The first thing Aelius noticed when he woke up was that he was whole. The second was that he was not staring up at the harsh white lights of an infirmary ceiling. Instead, rough wooden planks sat overhead, uneven with age, while the familiar scent of dried herbs, medicine, smoke, and old wood lingered thick in the air around him.
He recognized it instantly, Porlyusica's cabin. To most people, the place felt oppressive. Like stepping into the den of some ancient swamp witch that tolerated your existence only because killing you would interrupt her tea. To Aelius, though, it was familiar in a way few places were. He had spent enough years here as a child, coughing poison into buckets or accidentally rotting furniture apart whenever his magic slipped, that the smell alone dragged old memories back with uncomfortable ease.
His head turned slowly against the pillow beneath him, stiff but no pain, odd, that meant he was fully regenerated. Despite being left in a worse state than when he lost to Nezhhar, he could now feel everything again. His arms flexed beneath the blanket. His chest rose normally with each breath.
His core… Aelius's expression shifted faintly as his senses turned inward instinctively. It was… whole? That made no sense. A broken ethernano container was catastrophic. Mages could damage them through overuse, strain them, destabilize them, but a full break? Most people did not survive that at all. The few who did were usually crippled permanently, unable to use magic afterward. Yet he felt intact.
Before he could think further, Aelius pushed himself upright. Several joints cracked loudly in protest, and a small grunt escaped him as his spine shifted back into place, the sound immediately drawing movement from elsewhere in the cabin.
Porlyusica looked up from where she had apparently been sorting herbs near the far wall. Her eyes narrowed almost instantly once she realized he was conscious. "You're awake," she said simply. The words were flat as ever, though he still caught the brief flicker of surprise underneath them before it vanished again. "You humans never cease causing me strife."
"I'm not human," Aelius replied automatically. The response came out rougher than intended due to disuse, though the familiarity of the exchange made him roll his eyes in him anyway.
Porlyusica's eyes narrowed further. "Close enough," she muttered while walking toward him. "And you, specifically, are worse than most."
Aelius watched her approach carefully. Smaller than him by a fair amount, elderly, and physically unimpressive. And still one of the only people on the continent capable of terrifying him as a child. Her hands pressed against his chest before he could protest, one near his sternum while the other steadied his shoulder as she checked his heartbeat with practiced annoyance.
Instinct immediately flared. Not violent, just automatic. His body wanted distance before conscious thought caught up. Years of isolation had burned reactions like that too deeply into him to remove fully. It took actual effort not to pull away from the contact.
Porlyusica either noticed and ignored it, or simply expected it already. "And before you ask," she continued while listening to his breathing, "yes, I repaired your core. And yes," she added dryly, "I am likely the first person alive to achieve such a thing." Her expression darkened immediately afterward. "And I fully intend to be the last."
He waited till it was clear Porlyusica was finished before he sighed out his question. "How?"
Porlyusica clicked her tongue irritably. "Because you make no sense," she snapped. Aelius frowned faintly while she continued examining him. "Your ethernano organ technically exists," she said, "but it barely functions the way it should. It is more like…" She paused, visibly annoyed that she even had to explain it. "A connector or a conduit." Her hand pressed harder against the center of his chest. "Your actual reserves are elsewhere."
Aelius went still, his body tensing under Porlyusica, and the woman noticed immediately. "That expression tells me you were aware of that already. But I won't press further. Instead, I made a lacrima," Porlyusica continued. "Condensed poison attribute magic. As close to your natural ethernano alignment as I could manage without killing myself from the fumes."
Aelius snorted faintly at that. She ignored him, mostly, her fingers digging into his stomach where she was pressing. "I implanted it temporarily in place of your shattered core and used it to stabilize the connection before your body collapsed completely." Her expression twisted with visible irritation at the memory. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to manually force someone's magic circulation back into alignment while their body continuously mutates around the damage?"
"…I imagine unpleasant."
"It was infuriating. Once your regeneration started functioning properly again," Porlyusica continued, "I removed the artificial lacrima and reconstructed the damaged container manually."
Aelius stared at her for several seconds. "You rebuilt it?"
"Yes."
"That should not be possible."
"And yet here you are." Her tone carried the particular irritation of someone angry that reality itself had forced them to prove they were smarter than it. Silence settled briefly after that. Aelius looked down toward his chest slowly. He could feel it now that he focused properly.
