Disclaimer- We do not own Kingdom Hearts.

Author's Note(s)- Hello everyone! This is Justice333 coming with a new story that's been further developed and experimented with my fellow author, Dawn! This is my first time
doing a collaboration so I'm pretty excited to see all of your first
impressions. Have fun reading, and drop some feedback if ya can. :)

Hiya! This is Dawn posting this chapter today, and I'm so excited to have it up and the story started! I'm cowriting this with Justice, and we're just getting used to the whole cowriting thing. First project together, and it's a pretty big one. This is a total darkfic, like, completely. With any luck, it'll have plenty of suspense and horror. Credit to Justice for coming up with the idea!

And we hope that in future chapters, your heart may skip a beat, and that maybe, a shiver of fear will creep up your spine. We'll do our best to deliver a bone-chilling thriller. If we succeed in darkfic, send us a review and let us know!

Enjoy!

(Where Reality Shatters) The Tower of Letters and Blood

Prologue: Reality Shatters

When he opens his eyes to a dismal, steel ceiling, it becomes a chore to keep his eyes open, and not close them just to not see the painfully familiar sight. It arches upward in a perfect spiral, creating an effect that is usually reserved for the roofs of cathedrals.

He shivers, and pulls up his old cotton sheet in an attempt to shield his body from the numbing, constant cold. Its damp fabric fails to provide the comfort he seeks, and the itchy mattress beneath him doesn't help matters.

He breathes in deeply, and the spiky-haired brunette shifts his head to the side, taking in the barren cellar with mock curiosity. Besides the sad excuse for a bed he lies in, the only other object to decorate the room is located in the (not so) far corner of his small room.

A small, rickity desk stands there, mixed with a wooden chair that's missing one of its legs. The only light in the room stems from the window behind him, which is little more than a rectangular hole in the wall, shedding the dark tresses of the room with moonlight that makes everything shine with a cold, blue light.

A strange sound startles him out of his observation of the familiar surroundings, bouncing against the walls and slamming into his eardrums in ringing echos.

Startled, he jumps out of the bed, wildly shifting from toe to toe with nervous energy. After a few seconds of panicking, he lowers his head, only to startle again at a horrid rumbling sensation that twists his empty stomach into tight knots.

A grimace twists his features in the frigid air while the boy places a hesitant hand on his abdomen and winces at the hunger pains. His fingers twitch and shake before clutching at the dirty white shirt (better known as a rag) covering his too-thin, empty belly.

He forces a smile through the pain before walking up to his desk, and sitting carefully on the three-legged chair that groans ominously and wobbles unsteadily with his weight. Upon further inspection, one can see a pile of messy papers littering the desktop, some scrawled with close-spaced black lettering. The onslaught is parted in the middle by a black feather quill with a worn gold nib, an oval-shaped ink well, and the creaking, blue-painted boards of the desktop beneath the writing supplies.

Sora sits at an angle, his weight pressing into the chair's balanced foundation with a low 'thump' of the wobbling legs. His hand grasps the quill with conviction, his toned fingers prepared to attack as he sorts through the papers, and he removes the lid from the ink well and dips his pen.

He finds one that's only half-covered in messy writing, since his supply of paper isn't endless, and smoothes it out on the desk, then taps the end of his pen on the edge of the ink bottle to flick off the excess ink, since the inkwell won't last forever and he may has well stretch it to last for a long as he can, just like the previously-used paper which he draws a careful line across to divide the old writing from the new.

He frowns, and writes a date in the right corner up by the line, and begins to scribble out small, black inked printing at a fast pace.

Hey, Kairi. It's me again…

I know I haven't written to you in a while, but I've been feeling very… weird lately.

I don't know how to describe it… but I feel like something is missing… I'm finding it hard to believe I ever had a life outside this prison.

Whatever, how have you been? For me, everything is just a routine. Nothing really happens, just same old, same old…

My sleeping patterns have been off… then again, I can never tell how long I've slept because the moon is always out. I'm not even joking… there is no sun here, just the moon and the night.

Sometimes I dream about the outside world. About valleys filled with green grass and waterfalls… there are even flowers occasionally…

Then I see the sky, full of lively wind and clouds. It's all so… beautiful.

The sky here isn't like that. It's very dark; you can never see anything…

The only light that reaches this place comes from the moon… and that is how it has always been…

Someday… I'll be there. I know, I've rambled about that a lot…about leaving this place…

It's been so long… I don't really remember what my life was like before this…

But… even if it seems impossible, I still believe that a way out exists. I just haven't found it yet…

He pauses, and sets the quill, now dry of ink, to the side. With a disgruntled sigh, the boy lifts his paper up, glaring obsessively at the words littered along the paper in neat, straight lines of black letters.

His hands push together, clumping the item into a small wad. It flies through the air behind him, landing next to his poor bed, where it'll stay until later, when he'll pick it up and smooth the creases out to read the crumpled writing. His head slams straight forward into the desk while he bangs the surface angrily. "Ugh, that sounds stupid…"

As the statement leaves his lips, the chill air swirls around him, freezing him to the core. Sora coughs out a breath that clouds in the abruptly cold air, before turning to glance at the window. Leaves are rustling past the opening outside, running with the wind currents that sends papers flying off the desk as a low 'boom' shakes the room, the furniture rattling with the force.

