Chapter Text
She woke to the sound of crying — a thin, fragile wail that had no right to exist within her hearing.
It was an impossible sound on so many levels. Evernight Castle had not sheltered an infant in over six centuries, nor had it been home to one for much longer. She no longer kept a court, nor even a trusted inner circle. There was no one left who might presume to bring such a creature into her domain.
But I am not there, am I?
The realization came slowly, like frost creeping across glass. The walls around her were wrong — not the cold, eternal dark stone of Evernight, but splintered wood and broken plaster.
She stood within the remains of a modest living room. The house had been simple once, mostly timber, built for warmth rather than endurance. Simple wooden furniture and useless memories in pictures by the cracking walls. Now it lay in ruin.
Fragments of a shattered mirror glittered across the floor, and in them lay the truth.
Oh... I have lost myself again.
The understanding settled over her with the dull, familiar weight of inevitability. Cold. Terrible. Old.
This was not the first time Salem had drowned in grief and rage. The blackened blood of the Grimm that flowed through her veins sang its endless dirge without pause, a siren call that had accompanied every moment of her cursed immortality. From time to time, she ceased resisting. From time to time, she allowed the tide to claim her.
Each surrender rewrote the world.
Maps became obsolete. Entire cities became graves. Names became warnings told to children in trembling voices. Legends of devastation spread across Remnant — and, inevitably, heroes followed. Heroes who rose, struggled, and struck her down.
Never for the final time.
Her gaze fell to the mirror shard at her feet.
The reflection it offered was a mercy in its smallness. Each time the madness took her, it remade her into something new — something worse. Grimm were already creatures of nightmare, but her corruption twisted even their nature into forms that defied reason and mercy alike.
Even now, staring into that broken sliver of glass, she could see that she had become something the Grimm themselves might have feared.
And because the dreaded gods had willed it so she endured and so did all poor unfortunate souls that suffered under her cursed existence.
Her body confirmed what her memory already knew. Once again, she no longer possessed legs. In their place coiled a long, serpentine tail, heavy with unnatural strength, its dark mass dragging across the splintered floor with a slow, deliberate sound.
A grotesquely powerful pair of arms supported her broad, draconic torso, the muscles beneath pale Grimm-flesh swollen and inhuman. From her ribcage emerged a second set of limbs — longer, thinner, wrong in both proportion and purpose. They resembled the dead branches of a winter-stricken tree, jointed and brittle-looking, ending in elongated claws like blackened spears.
She shifted, and something along her back unfolded.
A wet sound followed.
There, running down her spine, yawned an open crimson slit — like the mouth of some buried hell forced into the shape of a wound. Pale bone jutted outward around it in the shape of broken ribs, framing the opening as though her skeleton itself had tried and failed to contain what lay within. From that exposed cavity spilled slow-moving, tar-dark tendrils that dragged along her body and coiled lazily around her tail, alive in ways they should not have been.
Still… none of that was the worst of it.
Her hand rose, almost reluctantly, toward her face.
The mirror shard showed what she already felt.
Her familiar pale visage remained — smooth, expressionless, and deathly white — but it did not belong. It lay rested across something else, as though her own face had been nailed into place as a mockery of memory.
Beneath it, visible through the splitting seams of Grimm corruption, lurked a draconic skull. Two pairs of burning red eyes stared from within the shadowed sockets, filled with a hatred older than the very kingdoms. Below them, a mouth far too wide for any human form flexed slowly, layered with jagged teeth that multiplied the longer one looked.
A queen’s face, resting above a monster.
It was… strange to be aware during one of her bouts of madness.
Ordinarily, clarity returned only after her destruction — after blade, bullet, or miracle had reduced her monstrous form to ash and memory. Awareness was not meant to exist alongside the Grimm’s dominion over her body.
Yet before the thought could deepen into dread, the small wail came again.
Thin. Insistent. Alive.
She turned her many eyes from the scattered mirror shards and found the source.
