Kingdom Hearts: The Girl Who Stole the Star

by Lacan Shinn

Sequel to KH: SEOD. Sora is restored from The Final World to find that much has changed since he vanished. Sora's death has devastated Kairi and Riku; Roxas, Xion, Anna, and Elsa are faced with nightmare destinies; and the mysterious Master of the Foretellers, adumbrated by shade, is on the verge of completing his millennia long plan. The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

3. Cascading Singularity of Fractured Dream

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CHAPTER 2:

CASCADING SINGULARITY OF FRACTURED DREAMS

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Author's Notes: The pieces to listen to when reading this Chapter are, in order of scene: 'Albedo,' from the XENOSAGA Episode One Original Soundtrack, Disc Two; and for the following scene 'Awakening' from the XENOGEARS Original Soundtrack, Disc Two. Both of these can be found in KINGDOM HEARTS Insider's MP3 section.

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To Sora's shock and surprise, what awaited him when he passed through the rift in space wasn't the familiar light blue haze of the heavens of the realm of light, or the star speckled colors of the Ocean Between, or even the amorphous shifting hues of the interspace that he and Goofy and Donald had voyaged through on their first quest, when the Door to Darkness had been open and the walls between the worlds had been down.

What met Sora's eyes was a red-carpeted tapestry-strewn and ornamented spacious, tall hallway in what must have been a castle or an estate.

And, just in front of him, no longer wearing a shawl but with her brown hair tied in the braids that Sora remembered, her hand on Elsa's back as she knelt hunched over at her sister's side with her arms wrapped tightly around her, was Anna, forcing a smile for Elsa's sake that was very obviously extremely strained and that she almost certainly didn't feel at all.

Sora's eyes widened both at the sight of Anna and Elsa, and at the knowledge of what he'd just done.

That was why he hadn't felt what he was doing before or as he'd done it.

He hadn't opened a corridor to the Lanes Between.

He'd just opened another Door to the Light directly out of his heart.

Sora barely registered the familiar figures of Marluxia and Larxene, or whatever their names were now if they'd been recompleted and weren't like Roxas and Luxord, standing beyond Anna and Elsa and facing the sisters in time to drop out of his flight into a roll he attempted to alter into a Dodge Roll–

–good, at least he could still do that–

–and then he came up out of the Dodge Roll, seeing Anna's eyes widen as she registered he was there, into a handstand that he sprang up into a forward somersault over her and Elsa's head to land between them and the two – hopefully – former Nobodies.

'Larxene' rolled her eyes as Sora shifted Oathkeeper into a ready position and assumed a combat stance.

He ran through his awareness of the abilities that he could feel.

He couldn't sense the power of waking at all, and his magical capacity and other skills had been stifled back to just basic grade spells and Flowmotion, but at least this time he hadn't lost the ability to cast spells entirely, and his Flowmotion capabilities hadn't been suffocated in any way.

Sora would have preferred to at least be able to cast Curaga, but Anna and Elsa needed what they could get.

"Not again," 'Larxene' groaned. "Listen, kiddo'. I am really not in the mood to put up with your wannabe heroics this time," Sora didn't bother to keep from cringing, "So just bug off and keep your nose out of our business. Lauriam," Sora sighed in relief, and to his surprise, Lauriam gave Sora a weak but genuine smile at that. Marluxia had been recompleted, "And I aren't here to hurt your two new best friends."

Sora didn't feel the least amount relieved. There were numberless other ways to hurt people than to physically injure them.

"Our new," 'Larxene' spat the word, "'Master' has a couple of scripts that he wants us to teach the Queen and the Princess how to recite, once they've chosen which one to rehearse."

"Elsa," Sora said without looking back at either sister.

Where were Riku and Donald and Goofy and Mickey and Kairi?

Sora had no idea if Elsa had gained any combat experience in the last around a year, but even if she hadn't, she should be able to partially make up for it with her raw power.

"Lauriam, the guy with the cherry blossom hair, uses flowers as his element, so if you've learned to control your powers better, you shouldn't be in too much danger contending with him, based on what I've seen you do before. But the woman with the blonde hair uses lightning, and you wield ice. If you fight her, she'll roast you."

