Fanfic / Lost In The Storm

She'd done it. May Marigold had finally stood up for what was right. And now, she was losing everything for it. Speaking up for everything she believed in didn't just get her thrown out of Atlas, it landed her right in Ironwood's sights. As it just so happens, however... James Ironwood isn't the most powerful entity in Remnant that had plans for her.

The question is, under Salem's guidance, just how far will May spiral? Just how many lines will she cross that she'd never even considered?

Lost in the Storm is a RWBY fanfic by Asheskies and the second entry in her Lepidoptera au, a Role Swap AU where events led Winter Schnee to join the Happy Huntresses of Mantle, Cinder Rhodes to become general Ironwood's right-hand woman, and May Marigold to become the primary enforcer of Salem's will.

After finally standing up to her headmaster and calling him out for his crimes, May has been arrested by one of the few people she considered a friend and imprisoned in a Black Site used to house those deemed a threat to the security of Atlas, simply for catching a glimpse of a classified file mentioning "The Witch".

Languishing in the hell that is Cerberus, May had no hope of seeing the sun ever again, until, an old enemy appeared to her with an offer for aid from an unlikely ally.

Surely any enemy of Atlas must be a friend of May?

Lost in the Storm is preceded in the Lepidoptera series by Holding the World On Their Shoulders and followed by Reignfall. Lost in the Storm was initially published as the second half of HTWOTS, but was later split into its own fic.

Like Holding the World before it and Reignfall after, Lost in the Storm is inspired by Badendchan's Blackened Bluebird, another RWBY fic with the same premise. Please note that Lost in the Storm, like its predecessors, deals with dark subject matters. Content warnings are provided at the start of each chapter.

As the fic deals with events only recently revealed in RWBY proper and is a sequel, spoilers for both RWBY and Holding The World On Their Shoulders are unmarked.

Lost in the Storm provide examples of the following tropes

• Abusive Parents:
  • Marcus Black, Mercury's father, raised Mercury to be a weapon, trained him to kill every day, hit him when drunk, and stole his semblance because it was a "crutch". Amusingly, Marcus is the only parent who's not directly transphobic, presumably because he wanted a son anyway and doesn't care enough about his child to object.
  • A private scene with only her present shows that Salem does truly consider May her daughter, but, in the same breath, she also plans how to best make May into a tool for her to use against Ozpin.
• Adaptational Badass: Due to showing up several years earlier than she does in the show, Fria is still a physically fit, if elderly, huntress. Whereas she had to rely entirely on her (extremely powerful) Maiden powers for defense in the show, here she's able to go toe-to-toe with Cinder in sparring matches.
• Adaptational Context Change: Cinder still loses an eye, but in this continuity it's taken out by an arrow from May, rather than Ruby's silver eyes.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: In-Universe;
  • Cinder meets Fria the Winter Maiden years before she (or Winter) would in canon.
  • May ends up running into Emerald while on a mission in Vacuo, unlike Cinder in canon, who only met Emerald a year at most before the Fall of Beacon.
• Adaptation Expansion: While the parasitic grimm Cinder used to steal the maiden powers was left largely unexplained in the show, the fic dedicates a lengthy arc to show how May retrieved the amulet of health that was used to create something similar.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: Fria tells Cinder that she was friends with Cordowin in their academy days.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Forrest, a minor vol 7 characters and supporter of Robyn Hill, shows up briefly in chapter 11 to throw out team name suggestions for Robyn, Fiona, Joanna and Winter. They settle on "Happy Huntresses", but his other suggestions are equally alliterative. Daring Damsels, Cheery Champions, Heroic Heroines, etc.
• Affably Evil: Salem keeps a constant calm and maternal tone around May, unlike in canon, where she often let her anger shine through.
• All Love Is Unrequited: May was in love with Winter, but Salem's gaslighting convinces her that Winter only saw her as someone to use and discard. It's strongly implied that Winter would have reciprocated if May confessed.
• Allohistorical Allusion: While pondering her old friends after joining Salem, May notes to herself that she felt more like Robyn, Joanna and Fiona were her team, and thinks there must've been some sort of cosmic joke that prevented it.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: In chapter 21, after having had a Utopian dreamworld where she was dating Winter cruelly ripped away, May admits that she was in love with Winter. At that point, Salem's manipulations have made her resent Winter, so she doesn't act on it.
• Anti-Villain: May works for an omnicidal witch on a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum, but she is also oblivious to Salem's true goal, and her goal is to upheave a status quo that allowed Atlas to get away with prejudice, oppression, authoritarianism and a long list of war crimes and civil rights violations.
