Two years.
He had been down here for two years, and the only measurable change he could point to with any honesty was that the kingdom under Bellacora no longer resembled a kingdom. It barely resembled land. What had once been a dead city, empty and preserved by stillness, was now something else entirely, something that didn't have a proper name because nothing that existed above ground had ever looked quite like this.
Most of the buildings were gone. The ones the dragon hadn't walked through in its slow territorial wandering had gone under instead, swallowed by the gradual rise of the sludge that had been spreading outward from the creature's presence for months, thickened by a year and a half of accumulated runoff and biological output until it had stopped being fluid and started being terrain. What remained above the surface was mostly structural bones, archways, and wall sections and the occasional tower stump jutting out of the murk at angles that suggested the foundations beneath them had given up on remaining level. The merchant district he had used as a base was gone entirely, submerged somewhere beneath a stretch of pale sludge that moved occasionally in ways that had nothing to do with current or wind. His fourth base had lasted the longest of all of them, seven months before the ground beneath it simply stopped being ground, and he had relocated to higher elevation after that, to a ridge of natural stone at the kingdom's northern edge that the sludge hadn't reached yet and that the dragon visited infrequently enough to be useful.
The swamp, because that was what it was now and the easiest word to use, had its own logic. It moved slowly, but it moved consistently, the corruption spreading outward from wherever the dragon nested longest, claiming stone and soil alike and converting them into something that sat closer to his grandfather's domain than anything he had encountered outside of it. The spore clouds had thickened with it, drifting in slow currents through the air above the surface, catching what passed for light in this place and diffusing it into something greenish and dim. The smell had changed too, or rather it had concentrated, the sickening layered quality of advanced rot that had once been the dragon's signature now simply the ambient condition of the air itself, present everywhere and inescapable.
To anything else alive, this place would have been a death sentence measured in minutes. The air alone would have been enough, the spore density sufficient to colonize lungs before the first breath finished, the corruption in the ground leaching upward through any surface contact, the sludge carrying enough biological hostility to dissolve most materials given sufficient time. He breathed it all in without consequence, quite the opposite actually; each breath felt like it made him stronger. His slayer nature doing exactly what it was built to do in an environment that was essentially a delivery mechanism for the one thing he processed most efficiently.
Right now, he stood on a ridge and looked out over what was left of the land. The dragon was below him, partly submerged, its bulk displacing the sludge around it as it moved in the long, circular route it had settled into over the last several months. The pale eye tracked along the surface of the swamp, present, enormous and patient. It had nested three times in the last month in the lower sections of what had once been the castle district, each nesting lasting several days, during which the sludge around it had visibly thickened and spread. The mushrooms along its underbelly had grown larger, their caps broad enough now to have developed their own smaller colonies along the edges. It was, by every measurable indicator, more itself than it had been when Nameless first produced it.
He watched it for a while from the ridge, the way he had watched it hundreds of times, and then he pulled out the communication lacrima. It had gone off while he was in his latest spar with the dragon, but he'd been unable to answer, so he had to put it off and hope it was nothing major. Not that he could do much if it was. It would take about six days of straight flying at his max speed to get back to Magnolia, and if anything had gone badly wrong in the time it took him to get there, it was already Vanessa and Laxus's problem whether he knew about it or not.
He channeled magic into the lacrima, and it took less than two seconds for Macao to pick up. Even through the magical haze of the connection, Aelius could make out the bruising on the man's face, and the nervous expression sitting underneath it that had nothing to do with the injuries.
"Macao." His tone made the request clear without needing to be a question.
"Oh, uh....Aelius." Macao laughed slightly, rubbing the back of his head in the way he did when he was buying time. "How's training going?"
Aelius didn't answer. His mask stared back through the lacrima, and the single widened eye made his feelings about that opener sufficiently clear without him needing to add anything.
"Uh....right. Not sure why I thought that would go anywhere." Macao exhaled, visibly steadying himself, the laugh gone now, replaced by the expression of a man who had been building up to something and had decided the building up was taking longer than the thing itself warranted. "Right. I think the council's making a move, but I'll just get straight to the point."
