The silhouette of pale skeletal towers before jaundice sunsets stood a testament to Mountain Glenn's legacy. There is a pattern of society overreaching their limitations and believing we've learned better than the ones before. Either our stupidity of hubris drives us to continue prodding the unnatural under the naïve belief the unnatural won't bite back.

The city served the perfect backdrop to our decimation, though I wasn't aware of it at the time. An entire community inspired to push into the unknown and was punished for being entitled. Isn't this the perfect analogy for what happened leading up to the Vytal Festival? In the same Kingdom no less, but I digress.

I'd visited Mountain Glenn four times. Once was a school trip, the second was stumbling into a madman's game, the third was a mass evacuation of the city, and when I was running away once again. Not because of something in my life but living itself. What little friends remained in my life were reminders of my failures. It wasn't unusual for an Atlas soldier or Huntsman to wander into the woods with a fresh clip and never return. War, while new to me, was a quick and merciless teacher. The question was whether I was a good student.

I wasn't. Despite multitudes of armaments and my own Gambol Shroud clipped at my hip, this necropolis was the closest I came to suicide. As much as I'd love touting an ironclad resolve the truth was, I'm too cowardly to do it myself. So instead of dying in the city of death I became a resident until something changed.

It was the tail end of autumn; the air was crisp despite the thick scent of decay hanging on the wind. I didn't know it then, but the change I waited for was tangible within the stale air. I'd set up home in a semi-basement bookstore, Gander's Tales, tucked away from the street traffic of deceased Atlas soldiers and Vale citizens above. My cloak reeked of rotted paper and mothballs, the store's product long reduced to binding and mush. But Gander's served as shelter and stood far enough away from the Creeping Wail few things wandered past my window.

Dark clouds outside made it impossible to tell whether it was lunch or dinner, but my stomach roared it was both. The shelves lining my walls were emptied of military rations and whatever else I scrounged up from the surrounding block. I only left Gander's if I knew my destination and guaranteed objective. Were I spotted, the enemy alerted others to my location and the prospect of moving wasn't great. Lying atop a slab of metal plucked from my past, I strove to ignore the grumbling in my gut. Thoughts of boiling the leather in my boots flitted briefly in my desperate mind. I'd never consider dying of hunger, most people in a civilized society going to a nice school and living in a nice home ever think of starvation. Being a Faunus, life was difficult before but never as dire as staring at the ceiling feeling my insides devouring themselves.

It was only interrupted by unfamiliar shambling above. The upstairs of Gander's was a series of apartments strung together by a long corridor. Cleaning her living space was necessary, but the upstairs was alien territory save for the few searches for missed crumbs. While Glenn's first people perished in their own horrible way, the evacuation of Vale offered families chance to die in the same homes someone else had. Morbid as it was, we made homes in coffins awaiting Atlas to save us from a momentary crisis. What a joke.

Gander's stairs led to the owner's original residence; a home later taken by a family of three. Their clothes still sat at the foot of their beds and cold mugs waited on the table. My arms turned to goose flesh when I raided their pantries and collected drinking water from their windows. Silly as it was, I feared they come home.

Maybe one of them had.

Gliding upstairs, my elbow nudged open the door, before I swung around the corner. The perception of Faunus's enhanced senses as gifts always bewildered me. Our senses channel through fear, to hear and see and feel danger around us before predators' pounce. Faunuss, I believe, are people who remember where we've come from. Long ago we were all prey, humans could see in the dark and hear like us too, they didn't lose these senses until they became our predators. If you envy my eyes quick adjusting in dim lights or my ears catching the drips from the daughter's room, know we've retained these traits because we've run from death our whole lives.

Plops of thick saliva spewed onto old carpet; some sounds echo forever inside your head. Awaking to gobs falling beside my pillow years ago conditioned me to narrow my focus for the noise. Creeping noiselessly down cracked floorboards, my heart sped when my head whipped into the girl's doorway. She'd long since gone, a stain across the floor left little to the imagination, but the new resident ransacked the room like it was his own.

Long ago a man was dragged away to the Creeping Wail, this thing returned. Flesh bulged in unnatural ridges across the body the color of a pale birch. Hardened from elements and time, the man's body creaked underneath the weight of deformed growths. Red thorns sprouted through split meat across it like fingers digging out of a cracked heel. From the corners of his jaw burbled black ooze dripping down his tattered clothes and bleached white skin.

