cleft, run down and devoured like a helpless doe brought to bay by the hounds of the hunt by a collection of creatures sprung out of storybook and nightmare of which she had never heard before and of which the wider world knew naught. She didn’t know what she was now, she didn’t know where she was going, she wasn’t even completely sure what she wanted, but she knew that this was not her fate.

Though she was not made to be great and terrible in equal measure, surely she had not passed through so much fire and death to meet an end so ignominious? Ruby had asked her why she was still here, when better souls than her were dead and gone; surely she had not been kept alive so far only to die in this place, at the hands of this rabble?

This rabble who would kill her if they had the chance, and Ruby too. Ruby. Ruby who had no weapon; Ruby who had Sunset’s love. She had to keep Ruby alive. She could never return to the camp if she did not. Ruby could go back without Cinder, but Cinder could not return without Ruby; that was the plain, unvarnished truth of it, and like or dislike came not near the fact of the matter. She saved Ruby, or she did not save herself.

So she would protect Ruby Rose. Because she was, for the moment, still Cinder Fall and no monsters of the dark and underground were going to get the best of her.

She leapt, kicking off the walls to carry her up towards the high ceiling of the earthen tunnel to kick at a little furry creature, that looked like the evil cousin of some foolish little girl’s stuffed toy – in fact Cinder could swear that she had once had a stuffed toy that looked like this little monster’s kindly relative, back when she had been a foolish little girl with a family that loved her – in the face as it tried to leap up onto Ruby’s back. It flew into the darkness with a yelp of pain.

These things had aura, but it seemed to be very weak and easily broken by attacks that a man would have shrugged off. For that Cinder was thankful.

But there were so many of them. They crawled or ran or shambled out of the darkness, or else they burst out of the earth with fangs bared and jaws agape. Wyrms and serpentine creatures; chimeras of all descriptions – one of them an actual chimera that had tried to get between Cinder and Ruby until Cinder cut off its snake-tail – great eels that burst out of the ground to try and swallow them whole; bulls and boars and lions of a monstrous size with inky blackness in their eyes; little beasts with jaws far too big for their small statures; giant suits of armour driven by a dark red glow within them; and the dead, the shambling dead who walked amidst the monsters. Some of them were mere skeletons, all flesh having sloughed from off their bodies long ago; some of them had only just begun to decay, most bore the mark upon them of a violent death, a skull stoved in, a chest cut open, a throat slit; all of them had eyes and mouths and any other visible orifice or opening that burned with a mixture of that pulsing purple light that had illuminated the serpent-bull upon its twisted resurrection and a golden light that intertwined and danced around it; the skeletons were filled with these lights, it was all that could be seen beneath their bones, but even the less decayed dead were suffused with it, whatever it was.

Whatever it is? It is magic, clearly, although not magic of a sort that I have ever seen. Cinder had never witnessed Salem wielding power such as this; no magic could bring back the dead, Salem had told her after Cinder had got down upon one knee and, in return for her faithful service, begged the Dark Mother for the return of her own mother from beyond the grave; Salem had informed her with regret in her voice that it was quite impossible.

It is far from impossible that she lied to me. She was not above doing so.

Yet I meant what I said to Ruby: you can hardly call this returning to life. It was not at all clear that these corpses could even think for themselves, although if it was not aura they had something that allowed them to withstand Cinder’s arrows and the blows of her swords, and to stand up to more such punishment than some of their more obviously monstrous brethren.

But monstrous or dead or something of both – for there were some of the creatures that seemed to have been brought back to life – they were all dangerous, especially to a huntress without a weapon and half her aura gone and another who shared one of those difficulties.

I will not die tonight. Not like this. Cinder thought, as she shot a trio of arrows into a snake with the head of a chicken – a creature that did not look as comical as it sounded when it was trying to bite you.

I may fall, but not like this.

She turned her bow into a pair of swords with which to slice a shambling skeleton into pieces in a flurry of blows with rendered it a pile of bones from which all glow of magic surely faded. She looked behind her, to see that Ruby was some ten feet ahead, still running. Cinder made to follow her.

Something coiled around her leg, yanking Cinder off her feet before she could react, pulling her onto her side, dragging her into the dark of a side tunnel.

Ruby! Cinder thought as she scrambled to her feet, feeling the taut tug that had dragged her down and backwards easing off. She had to get to Ruby. She had to protect her. She would never be welcomed back into the company without the silver-eyed girl they loved so well. Sunset might believe that Cinder had done the best she could but there is no way Ruby’s father would believe it. She had to-

“Don’t worry, they’re not going to kill her; not yet, at least. She’s needed alive, for the moment.”

Cinder’s eyes widened. That voice. It can’t be. “No,” Cinder murmured. “No, this isn’t possible.”

“Believe it, Cinder,” Phoebe declared. “I’m back.”

Cinder rolled over onto her back. It couldn’t be – but it was. There was no way but there she stood: Phoebe Kommenos, her stepsister, arrayed in all her gilded armour, with her spear gripped tightly in one hand and her tall tower shield upon her other arm; her eyes glowed purple and gold, but in spite of that she was yet managing to stare down at Cinder with just as much contempt as she had been want to show whenever she looked down on Cinder grubbing in the fireplace or doing some menial chore around the house.

“No,” Cinder murmured.

Phoebe laughed, that high-pitched laugh that Cinder had always feared and hated in equal measure. “What’s the matter, Cinder? Are you scared?”

“I was never afraid of you while you were alive,” Cinder lied as she surged to her feet, reacting angrily in the hope that anger would come and give her courage. “I’m not afraid of you dead.”

“Then why are your hands shaking?”

“This isn’t real!” Cinder snarled. “I killed you. I killed you!”

“This seems to be a place for the dead returning, doesn’t it?”

Cinder bared her teeth as she flowed into a sword stance, one blade held low and the other up high. “Then I’ll just have to kill you again, won’t I?”

“If you can. It’s not as though you have your magic any more,” Phoebe said. “You’re just little Cinder Fall, my scared little stepsister who used to beg me to stop.”

“Shut up!” Cinder yelled. “I don’t need to be the Fall Maiden to be…” She trailed off, her eyes narrowing. “Wait, how did you know about that?”

“About what?” Phoebe asked.

“About my magic,” Cinder said. “You didn’t know, there’s no way you could have known, did death suddenly grant you omniscience?”

Phoebe hesitated, and then disappeared before Cinder’s eyes, revealing not the stepsister that Cinder had murdered…but rather the servant she had led to her death.

Emerald stood before her.

And yet she was not as she had been. Her head was not quite at the right angle relative to her neck, and more the point it was caved in just above the right temple, her neon-green hair matted and red with stiff, dry blood; metal was beginning to protrude from out of her body, little shards and scraps and spikes emerging from out of her twisted neck, from out of her legs, down her arms they formed vicious-looking spines like the claws of a mantis, it looked like metal wings were starting to sprout from out of her shoulders; and her eyes, once red-brown, now glowed with that mixture of purple and gold that Cinder had seen so often in this underground warren.

“You got me,” Emerald said. “Just like I got a little carried away there.”

Cinder stared at her. “Emerald? No. This is another illusion, another trick.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because you fell,” Cinder said. “I watched you fall.”

Emerald popped her head back into place with an audible crick. “I did fall,” she said. “You let me fall. You let me die.” She raised both of her revolvers to take aim at Cinder.

Cinder took a step back. “Emerald? What are you doing?”

“You let me die,” Emerald said, her voice as cold as the wind gusting through the city streets in which she’d made her home. “You took me away and you led me to my death.”

Cinder closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did.”

“I had a life on the streets,” Emerald snarled. “I wasn’t rich but I was surviving!”

“I know.”

“Huntsmen, magic, Maidens, relics, the grimm?” Emerald demanded. “I would never have gone near any of that if it wasn’t for you! I would never have been anywhere near this place if it weren’t for you!”

“I know.”

“I gave up everything for you. I followed everywhere you led, even when you rebelled against Salem I followed you. I even followed you into captivity and a cage.”

“I know.”

“I loved you,” Emerald said. “You were so strong, and so passionate; you seemed like such a mighty figure, like a god from some old story. I loved you, even though I could tell that Sunset Shimmer was…you only saw me as a pawn.”

“I know.”

“Stop saying that!” Emerald shrieked. “Stop saying that you know as if you understand.”

“What am I supposed to say?” Cinder demanded. “Everything that you say is true. Should I deny it so that you can become even more inflamed at me? I took advantage of you, I led you into battle that was none of your concern, I involved you in a world too large for you, I knew how you felt and I either ignored it…or worse, I took advantage of your devotion to me, a devotion I had no intention of returning. I led you to your death.” A ragged breath escaped her. “But Emerald, tell me…who has done this to you?”

“I did,” the voice that emerged from out of the darkness was old, ancient even, a low rasp rich with years, as deep as the waters in which the leviathans swam. “With my magic, and a little touch of the Blood of Unicron, I have restored this lost child, just as I have restored all the sacrifices offered up to me by those who have passed through this valley and over the mountain beyond. She was not laid upon the altar, but she was offered up as sacrifice nonetheless.”

“Who are you?” Cinder asked, her eyes attempting to penetrate the darkness to no avail.

“Does the name Grogar mean anything to you?” Grogar – Cinder presumed – asked.

“Not until now,” Cinder said.

“It will to the one called Sunset Shimmer, I hope,” Grogar said from out of the darkness. “Yes, I know the names of your companions. It was fascinating to observe the battle on the mountain. I recognise the magic of my home when I see it brought to bear, and Emerald was willing to answer all of my questions.”

“Emerald?”

“I serve a new master now,” Emerald said. “One who will not repay my service with neglect.”

“Emerald tells me that the girl Ruby is well loved,” Grogar declared. “That is good. Love is so easily manipulated, and for that reason she will be allowed to survive, for now. You, on the other hand, I have no need of. Emerald, child; dispose of her, and take your revenge.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Is that what you want?” Cinder said. “Or is that what he’s telling you to do?”

“Don’t you think I deserve to kill you?”

“I want to know if you can say no.”

“It…it doesn’t matter,” Emerald said. “I wouldn’t even if I could. I see clearly now.”

