Expositus II

(or, Tree of Possibilities)

… … … … …†

Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.

- Ben Johnson

Care is taken that trees do not grow into the sky.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are places of darkness in the world, paths on which it is unwise for humans to walk.

Everything was quiet, frozen. It was a world without sound, filled with something much more than just lack of noise; tangible silence, in its truest form. You could feel it in the air, like humidity on a hot summer day, ringing in our ears like a high-strung glass, ready to shatter. A silence so loud, it drowned all other sounds.

I looked at the raging storm outside, and at the quiet beach, like a child holding its breath, and stepped through the door. There was no invisible barrier, no obstacle, no sudden rush of wind to mark this barrier between the worlds. It was as if I'd only stepped into an empty room.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I'd been holding. I was…disappointed, a little bit. It seemed too easy somehow. I'd expected…well, maybe not parades or parties or natural disasters, but at least something. After all, I was the first Destiny Islander that had stepped foot on another world.

"Kairi?"

"Yes?"

I fumbled blindly in the dark until I felt Kairi's hand, smooth and warm. I could feel the bones of her fingers and of her palm, small and deceptively fragile, but deft and, if she ever wanted them to be, viciously accurate. There were like bird bones, smooth, thin and endlessly fascinating, and I wanted to roll them between my fingers like river pebbles and erase all the callousness, the roughness on them of island life. They didn't seem to belong there, in my mind. They weren't from this world, but were meant for the pursuits of another.

"What do you see?" She asked, hesitantly.

"I'm not sure." I said.

There was a glint in the sand by the water's edge. There was a bottle, and in it a message. I looked down the shoreline and saw, suspended between water and land, more bottles, reflected flashes of moonlight in the sand. Kairi wandered down the beach, collecting them.

I gently tipped the aged parchment out of the bottle. The paper was blank.

"They're all blank." Kairi said softly behind me, more papers in her hands. Shoving the paper into my pocket, I jumped on top of the tallest rock I could find, to get a clear view of the island.

As different as it was from Destiny Islands, the layout of the island was exactly the same. It was so familiar, it was creepy. Off to the left was a small rock island, just like my island on Destiny Islands, except there was no plank bridge connecting it to the mainland. The island was the exact shape and size as Party Island, but instead of the rocks and buildings that were on Party island, the ground was completely flat and lifeless and the surface of the moon. Occasionally, a bunch of crystals, lumped together in what vaguely represented a tree, twisted brokenly out of a heap of slag. In the center, where the secret cave would have been, stood an enormous tree, the size of the old oak on Party Island. A small entrance, the size of a small cave, stood nestled in it's roots.

I leaned against one of the crystal trees behind me. Weird. It was all so weird. Wyrd Islands, I guess I'd call it. The named seemed to fit.

"I'm gonna go check out that tree." I said to Kairi.

As I got closer, I relized how massive the tree was in comparison. The I stuck my head into the hole. It was blacker than a telemarketer's heart.

"Throw a stone down to see how deep it is." Kairi whispered beside me. I grabbed a big pebble and threw it down into the hole. I never heard it hit bottom.

"Anything down there!" I yelled. It echoed and re-echoed but eventually was swallowed by the darkness.

"Okay. Who wants to go down the dark hole into the bottomless abyss first?" I said. Not waiting for an answer, I grabbed the lip of the tunnel and peered down. It wasn't the dark that bothered me. The dark I could deal with. I just had a little problem with small, enclosed places. Like tight, narrow tunnels that you had no idea what was at the end of them. That you had to lower yourself down on your back and get your ass bitten off by whatever was at the bottom. That was what bothered me. I value my ass. And I prefer that it stay firmly attached to my rear.

"You're not seriously going down there?" Kairi whisper-yelled, grabbing my arm.

"Don't worry about me." I said. "I'm ice man, remember? Impervious to everything- heat, feelings, bullets, monster stomach acid…I'll be fine, I promise." I added in at the end, seeing the look on her face get graver.

I took a deep breath. "Kairi?"

"Yes?"

"If I don't come back up, assume something ate me."

I fell down the hole and hit bottom on my back, rolling to a stop. I sneezed and coughed, clearing centuries-old dust from my nose. Yuck. I looked around. The only light came from the tunnel above, and the rest of the room, deep within the tree's roots, was swallowed in darkness.

