The Scars That Make You Whole

By CrimsonStarbird

Firesign, Part 3

-Flame Transcendent-

Acnologia screamed.

Zeref had put it to Lucy, once, that if she accepted love was a source of magic, she must also accept that magic could be born from hate, and fear, and pain… but although she'd come round to his way of thinking in time, she hadn't truly witnessed it until the moment Acnologia's severed arm thudded to the ground.

It was pain of the flesh and pain of the spirit. The crippling of the apex predator. A single blow to shatter his very identity. That pain, that loss, was the magic in his ungodly shriek, which turned aside the second sweep of Lucy's blade and hurled her away.

Head over heels, she first lost her grip on the sword, and then on her transformation. She skidded to a halt by Natsu's scaled head, mentally racing through her options, but Acnologia's moment of weakness was lost.

It was arrogance that had driven him to abandon his invulnerable dragon form in order to strike down the Fire Dragon King.

Never again would he know that arrogance. Never again would he make that mistake.

Howling in pain and wrapped in a cloak of his own blood, Acnologia transformed.

Transforming did not give him back his arms.

Dragons were beautiful, powerful, glorious creatures of magic. Acnologia was not a dragon. Not any more. Losing one arm had sent him into hiding for almost a year, though he'd emerged from it no less dangerous than before. Losing two, however, had destroyed the image of the world's greatest hunter. His wings struggled to keep him from pitching forward; his silhouette writhed against the horizon. Never before had he looked so much like a monster, his outer form at last reflecting the twisted soul within.

He screamed again, and Lucy heard it loud and clear: the pain of losing his last remaining arm was nothing compared to the pain of losing who he was.

But he wasn't the only one suffering, and the sound of Natsu trying and failing to suppress his own whimpers eclipsed the horror of it at once.

Lucy dropped to her knees beside Natsu's head, running her hand along his great, scaled jaw. Deep within his opalescent eye, muscles strained with the effort of bringing her into focus.

"You're going to be okay," she promised. "Zeref is not going to let you die."

She was so relieved to see the flames of emotion rekindling themselves in the dragon's eyes that she didn't even care, in that moment, that they had come from hatred. "Maybe I'd rather die than depend on him!"

"No, you wouldn't," she smiled. "As if you'd let this silly rivalry stop you from coming home to Fairy Tail."

Natsu closed his eyes. She thought it was the closest he had ever come to admitting defeat.

"You're going to be okay, Natsu," she repeated soothingly.

But even as she said it, she watched his chest heave with laborious breaths, and the warmth of the fire dragon's scales were not quite enough to combat the rising chill. Dragons did not survive a wound from Acnologia. It was as simple as that. She thought it was probably only because of the Book of END that Natsu was still alive at all.

Yet Natsu's body, part-demon though it may have been, was still fundamentally flesh and blood, fundamentally real. Zeref couldn't rebuild it out of magic the way he could the other Etherious demons. That was what he had warned Igneel when he had first taken Natsu under his wing; that was how Zeref had first met Grandine, when his own magic had been insufficient to heal Natsu…

Lucy's breath caught. Grandine was long gone, but hadn't all this begun because Acnologia had kidnapped Wendy and Gajeel?

The Sky Dragon Slayer had to be here somewhere. If Lucy could find her…

But her heart sank as quickly as it had risen, a vertigo-inducing drop-tower inside her chest. Acnologia and Natsu had levelled a huge swathe of forest, but the remainder was huger still, and untamed by human hands. Wendy could be anywhere. The only person who knew where she was imprisoned was Acnologia himself-

A stupid, reckless, insane idea sparked in her mind.

"Natsu," she murmured. "Do you trust me?"

Natsu went through an awful lot of effort just to glare at her. "Just because I've got scales now doesn't mean I'm not me, y'know? There's no one I trust more than you. If you've got an idea, you go for it, Lucy."

"Alright. Thanks." She took a deep breath, and then, deliberately, raised her voice: "You're going to be okay, Natsu. Wendy's here. She can heal you."

Reflected in the sheen of Natsu's gemlike eyes, she saw Acnologia's writhing cease.

She continued: "She's a Sky Dragon Slayer, remember? Her magic can… make you whole again."

A blast of air almost knocked her off her feet as the Black Dragon leapt skyward, wings thundering, desperate to find Wendy and force her to heal him.

Lucy's Fleuve d'étoiles was already in her hand. She twisted and the weapon ignited. With an expert flick of her wrist, it looped around the tip of the dragon's tail. Acnologia's wings beat down once, twice, and then her feet had left the ground and her shoulders were screeching with the strain and she was clinging to the handle of her whip for dear life.

Maybe losing his other arm had made him hyper-aware of what he had remaining, but somehow, Acnologia sensed her. In mid-air, his head craned back to look at her, dangling like a spider on a thread in the turbulence. Never in her life had she felt more vulnerable.

Instinctively, she let go, regretting her ill-thought-out plan, but the light was gathering in Acnologia's open jaws, and gravity wasn't pulling her away quickly enough-

A blast of fire struck Acnologia's breath attack head-on. Natsu's and Acnologia's magic met in a deadlock, the fire dragon's raw spirit making up for the fact that he could barely lift his head off the ground.

