Fanfic / Sparks Among The Stars

"You lose, Mother of grimm. You lose, Salem. All the sparks have finally been lit and set free from this wretched plane. They're free of you and your beasts, you monster still trapped in a tower. They are free and you lose!"

During the Fall Of Beacon, as Professor Ozpin stands face to face with the new Fall Maiden, and everything he's built burns to ashes around him, the ancient wizard enacts his ultimate, desperate play. Drawing on the long-dormant magic of Remnant,

...and igniting thirteen long dormant sparks.

Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Beladonna, Yang Xiao Long, Jaune Arc, Nora Valkyrie, Pyrrha Nikos, Lie Ren, Sun Wukong, Neptune Vasilias, Qrow Branwen, Taiyang Xiao Long, and Ozpin himself, are now Planeswalkers... and the multiverse unfolds before them.

Scattered to the far corners of the Blind Eternities, divided and alone, the Planeswalkers of Remnant must find each other, find their way home, and find a way to stop Salem before she destroys Remnant once and for all in their absence.

Sparks Among The Stars is a RWBY and Magic: The Gathering crossover that can be read here and here. The Fanfiction.Net version of the character list can be found here.

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Tropes found in this fanfiction:

• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In canon, Ozma and Salem were very much in love before his first death caused her Start of Darkness. Here, the love was entirely one-sided, with Ozma viewing Salem more as a daughter, and already being married to Jhoira. It was only when the God of Light warped Ozma's memories in his first reincarnation that he was convinced they were lovers, leading to their marriage and children, and that spell was broken after she killed that incarnation of him. In the modern day, he feels nothing but disdain for her, as opposed to being his Lost Lenore.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • The brother gods, and the God of Light in particular, get this: while they were no means sympathetic characters in canon, Light still gave Ozma a choice in reincarnating, and is implied to be pulling for humanity to pass their test. This God of Light fears and hates planeswalkers, viewing them as a threat to the sanctity of his "experiment", along with apparently being jealous Ozpin some of the faith of his followers, and brainwashed Ozma into forgetting he'd ever been one before sending him back to Remnant.
  • Ozpin is pretty sure that Salem knew, or at least strongly suspected, that the God of Light had altered Ozpin's memories upon bringing him back, making him return her feelings where he didn't before, but didn't care because she finally got what she wanted. Just when you thought that she couldn't get any more despicable than in canon...
• Always a Bigger Fish: Salem knows about both the existence of the Multiverse and the various powerful entities that exists in it, particularly planeswalkers, and is afraid that a planeswalker could find a way to end her despite the barrier the God of Light erected around Remnant or her own incredible power and immortality curse, and thus ruin her plans to force the gods to remember her as she destroys the world, even if she's destroyed herself. Thusly, she has devoted great effort to tracking down every Remnantian born with a spark and attempting to recruit them despite knowing that the barrier kept them from igniting. If they refuse, she kills them in such a way that Ozpin is at fault, having gotten bored with simply tracking down and killing his incarnations after a few hundred years.
• Ambiguously Related: Emmara calls Jakorai "uncle" in Chapter 13, but it's unclear if she's being literal or if it's merely an honorary title, especially given how old Jakorai is implied to be.
• Ambiguous Situation: There's an implication by the author that Pyrrha is the daughter of Rhodes, but it's unclear if she's remembering her own past, Amber's, or a mix of both.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Yang still loses her arm and falls into a depression over it, though her first trip through the Blind Eternities healed the stump over at least.
  • Cinder, as in canon, loses her left arm thanks to Ruby's Silver Eyes. Tezzeret gives her an etherium replacement, along with other mechanical parts to replace what she lost, like her eye.
  • Jaune's arm is bitten off by Korvold.
• Armor-Piercing Question: After Cinder tells Tezzeret about her past, he asks her why Salem needs people like Cinder. After all, a being as old as Salem, who is immortal and unkillable, with an effectively endless army of Grimm, along with having enough mystical might to literally destroy mountains with ease, should have been easily able to conquer Remnant anytime she wished. So why has she hidden in the shadows, only causing chaos and destruction, remaining an Orcus on His Throne for untold centuries? As he further explains his analysis of Salem and her motives, asking if it really seems like Salem wants to conquer instead of destroy, to help Cinder, he gets Cinder to realize the truth, that Salem never cared for her as anything more than a pawn.
• Artificial Limbs: Tezzeret replaced Cinder's missing arm with an etherium prosthetic, along with her eye, part of her head, and part of her torso.
• Been There, Shaped History: Ozma was a very old Planeswalker before ever coming to Remnant, and was part of everything from the Phyrexian War and the Time Spiral to the founding of the Guildpact on Ravnica and the sealing of the Eldrazi.
• Berserk Button: When the Lorwyn elves try to kill Yang for being ugly and weak, she's reminded of her mother Raven, filling her with a fury that she uses to fuel her slaughter of them.
