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Earth Land.
Crocus, the royal capital of the Kingdom of Fiore.
Flowers bloomed across the city in every season, and its prestige among the great cities of Fiore was unmatched. The City of a Hundred Flowers drew a steady stream of visitors every single day, filling its streets with noise and color and the kind of restless energy that only a thriving capital could sustain.
To the west of the city, a mountain known as Mount Toms had had its peak leveled flat. Construction workers swarmed across the cleared summit, building something large and purposeful. What made it strange was the security surrounding it. Fiore's elite Cherry Blossom Knights were stationed at every approach, posted so densely that there was barely a gap between them.
Just today, Mavis, Zeref, Anna, Irene, Erza, Mira, Lucy, and Natsu arrived at the foot of the mountain. They made their approach under the cover of Irene's Enchantment, moving unseen past the guards without slowing down.
Lucy looked up at the leveled peak and relayed what she had heard from her father. "He told me the Fiore government is building an arena up there, one that can withstand magical attacks. Apparently they want to host competitive matches between guilds."
Under normal circumstances, Natsu would have been rubbing his hands together before she even finished speaking, already fired up at the thought of a fight. Today he barely reacted.
None of them did.
Noah had been missing for three months. He had vanished along with the entire Principality of Veronica, leaving behind nothing but a vast, silent, and impossibly deep abyss. Even August and Precht, two of the sharpest minds either side of the continent, had been unable to determine where the Black Abyss led, until Zeref eventually pieced together enough clues to conclude that Noah was likely somewhere inside it.
It was, after all, the very place that had originally inspired him to create the Demons of his own Books of Zeref, back when he had first obtained the corpse of a Black Abyss Demon.
When Erza and Mira heard that Noah was trapped in the stronghold of the Demon War Gods, they had nearly thrown themselves into the Black Abyss then and there. Only Irene physically stopping them had prevented it.
Zeref had tried to reassure them. With Noah's strength, even if he couldn't overpower the Eighteen Demon War Gods outright, surviving long enough shouldn't be beyond him. The more pressing problem was finding someone powerful enough to enter the Black Abyss and get him out.
Anna and Lucy had both thought of the Celestial Spirit King immediately. But whatever had gone wrong in the Celestial Spirit World had made that impossible. Celestial Spirit Magic had been unresponsive for months, and without a way to open the Gate, reaching him was out of the question.
For the past two months, everyone had been searching for another way in. Zeref was the one who finally thought of the Eclipse Gate. It was his creation, after all. The Gate could move through space as well as time, Anna knew the coordinates of the Celestial Spirit World, and all twelve of the golden Zodiac Keys were already in Lucy's hands.
There was no time to build a new one, so Zeref and Anna turned their attention to the original Gate that had been used four hundred years ago.
Using a specialized positioning spell, the group made their way without stopping to Mount Toms. The Eclipse Gate was buried deep beneath it.
When Irene used her Eye of Truth to survey the mountain, she found an entire hidden world beneath the rock.
Following Irene's lead, the group descended a stone staircase that was clearly old but unmistakably deliberate in its construction, winding down into the mountain's core. The steps were steep and long. The air grew heavier as they went, thick with the smell of old earth and threaded through with a faint, strange energy that none of them could quite place.
Natsu stopped partway down and sniffed the air with a puzzled frown. "Why does this feel familiar?"
Zeref glanced back at him, holding Mavis's hand. He considered explaining, then decided against it. Natsu would understand soon enough.
After about fifteen minutes, the passage opened.
The sight that greeted them stopped everyone in their tracks except Zeref, Irene, and Anna. They stood at the edge of an underground cavern of staggering scale, as though the entire interior of the mountain had been hollowed out over centuries. And filling that vast space, piled in great silent heaps across the floor, were dragon bones.
Enormous skulls stared sightlessly upward. Spines lay broken and scattered. Ribs the size of fence posts jutted at odd angles from the piles. Shattered claws and the remnants of enormous wings lay strewn across everything. This was not the inside of a mountain.
This was a graveyard. A tomb of extinct dragons.
