Ch 12 - The Curse that Binds us.

A/N: Ya know, I'm in a fantastic mood today. This chapter has a fight in it. And then the end has some feels. Put that all together, and you can have a second upload today. I really need to keep to my schedule going forwards, though... That said, I'm still amenable to giving a celebratory chapter for 100 favorites, and the extra chapter per 100 reviews rule still stands...

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. The title is a reference (literally the title of the video) to a remix of the Twin Princes (from DS3) Boss OST, by Alex Roe on YouTube.

Review Responses:

veqis: Didn't expect Ruby to get a hex, since everyone always portrays her character as ultra pure, but i really liked the way you did it, also praise the fluf

My response: Well, everyone does see her as pure, but you can't forget that she has a dead mom who was added to the series at the last possible second, because RWBY likes to write by the seat of its oversized clown pants (cough cough JelloApocalypse reference cough cough). She has this naive, positive outlook on the world, but every rose has its thorns.

(outside review response) Also, Gwyndamn, I've been looking for an excuse to say "every rose has its thorns" in reference to Ruby Rose.

Disclaimer: I don't own Dark Souls or RWBY. Dark Souls belongs to From Software and RWBY belongs to Rooster Teeth. I only own my own OC.

(Vyliria)

Now a bit over three weeks into the semester, the first year students were beginning to familiarize themselves with their peers in combat class. And it was rapidly becoming evident that Vyliria's team leader severely lacked when it came to combat skills. While nowhere near as bad as some of the worst Vyliria had seen (a shining example of which was that one man with the pilfered, excrement stained uniform of an order of knights who fled their duties, who didn't seem to think that there was ever a problem that couldn't be solved by swinging his Irithyll straight sword with wild abandon, and was convinced the grass crest shield was the best blocking tool in existence), Jaune left a lot to be desired. Case in point, the blonde was currently getting his metaphorical teeth kicked in by Cardin, who had yet to land a single blow against Vyliria in the four "rematches" he had thus far demanded. Winchester had just kneed Jaune in the kidney, and now he was on the floor, as the larger man raised his mace to finish the job.

Just in time for a buzzer to go off as Professor Goodwitch called the match, and proceeded to reprimand Jaune, calling out that it had been weeks without him showing even basic improvement. As Glynda turned back to the rest of the class to tell them of the upcoming Vytal Festival (apparently some fighting tournament hosting students from all the kingdoms, that Vyliria couldn't partake in on account of her current lack of aura), Pyrrha looked at a crestfallen Jaune with a sympathetic expression. Vyliria merely added talking to Jaune about what issues were plaguing him to her to-do list, as she hoisted him up with one arm, much to his surprise, and then was joined by Pyrrha as they walked to the cafeteria.

Ten minutes later, Nora was telling a ludicrously over-embellished story at the table JNAPR and RWBY were eating at, being interrupted at every sentence by a clearly exasperated Ren, who corrected whatever fabrication she had just made. Blake was reading a book, Weiss had pulled a file out earlier to work on her nails, but had reconsidered and was currently looking over chameleon, which had become an unexpected roadblock for her. Yang was observing Nora's "story" with rapt attention, whilst Ruby and Pyrrha looked on at a despondent Jaune. Vyliria merely observed, her lunch packed away into her storage so she could eat at her leisure later, in a more solitary setting.

Finally, Pyrrha spoke up, asking if Jaune was okay. He gave a very unconvincing, "Oh yeah, why?" in response.

"It's just that you seem a little… not okay…" Ruby chimed in.

"And by 'not okay,' she means that it's blatantly obvious there's something wrong," Vyliria bluntly stated.

"Guys, I'm fine… Seriously, look!" He gave an even less convincing smile as he stuck a thumb up.

"Jaune," Pyrrha said, finally having enough, "Cardin has been picking on you since the first week of school."

