The Scars That Make You Whole

By CrimsonStarbird

Church of Blood and Stone, Part 2

-Zeref and his Fan Club-

Black was the stone, black like polished obsidian, a gleaming glassy monument of nothingness. Perhaps it was a window unto the starless void, or perhaps it was a mirror, and the void all our own. Grey were the roots, and grey the branches, twisting and coiling around the building like tendrils of crystalline fog; trees so old they had turned to stone embraced walls that were still somehow older. Blue were the torches where they burned, the unwarm eyes of a hundred otherworldly denizens.

It was awfully, horribly, frightfully beautiful.

Somehow it seemed right that an eldritch chapel should lurk at the heart of this forest, where the trees had shed their gaudy emerald jewellery and twisted themselves into skeletal claws. Somehow the unfathomable stone was perfect; somehow the unflickering eyes of flame entranced. Somehow, in some far distant when, wood and stone had merged, not alive but not dead either, as if all of Mikage Forest existed only to protect and to nurture this dark sanctuary.

There could be no doubt that men had died here, perhaps more than had ever called it home. Blood saturated the mortar, sustained the half-life of the trees, sparkled crimson and then was sucked into the stones. It had been a place of power long before the cult had come, and would remain so after the last stone had been torn down, for such wounds are not so easily erased from the world. Sin and sacrilege, subversion and desecration.

Such was the place that Avatar had taken for their own: this corrupted heart, this dreadful shrine, this church of blood and stone.

"This is the place?" Zeref asked.

"What, does it not look evil enough for you?" Lucy teased.

"I rather like the aesthetic, actually," he remarked mildly. "This is where Erza said they're keeping Natsu?"

"Yes, it does look rather… intact, doesn't it?" Lucy frowned. "Well, maybe they took him by surprise, or drugged him before he could do his usual level of damage to the building. Shall we go?"

"Mm. Let's get this over with."

They split up to break in.

That had been Zeref's call. The decision hadn't exactly filled Lucy with confidence, given that the whole point of him accompanying her was supposed to be because the cult was too dangerous for anyone to face alone, but apparently when history's most powerful mage deigned to accompany lesser mortals on a side quest, he always got to be in charge. Even when his leadership decisions made no sense.

He'd pointed out that just because she couldn't see the reason didn't mean there wasn't one, though he very grudgingly told her that he'd come and rescue her if she shouted. At which point she'd told him, wide-eyed and earnest, that that wasn't fair, he shouldn't have to be in danger, she was the responsible adult here, and if there was any trouble he should shout for her…

He hadn't been particularly amused, not least because there was a difference between being a competent mage and being literally unable to die, but on the plus side, they were both pretty keen to get away from each other after that.

Zeref had muttered something about the wards being weaker around the church's annex, and left her to find her own way in. Lucy decided that she would tunnel under the walls (and thus, hopefully, under these supposed wards) and infiltrate Avatar's hideout from beneath. Using what Zeref had only half-jokingly referred to as the Non-World-Destroying Version of Star Dress, she copied Virgo's power and began her stealth assault upon the black church.

So far, so good.

She dug down, and then horizontally, and that was when her tunnel came up against a wall of stone. The bricks appeared reddish in the golden light of the keys at her hip – far more ordinary than the light-eating obsidian of the walls above the surface. As she had hoped, there was no need to waste intimidating magical stone on a buried wall no one would ever see. These underground bricks, half-crumbled and virtually indistinguishable from the soil entombing them, were no barrier to Virgo's magic.

As a small patch of wall disintegrated at her touch, two further thoughts occurred to Lucy.

The first was that, if she'd encountered a wall here, it wasn't necessarily the lowest level of the basement that she was about to enter.

The second was that, if the building extended beneath the ground, there was no reason why the wards wouldn't do the same.

The past ten months of inactivity had made her complacent. She had already broken through the wall before that second thought occurred to her, too late to be of any strategic use, too late for her to keep going down until she reached the true base of the church, too late to do anything except suggest as an afterthought that she could angle her dive slightly sideways when she burst into the underground chamber-

Which she did-

Which was why she survived.

Something that was huge enough to fill her vision with silver-blue and yet sharp enough to carve cleanly through the air caught her a glancing blow as she twisted. Even that was enough to send her flying. She rolled along the stone floor – cold stone, too cold – and her feet failed to find proper purchase, so she scrambled forwards on all fours until there was an upturned table between her and the direction the attack had come from.

