Fanfic / Reignfall

May Marigold had seen the worst of what Remnant had to offer. Corruption and militarism ran rampant, led by James Ironwood, and apparently enabled by none other than Headmaster Ozpin, who was much more than the world knew. She had stood up for what was right, she'd left Atlas behind, and was found by none other than Salem. And thanks to the enlightenment she had offered, May knew what she had to do in order to set the world right. And it all started with Beacon.

Reignfall is a RWBY fanfic by Asheskies and third 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. The previous entires are Holding the World On Their Shoulders and Lost In The Storm.

Six years have passed since May Marigold started her time at Atlas Huntsman Academy. Four years since her team, team CASM, was sent on a mission to the Janus Archive that led her to be imprisoned in a secret government Black Site, where she was found by the enigmagic immortal Salem. In those four years, she has been sent on many missions for Salem, all leading up to this; The hunt for the Fall Maiden with the goal of stealing her powers. As the new Fall Maiden, May will finally end the immortal Ozma and the corrupt system he has perpetuated.

And if she has to burn a few cities, that's just the cost of a new world.

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

Sadly, due to a lack of motivation to write, as well as a growing disillusionment with RWBY as a whole, the fic was eventually left dead. The final chapter, uploaded on 3rd of November 2023, provided a chapter-by-chapter recap of the planned remainng eleven chapters and ending.

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

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Reignfall provides examples of the following tropes

• Abusive Parents: Marcus Black, Mercury's father, has brutally trained him for a decade, molding him into a lethal assassin through extreme cruelty. He did provide his son with the means for transitioning, but did so as a priviliege that could be revoked if Mercury did not obey him. Marcus also implies that his father did the same to him, and his father before that.
• Accomplice by Inaction: As May sees it, anyone who knowingly supports Ozpin, like Amber, are complicit in the atrocities he has committed (according to Salem). Wether they actively participated or not is irrelevant, since they still let it happen.
• Adaptation Expansion: The events surrounding May (Cinder in the original) setting up her plans for Vale are showed in more detail here than in the show, including showing how she recruited Roman, planned out the grimm assault on Vale, infiltrated Haven by pretending to be a student, etc.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: The fic reveals that the aura transfer machine used by Ozpin & co to give Pyrrha the fall maiden powers from Amber was also used by Pietro to transfer part of his aura to Penny so she could develop a soul.
• Adapted Out: Oobleck and Port are absent from the fic, and the Vytal tournament is instead announced by Glynda and Rosie Cypress, an original character.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • May considered wrapping her hair, but decided against it because she'd need three assistants to do it every morning. In the show, May's hair is wrapped, and she has three partners that presumably help her with it.
  • According to Winter, Cinder is who she could have been if she hadn't fallen in with the Happy Huntresses. Of course, Cinder the Atlesian Specialist is who Winter is in the show.
  • Winter remarks on the audacity it takes to challenge one of the world's best huntsmen to a fight in public, as Cinder did. Robyn points out that Winter would've done it during her first year.
  • The legbrace Pyrrha receives from Ironwood appears to be based on the same technology as Winter's exoskeleton from volume 8.
• Always Night: The Dark Continent where castle Evernight is located has, appropriately enough, apparently constant night time. This is caused by a mix of its far northern location, a constant thick cloud cover, and the overall dark magic permeating the place.
• Artifact of Doom: The remade amulet of protection that May retrieved from Solitas now carries "the essence of grimm tiself". Just holding it in the open causes anyone who sees it to feel anger, fear, sorrow and pain. May uses it to steal the Fall Maiden's powers from Amber, which kills her, which results in it being absorbed into May's body. It is strongly implied, and eventually confirmed, that the amulet is turning May into a grimm.
• Artistic License – Geography: According to the fic, the Dark Continent has constant night time because of its far northern location. In reality, a northern continent (at least on a tilted globe like Earth) would have Always Night for half the year, but also Endless Daytime the other half. Justified since it's also caused by a thick layer of clouds and dark magic.
• Author Filibuster: Robyn's views on violent revolution in chapter 15 quite clearly give across Asheskies' own. Robyn and Joanna note that it's easy to fall into the idea that the only way to truly deal with deeply flawed institutions is to burn it all down to the ground, but that the problem is twofold: One, truly making progress is rarely straightforward and often times involves needing to make compromises in order to ensure any degree of meaningful progress is made, even if it means that it can't fit everyone who's hurting. The second and more prominent issue that when revolution turns into outright war, it's oftentimes the most vulnerable (the minorities marginalized, in this case the poor, the Faunus, the people of Mantle, etc.) who are most likely to be harmed, because the state has a powerful army that would not hesitate to exterminate them without a second thought, and progress would be set back drastically, if not wiped out completely.
• Awesome, but Impractical: During a sparring match with a Petra Gigas, May uses her Doppler powers to turn the grimm goop on the ground into a massive claw to kill it with. As Salem points out, while this is very impressive, it would've been more practical to simply take control of the geist itself, since the arm trick takes a lot of energy and requires a supply of raw grimm.
• "Awkward Silence" Entrance: Lil' miss Malachite demands that May tell her name as insurance. The entire bar falls silent when May pulls of her hood and reveals that she's May Marigold.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Between May and Winter before they grew closer during their time at Atlas, though it's ambiguous when exactly they started developing feelings for each other.