"Cardin? Noooo, he just likes to mess around, you know? Practical jo-"

"He's a bully," Ruby interrupted, narrowing her eyes.

"Then name one time he's bullied me," Jaune shot back.

"I can name three," Vyliria said, "off the top of my head, and I'm sure I could recall more if I took a minute. You know, we're your teammates, Jaune."

"If you ever need help, you can just ask," Pyrrha said.

"Oh!" Nora suddenly inserted herself into the unofficial intervention, "We'll break his legs!"

"That seems a bit too much of an effort, Nora. Why not just literally set his arse on fire?" Vyliria offered, flickering her pyromancy flame for emphasis.

"I can get behind that," Yang said.

"Guys, really," Jaune placated, "It's fine. Besides, it's not like he's only a jerk to me; he's a jerk to everyone." As if to punctuate his sentence, a feminine voice yelped, "Ow, that hurts!" and the group's attention was drawn to another table, where Cardin and his cohort were harassing another student.

She was a rabbit faunus, with long brown hair, her animal ears bore the same shade, and hazel eyes, currently in the school uniform. And Cardin was yanking on one of her ears as his team laughed at the spectacle. On the left was a man with a pale green mohawk, and an otherwise shaved head. Blue eyed, with pale skin, he wore a green, spiked shoulder pad on his left arm, a vest with the sleeves torn off, and a gray, sleeveless undershirt beneath that. Between his elbows and wrists were two torn sleeves with a bird with wings spread on each, and gray pants with a gray belt completed his poor fashion statement (as a former denizen of Lothric, Vyliria was intimately familiar with the phenomena known as "Fashion Souls," where various unkindled and phantoms of all colors would mix and match combinations of armor sets in order to look good, rather than for protection. She was guilty of the same, though at least she considered what benefits the armor would provide beyond an intimidating appearance). This poor example of humanity was Russel Thrush, Cardin's partner.

Next to him was Dove Bronzewing, a boy with light brown hair, fair skin, and a perpetual squint that genuinely made it difficult to discern the color of his pupils. In an amazing display of variety, his black scarf complimented his black shirt and pants, and matched the brown armor on his shoulders and upper torso, along with the vambraces on his lower arms. His knee high boots were also a startlingly original shade of brown.

The team was completed by Sky Lark, who bore a similar fashion sense to Dove, except his ensemble and hair were grey. He didn't even bother changing his shirt and pants so that they didn't match Dove's, and his armor was in the same places as the previous boy's.

Cardin continued to yank on her ears, as his team laughed at her continued pleas for them to desist, until they were interrupted by someone clearing their throat. Doing a double take back to where she had been sitting, RWBY and JNPR realised that none of them had noticed the resident mage standing up and walking over to the bigots.

"Yeeeees?" Cardin drawled, letting go of the faunus girl's ear. He managed to avoid having his eyes widen as he realized that Vyliria was the one in front of him, but the sudden rigidity of his posture betrayed his apprehension just as well.

"Thou art going to stop harassing this girl. Thou art going to apologize to this girl for harassing her. Thou art never going to harass her again. And then you and your cronies are going to get the fuck out of this cafeteria," Vyliria stated, in an even tone of voice.

"Or what?" Cardin shot back, standing up, looking at the Irithyllian at approximately where her eyes would be under her mask. He was clearly more confident with his team at his back.

"Or I will make you," Vyliria said, with an undercurrent of hostility.

Cardin burst out laughing, shortly joined by his team, before he went to grab the other girl's rabbit ear again. Yet before he could reach it, he suddenly found his hand restrained in the iron grasp of the Dancer's gauntlet, the claws of the fingers digging deep enough to make his aura flicker.

"Well," Vyliria started in a matter-of-fact voice, "no one can say I didn't try to solve this peacefully." After which she immediately threw her other fist in a punch, decking Cardin in the face, sending him arse-over-teakettle, flipping over the table and taking Russel with him to the floor.

