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.