From You, 2,000 Years Ago

Two millennia in the past, a slave girl serves the Eldian chieftain Fritz. When a pig slips loose, the other captives point at her, and though innocent she lowers her head and accepts the punishment. Turned out into the woods as quarry for mounted hunters and their dogs, wounded and bleeding from one eye, she reaches an enormous tree and slips through a gap in its trunk, only to plunge into a chasm below. In the water at the bottom, a spindly living substance fuses along her spine, and Ymir rises from the ruined forest as the first Titan.

Fritz never frees her. Her colossal labor raises roads and bridges and tames the land, her power crushes Marley on the battlefield, and she is made to bear the chieftain's children. Years later, a defeated Marleyan officer hurls a spear at Fritz; Ymir steps into its path and, though the wound should not be fatal, she chooses not to rise when he barks at her to get up. After her death, Fritz has their daughters Maria, Rose, and Sheena consume her body, ordering that the practice continue down the generations so the Titans' power will never leave Eldia's bloodline.

Within the paths, Eren embraces Ymir and tells her this is where it all ends. She is a person, not anyone's slave, and the choice of what to do with her power belongs to her. A panicking Zeke repeats his royal command to sterilize the Subjects of Ymir, but Eren asks whether she has spent two thousand years waiting for someone, and Ymir, weeping, raises her head. In Shiganshina, threads of the same spindly matter bridge Eren's severed head and his body while Wall Maria breaks apart, exposing the Colossus Titans sealed inside as a massive Titan skeleton rises before Gabi.

Ymir Fritz's full history is revealed: her enslavement under the chieftain Fritz, the hunt that drove her into the chasm, and her merging with the source of all living matter that made her the progenitor of the Titans.

Ymir dies shielding Fritz from a spear, and her body is fed to her daughters Maria, Rose, and Sheena, beginning the cycle of inheritance that sustains the Nine Titans. In the paths, Eren offers Ymir her freedom and her choice, overriding Zeke's royal-blood command.

Ymir answers Eren's plea, and in the physical world Wall Maria collapses, freeing the Wall Titans and setting the Rumbling in motion.

The chapter's title mirrors the series' very first chapter, "To You, 2,000 Years From Now", and the simulpub release even ran under the alternate title "To You, 2,000 Years Ago". The opening flashback of Frieda telling Historia to emulate the kind girl from her storybook frames Ymir's tale as that story's dark truth.

A colored edition appeared in Japan in the fourth volume of Attack on Titan: Full Color Edition and in the United States in the second volume of The Best of Attack on Titan: In Color. A continuity slip carries over from Chapter 116: Eren's pants and shoes appear intact despite having been eaten. The chapter closes volume 30 and is adapted in the anime episode of the same name, sitting between "Memories of the Future" and "Island Devils".