There was no sign of what had almost crushed, or perhaps cut, her to death. Nothing but a glitter of fragmented white magic, and silence.

There was a flicker of panic, but only a flicker.

Lucy's hand was already on her keys. Training and habit and old, old instincts squashed that panic down into a guttering spark, and she summoned Sagittarius over her shoulder into the room.

Immediately, there was battle. She could not see it from behind her barricade, but she heard the twang and clatter of her Spirit's arrows bouncing from walls; felt the release of hostile magic so strong it sucked the heat from the air. She had already switched to her Sagittarius Form. Bow in hand, she burst out from behind the table to back him up.

One glance of the room was all she had time for – one glance to dismiss a large workshop of tools and tables, mundane greys and browns blurring into frosty white towards the door; one glance to find the enemy, half-hidden behind a protrusion of crystal, countering the rain of arrows with a burst of white-violet shards from his raised palm.

She raised her bow – and then jerked it aside, deliberately sending her own shot wide. She exclaimed, "Gray?"

Four spears of ice stopped an instant before they skewered Sagittarius. "Lucy?"

Shock twisted her old friend's face, followed by an emotion she couldn't quite place, and then, at last, Gray heaved a long-suffering sigh. "Oh, I see. You must be here to rescue Natsu."

"Just like the good old days, huh?" she joked.

Her bow dissolved back into starlight as her racing heart began to calm down – both from the adrenaline of battle, and the relief that she'd recognized him in the nick of time. Not that he'd made it easy for her to do the latter. The fact that he was actually wearing a t-shirt had thrown her.

Her attention was drawn to the dark stain that spread across his right cheek, down his neck, and vanished under his t-shirt. A midnight blue-black, it seemed to flow and distort, taking on a slightly different pattern every time she blinked. It jarred against his ice-pale skin, clashing light and dark, the oldest of wars waged anew upon her dear friend's body.

Fear took flight in her once again, but this time, it wasn't the animalistic reaction to mortal danger. It was fear of an outcome she could not prevent; a battle that had to be won, but which she herself could not affect.

Something good fighting something evil – that was what jumped into her mind when she looked at him. Gray fighting something Not-Gray, and slowly, slowly fading…

Lucy's thoughts stalled, and she blurted out, "What happened to you? Why are you in Avatar's hideout?"

Gray answered, "Because I'm a member of Avatar, duh."

"But-" That was as far as Lucy got before her brain shorted again. "Gray, they're evil! They're trying to murder Jellal's guild – they're taking over the underworld-"

A shrug. "You think I don't know that?"

"Then I don't understand – why would you-?"

Gray rolled his eyes – one the blue of a frozen lake, one the red lurking in the heart of a volcano, but both moving in unison. "I'm a spy, obviously," he drawled. He waved a hand seething with black energy and the spears of ice vanished. Frost melted upon the stones, leaving them glistening with damp. The bitter cold in the air receded. "Seriously, Lucy, you've spent too much time with that idiot of a Dragon Slayer. He's melted your brain."

"Oh…" Well, now she felt stupid. "So, you're pretending to be a member of Avatar while you're really Erza's spy? That makes a lot of sense…"

"Well, duh."

"I'm sorry, okay! I just thought… those marks on your body…"

"These? Pfft." With that dismissive sound, he waved his right hand again, and the inky stain across his cheek receded and vanished beneath the neckline of his t-shirt. "I can control them. You know, like the scales the Dragon Slayers get in Dragon Force. All I've gotta do is stop using my Devil Slayer magic and they go away again. Figured letting the evil cult think that some demonic force was taking control of me would be the fastest way in… though I didn't realize it was that convincing," he added, with a smirk.

"It wasn't just the markings!" Lucy defended. "I saw Juvia a few days ago, and she was really worried about you. I couldn't help feeling that something awful must have happened…"

She caught a flash of his scowl before he turned his face away. "I couldn't have her following me, could I? Can you imagine infiltrating an evil cult with Juvia tagging along? Besides, I needed to prove to Avatar that I'd cut all ties with my guild. They'd never have accepted me if I was sneaking out to see her every weekend."

"I guess," she relented. "It must have been hard on you too, cutting yourself off from everyone overnight."

Gray said nothing. He never had been one for showing his inner pain, her friend who sealed it all in a palace of ice.