• Badass Boast: When Marcus asks what Amber is running from, May outright admits to herself that she's being a bit dramatic on purpose:
  May: From me.
• Bait-and-Switch: May considers calling Winter to tell her everything. Cut to Winter receiving a phone call... from Robyn.
• Battle in the Rain: May and Cinder's long-awaited reunion in chapter 18 takes place in a ruined town in Anima during a rainstorm. For extra drama points, one of the combatants is revealed in a flash of lightning. The rain is actually a hindrance to May, who's semblance is less effective when someone can see the outline where the rain enters her bubble. Not that it matters, since Cinder can see her anyway.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Downplayed. Like in the show, Qrow arrives in time to stop May from stealing the entire maiden powers, but not fast enough to save Amber.
  • Played straighter during the Fall of Beacon. Qrow may not have been able to save Amber, but he is able to stop May from killing Pyrrha, though he loses his life in the process.
• Big Damn Kiss: May and Winter have their first kiss (first ever kiss in May's case) in chapter 10, atop the train where they also shared an intimate moment during their first Vytal tournament.
• Big Damn Reunion: In chapter 8, after 40 chapters and seven and a half year in-universe, May and Winter finally reunite. Both cry and, after just staring at each other in disbelief, spend a good while holding each other close.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows: Less dramatic than usual, but the first fight in the present day of the fic is in a small town church where Marcus and Mercury have been hired to kill a reverend.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: Pyrrha denies her feelings for Jaune in part because she knows that [[sopiler:as fall maiden]], she will always be in danger, and doesn't want to drag Jaune into that with her.
• Breath Weapon: The wyvern of Mountain Glenn can breathe lightning bolts. May uses her power over grimm to have it do this against Qrow to take out his aura and put them on even footing.
• Bullet Catch: Something May can do with her maiden powers, creating winds in her palm strong enough to counter the bullets' momentum.
• Bully Turned Buddy: May and Winter spent most of their time in Alsius playing mean-spirited pranks on each other and competing for the top spot while kicking the other down. In Atlas, they grow closer and start to consider each other best friends. May even developed feelings for Winter, which she never knew how to act on.
• Call-Back:
  • In chapter 3, Amber preparing to kill Emerald happens the same way Rusty tried to kill her back in Lost in the Storm. May notices the repeat and panics, shooting Amber with an arrow.
  • Ironwood assumes May's semblance is teleportation when she disappears in thin air, just as they initially did with Silver Chorus back during one of team CASM's first missions.
  • The opening line to chapter 6 is taken directly from chapter 16 of Holding the World, but replacing a few words:
  Holding the World: Winter glanced around the ballroom, confidence flowing through her core. To attend in a suit, it was far more… her… than anything she’d worn to an event like this ever before.
  Reignfall: May glanced around the ballroom, confidence flowing through her core. To attend in a dress, it was far more… her… than anything she’d worn to an event like this ever before.
  • Chapter 7 is titled "Where Our Lives Are, As of This Vytal Festival", calling back to a conversation between May and Winter in HTWOTS where they discuss what they hoped to do next time the Vytal festival comes to Vale. Winter directly refers to the conversation, finding that she is exactly where she hoped to be, whereas May is very much not.
  • A large portion of chapter 10 takes place with May and Winter riding the same train they took while having the aforementioned conversation.
  • In chapter 16, May is worried that her aura isn't recovering as fast as she'd like it to, just like Cinder worried about the same thing in Lost in the Storm.
  • In chapter 18, Pyrrha remarks that picking out a new outfit should have been a fun activity to do with her team, but she ended up doing it alone and in silence. Just like May in Holding the World, who had to watch her friends have fun clothes shopping while only being able to pick out clothes she was comfortable in alone and in silence.
• The Chain of Harm: The Black family has apparently been assassins for hundreds of years, with each generation putting their children through the same brutally abusive upbringing to teach them the trade. Even as he lays dying, Marcus gloats that Mercury is only perpetuating the cycle by killing him.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Why May only tells Mercury what he needs to know to fight Amber. If she told him that magic is real and that she's trying to steal the magic of one of only six mages in the world, he would just call her crazy.
  • When she holds her speech during the fall of Beacon, May reveals herself as the supposed dead heir to the Marigold fortune. Ladon Marigold responds in an interview by dismissing the claim as false because his "son" was a proud Atlesian who would never do something like this. May is understandable pissed.
• Catapult Nightmare: Discussed and subverted. In chapter 16, May suffers a nightmare and notes that she probably should have woken up screaming and jumped upright, but she's too exhaused and scared to move at all.
• Chekhov's Skill: May demonstrates the ability to only use the sound muffling aspect of her semblance to silence Marcus when he gets annoying. During the vytal tournament, she does the same in reverse to prevent herself from hearing Iris' voice-based semblance, which threatened to reveal her. She uses it again while fighting Qrow, combining it with her windthrows to throw her voice across a room and fake teleportation, and later wh.
• Childhood Friends: Played with to hell and back. The first chapter gives a summary of May and Winter's relationship as they grew up, and while they could losely be considered friends due to being the only ones they knew of their own ages, they actually hated each other and were more rivals than anything else. They didn't truly become friends until Atlas, and said friendship was ruined by Salem soon after.
• City Noir: Mantle and Mistral Below both have a reputation as cities of constant rain. May notes that it's a misnomer, but not entirely inaccurate; Mistral Below is in a dark ravine along the coast, making it rain more than normal there and the darkness makes the rain feel more oppressive, while Mantle's poor heating grid means that snow only melts into rain, compared to Atlas, which is completely climate controlled.
