A/N: This is the last of Anna's chapters, and it's a big one. Next week will be an epilogue with Zeref and Lucy in the present to wrap up this arc. ~CS
The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Hubris et Orbi, Part 10
-At the Edge of Time-
Grandine arrived shortly after Acnologia fled, with a worried but unharmed Wendy on her back. She left her foster daughter with Natsu – who was trying to comfort a detached Sting and a wild-eyed Rogue – and moved immediately to Weisslogia's side, nuzzling at his face and neck. Recognizing the faint blue glow of healing magic, Zeref stepped forward, intending to tell her there was no point, but Igneel's tail thudded down into his path.
"Let her," the fire dragon spoke quietly.
When Weisslogia did not stir, Grandine rose to her feet and did the same for Skiadrum, pouring healing magic into his lifeless body to just as little effect. Zeref watched sadly, one hand on Igneel's tail the whole time.
At last, the sky dragon padded back over to them, where they had been joined by Metalicana. "They've gone," she said tersely.
Igneel bowed his head. "I'm sorry."
The sky dragon ignored this. "Acnologia could return at any moment. He'll wait for us to let our guard down and pick us off one by one, just like he did to Weisslogia and Skiadrum. We have to go through the Gate before he regains his strength." As the others nodded, understanding that they did not have time for grief, she glanced to the east, where the dawn's light was beginning to swallow the stars. "Say your goodbyes to Sting and Rogue. I'll do it when the sun breaks the horizon."
"Do what?" Zeref wondered.
"End their lives, of course."
"What?" Zeref took a step back. There was horror in his gaze as he stared up at the sky dragon, mind scrambling to work out how she'd gone from mourning to murder in a few short sentences. "You- you're not serious!"
Her jaws twisted into a snarl. "The dragons who taught them are dead. Their dragonification can no longer be prevented. It is the kindest thing for us and them to end it now."
"You can't do that!" Zeref burst out.
"I won't let you, Grandine," Igneel added, his rich voice overlaying Zeref's own.
The sky dragon rounded on him, her nose an inch from his own as she hissed, "That was our agreement, Igneel! I would tolerate this mad plan of yours, and in return, if they ever started to turn, you would not get in my way."
"They haven't started to turn! They're still so young-"
"It is inevitable!" Grandine hissed. "Best to get it over with before they can turn on us!"
"You can't!" Zeref pleaded. "They're our family-"
"And they will die protecting their family from the monsters they are doomed to become!"
"Then you have to kill all of them," Zeref said. The words fell numbly from his lips. He could barely hear them over the frantic hammering of his own heart. "Wendy, Gajeel, and Natsu, too."
Lowering her head to his level, she fixed him with one suspicious, scarred eye. "Why?"
"Because I can't save any of them."
"Of course you can," Igneel asserted confidently. "You're going to save Natsu, right? You have a special ritual for it and everything!"
"The ritual won't work." His gaze was fixed on his feet, but the words just kept spilling forth. "Back when I created it, Anna and I got into an argument. She refused to look at it at the time, and I was so upset over it that I put my notes away and didn't look at them again until we needed them to calibrate the Gate. That was when I realized I got a sign the wrong way round."
"…You what?"
"When I thought I was proving that the atmospheric concentration of magic in forty years' time would be enough to stabilize the ritual, I dropped a minus sign in one of the equations. What I've actually proven is that there is no atmospheric concentration of magic, ever, at which my ritual will stabilize. Even if we go to the future, I can't prevent any of them from turning into dragons. They'll lose their minds and their humanity and become part of the very slaughter we're trying to end."
Igneel just shrugged. "That's okay, you can just come up with another ritual!"
"I CAN'T, IGNEEL!" Zeref screamed. "That's not how mathematics works! There is only one truth: it is not possible to prevent the draconic core from taking over!"
"But…" Igneel tried, lost. "If we're in the future, where there's more magic…"
Zeref just shook his head.
"You'll think of something. I know you will. We didn't drive off Acnologia only to be beaten by this."
Tears welled up in Zeref's eyes. Because that wasn't how it worked, invention wasn't a battle, no one could break the laws of mathematics just by trying harder, and all the determination and the will and the label of genius meant nothing when the numbers said no…
Grandine's tail thwacked into the ground. Unlike Igneel, she understood perfectly, though it didn't make Zeref feel any better. "We don't have time for this. I'll perform the Milky Way rite for Sting and Rogue at sunrise, and then I will put an end to this ill-fated plan. Just like I should have done from the start."
As she stormed off into the forest, Igneel shook his head sadly. Metalicana, who had been silent throughout Zeref's revelation, now lifted his head from where it had been resting on his paws. He looked as unfazed as if he had slept through the entire argument, but they knew him too well for that. "What's a Milky Way?" he asked. "Sounds tasty."
"Sky dragon magic," Igneel answered, his protective gaze not leaving the five children for an instant. "It can call back the souls of dead dragons, but only once. It's her clan's tradition that the elder would summon back the soul of one's ancestor to guide a dying dragon on their final journey… I think she intends to let Sting and Rogue speak to their fathers one last time. Then she'll kill them."
Metalicana's eye clunked shut, and then opened again. "Are you going to let her?"
"Of course I'm not! I'll find a way to save them, even if it means taking them all to the future on my own! And I'll drag that evil genius along with me if I have to!"
The iron dragon glanced at Zeref, who was staring off into space, and then back at Igneel.
"Yes, I know he's being a bit useless right now," Igneel blustered, "but Anna knows how to make him not be useless, and I'll knock some sense into him myself if I have to…"
He tailed off, frowning at Zeref, who still wasn't listening to him at all. He whispered, "She can summon dragon souls…?"
"Yes," Igneel said irritably. "We're past that part, already. Now we're trying to come up with a plan to save the children, please try to keep up-"
"Dragon souls!" Zeref rounded on the fire dragon so quickly that Igneel actually scrambled backwards. "I didn't know that was possible! A dragon's magic can't stabilize the draconic core in a human, but what about a dragon's soul? Surely that would be able to trick the draconic core into thinking it's in a dragon! If I could seal the soul Grandine calls back into the child's body…"
He snapped his fingers. "The first seven layers of the ritual can stay the same… invert the eighth… the ninth will need redoing for the nebulous qualities of a dragon soul – what even is a dragon soul, magically speaking? It must be different to a human soul or she wouldn't be able to call it back with such little consequence and I need to know – no, she can only summon a soul once, no time for testing, I'll have to improvise. Propagate the changes from the ninth layer outwards…"
"Do you have any idea what he's on about?" Metalicana wondered.
"Yes." A broad grin split Igneel's face in two. "He's being brilliant. Come on, we've got to tell Grandine!"
Grandine was less impressed. After Igneel had knocked Zeref out of his frenzy – quite literally, with a blow that would have make Acnologia proud – Zeref had calmed down a little and explained the situation to the sky dragon: how, if she could summon back the souls of Weisslogia and Skiadrum, and they were willing, he might be able to seal them into the bodies of their children to prevent dragonification.