The light from above flickered for a moment, as if something had passed in front of it. Kairi.

"Are you okay down there?" She yelled.

"Yup." I said. "Jump." She paused. "I'll catch you." I said. "I promise."

There was a scraping sound, and a whoosh, as Kairi camp down. I managed to catch her- sort of. I ended up knocked down, on my rear, with Kairi sprawled across my lap.

I froze. She did too. I stared at her, and she looked away, blushing. Have you ever had something beautiful enough you felt you could stare at all day? That's how I felt staring at Kairi. I cleared my throat and both of us snapped out of our trance.

She scrambled off. I sat there in the dirt, kneading my forehead. Mixed signals. I was getting mixed signals, giving mixed signals. This was driving me insane.

We sat in the dark for what seemed like an eternity. Uncomfortable silences can do that to your sense of time.

"Light." I said, weaving magic on my fingers into a small ball of warm, golden light. It drifted in front of us, illuminating the chamber, carved deep into the heart of the tree.

It had obviously been abandoned for quite some time. Dust, undisturbed and layered thick, lay draped evenly on every surface of the small room. Though the ceiling and the walls were carved straight into the heartwood of the tree itself, the floor was wooden planks. Save for a single sheet of paper, yellowed and solitary in its corner, a magnifying glass, and a gash in the floorboards, where someone had hacked a hole with an ax, the room was empty.

I pulled out the ax, still embedded in one of the floorboards. I saw a dull black gleam from somewhere inside the hole. Stone? Obsidian? Hefting the ax, I brought it down and began to clear away the planks. Little by little, something emerged from under the floorboards. A circular basin, made of shiny black stone. I ran my fingers over the engravings in the bowl. It was some kind of tree motif, with the center being a spiral, branching off into infinity. Among the leaves was a strange symbol, repeated over and over again, of an outstretched hand with a spiral for a palm. The raised ring around the bowl depicted some kind of timeline, a visual history of some sort, divided into four sections. The first showed a group of people- winged, and it seemed part plant, emerging from the branches of a massive tree, that itself seemed to come out of a massive fissure. Order emerging from chaos. The second showed a winged figure opening a box with the same hand-spiral symbol on the lid. The third showed two different races- one winged, one part plant, in the middle of a huge battle. The forth showed the plant people in chains, with heart-shaped holes on their chests- as if to signify that their hearts had somehow been taken from them. The whole scene seemed to be bathed in some sort of light; lines of light snaked from the holes in the plant people's hearts down to the tree, and inside the tree to a sort of crack, or fissure. The other people, the winged people, hovering over the plant people, had balls of light inside their chests. Those balls seemed to give off more light.

But there was something else inside the basin. It was a small tree, the same type of tree as the one we were in, sitting inside a glass case. But unlike the one we where in, this one seemed to have fruit- small, glass spheres with a multi-hued core.

I picked up the case carefully and placed it on the floor. I gently took off the lid and picked one of the glass marbles off the branch. I picked up the magnifying glass. It was carved out of white bone and had a distinctly futuristic feel to it. The lens, too, was tinted and odd color; a sort of gold hue. I peered at the multi-hued dot inside the crystal sphere.

The multi-hued dot turned into a massive explosion of gold energy, expanding rapidly through the crystal sphere. It filled it, and left behind nothing but blackness. For a moment, there was nothing but the darkness, but then, out of the corner of the lens, a tiny dot of white-hot light appeared, exactly like a star. Then another. And another. They clumped together and began to swirl, forming a tiny galaxy.

I had just seen what most scientists would give their right arm to see, spend their lives just trying to guess what it might look like. A tiny Big Bang. The creation of a new World. As I watched, galaxies formed and died, black holes were born, stars exploded into supernovas, and quasars burst into bright, violent displays of light. It was a tree that could make new worlds. It was impossible, unimaginable- even in my wildest dreams I never imagined something like this, but here it was, forming a new world before my eyes. Perhaps Destiny Islands itself had started as one of these crystal spheres. Maybe the tree we were standing in wasn't really a tree at all, but merely a branch, part of a much larger tree. Even more exciting, maybe there were other worlds on this tree like this one, waiting to be discovered. Hundreds more, even thousands- who knew how many worlds or how big the tree was that had made Destiny Islands.

