A/N: Sorry for not finishing the next part of The Raven Cries for Tanelorn, that's still entirely on me.

But this saga has not been abandoned, and this marks the start of a new part in this story, one I hope you've all been eager to see.

Thank you, and please enjoy.

The Price for Traveling on the Moonbeam Road, Part 1

Night fell across Remnant once more, uncaring of the darkness it brought and the gnashing teeth and scraping claws it hid. Watches were posted against it and fiendish plots were schemed from within it. But the great multitudes of the world, Human and Faunus alike, were prompted to turn in as they grew older with the night, no matter if they had to make their beds on clean-sheeted mattresses or soggy cardboard boxes. Whether filled with hope or dread for tomorrow, all needed rest for the next day ahead.

And for some of these, they would get to visit the land of dreams. It is a strange, paradoxical sort of place, where memory, parody, and fantasy conspire together to utterly confuse the poor fools who wander in to live out strange lives where roads can be made from bubble gum, stairs have been replaced with slides, and deep conversations are had with faceless strangers they've known all their lives. Then to add the cherry on top, wakefulness bursts through the wall like a clown car to drag you back to reality, with a healthy whack of amnesia across the brain to leave room for the next circus show to come on the next visit.

It's a clockwork routine as old as humanity itself, not a single cog ever slipping out of place for thousands of years. And it ground on again for four souls disheartened and wearied by the disappearance of four young women.

PTMR

Sleep has never come easy to a worry-stricken father, especially to one like Taiyang Xiao Long, whose soul had already been diminished by half twice over. But come it did by way of exhaustion, after the twin forces of fury and grief had drained his strength to the dregs. And as he dozed off in Ruby's precariously positioned bed in her team's dorm, he felt as though he were about to wake up from a nightmare instead of slipping into a dream.

For Qrow Branwen, it arrived swiftly on whiskey-slicked wheels, hounded by regret at his constant absence in the lives of his nieces, Ruby and Yang. No sooner had he received word of their disappearance as he then sped toward the nearest airport as fast as birdflight could take him. Much to his dismay, he'd arrived too late to catch a Bullhead making a routine supply run, meaning he would need to rely on his wings for the route home. His one consolation that night was that the local tavern still had a dry bed available.

Ghira Belladonna was glad to still have his wife, Kali, go to bed with him, an ever-steadying presence to his soul, especially as he worried for his wayward daughter. Menagerie's isolation meant that Blake could not call him on a Scroll, but it didn't mean she couldn't send him letters, yet none had been received. He had gone years without seeing his daughter, with only suspect hearsay to inform him of her possible wellbeing. By now, he had subconsciously accepted this lack of definite news as rote, praying against all hope that it wouldn't end with confirmation of her untimely death.

And finally, Specialist Winter Schnee was learning firsthand why the poets declared love to be the death of duty. When General Ironwood personally informed her of Weiss's disappearance, she firmly requested – not begged, she never begged - to be part of the search, despite knowing that she was too far from Sanus to be of any help. A lesser woman would have broken down upon being denied then and there, raging, sobbing, groveling for the chance to do something, anything, to be of help in getting her sister back. In front of the general, she stoically accepted his orders and awaited new ones. In her personal quarters half a world away, she unburdened her emotions. Only after she finished(?) did she slip into bed.

All four went to sleep with the same wish: to have their missing loved one back again, alive and well.

And in the strictest sense of these words, the granting was in motion.

Tai POV

Tai did not recall how he had returned to Summer's grave, but then again, he rarely recalled the passage of time whenever he stood before her. Or so he liked to pretend – only her spirit could reside here, which he best felt when she carried the scent of roses with her in the passing wind.

"Dad?"

Or when their daughter visited it alongside him. "Hey Ruby, I was-"

"It's you, right?" she interrupted.

Tai's mind hiccupped, shaking a stuck cog into motion. "Wh- what do you mean, Ruby?"

"This is a dream," the girl muttered mysteriously, "but I'm not dreaming you, right?"