"But you don't know," Grandine stated. It wasn't a question.
"Well… no. I don't have time to run the numbers. I won't know if it will work until I try it. But… I really think it can be done."
"You thought your first ritual could be done, too. And you'd spent years on that, not five minutes."
"I want to try it," Zeref asserted.
"It's too risky."
"Riskier than killing them?" Igneel roared.
"Milky Way only works once! If he tries this and it fails, I can't send the children off like true members of my family!"
"If they're your family, you should be doing everything you can to save them before you even start worrying about their funerals!" Shaking himself, as if to throw off his anger, Igneel folded his half-flared wings and lowered his mighty head to meet hers. "Grandine, this isn't like you. You've held on to hope for so long. Why are you giving up now?"
As she turned her head towards the brightening horizon, the false light of dawn glimmered upon the tears in the sky dragon's eyes. "I have to, because I know neither you nor Metalicana will be able to bring yourselves to do it," she murmured. "Having hope will only make it harder."
"Grandine-"
"No. All the grief of our age could have been avoided if the dragon who taught Acnologia had stood up to his adopted son – had had the strength to do what was necessary. I won't let you make the same mistake."
After a moment, Igneel drew himself up to his full height. "No," he declared. "I would do anything for Natsu. I don't care how high the cost may be. I am going to save him, from you and from his fate."
"You can't save him!" Grandine hissed frantically, gesturing at Zeref. "Didn't you hear what he was saying? His ritual won't work!"
"I heard him loud and clear," Igneel said severely. "And I believe in him, even if you don't. If you have to be certain before you are willing to summon back the souls of Weisslogia and Skiadrum, we'll do a test first. If that fails, you can perform the farewell rite for their children." He turned to Zeref. "Use your new dragon soul ritual on me and Natsu first."
Zeref blinked. "But… you're not dead."
"Well, obviously, that's the first thing you're going to have to correct."
"But-" Zeref shook his head, bewildered. "But, you-"
"Once my soul has been separated from my body," Igneel overrode him firmly, "Grandine will call me back with Milky Way and you will seal me inside Natsu's body to prevent his dragonification. If it works, you can do the same for Sting and Rogue. If it doesn't work…" He turned to the sky dragon. "Well, I would ask you to keep looking for another way, but I won't be around to stop you if you decide that preventing the rise of more Acnologias is more important."
"Igneel-" Grandine began shakily, but the Fire Dragon King was having none of it.
"I've made my decision, Grandine. Now, if you wouldn't mind, I need to talk to my archnemesis in private. Let's go for a walk," he added to Zeref, and it wasn't a request. He threw Metalicana a meaningful look – don't let her do anything stupid being the meaning in question – and marched off into the ancient forest.
Zeref trailed meekly along behind him, not knowing what else to do. It had all happened so quickly. Only minutes ago, he and Igneel and Natsu had been standing together against Acnologia. That was real. That was where his heart was. This was… a mistake. A cruel trick of his unruly mind. It had to be.
Yet Igneel continued to weave his unhurried way through the trees. He was the one who had wanted for them to talk, and yet he seemed perfectly at ease wandering on in silence. To Zeref, it felt like every step was grinding him further into the dirt.
When it became too much to bear, he spoke. "Don't do this, Igneel."
There was something almost fond in Igneel's eyes. "I'll do whatever it takes to save those children."
"We'll find another way," Zeref insisted. "We'll go to the future and look for a solution there. We've still got time-"
"Not for Sting and Rogue. Whatever we do for them has to be here and now, in the place where Weisslogia and Skiadrum fell. I know how Grandine's magic works – and I know that nothing less than this will convince her to have hope."
"But my idea might not even work-"
The dragon snorted. "Look me in the eye, Black Wizard, and tell me that you don't think it's going to work."
A helpless whine escaped him, unwilling to tell the truth but unable to lie.
"Thought so," Igneel said smugly.
"This is the missing piece," Zeref admitted. "It can save them, I know it can. Like Anna always said, I don't see the numbers, I see the magic, and this magic is complete. I don't think it'll be enough on its own, we'll still need to jump to a time of higher magic density to stabilize it, but… it's the answer I've been looking for."
"Then we have to do it."
All Zeref's carefully constructed arguments fell away, leaving nothing but three desperate words: "But you'll die!"
Igneel gave a derisive snort. "So, if you'd reached into the heart of magic and it had said sure, I'll give Natsu back to you, but I'll take your life in return, you'd have decided not to do it, would you? If you'd known that merely trying to give him a second chance at life would turn you into a walking zombie, stripped of emotion and ambition and the ability to form relationships with others, would you have considered that too high a price to pay?"
They walked on for a while in silence, and then Zeref murmured, "Natsu was all I had. It's easy to be heroic when you've got nothing left to lose."
"I don't think that's true at all," Igneel said unexpectedly. "I think it's how you act when you think you've already lost everything that reveals who you are."
Zeref tried to speak but no words would come.
Igneel resumed, "After Dad died, I wandered for a very long time. I watched as my brother turned away from everything Dad had taught us, blaming all of humanity for his death. And I wondered, more and more, how you could have lost everything to dragons, and yet harbour no hatred towards them. I wanted to know how I could still find love in the world, like you did; how I could make a difference. Then I came across Natsu – and you let me take him. The little brother who means more to you than anything, and you let me take him away from you, because it was the best thing for him and the best thing for me."
The fire dragon stopped and rounded on Zeref defiantly. "Don't you dare tell me you had nothing to lose. If it was for your family, you never hesitated to give away what was most important to you. Not just Natsu, but your hope, your mind, your very sense of self. It's taken you all this time just to find them again."
There was something of a smile in those opalescent eyes as he gently nudged Zeref's shoulder. "Welcome back, Zeref Dragneel. It's good to finally meet you."
Something broke in Zeref then, and he flung his arms around the dragon's snout as if the world was trying to sweep him away. "No," he pleaded. "I don't want this, I can't do this, I won't let this happen-"
"Oi," the dragon snorted, dislodging him with a gentle shake of his head. A smoky breath billowed around him, the warmth of a celestial furnace, and a carbon smell that once might have tasted like death upon his tongue, but for so long now had smelled like home.
"This is right, I think," reflected Igneel. "The age of dragons is coming to an end. What comes next is whatever you make of it, Zeref Dragneel."
"I can't do it. Not without you."
An amused hum, low and deep in the back of the dragon's throat. "You're not supposed to beg for help from your archnemesis, you know."
"You're not my- you never were-" Zeref swallowed, shook his head, tried again. "You kept coming after me, over and over, and that's the only thing that kept me grounded all this time."
"It's not like I did that on purpose." The dragon's tail twitched bashfully upon the ground. "And I don't think you need that any more. You've got Natsu and Anna… and I think you'll do fine in yourself. You're so much stronger than you were."
"I'm not," he whispered miserably, but, as he so often did, the dragon ignored him.
