Quoth the Raven

Yang ran through the dark tunnels. She couldn't see her quarry, she could barely see in front of her, but she ran anyway because if she stopped, if she let him get away, then she might have to confront what he had done to Ruby rather than simply vowing to avenge it.

Her Ember Celica were ready on her wrists, as soon as she got close enough he wasn't going to know what hit him.

If she could find him. If she could see him in this darkness.

The fire from Yang herself, the flames of her rage, provided a little light but barely more than a circle around her. Her shadow danced upon the walls, illuminated by her own fire, as she stopped at a crossroads intersection between two tunnels.

She had four different ways to go, and no idea which path the monster that she hunted had taken.

"Where are you?" she howled, as the flames that engulfed her leapt higher for a moment as she turned this way and that. "Where are you? Come out and face me, you coward!"

"He can't hear you."

Yang spun, raising her arms in front of her face ready to either block or punch as required, as a portal opened up in front of her. It was dark, and in this dark place she would hardly have seen it if it were not the crimson border, pulsing with malevolence, that surrounded this tear, this hole in the world.

This hole from out of which strode a single figure. She – judging by the shape of her figure and the undulating waves of black hair, as long and thick as Yang's own golden locks – was clad in ornate, Mistralian-looking armour of black and crimson, with a helmet that reminded Yang uncomfortably of the masks worn by the White Fang; but while their masks only bore a superficial resemblance to the creatures of grimm, if Yang hadn't known better she would have sworn that the helmet that this newcomer was wearing – the helmet that concealed the entirety of her face from view – had been cut entire from the head of some grimm that she couldn't put a name too yet.

She was carrying a large sword at her hip, a dust-blade like the one Weiss carried but much, much bigger. One of her armoured hands rested casually upon the hilt.

Who is this? Is this their big boss or something? Is this who the White Fang works for?

Yang gritted her teeth. Whoever she was, if she wanted a fight then she'd come to the right place.

"If you're looking for the big bull faunus with the sword I'm afraid you're out of luck," the woman said. "He's not here. He had a run in with your Ruby's team-mates and decided that he'd had enough for today. And you weren't on the right track in any case."

Ruby's team-mates? Like, plural? Did they all just ditch Ruby to come in here after Adam? Yang felt a twitch of anger towards them, which was only slightly dampened when she realised the hypocrisy involved in feeling angry towards them for doing what she'd done herself.

"Why should I believe you?" Yang demanded. "I mean, you're White Fang too, aren't you? Why should I listen to a word out of your mouth?"

"Because if I were White Fang you'd be dead already," the woman declared. "I don't waste my time talking to my enemies."

"If we're not enemies then what are we? Who are you?" Yang repeated.

The woman was silent for a moment. Though her face was hidden behind the mask, Yang had the impression that she was studying her.

"You were very brave to come down here, and even more reckless," the woman from the portal said. "You didn't get that from me. But then…it was always clear that you had more of your father in you."

Yang's eyes widened, and in spite of herself she lowered her hands, if only a little. Her breath caught in her throat because…because who else would say something like that. When her voice came again it was quieter than it had been before, and a little less angry for now not because she wasn't angry – and gods knew, if this was who she thought it was – but because right now she could hardly believe it.

She hardly dared to believe it.

"Who are you?"

The woman took off her helmet, revealing a pale face that was so alike to Yang's own that it was like looking in a mirror. Her eyes were red, as red as Yang's became when she was angry which meant that they were as red as Yang's eyes were right now.

"Coming down here was foolish, but I'm glad that we have this chance to talk alone. We have a lot to talk about."

"Raven," Yang breathed.

Raven smirked. "I suppose it's asking a little much for you to call me Mom."

"We have a lot to talk about?" Yang shouted, and she gesticulated furiously with her hands as she advanced a pace towards her…her mother, the woman she hadn't ever seen with her own eyes before. "We have a lot to talk about? You just show up like this and that's what you have to say? You're damn right we have a lot to talk about, how about we talk about where you've been for the last sixteen years and why you walked out on me and Dad and-"

"Yang, do you love your sister?"

