Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Some months ago, in Mistral:

Hazel watched as his entire reason for coming here bounced bonelessly down the steps. Sienna Khan—High Leader of the White Fang—fell into a heap at the bottom of the stairs leading up to her own throne. When her corpse rolled to an abrupt stop at Hazel’s feet, she was staring face-forward, flat on her back, limbs splayed out as though—even in death—she was still trying to catch herself and lunge back to action. Even now, the snarl never left her face. A fighter to the end. He respected that.

He did not share that same respect for her usurper, speaking now to the guards that helped betray her. Giving speeches, telling lies and telling others to spread them. As though their fellow faunus didn’t already have enough atrocities to be angry about, and enough loved ones to mourn.

“Sienna Khan will become a martyr for our cause,” Adam said. “Her final act as High Leader.”

Two guards robotically approached Sienna’s body with a stretcher, as though they had been ready for this, briefed on it, and held no particular feeling about any of it. Like they had killed her in their minds long before Adam had stabbed her through the chest and made it final. They simply lifted her, and left. No ceremony. No grief. No loyalty. They moved like the Grimm they fashioned masks of, killing efficiently and without second thought.

Hazel didn’t think Adam truly understood how concerning that was. Of what it meant for the stability of the Fang going forward, and the things Salem would demand of all their brothers and sisters in the times to come. Of how she would test their bonds, and their cause, and the very structure of their entire organization.

He tried to understand. He truly did. “When were you planning on telling me about… that.” The killing, the coup, the coverup—to Hazel, it had all come out of nowhere. What was the point?

Adam wiped the blood off his sword casually. “This was my business, not yours.”

“It’s our business now. And I don’t appreciate you withholding things like that.”

“Your master was concerned with Sienna’s willingness to cooperate. Now… she doesn’t have to be.” He said it like it was easy. Like it meant nothing at all. That a life wasn’t wasted when the whole point of Hazel coming here was to talk.

Hazel steadied his fists. He remembered his sister and found his resolve. He chose to focus on more pressing things, other matters that demanded his attention here in Mistral and what Salem had asked of him. Things that would make what he said to Adam next sound hypocritical in comparison:

“Nobody needed to die today.”

Even as he turned around to leave the throne room, Hazel could hear the smirk in Adam’s response, the pride he must feel as he sat down and his newfound seat of power creaked beneath his weight. “I disagree—” 

But then Adam didn’t sound proud at all. His voice caught on his teeth, and Hazel turned back just in time to see him slash at nothing over his shoulder. He whirled around in a frenzy, kicked the throne out of his way, and went on the warpath. His sword cut through the air and empty space behind him. Obviously, it did not fight back.

Hazel watched him rage about his throne with a flat expression. He wasn’t sure how to react. Wasn’t sure what there was to react about in the first place.

Eventually, the boy settled down, chest heaving as he ripped his blade from the wall, gouging through the elaborate tapestries that hung over the throne. It perfectly cut through the White Fang insignia emblazoned in the fabric, leaving an impression of a wounded, gutted animal in its place.

Adam took a moment to stare at it: the mess he made. He calmed his breathing till he almost sounded monotone. Indifferent. “Did you hear her, too?

Hazel frowned. “Who?”

Adam didn’t answer. He just kept staring where his sword cleaved the White Fang in two, the threads frayed apart straight between its angry, open jaws. It barely hung together at all anymore, on the verge of total collapse.

“...I think you should leave,” Adam eventually said.

And so Hazel did. He left the throne room, and set out to his next priority: preparing a supply for Watts’ upcoming operation. Assuming his machine was ready by the time Hazel had rounded up enough gangs and warehouse space for all the Aura users they would need for the experiment. He hoped it wasn’t; he hoped Watts failed and flustered and died in his sleep. He hoped he didn’t have to go through any of this at all. The sheer number of children alone was—

Hazel stirred from his thoughts as he caught sight of Sienna’s body, still being prepped for burial. The guards that had carried her into the hall had set her stretcher back on the floor, murmuring to each other quietly as they stared down at her corpse with visible unease.

It took a moment for Hazel to understand why. To find what could have possibly shaken them more than her actual murder. But he did. He saw, in perfect clarity, that her expression had changed. She was no longer snarling, eyes wide in dead surprise; the tone had changed entirely. Unnervingly so.

He kept walking, set back on the path Ozpin’s negligence had sent him on long ago, idly wondering how common it was for a mouth—post-mortem—to break into a ravenous grin mere minutes after death.

Present:

Ruby Rose bled open like a pomegranate. She felt like one, too. Juicy and fruity and full of holes that shouldn’t be there. She coughed and more juice spilled out. It was funny to think of it like that, instead of blood in her teeth, in her hair, and her fingers. Like there wasn’t something stringy and made of Ruby meat dangling out from her open chest, a bare rib catching the strand like someone poking a fork through her intestines. Like spaghetti. Pomegranate spaghetti. 

Funny imagery to think about, so long as Ruby forgot that she was probably about to die.

Her vision swirled red as her namesake as she thrashed in and out of consciousness. Hands tugged at all sides of her body—holding her down, tearing her clothes, pricking her skin—but she couldn’t see any of them clearly. Just bloody impressions of people made entirely of bright red polka dots, poking and prodding and murmuring nonsense to themselves as they jostled Ruby in every which direction.

She couldn’t remember how she got here, or where she was, or who they were, or why she was hurting more than she ever thought possible, but questions like those were for people without holes in their stomachs or ribs protruding past their very open skin. Ruby wished she was one of those lucky people. She’d probably be screaming a whole lot less.

Voices beyond her own tried their best to speak over her, and push her down, and touch her naked ribs, and, well, Ruby didn’t very much like that. Not at all. At some point or another, she snapped her teeth at fingers that brushed too close to her mouth, and someone other than herself screamed about it, but it was all lost in the sea of hands and bright, bloody polka dots that kept spinning and singing and spinning all over again.

Eventually, the dots became more solid—more unified—as one voice dominated the rest:

“Some say that it is in passing that we achieve immortality.”

Every hand gripped into Ruby more tightly than before, an unbearable heat suddenly building between each and every fingertip, closing in together like a living circuit board.

“But merely passing is not enough. It is not enough to have existed. It is not enough to have been born, and then died, with nothing of value in between. To become worthy of immortality is to become worthy of being remembered. To scar the world with your every action and word and breath, until no one alive now or forever after can deny your memory.”

The warmth consumed her entire body. It felt like her Aura, brittle and waning, stretched to its absolute thinnest limits. It made Ruby feel so very fragile, and small, and whimpering for it to be over. 

“To do this, you must survive as long as you can and by any means necessary. Steal if you are able. Murder if you must. Whatever it takes to leave your mark on the world, do it. For the world will not remember you for being kind. You must be ruthless.”

The warmth—her Aura—was focused all into one spot: the hole in her chest. Not by Ruby, but by the hands holding her, coaxing her Aura to follow both their touch and their words. Voices chanting in delayed unison that kept droning on and on about nothing and everything all at once.

“We must cut ourselves off from all weakness and hesitation and rise above all others. For it is in strength that we will find victory.”

Suddenly, Ruby’s vision cleared of red swirls and bloody spots. Replacing it all came the face of a familiar Nevermore in a mockingly human shape. Though its beak did not move, it spoke just the same:

“Infinite in power and unbound by death, I release your soul, and by my blade, demand thee rise.”

As its red blade tapped her sternum, Ruby felt the hole in her stomach clench and reknit and throb in fresh waves of pain as her eyes screamed open to numbing white and—

“Ruby?”

She woke up. And she was fine. No more hands, no more weird chanting or Nevermores who somehow knew how to swordfight. Just a persistent ache in her upper abdomen that flared even worse when she tried to touch it.

“I wouldn’t recommend doing that, Ruby. The stitches are still fresh.”

Ruby blinked and remembered she had eyes, and that they worked, and that they could be used to look at her favorite people. “Penny?”

By her side—a bedside, because, apparently, Ruby was lying in a bed full of pelted furs and patched up blankets—was, somehow, miraculously—impossibly—Penny. Or, well, totally possibly, because she still sorta kinda remembered the events leading up to this moment, Grimm bits and all (still fuzzy and coming back to her in pieces) but! Still! Penny!!!???

“Salutations, Ruby,” Penny said—'cause she was real and alive and Ruby might still be a little light headed or something from the blood loss ‘cause she kept changing colors. “I’m glad you’re awake. The last few nights have been… difficult to watch.”

While her vision stabilized and things got clearer and less wonky, Ruby clutched at her chest self-consciously, tallying all the spots it hurt too much to touch or move or think about. “A few nights, huh? Gosh… how much of me did they have to put back together?”

“More than they could have, less than they thought.” At Ruby’s confusion, Penny clarified, “Your eyes did something again, and, well… turned some of your outsides back into your insides. But it wasn’t enough on its own. The Branwens had to work their magic on you for days.” Penny curled up against Ruby, slotting her face like a perfect cog between the crook of Ruby’s neck and shoulderblade. She felt warm. “I don’t think I like anatomy anymore. I hope I never have to look at yours that closely again.”

It hurt a little to maneuver, but Ruby returned a little affection of her own, curling one trembling arm around Penny’s shoulder and hugging her tight. “Yeah, me neither. Sucked ass.” Penny’s giggles bounced down her neck and sent her goosebumps aflutter. Then her heart stopped. “Wait—the whomst?”

Penny visibly recalibrated. “Define… whomst?”

Ruby did, and Penny found it fun to say, which was cute and, like, really nice to watch her repeat a few times in a row as she found it funnier and funnier, but also—

“Yang’s MOM saved us? How? Why? Whomst’d?”