• Author Appeal: The decision to have May transition using a magical mirror instead of more conventional medical care was brought on by the author's love for magical transition wish fulfillment stories.
• Automatic Crossbow: May's second weapon, Clorinda, is essentially an upscaled model of Matilda, a crossbow-sword that can be loaded with "clips" of various bolt types. She eventually replaces the crossbow mode with a more traditional recurve bow.
• Bait-and-Switch: Salem offers May a way to draw out her deepest anger and hatred, to make her magic stronger. Most readers will expect it to be a Nightmare Sequence with all of May's worst fears. It is actually a Dream Sequence of May's ideal life, one where she's living as a woman, in a relationship with Winter, and has the support of her family. The anger and hatred comes from her waking up.
• BFS: May's second weapon, Clorinda, is a greatsword that transforms into a heavy crossbow (later a normal bow), symbolic of her desire to take up more space in her life. She has to downsize it slightly to wield it effectively, but intends to return it to proper size once she has built up a bit of muscle.
• Black Site:
  • The Cerberus site is a secret prison where Atlas sends prisoners to be tortured, along with containing those who work with or know about Salem. While it was briefly seen in HTWOTS when an innocent union organizer was sent there on suspicion of working for Salem, it is shown in more detail here with May's imprisonment.
  • After Cerberus is wrecked by Salem to free May, Atlas builds another named Tartarus. This time, it's May who arranges a breakout and lets it blow up to cover her tracks.
• Book Ends: The first chapter of HTWOTS and the final chapter of Lost in the Storm both open on a Fake-Out Opening of a battle eerily similar to one in the show, which turns out to merely be a sparring match.
• Born Unlucky: May considers herself this, both for her abusive upbringing, and because she tends to attract the biggest and most dangerous grimm. Justified, as grimm are attracted by negativity and, between the trauma, dysphoria, anxiety and depression, May pings the radar of every grimm within miles.
• Bow and Sword in Accord: After taking a liking to the weapon while in Vacuo, May replaces her sword's crossbow mode with a normal bow, splitting the sword's blade down the middle to form the bow's curve.
• Breaking Speech: Tyrian gives a minor one to May in chapter 22, trying to make May admit to herself that she has a sadistic streak. May tries to wave it of, but it stays with her.
• Breaking the Fellowship: Team CASM were hardly True Companions at the best of time, but Lost in the Storm shows how they go from reluctantly working together to completely fracturing; May is sent to a secret prison and later picked up by Salem, Cinder lets it happen and keeps it secret from the others, and Winter and Marrow suspect that Cinder is hiding something about May, causing them to avoid her at all costs.
• Breather Episode: Like in the original fic, each major story beat is followed by a chapter or two of May and her ex-friends hanging out. In a bit of a twist, the final chapter is a breather episode.
• Broken Pedestal: Marrow was initially what May calls a "centrist", still admiring and looking up to Atlas while also wanting to help Mantle. After the Janus archive and seeing proof of Atlas' war crimes, he loses that faith in Atlas, and his arc in this part of the fic is dedicated to him leaving Atlas and building himself up again.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The charybdis grimm May encounters in Vacuo ends up excavating enough of the buried temple she couldn't get into on her own.
  • The doppler grimm Salem is seen working on in the early chapters of HTWOTS come back in chapter 30 as the means by which Salem will have May steal the Maiden powers.
• Chekhov's Skill: In chapter 22, May demonstrates to Salem that she has learned to use the Windcoil to curve her arrows. In chapter 23, she shoots an arrow that would've killed Cinder if she hadn't doubted it the last moment and caused the arrow to only take out her eye.
• The Chosen One: Cinder and May are both chosen as inheritors of the Maiden powers. Downplayed in that the people who choose them are, respectively, a very fallible mortal and a Dark Messiah and it's framed less like a quirk of destiny and more like grooming.
• Content Warnings: Each chapter has a comprehensive list of potential triggers at the start, ranging from child abuse and cult brainwashing to common phobias.
• Cool Big Sis: May's relationship to Emerald, giving her advice about trans things and being the first in her life to offer support with no alterior motive.
• The Corruptor:
  • Ironwood continues to groom Cinder into becoming a completely loyal tool of the state.
