i am inhabited by a cry

PART ONE: A Blanker Whiteness of Benighted Snow

PART TWO: Blind and Blackening in the Moonless Air

unfortunately . no ghfrfk sorry. i know my frequent linking of old posts may give the impression otherwise but my secret is i just have all the First Sentences and Post Types of various important posts memorized so i can find them in the archive really fast 😭

to be clear. my stance on the reliability of the lost fable is that jinn answered with absolute honesty exactly the question ruby asked, which was “what is ozpin hiding from us?”—i think she obeys the same rule ambrosius does. you get EXACTLY what you ask for.

so ‘the lost fable’ includes:

the reason jinn frames it as a fairytale (“once upon a time…”) is because she is conveying specifically ozpin’s perspective, and fairytales, stories, are fundamental to how he sees the world. she is telling his story in his words, because that’s what ruby asked her to do!

but the lost fable doesn’t include:

so jinn herself is not an unreliable narrator per se, but the question ruby asked necessitated that jinn tell only ozpin’s side of the story, without filling in any gaps in his knowledge or correcting his misunderstandings and mistaken assumptions. the lost fable is therefore honest (in the sense that no part of it is a deliberate lie) but biased and limited (because ozpin is fallible and doesn’t know everything.)

which is something ozpin himself points out in his commentaries in the fairytale anthology—on the infinite man: “no one who wasn’t there could know what really happened. and even then, they would only have a small part of the story,” for example.

all of which is the long way around to saying that i do trust the dialogue in the lost fable to be accurate to what the characters actually said, and the scenes to be accurate depictions of events as they happened (if he was there) or as ozma imagined them happening based on what salem told him (if he wasn’t). the parts i don’t trust are the narration, because that’s the part colored by ozpin’s perspective, and the elisions of ozma’s dialogue in the key ozlem scenes, because things salem says in response to ozma lack the context of what ozma said.

(think about what listening to someone make a phone call is like; if the conversation is about a complex subject, it’s difficult to follow along and easy to misunderstand what the person you can hear is really trying to express.)

and on the topic of those elisions: if salem wanted to rule the world herself, i think she would have made an effort to do so before ozma returned. she is demonstrably capable of both merciless conquest (razing vale) and inspiring awe (slaying the nevermore). she’s immortal. she cannot be killed. before ozma returned there was absolutely no one who could have prevented her from, like, taking over a kingdom and expanding it into an empire with herself as the eternal god-queen.

but she didn’t. she lived alone in the woods, in a miserable hovel. given the well-maintained path leading to her doorstep, she had to have been visited on a regular enough basis for whatever community lived outside the woods to go to the effort of paving the way to her shack. which says… village witch.

left to her own devices, that’s what she did with her life: found some village or town at the edge of a forest and built herself a little house in the woods, just close enough that the townspeople could find her when they needed her but otherwise isolated.

and then once ozma found her, they fixed up her house together and lived happily for… apparently quite some time before ozma brought up “humanity seems more divided than ever” as a problem.

there’s nothing in the lost fable to suggest that salem wanted anything more than the life she had with ozma in that cottage. everything she says about bringing humanity together is specifically in response to OZMA telling her he wasn’t satisfied. she’s supporting HIS stated ambitions.

and like… she’s not… wrong? her phrasing is extremely blunt, but… you can’t bring people together without giving them something to believe in—a cause, a creed, a faith, a purpose—no one is going to unite for the sake of being united. ozma despairs that “humanity seems more divided than ever,” and salem goes… well yeah. the gods killed everyone and fucked off. people just need help. we could help. we have the will and the means to change the world, make it better than before.

but.

the problem is.

the task ozma was given isn’t to help people or make the world a better place; it’s to prepare for the final judgment by uniting the whole world—the god of light instructed him to end conflict full stop. ozma needs everyone to unite in submission to the brothers.

