Six more months had passed, and Aelius had done nothing but fail.
Though fail was perhaps being generous with the framing, because fail implied a consistent attempt at something that had a shape he could work toward, and what the last six months had actually been was closer to six months of running headfirst into the same wall from slightly different angles and discovering, each time, that it was still a wall. He wasn't dead, which was the only achievement he had as of now. He had survived every encounter with the Toad Dragon, had survived them with increasing efficiency even. He was faster than he had been. Harder to pin down. Better at reading the creature's movements, at understanding the rhythm of something that size, the way its weight committed before the strike landed, the way the reversed joints telegraphed direction differently than a conventional dragon's would.
The encounters, by now, were familiar enough that he could have narrated them in advance with reasonable accuracy. He would find the dragon, if it didn't find him first, attempt something, discover that the attempt produced nothing, and spend the next several hours using every piece of spatial awareness and tactical instinct he possessed to avoid being crushed until he found a gap and took it. Then he would surface into whatever part of the kingdom the tunnels deposited him in, find somewhere to sit, and think about the same problem from whatever angle the most recent failure had exposed. This was his life now. This was, he supposed with a flatness that had long since replaced any more active feeling about it, his training.
The dragon roamed, which had complicated things in ways he hadn't initially accounted for; the kingdom was vast, and the creature moved through it with the slow, purposeful rhythm of something that had claimed the entire space as its territory and saw no reason to stay in any one part of it. This meant that his resting spots kept getting trampled. The first house, the one with the intact chair and the crack in the wall, had lasted about three weeks before the dragon had found it and used its tongue, which had a rough range of one hundred feet, and used it to level the rest of the structure. He had been in it at the time, which had added an unplanned regeneration cycle to the evening. The second spot had lasted longer, a section of what had once been a granary near the kingdom's eastern edge, its walls thick enough and its foundations deep enough that he had cautiously allowed himself to regard it as stable. The dragon had walked through the outer wall on a Tuesday, if Tuesdays still existed in any meaningful sense in this place, with the complete indifference of something that had not noticed the building was there and would not have cared if it had. The third had been the most irritating, a tower section near the northern edge that had survived only because it leaned against the mountainside. He had come back to it after a particularly long engagement, only to learn the thing had somehow managed to follow him.
He had moved east after that, far enough from the dragon's most frequented routes that he had some reasonable expectation of a warning before it arrived. The kingdom was large, genuinely large, large enough that even something the Toad Dragon's size only occupied a fraction of it at any given time, and he had terrain mapped well enough by now to navigate most of it without thinking. It wasn't comfortable. Nothing about this place was comfortable. But it held, and the chair he'd dragged from the granary before it was destroyed had survived the relocation, and he sat in it now the same way he'd sat in the original, elbows on his knees, the same problem arranged in front of him with the same maddening clarity.
He had tried variations on everything. Concentration of magic rather than dispersal, pouring everything he had into a single point of contact rather than spreading the plague across a surface. He had tried mixing his magic with direct physical force, driving it through contact rather than projection, which required getting close enough to the creature that the margin for error was essentially nonexistent, and had produced two of the worst regeneration cycles of the last six months. He had tried patience, following the dragon through the cavern for an entire day without engaging, watching it move, watching it eat, watching it sleep, the corrupted body still seeping and shifting even in stillness. He had watched the pale eye close, and the cavern breathe around it, and thought about attacking it while it slept and done it and discovered that the dragon woke from sleep faster than its size had any right to suggest, and that attacking it while it was unconscious produced the same result as attacking it while it was awake, with the added variable of a much angrier dragon.
The magic simply would not take. Every spell arrived at the scale or skin of the creature and dissolved, consumed by the corruption already present; it was like pouring water into the ocean: no matter what, one could not see the difference, except he was not adding to what was already there. He was being absorbed into it, his plague meeting the dragon's plague and simply adding to it.