Yang halted, stunned into momentary silence by the unexpected question. "What?"

"Do you love your sister?" Raven repeated.

"What kind of a question is that? Yes, I love my sister, why-"

"Well, you wouldn't have a little sister if I hadn't left your father and Summer free to consummate the tension that had existed between them since the day they met," Raven said casually. "So you could say that it all worked out for the best."

"It all worked out?" Yang repeated, in a voice that was as sharp as ice. Her voice rose like an inferno climbing the walls of a tower block. "It all worked out? Do you have any idea what we all went through after-"

"That wasn't my fault," Raven said sharply. She scowled for a moment. "I thought that I was leaving you with the kindest, most generous people that I knew. I loved your mother, Yang." She glanced away for a moment. "I loved her as much as I loved your father, in spite of her…I loved your mother; I wept to hear that she was dead."

"I'm sorry that it upset you," Yang growled.

Raven met her eyes again. "Our time here is not unlimited, Yang, I didn't come here to have my decisions questioned."

"Then why did you come here?"

"I understand that you must-"

"No," Yang snapped. "No, you don't. You don't know me. You weren't there. You were never there."

"Don't mistake invisibility for absence," Raven replied. "I've been watching over you almost every day since your mother died."

"Really?" Yang said. "How about the day when I went looking for you to that cabin in the woods? Where you there watching me walk through the cold and the dark with Ruby in the back of a wagon, trying to find you? Where you there when I arrived at the cabin and all I found were beowolves."

"If Qrow hadn't come I would have stepped in to protect you."

"Why didn't you show yourself!" Yang demanded, a screech of rage that had been almost seventeen years coming bursting out of her mouth like a racehorse out the gate. "I was looking for you! If you were there then why didn't you let me find you?"

Raven's expression was almost inscrutable. Only the slightest tremor betrayed any hint of guilt for what she had done or not done. "If you want answers about your past, then come and find me. If you can do that, if you're strong enough to do that, then I will give you all the answers that you demand." She smiled. "You can even try to kill me, if you're still angry enough when we're finished."

How can you say something like that? Is this all just a big joke to you, or is that the kind of person that you are? Yang shook her head. I don't want to kill you, Mom. This isn't about…I never wanted revenge.

I wanted my mother.

When she had been a kid, after Mom had died, she'd thought that…she'd hoped…it was stupid, but she'd been so young so she was probably allowed to be stupid, she'd thought that if she could find her mother then she would come home with them and be Ruby's mom too the way that Mom had been Mom for both of them and she'd be with Dad and everything…and everything would be better.

Stupid, childish. Now she mostly wanted to know why…but there was a part of her that still wanted to have someone she could call mom again.

Forgive me, Mom, she said, thinking of Summer Rose.

"Why are you here?"

Raven stared at her for a moment. "I'm here to tell you to open your eyes. You'll need to see clearly if you want to understand what's coming."

"What?"

"Watch Ozpin," Raven continued. "Don't trust him. Ask yourself why he decided to admit your sister to Beacon two years early, why he couldn't wait until she was old enough. Ask yourself why there were no teachers around to stop you going on this little expedition of yours."

"There," Yang stopped, hesitated because it was a pretty big stroke of luck. She hadn't questioned it at the time because they needed luck and Ruby's life had been on the line but now that Raven forced her to look at it…it was odd. Where had Professor Goodwitch been, why hadn't there been anyone to catch them? Why had they been allowed to get out of Beacon and into Vale so easily? "Are you saying that Professor Ozpin let us go? Why would he do something like that?"

"How much have you seen of your headmaster?"

"Not a lot."

"It hasn't started yet then, good; you'll notice when it does."

"When what does, what are you talking about?"

"Ozpin plays favourites," Raven explained. "When I was at Beacon it was Team Stark, every few years it's someone else, this year…how much do you know about Silver Eyes?"