“And so do I,” Cinder growled. “You’re right: you do deserve to kill me. However, as much as I deserve death,” She chuckled. “I refuse to welcome it!” She charged, her glass swords held before her, weaving patterns through the air as Emerald fired, her revolvers blazing as green as her hair as round after round left the pistol barrels. Cinder blocked the shots with her swords, furiously beating away the bullets, as she closed the distance between them.

She slashed at Emerald with one glass scimitar. Emerald blocked with both her pistols, the hook-like blades appearing beneath the barrels to try and trap her sword beneath them. Cinder lashed out with her leg, bringing up her knee to collide with Emerald’s thigh and then, as she staggered with a wince of pain, bringing her other sword to cut across her exposed midriff. Emerald tried to sweep Cinder’s legs out from beneath her, but Cinder leapt above the kick to deliver a kick of her own with both feet to Emerald’s gut, staggering her backwards.

Cinder pursued her, thrusting one sword forward. Emerald parried with the blade beneath her pistol barrel, while with the other gun she slashed at Cinder’s face at eye-level. Cinder leaned back away from the blade, only for Emerald – with a speed greater than she had enjoyed when she was alive – reverse her stroke to slash Cinder across the face with the spines jutting out of her wrist and arm. Cinder felt her aura cut away as she was forced backwards, a moment before she felt the bullet hit her in the gut and double her over with the force of the impact.

She didn’t know exactly how much aura she had left but if it was more than a sliver Cinder would be very surprised. She leapt away, putting a little distance between herself and Emerald. Her glass blades fell away from her, crumbling into shards that tinkled on the ground as they descended to the earth. Emerald raised her revolvers.

“I used to think that you were destined to prevail,” Emerald said. “I looked at you and I thought that you were indomitable, that you would never give up. But now? You could have been the Fall Maiden. You were the Fall Maiden. You could have been the Red Queen of Vale. But now? Without your magic, what are you?”

“I’m what I’ve always been since the moment you met me. I’m Cinder Fall.” Cinder raised one hand, and all the shards of glass from her shattered Midnight flew towards Emerald in a torrent, a storm of razor-sharp shards that flew around her like a swarm of deadly flies, ripping at her aura.

Cinder charged once more, punching Emerald in the face, kicking her in the gut as she wrenched her bladed pistols aside, throwing her by the arms across the tunnel and into the dirt wall before assailing her with shards of glass once more; Cinder pursued her, threw her down and stood over her as Midnight reformed into a bow in her hands.

She drew back the string.

BANG!

Cinder staggered backwards as her aura broke. Emerald’s eyes seemed to grow a little brighter as she rose to her feet, a scowl darkening her features.

She lashed Cinder across the face with one of her pistols, knocking Cinder to the ground and drawing blood from her cheek. It hurt. It hurt more than Cinder would have expected. It had been a long time since her aura shattered. So long that she couldn’t actually remember the last time.

Emerald took aim at her down the barrel.

Not here. Not like this.

“Wait,” Grogar’s voice echoed out of the dark.

Emerald’s face twitched. “My lord?”

“You didn’t tell me she was so spirited,” Grogar said. “Or so capable. Bring her to me, that she may be forged anew.” He chuckled darkly in Cinder’s ear. “You belong to me now.”

---

The company floated down the hole, surrounded by a green bubble of Sunset’s magic.

Teleportation would have been slightly easier from Sunset’s personal perspective, but it had the difficulty first that Sunset couldn’t see the bottom of the hole that had swallowed up Ruby and Cinder, so judging where to actually teleport too would have been a little difficult, and secondly that – since it was likely, judging by the fact that they couldn’t see the bottom of the hole, that it was deeper than their limited supply of rope – there would have been no way that anyone else could get down after her.

She didn’t even have to look at Taiyang to know that there was no way that was going to fly with him.

It wouldn’t have flown with her either if the positions had been reversed.

So she had used a combination of a shield, telekinesis, anti-gravity and pegasus control of wind to pick the entire party up in shield bubble, drift said bubble over the hole and then gently descend them downwards until they reached the ground.

It was not the easiest thing that she had ever done with magic, and if she wanted to get all of them – plus Cinder and Ruby – out of the hole again afterwards, she would need to be considered and sparing with how she used magic between now and then.

But for now, they were down here, and finding their friends was more important than worrying about the exit at the end of the line.

The shield bubbled popped as it touched the ground, and the company dropped the last foot to plant their feet upon the dirt at the bottom of this tunnel.

The dirt or the metal armour of all the dead who littered the bottom, and whose corpses were illuminated by the light coming from those purple stalactites sprouting from the earthen walls.

If it was armour. Sunset didn’t know who would fashion their armour to make it look as though they were dying an agonising death.

It might just as likely be that they were the remains of people who had died an agonising death. True, Sunset didn’t know of any people who were between ten and twenty feet tall and made of metal, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. The world was full of wonders, after all, and who was she to say that she had seen them all?

She just hoped that, whatever these things were, they were all dead and there weren’t more of them alive and roaming around.

Since when do we ever get that lucky?

Taiyang cupped his hands around his mouth. “Ruby? Ruby, can you hear me?”

There was no answer but the echoing of Taiyang’s voice, bouncing off the walls and issuing forth into the dark.

Cardin rested his mace upon his shoulder. “Why would they wander off? Why not stay here, and wait to be found?”

“I don’t know for sure, but maybe that thing over there had something to do with it?” Torchwick said, pointing with his cane towards the dead ophiotaurus lying half-hidden in the darkness. Sunset hadn’t spotted it until now.

She walked quickly towards it, leaping over the armour or the body, whichever you wanted to call it, to reach the fallen creature. She knelt down beside it: it had been stabbed multiple times then sliced into pieces. Even if you allowed for the fact that it might have had aura in Remnant, it was still surprising that it had taken so much killing.

More to the point, what is an ophiotaurus doing in Remnant?

“What is it?” Taiyang asked.

“Something that isn’t where it ought to be,” Sunset murmured. She shivered, and not from the cold. She had dreamed of this, when she had walked with Amber to the coast: all Equestria’s monsters, here in Remnant, gathered around a creature that was half-man, half-goat. And now it seemed to be coming true.

Stay safe, both of you.

Bon Bon prodded one of the fallen metal bodies with the toe of her armoured boot. It clanked, if only softly. “And what do you suppose these things are?”

“I don’t know, but I think Twilight would love to see it,” Lyra said.

“Maybe, but I doubt that she’d actually like to be here,” said Bon Bon.

“None of them would want her to be here,” Lyra said. “I don’t really want to be here myself.”

“So…nobody knows what they are?” Jack asked, looking at the metallic creatures all around them. “Or, you know, whether there are any more of them.”

“The old gods,” Sami muttered.

“Will you stop with that stuff?” Jack demanded. “It’s not helping.”

“I know that!” Sami snapped. “But I was always told that there was something in this valley and now look at all this! Maybe there really were gods in this valley after all, just like they always said.”

“Gods?” the voice issued from out of the darkness, seeming to come from all around them; a hoarse and aged voice, deep and rasping in equal measure, not echoing precisely but seeming to hang in the air after it had spoken. “No, child, those are not gods. Those are the remains of fools who strove against a god. In the emptiness above the sky they fought, and through fire and darkness they fell to the world that once was like…shooting stars. A great battle it was, fought long ago, in which the sky burned and the darkness turned to light. Long, long ago, before ever a true god came to this valley.”

“Let me guess, you?” Sunset growled.

“Who are you?” Taiyang demanded, shouting at the empty air. “What have you done with Ruby?”

In response came not the deep, hoarse voice, but rather a low, growling, gurgling sound, accompanied by footsteps coming towards them.

“That…that doesn’t sound like Ruby,” Lyra said.

Nor was it Ruby that stepped out of the shadow. It was a young girl, but younger than Ruby, maybe thirteen, although she was tall for her age. She was also a reindeer faunus, with the fading marks of tattoos inked onto her skin…and the far more obvious mark of a slit throat, sliced open from side to side. Sunset could still see where the blood had dried on the wound. There were metal…things growing out of her body, extraneous parts sprouting from out of her skin: a line of spikes emerging from her back like the spines of a fish’s fin.

Her eyes were vacant, but at the same time burned with a mingled light of dark purple and burning gold.

“It can’t be,” Sami said as she pushed past Cardin to stand in front of this other girl. “Sunna?”

Sunna stared at Sami, and a low growl rose from her throat.

“How?” Sami said, her voice softer than Sunset had ever heard it before. “How is this possible? I saw…what’s going on?”

Sunna was still, and even for a moment silent. Then she let out a high-pitched keening shriek and launched herself at Sami, the dead girl bearing the living one to the ground and pressing her hands down upon Sami’s head.

“Sunna…what are you doing?” Sami gasped, as Sunna appeared to be trying to squeeze her head like a grape. “It’s me…it’s your sister.”

Taiyang was the first to react, grabbing Sunna and bodily wrenching her off of Sami. Sunna glared at him, and backhanded him hard enough to send him flying across the earthen chamber and into the dirt wall.

As Sunna dropped to the floor, landing on her feet like a cat, Torchwick shot her in the chest with his Melodic Cudgel. The blast knocked her backwards and onto her back, sending her skidding across the ground, but in a moment she simply backflipped back onto her feet and began to charge once again at a frozen and astonished Sami.

Sunset stepped between them, her black blade flying.

With her first stroke she cut off Sunna’s right arm.

With her second she drove it into the girl’s belly.

Sunna growled as she began to drag herself up the blade towards Sunset.

“By the gods,” Bon Bon whispered.

“Sunna,” Sami moaned. “What are you doing?”

More to the point, when are you going to stop doing it?

She shoved the revenant off her sword, and with her third stroke Sunset took off her head and at that she dropped, motionless, to the ground.

Sunset’s hands trembled as she stared down at the fallen trunk in front of her.

“No!” Sami yelled. “That was-“

“Not your sister,” Sunset said. “Not any more.” She glanced back at her. “I’m sorry.”

Sami didn’t reply, but in her eyes there was more resentment to be seen than understanding.

“At least now we know why Ruby and Cinder didn’t stick around,” Cardin said.

“Yeah, because of the monsters and the zombies,” Torchwick said. He shook his head. “You know, I really miss the days when I used to knock over betting shops.”

Taiyang picked himself up off the ground. “How do we find Ruby down here?”

