The castle sits on a plateau of black rock, hundreds of metres above the ground. Black stonework looms high, while above the walls, towers crowned with minarets reach up to try and skewer the clouds. Flying buttresses and abutments connect a large hall to a lower level beneath. Simple glass windows, with lattices of cast black iron, reach tens of feet into the air, to allow the unnatural red light of the Land of Darkness into the inner halls of Evernight.
Sitting in her normal chair, more of a throne really, she sits in calm repose. A queenly, monarchical position. While her outfit may appear ragged and tatty, it is pristine in its cleanliness, and it falls about her body perfectly. Her skin, through the same pale grey of the dead, is unblemished through mark or injury, the dark purple of her veins only furthering to highlight her regal face, or to highlight the power she wields in her arms. Her hair, the same colour, is done up heavily in a large bun, large singular tresses of which are allowed to frame her face, while six long buns sprout from the sides, adorned with jewels.
She is the beauty of natural destruction twisted with the unnatural perversion of the land she resides in, and of the being she commands wholesale.
She is Salem.
And she is looking at a largely empty throne room.
The only other occupant in the room, is the Atlesian doctor, Arthur Watts, a tan-suit wearing former scientists scrolling through his Scroll with an untoward scowl on his face.
Salem speaks. Unhurried of voice and tone, she speaks simply and flatly.
"My dear Watts. The others were told that our meeting would begin shortly, were they not?"
Quickly looking up from his device, Arthur Watts swallows nervously.
"They were, indeed, your grace. I told them myself personally, and them sent them many reminders on their Scrolls."
"Naturally that you would." Salem says again, not rising from her chair, or even shifting position in it. "So… have you been able to contact them. Am I correct?"
Watts moves to open his mouth, but he stops.
A tremor shakes the castle, making glass rattle and dust and flakes fall from the ceiling. The land of the Brother of Darkness had been formed in such tremors, and sometimes the creation of an extra-large Grimm had seen such events transpire.
But this was not a tremor of creation.
This was a tremor of destruction.
"My queen!" Tyrian's cry came out a second after the door was slammed open. A look sheer, wide-eyed panic was on his face, although it feel slightly with relief as he saw his sovereign unhurt. "Hurry! This must be seen!"
Normally, such a command from anyone would have earned a contemptuous sneer and a lashing from the Grimm under her command, but for Salem to hear such a command come from her most loyal subordinate, combined with the look of terror on Tyrian's face, told her this was an emergency.
Without a word, Salem vacates her seat and quickly as she can, she vacates her throne room, leaving Watts to follow quickly on her trail.
It doesn't take long for Salem to reach her destination. It's one of the many large windows that line the exterior hallways of her castle, and it allows her and the others of her faction an unparalleled view across the vistas of the Land of Darkness. Broken cliffs and plateaus of towering black rock jut to the sky in brutal parodies of broken teeth, while vast crystals of deep purple, either singular or in clumps, sat reflecting the ruddy wine sky to the ground. At various, random places in the land, the spawning pools of the Grimm, which even now unleashed new beasts out into the world of Remnant, even as the skies far to the north-west blazed with brutal fire.
Fire directed down from the sky.
"That's… that's impossible." Cinder Fall says aghast, her eyes open wide.
"Did Ozpin tell them about us?" Cinder's pawn, Mercury Black, says hurriedly and angrily, even as he watches the distant horizon be lit up with extra bright light of a super-massive weapon discharging from space. "How could he even know that we're here?!"
"We're fucked…" Emerald Sustrai whispers out in fear and awe.
The blasting, blazing light stops, the reverberating tremor stopping a moment later, although the rumbling aftershock persists for several seconds. A large cloud in the shape of a blossoming mushroom pushes itself through the sky, it's colour black and baleful as it scrapes at the top of the sky.
"Did… did they stop?" Tyrian asks, even as he shrinks inwards, his Faunus instinct for fear truly kicking in heavily. "M-maybe… maybe they got the wrong place?"
Salem says nothing, even as she steps closer to the window. She draws next to Hazel Rainart, the giant bulk of a man looking up at the sky intently. Lifting her gaze upwards, Salem tries to piece together what he is seeing.
"Everyone." Hazel rumbles out. "Brace!"
His call is almost lost in the roar of descending fury.
A point of light focuses in the sky, clearly coming high from Remnant's orbit, which gets closer as seconds pass. It's a brilliant, sun-eclipsing shaft of fire of the starkest, brightest white. And it slams down heavily through the clouds, reducing the atoms of the clouds to non-existence before it hits the ground.