"I want you to promise me two things: that you'll look after Natsu, and that you'll look after yourself." When Zeref looked up at him in helpless silence, Igneel growled, "Promise."
"Okay," he whispered.
"And don't you forget it. I'll be watching."
Satisfied, the dragon settled back on his haunches, gazing expectantly down at him.
Zeref's heart lurched with the realization. He fought against the buzzing in his ears and the sense of the reins slipping from his fingers with everything he had. "No. No. Don't make me do this."
"Please," Igneel said patiently. "For Natsu."
"I can't!"
The fire dragon tilted his head to the side. "Would it help if I blasted you with my new and improved Fire Dragon King's Righteous Overburn Strike? We could pretend to be mortal enemies again. It would be just like old times, hmm?"
A sob escaped Zeref's lips, and he wrapped his arms around as much of the dragon's neck as he could reach and pressed his forehead to the sun-warmed scales.
Like old times, Igneel had said, but it wasn't memories of the fire dragon's futile quest to slay him that came to mind. It was a little house in a forgotten village with sunlight pouring through the shutters and childish joy swirling with the dust mites in the air… but rather than two ill-defined faces and an adoring little brother who was never coming back, there was the noble dragon who had reached out to him and the brilliant scholar who had saved him from himself and the fearless boy who had faced down Acnologia with him and the gaggle of children who needed him and the legacies of two still and silent dragons whose sacrifice had ensured that their dreams would live on.
One hand curled around the pendant at his neck. "I'll save them, I promise," Zeref whispered, and no storm of black magic, however terrifying, could eclipse the warmth that shone within.
That was where they were when Grandine found them: Zeref with his arms around the dragon's neck, sobbing uncontrollably into fiery scales, while the dragon's tail curled protectively around him in turn. There was a fond smile etched permanently onto Igneel's face, an epitaph.
In any other time and place, Zeref might have been allowed his moment of mourning, but the sky dragon ripped him away and hurled him across the clearing. He barely registered the blow that might have killed a mortal man – not until she pinned him where he lay and bared her teeth in an unforgiving snarl. "You are the reason we are on this hateful path! Stand up, and walk it with us to the end!"
There must have been something in his expression that she liked, because she removed the claw pressing down on him. "Better," she growled, and then, without warning, slammed her head into his chest.
The suddenness of it stunned him. Colours whirled in his vision as he gasped for his scattered breath – and that was a mistake. The oxygen ignited something inside him, and the resulting explosion almost tore him apart.
There was something in his magic, in his very soul, and it clawed at his ribcage in an attempt to break free. His back arched with a sickening crack. Convulsions gripped him. Froth bubbled at his lips and in the corners of his rolling eyeballs; he was stretched to breaking point between something trying to burst out of him and something pulling back.
A single heartbeat thundered in his ears and the fragment of the One Magic inside him asserted its dominance. The wrenching pain collapsed in on itself, called to heel by the force that would not tolerate change. Bones snapped back into place like the forming of a prison. He rolled over and threw up, but it did not expel the sense of something alien trapped inside him.
Trembling, he gasped out, "What did you do to me?"
Grandine watched impassively as he struggled to stand. "I have permanently enchanted part of my magic into you. I thought it wouldn't kill you, given what you are."
Those words triggered a surge of panic before rationality reasserted itself. A human magical core was incompatible with a dragon's magic. Forced transference would cause them to turn immediately, and of the precious few who had survived that kind of change, not one had done so with their mind intact. That was why Dragon Slayer magic had to be taught slowly, and to young humans, whose developing magical cores could be encouraged not to reject the foreign magic outright. He, though, should either be dead or insane…
He tried to call the alien magic into the palm of his hand. It was not power that came, but pain. The flow of fully-formed draconic magic found his human form anathema, and tried to change it, just like it would one day change the dragon-children – but he was already broken, and his own cursed body simply would not allow it. The fragment of One Magic was too powerful. It had forced the dragon's magic to assimilate into a core that should have been incompatible.
There was a moment of startling clarity when he could hear the dragon-children whispering to each other like he was right beside them, could smell the blood and death and the route that Acnologia had taken from the clearing like it was painted in bright colours, but the awareness faded as the pain did, leaving a faint white light shining in the palm of his still-human hand.
"Why did you do that?" he wondered. Grandine had always been so protective of her magic, the magic that had doomed her clan to the avarice of dragon-hunters, trusting no one but her daughter with its secrets, and precious few of them at that…
The sky dragon's claw thumped impatiently into the ground. "There is no time to teach you properly, so you had better be as good as they say you are. Watch and learn. The Milky Way rite is incredibly complex magic and you will have to replicate it perfectly."
"Why?" he repeated, his head still spinning. "Aren't you going to do it-?"
"You will have to do the final casting on your own, fool boy!" she roared. "Stop gaping and prepare your ritual. Acnologia could return at any minute!"
"I…" Zeref let out a long, shuddering breath. "I will."
He moved to the very centre of the clearing, trying not to look at Igneel's unmoving body, and he dropped into a crouch. His palms pressed into the short grass. Ideally, he would have been drawing each component rune with chalk upon stone or wood, something that could be corrected and amended if necessary, but they did not have the luxury of time.
Fire swirled around him as he burnt the necessary runes into the forest floor ring by concentric ring. His eyes were closed. He was working purely from memory, lips moving soundlessly as he calculated and recalculated the adjustments needed to seal a dragon's soul rather than just its magic.
He only had one chance to get it right, but that would be enough. After everyone else's sacrifices, he would make it be enough.
"It's ready," he said, stepping out of the circle.
Metalicana shuffled forward and gently lowered Natsu into the centre. The sight of him almost shattered Zeref's concentration, and it was fortunate that the dragon had had the good sense to put him under a mild sleep enchantment. Zeref wrenched his gaze away, and was glad when Grandine called to him, giving him an excuse to hurry over to her side.
"Watch," she commanded. "Remember."
That was all the warning he got before she committed her immense power to the ancient ritual of her clan. He had expected similarities between her soul-summoning spell and his own disastrous first attempt at resurrection, but the magic had a cool, ethereal feel to it, a sharp contrast from the fiery vitality of the One Magic. Sky Magic, he realized, was never meant to cross between life and death, only to convey their words from one shore to the other. Dragging the summoned soul from death and sealing it within a living body was his role, just as it had always been.
The light of the world beyond filled the clearing, and Igneel was there.
He was just as large as he had been in life, except the vivid sunset-flash of his scales was now a shimmering, translucent blue. No grass bent beneath his mighty feet, and when he spread his wings, the air remained still, unheeding.
"Huh," he remarked, and all the joviality of his voice couldn't quite mask the way it echoed. "This is weird."
"Igneel…" Zeref whispered.
"Hey, are we doing this thing or what?" Igneel demanded. "Looking at my own body is making me feel queasy."
With his voice laden with disappointment, Metalicana asked, "Are you telling me you don't have some dramatic final speech prepared?"