The closest I'd come to describing it's sound when it moved was the summer I worked in a displaced Faunus shelter. We'd spent weeks crushing shells of crabs to scoop out soggy meat. As dry and shell like the outside was, movement squished delicate gore inside. Long ago I had an instructor named Bartholomew Oobleck whose mouth couldn't hinder his lightning fast mind. When this began, he had us fetch him one of them. For three days he worked in a tent, the sounds drove his neighbors away. He emerged bloodshot, trembling, but hyperactive.

"The epidermis has calloused to protect what I can only quantify as a parasite latched deep within a chest cavity, which supports my hypothesis: the need to be brought back to their base of origin is not only to rejuvenate their own strength but to implant us with it. To continue, the ebony viscous gelatin is the parasite's discharge meant to issue through the mouth because the host no longer has a need to eat being that the host is, itself, the meal.

"I suspect its ashen color is due to feasting on secretions of melanin, hence their ghostly appearance. As the parasite continues to grow within the body it will rearrange and transform the skeletal and muscular system that is kept alive by the said Creeping Wail, we are no more than a vehicle used to draw in other food for the young.

"Despite the confusion, modified branches or stems have a traditional vascular bundle are true thorns, these augmentations lack a vascular connection to the body and are otherwise used to latch itself within a target in a maw like grip between hundreds of these red teeth. Though clear conjecture, I believe their frailty, how they snap off with little effort, is to quick release their prey into whatever means changes us into them. So, I suppose you may consider these things drones and us the pollen meant to bring back for the young. As for what they speak, not even I can make sense of it, an unfortunate quirk within the vocal cords or an adjusted diaphragm perhaps? It would be titillating were it not such a horrifying and revolting abomination."

The Professor only reiterated our suspicions, whatever created the Creeping Wail had designed it to be durable, efficient, and ruthless. We weren't facing a malevolent evil or a figure from our past, we battled nature. It swept across the land like locusts with only the quick sharing how they'd stayed ahead. There were reoccurring favorite stories among farmers, one being the Shopkeeper's and his Wife.

At a corner store a man and his wife gave water to survivors passing through. They planned to leave before The Wail arrived, but a twisted ankle put the husband up in bed. The wife sealed up the doors and windows the night before the Briars arrived. The boards kept them out but soon came scratching at the walls. When they ate, when they spoke, and when they slept the scratching was always around them. One morning the shopkeeper awoke with his wife unmoving. Tearing the covers off, he found the skin around her wrists flayed off and her fingernails worn down to nubs. A hunter found him a week later, they'd just coaxed the story from him when he disappeared that night saying he couldn't sleep with all the quiet.

The noise its skin made when it brushed against the small bed might've been the same scratching the shopkeeper heard. Close enough to smell the meat spoiling beneath the wooden plates, I targeted a break in the skin at the base of the skull. Snapping out my blade, I swelled up to its neck, and readied to slit it wide. Efficiency was key given their cries of distress spewed spores drawing others.

Set to strike, my body grew rigid as I glanced over its shoulder. Above the girl's bed was a mirror with something I didn't recognize. A creature with wild and unkempt ebony hair. Bloodshot eyes looked set to pop out of a sallow face. It had tried hiding its ugliness beneath a cloak, rags of yesteryear clung loosely to an anorexic frame. What remained of Blake Belladonna draped around her neck, an old black scarf. I'd become as frightening as my prey.

It must've heard the air catch in my throat because it lunged around and back at me, black froth streaming from its lips. I leapt back, blade at my side, but paralyzed from what I'd seen. It lumbered forward, soon it would cry for its clan, even now I can't be certain whether I wanted to die or not. There wasn't any joy in living in a haunted house home to two monsters living a bleak existence.

A fire lit beneath myself with strength I didn't know remained. I dashed forward, blade slicing through the collarbone, and felt the head thud against the flood behind me. The parasite would starve when it couldn't return to the Creeping Wail, the slow painful death it deserved. Tearing away from the wretched thing, my foot clicked atop something plastic. I'd scoured the house months ago, so I'd remember seeing the lanyard ground into the carpet. Scooping it up, the gritty buildup of mud and drool caked the badge hanging from it.

