Chapter Two — A Paper With Teeth
Morning rinsed Magnolia clean. The night's rain still clung to window eaves and the undersides of awnings, beading into small suns that rolled and fell one by one. When Asu stepped into the street, the air had the bite of river water and bread ovens—fresh, awake, a little hungry.
He tugged his sleeve to check the new mark on his forearm. The Fairy Tail emblem—scarlet, neat—caught the light like something that had decided to be part of him rather than a stamp on top. His thumb rested there longer than it needed to. The ache underneath wasn't pain. It was the sense of something finally fitting.
[Note: Home Field (Tiny) active.]
"Morning," he told the phantom text, because talking to things that weren't people seemed like a bad habit to start and an impossible one not to.
The guild hall loomed ahead, all timber grin and open doors. A pocket of warm noise pressed out into the square: mugs clacking, voices crossing swords, a crash followed by applause. Inside, the chaos was organized the way a storm is organized—everyone knew where everything would land even if nothing was where it had been.
Levy and Jet argued over a book at one table, fingers stabbing at a diagram like they meant to threaten it into sense. Nab had planted himself in front of the job board like a boulder contemplating faith. Gray had already lost his shirt to the morning. A ginger-haired man stretched his face in the mirror behind the bar as if practicing a new grin to try on someone else's girlfriend later. Mira wiped a glass that didn't need wiping, hair bright as fresh metal, smile ready.
"Asu," she said, and somehow made his name sound like she'd been expecting him precisely this second. "Hungry? It's the kind of morning that wants you to be."
"Starving," he admitted.
"Good. Sit." She pointed with the glass. "Not by the window—Natsu throws people through that one more than he admits."
He took a corner table that felt out of the way without being hidden. The boards had grooves worn from card games and elbows, initials scratched into lower edges where bored hands had needed to make proof. A plate arrived without negotiation: egg, fried potatoes, bread that steamed when he broke it. Butter slid and pooled and made whatever it touched taste like it had been waiting to be found.
"Tea?" Mira asked.
"Please."
She poured, then leaned the elbow of her free arm on the table with the ease of a person who could make standing feel like sitting. "So, yesterday."
He took a careful bite, chewed, watched her watching him. "Yesterday?"
"You walked in, didn't mistake a bar brawl for a threat, put Natsu's hand fire out by… thinking politely at it, didn't flinch when Erza looked through your skull, and you let me pick your mark color." Her mouth tipped. "Some people stagger in here like they've been thrown by their own choices. You came in like you… meant to arrive."
He didn't have a smooth answer for that. "I'm trying to deserve the room."
"Good start." Mira's eyes softened for a fraction, then sharpened on a crashing sound behind her without turning around. "Elfman! If you break that stool again I'm bringing the bill to your sister, not you."
"It broke itself!" a mortified baritone protested.
Asu lifted his cup, let steam ghost his lips. "Do you always run the room with one eyebrow?"
"Two would be overkill." She straightened. "Eat. You'll need it."
"For…?" he asked, though the question didn't need asking.
Mira glanced toward the second-floor rail. The tiny shape of Master Makarov sat there, legs dangling through banisters, mug bigger than his face. He met Asu's eyes and raised the mug in a lazy salute that still managed to weigh something.
"For Erza," Mira said, amused and fond and a little cruel. "She's been here since dawn, armor polished like she's going to a wedding she plans to audit. If she doesn't take a job in the next ten minutes, I'll be surprised."
Asu's fork paused above the plate. "And I'm… invited?"
Mira's shrug was an entire conversation. "Erza doesn't 'invite.' She decides. But she sees people cleanly." A beat. "It bothers the people who like themselves less in clean light."
"You're strange," he said, which was not what he'd meant to say.
"I work here." Her smile turned quick. "Finish up."
He did, fast without looking rushed, the way you learn to do if you've eaten quick meals with people who might need you to run. The table shook once as Gray and Natsu shouldered each other past; Happy swooped down to steal a potato and left a fish scale in its place as payment. The guild had a gravity to it, like a large clock with too many hands, each ticking in its own temper, all somehow keeping time.
Erza appeared exactly when Mira had promised she would, or when she'd intended. Scarlets and steel, hair braided back today like she expected speed. She didn't say good morning. She didn't have to. Morning would obey her whether she acknowledged it or not.
"Asu," she said, stopping at his table as if they'd always met here. "You'll accompany us."
He set his cup down so the saucer clinked just once. "Us?"
"Natsu," she said, which explained the clamor behind her. "Happy. Gray—if he finds his shirt." A glance over her shoulder. "Gray."
Gray, shirtless and trying to look like the shirt was hiding from him on purpose, grimaced. "I swear it—"
"Your shirt is on that chair," Erza said without turning her head.
Gray looked. "Betrayal."
Erza's attention slid back to Asu. "The request is simple. East of Magnolia—a disused chapel has lost a relic lantern. We retrieve it, return it, ensure the site is secure."
Natsu vaulted onto the next table and balanced on the back of a chair like gravity was a suggestion he enjoyed declining. "We beat up anyone who took it!"
"Perhaps," Erza allowed, which for her was like shouting Hell yes.
Happy drifted by, upside down. "We also eat lunch."
"And we do not," Erza added, "purchase half the forest for 'campfire experiments.'"
Natsu's face performed innocence like theater. "Who would even do that."
