The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Interlude: The Dragon in the White Tower, Part 1
The Northern Shores of Fiore, X765
They said there was a dragon in the tower.
Zeref rarely paid heed to such stories. After all, they also said there was a kraken rampaging in the northern seas and a clan of vampires slowly draining the life from the inland forest. The former amused him; trading vessels were disappearing, certainly, but it was the work of Alvarez-backed privateers rather than the mythical emperor of the deep. He found the latter less amusing. It meant it was time for him to move on.
And that was the reason for his interest in the tower and its dragon.
There was no dragon, of course. Dragons had been extinct for over three hundred years. Even if one had managed to escape his notice for that long, it wouldn't have escaped Acnologia's.
An abandoned tower, though? A lone white sentinel on a forgotten headland, its impressive height made greater still by comparison with the crumbled corpse of the castle it had once called master, beautiful views, no neighbours, and the locals so afraid of a rumour that no treasure hunter had approached it for over a decade?
That was exactly what he had been looking for.
Three days he had spent in Ralvor, the northernmost town in the north-east of Fiore, making careful inquiries into the tower that lay even further north still, a monument to a lost pioneering spirit. The merchants responded with the fear usually reserved for after they'd learnt who he was. Parents hurried their children away from him; farmers made signs to ward off evil as they herded their meagre livestock from one barn to another, ignoring the endless expanse of fields around the town. A group of treasure hunters, passing through, had insisted on buying him a drink, and spent a rowdy evening boasting of the greatest monsters they'd slain and trying to flog him protective amulets they assured him he wouldn't survive without.
All agreed on one thing: there was a dragon in the tower.
Zeref hadn't thought much of the town of Ralvor. The people were superstitious, the library shelves were bare, and there wasn't a single interesting artefact in any of the magic shops in town. Still, there was nowhere else nearby where he could stock up on the provisions he would need in his new abode – books, pens, paper, food if he felt like it, shoes without holes worn into them, more books – so he duly went through the motions, intending to be gone as soon as possible from this crowd of ignorant whispers and frightened fools.
There was a dragon in the tower, they said, and he hadn't believed them until the moment a gigantic white claw punched through the stationer's roof and seized him.
There was a dragon, scales as white as the tower, and claws, so it seemed, as large. Wings flattened the air, lifted up to the skies by the rising sound of wails from below, the town's collective nightmare come to silence the one who asked too many questions.
Zeref alone felt no fear – not so much because he was braver, but because it was difficult to be afraid of something that he was convinced couldn't be happening. He twisted in its grasp, scouring the armoured underbelly and pulsing tendons above him for any sign of magical deception. He found none. The dragon flew on.
The white tower was the dragon's goal. At the very top was a single window, once a modest arch and now forcibly widened so that the dragon could have forced most of its head through, if it wished. Alighting, its free claw clutched the spire, its hind legs found purchase on the rough stone, the hooked joints of its wings dug into old cement; the dragon wrapped around the outside of the tower like an oversized gargoyle, and flung Zeref savagely through the window.
Something broke in his body. He remained sprawled on the floor, patiently waiting for it to heal, while the dragon, less patient, let loose a mighty roar. In the ruined castle below, several tiles decided that clinging to the skeletal rafters of a once-great hall was too much effort, and yielded to gravity's embrace. By contrast, the tower itself did not so much as tremble. Old enchantments, those, written deep into the tower's stone. They went some way to explaining the coexistence of dragon and tower, but not nearly enough.
With the eye of the dragon upon him, filling most of the window with bleached scales and crimson danger, Zeref brushed himself down. The architect might have taken his design for the tower straight out of a children's storybook, complete with a doorless room at the very top to house a captive princess. The only way out was the one the dragon guarded.
Behind him stood a four-poster bed so sumptuous that the very sight of it made Zeref's bones ache in longing, having never quite grown accustomed to the ground. Apart from a thick layer of dust, it was perfectly preserved, a product of the same magic that shielded the tower from the dragon.
Most importantly, though, were the books. They covered every surface and most of the floor, everything from tomes to notebooks to children's fables, and in every stage of decomposition – some whole, some pierced through by talon or fang, and some entirely torn apart, spilling white blood and the pride of ancient authors onto the rug. Many bore the stamp of Ralvor's municipal library inside their front covers; another unimportant question answered, while the matter of a living, breathing dragon in the tower remained entirely unaddressed.