Sunset considered it for a moment. She slung her sword back over her shoulder. “Torchwick, use your cane to draw a line in the ground as we go. We’ll follow it back when we find the others.”

The voice from out of the darkness laughed, a deep and throaty laugh, rich with contempt. “You disappoint me, Sunset Shimmer, if you think that so simple a childish trick will avail you. If it was so easy to escape this place why would I remain here, entombed in darkness, awaiting the coming of one such as you?”

“What is he talking about?” Cardin asked.

“He’s talking bull, he’s playing headgames to frighten us,” Sami spat.

“I’m not so sure,” Sunset said, as she reached out her sense of the world magical, extending her powers out all around her as she searched for any trace of magic in the vicinity. There it was, right in front of her! Right in front of her and extending out, like a dome, engulfing the underground. They stood upon the very edge of it, a magical barrier, a prison made to hold that which dwelt within.

“Meadowbrook’s Maze of Mirrors,” Sunset murmured.

“Meadow-who’s what?” Cardin said.

“It’s a magic spell,” Sunset explained. “We’re standing on the edge of it now; if we go into the tunnels we will be ensnared within it just as the being talking to us now is ensnared...just as Ruby and Cinder are ensnared.”

“Ensnared,” Taiyang gasped. “You mean-”

“They can’t find their way out, and if we go in there neither will we,” Sunset said solemnly. “Unless…” Why am I always faced with this same choice over and over and over again? Can I get no peace? Is there no respite? Must I repeat this moment of my life ad infinitum until I’m old and grey and always with my friends lives upon the line?

There’s no way the gods have abandoned Remnant; they’re still around and they hate me personally.

Which wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t always using those I care for the most as the instruments of my torment.

“Unless?” Taiyang demanded.

“Unless someone like Sunset Shimmer, an Equestrian mage, should break the spell,” the voice from out of the shadows declared. “Only then will you be able to rescue your young friend, who has already passed so deeply into the net.”

Taiyang growled. “You son of a-”

“Do not misdirect your anger,” cautioned the ancient voice. “It was not I who cast this spell. Rather, the spell was cast aeons ago to keep me here, that it ensnares those who wander too deeply into my domain is a side-effect but, to be sure, a welcome one.

“Long have I waited in this valley, lurking beneath the ground, tending to my forge, breeding my creatures, sending the meanest of my servants out to collect the tribute left to me; waiting, hoping, longing for the day when one would come with the power to set me free.

“And now, at last, fate has provided. Now you are come to me, Sunset Shimmer, mage of Equestria, and now your friend has wandered into my domain: the domain of Grogar.”

“Something you arranged, I’m sure,” Sunset growled, because if she focussed on the fact that she was upset then she didn’t have to think too hard about the fact that this was Grogar, the Father of Monsters who had terrorised Equestria ere Celestia and Luna were known in those lands. No wonder nothing had been seen or heard of him since his defeat at the hands of Gusty the Great: she’d send him here just like Equestria seemed to have everyone else they wanted rid of.

Ozpin has every right to be upset with us, doesn’t he?

“She yet lives,” the voice said. “Though for how much longer I really cannot say. Break the spell, Sunset Shimmer; rescue your friend, and release me from my confinement.”

Sunset grimaced. She ground her teeth. She wanted to yell and scream and shout. Again!? Again and again and again? Why this every single time?

“Sunset,” Taiyang said. “Can you do it?”

“Yes,” Sunset said.

“That doesn’t mean that she should,” Cardin said.

Taiyang rounded on him. “What are you saying? Ruby’s down here somewhere!”

“And this thing, whatever it is, was sealed away for a reason,” Cardin said. “Maybe we should take a minute to-“

“Ruby might not have time for us to stand around thinking it over!” Taiyang yelled.

“That doesn’t mean that we should just take the risk blindly-“

“Cardin,” Sunset snapped. “Ruby and Cinder are both down here and if I...if I...if I…” No. No, she couldn’t just break the spell from where she was right here, she couldn’t just let Grogar out to wander free and wreak the same evil on Remnant that he had wrought upon Equestria.

But she didn’t have to.

I may not be Gusty the Great, but then it’s not as if I have to be. She already did the hardest part, right? If the stories are in any way accurate then she already stripped him of most of his power. And I should be able to deal with what’s left.

My huntress way: no sacrifices, save the life in front of me. Save Ruby and Cinder.

And defeat Grogar into the bargain.

I remember when the idea would have thrilled me. To do what only a legend of pre-history had done before would have seemed to her so grand, not too long ago. Now...now she couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the prospect, but in a strange way she regretted the fact, as though she was burnt out by eighteen.

Save my friends first, then worry about my lack of enthusiasm.

“Everyone, stay here,” she said. “I’m going in, I’m going to get Ruby and Cinder, we’re going to defeat Grogar and then once that is done, once it is safe, I’m going to bring them back here and we can go.”

Cardin frowned. “Can you do it? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Sunset lied. It wasn’t a huge lie, she was about ninety percent sure. Eighty percent as a floor. But she wasn’t going to tell him or anyone else that in case it made him reluctant to let her get on with it.

“And if you don’t come back?” Bon Bon said. “If you can’t back up all your tough talk then what about us? How are we supposed to get out without you?”

Sunset exhaled through her nostrils like a bull in the field. “I’m not leaving Ruby to die, or Cinder either.”

“It’s two lives-”

“You sided with Amber,” Sunset snarled, her voice cold with fury. “You stood by while Professor Ozpin was murdered, you would have killed Pyrrha if you could, I’ll take no lectures from you on morality!” She turned her attention away from Bon Bon, addressing all of them. “I’m doing this,” she declared, her voice brooking no further argument. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Are you sure?” Taiyang demanded. “Are you sure that you can win?”

“Sir,” Sunset said solemnly. “I know that I’m not Ruby’s sister; I know that I’m not her best friend, or even a particularly good friend; I know that I was a terrible partner and I might not even have been a particularly good team leader but I promise you this: I will always watch out for Ruby, no matter what.”

Taiyang looked into her eyes. “I believe you,” he said. “But I’m still coming with you.”

Sunset didn’t try to dissuade. “Glad to have you, sir.”

“Straight ahead?” Taiyang asked.

Sunset turned to face that way. “Straight ahead,” she agreed.

And together, they plunged into the magical embrace of the Maze of Mirrors.

---

Ruby threw a punch at the armoured giant in front of her.

It didn’t do very much. The giant – dressed like a knight out of some old storybook, with a red glow coming from within the suit of armour – didn’t even seem to feel it.

Ruby backed away a step. She had always thought it was kind of ridiculous when Yang had tried to insist that she learn how to fight without Crescent Rose.

It didn’t seem quite so ridiculous at this point.

She had lost Cinder some time ago, and in the dark and with all of these tunnels looking pretty much the same, she had gotten lost, turned around, and finally cornered and hemmed in by all of the things that were down here.

And at this point she was pretty sure that she had hardly any aura left at all.

She backed another step. The creatures of the underground closed in around her, hissing and snarling and leering as they bared their fangs.

There was no way out.

Yang, wherever you are, are you with Mom?

I guess I’ll find out soon, huh.

The armoured giant picked her up in one ironclad fist, slamming her into the wall as the monsters cheered and hissed triumphantly. Ruby groaned in pain as she felt her aura break, the crimson ripples running up and down her body.

The giant slammed her into the earthen wall again, making Ruby cry out in pain as her vision began to blur.

“Yang,” she whispered, as the giant slammed her into the ground this time, and Ruby did not cry out in spite of the pain because she began to slip into unconsciousness. Her vision darkened, her eyes began to close as the creatures closed in.

“LEAVE HER ALONE!” the angry cry came from a distinctive voice, followed by a distinctive shot that made the armoured giant recoil with a bellow of pain.

“Yang?”

The last thing Ruby saw before the darkness claimed her was a figure wearing a bleached shell mask like some kind of grimm step between her and anger.

Her hair was burning gold.

---

Yang burned with fury as she set upon them. She didn’t know what they were, she didn’t know where they had come from, she didn’t know anything about them and she didn’t care; all she cared about was that they were a danger to Ruby, and that made them her enemies.

And so, her whole body ablaze with righteous wrath, she dove into their midst. It didn’t matter how big their teeth were, it didn’t matter what kind of weird powers they had, it didn’t even matter that some of them looked like walking corpses because right now she was more than just a person, more than just a huntress, more than Yang Xiao-Long; right now she was a force of nature itself, fury incarnate, and she tore amongst these monsters like a wolf amongst the flock. And there was no shepherd nor sheepdog to stand in her way.

Ember Celica barked again and again and again as Yang drove her fists into her enemies, her arms working like pistons or piledrivers, forward and back, forward and back, bringing fire and vengeance with every blow she struck. She blew a hole in the giant’s chest and a larger one out its back to lay it low, she ground skeletal bones into powder fit for Mistralian medicine, she made the monsters flee in terror of her coming and killed all those who did not run fast enough.

But run they did, for all those monsters had met in Yang Xiao-Long a greater monster than themselves by far.

In the dark she had become the nightmares’ nightmare, and they ran from her, fighting with one another to escape, crushing one another in the narrow confines of the earthen tunnels, the larger creatures trampling the little ones under foot.

Until at last she stood alone, surrounded by the bodies of all the monsters she had slain.

Alone with her mother…and Ruby.

Slowly, tentatively, Yang took off her mask. Ruby was unconscious, and so couldn’t see her face; she might not have taken the mask off if it had been any other way.

Mind you, the mask didn’t cover her luxurious mane of hair, so it might not have made any difference either way.

She held the bone mask tucked underneath one arm, and put it down beside her as she knelt at Ruby’s side, looking down at her sleeping little sister.

Gently, Yang reached out and brushed some of the hair out of Ruby’s forehead.

“Do you think she’ll be okay?”

Raven stood a few feet away, having watched Yang fight but not participated in the fighting – save to drive her sword into the head of a furry little creature who had turned its attention towards her. She watched Yang with her arms folded, her own mask hanging from her belt. “I think so; it doesn’t look as though there was any permanent damage.”

