Riku tried getting more specifics out of Kairi, but since she had no more to give, he gave up and trudged alongside her up the ravine path to the castle in silence. Even thinking about that woman still made Riku shudder a little. Evil fairies were somewhat more lax about staying dead than your average megalomaniac, but Yen Sid had spent weeks ripping out the resurrection spells she'd left behind and had assured them all the witch was really, really, really gone this time. But that didn't mean an end to the problems with the Heartless; no, they could not be so lucky. Without a hand to guide their wild hunger they were much easier to overcome, but no one believed for a moment that the power vacuum would remain unfilled forever. Most of the witches and wizards found throughout the worlds, no matter how personally unpleasant they were, had at least developed enough sense to keep well clear of the Heartless. Keyword being 'most'.
It had been exceptionally quiet in the recent months. All three of them had almost come to believe the late homework and bad hair days and other such petty crises would last and last. They were comfortable and predictable, signs they were just regular teenagers after all. It was probably this pretense that had kept them all sane, since what they really were were three battle-tested soldiers fighting a war with no end in sight, liable to being called to the front at a moment's notice—like today. This was the reason Radiant Garden and not Destiny Islands was home for them now. Their parents couldn't (or wouldn't) understand the calling that pulled them into mortal danger again and again and again. They were, as far as they could guess, actually winning the war, but it would be a long time before that victory was total, and even then it would be a fragile thing. This was what their lives were now, but it forced them to savor the moments most people took for granted.
Kairi pulled open the heavy door that lead to the first level of the castle. The floor was still a mess and patched over with scrap metal grating that made any visitors announce themselves loudly with the noise of their footsteps. The door of the War Room swung open before they reached it, and Cid ushered them inside. Riku slipped into the room behind Yuffie and Kairi, and they took the last three chairs at the large oval table. The rest of the Restoration Committee was already seated: Leon, chairman, acting president of Radiant Garden, leader of the Self-Defense Forces, and whatever fifteen other titles he held at any given moment; Aerith, director of public health, minister of agriculture, and volunteer party planner; Cid, transportation and communications specialist and brewmaster; Merlin, who refused to accept titles of any sort but was deferred to because he seemed to know something about everything; and Scrooge McDuck, chief financial officer and the Committee's primary private investor. Sora, of course, was there as well. There was a small pile of brownie crumbs in a napkin in front of his seat, but even so he looked wilted and unhappy. Chocolate was small consolation in the face of this news.
Leon's military background died hard, and he had insisted on remodeling one of the castle ballrooms into a command center for the on again/off again war with the Heartless. It was a step up from the chalkboard and packing crates that had served them in the early months of the Hollow Bastion restoration—the walls were plastered with maps of the Known Worlds crisscrossed with threads of various colors delineating navigable routes and stuck full of pushpins indicating relative levels of Heartless activity. Up until this morning, most of the map had been a nice, pleasant sea of grassy green. But in the upper left corner, clear off the map, was a red pin now jammed deep into the plasterboard with a thick ring of yellow blazing around it. It was bad, but at least it wasn't the black pin Riku and Kairi had half expected. Equal amounts of vigilance, skill, and luck had seen to it there had never been a need for a black pin since the day they pasted up the maps.
Leon cleared his throat and slapped a fistful of papers on the table, looking even grimmer than was usual for him. "We have a situation," he said, the word weighing heavily in air, a quaint military euphemism used when there was a good chance innocent people were going to die. "The pattern of reports we're getting indicates the original infiltration point was not from any of the known Heartless territories. This is all Cid and I found on the world in the lab archives."
Everyone at the table rose and pushed aside chairs to get a look at the papers. The file was extremely brief and the printouts yellow with age, containing only some brief notes and black and white photographs of a bustling city and a large airship soaring through the sky over a hillside. Aerith riffled through them, picked one up, and began reading aloud from the handwritten notes she found jotted on the back: "'Highly developed. Magic and technology advanced as Garden, possibly more. Royal Academy experiments similar to our own, but findings diverge. Fascinating. Further academic exchange likely very profitable!' I…think this is Ansem's handwriting," she said hesitantly, examining the bold flourishes of the pen (and dried spots of melted ice cream that were even more telling). "It's dated four months before the evacuation. This can't be all there was?"
Cid coughed, looking cross. "I looked all morning, and hard copies are all I got. Ya'll remember the Crimson Jazz that got loose in the data vaults?" he said, and withdrew one of the backups tapes from the pocket of his vest and tossed it onto the table. It was rather abbreviated—in that about half of it had melted into a slick black puddle of plastic.
"Did anyone ask the Queen to look in her library for more?" Sora asked.
"I did," Merlin said regretfully, "but the Castle librarians' search yielded even less fruit than our own. It's precious little, but we can deduce this: if Ansem the Wise was impressed enough by their wizardry to attempt contact with them, they must be truly powerful magicians."