"What do you mean- dreaming? What is-?" Tai felt the same lethargy one gets in the morning just after waking up, as his body shifted from autopilot to manual. "A dream- what? Ruby, what do you- wait, Ruby?"

A new sense of recognition electrified him. "Ruby? Is that you?"

"DAD!!!!" Ruby slapped herself around him with a cry of joyous relief that toppled his dream-body and rattled his mind.

"Ruby," Tai croaked, bear-hugging her. "I-"

"I'msorryI've*hic*beengonesolong*sniff*I*hic*missedyousomuchyouhavenoideawhatI-I-I'v-v-v-veb-beenthroughwhatI'veseenandd-d-ddoneandohmygodsithasallbeensososososohorribleI-"

Her words petered out into quiet sobbing, breaking Tai's heart with every tear shed.

"Shhhh, it's okay, rose petal. Daddy's here," Tai consoled, rubbing her back until she finally stopped shaking.

"Thanks Dad," Ruby got and wiped her eyes, regaining her composure. "I really needed to do that."

"No problem, kiddo," Tai said, standing back up. "But, Ruby, how are we both 'here,' exactly?"

Ruby's whole person cringed before she spoke: "Would you believe me if I said it was because of magic?"

Qrow POV

Qrow was silent for a moment as he processed Yang's answer. Then he responded: "Fuck."

Yang was caught off guard by the response. "Wait, you already knew magic was real?"

"Yang, there's a lot of shit about the world I know about that I hoped you'd never have to find out," Qrow replied, reflexively lifting his flask to his lips. It poured his favorite malt whiskey down his throat, filling his nose with the scent of Forever Fall maples and smoothing out his mouth and throat with a pleasant burn of fermented sugar. But because he now knew he was in a dream, the alcohol did not dull his senses.

Yang crossed her arms challengingly. "Okay, but did you also know that the Multiverse is real?"

Being in a dream did not prevent Qrow from reflexively gagging on his drink and then blasting it out across the bar he was seated at in the biggest spit-take he'd ever had. He then fixed a sour look on Yang and groused out "You did that on purpose."

"'Course I did," Yang smirked, lifting her sunrise cocktail to her own lips for a shallow sip. "Guess you didn't know that, huh?"

"Can't say as I have," Qrow admitted. "And I can't say that I understand what you mean by that, and what makes you say that it exists. But I'm guessing it has something to do with your last mission."

"Yeah," Yang swallowed more of her drink. "Well, let's just say that if Merlot had only been messing around with Grimm, we wouldn't have gotten blasted into another universe."

Ghira POV

"Blake, I love The Girl Who Fell Through the World as much as anybody else, but you're not seriously saying that you went to the Ever After, right?" Ghira asked of his daughter.

"If only," Blake mouthed to herself as she nervously shifted her feet in the warm beach sand. "But what matters right now is that there is a way for me and the rest of Team RWBY to come back home, but we need help on your side in order to make it."

"Okay," Ghira knew things would be too simple if Blake and her friends had been allowed to just return without issue. Life rarely ever worked that way, and stories were never allowed to work like that (he had read many of the same books as Blake and Kali in order to be able to know them better, and they both enjoyed fantasies of every kind). "What do I need to do?"

"First, you need to take this," Blake pulled from her pocket a small amethyst gem which Ghira then grabbed in his massive hand to hold up in the false sunlight. Ghira could tell it wasn't Dust, but it sparkled with an unearthly allure that he wasn't sure could be credited to the dreamscape.

"You need to take this to the island of Asphodel, where I and the rest of Team RWBY fought Dr. Merlot's Grimm, and also where we vanished from," Blake explained. "You will need to meet three other people that the rest of my team have contacted, each of them possessing a similar talisman, as well as being a close loved one and blood relative to each member: Taiyang Xiao Long, Qrow Branwen, and Winter Schnee."

Ghira raised an eyebrow at that last name but said nothing. If his daughter was teammates with a Schnee and trusted her enough to be part of whatever ritual it was that was being enacted to bring them home (and wasn't that a maddening thought on its own), then he was willing to work with a Schnee to bring his daughter home. They can't all be as bad as Jacques, he reasoned.

