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CHAPTER 60:

A GIGAS DOME WAITING THROUGH A CHURNING BOG

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Author's Notes: The pieces for this Chapter are, in order of scene: 'A Night On the Bare Mountain,' from the KINGDOM HEARTS Original Soundtrack Complete, Disc Nine, and after it, 'Proto Merkabah,' from the XENOSAGA Episode One Original Soundtrack, Disc Two. Both compositions can be found in KINGDOM HEARTS Insider's MP3 section.


Kairi spun in the direction of the new voice.

However, before she could say anything, or even truly see anything other than brown hair and an orange shirt, a volcano of roaring emerald flames columned down from far above in their direction in a counterclockwise swirling pillar yards in diameter.

"Ralph, don't worry!" Vanellope yelled, a furiously edged anguished determination in her voice that, even now, Kairi wasn't sure she could understand, and the next second, she had vanished and reappeared directly below them to throw her hands palms up, more spinning green cubes appearing above them in the shape of a platform large enough to intercept the onrushing pinnacle.

Then she clenched her teeth against a cry of a different, physical kind of agony, as the cubes above them hazed with static, and staggered backwards.

"Don't say I told you so!" the newcomer yelled.

A number of things happened almost at once.

Strelitzia's visage hardened with a skeletal white, almost not even there determination, as tears brimmed in her eyes.

"No, Ralph," she said, an eternal corridor of hollow emptiness in her broken voice.

"I'm the one you should have wrecked.

"From before you even first left Niceland for the medal.

"I've been the real Turbo all along, because I refused to leave my Game.

"If I'd had the courage to fight for anything other than a medal, Vanellope wouldn't have even been in danger from Turbo, far less Vanitas, and now the real Chernabog."

Donald quacked from somewhere Kairi saw no reason to pay attention to.

She heard Goofy's footsteps moving in Vanellope's direction, but she also saw no reason to look.

Because the sole purpose all these wars had been fought had been to enlist Kairi.

And she was the one who had begun the most recent war.

And turned Sora's Heartless into the keenest blade of all.

"If you see a good opening, I'm asking you this, because there's no one I'd rather you be than you.

"Please, beat Chernabog by wrecking Yggdrasil."

The gold pieces few at Strelitzia from all around them, and constructed themselves into a golden Gigas Kairi knew must be a real version of one of the Gigases Donald and Goofy had told her about from Toy Box's Verum Rex.

Six amethyst wings washed out from the back of the Gigas on each side, and then Yggdrasil leapt up to ascend through the fuzzing cubes and bent forwards to raise all of her wings as though they were a thicket of stakes directly at the bottom of the collapsing emerald typhoon.

Two pinions of leathery night, many times the size of Yggdrasil itself, extended downward out from the bottom of the approaching conflagration, and as they lanced their tips between all twelve energy extensions, they then separated outwards at precise enough angles they clearly sought to not just hurl them aside, but to actually wrench the segments of the Gigas from which they extended out of the back of Yggdrasil.

They separated with the sounds of doing so by intent, but they continued to push back against Chernabog's wings in combined parries as Strelitzia twisted Yggdrasil onto its back and segments of its midsection ratcheted open, from which a large cannon similar to a lens extended to shine a projection of white up into the tornado.

The next second, the photons within the lens congealed into an upward expanding funnel of transparent crystal along the edges of the projected beam.

Iridescent flame then roared outwards within the confines of the projector's path.

A roar of savage bestial fury resounded from within the tornado, and the mammoth shape of Chernabog, as far as Kairi could discern, identical to the Heartless and Nobody Sora, Riku, Goofy, and Donald had described to her, tumbled upwards and backwards to her right, the entirety of its body below the waist wreathed in a rising volcanic mountain of cyclonic jade.

"Formchange, Perpetual Bough One, Nifleheim: Moogle's Pompom Bicycle," Strelitzia's voice spoke, sounding as though emanating from unseen speakers in Yggdrasil.