• Better the Devil You Know: This is why Ozpin seeks shelter at the Izzet after arriving on Ravnica. Besides them being the nearest, he distrusts Niv-Mizzet the least out of the remaining paruns, in part because the Firemind is never cruel for the sake of it, and he has knowledge of the location of dragon egg clutches he can use for increased leverage.
• Big Damn Heroes: When Ruby and company are being attacked by a horde of ghosts and monsters, the Golgari lich Jakorai and his companions the Simic Vannifar and the Selesnya Emmara, the Rakdos Raishy, the Gruul two-headed ogre Ruric and Thar, and the Dimiri Mysl all come to their aid in some way or another.
• Body Horror:
  • Tezzeret's etherium enhancements to the injured Cinder include a good chunk of her head now being replaced with filigree metal.
  • Ruby is rather freaked out by the Golgari lich Jakorai when she first sees him, as he has mushrooms growing out of his body, among other things.
  • Tai's group encounters various mutated horrors in the crashed Skyclave.
• The Caper: Anastasia recruits the rest of the Ravnica group from their earlier fight to rob the Deus Vault as part of a plan to overthrow the District Five ruler.
• Control Freak: The God Of Light was one of these, according to Ozpin. Which makes sense, as he's implied to be an embodiment of White Mana, much like Heliod or Oketra.
• Crash-Into Hello: Once again Ruby meets someone plot-important, this time a young Jace, by literally bumping into them.
• Creepy Good:
  • The Golgari lich Jakorai Ruby meets is rotting, and has mushrooms growing out of his body, but seems to be a genuinely nice soul, giving Ruby an apple shortly after she arrives on Ravnica and aiding her and her companions against a ghostly and monstrous horde with his Simic and Selesyne compatriots.
  • The Dimiri assassin Mysl saves Ruby from a sneak attack from a surviving monster, even though doing so exposes himself, and is fairly polite despite his position and skillset. And the fact that he seems to be a vampire.
• Dark Is Not Evil: As in Magic canon, every color of mana has positive and negative qualities associated with it, even Black, with multiple heroic characters having an affinity with the color.
  • Jakorai is a Golgari Lich, but in all of his scenes, he has been nothing but friendly to the heroes, with his first appearance having him give Ruby an apple shortly after she arrives on Ravnica.
  • Jaune has an alignment with both White and Black mana, and despite his ability to kill people and absorb their ghosts via his arm, he still tries to be a hero and protect his friends.
  • Weiss struggles with this concept, as she has learned enough about Black mana to be horrified when she realizes she can use it, since Weiss associates the traits it embodies with her father. Although Argent tries to reassure her by giving her a more nuanced understanding of the color, she's still conflicted about it.
• Death Seeker: Salem is an interesting variation of this: according to Ozpin, she wants more than anything to end her immortality curse and finally die, but only if it's on her terms - i.e., in a way that brings all of Remnant down with her and spites the gods; she will fight against any other kind of death as firmly as anyone else would. And since an amnesia-stricken Ozma told her about the Multiverse, and the powerful beings in the worlds beyond Remnant, she's been tracking down and either recruiting or eliminating anyone with the spark, that potential to become a planeswalker, despite the God of Light's barrier preventing them from igniting.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: After Pyrrah ends up in Theros, she starts seeking out the shrines of the gods, trying to find a purpose again. After slaying a second chimera, the divine message that she receives even directly calls her "destiny's seeker".
• Detachment Combat: When Ruby cuts the arm off of a monster, it uses the severed limb as a weapon to attack her.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: Ruby is tasked to retrieve something for the Izzets, but she's attacked in the process, and the object is split in two. This gives her the chance to use the piece she has to track down the other one.
• Dramatic Irony: Only Ozpin and Ruby are aware that the other Remnantians are planeswalkers, or that they are scattered across the Multiverse. At one point Weiss even wonders if any of her other friends could be in the wider Multiverse, but after Bo Levar tells her how rare planeswalkers are, she decides that it's just a coincidence that both she and Neptune were planeswalkers.
• Evil Is Petty: Salem has been going after anyone that she can find with the spark, and if she can’t recruit them, she kills them in such a way that Ozpin is at fault. Apparently she got tired of tracking down and killing Ozpin’s incarnations in brutal ways after a while. She also wants to spite the gods and bring of all Remnant down with her, even prioritizing it over her Death Seeker desires. She’s also apparently been tracking down the descendants of his various hosts and killing them as well.
• Ghostly Goals: On Eldraine, Jaune finds himself dealing with a pair of ghostly armies, cursed to fight each other over and over again in a loop of the fight that killed them, which is blighting the land around them. After some observation Jaune and his allies realize that each side just wants the fighting to end, and are simply waiting for official word that the peace treaty was signed. Once Jaune figures out that the messenger griffin with the word of said treaty was accidentally shot down into the river and retrieves it, he tells the armies, which breaks the curse. Afterward, they decide to swear themselves to Jaune's service, joining the host of spirits inside his arm, so they can get their revenge against the one who cursed them rather than move on.
