[4-B] A Monster to Slay

Ruby grabbed Blake by the wrist and pulled, but she still stood rooted in place, just staring. She'd thought it went without saying when there was a giant dog monster trying to kill them, but, "Run!"

"I'm sorry... I'm sorry!"

The snarling, snapping thing charged them. Ruby got a glimpse of its legs and realized there were five, three on one side and two on the other, giving it a weird lurching gait. She also noticed that they were near a T junction.

"Sorry!" she said, then yanked her teammate to the left. The monster was right on their heels, but she'd forced it to turn towards the side with more legs. It tripped over itself, slid around the corner much too fast, and slammed bodily into the wall. The head turned, jaws open and spattering slaver all over the floor. Eyes rolled with mindless rage, bulging out of their sockets, and already it was scrabbling at the ground, gaining traction.

"Come on!" She gave Blake another pull. She tipped sideways, most of her weight coming down on Ruby's back.

"I'm sorry... I didn't mean to... I didn't know..."

The monster's eyes glowed with malice. Green. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't a Grimm. Already it was getting to its feet, just fifteen feet away, its jaws opening wide. It was hard to look away from them, hard not to at least wonder whether it might be easier to just stop...

"No!" Tearing her eyes away from the beast, Ruby grabbed Blake around the middle and, praying that this would actually work, she scattered.

There was a familiar rush of exhilaration as she whipped through the air, but something was different. She felt heavier, almost like she was moving through syrup rather than air. The hallway turned. Ruby perceived the wall up ahead and tried to turn, but the extra weight was too much. In a fraction of a second, she reformed herself and used her momentum to tug Blake around the bend. The hideous baying of the monster was still too close, much too close, so she scattered again. And again. And again.

For what felt like a long time, Ruby's world was condensed into bursts of motion. She had to stop whenever she turned, and every time the barking would come back to her senses, the thrill of her semblance would fade and she would be sick with terror. There was something unnatural about that thing, and this was coming from someone who hunted soulless abominations for a living.

Then she tried to call up her semblance again, and nothing happened. She took a few more steps. Her knees buckled, and she landed spread-eagled on the ground with Blake partly on top of her. Everything hurt.

"It's okay," Ruby panted, shaking Blake's shoulder. "It's gone. Sorta." She could still hear it, but it had faded into the distance for now.

Blake curled in on herself. She was mumbling under her breath, though Ruby could only make out the words, 'Please' and 'Don't.'

"Hey!" Another shake, harder this time. "It's me, okay? You're... you're dreaming, or something." Her head lolled sideways.

"Okay." Ruby swallowed. "Don't panic. Gotta get moving." She gave Blake's arm a yank. "Hey! Get up or we're gonna die!"

Blake didn't react, except for a long, slow blink. Her eyes were glazed over.

"Sorry," Ruby said, "but I'm out of ideas." So she slapped her teammate across the face as hard as she could.

For a second, there was no reaction. Then another slow blink, followed by Blake furrowing her brow as if the pain had only just hit her.

"Blake?"

Her head turned, and her eyes focused on Ruby's face.

"You have to get up. Okay?"

She didn't respond to that, so Ruby gave her a tug. Blake figured out what she wanted about halfway through, and she sort of helped. Between the two of them they managed to get her on her feet, though she had to lean on Ruby's shoulder.

"We're gonna be okay."

"...No."

Ruby gave Blake a stern poke in the side. "Stop that. We just need to get to... um..." She had been about to say a door or window, but there was no guarantee that either of those would lead anywhere good. She shuddered at the memory of the things that had fallen in through the window. Looking back, she wasn't totally sure anymore that they had only been worms or maggots.

"No way out," Blake mumbled. "We stole the amulet."

"What?" Ruby blurted out, but a second later she got it. "Oh! Oh!"

The jade pendant was still in her pocket—she'd totally forgotten about it since she'd picked it up. "Wait, that's perfect! We can just give it back!"

Blake's jaw jumped. "Stupid." It came out a little slurred.

Ruby clenched a fist. "I said stop that, okay? We're not going to die. I won't let us."

"Green."

"What?"

"I keep seeing it... it's in my eyes."