The arms and hands of Yggdrasil fell back to their sides, motionlessly, and the hazing green shifted into two cars without roofs and one seat that appeared to be made of, and colored like, candy interspersed with cake with patterns of icing and sprinkle candy on them, one of which soared in the direction of Yggdrasil's feet and morphed like flowing unfrozen ice cream.

At the same time, the outer plating and the inner cogs of Yggdrasil were altering position to elongate the height of Yggdrasil's legs, causing them to rise and become very lanky until Yggdrasil's head matched Chernabog's in height as the member of the Summation Organization Thirteen now fall back and down over the air of wherever this was to pull itself back and up out of the plummet. As this was taking place, the feet altered into an array of correspondingly sized hooks in the style of Captain Hook's with the differing colors of Sora's Anti-Form, and Rage Form, in the pattern of the Master Control Program, to latch onto what had now become a candy and cake colored skateboard the shape of the ones Hayner, Olette, and Pence had shown her at Twilight Town.

The other car had become two discuses the style of the ones Kairi had heard from Donald and Goofy Sora had told them Rinzler wore, shaded in concentric circles alternating between what Kairi knew to be Rinzler's coloring and Tron, and they attached themselves to another array of Captain Hook style hooks once more in the shades of Sora's Anti-Form, and Rage Form, with these ones patterned the same way all the Anti-Soras Kairi had seen.

Black motes washed out of the openings in Yggdrasil's back where the wings had been to surround it as though it were a corona of pixie dust.

Chernabog bellowed so loudly the bridge under Kairi shook tumultuously.

The demonic creature then crossed its arms before its chest and opened them wide, creating a circle of twelve immense torches of emerald fire that then shot at the altered Yggdrasil, curving to rocket in from differing locations at different directions.

The twelve wings turned inwards and fanned out, while altering position, until they resembled a Wayfinder, or paopu fruit, of pure violet light that then flew back in front of the verdant torches to spin counterclockwise as though they were they blades of a fan fast enough they caught all the comets between them and dispersed them before stilling.

"At least Chernabog's presence confirms where Arthur is," Vanitas commented, looking to Kairi's left, relative to the direction she was facing, at someone who must be Ralph.

Kairi started violently.

"Vanellope, you're jumping to assumptions about m–" Vanitas continued.

"BuzzTube is gonna' love this!" a new voice shouted.

"No Blocker will bounce me out after my Spyware gets this Trended as giant robots, giant monsters, or both!

"I can see it now!

"J. P. Spamley.

"The program who went down in history as winning spam's first true turf wa–"

"That's why, as Goofy puts it, the world border is about to do it!" Donald quacked in rage.

"Thunder!"

Kairi at least needed to see what was happening.

Kairi turned to her left in time to see a thin male, wearing blue skin, and blue clothes in the modern office worker style she'd seen on a number of worlds, while searching for a way to bring Sora home the last time she'd truly done it herself

for whatever that was worth

standing at the side of a large and tall male with short brown hair and an orange, red, and black striped shirt with ripped brown overalls hanging down from his torso, clearly Ralph, an expression of guilty surprise on his face set in such a way it made it clear he'd believed whoever this was wouldn't be nearby at this time, shout in terror and jump back from a descending current of Thundaga electricity.

He turned and sprinted away down another ramp of light the same light blue as this bridge that he'd arrived on with Ralph, until he vanished over the edge of this bridge from Kairi's vision.

Vanellope's mouth opened wide.

She then shut it.

"And you're worried about the company I keep," she commented.

Then she jolted violently, and her eyes widened.

"What are you wasting time with a petty crook with daydreams of making it big as a gangster?

"I thought you learned your lesson from King Candy."

Ralph's face shifted through a variety of expressions, among them a desperate terror Kairi identified with no effort at all.

In the air above them, Strelitzia soared forwards at Chernabog, her shield now in front of Yggdrasil's head with the points of the Wayfinder positioned to let the Gigas' eyes see clearly, the discuses in her hands whirling at a rapid pace.