• Giant Spider: Jaune manages to rescue a number of people from a group of talking ones on Eldraine.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Part of the reason that the God of Light hates planeswalkers is because when Ozma was recovering after arriving on Remnant, he wasn't quite as discrete as he could have been and inadvertently inspired a few religions based on him, causing the god to become jealous and paranoid.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: When the Green Knight heals even after Jaune takes off his head, Jaune realizes pretty quickly that there's no way that he can beat him and surrenders... which was the point of the Secret Test of Character.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: A Sympathetic Magic spell is named after Mark Rosewater.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Geyadrone sends Weiss into one in Chapter 16, weaving her way into her mind.
• Mass Teleportation: When Tai and company accidentally reactivate a Skyclave on Zendikar, its defenses eventually teleport the crew and their ship to Akoum.
• Mercy Kill: When a group of Flamekin comes across the bloody remains of the elves Yang slaughtered in self-defense, one of them considers giving the exhausted, poisoned, and injured Yang one. Luckily, another recognizes Yang's inner fire and stops him, so they take her back to heal her instead.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Pyrrha fights two Chimeras on Theros. The first is close to the classical chimera, with a lion, ram, and dragon head, wings, and a spiked tail. The second, Gnostro, has an owl head that has limited precognitive abilities, a wolf head with fire breath, and a stallion head that can heal the beast, a scaly back with no wings, and a giant stinger on its tail.
• Mugging the Monster: After Yang arrives on Lorwyn, a group of the native elves tries to kill her for being ugly. She slaughters them once she fights back.
• Multiple Head Case: An ogre that comes to Ruby and company's aid has two heads, each with a different personality and name. The right head is Ruric and the left head is Thar.
• Mythology Gag: Geyadrone was in the middle of a plan to Kill and Replace the Tolarian Academy Archmage before Weiss distracted her, which is what she'd been revealed to be doing in Dominaria United.
• Nay-Theist: After what he went through thanks to the Brothers and Salem, Ozpin will acknowledge the existence of gods, but he understandably holds a deep distrust towards them and those who follow them.
• No Need for Names: The unicorn Jaune saved on Eldraine had no name before they met for this reason. Jaune dubs them Gringolet, which they like.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The initial lack of any signs of what happened in a mountain city Jaune and his companions hide in is something that Jaune even mentally lampshades as being really unnerving.
• "Not So Different" Remark: It's clear that the Green Knight sees a lot of himself in Jaune, and vice versa once Jaune hears the knight's backstory, and the Knight wants Jaune to avoid making the same mistakes that he did.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The Rakdos that ends up with Ruby's group is named Horatio, but everyone calls him "Raishy".
• Took a Level in Cynic: Ozma is implied to have been much more idealistic and noble than the pragmatic and occasionally ruthless Professor Ozpin, something millennia of living and dying in defense of Remnant beat out of him.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Mentally lampshaded when Ruby finds herself with a group of people representing all of the Guilds, working together for a common goal. She notes that it feels right somehow.
• Really 700 Years Old: Even before he arrived on Remnant Ozma was already an old enough planeswalker that he was the 11th parun of Ravnica making him around 10,000 years old at the minimum during the Time Rift crisis, but trying to close a time rift ended sending him 15,000 years into the past on Remnant. In fact, depending on how long it was between his death and first incarnation, he might even edge out Ugin and Bolas for sheer number of years experienced.
• Rewrite:
  • The first version of chapter 7 introduced Nicol Bolas in the Meditation Realm, who has Jinn, knowledge of/apparent access to Remnant and was working with Raven. Upon realizing that the story would flow better that way, the author rewrote the chapter so that Tezzeret was instead the one who found Cinder and augmented her with etherium all by himself, and on an unnamed plane instead, with Cinder accepting an offer to join the Infinite Consortium as a partner, replacing Raven in the scene at the tail end of chapter 4 as well. Word of God is that Bolas will show up later, given the setting, same for Raven, but in different capacities, and that Remnant remains closed off to the Multiverse for the time being.
  • Later, the author expands on Ozpin's feelings about Salem's actions towards his first reincarnation.
  • He later revamps the lesson imparted in Jaune's Secret Test of Character to not needing to fight alone, and reworks Ozpin telling Ruby about his past so he leaves a few things out.
• Revenge by Proxy: Word of God is that Salem, unable to permanently kill Ozpin, has sometimes hunted down the relatives of his host bodies and killed them instead. She also kills any planeswalker that she finds and is unable to recruit in such a way that makes Ozpin at fault for it.
