Dark Road

The Child of Destiny

On an island with a few small desolate islets round it, a boy and the one who had raised him sat by a fire on the beach, and the boy was being told again what he was. "The child of destiny? Me?" The one in the blue hood said that he was: a child who would come from these islands, who could feel what was in other people's hearts, who could join his heart with another's and save the world from darkness. The boy had heard it all before. "You've told me that a hundred times. But what's a child of destiny?" And when the answer came round again to saving the world: "I don't get it."

He was small then, tan-skinned, with silver hair swept back into spikes and eyes that were silver too. He had lived on the island for as long as he could remember, because darkness could not easily find him there. "But we're the only ones here," he said once, and when he was told that one day he would have to leave: "Really? But I thought I had to live here so darkness wouldn't find me." He had another question, too. "When I get strong enough, will I get to see my mom again too?"

He did not really remember her. But there were other people he wanted to meet. "The kids from my dreams. I don't know who they are, but they really like each other. Is that what having friends is like?" He tried to describe them. "Umm. One's a boy with curly silver hair. Another boy has black clothes and a hat, a skinny boy with pink hair, and a quiet boy with blond hair. Oh, and a girl with dark hair just like my mom. And then there's this other one. Kind of like you." He looked up, because his guardian had gone very still. "What's wrong?"

The dreams were true, and the one in the blue hood knew it. That was part of the reason they believed he was the child of destiny: the boy was dreaming a life his guardian had lived before, among people the boy had never met. He was told, too, that he could see into other hearts. "What?"

The years went by. The boy grew into a young man, and the one who had raised him died, and he was alone on the island.

He still had the dream. "That dream again. I've been having the same dream over and over again for as long as I can remember. An unfamiliar world filled with unfamiliar faces and unfamiliar good-byes. As if I'm experiencing a life that belonged to someone else." The island, the small bare islets, the ocean and the sky were the whole of his world. "But maybe there's something beyond these waters. Maybe there are worlds like the ones I dream of. If I could get to the outside world, would I be able to meet my friends from my dreams?"

Someone was coming toward him along the sand, a man in a brown hood, and he called Xehanort his waypoint. "What?" Xehanort said. "Who are you?" The stranger only called him his waypoint again. "What do you mean? Who are you? How did you get here?" He did not answer that. He said it was Xehanort's destiny to see other worlds, and opened a way for him: a doorway of darkness standing upright in the sand, black and swirling at the edges, with nothing to be seen inside it. It was a corridor of darkness, a road between worlds. Xehanort looked at it for a long time. Then he walked into it, and the darkness in the corridor began, very slowly, to get into his heart.

Alba and Ater

He came out into a city standing on water. It went on and on: towns built up the sides of mountains, the mountains themselves made of white and gold buildings stacked one above another, and a windmill turning on nearly every roof. The sky over it was clear, and stayed clear. A star was worked into the paving. It was Scala ad Caelum, where Keyblade wielders were trained, and he was taken in there as a student of a Master called Odin, an old man with a white beard to his chest and a wide soft hat worn at an angle that hid one eye.

There were others in his class, and in time they were the whole of his life. Eraqus, a boy with dark hair tied back, dressed in white, was late to nearly everything and kept the rest of them laughing when there was least reason to. Vor was small and fierce, in a long purple cloak. Hermod was careful and liked things in order. Urd wanted to see every world there was. Bragi was quiet and said little. Baldr had long feathery white hair and silver eyes, and a sister among the upper classmen, Hoder, whom he loved.

The days were peaceful and a little dull, and Xehanort thought about that more than the others did. "Day after day, I spend my time with the same classmates in the same classroom. The days are peaceful and a little boring, but they're also familiar and comfortable. Even so, my new life is just like the old. A different world, but with the same days playing out over and over again." Perhaps it was not the place that mattered, he thought, but himself, and how he dealt with others. "All kinds of things can influence the growth of a heart. Change can come from anywhere, from the smallest, simplest thing. From light, or from darkness."

He did not often think about the man in the brown hood. "The day I met the man in the robe, my world was turned upside down. But I got used to it eventually. Your world can change in an instant. Sometimes all it takes is a single step."

He and Eraqus played a board game called Alba and Ater, white pieces against black, in a white classroom with golden beams and fans turning under the ceiling. Xehanort nearly always won. "Keep an open mind, Eraqus. Maybe then you'll actually beat me." Then, with the pieces still standing: "It's almost time for class." Eraqus did not move, and Xehanort sighed. "Wait. Aren't you going?" Eraqus only smiled. "Always doing things in your own time."