  • After getting away from Atlas, May ends up in the arms of an even worse corruptor than Ironwood; Salem, who proceeds to play on May's anxieties, need for affirmation and lack of maternal love for all her life to make her cut off any potential contact with her old friends and make her fiercly loyal to Salem herself. When Stella warns that May's lack of closure over her old friends is going to turn into anger and hatred, Salem remarks that May's emotional progression is going just as planned.
• Create Your Own Villain: Ironwood's authoritarian actions, culminating in throwing May in a secret prison after she glimpses the skeletons in Atlas' closet, are what ultimately led her to falling into Salem's arms and becoming a powerful sorceress hellbent on seing Atlas torn from the sky.
• Cult: Several characters, including May herself, note that Salem's whole setup is very cult-like. While it's not technically a cult, Salem still uses very cult-like tactics to recruit May; Sepparating her from her support network, offer her everything she wants, and shower her with love and affection.
• Deadpan Snarker: Tyrian, of all people, gets a moment of snark with Juni.
  Juni: I'd be careful. Snakes eat scorpions out here.
  Tyrian: But not bluebirds, it would seem.
• Death Faked for You: When May gets blackbaged and escapes from the Black Site with Salem's help, Ironwood puts out the story that she defected and fled to an outlying village, but dies in a grimm attack. May runs with it, but Winter is less convinced.
• The Dragon: May ends up becoming the primary agent of Salem's will.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Played for Drama. After joining Salem, a combination of Salem's manipulations and her own anxieties cause May to doubt her friendship with Winter, worrying that Winter was just manipulating her, and has probably forgotten her completely. The scenes from Winter's perspective shows that she is desperately looking for May, even when everyone else insists that she's in denial.
  • While in Vacuo, May goes into a negative spiral about her relationship to the happy huntresses and Winter, convincing herself that the HH didn't actually see her as a friend and Winter was just manipulating her. Not only does the reader know that's not true at all, but the previous chapter focused on the Happy Huntresses, including Winter, finding May's old weapon and growing more determined than ever to find her.
  • The above is taken a step further in chapter 19, where Salem trains May to use her anger to channel magic, convincing her that the Happy Huntresses abandoned her to rot in a Black Site but were happy to take in Winter Schnee as one of their own because they apparently cared more about her than May. Gilligan Cut to the Happy Huntresses staying up all night to find any sort of clue that could lead them to May despite knowing it could get them thrown in a Black Site.
  • While out looking for May, Robyn jokingly suggests the dark continent as a good vacation spot, which Winter rolls her eyes at. Guess where May is at right that moment.
• Easy Sex Change: Salem guides May towards an antediluvian artifact known as the Mirror of Reflection, which still holds some of the ancient magic from humanity's first go-around. With it, May is able to modify her body to be more comfortable and fit with her gender. It's not an instant fix, taking around nine months of daily use to get full effect and draining her aura everytime she uses it, but it's far quicker than mundane hormone replacement therapy. She later lets Emerald use it for her own transition.
• Emotional Powers: Salem advices May that she will have to channel her strongest emotions, particularily fury and grief, to use the maiden powers, encouraging her to think of her friends abandoning her to rot and clearly caring more about Winter than her. Strong emotions are not the only way to use the Maiden powers (Amber is quite calm, for instance), but Salem wants May as angry as possible to manipulate her easier.
• Empathic Weapon: The Mirror of Reflection is technically not a weapon, but it is a Magic Item that responds to and interracts with its user. Being a mirror, it reflects their appearance and personality back at them, but given that the user in question is May, it gets rather expressive.
• Everyone Has Standards: Rusty and Juni, the Vacuan thugs, will threaten to murder May, ransom her to her abusive family, or sell her to the Atlesian military. But they draw the line at transphobia.
• Evil Is Burning Hot: The Dark Continent, where Salem (and later May) lives, is described as swelteringly hot.
• Evil Is Petty: After Marrow leaves Atlas on ethical concerns, Ironwood has Prometheus, the only combat school in Mantle and Marrow's alma mater, investigated, branded as revolutionaries, and shut down, and all their graduates are put on the suspected terrorist list.
• Eye Scream: Cinder loses her eye to May in this version. May had initially intended to kill her to stop her from killing Amarillo, but regreted it in the last moment and used the windcoil to knock the arrow aside, so it only grazed Cinder's eye.
• Fake-Out Opening: The last chapter opens on what appears to be May's assassination of the Fall Maiden, but turns out to be training for the real deal with Salem.
• Faking the Dead: May is believed to be dead, but in her case it's more a case of Death Faked for You that she ran with.
  May: Getting fake burned alive clearly did nothing to take the stick out of your ass.
