Chapter Seven — Terms of Collection
The hand had no fingers and still he felt each one.
It fastened over his shadow at the stair's lip—flat and neat, a dark palm pressed to the darker cut of him that lived along the floor. No weight. No grip. A correction, like a teacher placing a page where it belonged.
Asu's foot kept moving. His shadow didn't. The tendon behind his knee sang a thin, bright note. His ankle protested in the private language joints use for this is wrong and I am doing it anyway.
Erza's blade came up—not toward the lantern, but between Asu and the room. She didn't look at him. She never looked in crisis; she placed.
"Gray," she said.
Gray's hands were already up. Air condensed in a wedge at Asu's heels, hard as glass and slightly cruel. His foot slid back onto it with a scraping whisper that didn't quite become sound.
The lantern nearest the stair wasn't a lantern anymore. Its threads hadn't spilled into a sentinel—no shape, no rims, no pretense at body. Only the hand, made of night, the rest of the shadow still caged behind glass like a cloud that had learned obedience.
The System put the letters up with the politeness of a functionary who knows there's no arguing with the form you forgot to sign.
[Clause Invoked: Collection Right (Minor).]
[Agent: nearest.]
[Demand: tender on account of accrued obligation.]
[Tender Types Acceptable: Time slice / Warmth tithe / Memory tithe / Name-glyph / Future-chance (minor).]
[Note: refusal escalates.]
Natsu snarled, flame cracking out along his knuckles before he strangled it and forced it back down. "Let him go."
The hand did not understand anger. It understood columns.
"Don't burn," Erza said, and Natsu didn't. He took that order like a punch and set his jaw.
Happy clutched the basket to his chest until the wicker complained. "It's holding the shadow," he said, voice gone small. "I don't like it—"
"Hold," Erza murmured, not to him, not to the hand—-to the room.
Gray pushed the wedge forward under Asu's heel. "Step."
Asu stepped. The hand came with him. His shadow stretched unpleasantly thin, a wrong length, as if the day had moved without the sun's consent. The pressure in his chest where the compact lived tightened, a thread tugged by a wrist as patient as geology.
[Reminder: Terms remain in force — Spill no blood / Profane not the altar / Devour not the path.]
[Observation: Collection may be negotiated.]
Negotiated. The word landed in him like a coin.
Erza's weight shifted the smallest fraction. Her blade's angle changed from you will not to I will testify. "Explain," she said.
Her gaze never left the hand. She wasn't asking for a lecture. She needed three words that made a plan or a throat to cut.
Asu didn't lift his palm. He wanted to. The Halo lurked under his skin like a dog at the end of a leash sensing prey. "It wants payment," he said. "Not all. A… piece."
Natsu's lip curled. "Take my piece then," he said to the hand, like bargains work that way when you love people.
The hand didn't look at him. It didn't have eyes and if it had it would not have known what to do with them. It had a shadow. That was the unit it understood. The debtor. The column that had been named.
Erza's mouth pressed into a line that could have been grief in a different woman. "No blood," she said. "No devouring. We keep the count. We don't give the room an excuse to ask new questions." Then, quieter, to Asu alone: "Can you write instead of eat?"
He almost smiled. She had named his sin and his virtue so cleanly it felt like absolution. "Yes."
The hand tugged. Not hard. A reminder. Time ticked in the room because it had enjoyed learning it could.
[Tender Required.]
[Suggested Settlement: Time slice (1), Warmth tithe (one hand), Name-glyph (one stroke), Memory tithe (minor), Future-chance (1/100).]
Time. Warmth. Name. Memory. Chance.
He knew what each would take if he put ink to them.
Time meant hours that would go missing like teeth, perhaps when he needed them, perhaps while he slept. Warmth meant a hand colder than luck, skin that never quite regained color, a tell. Name meant the surrender of a letter of himself; those are hard to regrow. Memory—no. He had too few he chose to keep. Chance—he didn't know what shape it would take; probability is a god's favorite joke.
"Choose," Erza said.