A woman lay dead only a few feet away, her body twisted where it had fallen. The ruin of her back bore marks Salem recognized with quiet certainty — wounds carved by claws not unlike her own. Blond hair, darkened by blood, clung to the woman’s face and shoulders. Red had pooled beneath her still form, soaking into the broken floorboards.
And beneath her arms, something moved.
A small, squirming shape pressed against the woman’s chest.
Freeing it would have been effortless. Her claws could have torn through bone and flesh without resistance, casting the corpse aside like debris.
She did not move. This one deserved better.
Whoever she had been, she had remained a mother until her final breath — dying not in terror, but in protection. A mercy Salem herself had never been able to grant to her own.
A bitter, distant memory stirred and faded. Four little girls, four heads of blonde hair and easy smiles. Faces faded and voices forgotten.
Slowly, Salem extended her elongated arms. Instruments of slaughter moved with impossible care, claws hovering before touching the body. With a gentleness wholly at odds with her monstrous shape, she turned the woman onto her back.
The mother’s eyes were half-open, clouded and lightless. They had once been bright blue. Her blood-matted hair clung to her pale face in uneven strands.
She had been beautiful, once.
“Curse the gods, young one,” Salem murmured softly, the words dry with centuries of resignation. “It is by their will that I remain.”
The woman’s arms loosened as they were moved, revealing the bundle she had shielded even in death.
Wrapped in blue cloth, the child squirmed weakly until the weight above him lifted. He drew breath in ragged confusion, then cried again — small hands grasping at empty air, wide sky-blue eyes searching a world he did not yet understand.
“And what misfortune has fallen upon you, little one,” Salem said, her voice scarcely louder than the child’s breathing.
The world would name her heartless. Her cults, her enemies, and Ozma himself would all believe the same convenient lie.
But Salem had never been without a heart. She had simply lived long enough for it to become irrelevant.
She no longer cared for the weight of her sins. Time had worn such concerns smooth and hollow. The blood upon her hands — oceans of it — could never be washed away, and she had ceased pretending otherwise long ago.
Yet the shape of this sacrifice… that she would remember. The dead woman had earned her respect.
But what are my sins, truly, when weighed against those of the Brothers themselves?
Every life she had taken, every family shattered, every child denied a future by her hand —all of it traced back to that first divine cruelty. Salem should have died ages ago. Her bones should have long since turned to dust, her name eroded from history, her deeds dissolved into nothingness.
She should have been allowed to end.
Instead, she endured— punished for the simple, unforgivable act of loving someone enough to defy death. That had been her first crime. The first mark in an account that could never be settled.
To love.
And now she would add another. Salem did not wish to, but what other choice was there?
A spear-like claw hovered above the infant, unmoving, suspended between decision and inevitability.
The house groaned around them, punctuated by the distant roar of flames and collapsing timber. No voices called for survivors. No boots struck the ground in rescue and no weapons sang or fired in last ditch efforts. Whatever resistance this settlement had offered had already been erased.
No help would come.
When Salem lost herself, the true Queen of Grimm did not march with a mere horde. She arrived as a living catastrophe— a tide of bone, darkness, claws, and hunger. Elder Grimm followed in her wake. Alphas gathered like carrion birds. Dozens, sometimes more, drawn to her corruption as though it were a second moon in the sky.
To stop such a force required armies. Kingdoms. Half or more of the world’s strength focused upon a single point.
And even then, it would only end with her destruction— never her death — and the monstrous tide breaking apart into lesser disasters. Each Elder walking away with its share of the horde and causing further tragedies.
Even if she spared the child…
Even if she commanded her Grimm to ignore him…
That protection would last only until she departed. Distance would dissolve control, and the creatures would answer the oldest law they knew: hunger drawn to despair. The crying of an abandoned infant would be irresistible.
Slow. Cold. Terrified. Alone.
The child’s fate would be worse than death.
Salem’s claw trembled, almost imperceptibly.
“It would be kinder,” she whispered, the words hollow even to herself.
Kinder than starvation. Kinder than teeth. Kinder than fear stretching into endless night.
