The Maiden's Fall

Volume I: The Spindlegrove/Chapter I: Clipped Wings

The silhouette of pale skeletal towers before jaundice sunsets stood a testament to Mountain Glenn's legacy. There is a pattern of society overreaching their limitations and believing we've learned better than the ones before. Either our stupidity of hubris drives us to continue prodding the unnatural under the naïve belief the unnatural won't bite back.

The city served the perfect backdrop to our decimation, though I wasn't aware of it at the time. An entire community inspired to push into the unknown and was punished for being entitled. Isn't this the perfect analogy for what happened leading up to the Vytal Festival? In the same Kingdom no less, but I digress.

I'd visited Mountain Glenn four times. Once was a school trip, the second was stumbling into a madman's game, the third was a mass evacuation of the city, and when I was running away once again. Not because of something in my life but living itself. What little friends remained in my life were reminders of my failures. It wasn't unusual for an Atlas soldier or Huntsman to wander into the woods with a fresh clip and never return. War, while new to me, was a quick and merciless teacher. The question was whether I was a good student.

I wasn't. Despite multitudes of armaments and my own Gambol Shroud clipped at my hip, this necropolis was the closest I came to suicide. As much as I'd love touting an ironclad resolve the truth was, I'm too cowardly to do it myself. So instead of dying in the city of death I became a resident until something changed.

It was the tail end of autumn; the air was crisp despite the thick scent of decay hanging on the wind. I didn't know it then, but the change I waited for was tangible within the stale air. I'd set up home in a semi-basement bookstore, Gander's Tales, tucked away from the street traffic of deceased Atlas soldiers and Vale citizens above. My cloak reeked of rotted paper and mothballs, the store's product long reduced to binding and mush. But Gander's served as shelter and stood far enough away from the Creeping Wail few things wandered past my window.

Dark clouds outside made it impossible to tell whether it was lunch or dinner, but my stomach roared it was both. The shelves lining my walls were emptied of military rations and whatever else I scrounged up from the surrounding block. I only left Gander's if I knew my destination and guaranteed objective. Were I spotted, the enemy alerted others to my location and the prospect of moving wasn't great. Lying atop a slab of metal plucked from my past, I strove to ignore the grumbling in my gut. Thoughts of boiling the leather in my boots flitted briefly in my desperate mind. I'd never consider dying of hunger, most people in a civilized society going to a nice school and living in a nice home ever think of starvation. Being a Faunus, life was difficult before but never as dire as staring at the ceiling feeling my insides devouring themselves.

It was only interrupted by unfamiliar shambling above. The upstairs of Gander's was a series of apartments strung together by a long corridor. Cleaning her living space was necessary, but the upstairs was alien territory save for the few searches for missed crumbs. While Glenn's first people perished in their own horrible way, the evacuation of Vale offered families chance to die in the same homes someone else had. Morbid as it was, we made homes in coffins awaiting Atlas to save us from a momentary crisis. What a joke.

Gander's stairs led to the owner's original residence; a home later taken by a family of three. Their clothes still sat at the foot of their beds and cold mugs waited on the table. My arms turned to goose flesh when I raided their pantries and collected drinking water from their windows. Silly as it was, I feared they come home.

Maybe one of them had.

Gliding upstairs, my elbow nudged open the door, before I swung around the corner. The perception of Faunus's enhanced senses as gifts always bewildered me. Our senses channel through fear, to hear and see and feel danger around us before predators' pounce. Faunuss, I believe, are people who remember where we've come from. Long ago we were all prey, humans could see in the dark and hear like us too, they didn't lose these senses until they became our predators. If you envy my eyes quick adjusting in dim lights or my ears catching the drips from the daughter's room, know we've retained these traits because we've run from death our whole lives.