Call the match.

Whatever ran the world — maidens, dust, or magic — Pyrrha pleaded with it. She had Cinder in a chokehold, the woman's hands molten hot around Miló, inches from her throat. Her arms and legs ached. Deep in her aura, Pyrrha knew no one could hear her. No one was coming. Yet she couldn't undo twelve years of tournament training in an instant; that little child in her memory, beaten and pinned by her trainer, was slapping a palm to the mat, begging, call the match. Please. Anyone. Before someone gets hurt.

The dragon was circling. Miló was growing too hot. She had one hit left in her, if that. She was out of time. She couldn't do it. Call the match. Don't make me— She couldn't—

Images flashed across her mind's eye: Penny's cloth on the ground; Ruby's white knuckles on a weapon that wasn't hers; the fear in Ozpin's eyes; the terror in Jaune's.

And a voice, deep in her bones, whispered, Yes you can.

Miló snapped in her hands. The dragon dove.

Pyrrha tightened the arm around Cinder's throat for grounding and swung what was left of Miló back. She squeezed her eyes shut. And thrust.

She felt Cinder seize as Miló, even broken, struck true. She felt the woman's aura shudder against her own, flickering, her footing loose—

Then the tower exploded around them.

Pyrrha was thrown by the force of it, clear across the room. Her aura collapsing with the blow against a remaining pillar. She called for Akoúo̱, her last defense, and staggered to her feet with ringing ears. It hadn't been enough. She braced herself behind her shield, reaching with her Semblance for any metal to take the place of Miló.

But Cinder wasn't standing. She was on all fours, coughing blood and shaking, Miló's hilt still visible in her back. Its molten tip a fading star just under the skin of Cinder's breast. She was staring at Pyrrha in shock. In fury.

Pyrrha took a step towards her. "You need to get to a hospital."

Cinder screamed something without words and threw a hand out. A rainstorm of glass materialized and flew at Pyrrha. She dropped to a ball behind her shield, but not fast enough to stop a dozen shards slicing into her forward leg below the guard of her calf.

When Pyrrha could think past the pain, when she was confident she could open her mouth without crying out, she looked out from behind Akoúo̱. Cinder was trying to stand. Bursts of fire flickered in her palm and out. The dragon was circling again, shrieking into the night.

"Please," Pyrrha called. "It's over. You need help."

Cinder laughed, slobbering blood all over the floor. Pyrrha attempted standing and almost blacked out from the pain. She tried not to look at her leg and the frayed mess of meaty wires her muscle now resembled. That dragon was fixated on them. She had to get out of the tower.

Weakly, she ripped a length of her sash and tied off her leg below the knee. She floated scraps of metal over to her and used them to get upright. Akoúo̱ nestled on her back in his place, and she pulled a twisted metal rod from the rubble for a crutch. Keeping a sharp eye on Cinder, Pyrrha hobbled over to her. Grimm were always deadliest near death.

"I'm sorry," she murmured. Pyrrha reached down with a hand. "I'm sorry, I— I can still help you."

Cinder looked up at her. The Maiden's eye was changing from her left to right, as if she was blinking asynchronously. Its stream of fire was slowly going down. Something was still burning in those golden eyes, but it wasn't magic.

"You don't…" Cinder choked, "...have it...in you…"

Pyrrha reached down further. "Last chance."

With one last spike of strength, Cinder lunged for her hand, pulling Pyrrha down. Pyrrha stumbled, re-balancing with her makeshift crutch. Cinder's other hand grabbed higher on her arm, nails digging into skin at the crook of her elbow — a dead man's grip — and Pyrrha didn't think — just drove the twisted rod of iron through Cinder's back.

Cinder's gasp was a spray of blood. Her hands slipped from Pyrrha's arm and dropped to the ground, twitching. Pyrrha shuddered, gripping the iron rod for balance.

In the distance, the dragon shrieked again. It almost drowned out the whisper of her name.

"...Pyrrha?"

She turned to find Ruby, looking miniscule in the light of the broken moon. Crouched at the edge of the shattered tower. She was staring, eyes wide.