Underneath it is a Grimm spawning pool. Had been a Grimm spawning pool. That has now been blasted to oblivion in fire and fury, the liquid in the pool reduced to steam and even that reduced to nothing. The Grimm that had just spawn from the pool are not even burnt away. They are there one second, then ash the next. Flash-incinerated right down to their atoms. The land immediately around the beam is set aflame, even as the displacement of heat and pressure blasts outwards in a shock-wave that travels for miles.
All of this, Salem notes with a grim sense of finality, only takes two seconds.
Another beam hits soon after the second, not too distant behind the first beam. It is the same colour and it blasts asunder a spar of dark rock, melting stone and rock to glass in an instant. It splits the ground beneath with the harrowing crack of an ancient thunder deity. Again, a shockwave buffets the area, the force shattering crystals and breaking stone. Grimm are buried under the dust or again flashed into oblivion.
The sky screams again as more missiles rain down.
These are decidedly more metallic; missiles the size and dimensions of the towers of Salem's own castle. They are propelled on mighty engines that send them travelling faster than the speed of sound, though their passage is easily visible as blazing controls behind spears of fire. They don't slam into the ground more than they burrow into it. Then they explode with volcanic power; molten rock and burning quartz are thrown into the air to crash down on the ground below. Grimm run in hordes away from the conflagration raining down from the skies, but they are either smashed under the burning rocks or blasted by steam and dust.
Salem has been knocked by from the window by the power of the three blasts, but she and the others are back upright to look at what is going on around them. And they look on aghast at what is happening in her kingdom.
For a moment, Salem looks on in horror and she expects to see a golden dragon wing down from on high. This is the exact type of punishment she expects that lizard would visit upon this world on his return to Remnant. But seeing the destruction being wrought upon the Land of Darkness, as more beams and missiles rain down on her land, she knows it only has one source.
The Imperium of Man.
She lets out a growl of rage that is eclipsed in timber by the fury of the bombardment outside.
She had done so much!
The alliances she has made with the White Fang, the new types of Grimm she had created to fight them! Had that not been enough?! Was humanity so pernicious, so perfidious and so bloody stubborn outside of Remnant that, even faced with the beings she brought forth; the amalgamations of machinery and Grimm, even combing the forms of humans with Grimm and machine, that they would not fall into despair? That they would continue to refuse the advance of her legions?
Humanity's lot was to die. It's lot was to be ruined and fractured before her anger, and Ozpin…
"Ooozzzzppiiin!" Salem's snarl becomes a howl of anger as more energy blasts and missiles strike the ground outsider Evernight.
"We got to move!" Mercury calls out, pointing to the top of the window, even as he begins to run away, Emerald and Watts hot on his heels. The others, ones Salem thought as stronger of mind than him began to falter before they turned and deserted her. Only Cinder and Tyrian are rooted to the spot, the same as her.
Another barrage of missiles are coming down, their trails blue-white in the heat as they punch through the atmosphere. Their tips blaze with atmospheric entry, and they are angled… directly… for Evernight.
"Shit." Cinder says resignedly, even as her eye widens in fright.
"Y-you're Grace…" Tyrian begins to say before fear gets its grip on him.
Salem says nothing in reply as the missiles fire second-stage ignitors in their engines, pushing them past any speed that a well-trained Huntsman or Huntress would be able to do anything to stop the first missile in flight. There's not a Grimm she can create that can do such a thing.
She's doomed, and Salem knows it. She will die, and there is no force on heaven or Remnant that can stop such a thing. The passage is inevitable, as is the destination and destruction that follows.
But Salem does not let it go easily. Harnessing her ancient power, her hands alight with dark energy that she raises above her head to blast the missile from the sky.
But she is too slow.
The first missile punches through deep beneath her feet, punching straight through the stonework of the castle, before it erupts in a blast of fury and sound like a star releasing in its anger. Plasma energy reduces millennia old stone to slag and glass before, with a thundering crash, the stonework topples in on itself, taking the floor that Salem, Cinder and Tyrian are standing on with it.
The second missile detonates.
Salem sees what happens to her followers as the plasma warheads takes them. It all happens in a horrible instant: clothing is burnt to cinders in an instant, each thread catching fire and burning away faster than a blink, leaving them naked beneath. Their skin goes next, the muscle beneath too, being flash fried away, leaving beneath their skeletons. Cinder's Grimm arm just evaporates in an instant, while Tyrian's tail fragments and shatters before they both disappear entirely in the heart of a new-born sun.
Salem tries to roar again, but the heat and energy takes her breath away, literally. Her open mouth is fried, her lungs reduced to ash and dust by the heat of the warhead before, she too, is reduced to nothing.