Lucy reached the ground, and fell into the ground, letting the coolness of it soothe the heat that crackled along her skin. Virgo's magic manipulated the earth around her. As soon as the world had stopped trembling from the dragons' clash, she headed back towards the surface.

The wasteland had melted in the heat and re-solidified into glassy waves. Ridges of it ran around Natsu's struggling form, as if it had become too solid halfway through dragging him down into the depths, and now it clung tight in the hope of getting another chance.

And in the sky, the silhouette of a monster was shrinking by the second.

Natsu's eyes were closed, but his growl was fierce. "Go, Lucy! Go!"

The magic of the stars filled her soul, and, like a greyhound bursting from the starting blocks, she began the chase.

Rogue's sense of smell as a Dragon Slayer was far better than Sting's as a bunny rabbit. Carried in his teammate's arms, Sting was swept along helplessly as Rogue vaulted over roots and ducked under branches, heading away from the great dead oak and deeper into a forest that had forgotten the sound of human feet. It scratched and clawed at the intruders, thorns running through fur and brittle twigs pressing into flesh; it delighted in having opponents who did not hide behind scales.

The grove Rogue brought them to wasn't as dramatic as the wasteland the battling dragons had forged, nor as twisted as the torture chamber in the grasp of a dead tree. They fought their way through the thickets enclosing it and found themselves in a hollow which was completely ordinary, save for three huge crystals which slowly pulsed with light.

They lacked the geometric perfection of manufactured lacrima, and yet no natural crystal could surely ever grow to that size. Perhaps Acnologia had ripped them from somewhere deep in the earth; perhaps they were a product of his own unfathomable mind. They jutted up from the soil as though the forest had grown crooked teeth.

Yet they were not weapons, but prisons. Within each one was suspended an unconscious figure: Wendy in the first, only half as big as the crystal that imprisoned her, drowned within its translucent blue; Gajeel in the second, looking more peaceful in forced slumber than Sting had ever seen him before; and in the third was a woman who could only have been Irene the fox. Seeing her as a human for the first time, Sting understood why Wendy had been so insistent that the daughter she had abandoned was Erza.

If he wasn't a rabbit, he'd probably have growled. Simply being related to a friend had been enough to convince Wendy that Irene was trustworthy, but as far as Sting was concerned, the thought that someone could abandon their child to go through what Erza had was hardly a mark in their favour.

Especially someone who'd done so to go and work for Zeref.

Rogue set the rabbit down and eyed the crystals warily. "Any idea how to get them out of there?"

Sting shrugged.

"Brute force it is, then," Rogue sighed, and he struck the crystal holding Wendy with a fist enveloped in shadowy energy.

It shattered. Rogue immediately stepped forward, catching the girl as she fell.

Wendy opened her eyes with a noise that would have demanded sympathy from the most hardened hearts, bleary and uncertain. "Rogue?" Her hand twitched, and she seemed surprised by the motion. "I'm… not a fawn?"

"Something must have happened to her," Sting explained, with what would have been an aggressive jerk of his head towards Irene had he been a Dragon Slayer, but which came out as a cute flick of his rabbity ears. "Rogue said she died as a fox. Maybe she ended the enchantments in time to send her consciousness back here, which also released you and Gajeel."

When Wendy nodded, digesting this a little too slowly for the liking of an antsy rabbit, he added, "So, any time you'd like to switch me back, too…"

"Not yet," Rogue interjected. "You'll end up back where your body is, and I think we should stay together."

"Fine, but we're going straight back to rescue me," he huffed.

Nodding, Rogue set Wendy down on the ground and let her find her feet while he smashed the second lacrima. Gajeel was not quite as catchable, but Rogue did his best. Fortunately, the Iron Dragon Slayer was too happy not to be a mouse for the crash-landing to bring him down.

Leaving Wendy to explain the situation, Rogue turned to the final crystal.

"Don't," Sting told him suddenly.

"Why not?"

"She's not our friend, Rogue."

Despite not yet being steady on her feet, Wendy stumbled over, unable to stay out of this. "She helped us, Sting."

"Only so that we would help her in return," he spat.

"But we can't just leave her," Wendy protested. She seemed genuinely unable to fathom such a thing. Despite himself, Sting felt a twinge of guilt.

"I'm not saying we abandon her for good," he amended. "Only that we get out of here, regroup with our friends, and evaluate the situation in Fiore first. If her friends from Alvarez haven't razed our kingdom to the ground, then we'll consider coming back and rescuing her."

Wendy bit her lip. "But if Acnologia finds her in the meantime, and realizes the rest of us have escaped…"

"We can't leave her at his mercy," Rogue agreed firmly.

The rabbit's gaze flicked up to the woman trapped in crystal. Unlike Wendy and Gajeel, she didn't give off an impression of harmlessness or peace. Even trapped, she was dangerous. His prey instincts had known it, and seeing her here, scarlet hair flaring out behind a body so sure of its own power, only reinforced that.

