16The Grimm Rider
Prologue
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Jaune Arc will be burned at the stake.
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A woman runs through dark streets, terrified, alone, and soaked in blood.
As she clutches her only child closer to her chest her heat threatens to beat out of her rib cage.
Her feet pound against the old cobblestone streets as she only runs for the sake of running, there is no hope for her escape, and yet she runs even as her ears pick up the rumbling growl that seems to come from every direction. The old walls of the decayed buildings she has been forced to offer little comfort as the hunger of the beast is only reflected off of them to be beaten again and again into her mind
There is only fear for her. No light left save the cold stars and a shattered moon.
And red glow of the beast.
Her child cries softly against her shoulder. "Daddy... where's daddy..." His quiet question is from a mind only half awake. Hoisted out of bed and rushed from his home in a blind panic, the child has only a sense of confusion. As the young mother runs she whispers to her child and tries to comfort him, even as her mind slowly loses it's rationality to terror.
Her feet splash noisily through a puddle in the now far less maintained streets. Another dead end, another group of houses with no lights. No warmth to offer comfort. No human awake who would let her in. Even the streetlights, old candlelit things, seem to blink out as she knows the beast comes closer.
Night after night, they had kept up hope, celebrated what little they could, even as they lost more and more. From birth they had been taught; Never were they supposed to lose themselves to the darkness of despair.
Because to despair was to invite death itself to your door. To allow the beasts to grow in your heart, and eventually, consume them.
But she knew her husband could not stand it. Seeing himself go without food was fine, he was a strong man who refused to complain about his burdens, but seeing his son and wife suffer the same fate as less and less came in for every month of work...
She had been lost in her wild thoughts, even as she cursed her eyes and ears for all the burdens and horrors that they had brought, they were the only thing keeping her and her son alive as she dashed silently as she could through the pitch of night.
But now she saw her mistake, a wrong turn had ended the delusion of hope that she had maintained.
A dead end.
Surrounded on all sides by the uncaring ancient stone walls of a damp alley, she could feel her hair rise as she sensed it approach. The ground seemed to shake in fear as much as she was with the sound of it's steps.
The darkness of the alley was like a living thing, swarming around her eyes and clouding her vision as she pulled her son tighter to her chest, trying to blink away the maddening shadow and look for a way out.
She did not see one.
The smell of it's breath arrived long before the spectre itself did. Putrid and rotten, yet cold as ice.
Her head turned involuntarily. Too afraid to look away, yet too far into despair to move.
She saw the beast. Its fingers came first, long white claws with dripping red veins that slowly curled around the stone corner of the alley and squirmed like a creature grasping desperately at something just beyond it's reach.
The face came next. What a horrid visage it was, exposed white bone crossed with red jutting out of shadowed flesh as tar flowed out like blood from a wound above and into it's open void of a maw. The eyes, the maddening red eyes. So full of hate and malice, and hunger.
How much like a beast it was when it stepped out fully into her vision, yet how much it aped the shape of man, as if it had stolen that once noble form off a corpse.
It seemed to savour the sight of her hopeless state. It approached slowly, drawing out the moment of the kill like a wild animal never could. Though her mind was almost lost, she could not look away from the horror, she saw the wicked grin that split it's fanged and dripping maw open all the way to the sides of it's neck.
Her son was too terrified to even twitch in fear even as she still held his head away from the awful sight.
This was the beast that had lurked in her mind since childhood, a warning of the horror of loosing the self to the darkness that had been branded so deep in her mind that she was never able to forget.
This was fear.
This was despair.
This was The Grimm.
As it leered ever closer to her, it's red eyes and marks burning like an unholy fire that scarred her fading vision, she only wished that their only child could have seen another Spring, another day where she could have taught him about the stars he loved. That he could have been able to live even without them to love him.
Then there was a sound of howling wind and a roar quite unlike that of the beast. A great crash shook the earth around her as a new feeling suddenly flowed though the air. For a moment, she felt like she was in an open sky, as the very sun seemed to brandish itself in defence of her and her son, and a strange warmth folded around them.
The darkness left her vision, not as if chased away by some bright light, but as if absorbed into a better host.
Standing in front of her was a man's shape, covered in blackest void only disrupted by white bone. But unlike the grimm, it stood tall and held itself with all the nobility of an ancient hero.
