The Book of Prophecies

The Gazing Eye

The book had been finished for some time before anyone else was allowed to look at it.

The man who had written it went hooded and coated in black, and the coat did its work thoroughly. Nobody who studied under him could have said what colour his hair was, or whether he was old. He was a shape that talked. He talked a great deal.

His apprentices had learned to read him the way people learn to read weather, by long exposure and without much confidence. He moved oddly, starting and stopping, going still in the middle of a sentence and then finishing it as though nothing had happened. He would be grave, then delighted, and the change came at no signal any of them could find. He was fond of them. That much came through the coat. It simply arrived alongside everything else, unsorted.

Six apprentices. Ira, Aced, Invi, Gula, Ava, Luxu.

He told them he had written the book himself. He had not found it in some ruin and he had not been handed it by anyone; he had sat down and written it, and what he had written down was the future.

He had an eye that could see it. Not in his face, or not any longer. He had put it inside a Keyblade, and the Keyblade had been made for the purpose, and the eye was blue with a pupil slit vertically like a cat's. "Well, gazing or not, that Keyblade does have an eye in it," he said. "My eye, to be exact."

What the eye saw travelled back to him, and he wrote it down, which meant the book was a record of things that had not happened yet, kept by a man who was reading over the shoulder of somebody who had not been born. Ira asked, once, how much of the future it covered. "No, the Book doesn't cover much at all," the Master said, pleasantly. "Just what the Keyblade I gave to Luxu sees, and even then, only the bits important enough to jot down."

Five of them were given copies. Ira, Aced, Invi, Gula, Ava. Luxu was given none.

The reason he gave for that was simple enough to say and difficult to hold onto. Luxu was going forward. A man walking forward through time must not be told what is in front of him, because then the thing in front of him would be a thing he had been told, and the whole arrangement would come apart in his hands.

The five read their copies. They came, in the end, to the last passage, which was short.

On that fated land, a great war shall transpire. Darkness will prevail and the light expire. "What's written in the last page of the Book is gonna happen," the Master said. "The entire world will be lost to darkness."

He said it the way a man reads out a delivery schedule.

He found Ira on the outskirts of the town and told him the end could not be avoided.

Ira asked to be allowed to try to stop it anyway. The Master thought about it for a moment, and said that he could.

Nothing in his manner suggested he expected it to work. Nothing in his manner suggested he minded. He gave Ira the role of leading the others and of taking over when he himself was gone, and told him to gather as many wielders as he could into the Unions and keep the balance between them, and Ira took all of it as an instruction rather than as a consolation.

Ira was a young man who hid his face under a white unicorn mask trimmed in gold. His cloak was white and hooded, and under it his robe and shirt and sash were light blue, embroidered in gold, and gold tassels hung at the front of the cloak.

He asked very few questions, and the ones he asked were about what he should do. "Then," he said, on one of those occasions, "what do you want us to do?"

To Aced the Master gave a role in two halves, and delivered both halves in the same friendly voice.

The first half was to stand at Ira's right hand. "Well, Ira's gonna be the new leader after I'm gone, you see, so just stand by him."

The second half was to step forward himself, and lead, if Ira ever proved unfit for it.

Aced was a muscular young man in a dark grey bear mask, his cloak tan, his robe and shirt and sash light brown with black embroidery, gold tassels at the front. He was the largest of them and his Keyblade was the bulkiest of the six. "You might not be entirely happy with your role," the Master told him, "but just know that it's the most important one."

Then he moved on to the next of them, having handed the strongest and proudest of the six a standing invitation to decide one day that the leader was failing.

Invi was to watch the others, all of them, without favour, and to stand between them when they needed standing between. "Like I said, Ira may have to take over for me," the Master said. "But don't be shy. Just be fair. And do not be afraid to speak up."

She was a young woman in a blue snake mask. Her cloak was violet, and the robe and shirt and sash beneath it were a deeper blue-violet, and the tassels at her front were turquoise.

She took the instruction about fairness. The part about speaking up she kept, and carried, and never spent.

Gula was a boy in a white leopard mask, his cloak pale yellow over a robe and shirt and sash of yellowish tan with dark grey embroidery and light blue tassels at the front.

He was told to find out what the book was hiding. He was told that one of the six was a traitor, and that his part was to work out which and to stop them. He was told to trust nobody.

And he was given the test by which the traitor could be known. Each of them had been assigned a role. Whoever departed from their role was the one.

Gula took the instruction whole, including the part about trusting nobody.

Ava was a girl in a white fox mask trimmed in blue, and her cloak was pink where everyone else's was a sober colour, hung with light green tassels, over a white robe and a light purple shirt and sash. She looked the youngest of the five who wore masks.

Her role ran differently from the others'. "Don't get involved in any battles," the Master said. "Forget the notion of Unions, find Keyblade wielders with potential, and create an entirely separate organization."

She asked what he needed of her. "Hope?" she said. "Master, what is it that you need me to do?"

He told her, and she did as she was told, and she did not tell the other five.

Luxu got no book, no mask and no Union.

He wore a black coat that covered him completely, and standing beside the Master the two of them were the same silhouette twice.

The Master gave him a Keyblade with the eye in it, and told him to carry it forward and to pass it to whoever came after him, and that one after that, on and on, so that the eye kept looking and kept sending back what it saw. He was to watch and he was not to interfere. "Yeah, sure," the Master said, when Luxu had questions about it. "Anyway, about your role. You need to pass down that Keyblade to your apprentice."

Luxu had taken the name of the eye for the name of the weapon. He was told it had no name at all. He decided that this was funny, and called it No Name, and that stuck, because nobody with the standing to overrule him was interested in doing so.

And a box.

It was black and it was heavy. Thirteen locks: three down the left side, three down the right, and seven across the front, the middle one of the seven made a little larger than its neighbours. On the lid was a crest with thirteen spikes pointing outward and seven pointing in, and at the centre of the crest a red mark with letters hidden inside it. "What's in it?" Luxu said.

"It's a secret. And, well, you see, the thing is, you can never, ever open it."

Luxu asked again, and this time the Master told him.

Whatever the answer was, it went no further than the two of them. Luxu stood holding the box and said nothing for a while. "Do I really have to go alone?" he said eventually. "What about the others?"

Whatever the Master said back to that, Luxu answered it in two words.

"I promise."

He made one more thing, out of nothing anybody could identify, and it was small and round and it stood upright and it was not a cat.

He called them Chirithy. One went to each wielder, to walk beside them and keep them honest and tell them what to do next. "Master, did you make this?" Ava said. "It's so cute!"

Gula wanted to know what they were, exactly, and got a word back that raised more questions than it closed. "Spirit?" he said.

The Master was already moving on. Then he stopped, in the middle of going, and turned round. "Oh, right, before I forget. If a wielder is overcome by malice, or rather, if their heart is tainted by darkness, their adorable little Spirit will turn dark and become a Nightmare."

He let that sit for exactly as long as it took him to lose interest in it. "So you're telling us," Ira said, "that if we see a Nightmare."

"So, if we see one of these Nightmares anywhere," Aced said, "we have to get rid of it."

They had both gone straight to the practical question.

Once, one of them pressed him about what would happen to him. He gave three words and discarded all of them.

"Vanish? Dim? Fade? I don't know how to explain it. It's just hypothetical talk."

Another time, more cheerfully: "By the way, if one day I suddenly disappear, I'm countin' on you to keep the others calm."

He said other things constantly, and one of them he said so often that it stopped being a sentence and became a way of ending a conversation.

"May your heart be your guiding key."

He disappeared without warning.

He left no last meeting behind him and no instruction beyond the ones already given. Ava looked for him. Gula looked for him. Neither of them found him, and neither of them found any indication of where he had gone or whether going was permanent.

The five with books went back to their books.

Luxu went out of the town with the No Name over his shoulder and the box dragging behind him, and stopped somewhere past the edge of everything, and said the words in the form he would be using from then on.

"May my heart be my guiding key."

A Town That Counts Light

Daybreak Town was built in blue and white, on stone, on the water.

It had a square at its middle with a fountain in it, and houses standing round the square on all sides, and behind the fountain a shop with a door in the centre of its frontage. The paving was cobbled and carried a purple star worked into it, over and over, all the way out to the districts.

West of the square the road narrowed into a market, a long run of stalls under parasols with bunting strung above them.

Numbered districts. A waterfront with a dock and a lighthouse, a beach, a park, canals. Underneath all of it ran a waterway, a long causeway of walkable stone with the water going alongside it in the dark, and it went further and connected more places than anyone above ground had cause to think about. Above the town, on a hill, there were dandelions.

And there was the clock tower.

It stood across a bridge with a waterfall behind it, and it was closed. Not closed the way a door is closed, but closed the way a subject is closed. Wielders stayed out of the clock tower.

The wielder came to the town the way all of them came to it, which is to say chosen by a Keyblade and then left to work out what that meant.

Five Unions took new arrivals, and a wielder joined one of them. Unicornis under Ira, Ursus under Aced, Anguis under Invi, Leopardos under Gula, Vulpes under Ava. Each wore its animal on its Foreteller's face.

The Unions worked apart. They were meant to. An alliance between two of them was forbidden outright, and the reason given, when a reason was given, was balance: if one grew stronger than the rest it would want to be stronger still, and wanting that was how darkness got in.

So the wielder joined one of the five, and was given a small round companion that stood upright and had firm views about what it was not.

"I'm neither of those things!"

It walked beside the wielder and told them what to do next, and when it could not show them the way it could get into their sleep and tell them there. Then it told them what the work was.

The work was light.

Heartless came into the town and into the places beyond it, and a wielder went out and fought them, and light came off them when they died, and that light was gathered up and counted. Lux, it was called. Each Union's total was set against the others'. A standing went up, and it always mattered.

It was light. It was gathered. The count went up.

What was known, and known the way unpleasant things are known in a working town, was what happened at the other end. Darkness could take a wielder's lux. When it did, the wielder did not die. The wielder became something that came back. "The Keyblade is the power of the heart of light," Chirithy said, when asked.

The wielder had no name that anybody used.

The wielder talked little, had little need to, and got on.

The boy at the Waterfront Park was losing.

He had picked a fight with a Heartless and had committed to it early and had not left himself anywhere to go. The wielder came in from the side and killed it.

He had curly silver hair and cerulean eyes and a red scarf wound round his neck with a pattern of swirls in it. His jacket was black and cropped and cut off at the shoulder, grey at the accents, green in the lining, over a white shirt buttoned to the top. Baggy dark trousers with a column of silver buttons down each leg. Black boots to mid-calf. Black leather gloves flared at the cuff, and a big tan pouch at his waist. "I'm all right. Thanks," he said. "I guess I got a little cocky."

He put out a hand and gave a name, Ephemer, and the Union he belonged to, and it was not the wielder's Union.

That should have been the end of it.

But Ephemer had a question he had been carrying around for a while and no one to ask it to.

The question was why the Unions competed.

Not why they existed. Why they were pointed at each other. He had asked, and got nothing back, and he had noticed something else while he was asking. All the Unions had different goals.

He also had a thing he had worked out and had kept to himself.

The places they were sent to, the worlds, the ones a wielder crossed to and fought in and came home from with the count higher than it had been. They were not real. They were projections, all of them, run inside one world, and their entire purpose was that light could be gathered in them.

He told the wielder because there was nobody else to tell.

They should not have been talking at all. They were in different Unions, and the whole architecture of the place was designed so that two people in different Unions had nothing to say to one another. "We may not be in the same Union, but we're friends, right?" Ephemer said. "Let's meet tomorrow at Fountain Square."

The wielder dreamed, and in the dream the Master of Masters was speaking to the Foretellers, and there was a figure present in a black coat.

The dream did not explain itself. It was a room with people in it and a voice going on, and the sense, the way dreams supply a sense without supplying a reason, that this had happened and was not happening now.

Ephemer wanted every detail of it twice.

They went under the town.

The waterways ran further than the maps of them suggested, and five separate corridors down there led into the base of the clock tower, and Ephemer had found that out by walking until he stopped finding walls. "Great minds think alike," he said, when the wielder arrived at the place he had picked. "Other than the entrance, this is the only place that connects outside."

The tower had floors and the floors went up, and on one of them was the room where the six of them met. That was as far as the plan went, because it was as far as either of them knew.

They got nowhere near it. The Heartless in the tower came in numbers that made the question of skill irrelevant, and the two of them went back the way they had come, and agreed to try again, and set a time and a place.

Fountain Square. The next day.

The wielder went to Fountain Square the next day.

What the Nightmare Meant

Ira found it near the Foretellers' chamber, and it should not have existed.

A Chirithy, and wrong. Turned. The Master had told them what that meant and had told them in passing, the way a man mentions where the spare key is kept, and now here it was standing in a corridor in the tower.

Ira called the others together.

His argument was short and it had only one conclusion in it. A Chirithy turned because its wielder had gone over. This one had turned. Therefore somebody had gone over, and the corridor it had been found in was not a corridor that ordinary wielders had access to. "Someone has fallen into darkness," Invi said.

Ira had more than that. Wielders in the town had been getting hold of bangles that drew darkness in. He thought somebody had put them into circulation, and the number of people who could have done that was six.

He never said the word he was building toward, and had no need to.

Aced said it back to him in a different form. "It looks to me like the Master made the wrong choice."

The room understood him. He was talking about Ira.

Ira told him that arrogance would be the end of him, and the meeting broke up without agreeing on anything.

Afterwards Ira kept Invi back and told her the part he had not put in front of the others.

He had gone through his copy of the book looking for the traitor and the traitor was not in it. Not hinted at, not alluded to. Absent. Which meant either that the book did not know, and the book was supposed to know everything worth knowing, or that the part of it which said so was not in his copy. "A Lost Page," he said. "Something's missing from our Book of Prophecies."

And if a page had been taken out, somebody had it. And the person who had it was hiding it. And the person hiding it was the traitor. It went together very neatly and he had thought about it for a long time.

The page was in Gula's keeping. The Master had given it to him along with the instruction to find the traitor, and the instruction to trust no one, and Gula was doing precisely what he had been told to do and could not say so to anyone, because saying so to anyone was the one thing the instruction ruled out.

Aced's answer to all of it was to stop waiting.

He went to the others and proposed that the Unions stand together. Not merge; stand together. Something was coming and Ira was spending his time hunting through a book for a name.

Alliances between Unions were forbidden. He knew that. He said it out loud himself, as though naming the rule were a way of getting round it.

Gula agreed, on one condition, which was that his own Union stayed out of the arrangement entirely. He would stand with Aced. His wielders would not.

Invi refused, and went to Aced and told him to his face what she thought it was. Not a defence against darkness. A way of ending up in charge, with a reason attached to it. The Master had forbidden alliances in order to hold the balance, and the reason he had wanted the balance held was that imbalance made people hungry, and hunger was the door.

Ava saw the alliance made and said nothing.

Ira asked Invi what she had.

They were in the clock tower. She told him Aced and Gula's Unions were standing together, and she told him without ornament, because that was what she had been asked to do.

Then she told him the other thing, which was that he was wrong about Aced.

To Aced, she said, this was not treachery. It was gathering strength before something arrived. His heart still belonged to the light and she was as certain of that as she was of anything.

She said she would talk Gula out of it herself, because if Ira did it Aced would only dig in harder. "And one more thing," she said. "Aced has begun to question the two of us."

Ira asked her what she meant by that.

She had already told him what she meant by it.

Months went by and nothing came.

That was the thing that killed the alliance. Not an argument. The absence of the event it had been built for.

Gula ended it. His reasons were arithmetic. The darkness Aced had promised had not arrived. Aced's recruitment stood at nobody. The arrangement had produced nothing and cost both of them standing, and it was, he said, meaningless. And Invi agreed with him.

Aced wanted to know whether Invi had put him up to it.

Gula told him she had had nothing to do with it.

Aced told him the alliance was holding. It was an instruction. Gula said that he trusted nobody but himself, and that this had not changed and would not, and left.

It was the most obedient thing anyone in the town did that year and it looked exactly like betrayal.

About a year after the Master went, Aced came for Invi in the street.

He said it was time to fulfil his true role, which was the second half of what he had been given, and which he had been carrying around since the day he was given it. He put her Keyblade out of her hands and stood over her and asked her questions.

She told him she was doing what the Master had told her to do, holding the balance, and that he should stop.

He told her the Master was gone.

That was the whole of his argument and he had thought it through. The Master had gone. The teachings had been left behind by a man who no longer had to live under them. The world had to be protected and the only people left to do it were the six of them, and if protecting it meant setting aside what they had been taught, then it meant that. "If we don't do something," he said, "light will expire!"

Ava and Gula came into the square at the run.

Invi got up and said to Ava that she knew who the traitor was.

"I found out who the traitor is, regrettably."

Ava told her she was wrong.

Gula brought his Keyblade up and pointed it at Aced and told Ava to do the same. Ava did it slowly and she did it.

Aced looked at the three of them. "May my heart be my guiding key," he said, and came forward.

The fight went through the town. A bridge came down into the water.

Aced got out of it and into a storage room and stayed there, and could not stand up properly, and that was where Gula found him after dark.

Gula had brought the page.

He held it out and told him what it was and where it had come from, and that he had been carrying it since before any of this started because he had been told to.

Imbalance observed, strength misplaced, a future filled with sorrow. Words of truth misunderstood as they explore the secret of tomorrow. With a single strike, toll the bells and herald the end, bringing war upon us, as fate did intend. "The traitor is the catalyst for the events that lead to the world's end," Gula said.

Aced asked him who it was.

The page said the one who bears the sigil. That was all it said. Gula had read it and read it and he did not know what a sigil was in this context or how one would recognise somebody bearing it, and he said so, and it was the first time in a long while that he had admitted to not knowing something in front of another person.

Aced worked out the rest for himself and it took him no time at all.

Gula had had this while Ira built a theory out of nothing. Gula had had this while the six of them came apart. Gula had had this in the square, with a Keyblade pointed at him.

He got up.

The fight did not last, because Gula was not expecting it and Aced, who could barely stand, was still Aced. Gula went down and stayed down.

Ava put herself between them.

She did not draw. She stood over Gula with her hands where Aced could see them and asked him to stop, and Aced looked at her standing there and understood it as the last of the four of them turning on him, and went out into the dark.

Ira found him.

He could have finished it. He did not. He told Aced what the mission had always been, that the light had to survive and that it had to survive with all five of them intact, and then he got him upright and took his weight.

Aced told him about the page.

Ira went to see it for himself.

What Ava saw of him when he arrived she described afterwards to Invi, and she described it badly, because she was trying not to say what she thought. He had wanted her to hand Gula over. His eyes, she said, were scary. She had thought he might do something terrible.

She got between them a second time that week, and Ira went away.

Gula was gone, and stayed gone.

Before that, while she was still working on his wounds, he had told her what he intended to do about the page.

He was going to summon Kingdom Hearts.

It was forbidden and he knew it was forbidden and that was the point. It would bring the Master back. He would hear about it, and hearing it, he would come. And when he came back, Gula was going to hand him the page and make him explain it.

He asked her to help him gather the lux for it.

She said no. He did not argue with her about it, which she had not expected, and which she thought about for a long time afterwards.

She had also said something to the others, earlier, when they were all still speaking. It had sounded, when she said it, like an ordinary complaint. "Maybe there's something he hasn't told us."

She was the only one of them holding an instruction the rest had not heard.

Invi came to her at the end and admitted that she was the one who had told Ira where to find her.

They sat with it, and between the two of them they put the shape of the thing together. Ira was gathering lux. Aced was gathering lux. Gula was gathering lux, for a door he intended to open. None of them were gathering it for the balance any more; they were gathering it against each other.

They gathered none of it themselves. Wielders gathered it, in five Unions, having been told that the count was what mattered.

Ava went and did the thing she had been told to do on the first day.

She took wielders out of all five Unions. She chose them for ability and for something harder to test for, a resistance to darkness that some people had and most did not, and she trained them away from everybody else, and she told them that when it came they were to hide and not to fight. "They're a special group of Keyblade wielders that will remain after the rest of us are gone," she said, when she had to explain them.

She did not put herself among them. "We cannot avoid the end," she said. "Not even the Masters, including myself, are likely to survive."

She named them for the weed on the hill above the town, the one that goes to seed and comes apart in the wind and puts itself down somewhere else entirely. "Let the wind carry you far, far away," she said. "My Dandelions."

The Offer

Ephemer did not come to Fountain Square.

The wielder waited, then went round the places he might reasonably be, then the places he might unreasonably be, and by the end of it the search had stopped being a search and become the thing a person does instead of admitting something.

Nobody in his Union would say anything about it. Nobody in any Union would say anything about it. He had been there and then he was gone, and the town, which was a town with a great deal of counting to do, went on counting.

The girl who found the wielder at Fountain Square had long blue-black hair cut short at the front and left long behind, with bangs, and amber eyes. Grey zippered shirt under a cropped black jacket, the cuffs wrapped in dark pink; a studded black belt taken twice round her waist; a short navy skirt, black stockings to the knee, black boots with the same dark pink at the shafts. A silver chain at her belt hung with stars, and stars again at her ears. Her gloves were black and left her fingers bare.

She had arrived in the middle of an argument between the wielder and Chirithy about the count. "But why does that matter?" she said. "It's not a competition. Or at least it shouldn't be."

She had walked into a stranger's conversation and taken a side in it. "Nice to meet you," she said. "Ephemer told me all about you."

Her name was Skuld and she had been in Ephemer's party before any of this, and she had not seen him either. She had a dream instead. He had come into it and spoken to her and told her to find the wielder and stay with them, and to do it before the world ended.

She reported this the way you report a thing you have decided to believe.

There was going to be a war. That was the rest of what he had said. She had no date and no cause and she had come to Fountain Square anyway.

The bangle had been going round the town for a while by then.

It had come from the Moogle who kept the shop behind the fountain, traded for by something that looked like a Chirithy and was not one. It drew darkness. That was what it was for and it did it well, and it did it to whoever was wearing it, quietly, over time, without any of the signs a person would think to look for.

The Darklings came out of the districts in numbers.

They had been wielders. That was the thing about them that took a while to arrive at and then would not go away afterwards. Darkness had come and taken the light a wielder had gathered, all of it, and what was left over got up and came back and had no interest in anything except getting more.

Skuld and the wielder fought them and talked about it very little afterwards.

The false Chirithy watched from further off than it needed to. "What the," said Chirithy, and did not finish.

It had said something to the wielder, earlier, in the tone of a thing enjoying itself. That it knew something about them. About before. It did not say what and it was not asked, because every way of asking would have handed it exactly what it was after.

The Foretellers were fighting in the streets by then and had stopped pretending they were not.

Wielders got out of the way of it. A bridge had come down. It was possible to stand in the market, under the parasols and the bunting, and hear it happening two districts over, and the stalls stayed open, because what else were they going to do.

Chirithy said that going back under the town was a bad idea.

They went back under the town.

They went the way Ephemer had gone, along the causeway with the water beside it, and up into the tower through one of the five corridors, and this time they got into the room where the six of them met.

There was nothing in it.

Not nothing in the sense of an empty room. Nothing in the sense that they went through it and found no record of Ephemer, no order about Ephemer, nothing with his name on it at all.

Then somebody was in the doorway.

The account they were given was complete and it was delivered without heat.

Ephemer had got into the tower. Ephemer had been gathering lux against the instructions of his Union. He had made a friend outside his Union, deliberately, and the friendship had been a way of finding things out. And when all of this had come to light he had been made to disappear.

The wielder attacked.

The fight had no good ending in it anywhere and the wielder had understood that before starting it. It went the way it was always going to go.

And then the room was not the room, and the Foreteller was not the Foreteller.

The fox mask was white with a blue trim, and the cloak over it was pink, and there were light green tassels at the front.

What Ava told them, she told them in order, and none of it was what they had come for.

The world was going to end. Not might. Was.

She had been going through the Unions for a long time, all five of them, looking at wielders. Not for the best fighters. For something else. And the way she had tested for it was to put darkness near them and see what they did, which she said plainly, to two people who had been near a great deal of darkness lately.

The ones who came through it went on. She had somewhere to send them, and she was sending them.

The ones who did not stayed, and fought the war. "I'm afraid it's inevitable," she said.

Ephemer had come through it. Ephemer had not been made to disappear; he had been sent ahead, first, before the rest of them, and he was there now and he was waiting. "Some things aren't for you to know," Ava said. "Listen to me: you must join the Dandelions and go far, far away from here."

Skuld said yes before Ava had finished.

She had no need to think about it and made no show of thinking. Later, when it was only the two of them, she put it in front of the wielder as flatly as she knew how: there was one road that ended with Ephemer at the far end of it, and this was the road.

The wielder did not answer.

The arithmetic was simple. On one side, Ephemer. On the other, every wielder in the town who had not been picked, going on gathering light for a count that had stopped meaning anything, while five people who knew better let it happen.

Ava had seen this before. "I thought you might say that," she said, to somebody who had said nothing. "But I wonder if you would feel the same if you were there to witness the end."

The Girl Who Could Not Find Him

Strelitzia was the last one Ava took.

She had pale skin and teal eyes and long ginger hair that framed her face, the bangs coming down past her eyebrows, the rest of it tied into two pigtails that went past her waist. The ties were orange and shaped like pointed petals. She wore a short white dress with black straps and a ruffled column down the front, and a black bow with long trailing ribbons, and lacy bell sleeves that were separate from the dress and held on with black ribbon, and white boots to the thigh with a column of orange diamonds down the outside of each. A black choker. A necklace with a purple stone cut like a diamond.

She had a brother. Lauriam. He was better known than she was and he knew it, and he had the idea, which he had never examined, that she was the less capable of the two of them. He would admit, if it came up, that her magic was better than his. He admitted it the way people admit a thing that costs them nothing.

She had asked him once whether they might work together.

He said not yet. When she was stronger. And then, because he could hear how it had sounded, he told her that if she was ever in trouble he would come.

She said that was all right.

Another day, in the ordinary way of things: "Actually, I'm done collecting my Lux for the day."

She had a place in the town she went to that nobody knew about, and she was pleased with it in the way you are pleased with something small and entirely yours. "I have a secret," she said. "This is my favorite spot that nobody knows about."

Ava chose her as one of the five.

Five were to be chosen, one for each Union, for when the Foretellers were gone and the wielders who came through were on the other side of it and needed somebody. Each of the five was given a rulebook. Strelitzia's was hers.

And she was given a task before that one, which was to bring in one more person.

Not a category of person. One. The wielder.

She knew what was coming. She had been told about the war and she believed it, and she went out into the town with a name and an errand and the specific intention of getting one particular person out of it before it started.

And she could not do it.

She could not find them, first of all. It was a large town and there were a great many wielders in it, and she had no title, and she had nothing to say that would explain why she was asking.

And when she thought about the finding being over and the talking beginning, she found she could not do that either. "I have to tell him!" she said, to nobody. "But how will I find him?"

She kept at it.

She found them in the end, in one of the empty houses in the Seventh District, in a building that had nothing in it and no reason for either of them to be there.

She got as far as beginning.

The blow came from behind her.

She did not see who it was. She had time to be surprised and she used it on that, and then she was on the floor of an empty house with her Chirithy in her arms and no strength in her hands.

The rulebook was taken.

At the end she said nothing about the person who had done it, because she did not know who the person was. She said nothing about the war, and nothing about her brother. "I'm sorry," she said. "This is all my fault."

She had been trying to tell someone something and she had not managed it, and that was the thing she was still holding when she went.

Her heart came loose and left, and the empty house was empty again.

The Bells

Aced found the wielder in the town and did not explain himself at length.

He wanted their strength. He said so. It was for his Union and his Union was going to need it, and the fastest way to establish who was going to be doing what was to settle it now.

The wielder went down in the street and did not get up for some time, and while they were down there they dreamed, and the dream was of a place with no town in it and a great many people fighting.

Chirithy said, afterwards, that Ava was missing.

Ava had gone looking for Luxu.

Nobody had seen him since the beginning. He had gone out of the town before any of it started, with the box and the No Name, and he had been out there ever since, and the fact that he had not come back for any of it was the thing she could not get past. Five of them had torn the town apart. The sixth had watched.

She found him. "It's you," she said.

"Oh, it's you."

He did not seem surprised and he did not seem pleased, and the coat gave her nothing to read. "Watching," he said. "That's my role."

"Tell me, what's written on that page?" she said. "Luxu, are you responsible for all of this? Are you, are you the traitor?"

He did not say no.

He told her.

She stood there with it. "You asked for the truth, so there it is," Luxu said. "Now that you know who the traitor is, can you accept it?"

He said something else too, later in it, and it was not an answer to anything she had asked. That the Master had never really been interested in what was going to happen. That what he had wanted to see was how the six of them would let their hearts take them.

Ava attacked him.

The two Keyblades met and the sound of them meeting went up out of the place where they were standing and across the whole town, because the bells in the clock tower rang.

Everybody in Daybreak Town heard it.

The wielder heard it in the street.

Gula found them and told them to run, which was not an order he had any standing to give by then and which he gave anyway.

The thing that had been wearing a Chirithy's shape came for them in the middle of it and got in, because the bangle had been letting it in the whole time. It told them where it had come from while it was doing it. Out of them. Out of their own darkness, which it had been feeding and which had been feeding it, and it had been their own the entire time.

The wielder threw it off.

The war was fought in the badlands outside everything, on rocky ground that went on without stopping, at a place where the ways met.

The people on the other side were not monsters. They were wielders, out of five Unions, who had been told that the count was the thing, and now the count was the thing.

The wielder fought a Foreteller, then another, then another, then a fourth, and got weaker each time, because that is what happens.

At one point Aced came at them and Ira put himself in the way.

Aced had by then announced that the Unions were one and that he was leading them, and that the others would be put out. Nobody was in a position to contradict him and nobody cared.

The hearts of the wielders who fell came up off the ground and went, in numbers, all over the field.

Invi said something to one of them, in the middle of it, that had nothing to do with the war. That they should live a good long life. Gula said that perhaps they would meet again somewhere.

And then there was nobody left standing except one, and then not that either.

The wielder went down on the stones with the rain coming, and Chirithy got to them and stayed.

Above the field something opened.

It was enormous and it was in the sky.

Then light came down through it, and there were two people standing where there had been nobody.

Skuld, and Ephemer, who had been somewhere else for a long time. "You broke," the wielder said. "Your promise."

Ephemer crouched down and put out his hand. "We'll go together."

The wielder took it.

A Backup of the Real One

The wielder woke up in Daybreak Town.

The square was the square. The fountain was where the fountain went. The shop was behind it with the door in the centre, and west of that the market ran off under its parasols with the bunting up, and the paving had the purple star in it going away toward the districts.

Chirithy was there with a job to be getting on with.

Something sat in the wielder that would not take a shape, a sense of an event, the way you can wake knowing you have dreamed badly without any of the dream left. It stayed where it was, and it never turned into anything.

They went out and gathered light, and the count went up.

Almost everyone had come through the same way.

The war was gone out of them. Not softened; removed, deliberately and by hand, on an instruction from Ava. Ephemer had been given the job, and he had done it.

Five people kept theirs.

They kept them because somebody had to know, and Ava had told those five to keep what they knew to themselves and let everyone else go on. So the five of them walked around a town full of people who had been at the war with them, and none of the people knew, and the five of them kept it that way.

Most of the Dandelions did not wake at all. Their hearts stayed asleep where they were, and each of them was guarded by a thing that had been their own Chirithy and was now something else, standing over a sleeping heart, indefinitely.

The wielder dreamed about the war.

It came in order, with the ground under them and Aced coming and the shape of how it had gone, and it did not feel like a dream while it was happening and it did not feel like one afterwards either.

Chirithy went to Ephemer and Skuld about it.

They told it to keep the wielder from remembering.

They said it was to protect them, and they meant it, and Chirithy went back and did as it was told.

The five had met before any of that, at the graveyard where the war had been, and had stood about on the rocks feeling unqualified.

Ephemer had said so out loud. "Me? A Master? A Union leader? That's crazy."

Brain said much the same thing in his own words, and meant it rather less.

Brain had dark grey eyes and messy black hair, longer on the right, where it came down over the eye. A black coat with gold buttons and a large grey collar and white at the cuffs, a black vest over a black shirt cut in a V, grey trousers, black cowboy boots. A silver cross in his right ear and a stack of bangles on his left wrist. And a black fedora with a tan feather edged in red, which he wore pulled down far enough to keep his eyes out of sight.

Lauriam arrived last, and they had waited for him.

The fifth of them was Ventus, and Ventus had a rulebook.

He was blond and blue-eyed, and his hair was short and lay flat, and he wore a short-sleeved jacket that was white with black edges down one side and black with white edges down the other, over a striped grey and white vest and a black shirt buttoned to the throat, and dark patterned trousers.

They went up into the tower to the room where the six had met.

The Foretellers were not in it.

So the five of them decided, standing in the empty room, that they would keep the Unions in name and stop keeping them in fact. One body. They had all seen where the other way went.

Ava had given Brain something she was not supposed to give him.

One of the five was to have a copy of the book. That was the arrangement, and the person it was meant for had been chosen in advance, and it was not Brain. She gave it to Brain anyway, and she knew what she was doing when she did it, and she did it because she wanted the thing that was written down to come out differently.

She gave him something else with it. A note from the Master, to be opened when he needed it. "One of the new Union leaders was chosen to receive a copy of the Book of Prophecies," Brain said, to the others, at a point when it had become relevant.

They brought the competition back.

Not the war. A contest, between the Unions, of the sort the town had run before, and Skuld said no to it flatly and went on saying no until Ephemer proposed running it with copies of the wielders instead of the wielders. Nobody real would be hurt. On that basis she agreed.

Ventus did not like it either, for a simpler reason. "Wait. Keyblade wielders fighting each other?"

He asked it as though it were new information.

Ventus went looking for Ava.

He went to an empty house in the Seventh District and stood in it and called for her, and she did not come, and he called again.

"Master Ava? It's me, Ventus. Master Ava?"

Nothing in the room answered him and there was nothing in the room to answer.

Then the town began to come apart at the edges.

Small things at first, of the kind a person explains to themselves. Then larger ones. Then a connection out of the town to somewhere that had never been connected to it, forced open from the far side, which nobody had asked for and nobody could close.

Brain had been quiet for a while by then. "Question," he said. "Is the Daybreak Town we're in right now, real or virtual?"

Skuld answered him. "As a backup of the real one."

She had known since the beginning. So had Ephemer, and Lauriam, and the thing that was walking around inside Ventus. Brain had worked it out from the inside of it, without being told, out of glitches and a book and the fact that the worlds had come apart in the war and there was no reason any of them should still be reachable. They had been recreated as data so that they could be.

Lauriam had stopped attending the meetings.

He gave Ephemer his vote to use and went out into the town and worked, and what he was working on was his sister, who had not been anywhere for a while, and whom nobody else appeared to be looking for.

He found the girl who had been in her Union.

Elrena had aquamarine eyes and blonde hair to about the neck, with the bangs swept short across her forehead and two strands standing up and curving back off the top of her head. Turquoise leather jacket over a white collared shirt, a black tie worn loose, a black belt with a silver buckle, wide black leather shorts, black socks to the knee and turquoise boots. A silver chain off the jacket and another at her throat. The whole of it had the shape of a school uniform. "I want to ask you about my sister," Lauriam said. "Strelitzia."

"Strelitzia's gone missing?" Elrena said.

She was telling the truth. Her memories of before the war had gone the way everyone's had gone, and the name was in there and nothing attached to it was. She could not tell him when she had last seen her, because she could not tell him that she had.

Her Chirithy could.

It had been friends with Strelitzia's Chirithy. It remembered all of it, and everything they got, they got from it.

They worked together after that. "You really care about her, don't you?" Elrena said, at some point, having watched him at it for a while.

In the empty house in the Seventh District they found something that played back: the last of it, the room, the girl, the moment. They watched it happen. Then it stopped, and they could not make it happen again, and they never did.

A sorceress had come into the town by then.

She had come from outside and she had come to alter what was written, and she had been told, by something that spoke to her and was not a person, that it could not be done. The Master had seen to that in advance. What was in the book could not be edited from inside the copy.

She was directed instead to the basement of the clock tower, where there was a pod that was not finished, and told the terms on which it would work. It would send her heart forward. Her body would have to be built again at the far end, and for that there would need to be something to build it out of, and somebody there who remembered her.

Lauriam went down to stop her and she beat him, and left.

What Was in the Room

It had no shape.

That was the first thing about it and the thing everything else came from. It had had one once, a long time ago, in a war older than the town and older than the book, and it had put the shape down deliberately in order to go on. Since then it had been a will without a body, which is very difficult to fight and impossible to kill.

To kill it you would first have to give it somewhere to be. It had to be inside something with a heart strong enough to hold it, and then, and only then, was it a thing that could be ended.

It got about by going at hearts. What came out of people when it did that, out of the worst of what they had in them, were the Heartless.

There was more than one of them.

One of them had been inside Ventus since before the war.

It had walked his body into an empty house in the Seventh District and it had struck a girl down from behind and taken the rulebook out of her hands, and then it had gone and stood in the place that had been hers, among the five, and nobody had asked a question about it, because there was no question to ask. Ava had chosen five and five had turned up.

Afterwards it had needed him to know what to do, so it had put on Ava's face and taught him.

When it came out and they all saw it, Lauriam went at Ventus with everything he had.

"Answer me!"

He had the Keyblade up and he came very close to using it, and what he wanted was not a fight. He wanted somebody to say the words in the right order so he could stop constructing them himself.

Ventus said that he had done it.

He said it plainly, and to the whole room. He said the thing had been done and that it had been him.

And the thing inside him said that this was wrong. That it had struck her down, itself, by its own decision, and that the reason it had was that it had looked into him and found a wish for power sitting there underneath everything he knew about himself, and had acted on it.

Which was either the clearing of him or the worst thing that had been said about him, and both of those were said in the same room in the same minute.

Lauriam turned to it and asked it why it had killed her.

It did not answer that. It answered a different question, which nobody had asked, and it answered it in one word.

"Infection."

They drove it back and they could not finish it, for the reason that had been true from the beginning.

Then Ventus woke up.

There was light in him. Enough of it that when he put it into the formless thing the formless thing could not stay formless, and came into a shape, and the shape could be hit.

Doing it nearly killed him.

Lauriam sat with him afterwards, while he was unconscious and could not hear any of it, and apologised.

His sister came to him.

She was in a white coat and she was not hurt and she looked at him the way she had always looked at him, which was the part he was least prepared for. "Hatred, anger, and sadness," she said. "That's exactly what they want."

He had no answer for that. "You have to let it go," she said. "What happened to my kind and loving brother?"

Then she was not there.

Elrena's Chirithy saw her afterwards.

Not in a vision and not in a dream. On the hill above the town, walking, with somebody, coming down toward the streets. It said so plainly and it had no reason to invent it.

The person she was walking with wore a black coat.

Brain thought about it for a while and said that somebody had got at what was left of her in the data, which was possible, and which was not the same as saying that she was alive.

Lauriam did not care about the distinction and went out looking.

Seven People and Five Doors

The copy started to fail.

Not at the edges any more. Everywhere, and quickly, and the thing eating it was the thing they had driven into a shape and had not managed to finish.

The pods were in the basement of the clock tower and there were seven of them.

Each one was about the size of a person standing up, with a door hinged at the top and a window in it cut in the shape of a heart.

They had been built to cross between worlds. They could go through time instead, but not both at once, and going through time cost more than going between worlds. It cost the traveller their body. What arrived at the other end was a heart, and for it to be anything more than that there had to be something waiting to build a body out of, and there had to be somebody there who remembered you.

The Master had said what their leaving would mean, at some point, to one of them, in the same voice he used for everything. "When all seven of the lifeboat's pods depart, this world will end, and a new day will dawn."

Seven of them went down into the basement.

Six pods were left, the sorceress having gone out in the seventh. One of the six did not work.

Brain gave Ephemer the Keyblade he carried and the copy of the book Ava had given him, and did it without ceremony, in the basement, with the room shaking.

Ephemer said he was staying. "I played a part in bringing the Dandelions together," he said, "so I have a responsibility to save everyone."

One of them told him it was over.

"It's enough to keep me from giving up hope."

Skuld gave up her place.

She gave it to Lauriam, so that he could go on looking for his sister, and she said it in a way that did not leave room for the argument.

"I'm not leaving you two here."

Lauriam took it. Ventus went in unconscious. Elrena went. Brain went.

As the doors came down Lauriam called out for Brain, and there was something wrong in how he said it, and then the pods went. "I hope I get to see you again too," Lauriam said.

One working pod was left, and three people.

Four of the Darknesses came up out of the failing town and wanted out of it.

They put it to Ephemer as a transaction, because he was the one holding what they needed. He could open a way out of the copy, and they wanted it opened.

He said no, and got ready.

Then the wielder hit him.

It came from behind and it was not close to a mistake, and when Ephemer got up the wielder was standing with the four of them and talking, at length, in a way the wielder never talked. That letting them out was not the disaster he thought. That a body could be traded for passage and this was a reasonable price and he was being sentimental.

Ephemer said no to that as well.

The five of them put him down, and put Skuld down, and it took very little time.

What Ephemer did then he did without discussing it.

He fired through the wielder's chest.

The shot opened something behind them, and the something took hold, and it took the wielder and all four of the others through it at once.

Inside, there was no floor and no direction, and the wielder had a hole in them and was going nowhere on foot.

The four came for them.

And the wielder laughed.

Because the possession had not happened. Not once, not for a second. It had been a performance put on for four things that had spent their entire existence certain that anybody could be got into if you found the right way in, and they had believed it because believing it was the whole of what they were.

The wielder sealed the way out from the inside.

It shut with all five of them behind it, in a place that was already coming apart, and it did not open again.

Ephemer closed his side of it.

The wound was going to be the end of it and it was not going to be slow.

Chirithy got to them. "It's not over yet," the wielder said.

They went down holding it, and the light came up over both of them and took them.

Afterwards there was a white place with no edges in it, and a great many other wielders standing about in it, and none of them saying anything.

Chirithy explained the two things that were available.

The first was sleep. That was what was happening to the rest of the Dandelions, and it was not nothing: Chirithy would take another shape and stand over them and keep them, for as long as that took, which might be a very long time.

The second was not to sleep. To go on instead, into whatever it is that hearts go on into, without any promise attached about what came out the other side.

The wielder chose not to sleep.

They picked Chirithy up and held onto it, and Chirithy said goodnight to its friend.

Then there was one heart where there had been two, and it went up, and out, and away from all of it.

A New Day

Luxu came into the tower while the town was going.

He was carrying somebody, wrapped up in a white cloak, and he brought them down into the basement and put them into a pod and sent them forward, and he said what they were while he was doing it. A seed of light, to be put into the ground in the future. The true Dandelion.

Then he went and found Brain.

Brain was not leaving. He said so before Luxu had finished asking, which suggests he had been expecting somebody to come and ask. He was staying in this time, with the sleepers, and he was going to get them out.

Luxu went through the terms of the pod again, patiently, the way you explain a thing to somebody who has already understood it and does not want to.

Brain would need somebody at the far end who remembered him. He would need a body waiting there to occupy.

And then he said it was a shame, really, that Brain only had the one life to spend.

The figure who walked out across the badlands afterwards had the No Name over one shoulder and the black box dragging along behind him over the broken ground.

The Keyblades of the people who had fought there were standing in the ground where they had come to rest, in numbers, all the way out.

He stopped somewhere in the middle of them and put the hood back.

The face under it was Brain's.

Brain woke up somewhere he had never been.

It was a city and it was dark, high towers and spires going up close together, and there were statues on the rooftops, cloaked figures and hawks, looking down at the streets. Under his feet the paving was cobbled, and worked into it, running away between the buildings, was a purple star.

A man was waiting for him. "You must be Brain," he said.

His name was Sigurd, and he had been expecting him, and he said that of everyone who had left, Brain was the only one who had come out in this time. The rest of it, he said, could wait until they were somewhere better.

They walked.

They came to a square with a fountain in it, and above the fountain, on top of it, a statue of a boy holding a Keyblade that Brain had been carrying himself not very long ago. "That's the man who built this town," Sigurd said. "The first Keyblade Master. Master Ephemer."

The town was called Scala ad Caelum, and it had been built on the ruins of Daybreak Town, on the same ground, out of the same wreck, which is why the star was still in the paving.

Brain stood and looked up at it for a while. "Ephemer was a good friend," he said.

The Master had said something once about what people are, when nobody had asked him and there was no obvious reason for him to be saying it. "Do you know what sets people apart from other living beings?" he said. "People want to believe in the future, even if they won't be around to see it."

And another time, in the same offhand way:

"When twilight ends, a new day begins."

Dark Road

The Child of Destiny

The boy had been told what he was so many times that he had stopped hearing it.

"The child of destiny? Me?"

The man in the cloak said that he was, and said it in the tone of somebody repeating a fact about the tide. "You've told me that a hundred times. But what's a child of destiny?"

He got an answer, and the answer was about saving the world and connecting with a great many others, and the boy turned it over and could find nothing in it he could use. "I don't get it," he said.

He was small and would not stay small. Tan skin, silver hair swept back into spikes with the bangs falling messy over his forehead, and eyes that were silver too and had always been. He wore a black jacket, high-collared and sleeveless, with the tails cut to points, over a long white shirt with two thin black belts drawn round the middle. Baggy grey trousers stuffed into black boots. Long black armbands to the elbow.

The man who raised him had come for him when he was an infant and had brought him to the islands because darkness could not easily get at them there. He was to be kept there until he was old enough to go to the other worlds. The boy had been on the islands ever since.

The cloak stayed up. In every hour the boy could remember, the man kept the hood where it was.

He taught the boy about darkness and about light, and he taught it as though the two of them were a subject a person could get to the bottom of.

"When I get strong enough, will I get to see my mom again too?"

He had got to the end of what the islands could give him. "This world is just too small," he said, to nobody in particular.

And he dreamed. "That dream again," he said, flatly, the way a person reports a thing that has stopped being interesting. "I've been having the same dream over and over again for as long as I can remember."

In the dream there were people.

There was a boy with silver hair that curled, and a red scarf with a pattern of swirls in it wound round his neck, and he was always on his way somewhere. There was a girl with stars at her ears who argued with him and went with him anyway. There was a man in a black hat pulled down low enough that his eyes did not come into it. There was somebody with rose-coloured hair who was looking for a person and had been looking for a long time. And there was a boy with blond hair lying flat, younger than the rest of them, who went where they went.

He had names for them. Ephemer. Skuld. Brain. Lauriam. Ventus.

He had never met anybody by those names. But they did not feel to him like things he had made up. They felt like remembering, and so he carried them about as his own, because he could not think what else they would be.

He did not tell the man in the cloak about them. It occurred to him as little as reporting the weather to somebody standing in it. A person does not report their own memories to somebody else as though they were news.

And they were not frightening. The dreams were good. There were five people in them and they liked each other, and the boy woke up out of them into an island with one man on it and no other children at all, and went down to the water, and got on with the day.

The man died when the boy was somewhere in his early teens.

There was nobody else on the islands who had known him, and so there was nobody to tell, and the boy did the necessary things alone, and afterwards the islands held one person where they had held two.

Not long afterwards somebody came toward him.

This one was hooded too. "Who are you?" the boy said.

The figure did not answer that. He said instead that the boy should leave the islands, and he said it as though the matter had already been settled somewhere else and he was only bringing word.

Then he opened a way.

It stood in the sand and it was made of dark and it went somewhere, and the boy looked at it for a while, and then walked into it.

Alba and Ater

He came out into a city standing on water.

It went on. That was the first thing about it and the thing that took longest to stop noticing. Towns built up the sides of mountains, and the mountains themselves made of nothing but white and gold buildings packed one above another, and a citadel on the top of each, and beyond that another mountain of buildings and then another, out as far as the water went, which was as far as there was. Nearly every roof had a windmill fixed on it, so that the whole enormous thing was turning slightly, all the time. The sky over it was clear. It stayed clear.

Down in the paving there was a star.

He was taken in as a student under a Keyblade Master called Odin, alongside six others.

Odin was old. Grey eyes under bushy white hair that came down to his shoulders, and a white beard reaching his chest. A buttoned beige shirt and beige hakama, the top of it worked like a sash with a gold emblem at the centre held through a yellow ribbon. Black heeled boots. Over all of it grey-brown robes to the floor, hooded, the sleeves wide and drooping, and a large soft pointed hat in the same grey-brown with a wide brim and a lavender lining, worn at an angle that kept one of his eyes out of sight.

The students wore a uniform, more or less. High collar, two straps crossing the chest in an X with a charm where they met, a sash at the waist, and over that whatever outer coat belonged to the wielder wearing it, which was where the uniform stopped being one.

Xehanort's was a sleeveless black shirt cut close with a large grey X worked across it, armbands much shorter than the ones he had arrived in, and a black belt with a silver emblem at the front. Over it a hooded black coat, sleeveless, falling to the upper calf, trimmed and lined in a pinkish brown, belted at the middle in dark grey, with long rectangular lapels embroidered in gold and pinned back with red cord.

Eraqus wore white.

His hair was loose and untidy at the front. The coat was hooded and white and more decorated than it needed to be, slit wide up the back, belted in black, its lapels beige and gold-embroidered and pinned with turquoise cords. Under it a high-collared black shirt and a hakama mostly tan with a lighter hem, the top of it dark grey and folded like a sash with a gold emblem at the front. Black boots with gold heels.

He was late to almost everything.

He was also, in the estimation of everyone around him, the reason the class held together at all. He talked. He made things funny that were not funny. He did it on purpose and he did it hardest when there was least reason for anybody to be hopeful, and it worked.

And underneath it he already believed, at that age, that darkness was a thing to be got rid of entirely. He said it came down to his family. His grandfather had fought it too.

The two of them played at a board.

Alba and Ater, white and black, thirty-two pieces to a board. Sixteen silver and white on the one side and sixteen gold and black on the other, each piece carrying a symbol on its head, each one named after somebody.

They played it constantly and Xehanort won. "Keep an open mind, Eraqus," he said, over one of them. "Maybe then you'll actually beat me."

And later, in the same room, with the pieces still standing: "It's almost time for class."

The room was large and white-walled, with golden beams across it and windows and arches at the ceiling and two fans turning at the top of the space.

When they were not in it they went up the long stair the city called the Stairway to the Sky and sat at the top of it.

That was where most of it happened. The training happened where Odin put them; the rest of it happened up there, the part that turns people who are in the same room into people who look for each other. They sat above the water with the whole white and gold weight of the place stacked up behind them and the windmills going, and they talked, and years went past while they were doing it.

Eraqus was late to that too.

Odin asked Xehanort once why he wanted to be a Master. "I don't know why," he said. "But I have friends. I want to see again."

He asked Odin, more than once, how a person got to the other worlds.

There were four others.

Vor was short and pale, with turquoise eyes and dirty-blond hair cut to the chin, the bangs swept left, the side locks curled. A high-necked white shirt with gold trim, turquoise straps crossing at her chest, a pendant, a sash striped in yellow-brown and white. Puffy violet shorts, black socks, white boots with gold trim and the cuffs turned down. Over it all a long purple cloak, the colour running lighter and darker through it, patterned in bubbles, trimmed in gold and lined in blue, the sleeves wide, a heavy blue cord tied in loops at her back.

Hermod was pale, blue-grey at the eyes, his hair the same blue-grey and parted to the left and never quite in order. White high-collared shirt, orange straps crossing, black trousers into tall boots tipped with gold, an orange sash with a pendant on it. Over that a loose olive robe with gold trim and long yellow lapels, the sleeves black and puffed, the cuffs orange and gold.

Urd had amber eyes and straight grey hair to her shoulders, pulled back into a ponytail. A long-sleeved grey shirt with wide white cuffs, light grey trousers, and a long black coat with short sleeves that flared.

Bragi was a young man with red-brown eyes set like a cat's and ginger hair blown mostly over to his left. High collar, black shirt, a black jacket cut for training in, a wide grey belt, two tan straps crossing to make an X with a white pendant hung where they met. Loose black trousers, black shoes with white laces. Over it a loose blue jacket, hooded, the lapels white, the hood lined with white fur.

He did not say much.

Baldr was pale, with silver eyes and long white hair, feathery, falling to his shoulders behind and cut shorter in front so that it framed his face. A white jacket with a very large hood, clasped in gold. A thin black band round his upper left arm. Lapels embroidered in gold, bridged by an orange cord that ended in a tassel at the left. Under it a black vest over a white undershirt, loose blue straps crossing at the waist, a silver chain at the left hip, black gloves with the fingers cut off, dark grey trousers, tall black boots buckled in gold.

Seven Who Did Not Come Back

Two years or so after Xehanort came to the city, Odin gave the lower classmen a job.

Seven of the upper classmen, by Odin's count, had gone out for their own examinations and had not come back. Nobody had heard from any of them. The lower classmen were to go and find them.

It was the first time most of them had left the city at all.

They went to a desert city first, and it was there that they had their first fight.

The things that came at them out of the street were shaped wrong and moved worse. "They've gotta be Heartless," Xehanort said.

They were, and the class dealt with them, and afterwards Xehanort looked at what was left and said, "Not bad for our first battle."

After that the search stopped being an adventure and became work.

There was a place of playing cards, with a queen in it. There was a wood, with a queen in it too, and a mirror. There was a castle, and a coliseum. They went to all of them and asked and fought and moved on, and the upper classmen were not in any of them.

Eraqus and Bragi went missing out of the group somewhere along the way, and Xehanort, Hermod and Urd had to go back to the desert city to look for them.

Bragi was the one they worried about least. He never got separated by accident. He was never where the trouble was and never far from it either, and when they found him he was generally already where they had been going. He was the quiet one, and a quiet one in a class that size gets read as shy, and nobody looked at him twice.

They found them. That was the pattern of those months. Losing people and finding them again, and each time the finding took a little longer.

It was during that stretch that Eraqus did the thing he was best at.

Going from world to world, finding nothing, and the arithmetic getting worse every time they arrived somewhere and nobody was in it. Eraqus kept the rest of them from working out how badly it was going, and he kept it up for as long as the search lasted.

Vor was separated from the rest and came across the mirror.

It was set in a frame ringed with chiselled tiles carrying the twelve signs, and the face that came up in the glass was a white theatre mask, lit so that half of it read darker than the other half. High-set eyebrows. Holes where the eyes should be, and a hole for the mouth, and the back of the face black.

It answered any question truthfully. It also answered cryptically, and the two together made it less useful than it sounded.

When the rest of them caught up and put the question to it, it told them the upper classmen were each acting alone.

Nobody knew what to do with that. It did not sound like people who had been taken.

Somewhere in the middle of all this Xehanort started saying things the others did not say. "Darkness can hide anywhere," he said to Eraqus. "Even inside someone."

It sounded like a general remark. "I wonder," Xehanort said. "Could darkness burrow so deep into someone's heart that they don't even know it's there?"

Eraqus asked him how he knew a thing like that. "Me? I..."

He did not finish it.

Later, and not as an answer to anything, he said: "One day we might have to decide."

The Darkness That Was His Own

Baldr had a sister among the upper classmen.

Hoder had the same white hair he did, short and feathery, and the same silver eyes. A collared white dress trimmed in black with a diamond cut out of the front of it, the hem uneven, ending at the thigh on the right under a thick gold band and falling to the calf on the left. A gold sash tied in a wide bow behind her, a black cord over it, a gold charm at the front. Black boots to the thigh with red cords crossing in an X at the tops.

Nothing was put into Baldr from outside.

He could feel the darkness in other people's hearts. All of them had some. And he could feel the other thing too, the way they held onto the light and would not hear a word said against it, and the harder they held the more clearly he could feel what they were holding it against.

And it grew. It grew in him, out of what he could feel in everybody else, until it was not a thing he was sensing any more. It was his.

When it had all of him, he intended to kill thirteen lights and summon Kingdom Hearts.

Hermod and Urd went into a corridor of darkness. They did not choose to; they were drawn in.

They were looking for Baldr, at the end of it, and they found him.

Hermod with his hair never quite in order and his olive robe and his boots tipped with gold. Urd with her ponytail and her flared black sleeves. They had sat in the same room as Xehanort every day since he came to the city.

He attacked them with darkness and killed them both.

Soon afterwards he struck Vor down.

She was the short one. She was the one who had got separated and found the mirror, and had brought the rest of them to it.

Xehanort and Eraqus got to her before she went.

There was time. Enough of it to reach her, and to understand what was happening, and to say goodbye, and none at all to do anything about it. So they said goodbye. Both of them were crying while they did it. She faded while they were still talking to her.

Bragi was counted among the dead. A stone went up for him with the others.

Hoder went first.

At the end she was reaching out toward her brother, and she faded into light while her arm was still up.

Vidar came for Baldr when he heard.

He was one of the upper classmen. So had Hoder been. The lower classmen had spent the better part of two years going from world to world looking for people like these two, and in the end had not found them so much as been overtaken by what had happened to them.

He was an upper classman, dark-skinned, with hazel eyes and short brown hair swept back. A dusty blue coat trimmed in gold, cut in the manner of a kamishimo, the short sleeves standing out over the shoulders. A black sash at the waist with a long yellow one wound over it and tied off at the left. A high-collared black shirt beneath, baggy black trousers into tall black boots with pointed tops and gold at the trim. A white charm on a silver chain at his waist. Long fingerless black gloves, the right one shorter with two bands above it on the arm, the left buckled, crossed with gold chain, the cuffs darker, white bandages wound over the top.

He was also the one who worked it out.

The darkness had taken Baldr as a vessel. It could not be reached any other way. The only method of destroying it was to destroy the body it was standing in, which meant killing Baldr, which meant that the thing they had been trying to save was the thing in the way.

He gathered the others and they went to do it and they were killed.

Vidar lived long enough to apologise, and to hand the job to Xehanort.

Which left Xehanort.

He found Baldr where the others had found him, and Baldr was still wearing the white jacket with the very large hood and the gold clasp, and his hair was still white and feathery and shorter at the front where it framed his face, and nothing about him had changed at all.

He had grown up being told that darkness came from outside and could be recognised and pushed back out again. Here was a boy he had sat in a room with for years, looking exactly like a boy he had sat in a room with for years, with their classmates dead behind him and his sister gone into the light with her hand still up.

Baldr said something.

Then Xehanort struck him down.

He made no attempt to save him. Somebody had tried that, and had died inside the attempt, and had handed what was left of it to him.

Whatever it was, Xehanort carried it out of that room, and he was still carrying it years later, and it had not got any lighter.

The Graveyard

Xehanort shut himself in his room for a month.

On the far side of the city there was a graveyard, a long one, and it took the four of them. Hermod. Urd. Vor. And a stone for Bragi, who had been counted among them.

Eraqus went there. Xehanort went there too, eventually, and they found each other among the stones rather than anywhere either of them had chosen, and that was where the month ended. They talked. They agreed to go on with the training.

They had not spoken since the graves went in.

Four stones. Hermod, Urd, Vor, and one with Bragi's name cut into it over nobody.

Eraqus stood in front of them still believing that darkness was a thing that could be got rid of. Xehanort stood in front of the same four stones and went somewhere else with it. Neither of them said so. They agreed to go on with the training, and that was the whole of the conversation.

A month after the burials, a man walked through that graveyard on his own.

Nobody saw him. The place was empty.

He went along the row without hurrying, and stopped, and put his hood back.

The face under it was Bragi's.

He remarked, to himself, that having died was going to make it difficult to go about showing it.

There had never been a Bragi. There had been a body with somebody inside it, enrolled among the lower classmen, going out on the search with the rest of them, and then a death, and a stone.

None of them ever found out. Not Eraqus, not Odin, not Xehanort. The stone stayed up.

Thirteen Lifetimes

Xehanort took something out of it that nobody expected.

He had watched a boy grow his own darkness out of standing close to people who would not admit theirs. Nobody had put it into Baldr. It had come up in him because he could feel what everybody around him was holding down, and because they held it down so hard, and so certainly, and called what they were doing the light.

So he stopped believing in the light they meant. Not in light. In that light, the one the world held up, which he had now watched conceal something until the thing it was concealing killed his friends.

A false light was what he called it, and having named it he decided to do something about it.

He told Eraqus what he thought.

The world needed rebuilding rather than repairing. The whole arrangement of it was wrong in the way a foundation is wrong, and putting it right would take longer than a person got. So he would want more than a person got. He would extend his own life, do the work, and then be there afterwards to live in the thing he had made.

They were sitting somewhere above the water when it came round to it properly. "It made me think, about a lot of things," Xehanort said. "The events of the past, what's to come. What about you? Wasn't it always your dream to travel abroad on your own?"

Eraqus said that what he wanted now was to stay true to the light. "Hm?" Xehanort said. "What brought that on?"

So Eraqus told him. He wanted to be a beacon: to stand where the people who were lost in the darkness could see him, and to bring them back out of it. He said it in a way that left room for Xehanort to be one of them. "I see," Xehanort said.

He let it sit. Then: "It made me realize that one lifetime is too short. It's not enough."

Eraqus asked him how many he wanted. "Hmm," Xehanort said. "Twelve. No, thirteen. That's what it'll take to rebuild the world."

Then he thought about it a moment longer.

"Scratch that. One more to explore the new world."

Odin meant to stand down.

He said so. The plan was for the two of them to replace him, and for him to retire somewhere that was not this city.

He arranged for them to sit the examination early.

Seven years after Xehanort had come out of a corridor of darkness into a city standing on water, the two of them passed it, and were made Keyblade Masters on the same day.

They were given weapons.

Eraqus, who was called the true heir, was given the Master's Defender.

Xehanort was given the No Name.

A year later they fought each other.

It came out of what Xehanort intended to do about the false light, which by then he had worked out in detail, and the detail was this: he was going to summon Kingdom Hearts. "Kingdom Hearts is the only way," he said.

Eraqus had been arguing with him for some time before that and he did not stop. "What about our duty as Keyblade wielders?" he said.

Xehanort was gathering his things while it went on, which did not help. "To think we became Keyblade Masters only a year ago, and now this."

He tried the weapon next, because the weapon was the argument he thought could not be answered. "You were bequeathed a Keyblade from the era of the Lost Masters. You were supposed to have inherited their weapon, and their resolve."

Xehanort let that one go by as well. "But summoning Kingdom Hearts is a drastic measure," Eraqus said. "How can you be so sure that's the answer?"

There was not a reason that would survive being said out loud to somebody who believed what Eraqus believed, so Xehanort did not offer one. "Life has taught us far different lessons," Eraqus said, and brought his Keyblade up.

Xehanort looked at it. "Do you stand in my way as a true Keyblade Master?"

"No," Eraqus said. "As a true friend."

Then he attacked him.

The two blades came together.

Xehanort left. "We all have our dreams," he said, on his way.

And at the last, with everything between them where it now was, and both of them Masters, and a year gone since the ceremony, and four stones on the far side of the town:

"See you."

The Mirror

A long time passed.

Enough of it that the boy who had walked out of a corridor onto a strange pavement was an old man, and the city had gone on turning its windmills without him, and most of the people who could have said what he had been like as a student were under stones.

He went back to the mirror.

The white mask came up in the glass the way it always had, lit unevenly, the eyes and the mouth two holes and nothing behind them, the twelve signs standing round the frame.

He had a question ready. He had had it ready for a very long time.

He asked it whether the friends in his dreams had truly existed at all.

Birth by Sleep

The Outside World

The old man had spent about a year on the boy and had decided he was not worth the trouble.

He was bald and very old, dark-skinned, with a curved silver beard and gold eyes and ears that came to points. His shoulders were broad and hunched and his back had gone crooked, and he stood with his hands folded behind him. That was how he stood while he worked. The coat he wore was black and grey with a red lining and layered pads at the shoulders, and belts crossed over the back of it in an X.

They were standing in a wasteland with dead Keyblades in it, driven into the ground where they had come to rest and left there. It went on in every direction and there was nothing else in it.

The boy was called Ventus and he was too frail to be any use. That was the finding. Xehanort had wanted a body he could put himself into eventually, and this one was not going to hold.

So he took out his Keyblade and used it to pull the darkness out of the boy's heart.

It came out. It stood up. It was a boy in a mask, about the same size, and it was awake immediately. The other one was not. "Yes, Master," it said.

What was left of Ventus went down on the stones. The heart was in pieces and it was not going to hold together long.

Xehanort carried him to a chain of islands and meant to leave him there.

What happened instead was that the broken heart reached for the nearest whole one, belonging to a child born a very short time before, and caught on it, and held.

Ventus, who was unconscious and should not have been able to do anything at all, summoned his Keyblade and put a line of light up into the sky.

Xehanort watched that happen and revised his opinion.

The castle he took him to instead stood high in grassy mountains with water running below it, and had tall spires coming off the roof, and four golden chains ran from it to two pairs of twin peaks and held it where it was.

The man who lived there had grey eyes and greying black hair to his shoulders, wavy, and a short triangular patch of beard under his lip, and a moustache, and two jagged scars across his face. He wore a long hooded white coat with wide sleeves and plum-brown trim, and under it a navy shirt with a large grey X across the front. "It seems you've settled in," Xehanort said.

He looked at the two young people in the hall behind Eraqus and made a remark about them. "You've taken on apprentices," he said. "They seem quite bright."

Then he put the boy in front of him. "Yes. His name is Ventus," he said. "I took him under my wing this past year. But I think he may be the child of destiny."

He asked Eraqus to raise him. He said the boy deserved to be guided by a true heir to light, and that he himself stood too close to the darkness, and he said it in the tone of a man conceding a small point in a long argument. "I'm sorry," he said.

He did not say what for.

Then Ventus screamed, somewhere behind them, and both of them turned.

The boy in the mask was standing in the hall. "You were to wait at the badlands," Xehanort said.

The masked boy had an opinion about Ventus and gave it. "He ain't gonna cut it," he said. "Somebody's gotta break that loser in."

"I did this for him. Not you."

Whatever the masked boy said to that, Xehanort answered it with his hand on his Keyblade. "Hold your tongue, boy. You may be pure darkness, but you are no match for my blade."

The masked boy went.

Ventus woke with no memory of any of it, and Eraqus told him he had always been here.

He was small and blond, with blue eyes and a round face.

The other two came and stood over him.

The young man was tall and built heavy for his age, with brown hair to the base of his neck, spiked up on top and falling over his face at the front, and blue eyes, and skin a little tanned. He wore a dark grey shirt with a high collar and short sleeves, and two red straps crossed over his chest, and his left arm was mostly in armour. "So, are you here to train with us?" he said. "Where are you from? Who was that man with you? You good with a Keyblade?"

"Ventus cannot tell you anything," Eraqus said, "because he cannot remember anything."

The young woman had blue eyes and bright blue hair cut choppy and parted on the left, chin-length at the front and down over her neck behind. Navy and black halter top with a high collar and an open back, a black corset laced at both sides, black shorts, black stockings to mid-thigh. Two pink straps crossed over her chest with a silver mark where they met, and a long piece of blue cloth hung over each hip past the knee. Her sleeves were white and detached, with three segments of silver and dull purple armour on them.

Their names were Terra and Aqua. They took to him almost immediately. It was not a thing either of them decided.

Terra gave him a wooden Keyblade. He said the words of the inheritance rite over it while he did it, as a joke, the way a person knights somebody with a stick.

"In your hand, take this key. And so long as you have the makings, then through this simple act of taking, its wielder you shall one day be made."

Ven kept it.

Wayfinders

Four years went by like that.

The castle had a forecourt, and a path up the mountain with small trees along it and thin waterfalls coming down beside it, and at the top of the path a summit where the three of them went to do nothing. The great hall below was spacious and covered in gold ornament, with tall stained glass windows that were the only thing lighting it, and three thrones at the top of the room.

The night before the examination there was a meteor shower, and they went up.

Ven was lying on his back with his eyes shut when Aqua came up behind him.

"Ven, you hopeless sleepyhead."

"Whoa! Gimme a break, Aqua."

"A meteor shower!"

The three of them lay out on the rock and watched it come down. "Y'ever wonder what stars are?" Ven said. "Where light comes from?"

Terra told him. "That every star up there is another world," he said. "Yep, hard to believe there are so many worlds out there besides our own. The light is their hearts, and it's shining down on us like a million lanterns."

Ven asked something else after that and got a different kind of answer. "You're too young to know now," Terra said.

"Quit treating me like a kid."

Aqua laughed at the pair of them. "I can't help it," she said. "You two would make the weirdest brothers."

"Oy, sometimes you are such a girl," Terra said.

She had made them something. "Oh yeah. Terra, you and I have our Mark of Mastery exams tomorrow," she said. "I made us good luck charms. Here!"

Three of them, one each, star-shaped, made of stained glass in silver frames, each one marked with the emblem of Mastery. "So this isn't a real good luck charm?" Ven said.

"Of course. One for each of us," she said. "Somewhere out there, there's this tree with star-shaped fruit, and the fruit represents an unbreakable connection. So as long as you and your friends carry good luck charms shaped like it, nothing can ever drive you apart. You'll always find your way back to each other. Technically, I think you're supposed to make them with seashells, but I did the best with what I had."

"An unbreakable connection," she said.

She had put a spell on them to make up for the shells. "Well, tomorrow's the exam," Terra said. "Anybody wanna spar?"

"Trust me, you guys are ready," Ven said. "You're gonna clean up at the exam tomorrow."

"I hope it's that easy," Terra said.

Nobody sparred. They stayed where they were until the shower was over.

It was the last night the three of them spent in the same place.

The Examination

The examination was Xehanort's idea.

Eraqus had meant to give the two of them the title and be done with it. They were the youngest prospects he had seen in years and he had watched them come up and he did not think there was anything left to find out. He had written to his old friend to say so, and to invite him to come and watch it happen.

The letter that came back said that Terra was open to darkness, and that a formal test would be the responsible thing, and that he would of course be delighted to attend.

Eraqus set the test.

He put it to them in the hall under the stained glass, with the old man standing off to one side of the thrones. "Today you will be examined for the Mark of Mastery. Not one but two of the Keyblade's chosen stand here as candidates, but this is neither a competition nor a battle for supremacy, not a test of wills, but a test of heart. Both of you may prevail, or neither. But I am sure our guest, Master Xehanort, did not travel all this way to see our youngest prospects in years fall short of the Mark. I trust you are ready."

Ven was not a candidate. Ven was watching from the side of the room, where he had been told to be. "Then let the examination begin."

The first part of it was orbs of light. Eraqus called them up and set them loose and the two of them were to put them down, and the point of it was the heart and not the arithmetic.

Xehanort corrupted them where nobody could see him do it.

He did not move. The light in the orbs went black and they stopped behaving like a test.

One of them broke off from the rest and went for the boy at the side of the room.

Ven put his Keyblade through it. "But Ven, you're in danger here!" Aqua said. "Go wait in your room."

"Don't worry about me. You two focus on the exam!"

"He can take care of himself," Terra said. "He's been out there training just as hard as us."

Eraqus said the thing a man says when he has decided to carry on. "That was unexpected, but one must keep a still heart."

The second part was the two of them against each other.

It went the way sparring goes between people who have sparred for years, until Terra's hand went dark.

It came up his arm and sat on his hand and he saw it there. He stopped, and put it down, and got it back under. It took him a moment and the moment was the whole examination.

Xehanort watched him do it with his hands folded behind his back. "We have deliberated and reached a decision. Terra, Aqua, you both performed commendably. However, only Aqua has shown the Mark of Mastery. Terra, you failed to keep the darkness within you sufficiently in check. But there is always next time. That is all. Aqua, as our newest Keyblade Master, you are entitled to certain knowledge. Please wait here for further instruction."

Terra stood in the hall and said it out loud. "The darkness. Where did it come from?"

Nobody answered him. Aqua started to and he stopped her. "Sorry, but I need some time alone."

He went out. Aqua stayed where she had been told to wait.