The bombardment of Evernight and the Land of Darkness continues. Plasma and magma warheads slam down into to crust of the continent, shattering the very ground with cosmic upheavals. Rifts are torn open, filling with rock, sea water or magma, as Grimm are sucked or thrown beneath like some ancient apocalyptic Armageddon. Lance strikes from high orbit flash down, punching holes through the smoke created by the other weapons destructive blasts.
Evernight is brought low. Even as the plasma warheads strike the stonework of the castle, magma-tipped missiles gouge into the rock of the plateau it's built on. Magma runs like water, hit after hit from the missiles sending the burning, molten rock to fall to the earth in a parody of rain, burning any surviving Grimm on contact, and ensuring the nothing beneath survives. The rapid change from solid state to liquid is too much for even the ancient rock to bear, and the plateau sinks in on itself, sucking down the castle with it as it collapses in a rock-slide of falling rock, masonry and magma.
In the space of perhaps ten minutes, a miniscule fraction of the Imperium, perhaps not enough to call it a nought-point-one percent, has ended the greatest threat known to Remnant.
In the twisting flames and fallen masonry of Evernight, a ball of light, perhaps the same size as a basketball flairs into existence before, in a bright flash of light, Salem is once again standing in the middle of her castle.
Or what was the middle of her castle.
Her abode is now several hundred metres lower than where it originally stood and also much more open than it originally was.
Salem, her body untarnished because of the God of Light's magic, looks around the area with a manic eye, her mind more broken than her body by what has just happened.
There are no Grimm. No Cinder, Tyrian, Hazel, no-one.
All that is around her is death, fire and destruction.
Looking up at the sky, through the dark storm clouds of the orbital bombardment, she can see shapes high above move. Like snapshots of oceanic predators being moved behind a hazy screen, or knifes being suspended on threads in the dark, Salem sees them.
Her enemy.
"Ozpin," She says with a snarl. "You… mother… fu-!"
Her last curse against her one-time lover is snatched away by the roar of a lance battery strike hitting her full on.
"Commodore," A deck-hand ensign says from his cogitator, "I'm reading a total destruction across the board. Complete destruction of targets in target area."
A small cry of joy goes up across the bridge of the Sublime Vengeance, Commodore Valask smiling warmly next to Professor Ozpin of Beacon Academy.
"So I would call that a 'job well done', right, professor?" The tall Imperial Navy officer asks, a smile on her lips.
"Even if she is not beaten outright, it means that her plans will be delayed enough for your Adeptus Astartes to move in and stop her." The silver-haired man with glasses says, a small smile on his lips, which is returned by the silver-haired woman.
"But still!" The commodore says as she turns to face her crew. "I would call this a victory. Ensign, take a message:"
"From the commodore; to my esteemed captains of the Imperial Navy, Basilica Astra and the Holy Adeptus Astartes, my sincere congratulations and thanks on your parts in this endeavour to rid Humanity of such a threat. Your duty does your ships, your crew, and your Emperor, proud."
As the message is sent, Commodore Valask moves to stand next to Ozpin again.
"I heard that you enjoy your 'cocoa', but have you ever tried some amasec? I have a nice Tyrolean vintage, M41.785. Care to give it a try?"
Ozpin considers it for a moment before he responds.
"I would be a poor guest to say no."
And with that, the Imperial mission on Remnant ended.
The evil was destroyed, the Fleet managed to find a stable Warp route back to Imperial space, and both groups live happily ever after.
Sitting in his Labyrinth, Tzeentch lets out a purring growl.
"Entertaining…" He says, his voice an ancient rustle of papyrus in a tomb. "But, ultimately of little value in The Game."
Without aplomb, he lifts up a thread of fate and time and severs it cleanly, before he swiftly ties the two ends into new positions. The story has changed now, and has the ending, all according to the whim of the Architect of Fate.
Tzeentch looks at the spindly threads that he has sown, severed and tied together. So many stories, so many lives, and so many struggles, intersecting and interconnecting together, all for his amusement.
All schemes are his domain. And he has such schemes for Remnant.
AN: This was just a little idea I had floating around, a suggestion of an omake from Parks_98 on Space Battles for Salem getting schalacked by the Imperial Navy.
I think I did pretty well, well enough to post it on here as well.
I am currently down with the chicken pox... at age 25, believe it or not, so my writing mojo is not 100% there. So if you're looking forward to the next chapter, I'm afraid it'll be a bit of a while in coming.
However, I do post the various bits and pieces of the chapter as I go along on Space Battles, and I also post previews of those parts onto my , Ciaran's Curios, so feel free to check out either option.