What he had not done, and could not make himself do, was the thing he needed to do. That had not changed across six months of trying everything around it, not that he was giving up, though; it was a common enough thought that made him hate himself just a little more.
The only thing of note was that, somewhere in the middle of his seventh month, his communication lacrima lit up.
He stared at it for a moment from across the room, and then he picked it up, because ignoring it was not something he was prepared to do given the short list of people who had the frequency.
Wakaba's face resolved in the crystal, slightly distorted by the lacrima, his pipe tucked into the corner of his mouth and his expression carrying the specific quality of a man who had been elected to make a phone call he did not entirely want to make.
"Kid," Wakaba said, by way of greeting.
"Wakaba." Aelius looked at him. "Where's Macao?"
"Currently dealing with a situation." Wakaba took a long pull from his pipe and let the smoke out slowly, which was his version of buying time before saying something he expected to land badly. "You know how it's been a few months now, and it's become pretty clear to most people that Fairy Tail isn't going to fall over. Well." Another pull from the pipe. "Turns out a fair number of people noticed that."
"How many?"
"A fair number," Wakaba said again, which meant he either didn't have an exact count or didn't want to give one. "The ones who left after Tenrou. After it became obvious the guild wasn't, you know. Collapsing. Some of them started coming back around. Wanting to return." He paused. "Macao's been dealing with them at the door since this morning, which is why I'm the one calling."
Aelius was quiet for a moment. He thought about the weeks after Tenrou, the guild hall nearly empty, the faces missing from tables that should have had people at them, the members who had looked at a Fairy Tail without its strongest and decided that the math no longer worked in their favor and found somewhere else to be. He thought about Macao taking on the Guild Master position with the expression of a man who had been handed something heavy and wasn't sure he could put it down. He thought about Vanessa and Laxus holding the line while he was here, in a dead kingdom, failing to kill a dragon.
Then he snorted. It came out before he'd decided to let it, a short, sharp sound that contained everything he felt about the shamelessness of it without requiring him to articulate any of it. People who had looked at Fairy Tail in its worst moment and walked away, now standing at the door because the worst moment had apparently passed and they had decided the calculation was favorable again. The sheer audacity of it was almost impressive. "Tell Macao," Aelius said, his voice returning to its usual flatness, "not to let them in."
Wakaba's eyebrows went up slightly. Not surprise exactly, more the expression of a man who had expected this answer and was still taking a moment to sit with it now that it had arrived. "All of them?"
"All of them," Aelius confirmed. "Every single one."
"Macao's not going to love that."
"Macao doesn't have to love it. He has to do it." Aelius leaned back slightly, looking at Wakaba through the lacrima with the patience of someone who had a great deal of time and very little of it to spare on this particular conversation. "Fairy Tail is not a guild you return to because it became convenient again. The people in that hall right now stayed. Through the worst of it, when there was no money and no strength and no reason to think it was going to get better. They stayed anyway." He kept his voice even, because none of what he was saying was angry; it was simply true. "The ones at the door made a different choice. They're allowed to have made it. They don't get to unmake it because the circumstances improved."
Wakaba smoked his pipe for a moment in the particular silence of a man who agreed with something and wasn't going to say so directly. "You know some of them are going to push back. Some of them were decent members before everything."
"Being decent before the test doesn't mean anything," Aelius said. "Passing the test means something. They didn't pass it." He paused briefly. "Tell Macao I said so. He can frame it however he wants. But the answer is no."
"Right." Wakaba took one more long pull, the ember of his pipe glowing faintly in the lacrima's image. "How's the training going?"
"Poorly," Aelius said, with complete honesty and no additional detail.
Wakaba looked at him for a moment with the expression of a man who had known him long enough to understand that no additional detail was going to be forthcoming and had made his peace with that. "Right," he said again. "Stay alive, kid."