Chernabog clenched both of its claws into fists, and then it launched an uppercut aiming to pass below the shield and above Strelitzia's discuses at Yggdrasil's chin.

Strelitzia moved the discs on that side as though it was a shield to intercept, while kicking up with her surfboard at Chernabog's stomach.

Chernabog brought its wings up, and their lower sections inwards, and the discus impacted with their reinforced surfaces but didn't penetrate them.

The demonic Summation Organization Thirteen member then stabbed a knife hand with its free claw at the lower torso of Yggdrasil, and Strelitzia blocked with her other discus while deflecting Chernabog's first uppercut to the side with the former one to cut it at Chernabog's neck.

Chernabog raised his wing on that side to block, and both immense combatants began to trade strikes and blocks, lunges and parries, with their discs, claws, and wings as though they were vast martial artists.

Ralph's features were now determined themselves.

"Even if it means letting you be the one to go Turbo this time?"

Vanellope started violently, and now the desperate terror, and a multitude of other emotions, passed over her own face.

Anna must have heard something in Ralph's voice now that struck a nerve, because she at last shifted a very small bit in Kristoff's arms.

Something seared at Kairi, almost with hysterical panic, that identifying whatever this was was almost more important for Sora than anything else.

Sentiment and sensation returned, enough she could feel herself throbbing with muted aches all over.

Above and to their right, Chernabog brought its wings in front of it and curved them in a position that latched their ends around the discs, and as Strelitzia moved to pull them back, he reached his claws forwards and grabbed the outside of both of Yggdrasil's wrists just past the backs of the hooks and began to squeeze.

The twelve protrusions from which the wings emerged separated, and shifted into twelve blades of violet energies.

However, before they could strike, another ring of green comets manifested in front of Chernabog and began rocketing at the blades, and Strelitzia had no other option but to swing them to cut them into the air as they soared at Yggdrasil along alternating vectors.

As they did, Chernabog created a second ring of flames to ensure they'd stay busy, and it then soared forward itself in the direction of a distant spire, high enough to be a towering skyscraper in an ordinary city, light blue in color with the name 'Google' on a sign atop it, to impact Yggdrasil with the back of the tower with unreserved potency

dim relief moved through Kairi at seeing, from the depth of the indentations around Yggdrasil, it wasn't far enough to endanger anyone on the other side of the wall on any floors that much

how could she feel this

after which Chernabog then dragged the Gigas up floor after floor while digging its back into the walls and pulling it with unrestrained savage wrath until it reached the roof of the skyscraper to soar up, pivot to plunge down, and collide Yggdrasil with the roof with so much might, even from this far away, the bridge under Kairi once more shook tumultuously.

However, Yggdrasil's arms hadn't given, so Chernabog at last released them, brought its wings in front of it, and new jade comets, this time so hot Kairi could feel the temperature rise even all the way over here, adumbrated its fists.

Dim unease swam through her.

If Kairi could feel this much heat from this distance, the true Chernabog possessed far more darkness than his two selves.

And it will still most likely just testing Yggdrasil's defenses.

She hadn't taxed Valkyrie in Rainbow Bridge against Empyreal that much, though.

And if he was still hanging around, and he hadn't fled as soon as Ephemer, and Strelitzia, had arrived, the sole cost she couldn't afford to pay to beat him was her life.

How could she still be this sure of that?

For the first time, something genuine rushed inside her.

How could she still believe Sora and Riku weren't better off without her now?

Chernabog now began to hammer jade impact after emerald strike into Yggdrasil's midsection, over and over.

"Is this about how much I love Slaughter Race?" Vanellope questioned, both edged guardedness and depthless guilt in her voice.

Ralph's face now shifted through a number of other expressions.

"It's not an issue of you not having the same dreams, if that's what you're worried about."

Vanellope's jaw dropped open as a sheen of shock manifested on her expression.