Kinder than the world she herself had made possible.
The infant’s cries softened into small, uneven breaths, unaware of the judgment hanging above him.
A simple swipe and it would all be over. A terrible mercy brought forward by her stained hands.
Salem hesitated. Just for a moment.
And within that infinitesimal moment, the child’s small hands rose and closed around the bone-white claw suspended above him.
He was far too young to understand what stood before him. He could not know the shape of death hovering over his throat, nor the history contained within the creature watching him.
Salem could barely feel the pressure of his grasp. It was weak —fragile in the way all mortal things were.
But it was warm.
The crying stopped.
Tiny fingers wrapped clumsily around the curve of her claw, testing it with uncertain movements. Without thinking, Salem allowed the motion to guide her hand, letting the terrible blade tilt and shift in slow arcs above the child.
It smiled.
A small, thoughtless smile, as the child played with the knife meant for his throat.
Time slipped.
It took her longer than it should have to realize what she was doing— how many silent minutes had passed with her claw lowered, moving gently at the direction of the infant’s uncoordinated hands. When the awareness finally came, it struck like ice water poured into her hollow chest.
The warmth inside her was extinguished immediately.
She pulled her claw free from his grasp.
The loss of contact was instant and catastrophic. The child lurched forward with surprising urgency, mouth trembling, eyes filling with tears before another wail broke free— louder now, desperate, searching.
For her.
The sound struck something buried so deeply within Salem that she had once believed it fossilized by time.
Her hand moved before her mind permitted it.
Ancient instinct—older than kingdoms, older than Grimm, older even than her hatred — guided her arm back toward him. Her monstrous frame bent slightly, and a voice unused for comfort in countless centuries emerged soft and low.
“There now…”
The sound did not belong to the Queen of Grimm. It belonged to someone long dead.
The child’s cries faltered, then quieted under the slow, careful motion of her claw hovering near him once more.
Salem watched him in silence.
All four burning eyes traced the details she had tried so carefully to avoid seeing. Pale skin. Soft strands of blond hair. Round cheeks still flushed from crying. Wide blue eyes that reflected her distorted form without understanding. All bundled in a blue blanket.
She had avoided looking before.
Memories were dangerous things. Faces were worse. She had not wanted the image to become strong enough to endure— even knowing the act itself would remain with her forever.
And she knew, with growing certainty, that this moment was about to become another.
There was also an emblem embroidered into the blood-stained cloth.
Two golden half-moons— one nested within the other.
Salem’s gaze lingered on the symbol, her expression growing still.
“What game are they playing?”
The emblem was a mockery of her own ancient crest. Mirrored horizontally and crowned with the diamond-shaped spearhead of her forgotten house, the design would have been nearly identical.
This could not be a coincidence.
The Brothers had sworn never to return unless summoned. But their promises were worth less than the ashes beneath Grimm claws. Salem had long since abandoned any faith in divine restraint. The gods had never truly understood absence, nor consequence.
She wished —with the hollow remnants of her long-dead heart— that they had found new worlds to torment. That Remnant had become nothing more than a discarded toy.
But she knew better.
Humanity had defied its creators. It had rejected them— openly, finally and without apology. Salem understood the Brothers well enough to know such defiance would never be forgotten.
Their creations’ only true act of independence had been to wish them gone.
How deeply had that wounded their pride?
She hoped the scar had been unbearable.
Turning the kingdoms against the gods had been simple enough. The Brother of Light had believed himself loved— worshipped and adored even — when in truth he had been feared no less than his sibling. Neither had ever been understood by the mortals they shaped. To humanity, they had been little more than incomprehensible forces —monsters with the power to reshape existence on a whim.
Creators, perhaps. But never guardians. Not when they granted wishes at random and no care for the impact it caused on other of theirs creations.
Still… what game could this be?
Guiding her to this place. Allowing her awareness during madness for the first time ever. Placing this child before her — a boy with features that stirred memories she had spent lifetimes burying.
And the emblem.
A deliberate imitation of her ancient family sigil, stitched into the cloth that wrapped him.
