The Scars That Make You Whole

By CrimsonStarbird

Sacrimony, Part 5

-Burn-

It was the smoke that did it.

Usually, Natsu liked the smell of smoke. It was one of his strongest links to Igneel. He remembered very little of his childhood with any concrete certainty, but nothing evoked memories better than the sense of smell, and no smell was associated more strongly with growing up as a fire dragon's son than smoke. It was home and warmth and kebabs grilled in the flames rolling from Igneel's mouth.

The smell of this smoke, though… It was the first time Natsu had ever cursed the enhanced senses his father's magic had bestowed upon him. There was something wrong with the air – something that made breathing a torture rather than a necessity; something that clung to the inside of his throat, which not even bile could scour clean.

The draconic part of him knew it well.

Terror.

In the distance, he could hear the children screaming.

After he had managed to extract himself from the collapsed mansion, Natsu had headed towards the town, reasoning that that was where the others had gone after their fight. He had been excited, at first: to demand a rematch from Gajeel, to ensure that Levy was unhurt after her captivity; to finally, finally see Lucy.

It was only when he reached the settlement that he realized how much he had missed while buried by his own overenthusiastic attack.

Cataclysm reigned over the ruined streets. The façades of shops wavered in the breeze, their insides hollowed out by exploding lacrima. Buildings had been left to the mercy of the apocalypse, possessions abandoned, civilians fled. Unhallowed smoke saturated the air and throttled his senses.

And all around him, the town burned.

Not beautiful, magical fire; not the legacy of the Fire Dragon King defending his home; not the unintentional and yet unstoppable blaze of destruction that followed him and his guild across the kingdom. The fires of hell had been dragged into this world, and there was no escape, no rescue, no trial – only the slow sacrificial roasting of too many helpless lambs.

He could hear their screams. He could taste their fear like only a dragon could, and he, who had never known fear of his own, found it overwhelming.

And as he followed the sound of despair through what had once been streets, he picked up a familiar scent.

Lucy.

He stopped in his tracks. She had passed through here, and recently.

Of course she had – there was trouble; where would she be but right at the heart of it?

He had to go after her. He had to see with his own eyes that she was okay. He'd wanted nothing else since he'd first gone to her house and found her missing.

But.

He could hear the children screaming. He could feel the fires drawing closer. He could taste the death stalking down forsaken streets – a blazing death of cruelty and hellfire which, perhaps, only a Fire Dragon Slayer could withstand.

He wanted so badly to go after Lucy.

But Wendy had said she was fine when she'd saved Lamia Scale.

And Gajeel had assured him she'd been more than fine when she'd come with him to help rescue Levy.

And Lucy, his teammate, his partner, his very best friend – she was brave and she was mighty, and he had faith in her to survive, to win, no matter what.

He couldn't smell Zeref. In fact, thoughts of the man who had supposedly kidnapped her did not so much as cross his mind. For the first time since Natsu had broken into her house to find her gone, it seemed that he was thinking clearly.

And he knew, he knew, what Lucy would want him to do.

"Hold on just a little longer, Lucy," he vowed, as he began sprinting in the direction of the screams. "I'll be right with you, I promise."

It wasn't how hard it had become to breathe that bothered Lucy as much as the fact that she couldn't pinpoint the exact reason for it.

Maybe it was the smoke and the dust from the collapsed buildings. Maybe the runic circle ensnaring the town had already been activated, and it had chosen to kill its victims through slow asphyxiation. Maybe the wounds Gray had dealt her were worse than she'd thought, and her lungs had been crushed or punctured or filled with blood.

So many different ways of dying, all competing for the chance to kill her first. There was a grim smile on her face as she hurried onwards.

She wasn't exactly running. It was enough of a struggle just to keep herself upright as she staggered through the ruined streets. But, injured or otherwise, she was as determined as she had ever been.

She knew she was on her own. The odds of Gajeel making it back in time – even if he was willing to leave his dying teammates in the hospital – were negligible. She had sent Loke back home already, and for good reason, given how wounded he was. The best she could hope for with Gray was that he wouldn't turn up again until the battle was over.

