The trees.
The trees were beautiful. Lucy saw, through her nearly closed eyes, the sun of a new day. The red and gold leaves reflected the light and filled her darkening vision with color. It was the most beautiful thing she could ever remember seeing.
And it would be her last taste of the mortal world. She felt, dim as an ember, the moist ground beneath her, running dark and gruesome with blood. She felt someone, a boy with pink hair and pointed teeth whose name she no longer remembered, shaking her and knew what he was asking.
He was asking her to come back. To come back to him and the others, who were just now arriving. Lucy wanted, more than anything, to know his name and to tell him that she couldn't do what he asked. For once in her life, Lucy couldn't follow her friends. She couldn't even move, just lay there in the boy's arms. All she wanted was to sleep, but just as she started to drift away, she was smacked in the head. She weakly smiled. The boy thought he could keep her here. Lucy watched, detached, as more of her friends arrived and gathered with concern and tears. She saw the glint of a sword. The flash of ice. The sign of Fairy Tail burned itself into her mind.
But she did not rise. The color of the world pulled itself away. Her friends screamed in pain.
And somewhere far away that Lucy would never be, in the endless abyss of the Celestial World…
The Lion fell to his knees.