"You're not making any sense." Ruby was already feeling bad about snapping at her. "Just... try not to think what it's trying to make you think, okay?"

"Can't." Blake let out a small moan, and her head fell forward as if a string had been cut. Suddenly Ruby was supporting a whole lot more of her weight. "Keep hearing it."

"Just... look, you kinda have to work with me here. Put your feet down." To Ruby's surprise, Blake obeyed. "Yeah! That's great! Now one step... and another... okay!"

Eventually, she got to the point where she was leading Blake instead of carrying her. She still stumbled sometimes, since she wasn't really looking at where she was going or anything, but she was moving. Progress.

Ruby bit her lip, then fished her scroll out of her pocket and opened it. Nope, no bars. She sent out a text anyway—it took forever to finish it, since she was walking and nudging Blake along at the same time. Her scroll should keep trying to send it every so often until it ran out of power, and... well, if something did happen, she was hoping that maybe they would go back into normal space, and the message would go out. At least... at least then Weiss and Yang would have some idea of what happened.

No, she scolded herself. Bad thoughts.

— Trapped in manor w monster. Not a grimm

She hit send, and as predicted she got an error message. She thought about telling them their coordinates, but... no. Whatever was going on in here, either it was possible to get out of here or it wasn't. If it wasn't, people coming to help would just get stuck too.

— Dont fllw. Not safe

Then she turned off the location function on her scroll, even though she was pretty sure it had stopped broadcasting a while ago.

"Sorry, guys," she murmured. Blake didn't seem to hear her.

Ruby knew they should probably be running, but she was just too exhausted. Blake followed behind her, staring off into space, her hand hanging limply from where Ruby was gripping her wrist. Without her help, it was hard to figure out where to go. There were candles all over the place, but there was a lot of space between them and the shadows hung so thick and heavy that she kept tripping over things

Maybe that was why it took her so long to notice. She couldn't really see her feet, and at first she thought it was just her imagination, but no—the hallway was tilting. The angle kept getting steeper, and soon she could see that the walls were leaning to the left, and one of them met the floor higher than the other.

Blake started having trouble moving in a straight line, which turned out to be a good thing. The more she had to focus on where she was putting her feet, the more alert she got. Eventually the two of them had to walk with one foot on the tiled floor and the other on the wall.

"This isn't right." It was the first coherent thing Blake had said since the monster. Ruby slipped a little trying to give her a hug, and her boot jammed painfully into the corner between the floor and the wall—which had pretty much switched places, so that the wall was flatter and easier to walk on.

Blake gave her an awkward pat, then tried to step away and lurched into the floor. She put one hand on the tiles, then squinted at it. "What..."

"It's been like that for a while. You didn't notice?"

"I thought I was imagining it."

The distant barking got louder, and both of them tensed. Blake's ears lay pinned against her skull. Her eyes were so wide Ruby could see the whites going all the way around. Then she broke into a sprint.

Ruby rushed to catch up with her. At a run, the tilt got steeper faster. Before long they were on a flat surface again, though she kept tripping over empty torch sconces and at one point she put her whole foot through a painting. She didn't feel too bad about that—it was of someone being flayed.

The barking wasn't getting any closer, but it didn't sound like they were getting further ahead of it either. Blake kept running for a long time, while an exhausted Ruby struggled to keep up. Then she slowed down again, limping and panting and leaning against what used to be the ceiling. It was now tilted about thirty degrees to their left.

"Blake?" Ruby nudged her shoulder.

"It's going to catch us."

She swallowed. "It... yeah, it probably is."

Blake's breath hitched, and she slumped against the ceiling. There was a cobweb there, and for a second Ruby was distracted watching a small spider hanging from a thread. It was going up and sideways.

"Look." Ruby grabbed her teammate's shoulder and squeezed. "There's still stuff we can try. Okay? I'm gonna toss it that pendant thingy. If that doesn't work, we find out if it bleeds. And... the next window, we can try smashing it and digging our way up."

Blake shuddered. "No. I'd rather let it..."

Ruby opened her mouth to argue with that, but then she remembered the worms squirming in the dirt.