And Zeref… she wanted to believe that he would negate the rune circle threatening the town, but, pragmatically, she knew she couldn't count on it. He hadn't appeared at their designated signal, after all. In fact, he hadn't been acting much like himself all afternoon. It wasn't like him to be so unfocussed. Maybe his obsession with the town's bookshops wasn't him being deliberately annoying, but something more serious.

Still, she would have to worry about him later. There was only one thing that mattered right now: stopping Avatar from massacring the townsfolk and using their deaths to ritually summon a fire god.

Time was running out. It had never been on her side, giving her far too much when she did not know how to proceed and nowhere near enough once her path had become clear, and the current lull seemed like a gift that could be withdrawn at any minute. Would she get any warning before the sacrificial circle activated? Or would there simply be annihilation, with nothing but a crater left to indicate that anything had ever stood here, as Avatar had done to their own black church? It was yet another question far less important than the need to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

She was still in Libra's Star Dress form – partly because reducing her weight through Libra's magic was the only way she could drag herself along, and partly because she did not think she had the energy to change to another form. Never mind that she hadn't used it in a proper fight before; it would have to do.

Then she rounded the final corner, and there, in the middle of a perfectly innocuous road, stood Colonel Lydiatt.

He had his back to her, but it was easy enough to recognize the scraggly white hair falling over his striped soldier's tunic. So, he wasn't merely Avatar's spy in the army. He was the one behind this whole evil scheme.

With his thin blade, he was etching symbols of violet onto the cobbles beneath – little wonder he didn't use a standard-issue army weapon, then. He carried a light blade for the same reason Freed did: to write the story of his opponent's defeat in a language they couldn't understand until it was already too late. In his other hand, he held open a book both Gajeel and Zeref would have recognized.

If he was still writing out the ritual, there was still a chance that she could prevent it.

Libra's form came with no weapons, as far as she could tell, but that didn't mean she was out of options. A quick scan of her surroundings revealed a face-down body – a soldier who had stumbled upon his commanding officer's true intentions and paid for it with his life. Limp fingers rested over a spear he no longer needed. If she could get close enough to seize it…

It was then that she realized the scratching of steel on stone had stopped. The blade's glowing tip hovered above the runes unfolding like a flower around his feet, and he said, without turning round, "Lucy Heartfilia, isn't it?"

"Colonel Lydiatt," she spat. "If that's even your real name."

"Of course," he said, making a slight bow in her direction. "I have served my king and country for far longer than Avatar has existed. Colonel Arlock Lydiatt, also known as the High Priest of Avatar, at your service."

While he was talking to her, he wasn't finishing the runes for the ritual. Shuffling a half-step closer to the deceased soldier, she demanded, "Why are you doing this?"

"Haven't you already discovered that from my followers?" Colonel Lydiatt returned lightly. No, she couldn't call him by that title any more; he didn't deserve it. He would just be Arlock to her.

As if he could hear the petty defiance of her thoughts, his lips twisted into a condescending smile."The ritual will summon Zeref to us, and when it does, he will grant the wishes of all those who have served him faithfully in his absence."

"That's ridiculous. You can't summon Zeref with a ritual; he's a human being, not a god or a Spirit. And even if you had found a way to do it, this ritual isn't it. It may have been created by Zeref long ago, but the only thing it does is summon a god of fire. It won't do what you want it to."

"Zeref is drawn to death," he explained, with the patience of one who had done so many times before.

"Then what did you even need to steal the ritual book for?" she spat, letting the outrage she didn't have to fake carry her two steps closer to the fallen spear. "Why not just blow up the town, like you have to do anyway to summon your god, and be done with it? You could have discovered the futility of your own actions years ago!"

"With this, I will prove myself worthy, by completing the ritual that almighty Zeref could not."

Although his words were the kind she might have expected from a fanatic like Mr Tea, there were creases around his eyes, as if amused by some private joke. There was nothing amusing about this situation to her. "Zeref chose not to carry out this ritual! He couldn't accept the loss of life, no matter how much power it granted in return!"

"He has his moments of weakness, as do we all," the old soldier rebuked her.

"You're wrong. Do you know why Zeref created this ritual in the first place? It wasn't to draw upon the power of a fire god to help in his conquest of the world, or anything ridiculous like that. He created it in the hope that the fire god's strength would give his greatest demon the power to end his own immortal life." Lucy shook her head, and took another step towards him, just for good measure. "You don't know him at all."