Yang closed her eyes. “Thank you, for watching out for them.” At her request, Raven had kept an eye on Dad, and in keeping an eye on Dad had kept an eye on Ruby too. Yang didn’t know much about what was going on with the two of them – she didn’t know where they were, or why they were here – but when she had agreed to stop trying to escape, she had extracted a promise from the woman who had birthed her: that she would watch over Dad and Ruby and, if it ever looked as though one of them was in mortal danger, then she would bring Yang to their aid.

Raven had agreed, with one modification: she could only save each of them once. Yang hoped it would be enough.

Raven nodded. “I don’t think I could look Summer in the eye if I did any less.” She paused. “You could bring her with you, if you wish.”

Yang looked up at her. “You mean…take her back?”

Raven shrugged. “She’s not in any position to object at the moment.” She gestured towards the portal, the tear in the fabric of space rippling crimson nearby. “Pick her up and carry her away. To safety.”

“Is that what you want?”

“She’s your sister,” Raven said. “The choice is yours.”

“Ruby?” a voice, Sunset’s voice, echoed down the corridor. “RUBY?”

“We need to go,” Raven said. “Is she coming?”

Yang shook her head, in spite of the temptation to do exactly as Raven had said: pick Ruby up in her arms and carry her away with her, some place where Yang could keep her safe from harm. “No,” she said. “No, I couldn’t do that to Dad. Or Ruby.”

“You speak as though saving her life would be a cruelty to her.”

It was for me, Yang thought. “She’d wither inside a cage,” she whispered. She bent down, and kissed her little sister gently on the forehead. “I love you.”

“It’s time,” Raven said.

Yang nodded as she got to her feet, picking up her helmet and putting it on in a swift, fluid motion. She knew how important it was to get out before they were found. As much as it hurt, not to be able to talk to Ruby, not to be able to see Dad again, if he found her like this…she couldn’t see a way that this didn’t end with one of her parents killing the other, and – no offence, Dad – her money was on Raven.

She took one last look at Ruby, feeling a little reassured to know that she wouldn’t be leaving her alone for long.

I don’t know what road you’re on, Ruby; but I wish you luck, wherever it takes you.

She followed Raven into the portal, which closed behind them as though it had never been at all.

---

Sunset ran forward, almost stumbling over the body of a cockatrice that lay in her path. In fact, the ground ahead of her was strewn with monsters, with Ruby lying in the midst of all of them.

Sunset’s heart rose into her throat, her stomach chilled, but as she got closer, leaping over the bodies of those that Ruby had despatched – she’d really done a number on them, hadn’t she? – she saw that Ruby was not, as she had feared, dead; but only sleeping, or unconscious.

She must have slain all her enemies before passing out from the effort.

Atta girl.

“Ruby!” Taiyang cried, rushing up after Sunset. “Is she okay?”

Sunset cradled Ruby in her arms for a moment, lifting her up and holding her close, resting her head against Sunset’s breast. “She’s out of it,” she said. “But I think she’s okay. But no sign of Cinder. Cinder?”

“Thank God,” Taiyang said, as he came to a halt in front of his daughter. He held out his arms, and Sunset passed Ruby to him, watching for a moment as he embraced her. “Ruby? Ruby, can you hear me?”

“…Yang,” Ruby murmured.

Sunset frowned. “Sorry, Ruby,” she whispered, reaching out of brush a few rogue strands of Ruby’s fringe out of her forehead. “You’re stuck with me instead.”

Taiyang continued to cradle his sole surviving daughter - his last remaining family, unless he had living parents stashed away somewhere that Ruby never talked about - in his arms, but as he held he looked about the chamber and all the slain monsters lying around the unconscious huntress. “These...there are gunshot wounds, there’s no way that Ruby could have done this; and I haven’t seen Cinder carrying a gun.”

Now that he mentioned it...leaving aside the fact that Ruby had never previously shown a propensity for ripping her enemies apart with her bare hands, some of these creatures did have what - on being forced to look at them - Sunset could not deny were gunshot wounds. They weren’t even particularly subtle gunshot wounds, some of them had gaping holes in their chests; it was only her focus on Ruby that had allowed Sunset to miss it the first time.

Another huntsman, one who got trapped down here some time before we arrived and has been fighting the inhabitants of the underworld down here ever since?

If that’s the case then why save Ruby and then vanish before we arrived?

It was a mystery, but one that could wait for a more leisurely moment to give it the consideration it deserved. For now, they had to find Cinder, defeat Grogar, and get out of here.

“Can you carry your daughter?” Sunset asked.

“Of course,” Taiyang said, picking her up in his arms as though she weighed nothing at all. “Where do we go now?”

Sunset took a deep breath, and as she turned away from him she closed her eyes and thought about Cinder; she conjured her likeness to the forefront of her mind, she thought about the way she smelled, the way they made her feel being near them, and as she thought of all that she cast Starswirl’s Spell of Seeking. When she opened her eyes a green light leapt from her hand to point down the left-hand tunnel.

“This way,” she said, and led the way, trusting Taiyang to follow behind her.

Hold on, Cinder; just hold on.

---

Grogar was a faunus, or at least he looked a little like one; he was one of the more bestial-looking faunuses that Cinder had ever encountered: he had the body of a man but the legs of a goat, grey-furred and ending in a pair of cloven hooves; from his grey, curly hair emerged a pair of proud horns, long and curved like the tallest of mountain goats. His eyes were red, and glowered down at her from out of an aged face, lined and wrinkled and ancient. He sat atop a throne of bones and he watched as Emerald dragged Cinder, weakened without her aura – which had yet to return – through the darkness towards him.

The cavern into which she was brought was no mere earth, as so much of the labyrinth was, but stone, as if they had passed from beneath the valley to beneath the mountain that overlooked it. Perhaps they had, Cinder had lost all sense of direction down here.

“Cinder Fall, my lord.” Emerald threw her down at Grogar’s feet. Cinder grunted and winced, but she managed to get to her feet; she was still Cinder Fall, after all, and she had no intention of dying on her knees. She had yet more pride than that, she hoped.

“So,” Grogar croaked as he stared at her. “You are Cinder Fall.”

“Tell me something, my lord,” Cinder said. “Have you enslaved Emerald’s will, or did she always hate me and simply fear to show it until now?”

“Emerald is my faithful servant,” Grogar said.

So it is control then. “I see, my lord,” Cinder said. “Then I will see you pay for it.”

Emerald struck her on the back of the head, hard enough to force Cinder to her knees with a grunt of pain.

“As if you have any right to talk,” Emerald spat. “After what you did to me.”

Control, but maybe with more than a little of her subconscious as well.

“Emerald tells me that you were great, once,” Grogar said. “Before you were weakened by…” he spat the word as though it were evil. “Friendship.”

“That depends on how you define great,” Cinder said. “If I was great, then I was terrible at the same time.”

“And now you are nothing.”

Cinder forced herself back onto her feet and upright. “I have never been nothing in my life,” she said. “Many have tried and all have failed, and you will be no different.”

Grogar laughed. “I? Make you nothing? No, Cinder Fall, you misunderstand my purposes. I will make you great once more, with the help of my Forge of Abominations.”

From the darkness at the back of the cavern a light began to shine, a purple light like the stalactites that had grown out of the earth amidst the fallen giants. But it was no rock or crystal shard giving off this light, rather it was an object that looked like a hollow anvil, or since it was hollow something that was merely designed to look like an anvil but which was in fact a container for the purple liquid – or was it energy? It was hard to be sure – which swirled inside of it, moving back and forth and, as it did so, revealing that it was actually mingled with the same golden light which were mingled in Emerald’s eyes.

“I found the forge amidst the ruins of a great battle,” Grogar explained. “Dormant, but pulsing with energy; and, with the help of a little of my own dark magic, brought to life.”

As Cinder watched, the anvil changed, transforming before her eyes as parts shifted and moved from where they were, the anvil resolving into a spidery form, which skittered across the stone floor on eight spindly metallic legs towards the throne of bones…and her.

“What news, Lord Grogar,” the spider said, in a voice that was surprisingly deep for such a small creature. “Was your plan successful?”

“Not yet, but it will be,” Grogar said. “She has entered the maze to find her friends, if she wishes to leave it she will have no choice but to break the spell. And when she does we will at last be free to leave this place, and make kingdoms tremble as I did of old.”

Cinder could barely keep the smirk of her face. Don’t underestimate Sunset, my lord.

“And her? Will she be my vessel, to bear my anti-spark?”

“No,” Grogar said. “She is not worthy of that. But she is fit to be re-forged, and she will go forth with us, and serve us now that the time of revenge is at hand.”

Now Cinder did allow the smirk to appear and even to run riot across her face. “I think you’ll both find the world outside this valley isn’t as helpless as you might think.”

“I am aware of what the outside world is,” Grogar said, and Cinder guessed that Emerald was not the first he had brought back with sufficient faculties to tell him news of the wide world and its doings. “But, once the Forge finds a suitable vessel to bear its spark-“

“Then we shall become a titan mightier than anything that walks upon this Remnant of a fallen world,” the Forge declared. “Nothing shall stand in our way.”

“That,” Sunset said. “Is not going to happen.”

Sunset strode into the cavern, a pair of crimson wings as red as blood blossoming on either side of her, her eyes burning like scarlet fire. A golden ring glimmered upon her finger; Cinder could not recall seeing it before.

Emerald turned towards her, reaching for her guns. Sunset raised one hand and a beam of crimson energy struck Emerald squarely in the chest, blasting her backwards into the wall of the cavern with such a forceful impact that the stone of the roof and wall alike were completely dislodged, burying Emerald beneath a pile of rock.

Sunset gestured towards Cinder, who was yanked off her feet and pulled by an invisible hand into Sunset’s arms. “Are you alright? Did they hurt you?”

“No,” Cinder said. “My aura broke, but that’s all.”

“Thank Celestia,” Sunset said. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when they opened again there was wrath burning in them. “Lord Grogar,” she declared. “I had not looked to find you here. Truly, we of Equestria have used this world poorly in treating it thus as a dumping ground for all our evils.”

Grogar chuckled. “Perhaps. And yet you would show scant more regard for this place by breaking the spell that prevents me from falling upon it with all my wrath.”

Sunset grinned. “I have done no such thing, my lord; do you really believe that I intend to let you leave this place?”

“How can you not?” Grogar replied. “Unless you intend to remain here yourself, and your friends with you, to keep me company in my long imprisonment.”