“Whomst’d,” Penny echoed, giggling again. “Also I have no idea either. She doesn’t like answering my questions… or talking to me in general. Or anyone. I think she’s very bad at communicating her feelings, like I am.”

“That’s called being a bitch, Penny. And—trust me—she is nothing like you.”

Ruby’s mood soured as Emerald’s head popped through a tent flap with the rest of her body, proving that, unfortunately, the details she had rather hoped she’d imagined about their escape from Salem had been entirely accurate. Crescent Rose stealing and all.

Emerald went to open her mouth again, but Ruby shut that down real fast. “Shut up—where’s my baby?”

Emerald froze, tilted her ear as though she was listening to someone explain something over her shoulder, before she groaned and rolled her eyes. “It’s literally right next to you, doofus.”

Ruby blinked, and looked down at the opposite side of the bed from Penny, and there CR was: folded, compact, and propped up on a pillow like a proper princess. As she deserved.

Still, Ruby eyed Emerald warily. “...why are you still here?”

Once more, Emerald rolled her eyes. “Uh… where the fuck else would I be? As much as I hate it, we’re kinda stuck together now. At least until we figure out what to do next. Speaking of which, now that you’re awake, we should probably decide where we’re going from here—”

Ruby shushed her again. Get shushed, idiot. “Uh, no, slow down—why are you here at all? Why did you help us? I still don’t really get what her whole deal is, but I know enough about Salem to safely say, yeah, she’s awful and evil and I hate her face and THAT YOU WORK FOR HER! Even if the ghost of Professor Ozpin is possessing you or something and helped us get out, that doesn’t actually explain anything—”

This time, Emerald shushed Ruby—physically, hand over mouth. Ruby retaliated with a tactical lick and saw Emerald regret every choice she made in her life in real time. She gawked, pulled her hand back, and stifled an angry scream behind gritted teeth. “Don’t say his name here—especially anything about him and me sharing brain cells, okay? Hate me all you want—’cause I don’t like you either—but Raven literally hates him enough to kill me JUST to get to him. Understand?”

Ruby thought about it. “No.”

Emerald breathed through her teeth, and seemed to calm herself. “No, you wouldn’t, would you? I forgot you don’t know as much as Penny yet.” She sat down on the ground of the tent, and steepled her forehead behind both hands. “Fuck… where should I even start?”

Ruby had plenty of questions of her own that she would be just thrilled to start off with, but then Emerald went really quiet, tilting her head again, her face exploding into something between a cringe and an outright aneurysm. “I am NOT saying that! That’s… so lame.”

Ruby just stared at her, Penny following suit. After a moment of (internal?) deliberation, Emerald finally sighed, mumbled ‘fuck it’ under her breath and asked:

“...What’s your favorite fairy tale?”

So, Ruby ruined Emerald’s info dump immediately when she answered that her favorite fairy tale was one of the few that Oz had absolutely nothing to do with:

The Girl Who fell through the World.

And because Oz had nothing to do with it, it meant there was literally no good segue from there to get into the Maidens or Relics or Brothers or the entire clusterfuck of a situationship that Oz and Salem had going on for the past few thousand years. Details that Oz didn’t seem particularly happy about sharing with Ruby… but fuck him ‘cause if he’s too pussy to do the talking while Raven is still out and clawing about, then Emerald could tell however much of the story she goddamn wanted to.

“Harsh, but fair,” Oz relented. “I suppose it would be stranger to keep Ruby in the dark anyway at this point, especially since Penny knows most of the details already as well.”

In the end, Emerald just ignored Ruby’s answer and used the Story of the Seasons instead (because, apparently, that was Oz’s go to or something?) and then quickly jumped BACK a cycle or so of humanity to explain The Girl in the Tower, and how Salem wanted to become a Goddess because she was too much of a bad bitch to die, and how the Brothers took that so personally they blew up the moon.

Oz glared daggers at her from behind her own eyeballs. “...you simply MUST phrase it better than that. You aren’t even describing the proper order of events.”

Penny helped fill in the other bits (and the bits that Emerald was a little too impatient to explain, correcting her where she summarized too much at once), particularly her time at Evernight and how she and Emerald grew to become unlikely friends while trapped under Salem’s thumb. Of course, that just led into everyone’s favorite bit of mildly controversial, totally morally ambiguous behavior—

“So, let me get this straight,” Ruby said, hands trembling as she fumbled for the oversized scythe at her bedside. “After you helped destroy my school and kill my friends and countless other people, you went on to gaslight Penny for months into joining Salem’s side—literally corrupting her soul to become someone else, with a VIRUS implanted in her body to keep her under control—AND you did all of that to Penny wh-while…” Her breath stuttered. “While pretending to be me.”

Emerald twiddled her fingers together, glancing away awkwardly. “I mean… I didn’t do that last part on purpose. I kinda lucked into it.”

Somehow, despite all the stitches, Ruby managed to cock her gun. “I’m going to kill you.”

Fortunately, Penny disliked that idea almost as much as Emerald. “Please don’t.”

“Why not? Penny, her semblance is the reason you died! She tricked Pyrrha into killing you—who she ALSO helped kill! She’s dangerous. She’s awful. I’m… I’m not just gonna forgive her!”

Penny clasped Ruby’s trembling hands and helped her put the gun down. It didn’t look easy. “I’m not asking you to forgive her. Merely to understand.”

Even Emerald flinched at the hurt washing over Ruby’s face, the pain that wracked through her entire body. “Understand what? You should understand me—you said you didn’t like seeing my insides? Well… right back at you. I didn’t like seeing yours either, back at Beacon.” Her hands twitched, threatening to pull from Penny’s. But she gave in, and held tighter, and started to cry. “Do you have any idea what it was like? Running from the stands, bursting through the doors to the arena, and seeing you in pieces? I even figured it out right before it happened—figured out what they were going to do with you. At the last. Possible. Fucking. Second! And I… I…”

Crescent Rose clattered to the floor and Ruby just… broke. She wept so hard it made her veins go black. The Grimm inside—its mind scattered and small and hard for Emerald to pick out cleanly—felt bigger. Engorged. Taking new roots while Ruby fell apart.

“I can’t fail you again,” Ruby said. “I just… can’t. I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t!” Words came out of her in a rush, something thunderous gaining weight behind them. “Just let me kill her. Make her dead. Make her suffer.”

Though those brambles Ruby wielded in Evernight didn’t shoot out immediately, Emerald could still see them threatening to grow beneath the skin, poking at tissue and waiting to be unleashed. It didn’t take using her semblance to feel the Grimm’s hate pounding behind Ruby’s. It was like Cinder all over again—the parasite feeding on negativity where it could, using Emerald as the catalyst. She didn’t know how to stop it, and neither did Oz.

Even Penny seemed rattled, trying (and failing) to yank her hands from Ruby’s sudden death grip. “Ruby, you… you’re hurting me.”

That did it. That gave Ruby pause. Made her pale in ways worse than just the blood loss. She pried her fingers from Penny’s wrists and hid them with the rest of her body, beneath a thick blanket. The Grimm settled down, still blackening the veins in Ruby’s neck, but no longer prodding beneath her stitches for a quick opening.

Emerald—feeling too many gods awful things all at once to respond appropriately—tried to break the tension with a laugh. “Well, fuck—that was scary.”

Ruby glared at her. Oz did the mental equivalent. It wasn’t until Penny glanced harshly at her that Emerald felt well and truly chastised.

“Emerald,” Penny said carefully. In a tone that reminded Emerald that she—out of everyone here—had the least reason to be gentle with her. And yet she was. And yet she tried. And yet she merely asked and did not demand: “Could you please leave us for the night? I think… I think Ruby needs some space.” From you especially was not said, but heard nonetheless.

“Yeah,” Emerald said, even as Ruby’s veins flexed and darkened and summoned images of someone else’s hand clutching and clawing and pawing at her throat. “Okay.”

She left the tent and found the Branwen encampment just as unwelcoming as before. Not that she was used to being welcome, like, anywhere—but still… the people here sucked. Mostly in the same way that Emerald did.

Bandits and scoundrels eyed her as she passed them, sizing her up, weighing their chances, and slowly remembered they were under strict orders to leave her alone. For now. For as long as Raven desired.

However long that would last.

“Hard to say,” Oz said. “She has never been known for kindness. Her concern for Miss Rose was unexpected enough on its own, much less for the two tagalongs she took back with her on a whim. Still, I doubt she’d suddenly change her mind for no reason. Especially after all that effort she put into Ruby’s recovery.”

“Yeah… what was it you called that chanting stuff again? A Mantra?” Emerald honestly didn’t give that much of a shit, she just needed the distraction. Lectures were boring, but remarkably better to listen to than bandits plotting her murder or Ruby plotting the same. “I still don’t get how it wasn’t like… magic. The real kind, like we did.”

While Emerald found a quiet corner of the camp—a place she scouted out with her semblance and felt no hidden minds that could overhear her whispering to herself like a lunatic—Oz took his time to answer, like she had asked something complicated instead of just one simple fucking question.

“I just don’t want to confuse you, Emerald. Not that Mantras are a difficult concept to understand—not exactly—but the truth is… I don’t fully understand them either. I can’t even use them myself. I lack the necessary mindset.”

Emerald considered that. “Why not? Are Mantras like Semblances, or the Maiden powers? Unique to certain people?”

“No, in fact from what I understand… anyone can use them, or rather anyone can learn to use them. More like… another universal application of Aura, similar to how you use it to shield your body, heal your wounds, and strengthen your weapons. Aura can also be used in tandem with another’s—without a semblance—through Mantras.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of people using them before. Doesn’t seem so universal if this place is the only one that does it.”