He could have asked her to decide for him and she would have. She would have taken the cost and he would have had to take it back later with interest anyway. Taking the decision was a small mercy he could manage.
He lifted his left hand—guild mark side—and set his palm flat to the cold air Gray held under his heel, using it like a desk. He did not conjure paper. He did not conjure ink. He wrote on the absence itself.
"Writ," he said under his breath. "Forbearance, minor."
He made the lines spare and honest. No flourish. No attempt to trick a room that could count down to the breath. He set his seal where a seal ought to go; it was not the guild crest. He would not bind Fairy Tail to a god's column. He set a different seal: the one the compact had put inside his ribs when he had said YES earlier.
[Creation: Writ — Forbearance (Minor).]
[Effect: Convert immediate collection to scheduled tender.]
[Terms: Warmth tithe (left hand), deferred.]
[Collateral: Name-glyph (first stroke only).]
[Fate-Debt: +1 → total 08]
The letters were not visible and still everyone in the room saw them, the way you see promises performed in how a person holds themselves afterward.
Something in the hand's posture changed—if a shadow can have posture. It pressed harder for a beat, testing, then eased. The binding on his shadow slackened enough that the wrong length began to shrink toward right.
Natsu's fists loosened a degree. "Is that a yes?"
"Asu bought time," Gray said, almost approving despite the thinness in his voice.
Erza didn't move her blade. "What will it take from you."
"Warmth," he said, and then, because she deserved the whole knife, "and a line of my name."
Her eyes shuttered for a breath. It was the closest thing to a flinch he'd seen her give a plan. "Good," she said, because she is cruel when she must be. "Keep your feet."
The hand finished reading a thing that had no letters. It slid off his shadow like a glove being removed by careful fingers. It did not leave empty. His left hand went cold in the specific way that means a debt has laid its head there. The guild mark flushed red and then dulled to a shade less proud. A translucent ring settled under the skin around his wrist—no ink, a bruise that was not bruise, a band of evening.
[Warmth tithe: scheduled.]
[Name-glyph collateral: marked.]
[Collection Time: "after return"]
The lantern fog cleared. The hand withdrew. The glass held a shape for a moment—the impression of a palm—and lost it.
"Move," Erza said, voice almost gentle now that no one else would hear it as weakness.
They moved. The stairs remembered they were the right size again and let them go.
—
Up in the chapel proper, the air tasted like stone that had been considered and approved. The bell did not come with them. The altar sat quietly with its ring of script. The door in the floor muttered to itself and then decided it would rather be shut.
Natsu exhaled long and loud. [Noise ▴] ticked somewhere far below and then forgave him because even rooms understand relief. He rolled his wrists and flame crawled and died over his knuckles in a habit that loves him.
Gray rubbed the heel of his hand over his face and left the smallest smear of dust. "I hate underground laws," he said. "Above-ground laws are bad enough."
"Report," Erza said, which is a way of telling your relief what shape it's allowed to take.
"Shadow hands," Natsu summed, cheerful and furious. "Bell that talks without being rude. Lanterns that want to eat fire. Asu wrote an IOU with the air. We didn't die. Happy didn't drop the basket."
Happy lifted the basket in triumph. "I didn't!"
Erza looked past them, scanning, scales tipping in her head. "We leave the ruin. We make the road. We speak to the petitioner. We bring the lantern back here later if the room wants it. We do not tarry between."
"Wait," Happy said. "Time."
They all tilted their chins the way humans do when told to smell something they do not understand. Asu didn't need to. The light in the windows had shifted along the pew-spines. Shadows stretched long. Outside the slices of sky, he could taste noon turned into something like evening.
"How long were we down there," Gray asked quietly.
"Not long," Natsu said, louder than it needed to be.
"Longer than we think," Erza said, and didn't make it a problem because making it a problem in the wrong place gives it a spine.
They crossed the nave. Roots watched them go with the patient malice of old things that know you'll be back because you always are. Asu's left hand kept trying to decide to be warm and failing. He flexed his fingers until the skin over his knuckles went tight and the tendons said unpleasant things and still the cold remained, a coin under a tongue.
