Disclaimers: Kingdom Hearts, Disney, Final Fantasy, and all related media do not belong to me. All original worlds and characters, however, do and I would like very much to be told if you decide to use any of them in related fanart or fanfiction if that ends up becoming a desire of yours. If anything within the story seems familiar, I may have used references to other games and/or media as inspiration. If they are yours and you wish to have a credit, please PM me and I will add your name to this disclaimer. Please support the official releases.

Also... Any questions that you may have on the story (it will be released each Sunday until completion), please either PM me or write it in a review so I may clarify for you. If many people have the same question, I'll simply include them in a small FAQ at the bottom of the following chapter. Please feel free with all criticism, but any flaming will be ignored and its writer either blocked or reported. Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy.

Chapter One

Stumbling through the darkness, Sora can barely see through the heavy canopy of trees above him and around him. He shivers violently. His sleeve is soaked with blood, his face scratched deeply with claw marks. Even so, he does not speak, not even to call out for help... not that he would have been able to through the mouthful of liquid.

But he can't spit out the blood, not even when the metallic taste threatens to make him throw up the last of the remaining contents of his stomach. They're too close. He has to keep running. He has to get out of here! They might smell it, they might even be able to track him through the splatter...

Sora looks around in fear, wondering what the darkness is hiding from him. To his terrified mind, every shadow on the trees is an enemy; every sound, every twig breaking in the distance is one more thing to run from.

All he wants is to sit down and let them take him. He's had enough. He's had enough of running from them. He's had enough of slamming into trees because he can't see them when he flies through the forest until he's exhausted and unable to stay in the air anymore. He's had enough of tripping over tree roots and nearly giving himself black eyes. He's had enough of getting winded from the mile-long runs he has to take. Enough of falling down and enough of choking on blood from accidentally biting his tongue whenever one of the monsters startles him back into charging blindly into the forest again.

He just wants to sit down and let them take him.

The realization of that is almost enough to make Sora throw up from sheer principle. His breathing briefly stops when the full ramifications of his thoughts sinks in, the idea of him just quietly dying here on this world alone. It's tempting, ridiculously tempting, and it makes him sick to find himself capable of such a thing... If he'd been capable of truly hating himself, he'd be doing so now. Even so, he starts trembling with a little more fright and forces his thoughts onto something else rather than explore this previously unknown and darker part of him. Not only have these monsters taken his physical energy, they've also taken his mental strength? Just what are these things?

How did the creatures that are currently plaguing him appeared in this world? Who... or even more terrifying in his mind, what could make something like them them? Have they always been there? Where are the inhabitants of this world?

Why did he have to convince Riku into exploring it on his own for a while? Why did Sora have to say that taking everyone else to Yen Sid's for training is more important than checking on a world that had been explored already many years ago?

Sora remembers claiming that he could handle whatever this small world could throw at him. That he's fought Heartless, he's defeated the Organization, he's held his own against the Nightmare dream eaters. He's a good fighter, even capable of going toe to toe with King Mickey and Master Yen Sid from time to time! Magic's easy for him, combat magic and healing magic only some of the many tricks up his sleeve. Checking on the residents of Gray Rock would have been easy and a bit of a break from the relentless training.

If it had been Heartless or Nobodies or even creatures on level with the Organization, it'd be a piece of cake. But nothing he's gone up against could have prepared him for these... these, these monsters.

He wants desperately to wake up. It feels so much like a nightmare. He'll give anything to wake up in his bed covered in sweat from a bad dream than to spend another moment in this dank forest hiding from those creatures. He wants to be home safe in his bed so much... but walking and running is all that matters right now.

All Sora can do is keep moving forward.

He shakes his head and wipes a sweat-soaked strand of hair out of his eyes. For a moment, he is silent, listening into the darkness around him. He hears nothing but his own labored breathing, his own rapid heartbeat pounding inside his chest. With that the only thing in earshot, Sora allows himself to spit out his mouthful of blood and falls weakly to his knees. He leans against a tree. The bark is rough against the back of his head but Sora cannot find a better location to rest.

