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."