Dove and Sky immediately jumped to their feet, vaulting the table and attempting to land strikes of their own against the armored girl. Vyliria intercepted Sky's fist, yanking him forward, and slamming an elbow into his nose before sweeping his legs out from under him. Immediately afterwards, she caught Dove's right fist, then his left, and next she spread her arms out to pull him closer while slamming her head forward to strike him with the grille of the Dancer's Veil in a vicious headbutt. As he reeled back, she closed the gap she had made and landed the pointed end of her boot directly between his legs. The men in the cafeteria collectively winced in sympathy as he went down, as even with his aura softening the blow he screamed in a voice several octaves higher than normal. Hearing footsteps behind her, she grabbed the wrist of Sky as he attempted to punch the back of her head, throwing him over her, running up to his again-prone form, landing four lightning kicks to his head before his aura broke, and a fifth, slightly less violent kick knocked him out.

Cardin and Russel had finally untangled from each other and leapt into the fray. Vyliria spun around a haymaker from the team leader, using her own hand to parry a strike from Russel, before slamming her other fist into his kidney, sending him stumbling back in pain. Able to take a few seconds to solely focus on Cardin, she dodged two swings before attempting a counter of her own. Cardin grabbed her oncoming fist, and followed up with his first successful blow to the girl since the school year had begun. His fist slammed into the Dancer's Veil hard enough to make his own aura flare, and there was the distinct crunch of a nose breaking as Vyliria's head whipped back. Vyliria responded with a violent kick to his shin, which made his grip loosen enough that she was able to yank her arm free and backhand his face. As they both stumbled back, Cardin was joined by Russel, and Dove started to get back up.

Vyliria held her hand out, calling forth a jade flask filled with an orange, fiery liquid. Pouring barely a mouthful's worth past her veil, she dismissed it, feeling the cartilage of her face re-knit itself as she rolled her neck, and cracked her knuckles. Bolting towards Cardin, who attempted to strike her, she merely jumped, avoiding the blow and vaulting past his shoulder, closing the gap to Dove in two leaping bounds, grabbing the side of his head, flipping him onto his back, and slamming her fist into his face until his aura broke. She landed two more punches to break his nose and knock a second opponent unconscious. Right after this, Cardin grabbed her by the shoulders, and before she could react, he threw her at the table, where she crushed the wood on impact. Russel ran forth and went to kick her while she was down, but she grabbed a piece of splintered bench, which absorbed the first blow, and gave her time to grab his leg and pull, sending him to the floor. Before she could take advantage of this, she had to roll out of the way of a stomp from Cardin, using her hands to push herself up enough to swing her legs beneath herself, following with a backflip to make more space.

"Fucking gankers," she spat, running forward, feinting towards Cardin, who bought it hook, line and sinker. Having committed himself to an attack that couldn't hit, Vyliria had free reign to dash towards Russel instead, hitting him with a shoulder check, before spinning around into a kick that sent him flying. Turning back around, she took a fist to the gut from the leader of CRDL, ignoring the pain as she grabbed his throat with one hand. When Cardin brought both his hands to her wrist to wrench it off, her other hand shot forward like a coiled serpent, two pointed fingers poking into his eyes. His aura ensured he didn't lose his vision permanently, but Vyliria would be damned if it didn't hurt him like the lava of Izalith itself. Blinded, albeit temporarily, he was powerless to stop the woman from getting behind him, wrapping one arm around his throat, the other pushing at his waist, before pulling with the first arm, lifting him up, and slamming him head first into the floor. His aura flared, and then shattered on the wound-up kick she followed with, which sent him rolling along the floor as she walked to close the distance she had made, before stomping onto the back of his head to knock him out. Turning around, she looked at a suddenly much less confident Russel. Vyliria took a step towards him, and he took one back. Then another, and another.

"Well?" she asked. "I haven't got all day; let's get on with this. Unless you've decided to suddenly grow a brain, and desire to leave this room under your own power?"

