Sora was lying on his back engaging in a staring contest with a fat-bodied spider dangling from the ceiling. He was pretty sure the spider was winning by several orders of magnitude, since it had way more eyes than he did, and for that matter may not have even been able to blink. Sora sighed. Sitting around waiting for other people to do interesting things was probably his least favorite activity, or at least close to it, since Algebra finals didn't feature prominently in his life anymore. Kairi had been gone for an hour at least, and it would probably be hours more before she got back. Knowing King Mickey as well as he did, he got to kick the line and sit down for a chat whenever he wanted, but he was vaguely aware there were rules of conduct about talking to royalty. He never followed them, but they probably involved scratchy clothes, bowing, and a lot of time sitting in uncomfortable-looking chairs.

"Riku?" he said finally. "My butt is going numb."

Riku looked up at him and stifled a yawn. He was sprawled on his side on the floor next to the bookshelves, where he'd found a volume on the many and varied products of Ingary's airshipyards and was consuming the contents with mild interest. It was only somewhat informative, however, since a lot of the middle section was stuck together with something gummy and brown that probably used to be applesauce. He shut the book on his finger to keep the place, sat up, and shook out the arm he'd been leaning his head on. "I can help you with that, although somebody could walk in on us at any moment. Kinkier than your usual."

There was a wad of paper on the floor behind Sora's head. He scrunched it tighter and lobbed it more or less at Riku's chest, although it was tough to gauge the angle accurately upside down, and it landed with a little 'plick' on the shelf near his shoulder instead. "If that's what you had in mind, you're on your own," Sora said. "I wanted to check out what's behind Door Number Four while Calcifer is snoozing."

"That black one is calling your name, isn't it," Riku said. It was the only one of the four they hadn't been through yet.

"Like, really loud, for hours. Are you coming or not?"

Riku closed the book with a quiet but definitive thump and got to his feet. "You know what curiosity killed?" he asked, but offered Sora a hand up anyway.

"I'm not a cat very often," he answered. "Let's go." Sora grabbed a handful of shimmering bottles in various colors from Kairi's backpack, just in case, and stashed them in convenient pockets. He chanced a look back at the hearth, where Calcifer was still out cold (or however a fire demon could be said to sleep), and only the tips of his body peaked out of the logs. Sora put his hand on the knob and clicked it twice. The marker above the door spun about after it, and the woolly light drifting through the half-circle window above the door suddenly became a flood.

"If you're going to be sneaking through forbidden doors, you might want to think about doing it more quiet-like," Calcifer said nonchalantly from behind Sora's back.

Sora started guiltily. "Are you going to try to stop us?" he asked over his shoulder.

"No—quite the contrary. I was waiting for you to start poking around in there. Howl has a lot of things to hide, but none of them are through the black door. All the mysterious forbidden blah-blah-blah is to keep the squirt out, since whinging aside, I'd sort of like him to live to see puberty."

"You know where it leads?" Riku asked.

Calcifer nodded.

"And?" Riku prompted impatiently.

"And nothing. I can't tell you. Have you ever wondered what the opposite of a secret is? It's that little piece of information," Calcifer said.

Riku scowled at him. "That doesn't even make any sense. And do you have any idea how annoying mysterious mystical guides are? Every time we meet one that doesn't cough up all the facts out of some misguided sense of theatricality it makes me want to punch a puppy." Calcifer snorted. "I am only barely exaggerating."

"I wish I could tell you more. I really honestly do. But I can't. I was c…c…caaaaugh!" he choked out angrily, and let out a cross 'woomph' of smoke into the chimney. He recomposed himself, and concentrated harder. "There is something through that door you need to attend to, for this world to become…to…be…uh…safe. Only you, because…because…you're special," he finished lamely. "Real special. So special trying to talk about you makes me sound like an idiot. Ahah. Howl has been trying to handle it on his own and failing miserably, and he's too busy wallowing in self-pity for it to occur to him to ask you for your help."

"The Keyhole?" Sora offered.