Said dragon growled at him now, as he moved slowly through what would have been a great hoard of treasure, were it not for the careless way in which it had been treated. Here and there, he could spot artefacts brimming with rare and tantalizing magic, plundered from the northernmost reaches of Fiore only to be dropped under a writing desk or shoved between the cushions of an armchair.
Lofty, inaccessible, sheltered, feared, and full of books and magic – the white tower had everything Zeref could possibly have asked for.
It would have been a perfect place for him to hide, he reflected sadly, as he teleported down to the base of the tower and began walking away.
It was just a shame about the dragon.
Apparently, the feeling wasn't mutual, because Zeref hadn't taken more than a few steps when the dragon let out a dreadful screech and launched itself from the tower. He ignored it and continued walking until the downdraft from its laborious wingbeats made taking any more steps seem like too much effort, then he resigned himself to the inevitable, and the dragon snatched him up once more.
This time, when the dragon threw him through the window, he landed on the bed. Perhaps it had been meant as a kindness, but it took longer for him to stop coughing from the cloud of dust that assaulted him like a vengeful horde of zombies than it did to recover from broken bones. The dragon gripped the tower with both claws and roared louder than before. The wave of sound rolled over him and was absorbed into the walls without visible damage.
The dragon's jaw snapped shut, and it lowered its head so that one red eye was once again blocking the sky. It glared at him with a ferocity he had not felt in a good many centuries.
This time, when he teleported away, he made sure to go all the way back to the village.
From the town square of Ralvor, Zeref watched the childishly small silhouette of the dragon flap in ever-widening circles around its lonely spire.
Truth be told, he wasn't much in the mood for a mystery. He wasn't much in the mood for anything – it was precisely to get away from it all that he had sought out the tower in the first place – and this only reaffirmed it. Humans were irritating, but dragons were… complicated. With their magic-resistant scales, they were perhaps the only creatures he could be around without fear of his curse, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. Humans reminded him of what he could never have; dragons reminded him of what he had had once, and lost.
Seeing one for the first time in nearly four hundred years brought back memories he would rather not have to relive. Try as he might to avoid it, he could not stop his thoughts turning to the most heroic dragon he had ever met, who put his whole heart into everything he did, and had fought fierce and wild against the burden of loneliness Zeref carried.
Nor could he stop himself from imagining the disappointment Igneel would feel if he could see Zeref now… and perhaps that was what changed his mind.
Magic gently but firmly put reality in its place, and Zeref was standing at the top of the white tower again. One hand rested on the broken wall which had once formed the sculpted frame of a window, from which a captured maiden might stare at the sky and lament her fate. It took two more laps for the dragon to notice his presence, which it did with an unhappy snort, settling onto the ruins of the hall below without care for it and growling up at him.
Zeref said, "If you wanted me to stay, why did you not just ask me?"
A deafening roar swept around the tower, which remained an unwavering bastion amidst the storm of pure sound.
When it had died away, he tried again. "Can't you talk?"
Another roar, this one quieter but accompanied by bared fangs. He had lived amongst dragons for years; he understood the sentiment behind it as certainly as it had understood his words. It was a proud dragon, and his guess was right.
"Telepathy, then?" he tried. "I can pick it up if you project."
Roar.
He took that as another no.
Pointing at the tiny stretch of sand, where the royal owners of the tower and its halls had once soaked in the private sunshine their wealth had afforded them, now littered with stones and darkened with silt, he suggested, "Then, can you draw letters in the sand?"
With a snarl, the dragon hurled itself into the sky. He thought it was coming to inflict upon him the same pain his questions had inflicted upon its pride, and braced himself to teleport away once more, half a continent this time, where the dragon would never bother him again.
It banked in mid-air, swooping over the paths that ran invisible through the overgrown garden and spilled out onto the strip of beach. There it landed, and, with terrible disdain, began scratching letters into the sand.
YES.
"So you do understand me," he confirmed. The dragon thwacked its tail into the sand, and he didn't need letters to understand that gesture: obviously. "Why can't you talk? I've never met a dragon who couldn't."