Arlock simply smiled at her, not a flicker of surprise or doubt upon his face. "We shall see."

Just like with Mr Tea, Lucy suspected there was no convincing these fanatics. "He will destroy you," she reiterated. "He utterly loathes your organization, like he does anyone who uses his name to spread hatred and fear. Maybe if you weren't so busy setting up a self-destruct circle which Zeref is actively trying to cancel right now, you'd realize that you were only antagonizing the very man you claim to worship!"

She thought of the man who had spent the entire day acting as if Bishop's Lace was an unexplored literary paradise; who had saved Gajeel's life and immediately become best buddies with Levy; who had looked her in the eye and promised that they would save the town. With a warmth in her chest, she asserted, "Zeref isn't like you think he is. All you're doing today is murdering innocent people and incurring the wrath of your so-called god in the process… but, don't worry. You'll never have to experience his fury, because I will stop you here and now."

Before she had even finished speaking, she was launching herself forwards with all the strength she had left. One hand reached for the fallen spear.

"No, I don't think you will," he informed her coolly, and he flicked the end of his blade towards her.

It was only because she was familiar with Freed's fighting style that she knew what was coming. She dived out of the way of the glowing rune that sailed towards her.

And on any other day, she'd have made it with plenty of time to spare, rolled, switched forms, and launched a hail of arrows from Sagittarius's bow before she was even back on her feet.

But this wasn't any other day – it was the day on which fighting Gray had already pushed her to her physical and mental limits. Her brain threw out survival commands with its usual lightning speed, and her body only seemed to register one in five of them, taking far too long to get itself moving and stumbling even when it did.

As Arlock's attack bore down upon her, and she realized she physically couldn't dodge it, she called out – to something, anything – with all her might… and a disembodied force dragged her out of the way of Arlock's attack.

It was a pull rather than a push, and she couldn't work out at first what had happened. Only when the dizziness faded, and she realized she was standing sideways with her feet pressed to a wall rather than the ground, did she understand what had saved her.

Libra. She wasn't even Lucy's Spirit, but Lucy could feel her celestial power circling through her body. All the stars in the heavens had her back.

Maybe Libra's form was more appropriate for physical combat than she'd thought. She could definitely work with this ability.

Then again, the middle of a boss fight probably wasn't the best place to try out this entirely new magic. She dodged another wave of runic missiles, only to fall sideways – to the ground – as soon as she left the cylinder of altered gravity. Her battered knees registered their objection to this treatment by immediately collapsing beneath her, right as Arlock gave another lazy flick of his sword.

Panicking, she called Libra's power again and reversed gravity around her. Although flinging herself straight upwards was certainly an effective way of dodging, it came with the downside of leaving her completely helpless in the air.

Before that day, she couldn't have imagined the vulnerability of it. No nearby surfaces, no wings, no magic to control her flight; just herself flailing in the emptiness, at the mercy of a power she barely knew how to use.

It made her far too easy a target. Two runes hit her in quick succession.

The impact shattered her control over gravity. She landed on her side, following up the thwack of the ground with a splintering encore from her hips. Like a crack opening in a caldera, molten rage spewed forth – rage not towards the traitorous soldier, but towards herself. Why was she so weak? Why had she been so determined to prove Zeref was wrong about Gray, when she could have avoided him entirely and gone straight to fight Arlock? Why couldn't her fragile, useless body stop with the pain and just do what she told it to?

"It seems to me as though you have no idea how to use that gravity magic of yours," Arlock remarked idly, twirling his sword between surprisingly deft fingers. "I feel for the world of light, if you are to be its saviour."

"Maybe, but I'm not alone," she growled. "If I can't stop you, Zeref will."

"We'll see about-"

He was only halfway through gloating when she launched into action. If her body wouldn't obey her, she would damn well use it as a missile fired from her very own gravity cannon.

Two cylinders of horizontal gravity twisted into being: one between her and Arlock, and another between the fallen soldier's spear and herself. The first shot her towards her foe. The second pulled the spear into her outstretched hand as Arlock dodged – but she hadn't been aiming for him. The butt of the spear swung out and knocked the ritual book out of his hand.