Oz sighed at that, and she felt his own resentment. “That is my fault. I… I accidentally eradicated the practice. When I first brought Semblances to humanity.”

Emerald perked up, now genuinely interested. “Oh yeah—Salem said something about that. About you giving them to us. Almost forgot about that in the aftermath of, well… everything.” It still felt unreal. The escape; Penny’s remodeling; Raven’s interference. It all just sorta… came together all at once. Nonstop crisis after crisis until now. Sitting here in the dark where the skies weren’t red and trying to kill her. But alone, without a warm body to cling to when the world felt cold. She hugged herself. “I hope Cinder is doing okay. Wherever she is.”

Oz pointedly ignored that comment, continuing on: “I haven’t forgotten my promise to you, Emerald.”

“Promise? What promis—” And then Emerald remembered, and she realized a part of herself never thought she’d actually survive long enough for Oz to follow through with this. “You’ll finally tell me everything? Like, everything, everything?”

“Though the collective experience of over half my lifetimes up until this point urges me to reconsider… yes, Emerald. As you had promised me, you helped save Miss Rose from Salem and you defected from her circle. Though I fear your loyalty to Cinder is still a problem we must address in the days to come, you taught me a lesson in waiting too long to confront a problem. Of leaving things unsaid and regretting them later. So… yes. Ask me anything, and I will answer.”

Emerald was dreaming. Or dead. Or dead and dreaming. The most unbelievable thing was that she was alive, now, with the potential of learning EVERYTHING that Oz had been so frustratingly vague about back at Evernight. The real reason he made the Maidens, his experiments with Ruby, the missing pieces he still hadn’t revealed of his past with Salem and their on-again-off-again nonsense for the past who knows how many thousands of years.

She could have started somewhere small, but still significant, letting Oz build up to the bigger, possibly more shameful things he had done across his many lives. Small, like the origin of Semblances. Or badgering him a bit more on what he meant by ‘accidentally eradicating’ Mantras. But Emerald didn’t want to start somewhere small, somewhere easy. She wanted to know that whatever came next, whatever choices she made against the immortal Grimm queen, would be worth it. That maybe, for the first time in her life, she could actually let herself believe she had a future to look forward to.

And so, crouched in a dark corner of a bandit camp—surrounded by thieves and murderers and absolutely no one that loved her—Emerald asked Oz her very first question:

“What is your plan to defeat Salem?”

Oz paused. Sighed. Collected his thoughts behind Emerald’s and didn’t let her sneak a peak before he was done sorting it all out. But he did not break his promise. “I will put an end to Salem’s story the same way it began: with her locked in a tower.”

Chapter Text

Emerald blinked. “Oh. That’s… not that surprising actually.”

She had been imagining something complicated when it came to Oz’s plan of dealing with Salem. The witch couldn’t die, controlled every Grimm on Remnant, and had powers humanity hadn’t wielded since before the Brother gods fucked off and left their creations to rot. Even holding herself back in the shadows, she felt more a force of nature than something that could ever actually be stopped. But trapping her somewhere where she couldn’t harm anyone… that just felt like an obvious solution. Way, WAY too obvious.

“She’s totally expecting that, right? I mean, she practically grew up in a cage. What would stop her from just, you know… breaking out again?”

Oz sighed. “I asked myself that very same question. Centuries of work putting the pieces of her prison together, and I still was not certain whether it would all be enough to contain her. But in the last few years… I think I found the last piece. My final experiment, capable of stripping Salem of her greatest power.”

Emerald groaned. “I swear to fuck if you’re talking about Ruby—”

“I am.”

She groaned again. “Of course. Always Ruby, Ruby, Ruby.” Cinder, Salem, AND Oz—they were all obsessed with the same alliteratively named brat. Emerald could not see the appeal in the slightest. “I’m guessing whatever you did to make her special eyes even more special is what matters?”

“Yes, but I might be getting ahead of myself. Remember, Ruby is the last piece of my plan. It would make more sense to explain from the beginning, wouldn’t you agree?”

Smug bastard. Dragging everything out bit by bit as narratively dramatic as possible, just like another one of his fairy tales. “Fine, whatever. What’s step one?”

“The prison itself. To contain Salem, physical restraints alone are not enough. She must be entirely isolated from the world to keep it safe from her. So… I took Remnant out of the equation. A prison that does not exist within our world.”

“What the hell does that mean—” Flashes of impossible schematics; experiments with the folds between space and distance and time; doors forged of gold that filled the cracks between realities. “...the vaults? The ones you made for the relics?”

“Ah, you’ve received more of my memories. That is bad for you. A likely side-effect of creating Penny’s new body. It means the merging of our souls has accelerated. I am sorry.”

Emerald’s forehead throbbed as the past threatened to swallow her whole. Bombarded by images of places she had never been but still somehow helped create. “I really don’t want to worry about that right now—just keep talking. Please.”

“Right… the vaults. Technically speaking, I did not create them. At least, not the pocket worlds that exist within them. The Brothers scattered them all over the world, hidden inside temples they created to challenge humanity and test whether they were worthy of wielding the relics they left behind.” Oz paused. “And then I ripped them from their foundations, and hid them beneath my schools instead.”

“Uh… wouldn’t it have made more sense to build the schools over the temples? So Salem would have to beat their challenges AND wreck your students?”

Oz sighed. “Against eternity, challenges are meaningless. In the temple of knowledge, I got so frustrated with the riddles that I just kept dying and reincarnating for a few lifetimes guessing every possible answer and accepting the consequences when I was wrong. I never truly understood half of them in the end—brute force was enough on its own to win. And for Salem—”

“She doesn’t have to wait to reincarnate like you do,” Emerald realized. “She could just die, immediately get up, and try again.”

“Exactly correct. The temples would delay her, but barely. Putting trained hunters between her and the relics was a far more effective deterrent. Especially since humanity improves as time goes on, while the temples… they never change. I don’t think the Brothers designed them with her in mind. Still, the temples were useful in one respect in the war against my wife.”

“How were they—” Another memory surfaced—fractured and fading fast—of Oz hiding hints to the temples’ locations across Remnant, and adding additional (fake) puzzles in place of where the relics were supposed to be held. “Oh… they were distractions. During the Great War… you sent Salem on a wild goose chase thinking you didn’t have the relics yet. So you’d have time to unite the world and put the academies together.”

“Indeed,” he said, uncharacteristically impressed with himself. “She was quite furious with me when she figured that out. But by then the damage was done—I had cemented my power in the four kingdoms, while Salem wasted decades chasing puzzles with no payoff. It was the only time that I’ve ever truly managed to outwit her. Since then, I’ve played more… defensively. Building up as many deterrents as possible while I simultaneously designed her prison.”

“Right, by using the vaults you ripped from the Brothers’ temples. You… changed them. Gave them doors only the Maidens could open.” Emerald froze. “Which… which was another fucking distraction, wasn’t it?”

Shame curdled in her stomach, but it did not belong to her. “Emerald—”

“That’s why you really made the Maidens, isn’t it? You just told me the temples never change and that’s why you couldn’t leave the relics there. But the Maidens… you designed them to change. Every time they die, it’s a whole new scavenger hunt for Salem to waste her time and resources on. She can’t focus on the vaults if she doesn’t even have the keys. You didn’t make the Maidens to be protectors of the world… you made them to be bait.”

Oz did not defend himself. He did not deny Emerald’s accusations—what would be the point? She could already feel the truth of it roll off him in waves, his guilt inflamed like a persistent little tumor. “I wish… I wish I could say that was the only reason. I wish I could say it was the worst of why I created them. I will not lie to you—there is more.”

Emerald wanted to be pissed, she really did. But there was more to learn and, despite her feelings about the Maiden powers and Cinder’s obsession with claiming them all (and the role that Oz played INTENTIONALLY instigating that pursuit)… the anger she expected to feel about their true origins just wasn’t there. She couldn’t find it. Instead she found… indifference? No, not exactly, more like—

“Like it’s something you’ve already known for a long, long time?” Emerald nodded and Oz sympathized. “Your thoughts and feelings are being more tainted by my own. Another side effect of our eventual merge. I am sorry—”

“Would you stop apologizing?” Emerald snapped. “Fuck. I feel like the more attention you bring to it, the more… the more I feel it happening, eating me away. Like… like it’s getting even faster.” She curled against her knees, pushing away the growing tide of thoughts swallowing thoughts. “If you want to hold off on all the Maiden shit until you’re done explaining the vaults, then fine. Just… keep talking. Distract me. It’s what you’re best at anyway.”

Emerald felt him recoil at that last barb, but she also felt (from both him AND herself) that it was entirely accurate. “Very well,” Oz said. “After creating the doors to the vaults and binding them to the Maidens, I studied them extensively with the hope of creating a new one myself. One that would have an entrance, but no exit. A one-way door to shove Salem through and be rid of her forever. Unfortunately… it was not to be. My magic, even before it became as finite as it is now, was not capable of such a feat. So I did the next best thing: instead of creating a new vault to contain her, I would simply need to modify one of the ones I already had.”

“Wait… so one of the vaults is a trap for Salem?” Emerald had to hand it to Oz—that was actually pretty smart. Just trick her into walking into the dummy vault and—”

“Not quite.” Damn. “Unfortunately, I believe Salem already suspects I’ve meddled with the vaults for such a purpose. It is likely one of the primary reasons she sends her agents to collect the relics instead of taking them personally, besides the obvious limitation of needing the Maidens to open them first.”