What Eraqus taught her was what a Master is for, which turned out to be less about fighting than she had expected. There was a Keyhole in this world, as there was in every world, and there was a way to find it and a way to seal it, and the Master's Defender was the key that did it. If the Land of Departure were ever threatened, she was to seal it, and that was not a last resort. That was the duty.

"And insomuch as you are now Keyblade Master, you must always be conscious of."

He never finished it.

Xehanort found Terra where Terra had gone to be alone. It was not difficult. There were not many places to go. "Yes. You are indeed strong," he said. "The darkness is nothing to fear."

"But why?" Terra said. "Help me understand, Master Xehanort. What is it that I have failed to learn?"

"You're fine as you are. Darkness cannot be destroyed. It can only be channeled."

He put it to him as a technical correction. The boy had been taught that the thing in him was a fault and that the work was to crush it. That was one way to look at it and it was not the only way and it was, if he might say so, not a very useful one.

Terra said the thing he had been saying to himself for a while, and it came out sounding like an argument he had won. "There's darkness within me. So what does that matter? I know I'm strong enough to hold it back."

Xehanort agreed with him.

Outside on the cliffs the masked boy was waiting. He had been told not to do that.

Xehanort told him again not to cause trouble here. "I know that," the masked boy said. "He just needs a little incentive to leave home."

The Unversed were already out. They had been going out across the worlds for some time, on the old man's instructions, for two reasons that did not have to be explained twice. One was to put something in front of Ventus hard enough to make him fight. The other was to make the worlds bad enough that Terra would be sent into them.

The masked boy found Ventus at the castle a little after that. "Better hurry, Ventus," he said. "Or you'll never see Terra again."

"Like right now? He's leaving you behind. And by the time you catch up, he'll be a different person."

"Look, whoever you are, you don't know the first thing about Terra," Ven said. "Me and him will always be a team. You trying to pick a fight or what?"

"Oh, grow up. Is that what you call friendship? You'll never know the truth unless you go out and look for it yourself. Come on, what could you possibly know when you're stuck here, looking at nothing but what's in your tiny world?"

"Exactly what I said, idiot. The Terra you know will be gone forever."

Ven told him that was stupid. "Stupid, or true."

"Good. Let's see what you're made of."

They fought. It did not last long and it ended with the masked boy stepping back out of it. "Hmph, you win. Consider yourself on probation."

He left.

Eraqus called Terra and Aqua in and told them what he had.

Yen Sid had sent word. There were things appearing across the worlds and there was now a name for them, which was the Unversed, and what they were was fledgling emotions that had taken monster form. They were turning up everywhere and they were going after the Princesses of Heart.

And Master Xehanort was gone. "Master Xehanort is gone?" Terra said.

The orders were to destroy the Unversed and to find Xehanort. They were given the Lanes Between to do it in. That was normally forbidden. And Eraqus put it to Terra as an opportunity, in those words, because a second look at the Mark was exactly what the boy wanted to hear and Eraqus meant it besides.

"Thank you, Master. I swear, I will not fail you again."

He kept Aqua back after. "Wait, Aqua. Before you depart, I have one other. Well, call it a request, of the utmost priority. I told Terra this could be a second chance to show the Mark of Mastery, and I meant it. However, that flicker of darkness he displayed during the examination, I can sense it runs very deep. If he were to. If those powers were to prove too much for him to handle, I want you to bring him back to me at once. It's for his own good. I could not bear to lose any of you to the darkness."

"Of course. I would never let that happen. I promise you I will bring Terra back. Only this time, you'll see he has what it takes to be a Master. He's not as weak as you think."

Ven went out after them without permission and without telling anybody. "No! He mustn't!" Eraqus said. "You have to bring him back!"

So Aqua left with two errands, and only one of them was the one she had been given in front of witnesses.

Three Roads

The armour came out of what they were already wearing. A boot, a belt, a plate at the shoulder, and when the shoulder was pressed the rest of it arrived in a flash of light and closed over them, and that was what kept the dark between worlds off a person while they crossed it. The Keyblade went up in the air and came down as something to ride. Terra's was built like a bike. Ven's was a board. Aqua's was two pieces, a bow and a platform, and she stood on it.

They went out one after another and did not travel together.

Terra came down in a country where nobody had been awake for a long time.

The Unversed were already in it. He recognised them from the briefing and said so out loud. "Monsters! The ones the Master mentioned, these are the Unversed!"

The woman he met there was not surprised by him and did not ask what a Keyblade was.

"I'm Terra. What do you know about those monsters, the ones who attacked me?"

She said she knew nothing about them. She said a great many things she knew nothing about, at length, and the whole of it moved gently in one direction, which was upstairs, where a young woman had been asleep for years and would go on sleeping. Her heart, said Maleficent, held the key to controlling all worlds. She would like it very much if he would take it.

"You seem to be mixed up. I'm a peacekeeper, not a tyrant!"

That is where the conversation ended and the other thing started.

She put him under. He did not see it coming.

What he saw next was the room, and the sleeping woman, and the heart gone out of her, and Maleficent telling him that he had done it.

He took her word for it. He took her word for it that day and he went on taking her word for it, and he said so out loud more than once afterwards to people who had no idea what he was talking about.

She offered him work. There were seven hearts of pure light in the worlds and she meant to have all seven, and she thought he might like to be the one who fetched them.

He turned that down as well.

"No more games. Where is Master Xehanort?"

She went, and left the castle full of Unversed, and he stayed to deal with them because there was nobody else to do it. "The Unversed. They're going to bring down the castle. I have to do something!"

Afterwards he stood over the woman who was still asleep and apologised to her. "It's my fault her light was stolen. It was because I was weak. I'm sorry. I'll get your light back, once I learn to stand up against the darkness."

Then he stood there a while longer and went at the other end of it. "Why would Master Xehanort imprison the light?" he said. "The purest hearts of light, do they hold the answer?"

What he took away from that country was this. That there were Princesses of Heart. That there were seven of them. And that a woman he had never met in a world he had never been to already knew about other worlds, and about the Keyblade, and about the three people who carried one, and about Kingdom Hearts, because somebody had told her.

In a wood some way from there a queen kept a mirror.

"A mirror that knows and sees everything. How about that?"

It was a white theatre mask hanging in the glass, lit from nowhere and unevenly, the eyebrows set high, holes where the eyes and the mouth should be and the back of the face black behind them. Round the frame ran chiselled tiles carrying the twelve signs. It answered any question it was asked truthfully, and it answered in the manner of a thing that has been asked a great many questions and has stopped finding any of them interesting.

"My name is Terra. I'm looking for a man named Xehanort. Master Xehanort. I thought maybe you might have seen him."

The queen had a price. There was a girl in the wood called Snow White, and the queen wanted her dead, and she wanted the heart brought back to her, and the mirror would be his afterwards to ask what he liked.

Terra thought about it. He did not refuse immediately. "A heart of light. This Snow White is my best chance right now. Maybe she will lead me closer to Master Xehanort. But what if I. No, I won't let that happen."

He found the girl and asked her one question, which was not the queen's question.

"Does the name Xehanort mean anything to you?"

She did not. He left her where she was and went back and told the queen what he had decided. "A request I chose to ignore. You know, you claim to be radiant, but all I see are shadows of jealousy, hanging thick on your heart."

She put him into the mirror for that. There was a thing living in there and he fought it and it lost.

"Now, you will ask the mirror. Where can I find Master Xehanort?"

The mirror said he was in a wasteland where a great battle had been fought.

"Is that all? Thanks. You've been a big help."

Aqua caught up with him at a castle where a ball was being held, and caught up with him is the wrong phrase, because he was leaving as she arrived.

She asked him about the worlds he had been through and he did not enjoy the question.

She asked about Ven. Ven had run away. Neither of them had known that until she said it. "No. Actually. Just before I left, he tried to tell me something," Terra said. "I should have listened to what he had to say."

He told her about a girl in that house whose whole situation was hopeless and who had gone to the ball anyway.

"There's this girl here, her name is Cinderella. She made me realize how powerful it is just to believe. No matter how impossible things seem, a powerful enough dream will always be enough to light the darkness. If you see her, give her my thanks."

He told her something else. The Unversed answered to a boy in a mask.

Then he went, and she watched him go. "He'll be all right," she said. "He won't give in to it."

The house that girl came out of had three women in it, and Aqua walked into it and knew inside a minute. "As I feared. There is darkness here."

"There was something very wrong about them."

She had been taught one thing about darkness and she had been taught it thoroughly, and the thing was that it needs to be destroyed. She had her Keyblade out and she was going to do it.

The old woman who stopped her was not a fighter and did not raise her voice. What she told Aqua was that light and darkness have to exist alongside each other, and that if you find darkness sitting on a person the thing to do is not to attack it. The thing to do is to help the light that is already in them. "Then I'm honored," Aqua said. "But why would you advise me not to fight darkness with light?"

"A pure heart filled with light. It's strange, the Master taught me darkness needs to be destroyed. But how, if not with light?"

She found the girl afterwards and thanked her for something the girl had not known she was doing. "I actually want to thank you, for teaching Terra he needs to keep believing."

The tower stood by itself and was mostly staircase. The room at the top was the largest room in it and had bookshelves and pots and windows cut in the shapes of stars and a crescent.

The sorcerer in it had a long grey beard parted down the middle and enormous bushy eyebrows and eyes that were mostly white around very small pupils, and he kept them open. He wore a tall blue cone of a hat with yellow stars and a yellow crescent moon on it, and blue robes lined in sky blue and dark red inside.

Something small came past Terra on the stairs at speed, said a word, and vanished in a flash of light. "Alakazam!"

Terra went up. "Master Yen Sid. My name is Terra."

"Yes. Eraqus's pupil. I've been expecting you. It is the Unversed."

Terra called him Master and was corrected. "I am no longer a Master. I doffed that mantle."

"Yes, Master Yen Sid. I thought it best to seek the counsel of one wiser than myself."

"I'm not sure I even understand what's wrong. Master Xehanort is missing. And now I've learned there's a masked boy who is controlling those Unversed on the loose."

The sorcerer told him to consider that those two things might be one thing.

"Master Xehanort and the Unversed are connected somehow?"

"I must not make assumptions. Find Xehanort, Terra. That is where you should begin."

Terra went down the stairs. The sorcerer stayed where he was and said something to a man who was not in the room. "I had hoped, Xehanort, your heart would no longer lead you astray."

The wasteland was where the mirror had said it would be.

Terra came down into it. The Keyblades stood in the ground at the angles they had fallen at, and there was nothing else.

Xehanort was waiting and had the whole thing ready.

The masked boy was called Vanitas. He was not a person; he was pure darkness with a shape on it. And Xehanort had taken him out of Ventus, because Ventus's heart had been so far gone into darkness that there was nothing else left to try, and it had worked, and the boy had lived, and the cost of it was that the heart he was left with had been damaged in the taking. That was the account. "I have been to other worlds. I know all about the things you've done," Terra said. "I just don't understand why."

"Master Xehanort. Ventus has gotten a lot better since then. You shouldn't blame yourself for trying to save him."

He was consoling him.

Then he was asked to destroy Vanitas, and he agreed, and Xehanort thanked him and used a form of address he had no right to.

"Don't worry, Master. I'll take care of Vanitas."

Master Terra, said Xehanort.

The dwarfs in the wood decided Ventus was a thief, and there were seven of them, so it took a while to be told so seven times. "That's not nice, treating me like some kind of bad guy," he said. "I'm just trying to find a friend. His name is Terra. He's dressed kind of like me, about yay tall."

What they had against Terra was that a tall man dressed kind of like him had been through, and monsters had come with him, and Snow White had gone missing after. They had put those in an order and got an answer.

"Fine, I get it. You want me to leave, I'll leave. Oh, but, can you tell me where I can find some other people around here?"

He went off to prove them wrong, which meant finding the girl.

He found her in the wood being frightened by things and put himself in front of them. "Back off!"

"Well, I saw a house just up ahead. Come on, I'll take you there. Oh, I'm Ventus. Ven for short."

In a meadow further on he met an old woman who had a great deal to say about Terra.

She said Terra had come to her castle and put a Keyblade to her and demanded to be told where Xehanort was. She said it sadly, the way people deliver bad news about somebody else's friend. "That doesn't sound like him at all," Ven said. "Ma'am, where did Terra go?"

He did not believe her. He carried it away with him anyway.

The country where the young woman was asleep had three fairies in it who took one look at Ventus and said his heart was pure. "Wha. Oh, I'm sorry. It's just, I've never seen anyone so beautiful."

They got him up the mountain and into the place where the heart was being kept, and he got it loose.

"That should do it."

He saw some of what she had been dreaming while it went past him. It was a man she was waiting for.

Maleficent told him Terra had stolen it.

"That's a lie!"

He fought her over it and was still angry about it long after.

Aqua arrived in that same place and heard the same sentence from the same mouth.

She started to believe it.

Ven would not come home. She told him he was in danger and he told her he was not going and he went. "Sorry, Aqua. But I can't go with you."

Maleficent put her in a cell under the castle for her trouble. There was a man already in it, and the three fairies came down and gave him a sword and a shield and told him what they were for.

"I'm going with you. There's something I need to know, and Maleficent has the answer."

"You don't even know the first thing about it," Aqua told her. "You're too clouded by darkness to see that there's something greater. Try all you want, but you'll never defeat a heart filled with light."

At the top of the mountain Maleficent stopped being a woman and became a dragon, and the fire came down green between Aqua and the thing, and it was the man with the sword who ended it.

"It's the power of true love that defeated you."

She left for Radiant Garden after Terra and lost him on the way. "Terra. You better stay strong for me."

Ventus went after the masked boy instead, and the masked boy let him catch up, and the place he let him catch up in was the wasteland.

"All right! What did you mean about Terra being a different person?"

It was not a fight. It went one way from the beginning and ended with Ven on the ground. "That really all you got? Man, you are worthless. I'd be going against the Master's orders, but so what? As far as I'm concerned, your job here is done."

Ven asked him where the Unversed came from. He got an answer, and it was a long one. "It happened when you and I were split into two. The negativity took shape as these monsters. They are what I feel, a horde of fledgling emotions under my control. I released them in all the worlds I could, hoping to lure you away from home and isolate you from your Master. We needed to make you stronger. The Unversed were the perfect opponents. And better yet, no matter how many times you defeat them, their negativity flows right back into me. You never stood a chance against us, Ventus."

Ven had no idea what he was talking about and did not get the chance to ask, because something came out of the sky and stood between them.

It was a mouse, and it was about waist high, and it had a Keyblade.

"Don't worry! You're safe."

"Tell me where you got that! Keyblades are not something you use just to bully somebody around! Here, I'll show ya!"

"We both will!" Ven said.

The two of them drove the masked boy off between them. He did not seem to mind particularly.

The mouse's name was Mickey and he was somebody's apprentice and he had left without saying so. "Yep. I've been trainin' under the great Yen Sid. He found out the worlds are in trouble, an' I sorta took off without tellin' him."

"Well, that makes both of us. I ran off, too."

What he had taken with him was a shard of something that moved him between worlds, and he was honest about how well he could work it.

"All I hafta do is think it, and the Star Shard will take me anywhere I wanna go. At least I thought it would. I haven't quite got the fine points down, like, when, or where. It just kinda kicks in whenever it wants to. But I wouldn't have met you if it hadn't brought me here."

It went off while he was holding it.

"Ya know, it might not be an accident. Maybe it starts workin' 'cause it's reactin' to somethin'."

It took both of them, and where it put them down was a city.

There were other worlds and they went through them.

There was a town built around a festival, where the rules were explained to Terra by a queen and broken constantly by a large cat in two different costumes. There was a coliseum where a god offered to teach Terra how to conquer the darkness and meant something else by it. There was a ship among the stars with a small blue animal on it that stole Terra's charm and gave it back once it was explained. There was an island where nobody grew up, and a pirate, and a chest that was supposed to have light in it and had ordinary loot in it instead, and Terra apologised to a boy for starting the fight.

All three of them passed through most of those places and kept missing each other. They had set out from the same house and they were three people alone in different worlds now.

Radiant Garden

The city was a place where people lived.

It had a castle at the top of it in pale colours and a town underneath full of trees and grass and flowers, and walls around the town with enormous fountains set into them and climbing plants over everything, and past the walls an ocean and green mountains a long way off. The square in the middle of it had flowers and trees and houses all round the edge. There was a court where fountains stood layered one above another, and gardens on a scale that took a while to cross, and out past those a platform shaped like a lotus sitting in water with more flower beds on it.

Ventus tried to get into the castle and was stopped at the doors by two of the guard.

One of them was tall and broad in the shoulder with black dreadlocks tied back low and one of them left hanging over the right side of his face, thick sideburns, heavy eyebrows, violet eyes. He wore a dark slate grey uniform with a curled heart on it and white gloves and knee-high black boots, and he carried a lance with a blue head and a handle that went from violet to silver. The other was in the same grey with white cuffs and a red heart at the chest and blue hearts on the backs of his gloves, and what he carried was an axe.

"But somebody just came this way! He's a friend of mine."

They did not move.

A man in a white coat had been watching him from further off than he needed to be.

He had light green eyes and wore the coat over a grey waistcoat and a white collared shirt and a purple ascot, which was what the men who worked in that castle wore.

What he had noticed about the boy, and what he said out loud to nobody, was that there was no darkness in him. Not a small amount. None. "Oh. You're on your own, huh? Sir, I'm looking for a friend of mine," Ven said. "He's a tall guy dressed kinda like me, have you seen him?"

The Unversed came into the town while he was in it.

He got an old duck in a top hat out of the way of them and was thanked at a length he had not budgeted for. "Well, could ya make it fast?"

He got an old man in a blue coat and a pointed hat inside a door. "Mister, get inside. It's not safe out here."

And he got a small boy out from under them, in the street, by picking him up and moving him.

The boy had steel-blue hair parted unevenly so that the longer side covered the right of his face and left one bright blue eye showing, and he wore the same white coat as the man in a size that did not fit him, the sleeves rolled and still over his hands.

The man in the white coat came and took the child and thanked Ven properly this time, and said the boy was an orphan and in his care.

The duck gave Ven three lifetime passes to a town he had never heard of, for no reason except that he had them. "Lifetime passes to Disney Town. He said to. He said to take two grown-ups."

He had two in mind.

Two boys about his own age were sitting up above the square with nothing to do.

One had bright red hair spiked upward off a slight widow's peak and blue-green eyes, and wore a sleeveless orange jacket over a white sleeveless shirt, tan baggy trousers, red and white shoes, and a yellow and brown cloth wound round his neck, striped along its length and gone to a checkerboard near the throat and frayed at the bottom. The other had bright blue hair swept back into spikes with two sections left down by his ears, turquoise eyes, a high-collared navy jacket with sleeves to the elbow half unzipped from the bottom over a black undershirt, white trousers, silver stud earrings, and a small yellow crescent moon over the left breast.

The red-haired one wanted to fight. He had a weapon that went out and came back and he was proud of it and he was looking for somebody to be proud of it at. "Fight? Why would I wanna do that?" Ven said.

They fought anyway and Ven won, and the boy declared them friends on the strength of it.

What he wanted, he said, was to be remembered. Not to be famous. To be in the memory of every single person he ever met, permanently, so that as long as any of them was alive there was still somebody carrying him about.

The blue-haired one had heard all this before and said nothing.

Somewhere else in the same city Aqua came round a corner and found a very small girl being chased. The girl was called Kairi.

She was four. She had on a white shirt cut like an apron with blue flowers on it and a blue line across the chest, a pink skirt with a white line, and large white shoes with pink and purple on them. "I can feel the light," Aqua said.

The mouse came down into the square out of nothing at all and the two of them held it together.

"Hurry! Ya gotta get that girl to someplace that's safe."

"I sense light within this girl," Aqua said. "You think that's why they attacked her?"

"And I'm Mickey. I used to be Yen Sid's apprentice. I came back to him for some more training."

He was pulled out of the world in the middle of saying something else.

"Let's join forces! Oh no, not now! I'll be okay! See ya real soon!"

What happened next happened because the child was frightened.

She took hold of Aqua's Keyblade with both hands, the way a child takes hold of an adult's arm, and that is the whole of the inheritance rite. Nobody said the words. Nobody meant anything by it.

The girl gave her flowers afterwards, because that was what she had.

Aqua put a spell on the charm the child was wearing before she went. "Wait, Kairi, just a minute. I just cast a magic spell on you. One day when you're in trouble, the light within you will lead you to the light of another. Someone to keep you safe."

Her grandmother came and collected her and told them both an old story while she did it, about a time when there was nothing but light, and everybody lived in it, and then it went.

The masked boy came into the square not long after that and Aqua knew him from a description. "A mask? You're the boy that Ventus mentioned."

"Ah yes, Ventus. Tell me something, has he learned to put up a decent fight yet?"

She asked him what he wanted with Ven. "I'll be asking the questions. And why shouldn't I? After all, between the two of us, I'm the only one who will walk away from here alive."

He was wrong about that. She put him down and he got up and did not appear to be embarrassed.

"Not bad at all. Congratulations. I'll keep you around. Never hurts to have a backup."

He was gone before she worked out what he had said.

The thing that brought the three of them into the same street at the same time was a machine.

It came apart and put itself back together, and the three of them dealt with it without discussing how. "We make a good team," Aqua said.

They never fought side by side again.

Then Ven said something about the boy in the mask. "It's okay, Aqua. Trust me, that guy in the mask is history," he said. "He'll never bad-mouth Terra again."

"You saw the boy in the mask?" Terra said.

He said it too quickly. Aqua heard how quickly he said it. "I'm not so sure. I've been to the same worlds as you and I've seen what you've done," she said. "You shouldn't put yourself so close to the darkness."

Terra told them both to go home.

Then Aqua told him why she could not, and the sentence came out with everything in it. "You mean you've been spying on me?" Terra said. "Is that what he said to do? The Master's orders?"

He went, on his own.

"Master Xehanort is the only one I can still count on."

Ven started after him and Aqua stopped him.

"Why won't you let me?"

"I don't want to put you in harm's way. You understand?"

"So now you know the truth," she said. "But the Master loves Terra, and you know that too."

He told her she had changed. He said it standing in the street with both of them watching Terra's back go round a corner, and then he went after him.

Under the castle there was a place where the water was cleaned, and a man was waiting in it.

He had brown eyes and dark hair to his shoulders worn slicked back, and a guard's uniform in dark slate grey with silver on it and two rows of gold buttons, black boots to the knee, and a red scarf that had seen better years. He carried two arrowguns shaped like crossbows, silver and a faded metallic purple.

"You must be Terra. It's that old coot, he won't stop asking for you."

"Ha! Do I have to spell it out? Xehanort, whatever he's called. You know, my prisoner."

"You're apparently not a very good liar," Terra said. "Master Xehanort would never let himself be caught by a thug like you."

"As if! I've got the old coot at my mercy, see for yourself."

"There's no way it's true, but no harm in looking."

Xehanort was up on the viaduct in chains. "The old coot certainly knows how to take punishment," Braig said. "Just like I know how to deal it out."

"You monster! What are you after?"

"That thing right there. It's called the Keyblade, isn't it?"

"Well, you'll find they're picky about their owners."

"Ha, if I heard the old guy right, you're what they call Keyblade Master material."

He wanted it handed over. He said what he would do to the prisoner if it was not.

"Ah-ah, one more step and the coot goes boom. You think I'm gonna fight fair? As if!"

And from up in the chains the old man told Terra to use his darkness.

"But Master, you'll."

It went badly for Braig. "Hmph. For a Keyblade Master, you're not very, what's the word, good."

Terra put dark fire into his face and took the right eye out of his head and left a jagged scar over the left cheek. "Hey, you old coot! You said I wouldn't get hurt!"

The whole of it had been arranged between the two of them beforehand. Braig had been promised something he wanted and had agreed to stand there and be the occasion, and what Xehanort had wanted out of it was to watch Terra choose darkness under pressure and succeed with it. The only part that had not been agreed was the face.

Braig went for him about it and was put down with a look and a raised hand, and settled for what he had been promised.

Xehanort opened his own heart and put a piece of it into him.

Afterwards Braig's eyes were gold and his ears had gone pointed, and he took to wearing a patch over the socket where the right eye had been.

Xehanort turned round and told Terra what he had just seen.

A man who could hold light and darkness in the same hand and use whichever was needed. That was not a failing. That was the rarest thing in the worlds and the boy had been raised by somebody who was frightened of it.

Eraqus is afraid of you, he said. That is what the watching is for.

And then he offered him a place, formally, as his apprentice.

"This power. But I was consumed by anger, hatred. That was the power of darkness."

He left without answering, and he was not disturbed by the offer. He was disturbed by how little effort the rest of it had taken.

"No. I succumbed to it. Just like when I stole Princess Aurora's heart of light. I can never return home now. I'm a failure."

Ven caught him at the edge of the city and asked to come with him.

Terra said no. He did not say it unkindly and he did not explain it, and what he said instead was the thing Ven kept afterwards.

"I just. When I really need you, Ven, I know you'll be there."

"Well, why wouldn't I? You're my friend."

Two Boys

Terra went to the islands because something there was warm and he followed it.

They were small. There was a main island with yellow sand and wooden things built on it, a shack by the water, a tower with a rope run down from it, a treehouse put into a tree that was much larger than the tree needed to be. A bridge went across to a smaller island beside it, and on the smaller island a palm tree grew out crooked over the water and carried fruit shaped like stars. Behind the waterfall there was a cave, and the walls of the cave were covered in chalk.

Two boys were on the beach. One was four and one was five. The younger one had light brown hair that lay flat.

The older one looked at Terra once and asked him whether he had come from somewhere else. Not from another island. From outside.

Terra looked at him for slightly too long and did not say what he was looking at.

Then he put his hand out and did the thing properly, with all of it, to a five-year-old on a beach.

"In your hand, take this Key. So long as you have the makings, then through this simple act of taking, its wielder you shall one day be. And you will find me, friend, no ocean will contain you then. No more borders around, or below, or above, so long as you champion the ones you love."

He had never been named a Master.

Aqua came to the same beach some while after and did not know he had been there. "Terra. Ven. I hope we're ready for the storm that's coming."

The two boys were still on it. She looked at them for a while before she said anything.

"This boy looks so sincere, just like Terra. And this one, he's the spitting image of Ven. One of you might be special enough. Hey, you two mind telling me your names?"

They told her. The younger one was Sora and the older one was Riku.

She looked at the older one first and knew before she had finished looking.

"Someone has already passed this boy the power. Was it Terra? Sora, do you like Riku?"

Then she reached out to the younger one, and stopped, with her hand where it was.

She did not finish what she had started and she did not say why.

What she did instead was ask him for something.

"So then if something happens, and Riku is about to get lost, or say, he starts wandering down a dark path alone, you make sure to stay with him and keep him safe. That's your job, Sora, and I'm counting on you to do it, okay?"

He said yes.

She went back up the beach.

"One Keyblade is enough, for any friendship. I learned it the hard way. I wouldn't wish our lives on those children. Terra, please tell me, what's to become of us?"

A Forgotten Past

On the island where nobody grew up there was a chest, and the boys who lived there kept in it the things that mattered to them, which were not valuable.

Ventus put the wooden Keyblade in. "It's, just something that one of my best friends gave me."

He did it because he had decided he was going to make better ones. The three of them were going to be together after this and there would be years of it and he did not need to carry the first thing any more.

Aqua came to that island afterwards and was made leader of a treasure hunt by a boy who could fly, on the grounds that somebody had to be.

The treasure was the chest and the chest was full of junk.

She went through it and found the wooden Keyblade in it.

When she turned round the masked boy was holding it. "So, have a good time hanging out with the kiddies?"

"I think that kid's outgrown such a childish toy, if you ask my opinion. Just like I've outgrown my need for you."

He broke it in half in front of her.

"You freak!"

She beat him so badly she thought she had killed him, and when it was over she went down on the sand and could not get up again, and the boy who could fly came and found her there.

"It's okay, Peter. Whatever it is that binds us together isn't going to break so easily, and that's our real treasure. I think Ventus knew that. That's why he left this behind."

She had not killed him. She was holding the two pieces of the wooden Keyblade when she said it.

Somewhere else in the same world the masked boy took the mouse and carried him to the wasteland.

The shard put Ven down at the tower.

A duck and a large dog met him at the door and mistook him for their king, and got over it, and took him up. "Ah, Ventus. Eraqus has told me much about you. If I am not mistaken, you were ordered to return home."

"I ran into Mickey. But we got sent flying into the light, I don't know where he went. He wasn't in the same world as the one where I found that."

"Where is this clue to Mickey's whereabouts?"

The sorcerer looked for him and found him, and where he was was the wasteland, lying down and not moving.

"As I thought. Mickey has been hurling himself from one world to the next."

The duck and the dog volunteered. "You two? That may not be adequate."

"Very well, Ventus. We will leave it to you."

The mouse was where the sorcerer had said and was breathing.

Xehanort was standing further off, waiting, and had been for some time.

What he did to Ven he did without touching him. He gave him back the year that had been taken out of him, all of it, in the place where it had happened, standing on the same stones.

Ven remembered being his apprentice.

He remembered a wasteland with things coming out of the ground in it, and himself much smaller, and asking not to be made to do it.

"Please don't do this, Master. I'm not strong enough."

He remembered the rest of it too. The Keyblade coming out and going in. The thing standing up out of him.

Then he was told what he was for.

There was a weapon, Xehanort said, and it was not one of the Keyblades that he and Ven and anybody else carried. It was the other thing.

"Not the Keyblades you and I carry. The x. A most ancient letter. Some say kye, but the meaning is the same. Death. A letter that spells endings."

It could be made, and it could be made one way only. The two halves of what had been taken apart in this place had to come back together, and they had to do it by fighting. "And I have the power to make it?" Ven said.

He was told that he did. He was told that it was the only reason he had ever been picked up.

And he was told one more thing. The man who had raised him for the last four years had not been keeping him safe. He had been keeping him where he could see him.

Xehanort opened a hole in the air and put him through it, back the way he had come.

The Land of Departure

Ven came in through the front of the castle and did not stop walking until he was in the hall. "That's your excuse, for keeping me imprisoned here, isn't it?"

"What did you hear?" Eraqus said.

Ven told him what he had heard and Eraqus did not deny any part of it. He stood in his own hall in front of his own thrones and said it out loud, and the man he was talking about was not in the room.

"I knew it. Xehanort, he could never let it go."

"I failed. I had the chance to stop him and couldn't do it. But I will not fail again."

What he had worked out was simple and he had worked it out some time before this conversation started.

The weapon could only be made one way and one of the two halves it needed was standing in front of him. Xehanort could not be stopped. The weapon could. And there was one method available, and the method was in his hand.

He raised the Master's Defender.

"The x-blade has no place in this or any world. Xehanort has made his purpose clear, and I am left with no choice. Forgive me, but you must exist no more."

"Master! What are you."

Terra had been told that Ven had gone home to confront his Master and that he was in danger, and he had been told it by somebody who knew exactly how long the journey took.

He came in and there was a man with a Keyblade up and a boy underneath it.

Eraqus told him to stand aside. "You may be my Master. But I will not, let you hurt my friend!"

"Why do all my attempts to reach you fail? If you don't have it in your heart to obey, then you will have to share Ventus's fate."

So it was going to be both of them.

Terra opened a corridor of darkness in the middle of his Master's hall, which is a thing he had been taught never to do, and put Ven into it and closed it. Where it let him out was the islands.

Then he turned round.

He used darkness to do it and he used a great deal of it, and it worked.

"What have I done. Master. I just. Wanted to keep Ven safe."

Eraqus, on the floor of his own hall, took the whole of it onto himself. "No, you were right. I failed you, Terra. Perhaps I've no one to blame but myself for the darkness inside you. And now I've done worse, raised my Keyblade against you and Ventus. My own heart is darkness!"

Xehanort came into the hall while he was saying it.

He came in without hurrying and he did not address Terra at all. "But once again you have it all wrong, Eraqus. Darkness is a beginning, you see, not an end."

Then he killed him, in front of the boy he had raised.

Eraqus went into light in Terra's arms and was not there any more.

Then Xehanort put darkness into the sky above the castle and let it fall.

The world went. Most of the castle came off the mountain and the four golden chains came down with it.

"You will pay, Xehanort! Was my Master, no, my father, Eraqus not enough for you? Leave my friends alone!"

He went after him. He was not in a condition to catch him and Xehanort had no intention of being caught yet.

Ventus saw none of it.

He came out of the corridor onto a beach and sat down on the sand and stayed there.

"Going somewhere?"

"Well, I'm just getting started with you. You're strong enough now to fulfill your purpose. So what are you waiting for? Join with me right here and now. Become the x-blade."

Ventus refused him outright. "No, I won't do it. He told me, the only way the x-blade can be forged is if you and me fight. Well guess what? I'm not fighting."

"You used to be too broken to talk back."

He tried it a few more ways and none of them worked, and then he stopped trying and used the one that would.

"Fine. Then I'll give you a reason to fight. Come and find me, at the one and only place to spawn the x-blade, the Keyblade Graveyard. There you're gonna see me choke the life out of Terra and Aqua. Then we'll see how long you play the pacifist."

He left him on the sand to think about it. It did not take long.

"Terra, Aqua. I swear I'll put an end to this."

Aqua found the mouse unconscious out in the Lanes Between and carried him to the tower.

While the duck and the dog were trying to wake him, the sorcerer told her the other thing.

"Aqua, the stars bring me grave news. Master Eraqus's star has blinked out."

He told her who had done it.

"No! That's absurd! Terra would never!"

"I hope with all my heart that you are right about your friend."

"Terra's heart is leading him to the ancient Keyblade Graveyard."

The Keyblade Graveyard

They arrived at the wasteland separately and within a short time of one another.

The place had a wide crater in the middle of a circular valley, and a barren field around the outside of the ridge, and a ring of stone pedestals. "What I do, I do for friendship," Terra said.

He told them about Eraqus before anything else, and he did not soften any of it, and he did not leave out his own part. "But I was tricked. Xehanort set the whole thing up, all so he could awaken the darkness inside me. You were right, Aqua, and so was the Master. I did need to be watched. I went astray, but no more."

"What else is darkness but hate and rage? Xehanort is feeding the dark fires within you, making you fight. You'll go astray again. Tell me, how does that honor our Master's memory, Terra?"

Then Ven told them what he was. "Xehanort wants me and Vanitas to fight, and make some kind of x-blade. But the Master said we can't let that happen, and he tried to destroy me for it."

He had thought about it the whole way here and he had arrived at one answer and he put it to them as a favour.

"I'm asking you, as a friend. Just, put an end to me."

Neither of them said no in words. "The three of us will always be one," Aqua said.

The old man came down the ridge on foot with the masked boy behind him. "Behold. These lifeless keys used to be full of power, united with the hearts of their masters. On this barren soil, Keyblades of light and darkness were locked in combat, as a great Keyblade War raged."

He said the weapon would be made today and the door would be opened.

He moved the ground first.

The valley came apart along lines of his choosing and put Terra on the far side of a gap that had not been there, and then every Keyblade in that part of the field came out of the stone at once and went through the air at him, and he went down under them.

He froze Ventus where he stood and walked him off the edge of the cliff.

Aqua caught him.

She was holding him with both arms when the man with the arrowguns came along the ridge. "How 'bout you leave the popsicle with me, so you can go have your little fight?"

"You think you two have got some grand role to play. As if."

"Go ahead if you wanna waste your time," Aqua said. "Keep trying to drive us apart with your mind games. It'll never work! Terra will prove to you he's stronger!"

She beat him. He was not there to win and he had cost her the time he had been sent to cost her.

"I keep forgetting, don't mess with Keyblade wielders. But you know what? That just means I made the right choice!"

He went.

Kingdom Hearts came up in the sky over the wasteland.

Terra got out from under the Keyblades and took his armour off, all of it, and threw it down and went at Xehanort with nothing on.

The masked boy put Aqua on the ground and stood over her with his Keyblade back.

The ice broke.

Ventus came out of it and hit him from the side and took him off her, and what followed was not like the fight in the badlands. Ven damaged him past the point where the body was going to keep working.

The masked boy stood up anyway, because there was still one thing available to him, and it was the thing he had been made for.

"You've done it, Ventus. Now that my body is about to perish, you and I will have to join together! The x-blade will be forged!"

He took the helmet off.

Under it was a young face with gold eyes and hair that was blue-black.

He put his creatures on Ven and they held him where he was, and the merger was not something Ven agreed to.

It went through anyway.

What stood up wore Ven's face and was not using it, and in its hand was the weapon.

It was two Keyblades crossed with the teeth turned outward, and it had come out wrong. The colour was red-orange where it should have been otherwise, and there was darkness coming off it, and there were chips out of the side of the blade, and a piece of the pattern was missing along one edge, and part of the hilt was not there.

A pillar of light went up out of the wasteland and could be seen from a long way off.

On the other side of the field Terra beat Xehanort.

He did it by going further into darkness than he had ever gone and he did it thoroughly, and Xehanort lay on the stones and was not distressed about it.

"At last, our moment is here. Out with the old and brittle vessel, and in with a younger, stronger new one!"

He put his Keyblade to his own chest and unlocked his own heart and threw it into Terra.

He had wanted a body that would last long enough to see what was on the other side of the war. This one would.

Terra reached for his armour to put between them and the armour did not come.

Afterwards the thing in his body explained the position to whatever was still in there listening.

"Darkness rules your heart, it gives me control. Muscle and sinew that once obeyed you now rebels against you."

The armour was lying where he had thrown it.

It stood up.

There was nothing in it. What was in it was the last thing he had been thinking when he took it off, which was that he was angry and that the other two had to be got out of this, and that turned out to be enough. It summoned its own Keyblade and it went at the thing wearing Terra and it beat it.

Then it could not do the next part, because there was no next part. It could win the fight and it could not get him back.

It drove its Keyblade into the ground and put both hands on the grip and stopped moving.

Before it stopped it said three things.

"Aqua, Ven. One day I will set this right."

It stayed where it was.

Aqua came round on the stones with the mouse standing over her.

"Gosh, I'm glad you're okay."

The thing with Ven's face was coming across the field with the weapon in its hand. "That's not Ven!"

"Shut up! I'm sick of your nonsense. Give Ven his heart back!"

The two of them fought it together and it was stronger than both of them and it put her down.

"Terra, Ven, lend me strength."

Inside Ventus, on a floor that had cracks running across it, the two of them had it out for the last time. "Our union was not finished. The x-blade shouldn't stay broken like this. Join me now, and we can complete the x-blade!"

Ven told him what he was going to do to it instead. "The x-blade is made of your heart, too, idiot. If you destroy it, your heart will vanish forever."

"At least I have some! I've become a part of their heart, just as they've become a part of mine. My friends are my power, and I'm theirs!"

"Hmph, it's always about your friends, isn't it?"

Ven destroyed him. That is to say, he took his own darkness back into himself, and for a moment there was nothing missing out of him at all.

Outside, Aqua got up and hit the weapon.

It cracked. Then it came apart in her hands and went on coming apart.

"Oh no! It, it's gone all haywire!"

It destroyed itself and took the wasteland with it as far as anybody could see.

The light picked all of them up and put them into the Lanes Between, every one of them, except the armour standing with its hands on its Keyblade, which the light went round.

Ventus put his own armour on as he went, without knowing he was doing it.

What Was Left

Terra was in three places.

His body was walking about with somebody else operating it. His heart was shut inside the thing that floated behind that body and went where it went. His will was standing in the wasteland with both hands on a Keyblade and would not be moving.

Ventus had destroyed his own darkness and got it back, and the heart it went back into was too damaged to keep. It left him. The body stayed alive and asleep.

Aqua was intact.

She was the only one of the three still able to go anywhere.

Castle Oblivion

She woke up in the tower and was told the two things in the order they had happened.

The mouse laid the Star Shard on the sorcerer's desk, and laid his Keyblade beside it, because he had gone out with both and come back having lost two people and saved neither.

The sorcerer picked up one of the two and gave it back to him, and smiled while he did it.

"Don't you worry, Aqua. I believe in Ven, too. Gosh, he's been as good a friend to me as anybody. And if both you and me believe in him with all our hearts, then he'll have two lights to follow instead of one."

The way home was opened by Ventus, who was unconscious throughout and did not know he had done it. His hand came up and the Keyblade came into it and the road was there.

The Land of Departure was in pieces.

The chains were down and the spires were gone and most of the building had come off the mountain. In the forecourt, lying where it had been dropped, was Eraqus's Keyblade.

She picked it up.

There were three thrones at the top of the hall and she put Ven in the middle one. "I'll keep him safe, until he wakes. Forever if I have to."

Then she did the thing she had been taught to do on the afternoon she was made a Master, in the room where she had been taught it, with the Keyblade of the man who taught her.

She found the Keyhole and she sealed it, and the world changed while she was standing in it.

What it became was white and it was a labyrinth, and there was no way through it for anybody who did not already know what it had been. Which was the point. The room with the thrones in it stopped being a throne room.

"I know it's a lonely place, but you'll be safe. Terra and I will be back to wake you up before you know it."

Before she went she laid the Master's Defender down flat, and put the three charms on it. Hers, and Ven's, and Terra's.

Aqua's were blue with cyan at the tips. Ven's were light green with sea green at the tips. Terra's were orange with yellow.

The Dark

She heard him while she was still in the corridor.

"Aqua. Put an end to me."

"Terra, tell me where to find you."

It took her to the city.

He was standing in the square in the middle of the city, and behind him there was a shape in the air that went where he went.

He looked like Terra and he was not sure whether he was. There were two hearts in that body and they were both talking and he had to answer with one mouth, and what came out was confused about which of them it belonged to.

"Such a terrible. Darkness. Fight it. Terra, please!"

He took hold of her.

"My name is Master Aqua. Now return my friend's heart or pay the price!"

She fought him and the thing behind him, and partway through it Terra came up through his own face for a few seconds and she saw him do it.

What Xehanort did about that was turn his Keyblade on the body he was standing in and burn Terra out of it.

It worked and it cost more than he had budgeted for. It took his own memory with it, all of it, down to one word, which was his name. And it opened underneath him and started pulling him and the shape behind him down.

Aqua went in after him.

She got hold of him inside the corridor and she was holding him when she worked out the arithmetic. She could put one of them back up into the light and not two.

She took her armour off.

She used it and her Keyblade together to throw the body back up the way they had come, and everything she had was in the throw, and there was nothing left over to hold herself with.

"I have to do something or we'll both be lost. I'm with you. Go! Ven, I'm sorry. I might not make it back as soon as I thought. But I promise I'll be there, one day, to wake you up."

She went down with the Master's Defender and nothing else.

On the islands two boys were sitting on the sand at the end of the day.

The younger one was crying and could not say why, because there was no why. He had been perfectly all right a minute before.

The older one thought about it and offered him an explanation. Someone a long way off must be sad, and if he called out with his heart the sad person might hear him.

So he did.

In the room where Aqua had left him, Ventus answered him.

In the city, in the square, a young man was lying beside a Keyblade and a set of armour that were not his.

The man with the eyepatch brought two people to look at him. One was the man who ran that castle, older, with long blond hair slicked back and a short moustache and beard, bright orange eyes and slightly pointed ears, in a white coat over a grey waistcoat and a violet ascot, with a red shawl across his shoulders. The other was one of his guard.

"Young man, what ails you? Can you speak? Tell me your name."

He said Xehanort.

The man with the eyepatch was pleased about that and did not explain why.

"Quickly, get him to the castle!"

The guard picked up the Keyblade and the armour and carried them away.

The place Aqua had gone down into had its own ground, stone with blue light coming up through the cracks in it, and rock shapes coming out of the walls, and paths that wound and doubled and joined each other again, and no light in it except a white cold one a long way off that never got any nearer.

They came at her out of it in numbers and kept coming.

She got to the point where stopping was the reasonable thing.

Then there were two lines of light standing in the dark in front of her, and they were Keyblades, and one of them was Terra's and one of them was Ven's, and neither of the people who owned them was in any condition to have sent them.

She took her charm out and looked at it and went on.

A long way from there, a boy called Sora stood in a round place with his own face under his feet.

He was four. Something came down out of the dark above him and stopped in front of him, and it was a heart with nothing round it, and it asked him whether it could come back.

He said yes. He said it could stay in him and rest until it was better.

"Thank you."

Inside the body the argument was still going on and neither of the two in it could be overheard by anybody.

Xehanort wanted to know how there was anything left of the boy at all.

"It's still my heart. You think you can just come in and take over? I'm not gonna sit by and let that happen."

"Wrong. You're gonna get shown the door, old man."

"I'm not afraid of what the darkness holds now. Even if you do wrestle control of my heart from me, even if you cast me into the deepest, darkest abyss, you'll never sway me from the one cause that pushes me to keep on fighting. Whatever the cost, I'm ready to pay it."

And there was a reason he could still say any of it, and he gave it. There was another heart in there with him and it was standing between him and the rest of it.

Xehanort recognised it.

He treated the whole thing as a delay on one of several roads he had open.

Some while later the young man walked a corridor in that castle with his hair grown longer and gone silver, in a white coat like the ones the men there wore, and his eyes were brown.

The man with the eyepatch walked beside him and talked at him and got nothing back, and worked out what had happened, and then stopped walking and asked him straight out whether he was Terra.

He got silence.

He said he had his back either way, and went on down the corridor with him.

Two people were sitting further along eating ice cream, one of them the master of that house and one of them a child, and they watched the pair go past and said nothing about it.

Kingdom Hearts

Glass Underfoot

The boy fell a long way through water and did not drown.

What he landed on was glass, and it took his weight. It was a pillar of it, wide enough across to be a floor, standing upright in a dark that had nothing else in it except other pillars, further off, too far to reach. The glass under his feet had a picture worked into it. Sleeping women, and the people who stood around them keeping watch.

The place had a name. Nothing in it told him the name. "I've been having these weird thoughts lately," he said, to nobody, because there was nobody. "Like is any of this for real or not?"

Something answered him. It had no body and no direction, and it never gave itself a name, then or at any point afterwards. What it told him was what to do next, and that he need not be afraid, and it said both in the manner of somebody who already knows how this goes.

There was a pedestal in front of him with three things standing on it, a sword and a shield and a rod. He was to take one. He was also to give one up, and the giving up was not optional, and the voice left it there. He stood there for a while with his hand out over each of them in turn.

Then the glass around his feet went soft and black shapes came up through it.

They were small and roughly the shape of people, and they were black all the way through, except for round yellow eyes that gave off their own light. Two long antennae came off the head and twisted back over it. Three clawed fingers on each hand. The feet had no toes at all. They did not walk toward him so much as pour.

He got clear of them, and stairs put themselves together out of nothing behind him, and he went up the stairs to a last pillar with nothing beyond it.

On that one his own shadow came off the floor.

It swelled first, spreading out under him the way a stain spreads, and then it stood up, and what stood up was enormous. Black skin. Legs too short for it and thin feet that curled up at the toe. Arms far too long. Two small wings, twisted. Where the head should have been there were dozens of black tentacles hanging down over its shoulders. The eyes were small and yellow and gave off the same light as the little ones had. And driven through the middle of its body, front to back, so that he could see the dark on the other side of it, was a hole in the shape of a heart.

He fought it with whatever he had chosen, and it was not a fight anybody wins, and the voice had not told him that part.

The dark came up his legs and then up over him and he went under it.

Then he woke up on a beach in daylight.

The Raft, and the Boy Who Wanted Out

He had been asleep on the sand with an arm over his eyes, and the girl came and stood over him and blocked the sun, and that woke him. "Sora, you lazy bum," she said. "I knew that I'd find you snoozing down here."

He was fourteen, and lanky with it, with dark brown hair standing up in spikes and blue eyes and skin gone brown from a life spent outdoors. He wore a red jumpsuit with a long zip down the front that ended in shorts cut wide at the leg, and over it a black hooded jacket lined in blue, the sleeves white and edged in grey. White gloves with blue and black and yellow straps at the wrist. A pendant at his throat in the shape of a crown, and a chain of the same shape hanging at his left hip. A blue belt worn loose enough to have given up. Yellow and black shoes with straps across them and grey underneath.

He sat up and tried to tell her about the dream, and got about a sentence of it out.

"No, this huge black thing swallowed me up! I couldn't breathe, I couldn't. Ow!"

"Whoa! Give me a break, Kairi!"

The other boy had come down the beach behind her and stood listening to all of it without offering an opinion until the end. "Giving up already?" he said. "Come on, Sora. I thought you were stronger than that."

The raft was Riku's.

He was the one who had thought of it and the one cutting the logs and the one who wanted to go, and Sora was helping because Riku was doing it, which is a different reason for building a boat. Neither of them said so. It sat above the tideline on the far beach getting slowly more like a raft over about a fortnight.

Riku had grown taller than Sora by then and his hair had been let alone well past the length a child's is kept at. Pale. A tank top in yellow and black, and black straps trimmed white crossing his chest and going over his back. Black gloves trimmed grey, black bands at both wrists. Dark blue trousers with brighter blue legs cut baggy, held up by suspenders studded in white. White and blue shoes. He stood with his weight on one leg and his arms folded, most of the time, including while working. "So, I guess I'm the only one working on the raft," he said, to the two of them, from up on it.

Kairi got up off the sand. "So what're we waiting for?"

He looked at her and then at the log and back at her. "So you noticed," she said. "Okay, we'll finish it together. I'll race you!"

"Deal?" Riku said. "The winner gets to share a paopu with Kairi."

Sora went red and ran and lost. That had been the arrangement for about four years.

Across the bridge there was a smaller island with one tree standing on it, and the tree grew out crooked over the water and carried fruit shaped like stars.

They sat on the trunk of it in the evenings with their legs hanging. It was the only place on the island from which the whole of the sunset could be seen with nothing in front of it. "If two people share one," Riku said, "their destinies become intertwined."

That was not the whole of the legend, and he knew it and left it there. The whole of it ran that if two people shared one they would remain a part of each other's lives forever.

Kairi sat further along the beach with her back against the seawall, threading shells onto a string.

She was fourteen too. A white top over a black one that showed at the collarbone and again at the hem. Purple bike shorts under a purple skirt, a blue belt, white slip-on shoes capped in purple. A black choker. A yellow band at one wrist and a purple band on her upper left arm, and bracelets on the right that clicked while she worked. Her bangs were parted to the right.

Sora asked what it was for. "This? I'm making a necklace of thalassa shells," she said, without looking up. "In the old days, sailors always wore thalassa shells. They were supposed to ensure a safe voyage."

She held the finished shape up on one finger, and it turned, and it was a star. "See this? It's a charm to help us find each other if we ever get separated," she said. "The three of us will always be together."

They talked about her on the walk back, as they did fairly often, and she was used to it and had stopped minding. "Sure. But isn't there anything fun to do now?" Sora said. "Hey, you know the new girl at the mayor's house? She arrived on the night of the meteor shower!"

"I've told you before," Kairi said, "I don't remember."

She turned it round on Riku instead. "So, suppose you get to another world. What would you do there?"

He had no answer ready, which was unlike him, and he took long enough over it that they both looked at him. "Well, I haven't really thought about it," he said. "It's just, I've always wondered why we're here on this island."

Later, when it was only the two of them on the dock and Riku had gone up to the house, Kairi said the other thing.

"You know, Riku has changed."

Sora asked her how.

She did not answer that. She sat with her heels knocking against the pilings for a while and then said something else entirely, in a rush, looking straight out at the water.

"Sora, let's take the raft and go, just the two of us!"

He turned round so fast he nearly went off the dock.

"Just kidding!"

She let him recover and then went on in a different voice, and this part she meant.

"Maybe. You know, I was a little afraid at first, but now I'm ready. No matter where I go or what I see, I know I can always come back here. Right?"

"I just can't wait," she said. "Once we set sail, it'll be great."

He went back into the cave on his own before the end of the day.

He had been in there before. Years earlier there had been a rumour about a monster in it, and two much smaller boys had come up to settle the question. "It's true! I saw it with my own eyes!" the smaller one said.

"You sure you didn't just hear it this time?"

"What difference does it make? There's a huge monster in there, I tell you!"

The older one thought about that for a moment and then accepted the whole of it at once, which was his way of settling arguments. "All right. Suppose there really is a monster," he said. "Think we can beat it by ourselves, Sora?"

"No problem. Let's do it!"

They went in the way children go into a place they have decided is dangerous, loudly at first and then all at once very quietly. Riku went first. He always went first. "Shh, quiet," he said, over his shoulder. "We've gotta be careful."

Sora stopped where he was and put a hand out flat behind him. "Listen! There! Can you hear it growling?"

Riku kept walking. "See that? It was just the wind making that noise."

The cave went back further than it looked from outside and there was nothing in any part of it. No bones. No nest. Damp rock and old chalk and a smell of the sea coming up through the floor. "Geez, is that really all that's in here?" Sora said.

"What do you expect in a boring place like this?"

"Aw, man. I wish it was a monster! Hold on! What's that over there?"

At the back of the cave there was a door standing in the rock. It was wooden and it was taller than either of them and it had no handle on it and no keyhole in it, and the rock came right up to its edges on both sides and over the top of it. Riku put both hands flat on it and leaned, and then put a shoulder into it, and it did not move at all. "A window, or maybe a door?" he said. "It won't open."

He stood back from it and looked at it a while longer than the answer needed. "When we grow up, let's get off this island," he said. "We'll go on real adventures, not this kid stuff!"

The door was still there and it still had no handle on it.

He found a stone with an edge on it and scratched a drawing into the wall beside the door, of himself holding out one of the star-shaped fruit to her. It took him some time. It was not a good drawing. He was still crouched in front of it when he understood that he was not alone in there.

There was a figure standing between him and the mouth of the cave, where nothing had been.

A brown hooded robe with two dark brown straps crossed over the shoulders and the chest, five metal studs down each strap. He was short, no taller than Sora. He stood still, at every point of it, and came no closer, and the voice that came out from under the hood was unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with the situation. "I've come to see the door to this world," he said.

Sora got up with the stone still in his hand and put his back to the wall beside the drawing. "Well, whoever you are, stop freaking me out like this! Huh?"

"This world has been connected," the figure said. "Tied to the darkness, soon to be completely eclipsed."

"W, what are you talking about?"

Nothing came back. Sora tried a different question, on the theory that one of them might land. "Wh, where did you come from?"

"You do not yet know what lies beyond the door."

Which was not an answer to that one either. Sora had worked out by then that the man was not going to answer anything he was asked, and was answering something else instead, patiently, as though the two of them were partway through a longer conversation that Sora had come late to.

"So, you're from another world!"

"There is so very much to learn. You understand so little."

"Oh yeah? Well, you'll see," Sora said. "I'm gonna get out and learn what's out there."

"A meaningless effort. One who knows nothing can understand nothing."

Sora went past him sideways along the wall, keeping the stone up, and got as far as the mouth of the cave before he looked back.

The cave was empty. Nothing had been named and nothing had been explained, and he went down to the boats and rowed home and told nobody about it at all.

The Door Has Opened

The storm came in that night and stood over the play island and stayed. Storms there did not do that.

He watched it from his window for a while. Then he was out of the window and down the trellis in his own shoes.

"A storm? Oh no! The raft!"

The island was covered in the small black things from the dream.

They came up out of the sand and out of the boards of the dock and out of the flat faces of the rocks, and they went for him at once and without any noise. He had his wooden sword with him. He hit one squarely and the sword went through it the way a hand goes through smoke, and the thing closed up again behind the stroke and kept coming.

He stopped fighting after that and ran, because running was the only thing left that worked, and he ran the length of the beach and over the bridge to the small islet with the crooked tree on it.

Riku was standing at the centre of it.

There was darkness spreading out from under his feet across the ground, in a circle, slowly, the way water spreads. It had reached the roots of the tree. He was not fighting anything and nothing was going near him, and he was entirely calm.

"Where's Kairi?" Sora shouted at him, over the wind. "I thought she was with you!"

Riku spoke at ordinary volume, and Sora heard him anyway.

"The door has opened."

"The door has opened, Sora! Now we can go to the outside world!"

Sora did not understand him at all. "What are you talking about? We gotta find Kairi!"

"Kairi's coming with us! Once we step through, we might not be able to come back."

He said that last part as a piece of information he had already accepted, and then he put his hand out across the widening dark, palm up, and asked Sora to take it and to take what came with it.

"I'm not afraid of the darkness!"

The dark came up around his legs while he stood there with his hand out. He did not look down at it.

It reached Sora and came up his legs too, and he did not take the hand.

Something arrived in his own instead.

It was a key about three and a half feet long, silver in the blade and in the teeth, with a blue guard against the rain and a bright gold guard at the hand, and a long silver chain off the hilt ending in a token made of three joined spheres. It weighed about what the wooden sword had weighed. The light coming off it pushed the dark back down off him to the ground.

When he could see again the islet was bare and Riku was not on it.

He cut his way back across the island to the cave. It took a long time, because the key worked and there were a great many of them.

Kairi was standing inside it with her back to him, facing the door with no handle. She did not turn round when he came in. She was standing too still and her arms were down at her sides, and when she said his name it came out slowly, with a gap in the middle of it.

"Sora."

Then the door came open behind her.

What came through it was wind with nothing in it but dark, and it filled the cave in about a second.

She was picked up off the floor and thrown down the length of the cave at him, and she got her arms out on the way, reaching.

He braced and put his arms up to catch her.

She went through him and was not behind him and was not anywhere.

The blast put him out of the cave and onto the surface.

The island was coming apart while he stood on it. Sand went up rather than down. By the time he was on his feet there was one piece of it left, about the size of a room, and it was floating, and there was nothing underneath it.

The giant from the dream came up out of that.

He knew what it was going to do before it did any of it, which did not help. He fought it standing on the last of his own island with a weapon he had owned for nine minutes.

He could not save the island.

The dark came up and took the two of them together, the boy and the thing he was fighting, and after that it took the islands.

The Stars Are Going Out

A long way from any of that, in a castle where nothing had gone wrong yet, a duck woke a dog up by shouting at him.

"Wake up, Goofy, wake up! This is serious!!"

"Hey there, Donald. G'morning."

The duck was white-feathered and wore a blue hat cut like a beret and a navy jacket with a high collar, and no trousers, and he was already halfway down the corridor. The dog was black-furred with ears that hung and two teeth that stuck out, in an orange hat with small red goggles at the base of it, and he came along behind at his own speed.

The chamber where the king sat was empty, and the throne in it was empty, which between them accounted for the shouting.

There was a dog behind the throne with a letter in his mouth. Yellow short fur, long black ears that drooped, eyes set close together. He would not give the letter up until he had been chased twice round the room for it.

The letter said this.

Donald, Sorry to rush off without sayin' goodbye, but there's big trouble brewin'. Not sure why, but the stars have been blinkin' out, one by one. There's someone with a 'key', the key to our survival. I need you and Goofy to find him, and stick with him. We need that key or we're doomed! So go to Traverse Town and find Leon. He'll point you in the right direction. P.S. Would ya apologize to Minnie for me? Thanks, pal. Signed, Mickey. "Gawrsh," Goofy said, when it had been read out twice. "I sure hope he's all right."

The queen read it herself and then sent them out after the key and after the king. "Your Highness. Don't worry," Donald said. "We'll find the king and this 'key.'"

There was a cricket on the table with the letter on it, standing on the folded edge of it, and he had been there for some time before anybody looked down. "Over here! Cricket's the name," he said. "Jiminy Cricket, at your service."

"Gawrsh, Jiminy, your world disappeared, too?"

"It was terrible. We were scattered. And as far as I can see, I'm the only one."

He got up onto the duck's hat brim while they were walking and rode there, and by the time they reached the hangar he had produced a book from somewhere about his person and begun writing in it. "Well, I see big adventures coming their way!" he said. "Looks like it's up to me."

"Hello up there? Donald Duck to launch crew! Anytime you're ready."

Two chipmunks ran the engineering of it from a gantry, at volume. The dog got aboard while nobody was looking at the ramp and lay down under a seat and stayed there.

They were an hour out when Goofy leaned forward and put a finger against the glass. "Look, a star's goin' out!"

Which is what the stars were. Each one of them was a world, and one of them had just stopped being one. They watched the place where it had been for a while, and neither of them said anything about it, and then Goofy started to and did not finish.

"Uh, Donald. Ya know, I betcha that."

A Town Where the Night Does Not End

The town was built in three districts, and the districts were numbered rather than named, which is what happens to a place nobody planned to live in. Over it the sky was night, and stayed night, and the stars in it were very clear, and there were a great many of them.

People whose worlds had been eaten arrived there. None of them could say how they had come or how long the journey had taken. They took rooms in the hotel and opened shops and waited, and after a while they stopped talking about it.

It was quiet.

Sora came out of the dark into an alley off the First District, and a dog he had never seen before woke him up. "What a dream. This isn't a dream! Where am I? Oh, boy."

"Do you know where we are? Hey."

The dog went round the corner and was gone before he was properly on his feet.

He walked the town for the rest of what would have been the evening, if there had been one, looking for two people among a population of about three hundred.

The First District had none of the black things in it and people sitting outside a café in it. The hotel was on the west side of the Second, and next to the hotel a house full of dalmatians whose world was gone. In one corner of the Third there was a fountain worked in gold, and off an alley there was a door with a flame painted on it, and behind that door a house in which the floor moved. He asked in all of them. Nobody had seen a girl with her bangs parted to the right or a tall boy with long hair, and several of them said it kindly, as people do who have been asked the same thing themselves.

He was crossing the Second District when the man walking ahead of him staggered.

It was not a fall. The man stopped mid-step and put a hand to his own chest, and something came out through the hand, small and shining and quite slow. Then the man came apart, from the middle outward, without any noise at all.

What stood up where he had been standing was one of them.

This one was a knight, of a sort, and built heavy. A bodysuit of a blue so dark it read as black, with an emblem on the chest of it, and purple versions of the same emblem upside down at the knees. Silver bands at the wrists. A silver helm with two angular spirals on the front where eyes would go and a curled silver plume above, and under the helm a face in shadow with yellow eyes in it and a mouth full of teeth. The claws were blue and tipped in red.

The emblem was a heart with a fleur-de-lis under it and a spiky cross driven through the middle of both. He would see it several thousand more times.

The man who came for him after that had been following the key and not the boy, and said so within about a minute of arriving.

He was older than Sora by ten years or so, with long brown hair and a scar running at an angle across the bridge of his nose, and he carried something that was a sword at one end and a firearm at the other. "They'll come at you out of nowhere," he said, by way of introduction, while the knight was still standing between them.

He killed it on the way past. "And they'll keep on coming at you, as long as you continue to wield the Keyblade," he said. "But why? Why would it choose a kid like you?"

Sora put the key behind him. "What? There's no way you're getting this!"

The man looked at him for a moment and then let his shoulders down, which turned out to be the worst thing he could have done for Sora's chances.

"All right, then have it your way."

It lasted four or five minutes and it went across most of the plaza. Sora was faster and had been fighting for a day and a half and had no idea what he was doing with the thing in his hand. The man knew exactly, and gave ground, and let him spend himself on the giving. At the end of it Sora was on one knee with the key on the flagstones beside him, and it was not the man who had put him there. It was every hour since the storm arriving at once.

The last thing he heard before the plaza went sideways was the man saying it to himself. "Still. Looks like things are worse than we thought. A lot worse."

Somebody else arrived at a run, from the direction of the alley. "Hey, you found him! Great job, Leon!" she said, and then, in a different tone, having got closer: "I think you might've overdone it, Squall."

There were two rooms at that hotel with somebody unconscious in each of them, and in both rooms the same explanation was being got ready for different people.

In the second, a woman in a pink dress with her hair braided down her back was working through it with a duck and a dog, patiently, from the beginning. "Excuse me. Did the king send you?" she said.

They said he had.

"Okay, you know there are many other worlds out there besides your castle and this town, right?"

"But they're supposed to be a secret," Goofy said.

She agreed that they were supposed to be.

In the first room Sora woke up with a girl leaning over him from about six inches away.

Short black hair under a metal headband, a yellow scarf, and a great deal of energy for the hour. He said Kairi's name before he had his eyes properly open. "Kairi? Who are you talking about?" she said, sitting back. "I'm the great ninja Yuffie!"

The man was standing against the wall by the door with his arms folded and had been there the whole time. "It was the only way to conceal your heart from them," he said. "But it won't work for long. Still hard to believe that you of all people are the chosen one."

Then the two of them told him what the black things were, taking it in turns, in a hotel room with the curtains shut against a sky that was not going to get any lighter. "Those without hearts," Leon said. "The darkness in people's hearts, that's what attracts them. And there is darkness within every heart."

"The ones who attacked you, you remember?" Yuffie said.

Sora said that he did, and that he had hit one with a wooden sword and nothing had happened. "The Heartless have great fear of the Keyblade," Leon said. "That's why they'll keep coming after you no matter what."

Which turned the thing in his hand round the other way while he was holding it. It was not a weapon he had been given so that he could fight them. It was the reason they were coming. "The Keyblade chooses its master," Yuffie said. "And it chose you."

Then Leon told him about the doors, and he did it standing up, drawing on the tabletop with a finger in spilled water. "Every world among the stars has a Keyhole," he said. "And each one leads to the heart of that world. There must be one in this town as well."

The rest of it he gave in pieces, the way a man gives information he does not enjoy having. Worlds had been meant to stand apart from one another and the walls between them were failing, because worlds were being eaten. A world had a heart, and the heart had a door to it. If the Heartless got through an open door they ate what was behind it, and the world came apart afterwards, and the stars went out one at a time. And the key in the boy's hand shut such a door, permanently, and nothing else did.

Sora asked how anybody knew all this. "Our ruler was a wise man named Ansem," Leon said. "He dedicated his life to studying the Heartless."

"He was studying the Heartless," the woman said, from the doorway, having come through from the other room some time before. "He recorded all of his findings in a very detailed report."

The report existed in loose pages and the pages were scattered across worlds the man had never lived in, and turned up in cellars and in chests and blown against walls. The man himself was missing and had been for nine years. "She's the reason this town is full of Heartless," Leon said, of somebody he had not yet named. "Don't take her lightly."

"She's been using the Heartless for years," Aerith said.

Then she named her, and went on, and stopped partway.

"No wonder there are more and more Heartless everywhere. The only way to stop them is."

Nobody finished it for her. Sora had heard the name for the first time and it went past him and landed nowhere, and he did not ask her to repeat it. "They, too, have been seeking the wielder of the Keyblade," Leon said.

The four of them were refugees. Their world had fallen nine years before and they had come here as children and grown up in a town with no morning in it, and the world had been called Hollow Bastion.

The Key and the King's Fools

The town was attacked while they were still in the room, and it was not the two or three at a time he had seen before.

They came up through the flagstones of all three districts at once. Sora was cut off from Leon in the first thirty seconds and pushed back through the doors into the Third District, and the doors shut behind him, and he was on his own in a walled square with the fountain in it.

Two floors above him a balcony gave way. "Gawrsh, are these the Heartless guys?" said somebody falling.

A duck and a dog landed on top of him and all three of them went down in a heap.

Then, from the flagstones, at close range, the two of them saw what was in his hand. "Who would've thought it?" Donald said.

He was up first, and had his staff out before he was upright.

"Let's go get 'em, Goofy!"

A suit of armour came into the square after that. It came apart into its pieces and went on fighting as pieces, and the three of them killed it between them without having been introduced.

In a dark chamber a long way from that square, six of them sat around a round table and watched the whole thing happen. "That little squirt took down that Heartless!" said the one with fire on his head. "Who'd have thought it?"

"Such is the power of the Keyblade," said the one in the turban. "The child's strength is not his own."

"And the brat's friends are the king's lackeys," said the one with the hook. "Swoggle me eyes, they're all bilge rats by the look of them."

"Enough."

The woman at the head of the table had not spoken until then and did not need to speak twice.

She was fair and her skin was green, and her eyes were yellow and heavily shadowed in violet, and her lips were red. Her headdress was black and horned. Her robe was black and long and tattered, trimmed in purple with maroon at the edges, and it flared where it reached the floor. She carried a staff with a green orb at the top of it, and she carried it the way other people carry a folded newspaper. She wore no ring. "The Keyblade has chosen him. Will it be he who conquers the darkness? Or will the darkness swallow him? Either way," she said, "he could be quite useful."

She gave out what she wanted in pieces across a number of these evenings, never all in one go, and never to all six of them at once. There were two objectives. The first was to open the door in every world and let the Heartless through it. That destroyed the world and fed her at the same time. The second was to gather seven girls whose hearts were pure light, because seven such hearts together opened a door at Hollow Bastion, and behind that door was a thing said to hold absolute power over everything there was.

The man with the hook sat at that table for all of it and was never told what the seven were for.

Back in the square the three of them sat on the rim of the fountain and worked out that they had been looking for each other. "So, you're looking for me?" Sora said.

They told him about the ship and about the worlds and about what a person could get to from here, and he stopped listening halfway through and started doing the arithmetic that mattered to him.

"I wonder if I could find Riku and Kairi."

"Name's Goofy," said the dog, putting a hand out.

"I'm Sora."

The duck looked him over and did not shake anything. "But you can't come along looking like that," he said. "Understand? No frowning. No sad face. Okay?"

"Yeah, ya gotta look funny, like us!"

Sora put his hands on his knees and produced the widest and least convincing face he had. "Happy? CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!"

It was a joke, and it was also a condition of passage, and he did not notice the second part for some months.

"Ok, why not? I'll go with you guys."

"Hold on. Sora, this is for you."

The arrangement was stated once, on the fountain rim, and never restated. Sora would look for Riku and Kairi. The other two would look for their king. They would travel together because each of them was the only transport the other had.

And the orders the two of them were carrying were to find the key and stick with it.

The letter had said the key. It had not said the boy.

The man who fitted out the ship kept a shop off the First District and had a toothpick in his mouth throughout, and had come to this town nine years ago with the other three.

"Hey there, how can I. Aw, it's only a kid."

Sora said something to that which is not recorded, and got the rest of it back at volume. "Don't call me gramps! The name's Cid! Anyway. Not sure what you're talkin' about, but this sure ain't your island."

He asked two questions about the ship and got an answer that ran a good deal longer than the questions had.

"You're kiddin' me! You're flyin' a gummi ship and you don't know nothin' about navigation gummis? Bunch of pinheads. Interspace ain't no playground."

They came to see him off at the ship, all four of them, which he had not expected. "Please lock the Keyholes," Aerith said. "You're the only one who can."

"I hope you find your friends."

"Look out for each other," Leon said. "Keep your spirits up."

They stood in the hangar doorway while the ramp came up, and the town went on being night behind them, and none of the four of them had anywhere else to be.

Goofy said the other thing once they were up and the town was a light going away underneath. "The king told us to go out and find the key bearer, and we found you," he said. "So as long as we stick together, it'll all work out okay. Ya just gotta believe in yourself, that's all."

A Circuit of Doors

The next six months had a shape to them.

They came down in a world, and there was a door in it somewhere, and they found it and he shut it and they went on. In between, twice, the reader is taken somewhere Sora is not: to a dark chamber, and to a boy travelling ahead of him.

The first of them was a country where a trial was already under way when they arrived.

The verdict had been reached before the evidence and the sentence before the verdict, and the girl it was all being done to was standing in the middle of the floor being extremely polite about it. She had done nothing. Everybody in the room including the judge appeared to know she had done nothing. "Hey, guys," Sora said, from the back, "we should help her out."

"We're outsiders," Goofy said, "so wouldn't that be muddling?"

Sora had already started walking. "Hold it right there!"

"Excuse me. But we know who the real culprit is! Anyway, she's not the one you're looking for."

He did not know who the real culprit was. He was fourteen and had said the first thing that would stop the proceedings, and it stopped them for about ninety seconds.

Then the room went dark, and when it came back the girl was not in it.

He stood in the middle of the floor with the key out and turned all the way round twice, and there was nothing to hit. Nobody in that country was surprised, and nobody would tell him where she had gone, and after a while the trial resumed without a defendant.