• Color Motifs: Discussed in regards to May's swords in chapter 3. Matilda was initially blue and gold, the colors of May's family. Her new weapon, Clorinda, mostly loses the gold with the exception of details on the hilt to remind her of her origin. The rest is colored obsidian, "unyielding and strong, but painted as villainous by those that would never hold the perspective to understand".
• Comical Coffee Cup: May sarcastically remarks that Watts' betrayed Atlas because Ironwood was hogging all the "World's Best Fascist" cups.
• Commonality Connection: Mercury and Emerald immediately bond when Emerald tells him she's also trans, as Mercury has never met another trans person before.
• Compelling Voice: Iris Drake, a classic mean girl type bully who targets her victims' insecurities, has a semblance that amplifies that to the level of this trope. She uses it on May during the Vytal festival, increasing all her anxieties and self-doubts to the point where May nearly uses her semblance on instinct.
• Confirmation Bias: In-Universe. May justifies killing Amber by reasoning that, since she works for Ozpin, she can't be as innocent as she seems, so when Amber tries to kill an incapacitated Emerald, May takes it as proof of Amber's casual cruelty. From the reader's perspective, Amber killing one of the assassins who just tried to kill her is a perfectly reasonable reaction.
• Content Warnings: Like in HTWOTS and LITS, each chapter starts with a list of content warnings. Chapters 2 and 15 also have additional warnings before any scene that involes transphobic and abusive parents.
• Continuity Nod: One looooong in the making. In chapter 8, Salem watches the Moirai, a moth-like grimm she originally created to demonstrate her power for Tyrian way back in chapter 10 of Holding the World, float past her window. It's grown a fair bit bigger than then, being roughly seven feet long.
  • After the Fall of Beacon, Cinder is seen listening to several old recordings from team CASM missions, several of which were seen in Holding the World on Their Shoulders.
• The Corruption: After absorbing half the Fall Maiden's powers and the doppler-infused amulet, May becomes more irritable and starts directing her frustrations at people who have never done anything to hurt her, like Pyrrha Nikos. It's implied that it's the influence of the Doppler, which now inhabits May.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Applied to a grimm, which makes it none the less horrifying. At the end of a lesson teaching her how to control grimm, May is instructed to destroy the grimm she's practicing on. She does so by slowly squeezing the lifeforce out of it, causing it to collapse in on itself, ripping its body apart until it's reduced to a black splatter. It shows how much the corruption has taken hold of May that she thinks nothing of it.
• Cult: Like in Lost in the Storm, Salem uses a lot of cult-like tactics to keep May under her thumb. Robyn, Joanna and Fiona specifically point out that the Fall of Beacon may be the ultimate example of this, as Salem has now made herself the only person May can go to for help without getting arrested or killed.
• Damaged Soul: Ironwood wanted to use the AEGIS project to create a more efficient aura dampener, one that would directly drain the aura instead of just supressing it. This would be permanent, and since aura is considered a manifestation of a person's soul...
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
  • May and Pyrrha can overtax their maiden powers, but doing so causes them abnormal exhaustion and even cause them to hallucinate. It's eventually revealed that when they do this they are drawing on each others' maiden powers.
  • Even more dangerously, during her fight with Cinder, May gets desperate enough to cross the Godzilla Threshold and draw on her grimm possession, turning her into a violently savage grimm-human hybrid.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Cardin Winchester, who in the show is still alive and reasonably well, is here killed by May using Penny as the murder weapon.
  • Qrow Branwen is killed during the fall of Beacon while fighting May, while Pyrrha Nikos survives.
• Democracy Is Flawed: When she's told about Robyn Hill's plans to run for a council seat, May dismisses it because Robyn would still have only one of five seats, two of which are occupied by Ironwood and the other two which are supportive of Atlas, so she wouldn't be able to do much. Winter is hurt and outraged that May would dismiss the Happy Huntresses' efforts so easily.
• The Ditz: May's cover when infiltrating Beacon, "Daisy Shepherd", is a bit of a clueless airhead, which is intentionally as far away from May's actual personality as she can get. In a conversation with Weiss, she "mistakenly" suggests Nevermores as a grimm native to Mistral, supposedly unaware that nevermores are found all over Remnant.
• Double-Meaning Title: Along with Pun-Based Title. "Reignfall" refers both to May's goal of ending Ozma's immortal reign, and to her maiden powers, which are primarily themed around storms.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • While walking the streets of Vale, May recollects her friendship with Winter, the only person she ever came out to before joining Salem, and how Winter lied to her, kept secrets, and never lifted a finger to save her from Cerberus. All of which the audience knows is not true or has deeper reasoning than May knows about.
  • May briefly ponders what happened to Matilda, her previous sword, but dismisses the thought. The sword is currently in possession of Winter as a Tragic Keepsake.
  • When seeing Pyrrha at the Vytal dance, seemingly having everything she could ever want, May has a brief moment of wishing Pyrrha would experience what it's like to have to choose between duty and happiness. As the reader knows, Pyrrha will face that choice very soon, having to chose between becoming fall maiden and being happy.
  • Winter takes note of several teams when she visits the Vytal festival, one of which is a team from Haven. Said team is May's team, DENM, but Emerald and Mercury is standing between her and May, preventing her from seeing her.
