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Yang made it home just as the edge of the sky was starting to turn pink, the first birds starting to stir as she let herself in and stretched some of the kinks out of her back.
She’d been up for twenty-four hours straight, between a day out with Ruby and some extra shifts Junior had pleaded with her to take. “Only human”, as the saying for some reason still went, and Yang was quite ready to take her well-earned rest. Still, she found herself pausing in the hall, some unnamed sense making her skin crawl. She couldn’t have said why, at first, but she carefully ascended the staircase onto Ren’s floor, half hoping to just find him passed out on his keyboard.
She was half-right, it turned out. He’d passed out alright, but splayed out across the floor. One hand was still clutched tight around his phone, and a thin sheen of sweat had his clothes clinging to his body. The whole scene looked off, wrong-how could someone have fallen asleep at that very moment? It didn’t fit.
Not quite comfortable seeing him like this, Yang leant over and laid a mild slap against his cheek. His body tensed, back arching, but his eyes didn’t open. Yang frowned, repeating the motion, and again her friend tensed up-but didn’t wake.
“I don’t like this,” she muttered, and bitterly wished it had felt like she really had just said that to herself. Instead, something seemed to shift on the edge of her consciousness, listening unseen.
When Ruby woke up not long after, stumbling into the kitchen in a pair of footie pajamas and a cape, she barely even paused at the sight of Ren laid out on the kitchen table as Yang leafed through one of several books at his head. Instead, she stumbled right to the fridge, pouring herself a long glass of milk and chugging half of it before shaking some of the cobwebs out of her head and staring at the room with new wakefulness.
“Yang,” she asked carefully. “Why is Ren sleeping on the table?” Any level of concern was interspersed with the fact it was still far too early for this, and the young reaper started fumbling around with the breakfast things as Yang figured out how to answer.
“I don’t think it’s sleep,” she said darkly, leaning over to pull one of Ren’s eyelids up in demonstration. His pupil beneath was dilated, twitching. Afraid. “He was like this when I found him, and I think he’s sick. I’ve been trying to figure out what’s happening, and-well, it’s not good.”
Ruby blinked, like a housemate who wouldn’t wake up was in any way a new experience for her. “Can’t we just call an ambulance? The lady at the curse-breaking ward gives out lollipops.”
Yang shifted, uncomfortable despite the amusing memory, as she dug out her own phone and squinted at a small card covered with Ren’s spidery writing.
“Ren doesn’t like the government looking too closely at him, Rubes, and really that’s not a terrible idea considering us living here isn’t strictly on the books. He has some contacts left for us, though, I just...” She paused, squinting at the number before the squiggles finally registered, and she gave a grunt of surprise.
“Oh. That makes things easier.”
~
Yang could only guess she wasn’t the only one who’d been up all night, as the phone was answered primarily with a sequence of cracks and sleepy sounds before a familiar, golden voice sent the same shiver down her spine it always did.
“You know Yang, if you want to arrange a date, calling me up at seven in the morning isn’t the best way to start,” Pyrrha teased gently, and Yang quickly turned in her seat before Ruby could see her blush.
“Ah, well, actually this is more about business. I’m supposed to speak to Nora?”
Yang tried not to imagine what that throaty chuckle and the sounds of shuffling looked like, and nearly missed the response.
“Nora has slept through things you wouldn’t believe, Yang. Why exactly are you trying to call my housemate anyway, I wasn’t aware you two were acquainted?”
That took all the excitement out of Yang as she remembered why she was calling, and her features fell into a frown.
“Its about Ren. I think he’s in trouble.”
~
Ten minutes later Pyrrha was knocking on the door, casually dressed but looking about ten times more alert than Yang felt, and as soon as she’d invited her girlfriend in Yang started explaining the situation. Unfortunately, she got a little more demonstration than she’d planned.
