AN: You'll quickly notice that this fic is slightly AU. There are no such things as nobodies, although many characters who were nobodies will be present. Ansem/Xehanort's Heartless will probably not come into play, but who knows? I have a concept of where this story is going, but nothing is set in stone. There will be some romance. As far as I know, the pairings will be Riku/Namine, Sora/Kairi, and a bit of Axel/Roxas.
As for the formalities: I do not own Kingdom Hearts. This work earns me no profit aside from my own enjoyment.
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~*The Art of Working Backwards*~
Introduction – We'll Start at the End to Begin Again
The realm of darkness was not always the featureless void that denizens of the light pictured it to be. A world unto itself, it possessed moonlit beaches, shadowed forests, and fathomless caves. Feral heartless scrambled, slithered, and swum through the endless nightscape, at home in the dark.
'A nightmare or a haven,' Namine mused. 'Whether it's one or the other is only a matter of perspective.'
She sat on the bare ground at the base of a dark, twisted tree, her form a surreal spot of white on the eerie nightscape. Ahead of her the barren ground came to an abrupt edge, dropping off into the sea. Behind her the wasteland rolled out, barren and empty, until transforming into the jagged teeth of a mountain range that sharply defined the horizon. There were no stars in the blue-black sky, only a moon that hung low over the water like a perpetually setting sun.
This was a quiet corner of the realm of darkness. It was here that Namine came to find peace. The only sounds in the seemingly empty world were the distant sighing of the waves on the shore and the light scratch of Namine's pencil on the last page of her care-worn sketchbook. Yet a glance upward revealed a bat-like heartless hanging above her in the tree by its hooked tail. Namine smiled to herself and added the creature to her drawing.
The heartless would not bother her. They had no reason to. Why attack something that posed no threat? Something that did not even possess a heart to devour?
Namine stopped drawing. Lifting her pencil, she looked over the completed sketch, assessing it. After a long moment, she closed the book and slipped both it and her pencils into the simple bag at her side. Standing, she shouldered the bag's strap and took three short steps to the edge of the cliff.
Well over a hundred feet below, the water shimmered darkly. Not for the first time, Namine wondered how deep the oil-black ocean truly was. On Destiny Island, the water had been so clear that one could see the sandy bottom at depths of almost thirty feet.
Namine shook the memory from her mind. This was no time for nostalgia, not when there was work to be done. Now that she had reached the end of her story, she was finally ready to begin.
Raising a hand, Namine summoned a portal of swirling darkness right in front of her on the very edge between land and void. Without hesitation she stepped into the darkness, and the portal shrank to nothing behind her.
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AN: Future chapters will be longer. ^_^ I hope you enjoyed it, and that you will review.