A/N: a/n at the beginning this time, surprise! this chapter was mostly written in one day on, like, 26 hours of consecutive, sleepless consciousness, which i hope is abundantly clear. its been stupid fun to edit and add to, trippy shit is my lifeblood and capturing the various imagery and vibes and... *forewarnings* was an absolute doozy, so i hope yall like it as much as i do!
also, im so sorry for anyone who simply cannot vibe with KJV biblical prose, because it was a huge inspiration for all the text excerpts here and in future chapters. super fun, super tedious to write, but very rewarding. im pretty happy with how i got it now.
anyways, enjoy! see yall soon! 3!
And unto the Ecclesiarchy I grant mine iris, for whosoever knoweth true my hymns, and whosoever knoweth true the hymns of my Sister, knoweth true my love's extent, and its furthest reaches across Her verdant pastures, in regard of thy purest being.
For when such hand is upon thee, wherein that palm's crease wetteth mine iris, it is my Watch that judgeth thy purity. Thine accords, thy truths, thy falsehoods, I lay them bare. Fearest not for thy sanctity, when thy being is unfettered, for mine iris is upon thee, and I gaze only with love.
But when such hand is upon thee, wherein that palm's crease wetteth mine iris, and thine accords I lay bare, thou knowest that my gaze wilt hold scrutiny, for in such accords I dwell, and by such accords I filter the black sheep from the lambs.
For when thy soul is impure, and thy white fleece hast blackened, my gaze shalt scour thee, for it is my Watch that seeth for my Sister, and in Her innocence, it is She who cannot parse the wolf from the lamb.
Ecclesiastical Arches: Etchings of the Ribbed Vault, quote 6.
Weiss jerked herself up with a heavy gasp, though she wasn't sure what for.
"Weiss?" Ruby groaned from beside her, her bare shoulders peeking above their motley collection of warm bed-furs. The smith's arms were, in a word, glorious, and Weiss silently rejoiced when one such muscled limb threw itself over her chest, pushing her back down to the bed. "G'back t'sleep."
She let the warm appendage press her back into their too-plush-to-be-straw bed, but the allure of sleep didn't strike her like she expected. Ruby seemed to notice this, judging by the way she nuzzled into Weiss' collarbone.
"I may not be tired now," Weiss playfully mumbled into Ruby's hair, her voice husky, "but I'm sure you could think of a way to tire me out."
Ruby raised her head from Weiss' chest and gave her wife… a look. It was a look Weiss had seen almost daily for the past eleven years, but somehow it still seemed alien to Ruby's face. Her lips were quirked in a half-smirk, one scarred brow arched, and her half-lidded eyes screamed, 'darling, I love you, but you're an idiot'.
Ruby kissed her on the cheek, then sunk back against her wife's breastbone with a long, warm sigh. "We have four kids, Weiss. If we 'tired you out' any more, we'd have to get a bigger house."
It wasn't a revelation, it was something Weiss had been living with for five years now, but she suddenly seized against her skin, muscles nearly ripping off her bones. The smith's heavy body kept her nailed to the bed. "Four… children?"
"Yeah," Ruby giggled. "It's like you said."
"Like I said," Weiss repeated, her voice hollow. "What?"
"Magic can do strange things."
Her words tore the veil.
Weiss was a pilgrim in the wrong temple. Thoughts in the wrong brain. Alien, here. A house made of paper, a wife made of straw— an imitation-mind, labyrinthine paths of memory branded into leather, then stitched, nailed over the webbing of her brain.
The Ruby around her chest was a mannequin. She didn't have to check to know that the children were, too. It wouldn't matter if she did— the world was collapsing into flames, into ice, into sheer, featureless void, existence itself drawn and quartered by loping steeds made of fingers, eyes on eyes blinking away the tears of being, tracking down the face, fading into the skin, nothing at all.
Weiss floated in the abyss. Not the Chasm— she'd seen that before— but true absence, infinite darkness, an eternal plane of white, two states of contradictory emptiness that ripped her mind , non-being, no cold, no heat, no nothing, as far as the eye couldn't see. Just like she had delusionally fished in that Grimm's stomach for any vestige of hope, for anything she could wrap her hands around and get some semblance of stability, she blindly reached out into the void, desperate for an anchoring handhold.
Her hands found a panel, a handle, a door. Small, but nonetheless distinct from its surroundings of unending, imperceptible lack. She twisted, and it opened.
Light flooded her palanquin. Weiss squinted, but she could recall this place with her eyes closed. The tourney. Where it all began.
Looking into the gaggle of not-Rubys, spotting the girl was extremely easy. With a peasant's umber cloak mantled on her shoulders, the girl was near impossible to pick from a crowd; her eyes were drawn to the right place regardless, as if finding Ruby was simply some ingrained part of her being. Weiss smiled fondly and reached for her paramour.