Yang's own eyes widened. Of course, she was Mom's team-mate. "What does that mean?"

"I can't explain it, but while you're thinking about all those other questions here's another: do you think it's a coincidence that a prodigy with silver eyes happened to be the girl picked to attend Beacon early? Or that she ended up on a team with two of the most talented huntresses to attend the academy since Summer and me? I guarantee that he's already taken an interest in them, and soon he'll start to show it: extra training missions, indulgence for breaking the rules…and then he'll pull back the curtain and show them a little of the truth he hides from the rest of the world."

"What truth?" Yang demanded. "Why can't you just explain what the hell you're talking about?"

"Because the things I know would shake the foundations of your world and you wouldn't believe half of the things that I could tell you."

"Why should I believe a word out of your mouth now?" Yang yelled. "You've never been a part of my life and now you just show up here of all places, saying a lot of vague stuff and I'm supposed to just buy it? What are you saying? Why are you here?"

"I'm trying to arm you!" Raven snapped. "You don't believe me? Fine, you don't have to. I know that you have Summer's journal. Keep reading, you ought to believe her when you wouldn't believe me. All the answers are there, the answers that your father and your uncle won't tell you: about Silver Eyes, about Ozpin…about why Summer died. You just have to keep reading and when you're not reading then watch. Ozpin might try to recruit you as well, be on your guard."

Yang felt as though her head was spinning. This was all happening much too fast, and too unexpectedly, for her to really process half of what she was being told. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I've been watching you," Raven replied. "I know that if Ruby is drawn into Ozpin's war the way that our team was drawn into it then you'll follow her to the ends of the earth, into the mouth of hell if you have to. I don't want that for you."

"I'm not going to abandon Ruby," Yang said, even as the words felt hollow in her mouth because of course she had abandoned Ruby to come down here, where her mother had found her.

"Then make sure you're protecting her from everything," Raven said. She drew her sword, and began to turn away. "I have to go."

"Wait!" Yang shouted, reaching out with one hand. "You can't just go! You can't just show up, dump all this stuff, and then just…leave!"

"You shouldn't take my word as truth any more than Ozpin's word or the words of your Father or Qrow. Keep your eyes and your ears open and decide the truth for yourself." Raven said, slicing her sword through the air to create another portal. She smirked briefly as she put on her helmet and concealed her face once more. "Oh, and by the way, Ruby's going to be fine."

"WHAT!?" Yang bellowed at the top of her voice. "How could you just…how do you even know that?"

"As I said, I've been watching," Raven replied. She began to step into the portal. "Your friend can show you the way back, I'm sure."

"No, wait, come back," Yang yelled, but already the portal that Raven had sliced through the fabric of the world itself was beginning to close. Yang dashed forward, hand outstretched…to close on the empty air as the portal disappeared as completely as if it had never been at all.

Perhaps it hadn't. Perhaps all of this was nothing more than a hallucination, a vision of her mother brought out of desperation and despair.

That might actually have been preferable to the idea that her mother – the woman who had given birth to her, at any rate – had shown up to tell her…what? Aside from the fact that Ruby was okay, delivered in so blithe and offhand a manner that it would have been infuriating if Yang could have been certain in believing it, everything else was so damn cryptic that Yang didn't know what to think. She barely knew where to begin thinking. Don't trust Professor Ozpin? The headmaster was going to start…what, keeping an eye on Ruby like it seemed he'd kept an eye on Mom? He hadn't yet, but Raven suggested that he would start. But why? And why was it a bad thing?

Keep reading Mom's journal? Thanks, but they'd already planned to do that. Don't listen to Dad? At least he'd been around all her life even if he hadn't always been a lot of help.

I loved your mother; I wept to hear that she was dead.

Why should I believe you? Why should I believe anything that you say? You left me and you're not sorry for it; why should I listen to a word you say?

Why would you show up out of nowhere for no good reason?