Outside, the forest had changed key. The light through the leaves was copper rather than gold; the gnats wrote the same words in a different script. The hum was gone. In its place was ordinary weather—vague, honest, full of the small decisions of small things.
Erza took point. She didn't rush. Silence did not mean safety; quiet is a stagehand, not a character.
They made the path carefully. Twice Gray stilled them and sent thin cold along a patch only he would have called dangerous. Once Natsu skated a hand through a dappled sun-patch and hissed and jerked back like he'd touched a stove. "Sun's hot," he said, offended by reality. Happy offered him a fish. Natsu took it and pretended it solved heat.
Asu walked with the rhythm of a man who is wearing a promise that has a clock in it. He tried not to glance at his left wrist. The ring under the skin did not glow. It didn't need to.
[Reminder: Collection after return.]
[Gentle Note: you promised.]
He breathed through his teeth until the System stopped trying to be endearing. Words have to happen in your head to matter. He refused to let its be the only ones.
"Talk," Erza said, so quiet only a person being measured could have heard it.
Asu didn't pretend not to know which part. He kept to the line that let them live and didn't feed her lies. "I said yes so we would be counted, not weighed. I bought time at the stair so the room could have its due after we'd done our job. I did not bind you. I did not bind the guild."
"You bound yourself," she said.
"Yes."
The word was soft and small and solid.
For three measured steps, she said nothing. Then: "You will tell me what your tool is called."
He almost smiled at tool. It took the sin out of a power like his and set it next to hammers and hinges. "Creation. Absolute," he said, giving the least and the most simultaneously.
"That," Gray said dryly. "Doesn't sound like a problem at all."
Natsu made a pleased noise. "Absolute creation! That's so cool! Can you make—"
"No," Erza and Asu said together.
Happy whispered, "Fish?" and Asu pretended not to hear him.
"The debt," Erza said, not accusing, inventorying. "It follows."
"Yes," Asu said. "Not like a dog. Like a law."
"A law can be amended," she said.
"In committee," Gray said, disgusted.
"In family," Erza said, and that was the first mercy she let herself say in thirty minutes.
Asu didn't thank her. The [Lies ▴] far below had long memories and a taste for gratitude that wasn't backed with gold.
They came out of the deeper green into the kind of light that throws long shadows of men and asks them to consider how far ahead they walk of themselves. The road widened into something that had been a road since horses decided to be useful to people. The smell shifted toward river and bread again. Magnolia's roofs were a smudge at the edge of trees, the signboard a rumor.
They were not alone.
A figure stood at the place where the path decided to become road. Not in the center; off to one side, as if the forest had set him there to see how he looked. Robes the wrong black for this light. Bare head. Skin the color of old paper that has seen smoke. In one hand, something that shimmered like glass ground too fine to hold shape; in the other, a staff-crook that had not been wood for many years.
He watched them arrive as if his job were to judge arrival and nothing else. There was no sigil on him. There was no scent, not even the honest smell of people. The world had not put him down. He had been written.
Natsu's shoulders came up in that pleased way that means his day is getting simpler. "Finally."
"Don't," Erza said, and the don't was a blanket, not a whip.
Gray murmured, "He smells like the lanterns," and Asu didn't argue—because he did. Not smoke. The after-breath of a room that has rules.
The figure inclined his head a fraction toward the basket Happy hugged, which was funny until it wasn't. Happy hugged it harder and bared his teeth like a very small lion. The figure did not look at Happy again; he had been taking a measure, not trying to take anything.
His eyes found Asu. They didn't move once they had.
"You carry it," he said. Not the lantern. Not now. The debt.
Natsu took a delighted step forward. "And I carry a fist—"
Erza's hand closed on the back of his scarf without looking. He stopped with a sound that was either indignation or affection; the two are the same in him.
The man's pupils were not round. They were circles with lines through them, thin as scribe's rules.
"Name," Erza said.
He smiled in the way paper smiles when you crease it where it means to. "Witness," he said. "Of the Door."
Gray breathed out something impolite. "Of course," he muttered. "The universe sends an auditor."
