FLAME AND ICE
Chapter 4 — *First Steps; Part One*
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Morning arrived at Beacon with the particular indifference of mornings that do not know they are significant.
The ballroom had been a dormitory for one night and would not be again. The sleeping bags were rolled, the scrolls tucked away, the weapons checked with the focused hands of people who understood that today was the day their reasons for being here would be tested. The soft, complicated atmosphere of the night before — the candles and conversations and the developing grammar of strangers becoming something more — had resolved overnight into the cleaner, sharper register of *what comes next.*
The dark elves dressed in the unhurried way of people who have done this before, in harder circumstances, under higher stakes. Armour checked at the joints. Straps tightened. Weapons confirmed in their carrying positions. The preparations were not ceremonial — they were practical, the practice of people for whom readiness was a habit rather than an event.
Roy was retying his headband, knuckle-checking the bandana's position the way he always did before anything that required him to move at speed, when he noticed the two students across the hall.
He watched them for a moment — the girl with the orange hair and turquoise eyes who appeared to be explaining something at length, and the dark-haired boy beside her who was listening with the quality of someone who has decided that listening is, at this particular moment, the best available option.
"What do you suppose that conversation is about?" Roy asked.
Odyn glanced over. He was adjusting the straps on his vambraces — a thing he did by feel, his eyes not needing to be involved, because he had done it ten thousand times. He watched the two students for a moment.
"Something important to her, apparently," he said. "We'll find out who they are soon enough."
Roy accepted this and turned back to his own preparations. Then, because it had been on his mind since the previous evening:
"Did you get a chance to speak with her? Properly, I mean."
Odyn didn't ask who. He finished with the left vambrace and moved to the right.
"Briefly. There wasn't enough time to cover much ground." A pause. "Nine years is a lot of ground."
Roy set a hand on his brother's shoulder — a brief, solid pressure that said *I know* without requiring the words.
"You'll have the time," he said. "We're here for four years. It'll come."
Odyn looked at him sidelong. Then he almost smiled, which for Odyn was functionally the same as someone else grinning outright.
"You're getting philosophical in your old age," he said.
"I'm sixteen."
"Exactly."
They fist-bumped — the specific knock of knuckle against knuckle that they had developed sometime in early adolescence and had maintained because it was theirs, a small private syntax in the language of being brothers.
Then they got back to work.
Across the ballroom, Sarai was running an oiled cloth along the flat of her blade with the focused care of someone who finds the ritual of maintenance genuinely calming. Beside her, Khanna was moving through a series of stretches with the unhurried certainty of a person who has learned that cold muscles are a problem that preparation prevents. Baron had his equipment spread before him — not because anything was wrong with it, but because checking it was the thing he did when his mind needed to be occupied. Hailfire was already fully armoured, shield at her back, mace in hand, running through a footwork sequence that existed only in the space between her and the wall.
They were ready in the way that people who have been trained since childhood are ready: completely, quietly, without performance.
---
Ruby Rose was also ready, in the way that Ruby Rose was ready for things, which was its own particular category.
She had Crescent Rose out — in its scythe form, fully extended, held across the front of her body the way a person holds the thing they love most — and she was stroking it with the focused, reverent attention of someone communing with something sacred.
"No more awkward getting-to-know-you stuff," she said, to no one in particular or possibly to the weapon. "Today, you do the talking."
Roy appeared at her shoulder.
In his defence, he had not been trying to startle her. He had simply walked up in the ordinary way of a person walking up to another person, unaware that Ruby Rose's awareness of her surroundings was currently almost entirely dedicated to Crescent Rose and had left very little bandwidth available for anything else.
"That's a good philosophy," he said.
Ruby Rose left the ground by approximately three inches.
"Ah — *Roy!*" She pressed a hand to her sternum. Her face was doing something warm and complicated that she was visibly trying to resolve into a more manageable expression. "You nearly gave me — I didn't even hear you coming—"
"I wasn't trying to startle you," he said, with the straightforward honesty of someone to whom subterfuge simply doesn't occur as an option. "I'm sorry."
"No, no — *I'm* sorry, I wasn't paying attention, it's my fault—"
"It isn't."
"It a little is—"
"Ruby."
She stopped.
"Good morning," he said.
