Crocus was a place Aelius had mixed feelings about. It was a nice city, objectively. Flowers literally everywhere, which wasn't something he was entirely against. The architecture was clean, the streets well maintained, the kind of capital city that took its role seriously and showed it in the stonework. He could appreciate that without difficulty.
The problem was when he had been young, young enough that control over his curse was more aspiration than reality. Makarov had taken the guild children on trips regularly, and Crocus was a natural destination, the capital, the center of Fiore, the place everyone visited at least once, and for a group of young mages it was practically mandatory. He remembered the streets being larger than they seemed now, or perhaps he had simply been smaller.
There was a fire, because of Natsu and Gray, because it was always Natsu and Gray, had started something that ended, as things between them literally always ended, in property damage. A block of the flower displays the city was famous for had caught, which was apparently common enough that there were established procedures for it, people with tools and prepared countermeasures appearing with the efficiency of a city that had learned to expect this category of problem. The fire was manageable. People were already handling it.
Aelius had grabbed a bucket anyway. He had been young and it had seemed like the right thing to do and he had not yet learned to be careful about which right things he reached for. His emotions were high. The chaos, the noise, the crowd pressing in from every direction, Natsu still arguing with Gray somewhere behind him about whose fault it was, which was not a debate with a clean answer. His magic was already close to the surface, the way it always was when he was young and overwhelmed. The magic went into the water, he hadn't meant it to. That was the part that sat with him longest, looking back on it. He hadn't meant anything by it. He had been trying to help, with a bucket of water, the same as anyone would. But his magic had slipped into the water the way it slipped into everything he touched without sufficient control, and he had thrown it anyway because he hadn't fully understood yet what that meant, and the water had hit the burning flowers and put the fire out.
And then kept going, the rot spread from the point of contact outward in a wave, moving faster than anything natural had a right to move. One flower, then the next, then the entire row, then the row beyond it, withering and blackening and collapsing inward on themselves in sequence, each one falling the moment the wave reached it, a line of death moving down the street in both directions from where the water had landed. The fire was gone. The flowers were gone. Everything the wave touched was gone, past the burn line, past where the fire had even reached, dying in a clean, terrible progression that stopped only when the magic exhausted itself against stone.
And to make it all worse, a woman's voice, from somewhere in the press of people behind him, loud enough to carry, the kind of voice that didn't know or didn't care that it was being heard by everyone present. "What kind of abomination walks around with magic like that. Someone put it down before it touches anything else."
He had been eight years old. He remembered the way the crowd had shifted after she said it, not away from the dead flowers, but away from him. The subtle, collective reorientation of a group of people deciding where the actual problem was located. He remembered Natsu, who had caused the fire in the first place, going very still, the words reaching him, and what they actually meant. He remembered Makarov's hand on his shoulder, which arrived quickly enough to suggest the old man had been watching more carefully than he appeared to be, and said nothing, just rested there, which was somehow worse than anything words would have done because it confirmed that what had happened was real and witnessed and not something he had imagined. He had put his mask on that evening and not taken it off in public again for a very, very long time.
The flowers were already blooming as the train pulled into the station, visible even from the window, the famous displays lining the main thoroughfares in every direction, cultivated and maintained and very much alive. He looked at them through the glass without expression. The city had not changed much. Larger than he remembered, or perhaps he was simply use to places smaller than this. The streets were already busy despite the early hour, the Grand Magic Games drawing the kind of crowd that filled a capital city past its usual capacity, people from every corner of Fiore moving through the flower lined avenues with the particular energy of somewhere that had decided it was celebrating something and committed fully to the decision.
As Aelius, and the rest of the guild, departed the train, Aelius found It was infinitely worse than he could have imagined. People everywhere, the kind of everywhere that stopped being a description and became a condition. The station alone was packed past the point of comfortable function, bodies moving in every direction with the collective momentum of a crowd that had somewhere to be and was not particularly concerned with whether anyone else also had somewhere to be. The noise hit almost painfully, hundreds of conversations layering over each other into something that wasn't quite sound anymore, more like pressure, the city itself vibrating with the weight of how many people had decided to be in it simultaneously.
"It's bigger than last year," Bisca said from somewhere to his left, turning her head to take in the scope of it, one hand finding Alzack's arm without looking. "A lot bigger."
"The king's attending again apparently," Alzack said. "Heard it on the train from the two men in the compartment next to ours."
"Everyone's attending," Wakaba muttered, pipe already out, already looking for somewhere the crowd thinned enough to smoke without it being someone else's problem. "Half of Fiore is in this city right now. The other half is on their way."
"It's amazing," Romeo said he was eight now, and had fully become a Fairy Tail mage now and Aelius could tell he meant it, head turning constantly, taking everything in with the open attention of someone experiencing something at a scale he hadn't been prepared for. He was taller than Aelius remembered, which wasn't surprising, he had forgotten Macao had a kid most days.