“My friends and I will all be leaving this place,” Sunset declared, as Cinder - glancing behind her - noticed Ruby’s father lurking near the entrance to the stony cavern, shielding a very still - probably unconscious, given that if she were dead Sunset would be displaying a lot less emotional mastery than she was now - Ruby with his body. Sunset continued, “But you, Lord Grogar, will not be leaving...alive.”

Grogar rose ponderously from his throne. “What makes you think that you can threaten me, girl? I am Grogar, first Emperor of Equestria and Father of Monsters!”

“And yet where are your monsters now?” Sunset asked. “Dead, or fled in terror. Is this the army with which you would conquer Remnant?” she laughed, and to Cinder it seemed an unusually cruel laugh. “You wouldn’t last a minute outside of this valley.”

“Such power,” the Forge said, its tone awed and enraptured in equal measure. “This…this is a vessel worthy of my greatness. This is one fit to receive the anti-spark! Let the Blood of Unicron flow through her veins and let-“

Sunset hit it with a magical blast, which made it jump through the air before landing upside down, its legs flailing uselessly in the air. It righted itself by changing its form, so that its legs were once more where they were needed to get it moving.

“You talk too much,” Sunset said.

Grogar growled with anger, and twin streams of golden lightning erupted from his horns towards Sunset.

“Stay behind me,” Sunset said, practically flinging Cinder behind her as she drew her sword, catching the lightning upon her black blade. It rippled and danced in front of her face but, as Cinder watched, she saw none of it actually touch Sunset’s face much though the snarling, hissing, spitting lightning reached for her.

“Your powers have grown weak, my lord,” Sunset said. “It is true then, that when Gusty the Great defeated you she stripped you of most of your power.”

Grogar hissed. “Insolent pup! I am the Father of Monsters!”

“And I am a huntress,” Sunset said. “Who will protect both her friends and the world.” She kept one hand upon the hilt of her sword, but with the other she fired a beam of magic at Grogar that drove him backwards, through his throne which shattered as he struck it, and pinned him against the crumbling wall, burning him as he cried out in pain and anguish.

Cinder could not see Sunset’s expression, but as she watched her friend she found that she could imagine the look that she was wearing: she had only to think of the expression that she herself had worn when she had burned down the house of her stepmother and listened to the cries of those trapped within.

The ceiling of the cavern began to rumble. Dust began to trickle down as the stones cracked and crumbled up above.

The Forge skittered backwards and forwards, left and right. “What…what are you doing?”

“Ensuring that you will not leave this place,” Sunset, as the ceiling crumbled and an avalanche of stone descended, burying the Forge and the screaming Grogar beneath it.

The stone continued to descend, and earth too, dust filling in the gaps left by the great chunks of stone, until directly before Sunset there was nothing but a wall of rock and dirt and debris.

Taiyang got up, still holding Ruby; she was definitely sleeping, Cinder concluded, and felt a twinge of envy for all that she knew that Ruby had probably gone through a rough time of it and had her rest enforced upon her by some foe.

I couldn’t protect her, in the end.

Emerald was telling the truth: without the power of the Fall Maiden I am not good for much.

And yet… She glanced at Sunset. The fact that, in spite of the fact that the loss of her magic had in a single bound caused her to descend from the level of a demi-god to that of a somewhat average huntress, Sunset nevertheless valued her company, her wit, her counsel and what martial skill remained to her would have given Cinder comfort. But now looking at Sunset caused her only a different sort of disquiet.

“Is it done?” Taiyang asked.

“Yes,” Sunset said, in a voice that was deeper than normal and touched with lordliness, reminding Cinder a little of Salem and the air of natural authority with which she spoke and bore herself, as one born and bred and destined to command and to have commands executed by those beneath her. It was a manner that Cinder had tried to emulate, but to hear that same tone coming out of Sunset’s voice sent a shiver down her spine. “Yes, it is done.” She clapped her hands together as a red glow surrounded them. “It is done and the spell is broken. We are free and I shall...no. That…” Sunset trailed off. She stared down at the ring upon her finger. “And that…” Her hand trembled, both hands in fact, and although she reached out for the ring she did so with a degree of reluctance, as though she were not really willing to take it off. “That is…” She snatched the ring from off her finger and stuffed it into the pocket of her jack. “That’s enough,” she said, her body sagging with a sudden weariness. She looked at Cinder. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“I can already feel my aura starting to regenerate,” Cinder said. “What about you?”

“Me?” Sunset said. “He didn’t do anything to me.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Cinder said softly, advancing a step towards her as she spoke. Sunset’s eyes, she saw, had returned to their natural green. That reassured her, but at the same time it reinforced her sense of wrongness from a moment ago. “Since when was your magic red? Or your eyes, for that matter?”

“Not here,” Sunset said softly, glancing towards Taiyang. “Not now.”

Cinder’s eyes narrowed. Something you want to keep to yourself? Why, unless it’s because you know that you’re doing something that others would look upon unfavourably?

And why would they do that unless it was an ill thing?

“Then when?” she asked.

“Later,” Sunset assured her.

“When?” Cinder pressed.

“Not here,” Sunset replied. “Not...now. You’re safe, Ruby’s safe, an evil was defeated and no more will stalk this valley. Isn’t that enough for now?”

Cinder took a deep breath. “As you say,” she said. “Enough for now.” Perhaps it was weak of her, to yield the ground so; perhaps she should have pressed harder; but it was only by the sufferance of Sunset Shimmer that she had any place in this company and without Sunset...without Sunset she would be truly nothing.

So she could not press too hard. She dared not. But as Sunset walked towards Taiyang and Ruby, Cinder hung back, watching her.

What was that, Sunset? What are you doing to yourself?

Sunset would do anything - almost anything at all - to help those she cared about; it was perhaps her most endearing and inspiring quality; unfortunately it was also her most worrying quality, as she would not necessarily stop to ask herself if what she was doing was wise.

But that was a concern for another day; for today, as Sunset had said, they could be satisfied with the way things had turned.

May it always be so.

---

“Sunset, can we talk?”

Sunset turned away from watching the sun rise above the horizon. They had only just returned from underground and, in view of the fact that they had spent a good portion of the night tearing through tunnels when they should be resting, they had decided to rest today and push through the Goat’s Cleft tomorrow. After all, it wasn’t as though there was anything to trouble them in the valley with Grogar entombed.

And now Ruby - who unlike the rest of them had already slept awhile, after a fashion, wanted to talk to her.

“Hey, Ruby,” Sunset said, a smile upon her face. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” Ruby said. “In fact…I feel a lot better. That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. Can we sit?”

“Sure,” Sunset said, squatting down in the grass while Ruby sat down in front of her.

“I can’t…I can’t talk to Dad about this,” Ruby said. “But…Sunset, I didn’t kill all of those monsters down there in the tunnel. They knocked me out.”

Sunset nodded. “Your Dad thought as much when he pointed out the gunshot wounds. So who did kill them all? We didn’t see anyone else down there, and no one sought us out. Did you get a look at your rescuer?”

“That’s the thing,” Ruby said. She leaned forward. “I think it was Yang. In fact I’m sure it was her. Yang saved me.”

Sunset blinked. “Ruby…Yang-“

“I know that’s what we all thought but what if she wasn’t,” Ruby said. “After all, it’s not like we ever found a body. And I saw somebody with hair just like Yang’s, burning just like Yang’s-“

“Did she say anything to you?”

“I, uh,” Ruby scratched the back of her head. “I kind of fell unconscious before she got the chance.”

Sunset sighed sympathetically. “Ruby-“

“I know,” Ruby said. “But I…I just know it was her, Sunset. I know, I feel it, I…I’m sure.”

“Are you?” Sunset said. “Are you really sure, or do you just want it to be true?”

Ruby squirmed. “I…maybe the second one,” she admitted. “But is that so bad? Cinder…Cinder said that I would have to fill up the hole she left with…with something else. And if I choose to fill that hole up with hope that she’s going to come back then is that such a bad thing?”

“Maybe,” Sunset said. “I know that it doesn’t sound like it, but what if your hope is dashed then it will just end up hurting you more. I…I suppose it’s not impossible, but…I don’t see why Yang would let you think she was dead if she wasn’t.”

“I don’t know that either,” Ruby said. “But I’m sure that she has a good reason. It is possible, isn’t it?”

“Like I said,” Sunset replied. “It’s not impossible. Perhaps the grimm carried her away to kill her later but she got away from them before they could, perhaps she got swallowed whole but survived and later blasted her way out of the belly of the beast. Perhaps…it’s not impossible. I don’t know how likely any of it is but it could happen. I’m not sure how she’d get here to save you from monsters, though.”

“I don’t know about that part either,” Ruby said. “But…she’s out there, Sunset, I know it.”

“You hope it,” Sunset corrected.

“Yeah, I hope it,” Ruby said. “But isn’t hope enough?”

Sunset chuckled. “Hope is a good eighty percent of what we’ve got on our side right now, so it’d better be.”

Ruby smiled. “We’ve made it this far, right? And we’re going to make it the rest of the way too. I hope.”

Sunset nodded. “I hope so too.”

And so, with hope, they faced a new day and a new phase of their journey.

---

In the darkness of Grogar’s cavern, the stones lay heavy, still and silent.

Until, unseen by any mortal eyes, they began to stir. A rustling sound could have been heard had there been any ears to hear it. The stones could have been seen to shift had there been any eyes to see it. And had anyone been left in what remained of the cavernous chamber to observe they would have seen the stones move so much that the Forge, still in its arachnid form - but with the addition of an armoured carapace to protect the Blood of Unicron that flowed within - emerged out of the rubble and into the air.

“Such a pity,” the Forge observed. “She would have made a truly excellent vessel. Her power combined with my anti-spark...such a pity.”

Emerald was the next to emerge, widening the hole that the Forge had made until it was large enough for her to scramble through, even with all of her extraneous metal parts making it that much harder. Still, she managed to crawl out of the rock and rubble, and then turned to haul out the battered, burned and bruised body of Grogar.

“My lord,” she said. “You’re wounded.”

