Slain Among Ice And Fire {Fairy Tail}

Chapter 30- Ripple

But it didn't move, and if it did it was so slow she couldn't make it out apart from the way it's form blurred and wavered near as badly as the rest of everything around her. She swallowed back at the lump in her throat, her hands pulling in toward her and riveted in her spot for a few more seconds, just staring... before slowly she forced herself to relax, at least a little.

... it's not... coming after me...

She dared break her eyes from the Demon, looking around at the fragmented memory of the town and blinking several times.

... this... isn't a dream... it... feels too... real...?

But... how does that make sense? This has to be a dream... but... why isn't it playing out like it always does?

Why does it... look like this...?

She stiffened, her head snapping upward as several figures flew passed over her head out of nowhere, approaching where she stood at a speed unimaginable, and then stalling entirely as they reached her- swirling, smoking shapes suspended overhead and bleeding bits of silver and white... ember...?

... wait a minute...

She counted, one, two, three- all the way up to 12 and she blinked, reeling slightly as she stared at what was little but blobs... but she still knew what they were.

...that's Drille... and the others... my Birds...?

But they looked malformed, and messy- what little linework she could make out above her, scraped across the paper that gave the Birds life was just... completely ill-drawn. They looked little more than the scribbles of a child, and she shivered again.

... these look like... back when I first made them... I couldn't draw for shit.....

"What... the fuck is going on...?" Hora whispered shakily, only for her voice to break when the Birds wavered and burst into pieces- pulled apart at the seams and only held together by stringy remains of monochrome light, before quickly getting swept away from her in the ever moving current of air. She turned, her eyes locked to their remains getting pulled away and the village went with them, jittering and glitching as it all changed again- still so malformed, so hard to make out, nearly impossible to be seen as anything but a watery mess... but this time she found herself standing alone in empty confines of the SaberTooth Inn- and around her flickered monochrome flame, the building crumbling all around, and yet the debris suspended mid-fall.

She turned, her blood turning to ice in her veins when one thing in all the blurry reality actually came into full focus- a burned, twisted, blackened human splayed on the cobble, blood turned to dust and ash in a circle around where it lay, a dead and broken crystal shattered into a million pieces sticking up passed a rib-cage barely holding together.

T-That...

She sucked in a sharp breath of air, stepping back and trembling.

"... t...that's me...?" She hissed, her voice shaking now along with her body.

"Yes."

Hora stiffened, her eyes going wide and heart lurching in panic at the sudden, and entirely unfamiliar voice- clear as day, and not at all dimmed nor subdued like everything else seemed to be.

She whipped around, her eyes flashing in the dim and shifting immediately into a defensive stance as her gaze landed on the voice's owner- a woman, with long, dark purple hair and brown eyes, dressed in a skintight suit that left her back open, and white ribbons in her hair. She walked forward through the monochrome current slowly, pinned between her hip and her arm a glass ball, expression nothing but utterly neutrality as she met Hora's eyes. The woman stopped a few paces in front of her, and Hora bit the inside of her cheek, eyes narrowing and tense as can be.