"You were spying on that conversation?" she shouted, and now there was undiluted fury in her voice, much of clearly directed at herself and Vanitas far more than Ralph, but the amount of genuine fury now submerging her during a conversation with a friend she was used to being close enough to to show the farthest depths of her heart to had at last clearly given her a target for her own self hate and guilt.

"Since eavesdropping throws itself into the chocolate puddles of the race track that caused this whole misadventure to begin with, repairs that you know darn well give me a valid cover for leaving Sugar Rush, give me one good reason to believe this company doesn't wreck races."

Ralph actually stepped back violently, recoiling as though he'd been struck, his mouth falling open and staying hanging.

Kairi didn't know why understanding and empathetic sympathy passed through her, even dimly.

On the pinnacle of the Google skyscraper, the amethyst energies had recomposed into the Wayfinder shield, and it now came whirling at the back of Chernabog's head at quickly fast speeds.

Chernabog must have heard its approach, though, for it sprang into a backwards somersault so the frisbee passed in front of it, reached out with one of its taloned hands, and struck it precisely enough to direct its angle of approach at Yggdrasil's neck.

As it was about to strike, the head detached, moving back from the neck and letting the giant disc strike the roof of the building hard enough to wedge into it.

Why was she even faintly relieved there was no visible damage to the minaret?

Then a thirteenth indigo pinion thrust out of the neck and bent forward at an around ninety degree angle as Yggdrasil sprang to its feet, its head attaching to one of the turrets the other wings had detached from.

Yggdrasil took back alight into the air to face at the similarly hovering Chernabog, and the thirteenth wing morphed into the contours of a violet Keyblade of energy in the shape of what was most likely a Kingdom Key Starlight.

This time, many of the expressions that passed over Ralph's face were clearly ones of anguished hurt, before they then hardened into edged, desperate rage.

"Oh, yeah?" he challenged with the defensiveness of someone backed into a corner.

"At least I accept how I'm bad!

"You refuse to even acknowledge what Shank, and Slaughter Race, even are!

"I'm just attempting to wreck the Turbotastic crown that's even more of a total greenhorn than what that thick skull of yours has now become, why won't you see that!?"

Vanellope staggered back as though she'd just touched molten lava.

Axel inhaled sharply, and he then strode past Kairi in their direction determinedly, his face pale over lips set with determination, his arms and hands raised in the air.

Isa was following right after him, his lips just slightly thin, his own horrified guilt and self hate in his eyes.

Unbridled fury was now washing through all the fibers of Vanellope's gaze, and her expression, and she opened her mouth.

"Hold on, can both of you please think over what you're about to say before either of you make any more comments you'll end up regretting later?" Axel spoke, his tone composed and level; possessing enough knowing sympathy it was clear he wasn't talking from an emotional remove about a situation he was in no position to understand, and thus pass judgments on; but not so much his tone of voice could also be misconstrued as an attempt to pry into a dispute that was none of his business.

"Locking the horns of our insecurities accomplishes nothing other than for us to leave the keys to those sealed lids behind, after we've realized, too late, just how priceless the jewels inside really are.

"There's this thing about the treasures known as our hearts, in our chests that will never stop beating with them.

"You keep them open."

Vanellope's face swept itself clean of all emotion.

Ralph's eyes widened in a different kind of desperate hope, however.

"Then I won't let a gangster con me this time.

He reached in a chest pocket on the left, undamaged side of his overalls and fished for something.

"All right, little pal, I now believe letting you out outside of a Game is actually safer, so how about you be the judge of which one of the two of us is the mo–"

Chernabog whirled, and it swooped down at Ralph with its maw open wide.

Vanitas started violently.

Yggdrasil spun itself, and soared after Chernabog, the large Keyblade of energies raising so it was aimed about straight forward in front of Yggdrasil's neck.

Oh, no.

Ralph had Arthur.

Chernabog spasmed violently, and came to a halt.

Yggdrasil arced around Chernabog and confronted it with its fore plating facing the jet demon, its Keyblade of light falling to aim at it once more.

