A black pool of liquid, surrounded by crystals of Dust stood against an empty landscape. It was both menacing and shockingly beautiful, the crystals of Dust shining violent purple against its waters.

Silently, a girl approached, afraid but also curious. It was almost like she'd been lured into a trap of sorts.

As she drew closer, the black liquid began to disturb itself. Small waves formed from nothing, moving and shifting and taking shape in a form of a woman that looked like almost exactly like her, but not quite.

The two of them had the same face, the same noses and mouths. But her doppelganger stared back at her with her burning red eyes, and a smile that strayed somewhere between beautiful and terrifying.

The woman reached a hand out for a young girl, and opened her mouth to whisper something to her that couldn't be understood.

The girl accepted the offer. She reached out for the woman, and when their hands touched, and the girl watched as her skin began to change to a porcelain white.

The girl woke up in a cold sweat with a violent jolt.

Cinder sucked in deep breath after deep breath, and tried not to let herself drown in the feeling of fear that gripped her. It didn't relent, and so Cinder had to remind herself over and over that it was just a dream. She blinked wearily, casting her gaze around the small area that she'd taken as a shelter for the night.

The sky had been dyed pink by the rising sun.

That alone told Cinder that she needed to get up, and get ready to leave. Perhaps the sooner that happened, she'd be able to forget her nightmare, vivid as it had been.

No matter how many times Cinder told herself that it had been just a dream, it wasn't enough. She just wasn't able to shake that fear that seemed to have wormed its way into her bones.

But she couldn't let herself sit around being afraid. That was dangerous, regardless of what lurked in the forests. Cinder knew better than to stay out in the woods for too long. There were too many threats. Whether those threats were bandits or animals, or something much more monstrous didn't matter. Staying there in her camp for any longer than she needed to was dangerous, regardless of the fact that she was armed to the teeth and more than capable of fighting.

But Cinder also knew when it was time to back down from a fight. She knew better than to think that she could beat one of the creatures of grimm, or to think that she could fend off a tribe of bandits.

An animal or two was manageable enough, but much more than that and she would have seen disaster.

More than a few bandits and she would be sure to fall.

As for the creatures of Grimm, Cinder could only remember the days of her early childhood when they had been different. She remembered how they used to be, much more plentiful than they were now. Beyond that, her memory was spotty. She'd never fought the grimm before they'd changed.

It left her with an incomplete memory of the monsters. Everything else was informed by rumors and education.

Cinder really wasn't sure how much of what people said about the grimm. People claimed that the world had changed so much, but days still turned to nights and people still thrived, though it was a difficult existence. But if what people said was to be believed, Cinder figured that it might have just been more of the norm.

As Cinder understood it, the threats hadn't changed, just the quantity of them had.

A shiver ran down her spine as she began to cover over the space where all of the wood had burned away from the fire that she'd lit the night before to keep her warm. That dream had been unlike anything that she'd ever experienced, and Cinder still didn't quite know what to make of it.

She remembered hearing an old wives' tale somewhere that said that dreams could have meaning, but at the time she hadn't believed it.

Now, as the thought back to the way that she had stared at a twisted mirror of herself, Cinder couldn't help the feeling of dread that overtook her. It was the sort of image that she knew she wasn't going to be able to get out of her head, but that didn't matter. She needed to get up and get going, if only because she wanted to get to the next town before nightfall.

The truth of the matter was that Cinder had been travelling for a long time, always in search of something that she was sure that she wasn't going to be able to find so easily. That was just a part of her life these days, after having spent years at Haven Academy to find that nothing was working out for her. She hadn't found a purpose there, so now she seeked one on her own.

There was just a constant feeling that there was simply something missing in her life, and she didn't quite know what it was. Maybe it had to do with the fact that at Haven she was a high performer but was never allowed to do anything with it.

That was the biggest problem that she'd had.

Despite her performance as a student, she wasn't able to do anything. Threats could linger near villages, but she'd never be able to go and help address them. Instead, she was kept close to the kingdom along with every other student as they waited for one of the giant grimm that wandered the landscape to get too close.

But they never did, and so staying at Haven just left Cinder feeling useless.

There was a reason that she'd left.

Now she mostly just wandered in search of something better. From time to time she would run into people that didn't mind having someone travel with them. Cinder would travel with those people for a little while, and when it was her time to leave, Cinder would. It was all based on instinct, for the most part.

There was always a feeling that there was something pulling her along a path, but Cinder didn't know what.

Destiny, maybe.