Anna gasped in horror at the revelation Elsa, for all her magic, was in fatal peril, and Sora's heart wrenched lethally tight and squeezed in a deathly, twisted vise.

"If we need to double team these two, I recommend that you dispatch Lauriam. I'll take out Larxene, or whatever her name is."

"Her name is Elrena," Lauriam informed Sora in an irritated voice. "Kindly use it from now on."

"I'm sorry," Sora said to Elrena, and he was pleased to see Elrena's eyes lost a small amount of their rage and hostility. "Elrena it is, then."

"I…" Elsa's voice was broken and ruined and guilt-ridden and terrified, and she sounded nothing like the confident young woman she'd been after Anna had taken away her pain when Sora had left the sisters, or even like the withdrawn yet determined and spirited girl he'd first met. She sounded at least as broken now as she'd looked when she'd lain on the frozen lake and left herself to Hans' whim, and probably, based on how Sora hadn't experienced Anna's pain when Elsa had given up and let Hans attempt to murder her but Sora had felt it literally worlds away this time, far, far more broken than that.

The sick white and ebony were back, even more potent and all-consuming than before.

Sora knew full well how Anna must be taking this.

He didn't need to have experienced Anna's pain himself to know that.

What had Lauriam and Elrena said to them!?

"I'll keep this in mind," Elsa finished at last, in a tone that didn't even sound defeated and exhausted and hopeless and tired, but as though the pain she was in was so terrible that even feeling defeat and exhaustion and hopelessness and tiredness were incomprehensibly and immeasurably too much for her.

Where were Riku and Goofy and Donald and Mickey and Kairi!?

It shouldn't be taking them this long to follow him through a Door to Light.

It was still open behind him and Anna and Elsa. Sora could sense that.

So where were they!?

He couldn't protect Anna and Elsa without them.

Not any longer.

"What did you say to them?" Sora meant it to come out as an angry challenge, but the words emerged as a low, very deadly hiss.

"Sora."

At the new terror and horror in Anna's voice, now specifically directed at him, the sick white and ebony fled a second time.

Sora took a deep breath, and then another and then another, and he continued to do so until he was reasonably sure he was calmer.

He knew better than this. He knew what darkness was. He couldn't let this get to him.

It wouldn't happen. Sora knew that it couldn't.

Kairi had protected him when he'd let the darkness take him in Radiant Garden. Kairi had protected him when he'd let the darkness take him on the beach of the Dark Margin. Kairi had protected him when he'd let the darkness take him at the Keyblade Graveyard. Kairi had just protected him once again after he'd let the darkness take him in the past before the true Kingdom Hearts.

All he needed was for Kairi to arrive here, and shine her light in the deepest darkness as she had since he'd known her, and he'd be fine.

And Riku was correct, as well. This might be part of Yozora's and Luxu's plan – Sora had no doubt one or both of them was the new 'master' Elrena hated. Yozora or Luxu might have sent Elrena and Lauriam after Anna and Elsa specifically to get to him.

Sora suddenly felt so exhausted he wasn't sure the tiredness and hopelessness weren't too much for him.

If that was true, if it was his fault that Anna was being tortured like this, whether Kairi was here or not, he might genuinely turn to Elsa and beg her to fire another fragment of ice into his own heart so he could go through what Anna had before and inexorably freeze into an eternal cold death, and if Kairi gave him her love to attempt to thaw the frost, he'd reject it wholly and hope that by doing so, she'd fail to break the curse and he'd still die.

If that wasn't enough and Kairi broke the curse anyway, he'd beg Elsa to fire another fragment, and when she did he'd flee into the deepest and most concealed recesses of the most hidden and remote building in The World That Never Was where Kairi would never find him and hide there frozen suspended in everlasting cold total loneliness forever.

Anna's love for Elsa blinded him with more incandescence than he'd beheld anything else since before he could remember.

If he was the reason that had been twisted into a source of this much pain for Anna, not even a reincarnating infinity of cold wholly lonely eternal deaths would be the most microscopically infinitesimal frayed thread of a silhouette of a shade of a shadow of a penumbra of an umbra close to being enough.

