Chapter Text
Tai’s watering his sunflowers, a small black and white dog panting at his heel. The dog looks happy. Tai does not. He’s gripping the watering can far tighter than he needs to, his shoulders are sagging, and the dog keeps nudging his leg. Tai never did like being alone, and yet here he is. Alone with a clueless pup.
Admittedly, dogs can be much better companions than people. In a better time, Raven would shift somewhere discreet and pet his dog, maybe ask its name. In a better time, and with different people, because Tai would be more likely to punch her than let her pet his dog, and frankly she’d deserve it.
The dog is cute, she’ll give him that. Tai doesn’t look too bad himself, just… tired. Raven can certainly relate on that part.
She rustles her feathers quietly, stretches. She might have stayed longer, except the dog chooses then to look up and bark.
“Zwei, no,” Tai mutters. “Do not go after another squirrel. It will climb a tree, and you will not be able to climb a tree after it, and then you will be sad.”
The dog—Zwei—barks again. Tai sighs, turns around, and—freezes. He stares. His mouth falls open.
For a few, long moments, Raven just stares back, frozen as well. She—why did she come here? Okay, she knows why, this was the closest viable portal to the tribe. Her tribe. She has a perfectly valid reason for coming here. Just not for staying as long as she has. She’s already stayed longer than she should. She’s not welcome, she made damn sure of that years ago.
“Qrow?” Tai asks slowly, evenly. There’s hope in his words. “Did the girls make it to Mistral?”
There’s hope in his words, and it’s that hope—and that Tai’s first thought was of her pathetic, tribe-betraying brother—that gives Raven the strength she needs to push off the branch and take wing.
She squawks derisively, just once, as she circles around over Tai’s house.
“Wait… Raven?”
So he remembers she exists after all. With a tone more confused than anything, but not without a glimmer of that same hope, and that gives her pause, if only for a moment.
She ruffles her wing and drops a single black feather, and speeds away to the east.
Darkness, all around.
Dark, ice-cold water.
She can’t breathe.
Cinder’s one eye snaps open, rimmed with fire that even the sea around her cannot quench, and she rockets upward. At least, probably upward. It’s hard to tell.
But water breaks around her and her burning lungs fill again, and Cinder drags herself out onto dry land.
It’s still dark, and her eye alone isn’t providing much illumination. After a moment to catch her breath, she grunts in frustration and slams her Grimm fist on the rocky floor.
The ground shakes, and a section of the wall collapses inward. Beyond there is sunlight, streaming into this small cave, beckoning her forward.
And so Cinder crawls, inch by agonizing inch, out of the cave beneath Haven Academy and into the grass beyond. She’s still freezing, but if she stops to rest she might never get started again. And she’ll be damned if some cold water is going to do her in, when even the Spring Maiden couldn’t quite finish the job.
Footsteps approach on the path ahead of her, but she can’t quite muster the strength to look up. She can only crawl forwards, another inch, another foot…
“Gods… What happened to–” The unknown woman’s voice cuts off suddenly, likely at the sight of Cinder’s arm.
She’s a monster. She knows that. Everyone thinks it. But she’ll be damned if she lets one more person look down on her, see her vulnerable, pity her… And besides, she can’t allow anyone to report her location to the authorities.
Cinder focuses all her energy to crane her neck upward and look at this woman in the yellow dress, whoever she is. It doesn’t matter. Her body may be weak, her aura may be nearly nothing, but her magic remains strong.
She aims for the face. She needs those clothes intact. Pale yellow is not her color, but anything dry is better than what she’s in now. In seconds, it’s over.
What the – Where am I? What’s going on? Is that…
Cinder rolls her eyes as she slowly struggles out of her wet clothing and into the yellow dress. “Gods damn it, I don’t need some random civilian in here,” she mutters. Must have been on reflex, and now her pitiful aura is another few percentage points lower.
Is that me? Am I… What happened? Am I dead?
“Yes, you’re fucking dead, that’s what happens to people who are in my way.” Why is she even wasting her time with this woman? Another huntress she could use, but this one doesn’t look like a fighter. But she must have lived in the area, so… “Ugh, fine. What’s your name?”
Tessa. Who are you? What did you do to me?
“Name’s Cinder. You’re one of the many annoying voices in my head now, because apparently I just do that automatically when I kill someone now. It’s my sembl–” Cinder grimaces and picks up her slow crawling pace out of spite. “Shut up, Pyrrha, I am done listening to you! Now, Tessa, I don’t suppose you’d happen to have your own semblance unlocked? Anything useful?”
She stops her agonizing progress as the other voice in her head speaks again. “No, damn you! If you weren’t such a good fighter I’d have killed you again months ago! You’re lucky I didn’t bring you out to fight your boyfriend at Haven.”
My semblance enhances the aura regeneration speed of others. I’m a paramedic.