and salem is absolutely correct that you cannot achieve that except by conquest. you cannot, you cannot, you cannot unite the whole world under one creed without genocide. it is impossible.

this is why i say the divine mandate is a fundamentally genocidal ideology: the premise is that humans as they are now do not deserve to exist and must be ‘redeemed,’ and the only way to achieve ‘redemption’ is through genocide. the logical end of any ideology that requires universal adoption or universal acceptance of a certain belief or creed is genocide.

salem understands this intuitively; when ozma asks her “are we sure that this is right?” she spells it out to him in plain terms that it’s what is necessary to achieve his goal. her implication is that if the end does not justify the means, he needs to reconsider the end. i don’t think she cared either way as long as ozma was happy, until she learned the truth about what he wanted to do and why.

as i’ve said before, i believe her final statement—why spend our lives trying to redeem these humans when we can replace them with what they could never be?—a) reiterates her longstanding dream of humankind overthrowing their “old masters” and claiming the power of creation for themselves to “perfect their own design” and b) quotes/paraphrases the closing lines of ‘the shallow sea’ to express this idea because she’s trying to communicate in ozma’s language, through stories.

and i think ozma understood her perfectly well, he just doesn’t think her third option of rejecting the mandate is possible. in the present, oz only suggests salem is out to destroy the world when he’s trying to scare hazel into turning against her; what he tells his inner circle is that salem’s after the relics because she wants to “change the world.” he believes she’s doomed to fail.

anyway, as to the question of what salem wants now: it’s revolution.

pretty… overtly. “your so-called free world.” her protégée was an enslaved child who grew up wearing a shock collar in the gilded heart of ozpin’s crowning achievement some sixty years after the vytal accords abolished slavery, and the huntsman who found her in that situation used her suffering to groom her for the huntsman academy instead of using his authority to help her by enforcing the laws against slavery.

watch WOR: kingdoms. compare the almost tender tone with which salem talks about the democratic councils that represent the people to the utter disdain she has for the huntsmen academies that exist solely to train “the next generation of defenders who will fight and die to protect the lifestyle that they’ve become so accustomed to.”

she wants to defeat the god of light, yes—or at least prevent him from ever returning, i do think Plan A might be “destroy the relics”—but she also wants to tear down the systems ozma built to uphold the divine mandate, systems that turned a blind eye to slavery and injustice and abuse. she wants the whole world to know the truth.

i think she also probably wants humans to coexist in peace with the grimm, and i suspect that will be the biggest sticking point; but salem clearly feels affection for the grimm, and—gestures at menagerie’s lack of a grimm problem—coexistence between people and grimm is possible, and because salem herself is grimm she’s never going to have peace or freedom until the existential war between humans and grimm is ended.

and i think she does intend to make good on her promises to her inner circle, in some form. hazel believes she’s planning to create a “new world order” (which, definitionally, a world with no huntsmen academies and no everlasting war is) and mercury says she’s “promised [them] everything,” which he takes to mean that they’ll be “top dogs in her new world.” but the one thing we know for certain about what salem offers to her followers is very vague; all of them project their own desires to fill in the gaps and come away with wildly disparate ideas about what this ‘new world’ will look like.

what salem has always wanted is freedom. she’s never shown any personal ambition to rule—even her rebellion, she isn’t the one who leads the charge, she walks among them. before ozma returned, she was… just the village witch somewhere. i do think it’s really quite likely that her plan is to tear down everything ozma built, destroy the relics or defeat the god of light, participate in rebuilding from the ashes to ensure that the new world isn’t founded upon lies or subjugation or eternal war against her existence, and then just… find a place where she can live. all she ever wanted was to leave the tower. i don’t think that’s changed.

oh oz absolutely thinks they’re not gonna make it. i am so sure about that.