He looked to Gajeel for support, who shrugged. "She turned me into a mouse," he said bluntly. "I ain't gonna be inviting her over for dinner any time soon."

"She was trying to save you," Wendy spoke up anxiously.

"I know." Gajeel shrugged again. "But she made herself a fox, and the rest of us her prey. That wasn't an accident. She didn't trust us – it's not like she ever acted like we were on the same side."

"Precisely," Sting confirmed. "If we free her, who's to say she won't turn on us?"

"Why would she?" Rogue countered.

"She works for Zeref!"

There was a moment of silence.

"So?" Rogue asked.

"So?" The rabbit rounded on him incredulously. Static prickled in his fur; his eyes flashed with the sweep of the lighthouse. "Rogue, Zeref killed Yukino!"

It was only a slight pause, in the grand scheme of things, but it was enough to tell Sting that his teammate, the other Twin Dragon, his best friend for longer than he could remember, had already forgiven their greatest enemy.

Rogue said, "He didn't mean to."

Sting took a half-hop backwards. "I can't believe it. I can't believe you."

"This isn't the time for divisions, Sting. We have to work together."

"With him?" Sting spat.

"With everyone who is willing to stand with us! That's what it takes to fight Acnologia!"

"He wasn't willing to stand with us!" Sting screamed back. "He killed Yukino and abandoned us on the battlefield! And now he's destroying our kingdom too, because killing our friend wasn't enough, and he has to inflict the same upon every other guild in the realm!"

"She hasn't done any of that," Rogue argued, nodding towards Irene.

"She's chosen his side. She told me herself that we were only going to be allies until she could return to his side!"

"Fine." Rogue wasn't one to raise his voice. His conviction was as quiet as the night, and as impossible to overturn. "If that's what happens, we'll deal with it. It isn't a reason to turn our backs on those who need us."

"Even at the cost of our own lives, our friends' lives, when we meet her on the battlefield tomorrow? Lucy loved Zeref, and look where that got her!" Between his teammate and the final lacrima, the rabbit stood up on his hind legs, ears flattened, eyes red, a nimbus of light around his body. "This is stupid. We're not handing Zeref back another weapon. We're getting out of here right now, before Acnologia finds us."

"You're the one being stupid," Rogue rebuffed. There was no magic at his palm, but open threats weren't the style of a shadow-user, were they? "Get out of the way."

Sting did not.

Wendy glanced between them – not afraid of either of them, but of the storm they would make together. Gajeel looked undecided.

It was a dragon's roar that finally broke the stalemate. In the sky, a monstrous black shape was growing closer by the second.

The only thing worse than being hunted by Acnologia was being hunted by Acnologia while in the body of a rabbit. It was all Sting could do to hold on to his sentience as the panic of the prey-animal flooded him. Going by the expressions on the other's faces, the humans weren't holding up much better either. Having fought him before hadn't made them used to it – it had only hammered home the truth of the myths.

"We have to go, now!" Sting yelled. "Leave her! We must- Rogue!"

Heedless to his cries, the Shadow Dragon Slayer leapt right over him and slammed his fist into the final crystal.

"ROGUE!"

Too late. The lacrima shattered.

Rogue caught Irene's body with a gallant struggle. He was still in the process of trying to lower her to the ground when her eyes opened. They were a dragon's eyes: inhuman in their yellow-green slits, inhuman in their haughty hostility, and they pierced through those in the clearing who waited with bated breath.

Overhead, Acnologia snapped his wings in and dived towards them.

"Can- can you stand?" Rogue asked breathlessly.

Irene closed her eyes again and did not answer.

For a moment, the entire group of Dragon Slayers stood frozen, as vengeance dived towards them on the wings of darkness.

Then Irene snapped her fingers.

At once, the thicket around them came alive. Thorny bushes embedded with fragments of crystal, underbrush entwined so tightly it was a hundred plants in one, the claws of brittle bark overhead – the forest abandoned its previous hostility and enclosed them in a dome of foliage.

In the lull that followed, Gajeel was the only one brave enough to speak. "Yeah, not sure that's gonna do very much against a freakin' dragon."

But if the forest had jumped to attention at the mere snap of her fingers, then Irene's voice could make the entire world fall in line: "Enchant!"

The leafy barricade blazed with her power: the magic of change and permanence, of substitution and augmentation, and her will.

And Acnologia's attack couldn't break through it.

The moment Irene's magic evaporated from the plants, they combusted in the residual heat. White ash crumbled around them, revealing Acnologia once more as he banked sharply in the sky, startled by the lack of effect his strafing run had had on the forest.

Irene slipped out of Rogue's numb grasp and landed with vulpine grace. Her body rippled with light, stripping away the old clothes in which she had been kidnapped and replacing them with supple leather armour, a sumptuous cloak, and a wooden staff which once would have anointed kings and awoken the sun. Beneath an oversized witch's hat, her hair twisted itself into a long plait.

It wasn't about vanity, it was about control. Out of all the Dragon Slayers facing down the Black Dragon, she was the only one who looked like she had chosen to be there.

"Yes, I can stand by myself, thank you," she said coolly.

"…Wicked," Gajeel remarked.

Everyone stared at him.