“Although my strength is impaired, my will remains indomitable,” Grogar said, though the groaning in his words proved that his strength was impaired, beyond doubt. “I, too, regret the loss of Sunset Shimmer as a vessel, just as I regret that she is our enemy...and yet, in the end, she has served her first and most important purpose: she has released us from the confines of this place.” Grogar reached up, and stroked Emerald’s face. “Emerald...you must serve as our strength, until a suitable vessel to be sparked is found. You must protect me, and bear the Forge upon the road. It may be that we will find another on the way to be reforged, but you...you are the one upon whom we must rely.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Emerald said, bowing her head. “I won’t let you down.”

“No,” Grogar said “I have no doubt of that.”

“Where shall we go, my lord?”

“Eastwards,” Forge said. “We must go east, across the sea.”

“Across the sea?” Emerald repeated. “Why?”

The Forge was silent for a moment. “I sense that is where we must be. I believe that you mortals might call it...premonition.”

Author's Note:

Parts of this chapter may feel a little out of left field, but they’re setting up for something quite cool to be announced in the not too distant future.

This chapter marks a breaking point, as the next chapter will see the focus shift to Atlas for a little while to see how the various ensemble darkhorses (and Weiss) are faring there.

Comments

[Fluffy-Boi]

Like the new cover art

[Pat_Hoof_5000]

That new fan art is sick! AWESOME!

[RedDog5207]

The Blood of Unicron......?! Wait, what's that?!

Plus, it REALLY stinks that Equestria keeps using Remnant as its dumping ground for its villains and monsters. This makes Equestria pretty guilty and maybe even needing some badly needed reckoning for its actions of making Remnant even more dangerous than it already is.....

[Sollys]

Red Magic?? Hmmmm

[DoctorWho4189]

Dark energon, anti-spark, and giant armored figures with glowing eyes, are you including transformers in this crossover? Also good chapter.

[The Corrupted Champion]

10102807
Unicron is basically the god of destruction in the transformers universe. a giant robot that literally devours planets whole; but after his supposed destruction, a tiny piece of him survived in the form of Starscream. though i think the forge taking on a spider like form is more a reference to his beastwars counterpart, Turanchulus, being referred to by megatron himself as a "spawn of unicron".

as for equestria using remnant is its garbage disposal... yes, Celestia already addressed that it was a crappy thing to do; in her defense, though i believe that this is a question best saved for old Starswirl the bearded in the case of the sirens, and Gusty the great in the case of Grogar. as we have yet to reach the point where the pillars come back, and we never see more of Gusty then Grogar/Discord's story in the show, the best we can do is speculate, but Starlight Glimmer is on the scene now in equestria, so it won't take too much longer.

“I know why you don’t trust me: because you hold those around you to impossible standards of nobility you hold for yourself,” Cinder said. “Standards that not even you can meet.”

FINALLY!!! someone called it out! she really has no right to call Sunset a monster when she was militant to the point of resorting to violence to ensure all the people trapped outside the walls of Vale were left to a horrific fate for the sake of little more then convenience. i also find it deliciously ironic that it was Cinder of all people who said it. No Ruby, Sunset is not a monster. she didn't just decide to endanger Vale for fun; your life and many others were in her hands, and she chose to try and save those lives, because that's what a leader is supposed to do. i've said it once and i'll say it again; being willing to take that bullet yourself is all well and good, but no one has the right to demand it of anyone else for any reason.

Speaking of Cinder, i do hope it doesn't take too much longer for her to catch on to Sunset's willful stupidity. her power trip on the mountain peak resulting not only in Emerald's death, but nearly losing herself to it entirely should be proof enough that she can't handle that much power, especially when it comes saturated with the desire to harm and dominate... those rings are literally filled with the parts of herself that she wanted nothing more to do with, and then cranked up to eleven!

the constant dour Sunset shows to three quarters of their "squad" doesn't help either. she refuses to show even the tiniest shred of respect to Roman. who is a petty theif, when Cinder, whom Sunset was willing to move heaven and earth for, is literally a MASS MURDERER! she killed for fun when Roman only killed when he was backed in a corner with no other way out; maybe not even then! I'm sorry , that's been really bothering me for quite some time

[Mastermind4892]

images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/d951e2d8-b266-43c9-95f4-a5e3d831509d/d7laiu7-fe7374b9-7db3-4bfb-854b-3252fe76b9e5.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2Q5NTFlMmQ4LWIyNjYtNDNjOS05NWY0LWE1ZTNkODMxNTA5ZFwvZDdsYWl1Ny1mZTczNzRiOS03ZGIzLTRiZmItODU0Yi0zMjUyZmU3NmI5ZTUuanBnIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.EoVl2Cz8TmogQOKaZ3tvtTTzEndTpEdiLjDRceAT4ds

This was awesome!

Ruby venting at Cinder, Ruby having to rely on Cinder, GROGAR (Celestia and Twilight are going to freak out when they hear that!), Yang's first return, Blood of Unicron, Sunset vs Grogar, zombie-Emerald possessed by Grogar... what a magnificent chapter!

[Mastermind4892]

10102956
Villains and former villains don't mince words and are also often the ones who easily see hypocrisy and weakness in the protagonist's arguments.

[TheArbiter1]

Yeah Celestia, Luna, and Twilight are gonna freak when they find out that Grogar is alive in Remnant.

[Lancerguy]

1) new cover art is amazing
2) just when i thought it couldn't get more awesome, you just had to add transformers

[Adser]

10102956
I have said it before and I will say it again. The issue with Sunset choice was not that she gave more worth to her friends that to the city, is the way she acted at that moment the real problem.

If, for example, her friends had been captured in one train while the breach was sent in another train, and Sunset decided to get into the train with her friends then that would have been understandable. Her team would still think that she should have prioritized the city, but they would have understood.

What Sunset did was to SABOTAGE the mission to try and ensure the safety of her team, and that malicious action, even if it was done out of fear and love, was the issue.
The only difference between what Amber did and what Sunset did was that after giving Salem agents what they wanted to save their friends (ignore for a moment the whole "you are my friends because I am mind-controlling you thing with Amber), Sunset stayed to minimize as much as possible the consequences of her betrayal, while Amber was thinking of just leaving the whole mess.

Also, there is a reason why when Ruby says that she does keep the high standards of morality that she judges others with, Cinder only looks at her with pity. Because Ruby is right, she does keep that standards, and that is breaking her apart.
Cinder can see in Ruby the same desire of filling the void with an idea that fueled her until Sunset saved her, even if the idea itself is different (hate and ambition for Cinder, saving people for Ruby), and she knows that at the end of that path you are left as a husk, with nothing else left in your life.
If Ruby keeps like that she would end up as Archer, from Fate, someone so obsessed with the ideal of a hero, that followed it with such an obsession, that ended dying alone, betrayed by his allies out of fear of what this monster would do to follow the idea of a Hero.

[DarthRevan]

Am I sleep deprived or did you add a Transformers villain to this? Blood of Unicron and some metal thing changing shapes.

Also, I'm assuming Raven has fully revealed that she's the Spring Maiden to Yang because that is legitimately the only way I can see Yang doing this to Ruby and Taiyang. She's mature enough to know she's destroying them and her being so willing to follow Raven seems mad OOC so far.

Edit: Transformers is kinda out of the left field but certainly and interesting inclusion

[ItsDaKoolaidDude]

“I know why you don’t trust me: because you hold those around you to impossible standards of nobility you hold for yourself,” Cinder said. “Standards that not even you can meet.”

“I can,” Ruby said.

As if.

[The Corrupted Champion]

10102990
i can respect that
10103152
very true
10103337
I am willing to concede your points on Sunset's actions, but that doesn't excuse Ruby, nor does it make Cinder wrong about Ruby's ideal being a pipe dream. much like Sunset's current "plan", it's unhealthy and self destructive. she WILL get herself and/or others killed if she doesn't wake up and stop going out of her way to inflict this on herself. As for her similarities to Archer, her being willing to cut down Twilight during the battle for Vale is evidence enough to me that she's already well on her way to that, and it won't end well for anyone involved.

[RolkFlameraven]

Was not ready for a Transformers crossover. A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.

[BeardedRedMane]

ugh. Raven is such a dumb bitch. Had she just saved everyone we wouldn't have another evil lose now.

[DashEight]

Hm. See all that Dark Energon leaking all over the chapter there? That’s gotta be a bad Hasbro valve. Maybe get another hundred miles tops before it blows completely, and trust me that is NOT an easy fix.

[Scipio Smith]

10104116
So...You didn't like it, then?

[DashEight]

10104233

No it’s great! Didn’t mean to make it quite so cryptic sorry.

[Mastermind4892]

10104233
So those purple 'living' crystals were Dark Energon? Interesting. And with the Forge and the essence of Unicron... well, it makes sense. Everyone knows MLP and Transformers are both from Hasbro, and if MLP comes to another world through the magic mirror, it's hardly out of the question that space-faring elements can find their way to this planet.

I have to say that I'm hardly a fan of crossovers that involve more than two exclusive sources. The inherent value of a crossover is what two worlds bring to the table; how they can blend, interact or even clash. But the value of those worlds isn't as special or unique when three or more sources are involved, as it stretches the elements thin. Not to mention how much more complicated everything gets.

Nevertheless, I don't mind if the third source (Transformers material in this case) is not put on the same level of involvement as the primary two, RWBY and MLP, and is not even regarded as another official crossover presence. When it's only a minimal overall influence and/or one singular agent. Especially if this third element doesn't last for either more than one story arc or retains a very scarce presence for the entirety of the whole story. Scipio, you've long since earned my every faith that you already know this, and that you don't intend to go crazy or overboard. That the vast majority of this threat will come from Grogar, Father of Monsters. (Especially since I know very little of Transformers lore past the bare basics).

Good luck!

[Arkonfleight]

It's worse than I thought.
>assuming people are dead
>monologuing
>big, dramatic deathtraps
The rings are making her act like a cartoon villain!

[_CheckMate_]

See? This is why you have to see the body to confirm the death. Glad to know that Emerald isn't completely dead before her arc is completed. I'm guessing with this latest development that this isn't just a crossover with MLP, but likely with most of Hasbro's works? The only question is if the shared universe will go both ways to other Roosterteeth properties (I'm personally hoping for some hunters based on X-Ray and Vav).

The moment with Ruby and Cinder was amazing with Ruby starting to see more of Cinder than just an irredeemable villian and Cinder giving her a wake-up call that she desperately needs to break her out of her funk. Though I wonder what exactly Raven said to convince Yang to actually go along with her plans for now.