Pyrrha tried to grab the rod and step away. The motion moved Cinder so unnaturally, that Pyrrha startled and staggered back on her bad foot. It couldn't support her weight, and she fell on her hip, just paces away from Cinder who was still alive enough to hold her gaze.

"I didn't mean to," Pyrrha whispered, her mind, at last, catching up to what it was she'd done. "I tried to help. I didn't... I didn't—"

Ruby moved towards her now. Carefully. Like she was approaching an easily startled Grimm. "Pyrrha, you had to."

Ruby understood. Ruby understood when she didn't. Ruby didn't have to do it. Pyrrha dragged herself back, further from Cinder, whose eyes had at last gone dim. Any kind of light — snuffed out.

"I'm sorry...I'm so sorry..."

It was the last thought Pyrrha ever had before something brilliant exploded out of Cinder. Then the world as she knew it caught fire.

Jaune was going to throw up.

He'd run as fast as his legs could carry him and faster. He'd stripped off his armor plating, his pockets and pouches, anything that wasn't Crocea Mors so he could run faster. In his mind, he already knew he wasn't going to make it. He saw the dragon take out the tower. He knew that already double the time had passed that Ozpin was able to stand against Cinder. He knew — and he kept running.

His family believed in an old god, one who granted visions and let you walk through fire. He never thought he'd need to call on a deity when skill and friends — and stupid luck when desperate — were enough to get him out of most scrapes. But as he ran, tapping into aura frantically even though he knew it might cost him any fight at the end of his sprint, he found himself battling tears that threatened to obscure his vision and begging for their lives.

Please let Weiss and Ruby have reached her. Please let the three of them be alive. Please please please if I can't save them…if I killed them...

He turned a corner and barrelled straight into Neptune, sending them both skidding down the empty street.

Neptune recovered faster, scrambling to his feet. "Dude! Where have you been?"

Jaune was gasping too hard to talk. He'd been right about using his aura to run. He had a lot of aura, but he'd also run most of the length of the city of Vale. Neptune came to help him up, but Jaune barely noticed, his eyes trained on the tower.

"C'mon, they've set up a perimeter a couple blocks away," Neptune explained. He tried to loop one of Jaune's arms around his shoulder but he resisted. "Jaune?"

Jaune staggered away from Neptune, tried to start running again, but his legs wouldn't have it. He collapsed up against one of the walls, still trying to move forward towards the tower.

"Crap, man, I think you have a concussion," Neptune muttered, coming over again and trying to help. "There should be medical—"

"Weiss," Jaune wheezed out.

That got Neptune's attention. "What?"

"Ruby," he gasped, pointing to the tower. "Pyrrha."

Neptune's expression hardened. When he came to help Jaune again, he threw Jaune's arm over his shoulder with resolve.

"I know where Scarlet and Velvet are," he said.

The shadow of the circling dragon soared over them, blocking out the moon. Jaune stared up at it, at its trajectory, and staggered forward with Neptune as support.

"No time."

Weiss's form was faltering.

She was swinging more wildly, her strikes landing just to the right of her intended marks. The Grimm were still collapsing around her, but Weiss was going to run out of aura long before the Grimm stopped overrunning Beacon.

"Ruby, hurry up," she pleaded under her breath, taking out another Griffon with an ice shard.

Two of it's friends dove from above and an ice umbrella easily impaled the pair. She heard the lumbering Ursa behind her and spun for the neat decapitation, but didn't expect the far closer King Taijitu, deadly in its silence, already mid-lunge at her.

A glyph kept its fangs from tearing into her, but the force of the strike still sent her flying. She indented into the wall of the former Beacon tower, it's shards now littering her field of battle. Disoriented, she heard more Grimm drawn to her rising panic and stabbed Myrtenaster into the ground, engulfing herself in a small glacier of ice. The monsters clawed at it, shaving off chunks, but it would hold, if only for a few minutes so she could catch her breath.

Weiss rested against the wall of the tower, untouched by the ice, and assessed the state of her aura and the Dust reserves in her rapier. Time for new strategies.