  • May assures herself that the changes she's going through can't be anything serious because Salem would have told her if it was. The changes are caused by Salem.
  • When Jaune worries about Weiss being taken home with her father, Pyrrha assures him that Weiss' sister will be there, having no idea that Winter left Atlas years ago and has very little opportunity to help her sister.
• Eating the Eye Candy: Winter, upon seeing May post-transitioning and expressing herself fully, blushes and has to force herself to focus on May's face instead of her body.
• Elemental Motifs: While training Cinder to use the new part of her semblance, Fria explains that maidens tend to favor one particular element, which often reflect on their personality; Fire is angry and destructive, wind is elusive and enacts indirect change, earth is rare but immovable and indomitable, ice is calm and patient, and lightning is direct and unstoppable, destructive but less so than fire. Coincidentally, May's chosen elements are wind and lightning.
• Embarrassing Slide: One of the pranks May played on Winter when they were attending Alsius together was replacing the attached file of her history homework with an hour of video game footage.
• Emotional Powers: May's ability to control grimm is reliant on negative emotions, namely hatred.
• Extra-Long Episode: Chapter 18 clocks in at over 18 400 words, making it the longest single chapter in the entire continuity, and the longest chapter Asheskies has ever written according to her author's notes. Roughly a third of that consists of May and Cinder's fight.
• Eye Color Change: When team DENM are being questionned by Ironwood, Emerald shifts May's eyecolor to brown with her semblance, which is close enough to May's natural golden eyes to not raise suspicion, while also keeping her safe from Ironwood recognizing her.
• Establishing Character Moment: May's first present-day appearance in the fic is told from Mercury's perspective, starting with her and Emerald sneaking up on a pair of professional assassins with ease, sarcastically congratulating them on a recent assassination, and telling them that she has a job for them fully confident that they will accept.
• Evil Is Burning Hot: The Dark Continent where Salem resides and most grimm come from is constantly swelteringly hot.
• Explosive Cigar: A rare case of it being used as an intimidation tactic. May flexes her Maiden powers at Roman by sending a lighting bolt at his cigar, burning it to a crisp in his mouth.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: When May receives a letter asking for a reunion, she initially assumes it's from the dead Juni Syntrichia. Then the letter uses military time (Eighteen-hundred hours), revealing even before she hears the signature that it's from Cinder Rhodes.
• Foregone Conclusion: In chapters 8 and 9, May and Winter reunite, reconnect, and even confess their love for each other. It all goes with the reminder that the Fall of Beacon, immense destruction and countless deaths caused by May, will happen within just a few days.
• Foreshadowing: May and Pyrrha being soul bonded is foreshadowed heavily, starting from the first fight between May and Qrow; When May overtaxes her maiden powers, she sees flashes of green light, just like the lighting in Amber's vault. During the fight on top of Beacon tower, May gets pain in her heel, where Pyrrha just took an arrow. When Pyrrha receives a gift from Ironwood, her immediate reaction is anger and resentment. Finally, May and Pyrrha's auras both seem to decrease randomly, almost like if they had been in a fight, which is handily explained when it turns out that their auras are linked.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • Because Winter is present in Vale for longer and has gone through plenty of Character Development on her own, she is able to provide advice to Pyrrha about how best to deal with the burden that has been placed on her shoulders. Because of this, Pyrrha withdraws from the Vytal tournament, letting Nora go in her place. Because Pyrrha is no longer a factor, May has to redo her plans for the Vytal festival, and the resulting change results in Cardin Winchester being killed and Penny surviving, albeit as his manipuilated murderer.
  • Because Winter confronts May about her actions at the Fall of Beacon while May is on her way to kill Amber, Pyrrha has time to receive about a third of the maiden powers before May kills Amber and steals the rest.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • As per tradition. May's fake team when infiltrating beacon is DENM (Denim, May's fake name is Daisy Shepherd). May and Emerald also mention the previous winners of the Vytal tournament, teams VLHL (Valhalla) and SPHR (Sapphire).
  • When Ruby and team JNPR go on their treck across Mistral, they settle on the team name PLANR (Planar). Other suggestions include RRNNJ (Orange), which Jaune considered too confusing, and RRAVN (Raven), which Ruby objected to because of her stepmom.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: According to Emerald and Mercury, May's eyes glowed in a creepy way when she used the amulet. Not the flares that are usually associated with a maiden either, something else.
• Green-Eyed Monster: May has a moment during the Vytal dance, first at Pyrrha, who has gotten everything she could have ever wanted with no sacrifice (that May knows of), whereas May lost everything because she stood up for her principles. Then at Jaune, who came to the Vytal in a dress and still seemed to have the time of his life, something May would have been desperate for eight years ago. The jealousy briefly turns into anger before she reins herself in
• Happy Rain: May likes the rain, associating it with Mantle, which has a constant downpour compared to Atlas' perfectly pristine weather. She considers rain when she fights the Fall Maiden to be a good sign, and her Maiden powers are usually depicted as storms.
• Hates Being Alone: After her experience being trapped in an Atlas Black Site, there is very little that scares May more than being trapped alone with no way to call for help, which is why she accepts a psychic link with Salem despite her better judgement.
• Hate Sink: Jacques, in his brief appearance, calls Weiss (a trans woman) a "crossdressing heir", misgenders and deadnames her, states his intent to have her branded as mentally unstable so he can keep custody of her despite her being an adult, and takes away Myrtenaster.