She didn't want to think about what that could mean in the grand scheme of things though. If she was being pulled towards something for a reason, she had no idea what it was and that scared her on some level.

Another shiver ran up her spine when her mind flashed back to her dream.

Nightmare, Cinder corrected herself.

She didn't like how thinking about that dream had been enough to make her blood run cold and leave her feeling like the single best thing that she could do was run away for the sake of her own safety.

Not that she really knew where she was running to anymore.

With her campsite finally cleared out, Cinder was ready to continue on her path. She picked up the small bag that she was carrying with her and walked towards the edge of the clearing so that she would be able to peer over the canopies of the trees above her and get an idea of how she was doing.

The sun had risen high in the sky, and she guessed correctly, it was only about eight in the morning now, which meant that she had plenty of time to travel. More worrying, the clouds were dark, and so Cinder was sure that she was going to have to find some sort of shelter later on.

It was possible that Cinder would need to cut her journey short that day, depending on when the storm came.

Her semblance could only keep her warm for so long, after all. She could only fuel it with her aura for a certain amount of time before it failed and she was left out in the cold.

And besides, Cinder didn't want to be travelling in the rain anyhow. The muck wasn't worth the effort, and Cinder didn't want to waste her time getting bogged down when she would be better off resting.

Cinder reached into her pack and removed a map, old and worn as it was, with small notes about the places that she'd been as well as the places that she hadn't been yet. A lot of those notes were rumors more than anything else, but Cinder didn't care.

There was a small percentage that would turn out to have some basis in fact.

Whether most of those rumors were reliable or not didn't matter, though- it suggested something that she would have to look forward to or worry about.

As things stood, she was on a path that should have led to a village named Hinagiku. She didn't know much about it, just that a traveler that she'd had a run in with had claimed that it was left abandoned about a decade before. There was no explanation for why it was abandoned, just that there was a story that it Hinagiku village had been cursed.

Apparently the village had fallen a few times before the settlers had finally given up on it.

Cinder didn't know whether she believed in curses. In all likelihood, the village had been founded in a poor location and had paid for that several times over. That didn't matter though- Cinder needed a place to stay for a night.

In Hinagiku, she was sure that was going to find a place to rest and hide from the rain.

But that was going to be a problem for later, Cinder knew.

For now, she was mostly concerned with how far her feet could carry her.

Weiss turned uneasily and peered out the window of her father's airship. She was almost hoping that she would find something out in the skies that would be able to take her away from the ship, but Weiss also was sure that was impossible.

Presently, she was halfway through a flight out of Atlas towards Vale, their neighboring kingdom directly to the south. She was accompanying her father and younger brother to Beacon Academy, where he had arranged a number of meetings. It was where the General was currently staying, and her father claimed that there was money in aiding the academy.

It looked good for the company if they had a hand in training warriors, regardless of how much of a role her father's company played. To Weiss' knowledge, there were partnerships between the company and all four of the academies.

Right now, her father's eye was on Beacon Academy.

It wasn't his favorite of the four academies. According to her father, Beacon Academy was a place of the disgraces of the hunting world. According to her father, Beacon was mostly useless, and the academy had been nearly leveled along with most of Vale many years ago.

He always boasted that such a thing never would have been allowed in Atlas.

Weiss didn't know how much she could trust most of her father's words. Even despite his many stories and frustrations regarding Beacon and Vale, he was always willing to come south to make trade deals.

The supposed end of civilization as they knew it hadn't slowed down a need for Dust. The world still craved that fuel, even when the supplies seemed to be drying out. The shortage was something that had impacted industry, the military, and ammunition supplies alike.

And it had all started thirteen years ago, when Weiss had been a young girl. She'd gotten used to seeing her father's back, as he got more and more involved in maintaining the Schnee monopoly on Dust.

That wasn't to say that Weiss was sure that she believed every word that her father said regarding the family business.

With regards to the family mines, Weiss was sure that the supply of Dust drying up had more to do with overmining than some sort of cataclysm, but she didn't dare voice such an opinion. Weiss knew that she would only see ridicule for it from her father.

Weiss supposed that her older sister Winter would agree with her, but as things stood Winter was a pariah amongst the Schnee Family, even on good days.

Weiss resented her parents for Winter's exile.

Maybe if she at least knew what had happened to her sister over the last two or three years, it would be different. When Winter had left (betrayed them, her father had said) that had been the last contact that any of them had with her. To Weiss' best knowledge, Winter was somehow involved in the Atlesian Military as one of the few Specialists left, but that was about all that she knew.

One day she would find her sister again, Weiss hoped.

