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The four-year grinding wheel had officially stopped turning, and for a while, Magnolia actually felt like a paradise. The Magic Council's silver robes had cleared out of our territory, leaving behind a massive, golden runic decree that cemented Fairy Tail as an official, sovereign power across the kingdom.
A formal envoy from the capital marched straight into the tavern a few months later, looking ridiculous in their velvet suits as they presented Warrod with a ceremonial crest. Because his advanced Green Magic logistics had single-handedly kept the entire province from starving during the siege, the Council officially appointed him as a founding member of The Ten Wizard Saints. Warrod spent the entire evening grumbling about how the fancy ceremonial robes were too itchy, but he accepted the title anyway, mostly because Mavis pointed out it gave the guild absolute legal immunity from the capital tax collectors.
Yuri finally stopped living like a reckless bachelor around that time and married Rita, a kind, lively girl from the outer valleys who became the heart of the guildhall. The entire town threw a massive, rowdy street festival that lasted three straight days. I spent most of it sitting at a corner table in my white-and-purple coat, drinking free ale and watching Yuri make a fool of himself on the dance floor.
For ten whole years, the peace held. The guildhall grew into a massive, multi-story landmark, the vaults were overflowing with noble gold, and the kids I had watched crawl through the mud were suddenly running the most famous guild in Fiore. Being three hundred years old meant watching these tiny mortal timelines play out was a decent way to kill a decade.
But the quiet never lasts long.
When Rita went into labor inside the guild backrooms, the entire tavern went into a state of total panic. Yuri was pacing holes into the floorboards, Precht was nervously sharpening his daggers just to keep his hands busy, and Mavis was in the back room helping deliver the baby.
The second the healthy, screaming boy was born, Mavis carried him out into the lantern light. She looked down at the newborn, her green eyes wide with pure affection.
"He's beautiful, Yuri," Mavis whispered, her voice trembling with happiness. "Let's name him... Makarov."
That single moment of pure love was the exact trigger the universe was waiting for.
Inside her chest, the dormant, divine Curse of Ankhseram woke up. I was leaning against the wall near the door, and my world-sight caught the exact millisecond her soul container flashed with a greasy, negative Ethernano pulse. It wasn't a spell; it was an absolute law of contradiction.
Rita smiled weakly from the bed, reaching out a hand to touch Mavis's arm—and went completely limp. The life force inside her container vanished, her skin turning sheet-white as she dropped dead right onto the pillows.
"Rita? Rita!" Yuri screamed, lunging past the counter.
Mavis stared at her hands, all the color draining from her face as the reality slammed into her brain. She was a walking plague. The more she cared about someone, the faster they died. Letting out a choked, terrified shriek, Mavis dropped the baby into Yuri's arms and sprinted out the front doors, fleeing Magnolia into the dark northern wilderness like a hunted animal.
Merlin POV
I didn't stay for the funeral. Honestly, watching a grieving family cry over a bad hand from fate is boring. I closed my eyes, let my passive magic warp the light around my robes, and tracked Mavis's Ethernano signature into the deep woods under a seamless perception filter.
For six miserable months, I watched her wander the wilderness. Because her subconscious mind still deeply loved nature and living things, the curse acted like an automated kill-switch wherever her boots touched the ground. Lush green grass withered into black slime, ancient oak trees rotted into ash in seconds, and forest birds dropped dead from the sky the moment she walked beneath their branches.
Driven completely insane by the guilt and the isolation, Mavis finally sat down against a hollow log, pulled her knees to her chest, and flatly refused to eat, trying to starve herself to death. She sat there for three months without a single crumb of food, only to discover the cruelest joke of the curse: her absolute immortality made it impossible to die. She was permanently locked in a tattered, emaciated state of constant suffering, weeping into the dirt while the forest rotted around her shell.
I was sitting on a thick pine branch right above her head, casually eating a mountain apple while I watched her cry.
Solomon, I thought, my gold eyes flaring as I scanned the dark purple aura suffocating her frame. Run a diagnostic pass on her container. Can we shatter this loop with a high-tier unravelling rune?
[Warning: Soul container is trapped in a permanent Divine Contradiction Loop. The curse is a conceptual law bound directly to her core architecture. Any attempt to force a magical extraction at your current output will shatter her soul matrix.]
Right. Divine law, I thought, tossing the apple core into the bushes. Guess we let things play out.
A full year into her exile, the static pressure in the clearing suddenly dropped, turning freezing cold. The rotting leaves rustled, and a guy in a high-collared black cloak stepped out from the shadows of the dead trees.
Zeref Dragneel.
He looked exactly like the records—pitch-black hair, dark eyes, and a massive cloud of active death magic radiating off his shoulders. Because they were both immortal anomalies bound by the exact same curse, they were the only two living things on the entire continent who could stand side-by-side without turning into ash.
Mavis lifted her tattered head, her voice raw. "Zeref..."
"You've grown thin, Mavis," Zeref said, his voice completely flat, carrying the exhaustion of a man who had been awake for four hundred years. He sat down on a rotting stone across from her, his expression twisting into a strange grimace. "I've been building an empire across the western sea. Alvarez. It's a massive, beautiful kingdom... No, it's disgusting. A collection of worthless pawns. I created the Etherious demons to murder me, but they're too weak. Everyone is too weak. I love people, Mavis... but I want to watch them burn."
His mind was a complete mess. One second he was weeping for humanity, and the next his eyes would turn pure crimson as the contradiction curse forced him to hate everything he touched.
Mavis stared at him, seeing the exact reflection of her own miserable rejection in his eyes. She didn't see a dark wizard; she just saw another broken soul who was entirely alone in the dark. Slowly, she stood up on her trembling legs, walked across the clearing, and wrapped her small arms tightly around his neck, pulling him into an embrace.
"We'll find a way, Zeref," Mavis sobbed against his shoulder. "We're the only ones who understand. We can break it together."
Zeref's eyes softened, a look of genuine love crossing his face as he leaned down and pressed his lips against hers.
The exact millisecond their mouths connected, the ultimate trap of the Ankhseram logic triggered. Zeref's affection for her peaked, and his curse responded by releasing an unprecedented shockwave of black death magic. The raw kinetic force of the output caused the surrounding mountain crags to crack and groan.
Despite her own immortality, the sheer intensity of Zeref's death magic completely overrode Mavis's internal container. Her eyes rolled back, her body went completely limp, and she collapsed heavily into his arms, falling into a permanent, comatose state.
"Mavis? Mavis, wake up!" Zeref panicked, shaking her tattered shoulders as tears streamed down his face. "No... not again... why does everything I love have to die?!"
He wept over her body for an hour, before his expression turned cold and dead. He loosely let her limp form slide onto the grass, stood up without a word, and walked away into the shadows of the northern forest, leaving her behind.
The second his Ethernano signature vanished from the mountain line, I deactivated my perception filter and stepped out onto the clearing. I walked over to the tattered grass and looked down at Mavis's comatose, pale face. Her soul container wasn't destroyed, but it was permanently frozen in a temporal paradox.
"Well, Master Mavis," I muttered, casually leaning on Odin's staff as a lazy smirk returned to my face. "You wanted to find a way to create the ultimate magic. This tragedy is exactly the fuel Precht needs to build the Lumen Histoire battery down in the basement."
I hoisted her limp body effortlessly over my shoulder, letting the pink flower petals of my teleportation magic start to swirl around my boots. The founder era was officially dead, the next generation was born, and I was getting incredibly bored of watching historical drama. It was finally time to hit the time-skip button.
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