"Don't wander off," Macao said immediately, in the tone of a man who had been saying variations of that sentence for most of his adult life and had made peace with the fact that it never fully worked.
"I'm not a kid anymore, dad."
"You're my kid. Different category."
Jet and Droy were slightly ahead, navigating the crowd with the ease of people who had spent enough time running jobs in busy cities that crowds were simply terrain rather than obstacle. Jet had been quieter than usual since Aelius arrived back, which was a choice Aelius had no particular objection to. Droy was pointing at something across the main thoroughfare, a display of some kind, and Jet leaned slightly to see what it was before shaking his head and saying something that made Droy push his shoulder.
"The arena's this way," Macao said, consulting something, a pamphlet by the sound of the paper. "Should be visible once we clear this main stretch, it's apparently impossible to miss."
"The Domus Flau," Bisca said. "I read about it before we left last year. It seats about fifty thousand."
"Fifty thousand?" Alzack repeated.
"Give or take. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they expanded it."
"That's more people than live in Magnolia."
"That's more people than live in three Magnolias," Wakaba said.
"Is the King actually going to be there the whole time?" Romeo asked. "Every day?"
"Opening and closing for certain," Macao said. "Possibly more, depending on how the week goes, I'd imagine. If it gets interesting enough he stays."
"It'll get interesting," Droy said, and glanced back briefly toward Aelius without finishing the thought, which was its own kind of statement.
The crowd shifted as they moved further from the station, thinning slightly into something navigable, and the city opened up ahead of them into the wider avenues of the central district. The architecture was different here, grander, the buildings taller and more deliberate, the kind of construction that existed to remind visitors they were in a capital. And beyond it, visible above the rooftops exactly as Macao had predicted, the Domus Flau sat against the sky like something that had decided normal scale wasn't worth bothering with.
"There it is," Romeo said, stopping for a moment just to look at it. Several others stopped with him. Even Wakaba paused, pipe halfway to his mouth.
It was large, the kind of structure that made the space around it feel smaller by comparison, its curved walls rising above the surrounding city with the easy authority of something that had been there long enough to stop justifying its own existence.
"Right," Macao said, after a moment. "Registration desk is inside the main entrance. We should get there before the queue gets any worse." He looked around at the group. "Anyone who's not part of the official team, you're on your own for the day until the opening ceremony. Stay together, don't start anything, and for the love of all that is holy, Jet, Droy, that applies specifically to you two."
"Why specifically us," Jet said.
"Because I know you," Macao said simply. Droy opened his mouth. "Both of you," Macao added, before he could.
Aelius had already started walking toward the entrance. The inside of the Domus Flau was, if anything, more overwhelming than the outside. The main entrance opened into a concourse that ran the full interior circumference of the arena, wide enough that the crowd moving through it didn't feel compressed despite the sheer number of people present. Vendor stalls lined the inner walls, food, commemorative items, printed schedules, things with guild symbols on them that people were buying with the enthusiasm of people who had traveled a significant distance and intended to have something to show for it. The noise echoed differently here, bouncing off the stone in a way that made it ambient rather than directional, coming from everywhere at once and therefore somehow easier to filter out.
The ceiling above the concourse was high enough that the upper levels of seating were visible from where they stood, rows and rows of stone benches curving upward and inward toward the open sky at the top of the structure. It wasn't filled yet, the opening ceremony still hours away, but it was filling, people claiming seats with the focused urgency of a crowd that had learned from experience that good spots required early commitment.
"Registration's that way," Macao said, pointing toward a section of the concourse where a cluster of official looking banners marked a set of tables staffed by people in Council uniforms. A queue had already formed, longer than comfortable but moving steadily. "Rest of you, seating's through any of those archways. We have special seats being in the top eight of last year, best you can get short of the king himself. Just look for our banner"
"We'll find it," Bisca said. She glanced at Aelius briefly, the look carrying something that wasn't quite concern and wasn't quite encouragement, landing somewhere between the two. Then she turned and steered Alzack toward the nearest archway.
"Don't do anything that makes the front page," Wakaba said to Aelius, which was the closest he came to a send off, and then followed Bisca with his pipe already producing a thin trail of smoke that a passing official frowned at and wisely chose not to address.
Romeo lingered for a moment, looking at Aelius with the expression of someone who had something to say and was working out whether saying it was a good idea. He apparently decided it wasn't, or decided he'd say it differently, because what came out was simply, "good luck," delivered with more sincerity than the words usually carried.
Aelius looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded once, which Romeo seemed to take as sufficient, and headed after the others. Jet and Droy left without ceremony, already mid argument about something that had started on the train and apparently hadn't resolved itself. Their voices faded into the general noise of the concourse within seconds.
