#ruakh is what she means. ]

[etruatcaelum]

On Ruakh.

Lux Aeterna, the kingdom Ozma and Salem had built together, was situated in the foothills of what is now the contested border between southern Mistral and the Palash region. Salem fled east after the kingdom’s violent collapse and ultimately came to a vast, arid expanse of grassland known today as the Taiyin Steppe. There, she buried herself: literally found a cave, laid down, and did not move for centuries.

About six hundred years later, a faunus boy called Irem found her. He was thirteen, and he hailed from a nomadic group—a deme—which had recently been decimated by human rivals; Irem had been among the youths captured and enslaved by the raiders, and after two grueling years of mistreatment, he had slain his master, stolen the man’s fastest horse, and escaped into the night.

All he had meant to do was hide in the caves from his pursuers until nightfall. Instead, he found Salem—far from an intimidating figure by then: emaciated and barely conscious, her flesh so fragile after centuries of stillness that it shredded like wet paper at the slightest movement. When Irem looked upon her, it did not occur to him to feel afraid; he felt only pity and profound concern.

He decided to stay with her. Help her, if he could. She did not speak any language he recognized, but when he offered her half of what little food he had, he saw a faint spark of hope catch behind her eyes as she reached out to take it.

The pair stuck together from then on, gradually learning each other’s language and piecing together their respective histories as they roamed the steppe. Salem grew very attached to him; he began to call her mother.

Then, about five years later, they were found by Irem’s old captors. The human warriors did not recognize him as the boy who had once killed one of their own, but they did see an able-bodied young man and a monster; they attacked, intending to slay the witch and capture the youth.

Not a single warrior survived.

After that massacre, they gave those who remained a choice: gather what they could carry and leave unharmed, or stay and live by the rule of Irem and his mother.

Most chose to stay.

Every enslaved person in the deme—whether human or faunus—was immediately freed, and the livestock of those who had owned them was immediately portioned between them. The dead warriors were given proper funeral rites and, with them, the brutal cruelties of the past were to be laid to rest too.

That was the beginning of Ruakh.

Irem would eventually take the name Samandar Khan. Under his rule, the deme grew stronger and swiftly became the dominant power on the steppe—not by conquest, but by brokering peace with grimm hordes and demes alike.

(Of course, it is rather difficult to say no to a khan whose favorite steed is a grimm.)

Ruakh lasted for some three hundred years: a khanate comprising myriad demes of humans and faunus living alongside thousands of grimm hordes, spanning the Taiyin Steppe from the western mountains to the more fertile plains far to the east. Salem never staked a claim of rulership, though she did receive a say in the assemblies to elect new khans. Mostly, she came and went as she pleased, sometimes among grimm and sometimes among people.

Owing to her immortality, her grimmness, her presence in the story of the khanate’s origins, and her reputation as a teacher of magic, Salem gradually came to be regarded as a god. She was mythologized as the Witch-of-the-Wilds, a god of storms and fire, witchcraft and war, death and rebirth—a prominent deity in the Ruakhian pantheon, but far from the only one.

However, nothing lasts forever. West of the mountains and far to the north, the young kingdom of Mistral had been pushing its borders ever further south, and although the mountains had long prohibited conquest of the steppe, the invention of airships opened the eastern frontier to the empire.

In Mistral, in those days, grimm were thought to be demonic spirits who preyed upon humans and infested the bodies of the slain, reanimating them as faunus. When rumors of Ruakh began to flow north, they inspired first panic, then hatred. The steppe was not desirable country, unsuitable as it was for farming and crawling with grimm besides, but that did not matter: terror of the grimm and religious zeal made the only arguments Mistral needed to justify a conquest.

Brutal, ugly warfare followed.

Ruakh held its own for many years, bolstered by the grimm—who were far more numerous than the khanate’s people and the empire’s armies combined—and by Salem’s raw power. The mountains and the vast steppe gave the advantage to the Ruakhian defenders, whose horse archers gained fearsome reputations among the Mistrali infantry.

For a time, it seemed as though the campaign would be forced back in the end.

Then Mistral found a powerful champion of its own in Kawayanagi Asaki, a young man of common birth who claimed to have received the blessings of the gods to put an end to the scourge. He demonstrated awe-inspiring magical powers, and the emperor sent him to the front without hesitation.

It was the first time Salem had seen Ozma in almost one thousand years, and meeting them again on the field of battle in a war of undeserved persecution broke something in her. That day was not the fall of Lux Aeterna all over again: it was far worse.

Ozma had not yet sacrificed their divine gifts—they would do so in their next life—nor found the lamp of knowledge. Asaki possessed the limitless might of ancient magic and nine lives’ worth of mounting desperation burning with the conviction that Salem could be destroyed. Salem, meanwhile, fought for a land and a people she had lived with and loved and learned from for three hundred years.

When they dueled in Lux Aeterna, they had ripped the castle down on top of their own heads and burned each other alive. This time, they met as opposing forces of nature. The mountains shook and the sky rained fire and the earth opened like a great maw to swallow the armies of Mistral whole; but Asaki was the better fighter, and she lost ground slowly but steadily as he advanced with what remained of his force.

So catastrophic was the scale of the battle that by the time Salem managed to kill him at last, the steppe had been utterly destroyed by fire, quakes, and a volcanic eruption.

The surviving Ruakhians were few in number. Although they begged her to stay, fearing what would become of them without her protection, Salem looked upon the charred husk of what had been the happiest time of her life and decided that she could not live among people ever again. Not if this was what Ozma would do if she tried.

But neither could she abandon the few people she had left, so Salem made them an offer: far away, on the other end of the world, she knew of a magical oasis protected by impassable expanses of uninhabited desert. It would be different from the life they had known, but she could take them there, and they could live in safety without her.

Most of them agreed.

And that was the beginning of Vacuo.

In the modern day, Ruakh is a quasi-mythical lost civilization—think in the vein of Atlantis. The Taiyin Steppe is very sparsely inhabited, still torn up and prone to quakes and volcanic activity.

Unlike the very short-lived kingdom of Lux Aeterna, Ruakh endured for hundreds of years; Ozma couldn’t erase it from history, but they did succeed in muddying the waters enough to create widespread uncertainty among historians as to whether the khanate truly existed as described in the sources. (Grimm have foiled every effort to mount archaeological surveys of the region.) The legend of Ruakh a favorite of occultists and conspiracy theorists, and better known to faunus than to humans.

Descendants of the Ruakhian survivors Salem brought to southern Sanus still live in the Vacuan desert, and although their culture has dramatically evolved in the three thousand or so years since, there are traces of Ruakh to be found even now in stories of an ancient journey into the unknown, a paradise promised by the gods and ripped away by human hands, and indomitable will to survive.