"What? We were all thinking it."

Acnologia circled back around. His wings fluttered, descending clumsily, bringing the full extent of his dismemberment into view. With one foreleg, he had looked like a wounded dragon. With none, he looked like no monster they had ever seen before.

The dust of trees and the heady smell of pine rose up as his hind legs crashed down. Not used to landing on only two, he struggled to find his balance, and roared, as if challenging them to laugh.

They didn't, not quite. Astonishment held their tongues more effectively than any threat.

But Irene was smirking slightly as she stepped forward. "Well, look at you. Who was it who bested you this time? Dragon… or human?"

"The damage is reversible," Acnologia snarled. His eye seemed to spin in its socket before settling upon Wendy. "Give me the one with Sky Magic, and the rest of you can live."

"Get lost," Sting spat. It wasn't particularly threatening, but then again, he was a rabbit.

"I won't help you," Wendy spoke up bravely. "No good will come of it. Your time is over."

The dragon snarled. "It's over when I say it is. And until I've torn every one of your friends apart bone by bone, do not think you have defied me, human."

"Our parents defied you until the end, and so will we," Rogue vowed.

"Then die pathetically, like your father did." Wings beating madly, Acnologia reared up, ready to strike like a snake.

Out of the treetops came a flash of red. It struck the side of his neck with viper-like finesse – a direct hit to a spot that those who had fought on board the airship knew all too well; that old wound made by Skiadrum and burned by Igneel and cursed by Zeref and re-opened only days earlier by the Alvarez fleet's command ship.

Two blades jutted from that weak point in Acnologia's armour like pitons from a cliff face, and clinging to them was a mage that, by this point, only Irene wasn't expecting to see. Having not met her before, Irene had yet to grasp Lucy Heartfilia's propensity for appearing wherever there was trouble.

The Black Dragon let loose a mighty howl, and the Dragon Slayers moved as though they'd been preparing for this moment all their lives.

Acnologia's tail swept round towards them. Gajeel intercepted it with a will of iron – and a gigantic blade of black karmic steel. Bolstered by the strongest support enchantments Wendy could muster, he barely flinched at the impact.

The dragon snapped at Lucy. She let go of Cancer's blades the moment she saw him move. He had been expecting that, and angled accordingly, but he hadn't been expecting Rogue to drop out of the shadow of his wing. In one easy move, Rogue scooped up Lucy and swung his foot to collide with Acnologia's front tooth, a blow that jarred all the way to his brain. They vanished into the shadow under his chin, and the dragon's jaws clamped shut on empty air.

Bellowing in rage, Acnologia pulled out of the strike, or tried to. But a rabbit possessed of the holiest of magic had woven between Gajeel's legs and slapped the dragon's tail with a binding stigma – not enough to freeze a beast of his size, but enough to apply unexpected resistance when he tried to use his tail as a counterweight.

Enough for him to begin to topple.

Instinctively, his wings flared out to catch the air. But there was no air. This space was under the control of a Sky Dragon Slayer, her hair billowing, her eyes luminescent, and if she desired for the air pressure around his wings to drop to nil, then so it would be.

His wings met no resistance. The once-mighty dragon crashed face-first to the ground.

Throughout this whole clash – which had lasted no more than a few seconds – the only movement Irene made was a slight quirk of her eyebrow as the dragon fell. "Not bad, for a bunch of kids."

"We're not kids," Wendy corrected her, and her voice was quiet but the low humming of her Dragon Force lent it unrivalled authority. "We're Dragon Slayers."

Irene's grip tightened until her staff splintered, but when it relaxed again, the wood was whole. "It must be nice to have something to associate with." Far from the patronizing tone Wendy was expecting, Irene sounded almost wistful. "Some good reason to fight."

"We're not fighting because we're Dragon Slayers," Sting interrupted, as vicious as a rabbit had ever been. "We're fighting for each other, and all our friends back home. If you don't understand that, it's your loss."

"Of course I understand it," she dismissed. "I just…"

"Don't have anyone worth fighting for?" Sting finished for her. "Not even your precious murderer Zeref?"

"Not now!" Rogue hissed at him.

Before Irene could say anything, Wendy touched the older Dragon Slayer's arm lightly in reassurance. "Don't worry. No one has to face him alone. You've got us."

Acnologia was thrashing around as he tried to stand. He had no balance, and, whether through fury or pain, almost as little motor control. His head was in the dirt; his shoulders contorted, heaving.

Across this gruesome backdrop Lucy ran. "Wendy! I need you- Natsu's dying! He turned into a dragon and Acnologia cut him down with his Dragon Slayer magic, he's barely hanging on, he needs you at once-"

Wendy nodded firmly. "Show me where he is, I can save him-"

"Never."

It was the rasp of vengeance, the ferocity of a skeletal hand punching its way through a coffin, even death unable to stop it.

"The Fire Dragon King will die."

Amidst the blood and the dirt, barely able to raise his head, Acnologia unleashed his most devastating breath attack yet.

And Irene moved.

Even as a fox, she had been graceful. Confident. Superior. As though she had never spoken a word she didn't mean, never acted with anything less than measured certainty.