That left Macao. "Right," the man said, looking at the registration queue with the expression of someone preparing to do something administrative, which Macao had never found natural and two years of Guild Master duties had not fully changed. "Let's get this done."
They joined the queue. It moved at a reasonable pace, the officials behind the tables processing registrations with the efficient rhythm of people who had done this before and had a system for it. The guilds ahead of them in the line ranged from names Aelius recognized to names he didn't, small guilds mostly, regional ones that competed in the preliminary with the full expectation of not making it through and came anyway for the visibility of having been present. A team of five from somewhere in the north were loudly discussing their strategy for the preliminary in enough detail that several people around them had begun listening with the alert interest of competitors gathering free intelligence. Another team, three women and two men in matching deep blue, stood in silence with the focused quiet of people who had done this before and knew that talking about it beforehand was wasted energy.
Aelius stood in the queue and said nothing. Macao filled the silence with low, steady commentary. Observations about the other guilds, estimates about the preliminary format, quiet questions about logistics that he answered himself before Aelius could respond, which suited both of them.
When they reached the front, the official behind the table was a woman somewhere in her forties with the brisk manner of someone who had processed several dozen registrations already this morning and intended to process several dozen more before the day was finished. She had a ledger open in front of her, a stack of forms to one side, and the particular focused expression of a person for whom efficiency was a genuine value rather than a professional performance.
"Guild name," she said, without looking up.
"Fairy Tail," Macao said.
She wrote it. "Number of competing members."
"One."
That made her look up. She looked at Macao first, then at Aelius, taking in the cloak and the mask with the brief, assessing glance of someone who dealt with eccentric mages regularly enough to have a calibrated response to them. "One member team is permitted under the current rules," she said, in the tone of someone clarifying something they expected to be challenged on. "However the team must still complete the preliminary as entered. Any member unable to continue during the games proper results in forfeit for that day's battle draw."
"Understood," Macao said.
"Competing member's name."
"Aelius Morvain."
The pen stopped, for a second, barely a second. The official looked up. "Do you have a title the populace knows you by? For example, one of the late stars of Fairy Tail was known as Titania, Queen of the Fairies."
Aelius was quiet for a moment. He didn't have one, not exactly, but there was something close enough. "Tenth Seat Wizard Saint. Does that work."
"It does." She wrote it, found the column that hadn't needed filling for the previous several registrations and filled it, stamped the form, stamped a second copy, and handed one to Macao. "Opening ceremony begins at the third hour past midday. Competing members report to the eastern preparation hall one hour prior. Non competing guild members may occupy reserved guild seating in section nine." She paused briefly. "Good luck, Fairy Tail.""
Macao took the form and stepped back from the table. Behind them, the next guild in the queue moved forward, and the registration process continued as though nothing notable had happened.
Except that the two men from the matching blue uniformed guild who had been standing in focused silence behind them in the queue were no longer focused. They were looking at Aelius with the expression of people rapidly recalculating something, and one of them already had a hand on a small lacrima at his belt, the communication kind, with the reflexive grip of someone who had just decided they needed to tell someone something before that someone found out from someone else.
"Well," Macao said quietly, falling into step beside him as they moved away from the registration tables. "Give it about twenty minutes."
"Fifteen," Aelius said.
Macao looked at him. "....Was that a joke?"
Aelius didn't answer, which Macao had learned over the years could mean several things, and took in this context as probably a yes.
They walked back through the concourse toward the archway that led to the guild seating, the noise of the arena building around them as more people filtered in, and somewhere behind them the man with the communication lacrima was already talking quietly and urgently into it, and the information was moving outward through whatever network it moved through, and by the time the opening ceremony started there would not be a competing guild in Crocus that didn't know Fairy Tail had entered one member and put a Wizard Saint's name on the form.They were perhaps twenty feet from the archway when a familiar voice came from somewhere to his left.
"Sir Aelius."
Aelius stopped and turned, to see Jura Neekis. Who unsurprisingly was still a large man, broad across the shoulder in the way that came from genuine use rather than maintenance. He covered the distance between them without hurry, and when he stopped it was at a respectful distance, the kind that acknowledged that Aelius was not a person who benefited from people standing too close to him. "I thought that was you," Jura said. He smiled, and it was genuine, the kind that reached the eyes without effort. "The cloak and mask are rather distinctive."
"Jura," Aelius said. Giving the man a small nod.
"It is good to see you well." Jura said, and Aelius knew he meant it, which was one of the things about Jura that Aelius found tolerable. The man said what he meant with a consistency that bordered on unusual for someone at his level, where saying what you meant was generally regarded as a tactical liability. His eyes moved briefly to Macao, and recognition settled into his expression. "Master Macao. It has been a while."
"Jura." Macao shook the offered hand with the slight awkwardness of a man who still wasn't entirely used to being called Master by someone of Jura's standing. "Good to see you again."