Then, as Lucy sent a silent apology to Zeref, the last of Libra's gravity magic kicked in and hurled the book up into the atmosphere. Lucy did not know where it would come down, if at all. The only thing that mattered was that it was beyond Arlock's reach.

Gasping for breath, shoulders heaving, Lucy turned to glare victoriously at Arlock. "It doesn't matter if you kill me now," she hissed. "Your horrible ritual will never be completed. It's over."

"I suppose it would be," he agreed amicably, "if I hadn't made sure to transcribe the full ritual circle before engaging you in battle. You're no threat to me; why would I put my plans on hold just to fight you? How foolish do you think I am?"

What?

No. It couldn't be. He had been holding onto Zeref's book their entire fight. If the ritual had been ready all along, what had he been waiting for? The despair in her eyes?

All of a sudden, Lucy remembered discussing Avatar with Zeref in the black church's dungeons. There was the cult of Zeref-obsessed lunatics, who worshipped a figment of their imagination and couldn't tell when their supposed god was in the cells of their own church. And then there was the organization which had realized Levy was a spy from the start, and used it to play them; which had set a trap in the black church while sending their lesser members to safety; which had outthought them at every single turn since their arrival in Bishop's Lace.

It wasn't paradoxical at all, when she thought about it in the right way.

Arlock's smart, Lucy. Smarter than you.

So Gray had warned her, and it was perhaps the only honest thing he had said to her today. Cultivating and channelling an obsessive loyalty to a fictitious man was simply a way for their leader to control of a ragtag bunch of fanatics. The cultists could be as quirky as they liked while carrying out their duties. While Colonel Arlock Lydiatt was pulling the strings, they wouldn't lose.

We are beaten, she thought numbly. We stood together as a team, and he demolished us without even raising a finger, except to gloat. We are beaten.

"Yes," Arlock confirmed softly, as if he knew exactly what was going through her mind – and by this point, she wouldn't have been surprised to learn that he did. "It's over."

Sheathing his sword, the High Priest of Avatar spread his arms wide as the swirl of runes at his feet began to smoulder. "Come, God of Fire and Magic! Come, Beast of the In-Between! Come, through death and into life; the path of ruin I open for thee! To the world of substance I summon thee; to the borders of time and space I bind thy great infinity!"

Heat swept over Lucy, and yet she found herself shivering. Something had heard. Somewhere beyond their world, something too great and too terrible to exist within it was awakening.

"With flame, I call thee!" Arlock commanded, his face a picture of rapturous glee. "With magic, I lend thee a body! With sacrifice, I open the way!"

The skies shook in response to these last words. Lucy fell to her knees, pushed down by the weight of a hundred atmospheres. There was magic above them, and it was alive.

Before she and Zeref had come to Bishop's Lace, when their conversation on the nature of magic had been safely hypothetical, Zeref had described the beings called gods as manifestations of magic in its purest form, temporarily granted a physical existence through the use of a ritual. Only now was she beginning to understand what that meant: power, pressure, and the certainty that this thing was more than she could ever hope to be.

Arlock snapped his fingers. Magic radiated out from the circle at his feet and flooded into the larger one that surrounded the evacuation zone. Had Lucy been able to tear her gaze away from the self-styled High Priest, she would have seen blood-red flames blaze up in the distance as the great circle ignited.

Really, though, the blaze was symbolic. It was the magic that would kill the citizens. That ravenous magic, freed from its starvation in an empty world, was already trying to wrench her soul from her body and feed it to something unspeakable, something that was beginning to take form in the sky.

No. She could still stop this.

She felt utterly drained, but she was still alive – and if Zeref was right, didn't that mean she still had magic, still had the power to alter reality? If Natsu could generate magic from nothing more than his will to live, why couldn't she do the same? She wanted to live, didn't she? More than that, she wanted everyone else to live. She would gladly die, if it meant the civilians sheltering in the evacuation zone would survive. Wasn't that enough?

Well, she wasn't like Zeref; this wasn't the time to theorize over the nature of magic. This was the time to do or die trying.