Taking the offer, Russel took another half dozen steps back, before turning and fleeing from the cafeteria, but not before hearing Vyliria snark, "I guess you're the smart one, then."

Surveying the damages to the bench, she pulled out her staff and cast a repair on it, before turning to the mortified faunus girl who had just watched the fight go down. Even now, she was alternating between staring at the Irithyllian and the prone, unconscious forms of three quarters of CRDL.

"I can't fucking stand bigots like them," Vyliria said. Taking on a more concerned tone of voice, she asked, "Art thou okay, miss?"

"Yes," she managed to eventually get out. "Did you have to…"

"It was the quickest way to get those idiots to stop. Arseholes like them only learn from strength, so someone wiping the floor with them should hammer the message through."

"Thanks, I guess?" she responded.

"No problem…" the unkindled trailed off.

"Oh! I'm Velvet. Velvet Scarlatina, part of team CFVY (A/N: Coffee)."

"Second year team, right?"

"Yeah."

Vyliria hummed an acknowledgment. "I'd recommend to sit with my team," she said, jerking a thumb towards her dumbstruck friends, though Blake looked especially perplexed, and was eyeing Vyliria much more differently than she previously had. "Don't worry, they're much less prone to direct solutions than I am."

She then turned to address the rest of the silent cafeteria. "You should all be ashamed of yourselves. You're training to be huntsmen, protectors of the innocent. Yet you won't even bother to protect one of your own? From one of your own? I expected this institution to have similar standards to the Blades of the Darkmoon, but it appears I was mistaken," she finished, turning around and taking the exit opposite the side Russel had egressed from.

Velvet gingerly approached JNPR and RWBY, and asked, "Is it okay if I sit here?"

"Uh… yeah," Jaune said in an absent minded manner. Then he asked, "Can someone tell me what just happened?"

Blake gently put a mark on her page, closed her book, and said, "Vyliria just beat the crap out of CRDL because they were harassing a faunus. And I'm going to go after her to see if she's okay," She finished, as she stood up.

"I'll go with you," Ruby said.

"No!" Blake shouted, in an almost-panicked manner. She attempted to cover her blunder by adding, "She obviously went off to vent. Bringing more people won't help her."

"Oh," Ruby said, mollified. "Well, good luck Blake!"

"Thanks, Ruby," the ravenette responded with a slight smile, before moving for the same door Vyliria left.

(Blake)

Blake found Vyliria on the roof, gazing out towards Vale in the distance. Blake walked up next to her, and besides turning her head to verify who was approaching, Vyliria gave no other acknowledgment. They both stared out over the city in a companionable silence.

"Hey, Vyliria?" Blake asked. When she got no response, she continued, "I wanted to thank you for helping Velvet."

"You could have helped her," Vyliria finally spoke, sounding drained. "You all could have helped her. Yet I was the only person who did. And I'm sure I'm going to get shit from Ozpin and Goodwitch for what I did. Well, at least Goodwitch. She'll be annoyed that I resolved the situation the way I did, but will probably agree privately to herself that they needed to be taken down a peg. And Ozpin will just give me a slap on the wrist; he values my unique talents too much to do anything serious so long as I don't cause permanent harm."

"I'm sorry I didn't help earlier," Blake said, as she finally started putting things together in her head. "It's hard to do what's right when you know that'll just put a target on your back too."

"Isn't it supposed to be our future jobs to put a target on our backs so the innocents of the kingdoms can sleep at night without having to worry about a Grimm coming into their homes?"

"I never saw it that way," Blake admitted. "But I think I finally figured you out."

"Oh?" the unkindled responded.

"It took what just happened for it to finally click. While I can't figure out where your magic came from, I figured out why you're so secretive, and why you deter people from looking into your past. Why your own team hasn't seen what you look like, why you eat your meals alone, why even your photo in combat class is just the mask. Irithyll isn't real, it's just a cover that you can conveniently back with your magic." She gathered her courage, sure she was right, and got ready for what she was about to do

"And… why would that be so?" she questioned in a bemused manner.