• Secret Test of Character: The Green Knight's challenge to Jaune was to see if he would Know When to Fold 'Em, which he does when it becomes clear that Jaune cannot win, as the Green Knight can recover from losing his head. It's later rewritten to knowing that you don't have to fight alone.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: The events of the Fall of Beacon, and then being hurtled across the Multiverse, has given most of the Remnantian planeswalkers PTSD to some degree or another.
• Shout-Out:
  • The author cites The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug as the inspiration for Jaune's Giant Spider fight.
  • Ruby encounters a Boros legionnaire named Vimes and a Wojeck named Carcer.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Pyrrha survives the Fall, due to igniting her Spark before she even has a chance to fight Cinder.
  • Bo Levar, of all people, turns up alive and well, despite canonically dying during the Weatherlight saga.
  • Vaevictis Asmadi was confirmed to be long dead after his spell was turned back on him in canon. Here he was inadvertently sent through the Blind Eternities to Eldraine, where he became known as Korvold (due to fusing with a king as he was cursed, according to Word of God).
• Speak of the Devil: When Korvold name-drops Bolas, believing that Jaune was sent by them, Jaune feels an inexplicable chill up his spine.
• Stable Time Loop: Before he was sent back in time during the Time Rift crisis, Ozma had discovered the barrier around Remnant, only realizing much later that him being hurtled back in time is what caused its existence.
• Stuff Blowing Up: When Ruby reunites the two pieces of the item she was supposed to retrieve, it causes a massive explosion.
• Teleportation Sickness: Tai soon discovers that he does not like the feeling of teleportation spells. Though that might have been partially because of interference from the Skyclave.
• Time Abyss:
  • Ozpin, due to his being thrust into Remnant's past, is potentially roughly as old as the 25,000 years old Ugin and Bolas, if not older, since he was 10,000 years old at least during the Mending (since he was already a planeswalker when the Ravnican guilds were created), then was sent back 15,000 years. Depending on how large the time gap between his first death and revival was, he could easily be, if not the clear oldest being in the Multiverse, pretty darn close to it.
  • Jakorai the lich claims to remember when Agryem was nothing but hills and meadows. Considering how Ravnica's been covered in cityscape for several millennia...
• These Hands Have Killed: After beating a prize fight opponent to death in a blind Unstoppable Rage, Yang has this reaction. She ends up emptying her stomach onto the street as she stumbles home in a daze and then finally planeswalking away from Zendikar instinctively when the weight becomes too much.
• War Is Hell: The ghost armies, when they were alive, had grown tired of the fighting and just wanted it to end. Unfortunately, the leaders of each army kept rumors of a peace treaty a secret to avoid giving their men false hope, and something caused the fighting to break out again, the messenger's griffin being shot down into the river as it arrived during the fight. Everyone died, and their ghosts were forced to continue fighting, over and over again, until Jaune finally broke the curse.
• Wham Line: Ruby meets a boy about her age during Savior's Day. When she asks for his name he gives it as Jace Beleren.
• Whodunnit to Me?: Exactly how Ozma died the first time in canon is never explained; in this story, not only does he not know, but as he points out, he was an Oldwalker at the time, so killing him should've been nigh impossible for anyone who wasn't also a planeswalker, something Remnant isn't supposed to have do to its suppression field. The nature of his death, therefore, is quite the mystery.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: In Chapter 13, Jaune despairs and feels like he's a failure that will only drag his new friends down with him, telling them to leave so it won't happen. They unanimously agree that Jaune's too hard on himself, pointing out how he's been nothing but courageous and genuinely heroic since he arrived in the Wilds.
• You Can't Go Home Again:
  • The nature of the barrier the God of Light erected around Remnant not only kept any planeswalkers from igniting, it prevents interplanar travel to or from the plane, and while Ozpin managed to bypass this long enough to allow the protagonists to ignite and escape Remnant (and Salem), even unexpectedly managing to reignite his own Spark and escape himself in the process, it took a lot of effort and prep work to do so, and he expects the barrier to be even more difficult to penetrate again from the outside, trapping the new planeswalkers off Remnant indefinitely. That said, Ruby still has hope that they can find a way to get back through and defeat Salem.
  • Weiss and Neptune get a taste of this once the former figures out how to consciously planeswalk and they try to return to Remnant; not only do they slam into the barrier, the God of Light tells them to stay away, overwhelming them with his sheer hatred, and seemingly fear, and apparently using his Silver Eyes power to repel them back to Dominaria and making them feel extreme pain in the process.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: After arriving on Eldraine, Jaune's arm gains the ability to drain the life force and essence of others, allowing him to not only access their memories and skills, but summon their Specters to aid him.

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