Calcifer said nothing, though not for lack of effort. Finally, he settled on: "Howl couldn't do it. Tried. And be careful."

"Thanks, Calcifer," Sora said, summoned his Keyblade, and pushed open the door.

-ooo-

It was the only door still on its hinges in the whole place. Sora and Riku stepped out of what had once been an elegant edifice of glazed beige brick, one of four that slumped like bleached skeletons around the square. The ground was paved with squares of pitted granite, and the shattered bodies of stately nymphs in cast concrete rasped under their tread. Not even weeds had the courage the spatter the rubble with a little color and reclaim the space from absent human hands. Sora wrinkled his nose, recalling the subtle scent of the place with distaste. "It smells like Hollow Bastion used to smell. All dusty and dead."

Riku nodded. It was cursed ground. Dead ground. It smelled like nothing beside dust and rock because nothing living was willing to set down feet or roots. "They'll be watching us. Let's split up, but don't go any further than shouting distance at most." They chose one of the other buildings, at random. The twisted bronze plaque beside the doors read "--stitute of Natural Scie---" beneath the accumulated grime.

Sora took a left where Riku took a right and wandered slowly through the rooms. The roof had caved in and most of the walls, too, and there wasn't much that hadn't burned. He found blackened wooden desks that crumbled at a touch, scorched books, shattered glassware, and half a painful-looking surgical device that proclaimed itself to be Property of Greyslake Research Campus, RSA. Listlessly he shifted a pile of rubble with his Keyblade. The brick skittered aside to reveal the sleeve of a dusty tweed coat, a pistol, and the five mummified fingers that were still clutching it. More of the brick shifted. The sleeve wasn't attached to anything else, and fell with a dry crunch to the ground.

"Riku!" he shouted as loud as he could.

Riku came running down the open hallway and swung around with his left hand on the the doorframe, weapon at the ready, but relaxed when he saw Sora was alone.

"What the hell was—" Riku began.

"There are bodies. Bones. Pieces of people," Sora whispered, looking sick. "The Heartless don't leave bodies behind. What happened here?"

"I don't know. Maybe he got lucky," Riku said, without irony, and swept his eyes over the scorched and crumbled walls uneasily. Heartless had little interest in leveling buildings, and only a horde of Darksides would have been able to wreck such havoc with sturdy masonry. The continued their grim explorations, but didn't split off again. They found three more bodies in more pieces as they shuffled through the rubble-strewn corridors of the school, two in lab coats and one in a blue military uniform lying in a scattering of his spent shells. In any other wilderness they would have been long gone to scavengers large and small, but here they remained where they had fallen.

The back exit was partially blocked where the decorative arch had collapsed, and through it Riku could just make out a lake and more buildings beyond that seemed to mark the center of the complex. A man-high block of sparkling white stone stood in the center of the water. He could almost see the waves of Darkness that sloughed off of it like wine from an overflowing glass. He stepped up on a convenient stone near the bottom of the pile of rubble, testing each hand and foothold to make sure it would support his weight. Sora followed behind him.

He crested it quickly and was about to leap down the other side of the pile when he realized what the bulbous metal cylinder sticking out of it actually was. He pulled himself back up with a sharp breath, mere inches from touching it with the toe of his shoe. "Sora, get down. Very carefully. Don't let anything come loose, not even a pebble, if you want to keep all your limbs attached."

"What did you—"

"Shut up and get down," Riku ordered through clenched teeth.

Sora wasn't going to argue with that tone. He did, and made room for Riku to do the same. He yanked Sora away by the sleeve in the direction they'd come, walking as quickly as his legs would carry him. "It was a bomb," he explained, pulling Sora along. "Almost stepped on it and killed us both. We're taking the long way around."

"But I thought they declared war less than a year ago…it looks like it was abandoned way more time than that. And this place is in the middle of nowhere. Why would the Strangians..." he asked, jogging along beside Riku.

Riku turned sharply into one of the classrooms, which had a promising hole in the wall. He looked back to Sora. "Do you really think Strangia was responsible for this?"