  Watts: And getting falsely mauled by an Ursa didn’t make you any more tolerable.
• Fallen Hero: The fic chronicles May Marigold's fall from grace, from a White Sheep wanting to make up for her family's crimes, to a willing agent for the setting's Unseen Evil, set on ripping Atlas from the sky no matter the cost.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Tyrian is this to Salem's inner circle. While no one is particularily fond of each other, everyone hates Tyrian.
• Gaining the Will to Kill: Salem wants her maiden to be willing to kill, so part of her training of May involves pushing her towards being more ruthless and embracing her anger. May is initially horrified when she kills someone for the first time, and stops herself from killing Cinder, but finally crosses the line with Juni, killing her out of anger and spite after Juni kills several of May's companions.
• Gaslighting: A favored part of Salem's manipulation of May. Particularily, she convinces May that Winter lied about not outing her to Stella, so if Winter lied about that, what else would she lie about? Winter and the Happy Huntresses didn't tell her about Janus, so were they keeping other things for her? If they were so happy to leave her out of things, did they even try to save her when she was put in Cerberus, or were they happy to be rid of her? Why would they embrace Winter, daughter of Atlas' most notorious Corrupt Corporate Executive, as one of them, but leave out May?
• Gilligan Cut: A rare Played for Drama example. In chapter 19, it cuts from May being manipulated by Salem into thinking Winter and the Happy Huntresses never cared about her, to the Happy Huntresses, Marrow and Winter risking their lives to find out what happened to her.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Downplayed. May doesn't go mad from her time in Atlas' Black Site, but it takes a heavy toll on her mental state and causes her anxiety to interfere with her reasoning, leaving her easy pickings for Salem's manipulations.
• Great Escape: Chapter 25 focuses on one. To get Cassia Troy out of Tartarus, May and Emerald disguise themselves as soldiers, using Amarillo as a Trojan Prisoner. Everything goes great until it doesn't, and they are forced to release every prisoner at once, resulting in far more casualties among both guards and prisoners killed in the fight, as well as Tartarus being blown to bits as a security measure, though only after the remaining prisoners escape to safety.
• The Great Serpent: May and Hazel run into an undiscovered type of grimm in Anima resembling a giant snake with a scorpion's stinger and three heads. Its gaze induces panic in people who meet it, causing them to attract more grimm, which is likely why it was undiscovered until then. May names it a Gorgon.
• Human Resources: Dust is formed from ancient, magic-using humans who died and their magic crystalized. After finding a room in an ancient ruin filled with dust, May bitterly notes that Atlas would've mined it for profit.
• I Have No Daughter!: May's parents don't get the chance before she "dies", but Jacques disowns Winter when she moves to Mantle, though she disowns him in turn first.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the vastly different circumstances, Cinder still loses an eye, though in this case it's caused by May instead of Ruby.
• Internal Reveal: May and the Happy Huntresses learn the truth about various things at different paces, leading to a lot of this. It takes until chapter 29 for the HH to learn that aura dampeners are essentially torture devices, whereas May has known that since chapter 1.
• Irony: May's relationship to Cinder can be best described as "bad and deteriorating". However, after her trip to Vacuo, May swaps out her crossbow-sword for a bow-sword, which is Cinder's weapon in the show.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: While they're not aware of it yet, the Happy Huntresses has no relationship to Salem, the Big Bad Omnicidal Maniac threatening the world. Her dragon, on the other hand, is their once close friend May.
• Legacy Character: Maidens, as per canon, passes their powers onto someone else when they die, either the person they think about when they die if they qualify, or someone random if they don't. The fic also runs with the idea that the Maiden powers originate not from Ozma empowering worthy mortals, but from Salem and Ozma's children, who inherited part of their father's Resurrective Immortality causing their powers (but not souls) to reincarnate. The fic shows the previous Fall Maiden pass her powers along to Amber, and May and Cinder are both being groomed as Maidens.
• Like a Daughter to Me: Salem tells May that she has started to see her as a daughter of sorts, and would be proud to have May inherit the Maiden powers that originated from Salem and Ozma's daughters. It's part of her manipulation tactic, but May buys into it wholesale, having been starved for maternal affection her entire life. She is genuine, but is also so ancient and detached from humanity that even her surrogate daughter is just a tool for her to use.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Chapter 21 is one long one, induced by Salem to help May embrace her anger. It depicts a perfect world where May is living openly as a woman and in a happy relationship with Winter, Ironwood, his lackeys and Jacques have been arrested for their crimes thanks to Ozpin, the Marigolds are both accepting of May being a woman and have decided to stop exploiting Mantle, Winter's family are happy and contributing to building up Mantle, and Amarillo is the new headmaster of Atlas with Marrow as his right hand man. When the dream finally breaks (just as Ladon Marigold was about to call May "daughter"), May directs her anger and grief at Winter, the Happy Huntresses, Marrow and Ozpin. Exactly as Salem hoped she would.
