RWBY Through Worlds (End)

BC91: Bait (Heroes)-4

The flight to Vacuo was awkward.

Oscar was oblivious. He was reading the whole time and making notes.

Cinder pretended to be reading also, again, but she wasn't really processing anything on the page.

"So..." Royal said, after an hour at least, "that was interesting."

"I don't want to talk about it," Cinder said firmly.

"All right, fine..." Royal dropped it.

But he kind of smiled to himself--and then frowned, confused.

"Aha!" Oscar scared both of them by saying some time later. "I think I've found something."

He walked up to the cockpit.

"We're nearly there," Royal said.

The flight to Vacuo from Vale was only a few hours, at the speed of these ships. They could already see the mountains below them.

"Okay." Oscar nodded. "But look, I've been researching the royalty of Vale. The records are pretty haphazard past 200 years, as you know, but there's some rough documents that they think survived... Anyway there're big gaps in the genealogy of the kings of the four kingdoms. but I finally found one book that mentioned a King Charles, also called Charlemagne the Humble."

"Humble?" Cinder grabbed the book out of his hand without asking. "Let me see." She frowned at it. "Why would anyone call a king that?"

"Well, you know how they used to give kings special titles to describe their ruling style?" Oscar said. "Apparently he didn't want to be king, so people said he was the humblest one. Also they were kind of poor. It was more of a title than anything that gave you wealth. I mean, they built the kingdom up, yeah. The records say he only became king in the middle of his life, which is pretty unusual. But the kings of Vacuo and Mistral also were like that. Only Mantle had an established line already. Kind of makes sense. They had to be the most organized kingdom. Oh, and Vale and Vacuo were friends at the time then too. King Charles and the King of Vacuo apparently knew each other."

"That sounds like the connection that might be missing." Cinder looked up. "Didn't you say that there was one other man who came back from that quest?"

"Yes, but I never heard his name," Royal said. "I didn't even hear it was a man."

"It was," Oscar said. "Mantle had a queen at the time--all the others had kings. Menagerie didn't even exist yet. This book is just a commentary on the old documents... Unfortunately they were pretty damaged. Most of the kings' reigns aren't preserved. We just have the names because they were listed in more than one section...and the titles and some other stuff. But the commentary says there were rumors that the Grimm began to lessen in those days, and we know that eventually the kingdoms were able to build larger cities, but those have hardly ever been replicated since. Every time we expand beyond the main cities, the Grimm stop us. Until recently."

"So you think that the reason is that whatever this Charles knew, from Alicia," Cinder said, "he helped the kingdoms use it to get actual strongholds established, just like we are now...but over time they forgot, and no one has been able to grow the boundaries of the kingdoms anymore since then."

"That's what I thought," Oscar agreed. "This is so interesting. It explains some stuff I wondered about, concerning the kingdoms. It always seemed so impossible that they ever grew so big when Grimm never let up...but if something was stopping the Grimm from working, that explains it. Something even Salem couldn't have explained since she didn't know about it. The Great War also changed stuff, but the kingdoms were way stronger when the War happened."