Foregone Fables - The Story of The Warrior King

The Great War between the Four Great Kingdoms of Remnant took place nearly a century ago, but it still has a profound impact on the world today. From the calendar divider of BV/AV (Before/After the Vytal treaty) to the color-based naming tradition embraced by nearly everyone on the planet, every facet of Remnant's modern society has been touched in some way by the Great War's legacy... And yet, not many have put any thought into the stories behind it, let alone questioned them.

Those stories begin with one man: Hector Hardrada, the Supreme General of Mantle. Once on good terms with the other world leaders of his time, his authoritarian tendencies were off-putting to the people of other kingdoms, particularly Vale, while Mantle's closer neighbor Mistral continued to side with Mantle. This, in turn, resulted in Vale growing to also dislike Mistral, which attempted to appease them by agreeing to share their colonies in the Eastern coasts of Sanus with Vale. Tensions between Vale and Mistral were still high, and unbeknownst to both kingdoms, among the Mistrali settlers was a fifth column sent by Mantle on orders from General Hardrada, which committed and incited terrorist attacks against Mistral's own settlers under the guise of Valean nationalists. Mantle used this false flag attack to begin attacking Vale directly, ultimately dragging all four kingdoms into a bloody war that lasted a decade. The war became so dire that the King of Vale, Karl Bismarck, was forced to come into the fray himself, taking with him three Relics with magical properties that would have driven others to insanity in order to bring down Mantle and Mistral's forces. In the aftermath of this deadly battle, the Four Kingdoms acquiesced to signing the historical Vytal Peace Accords, ending the war, and the Great General Hardrada was publicly tortured to death before a cheering crowd of his own subjects.

At the same time, King Bismarck laid the foundations for the creation of the Huntsmen Academies in the center of each kingdom. Shortly after the King's demise, a young boy from Vale who was one of many people working on building the Academies was able to find within the site where Atlas Academy was being built a fourth Relic similar to the three used by King Bismarck in the war. That same boy would go on to become a prominent contributor to the construction of the academies and later became the headmaster of Beacon Academy in Vale after it was complete. That boy's name was Oliver Ozpin, and he was in possession of a magical walking cane which he used to create Vaults in each academy to hide the Relics in. Ozpin wasted no time starting to build a circle of followers that included the headmasters of the other academies, and revealed to them dark and unbelievable secrets: Somewhere in the world, he said, lies a primordial being named Salem who commands the Creatures of Grimm, and he was given by the Gods the power to reincarnate in a new body whenever he died so he can one day destroy it. Ozpin usually wasn't direct about who he used to be in his past lives, but he all but said that his previous incarnation was the Warrior King of Vale himself. The stories he told them were hard to take in, terrifying at times, and completely made up.

Ozpin actually was the host of an ancient parasite that can travel from body to body, but he did so through his own Semblance, rather than the power of Gods. His previous incarnation was actually Hector Hardrada and not King Bismarck, who was poisoned by him as one of his first actions in his new body, allowing him to take hold of all Four Relics, which was his true goal in starting the war in the first place. A highly intelligent manipulator, Ozpin extended this ruse even to the general population who didn't know of his reincarnation as he was overseeing the writing of the war's history in Vale - and through his inner circle, the other kingdoms - by further idealizing the Warrior King and exaggerating General Hardrada's authoritarianism, going as far as to claim that his own past incarnation wanted to eradicate the very idea of individualism by outlawing all self-expression in his kingdom. And the Grimm weren't commanded by a supreme darkness named Salem - At least, not yet.

While there was never a single being who controlled all Grimm in Remnant, in the strange and dark dimension where Grimm originated, there existed some ancient and venerable Grimm Overlords who had a great number of lesser Grimm serving them. These Overlords had immense psionic powers that allowed them to warp reality and control life and death, and on occasion, one of them would see it right to snatch away the soul of a human who had died and give it life as a new Grimm called a Revenant. Karl Bismarck was one such human, chosen for his immense willpower, courage and wisdom, but even in death he refused to serve someone higher than him, and eventually became an Overlord himself. Bismarck had no desire to make an enemy of his own killer, but he did attempt to extend his influence back into Remnant and gather human followers; He too had heard stories of a formless primordial darkness named Salem from the time before he and Hardrada became enemies, and he decided to adopt that name as his own, introducing himself as "Master Salem" to each human he spake to.

For decades, the being known as Master Salem gathered followers in the Grimm and human worlds. He had constructed his own fort in the land of darkness, Castle Evernight, from which he would contract humans, including early leaders of the Black Sheep guild which learned to merge Grimm and Humans under his guidance. Through these followers, the former King would amass a collection of ancient magical items, hunt down Silver Reapers - which he believed were the only thing that could kill him - and experimented on the creation of new kinds of Grimm, even fusing some of them into his human followers as parasites that would grant them power at the cost of preventing them from betraying him. Although he may have not even known Ozpin was a vessel of the same being that inhabited General Hardrada or that he was now ruling the Human world from the shadows, Ozpin was never made aware of what became of King Bismarck either. They came very close to it once, though, when one of the best huntsmen in the world - a Silver Reaper named Tortuga who worked for the kingdom of Atlas that replaced Mantle - was tracked down by Master Salem, isolated from his comrades and attacked by all of the Overlord's human followers at once, but the Huntsman still managed to defeat them with no issue. Master Salem was left with no choice but to confront Tortuga himself and kill him before he could relay the information to anyone else.

At this time, where Master Salem was at his most vulnerable, another Revenant managed to do what no Silver Reaper could, and destroyed Master Salem with her own power. Some time after that, an aspiring new Overlord born from a member of Ozpin's circle who was betrayed by him, sought to rechristen herself as Salem for the same reason Bismarck did, and managed to find his abandoned Castle Evernight, the remnants of his experiments, and Tortuga's corpse. This new Salem didn't desire to continue what her predecessor started; Her goal was to destroy Ozpin and his reign that attempted to eradicate the Grimm race, and the name "Salem" for her was meant to signify that she has become his worst nightmares made manifest. This didn't stop her from taking over the previous Salem's domain and his works, using them as the groundwork for her new plan.

And for that reason, Ozpin did manage to learn of this new Salem's existence, rather quickly in fact. The parasite within him, through the Relics' power, began to revise his stories to match the presence of this now-real and active Salem, including a new false backstory for both himself and his former confidant's new identity, designed specifically to make it seem like this is what Salem has always been. Perhaps, in another world, someone might even fall for it. If he ever had the chance to tell it to anyone, that is.