Chapter 1 - Falling

"And you... should have never been born."

Those words were the last thing Ruby heard before falling into the void. She barely got a glimpse of what was happening around her in those fleeting moments.
...Her name shouted by her friends...
...Being held by Blake, before abruptly losing that connection and resuming her descend to an unknown fate...

Several conflicting feelings were swirling around in her head.

Pain.
For learning her mother's fate. For losing all those people that she was supposed to protect and save. For what happened to Pyrrha. For what happened to Yang...

Despair.
For not being able to overcome all these obstacles that, ever since the Fall of Beacon, seemingly grew bigger and bigger.

Anger.
Towards Cinder and her allies. Towards Ironwood for escalating the situation up to this point. Towards Salem. And towards herself for not being able to stop them.

Hope.
That Jaune, Oscar and the others will be able to bring all those people to safety on Vacuo, alert the rest of Remnant and band together against Salem.

Unsurprisingly, especially for those who knew her, was that never once, even in that final fall towards her impending demise, fear for her own well being was given birth from this whirlwind of emotions and thoughts.

In the end a final question sprung into her mind before disappearing.

"Have I done enough?"

⁓

For an everlasting instant, the being known as Ruby was free from the restraints of matter, a little soul without body.
Around her, an ocean of inconceivable colors and impossible sounds, dark as a supernova and bright as the abyss between stars.
She believed to be alone, but she saw, with eyes that didn't exist, unfathomable shades and outlines, titanic and microscopic, far beyond and next to her, some of which were closing in like bloodthirsty Beowolves, ready to gorge on this simpler, smaller soul.
She had no body to move, no mouth to scream for help, and all she seemingly could do was to wait for the inevitable.
Then, all the people she cared about resurfaced in her mind.
Her mother. Her father. Uncle Qrow.
Yang. Weiss. Blake.
Jaune. Ren. Nora.
Pyrrha.
Penny.
And many other she met during her life. In a way, they were still beside her, even now and here. And they would soon be gone if she let these entities devour her.
She could not allow that to happen.
Not anymore.
Never again.

And with that. a light inside her shone brighly, and the phantoms around her dissolved into nothing, leaving no trace that they were even there.

There was stillness following the light. She perceived the leviathans in the distance, those inscrutable colossal silhouettes made of thoughts and feeling, infinitely more hungry than the previous apparitions, but seemingly oblivious of such a tiny and inconsequential soul like hers.

All except one.

The being felt as indecipherable as the others, barring what looked like eyes staring right at her. Two golden eyes, gazing over the small soul and her silver eyes.
A golden light erupted from those eyes, and the soul felt her previous pain and sorrow washing away, bringing her momentary peace amidst an ocean of madness.

All of this happened in a second lasting aeons and an eternity as long as an instant.

And when it was over, there was darkness.

⁓

Ruby slowly opened her eyes, and she was greeted by a bright light that made her immediately regret what she did.
A deep breath was taken by the girl, and the sudden influx of dust in her nostrils almost made her choke. Coughing and with her eyes still adjusting from the abrupt change in brightness, she began to wonder wher-

...She and her friends escorting the people of Atlas and Mantle to Vacuo through the portals made by Ambrosius...
...Cinder and Neo's unexpected attack...
...Yang.

"You should have never been born".

"Do not fall"

Ruby jolt awake and immediately stood into the familiar combat stance that was ingrained in her mind with all those years of training, reflexively reaching for a Crescent Rose that wasn't there. The failed lunge for her weapon made her remember what happened to it, which deepened her sense of loss.
Trying to compose herself, she relaxed slightly after realizing she wasn't in immediate danger and began to process her situation.
She had fallen off the magical roads linking the portals in Ambrosius' dimension. She believed that would be the death of her. Instead she found herself...

"Where am I?"

She looked around and found only barren wasteland stretching seemingly to no end, with a solitary rock formation several dozens metres high, located to her left.
Was this the afterlife? If so, it was greatly disappointing...
...Was she actually dead?

She pinched herself on the cheek hard enough to make a small squeal. Her face quickly reddened from the shame of such display, before remembering that she was seemingly alone in the middle of nowhere.

"Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not dead, at least." she said while laughing nervously at her own silly action. "Though, that still leaves the question of where I am."

Was she on Vacuo? She didn't enter one of the portals leading to said Kingdom, though. Plus, she was pretty sure that Vacuo was a different kind of arid and dry.
More sand and nothingness, instead of barren rocky ground and nothingness.

Some other part of Remnant, perhaps? Possible, albeit difficult to determine where exactly, with what little she was seeing.

While pondering all this, a thought occurred to the redhead's mind: if she wasn't dead but teleported somewhere, maybe some of the people that had fallen during Cinder's attack might be nearby? Maybe Blake and Yang too?

"YANG!"
"BLAKE!"
"ANYONE!"

The only answer she received was the slow whisper of the wind.

"Alright, I'm not gonna solve anything by staying here." She then looked at the lone butte to her left.

"Well, they always say to go for the high ground." Ruby said smirking as she started walking towards it.
After a couple of minutes, she reached its base and, with a jump, she let her Semblance do the rest. With her body dematerializing into a slipstream of petals thanks to the power of her soul, she reached the top in less than a second, seemingly teleporting from an outside viewer.
On the top of the small hill, she gazed at the surrounding landscape.
The impression she got compared to her previous look didn't improve by much: to the direction she came from the wasteland stretched to the horizon for hundreds of kilometres, with no visible point of interest, be it natural or man-made.
On the opposite side, things were a bit different: after a couple of kilometres she noticed that the terrain changed into a mixture of hills and canyons, going on and on until, at the edge of her vision, she could make out the shapes of what looked like a vast mountain range, its peaks covered by stormy clouds.
The stream of thoughts this view generated, regarding her next course of action, was quickly interrupted by several distinctive noises coming from one of the canyons in the distance.

Guttural howls and roars.

Cracking sounds, like the snapping of a twig.

Loud gunshots, coming from what Ruby reasoned to be some large-caliber machine gun.

A fight was clearly going on in that direction. Perhaps some people were being attacked by a pack of Grimm. The roars didn't sound like any Grimm she had ever heard, but Remnant was vast and many new unknown forms of those monsters were constantly discovered.

For a single moment, the notion that she was currently weaponless sprung into her mind. But before it was fully processed, Ruby realized that she was already moving towards the site of the conflict. Because in the end, it didn't matter the fact that she was without a weapon. Or that she was alone, without her friends, in a place that she didn't know.

She was an Huntress. Even after all she had been through, her greatest desire was still to protect and fight for those who were in peril. And in that moment, within her reach, people were in danger.

Nothing else mattered.