Disclaimer: I don't own the Keyblade. That's all.
Merinc struggled to hold his ground as the darkness reached him. He looked over his shoulder to make sure that Aleila was running, and that she would escape. As the two strings that dangled off the bandana she always wore whipped around a tree and she was lost to his sight, he turned back to the darkness surging at him. He braced himself as tendrils of shadows curled around his legs, then pulled out the dagger he carried with him. After a few minutes of jabbing at the darkness, he realized that the blade couldn't pierce the darkness.
Merinc could feel his heart pounding in his chest he closed his eyes, waiting for the shock that he knew would come.
He had seen this happen before.
The darkness had come before, when he was just a little boy. Aleila hadn't arrived yet, and his uncle was still there. When the shadows came, his life changed forever. He was trapped in his house with his uncle, and the shadows were inside. There was no way that both of them, uncle and nephew, could get out of the situation and still be whole.
His uncle had protected him, holding the shadows off as Merinc made his way to the roof. As the child was climbing out the window, he looked back in time to see his uncle collapse into a dark pool on the ground, out of which came another form, another shadow.
As Merinc crouched on the roof of his home, he could see people running out of the village. Suddenly, a place in the pitch-black clouds above opened and light streamed down. A tall man holding another, smaller form in his arms, descended. Where he stepped, the shadows fled, and at the same time they tried to get closer to him. He held an odd weapon, a key of sorts, in one hand and a little girl cradled in the other arm. Merinc watched him in amazement as he turned to see the young boy cringing on a roof. He came over to the roof and looked Merinc in the eyes.
"Take care of her," he said, placing the sleeping girl on the roof. "Don't let her out of your sight."
He looked caringly down and the girl and whispered to her, "Goodbye, Aleila."
He then walked away from the roof, the darkness following him like a great, menacing shadow.
Merinc had remembered that moment for his whole life, and now it was happening again. Only this time, there was no man who could descend from the heavens and save them all. He could tell. No one was coming to save a town in the middle of nowhere, not again.
Merinc was waiting like a fool for someone that wouldn't come.
The darkness had reached his waist by the time that someone did.
The girl fought through the shadows toward him, her form familiar, but her clothes unrecognizable. Very dark blue hair that almost seemed black swung around her, hiding her face. What he did recognize was her weapon.
It was the same key the man had carried eight years before.