"Nah, I did all that cool stuff already. I've said everything I had to say, and actually, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out." Igneel shot Zeref a meaningful look. "Though, now that I'm a ghost, I feel qualified to add that if this ritual of yours doesn't work, I'm going to haunt you."
Zeref's lips surrendered to a tiny smile. "It will work."
They walked back over to Zeref's ritual circle, only one set of footsteps in the morning light. Igneel took his place in the centre with his foster son, while Zeref stood outside, ready to activate it. He raised his hand, and then hesitated, glancing questioningly at the dragon.
"Zeref," spoke the Fire Dragon King sternly. "Just because I'm not repeating my last words doesn't give you leave to forget them."
"I know," he accepted.
"Then do it."
Zeref bowed his head and activated the ritual circle.
It wasn't like the grandeur of dragon-magic, or the world-changing fury that his ill-fated foray into the One Magic had caused. It was careful, precise, controlled. The runes flared and then burnt out, doing no more and no less than they had been created to do. Igneel's spectre vanished. Natsu slept on.
Metalicana craned his long neck over the scorched earth and asked, "Did it work?"
"Milky Way no longer senses a soul to tether," Grandine reported, with a pointed glance at Zeref.
He whispered, "Igneel…?"
There was silence.
-Whoa, Igneel's voice rang out over their telepathic network. I thought being a ghost was weird, but this takes the biscuit!
-Igneel! Zeref sent back, as the dragons exchanged relieved glances. Can you hear me?
-Yeah! I can't see anything, though. Or feel anything. Or…
-Try picturing something, Zeref advised, and after a brief pause, Igneel's exclamation rang out again.
-Whoa! A volcano appeared! What is this place?
-It isn't anything, Zeref told him. It isn't real. I'm sorry.
Those last two words were promptly ignored.
-Can I talk to Natsu? Igneel asked instead. I can kind of sense him, but…
-I don't think so. The link is only there to subdue his magic. If you can find a way to seal it for good, perhaps you can do more, but disturbing the equilibrium before you reach that point will undo the entire ritual.
-Can we talk about this later? Grandine cut in. Even I can sense the binding falling apart without sufficient atmospheric magic to sustain it. We still have to go to the future; we cannot linger here.
-Right. Okay.
Igneel fell silent. Trying hard not to think about how isolated he must be feeling in his non-existent world, Zeref turned his attention back to the present.
This time, he tried to pay more attention as Grandine called back the souls of Weisslogia and Skiadrum, determined to commit the ancient rite of the sky dragons to memory. Once the situation had been explained to them, they agreed straight away, and Zeref repeated his ritual twice more. Whether they had nothing to lose or everything, not one of the dragons considered it too high a price to pay for their children's futures. Grandine watched Zeref critically as he conducted his first Milky Way rite on his own and then maintained it successfully while also sealing Metalicana's soul inside his son's body. A terse nod, from her, was high praise indeed.
It was only him and the sky dragon left, now. Not a word passed between them as Zeref helped to lift the unconscious children onto her back. They set off towards the Gate, there to meet up with Anna and travel to the future on which all their hopes now rested.
When the first two soldiers appeared in front of them, Zeref thought it was some kind of joke.
There they were, pikes crossed, standing guard on this unassuming forest trail as though it were the drawbridge of a castle. "Halt, strangers," one announced. "Passage beyond this point is forbidden by the order of His Majesty King Carlos III."
Zeref stopped short, baffled. "Why?"
"Because the land beyond, and everything upon it, now belongs to the king, and setting foot upon it without his permission is trespassing of the highest degree."
"But I need to get through," Zeref protested. "That's where our…"
That was where the dragons' encampment could be found: the unremarkable, hidden, not-on-any-map clearing where they had decided to build the Gate.
The land beyond and everything upon it.
As realization stole the breath from his throat, Grandine bore down upon the two soldiers with a snarl. "I do not recognize your human overlords, nor your claims of ownership to this land or any other. Stand aside, fools."
They did not. One's hand reached stealthily for the horn at his belt.
Before Zeref could point it out, Grandine wheeled round. Her tail struck both men a solid blow; they flew skyward and were caught in the foliage of an ancient tree, hanging like cheerless ornaments from its branches. She swayed a little before finding her balance, and glowered at Zeref to silence his concern. He duly said nothing, though it didn't change the fact that she had performed the Milky Way three times at the end of a long night, and even the constitution of a dragon had its limits.
"Come on," she snarled. He jogged alongside her as she wound her way between the trees.
How many times had Zeref walked this path before? Too many to count. At the end of it lay the camp where there had always been some dragon or other teaching magic to their child; the sheltered world where there was always someone with whom to discuss the latest academic paper or test a new spell or just relax at the end of a difficult day; the sanctuary where he and Anna had built the Gate, the culmination of their ambitions, the crux of their hopes.
Zeref burst into the clearing and all his fears condensed into a single, solid reality.
Their home had become a war camp.
That was the best word for it. There were tents, flags, tethered warhorses, guard posts, crossbowmen, and spiked wooden barricades; an ungainly obstacle course around which the red-clad soldiers flowed as if it had already started spilling blood. The clearing had already been large, slowly widened over the years by the increasingly destructive magic of the dragon-children, but that hadn't been enough for the invaders. The soldiers had torn into the forest, systematically toppling trees to form their rudimentary defences and cramming an entire battalion of soldiers behind them.
Above it all rose the twisted arch of the Gate. It had been imprisoned in hasty scaffolding; even from here, Zeref could see the heavy robes and pointed hats of the king's pet mages as they scrutinized his and Anna's masterpiece. Some held magnifying glasses and notepads. Others held drills and hammers.
"They can't do that!" It wasn't quite a shriek – the shock had left him too numb for that – but there was enough horror in each word to make up for it. "That's ours- we need it- they can't do that!"
"Since when have humans cared for what is and isn't theirs?" Grandine commented impassively, her tail twitching from side to side.
"But we warned him!" Zeref protested. "We went there and we told him to leave us alone…"
And so they had – gone to a man who thought of nothing but himself, who had spent the last few years taking exactly what he wanted from whoever happened to have it. They had told him he was insignificant, powerless, foolish, not worth their time; they had antagonized him, the village girl and her uncivilized friends against the King of Carligne… and they had, what, thought he would just accept it?
Thought that he would heed their plea to leave their family alone?
It hadn't been Zeref's idea, but he had gone along with it anyway, as drunk on the sensations of power and protectiveness as any of them that day. Given the chance, he would gladly have done it again, shoulder to scaly shoulder with those who had become his family.
Not once had he realized that, by doing so, they were making it clear that their family had something worth protecting.
Something worth taking.
Their enemy was Acnologia, and the decay and madness and never-ending war that he symbolized. And they had already triumphed over him that day. They'd driven back the apocalypse and created a new ritual to prevent dragonification. Now, only a few hundred metres remained between them and the best solution they had found to the chaos of their age.
The battle should have been won.