The door in that world was inside the mouth of a sleeping doorknob set into a wall at the height of his knee. "It talks!" Donald said. It did, though not usefully, and not for long.

Sora put the key to it and the world was shut.

There was a coliseum in another world where they entered a tournament and fought in it and left again.

Nothing that happened there went anywhere. In a back room of it the man who ran the underworld took a visitor, and she told him to enjoy his games, and he did. "As you wish," she said. "Fight to your heart's content."

There was a swordsman working down there who was looking for somebody, and would not say who, and was still looking when they left.

They argued about the next one before they had landed. "In a backwater place like that? No way!" Donald said. "Let's move on."

"Hey, Donald," Goofy said, "maybe King Mickey's down there."

They went down, and on the ground the duck laid out the law. It had two parts and he had clearly been saving it.

They did not meddle. And they did not, under any circumstances, tell anybody in any world that other worlds existed.

Sora pointed out that he had interrupted a trial four days ago and that neither of them had said anything at the time. Donald said that had been different. Sora asked how. Nobody answered that, and the argument went nowhere, and none of the three of them apologised for any part of it.

They found the door in that world behind a waterfall. "But it's sure not the king's," Goofy said, of something they had found on the way, and that was as close as they came.

"The hunter lured them there," the woman in the black robe said, at the table. "It was his lust for power that was the bait. But it seems the bait was too tasty for his own good."

The man in the turban wanted to know the mechanism rather than the moral. "What drew the Heartless to that world?" he said.

She told him, and he arrived at the part that concerned him.

"A weak-hearted fool like him stood no chance against the Heartless. But the boy is a problem. He found one of the Keyholes."

"Fear not. It will take him ages to find the rest," she said. "Besides, he remains blissfully unaware of our other plan."

She let that sit and then answered a question nobody at the table had asked.

"They are falling into our hands, one by one. Speaking of which."

One of them was already in a cell under that chamber.

The pages started turning up around then.

They were loose leaves out of one man's research, and they came out of chests and cellars and out from under things, in worlds he had never lived in, in no order at all. Sora carried them back to Traverse Town in a bundle and the woman in the pink dress read them out in the library there with the three of them sitting on the floor.

Darkness sleeps in every heart, no matter how pure.

She stopped after that one and looked at the page for a while longer than reading it took. "I thought the Keyhole would strengthen the darkness," she said. "I mean, the darkness is strong, but still. It's almost as if someone is holding the darkness back."

Leon asked her what she meant. She said she did not know what she meant. They went on to the next page.

The Boy Who Got Out

Riku was standing in the First District, by the doors, alive and unmarked and dressed exactly as he had been on the night of the storm.

Sora got about four words out and had to stop and start again. "Isn't she with you?" Riku said. "Well, don't worry. I'm sure she made it off the island, too."

He said it the way he said most things, as though he had already checked.

Then he looked down and reached over and took the key out of Sora's hand.

It came.

He turned it over once and held it up and looked along the length of the blade with one eye shut, the way a person looks down a plank to see if it is straight.

"So, this is called a Keyblade?"

Then he gave it back, and Sora took it, and neither of them said anything about what had just happened, because as far as either of them could see nothing had.

Sora had a great deal to tell him and got the order of it wrong. He started with the ship.

Then Goofy, who had come up behind and had been waiting to be introduced, said the part Sora had been going to say fourth or fifth. "Oh, and guess what?" he said. "Sora's the Keyblade master."

Riku looked at the dog. Then at the duck. Then at Sora, for slightly longer, and Sora started to explain and got as far as the first clause.

The doors were open behind him and there was a crowd going through them, and by the time Sora had got round the crowd there was nobody on the other side.

He stood in the doorway with his mouth open and the rest of the sentence still in it. "You see? It's just as I told you," the woman said. "While you toiled away trying to find your dear friend, he quite simply replaced you with some new companions. Evidently, now he values them far more than he does you. You're better off without that wretched boy. Now, think no more of him, and come with me. I'll help you find what you're searching for."

She had been saying a version of it for some weeks before that afternoon, and that afternoon had just done the work for her.

Riku heard the whole of it out and then asked the only question he ever asked her twice. "Why are you doing all this for me? What's the catch?"

"Catch? What's the catch? Silly boy. You're like a son to me. I only want you to be happy."

He did not believe a word of that and made no pretence of it, and she appeared not to mind, and neither of them said anything about it. Then she told him what the arrangement was, in full, without softening any of it.

"There are seven maidens of the purest heart. We call them the princesses of heart. Gather them together, and a door will open to the heart of all worlds. Within lies untold wisdom. There, you will surely find a way to recover Kairi's heart. Now, I'll grant you a marvelous gift. The power to control the Heartless."

Somebody in the chamber asked what had become of the girl. "Taken by the Heartless, no doubt," Maleficent said.

Somebody else said she was like a lifeless puppet.

"Precisely."

In a desert city Sora met a woman for about four minutes.

She was in a market square with the roof coming down on one side of it, getting people out, and doing it well, and she had stopped to argue with somebody about a cart when the wall went. He got a hand on her arm and moved her.

"Jasmine, run!"

She did not run. She got the last two people out and then she ran, which he noticed.

Somebody told him afterwards who she was. "Uh. So that makes you a princess," Goofy said, some way behind the conversation.

"And the Keyhole?" Maleficent said.

Jafar had not brought her either of the two things she had asked for. "You said you had things under control."

"We need all seven princesses of heart to open the final door. Any fewer is useless."

"The girl is more trouble than she's worth," Jafar said.

He got a look for that, and revised.

"Well, if the princess is that important, we'll find her."

She let him get to the door before she said the last of it. "Don't steep yourself in darkness too long," she said. "The Heartless consume the careless."

Then, to the room, of something else entirely: "That boy again?"

Riku took the woman from the desert city and delivered her to Hollow Bastion.

Sora did not see it happen and nobody told him about it, and he found out much later and in a room, and by then it was one item on a list.

He abducted a girl in order to save a girl.

The city came apart about a day after that. "Whoa, we'd better get out of here!" Goofy said.

"But we can't. If we take him to another world, we would be."

They pulled a page of the report out from under a fallen beam on the way to the ship. "Jafar was beyond help, consumed by his own hatred," Maleficent said, afterwards, to nobody in particular. "One should beware of letting it burn too fiercely."

Inside the Whale

The thing came at them out of open space with its mouth already open and it was the size of a district. "It's a giant whale!" Goofy said.

"Whoa! Sora, get us out of here!"

"It's Monstro!" said Jiminy, from the hat brim. "He's a whale of a whale, and vicious besides!"

Sora got them out of the way of it twice. The third time it took the ship and everything in it, and the light went, and they came down somewhere warm and ribbed and moving. "Uh, ya know, I think that big ol' whale Monstro just swallowed us," Goofy said, into the dark. "And for today's weather: expect showers."

There was a wooden boy in there with them. "Oh, it's just Pinocchio," Donald said. "Pinocchio!?"

"Well, well, as I live and breathe!" said Jiminy. "If it isn't Pinocchio!"

"It's true," Sora said. "So, how did you end up here, Pinocchio?"

He did not get the whole of the answer, because Riku was standing at the far end of the chamber and had been for a while.

Something came through the wall of the stomach at both of them at once, and Riku took the left of it without discussing the arrangement. "You up for this?" he said, over his shoulder, while it was already happening.

They fought it the way they had fought everything on that island for nine years, without looking at each other and without either of them getting in the other's way, and it took about a minute. That was the last time.

Then Riku picked up the puppet by the back of its jacket and carried it away down the chamber, and put a hand out over its chest, and started to take something out of it.

"Pinocchio, stop fooling around!" Sora shouted, before he understood what he was looking at. "This is no time for games!"

Then he understood.

"Hey, let Pinocchio go, Riku."

Riku did not stop and did not explain, and nobody in that chamber ever said what he wanted a wooden boy's heart for. "But Sora, I thought you liked games," he said. "Or are you too cool to play them now."

"Heart or no heart, at least he still has a conscience," Sora said. "You might not hear it, but right now it's loud and clear. And it's telling me you're on the wrong side!"

Then he said the other thing. Whoever this was, it was not Riku. He said it out loud and in front of him.

A tear opened in the air behind him and he stepped back into it and it closed. He left the puppet on the floor. "I sure hope Pinocchio and Geppetto are okay," Goofy said, once they were out and the ship was patched.

"Why do you still care about that boy?" the woman said, in the chamber, to somebody who had not mentioned him. "He has all but deserted you for the Keyblade and his new companions, after all."

Riku said he had not been thinking about Sora. "Oh, really? Of course you were," she said. "Beware the darkness in your heart. The Heartless prey upon it."

They went under the sea in another world and found the door there and shut it and came up again.

They went to a town where it was always the night before a holiday, and were made welcome in it, and left.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it Cid handed over a torn book to be mended by a wizard, and there was an afternoon spent inside that book with nothing dark in it anywhere. It was the only afternoon of that kind in about six months.

The pages went on accumulating, and the woman in the pink dress went on reading them out.

Those who lack hearts. I will call them the Heartless.

This may be a step toward creating a heart from nothing.

One page recorded a king from another world who had arrived by gummi block and told him a legend about a key. A key opens doors, the page said. It must be connected to the door I have opened.

I will cast it off and plunge into the depths of darkness.

I shall set her free and observe.

The page around that one recorded that opening a world's door collapses the world, and that this is what a shooting star is, and that a Keyblade can lock such a door for good. It also recorded that he had selected a girl, and that he hoped she was connected to the princesses and to whoever carried the key.

Wherein lies true nirvana?

That page recorded three realms, one of light and one of darkness and one lying between them. And it recorded one being that had kept its memories and had not become a Heartless when it died.

What He Found First

"Uh," Goofy said, looking behind them, "a big ship is catching up to us."

It was a galleon, under sail, in open space, and it came alongside and grappled them before Donald had finished objecting to the existence of it.

Riku was on the deck of it. The captain of that ship stood a pace behind him and to the side and waited to be told what to do, which told Sora more about the last few months than anything Riku said. "Let's get under way, already," Riku said. "And keep Sora away from Kairi until we're ready to land."

They kept him away from her for about six hours.

She was in a locked cabin below the waterline with a lamp burning in it, lying on her back on a bunk with her hands at her sides, and she had been carried from world to world in that room like cargo.

It was the first time he had seen her since the storm.

He said her name twice and then a third time with a hand on her shoulder, and she did not wake, and her breathing stayed where it was, and there was nothing wrong with her that he could point at.

Riku was in the doorway behind him and had been for a while.

He said it standing over both of them, and the shape of it was that Sora had been off having an adventure with a duck and a dog while she lay in a locked room, and that Riku was the one who had found her.

He was right about the second part. "Are they that important to you?" he said. "More important than old friends?"

Sora told him what he had been told in a hotel room in Traverse Town. The things he was commanding would turn on him and take his heart when they did, and that was not a risk but the arrangement.

Riku heard it out with his arms folded and then went up the companionway.

There was something standing between Sora and the door.

It was his own height and his own shape and it was black all through, with yellow eyes, and it held a key. It fought the way he fought, and it held him to a standstill for a long time in a small room, and every mistake he made it had already made a half-second earlier. He beat it in the end by doing something stupid, because stupidity was the one thing it had no answer for.

On the deck above, the captain wanted to be paid.

Riku told him that the girl he had spent three worlds catching was not one of the seven and was of no use to anybody, and the captain took this badly, and it emerged in the course of the argument that nobody had ever told him what the seven were for.

The world they were over was one where nobody grew up, and the rules of it were loose enough that a boy in green got the three of them off that ship by teaching them to leave the deck upward. "So, uh," Goofy said, some way above the mainmast, "how come you can fly?"

Nobody gave him a satisfactory answer, then or later.

They took the girl off the ship with them. The boy in green had a lost sister with him, or a girl he had decided was one, and she sat with Kairi in the hold of a hideout under a tree and talked to her steadily for an hour on the theory that people can hear you.

Goofy watched that for a while and then said what he had been carrying for two worlds, and stopped himself halfway through it.

He had been going to say that if she could not be woken then perhaps there was nothing in there to wake. "Sounds great. Okay, but first, how about getting off!" Donald said, of something else, loudly, to break it up.

The door in that world was on the face of the clock in a tower over a town, and they got to it by air. They found another page of the report in the tower.

By the time they came down, Riku had taken her off the island, and she was still not awake. "We had a deal, yes?" the woman said. "You help us, and we grant you your wish."

"Go to her. Your vessel is waiting."

He said something to that which she chose to treat as gratitude.

"Believe what you wish. But lest we forget, I kept my end of the bargain."

He had brought the girl in himself, through the dark, without a ship, because he had not been willing to hand her to anybody. "It was reckless to bring her here without at least using a vessel," she said. "Remember, relying too heavily on the dark powers could cost you your heart."

The Delivery Boy

Before they left for the castle a voice spoke from inside him.

It was hers. It was not loud and it was not in the room, and he put a hand flat on his own chest without deciding to.

"I believe in you."

Nobody else heard it. He did not tell either of them.

Then she pulled him into something that was not his.

A library, in a house he had never been in, with rain on the windows. A small girl sitting on the floor with her chin on her knees, and an old woman in a chair above her, telling her a story the girl had plainly asked for many times before, in the voice people use for a story they are tired of and will not refuse.

He came into it partway through, the way you come into a room where people are already talking.

With these fragments of light, children rebuilt the lost world. It's the world we live in now. But the true light sleeps, deep within the darkness. That's why the worlds are still scattered, divided from each other.

The girl asked a question about it that he missed, and then he was in the ship again with a hand on his chest.

Cid had heard where they were going before they told him. "You guys ever hear of Maleficent?" he said. "I hear she's in town."

"I installed that navigation gummi. But, ya know? That place is crawling with Heartless. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Sora said they were going anyway. "I don't think I can let you do that, kid," Cid said. "The Heartless there are multiplying by the minute. They'd eat your ship up."

He had them stand there for a while and then produced the answer he had already worked out.

"Simple. Go around 'em instead of through. Install a new navigation gummi and take a new route."

He did not have the part. He knew where it was, which was not the same thing. "The secret waterway," he said. "When I came here 9 years ago, I stored it there in case I ever needed it. Never thought a kid would be the one to use it!"

The waterway ran under the Second District behind a grating nobody had opened in years, and it took the three of them most of a day, wading, with Donald holding a light. There was a wizard's house down there at the end of it and a good deal of standing water and one crate under a tarpaulin with nine years of dust on the tarpaulin. "You found it?" Cid said. "All right, I'll go fix up your ship."

He was still under it when they came to collect it. "All set! You can get going any time," he said, and then wiped his hands and said the other thing, which was not like him. "Kid, I gotta say, I wish you didn't have to face all this danger."

That was the last ordinary afternoon any of them had. "Gawrsh," Goofy said, at the glass. "Look at that!"

The castle stood over an abyss with broken rock hanging in the air all round it, and the water there ran upward instead of down, in columns, and there were bubbles in the air that were not water and held their shape. Inside it was a hall on two storeys with an enormous emblem worked into the fabric of the building itself, a ceiling of stained glass, and balconies running the length of both floors. It had been somebody's home and the furniture was still in it.

Down at the water a boy was standing over something enormous that had walked there.

It was on all fours at the edge of the rock and it had been fighting for a long time before they arrived, and it was still trying to get up. "No vessel, no help from the Heartless," Riku said, to it. "So tell me, how'd you get here?"

"A castaway," the woman said, from further up the steps. "Though his world perished, his heart did not. When we took the princess from his castle, he apparently followed her here through sheer force of will. But fear not. No harm will come to you. He is no match for your power."

She was right about the last part. The Beast was put down twice while Sora was crossing the rock toward them, and it got up both times, without hurrying, the way a thing gets up when the question of whether to has not occurred to it.

Then Riku turned round to Sora, and told him what he had worked out over the last six months.

It was that the key had never been Sora's. It had come to him on an island on the night the island fell because Riku had not been standing there to take it, and Sora had been carrying it since. A delivery boy, was the word he used. "Maleficent was right," he said. "You don't have what it takes to save Kairi."

He put his hand out.

The Keyblade went out of Sora's grip so fast it took skin off two of his fingers, and crossed eight feet of air, and settled into Riku's hand as though it had been made to sit there.

Then Riku threw him something underarm and Sora caught it without looking, which is how he knew what it was before he saw it.

It was the wooden sword from the island.

Riku went up the steps and did not look back to see whether anybody followed.

Donald and Goofy stood where they were for a moment. Then Goofy started to say something to Sora and got the beginning of it out and stopped. "Oh! Well, I know the king told us to follow the key and all. But."

"Goofy," Donald said. "Let's go. We have to remember our mission."

Goofy looked at Sora, and at the wooden sword in Sora's hand, and at Donald. Then he went, and Donald went ahead of him, and neither of them said anything else, and neither of them looked back either.

Sora was left standing at the bottom of a castle with a wooden sword and a bleeding animal.

The animal got up again. Then it started up the steps, and Sora went after it, because it was going the right way.

He caught them in the Entrance Hall, at the foot of the stairs, and Riku was on the third step with the other two behind him.

Sora came in with the wooden sword. "Your heart?" Riku said, looking at it. "What good will that weak little thing do for you?"

"I don't need a weapon!" Sora said. "My friends are my power!"

"Really. Well, we'll just see about that!"

He threw fire, and it was not fire, and it crossed the hall in the time it takes to blink, and Sora had a piece of wood.

Goofy got in front of it.

He did it from a standing start, from behind Riku, from the wrong side, and he got the shield round and planted and the whole of himself behind the shield, and it went off the face of it and took out a section of the balcony above them.

Riku told him to move. "Not on your life!" Goofy said, from behind the shield, not moving. "But I'm not gonna betray Sora, either, 'cause he's become one of my best buddies after all we've been through together! See ya later, Donald. Could ya tell the king I'm really sorry?"

Donald stood on the step and swore at him for about four seconds and then came down off it. "Hold on, Goofy! We'll tell him together."

Riku still had his hand out from the throw when the Keyblade left it.

It went across the hall in front of all five of them and put itself into Sora's hand, and Sora, who had been holding a wooden sword a second earlier, was holding both.

Nobody said anything at all for a moment. Riku looked at his own empty hand and then at the hall, at the duck and the dog standing on the wrong side of the room, at the boy holding the thing that had been his proof.

Then Sora put him down. It took some time and it was not one-sided, and at the end of it Riku broke off and went up the stairs and through a door at the top of them.

He got four rooms into the castle before he stopped.

He put a hand on the wall and stood there. There was nobody with him and nothing coming, and the corridor went on in both directions, and he had lost track of which end he had come in by.

"Where am I? Sora! Kairi!"

Nobody came, and after a minute he went on.

The Stronger Heart

Something came to him out of the dark at the end of that corridor.

It did not arrive so much as be there, standing further off than it needed to be, and it was cloaked, and it stayed still while it spoke. The voice was unhurried. It gave him nothing to look at and no name to put to any of it, and it began in the middle, as though the conversation had been going on for some time and Riku had come late to it. "Know this," it said. "The heart that is strong and true shall win the Keyblade."

"What?" Riku said. "You're saying my heart's weaker than his?"

"For that instant, it was. However, you can become stronger. You showed no fear in stepping through the door to darkness. It held no terror for you. Plunge deeper into the darkness, and your heart will grow even stronger."

Riku did not answer that for a while. The thing waited without any sign of impatience, which was the most persuasive part of it. "It's really quite simple," it said. "Open yourself to the darkness. That is all. Let your heart, your being, become darkness itself."

He said yes.

He said it himself, out loud, in an empty corridor, on purpose, and he still did not know what he was saying it to.

They found the woman in the chapel at the top of the castle with the work nearly done. "I'm afraid you're too late," she said. "Any moment now, the final Keyhole will be unsealed. This world will be plunged into darkness. It is unstoppable."

"You poor, simple fools. You think you can defeat me? Me, the mistress of all evil?"

She fought them from the far end of the chapel and held that end of it, and she brought the ceiling down in pieces on them for most of it.

"Meteors of heaven, unleash thy fury!"

It took the three of them a long time and cost Donald most of what he had, and she went down on one knee at the end of it with the staff across her lap, and stayed there.

Then somebody came up the chapel behind her, walking, in no hurry. "Do you need some help?" he said.

She asked him what he was offering. "Yes. A Keyblade," he said. "But unlike yours, this Keyblade holds the power to unlock people's hearts. Allow me to demonstrate. Behold!"

The thing in his hand was red and black and had no chain on it, and its teeth were shaped like a heart with a break driven through it.

"Wha."

"Now, open your heart, surrender it to the darkness!" he said. "Become darkness itself!"

She said the next part with her head back and her arms open, and she said it like somebody arriving.

"This is it! This power! Darkness. The true darkness!"

She became something enormous and black that filled the chapel to the roof.

The floor moved under them the whole time. The heat came off it in pushes that drove them back down the length of the chapel and into the doorway, and they went at it and came away and went at it again, and Goofy spent the whole of it standing between it and the other two with the shield up and his heels sliding.

It died about twenty minutes later.

There was a scorch on the flagstones afterwards, roughly the shape of a woman, with her cloak lying in the middle of it and nothing else in it at all. "How ironic," the man said, looking at it. "She was just another puppet after all."

"The Heartless were using Maleficent from the beginning. She failed to notice the darkness in her heart eating away at her. A fitting end for such a fool."

He said all of that out loud, in a room with four people in it, at some length.

There were pages of the report on the floor of that chapel, blown into the corner of it, and Sora picked them up while the scorch was still warm.

What was that powerful mass of energy?

That was the heart of the world.

The Seventh

The Grand Hall was the top of the castle and most of one wall of it was a keyhole.

It was enormous, cut into the stone the height of three men, and it was nearly finished, and something was moving slowly in the dark behind the shape of it.

Kairi was lying on the floor in front of it on her back with her hands at her sides, exactly as she had been in the cabin on the ship. Six lights hung in the air above her at about the height of a standing person, spaced evenly, turning very slowly.

Sora came in at a run from the far end and got about a third of the way across the floor before he stopped, because Riku was standing over her.

Somebody shouted at him from the mouth of the hall.

"You've got to run! The Heartless are coming!"

Nobody in that hall ever mentioned it again.

Sora went down on his knees beside her and said her name and got nothing, and the figure standing over both of them let him do it for a while before it spoke.

"It's no use. That girl has lost her heart. She cannot wake up."

"The Keyhole cannot be completed so long as the last princess of heart still sleeps."

Sora stood up. He had crossed nine worlds to catch the person in front of him and he had a great many things to say, and he started on the first of them, and got as far as the name.

Then the thing wearing Riku's face told him who it was. "It is I, Ansem, the seeker of darkness."

Behind Sora, Donald said something under his breath. Goofy did not say anything. The name meant nothing to any of the three of them except as a name they had been reading off loose pages for six months, in a library, in a town with no morning, in the handwriting of a man who had been missing for nine years. "I know all that there is to know," he said.

Sora asked what he had done to her. "Without her heart, she will never be able to release her power."

He asked what the lights over her were for, and got an answer to a question he had not asked. The same thing had happened to him in a cave nine months earlier and he did not notice the resemblance.

"Yes, and without her power, the Keyhole will remain incomplete. It is time she awakened."

"But first, you must give the princess back her heart."

Sora said that he did not have her heart.

The man came a step closer to him and put his head slightly on one side.

"Don't you see yet? The princess's heart is responding. It has been there all along. Kairi's heart rests within you!"

He let that sit for exactly as long as it needed and then turned back to the girl on the floor. "So, I shall release you now, Princess. Complete the Keyhole with your power. Open the door, lead me into everlasting darkness!"

"Forget it!" Sora said, getting between them. "There's no way you're taking Kairi's heart!"

"It won't work!" Goofy shouted, from the door. "The Keyhole's not finished yet!"

Sora fought him across the whole width of that hall and won, and drove him back through the arch at the end of it, and he went.

Once, in the middle of it, the face went wrong. It lasted about as long as a blink, and Sora saw it and did not know what he was looking at and had no time to ask.

The red and black key was lying on the flagstones where it had been dropped.

Sora stood over it for a while. Donald and Goofy were at the other end of the hall and could not see what he was looking at. "A Keyblade that unlocks people's hearts," he said. "I wonder."

He picked it up. He turned it round so that the teeth were toward him. Then he put it into his own chest, which took both hands, and he did it slowly and without any noise, and he was looking at the girl on the floor while he did it.

Somewhere in the hall a voice that was hers began a sentence and did not get to the end of it.

"Sora, are you really."

"No. It can't be! I won't let him go!"

It was coming from inside him and it was the only warning anybody got.

"Sora. Sora!" Donald shouted, from forty feet away, already running.

It let her heart out, and it let the other six out with it, and the girl on the floor opened her eyes.

It also finished the keyhole in the wall, the thing the man had wanted done, and Sora did it himself, knowing that was what he was doing, because it was the only way the heart came out.

And it unlocked his own.

He came apart standing up, in about a second and a half, without any noise at all, in front of both of them.

What was standing where he had been standing was small and black with round yellow eyes, and there was nothing whatever about it to tell it from any of the several thousand others already in that castle. "So, you have awakened at last, Princess," the man said, from the arch. "The Keyhole is now complete. You have served your purpose. But now it's over."

Then the hall filled.

They came through the finished keyhole in the wall, out of the shape of it, in numbers that made the room dark in about ten seconds.

"Confounded Heartless!" Donald shouted, swinging. "Get lost, will ya?"

The two of them got Kairi up off the floor between them and went backward with her across the hall, and they were driven the whole width of it and put against the wall by the arch, and there was nowhere further to go.

One of them did not attack.

It came across the floor of that hall through all the others, at its own pace, and it stopped in front of the girl, and it stood there.

Goofy got the shield up. Kairi put a hand on the shield and moved it down. "Sora?" she said. "Is that you?"

It did not answer, because it could not. It stood in front of her with its head up while the room went on happening around all four of them. "This time," she said, "I'll protect you."

She went down on her knees on the flagstones and put her arms round it.

It was smaller than she was. It came up to about her collarbone, and it stood still and let her, and she held onto it with her eyes shut and her face in the side of its head.

Then there was light, and it went out through the whole hall, and the ones nearest them came apart in it.

And he was standing there with his arms round her, himself, whole, in his own clothes, with his own face on, holding her up because she had just taken all of his weight.

Neither of them let go for a while. "Even in your Heartless form," she said, into his shoulder, "I knew it was you."

Then she pushed him out to arm's length and looked at him properly.

"Sora, are you feeling okay now? If you're not, then say so."

"I didn't want to just forget about you, Sora," she said. "I couldn't."

They got out of the hall and down two floors before anybody asked her anything. "I used to live in Hollow Bastion," she said, "but I don't remember much now. My real home is the island where we used to play."

She stopped on a landing in front of a mural that ran the height of the wall. "What a mysterious mural," she said. "It's almost hypnotizing."

Then she asked whether it could ever be the same between the three of them again. Sora said that it could. She started to say what she thought Riku had lost, and did not finish it, and Sora did not finish it for her.

The Beast found the woman he had walked there for on the floor below that.

And four people came up the steps from the water who had not been inside that building since they were children.

They came slowly and they did not go where they were going. Yuffie went into two rooms that were not on the way to anything. Aerith stopped in a corridor and put a hand on a doorframe. Cid did not come in past the forecourt at all. "We came in Cid's ship," Yuffie said, by way of accounting for it.

"This is our childhood home," Aerith said. "We wanted to see it again."

Leon stood in the hall with the stained glass over him and looked the length of it, at the emblem worked into the fabric of the building, at the furniture still standing where somebody had left it nine years before, at the black things going up the walls. "It's in worse shape than I feared," he said. "It used to be so peaceful."

Sora told them about Riku, and about what had been in the hall wearing him, and about the key with the broken heart in its teeth. "That's right," Leon said. "You have one more friend to worry about. Riku's Keyblade must have been born of the captive princesses' hearts, just like that Keyhole you saw."

"It seems the other princesses have been freed as well," he said. "Jasmine apparently hasn't returned to Agrabah. I suspect the others are still in the castle, too."

There was a thing the size of a cart in the hall by then and they killed it, all six of them, and it took a while. "Sora," Leon said, afterwards. "You did it."

"Wait, Sora. Take this with you."

Kairi came down the hall while he was getting ready to go and put something into his hand and closed his fingers over it. "Take this. It's my lucky charm," she said. "Be sure to bring it back to me."

It was the shells she had been threading on the beach. It had come a long way in a locked cabin and it had not broken.

He sealed that castle's keyhole, and the wall was a wall again.

The girls who had been let out of it stayed behind in the hall to hold back what was still coming through the other one, the one still standing open, and to wait for whatever came next. They told him the man had already gone out of the world entirely.

Then Aerith told him the price, before he had agreed to pay it, standing in the forecourt with the ship behind her. "Once the worlds are restored," she said, "they'll be separate again."

He worked out what that meant about the island, and about the four of them, and about the girl standing ten feet away who was not coming. "No matter where we are," Aerith said, "our hearts will bring us together again."

"We may never meet again," Leon said, "but we'll never forget each other."

"Besides," Yuffie said, "I couldn't forget you even if I wanted to."

"Sora, good luck."

"Dive into the most dangerous place and we'll find him!" Donald said, who had not been consulted and had already decided.

"Come on, Sora," Kairi said. "We made it this far by sticking together. You can't go alone."

When the man was driven out of that hall, the boy whose body he had been wearing went somewhere else. "Sora. Kairi. I'm sorry," he said, to nobody, on his back. "Is this the afterworld?"

He got up onto an elbow after a while.

"I'm not ready. Not yet. Not until I see Sora and Kairi one last time."

Something small came toward him out of the dark. "Who are you?" he said. "What's happened to me?"

He was given an answer he did not accept. "Fate, huh? You seem to know everything, don't you?" he said. "Then tell me: Are Sora and Kairi okay?"

The Endless Abyss, and the Road

"Gawrsh," Goofy said, at the glass, "is that all that's left of the worlds taken by the Heartless?"

It was not a world. It was the wreckage of every world that had been eaten, fused into one mass at the bottom of everything, and it hung there without turning. An empty field of dark with snowy fragments of land scattered through it, and dark orbs coming down into it out of the sky above it, slowly, and going further in and not coming out.

They were told that if they won, this place would stop existing, and that they themselves would be all right.

Nobody asked how the second part followed from the first.

Part of it was a corridor of preserved pieces.

Each one was a fragment of somewhere that no longer existed, held whole, and they walked through them one after another and recognised nearly all of them. A snowy waste with crystal coming out of the ground. A quiet canyon full of colour. Pillars standing over nothing. One end of it made of sparkling light and one of roaring flame.

In two of them Sora's body turned back into what it had been in those worlds while he stood in them, and turned back again on the way out.

There was an enormous winged thing on a mountain further in and they killed it, and there was a crater under where it had been standing. "I wonder where that Ansem feller went?" Goofy said, into it.

Past the crater there was a quiet room with nothing at all in it, and they sat down in it for a while, because there was nothing else to do in there.

Through a door after that was the island.

It was the right shape when they came onto it. The tree was where the tree went and the bridge was where the bridge went, and it turned into the wrong one while they were walking across it, so gradually that Sora could not have said at which point it stopped being his.

Riku was standing on the shore with his back to them.

Then he was not, and what was standing there was taller by a head, and it turned round, and it had a face on it that nobody present had ever seen.

Silver-white gloves with grey bands at the wrists. Black pauldrons. Black trousers and black boots to the knee lined in silver. And on the chest of a long coat, worn there as though it were an ornament, the emblem. He stood with his weight even and his hands loose at his sides and he did not hurry any part of what he said. "Take a look at this tiny place," he said, and he took his time about it, turning to look at it with them. "To the heart seeking freedom this island is a prison surrounded by water. And so this boy sought out to escape from his prison. He sought a way to cross over into other worlds. And he opened his heart to darkness."

Sora called past him, at the shape of him, using the name. "Don't bother. Your voice can no longer reach him where he is. His heart belongs again to darkness. All worlds begin in darkness, and all so end. The heart is no different. Darkness sprouts within it, it grows, consumes it. Such is its nature. In the end, every heart returns to the darkness whence it came. You see, darkness is the heart's true essence."

"That's not true!" Sora said. "The heart may be weak and sometimes it may even give in. But I've learned that deep down, there's a light that never goes out!"

"So, you have come this far and still you understand nothing. Every light must fade, every heart return to darkness!"

They fought on the beach, then in the water, then on what was left of the beach, and Sora put him down.

The ground came apart under both of them and the man went down through it, and Sora went after him alone, past one barrier and through another of the giants and out at the bottom of everything.

There was no floor down there. There was a great deal of nothing, going down, and no bottom to it that anybody could see. "Behold the endless abyss!" the man said. "Within it lies the heart of all worlds: Kingdom Hearts!"

"Look as hard as you are able. You'll not find even the smallest glimmer of light. From those dark depths are all hearts born. Even yours."

"Darkness conquers all worlds!"

Then he went into a thing that was part ship and part body and had a face on the front of it, and it came at them out of the dark with him somewhere inside it.

It shut Donald and Goofy into separate compartments of itself and Sora cut both of them out, and after that the three of them took it apart from the inside.

Behind where it had been there was a door.

It was tall and it was white and it stood on its own in the abyss with nothing holding it up and nothing on either side of it.

The man got up off the floor of the world in front of it. "It is futile. The Keyblade alone cannot seal the door to darkness," he said, and then he stopped speaking to Sora and spoke past him, upward. "Kingdom Hearts! Fill me with the power of darkness."

"Supreme darkness."

The door began to open behind him.

Sora was standing about thirty feet away with the key in both hands and he had had nine months to think about this and about four seconds to say it.

"You're wrong. I know now, without a doubt, Kingdom Hearts is light!"

The door opened.

What came out of it was light. It came out in a mass, without any sound in front of it, and it filled the abyss from side to side, and Sora could not see anything at all for some seconds and put an arm across his face.

It went through the man where he stood. "Light. But. Why."

He died confused, with his hands up, still talking.

Behind the open door there was no end to the dark.

It was full of them, standing, as far back as the light reached, and they had begun to come forward.

The door had to be shut. It weighed what a door that size weighs and it would not shut from one side, and the three of them got their shoulders into it and moved it about a foot.

"Stop staring and keep pushing!" Donald shouted.

Then there were hands on the inside edge of it.

They came round the gap at about Sora's height and took hold and pulled, and the gap started closing faster than three people could close it, and through it Sora could see who it was.

It was Riku, and he was himself. "Don't give up!" he said, through the gap, pulling. "Come on, Sora! Together, we can do it!"

Behind him in the dark, small, with its back to the door, something was holding the whole of what was coming off both of them with a golden key. "Your Majesty!" Goofy said, and stopped pushing for about a second.

"Donald, Goofy, thank you," it said, without turning round.

The gap was down to a foot by then. Riku had both hands on the edge of the door and was leaning back against it with his heels dug in, and he was on the wrong side and was not going to be on any other side, and he had worked that out some time before Sora had. "Take care of her," he said, through the gap.

"Now, Sora!" the small one called, from further back. "Let's close this door for good!"

Sora put the key up on his side of the door. The small one put the golden key up on the other side of it, through the last of the gap. "Don't worry," it said. "There will always be a door to the light."

Then they turned the keys together and the door was shut, and then it was not there at all.

While it closed there were two boys on a beach, much younger, playing.

The wreck came apart from the middle outward.

The worlds that had been eaten put themselves back where they had been, all of them at once, and the walls went up again between them.

The ground the two of them were standing on tore in half between their feet. "Don't ever forget," she said, as it opened. "Wherever you go, I'm always with you."

"Kairi, remember what you said before?" he said. "I'm always with you, too. I'll come back to you. I promise!"

"I know you will!"

He had hold of her hand across it and he held on for as long as the ground allowed and a little past that.

She went back and he did not.

She was on the island, and it was whole, and she was the only person on it.

She went up the beach and across the bridge and back, and then she went into the cave, and the door at the back of it was shut and had no handle on it and looked like a piece of rock that somebody had leaned there.

The drawing was on the wall beside it where he had left it. A boy holding out a star-shaped fruit to a girl, badly, in a hand she knew.

She found a stone on the floor with an edge on it and knelt down and added her half of it. It took her some time and was not much better. The girl holding one out to him.

Then she sat down on the floor of the cave and cried. "But, uh," Goofy said, "where do we start lookin' for that there door to the light?"

"We've gotta find Riku and King Mickey," Sora said.

"Well, now what do we do?" Donald said.

The three of them were standing in a wide green field under an open sky with a road running away across it and over a hill, and none of them had ever been there, and none of them knew what was at the other end of the road or whether anything was.

Then a dog came past them at a run with a letter in his mouth.

He did not stop when they called him. He went straight down the road and kept going. "Gawrsh, that's the king's seal!" Goofy said.

"Hey," Sora shouted after him, "have you seen King Mickey?"

"Guys, let's go!"

They ran after him.

A Fragmentary Passage

Lanterns on the Main Road

She was already walking, and had been for a long while.

The road went down into a valley and then up again through trees, and the trees were coming apart. Lanterns hung along it at long intervals, not enough of them, and the light each one gave reached about as far as the next. At the edges of the path the ground had gone to blue crystal where the world had begun to fail. Above her, pieces of buildings hung in the air with nothing holding them, at the height they had been standing at when whatever happened happened.

The castle stood at the top of the valley where the trees ended.

She knew it. That was the trouble with it. She stood on the road and looked at it for a long while without going any closer, and then made herself start walking again.

"Why is Cinderella's world here in the darkness?"

Nobody answered her. She went on saying things anyway, because she had been down here long enough that the habit had stopped being strange. "There's no 'time' in the realm of darkness," she said. "I walk on and on without end. In the realm of light, do days or years pass with each step? I know something has started to go wrong. I must hurry."

The road fell in ahead of her while she was still on it, and took the way up to the castle with it.

"I guess I know which way I'm going."

Something in her chest moved, which had not happened in a while, and she stopped walking to notice it. "I haven't felt my heart stir in a long time," she said. "Something about this place. It looks like worse things are stirring!"

The thing that came out of the trees was called a Dark Hide. She put it down and went on.

The way the road left her was down into the town, and the town under the castle had been a town.

The houses were still standing and the doors were shut. There were stalls in the market with nobody at them and nothing on them. In the middle of the square a fountain stood with its water stopped, not drained, stopped, holding the shape it had been making.

She walked the length of it. She kept to the middle of the road. "I took it for granted," she said. "I thought I had nothing in life to lose. Here, too. Everyone in this world thought that they were safe. Not just the people, but the dog waiting for his owner, the cat curled up in her nook. So much life. Trees and flowers. There's no deeper sadness than discovering all that you knew is gone. The grief in this place is too much to fathom. That's enough. I can't keep on wishing for the past."

Somewhere above her the clock on the castle had moved, and the road had gone when it moved, and standing in the empty square she put those two things in order. "The road collapsed when the clock advanced," she said. "If only I'd made it in time. But there is no time in this place, only the clock."

She went and found a gear of it and hit the gear until the clock turned the other way, and the road came back, most of it.

"I knew it."

At the castle gate she turned round and looked back down at the town.

"Not even memories are safe from the darkness."

"What I wouldn't give to really turn back time," she said. "To spend one more night beneath the stars with my best friends. I'm doing it again."

There was a man standing on the road ahead of her.

It was Terra. He was the right height and he stood the way Terra stood, and he was looking at her, and he did not speak. She got closer and he stayed where he was and went on not speaking. "It can't be," she said. "What are you doing here? You should be in the realm of light. Oh no! Did you not make it out? Don't tell me. Has the realm of light. Why won't you say anything to me?"

He gave her nothing. She stood in front of him and arrived at an explanation on her own, out loud, the way she had been arriving at everything for a while. "So what are you, a memory among these shadows?" she said. "Are you here to try and tell me not to lose heart?"

Then he was not on the road any more. "The world keeps our thoughts alive," she said, to the place where he had been. "But where did the people who lived here go, once their world was taken away? At least they're not here. So, they haven't fallen to darkness. I'll take what solace I can from that."

She took what solace she could from it, and walked on out of the world.

The Glass Coffin

The next place had a cottage in it, small, with seven of most things inside.

"Another world that was lost to the darkness?"

She went past the cottage and up through the trees behind it, and stopped.

"Is that?"

There was a coffin in the clearing, made of glass, and there was a boy asleep in it.

"Ven!?"

She went down on the grass beside it and put a hand flat on the lid and left it there.

What she said to him she did not say out loud.

"Ven. What did you come here to tell me? I know I promised to wake you up. I'm sorry. But I have to find a way home before I can help you. I just want you to know that it's been you that keeps my heart strong. Keeps the dark away."

He gave her nothing either.

Then the coffin was empty, and then the coffin was gone.

What was there instead was a mirror standing upright in the clearing with her in it.

"It's a mirror. What!?"

Her reflection moved before she did, and took hold of her, and pulled.

Three Mirrors and a Face

The place on the other side of the glass looked like two places at once, and she had been in both of them. Part of it was the room behind the queen's mirror. Part of it was the cell under the queen's castle.

Three mirrors came up out of nothing around her, identical, and stood there a moment, and then drifted apart to three separate places and settled.

She looked down at herself and there was no reflection in any of them.

"What just happened?"

She went back to the way she had come in and it was not a way any more.

"Those mirrors. Maybe they're a clue."

"Is this what it means to face your demons?"

The thing that came out of the first mirror was her.

Not a shape like her. Her, at her own height, in her own clothes, holding the Master's Defender, or something the same shape as it. The only difference anywhere on it was the eyes, which were a lighter blue.

It spoke to her. She listened to the whole of it without moving.

Then she answered it.

"That's not true! My heart is strong! I'll prove it!"

She fought it. She had said she would prove it, and the fight was the proof of it, and she did not stop anywhere in the middle. "Terra, Ven, and now my own phantom?" she said, afterwards. "What could it all mean?"

Then the second mirror gave her back to herself, and she did that one too. Then the third did the same, and she did that one as well. "That's all of them," she said. "Terra and Ven didn't have anything to say. But my shadow. She wanted to destroy me."

She stood in the middle of the three mirrors with her reflection back in them and said the rest of it to nobody.

"Never would have thought I'd become my own worst enemy. I've talked to myself a lot since falling into these shadows. But with the phantom, it's as though all of my doubts have gained a voice of their own. She's the weakness in my heart. I know I'm alone here. Have the uncountable hours in the shadows whittled away the courage I never really had? I'm losing this fight. The darkness has found the cracks in my heart. Is this the last apparition before it takes me over?"

Then she went out through the mirror.

The voice did not stop when she left it.

The Road Is Thorns Now

"Another world I know."

It had been a dark forest under a mountain. It was the same forest now, with thorns grown through it, closing every way except one. The one went up. It ran through open ground first, then over rock, and then to the foot of the mountain itself.

Two figures were on the path ahead of her, some way up, walking. "Terra. Ven. Are they phantoms?" she said, already moving. "I don't care if they are, or if I fall into the darkness. I miss them!"

The thorns came across the path in front of her.

"Get out of my way!"

She cut through them. Something stood up out of the ground behind them and she went through that too.

"You really think you can keep me away from my friends?"

At the foot of the mountain there were more of them than she could count, standing in the open ground, waiting.

"Okay then."

She got through those as well, the ones in front and then the ones behind those, and she came off the open ground still going uphill, onto the rock, where the two figures had been walking.

"Terra. Ven."

"Aqua, you're."

She stopped where she was. Nothing wearing a face had ever finished a sentence before.

"Terra. You spoke?"

He stayed where he was.

"Can you see me?"

"Of course! I see Ven too."

That stopped him.

"Ven? He's here?"

He turned his head as he said it, toward the place where the boy was standing and had been standing the whole time. He looked straight through him and went on looking, waiting to be told which direction to try next. "Terra, what's wrong?" she said. "Don't you see him?"

He did not answer that. He asked something else instead.

"Where are we?"

"A world the darkness has consumed. It's Enchanted Dominion."

"Consumed? The worlds fell?"

She heard how that sounded, and she had just come out of a room with three of her own faces in it. "What's gotten into you? How do I know that you're Terra? And not the weakness that's in my heart playing more tricks?" she said. "Ven! Please say something."

The boy said nothing.

"Aqua, listen. I promise this is me. But I'm not myself."

"What do you mean?"

He told her carefully, as a man explains a thing he has had a long time to work out.

"You're using the name 'Terra.' That means you're seeing me the way that you remember me. But your heart is just painting the picture that it so wants to see. The real me is lost in shadow."

"Then you're here, trapped in the realm of darkness."

He shook his head, and he did it in the direction of her voice rather than in the direction of her.

"No. My heart has ties to the dark. That must be why we can talk. But I can't see anything, Aqua. If you say Ven is there, then he's like me, an illusion created by your heart."

Then, after a moment, on its own:

"I think."

"I understand," she said. "Then, you and Ven are safe in the outside world?"

"That's good. But, how did you find me?"

"I looked here. And heard you in the darkness."

"Right, but why does your heart have ties to the darkness now?" she said. "What did you mean 'lost in shadow'?"

"Forget about me. Aqua, Xehanort is trying to locate Ven."

"He'll never find him. I hid Ven well," she said. "I think the reason he's not talking to me here, is because he's still there sleeping."

"This 'place,'" said the voice she had been talking to. "Is it the Chamber of Waking?"

"Yes," she said, and then heard herself. "Who are you? Really."

"You don't know? My name."

Then whatever was in him lost the front of it for a second, and the man came back up through his own face and got a few words out with the second he had.

"No, I can't control."

"Terra!"

She had started forward and he got a hand up to stop her.

"Aqua! Get back!"

"Silence!"

He said the rest of it over the top of that, fast, all in one go, because he had it and did not expect to keep it.

"I messed up. Xehanort is part of me. Now he's using me so you'll tell him where you hid Ven!"

"Still you struggle!"

After that the two of them went at each other inside one body, and what she stood watching was a man losing an argument in a place she could not get to.

"I won't give in! Aqua! You have to."

Then he stopped struggling, and it was not him standing there any more.

"Now you can be one with the darkness!"

Hands came up out of the ground and took hold of her, and took hold of the boy who was standing where the man could not see him.

She could reach one of them and she went for the boy first, which she would have done every time, and the hands had him before she got there.

"Ven."

The man came back up one more time, and this time he was not warning her about anything.

"Aqua!"

"That is enough!"

Chains of light came off him and put themselves between her and the hands.

"Terra."

Then the ground took her, and she went down away from him, and she was still talking while she went.

"Now I can be one with darkness."

A Warm, Familiar Light

"Aqua, are you okay?"

The voice was not hers and it was not Terra's, and it was the first voice in a very long time that had asked her a question and then waited for the answer.

She got up onto one elbow and then onto her feet. The path she had been standing on was somewhere above her now, and the two figures were not on it, and the thorns had closed over wherever it had been.

"Mickey, how did. Terra! Ven!"

She was still turning round looking for the two of them when he stopped her.

What came along the ground was not a crowd.

It came as one thing. They had pulled themselves into a single column that turned over on itself as it moved. "No time to talk," he said.

"Dwellers of darkness."

He was already past her. "They're called Heartless!"

They fought it together.

She kept looking. She had been fighting alone long enough that she went on turning to cover ground nobody was leaving open, and every time she turned there was somebody already standing in it. "Better not push our luck," he said, when it was down. Then, in a completely different voice: "Gosh. I never thought I'd find ya in the realm of darkness, that's for sure. So, um, what happened?"

She did not answer that for a while, and when she did she answered a different question.

"Have you seen Terra or Ven?"

"No, just you."

She looked at the ground for a moment, at the place where the two of them had been standing.

"I'm sorry. The darkness in this place, it's getting to me."

"Oh. But, you'll be okay," he said, and he said it flatly, as a fact about her rather than as encouragement.

"Right."

"Say, we've been looking for ya a long time," he said. "How come you're in this place?"

She did not answer that either. She had a question of her own that she had been carrying for the whole of the walk and had never had anybody to put it to, and she asked it the way people ask a thing they have decided in advance not to flinch at.

"First tell me: how long's it been in the realm of light?"

He told her.

"About ten years."

She gave him the account in order, the way somebody delivers a thing rehearsed alone and never said out loud, and she began it with the word she had chosen for ten years.

"Interesting. After we last spoke, I took Ven somewhere safe, and then I went after Terra. But Terra was about to fall to darkness, so I had one choice. I stayed here in hopes of giving him a chance."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I didn't know."

"What 'bout you? What could've brought you here?" she said. "Has something happened? In the realm of light?"

He told her standing, in one go, without stopping to check whether she was following.

"It's the Heartless. They've been attacking worlds and taking their hearts. And worlds with no hearts vanish into darkness. But if we can lock the door between the two realms, light and dark, from both sides, we can protect the other worlds. So ya see, I came here to find the key on this side. Turns out, it's not so easy getting into the realm of darkness. The points you can cross have become unstable. It's only when a world gets consumed, that an entrance appears in the realm between. So, I waited for my chance, to sneak in. But hey, when I got here, I felt a warm, familiar light. I followed it to find my way, to you."

She had the charm out in her hand before he had finished. "The charm. So they were helping," she said. "Terra and Ven brought you and I back together again."

"Yeah!"

She put the charm away.

"But, the worlds are still in danger. Terra, did he make it back to the realm of light?"

"We still haven't found him."

She took that without any change in her face at all. "I see. Well, wherever he is, he's fighting," she said. "He'll beat his darkness. And I know he wants me to fight too."

"I think you're right. He'll be just fine."

"Yes. But what about Ven?" she said. "He won't wake up unless I'm there with him. I have to go. I have to find a way back to the realm of light."

"Good. Then let's locate that key and go home together!"

She looked at him for a second before she asked the obvious thing, because she had already worked out what the answer probably was.

"Does that mean you know an exit?"

"Well, uh, I was so busy finding a way in, that I didn't give a lot of thought to where there'd be a way out." He said this without any embarrassment whatever. "But, together we're sure to find one!"

"You haven't changed at all."

Before they started down he said a thing she had not heard anybody say in a very long time.

"May our hearts be our guiding key."

He caught her looking at him and explained it, which she had not asked him to do.

"Keyblade wielders used to say those words to each other. And now, it's something I like to try and remember."

"There's a phrase no one's used in ages."

She said it as a fact about the phrase. He took it as agreement and started down the slope.

"So. Ready?"

"Ready!"

The Same Boys

The way through was a portal, then a cavern that went on a good deal longer than a cavern needs to, then sand underfoot, then a light at the far end of it bright enough to walk toward.

They walked toward it and came out.

What was on the other side was an island.

It was made of sand and it was floating with nothing underneath it, and there were palm trees round the edge of it leaning out over the drop. A ring of large sharp purple structures stood up around the whole of it. A long way below, much bigger, another piece of land hung in the air doing nothing.

The sky over it was blue.

She stopped at the edge of the sand and stood there. "So many worlds have been lost. And now they're trapped here in the dark," he said, and then he saw her face. "Wait, you know this place, Aqua?"

"This is where I met those children."

He waited, so she gave him the rest of it, and it came out in one sentence.

"Yes. I visited once, and I met two boys I considered passing the Keyblade on to. But because Terra had already given one of them the power, I didn't."

"Aqua." Something had changed in how he was standing. "What were the boys' names?"

"They were Sora and Riku."

"I see," he said. "We're getting warm."

"Huh?"

"Welp, it's Sora and Riku who've been helpin' me," he said. "We're tryin' to get that door shut for good."

"The same boys?"

He was already looking past her at the far end of the beach, working something out, and he answered her without really answering her.

"Aqua, if this is where my friends first got the Keyblade, it also must be where we'll find its counterpart. The Keyblade of darkness has gotta be here on the dark side of their world."

"We'll have to hurry. C'mon!"

There was a fight on the way across the sand. They took it between them and got through it, and neither of them said anything about it afterwards.

"Let's keep goin'."

The place he was taking her to was a cave at the back of the beach. She had been in it before, once. "I bet it's in here," he said.

It was standing in the middle of the floor of it, upright, in the dark.

"There!"

"Is that what you're after?"

"Yep, it's just the key I was looking for," he said, taking it. "A Keyblade from the dark realm!"

"A Keyblade of darkness."

He said the old lines first, the way a man says something he learned before he was old enough to understand it.

"The door of darkness, tied by two keys. The door of darkness, to seal the light."

Then he said the rest in his own voice.

"Welp, we've got the keys. Now, we find the ones to close the door."

He explained the mechanism on the walk back down the beach.

"The door between the two realms, it won't let a heart with light pass through. So only darkness keeps spilling out. We can lock the door by using the two Keyblades, but we need help on both sides to get the door shut."

"Sorry?"

She had already worked out what the arrangement cost and had already decided which end of it she wanted.

"Well, then, since you'll be doing the locking, let me be the one to close the door."

"Sorry, but the job's taken, by somebody else."

"Huh?"

He took her to it.

"Is that the one?"

"Yep, the door to Kingdom Hearts." He looked up at it while he talked, and he talked for a while, because it was the part he had come here to do and he wanted it said properly. "Welp, it's not the Kingdom Hearts you know. Not exactly. But even though it's smaller, it's still the heart of many worlds. And even if it's not a complete Kingdom Hearts, we definitely can't leave it open like this, or darkness will escape and destroy the remaining worlds. It's time. With this key and Sora's in the realm of light, we're gonna close this door. Now, all we need is Riku."

The Shore

The boy came through onto the sand from somewhere on the other side, and she knew him from one afternoon a long time ago and from a name she had said out loud not long before.

"Sora, Riku."

"There! That's everybody! Come on, Aqua."

The swarm came together over the water.

It did not arrive as a crowd. It gathered, pulling itself in from every direction until it was one mass, and then it turned, and when it turned it went up into a column and the blue sky over the island went dark red.

It went for the boy. "Oh no!"

"Back off!"

She put the Keyblade into it and the spell after the Keyblade and tied the thing where it stood. The tie held at both ends. It held the swarm off the boy and it held her to the swarm, and when the swarm went it took her with it.

"Aqua!"

She saw him start toward her and got the words out first.

"Go without me!"

"No, I."

He did not get to the end of it. The distance between them had already stopped being a distance anybody could cross.

"Aqua!"

He said it again, and by then she could not hear which direction it came from.

"Aqua."

Then the thing threw her, and the island came up under her, and when she got her head up the two of them were on opposite sides of a great deal of water.

She fought it on her own and beat it.

Then she stood on the sand with it gone and said the rest of it out loud, to nobody.

"The battle for the realm of light is not won. Thanks to Terra and Mickey, I know what's at stake. I'm not afraid. I will face the long darkness. The next time someone wanders into the realm of darkness, I'll be here. A light to cut through all the shadows. I will be their wayfinder. And one day, I'll return to Terra and Ven. I am Master Aqua. And that's a promise."

Somewhere behind her and out of her sight, the door was shut.

She was lying on her back on the sand by then, because she had stopped being able to stand up and had not particularly minded.

"It's beautiful. The stars are out. Terra, Ven. Just me again."

Then something changed in the sky and she read it.

"They did it. The worlds are being restored."

Her hands were empty.

The Master's Defender was not in them and had not been for a while.

The sand gave under her and she went down through it, and she said the phrase he had given her, to somebody who was no longer in the world with her.

"'May our hearts be our guiding key.' You'll know where I am."

Chain of Memories

The Forgetting

The road went nowhere. Then the ways they might have taken stopped being several and became one way, and the one way ended at a castle.

Goofy stopped short of the doors. "You sure we should just barge in like this?"

They went in, and the castle took what they knew at the threshold. Donald had his spells on one side of the door and did not have them on the other, and none of the three noticed, because losing a thing makes less noise than having it. "Looks like nobody's home," said Donald.

"Okay, but we should shut the door behind us. Sora!"

What went was not only the spells. The further in they walked the less they were carrying, and the book Jiminy kept emptied itself as they climbed, a line at a time, without anybody watching it happen.

There was a figure in a hood standing in the first room, and it did not speak, then or ever.

Donald went at it the way he had always gone at things, and found out in public what the door had done to him. "It must be a Heartless! Let's see how it handles my magic! THUNDER! Huh? That's odd. THUNDER! THUNDER! Umm. FIRE! Blizzard? I don't get it. Why isn't my magic working?"

They got through it anyway. Afterwards they stood taking stock, and it was Goofy who noticed that something had changed which was not inside them. "Hey, wait a second. Donald, where'd you get the new duds?"

"You tell us! When you opened the door, there was this weird light, and the rest is a big blank."

A man in a black coat was standing where nobody had been standing.

He explained the house rules without being asked for them. "I should think it's obvious. The moment you set foot in this castle, you forgot every spell and ability you knew. Though the forgetting does not end there. In this place, to find is to lose and to lose is to find. That is the way of things in Castle Oblivion."

"Yes. Here you will meet people you know. People you miss."

Riku's name came into it, and the man in the coat picked the name up and made an offer out of it.

"Do you want to find him? If you do."

Then he had a card in his hand. He held it out and waited, and Sora took it, because of what had been said just before it.

"I sampled your memories. And from them, I made this. This is the key to reuniting with those you hold dear."

"A promise," he said. "Use that card and press on. You will find your friend. Hold the card before you. The door will open, and beyond it a new world."

"Yes. Go, Sora. To lose and claim anew, or to claim anew only to lose."

Then he was not there.

Beyond the door was Traverse Town, and it was the wrong Traverse Town in a way Sora could not immediately name. The man in the coat was there ahead of him to name it for him.

"It isn't reality that you see. This town is an illusion conceived by your memories ingrained in that card."

Then he taught him the castle.

The rule was that his friends were cards now, and that he would have to pick them up off the ground to have them at all, and that spending one spent it. Spent cards came back when he wanted them back badly enough. Each time they took longer coming. "Cards are the hearts of your friends," the man said. "Everything in this castle is ruled by cards."

"The strength of your heart brought back the lost cards. You can recall spent cards at any time, you need only wish it. But each time you do, the cards will take longer to return. The cards are by no means unlimited. Use them wisely."

Sora asked him something. Whatever it was, he did not get it answered. "That is for you to ponder. Master the cards and make your way through the castle. From here on, you walk alone."

"Boo."

There was a second man in the same coat, and he had come in behind all of them.

"I got bored, what with you hogging the hero."

"Looks like it's my show now, Keyblade master. My name is Axel. Commit it to memory."

Donald put himself in front of Sora, which was the first thing anybody had done in that castle without being told to. "He won't! We won't let him!"

"Good, you learn quick. So, Sora, now that we're on a first-name basis, don't go dying on me!"

They fought, and Sora won it, and the man got up off the floor of his own defeat as though winning had not been the object.

"After an introduction like that, you don't think I'd just give up the ghost?"

"Congratulations, Sora. You passed! You're ready to take on Castle Oblivion. Follow your memories. Trust what you remember, seek what you forget, and you will find someone very special."

Sora asked who. The answer went around the question and came back out the other side of it without touching it. "Well, I don't know. You'll just have to give some more thought to who's most important to you. Our most precious memories lie deep in our hearts, out of reach. But you can find yours, Sora."

"The light within the darkness. You've lost sight of it, Sora. You've forgotten forgetting."

"Would you like a hint?"

Sora said no. "That's my kind of answer. Just what I'd expect from the Keyblade master. But be forewarned. When your sleeping memories awaken, you may no longer be you."

Then he was gone as well, and the stairs went up.

What the Cards Remember

He climbed five floors and every one of them was a place he had been before. Wonderland. The Coliseum. Agrabah. Halloween Town. The inside of the whale.

None of them was the place itself. Each was built out of what he remembered of it, and he came out of every one of them carrying less than he had carried in.

Somewhere out of his hearing, two of them were talking about him.

"Wow, Axel, you seem pretty intrigued by this Sora kid."

He did not trouble to deny it, so she went at it from the other end.

"I haven't made up my mind, but I'd like to know what's on yours."

He had been thinking about a thing that had happened to the boy once and had not taken. She laid out the ordinary case first, the way a person does when they are working toward the exception.

"People who lose their hearts also lose their minds, their feelings. They're consumed by the darkness."

"So it's the strength of his heart that intrigues you, the heart chosen by the Keyblade."

She said the last of it lightly, and left it standing.

"The heart is a mysterious thing, Axel."

A fourth coat arrived among them and opened with the fight she had just lost.

"Axel is right. That was an ungainly performance, Larxene. Humbled by someone of such limited significance. You shame yourself and the Organization."

"I came to lend a hand. I remain unconvinced of any potential in this 'hero' you've been coddling. Perhaps an experiment would put my doubts to rest."

Somebody asked him what he thought he was going to do to the boy. "I'm a scientist. Experimentation is what I do."

"Follower? I'll have you know he's the product of much research."

"Hmph. I see I'm wasting my time."

He did not leave on that, because she said something to his back.

"Hold your tongue!"

"You're hardly one to talk, you conniving little."

When he had gone she rolled her shoulders and put a better face on the fight than the fight had earned.

"Whew. Throwing the battle back there really wore me out."

"Throwing the battle? Looks to me like you plain old lost the battle."

"H-How dare you! You just don't appreciate the finer nuances of."

By the fifth floor the thing they had been doing to him from underneath had begun to take, and she reported it as a gardener reports a planting.

"It looks like Sora's memories have taken root, just as we planned."

Whose turn it was to go up next became an argument, conducted in the tone of people dividing something that could not be divided twice.

"Only if it's my turn to play. You had your fun on the first floor."

"Fine. But who says I can't have my way with him first?"

He said something that gave him away, and she caught it.

"Do I detect a soft spot?"

"I'm not going to break the toy, Axel, just play with it. I'm not dumb."

Then she said the other thing, the one that had nothing to do with the boy, and she said it as though it were already settled between them.

"So you're in on it, too? Well, keep it under your hood until the time is right."

Somewhere in those five floors Sora started remembering a girl.

He had not mentioned her before. Jiminy, who had been keeping the book and watching it empty, noticed that this one had gone the other way.

"Hey, Sora! Did you remember anything else about that girl?"

"Well, I'll be! I think that's the first time you've ever mentioned her."

Then he worked out which way the traffic was going, and said so to all of them.

"Anyone noticed something odd? Sora's remembering things, instead of forgetting them. Hmm. Maybe forgetting things is the only way to reach the memories buried deeper down."

"Tell us about her! Talking about it might help you remember."

Her name was Naminé. While it was arriving, something else was going, and nobody in the room had the equipment to notice a subtraction.

After the sixth floor she came up to meet him herself.

"Ooh, aren't you clever. The name's Larxene. Are you enjoying your stay in Castle Oblivion? I bet it's nice to peel all the worthless memories away, and awaken the true memories that lie deep in your heart."

"But you're still forgetting something, aren't you, Sora? The most important thing. When that poor girl hears you've forgotten her name, she'll be heartbroken."

He worked out from that that the girl was in trouble. That was the working out she had come up six floors to arrange. "Uh-huuuuh. The bad guys are holding her deep within the castle. And you, the hero, have to go save her. Sadly, there's a catch. I'M a bad guy, so you have to go through me!"

Then she took something small out of the air and held it where he could see it, and it was his, and he had been wearing it the whole way up.

"Tsk, tsk. You've been wearing it all this time, and you forgot? No, you couldn't have. The memory is engraved in your heart. Now think, Sora. What oh what could it be? Who gave it to you?"

"That's right! Free the memory from your heart!"

He got most of the way to it and stopped, and she finished it for him, which was not a kindness.

"Well, it's about time. That's right. Naminé. She's the one that gave you the cheesy good luck charm. Not that you remembered. No surprise, seeing as you forgot her NAME. Talk about heartless! It'd serve you right if I smashed this piece of junk!"

He said it was precious to him.

"Precious? Spare me! Ten seconds ago you didn't even know what it was!"

He beat her, and she took it about as well as she took anything.

"Hey, you're not half bad. Guess you really are a hero. A heartless hero!"

"Does it hurt 'cause it's true? Grow up, Sora. If you're going to be a baby, then here, play with these. They're more cards made from your memories. Say 'thank you' like a good boy. Ta-ta!"

Somewhere in that stretch he met her.

She was standing in a place he half knew, and she spoke to him as though the two of them had a long history behind them, and he could not find the history but could not find the absence of it either.

"Sora. You came for me."

"I could say the same. But I messed up. I really wanted to see you, but not like this."

"I was alone for so long. I couldn't bear it anymore. So I beckoned your heart to lead you here. And I'm so glad you found me. But your heart, I had to."

She stopped there and did not go back to it. Then she said a stranger thing, and said it as an apology.

"Thank you. Oh, Sora, forgive me. I'm not supposed to be in this picture."

"That's not me. I'm not in your heart. I'm not in anyone's heart. I never have been."

"Was it really me you came for?"

The voice that said the next thing was hers and was coming from somewhere else, and it was arguing with the girl in front of him.

"No, Sora! Don't believe me!"

"Think, Sora. Think of the person who's most special to you. See that faint glimmer way in the back of your heart? That's a piece of your memory, Sora. Call out to it! No matter how far away the light gets, your heart's voice will always reach it."

"No. The girl you care about, the one who was always with you. It's not me. It's her."

Sora took one thing away from all of it. She was being held somewhere above him, and he went at that hard enough that the other two started watching him instead of the stairs.

"Can you blame him? After all this time, he finally remembers Naminé, only to find out she's being held prisoner!"

Later, when it had gone on longer, Donald said the other half of it. "Before we came to this castle, you didn't even know her name. Now she's all you think about."

"Sora. What's happening to you?"

Goofy asked the question the way he asked everything, without any edge on it at all, and it went in further than the edge would have.

"You always get real touchy when it comes to Naminé. Did you ever ask yourself why?"

The Replica and the Traitors Beneath

Four more floors went by the same way. Atlantica. Neverland. Hollow Bastion. The wood with the hundred acres in it.

In the one that was Hollow Bastion, Goofy stopped and named it, and got it right, out of a memory of his own that the castle had not taken yet.

"It's that castle I mentioned earlier. I'm sure I didn't make it up. That was the castle where Sora used the Keyblade to free Kairi's heart. Then he disappeared for a while, remember? I'll never forget how worried I was."

Later, with nothing leading up to it, Goofy asked the other question about that time. "Sora, when you turned into a Heartless, did you forget about us?"

Donald, meaning to be encouraging, went for the three names and came up with two of them. "Have a little faith, Sora! You guys used to be inseparable, right? You, Riku, and Kai. Kai. And, um, what's-her-name."

"The tenth floor already. We've come a long way."

The charm came out again somewhere around there, and this time it was Donald holding it and Goofy looking over at it, and neither of them was in any doubt about whose it was.

"This is. Naminé's good luck charm, isn't it?"

"Naminé's good luck charm!"

Separately, and with more alarm in it, Goofy found the other one. "Riku's good luck charm turned into a card?!"

The trouble that came next was that two people had the same memory, and Donald was the one who could not let it alone. "Of."

"So you and Riku had the same memory? Umm."

Sora took that badly, and Goofy stepped in between the two of them without moving.

"That's not what Donald meant. We're just worried."

"Ahh, somebody tell me what's going on here."

"Of course it matters! Don't you think it's weird that you and Riku have the same memory? You can't both be right."

Riku was standing in front of him.

He was the right height and he had the right voice and he used it the way Riku used it, and what he said with it was that Sora had stopped thinking about him some time ago.

"Don't sound so happy to see me, Sora. Let me know if I'm getting in the way of something more important."

"Spare me. I bet you'd all but forgotten about me."

Sora said something about Naminé, which was the wrong thing, and it opened the rest of it. "But not anymore, right? Now it's Naminé this, Naminé that. You don't care about me any more than you care about how Naminé feels."

"Never even gave it a thought, did you? Just 'cause you want to see Naminé doesn't mean it goes both ways."

Sora took it for a joke and was told it was not one. "Who's joking? Naminé doesn't even want to look at you."

"Ask your memories. If you bothered to remember why Naminé left the islands."

Sora asked what that was supposed to mean, and got an instruction rather than an answer. "Go home, Sora. I can take care of Naminé. Anyone who goes near her, goes through me!"

"Since when have you cared about me? Naminé's not the only one who's sick of you."

Sora did not leave. "Can't take a hint, can you? Leave, Sora."

Sora said he had come to get him out, and that landed worst of all. "Hah! What makes you think I need rescuing?"

They fought. Sora fought him the way you fight somebody you are trying not to hurt, and it went on longer than it needed to for that reason.

"Sora, are you okay?"

"He sure was acting strange. It's almost as if the Heartless were controlling him again."

She stopped it before it got any further, and this time she was in the room, and the difference between this and the other time was audible.

"It's because I went into your memories and."

"Stop! Riku, no!"

He did not stop, so she said it again with everything she had behind it, and that turned out to be enough. "I said, STOP!"

Afterwards Jiminy found the reading of it that let everybody keep walking. "Hey, Riku is still your friend, and that's no mistake."

"I know he said some awful things to you back there. But don't forget, we're in Castle Oblivion. People lose their memory here a little bit at a time. Riku's probably forgotten that he and you were friends. That's all."

"That'd be my guess. So instead of being sad, let's figure out a way to make Riku remember. It's not like you to mope. Let's work together and get through this."

Sora said something in the right tone, and Jiminy took it and ran with it.

"That's it, that's the spirit! Good, good! Now you're sounding heroic!"

Then he looked down at the book, and that was the part of his job he was worse at being cheerful about.

"This is awful. Our memories are fading fast. We'd better hurry, Sora. I'm sure you and Riku can talk things out."

Ten floors up, he did the sum out loud.

"And we've lost ten floors' worth of memories. Sora, it's not too late. We should turn back."

Nobody turned back. Donald said the thing underneath it, and it was not about the ten floors behind them. "So. The higher we go, the more we forget? What if we forget everything and can't get it back?"

Underneath all of that the coats had begun to come apart.

Marluxia found Vexen and closed his project for him.

"That will do. Your project has failed, Vexen. Do not disappoint us again."

"Disappoint YOU? You presume too much, No. 11. I am No. 4, and I will not stand for your snide remarks!"

The numbers were the wrong ground to fight it on, and Marluxia moved off them onto the ground he had prepared. "Yes, you will. This castle and the girl Naminé have been entrusted to ME. Defy me, and you defy the Organization."

"In the name of the Organization, I pronounce your project a failure. This lapse must be reported to the Superior."

Something went out of Vexen at the last word of that, and what he said next he said in a voice nobody in the castle had heard him use.

"No. Please, don't! I beg of you! Leave him out of this!"

The price of the lapse was set immediately and it was not a punishment, it was an errand.

"You must eliminate Sora personally."

"No. I mean. But. Why would you want that?"

He did not get an answer to that either.

In another room the two who were planning something else were taking the boy's measure again, and the thing Axel kept coming back to was the thing that had happened to him once and had not held.

"He became a Heartless, Larxene, and you know what happens to people who do."

"Right. But that didn't happen to Sora. He held on to his feelings, even as a Heartless. Only one other man ever managed to do that."

"What makes his heart shine like that? What sleeps in its most secret depths?"

She said something dismissive about hearts, and he agreed with her and turned it into the reason all of them existed.

"Maybe so. But unlocking its secrets is the whole reason we, the Organization, exist."

"Let's see how far our boy will go, then. Think it's time for another round?"

She was already leaving when he put the conditions on it.

"Remember, Larxene. Our job is to deliver him in one piece."

"Don't break him."

She wanted to know what that was worth.

"He's partly one of us."

"Then you won't mind the warning. Remember, Sora is the key. We need him if we're going to take the Organization."

Then she was gone, and he said the last of it to the room, which was a habit of his.

"You would have been wise to do the same, Larxene."

Vexen came up again, and he did not come up alone, and Axel counted the company before he said anything to any of them.

"Can we help you, Vexen? It's not very often we see you topside."

"Whatever, Vexen. Do what you want. But cut the act. Testing Sora is just an excuse to test your little follower."

Then he gave him something, with both hands, the way a man gives a gift he expects to be opened somewhere he will not have to watch.

