RWBY: The Winter Maiden of Revolution
The Winter Maiden, Fria, passes away peacefully in her sleep, alone, with no one on her mind. With no chosen successor to anchor to, the Maiden's powers scatter, searching for a soul.
They drift far from the heights of Atlas and into the depths of Mantle’s frozen slums… where they find a vessel in the most unlikely of beings.
Her name is Evelyn, though the world would soon come to know her by another name during her time in the slums as White-Haired Nova.
Born a Faunus under the crushing grip of the Schnee Dust Company’s labor camps, Evelyn knew only frostbite, hunger, despair, and heartbreak. Her parents died in a collapsed mine when she was five. Her grandmother, the last of her family, worked herself to death to keep her warm for one more winter.
By age nine, Evelyn was an orphan scavenger, a silver-haired girl with snow-kissed wolf ears hidden beneath a cracked miner’s helmet from her grandmother's corpse, shielding younger Faunus children from the cold and cruelty around them. She never asked for power. Only for a chance to survive.
That chance came the day soldiers tried to make an example of her. As they raised their weapons to beat her for defying them, the air around Evelyn. The temperature plunged more than Atlas should have. Shards of ice burst forth from the ground, with blue particles swirling around her as the wind appeared from nowhere. From her lips came a furious cry:
"Stay away from us, you monsters!"
In that moment, the Winter Maiden awakened—and she was a Faunus.
The incident sent shockwaves through Mantle and Atlas. General James Ironwood, determined to prevent political chaos, had her detained and hidden away. A Faunus Maiden was unheard of and unacceptable to the Atlas eyes if seen with the higher-ups of Atlas. The official report claimed the attacker was a rogue human attacking faunus. Evelyn’s identity was scrubbed from the records.
But Ironwood made her an offer: freedom and protection, in exchange for secrecy. The world must not know the truth for now.
Before agreeing, Evelyn made three demands. Three favors she could call upon at any time. Desperate to contain the fallout and work with him, Ironwood accepted.
Now free, Evelyn wanders the shadows of Mantle and Atlas
Some whisper about the mysterious “White-Haired faunus who appears in blizzards to protect the innocent faunus in mantle even in the slums. Others deny she exists at all.
