Chapter 1
Return from Azeroth
Laying on the ground, and bleeding from a thousand wounds, the Rusted Paladin knew that he was going to die.
Yet even in this state he had to press on. Lifting his blade once again to defend against his foe's incoming attack Jaune Arc felt the mythril wrought steel of Crocea Mors clashing against the infernal glavies of Illidan. The paladin's objective wasn't victory. He was merely a sacrifice, an obstacle to buy precious seconds for the Lich King to unseal the doors leading to Icecrown Citadel. His demonic foe knew this, its face betraying anger and frustration after every blow that was countered by the enemy.
"Why are you still fighting for him?" -asked Illidan as he was still trying to get through his defence- "Friendship? The Arthas you knew is gone! Ner'zul made sure of that! Let me to him and I'll avenge his death for you!"
Feeling his life slowly draining away Jaune had only answered with silence. Neglecting the defensive properties of his Aura, he chose to rely on its healing and enhancing effects instead. He knew of Illidan's strength, and knew that parrying his blows would be more effective than taking them head on. But what he had said about Arthas….
The paladin had already knew it. He saw first hand what monster his once best friend became, but knowing that the Legion wouldn't invade Azeroth as long as the Lich King had still power here… really it was the lesser of two evils.
Blow after blow came upon the wounded warrior but he somehow had managed to fend them off. That is until Jaune had suddenly heard a sickening crack, followed by a sharp pain running through his sword-arm. It seemed that his opponent had finally managed to land a lucky blow, bypassing his defences and bringing down the warglaives with such power that it had managed to break his arm. It was only thanks to his armour absorbing the brunt of it that they weren't outright cut off.
Knowing that he had no way of defending himself the boy shifted tactics and gathered what precious Aura had remained in him, just in time to use it to block one last attack from his foe.
To Illidan's credit - thought the Rusted Paladin- the demon was smart enough to avoid the classic mistake of every comic book villain: gloating over his defeated enemy. Not as if anyone would come to his rescue, but with a timed objective like that every second had counted.
Comic books. Why exactly did he remember them now? After all there were other, more important things in his life. Both this and the previous one. His family, from whom he ran away. Team JNPR, without him leaderless and broken. Uther, his mentor who was surely disappointed in him. Stratholme, which he had helped to burn. The man at Northrend who died in the former prince's mad quest for vengeance. And finally Arthas.
His thoughts were interrupted by another hit to his body. With one last flicker, his aura shattered, leaving him defenceless, ready for his enemy"s final strike.
He knew from the beginning that his prince was making a giant mistake. Yet he had followed him in the hopes of at least controlling the damage he had caused. That wasn't enough. It was never going to work. He had only realised it when it was too late.
It was because of this that he had left him at the frozen shores after the killing of Mal'Ganis. Uther, the stand up man he is, welcomed Jaune back to the order, and after serving a long penance paroled him. Yet that did nothing to extinguish the young man's guilt. Maybe it was that guilt that drove him towards vengeance when his mentor was slain, unknowingly spending the last days of his life obsessively hunting the Lich King.
In a sense he had become just like his foe, for whom now he was ready to sacrifice his life. But at least it would mean that he would die as himself, and not as a pawn of some higher power.
He was ready to embrace death. By now the seal on the Citadel must have been lifted. He couldn' keep his eyes open any longer. Darkness fell over him as he had waited for his death. And waited…. And waited…. He might have waited for eternity if not for the sudden heat assaulting him from every direction. Baffled at first, Jaune opened his eyes only to see…. nothing. No blood red snow or piled up corpses, and no Illidan ready to deliver the final strike.
Instead he was floating in the middle of a great radiance that had seemed to envelop.. well everything, and for a moment the paladin thought that it would burn him alive. His fear proved unfounded however, and after a few seconds of basking in the power that had radiated from all around him, the boy felt a sense of calm as if some higher entity had washed away not just his physical pain but also soothed his mind, calming the raging ocean of emotions inside him.
And while the painful memories of the past years had still lived inside him, suddenly they had become less burdensome. For the first time since he had arrived to Azeroth, Jaune was now able to think with a clear mind.
As if the world could sense his thoughts, the world around him suddenly began moving. Small particles of light -as if they were fireflies in the evening- had begun excitedly moving around, all of them rushing towards each other, forming clumps of concentrated radiance at seemingly random places, while the area around them had gradually darkened until they became nothing but void.
The Rusted Paladin blinked for a moment, time enough for the Avatar Of Light to fully manifest itself before him. It was a breathtaking moment, one that he could not enjoy for long as the Avatar had began to speak to him:
"Jauna Arc. My faithful paladin. I've been waiting for you. Do not fear as I came to you with a mission, child of Remnant."
The boy was caught off-guard by this statement. It wasn't that the Light knew of him being from another world, or that it knew Remnant. No. It was that it had spoken to him. While paladins wielded its power and fought in its name, it had never spoken to them. Or at least Jaune was pretty sure that it never did. And never once they did receive a mission from it. Even for them it was as if a lowly foot soldier had got their orders from the King personally - a highly unlikely event with no recorded precedent.
Yet here he was, hearing the words directly from him. It had seemed that the Avatar had read his thoughts, because the moment he had overcome his shock, it had continued:
"Darkness approaches the land you once called home. The natural order will soon be out of balance. The champion has failed, and the Grimm Witch's grip gets stronger day by day. Her minions had already stolen power not belonging to them, and they seek to gather more."
That was new information for Jaune. He could understand the part about the darkness, yet the rest of the sentence didn't make any sense to him.
"What Grimm Witch? - slipped the question from his mouth - "And what power?"
