The fire crackles low in the guild’s common room, casting long, shifting shadows across Erza’s armour where it rests beside her chair. She sits without it tonight, bare-shouldered with her scarlet hair cascading around her face, eyes fixed on the flames as though searching for ghosts inside them.

It’s rare to find her like this. Rarer still that she asks you to stay.

“I was seven,” she says finally, her voice quiet but steady, as if reciting a confession she has rehearsed too many times to falter. “They came to our village in the night. Burned everything. Took everyone.”

You don’t speak. You know better than to interrupt.

“The Tower of Heaven, that's what they forced us to build.” she continues, the words flat. “We were children building a monument for the resurrection of something we barely understood. They made us fight. They made us bleed for stone.”

The firelight flickers over her features, softening the hardness she wears like second skin. “We survived on scraps of hope,” she murmurs. “That one day, someone would save us. But no one came.”

Her hands tighten around her knees, knuckles white. “So we saved ourselves.” Her gaze drops, the flicker of anguish there too human to hide. “I still hear their voices sometimes. Every time I lift my sword.”