• Magic Knight: May after gaining a weaker version of the Maiden powers in the form of the Windcoil and the Lightning Rod still prefers to use them to supplement her conventional weapons, particularily using the windcoil to curve the trajectory of her arrows.
• The Man Behind the Man: Salem frames Ozpin as this, the last in a line of Ozma's reincarnations who realized he couldn't rule the world openly and instead chose to become a force hidden in the shadows, working to uphold his tyrannical regime. She's heavily exaggerating his flaws, as he's actually the head of a Benevolent Conspiracy.
• Mercy Kill: How Salem justifies the death of Cerberus site's prisoners to May. She couldn't bring them with her, so her options were to let them be recaptured and most likely executed or tortured by Atlas, or let them go, in which case they'd freeze to death in the tundra.
• Mirror Character: May and Cinder have strong parallels in their respective arcs, and notably are both driving forces in each other's fall from grace. 'May initially falls into Salem's hand because Cinder didn't take her side when she was arrested. This leads to May's corruption arc, including shooting out Cinder's eye in retribution, which in turn leads to Cinder getting a prosthetic that can see through May's Semblance. May's preference for Shock and Awe for her Maiden powers also stems from her anger at Atlas, which Cinder was part of, unintentionally giving her the ability to press Cinder's Trauma Button. Every step of the way, Cinder and May push each other to become worse and arm each other to better fight one another.
• Mundane Utility: It's suggested at a few points that the mirror of reflection could be used to both instantly clean up and apply makeup, though both are deemed too costly in aura.
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: When Cinder and Clover show up on the Happy Huntresses doorstep to ask about the location of a fugitive, Robyn and Fiona list the exact legal protections they have against being forced to say anything, and several good reasons they could make a lawsuit if Cinder does anything to force them.
• Mythical Motifs:
  • To reach the Mirror of Reflection, May has to fight a giant multi-headed serpent that can petrify her with a look (from panic, not literal Taken for Granite), which she names a Gorgon. Gorgons were the species of monster Medusa was part of, and the hero Theseus famously used a mirrored shield when fighting her.
  • When looking for the second artifact, May runs into a grimm named the Charybdis, which has the ability to breathe in sand and spit it out again. Charybdis was a monster faced by Odysseus, which had the ability to do the same with water.
  • When on a mission in Solitas for the third artifact, May get the help of Amarillo Suadere, who alludes to Orpheus, to get Cassia Troy out of Tartarus, mirroring both Orpheus going into Hades to save Eurydice, and Odysseus seeking the dead prophet Tiresias.
  • Cassia Troy is based on Cassandra of Troy and the blind prophet Tiresias. She is knowledgeable, like a prophet. Like Cassandra, her warnings to Marrow about attending Atlas went ignored. Like Tiresias, she is sought out by a hero who needs her guidance.
  • The combat school in Mantle is named Prometheus. In Greek myth, the titan Prometheus gave Fire to mankind, giving them the tools to survive, but in doing so angered Zeus, who punished Prometheus severely. The combat school Prometheus equipped the people of Mantle with the knowldge and tools to protect themselves, but when some of its graduates defies Atlas, it angers Ironwood, who has Prometheus shut down and its teachers arrested.
• Never Found the Body: May's body is not found in the aftermath of the grimm attack that supposedly killed her, something Cinder and Winter both take as indication that she's alive. She is, of course, but on a different continent.
• Nightmare Sequence:
  • Chapter 16 ends with May suffering a nightmare where she and Winter try to escape from the Marigold manor, helped by the Happy Huntresses, only for them all to leave her behind and mock her. It not-so-subtly reflects how she is starting to feel about her old friends, however unjustified.
  • Chapter 30 has May suffer a nightmare about her various anxieties and traumas. First, she sees the Happy Huntresses in a bar in Mantle being happy that they got rid of her, then Emerald, Cassia and Silver dying, and finally Cinder accusing her of being responsible for their deaths]].
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Discussed. After she and May camp together in a sandstorm, Emerald considers that the smart thing to do would be to steal May's supplies and leave her to rot. She decides against it, reasoning that May could probably take her in a fight but still let Emerald use her supplies freely.