"Have your fun. But take this with you. A wild card to keep the game fresh. Now don't tell me I don't respect my elders."

Larxene had an opinion about the follower and Axel spoke up for it. That surprised her and was meant to.

"Now Larxene. Shouldn't we give Vexen the benefit of the doubt? Riku could be hiding as part of some elaborate plan to lure Sora deeper into the castle."

The follower had stopped doing what it was told, and she came to say so.

"I knew this would happen. Everything's an experiment with you."

"What he is is a toy."

"Now what, Vexen? Looks like your little toy isn't taking orders anymore."

Vexen said something back. She took it for an excuse. "Oh, of course! Why didn't I see it before? Terribly sorry, Vexie. I guess I'm just used to you and your research being more funny than formidable."

"Aww, are you sulking? Ha ha, you are so half-baked."

Then she stopped enjoying it long enough to name the thing she had been circling, and she left it in the room with him.

"Unless I'm mistaken, treason is a CAPITAL crime."

The Other Side of the Heart

The one who came up to meet him on the eleventh floor came as a creditor.

"That's no way to greet a stranger, Sora. I am Vexen. I've come to collect your debt."

"Do you owe him something?"

Nobody answered Goofy. The man answered Sora instead, and the answer was worse than the question.

"Oh, but you do. You owe me for reuniting you with your former friend."

"Yes. I am the one who brought Riku to you."

Sora asked him what that meant. "I see no need to tell you. Why trouble you in your final moments?"

Sora beat him, and it did not appear to cost him anything he minded losing. He got up in the manner of a man whose experiment had run to completion.

"Splendid! As expected, you don't die so easily."

Then he had a card, and it had been made out of Sora while the two of them were fighting. "You'll yet have your chance. As we fought, I delved deep into your memory, and look what I found. This is a card crafted from memories locked in the other side of your heart. If you want to fight me for real, then step into the world within this card!"

The card opened onto a town at evening, and the town was Twilight Town, and Sora had never been there.

Jiminy said so out loud, because it broke the only rule the castle had kept so far. "But that can't be right! Up until now we've only been to places in Sora's memory."

The man in the coat let him stand in it a while before he asked the question he had built the place to ask.

"Does it, now? A question, then, Sora. Which is more real to you: your memories of Naminé, or the familiarity you feel here?"

Sora did not treat it as a question. "That's enough! YOU'RE the one who changed Riku! Every word you've said is a lie! I'd never throw away my heart! I'm gonna take you down and save Riku and Naminé. That's what's in my heart!"

"Ha ha ha. The memory's wiles are cruel. In its silence, we forget. And in its perversion, it binds our hearts firmly."

"Then recall that this place was made from another side of your memory. Yes, the other side of your heart knows this place. The other side remembers."

"If you remain bound by the chains of memory, and refuse to believe your heart, then you may as well throw your heart away. You're no Keyblade master, no master of anything, just a slave to twisted memories. Just like my Riku. You're not fit to exist."

They fought again, and this one Sora had to work for, and when it ended the man was on the floor of a town nobody had been to.

"Urrgh. Such strength, even at the mercy of your memory. You ARE dangerous! You must be exterminated!"

Sora said something about putting Riku back the way he had been. That was the wrong offer to make to this particular man, and it produced the only useful thing he said all day.

"Put him back? Fool of a boy! Even now you understand nothing. The Riku you speak of has but one fate, to sink into the emptiness of darkness. And you will share that fate, Sora! If you continue to seek the girl Naminé, the shackles will tighten. You'll lose your heart and become Marluxia's pawn!"

"Marluxia? What does Naminé have to do with."

Below, the card he had handed over was read for what it was. It was a man losing his nerve in public.

"Is it just me, or has Vexen finally lost it? Now he's done something REALLY rash. What now, Axel? The show's over if Sora finds out about the other side."

Axel answered it by coming in from behind while Vexen was still talking, and putting an end to the sentence rather than to the argument.

"Hey, Sora. Sorry to cut in right when he was getting to the juicy bits."

The question Vexen got out was not a whole one. "Unnngh. Axel, wh. why?"

"You sure love to talk. It's about time you shut up, forever."

"No. Don't do it!"

Axel explained it to him first. He took his time over it, and what he said was not about Vexen at all.

"We're nobodies, Vexen. We've got no one to be, but we still 'are.' So look on the bright side. You're off the hook. Now you can be nothing instead of just being nobody."

"M-Mercy, Axel! I don't want to. go yet."

"NOW you can tell me I don't respect my elders."

Then there was no Vexen. "Nice work, Axel. Good riddance to that blabbermouth."

She said the rest of it as an admission, which was rarer with her than the killing had been with him.

"Not just Sora's. Yours too, Axel. We weren't sure if you had it in you to take out a fellow member of the Organization. Well, I guess you did. You can join the big leagues now. With the three of us, taking over the Organization will be child's play."

"Right. He wants to see Naminé, so we give him what he wants."

The Promise That Wasn't

On the twelfth floor the two of them tried to slow him down and got the first of it in the face.

"Think ahead? What is the matter with you guys? Do you want me to abandon her?!"

"Then do whatever you want! You can lay back and take a nap for all I care! I'M going to find Naminé!"

Jiminy started to say something about that. "Sora, you shouldn't talk to Donald and Goofy like."

"That's not what Donald meant. We're just worried."

Somewhere below him she was being spoken to as well, and the warning she got was dressed as manners.

"Are you, now? Well, in your fits of happiness, try not to do anything to hurt Sora's feelings. Am I clear?"

Then Larxene came up and told Sora a true thing she had been saving.

"She broke his heart. More like smashed it, really."

"Ah ha ha! You're so much fun to watch. If it's Riku you're worried about, then worry no longer. Riku was never here."

He asked what she meant by that. That was the point of saying it that way.

"You want me to tell you? Gee, I don't know. I just HATE spoilers."

Riku was in front of him again, and this time he had an argument ready. "You're the one forgetting. I told YOU to take care of her. At Kingdom Hearts, when we closed the door to darkness. Give it up, Sora. I'm not going back to the islands, and you're not changing my mind."

Sora said the names of the people at home. "You can have them. I forgot about those losers ages ago."

"What about you, Sora? Do you even remember what they all look like?"

Sora tried to and could not, and the answer came back to him from a face he trusted, in a voice that had gone gentle for it.

"Don't feel bad. That's what this castle does to you if you stay too long. You forget all the useless stuff and remember for the first time what really matters. I remembered it, Sora. The one thing most important to me. I'm staying here to protect Naminé. Nothing else matters!"

"Go ahead and try."

They fought a second time. Sora hit him and nothing came back the way it was supposed to, and the thing standing in front of him took that as a joke at Sora's expense.

"Grrr. Too bad, Sora. Nothing's coming back to me. Maybe you should try hitting a little harder."

Sora offered to go up the rest of the way together. It was the only offer he had. "What, together? That is so like you. You're always trying to worm your way into my heart!"

"Hmph, you probably forgot. It never mattered to you how I felt!"

"Enough, Sora! You'll just hurt Naminé if you go any further."

Sora asked him what he thought he was protecting her from, and got the reason instead of the answer. "Free? I'm protecting Naminé from you because it's what MY heart tells me to do. I promised her. I promised Naminé I'd keep her safe."

Then he told him what the promise was, and it was the same night, the same sky, and the same words that Sora had been carrying up twelve floors as his own. "There was a meteor shower one night when she and I were little. Naminé got scared and said, 'What if a shooting star hits the islands?' So I told her, 'If a shooting star comes this way, I'll protect you!' And then."

Sora finished it for him. "Y-Yeah. How do you know about that?"

"Liar! It was just me and her!"

Sora held out what he had been carrying since the sixth floor, and the other one went into his own pocket and produced its twin. "But. Where did you get that? Oh, I know what you're trying to pull. That's a fake. I've got the real one right here!"

"I'll teach YOU to make stuff up!"

They fought a third time and it went the way the first two had gone, and afterwards he came up off the floor still arguing, because the argument was the part of him that would not stop.

"Let ME explain this. Plain and simple. Your memory is a train wreck. You're not the one who's meant to protect Naminé, I AM. But you and your messed up memories always get in the way!"

Sora got up again. "Want some more?"

"Looks like I win."

"You're through, you fake!"

She stopped him again.

Below all of that, Axel had gone to see the girl.

"Heh heh. I know exactly how you feel. Don't get your hopes up. Nobodies can't be somebodies. But think, Naminé. I'm sure there's SOMETHING you could do."

"You're all he's got left. If you don't stop this, no one will."

She said she could not, or that it was not allowed, and he answered that by looking round the room.

"Oh, I don't think you should give up just yet. By the way, Naminé. I don't see Marluxia around. Do you?"

"There's no one here to stop you. Do it right."

Then she was gone out of the room she had been kept in, and he stood in it by himself.

"Hm hmm. Ha ha haaa! Now THIS should be good. All the actors are in place. Now, Sora! Naminé! Riku! Marluxia! Larxene! It's about time you gave me one hell of a show!"

Larxene had been waiting a long time to say the next part and she said it slowly. "All right, have it your way. It'll kill you to hear this, but I can live with that. That thing lying there is a puppet Vexen made. Nothing more than a toy. It's laughable, really. It called you a fake, but IT was the fabrication all along."

"Fake in every way. It was only finished recently. And without any past, how could it remember anything? Its memories with Naminé were planted, not real. All this time it's been picking fights with you over bogus memories. Isn't that right, Naminé? Behind that cute little face you do some awful things."

Sora said it was not true. He said it the way people say it when the arithmetic has already been done somewhere behind their eyes. "You are so STUPID. Don't you get it? Messing with people's memories is about all she's good at. She steps into people's hearts and rearranges their memory. If she wants, she can even draw new memories of things that never happened. The girl you've been dying to protect is a manipulative witch who shackles people's hearts with phony memories!"

"Lies, lies. All lies! An illusion Naminé made. Binding you in the chains of your own memory was central to our trap. It makes me tingle to think how easily you were duped. This was our chance to make the Keyblade master our puppet! We nearly had you. But that jerk Axel used Naminé to wreck everything! He betrayed us!"

Naminé said something on his behalf, and Larxene stopped bothering with Sora and turned round on her.

"Excuse me? It's a little late to grow a conscience, witch. Last I checked, YOU'RE the one who got him into this mess."

"I should tell you that I am in an EXTREMELY foul mood. Thanks to you, all our plans are toast!"

Sora said the promise still stood. He had been told inside of two minutes that the girl was a stranger, that the night had not happened and that the promise had been drawn for him like a picture, and he said it still stood.

"What what what? Do I detect DISTRESS? You don't even know her!"

"What an idiot! There is no promise, there never was! YOU ARE DELUSIONAL. Must you insist on playing the hero? Oh, whatever. It's your funeral. Nighty-night, you sham!"

Donald and Goofy came in at the top of the stairs, which settled the arithmetic.

"Right! It's always been the three of us."

"Have it your way. Thrice the pain for you means thrice the fun for me!"

The three of them put her down. She went the way the older one had gone, except that she was still talking.

"No. Nooooo!! I refuse to lose to a bunch of losers! I. I'm fading?! NO. this isn't. the way I. I won't. ALLOW."

Somewhere else in the castle a man who had not been told anything worked out most of it from an absence.

"First Vexen, and now Lexaeus is gone as well. What's to become of the Organization?"

Then she came out and stood where all of them could see her, and did the thing she had been unable to do for as long as she had been in the castle. She spoke first.

"Gawrsh, you must be Naminé! We're friends of Sora, I'm."

"Goofy, I know. And this is Donald."

Donald said something about what she had done to them, and she agreed with him before he had finished. "I don't mind. It's my fault, after all."

"I took the people and memories in Sora's heart, and little by little replaced them with false memories that I made."

Then she said the part that was for Sora, and she said it looking at him. "It was all a lie. Sora never promised me anything. Me being on the islands, that was a lie, too. This is our first meeting. I was never Sora's friend."

"I'm sorry. In your true memories, I was never there."

What she wanted was to put it back, and the obstacle she named was upstairs.

"Not right away. If we go to the thirteenth floor I can fix everything. But Marluxia."

"He said he'd keep me locked away in this castle forever if I didn't obey. I've been alone for so long."

"I'm. I'm so sorry."

Sora told her it was all right. She would not take it. "I know. I don't have the right."

So he explained why she did, and it took him a while, and he got there in the end by a route that had nothing clever in it. "It's like this. I'm really not happy about you messing with my memories. But you know, I can't really get mad at you for it, either. These memories you gave me. In my head, I know they're lies, but they still feel right. Like the promise I made. I said I would protect you and that I wouldn't make you cry, not ever. Naminé, if you cry now, I'll feel guilty, like I let you down."

"You're sweet, Sora."

"Okay. Be careful, Sora."

What Remains

Marluxia found Axel before Sora found either of them.

"You're a fool among fools to show your face here, traitor!"

"Why did you let her go? You and your cursed meddling! He was ours!"

Axel let him finish. "Traitor? I don't know what you're talking about."

"But you eliminated Vexen!"

Marluxia worked it out while he was still speaking, and did not enjoy the working out. "I see. A double agent. You've been investigating our conspiracy from the start."

Axel did not deny that either. He laid the whole of the other man's plan out on the table between them, in order, the way you read a list back to somebody to show them you have had it for a while.

"Right, your big plan. You use Naminé to rewrite Sora's memory piece by piece. He becomes her puppet. Then, using Naminé and Sora, you and Larxene overthrow the Organization. Did I get it right? 'Cause that would make YOU the traitor, Marluxia. Not me."

"Go ahead, then, strike!"

Marluxia came back to the killing. "Yeah, come to think of it. So what? All I did was weed the garden. And I had to be sure you two trusted me."

"Moving on. I believe you ordered me to 'rid us of our traitors.' I always follow orders, Marluxia."

Then he said the last of it.

"Larxene paid the price for disloyalty. You're next, Marluxia. In the name of the Organization you betrayed, I will annihilate you!"

Marluxia put the girl between them and stood behind her, and Axel looked at that for a moment and then put his hands down.

"What kind of game is this? You think cowering behind Naminé will stop me? Think again. Your little mascot can keep you company in the void. Farewell, Marluxia."

Marluxia did the rest of it by handing the fight to somebody who had been told for twelve floors that his job was to protect her.

"Oh, I think not. Are you listening, Sora? Axel is willing to harm Naminé just to get at me! Destroy him!"

Sora went at him, and Axel let it happen and remarked on it while it was happening.

"Well, well, Sora. Marluxia made you his puppet after all."

"Hmm. Listen, Sora. We've got more in common than you think. I'd rather not fight you, but I do have a reputation to think of!"

They fought, and Sora won that one as well. "You're not half bad! Looks like it was worth saving your hide after all."

"Sorry. I'd hate to kill the suspense."

Then he was not there either.

The room at the top was the last one, and the man who had given Sora the first card was standing in it.

"So you've destroyed Axel. You have my thanks, Sora. Or perhaps I should thank the power of the Keyblade. How I long to make it my own, and have the Organization at my mercy!"

Then he gave the order, and he gave it to her rather than to Sora, because she was the part of the machine that had never been meant to answer back.

"You cannot win as long as she is in my hands. Naminé. Erase Sora's memory!"

"No. Sora forgave me even though I deceived him. I could never break his heart! I don't care what you do to me. I won't hurt Sora!"

She was asked, then, whether she understood what she was refusing to do, and the answer was that she did.

"Yes. If you uproot the memories you planted, then Sora's heart will collapse and all his memories will be torn asunder."

"I'd prefer the Keyblade master unmarred, but even a riven heart can be rebuilt with time. Sora will yet be my slave. Do it, Naminé! Obliterate his memory!"

"Then you'll pay the price."

Sora said something in front of her, and got told what he had been standing in front of. "Ignorant fool! If Naminé destroys your memory, you'll be naught but a lifeless shell. Your heart will be unable to feel, to care! Just like that pathetic imitation of Riku."

"Guess again."

He had come in at the other end of the room and he had come in for Marluxia, and he was standing in front of the girl.

"But. you're an empty shell! You've been stripped of all you had!"

Sora said his name. "No, not Riku. Just someone's pet project."

"What did I ever have? My body and heart are fake. But there's one thing you can't take from me anyway, even if it is a lie! I will protect Naminé. Phantom promise or not, it's MY promise!"

"I'm not Riku. I'm fake. I can't remember when I was created, or why. All I've got left is you and Naminé. But those memories aren't real."

Somebody started to say something and he stopped them.

"It's all right. Don't worry about me."

"Sora, you're a good person. I don't have to be real to see how real your feelings are. That's good enough for me."

Then he was gone, and he had been the only one of them who left saying something kind.

"This is it, Sora! The final battle!"

"Know your place! You would chain your heart with false memories? Cast your heart's freedom aside? You turn from the truth because your heart is weak. You cannot defeat me!"

Sora beat him. What went down was not him. "You could say that. But what you destroyed was just an image of me. No more than a petty imitation."

"Drown in the heart-lorn world of nothingness! I shall scatter your heart to the empty winds!"

The second time it was him. He put a hand out toward Sora as he went, and what he went into was flower petals, and there was nothing standing there afterwards.

"We. we got him?!"

Sora locked the door behind them.

Then she told them what she had actually done, and it was not what any of them had thought.

"Hmm, where to begin. Naminé, I know it's not easy, but could you tell us what's going on?"

"So you're the reason the rest of us lost our memories, too. Can we ever get them back?"

"It. It doesn't work that way."

Jiminy asked the next one. "Is that the person who made you tamper with our memories?"

"Yes. Just because you can't remember something doesn't mean it's gone."

That was the first good news anybody had had in thirteen floors.

"So you can put them back together?"

She explained the shape of it then, and it was the first plain description anybody in that castle had given of what the castle was doing.

"Remembering one thing leads to remembering another, and then another. Your memories are connected, like links in a chain. Those same chains are what anchor us all together. I don't destroy memories. I just take apart the links and rearrange them. You still have all your memories."

Jiminy got to the end of that faster than the others did, and stopped in the middle of getting there. "Hey. Wait just a second! You said you'd have to undo the links you made. But that means."

"So the promise Sora made to keep you safe."

"I'm sorry. It's the only way. You have to choose, Sora. You can lose your memories of this castle and reclaim your own memories, or keep your memories here and give up the memories that you've lost."

He chose without going away to think about it.

"Okay, I understand! Who needs false memories, right? Especially when you have real memories of people who are really important to you. Anyone would say the same."

Then she told him what it would take.

"Yes, but first I have to undo the links I made. Then I have to gather up the memories scattered in your hearts and reconnect them. It will take time. But I think it will work. No, I'll MAKE it work. It's my turn to help you out."

"Yes, Jiminy. You won't be able to recall what happened in this castle."

"Naminé, can you put Riku's memory back to normal?"

Goofy had been quiet for a while and had been working on something, and what he had been working on was the one thing in the castle that nobody had thought to try.

"Then let's make a promise!"

"What you said back there got me thinking. It's easier to face the scary stuff when you've got a promise to keep!"

"That's easy. No matter what happens, even if we end up far apart or forget each other."

"Whatever happens, we're friends!"

Donald came in on the end of it, late and loud. "Of course! Why didn't I think of that!"

"But when we wake up, we won't remember you anymore."

She answered Goofy rather than the room. "You'll be fine. It might take a little time, but I'll take care of you."

"Good night. You too, Sora."

There were pods for them to sleep in while she worked, and she had got them from the one member of the Organization nobody in the castle had ever seen.

"It may have started with a lie, but I'm really glad I met you, Sora."

He said they should make one too, and she agreed to it as though she had been asked for something enormous.

"I guess you're right. Let's promise, then."

Then he was lying down in it and she was talking to him through the front of it, and she told him where to look for the rest of himself.

"Sora. The loose links will sink into the darkness in your heart. You won't be able to just reach in and pick the one you want. But there's another promise you made, a promise to someone you could never replace. She's your light. The light within the darkness. If you can remember her, all the memories lost in the shadows of your heart will come into the light."

She had the charm in her hand by then, and she turned it over where he could see it, so that he would know what had happened to it while he was not looking.

"Look at the good luck charm. I changed its shape when I changed your memory. But when you thought of her, it went back to the way it was. You're remembering."

"Don't worry. You'll forget me, but we have our promise, so I can come back to you."

"One day it'll be our light, the light that brings us together. I'll be in your heart until that time comes."

Then the front of it closed, and he went to sleep in a castle he would not remember, having been promised twice by two people, one of whom he had known all his life and could not name.

The Offer

He woke up in the dark, and the dark had no floor and no direction in it.

"Ungh. Where. where am I."

Something came back to him then, most of a thing, a door and somebody standing on the other side of it with him, and it stopped short of being a memory.

"The king! Where's the king?! Together we closed the door to darkness, and after that. Grr, why can't I remember?"

"Sleep. Here, between light and dark."

There was somebody talking to him who was not there to be looked at.

"Your king is far away. Sleep, and leave the war with darkness in his hands."

The offer was made twice, once as the dark and once as the way out of it, and the second one had a card in it.

"Can you face the truth? Here, blanketed by the darkness, sleep is safety."

"It is a door to the truth. Take it, and your sleep ends."

Riku took it, and said what he said about it, and it was the first thing he had said in the dark that sounded like himself.

"This seemed like a boring place to take a nap anyway."

"That was very well said, Riku."

"A door to the truth, huh?"

Everything the voice had said had been about the dark, and Riku had heard talk like that before from somebody who had meant it about him personally, and he put a name to it out loud.

"I thought it was you, Ansem."

"All you have been talking about is the darkness. I can only assume you wanna pull me back in, so you can play Puppet Master."

The Lowest Basement

Where the card put him down was a castle he knew, at the bottom of a building he did not.

"This is Maleficent's castle! How'd I end up HERE? Someone must have brought me here while I was sleeping. But who?"

"What you see is not real. It's the world of your memory."

Riku looked around at it, and it was the right castle in every particular. "The things you remember from your time at Maleficent's castle became a card, and that card made this world. You've seen everything here before, haven't you?"

"Ordinarily. yes. You would meet the people in your memories."

Higher up, two of them noticed the door at the bottom had been used.

"What is going on here, Zexion? I want an explanation."

He got a line of reasoning instead, and he did not care for where it went.

"You're only number 6! How dare you."

"Don't be absurd. The witch is gone. She cannot return from the realm of darkness of her own volition."

"We wait, see what develops."

Lexaeus said the other thing last, the way a man mentions weather he expects to have to walk through. "And then there is Axel. Who knows what that one is thinking."

She was waiting for him in the room she had always waited in, and she was made of what he remembered of her.

"Of all the people I could run into, it had to be you."

He did not argue with her about her. He put the whole of it on himself instead, in front of her, and that was not what she had come for.

"There was a time I did want you around. I surrendered my heart to the dark. But never again. You and your darkness have nothing to offer. All I did was lose myself. Empty myself! I'm finished with all that. If I'm stuck seeing people like you, people of the dark, I'll take you out one by one."

"That's fine with me. I turned to darkness because my heart was weak. I hate that weakness. It's like I'm my own enemy. And seeing people like you embrace the darkness just makes it worse! Enough talk, Maleficent."

Then she was a dragon, and then she was not anything.

Something happened to him during the fight that had not happened before, and it took him a moment to work out that it was a sense he had not had before.

"Something smells. funny. What's that scent? It's so familiar. Darkness. It's the smell of darkness. I can't believe this is happening. The darkness even seeped into my skin."

The voice that answered that was not the hooded one. It came from further in and it wanted something specific.

"You called out my name. You have been thinking about me. You're afraid of the darkness I command. Good. The more you think of me, the closer my return draws. And when I have awoken, I will take hold. Your heart will be mine!"

"That's not gonna happen!"

"I won't lose to darkness. Not today."

He went up four more floors and every one of them was somewhere he had been. Traverse Town. Agrabah. The whale. Neverland.

On the first of the four, light came into the room that had not come from anything in it.

"Your Majesty!"

"You betcha! Riku, you're not alone. Listen careful now, Riku. The light'll never give up on you. You'll always find it, even in the deepest darkness! But you have to believe!"

"I can only send a little bit of my power here. But I have a request."

Riku went to take hold of him and did not take hold of anything. "You're. an illusion? My hand passes right through you."

"This card showed me the way. I was lookin' for the way out of the realm of darkness, and then this card came along. As soon as I picked it up, it showed me your heart, waaay out beyond the darkness. And that's how I tracked you down. I guess the card thought it belonged with you."

Riku asked him the only thing about any of it he wanted answered. "You're with me, aren't you?"

"But we shook hands, in our hearts. We're connected, you and me."

"And I'll try to find a way to reach you. I'll come, I promise."

Something in Riku objected to all of it, and it objected in a voice. "You meddlesome king!"

The one who came down to look at him came with a question rather than a fight, at first.

"Are you with Ansem?!"

"You are half correct. Let us say that it's not the Ansem you know. He is Ansem and he is not, which is to say he is nobody."

The man went on.

"He belongs to neither the light nor the dark, but walks the twilight between. As do I. And for that matter. Ha ha, that's right. We have much in common."

"Riddles were never my thing. Try again."

"Oh ho, so it's a fight you want. Very well, a fight you shall get!"

Riku fought him for the reason he had just been given. The man smelled of the thing Riku had found in himself in the lowest basement. "Like you said, there really is darkness left inside of me. But so what?! Darkness is my enemy! And so are you for reeking of that awful smell!"

The man came out of it and said what the fight had been for.

"Ha ha ha. This battle has made it clear. The darkness coursing through you is a tremendous power. All you needed was the right provocation."

"Precisely. Your fiery reaction provided just the data I needed. You have my thanks, Riku!"

Somewhere he could not be seen, the same man was talking to something he had built.

"How did it feel to fight the real Riku?"

"Before that, wouldn't you like to meet another hero?"

It answered him.

"Nothing's definite, but yes, it may come to that. I intend to make good use of you."

"Didn't I say I intended to make good use of you?"

What was standing in his way when he came back out was Riku. "Huh? What are you supposed to be?"

"Surprised? I guess you should be. After all, I look just like you."

Riku said nothing to that, so it went on without being asked. "I'll tell you what I am. I'm an exact replica of you that Vexen made from your data."

"So you're a fake me."

It objected to the word, and the objection went straight to the one difference it had been built to be pleased about.

"Not a fake! I don't care if you're 'real', you're not better! We share the same body and the same talents, but there is one easy way to tell us apart though. Unlike you, I fear nothing."

"Are you. calling me a coward?"

It had not used the word. It used the next thing instead, which came to the same.

"It's nice having darkness on my side. You are SO missing out. How can you be scared of something that can be so thrilling?"

"Hey, Fake! I thought I heard you say you were gonna wipe the floor with me."

Riku had heard as much of it as he intended to. "Then let's fight now!"

They fought, and it stopped before either of them had finished it, because the one who had said he feared nothing decided to go.

"No way. I'm not a coward."

"Come out! Show yourself, Fake!"

"So now the coward is playing tough guy. That's cute. See you next time, Real Thing. Try not to miss me."

When it came back they discussed it in front of it.

"This is your chance to get your hands on the real Riku's memories. All you need is that card and a little help from Naminé. Maybe we'll get her to make you forget you're fake. Better yet, we could remake your heart so you can be just like the real Riku."

"Any objections, Vexen? Do you or don't you want to test Sora?"

It had an objection of its own, and made it, and that was not in the specification.

"Hey, hold on! What do you mean, remake my heart?! The real Riku's a wimp who can't deal with the darkness inside him. What do I want with the heart of a loser?"

"I'll show YOU hurt!"

She put it on the floor without much effort and explained the arrangement to it while it was down there.

"Stupid little toy! What made you think you could even SCRATCH me? But look on the bright side. Naminé will erase the memory of me knocking you flat along with everything else. She'll implant the loveliest little memories you could ever hope for. So what if they're lies?"

It got up and said something, and the something was not to her.

"Knock it off, Larxene. Naminé wants to forget about Sora."

"Don't worry, Naminé. I'll make whatever's hurting you go away. I swear it on the good luck charm you gave me. I'll be back."

Larxene stayed behind with the girl and went through the work item by item.

"Why so glum, Naminé? Is something on your mind? Feeling bad about tinkering with Sora's memory? Or maybe you."

"Simply amazing. It's like you completely rebuilt his heart. The good luck charm was an especially nice touch. I didn't know you could use memories to transform objects like cards into keepsakes. Just like you changed Kairi's good luck charm. It won't be long before Sora forgets her completely! And then he'll be yours to."

"So what? There's your incentive not to screw up. Rewrite Sora's heart, and you can be somebody, not just the shadow of somebody. In Sora's heart, you can be real."

Vexen came back to Riku wanting to talk about the thing he had made, and got nowhere with it.

"What are you saying? Isn't he just a copy of me?"

"When have I been afraid of the dark?"

"Be quiet!"

He had been counting the cards the whole way down, and there was one of them left.

"Just one card left. If I get through this, will I be free of the darkness?"

Lexaeus, Zexion, and the Replica's End

Four more floors, and every one of them somewhere he had been. Wonderland. The Coliseum. Halloween Town. Atlantica.

The big one was waiting in one of them, and Riku knew what he was before he had finished turning round. "That scent. You're another one of those Nobodies."

"You've done well thus far. But to possess your powers, and yet fear the darkness. What a waste."

Riku denied it before the man had finished putting it to him.

"I sense that you do. You're also capable of controlling the darkness. Cast away your useless fear. Open your heart. Embrace the darkness."

"I do not. fear it!"

"Then you lose both light and darkness, and disappear! I, Lexaeus, will not yield to the frail-heart of an infantile coward! Now, stop resisting, and let the darkness in!"

They fought, and it was the hardest thing Riku had been given so far, and he won it and could not stand up afterwards. "You're finished!"

"Too slow."

"You were too much trouble."

The answer came out of Riku's mouth. It was two words Riku had used himself a little earlier, and the rest of it was done with his hands.

"Too slow."

Lexaeus understood what had hold of the boy only at the end, and what he said then he said to somebody who was not in the room.

"You are the Superior's? Forgive me, Zexion. This was a fight I should not have started."

Riku came round to an empty floor and a name he could not account for. "Lexeaus?!"

It stayed in him after that, and it was patient about it.

"I see you now. clearly."

"Riku. I can see your heart."

"That's it, remember me. Let me drift into your heart."

Higher in the castle something large went out, and Riku, who could smell such things now, felt the room change. "One of the scents has died, a really strong one."

The one who came to tell him whose it had been came to tell him something else as well.

"That was Marluxia, keeper of this castle. Ex-keeper, I should say. The Keyblade master just finished him off."

"Keyblade. You mean Sora. Sora is here?"

He did not get back a yes or a no.

"Would you like to see him? Or should I say, can you face him?"

"What's that mean?"

He was told it in the order that would do the most damage, and that was not the order the facts came in.

"Darkness and Ansem's shadow nest within your heart. Aren't you ashamed to face Sora in that state? Sora's fate is to battle the darkness. As the hero of light, he must oppose hosts of the dark, in other words, you. If you don't believe me, then you had best see the truth for yourself."

"You've been to a number of worlds in your memory before this one. And in those worlds, you met only dark beings. That's all that's left in your heart: dark memories. Your memories of home are gone, each and every one."

Riku said something about his friends, and that was the door the other one had been waiting at. "And who threw away those friends? Maybe it's your own actions that you forgot. You destroyed your home!"

"The islands you grew up on were sundered, scattered. Many hearts were lost to the darkness. Because of what YOU did!"

"You hated being an islander, cut off from other worlds. So you opened the door to darkness and destroyed the islands. YOU did that! And now you belong to the darkness. Look at what you are!"

Then the floor was sand and the air was moving and it was warm, and the place had a shape he did not have to think about to walk in.

"I never thought I'd miss the island winds so much. Funny, there was a time I couldn't wait to get off this rock. And now I'm acting all relieved. Is that? Hey! What's with you guys? I don't think I've EVER seen the three of you so quiet. What, is there something on my face? Guys?!"

They went without answering him. Then there was one more of them standing further down the beach, and she went the same way while he was still crossing the sand toward her.

"Kairi. Hey, Kairi. Don't tell me you. Ah. No, no, NO!"

Sora was standing where Kairi had been.

"Yeah, I recognize you. I can see exactly what you've become! Look at you, shrinking away from the light. You're not Riku anymore. You're just a pawn of the darkness. So be it. It's time for you to face the light!"

"That's a lie! I remember everyone from the islands! Tidus and Selphie and Wakka. Kairi and Sora, too! They're my. my. They're my friends."

"Stop it, Sora! Don't you recognize me?!"

The light came up around him and it was not a light he could stand in.

"I'm. fading. Consumed by the light."

Then the light let go of him, and the girl was the reason it did.

He came out of the light knowing exactly who had put him in it, and he had not needed to see anything to know it.

"You reek of darkness. Even the light can't block the smell."

"I guess I followed the darkness right to you."

He said the rest of it while the light was still going out around him.

"I know who I am."

"Can't move."

The one who had made the light did not understand how it had failed.

"Im. Impossible! How did you find me in the light!"

"Heh. After all your protests you're still just another darkling."

Riku did not answer that either. "Since when? You were terrified of the dark before."

"This is absurd. Then I shall make you see. That your hopes are nothing. Nothing but a mere illusion!"

Riku hit him, and what came out of him was not an argument any more. "Ngaah. Hypocrite!"

"What, what IS he?! No one's ever worn the darkness the way he does. It's NOT POSSIBLE!"

"What is he? No one has ever worn the darkness the same way he does! That's impossible!"

He got himself as far as a room where the rest of them met, and there were two people in it already.

"Vexen, Larxene, Lexaeus. I wonder who will be next in line."

"Me? No way. I already took my pounding from Sora. He thinks I'm done for good. Nope, I think it'll be Marluxia next. For defying the Organization and targeting Sora. I hope he moves exactly as his heart commands him to. So, what about you? I thought you guys had plans for Riku."

Then he turned to the copy, which had been standing there the whole time being talked over, and offered it the one thing nobody else had offered it.

"All you need is the kind of power that the real Riku doesn't have. If you can get that, you can be a new person, not Riku, nor anybody else. You won't just be a copy of someone. You will be unique, your OWN self."

"What are you saying to him?"

Zexion saw where it was going about a second and a half before it went there. "Waaah! Riku?! Oh. Oh, yes, of course. Vexen's replica. Good thinking. We can use this Riku to defeat the real one. Axel?"

"You can't do this!"

"No. STOP!!!"

It took him.

"So sorry, Zexion. You just found out way too much."

It came for Riku with what it had taken, and it had stopped arguing about which of them was real. "Hold it, Real Thing. Well, well. You've changed. Last time we met you were afraid of the darkness, but not anymore."

"'I'm me,' he says. It must be nice, being real. A fake like me could never get away with saying that. That's right, I'm a phony! The way I look, the way I feel, everything!"

"I thought by finding some new strength, I could finally be someone. Someone who is not at all you! But nothing changes. I'm still just empty! Everything about me is borrowed. As long as you're around, I'll never be more than a shadow!"

Riku put him down. "So. this is the end. Figures. But I'm not afraid. Good riddance to an artificial life. I never had a real heart. Even what I'm feeling now is probably fake."

"What happens when someone who's not real dies? Where will my heart go? That is, if it doesn't disappear completely."

Riku answered him, and did not hedge it, and it was the only answer anybody gave that thing in either half of the castle. "It'll go somewhere. Probably the same place my heart will go."

"A faithful replica until the very end. That's. okay."

Twilight Town and Naminé's Choice

The next floor was a town at evening that he had never been to.

"Where am I now? I don't remember this place. Your Majesty, do you know where we are? Your Majesty?"

The King was there, and this time when Riku got to him there was something there to get to. "Your Majesty, it that you?"

"This time, you're not an illusion. I'm so glad that you could make it here."

"But how did you get here? I thought it was too far."

Kairi was in the town as well, and Riku looked at her for a while before he said anything, and what he said was not her name.

"Are you Naminé?"

She did not argue. What she said instead was about somebody else entirely.

"He won't forget. No matter how much I change his memory, Sora will never forget Kairi. Memories of me will just make his feelings for Kairi stronger. Because. Because I'm her shadow."

Sora was further in, lying down, with something closed over him. "Sora! What have you done to Sora?"

"Nothing, he's just sleeping. He has to, to get his memory back."

Then she told him the thing she had come to tell him, and it ran against everything he had been telling himself since the lowest basement.

"You won't fade. You can't fade. No power can defeat you, not the light, not the dark. So don't run from the light, and don't fear the darkness. Both will make you stronger."

"Especially darkness. Because that power is yours alone. The darkness in your heart is vast and deep, but if you can stare into it unflinching, you'll never know fear again."

"Just be brave. Know that the darkness is there and don't give in. Do that, and you'll gain strength unlike any other. You'll be able to escape the deepest darkness."

She did not get to the end of it. He got to the end of it for her, without being asked and without stopping to think about it.

"And I'll be able to see through the brightest light."

"Follow the darkness, Riku. It'll show you the way to the friends you miss."

"You know I do. And I will! The darkness, MY darkness, will show me the way! Darkness, awaken!"

She told him about Sora then. "So Sora chose to forget about this castle, and get his old memories back?"

She said the same choice was on the table for him, and he could not see why.

"Why me, too? No one's messed with my memories."

"It's not about your memories. It's about your darkness. In your heart is darkness, and in that darkness is Ansem. Right now, he's at bay, but eventually he'll awaken, and he'll conquer you when he does. Before that happens, let me lock your heart tight. I can make it so Ansem never escapes."

"The darkness in your heart will be sealed along with your memory. You'll stop remembering the darkness. You can go back to the way you used to be. It's your choice, Riku. So. choose."

He went somewhere else with it first. That was his way of taking a moment. "That's it. When this slacker wakes up, I'll tell him off. I told him to take care of Kairi, and here he is just taking a nap! But I can't chew him out like he deserves, if I've been asleep."

Then he turned it down.

"I don't need my heart locked. I'm ready, I'm gonna fight Ansem."

He told her at the door that she had never fooled him, and gave the reason, and the reason was not one anybody else in the castle could have given.

"I knew when I met you. You and Kairi smell the same. Look after Sora."

"I didn't know. I hoped. I want you to face the darkness, because you're the one who can."

The hooded man gave him a coat, and it was the coat the rest of them wore.

"The Organization will pursue you. Like a pack of hunting dogs, they will sneak up on you if they sense your presence. However, this cloak that is worn by Nobodies will render their eyes and their noses useless. The ears, not so. They wear this to give themselves protection from being devoured by darkness. Is it clear? Even the Organization cannot rule the darkness."

"The card will draw out your heart's darkness. Finish your business with Ansem."

The Road to Dawn

At the bottom of the last flight he asked the King for something and could not get to the end of asking it. "I'm glad you said that, but I have to face Ansem alone."

"There's no point in doing this if I can't do it on my own. But I have a favor to ask. If Ansem wins, he's going to enslave me. If that happens, I want you to destr."

"Huh? You're not listening. I want you to destroy Ansem and me with."

He did not get to the end of that one either.

"No can do! I already made my choice. No matter what happens, I'm going to be there to help you. I'm not backing down. Unless you don't believe I'll come through for you."

"It's my choice to believe or not. I know you'd never let me down, Your Majesty."

He found the last room by smell, which was the only sense he had left that he trusted.

"Ansem! Where are you? Show yourself!"

"I smell you Ansem. Show yourself!"

The answer came from where it had been the whole time.

"Riku. Riku."

"I know you can feel it. The grip that I have on your heart. You have let in the darkness, Riku. That means very soon your heart shall become an all-consuming darkness."

Riku said he was not what he had been. "Yes, you are."

"The deeper the darkness runs inside you, the stronger I become. Controlling you is effortless. Must you interfere again!?"

Then it made its case, and the case was that the two of them were the same thing and that Riku's objection was cowardice. "I have watched you fight. I know your strength. Your skill with darkness has grown. It has become more mature. And yet, why. Why do you accept the darkness, but still refuse me? You know you and I are similar. We both follow where the darkness leads. Indeed, we are the same, so why? Does some part of your heart still have a fear of the dark?"

Riku drew. "You are a fool. You should know my powers well by now."

"Yeah, I know. Or did you forget? I used all the power you had to give-and Sora still beat me. I'm not at all impressed with your power."

That ended the talking.

"Very well. In that case. You shall sink into the abyss!"

"Insolent brat!"

"Ansem! You're finished!"

He finished it. What was left of the voice used the last of itself on a schedule rather than on a plea. "This. is hardly. the end. Your darkness, I gave it. all to you. My dark shadow. lingers. Someday. Someday. I will return!"

Something came loose in Riku when the other thing went, and what stopped it was the King, who had said he would be there and was.

"Unnh. The king. protected me? Your Majesty, where are you? Please answer! You're with me. aren't you."

In the entrance hall he said the thing he had been carrying since the fight ended. It had not entirely worked.

"I don't know if I can. It's still there. His scent. it's faint, but not gone. I can't go home until it is. His darkness may still have a hold on me."

The King had been thinking about it the whole way up and had arrived somewhere he had not expected to arrive.

"Your darkness belongs to you. Just like your light. Until now, I thought darkness was nothing but bad. But my time with you made me change my mind. You've chosen a road I never thought of. Light and dark, back to back. With you, they mingle in a way no one's ever seen before. I want to see where that road leads. And if it's okay, I want to walk the road with you."

"Wow, Your Majesty, I don't know what to say. Thanks."

Outside, the hooded man put it to him one more time, as two things.

"Will you take the road to light, or the road to darkness?"

"What are you making me choose now?"

He did not take long over it.

"Neither. I'm taking the middle road."

"You mean the twilit road to nightfall?"

"No. The road to dawn."

They went out of the castle together in the coats they had been given, and Riku thanked him again on the way, and got laughed at for the title.

"Oh, you don't have to call me that, heh heh!"

358/2 Days

The Round Room

He came into the world in a town, and there was nobody in it who knew him.

A man in a black coat found him there and gave him a name. The name was Roxas. The man did not give his own.

There was a second man in the same coat, and this one talked.

"Heya, Roxas."

Three children went past below them on their way somewhere, and neither of the two in coats had anything to do with them.

Then they were up on the clock tower with the town underneath and the sun going down on it, and the man in the coat had brought ice cream.

"What. what do you mean?"

"Y. yeah, I think so."

"Something I can help you with there, chatterbox?"

Six days went by. On the sixth or the seventh of them the first man came and found him again, somewhere dark with water in it, and the two of them stood there and the man did the talking.

"You have been with us for six days now. The time has come. Sora."

Roxas asked him his name and did not get it. He got the question back instead, and then the man went away saying the other name to himself.

On the seventh day there was a meeting.

"Ah, I remember now. We were supposed to convene in the Round Room today. Blegh, meetings."

Roxas said the two words back to him, turning them into a question. "Round. Room?"

"Yup. Apparently the boss man's got some big news. Wanna head over there now?"

"Alrighty then. Follow me."

The room was round and every chair in it had somebody in it.

"Good tidings, friends. Today is a momentous day. I am pleased to announce that a new comrade has been chosen to wear the coat. Number XIV. Let us all welcome one of the Keyblade's chosen."

"Let us all welcome one of the Keyblade's chosen."

Below the chairs there was a girl standing in a coat of her own with the hood up.

"Eww. You're awake?"

Saïx gave the boy to the second man to look after, and said so in front of everybody. "Oh boy. What, are you making me the kid's mentor now?"

"Well, you heard the man. Starting today, I'm your babysitter."

Roxas was looking at the girl and not at him.

"Hey, what's wrong? You worried about the new kid? What was that name again."

"Right. I knew that."

"A name defines an object. Describes the span of it. Gives it purpose."

He had a number and a name and seven days, and nothing else, and he said so himself afterwards, twice, in two different places.

"You gotta figure, everything starts someplace. The closest thing for me is when I was just seven days old, and I met her."

"After seven days of clinging to a number and a name, I had trouble processing anything else. I couldn't have told you who the people in black coats were, or what they wanted with me."

He was also required to keep a record, and had nothing to put in it.

"What am I supposed to write about?"

They passed him round for the next week. Each of them taught him one thing and none of them taught him anything about himself.

"Roxas, was it? I never properly introduced myself. I am Marluxia, Number XI."

"A Keyblade wielder. This could prove quite enlightening."

"Hey, Roxas. Welcome to the program, as they say."

"Because I said so, that's why! Saïx told you to practice magic today, didn't he?"

Axel taught him the names, all of them, one after another, and made him say them back until he had them. It became a thing he said.

On the eighth day he was given work, and did it, and did not understand what he had done. "That was my first day working for the Organization. They gave me missions, and I carried them out. But if you asked me what my job was. I would've just stared at you."

"I said. I could have done that blindfolded."

Afterwards they went up the tower again, and this time he was given one of the ice creams to hold and nobody told him what it was going to taste like.

"It's really salty. but sweet, too."

"Axel called it the 'icing on the cake' after a successful mission."

"Hey, Roxas. Let's meet up for ice cream again after your next mission. I mean, who wants to spend their days just bouncing between work, and the castle, right?"

"Once you finish your ice cream bar, check the stick. It might say WINNER."

Somebody else spent the day thinking about the number rather than the boy. "Number XIV's name. I wonder if it bears some significance."

"He's not a bad kid, but he's spacey. Good fighter, though."

Over the next few days they told him what the work was for, and then what he was.

"So that's what the Organization does? Collect hearts?"

"If I collect enough hearts, I can complete Kingdom Hearts. Then I'll be whole."

"I don't have a heart?"

He wrote it down later in his own words, and the writing has a question in it that nobody in that castle would answer.

"I found out I was a Nobody, that I was incomplete. Just like the rest of them, I came into the world without a heart. Would it have made a difference? If I had a heart. would that make me somebody?"

"Roxas, you and I and all the Organization's members are what we call Nobodies."

"The Keyblade wielder's power. How fascinating."

The next day it was Vexen who spoke. "Hee hee. Interesting. So much to inspect. To dissect."

"They taught me that my Keyblade releases hearts."

The next day it was Vexen again. "Hee hee. It appears my conclusions were, once again, flawless."

"Later on, I discovered the job was more than just a commute between the castle and that town."

"What do you want? I'm busy. Go hit your head against the glass or something."

The next day he wrote about the people around him.

"Our group had its good apples, just like it has its bad."

"Yes, what is it? Don't waste my time with idle chatter."

"Numbers XIII and XIV."

By the fourteenth day he had started asking himself a question about the two people he saw most.

"So does that mean me and him are friends?"

"Still, this kid's supposed to be the Keyblade master's Nobody? I don't see it."

Marluxia gave him an order. "Your task is clear. Strike down the Heartless and collect hearts."

"What are you looking at? Oh, dream on. It's not gonna happen, pipsqueak."

"Get lost. You're blocking my light."

The next day he wrote again.

"Every day after work, I've been meeting Axel at the clock tower to have sea-salt ice cream."

"We all need a little break every now and again."

"Your work has been improving by leaps and bounds."

Marluxia had something to say to him as well. "If only we'd met sooner, Roxas. You would have made a fine addition."

Larxene wrote something on the fifteenth day that was not for Roxas, and he never saw it.

"Ugh! How DARE they shut me out of monitoring the Keyblade master! And then to send me off to teach that half-baked Nobody basic magic!? I should've had him light ME on fire. It won't be long now, though. Once I'm over at C.O., our plan goes into action. No more playing nanny. Ever."

She very nearly said some of it out loud to him a few days later, and caught herself in the middle of the word.

"Is it true you're almost semi-competent now? Maybe we should've let you in on. Nothing."

"The Organization's got a second castle situated in the world between worlds. It's called Castle Oblivion. Got it memorized?"

"So, you got the number memorized, do you?"

"Right, that first week you could barely form a sentence. But come on, you're still kind of a zombie."

Somewhere in that stretch the girl came with them up the tower for the first time, and Roxas was the one who asked her.

"I've got someplace to be. You go ahead and RTC without me."

"You did great. In fact, you deserve a little something extra."

"Yeah, the icing on the cake. C'mon. There's this place."

Six Gone to Castle Oblivion

On the twenty-second day Axel was sent away, and the only reason he gave for telling Roxas about it at all was the one he gave. "He told me because we're friends."

"Me and his Nobody have been meeting up for ice cream the last few days."

Six of them went. That was half the coats in the building, and the building noticed.

"It's nice in here with the loudmouths gone."

"We sent a total of six members over to Castle Oblivion. That's about half our number."

"What shall I do without half the poker league?"

Luxord kept talking after that. "No use fretting the absence of others. They simply lose this round by no-show."

"Have you been customizing your weapons? A smart player knows how to adapt his game to suit the house rules. Axel's whereabouts? I have no clue."

With Axel gone the two of them were put together every day, and having nobody else to talk to she began talking. "Afterwards I went and had ice cream by myself."

"The lady at the shop said you can trade the WINNER stick for an extra bar."

By the twenty-fifth day he had three facts about her and put all three in the record in one sentence, in the order he had got them.

"That's right, she's a girl, with black hair, and she can use the Keyblade just like me!"

In rooms he was not in, other people were writing about her too.

"No. i, my finest Replica, has proven an even greater success than anticipated."

"Marluxia has succeeded in leading the Keyblade master to the castle."

"They hug their truths close and leave the rest of us to speculate."

On the twenty-sixth day the news came back that one of the six was gone, and it did not come with a name attached.

"Word has it at least one of the folks we sent to Castle Oblivion has been terminated."

Roxas asked what happened to a Nobody who was destroyed, and got an answer with nothing in it to hold. "Xigbar said nothing's left of Nobodies once we're gone, because we have no hearts to leave behind."

"You ready or what?"

"I guess we're not working together today."

He went down some time after that and did not get up.

"Why else eliminate Vexen? He simply wanted to do research."

Somewhere else entirely, and at no day anybody wrote down, a man in red bandages was working on a boy's memory with a girl's help, and neither of them was getting anywhere.

"You seem to be struggling."

"A Nobody?"

"Oh, I think he can do without a memory or two."

She said something he did not like, and he put the question to her straight.

"Naminé. You are a witch who has power over Sora's memories and those connected to him. Are you seeing something I cannot?"

"Then so be it. The gloves must come off."

Nobody answered him.

"Those Nobodies had no business existing in the first place, as you know fully well, Naminé."

"It appears we've come to a standstill."

He woke on the fiftieth day with things on the table beside him that had not been there when he went down. "You were sleeping, a long, long time. Saïx told us not to get our hopes up. That you might not. Well, you're awake now. That's what counts."

She had been coming the whole time and talking to him while he was under.

"I went to a new world today. Roxas, you should've seen it. It was so beautiful. Well, I'll visit you tomorrow, okay? Bye, Roxas."

"Here, I brought you this. It's a seashell. I've been picking one up every time I go out on a mission. Hold it up to your ear."

He did what he was told with it.

"I held it up to my ear, and I could hear the ocean. Why did it sound so familiar?"

"Being with him feels strange. Familiar. Like listening to the waves crash up against the shore."

While he was under he had seen somebody. He could not say who, and what he wrote down about it was a description of clothes and an age and a voice that belonged to a girl he had never met.

"I'm fine. Thanks. It's just."

"Will he wake from this?"

The rest of the news about the six arrived on the fifty-first day, all at once, with one exception in it that was not named.

"It's hard to come to grips with the idea that Axel is gone. I feel. choked up?"

The next day he wrote something else.

"I sit up on the clock tower, but no one comes. Not Axel, not even Xion."

"Correction: the weaklings were annihilated."

"My orders were to end the traitors, but I think by this point, I fit that bill better than anybody."

Axel came back on the seventy-first day without any warning that he was going to. "After work, Axel turned up. Just like that, out of nowhere. I didn't know what to say."

"Saïx had a hand in what went down at Castle Oblivion, well, more like a whole arm."

He declined to go into what had happened to the other five, then or later, and he put the reason in his own record.

"When it comes to what befell our late comrades at Castle Oblivion, ambiguity suits me just fine."

"Come on, I would have told you that much. I gotta hand it to you. You were right. About Marluxia, the traitors. You knew exactly what was up."

"I wonder when me and Axel and Xion will all get to have ice cream together."

The next day he wrote about ice cream again.

"After I finished my mission I wanted all three of us to have ice cream, but I couldn't find Xion."

She was somewhere else working out what she was worth.

"If I can't collect hearts anymore, the Organization has no use for me."

They found her, and on the seventy-fourth day the three of them sat on the tower together for the first time, which Roxas recorded as the good half of the day.

"We finally got to all have ice cream together, which was nice, but Xion can't use her Keyblade anymore."

Xion explained it herself. "I can't. I can't use the Keyblade anymore. And without it, I can't do my job."

"I don't know. But if I don't defeat Heartless with the Keyblade. the hearts they release just find their way into other Heartless instead."

"It's no use."

She had worked out what that made her, by the only arithmetic anybody in that building used.

"I'm supposed to be collecting hearts. Those are my orders. Without the Keyblade. I'm useless."

"They're gonna turn me into a Dusk once they find out they don't need me."

Roxas offered to do both jobs. Axel was asked whether there was anything to be done about it and said there was not. "Wish there was. But. it's just like Xion said. No Keyblade, no can do."

"You don't mind?"

"I guess. I can. But Roxas. What are you gonna use?"

He picked something up off the ground and she told him what it was.

"Roxas, that's a stick."

"I dunno about this."

She had not asked him that before.

"Thanks. So. Axel, does that mean you and I can be friends?"

"Thank you. Roxas, Axel, thank you!"

Axel wrote something down that evening and showed it to neither of them. "Xion is a girl, and she looks just like Naminé."

"But what am I going to do if I never get the Keyblade back?"

"The Genie we met in Agrabah said he and his friend Al are 'inseparable.'"

They were sent to the same few places over and over that season, a city of sand with a cave outside it, and a castle with long corridors and servants in it who talked.

"Psst! Roxas, change the subject!"

"Mission accomplished. Ready to head back? We can stop for ice cream and."

On the ninety-fourth day they were all called up to the top of the castle to be shown something.

"He showed us Kingdom Hearts, a big heart-shaped moon floating up there in the night sky."

"Good luck today."

"The time has arrived. Look to the skies! There hangs the heart of all hearts, Kingdom Hearts, shining down on us at last. See the countless hearts that have gathered? Hearts full of rage. hate. sadness. and bliss. There, in the sky, hangs the promise of a new world. My friends! Remember why we have organized, all the things we hope to achieve. The strength of the human heart is vast. Soon, though. we will have gained power over it! Never again will it. have power over us."

Axel had something to say about it too. "Exactly. It's because of you two and the Keyblade that we're finally making some progress. We might finally get hearts of our own."

"Once Kingdom Hearts is complete, you'll be able to do all kinds of things."

"Kingdom Hearts will complete us. That's the Organization's goal."

Roxas heard the last part of that and could not get it to sit with the first part, and nobody ever put the two together for him.

"The ones who make it into the Organization are powerful enough to keep their memories. But me and Xion can't remember our pasts."

"Ready for another day?"

"Neither Roxas or I have any memory of our human lives."

For that stretch she used his and he used whatever was to hand, and she apologised for it about once a day.

"Okay, if you're sure. Thanks, Roxas."

"I'm sorry, Roxas. My taking your Keyblade must make things harder for you."

"Thanks, Roxas. You can have this back."

Then on the ninety-sixth day it came back to her, and the arithmetic went the other way for a while.

"I don't know. Let me give it another try."

"I don't believe it! Roxas, it worked! Thank you so much!"

"I'd like to dedicate this Keyblade summoning to my good friends Roxas and Axel."

She kept talking about it.

"Yeah, everything's fine now. I owe it all to you and Axel."

"Afterwards Xion remembered how to summon her own Keyblade, so I guess we're out of trouble."

"This has to have been what it was like, friendship."

Saïx split them onto separate missions the same day.

"What? Why? But how can. Never mind."

Three for Ice Cream

For a long stretch after that nothing happened, which is to say the work went on and the three of them went up the tower afterwards and the days had numbers on them and nothing else.

"I wonder if Axel and Xion feel the same way."

"Every day it's work, work, work. I'm dead bored, and I'd kill for some vacay."

On the hundred and seventeenth day somebody told him a thing about himself that he wrote down in quotation marks because he did not know what to do with it. "Xigbar told me that Xion and me are 'exceptional,' you know, like, special Nobodies."

"The worlds seem so divided and alone, but there's always that steady thread there to connect them."

He told her about it and she had already worked out what the word meant when it was applied to her.

"Special just means different. Because I'm a mistake."

"Well, we may both be exceptional, Roxas. But I don't think we're the same."

The next day came.

"All I like is having ice cream with my friends, so that's what I ended up doing."

"I'm not the one who changed. You did."

Somewhere in there Axel told him why the sunset was the colour it was, unasked, while they were sitting in it. "Hey, Roxas. Bet you don't know why the sun sets red. You see, light is made up of lots of colors. And out of all those colors, red is the one that travels the farthest."

Roxas asked him something else. "What does it mean to care about something that much?"

"Why would caring about something be a weakness?"

"Couldn't tell ya. I don't have one."

Roxas asked him whether memories were the same as a heart, and got most of an answer. "Hmm, true, but. I don't think that's quite the same."

"Because you're not so complicated. But don't take it personal."

She said the other part of it to Axel, on her own, when Roxas was not there.

"You know how you were talking the other day about how we all have pasts? When I sit here with you guys, it's weird. I get the strangest feeling I used to watch the sun set with somebody else. Or when I'm by the sea. When I look at the water, and hear the waves lapping against the shore. it's almost like I can hear another voice."

"No. It's not quite like that. Well, I dunno. Maybe these ARE memories. It just seems weird that they're mine."

"I guess I'm more like Roxas. Neither one of us remembers much. I wonder if he and I had this much in common before we were nobodies."

On the hundred and forty-ninth day she was sent to the castle with the long corridors and somebody in a coat like hers was waiting in it.

"Your face. Who are you really? And why do you have a Keyblade?"

"Tell me first. why you are dressed as one of us."

"Fair enough. You could say I am. the biggest nobody of them all."

She fought him and lost, and what he said while she was down was the thing she carried for the rest of the year.

"To make sure my best friend. sleeps in peace. I don't know who you're supposed to be. But. you can't fight fire with sparks. This Keyblade, it's a sham, worthless."

"My Keyblade is not a sham! What gives you the right to say that?"

Riku answered her. "Find a new crowd. Trust me. Those guys are bad news."

"Why? You're the real sham."

She said the rest of it to herself afterwards, twice, in the same words both times, which is how the source has it.

"How could he say that. He's wrong. It's not a sham. and neither am I."

"How could he say that. He's wrong. It's not a sham. and neither am I."

"And I'm not a sham. I'M NOT. He is."

Roxas wrote about something else. "I was gonna give Axel that WINNER stick, but I should wait until I get another one."

The next day Saïx dealt with the failure the way Saïx dealt with things.

"Just give me another chance!"

She told Roxas about it afterwards and put the worst word last. "I was upset. I messed up a mission really bad. I don't suppose you heard about the guy pretending to be one of us? The Organization impostor? I was ordered to take him out. but I couldn't beat him. Saix was so mad, he called me a "mistake"."

"Don't be. That jerk can say whatever he wants. I can take it."

"Roxas, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have run off like that yesterday."

"the idea of losing the present, Axel or Xion, scares me."

After that something was wrong between the two of them and neither could say what. "She said me and her are different, which is pretty obvious if you look at us, but I don't think that's what she meant."

"Last night I dreamt of the ocean. I was drowning."

"What this game needs is a few thrills. Don't you agree?"

"Axel says girls are complicated. You can't press the wrong buttons."

Axel was watching both of them by then and wrote down what it was doing to him. "Watching them, it's like they're human. It's messing with my head."

"I've been having ice cream alone, but it's just not the same."

"X-face is always barking at me to work, but what's he expect me to do against a monster like that?"

She had started asking a question that nobody in that building had a use for, and she kept asking it.

"Sorry. My mind's on other things. Roxas, why are we doing all this? Working for the Organization?"

"Why? What do we need hearts for?"

She kept asking.

"Maybe. I just wish I knew what I was doing here. How I got here."

"I started having the strangest dreams. I can never remember what they're about. I just wake up feeling like. like something is really wrong."

On the hundred and seventy-first day she went down the way he had gone down, and stayed down for three weeks.

"Every time I ask him about this kind of thing, he tells me I need a heart to understand."

He did for her what she had done for him, and wrote down why.

"I left a seashell by her pillow, just like she did for me."

"It would please me to see her smile when she finds them."

"I've decided to work harder while Xion is asleep to pick up some of the slack."

Luxord spoke next. "Ready to begin? We can leave whenever you're ready."

"Another day, another game, eh?"

"The longer you have lived, the more you are positioned to lose with such a gamble."

Axel spent those weeks on a question he did not put to anybody. "Xion and Naminé must be connected. Whose Nobody is Xion, anyway?"

While she was under she said a name once.

"Sora."

She woke on the hundred and ninety-third day with the shells beside her.

"You brought me seashells."

"Yeah, the sound of the waves. How long was I asleep?"

He told her, and she did the sum on herself.

"That long!? I'm sorry. I feel bad. Kind of. weird that we can feel anything at all, huh? Without hearts to feel with."

"Heh heh. Thanks, Axel. You're sweet."

She kept talking.

"I just got a little dizzy. Sorry to worry you guys."

"I think I'll be okay now."

She wanted to go back to work the same morning and went to argue about it.

"Hey, don't you have work?"

"Can I come, too?"

"After sleeping for three weeks? I'll be fine. C'mon, take me with you."

She said the same thing to Saïx.

"Saix, I want to go with Roxas today on his mission."

"Don't keep me pent up in here. I need the exercise."

She got her way.

"A three-man team? That's a first."

"All I can remember is the sound of waves, gentle, in the distance."

That evening Axel said the word that the rest of the year is measured against. "He said the three of us were best friends, inseparable."

"You wanna know why I do? Because you're my best friends."

"This should be fun, huh? Tripling up like this."

"Yeah, yeah. It sure is nice to be back on my feet."

Roxas wrote about it afterward. "But even if they're not there, at least now it seems like we're together again."

"Sorry I worried you. Hey. You want this?"

She went on.

"I'm fine. really."

"How will this round play out?"

Axel was still on his question and had got no further with it. "But my questions remain unanswered. Who is she a Replica of?"

"It's getting late. I don't think he's coming."

She kept talking while she waited.

"Okay. You and him are always there for me."

"Well, I'm just glad the two of you are in the Organization with me."

"What's wrong? You look pale."

By the two hundred and twenty-fourth day Axel had an answer to his own question and kept it. "Even if Xion is a replica, a puppet, she's still Xion."

"Axel said we should all go to the beach next time we get a vacation."

He said the spoken half of it to her and not to Roxas. "I can't make that decision for you. You're no puppet in my book. You're my best friend. Mine and Roxas's. Got it memorized?"

"So what, now I've gotta rat on my friends to you? Get out of my room, man."

"Ha ha, relax, would ya? I'm kidding. I just gotta keep my mouth shut about it."

The next day came.

"He knows something is wrong. I bet he's just telling me that to put my mind at ease."

"It must be in Castle Oblivion. That's where I was born."

The Replica

On the two hundred and fifty-fifth day she went to the castle she had decided she came from, and Axel was sent after her. "Axel said she got sent on an important mission, but he wouldn't look at me when he said it."

"Then how 'bout I tag along? I know Castle Oblivion better than anybody else in this outfit."

"You're sure things are better this way?"

She was already remembering by the time he got there, and she would not be talked out of the building.

"Don't lie to me! I know this is where I come from! The answers are here."

"Axel, I'm remembering things. About who I was."

"You can't fool me. We've met before, Axel, right here in this castle!"

He left. She stayed and got the rest of it on her own, and what she worked out she said out loud to an empty room in four pieces.

"No. Then. I'm not. The person I was before. wasn't me."

The man who ordered her made a report that same day about what she was and what he had made her out of.

"Xion's appearance should vary based on the relation of the viewer to her. Saïx sees her simply as a puppet. The Program approaches completion. Through Roxas, Xion is assembling a copy of the hero of the Keyblade. As proof, she sometimes appears to take on his form to my eyes."

The Organization decided not to go and get her.

"Xion is gone."

"On the contrary. No one is to go looking for Xion without my express permission."

"Xemnas told us not to go after her. The way Saïx explained it, it's almost like they don't think she's worth getting back."

Roxas went and asked about it and was answered in the voice used for children.

"Put your mind at ease. Xion is a valued member of the Organization, but she needs her rest."

"All will be revealed when the time comes."

He said something different about her when Roxas was not in the room. "Take steps? How can you not see how perfect this is? Xion is marching right into the arms of destiny. The only steps we need take are two: watch. and wait."

"I see her as. him, though I suspect that Xemnas sees entirely something else in her."

The next day came.

"I want to talk to Axel about Xion, but I can't seem to get ten seconds with the guy."

"You go out on a big gamble at a time like this, and you're going to lose big."

Where she went was an island, and somebody found her on it who had been looking for her since the castle with the long corridors.

"Who am I? What am I. here for?"

"Is it that I'm not supposed to exist?"

She kept talking.

"I want. I want to be with you two. But. what would it take for me to be like you?"

"I can't. Not the way I am now."

This time he gave her his name with a second thing attached to it, and the second thing was the part she had not had.

"Riku. Sora's friend."

"Sora? You know Sora?"

"Thank you. You saved me, but I don't know why. you did."

He answered her.

"I guess. I just felt like it."

"Riku, please. Tell me more, about Sora and that girl he's always with."

"You mean Kairi."

She repeated the name back to him.

"Kairi. That's right. She's the one who looks so much like me."

"To Sora, she's someone very special."

She put her own case to him and asked the question at the end of it.

"It's just. I remember things about the two of them. But I'm nothing more than a puppet, something that somebody created. So why would I have. their memories? Do you know where Sora is now?"

"That secret stays with me."

"Xion. your memories. they really belong to Sora."

She asked him something else.

"So you mean. I'm like a part of him?"

"You can't, because part of it is inside of me. That means. he can't wake up."

"So, do you hate me for taking your friend away from you?"

He did not, and he did not tell her what to do about it either. He asked her for one thing and gave her the time to do it in.

"I'm sorry, but. I can't go with you. It's my friends, they need me. And I need them, too."

"How will I know where I belong, truly? I'm not sure I can promise you I'll come up with the right answer."

She said more.

"I'll try. Thank you, Riku."

"Riku, what should I do?"

He had his own arrangement running underneath all of it, with the girl and with somebody a long way off. "You made me a promise."

"You can't get the memories back out?"

"So what's the solution?"

He was talking to somebody else now.

"Searching, for a way to conquer the darkness within me, while we wait for Sora to awaken."

"Promise me, Mickey. You have to be there for our friends."

Roxas looked for her in every world he was sent to and did not find her once. "Me and Axel agreed to start looking for Xion tomorrow."

"But something far more important lies behind that truth."

"I've looked everywhere for Xion, in every world, but there's just no sign of her."

Luxord noticed something too. "Up to something? You have a terrible poker face."

"Xion's whereabouts? Shall I ask the cards for you?"

"C.O. is where Xion comes from. I guess he just found out himself."

Xigbar said something about it too. "None of us really know everything that's going on in Castle Oblivion."

"Our plans remain unchanged. Axel, Roxas, and Xion will play the roles Kingdom Hearts has chosen for them."

"That gadfly? See that he stays away from Roxas. He only poses a threat if his buzzing reaches Xion's ears."

There was also a place with a maze in it that he was sent to more than once that season.

"A 'new shadow,' is it? Hmm. Let's check the maze for those switches, Roxas."

On the two hundred and ninety-seventh day he woke up in the town and she was sitting there.

"I woke up in Twilight Town, and incredibly enough, Xion was there."

"You have? Sorry."

He told her to come home. She would not, and she gave no reason for it.

"I really can't."

"I wasn't aware she had returned."

Luxord said it again, differently. "That is generally what 'wasn't aware she had returned' means, yes."

"It's Riku. Roxas could very well remember that, somewhere deep in his memories."

Axel had been given an order about her some time before, and it was the kind of order that names the condition the goods must arrive in.

"Axel. Seeing as how she escaped on your watch, the onus is on you to capture her and return her here. I am willing to overlook any nicks or scratches. Just ensure she still functions on arrival."

"Axel, you have your orders. Dismissed."

He carried it out the next day, with Roxas standing there. "Well, hello there. Xion."

"I don't believe it. Axel attacked Xion. There had to have been some other way."

The day after that Roxas went and asked the only question he had left, and got a name back and nothing to put with it. "And what would that be?"

Roxas said the name he had been hearing since the sixth day. What came back was not an answer and not a refusal; it was a length of silence, and the source sets it down as one.

"He's the connection. He is what makes you and Xion a part of each other's lives. Just as he is the reason I placed Xion among our number. And if you want her to stay that way, I must insist you get your mind off these needless distractions. I will have Xion return to her duties tomorrow. Today, you must focus on yours."

"Xemnas told me that 'Sora' is the connection between me and Xion. But just who exactly is Sora?"

"So why does it still sting, just a little, when I lie to him?"

After that the three of them stopped going up the tower together, and it stopped without anybody deciding it had.

"So much has happened lately that I've been forgetting to write about those pictures in my head."

"The three of us. I didn't think we'd ever be able to do that again."

The next day came.

"Xion and Axel don't come to the clock tower anymore."

"I'm fine. I'm. I'm sorry, Roxas. Here, this is for you."

She gave him the thing and then sat down with him anyway.

"I guess he's not coming today."

"What, did you two have a fight?"

Roxas said what he thought of Axel now, and she would not have it.

"So he's a jerk now? Roxas, I wouldn't be sitting here with you if Axel hadn't done that. He's your best friend."

"It's just not the same without all three of us."

"Even without my orders from Saïx, I'd do anything to stop Roxas from being erased."

She went to Axel about it, because there was something happening to Roxas that she had started noticing in herself.

"What? No. I just. Something's wrong with Roxas. I thought you might know what's up. He says the Keyblade wears him out now when he goes to use it. And suddenly I find myself fighting the same way he does."

"Why. why would you say that?"

Then she asked him the other thing, which she had been carrying since the two hundred and ninety-ninth day.

"Can I ask you one other thing? I saw a boy today who looks just like Roxas. Is he who I think he is?"

The Leash Shortened

By the three hundred and twenty-first day it had turned into something that could be measured, and what it measured was Roxas going down while she came up.

"I feel so tired, almost disconnected from my body."

"Roxas, are you okay? You don't look so good."

"H-how. How did I just do that? Where did that power come from?"

She kept asking.

"Roxas? Hey, are you all right?"

"You sure you're okay?"

"You're really, really okay?"

He answered her the third time in a way she did not care for.

"Well, excuse me!"

"Well, for your information. I worry about you all the time, Roxas."

The next day he was no better.

"I had another dream. My head feels heavy."

Xion had more to say to him. "Please be careful, Roxas. Here. This is for you."

"Please, Roxas, don't. Don't do anything crazy."

"Roxas, try not to. Just. don't push yourself too hard."

Somebody else was watching him too.

"So, sleep has taken you yet again."

She had decided something by then and she put it down in one sentence.

"But before I'm gone, I want to help Roxas and Axel."

"I'm going to wreck everything. What's the right thing to do? Riku would know."

She had more to say.

"I have to make the most of the time he's given me."

"You look so much like him."

The men at the top discussed all of it among themselves, in their own words, at length.

"I will admit, Xion has strayed from our original designs. But this unpredictable behavior is proving to have an interesting side effect."

"We wanted the Key. Xion's exposure to Roxas effected a transfer of its power, just as we had hoped. Had things stopped there, Xion would have been an unequivocal success. But then, through Roxas, Sora himself began to shape 'it' into 'her,' giving Xion a sense of identity."

"I was ready to scrap the whole project. Then, it occurred to me: Xion is keeping Sora's memories trapped by claiming them as her own. Keeping her close to Roxas will prevent Sora from ever waking."

He kept talking.

"Indeed, perhaps we ought never allow Sora to awaken."