Yang's hands clenched into fists. If Ruby was okay, if Yang could breathe again in relief that she still had a younger sister and a hero to look up to, if the weight was lifted from her shoulders, if she got out of this tunnel and found Ruby alive and well then…then she would do what she had always done, and take care of her.

If it was true then she wanted to sob with relief; she wanted to collapse on the floor in tears of joy at the escape; she wanted to hug Ruby so hard that her aura broke all over again. She wanted to chain them together so that this couldn't happen again.

She wanted to see her again. But with a cooler head Yang was forced to confront the fact that she was a little bit lost.

"Yang?"

Yang whirled around, fists rising momentarily until she saw that it was Blake, advancing warily towards her.

"Blake."

Blake lowered her gun. "I heard shouting. I thought…I thought you might have found him."

"Sorry," Yang replied. "I think we might have missed him."

"I'm not surprised, these tunnels are a mess. There are a dozen different ways he could have gone and we'd never know."

Yang was silent for a moment. She could barely see Blake now, what with the flames that had once lit up the space around her dying down as her anger cooled. The other girl little more than a shape to her, a shadow in the darkness, and even that was fading as she blended in with the other shadows all around her.

"Uh," she said. "Are you still here?"

There was silence, but Yang felt a warm hand brushing against her fingertips as something, a length of ribbon, was wrapped around her hand.

"Hold onto that," Blake said. "We should probably…go back. I'm sure that you're missed already."

"I'm sure both our teams think we were pretty stupid to come down here," Yang said with a slight chuckle.

"We were a little rash."

"So I've been told," Yang murmured. "Can you find the way back?"

"I think so. I…I'm not completely blind down here."

"Lucky for me," Yang said. She felt a tug upon the ribbon in her hand, and began to walk forward.

Silence lay between them for a moment before Blake spoke. "I'm…sorry, about what happened to Ruby."

"I…" Yang trailed off. What could she say; that her mother had appeared and told that Ruby was going to be fine? She didn't know if she believed that herself, she couldn't ask Blake to believe it. "Thanks," she said. "Hey, Blake?"

"Yes."

"You're the one who found this place first, how did you do it?"

Blake took a moment or two to answer. "A friend of mine risked his life to find this place for me."

It was Yang's turn to hesitate, because it took a while to work out what to say to an answer like that. "Why?"

"Because it was the right thing to do," Blake said. "Ruby, the others, they didn't deserve what was going to be done to them. They're innocent in all this."

"Blake?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you," Yang said, putting every once of sincerity that she could muster into the two simple words. "If you ever need anything, anything at all…you can always count on me."

There was no response, not even though the seconds ticked by into double figures.

"Uh, hello?" Yang called. "You still hear me up there?"

"Yes, I can hear you fine," Blake said. "That's…kind of you."

"Nah, what's kind is what you did to earn it."

Blake lapsed once more into silence before she said, "Yang?"

"Yeah?"

"Who were you shouting at up there?"

Yang frowned. "Nobody," she said. "Just…a ghost from my past."

A ghost who had given her no answers, but who had left Yang with a lot of questions.

Author's Note: Originally there was going to be a fight between Yang/Blake and Adam, which Adam would almost win necessitating Raven to come in for the save like in the Yang vs Neo fight; but I decided that after several chapters of Adam tanking hits and talking about how his aura must be almost out it would verge on the ridiculous for him to pick a fight with Blake and Yang as well (not to mention that a fresh Raven would absolutely wreck a tired Adam on low aura, and it was difficult to see how he would survive such an encounter). So I decided to use this as a the moment for a scene I wanted but couldn't quite decide where to put: Raven appearing to Yang and warning her about Ozpin and his plans for Ruby. It's a combination of her appearance in Volume 5 plus the sort of thing that might have happened after the Volume 2 stinger if Miles and Kerry hadn't decided to retcon it out of canon.

Raven is possibly a little out of character here, but I really, really like that volume 2 stinger which seems to suggest a slightly different direction for Raven than the one they ended up going with in the end.