"Likewise." Jura returned his attention to Aelius. "I confess I wasn't expecting to see you here. Though I suppose I should have." A brief pause. "Are you competing?"
"Yes," Aelius said.
Jura absorbed that without pressing further on the details, which was another thing Aelius found tolerable about him. "I am glad for it, then. The games are better for having you in them." He said it without flattery in the delivery, a plain statement of what he believed. Then something shifted slightly in his expression, moving from cordial to something quieter. "I had intended to reach out sooner, regarding Tenrou. I was abroad when it happened, a mission that ran considerably longer than anticipated, and by the time I returned and heard the full account of it...." He exhaled slowly. "I visited Magnolia when I could. Master Macao was kind enough to receive me."
"He came personally," Macao said to Aelius, with a briefly meaningful look that communicated that this had meant something to the guild at the time, in the period when things meaning something had been in short supply.
"It felt like the least I could do," Jura said simply. "We fought together during the Oración Seis incident. That counts for something, in my view. Especially against the monster you took on." His eyes were steady on Aelius. "I was sorry to hear about what happened. And I am glad at least you survived."
The concourse moved around them, hundreds of people flowing past in every direction, a few whispering about meeting Iron Rock Jura, and the man he was speaking with. Aelius took a slow breath and looked at him. "They aren't dead."
Jura looked sad. That was the only way to describe it, somewhere between grief and pity, the expression of a man who had delivered difficult truths to people before and recognized the shape of someone not ready to receive one. "Aelius....perhaps it is easy to forget you are still rather young. You are twenty one this year, correct? But if what the Council told me is true, it is a miracle you survived at all, and sometimes when we lose people we—"
"Trust me Jura." Aelius's voice was flat but not unkind, but leaving no room in it to argue. "They aren't dead. They'll be back."
Jura studied him for a moment, and whatever he saw there shifted something in his expression, the pity retreating slightly, replaced by something more careful. He had fought beside Aelius once, briefly, and brief as it was, it had apparently been enough to teach him that Aelius did not say things he didn't mean. "....How long."
"Five years."
Jura was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded, slowly, accepting it without demanding the explanation behind it. "Then I will look forward to meeting them," he said simply, before he turned slightly. "It was good seeing you again, Sir Aelius." A brief nod toward Macao. "Master Macao. I hope the week treats Fairy Tail well."
"And Lamia Scale," Macao said.
Jura smiled briefly and moved on, disappearing back into the flow of the concourse without ceremony, the crowd parting slightly around him the way crowds parted around people who carried a certain kind of weight, instinctively and without fully understanding why.
Macao watched him go. "Good man."
Aelius didn't answer. He stood there for a moment longer, watching the space Jura had occupied, and then started walking toward the archway.
Macao fell into step beside him. "You alright?"
"Yes."
They found the guild in section nine without difficulty, the reserved seating close enough to the arena floor to have a genuine view but high enough to see the full scope of the space below. The Domus Flau was filling properly now, the stands climbing toward capacity in every direction, the noise of it building into something that pressed against the ears and kept building. Romeo had claimed the end of the row and was leaning forward with both arms on the barrier, looking at the arena floor below with the focused attention of someone memorizing everything. Jet and Droy were arguing about something that had probably started before they sat down. Bisca and Alzack were talking quietly between themselves, and Wakaba had somehow produced a fresh drink and was regarding the filling stands with the expression of a man who had made his peace with large crowds by simply refusing to engage with them emotionally.
"Aelius," Romeo said from the end of the row, not looking away from the floor below. "They're going to announce the teams during the ceremony aren't they."
"Yes," Macao said.
"So everyone's going to find out then. That we only have one person."
"They already know," Wakaba said, from behind his drink. "Word travels fast in a building this size."
Romeo finally looked up, turning toward Aelius with the straightforward curiosity of someone who had decided to just ask the thing he was thinking. "Are you nervous?"
The question landed in the middle of the row and several people made the subtle adjustments of people suddenly very interested in the answer to something they hadn't wanted to ask themselves.
Aelius looked at him. "No."
Romeo held his gaze for a second, then nodded and turned back to the floor, apparently satisfied. Jet said something quiet to Droy that Aelius didn't catch. Droy nodded.
Below, the arena continued filling. The noise climbed higher, the collective sound of fifty thousand people finding their seats and deciding the day had properly begun. The banners moved in the wind coming through the open top of the Domus Flau, guild colors bright against the afternoon sky, and the single chair in Fairy Tail's section sat exactly where it was, visible to anyone who looked, which was most of the building by now.
Macao looked over at Aelius and said nothing, which was its own kind of statement.
Aelius looked out at the arena, at the scale of it, at the thousands of people who had come from every corner of Fiore to watch a week of this, and felt something settle into place in him that wasn't quite calm and wasn't quite anticipation.
He hadn't performed in a very long time, ands he was ready to remember how.