"Yes, it was not supposed to gain a mind of its own, nor become the person we see. But in the end, it only proves the puppet is the more worthy vessel."

"Replica whatza?"

On the three hundred and fifty-second day the two of them were sent to the same place and each was shown something that was not there.

"It was rigged so you two would battle each other."

"Roxas? Wh. what are you doing here? The Heartless I was fighting, it was you?"

Xion asked something else. "They would do that?"

"I never would've guessed about Xion. That's some puppet!"

They had ice cream together that evening, the three of them, and it was the last time.

"Brain freeze, ha ha."

"Heh heh heh. Wow. The sun sure is beautiful. I know we've seen a lot of sunsets, but today's puts them all to shame. If only things stayed like this."

Roxas said they should go somewhere, all three of them, and not come back. "We don't have any place to run."

Axel started on the speech he had made before. "As long as we remember each other. right? Don't worry, Axel, we got your hokey speech memorized."

"I'll have these moments memorized for a long time. Forever, I hope."

Xion wrote about it too. "I wish the three of us could stay together, just like this, forever."

"I don't have to write anything else down, because I'll never forget this day."

She left the next day and somebody was sent after her, and what happened in the place with the maze is that he looked at her in the middle of the fight and stopped, because of what he saw.

"Shut up!"

"So now we just sweep it all up? Heh. As if."

He went down. Axel came into it at the end and she took the hood off in front of him. "Axel, I'm sorry."

"Please. let me go. I have to do this, or else. Look."

She kept talking.

"Yeah. I did. I'm on the verge of losing everything I ever cared about. I can't let that happen. Tell me what I need to do."

"Please, Axel. You have to take care of Roxas."

He let her go and then said he had not.

"I didn't let her go. The old man needs to get his eyes checked."

The Organization was told the same evening, and this time it was told what she was.

"Xion has vanished again."

Somebody used the wrong pronoun and was corrected.

"It, not 'she.' Xion is just a Replica. a puppet."

"The goal was to duplicate the Keyblade wielder's memories, and through them, his powers, thus making them our own. Vexen oversaw the project at Castle Oblivion. However, our efforts were severely derailed by his unexpected demise. And this particular Replica, the one we called Xion, came to form an identity of her own."

"Fortunately, the puppet has no means of dashing our plans now, even if she has learned to pull her own strings. Still, she knows our secrets. We need to shorten her leash. And perhaps tighten it."

Roxas found Axel that same day and asked him why he had let her go, and got a different answer from the one he was braced for.

"The Organization made her to duplicate your powers. She's a puppet."

"She's a puppet? A mirror that reflects me?"

He did not believe it, and he said so, and Axel did not argue. "You really think the truth is going to make you feel better? It won't."

The Puppet and the Girl

He went to Axel one more time and asked him to explain it properly, and was told to trust him instead. So he asked him who he was.

Then he walked out of the building. Saïx tried to stop him at the way out and did not manage it.

Axel caught up with him in the city underneath and told him what the Organization would do to him for it. He kept walking. "If Kingdom Hearts can be said to possess a mind of its own, it is surely rejecting Xemnas, no, rejecting Xehanort."

She went to the old house on the hill outside the town, where the girl who could do things to memory was waiting for her.

She was told what would happen to her, and she had worked most of it out before she arrived.

"I know. I'm ready. Otherwise I wouldn't be here. Roxas belongs with Sora, too. But. I don't think he would understand. Not yet."

She said it again a moment later, the same words in the same order, the way a person repeats something until it holds still.

"I know. I'm ready. Otherwise I wouldn't be here. Roxas belongs with Sora, too. But. I don't think he would understand. Not yet."

She had asked about her before ever meeting her.

"Naminé? What's she like?"

"Naminé, you can see my face?"

The girl asked her what she had wanted.

"I thought I knew at first. I wanted me and Roxas and Axel to be together forever. But then I started to realize these memories don't belong to me."

Then she asked for the one thing she wanted out of it, and it was not for herself. "Naminé, will you watch over Roxas once I'm gone? You won't be alone. I asked somebody else to look after him, too. It's just. there isn't anything else I can do for him."

The man in the bandages came in with news of who was outside.

"Naminé, they've found us! They are on their way! That blasted puppet led them right to our doorstep! See what you get for trusting it?"

"I've decided that I have to go back to where I belong."

"I'll get rid of them!"

What was outside was Axel. "Why do I always get stuck with the icky jobs?"

"It's for the good of everyone."

"Well, to be honest, I always felt that was best, right from the very beginning. But you know, it still really bugs me. Something about this just stinks."

Xion answered him. "This is right."

"But how do you know that? Everybody thinks they're right."

"They're gonna destroy you!"

She asked him for the thing she had asked Riku for, in different words. "Please don't hold back, Axel. Promise."

"What's your problem? You both. think you can do whatever you want. Well, I'm sick of it. Go on, you just keep running. But I'll always be there to bring you back!"

He beat her and stood over it afterwards saying something to nobody.

"Man. Why you always gotta. cause me. trouble."

They took her back and the man at the top of the building took her body from there.

On the three hundred and fifty-seventh day Roxas was sitting on the tower by himself and somebody came up who was wearing a face. "At last, the time has come. Saïx, are the devices ready?"

"Good."

Xemnas kept talking. "Both of them have connections to Sora, but we only need one of them under our thumb. Let Xion take from Roxas the rest of what he has to give. Or, let him destroy her first and get it all back. It makes no difference to me. Either way, Sora's power will be ours."

"Roxas. I'm out of time. Even if I'm not ready. I have to make this choice. You have poured so many memories into me, given me so much, that I feel like I'm about to overflow. Look at me, Roxas. Who do you see? If you see somebody else's face. a boy's face. then that means I'm almost ready. This puppet will have to play her part. Roxas. This is him. It's Sora. You're next, Roxas. I have to make you a part of me, too. Don't you see? This is why I was created."

They fought across places that were not there and then back to the one that was.

Somewhere in the middle of it he stopped knowing who he was fighting.

"Who are you. again? It's weird. I feel like I'm forgetting something really important."

He won. She came apart out of the face she had been wearing and back into her own, and he caught her.

"You'll be. better off now. Roxas."

"Am I. the one who did this to you?"

"No. It was my choice. to go away now. Better that, than to do nothing. and let Xemnas have his way. I belong with Sora. And now, I am going back. to be with him. Roxas. I need you. to do me a favor. All those hearts that I've captured. Kingdom Hearts. Set them free."

Roxas asked her something else. "Kingdom Hearts. Free them?"

"It's too late. for me to undo my mistakes. But you can't let Xemnas. have Kingdom Hearts. You can't. Good-bye, Roxas. See you again. I'm glad. I got to meet you. Oh. and of course, Axel, too. You're both my best friends. Never forget. That's the truth."

It came back to him at the end.

"No! Xion. Who else will I have ice cream with?"

Then she was gone and there was a shell on the ground where she had been.

"It is probably for the best. Get me back my Keyblade wielder. Fetch me Roxas."

Axel went up the tower that evening and found what had been left on it. "How did this happen?"

"Roxas left. It's so like him to just leave that WINNER ice cream stick behind. Come tomorrow, I'll probably get the order to hunt him down, but leaving that here makes it feel so permanent. I wish the three of us, three? No. That the two of us could share some ice cream again someday. That's what it is to be friends."

Memory's Skyscraper

He went back to the city to do the thing she had asked him to do, and part of what he wanted out of it was her.

"I must become one with Kingdom Hearts. I will become a higher existence."

They came up out of the ground at him in the street under the tall building with the screens on it, more of them than he could deal with, and somebody arrived who had been looking for him.

What Roxas did then he did not decide to do. He threw the black one across the street to him instead of at him; the two of them cleared the street together, then turned round.

"Why are you trying to stop me?"

The answer had a name in it that Roxas had been hearing for three hundred and fifty days without being told what it meant. "Sora, Sora, Sora! Enough about Sora!"

"I'm going to set Kingdom Hearts free! Then everything can go back to the way it was! Me, and Axel, and. and her can go on having ice cream together."

He kept talking.

"I have to find this Sora person, and freeing Kingdom Hearts is the only way! I want Xion back. I want my life back!"

"Shut up!"

The other one fought him and could not put him down, and started using the name as a weapon.

"Sora."

"stronger than this"

"Get real. Look which one of us is winning!"

He could not win it as he was, so he stopped being as he was. What he became is a shape already known in this account.

Roxas went down under it. "Roxas, don't be sad. I came from you and Sora. I am you. the same way that I am Sora. You'll forget me, but the memories themselves will never go away. Memories of you and me will always be together. forever, inside him."

Then everything he had of her went, and so did everybody else's, and a few people kept theirs and were not told why.

The man in the bandages came and looked at what was lying there and was sorry for it, and said in the same breath that it could not feel anything.

"When Riku brought Roxas back to me, he was introducing himself. as Ansem. If that was what it took to awaken his friend, he was ready to live in darkness. Riku was the victim of my revenge. Oh, how my heart ached. I could only laugh to hide my shame."

Then he put him somewhere he would not be found, which was a town built to look exactly like the one Roxas had been having ice cream in all year, and set it running.

He woke up in it with a summer to get through and three friends waiting for him, and he had a plan for the day.

"Maybe. today we'll finally hit the beach!"

"Only seven days to go, and then my summer vacation's over."

Some while after that, in the basement of a house on a hill outside the town, he met a boy his own age in red.

Kingdom Hearts II

The Town That Wasn't

The man in bandages already had him. What he meant to do with him he explained only to Riku, and Roxas was not there to hear it.

"At last, the Keyblade's chosen one."

He had gone into a castle that was not his first, before any of this, hunting it down.

"Revenge."

What he built afterward, he built somewhere else: an old mansion nobody was using, with a machine in the basement, a room of pods for three sleepers, and a white room for a girl who was not asleep.

"His heart is returning. Doubtless he'll awaken very soon."

"If we can maintain the simulated town until Naminé finishes chaining together Sora's memories."

He went straight on to the next part of it.

"He holds half of Sora's power within him. In the end, he'll have to give it back. Until then, he'll need another personality to throw off his pursuers."

"It's the fate of a Nobody."

He kept talking.

"To half of Sora, of course. You reside in darkness. What I need is someone who can move about the realm of light and destroy Organization XIII."

He altered what the boy remembered and set him down in a town built to look exactly like the one he had actually lived in, with a lifelong history in it and three friends who had never been real.

"We can always buy some sea-salt ice cream. Objects from that town must be kept out of the real world. You can delete that."

"We'd be giving the enemy another entry point."

He went on counting up what could be used against him.

"Organization miscreants. They've found us."

"Both are nothing but data to them. The fools could never tell the difference. We are running out of time. Naminé must make haste."

He said it flatly, the way a man states something already decided.

"No. Naminé hijacked the data herself. Look what she's done now. She's totally beyond my control!"

"It doesn't matter. As long as Naminé accomplishes her goal. we needn't worry about what befalls Roxas."

He moved past it before it could become an argument.

"Naminé's encounter with Roxas put his heart in contact with Kairi's. And that, in turn, affected Sora. You see?"

"She wasn't born like other Nobodies. She can interfere with the hearts and memories of Sora and those aligned with him."

Then he circled back to what he actually wanted done.

"Now, for the finishing touches. First, we must dispose of Naminé. She did a splendid job with Sora, but it's high time she disappeared. Roxas isn't the only one who was never meant to exist. Take care of it, Ansem."

"There's no knowledge that has the power to change your fate."

Nobody had asked him anything yet.

"A Nobody doesn't have a right to know. Nor does it even have the right to be."

"No further outbursts!"

He did not raise his voice again after that.

"I am a servant of the world. And, if I'm a servant, then you should consider yourself a tool, at best."

"You should share some of that hatred with Sora. He's far too nice for his own good."

Roxas woke into the life that had been built for him and knew none of it was borrowed. "Another dream about him."

Summer was almost over, and he meant to spend what was left of it with the only three people he had ever known, chasing a plan for beach money that kept falling apart.

"Uh, well. We could find the real thieves. That would set the record straight."

"First, we gotta clear our names. Once we find the real culprits, everyone will get off our backs."

White creatures came into the town after the photographs and after him, more than once, and each time a single key-shaped blade came to his hand out of nowhere and left again once the danger had passed.

"It's no use. What? What. what is this thing?"

"A key. blade?"

"A Keyblade. What was that about?"

Whatever it was, it left as quickly as it had come, every time.

"Maybe you forgot, but we're broke."

"Hey! You're that pickpocket!"

Somewhere in among his ordinary days a name came to him that did not belong to anyone he could put a face to.

"Right. 'Promise'. What a mess."

"Wait a sec, tell me what's going on!"

"What's going ON!?"

"Okay, fine! You asked for it!"

"Hayner. Pence. Olette. Hayner! Pence! Olette!"

"Naminé? Naminé? What's happening to me?"

"Kairi. I know you. You're that girl he likes."

None of it settled into anything he could explain.

"I'm dreaming. But which parts. were the dream?"

"Yesterday. I fell off the station tower, didn't I?"

He said it to no one in particular, and kept walking.

"You know. that last wonder wasn't exactly wonderful."

"I dunno. Maybe it's destiny."

The four of them went looking for the town's seven wonders as a school assignment, since the summer had nearly run out from under them.

"Look! It's really true. And there's really no one aboard! What's the catch? There's gotta be a catch, right? Then it's real!? Let's go to the station!"

"But what about the last one. the seventh wonder?"

He went to that last one alone, and it was a mansion at the top of a hill outside the town.

Somewhere in those same days a girl found him who already seemed to know him.

"Hello, Roxas."

"I wanted to meet you at least once."

"Roxas! Use the Keyblade!"

She was gone again before he could answer.

"My name is Naminé."

"Naminé? This is. me? And Axel's here too."

"No one knows me better than me."

Axel was ordered, over his own objections, to go and bring the boy back or else be rid of him.

"No way! It's too soon! You can't seriously get rid of him."

"But it's not like that! He didn't betray us. He CAN'T come back!"

They gave him no room to argue further.

"So you'll turn me into a Dusk."

"All right. I'll do it! If that's what you want."

He came into the town after that and found Roxas, and Roxas had no memory of him at all. "Roxas. All right. Fight fight fight."

"You really don't remember? It's me. You know, Axel."

"Talk about blank with a capital 'B.' Man oh man, even the Dusks aren't gonna crack this one."

Roxas gave him nothing to work with. "This town is his creation, right? Which means we don't have time for a Q & A. You're coming with me, conscious or not. Then you'll hear the story."

"Number 13. Roxas. The Keyblade's chosen one."

The fight folded itself into the middle of the town's own tournament, in front of everyone who lived there.

"So it was you."

"Roxas, don't let him deceive you!"

The man in bandages reset the town's own running rather than let it finish, and pulled Axel out of it before it could.

More than once after that Roxas was reached in danger by someone he took for the girl, and once by somebody else entirely: a stranger in a black coat who put one question to him and vanished before he could answer it.

"Can you feel Sora?"

He fell from the station tower once, after the tournament, reaching in his own mind for the girl he thought had been keeping him safe, and touched someone else instead: a name he already had from his dreams of the boy in red. When she asked what that boy was called, Roxas found himself answering with a letter that was not his to give.

For a stretch after that the town began skipping around him, moments repeating or vanishing while everyone else in it noticed nothing, and he went on being confused about it for longer than he would have liked.

Summer's last day arrived and the girl told him outright what he was, and who he was for. He was not born the way his friends were. He was going to meet a boy his own age, the one from the dreams, and complete him. Nothing in the town, not the friends and not the town itself, was real.

He came a third time, with new orders.

"Look at what it's come to. I've been given these icky orders to destroy you if you refuse to come back with me."

"Sure. but I'm not getting turned into a Dusk for. Wait a sec! You remember now!?"

"Great! But, you know, gotta make sure and all. So, umm. What's our boss's name?"

Roxas answered anyway. "We're. best friends, right?"

"The Roxas that I know is long gone. Fine, I see how it is."

The man in bandages froze him where he stood, and froze the moment around him too, and got Roxas out from under it. "Roxas, to the mansion! The time has come!"

Inside it the girl was waiting for him again, and this time she had more to tell him than a name. "Roxas. Do you remember your true name?"

"But if no one tells him, Roxas will."

"You ARE best friends."

She kept talking before he could ask anything back.

"Don't you want to know the truth about who you really are?"

"You know these three, don't you?"

She didn't wait for an answer.

"About a year ago. some things happened, and I had to take apart the memories chained together in Sora's heart. But now. I'm putting them all back exactly the way they were. It's taken me a long time, but pretty soon Sora will be his old self again. The process has been affecting you, too, Roxas."

"Yes. You and Sora are connected. And. in order for Sora to become completely whole again. He needs you."

She did not stop to let him respond.

"You hold half of what he is. He needs you, Roxas."

"I'm a witch with power over Sora's memories and those around him."

"That's what DiZ called me. But I don't know why I have this power. I just do. I'm not even sure there's a right way for me to use it."

"But. I don't get what's been happening lately."

"Yeah. Sora, Donald, and Goofy. They're from the dreams."

It did not make the dreams stop.

"Hmm. I can't help you there. It's funny. Suddenly I feel like I don't know myself at all. I guess I would like to know. What do you know about me. that I don't?"

"You. you were never supposed to exist, Roxas."

He had no answer ready for that.

"What? How could you even say such a thing. even if it were true?"

"I'm sorry. I guess some things. really are better left unsaid."

He pressed her again anyway.

"Organization XIII. they're a bad group."

"Bad or good, I don't know. They're a group of incomplete people who wish to be whole. To that end, they're desperately searching for something."

"Kingdom Hearts."

The man in bandages cut the conversation there and had her taken away before she could tell him anything else. What she told him instead, before she went, was not a fact about Nobodies. She said they would meet again someday, even if neither of them would know the other when they did.

He went further into the mansion after that, and the deeper he went the more of his own memory came back to him: a number, a coat, a life he had actually had before this one.

"Even if it doesn't, I wanna know. I have the right to know!"

"But what IS a Nobody!?"

"Who are you talking to? Me? Or Sora?"

Nobody in the room answered him.

"Was that. Was that supposed to be a joke? 'Cause I'm not laughing!"

"I hate you so much."

"No! My heart belongs to me!"

At the bottom of it he found the machine itself and wrecked it, in a fury that had been building the whole way down.

"My apologies. This is only a data-based projection."

Knowing that changed nothing about what he did next.

Axel was waiting for him in the room after that, one more time. "Simply amazing, Roxas."

"You really do remember me this time? I'm SO FLATTERED. But you're too late!!!"

He could hold two blades now, one in each hand, and it was enough.

"Yeah. I'll be waiting."

He went out through a hole that was not a door.

"Let's meet again in the next life."

"Silly. Just because you have a next life."

Past two more sleepers in their own pods he found the last one, and the man in bandages was there ahead of him, saying things about what he was that put him back into the same blind fury as the machine had, until partway through hitting him he understood that this, too, was only a projection, and kept on anyway. Then it was gone, and so was the anger, all at once.

"Sora. You're lucky. Looks like my summer vacation is. over."

"Sora?"

Sora woke to that name being called, with the other two waking beside him and a year gone from all of them that none of the three, or the cricket who kept their record, could account for.

"Thank Naminé."

Riku let the two of them go rather than hand them over, and at Sunset Hill something the girl said moved the man who had fought Roxas twice more than he expected it to.

"Yes, it's true. We may not have homes. But there IS someplace I want to go. And. someone I want to see."

"DiZ? Wants to get rid of me?"

"Thank you."

Axel took longer to say his half of it. "Guess that's that."

"Go where? It's not like we have homes to return to. We don't exist, remember?"

Riku had already made up his mind. "Same here. So, you think you might let us go? I know you're here to get rid of us, but."

"You sure about this?"

"Heh. You don't have to tell me twice."

A way out opened for both of them, and they took it.

In the days after, the man in bandages, the girl and Riku kept working on what Sora still needed. He was told to be rid of her and did not do it. Somewhere in the same stretch, studying the sleeper's heart, the man in bandages found more inside it than the one boy he had gone looking for, and hid what he had learned there instead.

They woke again in a town built exactly like the one they had just left, except that this one was real, and none of them could account for how long they had slept or how they had gotten there.

The three friends who lived in this town for real, and Seifer besides, were among the first people they went looking for answers from. Mickey found them before anyone else did, cleared a swarm of white creatures off them, and put them on a train out of town without stopping to explain any of it.

At the station the three real friends said goodbye to a boy they had never actually met, and he cried without knowing why he was doing it.

The train carried them toward a tower that stood by itself, away from every other light.

Everyone Is Waiting

Somebody was waiting at the foot of the tower who had no business there.

"I sent some of my lackeys inside to see if the master of this here tower's as big and tough as they say. Word is, he's a real powerful sorcerer. Which would make him the perfect bodyguard for me. See, it don't matter how tough he is. once he's a Heartless, he'll do as I say!"

He knew the two who came off the train with Sora on sight, and did not bother hiding it. "What are you two nimrods doin' here!?"

Donald and Goofy told Sora who he was, and none of it was in his favor.

"You want to know how, eh? Well, Maleficent busted me out, that's how! And now your world. no, no, no, all the worlds. are gonna belong to yours truly. Cause Maleficent's gonna help me conquer 'em!"

Told that she was dead, he did not take it well.

"Heartless squad! Round up!"

They beat what he sent.

"Oh, ya don't know, eh? Well, it's old Yen Sid. 'Course he's probably a Heartless by now!"

Sora, Donald and Goofy went past him into the tower without waiting to hear the rest of it, and Pete was left outside to lose his temper alone.

Up the stairs somebody had been waiting considerably longer than Pete had.

"So, you are Sora. Now then, have you seen the King yet?"

He had not, and said so.

"Yes. I know. However, everything in your journey, Sora, is connected. Whether you will find your way home to the islands. Whether you will return alone or with your friend. And, whether or not the islands will still be there. And the key that connects them all is you, Sora."

"Your past endeavors did prevent an immense effusion of Heartless from the great darkness; make no mistake about that. However, the Heartless are darkness made real, and darkness yet lingers in every heart. The Heartless are fewer. But while darkness exists in a single heart, it will be difficult to eliminate them."

He turned the warning on Donald directly, by name.

"If one such as you, Donald, yields to the darkness in their heart, they too will become a Heartless. But you know this. The Heartless are always lurking and ever seeking to capture new hearts. Never let your guard down! Now then. At times, if someone with a strong heart and will, be they evil or good, becomes a Heartless, the empty shell they leave behind begins to act with a will of its own. An empty vessel whose heart has been stolen away. A spirit that goes on even as its body fades from existence, for you see, Nobodies do not truly exist at all. Nobodies may seem to have feelings, but this is a ruse, they only pretend to have hearts. You must not be deceived!"

He did not pause to let it land before he moved on to what it was for.

"While Heartless act on instinct, Nobodies function in a higher manner. They can think and plan. And it seems they are working towards a goal. What that goal is, we do not know. The King sensed the danger, and journeyed forth to fight it. He found the dark realm's Keyblade, and with it, closed the door. Now he's traveling from world to world, fighting the Heartless as he seeks the answer to the riddle of the Nobodies and Organization XIII."

That was as much as he meant to explain of the enemy. The rest was about what came next.

"Through there, you'll find three good fairies. If you ask, they'll create for you appropriate garments."

"You'll be departing after you've changed in the wardrobe. Take time now to prepare."

He explained how the worlds themselves would be found this time, before he let them go.

"Do not fear. If what the King suspected proves true, the worlds have prepared new pathways along which you may travel. These pathways may be utilized by unlocking special gates. How these gates are opened, I'm afraid I do not know. However, the Keyblade will serve as your guide. When a beam of light radiates from the Keyblade, return to the Gummi Ship. Though the worlds may seem far apart and out of reach, they nonetheless remain connected by invisible ties. As do our hearts."

"Now then, that is all the information I can give to you. Go forth, Sora, Donald, and Goofy. Everyone is waiting."

Through the door he found three more people waiting, and all three noticed him at once.

"Well, look who's here, dears! Sora, Donald, and Goofy!"

"I'll do the designing."

"Ooh, if you're looking for clothes, you've come to the right place!"

None of the three agreed with either of the others about what that meant.

"Now, now, dears."

"Oh, that will never do."

"But don't you like this better?"

They went back and forth like that until Flora put a stop to it herself.

"All right, then. Together now, dears. And no more squabbling!"

"Ooh, it's lovely."

"Oh, yes! He does look very dashing."

Whatever they had settled on, all three were satisfied with it, and moved on to what it was actually for.

"Now, those aren't ordinary garments."

"They have very special powers."

Flora, at least, meant to be specific about it.

"Your garments also have other powers. but you will have to discover what they are as you continue on your journey."

"Those clothes have all kinds of powers that rely on the help of friends! Just as you on your journey, they need friends, too, to unleash their powers."

Fauna had one more thing besides, not from herself.

"Take the orb, dear."

"Oh, and there's something else for you. from Master Yen Sid."

She did not say what it was for, and nobody asked.

"And watch what happens."

"You'll have amazing powers when you transform, but the process takes time. Even so, transforming will help you tremendously on your adventures!"

Merryweather had the last word on it herself.

"You've already gained a new ability! Those clothes must be meant for you! That transformation unleashes your potential to the fullest, Sora!"

"This journey's gonna be twice as difficult as your last."

Yen Sid called the Gummi Ship for them, and they left in it.

Their first stop put them back among people they already knew.

"I knew it."

"Hollow Bastion's got a problem. A big problem."

"We want to restore Hollow Bastion to what it used to be. Who knows, maybe even something better. There's still a lot to do, but I'm sure we can handle everything, except. for that."

He made them honorary members of it on the spot, and took them out to see the work for themselves.

At the Bailey something was waiting for them that was not restoration work.

Sora and Leon fought it off together, and the fighting led the three of them away from the main town. There, something answered them that was only laughter with nobody attached to it, until Sora demanded whoever it was show themselves, and several hooded shapes did.

"Oopsy-daisy!"

"Now do you think that's polite, shutting me down like that?"

"As if! You can talk all you want, but that won't change a thing."

The rest of them left. This one stayed.

"See, that would work. if I were just any old dude. 'Cept I'm not. I'm with the Organization. Nothing 'any old' about me."

"Oh, dear. I think you got the wrong impression."

"As if! Why don't I remind you how tough the crowd you're dealing with really is?"

Something about the way Sora was looking at him seemed to remind him of somebody else entirely. "That's RIGHT, he used to give me that same exact look."

Sora told him he was talking nonsense. He spread his arms open, as if inviting a blow he plainly did not expect to land. "Gee. I just don't know."

"Be a good boy now!"

Then he was gone too.

Before the Keyblade could open anything, Leon said one more thing. "Organization XIII. They look tough. Be careful out there."

Shortly after, a beam of light answered him from the Keyblade itself, and Sora, Donald and Goofy went back to the ship.

None of the three of them were there to see what happened at the tower after they had gone.

A bird brought something old and tattered to the three who had dressed him, and none of them wanted to recognize it.

"My goodness! What's that?"

"Haven't we seen this somewhere before?"

One of them almost placed it out loud.

"Yes, dear. I wonder whose it was."

"Oh! Malefi-"

Flora would not let her finish it.

"No! We mustn't remember her name! Oh dear."

It did not work.

"She was a mean ol' witch. Oh no! The memories are coming back! What'll we do!? Oooh-what'll we do!?"

"Yes. That's what we must do. Hurry!"

"Maleficent!"

They ran to find Yen Sid, and by the time anyone thought to check on either the fairies or the sorcerer, neither one could be found.

The Cornerstone of Light

He did not believe he had been told the truth, and went to see for himself.

"Now what's gonna happen to our plan?"

Nobody answered him at the empty fortress but her bird, and that was enough. He went back to her in glee.

Being under her again had cost him something, and what it left him with was a longing for an easier life he used to have, back when he only captained a boat. A door opened because of that longing, into the very years he was missing.

"On the other side of this portal, they're about to begin construction on that wretched castle. But until then, their treasured Cornerstone of Light lies unguarded, with all of its power still contained!"

In the present, black thorns closed around the thing that door was aimed at, and Heartless started turning up inside the castle that kept it. Somebody who was not really there came to gloat over it before anyone could stop her.

Somewhere she could not be heard, before anyone answered her, the queen said what she was afraid of out loud. "Oh, King Mickey, I wish you could hear me. The castle is in danger! We've got to do something soon! Donald. Goofy. Where are you?"

They arrived anyway. "Oh, Sora! The King told me all about you in his letters. He said you're a very brave young man."

Then she saw what had come in with them.

"Oh my. So those are the Heartless."

"The audience chamber is through the large door in the hallway. Now hurry, Sora!"

She led the way there herself.

"As soon as the trouble started, I made sure to seal this room."

"All that's left now is to go to the audience chamber. Hurry, Sora!"

It was not the last room with something waiting in it.

"Not here, too!"

In the room below, she told them what the castle had always had to protect.

"The room below is called the 'Hall of the Cornerstone.' Our castle has always been safe from worlds that are evil. thanks to the Cornerstone of Light which we keep down there."

"The Cornerstone. of Light?"

Thorns were already closed around it, and the shape that was not really there had come to gloat.

"Just what are you doing here, Maleficent!?"

Minnie did not have an answer ready for that. She had an idea instead.

"Yes! That's perfect! Merlin just might know something about this mess. Let's ask his advice!"

"I'm sure Merlin will help. Please, go to Hollow Bastion and tell him about the castle."

He came back with them, and opened a second door where the first threat had come from.

"I knew Merlin would help! Still, our problem's not solved. Sora, I'm counting on you!"

Then the three of them went through it, and Minnie stayed behind to protect the castle itself.

On the other side, the castle had not been built yet, and the Cornerstone sat by itself on a bare hill.

"What's going on? Everything's black and white."

Somebody they did not recognize ran past them before they got far, dressed for a much older year.

"Ah, which is it?!"

"Hey you! Seen any bad guys around here?"

They decided he was one, and said so.

"Why I oughta. Bah! I don't have time to waste on punks like you! So, I guess I'll go easy on ya!"

"What's with you squirts? You got some kinda bone to pick with me?"

"Them's fighting words!"

He asked one more question before the fighting answered it for him.

"What's that for?"

They won, and only then did any of it stop making sense.

"What's you punks' beef with me anyway? Hmm. Who are ya? You new around here?"

"Well, of COURSE I'm Pete. I'm the captain of the steamboat. So stop botherin' me, see?"

"So hit the road! I gotta go find the little runt what stole my boat!"

None of them corrected him about who he actually was.

Back at the hill, the past had come open in more places than the one they had used. Four windows looked onto other days of it, each one thick with the same white and black creatures as everywhere else, and a fifth showed them exactly why any of this was open at all: his own homesickness, and nothing more deliberate than that. They went through the four in turn, clearing each one, and found further windows behind those, laying out the rest of it: what she actually meant to do with a door that had only opened because somebody missed his old life.

Coming out of the last one, they found the Cornerstone already gone. They caught up with it at the Pier, in hands that were not the ones they had already fought.

"Don't fail her again. let's see. That's it! I just gotta smash that cornerstone to smithereens! But first. I gotta go get my old boat back."

He had taken a boat along with the stone, and it was not his to take either.

"No way, small fry! I finally found the pipsqueak what stole my steamboat!"

He was still wrong about who he was looking at. They took both the stone and the boat back from him.

They returned the Cornerstone to its hill, and found the boat's own captain again at the Wharf. This time he joined them.

"Your future's on the line, pallie, so back off and give me the boat!"

"You'll pay for this!"

"Ha! You're still wet behind the ears!"

Somewhere in the middle of it the wrong man caught a blow meant for the right one.

"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!"

It ended with only one of them still standing.

"It serves ya right!"

He went back to her beaten, and Sora's Keyblade sealed the door shut behind him so he could never use it again. "Yeah. Annnd stay out!"

"Secret? What kinda secret? Oh, never mind. Sorry I put you guys through all that trouble."

"And to show ya my appreciation, I'll let you pilot my steamboat. Best little craft on the river! My deck hand Mickey's late anyways."

They let that go unanswered too.

Back in the present, the thorns were already gone.

"The thorns have disappeared!"

"Welcome back! Because of your bravery, the castle is safe and protected again. Thank you so much for all you've done!"

What the Cornerstone had been guarding came open behind it, a gate, and Sora's Keyblade answered it the same as it always did.

The One Who's Coming Back

They had a story to tell him before he could ask them anything himself.

"You and that dog came flying out of a hole in the wall. You nearly gave us heart attacks!"

"You okay?"

She had been looking for somebody, and they told her the same thing more than once.

"If you stick around, Sora's bound to show up."

"Yeah, he said he's coming back."

"What a romantic story!"

She waited with them for a while after that. Then Axel came, and took her. Nobody had a line for that part, only for what came before and after it.

Getting out of town again turned out to be harder than getting the story out of them had been. Something met Sora, Donald and Goofy in the streets that had nothing to do with any of that. They beat it, and only once it was over did somebody come to see them off properly.

"Impressive. By the way, have you seen a man named Axel? I expect he's here somewhere."

Sora did not have him. "You see, Axel's no longer acting in our best interest."

"Don't let your guard down. Axel will stop at nothing to turn you into a Heartless."

Then he said something that did not sit easily next to the warning he had just given.

"Glad to hear it. Axel aside, it would break our hearts to hear something happened to you."

"True, we don't have hearts. But we remember what it was like. That's what makes us special."

"We know very well how to injure a heart. Sora, you just keep on fighting those Heartless."

He left them with one thing more, and no explanation attached to it.

"Don't be reckless. Do you want to end up like Riku?"

Then he left, without waiting for an answer.

"You okay?"

He left for the next world meaning to find both of them, Kairi and Riku.

Under Arrest

Mickey turned up long enough to say part of it. "Say, fellas, did somebody mention the Door To Darkness?"

"Well, the Door To Darkness can only be opened by the seven princesses. There's Snow White, Jasmine, and Belle."

He gave Sora's own clothes something more before he went, the same as the fairies had. "I'll see ya when you get back. Oh! One more thing. Let me give your clothes some new powers, Sora."

"Finding Ansem's research data will have to come first. I'll explain everything later. Please be careful."

Then he was gone again, the way he always was.

They were called back to the same castle, for a different reason this time.

"We found the computer Ansem was using!"

"Hey, fellas. you're just in time. Got some good news for ya, so get yourselves over to Leon's."

"He went on over to Ansem's study to find out what all the ruckus was about."

Sora went looking in it for anything that might say where Kairi or Riku or the King actually were.

Something was already on the ceiling above him while he typed, and it did not stay there. It landed on the keyboard, and Donald went after it, and between the two of them the keys took a beating neither one had meant to give them.

"Attention current user. This is a warning. Further misuse of this terminal will result in immediate defensive action."

Nobody stopped in time.

"I am the Master Control Program. I oversee this system."

"Decision gate reached. You are now under arrest."

Then all three of them were somewhere else.

Somebody was waiting there who worked for the very system they had just annoyed.

"I am Commander Sark."

"Observe."

Donald and Goofy found out what that word meant a second later.

Then he turned to report them up the chain.

"Master Control. Why not just de-rezz Tron?"

"What about a logic probe? With all your processing power."

"Acknowledged."

They were sent down to a cell built to hold exactly this kind of trouble.

Somebody was already in it.

"You're inside a mainframe computer system."

"A computer system. for processing data. This system is a copy of one created by a corporation called ENCOM. The original program was destroyed."

It had not stayed that way.

"But this copy was acquired by another User. The new User updated and customized the programs, renaming the system 'Hollow Bastion OS'. He used the system for town maintenance, and to advance his private research. My name is Tron. I'm a security program. But now I'm under arrest, same as you."

"The Master Control Program. It controls the whole system. If you idle here, you will be derezzed."

Somewhere above them, the thing he had just named was still looking for something it did not have.

"I still haven't located the password to the dataspace."

"You're dismissed, Sark. Stop any remaining anomalies in the system. or else. End of line."

None of it had been meant for them to hear, and all of it was.

Getting out meant getting power to a door, and getting power to the door turned out to be its own kind of trouble.

"If we could bring the energy core in the canyon online, we could power it back up. The problem is. we're stuck in this cell. We're not going anywhere unless we unlock the energy fields."

"We can get out by gathering the door's lock data and freezing it. The problem is, we don't have any way to extract the data."

They found a way around that anyway.

"That thing in the center's the energy core. Let's try accessing it."

"This is the energy core."

"You guys really are Users. Your actions are totally illogical."

He had one more thing to explain before they could use the terminal that had just opened.

"DTD is the name my User gave to the dataspace. Copies of all the original system programs are stored there, along with anything that's sensitive or restricted."

"Looks like the MCP's on to us. I'll keep this terminal up and running. You better exit the system, now!"

They went home without the one thing they still needed to come back with.

The New Password

The password turned out to be names he already had reason to know: the seven Princesses of Heart, met one by one across his own travels. Nobody staged a scene for how he found the list in Ansem's study, and none is invented here. He went back into the system with it.

Getting back to Tron meant getting past somebody else first.

"Welcome to the game grid."

"That's right, you've been chosen to play a few games. Lose, and you will be subject to immediate de-resolution. Win? Well, (chuckle) no one wins."

Nobody actually won it, the way he told it, except that they did.

"Tenacious little bugs! You're time is up. Prepare for de-resolution!"

"We. would have made a great team."

Tron did not expect them back.

"I don't understand. Why are you here?"

"The MCP is originally a data acquisition program. If you hadn't rescued me, it would have stolen all my data."

They went to the Dataspace together and gave it the names.

"No, it's the DTD's final security routine. This isn't a game. Stay focused!"

"I'm as good as new! All my functions have been restored!"

The same password that fixed him let something else in behind it.

"Finally. I have full access to the DTD. My takeover of the system is now complete. I might have anticipated such a simple password. What's this? An emergency destruct program for the town. Let's see how it performs."

"I'm disappointed in you, Program. Why do you insist on allying with these selfish Users?"

Tron did not deny it.

"Because I want to help them. Something written into my code commands me to do what is right."

"Any data you need from the DTD can be accessed through my User's terminal. I'll keep a dedicated access channel open for you."

"I knew you'd ask. It's a very important link between our worlds. It's how we stay connected."

Then he did something about the trouble instead of just explaining it.

"You. my friends. are the new password."

"I changed the password, so you won't have to worry about the MCP for a while."

What the MCP had actually been arming went up next, in the I/O Tower.

"The MCP's loading a hostile program into the I/O tower."

"I disengaged the security program. Now the lift to the I/O tower should work. Hurry! The lift's straght ahead out of this room!"

He explained what came next before doing it.

"More dangerous programs are sure to follow. To fight these guys. we should delete the enemy data to limit their movements."

"Really? And what command would that be?"

They deleted it together.

"I really owe you one. With all my functions up and running, I think I've got a chance of getting system control away from the MCP. Now I'd better get to work. It's what my User would want."

Then, with nobody asking him to, he said the thing he had plainly been sitting with.

"Well, actually. he's my enemy, too. Ansem took ENCOM's original system and customized it for his own use. I was part of the original system, and Ansem modified me, too. So that makes him my User. But Ansem is also the one who brought back the MCP. The Ansem I first knew wouldn't do that."

"I don't. understand it either."

"But I think Users, like you, are going to be the ones who will finally figure it out. You have the ability to take illogical routes and still arrive at the answers you seek."

He sent them home through the same terminal, and stayed behind himself.

"I'll stay here to make sure the MCP doesn't cause any more trouble. The User world is in trouble. You should hurry back through this terminal."

"You too! And give my best to the Users!"

Back in Ansem's study, what the DTD actually held had been left corrupted. Space Paranoids was quiet again, for now, and there was still the rest of the castle to deal with.

Who Ansem Actually Was

Everything the DTD was supposed to hold had come out of the corruption as one surviving picture. They showed it to him.

"Of course I do! And this is him! I'm positive!"

The face in it belonged to the real one.

"Well, the man in the picture is definitely the one who tried to take over Kingdom Hearts. the one you fellas defeated. But, what you actually fought was his Heartless. Ya see, he wasn't really Ansem. He just went around telling everybody that he was."

He added one thing more, unasked.

"I know I've met this fake Ansem before, and I've seen the leader of Organization XIII, too. Hmm, kinda felt like bein' around the same fella."

He did not take the thought any further than that, and nothing here does either.

Look Out

It came right out of that same conversation. An explosion tore the Bailey open, and Heartless and Nobodies came through it into the town. They had to fight their own way out of the castle's own halls just to reach what was left of it.

"Now I remember! Xehanort! Ansem's apprentice! The leader of Organization XIII is Xehanort's Nobody!"

"Looks like there's more Heartless now."

"Don't worry. There's already lotsa help here. We'll take care of this fight."

He meant for them to go find Riku and Kairi instead. They went to help anyway.

"You're comin' with us whether ya want to or not!"

At the Castle Gate somebody they already knew was waiting.

"Didn't we catch you messing around in the Underworld?"

"Hey, you guys are looking lively."

"You shouldn't judge anyone by appearance."

He kept talking even as they drew on him. "I told them they were sending the wrong guy."

"Oh, we do too have hearts! Don't be mad."

It didn't stop the fight.

"You rotten-!"

"Silence, traitor."

It ran long.

"No way?!"

Mickey caught up with them once it was over. "You sure have lotsa friends to help. So, I guess we better all pull together and finish this battle for good!"

"Yeah, we gotta go help our friends out first."

Something a Heartless fired knocked a boulder loose over his head.

"Look out!"

Goofy took it instead of him.

He did not answer when they tried to wake him. All three took that for the worst thing it could mean.

"They'll pay for this."

They forced their own way through the Ravine Trail after that, and did not do it alone: Cloud, Leon, Tifa and Yuffie were there too, fighting the same thing from their own side of it.

Partway through, he came to.

"Gawrsh, Yer Majesty, I get bumped on the head all the time."

The Answer's No

They fought their way into the Great Maw and saw him for the first time.

"What a shame. And here I thought we could be friends."

Mickey went after him alone. "I know nothing of any Kairi. As for Riku. Perhaps you should ask your king."

Then he was gone, and Mickey followed him through a Corridor of Darkness.

Before the other three could follow, a whole army of Heartless closed around them instead. They split up to get through it faster, and when it was over, only the three of them were still standing in it.

Somebody else came instead, meaning to tell them the truth.

"Way to fall right into their trap."

"C'mon, it's a set-up by Organization XIII. Xemnas is using you to destroy the Heartless. that's his big master plan."

"The guy you just saw. He's their leader. Got it memorized? X-E-M, N-A-S."

He kept going.

"Man, you're slow. Every Heartless slain with that Keyblade releases a captive heart. That is what the Organization is after."

"Bingo. The name's Axel. Got it memorized?"

"Look, about Kairi. I'm sorry."

He did not get to finish it.

"You're doing well."

"We'll ensure he receives the maximum punishment."

Then he turned to Sora. "If it's Kairi you're worried about, don't. We're taking very good care of her."

"Is she that important to you?"

"Show me how important."

Sora went down on his hands and knees for it. Nothing here records the words he used doing it, only that he did it, and that it did not work.

"So, you really do care for her. In that case. the answer's no."

"Are you angry? Do you hate me? Then take that rage, and direct it at the Heartless."

"Pitiful Heartless, mindlessly collecting hearts. And yet they know not the true power of what they hold. The rage of the Keyblade releases those hearts. They gather in darkness, masterless and free. until they weave together to make Kingdom Hearts. And when that time comes, we can truly, finally exist."

Leave, Now

She came in already sure of what she wanted, and said so to the one who had just been explaining his own certainty.

"What in the world do you think you're prattling on about?"

"Kingdom Hearts belongs to me! The heart of all kingdoms, the heart of all that lives. A dominion fit to be called Kingdom Hearts must be MY dominion!"

She meant to hold his Nobodies back with Heartless of her own. Sora wanted her to stop. "I do not take orders from you!"

"While I keep these creatures at bay, you devise a way to vanquish them. forever!"

Her own Heartless lost to his Nobodies anyway, and she went down still refusing to be sorry for any of it.

"Do not misunderstand me. I shall have my revenge on you yet."

With her down, he went right back to where he had left off.

"Now then. Where did we leave off?"

"The Heartless ally with whoever's the strongest."

"Yes, Sora! Extract more hearts!"

Sora would not do it.

Beaten as she was, she still got them out.

"Leave! Now!"

"Imbeciles! You can't be trusted to do anything!"

She opened a way into the dark and put them through it. The battle ended there.

Whatever it had cost her broke her own hold over the Heartless. The Organization took them over instead, and started sending them to worlds Pete had already been to.

In the dark she had just sent them into, they found something to follow: clues that would eventually lead them to Twilight Town.

"Maybe everything we've done. maybe it was for nothing. What am I supposed to do if I can't use the Keyblade?"

Goofy did not let him stay there long. Doing nothing, he told him, would only mean the Heartless kept taking worlds.

The Other Twilight Town

They went back to Twilight Town looking for a way into the enemy's own world, and found the other three already working on a theory of their own.

"This mansion's freaky. It feels like monsters are lurking in there."

"Word is, this mansion gets a lot of really strange visitors."

"We thought this place might be the gateway to some kind of alternate Twilight Town."

They had worked out more than that.

"A computer. Do you think it's connected to that other Twilight Town?"

"I bet you can get to the other Twilight Town through this mansion."

"And this is the trophy Seifer gave you. You left it behind, remember?"

They had a use for the pouch too, once they saw it again.

"I made that pouch myself, and I still have it. So there shouldn't be two of them here."

"Your Majesty? You got the pouch with the crystal from Riku, didn't you? And you promised not to tell, right?"

"The pouch is from the King. When he gave us munny for the train ride, he gave us the crystal too."

Nobodies found them at the mansion before they got any further. Mickey arrived in time to help fight them off.

Inside, Pence went to work on the same computer, though nothing told any of them it was the same one that had once run an entire summer for somebody else.

"This place is falling apart. There's supposed to be a computer in this raggedy mansion?"

"Let's head in! This place has to be hiding some kind of secret!"

It wanted a password.

"Hey, that's it! Ansem the Wise loved ice cream!"

"The password's the name of that ice cream! Make sure you get it right. It won't take an incorrect password!"

The other three stayed behind.

"We'll be here to hold down the fort."

"Leave this world to me! If you get in trouble, just come back. That device there should be able to bring you back."

They had a little more to say before the door actually opened.

"There should be a device like this in the other world, too. You should be able to come back by using it!"

"Say hi to Kairi!"

"I feel we'll see you again. Bring Kairi back with you, okay? We'll be here waiting for you!"

The computer opened a way through.

Got It Memorized

The computer opened onto the same simulated town Roxas had once lived in, though nothing here said any of them knew that.

From there a passage led toward the enemy's own world, and a horde of Nobodies closed around them in it before they were halfway through. Axel was already there.

"Don't stop moving, or the darkness will overtake you! Get goin'!"

The Dusks kept coming.

"Don't ask. Just do it!"

He fought the rest of them back himself, and told them plainly what none of them had had before now.

"I kidnapped Kairi, but she got away from me. After that, Saïx caught her. He's a member of Organization XIII. Saïx. Got it memorized? Now go save her!"

He was still fighting when the worst of the horde finally went down.

"I think I liked it better when they were on my side."

"Nah. I can handle these punks. Watch this!"

The attack he had promised took out the rest of the horde in one stroke. By the time it cleared, he had already begun to fade.

"Well, that's what happens when you put your whole being into an attack. You know what I mean? Not that Nobodies actually HAVE beings. right? Anyway, I digress. Go, find Kairi. Oh, almost forgot. Sorry for what I did to her."

He kept going anyway.

"Think I'll pass. My heart just wouldn't be in it, you know? Haven't got one."

Then he said what he had wanted all along.

"I wanted to see Roxas. He. was the only one I liked. He made me feel. like I had a heart. It's kind of. funny. You make me feel. the same. Kairi's in the castle dungeon. Now go."

He opened the portal to Organization XIII's own world. Then he was gone.

A Good Other

They came through into the enemy's own city.

"Axel, what we're you trying to do?"

No one answered him. He told them himself what he had learned instead. "Axel said Kairi's in the castle dungeon."

They fought their way through the Heartless the city was full of, toward a tower standing over the rest of it.

At its foot, armored Nobodies closed around Donald and Goofy. In the same moment, someone else pulled Sora somewhere they couldn't see.

A figure stood across from him, hooded, a blade in each hand.

"You can't be. Riku?"

"Riku? I defeated a Riku once."

He didn't let the question sit.

"Tell me. Tell me why he picked you!"

Sora had no answer for that, not in words. The figure looked at something around them Sora couldn't make out, and found his answer in it anyway.

"I see. That's why."

They fought again. Sora took both blades out of his hands before the end of it. "You make a good other."

He fell where he stood, satisfied rather than bitter.

His memory had already begun to move into Sora's own.

You Just Disappeared

What was left of Roxas reached out, and found Axel, in a place made to stand for the clock tower the two of them had once shared.

"Look who's finally awake."

They both knew why they were there.

"Or, maybe I have it wrong. Might be time to sleep. Soon, we won't be able to talk like this anymore."

"Does that mean. it's time for me to go back to where I belong?"

They talked about whether a Nobody might have a heart. "You know, I've been thinking about something Naminé said. Roxas, are you really sure that you don't have a heart? Is it possible that we ALL have one? You, me, her. Or is that just wishful thinking?"

Roxas tried to answer by looking inward. "I dunno. I can't. just look inside."

"But I figure, if there is something in there. inside us. then we'd feel it, wouldn't we? And if so. No, never mind."

Axel wouldn't let him leave it there. "Yeah, I guess not."

"C'mon, don't leave me hanging."

Roxas answered him instead. "Sora will find the answer we're looking for. I know he will. Because he's me."

"True enough."

He offered him a sea-salt ice cream, the same kind they had shared in the other Twilight Town, and they ate it there together.

"Man, I miss the old times. Still got it memorized? The day we met, when you got your new name, you and I sat right here and watched the sun set."

"Yeah. This place is home. Me, Hayner, Pence, Olette. We've shared a lot of adventures."

"You'll see them again. I know you will."

Something in the way Roxas ate answered a question Axel hadn't asked aloud.

"Yeah, I suppose he is. Man, this is some good ice cream, huh?"

"Yeah, you're right. Well, I should go. Sora's waiting for me."

They said the same words back to each other.

"Take care, okay?"

"Right back at ya, buddy."

Both of them faded from the place as they said it.

Sora came back to Memory's Skyscraper still turning over what the figure had told him.

Donald and Goofy insisted nothing had happened to them at all.

"Gawrsh, I dunno. You just disappeared. Then me and Donald had to fight some Nobodies."

They went further, dismissing him outright as an enemy who had probably been lying to confuse Sora, someone not to be trusted.

Sora was left with the gap between what he had just been through and what they insisted had happened to them, and he went on regardless.

A Hall of Empty Melodies

They made their way from the city toward the castle, and a path opened before them.

"This town sure is dark. This is where the Nobodies live, right? C'mon. Let's try to find a path to the castle Kairi's being held at."

"This sure is a strange world. The moon even looks like a heart. C'mon, now that we've opened the path to the castle, let's go rescue Kairi!"

They studied it from outside before going in.

"That castle's the enemy's headquarters. It's probably swarming with Nobodies. They're tough opponents, but they all have weaknesses. Try to find them out."

"Be careful! I think we got company!"

Whatever had come at them was dealt with by the time they went in.

"Golly, I feel darkness around us but we haven't seen any members of Organization XIII. But you know they always show up out of nowhere, so let's be ready."

"Wow! This place looked big from outside, but the inside looks even bigger! If this is going to be our last battle, let's show them what we're made of!"

They still had no way straight to her.

"It doesn't look like we can get to Kairi directly from here. I know you're in a hurry, but we need to take that path over there."

Naminé freed Kairi from her cell herself. "This way!"

Kairi showed her distrust. "Believe in yourself. C'mon, hurry!"

They did not get far before Saïx stopped them.

"Naminé. There you are. Kairi. I'm afraid leaving is not an option. I'll take you to see Sora."

"I do. More than anything. But not with you around."

A hooded figure came at Saïx, carrying Riku's own weapon reshaped into a Keyblade, and Saïx chose not to press the fight. "You can take it from here, Riku."

"You. Didn't Roxas take care of you?"

"If I had a heart, this would be where I die of laughter."

He was already withdrawing as he said it. Naminé's own part in this was finished, and she vanished too.

Kairi would not let him leave unrecognized. She pulled the hood back herself and found Ansem's own face underneath it, and took it in stride rather than flinching from it.

"Riku. You're really here."

Riku led her on toward Sora, but Heartless rose up between them before they arrived.

"This time. I'LL fight. You know Sora's completely hopeless without us! C'mon, Riku!"

He gave her a Keyblade of her own, and together they cleared the way.

Sora, Donald and Goofy reached the hall without Mickey, who had gone on ahead alone.

Saïx was waiting for them there.

"Well, you don't have to. But you can believe this. Organization XIII has no further use for you. Just look there. Our Kingdom Hearts. Thanks to you, we've collected countless hearts. Can you hear their euphoria? Now, all they need is one more helping from the Keyblade bearer!"

He set a swarm of Heartless on them that filled the hall.

"We gotta fight!"

In the middle of it, Maleficent and Pete slipped in to make their own use of the chaos. "Well, well. Will the intrusions never end?"

Kairi and the hooded figure arrived from the level above in the same stretch of time. Donald knew the face for Ansem's, and was afraid for her because of it.

"What's going on? Ansem was fighting alongside Kairi! Anyway, Kairi's under attack. We have got to help her!"

The castle's own sharpshooter cleared the rest of the swarm himself, a barrage of gunfire raining down from above, not to help them but to clear the field for himself.

"Have you been a good boy?"

He was mocking them, not fighting yet.

"Oh, it sounds like you haven't. Sora! Roxas!"

"You've really put Organization XIII in a pickle. I guess that must be why the Keyblade chose you. But MAN, did it pick a dud this time. You don't look like you're half the hero the others were."

Sora had heard enough of it. "Are you done rambling?"

"Rambling? As if! All I'm trying to tell you, traitor, is that your time is up!"

They fought, and Sora won.

He needled Sora once more instead of answering him, fading as he said it. "Wouldn't you like to know."

"Why did you call me Roxas?"

Nothing answered him.

The One They Called Roxas

They climbed to the level above and reached Kairi, where a hooded figure stood beside her. Sora asked him, before anything else, who he was.

"I'm no one. Just a castaway from the darkness."

Kairi and Sora embraced.

"This is real."

The figure tried to leave rather than be found this way. Kairi would not let him go, and said his name aloud to stop him. "Riku, don't go!"

With some concentration of his own, Sora saw Riku beneath the dark appearance, and the recognition overjoyed him to the point of tears.

"I looked for you! I looked everywhere for you!"

"Why didn't you let me know you were ok?"

Riku told Sora plainly.

"I didn't want you to find me."

He told Donald and Goofy, half fondly, that he had worried they would never catch on to the clues he had left them, the ice cream and the photograph.

"I was starting to worry you guys weren't ever gonna catch on. Sora never did pick the brightest friends."

Then he explained the face itself. He had fought Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, when Xehanort's Heartless invaded his own heart, and had won, but the power of darkness it took cost him his own form. "I told you. I didn't want to be found. Not like this. I couldn't. I fought with Ansem. With. Xehanort's Heartless. When it invaded my heart, and I won. But to use the power of darkness, I had to become Ansem myself."

He gave the tactical reason first.

"This battle isn't over. And until it is, I still need the power of darkness."

Then, separately, came the confession beneath it.

"In the past, I was overcome by the dark and betrayed you. Look what's become of me. I wasn't sure I wanted to see you. But Kairi insisted."

Donald and Goofy confirmed the clues between them.

"But it was him that was helpin' us, wasn't it?"

"So Riku was the one who's been helping us all along. You two must be best pals for him to change his look to help ya!"

"It's amazing Kairi and you recognized Riku. He looks just like Ansem. I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw him."

Kairi gave Sora back the substance of her own charm.

"You held onto that charm. That talisman of reunion really worked! I wanted to see you so badly, Sora. I missed you so much!"

Sora accepted him exactly as he was. "Then, let's finish it. You're still Riku, no matter what."

Riku turned the group toward what was left to do. "We must defeat Xemnas. He's the Organization's last survivor. C'mon."

The group, now five, continued upward through the castle.

"I wonder how far the King went? I know he's strong enough to take care of himself, but I'm still worried."

"I wonder what this castle was built for? It's pretty mysterious."

Kairi felt it too, and said so. "I don't like the feel of this place. It's almost like a graveyard. Do you know what it all means, Sora?"

Kairi walked with them now, rather than watching from behind, and complained lightly at having been left out of their earlier adventures. "So all of you were out adventuring while I was living a normal life. Why do I always get left out!? You're going to tell me about it later!"

"I wish I could fight like you and Riku. I know what you're thinking, but you guys shouldn't be the only ones getting hurt."

Riku warned them, in general terms, about members of the Organization who treated a fight as a game. "Some members of Organization XIII see fighting as a game. No matter what the rules are, you'll always have a chance to win. Don't miss that chance."

The five reached the area where Luxord waited, Sora walking ahead of the others. Luxord appeared between them and used his cards to remove Sora's friends from the area entirely, leaving Sora to face him alone.

"I'd rather we just skip the formalities."

Mid-fight, Luxord called him by another name, and Sora corrected him outright.

"That's SORA!"

Sora wore Luxord's own time down, cutting through the cards he raised to shield himself, until Luxord was beaten. He named Sora the same way once more as he faded.

"How could you. Roxas."

Separated from the fight, Donald complained he had never gotten the chance to help. "Oh, phooey! I was all ready and raring to go, but I didn't get a chance to fight! We really can't tell what's going to happen! Keep your guard up!"

Once the group was whole again, Riku told Sora he had grown stronger.

"Hmph. Not bad, Sora. You've grown stronger. You don't need my weapon, Soul Eater, or the power of the dark yet."

Saïx came to Xemnas somewhere apart from where Sora's own party climbed.

"Xemnas. Is Kingdom Hearts ready?"

"Very soon."

Saïx pressed him further, and waited on the answer.

"Then, I can end this charade?"

"Indeed."

Saïx closed the exchange with how long he had waited to hear it.

"How I've waited to hear that."

Riku sensed Saïx ahead of them, using something to boost his own power. "I can sense Saïx. He's using something to boost his power. If we can figure out his power source, we may be able to use it, too."

Kairi spotted the glowing entrance before any of them. "Look! Now this entrance is glowing. Could this have something to do with your enemies, Sora?"

Saïx was waiting for them there, and called Sora by the other name again, warning that a different name meant the same fate. "Only you could have made it this far in one piece. Roxas."

"Different name, same fate."

Donald corrected him. "Yeah! He's Sora!"

Sora had heard it too many times already to let it land as anything more than an irritant. "That's really getting old!"

The fight opened. Saïx's shockwave forced Kairi and Riku back, and Riku shielded her with his own body, leaving Sora, Donald, and Goofy to fight Saïx alone. They defeated him. In his own last moment he reached for Kingdom Hearts.

"Why. Kingdom Hearts. Where is my heart?"

Donald, afterward, was simply exhausted. "Gwah! I'm exhausted! Let's rest before we go."

It was Kairi, not Sora, who opened it.

"Roxas. I know that name. Once I spoke to him. He reminded me of you, Sora. Who is he?"

Riku answered Sora directly.

"Because, Sora. Roxas is your Nobody."

He explained the rest of it.

"Xemnas was the one who found Roxas. He could use the Keyblade because he was your Nobody. That's why Xemnas brought him into the Organization. But Roxas betrayed them. After that I fought him because I thought it would help you wake up. I lost, but the next time we met I made sure I was the stronger one."

Then he went further, and second-guessed the fight itself.

"Maybe I didn't need to fight him after all. I think he left the Organization because. He really wanted to meet you."

Sora's own reaction was quiet. "Roxas. I wish I could meet him too."

The Man They Called DiZ

Riku turned the group to keep moving, and told them what he knew of Mickey and of the man Sora still knew only as DiZ.

"It's the King and DiZ. I mean, Ansem the Wise. They must be higher up. We better hurry."

The name reached Sora for the first time fixed to the man ahead of them: not DiZ, but Ansem the Wise. Still talking, now of how he had first come to know Roxas, he returned to the older name, the one the man had gone by when the two of them met.

"I met Roxas because of a guy named DiZ. I didn't trust DiZ at first, but we both needed each other's help."

Mickey had gone on ahead of them alone, into a stretch of the castle Sora's own climb never touched, running the same stretch of time as the fights with Luxord and Saïx. He found Ansem the Wise under attack by a band of Nobodies and Heartless, and fought them off. Ansem the Wise let the mask he wore fall away, and greeted Mickey as an old friend.

"It's been too long, my friend."

Mickey asked him plainly why he had not come for help sooner. "Ansem the Wise. Why didn't you come to me before things got so bad?"

Ansem the Wise answered with the plain fact of who Xemnas was, and did not stop there.

"Xemnas, the Organization's Superior, is the Nobody of Xehanort, my foremost apprentice. The burden was mine to bear."

"I won't deny there was more. I was. Obsessed with thoughts of revenge. My apprentices stole everything precious to me. My research, and my pride."

He turned from himself to Riku, and told Mickey the good that had come of it.

"He must be with his friends by now. Riku was a great help to me. I found him wandering the darkness, after you and he lost track of each other."

Mickey filled in his own half of the story. "Gosh, we didn't lose each other exactly. Riku left. Well, 'cause Xehanort's Heartless was still inside his heart, troubling him. And he sure must've been suffering. But what I don't understand is why he looks like that now, when he's still Riku at heart."

He told Ansem the Wise the promise Riku had made him keep, too. "I guess it must have been after that when I saw Riku again. He said he wanted to help Sora. But he made me promise. Promise that Sora wouldn't ever find out about what happened to him while he was out in the darkness."

Ansem the Wise went back further, and gave him the whole account of Riku.

"I am to blame. When I met Riku the first time he still had the appearance of a boy. Probably because he had such a strong heart. I asked him to find a young man named Roxas from Organization XIII, and bring him to me. When I told him it would help Sora awaken from his slumber, Riku left without a word. He fought Roxas. And I can only surmise Riku lost that fight. Riku must have realized then: to fight in the realm of darkness, he would have to immerse himself in that same darkness. And when he did. You saw what became of him. When Riku brought Roxas back to me, he was introducing himself. As Ansem. If that was what it took to awaken his friend, he was ready to live in darkness. Riku was the victim of my revenge. Oh, how my heart ached. I could only laugh to hide my shame."

He said the time had come to make it right.

"My friend, the time has come. I must make amends to these young people."

"Sora and Riku are together. We have no part to play here."

He added one more thing about the shape Riku wore. "Riku chose that form so he could use the power of darkness. It won't be easy."

Mickey asked about the device Ansem the Wise carried.

"What's this gadget for?"

Ansem the Wise told him what it was.

"It's a device to reclaim Kingdom Hearts and encode it as data."

He admitted, more than once, that he did not know what the attempt would cost him.

"I do not claim to know the outcome of this venture, either. After all. Hearts are unpredictable."

"I'm a fool. I've spent years studying the workings of the heart. Yet it seems I still haven't learned a thing!"

He went further, and reflected on what his own research had gotten wrong.

"The process of encoding hearts is incalculable. The inhabitants of my Twilight Town were data created from real hearts. I was convinced that they would think and behave the way I had envisioned. But I couldn't have been more wrong. A heart is so much more than any system. I saw it when Roxas and Kairi crossed paths. I knew. But I was too stubborn to accept it. It's always the same. I try to wrap my mind around things my heart already knows, only to fail. While I was trying to bring Sora back, I had so many plans in store. But once Sora was an acting force, they fell apart. All my research amounted to nothing, compared with that one boy's heart."

The attempt began, and failed. Kingdom Hearts proved too great for the machine to hold, and it started to overload. Ansem the Wise ordered Mickey to run.

"All the more proof that hearts cannot be contained by data. Run, my friend! It's going to self-destruct, and anything could happen!"

As the machine went critical, Sora, Riku, Kairi, Donald, and Goofy reached Mickey and Ansem the Wise, and Xemnas arrived at almost the same moment. The whole party tried to stop what Ansem the Wise was doing.

"My heart is telling me what I must do. Please allow me to do what it says!"

He told Sora that what happened next was his to finish, and turned, in the same breath, to an apology he did not know would be heard.

"Sora, the rest is up to you. And Roxas. I doubt you can hear me. But. I am sorry."

Xemnas addressed him by the name he had just reclaimed. "I was wondering who would dare interfere with my Kingdom Hearts. And look. Here you all are. How convenient for me. Ansem the Wise. You look pathetic."

He laid the blame for everything at Ansem the Wise's own feet.

"Students do take after their teachers. Only a fool would be your apprentice. After all, none of this would have happened without you. YOU are the source of all Heartless. It was your research that inspired me to go further than you ever dared."

Ansem the Wise did not deny it.

"Have your laugh. I deserve as much for failing to see you for the fool you are."

Xemnas answered that he was only carrying the work forward. "All that and more. I'm carrying on what you yourself began, and I'm creating a brand new world, one heart at a time. I thought you'd praise me, but all you ever do is hold me back. I understand, though. Unlike me, you have a heart. And you're powerless to control it. Consumed, by the jealousy you feel toward the student who surpassed you."

Ansem the Wise admitted his own share of it, and turned the question back on him.

"I admit. My disregard brought chaos to more worlds than one. But what were YOU seeking? You erased me from the world, only to take my name and continue research better left forgotten. Is this the answer you've been looking for?"

He did not stop there. He named Xemnas by the name underneath the name. "Xehanort. Foolish apprentice of a foolish man. You have surpassed nothing. Only proved how little we both know. We may profess to know the heart, but its essence is beyond our reach. We're both ignorant. As oblivious as when we began. I'm afraid that any world you try to create. Any world of yours. Would be an empire of ignorance. That is why you and your creation are destined to fall!"

Ansem the Wise turned to the two men closest to him. "We've said enough! Riku, you know what to do! King Mickey, my friend, forgive me! Farewell!"

Still bearing the face of Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, Riku took hold of Mickey's hand.

"His heart's decided. We can't change that."

Then the machine exploded. The blast purified Riku of the presence of Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, and restored him to his own true form. It released several hundred Heartless down into the city below, where Nobodies also came to try to catch the falling hearts. Mickey saw Riku standing there whole again, and thought of the warning Ansem the Wise had given him.

"Ansem did say 'anything could happen'."

Riku stood whole again, but the remorse the ordeal had put in him had not lifted with the rest of it. Sora spoke to him.

"Riku. C'mon, man. Why do you have to do so much on your own? You got friends, like us!"

The two of them went on together through what remained of the castle.

Maleficent and Pete had been inside the castle since infiltrating it earlier, apart from the party's own knowledge, and they stepped in now as the released Heartless threatened to overrun everyone. Maleficent told the party to go on, and left the creatures to herself and Pete.

"Be gone from here! Leave these creatures to us!"

Mickey explained to the others why they let it stand. "They're doing what their hearts command. We can't interfere."

Maleficent gave Pete a choice of his own. "I will be sending them after Xemnas. Or, perhaps, you would rather fight them yourself?"

Pete doubted they could take on so many.

"But there's no way we can take 'em all!"

Maleficent answered his doubt with a dismissal of her own. "Off with you then!"

Pete greeted Mickey with his usual disrespect, then turned to the fight itself with enthusiasm. "Well, if it ain't the boat-boy King."

"Now lookie here. Opportunities like this don't come along every day, ya know. Bring 'em on!"

Maleficent closed the exchange with a warning of her own. "Sora! 'Your Majesty'! Do not forget. When I've destroyed them all, this castle shall be mine!"

The Promise Kept

With the path ahead of them clear, Sora, Riku, Kairi, Donald, Goofy, and Mickey went on together and reached Xemnas at the Altar of Naught. He mourned the ruin of his own attempt to reclaim Kingdom Hearts, vowed to start over, and called on his warriors to bring him more hearts.

"Ohh. My Kingdom Hearts. Ruined. Now I'll have to start all over again. Warriors of the Keyblade! Go forth, and bring me more hearts!"

Xemnas turned from his own ruin to the party gathered before him, and put a question to all of them at once. "Denizens of light, answer this: Why do you hate the darkness?"

He pressed further, setting their own choice of the light against what he called the Nobodies' own exile from both light and dark alike.

"Then allow me another question. You accept darkness, yet choose to live in the light. So why is it that you loathe us who teeter on the edge of nothing? We who were turned away by both light and dark. Never given a choice?"

Mickey answered him, unprompted by any question meant for him alone. They did not hate the darkness, only found it frightening, since the world was made of light and darkness together, in equal share.

"Aw, we don't hate it. It's just kinda. Scary. But the world's made of light AND darkness. You can't have one without the other, 'cause darkness is half of everything. Sorta makes ya wonder why we are scared of the dark."

Riku answered too, though no source preserves his own words; only Xemnas's reply survives.

"That may be. However, what other choice might we have had?"

Mickey cut in sharply, mid-speech. "Xemnas! No!"

Donald answered Xemnas's own goading in kind.

"You'll never win!"

Xemnas closed the exchange and turned toward the fight to come, declaring he could feel no sorrow, whatever became of the worlds, and whatever the party thought, felt, or were.

"Very good. You don't miss a thing. I can not feel. Sorrow. No matter what misery befalls the worlds. No matter what you think, what you feel, or how you exist."

Sora answered him plainly. "Just give it a rest! You're Nobodies! You don't even exist! You're not sad about anything!"

Riku, addressing Xemnas directly for the first time in the exchange, gave what may have been his own answer to the question no source had preserved from him a moment before.

"It's because of who's lurking inside it."

Xemnas was not finished with words. He drew Sora alone into a phantom battleground called Memory's Contortion, a place that echoed Riku's own earlier fight with Roxas.

With Sora gone from view, Kairi called out for him.

"Sora! Where are you?"

Riku demanded he answer. "Sora, answer me!"

Sora fended Xemnas off, who conceded upon defeat that the fight had been no illusion.

"So, it wasn't a fallacy."

Sora was returned to the Altar of Naught, where Mickey greeted him.

"Gosh, you all did great!"

Xemnas was not finished even then. Sora told him he could not hide from them.

"Xemnas, you can't hide from us!"

Xemnas retreated into what remained of Kingdom Hearts, and addressed it directly, appealing for the power to be made complete. "Hear me, Kingdom Hearts! It seems we must begin anew. Ah, but know this: I will give to you as many hearts as it takes. Mark my words! You can no more be complete without me than I without you. Heed me, Kingdom Hearts! Lend me your power, so that we may be complete! The power to erase the fools that hinder us."

He went on, setting his own understanding of hearts against what he named as Ansem's own mistaken teaching. "Hearts quivering with hatred. Hearts burning with rage. Hearts scarred by envy. That fool Ansem said the heart's true nature was beyond his understanding. But it's not beyond mine! Hearts are the source of all power!"

The worlds themselves answered him. A door appeared. Mickey marked the moment. "The worlds gave us this doorway. They want us to be the guardians of their destiny!"

Goofy marked it too. "What's goin' on?"

Riku laid out the stakes plainly: there would be no turning back once they went through, only victory or oblivion, and he remembered standing on the far side of a door from Sora once before, now standing beside him instead.

"Once we go through, there's no turning back. It's victory. Or oblivion. So, Sora. Are you ready? Do you remember before? We stood facing each other on opposite sides of that door. Now we stand side-by-side. Let's go home together this time."

The party followed Xemnas through the door. He mocked their own loyalty to their hearts as they went. "So, it seems your hearts have led you to obliteration. Perhaps it doesn't pay to be too loyal to one's heart. I will have to be sure and remember that."

Sora declared it would end there. "Get ready, Xemnas. It all ends here!"

The party infiltrated the war-machine Xemnas had made of himself, the fight carried partly inside its hull and partly outside it, against the dragon directly. Partway through, Xemnas's own attacks cut Kairi and Mickey off from the rest of the party.