He did, all at once, with the speed of someone hoping that moving fast would make the landing softer. Fairy Tail had dropped to sixth place the previous year. The Council had introduced something called the Grand Magic Games, an annual competition to determine the strongest guild in Fiore, officially framed as a way to give guilds a clear picture of where they stood relative to each other, a cleaner alternative to the kind of conflict that had produced Phantom Lord. Dropping to sixth hadn't been a catastrophe, Macao was quick to clarify; it had actually generated more recognition than they'd had in years, because the only reason they weren't higher was that certain events required numbers that even two people of Vanessa and Laxus's caliber couldn't fully compensate for. Solo, they were nearly unstoppable. In anything that required area coverage or coordinated team effort across multiple simultaneous points, two people were simply two people regardless of how strong those two people were.
Aelius let him finish. Then, "Macao. Is there a reason you're telling me this, or is this simply an update, and your wife beat you for ogling other women again?"
Macao had the decency to look briefly sheepish before pushing past it. "Uh....no. That whole explanation was related to why we need you back, actually." He shifted, and the bruising on his cheek caught the light differently as he moved. "The second Magic Games are happening in a month. And Laxus and Vanessa are currently out on a high-priority S-class mission. One given by the royal family themselves." He let that sit for a second. "You can guess why they can't exactly abandon it. But because they've been gone as long as they have, a few other guilds have started noticing the gap. There's one called Twilight Ogre that's been trying to....coerce us into selling them the guild hall." He placed a hand carefully over the bruise on his cheek. "And you can probably guess what I mean by coerce."
"....And if the guild drops further, others will follow their example," Aelius said, putting the pieces together.
"Yeah....something like that," Macao confirmed.
"So why tell me only now? It will take me three weeks to get back, assuming no major delays." Aelius looked away from the lacrima briefly, down toward the swamp far below the ridge, the dark mass of the dragon moving slowly through the murk before he brought his gaze back to Macao's. "The other two were supposed to be back before the games. That was the assumption you were working from."
"Yeah." Macao's expression did something complicated. "That's why I said I think the Council is making a move. The date was changed a few days ago. Three whole months earlier than last year."
"....So they worded it as adjusting the schedule for a new event format," Aelius said, and he was talking slightly more to himself than to Macao now, a habit that had developed somewhere in the second year of isolation without him fully noticing it. "Likely something about summer attendance. More people, bigger audience, cleaner optics for the announcement." His words trailed off. The silence afterward stretched for a long moment. The greenish light around him filtered through the spore clouds above him, and below the ridge the sludge moved in the slow, independent way it had been moving for months now, the dragon somewhere in the deeper sections, its pale eye somewhere beneath the murk.
It was Macao who broke first. "....Uh. Aelius. You still....there, I guess." He asked, with the tone of a man who knew perfectly well that Aelius was still there and was asking anyway because the silence had become uncomfortable enough to need interrupting.
"....Let me ask you something, Macao," Aelius said at last, his eyes narrowing slightly as they refocused on the lacrima. "Perhaps your age and....wisdom will help me."
"What's that pause supposed to mean, kid?" Macao's voice carried equal amounts of outrage and amusement, the combination producing something that was almost dignity. "I'm plenty wise. I'm still alive, aren't I? Ask me anything. I promise you I can help."
Aelius raised an eyebrow at that, mostly invisible behind his mask except for the faint widening of the eye above it. "....Alright then." He said. And then he used a mental command to switch the lacrima's view, turning it outward and holding it facing below the ridge, giving Macao a clear look at the thing moving through the swamp far beneath them, vast and dark and trailing its slow biological ruin through the sludge with the patience of something that had never once needed to be in a hurry. He let Macao look at it for a long moment. "....How do you suppose I beat that?"
The silence on Macao's end had a different type than the one before it. Less uncomfortable and considerably more stunned, the sound of a man looking at something his brain was still in the process of fully registering as real. "....Aelius," Macao said finally, and very carefully.