"Kairi, come see this.", I said. She didn't answer. "Kairi?"

I heard the sound of crumpling paper from the far corner of the room. "My name" she said, "Is not Kairi."

I'm not sure how this will turn out.

It's midnight now. We are tending to the sick the best we can. Some of the townsfolk are beginning to cough up bile. Everyone is desperately sick, throwing up. I'm worried about the littlest one, Kairi, but I had to make her sick too. It was her only hope.

I've sent Maleficent down to check on the Library. I expected some word from her hours ago, but so far, nothing. Perhaps she has already gone to the Senate. They'll listen to her. I can only hope that she makes them understand how desperate the situation is. How necessary it is that we work together despite our past differences.

It is very possible that our creation will destroy us.

It seems strange that a week ago my biggest problem was the heartless. It seems almost laughable now. But then again, things never turn out how you want them to be.

It all came back when I read the letter.

I remembered everything that…bastard did to me. To the others. All in the name of his precious revolution. He thought just because he was right, and his enemies were committing horrible atrocities against his race, he could do horrible things to them as well. The things he did to his own kind, his brothers and sisters- and I'm not just talking about the heartless, either.

There are few times I could say I had really been mad. The bad things of the world will pile up on me until I feel hopeless, crushed by the weight of the world. There are still days when I wake up and I can't remember where I am, or anything about me. There are times when I forget who Sora and Riku are. It spirals onto itself and crushes me, the feeling of helplessness, of never getting closure, never knowing who I am. I can be angry because I have no-one to be angry at. Anger needs a target. I just have…nothing.

But then I found a target. A hook in the nothing. And the memories all came back, but it was like jumping in the river and touching the bottom with your feet. You take for granted that its there and you expected to be firm, but instead its slimy and treacherous, shifting beneath your feet. I reached down into the dark waters, expecting to find light, but only found the slime of decayed memories, dark and foul. They shifted benighted my hands like riverbed slime, and I could neither stop their movement nor discover their poisoned source.

I cursed myself for being such a fool. If they were pleasant, why would I have forgotten them? But they were fading, like sand carried in a sieve.

"Kairi?"

"My name's not Kairi."

"What?"

"My name is…my name is…" I kneaded my forehead, but the details kept slipping through my fingers.

"Kairi, are you okay?" He'd dropped whatever he'd found so fascinating before and moved over by me. There was concern in his eyes- but he didn't move closer. I knew that he would never make the first move. I remember watching him spar, and every time he would never strike first. Moving first made you vulnerable. But you know what? I didn't care. I collapsed against him and blinked to keep back the tears. I felt him wrap his arms around my back. I could stay like that forever. Safe in those arms.

"Come on, we need to be getting back." He said after a while. "We need to start looking for a door."

"What makes you so sure they'll be a door?" I asked.

"That shaft was too small to be anything other than for ventilation." He said. "The door must be hidden…" he began to feel along the wall. "or simply darkened from age." He turned to me. "Try and feel for a crack where the door meets the wall. I'll start on this side, you take the other."

Jesus. Who knew a door was so hard to find? I'd gone over the wall twice, till I found the door's edge. I swear, I haven't seen such a smooth surface since Sora coated the gym in floor wax and we spent an hour watching Coach Mehetabel slip and slide around the gym floor.

Taking out my sword, I wedged it in the crack and pushed, levering the door out of the crack. "Finally." I muttered under my breath, feeling a faint breeze issue from the crack.

There was a man on the other side of the door, but he didn't seem to be entirely…there. I backed up, sword in front of me, and the figure, dressed in brown rags, walked through me as if I wasn't there.

There was a brief flash, a rapid stream of incoherent memories, thoughts and images.

The darkness is…comforting to me.

What do you wish your Midnight to do, master?

That's a familiar sound.

Another Keyblade…I've gotten the Keyblade for this side.

Light, darkness, and a third power…

Maybe it's a power even more dangerous than darkness.

There are many of us who are worried about the consequences this technology will pose for the future.

Could be. We'll never know by staying here.

I don't know who you are but… What's happened to me?

This new organism, it is artificial in the sense that in the beginning, at least, it will be designed by us…

In this dark side where stolen hearts are gathered.

