Lightbringer; Chpt. 8- The Best Intentions
Adalai- Alright Zena, Disclaimer!
Zena, Muse of Tragedy- Adalai owns nothing. Ok!!!! NOTHING!!! Runs away bawling, asking 'god why me'.
Adalai- Ok... that was somewhat unexpected...But I do own the plot and OCs. AHAH! points and laughs at lawyers, singing 'you can't sue me, you can't sue me...ect, ad verbatim.
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Kairi opened her eyes. This can't be real...
It must have been a dream. Whether it was a bad dream or a good dream she had not yet decided, but it certainly was a strange dream.
She was standing inside what looked like a giant hollow tree, at least as wide as a city and god knows how tall. Pieces of the tree spiraled around in abstract forms. On the top of these relatively flat masses of earth lay, covered in the strangest plants, animals, and plant-animal hybrids she had ever seen. Instead of air, the surrounding area seemed to be filled with a sort of liquid that was as light as air. Light seemed to come from everywhere at once, probably from the surrounding liquid.
It was on one of these that Kairi stood. It was covered with long, blue- green grass, small, glowing, scalloped-shell like lichens, and large, semi- transparent flowers, ranging in size from her curled fist to the size of her face, speckled with rainbow colors, and a thousand other tiny plants too strange to describe here, climbing and clinging to every available surface. Large flat pieces of living wood from the tree stuck up like strange monolith, curving around each other above, bellow, and to the side of her, strange plants and moving things, some of which she was not sure were animal, but parts of plants, covering them.
Slowly, people began to appear. The first was Sora; He was taller and wearing black, blue and red clothes. Then...another Sora appeared?
What the hell was going on?
The second Sora was in black and white clothes, and had blond hair the same shade as Alma's instead of brown. A third Sora appeared, wrapped in a black raincoat. Half of his body was gone and had been replaced with shadowflesh; the right side of his body resembled that of a Neo heartless. Then, a fourth Sora appeared; or, at least, what Sora would have looked like if he was a girl, and had shoulder length blonde hair. This Sora held herself like Kairi did; back straight, hands clasped behind on the small of the back. A fifth Figure appeared, wrapped in a black cloak, the cowl thrown over his face, yellow heartless eyes peering out from the shadowed face.
Who are these people?
"We are but hollow men; ashes to ashes, shadows and dust. Measured, weighted, and divided."
Kairi looked at the speaker. It was a girl, who seemed to be the opposite of everything she was, standing on her left. Fiery red hair to cool ashy brown, open blue eyes to hidden ones behind reflective lenses, delicately shaped features to longer, leaner, sharper, more scuplted ones, round face and wide jaw to lean, thin oval face and tapered jaw, short well-toned body to a slender, lean, tall one. She seemed somehow familiar.
On the other side of her stood Riku, in the same black raincoat, with a blindfold over his eyes.
The first Sora looked at her. The other Soras held out glowing crystals, seemingly made of light. The first Sora looked at her, with eyes that seemed to be empty and devoid. It made her shudder. For is there anything more scary than nothing where there is supposed to be something? He spoke, addressing the three.
"If we take this to be the case, then there must be other 'you's other than yourself existing somewhere Find them for me."
...
It was night before Ellos woke up.
Yawning and stretching, Ellos looked outside the window. Rain beat down mercilessly on the streets and canals of old Venice. Nighttime was Ellos' favorite time of day, when Heartless came out, people went in, and all the unnecessary light vanished, leaving Ellos alone and able to see without the constant glare of sunlight in her eyes. Sometimes, on pitch-dark nights, she even stalked the streets with her face bare, glad for a respite from her special glasses, clinging to her face like a symbiotic parasite.
Ellos decided to take a walk. Plucking her glasses from the nightstand and her jacket from the peg, she put both items on a lifted up a window, ready to jump out.
The sound of a door being opened caused her to turn around. The girl with the dark brown hair and orange and yellow clothing was there, peering behind the edge of the door at her. "Aeris says that you can come out now. Where are you going, in this rain?"
She didn't usually like company, but it would be nice to talk to someone. "Going for a walk. Would you like to come?" she asked politely.