Not just the repaired core, but the scar tissue around it. Fine fractures healed together manually instead of naturally. His regeneration had smoothed most of the damage away already, but traces remained beneath the surface. Careful and precise work, dangerously precise.
"You almost died," Porlyusica said suddenly. The bluntness dragged his attention back upward. Her expression had shifted while he was distracted. Still irritated. Still sharp. But there was something heavier underneath it now. "You did die, briefly," she corrected a moment later. "Twice, technically. Your heart stopped during surgery once. The second time, your nervous system collapsed because your magic tried rebuilding organs faster than your body could sustain them."
Aelius absorbed that quietly before asking, "…How long?"
"Five years."
Aelius gave her a flat stare strong enough to kill lesser men outright. The silence stretched for five full seconds before Porlyusica rolled her eyes with visible annoyance. "Seventeen days," she corrected. "I forgot that trick stopped working on you years ago."
Aelius exhaled slowly through his nose before swinging his legs over the side of the bed. The wooden floor creaked faintly beneath his weight as he stood. His body stretched automatically afterward, joints cracking one after another while stiffness loosened across his back and shoulders. "You only did that consistently for a month when I was younger," he muttered. "I learned eventually, which." As he reached for the door, Porlyusica's voice cut through the cabin again. "And Aelius." He paused and turned to look at her out of the corner of his eye. The old woman looked at him properly now, irritation fading slightly into something sterner. "You had better not have reverted."
Aelius frowned faintly, his hand stopping just short of the doorknob. "Reverted."
"You barely tolerated people near you," she continued. "Every interaction became transactional, cold, and distant. You looked at companionship like it was leverage instead of affection." Her mouth thinned slightly. "You were cruel, Aelius. You weren't loud about it, but you were truthful, which was worse."
Aelius let out a low sigh through his nose, equal parts annoyance and exhaustion. "You say you hate humans," he muttered, "but you worry enough to keep sticking your nose where it doesn't belong."
Porlyusica's expression flattened immediately. "Do not mistake observation for affection." Aelius rolled his eyes faintly before turning back toward the door. "I'm not reverting, witch," he said after a moment. "I used to be angry at everything." His voice stayed even, steady in the way it always became whenever he spoke about himself directly. "Now I know what I'm angry at."
"That does not sound healthier."
"It probably isn't, but it doesn't mean I'll suddenly turn into sunshine and rainbows like the rest of the guild," he continued. "But I'm not going to kill someone for saying the wrong thing…Probably."
Porlyusica gave him a deeply unimpressed look. "You say that as though it is reassuring."
Aelius shrugged once. It was truthful, mostly in any case. The urge to retreat was still there. He could feel it sitting underneath everything else like an old scar that never healed properly. The instinct to isolate himself. To reduce relationships into distance and utility because distance hurt less when things went wrong. And as proven, things always went wrong eventually.
But now another feeling sat over top of it, heavier than the isolation he oh so wanted to fall into. It was an amalgamation of other feelings, all slammed together to push him forward; instead of retreating, and it was far uglier than simple isolationism.
An amalgamation of other feelings crushed together until they became momentum instead of paralysis. Rage and Vengeance, topped with the need for power so overwhelming it bordered on obsession. Aelius chose that moment to remember the way Acnologia hovered above Tenrou like a living apocalypse while every instinct in his body screamed helplessness. He remembered the certainty that nothing he did mattered against that kind of power. The sensation of his defenses shattering like wet paper. His body disappearing piece by piece while the island vanished behind him.
He remembered failing. And worse, he remembered how small he had felt. The thought alone made something dark twist beneath his ribs. He lived his life under the philosophy that weak people died. Weak people watched others die. Weak people stood helpless while monsters decided whether they lived or vanished. Aelius had spent years surviving horrors stronger than him through stubbornness, adaptation, and endurance, and for just a moment, he thought, maybe he wasn't weak. But it was no longer enough. He want—no, he needed more. Enough power that no one could ever force him into that position again. Enough strength that another Acnologia would not leave him broken in the ocean waiting to die. Enough that nobody could touch the people he cared about and walk away afterward.