"Okay, maybe not. But I'm still gonna smash 'em just in case they don't all do that."

"They do."

"We won't know until we try it!"

Blake's head fell forward. Ruby grabbed her hand, alarmed, but it looked like she was just... staring at her shoes.

"Blake?"

Her ear twitched a little at hearing her name, but she didn't respond. Ruby tugged at her arm, and she began to walk—a slow, mechanical shuffle.

"Just... say something?"

Nothing.

Ruby kept moving, trying to focus on the comforting weight of her sweetheart on her back, and her friend's wrist in her hand. She could sorta feel her pulse, which was good since she was walking like a zombie and it was getting pretty hard not to panic.

The floor was directly overhead, now. Ruby reached up and brushed her fingers against the back of a chair that was sticking to it, and the whole thing tumbled to the ceiling with a crash. Blake flinched.

"Sorry."

No response.

Ruby fished her scroll out again, typing as she walked.

— Gravitys being weird. Feeling kinda alone here. Thinking of u guys

The screen flashed with another error message, and she stuffed the scroll back in her pocket. "They'll get it," she told herself. "Eventually."

They turned a corner, and about fifteen feet away the path forked. One side ran for a while until it hit a dead end, while the other... it was a flight of steps, only it twisted somehow so that the top stairs were upside-down. Only when Ruby climbed them, they were straight all along and it was everything else that got all twisted, until she was standing on a perfectly good floor looking at a perfectly normal set of corridors and feeling vaguely nauseous. At least this was 'too much cotton candy before the teacups' kind of nauseous, rather than 'a waterfall of rotten dirt and maybe-flesh-eating grave worms almost fell on my head' kind of nauseous. It almost felt like welcoming in a friend. Or maybe an acquaintance she didn't like very much.

Of course, then it happened again—only this time the hallway ended in a dead stop and a massive pit, which turned out to be more hallway pointing down. When Ruby put her hand over the edge to touch it, she found herself suddenly hanging by her fingertips from the ledge, with Blake standing sideways a few feet away from her.

If nothing else, that startled Blake back to herself. She went over more carefully than Ruby. First she put both arms down flat, so that when gravity changed on her she could just swing a leg over. Then they were both sitting on the floor, looking down into a massive chasm that they'd just been walking up, and Ruby was having a harder and harder time imagining what escaping from this place would even look like. Where were they, right now? Underground somewhere? Still in that mansion, with space all crumpled up like dirty laundry? Another dimension?

She wished she could ask Weiss.

They walked around like that for a while. There were more weird chasms. Once, Ruby put her hand on what she thought was the floor of another hallway, but it turned out that part was just a giant pit made to look like a corridor. After that, they were a lot more careful about where they were walking.

They went down a staircase and ended up on the ceiling of the corridor they'd just come from. They went straight and circled back around to the same hallway, under the same painting—this one of an ocean landscape and a ship, one that would have been pleasant if it weren't for a strange and unsettling ripple on the surface. Then they turned up. Ruby jumped and slapped at a carpeted ceiling and landed on her butt, with Blake standing upside-down from her perspective. By now she was almost getting used to the weird lurching feeling she got whenever the world spun around her.

"See?" She grinned. "I bet this thing is too dumb to try that. We can keep ahead of it."

Blake flinched, and the barking in the distance got louder. Ruby didn't try encouraging her like that again. She didn't have to, because seconds later they were both completely lost for words. They'd walked out onto a balcony, with a staircase leading up... and sideways, and another that went down and around and somehow spiraled in on itself so that someone walking down it would keep walking forever. There were more staircases, all of them bending in impossible ways, leading to hallways with vases perched on them so that Ruby couldn't tell if the gravity there was going up or down or sideways, or all three at once.

"Whoa." Ruby was pretty sure this was the coolest thing she'd ever seen. Not worth it, but still.

They picked the most normal-looking staircase. Unfortunately it did a sneaky sort of corkscrew as they were walking, and they ended up on the opposite side of the room from the place they were aiming for. There was an arched bridge, or a slide, or both. Halfway across, Ruby heard a series of squeaks and wing beats. She whirled around, then ducked down with a yelp. Bats fluttered overhead, some of them brushing past the arm she'd held over her face.