"That reminds me," she added, a piece of news which was bound to help a little. "First of September, at the site of the old guildhall – we're reviving Fairy Tail. Me, Wendy, Cana, Juvia, Erza, and anyone else I can find between now and then – we're all going to be there. Come along, if you can."

"Thanks, but no thanks. There are things I need to do that I can't as a member of Fairy Tail."

"Infiltration. Right." She tried not to look too hurt by his blunt rejection, instead focussing on the positives. "Well, you never know – we might have destroyed Avatar by then, and you won't need to be undercover any more!"

"Maybe. We'll see." The ice mage turned away, took a single step towards the door, and then paused. "I can't help you, Lucy. They'll suspect something if I do. I'll tell them it was a mole that triggered the wards again… and then I'll go report to one of the other branches. Keeping out of your way is the best I can do."

"I understand. Do you know where they're keeping Natsu?"

A brief pause. "The floor below this one. Take the stairs at the end of the corridor."

"Great. Thanks."

Gray offered her a faint smile and turned back towards the door.

A chill breeze curled across that underground workshop, bringing with it something that might have been a whisper: "I wish it wasn't you, Lucy."

"What?" she said, without thinking.

"Nothing," Gray said, and when he glanced over his shoulder, half his face was once again shadowed by his demonic disguise. "See you."

And then he was gone.

Lucy waited until his footsteps had disappeared completely before creeping to the door and peering out. It opened onto an empty corridor of uneven stone, lit intermittently by torches which grew increasingly dimmer the further they were from the workshop. The two torches flanking the top of the stairs leading down were unlit. The first few steps were visible, the rest only shadow.

It certainly was an atmospheric entrance to the dungeons, Lucy thought, as she looked dubiously down into the darkness with a care she might not have taken before almost being knocked out by Gray's surprise attack. Not even the starlight of her keys could penetrate those shadows. That wasn't just her imagination; that meant there was magic involved. She couldn't believe there was no trap here – spikes, a lurking beast, a pit in place of a step.

Still, if there was danger, Gray would have warned her, wouldn't he?

Unless he didn't know himself. How deep was he in with Avatar? Why was he doing this? What, exactly, was this cult after? She wished he'd stuck around, rather than leaving her alone with her unanswered questions.

But with Natsu in danger, she couldn't afford to let fear get the better of her-

A distant screech reached her ears, and she froze with one foot in mid-air.

That didn't sound like a triumphant battle-cry. Nor did it sound like a prisoner screaming in pain. Not the wails of the dying, or the furious bark of evil orders, or any of the sounds she would have expected to hear on a raid like this…

In fact, Lucy thought that the odds on that being a certain immortal death-mage calling for help were pretty good.

"Boy, am I glad he didn't leave me to face the dangerous cult on my own," she sighed, pausing only to roll her eyes at everything and nothing before dashing back up the steps.

The first room Zeref checked was full of minor artefacts.

The antechamber was set out more like a tiny museum than a dark cult's secret armoury. Beneath grey-tinted windows, almost indistinguishable from the stone surrounding them, tables proudly displayed a collection of cursed jewellery, enchanted weapons, and even the odd spellbook. Many of these were accompanied by a page detailing the experiments done on the artefact (and the magical properties thus discovered), just in case a thief needed help deciding which to steal first.

For a sinister cult, Avatar seemed very careless with their magic items… although, on second thoughts, none of these were radiating much magic, so the entire room could have been a decoy. It certainly wasn't impossible that the artefacts had been deliberately mislabelled to make them seem more attractive to thieves, since from where he was standing, he could see at least two half-rusted magical rings attributed to him – which was interesting, because even in his long and varied career, he had never felt inclined to imbue a ring with magic. Weapons, yes, books, of course, and all manner of miscellaneous minor artefacts when he was bored, but no magical rings. Love, eternity, partnership – the symbolism had never sat well with him.

None of the artefacts came even close to the calibre of the blade that had dealt Lucy such fascinating wounds, and thus Zeref closed the door again and padded off down the corridor.

The second door he tried opened into a candlelit, velvet-draped, skull-decorated ritual room, which couldn't have been more stereotypically occult if a hidden gramophone was blaring out creaks and caws and distant bloody screams, and which sadly lost a lot of its allure once Zeref found the light switch.

A runic circle took up most of the floor with its symbols of dried blood and white chalk. True ritual magic – something given, something taken away – was rare in this day and age, partly because the consequences of getting it wrong were so devastating, and partly because the Council had outlawed it several centuries ago, causing the most creative law-abiding mages to select other disciplines to benefit from their talents.