"You're thinking too loudly again. It is written all over your face, boy." Porlyusica's voice cut through the silence sharply enough that Aelius blinked once, attention snapping back toward the cabin. The fact that he had forgotten she was still there irritated him; his thoughts must have dragged him deeper than he realized. Porlyusica was watching him closely now, her expression harsher than before. "That's a very, very dangerous line of thought, especially for someone with your magic."
"I'm not going to fall into a rut," Aelius said.
The words came out calm enough, though Porlyusica clearly did not believe him entirely, and he clearly didn't care. Aelius finally grabbed the doorknob.
Then immediately recoiled. Black rot spread across the metal the instant his fingers touched it. Rust erupted outward in branching patterns fast enough to see with the naked eye before the entire knob simply crumbled apart with a brittle snapping sound, collapsing into reddish-black flakes against the wooden floor.
Aelius stared at the empty hole left in the door for a moment. "…Did breaking my core reset me to being unable to control my magic?"
The question came slower than usual, his voice rougher too. Not angry exactly. But something underneath it growled unintentionally through the words.
Porlyusica looked entirely unsurprised. "No clue," she answered bluntly. "It is not exactly a common procedure."
Aelius glanced back toward her.
"You are quite literally the only idiot alive who has managed to shatter their ethernano container while simultaneously surviving long enough for me to fix it." She crossed her arms. "Just put your gloves on and go home," she muttered.
Aelius looked down at his hand again. Before they flashed white and his gloves appeared already on, he was officially out of cloaks, something he would have to deal with later.
"One last thing." Something in her tone made Aelius glance back immediately.
The old woman looked irritated. More than irritated, actually, uneasy was a closer word, which was significantly more concerning. "During your stay here," she said slowly, "I noticed something felt…off."
Aelius frowned faintly. Porlyusica's foot tapped once against the wooden floor as though she was organizing the thought carefully before continuing. "You don't feel whole."
Aelius's eyes narrowed slightly. "That is a very vague statement."
"Yes, because you are a very vague problem," Porlyusica snapped immediately. "You are alive, but incorrectly."
That was not reassuring. Her expression twisted deeper into a scowl while she searched for the wording. "Your body feels…" She paused again. "Artificial." Aelius's eyes narrowed more, his fist clenching, Porlyusica noticed, but continued anyway. "When I examined you during surgery, your organs were there. Your nervous system functioned. Your heart beat normally…But none of it felt entirely real. It was like touching condensed magic pretending to be flesh," she said.
Aelius said nothing. Because something cold had settled low in his stomach the moment she started speaking. Porlyusica crossed her arms tighter. "The best comparison I can make," she muttered reluctantly, "is an Etherious."
Aelius's newly covered hand pushed the cabin door open more carefully this time. He huffed a sigh as he looked outside. "I know something that will probably have better answers," he said. Aelius glanced back over his shoulder slightly. "And for your sake, witch," he continued with a quiet sigh, "don't tell anyone else about that."
The silence afterward stretched just long enough to become tense. Before Porlyusica's expression flattened completely."You are becoming irritating again."
"That implies I stopped." Aelius stepped outside fully now, boots pressing into damp earth while morning light filtered through the trees overhead. The forest smelled alive. Wet bark, moss, fresh air. "I'll send someone with payment," Aelius said after a moment. "I doubt anything you used during surgery was cheap."
Behind him, Porlyusica scoffed loudly enough that he could hear it through the doorway. "You think I care about money?"
"No," Aelius admitted. "But I assume you care about wasting rare magical materials on me."
He kept walking after that, leaving Porlyusica's cabin behind while the forest slowly swallowed the sound of their conversation. The path beneath his boots was familiar enough that he barely needed to think about where he was going. Roots twisted through damp earth while cold morning air drifted between the trees, carrying the smell of moss, rainwater, and Magnolia somewhere further in the distance.
Luckily, his house was not far from Porlyusica's territory. More importantly, the route avoided most of the city itself. He did not have to walk crowded streets while his magic leaked corruption every time his focus slipped. He did not have to deal with civilians staring at his wings. He did not have to answer questions. Right now, that alone felt exhausting.
The walk should have felt comforting. He had taken this route hundreds of times before Tenrou. Through the same trees. Past the same old clearings where Makarov forced him to practice control after his magic started mutating beyond what anyone expected. There were still sections of the forest permanently discolored from accidents years ago, places where plague spores seeped too deep into the earth for nature to fully recover. Now, though, everything felt displaced somehow, like he was moving through memories instead of returning home.