Only at the last were her motions clumsy.

As if this wasn't something she'd practised a thousand times for an ancient royal court.

As if this was something she'd never done before at all.

She tried to push Wendy's shoulder, missed, caught her by the neck instead; the girl half-fell, half-spun out of the beam's path.

Irene was already turning, trying to enter a defensive stance, but the attack hit when her staff was only half-raised.

Regardless, she poured all the magic she had into her own body. Her skin was hardening even as it burned, flesh was eaten away but the bones beneath were indestructible. There was no time to create a shield, so she made her own body into one, set between Acnologia and the young Dragon Slayers.

For a single moment, her defensive magic was greater than that of any dragon who had ever lived.

Acnologia's hate was greater still.

All his rage was focussed into a single, sustained blast. It cut through the earth as easily as it did the air, and it cut through her, too – the first of the Dragon Slayers, and the oldest, but not quite the strongest, for she had pushed her fate away when Acnologia had embraced his.

She was still standing when the light faded, but by the time the earth had stopped shaking and time itself had crawled back out of hiding, she was sprawled on the ground.

Breathing, but dying a little bit more with each breath.

Wendy took an automatic step towards her, and then hesitated, her foot still in the air.

"You have to help Natsu!" Sting shouted over the reverberations in their ears, the first to understand her hesitation.

"But- Irene-" There were a hundred equally ineloquent words in Wendy's helpless gesture.

"There's no time," Irene rasped, with more rationality than anyone so close to death should have. "Go to your friend. If he has turned, he will be of more use in this battle than I."

"But-"

"Wendy, go!" Sting roared, bounding towards her.

Quite what he was going to do when he reached her wasn't clear. He only knew that he had to stop her from choosing to save their enemy over Natsu, his idol, his inspiration, his friend.

But magic flared around Wendy's hand, and then the rabbit was just a rabbit, thoroughly confused by all the people staring at it. It took one glance at them and scampered away. Too far away for them to hear, a newly human Sting screamed in frustration.

"You saved me," Wendy murmured, stepping towards the dying woman. "I can't just walk away and let you die."

"Foolish little girl." Irene's eyes closed. "That's not your choice to make."

With one last effort, she raised her fist, and slammed it back down into the ground.

The world was bathed in scarlet light – and then, for all in the vicinity, there was a twisting, a pulling, and then darkness.

Lucy didn't know where she was. One moment, she'd been facing Acnologia alongside the Dragon Slayers, and the next, some peeved deity had snapped off part of the dragon-created wasteland and jammed it into the heart of the overgrown forest, then dropped her right in the middle of it. Trees sprouted awkwardly from earth that was only just re-solidifying; the barrenness seemed taken aback by the sudden presence of life amidst its devastation.

But more importantly, Lucy didn't know where Natsu was.

There was no one in sight. She screamed his name, screamed Wendy's name, realized she didn't even know the name of the scarlet-haired stranger who had taken the attack meant for the last Sky Magic user, and screamed wordlessly for her, for them, for the emptiness.

The whole point had been to trick Acnologia into leading her to Wendy, so that she could bring her back in time to save Natsu. Now, she'd lost both of them, and herself-

"I could get whiplash watching you go from badass to totally pathetic," a familiar voice sniffed. "Good job I never pay that much attention to you, really."

Lucy almost fell over backwards. "Aquarius?"

Floating in mid-air over a disjointed wasteland, Aquarius gave her owner a look that managed to drag out all four syllables of ob-vi-ous-ly without making a sound.

"What are you doing here? I don't even have your key!" Acnologia must have taken them from her when he'd attacked the airship and captured her. The rift in spacetime had been her weapon ever since.

"Hmph. What's new? You didn't have my key for nearly an entire year before you bothered to do anything about it!"

"Look, I've said I'm sorry! I didn't know celestial keys regenerated when they were broken! It's not my fault no one ever explained the rules to me!"

From the mermaid's expression, she clearly considered this no excuse.

Huffing, Lucy turned to glare at the wasteland instead. Surely she should have been safe from this Spirit here, where any water that had once flowed by had evaporated long ago. "I suppose now you're going to tell me you don't even need water to be summoned."

"There's never a shortage of water around when it's you," Aquarius said dismissively, flicking a stray tear from Lucy's cheek. "Honestly, you'd think having a boyfriend who cried all the time would make you take a long, hard look at your own habits, but I suppose some people just aren't capable of change."

Lucy sighed. "Did you want something, or are you just here to criticize my life choices?"

The Celestial Spirit spent a little bit too long thinking about this. "Well, I'm not really supposed to tell you things I learnt while bonded to other owners, especially ones on opposite sides of the war, but all bets are off on whether your boyfriend's going to pull through today or not, so to hell with his rules. That magic you just experienced is a favourite of Irene's called Universe One, albeit on a much smaller scale than normal. It rearranges space and geography in accordance with some bizarre coordinate mapping that not even she understands. Best she can do is pick two boundary conditions – say, putting Wendy exactly where Natsu is and sending Acnologia as far away as she can manage – and solving those dictates the locations of everyone and everything else."

