Kingdom Hearts

A Dive into the Heart

A boy was falling through water, a long way down, and somehow he did not drown. Something was on his mind. "I've been having these weird thoughts lately, like is any of this for real or not?"

Then the water was gone, and he landed on glass. It was the top of a pillar, broad as a floor, standing alone in the dark, with other pillars too far off to reach. A picture was worked into the glass beneath his feet: sleeping women, and the faces of the people around them.

Something spoke to him. It had no body and came from no direction, and it never gave its name. It told him not to be afraid, and what to do next, like someone who already knew how this went.

In front of him stood a sword, a shield and a staff, each on a pedestal of its own. He was to take one and give one up, and the voice didn't say why. He held his hand over each in turn for a long time before he chose.

Then the glass went soft under him, and small black things came up through it. They were roughly the shape of people, black all through except for round yellow eyes that gave off their own light, with antennae curling back over their heads, and they didn't walk so much as pour. He got clear of them. A stair built itself out of nothing, and he climbed it to one last pillar with nothing beyond.

There, his own shadow peeled up off the floor. It spread under him like a stain, then stood, and it was enormous: black-skinned, its arms far too long, a mass of black tendrils where its hair should be, small yellow eyes, and a heart-shaped hole through the middle of its body that showed the dark on the other side. He fought it with whatever he had chosen. It was not a fight anyone could win.

The dark came up over his legs, then over the rest of him, and he went under.

He woke on a beach in daylight.

The Play Island

He had fallen asleep on the sand with an arm over his eyes, and a girl came and stood over him, blocking the sun. "Sora, you lazy bum. I knew that I'd find you snoozing down here."

He was fourteen, all elbows and knees, with brown hair that stood up in spikes whatever he did to it, blue eyes, and skin browned by a life spent outdoors. He wore a red jumpsuit cut off at the knee, a black hooded jacket, shoes too big for him, and a small silver crown on a chain round his neck. He sat up and tried to tell her about the dream, and it came out in a rush. "No, this huge black thing swallowed me up! I couldn't breathe, I couldn't." She knocked him on the head before he could finish. "Ow!" He rubbed the spot, aggrieved. "Whoa! Give me a break, Kairi!"

She laughed at him. She was his age, dressed in white and purple, her bangs parted to one side. She had come to the islands from somewhere else when she was small, on the night of a meteor shower, and whenever he asked what that place had been like, she gave him the same answer. "I've told you before, I don't remember." Then she pulled him to his feet. "So what're we waiting for?"

The raft was Riku's idea. He had thought of it, he was cutting the logs, and he was the one who most wanted to go; Sora was helping because Riku was doing it, which is a different reason for building a boat. Riku was fifteen and taller than Sora by then, his silver hair grown long, and he came down the beach with a log over his shoulder and looked at the two of them sitting on the sand. "So, I guess I'm the only one working on the raft." Kairi grinned up at him. "So you noticed. Okay, we'll finish it together. I'll race you!"

It took two days. Sora went round the island gathering logs, cloth and rope for the raft, and food for the journey. In between he fought anyone who would fight him with a wooden sword, and Riku beat him, as Riku generally did, and stood over him without a mark on him. "Giving up already? Come on, Sora. I thought you were stronger than that."

In the evening the three of them sat on the trunk of the crooked palm on the little island across the bridge, where nothing stood between them and the whole of the sunset. Kairi asked the question none of them had asked out loud. "So, suppose you get to another world. What would you do there?"

Riku took his time over it, which was unlike him. "Well, I haven't really thought about it. It's just, I've always wondered why we're here on this island. If there are any other worlds out there, why did we end up on this one? And suppose there are other worlds." He looked out at the water. "Then ours is just a little piece of something much greater. So we could have just as easily ended up somewhere else, right?"

On the second day Riku threw Sora one of the star-shaped fruits that grew on the crooked palm. It was a paopu, and everyone on the islands knew the legend. "If two people share one, their destinies become intertwined. They'll remain a part of each other's lives no matter what. C'mon, I know you want to try it." Sora went red and wouldn't answer. Later Riku challenged him to a race along the beach to settle what the raft would be called, and when he saw Sora's face he raised the stakes. "Deal? The winner gets to share a paopu with Kairi."

Further along the sand Kairi sat against the seawall, threading shells onto a string. When Sora asked what it was for, she didn't look up. "This? I'm making a necklace of thalassa shells. In the old days, sailors always wore thalassa shells. They were supposed to ensure a safe voyage." She held up the shape it was making, and it was a star. "See this? It's a charm to help us find each other if we ever get separated. The three of us will always be together."

There was a cave on the island behind the waterfall. That afternoon Sora went in alone, looking for something for the raft, and remembered the first time.

They had been much smaller then, and there was a rumour of a monster, and Sora had sworn to it. "It's true! I saw it with my own eyes!" Riku had been a sceptic even at that size. "You sure you didn't just hear it this time?" Sora wouldn't be talked out of it. "What difference does it make? There's a huge monster in there, I tell you!" And Riku, who settled most arguments by accepting the other side whole, accepted it. "All right. Suppose there really is a monster. Think we can beat it by ourselves, Sora?" Sora was already on his feet. "No problem. Let's do it!"

They went in loudly, and then went very quiet. Riku went first. "Shh, quiet. We've gotta be careful." Sora stopped with a hand held out behind him. "Listen! There! Can you hear it growling?" Riku walked on. "See that? It was just the wind making that noise."

There was nothing in the cave but damp rock and old chalk, and Sora was disappointed. "Geez, is that really all that's in here?" Riku shrugged. "What do you expect in a boring place like this?" Sora had already turned away. "Aw, man. I wish it was a monster! Hold on! What's that over there?" At the back of the cave a wooden door stood in the rock, taller than either of them, with no handle and nothing to show what it was for. Riku put both hands on it and pushed. "A window, or maybe a door? It won't open."

Sora had already lost interest. "Sure. But isn't there anything fun to do now? Hey, you know the new girl at the mayor's house? She arrived on the night of the meteor shower!" But Riku was still looking at the door. "When we grow up, let's get off this island. We'll go on real adventures, not this kid stuff!"

The door was still there now, still without a handle, and the walls around it were covered in old chalk. Sora picked up a stone with an edge on it and scratched a drawing into the rock, carefully, of himself holding out a star-shaped fruit to Kairi. It took him some time. He was still crouched in front of it when he realised he was not alone.

A figure in a brown hooded robe was standing between him and the way out, where nothing had been before. It came no closer, and the voice under the hood was unhurried, as if it had all the time in the world. "I've come to see the door to this world."

Sora put his back to the wall. "Well, whoever you are, stop freaking me out like this! Huh?" The figure was not listening to him. "This world has been connected. Tied to the darkness, soon to be completely eclipsed." Sora tried again. "W, what are you talking about?" When he asked where it had come from, it answered something else. "You do not yet know what lies beyond the door."