A beat. Her expression completed its journey from startled to something that was attempting composure and landing somewhere appreciably warmer.
"...Good morning," she said.
In the background, with the studied casualness of someone who is absolutely watching this exchange and has several opinions about it, Yang Xiao Long was smiling in a way that had never once in her life been described as subtle.
"Should I give you two some space?" she called.
Ruby's face achieved a new level of colour.
"*Yang,*" she said, in the tone of a person who has been embarrassed by the same individual so many times that the embarrassment now contains an entire history.
"I'm just saying! It's a big ballroom. Plenty of room for—"
"Yang."
"—a nice, *private*—"
"*Yang.*"
Roy, for his part, turned toward Yang with the expression of someone who has decided to deal with the situation directly. "It's early," he said, pleasantly. "Maybe save the teasing for after we've all survived the initiation?"
Yang looked at him. Then she grinned, which was not quite a concession but was a positive movement toward one. "Deal," she said. "For now."
Ruby muttered something inaudible into the shoulder of her cape.
---
The conversation about teams had been ongoing since before any of them woke up, conducted in the particular way of conversations that have been happening inside people's heads long before they become audible. Ruby's position on the matter — that she would like to be on Yang's team, or possibly Roy's team, or possibly a team that somehow contained both of these options — was outlined at some length. Yang's counter-position — that Ruby might benefit from stepping outside her established comfort perimeter — was delivered with the cheerful certainty of someone who has already decided on their argument and is simply looking for the right moment to present it.
"Since when does meeting new people have anything to do with fighting?" Ruby demanded, having reached the outer edge of her patience with this line of reasoning.
"It has everything to do with fighting," Yang said. "Fighting with people you don't know yet is how you find out what they're made of. Also what *you're* made of."
"I drink milk," Ruby said. "I know what I'm made of."
This was so definitively unanswerable that Yang simply sighed fondly and looked at the ceiling.
"What about when they assign us to teams?" she tried.
Ruby's certainty flickered. "I could... be on your team."
Yang tilted her head, running her hair over her shoulder in the gesture she used when she was about to say something that she knew Ruby wasn't going to like. "Or you could try someone else's team."
Ruby processed this. Then she laughed, the slightly strained laugh of someone who is hoping that if they approach a statement from the angle of gentle confusion, it will turn out to mean something other than what it said.
"My *dear* sister Yang," she said, "are you... implying that you don't want to be on a team with me?"
"That's not what I'm saying—"
"Because I have to say, that would be—"
"Ruby, that's *not* what I'm—"
The argument was interrupted by the appearance of Jaune Arc, who walked through the middle of it with the perfect obliviousness of a person having a completely separate crisis. "There is no way I put my equipment in locker six hundred and thirty-six," he announced to the hallway. "I would have *remembered counting that high.*"
He disappeared around the corner.
The sisters stared after him.
"...I like that guy," Yang said.
"He's a disaster," Ruby said.
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
---
Weiss Schnee and Pyrrha Nikos had found themselves adjacent to each other in the way of people who are both self-sufficient and who have, through proximity, discovered that the other person is worth talking to.
Pyrrha Nikos was, if the records were accurate — and they were, because the records were Pyrrha's tournament results, which she had no capacity for modesty about because she had not done anything to generate them beyond competing and winning — the most decorated active competitive fighter in her age bracket in Mistral. She carried this distinction with the particular grace of someone who has spent four years being famous and has found, consistently, that the fame makes it harder to have conversations that are about anything other than the fame.
She was also, Weiss had noticed in the past day, very good at listening and very careful about what she asked. Which was, in Weiss's experience, a quality that distinguished the people worth talking to from the people worth tolerating.
"Have you thought about who you'd like to be partnered with?" Weiss asked, as they readied themselves near their lockers.
"I've been leaving it to the process," Pyrrha said. "Whatever the initiation decides." A pause. Then, with the particular diffidence of someone who has been curious about something for two days and has been waiting for a natural opening: "I hope this isn't too forward — but may I ask you something?"
Weiss gestured in the direction of *go ahead.*
"That boy." Pyrrha tilted her head — a small, careful movement — toward where Odyn was standing some distance away, talking with Sarai and Khanna. "The one with the dark blue hair. You've spoken with him several times since we arrived. I've been curious." She looked back at Weiss. "Who is he?"