The dragon snarled, but if it knew the answer, it did not deign to write it down.
"Very well," Zeref sighed. "What do you want from me? I presume you brought me here for a reason."
This time, the dragon did not hesitate, and each letter was the size of its paw: TURN ME BACK.
"Back into what?" he asked automatically, although he had answered his own question before the dragon managed half a letter. "You're human, aren't you? You're a Dragon Slayer who turned."
The dragon gave a sneer, but one aimed not, so Zeref thought, at him.
He said, "But you can't be. Dragon Slayers lose their minds before they lose their bodies, and you… you're not crazy. Acnologia killed until there were no dragons left for him to kill, and then he was forced into hibernation to await the return of the last true dragons to linear time. But you? You're living here quietly, out of the way. You're scaring the townsfolk, but not so much that anyone outside the region believes the rumours; you steal livestock to eat but not for pleasure, as the town's survival indicates; you've taken books on magic from nearby collections… in the hope that you might find a way of undoing what has happened to you, I imagine. You can't be a turned Dragon Slayer. It's not possible."
While he was outlining his logic, the dragon was finishing its word in the sand: HUMAN. At his conclusion, it slammed its paw into the earth beside the word. Then it struck its own chest, where its heartscale sat as bleakly colourless as the rest of it, save for the eyes.
"You can't be!"
That snarl promised painful retribution for his denial, though apparently not quite yet, as its eyes swam with resentment but its wings remained folded against its body.
"How?" Zeref persisted.
TURNED.
"I know that, but…" He shook his head, frustration getting the better of him. "Look, can I teach you telepathy magic? It won't take long, and it'll make this so much easier."
Rather than flying up to him, however, the dragon returned to writing in the sand.
CAN'T.
"What do you mean?"
NO MAGIC.
"How can you not have magic?" Zeref demanded. "You're a dragon! A creature of magic!"
The dragon pounded its paws into the ground, as if it could erase the truth along with the words it had written. It glared up at him, flanks heaving.
"Not even a breath weapon?" he checked.
It shook its head.
"How peculiar."
Zeref sat himself down on the window ledge, cross-legged. All thoughts of isolation had gone; he saw only the scale-wrapped enigma in front of him. The more he looked, the more he began to notice the anomalies he had missed before. It was a white dragon, but not a White Dragon, as Weisslogia had been; a child of holy magic with scales like starlight and sanctuary. Perhaps it would better be described as a dragon without colour – except for its red eyes, in which the fires of its pride burned hot.
No colour. No magic. No voice. A dragon, but not a dragon, and not not a dragon in the way that Acnologia was not a dragon. Acnologia was more of a dragon than this.
While he had been thinking, it had been writing.
TURN ME BACK.
"What makes you think I can help you?" Zeref inquired. Then, as it glared at him and began writing another laborious answer, he suppressed his own curiosity with an effort. "No, don't answer that, it isn't important. A better question would be, why should I help you?"
First the dragon roared, slashing its tail through the air and sending dirt flying all around it. Then, in case that wasn't clear enough, it wrote, one violent slash after another: IF YOU DON'T, I'LL KILL YOU.
Mildly, Zeref pointed out, "You'll have a job. If you've heard enough about me to want my help, presumably you know that I'm immortal."
It was the longest phrase the dragon had written so far, yet it seemed to take bitter satisfaction in tearing each letter out of the earth.
I KNOW HOW TO KILL YOU.
"How?" he demanded.
The dragon tapped the ground next to its first instruction: TURN ME BACK.
"Tell me how you'll kill me!"
It was the first time he had seen the dragon look smug.
Zeref bit back his impatience with an effort. It was a bluff. It had to be. There was no way a human who had turned into a dragon – and not even managed that properly – had discovered a means of overcoming his curse. It was just saying that to win his help.
As if he needed a reason to investigate the single most peculiar thing he had come across in years.
"I don't know how to turn you back," he admitted. "It's true that I did, long ago, develop a ritual that could prevent dragonification, but I don't know how to reverse the process once it has already taken place. I don't know if that's even possible."
Three words in the sand: WORK IT OUT. The dragon pointed to the room at the top of the tower, and then scrawled, BOOKS. Then it tapped its own heartscale again, and added, ME.