But it will 'evolve' into something other than its original form…It will be 'alive' under any reasonable definition of the word…

It will evolve in a fundamentally different manner- compared to ours, its pace will be extremely rapid…

You yourself should be able to feel their hearts.

And there is no telling, once it is created, whether or not we can control it, and most importantly, what it will become.

Truly fascinating.

There is no such thing as perfection, only the path toward it.

Because of this, you are, by you nature, incomplete.

In your present state, you probably cannot understand.

Something built for perfection must always be incomplete.

In any case, the time when we can meet again will doubtless come.

I am…a mere shell. We are all…shells. We have no hearts…

If I must have a name, you may call me…Nobody.

I stumbled and fell. The figure became solid again, and knelt by the basin, picking up the glass container and it's tiny world tree.

It turned around and looked at me. I froze.

"Đüán aeksimë? Penëmæ satsuó aneirmía? No wait, that's right, they wouldn't understand Ænir." The figure said, pacing. It raised it's hand to stroke it's chin. Both seemed to be nearly transparent, as if they weren't really there. Was it some sort of projection? A hologram? Or perhaps some kind of bodiless spirit?

"Who are you?"

"Thank you for the compliment. You referred to me as a person. It has been a long time since one of your kind has done that."

"I said, who are you?" I glanced quickly at Kairi. She was edging toward the door.

"Direct, aren't you? I am something that is not supposed to exist. If you must know who I am, the best answer I can give you is that I am a Quintia. The original Quintia." He replied. "And if you do not know who I am from that, then…we are truly screwed."

Another glance. Kairi was almost at the door now. As long as this…non existent person kept their attention on me, she had a chance to make it back through the door and into Destiny Islands.

"Then I guess we're screwed."

"Truly fascinating. This means…you are not complete." He said, and shifted to a fighting stance. "Perhaps a test of your power. But not here. The fabric of this world is too…unstable, too mutable to your kind. A change of scenery is in order."

There was a sickening lurch, an that familiar feeling of a teleport spell- Like throwing a baseball through a window, except what's throw isn't a baseball, it's you, and that feeling isn't glass, but reality breaking. But this time it was different. This time, the glass was a lot thicker- like being rammed repeatedly at a shatterproof glass pane. Then, it felt like being twisted so small and thin as a needle, and being wrung like a rag through a microscopic crack in said glass wall. Then, instead of feeling like you were sailing down though nothingness, it felt like wading through taffy, hard taffy, not that soft stuff. Taffy mixed with Novocaine, mind you, because my whole body began to feel numb.

It was not a pleasant experience.

I came back to consciousness slowly. Everything ached; arms, legs, and brain. Brain especially. I've never claimed to be physic, but right now my brain was throbbing to the beat of the Numa Numa song and my skull will soon crack open like china basin in a gorilla pit. I have foreseen it.

"Sleep, incomplete one. It's past you're bedtime."

Wah?

(crack)

The brown-cloaked figure sheathed the sword whose hilt he'd used to knock Riku unconscious. He didn't fear for the boy's safety- the heartless wouldn't attack this one, even if he were to order them too. There are some forms of protection against which no harm can be leveled, the figure knew.

Besides, there were other, more important matters to attend to.

He could sense the faint beatings of a spectral heart, like the soft coos of doves, from somewhere near. The man strode forward. The ground benighted his footsteps turned black with shadow. Deep inside those shadows, eyes opened, glowing with unearthly butter-yellow light, the color of decay.

Eyes became faces, and faces forms, as shadow Heartless glided into the night. But the yellow of his creation's eyes, the figure mused, could not compare to the color of his first creations eyes; purest gold: brilliant, clear, luminous, flecked with the faintest hints of amber and hazel. It seemed no matter how hard he tried to duplicate those eyes in his other creations, he failed, and was left with only these imperfect reflections.

And so the figure strode into the Secret Place, a man of shadow, a darkness filled with endless, twisted eyes.

I drew my knees up to my chest and wept. I was lost, cold, and all alone. So alone. I had no idea what happened to Sora, or to Riku. I only prayed that they weren't dead.

I heard footsteps, the crunch of feet on gravel, and I knew someone was coming. I hoped, I prayed it was Sora, but the cold feeling running down my back, the hairs standing on end on my neck, told me otherwise.