The moment his eyes close, Sora hears the echoes of the monsters' voices wailing in his ears as he quickly falls into dreams...

When he first arrived in the small town of Grey Rock, Sora had assumed it had been plagued by a group of Heartless. It'd been years, of course, since the Heartless had ravaged this world according to reports given to the King by Even and Ienzo. It had come back just a while ago, a little after Sora had defeated the Seeker of Darkness, but no one had bothered to see if everything was alright yet. His entire mission here was to figure out if there were any of the Heartless (or even Nobodies) left and get rid of them. Then he'd "RTC" as Lea jokingly put it, be picked up by Riku, and then fly to the Tower for the second week of training.

There had been no children playing in the streets, all remaining shutters were shut tight against the elements, and no animals could be heard. He was alone. As he walked throughout the town and quietly read the signs and posters proclaiming the gentle rule of the new queen that were nailed to every door he finds, his footsteps and his voice were the only sounds to echo throughout the streets.

The smiling face of the Queen, a girl only a year or two younger than Sora himself, was the only image of humanity he even saw in the town. Her blue eyes seemed to follow him from within the signs, her painted red smile encouraging him to move forward. In reality, her image had stayed still on the paper. Here, she nodded at him and laughed inaudibly while she pointed the way forward, skipping a path between the posters and flickering in and out of them as he continued.

The sun beat down upon Sora and he had to shield his eyes against the bright light. When he finally got used to it, he turned to see the girl Queen gone from her posters, the writing wiped from them and blank save for a symbol of a black crown.

His footsteps had been the only sound, the only sound through the empty streets as he walked and the silence was deafening...

It wasn't like his usual dreams, full of colors and explosions of sound and faint ideas of smell and taste... no, this was muted, strangely a warped memory rather than imagined. Ever since his Mastery Exam, his dreams had become so much clearer...

He ran his hands over the doors of the empty streets, over the signs, his lips working in a failed attempt to get noise out. But the silence was in him, too, even though he knew that in reality he had been calling out to people in the houses lining the road. His eyes darted around the small space, looking for children but everything was silent, deafeningly silent as he walked...

Sora jolts awake, suddenly looking up into the face of one of the creatures that had been chasing him. The once human stares down at him in silence. For a moment, neither moves nor breathes. Then the high screech of dying vocal cords rips through its mouth and the creature bends down towards him, clawed hands reaching for the deliciously sweet meat of Sora's living flesh.

A panicked moment later, Sora is the one standing and the monster is the one lying on the ground.

The Keyblade is again stained with dark blood and Sora bolts back through the forest, already gone by the time that the severed head hits the forest floor in a spray of rotting leaves.

Sora had smiled when he found the man standing in the doorway. Eager to make a new friend, he had walked right up to him with a cheerful greeting. When the man didn't turn around, Sora hadn't thought that maybe there was something wrong with him. He had just tapped on his shoulder, asking him what was wrong and if there was anything he could do to help. After all, Sora'd seen plenty of people traumatized by a family member or a friend taken by the Heartless or hurt by the Nobodies. He had just assumed that it was the same for this man.

He hadn't been prepared for the man letting out a loud, agonized moan and slowly shuffling around to look at him. The man's eyes had been dulled over with gray cataracts and splattered with flecks of scarlet. No trace of the familiar yellow of Darkness. Instead, there had been brown and black stains around its mouth and another scream came out of its throat.

Sora's instincts had warned him to run.

But his better nature had prompted him to ask again if everything was alright. He had hesitated to fight, in fear of hurting someone who had been injured. He had still reached out to him and asked again if he was hurt.

It was only when the man had almost taken a bite out of him that Sora finally retaliated and bashed him with the Keyblade. It was later that he realized that he had had an incredibly lucky break in having hit him in the head instead of the much more accessible chest. The only way to take these things down, as he discovered much later in an enormous battle involving a great deal of ineffective fire magic and far more reliable blizzardaga attacks, was to aim for the head.

But then, when he had first discovered the creatures, all Sora knew was that a human head shattered and burst quite easily under a Keyblade.

And he ran.