She pushed herself up from the ground, as if about to run a sprint, and called all the magic she didn't have as she burst forward. She didn't wait to see if Cancer's blade had painted itself out of starlight in her clumsily grasping hand. She pressed on through heat and thunder-

"No," Arlock said calmly, clearly, and flicked his sword. Violet death streaked towards her heart; one more life to be taken so that his creation of magic could live.

Then space twisted, and Zeref was there.

Amidst the heart of the magical maelstrom he appeared, batting Arlock's death-word away with his bare hand. Lethal energy lanced through his body from the contact, though he paid it no heed, landing with two feet and one hand down as the air began to boil.

"Zeref!" Lucy shouted, startled, the word igniting in her throat.

He didn't look at her as he stood. He held his arms out to each side, a slow and simple gesture that belied the immense surge of magic that followed.

A horseshoe-shaped shield of water burst into being around the two of them – tsunamis rising without ever breaking; waterfalls that plunged but never hit the ground; a shield which absorbed the searing heat and exploded as steam, yet never became any less durable. Lucy hadn't realized how hot the world had become in the shadow of the fire god, how suffocating the very air had been, until she took her first breath within his space and it didn't try to tear her apart from the inside.

There Zeref was, at the heart of it, his body far, far too small for the magnitude of the power she could sense. His arms trembled under the strain of maintaining the barrier against the god's might, his feet a few inches above the ground, his robes streaming out in the turbulence of his own incredible presence. It was as if he was not using the magic, but letting the magic use him, and it was magnificent. He looked every bit as unearthly as the beast trying to break into their reality, and Lucy thought that if only Avatar, who had clung to their warlord-like posters and glorious fantasies of destruction, could see him now…

But Arlock could see it perfectly well, and it did not stop him from flicking his sword once more. This time, the death-word struck Zeref directly. He fell to the ground with a hiss of pain, but his shield of water did not waver, not even for a moment of death and rebirth.

He was slower to get back to his feet, this time. Arlock watched him struggle, curious, and then sketched another rune. No sooner was Zeref upright again than he was flung to the other side in a crunch of bone.

Lucy's eyes widened. It was her fault. He was focussing on the shield of water, which was protecting her from the fire god's descent; if not for that, Arlock would surely not have been a match for him.

The tip of Arlock's sword traced a rune twice as complex as before, and she tried to shout a warning to Zeref, but he was still on the ground – though Arlock's spell washed over him this time without any noticeable effects.

The former soldier frowned in response to something only he could perceive. It hadn't been an attack, Lucy realized, but a diagnostic spell – and if the smile now twisting his cracked lips was anything to go by, he was particularly pleased by the results.

"Fascinating," he purred. "You are a beautiful little anomaly of magic, aren't you?"

Arlock, however, was not the only one smiling.

"Got it," Zeref said. The walls of water collapsed as he staggered to his feet, but even as the deadly heat flooded in, Lucy did not feel the faintest touch of fear. It had been banished by the brilliant, brilliant light in his eyes.

Zeref thrust his right hand skyward and shouted ten words to the heavens.

At least, Lucy assumed they were words. She did not hear them with her ears, but felt them striking her entire body. Each was revelation, forgotten the instant it was comprehended, leaving a thrumming deep in her bones and a fearful awe in her heart. It was the language of the universe, never to be heard by man.

And the universe listened.

Divine flames shrunk, flickered, and returned to slumber.

The magic in the sky folded in on itself and was gone.

Arlock's ritual circle turned to ash at his feet.

There was silence, cold and empty.

Tentatively, a little breeze blew, scattering the first of the ashes at the dark mage's feet.

Arlock stared at Zeref. "That's not possible."

Every bit as condescending as Arlock had been to Lucy earlier, Zeref asked, "Oh, is that so?"

"It's not possible," Arlock insisted, too perplexed to even think about fear. "I know for a fact that no counter-ritual was ever created!"

Zeref brushed a speck of ash from his sleeve. "I just created one."

"No! No one can spontaneously create a counter-ritual like that. Not from memory- not while maintaining shielding magic- not while repeatedly dying-!"