Weiss stared out the window and watched the clouds pass them by, along with the occasional bird. It wasn't interesting. In fact, she was sure that this entire trip was going to be entirely uninteresting, with herself and Whitley being there mostly so that their father could show off his trophy children to the people of Vale.

Nobody who knew her father would think that he was below using them as bargaining chips.

Weiss resented it, but if she was going to be the one to start fixing her father's company, she needed to go through these sorts of rituals, as painful as they tended to be. This was necessary, demanded of an heiress like herself. Weiss knew that, and so she went along with it, despite how much she disliked her father and his business practices.

Deep down, Weiss wanted to stay there in Beacon Academy, just like she'd dreamed as a little girl listening to Klein's stories about heroes and monsters that were meant to make her feel better about the world. She wasn't going to let herself think that she could stay there realistically for a second. But Weiss could dream all she wanted.

After all, academies like Beacon and Atlas only took the best fighters of the best, and Weiss was fairly certain that she didn't fit in that category. She'd learned to fight and use her family's semblance to some extent. Winter had been sure to give her that sort of training in the background and out of their parent's eyes. Despite all of that, Weiss was sure that it wasn't enough for her to enter one of the academies.

Even now, Weiss had a rapier tucked away in her luggage that she could use should something end up going wrong. Weiss didn't realistically think that she would need it on a simple business trip, but she couldn't be sure. She could still pack the weapon away and imagine different scenarios, though.

If something happened, she'd been prepared.

Apparently the end of civilization meant that everything was unpredictable, so nothing was really impossible.

One couldn't even rely on a ship to land in the right place, apparently.

At least, that was the rant that her father was currently reciting to Whitley, who listened along attentively like he was actually going to learn something from one of their father's rants. He wouldn't, there never was anything to learn from his rants. Jacques Schnee ranted for one reason and one reason alone, and that was to be heard.

Weiss knew that better than everyone.

Throughout the flight, Weiss had decided to sit back and be quiet, because at least that way she couldn't come under her father's scrutiny. She couldn't become the target of his frustrations, and that meant that she was safe from most of the things that she feared. She'd seen enough and heard enough of her father's treatment of her mother and Winter to know not to cross him.

She hadn't fallen victim to any of the physical punishment yet, but she'd been pulled and tugged in so many directions mentally by her father that sometimes she couldn't help but wonder what decisions she actually made for herself.

It was only slightly troubling to think about.

"Weiss." Whitley spoke up, focusing his eyes- their father's eyes onto her and smiling. "Father says that we're supposed to be landing in Vale soon." He leaned back into his seat, crossing one leg over the other. "I suppose that we should be preparing to leave a good impression."

Weiss blinked, thinking fast to give a reaction and plastering the fake half-smile that she usually needed when it came to these things. "Yes," She smiled, nodding just slightly. "Of course." She looked between her father and Whitley. "Is there anything in particular that we should be preparing for?"

Her father stared down at her with a certain sort of coldness that Weiss had never quite gotten used to seeing. "Yes." He responded, reaching up so that he could adjust his tie and make himself look more proper. "You should both be preparing to make an appearance, but also to stay out of the way. We'll be in contact with some very important people, and I don't need either of you making an embarrassment of our family."

"Of course, father." Whitley interjected, sounding entirely too confident about the situation at hand and entirely too comfortable with all things considered. Weiss did her best to mirror him, smiling and nodding along.

But her father just let out a quiet sigh and rolled his eyes before leaning back into his seat and letting his eyes slip shut. "You two should be ready for arrival. There should be an hour left of the flight."

"Yes, father." Weiss spoke up, looking down at herself and just smoothing down her dress so that she looked a little bit more presentable.

Soon the flight would end, and after that, she was going to have plenty to do, though mostly it was going to be a matter of staying out of the way. Being seen but not heard tended to be surprisingly tiring work. Because of that, Weiss she was going to do her best to relax while she still could.

Everything else could come later on.

Blake's chest heaved as she sat up in the treetops, watching as a copy of herself sprinted down the forest path below, surrounded by a sea of red that reminded her too strongly of blood. There was a sweetness in the air that hung over her, which mingled with the coppery scent of Blake's own blood.

She watched herself run down that path, like it was the only thing that mattered in her entire life. There was a turn up ahead, and the clone would take it there.

It wouldn't matter.

After all, this was merely a diversion, and Blake needed to do whatever she could to survive. The clone was only there so that she could protect herself. It would run until it faded away to nothingness.