Winter POV

I hope Chief Belladonna doesn't try to rip my head off when we meet, Specialist Winter Schnee mentally mused, fiddling with the blue crystal in her hand. I can only hope he doesn't think of me as my father's daughter.

"Do we need to go to exact spot on the island where you disappeared?" Winter asked Weiss.

"Fortunately, no," Weiss replied. "Just a wide enough space under the open sky as close to the center of the island as possible where you can make a portal."

Winter added yet more questions to her list.

"There, you each need to put your blood on your respective talisman and then together draw one large circle. Then you and Taiyang need to draw a square connecting the four points of the compass, and Ghira and Qrow need to draw a second connecting the points between them. And then, last step, break each talisman in half, and place them on the opposite points of the square they were used to draw."

"And then what do we do after that?" Winter inquired, leaning back slightly in her seat. "Hold hands, stand around it and chant 'Home' three times?"

"Thank gods, no. Your part is finished at that point," Weiss waved off. "With the circle complete, my team would now have an exact point in both space and time to aim for in getting home."

"Time?" Winter noted.

"Yeah," Weiss exasperated, rubbing her temples. "Turns out, on a multiversal scale, time is more like a landscape than a line and is just as tricky to navigate. Hence the talismans and the circle."

Then the world *CRACKED*.

Tai POV

"Ruby!" Tai panicked, as fractals broke across the earth and air, splintering his vision. "What's happening?"

"I'm sorry!" Ruby cried, clutching her father again. "I thought we had more time!"

Qrow POV

"I'm not letting you go!" Qrow reached across the divides of the dream-realm to grab Yang.

"It's okay!" Yang reassured. "You guys just bring us home and we'll never have to leave you again!"

Ghira POV

"Please come home Blake," Ghira whispered, as the world fell apart. "I have missed you so much."

Blake sniffled. "Me too."

Winter POV

"I love you Winter," Weiss teared up, while the upheaval of the dream carried her out of Winter's reach. "I regret not saying that more often."

The Specialist's dam on emotions leaked. "I do too."

Winter saw Weiss give her the most bittersweet smile she had ever seen.

Then the fracturing vision of the dream shifted like a switched channel, and Weiss changed with it. Where before the two were separated by the dining room table at the Schnee Mansion, now they were separated by a red staircase lined with spiking crystals of the same material, with Winter at the foot, and Weiss near the top, where there was… a seat? Then Winter realized that what she saw wasn't a staircase, but steps leading to a throne, one carved out of a single, gigantic ruby gem.

And as for Weiss herself, Winter would never forget the sight. Her blue-white dress and bolero were suddenly replaced with a flowing dress so darkly blue as to almost be black, highlighted by gold from collar to arm to bosom to hip. Where before her face was soft and her eyes filled with heartfelt love, suddenly it looked cut from marble, face paint below her eyes a red bright as gold, and in her eyes, though they were just as blue as before…

Their gazes were locked together for only a few seconds, but it was enough to chill Winter's soul. The girl wearing Weiss's eyes recognized Winter, but only as a stranger might upon meeting someone for the first time they'd heard of before. And there was arrogance in those eyes, at once imperial and casual and cruel, that she had never seen before, no matter how many Atlesian parties she had attended over the years.

Winter suddenly felt as though she understood how her distant ancestors felt when they had encountered Faunus for the first time, meeting something almost human. But the Faunus had been obvious in their inhumanity for the most part, with their animal ears, tails, horns, scales, fur and feathers, and physical differences could be easily overcome if one simply put the time in for understanding. Whatever it was that stared down at Winter had no obvious signs of its inhumanity aside from sharper ears on the side of its head; but some reptile instinct deep in her brain was screaming at her that what she saw wasn't human in the most fundamental sense of the word. It appeared to her as though it were a member of a humanoid species that had reached the same end point as hers from an entirely different evolutionary track over millions of years.

Then it spoke, and the words that came out disgusted and terrified her like nothing else could:

"I can't wait to meet you, dear sister."

Then the dream ended, and Winter woke up gasping like a drowned woman.