Chernabog's visage then contorted in an expression of unmitigated and feral bestial hate and wrath as it whipped its head to look down at them with a similar unrestrained lack of reserve.

"So that's why."

Kairi suppressed the urge to start slightly as the voice emanating from Chernabog's huge mouth wasn't a reverberating roar, but so strained and cracked it was as though the speaker was unused to talking in it.

"The data isn't in place yet, but that can wait."

Even with how strained Chernabog's voice was, Kairi couldn't justify suppressing the urge to cringe at the unbridled hate in it.

"However, even though you told Data-Sora about the day you set out on your first adventure before you even acknowledged your memory of making your first friend, it changes nothing that you even had enough decency remaining to first admit you let your priceless brooms drown every single memory we once shared lounging the days away on Steamboat Willie, writing to our other best friend, our pen pal Minnie, in the Country of the Musketeers, wishing upon the twinkling stars with all our hearts we would one day sail the Ocean Between and meet in person, then twirl rocketing through the stars with nothing but our most far flung imaginations as the pinnacle of our dreams, believing our future would last even longer than the friends forever I once trusted with all my heart you would never stop cherishing."

"Sora, don't ever change."

"I just can't wait. Once we set sail, it'll be great."

Kairi was aware she couldn't breathe, with such laser pinpoint acuity it was as though the silence around her was howling louder than anything the ears could process, drowning out anyher from inside her lungs with such a constricting vice it was so easy to breathe she was so giddy she'd never need to take another gulp of air once again.

At the most distant fringes of her perception, Kairi was aware Mickey was inhaling with the kind of anguish she'd solely heard in Ephemer's, and Strelitzia's voice.

"Horlaikio Hamlot, the Hamster," Mickey breathed.

Then there was nothing but exhausted resignation in Mickey's voice.

"I won't deny it, or even attempt to prove I didn't do to you what I've done to everyone else, for no reason other than how scared I was of the darkness until I met Riku.

"I went back for you," if Kairi hadn't known what to look for by now, even with how great they were, she wasn't sure she'd have seen the barest retractions, so fractional they were almost imperceptible, in how pronounced the lines around Horlaikio's eyes were, "but by the time I at last stopped hiding in my comfortable bubble filled with nothing but remote candlelight I could aimlessly flutter around like the moth I've been most of my life, and I admitted to myself, even that early on, yes, Pete might have been willing to sink as low as what I refused to face, I couldn't find a trace of what had happened to you.

"I should have known you, too, remained at my side as the shadow I cast, the whole time."

"It's not the least bit surprising you couldn't even figure out that much," the savage fury in Horlaikio's voice remained unchanged.

"You were never willing to make any more effort at doing anything than the barest minimum necessary to ensure you could return to lounging around.

"Once you, and Minnie, discovered you two didn't even need to sail on a steamboat over water, far less have any use for a tame mutt with the stamina of a hamster on a treadmill to assist it in chugging along, I became as much of an angle for you two as Pete.

"Even Arthur won't be able to keep my memories intact long enough for me to recognize who I am, but at least spare me the hypocrisy of pretending to be disappointed when I once more forget everything,"

"Sora, don't ever change."

"I just can't wait. Once we set sail, it'll be great."

once more, from how an almost unidentifiable amount of hardness in the lines around Horlaikio's eyes receded, Kairi knew Mickey had let what he was feeling show

"other than how to live as a tireless hound of warfare.

"I don't need memories, just the despair and animosity that are all that are left in my own heart, to be able to keep on timelessly shearing and scything down World after realm, Ocean Between after river, so swiftly," Horlaikio's voice broke into a thin near whisper as he attempted to raise it, but even though he didn't stop straining his vocal cords at all, the rest of his words were clearly audible, "the mops and brooms in the firmament can't plough down the cesspools I leave behind!"

Horlaikio's expression then assumed its ordinary savage cast.