Sora understood that much at least. "So, you're from another world!" The hood did not move. "There is so very much to learn. You understand so little." Sora lifted his chin. "Oh yeah? Well, you'll see. I'm gonna get out and learn what's out there." And the figure dismissed him. "A meaningless effort. One who knows nothing can understand nothing."

When Sora looked again, the cave was empty. He told nobody about it.

That evening, with Riku gone up to the house, Kairi sat on the dock with Sora, her heels knocking against the pilings. "You know, Riku has changed." Sora asked her how, and she didn't answer that. She looked out at the water, and then said something else in a rush. "Sora, let's take the raft and go, just the two of us!" He turned so fast he nearly went off the dock, and she laughed at him. "Just kidding!"

Then she said the 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?" The sun was nearly down. "I just can't wait. Once we set sail, it'll be great."

The Door Has Opened

That night a storm came in over the play island and stayed there, which storms did not do. Sora watched it from his window, and then he was out of the window and running for the boats. "A storm? Oh no! The raft!"

A dark mass hung turning in the sky over the island, and the island beneath it was covered in the small black things from his dream. They came up out of the sand, the boards of the dock and the faces of the rocks. When he hit one with his wooden sword, the sword went through it like smoke. So he ran the length of the beach and over the bridge, to the little island with the crooked tree on it.

Riku was standing there, alone, looking up at the dark. Riku had been the one to open the door in the cave, and he was not afraid of anything that had come out of it.

Sora shouted at him over the wind. "Where's Kairi? I thought she was with you!" Riku did not raise his voice, and Sora heard him anyway. "The door has opened." He turned round, and his face was lit up. "The door has opened, Sora! Now we can go to the outside world!"

Sora stared at him. "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. We may never see our parents again. There's no turning back. But this may be our only chance. We can't let fear stop us!" Darkness was spreading out across the ground from under Riku's feet, in a circle, slowly, the way water spreads, and he put his hand out across it to Sora. "I'm not afraid of the darkness!"

Sora reached for him. The dark rose around both of them, and Riku sank into it and was gone. It came up Sora's legs too.

Something appeared in his hand instead. It was a key as long as his arm, silver in the blade and the teeth, with a gold guard around the grip and a small charm hanging from the hilt on a chain. It weighed about what the wooden sword had weighed, and the light that came off it drove the darkness back down off him.

He cut his way back across the island to the cave. It took a long time. The key worked against the black things, but there were a great many of them.

Kairi was standing inside, facing the door at the back of the cave, too still, with her arms at her sides. When she turned her head toward him and said his name it came out slowly. "Sora." Then the door came open behind her.

What came through it was wind with nothing in it but dark. It picked her up off the floor and threw her down the length of the cave toward him, her arms out, reaching, and he braced himself to catch her. She passed straight through him as if he were not there. When he turned, she was not behind him. She was gone.

The blast threw him out of the cave. When he got up, the island was coming apart around him. Only one piece of it was left, floating over nothing, and the giant from the dream rose out of the dark to stand on it with him. He fought it on the last of his own island with a key he had been holding for less than an hour.

Then 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 King's Letter

A long way from the islands, in a castle where nothing had gone wrong yet, a duck came down a corridor at a run and woke a dog by shouting at him. "Wake up, Goofy, wake up! This is serious!!" The dog opened one eye. "Hey there, Donald. G'morning."

Donald was the court magician, white-feathered and short-tempered, in a blue hat and a navy jacket. Goofy was the captain of the guard, tall and gangling and never in a hurry, with ears that hung down and two front teeth that stuck out. That morning Donald had gone to greet the king in the audience chamber and found the throne empty, and the king's dog Pluto, yellow and floppy-eared, behind it with a letter in his mouth.

The letter was in the king's hand. "Donald, Sorry to rush off without sayin' goodbye, but there's big trouble brewin'." The stars, he wrote, had been going out. "Not sure why, but the stars have been blinkin' out, one by one." There was more, and the heart of it was this: "There's someone with a 'key', the key to our survival." Donald and Goofy were to find whoever held it and stay with them. "We need that key or we're doomed!" They were to start at a place called Traverse Town. "So go to Traverse Town and find Leon. He'll point you in the right direction." And at the bottom: "P.S. Would ya apologize to Minnie for me? Thanks, pal. Signed, Mickey."

Goofy read it over Donald's shoulder. "Gawrsh, I sure hope he's all right."

Queen Minnie, a mouse in a pink gown with a small gold crown, read it too, and took it more calmly than either of them. "It means we'll just have to trust the king." She sent them after him. Donald drew himself up. "Your Highness. Don't worry. We'll find the king and this 'key.'"

She had one more thing for them. "Oh, and to chronicle your travels, he will accompany you." There was a cricket on the table, standing on the edge of the letter, and he had been there some time before anyone looked down. "Over here! Cricket's the name. Jiminy Cricket, at your service." His own world was gone too. "It was terrible. We were scattered. And as far as I can see, I'm the only one who made it to this castle." Goofy was stricken for him. "Gawrsh, Jiminy, your world disappeared, too?"

Jiminy rode on the brim of Donald's hat down to the hangar, and by the time they got there he had produced a book from somewhere and begun to write in it. "Well, I see big adventures coming their way! Looks like it's up to me to keep track of it all in my journal!" The queen saw them off. "We hope for your safe return. Please help the king."

The ship was a Gummi Ship, built of bright blocks fitted together, and two chipmunks ran it from a gantry. Donald called up to them from the cockpit. "Hello up there? Donald Duck to launch crew! Anytime you're ready." Pluto had got aboard while nobody was looking at the ramp.

They were a little way out when Goofy leaned forward and put a finger to the glass. "Look, a star's goin' out!"

It was. Each of the stars was a world, and one of them had just stopped being one. The two of them watched the place where it had been. Then Goofy started to say something about which way they ought to go. "Uh, Donald. Ya know, I betcha that." He did not get to the end of it.

A Town Where It Is Always Night

Sora came out of the dark in an alley, face down, and a dog he had never seen before was sniffing at him. He sat up. "What a dream." Then he looked round him properly. "This isn't a dream! Where am I? Oh, boy." He asked the dog. "Do you know where we are? Hey." The dog trotted round the corner and was gone.

The town had three districts, numbered rather than named, and the sky over it was night and stayed night, full of stars. People whose worlds had been swallowed came here, though none of them could say how. They took rooms in the hotel, opened shops, and waited. Sora walked it for what would have been an evening, looking for two faces among a great many strangers.

In a shop off the First District, a man with goggles pushed up on his blond hair and a toothpick in his mouth looked up when the door went. "Hey there, how can I. Aw, it's only a kid." Sora said something about it, and got 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."

