The child is a burden, the mountain of black and white before her rumbled, you should kill her and be done with it. The ground shook from each massive and lumbering step of the Goliath before them, and its grumblings shook the leaves of nearby trees with its bass.
She set her shoulders and bared her teeth at its rump, I will do no such thing. I will protect her.
A soft, almost amused, trumpeting of air from the beast before her. You can try, but she will die. All humans will.
A violent gust of wind buffeted her side as they broke out of the treeline, followed by a soft squeal of surprise from behind her as the gale slammed into Brunt. Pyrrha's head snapped around, one hand already reaching to firmly support the girl's back. Her palm was spread wide and flat, talons as far away from delicate flesh as they could be. It had been a position she'd found her hand adopting quickly over the past week.
Yellow eyes met crimson and verdant, and a smile split across the girl's face. Pyrrha returned it, relishing in the familiarity of the action as she did, before turning back to face the Goliath. It had turned, the left half of its scarred mask and trunk dancing with midday light that tore into her vision; crimson orbs at least a foot in circumference met her own. Then I will die with them.
It snorted, the breath from its snout sending an explosion of sand and loose soil up into the air, they will not abide you. Its head turned to face the glimmering sea of blue-green that roiled in the distance. So close, yet so far.
You are deceiving yourself if you think they would allow anything but your demise, it said, continuing its earth shaking plod. She stood there, crimson-green eyes watching the beast flatten adolescent dunes indiscriminately, leaving whole tracts of once thriving miniature ecosystems in pancake-esque tatters.
Pancakes.
A scene flashed before her eyes, forcing the world out of her vision as it slammed itself to the forefront of her mind. She was sitting in a massive hall of tastefully gray stone with pillars that stretched ever upwards to a ceiling she could not see.
Warm, early morning light gushed through lofty arched windows that shot up out of her vision, just like the columns. Each massive pane was separated by a kindly, black steel frame that accented the gray of the hall quite nicely. An infinite din of various voices sounding at different volumes about different things formed a surprisingly peaceful backdrop for the morning. It soothed her. She closed her eyes and sighed.
The sound of cafeteria plates slamming against wood forced her eyes to snap back open and instinctively flick to the source. It was Nora, her plate was so full of pancakes that their tower surpassed even her sitting head, so that only the familiar white gloves, tufts of orange hair, and occasional splashes of pink were even visible.
"Are you sure that's healthy, Nora?" Her voice was soft and whole, a far cry from the ragged rasps she was used to now.
Strands of vertically shaking ginger hair, bits of flying pancake, and the muffled sounds of vicious consumption were her only answer. Pyrrha and Jaune both glanced questioningly at Ren, but the boy in green refused to even acknowledge anything unusual about the activities of his partner.
She smiled and lifted her fork, ready to dig into the mountain of protein that she had heaped upon her plate, but she never did. A tiny force tugged at the crimson sash around her waist, so she turned, without thought or regards for her action, after all, she was among friends at Beacon. Out of the corners of her eyes she could see the source of the din around her, but they were muted, indistinct. Less human and more smoke with constantly shifting faces clouded in gray. Here and there were familiar, solid faces, lighthouses of certainty in an uncertain mind, but they were few and far between. Her gaze did not linger on them, nor did it focus on the swirling mist that made up the rest of the people around her, instead it locked onto the diminutive form of Brunt behind her.
One hand gripped the flaking black doll close to her breast while the other was wrapped in a fist that gripped crimson cloth between white knuckles. Her yellow eyes were wide and filled with concern that bordered on panic. Pyrrha couldn't speak. What was Brunt doing here? She had never gone to Beacon, had never even been inside Vale for all she knew.
She blinked, and the real world appeared. The graceful windows and protective walls of Beacon were replaced by rolling dunes covered in reeds and scraggly shrubs. The din of humanity around her was gone, replaced by the roar of whipping wind mixing with the whispers of rustling leaves and the distant crash of the waves. The smells of food were gone, saltiness, seaweed, and brisk air replacing them. The familiar bronze of her armor and tan of her arms was gone, and in its place was the plating of white and crimson that masked pure white skin lined with pitch black veins.
There wasn't even a second to process it, Beacon was gone the second she closed her eyes, and the world around her was simply...there.