Ozpin POV

Ozpin has lived many lives, each one merely a variant on the same routine: awakening, assimilating, preparing, fighting, enduring, and dying. Rest came sparingly, and tiredness was the daily reality of his existence, for which he blamed the gods for giving him the task of fighting Salem, himself for accepting it, and Salem for not stopping herself from dragging the whole world into her grief and rage.

But the last couple of days had been especially maddening.

First, Taiyang approached him about a dream he had where he met Ruby and she gave him instructions for a magic ritual to bring her home, for which he produced a red gem with an otherworldly shine as evidence. Ozpin desperately wanted to deny Tai's witness, but then Qrow called with a nearly identical story, but this time with Yang and a yellow stone for proof. This prompted Ozpin to call General Ironwood to contact Specialist Schnee, who then reported having a similar dream where she conversed with Weiss, with a blue gem in her possession as proof. Though he couldn't contact the Belladonnas immediately, Ozpin knew at that point that either Ghira or his wife had just met Blake in a dream, and received a purple jewel in order to help bring their daughter back to Remnant from wherever in the Multiverse it was she and the rest of Team RWBY currently were.

The Multiverse.

There was nothing Ozpin knew less about, or gave him more cause for fear and frustration. Bound as he was to Remnant, he could only make observations about its greater reality through that which came to Remnant. And nothing good ever had ever come to Remnant from beyond its sphere.

The pattern was always the same: they contacted the people of his world, made them dissatisfied with it, and drove them to apocalyptic war. They were rare occasions, thankfully, but each of these conflicts had ended with cities burned and kingdoms shattered so completely that all official histories dating back further than two hundred years were subject to intense debate, and everything older than five hundred years was little more than suspect legend. Only he, Salem, and whatever gods from beyond that had meddled still remembered.

Frankly, it was a miracle in Ozpin's eyes that each of the Kingdoms had actually managed to survive the last one. And it was why he had tried so hard to keep its existence hidden away from even his most trusted confidants, lest they too go down the well-intentioned road to ruin.

All of this swirled about in Ozpin's head every hour that he worked to bring the contacted men and woman to the island of Asphodel. Fortunately, many things had gone according to plan so far:

Team JNPR, aided by Professor Glynda Goodwitch, had admirably cleared the isle of Grimm ahead of everyone's arrival, Winter Schnee and Qrow were unimpeded in their trips to join up for the expedition to the island, and Ghira Belladonna had contacted them as soon as he came within range of a CCT Tower to inform them that he was on his way to Asphodel, complete with gem and instructions. And everyone who needed to get to the island made it within mere hours of the agreed-upon time.

Once everyone was gathered, they all trekked to the island center with little fuss, despite some pre-existing discomfort between a few of them (mostly between Qrow and Winter, who had constantly bickered and sniped at each other from the moment they met). And once they had all reached the appointed place, Ozpin, Glynda, and JNPR stood back as they watched Tai, Qrow, Ghira and Winter follow the instructions Team RWBY had given.

With every shed drop of blood and scratch on stone, an arcane mystery was made manifest before the neophyte audience, as they noticed runes manifesting as every curve and straight line of the magic circle was drawn, adding greater complexity to a ritual which those in attendance could barely fathom the very basics of. Within minutes, the circle was drawn, and then the four participants broke the gems in half, and placed them on the cardinal points: Tai placed Ruby's gem on the eastern and western points, Qrow placed Yang's on the northeastern and southwestern points, Ghira set Blake's on the northwestern and southeastern points, and Winter set Weiss's on the northern and southern points.

Just as the last stone was set, the sigil flashed with a shower of rainbow sparks that cast off colors no one present would be able to properly recall later. Each talisman then flared in red, blue, purple and gold, piercing the night sky with eight great spears of lights. Then, like trains on a track, they burned their way clockwise around the circle to the next point on the compass before then carving like lasers across the circle on the squares drawn within it. And when the talismans had completed their course, the lights dimmed and died.

Quiet fell upon the world like the brightening moonlight, and all present were left confused and betrayed at the cosmic anticlimax.