Crossing the Second District, Sora saw a man ahead of him stagger. He stopped mid-step and put a hand to his chest. Something small and shining came out of him, quite slowly, and he came apart from the middle outward without a sound. Where he had been, one of the black things stood up.

After that Sora saw them everywhere, and a new kind among them, knights in dark armour with a sign on their chests: a heart, with a cross driven through it. They came at him, and he fought them off with the key. Then a man was there, who had been following the key and not the boy. He was older than Sora by ten years or so, with long brown hair and a scar at an angle across his face, and he carried a sword with the grip of a gun. "They'll come at you out of nowhere," he said, and cut one down on the way past. "And they'll keep on coming at you, as long as you continue to wield the Keyblade. But why? Why would it choose a kid like you?"

Sora put the key behind his back. "What? There's no way you're getting this!" The man let his shoulders down. "All right, then have it your way."

Their fight went across most of the square. Sora was faster, but he had been fighting for a day without sleep and had no idea what he was doing with the thing in his hand. The man knew exactly, and let him wear himself out. At the end of it Sora was down on one knee on the stones, and then he was down altogether. The last thing he heard was the man saying to himself, "Still. Looks like things are worse than we thought. A lot worse." And then a girl's voice, running up. "Hey, you found him! Great job, Leon!" And then, closer: "I think you might've overdone it, Squall."

He woke in a hotel room with a girl leaning over him, short black hair under a headband, and he said the name he had been saying all day before his eyes were properly open. The girl sat back. "Kairi? Who are you talking about? I'm the great ninja Yuffie!"

The man was leaning against the wall by the door. The key was not in Sora's hand, and Leon did not give it back. "It was the only way to conceal your heart from them. 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. "Those without hearts," Leon said. "The darkness in people's hearts, that's what attracts them. And there is darkness within every heart." Yuffie leaned in. "The ones who attacked you, you remember?" Sora said he did, and that he had hit one with a wooden sword and nothing had happened. They were called the Heartless.

And the key in his hand was the reason they kept coming. "The Heartless have great fear of the Keyblade," Leon said. "That's why they'll keep coming after you no matter what." Yuffie grinned at Sora's face. "The Keyblade chooses its master. And it chose you."

Leon told him where the knowledge came from. "Our ruler was a wise man named Ansem. He dedicated his life to studying the Heartless." And there was a woman, whose name he spoke as if it tasted bad, who had been using what Ansem studied. Her name was Maleficent. "She's the reason this town is full of Heartless. Don't take her lightly."

In the next room a young woman in a pink dress, with her hair in a long braid down her back, was telling the same things to a duck and a dog. She had met them in the square. "Excuse me. Did the king send you?" They said he had, and she began at the beginning. "Okay, you know there are many other worlds out there besides your castle and this town, right?" Goofy looked worried. "But they're supposed to be a secret." She agreed that they were.

Her name was Aerith, and she told them about the man Leon had named. "He was studying the Heartless. He recorded all of his findings in a very detailed report." The pages of it had been scattered, across worlds, and the man himself was gone.

She knew the name Maleficent too. "She's been using the Heartless for years." Goofy and Donald looked at each other. Aerith was thinking aloud now. "No wonder there are more and more Heartless everywhere. The only way to stop them is." She did not finish it.

The King's Fools

The Heartless came up through the stones of all three districts at once. Sora had the key again, back in his hand when he needed it. In the first minute he was cut off from Leon and Yuffie and driven back into the Third District, a walled square with a fountain in it, and the doors shut behind him.

On a balcony two floors above him, a duck and a dog were backing away from a knight of the black things. "Gawrsh, are these the Heartless guys?" said the dog. Then the balcony gave way, and the two of them fell on top of Sora, and all three went down in a heap.

Donald was up first, his staff already out, and he looked at what the boy under him was holding and forgot to be angry about the fall. There was no time to discuss it. "Let's go get 'em, Goofy!"

A suit of armour came into the square after the knights. It broke apart into its pieces and went on fighting as pieces, a head, two hands and two feet, and the three of them took it down between them before they had even been introduced.

In a dark chamber far from that square, round a table, a handful of people had watched the whole thing. One had hair made of blue fire, and he was delighted. "That little squirt took down that Heartless! Who'd have thought it?" A tall man in a turban was not. "Such is the power of the Keyblade. The child's strength is not his own." A pirate with a hook for a hand spoke up. "And the brat's friends are the king's lackeys. Swoggle me eyes, they're all bilge rats by the look of them." A sea witch had a suggestion. "Why don't we turn him into a Heartless? That'll settle things quick enough."

The woman at the head of the table had not spoken until then. "Enough." She did not need to say it twice. She was tall and green-skinned, with yellow eyes and a black horned headdress, and a staff with a green orb at the top that she held the way other people hold a folded newspaper. "The Keyblade has chosen him. Will it be he who conquers the darkness? Or will the darkness swallow him? Either way, he could be quite useful."

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. Donald and Goofy told him about their king and his letter. "So, you're looking for me?" They told him about their ship, and about other worlds, and Sora stopped listening halfway through and did the only arithmetic that mattered to him. "I wonder if I could find Riku and Kairi."

They told him he could come along, and he said he supposed so, without much in it. "Yeah, I guess." Donald looked him over and did not like what he saw. "But you can't come along looking like that. Understand? No frowning. No sad face. Okay?" Goofy nodded hard. "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 so bad that the two of them burst out laughing, and so did he. "Ok, why not? I'll go with you guys." The dog put out a hand. "Name's Goofy." Sora took it. "I'm Sora." The duck gave his own name, and then remembered something. "Hold on. Sora, this is for you." It was a spell, the first of several.

That was the bargain, stated once and never restated. Sora would look for Riku and Kairi. The other two would look for their king. They would go together because each was the only way the other had of getting anywhere. And the orders the duck and the dog carried were to find the key and stay with it.

Aerith and Leon came to see them off at the ship, which Sora had not expected. "I hope you find your friends," Aerith said, and then, more seriously, "Please lock the Keyholes. You're the only one who can." Leon was brief. "Look out for each other. Keep your spirits up."

A Circuit of Doors

The months after that had a pattern. They would come down in a world and find the door hidden somewhere in it, a Keyhole. Sora would put the key to it and lock it, and after that the Heartless could not get into that world's heart. Then they went on.

The first world was a country where a trial was already under way when they arrived, and the girl it was being done to was standing in the middle of the court being very polite about it. Her name was Alice. "I'm on trial? But why?" The queen on the bench had it all worked out. "The girl is the culprit. There's no doubt about it. And the reason is, because I say so, that's why!" Alice stood up for herself. "Of course! I've done absolutely nothing wrong!"