bc the thing is, ozpin thought he’d been at war with salem for centuries, he thought he’d managed to keep her out and whittle away her influence down to almost nothing. right. his whole reason for handling the situation the way he did in v1-3 is he believed that salem wouldn’t leave the shadows, wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize her secrecy. the thing about his paranoia in seeing salem’s hand behind every grimm attack and every period of unrest or war is he had no idea what salem was capable of or how far she would go, but he believed that he did.

within the space of, like, maybe a year and a half, salem has. knocked down beacon academy, forced haven academy to close by assassinating most of its faculty, laid siege to atlas with a fleet of millions of grimm and directly caused atlas to fall, and within a few weeks of that razed vale to the ground. three of his four academies are either destroyed or defunct; two whole countries are just. Gone. it’s been a year and a half!

he. underestimated. really really badly, he underestimated salem and for him this past year has been a harrowing journey of discovering exactly how badly he underestimated her. a year and a half and they’ve gone from “unprecedented era of peaceful prosperity” to desperate last stand. oz hasn’t been in such dire straits since the final battle of the great war when he resorted to using two relics to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and now one of those is within salem’s reach, and if they take the sword out of its vault that’s just one step closer to salem getting her hands on it.

like, oscar annihilated her millions of grimm in atlas and a few weeks later she turned around and flattened vale.

this is not a fight they can win. and i think oz is painfully aware of that. (the whole point is that the only way out is through negotiation. they have to stop fighting her and start talking to her.)

but i also think he meant “around that campfire, did it matter?” very genuinely because he found his hope again when he returned in atlas, and the situation being hopeless has no bearing on how he chooses to look at it or how he chooses to act. so things are very very bad but oz is, emotionally, in a much better place now than he was at the beginning of the story when things appeared to be okay. it’s the next step from “fear isn’t worthy of our concern”

cackles

i’m thinking it might be specifically dead people whom she’s used her eyes to protect and whose deaths she’s witnessed—after beacon fell, it was only pyrrha, and then ruby uses her glare twice in atlas to protect penny after having seen her die at beacon and wakes up in the ever after hearing penny. or else penny technically wasn’t dead, just dormant.

she also seems to mainly hear the dead person crying out for a loved one, and only when she’s asleep or unconscious; the only reason we know there’s more to it than dreams is she also has that flashback to pyrrha’s last words, which ruby wasn’t present for, but ruby has no way of knowing that.

so i wonder how it’s going to come up again. it’s only been two days since penny died; she kept hearing pyrrha for months, and if she starts hearing penny’s final moments too…

it does seem like an obvious way to lead in to the answers about what’s up with silver eyes. which, sidebar, salem and summer are also an obvious potential source of answers; salem certainly seems to know or at least suspect more than maria knows, and fourteen years of being a silver-eyed warrior on salem’s side is plenty of time for summer to have figured out a thing or two other than deleting grimm

no. although hellebore’s crossing itself is a very mixed community—like a third or so of its full-time population are fauni, many of whom practice khimerism—so cinder is a lot more familiar with what khimancy is than the average human. (one of the people in her contact list in burnt roses ch1 is a turnskin.) which isn’t to say she knows very much in detail, ’cause it’s a closed tradition, but she could define it accurately.

this is also why she recognizes the white fang safety mark on roin’s truck in ch5, since sable rescued her from the glass unicorn situation she’s grown up in an environment where it’s safe for fauni and specifically khimeric culture to just exist openly around their human neighbors. which translates into knowing how to signal that she’s a Safe Person.

lonán is a practicing khimancer (albeit one with no formal training); roscoe march and raymond altansarnai are as well (both formally trained); rue has khime for religious rite-of-passage reason, but she’s secular and not really interested in pursuing the art itself. the other fauni students in the spring class (bella marshal, garth saille, scar tybalt) don’t have khime. roscoe is REALLY GOOD bc he learned from his mom, who’s a turnskin.

cinder’s religious Situation is smth called strigism by like. religious scholars. it doesn’t have a name though, the people who practice it just refer to it as ‘our way’ or similar turns of phrase—it originated in the vitrine peninsula (where hellebore’s crossing is) and is more or less only practiced there.