She blinked twice more, mouth slightly agape and eyes wide with concern. She was jarred, confused, shocked, confounde-tug.
Pinpricks of sparkling verdant encircled by burning orbs of red focused, and, sure enough, there was Brunt. The exact same in every way from when she'd seen her, but not seen her, in Beacon just a moment ago.
Pyrrha's right hand glided to her waist, pitch black palm easily encompassing the entirety of the child's fist. She gave it a gentle squeeze partnered with the most reassuring smile she could muster.
"What's wrong?" Brunt's voice was soft, a whisper in the gale of nature around them, but her ears still caught it.
A shake of the head: nothing.
She felt the girl's grip tighten on her sash, saw the form of the doll shift closer to her chest, and noticed her lone ear twitch upwards.
Pyrrha breathed deeply, placing her left hand atop the girl's head, careful to avoid the torn remnants of her ear. The waves of brown flattened underneath her hand like the dunes underneath the Goliath, but Brunt did not flinch, instead her gaze only got more expectant.
"Memory," she spoke, throat constricting in pain and vocal chords growling in protest as she did.
Brunt said nothing, but her grip relaxed, her tiny fingers releasing the black fabric as her hand slid out from underneath Pyrrha's grip. She didn't quite smile, not really, but her eyes gave off a certain understanding that could've been mistaken for happiness.
The girl marched onwards, brown hair whipping in the rushing wind, and Pyrrha followed close behind, eyes scanning every dune again and again.
The night air was crisp and familiar, carrying that intimate yet unknown scent of darkness on the salty air. The wind still beat ceaselessly against her armor, switching sides at a moment's notice, and the sound of waves crashing against the shore still pounded against her ears. But everything seemed calmer, not quite dead, but not buzzing with life like it had been in the day. The insects and birds that her subconscious had registered were silent, their soothing cacophony replaced with silence broken only by the ground shaking footfalls of the Goliath and the occasional skittering of a crab. But, despite the darkness, she could actually see quite clearly.
That wasn't to say it was bright out, it was the deepest point of night, where only the stars and the shattered moon provided any light at all, but even then she could see everything somewhat plainly. And so, she assumed, given that the girl had yet to even trip, could Brunt.
The massive craters of sand and crushed plant life that the Goliath left behind helped make the journey easier, providing paths of alternating sides through the ever larger dunes of grass and sand. The, suffice to say, odd trio trudged along in silence, and not just because of the unrelenting wind.
The stars were an incredibly vibrant mix of colors that stretched in a horizontal ribbon across the night sky. Cloudy purples, electric pinks and blues, gentle reds that stretched on for what must've been hundreds or thousands of miles. Distant, almost spectral, clouds linked the ribbon together in a blossoming trail of gold, orange, green, and so much more. She didn't think she'd ever seen the stars so clearly; she loved it.
Brunt shuffled along barely five feet ahead of her, the tips of her shoes leaving shallow gouges smaller than the width of Pyrrha's wrist in the sand. Her right arm dangled limply at her side while the other managed to somehow still press the doll firmly against her stomach, but she teetered ever so slightly.
Pyrrha's head moved in a steady half-circle from left to right, eyes flicking across every cluster of shrubs and dune crest within fifty feet. She turned, walking backwards for a few steps as she did the same to the land they'd already passed before coming to a decision. She turned back around, slightly increasing her gait as she did; she was on Brunt in a second, leathery, midnight black forearms sliding gracefully behind her back and underneath her legs before lifting the girl up to her chest.
"Mm not tired," came the murmured protest, "I can keep going." The words were muffled by the unyielding bone plate that the girl somehow managed to cuddle into, and her yellow eyes were already half shut and glazed over from sleepiness. Pyrrha just smiled, her left hand grappling below before finally bringing up her onyx sash. She wrapped it delicately around the girl, taking extra care to place enough between her head and the plate for a comfortable pillow.
Something bloomed in her mind, but she wasn't sure where it came from. It was intimately familiar, even ingrained into her, but the thought refused to yield any secrets of its origin; it merely sat there in her mind, insistent on being used. And so, with a deep breath and an adjustment of the child leaning on her breast, she satisfied it.
She began to hum.