Sora leaned over to the others. "Hey, guys, we should help her out." Goofy hesitated. "We're outsiders, so wouldn't that be muddling?" But the queen was already passing sentence, and Sora was already walking. "Hold it right there!" The whole court turned to look at him. "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 went and found proof and brought it back. Then, in the middle of the court, the lights went out, and when they came back on the girl was gone. Nobody in that country could say where. The world's Keyhole, when they found it, was in the mouth of a sleeping doorknob, and Donald jumped when it spoke. "It talks!" Sora locked it and they left without her.

At the Coliseum in the next world a little satyr who trained heroes looked them over and gave his verdict. "Two words: You guys ain't heroes." Sora bristled. "What's so funny? I've fought a bunch of monsters!" Donald pointed at the three of them. "You got heroes standing right in front of you." Goofy agreed. "Yup. He's a real hero chosen by the Keyblade!" In the end they were let into the games. "Looks like I'm headed for the games!"

Below the stands, the god of the dead was entertaining a visitor, and he did not want her there. "Who invited you to the party? Stay out of this. This is my show." Maleficent let him have it. "As you wish. Fight to your heart's content."

He had hired a swordsman for the games, a quiet man in black with a great sword, and after Sora had fought him the man told him why he had taken the work. "I'm looking for someone. Hades promised to help. I tried to exploit the power of darkness, but it backfired. I fell into darkness, and I couldn't find the light." He was still looking when they left.

They argued about the next world before they had landed. From the ship it was nothing but trees. Donald wanted to go on. "In a backwater place like that? No way! Let's move on." Goofy was looking down at it. "Hey, Donald, maybe King Mickey's down there." They went down.

On the ground Donald laid down the law. They were not to meddle in any world's business, and they were not, under any circumstances, to tell anyone that other worlds existed. Sora pointed out that nobody had said anything about meddling when he stopped a trial. The argument went nowhere, and none of them apologised for any part of it.

A man who lived in that jungle, raised among the apes, helped them find each other again. A hunter came after the apes with a gun and let the darkness into himself to get them, and the Heartless took him. Donald lost his temper with him before it happened. "What's the big idea!" Afterwards the jungle man tried to put what he had understood into the few words he had. "Friends, same heart. Clayton, lose heart. No heart, no see friends."

The Keyhole in that world was behind a waterfall. On the way to it Goofy found a gummi block and held it up. "Sora, look what we found. Look at this." It was not the kind their ship was built from, and for a moment it looked like a clue. "But it's sure not the king's."

At the round table in the dark chamber, the man in the turban wanted to know how it had gone wrong. "What drew the Heartless to that world?" Maleficent told him. "The hunter lured them there. 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 was not interested in the hunter. "A weak-hearted fool like him stood no chance against the Heartless. But the boy is a problem. He found one of the Keyholes."

Maleficent was not troubled. "Fear not. It will take him ages to find the rest. Besides, he remains blissfully unaware of our other plan." She let that sit. "They are falling into our hands, one by one. Speaking of which." In a cell below the chamber a girl was waiting: Alice, taken out of the middle of her trial.

Back in Traverse Town, Cid had a word to say about how they had been getting about. "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."

The Boy Who Got Out

Riku was standing in the First District, alive and unmarked, dressed as he had been on the night of the storm. Sora got four words out and had to start again. Riku grinned at him. "Isn't she with you? Well, don't worry. I'm sure she made it off the island, too. We're finally free. Hey, she might even be looking for us now."

Then he reached over and took the key out of Sora's hand, and it went to him easily. He turned it over, held it up and looked along 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?" He handed it back and Sora took it. Neither of them said anything about what had just happened, because as far as either of them could see, nothing had.

Goofy had been waiting to be introduced, and he said the part Sora had meant to say fourth or fifth. "Oh, and guess what? Sora's the Keyblade master." Donald could hardly believe it himself. "Who would've thought it?" Riku looked at the dog, and at the duck, and at Sora for a little longer. Sora wanted him to come with them, and Donald would not have it. The two of them were still arguing about it when Sora turned round and found Riku gone.

Somewhere out of sight a woman in black was standing beside him. "You see? It's just as I told you. 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."

Sora, who had not seen her, was only glad. Riku was all right. Kairi might be too.

Before they left the town Leon took them into the Third District and told them what they were looking for when they looked for a Keyhole. "Every world among the stars has a Keyhole. And each one leads to the heart of that world. There must be one in this town as well." There was, and they found it, and Sora locked it.

In a desert city a young woman was running through a market with guards behind her. She was the sultan's daughter. "I'm Jasmine. My father is the sultan of Agrabah." The sultan's vizier wanted her, the tall man in the turban from the round table, and he had a use for her that he did not trouble to hide. "Not a chance. You see, she's a princess." He smiled. "One of seven who somehow hold the key to opening the door." When he came for her, Sora put himself in the way. "Jasmine, run!"

Maleficent visited the vizier in his rooms. "And the Keyhole?" The Heartless were searching for it, he told her. And the princess? He was dismissive. "Agrabah is full of holes for rats to hide in. But why worry about Princess Jasmine? With her or without her, surely this world will be ours when we find the Keyhole." She corrected him. "You said you had things under control." He had nothing to say to that. "We need all seven princesses of heart to open the final door. Any fewer is useless."

He revised himself. "Well, if the princess is that important, we'll find her. Find Jasmine and bring her to me at once." She warned him on her way out. "Don't steep yourself in darkness too long. The Heartless consume the careless." He smiled at that. "Your concern is touching, but hardly necessary." And later, when Sora and a boy from the market called Aladdin had got in his way again, the vizier had an idea. "He's more persistent than I expected. Why not explain the situation to that boy Riku? Doing so may actually prove useful to our." Maleficent did not let him finish. "That boy again?"

Riku took the princess. He stepped out of the dark in the middle of the fight, seized her, and carried her back into the dark, all the way to the castle where Maleficent kept the others.

The vizier was destroyed that day, in a cave under the desert that fell in on itself. Goofy had understood who Jasmine was a little behind everyone else. "Uh. So that makes you a princess." Then the cave began to shake. "Whoa, we'd better get out of here!" Aladdin was left in a city without her. "Sora, please find Jasmine for me."

In the dark chamber Maleficent spoke of the vizier to no one in particular. "Jafar was beyond help, consumed by his own hatred. One should beware of letting it burn too fiercely."

She had brought Riku a long way by then. "We had a deal, yes? You help us, and we grant you your wish." He had kept his side. He still did not trust her, and he did not pretend to. "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." Then she gave him what he had wanted from the start. They had found Kairi. "Go to her. Your vessel is waiting."

The vessel was a pirate ship, and its captain, the man with the hook from the round table, did not care for his passenger. "Just remember, this is no pleasure cruise. It won't be a pleasant voyage." Riku said something to Maleficent as he went that she chose to take as thanks. "Believe what you wish. But lest we forget, I kept my end of the bargain."