"But one of them was dumb enough to start playing footsie with an army of pure and unrelenting evil that could turn on you at any moment. Seriously, don't these people learn?" Riku observed acidly.
"Great power can be difficult to refuse, no matter what the cost," Merlin chided, and like many of the nuggets of wisdom he distributed, it had an uncomfortably personal sting. Riku sat back in his chair, looking vaguely contrite. "The fact of the matter is that they may not even be aware of what power it is they hold. The world is so isolated the first wave of Heartless Xehanort unleashed may not have reached them."
"But then how did the Heartless get all the way…?" Sora mumbled, puzzled, gesturing vaguely at the map. "All that is empty space. They don't like crossing empty space."
"The same way they first came here," Aerith answered quietly, her hands folded stiffly in front of her and her attention fixed not on Sora or on any of the faces at the table, but into tarnished and painful memory. "Someone intentionally opened a Keyhole, and gave their Darkness form. It could be like the fall of the Garden all over again."
"That's what we're afraid of. Everything you've accomplished," Leon said, tilting his head in Sora's direction, "could be undone in a matter of months. Worst case scenario is this: whatever control they have over the Heartless begins dissolving, with the lesser mages falling first when their servants sense the tide is turning. Very quickly, in a matter of weeks or even days, the exponentially multiplying Heartless create a critical mass that topples any more powerful opposition. Once they have drained the world dry and moved on, we would be facing not a handful, but an army of Heartless sorcerers at least as skilled as the best of Maleficent's allies, and possibly their Nobodies as well."
Merlin raised a calming hand to reassure the stricken faces around the table. "But we're not there yet," he added. "If the wizards controlling the Heartless can be awakened to the danger, or, as an absolute last resort, eliminated, it should still be within our power to contain the Heartless released."
"I'll start packing," Sora said.
"Me too," Riku seconded.
"And me," Kairi thirded.
"How unexpected," Aerith commented with a faint smile. "I think Leon and I ought to pay a visit to Olympus to see if we can coax some divine intervention out of Zeus and Hera, should things get…out of hand."
"One more thing," Leon said. "Cid and Merlin are staying here to coordinate operations, but the world is so remote you may not be able to get a message out once you enter the GBLI sector. If we don't hear from you in two weeks, we alert the King." Sora, Riku, and Kairi all nodded in silent acknowledgement. Leon conscientiously did not mention what he would alert the King of, which was that he should start looking for a new Keyblade Master or two as quickly as possible.
-ooo-
Any warp point established between Radiant Garden and the new world by Ansem or his apprentices had long since dissolved, and that meant the long way. The vast space between the worlds was only a vague sketch on the wall of the War Room and a set of coordinates plugged into the ship's computer that they had found engraved on a flattened and brittle nav-gummi in Ansem's files. There was nothing in the emptiness the Heartless desired, so nothing impeded the long flight but patches of rocky debris spinning through the nothingness, the final testaments to the failure of one of their predecessors uncountable years past. The shattered worlds were so old not a whisper of their history remained, nor did the name of the Keyblade Master who had presumably died defending them.
It was on these quiet journeys between stars that they felt their ignorance the most keenly. Nobody knew how big it all really was, not even its King. Every world discovered opened new roads into the unknown, the roots and branches of an infinite tree. It was the unpleasant reality of a Keyblade Master's life that he or she could hardly ever make their aquaintances with a new world that was healthy and whole—it seemed everywhere they went the Heartless had gotten there first. Sometimes it felt like they multiplied faster than they could be slain, tough and tenacious as roaches scuttling through the walls of an old tenement, that burrowed into cracks and crevices when the brilliance of the light seared their eyes.
As the ship neared its destination, the brittle anticipation of a difficult fight and the intense curiousity about the new world they had glimpsed in the photographs soared and mingled together. Now only hours away, they traded in their old clothes for something more suitable to the local tastes—Donald had kept a 'Don't Mind Me' spell going that forced the natives to overlook the fact he was a huge talking duck, but when the dominant paradigm was human it was easiest simply to change outfits. Kairi looked quite pretty but rather uncomfortable in her lavender ankle-length dress, and complained loudly over the unfair masculine advantage of being able to fight Heartless without wearing petticoats. Sora and Riku could get by in plain button-down shirts and dark pants, although there was much sighing over the new world not having invented the zipper yet.
The gummi ship's teleportation spell brought them down beside a dirt track that wound through the foothills of a majestic mountain range, its peaks still frosted with the remnants of winter. The breeze swept down that faint scent of snow from higher altitudes, but in the sunshine the air was only chilly enough to be pleasantly crisp. The path meandered lazily across the ragged grass and bunches of early and eager wildflowers until it terminated in a large town in the valley below, split in two by a sinuous silver line peppered by the dark dots of boats traveling to and fro.