She was mid-calculating if she had enough glyphs left to get her up the side of the tower as well when the ice barrier cracked down the middle. Myrtenaster was ready in an instant, but the sound of bullets and the shape of a scythe through the blur of the ice let her relax a second longer. She waited for the all clear from Ruby, but instead jumped at Qrow's voice.

"You done playing hide-and-seek, Schnee?"

Weiss dispelled the ice in one motion. Qrow stood before her amid an ocean of dissolving Grimm. He held his scythe over his shoulder, looking intense. He must have been sober.

"Ruby's at the top of the tower with that woman!" Weiss shouted, pointing up. "She and Pyrrha haven't come down."

Qrow scowled at the top of the tower, then at Weiss. "How'd she get up there?"

Weiss huffed but eyed the approaching swarm of Beowolves critically. She cast an ice wall wide, then spun and aimed her glyphs up the side of the tower, as she'd done for Ruby.

"If you don't come back with both of them, you're going to get your butt kicked by the other Schnee sister," she said, already paying attention to the oncoming Grimm. Qrow was gone so quickly, she wasn't even sure he'd heard her.

Weiss readied a lightning strike and held her position. As the first Grimm charged through the wall, she swung Myrtenaster and sent it flying. She prepared a second strike but faltered.

The air around her suddenly spiked in temperature. Her ice wall melted without her control. The Grimm staggered back in the sudden heat.

Weiss didn't waste the distraction. She disposed of the pack quickly, struggling only with the Alpha who seemed less affected. It caught Myrtenaster in its teeth and Weiss cut off its snout before impaling it in the eye.

Then Weiss glanced up the tower. She couldn't see Qrow. She couldn't see anything but the one burning spot of light atop.

Weiss Schnee knew Dust. She knew Dust backwards and forwards and knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that what she was witnessing was not a result of Dust.

Signal training told her to save her reserves of aura and Dust, to keep them for an emergency. Beacon training said hold your position, your friends are going to need you on the offensive.

But the sight of a sun where no sun should be was already propelling Weiss into the air, bouncing glyph to glyph as she raced to make the height of the tower before she lost anyone else.

Pyrrha had been ready for a lot of things with the Maiden's powers. She had been prepared to die. She'd been prepared to lose herself to the aura of a different person, to have her memories stripped away and merged. She'd been prepared for a power she couldn't understand or control.

No one had told her about the voices.

Dozens of them — hundreds, perhaps — all in her mind, all talking at once. Women, all of them. Pyrrha knew some of the names abruptly, as well as she knew her own. She knew them by voice, by memory, crowding out things she knew of herself, like her favorite colors or what she was supposed to do next when her skin was on fire.

She struggled to remember her training. Trying to think was like wrestling metal pokers into her eyes, splitting her skull with pain. She remembered that little girl on the mat. But she remembered another little girl on a farm, burning clear a field of crops with a thought. She remembered killing the Grimm that had murdered a brother she didn't have. She remembered being ten and kissing a girl for the first time, though she'd never kissed—

Jaune.

The name brought everything back into focus. Her eyes flew open, meeting the eyes of a panicked silver-eyed girl who was attempting to carry her.

"Pyrrha! Pyrrha, come on! That dragon's coming back!"

The sound of her name. It cast the memories to the back of her awareness. She struggled to find her voice amid the choir in her head.

"Ru-Ruby?" she tried, her tongue thick in her mouth. Was that the sound of her voice? Ruby looked down at her, from her frantic scan of the sky, and Pyrrha saw her own reflection in the girl's mirror eyes.

This is you, a voice inside her head urged. She couldn't tell if it was her own. This is us. There is a dragon coming. You are in danger.

"We're in danger," Pyrrha repeated, struggling to find her footing. She took one step and the pain from her torn calf ripped through her leg, letting loose a blast of withering heat from her body.

The silver-eyed girl — Ruby, her name was Ruby — jumped back from the sudden burning. Pyrrha collapsed on the ground.

You're bleeding out, Amber's voice informed her, to which Cinder replied, Let her.