Inside the Whale

It came at them out of open space with its mouth already open, and it was the size of a town. "It's a giant whale!" Donald grabbed at the controls. "Whoa! Sora, get us out of here!" Jiminy knew it from home. "It's Monstro! He's a whale of a whale, and vicious besides!" Sora got them clear of it twice. The third time it took the ship and everything in it, and the light went.

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 an old woodcarver in there already, who had been swallowed with his boat. "My name is Geppetto. I'm Pinocchio's father. When we got separated, I traveled all over, looking for him. Thank goodness we're together again." His son was a wooden boy who had come to life, and who ran off at every opportunity. Sora asked him how they had ended up in a whale. "It's true. So, how did you end up here, Pinocchio?"

Riku was standing at the far end of the chamber, and he had been there for a while. He told Sora he was looking for Kairi. He had a way to find her, he said, and Sora could come with him. Then something burst through the wall of the stomach at both of them, a great cage of a creature with the puppet shut inside it, and Riku took the left side of it without discussing the arrangement. "You up for this?" They fought it the way they had fought everything on the island for years, without looking at each other and without getting in each other's way, and it took about a minute.

Then Riku picked up the puppet and took him away down the chamber. Sora, who had not yet understood, called after the boy. "Pinocchio, stop fooling around! This is no time for games!" Geppetto understood before he did. "Pinocchio! Pinocchio! Please! Give me back my son!"

Riku turned round with the wooden boy under his arm, and he was smiling. "But Sora, I thought you liked games. Or are you too cool to play them now that you have the Keyblade?" He meant to use the wooden boy, somehow, to find a way to Kairi's heart. Geppetto would not hear it. "He's no puppet! Pinocchio is my little boy!"

Sora came up the chamber toward him. "Hey, let Pinocchio go, Riku." And when Riku would not: "Heart or no heart, at least he still has a conscience. You might not hear it, but right now it's loud and clear. And it's telling me you're on the wrong side!"

The cage came back through the wall between them. When it was gone, so was Riku, through a tear in the air that closed behind him. He had left the puppet on the floor. Jiminy was already running to him. Afterwards, with the ship patched and the whale behind them, Goofy looked back. "I sure hope Pinocchio and Geppetto are okay."

Maleficent was waiting when Riku came back to her. "Why do you still care about that boy? He has all but deserted you for the Keyblade and his new companions, after all." Riku said he had not been thinking about Sora at all. "Oh, really? Of course you were. Beware the darkness in your heart. The Heartless prey upon it."

He asked her what had become of Kairi's heart. "Taken by the Heartless, no doubt." Without her heart, it was put to her, the girl was no better than a lifeless puppet, and Maleficent agreed. "Precisely."

Then she told him what the princesses were for. "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."

In another world they went under the sea, where Donald's magic turned them into creatures that could swim ("Not with my magic, we won't. Just leave it to me."). There they found the sea witch from the round table, after a king's trident, and they found that world's Keyhole and locked it. Goofy put the question to the king there that none of them could answer. "Oh, yeah, the crystal! Why did you destroy it?"

They went to a town where it was always the night before a holiday, and Goofy did not like the look of it. "This sure is a spooky place. I'll bet the people here are scary-lookin' too." Donald had the answer. "Don't worry. We look spooky, too. If they scare us, we'll scare them right back!" The king of that town was trying to build a heart out of spare parts. A bag of bugs from the round table stole it, and they got it back and locked that world's Keyhole too.

By then they had a bundle of loose pages, picked up in chests and cellars and from under fallen things in worlds the man who wrote them had never lived in. They were pages of Ansem's report. Aerith read them out in the library in Traverse Town with the three of them sitting on the floor.

The first began with a sentence she read twice. "Darkness sleeps in every heart, no matter how pure." Another page said he had begun to experiment on the darkness in people's hearts, and that the hearts of the people he tried it on had not held. "How fragile our hearts are!" Then there were creatures under his castle that had not been there before, without feeling, multiplying in the dark, and he gave them a name. "Those who lack hearts. I will call them the Heartless." He came to think they took hearts, and made more of themselves from what they took. "Could they be the darkness in people's hearts?"

There were pages out of order. One said he had found stuff that had fallen out of the sky, stuff that belonged to no world he knew. "Could there be uncharted worlds up there?" Another said he had built a machine that made Heartless of its own, and he was pleased with it. "This may be a step toward creating a heart from nothing."

The Captain's Ship

Goofy saw it first, out in the dark between worlds. "Uh, a big ship is catching up to us." It was a galleon, under sail in open space. When they came down in the next world, it was lying off an island there, and Sora found his way aboard.

Riku was on the deck. The captain of that ship, the man with the hook from the round table, stood a pace behind him and waited to be told what to do, and that told Sora more about the last few months than anything Riku said. "Let's get under way, already. And keep Sora away from Kairi until we're ready to land."

She was below, in a cabin with a lamp burning in it, lying on her back on a bunk with her hands at her sides. It was the first time Sora had seen her since the storm. He said her name, then said it again with a hand on her shoulder. She did not wake, and there was nothing wrong with her that he could point to.

Riku was in the doorway behind him. He had found her, while Sora had been off with a duck and a dog, and he looked at the two of them with something worse than anger. "Are they that important to you? More important than old friends? Instead of worrying about them, you should be asking, about her."

Sora told him what he had learned in Traverse Town: the things Riku was ordering about would turn on him in the end and take his heart. Riku did not want to hear it. He raised his hand, and something stood up out of Sora's own shadow: his height, his shape, black all through with yellow eyes. The floor opened, and Sora fell into the hold with it.

It fought the way he fought, making every mistake he made half a second before he made it, and it held him off a long time in the dark before he beat it. Donald and Goofy were in the hold too, with a girl called Wendy, whom the pirates had taken. She had seen the girl in the cabin. "Oh, why, yes. But she seems to be asleep. She hasn't budged an inch." Sora told the others that he had found Kairi. Donald cared more, at that moment, about the Heartless coming out of the walls. "Sounds great. Okay, but first, how about getting off!"

On deck the captain wanted his reward. Riku told him the girl he had caught, Wendy, was not one of the seven and was of no use to anybody, and the captain was outraged. "What? So Wendy's not one of the chosen ones?" He had never been told what the seven were for.

When Sora came up out of the hold, Riku was gone, and so was Kairi. The captain was glad to tell him. "Quite a codfish that Riku, running off with the girl without even saying goodbye." Sora demanded to know where, and got it. "To the ruins of Hollow Bastion, where Maleficent resides. But you won't be getting there." Sora said Kairi's heart could still be found, and the captain laughed at him. "Hmph. You're wasting your time! The Heartless have devoured that girl's heart. I'll stake me other hand it's lost forever."

The Heartless came up round them on the deck. "Hand over the Keyblade and I'll spare your lives. Be glad I'm merciful, unlike the Heartless." He pointed with the hook at a plank run out over nothing. "So, which will it be? The Keyblade, or the plank?"