"You," Gray and Happy said together.
Makarov's voice floated down, mild. "Bring the relic back in one piece and yourselves in at least that many."
"As you wish, Master," Erza said, and the respect in it had teeth.
Asu felt the tug he'd been expecting all morning—no, the tug he'd been wanting. It lodged under his ribs, precise as a hook in good wood. He kept his face composed and his tone light enough to pass as easy. "If this is my formal invitation to risk my life for tablemates, I accept."
Erza's mouth made a shape that almost, almost counted as pleased. "Good. Gather what you need. We leave in twenty minutes."
Natsu was already leaving, in the way that meant he was doing three things that would make them late. Gray was tugging his shirt on like it had personally offended him but he'd decided to forgive it. Happy had found a basket and put a fish in it, then another fish, then looked mock-surprised when Mira slid a wrapped parcel in too.
"Don't bribe me," Happy said, clutching the parcel tighter.
Mira set another paper-wrapped bundle on Asu's table. "You look like someone who forgets to eat when thinking."
"I only—" He stopped. "Yes."
"Sandwiches. And a sweet. If you share with Natsu, I'll know."
"Will you be mad?"
"No," she said. "Just disappointed."
He matched her smile and slipped the parcel into his satchel. The leather felt old and new at once, like it had been made for a different shoulder and decided his would do. He stood. The hall's noise flowed around him and re-formed after he moved, as if to say: you're one of the things that pass through, not one of the things that break the current.
On his way to the board, a stool listed under a too-large man taking too-small care with it. The socket at the top of one leg had chewed itself open, and every time the man shifted his weight the wobble got more enthusiastic.
"Hold on," Asu said, because watching something fail slowly felt worse than fixing it. He knelt, palmed the joint, and pictured wood mending into wood—no flourish, no shine. Not a miracle. A correction.
Heat that wasn't heat nudged his palm. Fibers found each other and remembered their original intent.
[Creation: Joinery — trivial.]
[Fate-Debt: negligible.]
The stool steadied. The large man looked down, at once sheepish and proud. "Huh. Guess I sat better."
"Guess so," Asu said, moving before anyone could ask what he'd just done. It wasn't that he meant to hide. It was that talking about certain things always made them bigger than they had to be.
The job board was a cathedral of desperation and grocery lists. Sheets curled like fish scales along the edges, ink run by damp fingers, wax seals cracked. Requests for missing cats and missing husbands and someone to clear the hornets from the schoolhouse roof. A farmer wanted rain he could afford. A woman wanted someone to tell a ghost to stop touching the curtains.
Between two sheets for bad plumbing and worse rent sat a page that did not belong to either category. The paper was older than the rest but less yellowed, a kind of stubborn white that didn't take stains. The handwriting marched like an old soldier. A simple sketch of a lantern had been drawn in fine strokes, the kind you do when you are trying to remember the exact weight of a thing so you don't forget where you put it.
REQUEST: Retrieve the Lantern of the Silent Chapel (East Forest).
DETAIL: The flame within does not go out. It is needed for rites we remember and debts we fear.
PAYMENT: Fair and grateful.
WARNING: The steps below the altar were not there last week.
Asu's cursor of attention snagged on that last line. Were not there last week. He didn't like the way the words folded back into his head and made slightly different words. Were not there.
Erza arrived at his shoulder without announcing herself. He knew it was her because the air straightened its back. "That one," she said.
"You didn't even look at the pay."
"People who mean 'fair and grateful' write like this," she said, tapping the letters. "And people who lie about it don't draw objects like they're afraid they'll forget them. Besides—" Her eyes moved to the sketch. "—that flame is… wrong."
"Wrong how?" he asked, because he wanted to know what her eyes saw that his didn't.
"Too tidy," Erza said, and left it like a riddle meant to be earned, not solved.
A shadow of him—older, less kind—would have asked whether taking the job was worth the risk. The one standing here felt the question and found it uninteresting. He could taste, like metal on the tongue, the thin thread that had hummed on his skin even before he touched the board. It ran out through the city gates and into the trees and down into stone.
[Ambient ping: Aetheric filament within operational radius.]
He did not look up to the second-floor rail because he knew if he did the Master would still be watching and that watch would be gentle and exact, and he was not ready to be seen that cleanly twice before lunch.
"Take it," Erza said, not an order and not a suggestion.
He reached.
The paper—cool, drier than it should have been in this wet morning—stuck to his fingertips like a mouth that didn't want to let go. A chill coasted under his nails. The room tilted, not physically, but like a thought dropped into a pool and the circles reached farther than they had any right to.
The System stepped out of the dark behind his eyes with its good manners on.
[Quest Registered: Lantern of the Silent Chapel]
[Risk Class: C → pending reclassification]
[Annotation: Divine residue present.]
[Flag: Threshold event.]
Erza's head turned, eyes narrowing the way a hawk's do when a mouse thinks it is the only thing that knows how to be small.
"Asu," she said, low.
He didn't look away from the page. The lantern sketch seemed to be a little more detailed than it had been a breath ago, as if the person who had drawn it was somewhere, right now, remembering the pattern cut into its rim and willing that memory back into the world.
"I'm fine," he said, and wasn't.
"Good," Erza answered, which could mean anything from I believe you to I will stand on your chest if you die in an inconvenient place. She lifted her hand, palm open. "Let's move."