Yet in their way stood humanity.
Human beings, who should have been their allies, who professed to the love of science and the protection of their own kind… but who had, in the end, chosen greed.
Their own lives over the whole world's future.
Loyalty to a cowardly little man who did not deserve it.
The battle against Acnologia had been won, but it was human nature that would deny them their final victory.
"It's over." A mournful whisper, a lost little voice. "They've taken the Gate. We can't go to the future, but the seals are unstable in this era… what can we do?"
"Zeref Dragneel, what the bloody hell is wrong with you?"
Zeref whirled around faster than he would have done had that scathing tone been an actual blade. Like an earthquake in human form, Anna came marching out of the forest behind him and did not stop until she had grabbed the front of his robes in both fists and slammed him back against a tree.
"I am ashamed and appalled that you even need to ask!" she declared. "They have taken something of ours and are using it to hold our children's future to ransom! We are bloody well going to take it back!"
"But…" As frightening as Anna was, over her shoulder lay a swarm of shields and spears. After the showdown in the palace, the king would have bribed and blackmailed every Dragon Slayer he could find before coming here. "We can't. There's only two of us, an exhausted dragon, and five unconscious children – and they have a literal army-"
"So do I." Stepping back, she let go of him in order to summon an oversized keyring with a swipe of her hand. It floated in front of her, all eighty-eight keys pointing outwards like the rays of a gold and silver sun. "And unless those evil minions of yours were serving a purely decorative function, so do you. Still," she added, her eyes hardening once again, "even if I were alone, there would be no earthly force capable of stopping me from reaching that Gate."
"You're not alone," he conceded. "I'm with you."
Anna nodded once, and her gaze flicked to Grandine. "Where are the other dragons?"
"They…" Zeref tried to explain, only to feel his throat close up.
Anna gave a brisk nod; the hopelessness in his eyes was all she needed to see. "Explain it to me on the other side. I can practically feel whatever you did to the children coming undone."
Despite the best efforts of Igneel and the others, the atmospheric concentration of magic was simply not high enough for the soul seal to settle into an equilibrium. In fact, at the rate it was draining, Zeref was beginning to worry that not even the few decades they had anticipated would be enough to stabilize it.
Anna was saying, "We're going to break straight through. It's not about defeating them all in combat; we only need to reach the Gate."
"And hold it," Zeref added, with a glance at the sky dragon. "We have to do the final sealing ritual there. And I want to add a component to the Gate, too… something that will seal it shut, even against the keys, until the atmospheric concentration of magic becomes strong enough to save them."
"Take the Gate and hold it, then," Anna agreed. "Are you ready?"
He wasn't, not at all, but he repeated his earlier words in a murmur: "I'm with you."
"Then I'll see you on the other side," she grinned, and leapt into the clearing.
Anna led the way.
Never mind that she was travelling in the company of an immortal and a dragon. She was the one who headed the charge across the battlefield, fearless in love and war, and Zeref was a starling in the tailwind of her hurricane.
She was the one the soldiers noticed first, and when they shouted their warning, they shouted it to her. "Halt! This is a restricted area! Turn back this instant, or your lives will be forfeit!"
Anna glanced up at the armoured men in their makeshift guard turret. Her hair flicked dismissively over her shoulders as she picked up the pace. "Get your filthy hands off my science experiment!"
"We- we will shoot!" the same soldier blustered. The men on either side of him drew back their bowstrings, taking aim. "We won't warn you again!"
"You take the words right out of my mouth!" she yelled back.
The soldier's expression darkened. "Fire at will!"
"Anna!" Zeref shouted needlessly.
Anna touched her palm to the wheel of keys hovering before her. Not a word of command passed her lips. The magic of the stars sang in the fire of her veins.
The first arc of arrows sank soundlessly into a fluffy pink barricade. It dispersed, cloudlike, as Anna stormed through it, leaving the arrows to clatter feebly to the ground.
"Again!" howled the soldier.
His companions readied a second volley with far less hesitation than the first, but before they had chance to aim, their turret gave a violent shudder. As they flailed for balance, the bull-man at its base raised his axe once more. This time, the blow cleaved the leg as it would a sapling; the turret fell at once.
And just like that, they were past the guard post and into the encampment proper.
The soldiers were alert to their presence, now. On either side, rows of wooden stakes hammered into the earth provided cover for a company of crossbowmen, who wasted no time in loosing twin swarms of black missiles towards the intruders.
A sandstorm caught the bolts from the right, whipping them off course. On the left, a score of iron bolts thudded harmlessly into the side of an enormous black-scaled serpent, which wound its way along beside them like a living barricade. From atop its back, a half-man half-horse archer returned fire with blistering speed.
A moment later, they too were gone, and instead there was a teddy bear, who scampered between their legs and caused the whole band of soldiers to trip and break formation, or the keel of a ghost ship, so huge that the hull disappeared into the mists above, which ploughed through the barricades like they were mere waves… Anna's hand danced over the wheel of keys, knowing each one without having to look, just as they knew exactly what she needed of them without having to be told.
She led the charge towards the Gate as if she'd been preparing for this moment her whole life, and watching her, Zeref's heart thudded with a rawness he had not felt since he and Igneel and Natsu had howled their triumph towards the fleeing apocalypse.
Anna had been right. There was nothing to fear. Their enemies were countless, but they were only men, most not even mages, against two people and a dragon who held the fate of the entire world in their hands.
They weren't going to lose.
Anna's wheel of keys clicked round again. The ghost ship was gone, and in its place was a narwhal, half a coconut strapped to each flipper, which it used to make clip-clopping noises as it swam through the air, merrily impaling each soldier it came across. Zeref shook his head at the peculiarity of magic when allowed to take its own form… and then, with a flick of his hand, he drew forth a book from his pocket dimension.
He had returned his demons to their inert forms and brought them with him not because he thought he would need them, but because their power came from him, and so they would die if they lived in an era where he did not. Now, he was glad he had them with him. It meant he could help.
The demon who appeared looked almost human, and anyone who drew close enough to confirm otherwise would not live long enough to spread the word. Materializing on one knee, with his head bowed before his creator, he radiated an otherworldly power, an unnatural elegance. "You called me, Master?"
"I have need of you, Mard Geer." Zeref stumbled over the words at first, but when the demon raised his head and regarded him with a patience he would have afforded no other living being, he grew a little more confident in himself. "The soldiers are our enemies. Help us reach the Gate."
"As you wish, Master."
He stood and was gone in the same motion. A line of thorny vines, as thick in diameter as the trees that circled the clearing, punched up through the ground alongside Anna and Grandine, hurling countless soldiers into the air and forming a barrier against attacks from the flank.
Anna glanced over her shoulder. When she caught Zeref's eye across the battlefield, she grinned – and to his surprise, he found himself grinning back. There was no need for him to shy away from this battle; no need to be afraid of what he could do.