"Because it's all a way to hide what you look like. It's the same reason why you didn't hesitate to step in to help Velvet. You're a faunus. But… you're not alone." Blake reached up to the bow atop her head, undoing it, and revealing to the daughter of the Boreal Valley a pair of cat ears as black as her hair. Her heart nearly stopped as Vyliria just watched her.

"I was actually expecting something like that for a while," Vyliria started. "I mean, it was fairly obvious, considering that thou have an obsession with fish, you never take the bow off, and I've never seen it flattened by the wind even once. And then, when someone actually does their research, your last name isn't exactly an anonymous one. But congratulations, Blake Belladonna, you're half right. Technically three-fourths, actually."

Blake's blood ran cold as her breath stopped. She swallowed, suddenly defensive. "What do you mean?" She suddenly regretted not having her weapon on her, especially considering that Vyliria had an entire arsenal a literal thought away.

"Irithyll is a cover. The city no longer exists. But it did once. I'm not a faunus though. Yet, all the same, I'm not exactly human, either."

The only reason Blake hadn't bolted was the addition of that last sentence. "What does that mean?"

"Do you trust me, Blake?"

"I don't know," she responded, trying to figure out what angle Vyliria was working.

"You revealed to me a significant secret of yours. I wish to respond in kind, to ease your mind. But I would prefer not to do it here. This is something that cannot be overheard."

"And why do I need your trust for that?" she asked, her mind whirling through possibilities.

"I know a miracle that allows one to teleport. I've seen it enough times to replicate it, but I never found a tale for it. I can cast it, but it takes a good five minutes to do so. Teleportation is an amazing boon, but not exactly useful in combat when you need to stop and ask your opponent to wait patiently and count to three-hundred in order to do it." Blake was about to shoot down an obvious trap when the enigmatic woman added, "I swear on Gwyndolin's name that there is no trickery or betrayal planned on my part. I genuinely just wish to move to a more secluded location for this."

Blake had to admit to herself that she knew very little about Vyliria, but one thing she did know was that the woman was surprisingly religious, but not in a zealotrous way. She just honestly revered her pantheon, especially Gwyndolin, which made sense when she was sworn into a covenant to him. But then if Irithyll didn't exist anymore, what happened to him? Against her better judgement, she decided to give Vyliria the benefit of the doubt, solely by the merit of her defending Velvet. "Fine. What do I need to do?"

"Just stand close to me while I cast it," she said, moving away from the edge of the roof as she drew her chime. Blake complied, and watched with an overall sense of nervousness and trepidation as a white circle, then a set of runes, then another white circle etched themselves around Vyliria over the course of the next few minutes. Suddenly, they shined incredibly brighter, before her vision was replaced by a flash of white. When she blinked the spots out of her vision, the first thing she noticed was a crackling noise, turning to it, she saw the bonfire that had spawned from the elder nevermore during initiation. Looking around confirmed that they had just moved from Beacon to halfway across the Emerald Forest in under a second. As she opened her mouth to give her most pressing concern, Vyliria beat her to it.

"You don't need to worry about Grimm lurking about. The bonfire naturally wards hostile, non-intelligent entities away. As long as you don't walk away and bring one here, they won't approach."

"Fine," Blake said. "We're here, start talking."

"I feel it would be better if I showed instead of spoke," Vyliria responded. She walked a ways away, and dragged a rock half her size over to use as a seat. She took a breath, and then reached to the Dancer's Veil, and pulled it off. Her heterochromatic eyes met Blake's as she gave a bitter smile. "I wasn't lying about my skin, either."

