3.
"In the darkness there is silence. In the daylight only lies. Thinking magic is the key opens gates of deadly cries."
The words of the dark ghost drove Lucy to run faster away from the evil spirit, only to remember that she had left Crux in the café next door. She slowed to a stop near a building and leaned against it to catch her breath. Hand to her heart, Lucy calmed down enough to look at her surroundings.
*Where am I?* she thought, looking around only to find the same empty city streets, but no familiar landmarks anywhere. Something made Lucy look up. The sun was still shining, and the sky was blue, but something seemed to be…off somehow. *Was the sky always that shade of blue? Why are there no clouds? Come to think of it…did I see any clouds since I entered the city?*
Puzzled, Lucy moved her head to search in the area around her. The light seemed to bounce off the buildings at a different angle the current position of the sun, casting strange shadows on the ground that didn't match the structures. *Two suns?* she wondered before she moved away from the wall she was leaning on to walk back the way she came.
*This all keeps getting weirder and weirder* Lucy thought, taking a good, hard look at everything in sight.
"In the darkness there is silence. In the daylight only lies…" she said aloud, trying to piece together this strange puzzle.
"Oh man! If only Levy were here. She would know what to do. Or maybe Mira? Or, heck, even Natsu would have a good idea what to do about that scary ghost in the guildhall!" Lucy said, talking to herself just so she could hear something besides the quiet.
Lucy stopped in her tracks and listened.
Silence.
*But the ghost said that silence only happened at night, not during the day, right? So, does that mean there's something, or maybe someone else here with her in the city? Something that, I don't know, makes noise during the day? Maybe?* She was so confused, and that is when she heard it.
A light rumbling sound started all around her and the earth started to vibrate, like the feeling you get from your feet as a train rumbles past or…
"A stampede?"
Lucy looked around franticly, trying to find the source of the noise.
"No one I talked to mentioned anything about wild animals taking over Magnolia! So, where is this crazy sound coming from?!" Lucy yelled; her voice almost being drowned out by the near deafening roar.
Just as she started to cover her ears, the noise suddenly stopped.
"What the…"
When she looked around, she saw that the 'sun' was going down, but the shadows still didn't match. The shadows looked they way they were supposed to, if it was early afternoon; but not sunset.
"Ha! Ha! Ha!"
Lucy heard the laughing and started to find somewhere to hide. She found an empty dumpster and slipped behind it just in time to see the black ghost floating slowly down the street. In the quickly fading light, the ghost looked almost outlined in a faint, white glow.
"Come out, come out wherever you are Lucy! I know you're there. Why don't you come out and play?!"
Lucy took a steady breath, trying to calm her racing heart.
"Come out little Fairy! I don't want to hurt you…much…"
Lucy could hear the threat in the ghost's voice. *Ghosts can't hurt me. They are not really here,* she tried to tell herself this while backing further into the shadow. *But, how do I know that this thing is really a ghost?* Lucy turned to look at the floating image again.
It's body was shaped like a person, only not. It had a head, two arms, but no legs. It looked like it was floating on nothing with a dark, shadowy robe flowing around it. Lucy was really scared to look at its face, but she needed to know. When she saw its eyes, she covered her mouth and tried not to scream.
It had the head of a white skull. Its eyes were an endless black and bleeding dark red blood that sizzled into nothing when it dripped to the ground.
*What the heck is that thing?*
A noise from the far right made Lucy and the ghost look. It was the same group of men she saw before, starting to drink the night away from the many bottles in their hands.
Lucy heard the ghost growl in frustration.
"I will kill you all! DIE mortal scum!"
Lucy didn't have time to react as she saw the ghost fly towards the group of men. She almost yelled at them to run away, but then the ghost flew right through the group of men. *Huh? What just happened?*
The men kept walking without a care in the world, while the black ghost turned to glare at their backs.
"When I capture that Fairy, I will have the power to kill you all!"
Lucy's eyes went wide as she watched the ghost fade into nothing.
*Oh crap! Oh crap! Oh crap! I need to get out of here!* Lucy thought franticly, scrambling to leave her hiding place and turning to run in the opposite direction from the men. Soon, Lucy found the river that ran next to her apartment building. *Yes! Finally, something familiar!*
She watched the shadows start to fade away from the missing sun just as she reached her apartment. *Thank the gods I found it!* she thought as she carefully went through the front door, locking it behind her.
Lucy waited and listened for any sound.
Nothing.
She let out her breath and started up the stairs.
"It's about time you came back, girly!"
Lucy froze. There, sitting on her broken couch, was one of the burly men from before. Her hand went straight to her keys, but she stopped at the man's next words.
"In the darkness there is silence. In the daylight only lies. Thinking magic is the key opens gates of deadly cries."
*How…how does he know that?*
"Confused? Ha! So was I when I first heard it," the man said, getting up and walking around her apartment. "Some creepy ghost looking thing came out of nowhere and started saying that stupid phrase over and over…scared the shit out of me. Doesn't make a lick of sense. But, then again, nothing makes any sense these days."
The man stopped at Lucy's toppled over bookshelf. He looked down and there was something familiar about the way he bent over to pick up a book from the floor. Lucy slowly walked into the room, keeping a good distance away from the stranger in her living room, trying to figure out where she might know him from.
"Who…who are you?"
The man stood up and started dusting off the book.
"You don't recognize me, do you Lucy?" the man said, grinning.
Lucy furrowed her brow and saw something strikingly similar to the man before her and one of the old guild masters.
"Macao?"
The man burst out into laughter and Lucy's eyes went wide as realization started to dawn on her.
"No…no way…"
The man continued to laugh and finally ran his free hand through his hair, giving Lucy a good look at his uncovered face.
"Romeo?!"
"In the flesh, well, sort of."
"But-but…I've only been gone a year! The last time I saw you, you were still little! A kid! Not-not this…adult!"
The man calling himself Romeo stopped laughing and stood up to his full height, towering over Lucy.
"You might want to run that by me again Lucy, because I don't think I heard you right. You think you've been gone for just one year?"
Lucy nodded once, not liking the direction this conversation was headed.
The man let his head drop, looking down at the floor with his eyes closed.
"Lucy…when you left Fairy Tail to go on that solo mission…that was 20 years ago."
Lucy stopped, her brain going into information overload, and she immediately passed out.