A suppressed cry of agony emitted from where Namine was standing, behind Kairi, and to her left.

The blood drained from Vanitas' face, and it became thinly acute.

A madly counterclockwise twisting, dancing vortex of sanguine light violet and pale gray Blox rushed out from Ralph's hand in all directions with the rage of a tsunami to suspend in preserved haphazardly interspersed bricks that Kairi could also see below the bridge they were on with the arrangement of the inside of a globular sphere of revolving slowly counterclockwise in orbit around all of them.

Vanellope's eyes flew open wide, and her jaw dropped, as she gazed out sightlessly at something no one but her could see.

Ralph's own eyes went wide, and more guilt appeared on his face.

A desperate expression of slack, distilled unadorned horror appeared on Vanellope's face, and tears brimmed in her eyes and spilled over down her visage.

"Empyreal," she breathed, her voice a concave sinkhole of not even lacking nothing.

She whipped her head in Vanitas' direction, and there was now nothing but unconstrained hate in her expression.

She swung her right hand in at herself, and the Blox all flew in towards her, shrinking as they went.

Around them, small spinning green cubes began to flicker in and out of sight at haphazardly different locations, while Vanellope herself began to glitch once more, her green cubes this time sheeting with flickering gray and crimson light purple, but she paid no attention to it.

The coalescing Blox altered form into the shape of a thick, long Keyblade that then comprised itself together around her forearm, above her elbow.

Vanitas snarled with contained anger, and he moved his right hand and arm to bring Void Gear into his grip.

Then he clenched his teeth, his eyes sliding to the side at the cubes still surrounding him, clearly uncertain what they would do to him, and his darkness, if he called his Keyblade.

"Bad Guy Breaker," Ralph commented, uncertain trepidation, and a new kind of guilt in his voice.

"Not… you…" a metallic and echoing voice, fuzzed with spasms of static, sounded as though coming from everywhere around them.

Entire cubes of four transparent green blocks apiece, each block itself around the size of Kairi's head, erupted all around them and began to rotate at different speeds and directions.

Ephemer inhaled once more, terrified reproach in the sound of his breath that made it clear he recognized those words, and he knew what they meant.

"Vanellope, wait!" he shouted.

Namine's voice now sounded, terror Kairi was far too familiar with at losing the connections, and life, she'd so recently gained Kairi was so familiar with drenching every inflection, and syllable, of her words.

Though, her voice was also a washing sheer of wasted and cracked, self directed hatefully guilty terror that, even though Kairi had never heard it from Namine's voice before, she recognized the most essentially of all.

"Vanitas isn't armed, and he's partially at a disadvantage!"

Vanitas' expression removed all sentiment.

Ralph's jaw slacked once more, as all of the color left his face, and he stood staring at something no one but he himself could see, too.

"I will never be good," his voice was a wisp of swelling horror.

"And that's…

"…not…

"…bad."

"He's a prisoner, and at your mercy!"

Anna shifted slightly in Kristoff's arms, once more.

"I was supposed to have lit his way home!

"Don't do to him what DiZ did to Riku, his own replica, Roxas, an–"

However, if Vanellope even discerned what Namine was saying, she didn't pay any attention to it.

"I'm gonna' wreck you!" she howled with so much desperate hate brimming fury her own voice was so strained it lacked the ability to become that loud, her eyelids lowered slightly with her irises directed at herself even while her vision remained on the person Kairi knew was merely Vanellope's best punching target of all.

Shrieking wordlessly, she sprang at Vanitas.


Xion barely even processed that Roxas, a frosted sculpture that had used to be Elsa, and she were now standing through her tears on a transparent surface of interlocked polygons in front of the balcony of the Twilight Town clock tower.

"Because you've got friends in high places, you mean. Tricks like that don't fly for your average joe."

"What do you know? You weren't even there! If you were, you'd admire Herc's courage."

"I don't admire one guy leaping into danger if it means someone else might have to jump in to save him. You're all just lining up to lose out. Dooming others to take the fall with ya'."