“So what’s the plan? If she already knows to avoid the vaults, then we’re totally fucked.” Though, that did explain why Salem never tried going to Beacon herself to find where the vault was hidden—she was being cautious of accidentally triggering it. 

“True, but the real reason she hasn’t found it yet is because she never will. It’s simply not possible.”

Emerald tilted her head. “Uh, why not?”

“Because there is no vault under Beacon. It wasn’t necessary to hide one there. Not after I destroyed the Relic of Choice.”

He said it so casually Emerald almost didn’t react. “You did WHAT?”

Meanwhile, in a semi-nearby tent:

Penny tried her very best to look at Ruby without cringing. This was particularly difficult as the Grimm writhing within her bloodstream kept triggering sensor alarm after sensor alarm in Penny’s HUD and disrupting her field of vision with screen-blaring notification after notification. From critical biometric alerts to suggested battle tactics, none of Penny’s subroutines could settle on whether Ruby was a human being in need of immediate medical attention, or a new and dangerous strain of Grimm in need of total extermination. She ignored them all and shut them down because neither conclusion was true, and Ruby deserved her complete and undivided attention. Such was fact even when she wasn’t being consumed internally by a mind altering Grimm parasite.

“Ruby,” Penny started. “Do you think you can activate your eyes again?”

Ruby blinked, blinked, and blinked some more. Her veins did not magically become better, and less clogged with Grimm Matter. She blinked again—in rapid, angry flutters—and started to cry furiously. “It’s not working! I’m not enough! I’m never enough!”

Penny had never disagreed with a statement more in her entire life. She articulated as much to Ruby with tenderness she had very clearly needed to hear for a long time. “Your value to me is not in your eyes. It is in seeing you safe and healthy and happy. Does this compute?”

With a haggard, viscously strained breath, Ruby said, “I…” and immediately paused. “Did… did you just say compute?”

“Yes. Like a robot.” Penny cranked her arms at rigid, ninety degree angles, joints audibly creaking like a dance Ruby showed her a lifetime ago. “Beep boop bop.”

Rubbing at her eyes, Ruby sniffled into a long, wet laugh, and the world became objectively brighter just from that sound existing. The black in her veins lessened somewhat, fading to a grey translucence. “I… I don’t know why but I really needed that. Thank you.”

“Of course. You are my friend.” Penny clutched at her new skirt, picking at the ruffles with her fingers and marveling at the sensation it sent through her semblance. It did not make saying: "But so is Emerald,” any easier.

Ruby’s veins darkened again, her eyes grinding dull. “Penny… she lied to you.”

“Many times in fact.”

“She murdered you.”

“Objectively true.”

Penny’s nonplussed responses didn’t seem to make Ruby any angrier, but she looked tired all the same. “Then if you agree… why doesn’t it bother you? Why are you defending someone who has hurt you so much? You should hate her even more than me.”

“Why?”

That struck Ruby dumb where she sat, which was entirely the intention. “W-what?”

“Why?” Penny repeated. “Why should I hate someone who has hurt me?”

Some form of algorithm clicked and clacked its way behind Ruby’s scrunched up forehead. It jumbled numbers down her jaw and puckered teeth, solution after solution tossed out like the wrong answer to a particularly grueling math problem. Even she did not seem to agree with the answer she eventually settled on:

“Um…” Ruby said. “Because?”

Penny did not laugh because this conversation was not the least bit funny. She wasn’t trying to be mean or demean Ruby’s feelings, she was simply trying to elaborate her own perspective. Which… was remarkably easier to explain than she expected. “I promise I’m not trying to be condescending. I’m not saying you can’t be mad at her—that your anger is unwarranted, or even remotely wrong. I’m the one that actually cares about her and I’m mad at her too. But still—we’re all in this together now. Throwing every mistake she’s ever made in her face and threatening to kill her doesn’t help anyone.” She stared pointedly at one of Ruby’s engorged veins, twitching and inflamed. “In fact, it seems to hurt you most of all.”

Ruby rubbed the spot, wincing as the Grimm underneath tried to mirror the motion, circling inside the vein like a wound-up centipede. “I… I don’t think I can stop hating her, Penny. I just can’t.”

“That’s alright. I’m not asking you to. Just… tolerate her. At least a little. We’re going to need Emerald and you-know-who’s help with whatever we do next.”

Another algorithm went off behind Ruby’s furrowed brow. “Right. Salem. Magic. Gods. And a whole lot of other stuff I don’t think I was fully paying attention to until right now. What the fuck?”

Penny shared that same sentiment. “Yes. It is a lot. Fuck.”

While briefly surprised at Penny’s newly acquired ability to say fuck without censoring herself, Ruby seemed far more concerned with going over everything Penny and Emerald had already explained (but perhaps was a little too focused on certain, other details to really absorb the first time around). By the end, Ruby seemed exhausted but contemplative.

“Okay… I think I’m a little pissed at O—sorry, you-know-who—for not explaining any of this before I got kidnapped by his immortal ex-wife, but whatever. He’s stuck in Emerald’s head, so that seems like punishment enough for now. But man… I’ve got no idea what to do about any of this.”

Penny didn’t either. For the longest time, her chief concern had simply been escape—no, not even that. She just… wanted choice again. Agency. Evernight had almost disassembled her entire identity and tried to put the pieces back together in the worst ways imaginable, like a doll with its limbs shuffled into every wrong socket. Even after Emerald and Oz (and maybe God) gave her the power to remake herself, Salem’s influence hadn’t left her. Not entirely. She tried her best to ignore the new itch in her scalp that Emerald had pointed out to her—a splotch of blonde that somehow snuck its way from one body to the next.

Which was another thing—itchiness. Despite her semblance, it was not a pleasant sensation in the least. Though she doubted Ruby needed any reminders of such a thing this very moment, squirming in bed while something monstrous scratched at her skin from the inside out.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Penny asked. “We could try some of the pain relief ointments some of Raven’s… subordinates? Gave us for your wounds.”

“I don’t think so, Penny. Might just need to pass out again or something. Maybe sleep will settle Brambles down by the time morning rolls around.”

Penny tilted her head. “Brambles?”

“Yeah—it’s what I’m naming my Grimm until I find out how to murder it.” Ruby cleared her throat, her voice evening out to far less terrifying decibels. “Sorry. Apparently murder makes it worse. Who woulda guessed, huh?” She settled down, laid back, and seemed ready to close her eyes. Then she opened them again. “Hey, uh… Penny?”

“Yes?”

“Are you just gonna, like… stare at me? While I’m sleeping? All night?”

That was the plan, but now that Ruby was no longer comatose, she understood that was probably no longer socially acceptable. “Right, sorry. I’ll leave you to rest.”

“I didn’t say you had to leave. I don’t think I want to be alone right now anyway. Just feels weird to be laying here with you just leaning to the side, ya know?”

Penny considered that. “Is there an alternative?”

Ruby fiddled with her blankets, oddly averting her eyes from Penny’s. “I mean… you could lay in the bed with me. If you want.” Her voice quieted, a tense kind of soft. “Seems big enough.”

Penny stared at her and Ruby shrank even more beneath the covers. Calculations ran at an overclocked pace, multiple subroutines put aside to work in tandem to figure out—exactly—what Ruby was asking of her. All data came back to the same world-shattering result—

“Ruby,” Penny asked carefully. “Are you inviting me to… to a sleepover?”

“Uh… I guess so—”

It was thanks in no small part to Atlesian engineering that Penny did not rebreak every rib in Ruby’s body. The speed, force, and overall horsepower that Penny launched herself into the bed was perfectly calibrated to minimize injury. Calibrations that were far easier to make now that Penny’s semblance could be used as a reference for human anatomy and where best they felt pain.

Ruby wheezed at the impact but did not outright cough more blood, so she was probably fine. “Oof. Heavy.” 

“Sorry,” Penny giggled, only somewhat apologetic. “This is just so exciting for me!”

“I bet,” Ruby said, before saying something else that strangely hurt: “You really haven’t changed much at all since Beacon, have you?”

Penny frowned. She had changed since Beacon. And not always in ways she liked. Watts’ soul had felt like acid, corrosive and scarring. “I wouldn’t say that. Doesn’t feel that way.”

Ruby fell quiet. “...yeah, no, I get it. Sorry. Do you wanna talk about it more? All that, um, Cricket stuff?”

Penny shook her head, trying to calculate the most optimal position in which to spoon Ruby. “What about you? You haven’t said much about, well… what Salem did to you.”

Ruby sighed. “Honestly I was too delirious for most of it to even remember. Like a really bad dream I know I had but just… can’t seem to imagine anymore.” Her face soured. “Most of it anyway.”

Penny helped Ruby snuggle up against her—avoiding the stitches—and nearly lost herself in the sensation. So much Ruby to touch all at once was almost overwhelming. She had to shut down [Sensational] entirely just to stay focused on the conversation. “Something on your mind?”

“There was this one guy—Tyrian. He’s the one that helped grab me with Mercury. Hurt my uncle, too—which is a whole other thing I’m worried about—but… he said some things to me.” Ruby curled against Penny and—even without her semblance activated—she knew Ruby felt cold. “Gross things. About wanting to touch me and… my… my mom.”

Penny suddenly felt a profound sense of powerlessness. “Ruby—”

“Whatever’s happening to me, Salem did it to my mom, too. I think it’s how she died.” Ruby started to sob again, Grimm unprovoked, but still so, so broken. “I always wanted to know what happened to her, but not like this. I… I never imagined it would be this bad. It’s too much. It’s all too much.”