"Shure. Let me get my umbrella. Oh and by the way, my names Natalia."
...
10 minutes latter, Ellos and Natalia were walking side by side, under an umbrella, wandering through the streets of Old Venice, Natalia leading and pointing out places of interest.
Charisma is one of the vaguest and undefined characteristics accorded to the human race. Ellos had always found that, when she wanted to, she could make people open up to her and spill all their dreams, hopes, desires, and innermost secrets to her. She never really knew why; she just preferred to listen, rather than talk, in a conversation, and she spoke her mind simply and honestly when people asked her what she thought. Under the umbrella, Natalia told Ellos her own story; how she had come to Twilight Town, her hopes for the future, her interests, her friends, her fears. Ellos listened appreciatively; she enjoyed listening to the lives of other, of their little struggles and oddities. Most people thought that descriptions of their day-to-day lives would be boredom fodder, but these descriptions of normalcy gave her a feeling of peace.
The two girls walked on, admiring the same sights through two very different pairs of eyes. Their conversation wandered from their lives to the recent going-ons in the Bell Tower; a great amount of it gossip which Natalia spouted while Ellos listened.
Suddenly, Ellos observed a flash of blue out of the corner of her eye. Turning, she saw a woman in a dark blue raincoat, holding an umbrella by her side.
"And then he...Umph!!!" Ellos grabbed Natalia, clutching her arm and clamping her hand over her mouth. She led her down a smaller street with a canal down the middle, walking fast but not running, until the woman was out of view.
"What is it?" Natalia asked, fear creeping into her voice.
"That woman in the blue raincoat. Something was wrong with her. She didn't move right, didn't act right, didn't look right.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm never mistaken about these things."
"So what do we do?"
"Head back for the Bell Tower. It was a mistake to come out here..."
As she spoke, the woman emerged from a side street, cutting off their escape. Ellos grabbed her. "Into the water!"
Pushing Natalia into the canal, Ellos balled her fists, the blades, attached to the gloves, coming out with a whoosh. The woman in blue looked at the canal with Natalia in it, and, as Ellos though she would, drew away from the water with an involuntary shudder. With a yell, the woman in blue threw herself with a bloodcurdling shriek at Ellos. Ellos plunged the blade deep into her gut and yanked it out, backing away.
The woman fell to the ground. Then, something like a black cloud seemed to float off the woman, except she seemed to be emancipated and starved, barely able to stand. It floated around the body, thinking for a minute. Then it descended back on the woman's body, covering all of her in a black cloak that reached up to her jawline. Moving the half-dead body on it's feet, jerking like a marionette in the hands of a toddler, and charged again to Ellos.
Knocking it off it's feet, she began to stab it repeatedly, with her blades as big as normal sword blades. Once, twice...so many times she lost count. At first the black cloud pulled the screaming woman back on her feet, each time the movements more jerky and stumbling. Even when she died, her heartless parasite still hauled her to her feet, still trying to use the woman's body to scare or disgust it's attacker. But Ellos would not be discouraged; she kept stabbing again and again and again...not stopping, each stroke carefully calculated to do the most damage, as cold and efficient as a machine. That was what scared Natalia the most; Ellos coldly plunging the knife into the woman's body, trying to get at the swarm heartless that, finally giving up on trying to move the woman's body, had gone inside her, using her body as shelter. The woman screamed and convulsed, the heartless inside her killing her slowly. Blood dripped and sprouted from her knife wounds.
Ellos stopped. The heart of the heartless drifted up from the woman's body and disappeared. But still she heard screaming, pounding in her ears, turning around, she saw Natalia. She was standing in the canal, waist deep in water, screaming her head off. Screaming, screaming.
"Natalia, SHUT UP!"
She instantly closed her mouth, sobs still wracking the girl's small frame. The shock of hearing Ellos raise her voice was enough to silence her. Ellos jumped in the canal, no longer worried about getting wet; the rain had already soaked her. "Go back to the Bell Tower and get Leon and the Nobody. He needs to see this. Tell him there are Predator Heartless in Old Venice." The fawning hero worship was gone from her eyes, replaced with a look of absolute terror and fear. She realized what Ellos really was; a killer who killed to keep alive, nothing more. And it filled her with terror and disgust for the older woman. Ellos had seen such realization come to the faces of many people, but in this case, it somehow made her extremely sad.