“You were.” Cinder snorts. That could be useful, actually. Maybe this civilian who happened onto her path is a good catch after all. “You live around here, Tessa?”
Just up that hill.
Up that hill… which she’s in no state to climb, right now. Just her luck. Unless, if her aura has come back enough since her fight, since her pulling this latest soul into reserve…
Cinder stops her crawling and flops over on her back. The sky above is clear and blue, trees around her looking impossibly tall from this low vantage. She raises one forearm and points her palm outward, and a flash of yellow light emanates in a cone from her hand.
Motes of the same pale yellow condense out of the air and form the standing figure of a woman – Tessa, just as she looked in life, but constructed entirely out of yellow aura. The moment her form is complete and the surrounding cone of light fades away, Cinder’s own aura shatters into a million pieces.
“Tessa…” Cinder’s eye flicks over to look at her, but she can’t bring herself to move her body. “Use your semblance on me. And carry me up the hill to your old house. I need somewhere to recover for a while.”
Tessa finishes staring down at her new spectral body and kneels at Cinder’s side. She looks into Cinder’s eye and gives a small smile. “You could have just asked before…”
One arm goes under Cinder’s shoulders and the other under her knees, and then she’s finally off this hard dirt road. Tessa’s hands flare brighter yellow and that color fades into the orange of Cinder’s own aura around the points of contact, and suddenly Cinder can feel her aura strength returning.
At this rate, it will be nearly full again before they even reach Tessa’s home. This random civilian who got in her way might turn out to be the most useful summon she’s ever had.
“So, Pyrrha…” she mumbles softly to the air. “What was it you said about destiny?”
Vernal is dead.
And the Fall Maiden works for Salem, and her own daughter holds one of the Relics, and she’s halfway across the world because Tai was the only option for an escape portal… Qrow would have been closer to home, but she’s not portaling to him…
But all of that is secondary. What’s important, what really hurts, is that Vernal — her precious, faithful Vernal — is dead.
And Cinder killed her.
Now, she has to fly all the way back home to the tribe, alone. Easier said than done, over that distance. There’s no way Cinder survived their fight but Raven almost wishes she had, just so she could get the chance to make her pay for what she did.
Yesterday to cross Vale and climb the mountains. Today to descend again and rest in a small town on Sanus’s east coast. Tomorrow she’ll cross the ocean, thankfully at one of its narrowest points. And then another day to fly over Anima and find her tribe — her family — the only people in this world who care about her, the ones who raised her and who now look to her for leadership.
The tribe will survive a few days without their leader. She did do her best to warn them all about Cinder and Watts, to say there might be complications, in the rare few moments she had away from their watchful eyes. The scientist wasn’t there at Haven – there’s hardly any technology there for him to work with – and after what happened to Cinder she shouldn’t be hearing from that particular nuisance ever again.
She’s safe from Salem, for now. Even without the Relic in hand. With the lamp out of its vault, neither side of that pointless, unwinnable war will need the Spring Maiden’s power again. Raven, and her family, are free.
But she knows better than to think that freedom will last. Both the immortals still want Maidens as fighters, so it’s only a matter of time before one or the other comes to try to recruit her – and after that fails, they’ll try to kill her and start fresh. It doesn’t much matter if it’s Oz or Salem who finds her first.
Begrudgingly, Raven admits that Yang was probably right. She already knew it, deep down, that holding the Relic of Knowledge would only intensify her tribe’s problems by bringing the war down on all their heads. But the allure of power was strong, and it would have been very helpful to get some truths out of the lamp before she had to pack up and flee again.
You may be powerful, but that doesn’t make you strong. Yang certainly has a way with words, doesn’t she? At least when it comes to turning her back on her family. If she thinks some abstract moral strength is going to beat an immortal at a game she’s been playing for millennia, if she thinks it will somehow lead her and her teammates to anything but a pathetic early demise, then she can take what’s coming to her and Raven will happily stay far away.
Power, like she has, is the only strength that truly matters. That’s the kind of strength that keeps her alive, where so many others around her have failed. Accumulating power of her own, and avoiding those who have accumulated more. And occasionally, when necessary, putting an upstart like Cinder back in her place.
Unfortunately, no amount of sheer power can negate the exhaustion of beating her wings ceaselessly from dawn to dusk, or at least, that’s not a form of magic she’s yet discovered. If it ever were to come to her like the unlocking of a semblance, now would be the ideal moment, now when she’s got such a long journey ahead of her.
Remnant has never been a big place to her, not when she can cross the planet in seconds to appear at a loved one’s side. But the numbers of those loved ones have been dwindling, through death or mere estrangement, and now…
Now she’s down one more. Vernal is dead.
It’s a good thing her bird form is incapable of shedding tears. That would be rather unbecoming for Raven Branwen, Spring Maiden, leader of the Branwen tribe, and survivor of everything this cruel world ever has and ever will throw at her.