Penny hugged Ruby through her sobs, understanding rather easily that Ruby wasn’t just talking about her mom—it was everything. Beacon, Evernight, the Gods—it was a relentless torrent of information, too much to parse in just a day, or two, or even a hundred. But she had to, and so did Penny. Whether the world knew it or not, it was relying on them.

“It’s not fair,” Ruby said. “None of this is fair.”

“It’s not,” Penny agreed, and she left it at that. Instead she scanned Ruby’s body for pressure points, pressing down where Ruby allowed to help ease what pain she could. Eventually the weight of making it to tomorrow sat too heavily on Ruby’s eyelids to keep them open any longer, and she fell asleep fitfully in Penny’s arms. Her pulse slowed, spiking infrequently as Penny tracked it through the shifting realm of REM. 

It was not at all the way Penny ever imagined her first real sleepover would go. It had been fun in only short, sprint-like bursts of time, and otherwise a hurtful experience. More so for Ruby than herself, but still—she wished she could have done better. She wished the world had been better to them both.

Meanwhile, back in Emerald’s bandit camp corner of world breaking lore dumps:

“I meant exactly what I said. I destroyed the Relic of Choice. Permanently.”

Emerald had to reevaluate her life choices for a second. “Oz… that means Salem attacked Beacon for nothing. She destroyed an entire city for nothing. It means I… I did it for nothing. What the fuck!?”

“Would you rather Salem have the Relic then, just so your mistakes can achieve results?”

“Well, no, but…” Emerald sighed. “I don’t know. I just feel like that makes it so much worse somehow. Like I didn’t help break Vale so some super goth could become an even worse God than our last two, but now it’s like… what did anyone get from that? What’s the payoff?”

“There shouldn’t be a payoff. It was pointless death and chaos and carnage.” Oz paused. “But technically… there was some good to come from it. In a purely logistical sense.”

“...Do I even want to ask?”

“Emerald,” Oz started. “Are you familiar with Remnant: The Game?”

“I already despise where this is going—”

“I’m going to take that as a yes and elaborate further—in the game, the main objective is to conquer Remnant. Players take turns, each one representing a different kingdom, as they painstakingly attempt to destroy each other’s crops and infest their neighbors with Grimm.”

Emerald was well aware. Mercury fucking loved that overly complicated slab of cardboard and math, math and cardboard. She tried playing it once and then never again.

“A shame, it’s really quite fun if you forget about the implications. But I digress—conquering Remnant is the main objective, yes. It is certainly the only way to win. But winning is not always the opposite of losing. Most games end with a majority of the players locked in a stalemate, inevitably leading to that uncomfortable tension we call peace between our kingdoms. But to achieve that peace often requires… sacrifice.”

Emerald thought about a cardboard slab—four kingdoms stacked against a sudden and inevitable fifth faction of Salem and her Grimm. Pieces scattered like Relics, but one of the pieces—unknown to all the players except one—was fake the entire time. “You absolute bastard.”

Oz agreed wholeheartedly. “Yes. It is as you suspect—Beacon was always intended to fall. A sacrificial pawn. Just like I tricked Salem into wasting time on those empty temples, I tricked her into targeting the school she knew I was overseeing personally. Her pride would allow no other first target.”

“So you knew the attack was gonna happen?”

“Of course I did. I didn’t know how exactly Salem would go about her plan—I never once anticipated Watts’ virus or Penny’s true nature—but I knew the attack was inevitable. My biggest regret was underestimating the sheer scale of it. How total the devastation would be…” He trailed off, mourning more than just people. “I always underestimate just how cruel she has become.”

Emerald tried her best not to relate to that. “So you used Beacon just like you used the Maidens—a distraction to make Salem waste resources and buy yourself more time.” She hated how the game analogy made this even easier to understand: as though the costs were just trading pieces and resources instead of the people that lived on them. “That… that makes sense—grossly—but why did you even break the Relic in the first place? And how?”

“Answering your second question first: the Relic of Destruction. It can destroy anything at the cost of losing something else of equal or greater value. Thanks to the Relic of Knowledge, I discovered that losing the potential of ever using the Relic of Choice again was a fair enough price on its own. As to the why… it is because I was arrogant. I thought I found a way to fool the gods and prevent them from ever returning to Remnant.”

Right. If all four Relics were needed to summon them, then— “But that obviously didn’t work, or you would have rubbed it in Salem’s face by now, right?”

“I thought if I removed the gods from the equation, I could reason with her. Get her to give this second generation of humanity another chance. But I was wrong. The gods knew what I had done instantly, and punished me for it. Personally.”

Though her Aura was still too strained (even after days of rest) to use her semblance effectively, Oz used it in broad, abstract strokes to paint a picture of the past—not a true memory that would accelerate their soulfucking anymore, thank fuck—but still more than enough to see the Brothers strike Oz down, shattering his Aura and with a wave of their hands they—

“They broke your magic,” Emerald said. “Your… your magic didn’t used to be finite and waning every incarnation, it used to be whole just like Salem’s.”

Oz’s presence in her mind—fractured and old—had never felt more unbearably tired. “I tried to talk to them. Explain that Salem forced my hand, that I couldn’t help humanity better themselves while she was working against me. They wouldn’t listen. Said I disappointed them, abused the parameters of their experiment, and for my hubris humanity would receive a penalty. And so, they made sure I would always be weaker than her… and changed the rules of their return: now, only the three remaining relics would be required to summon them to Remnant."

Emerald processed this new and awful development like a paper shredder. “So not only does your magic get weaker and weaker for the rest of eternity now, but also Salem only needs three Relics to become a Goddess instead of four?”

“Yes.”

“...You fucked up, dude.”

“I know. More than anyone else on the planet.”

It somehow sucked more when Oz didn’t argue with her. He’d be a fucking maniac to do so considering how he objectively biffed the whole world with this stunt, but still—she needed the banter to survive at this point. “Okay. That’s fucked, and you know it’s fucked, and we’ve gotta move on. That explains how you’ve got a spare vault to mess with for Salem’s prison. What was step two?”

Oz seemed to collect himself for a moment, and she felt his surprise at how quickly Emerald was allowing him to move on without ripping him a new one. “I quite frankly deserve to be ripped a new one a million times over, but thank you anyway. Step two… well, the timeline is actually a little strained here in my planning process. After I broke the Relic of Choice, and my magic began to wane, I still hadn’t even considered the idea of making a prison. Instead I fell back on another idea I tried in the past but ultimately abandoned: improving humanity. I thought if I could make humans as magic as they once were—or as close as I possibly could without the Brothers’ intervention—I could convince Salem that your kind was equal of respect. Sort of how she currently sees Penny, I suppose.”

“Alright. So this is when Semblances came into play.”

“Yes. I quickly abandoned the project the first time around after showing Salem the results. She found semblances amusing but ultimately insignificant compared to her power and my own. But despite a few minor missteps and delusions, I decided it was at least worth equipping humanity with some semblance of power capable of defending themselves from Salem and the Grimm, though she still hadn’t quite taken control of them yet at this time, but she would figure it out eventually.”

At ‘missteps and delusions’ Emerald had a sudden and rather abrupt thought about Cinder. Ergo: Oz was projecting. “...This is when you had more kids with her, wasn’t it?”

“...Maybe.” At Emerald’s eyeroll, he continued, “That was another plan that ultimately failed. Our children could use magic, so I thought we could introduce it slowly, over generations into the rest of humanity. This did not appease Salem, who only became more convinced that death was unfair as it took more and more of our daughters away. I realize now—with hindsight—this is probably when her plan of taking death back from the gods really cemented itself in her mind.”

“Wait… hold up. You… did you try to breed magic back to humanity?”

“I wouldn’t phrase it quite like that… but yes. The result was the modern semblance.”

Emerald nearly passed out. “You’re joking.”

“I didn’t force our children to do anything. Many of them simply lived with Salem and I their entire lives, never seeking to plant seeds of their own—”

“Gross, gross, fucking disgusting—”

“But the ones that did quickly discovered that their children did not inherit their full magic. Like me, the power waned and expressed itself in smaller, more honest ways. And so the first semblances were born.”

“So, everyone who has ever unlocked a semblance… is a descendant of you and Salem?”

Oz cringed, more bullshit clearing incoming. “Not quite. Salem and I could never find common ground even as we tried to make amends and another hand at a family together. We both quickly grew sick of each other’s ideals… and of watching our descendants die before our eyes. When I eventually returned to this idea of arming humanity with semblances, the few generations that spiraled away from us and into the rest of Remnant had not been anywhere near populous enough to spread it over a continent, much less the entire globe. So I worked to… accelerate the process.”

And so, with inexplicable dread, Emerald understood now why Oz really loved going to sex clubs. “You didn’t.”

“Your semblance is proof I did, sorry. With every incarnation, I made sure to, well, spread the gift as it were, by starting families of my own. Even easier when I reincarnated into men who were already nearing that stage of their life, with partners already entangled. My children were not born with their whole magic intact as the ones I raised with Salem, but there was a chance of them still unlocking a semblance, and of their children’s children doing the same.”

“Okay, so, after you—” Emerald shuddered. “Spread the gift over a few generations, that’s how you introduced semblances to humanity?”

Oz cringed again, harder this time. There was more; there was always more. “I wish I could say that was it. But no. It still wasn’t spreading fast enough. I needed humanity to be stronger, and I couldn’t spend every incarnation on this purpose, not while I eventually set about the task of fashioning a prison, and Salem grew bolder in her own pursuits. There just wasn’t enough time—or of me—to go around, especially as my magic continued to wane slowly but surely.”