"Working on it," Aelius said, and closed the lacrima. He set it down on the floor beside the chair and looked at the wall again, attesting that the encounter would give him some entertainment, though he swelled on how insane it sounded that he found hunting, and being hunted by a dragon, almost monotonous. But it was yet another thing wrong with him, to be shoved into the corner and repressed. The healthy way, obviously.
He set the lacrima down and did not think about Fairy Tail again for the rest of the day, mainly because he didn't have the luxury of those thoughts. But thinking about Magnolia while he was here produced nothing; there was nothing he could do about any of it from inside a dead kingdom. Macao would handle the door. Wakaba would handle Macao. Vanessa and Laxus would handle anything that needed handling with more physical immediacy, and the guild would either hold or it wouldn't, and if it didn't, he would deal with that when he got out. He went back out later that evening. He navigated the kingdom by memory now, the mapped routes sitting in his head.
The dragon was in the central plains when he found it, which was not always the case. Sometimes it moved through the outer areas for days at a stretch, dragging its rotting bulk through trees that were destroyed and rotted to sludge under its presence. Tonight it was still, which was the version of it he had the most conflicted feelings about. A moving dragon was a problem with angles, trajectories, gaps to exploit. A still dragon was arguably less of an issue, except Aelius had already been on the receiving end of this thing's 'mornings' and he didn't feel like repeating it.
He stood at the edge of a hill and watched it. The pale eye was closed. The corrupted body rose and fell with the slow rhythm of something genuinely asleep, each breath releasing a faint mist of spores that drifted upward toward the sky and dispersed in the air. The pustulent mounds along its flanks moved with their own independent rhythms as always, indifferent to the sleeping state of the creature they occupied. The fluid from its underside had pooled in the craters of the grass and gone still, reflecting the faint bioluminescence of the corrupted veins in the walls back upward in distorted patterns.
He had stood here before, in roughly this spot, looking at roughly this view, and had attacked it and learned what he already knew. He stood here now and did not attack it, because he was here to watch, which was a different activity and occasionally produced different information even when it felt identical.
He watched it for two hours. The eye stayed closed. The breathing continued. At some point, a section of the creature's left flank sloughed off entirely, a section of corrupted hide the size of a small house, and landed on the grass with a wet impact that echoed for a long time. Even then the dragon did not wake. The section of hide that had fallen continued its own biological processes independently for several minutes before whatever animated it finally gave out, and it went still on the floor, and the dragon grew a replacement over the course of an hour.
He stayed until his own stillness started producing thoughts he already had, and his bones began to ache slightly.
The months that followed had been… slow. He fought the dragon every second or third day, the fights lasting anywhere from two hours to the better part of a full day depending on how the terrain played out and how aggressively the creature was moving. He continued not to hurt it. He continued to survive, which required increasingly less of his active attention as the months had built his understanding of the creature's patterns into something close to instinct. He knew how it moved. He knew which of its attacks committed its weight fully and which were probes, knew the difference between the tail as a weapon and the tail as a counterbalance, knew that the reversed-joint legs actually gave it more lateral stability than a conventional dragon would have had and to stop assuming it was going to overbalance on turns.
He knew the dragon the way he knew himself, completely, and still useless. The annoyance of that thought had been building for weeks before he acknowledged it properly.
He had tried to be patient with himself about it, which was not a disposition that came naturally, despite everything, and had not improved with practice. Patience with external problems was something he understood; patience with terrain, with opponents, with the long grinding work of becoming better at a specific thing through repetition and failure and incremental adjustment. He had that kind of patience in abundance. What he did not have, and was discovering he had never had, was patience with a problem that lived entirely inside himself and refused to yield to any of the methods he would have applied to anything external.
He could not figure out how to become the magic. That sentence had lived in his head for the better part of eight months now, and in that time it had gone from a problem to an obsession to something closer to fury that he was increasingly bad at keeping below the surface. It was not the dragon that was making him angry. The dragon was simply a creature doing what the corruption in it demanded, vast and patient and largely indifferent to him except when he was directly in front of it. He could not be angry at the dragon the way he could not be angry at weather. It was simply a condition of the environment he had not called home.