Weiss absorbed this. It was a question she had been expecting since approximately the moment Odyn appeared in the courtyard and said *princess* in that voice, in front of an audience. She had been deciding, at intervals, how to answer it.
"Odyn," she said. "Odyn Albanar. And yes — we know each other." She looked at her locker door for a moment, then back at Pyrrha. "We've known each other since we were children."
Pyrrha's expression moved through something — a kind of recalibration, the adjustment you make when information you receive is genuinely unexpected. "Childhood friends," she said.
"Yes."
"Is there a reason it seems like a secret?"
Weiss had not expected that question, because most people asked the obvious follow-up — *how did you meet, how long has it been* — rather than the observational one. She looked at Pyrrha with slightly more attention than she had been giving her.
"It's complicated," she said, which was the most honest answer she could give without the context that came with it. "Let's say that if certain people found out the extent of our... connection, it would create a significant amount of difficulty for both of us."
Pyrrha held her gaze for a moment. Then she nodded, simply, with the expression of someone who has decided that understanding the shape of a thing is enough and the interior can wait.
"I won't ask further," she said.
Weiss breathed. "Thank you."
A beat of comfortable silence — the kind that develops between people who have just established a mutual understanding and don't need to ornament it.
"In any case," Weiss said, returning to the previous subject with the clean transition of someone who moves from one register to another without friction. "I was thinking that the two of us might make rather an effective team."
Pyrrha's expression brightened — genuinely, with none of the practiced warmth of someone performing pleasant surprise. "I'd like that very much."
"Wonderful." Weiss allowed herself a small, satisfied nod.
And then, in the private theatre of her own mind, she let herself have the thought that was unbecoming of a Schnee heiress and entirely accurate: *the most technically precise student in her year partnered with the most decorated tournament competitor in Mistral.* The arithmetic was simple. The result was, by any reasonable calculation, inevitable.
She was in the middle of arranging this pleasant arithmetic when Jaune Arc walked between her and Pyrrha with the trajectory of a person who is searching for something and has not noticed that he has arrived somewhere.
"You know what else is great?" he said, apparently to the general air. Then he seemed to notice Weiss. "*Me.* Jaune Arc. Short, sweet. The name kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it." He attempted a pose that could only be described as optimistic.
Weiss stared at him.
Odyn, from across the hallway, winced internally.
"*You,* again," Weiss said, with the precise flatness of someone who has not forgotten the natural blonde comment from the previous day and has not forgiven it either.
Pyrrha stepped forward with the cheerful urgency of someone inserting herself into a situation before it deteriorates. "Nice to meet you, Jaune!"
Jaune, who had the particular gift of being able to miss the most significant person in a room when a different person was also present, stepped around Pyrrha in order to maintain his eye contact with Weiss. "I couldn't help but overhear about your fondness for me the other day."
"My *what,*" Weiss said.
"No need to be embarrassed about it. I was thinking, with all these team rumours going around, that you and I might—"
"You are," Weiss said, with the methodical calm of someone who has run the mathematics and arrived at a conclusion, "out of your mind."
Pyrrha tried again. "Jaune, teams are actually four people each, so the process—"
"Is that so?" Jaune pivoted to Pyrrha, apparently noticing her for the first time as a person rather than an obstacle. His expression shifted into the specific register that Odyn, watching from a safe distance, recognised as *Jaune has decided to attempt a different approach.* "Well in that case, hot stuff, if you play your cards right—"
"*This,*" Weiss said, stepping between them with the authority of someone who has decided that she is the only competent adult in this corridor, "is Pyrrha Nikos."
"Hello again!" Pyrrha said, waving.
"Pyrrha graduated top of her class at Sanctum Academy."
Jaune blinked. "Where?"
"She has won the Mistral Regional Tournament four consecutive years. A record, incidentally. A *new* record."
"The what?"
Weiss's patience was completing its final lap. "She is on the front of every box of Pumpkin Pete's Marshmallow Flakes currently in production across three kingdoms."
This landed.