Carefully, so as not to let on how his heart had leapt at the thought of freely experimenting on the not-quite-dragon, the only one other than Acnologia there ever would be, he said, "And if I do, you'll kill me?"
Halfway through nodding, the dragon paused, cocked its head to the side, and drew a question mark in the sand.
"You heard me right. I want to die. Do you truly have a way to kill me?"
YES.
Zeref glanced up at the tower, that haven of forgotten books and broken artefacts, preserved in a half-living state perhaps for longer than he himself had been. In comparison to the practical magnificence of the palace at Vistarion, it was rough, antiquated; he would have preferred no company at all to that of a proud, violent dragon… but sometimes, there were straws that had to be grasped. And sometimes, just sometimes, they were interesting enough to keep him afloat throughout the despair of the years.
He let out a long, slow breath. "Then we have a deal. And I suppose I have a new home."
For several days, Zeref remained in the room at the top of the tower, cataloguing the books and sorting through the artefacts that the dragon had gathered. Though they had seemed random at first glance, the more he looked, the more he could see the trend.
The oldest books were as old as the tower, and many, Zeref suspected, were even older than he himself was. They were in the best condition. Page upon yellowed page of tantalizingly complex enchantments had been treated with great care by a creature who lacked the ability to use them.
The newer they were – as the dragons had been killed off one by one, and the observations of their physiology and magic had become histories, and histories became myth, and myth became stories and speculation – the more callously the books had been treated, because although knowledge had advanced greatly in that time, knowledge about dragons had not. These stolen books were more of a hindrance than a guide towards the answers this particular not-dragon sought.
All of the books told, in some way, of dragons and Dragon Slayers and that most difficult school of magic to master, enchantment magic, the magic of change and permanence.
The dragon in the tower had been looking for a way out for a very long time, he thought.
It left him in peace, his albino-winged gaoler. Occasionally it flew laps around the tower, and sometimes it went to hunt, but for the most part, it curled in the ruins of the hall and dozed, one half-open eye always turned towards the window.
Physically, it had no power to keep him here. In practice, every glimpse he caught of it deepened the mystery; bound him to his quest for answers with titanium chains.
At last, he teleported down from the tower and stood in front of the dragon, whose head lifted hopefully.
"I've not even started," Zeref told it flatly. "I need to understand what I'm dealing with before I can even think about adapting my ritual. Let me look at you."
The dragon shifted and snorted and stamped its feet on the weed-choked flagstones, but he persisted, and three days later – for time meant little to either of them – it finally relented.
He invoked a range of diagnostic spells, some of which he had found in the tower and others he had developed himself, long ago, with a boisterous (and occasionally oblivious) fire dragon as his test subject. Spells to determine whether the dragon of the tower was a dragon or a human being returned a confusing mix of data he spent a week trying to decipher and then gave up as a lost cause. Spells to reveal the nature of the dragon's element returned no result at all. Spells to detect magic did not agree with the nothing he could feel from the dragon with his own senses, instead insisting upon a mathematical distortion which had no physical counterpart.
In fact, the only remotely concrete piece of information yielded by his tests was that the dragon was a she, and he resolved to try and think of her as such, from now on. "Tell me your name," he had also asked, curious, but the dragon scoffed at him and did not answer.
The only questions she was willing to answer were those directly relating to her current predicament – and then, only with great patience on his part. "Do you grow?" No. "What happens if you go a long period of time without food?" She didn't know. "Do your scales grow back if they are torn off?" Yes, but they didn't shed naturally. "How have you managed to avoid Acnologia's notice for so long?"
This last one, she was even more reluctant than usual to answer, and only after much persuasion had she raised her right wing, revealing a nasty scar near the juncture of her wing and body – a scar that could only have been inflicted by another dragon's claw.
So, she hadn't managed to avoid Acnologia's notice. He simply hadn't deemed her worth killing. As far as he was concerned, she wasn't a dragon.
That was the most promising sign Zeref had seen so far that it might be possible to undo what was done to her.
Eventually, he told her, "I need to know the name of the dragon who taught you."
And he had held his ground throughout her ensuing fury until, at long last, she scored the letters in the sand with such savagery he could barely read them.
BELSERION.
DRAGON OF THE GARDENS OF MIST.