The world stopped, a hundred breaths left to fester in their lungs as the crowd was forced apart, each person rigidly wrenched aside like some great, invisible puppet master had yanked their cords. Ruby's presence was dragged before Weiss until her face was all she could see, the girl drifted motionless across the square like a chess piece crossing its board. The smith's expression was impassive, a blank slate.
Weiss opened her mouth, but the images in Ruby's silver eyes summarily executed anything she could've voiced, her words tumbling like heads from the block, crowned with iron nails.
Reflected in the argent lens, Ruby turns a long piece of metal, then strikes it with her hammer; a beautiful longsword nears its completion, all done within the girl's large, prestigious smithy that sits right in Vale's heart. The smith admires her work, her face a smile of pure, unburdened content. Innocent, beautiful, unscarred by violence or fear or romance. A rose in bloom, with roots as deep-set as any oak or elm.
The silver shifts, melts, blackens. The world becomes an iron chalice, one filling with black ichor as Ruby dances along its rim. Grimm split and bleed before her swipes, her whole body becoming a maelstrom of red slashes that splits hide and bone, spills ichor, floods the world with the inky effluvium. Her face— what few glimpses could be caught between movements— is a marred tapestry of scarred tissue. A trio of gnarled claw-marks rake across her face, a deep gouge bites through her lip, and a patch of twisting flesh has burned a red crater through her cheek, baring her black teeth straight through. Her mouth is split in a psychotic rictus, but her eyes cold and dead. She breaks Grimm like eggs, casting their nightmarish vitae into the sacrificial receptacle.
Beneath the roiling inky black, a single spark of otherworldly silver glimmers, shimmers, shivers.
Her Knight kneels before her, and the black sea under their feet turns a sickening Ruby red. The smith, the killer, stares beyond Weiss, her dun metal eyes washed with eons of gore, regret, and terror. Weiss' gown drinks the blood, her shaking hand adorning each of the girl's shoulders with a fresh streak of scarlet from Myrtenaster's dripping blade. They remain posed in silence, rigid like the memorial statues of the Grand Crypt's halls, even as the tiles fall beneath their feet and cast them into hell.
They dance in the corpse-silent ballroom, gowns and coats swinging with each step, gore flying with each slash. Weiss takes her hand and twirls, Ruby takes her hand with a swirl of her blade. The red Knight prances to the foxtrot, Weiss arcs a heel through her blood. They tumble through their danse macabre, only she can't tell who's bearing the sickle.
Gone is the illusion of Ruby, but perfect silver remains sprawled across her sight. Weiss stares into the mirror. A ghoul stares back, its mummified lips cracking around its words. "Did you do the right thing?"
"I… I tried."
It grins at her lie. "Can you see what you've made them do?"
"I didn't make them," Weiss feebly argues, "they do it because they're my frie—"
The corpse's lips part into a full smile, bearing a hundred cracked teeth of pure black, knowing, knowing. "Can't you see what you've made her?"
The perfection she corrupted, the Ruby she killed, the world she deprived of its greatest creature. A single jagged line splits through the mirror, and still Weiss continues to vomit her repugnant lies. "She's her own person, she can make her own choices. She chose me."
"Chose. Just like she chose to flee here with you."
"S-she did!"
"Where else would she go?"
A spiderweb of cracks breaks the mirror, each shard reflecting Weiss' wide eyes back at her.
"Who are you, Weiss?"
"What?"
"What do you want?"
"I… I want…"
"You don't even know," the ghoul laughs, because it's right, because it knows her immutable truths. "You kill with conviction, but without purpose."
Weiss grabs the mirror's wretched frame, the wood pressing and pulsing against her fingers like all the flesh she hadn't the heart to split. "I haven't killed anyone!"
She lunged for Dove. He tried to guard himself with a raised hand, but he was only as competent as Ruby had proven thrice over. With his Aura already shattered, her rapier pierced easily through his palm, then his throat, her perfect blade finally sheathed in noble blood as it emerged from the back of his neck, his last words pouring down her fuller. He gurgled, twitching fingers feebly grasping at Myrtenaster.
"I— I didn't do that! I didn't!" Weiss screams, as if her shrill cry could banish her deepest desires. "This isn't real, that didn't happen!"
She drove her shortsword into Jacques, the man gulping an empty breath as she forced the air from his pierced lung. She wrenched the blade down with all her might, raking through the flesh and parting bone with snap after sickening snap. Jacques curled over his own back like a pathetic arachnid, vengeful tears pouring from his baleful, dying eyes. She laughed.
Weiss rips the shards from the mirror, shredding her guilty palms, but the glass instantly regrows and multiplies, magnifying the truth that she should've let come. "That's not what happened! He didn't die!"
