So uh, yeah, a new fic. Whoopee. Meandering Arc will get its ending, eventually, kind of (if I literally just cannot do it, I'll post a broad outline). This is just the new one I promised, here early. Again, whoopee.
With that said, this fic will essentially be an anthology series with multiple 'storylines'. It's an AU that's essentially my take on Remnant.
I hope you enjoy.
Btw thank you to Witen for inspiration on the name
It has been 718 years since the Twin Gods fell to the world, their corpses fusing with the land. It has been 572 years since the Calamity Grimm appeared. It has been 283 years since the Xogenite church split between the New Age sects and the Traditionalists. It has been 86 years since the Xogenite Church and the People's Military overthrew the Mantlese Monarchy, replacing it with a new Atlesian technocracy. It has been 208 years since Vale's monarchy was overthrown and replaced with a democracy. It has been 553 years since Menagerie was founded. It has been 107 years since Vacuo's monarchy collapsed. It has been 4 years since the Argonian War began.
It has been five days since Ruby Rose began attending Beacon Academy.
The first note of its existence was when the Primal Collective fell from the sky with its twin, both of them made corpses. Upon impact, it was a single microbe of blood that had jumped from a bruised and cut mouth of the Eldritch Animal God, carried by tsunamis created by the impact. The next few thousand years would be filled with nothing but endless nothingness, as it didn't have enough matter to even think.
Slowly, but surely, it began to gain power.
The first thing it knew was consumption. It was hungry, but for what? It needed something, but what could it possibly require? What in the world was it thirsting for? The microbe grew to be more than a thousand times larger, but it was still nothing more than a small worm.
A worm that crawled throughout the world, feeling everything it had to offer yet having none of the intelligence to truly process it. It lived exceptionally long, feeling nothing as it existed within nature, the only movements being of animals.
Then, it felt the first pang of difference in hundreds of years when it felt emotion. It was a simple feeling that it would later learn was called annoyance by the sentients. It was like a drug that gave it new power. Like little vermin to food, it crawled towards the source of emotion and fed from it.
Now the size of a little rat, it curiously bit on the sentient. Suddenly, a flash of different emotions shot into the air and was eaten by it, filling it with new power. The sentient registered its existence and tried to swat at it, stomp at it, and kill it. Its malice was delicious as it scampered away, avoiding the sentient's strikes.
All new emotions were registered and consumed by it, like nectar from the mother, it was nourishing and delicious. It craved more and more of it. It began to circle the sentient, following it, testing it to see what would make it release more and more of its delicious emotions.
Fear and hate and disgust were so much more stronger, so much more delicious. It didn't even register to it when the sentient disappeared. It simply waited until another sentient was present and continued to move, using its small body to elicit a number of emotions.
It knew that the land it resided in was isolated and that it was the only one of its kind in the area. That meant that it owned the entire land. It was all its territory and any of its kind that came near it would be driven out. It didn't know how, it didn't even know how powerful others of its kind were, but it knew they existed and it knew that it didn't like them.
It continued to fester and annoy in the woods for what felt like eons upon eons, though it hadn't exactly developed a sense of time's passage yet.
It had barely even noticed when it evolved. For the sentients were becoming annoyed. There was a small little village and he had been pestering the farmers. They'd gotten annoyed and were hunting it. That malice, that desire, it was all it needed to become a small shadowy pup, hungry for the taste of flesh.
For in its vermin form, it knew that it tasted good.
It leapt onto its pursuers, using its claws that could tear through steel to rend their flesh. The first one died instantly, torn apart. Their death cry was more delicious than anything else it had eaten before. The fear and hate and anger and despair that the others felt was desert. It took its time killing the others, lessening the amount of force in their strikes in order to prolong their suffering and become more and more powerful.
One got away because of its hunger, but that was ok.
The Beowolf pup found a den and began to rest in it, waiting for another sentient to arrive. It would prowl around, marking the land in order to make it easier to navigate for itself. It used the birds and wolves and emotions of other animals to navigate in certain areas while using its marks in others.
It took up the habit of slaughtering cows. Not because it needed to eat or the death cry of the cows would satiate it, no, but because of the anger the farmers felt. It felt sadistic joy as it gleefully tore apart the carcasses as well, not even leaving a scrap for the farmers to take back. It would allow no silver lining to be.
The sentients decided not to hunt it. Their fear and reluctance made the fledgling Beowolf feel glee, feeding off of the fear in the air and occasionally slaughtering poor fools who intruded on its territory.
Soon enough, it earned a crown of bone adorned with red stripes. Though it could not think, it was a mark of achievement for it to survive so long.
