RWBY: LUCID

There was one room left on the second floor, his father's.

Jaune hesitated outside the door. The wood was warped and discolored, similar to his own room, with the edges dark with moisture.

A musty, metallic odor seeped from the crack beneath it. For a moment, he just stood there, staring at the handle.

Then he reached out and turned it.

The door groaned open, resisting him like it didn't want to be disturbed but he forced it open anyway.

Inside was a mess of shadows and ruin.

The window blinds were broken and collapsed inward, letting in faint, sickly red light. The window itself was cracked but not broken, just grimy with some type of dirty substance that Jaune didn't want to find.

The walls were water-stained, the ceiling above bowed and sagged as if it might cave in at any second.

A fan hung from the ceiling by a single wire, still as a dead babe.

His father's bed was partially collapsed. The mattress was sunken in the middle and torn wide open, yellowed stuffing spilling out like entrails. Jaune approached it carefully, heart in his throat.

"Dad?" he called again, softer this time.

The silence was deafening.

He checked the nightstand. A few rotten books laid there, dusty and moldering, beyond recognition.

A wooden watch box sat cracked in the corner, its lid hanging off the hinge. The watch's inside was rusted and frozen at a meaningless hour.

He crouched and looked under the bed.

Nothing, just dust and cobwebs.

He looked into the broken closet.

More of nothing.

Jaune stood there for a moment, staring around the ruined room. This space, his fathers new room, felt long-abandoned, like it hadn't been touched in years. The smell of rotten wood lingered at the back of his throat, and the floor groaned under his feet as he turned away.

A part of him had hoped desperately, irrationally, that he would find something. A sign or a clue.

Or even...his dad.

But the room offered nothing except silence and dust.

And so, with a heavy breath, Jaune stepped back into the hallway.

Jaune lingered at the top of the stairs, staring down.

The staircase looked like it could collapse under a strong breeze. Each of the steps were warped and the wood was dark with age, moisture, and something he couldn't even begin to name. Bits of splintered railing jutted out like broken ribs, and the banister was sagging under its own weight.

Carefully, Jaune tested the first step with his foot.

It groaned, but held.

He exhaled, gripping the decayed banister for balance and slowly made his way down, step by cautious step.

The silence was thick and clawing—oppressive.

Like the house itself was holding its breath.

Halfway down, the air grew colder. His breath fogged slightly in front of him.

"What happened here…?" Jaune whispered.

The lower floor greeted him like the ruins of a memory.

The kitchen was a wreck of shattered cabinets and blackened tile. The fridge hung half-open, its door dangling on a single hinge like a snapped jaw. Everything was coated in grime, as if decades had passed since anyone lived here.

Dust floated in the air, and cobwebs clung to the corners like pale veins.

He wandered cautiously through the living room. The furniture was unrecognizable. Lumps of torn fabric and broken frames with even the TV laying on its face, screen cracked and just broken as the rest of the ruined house.

And then he glimpsed it.

That red glow from before, faint but distinct, filtering in through the broken window near the front of the house.

Jaune was startled but he felt drawn towards it.

Something about its color wasn't right. It wasn't the warm orange of a streetlamp or the sharp red of brake lights.

It was deeper.

Sicklier.

Almost like blood seen through a thick fog.

He crept toward the shattered window and wiped a small smudge off the small bit of glass still attached to the frame with his sleeve, but the grime smeared, making the image even murkier. He leaned past the hole, trying to see.

At first, he thought it was just a trick of the light. Maybe a busted traffic signal or the light of some type of fire alarm across the street. But then his eyes adjusted.

And his stomach dropped.

The suburbs, his new neighborhood... it was all...

In ruins.

Flipped cars rusted in the street like discarded toys. Street signs lay twisted and broken, and buildings slouched under their own weight with shattered, broken windows.

Cracked pavement covered the roads, as if time had attempted to reclaim the world in his absence.

"What… the hell…" Jaune breathed.

It looked post-apocalyptic.

Like a war zone. But he didn't remember any disaster. No earthquake. No bomb sirens. No screaming.

Just him... sleeping?

His eyes flicked up the block, then down the other end.

Dead, broken streets and red, glowing haze.

"Am I dreaming?" he muttered. "No… no, this is a dream. That odd Nightmare System even confirmed it. But this seriously feels like the end of the world."

He felt an odd cold seep into his skin again.

The wrongness of it all dug into his spine like claws.

"What if instead of this being a dream... what if something happened while I was asleep?" he whispered to himself. "What if I'm in a coma of some sort? What if there was some... disaster? Some earthquake or invasion? And now my brain is just—just making this up?"

His words sounded stupid, even to himself.

And deep down, he knew it wasn't true.

This wasn't imagination. The house. The system. The way his skin prickled with every step.

It was real.

In its own terrible, twisted way... it was real.

His eyes drifted upward, toward the sky.

And that's when he saw it.

A blood-red moon hung above the city, huge, heavy, and broken.

Not cracked but practically shattered.

Massive chunks floated around the celestial object like debris caught in orbit, the remains of a cosmic wound.

It pulsed with faint red light, bathing the ruined world below in a sickly, hazy glow.

Jaune's breath hitched.

It looked terrifying.

Not just unnatural, but offensive to existence itself. A celestial corpse staring down at him with a dead eye.

He pressed a hand to the window frame, needing something solid to hold onto.

"What the hell is this place...?"

He couldn't look away. That fractured moon seemed to mock him, like it knew something he didn't. Like it was waiting for something.

Like it always had been.

Jaune stepped back from the window, heart thudding in his chest.

Whatever this dream was—whatever the Nightmare System had pulled him into—he had the awful feeling that it was only just beginning.

He was proven right when only a moment later he heard a shuffling sound cut through the silence of the night like a razor.

Jaune stilled.

He wasn't alone.