One of the Schnee Reiters is thrown from his horse, his body impacting her icy stakes. Thankfully, his armor took the blow, though it was clearly worse for wear. The banded plate had snapped and buckled in all the worst places, and she abandoned him to focus on the fight.
"W-what? He— he's okay, see—"
He vomited a thick gout of blood, locked her gaze with pure fear, then gushed forth his final sanguine litany. Staring into her soul, she watched his eyes fade into death.
"T-that's… that's not…"
She didn't kill anyone, she didn't. It's the sap, trying to drive her mad!
"You killed him."
"You can't prove—"
Her reflection smiles wide. "What do I have to prove? I'm you."
Weiss blinks. Despite all her pride, despite all her time speaking and arguing and worming her way through life, she has nothing to say. The ghoul's smile drops, losing the schadenfreude of her misery, and its eyes become welcoming, loving, begging her to accept, to climb into its cracked glass facade and shear her black wool on its edges.
"Sure, the other two were a lie— a representation of what you wanted rather than what you did— but the last one is pure truth, you know that."
She did. After all, how could she lie to herself?
Blood seeped between the cracks in the mirror. It smelled like lavender, fire, roses, tobacco, mint, and pure, pure death. Enough to fill the Shepherd's pastures, enough to stretch past the Watcher's gaze, enough to send the herd tumbling through the Chasm like lemmings.
The mirror toppled across the void, its reflective shards paving a jagged path across the endless dark. Flanked only by darkness, with no hand to guide her, Weiss trekked it mindlessly, cutting her feet on each splinter of glass.
She followed the path. She cut her feet. She followed the path. Her feet bled. She followed the path. Cuts were on her feet. Red and red. She followed the path. She missed Carrots.
She dragged her soles along each glass edge, but the blood she painted over each shard could never repay the guilt she'd accrued. For ages she trudged, leaving a path of red until she fell upon a curve, a bend— no, a fork. No signs, of course.
The split path towered before her, staring, cleaving her down the middle. Sounds pushed against her ears from miles, lifetimes, eternities away, but she shut them out. There was only one side, the right side. The right thing to do: return to Vale, demand her reinstatement— begging was past her now. No good would come of it. Jacques would understand his own language, especially if he didn't want to get stabbed again. She imagined threats would do good to bargain Ruby's safety. Safety from her bloodsoaked hands. She wouldn't let the girl be ruined any more.
She didn't listen to the other side, and walked down the right path. She walked on broken glass, followed the path, her feet bled, she missed Carrots, tink tink went her heels on the glass, slick slick went the glass into her soles, she walked and walked, walked and walked, feet bleeding, following the path, missing Carrots, tink tink, slick slick, walk, walk, bleed, follow, Carrots, tink, slick, walk, walk, bleed, path, miss, walk, tink, slick, walk, path, slick, tink, follow, Carrots, path, slink, the, miss, bleed, path, slick, follow, feet, tink, path, walk, Carrots, sink.
The path wound ever on, ever in, ever out, feet bleeding, missing Carrots, following the path,shredding herself as the broken glass soaked red. Nothing left to reflect. Torn by the shards, a worthless pulp of red nothing.
It sighed, the sound reverberating off the shards of glassy blood. The false liturgy of forgiveness, the palace, the shards, the stones, lay just as distant as when she'd first embarked. Gone. Dust. The red circle it'd wound itself, the path it had dutifully followed, lay perfectly parallel to the contents within. Never touching, without intersection. A slug's ouroboros.
Tink, tink.
No glass, just the path. And a sound.
Tink, tink.
It stopped. Slick, slick, its body no longer went. It was tired.
Tink, tink.
Its path, its circle, lay bare to the sands of time, grain by grain draining its seconds into void. The red turned to brown, to crust, to dust, to the wind. It lay empty, in and out, without the with, it ate its tail.
Tink, tink.
It was a lie given flesh, a confession without deed, a sermon without gospel. Cold iron, born to rust.
Tink, tink.
Its eyes closed, the hammer sat in its hand.
Tink, tink.
The iron lay cold on its anvil, rusted and cracked.
Tink, tink.
It struck the iron. The iron did not mold, did not shape, for it was rusted and cracked and cold. The hammer's tempo rang.
Tink, tink.
It struck the iron. The iron did not mold, did not shape, for it was rusted and cracked and worthless. The hammer's tempo drummed the anvil, the vibrations unsettling the feeble, cold metal.
Tink, tink.
It struck the iron. Rusted and cracked, unmoldable, useless, old, the tempo split its ears, split the iron.
Tink, tink.
It struck the iron. The feeblest piece spited the hammer, daring to remain, but the tempo was unceasing, ringing without mercy.
Tink, tink.
It struck the iron. The rust flaked away. The cold became heat. The tempo stuttered.
T-tink.
Tink.