"Here it is," Irene said quietly. She let out a slow breath and turned to the others. "This is where the Dragon King Festival was held. Four hundred years ago, this was also where Acnologia slaughtered the dragons. Nearly all of them, in one place."
The weight of those words settled over the group. Erza and Mira felt it physically, a deep, suffocating pressure, as though the accumulated grief and fury of an entire extinct species still saturated the air. Natsu went silent, which was rare enough on its own, but the feeling inside him was Igneel's, and it went far deeper than words.
There was no time to linger on it. They composed themselves and moved on, following the path deeper into the tomb.
"Someone's been down here recently," Erza noted, eyeing the carefully laid stones beneath their feet. "This path wasn't here when the dragons were alive. The Fiore royal family has been keeping more secrets than anyone realized."
"Doesn't matter." Natsu's fists lit up. "Whoever tries to get in our way while we're saving Noah is getting knocked out of it."
Lucy pressed her hand over his mouth before he could say anything else. "Senior Irene has put visual deception and silence on all of us," she said, sounding thoroughly exasperated. "As long as you don't shout, nobody can find us. So please, stop shouting."
Natsu grumbled, caught Erza's eye, and went quiet. It wasn't Lucy that made him do it.
The further they went, the more complete the remains around them became, and the heavier the dragon resentment grew in the air. But Mavis walked calmly at the center of the group, her Life Aura spreading out from her in a gentle, steady warmth, keeping that grief at a distance.
They stopped when the passage opened into a wider clearing.
At the center of it stood a gate unlike anything most of them had ever seen. Ancient beyond reckoning and enormous in scale, it rose above them with quiet authority. Along its frame, the symbols of the twelve Zodiac constellations were arranged in careful order, each one distinct and unmistakable.
Lucy stared up at it for a long moment. "This is the gate that connects the past to the future?" It was difficult to reconcile the magnitude of what she was looking at with the fact that it was simply one of many things the Black Wizard had made.
"That's right. This is the Eclipse Gate." Zeref stepped forward, and the look on his face was complicated in a way that was hard to read. "It requires an extraordinary amount of energy. When it was last activated, four hundred years ago, it drained every drop of my Magic Power and then some."
"Then I'll be the battery this time."
Mavis stepped forward and looked at Lucy. "Insert your keys. With my Magic Power behind this, there won't be any problem."
That was the quiet confidence of someone carrying the infinite Magic Power of Fairy Heart within them.
One by one, the twelve golden keys were fitted into their corresponding Zodiac keyholes along the gate's frame. Zeref locked in the coordinates. Mavis poured her power into the ancient structure, and the carved patterns began to glow, slowly at first, then one after another in a steady, building sequence.
Erza, Mira, and the others threw their weight against the gate together, and with a low, resonant groan, it swung open.
Before anyone could feel relieved, something came through headfirst.
It was enormous. It barely fit through the opening. It landed face-up with a crash that shook the cavern floor, and Lucy and Anna both stared at it with expressions of pure disbelief.
Despite being covered head to toe in a deep, strange blackness, there was no mistaking who it was. The sheer size alone was enough.
The Celestial Spirit King.
He was in terrible shape. The starlight that was as natural to him as breathing was completely gone, replaced by an eerie black glow that covered his entire body from crown to base.
Before any of them could begin to process it, a voice came drifting through the open gate from the other side.
"Celestial Spirit King, stop running. I'm not done yet."
A pause.
"And what's the problem with hitting you a few times? I'm doing this to help you push back the Eclipse erosion. You have to suffer a little for it to work. If you want someone to blame, blame Ankhseram and the Wheel of Fate."
Another pause, lighter this time.
"Actually, where did this gate come from?"
A white-haired young man stepped through the opening, looking genuinely puzzled by his surroundings.
Erza and Mira did not wait for an explanation. They crossed the distance between them in seconds and collided with him, and neither of them was making any attempt to hold back the tears.
Noah stood there, completely bewildered, with both of them wrapped around him. He had only been gone for a day. At least, that was how long it had felt on his end. So why were Erza and Mira looking at him like he had come back from the dead?