"Yes."
"....That is the single most horrifying thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and I have seen Makarov naked."
"....Noted," Aelius said, and switched the view back.
Macao stared at him through the lacrima with the expression of someone who had called to deliver bad news and had somehow come away feeling that his problems were considerably more manageable than he had previously appreciated. "....I'll have everything ready for when you get back." He said.
"See that you do." Aelius looked out over the ridge one more time; the swamp spread below him, the corrupted air moving through his lungs and back out. "And Macao."
"Yea?"
"If Twilight Ogre sends anyone else while I am traveling." His voice had returned to its usual flatness, the brief thread of dry humor entirely gone. "Tell them I am on my way home, too negotiate."
Macao's expression shifted into something that was equal parts relief and quiet concern for whoever was on the receiving end of that particular message. "....Got it, kid."
The lacrima went dark, and Aelius sat on the ridge for a while longer after that, looking down at the swamp. Eventually he stood and spread his wings, the motion immediately complicated by his cloak, the fabric catching the air beneath the span and bunching upward in a way that threw the balance of the first stroke off entirely. He looked at it for a moment, then simply willed it into his requip space, the cloth vanishing cleanly, leaving him in the greenish half light, in just his shirt and the mask, which was a considerably more practical arrangement for what came next.
He pushed off the ridge and caught the air properly on the second stroke, rising above the swamp in a long, banking arc that took him high enough to see the full extent of what two years had produced down here. From above it was worse than from the ridge. The sludge had claimed more of the lower sections than he had realized, the former castle district almost entirely submerged now, only the tallest structural remnants still breaking the surface. The spore clouds sat in thick, drifting layers above it all, and the corruption in the air thinned noticeably as he gained altitude, which was the first time he had been above the worst of it in long enough that the difference registered. He breathed the cleaner air and felt his reserves stop their passive refill and sit where they were, full and stable, no longer being topped off with every breath.
He turned north and flew. It took a day and a half before he reached the entrance of the kingdom. He had forgotten how large it was. Flying at the speed he flew, a day and a half was an answer to a question he would not have guessed correctly if asked. The kingdom spread beneath him in every direction for most of that time, the corruption thinning gradually as he moved further from its center, the sludge giving way to cracked stone, giving way to the drier, stiller ruins of the outer edges, and eventually to the passage that led back out through the false wall.
He landed at the entrance, retrieved his cloak from requip, and went through. The Labyrinth on the other side felt almost quiet by comparison, which said something about how thoroughly time had recalibrated his sense of hostile environments. He moved through it at a pace that left no room for anything the Labyrinth chose to put in his way, and nothing put itself in his way with any particular commitment, and eventually the guarded entrance appeared ahead of him with its torchlight and its posted sentries and the general atmosphere of people whose job was to make sure nothing came back out of that place.
The reaction when he stepped through was immediate. Two of the guards went for their weapons before the recognition hit, and a third made a sound that was not quite a word in any language he knew. Several of them simply stared with the expression of pure shock.
Aelius looked at them for a moment. Then he looked back at the entrance behind him, then back at them. "....I should have told you how long I was planning to be in there," He said. It was not quite an apology and not quite not one.
Aelius walked past them and into the open air beyond the Labyrinth, and felt, for the first time in two years, actual sunlight land on his mask.
He stood in it for a moment. It was warmer than he remembered, or perhaps he had simply forgotten what warmth felt like when it wasn't the ambient heat of biological decomposition. The road stretched ahead of him toward the nearest town, ordinary and unremarkable and entirely free of corruption. It was… nice.
He willed his wings away, folded them tight against his back beneath the cloak as he resummoned it from his requip space, and started walking toward the town.
It took two weeks and three days in the end. The mountain had been his idea, or rather the map in his head had produced the mountain as an obvious answer to the problem of the train route winding around it for three days when the mountain itself was crossable in an afternoon with wings. He had stood at the base of it, looked at the path the train took curving south around the range, looked at the peak above him, and made the straightforward calculation that anyone capable of flight and unbothered by altitude or temperature made when presented with terrain that existed specifically to inconvenience people who couldn't do either.