[RolkFlameraven]

Either Grogar was much weaker then I would think he would be, or Raven's semblance is damned op, as it bypassed a dimensional anchor with ease.

This means she can bypass any wards to stop teleportation at will. Really freeking good for a thief who is always on the run.

[Voltaje]

About timewedee Weiss, and I want to see how the construction of the tower is going on, atlas will not be a good place the moment, pecially mantle, thoughts lit of changes will take place. Like penny's father, or Luna as the winter maiden :D.

[Adser]

10103780
I don't think you can compare any character with Archer mentality and end it being anything resembling healthy

My comment about Ruby ideology was not about her being right or wrong (she is wrong), it was more of a clarification that Ruby is not a hypocrite (like say, Bon Bon), she does follow and meets the levels of morality that she demands on others. And there lies the problem with her.

About the battle of Vale bit, while the actions of the people of Vale were heartless and completely IDIOTIC, Ruby stopping Twilight from opening the gates, even by force if necessary, was the correct thing.

What the Vale council should have done was to leave the gates open from the start and use the retreating forces to man the walls, giving covering fire to the rest of the army and letting them reorganize behind the gates to act as a roadblock to any Grimm that was able to cross the gate before the retreat was over and the gates were closed.

But they decided to close the gates, and that moment sealed the army fate. the Grimm were too close and the gates too small. Once the inertia of the retreat was stopped, any attempt of opening the gates again without stopping the Grimm advance (like what Sunset did) would just end transforming their last stand into a rout, the Mistrallian army would have died faster between the chaos and the reduction in retaliation fire against the Grimm and the Grimm would have a clear shot towards the city.

Letting Twilight open the gates would just end with more dead bodies and noone to save.

[The Corrupted Champion]

10106727

any attempt of opening the gates again without stopping the Grimm advance (like what Sunset did) would just end transforming their last stand into a rout, the Mistrallian army would have died faster between the chaos and the reduction in retaliation fire against the Grimm and the Grimm would have a clear shot towards the city.

Letting Twilight open the gates would just end with more dead bodies and noone to save.

i suppose that's true. i hadn't considered that.

I don't think you can compare any character with Archer mentality and end it being anything resembling healthy

My comment about Ruby ideology was not about her being right or wrong (she is wrong), it was more of a clarification that Ruby is not a hypocrite (like say, Bon Bon), she does follow and meets the levels of morality that she demands on others. And there lies the problem with her.

i didn't mean to suggest that she was a hypocrite. merely that she's wrong. I'm glad we seem to be on the same page on that one.

[AlanSmithy]

10105129
Well it's limited by only appearing by people she forges a bond with. Ruby, Yang, Qrow, and Tai Yang are the only ones we know she's done that for. Probably her second in command too, but it's properly balanced.

[Pinklestia]

I wonder what will happen if someone who is not Sunset uses the rings?

[blairmen]

10108113
I think like the normal humans in the Equestia girls franchise who encounter magic, they would be consumed by it, and turn into a magical villain. would be interesting to see what a corrupt ruby looks like (and her midset)

[Secundum]

Sunset, you should have killed Grogar properly. -_-
Also, maybe write back to Celestia to get a list of what got dumped into Remmant...

Run Frodo Ruby, Boromir Cinder is trying to take The Ring!

[Boltstrike58]

Now we're crossing over with Transformers?! I can safely say I didn't see that coming.

[Corascal]

I don't know if anyone has caught on to this, but Grogar plays a much bigger role in this story than just being yet another villain for our protagonists (a little hesitant to call all of them outright heroes) to battle against. What was made clear in this chapter is that Grogar hasn't just been on Remnant for millennia, he's also been trapped in Meadowbrook's Maze the whole time, meaning that Sunset and Ruby's team are the first people in the history of Remnant to not only meet Grogar, but also to hear about him. This means he is someone so old that not even Salem and Ozpin have heard of him (probably).

This is something especially important in regards to the fact that Salem currently holds the Crown of Choice, which allows her to plot out the best possible moves to achieve her goals - and here's the catch - based on what she knows. Normally, seeing as she's an immortal and unkillable woman of immense power and knowledge, holding the crown would give her a nigh insurmountable advantage, as she will have seen everything that's happened in Remnant before and will likely see anything coming based on her past experience.

But Grogar is completely unknown to her.

The simple idea of an X factor with enough power to change the playing field would be more than enough to throw Salem's plans for a bit of loop, but she could always count on her immortality to allow her to adjust.

But, considering the moves she's currently making, she is acting as if she is entering into her endgame, and her acquisition of the Crown of Choice means that she is currently more vulnerable than ever to the rise of another powerful X factor that can - and almost certainly will - derail her plans. Grogar by himself would almost certainly qualify, since he is able to breed an army of monsters that most of Remnant regards as myth. But combined with the Dark Energon that allows him to reanimate the dead into his servants and the Forge with its anti-Spark, the only question as to the disruption of Salem's plans is not if, but when.

And that disruption will be exactly what the protagonists will need in order to prevail against Salem in the end.

[Mastermind4892]

10116711
I noticed that as well. Things are changing.

[Aurora Dimmet]

10103780

To be fair, that IS in line with canon Ruby. I've been disgusted with the whole crew since they did Ozpin wrong, and I've heard that recently Ironwood shared the same fate.

Immature, naive, pointless idealism estranged both of their strongest backers, betraying both of them and causing them to respond after losing their faith in the junior Hunter crew. Then said crew wonder why THEY feel betrayed, as if they were innocent and never did anything wrong. They're kids, who've been entrusted to help the world - earlier than expected. But proved they weren't ready when they screwed over the people they should have been working for.

But, RWBY follows shounen tropes so somehow they'll be 100% right, no punishment will happen that isn't perceived as evil by a biased and bloodthirsty audience, no loss will happen to make them learn their lesson and grow up. People who are veterans of the current situation are stupid, idealism forever, Ruby being mad that no one else believes in pixie dust and Unicron farts instead of solid tactical thinking.

So, from your posts it sounds like Ruby is very much in character in this story! Time to give it a read.

[The Corrupted Champion]

10127148
I'm not denying that they've been acting stupid in Atlus. the major difference is that, with Ironwood, they went out of their way to with hold critical information and let him believe in a lie until Salem was literally on their doorstep. they continuously lied to him for what i can only guess to be weeks on end, possibly over a month. after pointing the finger and trying to lecture Ozpin for his actions, they turned around and did the exact same thing, so, of course the general is perceived as the bad guy when he calls them out on it. They absolutely brought that upon themselves.

my argument as far as that's concerned, is that the Ruby in this story seems to be all for "necessary sacrifices" and was willing to cut down a friend to ensure they happened; where as canon Ruby is trying to save EVERYONE. the Ruby in this story is militant that everyone be willing to martyr themselves in vain just because it's her own narrow minded belief that it's what a hero would do; regarding everyone who wouldn't as lesser trash, unworthy of even the tiniest shred of respect.

I really don't think it's immature, naive or pointless idealism to have a problem with Ironwood leaving the crippled city of mantle to die by the tundra's lethal cold or being torn apart by grimm, however. so i'm going to have to disagree with you there.

[Aurora Dimmet]

10127560

I was agreeing with you overall, while also being facetious in pointing out that cabib Ruby is not really a good fit for being a leader, a bit of a baby, and also kind of crazy.

This one seems to have a 180 personality, but the earlier points about canon Ruby not being a good fit for a leader and kind of crazy still work here. I still haven't read the story through, yet, so don't worry about the latter bit. I'll find out about that soon enough.

[Adser]

10127560

the Ruby in this story is militant that everyone be willing to martyr themselves in vain just because it's her own narrow minded belief that it's what a hero would do; regarding everyone who wouldn't as lesser trash, unworthy of even the tiniest shred of respect.

Exaggerating a bit much? Ruby has bitched about morals to only 2 people. One of them is Cinder, who she blames for the whole fiasco for damn good reasons, and the other is Sunset because she betrayed her trust and endangered civilians.

And yes, having your team leader sabotage your mission definitely counts as a breach of trust, and no, that she did it to save her friends is not an excuse for 2 reasons:

1) All her friends in the train (except Rainbow, but she is another can of worms) were willing to take the risk of stopping the train. And they would have done so anyway if it wasn't because of Blake. Sunset was overriding the decisions of her friends, without even telling them, because she couldn't accept them.

2) It is part of the job. No, you are not expected to throw yourself to the ground and let yourself get mauled for shit and giggles, but there is always a risk in the mission and usually that risks becomes much bigger that originally expected during the mission itself, sometimes to unmanageable levels. That doesn't mean you can just decide to leave everything behind and much less sabotage the mission so others cannot even attempt it.

If the mission was to protect a town and Sunset learned that the Grimm group getting closer is too big for them to fight, is it ok for her to grab her team and run, fuck the town? No, it is not. If you want a real-life example, is it ok for the police to stay away from a situation if the criminal has better weapons? is it ok for the army to stay away from a fight if they don't have the advantage? Hell no, acting like that would undermine the reason for the institution itself.

You can debate that the teams were just too young to be given a mission like that and that they didn't have the maturity to face such escalation, you can even debate what would be the most efficient solution to the problem, but that doesn't change the fact that Sunset screwed up big time, that things can go wrong at anytime, prepared or not, and that you should not join an institution that has such personal dangers if you are not willing to take those dangers once they materialize.

[The Corrupted Champion]

10128049

Perhaps i am exaggerating. I will grant that, and i agree with everything you said; the reasons you raised were absolutely on point. my little rant there wasn't referring to the Breach, however. Yes, Sunset chose probably the absolute worst course of action she could have ever chosen on that train, I'm not trying to argue otherwise. if i didn't convey that clearly, then that's on me.

my issue here isn't that Sunset was put on blast for what she did; it goes back to Ruby's Archer mentality and how dangerous it has the possibility to make her to those around her. we've already gone back and forth about that one at some length, so there isn't much need to go any further.

[Scipio Smith]

10127148
As a general rule I quite like the 'new generation surpassing the old' trope in shonen anime, but I agree with you that RWBY has executed it quite poorly.

[Aurora Dimmet]

10129007

Huzzah, a pone of culture!