Then he looked past her, to the sea of crimson and steel and mud beyond, and his grim expression returned. There were so many of them. For every man beaten, there were another ten to take his place. The enemy spellcasters were rallying, peppering the sky with danger. Grandine's roar had scattered the surging tide to their right, but the king's Dragon Slayers were closing in, and with the children on her back, she could not risk engaging them.
Zeref slowed to a stop. Heedless to the soldiers rushing towards him, flooding the path Anna and her Spirits had cut, he turned his attention away from the nearest enemies and towards the battle as a whole. The immediate battle was where they lived or died, but it was on the larger scale that they would win or lose – and since he could not die, he would leave the former to Anna and focus on the latter.
His gaze skimmed over endless waves of soldiers, spears and crossbows, trenches, barricades, traps – and there, to the far right, five ballistae were slowly turning to aim their lethal points at the tired dragon and the children she carried.
He drew out another book and returned it to life. "Seilah," spoke he, quiet and firm. "Take care of the ballistae, and return to me."
"Yes, my Master," she bowed, and vanished into the melee. Shortly after, chaos erupted far from the main battle, as the men operating the ballistae drew their swords and turned upon their own machines. They hacked apart winches and severed cords with berserk fury, and by the time their colleagues were able to restrain them, every one of the weapons had been rendered useless without firing a single shot.
Zeref barely registered the success, having already singled out the next most dangerous element and chosen a new demon to counter it. An explosion blew the legs out from under the closest archers' tower – and then the next, and the next. Fire and force made short work of the soldiers' defences.
Not enough to stem the tide of soldiers.
But enough, maybe, to give them a chance to break through.
Emboldened, Zeref thrust his mind into the vastness of space and pulled it into his own reality. As when fighting Acnologia, it wasn't so much that he moved as that the coordinate axes which defined his spatial position had shifted. He was suddenly at the top of the scaffolding that had been constructed around his and Anna's Gate.
There was no burst of magic – not even so much as a pop of air – to announce his arrival to the enemy mages present. They sensed the surge of power as he returned Kyôka to her living form, but by that point, it was already too late. Bird-like talons closed around their necks and flung off the platform.
Kyôka followed them to the ground and continued to wreak havoc amongst the unprepared mages. After a moment's indecision – which, for him, was as good as acting on instinct – Zeref placed both palms to the platform beneath his feet and sent a pulse of power through it. The scaffolding fell away, freeing the Gate. Zeref landed amongst the debris with a crunch of pain in his ankle that faded almost immediately.
Anna finally reached the half-circle Kyôka had cleared in front of the Gate, shortly followed by Grandine. The dragon skidded to a halt, panting, sacred blood streaming from old wounds reopened by enemy magic. Anna jumped forward to help lift down the unconscious children, but she wasn't the only one who had noticed. Enticed by the sick glory of slaying an exhausted dragon, the soldiers surged forwards with renewed vigour.
The wave of enemies broke against the wall of Spirits, who had hastily spread out to form a circle around the Gate. Even with the demons slipping through the struggle to back them up, there weren't enough of them. The sheer number of opponents pushed them back step by step.
Zeref stepped back, shaking, eyes darting between children and dragon and Gate and never-ending enemies; calculating, re-calculating, losing the numbers that had always come so easily to him in a whirl of sight and sound-
"Zeref!" Anna shouted to snap him out of it, as she returned to the deadly melee. "Do what you have to do with Grandine. Hurry!"
His eyes widened. "Anna, it's too dangerous! You've done enough; fall back!"
"No," she declared. "I will fight alongside my Spirits. I will protect the children no matter what. I… I do care about you. About all of you." Her gaze drifted momentarily to the side, to where Zeref knew the Heartfilia homestead lay beyond the trees. "I won't let anyone else suffer because of my decisions. I will stand by you all until the end."
"But-"
"Zeref. I've got this."
As unshakeable as the earth itself, her steady gaze met his. And he didn't stop to wonder how, exactly, she had 'got' the endless army. If she said she had it under control, then she had it under control, and that was that.
So he turned his back to the enemy horde and dropped to his knees, burning his modified ritual circle into the ground just as he had in the clearing where Igneel had fallen. He'd focus on his role and let Anna do her thing.
Only when the heavens split in two and a crash of dark thunder stunned the entire army into silence did he begin to question the wisdom of his complacency.
And when he glanced over his shoulder to see an armoured giant raising a sword of starlight towards their foes, all thoughts of the half-finished ritual vanished from his mind.
"Anna!" he shrieked.
"Zeref, do the bloody ritual! What part of I've got this did you not understand?"
"What have you done?"
"Summoned the Celestial Spirit King," she shrugged, as if it wasn't something that scared him more than the literal army bearing down upon them.
"How?"
"I invented a ritual for it. Just now."
"You can't spontaneously invent new ritual magic in the middle of a fight!"
"Maybe you can't."
"No, Anna; you can't just pull the core of our magic out into reality like that! The entire space-between-time will collapse!"
"Obviously, I thought of that. Amateur." Anna rolled her eyes. Behind her, the almighty embodiment of the magic they had created flung an entire brigade of troops up into the air with one swipe of his sword. "It's not a true ritual. Both effect and cost are temporary. I calculated that I could briefly substitute one of the other Spirits as the magic's core, which would hold the entire system together long enough for the Spirit King to give us a hand – well, a sword – in this dimension."
Zeref blinked; numbers ran faster than thought across his mind. "But only the Zodiac Spirits would be strong enough to sustain the core, and the resonance would shatter the key! Anna, we need the twelve Zodiac keys to open the Gate!"
"Yes, Zeref," she huffed, opening her hand to reveal a broken black key, slowly turning to stardust. "But you were being so sentimental about it that I had to go and make thirteen – the thirteenth being entirely mathematically superfluous for the smooth functioning of our Gate, and therefore a sufficient sacrifice for my ritual. I do know what I'm doing, Zeref. If you can just accept that, all these little moments of panic you're having can be avoided."
"Yes," he promised. "I can. I will."
Anna seemed a little taken aback by this concession. "Yes, well, good. Anyway, don't you have something to be doing? I told you, I've got this."
Nodding, he returned his attention to the ritual, letting Anna's mighty presence shield him from the volume and the madness and the awe of it all. Once the ritual circle was complete, he and the sky dragon faced each other.
"Do it," Grandine commanded.
"I'll protect them in your stead, I promise."
She growled something feral, but it was softer, he thought, than he had ever heard from her before. "Walk this path to the end, Zeref Dragneel."
He bowed his head and reached inside him for the emotions he had spent three decades pushing away and a fourth slowly reclaiming – and all the power, good and bad, that came with them. The great and noble sky dragon sacrificed herself for her daughter's sake without a word.
There he remained for as long as he dared, the heels of both hands pressed to his forehead, trying to find the stability that held the black wind at bay. Purpose helped far more than peace, and purpose abounded in this place. He risked a glance over his shoulder, and there they were: Celestial Spirit and Etherious demon alike, tired yet resolute, overwhelmed yet unyielding, and not a single one of the king's men had managed to slip through their perimeter.