"What did you say to them?" Sora pushed the exhaustion away as best as he could and kept his voice neutral this time.

Lauriam scowled blackly, at Sora and at himself. "Go ahead and be angry," Lauriam invited Sora. Elrena opened her mouth to object, but Lauriam held up a hand to forestall her. "I know I did a lot of rotten things as Marluxia, but even then I wouldn't have sunk this low. I wanted puppets I could strut about to enforce my own identity, not broken marionettes who can't even swing their limbs at command.

"I told Elsa that her parents are dead because, unknown to her, they'd attempted to sail to a forbidden civilization to attempt to discover a way that she could control her powers so she wouldn't unintentionally blast Anna in the head again like she had as a child, knock her into a coma, and almost murder her."

Sora felt so sick he doubted he had the strength to retch this time, or the emotional willpower to pass out.

That was why Elsa had shut Anna out?

That would have been enough to rob Sora of any power to throw up or will to faint, but combined with what Lauriam had revealed to Elsa about her parents, Sora was no longer sure he'd be able to eat or drink or sleep again.

Then a violent chill ripped up Sora's spine, and he was so cold it was as though Elsa had already condemned him to an everlasting cold and lonely death.

That alone shouldn't have been enough to break Elsa this badly. If nearly killing Anna as a child had been why Elsa had pushed her away, then she'd begun to come to terms with it once Anna had given up to the curse for Elsa. Learning that she had murdered her parents shouldn't have broken Elsa again this badly.

"But that's not all," Sora prompted. "What's the rest?"

Lauriam scowled blackly once more, and Elrena answered Sora before Lauriam could.

"Luxu," Sora clenched his teeth tightly, "'kindly asked us,'" Elrena's voice dripped with venomous sarcasm, "To further inform Elsa and Anna that he'd been watching them for years, knowing that they were potential candidates to become," if any blood had returned to Sora's face, it was gone now.

No please don't say it please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please don't say it don't tell me that you broke the world order down around them don't tell me that you dragged them any further into this pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease

"Princesses of Heart."

Lauriam or Elrena had told them.

Anna, and the sister that she loved so much, knew what they were now.

And, from what Sora knew about them, neither of them would be content with just shrugging this off. They'd want to know more about who they were and their powers, and that would pull them further and further into the nightmare until they'd been as asphyxiated by it as much as Kairi and Riku and Donald and Goofy and Roxas and Xion and Lea and Ven and Mickey and Aqua and Terra and everyone else had.

Sora shouldn't be worried about fainting.

He couldn't be awake.

This had to be a dream.

Or a nightmare.

Or a memory of a nightmare.

Or a barely grasped memory of a nightmare that he'd forgotten long ago and had never wanted to remember again for as long as he lived.

Where was Meow Now? Where was Komory Pat?

They were Dream Eater Spirits, correct?

Why weren't they here eating this nightmare!?

Where was Kairi!?

"And while Luxu was watching them," Elrena was going on, "He overheard Anna's parents talking about taking Anna on the voyage so she could testify about Elsa's powers from her own experiences. But in the end they decided not to because Anna's memory of Elsa nearly murdering her had been rubbed out."

This wasn't even a barely grasped memory of a long forgotten nightmare.

This was a nightmare that he'd forgotten completely, leaving behind nothing but the pain that proved that it had once happened, as Data-Sora had learned pain demonstrated.

So why hadn't he forgotten it!?

Why was he aware of it!?

Anna's own parents had robbed her of memories she'd had of times she'd spent with Elsa!?

Then what Elrena meant registered.

"'Emptiness empty of even emptiness.' Emptiness so empty it doesn't even have the lack of the happiness and joy and sadness and pain. When you're empty there's at least that lack, that knowledge that you're missing something that you can't afford to let go of. There's at least a beginning and an end, a first and a last. But when you don't even have that lack, there isn't even the knowledge that you're missing something. There's the absence of no beginning and no end. Time doesn't have a starting point and a stopping point, but it's not just eclipsed. It's blinked out. And you can't even dream of what you're missing because you don't know that you're missing something so not even dreams can save you. You're just entirely alone in the darkness, abandoned and betrayed past the point of no return."