With a flick of my blade, I cut a bit away displaying the proud Atlas logo at the top. Booting the corpse onto it's side my imagination replaced the rags with what could've been a pristine white uniform. Atlas was there on the eve it started, they remained until fleeing with the rest of us and establishing a fort in Mountain Glenn. The fort was the first to be overrun and was a regular patrol for hundreds of soldiers, piquing my curiosity how this one wandered off so far. Giving the card another swipe, muck crumbling to the floor, my eyes widened upon reading his occupation: pilot.

Tearing from the room and back down to my home, I doused the lanyard in a basin of water I used to clean my face. Hopping up on the metal slab from Beacon, my blistered thumbs wiped away old grime until the area beneath the picture was spotless. That Briar wore a usable barcode. Debating whether to cheer or cry, I collapsed against my metal bed and did both. The face of the man who'd saved my life remained stoic and proud, Choe Adams, the pilot who owned the only keycard I've found in Glenn.

As Gander's shelves depleted and scavenging grew dire, the world mocked me with crates and vehicles stocked to the brim with relief aid. When Atlas still believed this a fight they could win, dozens of bullheads loaded with rations and materials were flown into the city. Breaking into one wasn't impossible, but their locations usually sat at the center of a large hoard. All except for a downed bullhead over the shopping center. Impossible to pierce with the tools I had, it sat like a chicken keeping hold of a delicious egg, and it would be mine.

My choosing Gander's was heavily influenced by a staircase leading to the roof. Bursting outside above the stale air and toppled medical stations, you'd imagine elevation a godsend. Instead it swam with sickly-sweet pollen emanating from the Creeping Wail. Chalk white roots the circumference of Beacon's clocktower burrowed through buildings and uprooted sidewalks. It wove into Glenn like the back of a great sea monster. They branched over buildings and drank the nutrients of the Earth, feeding the blossoming luscious rosy flowers dripping with nectar. A dangerous combination, roots choked the land and flowers lured in starving fauna. Seeing the odd doe or fox consumed by it traumatizes me even now.

My stomach yammered like an upset cat, prompting my risky leap across rooftops. The promise of even dried heavily altered synthetic military rations drove me to throw myself across buildings. A year prior I watched a root smack a bullhead from the sky and into a glass dome where'd it stayed ever since.

Air whipped my hood back and pulled my hair free in its untamed wild mane. My boots glided across tarps and brickwork. In another life I would've mistaken me for a ravenous beast. I tucked, rolling across the roof, and landed before the Atlas ship.

The shopping center was placed on the far side of Glenn and was the closest anyone within the city could see into town. Before, the glint from a clocktower or the skyline of the industrial district was all anyone could see here. That was before The Kingdom of Vale became the Spindlegrove. Barbed roots threaded through factories, schools, and houses, the air above them a dark amber from flower pollen. The city was covered in a tangled web of roots in a weeks' time, giving validity to the name Creeping Wail. Wherever you saw it cries were soon to follow. I still hear the shrieking audience when it tore Amity Colosseum from the sky and smashed it upon the ground. It remained a broken obelisk in the center of the agricultural fields, bits if crystal and metal littered the ground.

At the time I paid it no mind, my stomach dictated my next actions. Sprinting toward the sun-bleached hull, my fingers ran across the dirtied cockpit and the sheets of peeling paint. Despite sitting a year, the card reader was powered separately for safety reasons and lit up on my approach. My hand clutched my stomach, it wrestled against my ribs, and I retrieved the dead man's card from within my cloak. Slide, beep, and the side door clunked open like a slowly drawn back curtain. It died halfway, but it was more than enough room to climb inside and claim my prize.

Crates labeled Atlas and Schnee lined the walls of that wonderful toy store. Red flickering lights led me through the interior of the small vessel. Passing over crates filled with dust or armaments, my teeth clicked with anticipation. Then, at the back wall, stacks of cardboard boxes sat with the smell of cheap plastic and cheaper ingredients inside. My fingers tore one box from the wall and popped it open.

Dried apple cobbler, powdered juice drink, chicken soup supplements, turkey meal bars, so many things I despised and craved at the same time. Each brand new with the factory seal for approval.

Except for the box. The box hadn't had a seal.

Trembling fingers fell to the flap, ignoring my roaring belly, and felt the clean cut through the tape. No way had my nails done it, a blade had, and mine was still tucked in it's sheathe. My ears perked and spine straightened when the cannon blast of a mechanical clack sounded behind me and the barrel of a gun nestled into my hair.