It landed in the specific way that celebrity lands on someone who has not previously had a reason to think of this person as a celebrity — the rapid re-sorting of categories, the sudden inflation of the figure standing in front of you from *person* to *person who exists in the wider world in a way you apparently should have already known about.*
"That's *you?*" Jaune said. "But they only put star athletes and cartoon characters on cereal boxes."
"It was an honour," Pyrrha said, with the practised grace of someone who has had this conversation before and has learned to be generous with it. "Though the cereal itself is—"
"More sugar than nutrition," Weiss supplied.
"Yes. Regrettably."
Jaune looked at Pyrrha. Then at Weiss. Then back at Pyrrha. Then at his shoes. His shoulders found a position somewhere south of where they'd been.
"Right," he said. "Sorry for bothering you." He turned to go.
And Pyrrha Nikos, who had a quality of not being able to leave things worse than she found them when she had the option to do otherwise, said: "Actually — Jaune. I think you'd make a great leader."
Jaune stopped. Turned back. The sun came out from behind the cloud of his self-assessment.
Odyn, watching, had the thought: *of course she would say that, because it's probably true.* There was something about Jaune — underneath the misread confidence and the complete absence of any accurate understanding of social dynamics — that was genuinely there. Whether Jaune knew it was there was a separate question.
Whether Weiss thought this was a productive development was abundantly clear from the expression she was wearing.
"Spots are filling up fast," Jaune told her, apparently reinvigorated. "I know I'm not really supposed to do this, but I could pull a few strings, put in a word—"
"*Pyrrha,*" Weiss said, in the tone of someone issuing coordinates.
Pyrrha had already produced her weapon — a spear, converted from its dust-round rifle configuration, sleek and balanced and clearly very well-made. She made an apologetic face that she aimed at Jaune.
"I *am* sorry about this," she said.
The spear crossed the distance, caught Jaune neatly by the back of his collar, and deposited him into the far wall with the efficient precision of someone who has spent four years in tournament competition and understands exactly how much force is required for a given result.
Pyrrha retrieved her weapon. She looked at Jaune, who was currently vertical against the wall for reasons that had more to do with the spear than physics.
"I'm sorry about that!" she added, as the intercom activated and Glynda's voice filled the hallway.
---
*All first-year Beacon students are requested to report immediately to Beacon Cliffs for initiation. This is not a drill. All first-year students to Beacon Cliffs.*
---
The morning air at Beacon Cliffs was the kind that people describe as crisp when they mean *cold with good intentions.* The cliff faced east, overlooking the Emerald Forest, and at this hour the light was coming in at an angle that turned the canopy below into a continuous surface of green-gold depth — beautiful in the way that places are beautiful when they are also about to become relevant to your immediate survival.
The students arranged themselves across the silver launch tiles in the instinctive way of people who have identified that the tiles are significant and have placed themselves on them accordingly. The tiles were polished, shield-shaped, and reflected the morning light in a way that suggested they were both ornamental and entirely serious.
Ozpin stood before them.
He was a man who occupied a particular register of presence — not the large, deliberate presence of someone who has cultivated authority as a performance, but the smaller, denser presence of someone whose authority is structural rather than demonstrated. He held his mug. The mug was, somehow, in keeping with all of this.
"For years," he said, "you have trained to be warriors."
His voice carried without effort, in the way of things that have been doing something for long enough to be very good at it.
"Today, your abilities will be tested within the Emerald Forest."
Glynda stepped forward with her tablet, which she held with the competence of someone who is managing several things at once and has decided that this is preferable to managing fewer things less well.
"The rumours you've heard about team assignments are true," she said. "You will be given partners today."
The murmur that moved through the students was the collective sound of a hundred people processing information they had been half-expecting and were not fully prepared for regardless.
The dark elves, distributed along the tile row, absorbed this with the equanimity of people for whom unexpected partners was, relative to some of the situations they had navigated, not the most challenging thing on record.
"Interesting approach," Khanna said, mildly.
"Forced adaptability," Odyn said. "Makes sense."
"I like it," Hailfire said. "You can't plan for a partner you don't know yet. Keeps the thinking honest."
"It'll be interesting to see where everyone ends up," Roy said, looking along the row of students with genuine curiosity rather than competition.
"The first person you make eye contact with after landing," Ozpin continued, "will be your partner for the four years you spend at this school. I would recommend, therefore, that you choose that first eye contact carefully."
