Chapter 11

Silence pulsed between them like an unsheathed blade, poised and ready to strike. Mavis could hear the crash of her heart, beating wild against her ribs – could place the exact moment the truth turned to realization – to cold anger – to sheer, undiluted loathing.

"You killed them," she said. "When you killed the academy, you doomed us all."

"Ankhseram never wanted them to live," Zeref said, still composed, but there was a terse undertone to it. "You opened your very soul to Chronos. He had to know –"

"Don't antagonize her," Mavis warned in an undertone.

The woman had just slowed time before them with more ease than breathing – whatever spell he was using to counter the seal, it couldn't hold up against someone channeling the powers of a deity.

"I don't need him." Chronos – the woman that was housing his soul spoke, then, plain with certainty. "Even if you have not become him, you can."

Her eyes were alit. There was something familiar and rattling to her expression, to the fervency in it and the conviction behind her announcement. Mavis could see, then and there, how that obsessive hold to that wish had been the only thing which kept her sane over the course of three centuries, trapped and feeding from the remains of a lie.

Zeref shook his head slowly. "I can't," he said. His voice was low with regret.

Chronos stared at him, incomprehension stark in her face. "I heard you, at that symposium. Your theory on the R-system – surely you have already succeeded –"

There was no more recognition in his face than there was when they had first seen her. Mavis shook her head, caught between sympathy and repudiation. There was no expecting him to remember a stranger amidst a crowd from then, in a place he had believed to be dead all along, when she could barely even remember the faces of her own parents.

"I was urged to stop my research on it," Zeref said, faintly. "My teachers...were right to stop me. I hadn't understood, then, but – they were right."

Mavis turned to him, startled.

He had told her that he succeeded.

She would not contradict him – not now, not in circumstances as these, but –

"You never saw cause to follow the laws of our gods!"

Chronos closed in the distance, so swift that not blurs of her image was visible. She reappeared – barely more than an arm's length before them, heedless of their curse.

"And now you choose to – just to spite us?" Her face was twisted with fury.

Mavis recoiled, more from shock than actual fear of doing harm. Zeref did not move from where he stood – merely shifted, a minuscule movement that could almost be mistaken for a flinch.

"It's not…" he began.

Mavis seized him by the wrist, trying to pull him back. Every nerve in her was taut in anticipation of an assault.

"You have every cause to loathe the gods, for what they did. But these people – these people are innocent," Chronos said, deathly quiet.

And Mavis watched, completely stunned, as she sank to her knees before them.

"I've waited three centuries for you to return," she said, lowering her head further – "Please. Bring them back."

Not an assault.

A gesture of obeisance.

"They cast you out. They damned your very name in history… Is that why?" Her voice was near inaudible as she spoke into the ground. "They didn't know – they had been nothing more than pawns and sacrifices –"

"I deserved that," Zeref interrupted, with the strained tone of someone who was approaching the limits of his tolerance. "I deserved a lot worse than that."

"Then why?" She lifted her face, and bored into him.

In the wrong light, the woman before them seemed almost more ghost than human – stillness in her frame and desperation burning in her eyes.

Mavis could catch the strands of white in the greying hair of the woman kneeling before them, could count every line in her aged face, at the distance – and it sent a cold, sinking feeling through her, as it finally occurred to her to wonder.

If her family was amongst those she was so desperate to save; if they had just walked by any of them amidst those remains, completely unaware.

"A life for a life," Zeref said, the barest of tremors entering his voice. "If that was all it took, I would have…I would have, then, but the human cost required for it – it's not plausible. The R-system has been forbidden knowledge for centuries. I had a stroke of luck, once, only because I knew the imprint of his life like no other…enough to rewrite it into being.

"If I could repeat that feat so effortlessly, I'd have started with those I killed. This curse would have meant nothing."

"Don't…" Mavis muttered. Comprehension dawned, only to be quickly replaced by dread.

Don't tell her you succeeded.

You shouldn't have told her that you succeeded for your own –

"These people are dead," he said, and she knew he could not have heard her – much less what she was trying to tell him. The tremor in his voice was so prominent by now that it could not possibly have escaped either of them, whether he had been trying to veil it –

"They've been dead for centuries, and they can never live again."

Chronos lifted her head and looked at him, dead in the face. There was no light, no life, nothing at all in the black vacuum of her eyes.

Darkness crashed in like a physical thing.

There was a sharp crack, followed by a strange, shuddering sound as light came through again. Mavis caught sight of Chronos, advancing in on them.

There was nothing human left to her. White runes were creeping over her body, a solid midnight black. Magic emanated from it and pressed in on what felt to be every direction at once, filling any and all of the stillness she had once sensed in the air.

Zeref was stepping back and away from her, both of his hands raised.