Sora narrows his eyes, dreading the weather's growing temper tantrum that he knows is coming.

With a large groan fit for any weary teen, he heads back towards his humble sleeping abode. His foot glides past the crumpled up paper, and a frown makes its way onto to his features as he picks up the disgraced parchment warily.

After he mumbles incoherently for several long minutes, his hand works through the hasty folds and creases, attempting to reread the smudged, creased handwriting on the page. The atmosphere continues to chill as rain starts, pelting the floor beneath his window with water droplets that blow in with the icy wind that sends goosebumps rising on his skin.

Sora ignores the new disturbance as his eyes race over the words on the paper. He stops when he reaches the final line of writing.

Even if it seems impossible… I still believe that a way out exists. I just haven't found it yet…

His soul bursts with agony over the lie that he wrote himself only moments earlier. His face is a mask of aloofness, and his eyes appear hollow and empty. A false grin slithers over his face while he clutches the paper to his chest tightly. The expression twists into a tired, bitter smile that's hard to hold.

The silent seconds of mourning are broken by a flaring shot of pain that pierces into his stomach and brings his arms to wrap around his midsection as he doubles over.

His yelp blasts out into the room, louder than the relentless rain and rumbling thunder. He hisses, holding in another scream and he stares incredulously at the dropped paper in front of him, resting on the grey, faded blanket that covers the lumpy mattress. His arms tighten around his stomach at a fresh wave of hunger pains, and he falls onto his knees by the bed with his head bent down.

He gasps as crimson liquid starts spilling onto the page, and a hand that brushes over his mouth momentarily interrupts the flow of red, and his fingers are coated with blood when he glances down at them. His chin is wet with the liquid trailing from his gasping mouth, wide open and leaking a thick, constant stream of blood as he stares in horror at the page and the drops falling steadily onto the writing that blurs as the ink runs.

The hair on the back of his neck stands up as Sora takes in the puddle with morbid fascination, the blood dripping more slowly off his lips into a splattered pool. The liquid runs off of the edge of his bed, and drips onto the floor, staining the wood just as it stains his worn blanket.

The red fluid continues to drip, slipping down the uneven wooden floorboards to the opposite wall. It creeps sluggishly and unnaturally up the stone wall with shining, wet, red trails, and starts to shift into clearer shapes that form letters on the cold, dark rock.

And Sora can't move, can't breathe, can only gasp stutteringly as the blood continues to fall from his lips, cooling and congealing into a grizzly mess on the bed. He grips his stained blanket, lips moving soundlessly as he mouths out the words that seem to be finger-painted on the wall with an invisible hand, and traces them with wide, scared blue eyes.

The blood shimmers eerily in the moonlight, and the moon coats the words with a soft, ethereal glow that seeps into the cracks:

I can help you escape…

Sora swallows his pooling saliva, and almost chokes at the amount of blood he swallows with it, coppery in taste and thick like mud, and his voice shakes with unrestrained tremors when he finally finds his voice to whisper into the empty room. "K-Kairi? Is that you?"

There is no answer, and if Sora's honest, he didn't expect one, even if he hoped to hear a familiar voice respond. Instead, the fluid continues running into the cracks in the stonework, disappearing from view and erasing the words that dance in his head. The boy slumps down against the wall at his back, his form boneless and limp as he blinks in stunned stillness at his bed, the paper sitting there once again white, the blanket unstained and the blood gone.

He licks his lips and tastes copper, then rubs a hand over his chin to see, to see if, if-

He stares at his hand, at the red that he had wiped off his chin, and feels his jaw flop open as he tastes the blood on his tongue and his lips, and smells the iron that's thick in the air. He looks up at the wall, at the place where the words had been, and he wants to scream because they're not there, they're gone, and he doesn't know what happened. He doesn't know how it did, or if it really even did, and wonders if maybe it was just a hallucination.

The words are fresh in his mind with the memory of the red, hand-written letters that were there, they were really there, but they're not anymore. No proof, no evidence, and even with the memory it seems unbelievable and impossible.

But the taste of his own blood lingers in his mouth, and there's still red on the back of his hand that didn't disappear with the rest of it.

It's too much, too much to deal with, and too much to understand at all. He curls up against the wall, knees against his chest and arms over his head as he cowers and trembles and screams.

Thunder crashes overhead, and he jerks violently, his scream cut off as he freezes.

Then he blinks, as lightning follows the thunder and flashes brilliantly, illuminating the room with pure, white light. He presses his back to the wall, fingers scrabbling against the stone with a sound like nails on a chalkboard, and his eyes are wide and flashing in the lightning that bursts into the world with more thunder in an explosion of sound and brightness that reaches every corner of the room.

And Sora shrieks in terror.

From wall to wall, the floor is covered in blood.