He rolled the words along his tongue, liking the sound of them. The name and the title sounded familiar to him, although he could not remember why.
A swipe of her tail erased all trace of her writing from the earth. She snarled at him, bare fangs dripping with hate, as the waves quailed back from the shores and the ruins of the castle shuddered in fear, although the tower was as immune to it as ever.
Zeref saw all this, and then asked, "Did he love you?"
Silence, as the rest of the world did its utmost to avoid drawing her attention.
"It matters," he persisted. "Even if I can adapt the ritual, it will do nothing without his goodwill. The dragons I knew were willing to give their lives for their children; it was the strength of that bond which made my ritual possible. Would this Belserion be willing to give up everything for you?"
A howl of unimaginable pain rent the air; he could not picture her making such a terrible sound even as Acnologia's claws had cut open her side.
"Then, I am truly sorry," said he. "But I don't think I can help you."
Her tail smashed into him. Then her pain was his own, and all of it physical. Bones exploded and organs ruptured, staining his skin blood-red from the inside-out. He didn't have the breath to scream, but she did, and the fury of the dragon resounded in his ears long after he had fallen into the numbness of death.
When he came to, he was driftwood in the ocean, lungs full of water, face-down in a shroud of crimson too thick for the waves to disperse.
As panic seized control of his limbs, the part of his mind which had done this countless times before seized control of his magic instead. He vanished and reappeared somewhere dry and solid, choking on the water in his lungs, dying, reviving, repeat, until all the bloody seawater had been expelled from his body. He lay there until his body had come to terms with its not-dead status and stopped its convulsions long enough for him to stand.
He could have been anywhere in the world.
He was, in fact, back at the top of the white tower.
He had heard of the dragon Belserion before, just like anyone who had ever studied Dragon Slayer magic ought, and death didn't bother Zeref nearly as much as leaving a puzzle half-solved.
"I know who you are," Zeref said.
The dragon raised her head from the sand and growled a warning in the language every living creature understood. He raised his empty palms in an equally universal gesture of peace, but his eyes were shining far too bright to stop now.
"I broke through the floor of the room at the top of the tower and explored the halls below," he explained. "The records I found there confirmed my hypothesis. This is now part of Fiore, but before that it was one of the Eastern Union states, who absorbed it into their territory some three hundred years ago at the end of the dragon wars. Hardly anyone lived here at that point, and no one else wanted it, because this land had been ravaged worse than any other outside Alakitasia by the mad dragons. And why? Because before its fall, this place went by another name entirely: the kingdom of Dragnof, where humans and dragons lived alongside one another in harmony. Instead of a single ruler, it had two, of equal standing: the dragon Belserion the Wise, and the human Queen Irene, the first Dragon Slayer."
Her eyes narrowed to streaks of fire. She rose to her full height, maw opening like the curtain might rise on the final day on earth, all fury and frightening hate.
Yet she did not strike, but turned instead, sinking back towards the ground. The spikes on her back rose and fell; a swish of her tail drew a line between them in the sand. Leave me alone, it said, no need for words.
Not dissuaded, he ducked under her tail and threw himself into her path, arms outstretched. "Have you any idea how long I've wanted to meet you?"
A snort, a distrustful glare.
"You're the one who created Dragon Slayer magic!" he exclaimed, baffled as to why she needed this spelling out. "You're the greatest enchanter who ever lived! I've read everything you've ever published! Do you know how much of my research relied on your work? Yes, I may have been the one who found out how to prevent dragonification, but only by building on your studies of transfusing dragon magic into a human body! It's incredible! Pure genius! I've never even come close to your mastery of enchantment magic, and not through lack of trying! If I'd known you were alive, I would have sought you out four centuries ago!"
Another warning growl fell on deaf ears.
"And you're older than me!" he cried delightedly.
The dragon took a startled step back, in that moment looking not like a dragon at all, but like a queen who had been gravely and unexpectedly offended.
"No, I don't mean it that way," Zeref added. "I mean, the only person around who's as old as I am is Acnologia, and he's not interested in talking to me, but you-? I never went to Dragnof, but you knew Carligne, didn't you? I know you never studied at the Mildian Academy of Magic, but you visited it. I read the transcript of the keynote speech you gave at the Annual Magicians' Dinner of X325. About how we could and should do more in the Dragon Wars, and how the enchantment magic you were developing was the key."
