My past is not a memory. It's a force at my back. It pushes and steers. I may not always like where it leads me, but like any story, the past needs resolution. What's past is prologue.
Samus, Metroid: Other MCrystal Stasis
The boy hardly aged.
How could he when he had been asleep for far too long?
He had no memory of his past. He couldn't tell you the name of the city he was born in or the town he had spent his childhood days in. His memories before Master Xehanort had taken him under his wing, was a blur. It was almost as if it was erased.
Maybe it had never even existed. Master Xehanort told him that he had been living with him for his whole entire life; a familiar sentence for Aqua and Terra had told him the very same thing as well. The line between truth and line was starting to blur in a blend of distorted shades, like the painting of an abstract art piece.
That was what Ventus was, the keyblade wielder who was named after the wind, in an ancient human tongue unspoken by many in the modern world.
Ventus was around 15 years old when he fell into a coma which lasted for 10 years, his body locked away in a guarded château, thanks to Aqua. Aqua's last words for him were simple.
"Wait for me, Ven." She whispered, placing her hand on his head. Her calloused fingers stroked his golden hair. "I'll be back, with Terra."
They say that those who enter the world of sleep would be locked away in a dream. Ventus' slumber was uneventful. He didn't even know that he had been asleep for years. When consciousness finally graced him, he found himself in a broken world; a world where people no longer believed in dreams, where magic no longer had a place.
His friends were long dead and his home was completely destroyed. When he closed his eyes to rest, the past haunted him. In his waking moments, he fought with the other refugees over scraps of rotten food and what very little warmth some threadbare canvas blanket could offer.
The future was bleak and without magic and dreams, there was no way the wayward wind would come to his call. Even his keyblade understood and learned the art of loss.
Ventus wanted to be no part of this wretched reality.
Closing his eyes, the last keybearer of the universe laid his battered body down to sleep amongst the corpses of the raging battlefield, illuminated by the artificial setting sun.
When the sun rises again, he knew he will be back at the Land of Departure with his family.
- End -