Witness tipped his chin toward Asu's left hand. The band under the skin felt his attention like cold. "You promised."
"I did," Asu said.
Witness nodded, pleased when people kept their own records. "Then I will attend."
"How long," Erza said.
Witness looked at the sky as if time had been hung properly this afternoon. "Until after return."
"Your return," Gray said, unable to help himself, and Witness's mouth did something that might have been amusement if he'd remembered how to have it.
Natsu scratched his head. "So we go talk to the person who wrote the job and then we come back and then we—what? Pay his hand to be warm again?"
"Something like that," Asu murmured, because the choices ahead tasted like metal and prayer and the air above Magnolia.
Witness extended a palm. Not to demand. To show it was empty. The fine, ground-glass shimmer in his other hand caught the light and did not throw it back. Up close Asu saw what it was: lantern ash, the kind that makes your tongue think of devoured flame.
"Do not be late," Witness said mildly, and Asu's compact-thread tugged once in his chest as if to echo him.
Happy glared with the bravery of a small hero. "We are never late," he lied, and Asu loved him for it.
Erza nodded once, the way one captain nods to another across an estuary when the tides make promises between them neither can hurt. "Walk."
They walked. Witness fell in beside them without walking, which is a trick civilized rooms teach their servants. Natsu tried not to stare and forgot and stared; Gray remembered to stare and pretended he hadn't; Happy stuck his tongue out and then was mortified to have done it; Erza did not spare him a glance and thus spared him entirely.
Asu's left hand burned with cold like a candle in reverse. The band around his wrist did not tighten. It waited with the patience of numbers.
[Task: Return what drifts — open.]
[Scheduled Collection: pending.]
They stepped out from under the last row of trees and Magnolia's roofs picked up the late light and hurled it back at the day as if daring it to end. The signboard with FAIRY TAIL on it laughed from its post. The door would be open. Mira would be behind the bar, glass in her hand she did not need. The Master would be a small, precise gravity on the balcony. He had bought time and a debt would mature in it like fruit spoiling in a bowl.
They were twenty paces from the square when the compact thread inside him tugged hard enough to make the world blink.
Not the bell. Not the room.
The other attention.
The circle-and-line hung in the back of his skull like frost.
[Ankhseram: Addendum filed.]
[Comment: Maker who signs for others.]
[Directive: Bring the name that wrote the request.]
[Interest: increasing.]
The air over Magnolia dimmed by a shade no one else noticed because it had no business being a color at all.
Witness—who had not moved—turned his head an inch, as if listening to a wind that had shifted in a room with no windows.
Erza's hand kissed his elbow exactly once. Not a comfort. A tether. "With me," she said, which had begun as tactic and was now a promise.
He was here. He was. The coin under his tongue heated and cooled and refused to be swallowed.
Asu lifted his eyes to the guild sign because it was the only clean line he had left and then lowered them to the square where the petitioner would either be waiting or not.
He didn't have to guess.
A woman had planted herself in the shade of the board where jobs came to be judged by hands. Cloak. White hair, badly tied. Fingers ink-stained the way people's are when they lie to rooms for a living and break themselves a little each time they do it.
She looked up as if dragged and saw the lantern ash in Witness's hand and went dead pale.
Asu felt the compact thread in his chest lift like a hound catching scent.
"Are you the one who wrote the request," Erza asked, though she already knew; asking is part of kindness.
The woman swallowed. "I am."
Witness's non-smile did not get wider. He tipped the ash, a fraction, an hourglass with no glass.
Asu's wrist burned with cold, and the ring under his skin answered a rule from far away.
[Collection: ready.]
The woman's eyes fell to his hand like metal to magnet. "You… took it," she whispered, horrified and relieved in equal parts. "You signed."
Asu opened his mouth to ask her name and the world decided they were out of time for introductions.
The bell they had left underground tolled in his bones.
Witness set his empty palm out into the air between Asu and the woman with the courtesy of a clerk presenting a pen.
"Settle," he said, and everything that loved him or wanted to eat him leaned at once to hear how he would pay.