If Blake needed to, she could strain herself and send another copy of herself running down that road again. However, she knew that this could only go for so long before-

The girl was broken out of her own thoughts by the sound of someone moving around in the underbrush. Blake froze almost completely, crouched as low as she could manage on her perch for no reason other than to avoid being seen. She needed to do what she could to stay alive, after all.

This was a part of it. Not something that she would have liked to do, but it was what she needed to do, and so she did it.

Blake was injured. If she got seen, she was sure that she wasn't going to be able to fight anyone off.

Other people came into view, one by one.

First, a girl with long red hair, charging ahead after the clone of Blake, and then after two men. One, impossibly tall and lumbering, carrying a chainsword so large that it could dwarf Blake. Beside him, a man, thin, handsome, and with burning red hair that came adorned with a set of horns that had been sharpened over and over again into something that could be deadly should the man wanted them to be.

All three of them wore masks. The girl with the red hair quickly dipped out of sight, which was something that Blake was grateful for, but the others lingered, still below where she was hiding.

If Blake could have done anything to stop herself from breathing, she would have. She could take comfort in the fact that there wasn't wind that day, but it wasn't much. There was no comfort when it came to these men.

Her torn right ear could tell her that.

"We'll find her, Sir." The larger man said, turning to the other.

"Good." The thinner one- Adam Taurus, his name was, turned to face him and nodded silently. The hulking man seemed to take that as an order and followed ahead after the girl and that left Blake sitting there, up in the trees, with Adam standing in the clearing below her.

Blake felt the bough below her move, and heard the sound of leaves almost immediately sprung to action, his hand going to his sword at his side and him dropping into a position so that he could attack at even the slightest provocation.

Had he heard her?

A large black bird emerged from the trees on the other side of the path, ignorant to what was happening. Blake watched it, just the same as Adam did. The man seemed to relax slightly, though it was only just. His hand pulled away from the blade and he just watched the clearing again.

For a second, Blake was sure that the man was staring at her, but if that was the case, he would have attacked. He would have shouted, he would have done anything to get her attention and the attention of the others as well.

Adam said nothing, only turned and continued down his path and ultimately left Blake alone there in the treetops with nothing more than her name, a weapon, and the clothes on her back.

She wasn't safe.

She was never safe.

She needed to run.

She needed to run, and never turn back.

She couldn't do that until she was absolutely sure that Adam and the others were gone, and even then…

If Blake ran, she didn't know where she could really go. There was always home, but that was too dangerous right now. Blake couldn't risk being seen. Surely there was somewhere that she would be able to go and feel safe, even if it was only for a little while.

Adam and the others would follow her clone until it either disappeared, or they lost its trail. That gave her a little bit of time to run, but that was hard, with her injured as she was now. Blake's aura had broken a while ago, and nothing would be enough to make her ignore the burn in her muscles, or the constant throbbing pain stretching out from her right ear, or the fact that she wanted nothing more than to break down and cry but she couldn't allow herself that luxury.

It wasn't safe enough.

She was never safe enough.

Blake sat there in that treetop for what almost felt like an eternity, and when she finally mustered the courage to climb down from the perch, she did so as silently as she was able to manage before turning down the same path from which she'd come.

There was enough space between her and Adam that she could avoid the group that hunted her, at least for a little while. She'd be able to find a place to rest somewhere, and then she'd have to pray that she didn't end up crossing paths with Adam again.

Blake would also have to pray that she didn't end up crossing paths with less human monsters as well, but somehow that felt like less of a concern. Despite everything that she knew and that she'd heard about the creatures of Grimm, they scared her less than the men that chose to bear their faces.

Somehow the monsters would never be as terrifying as them, despite the fact that the monsters towered over the world.

Blake stuck to the path and unsheathed her sword as she walked. She needed to be ready to defend herself the second that something that anything appeared to come after her. If she needed, she could make another clone and hide in the trees or the bushes again, but that wasn't what she wanted to do.

With all things considered, it didn't take long for Blake to realize that she didn't know where she was or how long she'd been travelling. She stopped at a crossroads and was presented with a choice of two roads.

One, to a ruined city that Blake had never been to. The other, to another ruined city that Blake had been to, but never wanted to go back to.

She chose the uncertain path, and took a deep breath. Blake took two or three steps back away from where she was standing before activating her semblance and jumping away from the clone that was left behind to take the other path.

It wouldn't last long, but if someone that was looking for her saw the clone, they would follow after it. At this point, using her semblance was difficult and draining, but she had to do it.

Blake needed safety, and maybe she could find that out in Vale.

That was the probably one thing that she could hope for.