Eventually, the trees thinned enough for his property to come into view, and Aelius stopped walking entirely. Aelius stood there silently, staring at the house for several long moments. Despite it being chosen for its seclusion, it felt emptier than usual. His chest tightened painfully. Everyone was gone. Even if Nameless had told the truth. Even if Fairy Tail survived somewhere beyond time itself. Even if Levy were still alive and would eventually come back. Right now, they were still gone, and he was here. Alone again. The thought hit harder here than it had inside Porlyusica's cabin because there was nothing left to distract him anymore. No conversation to distract him, no irritation of listening t o Porlyusica's rants for the millionth time.
Aelius walked toward the front door slowly before pushing it open. The hinges creaked softly as stale air drifted out to meet him. Some dust lingered faintly through the house despite the enchantments preserving most of it. Furniture remained where he left it. Books sat stacked unevenly near the fireplace. A cracked mug still rested near the kitchen counter.
Something inside him finally gave way beneath the weight of how normal everything was. The wall beside him exploded outward as rot erupted through the wood instantly in violent black-green veins while plague magic burst from his body hard enough that the entire house shook around him. Furniture collapsed into ash. Thick fungal growth spread across the ceiling in wet masses while glass shattered outward from the windows under the pressure flooding the room.
Aelius grabbed the nearest table and hurled it across the house hard enough that it disintegrated before it even hit the opposite wall. Magic poured from him uncontrollably now, leaking through cracks in the composure he had held together through sheer force for years. Another section of the wall blackened and collapsed inward while the wooden floor beneath his feet softened and decayed.
"I was right there—" The words tore out harsher than intended. Aelius slammed his fist into the kitchen counter. The entire structure detonated into splintered rot and crumbling wood beneath the impact. "I was RIGHT THERE! AND I FAILED, AGAIN!" His voice cracked violently this time. Aelius staggered backward as memories crashed through him all at once. Levy is smiling beside the campfire. Makarov is standing against Acnologia. Natsu shouting victory minutes before the world ended. Then, the blue-black light swallowed all of it whole while the ocean itself burned beneath the dragon's roar.
His knees hit the floor hard enough to crack the wood beneath him. Magic still bled from his body in unstable waves, spreading rot through the house faster by the second while blackened growth curled across nearby walls. For years, he survived everything the world threw at him. The labyrinth. The creatures with it. Gods. Nameless. Hades. Acnologia itself.
He endured all of it, and this hurt worse. Because just like always, there was nobody left beside him when it ended. Aelius lowered his head while his shoulders shook once, then again, as something raw finally tore loose from somewhere deep inside him. The sound that escaped afterward barely resembled anything human at all. And for yet another time in far too short a period since his return, Aelius broke completely.
He did not know how long he remained there afterward. At some point, the shaking stopped. The pressure building inside his chest eased enough that he could breathe normally again. The thoughts were still there, circling endlessly through his head, but they had lost some of their sharpness. The house was quiet again.
Aelius remained sitting on the damaged floor, one arm resting across a raised knee while he stared at nothing in particular. His magic had stopped leaking at some point as well. The corruption coating the walls had gone dormant. The fungal growths spreading through the wood no longer expanded. Whatever instability had accompanied his breakdown seemed to have settled for now. Thankfully, because despite everything, his outburst had not completely destroyed the house. Damaged it, certainly. Several walls would need repairs. A portion of the kitchen would need to be rebuilt entirely. One window was simply gone now. The floor beneath him had enough rot damage that stepping carelessly would probably send someone through to the crawlspace underneath.
Still, the structure remained standing. Which meant it had merely joined the ever-growing list of problems waiting for him. Aelius slowly pushed himself upright. The motion felt heavier than it should have, though he suspected that had less to do with physical exhaustion and more to do with everything else.
His gaze drifted toward the nearest window. Or what remained of it. The sunlight outside had shifted enough that Orange and gold light had begun to filter through the trees surrounding the property, casting long shadows across the forest floor. The sun was beginning its descent toward the horizon.
Aelius frowned faintly; more time had passed than he thought. The guild would be closing before long. The realization lingered for a moment before he dismissed it almost immediately; it did not matter; he had already missed seventeen days, one more would not change anything. The guild would still be there tomorrow. And with that final thought, Aelius went upstairs to his bed and simply slept.