They talked about everything, up at the top of the long stair the city called the Stairway to the Sky, with the water all round them. Eraqus asked him once what lay on the other side of the ocean. "Beats me." Eraqus reminded him that he had been found lying unconscious in the city, as if he had come from nowhere. "Yeah, I was lying here unconscious. But what does that prove?" He grinned. "Or maybe I fell from the sky." What you could see, he told Eraqus, was only part of the picture. "Not only that, the things you get used to seeing can fade into the background."

Once, when they talked about why they wanted to be Masters, each of them gave a different answer. For Eraqus it had begun as something his family expected of him. Bragi wanted to do what was right, Urd to learn about the worlds and see them, Baldr to protect what mattered to him, Hermod to uphold the greater order. Vor thought about it and would not say. Xehanort had his own reason, and it was not much of one. "I don't know why. But, I have friends, I want to see again."

He asked Master Odin, more than once, how a person got to the other worlds. "How does one get to those worlds?"

Seven Who Did Not Come Back

Two years after Xehanort came to the city, Master Odin gathered the lower classmen and told them that seven of the upper classmen had gone out to train for their Mark of Mastery and had not come back: Hoder, Vidar, Vala, Vali, Heimdall, Sigrun and Helgi. Nobody had heard from any of them. The lower classmen were far from ready, but they would have to go and look. Baldr was not among them; he had been given some other task, and nobody had told him that his sister was one of the seven. Xehanort was glad to go. "The situation is worrying. Which is why I'd rather be part of a search party than sit here and do nothing."

Before they left, they talked about the worlds they would find. The Keyblade War had swallowed everything in darkness, Xehanort said, and afterward the worlds had begun to be rebuilt. "But time flows differently in each one." It depended, he said, on when they were remade. "Depending on when and how quickly they're restored. Some worlds are already complete, and their time has begun to flow. But others are not, and for them, time stands still." They were not to meddle in any world's order. "What I'm saying is that we need to be careful about what we say and do while we're out there."

The first world was a desert city with nobody in it but Heartless. "They've gotta be Heartless," Xehanort said, and when the fight was over: "Not bad for our first battle." The buildings were whole, but there were no people. "Look at the buildings. Maybe living beings are restored last."

The next world had a queen in it, who ruled by rage and whose subjects lived in terror of her, and there was darkness in her. Xehanort watched her and thought about it. "Look at that queen. She believes people respect her power, even though it's obvious they live in fear. That's the kind of delusion that might force our hand down the line."

He and Eraqus found themselves saying the same words at the same moment, words neither of them knew where they had got. "Darkness can hide anywhere. Even inside someone." Xehanort stopped. "Huh?" Eraqus asked him how he knew the saying. "Me? I" He could not finish. The words belonged to someone else, someone in a dream.

The thought stayed with him. "I wonder, could darkness burrow so deep into someone's heart that they don't even know it's there?" He looked at his friend. "Could you turn your Keyblade on a being that has no idea what they've become?" Eraqus had no answer, and Xehanort did not press for one. "One day we might have to decide."

He and Eraqus stayed in that world after the others had gone on, watching the queen, and Xehanort came to understand her. Her darkness did not come from greed but from wrath, and it held her world together. "So many of them seem silly and carefree, but beneath it all, they're afraid. That's how order is maintained here."

When the class came together again, he told them what he had worked out. "There may be more than one dark entity. A single light can cast countless shadows. And as light's guardians, we may have a similar effect. The more we venture out into the world, the more darkness may follow in our wake." And in a world where darkness was the order, the rule they had been taught did not hold. "The rule that light is right and darkness is wrong just doesn't hold true. It's a question of perspective." Eraqus stared at him, and Xehanort shook his head. "I'm not, don't worry. What I'm getting at is that if the missing students found themselves facing darkness, and darkness was that world's order, then it's possible they were defeated."

They remembered, then, one of Odin's lessons: that long ago darkness had come from outside and spread through people like a sickness, but that as time went on people had begun to make their own, out of their own bad feeling. And Eraqus remembered something else. A week before, Baldr had come to him worried about his sister Hoder, out on her training. Baldr still did not know she was one of the seven.