• Old Friend, New Gender: On a mission to Mantle for Salem, May recruits Barry, a miner who's wounds she treated when she was still attending Atlas, giving him a bit of a shock when revealing that she's that Marigold.
• Panacea: The third artifact May recovers, the Amulet of Protection, can heal any wound or disease short of death. She uses it to save Emerald from a lethal poisoning, but is too late to save her other companions.
• Past Experience Nightmare: May suffers trauma-induced nightmares about being kept in Cerberus.
• A Place Holds Memories: On the mission to Solitas, May struggles with her memories from before her faked deat]. Both the happy memories of spending time with Winter and the Happy Huntresses, and more traumatic memories about Atlas in particular.
• Power Incontinence: May's invisility misfires when she returns to Mantle on a mission for Salem and runs into the Happy Huntresses. She panics and cloaks herself so completely that even when she builds up the courage to call out to Winter, her semblance quiets her.
• Power Nullifier: Atlas uses Aura Dampening Handcuffs that prevent prisoners from manifesting their aura or use their semblance. As May learns firsthand after being blackbagged, however, they are less power nullifiers and more power drainers. They automatically detect when a prisoner's aura is recharging, then gives them a shock strong enough to drain it again.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: The entire fic follows May as she slips down the slippery slope thanks to a highly traumatic life and Salem's subtle pushes.
• Rage Breaking Point: May reaches hers in chapter 29, after Juni Syntrichia kills Barry, Silver and Cassia, and fatally poisons Emerald. She goes completely feral and murders Juni in anger, rather than desperation as her previous kill had been.
  • In chapter 5, Marrow, Winter and Cinder have a mutual one. Cinder and Marrow accuse Winter of being naïve and unwilling to accept Marigold's death. Winter and Marrow call Cinder out for being an incessant rules heckler who never even tried to be close with her team, only playing nice with them if they did as she asked, and being so mindlessly obedient that she didn't even support May when she was objecting to war crimes.
  • Qrow Branwen gives one to Ironwood in the final chapter, pointing out how killing Amarillo would only cause more trouble and caused the loss of a possible asset. He also peppers in complaints about Ironwood's generally authoritarian methods.
• Revenge Before Reason: Juni Syntrichia is so determined to get revenge on May for killing her partner that she makes her way across a desert while heavily wounded on foot, goes back into said desert for clues on where May went with barely a second of rest, and completely neglects her safety and health in the process. This is despite the fact that May only killed Rusty out of desperation, after specifically warning that any fight would end in death for one of them, and then saving Juni's life because she could.
• Rudely Hanging Up: Played for Drama. When calling to inform Amarillo of Cassia, Barry and Silver's deaths, May hangs up as soon as he mentions the Happy Huntresses.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • When making her new weapon, May plays into the symbolism of it all; Her previous weapon, Matilda, was a comparably small and light bastard sword that worked for proper duels. Her new weapon, Clorinda, is a massive greatsword, representing her not constraining herself and taking up space.
  • In case it wasn't obvious, Salem spells out why May is the perfect symbolic fit for Fall Maiden; Fall is the season of Change, and may has gone through extreme change, for better or worse, in recent years, from her joining Atlas, defecting from Atlas, and transitioning. The Fall Maiden guards the relic of Choice, and May chose to leave her family to join Atlas, then chose to defect, and finally chose to join Salem.
• Sand Worm: May runs into a grimm resembling one after crashing in the Vacuo deserts. It's large enough to swallow her ship whole.
• Shattering the Illusion: The perfect world dream sequence Salem puts May in shatters just as Ladon Marigold was about to call May his daughter. Salem stands ready to call give her maternal love and gender affirmation instead, driving May further under Salem's sway.
• Shout-Out:
  • Chapter 21 is titled after What Could Have Been by Sting, which was featured in the Arcane soundtrack. Appropriately, the chapter is a Dream Sequence of May's ideal happy world, which could have been if not for Ironwood, Ozpin, Winter and the Happy Huntresses (or so Salem tells her, at least.
    I want you to hurt like you hurt me today
    I want you to lose like I lose when I play
    What could have been
  • While talking about movies to watch with Emerald, May lists The Lancer, Executioner, Jellyfishicane and Constitutionally Brunette (featuring the song "Gay or Mistrali"). Emerald later compares May's outfit to a hippie girl getting lost in a Professor When set.
  • After being asked to identify May, Troy cracks a joke that it's Princess Merida who dyed and straightened her hair.