The crossing had taken four hours. The wind at that elevation had been considerably strong, pushing against the full span of his wings with the kind of sustained force that required actual effort to compensate for rather than simply being an irritant. He had compensated for it, banked north to use the ridge line for shelter on the worst section, and came down the other side into the valley below with roughly four days saved.
The rest of the journey had been unremarkable. Nothing had slowed him down, other than yet another issue of a masked man attempting to board a train, which had been resolved by a simple flash of his guild symbol and a look that discouraged further questions.
And then he was back in Magnolia. It hadn't changed much. Though he could see a few new buildings scattered around that hadn't been there before, larger than they needed to be, the kind of architecture that was less about function and more about being visible. Guilds, most likely. Positioning themselves in Magnolia the way guilds positioned themselves when they smelled an opportunity, eyeing the role Fairy Tail currently held over the city and making their presence felt in the meantime.
He had tried calling Macao as the train pulled into the station. No answer. Which meant either Twilight Ogre was giving them trouble again, or, the considerably more likely explanation, Macao had left the lacrima somewhere he wasn't.
The smoke rising from the direction of the guild hall suggested the former. Or some variation of it, at least. As he approached, the shouting reached him before the guild hall did. Yelling, crashes, the familiar sound of a table breaking. As he got closer to the open doors, he could see Macao and Wakaba were standing together near the center of the hall, trying to hold their ground against a man wielding an iron club. Behind that man, between him and the door, stood four more. Aelius took them in at a glance. The posture said everything. Shoulders back, chins up, the kind of people who joined a legal guild not for magic or camaraderie, but for the license it gave them to do what they would have done anyway. It was honestly laughable. A guild like this never lasted long, and that would be before Aelius was done with them.
"Face it,t old man," the one with the club was saying, voice loud and satisfied. "Fairy Tail's through. Your two strongest mages out on some suicide quest. You should be thanking us for even being willing to buy a dump like this."
Macao had a fresh cut along the side of his head, blood tracking down past his ear. He spat. Right onto the man's shirt, and looked up at him without a trace of apology. "Those two may be gone right now. That doesn't mean we're finished. What gives you the right to attack a legal guild in broad daylight?"
The man laughed, glancing down at his shirt. "Friendly bar brawl. Nothing out of the ordinary for you lot." He raised the club. "Besides. I'm starting to think those two only saved you some face off sheer luck. Weren't you supposed to have a Wizard Saint? Maybe two?" The club went higher. "Willing to bet both died in the accident, and the Council felt too bad to say anything. Let you run around claiming you still have one." The club came down.
Macao smiled. Not the smile of a man losing. The smile of a man who had just seen something standing behind the entire group. Aelius stepped forward and caught it. One hand. It stopped completely, the man's full swing absorbed without Aelius shifting his footing at all. He looked at the man over the heads of the four who had finally turned around, all of them wearing variations of the same expression. "I died, did I?" He glanced at the club in his hand, then back up. "Not too far off, I suppose. But I'm curious." His fingers tightened, causing the iron to groan and begin folding inward where he gripped it, shrieking quietly as it went. "Could a dead man catch this toy of yours?"
"Ah, Thibault," Macao said, far too smug for a man who had just been saved by timing and luck. "Meet Aelius. One of the Wizard Saints you were just asking about."
Thibault stared at him. He was broad across the shoulders, with poofy dark hair, the kind of build that had probably won him every fight he'd ever been in before today by simple virtue of being the largest thing in the room. His guild mark sat dark on his right forearm, and there was enough muscle packed into him that the iron club had probably felt like a reasonable weapon right up until thirty seconds ago. His four companions behind him had gone very still, and Aelius could see the exact moment the calculation happened in each of their faces, the moment the confidence that had walked them through Fairy Tail's front door started quietly looking for somewhere to be instead.