and then oak is a kairoist—which is the dominant religion in anima, although a plurality of mistral’s urban population are draconites in some form, kairoism is Much Older (as in, predates ozma’s first reincarnation by a couple thousand years). [pyrrha is not in burnt roses because she is eleven but kairoism is conceptually just an elaborate riff on the mantra she uses to unlock jaune’s aura in canon, to give a sense of the vibe]

gretchen’s religion is folk draconism (<- the brother-cult) pejoratively called sanctimony by normative draconites because it is WILDLY HERETICAL and revolves around worship of various ‘saints,’ largely regional folk heroes syncretized into draconism as sacred heroes who inherited or otherwise obtained slivers of divine power after the dragon-brothers, who became mortal through the act of creating the world, died. (WILDLY. HERETICAL.) (fretting abt folk draconism keeps ozpin up at night.)

larkspur and rani both grew up reform draconites (<- aka the lucent church. reforms happened under king osiander and mainly involved imposing a separation between the valean aristocracy and the church and pushing a much greater theological emphasis on peace and inclusion. this got him briefly excommunicated but proved so popular with the common people that the church had to walk that back to save face. orthodox draconism is the radiant church. the vermeils were the only noble family to support the reforms and that was partly a political move to empower themselves over rivals and partly because the winter maiden at the time was a vermeil.)

filemot is an indifferent madagian (<- worship of the four maidens) which means he attends services on the equinoxes and solstices and that’s basically it.

and sacnicte practices ixtuan ancestor worship, which is very funny for her for reasons that we’ll get to Later. :)

and beacon—the only academy that is not in the middle of its kingdom—is also the only school whose vault probably isn’t on campus.

to be a little fair to ozpin, he professes to be under the impression that the attraction is “faint,” and might be lost in the noise of an urban center. to be less fair, the leviathan BEELINES to ruby and completely ignores 1. the city full of terrified people behind her and 2. the ship full of likes dozen panicky huntsmen actively trying to get its attention, because ruby has the relic on her hip, so the attraction is clearly a lot stronger than “faint but undeniable” and ozpin has a very well-established habit of downplaying and hiding information, and if he’s been carrying these relics around for years he ought to know better.

yeah just put the grimm bait where all the civilians are. and then keep it secret. the funny part is that as a strategic choice to protect the relics, it makes the most sense if oz assumed—whether consciously or not—that the risk of thousands of civilian casualties would actually deter salem from going after the relics. which. given how long she kept her distance…

tdt is the au name, all the ash burnt roses leave is the name of the fic 👍

welcome back from The Void! 🥳

on the one hand i have no idea because i don’t know. what the VA situation is like or to what extent that was/is a deciding factor in which of the planned spots they could Do. IDEALLY i would like to glimpse some characters whom we haven’t already seen in the 9.11 animatic or B1-2 (the exception being ozpin and oscar—i promise i will be on my very best unhinged behavior if one of of the remaining two focuses on them), and i would love to get even the smallest peek at what is happening somewhere else besides vacuo (even if in the form of characters Showing Up in vacuo with News From Elsewhere).

but idk what the logistical limitations are for this little series. grbfhdck oz being in B2 gives me hope that an oscar+oz focused spot is within the realm of possibility so MAYBE… maybe… my shoot-for-the-moon wish is of course salem but i am not holding my breath for that. given. The Situation.

question. are you using windows defender (as in the default antivirus program built into windows) as your antivirus solution? i ask bc 1. that’s a super common WD false positive, and 2. kaspersky doesn’t detect any threats. so i think you might be seeing a false alarm.

