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Frail

1. (of a person) weak and delicate

2. easily damaged or broken; fragile or insubstantial

3. (archaic) weak in character or morals

So what if she's a frail, sheltered girl venturing out into the big wide world for the first time? It's not like she'll let it chew her up and spit her out.


She's a mere slip of a girl, with stick-thin limbs and feather-light bones and spun-silk hair. Small as a child and delicate as porcelain, she's almost as insubstantial as the illusions she weaves. She can create worlds of whimsy and fantasy, but an illusion will always be an illusion. In the face of reality, they shred like wet paper and crumble to dust.

When the treasure hunters come to her island, she knows they don't think much of her. She's just a girl, a child, but she has dreams bigger than her body and she wants to believe that dreams can be more than ephemeral fantasy. She wants to believe that with enough determination and strength and willpower, her dreams are powerful enough to swallow the world.

She loves Tenrou, it's her home, but she wants to see the world. She wants to see the things she's only read about in her beloved library, experience the things that have only ever been paper beneath her fingertips. So what if she's a frail, sheltered girl venturing out into the big wide world for the first time? It's not like she'll let it chew her up and spit her out. She'll have Yuri and Precht and Warrod. And Zera, of course. She's always had Zera.

Even if she's not strong enough to stand on her own two feet and face the world—although she'd like to think that she is—she's hardly alone.

The adventures they go on are grand, exciting, everything she's ever dreamed of. And when her spun-sugar illusions just don't feel like quite enough, when they shatter like glass under real—'real'—magic, she meets Zeref.

He's a strange man, undoubtedly, but she sees his loneliness and spins him illusions for company. Perhaps they aren't real, but although that's a handicap in the world at large, here it means that Zeref can sit with them safely without destroying them. His curse will pass right on through. It might blacken the grass and trees, but it won't touch what is visible only to the mind.

It's not enough, of course. Something that isn't real can never provide true companionship, can it? So she inches a little closer and sits with him instead. Call her brave or foolish or out of her mind, but the girl delicate enough to be blown away by the wind braves the strongest curse black magic can offer.

And when her illusions seem too insubstantial to be of use to her friends, she begs him to teach her his magic too.

The black magic is electricity sizzling through her veins as she molds it to her soul and shapes it between her fingertips. It makes her feel powerful. Her body is small, but the magic swells like a sunset shadow trailing behind her. She's not sure she ever realized quite how frail she was until she sees how strong she can be. It's heady, intoxicating. It's the kind of power that could make you want to crush the world beneath your foot just to prove that you could, but she uses it only to help her friends.

The moment she wins and saves Yuri is when she feels the biggest, strongest, most invincible. And then she's falling, the magic snapping her bones and crushing her soul and rendering her forever small. The doctors say it stunts her growth, that she will forever be a child. She wonders how something that makes her feel so big can reduce her to something so small. But she knew that she didn't yet understand the magic she tried to wield, and she knew there would be a price to pay for it. She will survive.

The moment she's left wailing in the dust while Zera fades to nothing comes much closer to breaking her, because at least before she was saving a friend rather than destroying one. The revelation that Zera was an illusion all along shakes her to her core. Zera was always so solid, so real. How can someone so real be suddenly gone? Reduced to nothing like she had never been?

She realizes for the first time how something as insubstantial as an illusion can be its own kind of powerful. But in the end, it still fades.

She follows Zera's last wishes and recovers and founds a guild so that she and her friends always have somewhere to return. It's a dream come true, until she realizes that the true cost of Law wasn't to stunt her growth but to bestow upon her Zeref's paradoxical curse.

Before, her illusions could never quite interact with the physical world. They couldn't hurt or kill or destroy. But this curse is powerful and dark. It seeps out of her like the falling night and withers all it touches. It hurts the people she wants to protect.

She runs.

Her fragile, stunted body no longer seems quite so frail, even when she starves it to skin and bone and collapses to the ground in weakness. She cannot die, no matter how she claws at or deprives or assaults her body. Her skin is soft and paper thin, her bones are brittle, her body is small and weak as a child's, but this frailness means nothing now. She is invincible. Immortal.

It is the worst curse imaginable.

It is hell on earth until Zeref kisses her and the world goes black.

It turns out not to be that simple, though. She supposes that it rarely is. A curse so strong will not be so easily cured. Precht's relentless experiments leave her fragile, immortal body encased in a lacrima, but she finds that she can project her awareness out. An illusion only powerful enough to be visible to her heirs, the ones who bear the mark of her guild.

It's a barely-there existence. She can roam the world as a specter, a shadow, an invisible phantasm, but she cannot truly interact with it. She watches from the sidelines, silent and unchanging as the world marches on around her.

It's many years later that the most recent generation of Fairy Tail mages encounter Acnologia on Tenrou, and their feelings are so strong that she is moved to action and draws on their strength to save them. She's surprised she can even use such a powerful spell in her current state.

Her curiosity is aroused, and she wonders about the people she has saved and what they have done with her guild. She waits and ponders, but there's little more she can do for them. She isn't truly part of their world anymore.

It takes seven years for them to wake, and she considers her options carefully before revealing herself to them and returning to her guild. She has lived in exile long enough, and she tires of being alone. She thinks that maybe it's time to rejoin the world, or at least Fairy Tail's corner of it. She's the most real there. At least they can see her.

She can sense the conflicting views they have of her. They respect her as the founder of the guild and its first master, they know she was a powerful mage and formidable tactician, but they also see a small, fragile girl little more than a ghost who almost seems to shimmer out of view if you look too closely. She doesn't look like much, this girl who never grew up yet is the oldest and weariest of them all, especially not in comparison to these young mages bursting with power and vitality and life. They see her as a ghost, a has-been, a vestige that will fade over time.

Mavis watches them from the sidelines with jaded eyes, knowing she will outlast them all.