The resemblance to her daughters was already difficult to ignore.
This… was cruelty with intention.
But the intention behind it all eluded her.
To make her kill a child? Perhaps one separated from her own ancient bloodline by a thousand generations?
It would change nothing.
She was already responsible for deaths beyond counting— villages erased, bloodlines ended, children lost before they had learned to speak. Whether this boy lived or died would not meaningfully alter the weight she carried. And the notion that he was truly her descendant bordered on absurdity. So much time had passed that any resemblance to her or her daughters could only be coincidence.
No.
If the Brothers were involved, they would want the child to live.
There were only two ways that could happen.
The first was simple in theory: she could bring the infant to the nearest settlement and leave him behind, departing with her Grimm horde into the wilderness.
But that was foolish. No one would accept a child delivered from the arms of a Grimm. They would assume corruption, infection, or deception. Fear would decide faster than reason ever could.
The child would be executed.
The second possibility…
She would take him.
Salem’s eyes remained fixed on the small figure wrapped in blue cloth.
Yes. That made a cruel sort of sense.
She would raise the boy —this child who resembled her daughters in ways that made memory ache like an old wound. She knew herself well enough to predict the outcome. She would grow attached. She would love him. She always did.
Even after her transformation, she had tried before. More than once. Adopting abandoned children, orphans, survivors of disasters she herself had caused. Brief attempts at defiance against eternity.
It never lasted.
Mortals were fragile things. Those who survived longest had given her eighty, perhaps ninety years at most— a breath against the endless span of her existence.
A whisper of joy.
Then centuries of grief.
Perhaps that was the game.
Now that she stood so close to surrender — so close to desiring true oblivion — the gods offered her something to love again. Something small and fragile. Something temporary.
A candle placed in the hands of the condemned.
Only to watch it burn out.
Her gaze softened, almost imperceptibly, as the child shifted in the cloth.
But… perhaps…
Perhaps he would be the last.
Perhaps she would love him more deeply than all the others. Enough that when time finally claimed him, the accumulated weight of loss would shatter what remained of her mind.
And in that final breaking…
She might finally find rest.
The hand not held by the small boy turned inward, the great white claw settling beneath her draconic throat.
Without warning, it sank into her own flesh.
Grimm matter parted with obscene ease, opening beneath the bladed finger as though eager to be undone. The wound spread downward as she drew the claw along her torso, splitting blackened skin until it reached the center of her abdomen. From the exposed crimson cavity, pale shapes began to wriggle and emerge.
Arms.
Countless white arms forced their way into existence, unfolding like something remembered rather than born. Some were too long and thin, others short and soft; some bent with too many joints, others trembled with newborn weakness. Imperfect. Uneven.
But human enough.
Not claws. Not weapons.
Hands.
With reverent care, Salem gathered the child. The pale limbs moved with careful coordination, cradling him securely against her body. Some brushed away the drying blood on his cheek. Others adjusted the cloth around him. One traced the curve of his round face with a gentleness so slow it was almost hesitant.
The infant responded with a quiet, pleased sound, his small features relaxing beneath her touch. He did not fear her. He did not recoil from the unnatural cradle that held him.
He seemed to preen beneath the attention.
“So be it,” Salem murmured. “A gamble…”
She lifted him higher, toward the pale, human mask that rested above her draconic visage. The child yawned, unaware of the abyss behind the face watching him.
“Curse the gods, little one. It is their hands that write your fate.”
Her body answered with a low, resonant hum, Grimm flesh shifting and settling as though acknowledging a decision made.
Salem turned and left the ruined house behind.
Outside, the village burned. Flames devoured timber and roof thatch alike, casting long, broken shadows across the street. The distant sounds of Grimm faded as her will reached them, the monstrous tide already beginning to withdraw into the wilderness.
She slithered through smoke and ruin, past the remains of lives ended in moments she could not remember.
At the edge of the collapsing settlement, the last survivor slept peacefully against her chest, held within a cradle of pale arms.
Salem did not look back.