"Parts of a terrible truth, hidden by the Guardian of Remnant. Keeping the people in blissful ignorance. But the consequences of his actions will come back to haunt him. It is for that reason that I will show it to you."
Before he could raise any objections, the boy had suddenly felt as if he was struck by lightning. His head was aching with terrible pain, while visions of a distant past played before his eyes.
A kingdom long gone. A beautiful princess trapped in a tower. A handsome boy coming to her rescue. A great plague ravaging across the land. A woman kneeling before brother gods of Light and Dark.
Disconnected snippets, yet somehow each of them telling a cohesive tale. A tale about tyranny and love, about a conflict between light and dark, about a pair of lovers turning into bitter enemies.
The reel went on for some time, covering a thousand years worth of events in but mere minutes. By the end Jaune had understood everything. Looking up to the Light once again, he knew what he had to do.
Stretching out his hands he grasped the darkness, only for it to become substance. A warm steel handle, - connected to a hilt holding a once broken blade made whole again - had begun to materialise in his hand. It took less than a minute for the process to be complete, and after inspecting it thoroughly and finding nothing wrong with it he put it inside its hilt/shield.
Reuniting the two weapons his confidence had surged once again,and circulating it through his entire body he closed his eyes, and gave himself to the void.
—-
Pyrrha Nikos was in a terrible state.
Ever since they had returned from the disastrous journey that was Forever Fall, the champion was unable to sleep. It had been days, yet to her it seemed like an eternity since Jaune became comatose, which was strange because according to the doctor besides a few broken bones and some lacerations, the leader of team JNPR was otherwise fine.
Sitting beside him in Beacon's infirmary she had a lot of time to think. When she had first talked with him the boy seemed clumsy, yet determined. Because of this at first she was shocked when the knight wannabe was chosen as their leader, yet as time went by she came to not just accept it, but also see why Ozpin had put him in charge. She saw their leader's small but steady growth and came to cherish every bit of progress he had made.
Then came the trip to Forever Fall. At the time she was confused at Arc's actions, but later realised that it was because of Cardin blackmailing the boy to participate in his idea of a 'prank'. A prank which had almost immediately backfired on him in the form of an Ursa, and it was only thanks to Jaune's intervention that the members of CRDL could return in one piece.
The moment Pyrrha discovered this, anger began to swell up in her chest. At first she had thought it was because Jaune was such a good friend of hers, but after a match against Cardin and his buddies - during which she accidentally overshot and sent them to the infirmary - she began to realise that what he felt had gone beyond simple friendship. At first she had trouble admitting it, but soon she was ready to face the truth: she was in love with the young knight.
The revelation had greatly upset her. For the rest of the week she was unable to concentrate on her studies, spacing out in the middle of class or during combat. It came to a point where Miss Goodwitch had forbidden her from fighting, because she would often fail to notice that her opponent's aura was in the red, or other times was caught staring into the void long after the start of the match. There were also talks of her going to a psychiatrist (suggested primarily by Ozpin) but so far nothing came of the arrangement. Besides, if she was away playing twenty questions in some dark office, she might miss Jaune's awakening.
The rest of her team had quickly taken notice of the toll their leader's coma put on her, and it wasn't long before they had also figured it out . Of course rumours quickly spread, and by Friday everyone was talking about the both of them. Some of them even suggested that Jaune did really die, and his vengeful spirit had possessed the Invincible Girl in order to punish his killers.
Even team team RWBY - who usually stayed out of nonsense like this - came to visit their room every day.
The events must have affected them too, because the usually loud group was awfully quiet, a very unusual thing from them. Of course Yang being Yang hasn't missed the chance to make some innuendo filled comments about the two of them, which caused the champion a great deal of embarrassment. She was quickly shut down by her sister, while Blake, being her usual self, had opted to watch from the sidelines. Weiss - who previously berated the boy every chance she got - had come to apologise about her past hatred of Jaune.
But the biggest surprise amongst them was from Cardin. There was a fifty-fifty chance that it was because of guilt or because he got trashed in the arena, but the bully had come to regret his actions. At first Pyrrha was suspicious of him, but as time went by it seemed that his intentions were sincere: he even managed to get hold of a signed copy of the latest Professor X-Ray volume, with plans of handing it over to Jaune once he got better.
Even if these gestures of goodwill had done nothing to improve the boy's condition, they were enough to break the 'spell' which Jaune's current state had put on Pyrrha. Once again the champion had managed to return to her usual daily routine, the only change being that instead of putting her free time towards training, she instead chose to visit the infirmary every chance she got.
It was because of this routine that the rays of the setting sun had caught her sleeping in her chair beside the bed of her teammate. The past weeks had drained almost all of her energy, so she needed to get some shuteye every chance she got, which usually coincided with her visits.
When it was not interrupted of course.
Sensing that something was moving in the room, the Champion of Mistral suddenly woke up as if lighting struck her. Looking frantically around for Milo it took her a few seconds to realise that she had left her in the locker. Upon coming to the conclusion that she has to come up with a plan, Pyrrha had focused her aura and began scanning the room, looking for the thing that had dared to disturb her sleep.
At first she hadn't found anything. Then as her higher cognitive functions had begun to return from the slumber, a small idea had slowly wormed its way into the girl's mind, creating equal amounts of hope and dread at the same time.
Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath she slowly moved her head towards the middle of the room. After staring into the darkness for a few more seconds, she had finally opened her eyes. Then she almost let out a joyous scream.
Because at the middle of the room, illuminated by the setting sun, Jaune Arc, leader of team JNPR had began to move.