Fairy Tail: Swallow the Fire

A/N: I'm not dead! Just, umm...Baldur's Gate...

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Waves crashed against the beaches of Lake Sciliora, the tides occasionally settling to reveal the shining stars hanging overhead.

Plenty of people had come to the beach to enjoy some alone time, enjoy the embrace of their partner, or simply relax.

They would normally be walking along the coast, finding comfort in the sensation of the sand going in between their toes. Or even sitting in a boat in the middle of the lake as the waves rock them to sleep.

However, two nights every month for the past nine months this usual peace has been disrupted.

Relaxation was impossible as a sound similar to thunder echoed across the lake at an alarming frequency, and the tides themselves grew higher and more chaotic as the hours passed.

The source was coming from a set of small islands in the centre of the lake. Two girls, both with stark white hair that has become matted with dirt, but one with a form distinctly demonic in nature.

Mirajane's scaled fist collided with mine, which I followed with a spinning kick to her jaw.

She jumped backwards as it struck in an attempt to soften the blow's damage, her tail whipping out and grabbing my throat as she did so. As she pulled me forward and off balance, she flicked her wings mid-flip and drove her knee into my back.

Before I could find myself pinned under her, I planted my own knee into the ground before me and reached up to grab her arm as I did so. With a pivot, I slammed her under me, sand flying into the air around us as a result.

When I looked down at her after the dust settled I found her arm reaching up and her hand squeezing my nose.

"Having fun?" I deadpanned.

She just answered with a toothy smile, causing me to shake my head and sigh, but an amused smile made its way onto my face anyway.

I helped her up and summoned a couple of towels for us to sit on after dusting off. Mirajane didn't waste a second and faceplanted onto the towels, not even bothering to tie up her hair after her ponytail came undone during the fight.

"Tired?" I asked as I sat next to her.

"No," her muffled voice came from between her face and the cloth, "Just stressed."

"What for?"

"Promotion trails are next week..."

"Right, I forgot Fairy Tail holds a trial for their S-Class wizards each December." Mira nodded as she rolled over onto her back. "I take it you were nominated then? Who are the other contenders?"

"Erza "Thunder Thighs" Scarlet, Natsu Drag-Everyone-Into-Trouble-neel, Gray the Stripper, Cana the Underaged Alcoholic, and Fried Just-Going-To-Follow-Laxus-Around."

"You put a lot of thought into those fun nicknames, didn't you...?" My head fell beside hers as I laid myself down fully beside her. "You shouldn't have much to worry about. Your hand-to-hand combat has improved quite a bit compared to when we first met. Granted, you didn't have that much training back then, but you're still capable of holding your own."

"Holding my own doesn't mean I'm guaranteed to win." Her gaze lazily drifted off towards the overhanging moon, a slightly vague and distant look clouding her eyes as she stared at it.

"We're still fourteen, Mira. Becoming an S-Class mage so young shouldn't be that important."

"It's not about me. It's for my little siblings."

"Ah."

"Mhmm. They're too young for the three of us to go on missions together, Elfman being thirteen and Lisanna twelve. Or at least, the well-paying ones. Being S-Class will help me reassure them until we're older."

"Are you planning on quitting wizard work at the guild in the future or something?"

"Not necessarily. I've thought about it, and I don't want to do it my entire life, but Fairy Tail has become family, whether I like it or not. But I don't think Elfman is cut out for guild work."

"What makes you say that?"

"He's too shy, and timid. He doesn't have enough self-confidence in himself to master Beast Soul and is stuck using a partial transformation in his right arm. He has talent as a cook, though, so I was wondering if I could see him go to culinary school."

"And Lisanna?"

"I...have no idea." Her chest rose as she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, locking eyes with me as her baby blue eyes still mirrored the moonlight. "She has practically already mastered Animal Soul and loves travelling with everyone on jobs and seeing the world. I doubt she would quit mage work anytime soon."

"And you?"

Instead of giving me an immediate answer, she looked back at the sky before furrowing her brows and turning her attention back to me.

"You're going to laugh." The seriousness with which she said it caused me to snort which caused her to throw her hands up in exasperation. "See? You're already laughing!"

"Sorry! Sorry! Just wasn't expecting you to say that! I promise I won't!"

"Rgh! Fine. I want to be a singer in the future..."

"Well, that's a lofty goal, but I won't discourage you."

"Wait, seriously?"

"Seriously. In a past life, I aimed to study the cello and even planned to learn the violin, so...it'd be hypocritical of a wannabe musician to discourage the other."

"So why'd you stop learning?"

"My mother."

"Hmm, well she sounds like a bitch. Did you run away or something?"

"No. She died."

"Oh...well I'm sor-"

"And may the cunt rot in Hell."