Although all were living magic, the demons could not have been more different to Anna's Spirits: composed where the Spirits were wild; obedient where the loyalty of the Spirits had to be earned; their form and their danger was perfectly engineered, rather than born of the whims of myth and magic. And yet they fought together as if they always had. From two very different origins, their goals were one and the same.
This is how it's supposed to be, Zeref thought fiercely, watching Mard Geer and the Celestial Spirit King standing back-to-back amidst a sea of foes. And he was determined to see this through, for all of them.
He performed the Milky Way rite as Grandine had instructed, and summoned back her soul to this side of the river of stars. She spoke not a word to him, merely waited for him to complete his task. When he activated his own ritual one final time, sealing her spirit within the body of her daughter, she transmitted to him three short words – it is complete – and fell silent once more.
There was, as usual, more than enough volume in the real world to make up for it.
"You have some nerve, Zeref!"
"Anna…?" he murmured groggily, still too deeply immersed in the otherworldly magic to comprehend why she looked so angry.
"Whatever the hell it was you just did had only a passing resemblance to the ritual you calculated all those years ago! You have some nerve berating me for improvising ritual magic when you're doing incredible things like this! At least my pseudo-ritual to summon the Celestial Spirit King only had three interlocking layers; I counted at least twenty-seven in that one-"
"ANNA!"
Too late.
She was still turning to see what had frightened him so, starlight shimmering around her body, when the arrow of crimson light slammed into her side.
Claws flashed, blades sang. Zeref didn't know if one of the Spirits had done it, driven by Anna's emotions, or if one of the demons had done it, driven by his, but the enemy spellcaster who had flung the bolt fell to the ground, dead, and he still couldn't comprehend it – not the way she'd fallen – not the way she'd vanished.
Where Anna had been standing, there was now a black-armoured knight, leaning heavily on the cross-guard of a sword buried into the ground.
"Anna…?" he whispered, trying to make sense of the magic swirling around her, of the fear in his blood, of the adrenaline that swallowed conscious thought.
"I'm fine," she sighed, her voice sounding oddly distant from inside the helmet. "I calculated that there would be a little bit of extra power left over from sacrificing the black key. The magic of Ophiuchus resides in me, for the time being."
The relief almost pushed Zeref to his knees. "Anna, don't- don't do that to me!" Vigorously, he shook his head, strength returning with every moment now that the cliff edge was safely behind them. He stepped forwards to help her, only for her to shake her sword at him more threateningly than any soldier.
"I told you, I've got this, Zeref," she scowled. Well, he couldn't see her face, but it was difficult to imagine the nightmarish visage of the black knight doing anything but scowling. "I told you to trust me, remember?"
"I do," he conceded.
"Well then, shall I open the Gate?"
"Not yet. I need to add that lock so it can't open too early."
There was a pause. "Fine." With a grunt, she hefted the huge sword onto one plated shoulder. "Be quick. I'm not cut out for this; I'm a scholar, not a swordswoman."
"You're everything."
The words slipped from his lips before he could stop them; a product of his gratitude and relief, and the horror of that half-unreal moment when he thought he'd lost her. They were a plea for her not to scare him like that again – a prayer against the horrifying future he had glimpsed in that instant.
"Don't be ridiculous," she huffed.
But he wasn't being ridiculous.
He hadn't meant to say it out loud, but he did mean it.
She was a scholar, an inventor, a mage, a pioneer, and more of a warrior than he would ever be.
Colleague, friend, and rival.
Mentor and muse.
A reason to try.
For as long as his life had held meaning, he had had her.
She was everything to him, in the sense that everything he now was, and everything he could now do, was only possible because of her.
Perhaps she guessed some of what he wasn't saying, because she murmured, so quiet he could barely hear it over the fray, "You have, yourself, everything you could possibly need, Zeref."
Then, with more of the fire he was used to: "Except, maybe, a sense of appropriate timing. Are you going to fix the Gate any time this century, or do I have to beat all of the king's men singlehandedly and then do it myself?"
"I'm doing it," he said, because he wanted nothing more than to take his family away from this accursed age.
Anna took up her place beside the Celestial Spirit King. Although she may not have had any more experience of battle than Zeref did, she had never shied away from defending what mattered to her; the giant sword was merely a novel means of doing what she had always done. For his part, Zeref took up his place by their invention. The magic – the numbers – the answers – came to him more easily than they ever had before. Into the very foundations of the Gate he worked a powerful enchantment, rendering it unusable until the atmospheric magic was strong enough for Igneel and the others to save their children.
When that time would be, he no longer knew. The future held frightening potential. Yet, even if he and Anna and the children entrusted to them emerged into a barren wasteland, he knew they would thrive.
"Done!"
"About time." Anna was at his side at once – panting, leaning on her sword, and still dressed as a dread knight.
"Are you… going to open the Gate dressed like that?" Zeref wondered.
"Jealous that you never invented magic that looks as cool as this?" she retorted. "Get out of the way."
He obliged, although he didn't go far. It wasn't fear that the untested Gate might not work as planned that made him hover so anxiously – after all, he and Anna had built it together, and although he sometimes doubted himself, he never doubted her.
But he was afraid. He had been ever since he thought he'd lost her. So close to their goal, every action and consequence was a hundred times more vivid. More dangerous.
It was the Celestial Spirit King who vanished first. Anna slumped to her knees, palms flat on the floor, armoured pauldrons heaving. "I'm fine," she muttered again, before he could run over to her. "Didn't realize how quickly the Spirit King would burn through the magic I borrowed from Ophiuchus. That'll teach me to experiment in the middle of a battle…"
The Zodiac Spirits were the next to disappear. That was intentional – she needed their keys to operate the Gate – but that didn't make it any less alarming when the enemy army surged into the breaches in their line of defence. His demons were doing their best to cover for them, but one by one, the sparks of their lives were winking out.
Almost out of time.
Zeref took the gold keys from Anna and slipped them into the Gate's mechanism, feeling the dull click echo deep within his magical core as they fell perfectly into place. She called the magic forth with all the power of her bloodline… and the great doorway opened.
Trapped within the mouth of twisted metal, a hungry vortex roared. It gleamed with all colours and none, sometimes dark and sometimes light but more often than not, both at once. Try as he might, Zeref could not pierce that vortex with his eyes. All his senses shied away from the touch of its magic. If the future truly could be found on the other side of that doorway, it could not be seen from the past.
"Anna," he whispered, exhaustion banished by the universal light. "Anna! We did it!"
If she shared his exultation – and surely, surely she did – there was no sign of it in her impatient grunt. "Then hurry up and go through already."
"Natsu has to go before I do, or he'll die," Zeref countered.
"Send the children first, then," Anna instructed. Zeref nodded, but hesitated, and he could feel her rolling her eyes behind the black knight's helm. "Just pick them up and throw them, Zeref. You can apologize once you're on the other side."
