Welcome, I own naught but a love of Kingdom Hearts and Melody's character,
Thanks to the creators of the game for inspiration. Proceed
Who is this story about? It's about puzzles and things becoming whole and things splitting apart. It's about a raven, a hornbill, a parrot, and a hawk. And most of all it's about a girl. If I said this story was about me that would only be half correct. Or maybe it is true, for nothing I am is without all that comes before. All I am left with is my heart and the memories of what happened and I will do my best to catalogue them so that she will be remembered. Chronicles of light and dark are often told but hardly ever lived. That's because those who live through them don't want to remember. But my kind has chosen that road too many times. It's time for a Nobody to remember and to learn. I will tell her story…
It was the next day. That's all the morning ever meant in Boston. Or at least to Melody it was. One more day to live and work and play. But nothing magical. As the fourteen-year-old girl padded up the sidewalk to her bus stop she watched the shadows lengthen behind the streetlamps and mailboxes. The world seamed sleepy to her as she waited for the bus with the other kids. But as she glanced up at the dwindling stars above something in the air sparkled. Sunlight no doubt.
It was a good day. School was bearable as always. The air of the bus stop hadn't changed since this morning but the rift in the sky was there. She saw it directly above her when she got off, but no one else looked up. It was filled with stars. But from the side it was a line. A portal then?
"Stop it!" Melody told herself. "You've been daydreaming too much at school and staying up too late working". She turned to look for the rift. It wasn't there. In her relief she ignored the fact that she was viewing the rift from the side and thus it was nothing more than a line.
No one was home yet. She was ready to fling her backpack on a chair when- -and she dropped it to the floor. Something was happening. A shivering like when someone has left a door open on a cold winter day and icy air was creeping in. Melody ran to the house door and thrust it open.
When had it gotten so dark out? Like a storm was coming. No- like a storm had come. Up the street- at the bus top- she had been right! The rift filled with stars a moment ago, was pulsing black and darkness was shooting out of the shadows. The ground trembled. Melody looked around wildly. Where was everyone? But in the middle of the day most adult were still at work and many kids stayed after school. A few faces stared out their windows in horror, as the street below broke apart. Melody cried out and fell hitting the pavement on her side in pain. A whooshing noise roared through the air as the broken fragments of concrete failed to fall away. Instead they rose, swirled, and were swept away as black shadows covered each piece like a certain. As she struggled to stand Melody felt herself being pulled back down. Looking over her shoulder she felt queasy. Greasy black monsters each the size of a welcome mat, with claws that hardly hurt but sank into her sides and arms as if fusing with the shadows there.
She was scared. Frightened of monsters she had never seen. But she wasn't stupid, and she wasn't panicked. These two things made it perfectly clear that if she let these things wash over her head and body it would be as dire as if she had allowed herself to sink beneath frothing waves.
"No!" she shouted and pulled herself away from the creatures. The world around her no longer existed. All there was now was empty air and the platform she was standing on. Except that standing amid the creatures was like standing on quicksand. "no, No NO!" the creatures were jumping at her head, landing on her shoulders and forcing her down. They had no snapping mouths for her to fear, only lamp like eyes that seemed to multiply as they closed over her. These lights in the darkness around her drew Melody's attention. They shown like searchlights looking forever on a dark ocean. Looking lost.
"Oh my God!" thought Melody. "These things were once human!"
That realization burned Melody. Something vile and wrong was happening. No one should be reduced to something like these creatures were. And with horror Melody realized that this was what was going to happen to her. And it Was WRONG!
In the darkness around her Melody found her hands and clasped them together.
"Please, Someone, this isn't right. This town and its people don't deserve to become shadows to terrorize. If I die here will this happen again? No!" a tear slid down her cheek. "No! I want to stop this! People and these monsters and this world, it can't all become darkness! Did we ever get a choice? Because I chose Light!"
There was a flash and the darkness was gone. Stone steps led away from a circular platform beneath Melody's feet. The circle was huge and it held a stained glass image of a heart with a chain surrounding it. Part of Melody wanted to peer over the edge of the platform, the steps had no supports and everything around it seamed to be empty air. A rushing that sounded like when the wind blows very hard, echoed through the stillness. Right in front of Melody, rising out of the floor, appeared a single shadow creature like the monsters that attacked her. It hesitated for a moment, turning it's head this way and that like some blind thing, then it shot forward, sliding across the ground, and knocked Melody's feet out from under her. Falling backward Melody raised her arm to shield herself from the creature as it reemerged from the floor a few feet away. The emptiness seamed to thicken in the air around Melody, and to her amazement, in a shining golden light, there appeared in her hand a sword.
It was a rosy golden color extending longer than her arm with a very long hilt rapped in red. The rest of the hilt was curved up around the blade on one side and pointing straight out on the other so that the blade stuck out like an ear of corn between two halves of husk. But the most amazing feature on the sword was the tip. Where it aught to have tapered to a point, the sword split into five petals that fell backward and pointed toward the hilt. In the center of the petals sat the sharp point of the sword.
The weight felt right in Melody's hand as she raised the sword in front of her and rose to her knees. The Shadow, feeling ignored, chose that moment to spring forward for a new attack. Her grip tightened on the sword and Melody swung it in an arc around bringing the point to face the creature. Staring at the lamp like, lost looking eyes, she speared the creature through.
For the moment before the creature dissolved into a splash of darkness, it appeared as though a flower had sprouted out of it's back where the sword emerged on the other side. Then it was gone.
But for a single heart that rose up out of the pool of darkness and drifted away toward the sky.
Melody's eyes followed the heart. Something about it, something called to her. Stepping forward, unknowingly off the platform, she reached out toward the heart, which paused. For a moment she was suspended like that, in the air with the heart above her, then the world around her blurred and faded. In a moment she found herself surrounded by cobblestone and brick, with her hand still reaching out to find the heart.