Then came the first hunter. They wore armor and wielded weapons that reeked of the eternal enemy of it and its kind. The smell drove the Beowolf mad with rage as instinctive hate filled its every thought. Millions upon billions upon trillions of years of clashing and feuding was the fuel and the Beowolf ignored everything else in order to destroy the eternal enemy.
The hunter who went to its territory was confident. It radiated no fear. The fact infuriated it. It blamed the glowing god. On their body was the flesh and scales of the glowing god, forced to fit the sentient. In their hand was a destructive lance that had seared the flesh of it and its kin for eons untold in the eternities of strife and warfare that it and the collective suffered.
It attacked without hesitation.
For the first time in its life, it was fended off.
The Beowolf felt defeat for the first time. Its slashes, usually capable of cleaving through sentients like a hot knife through butter met its match against the armor of the glowing god. Its hide, normally untouchable by the pathetic pitchforks and makeshift spears that the sentients cobbled together, was pierced by the glowing lance that the DESPISED sentient wielded.
Bleeding and with claws dragging against the ground because the lance made cuts from its neck to its hip, the Beowolf retreated. It whimpered and whined as the sentient, no, the hunter chased it.
It scampered through the woods. The animals and birds had long since learned to fear it, getting out of the way wherever it went. It found its cave and curled up, hiding, feeling fear for the first time in its life. It waited and waited and waited, but the hunter would not leave. Even as the days passed and its wounds healed, the hunter would not leave. The Beowolf would not leave its den, too scared of the hunter to leave.
But as it stayed in its cave, whimpering as it felt the hunter's emotions getting closer and closer, it felt resentful. How dare this hunter do this to it!? How dare it!? And it was doing it using the flesh and scales of the despised glowing god! The hate of the Primal Collective clamored within it and it slowly slunk out of its cave.
It stalked the hunter. For if it could not beat it in straight combat, it would drive it mad. It destroyed branches. It trampled leaves. It slaughtered animals and left them in its path. It annihilated trees and let them fall in front of the hunter, narrowly avoiding killing it with such an indirect method. It wanted to do it personally.
The hunter felt no fear though. None whatsoever. Its shining armor was so great that it felt invincible in it. Its lance was so strong that it could fell an entire mile of trees with a single thrust. The Beowolf hated the hunter for its confidence. Its lack of fear was starving it, making it snarl and scowl in disgust.
It could've retreated, it could've terrorized the town and its sentients more. It could've decimated them, fed off their hate, and come back to destroy the hunter. It could've broken the hunter's body and dragged its bloody barely alive carcass to the destroyed town it failed to protect before letting its life slowly fade away.
But it didn't.
Because it hated the hunter so much that it couldn't conceive of any action besides killing it first.
The gallant hunter wandered the forest for many days and many nights, always on the cusp of finding the Beowolf, but it was far faster and far more nimble. It evaded capture and confrontation, always taunting the hunter with how close it had gotten. Cracks began to form in the hunter's confidence and frustration began to seep through. The hunter enjoyed how the once radiant perfection was now leaking irritation.
Though it was normally a mere pittance in comparison to the despair of the dying, coming from the hunter it was the most delicious and nourishing of meals.
The wolf began seeking new ways to frustrate it. It began stalking from afar, not even giving the hunter a single sight of it. It always remained out of view, only leaving markings that misled the hunter. It worked.
It worked more than intended. As the hunter thought that it was the one chasing the Beowolf, it grew cocky once more. Then, they needed to relieve themselves, to clean themselves in the river. So, confident in the fact that the Beowolf was away, they took off their armor and did their business.
While the hunter wasn't looking, the Beowolf dug underneath the protective shell of both the armor and the lance before poking its claws at the brains of both. It felt how it began to bubble and burst and left, leaving the hunter none the wiser to the Beowolf's sabotage.
The Beowolf began to tease the hunter. Though it radiated no hate or irritation as it began getting sights of it, that just made the anticipation greater. It made what would inevitably come all the more sweeter. Slowly, the Beowolf let the hunter close the distance, and when the hunter was so sure of their victory, they thrusted with their lance.
And it broke against the Beowolf's palm, crumpling like the fragile skeletons of sentients, as it had lost its luster after being tainted by the essence of the Primordial Collective.
The Beowolf began to torment the hunter, thoroughly enjoying its scream and pleas and cries. Then, when it was finally satisfied in its revenge, it grabbed its mangled and desecrated corpse and tossed it into the village. As it slipped back into the forest, the Beowolf enjoyed hearing the screams of the sentients in the village.
As it did, it grew more and more boney armor and long and longer limbs. Its claws and eyes became sharper. Its teeth, once mangled and uneven, was now a vicious army of sharp fangs ready to rend anything that came close to it.