"…Uh," Lucy managed.

She got the distinct impression that Aquarius was rolling her eyes without doing anything as demeaning as actually rolling her eyes. "Natsu's going to be fine."

"Good." Lucy would have collapsed into a chair if there was one to hand.

"And, secondly… this is the Dragon of the Apocalypse we're talking about. You're not going to beat him unless you give it everything you have." When Lucy just blinked at her, Aquarius flicked her tail, finding the gap between pride and compassion a tricky one to navigate. "Do I have to do everything for you, just like last time? You have to summon the Celestial Spirit King."

"No!" Without thinking, without hesitating, just a mistake Lucy wouldn't – couldn't – repeat. "I can't lose you again!"

"It's not as though you having my key or not makes a difference, does it?" Aquarius sniffed. "Given the, oh, one time you've summoned me since becoming my owner again."

"I thought you didn't like it when I summoned you," Lucy floundered. "Disrupted dates and all that…"

The Spirit ignored this. Even her silences sounded haughty.

"But I can't do it anyway!" Lucy protested. "I don't even have your key, so I can't possibly break it to summon the Celestial Spirit King!"

"Yes, which would be a problem, if not for the fact that you've been steadily ripping a hole in space for the past ten months or so."

"That wasn't me-"

"It was perfectly stable for four hundred years, then you started pulling Celestial Spirits through it," Aquarius accused. "The only thing stopping you from doing the same to the King is your own cowardice."

"But-"

"Listen. The Celestial Spirit King is the Celestial Spirit Realm. He's the personification of the magic that bridges physical reality and the vastness beyond. To manifest him in this world, someone needs to take his place, or the entire magic your boyfriend helped create will collapse. All the Zodiac Spirits are strong enough to do it, but only for a short period of time, and the strain of it invariably shatters our key."

Aquarius folded her arms tightly, bored by having to give even that much explanation. "You don't need my key to summon the King. You need only magic, heart, and my goodwill. Which you will have, on one condition."

Lucy's mind was whirling, but those sea-blue eyes weren't prepared to let her go. She swallowed. "What's the condition?"

"That once my key has regenerated, you come and find it properly. No cheating. No asking your boyfriend where it is. You have to earn it – earn me. Prove yourself worthy with your own two hands." Aquarius flicked imaginary dirt from her forearm and added, under the pretence of an afterthought, "And don't take a whole year over it this time."

"I won't, I swear!" Lucy responded automatically, throwing her hands up to protect herself, and only realizing a heartbeat later what it was she had agreed to.

"Right. Good." Aquarius gave her owner an even sharper look than usual. "Well, then."

"Aquarius…" she prevaricated.

"You're better than this, Lucy."

Lucy drew in a deep breath. Everyone knew what needed to be done – Natsu, Zeref, Irene, Aquarius. She was the only person struggling to make that sacrifice, and she was being asked to give up far less than any of them.

This wasn't goodbye. It was just… a temporary respite from Aquarius's attitude, that was all.

Last time Lucy had performed this ritual, she had been drowning in the sorrow of their parting, pouring her heart and soul into a magic she didn't understand in the hope that she would have nothing left with which to feel the pain. She had been nothing more than a conduit for grief, a vessel for the magic; she had survived the devastation by pure chance and been offered a gift she had done nothing to deserve.

This time, she knew the weight of the magic she called. She knew the cost; she had borne it entirely on her own for ten months. She knew its legacy, too. The nightmare of Tartaros – desperation and isolation and fear – wasn't the beginning and end of this magic. She remembered, as vividly as if she'd been there, Anna creating the ritual in the chaos of the battle for the Eclipse Gate, sacrificing the black key so that the Celestial Spirit King and Mard Geer could fight back to back against the overwhelming odds.

This time, she was in control.

This time, rather than being driven beyond her own limits, she was the one pushing at the boundaries of magic.

No one had ever done this before. No one knew how to invoke the power of Star Dress without using the corresponding celestial key, so the King, who had no key of his own, was naturally barred from that form of the magic.

But as the Celestial Spirit King's power began to manifest in the physical world, Lucy drew upon the magic she wasn't supposed to use – because when had that ever stopped her? – and embedded that power within her own body.

She was a living creature, a miracle of the One Magic. The Celestial Spirit King was the closest it was possible to get to World Magic within a single reality. For longer than there had been a concept of time, the two forms of magic had coexisted without interacting.

Now, in her, they came together: two and yet one; a vast swirl of concepts and meanings that was no longer the girl named Lucy Heartfilia.

And they are…

Time without end.

Space without limit.

A universe that is infinitely vast, and yet is only one within an infinity of infinities, filling a space which can never be filled.

And they are…

Everything that was.

Everything that will be.

The explosive birth of the universe, and its slow, entropic death; the billion billion lives that fade to nothing as somewhere else, somewhen else, those infinite infinities roll on, their multitude not lessened by the expiration of one more.

And they are…

Size.

Scale.

The sun impossibly far away, the stars further still, and beyond them, a place that light has not yet reached in fourteen billion years of travel.

A place that is dark and dark and dark.