“So, what? What else could you do to make it go faster beyond just… what? Being a deadbeat and popping kids all over the place and abandoning them. Is that it? Is that the next big fucked up thing you did? ‘Cause, like that definitely sucks, but not anymore than anything else you’ve done.”

Oz took a heavy, metaphorical breath. “I need you to understand before I continue that, before I did this, I did not know I could reincarnate into women. I thought I would always be a man. Neither sex nor gender were as loose to me back then.”

“What does that have to do with anything…” Emerald froze. “Oz… no. Please tell me you didn’t. Holy fuck please.”

Oz refused to defend himself once more, and Emerald knew—once again—what he was going to confess before he even said it. “I needed someone like myself, who had a greater chance of spreading semblances to humanity. Who could reincarnate anywhere in the world, at least partially, to spread the power more evenly from one lifetime to the next. In the end, I set aside enough of my magic to make four.”

If Emerald could do so without harming herself, she would punch Oz in the face so hard he’d never breathe through his nose again. “That’s the original reason you made the Maidens. Before they were protectors, before they were bait… you made them to be breeding stock.”

“That is not how I would have phrased it back then. It is certainly not what I told them… but yes. I created them with the explicit purpose of accelerating the spread of semblances across Remnant. Sometimes they would have children, and sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes those children would express semblances, and sometimes they—unfortunately—did not. It was never an exacting process. I just knew that when I sought them out, seduced them with words or offers of wealth and influence… the Maidens that did choose to bear my children had a much higher chance of spreading the gift. It was all I needed from them back then.”

Emerald had to hand it to Oz. He really outdid himself here. No wonder they were like-minded souls—they were both absolute monsters. “That is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most disgusting thing I have ever heard a man do.”

And Oz—that sick and twisted and remorseful wizard Oz—replied ever so softly: “But you haven’t even heard yet about what I did to Ruby.”

There was no possible response Oz could have given more ominous than that. Almost as ominous as Penny’s scream piercing through the entire bandit camp, sending the whole tribe to a frenzy of swords and spears and axes and action. Whatever war crimes Oz had left to confess, they would have to wait. 

Emerald was already running.

Chapter Text

Ruby found herself in a familiar dream. And she knew she was dreaming because her mom was right there beside her—alive, smiling, graveless. One of her oldest fantasies to be sure.

She was wrapped snug and tight in her mother’s lap as they both sat in a wooden rocking chair off the porch. The rest of the cabin creaked with activity as dad and Yang tussled about the kitchen inside, preparing a warm dinner. That sounded particularly nice to Ruby because it was starting to get a little cold outside. Snow began to fall at her mother’s feet.

“Ruby,” said mom—slayer of monsters, baker of cookies, conqueror of death. “Can you tell me where you are?”

It was the empty sort of question only a dream could ask. Especially since it had such an obvious answer:

“Home,” Ruby replied. “The way it used to feel, I think. It’s getting harder to remember.”

Mom acknowledged that answer with an odd tint to her voice. “Patch? You couldn’t have possibly made it there already. Not by conventional means.” The snow fell faster, blurring the tree-line from the porch in a shade of white so all consuming it was practically raining teeth. “Could you picture it for me? Where you were just before now, before your proper welcome home?”

Ruby shivered in the cold, snuggling deeper against the folds of her mother’s bone-white cloak. “Nah, don’t wanna do that. Sucks right now. Sucks less here. You know how it is, dream mom. Can I call you D’mom?”

D’mom laughed in a way that shook Ruby to her arteries. “Is that how I’ve manifested in your mind? How appropriate—how novel! I quite like that indeed.”

Ruby glanced slowly up as white arms flushed with black blood wrapped around her waist and trapped her in place. The snow that fell like rows of teeth bit down at Ruby’s skin with cold, sudden dread. “You’re not my mom.”

Salem’s eyes found hers and all she could do was squirm. “But I could be. So tell me, my lost little pet, just where in the world have you wandered off to?”

Because Ruby was sane and not even remotely into this creepy shit, she thrashed against Salem until her dream toddler body got big enough to sucker punch dream Salem in the dream chin so hard her dream teeth clicked from the dream force. Yang (dream version or otherwise) would be so proud of her.

D’Salem—on the other hand—was not. “A pity. I had hoped a more direct connection would override whatever means of control you have managed over my Nightmare. And yet… it still sees you as its primary. Curious.”

Ruby didn’t know what that meant and she didn’t want to. She called on her aura to [Petal Burst] away, but couldn’t because this was a dream and (for some reason) dream semblances didn’t work like dream punches. So instead she used a different sort of dream logic: wishful thinking.

“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” Ruby repeated again and again, clacking her heels together because it just felt right. “This isn’t real and I don’t wanna be in a nightmare right now. Go away. Get bent and maybe let in some sunlight for once you pale powdery donut of a woman.”

Salem got neither bent nor sunshine. She stood up and the vestiges of her long, black dress stretched so long and wide and globally that it swallowed the cabin behind them. It kept stretching, growing, yawning—until nothing was left of Patch or Vale or Remnant. Just Ruby alone and cradled in the dark.

“Even with all my attention,” Salem said—both nowhere and everywhere all at once, “still you resist. It is as though the Grimm in you has been severed from my influence entirely. This should not be possible. You are a fascinating anomaly, Ruby Rose. Perhaps my daughter has better taste than I gave her credit for.”

Ruby tried to pry her own eyes open—her real ones—but no matter what she did, the dark would not let her go. So she improvised. “What are you talking about? Why are you doing this to me? Just to see me suffer? Huh!?” She clawed at the dark and felt it get under her fingernails, viscous and malleable. She could work with that.

“I am not Cinder, child. Pain on its own can do little to amuse me. Though it is true I wish to see this world break. I cannot build my utopia atop rotten foundations. It is why I must break you as well. And from your kindly scattered pieces, I shall make something new and wondrous.”

Ruby dipped her fingers deeper into the dark, cupping it like mud—like clay. Brambles began to form between her hands, and from that one sculpted vine came a paradigm shift. Everything writhed at her touch, until all of the dark—as one—grew thorns.

“...Huh.” Salem’s voice sounded more distant; wracked with static. “Seven of my seers just killed themselves because of something you did on your end. That isn’t merely resistance, you are a disruption to the entire network. Even with your eyes, such a thing is… unless—”

Though she sunk into the dark to hide herself, Ruby still felt Salem’s presence probe past her brambles and straight into her eyes. It hurt like thumbs pressing on her cornea and she screamed in agony.

“Ozma… of course. You couldn’t improve silver eyes with your own magic—fickle as it is—so you simply compounded what was there. You just kept adding and adding more slivers of Him until her poor mortal body couldn’t hold any more. I hate how simple the truth of it is. Ham-fisted as ever. But the cost… oh, Ozma.” Salem’s laughter filled the dark until it was louder than Ruby could scream. “Just how many of her kind did you have to sacrifice to accomplish this? It boggles the mind.”

Thumbs pressed on eyes until something snapped in the dark of Ruby’s brain. Her screams broiled over into a war cry, brambles rising like a flood around her as she pointed blind towards where she felt arms holding her down. “Get out of my head!”

And just like that, the dark fell apart. Salem’s voice cut off as Ruby’s brambles severed the connection, digging at where her arms were until with a satisfying snap they—

Ruby woke up to a scream. It did not belong to her. It did not belong to Salem. Her hands felt wet with her own blood as Brambles the Grimm ripped thorns and vines from her veins and struck them towards the only target it could find in reach: the only other person in Ruby’s bed.

Penny lay gawking at Ruby’s side—face frozen, eyes twitching through every RGB color in the spectrum—as green fluid spurt from her newly shredded left shoulder. Brambles was still there, serrating the joints and frayed wires until Penny’s arm fell off and clanged to the floor in a sputtering mess of sparks on sparks.

Ruby stared at it. Penny stared at it too. Briefly, there was quiet.

And though Salem’s voice was gone, the real nightmare began.

Three days later:

The good news, Emerald supposed, was that Penny’s arm had healed up nicely. Just a little soldering to put things back in place and—BOOM!—Penny’s aura did the rest and patched her up just fine. Which apparently wasn’t something Penny could do before whatever magic-y higglety pigglety nonsense Emerald and Oz had done to her body during their escape, but, ya know… magic, or whatever. Enough said.

The bad news was absolutely everything else.

One: the Branwens didn’t appreciate polishing up all their weapons for nothing. When Emerald had stormed into the tent, helping a despondent, twitchy Penny collect all her robo bits off the floor, the bandit tribe had trailed after her expecting a fight. When there wasn’t one (and Raven was still away from camp doing, quote, ‘chiefly things’) they nearly throttled Ruby anyway for the sheer sport of it (and Ruby, shaking and mumbling and rocking back and forth, nearly let them). 

Luckily some lieutenant Raven left behind stopped them just in time (what was her name again? Venison?) and wrangled them all out of Ruby’s tent and back to their posts. She had still shot Emerald a glare about it on the way out, which, like, what? What was Emerald supposed to have done about it? This was one of the few bad things that had happened to Penny that WASN’T her fault!

Two: Ruby (rightfully) blamed herself. This wouldn’t normally be a problem for Emerald, except she was being a real fucking bummer about it and reopened every wound on her body thrice over. Her Grimm kept cutting her again and again and again, and Ruby’s eyes weren’t splitting the difference anymore. Emerald didn’t think she was even trying to use them. She just sat there—unblinking—and let the thorns grow wild and ravenous and self-flagellating. It hurt just looking at her.

Three: Penny (wrongfully) blamed herself. Which was crazy. What a crazy sentiment to have in this situation.