The Mirror and the Lamp

In a wood with a castle and a queen in it, Vor wandered off from the others and found a mirror. When Xehanort and Eraqus caught up with her, she showed them. It hung in a frame ringed with the twelve signs of the zodiac, and a white mask rose up in the glass, lit so that one half of it was darker than the other. It answered any question put to it truthfully. Eraqus asked it how he could beat Xehanort at chess, and Xehanort closed his eyes. "Eraqus." He turned back to the glass. "Please ignore him." Then he asked what mattered. "We're looking for some classmates who went missing. Do you know where they are?" The Mirror told them that each of the upper classmen was acting alone.

Eraqus began to ask after Vidar in particular, and Vidar himself walked in. He looked at Xehanort without liking what he saw. Then he offered Vor a place among the upper classmen, and Vor said yes. The Mirror had told her, when she was alone with it, that if she stayed with her friends she would never grow. Xehanort saw it in her face. "Her heart and her mind are made up." Eraqus insisted that they would never change, and Xehanort told him that was not how things worked. "Change is inevitable. You should embrace it and learn to build new relationships."

They could not reach Odin to tell him, and they quarrelled over what to do. Eraqus wanted to go after Vor; Xehanort wanted to keep looking for the seven. Eraqus was afraid Vidar meant her harm. "Even if he is, she'll be fine. She's tough. She doesn't need our help." Eraqus accused him of not caring, and Xehanort turned it round. "What about you? Would a friend try to manipulate someone's beliefs just because they don't line up with their own?" And when Eraqus said a Keyblade Master would know what was right: "Who's to decide what's right and what's wrong? Unless you know of someone who has a heart of pure light with no trace of shadow."

In the end they split. Eraqus and Bragi went back to ask the Mirror where Vor was, and found the queen of that castle guarding it. Xehanort went on with Urd and Hermod. "Even if we take different paths to locate the missing upper classmen, we're bound to arrive at the same destination. Eraqus should follow his heart on this one."

In a castle whose master was a beast, two of the upper classmen had stolen a rose. Heartless lured Urd away into a ballroom, and when she was all but overwhelmed Vala, watching from above, struck them all down with a single spell. Vala was taken with Urd's stubbornness and asked her to join them. Urd said her mission was to bring them home. So Vala had Vali hand her the rose instead, because it was essential to that world's order, and the two of them left through a portal. Xehanort had heard it from the shadows. "Essential to the order?"

In Scala ad Caelum, on a windy balcony, Master Odin was warning Vidar about something older than any of them. There had been thirteen ancient darknesses, true darkness, without form, the source of most of the darkness in the world. Seven had been sealed inside the Lost Masters, four trapped in the Realm Between of a world made of data, and two were said to have been destroyed when the old world fell, though nobody could prove it. Vidar should learn to tell true darkness from the other kinds.

In the desert city a man named Jafar asked Xehanort's group to fetch a lamp for him from a cave. When he shook Xehanort's hand, Xehanort felt what was in him. "All I know is that when he took my hand, I felt his greed. He covets power, and he'll stop at nothing to obtain it." He went anyway, because it was a way into parts of the world they could not otherwise reach, and in the cave they found Eraqus and Bragi, sent on the same errand. Urd guessed that the lamp mattered to the world's order, the way the rose had, and she was right: as they reached it, Vidar stepped out of a portal with Vor beside him.

The upper classmen needed seven lights to defeat true darkness, Vidar told them, and they had lost some, so they were taking whatever each world held most precious, hoping to find true light among them. He had given up the vow not to meddle. All he wanted now was to avenge the friends he had lost. Xehanort did not understand it. "We've defeated countless dark entities the old-fashioned way. Why go this far?" Vidar asked Eraqus to come with them, and left with Vor before Eraqus could answer. Eraqus was shaken, and Xehanort put a hand on his shoulder. "It's okay, Eraqus. None of us have the knowledge or experience to decide. When you do eventually become a Keyblade Master, you may find yourself having to make this very same decision. And maybe then, you'll know what to do."

They told Master Odin, and asked him why defeating true darkness should need anything like this. Odin told them what he had told Vidar. A true darkness that had taken a vessel could be destroyed by destroying the vessel, as the Lost Masters had done; and Vidar would not accept more deaths. Xehanort asked the obvious question. "If that's true, how do we defeat something like that?" There was one other way, Odin said, and he did not trust it. "Kingdom Hearts," Xehanort whispered. It needed seven true lights to summon, and it might purge every world along with the darkness. "It could even purge the worlds."