The tableau was flawless, a landscape fit for a painter's masterpiece, with no outward sign Darkness had ever touched this world—but that meant little. Years of battling their implacable enemy had honed their senses to razor sharpness, and far, far away could be felt the sickening pressure of the Darkness straining against the boundaries of the world, waiting for hope and courage to fail and give it passage. It was an unpleasantly familiar feeling, that jarring dissonance between the beauty before their eyes and the horror that lurked out of sight.
Kairi was the first to break the brief silence after they finished drinking in the scenery. "It's perfect. Just like the Garden must have been," she said softly. "We should drag Leon and company out here for a picnic when this blows over."
"Picnic? Leon?" Riku scoffed in mock derision. "You're a cruel woman, Kairi. Who knows what all the flowers and sunshine and tiny sandwiches might do to him. Could be fatal."
"I'll take that risk," she said impishly, but the banter sounded forced to both their ears, like laughing too loudly while walking in the dark, and it melted away as quickly as it had surfaced. Kairi took a step away and hugged her arms as if the cool breeze, or a chill more sinister, had suddenly knifed through the fabric of her sleeves. "You can feel them out there too, can't you."
"Always can," Sora said, the seasoned veteran reassuring the greenest of his troops. "But I try not to think about it until I have to." He knelt down to pluck one of the nameless flowers, a blue one with a spray of thin petals emanating from a dark center, and tucked it behind her ear. "Don't worry, Kairi. We'll figure out what we have to do, we'll do it, and then we can come back here in a month or two loaded up with sandwiches. Easy."
Riku looked askance at Sora. "When has saving the world ever been easy?" he asked incredulously.
"Well, plain old me has figured it out at least a dozen times by now, so it can't be that hard," Sora replied, shrugging, and he stepped off down the path with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his thin coat.
Riku and Kairi exchanged looks. "He wasn't kidding, was he?" she asked. Riku shrugged his shoulders and followed after Sora, wondering that himself. Sora was as transparent as the water in the pristine lakes in the mountains surrounding them, but…sometimes that very clarity masked how deep the water truly was.
-ooo-
About two hours of easy downhill hiking past mossy stone walls and flocks of newly shorn sheep brought them to a real road. The painted signpost hammered into the ground beside it read:
Welcome to Market Chipping—try our éclairs!
Traffic was light, and mostly of horsedrawn carts, although there were a scant handful of boxy automobiles puttering over the brick. Squadrons of one-man airships like enormous mechanical dragonflies buzzed by overhead in tight formation, red and yellow flags flying from their tails. The closer the trio approached the outlying buildings, the thicker the bustle of people got. Sora grabbed hold of Kairi's hand, and they strode ahead like a wide-eyed country couple, arm in arm, while Riku hung back and kept his eyes open. Almost beyond the range of their hearing, further into town, was interwoven the rousing clamor of a brass band and the shouts of a joyful crowd. The town was full to bursting with soldiers, a danger sign under normal circumstances, but the people didn't have the look of paranoia or haunted defeat that marked a town overrun with Heartless. It was quite the reverse—the tone of the conversations they caught was feather-light, and the laughter real and unforced. The blue-clad soldiers in the streets wore spotless uniforms and debonair smiles for the breathless girls hovering at their elbows.
Sora decided their first objective was to gather information on the level of Heartless infiltration, and as a corollary perhaps find some lunch, since the sun proclaimed it to be well past noon and they were all heartily sick of the canned junk that masqueraded as cuisine aboard the gummi ship. They squeezed into a bustling café at the outskirts of the town square, and while Riku ordered them some food, Sora got to work. He liked to listen and liked to talk, and within minutes had smiled his way into the middle of a small knot of the locals bursting with gossip. Strength of heart manifested in as many ways as there had been Keyblade Masters, and here he was utterly in his element. His innocent smiles and guileless conversation made friends of strangers in the time it took to share a pot of coffee. Sora was soon loaded down with tips on where to find the nicest rooms, the most entertaining shows, and the choicest meals.
Meanwhile, Riku flipped through an abandoned newspaper he found on his chair and tried to tune most of the chatter out. This was only the warm-up, and they weren't here to sightsee. The headlines of the paper all had the word WAR printed in them, in screaming blocky letters. The Ingary Daily turned out to be a dense and florid catalog of the victories the country had won against the 'brutes who charged our borders', and although the places and faces meant nothing to him, it at least explained the profusion of soldiers. Market Chipping was mustering the boys to head out to war. The fighting hadn't been going on long, according to the articles, which was a relief. The Heartless reveled in war, whether they were its cause or not, since it teased the worst cruelties out of the hearts it touched, and set a thick miasma of confusion and suffering over the land that hid the evidence of their feasting.