“Penny,” Emerald said—with as much exasperation she could pack into just her name alone. “She dismembered your arm after going Grimm hungry. In what possible way is that your fault?”

Penny, however, was not one for logic (anymore, apparently). “I should have anticipated this—”

“Literally how?”

“The signs were all there—”

“No they absolutely were not.”

“I shouldn’t have had a sleepover with her so soon, Emerald! I knew she had a Grimm in her body that she can’t fully control and I did it anyway!”

Emerald paused. “I mean… yeah. That part you coulda been a little smarter about, but—”

“And now she’s hurting herself and not eating and and and—”

Emerald grasped Penny’s shoulders and squeezed. “Penny… you’re buffering again.”

She really was. Her mouth wasn’t quite moving in sync with her voice, repeating words a few times before ricocheting like a record scratch to the next jittery syllable. The more worked up Penny got, the less her body could match her frantic pace. Like one of those really old library computers that nobody remembered to log out of, or close all the tabs on, Emerald just needed to slow Penny down and help her through a quick reset.

So she did. The breathing exercises she’d helped Cinder with in the past wouldn’t work (for obvious reasons) but Penny always seemed to find comfort in more grounded, tactile exercises anyway. She slid her hands from Penny’s shoulders to her wrists, and used her semblance to make each inch of contact an entirely new experience—a glance of her skin became a prickling blade of grass became a soft, puff of wool became a slick sheet of ice became fingers intertwining with fingers and holding there until Penny held back.

When she did reciprocate, Penny smiled in a way that only women that drove Emerald ragged could accomplish, a talent too many women seemed to possess. “Thank you. Your touch is appreciated.”

Emerald appreciated the way she said that but had no intentions of ever saying such a gay ass thing outloud. “Yeah, it’s whatever. No problem.”

“Still… she needs my help.” Penny slowly pulled her hands away from Emerald, and turned back towards Ruby’s tent, barely out of earshot. “She’s not taking care of herself and her condition is only getting worse. I don’t know what to do.”

“I mean… you could talk to her? That’s a start.”

Penny just whined at that answer, bouncing in place anxiously as she kept stepping towards Ruby’s tent and immediately leaping back. “But I can’t! You know I can’t…”

Yeah. Yeah, Emerald did know that. She knew even after Penny’s arm clicked back into place, even after her aura erased all traces of injury… Penny kept trembling and shuddering and falling apart in all ways but physical every time she tried to visit Ruby after what happened. She knew it wasn’t Penny’s fault—or even Ruby’s—that Penny scratched at her wrists for strings that weren’t there. That sometimes she yanked out of hugs and hyperventilated like a burned out computer fan, all steam and no breath, because sometimes holding her too tight sent her back there, back then, in the stadium, before she died and came back and died all over again.

Emerald knew it since Evernight, when Penny was so scared of her own weapon she had Watts throw it away and never looked at it again. And just like then, Penny was leaning on Emerald to wake her from the nightmare and pull her free from that screaming crowd in Amity.

The nightmare that Emerald had caused to begin with.

In the corner of her consciousness reserved for deadbeats with world devastating divorce issues, Emerald felt a sliver of sympathy. She did not think she deserved it, which, of course, only made that sympathy expand from a sliver to a shred. Perhaps even a morsel if she squinted hard enough.

“We all make mistakes,” Oz said, which was a rather obvious thing for him of all people to say. “What matters is to keep moving forward.”

Ignoring him and his wizardly platitudes, she focused back on Penny and said, “Ruby won’t be mad at you for being a little scared of her. Pretty sure she’s even scared of herself at this point.”

Penny nodded, took another step towards the tent, and—again—stepped back, flapping her hands in frantic need. “I… I just can’t do it. Those vines stabbing and wrapping around me… I can’t do it, Emerald! I need more time.”

Emerald sighed. She had been afraid of that. None of the bandits were allowed in Ruby’s tent while Raven was away, and even then the few that were AND had medical training were already tired of Ruby’s nonsense biology. Before Ruby woke up—but after Raven did all that Mantra magic healing chanting thingy—Penny had been the one changing her bloodied bandages and soiled sheets. A need that was probably even higher now that her Grimm was taking all her self loathing and reflecting right back at her like rusty knives on a cutting board. And if Penny wasn’t up to doing it anymore, well…

That only left one option left, didn’t it?

Ruby wallowed in the dark. It was her home now. She might as well have been born here, under Brambles’ prickly embrace. It cut, and she bled, and she blacked out. She didn’t know how many times. It was hard to tell the difference between being awake and not anymore. Sound still carried through Brambles, though, so every now and then something loud enough would remind her of the difference. For example—

“What up, bitch? Still being a freak?”

Emerald’s voice pierced the dark clouding Ruby with all the grace and careful tact of a fog horn. Not in a way that actually accomplished anything other than pissing her off, but she turned towards the noise anyway and said, “Leave, wench. Even blind I can still murder you.”

The still approaching foot steps and accompanied tongue click told Ruby that leave, the wench did not. “You need a cough drop or something. Whatever’s going on in your mouth demands intervention.”

Ruby growled. “Get out!”

Brambles shuddered and swung about the room. Emerald must have dodged it though, because she wasn’t dead yet. “Damn, don’t gotta be so dramatic. Callin’ me a ‘wench’ and shit. I’m just here to clean you up a little and pass you some food. That’s all. Let me do that, and we can both go on hating each other behind Penny’s back.”

Penny. Even just thinking about her sent a terrible pang wracking and clanging down inside Ruby’s chest. If she could tear off her own arm to undo it all, she would. “Just… leave me alone. I need to hurt.” It was the least she could. Repent and whatnot.

A sigh, then a clatter of metal. “This better work, Oz. Otherwise she might actually kill me.”

Before she could yell at Emerald to leave again, the metallic sounds got louder. Like metal scraping metal. “What are you doing?”

“Do you know how your eyes work yet?” Emerald asked, answering nothing about the noise. “Oz doesn’t fully get it either—apparently the silver eyes are, like, the Relic of Knowledge’s one blind spot. But he’s pretty confident it has something to do with love, or loving life, or something cringey like that.”

The scraping escalated. Brambles stirred as Ruby fought between apathy and figuring out where Emerald could possibly be going with this. “Leave now or—”

“You called this gaudy thing your baby, right, Red?” Emerald said flippantly, and just like that Ruby’s mind went blank. “Guess I can see the resemblance. Especially now with all these new,” scrape, “matching,” scrape, “scratches.”

Metal had never sounded louder in Ruby’s eardrums. “Y-you’re not.”

“I am.” Scrape, scrape, scrape. “It’s kinda fun, actually. Might make this a hobby.”

Every scrape, every scratch, every moan of metal on metal set Ruby’s face aflame. Brambles shook and stretched and shot out towards the noise, but beneath all that rage and hate came—

Doodling schematics in her notebook during class instead of paying attention to her dad’s lecture. Sweating for hours at the forge as she made each piece by hand. Breaking down—sobbing—in the middle of Signal’s firing range when her first draft fell apart after one sniper round. Tripping and stumbling over herself as she practiced with Uncle Qrow, getting used to the recoil one crash landing at a time. Fiddling with replacement parts after Pyrrha was a little too rough with her semblance during some interteam duels Professor Goodwitch didn’t need to know about. Hugging Crescent like a plushie to her chest as she heard Yang go through another night terror after Beacon and Ruby didn’t know how to help without making it worse—

—Love.

That’s all it took. One second it was dark and then it wasn’t anymore. Ruby blinked till the glare dimmed from her eyes and all she was left with was a low, steady throb at the back of her forehead. Some Grimm bits were still disintegrating in the air as Ruby glanced around the room and found Emerald sitting in the corner, wiping at her face.

“Gods that just burns every time, doesn’t it?”

Ruby tried to lunge for her but discovered she could barely move her limbs to stand up, much less strangle someone. “Give me my baby. Right now.”

CR was tossed to her unceremoniously and she clutched at it like a loved one dying from a terminal illness. But as she spun CR around, checking every collapsible inch for new damage… she couldn’t find anything. Not a single scratch.

Emerald snorted. “I cannot believe that worked.”

“Just tell me where you…” Ruby blinked. Across the room, Emerald held two forks out—one in each hand—and struck them together. Scrape, scrape, scrape. And Ruby had never felt more affronted in her entire life. “You suck.”

“Yeah, I know. Ready for stale bread and possibly undercooked, miscellaneous meat?”

The meat was not miscellaneous. It was clearly pork. Or maybe poultry. The colors were all over the place, but what mattered was Emerald being wrong about something. The bread was totally stale though. That part was true.

Emerald didn’t say anything to her while she picked her plate clean. Ruby shot her glare after glare but she barely shot one back. Annoying. Only after she finished eating and started swigging a cup of water did Emerald finally speak again:

“You can’t let it get that bad. You could have killed yourself.”

Ruby scoffed. “Oh, like you care?

“No, but Penny does. Family, friends—you’ve got those, right?”

Yang. Dad. Uncle Qrow. All three of them broke in different ways when mom died. Ruby dying too would just break them all over again. 

Ruby swallowed. “...I didn’t mean to. Everything just got so… heavy… after what I did. And…” She frowned. “I… I can barely remember it, actually. Even though it just happened.” She remembered the dream with Salem, and waking up to Penny losing her arm… but everything in between that and Emerald’s stunt was just… smudged. Like only vague impressions remained, just like most of her time back at Evernight.

“A smaller, more honest soul,” Emerald said suddenly. “That’s what O—fuck, I’ve been saying his name outloud, godsdamn it—that’s what he made you to be.”