Sora didn't want to remember Anna saying that.

Even if it hadn't been Anna who had spoken those words, those words had been the single most horrifying and terrible thing that he'd heard since he'd been old enough to have true memories.

That it had been Anna who had said them prevented them from even entering Sora's heart and mind further than at their edges if he recalled them, because he knew that if they passed too much into his conscious awareness he'd lose every capacity to feel and think in the first place, much less speak or move.

When Anna had spoken those words, Sora had refused to believe that it was possible to literally feel that way, no matter how bad things became. He'd realized that Anna had felt that pain in her heart, but he'd assumed that Anna had just been aware of the concept of it when she'd gone through that pain, and that she hadn't genuinely suffered through it.

Now, for the first time, a frigid cold more lethal than death itself began to blow into his heart and essence, and, against every single solitary facet that comprised Sora's being, he was forced to wonder if Anna had truly felt that way in a literal sense, and that she hadn't just become aware of the concept, when Elsa had struck her in the heart with the ice fragment, and just now when Sora had felt her pain on the play island.

Because Elrena had just told him that she'd revealed that the sole reason Elsa hadn't murdered Anna at the same time as she'd murdered her parents was because Elsa had already nearly murdered Anna, and the only reason Anna was still alive to love and care for and cherish and protect Elsa was because Elsa, and Anna's parents, had done something unimaginably atrocious to Anna.

That had better be the reason why Elsa had broken this much again.

Because if it wasn't…

If it was even worse…

That wasn't possible.

Xehanort, as misguided as he had been, had still believed that what he was doing was for the best overall, and that hurting uncountable people and hearts was okay because it would cause things to be better for them in the end.

It was a wholly rotten way to be there for your friends, but even Xehanort had understood love and friendship, as much as Woody had been convinced otherwise.

But if you went even farther than what Luxu had just forced Lauriam and Elrena to do to Anna and Elsa, or what Xehanort had manipulated Xemnas into doing to Roxas and Xion and Lea or done to Ven and Aqua and Terra himself, Sora wasn't sure that he could believe that you even recollected what it was like to have a heart, as Isa had told Sora was supposedly the reason that Nobodies knew what emotions were.

And even when Sora had revoltingly bought into Xemnas' lie that Nobodies had no hearts, he hadn't doubted Isa's claim that Nobodies at least recalled what it was to have a heart and laugh and cry.

No one who had a heart and knew what pain and hurt were, or who, at the absolute worst, remembered what pain and hurt were, would go farther than this, correct?

That was correct.

It had to be right.

Sora took a shaky breath, and then mentally kicked himself.

This was crazy.

Feeling and thinking dark emotions and thoughts, and even considering giving in to them, was one thing. That was natural emotion; it wasn't that big a deal so long as he didn't actually act on those impulses or thoughts.

But believing that someone was willing or capable of going farther than erasing most of the memories two people possessed of one of their best friends, or attempting to force them to murder or enslave one another; or splitting up three other best friends and consigning one to an unending slumber, another to unending imprisonment in a boundless night, and a third to unending imprisonment in a shackled night; or using Kairi against her two best friends to attempt to force them to sentence the whole cosmos to oblivion; or telling someone that the sister who loved you and who you loved was just alive because you'd hurt her badly and your parents, who you'd also murdered, had hurt her badly as well…

…That was sheer lunacy.

People could be utter creeps at times, but deep down they could still laugh and cry.

No one who knew what laughter and tears were could even begin to feel or think that it was possible to go farther than that?

Correct?

Then why was Sora wondering if it was possible?

Why had Anna been aware of the concept that it was possible, when she had almost finished growing into a Princess of Heart of pure light?

Sora's mind went blank.

Anna was a Princess of Heart of pure light now.

She should not have been able to suffer like that again.

Her light should have been far too strong for her spirits to fall that much now.

And Elsa had become a Princess of Heart once Anna had enabled her to begin to heal.

Elsa's light should have been far too strong now for her spirits to fall this much again.