She wasn't too bothered, she'd loved bats ever since Uncle Qrow had told her they ate mosquitoes. Then she took her hand away for a second and got a glimpse of one of them. Its eyes were bright green.

The barking got louder, but Ruby hardly noticed. Blake had crumpled to the ground, both hands over her head. "It's okay!" Ruby put a hand on her arm. "They're gone."

"It isn't gone. It's never gone."

That gave her a chill. It, not they. The second Blake said it, she had trouble thinking of the bats as anything other than an extension of the monster. One and the same.

"Let's go." She gave Blake a tug. "I'd kinda rather not be out in the open like this."

"It doesn't matter."

"Well, there's no way to run in here. We can't even aim for where we want to go, we might loop back into its mouth by accident."

"Doesn't matter." Blake's shoulders slumped. She was half kneeling, half sitting on her heels, with both hands lying limp in her lap.

Ruby grit her teeth. Okay. Enough is enough.

"Blake. Get up." Blake twitched. "We have to keep going, okay? We have to. Yang and Weiss are waiting for us!" The little rush of anger she'd started with had already fizzled out. "It's not like you to give up like this," she finished, more pleading than scolding.

"Yes it is." Blake hunched in on herself, tucking both elbows against her sides.

"Please. Let's keep going a little longer. We just have to find a way out. Or... or if it catches up to us first, then we try to give back the amulet. And if we really need to, we can fight. Maybe if we kill it this place will go back to normal."

"There's no point!" Blake's head snapped around. Ruby was almost glad to be shouted at—there was a spark in her eyes, at least. She wasn't just stumbling around half dead. "We can't run, and we can't fight. It's useless."

"That's the monster messing with your head," Ruby insisted. "We can't know that until we try, right?"

"You saw it. It's not a Grimm, it's older. I think it's been here longer than any of us. People or Grimm."

Ruby couldn't say for sure where that feeling came from. Something about it evoked a primal sense of fear, the way a really powerful Grimm might, but there was also something... else. Maybe it was that she could sense the echo of its shape in old carvings she'd seen in museums, ancient depictions of gods whose names had been lost to time. Maybe it was just the way its eyes bugged out, the smell of its fur, the eerie barking she could hear even now. She didn't know they couldn't kill it, but she could feel it.

"Maybe," she admitted. "But we've got to try, at least. It could be the only reason no one's ever killed it is that no one ever thought they could." That was the worst thing—it was so easy to imagine lying down and letting it eat her.

"I can't." Blake's head fell forward, her hair hiding her face. "I'm just... I'm so tired."

"Blake..."

"Go on ahead. It's... maybe I'd slow it down."

"What?! No!"

"There's no point! I can't even get up, you... you can outrun it. Find the way back."

Ruby sat down in front of her, cross-legged, ignoring the barking. "That's dumb." Blake glanced up. The spark was gone, smothered. "I want to keep going because I think our lives are precious. That we're precious. You're worth fighting for, and... if I ran off like that, I wouldn't be me anymore. Then there'd really be no point.

"So... we can stay here if you want. This place is... it's weird and kind of disturbing, but it's pretty awesome too. It's... it's not a bad spot to..." She swallowed. "But I think we should keep going. Together. Maybe the odds are pretty small, but... I believe we can do it."

Blake looked up, then. "How do you do that?"

"Huh?"

"Just... keep on clinging to blind optimism."

Ruby smiled. "It's not blind, not really. I know things are bad, but... I don't know it's hopeless until I've tried, and I'm not going to try if I just think it's hopeless. So I don't."

"You're setting yourself up for disappointment."

"Sometimes it's worth being disappointed."

Blake tipped her head back, looking around at the room above them. It was really something—Ruby was pretty sure she saw a set of monkey bars overhead. Or maybe a rope bridge. "I don't think I can do that. It feels like lying to myself."

"I don't think it is. It's like... when somebody tells you you're okay, that nothing's gonna hurt you. They're not really saying they know that, nobody can ever know that. They're saying that they'll do everything they can to protect you. Even if it's hard, they won't stop trying."