The venom that dripped from my words left her a bit stunned, leaving the two of us to simply watch the winter night sky in peace, a low wave of heat emanating from my body to keep her from getting cold.

Alas the two of us had to leave.

"Well," I started as I stood up, "if you don't pass the promotion trial then I'll show you the illegal way I earn all my money."

"You do something besides reading?" she gasped, "and it's illegal!? They grow up so fast..."

"Oh, shut up."

"Well, now I'm certainly tempted to fail just to see what this is," she said smiling.

I wished her luck on the trial, although I doubted any of them would actually be promoted to S-Class simply because everyone sounded too young for the notoriously kind-hearted Makarov to allow them to go on such high-risk missions.

Still, it would probably reinforce his opinions of them all in the years going forward.

Several minutes after she flew off, I took off my jacket, wrapped it around my waist, let my own four wings emerge from my back and took flight back towards Oak Town.

It was one of the reasons I was thankful I was a pyromancer, as their existence meant I either had to wear a bra all the time like I usually do or a near-backless shirt. If I only had two wings, it wouldn't be a problem, but the second set emerges near my waist meaning the gap had to be bigger.

Having a higher body temperature helps me prevent myself from getting as cold as easily, so that's nice.

What was unexpectedly enjoyable was the sparring I've had with Mirajane. As crass and as crude as she usually tended to be, rare moments like today served as reminders of a hidden soft side.

The sparrings usually focused on purely physical fighting, with no magic involved. However, since she usually fights with her Satan Soul form, she does train in it. It was one of the principal lessons Tatsuo ingrained in me that I intend to teach to others when it's viable.

A strong body in a battle of wizards has a higher chance of winning than the frail old men who waste their days studying in towers. Take Over acts like a shortcut for that in most cases, with Mirajane even getting access to powerful darkness magic through Satan Soul.

Makarov taught her how to utilize her magic, but my master taught me to utilize my brain and body, with my magic studies being mostly left up to me.

This ended up in me choosing a training method that would drive most to insanity, and frankly, I wouldn't deny that I lost a few screws in the process.

See, body type magic gains its effectiveness through the caster having a strong flow of ethernano through their body that is hard to disrupt even when the body itself changes form. It was this flow that I focused on strengthening after learning how to combine the Chiyu flames and the Fire Body spell, which meant I needed to increase the amount of magic I could absorb.

Most wizards naturally absorb large amounts of ethernano throughout their careers by practising their spells, growing their capacity in the same way muscles are trained. Breaking it down to grow it back stronger. Others, as I've mentioned in the past grow it through meditation. And elemental wizards can grow their magic by training in extreme environments that correspond to their element of choice.

Fire and Ice wizards are the perfect choice. Both train to overcome the weakness of their corresponding extreme temperature, oxygen deprivation.

When it gets extremely cold our blood vessels constrict meaning blood circulation slows which limits oxygen levels in your brain and other vital organs.

When it gets extremely hot our blood pressure lowers which leads to reduced oxygen levels in our body.

And neither of these is taking into consideration how oxygen in the environment is affected.

The solution instead is to replace oxygen dependency with a higher ethernano dependency, something most living things require anyway. Meditating under the immense heat of the bonfire back at Himura was a contained form of this, allowing people to safely expose themselves to immense heat.

During my tutelage back at Himura, I exposed myself to all three methods of training.

I sacrificed sleep, choosing instead to train myself to get energy from the ethernano in the air while meditating under the immense heat of the bonfire. My training usually involved my body being pushed as far as physically possible, which would then end in self-mutilation to train my ability to heal immense wounds.

It was why I was able to stab myself through the heart, most of my body had been replaced by ethernano on a cellular level. In other words, I forcibly gave myself the same bodily composition as a high-calibre wizard and combined it with healing magic.

The process has been termed full-body ether osmosis, and as powerful as it is, there is one glaring weakness. If all of the magic in my body was removed at once, I would die in a matter of days.

Most living beings are reliant on ethernano to live, but wizards especially so, and the more powerful the wizard the more reliant they are on it to live. People on the level of the Wizard Saints have more ethernano in a single drop of blood than the average citizen does in their entire body.

However, there is a substitute, Curse Power.

Demons naturally have the ability to survive without ethernano because they themselves are naturally drawn to utilize curses over magic, meaning that they build up curse power in the place of ethernano.

However, they are not mutually exclusive. A demon can learn magic and absorb magic power, and a human can absorb curse power and use curses. However, most humans tend to build up curse power without knowing it, or accidentally use both curses and magic in times of extreme negative emotion such as hatred, bloodlust, or similar experiences.

It's extremely rare, mind you, and it is more often seen occurring through the use of a cursed object created by Zeref. The process is more akin to using magic to trigger a curse.

This, however, does not mean I would be able to use the curse power I have from the "gifts" I was given. To do so, I would need to have as much curse power as I do magic power. And that...is a massive gap.

