It was a quiet Sunday morning, a morning quite undistinguished from all others, when Robert found the Book.
A few rays of light spilled through the roof of the abandoned warehouse to trickle determinedly onto the floor. Although they tried their best to spread out and flank the enemy, the shadows within held their own.
"Sanahx, get the candles ready."
Shana scowled. "I keep telling you, call me Auxra." Nevertheless, she did as she was told.
The older girl grinned, a rare, callous grin, then turned. "Robert, do you have the incense?"
A pudgy, innocent-looking boy sitting in a patch of sunlight looked up from the chest of drawers he was rummaging through. "Yes. I found it." Then, very hesitantly, "Lauren, don't you think we ought to…"
The girl didn't glare at him exactly. She didn't need to. She just looked at him, her eyes seeming swallowed by the darkness of her pupils – looked at him as though he was scarcely worth looking at. Robert swallowed, but bravely went on.
"I mean, it just seems to me that this all sounds and feels… kind of Satanic. I mean… we don't know where it came from, this book. And these instructions –"
"Do you want to leave, Robert?" Lauren's voice held no emotion, but something prickled uncomfortably down his skin anyway. He wished she would step out of the shadows, so he could see more of her than just her pale face swimming in the dimness of the warehouse.
"Yeah, we already set all this stuff up, and rehearsed, and everything," added Shana. The thin brunette was nimbly placing candles around the sigil on the floor. "It'd be kinda pointless to stop now…"
"But Steve is hungry!" came a jocund voice from the corner. Steve's rotund figure lumbered into the sigil with an armload of jars, producing a wail of protesting despair from Shana as his careless feet knocked a few of her candles to the ground. Heedless of her cries, he squatted and carefully placed the jars onto the dusty floor, one by one.
"Steve can wait and accept that no one cares," said Lauren. She drew closer and knelt next to the jars, turning the labels and reading them. "And he can stop referring to himself in third person, too. All right. Mercury, sulfur, saltpeter… dried hawthorn and mimosa…thyme…"
The front cover looked like no book he had ever received. It displayed a shimmering pink marking in the shape of a stylized heart, overlaid on a blue background. On the recto, a crimson heart-shaped symbol bearing a thorny "X" design adorned a backdrop of purple. The black-draped spine bore no title or author; the inside pages were covered in words which, although they seemed to make sense at first glance, quickly proved on further inspection to be gibberish.
Robert had given the book to Shana, who had realized the cover's symbols for what they were – the sigils of Kingdom Hearts. Dumbfounded and elated at the discovery, she had showed her friend Steve, who was puzzled by the meaning of the long and nonsensical words inside.
As was typical procedure for long words that no one understood, Steve asked Lauren to decipher their meaning.
So it began.
"Right." Lauren stood, dusting her hands. "I think we're ready."
"Finally," breathed Steve. "After all those months getting ready…"
"You think this'll really get us to the Kingdom Hearts world?" Shana asked eagerly, her blue eyes wide with the realization of untold fantasies.
Lauren shrugged noncommittally. "Who knows," she said, folding her arms. "After all this work, it'd better."
"Come on, Robert! Join the circle." Steve had crossed to the patch of light where the boy still knelt in thoughtful hesitation, and, taking his shoulder, playfully rocked him gently back and forth in a nagging fashion.
"Don't worry," added Shana, with a disappointed sigh. "It probably won't work anyway, right? And all of this will have been for nothing."
"Still…" Robert gave up. He didn't think he could express properly his foreboding in words. And anyway, if that was the case… why was everyone so excited?
He glanced up at Steve for a moment, then sighed. The inescapable fact was that he was excited to find out if it would work, too. Robert stood, and almost fell under the weight of Steve's enthusiastic swaying.
"Okay." He took his place at the side of the sigil.
Lauren opened the book impressively to another well-thumbed page. Her lips moved with the syllables of the mysterious words she had decoded. At length, she looked up. Her somber, owlish eyes, dark with excitement, bore into them, and the grin on her lips slowly resolved itself on their faces as well.
It was time.
The girl began, slowly and softly and then with greater vehemence, to read.
The first miracle – the candles which surrounded the sigil's flowing lines burst into flame all of their own. The light of them shone and guttered unbearably on the eyes of the four, accustomed to the dark interior of the warehouse. Robert's eyes grew wide, Shana repressed a squee, but the four didn't budge, rooted to the spot by the suspense of the moment. Lauren finished the first paragraph.
The next moment, the light of the candles was gone, consumed by the darkness of the portal which seemed to arise from the squirming, inky sigil between them. The windowlike opening whorled and twisted, a darkness so repellent that it pushed itself away, growing wider with each word. Shana was unable to bite back a gasp – Steve threw his hand out to stop her from uttering more, but the portal spiraled heedlessly in front of them. The dizzying sensation of success flooded into them – they had done it, it was true! How could Lauren control herself enough to read? But, somehow, she did. The second paragraph ended.
Midway through the third, everything began to go wrong.
Lauren was logical; she had a mind like a steel trap. And once a puzzle was presented to her, no matter how unsolvable, she would not rest until the mystery of it had been opened and laid bare for all to see.
Still, enlisting Shana, Steve, and Robert for help had proven invaluable. It was she who had decoded the rituals described in the book's unusual cipher, but it was they who had, with a mixture of hard work, petty theft, and blind luck, unearthed the odd and manifold ingredients that the book called for.