It was the man in the brown rags. He stood at the entrance of the secret cave, were it widened from a tunnel into a proper cave, blocking out what little light was to be had from the storm. A flash of lightning lit the night, and it appeared, for a moment, as if his form was edged in blue-white light. But there was nothing comforting about this man's halo.

I bit back a sob.

"Come." The figure commanded. There was magic, dark and foul, woven in the word. shuddering, hesitantly, my body obeyed.

He pulled out a black sword. The blade was wing-shaped, and in the hilt was fixed a green eye- an eye that seemed to bore into my heart, as if it were alive.

The tip of the blade dipped low under my jaw and tilted my chin upwards.

"Tell me, child, what do you remember?"

"Why?"

"I am a person of a curious nature, that is all."

"No. Why did you come here?"

"I came here for you. Tell me" He continued, "Do you remember this blade?"

I remembered mist and stone. A castle fallen to darkness, a hollow place.

And I remember a girl, not much older than I am now. I remember when I first saw her, she was in one of the Ænir suits- humanoid, impossibly thin, a weeping face without eyes. But unlike the other suits, this one was dark; a wizard's robe blue, the color of the sky at midnight. Darkness with the promise of light. I remembered the scarf that trailed behind it, blue fading into golden yellow, insubstantial, fading, as if at any time it might be dissolved by the mist of the falls. Had I not been so afraid of this fairy-tale monster I would have chased the tails of that scarf, which seemed to move of their own accord behind the creature, consumed in a dance that defied gravity and common sense.

Then she took off the mask and approached us. We saw that she was a young girl, with eyes the color of gold.

She drew a sword; jet black, shaped like a wyvern's wing. And she spoke.

"Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, Writer of Worlds…"

And the memory faded.

"Yes." I said slowly. "It was called…Souleater. The girl…Midnight…had it. It made you angry when you saw it."

"It is a relic of a forgotten war." He said. "It can only be given, never taken. If it is taken or found, it devours the heart of the one who took it, hence it's name. But if the one who takes it does not have a heart to devour, It gives them a heart, and makes them wander till the blade is given freely again. It's power is equal to that of the keyblades themselves. But most importantly, it has the ability to remove a heart from a person's body."

Isn't it painful, to know what is about to happen but are unable to do anything about it. I wasn't an idiot not to know what was about to happen when the figure trailed the tip down the indentation of my throat, to my chest, where my heart lay.

"Allow me to demonstrate." He said.

There was a stabbing, piercing pain, that seemed to radiate from it's source in Kairi's heart outwards, a single scream echoed in the dying throws of a world. If all hearts are connected, if ever there was evidence of it, it was here, now. For in that same moment, Riku was jarred out of his unconsciousness by a familiar cry. Sora, almost on the island, felt a sharp, stabbing pain in chest, sharp enough to take his breath away. But the pain soon subsided, and he rowed toward the island, more determined that ever. And, even if it was for just one moment, all the heartless on Destiny Islands stopped what they were doing, as if the passing of one so filled with light had blinded them.
It was a strange feeling, dying for the first time. There was no tunnel, no light. Just a lightness, all the sudden, as if someone had removed lead sacks from my arms and legs. I felt like I could just…float away. Float away from it all, all they dying, the darkness, my home. But it was no longer my home. Evil had come, and defiled it's innocence.

Being dead wasn't and worse than being alive. But it was very different. You could say the scope was larger. The view broader.

Someone had thrown open all the doors and the window my life, letting all the light and the outside world in. Destiny Islands rushed away, smaller and smaller in the growing darkness. I now saw how truly small in the grander view of things it was. I was a balloon someone had let go, spiraling upwards into oblivion.

Destiny islands became a tiny pinprick of light, flickering and weak, as I zoomed upwards. Other pinpicks appeared, a thousand tiny stars in the darkness. Eventually I could make out a shape in the dark- a network of shining branches, from which the stars hung like fruit.

Was this what you so longed to see, Riku? Was this the feeling you so wanted to feel? To look down and realize how much you would never be able to comprehend?