• History Repeats: Discussed. After Weiss loses her temper at Atlesian nobles being insensitive about the Fall of Beacon and misgendering May, Atlesian society (at least according to Jacques) starts to worry that she'll be the next May Marigold, a supposedly mentally unstable and dangerously angry trans woman. Weiss would of course never do anything close to what May has done, but it doesn't stop Jacques from using it as an excuse to strip away any independence she had.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Ozpin assigned Qrow to protect Amber for her safety. It ends up making it easier for May to track her down, since Qrow with his giant sword is more noticeable than Amber. Downplayed, since Qrow does still succeed in protecting her, though not enough to stop May from stealing some of the maiden powers.
• Hopeless with Tech: Hazel Rainart, due to a combination of age and growing up in the countryside, is bad at using a scroll. Salem as well, having lived longer than all of modern technological development.
• I've Come Too Far: Discussed. May expresses this sentiment at times, and Robyn suggests that May has done so much wrong that she has no choice to continue, because doing so would mean facing the fact that every death she caused was for nothing.
• Improvised Weapon: Mercury kills Marcus by throwing a dust-powered lantern at him. Marcus blocks it without thinking, causing it to explode.
• Information Broker: Like in the show, Lil' Miss Malachite is a mistrali crime lord who runs an extensive spynetwork across Mistral and beyond. May goes to her to get information about Vernal and the Branwen tribe, though Malachite also passes along a message from Cinder, asking for a reunion.
• In Medias Res: Chapter 20 starts with May in an Argus prison cell, before flashing back to show how she got there.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite May and Cinder being very different people, the fight against Amber goes more or less the same as it did in the show; Emerald and Mercury keep Amber occupied until May can hit her in the back with an arrow They hold her down while May steals the Maiden powers, until Qrow shows up in time to sever the connection and take Amber to safety. Even the location appears to be the same.
• Internal Reveal:
  • In chapter 8, Winter learns that May is alive, that she has transitioned, and that she is working with someone looking to undo corruption. May in turn learns that Winter is now on a team with Fiona, Robyn, Joanna and Marrow, that they were the ones to leak the story about the aura dampeners, and that Winter never stopped searching for her.
  • In chapter 11, everyone learns that May is still alive, and Winter learns the cost of May's revolution.
  • In chapter 15, the Happy Huntresses learn May's name, that she came out to Winter years ago, and everything Winter knows about why she caused the Fall of Beacon.
  • In chapter 16, May learns that the doppler possessing her has been slowly turning her into a grimm-human hybrid. The rest of team JNPR and Ruby also learn about Salem, the silver eyes, the maidens, and the relics. Pyrrha learns about Ozma's immortality.
  • In chapter 18, May learns that Atlas experimented on her semblance to develop a way to counter it, and Cinder can see her even when she's invisible as a result.
• Last-Second Chance: At the Vytal Festival, May reunites with and even confesses her love to Winter. The two proceed to have some of the few truly happy moments of May's life just spending time together, and Winter offers her to come back to Mantle and join the other Happy Huntresses. May genuinely wants to, and even tries to tell Winter everything, though the Doppler stops her. All the way up until the start of Penny and Cardin's match, May has her finger over Winter's name in her contact list, ready to call her and accept her offer. But she ultimately decides against it, going through with the Fall despite her conscience screaming at her to not do it.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Discussed. After learning that May is responsible for the Fall of Beacon, and is in some kind of cult, Robyn points out that at this point May would have to rely entirely on whoever is manipulating her for emotional support, since literally everyone else hates her.
• Loose Lips: May accidentally lets slip to Mercury that she's Atlesian and attended Atlas Academy when she mentions how bad the Atlesian dorms are.
• The Lost Lenore: May is this to Winter, which is heartwrenchingly depicted in chapter 7, where Winter gets a glimpse of May in the crowd. She tries to chase after her, but only finds an empty courtyard. She proceeds to sit down and say to the empty air how much she misses May, how even after seven years she hasn't been able to move on or stop thinking of all the things that could've been different.
• Love Confession: Winter confesses her feelings to May in chapter 9, saying that May was the closest friend she ever had, that she missed her more than words can tell, and the week they have been reunited has been one of the happiest in her life. May, after being briefly stunned by the confession, admits that she reciprocates, and has for a long time.
• Loving a Shadow: "Loving" is the wrong word given how cold and abusive he was, but the way Ladon Marigold describes May to the Atlesian press is not even close to how she actually is. According to Ladon, *** (May) was a proud Atlesian who wanted to fight for Atlas' greatness and who was close friends with and admired Ironwood. He also completely denies the idea that she's trans.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Roman Torchwick enjoys the fine things in life, and his base of operation when May hires him is an upper class mansion in minimalist style. May, who was raised in such a mansion, despises it.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • When she wakes up after the fall of beacon, May says "Fuck you, Nikos. I should’ve had it all, and you should’ve never been part of this", echoing two sepparate lines from Cinder in the show; ""You're just not worthy of such power. But I am..." and "And you... should never have been born".
  • When May sees Jaune at Haven, she internally asks "who was he, again?", echoing how Cinder asked Jaune the same question when they met at Haven in the show.
• Meaningful Name: Basil Concord, the journalist who interviews Ladon Marigold about the supposed true identity of the Beacon terrorist. The herb basil has historically been used to symbolize both love and hatred, both of which tie into the scene they appear in, where May is furious at her father for his cruelty and abuse.