If not for Lauren's determination – and Lauren, in her own, ruthless fashion, could be very persuasive – it might never have been done. But the innocent joy that the three found in imagining themselves members of the Kingdom Hearts universe was motivation enough. Shana had even given everyone new names, after the style of Organization XIII: Shana became Auxra, and Robert, Phaux. Lauren, disdaining such made-up names as being false and insinuating laziness on the part of their creators, had crafted her own name: Lunarex. And Steve – on his own insistence - was Stevex, the 'x' remaining silent. He claimed it was foreign.
On some days – only a few, mind you, and very far between – the three's antics had even made Lauren smile.
It was then that everyone realized the sun had gone out.
It was not that it had simply set – this was altogether the wrong feeling, the wrong air, for a sunset. This was more like the utter disappearance of light altogether – as though not only the sun, but light itself as they knew it, had ceased to exist. It had been replaced with a strange, dim red luminosity, a dry, decayed-feeling illumination, false as the grin of a skull. Robert glanced fearfully at a trembling Shana, but they did not dare move. The discipline created by fear of Lauren's temper rooted them to their positions.
Lauren herself continued to read, the book before her illuminated by one last, single candle.
Then, three syllables before the end of the passage, Robert could bear the strain no longer – he looked up. The blue sky above had turned a bloody, jeering red. It glowed sullenly with a dour luminance of its own, a weak and corrupt perversion of what had shone only moments before.
That was the breaking point. Robert yelled, and Shana screamed, and Steve, glancing upward and taking in the horrific tableau, took a step backward in terror – then barreled away from the circle toward the door, as though hoping to break the spell, hoping to escape. He flung the entrance open – and stopped short again.
The other two surrounded him, staring out into what had once been their home. Behind them, Lauren's soft voice continued to sound out syllables in that strange tongue.
A portal of darkness had opened in the crimson, star-speckled sky. From it issued a colossal red dragon, all whirling claws and dire fangs. Its many heads snapped and wheeled at the stars, and the stars fell without protest, devoured. And there – there on its chest glinted the emblem of the Heartless, a sign that burned with a terrible new light.
The earth rumbled beneath their feet, and more and more came, titanic, draconic beings, as though Hell itself had vomited them forth. Great dark insects with the tails of scorpions, horned beasts from the depths of the sea, Heartless tall as skyscrapers and broad as buildings, dancing black-draped spirits in the thousands and the tens of thousands. The sound of weeping and helpless screams filled the air. With a sudden, horrible knowledge, the three realized what the sound was. It was the shrieking of their own neighbors. People they knew, people they saw every day, were being murdered in place, falling to darkness… or simply going mad at the sight of it.
Beneath the furious onslaught, it seemed as though all the planet was dying, succumbing to the darkness all at once. Plants withered to blackness and ash before their eyes in the wake of the invaders. The death seemed to penetrate to the heart of all the world. All around was the smell of entropy and decay.
After a few minutes, the weeping gave way to a silence that was far worse. Then came the final atrocity: with the popping sound of bubbles erupting, the Shadows crawled from the corrupted air, creeping across the land in droves, their blank yellow eyes and clamoring antennae speaking of a mindless, all-consuming predatory hunger.
Shana, Robert and Steve would have wept if they could, but could only stare, mute and paralyzed with horror. The thought was shared among all of them – What have we done?
Precious minutes passed. They stood there, lost in the deadly silence, not daring to breathe for fear the Shadows would take notice. Not daring to think, for fear that they would remember their part in it all.
A sudden realization hit Steve. "Lauren," he whispered, turning his back on the desecrated world. His eyes were wide with fear.
But she stood there, indomitable, safe from harm. She had finished reading; the book was stowed under her arm. Her eyes seemed to glow with a pale yellow light all their own. Somehow, it fit her.
"We've… we've gotta get out of here," faltered Shana.
Lauren nodded her agreement, motioning to the portal. Her voice seemed to crack and distort, becoming the voice of many, a teaming legion of hungry, doomed spirits.
"After you," they said.
They looked at each other, then at the ashen ground, as though eye contact were too painful, too reminiscent of normalcy. Then, one by one, Shana, Steve, and Robert stepped shakily up to the portal, taking a final look back at the world they had once belonged in.
Inconceivable. That thought dwelt in each of their pallid faces in turn. On top of everything else, this was the last inconceivability – to give up and leave behind everything that they had once had, with no hope of returning. To know that the blood of the Planet was upon their hands, and that they would never be called to account – they would roam free. To continue on in the face of terror and madness, knowing that they were responsible, that everyone they had ever known, their families, their friends, lay dead or worse because of their own terrible, selfish curiosity.
But they each did it. And slowly, with a shudder of distaste bordering revulsion, each one of them stepped into the portal, leaving the world they had known.
Left alone at the end, as she had always preferred it, Lauren watched the last stars fall, watched the Shadows rejoice with eyes beaming like yellow lanterns. Distantly, in the wake of the growing hunger that overtook her, she was reminded of a book she had once read. How had it gone?
"O brave new world," she told the Shadows, all at play within their wasteland. "O brave new world, that has such people in it."
And she walked into the portal, and never returned again.