An incomprehensible vastness that reaches out and swallows one overwhelmed human mind, who never should have looked so deep.

…

…

…

And she is Anna Heartfilia, the scholar who realized that humanity had no words to describe such vastness, so crafted a language of mathematics to frame it for her.

And she is Zeref Dragneel, who felt that no magic should be beyond human reach, and created a way for its potential to be harnessed in their own reality.

And she is every human being who ever looked up at night and drew lines between the stars, binding the vastness with their own imaginations, finding dreams where there should only have been emptiness – dreams which became myths, myths which became part of collective memory, collective memory which resided in the minds of those two pioneers and shaped the living magic they brought into existence.

And she is Lucy, heir of the Heartfilia line, the last true Celestial Spirit mage, who has seen into infinity and yet remains of the One Magic; of love, of life, of humanity, and herself.

Lucy opened her eyes.

The world was brighter than it had been before.

Aquarius was gone, but the last of her power resided within Lucy, a connection to the Celestial Spirit Realm and the infinities it promised. The wasteland was still the jumbled mess that Irene's magic had made of it, but even that had its patterns, equations that explained how and why to anyone with the patience to look for them.

There was no such thing as chaos in the universe. Everything moved as it was meant to; with ambition and tenacity, everything could be understood.

She breathed in.

Breathed out.

She had no fear, she had shed that amongst the nothingness of space, and without it, the world seemed so calm.

White armour had settled around her body with the lightness of silk. It felt like wearing starlight; nothing impeded her motion or her sight, and she could detect it only as a shimmer in the corner of her eye. At her hip there rested a sword, its hilt bedecked with a five-pointed star. It wasn't as large as Ophiuchus's greatsword, or as flashy as Cancer's twin blades, because that wasn't where the power of the Celestial Spirit King lay.

"Lucy!"

The shout echoed from a great distance, but dragons could cross such distances in the blink of an eye, and Natsu was already crashing down in front of her. There was a scar across the pale scales of his underbelly, a remnant of a wound that not even Wendy had been able to fully heal, yet the dragon bore it proudly.

He paused for a moment to take in her new appearance, opalescent eyes so familiar despite the serpentine double-eyelids. "Nice getup. Is it from that big ol' king?"

Lucy nodded.

"Thought so. The moustache was a bit of a giveaway."

Yelping, Lucy pawed at her upper lip, only to find it just as moustache-less as usual. She glared at the grinning dragon. "You jerk," she groaned, swatting his leg.

"You coming, or what?" he asked her, still grinning.

"Course."

Natsu crouched low to the ground so that Lucy could climb onto his back. In her left hand, she clutched a bone-white spike for security. With the other, she drew her sword from its sheath and set it across her lap. It felt as though it had been made for her. It was, after all, only a concept.

Effortlessly, Natsu took to the sky. There, above the patchwork ground, as though the wasteland was already trying to knit itself back together, the dragon and his rider circled, waiting. They both knew that Acnologia would come to them. One way or the other, it would end here.

Acnologia knew that, too. And thus, battered, broken, and incensed beyond any reason he may have retained throughout the years, he came anyway.

He was a blot on the perfect horizon. He was a grotesque husk of a dragon, more a lump of flesh than a living creature, the stumps of his forelegs oozing blood and dirt without discrimination. Broken as he was, his short-lived dream of hunting dragons until the end of time was no longer possible. Every efficient blow the Dragon Slayers had struck against him had chipped away at his superiority, had driven a wedge into his wounds both physical and mental.

There would be no more restraint. No more rationality. If he was not stopped now, then he would not stop until all the world was ash.

Lucy looked with the eyes of one who had seen through time and saw the end of an age in him.

Everything else, they could sort out themselves. The war, the political tension, even the civil unrest that had spawned Avatar – between her and Zeref, Natsu and August, Invel and Cana, Dimaria and Brandish, they could find a way to resolve them. They were human problems, and they would be overcome by humans; by foolish, naïve, but ultimately optimistic humans, who dared to love each other and clung to the belief that they could become better people than they were before.

They could end the war by themselves.

They could not end Acnologia.

His era should have closed with the departure of the dragons' ghosts. He had been given a chance to move on, to find another purpose, to make a new life for himself in whichever form he chose. He had turned it down. He had chosen to fight and never stop fighting; to make dragons when he had run out of natural prey to hunt; to propagate the cycle of violence that Igneel had given everything to end.

A monster like that did not belong in their world.

As soon as he saw them, he blasted out the most powerful breath attack Lucy had ever seen. Natsu spiralled out of the way. He made it look so easy. Those reaction times, that strength. Lucy could feel the muscles shifting like continental plates beneath his scales, and heralding just as much devastation.

Leaning forward, she murmured, "Show him how it's done, Natsu."

As though he'd been doing this all his life, Natsu pulled out of his dive at the perfect moment, replacing the fizzled-out energy with a surge of fire.

Lucy knew heat. She had taken on the powers of a Fire God Slayer; she had crushed Arlock's manifestation of pure fire magic with her bare fists. Yet the power of a god was nothing compared to the flame transcendent of the Fire Dragon King.