She knew as soon as she saw Ruby splayed out on the floor that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Small shards of china and a sludge of milk and cereal covered the floor and Ruby’s eyes were half open, unfocused, as Yang frantically pulled her up. She shook her sister with a hint of desperation, but her head lolled weakly. Logical thought was out of the Blonde’s grasp for sure-but then Pyrrha was there next to her, voice calm and constant for Yang’s sake as she checked the girl’s airway, pulse and head for signs of trauma. She motioned for Yang to lay her sister down and after a brief moment of uncertainty, she did.
Immediately Pyrrha started examining the sleeping girl in more detail, and Yang couldn’t help the way her spirit soared as the Valkyrie let out a noise of revelation.
“Here. Some kind of mark of claiming. I think it’s the source.”
Yang leant over excitedly-before letting out a huff of breath and sitting back, pressing her palms against her eyes to push back the attraction of sleep.
“Ah. That’s actually supposed to be a skull and cross-scythes that she convinced Weiss to tattoo on her. I told them not until her birthday, for goodness’ sake...”
This got the other girl’s attention, eyes flicking up from her patient.
“Weiss? Your friend the Shaman?” When Yang nodded Pyrrha hummed pensively, before gently closing Ruby’s eyes fully and stepping back.
“I think you should call her. I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with a somnaphage.”
~
Weiss and Blake appeared only a few minutes after Yang sent the text, their new, shared apartment much closer than their old room in Schnee manor, and some part of Yang bitterly noted that she shouldn’t have been surprised that Weiss was, apparently, more of a morning person than she was.
“A dream eater,” Weiss explained to her collected audience as she unpacked some things, voice uncommonly grave. “Rare, dangerous, and from the look of it so far, powerful. It would have followed him home, then pulled him into a shared dream-state, trapping him and laying out threads to pull in new prey.”
Nervous eyes flicked to Ren and Ruby, laid down across from her inside of the chalk circle Weiss had carefully plotted out. Only Pyrrha had been excluded from the circle, waiting with a barely-noticeable air of tension an inch from the edge as Weiss made the final preparations. Blake had seemed to bristle with distaste as soon as the sleeping bodies had come into view, and it had taken a mumbled apology to verify it was the hostile spirit itself and not the victims that were affecting them so.
“You remember the plan, right?” Weiss checked once again as she held the pinch of herbs over the brazier, set between herself, Yang, and Blake. Yang rolled her eyes, heavy and tired even without the ritual, and motioned at her to continue as she focused on keeping her eyes open.
“Get in, find Ren and Ruby, get out, and the spirit should wither on its own. Now get on with it, or I’m passing out with or without your help.”
The shaman and her cat shared a moment’s look, and then the fire jumped into a green blaze and everything went black.
~
Before Weiss had even opened her eyes, she knew something had gone wrong. She was alone- something she knew instinctively, absolutely, an absence of Blake she wouldn’t have been able to describe but knew without question. It felt like a day’s work just cracking her eyes open and crawling to her feet, but she managed it, head turning slowly to scan the landscape. It...wasn’t what she’d been expecting.
The plan was to drop directly into Ruby’s dream, their familiarity and closeness to the girl allowing them to slip in under the spirit’s defences for a solid, decisive strike. Weiss barely understood how Ruby’s head worked at the best of times, and freely admitted she didn’t know quite what the girl’s dream would resemble.
Still, she was fairly certain it shouldn’t have looked like Schnee manor.
No, this was definitely Weiss’s own dream. The room she’d “awoken” in was her own, right down to -she checked quickly- the creak in the third floorboard from the door. The cat bed at the base of her own looked pale and sunken, just like everything else-but it also looked mussed, recently slept in. When Weiss wound her hand through the blanket, it still felt warm. Maybe just an illusion of the dream. Probably. But not for sure.
It was as she strode down another indistinguishable corridor that she found the other feature of this world: namely, her magic didn’t work. It had been a minor seeking charm to find Blake, followed by a more subtle one when the first didn’t work, but nothing happened. This wasn’t like being cut off from her power, or unable to concentrate enough to draw on the energy. This was as if the magic wasn’t there at all. Whatever conduit to the planet granted her gifts to her, it apparently couldn’t reach her in her own head.