Odin took the mission back from them; it was beyond them now. As they left the room they heard him say, to nobody, that the dark seeker would soon be upon them.

The Underworld

They did not know what to do next, and then Baldr was there, back from a task of his own, studying the different kinds of darkness. "Baldr!" Xehanort said. "What've you been up to?" Baldr had an idea for them: the dead upper classmen, if any were dead, might be reached in the Underworld below the Coliseum of Olympus. Eraqus let slip what they had been searching for, and Baldr told them what they did not know.

He had followed Hoder, after he spoke to Eraqus, to a world called the Enchanted Dominion, and there he had watched her die. A sorceress named Maleficent had come for him, and Hoder had put herself between them. Baldr woke up in the infirmary in Scala ad Caelum, and it was then that Odin had sent the others looking for the seven. There had been no other task for Baldr. He had been given time to heal.

At Olympus a god named Hades struck a bargain with them and split them up, and sent Xehanort, Eraqus and Bragi down into the Underworld. "We want to talk to someone who disappeared," Xehanort told him. "Hoder." A great three-headed dog stood in their way, and Baldr was suddenly there beside them. He and Bragi would hold it; Xehanort and Eraqus should go on. Xehanort went, and could not quite shake something. "I hope it's just my imagination."

Further in they found Hoder, and with her Heimdall, Helgi and Sigrun, fading at the edges. "We were tasked by Master Odin to find all of you, the missing upper classmen," Xehanort said. They told him how it had gone. In the Enchanted Dominion they had decided they could not help the princess there without breaking that world's order, and in the night Hoder had gone alone to fight the sorceress. The other three found her fading, fought the sorceress for her, and died too.

Xehanort told them what he had seen in the worlds. "There's a little bit of darkness everywhere. But that's its way, to slowly infiltrate everything. Darkness can hide anywhere. Even inside someone." Heimdall wondered aloud whether light and darkness were only a matter of how you looked at them, born of beliefs that clashed, and whether some middle ground might be better than keeping them apart. Xehanort and Eraqus did not agree. Then the upper classmen began to vanish, and Hoder, at the last, asked Xehanort for a favour.

They went back for the others and found Urd alone, and Hades telling them that one of them would have to stay. Urd would not have it and went for him. Hermod came running to help, and Hades gathered himself for something terrible. Before he could loose it, a portal opened under them and all four were pulled into a corridor of darkness.

Xehanort found Eraqus lying in the dark. "Eraqus! Eraqus, wake up!" He dragged him up. "Quick, put on your armor. Darkness is all around us. If you listen to its whispers, it'll get inside your head and your heart." Each of them touched the plate at their shoulder, and armour closed over them in a flash of light, from helmet to boots. Urd and Hermod did the same. It bought them time, and not much else. "We need to find a way out, but. How? What do we do?"

Hermod went down first, overcome by the dark. Then a shadowy figure came out of it. Urd knew it for a friend, and it killed her and Hermod both. Xehanort and Eraqus fell the same way, and it came for them. Then there was light: Master Odin had come, the Master's Defender in his hand, and the figure could not finish them. Odin opened a way out.

When they came round, Odin told them that they were the only two who had come back. He was surprised to hear they had seen Baldr. Before he could say any more, the city came under attack. He called down the No Name Keyblade from where it hung on the wall above them and went out to get the other students to safety. Eraqus asked him if he knew who it was. "I almost wish I didn't." He had lost his sister, Xehanort said; anyone would be weak to darkness after that. It was Baldr, and Baldr had killed Bragi. "And Hermod and Urd."

The Darkness That Was His Own

The city was fighting in its streets. Eraqus ran out into it and Xehanort went after him. "Eraqus, wait! Things seem to be under control here. Let's leave it to them." Then Vidar, Vala and Vali came through a portal, and Eraqus turned on them for letting Hoder die, and would not be held back. "Eraqus, no. Don't let your anger take over. That's what happened to Baldr." When it was over Xehanort had to pull him off. "That's enough, Eraqus. You wanted to defeat the darkness, not your classmates. Remember?"

"Wait, where's Vor?" Xehanort said. Then Baldr came to them, floating above the street, wrapped in darkness, and Xehanort felt his pain like a blade in his own chest. "So it's true." Baldr sneered that they had never found their seven lights, and when Eraqus swore he would save him, the darkness in him said it was too late. Then it left, making for the tower, and Xehanort understood. "The tower. He's going after Vor!"

