The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Stellar Constellations Rise, Epilogue
-Eulogy-
Somewhere in the Forests of Northern Carligne, X371
The locals called the meadow Elysia: Heaven-on-Earth.
He hadn't believed in an afterlife even before the curse had prevented him from ever finding out for himself, but he had read poetry and seen paintings and failed to wriggle out of enough trips to the local chapel as a child to be able to appreciate the metaphor of it all.
A little patch of golden grass on the edge of a cliff as white as angels' wings, it always seemed to be bathed in sunlight, as if the clouds were ashamed to dim something so peaceful, so pure. It was easy to see from the village far below but near-impossible to access, unless you were a child, small enough to slip through the zealous thickets which guarded it and tenacious enough to trade torn clothes and muddy knees and parental disapproval for an hour in a secret little Eden.
The children were gone, now. They'd disappeared when the village had, one night of cataclysm and then silence, unrealized dreams and unlived lives catching and burning as easily as the cottages which had housed them. It was long enough ago that nature had reclaimed the valley as her own, tattooing over that black-burnt scar with promises of green and white, until the only sign that anyone had ever lived and loved in that place were the broken timbers that jutted from the ground like grave-markers, thick green moss hiding epitaphs scrawled in soot and ash.
Perhaps through divine protection, or perhaps by the coincidence of its geography, which was arguably the same thing, the infernal flames had not been able to touch the place which generations had known as Heaven-on-Earth. In rage, they sought revenge by scouring the world of all the children and once-children who knew of its existence. Thus the little haven had vanished overnight from society's collective memory, along with the village whose name had already been forgotten – forgotten, by all but one.
He would never have found the way through the thickets himself. Even as a child, he had never had time for things like that; the hours spent sewing up gashes in his clothes and being lectured by his parents not to go into the woods without supervision could be far better spent in a corner with the latest treatise to come out of the Academy. But his little brother had shown him once, and of the thousand more important things he had no doubt read about that year, his brain had chosen to remember that instead.
He had grown too large for the secret passage now, and the intervening years had nurtured the thorns into twisted, merciless blades, but all the wounds his flesh incurred soon vanished, and by the time he had made it through, all trace of his passage had disappeared both from his body and the closing spiny briars behind him.
There he lay in that meadow called Elysia, the wayward child of a forgotten village, the prodigal son returned, and he dreamed.
It was sad, this place. It was too symbolic not to be. But it was also hopeful, life and death and life again; that most beautiful kind of sadness.
The noonday sun blessed this place, now as it ever had, transmuting the world beyond his closed eyelids to burnished gold. He felt the prickle of stiff summer grass against his back, his neck, his widespread arms, and the pattering of six ticklish feet across the open palm of his hand. Wildflowers swayed and pollen swirled; the air was thick with the smell of the earth in bloom, and thinned by the breeze which curled as eddies over the top of the cliff and tugged and pressed at the treetops, casting him alternately into warm brightness and refreshing shade.
Somewhere, the joyful orison of a songbird rose towards the sun; somewhere, he could hear the sproing-sproing-pause-sniff-sproing of a curious bunny exploring its surroundings; somewhere, a bleating fawn philosophized over the nature of the human-shaped figure lying in the grass for the first time in generations of doe and buck.
Everywhere, light.
Everywhere, life.
If there was a singular source of magic in the world, it could only be-
"Are you Zeref?"
A question like a dragon's roar in the calmness.
He would have jumped, had he not been too deep into that meditative state for the shock to reach his nervous system. Perhaps his heart forgot to beat; his immortal body would not have noticed either way.
He was the only person alive who knew about this place, let alone was able to reach it. He should have been alone.
But he wasn't.
And just like that, the texture of life in the meadow ignited, blazed, exploded out of all control.
He struggled to pull himself out of the serenity, as if the scent of wildflowers pouring over him had become honey. "W-what?"
The voice must have thought him too slow, because it persisted, with all the patience of an interrogator with a hundred other prisoners to get through before sundown, "Are you Zeref Dragneel?"
"Wha- How do you know that name?"
More awake this time, more alert. Fear was good for that. It had been thirty years since Zeref Dragneel had supposedly died in the disaster at the Academy, and all his research lost in the fire that followed; just one more name, one more victim, one more entry on a list of dead so long that no one had bothered matching every single name to a body…
At last he managed to keep his eyes open against the blinding sunlight for long enough to see the voice's owner: a stranger, a young woman, tall, blonde, clothes torn and blood welling from several visible thorn-wounds – and all the more terrifying for it, as she glared down at him with her hands on her hips.
Then he couldn't see anything, because she had dropped an open book across his face.
The tastes of old leather and yellowed glue hit harder than the book itself. They didn't bind books like this nowadays, with respect and with reverence. Elegant calligraphy and sumptuous leather protected wisdom meant to be handed down from generation to generation. The publishers hadn't known that, within two years, the great Academies would be naught but smoke and ash, their names nothing more than a footnote to the eulogy of time.
Philosophical Transactions of the Mildian Academy of Magic, X339.
Opened to the abstract of a particular paper: Further Ruminations on the Theory of World-Magic, In Particular its Consequences for Time-Travel, by one Zeref Dragneel.
And the owner of the book demanded, "Are you the moron who wrote this paper?"
In a far less friendly forest, in a far less friendly age, a man awoke screaming, Anna's name upon his lips.
A/N: Author's week off. Sorry, life really caught up to me this week. We'll jump right back into it next week, as Lucy meets some unexpected allies(?) she'd probably be better off without, and one of my old favourite characters, who is disappointingly absent from the canon Avatar arc, makes an appearance. ~CS