Sora insisted the four of them left could still finish it. "We can take him on our own!"

Xemnas took up Master Xehanort's own Keyblade Armor and the weapons of his fallen Organization, and turned on Sora, Donald, Goofy, and Riku directly, expelling Sora and Riku bodily from the ship's own cockpit.

"Hearts are power."

The fight carried on outside, against the dragon in the open air, and Xemnas turned his own attacks into taunts as he fought. "Sora. Are you certain you can trust Riku?"

"Riku. Are you sure you're not jealous of Sora?"

"Sora. Riku. There is falsehood within your hearts. Do you dare deny it?"

Defeated a second time, he protested that he needed more, and began to fade.

"I need. More rage. I need more. Hearts."

He seemed to fade into darkness, and the party found themselves once more at the Altar of Naught. Riku spoke of what the darkness had already done to him.

"I had given in to the darkness."

Sora pressed Xemnas even in his own retreat, about what a heart held beyond anger and hate.

"Xemnas, there's more to a heart than just anger and hate. It's full of all kinds of feelings. Don't you remember?"

Xemnas answered only that he did not. "Unfortunately. I don't."

Before they went on, Sora asked one thing more. "You're coming back with us, right?"

The party believed itself still bound for one shared last battle, not yet knowing it would be Sora and Riku's own to finish alone. Donald warned they might yet be separated, and urged pressing on regardless.

"Don't let your guard down. We may wind up getting separated at any time. Come on, let's save the world again!"

Goofy called the door Kingdom Hearts itself had opened a chance not to be missed, a hard fight, but a winnable one. "The Kingdom Hearts opened the door to Xemnas. We can't let this chance slip by. It's going to be a tough fight, but we can do it!"

Mickey guessed Xemnas had only grown stronger still, and said the battle had begun with Ansem's own research and ought to be finished for his sake.

"Xemnas has probably grown even stronger, and is waiting for us. This battle began with Ansem's research. Let's finish it for him!"

Kairi refused outright to be left behind. "I'm tired of waiting, so don't tell me to stay behind! From now on, wherever one of us goes, the other follows, got it?"

Naminé appeared again, and opened a corridor of darkness that led toward Destiny Islands. Riku, purified now of Ansem's own darkness, could no longer open one himself.

Roxas came forward out of Sora, and he and Naminé stood together before Sora and Kairi. She spoke first.

"Sure. See? We meet again, like we promised."

Roxas spoke next, of his own doubt, that after so long apart the two of them might not know each other anymore. "You said we'd meet again, but when we did, we might not recognize each other."

He answered his own doubt himself.

"I think I understand. I see myself the way you remember me. And you see yourself the way I remember you."

He set that against what Sora and Kairi alone, of the four of them, had been given.

"Yeah, but you and I didn't. We got to meet our original selves."

Asked when they would meet again, he answered simply.

"Right. Anytime Sora and Kairi are together."

Kairi thanked Naminé for it. "Thank you, Naminé."

And in the same breath, told Sora what she meant to do with it. "We'll be together every day. Right, Sora?"

Roxas accepted what came next, and joined with Sora.

"Look sharp!"

Naminé, too, wondered how the two of them had survived so long inside Sora and Kairi at all.

"I always thought Nobodies were doomed to fade back into darkness."

Then she let herself see the plain gladness in it.

"So, we can be together again!"

She merged into Kairi, as Roxas had already merged into Sora. Once both were gone, Riku offered what reassurance he could.

"Don't worry. You're all still you."

One by one, the others went on ahead through the corridor Naminé had opened. Kairi stood by the portal, and spoke before she went through it herself.

"Hey, let's go home!"

Mickey admitted he could not be certain what waited for them beyond the corridor, but pressed the others to hurry through all the same. "Well, I'm not sure. But we'd better hurry and get through."

Goofy called back not to be left behind. "Wait for me!"

Donald's own voice carried after him as he went. "C'mon!"

Before Sora and Riku could follow them, Xemnas's construct, having escaped the World of Nothing, attacked once more, and cut the two of them off from everyone else. Sora and Riku alone were left to face what remained of him.

No More Eternal

With the rest of the party already carried through Naminé's corridor and the portal closed behind them, Sora and Riku destroyed Xemnas's construct and gave chase, following him back into his own pocket dimension for a third and final battle.

Somewhere in that chase, alone together, Sora spoke of what he had not yet managed to say. "Hey, Riku? I wanted to thank Naminé, but. I couldn't bring myself to say it, not until everything was back to the way it was before."

Riku answered him. "Don't worry, we'll make that happen. Once this is over, you can thank her all you want."

Once the construct was gone, Sora and Riku found themselves inside the World of Nothing, a nearly empty void of shifting greys and whites, where Xemnas would be fought for the last time.

Xemnas opened the fight with a boast. "Anger and Hate are supreme."

He mounted his final assault, drawing on his full power over light, darkness, and nothingness, and very nearly ended the fight there with a massed volley of Ethereal Blades.

Pushed back but not beaten, Xemnas refused to yield, and turned to the same claim of permanence the Organization had made from the start. "Heroes from the realm of light. I will not allow it to end this way. Not yet. If light and darkness are eternal, then surely we nothings must be the same. Eternal!"

Riku took up the claim, to turn it back on him. "You're right, light and darkness are eternal. Nothing probably goes on forever, too. But guess what, Xemnas?"

Sora finished it. "That doesn't mean YOU'RE eternal!"

Xemnas pressed on for one more round. "No more eternal than that radiance of yours."

Near the end of the fight, Sora was left open to a blow meant to finish him. Riku took it in his place, and gave Sora the opening to beat Xemnas into submission.

Together, Riku and Sora fired a beam of light from Sora's Keyblade, and it finished Xemnas for good.

"Curses. Keyblade."

Riku answered him once more. "I wouldn't be too sure of that."

Defeated, Xemnas had left one last order behind him: an onslaught of Dusks, sent to finish what he could not, and eliminate the Keyblade wielders. Sora and Riku destroyed them.

Sora and Riku escaped the realm and arrived at the Dark Margin: a dark beach with blue rocks and huge arches stretching above and across the sea, and a cold light resembling a sun shining far off, at the border between the Realm of Darkness and the Realm Between.

Closer Than You Think

Sora and Riku came to rest on the Dark Margin's own shore, both of them spent, Riku exhausted and injured besides.

Riku spoke first, and what he said was a small, bitter joke. "You know. I always figured I was better at stuff than you."

It did not stay a joke. Looking at the place they had washed up in, he wondered aloud whether this, nothing, was simply what the world really was underneath everything, and whether he ought to stop fighting it.

"If this is what the world really is. Just this, then maybe I should fade back into darkness."

"If the world is made of light and darkness. We'll be the darkness."

Sora would not let him. "Aw, c'mon, Riku. You've been hanging around darkness for too long. You gotta try and think positive."

Pushed to it, Riku admitted the truth underneath the joke. "What I said back there, about thinking I was better at stuff than you. To tell you the truth, Sora. I was jealous of you."

Something washed up beside them: a bottle, and inside it, a letter. Riku took it, read enough to see it was not his, and passed it to Sora.

"Sora? I think it's for you."

Sora read it aloud. "Thinking of you, wherever you are. We pray for our sorrows to end, and hope that our hearts will blend. Now I will step forward to realize this wish. And who knows: starting a new journey may not be so hard, or maybe it has already begun. There are many worlds, but they share the same sky, one sky, one destiny."

Reading it, Sora noticed a light where there had been none. "Hey, Riku. What's that light?"

Sora got up and offered Riku a hand. They walked into the light together, and fell, and the fall ended in open water, the sky overhead the one they had grown up under.

Kairi was already there, and called out before Sora even reached the shore. He swam for her, and the two of them came together the way the letter itself had promised they eventually would.

"You're home."

Sora returned what he had carried the whole way: her charm, still on its string, kept exactly as promised. "You held onto that charm. That talisman of reunion really worked! I wanted to see you so badly, Sora. I missed you so much!"

Around them, Donald and Goofy closed in on Sora. Riku, separately, was met by Mickey.

Later, once the noise of arrival had settled, Sora and Riku talked once more, this time without anything chasing them. Sora asked what he still did not quite have words for otherwise.

"Hey Riku, what do you think it was, the door to the light?"

Riku did not answer with an explanation. He tapped Sora's own chest instead.

"This."

Sora pressed a hand to his own chest, and looked up. "This?"

"Yeah. It's always closer than you think."

Somewhere in the same stretch of homecoming, a second letter turned up, this one not Kairi's. Sora looked at it, and asked the only question the record gave him to ask.

"From the king?"

Sometime after, in a moment set apart from everything before it, Sora went back to the Secret Place and found a new drawing on the wall: Kairi, giving him a paopu fruit.

Re:coded

The Sora Who Wasn't

Back at Disney Castle, reorganizing his own journal, Jiminy found a line he had not written. "We must return to free them from their torment."

He could not account for it, and brought it to Mickey.

To find out where it had come from, Mickey digitized the journal's own contents and, inside it, made a Sora out of data.

This Sora woke on a data version of Destiny Islands, cleared the corruption spreading across it, and followed a cloaked figure who kept vanishing just ahead of him, world after world, never close enough to catch.

Cornered at last, the figure gave himself up. He was not a stranger. He was the journal itself, alive, wearing Riku's own shape and voice.

Sora asked him outright whether either of them was anything more than data. "Oh, yeah. There was something I wanted to ask you, Riku. You said that you and I are 'data', right?"

The Journal told him it did not matter, so long as it helped their friends, and the answer put his heart at ease.

Heartless broke into Disney Castle itself. Mickey fought them off, but he, Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy found the castle sealed around them, and were pulled bodily through the same breach the Journal's own corruption had already opened, into the data world alongside him.

Mickey understood at once what this meant for the Journal, held there in Riku's own borrowed shape.

"Riku's body was taken over by the bugs. So that means. Oh! If we don't get rid of these bugs, Riku might never wake up!"

Maleficent and Pete, tracking the same disturbance under Maleficent's own orders, forced their own way into the data world too, and where Mickey saw danger to a friend, they saw a weapon. Corruption of their own making bound the Journal to their side.

"I turned him into my Puppet, that's what! I got those bugs inside of him."

The True Hurt

In the fight that followed, Sora's own Keyblade was destroyed outright. Without it, he made his way on foot through a data version of Hollow Bastion, and there, at last, found Donald and Goofy again.

"Even if I don't have my Keyblade, there's gotta be something I can do. At the very least, I've got to help Riku."

Pete caught up to the three of them and mocked him for it, data and nothing more, no heart of his own to speak of. Donald and Goofy would not hear it.

"He's not artificial! In every kind of world, Sora is still Sora!"

"He even said he'd fight with us! His feelings, they're so deep, and so happy! That's how, that's how we know for sure! Sora has a heart, and it's inside of us!"

The Keyblade answered them, and returned to his hand real this time, tied to his own heart rather than to whatever had assembled him. He beat Pete, and after him the Journal himself, corruption and all, and set him free.

To recover what the ordeal had cost him, Sora went further still, into the Journal's own data directly. Inside, the Journal showed him a memory kept apart from the rest, calling it a hidden truth.

"Darkness had taken ahold of my heart, and Kairi had lost hers completely. But at the end of your journey, Sora, you would have saved us. Now, what did me and Kairi have in common? When you watched-what did you feel? It was 'hurt'. We had both lost ourselves, and we were hurting. So what would you have done?"

None of it was new. Not to the one hearing it for the first time from inside a memory not his own, and not to anyone who had already lived through Castle Oblivion in full.

With the Journal whole again, he said his own goodbye.

"I just wanted you to see you always make the right choices. On the road ahead, more than one truth will come to light. You'll forget things, lose things that you care about, and it won't always make sense. It may hurt so bad you'll feel like you're about to lose yourself. But you won't. Not you. You're like a sponge. No matter how much pain they throw at you, you'll suck it up, squeeze it out, and leave things a little better. Just follow your heart, and you can change lives. You don't do anything special. Just do what you do."

The cloaked figure from the very start found him again, across every world he had already set right, handing over a card each time without a word of explanation. Once the last of them had passed between them, the figure finally spoke, mocking what he had cost Sora to remember.

"The sadness of knowing you forgot someone who matters, that'll gnaw at you forever. And you believe carrying around that kind of hurt will bring back the memories you lost? Really, Sora?"

Sora refused him. He would rather keep the hurt than set down the people it belonged to. "You, accept it? Heh! Don't make me laugh! It's time you learned what real hurt feels like!"

Beaten, the figure gave himself up in turn. "Come on, Sora. Do it! Finish me off. What are you. Ah! Hmm. I guess you've seen through the last illusion. Me. I'm data, just like the rest. Not even worth the effort, right? No point in destroying what never really existed."

He was a data version of Roxas. "My role was to see if you were ready to take ownership of the hurt inside you. And now that role is done. Nothing left for me to do but, go away."

As he began to merge back into Sora, Sora asked him whether he had anywhere of his own to go back to. "I don't know if I have one, but, there's a place I'd like to be."

His own last words, before he was gone entirely.

"Summer vacation."

The Truth Behind the Keyblade

A woman made of the same data met them next, introduced by no one but herself.

"Nice to meet you. My name is Naminé. You don't know me, but I know you."

She did not wait to be asked what she meant.

"No, you really don't. It's true I put your scattered memories back together, but I'm also the one who took them apart in the first place. Not only that, the bugs that appeared in Jiminy's journal, those were my fault, too."

Every world's own corruption, she told them, had been meant to teach exactly what it had taught: that hurt faced is not the same as hurt erased.

Then she went further, surfacing memories that were never Sora's own to begin with. Roxas first, and Axel. Then three names spoken plainly, for the first time, to anyone still living who could hear them.

"Mickey, maybe you know how much they're hurting. These three were keys, too. They were connected to the truth behind the Keyblade."

"And, they're still connected, Sora, somewhere way down deep inside of you."

She let that settle before she went further still.

"Yes, two of them, you have met. As for the third, I never realized it, but you and he share a very special connection."

"I can't say for sure. But I do know a day will come when they must rise from their sleep. And then, the only one who can save them, will be Sora."

There was one promise left unpaid, from further back than any of this, and Sora paid it now, on the promise's own behalf. "Oh, and. There's one more thing I have to tell you, Naminé. Thank you."

She answered him, and let herself go.

"I'm really just data made to pass along a message. I shouldn't exist right now in this journal at all. And now, the record of me will disappear. But when you pass my message on to the other Sora, just remember to tell him the things that you've seen and that you've felt. If you do that, then we'll be at rest, her, and me too."

Before the journal closed for good and Mickey went home, he said his own goodbye to the Sora who would remember none of it.

"No, Sora. That's how it feels to say goodbye. Since meeting you here in the data world, I've come to remember a lot of things. Things about the first time I left home to go on an adventure. About the first time I made friends, long ago. This all brought back so many memories. And now I understand. The notebook didn't only contain the record of your journey. It also held everything that each of us felt. Our hearts. I promise you. We will tell everything that happened here to Sora and Riku. That way, we can all remember this adventure, together. Memories link hearts to each other. They link us to each other. So, we'll be friends forever."

Back in the real world, Mickey put what he had learned into a letter, sealed it in a bottle, and sent it out to find Sora, Riku, and Kairi together.

Then he went to Yen Sid with what the data world had given him. "Yen Sid, I think we're finally close to figuring out where Ven's heart is."

Talk turned to Xehanort, both of his known halves already gone. "Xehanort? But his two halves are gone. There was Ansem, who commanded the Heartless, and Xemnas, who commanded the Nobodies. Didn't Sora defeat them both?"

Whatever answer Yen Sid gave him, Mickey's own mind was already made up.

"Well, it doesn't matter what he cooks up. Me and Sora, we'll be ready, and Riku, too!"

Yen Sid sent for them both.

Dream Drop Distance

Got It Memorized

In the Hollow Bastion computer room, Braig found Even and Ienzo unconscious on the floor, darkness leaking out of them in fine specks. Only one other person was there.

He asked Terra what had happened. "I am."

Terra's Keyblade answered instead, run through Braig's own chest before he understood he was in danger. As he lost hold of himself, the voice that had answered for Terra gave itself a new name.

"That's not my name. I'm not 'Xehanort.' My name. Is Ansem."

More than ten years later, Lea woke with his own memories whole, Axel's among them.

"Where. What happened to me? Roxas?"

He found himself back in Ansem's own study, and was not alone there. "That's me. Dilan, Aeleus, Even, Ienzo."

All four of them had been recompleted together. Two were still unconscious. Braig and Isa were nowhere in sight.

"We're people again. But only the ones who joined the Organization here. I guess Xehanort doesn't count, but where are Braig and Isa?"

Aeleus and Ienzo argued that the two of them should already be here too, recompleted or not, the same as everyone else.

"No, look, okay, the fact is, we're here. We've been recompleted, right? So they should be here too, plain and simple."

Lea would not hear it. He remembered, correctly, that Braig and Isa had been in Radiant Garden with the rest of them when they became Xigbar and Saïx, and that argued for looking closer, not further off.

"Ah. Forget it. You know what? I'll bring 'em back myself."

He left through a corridor of darkness rather than keep arguing about it.

"Why do I always get stuck with the icky jobs?"

At the Mysterious Tower, while Yen Sid oversaw the exam, a raven dropped a note and a crown at Mickey's own feet.

"Why, that's Minnie's."

"It's from Maleficent. She's kidnapped Minnie."

Mickey, Donald, and Goofy returned to Disney Castle at once and found Maleficent and Pete in the library, Minnie held between them.

"Perhaps you should take a few moments to reconsider. Or does the Queen's life mean nothing to you at all?"

Mickey asked what she wanted, plainly, and Maleficent answered him by naming a name she had no business knowing.

"All right, Maleficent. Tell us what you want."

"Very perceptive. I presume you are familiar with Xehanort, the man who led me to discover worlds outside of my own?"

She told them what he had shown her, unasked.

"As do you, I see. Yes, he shared everything with me, how to go about winning a heart over to the darkness, and, most gloriously, about the seven hearts of pure light, the ones that would grant me the power I need to conquer all worlds."

She wanted something simpler now, she said, than a war she could no longer manage alone.

"However, the worlds were too complex, too much for even me to contain. It seemed I had miscalculated. Then it came to me, of course. I could go about conquering other worlds in my own manner. You do have the 'data' for all the worlds, do you not? And now you will hand it over to me."

Mickey pressed her on why, and got nothing for it. "Why do you want the data?"

"I'm afraid that is no concern of yours."

Pete, standing over Minnie, made the same demand his own way.

"Don't you bozos pretend you don't remember. Me and Maleficent was trapped inside it. Now cough it up!"

"Ah. Ah. Ah. Wouldn't want her Royal Minnie Mousiness to get a boo-boo, now would we?"

Refused a second time, Maleficent gave up asking. "I see you have failed to recognize the futility of your situation. Very well. Face your doom!"

She attacked. A corridor of darkness split open, and out of it came two chakrams, one turning her own strike aside, the other keeping Pete busy long enough for Minnie to break free. Their leverage gone, Maleficent and Pete withdrew. Out of the same corridor stepped the one who had thrown them.

"You used the darkness to get here? That was reckless. But gosh, I didn't expect you to save us. Axel."

"Axel didn't. My name is Lea. Got it memorized?"

"I now know that what I seek lies within these walls. Trust that I will eliminate you in good time."

Seven Lights, Thirteen Darknesses

Back at the tower, Yen Sid brought Lea up to date on the exam already underway, and on Xehanort's own coming return.

Lea said he had come to learn how to wield a Keyblade himself, and it was not what anyone in the room had expected him to say.

"I must warn you again, the road will not be easy."

"Fine. Let's jump right in."

Given how little time was left to spare, Yen Sid agreed, and sent him to the Secret Forest, where Merlin and the three good fairies had bent time itself around him.

"It's clear you cannot teach a cat to bark. But Merlin and the three good fairies are aiding him in a place that's more temporally flexible. My hope is that he can at least learn to wield it. He certainly has fire, so I suppose it depends now on how strongly it burns."

To Sora and Riku, still waiting, Yen Sid turned next, and told them plainly that Xehanort was coming back. Sora did not see why that needed a test at all.

"But that's a formality, right? I already proved myself. Me and the King, and Riku, we can take on anything. Right, Riku?"

Riku answered him, not with a boast, but with what he still owed himself, ever since watching Xehanort lose his own Keyblade for good to the very darkness Riku had once carried too.

He agreed to the exam.

"Riku. Then count me in. Put me through the test! Just watch, me and Riku will pass with flying colors!"

"As a Keyblade Master, Xehanort had a gift like few others. But such great minds are often plagued by a single great question. What is the essence of the human heart that weakens us, or empowers us? The answer, he believed, would be found in the 'Keyblade War.' What if the challenges of our past were, in fact, a map to the light and darkness that battles within us all? Xehanort had to know, so he renounced his duties as master and chose the seeker's life. Since then, in many a guise, he has clashed with protectors of the light, Keyblade wielders like yourselves. And mark my words, he will trouble us yet again."

"We must be ready. Which is why you, Sora and Riku, are to be tested for the mark of a true Keyblade Master. No doubt you fancy yourselves masters already, but it takes years of training. Only a true master can teach you the proper way. Both of you are self-taught Keyblade wielders, an impressive feat. However, the time has come for you to let go of preconceived notions, forget what you know about the Keyblade, and begin your training again with a clean slate."

Then he told them the whole of it.

"Long ago, in the age of fairy tales, the World was filled with light, a gift, many believed, from an unseen power known as 'Kingdom Hearts.' You see, Kingdom Hearts was protected by its counterpart, the 'χ-blade,' so that none could ever lay hands on its mysteries. But in time, the World was overrun by legions who wanted the light all for themselves, and the first shadows were cast upon the land. These warriors crafted 'Keyblades' in the image of the original χ-blade, and waged a great war over Kingdom Hearts. We call this the 'Keyblade War.' But though the war extinguished all light from the World, the darkness could not reach the brightness inside every child's heart. With that light, the World was remade as we know it today, with countless smaller worlds shining like stars in the sky. As for the real χ-blade, it did not survive the battle. The two elements that created it, one of darkness and one of light, shattered into twenty pieces, seven of light, thirteen of darkness. And as for the source of all light, the one true Kingdom Hearts, it was swallowed by the darkness, never to be seen again. As long as it remains there, even the brightest world will have its dark corners. After all, light begets darkness, and darkness is drawn to light. For this reason, some decided to use the Keyblade, a weapon designed to conquer the light, to defend the light instead. These were the first heroes of the Keyblade."

Only the task itself remained to be laid out.

"One dream is connected to another, which means we must choose in which 'Sleeping World' you will begin. I will return you to the Destiny Islands just before they were swallowed by the darkness and plunged into sleep. Once dreams take you, you must let them guide you to the Sleeping Worlds. As there are seven pure lights, there are seven 'Sleeping Keyholes.' Unlocking these will both grant you new powers, and free the worlds from their wakelessness. Complete this task, and return here safely, and I will name you both true masters."

"Very well, then. Sora and Riku, let your examination begin."

Both of them woke on the same shore, young again, on an island that no longer existed anywhere but here.

Not So Very Different

The exam put them back on Destiny Islands the night it fell, younger than either of them had been in years. They kept clear of who they used to be and took the raft out ahead of the Heartless.

A storm broke the sail. Out of the water, grown giant, rose Ursula.

"Oh, he was right. Those wretched guppies are here. Well, it's about time we settled the score!"

"Sorry, dearies, but I won't fall for that trick!"

They beat her. Her own wake pulled them under, and in the dark below the surf a Keyhole opened onto Traverse Town. Someone in a robe stood watching from above the water, and neither of them knew who.

In Traverse Town, without either of them choosing it, they were apart.

Onward, in a world gone strange with a wooden boy's own borrowed heart, Sora found someone he had thought long finished with. "Xemnas? This is impossible!"

"My my, a hollow puppet that's managed to grow a heart. Just imagine that."

Sora asked why a Nobody could not have one too. "Maybe so. However, do not forget that you, yourself, are not so very different from us."

"The memory and heart are tightly linked. Rub a few memories together, and you get a spark of emotion, a feeling. But in a digital world, memory does not work like that. Nothing is ever felt. You can hold a thousand, a million times the information, but there is still no heart with which to parse it."

He found Xemnas again further on, inside a machine world running on somebody else's stolen work. "Once, my master, Ansem, found an old system and made a copy of its Master Control Program, and used it to serve his own ends. This is the original data of that system. Here, data can be copied. Memory can be changed and easily manipulated. Tron is a digital entity, so why would he be any different? He obeys the rules of this world."

"Sora, what about you? Your heart, memories, your data, and your dreams. The bits and bytes that have made up your life so far, can you say for sure they are not just copies of someone else's?"

Sora did not answer him. Xemnas did not seem to need one.

"Indeed. A heart is never lost for good. There may have been variances in our dispositions, but a number of us unquestionably showed signs of a burgeoning replacement. Once born, the heart can also be nurtured. Our experiments creating Heartless were attempts to control the mind, and convince it to renounce its sense of self. But understand, one can banish the heart from the body, but the body will try to replace it the first chance it gets, for as many times as it takes. And so I knew, even after we were divided into Heartless and Nobodies, it was just a temporary separation."

"However, through weakness of body, weakness of will, or weakness of trust, most of the original members we had chosen for the Organization were inadequate. Thus, naturally, they never had a chance to attain their goal. Yet, even this was to be expected."

"We have learned of the heart's folly, and we have achieved our other goals. This last excursion has proven to be a worthy closing assignment for the Organization."

Further on still, in a place built out of somebody's own idea of music and light, the young man in the coat stood waiting rather than watching from a distance for once. He told Sora plainly that none of this was his own dream to wake from, and that they would meet again.

My Friends Are My Power

Every Keyhole sealed, Sora expected the Realm of Light. He got The World That Never Was instead. "Aw, what's the matter, sleepyhead?"

"We jumped through a lot of hoops to get you here. But it looks as if it's gonna pay off."

Xigbar told him the whole shape of it, unasked. "Hey. Let's hit these plot points in order, Sora. Roxas. First, you must be wondering about your revised itinerary. 'Why am I here, not back home?' The answer's simple. We brought you to this place! Hijacked your little slumber party before it started. And ever since, we've been both your companions and your constant guides."

"Bingo. You were able to go back in time to just before your home became a Sleeping World, only because a past version of you already existed there. And I can see, in the past, you already met Mr. Robe Guy. Yup, he was there then to make sure you ended up here now."

None of it had ever been a test, not the way Sora had believed. "It sure is. It's too perfect. Who'd ever believe it? Which is why you idiots never saw it coming. You thought you were off doing some kind of test, right? Well, test this, how come you're wearing the same clothes if you're already back home? You are not gonna wake up, okay? Look, there's no real versus dreams anymore. There's just you, us, and this."

Faces came next, one at a time: Naminé, Xion, Roxas, Riku, Kairi, Terra, Aqua, Ventus, each of them there and then gone, carried without Sora ever having chosen to carry them. To Naminé he tried to say something he had never managed to say to her in person.

"Wait! Naminé! I've got a message for you. I meant to tell you once this was all over."

Roxas did not vanish the way the others had. "Roxas. How can you be here? Am I dreaming? C'mon, say something."

"Roxas, you're you. We're not the same. I wanted to tell you that. That you deserve as much as I do to be your own person."

Through him, for just as long as the illusion lasted, Sora felt what Roxas himself had once felt, all of it at once.

"Axel and Roxas and Naminé, and that other girl. I felt what Roxas felt and, they laughed together, got mad, and they grieved. You have to have a heart to cry."

He found Xigbar again, and this time asked him outright what the Organization had actually been for. "Xemnas and Xehanort formed the Organization for a specific reason, round up a bunch of empty husks, hook them up to Kingdom Hearts, then fill them all with the exact same heart and mind. Translation, they were gonna turn all the members into Xehanort."

"Me? I'm already half Xehanort."

Sora would not let the answer stand unchallenged. "Just stop it! You treat people's hearts like bottles on a shelf, but they're not! Hearts are made of the people we meet and how we feel about them. They're what ties us together even when we're apart. They're what, make me strong!"

"I know the Keyblade didn't choose me, and I don't care. I'm proud to be a small part of something bigger. The people it did choose. My friends, they are my power!"

Xigbar had heard enough. "Those are just words. You've lost. Fine. See where your power gets you here. Xemnas! He's all yours."

Sora fought Xemnas and won. The win cost him what the fight itself had not: his own heart's hold on waking gave out, and he dropped into a sleep no dream of his own would release him from. As he fell, Ventus's own heart, resting inside him since before he ever knew it was there, rose to meet him, and closed Ventus's own Keyblade Armor around him on the way down. The young man in the coat carried what was left of him to the Castle That Never Was.

The Road to Dawn

Somewhere in his own onward journey, in a city of bells and stone, Riku found someone he knew by sight alone. "You're Ansem! Why are you here?"

"So sad. The cost of yielding to the darkness."

Ansem left him with a warning rather than a fight. "But I embraced the darkness, and unless you hurry up and learn to do the same, your story will end just like his."

Riku answered him after he was already gone, to no one in particular, and then to Jiminy.

"I walk the road to dawn!"

"I know the road my heart walks."

"That was my, my dark side. I gave in to the darkness once. And ever since, it's chased me around in one form or another. The Seeker of Darkness who stole my body. A puppet replica of the shadows in my heart. And now, I'm facing me."

Further on, inside a world built on somebody else's stolen work, Riku found the comparison too close to leave alone. "His single-minded thirst for answers created Ansem. We all have a little of that curiosity within us. So if we're not careful, any one of us could create an Ansem."

Because of Him

Something was wrong with Sora, and Riku felt it before he understood it. He found him trapped and fought to reach him.

"Is that. Sora? Sora! Don't! You've gotta wake up! Sora!"

Whatever held him under had a shape of its own, and Riku met it head on. "Are you what's trapping him in that nightmare? 'Cause if you are. I'm what nightmares fear!"

Beating it back only led him to Ansem again, waiting. "That is right. Sora can no longer wake up. No matter how many nightmares you consume, you cannot wake someone who has fallen into the chasm of dreams."

"Dreams hold our memories. Sleep holds our dreams. And darkness, it holds our sleep. Sora's heart belongs to the darkness now."

Riku would not accept that as final. "But you feel it, don't you? This world, the nightmare, the abyss. Why haven't you returned to the reality whence you came?"

"Dream of a dream. A twofold nightmare. This whole journey, you have been inside Sora's dreams. And now darkness within darkness awaits you."

Then Ansem told him what he actually was. "At the start of your test, when you struck out from that tiny island, you saw me there dressed in a robe. Immediately you knew something was wrong, so without even knowing it, you dove into Sora's dream. And you became exactly what that sigil on your back represents, a Dream Eater to protect Sora from nightmares."

"Me? I'm a Dream Eater?"

Ansem did not let him sit with the shock of it for long. "Correct. But you failed to protect him. After all your efforts to command the darkness and protect those you cherish, it is a shame you locked that power away in the end."

"So you understand what to do. Set the darkness in you free, and you can rescue your friend."

Riku answered him with the truth instead of the offer. "Ansem. Or. Xehanort. You used to be a Keyblade wielder. But darkness stole your heart, and the Keyblade with it. Don't you see? That's half the reason I'm even on this journey. After allowing darkness into my heart, am I still fit to wield the Keyblade?"

Then he told him the other half. "You know. When I look at you. There's this memory that flashes back. A secret I said I'd keep when I was little. The main reason I kept dreaming about the outside world was 'cause of him."

He meant Terra. Nothing more was said about it, and nothing needed to be.

Riku refused what Ansem offered him and reached for something of his own instead.

"I know the way. Consume the darkness, return it to light."

"You can try."

They fought a second time.

"Ansem! You're part of my heart now. Part of the light!"

"Ever the fool, boy. And forever a pawn of the darkness!"

Riku won. "Strength, to protect what matters."

He came back to himself in the real World That Never Was, in front of Memory's own skyscraper.

"This place. Did I finally make out of the dream?"

He understood the whole of it now.

"Sora and I have been split up since the start of our journey, because Ansem, no, because Xehanort planned it. And that means we're a long way off course from the Mark of Mastery exam Yen Sid gave us."

He went looking for Sora, and did not stop until he reached Where Nothing Gathers. "All right, Sora has gotta be here, somewhere."

Sora was there, on an Organization throne. Between Riku and him stood the young man he had crossed paths with the whole way here.

The Gathering Is Nigh

Mickey reached Where Nothing Gathers before Xehanort's own revival could complete, and stopped the whole standoff cold where it stood.

"Stopza!"

It bought him a moment, and he meant to spend all of it getting Riku moving. "I'm glad I'm not too late."

"Just grab Sora so we can go! I can't stop them for long."

Xehanort broke the spell himself, working through his own younger body before his own revival was complete, and gave Young Xehanort back the power to move. "I said, hands off!"

He turned on Riku and opened the fight himself. "Begone."

Riku won the duel, but Mickey's spell had already worn off by the time it ended. Xehanort completed his own revival there, whole again in his own old body, and took the highest of the thrones around them. Young Xehanort returned to a lower one among the rest of the gathered Organization.

"Oh no. Are you."

"Are you okay, Riku?"

"Master Xehanort! We were right about you!"

He answered as if the outcome had never been in doubt.

"All of this was decided. My twelve selves would welcome me here on this day, when I would return a complete person. It is the future which lies beyond my sight."

He told them the same history of the Keyblade War that Yen Sid had already given them, the x-blade's shattering into seven lights and thirteen darknesses, save that now he was the one telling it, and the two of them were meant to hear it as prophecy rather than as the past.

Then he admitted where his own first attempt at it had gone wrong.

"I once tried to create my own pure light and darkness to forge the x-blade, but the attempt ended in failure. In my eagerness, I had lost sight of the correct way to achieve my goal. I acted rashly. I can admit that now."

Mickey would not let it pass without naming what it had cost. "Why are you doing this?"

"What you did back then, your mistakes, changed the destinies of three of my friends!"

Xehanort answered with the thesis he had always carried, that destiny was never left to chance, and named the three of them only by what they had become rather than by name.

"Ah, but destiny is never left to chance. I merely guided them to their proper places. The broken boy who failed to be the blade, the misguided master who sacrificed herself for a friend, and the feckless youth who became my new vessel."

Only then did Mickey see how far back it went. "I couldn't find a way to save 'em. But I wanted to believe that their sacrifice stopped you for good. Why? How was I so blind? I should've seen it, as soon as Maleficent started gathering the seven princesses of heart."

Xehanort confirmed it without hesitation. "Yes. They were all my doing. I used the evil fairy to find seven pure lights for me, just as I prepared thirteen vessels to fill with pure darkness."

Riku spoke for the first time since the duel had ended. "But you failed. Sora stopped you in your tracks on both counts."

Xehanort granted the point without giving up anything larger. "Yes, he did. That dull, ordinary boy, a Keyblade wielder so unlike any I have ever seen. However, I have not abandoned my ambitions, the seven guardians of light and the thirteen seekers of darkness."

Mickey started counting the guardians of light out loud, and came up short. "Seven guardians of light? Well, for Keyblade wielders, there's me and Riku and Sora. And my three missing friends, that's six. Then the seventh would be. That means, the thirteen seekers of darkness."

Xehanort confirmed the shortfall and named what all of it was for. "Yes, little king. Perceptive. But Sora and another on your list belong to me now. And that puts you three guardians short. But worry not. All of the pieces are destined to appear. Your seven lights just like my thirteen darknesses, whose final clash will beget the prize I seek. The x-blade!"

"The x-blade!"

Xehanort turned back to Sora to finish what he had promised.

"But first, the thirteen darknesses shall be united. All the seats have been filled. And now the last vessel shall bear my heart like the rest!"

He never got the chance. Lea had tracked the danger from the Secret Forest, and reached them in time to put himself between Xehanort and Sora.

"You!"

Lea answered with the same taunt he had used introducing himself the first time. "Axel? Please. The name's Lea. Got it memorized?"

"Promises to keep. I'll always be there to get my friends back. What, bad timing? You had your perfect little script, but you kinda forgot to write the sequel. Now, let's find out what happens!"

Riku, seeing him there, still called him by the name he had always known him by. "Why are you here, Axel?"

Xehanort answered by setting one of the hooded gathering against him, and the hood came back to show Saïx. "Isa!"

Even fighting him, Lea would not let Riku's own mistake stand uncorrected. "No, I told you my name's. Agh, whatever, Axel, fine. Now let's get outta here!"

Ansem's own Dark Figure seized Riku and Mickey both before either of them could break free.

"No!"

"He made it!"

Mickey agreed there was nothing left to do but go. "Right!"

Then Donald and Goofy broke through and cut the Dark Figure down, freeing them both.

"Goofy, Donald! You saved us!"

With neither side of the plan complete, the new Organization began to disappear, each of them back to their own point in time. Xehanort left them with a promise rather than a defeat.

"We are out of time. Neither the union of light nor darkness has been achieved, and we must all return whence we came. But, the gathering of the seven and thirteen is nigh. Let us finish this at the fated place, once your lights and my darknesses have joined together!"

He Needs Me

Mickey and the others carried Sora's own body back to the Mysterious Tower, and Yen Sid knew what had happened to him before Mickey finished saying it.

"Aw, Sora. Don't tell me your heart's sleeping, too."

Yen Sid answered him plainly. "Seven lights, thirteen darknesses. Master Xehanort has been busy."

"No, Mickey. This affliction is not the same."

He explained what the difference actually was.

"In your Mark of Mastery exam, you were to unlock seven Sleeping Keyholes. By doing so, you would awaken those worlds from their prison of slumber, and also acquire the power to free a heart from its sleep. Riku, you unlocked those Keyholes within Sora's dreams. Therefore, it stands to reason that you now have the power to awaken Sora's heart."

Mickey offered to go instead, worried about how deep the darkness ran. "You want him to dive back into Sora's sleep? But Master, Sora's heart is down in the darkest abyss. If Riku's not careful, he might just get trapped down there with him. No. I'll go instead."

Yen Sid did not refuse him outright, but he told him plainly which of the two stood the better chance. "And perhaps you may even succeed, Mickey. But there is no denying Riku stands the better chance, having dived into Sora's heart as long as he has."

Riku answered, not with a boast, but with the plain truth of why it had to be him. "Mickey. I really appreciate it. But, I'll go wake Sora up. Look at his face. Sleeping like nothing's wrong, like there's nothing to even worry about. He's always been like that. The three of us would agree to work on the raft, and then this guy would go take a nap on the beach. You see, it's my job to keep him on his toes. Besides, what kind of Keyblade Master sleeps through his test? I'm doing it for me, too. Sora saved me once. And. I heard him call my name. He needs me."

Mickey told him he already knew the way. "There's something real strong that binds us to each other. Even in the darkness, you can reach him. All you gotta do is follow that connection!"

Riku dove into Sora's own Dive to the Heart and found Sora already waiting for him there, though not as himself. He wore Ventus's own Keyblade Armor, moved from inside it by the Armored Ventus Nightmare. Riku fought him and won, freeing Sora from what had been wearing him.

What came after was quieter. Riku found himself standing inside a memory of Destiny Islands, buried deep in Sora's own heart. Roxas came to him there and asked him something, then was gone. Ventus came next, then Xion, each with a question of their own, each gone the same way.

Further along the shore, Riku found a bottle in the surf, and with it came a data projection of Ansem the Wise, who had not expected to see him.

"DiZ! I mean. Ansem the Wise. What are you doing here?"

"You were not the visitor I expected."

He explained why he was there at all.

"Perhaps I wanted to atone for events of the past, even if no apology can undo the harm I have wrought. I felt, that I ought to leave at least something behind. So I digitized myself and my research, and hid them within Sora."

Then he spoke at length about the heart he had chosen to hide inside.

"Yes. A clue, I hope, to finding yourselves or your lost friends in your hour of need. The heart has always been quick to grow. Each exposure to light, to the natural world, to other people, shapes this most malleable part inside of us. Nobodies are not different from us in that manner. Sora was the only one able to return to his human form without destroying his Nobody. That is a statement to the love in his heart for other people, and the bonds that tie them together."

From what Sora's own heart had already proven, he turned to what it might still do. "Perhaps, he has the power to bring back the hearts and existences of those connected to him, to recreate people we thought were lost to us forever. Our most precious treasures, even an empty puppet, the trees of the forest, and the petals on the wind, there are hearts around us everywhere we look. And it does not take superhuman powers to see them."

He closed by naming the part of Sora that made all of it possible.

"Surely we remember as children the way our hearts made everything seem so shiny, and perfect. Sora has a heart like that, uncorrupted, willing to see the good before the bad. When he sees the heart in something, it then becomes real. When a connection seems broken, he may have the power to mend it. He has touched countless hearts, he has accepted them, and he has saved them. And some of those hearts have never left him, whether they fell into darkness or were trapped there, whether they sleep in the darkness of Sora's heart, or were welcomed into its warmth, they can be saved. All Sora needs to do is be himself and follow wherever it is that his heart takes him. It is the best and the only way."

Then he turned from his own history to Riku's, and asked why he had come. "The rest is in there."

"Of course. Now why is it that you are here?"

Riku admitted the truth of it. "Uh. I kinda need to wake Sora up."

Ansem the Wise pressed him further, and Riku made sure he understood exactly what he meant.

"Don't tell me he's gone to sleep again?"

"You mean, the Sora wrapped in that black phantom?"

Ansem the Wise set his mind at ease.

"What, indeed? Never fear. Sora is safe."

"He's not here. You see, by defeating the Nightmare imprisoning Sora, you freed him."

He told Riku the rest of it plainly. "Then, you came here, and you were questioned by three young people. That was the final key to awaken him. Sora is awake. You can go home now."

Then he asked for the one thing he had not yet learned. "Young man! I do not believe you ever told me your name."

Riku told him his name. He returned to the real world and opened his eyes to find Mickey already there.

"Riku!"

Sora was awake beside him.

A New Kind of Power

With the exam concluded, Yen Sid spoke first to what the ordeal had revealed rather than to who had passed it. "You performed truly admirably, both of you."

Then he held himself responsible for what had happened, plainly and without qualification.

"More than anything, I am grateful to have you both back from Xehanort's deception unharmed. And I am grateful to Lea, whose spontaneous actions turned the tides. I am also deeply sorry, for failing to perceive the danger and throwing you headlong into a perilous test. This experience has revealed many hidden truths, and we must gird ourselves for the great clash with darkness that lies before us. I believe we need a new Keyblade Master, one with a new kind of power."

He named only one of them a Master, and gave his own reason for it. "Sora and Riku, you both deserve the honor. However, one of you braved the realm of sleep again to unlock the final Keyhole and save a friend. Riku, I name you our new true Keyblade Master."

Riku could hardly believe it. "Really? I'm a Keyblade Master?"

"Congratulations, Riku!"

Sora, though the honor had passed him by, congratulated him all the same.

Lea reminded them why he had come to Yen Sid in the first place.

"Yeah. I mean, I came here to learn how to wield one."

He admitted he had not yet managed to summon one of his own, and demonstrated by trying again in front of them.

"Hey, thanks for the vote of confidence. You know, I was gonna come swooping in, Keyblade in hand! But I just couldn't get mine to materialize. Must be in the snap of the wrist or something."

This time it worked, and Lea credited it to luck rather than skill.

Sora, though not named Master, set out on a journey of his own to train further. Mickey saw him off.

"Be careful."

Sora returned to the sleeping Traverse Town in the Realm of Sleep, looking for his own Spirit Dream Eaters. "Good. I was hoping this world was still here. But where are they?"

He found them again all at once.

"Thanks! You're the best!"

Away from all of it, inside the Chamber of Waking in Castle Oblivion, where Ventus's own body had rested since it was carried there, Ventus stirred in his sleep and smiled, the only sign given that anything inside him had changed.

The credits that followed showed the cast in turn, and spelled out, letter by letter, that this led to Kingdom Hearts III. Sora and Riku walked into the light together.

Blank Points

Two Who Were Never Meant to Meet

Eleven years after Kingdom Hearts II closed, Aqua was still walking the Realm of Darkness, and a stretch of it called the Dark Margin put a stranger in her path for the first time since she had gone under.

He sat on the shore in a black coat with the hood up, and he stayed where he was when she stopped in front of him.

"Who are you?"

"Why, hello. It's not often I get visitors."

"Please, call me Aqua. Why are you sitting here all alone in the realm of darkness? How did you end up here?"

He answered her the way a man answers a question he has already given up trying to solve for himself.

"Well. I can tell you this is my second time on these shores. But unfortunately, much like the first, I do not remember who I am or whence I came. Everything was washed away in whatever currents carried me here."

She sat beside him and gave him back the same kind of answer, plainly, in exchange.

"That's too bad. I know I've been here a long time, wandering through the endless hours, unable to escape."

"You wish to return to your own world?"

"It's my friends. I promised I'd be there for them."

The word caught on something in him.

"Your friends? Somewhere in the scraps of memory I have left, you remind me of a boy I once knew. He is very much like you, true to his friends, and kind. This boy travels to many worlds and fights to keep the light safe."

"Keep the light safe? I've been away too long. Did something happen out there? Are the worlds in danger?"

"Sad to say, they nearly fell to darkness more than once. But at every turn, that boy arrived with Keyblade in hand to save the day."

Aqua had two names ready before he finished. "Huh? Wait a sec. Is his name Terra or Ven?"

"Neither of those, I'm afraid."

"Should've known."

He gave her the rest of it unasked, the way a man finally sets down something he has been carrying alone for a year.

"How long has it been since I met him? At least a year now, perhaps more. Back then, my heart was clouded with vengeance. I did terrible things, both to him and his friends. I brought unhappiness to more lives than one. I felt something must be done. Was that why? A means of clearing my conscience? Or perhaps, out of a sort of scholarly instinct? While the boy slept his long sleep, I hid the results of my research inside him, transplanting the data to where it might best serve a purpose. In fact, I would like to believe. Maybe he can set things right. A boy like him who touches so many hearts, he could open the right door, and save all those people whose lives I managed to ruin. So many are still waiting for their new beginning, their birth by sleep. Even me, and even you."

She asked him the only thing left to ask.

"What's this boy's name?"

"His name. Is."

He did not finish it. Aqua finished it for him, and knew, saying it, that she already had the answer before he gave it to her.

"Sora."

She wept there on the Dark Margin, looking out to the cold light on the horizon.

In the White Room of the Old Mansion in Twilight Town, Naminé finished a drawing of Sora on a paopu tree and said his name.

On the clock tower above the same town, Roxas, Xion and Axel sat together with sea-salt ice cream, watching the sun go down, and Roxas and Xion said his name too.

At the Land of Departure, in the sealed room where Aqua had left him, Ventus stirred.

Terra was there beside him when he woke, and the two of them, looking up at a shooting star, said the same name Aqua had just learned on the other side of the dark.

See You Soon

Sora sat on the paopu tree with a letter in his hand, the one Mickey had sent out in a bottle after the data world closed. He had been sitting with it long enough that the look on his face had settled into something closer to a decision than a question.

Riku came up behind him already knowing what the letter said. "Sora. Your mind's made up?"

Sora told him it was.

Kairi found the two of them there, and Sora told her himself rather than let Riku do it for him.

"Kairi, I. It's just. They really need me. I have to go. I am who I am. Because of them."

She said nothing against it. She took her own Wayfinder and put it into his hand.

"See you soon."

Kingdom Hearts III

The Three We Lost

At the Mysterious Tower, Mickey told Riku and Kairi what had become of Aqua.

"I saw her. In the realm of darkness."

He told them the whole of it: the ruined Castle of Dreams and the silent phantom of Terra she had found wandering it, the glass coffin holding Ventus's own likeness in the Dwarf Woodlands and the three mirrors that pulled her into a fight with her own doubled self, the two of them made real again for a moment in Enchanted Dominion before Xehanort took Terra over, his own finding her at last, the swarm that came for Riku at the door, and what she had given up to hold it back.

"I thought. I heard her voice in the distance."

Riku had heard enough of it to know what it cost her. "She sacrificed herself to save me? Why did you keep it from me for so long?"

Mickey did not try to make it sound better than it was. "I had to respect her choice."

"What about us? You could've given us a choice. We could have gone and helped her."

"I know."

He did not stop there.

"But, now we can help Aqua. You and I, we're gonna go find her!"

Yen Sid took up the rest of it himself. "The great battle with Xehanort is almost upon us. As you know, we must take action to keep the seven pure lights safe, and thus we must hasten to assemble the seven guardians of light. It is time to return to our world the three Keyblade wielders we lost over a decade ago. Ventus, Terra, and Aqua must be saved from their sad end, for they have more to achieve. Following their first battle with Xehanort, Ventus's heart refused to awaken, and so Aqua found a safe location to conceal him. But when she set off in search of her other missing friend Terra, she fell to a place from which there is no return without outside help."

Riku asked him the question he had already asked Mickey.

"Why keep it secret?"

"Do not be rash, Riku. As Mickey told you clearly in his story, reaching the realm of darkness the first time was not a simple task. And even if we had found a way back in, regrettably none of us possessed the necessary means to get Aqua back out safely. So I forbade Mickey from telling you, let alone going after her."

"That much is obvious. If not you, then certainly Sora would have staged a reckless attempt at rescue."

Riku did not wait to be asked. "Yeah! Count me in!"

New Vestments

Kairi looked at Riku for a while before she said anything about the mission at all.

"Who's this new Riku and where's the old one?"

"New me?"

"Yeah. You're more like Sora."

Riku considered that for a moment. "Should I be flattered? I try too hard to be the role model. It's more fun to just listen to my heart. Which is Sora-esque."

"Well, we still like you."

Then she turned to Yen Sid with the question she had actually come to ask. "Master, I came here because I wanted to help somehow. What can I do?"

"I have entrusted the wizard Merlin to oversee the training for our new Keyblade wielders, yourself and Lea."

She did not know the name.

"Lea?"

Mickey supplied the name she would know. "He means Axel."

"What!?"

"He's a regular person now. He even saved Sora for us. You can trust him!"

Yen Sid had one more thing for the two who were leaving. "Mickey, take these along with you. The three good fairies asked that you be presented with them. They are new vestments which will shield the both of you from the darkness."

Riku and Mickey thanked him in the same words.

"Thank you, Master."

"Thank you, Master."

Mickey was already turning to go. "C'mon, Riku. It's time for us to go. First, we gotta find an entrance to the realm of darkness."

"Okay, let's go!"

They left for the Dark World, and the tower was quieter for it.

These Things Take Time

Sora, Donald and Goofy came back from the Sleeping Worlds to a tower with two fewer people in it than he expected.

"Heh heh heh. Secret. I'm back!"

"Huh? Just us?"

"That's great. They coulda said good-bye."

Donald said something back, and Sora would not have it.

"It is not. I just like to say good-bye to all my friends."

"I'm here now, right?"

He was told, not for the first time, that he had lost his own abilities again.

"Whatever! Happens all the time."

Yen Sid explained where the other two had gone before Sora could ask.

"The others all had important work to do. So I sent them on their way."

He put a stop to an argument that had already started.

"We have matters to discuss."

"In order to defeat Xehanort, there are allies we must gather, acting now to rouse them from their slumber. We have discussed this before, Sora."

"Your Mark of Mastery exam was conducted in the hopes you would acquire the power to wake them. However, the darkness nearly took control of you, and your grasp of your new abilities leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, Xehanort nearly made you his vessel, and in the process stripped you of most of the power you had gained by then. I suspect you have already noticed this, correct?"

Sora had no argument against it, and Yen Sid went on.

"Yes. Chip and Dale are currently analyzing data that Ansem the Wise provided to Riku and which could offer us a clue to retrieving our friends' lost hearts. I have very high hopes for this data. However, our greatest chance of stopping Xehanort's plan still lies with you, Sora. If you trust the guidance your heart gives, I know we will find all of the guardians of light."

"But first, you must regain all the strength you have lost. Perhaps it is foolish to expect a complete recovery, but it is absolutely vital you perfect one power, the power of waking, which you failed to master during your exam. There's someone who lost his strength and found it again, a true hero to whom you ought to pay a visit. Perhaps he can point you in the right direction."

Then he gave Sora over to the two who had come with him every time. "I would have it no other way. I put Sora in your hands."

Sora was glad of the two of them all over again. "Donald! Goofy!"

Sora had heard enough to be moving. "Let's go! Count on us!"

Aboard the Gummi Ship, none of the three of them could find a way to anywhere.

"How're we supposed to get there now?"

"Gimme a break, I'm trying. These things take time!"

"Sorry, I got nothin'. What did you expect?"

Goofy remembered something Yen Sid used to say.

"Huh? What's that?"

"Really? Ring a bell?"

It did.

"'May my heart be my guiding key.' I've got it!"

"All right! Olympus Coliseum, here we come!"

Zeroed the Hero

Sora, Donald and Goofy missed the Coliseum entirely and came down on the mountain above it instead.

"I was a little off again. Sorry! We'll find him. But we need to go!"

They tried to climb it and went in circles until there was nothing left to do but call for Hercules by name.

"Yeah. 'Up' is the usual direction."

What answered them was not Hercules.

"All right. I know I dotted my I's, crossed my T's, zeroed the hero. So what gives? Who could possibly be trying to give me a migraine by yodeling that yutz's name?"

"Oh, it's just you. Oy vey."

"It's just us? Even for you that's cold."

Hades did not deny it.

"Don't forget, I can always turn up the heat!"

"What is everyone's infatuation with that dolt?! You know what? Never mind. Never mind. I'm cool. I'm good. Because, Wonderboy'll be outta my hair soon enough."

He had the Titans blow all three of them down the mountain and into Thebes.

Hercules got to them before anything else in the city did.

"You guys are here! Sora, Donald, Goofy! You literally dropped in. Gotta say, I'm impressed."

"Take a guess. Starts with an H."

He did not sound surprised by any of it.

"All of it, huh? Nice of him to show a little self-restraint. Well, whatever he's planning, I'll send him running back across the Styx."

"So Sora, is there a reason you guys are visiting? I'm guessing it's not just for the cheese and olives."

Sora told him what Hades had already guessed at. "So you're up to no good again!"

"Do you remember the last time we were together? You were feeling down and out. How'd you get your strength back, when you jumped in and saved Meg?"

"All my strength is gone from me too. That's why I need you, because I was hoping you might have a solution, or something."

Hercules did not have one ready to give him.

"Hmm, that's tough. All I know is that she was in trouble. Suddenly, I wanted to save her with all my heart, but, it's not like I could tell you how."

Full Marks

Fire came down on Thebes out of nowhere, and Hercules stopped being a host and started giving orders.

"Let's talk later!"

"No, not with the Heartless involved. We're just lucky our friends showed up."

"Meg, you need to stay someplace safe. We'll search the city and make sure everyone manages to get clear of the fire."

He was already dividing up the work.

"Phil, you should go with Meg."

"You gotta keep her safe."

Megara had arrived already knowing the worst of it.

"Hercules! You're okay!"

"Boy, that didn't look so fun."

Hercules launched Sora, Donald and Goofy up onto his own statue when he saw who else was still inside the fire.

"Oh no! There's a little girl caught in the fire!"

"Wait. Running's too slow!"

"Get the people out!"

They got her out, and Hercules made light of what it had taken.

"It's nothing. That's what these are for."

"Well, whaddaya know? Sora, Donald, Goofy, guess I owe you a big thank you."

Sora found two people in the smoke who were not there to help. "Hey, now, that ain't no way to say hello, 'specially to your old friends."

"Well, if it isn't Sora and the King's pawns."

Sora asked her outright whether she was behind the attack. "Certainly not."

"Say, Maleficent, I dunno about his sidekicks, but Kid Keyblader here looks way punier than the last time we saw him. I say we finish him off while we still can."

She was not interested in him either.

"Waste no time with the boy. He's inconsequential. We have a far more pressing matter to attend to."

"Be silent, you fool! As for you three, we shall meet again, when I have time for such trifles."

"Yeah, and youse better get your act together before then. Later, twerps!"

Sora and company helped Hercules pull citizens out of a temple that was already coming down when somebody else stepped out of the smoke to watch.

"Oh, wow! Very nice, full marks."

"All this altruism is giving me the warm and fuzzies. So then, does having a heart of light come with an extremely good insurance policy?"

He did not wait to be asked what he meant.

"Oh, but I did though. No good will ever come from putting other people first."

"Because you've got friends in high places, you mean. Tricks like that don't fly for your average joe."

He went on before anyone could answer that.

"I don't admire one guy leaping into danger if it means someone else might have to jump in to save him. You're all just lining up to lose out. Dooming others to take the fall with ya. Oh, and you can spare me the usual party line. Yes, hearts are powerful when they're connected. But if you put too much of that power in one place, some of those hearts might end up breaking. Still, Sora, that doesn't mean you should change. Accept the power you're given. Find the hearts joined to yours."

"I was able to save Meg's life because I was ready to risk my own."

"As if! You don't have any choice but to follow this sweet little trail of bread crumbs. And at the end, you'll finally realize what destiny has in store for you. In fact, your reward might be right around the corner. You're so close!"

He left before anyone could answer him, and Hercules answered him anyway.

"Sora, don't let him bother you. He's just trying to get under your skin 'cause he thinks he can. But we'll prove him wrong. We'll show him that our sacrifices haven't been for nothing."

The Realm of the Gods

Megara sent them off toward the mountain a second time.

"Be careful, Wonderboy."

"Break a leg then, heroes."

Hercules had already worked out why the trouble kept getting worse.

"Guys, this is getting worse by the minute. I hope I'm wrong, but my family may need me."

"Sora, I'm gonna fly ahead. You've been a big help, but, leave the rest to me."

"Yeah. Dad's king of the gods."

They climbed back up Mount Olympus and put down the Rock Titan on the way.

"Don't get too comfortable, Hades!"

"Whoa, easy, what is this, Sparta? Kind of on a schedule. Don't have time to toss around the old fire and brimstone. The whole cosmos is basically waiting for me to, you know, conquer it!"

Nobody waited for him to finish deciding.

"Sora, Donald, Goofy! It's on!"

"Where are my Titans? Show me your power!"

"Ahh! Love the breeze."

They beat the Titans between them, and Hercules sent them flying.

"Ahh. That sent 'em sailing. Sailing right to where I left. Eh, no biggie. Nice work, boys! So, back to the whole cosmic coup thing?"

"No, I'm the one giving orders now, bolt boy."

He set the Titans on them again.

"Get them!"

"Actually, I think I can make it five."

Zeus was free before Hades understood he had lost.

"Hades. The exit is that way."

"Hold on. I almost forgot. That one's for trying to wreck Thebes."

Hades came up out of it furious rather than beaten.

"I can't believe it! I put eighteen years into that plan and you've blippin' ruined it! I really don't like you."

"Enough already! I did not come this far to be ridiculed by Zeusy high and mighty, his little sunspot, and a trio of clowns! You know what? I'll just go ahead and destroy you!"

Zeus sealed him away in the middle of his own threat.

"You'll pay for this! I have a very, very long memory! I can still dunk your little Nut-Meg in a river of de,"

Somewhere else in the same city, Maleficent and Pete had tracked Hades down on their own. "We are not here for you. I have my own business to attend to. All I need to know is if there is a distinctive black box somewhere in this world."

"Ugh. Really? Are you kidding? Geez Louise. Seriously, when it rains, it pours. Okay, who's the new pest?"

"Black box, huh? Hmm. Black box, black box, black box. Wait. Don't tell me. You're after the one Zeus hid on earth?"

She did not deny it.

"Possibly. If I were, where might it be?"

"Oh, perfect. Now I gotta put up with you two. Funny, I don't remember you doing me any memorable favors. So, you can keep your Heartless this time. I'm going back to my original plan. All right? So, toodle-oo! Exit's thataway. Hey, it was great seein' ya! Happy trails!"

Left to themselves, Pete gave the game away before Maleficent could stop him. "Oh! We gots to find that black box."

"Be quiet and dig, you imbecile. I must find that Book of Prophecies and make it my own. His was the only clue we have. We cannot afford to dismiss it without a thorough investigation."

"Are you sure this box with the Book of Prophecies is for reals? I think that dingbat in black was pulling your leg."

He found something anyway.

"Yes sir-eesy, this has gotta be that Pandora's Box Hades mentioned."

"What is it? Have you found something? Show it to me at once, fool."

It was not what she wanted.

"Leave it."

"What? After all that diggin'?"

"That is not the box which I desire. We are finished with this world. Come."

Somebody had been watching the two of them the whole time, from above, and got no further than the start of an old saying before he stopped himself.

"May your hear,"

What happened after that had no witness this book can call on. Somebody else came and stood behind him and asked him, without saying so outright, whether the black box was his own business rather than the Organization's. He gave no answer, and the one asking let it go rather than press him for one.

Something to Fight For

Sora got one more shot in at Hades before the fight was over for good. "Just give it up already! You'll never beat Herc, no matter how many times you try."

Hercules chased him off and did not go home himself.

"I can see my family anytime I want. If I stayed, I'd have to be apart from the person I love most. And that life would be empty. I finally know where I belong."

"Nice job, Wonderboy. We checked the whole area. It looks like everyone's safe."

"You heroes have been busy little bees."

Hercules remembered the question he had never answered.

"Sora, we never got back to your question. Can I help?"

Sora had already found the answer without him. "Mmm, it's okay. I think I'm meant to figure it out for myself. I'll find my strength the way you found yours. Something to fight for. With all my heart. I guess you did have the answer."

"Well, you've got heart, Sora. Just keep at it and I know you'll be stronger than ever."

Poor Thing

At the Dark Margin, Aqua sat with Ansem the Wise the way she had since Entry XI's own meeting between them.

"I can't shake the feeling that these waters touch another shore I've visited."

"Tell me, will you stay here?"

"You've heard of them?"

He answered her plainly, the way a man names a place he has thought about often.

"The Destiny Islands."

"Yes. They are quite lovely, a far cry from this wasteland."

"I'm staying. Someone will come for me."

He offered her something closer to hope than either of them had reason to expect from that shore.

"These waters are the in-between of dark and light, its shores the margins of day and night. They brought you and I together, so why not also you and another?"

Aqua heard something before she saw it. "Who's there?"

"I think you should go."

Ansem the Wise knew the voice that answered her before it named itself.

"'Master'? So now you mock me."

He put himself between them anyway.

"No more! I'll go."

"A lost guardian of light? You wait here, for the King and his fool."

He turned to Aqua next. "Where's your Keyblade?"

"Don't need it!"

The offer was refused, not out of mercy.

"You are wise."

"Poor thing. I mustn't leave you with nothing."

"What. Is this feeling?"

Strength to Protect What Matters

Riku and Mickey went into the Dark World separately from whatever had just happened to Aqua, and found it changed from what either of them remembered.

"No, just. I've been here. I should know this place. But that all seems like another life."

"What's wrong, Riku? Are you tired? Do you need a break? We can stop."

He told Mickey what was actually different. "I remember my first time here. I was so scared. But now, my doubts and fears are gone. If anything, I feel exhilarated. And it's not because there's darkness in me, I know too well what that rush is like. This is different. And it's not adrenaline either. I know Aqua needs us, but I'm ready. I'm in control now. Maybe it's because you're with me this time."

"Well, gee. Think of all you've seen! All the feelings you've felt. Why, you've done years of growin' in almost no time at all."

"It's not me. I think it's because you've finally found inside you that special strength to protect what matters. Sometimes you care so much for somebody that other feelings disappear. And then, there's no room for fear or doubt."

Riku recognised the phrase before he placed where he had heard it. "Is that it? 'Strength to protect what matters.' It reminds me of a promise I made."

"Yeah. While we're reminiscing, Mickey, does any of this look familiar?"

"Sort of, but the realm of darkness has changed since I was here with Aqua."

They reached the Dark Margin itself.

"I've been here, too. With Sora. This is where we found our way back to the realm of light. Hey, maybe Aqua did, too!"

Mickey had been counting on more than memory to find her. "Usually, I'd just follow my heart, and Aqua would show me the way. But the closer I get, the hazier our connection feels."

"It's gone. I'm positive Aqua was here. But now, her trail's gone dim."

"Aqua has fallen into an even darker abyss, somewhere I can't see her. And I don't think we're equipped to dive any deeper than we already are."

What was already in that part of the realm did not wait for them to decide anything.

"Oh no! Riku, be careful. Even the least threatening Heartless are stronger in this realm."

It went badly enough that Riku went down. "Riku. Wake up. Riku. Are you okay?"

"I got more than half of 'em, and the rest vanished. But, they spit you out first."

"I know ya feel invincible, but we're not."

They agreed there was nothing left to do but go back and come better armed.

"Yeah, thanks to the new gear. But, your Keyblade. The Heartless here are stronger than what we expected. I guess we probably should've powered up our Keyblades before we came in here, huh? I think we need to go back to Master Yen Sid's tower so we can regroup."

On the way out, in a part of the realm that was his own alone, Riku found the one person who had never needed the story explained to him.

"Didn't expect to see you again. Why did you even come here?"

"Because somebody needs me."

"Do you want some help?"

The Way to the Dawn was broken clean through, and no longer his to carry.

"Right. Can't use this Keyblade anymore. Might as well leave it here, for the other me."

"Me? I'm."

Whatever came after that, Riku did not hear. He was gone before his own Replica finished the sentence.

Strong Like Sora

Donald and Goofy were already back at the tower when Riku and Mickey returned, which meant Sora's own party had beaten them home.

"Hey there, fellas. So, what've you three been up to?"

He gave Yen Sid the shape of what had happened before either of them asked him to. "All traces of her vanish into the great abyss, beneath the realm of darkness."

"I'm not sure who's even left to ask. Ventus is hidden, and Aqua's the only one who knows where. Plus, nobody's seen Terra in ages. Aqua was the last."

"Good plan, sir. Riku and I will retrace her steps and see if we can find any sort of clues, but first. We got hit pretty hard in the realm of darkness. My Keyblade was damaged, and the Heartless broke Riku's clean in half. So, we're gonna need to get replacements before we can continue."

What Riku actually wanted to say came out later, once the two of them were alone again. "But Aqua's still down here, alone. Facing enemies like that. What if she's feeling as scared and alone as I felt the first time I came here? How long are we supposed to keep her waiting in this awful place?"

"But Aqua. She's like Sora."

Riku did not follow the comparison. "No no no. Strong like Sora!"

"Okay. Good. Then I guess she's gonna be all right. Sora could fall into any darkness and swim his way out."

A Man Calling Himself Xehanort

Dilan led Riku and Mickey to the Central Square at Radiant Garden, where Aqua had last stood in the Realm of Light.

"Where Aqua fell into the realm of darkness after she dove in to save Terra."

"Yeah, she said he was acting strange."

"She sensed darkness in him, and they ended up getting into a big fight."

"Right. And in the aftermath, the two of them disappeared. Around the same time, the guards found a stranger with white hair lying unconscious here in the square, a man calling himself 'Xehanort.'"

"Ansem the Wise took the stranger in, but that was a mistake. Xehanort betrayed his master, stole his research, and along with his fellow apprentices, separated his heart from his body. Xehanort's heart took his master's name, 'Ansem,' and traveled to the past to give his younger self instructions. He even briefly had control of you. His empty body stayed in the present, took the name Xemnas, and founded Organization XIII. Their goal was to prepare thirteen vessels for Xehanort's heart."

"Until we put an end to the Organization. But all the while Young Xehanort had been visiting the future to choose thirteen vessels of his own, hearts with strong enough ties to him to begin a new Organization, the real Organization XIII. And now they're looking for a fight with us. But what happened to Terra? I thought you said that Aqua saved him."

"Yep. Master Xehanort told us 'another on our list' belonged to him. He was talking about Terra. Turns out, Aqua saved more than just her friend that day."

"No way! That was Terra? Master Xehanort was using Terra?"

Mickey went back further, to make the shape of it clear. "Yep, she did. The problem is we didn't notice. You remember the end of the Mark of Mastery exam, when Master Xehanort made his grand return? That's the Xehanort I remember. He was already a pretty old man then. But how do you explain Ansem and Xemnas, his Heartless and his Nobody? Isn't it strange how young they look? Why aren't they old men? It's because Xehanort was using a different body when the split happened. That face from the portrait I mentioned, it wasn't just some stranger that Ansem the Wise took under his wing. It was the young man whose body Master Xehanort possessed."

"Okay, but Master Xehanort is an old man again now. Where did Terra's body go?"

Mickey had an answer for that too. "Hmm. It's because Master Xehanort's collecting vessels! He claimed to have two of our seven lights. We got Sora back, but Terra must still be on Xehanort's side."

"He's with Organization XIII? We should warn Sora."

A call came in from Sora before they could act on it, wondering aloud how Roxas might be brought back.

"No, Riku and I are visiting Radiant Garden. Actually, we were just about to call you guys, but it looks like you beat us to the punch."

Riku thought of the one answer he actually knew something about. "Replicas. Well, replicas are basically human."

"Oh, yeah. You wouldn't remember. The previous Organization XIII developed 'replicas': realistic vessels to place hearts in. They're so real, in fact, that you'd actually mistake them for people. And with hearts, the replicas will become people."

"Yup. The replica takes the form of the heart inside it."

Mickey had been thinking about who to ask. "I'll talk to Ienzo. He was in the Organization back then, so he might know more."

"Aw, it's okay. But there's something you guys should know about one of their members."

"So, let the rest of us worry about Roxas and Naminé for now. You journey on, and keep an eye out for Terra."

The call ended there. Mickey watched it go with something close to fondness. "They don't change, do they?"

"Nope, that's their best quality."

"Welp, we gave Merlin the vestments for Kairi and Axel. Let's go stop by Ansem the Wise's study."

Ienzo heard them out. Mickey wondered aloud whether Even could have simply walked out through a corridor of darkness.

"The dark corridors."

Ienzo told them plainly that the only one of them who had ever gone that deep into the work was Even himself, and that Even was nowhere in Radiant Garden to be asked.

"But not everyone's. What if Even was taken?"

"Of course! The Organization could also use the replicas!"

Riku got there himself before Mickey finished the thought.

"To fill out their ranks."

"Maybe, except Aqua's the only one who knows where he's hidden. We still have to find her first."

"We'd better go tell Master Yen Sid. And Sora, and the others, too!"

What About My Outfit

Sora got back from Olympus with nothing to show for it. No shortcut, no quick fix. Whatever his own strength was going to take, it was going to take the long way.

"I see. You could not regain your strength."

"Regardless, Sora, you will need the power of waking."

Yen Sid did not treat it as a failure. "Perhaps it could be something that is as simple as that. Whenever you are in need, magic happens. That is your greatest strength, Sora."

He turned from Sora to the two who had come back with broken weapons and no Aqua.

"Yes. Their teacher, Master Eraqus, would have been another possibility, had Xehanort not mercilessly struck him down."

"Sora, you must focus on regaining your lost power of waking. Mickey and Riku, I recall that Master Aqua journeyed to many worlds, and connected with others who could be the link we need."

He had already decided where they should start.

"In that case, rendezvous with Kairi and Lea. They are continuing their training under the tutelage of the wizard Merlin. Also, I would like you to deliver these for me."

"Yes, they are the same as the ones I gave you. Special vestments to shield Kairi and Lea from the darkness."

Sora came back to the tower from Olympus with a new set of Keyblade armor and Donald and Goofy each with new coats of their own, and found nothing waiting for him.

"What? No fair! What about my outfit, Master?"

The Master gave him one anyway, drawn to match the strength he had already shown rather than anything still owed to him. "I knew you'd come through for me. Thanks!"

Yen Sid was not finished with him. "Good. Now, to mark the beginning of a new journey, I wish for you to have this, Sora. That is a Heartbinder. Think of it as a good luck charm made just for you. You have a gift, Sora, for connecting with others, and this makes that gift stronger."

Both errands went out from the tower within the hour.

"May your heart be your guiding key."