Heat cracked her skin, set the blood frothing in her veins. Her hair twitched and jumped as its ends began to smoulder. She wanted nothing more than to crouch down amongst the bony ridges of Natsu's back, seeking shelter from the blaze, but she forced her head up, unblinking, and stared into the flame.

Stared through the flame.

To the future it was forging.

It was a tiny sliver of the King's true power, a mere few seconds of the future all at once, not enough to risk losing her identity in the vastness of it, but more than enough for her to whisper to Natsu, "Dodge when I say… now."

The Black Dragon burst through the flames. Acnologia's jaws crashed shut right where Natsu should have been, aiming to sever the smaller dragon's neck in a single definitive blow.

But Natsu had already dodged left. Tooth and claw, he and Acnologia grappled in mid-air, clinging tight and biting deep enough to puncture scales.

For all that he fought like a dragon, though, Natsu listened like a human to the instructions Lucy relayed to him from somewhere outside time – reacting in a heartbeat to advice that went against his draconic instincts, but was invariably correct. Natsu's smaller size didn't matter. When every flip of the coin went their way, his recklessness was their greatest asset.

As the dragons wrestled, jaw-to-jaw, neck-to-neck, Lucy shouted, "The age of hatred and war is over, Acnologia. You can choose to stop fighting. You can find a place in this world too."

His was the roar of a beast that rejected any world which valued forgiveness.

Lucy closed her eyes. "Then begone," she murmured. "We reject you also."

In one swift move, she seized the sword from her lap and slashed it horizontally. The hum of her blade was the hum of the firmament; an edge of starlight leapt from the metal and struck Acnologia across the eyes. His howl jumped an octave. Wings flapping madly, he tried to throw off the smaller dragon.

Light shone in Natsu's eyes. He drove his hind legs mightily into Acnologia's underbelly, using the impact to push off and arc backwards in an elegant, curling dive.

Lucy cried out in exhilaration, and Natsu roared with her. Any tension between them was long gone. Acnologia feared letting go of his hate – feared what he would find beneath it. Feared that there would be nothing there at all. But for those two, any anger they felt for each other always yielded. They were best of friends, teammates who had had each other's backs from the day they'd met; a human and a dragon working together to banish a foe who could not be defeated by either.

As they levelled out again, Lucy glanced up, glanced through, the photons hitting her eyes a few seconds before they'd left, because all of time was now and the past and future merely perceptions.

Acnologia dived towards them faster than she would have thought possible, had she not already seen it happen. Lucy counted the last few seconds, and then yelled, "Now!"

Like twin pennants of the cataclysm, crimson wings flared out on either side of her. In fact, the sudden deceleration left her body feeling like a flag in a gale, but the sight of Acnologia crashing into the earth in front of them brought her firmly back to reality. Natsu was already upon him, aiming for the old wound in his neck, striking to kill.

And then there was fire.

For a moment, Lucy thought she had fallen back into the vastness of World Magic, and was witnessing the birth of her universe once more.

But it was too real for that, too familiar, too righteously, bright-burningly savage. That fire held the power of a dragon, a demon, and a human, stabilized by Zeref's unyielding will and harnessed by Natsu's unrivalled passion.

Acnologia's exposed flesh, the stumps of his arms and the re-opened scar at his neck, blackened before their eyes. His scales, impenetrable by force, glowed so hot that the flesh beneath them was burning. He was cooking within his own hated dragon-skin.

In desperation, Acnologia did the only thing he could to make it stop: he transformed back.

Maybe he'd hoped that he could eat Natsu's fire in human form.

Yet as he gulped that poison down, it didn't lessen in intensity, but darken in colour. The Book of END was fully active; Natsu had come into his powers as the greatest of the Etherious demons. Acnologia burned on a pyre of ruby and onyx.

Maybe, instead, he'd hoped that he could use his Dragon Slayer magic to kill Natsu before Natsu killed him.

Indeed, the absence of his arms did not stop him from pivoting on one leg and lashing out with the other. The horrid light around it, forming the shape of a ghostly dragon's claw, would have cut Natsu right open, if Lucy hadn't blocked it with her sword. The flames twisted around her without touching her, because all of space was here and location merely a perception.

Fearless amidst the inferno, blade of starlight in her hand, she stood between Acnologia and her best friend: a human siding with a dragon, a scenario the assassination strategy he had perfected over the centuries did not account for.

Maybe, when Acnologia changed back, he'd done so in the hope that he could die as a human.

In that, his wish was granted.

It might have been Natsu's claw, it might have been Lucy's sword. Firelight glinted upon twin arcs moving in perfect alignment, and Acnologia's head toppled from his body.

The flames reached out and took what was left of him down to hell.

"It's over," Lucy said.

To the corpse of the monster turning to ash before her.

To the Dragon Wars that had birthed him.

To the cycle of hatred he had kept alive across four hundred years.

To the age that had been lived the shadow of the Wings of Darkness.

Over.

A/N: Happy New Year all! Believe it or not, it was entirely unplanned for this chapter to fall over the New Year, but the timing couldn't have been more appropriate. The end of an era. Let's hope 2022 is a good one! ~CS