Ruby didn’t like the way she phrased that. “Made me?” And then she remembered her dream, Salem saying something about Oz changing her eyes with… sacrifice? The more she thought about it the more her head hurt, smudging the memory even worse.

“Maybe we should hold off on that for a second. At least get you into clean clothes before I ruin your day again.”

Emerald pulled at her blankets and sheets and rolled them into a ball. Only then did Ruby notice the stains and she curled herself into a ball in mortification. But if Emerald was judging her she wasn’t outright saying it to her face, instead just tossing her some patchy secondhand clothes towards her as she left the tent for replacements.

When she returned, Ruby had wiped herself down and swapped one pair of ratty clothes for another. She only just now realized her cloak and mom’s emblem were missing and hadn’t fully dried off her tears before Emerald walked back in.

And yet—again—if Emerald noticed, she didn’t say anything about it. She just plopped back in her corner after tossing Ruby some new sheets and bedding. She was so clinical about Ruby pissing herself and crying over nothing that she wasn’t sure whether she should feel insulted or not.

“There’s no good way to say this, Red,” Emerald said abruptly. “You’re the only thing in the world that can stop Salem and I’m sorry.”

“Eh?”

“O—he—fuck it, let’s just call him Jim. Jim made a prison for Salem. But he was scared that she’d find some way to break out of it. He needed a weapon that could incapacitate her so severely she’d never even be able to try escaping. So he made you.”

That made no sense to Ruby whatsoever. “But my eyes come from my mom—” A sudden, epiphanous thought came to mind. “You’re not saying that O—that Jim—and my mom were, you know…” She raised her shaky hands and bashed them together suggestively.

Emerald snorted but tried to hide it (badly) when she noticed whatever dark look must have passed over Ruby’s face. “Nah, Jim ain’t your secret baby daddy or anything like that.” She paused. “Er, well, technically he’s almost everyone in the world’s secret baby daddy, but that’s a whole other clusterfuck to get into.”

“What—”

“But he did change you. In the womb. Though, he apparently wasn’t trying to do that. He had actually been trying to change your mom’s eyes. He just… he didn’t know she was pregnant. Neither did she. Pretty sure this is how she found out.”

“So I’m, what? An accident?” That would make sense, considering recent events. And if these powers were supposed to go to her mom in the first place, then— “Am I the reason my mom died? If I hadn’t been born, and she got these powers like she was supposed to…. would she still be alive right now?”

Emerald blinked. “That’s a whole lotta hypotheticals you’re throwing at the wrong person—”

“He’s literally in your head!”

“Just slow down before you give yourself another Grimm attack, okay? Fuck. He’s telling me everything right…” She paused again. “Wait, my Aura is all healed up now. I can just—”

Suddenly, Professor Ozpin popped into existence by Ruby’s bed. She threw a fork at him before she could think better of it, eyes bulging even wider as the fork just passed through him like a hologram.

“Greetings, Miss Rose,” said Oz, a dead man. “I wish we were meeting again under better circumstances.”

Ruby was at a loss until she realized this was probably related to Emerald’s semblance… the same semblance she used to manipulate two of her friends in front of the entire world and tricked one into killing the other. “...Same.”

Oz sighed, crouching down onto a swivel chair that puffed into existence behind him. “To answer your question, no. These extra abilities I’ve given you were unlikely to save Summer’s life. To use them properly would require Salem confined and surprised. Neither of which do I believe were accomplished with… whatever your mother did behind my back.”

Ruby thought of Tyrian and nearly retched. “I don’t know everything either, but… Salem got hold of her. Tried to turn her into something like, well… me.” She gestured at the Grimm in her veins, getting colder and more persistent the longer this conversation went on. “I think she died there.”

The illusion of Oz grimaced. “I am sorry to hear that. I suspected that may have been the case, but still… I had hoped for something brighter. Your mother had quite a nasty habit of surprising me back in the day. It’s a shame she broke it.”

“You’re making it sound like it was her fault.” She imagined her mom—alone and cold and frothing with Grimm at the mouth. Just like Ruby had been; like she still was. “Being dead doesn’t mean I can’t kick your ass, Ozpin.”

“Knowing Emerald, she’d probably like it—”

“Hey! Fuck you!”

“But,” Oz pressed on. “You are right. That was insensitive of me. Yet it is also true that your mother purposely left me and your father and all her closest friends in the dark about the details of her last mission. And considering the importance of her eyes, that was well and quite truly foolish of her. It is not a mistake the world can afford to be made again.”

Ruby sighed. “I’m not planning on disappearing anytime soon.” While she emulated her mom as best as she could, that was one trait she… wait fuck she totally did that to dad and Yang back in Patch. “Not without leaving a note, at least,” she added sheepishly.

Oz smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Ruby… do you know where your eyes came from? Aside from your mother, I mean.”

“Um… no. All the stuff I even know about them comes from you and Uncle Qrow.”

He leaned back. “Honestly there’s not much else to tell. The eyes originated from the Gods, but that’s all I know. I have no idea why they exist, whether they were left here on purpose or were a total accident—they are a true and total mystery to me. Everything except their function is an unknown.” His smile fell and his eyes—fake as they were—became cold. “So to understand them, I had to get… creative.”

He spun around in his chair until bright blue mist erupted from his feet. The illusion spread across Ruby’s eyes, transforming the inside of the tent to the cobblestone path of a village square. Oz filled the place of a different old man holding the same cane, kneeling on the road before a drunken figure in a thickly shawled cloak. Peering beneath that hood came a pair of shimmering eyes, silver and dazed.

Before Ruby could utter a single question, the illusion shifted again, and suddenly time had passed, that cloaked figure was dead, and the old man that was probably Oz in another life took a knife and—

She looked away, shaking free from Emerald’s semblance. “Y-you… you stole them?”

Fake Oz sat back in his fake chair with a sad frown that may have also been fake. It was getting harder to tell what was genuine and what was not. “No. I always ask them before they die for permission. Usually in exchange for Lien or other support for their family. And later, as medicine progressed… I didn’t even have to wait for them to pass. I could buy their eyes while they were still alive and send them back on their way.”

More images flashed with a similar story: of people, poor and hiding and scared, approached by Oz and given food, money, shelter, and whatever else they needed. So long as they paid them back what he needed. Over time he amassed dozens of eyes. He collected them; dissected them; stitched them back together. It was a process centuries in the making.

At last when the illusion was over, all Ruby’s eyes could do was itch. “Why… why are you showing me this?”

Oz didn’t answer right away. He just stood up and let his chair fade behind him. Eventually he seemed to collect himself and kneeled by Ruby’s side, his eyes meeting hers like he knew her pupils from the inside out. “Ruby, your eyes are not simply magic—they are divinity itself. Passed to your family—I believe—by the God of Light. It is a power that only destroys the Grimm, a creation of his younger brother. Or, at least, I thought it only destroyed the Grimm. But it does more than that if you pack enough divinity together in one spot. One vessel.”

Ruby thought about the dozens of eyes Oz had scavenged together, and she thought about what Salem meant by sacrifice. “All of those eyes you found… you put their light in me, didn't you?” She wasn’t just carrying her mother’s legacy—she was carrying the burden of every silver eyed warrior that gave up their sight so she could have hers. “My eyes don’t belong to me. They never did.”

“I wish there had been another way,” Oz said. “But aside from the fact that Salem discovered your kind before I did and scattered what few of you remained… I discovered your power isn’t like Aura. It doesn’t replenish itself the same way, relying on the soul to stay lit and hopeful. Whatever the God of Light did, he only left so much of his divinity behind. When a new silver-eyed child is born, their eyes are not equal to their parent’s. Instead the power splits between them. Your mother’s eyes became half as strong just by bringing you into the world.”

Half as strong. Summer Rose lost half her power just so Ruby could exist. Eyes upon eyes upon eyes were on her now—she could feel them all staring back from her own face. She blinked and felt bad about it. “What…” She needed something else to focus on—anything else to focus on. “What else can I do with them other than kill Grimm?”

“Well, as you’ve no doubt already noticed, you can heal yourself. Spectacularly so, I might add. Aura by itself cannot regrow entire organs and reverse scarring. But I’m more interested in another aspect—the power to destroy all of the God of Darkness’ creations, not just Grimm.”

Ruby didn’t understand what he meant at first. But then she thought about the stories Penny had told her the other night, rehashing what Emerald had already tried to describe (and was horrible at conveying). That the Brothers had both made humanity. And if one was Light and the other was Dark; if one was Creation and the other was Destruction; if one was Knowledge and the other was Choice—

Ruby remembered waking up in Penny’s arms back during the escape from Evernight and somehow not being sad anymore despite weeks of torture. How everytime her eyes flashed, it didn’t just erase the dark in front of her… it cleared it from her own head, leaving only smudges behind.

And she thought about what it meant to be a smaller, more honest soul.

“My eyes can change minds,” Ruby said. “I can erase the God of Darkness from a person—from their soul.”

Oz nodded, smiling yet clearly not happy. “Pain and hunger and drive were all given to us by the Brother of Darkness. The ability to choose for ourselves is an inherently painful thing; it gives rise to pride and shame in equal measure. Your eyes can wipe that all away—leave us blank and empty and blissful. Until only knowledge, with no ability to act upon it, is left behind.”

In that moment, Ruby understood—at last—why she was made. “That’s what you want me to do to Salem. You want me to make her empty.”

“No—I want more than that, Ruby. If Remnant is to be saved,” he tipped his glasses with one hand and went on to say as if it were the easiest thing in the world: “You must leave her utterly brain dead.”