Helping her out of the canal, Natalia ran, toward the Bell tower. And running from me, Ellos thought. The rejection and fear from Natalia's eyes was almost heartbreaking, for some reason. Why should it matter that much to me? The opinion of a girl I barely know? Ellos wondered. She suddenly felt a wave of depression flow over her, a burden so heavy she could barely stand. She felt...hollow. If someone came right now to kill her unless she gave him a reason not to, she would not be able to think of a single one.
Suddenly, Ellos turned, looking down the waterway. The water, much different in Ellos' sigh than in human sight, appeared completely transparent, the tiny ripples made from falling water seemingly etched in light, each raindrop creating bursts of subtle color and sound, both in the real world and in Ellos' synaesthesic mind. Peering through this covering of light, color and sound, Ellos saw a group of 5 predator heartless, coming for her.
Each was about the size of a man, shaped roughly like a Spinosaurus. They were jet black, with webbed feet designed for swimming. Most heartless avoided the water, because it dissolved shadowflesh and swarm heartless avoided it because they couldn't keep their swarms together in the currents. Their spiked frills cut above the water, their heads and mouths clear of the waves. Their heads where covered in small, closefitting plates of armor, almost indistinguishable from their pebbly skin, a shade of black just slightly more blue than their shadowflesh. The heartless crest was outlined in deepest black, except it seemed to be broken in many places, with cracks of lighter blue-black shadowflesh in it.
As they came closer, Ellos could see their skin seemed to move, made of tiny particles. Swarm Heartless Ellos thought, Adapted to survive in water.
Suddenly, one of them dissolved into fist sized black spheres. Each sphere must be a swarm; that means each creature must be made of many swarms, working together. The spheres gathered together, some flattening out over the others to form it's skin, falling toward Ellos, claws outstretched.
Ellos slashed through it, bringing her left blade across it's middle and her right hand down and to the left, slashing across and down it's middle. The two parts flew apart, spheres flying everywhere, until tendrils of it's skin reached out, connecting the parts, healing them, the spheres flying back into position before the wounds closed. It landed with a splash, fully formed again. By Ellos' side.
The other 4 did the same thing. Circling her, they had the advantage; they moved faster than her in the water, and they didn't need to breathe. She slashed at them, but when her blade came anywhere near them, they flattened out on the surface of the water, impossible to attack. She cut them when they tried to leap at her, destroying as many of the black spheres as possible before they healed.
Feeling claws sink into her leg, she stabbed downward, hitting a heartless. She swing her blade down in the water, stabbing and slicing, until it was too damaged to heal itself, the black spheres that where left drifting off in the current.
Suddenly, she felt the weight of another heartless on her back, dragging her into the water, claws buried deep in her back, reaching for her heart. She felt her wing tear loose through one of the gashes in her back. She dropped in a kneeling position, water now above her head.
Leaping on their now stationary target, the Heartless descended on Ellos, trying to crush her under their weight. One grabbed Ellos' wing, almost ripping it from her back, gnawing on it with it's teeth. The other piled on top of her, forcing what little air she had from her lungs, claws leaving deep gashes on her chest and sides in their mad scramble for her heart.
Form out of nowhere, someone jumped into the canal, and yanked the heartless from her back with inhuman strength. The same person grabbed her around the waist and hauled her up into the air. Gasping for breath and coughing up water, Ellos watched as the figure behind her obliterated the heartless in front of her with a firaga spell. While Ellos did not normal like being helped or hugged, right now she was more thankful for it than she could say.
And incredibly suspicious. Who was this person? She tried to twist around to get a better look at her attacker, but only caught a glimpse of white hair. White hair?