Metal is your armor, one more voice chorused. Metal and fire. You are metal and fire and it can save you, child.

Pyrrha remembered something like this, a sword to a femoral artery. A burning hand closing the wound. Pyrrha reached down to her leg, the metal plates of her shin guards shifting and stacking like scales over the entirety of her lower leg. She made a fist and the metal became hot. She screamed.

The dragon shrieked nearby. Pyrrha heard the sound of a gun loading and the desperate little noises Ruby made when she was trying to think under pressure.

You cannot kill a dragon like a Grimm. A dragon is also metal and fire, the same voice said. Georgina, Pyrrha thought alongside the voice. And she remembered — Georgina remembered — being clad in aquamarine steel, a sword of metal and fire as large as she was tall, and a dragon the size of a mountain bearing down.

Pyrrha released her fist. Instantly, the scorching metal turned ice cold, soothing the burn.

"How... How do we kill it?" Pyrrha asked. But the moment she did, she already knew. The memories of Georgina and others older told her. Dragons were Grimm so ancient, they had hearts. You cut the head of a Grimm, but you cut the heart of a dragon.

Ruby shouted at Pyrrha to try and crawl to the elevator shaft, she was going to try and distract it. The voices shouted too, arguing over the silver-eyed girl. She could take the dragon, some said, she had silver eyes. Others knew that was a power Ruby had not mastered. They all agreed: If she tried to take it's head, she'd die.

"Ruby! Don't!" Pyrrha shouted. Ruby opened her mouth to argue, but a figure appeared behind her, as if from the very air. Qrow grabbed Ruby and told her something Pyrrha was unable to hear. Ruby looked desperately to Pyrrha, unwilling to listen. Then Qrow pulled Ruby with him and the two vanished out of her sight.

Qrow has her, Amber said. He protected me. He'll protect her.

A young voice spoke — Faith, only fifteen and excited — her words laced with a smile and a cheer. Get to work, Nikos.

Pyrrha knew then, as Cinder knew, how to pull metal from around her, to melt it in the air, to make your weapons for you. Miló arrived in her grip, hot from its reformation at the very points it had split. It's handle was still wet with Cinder's blood. Pyrrha extended it to a javelin and used it to get up, leaning heavily against it. Akoúo̱ dropped from her back to her arm. The dragon tightened its circle.

Not enough, one of the voices said. Elphaba, green-haired in her memory, violet eyes that Pyrrha had seen somewhere before. Fire and metal and fear, she said, and Elphaba remembered how to make them afraid, and Pyrrha did too.

She burned, bright as a star. The light glowing off her skin, her armor, her weapons. Grimm were afraid of Dust because it was light. They would fear her too. Pyrrha was light now too.

The dragon's head snapped in her direction.

More metal came. Miló piled layers and layers until the javelin should have been too large to hold. Her Semblance kept it aloft. From the wreckage, she rebuilt the armor of her leg with a thought, keeping the shell around her injury in place.

The dragon rose up from it's arc, shrieked, and dove for her.

She didn't need anyone's memories to remember timing and wind speed and accuracy. She knew them like her own name. She felt them like she felt the burning in this new aura that was and wasn't hers.

Pyrrha Nikos couldn't stand. But the Fall Maiden could fly.

Pyrrha launched herself into the air — and mutely wondered, in her own voice, if this was destiny all along.

Author's Note: So this was originally written as a one-shot, but I decided to try it out as a full story. Currently, the outline sits at 12 chapters but don't hold me to that. It's my first RWBY fic (cross-posted a month ago on AO3) and I'm still unsure if it's any good. I'm new to the show/FNDM/community and am nervous I have no idea what I'm doing or am attempting to write something that has been written already by someone else, and written better. I just had a lot of Pyrrha Nikos feels and RWBY fic ideas, and then had the one idea that could incorporate all the other ideas.

If you like the style/idea, just a couple words of encouragement would mean the absolute world to me.

Cover Image courtesy of kingovan on tumblr.

Chapter Title: "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" -The Tyger, William Blake