What he was angry at was himself, which was less productive but considerably more honest. He knew what he was, but he didn't know how to be it. Or rather, it was better to say he was unwilling to let it. That was the more accurate version and also the more infuriating one.
Every time he reached for the thing underneath the spellwork, the reaching itself was the problem. Every time he tried to stop translating what he was into output, he simply could not think his way into not thinking, could not consciously decide to stop being conscious about it, and the circularity of that had gone from an intellectual observation to something that made him want to put his fist through whatever wall was nearest, which he had done twice in the last month, once in genuine frustration and once simply to see if the physical release of it did anything useful. It hadn't.
Now he was standing in the open air of the kingdom's eastern edge when the thought arrived that pushed the annoyance past the point he'd been managing it at, and the thought was simple and stupid and had probably been true for months without him being willing to look at it directly. Every mage he had ever met, regardless of their magic type, regardless of their power level, operated through intent. Intent was the mechanism. You decided what you wanted the magic to do, and the magic did it, and the sophistication of what you could do was a function of how clearly you could hold the intent and how much power you had available to execute it. That was magic. That was how it worked for everyone.
Except that wasn't how it had worked on the day with Nameless. On that day there had been no intent in that sense. There had been nothing that resembled a decision, nothing that resembled spellcraft in any form he had ever practiced or studied or seen in someone else. There had been grief, and well, still intent, which was always the part he was stuck on, intent, without intent.
The redundancy created a fresh wave of irritation that caused him to laugh, a short, sharp sound that went nowhere in the dead air of the dead kingdom.
He had been trying to decide his way into not deciding. He had been using intent to reach for the place where intent didn't exist. Every meditation, every quiet hour sitting with the substrate trying to feel his way toward the thing underneath, every careful deliberate attempt to stop being careful and deliberate, all of it was still him making choices about how to stop making choices, which was not the same thing and never had been and he had somehow spent eight months not seeing it clearly enough to be properly furious about it. He was furious about it now. He walked, because standing still was not tolerable in this mood, moving through the ruins of the eastern district with his hands behind his back and his jaw set and the absolute patience of a man trying not to lose control.
He stopped walking at the edge of what had once been a market square, the stone cracked and overgrown with whatever the corruption had allowed to grow in its place, and looked out across the dead kingdom with the expression of someone who had run out of patience for a problem without running out of the problem.
He stood there for a long moment with that thought, turning it over the way he turned over things that felt important before he understood why they felt important.
The dragon was immune to his magic because the corruption had claimed every part of it so thoroughly that his plague arrived and found nothing left to infect, nothing left that wasn't already his grandfather's power wearing a different shape. Merlin's armor had worked on the same principle, constructed from the hide of something his grandfather had made, something so thoroughly saturated with that original power that Aelius's magic had met it and found no purchase. He was also his grandfather's making.
He stood with that for a long moment, the market square ruins spreading out around him in the gray light, and felt the shape of something shifting underneath the problem without yet being able to see what the shift was revealing. It was there; it had to be.
The armor and the dragon were immune to his magic because they were already his magic. His grandfather's power had made them what they were, and his grandfather's power had made him what he was, and when his magic arrived at their surface it was the same thing meeting itself. Two expressions of the same original substance, and the substance did not consume itself because it had no mechanism for treating itself as other. It could not infect what was already infected. It could not rot what was already rotten. It could not impose itself on something that was already, at the deepest level, itself.
Which meant that when he used his magic in the way he always used it, directed outward, shaped into intent and pushed toward a target, the dragon read that arriving magic not as an attack but as more of what it already was. His grandfather's power, coming home. There was no conflict at the point of contact because there was no difference at the point of contact.
He exhaled slowly through his nose, his eyes still fixed on the distance. There was nothing much he could do, other than continue to ponder and hope it would click one day.