did it identify and quarantine an infected file? if so, upload and scan on virustotal to check. if not and you can’t get it to Tell You where it detected the threat, use your best judgment (& consider switching to a better AV)

i stand by the gillian theory and my general thoughts on what the maidens are for, thematically. if she isn’t gill, i think she’s definitely starr (& as outlined in the gillian theory post, between gill’s semblance and the ATMs i think the summer maiden might get hot potatoed without character deaths—in the form of gill temporarily stealing the magic by draining the real maiden’s aura with her semblance, or if gill is the maiden, the ATMs being used to permanently transfer half her aura to jax and that causing the maiden power to part from her and go to someone else, probably starr).

there’s also the ‘lessons’ and the divine quality associated with each maiden:

winter + creation + “learn to center yourself and think reflectively to gain awareness of who you are and what you can contribute to the world”

spring + knowledge + “hard work can be its own reward” and “try to nurture the life around you and remember to ‘stop and smell the roses.’”

fall + choice + “be thankful for what you have and show your gratitude.”

so.

summer + destruction + “don’t view the world at a distance, take an active part in it.”

as i discussed here, i’m skeptical that the mystery girl in B1 is the summer maiden. but if she is, or if she’s a presumptive heir, the secrecy surrounding her and the fact that she isn’t publicly known or acting in the open like winter and raven are would suggest that the inner circle hasn’t shifted its thinking whatsoever on the maidens: winter and raven are free because their vaults are open and salem has their relics, but the summer maiden must be kept hidden to safeguard her vault.

on the other hand, if mystery girl is a spy (emerald), then the summer maiden’s absence could suggest either that she is in hiding or that she is someone outside of the inner circle’s control.

because cinder isn’t in vacuo, i think the latter option is more likely—which is one reason i think it’s probably gillian first and starr becoming the maiden during the vacuo arc. if the summer maiden is already someone outside of, and antagonistic to, the inner circle, then there is no narrative need for cinder to be involved in the summer maiden arc; the summer maiden is already free.

(this would also allow for an interesting inversion of the last two arcs and mirroring with the second beacon arc, in that if gillian is the summer maiden, the crown will be gunning for the sword of destruction, and the conflict is not “how do we keep the key out of salem’s hands” but “how can we prevent an enemy maiden from taking the relic.”)

similarly, if the maiden is starr, then the crown is likely to be gunning for her and between the twins’ semblances and tyrian they certainly have the means to do it if they find her.

the other thing to consider with regard to the summer maiden is the history vacuo has with the sword, and how that intersects with the summer maiden’s theme of taking an active part in the world: eighty years ago, ozma used that sword to end a war and enact dramatic world-wide changes, and then he sealed it away with the presumable intent that it would never be used again. this is antithetical to the thematic purpose of the summer maiden and of destruction conceptually; the summer maiden must act, and destruction is a force which drives constant change.

if the summer maiden is part of the inner circle and on board with keeping the sword locked away at the top of the vacuo arc, i think it’s very likely that she will die, and the power will go to a character who wants to open the vault and use it to protect vacuo. whether that is gillian or starr or both at different points in the narrative, it makes sense to me for the summer maiden to be someone who decides that the sword must be used, for better or worse.

if gillian is the summer maiden, i think her determination to use the sword for vacuo’s sake in combination with her love for her brother might end up being the common ground between the crown and the coalition: they agree to help her heal her brother via partial aura transfer, she agrees to relinquish the maiden power, and everyone comes together to mount a counteroffensive using the sword of destruction. or the summer maiden power might end up divided between multiple people, with gillian keeping half and the half attached to the aura transferred to jax seeking a new host.

generally, i think it’s more likely than not that the summer maiden will break the existing pattern of [vulnerable dead/dying maiden] -> [“false” or “illegitimate” maiden] -> [freed maiden] and in that case the expectation that the initial summer maiden will die might be subverted completely. there is also something compelling about the summer maiden choosing to ‘destroy’ her power by dividing it, in a mirror image of the fall maiden arc.

although that being said i don’t think the maiden cycle itself will be ended, just freed from the artificial system of control imposed by the vaults and the oz conspiracy.