Too many people were just blindly ragging on Ozpin and Ironwood as if they were villains, when it was the kiddy crew that set themselves against their own, more experienced allies.

They get angry at Ozpin for not giving him his life story that they - basically soldiers - don't need to know, and would affect morale. This drives him away as his allies turn on him. Then they get mad that Ozpin left and isn't helping them. Then the whole Atlas mess. I've been so upset with the RWBY crew. I can't help but feel this wasn't what Monty wanted for his characters. The crew weren't trained in situations where all the adults were arrogant blowhards without tact or skill. They were, in general, heroic veterans that the students all looked up to.

So why is it now that they're acting so immature, one of those 'teen power' phases where they think they know everything and everyone else is wrong? Even the team leaders themselves were arrayed against actual leaders who have experience at command, and what it entails. Makes me sad to see the writing going this direction.

When I want to see 'new generation surpasses the old', I want to see the characters honestly surpass them. They've absorbed so much knowledge and so many skills and such from the old guard that they've caught up to them in ability - and everything from there on out is leaving the old guard behind as they become superior. This is just kicking the old guard in the teeth for daring to treat them as what they currently are.

The only way this can be redeemed is if there's a big, painful slap coming, to teach them how wrong they are, and the teams actually smarten up from it.

[Scipio Smith]

10129189

When I want to see 'new generation surpasses the old', I want to see the characters honestly surpass them. They've absorbed so much knowledge and so many skills and such from the old guard that they've caught up to them in ability - and everything from there on out is leaving the old guard behind as they become superior. This is just kicking the old guard in the teeth for daring to treat them as what they currently are.

I think Naruto did this really well; we saw Naruto and the other characters do things that had eluded the previous generation - like Naruto doing what even his legendary father had failed to do and perfecting the rasengan - but despite all of that he never stopped respecting characters like Kakashi and Tsunade, and he never stopped caring deeply about them either, even as he outgrew them.

[Aurora Dimmet]

10129248

I completely agree. That was handled well. Even when he was beyond them he still looked up to and respected the figures who helped him reach those heights. He stood on the shoulders of Jiraiya and Fourth, Kakashi, Tsunade, even more to a lesser extent, and never set aside his gratitude, or working to continue being someone they could be proud of.

People can say a million things about the Naruto series one way or the other, but THAT was surpassing written well. Everyone on Remnant owes Ozpin... literally everything. They wouldn't exist without his efforts. And more specifically even during their current lives, he's constantly trained the Hunters who keep many of them safe, often at the cost of those brave souls' lives, all for the greater good. Ruby and her lot even learned just what it was he went through to try and keep them all safe, to ensure they'd exist at all, and immediately ignored all of it to screech at him for not telling them he and Salem had history, or that they were both immortals, like he betrayed them.

What do these tots understand of their OWN lives, let alone hundreds more? What do they have that was not gained from Ozpin's efforts? He never held them in contempt, either - and we can clearly see everything he did was trying to find a path to success for the future. Cue getting bitched at for not having found it yet.

But of course the writing will have it that they find it effortlessly within, at most, a year. Because the kiddos are always right about things they don't know anything about. Pah, writing.

[Mastermind4892]

10129007
10129481

I concur with nearly every point. I was not happy with the way the adults were subtly pushed to the side in V6 (save Maria). Qrow barely did anything and you've already made excellent points about the kids getting foolishly mad at Ozpin for hollow and unfair reasons. I've defended many of Ozpin's reasons over the course of this story, so I'll just offer my own point about 'shounen'.

While I'm still upset at how unfairly treated Ozpin was in V6, I must say that Ironwood's fall was actually well-executed. The writing was on the wall as far back as V4 as he grew increasingly worried and paranoid. Desperate to keep Amity Tower and his work secret, terrified of Salem finding out and infiltrating the kingdom like when the Black Queen virus rendered his forces helpless and displayed its symbol, "The way she told me she was there." Ironwood is the supreme commander of the mightiest military in the world and Salem was laughing at him. (Even before the Grimm dragon tore the Atlas ships apart in this story, Qrow had warned Team RSPT that their Atlesian bravado wouldn't be worth much). Ironwood had so few people that he could trust. And then RWBY and the others come along with good news, a Relic safe and sound and even the next Ozpin, and then Ironwood is thrilled to have close allies again. He eagerly provides new weapons, outfits, equipment, tells them his plans for Amity Tower just like that and he even gave Qrow a hug. No wonder he felt betrayed by the end. Throughout V7, Ironwood was wracked with doubts, conflicted over his choices and their potential consequences. He was swaying on a tightrope back and forth. And then Cinder's glass chess piece and Salem's terrifying ultimatum become the final push that sends him over the edge. Again, Ironwood's fall was gradual, subtle and well-carried out; making overly militaristic and bull-headed decisions as he has done ever since his introduction in V2, and thus culminated in his eventual fall. (Much better than the abrupt 180 that was thrown at Ozpin over the course of a single episode).

And V7 also showed plenty of capable adults, the 'old guard'. We finally got to see actual faces of the Council, and they proved to be quite competent at their jobs and decision-making, unlike the Vale Council. We have Pietro, the good-hearted genius that got Yang her new arm and brought Penny back. We have Robyn Hill trying to make things better for everyone in Mantle. And we even have Weiss' mother, her first appearance providing the evidence to ruin Jacques Schnee at long last.

As for Ironwood's decision, I have to say it was a genuine "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, and sadly those can happen a lot in times of war and crisis. Abandoning Mantle and thousands to die to the Grimm and frozen tundra would have been just the start. Ironwood would have permanently deprived the world of its finest Dust, its best weapons and even the world's best military. Not to mention that if one of the four kingdoms completely deserted the fight, the world's mightiest military abandoning the rest of Remnant? The division already splitting the world would have been lost beyond any hope of recovery. Which is exactly what Salem would love.

And as for staying... *sigh* that 'painful slap' may very well be coming after what we saw at the end of Volume 7. RWBY and the others wanted to stand their ground against the invasion, but Grimm Monstro, countless flyers and the immortal Salem herself? How can they fight all of that?

One final note to make? I prefer to keep self-aware of all sides of arguments. Even though it technically goes against a big portion of my points here, for the teenagers finding the answer to the world's problems where none have done so before, I have to say that in all fairness the Mane 6 do it all the time.

[Aurora Dimmet]

10131335

People are upset about Ironwood because he's opposed to the RWBY crew, less because he made the decision to abandon Mantle. And as a leader, sometimes that's the call you have to make. "Keep the immortal evil supermonster queen from getting the things that destroy the world, no matter the cost." or "Fight and have an 80% or higher chance to die, over Mantle. Try to save the few, lose everyone. Or lose the few, everyone gets to live longer while we try to find a solution." Might be 'heartless', but at least those people would be alive to complain, kind of deal.

As for the Mane 6... well, agreed, but there's that trope again. Also I never really think of them as teenagers since several of them are business-owners, in the military, or part of the ruling body of the nation.

[Mastermind4892]

10131918
Like I had said, damned if you and damned if you don't. Things are rarely simple or black-and-white in times of war and disaster. I'm a big fan of similar characters, of great leaders and generals, like Lelouch, Thrawn and Reinhardt. It's one of the reasons I've admired General Ironwood, but also why I was always concerned about his impulsive militaristic responses, treating nearly everything in life as a soldier; measuring everything in battles won and territory lost.

I also noticed from the start how similar it was to Sunset's choice on the train. I wondered that if she were present, she would have pointed out to him that he was making the same kind of choice she was arrested for making and still feels guilty for. I imagined he would freeze for a moment as the implications hit him and would then give her an honest apology for unfairly condemning her back then. But he would still stand by his point that the stakes are far too high this time to make any other choice.

Bottom line, right after Ironwood's turn, I started considering all the angles, the pros and cons of both sides. TEAM RWBY's plan was to commit everything to repelling Salem; to keep the masses from being abandoned and stand their ground no matter what. And Ironwood's plan was to save Atlas and remove half of the Relics from Salem's reach forever.

But the ultimate reason I side with Team RWBY in this situation is because of the long-term. Depriving Salem of the Relics wouldn't stop her at all. They may be her ultimate prize, but Salem doesn't need the Relics to destroy Remnant. But taking Atlas away into the sky would not only give sacrifice Mantle but also surrender control of the planet's largest source of Dust to Salem. And further, just as I stated earlier, Remnant would also have lost the world's strongest military. Worst of all, the world would never unite and stand together against Salem once they heard Atlas had abandoned them.

And while this is a war and most certainly not a simple elementary school election, there is still the lesson from the CMC against Diamond Tiara in Season 5: How can the people put their trust in a leader that treats their own friends and allies so callously?

Notice how Team RWBY stood against Ironwood because of the people (which is still one of the best reasons to fight). But Oscar was the one who stood against him for the reasons of the bigger picture. I stand with Team RWBY's decision because Ironwood's plan would cost us the entire war itself. At least by staying with Mantle and standing their ground, there is still the chance of repelling Salem's invasion. A slim chance is still better than no chance, and sometimes a slim chance is all we have left.

[Aurora Dimmet]

10131998

I just realized/remembered why Ironwood's supposed to be 'heartless' and view things only in terms of logic and strategy.

He's the Tin Man. "If I only had a heart."

[Mastermind4892]

10132032
Yes indeed! He even points out as much with Salem being strong because she's not human anymore.

Ozpin is the Wizard who tries his best despite being frailer than others realize and having a few secrets behind the curtain. (Ozma is actually the name of the rightful Ruler of the Emerald City in later books). But even when revealed, he has a good heart and is still willing to try. Leo the Cowardly Lion, who could not find his courage to stand up to the Wicked Witch Salem. Qrow is the Scarecrow... which other than his shapeshifting is a little hard to pin down the connection.

Overall, I've always loved the show's talent for connecting with fairy tale characters and stories.

[Aurora Dimmet]

10132049

Likely the 'brainless' portion of the Scarecrow, given that being an alcoholic is supposed to kill brain cells as well as your liver.

[Mastermind4892]

10132055
Hmmm... possibly. Well, I'm glad that Qrow is kicking his drinking addiction. That's a big development of character.

[kyubbiman]

Oh dear god you've included transformers lore in the story barring that a piece of Unicron. This makes the story much more interesting and concerning.