Vor had not seen him coming. He told her how it had happened: seven days of grief that turned to blame and then to anger, and a darkness growing in him that urged him to purge the world by giving the thirteen lights to the shadows. It had killed Hoder, he said, and when it had his body it had killed Sigrun, Heimdall, Helgi, Hermod, Urd and Bragi. Vor raised her Keyblade against him and was overwhelmed. Vidar, Vala and Vali came to help her, and that was how Xehanort and Eraqus found them. Baldr called up a Heartless so huge it filled the room, and it cut down the three upper classmen in a single stroke. "Vidar!" Xehanort shouted. While he and Eraqus held the monster off, Vor went for Baldr, and he ran her through with darkness. "Vor!" She was gone before they reached her. "Vor."

Baldr went up to the roof, as if the occasion deserved it, and they followed him. There he told them what he wanted. Thirteen lights given to the shadows would summon Kingdom Hearts, and the world would be born again in darkness. "Thirteen darknesses?" Xehanort said. He did not follow. "Wait. Calling on that power would purge the world, which means that darkness, you, would disappear."

It had been a plan once. Kill Hoder, and Vidar would want revenge; kill the others, and he would want it more; and when Vidar learned he would have to kill Baldr to end it, he would not be able to, and would turn to gathering the seven lights instead. "And he'd turn to Kingdom Hearts," Xehanort said. But Vidar had given it up, and so Baldr had come to kill the lower classmen and summon Kingdom Hearts with the thirteen darknesses himself.

He took the shape of his great Heartless, and they fought him until both sides were spent. Eraqus turned aside a last blow and brought them both down, and told Xehanort to drive the darkness out of Baldr. Xehanort gathered the light in his Keyblade to do it. Then he stopped, and raised it to kill instead, and Eraqus cried out against it.

Darkness closed round the two of them, Xehanort and Baldr alone in it. "What's going on?" The darkness said it was not one of the ancient ones. "Then prove it." It said it had not been born in Baldr's heart either, but out of the darkness of the people Baldr had known, and it asked Xehanort whether light or darkness ruled his. "I." He could not answer. "You don't know what you're talking about," he said instead, when it told him they were alike. "The darkness grew and became his own."

Then Hoder came out of Xehanort's heart, a spirit, the favour she had asked of him in the Underworld, and she spoke to her brother, and the thing in him cracked. Baldr told her, in a rush, what it had been like. All his life he had felt what was in other people's hearts. From Hoder and from Eraqus he had felt only light, and from nearly everyone else, darkness. It had frightened him. It had gathered in him, and slowly it had become his own. With Hoder he had felt safe. When she was gone he had fallen the rest of the way. There were two kinds of people, he said: those whose light was pure, and those with darkness in them, in whom it grew. "Two kinds of people," Xehanort repeated.

Brother and sister reached for each other, and then, not trusting, both summoned their Keyblades. "Wait!" The darkness took Baldr's body and struck, and golden chains caught him and held him fast. The dark around them broke. The chains came from Master Odin's Keyblade. "Master Odin!"

Odin told Xehanort to drive the darkness out of him. But Baldr could still fight. He clashed with Hoder and they both fell, and Hoder faded away. Baldr looked at Xehanort and said he saw himself in him. He asked him to understand: that those whose light was pure would coldly condemn those with darkness in them, and that Xehanort must go and find the answers, about darkness and about how unjust the world was. Xehanort pointed his Keyblade at him as if to purge him. Then he changed his mind and killed him.

Baldr faded. Odin grieved for another of his students.

The Graveyard

For a month Xehanort kept to his room. Then he took flowers to the graveyard on the far side of the city, where there were eleven new graves, and laid them down one by one, naming the ones he had sat beside every day. "Hermod. Urd. Bragi. Vor. Baldr." At the last he stopped. "Now you and your sister will always be together. You'll always have the light to share."

Eraqus came with his own flowers. "Eraqus. I didn't expect to see you here so early." Eraqus worried that he had brought too many. "I don't think there's such a thing as too many." Xehanort asked after Odin, who had grown glum since it all, and Eraqus called him a glum old man, and Xehanort nearly smiled. "I'll be sure to tell him you said so."