A boy in green who could fly got them off that deck by teaching them to leave it upward. Goofy, some way above the mainmast, wanted to know how any of it worked. "So, uh, how come you can fly?" Nobody gave him an answer he was satisfied with. The Keyhole in that world was on the face of a clock in a tower over a town, and they got to it through the air.

Afterwards, with the captain beaten and the ship quiet, Goofy said what he had been carrying for two worlds, and stopped himself halfway through it. "Uh, Kairi couldn't wake up, so maybe she's really lost her." Wendy answered him before Sora could. "You'll find her, Sora. Just don't give up."

They found a page of the report on the ship. It said a king from another world had come to see its writer, travelling by the same kind of blocks their own ship was built of, and had told him a legend about a key. The writer was taken with it. "A key opens doors. It must be connected to the door I have opened." The page after it was the last of the ones they had. Every world had a heart, it said, and every heart a door, and the man who wrote it had decided what he would do. "I will cast it off and plunge into the depths of darkness."

Riku had not gone by ship. He had carried Kairi himself, through the dark, without any vessel at all, because he would not hand her to anyone else. He arrived at Maleficent's castle worn to nothing by it. She was displeased with him. "It was reckless to bring her here without at least using a vessel. Remember, relying too heavily on the dark powers could cost you your heart." And while he was still spent, she gave him the rest of it. "Yes, the untapped power that lies within you. Now, child, it's time you awakened that power and realized your full potential."

The Delivery Boy

Before they left for the castle, a voice spoke from inside him. It was hers. It was quiet, and it did not come from the room around him. He put a hand flat on his own chest without meaning to. "I believe in you."

For a moment he was somewhere else: a library, in a house he had never been in, a small girl 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 asked for many times before. He came into it partway through. "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." Then he was back, with his hand on his chest. Nobody else had heard anything.

Goofy saw his face and did not ask. He said something else instead. "The king told us to go out and find the key bearer, and we found you. So as long as we stick together, it'll all work out okay. Ya just gotta believe in yourself, that's all."

Cid knew where they were going before they told him. "You guys ever hear of Maleficent? I hear she's in town." He had put in the part that would take them there, he said, but he did not like it. "I installed that navigation gummi. But, ya know? That place is crawling with Heartless. Don't say I didn't warn you." They would never get through. Then he 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. "The secret waterway. 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!" It took them most of a day, wading, under the town. "You found it? All right, I'll go fix up your ship." When they came back for it he was wiping his hands, and he said something that was not like him. "All set! You can get going any time. Kid, I gotta say, I wish you didn't have to face all this danger."

The castle stood over an abyss with broken rock hanging in the air round it, and the water there ran upward in columns. Goofy stared out at it. "Gawrsh, look at that!"

At the water's edge Riku was standing over a great animal, a beast on all fours that had been fighting for a long time and was still trying to get up. Riku looked down at it with something like curiosity. "No vessel, no help from the Heartless. So tell me, how'd you get here?" Maleficent answered from the steps above. "A castaway. 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."

Then Riku turned round to Sora and told him what he had worked out. The key had never been Sora's. It had come to him on the night the island fell because Riku had not been standing there to take it, and Sora had been carrying it for him since, like a delivery boy. "Maleficent was right. You don't have what it takes to save Kairi. It's up to me. Only the Keyblade master can open the secret door, and change the world."

He put his hand out, and the Keyblade left Sora's grip, crossed the air, and settled into Riku's hand as if it had been made to sit there. Then Riku threw him something. Sora caught it without looking, and knew what it was before he saw it. It was the wooden sword from the island.

Riku went up the steps. Donald and Goofy stood where they were. Goofy started to say something to Sora and could not get to the end of it. "Oh! Well, I know the king told us to follow the key and all. But." Donald did not look at Sora. "Goofy. Let's go. We have to remember our mission." And they went, after the key, as they had been told to, and neither of them looked back.

Sora was left at the bottom of the castle with a wooden sword and a bleeding animal. The animal got up again and started up the steps, and Sora went after it, because it was going the right way.

He caught them in the great hall at the foot of the stairs. Riku had changed. There was something darker about the way he stood now, and about what he wore, and Donald and Goofy were behind him. Sora said he had come for Kairi, and that his heart was all the weapon he needed. Riku laughed at him. "Your heart? What good will that weak little thing do for you?"

Sora held up the wooden sword. "I don't need a weapon! My friends are my power!"

"Really. Well, we'll just see about that!" Riku threw dark fire across the hall, and Sora had a piece of wood to meet it with.

Goofy got in front of it. He did it from a standing start, from the wrong side of the room, and planted his shield with the whole of himself behind it, and the fire glanced off its face. Riku told him to move. "Not on your life! 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 for about four seconds, and then he came down off it. "Hold on, Goofy! We'll tell him together."

The Keyblade left Riku's hand. It crossed the hall in front of all of them and put itself into Sora's. Riku looked at his own empty hand, and at the duck and the dog standing on the wrong side of the room. Then Sora beat him. It took some time, and at the end of it Riku broke away, ran up the stairs and through a door, and was gone.

He got four rooms into the castle before he stopped. He put a hand on the wall. There was nobody with him, and he had lost track of which end of the corridor he had come in by. "Where, am I? Sora! Kairi!"

Something came to him out of the dark at the end of the corridor, a figure in a cloak, standing further off than it needed to, and the voice was unhurried. "Know this. The heart that is strong and true shall win the Keyblade."

Riku turned on it. "What? 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 said nothing for a while, and the figure waited without any sign of impatience, which was the most persuasive thing about it. "It's really quite simple. Open yourself to the darkness. That is all. Let your heart, your being, become darkness itself."

Riku said yes. He said it out loud, in an empty corridor, and he still did not know what he was saying it to.

The Mistress of All Evil

In the chamber at the top of the castle, Maleficent stood before a great wall with the shape of a keyhole cut into it, unfinished, and raised her staff. "O purest of hearts! Reveal to me the Keyhole!"

Riku was behind her. She had not heard him come in. He spoke in his own voice, and it was not quite his own. "So, I see the path has emerged at last." She did not turn round. "Yes. The Keyhole to the darkness." He warned her, quite calmly, what it would do. "Unlock it and the Heartless will overrun this world." She laughed at that. "What do I care? The darkness holds no power over me. Rather, I will use its power to rule all worlds."

Riku smiled. "Such confidence."

He held up what he carried now: a Keyblade, red and black, with teeth shaped like a heart with a break driven through it. It had been made from the hearts of the six princesses she had gathered. It did nothing to the keyhole in the wall. Maleficent stared at it. "Oh! Impossible! The princesses of heart are all here! It must be her." The seventh. The girl Riku had brought through the dark, who lay somewhere below them with no heart in her. Then Maleficent heard something else. "The king's fools are here. I'll deal with them myself. You stay here and guard the princesses."