There weren't many mages alive with the skill and knowledge to attempt a true ritual. The art might well have died out completely, had it not been for the occasional piece of research he had published across the centuries, and yet even he could count the number of rituals he had actually enacted in his life on his fingers. Running his gaze over the circle in the floor, Zeref wasn't entirely sure whether to be relieved or concerned. He couldn't tell what it did without proper study, but it was in a language and style he happened to be very familiar with. He could see that it wasn't going to work… and yet the fundamentals were all correct. Only the application was lacking.

It wasn't the work of an amateur. It was the work of someone who only needed a nudge in the right direction to unlock that ritual in all its complexity.

For longer than he should have done, he stood and wondered – not about the powers of the ritual or the identity of its creator, but about the cheap artefacts in the room next door and the sword that had wounded Lucy; about the over-the-top appearance of the ritual room and the magic circle within that was yet so close to the truth. He wondered about contrast and contradiction, about purpose and intent, and whether the fact that all of these things were attributed to a single name – Avatar – meant that there could be only one explanation.

Then he turned around, closed the door behind him, and continued his investigation.

The third room was a library, and libraries were dangerous. Not because of the potential knowledge contained within, but because they were so very distracting. He was here for a reason, and that reason was not to check every book in the library in the hope of finding something interesting.

Then again, it would be a shame not to, while he was here.

Like the rest of the building – once he had manipulated the wards around the annex to let him in without triggering any alarms, at least – the library was both empty and unprotected. He drifted from shelf to shelf, trying to restrict himself to only a quick glance at the titles. One great leather-bound tome vanished into his Requip Space, followed by a handwritten diary that looked older than he was… and then his attention was hijacked by a book that lay open atop what might have been an altar, or might simply have been an odd flat rock that the cult didn't know what else to do with.

He knew that book from a glance. And so he should have done – he had written it. Handwritten, handbound, it showed not a single sign of damage for all its years, for throughout them it had been hardly used, only hidden and protected. He ran his fingers over the page, and the crinkle of old paper felt just right beneath his fingertips. He'd thought he'd lost this one. It was only a translation and commentary on a classical work – not even magical, let alone dangerous – but still, he'd thought this one lost to time. To think it would turn up in a place like this… he dreaded to think what these people were using it for.

With a shake of his head, he snapped the book shut. "Oh, honestly," he said, to no one in particular. "You people are exactly why my Eclipse Gate was destroyed. Stop taking my stuff."

One dismissive flash of light later, the book was safely stowed in his portable library – err, his rather full Requip Space – and he decided it was probably time to move on. In a supreme effort of will which no one would have given him any credit for (except perhaps for Levy, if Lucy ever succeeded in introducing them), he left the library without looking at another book and headed for the final door in the church's annex, blissfully ignorant to what awaited him there.

The thing was, he still hadn't made the connection.

The eagerness to attribute the creation of all things magical to him.

The fascination with ritual magic, which he had written more about than anyone else alive, and the ritual circle drawn in his preferred language and style at that.

The pride of place given to his book, even though it was only a translation; nothing powerful, nothing alive, merely words he had penned so long ago.

By the time he opened the final door, it was too late.

When Lucy caught up with her wayward teammate, he was stood in a bland corridor, staring blankly at a door.

He did not look around as she jogged towards him. He did not, in fact, seem to notice her presence at all. Had it not been for the fact that the main body of the black church was entirely devoid of people – she had encountered no one but Gray in all her time here – this mission would probably have tested his immortality.

"Zeref!" she called. "Was that you shouting? What happened?"

"I have seen hell, Lucy Heartfilia," Zeref spoke hollowly. "We should depart from this place forthwith."

"Uh, no, we can't do that. We haven't found Natsu yet. What's got you so spooked, anyway?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Uh-huh." Lucy gave him an unimpressed look. "We can't leave until we've checked everywhere. You can wait out here, if you want."

He flinched visibly as she reached for the door in front of him, but he didn't try to stop her. Now a little unnerved herself, she asked, "It's not dangerous, is it?"

Numbly, Zeref shook his head.

"Okay, then," Lucy said, and she opened the fateful door… and stared.

And stared.

And stared some more.