"It's too late… for me to undo my mistakes."

All Xion could think to do was to incline her head in acknowledged thanks to Elsa.

Roxas was just standing there, eyes wide with an indecipherable expression on his face as he beheld what Elsa had just said, and done.

Xion, however, knew him well enough to see the traces of new horrified hate passing through his eyes.

Even now, hot pressure pushed against the backs of her eyes.

This time, however, Xion actively forced the tears back.

No.

This time, it was not going to be too late.

It didn't matter what the answer was.

It didn't matter whether it was best for everyone, and everything, or for her.

It didn't matter whether there even was one.

She was not going to do nothing, this time around, and let Maleficent have her checkmate.

Xion banished the Keyblade of Hearts in coiling energies, and then returned it to her hand while spinning and vaulting into a low jump to position herself between where Christopher's voice had come from, Roxas, and Elsa, unsure what had happened to her phantom self even though she couldn't see it, and unwilling to risk shattering Elsa, or hurting her if she'd begun to defrost by now.

Xion couldn't see anyone, but she still settled into a neutral stance, with the Keyblade of Hearts ready to protect, or strike preemptively, as soon as she had a good idea how.

"I don't need a light from a past to show also ran vultures like you not to call a win when it isn't over yet!" she shouted with contained and angrily determined challenge.

It was a little easier to breathe at how it took no effort at all to keep any of that anger from directing itself at her.

"You sacrificed yourself for me?"

"Yes, hearts are powerful when they're connected. But if you put too much of that power in one place, some of those hearts might end up breaking."

If there was one thing that Xion still couldn't let go of, even now; it was that, no matter how useless she was, no matter how powerless she was, no matter how caked her hands were with bloody mistakes, no matter how treacherous she was; in whatever sense that remained she could call herself that, she was an average joe.

"Yet, poor child, it is not the past that never ceases to slip from your grasp you need not let slip away, but the future," Maleficent's voice sounded from all around them, with a calm triumph in it that was more sure than at any time before.

"Remember, the Oathkeeper is a Wayfinder.

"As you know by now, I reign over not soldiers, but proxies.

"Any carriers that bring the Oathkeeper in between to this place, and this time, were sufficient as long as I could properly weight the scales of light and darkness, acceptance and dismissal, not as a judge presiding over an execution of all hearts within the realm of light before which all light and darkness are equally balanced beneath the guillotine of the Kye-Blade's one incontrovertible law, but as the balanced ledger of the Keyblade of Hearts.

"His words to you, too, had their role to play, but I was no more willing to trust Runeard with one sky than Xehanort was the first Organization."

Xion suppressed the urge to clench her teeth.

At the knowledge who knew how much of what Maleficent was saying now could be false, or sincere, too.

In front of her, the silhouette of a Keyhole the size of the Final Keyhole flickered, its edges not the gold wrought from the pipes in Radiant Garden's audience chamber, but the rapids of eddying colors she'd seen in the picture of the darkness and light inside it.

It did so once more, and this time, the flickers reverberated back and forth between nearly solid, and almost indiscernible.

Xion's heart squeezed in such an immovable, relentless vise she needed to actively take breath after breath to keep ingesting oxygen.

Though, however she was doing it, she could now perceive Maleficent's words enough to know that this time, she was hearing nothing but entire honesty.

Xion couldn't breathe at all.

Was this how Xehanort had channeled darkness to wield the K

No.

No one, and nothing, was going to take the fall any farther down into her quest for answ–

Xion was light enough she no longer had to think about it to breathe.

Her eyes were still obscured by darkness.

Sora had literally redirected the currents of reality into the one he knew with all his heart, merely by refusing to lose trust in the existence he believed in when confronted with the absolute strictures of the Kye-Blade, and Kairi's Demon Tide, before which all else was judged.

And, from this, he had completed learning that there was no such thing as a total defined separation between light and darkness, or wrong and right, and that disputes fountained from a clash of beliefs he could end by lighting the way to a compromise at a table at the common room of a home.