And as it continued to terrorize, it knew that it had a name.
The Wolf of the Emerald Forest. The Big Bad Wolf. The Hound of the Woods. The Killer of a Thousand Hunters.
They were all its names.
Over the years, its presence would drive the village to relocate, too many casualties both hunter and sentient piling on to justify their presence. For a while, the Wolf enjoyed solitude, feeding off of the folk legends. It tormented anything that came to its woods and fended off any of its kin, for the forest was its territory. Children scarred by its bloodshed grew up to tell their children similar stories, of how the Big Bad Wolf would come and eat them if they wandered too far.
It rarely did so, sticking around the Emerald Forest, but it fed off the fear regardless.
Then, something happened that would make it howl in rage night after night in fury.
On the cliff looking above its forest was a monument to the antithesis of the Primal Collective, spit in the face of its animalistic glory. It was a large building, a church, a scar in the land created by the glowing god in order to mock its twin. The Wolf snarled and howled and threw every corpse it had onto the premises of that accursed place.
Then they began sending hunters. Hunters, armed with the flesh and scales and claws and eyes and other organs of the glowing god descended upon the Emerald Forest. All believed themselves so superior with their new and advanced toys, only to lose as the Wolf played on their confidence. It lured them and gave them a fighting chance, only to take their toys away to spit in the face of the glowing god they tore it from.
Every hunter sent after it was thrown back onto the church as a corpse.
So, even the church left it alone. Nobody messed with the Wolf of the Emerald Forest. For decades upon decades that was the case. Some foolish people tried, of course. They bore new toys that didn't irritate the wolf as much, but it killed them with just as much ease.
It was rare, though. Few were stupid enough to come into its woods.
That night was a rare highlight as a new sentient came in. They were so old that their eyes were capable of actually registering things like color and shape rather than clouds of emotion. They stalked the curious humans as they walked into the woods, shivering in the night.
The only light to illuminate them was the moon.
They were covered by a red cloak, a familiar color. Underneath they wore an excessive amount of black with red underneath. Their skin was pale, whether from cold or fright didn't matter to it. Their black hair had tangled and curls that they tugged at with their fingers.
But above all else, they radiated an emotion that the Wolf rarely saw at first from the hunters that came to confront it: Fear.
Oh fear. It was so utterly delicious. Not as great as despair, but it was a close second. Fear was felt every time it threw the mauled body of the foolish hunters onto the campus of foolish sentients clinging to the corpse of the glowing god. Fear was felt every time their confidence was broken, a hunter's leg rendered a bloody paste, forcing them to limp through the forest still thinking they had a chance as the Wolf slowly trailed after them, its claws digging into the wood in satisfaction for a good meal.
It began to observe the curious sentient. It was barely even worthy of being called a hunter!
"Why did I do this? Why am I doing this, what am I doing, why am I doing?" The sentient was hyperventilating, radiating panic and fear and all sorts of negative emotions that were an absolute delight. The Wolf hadn't even done anything yet! "Great job Ruby! You got into Beacon Academy! Your dream school! You get a scholarship because we can't afford anything else! And what happens on your first day? Your baby gets launched into the Emerald Forest! Great, just great!" The sentient's panic was amusing, so the Wolf let it be for a while, it let them stew in their emotion.
"And of course it had to be that stupid jerk who did it!" It let out a long groan and stomped the ground. "Of course he would 'mix up the lockers' and that it 'wasn't his fault that I didn't stop him'. He probably just wants to prank me or something." It changed its voice in a mocking manner, its irritation and hatred amplified. "And now I'm here! On my first day of school! Instead of doing something awesome like modifying my baby, I'm stuck here! In the Emerald Forest! Walking alone!" It continued to gripe and gripe and rant. The taste was beginning to get a bit samey.
"Ugh, and now I'm getting the jitters. I wonder what dad's doing. I wonder what Uncle Qrow's doing. I wonder what Yang's-" That was enough. Though it was a new taste, the Wolf had gotten more than enough of it to say that it was tired of it.
So, it rustled the bushes and left to stalk the sentient from a different spot.
It had the intended effect. The sentient, who obviously didn't believe that bushes could move on their own, whipped around, their road cloak flapping with the motion and their hair whipping their own face. They frantically stared at the bush in question, their heartbeat rising, a familiar and tasty fear jumping off of them.
It was delicious. It had been quite some time since the last person tried to hunt it.
"I-it was nothing." The sentient quickly rationalized the phenomena, a much preferable alternative to the very real fact that the Wolf was present and stalking them. They continued to walk, though they sped their pace up a little bit out of fear.