Once, Lucy had made the mistake of visiting Juvia's room at Fairy Hills. The nightmares had persisted for days: nightmares of being chased by an unstoppable horde of animated Gray dolls, where every household object she picked up to use as a weapon turned into another Gray, and every door she flung open revealed a bricked-up escape route covered by a floor-to-ceiling poster of Gray's face. She had thought Juvia's obsession with her crush unmatched in heaven and hell.

Avatar might have had something to say about that.

The evil cult's inner sanctum looked exactly like Juvia's room would have done, if she'd had a crush on a certain Black Mage instead of Gray.

Stretched across the opposite wall, a huge banner greeted them with the blood-red legend BLACK MAGE ZEREF, THY WILL BE DONE. Beneath, in pride of place upon a profane altar, a tome radiating sinister magic lay open amongst a bed of dead and dying rose petals. On either side, twin dire wolf skeletons stood guard, ribbons and charms hanging from their ribcages.

Any illusion of dark sophistication offered by the altar, however, was very quickly undone by the rest of the room. Alcoves offered up an array of relics from the sublime – here the horn of a demon, there the very quill with which he had penned Blood and Sacrifice – to the outright ridiculous. Lucy really, really hoped that the whole unchanging-body thing still applied to locks of hair and toenail clippings, otherwise that far corner was going to stink.

And as for the walls… well, they had been covered in paintings of Zeref. Which wouldn't have been too bad, except that the artists, unaware that their deity was cursed to spend all of eternity as a teenager, had chosen to depict him as a heroic, manly warlord, so muscled and powerful that he had no need for such things as armour… or, in one particularly prominent case, any kind of clothing at all.

And, just in case gazing upon his magnificent, uh, visage wasn't enough, Avatar had also thought to knit little chibi dolls for devotees to take home with them. They looked dangerously huggable – and, compared to the paintings, almost lifelike.

Lucy stared at the shrine.

Then she stared at Zeref, who had his hands over his eyes, having converted to that school of thought favoured by metaphysical philosophers and toddlers alike: if I can't see it, it must not be there.

Then she looked back at the shrine.

"That's so sweet, you have a fan club!" she exclaimed.

"It's not sweet!" Zeref shouted, desperation cracking through his voice. "What sort of deranged freak would do this?"

"That's no way to talk about your fans!" she admonished him. "Say, while you're here, why don't you autograph something? It'll make their day!"

"I don't want to make their day! I want to wipe out all the imbeciles who dared-"

"Aww, look at this!" Lucy chirped. "They've written down the wishes they're hoping you'll grant them once you're ruling the world, and hung them up on this wolf skeleton! That's adorable!"

She flicked eagerly through the hand-made charms. "Ooh, this person has wished for a first-edition copy of Magic in the Age of Empathy – huh, I think they might be getting you a bit mixed up with Santa Claus. Easy mistake to make, I'm sure. And this one wants you to silence their mother-in-law, preferably permanently. That's an interesting reason for joining an evil cult; can you imagine that going down in history as your villainous backstory? Oh, now this is more like it – this person hopes you'll obliterate the corrupt order and bring true freedom to the world!"

"I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do for them," Zeref fumed. "First, I'm going to murder every single person who was involved in this sick joke. Then I'm going to murder their families. Then I'm going to murder everyone they've ever spoken to in their lives, so that I can be sure I got everyone who ever knew this place existed, and then I'll burn this room, and then I'll burn the ashes, and then I'll fill the ruins with lava and set fire to that too…"

"I have to wonder how you're going to find the time to do all of that, in between posing naked for all your new art commissions," Lucy reflected. "Though, now I understand the reason for your overreaction to my Weekly Sorcerer photoshoots. You were worried I was stealing your spotlight!"

"Lucy. This is not funny."

"You're right, it's hilarious."

The look he turned towards her was almost pleading. "Lucy, how would you feel if we broke into a total stranger's house and they had a shrine to you set up in their spare room?"

She considered this. "Hmm… I suppose that would be quite creepy."

"See? That's why we are going to pretend we never came in here, carry on with the mission as before, and never ever ever speak of this room again."

"…Can I at least steal one of the little Zeref plushies?"

"Do you want to die?"

Lucy pouted. "What a heartless deity you are."

"But I will take this." Tactfully ignoring her, he lifted the book from the altar and closed it gently, cutting off the waves of ambient magic. "I'm not leaving this in the hands of these lunatics. This one's actually dangerous."

There was a brief flash of light and the book vanished – followed by a sound like another world's shrine-bell ringing, and it reappeared in his hands.

"Requip Space full, is it?" Lucy sniggered.