It was only after Sora's new friends worked their way around to discussing the other things that came with the war, the mysterious shadows that lurked in the darkest alleys of the big city, in the wilderness of the Waste beyond the furthest farmstead, and in the trenches of the distant warfront, that Riku's ears perked up.
"They say…" said an older man with a bristle-brush mustache, as Sora and Kairi leaned in to hear the low and dramatic tones over the bustle of the café, "that those Strangians our boys are fightin' aren't all men. My nephew's best friend's platoon caught up with one once, on the lines down south. Looked like it was made of tar, and maybe it was, 'cause it shrugged off the bullets and bayonets as if they were no more than flung pebbles and sewing needles, swear to god. Took a fireball from one of the officers to finally torch the thing."
Kairi gasped and slapped her gloved hand over her mouth. "That's horrible. absolutely horrible," she muttered through her fingers, in a tone that transparently begged for more of the tale. She batted her eyelashes at him for good measure, spreading it on so thick Riku had to duck back behind his newspaper again to hide the stifled snort of laughter. The man didn't seem to notice, or didn't care, about Kairi's mediocre skills as an actress, since he happily careened off to the next one.
"The Witch of the Waste is even worse, since there's not so many miles between her and us, and I heard she's got her own damn army of them. She lures strapping farmers' boys away, and then…bam! Rips out their hearts and turns them into beasts!"
"Lars, you watch your language," snapped another man from a table in the corner, where he was splitting a quiche with two young girls who shared his warm brown eyes and curly blonde hair. "There are ladies present. And anyway, Wizard Howl tops her for wickedness, especially if you've got pretty daughters to look after. Or a girl with a nice sweet smile like that." He nodded sagely and caught Sora's eye. "It was Sora, right? Rather foreign name, but it doesn't sound Strangian, and you seem like a decent enough young man, so listen close: you look after your girl after dark, this close to the Waste."
"Why? What's he do?" Sora asked, face full of real concern, and Riku sat up a little straighter to listen. Kairi's power had blossomed with years of careful instruction and bruising practice with her Keyblade, and she was nowhere near as defenseless as she had been when Malificent scooped her comatose fourteen-year-old body off the beach, but still, old habits died hard.
"He lives in a moving castle out in the mountains—you can see it on occasion when the mist clears, roving back and forth on its unnatural little legs. But sometimes he comes into town, in disguise, when the urge comes on him to hunt. He picks a pretty girl, and says his niceties to her, gifting her with dinner and a bauble or two, maybe, charming as a cobra all the while. At the end of the night he'll lead her down some dark alley, and then…" he said, pausing to let the dramatic tension tighten, and then snapping it with the loud thwap! of his flat hand against the table that made his youngest daughter start and nearly knock over her water glass, "he tears their hearts out! They never find the bodies, though. As to what he does with them afterward…that is not a subject for young ears or polite company."
The three friends exchanged knowing glances, and Riku joined the conversation for the first time, folding his paper over and setting it aside. "If nobody ever find the girls, how do you know it's him that killed them? Maybe they just decided to run off with somebody their mothers didn't approve of." The rest of the locals murmured at the challenge, some agreeing with his logic, and some standing steadfast with the tale-teller. Riku was fairly sure he was telling some version of the truth, since this wizard's predations matched line for line what someone on the verge of falling into Darkness would be doing, but stories weren't quite hard facts, and he himself had done his fair share of messing around with tourists back on Destiny Islands. The fact remained that the macabre glee that saturated the tales made it very clear no one speaking of them had actually seen any of these villains or monsters. It felt like a little scare for the fun of it, to have those with overactive imaginations jumping at shadows for a few days until the beastly visages faded from their minds.
"Don't believe me? Hmph," he grumbled. "Wizard Howl is real enough. They've got wanted posters up all over with his face on them."
"I believe you," Kairi assured him. "We'd better be going, but thank you…not that I'd ever go looking for another man in my life." She reached out to stroke Sora's fingers and favored him with a syrupy gaze. Riku rolled his eyes and busied himself with fishing out enough cash to cover their check so the amusing irony of that statement wouldn't betray him.
Once they'd stepped back out into the open air, Kairi nonchalantly sidled into a side street, with the boys following her lead. "That was a juicy tip. Are we lucky or what? And Wizard Howl could be here, now, so careful about what you let people hear."
"Yeah, I figured that. But why'd you decide to be his boyfriend instead of mine?" Riku asked.
"I had to pick one of you. They seem like old-fashioned folks. Tell you what: if we finish up reconnaissance quick tonight and I let you go first, would that make your manly pride feel aaaall better?"
"Hmmm…" he said wickedly. "Probably would."