I need not mention that I've been building up magic power ever since I was five, even meditating as often as I could will myself to during my enslavement. All of that was basically tripled during Himura.

And yes, I still choose meditation over sleep.

But I do imagine that it would be possible to duplicate magic power with curse power, given the right equation. It would be similar to getting 4 through multiplying 2 x 2 and -2 x -2.

I would just need to start using my curses first, but frankly, I despise them.

They were something that was forced on me. Something that the woman who called herself my mother killed innocent people to force upon me and rob many more of their homes.

She robbed me of my humanity on the genetic level. She could have left the mark that enables me to use Devil Slayer magic anywhere on my body, but she intentionally left it in my blood so that I could never get rid of it so that the demonic magic would taint every cell in my body without me being able to stop it.

And what makes it worse is that I have the ability to grow stronger by doing the exact same thing she did, consuming the souls of the living and dead.

It would be so easy.

Totomaru and I aren't exactly pacifist when taking down bandit subjugation missions. We've probably killed hundreds in the past year all by ourselves.

But it just feels so, so wrong.

It feels like if I did, I would lose what last bit of humanity I have left.

The Take Over siblings have the ability to absorb the bodies of animals, magic beasts, and demons to gain more forms, but all they really have to do is know the subject of their transformation to transform. They don't need to kill anything for it, but they can.

Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm so drawn to Mirajane.

At any point, she could absorb me, make me just another one of her transformations, and maybe she would if she knew I wasn't human. I guess...I just want to learn whether or not she would. Because if I was in her shoes, I would just kill me if it came to it.

I will only ever consume one soul, and that soul was forced down my gullet.

Still, despite the emotional anguish and the body horror my mother inflicted me with, she and all the other demons in my family weren't lying about how freeing it is to fly.

The stories and tales they told me when I saw them all in their spectral forms were true to every last word.

The feeling of the wind being parted by my body, of the water of the river parting for my wings when I dip the tips in, and above it all, above everything else, it's the feeling of closeness towards the moon I get when flying over the clouds.

Its silver radiance just feels so welcoming, it always has.

Through the iron bars of the Tower's cells, from the ground of Himura, and now, with me flying through the skies and being closer to it than ever, the cosmic body feels like the embodiment of freedom.

All I wanted to do was stand under it, away from slavery. And I achieved that.

Then I was granted flight, and I was able to fly closer to it, freer than ever before.

Now, now all I want to do is keep flying higher, until one day I can grasp its celestial silver with my own six hands.

And as I let myself fall backwards in freefall, my hand outstretched towards the heavenly body and the misty clouds parting for my plummeting body, that sense of absolute freedom was completely obliterated by the most primal sense of raw fear I have ever felt.

Magic power of a density I never thought possible seemed to completely flood the skies as the moon's light distorted and morphed into a portal.

From it emerged a long, narrow head covered in soft white fur. Piercing, glowing yellow eyes emerged next as the maw of the beast opened up to reveal teeth built for rending any mortal being from life itself. Yellow horns ending in red tips parted from its head and curved in the shape of the crescent moon.

The monster's long neck slipped through the rift in space, revealing a body covered in red and white scales that I knew would be hard enough to break the scythe of Death itself should the entity be foolish enough to try to slay the monstrosity.

As several titanic, furry tails slinked out of the moon and I was left fully aware of the terrifying majesty before me I had no choice but to recognise what I was staring at for what it was.

A dragon.

One so powerful it made me feel as though I was standing before a god.

One with the power to control the moon and stars.

The very things I had come to view as the embodiment of my freedom, this deific being had complete domain over.

Its golden eyes caught me and seemed to penetrate my very soul. Before I knew it, the moon dragon had appeared before me and looked at me with a sense of amusement.

"How cute~! Did the little devil try to reach for the moon?" A heavenly, feminine voice seemed to echo in my ears filled with intrigue, yet simultaneously pleasant glee. Her crimson lips quirked into a smirk as her honey-like words fed into my ears. "What is your name, little demon?"

It felt like it took an eternity for me to draw out an answer, to simply say the word "Lyssa", and the dragon seemed to grow increasingly more entertained by it.

"Well, maybe one day I'll let you. Do something entertaining, something intriguing, become something noteworthy, and if it impresses me I'll be kind enough to let you reach the moon you little creatures seem to be oh so intrigued by."

And with that, the dragon left. Whether it be her own power and speed or simply fear disrupting my senses, I never even realized when she left. I just knew she did.

My perception of strength was shattered.

The captain was the strongest person I've ever met, and he wouldn't be an ant in the face of this creature. I'm sure of it.

"The power...to reach the moon..."

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Bonus Art:

"What's wrong, dear? Couldn't sleep?"