She might not have been able to sing, be it ever again or just for now, but she was confident this would do. The song was a soft one with slow, melancholic chords on a long beat that gave it a certain bittersweet peacefulness. She couldn't remember the words, or even what the song had been about, but she could remember the feelings associated with it: a deep love, a warm contentment, and a feeling of safety and serenity so overwhelming it almost made her laugh from sheer absurdity given the situation she was now in.
The halfhearted objections soon gave way to silence, followed in short order by tiny snores complemented by gentle fidgeting.
Pyrrha kept on humming though, both for Brunt's sake and for her own.
Pyrrha was laying down, bone plates breaking the web of roots that snaked across the surface of the dune with ease. Her head rested against the surprisingly soft mixture of roots, scrub, sand, and towering reeds that lined every dune in every direction except straight forward. Brunt was sleeping, brown hair a matted mess pressed against the ebony fabric of her sash while tiny fingers scrabbled gently against the ivory of her bone plates. The doll was pressed against her face, collecting new, drool-forged stains as marks of honor from its charge. She kicked and fidgeted, murmuring intense but incoherent words every now and then.
Pyrrha enjoyed it, the pressure on her chest, the warmth of her body, the comfort of just someone being nearby. Her left hand moved unconsciously to Brunt's head, one armored digit twirling the brown of her hair gently around her finger before unwinding it again. There was something so human about the contact that it forced all thoughts of corruption, darkness, and Grimmness from her mind. It made her feel a little more whole, a little more certain. She smiled.
The Goliath stood exactly where and how it had been for hours: massive and scar laced face locked in an unceasing staring contest with the oceanic horizon. Its armored tail flicked and stretched, breaking through the air with a giant whoosh each time, but otherwise it was silent and still. Frankly, she was impressed with how utterly stationary such a behemoth could be, she'd never really thought it possible.
Then again, there were a lot of things she never thought were possible that were rearing their heads right now.
Her eyes drifted across the multicolored sky, savoring every last drop of sparkling light. The clouds ran in their little race across quilt of nothingness, the wind blew across the surface of the beach, and the waves continued to pound again and again against the shore.
How are we going to cross the channel? She wasn't so scared of talking to the Goliath, not since Brunt came along; she had someone that didn't see her as a monster, or at least not a totally evil one. It made her more certain of her humanity, her identity.
You, it seemed to speak to the horizon, will cross by air, on the wings of what The Weak call a Nevermore. It should be here soon.
A Nevermore. She didn't think she'd ridden one before, and yet something scraped a knife down the blackboard of her mind at the thought, rousing it to an acute awareness of the emptiness of her concept at least wasn't unfamiliar to her.
Brunt stirred on her chest, murmuring something about a family she no longer had; Pyrrha's eyes slid downwards at the movement, then hardened slightly when she heard the words. They snapped back up to the sky as her mouth set in a determined line.
Brunt is coming with me.
The Goliath stirred for the first time in hours, snorting and flapping its massive ears as it shook its head in a manner that would've been comical were it on a human, but instead was only intimidating. It will die.
The absolute surety behind the statement had her tensing every muscle in her body as her mind screamed threat, but the Goliath made no move to attack, and nothing shot over the scrub covered dunes. Her fist dug into the sand, scraping it with sharpened bone as she mulled over the Goliath's "words". It was clear its "words" weren't a threat, it just saw them as statement of fact, and, in a way, maybe it was.
After all, nobody lives forever.
Her hand moved without thinking, wrapping around the center of the lump of black cloth topped with a tousled and greasy mane of brown curls that lay scattered on her chest in a river of brown. Her eyes found the moon.
Not while I draw breath.
A new star blossomed forty feet above the dunes and directly in front of her, a red dwarf fueled by centuries of nothing but hate, nothing but death, nothing but slaughter, all accented by an intelligence that was not only acutely aware of that, but enjoyed it. Your love for The Weak is strange, considering the hate they will and do lay upon you like a swarm of flies. They are a blight, an accident. A failure. They know nothing but destruction and do not even have the means to protect themselves. Its exhalation ripped through the air and across the sand in a clap of tearing wind and flourishing particles that landed with gentle plops upon the beach. But it matters not why or how you love them, they will all die. Its gaze shifted back to the horizon, disregarding the brilliant orange and purple of the sky that heralded the sun's imminent arrival.