  • Along with Marigold and Ottendorf (the union organizer), the Cerberus innmates Clover lists are Lacroix, Cazo, Lawton and Quinzell.
• Shout-Out Theme Naming: The instructors at the Prometheus combat school are all shoutouts; Vander, Greyson, Alenko, Parker, Morales and de Rolo.
• Special Thanks:
  • The author's notes on the first chapter ends with Asheskies thanking her fiancee and her girlfriend for their help and emotional support, stating that the series would likely not have existed without them. She also throws in occasional thanks to both her partners and her friends whenever it seems relevant or they helped out with a specific section.
  • The endnotes of the final chapter, "At risk of potentially sounding pretentious for what is the endnotes of a fanfiction", has thanks given to the author's friends, fiancee, author of Blackened Bluebird and artist that inspired Winter and Cinder's designs.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: A minor sideplot in the first fic follows a union organizer from Mantle who sneaks into Atlas to recover evidence of Ironwood's misdoings. She's unluky enough to do so at the same time as Salem's agents are breaking out dr. Merlot, and Ironwood arrests her on the suspicion that she is an agent of Salem. The last the reader sees of her is that she's being tortured at the Cerberus Black Site. Considering that Cerberus was destroyed by Salem, who only wanted May alive, it's safe to say that the organizer didn't make it.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat:
  • May and Watts, May and Cinder, May and Winter. May and everyone, really. Taken to its logical conclusion when the Mirror of Reflection manifests as a perfect replica of May.
  • May and Tyrian also get a moment:
  May: The company sucks, but what else is new?
  Tyrian: How rude! And I was hoping we’d all have a chat, maybe a sleepover. It’s been far too long since I’ve done truth or dare.
  May: I dare you to leave.
• Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: According to Salem, there have been previous trans maidens, and in one case, a trans boy who failed to inherit maidenhood because of his gender. She even chooses May as her perfect candidate, and tells her in no uncertain terms that May is a woman and the Maiden powers will accept her.
  May: But… could I even be a maiden? You said it yourself, maidens have to be-
  Salem: A woman. Which you are. Doubt ill-fits you.
• That Was the Last Entry: May finds an ancient archeologist's diary while searching for the second artifact. It conveniently cuts of just after listing a series of landmarks pointing to May's goal.
• These Hands Have Killed: May gets her first kill in Vacuo, putting a crossbow bolt in the back of a mercenary to save Emerald. She ends up vomiting over it, and uses her medical knowledge to at least attempt to save the mercenary's companion out of guilt.
• Titled After the Song: Chapter 21 ("And All That Could Have Been") is named after "What Could Have Been" by Sting, featured in Arcane. The song is about someone who sees themselves as a monster and blames someone they loved for what they have become. The chapter is about Salem Gaslighting May into blaming the Happy Huntresses for her suffering at Ironwood's hands.
• Trans Tribulations: Emerald suffers dysphoria, though not much transphobia since Vacuo is comparably tolerant. She still doesn't have the means to transition, though, which leaves her in a bad mental place. Mercury, ironically, gets less than the others, since his dad doesn't give a shit about what gender his kid is as long as they can fight and kill.
• Trauma Conga Line: The one started in the final chapters of Holding the World continues, as May is kept in a torturous blacksite facility with no hope of rescue until she is eventually offered a way out by Salem.
• Trick Arrow: May continues to make use of a variety of trick arrows for her crossbow. After swapping her weapon to a bow, Watts offers to make her sonic arrows.
• Trojan Prisoner: To retrieve Cassia Troy from the Tartarus facility, May and Emerald dress up as guards and pretend to escort Amarillo as a prisoner.
• True Companions: The Happy Huntresses, including Winter, and Marrow grow into this over time, particularily on their quest to find May. May would have been part of it if not for Salem and Ironwood.
• Terrifying Tyrannosaur: The grimm guarding the silent archive is modeled after a T. rex, and is by far the most dangerous grimm May fights in the entire fic, being fearsome enough that just the ancestral memory of it causes Cassia to freeze up.
• Unreliable Narrator: Salem gives May a course in the history of her secret war with Ozma, which is extremely biased and rewritten to get May on her side. Ozma's flaws are played up to the point where she frames him as a tyrant ruling from the shadows, while her flaws are downplayed or ignored entirely. The death of their four daughters, in particular, is framed as Ozma attempting to brainwash them into weapons, as opposed to the reality, that Salem wanted to commit what amounted to genocide against humanity and Ozma wanted to keep his daughters away from her.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Ladon Marigold blackmailing May from going into Mantle with the Happy Huntresses contributes to her depression and makes it easier for Salem to Gaslight her into thinking the HH never cared, which is a big part of her becoming a Fallen Hero.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: In Solitas, Juni admits to herself that she has no idea what to actually do once she kills May, since she has nothing to return to, but decides that she has come too far. She never gets the chance to find out, since May kills her first.