"And you're still you," Xehanort said. "Always the joker." Eraqus announced that he was sunny and delightful. "Is that really how you see yourself?" Life should be fun, Eraqus said, and Xehanort looked at him. "Says the person weeping loudly night after night, alone in his room." Eraqus accused him of listening at walls. "You're in the next room. I couldn't tune you out if I tried."

Odin wanted them to sit the Mark of Mastery as his last students, Eraqus told him. "Really? Already?" And afterwards he meant them to replace him, and to go and live somewhere that was not Scala ad Caelum. "Oh." It was time for a change, Odin had said. "Maybe it is." Then Eraqus suggested a game, to lighten things, and Xehanort looked at him sideways. "Do you really want to lose that badly?" They went back up into the city together.

When they had gone, someone else walked through the graveyard, a figure in a black coat, not hurrying. He was disappointed; he had not found a chosen one here, though he thought this Xehanort might yet be useful.

He was remembering the Underworld. Baldr had found Bragi alone there and threatened him, and Bragi had not been afraid. If Baldr came back without him, Bragi had pointed out, it would only prove what Xehanort already suspected. Bragi had even wondered aloud whether he ought to take Baldr's body, and decided it would make keeping a low profile difficult. Baldr was no match for him, and when he attacked, Bragi simply turned to walk away. He would not get in the way of Baldr's plan, he said; he would just disappear. Beside himself, Baldr struck him down and left without making sure he was dead.

The figure put back his hood in front of the stone with Bragi's name on it, and the face under it was Bragi's. It was Luxu, and he was annoyed. With his name cut into a gravestone, he could hardly go on being Bragi in Scala ad Caelum.

The Master in the Black Coat

A year after the upper classmen went missing, it was decided that Xehanort and Eraqus would be tested for the Mark of Mastery, and before the exam a wielder had to go out alone into the worlds. Xehanort went by the corridors of darkness, in his armour, and thought about the first time he had walked one, off the island. "As I walked along the path, darkness whispered to me from all around. Though I couldn't understand what it said, it stirred emotions deep within my heart." Hatred, jealousy, doubt, things he had never felt, some of them aimed at him. "Regardless of where these foul emotions were coming from, they gave me comfort. They helped me realize that my heart could still feel."

The armour kept most of it out, but not all. "My armor provides protection, yet every time I pass through, the darkness seeps further into my heart. I can feel it, faint though it may be. But if my heart is strong enough, maybe it could weather this maelstrom?" He was the child of destiny, he had been told. So he let the armour go. The darkness came in, and he fell.

He woke with a start in a wasteland full of old Keyblades standing in the earth. "Whoa!" A figure in a black coat, hooded, was sitting nearby, and seemed pleased with him; he called Xehanort the singularity. "Who are you?" The answer made no sense, and Xehanort sighed. The stranger said he had saved his life. "You what?" Then Xehanort saw that it was true. "Oh."

"Well, what about you? Why were you there?" The stranger said he had once been a Keyblade wielder. "Really? I've never heard of you." Xehanort did not trust him and called his Keyblade to his hand. The stranger simply called it out of Xehanort's hand into his own, then gave it back. Did Xehanort trust him now? "Even less."

He should not go into the corridors unprotected, the stranger told him, and held out a black coat, like his own. It would keep darkness out better than any armour. "What's this?" He turned it over suspiciously. "Are you trying to sell me this coat?" It was free, the stranger said. "Still don't trust you."

Xehanort explained why he had been in the corridor at all, and it turned out the stranger did not know what a Mark of Mastery was. "I thought you said you used to be a Keyblade wielder." Then, for the coat, the stranger wanted a favour. "I thought you said it was free." He wanted Xehanort to take a look. "At what?" At people's hearts, the stranger said: to see how tangled feelings, and differences in power, could hold light or darkness. Even what people felt for those they loved, he said, was not always light. "Whoa, where did that come from?"

When the stranger began to sort people into two kinds, Xehanort would not have it. "People shouldn't be categorized in extremes. And even if I was either type, it doesn't mean that I carry those dark intentions." The stranger asked him whether what he had seen had not already shown him that he was wrong about people, and Xehanort did not answer.

He came back to the wasteland some time later with what he had seen. There had been darkness growing in every heart he looked at. He had come away disillusioned, and certain that nothing would keep the world from chaos unless he took hold of it himself, with darkness if need be. The black coat felt familiar to him, and so did a path he could feel in his heart, though he could not have said why. He would not need the coat much longer, the stranger said; soon he would command the darkness instead of hiding from it. Xehanort asked him how he could know that. Then the stranger told him his name, and what he had been: a Lost Master. And he was gone.