Despite herself, Lucy was grinning, because if anyone could, it was Zeref – the man who hadn't rushed here to fight the enemy leader, as all her other friends would have done, but who was more than happy to lose to him in battle as a distraction while calculating the exact counter-ritual to his ultimate weapon at the same time. There was something so very beautiful about the way he used magic: not at all and then all at once, the world rewritten in an instant.

As if coming to the same conclusion, Arlock slowly drew his sword once more. "Well," he remarked. "It seems one part of the legend is true, after all. You really are unrivalled in your knowledge of magic."

"It's over," Zeref stated. "Your god has been banished; your ritual has failed. End the spell you have set to destroy the evacuation zone. There is no point to it now."

At this, despite the exceptional magic he had just displayed, Lucy felt a sharp pang of fear. Had he not managed to negate the self-destruct circle? Had he come straight here to the epicentre, to where she was, obliterating the bridge Arlock was building between realities but not able to stop the deaths from which he had been building it?

In the corner of her eye, the ring of blood-red fire blazed still, them and several thousand townsfolk trapped inside.

Had it been too complex for him? Or had he simply run out of time? Whichever it was, she felt a growing alarm that his cold confidence was a bluff – and if there was one man in all of Avatar who could see through it, it would be Arlock.

"Hmm. No point to it, you say?" Arlock tapped the tip of his sword against the melted and re-fused cobblestones. "I grew up in this town, you know. I wanted to protect my home, so I joined the Rune Knights. One day, a long time ago, an ancient and deadly ritual was almost unleashed here. I alone recognised the signs and was able to organize an evacuation. And do you know what happened as a result? I was thrown out of the Rune Knights. It didn't matter that I'd tried to help people – it didn't even matter that I was the only one who'd been able to help people. I had demonstrated that I possessed forbidden magical knowledge, and for that reason alone, I was expelled."

He paused for a moment in reflection. "My hometown should have been my sanctuary. There is rare magic to be found here, dark legacies, old secrets… and yet they are hidden away. The town denies its heritage and panders to the will of the Magic Council. After the Knights threw me out, the booksellers, the underground traders, and the guilds all shunned me, too afraid to incur the Council's wrath. Wherever I travelled, it was the same. In the end, the only job I could get where I could still use magic was in the army – not because they were inclusive or forgiving, but because, not being mages, they didn't truly understand the issue that the Knights had with me. So I served the king instead… and bided my time.

"And now, at last, I've returned. It wasn't an accident that I chose this town for my ritual. This is the place where it all began for me. This is the place that cast me out. And this is the place where my conquest begins anew. After today, everyone will know Avatar's name."

Magic swirled around him, far crueller than that of a distant god, for this was far more personal. "I despise this place. And if I can no longer use its destruction for my ritual, there is no need for me to destroy it with such… finesse."

With the tip of his blade, he scratched a single rune into the ground. "Burn."

The world ignited.

"No," Lucy snarled. She sprung through the inferno with all the life left in her limbs, Cancer's blade in her hand and Arlock's heart in her sights, closing the distance between her and the startled priest the only thing that mattered as she burned-

A hand seized her forearm. It pulled her backwards even as momentum tried its hardest to convey her to her goal.

There was a moment of disorientation. She couldn't tell whether it was her or the world that was falling. Space warped in peculiar ways – ways echoed within herself, as her body twisted beyond its limit. She was still falling when her consciousness succumbed to the pull of purgatory-

-and snapped back to reality a fraction of a second later; soon enough for her to notice she was falling face-first towards the road but not soon enough to stop it from happening. She landed painfully, bruised ribs beneath her, but could not comprehend trying to move until the world had stabilized.

And when it finally did, she found that her surroundings had changed.

Gone was the inferno. Gone were the streets of the evacuation zone. Gone was Avatar's High Priest, laughing within his circle of death. The road she was in bore the scars of Gray's earlier rampage; shadows yawned as the last trickles of flame burnt themselves out. The only living creature in sight was Zeref, and he looked little better than she felt as he also tried to push himself up from the cobbles.

In the distance, horrid light blazed like a portal to hell left open.

In the distance.

She was no longer within the circle.

She was no longer able to stop it.

She could only watch as the entire evacuation zone went up in flames.