And then, suddenly, the figure shifted it's grip on her, putting it's other arm from her waist under her knees and lifting her up, one arm on her back, the other under her knees. With a groan, the figure tossed her onto the street. She landed on her back, the force of her descent winding her. She turned to see a figure in a raincoat with white hair and a blindfold climb out of the canal.
"Ellos, if you tell me you could have taken them down by yourself, I will break your legs and leave you for the heartless."
...
Ellos started, mouth slightly open. She had wondered what had happened to Strife after she had left him, at the door between Kingdom Hearts and the In-Between World. But she had never thought he would become a Nobody. Well, almost a Nobody.
Ellos' fist smacked into Strife's raised hand; his hand tightening over her's when she tried to draw it back to strike him again. "Well, I suppose that's an answer."
"Let me go. Why? Why a Nobody? Why one of them? Why these stupid games, this messing with people's lives, hiding you identity from me like this? Why bring me?"
Strife let go and spoke, sadness in his voice at the sight of Ellos' hurt. "Would you believe...I'm trying to do the right thing, for all the wrong reasons? Would you believe that I was a Nobody even before I met you?"
Strife turned, walking back towards the Bell Tower, shoulders slumped. He always walked like that when he didn't think anyone was looking; like he was carrying some terrible burden of guilt for a sin which he was afraid of being forgiven. Ellos looked up; it had stopped raining, revealing a jet black sky, littered with stars, the horizon of which was just begging to turn pink with the promise of another twilit day. Rays of the twilight struck the water now dripping from the buildings around them, causing them to flash brilliantly with multi-hued light, revealing tiny rainbows of color only Ellos' and Strife's sensitive eyes could see. The whole place looked innocent and clean, like a brilliant light born from brooding darkness. Hard to imagine she had just killed someone, and probably emotionally scared another, just...how long ago was it? 30 minutes? 15? Better than doing the wrong thing, for all the right reasons. Ellos thought, unaware of the secret irony of this statement.
...
For the second time, Ellos had to break into a run to keep up with Strife. Because he was taller than her, he had a longer stride, and walked faster. Looking up, she saw the clear sky of Twilight Town. But something was wrong with it. They were dark clouds, floating in the sky, blacker than any storm clouds she had ever seen. As they grew nearer, she saw the clouds where not normal clouds of water vapor and air, but where made of solid darkness and dark energy. Connecting them was a sort of white lightning with a bluish tinge, which left after-images of intense blue fire in Ellos' sight and filled her mouth with a cold-iron tang. He stomach heaved with the wrongness of it, from the evil she could feel emanating from it like an almost visible aura. Patches of it seemed scattered at random over the city, moving and drifting with an insidious, hidden purpose.
"One of them is over the Bell Tower." Strife said, obviously thinking the same thing she was. He grabbed her arm and teleported.
One moment she was on the street, the other she was on the roof of the Bell Tower. Disoriented by her sudden change in location, Ellos sat down on the roof, dizzy.
Above her, the underside of the cloud moved and shifted as if it was a living thing. Wispy, finger-thin tentacles, both light and dark, drifted downward to poke at the walls of the tower, but didn't go in.
Gummi blocks...Heartless, mindless, and Nobody cannot pass through gummi blocks.
But now those same tentacles where moving toward them. Many of them where clustered around the clock face, a weak point in the wall because the clock itself was not made of gummi. Strife saw these tentacles too. With a flash, they where once again outside at the front entrance of the Bell Tower. The two raced inside.
Inside the Bell Tower, the inhabitants where preparing for war. Cloud, Riona, Scion, Leon, Yuffie, and any other warriors they could muster where also there, armed to the teeth.
"It's going to break through at the clock room."
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Adalai- ok, short little chapter before I leave for the weekend for you. Really more of a connecting chapter, to lead in the next chapter. That doesn't mean important things aren't in this chapter; like Kairi's dream, Ellos finally meeting up with Strife, and the incident with Natalia, and the heartless woman. Turns out Ellos isn't such a heartless bastard after all, eh? Next chapter is going to be really big, with the plot really starting to start up and all sorts of secrets revealed and all that stuff. So it's a crucial chappy. I should have it posted hopefully some time next week. But I won't tell you any more.
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The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
-Anonymous