The Wolf retreated, but kept its keen eyes on the sentient. After gaining enough distance, it looked up to the full and broken moon, a reminder of how much stronger it could be and how much more grand the Primal Collective used to be, and howled. It could sense a great many opening their eyes in fear, but the one closest to them was the most delicious one of all. As they crept closer, their sensitive ears could pick up on what they were saying.
"W-what was that?" They were jittering. They could've passed off the bush rustling, but the howl of the wolf wasn't something one could just ignore. "I-it was probably just some local wolves. Y-yeah, totally, totally." They gulped. "Totally." They continued to walk forward, turning around at the slightest sound.
The Wolf abstained from indulging too much in tormenting them. They couldn't outright confirm to the sentient that it existed. No, it needed to milk that disbelief as much as possible before making itself known.
It pressed its lips and began to whistle. Occasionally, the sentient's fear would spike up as a distant whistling could be heard in varying directions. The sentient didn't know where it was coming from, but it knew that it was coming from somewhere. Bushes were trampled, trees were marked, and only once would the Wolf let the sentient get a brief glimpse of its bright yellow eyes.
The sentient was practically dripping with fear now.
Finally bored, it went in to raise the stakes. Suddenly, with feet as quiet as the vermin it once was, it appeared behind the sentient. It noticed its presence as the moon's light was blocked out, a looming shadow behind it. Slowly, they turned around, their face contorted into a grimace, their voice failing them. But the Wolf spoke for the sentient.
"Hello." In a guttural and gravelly voice, it spoke, and bore all of its canines for the sentient. The single word, the breath of which blew into the sentient's face and caused their eyes to water, caused them to become a beacon of fear. If the other of its kin didn't know to avoid its territory, then they would've swarmed the sentient in order to kill it. "Die."
Its claws came down like a lightning bolt, but the sentient was fast. It had to give it credit for how their legs moved. It couldn't even smell any of those disgusting toys from the glowing god, not even the offshoots that were less irritating to the nose. Their hands obviously worked often with those toys, but there was nothing on the sentient themselves.
Their claw only ripped through the end of the sentient's red cloak. Dark and deep chuckles erupted from the Wolf's maw.
"So be it." It then began to go forward. No matter how much the sentient ran, it would never be free.
As soon as the sentient's fear began abating, as they thought in hysteric relief that they had somehow outrun the Wolf, it burst forward in a frenzy of furious speed. It didn't bother with stealth and the sentient felt another spike of fear as they sought to outrun it for some ludicrous reason. Did they not know that there was no fleeing from the Wolf? Did they not listen to the legends and myths their parents told them before going to bed? Did they not heed the warnings of the man with no arms or legs who told of how they lost it all when they went into the forest?
The Wolf took joy in always appearing distant to the sentient before catching up in an instance, making a slightly inaccurate strike to make them feel more fear.
Its chuckles echoed through the woods. Its whistle became a song that instilled hysteria and maddening paranoia. The sentient thought to hide from it, but one could not hide from the Wolf. Its eyes could spot a single bird from across the entire forest. Its ears could hear a whisper from the cliff. It would not be beaten in its perception.
But it played along. After all, what use was there in gorging oneself if there was not a break for contrast's sake. So, as the sentient hid poorly in a bush, failing to notice how an inch of fabric revealed their hiding spot, it inched closer and closer. It sniffed the air and made their fear ever more potent as it came closer with every sniff.
Inch after inch, it could feel the sweat growing.
Then, it backed off. The fear disappeared as the human foolishly thought that it would simply ignore it.
"I see you." In an instant, its mouth was to the sentient's face, and its words made their fear absolutely skyrocket.
They burst out of the bush, a trail of roses that got caught on the fabric of their clothes following after them. The Wolf snickered as it followed.
The animals parted ways, knowing that when the Wolf went on its hunts that it would kill animals to taunt the sentients. It licked its lips as the sentient ran up a hill, for once leaving its line of sight. They sharpened their claws on jagged rocks as they ran by, finally ready to enjoy the climax as they ended the sentient's life.
As soon as they jumped out of the woods, a Caliber 20 Anti-Flesh rifle round impacted its arm. The bone armor protected it, but there were cracks. The knockback was so great that it was shoved back into the woods. It was dazed, having not felt the impact of an attack in so long.
"G-gah." The sentient was breathing heavily, but their fear was slowly abating. "I wish I had Anti-Armor. Well, beggars can't be choosers." They laughed awkwardly as they pulled back the bolt on their crimson red toy. If there was anything the Wolf hated more than humans using body parts taken straight from the glowing god's corpse, it was humans making more tech. The corpse of their eternal enemy was enough, there didn't need to be more things based off of it, even if the smell wasn't as bad.