"That, that can't be it, can it?" Tai whispered, fear creepily overwhelming him.

Ozpin's mind betrayed him with the thought that he hoped that was indeed it.

"Everyone!" Pyrrha cried, drawing the attention of the gathered, here eyes turned upwards. "Look at the Moon!"

They did. And saw something coming.

At first, it looked like a bright star had maneuvered into the cracks of the broken Moon. But it was growing, in both size and brightness as to make the night seem as day, though the rest of the stars remained visible in the sky. And as it grew closer, the arc of the path it had taken became visible, shooting behind it like a constant rapid-fire of lightning bolts. And the closer it came, the more colors it exhibited, alike to those that the gems had emitted before. And the closer it came, the more that they noticed the sound it was making:

"heeheeheeHeeHeeHaAHAHAAHAHAHAHAUHAUHHAHAAHAHHAHAAHAAHAHAHHAHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAAAAAAAAAHAHAHHHAHAAAAAAHAHAAHAEEEEAHHAHAAAHHHAHAHHAEEHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHHAAHHAHAAHHAHHAAHAHHHAHAHHEEEEHEHAAH̷̗̪̙̲̫̫͚̲͉̓͂͊̉͌̂͝ͅẠ̸̛͍̑̓̎́̓̈́̀͝͝H̶̪̳̳̖́͑̒͘͝Á̵̡̹͉̮̝͊͒̾̉̉̕͠͝ͅͅH̵̨͈̬͖̊͒͒A̶̧̢̹͓̦̻̳̤̱̙̱͚̓̔!"

Laughter.

It was as uproarious and jovial as it was cruelly spiteful, in a voice that slid from masculine highs to feminine lows and everywhere between with the whimsical randomness of a child. It was laughter born of total power and complete victory.

It was the laughter of a god.

Or a demon.

And it filled the hearts of all who heard with unholy terror, and they fled from the ritual site just as the laughing comet crashed to the earth in a thunderous crescendo of sound and fury that shook the world. The tremors slammed them all to the ground, each thankful for their Auras taking the brunt of the falls. The world was filled with light and laughter, the most terrible they'd ever seen or felt, even with eyes closed and ears covered.

And then like a blown-out match, they were gone, and darkness and silence resided in their place.

Slowly, hesitantly, Ozpin lifted his head to look around waiting for the next shoe to drop. When none did, he rose to his feet and turned to go look at the magic circle, reaching it first before the others could properly recover.

And there he saw Team RWBY.

Any relief he felt at their return was immediately overshadowed by several observations he made as he approached:

First, all of them were unconscious – far too much practice let him see that they were still breathing.

Second, none of them were wearing any of the clothes that they had packed for their original mission, and each outfit they wore looked like it had seen a lot of rigorous use.

Third, they were all wounded, lacerations slicing somewhere on each of their bodies along with nasty bruises that their Auras weren't healing; they all had been in a fight right before their journey, and it didn't look like they had won it.

And fourth, they had brought a fifth with them: He was a large man, easily head and shoulders taller than anyone on Team RWBY. He wore a full set of gold-gilded armor beneath a red cloak embroidered with black dragons in flight, a sign of eight arrows radiating from a central point above their heads. His hair fell to his shoulders in raven waves, framing a regally-chiseled pale face begging to be immortalized in marble, as well as parting on the side around a pair of ears that pointed upward like spikes.

And clutched unconsciously in his arms was the equally unconscious Weiss Schnee, dressed in a gown of near-black blue and gold, her face appearing slightly sharper, and her ears noticeably more pointed, as if she had been made to resemble the man she now slept with.

What happened to you? Ozpin sorrowfully wondered. And what terrible things did you endure in order to come home?

Then a groan issued from the youngest, and she slowly pushed herself to wakefulness. "Ugh, did we make it?"

Ozpin set a weary smile to his face. "Hello again, Ruby Rose."

Ruby's head jerked at the sound, and she looked up to see the headmaster standing there, emanating relief. The sight pulled out of her a broken sob, and put a crooked smile on her face. "Hi, Professor Ozpin. We're back."

A/N: Please be honest in your feedback.