"Don't do this," he said, placating rather than threatening – a surprising sincerity behind it. "We are not your enemy –"

"Ze–"

Her sound was ripped from her along with her sight before she could even finish the word. She spun around, reaching out blindly with both hands for where he had been, trying to convey to him what she could no longer say –

You can't reason with her.

You just ripped the last shred of hope out of her begging hands. She is beyond reason now.

In all the years that came after, she would not know what it was that compelled her to move, just so, just then. All she could remember was the single thought of it, in that single instant, without reason or hesitation.

Pain hit her worse than it ever did in her life.

It hurt.

She curled in on herself. It hurt like the summation of every wound she had ever lived through, a mass of scald and scrape and bruise and break all at once, and she would scream but there was no sound, there wasn't even enough air in her lungs –

"Mavis –"

She thought she could hear her name, somehow, through that silence – before it died out as well. There was nothing left but the all-encompassing darkness from when they first stepped into the seal.

No light or sound, or time.

The pain receded as fast as it hit. The curse worked through flesh and skin, mending every injury without fail, leaving a numb and tingling trail in its wake.

She clung on to the edge of consciousness, bereaved of all her senses, more terrified than she had ever been.

That assault had been meant for Zeref. If it did what she believed –

Law was completely beyond her ability, and her light magic had not even pierced the seal when she used it. It was galling – terrifyingly so – that there were so few spells in her arsenal that she should run short of an offensive when she most needed it.

Vision flooded back, all of a sudden.

Mavis stood, unsteady on her foot. A solid hold caught her by the back of her waist. She looked up and saw his eyes, staring straight ahead – red flashed across them, once, then again, brief and erratic.

Chronos stood only steps ahead of them, making no move to follow through the previous assault. He was not looking at Zeref, but at her – with far greater intensity than that sole instance she had caught his attention.

"You bear Ankhseram's mark as well?" He asked. It was the same voice of divinity they had heard from him, in the beginning – when he claimed to have offered aid to Mildian.

Mavis did not answer; did not so much as pause to think of the meaning of it. She broke free of the hold on her, calling upon her magic as she did. Light folded around her like a cloak as she rushed forward.

She held her breath, and reached –

For the first time in memory, she was willing for it to happen. But in the one moment she needed it most, the familiar throb behind her eyes never came.

The curse would not strike when she acted with the intention to kill.

"Is this your plan?" Chronos asked – looking straight at where she was.

Mavis stared back, so startled for a moment that she forgot about fear entirely.

The column of black magic headed for them before she could react.

She sensed the spell before she saw it. The same death as that held by the curse – only unleashed with intention, as it did back in the clearing last night.

There was no knowing if it would work against a god, but she could not die. She latched on to the arm before her, holding both of them in its way –

It slowed, before stilling entirely.

However immortal or powerful, they could not defeat someone who could manipulate time to his will.

Chronos was lowering his hand – impossibly, a gesture of peace, after the offensives they had just traded. A smile showed through the obscuring runes in his face.

"So he chose another," he said.

It took a long second for her to even recall her intention.

The change hit almost like a physical sensation. The fog that had always hung in the back of her mind cleared almost instantly, leaving a sharp lucidity in its wake. Every shape and color in her surroundings were heightened – felt somehow larger, felt more vivid than they had once seemed.

She had power over this curse – she was in complete control.

But she had no way of acting upon that intention. She turned back to Zeref, a detached curiosity rising through her.

Was this what it had felt like, when he was making that choice?

If that was so – she wondered how he had ever managed to stop.

His eyes were wide as he took in the sight of her, the last vestiges of red already retreating from them again. There was a minute, almost imperceptible trepidation in the look he was giving her.

Maybe that was the expression she wore, the first time he had killed before her in deliberation.

Or had she stared at him, reviled, as if she was looking into the face of a stranger?

"You wish to break free of your curse?" Chronos asked, taking in the exchange between them. There was something akin to cold triumph glinting in the black discs of his alien eyes.

She remembered, then. It was the very first question she had thought to ask him, when they learnt of his presence – before everything fell apart. The answering plea hung on the tip of her tongue, almost on reflex.

But she had no words left to give, nor trust for his sympathy to spare.

Light burst into her vision, burning into the back of her eyes. The flesh in her hold turned scalding to the touch. Her hand slackened as she stumbled back.

She saw –

She could see time.

The very fabric of it, spun like threads on an invisible wheel – a nebulous web that pulsed through the space like countless tiny hearts beating in sync, dying out one after another as each knot of it unraveled in the light. There was a shape in the heart of it – a face, only barely discernible as that, the true face of the deity before them. Its hollow eyes were narrowed into slits, its mouth slowly twisted into a mimicry of a human smile –

Unconsciousness hit fast and brutal.