Chapter 1: A Dream

There was a sandstorm brewing.

Sounds of battle raged in the distance for several minutes, before finally they died down. An enormous machine of some sort crashed to the ground, battered and broken, clanking one last time before it stopped moving entirely.

A knight, wearing heavy-looking golden armor and carrying an enormous Keyblade, fell from the sky, landing on top of the machine and plunging the Keyblade into it. A second passed, and then the knight removed the Keyblade and walked away from the machine, stopping to stare out into the distance.

An image, almost like a blurry mirage, flashed over the knight for a second, and then was gone. The mechanical creature behind soon went as well, dissolving away into its component particles as a strong gust of wind came along.

There were two more knights now, walking toward the first from opposite directions and finally meeting in the middle. Each of them carried a Keyblade of their own, similar to the first one but smaller. In the field around them lay hundreds, if not thousands, of Keyblades--all stabbed blade-first into the ground, dusty and worn from battle.

There were three more Keyblades now, stabbed into the ground at odd angles. The Kingdom Key, Sora's Keyblade, was one of them... another was one that belonged to King Mickey. And the third... it was very familiar to me.

The knights saw the Keyblades, and pulled them up from their places in the sand, wielding them alongside their own.

Another figure approached from the distance, barely visible through the sandstorm. The three knights turned toward the figure, readying their Keyblades, and the other two knights were, for a second, surrounded in the same sort of blurry image that had appeared over the first.

The person approaching from the sandstorm drew closer. The sandstorm began to clear, and the man's tattered brown cloak became visible. The coat's hood was pulled up over the man's head, presumably to shield his eyes from the sand.

An image of Xehanort flashed over the man for a second, fading into a blurry mirage seconds later and quickly disappearing. And then...

The man reached up slowly, removing the hood.

And it was me underneath.

I woke up suddenly, covered in sweat and breathing heavily. I heard someone down the hall cough, but other than that, the entire building was silent. There was no sign of the knights with Keyblades, and there was no sandstorm. Nothing... only the quiet of a peaceful night.

It was only a dream. That dream. Again.

This was the third night in a row that I'd had the dream. It was always the same thing--a scene of some far-off world at war, in the middle of a sandstorm. Somehow there were Keyblades there--too many Keyblades. Sora's Keyblade, and Mickey's, and even my own, were among the fallen blades stabbed into the ground.

And then, walking in from somewhere far off, there would be the man in the brown coat.

But none of that bothered me. I often had strange dreams, especially after visiting new worlds I had never seen before. But this was different.

It was my brown coat that he was wearing. Underneath the hood was not just a man with silver hair, but my hair. I was the one in the dream.

But I had never seen a world like that before. Even the desert worlds I had seen were nothing like that one--there was so little vegetation there that I don't think anything could have lived. It seemed unnatural somehow--like something had burned away every last speck of life, even causing the toughest of desert grasses to grow dry and brittle.

The entire dream bothered me, now that I thought about it a little. Why had I had the same dream so many times in a row? How could any dream be exactly the same every time? Who were the three knights, and how could they wield a Keyblade--or even two Keyblades? Where was that desert world, and why was I there?

It's been more than a decade since anything stuck with me like this. Not since Xehanort...

No, it couldn't be Xehanort. He was gone--all of him was gone. Both his Heartless and his Nobody were destroyed in that final battle, and the events leading up to it. But who else...

No. I couldn't keep thinking about it. Not like this--I had to get help from someone else. I had made the mistake of trying to solve my problems alone once, and I wasn't about to do it again.

Sora and Kairi. They could help... I had to find them. I needed to go back home, after all these years.

I immediately put on my trusty brown coat and the black hat I had found in my recent journeys, and began to pack up all my supplies.

Later that morning, after the sun had finally risen, I headed down the stairs of the old hotel and checked myself out. I couldn't get the dream out of my head, even now--and now, one part of it stood out to me even more than before.

Why had an image of Xehanort appeared over me in the dream? Xehanort had been dead for over ten years now. Or... had some part of him survived?

No, that was impossible. I had seen the death of Xemnas with my own eyes, and I had not heard even a whisper from Xehanort's Heartless since the moment that Ansem the Wise's machine overloaded. Every last bit of Xehanort was gone--Heartless and Nobody; body, soul, and heart; nothing could possibly be left of Xehanort but the memories we all had.

I nearly bumped into a woman carrying a bag of groceries, just barely catching myself before the impact. She scowled at me briefly before clutching the grocery bags a little closer to herself and hurrying away. This world was a busy one, seemingly covered in city from one end to the other. It almost seemed like this city-world was once part of something much greater--almost like the stories we had all been told in our childhood, about how the worlds were once one.

I saw an old Wanted poster taped to the side of the hotel, blowing in the wind and only held onto the brick wall by a single nail. It was a wonder that the poster had lasted this long--especially with the winds that seemed to blow almost constantly on this world. I got a quick look at the poster, noticing a rather attractive blonde-haired girl, before the last shred of the paper that held it together finally gave way to the wind and it went fluttering down the sidewalk.

I shrugged, turned my attention away from the old poster, and then quickly reached up to catch my hat before it too was blown away in the wind. The Gummi Ship parking area was still quite a ways off, so I couldn't be distracted so easily anymore.

About half an hour of walking passed, and finally I could see the enormous parking garage that held my Gummi Ship, as well as various other vehicles used by the inhabitants of the world. When I had first arrived here, the people there would always stare and gawk at me--my hair color, which had always been the oddest thing about me as a kid, was seemingly ignored in favor of rumors that I was an alien, or that I had actually come from some point in the future.

But now, after staying here for about a month, they all seemed to have gotten used to my presence. I had even made a few friends--particularly an old guy named Victor, the owner of a local pizza shop. We never had pizza back home, but after a few bites, it quickly became one of my favorite foods--the mixture of different toppings was like nothing I had ever tasted before. Many evenings of my stay on this world were spent talking to Victor and the other people working at the pizzeria, especially on nights when business was slower than usual and they didn't have anything really important to do.

I guess that's all over now, with this dream coming back every night and all of these thoughts running around in my head.

Now... It's time for me to go home.