• Misplaced Retribution: May justifies killing Amber by reasoning that, since Amber is on Ozpin's side, she's either actively involved in or passively complicit to the atrocities happening under Ozpin's regime. In reality, Amber has only met Ozpin a few times, uses her powers to help people, and is an otherwise kind and gentle woman pressed to the breaking point.
• Mundane Utility: May uses the sound-dampening part of her semblance to silence Marcus Black so she can have an uninterrupted discussion with Mercury.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When Emerald suggests that maybe not everyone in Atlas is purely evil and deserve to die, May gets furious and angrily rants at her until she realizes that the poor girl is terrified and is gripped with remorse, apologizing. Emerald accepts her apology, but warns her that if May does that again she will leave, which May accepts.
• Mythology Gag: Weiss scolds herself for having missed some strikes during team RWBY's fight with ABRN, which Winter tells her not to worry about. In the original show, it was Winter doing the scolding. Taken a step further when Cinder arrives in the same scene, and does scold Weiss.
• Necessarily Evil: May isn't comfortable with the innevitable death and destruction she'll cause in the Fall of Beacon, especially not since it will innevitably hit innocent people who have suffered under Ozma just as she has. She still sees it as better than the endless misery caused by Ozma in the years to come if she does nothing.
• Nightmare Sequence:
  • May suffers one in chapter 16, which combines all of her traumas into one. She's in Marigold Manor, without a weapon or aura. The lighting is like it was in Cerberus, and she's being chased by a grimm that sounds like a mix of a normal grimm and a chainsaw (Juni Syntrichia's weapon) and can burrow underground to get closer to her (Juni's semblance). When it finally comes face to face with her, it looks like an unnaturally thin and lanky human with her own face with red eyes and bloody fangs. Just like the Doppler.
  • Chapter 20 opens on one from Pyrrha's side, where she meets May at the road where she stole half the maiden powers. Both are frozen and unable to move as Grimm close in, and Pyrrha watches as May's humanity is stripped away.
• Not Quite Flight: After being cornered by Ironwood in the Beacon CCT tower, May escapes by using her maiden powers to control the winds and let her glide to safety.
• Old Friend, New Gender:
  • Downplayed since May was out when they last met, but Roman fails to recognize her when they meet again four years later, since she has fully transitioned since then. He only recalls who she is when Neo reminds him.
  • Once May reveals herself to the world, a lot of characters are faced with this realization. Those of her old team that didn't know, even Cinder, are surprised but realize that it makes sense in hindsight.
• Once More, with Clarity: Winter venting to the seemingly empty courtyard is told twice, once at the end of chapter 7 from her perspective, then at the beginning of chapter 8 from May's perspective from behind her cloak.
• One Degree of Separation:
  • When May meets them, Marcus and Mercury were doing an assassination for Keegan Athery, whom May's old team had a rivalry with during the Vytal tournament.
  • Of the potential competitors of the Vytal tournament, May takes notice that a lot of them have a connection to her; Blake was a high ranking member of the White Fang branch that May works with, Reese Chloris was trained by her old partner Marrow Amin, Penny Polendina has some relation to Atlas' best mechanic, Weiss knew May personally before her transitioning, Cardin Winchester was trained by May's old teammate Cinderhois the niece of Qrow Branwen whom May has encountered before, and May Zedong has the same name as May.
  • Of the competitors actually encountered, Opal Morrigan is the younger sister of Orhcid, whom May fought in the previous Vale Vytal tournament, and Duke Cobalt is one of Marrow's students.
• One-Steve Limit: May takes note that one of the competitors in the 40th Vytal tournament is named May Zedong, so she has to make sure not to respond to that name while undercover.
  May (Marigold): Also, I’m way more of a May than she is. Rude.
• One-Word Title: "Reignfall", which is notable since the title of the first two fics, "Holding The World On Their Shoulders" and "Lost in the Storm", are entire sentences.
• Only One Name: In the flashback to May's time at Alsius, the narration refers to her only as Marigold since she had yet to discover that she is trans.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Watts is legitimately surprised when May sincerely thanks him for saving Emerald's life after she got injured in the crossfire from May and Qrow's fight.
• Painful Transformation: May's slow transformation into a grimm-human hybrid is extremely painful whenever it jumps a step. Her horns force their way out of her skull in a way that's described as similar to a literally splitting headache, her jaw feels like it's being ripped off when she grows fangs, and her blood feels like it's been replaced by ice water.
• Painting the Medium: After May forges a Psychic Link with Salem, she'll occasionally get intrusive thoughts making her angrier and pushing her away from any support network other than Salem. Said intrusive thoughts are written in bold text, which is also the stylization given to Salem's mental communication. Chapter 8 confirms that May's intrusive thoughts are actually subtle messages from Salem.
• Perspective Flip: The opening chapter shows a flashback to team CASM being formed, which was originally told from Cinder's perspective, from May's perspective. The end of that chapter also shows a rare glimpse of May as seen by an outside observer, in which she comes across as a Femme Fatale.
• Phlebotinum Rebel: Salem tells May that when a man tried to steal the maiden powers, they burned him up from the inside and returned to their proper host. This, thankfully, does not happen to May, who is a woman.