Thibault recovered faster than his companions. That was something, at least. His jaw set, and he pulled his arm back, trying to wrench the club free, which accomplished nothing except confirming that the grip wasn't giving. "A Saint." He said it like he was testing whether he believed it. "You don't look like much."
"No," Aelius agreed.
"The mask's a bit much."
"Practically and sentimentally. Not for your opinion"
One of the four behind Thibault, a wiry man with restless hands and the eyes of someone who had talked his way out of more situations than he'd fought his way out of, took a small step back toward the door. Aelius didn't look at him. "Stay where you are."
The man stayed. Thibault tried once more to pull the club free, failed, and then made the decision to simply let go of it and step back, squaring his shoulders in the way people did when they were trying to make abandoning a weapon look like a choice rather than a retreat. "You know what I think." He crossed his arms. "I think a real Saint doesn't need to crush someone's weapon to make a point. I think you're new to the title and you're still enjoying the sound of it."
"If I wanted to make a point," Aelius sighed, "I would have done this instead." He let go of the club. Before it reached the floor, it had already begun to go, the iron browning and flaking, rust spreading across it in a wave that moved faster than rust had any right to move, until what hit the floor wasn't a club at all but a small pile of reddish dust that scattered quietly across the wood. He looked back up at Thibault. "That was a point."
Thibault stared at the dust. Something moved through his expression, the first genuine crack in the front he'd been maintaining since Aelius walked in. His jaw worked once. Then, because he was exactly the kind of person he was, he found the bottom of the crack and pushed off it instead of letting it widen. "Parlor trick," he said. "Old metal. Probably already halfway gone before you touched it." The four behind him said nothing. They were doing the collective math of people who knew the answer and didn't like it.
"I see," Aelius said. He reached up and began pulling his glove off. It was a slow, deliberate process, finger by finger, and the hall went very quiet around it. Not the quiet of before, which had been the absence of noise. This was something with weight to it, the quiet of everyone in the room understanding that something had shifted without being able to articulate exactly when.
"Wait—" one of the four started.
Aelius closed the distance to Thibault in two steps and pressed two bare fingers to the man's forearm, just above the guild mark. It was not dramatic. That was perhaps the worst part of it, from the perspective of everyone watching. There was no flash, no sound, no visible magic output of any kind. Aelius simply touched him, and Thibault's face went through several expressions very quickly, confusion first, then something sharper, then nothing at all as his legs gave out beneath him. He went down in sections, the big frame folding without any of the resistance it had carried for the entire conversation, and by the time he hit the floor the guild mark on his forearm had gone dark, the skin around Aelius's two fingers already showing the deep, spreading discoloration of something that had moved very fast from the inside.
He was still breathing. Barely, but he would live. Aelius straightened and pulled his glove back on, smoothing it carefully over his fingers. He turned to look at the four remaining members of Twilight Ogre. They were all looking at Thibault on the floor, and then at Aelius, and then at the door, in a rotation that was getting faster.
"Take him," Aelius said. His voice hadn't changed at all. "He'll live. And every time one of you considers walking back through that door," his eyes moved across all four of them, unhurried, "take a look at that scar, and remember why you shouldn't. Leave."
They left. Two of them grabbed Thibault between them without discussing it, and the door swung shut behind all four, and the guild hall was quiet again in the way it had not been quiet for however long Twilight Ogre had been making it their business to come here.
Aelius turned back toward Macao and Wakaba. Wakaba was staring at him with the expression of a man who had known Aelius for years and was still occasionally reminded that knowing him and understanding him were different things. Macao's smug expression had not entirely survived what it had just watched, replaced by something more complicated that he was working through in real time.
"....You actually just." Wakaba started. Stopped. Tried again. "In the guild hall."
"I didn't just kill a man if that's what you're worried about; it was just a paralytic, and a neurotoxin that causes permanent discoloration," Aelius said simply. "Now." Aelius pulled a chair out and sat down, the most normal thing anyone had done in the last several minutes. "Tell me about the Magic Games."\