Her glare never left the Goliath, but still, she was curious, intensely so. A gauntleted finger scraped softly across the armored surface of her chest, following the crimson trim to the ragged hole in her sternum. What are the Grimm then?
What are we, came the Goliath's response. Shoulders made up of thousands of pounds of solid muscle shifted and rolled, moving trunks of flesh, bone, sinew, and even more muscle as its stance shifted into something akin to a formal posture. We are the remnant, it said, pride dripping from its words like venom from a snake's fangs. We are the cure.
Her eyes flicked across the grass and sand around her, spying every crab that scurried hurriedly to and from their sandy lairs, watching every bird that dived after them in an attempt for an early morning meal, analyzing every fish that leapt out of a sea that glimmered and burned like a fire dust crystal. She saw every clam that burrowed deep into the dark, wet sand, saw every drop of foam that danced and died in tiny tide pools of rock that hummed with starfish, minnows, crabs, and every other form of sea life left behind by the receding water.
And then the form on her chest shifted, groaning softly as she pawed at the sash to shield her eyes from the light of the world. Pyrrha's eyes did not leave her.
I don't believe you, she thought.
Sleepy eyes with golden pupils opened reluctantly, seeing but not really processing anything. There was a flicker of something as her eyes saw the sea and the Goliath, but exactly what Pyrrha couldn't tell. Then those same yellow irises shifted up to her face, locking onto her ivory mask and skin, scanning every pore, black vein, line of crimson trim, everything that marked her as a monster in a second. And yet, she smiled.
"Goo' morning, Thetis." The words were slurred with sleep, and her yawn was muffled by the skin of her arm as tiny fists rubbed at her eyes.
I can't believe you.
The earsplitting cry of a Nevermore tore through the early morning peace of the world around her, shattering it in a second. Four eyes, one pair yellow, one pair green and red, joined the already massive crimson orbs of the Goliath as they locked onto the ever growing dot of blackness in the fiery sky.
A/N: First off: sorry about the wait, it was a lot longer than I, and you, anticipated. Basically what happened is the first week after I took a break and worked on some other stories that are yet to be published. Then the week after was midterms + lots of papers, so that dominated my week. Wanted to finish this chapter up over Fall Break, but had a few family emergencies/tragedies that prevented that. So I've been writing this since the beginning of this week in intermittent little spurts.
Primarily a character/setup chapter, and I'm sorry about that, but this is officially the last chapter on the continent of Sanus (Vale and Vacuo, thanks World of Remnant!); after this we will be on Mistral's continent (forget the name) and, well, so will most everyone else. Things might get a little hairy.
Also hot dayum dat RWBY 4 tho. Good as fuck fight and the entirety of the scene in the blacksmith's shop was fantastic, from the comedy of the hoodie reveal to the somber nature of the new armor. For those wondering, this fic takes place after the events of Volume 4 chronologically, seeing as the timeskip for it was 6-8 months after Vol. 3 and this fic takes place 12-20 months (I know I said one year, but that seems a little rushed in retrospect, may change that) after the Fall of Beacon. Just something to keep in mind in regards to the future pacing of this fic and stuff.
Anyway! The first chapter of my Ruby-Assassin-Canon-Divergent fic Sanguine is ready to be published and released this weekend, so be on the lookout for that if it sounds interesting to you; I'm very excited for it and love writing it.
Other story updates: Gonna be reforming the GoT crossover that I wrote pretty heavily, wrote four chapters, but wasn't satisfied with certain aspects of the story, so I'm gonna be revising that. Also wrote two chapters for a LotR crossover to test it out, feels pretty good so far, though I have no overarching story plan for that one. I'm also in the planning stages for a Dragon Age crossover if that sounds cool to any of y'all, after that I'll be working on a sci-fi, galaxy spanning, AU/Crossover (maybe/kinda) sorta deal. So, to sum up, four main stories: The Ivory Champion, Sanguine, Lyrium and Dust (working title), and Galactic Remnants (working title). Let me know what you guys think of all those ideas, I know it's a lot, but they all seem like so much fun to write!
That's all for today, y'all! Have a good one and stay safe out there!