Riku's question was a rhetorical one, since it was brutally obvious to both of them what the answer was. The evidence was all around them, in the thoroughly shattered bricks and unburied corpses. "No," Sora admitted in a whisper.

"Cowards," Riku growled. "They couldn't contain the Heartless, so they bombed the whole place—even though there were still people on the ground. It must have been a firestorm."

The air was kissed with spring and warm even under the scant cover of clouds, but Sora shivered, and looking slightly gray under his deep tan. "We're going to find the Keyhole, lock it, and leave. This is worse than the old Bastion Castle grounds. Way worse."

"I saw a lake further down," Riku said, turning his mind away from the lonely bones and wishing they had the time and tools to bury them. "All the roads lead to it. If this complex was built to study the Keyhole, I'm guessing it's going to be there."

Sora numbly let him lead the way through the gap in the wall and down the footpath that connected the building with the lake. An altar of white stone stood in the center of the water, looking battered and dirty but miraculously whole. Under the grime and dead lichen it shone faintly around the lock symbol carved into the center. They knew, instinctively, that it was older than the surrounding buildings by centuries, perhaps even millennia. The pool bottom was blackened with settled soot and rippling faintly in the breeze. "Something should've tried to jump us by now," Riku said. "This is way too quiet."

Sora's answer was to pick up a flat stone from the edge and pitch it into the lake. It skipped once and sank. Nothing came boiling out of the water to object to the disturbance. He crouched at the edge and tried experimentally dipping in a finger. The water was bitterly cold but did not look deep, and the swim to the shore of the island in the center was a scant fifty feet, albeit a freezing fifty feet. "Don't see a boat. Guess I'm swimming." He stripped down to his pants, rolled those up to the knee, and thrust the wad of shoes and clothes at Riku, who was too preoccupied with the forbidding silence to say anything lewd about Sora's state of partial undress. Sora stepped in, nearly yelping at the way the cold sucked at his skin, but clamped his teeth shut and continued wading.

There was something here, Riku was sure of it, something big and old and mean. He felt like they were being watched. Granted, after the trials he had endured this was not an unusual sensation for him, and often completely unjustified, but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. He tossed Sora's clothes aside on a flat stone and summoned his Keyblade. Nothing moved in the ruins, or in the water, or in the air. Sora had gone too deep to stand and begun slicing through the water with practiced and confident strokes. Riku gripped the hilt of his blade tighter against the slickness of his palms and tried to ignore the staccato drum solo pounding in his chest.

Sora was nearly there—twenty feet…fifteen…and then he disappeared below the surface so quickly he didn't even have time to scream. The ripples he left behind parted and disappeared. Riku swore. Sora was a strong swimmer and more practiced at fighting underwater than he. If he didn't surface soon, or give Riku some kind of target to start beating on, wading in after him probably wouldn't do much good.

Suddenly the water shifted as if the pond's bed had been tipped, and a spume the size of a tree trunk shot up from near the bank and executed a scientifically suspect right angle turn to smash into Riku's chest with enough force to lift him from his feet and toss him into a crumbling wall. Gasping for air against the sudden blow, Riku realized much too late the Heartless wasn't in the water.

It was the water.

Half a dozen more tentacles rose from the pond, one holding a struggling Sora in its grip. His wrists were twisted and pinned behind his back by its coils and the tip wrapped tight around his neck. As Riku watched it shuddered and constricted like the body of a python. Sora arched convulsively and struggled harder, all in silence, mouthing spells he lacked the breath to cast. Two of the free tentacles cast about for a target and shot toward Riku again, but this time he was prepared, and they burst apart against the dark shield he summoned in their path. Riku let it down for just long enough to hurl his Keyblade at the one grasping Sora. It was severed, and he fell, almost free, until another tentacle shot out and caught him by the ankle, and the barrage against Riku's shield doubled in ferocity.