Sitting down on the rock, facing away from Blake, she took another deep breath, and then her chest piece and gauntlets burned away in a wash of embers. While she had a white strip of cloth covering her upper chest (which a dark part in the back of Blake's mind noted might rival Yang's, and also marveled at how well her armor hid it), that was the last thing she was noting as she struggled to register what she was seeing. On the back of Vyliria's right shoulder, slightly smaller than the diameter of a clenched fist, a circle of fire was burning on her skin, the inside of which was pitch black, despite the sun shining down on it. Blake honestly couldn't muster the words to ask what she was seeing. Eventually Vyliria chose to explain it herself.

"That burning circle… is my darksign. My curse. I was once human, but no longer. While that brand rests upon my very soul, I am undead. I have not aged a single day since I woke up after a fatal wound. And every time I am slain, I am merely reborn at the last bonfire I visited."

"You're immortal?" Blake eventually managed.

"Quasi-immortal," the undead corrected. "You can kill me. I'll just come back."

"What's the catch?"

"Astute of you. Wouldn't be a curse if it was beneficial, now would it? Every time I die, I lose some of myself. Some of my memories, that will never return. The same will occur if I ever lack the will to push on, or lack a purpose to strive for." She hesitated for a moment. "If I were to lose everything, I would be left as a mindless hollow, a shambling, dessicated corpse only driven to kill anything sane around it. And only then are the mindless things we became allowed to truly die. I would look something like this…"

As she finished speaking, she reached with her left hand, fingers lightly touching the mark on her shoulder, shuddering as she did. A wave of fire ripped out from the circle, burning away her skin wherever it touched. Left behind was desiccated, shriveled, leathery black flesh, hair of a significantly worse quality, and as she turned around to meet Blake's gaze…

She actually took a step back when confronted by two empty eye sockets, save for two red dots in a grotesque facsimile of pupils.

"I am old, Blake," she said in a dry, raspy voice, "older than Ozpin, older than Beacon, older than Vale. Old enough to remember a time when this world was not called Remnant, old enough to have lived before Grimm existed, though that is a scant comfort when the things that dwelt in the darkness in my era were worse. I am old enough to remember a time when the moon overhead was whole, and I studied how to fight under the tutelage of the last god of Anor Londo."

"How old are you?" Blake finally found her voice and asked.

"Truthfully, I don't know," the animate corpse replied. "I spent most of my existence unconscious in the Kiln. Given that the world knows nothing of the curse, I am likely the last of my kind."

"So what is true about your past?"

"I was born in Irithyll. My parents were that terrible. The stories of my gods are true, and I genuinely don't know if there is truth behind yours." Reaching towards her darksign, she reversed the process that had passed over her, regaining her skin and redressing, setting her mask upon her head again. "Blake?" she asked, in her normal voice, "Canst thou promise me something?"

"I don't- I'm still processing this. You're a living corpse, you're ancient, there's literal gods-"

"I have genuinely lost count of the amount of times I've died. I remember counts for specific instances, such as deaths from falling, but the overall total is gone." She paused. "You are one of three people in this age to have seen my face. You are the only person besides myself who knows what I am. If I were to ever lose myself, if I ever went hollow… I need you to promise me, that you will kill me for good."

"I can't just-"

"Please!" For the first time in Blake's memory, Vyliria begged. "If I am lost to the curse, the thing that is left behind will only be wearing my desiccated cadaver. For your sake, for our friends' sakes, for my sake, I need you to swear that you will lay me to rest should the worst come to pass."

Blake's thoughts whirled in her head, but she decided that this was a problem that she couldn't run away from. "Fine," she finally got out.

"Swear it. I need you to swear that you will do it."

"I swear… that if you really lose yourself, if there's nothing I can do to save you, that I'll stop what's left of you from hurting people by any means necessary." The words tasted horrendous to utter, but she recognized that they needed to be said.

"Thank you," Vyliria whispered.

Blake moved over and sat next to her for a few minutes, hesitantly putting an arm around the other woman as shaky breaths made their way in and out of her.