He had no orders waiting for him either, only the pull of his own heart toward wherever Roxas's own heart had gone. He knew the place. He gathered Donald and Goofy and set out for Twilight Town.

The Photograph

Nobodies met them the moment they arrived in Twilight Town, and a Demon Tide rose up out of them in the same square where Hayner, Pence and Olette were standing.

"What? Hold up!"

"Get the ice cream later!"

Sora, Donald and Goofy fought the Demon Tide off before it could reach any of the three.

Pence wanted to know at once whether the strange creatures from before were back.

"So does this mean that weird stuff's going down again?"

"Hmm, I guess it is. The creatures from the last time were bright white. These things must be new. Man, I can't wait to get to sleuthin'."

Olette was glad to see the two who traveled with Sora again. "Donald! Goofy! How are ya?"

"Whatever's going on, you wouldn't be here unless you had a good reason."

Sora took out the photograph he still carried, the one from the mansion grounds, and told them about the boy in it. Roxas.

"Roxas?"

Hayner had heard the name somewhere before and could not place it.

Olette took the photograph from Sora's hand to look at it more closely. "This photograph."

She recognized the place in it at once, and told him where the answer would be waiting.

"Mm-hmm. Sora, you three should go to the place in the photo. It's the old mansion. The three of us'll cover places in town."

The Other Twilight Town

The old mansion held what Sora expected: the same doorway into a virtual Twilight Town that Roxas had spent his last days inside, built out of Ansem the Wise's own data.

Hayner heard the name Roxas again there and still could not place where he knew it from.

Pence had an idea about that.

"Maybe we bumped into him somewhere."

He found the same photograph inside the data town that Sora had brought with him, and set the two side by side. "Yeah. We've got the same one."

"It's like one of those 'spot the differences' puzzles, except really easy. I guess in that town, we're friends with this 'Roxas' person."

He proposed the obvious next step.

"Great. Then let's all go ask around town. If alternate-us knew Roxas, then maybe alternate-other folks did too."

It came to nothing.

"Nope, 'fraid not. The asking around thing was a total bust."

Pence turned instead to the transporter that was meant to carry them into the data town itself, and remembered the password from before.

"Here we go! The password was, uh, 'sea-salt ice cream,' right? Okay, I'm in. Let's get that transporter working. Oh, man. The transporter's been protected."

"I guess from us? We can't use it to get to the other Twilight Town."

Doesn't Belong Just to You

A call reached them at the blocked transporter before they could try anything else.

"The data has been encrypted, so we've only deciphered some of it."

Sora had not spoken to the voice on the other end since the castle at Radiant Garden fell quiet.

"Oh. I guess we haven't spoken since the castle. I'm Ienzo. Aeleus is here too."

Aeleus said nothing, and Ienzo spoke for him, setting aside whatever still stood between him and Roxas. "Aeleus, whatever's between you and Roxas, it's in the past."

Ienzo explained why he was calling at all.

"Sora, the reason we're here is because you and your friends defeated our Nobodies, thereby 'recompleting' us. We cast off our hearts by choice, make no mistake, but we didn't know that Xemnas, or rather, Xehanort, was deceiving us."

"Not anymore. Xemnas and Xehanort have no hold over us now. We're just students of the heart, exactly the same as we were before all of this began."

"We have friends we want to bring back to this world, just the same as you. To do that, we have to work together. In that spirit, Sora, we found some intriguing data in the bit of code we deciphered."

He came to what their teacher, Ansem the Wise, had found while studying Sora's own heart in order to piece Naminé's scattered memories back together.

"Yes. In order to piece your memories back together, our teacher, Ansem the Wise, took a close look at your heart. And what he found is that your heart doesn't belong just to you."

Sora offered the one thing he actually knew for certain, that Roxas's own heart had always been part of it.

"Interesting. Well, no one knows your heart better than you. To be honest, we still have a plethora of questions on our side, but the idea has merit. It's incredible enough that you and your Nobody are able to coexist. If you share a heart, no wonder someone as remarkable as you caught Ansem the Wise's eye. We'll keep investigating based on your hypothesis. I'll be in touch."

The Network

Ienzo called again while Sora was still standing at the mansion's own terminal, and asked whether he was in front of a computer. "Hello, Sora. You wouldn't happen to be in front of a computer?"

He explained why he was asking.

"I was tinkering with Ansem's computer, you know, to decrypt the Code that was left in it? And I noticed that someone had logged in from another terminal. I figured it might be you."

"Then, uhh, who was it that logged in?"

It was Pence, not Sora, who answered him. "Oh, hi. This is Pence. I'm the one who logged into the computer."

Ienzo took that in stride.

"Good. As long as it's a user that we know we can trust."

Sora and Pence told him between them what the terminal had shown, another Twilight Town reached through a transporter that would no longer let them in.

"Another Twilight Town? And a 'transporter'? Okay. A virtual world inside the computer, made of data."

Ienzo saw a way through it.

"Maybe I can do something. Pence, let's get a network set up. My address here is."

Pence gave him what he needed on his own end, and Ienzo confirmed it a moment later.

"Okay, sharing is enabled."

"Now that our two computers have been successfully networked together, I can take control of the terminal there and change the privileges."

He set out what the reward would be, beyond simply getting them back inside the data town.

"Yes. For the virtual world to be completely realized, Ansem the Wise would've included Roxas's full data in the construction. Meaning, somewhere on your machine there's a log of that data that. Uhh, basically, we can decipher Ansem's Code more quickly, and we can analyze the virtual Twilight Town while we're at it."

Pence followed the explanation well enough that Ienzo did not need to repeat it.

"Glad you're following along. Don't worry, we'll handle it. Chip and Dale will be helping me out here on this end. I'll call you back as soon as we know anything more."

Set Your Heart Free

Ansem, Seeker of Darkness and Xemnas were waiting outside the mansion when Sora came back out into the courtyard.

"So, you think you can bring Roxas back?"

"Do you even realize what you are saying? The other Twilight Town is just data."

Xemnas spoke over him. "Roxas should never have existed in the first place. What you seek is impossible."

"And in the unlikely event you did manage to separate the two, where is it you think you can put his heart?"

Sora told them he meant to bring Roxas back regardless of what either of them believed was possible.

"In that case, by all means."

"Nothing would please us more than Roxas's return, of course."

"Go on then. The shadows are never out of reach."

Xemnas was not finished with him yet, and told him the one truth he still refused to hear. "Still so blind. A Nobody is what's left behind when one gives his heart to darkness. There is only one way to bring Roxas back, which is for you to give your heart up as well. Sora, have you finally decided to call upon the darkness?"

"Now, set your heart free."

Sora refused. Neither of them pressed him further. They left him standing in the courtyard and went their own way.

Never Just One Iron

Xigbar met the other two once Sora had gone, wanting to know why they had let him walk away unpressed.

Ansem, Seeker of Darkness answered him first. "Yes. Just look at them. They wouldn't get far if we did not spell it out."

Xemnas explained what the two of them were actually for. "We were instructed to guide him."

"That is why we never have just one iron in the fire."

Ansem, Seeker of Darkness made clear what would happen if the guiding stopped working. "If he wavers from the path we lay, we destroy him."

Just Gone

Ienzo called once more before Sora left Twilight Town, with news that had nothing to do with the network or the data town at all. "Oh, before I forget, a bit of troubling news. It's about one of the Organization's former members. You knew him as Vexen, but to us he was Ansem's apprentice Even. He was recompleted like the rest of us, but hadn't regained consciousness yet. Then, sometime after Lea left, Even vanished. Aeleus and Dilan, the two you knew as Lexaeus and Xaldin, they went out looking for him, but he's just gone. And I'm starting to worry."

Sora asked whether Even might have been taken the same way Terra had been.

"I think it's a real possibility. He's a devious researcher. You should be careful."

Andy's New Toys

Rex and Hamm were watching a commercial for a game called Verum Rex when Woody switched the television off.

"Ah, sorry. But this is no time for television, Rex."

"Gotta say, that Gigas is pretty impressive."

Woody tackled Hamm without warning, and Hamm did not understand why until he saw what Woody had already seen.

"Woody? What gives?"

Heartless had appeared in the room, and Woody rallied the others to meet them.

"All right, guys. Today we teach those masked intruders who's boss. Is everybody in position?"

"Okay. We go on three. One, two."

Rex was not ready for a fight, and Hamm tried to steady him.

"Would you calm down? Don't worry. I got ya covered."

Buzz asked Woody whether the intruders were back, and readied himself the moment he had the answer.

"Are they back?"

"It's go time."

Sora, Donald and Goofy arrived in the middle of it, shrunk down to the size of the room's own toys, and helped drive the Heartless off before they had time to take stock of where they were.

"What in the world? Where are we? Oh my gosh! Have we been shrunk?! And. and look at us!"

Buzz was not ready to trust the newcomers either.

"Stay back! For all we know, the intruders sent them."

"Gotta be smart, Woody."

Woody had already noticed them himself.

"What are you doing?! Who are those guys?"

"Are they new?"

Rex looked at Sora and saw someone else entirely, a hero from the game he and Hamm had just been watching. "Slow down there, Rex. We don't know them."

"Yozora!"

Sora had never been mistaken for anyone quite so polished before. "Well, I never look this good. The clothes kinda match."

Several of the toys crowded close around him to look him over.

"Could you guys take a few steps back? You're givin' me the heebie-jeebies."

Woody asked plainly whose toys they were.

"So, you're. Andy's new toys?"

"Yeah, Andy's mom must've bought 'em for him."

Sora tried to explain who they actually were instead. "Um. basically. we've come from far away to get rid of these creatures causing trouble. We're like. exterminators?"

Woody had seen enough of the fight already to make up his own mind.

"You sure did a number on those intruders."

"Okay. In that case, you're all right by me. My name's Woody. Put 'er there."

"Call me Hamm. It's a real honor."

Buzz introduced himself last, still holding back.

"And I'm. Buzz Lightyear."

Woody would not let him press the newcomers further.

"Take it easy, Buzz. What matters is that they got those intruders out of our way, for at least a little while. No need to interrogate 'em."

Buzz wanted answers all the same. "Excuse me. You said that you've battle those intruders before. Tell us where and why."

"Well? You must have come from somewhere."

Woody told him the intruders were new to this house too.

"No, they just showed up a little while ago."

We Keep Waiting

Woody told them what had happened to the house.

"It wasn't always this lonely. One day we all woke up, and we were the only toys left here. Nobody's heard from Mom, Molly, or Andy. We keep waiting for Andy to come home."

"Yeah. He's the best friend that toys like us could ever hope to have."

Buzz added what he knew about the Heartless themselves.

"In fact, those 'Heartless' materialized, right after all of our friends up and vanished."

"After everyone went MIA, the intruders didn't come alone. They arrived with a guy wearing a hood, dressed in black, just like you. As a matter of fact, he's the only other toy we've seen, outside of you three."

"Seems like you have a lot of enemies."

Woody remembered a clue he had almost forgotten.

"Well. Hmm. There's one thing."

"You know who it is?"

He decided then that the search belonged to all of them, not to Sora and his friends alone. "I'm sorry. But we're not gonna leave this to you. If that guy had something to do with our friends vanishing, then he's our problem too. We've got to work together."

"Then Galaxy Toys is where we're going. Sora. Follow me. It's out the window and down the roof."

Buzz was still not convinced they should leave at all.

"Not so fast, cowboy. You seem pretty gung ho about going, but shouldn't we stay and wait for Andy?"

Woody had already tried that, and it had gotten them nowhere.

"Well. You've got a point, but. We've tried waiting. Look, if we go with Sora, we might find a clue. Are you with me, Buzz?"

Splitting the Heart and Body

The group reached Galaxy Toys and found a display Gigas standing motionless among the shelves.

"I guess it hasn't figured it out."

A stranger in a black coat answered him instead of Sora. "I can make it move for you."

Sora recognized him from before. "I'm so honored you remember me."

He had a Heartless take hold of the Gigas and set it moving.

"One heart's shadows fill the emptiness of another. See how they bring him to life? Like Heartless and Nobodies, they fit together."

Sora asked him what any of it had to do with the toys, or with this world at all. "There's a darkness we are missing and must reclaim. The way hearts connect in this world can provide us with a clue. So we made a copy of the world, and then pulled those hearts apart. I wonder how you'll handle the strain."

"Don't let me down."

He left the possessed Gigas behind him.

"Oh no! He can move!"

"Way cool!"

They fought the Gigas off, and Woody was left turning over what the stranger had said.

"I'm confused. That guy in the black coat, did he say he made a copy of the real world? What's that mean?"

Buzz refused to take any of it seriously.

"You can't be serious. Oh! That's right, you're from a video game. Well, maybe in your game, that's how things work, but here in reality, you can't 'split worlds.' This is ridiculous."

Woody was not so sure Buzz was right to dismiss it.

"I admit, it does sound just a little far-fetched. But, say we have been taken to some kind of alternate world. That would explain why your laser's real. And is it really that crazy? Worse than 'evil emperors' and 'protecting the galaxy'? Any of that ring a bell?"

A Green Army Man broke in on the argument to report that Rex, Hamm, and the Little Green Men had all gone missing, and Woody turned the conversation back toward Sora.

"Sora's right. They helped with the intruders, so they might help find our friends. They have been there for us so far. You can't deny that. Come on. Every toy deserves a fair shake. Am I right?"

"Well, Buzz? Do you really think we can save our friends on our own? We didn't get very far before. We gotta take all the help we can get."

"See, they don't seem bad. Am I right, Buzz?"

Every Toy Accounted For

The group searched Galaxy Toys floor by floor. They freed Rex from the Supreme Smashers, pulled a Green Army Man out of a Musical Toad, and broke Hamm loose from the Angelic Amber's own dollhouse.

"Too bad we're not strapped to a rocket, huh?"

"Nice moves, Rex."

Woody was starting to come around on the newcomers himself.

"I think they really are good guys."

"Come on, Sora. You've never used a record player? Like this!"

Hamm was glad to be out of the dollhouse.

"Talk about cabin fever. Thanks for the save."

"Yeah, aside from being locked in, the accommodations were fine."

The Angelic Amber itself reappeared once Hamm was free of it, and Hamm knew it at once.

"She's back! That's the doll that pig-penned me!"

"Uh, copy that. One stay in the dread-and-breakfast was enough for me!"

Looking at the doll's own lifeless face after the fight, Buzz wondered aloud whether he, or any toy, could end up the same way.

"Hey, hey, hey! What is going on?!"

"Why didn't you tell me a little sooner?"

Sora and Woody told him that so long as he did not lose his own heart, he would never fall to darkness the way the Angelic Amber had.

"Buzz, you're overthinking it."

"Well, that's good. Because I know you, Buzz. You'll never lose heart when it comes to your friends."

A UFO swept the Little Green Men away soon after, and Sora destroyed it before it could carry them off.

With everyone else found, Woody remembered Rex was still missing.

"I think I know who that might lead us to. Come on, guys."

They found him at the video game section, watching Verum Rex play through its own story.

"Aw, he took off. Said he wanted to prove to you you could trust Sora. He's up there by the video games."

"Hmm. You're right, Buzz. Now that we're all accounted for, we should meet up at the entrance and go home."

"You're right. Sora, Donald, Goofy. Any chance you could help us one last time?"

Rex had finally seen enough of the game to believe what he was looking at. "Whaddaya know? They are video game figures. See? I told ya, Buzz. They're toys, just like the rest of us."

"Yeah, stuck like pigs."

A Moment's Rest

The group turned to head back for Andy's room, Rex found and the others with him. Before they reached the entrance, the man in the black coat was standing in their way again.

"Oh, but you needn't rush off."

Sora told him plainly that they were finished here and meant to leave. "I have more to observe. I can't let you leave yet."

Sora refused to be held up any longer and moved to get past him. "You would say that, champion of light. Very well, let's skip to the final stage."

A Heartless closed over Buzz before anyone could stop it, and he went rigid, then turned on his own friends with no recognition left in him. Sora started for him, only for the black coat to come between them first.

"Not this time!"

"Haven't you heard? In this world, you come from a video game. So now, you can watch my experiment from inside that screen. That is, if you manage to find a moment's rest."

Sora was pulled from the aisle into the screen itself, and it was some time before he broke free of it and found his feet again in Galaxy Toys, Buzz still gone from himself in front of him.

"C'mon, Buzz. Quit fooling around."

"I can't believe it! Buzz has been taken over?"

"Does that mean we'll all be like Buzz, if we don't find Andy?"

The Heart's True Nature

Word reached them that Buzz had been carried off to a dark corridor opening in the Kid Korral, and they went after him there.

"Look. Such tremendous darkness. All because he was ripped away from the boy who cares about him most."

Sora told him that friends were a source of strength, not a weakness to be used against them. "What? 'Your friends are your power'? Ah. How very true. But if the light of friendship is a form of power, the darkness of being alone is a power even greater. Darkness is the heart's true nature."

"Xehanort, you're so caught up in finding the shadows, you forgot about the light that cast them."

He went on as though Sora had not spoken. "I thought I made it clear. I am testing the strength of their bonds. In this world, toys have hearts. And those hearts come from a powerful bond. So what happens when those bonds are stretched to their limit? When they are worlds apart, can cloth and plastic hold on to their hearts? All I needed was a wedge to widen the divide, someone like you to fill them with distrust and doubt. And that chasm you created can be filled with a vast darkness. Witness it for yourself."

Woody had heard enough of it.

"Whatever you're talking about, I don't care. Put Buzz back the way he was, then get lost!"

"Or else what, toy?"

"Yeah, I am a toy. And a friend. My guess is no one's ever loved you before. Because you know nothing about hearts and love."

Sora and Woody pressed the darkness back together, and Woody was the one who finally pulled Buzz free of it. "No!"

"Woody. Wait, how did I get here?"

With Buzz himself again, Sora answered what Woody had asked back at Galaxy Toys, about whether they would all end up the same way if Andy was never found.

"There are hearts all around us, trying to connect. Your 'loneliness' only made Woody and Buzz's connection stronger. That's the heart's true nature, to never, ever let go. Wherever they are, Andy and the other toys haven't let go either."

"So, even empty puppets can be given strong hearts. I am going to have to remember that."

Woody was not about to let him have the last word.

"Yeah! You can't keep us from Andy. We're going home no matter what. And taking Buzz!"

"And that's something you'll never understand, because you're hollower than any toy."

Buzz added his own answer beside him, turned on the man in the black coat himself. "Remember this, our hearts will always be connected to Andy's. No matter what you do!"

"But now I know a heart can be placed in the vessel of our choosing. For that, let me give you a parting gift to play with. Find the hearts joined to yours."

He left them a Heartless shaped like a toy king, and the group fought it together in the corridor until it fell.

Part of Our Hearts

Back in Andy's room, Sora could not help feeling sorry that Andy, Molly, and their mother were still missing, and that he and his friends were leaving without having brought them home. The toys told him they did not regret any of it, meeting him and Donald and Goofy included, and for the first time since the trio had arrived, Buzz let his own guard down with them.

"After all the adventures we've had, we're not quite ready to say, 'so long.'"

"Besides, if we do go back to the real world, we'll never see you again, right?"

"If we follow our hearts, we'll find him again. So, Sora, are you goin' after the guy in the black coat?"

Sora told him that he was. "That's okay, because you've become part of our hearts. So let us become a part of yours."

Woody wanted the whole group to come together for it, and Sora went along with him, embarrassed as he was. "Whaaat? Ugh, if you insist. Everybody join in!"

Buzz saw them off with the same line he always gave his own friends before parting, and Sora, Donald, and Goofy left Andy's room and Toy Box behind them.

Meant for Me

A mother's voice had told a much younger Rapunzel that the outside world was too dangerous a place for her.

"The outside world is a dangerous place. You must stay here, where you're safe. Do you understand, flower?"

"Why can't I go outside?"

Alone in her tower every year on her own birthday, she watched lights rise into the sky and could not shake the feeling they were meant for her.

"Those lights appear every year on my birthday, only on my birthday. And I can't help but feel like they're, they're meant for me. I need to see them. And not just from my window. In person. I have to know what they are."

Sora, Donald, and Goofy arrived in the forest of Corona with no idea why they had come, and a stranger burst past them fleeing a swarm of Heartless.

"Make way! Make way! Make way!"

As the trio turned to fight the Heartless instead, he saw his chance.

"Say, since you three seem to know what you're doing, mind if I leave this to you?"

Another set of hoofbeats seemed to be chasing him besides the Heartless.

"You have my thanks. The horse was enough. Don't need any monsters on my trail."

He gave them his name in passing and vanished into the trees.

"Oh, nothing, nothing. Name's Flynn. Flynn Rider. Ohh! Watch out, they look mad! Slowly. Slowly. Outta here!"

That Is My Deal

Following the secret passage the trio found at a dead end of the forest, Sora, Donald, and Goofy came to a hidden tower where a young woman was holding Flynn Rider captive.

"Who else knows my location, Flynn Rider?"

He tried his usual charm on her first.

"How you doing? The name's Flynn Rider. How's your day going? Huh?"

"All right, hang on, Blondie."

Only once he reached for his belongings did he notice what was missing.

"Gesundheit. Here's the deal. I was in a situation, gallivanting through the forest when I stumbled upon a, Oh! Oh no no! No no no! Where is my satchel?"

She had already hidden it, and turned his own panic back on him.

"I've hidden it. Somewhere you'll never find it. So, what do you want with my hair? To cut it? Sell it? Wait. You don't want my hair?"

He had no idea what she meant by it.

"Why on earth would I want your hair? Look, I was being chased, I saw a tower, I climbed it, okay? End of story."

She got to the point instead.

"Okay, Flynn Rider. I'm prepared to offer you a deal. Look this way. Do you know what these are?"

"A deal?"

He guessed at what she meant before she could explain.

"You mean the lantern thing they do for the princess?"

"Lanterns? I knew they weren't stars. Well, tomorrow evening they will light the night sky with these 'lanterns.' You will act as my guide, take me to these lanterns, and return me home safely. Then, and only then, will I return your satchel to you. That is my deal."

He refused outright, twice.

"Yeah. No can do. Unfortunately, the Kingdom and I aren't exactly 'simpatico' at the moment, so I won't be taking you anywhere."

"A horrible decision, really."

She was not asking anymore.

"Something brought you here, Flynn Rider. Call it what you will: fate, destiny. So I have made the decision to trust you."

With the satchel still hers to withhold, he gave in.

"Let me get this straight. I take you to see the lanterns, bring you back home, the you'll give me back my satchel?"

"I promise. And when I promise something, I never, ever break that promise. Ever."

Just Like Your Face

Outside the tower at last, Rapunzel felt the ground under her for the first time in her life.

"It's so soft! I'm free! I'm really free!"

Joy gave way at once to guilt and back again.

"I can't believe I did this! I can't believe I did this. I can't believe I did this! Mother would be so furious if she knew I disobeyed her and left the tower. But that's okay, I mean, what she doesn't know won't kill her. Right? Oh my gosh! This would kill her. This is so fuuuun! I am a horrible daughter. I'm going back. I am never going back! I am a despicable human being. Best. Day. Ever!"

While she argued with herself, Flynn was already working out how to keep his own satchel safe from the monsters still roaming the forest.

"Oh, what to do? I cannot let her find that tiara. Okay, just think. I need the satchel and Blondie has it. There might be more monsters out there. I've got it! The three guys in the funny outfits. They looked tough enough to come in handy."

"All right fine, I'll take you. But on one condition: my three sidekicks come along."

"Guys! You're here, and just in time."

Rapunzel had not met them yet.

"Stop right there! Who are you?"

"I told you before: my sidekicks. May I introduce, ehh."

Flynn did not actually know their names, and Rapunzel supplied her own introduction instead.

"Sora, Donald, and, Goofy. It's, nice to meet you, too. I'm Rapunzel."

Flynn filled them in on her.

"Uh, that would be Rapunzel. Something tells me this could be her first time outdoors. Give her a few minutes to get used to it."

"I notice you seem a little at war with yourself here."

He laid out what he actually needed from them.

"Look, she really wants to see the lantern show tomorrow night. Now, I'm a nice guy, so I've decided to help her. Only problem is those monsters might show up again. I can get her to the Kingdom, but you guys are clearly more cut out for combat."

As they made their own way toward the Kingdom, Sora tried to put her at ease. "The outside world seems so big and scary. I know how she feels. Lucky for me you two came along at just the right time, and the rest has been unforgettable. Yep, unforgettable, just like your face!"

Rapunzel splashed in the water and chased after rabbits, delighted by something new at every turn.

"Oh, look! What is that? It's so fluffy!"

Precious Gift

Back at the tower, Gothel found the room empty.

"Rapunzel? Rapunzel!"

A stranger in a black coat answered her instead.

"Who's there?"

He offered her a bargain of his own.

"Missing someone? She's such a precious gift. Allow me to assist you in getting her back."

Elsewhere, a flower-like pod the group had stumbled on split open into a Reaper Nobody, and Flynn's nerve went first.

"All right, I hate to say it, but I'm lettin' you outta this deal. It's way too scary out here. Let's just turn around and take you home."

Rapunzel was not ready to give up on the lanterns.

"No. I am seeing those lanterns. It's okay. I'm not afraid to face them."

"Oh, come on!"

More of the pods opened around them.

"Okay. That's suspicious."

Rapunzel had learned her own lesson about the local flora.

"Don't worry. I know to be careful around flowers now."

"Mother said the outside world would be filled with ruffians and thugs."

She left the fighting to Sora and the others. "All right. Please be careful, Sora."

Flynn was already pulling her away from it.

"No problem. Knowing when to flee is one of my specialties. C'mon, Rapunzel. Gotta go. Look, I wanna stay and slug it out too, but my sidekicks have it covered."

Once the Nobodies fell, their own master appeared to Sora. "'Has-beens'? Now why would you say that?"

"My name is Marluxia, and yes, that is correct. How interesting it is to see you again, Sora."

"A shame you've no memory of me, because I remember you exceedingly well. Although, it's those memories I'd soon erase."

Sora had no patience for him. "Because, bossing around Nobodies? That's the old Organization. Why? Are you in the 'real' one too? Good for you."

Marluxia brushed the question aside and came to the point. "Nor should you. Nor will you ever, for that matter. Now, if you'll permit me, I've come to ask a favor."

"Please hear what I have to say. I'm sure you've noticed, well, perhaps not. But you should know that maiden with you, Rapunzel, is the very light of this world. I would see you guard her from its dark horrors."

"All the Organization seeks is balance. You must understand, our ultimate objective is not to clash with the light. We seek to complement it. Use that Keyblade, to keep Rapunzel safe."

A New Dream

Separated from Rapunzel and Flynn after the fight, Sora, Donald, and Goofy searched a marsh for them and ran into the same woman who had spoken to Marluxia.

"Excuse me, good travelers. Do you know Rapunzel?"

"My apologies. I'm Rapunzel's mother. The poor child left home without a word, and I've just been worried sick. Please tell me: where is my dear, sweet girl?"

They had no answer for her, and she had no more patience for them.

"Lost her? You're of no use to me. I'll find her myself."

Elsewhere, at a campsite, Rapunzel and Flynn found themselves face to face with the very horse that had been hunting him.

"Wh-wh-whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Easy, boy, easy! Settle down. Whoa, whoa! You are such a good boy! Yes you are. Are you all tired from chasing this bad man all over the place? Nobody appreciates you, do they?"

"Excuse me? Oh, come on. He's a bad horse!"

The horse was already won over.

"Ohh! He's nothing but a big sweetheart! Isn't that right, Maximus?"

"Wha. You've got to be kidding me."

Rapunzel talked the horse into a truce.

"Look, today is king of the biggest day of my life, and the thing is, I need you not to get him arrested. Just for twenty-four hours, and then you can chase each other to your hearts' content. And it's also my birthday. Just so you know."

With Maximus won over, the two of them found their way back to Sora, Donald, and Goofy.

"You're here. And you're okay! And look! I made a friend. Meet Maximus. You could say Flynn introduced us. And where one goes, the other follows. This is Sora, Goofy, and Donald. They've been helping me."

"Come on, the Kingdom's not far."

As they walked, Rapunzel admitted what frightened her about the night ahead.

"I've been looking out a window for eighteen years, dreaming about what it might feel like when those lights rise in the sky. What if it's not everything I dreamed it would be? And what if it is? What do I do then?"

"Well, that's the good part, I guess. You get to go find a new dream."

Something to Take Care Of

The Kingdom was already alive with its own festival when they arrived, and Rapunzel noticed a mural of a princess the kingdom had lost long ago before anyone had told her a word about it. In the town square, she pulled everyone into a dance.

"C'mon, everyone! Come dance with us!"

As the lanterns began rising into the night sky around them, she gave Flynn back the satchel she had held onto since the tower.

"I have something for you, too. I should've given it to you before, but I was just scared. And the thing is, I'm not scared anymore. You know what I mean?"

"I'm starting to."

He left her watching the lanterns alone.

"I'm sorry. Everything is fine. There's, just something I have to take care of. I'll be right back."

A New Seven Hearts

Marluxia found Rapunzel alone once Flynn had gone. "Oh dear. He's run off with the crown and forgotten you."

"Forget Flynn Rider. You know where you belong, and it's not with him. Now."

"No. He wouldn't. Who are you?"

Gothel arrived before he could answer her, pulling Rapunzel away while Nobodies broke out across the festival.

"Rapunzel! My precious girl. Are you all right? Are you hurt? I was so worried about you, dear. So I followed you. And I saw them attack you, and, Oh my. Let's go. Let's go, before they come to."

"M-Mother, how did you."

Sora, Donald, and Goofy, fighting through the same Nobodies, saw Gothel take her and tried to follow, only for Marluxia to block their path.

"Show some decorum. The girl has found her dear mother. You should let them be."

"Because Rapunzel is far too important. Atop her tower, she must remain out of sight, and live out her days with Mother Gothel."

"That is exactly what it's like. Rapunzel's hair holds the powerful magic of healing. And yes, Mother Gothel wants it for herself. As do others. And, if Mother Gothel's actions will protect Rapunzel, preserve her, then she is doing the Organization a favor."

He went on before Sora could press him further. "Let's say she's keeping Rapunzel on the shelf for us. An extra pawn in case you fail to find the remaining guardians of light, and we have occasion to call on other hearts of light instead. A New Seven Hearts to fill out the ranks."

"Yes. Seven who inherited the princesses' light after their role was fulfilled."

He put Sora to sleep before the argument could go any further. "Hmph. I just knew you would go and make a scene. Very well, then it's lights out for you. You always were such a sound sleeper."

Some distance away, still hunting the black box, Pete was losing what little faith he had left in it.

"Another world where we got doodly-squat. You sure this box thingy's even real?"

"Yes."

He wanted to know how she could be so sure.

"It is etched."

With nothing found here either, she was ready to move on.

"Come with me."

Pete wondered whether they ought to tail Sora's group instead, since the Organization seemed just as interested in whatever they were after. "Who said anything about following them?"

Aren't I?

Back at the tower, Rapunzel worked through what she had just seen and what it meant, and Gothel grew impatient with her own silence.

"Please speak up, Rapunzel. You know how I hate the mumbling."

"I am the lost princess. Aren't I? Did I mumble, Mother? Or should I even call you that?"

"Oh, Rapunzel. Do you even hear yourself? Why would you ask such a ridiculous question?"

Rapunzel understood everything now, not just what she was but who had taken her.

"It was you! It was all you! I've spent my entire life hiding from people who would use me for my power. When I should have been hiding from you!"

"Everything I did was to protect you."

She would not be talked back into believing that.

"No! You were wrong about the world. And you were wrong about me. And I will never let you use my hair again!"

Gothel dropped any pretense of gentleness.

"You want me to be the bad guy? Fine. Now I'm the bad guy."

"Rapunzel, really! Enough already! Stop fighting me!"

Once she had the upper hand again, she played her last card.

"Where will you go? He won't be there for you."

Rapunzel had no way to answer that.

"That criminal's to be hanged for his crimes. Now, now, it's all right. Listen to me. All of this is as it should be."

Just Let Me Heal Him

Flynn found Sora still unconscious where Marluxia had left him.

"Whoa, Max! Whoa, boy. Is Sora okay?"

He had Maximus try the obvious solution.

"Hmm. Unresponsive sidekick. Wait a minute. I know how to fix this! Max, give him a wash!"

It worked.

"Well, that did the trick. Nice work, Max!"

With Sora awake again, Flynn told him and the others where Rapunzel had been taken. "That's right. In her mother's tower. This calls for a rescue. Are you with me?"

He was caught before he ever reached her, and chained for it.

"In case you get any ideas about following us."

Only the next day did he manage to break free and ride Maximus back to the tower himself.

"Rapunzel! I thought I'd never see you again."

Gothel stabbed him as he reached her, and Rapunzel begged to be allowed to heal him in exchange for giving up everything else.

"No! I won't stop! For every minute of the rest of my life, I will fight! I will never stop trying to get away from you! But, if you let me save him, I will go with you. I'll never run. I'll never try to escape. Just let me heal him, and you and I will be together, forever, just like you want. Everything will be the way it was. I promise. Just like you want. Just, let me heal him."

Flynn would not let her trade herself for him.

"No! No, Rapunzel."

"No. Rapunzel. No! I can't let you do this."

He warned her what returning to Gothel would actually cost her.

"But if you do this, but if you do this, then you will die."

"And I can't let you die."

He stopped her the only way he could.

"Rapunzel, wait."

He cut her hair with a shard of broken glass rather than let her heal him, and Gothel aged to death before their eyes.

"No! Oh no. No. What have you done? What have you done?!"

Marluxia turned what was left of her into a Heartless before it could settle. "Fallen to darkness. We can't allow her near our pure light now. Her presence would only cast a pall over it."

Sora and the others fought the Grim Guardianess until it fell.

My New Dream

With no magic left in her cut hair, Rapunzel tried anyway.

"Don't go. Stay with me, Eugene. Flower, gleam and glow. Let your power shine. Make the clock reverse. Bring back what once was mine."

He spoke what he believed were his own last words to her.

"Rapunzel. Hey. Rapunzel. Rapunzel. You were my new dream."

Her tears, carrying the last of her hair's own power, brought him back.

"Rapunzel. Did I ever tell you, I've got a thing for brunettes?"

Rapunzel could hardly believe any of it herself.

"I know! I mean, I can't believe it! I can finally be with my real family! I couldn't have done it without your help."

Eugene thanked Sora and the others in turn. "Well, from where I'm standing, the Kingdom couldn't ask for a better princess. And I couldn't have asked for better sidekicks! Thanks."

"True. But nevertheless, I won't let her out of my sight."

He finally told them the name he had been going by for years was not his own. "Oh! That's my real name. Eugene Fitzherbert. That's right. I never told you guys."

"Hey! I thought I was the only one you were gonna tell."

He was not done teasing her back.

"Don't worry. I've saved plenty of Fitzherbert-y secrets just for you."

"This one is none of your business."

Sora sent Maximus and Rapunzel's own chameleon after him one last time before they parted ways. "You have got to be kidding me!"

That Googly Bear Eye

Sora, Donald, and Goofy arrived outside Monsters, Incorporated already unsettled by each other's own new monster shapes, and more confused still by a sign reading that the company scared because it cared.

Inside, one of the monsters noticed them first.

"Hmm? I wonder who those guys are."

His own companion panicked at the sight of the child beside them.

"What?! Careful, Sulley. If they see the K-I-D."

Sulley was unmoved.

"But you're the CEO! You set the example."

Sora assumed the child was in danger until he saw how happy she looked, which only left Mike more rattled. "Guys! Guys, it's not what it looks like. Okay, listen. That kid over there just popped out of nowhere! We gotta call the CDA. Uh, it's a, uh, Oh yeah, a Code 835!"

Sora pressed him on whether they meant the child harm. "Yes! I mean, no no no! We're done with scare power. Nobody's gettin' scared."

Once Sora greeted the girl without any fear of her, Mike could hardly believe it.

"Hold on! You guys really aren't afraid of humans?"

The girl mistook Donald for someone she already knew. "Well, you can see the resemblance. That googly bear eye."

Mike corrected her himself.

"Come on, Boo! I'm Mike Wazowski."

Sulley started his own introduction, only for Mike to talk over him.

"Well, my name's Sulley. And this is."

The introductions ended there, as something new appeared in the room.

"Those guys are right, Sulley. This has got 'bad news' written all over it."

Sulley moved Boo out of the way at once.

"Stay here. Kitty will be back."

"I'm on it."

Between them and Sora's own group, the creatures, unlike anything Sora had faced before, did not last long. "Heh, still runnin' circles around you, butterball."

"Nice, Sulley. Even with those extra pounds you put on."

Boo had not enjoyed the encounter.

"They sure gave Boo a scare."

"So, any ideas who those guys were?"

A Couple of Exterminators

Donald accused the two of them of causing the attack themselves. "Hey, I told you we're through using that! Besides, we have no idea who or what you're talking about."

Sora explained that they had come from far away to deal with creatures like these. "Just how far away?"

"Hmm. Okay, okay, let's just say we buy all that. Are those creeps dangerous?"

Sulley decided the newcomers could be trusted with the truth.

"You're right, Mikey. Let's get our girl home."

"So, Monsters, Incorporated used to rely on scream power from human kids for energy, but now we collect their laughter instead. It turns out laughter's ten times more powerful. And we'd never have figured it out without Boo."

Mike was more concerned with getting her home safely than with the company's own history.

"Sulley, I know you've missed her, but it's time to postpone our playdate."

"It's kind of a long story, but Boo's from another world, and we gotta send her back there, to keep her safe."

Sora and the others offered to help. "Great! We could use a couple of exterminators around here!"

Sulley turned back to Boo before anything else.

"Boo? Hold on. Don't want you to get hurt."

He told them about the one other danger they knew of.

"The creep we banished for trying to collect screams by force. He used to be Boo's scarer."

"We have got to get Boo to safety first. Then, we can take care of Randall. Time to find a way out!"

A Walking Energy Generator

Mike led the way to the Laugh Floor, singing his own worry to himself the whole way there.

"Gotta send her home right now, or so help me. So help me! So help me!"

But the Unversed had already broken in, using the closet doors themselves to hunt for scream energy, and Boo's own door was swept up with the rest of them.

"Look! There's Boo's door! Go get Boo!"

They chased it through the Door Vault instead, riding whatever stray doors they could find.

"Ride's here! Grab onto the door when you're ready."

"Boo's door, here we come!"

Not every door was ready to open.

"It's offline! We'll have to power it up!"

"Sora, we gotta make Boo laugh to open the door!"

Sulley had already worked out a better way through the locks that stood between them and Heartless mixed in with the Unversed.

"Hang on! Think I've got a better idea. If we can just short it out, the lock will disengage. And, lucky for us, Boo is a walking energy generator."

"Ready? It's time to hitch another ride."

The Last Turn

What they thought was Boo's own door dropped them into the Factory's own basement instead.

"Wait! How'd we take a wrong turn?"

Someone was waiting for them there.

"Who cares? All that matters, is that it's the last turn that you losers are ever gonna take."

Mike recognized him at once, and had assumed he was gone for good.

"How did you even get back here? The door we sent you through is sawdust!"

Randall was gloating already.

"Yeah, and I almost got turned into somebody's wallet. Lucky for me, a real nice guy came along and fixed the door. So here I am. And starting today, I'm numero uno! Top of the leaderboard, baby."

Mike was not impressed.

"Ha! You, a top laugh collector? In your dreams, Randall. My laugh totals are off the charts."

Randall corrected him. "Who said anything about collecting laughs? I'm after negative emotions. And my new friends have kindly invaded the factory to get 'em for me."

"Laughter's just not sustainable. Once junior chorts his last chortle, you've gotta start over. But negative energy? Especially sadness? Give 'em something that really breaks their little hearts, and they'll stay sad forever. We'll never have to worry about energy again."

Once he was gone, Mike knew better than to relax.

"That weasel means business! He'll never quit."

Randall's own parting shot proved him right.

"Just try and stop me. You'll see soon enough. I am gonna be a legend around this place. Now, consider your careers officially over. And that goes for the rest of you, too."

Not What I Had in Mind

The basement's own machines had been thrown into chaos.

"Hey! What's with the machines? They've gone totally bonkers! There's no way we can take Boo through here safely."

Randall's own voice carried over the noise.

"We're in control of this factory now. And I suggested a few improvements, some real doozies I just know you're gonna love. In fact, you're not getting out of here alive."

Mike spotted a way through.

"Okay! We know what to do. Gotta find. Bingo!"

"Yep, take it away!"

Sulley was not going through the painting booth alone.

"Nice try, Mikey. I'm not doin' this alone!"

Mike ended up painted along with him, and did not take it well.

"Wha? Wait! Hey! You, not me. C'mon. Sulley! Woah! No. Stop! Sul-ley! Not what I had in miiind!"

Boo wandered off toward the Heartless before either of them could stop her.

"Come back! You can't run off, kid!"

Once the paint had washed off him again, Mike was relieved.

"Woo! This is way better!"

Sulley tried a joke on Boo while they worked their way toward her.

"I don't think Boo's gonna get it, Mike"

"Yeah, it's 'cause his eye's so big. The joke is you can't lose a contact the size of a dinner plate."

With the Heartless dealt with, Mike pulled Boo back to safety.

"Sulley, let's get her outta here."

Show a Little Finesse

Reaching the Accessway, Mike recognized what they had found.

"Yup! This is the central control unit for the whole factory! Now whaddya say we get outta here?"

Randall was waiting for them there too.

"You boys aren't gonna leave without saying good-bye?"

Sora and Donald fought over the controls while trying to short the system out.

"Hey, hey! Show a little finesse!"

"Rats! Randall must've messed this up. Nothing works!"

"It's no use. We need a bigger burst of laughter."

Mike would not let Randall's own interference stop them.

"Give a rest, Randall. You're not gonna get away with this."

Randall was already threatening worse.

"Maybe you will. Or then again, maybe you won't. I have still got an ace up my sleeve. Now, I command you to destroy them!"

His own trump card refused to cooperate at first.

"Hey. Come on! Move. Move, you stupid, What a pile of junk!"

Mike could not resist rubbing it in.

"Didn't you learn your lesson with that pile-of-junk fiasco?"

"Oh, I learned a lot."

Mike was unconvinced by whatever Randall meant by it.

"Oh, please. It's just more junk."

Making Children Laugh

The junk pile Randall had been fighting with rose up animated against them, and Sulley called on Mike to meet it head on.

"Mike, time to reach down and let the scary out."

"Oh, I'm ready, Sulley. I'm ready!"

Randall set it loose on them himself.

"Finally. This is exactly what I need to take over the company. But first, I am getting rid of you. Attack!"

Once it fell, so did his own confidence.

"Whyyy?!"

Sulley finally told him what the company had become without him.

"There's no place for you here anymore, Randall. Now we're in the business of making children laugh."

"You think it's funny?"

Mike and Sulley sent him back through the same door he had come from.

"All right, and in ya go."

"Hilarious! The more that you whine, the funnier it gets."

Randall shouted one last threat before the door closed on him.

"You clowns are gonna be sorry when I find my way back and I finally take over this place!"

"So long! Smell ya later."

The Half of Me That Sleeps On

Before the group could return Boo's own door, a figure Sora recognized from a vision at La Cité des Cloches stepped out to meet them. "Gotta say, that strange facade had me fooled at first, brother."

Sora was already bracing for another riddle. "This is the part where you spout some mumbo jumbo and disappear, right?"

"We haven't ever met in the flesh. I am Vanitas."

Mike still thought this was about scare power.

"For the last time, we already stopped doing that!"

Vanitas corrected him. "This whole world was powered by scream. They converted the screams of human children into energy. And this very company was what made it all happen. It's as rich a source of negative emotion as we'll ever find."

"Yeah, and the whole time they were trashing our company in the process!"

Vanitas had his own use for the wreckage. "Did you? Then how do you explain all these canisters of surplus scream? This facility was everything I could hope for. And I was lucky enough to find a pawn whose heart was darkened by thoughts of revenge."

Sulley understood at once what that pawn had been.

"All Randall ever cared about was winning. And this guy took advantage of that weakness."

Vanitas explained what all of it had bought him. "My heart is made of just one thing. And the Unversed collected enough screams and sadness from those children to reconstruct it."

"But, even with all this negative emotion, my heart is still incomplete. I need something else. The half of me that sleeps on, inside of your heart."

He turned his own attention on Sora directly. "Ventus. What a strange place to slither off to, you insignificant speck."

"Oh, you wouldn't remember. When you were little, you formed a special bond, with a boy named Ventus who joined with your heart."

"Now, you will return Ventus to me."

Donald and Goofy moved to stop him.

"Stay out of this."

"Join your heart, with mine!"

Sulley caught him from behind before he could finish it.

"Made you look."

Mike had a door already waiting.

"Over here, Sulley!"

"Let me go!"

Sulley threw him through several doors in a row and shredded the last one behind him.

"Close it, quick!"

The Most Laughs

Boo's own door had finally settled back at the Laugh Floor.

"And finally, we found her door."

Sulley and Mike said their own goodbyes to her first.

"We'll catch up soon, kid."

Boo reached for Donald again on her way through. "No, that's Donald, Boo."

"Better. I'll see ya, kid."

With Boo home, Sulley turned to Sora and the others. "No, we should be thanking you. We never woulda managed to get Boo this far if you hadn't come along to help."

"Don't mention it. And actually, it was kinda nice havin' a little adventure for old times' sake."

Mike offered the same before they parted.

"The door's always open!"

"Happy exterminating!"

Mike could not let him have the last word.

"For the record, I still get the most laughs!"

All I Ever Do Is Hurt People

The sea itself was turning to ice by the time Sora, Donald, and Goofy noticed, and a woman was running across it in the distance.

"It's cold! Donald, gimme a coat!"

They caught up to her and she rounded on them at once.

"Why are you here? Where did you come from?"

"Are you visiting Arendelle? For the coronation?"

"Elsa. Queen Elsa of Arendelle."

She wanted them gone.

"You shouldn't be out here. Please go back to the village."

The group's own questions only pressed on her further.

"Please leave. I need to be alone. I don't want to hurt anyone."

Sora understood the feeling better than she knew. "Exactly! Although, Donald, you do lose your temper a lot, so, I can relate to wanting some alone time."

Her own temper broke before his did.

"Enough"

Ice burst from her hands, and the fear it left behind drew Heartless out of nowhere. Once the group fought them off, she was shaken by what she had done.

"I. I'm sorry I was so upset. Thank you for your help."

A Winterhorn lunged at Sora from behind, and she brought it down herself with a blast of her own ice. "Look out!"

Sora was impressed rather than afraid, which only unsettled her more. "Control it? No, all I ever do is hurt people."

She had never heard the word he used for the creatures before. "You said that word before. What are they?"

"They're after people's hearts?"

Not About to Put Up With Your Meddling

Frightened by her own strength, Elsa threw up a wall of ice between herself and the group and fled toward the North Mountain. Sora reached the wall only to find it would not give way, and a woman in an Organization coat spoke up behind him before he could try again.

"And how is it any of your business? Read the room, kiddo."

Sora did not recognize her at first. "Excuse me? Oh yeah, you forgot. The name's Larxene. This time, remember. And we'll take care of Elsa, so don't you worry."

The group turned back to the wall instead of answering her.

"Excuse me! I'm right here?"

She warned them off Elsa herself.

"No one's gonna hurt her. But we're not about to put up with your meddling. Stay here and behave yourselves."

She shattered the wall with a bolt of her own lightning, and the ice fell around them into the shape of a labyrinth instead.

"Ice is so not my style."

Sora, Donald, and Goofy had to find their own way out of it.

That Special Glimmer

The group found a dark portal through the labyrinth's own twists and turns, and it set them down near the Mountain Ridge. Climbing after Elsa, they caught up with her just as she raised a palace of ice out of the mountainside itself, singing as she built it, and stood speechless at what she had made. Sora moved to greet her, only for Larxene to step into his path first.

"Please don't tell me that you're spying on her now."

Sora pushed back, and Larxene answered with more than he expected.

"Ooh. Look at you get all sassy. Okay, I'll admit Elsa is a person of interest to us. Maybe she's one of the seven pure lights we need, the New Seven Hearts. Gotta make sure though. Fortunately, we're in the best position to tell. Can't pick out that 'special glimmer' unless you're standing in the shadows. And maybe, Elsa doesn't have it. I mean, just look how icy her palace is, made of magic she forced herself to keep hidden until now. What if it's dark magic?"

She turned the question over out loud, as though genuinely unsure of the answer herself.

"Actually, it's still too early to call. Depends on how she sees it. If she believes her magic is darkness, that's what it will become. Accepting her power, whatever it is, is the only way she can set her heart free. So what will Elsa accept? Light or darkness? I know I wanna know!"

Sora insisted Elsa would never turn to the darkness. Larxene was not interested in continuing the argument.

"It's her choice to make, not yours. You know, I'm starting to understand why she gave you the cold shoulder. You wanna help her? Then stop trying to be her hero! Let her figure things out her own way!"

She blasted the group down the mountain before either side could press further.

Nobody's Ever Come Along

Falling from the mountain, the group found themselves caught in an avalanche below the North Mountain, and rode Goofy's own shield down the slope like a sled.

"Good thing snow's so soft. We could do this a hundred times."

Three Frost Serpents ambushed them partway down, and once those were beaten a second avalanche buried the group entirely.

Coming to, Sora found himself face to face with a talking snowman. "Wow! Look at all the pretty colors. There's blue, and green, ooh, I love green! And look, black. Just like my buttons. Hmm?"

Sora was too dazed to answer him at first, and the snowman spoke to his own foot instead. "Silly spiky grass. Give me back my foot."

Sora asked how he even walked at all. "Um, well, I guess, my feet."

He denied knowing Sora and the others at all. "Nope! Never met 'em. Don't know anyone blue, green, or who's oddly spiky."

Once Sora and the others found his own head, he recognized him at once. "Hi, Sora!"

"I was starting to think nobody'd ever come along and find me."

It Was All My Fault

Climbing on toward a frozen pond, the group found Olaf already walking alongside three strangers.

"Hello. Olaf, are these your friends?"

"I'm Anna. And I know they're strangers, but, they seem pretty nice to me."

"I'm Kristoff, and this is Sven."

Both parties, it turned out, were looking for the same person.

"And to do that, we need to find my sister, Elsa."

"You know Elsa?"

"We're going to try and put an end to this crazy winter."

Sora told them Elsa might be in danger. "Trouble? Are you sure?"

Anna decided to trust him with it anyway.

"All right. I know we just met, but, Sora, was it? I get the feeling that you're someone to trust."

"I'm right there with ya."

Kristoff left the explaining to her.

"Ya know, I should go find some moss for Sven. He's looking a little hungry. C'mon, Sven."

Anna warned Sora what he was in for. "I just hope you like long stories."

"When we were little, my sister and I used to be really close. It was all my fault."

She sang for him the words she had once called out to Elsa herself.

"Please, I know you're in there. People are asking where you've been. They say, 'have courage' and I'm trying to. I'm right out here for you. Just let me in. We only have each other. It's just you and me. What are we gonna do? Do you want to build a snowman?"

Sora thought of Riku, who had once believed the same thing, that pushing someone away could be a way of protecting them.

"And I think, maybe that's why she looked so sad. It's just like when Riku disappeared. He thought he had to push me away, to protect me. Maybe Elsa's the same."

Anna's own resolve only hardened.

"I shouldn't have upset the way I did. Elsa ran away because she was frightened. I have to bring her home."

Fallen Apart Again

Kristoff took Olaf along with him as the group set out together.

"C'mon, Olaf. You're with me."

Olaf mixed up the reindeer's own name along the way.

"The reindeer is Sven."

Kristoff's own group had crashed into a knot of Heartless not long before, and Olaf had come apart in the collision.

"Hey, guys! I need some help!"

"It's not a stick. Well, it is a stick, but it, It's Olaf's arm. He's fallen apart again."

"The pieces can't be too far from here. Could you guys help us look for him?"

They found enough of him to put him back together, though not quite right the first time.

"Wait, why does everyone look all wobbly?"

He fell apart again almost at once.

"Huh? Wha, Oh no."

The second attempt left him taller than before.

"Anna, question. When did you get so small and tiny?"

"You're right! What a great view!"

Goofy pointed out that this was not right either, though Olaf did not mind. "Aw, but I like being tall."

Anna was not troubled by any of it.

"Oh, it's no big deal. He's a snowman. We'll just, put him back together."

Once every piece was found and set right, Olaf felt like himself again.

"Wow, I feel so much better."

Only his own nose was still missing, and Kristoff turned to Sven for it.

"Sven."

"Wait! Where's my cute new nose? The one Anna gave me!"

Kristoff answered for the reindeer himself.

"'Someone had to pick it up!' You're right, buddy. Thanks for finding it, and not actually eating it. 'Aw, you're welcome.'"

Olaf was delighted to have it back.

"My nose, it's back! Oh, I love having a nose!"

The Heartless found them again before they could celebrate for long.

"No. I've already fallen apart today."

We Should Team Up, Big Guy

The climb back to the ice palace brought them to Elsa herself, and she would not be swayed.

"This is my home now. I can't go back. I don't want to hurt anyone."

"Arendelle is safer with me staying up here."

"Please, go away!"

While Sora stayed outside, Anna went in after her sister anyway, trying to end the eternal winter herself. Elsa, still certain she could not control her own powers, struck her with them by accident. Sora felt something go wrong inside the palace before he even saw it, and Elsa's own bodyguard threw Anna, Kristoff, and Olaf out before he could enter.

"Go away."

In his own distress he turned on the group itself, splitting Sora off from the others in the chaos. "Elsa."

Sora caught up to him and made his own case. "Hey, wait up! Are you, looking for Elsa, too? Whoa! Eeeasy! Do you wanna save her from the bad guy? We're on the same side. Hey. We should team up, big guy."

Marshmallow agreed to it.

"You, go."

"I, wait."

Olaf knew what it would take to save Anna now.

"An act of true love will thaw a frozen heart."

Completely Turning to Ice

Making their own way back up the mountain with Marshmallow now beside them, Sora and the others spotted a man carrying Elsa's own unconscious body and felt something dark and wrong coming off him. Together they gave chase.

Catching up with Kristoff and Sven along the way, Sora learned that Anna had been struck in the heart by Elsa's own magic, and that only an act of true love, which everyone assumed would have to come from the man now carrying Elsa away, could save her from freezing solid. Kristoff, mistaken for Anna's own love interest, corrected them only long enough to say he was her guide and nothing more, before a blizzard drove him and Sven back toward the kingdom in fear for Anna's own safety. Marshmallow sensed Elsa was in the same danger, and the group ran for the storm together.

They found Anna walking the frozen fjord on her own, just as she caught sight of the man raising his sword against Elsa in the distance. Anna threw herself between them, her own body turning fully to ice as the blade struck her instead, and the impact knocked the man out cold. Darkness poured out of his own heart and pulled Sora, Donald, and Goofy into it, where a massive Heartless rose to meet them with Marshmallow fighting at their side. When it fell, the force of its own end threw all four of them over the edge of the fjord.

Two in One World

Sora and the others woke on the frozen fjord to find Elsa mourning over her sister's own frozen body, Kristoff, Sven, and Olaf standing in silence around them. Before anyone could react, the ice began to thaw on its own. Just as the group's own relief turned to joy, time itself stopped, and Larxene appeared to explain why.

"So, love has filled both their hearts with light. Two in one world. Definitely didn't see that coming."

She spelled out what it meant for them going forward. "Oh, I see, so you bumped into Marluxia. Then why am I explaining this again? I told you before: the New Seven Hearts. If you mess up and don't find your seven guardians of light, we're gonna need another group to fall back on."

Sora demanded she leave Anna and Elsa out of it. She turned the demand back on him instead. "Ohh, look at this tough guy. Such a big boy now. Well, maybe you should do your job, and find the other guardians of light."

Sora pointed out that the Organization itself was still short a member. "Oh no, we're set."

She left it at that, and time in Arendelle moved again.

With Anna and Elsa reunited, it became clear that Anna's own sacrifice had been the act of true love that saved her all along. Elsa discovered that love, not fear, was what let her master her own powers, and the eternal winter lifted from Arendelle at last. Sora could not help worrying what the sisters' own new place in the Organization's plans might cost them, until Donald and Goofy reminded him how much strength the two of them had already shown together.

"You kind of set off an eternal winter, everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it. Sure you can. I know you can!"

Weigh Anchor, All Hands

Sora, Donald, and Goofy rafted off a waterfall for fun and fell through an abyss instead, landing in the middle of a desert. Trudging on, they spotted a great ship in the distance, and Jack Sparrow greeted Sora like an old friend.

"Hail, Sora!"

He had no time to explain himself before turning back to his own trouble.

"Belay that. Ship absconding! Help me catch the Pearl before she gets away!"

Once they had wrangled it back from the crabs that had carried it off, the ship brought them to shore, where a whole crew of Jack's own acquaintances was waiting: Will, Elizabeth, Gibbs, Tia Dalma, and a Barbossa Jack had clearly not expected to see alive again.

"I thought so. I expect you're able to account for your actions, then. There has been a perpetual and virulent lack of discipline aboard my ship, why?"

Gibbs told him plainly where they had all ended up.

"I know that. I know where I am. And don't think I don't. I'm in Davy Jones' Locker. Assuredly."

He greeted Barbossa next.

"Ah, Hector! It's been too long. Hasn't it?"

Then Tia Dalma.

"Tia Dalma, out and about, eh? You add an agreeable sense of the macabre to any delirium."

Will warned Sora that Jack still believed the three of them to be figments of his own imagination. "Heh. Complete with these three masqueraders."

Elizabeth told him they had come to rescue him.

"Have you now? That's very kind of you. But it would seem that as I possess a ship and you don't, you're the ones in need of rescuing. And I'm not sure as I'm in the mood."

Once they filled him in on everything happening beyond the Locker, he was not pleased.

"Leave you people alone for just a minute and look what happens. Everything's gone to pot!"

He was not eager to let them all back aboard either, given their own history.

"Why should I sail with any of you? Four of you have tried to annihilate me."

He relented anyway, Sora and his friends included. "Aye, so you are, mates. I never could have caught the Pearl without you. Sora, Donald, Goofy, you're hired. Now, as for the rest of you, Tia Dalma, you're in. Gibbs, you can come. Weigh anchor, all hands! Prepare to make sail!"

He put Sora at the helm himself, on one condition. "Now then, Mister Sora. The helm is yours, provided you pass muster. See that island there with the two peaks? Prove you can reach that, and the open sea is yours."

Good Business

While the Pearl worked its own way out of the Locker, Tia Dalma laid out for Sora what had brought them all here. Cutler Beckett was seizing control of the seas by holding Davy Jones's own heart hostage, forcing him to hunt pirates on his behalf. Jones had never forgiven Jack his own debt.

"Sparrow. Your debt to me is still to be satisfied. One hundred years in servitude aboard the Dutchman. As a start."

"That debt was paid, mate."

Beckett had once offered Jack a way out of it.

"Perhaps you'll consider an arrangement. One which requires nothing from you but information."

"Of course. It's just good business."

He wanted the Brethren Court delivered to him.

"Everything. Where are they meeting? What are their plans?"

Jack had named his own price for it.

"Regarding the Brethren Court, no doubt. In exchange for fair compensation, Square my debt with Jones, Guarantee my freedom."

Beckett had held him to it since.

"You made a deal with me, Jack, to deliver the pirates. And here they are. Don't be bashful. Step up. Claim your reward."

Jack was not eager to admit how much of it was true.

"Were I in a divulgatory mood, what then might I divulge?"

Not the Slightest

Two figures in Organization coats had their own reasons for being here. One of them could not stop wondering how Davy Jones lived without a heart.

"Oh, how does he do it? A creature absent a heart and yet somehow able to keep existing. Not even my finest replica can claim that achievement. The secret must be in that box. I have to know what mysteries it contains."

The other wanted him to leave it alone.

"I believe our orders were to find the box and seize it. No more. Put a leash on that runaway curiosity."

Vexen took it as a slight against his own standing. "Always so shortsighted. Why would the Organization seek me out just as soon as I was recompleted, if not to affirm my intellectual prowess and invest in my research? Every stride I make is a stride for all of us."

"Oh really? And what exactly are we striding towards?"

Vexen turned the question back on him. "Luxord, do I detect a hint of treachery in your words?"

Luxord denied any loyalty beyond his own. "What? Don't be absurd. But to be clear, I serve the Organization. I don't share your need to please Xemnas. He's good at wrapping you around his little finger, always has been."

"All I desire is the freedom to continue my research. Ansem the Wise refused to nurture my talents. So I cast my lot with Xemnas, with Xehanort, rather. Simple as that."

Luxord was not satisfied with that answer. "I see. And you don't care how he uses your research?"

"Not in the slightest. All that concerns me is that I complete the perfect human vessel."

Luxord had already noticed Sora's own group nearby.

"That's all well and good. But I know this world better than you. Kindly stay out of the way."

"Oh, of course. Considering those pests have shown up, I'd hardly get anything done."

Luxord had it handled already. "I already know what to do with the 'pests.' Then you can resume your stuffy studies."

"Ah, that's my boy. I'll be watching from the shadows, then."

Suppose You'll Have to Do

Jack was confident about the plan even before the Pearl broke back into the living world at sunrise.

"Never fear. All according to plan."

Moments later the Raging Vulture attacked, and Sora fell into the sea defeating it. Donald and Goofy woke him afterward to tell him their friends had left them and Jack stranded together on an island. Searching it, the three of them found a new ship, the Leviathan, hidden nearby.

"That eager to sail under Captain Jack Sparrow?"

He put the blame for their stranding on Sora himself. "Some pirate! Won't get anywhere without a ship. So, let's go get one."

He was not about to give up the ship once they had found it.

"Are you certain about that? Finders keepers."

"Aye, to which this ship holds no candle. But, take what you can, mate. Now then, my ship has a captain, but it does appear I'm in need of a crew. Suppose you'll have to do. Don't dawdle. Climb aboard!"

He talked Sora through raising the sails himself. "Now, Sora, I know you've made passage through straits far more dire than this. Just follow your heart's command."

Never Count Your Cards

A second ship crossed their own path before they had gone far.

"Not the merry company I'd hoped for."

Its own captain called across the water first.

"Parley!"

Jack would not let Sora move against him. "Sora. Stand down. It's the Code. Mustn't strike a pirate aboard ship, when said pirate offers to confabulate."

Sora asked whether he was back with the Organization. "Yes. Surprising, isn't it, that they'd do me the honor? Never count your cards until they've all been dealt."

"Come now, are you really so unsophisticated that you'd decline a gentlemanly conversation?"

Jack backed him up on the point.

"But, of course the Code is actually more guidelines than rules. Speak your piece."

Luxord explained himself. "Ah yes. And how could I love games and contests without honoring the rules? Because only by winning fairly does victory have any savor at all."

"I am looking for a box. A chest, perhaps. You know the one?"

Jack was cagey about it. "Yes. M-maybe. No! I know of a box. But said box is not a box you want to trifle with, mate. Trust me."

Luxord proposed a way to settle it. "Really? A wager, then."

"And of what nature would this wager be?"

"What say we have a little race to that charming port town which you hold so dear?"

He laid out the terms.

"Yes. Whoever reaches it first is the victor. And the stakes: you tell me all about that chest."

Jack hedged rather than answer him straight.

"Let's just say, there's a potential possibility he wants the chest containing Davy Jones' heart. But I haven't the foggiest notion why he'd covet the blighted thing."

"I will get you whatever it is you want."

"Then we have an accord. Now, let us begin!"

Jack called the crew to their own stations.

"All hands! Prepare to make sail! Drop canvas! With a will, lads!"

He was pleased once Sora understood what was at stake. "Precisely. No purchase, no pay. You might have the makings of a pirate after all."

Luxord goaded Sora directly rather than race fairly.

"I've always been far more interested in the long game. Now, let's see where it takes us. That is, if you stay apace."

"Ahh, you do know how to make good time. Yes, one must simply marvel at your celerity. But, such compulsive behavior is eventually going to bring you nothing but sorrow."

He did not intend to lose fairly either.

"The game isn't over until it's over. Fire!"

"They're closing in! Come about! Make ready to return fire!"

Once the Leviathan crossed the line first, Luxord conceded with grace. "Magnificent! I salute you all, gentlemen."

"Perish the thought. I know when I've been outdone."

Jack allowed him that much.

"You were outdone before you even started, mate. But I admire your concillatory way of conceding defeat."

Luxord asked what he owed as the loser. "Yes. Now, I believe I owe you your prize. But I neglected to ask what it is that you want. Perhaps you'll enlighten me?"

Jack answered without thinking.

"Aye, that's easy. I want the chest that's aboard the Dutchman."

Luxord had gotten exactly what he came for. "Actually, I outwitted him."

Jack realized his own mistake too late.

"Not good? Well, I didn't tell him which Dutchman."

The Surrogate Me

The Leviathan had taken enough cannon fire in the race that it needed repairs, and Jack decided where to make for.

"Nay. There's no point. That's ship's listing near to scuppers with that cannon fire. She'll be needing repairs. Best make berth at Port Royal."

Once they arrived, the fix called for an odd ingredient.

"Look for crabs. They'll set her right. Never mind the particulars, mate. The white crabs. Savvy?"

With enough of them gathered, Jack sent Sora off while he finished the job himself. "Aye, that's all of 'em. Now, to my final task. Be back in a trice."

The ship was seaworthy again by the time he returned, though he had one more question for Sora first. "There, mates. Fit to sail any sea. Now, Sora, one final inquiry: is there any particular reason you wanted this ship?"

Whatever Sora answered satisfied him. "Good answer. You are a pirate, Captain Sora."

Then he told them the truth.

"Ah, It's because this me has run his course, mate."

"Aye, the surrogate me that the goddess of the sea sent here to help you lot. Of course, any me is still me. I may be duplicatable, but I'm always incomparable. The sea, she smiles upon us, Sora, and let's leave it at that, shall we? For now, the real me has a crucial engagement, at Shipwreck Cove, where the Pirate Brethren will meet Beckett and his lot in battle to win back our freedom."

His own task done, he had nothing left to ask of Sora. "No, it's for pirates to resolve. But not you, Sora. You're as free as the winds now, and far you'll go."

The Wrong Box This Whole Time

By now Jones and Beckett had taken Jack hostage, and the pirates had freed Tia Dalma, the sea goddess herself in mortal form, in hope she could help. Sora urged his own friends to keep fighting as the Pearl and the Dutchman were drawn into a whirlpool, the Leviathan following close behind.

"I may still have a lot to learn about love, but I know what it means to share my heart with others. And it will take more than you to break a bond like that."

Luxord had followed them into it as well, more interested in the chest than in the storm. "So that's the Flying Dutchman."

"No one knows what's in the chest we're looking for. If it's a black box, then we are to collect it, simple as that."

He would not say more than that.

"Got me. Regrettably, the higher-ups haven't deigned to tell us. But they did say the box contains 'hope.' That's all you'll get from me."

Vexen had finally gotten his own answer, and it was not the one he wanted. "How disappointing. So this is all they meant when they said 'heart.' We've been chasing the wrong box this whole time."

Luxord decided the Pearl was in his own way. "Hmm, it's far too chaotic to find the box like this. Perhaps I'll remove that ship from the picture."

He summoned the Kraken against it and left to search elsewhere while it fought.

"Now, this should afford me time to look."

The Whelp Has Seen Far More

Freeing the Pearl from the Kraken, Sora, Donald, and Goofy boarded the Dutchman to help Jack, still Jones's own prisoner there.

"You escaped."

"Jack Sparrow. Are you lost? Prisoners don't belong on deck. Your station is in the brig!"

He set his own crew on all of them.

"Hardly. Just a few more maggots to join my crew!"

Jack was ready for him this time.

"Tables have turned, mate."

"The chest. Hand it over!"

Sora moved between them. "Stay out of this, boy!"

"What does a whelp like you know about the heart?"

Jack answered for him.

"The whelp has seen far more of the world than you know."

"You're a cruel man, Jack Sparrow."

Jack held the chest up between them.

"Heady tonic, holding life and death in the palm of one's hand. Cruel is a matter of perspective."

Luxord chose that moment to reappear. "So, you got what you want. Perhaps you're the better player among us. However, I must demand you give that to me."

"Pardon? You must be mistaken, mate. I'll not be giving you anything."

"Then I invoke the right of parle."

Jack cut him off before he could finish it.

"Uhp, no! No parley. Look around. We're a little busy. And besides, I've already got all that I want, mate."

A breath in Luxord's own face was enough to send him overboard. "Yup. Still works."

So Easily Severed

Will and Elizabeth joined the fight against Jones themselves.

"Harridan! You'll see no mercy from me."

Jack kept his own eye on the chest through all of it.

"Easy there, mate. You wouldn't want to damage the leverage, now would you?"

Jones turned on Will directly.

"Ha! What of it? Tell me, William Turner: do you fear death?"

"Is it?"

His own blade found Will before anyone could stop it. Will drove his own sword into Jones in return, to no effect at all.

"Mister. Did you forget? I'm a heartless wretch!"

Sora, Donald, and Goofy pulled Jones's own attention away long enough for Jack to guide Will's hand to the chest instead, striking the heart kept inside it. Jones's own mockery of Will and Elizabeth was among his own last words.

"Ah, love. A dreadful bond. And yet, so easily severed."

He turned on the rest of them with what strength he had left.

"You will not forestall my judgment!"

It was not enough to save him.

"Care to surrender?"

With Jones gone, Jack made the hard call about Will himself.

"Part of the ship, part of the crew. The Dutchman must have a captain. Elizabeth, say good-bye."

Elizabeth would not simply accept it from him, and Jack backed down.

"As you command, your nibs."

Back aboard the Pearl, Jack noticed something off about Barbossa amid the Heartless still harrying the ship.

"Barbossa, have you allied with those fiends again?"

"But you did conspire with them."

Time for Hearts to Say What's True

Beckett had Elizabeth and the Brethren Court cornered with his own armada.

"Advise your Brethren. You can fight, and all of you will die. Or you can not fight, in which case only most of you will die."

He turned the same cold reasoning on Jack.

"It's nothing personal, Jack. It's just good business."

Moments later, the Dutchman resurfaced with Will himself in command of it.

"Never actually been one for tradition. In we go!"

Both ships fired together on Beckett's own Endeavour.

"It's just, good business."

It was the last thing he ever said. Gibbs explained afterward that Will had survived only by taking on Jones's own curse himself, ferrying souls to the afterlife in exchange for a single day ashore every ten years. Jack told Sora that was enough.

"Oh, there's always enough time for hearts to say what's true. Sora, you know better than anyone. It only takes a moment to connect with your mates. With your hearties."

Not My Real Body

Sora, Donald, and Goofy were still taking in the city's own skyline when Heartless attacked and sent a girl flying. Two more strangers flew in after her, one of them a machine that looked her over at once.

"Go Go's suit has shielded her from a major injury, but the blow she sustained to her head has caused a mild concussion. We should take caution and not move her until we can fully stabilize her head."

Together the two groups cleared the Heartless off the bridge and made their own way back to a garage belonging to the boy who had flown in with the machine. The team gathered there was still smarting from an earlier loss of its own.

"I don't get it. I mean, didn't they see how awesome we were?! Sure, those things landed a couple of good hits, but we had chem-balls, and laser hands, and fire-breathing!"

"Not cool."

"Yeah, who needs quality reporting when you can just make stuff up?"

The news had not been kind to them.

"People like spectacle, not truth."

"Well, it really didn't matter. They beat us."

Wasabi thought their own visitors might have better luck.

"Well, why don't we ask the guys, who actually stopped 'em?"

The machine introduced itself first.

"Hello. I am Baymax, your personal healthcare companion."

One of the others followed, in a costume that plainly was not his own skin.

"I'm Fred. Don't be alarmed. This is not my real body."