Scowling, as if this whole situation was somehow her fault, Zeref pulled one of the books he had stolen from the library out of his pocket dimension and replaced it with the enchanted one from the altar. The ordinary book, he handed to Lucy. "Put that in your bag."

"My bag's full too, you know," she pointed out. "With all the important quest supplies you didn't bother to bring, like food and clothes."

"Your clothes aren't important. Get rid of them."

"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that," Lucy sighed, although she managed to get the book inside her bag with a bit of shoving. "Fine, let's get out of here and keep looking for Nat- oh."

That was when she realized that there was a third witness to Zeref's Room of Horror.

In the doorway stood a tall, bald man, with dramatically owlish eyebrows and a formal black kimono, all of which would have combined to lend him an intimidating aura if he hadn't also had 'green tea' tattooed to his forehead. In his hand, he was holding a huge wicked-spiked club… but no, it still wasn't enough to compensate for the tattoo. There was no way that wasn't a mistake. Lucy wondered if this was a sign that Avatar did epic evil cult nights out.

"Two thieves, stealing from our precious shrine," cried the man Lucy had mentally dubbed as Mr Tea. "Truly, this is a tea-rible sin!"

"Tea-rible?" Lucy echoed to Zeref, in a stage whisper. "That's a dreadful pun!"

This earned her an aghast look. "That's your biggest problem with this situation?"

"Ahem!" announced Mr Tea. "As I was saying, you will be punished for your felon-tea-"

"Wait!" Lucy held up her hand, having decided that the best way to deal with this madness was by participating in it fully. "We didn't mean to disturb your shrine. We were simply drawn here by its majes-tea… I mean, majesty. Won't you at least tell this poor, lost believer what this church is for?"

("Lucy," Zeref hissed to her in an undertone, "real villains aren't actually that stupid.")

("Zeref, he has the words 'green tea' tattooed to his forehead. Your argument is invalid.")

"Certainly!" Mr Tea proclaimed, over the sound of Zeref repeatedly hitting his head against the wall. "We true believers have a glorious purpose! Our cult exists for one reason only: to perform the ritual that will draw Zeref to us!"

There was silence.

"Umm," Zeref said.

There was more silence.

Lucy was struggling to keep the glee out of her voice as she turned to her companion. "Are you going to tell him, or shall I?"

"Umm," Zeref said again.

Mr Tea's patient smile did not falter. "For years we have sought a way to draw our dark saviour to us. Now, the path has finally been revealed to our leader, and once the great Zeref stands before us-"

"Yes, hello, here I am," Zeref interrupted.

The cultist's hand came to rest patronizingly upon Zeref's shoulder. "Ah, my poor, misguided acolyte. The dangers of walking this path are well-known to me. How easy it is to draw too close to our Lord Zeref in his overwhelming allure – and how natural it is to lose oneself in worship and believe ourselves to have become one with our Lord! Why, I have even had his name tattooed onto my forehead…"

Lucy clapped her hands to her mouth in mock surprise. "So you do! I can't believe I didn't notice that!"

Zeref made a sound like a strangled kitten.

"But alas, we are mere servants, fit to open the way for our dark saviour and nothing more."

"…Right," said Zeref. "Just out of interest, when you finally meet this man who has been in hiding for centuries – and looking around, I can't possibly imagine why he would do such a thing – how, exactly, are you going to recognize him?"

"Oh, his aura of power will be unmistakeable," gushed Mr Tea. "His magnificent magic, his heroic visage, his commanding presence-"

"You're going to be so disappointed," Lucy sighed.

The cultist continued sagely, "And of course, he will return to us when the ritual is performed, and not before."

"No, he won't!" Zeref cried, over the sound of Lucy's hysterics. "He will not show up because you've done some made-up ritual! And if he does, it will only be to tell you how stupid you are, right before he wipes every trace of this cult of utter morons off the face of the earth!"

"Such blasphemy will not be tolerated," the cultist warned.

"Blasphemy-?" Zeref's voice rose to a shriek. "How can I possibly commit blasphemy against myself?"

"Such a fickle deity," Lucy sighed. "Truly, who can keep up with thine unpredictable whims?"

"LUCY, YOU ARE NOT HELPING!"

"That's enough, infidels!" Mr Tea boomed, and he drove this point home by bringing his club crashing down on a startled Zeref's head.

And thus the first tragic encounter between the evil cult and the patron deity they had mentally scarred for life came to an end.