• A Place Holds Memories:
  • While walking through the streets of Vale, May walks by the spot where she first came out as trans to Winter, leading her to reflect on her and Winter's broken relationship. Later, during the Vytal dance, she notices all the places in the ballroom where she and her old team hung out during the dance eight years prior, which causes her so much emotional turmoil that she has to leave.
  • Winter has the same remembrance when she visits Vale for the Vytal festival, though even more bittersweet for her since she thinks May is dead.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Marcus Black. May gets her first taste of standard misogyny while working with him, noting that he's a toxic masculine asshole who derides her for being "too emotional". According to Mercury, Marcus doesn't actually respect trans people either, only seeing it as a way to control his son.
• Power Incontinence: When Qrow accidentally ignites an explosion in the warehouse he and May were fighting in, May is able to fly using her maiden powers (which she usually can't since she only has half of them), but then finds them difficult to use to get a safe landing.
• Psychic Link: More like a psychic chain;
  • After May acquires the first half of the Maiden powers, Salem offers to create a link between them so she can reach May at any time. The link is actually with the Doppler possessing May.
  • May and Pyrrha, as a result of both having parts of the single Fall Maiden powers, have their auras and souls linked. In addition to occasionally and unonsciously sharing thoughts and feelings, this also means that they can draw on each others' maiden powers, though doing so exhausts them, and their auras are linked in such a way that when one goes down, the other goes down the same amount. Ozpin worries that the eventual outcome of this will be that one entirely consumes the other, or that they will merge into a single entity similar to Ozma's reincarnations.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Adam Taurus, of all people. Whereas inthe show, Cinder used appeal to force to get Adam on her side, here, May is able to calmly reason with him, and he agrees to work with her because she also wants to combat societal injustice. Downplayed in that May later realizes that he's rather ill-suited to lead, but figures there's a reason he's in the position he's in.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • When Winter asks how May was able to fake an aerokinetic semblance, May answers "Magic", which is the truth but also something that sounds like just May being snarky.
  • She later describes her transitioning as "my magical reflection gave me mystical hrt", which is accurate but Winter calls her out on always speaking in absurdist terms.
• Repeat Cut: Chapter 12 opens on May's speech repeated as different characters react to it.
• Resignations Not Accepted: Discussed. After the Fall of Beacon, May assures Emerald that she is free to go whenever she wants, and that she should the moment she gets uncomfortable with what they're doing. May won't sent anyone to hunt her down or silence her, and she's pretty sure Salem wouldn't either. Salem would absolutely do that.
• Rule of Symbolism: Doloma, the weapon May uses while infiltrating beacon, is described as a "Poor almost-heir that died in the arena", "Usurped before it could ever grow", and "Good riddance". Which can be accurately described as May's view on herself as she was back in Atlas.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: While catching Mercury up on The Masquerade, May and Emerald get into an argument about what the proper term for the Amulet of Protection is. May insists that it's an amulet, Emerald suggests talisman or medallion, with Mercury agreeing that it's a medallion.
  May: It was a fucking disc with a gem in the center, on a chain, that gets worn around the neck. That makes it an amulet.
  Mercury: Nah, I think Em’s right, medallion sounds more accurate now that you say it like that.
• Shadow Archetype: Discussed. When Weiss asks Winter why she hates Cinder so much, Winter says it's because, among other reasons, Cinder is who Winter could have been if she hadn't met Robyn. A cold enforcer for an unjust system, so caught up in propaganda and brainwashing that she can't see how much suffering she causes.
• Shout-Out:
  • In chapter 2, May feels like she should be contacting Salem through kneeling in a personal holographic chamber, not by way of scroll.
  • The "Atlesian copaganda show" Mercury watches in chapter 4 is called Mantle Nine-Nine. He and Emerald later try watch a comic book show called Ultra-Girl
  • One of the students that May notes as a potential threat or asset is Rajah Collin, an archer from Shade who shot an apple out of the mouth of a pig during his exam, and May notes that the odds are in his favor.
  • Another is Fazsen Bradley, a pyromaniac who references Fahrenheit 451.
  • A former teacher at Beacon Academy is named Talis, as in Jayce Talis. A current teacher is Professor Solus.
  • A mentioned character, Bjorn Valemo, seems based on the Norwegian fairytale Kvitebjørn Kong Valemo.
  • One of Roman's hideouts is Orange Clockwork Storage.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: During their confrontation, May accuses Cinder of having killed Amarillo in revenge and lied to herself to justify it. Cinder shoots back that those accusations are pretty rich coming from the woman who caused the Fall of Beacon and works for Salem.
  Cinder: At least when I got my payback I didn’t leave a river of blood.
• Sins of Our Fathers: The Fall of Beacon causes Atlas' already bad transphobia to flare up, to the point where any trans atlesian are treated as the next international terrorist.
• Sleepy Depressive: May spends the majority of chapter 16 sleeping or lying in bed trying to sleep, because she can get away from her guilt and depression when unconscious. It doesn't always help, as she often suffers either nightmares or dreams about how things could have been that only hurts more when she wakes up.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Narrowly averted. Iris, May's opponent in the Vytal tournament, has a semblance that targets the victim's anxieties. May suffers Power Incontinence due to her anxieties, causing her to nearly reveal her true semblance.
  • Played straight twice by Winter, who first gives Pyrrha some advice that causes her to withdraw from the Vytal tournament, forcing May to find someone else to kill to incide horror and shock in the audience, and later confronts May on her way to Beacon Tower, delaying her long enough that Pyrrha has time to inherit part of the Maiden powers.