Sora coughed and sucked in as much air as his starved lungs would hold. He twisted his head around and saw the living water was pounding against Riku's shield with blow after blow after blow, forcing him on the defensive. The beast was too occupied with trying to snake around Riku's shields and didn't try to wrap him in the stranglehold again—a mistake for it and an opening for him. Sora blasted it with a blizzard spell to slow it down and give Riku a chance to breathe. A thick skin of ice crackled across its surface where the searing cold fixed its shape in place. The tentacles withdrew in confusion, probing its frozen body. Riku dropped his shield and was about to add his own blizzard spells to the fight when the sheaf of ice cracked and dropped into the lake. More angered than hurt, the Heartless hefted three chunks of the ice and lobbed them at Riku's head in retaliation, which only barely missed.

It swung Sora around to inspect him with its single eye. It was bigger than his head, and lacked both whites and an iris—a void of darkness. The slick skin beneath it creased and parted, and its mouth began to open, wide enough to swallow him whole. This fight would be over soon, one way or the other. If they were both killed the Keyhole might never be sealed in time. He looked at Riku, looked at the Heartless, and decided it was time to do something heroic…and tried not to think about how much it was probably going to hurt—if he even lived. He arched and swung himself back, and let the momentum jab his Keyblade at its eye. He barked out the words of the spell before the beast could silence him.

The whipcrack of the lightning echoed against ruins. It surged from the end of his blade to the single staring eye, to its core, through its tentacles, and back out again…through Sora, still in its grip and in the path of the electrical current. It hurt more than plunging the Dark Keyblade into his chest had hurt, like he had been thrown into an avalanche, but lasted only a fraction of a second. The beast shrieked and collapsed with the sound of a rushing waterfall. Already mercifully unconscious, Sora fell with it.

Riku cried out in anguish and took a running leap into the lake. The water was steaming into nothing as the massive Heartless died, and what was left was churning and murky black. He saw a scrap of white cloth bob to the surface to his left, and splashed toward it. He grabbed Sora's limp body under one arm and struggled up the rocky bank.

Sora stirred a little, just enough to make Riku's heart leap with relief, and started to cough. He couldn't hold his head up right, his arms were too rubbery to support his weight, and his ankle was badly burned where the Heartless had grabbed hold of him, but he was breathing. Riku held him up until he stopped retching into the gravel long enough to choke down a mouthful of elixir. He sagged against Riku, still coughing, but not as convulsively.

"What kind of shit-for-brains dumbfuck move was that?!" Riku muttered into his hair, although the tight embrace took all the bite out of the words. "Water conducts electricity, you moron!"

Sora didn't answer at first, letting the quiet stretch out so long Riku was afraid he'd lapsed into unconsciousness again. "Sorta what I was counting on," Sora whispered finally, through chattering teeth. "I got C's in science, Riku. Gimme a little credit."

"So…you went and fried yourself so at least one of us would survive to seal the Keyhole?" he asked.

"Mmmm-hmmm," Sora murmured. "Worked, dinnit?"

"Yeah," Riku agreed. "But don't ever scare me like that again. I thought I'd lost you." Sora mumbled his apology into Riku's neck. He didn't let go of the younger boy, on the pretext that the spring breeze was icy on their wet clothes, and Sora still shivering violently. He wasn't usually much for gestures of tenderness, but bent over a little awkwardly to brush Sora's forehead with a kiss, since it seemed like the right thing to do. Sora sighed and huddled closer. Eventually he did have to let go, as much as he was loath to—their original goal had not yet been realized. Cringing, Riku unknotted his arms, waded back into the pool and brought his Keyblade to bear on the lock. The ancient magic warmed him a little as it flowed into the stone altar, or least made the walk back to shore seem less torturous. Sora had dressed, clumsily, into the meantime, as little protection as a soggy shirt was in this weather. The burn on his leg was healed, but his limbs still felt about as steady as chocolate pudding—whatever riot the electricity had unleashed on his nervous system was beyond a potion's ability to instantly repair.