Blake managed a weak smile. "You win. Remind to never debate philosophy with you."

"Cool." Ruby slipped her scroll out of her pocket.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing. Just turning it off."

She put it away, catching a last glimpse of the screen before it snapped shut.

— We love you and were sorry

They left the tangled room as soon as they could, vanishing back into the maze of hallways. Neither of them gave the chair stuck to the ceiling a second glance. Ruby paid more attention to a painting on the wall. Two lovers were stargazing, their arms intertwined, one leaning their head on the other's shoulder. Up above them, the night sky was dusted with silver stars and bright purple nebulae—except for one dark spot, just out of their line of sight.

The barking was closer, now. Much too close. Blake was still only walking, though the way her brow was furrowed made Ruby think that she was going as fast as she could. She wanted to burst apart again, carry them both away, but her semblance hadn't had enough time to recover. She couldn't do it more than once, so she'd better make it count.

Then she started hearing the scratching of its claws against the tile, and realized it was probably now or never. So she grabbed Blake and scattered them. She reformed seconds later feeling wobbly and spent. The barking was quieter, but not by much.

Blake broke into a sprint when it started howling. Ruby kept pace with her, even if her lungs were starting to burn, waiting for another passageway to split off this one. They could try and lead it down one hallway while they escaped in another direction, or find a corridor too narrow for it to turn around in and run past it. Something. But there was nothing, just rows of torches, a chair stuck to the ceiling, a painting of the night sky—

Ruby stopped dead and stared. It was the same painting, the exact same painting, except for the fact that the blank space in the stars was closer, and its shape was clearer—something humanoid with wings. Maybe there were two different copies? But no, she could remember looking at the back of the left figure's head, and the strokes that rendered it were exactly the same. Not different copies. Not different paintings.

"Ruby!" Blake was backing up, her eyes blown wide. "Come on!"

Shaking herself, she took off after her teammate. She could hear its claws scratching the floor again. The snarls. Even the ragged breathing in between barks, trails of slobber hitting the ground, and the faint whirring of wings.

Blake sped up, casting terrified glances over her shoulder. Ruby had a hard time paying attention to where she was going. She was watching the ceiling, waiting... waiting... and then it was there, the chair overhead, the painting of the night sky. She only glimpsed it as they blew past, but she could tell it was the same. Now the void was directly overhead, filling most of the sky, revealing clawed hands and a long, sinuous tail.

Ruby memorized the next three paintings, shuddering as she did so. A squidlike creature with draconic legs, a man with his chest cut open and splayed out as if for display, rows of sarcophagi with inhuman proportions.

The chair flashed by. The shadow in the sky was gone, now, and the cliff was empty. No sign of the lovers. Then the others flew by; squid, dead man, sarcophagi. Same order. None of the others had changed at all. It's looping.

One moment Blake was sprinting flat-out, hair streaming behind her. The next she was on the ground, slumped, propped up on one elbow. Drained. Ruby skidded to a halt. She didn't bother insisting they keep going, not when she was pretty sure they were running in circles.

Instead she dug into her pocket and produced the jade pendant. "We're sorry!" she called out, as the monster emerged from the shadows and into the light of one of the torches. She hurled it at the thing's feet. "We didn't know it was yours! We're giving it back!"

The mismatched fifth leg came down on the little amulet mid-stride. It shattered.

Ruby tried to haul Blake to her feet. She'd gone completely limp, and there was no way she could drag her away fast enough. So she drew Crescent Rose, aimed, and fired.

The bullet passed through the monster as if it were made of smoke. It lashed out with a foreleg and slammed her into a wall. Her aura shattered. She rolled sideways, barely escaping another slash. Then she retreated, limping and struggling for breath, until she was just in front of Blake.

When the long shadow of the beast fell over her, there wasn't any more question of fighting or killing it. There was nowhere to run. All hope was lost. Ruby Rose stood between it and her friend, brandishing her scythe in front of her, and wondering if this was how her mother had felt.

This one is based on a short story by H. P. Lovecraft called The Hound. It had a pretty cool monster—and let's be honest, no one reads Lovecraft for the protagonists.