Ruby Rose, two tiles down, appeared to experience something that could only be described as her entire worldview briefly achieving a different geometry.
"*What,*" she said. Not loudly. More the specific sound of a small person absorbing a large piece of information.
Nora Valkyrie, somewhere down the line: "I *told* you."
Ren, beside her, was already the expression of someone who has been told, who was in the process of continuing to be told, and who had accepted this as his operating condition.
Ozpin was not finished.
"At the northern end of the forest, you'll find the ruins of an old temple. Each pair is to locate a relic within and return with it to the cliffs on the far side of the forest." He paused — the pause of someone ensuring that what comes next receives appropriate weight. "You will encounter opposition on the way. You will not hesitate. Our instructors will observe, but they will not intervene. Your evaluation will encompass both your combat performance and how you conduct yourselves when the situation requires judgment rather than instruction."
Jaune Arc had raised his hand.
He had, Odyn noted, the particular quality of someone who raises his hand in situations where the raising of hands is not the intended response — not out of defiance, but out of a genuine belief that the hand-raising system was still operational.
"Professor—" Jaune began.
"Take your positions," Ozpin said.
The tiles activated.
What followed happened in the quick, overlapping way of things that are designed to allow very little time for second thoughts. The tiles rose. The students shifted their weight. And one by one — in the clean, decisive manner of people who have committed, and in the slightly less clean manner of people who were still asking questions — they were launched.
Odyn looked down the row.
Weiss caught his eye from several tiles over. She was composed, rapier at her hip, the pale blue ribbon in her ponytail catching the cliff wind. She looked at him with the expression she'd been giving him since they were children when something significant was about to happen and neither of them had the words for it yet: steady, certain, in the way of something that does not need to be named to be real.
He nodded. Small, specific.
She returned it, with the corner of something that was almost a smile.
His tile activated.
The cliff dropped away beneath him, and the forest rose to meet him, and for a moment the sky was in every direction at once.
---
Roy's tile went second in their sequence. He looked back along the row as the mechanism engaged — found Ruby Rose, who was staring down at the forest below with the expression of someone committing very hard to something — and gave her a thumbs-up with the easy cheerfulness of someone for whom a hundred-foot launch is simply Tuesday.
She returned it, knuckles first, in the particular fist-bump-adjacent gesture she had apparently developed in the last twelve hours and considered transferable.
Then he was airborne.
---
The tiles continued in sequence — each one precise, each launch its own small act of irreversibility. Yang went with a *whoop* that carried across the cliff face and probably reached the forest before she did. Ruby went thirty seconds later, disappearing into the airstream with the rose-petal trajectory of her Semblance marking her path like a signature.
At the far end of the tile row, Jaune Arc was still engaged in a conversation that had moved from *what is the landing strategy* to *are you sure there are no parachutes* to *I understand that I will be falling, what I'm asking is whether falling is optional.*
Ozpin sipped his coffee.
The tile activated beneath Jaune mid-sentence. The resulting launch was, in the technical sense, successful.
---
On the observation platform beside the headmaster, two relatively new members of Beacon's faculty watched the last of the students disappear into the forest below.
Sybyrh Arkham had the expression of someone who had been expecting most of what had just happened and had accepted it as the price of working in a human institution. Beside her, Tarro — the second new faculty addition, whose presence had been arranged through the same quiet back channels that brought Sybyrh and Lylah here — was watching the space where Jaune had been with something between amusement and professional concern.
"He could have warned the boy his tile was activating," Sybyrh said, to the middle distance rather than to anyone specifically.
"He could have warned all of them about quite a number of things," Tarro said.
Glynda, to their left, drew a breath through her nose that contained, if one listened carefully, an entire editorial on this subject. "You're both new here," she said, "and I will not have faculty speaking critically of the Headmaster's methods in the open."
A pause.
"That said." She looked at her tablet. Tapped something. "His approach to the initiation process does leave certain things to chance that more *conventional* preparation might have addressed." She did not look up. "In my professional opinion."
Ozpin sipped his coffee. The trees received his students. The morning light continued at its angle across the canopy.
The initiation had begun.
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**— To Be Continued —**
*Next Time: Chapter 5 — First Steps, Part Two: Into the Emerald Forest.*
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