It's dusk and she struggles to run, to get just a little further away from the tiny town she left behind what felt like hours ago. Ruby had to get as far as she could or else risk being driven back there once the sun fully sets. Driven back to kill again. The scarred over, jet black wound in her side has begun to pulse with a dull, heated pain, a throbbing reminder of what's coming. Already she feels the edges of her canines against her tongue.
And all the while the Maiden mark on her wrist burns.
She rips her way through the alpine forest, withered osiria in her wake, the red-white petals steadily turning more dry and gray as the sky darkens. In her maddened hurry, Ruby's foot catches the upward bend of an exposed root, spinning through the air with her own momentum behind her. She drops and skids and rolls between the timbers, eventually coming to a rough stop with her face in the dirt. For a moment she simply lays there, gasping for air and trying to stomach the burning in her side and in her ribcage. Rolling onto her back she forces her eyes open, feeling a clench in her gut at the fading orange of the sky into indigo. She might have a few minutes left.
Gotta get up...go further...
Ruby struggles to her hands and knees, each movement painful and leaving her feeling raw, like an exposed nerve. There it is, the change is coming on, the Grimm is just beneath her skin now. Her stomach clenches again, followed by her whole body, and then a wash of crackling pain that erupts from the marrow of her bones. It surges through her chest and up her throat, erupting through a clenched jaw and steadily sharpening teeth.
Having two pairs of working ears allows Blake to hear a great deal of things, particularly the grinding echo of what sounded like some wild animal. Normally that would have been enough to keep her from investigating, keep her close to her Guardian, but that hadn't sounded like any creature she had heard before. Going against her better judgment she slips away, mentally reprimanding herself for ignoring the old adage about curiosity and cats. And the moment she breaks through a wall of laurel bushes onto a game trail and sees what is there -emphasis on the what- she wishes she had listened to her common sense.
At first all she can make out is a thrashing tangle of limbs, the vague shape of a humanoid body, and a messy wash of bloody crimson and silver splashed over it all like wet paint. The agonized noises coming from it tear at the Maiden's heart, not just from a natural sympathy towards another's obvious pain, but because it's somehow familiar. It's too much like Yang's, and as the creature before her fully manifests and twists out of a crumpled heap into a wolfish looking beast, questions she hadn't even thought to ask yet suddenly have answers.
"Ruby," she whimpers just above a whisper, just as silvery eyes settle on her and slavering lips pull back to reveal a mouth full of fangs. This time her instincts screamed for her to turn and run, and she obeyed without a second thought. She was afraid, mortified even, and knew that fear would travel back to Catastrophe and likely wake it, the hybrid heeding it like a distress call. She didn't want that, but she had no other choice.
Garm chases the Maiden through the trees, ripping through the clones she puts out in an attempt to distract it. It feels the heat of her magic, the tainted life of her aura, and hungers after it. It would devour her whole if it could just get its claws in her. It grabs a mote of the host's Semblance to propel itself forward, connecting with the Faunus' and dragging her to the dirt. Chunks of dirt and leaf litter kicks up into the air as clawed hands and paws rake the earth, searching for flesh as the Maiden desperately uses both hands to keep Garm's clenching jaws apart. The hard ground grinds into Blake's shoulders as she's shoved along the trail, all that murderous weight and force pushing on her, and somehow she manages to produce another host of clones through the startling distraction of hot drool and heaving breaths against her face. The body doubles come out of the shadows, dark specters that are only half there and half solid. They pile atop the morphing hybrid in an attempt to distract or tear it away, only to be shred apart into little more than tatters of smoke. A wild twist of its whole body scatters the last of them, and Garm is quick to grab hold of the Maiden before she can get to her feet, holding tight with its monstrous hands as it calls on its host's Semblance again.
Blake feels the momentum of the dash against her back, and the blistering, crushing impact between her shoulders as the two of them collide with something she can't see. There's the commotion of splitting wood and the bristle of slivers hitting her skin, and the distinct, sucking pain of the air flying right out of her lungs. That's why she can't scream when Garm swipes at her, the first strike glancing off her flickering aura, the second pushing right through it and ripping her open.
Blake expects to die, she believes the gray wash of her night vision on the blood-spattered ground will be the last thing she sees. She can make out the hind legs of the hybrid, how they're suddenly backpedaling, and somehow she acknowledges the riot of crashing noises over the pounding blood in her ears. The gray is suddenly broken up by shades of crimson and sunlight, though she's still faintly aware that the sun had just gone down. It's the colors of fire.
The canopy of branches over them comes alive with heat and light, fire swallowing the caps of the trees in mere seconds and then descending just as Catastrophe rips through the forest floor. It lands between Garm and the Summer Maiden, fangs and claws bared as sparks flicker at the back of its throat in lethal promise. A tense, wrenching moment passes before the two creatures throw themselves at each other. And the forest continues to burn around them.