He thought about this for a moment, seeing not the ruined castle, but a hall grander than Dragnof's royal palace had ever been, and filled with men even more entitled; a hall in which he himself had given a speech nine years later.
"I think I would have disagreed with you back then," he admitted. "When I was at the Academy, I believed strongly in the study of magic for its own sake. I still do, I suppose, but not to the extent that it is good or right to ignore the affairs of the world because of it – because it isn't right, and we are never fully apart from the world in which we live, no matter how we might wish it. But it took me a long time and a lot of suffering to understand that… and I think, if I had been at the Academy just a few years earlier, and heard you speak, a great many of my mistakes could have been avoided."
Then he shook his head, vigorously, and asked, "Did you ever go into the Masters' Library? I could never get permission, no matter how many times I asked. Is it true that they kept a lacrima there containing the soul of an ancient dragon, who would answer a single question about magic for any human who could solve its riddle? Did you ever get to listen to one of Dean Osvalio's lectures? Did you-?"
He stopped abruptly as the strangest sound came from the white dragon. She lay down her head upon her two front paws and closed her eyes. It was not enough to stop the first crystal tear from escaping.
"I'm sorry," Zeref murmured, placing his hand gently upon the end of her snout. "I didn't mean… well…"
After a moment, she raised her head again, blinking fiery eyes that were no less fierce for their crystalline distortion. She nudged him back, but not roughly. More delicately than ever, she traced words in the sand with the tip of one claw, so small that he had to hop over them and stand beside her to read them.
I WISH I COULD TALK TO YOU.
"Me too," he said, with feeling.
I'M SORRY FOR HURTING YOU.
It took him a moment to remember the repeated deaths of an hour ago, and he dismissed them again with a wave of his hand. "Don't worry about it. Happens all the time." And then: "Are we still on?"
She turned her head away with a whine. Again, she wrote, HE DIDN'T LOVE ME.
"That's not what I heard," Zeref said quietly. "Granted, they were only stories, but they were adamant that you and Belserion were inseparable. They said that you only developed Dragon Slayer magic in the first place so that you could fight alongside him, to protect him in the same way he was protecting your people."
Another whine fled from between the dragon's fangs.
HE DID THIS TO ME.
After a moment, Zeref stepped forward, and scuffed out the letters with his boot one by one. "Tell me exactly what happened to you. If there are answers, we'll find them together."
Queen Irene of Dragnof, so it transpired, was not what one would call a bard.
Then again, there was probably a reason why none of the great bards of old had been mute dragons. The sand was the only medium she had to tell her tale, working first by the sunset's red-orange breath and then by the colourless light of the orb Zeref had conjured, scribbling down what she could before the tide swept her words away. She abbreviated names to barely distinguishable symbols, pared tales of war and woe down to their barest factual bones, often skipping details that Zeref had to ask her to go back and explain.
The resulting chronicle was terse and jumbled, hardly worthy of the legends it described.
Yet as Zeref watched the former queen crawl across the beach, mud on her scales and sand clinging to her claws, pressing the scars of her life one by one into the earth, he thought there was something truly beautiful about it, about her.
When the Dragon Wars had reached the kingdom of Dragnof, Irene and Belserion had created Dragon Slayer magic together so that humans could join the fight alongside their draconic allies. If a dragon's magic was transfused too quickly into a human's body, as Grandine had later done to Zeref, it was fatal to all but an immortal. Yet the enchantments the two of them developed appeared to be steady and safe. They spread the knowledge amongst the dragons, and Irene was but the first of many to be granted that power.
The entry of humans into the fray only made the fighting more vicious. The eyes of the enemy dragons turned upon Dragnof, promising vengeance. Belserion was struck down in battle, and as he lay dying, with Irene weeping at his side, he used his last breath to cast one final enchantment upon her.
When he passed away, and she got to her feet, the skin of her left cheek had become scales.
The curse spread rapidly. Her husband turned against her, horrified by what she was becoming. He rallied the soldiers – her own guards – and dragged her back to the palace; when she tried to fight them off, she found that her magic would not come. She could not enchant her own body against the change coming over her. Without magic, she could not fight it at all.