The new creature turned, and she gasped with a strange feeling of hope that she thought had left her with her husband. The creature wore a semblance of a skull, much like the grimm that she noticed had backed away, but rather than a beast, it was the skull of a man, and in that skull there burned two fires of light. They burned like the sky with the noon sun crowned upon it's highest arc, and through that light she felt warmth and hope surge into her tired body.
Upon it's bones were not the blood red burning lines of the grimm, but the dazzling sky blue of its brightly flaming eyes.
The Grimm Man gave the woman as cheerful a look as ever a skull could give, and, seeming to realize that that wasn't much of one, gave her a thumbs-up before turning to the beast that had dogged her every step for the terror filled night.
"Alright you overgrown tar pit in the vague shape of an animal, you're about to meet your match tonight! The Hero of Justice is here in Vale, Jau- I mean me!"
The woman wasn't sure whether to be more surprised that the new creature could talk or that it sounded like an awkward teenage boy. Unable to come to a decision, her mind decided that going blank would be preferable.
Then, as she blinked in confusion, The Grimm Teen struck the stone street with such force that he carried himself and the giant beast crashing far over into the building across the street from the alley where she had almost met a gruesome end. They hit the stone building with such force that they carried on well into it.
She slowly walked out of the alley, her son, no longer sleepy or afraid, watched enraptured as the human sized blue-lined grimm fought the gigantic red-lined grimm with blows that shattered the street and buildings around themselves.
Both the mother and the son found themselves looking up towards the thin sliver of moon that was in the sky as the Grimm Teen kicked off the ground again, this time launching himself high into the air.
He then crashed down into the larger grimm with a kick that seemed to shatter what little light was around them, before an explosion of rubble and dust shook the block.
As it cleared, the mother and son saw the blue-lined figure crawling out of a rather large crater in the street, as black smoke coiled around him before sinking into his pitch coloured body. He looked up and saw them staring, and with a flash of movement had picked them both up in his arms.
Before any panic could set in, the mother and son felt the air compress as they were forced to hold tight to the strange teen-sounding skull creature as he moved faster then anything they'd every experienced.
The next minute the woman found herself and her son sitting in a shelter hospital's waiting room next to a very shocked looking staff member.
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Jaune Arc was tired, sore, bused in several places that he didn't want to think about applying ointment to, and to top it all off he was motion sick.
"You know," He thought to himself as he tried to hold in the pitiful concept of a breakfast he had been forced to rush through. "You'd think when a guy gets to be able to move faster than a bullet, he'd be able to handle a little train ride." He would have been indigent, but for his indigestion.
A horrified scream of utter despair ripped across the train station.
Aaaand now he'd just lost it on a cute blond girl's boots.
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Jaune Arc, age: Seventeen. Currently in possession of his great-grandfather's sword and shield, the clothes and armour on his back, a small amount of pocket money from his own savings, a set of forged entry papers for the academy of heroes, a strange little black book, and all the hopes and dreams of a young man with a real chance to become the hero he'd always wanted to be.
Now all he had to do was not die from exhaustion from lessons and his personal night shift, or from his new fellow students trying to throttle him.
Life was looking great!
(^)
Jaune Arc will be burned at the stake.
(^)
P.S.
"A little something new that I've been kicking around for a couple of weeks. Normally I have little interest in RWBY, but having recently gotten into, if not the show itself, the lore and themes of a strange live-action Japanese series called 'Kamen Rider' I saw a neat idea for a story and took it."
"Now I imagine that some of you might be a little tired of this whole song and dance. 'oh look, the mostly blank self-insert character got a new overpowered ability again, yawn.' But rest assured that it will not be so plain. I like what I have read of Jaune, and besides that, there are going to be some changes around here. Lore coming out the cracks in the ferment of Remnant to fill out those plot holes and empty sub-plots."
"This will also be my first foray into something resembling horror on this website. Not that it will become overflowing with images of gore and rambling descriptions thereof, I detest things like that. No, the horror here will mostly come from the series' monsters, the Grimm. I felt that, despite their prominent position in the lore that I read, the show only seemed to give any real sense of danger to the creatures when they were in stupid huge numbers, or when there was a fukhuge one with a brain slightly larger than a weasel. Though Jaune's heroic take down of the grimm this chapter seemed like I'm going to be treating the monsters like the fodder they are in the show, my explanation will be that that was a recently formed one that was unusually weak. Also you must remember that a character is always going to be their strongest when they have a new power to show off. Its a law or something."
-B. R. III.