All Xion needed to do, even in the face of this much proof there wasn't an answer of her own to begin with, was to believe there was one.

She didn't need a trail before her to guide her, any more than she needed a set destination.

A severance between the presence of a path, or its lack, distinguished between delineations as calling a self, or perspective, on one side of a conflict, rightly light, and the other heart, or person, darkly wrong.

There was no difference between this, and any other journey that lacked a set solution.

All she needed to guide her was to trust, not even in the answers within her own heart, but that she could discover an answer.

She just needed to believe that, somewhere, there was a warmly lit fireplace she could curl up at, and rest.

"It's good to tell, at last, there is no skein separating us, any longer," Maleficent went on, her voice unperturbed.

Her newfound awareness was another reason for Xion to not worry about the specifics of what Maleficent meant about this.

"For, dear stepdaughter, what I required was a stage with adjustable enough props I could, one way or another, ensure the Oathkeeper of the Compass welcomed and refused the Keyblade of Hearts at the same time, as the arbiter of the ethereal and the material holds both dreams close while refusing their nightmares, in order for me to coalesce them into wishes for a fated future and mingle together the histories of data and memories in its undertow through Arthur and Ahtohallan."

Xion suppressed the urge to clench her teeth.

She pushed all sentiment as distantly away as she could justify.

"I have wrought Hringhorn's Wayfinder.

"And, through its ability to alter the electrical impulses of data into memories, I have opened a direct bypass for Arthur, the Once, Now, and Future King to hack the hurt from the world data within Jiminy's Journal directly into the world hearts of the planets upon which they are based.

"Hringhorn's Wayfinder is now well into the process of carving a small, Postern Door of Darkness into them all, each wide open, through which every single Keyblade of Darkness are now arriving to seek your now, once more all but cast, Keyblade of Hearts.

"What were the words Sora's data partition uttered?

"Ah, yes.

"Riku fulfilled his role, after all.

"The part I wrote for him to play.

"If I hadn't been inspired to claim his legacy in his name, I would never have been able to nest on the real pinnacles of the golden hoard that is Jiminy's Journal.

"Or chanced upon a most intriguing conversation.

"As the most brilliant light leaves the deepest shadows, it was none other than Data-Sora who gave me this idea to begin with.

"Along with Namine's data.

"And, I daresay I don't need to add, Roxas'."

At those words, Xion needed to suppress the urge to clench the hand holding the pommel of the Keyblade of Hearts tightly around it.

"Through the Keyblade of Hearts, I will thread through these Keyblades of Darkness the spindle of the Wishing Singularity directly through the hollows of the realm of darkness beneath the crust of realm of light on the surface of the celestial globe, and constrict the endless great abyss itself into the Wishing Singularity that will draw all the branches of the brooks of the stellar clock until Castle Oblivion's data truly has the whole universe inside it."

.

"It's all about different beliefs. People want to believe they're right, so anyone who goes against them is wrong, making them darkness in the eye of the beholder."-Helgi

"In every world, there was strife born of conflicting beliefs. Instead of creating a divide like light and darkness, maybe there's a way for everyone to coexist."-Heimdall

"We've also visited a few worlds and seen the same thing. There's a little bit of darkness everywhere. But that's its way, to slowly infiltrate everything. Darkness can hide anywhere. Even inside someone."-Xehanort

"Yeah, darkness doesn't exist in people's hurts… until it burrows its way inside. I'm gonna' make it my duty to destroy the shadow and only the shadow. Just need to know it when you see it, right?"-Eraqus

"Right."-Xehanort

"We have nothing more to share with you but this: Your lives are not ours to judge, but yours to lead. Broaden your horizons and find your own answers."-Heimdall

"Thank you."-Eraqus

"Thank you."-Xehanort

"May your heart be your guiding key."-Heimdall

KINGDOM HEARTS: DARK ROAD