She met them in the chapel at the top of the castle, with the work nearly done. "I'm afraid you're too late. Any moment now, the final Keyhole will be unsealed. This world will be plunged into darkness. It is unstoppable." And when they did not stop: "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, held her ground there, and brought the ceiling down on them in pieces. It took the three of them a long time, and at the end of it she sank to one knee with her staff across her lap.

Then someone came up the chapel behind her, walking, in no hurry. It was Riku. "Do you need some help?" He showed her the Keyblade of heart. Unlike Sora's, he said, this one could unlock a person's heart, and he showed her how. He drove it into her.

Maleficent looked down at it. "Wha."

He twisted the key. "Now, open your heart, surrender it to the darkness! Become darkness itself!"

She threw her head back and opened her arms, and cried out as if she had finally arrived. "This is it! This power! Darkness. The true darkness!" Then she became a dragon, enormous and black, filling the chapel to the roof and breathing green fire.

It died in the end. Afterwards there was a scorch on the flagstones, roughly the shape of a woman, with her cloak lying in the middle of it and nothing else. Riku looked down at it. "How ironic. She was just another puppet after all." He stepped over the cloak. "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." Then he was gone.

Pages of the report lay on the chapel floor, blown into a corner, and Sora picked them up while the scorch was still warm. A Heartless had led their writer to a door deep under his castle. He had opened it, and something had come out. "What was that powerful mass of energy?" The next page answered him. "That was the heart of the world."

The Seventh Princess

Most of the far wall of the great hall at the top of the castle was taken up by a keyhole. It was three men high and nearly finished, and something moved slowly in the dark behind it. Kairi lay on the floor in front of it on her back, as she had lain on the ship.

Riku stood over her. He spoke before Sora could reach her. "It's no use. That girl has lost her heart. She cannot wake up." And he told them what she was. "The Keyhole cannot be completed so long as the last princess of heart still sleeps."

Sora looked at the face that had been his friend's, and it was not his friend. Riku's voice said who it was. "It is I, Ansem, the seeker of darkness."

The name meant nothing to them except as a name they had been reading off loose pages for months, in a library, in a town with no morning, in the handwriting of a man who had been missing for years. "I know all that there is to know." Without her heart, he said, the girl could never release her power. "Yes, and without her power, the Keyhole will remain incomplete. It is time she awakened."

Then he came a step closer to Sora and tilted his head. "Don't you see yet? The princess's heart is responding. It has been there all along. Kairi's heart rests within you!" He turned 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!"

Sora put himself between them. "Forget it! There's no way you're taking Kairi's heart!"

He fought him across the whole width of that hall and won, and drove him back through the arch at the end of it. Goofy shouted from the door. "It won't work! The Keyhole's not finished yet!"

The red and black key lay on the flagstones where it had fallen. Sora stood over it for a while. "A Keyblade that unlocks people's hearts. I wonder." He picked it up, turned it so that the teeth faced him, and slowly drove it into his own chest, looking at the girl on the floor while he did it.

Light poured out of him: the heart that had been sheltering in him, and the six the key had been made from. Kairi's heart went home to her, and she opened her eyes. In the wall, the last of the Keyhole finished itself. And Sora, still standing, came apart into small lights and was gone. Kairi saw it and could not believe it. "Sora, are you really. No. It can't be! I won't let him go!" Donald was already running. "Sora. Sora!"

The man was back in the archway, in Riku's body, and pleased. "So, you have awakened at last, Princess. The Keyhole is now complete. You have served your purpose. But now it's over." Goofy stood in front of Kairi with his shield up. "Do you think we can stop him all by ourselves?"

He came toward them, and then he stopped. His face moved, and it was Riku's face for a moment, fighting, and the voice was Riku's alone. "You've got to run! The Heartless are coming!" The man in him could not believe it. "Impossible."

They ran. They got Kairi up between them and went down through the castle, and the Heartless came through the finished Keyhole after them in numbers that made the rooms go dark.

One of them did not attack. It was small and black, with round yellow eyes, no different from thousands of others, and it came after them at its own pace and stopped in front of Kairi. Goofy got his shield up. Kairi put her hand on the shield and moved it down. "Sora? Is that you?" It could not answer. She knelt on the stones and put her arms round it. "This time, I'll protect you."

Then there was light, and the Heartless nearest them came apart in it. Sora was standing there with his arms round her, himself again, whole. Neither of them let go for a while. "Sora, are you feeling okay now? If you're not, then say so." And then, into his shoulder: "Even in your Heartless form, I knew it was you."

They got out of the castle and back to Traverse Town. Leon had worked out what they had seen before they finished telling it. "So the darkness is flowing out of the Keyhole." Aerith was puzzled. "I thought the Keyhole would strengthen the darkness. I mean, the darkness is strong, but still. It's almost as if someone is holding the darkness back."

And there was Riku. "That's right. You have one more friend to worry about," Leon said. "Riku's Keyblade must have been born of the captive princesses' hearts, just like that Keyhole you saw. Of course, without Kairi's heart, it remained incomplete. Once that Keyblade was destroyed, the princesses' hearts should have been freed. Don't worry, Sora. If anyone can save your friend, you can." The princesses had not come home. "It seems the other princesses have been freed as well. Jasmine apparently hasn't returned to Agrabah. I suspect the others are still in the castle, too."

Kairi walked with Sora under the town, in the waterway where Cid had kept his part, and stopped in front of a painting on the wall. "What a mysterious mural. It's almost hypnotizing." She did not know where she had come from, only that the castle had been home once, and the islands were home now. She asked him the thing she was afraid of. "You think it'll ever be the same again between us? Riku's lost his." She did not finish it. Sora said it would. "I didn't want to just forget about you, Sora. I couldn't."

He was going back for Riku, and she wanted to come. "Come on, Sora. We made it this far by sticking together. You can't go alone." He would not take her. So she put something into his hand and closed his fingers over it. It was the star of thalassa shells from the beach. "Take this. It's my lucky charm. Be sure to bring it back to me."

Where Everyone Came From

Sora went back into the castle with Donald and Goofy, and he was not the only one. Four people came up the steps from the water who had not been inside that building since they were children. Yuffie accounted for it. "We came in Cid's ship." They did not head straight for the Keyhole. Yuffie went into rooms that were not on the way to anything, and Aerith put a hand on a doorframe and stood there. "This is our childhood home. We wanted to see it again."

Leon stood in the entrance hall under the stained glass and looked the length of it, at the furniture still where somebody had left it and the black things climbing the walls. "It's in worse shape than I feared. It used to be so peaceful." This was the place called Hollow Bastion. It had been their home, and it had fallen to the Heartless nine years before. So had Kairi's.