"I have lost… so many friends over my existence," Vyliria spoke up again. "To the curse, to other things, most of their deaths that I am aware of were violent in nature, and I don't know what happened to some of them, which somehow feels worse. My greatest, deepest fear is that I will forget them. I wrote their names down on a list that I look at every night," she said, bringing forth a parchment with well over a dozen names scrawled onto it. She swallowed, before continuing shakily, "But I still fear that I will forget their names. Because if I don't remember them, who will?"

Vyliria held the list with slightly shaking hands, likely pouring over the names repeatedly, as Blake finally forced her thoughts under control, and figured out what she needed to say. "Why not tell me?"

"What?" Vyliria said, her helm turning to Blake.

"If I knew their names, and who they were, then if you forget, I could remind you. So why not tell me their names, and tell me about them?"

"I… I'd like that," the unkindled replied in a small voice.

As Vyliria spoke the first name on the list, Blake could honestly say for the first time in a long time, that she was proud of herself, and not just for facing a problem instead of running away.

()

A/N: Holy Gwyn, this is my longest chapter yet! (spoiler alert me from the past. I write some much larger ones. My biggest blockbuster surpasses 11k words...) Almost 5k words for the chapter proper, and it exceeded that count with the author's notes. So, a bit of a chapter to digest here.

First off, Vyliria ran into a literal textbook DS3 early game casul. That's now canon to this story. Also, Fashion Souls is canon to the story too.

Second off, Vyliria just 1v4'd CRDL in a fist fight and won. She also has a low opinion of gankers, and all those 45 levels in STR showed themselves when she was able to pick Cardin up and slam him face-first into the floor. I know basically every author who has an OC or even alters cannon slightly has someone step in and help Velvet, but Vyliria is in the Blades. Her vows demand she acts. Also, because of her own childhood experience, witnessing abuse, even as bullying, may or may not be a major trigger for her temper. Thirdly, she was the victim of quite a lot of being hunted like a literal animal herself as an undead (prior to being unkindled, because if you read up on your DS lore, an unkindled is an undead who tried to Link the Flame [as in, they actually got to the thing and started burning] and then weren't strong enough to properly Link it, leading to them getting burnt to ash, only to be revived as a final failsafe as the Fire faded). She might not speak or even think about it, but she strongly sympathizes with the faunus, and has an extreme distaste towards discrimination. Stack her covenant's vows, Cardin pulling one of her biggest triggers (and also ganking as a lesser trigger, now that I think about it), and then blatant racism on top of that, and the only reason she didn't outright murder them with magic is because she recognized that she wouldn't be able to get away with it. Suffice to say, by the end of this chapter, if she saw any member of CRDL in a situation where a Grimm was about to kill them, she would even bother standing and standing aside to let it happen. She'd straight up leave them to die.

I know I said I was getting back to canon, but it was not my intent when I started this to only have the first 2 pages shadow roughly 4 minutes of the show.

The scene with Blake and Vyliria in the forest was another one I had planned out for a while, along with the somewhat heartwarming ending, and I wanted to show that for however much of an undead badass Vyliria is, she still has fears, and some part of her is still human. Fun fact: early in writing this, I had an angle planned where the rest of Lothric was racist as hell to Irithyll, but I eventually dropped it because even under the Dark Souls clause, it felt like a stretch, with only a single line in the description of an Irithyllian in the character creator even vaguely hinting at that being a thing. Gonna be honest, I kinda went on autopilot from page 4 onwards, just letting the muse take the wheel.

Also, for Lothric's teleportation miracle, I needed something to get to the bonfire, that wasn't one-way, like homeward or a coiled sword fragment, and after two hours of trying to come up for a tale for a miracle with no lore whatsoever, I just gave up and had Vyliria know it because of how many times it had been used to kill her ass, but without the tale, it took too long to be practical to use in combat.

See you all next week.