"Right- yes- right." The surrealness of it helped. It was difficult to prevaricate over the complex and dangerous emotions he felt towards his brother when he was throwing him bodily through an interdimensional vortex. One by one, Anna's magic whisked them off to somewhere incomprehensibly far away.
"Now you," she ordered.
He shook his head. "We'll go together."
"Stop being sentimental and go! I'll be right behind you!"
"No. We started this together. We'll finish it together."
He held out his hand, waiting for her to take it.
She did not.
A soft thump reached his ears.
He turned, and Anna, his Anna, was sprawled on the bloody earth.
A scream tore from his lips. He was already at her side, skidding, falling to his knees, reaching for her. A golden halo surrounded her as the last remnants of her armour disintegrated.
It seemed to take forever for her eyes to open, and even when they did, the expression of resignation upon her face was so unfamiliar that he almost didn't recognize her.
"Sorry," she said ruefully. "I lied. I'm… not really fine."
"Anna- what-?" He stammered the words and stopped when his heart did. The sight of the burnt and bloody hole in her side broke thought and emotion at once. Beneath his gaze, the corrupting dark of it seemed to spread, taking more of her flesh and organs and life just as the sight of it was draining the colour from his vision, the movement from his blood, the coherence from his thoughts. This couldn't be real. She was fine, she'd said she was fine-
"It's typical, isn't it?" she reflected, to the clouds somewhere over his shoulder. "You can rewrite the laws of space and time, craft new rituals on the spot, and create utterly revolutionary new magic… and still get taken out by some oaf of a mage who can't do more than fling bolts of energy around. Barbarians, the lot of them. I hope the future's more civilized than this."
"Anna-" he choked again, no better than the first time.
With immense effort, she dragged her gaze towards him. Her brown eyes softened, mighty mountains crumbling. "You were right, Zeref. We shouldn't have antagonized the king. I felt like I owned the world, with you and the dragons beside me… I was such a fool. Just because I was happier in it didn't mean the world had become a better place. We should have kept our heads down. Kept our family safe."
Then she laughed, a choking sound almost as painful to hear as it must have been to make. "And there I just admitted you were right and I was wrong. I really must be dying."
Those words, more than anything, snapped Zeref back to reality. "You're not going to die," he insisted. "Grandine shared her magic with me before she died. I can heal you!"
Extending his trembling hand towards her, he forced the sky dragon's magic to stir within his body. It clashed with his own broken magic at once, and he relished the pain; it gave him something to focus on as a white glow appeared at his palm.
A white glow, tinged with black.
Darkness twitched at his fingertips as if it could taste the life pouring out of her, that fragment of his own cursed existence, the price of his sins.
He couldn't save her.
He loved her too much to be able to save her.
A cry escaped his lips. He could create life and stop time and fight off Acnologia, and yet the one thing he wanted, the one thing he needed, the simplest application of magic that even a five-year-old Sky Dragon Slayer could do was beyond him.
A cool hand touched his cheek. Too cool. "It's okay, Zeref," Anna smiled. "You need to go through the Gate."
"Not without you."
"You must. The children need you."
"It's you they need!" he shouted. "You're the one who helped raise them, you're the one who taught them, you're the one who gave up your own family for them; it's you they need, Anna, not me!"
"Well they can't have me!" she shouted back. A bubble of blood burst on her lips. Her hand slipped from his cheek, and he caught it in both of his, clutching it as if he could somehow stop her from falling. Softer now, she continued, "You'll have to do it for both of us."
"I can't do it!"
"Of course you can." Her eyes closed and his heart stopped, but then they reopened, bloodshot yet focussed. "Zeref, I am so sorry. I know I forced you into this. I took advantage of you when you were lost and fragile, and I made you do what I wanted when you were perfectly happy without me-"
"No," he overrode her fiercely. "Don't you dare think like that. Meeting you saved me, Anna. It was you I needed – you, who motivated me to be better and reminded me of all I had given away and saw something in me worth saving."
It seemed, then, as though a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders, and she smiled, not seeming to care how it shattered his heart into pieces. "You haven't needed me for a very long time, Zeref," she murmured. "And you don't need me now. Don't forget, you won't be on your own. You can speak to Igneel and the others any time you need. They'll help you. I know you can do it, so go and prove it to me."
"No," he whispered.
"Go through the bloody Gate, Zeref!"
"I won't leave you!"
The next shout broke and died on her lips, and was reborn as a blood-tinged whisper. "Please."
"No." Shaking his head in a desperate attempt to clear his blurry vision, he told her, "You're the only reason why I didn't die alone and forgotten; I am not leaving you to do the same."
A curious frown creased her forehead. "You can't die, silly."
"There's more than one way to die," he murmured. "I have existed for a long time, but it is only recently that I have started living. You're the reason for that, Anna. You're everything. I won't leave you."
"But the children-"
"I'll catch up with them." The Gate – if everything had gone to plan – was connected to a single point in time. It didn't matter if he went through now or in an hour; he would still arrive in the exact same moment as the dragon-children. And if it hadn't gone to plan, well, even if the children were scattered across the world and through the years, he would find them. He didn't bother glancing over his shoulder to see if the last surviving demons were still holding out against the army. No force on earth would be capable of stopping him from passing through the Gate now. "I'm immortal, remember?"
Her lip trembled. Tears sparkled in her eyes, and the sight of them froze the breath in his throat.
Not like this. Not from the one who had always held him while he cried.
"Then promise me," she rasped. "Zeref, promise me that you won't ever stop trying."
He didn't think he could speak, so he nodded instead.
There was a gentleness in her eyes, and he hated it. It was as if death had stripped away her fire.
She pulled her hand out of his and softly, without breaking eye contact, rested it over his heart. "Does it hurt?" she asked.
He whispered, "Unbearably."
"Good," she said. "The depth of your pain is the depth of your heart. It hurts because you love me, and I you, and that is all I could have hoped for. You are so very alive, Zeref. You're going to change the world, I know it."
"We've already changed the world, Anna," he whispered. "We are bringing this age of hatred to an end. We did it together."
"Yes," she mused. "We did, didn't we? So be sure to see it through to the end for me, won't you?"
At last, she smiled up at him, and it wasn't gentle – it was as fierce and proud and blazing as it had ever been.
And if the universe had seen her in that moment, it would have realized she was meant to live; and if the gods had been watching, they would have surely spared her, just to see what miracle she would work next.
But there were no gods, and there was no great meaning to the universe, and when she closed her eyes one final time, she was gone.
Slowly, Zeref got to his feet.
He knew what he had to do.
He didn't know if it would be possible to complete their mission on his own. He wasn't sure if he could do it, weak and cursed as he was… but he was going to try.
He would do it for her.
He would see this through to the end.
It was in that moment, as he turned to face the Gate that would take him alone to their future, that he realized what he should have done a long time ago.
There was no crackling doorway to destiny.
There was no miraculous rift in time and space.
The Gate was inanimate, dull, closed; as dead as the one whose magic had so briefly held it open.