Chapter Text
Nimble fingers drummed rhythmically against white bone, filling the echoingly empty chamber with their monotonous tapping. Salem huffed a small sigh in her throne as she leaned her head against her hand. Despite the near infinite patience that tens of thousands of years in isolation forced her to learn, she could definitively say that waiting was the least enjoyable part of her current endeavor. On the grand eve of her impending conquest, the placid calm before the dark and violent storm that would signal the beginning of her campaign of destruction, the dark queen of the Grimm found herself so very, very bored.
Though the technology had advanced by leaps and bounds, Salem couldn’t help but feel like she’s done this all before. Oceans of Grimm would flood the bastions of humanity at her command and, while dust mages and ballistas had been replaced by huntsmen and rifles, the result would always be the same in the end. Her infinite adversary and once love would manage to rally a puzzlingly strong defense despite the limited resources at hand and the relic, the potential key to her own long-awaited demise, would be kept out of her hands. Perhaps a lighter soul, one lacking in fear or self-preservation, would teasingly call her pessimistic and they could share a thin chuckle over the comment but, alas, she was merely surrounded by sycophants, cowards, and those somehow as nihilistic as she was.
What a merry band they made.
At the thought of her… disappointing cadre of followers, Salem straightened out in her throne once more. Despite being blessedly alone for the moment, Salem refused to allow any of her people to see even a shred of her lingering humanity. Back straight, royal chin tipped upwards in mildly judgmental disdain, chalk-white hands resting comfortably on the arms of her throne, none of her co-conspirators would ever find even a single hair out of place. She couldn’t afford to simply be human; she always had to be more.
Though utterly, painfully immortal, she was certainly not invincible. Hazel himself had proven that fact countless times before the exhaustion and hopelessness finally wrapped around the man’s soul. And if Salem had stationed a few Apathy nearby to speed up the dull process of providing her latest victim with some pathetic measure of emptying catharsis well… who could really blame her. It’s not like it was an enviable position to be in, being pummeled into the ground repeatedly by expressions of violent strength in lieu of much needed therapy. As ever, dying was a bore and regenerating was a chore.
But those were human emotions, or as human as her emotions could really get, and if she were truly to be seen not as a person but as a force of nature itself then she would need the veneer of untouchability she had so carefully constructed to remain intact, no matter how exhausting it truly was at times after all these years. She still remembered the way Tyrian’s face lit up with deranged glee at seeing her imposing control over the creatures of Grimm as they liberated him from his cage. For the assassin, it was the first time beholding a goddess of destruction, but for Salem it was a role so worn the holes in the act were starting to show to anyone observant enough to look for them. It was all becoming so… rote.
Not for the first time did Salem wonder exactly where her true powers of persuasion had gone. When was her silken charisma usurped by that borderline nonchalant dismissiveness that plagued most of her interactions with living beings these days? For the infinite life of her, Salem found herself unable to pinpoint a single moment responsible for the disappearance of her old self, her personality having glided gently, gradually into the abyss along with her will to live.
A human mind wasn’t meant to last forever and she had already forgotten so much…
Unconsciously, Salem’s hand began to clench in renewed frustration against the cursed brothers who forced this hell onto her. As the dwindling ember of human irritation began to burn brighter inside of her, she found the more troubling aspects of her Grimm nature singing delightedly. Frustration became anger and anger became fury, the foreign urge to rend the world to pieces swelling within her like a gluttonous parasite before a soft whine from Monstra drew Salem’s attention to the crumbling bone beneath her fingers.
Relaxing the grip on her throne and mentally apologizing to one of her greatest creations through their mental link, Salem allowed the dull ache of guilt to curdle in her stomach. It was ridiculous really, the immortal witch of destruction lamenting the harm caused to an innocent creature in anger, and yet Salem always despised how deeply the pools of destruction had tainted her being. An act performed out of pure agonizing desperation for any respite at all from her curse only served to damn her further and, despite the power it gave, pollute her very being. The second dip that came after Ozma’s treachery only made things worse… and the third… and the fourth… and the fifth…
It wasn’t her fault that those bleak shores were so inviting when there was so little left to live for. Everyone has their vices, after all.
Sometimes, she would think on those cold nights as she languished alone, Salem almost appreciated how deeply the pool had hollowed her out inside, trading the aspects of herself she hated most for a more numb kind of power. The human parts of her were weak, foolish, and better left behind her where they could not further mar her life with thoughtless mistake born of passionate emotion. But then… Salem could almost hear the echo of four sets of tiny footsteps echoing down the hallways of her oppressive fortress and she would mourn for what was and what never should have been. Even now, behind closed eyelids, she can still see the fierce glow of destructive spellcraft, the phantom scorch of magical flame pulsing through her hand providing unwelcome accompaniment, as she recalls her greatest mistake.
She should have hesitated.
Salem didn’t cry, not anymore, – the pools had seen to that – but the thought of her daughters always brought her close. Thankfully, that contemptible swell of human sorrow would soon be submerged into a veritable sea of wrath directed towards her former love.
Only now, bored and exhausted and so sick of the many, many games they played, did Salem reconsider the state of her grudge. She had been distracted for so long by the raw emotions brought forth by the game when she should have directed her attention towards the pair that forced them to be players in the first place. The brothers who pitted husband and wife against each other, sacrificing all of humanity in the process twice over, just to prove a wretched point. She couldn’t even fault Ozma his zealotry anymore. They had each only been given a single out from their damnable circumstances and it lay beyond the corpse of the other.
If ending her life and restoring humanity to a vision of the world that met the approval of the brothers was the only way he could properly rest, perhaps she and Ozma had more in common than she thought. So maybe… it was time to change the game entirely.
Salem was well versed in spinning webs of false promises to lure in potential allies. To garner sympathy, she had penned her own little fairy tale, expressing the veiled truth of her history to a new humanity with a bleeding heart. To topple The Circle, she spun a tale of a blade that could kill a god and the prestige such a feat would bring. To hunt her adversaries, that pesky bloodline that bore the Elder Brother’s gifts, she provided instruction in the many ways of combat to a faunus eager for strength. To collect the relics, she promised so many impossible things to the group currently at her disposal.
Strangely, despite her ponderously long life, the one thing she never considered was directly telling the truth. Humanity had produced wonderful advances in technology that made spreading a message far easier than ever before. It was time, Salem supposed, to finally make use of the many lessons in modern electronics that one Arthur Watts begrudgingly bestowed upon her.
For once, a genuine smile began to stretch across her lips as she retreated to her quarters to retrieve her tragically neglected scroll, a plan taking form in her mind. The dear doctor had already done her the favor of taking control of most of the systems of Amity Colosseum, backdoor access perpetually enabled for Salem and her people, so the only thing remaining was to put her many years of oratory skills to work. The general and his gaggle of soldiers and his misbehaving children were quite naïve in their planning but they certainly had one thing correct…
It always paid to control the narrative, and that was exactly what Salem was going to do.