User blog comment:Ncduru/Who is Anna?/@comment-7418318-20151201220145

Since it's a "bit" longer, I'm just going to copy my comment from the review blog :P

Anna and Layla used to be best friends and devoted to Zeref (maybe even Shields). They caught Zeref's eye and he got more than just a bit "friendly" with them.

He started to care for them, but due to him still considering them pieces on his "Alvarez Chess Board", even if they were well liked pieces, he didn't shoot any over-kill deathwaves, but a bit of his curse leaked out and hurt the two, causing them to be hit with something like an illness that slowly wasted them away, instead of just snuffing out their life in an instant.

With Anna either being with Zeref more often, or him liking her a little more, she got it worse and was in great agony, so she begged her best friend Layla to end her suffering by killing her. After a while Layla gave in and killed Anna as by her request.

Heartbroken over the deed and the fact that their emperor/lover is a "monster" she fled Alvarez and moved to Ishgar. At first she was a mage, but then when she found out that using magic accelareted her symptoms, she had to give that up and used her knowledge and remaining contacts on the other contacts to land a job in the trade-guild Love and Lucky, where she met and fell in love with Jude. Being only too happy to leave those bad times behind, she kept quiet about them, so Jude and Lucy never learned of Layla's dark past on the other continent and the three could live a happy life, until that was cut short when Layla eventually succumbed to the condition incured from Zeref and died.

Back to Alvarez. With Layla fleeing head-over-heels into a country that Alvarez just failed to invade a little before, without speaking to anyone, people (though probably not Zeref himself) got some misconceptions about her. They thought she defected to the enemy and killed Anna as part of her betrayal. That's also what they told Anna's little daughter Brandish.

And now we have a dramatic (and highly speculative ^^ ) little arc that ties Zeref, Layla, Brandish and the mysterious Anna together that would explain why Zeref has fond memories of Layla and Anna and why Brandish could hate Layla so much.