Her pleas fell on deaf ears. She was thrown into the dungeons of her own castle, and hours later, she turned. Her newfound size made up for her lack of magic, and she broke out of the dungeons and fled. Only later did she hear that Dragnof had been overrun without her and Belserion to defend it. Her husband and his men had fled back to the kingdom of his birth, leaving her people at the mercy of the dragons, and mad dragons were not merciful at all.
By the time she returned to her tower, it was empty, the castle abandoned. She had neither reason nor desire to follow the fighting. She had remained there in solitude ever since, infrequently venturing out into the world in search of a way to regain her humanity.
"Is that everything?" Zeref asked, when she was done. "There is nothing else you know or remember? Nothing you're keeping from me?"
The dragon hesitated for a moment, and then shook her head.
"Okay," he said, and that was all he said for some time. It wasn't until she nudged him that he looked up from his notebook to see the words she had written in the sand: HE TURNED ME.
"Maybe you thought so at the time, but you must have learnt since then that turning is the ultimate fate of all Dragon Slayers. He didn't do it to you, not directly."
HE TOOK AWAY MY MAGIC. HE SPED IT UP.
"Why would he do that?"
HE DIED BECAUSE I DREW THE WRATH OF THE DRAGONS TO OUR KINGDOM. HE BLAMED ME.
Zeref dismissed this hypothesis with a toss of his head. "I understand why you would be angry towards him for what happened to you, because if not for him, you wouldn't have become a Dragon Slayer, nor suffered like this for so long. But you're trying to blame him to justify that anger. If it helps you cope, that's fine, but don't bring something so irrational into my analysis." He forestalled her snarl with a raised hand. "In which year did this happen? Do you remember?"
With agonizing slowness, enough to ensure he felt the true measure of her rage, and how fortunate he was that she was electing to spare him from it, she turned her attention back to the earth. X328.
"Acnologia had already turned by then," Zeref noted. "Word may not have reached Dragnof, but in Carligne, the final consequence of Dragon Slayer magic was already well known. It is possible Belserion knew, and hadn't been able to bring himself to tell you."
Her tail slapped the ground next to her original accusation: HE TURNED ME.
"How about an alternative hypothesis?" Zeref suggested. "He was trying to stop you from turning."
There was disdain in her eyes and the spreading of her claws, enough to convince him that she really had been a queen, once.
"You enchanted this tower, didn't you?" he asked suddenly. Disarmed by the change of topic, she nodded. "You used magic to protect it from damage by dragons – not enemy dragons, mind, but accidental damage from the dragons who lived amongst your people here. After four hundred years, the enchantment still stands strong." He shook his head in awe, taking a moment to appreciate the beauty of her magic, before logic snapped back into his voice. "If Belserion took away your magic, the enchantment would have faded. It hasn't. Therefore, your magic is still there."
From the depth and fury of her roar, it seemed she was trying to prove it by summoning forth a breath attack, but none materialized. He would have faced her down without fear either way.
"I think your magic is sealed," he continued. "I think, knowing of the fate that awaited you, Belserion attempted in his dying moments to create an impromptu enchantment with the same effect as my ritual. It failed. It suppressed your magic, but that wasn't enough to stop you from turning. In fact, it only made things worse for you after turning, stripping away your speech and your ability to use magic… but in return, you kept your mind."
Two short words: NO PROOF.
"True," Zeref conceded. "But it's the hypothesis I'm going with anyway."
He didn't need words in the sand to interpret her scornful laugh. It was the same response he would have got from any of his colleagues in the Academy, and it only made him smile, because as he had told her, he was not the same man he had been back then.
Patiently, he explained, "If you're right, and he cursed you, then you can't be saved. But if I'm right, and he was trying to save you, then if I can work out what he did, I can calculate how it will interact with my ritual and obtain his help to turn you back. I'm not prepared to give up just yet. Therefore, I am going to assume my hypothesis is right, and move on with our project."
The dragon stared at Zeref.
Zeref stared at the dragon.
With a clap of wings and a hurricane of sand, the white dragon launched herself skyward, back to the tower and her home.
"There's no need to look so dubious," Zeref sighed, brushing sand from his hair. "I am usually right about these things. You'll see."