• Villain Protagonist: May, while highly sympathetic and Obliviously Evil, is The Dragon to RWBY's Big Bad in this continuity, making her the villain in the larger narrative.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: After joining Salem and losing Matilda, she builds a larger broadsword with an in-built heavy crossbow named Clorinda, symbollic of her deciding to take up more space in her life. She later replaces the crossbow with a normal bow after getting a taste for the weapon in Vacuo.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl:
  • May, having been starved for any sort of affection from her parents her entire life, is easily manipulated by Salem with promises of maternal affection.
  • Cinder has it similarily. Her parental figures include the physically abusive Madame and the emotionally distant Rhodes, leaving her clinging to any paternal approval from Ironwood. The author has stated that Cinder's relationship to Ironwood was foreshadowing for May and Salem.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Even after becoming a Fallen Hero, May is motivated by a desire to undo a power structure that left her and others like her to rot in prison cells or under the yoke of oppression.
• We Used to Be Friends: Played heartwrenchingly straight on May's side after she joins Salem. A combination of her own anxiety and Salem's manipulations convinces her that any and all actual friendship she had with the Happy Huntresses and Winter was superficial, and she decides she's better of without them. Subverted by the Happy Huntresses, including Winter, themselves, who still see May as a close friend and want to find out what happened to her. But May doesn't know that.
• Wham Line: In chapter 23, with Cinder in pursuit of Amarillo and May nearby, Amarillo is saved when Cinder gets an immense pain in her head, followed by this line making it clear that May just took out Cinder's eye.
  She tried to open her eyes, panic setting in when her vision only returned on her right side.
• Whole-Plot Reference: To Homer's The Odyssey, placing May in the role of Odysseus, although with the events mixed slightly around.
  • The Trojan War - May being capturead and imprisoned in Cerberus. While the enviroments are quite different, both are comparable to Hell.
  • Scylla and Charybdis - In Vacuo, May encounters a grimm literally named Charybdis. This is also where she meets Juni Synthrichia, who, like Scylla with Odysseus, will eventually result in the death of May's companions.
  • Meeting Aeolus, the king of winds - Through Salem's patronage, May finds the Windcoil and Lightning Rod, two weapons associated with storms that are a great boon but in the grand scale only works to make May's condition worse, much like the bag of winds gifted to Odysseus.
  • The Lotus Eaters - Salem creates a heavenly illusion of May living her best life, which she does not want to leave. Unlike Odysseus, May does not leave willingly.
  • The Cyclops Polyphemos - May goes to Solitas and blinds Cinder in one eye, which leads to Cinder pursuing a vendetta against her for many years to come.
  • Journey into Hades and meeting with Tiresias - May, Emerald, and Amarillo (who's motif is Orpheus) travel to the new Atlas black site (named Tartarus) to rescue Cassia Troy for the information she can divine (Cassia's motif is Cassandra of Troy, another prophet from the epic cycle).
  • The Trojan Horse - In order to rescue Cassia, May and Emerald pretend to be guards with Amarillo as their prisoner.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Salem continues from the first fic. When May is blackbaged by Ironwood, she puts her people to work tracking her down so that she can offer her a hand when she's at her lowest.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • Marrow, Robyn and Winter gain hope that May is alive when they find Matilda. When they finally track down the Cerberus site a year and a half after May was imprisoned there. With the obvious aftermath of a grimm attack, no security footage to go on (wiped by Watts), and no sign of May, they are forced to conclude that she is truly dead.
  • On a mission to Mantle for Salem, May nearly runs into the Happy Huntresses, but panics and cloaks herself. She finally builds up enough courage to call out for Winter, only to suffer Power Incontinence that quiets her voice so Winter doesn't hear her. By the time she calms enough to turn off her semblance, the happy huntresses have left without knowing May was there, and May decides it's better this way.
  • Amarillo had just decided to defect from Salem and tell Ozpin everything he knows about her plans when Cinder catches up with and kills him on Ironwood's orders.
• You Killed My Father: Specialist Cinder Rhodes has personal beef with Suadere Amarillo for this reason, taking him on alone despite Clover having a more suited semblance.

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