With Sora leaning heavily against Riku, they picked their way back to the door that opened into the welcoming warmth of the castle in the Waste. Markl was waiting for them when Riku pushed open the door, lying on the floor studying a spellbook and chewing on a piece of stale teabread. He shot to his feet when he realized the marker had clicked into 'black'. "Howl said no one should…it's too dangerous," he babbled. "What were you doing out there?"

"We're monster-slaying experts, kid. Don't try it at home. Got any towels?" Riku asked, as they pushed past Markl and Sora collapsed gratefully into one of the kitchen chairs with his head pillowed in his arms.

"Mmm-hmm, in the upstairs linen closet, end of the hall. Sora, um…" Markl began, chewing on his lip, "are you okay? You don't look that great."

Sora turned his head a little and gave him reassuring a thumbs-up. "Struck by lightning; almost drowned. I've had worse. I'll be fine."

"Oh," Markl said stupidly, looking horrified that Sora had endured things that fell under the category of worse. "Um…let me see if Calcifer'll let me put the kettle on." He looked hopefully at the hearth fire.

"Did you do it?" the demon asked nervously. Sora mumbled an affirmative, and Calcifer sighed an enormous sigh of relief. "The answer is yes, Markl. But just this once. Cause of them. Don't be getting any ideas about dropping a pot of soup on my head tomorrow. Sophie doing it is bad enough."

Markl scrubbed the kettle down, filled it with water, and held it out to Calcifer, who shuffled it around on the grate until he was comfortable. Riku returned with an armful of towels and dropped them in front of Sora. "Kairi hasn't come back yet, I assume? Or Howl or Sophie?"

"Master Howl followed after them in disguise. It shouldn't take them this long, at least I don't think so. The court's kind of a nasty place. He complained about it a lot. I hope nothing happened to them."

"Happened? Happened like what?" Riku asked suspiciously, pausing in the middle of unbuttoning his wet and muddy shirt.

Markl looked suddenly embarrassed, like he realized he said something he shouldn't have. "I dunno. Howl just…he always said they weren't nice people and when I get my title I shouldn't ever go work there."

Riku snorted. "Not nice? That was the word he chose? Take a seat and I can give you a whole sack of more accurate words to describe those murderous snatchrags."

"Stop it, Riku, he's like eight," Sora warned him. "He doesn't need details. Or your vocabulary."

"Nine," Markl corrected.

"Fine," Riku conceded, to indulge the tired and injured Sora, who was glaring at him somewhat muzzily with narrowed eyes.

Markl looked unsure about whether he wanted to press the point, but Sophie's grandmotherly influence won out, and he backed down and excused himself upstairs to let them change. There was exactly one set of dry clothes for each of them in Kairi's seemingly bottomless pack that they'd picked up in Market Chipping. They tossed their dripping clothes over the chair in front of the fire and let the heat sink into their chilled muscles. The kettle began to sing, and Calcifer lifted it obediently off his head and poured it into the teapot Markl had set down for them. "Thanks. I mean it. I'm sorry I couldn't give you more warning about the guardian."

The prospect of having something hot in his palms perked Sora up a little, and he pushed his face off the table and sat up. "It's alright. I know you tried. And we're pretty used to that kind of thing. I just shoulda been more careful."

"At least Howl will be—" Calcifer stopped short and flared suddenly. A ripple of mysterious energy flowed out from the hearth, and the castle shuddered for a moment, metal screeching against metal, as if every steel plate and stone suddenly remembered they should by all rights be lying in a heap in the Waste. Shafts of light yawned through the cracks in the floorboards. The room contracted with sickening sucking sensation, like it was being pulled into itself, and then, just as abruptly, snapped back, flooding the room with puffs of dust.

"What in the hell was that?" Riku yelled, jumping to his feet with teapot in hand, and slopping tea all over the floor.

"Bad," Calcifer said blearily. "I think their audience is over."

"Are you okay?" Sora asked him.

"I think so. At least for now. Drink your tea and don't even bother asking me what that was about," Calcifer said, and disappeared beneath a heavy log with a puff of ash.