Or maybe the rules were just different, Weiss reasoned as she reached the same junction for the third time from another path that hadn’t existed last time she passed through. Dreams weren’t truly random-they just followed a different set of rules. Things didn’t have to be consistent, but they had to be related somehow to the person, if not the situation. And if there was one thing Weiss had learnt aside from the magic since her last birthday, it had been herself.
She closed her eyes-or maybe just pretended her eyes were closed, separating herself from the “reality” of the body that seemed to be here- and imagined her staff, remembering the cool wood under her palm as if it were right there in her palm. In moments she could have sworn it was there, the familiar weight, and when she twisted her hand it moved it should have, twirling lazily before she rested the end on the tiles with a click.
Well, that was a start. Still, Weiss couldn’t help wondering why she should stop there. Imbuing magic items was a slow and arduous task, filled with small mistakes and retraced steps, but here the only limit was her mind. She opened her eyes, lifting the piece of memory before her, as the corner of her mouth already began to crook up with new ideas.
When she strode forward a few minutes later, she didn’t look like a teenager lost in her own home any more. Black and white plates, sketched with interlocking symbols and runes, covered her limbs and body, while a bladed staff that practically thrummed with controlled potential hit the tiles with a spray of sparks as she strode forward, both legs moving equally without mark of previous injury. When she reached a dead-end, the very first, she didn’t even slow down, cutting away the room with an effortless flick of the staff and striding forward into the empty whiteness that took it’s place.
The expanse appeared to go on forever, but Weiss wasn’t having that. Instead it immediately started changing as she strode, becoming uneven and gaining features. Black roots broke the surface, twirling around each other and combining as ever greater shapes of blackness materialized around her. She only stopped when her staff thumped down on something squishy. Letting her eyes focus, she looked up.
And up.
And up.
Anywhere else, she knew, she would have been terrified. The thing was beyond massive, beyond titanic. It stretched up further than the eye could see, surface interspersed with yellowy nodes in which she could faintly see humanoid shapes, jerking and writhing in agony.
She knew, without questioning it, that she could lean up a little and look this thing in the eyes without taking her heels off the ground. However, Weiss was used to being the shortest person in any given conversation, and it wasn’t going to start bothering her now. Instead, she glared it down and felt the thing freeze.
“They are not yours,” She said simply, the words a punishment and a sentence all at once. “You may have caught them off guard, but I’ll give you a chance now. Let them go, and you can slink away from here in one piece.”
Hostility rolled off the thing in waves, and a fierce smile spread across her face as an elephantine limb crashed down towards her.
“Well, then. Rest in pieces.”
The limb crashed against a sphere of starlight a twinkle thick and stronger than all the iron in the world, and as she rose to the air on wings of dreamstuff she felt every person in this thing’s grasp pull in a breath as she steadied her stance with the blade-staff.
~
Ren, Ruby, and all their rescuers woke in the same gasp, shocking the dozing valkyrie nearly off her seat. All of them had witnessed Weiss’ stand against the far, far stronger than anticipated spirit. Toasts were suggested, then toast when it was realised that it was still morning.
Blake remained in the corner through it all, silent. They’d been caught off-guard by the spirit, its forewarning of their arrival allowing it to quickly disable the Sidhe.
Blake had figured that was probably it for them. Its strength was magnitudes beyond anything she’d ever seen.
Until she saw Weiss, clad in moonlight and will wrapped around her like armour.
Dreams followed logic, certainly-but strength had to come from somewhere. Maybe you could lift a car, or a mountain, in that half-realm, but all you would be moving was wisps. Actual spirits, creatures of nightmares like the spirit, could pierce the false displays of power as the dreams they really were.
Apparently no-one had told Weiss that. For the first time, Blake questioned just what was in the woman’s head-or her heart- that allowed her to overturn a being of pure willpower in its own domain.
And felt just a note of fear mixed with Pride.