  • When Ruby and team JNPR arrive in Haven, May explicitly calls them "a wrench thrown into the fucking gears."
• Spared By Adaptation:
  • Briefly, and overlapping with Dies Differently in Adaptation. In the show, Marcus Black only appears as a corpse, having already been killed by Mercury when Cinder arrives. In the fic, Marcus is recruited along with his son by May, but is killed by Mercury (with May's blessing) one chapter later.
  • Penny Polendina is not killed in the Vytal tournament, instead being the one who's manipulated into killing another contestant.
  • Pyrrha Nikos is not killed during the Fall of Beacon, Qrow Branwen arriving just in time to save her.
• Spotting the Thread: During the interrogation after the Fall of Beacon, Winter lies that she hasn't seen May since the Janus mission. While she relies mostly on lies by omission, Cinder notices that she's leaving something out when her explanation of having found and repaired Matilda does not explain how it received scorchmarks from an electric charge.
• Starting a New Life: After selling out Russ Athery to the SDC for corporate espionage, Finn Collare tried to lay low in a small town as a reverend until Mercury and Marcus Black showed up to kill him, hired by Russ' son.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: May uses this as an intimidation tactic when meeting with Roman to hire him, using her semblance and her training to sneak past security and appear in a chair right next to Roman, sipping from a coffee cup she took from his kitchen for good measure. She leaves by the same method.
• Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: May once again expresses concerns that the Maiden powers won't accept her, or that the unusual transfer method will mean that her gender wouldn't matter anyway. Salem assures her that they will accept her, and that the powers themselves are gender locked. She has attempted a similar transfer method with a man before, but it failed miserably. True enough, the Maiden powers accept May as their new host without issue.
• Take That!: Asheskies' thoughts on Brooklyn Nine-Nine are made reasonably clear when Mercury describes Mantle Nine-Nine as Atlesian Copaganda.
• Talking to the Dead: Slightly downplayed in that May is still alive (even if she doesn't know that), but Winter in chapter 7. After catching a glimpse of May at the Vytal tournament, Winter follows her to an empty courtyard. Partially to vent feelings that she has kept bottled up since May's "death", and partially in the vain hope that May really is there and hidden from sight, Winter sits down and talks about it. How much she misses May, how she has tried but can't move on from her, how much she regrets all the things she could have done different, and how much it hurts to keep May's gender secret while listening to others misgender her. She ends it by begging May to give even the slightest hint that she's alive. And May reveals herself.
• Tempting Fate: When she was first assigned to team CASM, May assures herself that, despite being on a team with Winter and Cinder, it would probably be fine. As the reader knows, it most certainly was not.
• Testosterone Poisoning: May notes that Vulcan Barett, the head of team VOID, fully buys into the toxic masculinity you find in "the gross corners of the internet.
• Time Master: Ozpin is an adept of time magic, which he uses against May during their battle. May compares it to the effect of Marrow's semblance, only much stronger.
• Time Skip: Between chapters 15 and 16, there's a 10 week (roughly three months) timeskip.
• Titled After the Song: Chapter 13 is titled "Achilles, Come Down", from the song of the same name by Gang of Youths, a song about Achilles being talked down from suicide. The chapter features Pyrrha, who's Mythical Motifs is Achilles, going to fight May, a suicidal course of action. The song also applies to May who, while not suicidal, is comitting the worst mistake of her life.
  Achilles, Achilles, Achilles come down
  Won't you get up of, get up of the roof
  You're scaring us, and all of us
  Some of us love you
  Achilles, it's not much but there's proof
• Traintop Battle: During the Fall of Beacon, May and Winter's confrontation eventually leads them to fight on top of the same train that they had previously had some of their most important moments together, including their first kiss.
• Trans Nature: Aside from May and her two companions who are all trans, Neopolitan also explains that she has had an experience similar to a trans person, having chosen a name for herself different from her birthname, hated text-to-speech devices because the voice never sounds like her, and remade her appearance completely to feel more comfortable in her body.
• Trauma Conga Line: Poor Winter. After having lost her best friend and one true love, she spends several years desperately trying to find her before being forced to accept that she's dead. Then it turns out that the friend in question is alive but didn't make contact because of Winter's own paranoia making her impossible to track down (or at least that's what Winter thinks). They manage to rekindle their friendship and even start a romantic relationship, only for it to turn out that her now girlfriend is a terrorist who kills thousands of people in a single night, and she is forced to fight them.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Amber had been given a fair bit more characterization in HTWOTS and LITS than in the show, but ultimately the narrative demands she dies. She's killed by May in chapter 3, in order for her to obtain the maiden powers.
• Whole Episode Flashback: Not quite whole episode, but most of chapter 1 is made up of flashbacks to earlier events in the timeline, some recounting scenes the audience are familiar with, and some brand new.
• Will They or Won't They?: When May meets him, Roman was watching a Show Within a Show that apparently had this conflict between two doctors, with the female doctor mad because the male doctor didn't make it to a date.
• Wrong for the Right Reasons: After walking in on May infiltrating the Beacon CCTV, Ironwood witnesses her vanish from sight and assumes she used a teleportation semblance. May makes sure he continues to think that by having Emerald project an image of her in a different location.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: The Amulet of Protection, after Salem's meddling, contains both the power of the God of Light and the grimm, created by the God of Darkness.

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