Thirteen Lifetimes

Two years after that, Xehanort and Eraqus sat in their old classroom and talked about what their travels had taught them. "It made me think." He was quiet a moment. "About a lot of things. The events of the past, what's to come. What about you? Wasn't it always your dream to travel abroad on your own?" But he had learned something else, and it came out of him slowly. "It made me realize that one lifetime is too short. It's not enough."

Eraqus said a person could pass what they had on to the next generation. "Yes, but. I'd rather do it myself." Eraqus asked how many lifetimes he wanted, then. "Hmm. Twelve. No, thirteen." Eraqus asked him why. "That's what it'll take to rebuild the world." He thought a moment longer. "Scratch that. One more to explore the new world." Eraqus stared at him. "We all have our dreams," Xehanort said.

He asked what Eraqus's was. "Yeah. What's yours? To become a Keyblade Master?" Eraqus said he wanted to stay true to the light. "Hm? What brought that on?" If anyone were lost in darkness, Eraqus told him, he would be a beacon, so that they could find their way back. "I see." Eraqus asked if he was laughing at him. "No, it's the perfect dream for you." And when Eraqus said that anyone who tried to escape the darkness alone would only sink deeper into it: "It's true that running away isn't my forte, unlike someone I know. Thanks for always being there."

Four years on, Xehanort laid fresh flowers on four of the graves and told Eraqus he was leaving, on his own, to see what Odin had not shown them. Eraqus asked if they had had some good times. "Yeah." He tried to talk him out of it, and Xehanort said nothing. "I just want to see more of what's out there before the Mark of Mastery exam." He had seen the other worlds already, Eraqus said. "Not everything."

Eraqus did not stop him. He would be back, Eraqus said; they still had a score to settle at chess, and he named it, generously. Xehanort corrected him. "You mean 107 wins, 323 losses, and 7 draws." Eraqus said that was close enough. "Do you seriously mean that?" Then he went. "See you."

He went back to the world where the queen ruled by rage. She had forgotten him the last time, and she was still full of darkness, and he stood before her waiting to be tried. "You don't remember me? I knew it."

Eight years after he came out of a corridor of darkness into a city standing on water, he and Eraqus passed the Mark of Mastery and were made Keyblade Masters on the same day. Eraqus, the true heir, was given the Master's Defender. Xehanort was given the No Name, so that the Lost Masters' resolve might pass to him along with it.

A year later they fought. Xehanort had decided what was to be done about the world. "Kingdom Hearts is the only way." Eraqus would not hear it. "What about our duty as Keyblade wielders?" Xehanort's answer came from the same place. "Our duty is to protect the world. This is the path we must take."

"To think we became Keyblade Masters only a year ago, and now this," Eraqus said. "You were bequeathed a Keyblade from the era of the Lost Masters. You were supposed to have inherited their weapon, and their resolve." Xehanort said the title meant less than Eraqus thought. "We were both given the title, but you alone are the true heir." He had not come to it lightly. "Since coming here nine years ago, I've contemplated what it means to protect the world. This decision did not come easily."

"But summoning Kingdom Hearts is a drastic measure," Eraqus said. "How can you be so sure that's the answer?" Xehanort turned it back on him. "And how can you be so sure it's not?" Eraqus raised his Keyblade. "Life has taught us far different lessons." Xehanort looked at it. "Do you stand in my way as a true Keyblade Master?" "No," said Eraqus. "As a true friend." Then the two blades met.

The Mirror

A long time passed. Fifty-four years after the upper classmen went missing, the two old friends stood in the Land of Departure, where Eraqus now taught, and argued again. Xehanort had turned his mind to the χ-blade, and to another Keyblade War, and Eraqus could not talk him out of it. Eraqus tried to stop him by force, and Xehanort answered with darkness. It left two scars across Eraqus's face, and a look on it of a man who could not believe what his oldest friend had become.

Ten years after that, Xehanort went back to the Mirror. He was old now, and bald, and the white mask came up in the glass the way it always had, lit unevenly, the twelve signs round the frame. "Do you recognize me?" The Mirror remarked on his head. "A demonstration of my resolve."