Fortunately, nothing occurred during the night, nor the following morning. At least, nothing beyond the thoughts that refused to leave him alone. Sleep had helped more than he expected, dulling the sharper edges of yesterday's breakdown, but it had not erased them. The emptiness was still there, sitting somewhere behind his ribs where he could feel it whenever his mind wandered for too long. By the time he left the house and made his way toward Magnolia, he had settled back into the familiar routine of keeping everything locked behind carefully maintained walls.
The townsfolk noticed him long before he reached the center of town. They always did. Even before Tenrou, Aelius had been the subject of no small amount of gossip. A Fairy Tail wizard was already enough to attract attention. The weeks following his recognition as a Wizard Saint had only made matters worse. Now, add his new wings and the recent events on Tenrou, and it was worse than ever. Normally, though, people at least attempted discretion when they stared. They whispered behind their hands, waited until they thought he was out of earshot, or pretended they were discussing something else entirely.
Now they were not even trying.
Conversations halted as he passed. Shopkeepers paused in the middle of unloading deliveries. More than one person openly turned to follow him with their eyes. Aelius caught fragments of hushed conversations drifting through the streets around him. Most were not malicious. Curious, confused, concerned. A few looked relieved simply to see a member of Fairy Tail walking through town again. Others looked saddened by the reminder.
Honestly, he could hardly blame them.
Magnolia had not just lost a guild. It had lost a fixture of everyday life. Fairy Tail had existed here longer than many of the town's residents had been alive. And Makarov... Makarov had practically become part of the town itself. The old man knew everyone. Their names, their families, their problems. He attended weddings, funerals, festivals, and celebrations without ever being invited because nobody imagined the event without him. If a roof collapsed during a storm, he somehow heard about it before the owner finished filing a complaint. If a child got lost, half the guild would be searching within the hour. Aelius would not have been surprised if Makarov genuinely knew every resident in Magnolia by name.
Now he was gone, and still the town was still functioning. Shops remained open. Merchants continued selling their wares. Children still ran through the streets. Life moved forward because life always moved forward. But there was a subtle absence beneath it all, a hollow space where people kept expecting someone to be. Aelius suspected the true weight of that loss would not fully settle on Magnolia for years.
That realization did absolutely nothing to improve his mood regarding where he was headed.
The closer he drew to the guild, the more he found himself dreading the inevitable conversation waiting for him. The surviving members deserved answers. More than that, they had a right to them. He could avoid strangers easily enough. Guildmates were another matter entirely. They were going to ask questions. Difficult questions. Questions he did not particularly want to answer. Questions about Tenrou. About Acnologia. About what happened after the island vanished.
Unfortunately, avoiding the subject was no longer an option.
Aelius had already decided what he intended to do. The plan required commitment. Half-measures would only create more problems later, and he was tired of dragging secrets behind him like chains. If he wanted the guild to move forward, then they needed the truth, even if that truth was ugly. Even if speaking it aloud made everything feel more real than he wanted it to. Besides, they were family, dysfunctional and infuriating as they often were. The situation was not much different from learning that a relative had died. Whether he liked it or not, he owed them that much. The thought did not make the conversation any easier. It simply made it unavoidable. As the familiar shape of the guild hall finally came into view in the distance, Aelius let out a long sigh and continued walking. There was no point delaying it any longer.
He closed the distance to the guild, and within a few seconds, he was standing in front of the closed door. And it wasn't loud. But why would it be? Natsu wasn't here to start fights, and Elfman wasn't here to criticize anyone on what he considered 'manly'. Ezra wasn't scolding the guild for fighting, while simultaneously joining in for some stupid reason.
Aelius's hand hovered just before the door handle. He'd gotten his grief and anger out the best he could. But still, the silence was deafening in its stillness. God, he hated the constant noise, the stupid arguments, and the plight of choosing a job. But now, without them, he hated it even more.
He snorted softly as his hands closed around the handle. He was so adamant that Makarov was wrong all those times he said Aelius's walls could be, and would be broken by the chaos that is Fairy Tail. But here was the hole in his soul he was sure would never fill, which was emptied yet again.
With that thought fading, Aelius pulled and opened the door to the next seven years of Fairytail.