The princesses were still in the castle. They had been freed from the key that held them, and they had stayed, holding back what was still coming through the open Keyhole with nothing but the light in their own hearts. Belle met them in the library. "You've come to seal the Keyhole, right? Please, be careful. The darkness is raging deep inside. We've been holding it back, but we can't hold out much longer." Alice was in the chapel with the others. "It's all we can do just to hold back the darkness." She looked toward the door. "We must close the Keyhole before it's too late." Jasmine could feel it. "Sora, please hurry! Darkness is pouring from the Keyhole."

A creature the size of a house stood between them and the Keyhole, and they killed it. Afterwards Leon found Sora standing in front of the finished Keyhole. "Sora. You did it."

Before Sora locked it, Aerith told him the price. "Once the worlds are restored, they'll be separate again." He worked out what that meant, about the islands, and the four of them, and a girl in Traverse Town. Aerith smiled at him. "No matter where we are, our hearts will bring us together again." Leon was plainer. "We may never meet again, but we'll never forget each other." Yuffie had the last word. "Besides, I couldn't forget you even if I wanted to." Leon nodded to the Keyhole. "Sora, good luck."

He locked it, and the wall was a wall again. Alice felt it at once. "Thank you, Sora. I think the darkness has begun to weaken." Jasmine had one favour to ask. "Please don't tell Aladdin about this. He will worry to death if you do! I will tell him about it, once I return to Agrabah."

The man in Riku's body was gone. He had left that world altogether, the princesses said, for another. Donald had already decided where. "Dive into the most dangerous place and we'll find him!"

When the man was driven out of the great hall, the boy whose body he had been wearing went somewhere else. Riku lay on his back in the dark. "Sora. Kairi. I'm sorry. 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."

A voice came to him, small and far off. "Riku, can you hear me? I'll be there soon." Riku looked round and saw nothing. "Who are you? What's happened to me?"

It was the king, though Riku did not know it. "I have the other Keyblade, the one that belongs to this world. I've been trying to get through to you, but the darkness in your heart kept me away." He told Riku where he was. "Your heart won the battle against darkness, but it was too late for your body. That's why you're here, in this place of darkness where hearts are gathered." And he told him what was coming. "The Door of Darkness will open soon, but it's a door we can't enter. It has to be closed from both sides. To do this, you need two keys and two hearts. Maybe you're here for the same reason I am. Maybe it was fate."

Riku did not care for fate. "Fate, huh? You seem to know everything, don't you? Then tell me: Are Sora and Kairi okay?" The voice would not tell him. "Don't you feel the echoes of their hearts? You already know the answer. Look inside your own heart."

The End of the World

It was not a world. It was the wreckage of every world the Heartless had eaten, fused into a single mass at the bottom of everything, and it hung there without turning. Goofy looked at it from the ship. "Gawrsh, is that all that's left of the worlds taken by the Heartless?"

They went down into it. Some of it was pieces of places that were gone, held whole, and they walked through them one after another and knew nearly all of them. Further in, a great winged creature waited on a mountain. They killed it, and where it had stood there was a crater. Goofy looked down into it. "I wonder where that Ansem feller went?"

Through a door after that was the island. At first it was the right shape, the tree where the tree should be and the bridge where the bridge should be. Then it turned into the wrong one so gradually that Sora could not have said when it stopped being his. Riku was standing on the shore with his back to them. Then he was not. The man who turned round was a head taller, with long silver hair, amber eyes and dark skin, in black boots and a long coat and silver-white gloves, and he wore the sign of the Heartless on his chest as though it were an ornament. He looked round at the little island with them as if he were showing them over it.

The man spread one hand toward the sea. "Take a look at this tiny place. 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 shouted Riku's name past him. The man shook his head. "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."

Sora had the key up. "That's not true! 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!" The man was almost sorry for him. "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 the ground gave way under both of them, and they fell through it to the bottom of everything. There was no floor there, only nothing, going down. The man spread his arms. "Behold the endless abyss! Within it lies the heart of all worlds: Kingdom Hearts!" He looked down into it with them. "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." Then: "Darkness conquers all worlds!" He climbed into a thing that was part ship and part body, and it came at them out of the dark with him inside it. The three of them took it apart.

Behind where it had been there was a door. It was tall and white and stood on its own in the abyss with nothing holding it up. The man got up off the floor in front of it. "It is futile. The Keyblade alone cannot seal the door to darkness." He turned his back on them and spoke upward, to the door. "Kingdom Hearts! Fill me with the power of darkness." And the door began to open behind him. "Supreme darkness."

Sora stood a little way off with the key in both hands, and he had had months to think about this and a few 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 filled the abyss from side to side and went straight through the man where he stood with his hands raised. "Light. But. Why." And he was gone.

Behind the door the dark went on without end, full of Heartless as far back as the light reached, and they had begun to come forward. The door had to be shut. It would not shut from one side alone, and the three of them put their shoulders to it and moved it a foot. Donald was shouting at them. "Stop staring and keep pushing!"

Then there were hands on the inside edge of the door, pulling, and through the gap Sora could see who it was. It was Riku, himself. "Don't give up! Come on, Sora! Together, we can do it!" Behind him in the dark, a small figure with round black ears was holding back everything that came at them with a golden key, and Goofy stopped pushing. "Your Majesty!" The king did not turn round. "Donald, Goofy, thank you."

The gap was down to a foot. Riku had both hands on the edge of the door and was leaning back against it. He was on the wrong side, he was going to stay there, and he had understood that before Sora did. "Take care of her."

"Now, Sora! Let's close this door for good!" The king put the golden key up on his side of the door, and Sora put his up on the other, through the last of the gap. "Don't worry. There will always be a door to the light." Then they turned their keys together. The door shut, and then it vanished.

The wreckage came apart from the middle outward. The worlds the Heartless had eaten went back to where they had been, and the walls went up again between them. Kairi was there on a piece of ground, and the ground tore in half between her and Sora. "Don't ever forget. Wherever you go, I'm always with you." He had hold of her hand across it. "Kairi, remember what you said before? I'm always with you, too. I'll come back to you. I promise!"

Kairi was crying and smiling together. "I know you will!"

He held on for as long as the ground allowed and a little past that. She went back, and he did not.

She was back on the islands, and they were whole. She went into the cave. The door at the back of it was shut, and looked like a piece of rock 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, badly, in a hand she knew. She found a stone with an edge on it and knelt and added her half, the girl holding one out to him.

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. Goofy scratched his head. "But, uh, where do we start lookin' for that there door to the light?" Sora knew who they were looking for. "We've gotta find Riku and King Mickey." Donald looked at the road. "Well, now what do we do?"

A dog went past them at a run with a letter in his mouth. It was Pluto. Goofy saw the seal on it. "Gawrsh, that's the king's seal!" Sora shouted after him. "Hey, have you seen King Mickey?" Pluto did not stop. Sora looked at the other two. "Guys, let's go!"

They ran after him.