Sora, for a moment, was struck by how much it resembled a world he had already visited, and started to say so before Donald and Goofy cut him off.

"How're ya doin'?"

Honey noticed the one introduction missing.

"Hiro, you never introduced us."

Go Go still wanted to know where the attackers had come from.

"Where'd they come from?"

When Sora introduced his own group as Keyblade Hero 3, Baymax took it as a medical concern. "I am detecting minute contractions in your faces and shoulders, perhaps due to the garage's brisk temperature. To remedy that, I will give each of you a hug and warm you with my internal heat source."

Fred was delighted once Sora explained what the Heartless actually were. "Ooh, now we're talking! Light versus darkness. Classic conflict!"

Go Go wanted the practical version instead.

"The monsters. Tell us how you managed to take them down."

Shugyo Time

Sora told the team his own group could handle the Heartless alone, but Go Go was not convinced that was the end of it. "Wait. So we're just gonna give up?"

"Very serious. We don't have any way to fight them."

Wasabi tried to settle Fred down before he got carried away.

"Would you calm down, Fred? This is serious."

Fred had an idea anyway.

"We train up! When heroes are brought low, they get new powers. It's shugyo time!"

"Now can we shugyo?"

"Shugyo, shugyo, shugyo!"

Go Go doubted where he had picked up the idea.

"Did you read that in Geek's Quarterly?"

Wasabi wanted something more concrete than enthusiasm.

"Great, buuut, don't we need a plan?"

Baymax had already run the numbers on their odds as things stood.

"With our current skillset, my analysis places our chances at 0.0000."

He had a way to improve them before anyone could dwell on it.

"I can shugyo by installing new combat data."

Hiro gave Sora an AR device to make it work, and Wasabi kept Fred from rushing him. "Not yet, Fred. He's still learning."

Go Go explained what the device would actually do.

"We'll put a tracer on your movements so we can, So we can shugyo."

"Sora, all you need to do is run through some courses that Hiro scripted. Like a minigame."

Change the Weapon, Change the Attack

Go Go led Sora through the Flash Tracer circuit herself. "Try to keep up, Sora!"

Watching him move, she noticed something worth studying.

"Interesting. Gravity, not binding."

Wasabi saw an idea of his own in it.

"Hey, wait. My laser hands, can be projectiles!"

Honey found her own inspiration watching Sora switch weapons mid-fight. "Ooh! Change the weapon, change the attack."

One of her own chemical compounds obscured the Heartless from Wasabi's own view partway through the fight.

"Hey! I can't aim if I can't see!"

"I've got an idea! Better?"

"Much better."

Go Go was already thinking ahead to what else the training might make possible.

"Yeah! Hiro, I think there's a way to."

Diametrically Opposed

The training paid off the moment the Heartless invaded the city in force.

"Just try and catch me."

A Metal Troll loomed over Wasabi, and he was not thrilled about it.

"Ugh! Can't we pick on one our own size?"

Fred noticed something new in how Sora fought it. "A freeze attack! Fire, and ice. Diametrically opposed, or so we thought!"

"Freeze! Whuh? Oh, I get it, It's a combo move!"

He tried his own version of it before the fight was through.

"Watch me scorch 'em with my freeze-nado! The only tornado made of ice and fire."

Go Go and Honey caught up in time to finish it together.

"It looks the right size to me."

"We're here!"

Once the Heartless were cleared, Fred could not stop grinning.

"Was that awesome, or was that totally awesome?!"

Baymax taught Sora something new of his own to mark the win. "Now, we fist bump. To display excitement. Hiro taught it to me. Bah-la-la-la-la-la-la."

Still Alive, in a Way

The whole group rested afterward over ice cream at the bridge. Honey Lemon had noticed enough of Donald's own magic by then to want a closer look at it.

"Your magic is amazing. Do you think I could study it sometime?"

Hiro told Sora about his own brother, Tadashi, who had died before any of this began. He said Tadashi was still alive, in a way, in how much he kept inspiring and shaping the people he had left behind.

Every Bad Baddie Needs a Cool Name

At night, cube-shaped Heartless swarmed the city. Hiro assumed at first they were his own Microbots turned against him.

"Great, they're back."

"Cheee-aaarge!"

"Oh, we got this."

Honey was already sizing them up.

"Time for a lesson."

They proved harder to pin down than expected.

"Guys, I'm really tired of just dodging this thing."

"Freddie getting frustrated!"

"Now he tells us. Let's just say it's a handful."

Fred thought Hiro should study them from the garage instead of fighting blind.

"Hiro, you analyze the Darkubes."

"Yeah, that's not cool."

Wasabi questioned the name before anything else.

"Wait, did you just say 'Darkubes'?"

"Yeah. They're dark, they're cubes. I call 'em like I see 'em. Every bad baddie needs a cool name."

Go Go convinced Hiro to trust the rest of them with the fight itself.

"Hiro. We are a team. And teams delegate. We need you at the garage. We trust you, so you trust us."

Back at his own workbench, Hiro confirmed the Darkubes were not his own creations at all, while the others held the line outside.

"So far, so good."

"Hiro, figure out a way for us to beat this thing!"

Gracias, Sora

Hiro sent Baymax out with Sora's own group to bring the others home. "All right, Hiro. Sora, Donald, Goofy, I will be your personal healthcare companion."

They found Go Go caught fast by the Darkubes first.

"Sora! I don't know how to stop this thing. I tried slowing it down with my discs."

"Thanks. I owe ya."

Honey was ready to make use of the danger rather than just escape it.

"We'll gather as much data from the Darkubes as we can."

"Hey, Sora? I think I'm stuck. See if you can find the residue from my chem-balls. If you hit it with fire or electricity, it might trigger a chain reaction!"

"Gracias, Sora! Next time I won't go so easy on them."

Wasabi had been dragged somewhere he did not care for at all.

"Sora! Am I glad to see you! I am not a big fan of heights. Hey, you think it dragged me up here 'cause it's scared of being attacked from above?"

"Finally! Thanks for the save, Sora. I'll see if anyone else needs help."

Fred was the last one still caught.

"I'm getting pulled in too many directions! Do you think you can free my arms and legs? Gotta find a weak point and loosen the Darkubes' grip!"

"Super juuump! Pure appreciation, my man. My citizens! They need me!"

With everyone free, more of the Darkubes closed in.

"Okay, there's a lot of them."

"I don't think we wanna find out."

Honey held them back from charging in blind.

"But without a strategy, we'd just be wasting our strength."

"I say we destroy this thing!"

Once the fight was finally over, Baymax had a diagnosis for all of them.

"You are all suffering from acute exhaustion. I recommend rest."

Any Me Is Still Me

Heading up toward a rooftop, the group spotted a man in a black coat already waiting there.

"The black coat. He's back?"

"Are you done messing around?"

Sora recognized him from a vision he had once had at La Cité des Cloches. The man held up Baymax's own combat chip, plainly not his to have.

"Funny. As if this stupid experiment wasn't already a hassle."

He tossed it to the Darkubes rather than hand it back.

"Not quite ready. More then!"

"He definitely has the vibe."

"And now, enter the supervillain."

Hiro managed to grab the chip back in the chaos, only for the man to take it from him again just as easily. "Oh, this isn't for you. At least not until we're done."

He turned his own attention on Sora. "Looks are deceiving, but the heart? You know that it's me."

He claimed to be Riku himself. "A reason? When did that ever matter? We've been trying to one-up each other since we were kids."

Honey was more interested in what he was actually doing here.

"And what did he mean about an experiment?"

"Fred. Not now."

"And what do they want?"

Goofy reminded Sora this man belonged to the Organization.

"Smarter than you look."

Wasabi still wanted to know how he had gotten hold of the chip at all.

"Okay, but how'd he get Hiro's chip?"

He answered that too, unprompted.

"Unlike a certain wizard you know, I had to play by the rules to travel through time. Which meant leaving my body behind."

"Xehanort's heart left his body in order to voyage back through time. He needed to tell his younger self of the great plans he had in store. There in the past, his heart stayed, and waited out the years until you and I came along. Xehanort's heart possessed me and became Ansem, the first adversary you faced. The rest of him, the piece he left behind, took the name Xemnas and created the first Organization. It was all a part of a larger plan to bring Xehanort into contact with the right hearts, enough of them to form the real Organization XIII. They could come from anywhere, any when, just as long as he had the right vessels at hand to place their hearts in."

"That's right. The Replica Program was a success. We are as real as people."

Sora asked what any of it had to do with San Fransokyo. "To see if we can recreate a heart from data."

"Sorry, did we steal your idea? That walking balloon over there has a 'heart.' At least that's the nonsense I'm supposed to believe."

Hiro demanded the chip back outright, and the man made him a promise instead. "Oh, well, I'm sorry about that. But I promise I'll put it right back where I found it."

"I think I'll be getting back to work now."

He left them for the night, but not before crossing paths with two other figures skulking through the same rooftops.

"Why are you snooping around?"

"That would be none of your concern."

Maleficent's own interest in the world did not sit well with him. "Overstep, and darkness will consume you again."

"What an interesting thing to say. I shall do anything I please. As should you."

"Oh, I intend to."

He left them to it. Pete had questions of his own once he was gone.

"Who's he? Friend of yours?"

"Yes. Though I could not tell you from 'when.'"

Doesn't Look as Bad as the Last One

Once the fighting had died down for the night, Fred would not let anyone sulk over it.

"C'mon, guys. What's with all the long faces? Did you forget that we WON?!"

The next day, everyone found Dark Riku waiting for them again, Baymax's own chip still in his hand. Hiro demanded to know what he meant to do with it, and got a question back instead of an answer.

"Which adds up to what? Show me."

He explained himself before anyone could stop him.

"Almost there. This pile of junk collected the data we needed. The terror of being attacked without warning. The despair of having no place to run. The longing for vengeance."

"You're right. That's why I made sure our creation fought you. Now the data contains a complete heart."

He wanted the same thing done again, in front of them this time. "What was it you said? I only have to see it for it to become real? So, let's see it. First, we need a vessel."

The corrupted Baymax standing beside him did not stir.

"Don't bother. This puppet has lost his heart. He won't wake up."

"Yes. I did promise I'd put this back where I found it. But there's one piece missing. Sora, you're the one who's going to complete this heart. You can't have a heart without sadness, without loss. You see, you're going to destroy Hiro's friend right in front of him."

Fred was not about to let that happen.

"Freddie want to destroy!"

"Doesn't look as bad as the last one."

Go Go was ready for whatever it had learned since the night before.

"Hope it's learned some new tricks."

Baymax himself was ready too.

"I am ready, Sora."

"Yeah, now it's gotta face all of us."

Support from Friends and Loved Ones

Once the corrupted Baymax fell, Wasabi was not sure it was really over.

"So, did we stop him?"

Hiro considered destroying the infected chip outright, and Go Go pushed back on it.

"Maybe we can find another way."

Hiro apologized for referring to him as the second model in the meantime, and Baymax did not take it as an insult at all.

"I am a robot. I cannot be offended."

Honey was not sure Hiro's own way forward was right either.

"But, are you sure?"

"Yeah, dude, You don't need to go that far."

In the end Hiro used his own resources to save the original Baymax rather than lose him, and Baymax had his own words for the loss they had all been carrying since Tadashi.

"Those who suffer a loss require support from friends and loved ones."

Baymax joined Big Hero 6 as its own seventh member from that day on.

The Key to Finding All Three

Back at the tower, the group worked out what little they knew of Aqua's own trail. "We know Master Aqua made it as far as the beach that Sora and I once visited, but that's where her trail ends."

Riku thought back to his own dive into the abyss during the Mark of Mastery exam. "No. Sora was dragged into the abyss during his exam. And I went in after him. So, I think if we find someone who was really close to Aqua, and they make the dive, they could reach her down there."

"So Aqua, she's gonna be the key to finding all three."

Sora wanted to go immediately, and Riku held him back. "Sorry. Master Yen Sid knows you a little too well. He said you'd try to stage a half-baked rescue."

"Sora, I know you're volunteering because you're worried, about me and Mickey. Well, thanks. But, the power of waking's important. You can come to the rescue once you've got that. Sound fair?"

A Keyblade

Sora did not wait for the power of waking. Once word reached him that Riku and Mickey were in trouble, he trusted his own heart to find a way there instead.

"May my heart be my guiding key. It'll show us the way."

It led him, Donald, and Goofy to the Destiny Islands, where a Keyblade waited for him that he had never held before.

"Why do you think that gate took us here? A Keyblade?"

He used it to turn the door to the Secret Place into a door to the Realm of Darkness itself, and made clear only he could go through it.

"Not you guys. The realm of darkness, it isn't safe for you."

Donald and Goofy wanted to come anyway.

"Come on, guys, think about it. Even the King and Riku struggled in the realm of darkness. Someone needs to stay out here, just in case. If something happens to the rest of us, you two need to carry on."

"Thanks, guys. But I'll be fine. I'll make sure Riku and the King are safe. Trust me."

Now You Can Share It

Riku and Mickey found Aqua again, corrupted still, and this time she caught Mickey in a Demon Tower and took his own Star Cluster for herself.

"This Keyblade."

She meant to leave him there in her own place.

"Mickey. You're too late."

"I'm sorry. It's all my fault."

She would not let him off that easily.

"You abandoned me, that's what. Left me in this shadow prison for more than a decade, knowing what it would do to me."

"I reached this shore after endless wandering. Waited forever for help to arrive. But no one ever came. I lost my Keyblade. Had no means of fighting my way back through the Heartless. You should have known I was stranded. Do you have any idea how lonely it is here? How frightening it is to have no one? All that's left in my heart is misery and despair, and now, you can share it!"

Riku would not take the darkness she was offering. "There's no need. Got my own."

It's You

Sora reached them through the Realm of Darkness with the Master's Defender in hand, freed Mickey from the Demon Tower, and turned to face Aqua himself.

"I. Had a little help. Watch over the King. I've got this."

She fought him with everything the darkness had given her, and it was not enough.

"So, this is the end."

"Sora."

For a moment she saw him and Riku as somebody else entirely. "Ven. Terra."

Then she knew them for who they really were.

"It's you."

Riku told her she was safe now. "You're in the realm of light."

Mickey had told him something about her he had not known before. "Mickey told me that you saved me in the realm of darkness. I should have gone to help you right away. But I was too inexperienced. I'm sorry. I know that I let you down."

Ven's Expecting Me

Sora and Riku brought her back to the Destiny Islands, and for a moment she could not believe what she was seeing.

"Mickey. Are these the Destiny Islands? When did they fall to darkness?"

"You're home."

Mickey was simply glad she was awake at all. "Thank goodness. You're awake!"

Sora offered her someplace to rest. "If you want, we can take you back to Master Yen Sid's tower to rest with Riku and the King?"

She had somewhere else in mind already.

"Thank you. But, Ven's expecting me. I promised to wake him. Said I'd be right back, but I'm not even close. I'm in for an earful."

Sora was not sure she was ready for that yet. "But. You haven't recovered yet."

One Last Thing to See Through

Riku found his own Replica waiting on the Destiny Islands, having followed them home from the Realm of Darkness without a word to anyone. "How long have you known that I was with you?"

He explained what had kept him going since the Heartless had broken his own body down there.

"I didn't make much of myself as a replica. I was a failure, and after you and Sora moved on, my body fell to ruin and the darkness took my broken mind. I was all ready to give up and let it happen, and then you showed up."

Riku asked whether he had come here to end it instead. "Maybe. I'd rather face my end with you than in darkness."

He was not ready for that yet either.

"Yeah. But I'm not done yet. Got one last thing to see through."

No Wonder No One Could Find Him

Restored to the Land of Departure, Castle Oblivion opened the Chamber of Waking to Aqua again, and she led Sora, Donald, and Goofy straight to where Ventus still slept.

"Ven. I'm sorry it took so long. Ven, wake up. Open your eyes, please! Why? Your heart never found its way home?"

A voice answered her instead of Ventus. "That was a neat trick. No wonder no one could find him."

Vanitas had followed them the whole way, and made no secret of why. "Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt your touching reunion, but surely you won't begrudge me a moment with my brother?"

He looked over Ventus's own still body without any hurry at all. "So, Venty-Wenty wants to keep sleeping. What am I ever going to do with you?"

Aqua put herself between them. "Why are you here?"

My Turn to Shine

Vanitas was not worried by her own challenge. "You better settle down there, 'Master.'"

Sora, Donald, and Goofy moved to help her, and Aqua would not have it.

"No. I'm ending this."

She threw up a barrier around the two of them before anyone could argue.

"Sorry, but you've seen me too weak, too often. Now it's my turn to shine."

Call to It

Aqua was winning inside her own barrier, until Vanitas gave up on her entirely and turned for Ventus instead, striking at the barrier itself to reach him. Aqua threw herself between them and took the blow meant for him, and Vanitas moved to finish her while she was weakened.

"I. Have to wake up."

Something in Sora answered him, the same heart that had slept inside his own since he was a child. "The power of waking."

"You never lost it. It sleeps, until someone needs it. Call to it."

Sora called to it, and Ventus's own heart found its own way home.

"Thank you for always keeping me safe, Sora."

Ventus broke the barrier from inside it and drove Vanitas back himself.

"Three guardians is more than I care to face. But now that my brother is awake, I'm just certain that he'll come to visit."

He vanished into a dark corridor before anyone could stop him.

You Were My Second Chance

Aqua found her own feet again in time to see him standing. "Good morning, Ven."

Ventus turned to Sora first, struck by something he had not expected to see.

"Huh?! You're. Sora?"

He understood it all at once.

"I get it. You were my second chance."

Only then did he answer Aqua's own greeting. "Good morning, Aqua."

Sora turned to check on her in turn. "Yes. I'm fine, Sora."

There's No Heart Your Smile Can't Reach

Merlin had brought Kairi and Lea somewhere time itself did not reach, so their own training could take as long as it needed to. Lea found Kairi writing one day.

"A letter? To Sora?"

She read it out to him rather than answer directly.

"I'm sorry I left without saying good-bye. Did Master Yen Sid tell you? I'm training to become a Keyblade wielder like you. That's right. No more waiting for you to come back from your adventures. I want to get out there and do my part to help. Merlin has used his magic to bring us to a place where time doesn't matter. We can take as long as we need to complete our training. He's an amazing wizard. Oh, and by 'us,' I mean me and Lea. He's really sorry for all the trouble he caused. I told him it's fine, but he won't stop apologizing. I'll admit I was a little scared of him at first, but I've gotten to know him better. All he ever wanted was to help his friend. Honestly, it's hard not to like him. Every now and then, I catch him staring at me. When I ask what's wrong, he says, 'I'm not sure. I think I'm forgetting something. Don't know what.' Sora, I think it may have something to do with you. Your journey is all about helping people: some that you've never met before, and some like Lea that you have. They're all counting on you. It won't be easy, but I hope you'll remain the happy and cheerful Sora I know. There's no heart your smile can't reach."

"Ask Merlin. He'll deliver it for you."

She had no plans to actually send it.

"Mmm, technically yes. But I won't send it. It's more for me."

"Yeah, but it's okay. I just like talking to Sora, even if it's on paper."

Trying to Remember

Lea brought her something to mark the occasion. "Yeah, I asked Merlin to pick these up. Ya know, we did both summon Keyblades. Gotta celebrate."

"Ice cream? Really?"

"You're sweet, Lea."

She caught him staring at her more than once after that.

"What? You're trying to remember what you forgot?"

He would not say what it was.

"Something in my eyes. I'm, gonna go. Sorry."

Stop Apologizing

Kairi challenged him to a proper match. "So tomorrow, you and me in the ring. You ready? Don't hold back, Lea. Promise?"

Something in the middle of it caught him off guard, a memory of Xion rising up without warning, and he was crying before he noticed it himself.

"Huh? Are you okay? Lea! You're crying. What's wrong?"

He had apologized to her so many times by now that she was done accepting it.

"'Kay, but stop apologizing."

He agreed, on his own terms.

"Fine, on one condition. Call me Axel from now on. Got it memorized?"

"Yeah. Okay, Axel."

Easy to Remember

Their own new clothes arrived along with everything else Merlin had gathered for them. Kairi showed hers off first. "Hey, Axel!"

"Hey. Liking the look. Cut your hair, too."

She expected the same from him.

"Mm-hmm. So, you gonna try yours on?"

"Uhh, I dunno. Maybe later."

"But you always wear the same thing."

He had his own reasons for keeping the black coat.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This is how you pick me out of a crowd. I make myself easy to remember."

Still Got Me Memorized

He finally told her what kept catching at him.

"I know. Way back when I was a kid, I met this other weird kid. Somehow we became fast friends. Never saw him again, nearly forgot about him, too. Then, I met Roxas. Couldn't believe it. The two of 'em were identical. Oh, I didn't tell Roxas. Didn't want him to go vanishing on me, too. The kid's name was Ventus. He's one of the lost Keyblade wielders we're looking for. Think he's still got me memorized?"

With their own training drawing to a close, he could not help worrying about what waited for them.

"Now that we're going back, I'm worried about everything."

Kairi had a promise of her own weighing on her. "Our training's almost finished. Somewhere inside me is Naminé. If we can free Roxas, we can free her too. Naminé was made when Sora freed me from his heart. So, now that she's a part of me again, I figured all was right. But she can't look at this forest, feel the wind on her face, none of it. And if she could, it would be different for her. Her time was short, but she lived it, and that makes it hers. What right did I have to take those feelings and experiences back? They don't belong to me. Nothing's as it should be. Not for her or Roxas."

Major Brain-Ache

Kairi and Lea's own training finally finished, and Merlin brought them to the tower, where Aqua and Ventus were already waiting with everyone else. Lea introduced himself to the two he had not met.

"Hey there. And that's 'future Keyblade Master.'"

Yen Sid welcomed the whole group together at last. "At last, we are all assembled. First: Sora, Riku, Donald, Goofy, Mickey, I cannot thank you enough for what you have done. And you, Aqua and Ventus: we are fortunate to have you back."

"Ah yes. Let us not forget our new Keyblade wielders. Lea, Kairi, you have made tremendous strides."

Lea took one look at Ventus and Roxas and could not make sense of it.

"This is all very touching, guys, but where do I fit in? Ven looks just like Roxas, or is it Roxas looks just like Ven?"

"And now I have to explain all of that to him, which is in itself a crazy long story, and apparently everyone already knows everyone, and this is an insane amount to get memorized!"

"See, see, see? Major brain-ache."

Incredible. It Is You

Aqua thanked everyone for the rescue before anything else. "Thanks. I only wish we could have returned to help sooner. We're grateful to all of you for rescuing us."

Mickey still felt the weight of what they had not managed. "I feel bad for letting you guys down. We tried, but we still haven't found Terra."

Aqua would not let him carry that alone. "Don't. He studied with Master Eraqus, just like us. He's our responsibility."

She turned to Riku next, answering a doubt he had not voiced aloud. "No, just the opposite."

Then to Sora, whom she had met once long before he could have remembered it. "I'm happy to see that you haven't changed one bit. Sora, you probably don't remember."

She recognized Kairi next, and could hardly believe it. "Kairi? Incredible! It is you."

Mickey put it together before anyone explained. "Oh, gosh! That little girl was Kairi?"

Aqua told them both what she remembered. "When you and I first met in Radiant Garden, the Unversed tried to attack a little girl. Do you remember?"

"I guess it must've worked, the spell that I cast on you."

Kairi had no memory of any of it, and Aqua did not expect her to.

"Please. You were really, very little. Anyone would forget, hazy memory or not."

She turned back to Sora about the one person still missing. "Leave it to Ven and I. We'll bring him home."

Then to Ventus himself, about everything still ahead of them. "I've been places, too. But pretty soon, things'll be back to normal."

You Don't Have to Worry Alone

Kairi told Lea he had nothing to fear before Ventus even answered him.

"Oh yeah. Very memorized."

Ventus proved her right. "Yeah, 'course! We're friends. I can't believe you became a Keyblade wielder just like me."

Only the new name threw him.

"Axel? Who's Axel?"

Kairi answered for Lea before he could.

"Well, you don't have to worry alone anymore, Axel."

He turned his own thoughts to Roxas instead. "And I'll figure Roxas out. Don't know how, but, I'll get him back."

"Well, Roxas. I shoulda been there for you by now, but here we are."

Kairi found her own way to Aqua at last.

"I'm sorry. Those days are hazy for me. But it sounds like I'd have been in trouble without you. So, thank you."

Her own promise to Naminé had not changed.

"Naminé is right here, safe with me. I know that we'll find a way to help her. Trust me, I'm not giving up."

Nine Guardians

Ventus had not forgotten what he owed Terra either. "Yeah, I made Terra a promise. I said I'd be there for him when he needs me."

Sora noticed Riku had drifted off on his own, and Kairi did not think it needed explaining further. "He said he needed time to himself. Let's let him be."

Yen Sid brought the whole gathering to a close. "It is a shame that all of our friends could not be here. But our seven guardians of light have united. Perhaps you might say that we have nine guardians, with Donald and Goofy. Given time, I know the others will soon stand with us. Today, you recuperate. On the morrow, you journey to the fated place."

Jiminy had prepared something of his own for all of them. "Not to worry, folks. To help us out, I've given each of you a Gummiphone. They've got summaries of everything that's happened so far. That way, you can read up, if you'd like. And if anyone has any questions, we can call each other."

Part of Some Big Adventure

Aqua and Ventus stayed outside together once the others had gone in to rest.

"The stars here are so beautiful. I noticed it when we arrived."

"We've gone without this for so long."

He tried to piece together what he remembered of the years he had slept through.

"I remember dreaming a lot. Of you and Terra. Of Sora and his friends too, I think. And there were some more people I didn't recognize. Oh, and I saw these weird animal creatures! It's like, I've been part of some big adventure."

The rest could wait for Terra to hear it too. "Let's share stories when Terra's back."

Our Toughest Yet

Before anything else, Sora and Kairi sat together on the Destiny Islands and shared a paopu fruit between them.

"Here. Tomorrow's fight will be our toughest yet. I want to be a part of your life no matter what. That's all."

"Kairi, I'll keep you safe."

He could not help thinking of who was missing from the gathering.

"Yeah. But, I do wish that Roxas, and Naminé, and Terra could be here with us too."

Some distance away, Riku sat with his own Replica beside him, a presence no one else on the beach could see.

I Will Hold Them Here

Yen Sid gathered the seven guardians one last time before they set out. "Go, my young champions. I will hold them all here for as long as I can."

The Ultimate Key

The Keyblade Graveyard was waiting for them, and so was Master Xehanort.

"Legend has it that darkness once covered the world. We know so little about the Keyblade War, only that it was just the beginning. If ruin brings about creation, what, then, would another Keyblade War bring? When the darkness falls, will we be found worthy of the precious light the legend speaks of?"

A younger version of him stood at his own side.

"And break you is what we shall do. It has been etched."

Master Xehanort made his own intentions plain.

"Today, we join these other wielders and leave our mark on fate. I have waited patiently, but together, we shall unlock the Keyblade War's secrets. Now we forge it. The ultimate key. The χ-blade!"

"Settle down, boy. The thirteen darknesses and seven lights have clashed nine times, yielding these nine keys. We are four short. But those four keys will be produced here and now."

Torn Heart from Body

Ventus was the first to see him. "Terra! Terra! We found you!"

A newly risen Terra-Xehanort stepped forward to meet them, and Aqua spoke next.

"Terra, please say you're in there."

"I know that you're not him. Now, let our friend go!"

Terra-Xehanort gave her no such comfort.

"Today is the day you all lose."

"We're not gonna lose to you."

Master Xehanort was unmoved by the defiance.

"You forget I plan for every eventuality."

Terra-Xehanort made the stakes plain before the fight even began.

"Before you even face the thirteen, every last one of you will be torn heart from body. But fear not. The χ-blade will still be forged."

The Keyblades of a legion long past rose around them.

"Keyblade wielders, from long ago."

"It's the light of the past."

"Form up! Now!"

Aqua meant to meet the legion herself. "I'll try and break through. Everyone, get ready!"

"Alone? That's crazy! I'll help!"

A greater darkness was rising behind the legion, and Aqua sent Ventus toward it instead.

"No, Ven! Them first. We'll hold off the others."

"We stand together. Mickey, Kairi, Goofy, watch the others."

He was as good as his own word. The guardians fell to him, and a swarm of Heartless rose into the shape of a tide that towered over all seven of them.

"It can't be. No."

Before any of them could recover, the Demon Tide closed over all seven of them where they lay.

Ancient Keyblade Legacy

The same night, elsewhere from the guardians' own gathering, the reconstituted Organization met on its own account. Luxord was in no mood for it. "What? So that we can rot away on the bottom rung?"

"I happen to play an important role. No one 'benched' me."

Demyx was not impressed by the claim. "Oh, please. You couldn't do it last time. You gotta play it smart, like me."

"One must hold one's cards as long as necessary."

Larxene found Marluxia among them.

"Nice way to greet your old partner in crime. So, why do you think the old geezer took us back? He must know we backstabbed the Organization when Xemnas was running it."

"So, why are you back?"

"Husks? Not me. You up for another coup?"

Marluxia set her straight on what they actually were to Xehanort.

"Xehanort doesn't care about you or me. To him, we're nothing but empty husks. The old Organization was the same. Xehanort needs thirteen vessels to hold his essence."

Larxene turned her attention to an easier target. "What?! You're not smart! Or capable, or likeable, or attractive. A cereal bowl would make a better vessel."

"Well, you heard what Marly said. I don't have to be smart."

Larxene was not finished with him. "Why haven't you gone to any worlds? Are you slacking?"

"Whoa now, you are way out of line. I am extremely imposing, when I want to be. Which is, admittedly, almost never."

"'Course not. I got benched."

Larxene had heard about the replicas. "Those windup toys?"

"Saïx brought Vexen on board. They must be planning to use replicas."

Demyx knew that part all too well. "Oh, no. The replicas are way more real than you remember. I mean, one stole my spot!"

"Of course it stole your spot. You're dumb as a brick."

"Har-dee-har."

Marluxia had more to say about the replicas than either of them knew. "Vexen's latest replicas are no mere puppets. The Riku replica we used in Castle Oblivion was just a prototype. The next replica, the one crafted from Sora's memories, was real enough to join our ranks. And Vexen claims the new ones will be human in every way. If he ever finishes them."

Larxene remembered something she probably shouldn't have said. "Oh. The thing is, I kinda told Sora and his nitwits that we're ready. My bad."

Xemnas arrived before Marluxia could answer.

"Ugh. Xemnas."

"Hey now! Pointing is rude."

Larxene ignored him entirely. "Why is this thing a member again?"

"Because our hearts are über powerful."

Luxord arrived on Xemnas's heels, wanting a straight answer.

"You'll just have to ask Xigbar that. Now then. Xemnas, what is this 'purpose'? You didn't invite us back for old times' sake."

"You were listening? So not cool."

Larxene had her own questions for Luxord.

"You're in too? What is this, Organization Rehash?"

"What 'important role'? That stupid box that Xigbar claims is real, but won't tell us a thing about?"

Xemnas answered none of them the way they expected. "Let them believe as much. If they think that we have all thirteen darknesses, then they will panic. And panic leads to a lack of preparation."

"The first six members of the original Organization were all apprentices to Ansem the Wise, and the seventh and eighth members joined thereafter. The thirteenth member was Roxas, a Keyblade wielder. So. What about you? How do you suppose I chose numbers nine through twelve?"

None of them had an answer for him.

"Wrong. You have been brought together for another purpose."

"You four are going to reveal your greatest secret: the ancient Keyblade legacy that slumbers within you."

No Benchwarming

Saïx had approved Vexen's own return before any of this. "Humanity is a precious gift. And yet you desire to return to the Organization?"

"He gave you a second lease on life."

Vexen understood exactly what was being asked of him. "The replicas."

"What excellent tidings. I would hate to think we invited you back into our ranks only for you to fail to deliver our final vessel, Vexen."

Vexen found Demyx alone, away from the others.

"Quiet, you dunce! I cannot let the chosen catch wind of this, understand?"

"But, dude, why would you pick me?"

Vexen took the question badly. "I got 'benched' too!"

"Oh, I see! It's because I got benched!"

Vexen gave him the real reason. "Forgiveness."

Demyx wanted no part of it. "Okay, man, look. Real talk? Backstabbing those guys would be stupid. If they find out, we are yesterday's toast. I mean, what's in it for me?"

"Men like us, in the pursuit of science, we sometimes make terrible mistakes. Lose sight of our mission to help people. But now I can help someone with my research. Now, I can atone."

Demyx tried a different excuse. "I'm not a scientist."

"C'mon, dude. I'm useless, I'm chicken, we're not friends. I can count the number of times you and I have hung out in one hand, less than one hand! I didn't even know you in the old life!"

Vexen told him whose idea it really was. "It's true. The whole thing was his idea. He wants to atone too. But, he is one of the chosen, so his hands are tied. Hence my actions on his behalf, hence my need for you to act on my behalf should all go awry. As you said, we are far from friends. No one would ever suspect you."

That was enough to change Demyx's mind. "Hmm. So I'm not doing any fighting? Ha! Yeah baby! Sign me up. Yes! Demyx time."

"Correct. And more importantly, no benchwarming."

You Are Roxas's Friends

Ansem, Seeker of Darkness had not given up on finding what he wanted from his own former master. "Master. I must have a word with you."

"Please. I have created enough victims."

"Do you recall those experiments of the heart you bade me cease? Among the test subjects was a girl. She had lost her memory, just as I had. But, you can reconstruct memories. You did with Sora. I believe you have seen the girl's memories."

Ansem the Wise gave him nothing. "I told you I did not take her. Her disappearance was why I put a stop to the research."

"Where did you put the girl?"

He would not be moved on the point.

"Roxas and Naminé. If there is any reason that I still draw breath, it is to atone for what I did to them."

"Very well. If you won't tell me here."

"If you do find the girl, what is it that you expect will happen?"

He was made to walk on toward Twilight Town, and stopped once along the way.

"What now?"

"Yes, you have. All the children sacrificed in the name of your research. So make things right."

He pressed on without waiting for an answer.

"And that makes you honorable? You used Roxas and Naminé and threw them away. I doubt there's a merciful bone in your body. You took the girl, and hid her. Now, show me the data you are hiding here."

"The child's memory holds a mystery to unravel, one concerning the battle we seek between light and darkness. You know something and that is why you stopped the experiments."

Ansem the Wise had heard enough.

"You are completely deluded, Xehanort."

"We shall soon see."

A boy stepped into their path outside the mansion.

"Who are you?"

"No one lives here. Begone. No, no, no! Not one more step. Get out!"

Ansem the Wise recognized the boy for who he was.

"You are Roxas's friends."

A pack of Nobodies rose against Ansem, Seeker of Darkness before he could do anything about Pence at all. "I serve the Organization. This is treason. I see what is happening. Have it your way then."

Ansem the Wise recognized who stood behind them.

"Even, is that you? So, those Nobodies were your doing."

Vexen sent word ahead and made ready to bring him further still, to Ienzo.

A Vessel

Ienzo had been trying to reach Mickey and Riku with what he knew.

"Yes. Even would know all about the replicas from his time as Vexen in the Organization. He was recompleted like the rest of us, but he didn't regain consciousness. After Lea left, he must have woken and taken his leave. Aeleus here and Dilan went out and turned the whole town upside down to try and find him. But no Even."

"Unfortunately, his work on the replicas was incomplete. There may still be documents around, but all of them from well before he made any significant progress."

The question of the dark corridors came up next.

"There's no place that he could go now that he's human. He has no means of leaving this world."

"Are beyond his faculties and mine now."

He called Sora next. "So, I have some news about Ansem's Code and the replica we need for Roxas's heart."

"First, the replica. Even is still missing, but we found some of his research. I'll see what I can learn from it."

He had more to share about Ansem the Wise's own writing.

"As for Ansem the Wise's data, we've discovered a very interesting passage. I'll read you exactly what he wrote. 'I have discovered three unique hearts inside of Sora's. One is Roxas. The second has been with Sora for nearly as long. And a third has resided in Sora's heart for even longer, most of his life, in fact. This is a truly astonishing discovery. While these hearts have now melded with Sora, grown silent and indistinct, Sora retains the memories of all three. The memories have been compartmentalized, each placed in its own box, so to speak. I surmise the hearts can be awoken, provided that each of them is returned to the box that contains the correct memories. Unite the heart with its memories, and provide it a suitable body within which it may flourish, and I believe any or all three of these people can be made real again.'"

Alone afterward, he weighed what was still missing.

"We've come a long way toward reconstructing Roxas's heart. But a vessel. Without that. Yeah, right. Bodies don't grow on trees, Ienzo. It's the backup plan or nothing now. But, the backup plan isn't a true solution."

A familiar voice interrupted him.

"Finally. 'Bout time. Ooh. Nice place. Hey, Zexion! Long time! How's humanity treatin' ya? I rejoined the Nobodies, but, like, I just can't shake the feeling I've been sweet-talked, y'know? We have sooo got to have a chat."

"Demyx? Is that you?!"

"Whoa, back up. What?"

Demyx got to the point. "Oh! Sorry, sorry. I'm gettin' ahead of myself. I'm actually here on a top secret mission. Apparently I'm so off everyone's radar, that I'm just the guy to handle a special delivery. Ta-daaah!"

Ansem the Wise stood behind him.

"Ah, well met, little Ienzo."

"Master Ansem!"

"I think what matters is that you recognize the mistake. Peace, Ienzo. It was I who was consumed by hatred, who failed you in my obligations as your mentor. Forgive me."

Ienzo could not let it go so easily. "They told me you'd gone mad. That you abandoned us. I was just a boy, but I should have known better. I am truly, deeply sorry."

Demyx had one more thing for him. "So uh, are we cool to get on with things here? Got ya a present from Vexen. One was all he could manage for the time being, but hey, he figured you guys would know what to do with it."

"A vessel!"

Hanging by a Thread

Sora opened his eyes on a featureless plane, and found he still had eyes to open. A creature was watching him. "Can't stay away, now, can you?"

"The name's Chirithy. And this is The Final World."

Sora asked where his friends were, and what this place was, and Chirithy answered both at once.

"There's nothing else beyond this. You've wandered here more than once before on your visits to the Station of Awakening, but I let that slide. The edges of sleep and death touch, and one can't help the occasional crossover."

Sora asked whether this was the place people went when they died. "Yes. The natural end for those whose hearts and bodies perish together. But some persist, and arrive here."

"Something is holding you here, refusing to let you go. You're hanging by a thread."

Sora asked after Donald and Goofy and the rest.

"I'm afraid that no one else arrived with you. And if they're not here, they're either gone forever, or they're clinging to the world you came from."

Sora said he'd find a way out. "Whoa, whoa! How exactly? You can't just wander out like your other visits."

"I told you. The other times you came here by your own choice. This time is very different. To become your old self again and return to the real world, you'll have to piece yourself back together in this world first."

Sora looked down at himself, whole as far as he could tell, and said so. "What? No, not literally, of course. You're conceptually in pieces. On the inside, who knows, but on the outside you're just fine."

Chirithy studied him a moment longer, and seemed to notice something odd about how solid he still was. "Oh boy. Usually, only a heart can reach The Final World. But since you've clearly managed to retain some kind of form, that can only mean your body was cast into this world as well."

"Okay, so, then if I can find my body, that means I'll be able to go back?"

"Precisely. But there's a lot of you to find. You're going to be busy."

Sora set out across the plane to gather himself back together, piece by scattered piece.

Naminé's Star

Among the scattered pieces of himself, Sora found a star that called his name. "Sora?"

He turned, and found he knew the voice before he saw its shape. "It's me, Naminé."

"I'm so glad that you managed to hold on to who you are."

Sora asked how she had come to be there. "I was in Kairi's heart, but then we were struck by a powerful darkness, and I woke up here."

Sora told her that a debt he owed her still hadn't been paid. "Naminé, I know that I'm supposed to thank you. The datascape doesn't count. I need to say the words myself. But, not like this. You and Roxas can't tell me you're okay with this. I know how much you're hurting. I, felt that pain through Roxas."

Sora asked about Kairi.

"I can feel her heart. She's fighting with all her strength to keep you from fading away."

Sora put together why he still had a body to gather, at least in part. "It's because she's holding you together. Go to her."

Naminé told him not to spend his worry on her.

"It's okay. Really. Kairi is where I came from. So, once she's safe again, Kairi is where I'll return."

Sora wouldn't let her carry that alone. "Wrong. What about me, Kairi, Donald, Goofy? The King! Roxas too, he misses you! And someone else special I know won't let you down."

"He's the one they all miss. It's, not me."

Sora made his answer plain. "Well, then I'm gonna go save Kairi so at least you'll be free of this place. Okay?"

"Sora. Thank you."

He turned to go, and she stopped him.

"Oh, wait!"

"While sifting through memories, I spoke to Terra, the Keyblade wielder you've been looking for. He has a strong will, and it keeps him tethered to the realm of light. I'll try tracing that connection. Maybe that'll be enough to tip the scales in the other direction."

Sora looked at her, uncertain what she meant by it. "Umm. Let's just say I've got your back?"

"That part of you, it reminds me of Kairi. Thanks, Naminé. Oh! That's not the official thank-you! Well, see ya!"

Naminé took the thanks however he meant to give it.

"Uh-huh."

"Be careful."

Sora went on to find the rest of himself.

Our Secret

Another star greeted him as he passed.

"Good day."

"You look like a person. How is it that you retain your appearance? Are you special?"

Sora admitted he wasn't sure of the answer himself. "Umm. I'm a little hazy on the details."

"No one's anymore. They took away my name, everything about me."

Sora refused to believe it went that far. "No way. They couldn't have taken away your heart."

"Only because it pines for another."

Sora asked who she was waiting for. "I cannot be certain. He's been changed beyond recognition, his heart replaced with another's. But, were he to regain his old self again, he would be distressed by my absence. So I choose to wait here, where he can find me."

"Good. You have to believe."

She pressed him on what he meant by it.

"Believe? Oh, you mean know in my heart he will return? Without any proof?"

"Exactly, believe. I thought it was all over for me, but a friend of mine looked me in the eye and said, 'You don't believe that.'"

Sora asked, carefully, what had been done to her. "So, uh, who did this to you? Heartless steal hearts, so, a Nobody?"

"A, somebody."

Sora offered what help he could. "Really? Hmm. Well, I wish I could help, but my situation's no better."

"You must see to the tasks before you first."

Sora thought of everything still ahead of him. "The tasks before me? There's so many."

"All the more reason for you to make an effort."

"Yeah. You're right. I just wish I knew what to do."

She told him what she saw in him.

"Here you are on the brink, and yet you hold on to who you are. You possess a strong sense of purpose. And in that purpose you will find direction."

Sora thanked her for it. "Thank you. I'm really glad we met. You cheer me up. I hope that friend of yours finds you soon."

"Oh, hey. If I see him, I'll tell him that you're here. What's his name?"

She told him, quietly, and asked him to keep it between them.

"Our secret."

Sora promised, and went on to gather the last of himself.

The Guiding Key

Whole again, Sora found Chirithy waiting for him.

"I see that you found them all."

"Then, isn't it time that you left?"

Sora looked at the small creature and thought of everyone else the Final World might be holding. "Hey, Chirithy. You still look like you, right? Would you like me to help you find your pieces?"

"What? I'm doing you a big favor here, you know. Don't push it."

Sora asked whether Chirithy was waiting for someone too.

"Oh, I don't work like that."

"Mmm, sort of?"

Chirithy caught itself, and shied away from saying more. "Uh, no no no no, that's okay. He doesn't remember the past. Besides, I'm sure that he's much happier with his new friends. But I'll wait. He'll arrive here one day."

"Okay. I'll be back to visit you. You and me are friends now."

Chirithy hadn't expected that. "What?!"

"Really? I've missed having friends."

Sora asked how he was supposed to save the friends waiting for him beyond the Final World. "Seriously? Are you a Keyblade wielder, or aren't you? Haven't you already learned how to restore someone's heart after it's been lost?"

"I'm not sure, but, give it a shot?"

Sora made up his mind. "No. This'll take all my heart. Okay."

"Look for the light in the darkness! May your heart be your guiding key."

Sora reached out with everything he had, and one by one he found them. Donald and Goofy came back first, then Riku, then Lea, then Aqua, then Ventus, and at last the King.

"But we're one short. Where's Kairi's heart?"

Before Jiminy could answer, Chip and Dale reached Sora over the Gummiphone with word that a new path to the Keyblade Graveyard had been found. Sora left the Final World, and found Kairi along the way.

Kid, Take It Away

The Demon Tide closed over the guardians, and Terra's own Lingering Will and Yen Sid together turned back the moment of their defeat. The fight began again, this time with the guardians still standing.

"Only when your hopes have been broken by battle upon battle can the key be claimed to Kingdom Hearts."

Xemnas himself had a warning of his own for them. "But first. Your light shines far too brightly. It must be extinguished in order for the truth to be seen."

Elsewhere, Xigbar was speaking with Ansem and Xemnas.

"Aren't you making it a little too obvious?"

"Fair enough. But let's not forget how many times Sora still managed to rain on our parade."

Ansem spoke of destroying Sora should he waver from the path they had laid for him.

"But in that case, we'll have to find ourselves another vessel."

Xigbar turned from that conversation to the guardians themselves, Dark Riku at his side.

"We gotta make sure you're not blundering your way toward a second failure."

"At least you admit it. Well, if you guardians think you brought the goods, you'll have to prove it to the old guy one last time. Kid, take it away."

Dark Riku turned on Sora and Riku both, and Xigbar joined the fight beside him.

"Hey, let's speed it up! Keep the line moving!"

Dark Riku fell at last, still insisting on who he was. "You're not real. I'm the real one."

Xigbar fought on alone, and it was not enough. "Figures. If I had a Keyblade, it'd be different."

"Like you're actually worthy to use one."

Xigbar took the jab badly. "Oh, I am worthy."

"The old coot promised to bequeath me his. Why else do you think I would ever put up with all his nonsense?"

"It'd be wasted on you."

Xigbar had no answer for it but scorn. "As if."

He opened a corridor of darkness and fell through it, and was gone.

A Wild Card

Larxene fell next, and would not hear a kind word about it. "Are you kidding?"

"I didn't ask you for your garbage opinion. I lost! To a bunch of losers like you! But, could be worse. Become that geezer's heart tank? No thanks."

"You're gonna be recompleted."

She had little more to say for herself.

"I was really just along for the ride."

"My secret."

Then she was gone.

Luxord met his own end with more composure. "Exactly what I needed."

He held Mickey hostage among a scattering of cards. "Sora, one final game. The rules are simple. All you have to do to win is find me among these cards and strike me down."

He pressed a card into Sora's own hand before the game began. "You were born for these sorts of games."

"A wild card. You've earned it. Hang on to it. Could turn the tables."

Sora found him among the cards and won. "Play ya again someday, when we're just guys."

"I should like that very much, Sora."

He faded away with the rest.

Marluxia fell last of the three, and something in it seemed to loosen a memory in him. "Oh. So, now it all comes back to me."

"Yes. My heart is remembering how to feel."

"And now, I am on the cusp of reclaiming my identity. My purpose for being. Thanks to you, Sora."

What I Am Is Darkness

Ventus faced Vanitas one last time.

"But I didn't ask for this. To be sifted apart, nice and neat. We should be free to choose. Not just light, not just darkness. We decide what we are."

Vanitas turned instead to Sora.

"I'm the piece of Ventus that was taken away. And you're the piece Ventus needed to be whole again. So, why shouldn't you and I look exactly the same? You define me, Sora, the same way that Ventus does. We are brothers who, together, make a greater whole."

"Then why won't you stand by our side? Instead of with darkness?"

"Because I am darkness. And I do stand by your side. I'm the shadow that you cast. How much closer could I be?"

Ventus pressed him further. "And what you are is darkness?"

"But, Ventus, I did decide who I am. You see?"

"How is that okay? Vanitas!"

He gave them no argument against it, only the plain fact of himself.

"What I am is darkness."

He faded away, accepting it to the last.

Our Bonds

Terra-Xehanort had cornered Ventus, Aqua, and Sora, and bound them in chains of his own making.

"You'll never be able to break these chains. They're our bonds. You have no power over me!"

Ventus called out to the man he still believed was there.

"Come back. Terra!"

"Terra, please."

Terra-Xehanort meant to finish them both.

"Farewell."

Sora reached for whatever of Terra's own heart still remained.

"You have to fight the darkness!"

A figure Terra-Xehanort had trusted turned against him instead.

"How?! You fell to the dark."

Terra fought for control of his own body. "Aqua. Ven."

"One day, I will set this right. One day, I will set this right. I will return to this land, and protect my friends!"

"Terra. Is it you?"

He won himself back, and ran to where Aqua and Ventus had fallen.

"Aqua! Ven!"

"Terra. I kept my promise."

Terra had never doubted it. "Yeah. You never stopped lighting my way back."

"I heard you too, Ven. You found me, just like you promised."

Terra held them both close. "Thank you."

Sora left him to it. "Aqua and Ventus need rest. Terra, look after them."

"Sora, go. We'll catch up with you."

Sora went on ahead, toward whatever remained of the Organization and, past that, toward Xehanort himself.

No One Axes Axel

Sora had already warned Ventus what Xehanort was hoping for.

"That's what he wants. For us to make a mistake. Put ourselves in danger."

Even so, the group split up, and Lea found himself facing a masked figure he did not know.

"Who. Are you."

Xemnas answered for her. "There was a time when I trusted you to deal with traitors. And now, your betrayal outstrips them all. What final words do you have for your superior?"

"Well, let me think about it. How about, 'You were never my superior.'"

Xemnas was not amused. "Ah, ever the rogue pawn. Knocked from the board early in the game. Utterly useless and forgotten."

"You kidding? Do you know how popular I am? I got loads of people rootin' for me. Sorry, boss. No one axes Axel. Got it memorized?"

Xemnas caught Lea's own Keyblade in one hand, as if it weighed nothing.

"Is this supposed to be a Keyblade? Or is it some sort of joke?"

He knocked Lea down. "Our plans have been dashed by you, far more times than I care to count. Now it ends. I will purge that light in you, with darkness!"

The masked girl spoke up before he could finish it.

"We need him alive. You know that."

Xemnas turned the reminder into an order instead. "We only need his heart in order to forge the key. We do not need his soul. Oh, but that's right. You were 'friends.' Then, you take his life."

A voice reached her through a connection she did not yet remember she had.

"Don't do this. Wait. It's all right! You can stop now! It's all right. Xion."

"Xion."

"Roxas."

She turned on Xemnas instead of Lea.

"Changing sides again?"

"Useless puppet."

He moved to finish Lea off himself. "Your Keyblade is no more. And still you think you can play at being a guardian of light? You can wait your turn, also-ran."

Roxas stepped between them. "Hands off my friends."

"My turn."

Xemnas stared at him as though he could not trust his own eyes. "It cannot be!"

"This is impossible. Where did you get a vessel?"

"Same as you."

Xemnas demanded to know what he meant by it. "Same how?"

"Most of the Organization's members, they traveled here from the past as hearts. And you had replicas ready and waiting. One for each of them."

Xemnas wanted a name. "Who told you?"

"I owe my return to many. Some of them people you knew."

The names came to Xemnas easily enough. "Ansem the Wise. Zexion."

"And others, too. It seems you're not as good at winning over people's hearts as you think."

"Ah, I see."

Roxas gave him the last of it. "There was one last thing I needed in order for me to be whole again. A connection. Sora helped me find my way back here, to my friends."

Got It Memorized

Lea left Roxas and Xion to finish it.

"Yeah. When it comes to Keyblades, you're the old hands."

Saïx was waiting for him alone.

"Shouldn't you say good-bye to your real home?"

"I'm not here to fight. Relax."

He noticed the ice cream Lea was still carrying. "You can't eat all this. Why did you buy three of them? One for Roxas, and two for good luck?"

"Got it memorized? Back when we were still friends, we used to sneak into the castle. And we made a friend there, a girl. We apprenticed to Ansem the Wise to rescue her."

"You gave up."

Saïx had his own account of why.

"Following Xehanort's Nobody was the only way to discover what happened to her. She was his lab rat."

"I'm afraid not. Nary a trace. I started to wonder if we'd imagined her. Maybe she never existed. And then, in time, I awakened to a new purpose. I realized I could be stronger."

He looked at Lea as though measuring what was left of him. "Face it. Roxas is just like our other friend. Gone forever. You need to accept that."

"The marks under your eyes. They're gone."

"Always told you they'd stop you from crying. The upside-down tears."

He turned to go.

"I expect no less."

See You, Isa

Lea would not let him simply leave. "Stop it! Isa!"

Saïx fell before him.

"Why, so sad?"

"I thought you outgrew the marks under your eyes. You look like you need them."

"At first. I sacrificed everything to try and track her down. You're the one who went off and made other friends. Left her and me both in the dust. It infuriated me how you just exited our lives. I lost all sense of purpose."

Lea would not let him make it only about that. "You let them reduce you to this?"

"Stop it. The whole act. I thought this was all for her."

"I didn't forget you."

Saïx had nothing left to hide behind.

"Yes. I know. You wouldn't do that. But, I was jealous."

"You admit it."

Saïx would give him nothing more than that.

"Well, if I make it back, you won't get it out of me a second time."

"See you, Isa."

"See you, Lea."

He faded away as himself.

Lea found Roxas and Xion waiting, and the ice cream long since forgotten.

"All right. What now? Guess I shoulda brought some ice cream."

The three of them went together to rejoin the rest of the guardians.

"Sorry we took so long. Had a couple of plot points that needed ironing out."

Bested, Yet Again

Master Xehanort watched the guardians regroup, unconcerned.

"Perhaps. That is, if you survive that long!"

With most of the Organization fallen, the guardians split three ways.

"Sora, I'll go after Xemnas, while you go find the others."

"I'm going after Ansem."

Ansem, Seeker of Darkness met them with one last claim on the legend. "Or will all of creation be instead returned to the shadows? Today, we will recreate the legend and see."

He fell before he could make good on it.

"What, a journey you and I have had."

He turned what was left of his own composure toward Riku alone. "Your strength is vaster than darkness. I knew I never stood a chance. Part of me wanted to defy my fate, but when the others betrayed us, I found I did not care. And then, nothing else seemed to matter anymore."

"You know, it's strange. I think I'm gonna miss you."

"What? It is time to move on, boy. There is more to seek. So go forth now, and seek it."

Elsewhere, Xemnas had already decided Kairi was worth taking.

"I don't need hearts! I will scatter them all to the winds! What difference does one little light make? You have others. Just as we have more darknesses to replenish our ranks."

"Sora!"

Sora, Riku, and Mickey caught up to him before he got far. Master Xehanort himself appeared for a moment, with some demand none of them would meet.

"Yeah, sure. And what makes you think there'd ever be any way we'd help you with that?"

Xehanort withdrew, and the fight against Xemnas continued without him. It ended the same way as all the others.

"Bested. Yet again."

"I know that you have a heart. What do you feel? Was it worth it?"

He answered with something none of them had heard from him before.

"I feel the emptiness where my companions once stood. I took them for granted. And now, I have nothing. My first surge of emotion in years, for as long as I can remember, and it's loneliness. Do you see? A heart is just pain."

"Pain is being human, Xemnas."

"Really? It must take incredible strength."

He faded away for good.

Darkness and Light's Final Clash

Only Xehanort himself remained. "Twelve keys we have now. Leaving just one more! Now, Sora. Darkness and light's final clash."

"If you do summon Kingdom Hearts, we will defeat you, and we will close it again."

Xehanort was unmoved by the warning. "You require motivation."

He struck Kairi down where she stood. "Kairi! Kairi!!! Why her?! Why?!"

"I have done it."

Mickey answered with everything he had. "You'll pay! Ultima!"

"Stopza!"

With the thirteenth key completed, Xehanort forged the χ-blade at last. "Now, the Keyblade War will finally reach its conclusion! The χ-blade is complete. Kingdom Hearts! I call upon your true form. Open now and show me the World to come."

A Portal He Did Not Summon

Kingdom Hearts itself opened above them.

"Yeah, but, he controls Kingdom Hearts now. And Kairi."

Sora would not let Donald and Goofy stand in Xehanort's own way alone.

"Wait. I'll do it. Kingdom Hearts is a much bigger threat. Let me handle Xehanort, while you guys keep it shut."

"Three half-pints together again."

Riku went after Xehanort himself.

"Xehanort!!!"

He had already worked out how to turn Xehanort's own power against him. "It's Xehanort. During the Mark of Mastery exam, we learned that he can transcend space and time. He's a portal. And we can use that to trap him."

"We've still got one hope."

"But, it won't be easy. Aqua, Riku, I'll need both your help if we're gonna push Xehanort out of this world."

Before they could act on the plan, a portal opened from Xehanort himself, one he had not summoned. "What?!"

United in Scala ad Caelum

The portal had not betrayed Xehanort. It had answered the guardians' own trap. "Of all the places to be sent. Behold, this town. Once a seat of power for all Keyblade wielders. It is the nexus from which all worlds spring. Here, I and my other selves can be one. United, in Scala ad Caelum."

He turned on Sora at once. "We are just getting started."

"You thought you could contain me here, knowing all that you do about connections? There is one sky, one destiny!"

He summoned the χ-blade and Kingdom Hearts both, and nearly finished Sora with them. "It ends here and now."

The other guardians had followed their own hearts through Kingdom Hearts before it closed, and arrived in time to see it.

"Kingdom Hearts is closing on the other side. But we managed to follow our hearts to you."

Terra was among them. "Master Xehanort."

"Let's move. The darkness is spreading."

An Old Friend

With the others now beside him, the tide turned, and Xehanort fell. "Why. How."

"It's over now! You lost!"

He was not finished yet.

"No, look. You are too late."

"It wasn't your decision to make."

He answered with the whole of what he believed.

"A purge. The World will be returned whence it started. The World began in darkness. And from that darkness came light. From the light came the people, and the people had hearts. Evil burgeoned in those hearts, begetting more darkness. And that darkness spread across the World like a plague. The light, the symbol of the World's hope, was devoured by shadow. Leaving nothing but ruin. An utter failure. But, the first light, the light of Kingdom Hearts, it can give us a new start. An empty World, pure and bright."

"If so, you're not that person, Xehanort. A real leader knows that destiny is beyond his control, and accepts that."

"Then whose was it? The World needs someone to stand up and lead. Someone strong, to stop the weak from polluting the World with their endless darkness. Someone to dictate their destiny."

He looked at Sora and saw something he had not expected to find there. "You, make me think of an old friend."

Ready, My Friend

Terra stepped forward and made himself known. "Master Xehanort."

Xehanort saw more in him than Terra alone.

"You sly fox."

Eraqus spoke through Terra's own voice. "There's more to light than meets the eye. As I told you. Now, hand over the χ-blade, Xehanort."

"It is too late."

"No. I can do this."

Eraqus would not let him finish it alone. "For us, perhaps, but not for them."

"Enough. Checkmate."

Xehanort yielded at last. "Very well done."

Dying, he was met by Eraqus's own spirit, no longer only a voice inside Terra.

"Terra, Aqua, Ven. Forgive your foolish teacher."

"Ven, I put you through such a harrowing experience. And Aqua, I left you with such a heavy burden. Terra, look after them for me. Please."

"Master!"

Eraqus turned from his own students to the man he had once called a friend.

"Here. Ready, my friend?"

"Yes."

They departed together, and Kingdom Hearts closed behind them.

"It's finally over."

Go It Alone

Riku offered the more cautious path first. "We'll find Kairi. Let's head back to Master Yen Sid. We can figure it out."

Sora would not wait that long. "No, I know what to do. My whole journey began the day I lost her. And every time I find her, she slips away again. I thought we'd finally be together. But she's out there, alone. Not for one more second."

Mickey warned him of the cost one more time. "Sora, listen. The power of waking isn't to go chase hearts around! Even if you do locate Kairi, you might never come home to us again."

Riku overruled him. "Let him go, Mickey. His heart and his mind are made up. Now, believe in him."

Sora said his own goodbyes. "Thank you, Donald, Goofy. But this time, I have to go it alone."

"I will. And we'll both be back before you know it."

"Yeah. Safe journey, Sora."

Safe Journey

Sora reached for the power of waking once more, and brought Kairi back.

Ventus was reunited with Chirithy. Roxas, Lea, and Xion were reunited with Isa. Naminé was restored into a body made from Dark Riku's own replica.

Everyone gathered at the Destiny Islands to rest on the beach. There, they watched Sora fade away beside Kairi, the price of the power he had spent once too often.

I Hope You Like Long Stories

Four of the five Foretellers found themselves summoned back without warning, and Aced said what the rest of them were thinking. "What happened? Why are we here? You tell me."

A hooded figure stood before them, Xehanort's own Keyblade newly reclaimed in hand. "Finally, back where it belongs."

"Did you summon us back?"

"Yep."

The hood came down.

"Is that you, Luxu? You look different."

"Haven't heard that name in a long while. These days they call me Xigbar, but hey, whatever suits you."

Invi was not so easily convinced. "Is it really you?"

"Yeah, but some time ago, I had to cast my old form away. Been through plenty more semblances since, but it's still me underneath it all."

Aced wanted more than that. "I've heard enough! Luxu, what was your role?"

"What role?"

"I had a role to play. And after all these years, it's done."

He looked among them and noticed who was missing.

"I guess Ava didn't make it after all."

"Meaning what?"

Xigbar answered plainly. "I told her, clear as day, what it is I had to do."

"And is that why you decided to exclude her?"

"As if. Ava had her own mission, and she carried it out."

He settled in to tell them the rest of it.

"I hope you like long stories."

Seven Against One

Pete had had enough of digging in worlds that gave nothing back.

"I've had it with this stupid treasure hunt. Every box we've found has been nothin' but a bust."

"I agree. Our search ends today."

That was not the relief he had been hoping for.

"What-a-huh-now?!"

"You cannot find the unfindable. The box does not exist."

"I knew they was takin' us for a ride."

She had not finished.

"Silence, imbecile. I mean the box does not exist now."

"Is that some kinda riddle? Just where we s'posed to be lookin'?"

"Light and darkness are fated to clash. A Keyblade War is upon us. We need only wait for that destined moment. No matter the victors, the box will be revealed."

That much, at least, was a promise.

"You will have it soon enough. Once I possess the box, our real work can begin."

Pete's own complaint, when it came, was not about the wait.

"That's it?! But when's my big moment?"

Maleficent and Pete watched the whole exchange from a distance, and said nothing. When it was over, they turned and left.

In a memory neither Xigbar nor the Foretellers could see, two boys sat down to a new game of Alba and Ater, seven dark pieces ranged against a single piece of white.

Melody of Memory

This Place

Kairi had let herself be put into a deep sleep to search her own heart for some clue to Sora's whereabouts, and she had been asleep in Ansem the Wise's own computer lab for a year, watched over by Ansem the Wise, Even, and Ienzo, when the equipment monitoring her failed all at once.

"Something's wrong. Shut it down!"

"And just when things were going well."

"What's happening!?"

Kairi found herself somewhere the equipment could no longer follow her. "This place."

A memory rose up around her, of the day she had been sent away from Radiant Garden as a child.

"This world will be engulfed in darkness, everything you care about and everyone you love. If you truly possess the power of a princess of heart, your heart will resonate with a Keyblade wielder's, and I believe you can lead me to that wielder's world. That is the only possible way to save ours. You see, this is more than an experiment, it's hope. Like most, you probably believe that nothing exists outside of this world you live in. And yet, there are countless other worlds. You can see them sparkle brilliantly in the night sky. Through that sea of stars, fate will guide your ship to where you are meant to be. However, if you arrive in a world that's neither of light nor darkness, but somewhere on the other side, your task will be far from easy. If that happens, you must abandon your search, we have failed."

A Product of Your Heart

The memory gave way to a hooded figure, waiting for her.

"Not so fast, my dear."

"Who are you? Show your face!"

He obliged her.

"You're right. I set you adrift in another world and drastically altered the course of your fate. In the end you were destroyed by my hand, paving the way for Sora's disappearance."

"You're the one who keeps messing with my fate. If it weren't for everything that you've done, then Sora and everyone would be safe. Even if you're not really here and this is just a memory or illusion, I won't let you walk away!"

"You've become quite the Keyblade wielder! For a retired master, Yen Sid prepared you remarkably well."

He was not finished taunting her.

"This world was created from the memories contained within your heart. You seek clues to Sora's whereabouts by using your memories of him to search through your own heart. But there's nothing for you to find here. I'm afraid the answer you seek lies in memories that are long gone."

"I have had enough of this!"

She charged him and was overpowered. Before he could finish her, Sora took over her body to save her. "Ah, look who joined us. As I thought, your voice can't reach us here. Now I'm certain of where your heart is."

Sora defeated him where Kairi alone could not. "On the day that I sent you out from your world, do you remember what it is I said to you? Those words hold the answer you seek. I may cause you to suffer, but I am a product of your heart. For that reason, I shall give you your answer."

He became Terra-Xehanort before her, one last time. "Before, when my heart and body were still united as one, I told you about what would happen if we were to fail. 'If you arrive in a world that's neither of light nor darkness but somewhere on the other side, your task will be far from easy.' That is the answer I have for you."

Then he was gone.

"Thank you, Sora."

"What does that mean?"

The Lab

Kairi woke, and told them what Xehanort had said to her. "Yes, he said that's the answer."

"Maybe Mickey or Master Yen Sid knows."

Even turned the words over first. "Not of light or darkness, but on the other side?"

Ansem the Wise took them further.

"Where voices can't reach. The other side of our world, of reality. Unreality? A fictional world? I'm afraid such mysteries are beyond our comprehension."

"Something else he said perplexes me. 'Your voice can't reach us. I'm certain of where your heart is.'"

Ienzo was no closer to an answer.

"I've never heard of a place like that."

"You would assume that he's referring to the realm of darkness, but, that clearly isn't the case here, wouldn't you say?"

Ansem the Wise reasoned it out as far as he could.

"Yes, perhaps. The three realms of our world, light, darkness, and between, these are all places we can travel to because they are on 'our side.' This also includes the worlds of memories, data, and dreams. If I am correct, then this 'other side' of our world from which voices cannot reach must be a place outside of our reality. Namely, it must be unreality, or fiction. But, that is the extent of our knowledge."

Riku arrived before anyone could take it further. "Kairi! You woke up!"

"Yeah, just now. How come you're here?"

He had not come only to check on her.

"Well, actually I found some info about Sora."

"Really? We got something too!"

She wanted his own first.

"Riku, what did you dream?"

"Oh, well since Sora disappeared, I've been having dreams about a large city with tall buildings. Apparently, that's the clue."

Kairi already knew where she wanted to take it. "So, I thought we should go to Mickey and Master Yen Sid to ask about it."

The Final Key

A voice interrupted them before anyone could say more.

"Oh, excuse me, dears, I certainly didn't mean to startle you. If you're not expecting magic, it can be a surprise."

"Now then, I am the Fairy Godmother. And it's a pleasure to meet you all."

"Yen Sid sent you?"

Riku answered before she could. "She came here at Yen Sid's request. He said she's got a clue that might help us find Sora."

Ienzo laid out what they had for her benefit.

"Yes. We performed an examination of Kairi's heart and obtained an important clue from the lost memories it contains, which is that, there's another world on the other side of ours that's not of darkness or light."

"Maybe that's what Xehanort was talking about. A fictional world."

The Fairy Godmother had come with her own answer.

"That's right. To find Sora, we need three keys. First, Riku, and then of course there's you, dear Kairi."

"With Riku's dreams and Kairi's memories, you two have already done your part."

Kairi still had her own suggestion in mind. "Mmm, I'm not quite sure they'll be able to help you, my dear."

"Oh, you forget; there are three people who hold the key. There's still one more. One with a strong will and a very precious dream."

Neither of them knew who she meant.

"You'll see. I'll introduce you!"

She brought them both to the Final World, a place Kairi already knew. "Yeah, I came here with Sora, and also in my dreams while I slept. This is, the Final World. But there's no one here."

"That's not true. Why don't you look closer?"

"The stars. I never noticed."

The Fairy Godmother told her what they were.

"Yes, strong hearts gather here after death until they are ready to move on. I'm sure she's around here somewhere."

She found the one she was looking for.

"The final key."

"We found you! We've been searching all over for you, my dear."

The star did not recognize her.

"Do I know you?"

"You're all able to retain your appearance in this world. I met someone else who could do that."

Kairi introduced herself. "I'm Kairi. It's a pleasure to meet you."

"Oh, yes. It seems you know a lot about me."

The Fairy Godmother confirmed it for all of them.

"That's right, dear. Now we finally have all three."

"Um, so she's the final key?"

She explained what that meant.

"It's simple. She came from the world on the other side. You see, she's very special. Her form was taken from her, but she managed to find her way here. If she goes back to her world, her heart will certainly be stolen. Right, dear?"

"My dream, come true?"

"A little, and I would use my magic to change you back if I could. But I'm afraid that's impossible while you're in this form. Don't fret, though, I believe that we'll find a way to make your dream come true very soon."

Riku saw a way to be useful in that. "I want to help make that happen. Will it lead us to Sora?"

Quadratum

Kairi thought of the one name that mattered most. "Wait. Do you know him?"

"Sorry, but did I hear you say 'Sora'?"

"Yes. He was here. He encouraged me not to give up. Did something happen to him?"

Riku told her. "Yeah. Sora disappeared. He's a good friend of ours, so we've been looking for him. Right now, we think he's in a big city full of tall buildings. Ring any bells?"

She knew it at once.

"A city full of tall buildings, Quadratum? It has more skyscrapers than any other city I know. That must be it."

"Quadratum, is that where Sora is?"

The Fairy Godmother would not promise more than she knew.

"There's no way of knowing, but I believe it is possible."

"I'm not sure exactly what's happening. But if Sora is in trouble, I want to help. Please, let me know what you need from me."

The Fairy Godmother told Riku what that would take. "Oh, I'm afraid it's not that simple. First, we must get to her world. She can open a path for us, and you can use the power of waking to go there."

Kairi wanted to go with him. "I want to go."

She talked herself out of it in the same breath.

"Yeah. I know. I want to go with you. But, I know that I can't. I need to finish training. I need to become stronger. And when I do, I'll be right there next to you and Sora. But first I'll go explain everything to Donald and Goofy and to Mickey and Master Yen Sid."

The Fairy Godmother had done all she could.

"I'm afraid this is as much as I can do. It's up to you, Riku, to take care of the rest."

"Be careful out there, dear. And try not to do anything too reckless. Come straight back if you encounter any trouble."

Riku went alone.

Where You'll Begin

Word that Riku had gone alone reached Mickey before Kairi did.

"Riku went alone!? But that's way too dangerous! I hafta go after him now!"

"Do not be hasty, Mickey."

Mickey would not let it go so easily. "But Master Yen Sid, he's all alone in a world we know nothing about!"

"Precisely. We have never faced something like this before, which is why we must remain calm."

Yen Sid turned to Kairi for the rest of it.

"Kairi. This information you bring us, it comes from Xehanort during his time as a researcher?"

"Then that means he must have been aware of this other world for quite some time."

"But we defeated Xehanort. Is there anybody else we can ask?"

Yen Sid traced it back further than Xehanort.

"When I was still serving as a Keyblade Master, it was known that the ancient masters had crossed over into another world. I surmise that Xehanort looked more deeply into that world."

He turned to what needed doing now.

"For now we must reach out to those in Radiant Garden, the Land of Departure, and Twilight Town who are searching for Sora to inform them of what we have learned and have them halt their respective efforts. Donald, Goofy, I leave this to you."

"And Kairi, will you continue your training as you were before?"

She had already decided on something a little different.

"Actually, I'd like to study under Master Aqua."

"That is an excellent idea. I approve."

Last, he turned to Mickey. "And you, Mickey. I task you with the investigation of this new world and how it is related to the ancient Keyblade Masters."

"You'll begin, in the world of Scala ad Caelum."