Effervescence

Chapter 6

Oh. My. God. I have 2.7K reads on this thank you so much!!!

This chapter is dedicated to EVERYONE who has read this story. Thank you all so much!

I'm so sorry I haven't updated in nearly a month. My internet in Europe was sketchy, and tended to quit halfway through anything. Then, school and rowing practice started and, BAMM, no time for ANYTHING. No excuses though.

This is going to be short, but necessary. Enjoy!

-Maia

~~

Sting, Laxus, and I stumbled off of the train, and by the look of the two - I was just as green. We had traveled from Magnolia to a small town called Clover on the east side of Fiore. From here, we'd team up with Sting's guys. Rufus Lohr, Rogue Cheney, and some chick called Minerva were meeting us at some place called the Rusty Inn.

Oh, and some dude called Orga (who for some reason Laxus couldn't wait to pound into the ground) would meet us at the cave.

True to the plan, we found Sting's three friends waiting inside the Inn, and we got the run-down of what was going on. Basically, they'd been commissioned to figure out why some runes weren't letting some rich entrepreneur excavate a mountain. Rufus Lohr found the origin of the runes to be a cave entrance, and you know the rest- only siblings can open the cave, yadi-da.

"Why do you think it has something to do with Acnologia and Zeref?" I zeroed in on the Sabertooth group.

"I caught some runes in the enchantment that may have alluded to the two, but mostly it's just a hunch." Rufus Lohr, a memory make mage, told me.

I rounded on Sting, gave him a paralysing glare, and turned tail away from the group.

"Where are you going?!" Sting yelled at my back.

The bastard lied!

"You said it was definitely something about defeating Zeref or Acnologia. It's probably not. Just a hunch. I'm not gonna waste my time here, thanks." I felt a muscled arm stop me, and growled.

"Sis, we can at least help them open it now that we're here. They might be right, anyway." He grunted. I sighed, knowing he'd just throw me over his shoulder if I said no.

I mustered every ounce of happiness I had at the moment- that is to say, none. I grinned and turned on my heel, fist in the air.

"Alright! Let's get a move on, gents!"

~~

At the cave entrance, we found a huge, tattooed, spiky-haired, half-naked Orga. He had a really cool hair color, something between mint-green and aqua. As I said, cool.

Before Laxus and Orga could start a fight, I ordered everyone to stand back as I dragged my brother to the cave entrance. We pressed our hands into the rock face, and runes started glowing in the opening.

All at once, the runes disappeared and a dark aura I was well acquainted with hit us like a wall.

Rufus was right after all...

~~

I trailed my fingers across the deep grooves in the wall. It looked like a dragon hollowed out several large rooms in the side of the mountain. The walls were painted with vivid colors over the carvings, swirls of black and blue and red intermingling to create beautiful mosaics of dragons.

A war raged around us. Dragons fighting. Tearing each other apart.

A doorway ahead of me showed a dark tail snaking into the passage, and I jogged through it before anyone could stop me. I emerged into a cave twice as large as the one behind me. Blue words were carved into the ceiling, high above me. Curling around the room was the most life-like fresco of-

Acnologia.

Oh no.

Where the image arched his head downward, beneath it stood two figures- one of them scarred and burned beyond recognition with only one ruby where an eye would have been, and the other...

"Shit."

It was me.