Ruby sits alone on the bottom step of the staircase.

She is numb all over: legs from walking, brain from processing, heart from feeling. The teal of Jinn's mist surrounds her with every blink, the tumbling realities of magic and gods and fairytales threatening to overwhelm her senses with each second that passes.

She looks around and up, searching for distraction, and instead sees the moon.

The moon...

The storm has passed, and it is shining down through a dirty window pane, the same as it has her entire life- glowing, and shattered like broken glass across the night sky.

Except it isn't the same. It will never be again.

Nothing ever will.

Ruby knows now that none of the stories her dad told her as a kid had been true- the moon hadn't been hit by an asteroid or destroyed by a giant flying space Grimm or anything any astrologist or historian had ever theorised.

It hadn't even been a significant part of the story, more like a footnote - a pesky obstacle in the way of a god launching itself into the cosmos with no care for the damage they left behind.

And Salem had been there.

Ruby's thoughts whizz by as fast as her semblance.

Salem, the one they were fighting against, that frightening, twisted vision Emerald had conjured back at Haven, who even Ozpin seemed to fear, had been there through it all.

She'd knelt amongst the fiery moon debris as it rained down, covered in the dusty remains of humanity as it had been Before and screamed in the face of it all.

Salem had been human, had loved and lost and let her humanity destroy her, and a lot of it had been her fault but some of it wasn't, and also Ozpin (Ozma?) had been there, persisting from body to body, and they had lived through all of history playing gods and heroes and villains and-

(Ruby takes a breath.)

Through it all Salem had remained. She'd turned from a lonely girl in a tower into a creature of hate and destruction bent on killing them all.

And she couldn't be defeated.

You can't, Jinn had said. The words still echo in Ruby's ears.

So stop trying, a tempting voice in her head nudges. She shakes it away.

She's just so tired.

But like the moon above, Ruby knows she must keep her orbit steady. For the sake of her family, her friends, her entire world, in fact, she must hold true.

She only hopes to still be in one piece by the end of it all.


Just something short because RWBY is freaking stellar so far this season.