So it snarled, only to retreat after well placed round after well placed round tried to destroy its body.
"Ok, I have the high ground." Another round of awkward chuckles. Forced attempts at levity to negate the horrible situation they were in.
The Wolf fought back another snarl, knowing that any noise it made would result in it being shot.
A bird, awoken by the noise, flew upwards to flee. On instinct, the sentient aimed and fired, reducing the little bird to nothing more than gibbs.
"Oh my god I'm so sorry!" In despair that was somehow amusing and pathetic, the sentient cried out for the small and insignificant avian.
The Wolf had an idea. Silently, it began to kill the sleeping animals who didn't have the wisdom to wake up and flee from the Wolf. Then, it began throwing them at the Sentient. They reacted predictably, firing at the incoming object. But their bullets were so powerful that instead, they popped the animals like balloons, causing gore and blood to splash onto them.
More and more things were thrown up into the air and then at the sentient. They couldn't take risks and had no sense of conserving their shots, so they fired with reckless and paranoid abandon as every single new thing on their periphery caused a spike of fear.
Suddenly, the Wolf uprooted shrubs, avoiding the rifle fire, and threw them at the Sentient. They exploded predictably, but following the greenery was the Wolf, who avoided the piercing shots and used them as cover.
Their claws were cocked back and ready to swipe through the pathetic sentient, ready to rend it in two before sending its body back to the church.
Only for their toy, which did look awfully different from the toys of that type that the hunters often employed, to fold out to have a claw kind of like its own, except it was illuminated with the power of the hated glowing god.
They could only turn in the air as the gun was fired and the blade was swung. Due to their cautious measures, the Wolf only lost a single arm, the weakened arm. But it was still a monumental loss. Even the first hunter didn't take any of its limbs. This one had.
Before it even fell to the ground, it was vaporized and the dust was absorbed by the blade.
They were still radiating so much fear as well! But there was something else, something different, something incomprehensibly maddening to the Wolf who had been blemished. It roared and tried to swing with its other arm, but had enough sense to fall back to dodge another deadly swing.
"Hmmm, works better than I thought." The sentient-no-the hunter spoke. "I'm not letting you get away. I'm not letting you hurt anyone else!" The Wolf did not care for the hunter's proclamation as it fled scared shitless of the hunter. Not once in its hundreds of years of existence had it ever been defiled like that, had a part of itself severed. It would retreat and recover.
It felt the fearful but frightening presence suddenly coming much closer.
The Wolf ducked rapidly to avoid a sudden strike aiming for its head.
"Should've gone for the midsection." The hunter casually remarked despite the fact they were so very scared. They had been using the knockback of their toy to propel them forwards at speeds the Wolf could only get after a few seconds of accelerating.
The Wolf immediately fled, dodging bullets as the hunter began to try and snipe it. Suddenly, the gun jammed, and no more bullets could be fired.
"I should've never let you out of my sight." The hunter groaned and the Wolf felt a sense of elation. Finally! It was safe! Without any of those blasted bullets, the hunter couldn't chase after it!
The hunter immediately proved the Wolf wrong. They pressed a button with their crest painted on it and felt themselves change. Suddenly, the energy from the arm, collected from hundreds of years of slaughter, which itself had been collected by the hunter's toy, was being processed. Then, a sea of red engulfed the hunter, an energy so powerful that the old crust was constantly cracking, falling to the floor as bright red petals.
As they ran forward, they appeared so fast that it was as if they were a red line. As they ran, more and more flakes of red energy split off from their body, becoming glowing red petals that formed a carpet of sorts that slowly began to evaporate.
In a second, the blade had bisected the Wolf of the Emerald Forest, and Ruby Rose exited the transformation of Crescent Rose's second Semblance Drive: Petal Burst.
"Whew! I haven't had that much power in so long!" Ruby smiled, her fear disappearing as the fight was over. The Wolf, after such a long life enjoying tormenting the lives of others, felt despair as its consciousness slowly faded away from existence. "Maybe I should ask the teacher what that was." Ruby Rose, student of the New Age Beacon Academy, which also hosted a Traditionalist church, sighed as she had unknowingly defeated the terror that was the Wolf of the Emerald Forest. "Well, I gotta go get sleep." She yawned and, with her baby in hand, began walking back to her dorm.
Bit short. That's why I'm not releasing it on its own.
I hope you liked this little thing.
Ok, a rule I'll try to keep for this fic is that no character will have two chapters in the same row. With that in mind, onto the next one.