He had a question, and he had had it ready for a very long time. "Over the years, I have lost many comrades. Some passed on, while others chose a different path. However, there will always be a special place in my heart, for those friends I never met save in my dreams as a young lad. Alas, my efforts to find them have been in vain. I don't even know their names. But I can see their faces still. I ask you: did they ever exist, or were they merely a figment of my imagination?"

Some of them, the Mirror told him, were still alive. He could not believe it. "How can you be sure? Without even their names?" The Mirror was sure. "Where are they now?" It told him where to find one of them, and he knew the place. "The Keyblade Graveyard!"

A year later he took Ventus through a corridor of darkness, walking, the boy beside him with his eyes open and nothing behind them. Xehanort talked as he went, as old men do when there is nobody to answer. The corridors, he said, were not meant for the living. Feelings gathered in them, and a heart that tried to take those feelings in would rot, which was why the ones who used them wore coats against it. He did not think much of the warning. "But those words of caution are for the weak. I believe that a heart strong enough can withstand the strain." He looked down at the boy. "I suppose this is of no concern to someone who's closed off their heart." And then, to himself, remembering the islands where he had grown up and the one who had raised him there: "My first mentor taught me of the child of destiny who can connect their heart to others and feel what they feel."

The corridor let them out in grassy mountains, at a castle with tall spires held in place by four golden chains that ran to two pairs of twin peaks. In the forecourt a young man and a young woman were training, and they stopped when they saw who had come. Xehanort left Ventus at the door.

The Master of the house came to meet him. He was Eraqus, the friend of Xehanort's youth, older now, his black hair gone grey and down to his shoulders, two jagged scars across his face. He wore a long white hooded coat with wide sleeves. The two of them walked the great hall together, under the stained glass, like men who had once walked a great deal together and had got out of the habit. "It seems you've settled in," Xehanort said, and then, of the two in the forecourt, "You've taken on apprentices. They seem quite bright."

Eraqus had been waiting a long time to see him. "Better late than never. You mentioned in your letter that you had one of your own." Xehanort said that he had, and then he stopped walking and began on something harder. "I'm sorry." Eraqus did not let him finish it. "There's no need. Your letter said enough. Water under the bridge."

So Xehanort told him about the boy at the door. "Yes. His name is Ventus." He let Eraqus take that in. "I took him under my wing this past year. But, I think he may be the child of destiny." He asked Eraqus to take him on. "Yes. He's a special boy, one who deserves to be guided by a true heir to light. I stand too close to the darkness." Eraqus looked at him as if he had been handed something very heavy. "Could he really be."

From somewhere behind them Ventus screamed, and both men turned and went to him.

Afterwards Xehanort walked a corridor of the castle alone, and found the masked boy there, waiting for him where he had no business to be. "You were to wait at the badlands."

Vanitas wanted to know how Ventus had taken it, and when he got no answer he decided he did not care. "Whatever. Good riddance." Xehanort corrected him. "I did this for him. Not you." That stung. "What do you mean, old man? Switching sides on me now?" The old man turned his head. "Hold your tongue, boy. You may be pure darkness, but you are no match for my blade." Vanitas backed down. "G-got it."

They walked on together, and Xehanort told him an old story as if he were only passing the time. Long ago there had been thirteen ancient darknesses. The Keyblade Masters of old had made themselves into vessels for the seven strongest, and four more had been locked away in a world made of data, and two had been destroyed when that world collapsed. "But one survived, it is said, and disguised itself as an ally of light. Perhaps it hides inside one of us, here in this time. Tell me, Vanitas. As a being of darkness, what do you think?"

Vanitas did not think it had anything to do with him. "I'm my own being," he said, and when he was pressed on where the others might be, "Who knows?" Xehanort asked him, as a purely hypothetical question, why a darkness like that would need to hide. "Fear, perhaps?" Vanitas laughed at him. "And what exactly would I have to fear?"

Xehanort answered without hesitating. "Light."

Vanitas snorted. "Ha! You think I'm afraid of Ventus? You're dreaming."

Xehanort kept walking. He said it now, the thing he had been circling. The boy's heart had not been split into light and darkness at all. "You were not born from it. You inhabited his heart, I surmise. And if that's true, where did you and he come from? Ventus appeared in my dreams as a young lad. Our meeting was not by chance." For the first time Vanitas stopped sounding bored. "What do you know?" The old man only turned it back on him. "What is there to know?" Vanitas would not say. "Nothing. Forget it."