But as I spiraled up, I felt the slightest of tugs, an tingle almost, that pulled me back to Destiny Islands with a thud. I couldn't just leave my family, my friends, the two people who I loved the most in this world. Not without some kind of closure, for there sakes as well as my own. I could feel myself fading slowly, the memories slipping away again.

I wondered what would happen once I faded completely away. Maybe there was no heaven or hell, only that view from elsewhere. Maybe I would completely dissolve away, till I was spread thin across the entirety of the universe. A tiny piece of me in everything, living through everything. I think I would like that very much. I would be with my family again, wherever they are. I would be with Sora and Riku forever.

He was cold and wet, scared but still brave, holding on for me. a familiar flash of silver in the darkness. Riku. Blood dripped from a wound in the back of his head and I reached out and touched the ragged wound. It closed up under my fingers. He turned around, eyes wildly searching for the touch her knew well. "Kairi?"

I sighed and leaned forward, giving him the faintest of kisses; a brush of lips, if you will. I whispered a few words in his ear.

"I'm here."

He turned around still looking at me, but the tentative thread was snapping and I felt myself beginning to drift away once again.

"Kairi?"

I'm here.

Just then the shadows began to thicken, to pool into some kind of liquid blackness. Tendrils began to feather outward from the mass, twining around my arms and legs. The darkness was cold as ice.

"Where's Kairi?"

I turned around and saw Sora, staring at me accusingly. "I thought she was with you?"

Yeah, and what where you doing? Running around with a stupid wooden sword, attacking your own shadows? Wait, why am I thinking this? Sora just wants to help us, he's my friend, inept though he sometimes may be…the loss of blood must be catching up with me…

"The door has opened…"

"What?" he said, scratching his head in confusion. He looked at me as if I was stoned out of my bong.

"The door has opened Sora! Now we can go to the outside world!" Didn't he know! God Dammit don't play stupid with me Sora, now's not the time

Oh, wait. I have to tell him first.

"What are you talking about? We've got to find Kairi!"

There he goes, accusing me, as if I just left her somewhere. She's here, I heard her voice! We just have to find her. Maybe the darkness swallowed her up, like when she was little and she was afraid of monsters under her bed. She said the darkness had yellow eyes.

"Kairi's coming with us! Once we step through, we might not be able to come back. We may never see our parents again. There's no turning back. But this may be our only chance. We can't let fear stop us! I'm not afraid of the darkness!"

Everything felt slow and cold. And everything was turning black. The darkness was oozing, crawling everywhere, reaching out to devour my world my home my friend. And I couldn't care less. It was like some part of me was drowning, was being washed away by the seemingly endless sea of black, dark as ink. I was briefly aware of holding out my hand to Sora, but I could remember why. Did I want him to pull me out of the darkness? Or for him to come with me into it. Maybe this way we could both be with her the way we wanted.

No trees, no storm, no island. There was only a yawning expanse of white that stretched into eternity. But there was something in the light, staying where it's brilliance would blind him to it's shadow. He could almost feel it brushing against his skin.

Suddenly, I felt a hand stroke his cheek. I reeled backwards, realizing that it wasn't the background that was white.

I was blind.

Special. the shadow purred inside my head, a though without a voice. Tell me, my child, how much do you love your friends?

"You so much as breathe on them and I will hunt you down. You will die slowly, and painfully, begging for death long before I finally kill you."

When did I say that it was I that would hurt them?

Coldness spread over my body, and my lungs seemed to tighten, as if they were being slowly frozen. I felt that shadow coil tightly in my brain.

Sleep, little one. The more you try to resist…the greater the pain will be.

In my blind landscape, the whiteness began to turn dark. The shadow wrapped around me in an almost loving way, and I felt the strangest feeling of falling, falling and knowing that there's no way to stop.

I was no longer afraid.

Maybe I'd never been afraid of the darkness after all.

…

Kairi is down there somewhere. Shall we go find her?

…

Lethal Froggie- short little thingie to hold you over till the next chapter. Yes, I finally have the plot settled in my mind, and in the next chapter Octavia appears again.

Disclaimer- I own nothing so far. I can't even say that I own the plot, yet. But soon, yes, very soon, Kingdom Hearts will be mine (evil laugh)

Stinky- (Sigh) Dante, bring the tazer.

Thanks to those who reviewed for the last chapter.

Victor Martin