She screamed out loud; a frantic, pointless sound. But it wasn't too late, she could still stop this, she just had to get back in there and stab Arlock-

"No!" Zeref seized her arm, once again stopping her in her tracks.

"Let go!" she roared.

"You can't go back in there!" he snapped back, words like a whipcrack.

She shoved him away, not caring if he fell. Some vicious part of her marvelled at how physically weak he was compared to her. She wouldn't let him stop her again.

She heard him click his tongue, and then there was an invisible force suddenly pinning her to the wall. A wordless shriek escaped her lips. It wasn't from pain, not really, because if she'd stopped and thought about it, she'd have realized that the pinning force was careful to avoid her bruised ribs and open wounds. It was from pure incomprehensible frustration.

She could still stop this. Why couldn't he see that?

Her zealous thoughts must have forced their way out of her mouth, because he told her, "Lucy, if you go back into the circle, you will die."

"I can stop it!" she insisted, struggling against the invisible bonds with all the strength she had left and some she didn't. "I can kill Arlock!"

Those black eyes were utterly impassive. Echoes of the power that had held back the fury of an otherworldly god rippled through the air; even at full strength, she would have been no match for him in raw magical power. "It's too late. Killing him will not stop the magic he has set in motion. All it will do is ensure you are close enough to die too."

The look of surprise on the smug priest's face flashed through her mind. Her last burst of energy. Cancer's blade, stopped mere inches from his heart by the hand of her so-called ally.

It hadn't been too late then.

"I could have done it! I could have got to him in time! I could have saved everyone, if you hadn't stopped me!"

"You couldn't have done, Lucy."

"You can't know that for sure! You didn't even let me try!"

"You would have died." He stepped closer. Once more, and he'd be close enough to reach. Either he didn't realize how she was feeling towards him right now, or with his immortality, he simply didn't care. "Please, stop this."

How could she stop?

Innocent people were dying right now, people whose deaths she had inadvertently helped cause, and now she wasn't even allowed to try to save them?

But Zeref didn't understand, did he? He didn't care about anything but his quest. What did it matter to him who lived and who died, as long as he got what he wanted?

"Let me go, Zeref!"

"No."

"Yes!" she screamed. "So what if it's dangerous? I'm a Fairy Tail mage! I can't give up! I have to fight until the end!"

"Not like this. You did everything you could, Lucy."

She flinched back from his words. This wasn't what everything she could was supposed to look like.

If only Zeref had been half a second slower in trying to stop her. If only he'd fought with her rather than against her at the very end. If only he hadn't prioritized her life over everyone else's – that bloody quest – they would have had a chance; they could have turned it into victory. And even if they hadn't; if she'd died trying, rather than lived to witness her failure… would that hurt less than this?

The heat was beginning to die, now. The death which stretched over the town in venomous orange was flickering, fading, retreating into the void with its prize.

It was over.

She had failed.

"I am sorry, Lucy."

All the fierceness had gone from his tone – if indeed it had ever been there at all, and not a product of her own fevered mind. The pressure pinning her to the wall vanished. She realized too late that it had been the only thing holding her upright, and she would have fallen if he hadn't caught her. Hopeless tears stung her eyes.

Silent, patient, he let her lean on him without complaint, even though his body was as tense as always when someone was close enough to touch him. That was how estranged he was from other people. No wonder he could think nothing of leaving so many to die.

And yet she could think of nothing else.

"Lucy," he whispered. "We need to leave before the Rune Knights get here-"

Something snapped in her, then. She shoved him back as roughly as she could. He stumbled, too rigid to react properly, and looked up at her with startled eyes.

"Leave and pretend it never happened?" she yelled at him. "Just get up and move on? As if there aren't three thousand people who won't be waking up tomorrow, because I wasn't strong enough to save them?"

"Lucy-"

"LEAVE ME ALONE!"

She turned and ran from him, and her final command settled like ash atop the ruins of Bishop's Lace.

A/N: One chapter of this arc to go. As I may have mentioned last week, Ch33 and Ch34 were originally one chapter which got split because its length got out of hand, so there are still answers, explanations and so on to come next week. Though, as you'll also have realized if you've read this chapter, the Avatar storyline is far from over, so not everything will be answered yet. Thanks so much for all your comments and your support! ~CS