Because if their lights weren't, if even a Princess of Heart could experience this much torture, then K–

What had he just been thinking?

Something about Kairi, he remembered that much.

He'd probably just been wondering where she was.

He was being an idiot. He had something to believe in now besides Kairi and his friends. Anna and Elsa needed him, and Lauriam and Elrena needed him too, now, before they became victims like Xemnas and Ansem and the young Vanitas and Isa had been.

"So that's it." Sora found his voice was stronger again, now that he had rediscovered something else to believe in. "Okay then. Will you get in too much trouble with Luxu if you tell me everything you know about what he and Yozora," Elrena's mouth opened and Lauriam's eyebrows rose at the revelation that Sora knew that name, "Are up to? Or will I need to cut you free of your new strings on my own, with Kairi and my friends?"

Elrena's face became a mask at Sora's pledge to cut their latest strings, as did Lauriam's, but then it twisted in a look of absolute and utter disgust, and she sneered with hateful loathing, clearly because she was thinking about Luxu or Yozora.

"Oh, no," she snarled. "What we've told Elsa and Anna so far is the barest tip of the iceberg."

Sora's mind wasn't even blank this time.

It was empty.

"We still haven't gotten to the scripts that they need to decide between. The point in telling Elsa and Anna the truth about their past was to break down their unwillingness to hear us out when we read them their lines. Whichever script they adopt, their lines," Elrena appeared as though she herself was about to retch, and Lauriam looked ill and pale, "Themselves are so much worse like you wouldn't believe."

The emptiness was gone, and Oathkeeper was leveled pointed forward at Elrena and Lauriam without the slightest second thought.

Sora hated this. He'd defeated Elrena and Lauriam before during the Second Keyblade War, and one or more times in Castle Oblivion prior to that, according to Riku, and he'd beaten the stuffing out of the rest of Xehanort's other friends cumulatively too many times to count, but once he'd understood why revenge was wrong, he'd begun hating that he needed to do so and he hadn't stopped.

He didn't want to do this again.

But what did it matter at this point? One more time wouldn't make any difference after his track record.

"Then don't tell them their supposed 'lines,'" Sora responded. "For that matter, I'm going to make certain that you don't."

Elrena laughed, and there was a shrill terror and desperation in her laughter that hadn't been there when she'd scorned Xehanort's wish to use her as a vessel for a fragment of his heart.

Sora's heart and mind emptied further.

When Elrena had said there was more, she'd just meant that Anna's and Elsa's supposed 'scripts' involved a lot more of the same kinds of hurt that she and Lauriam had already put them through.

Correct?

Correct?

Even to himself, that last thought felt and sounded almost plaintive.

"You're still a naïve child," Elrena scoffed, shaking her head back and forth. "Even if you prevent us from reading Anna and Elsa their lines, Luxu or the other Foretellers or Yozora himself will just drop those nooses around their necks in due time anyway, and under those circumstances it'll be completely out of the blue and they won't even have any idea what's coming."

Could his heart and mind empty any more?

Sora extremely highly doubted it.

"Stop us now and you'll just make things a lot worse for them," Elrena continued, and though Sora doubted he could become emptier, the agony that ripped through him and consumed him fully proved that, though the hurt was weaker than Sora knew that it should have been, he hadn't yet lost the capacity to be almost completely empty of pain and reached the point where he just lacked like Data-Sora had. "One of the reasons Lauriam and I agreed to this was because, at this point, this is one of the few mercies left anyone can show them.

"You can't do anything about it. No one can." Elrena laughed in shrill terror and desperation once more. "A vortex of loss and despair and hatred and rejection has been engulfing the universe since time immemorial, and it's about to whirl to its most voracious intensity."

"Are you sure about that?"

Sora started, and a small amount of the emptiness retreated.

That was Riku's voice.

Sure enough, Riku came running up the hallway behind Elrena and Lauriam, Braveheart unsheathed and Mickey to his right with his own Keyblade at the ready.

Most of the emptiness went away when Sora saw that Kairi was running at Riku's left, Destiny's Embrace in a combat position.

But by no means all of it, and the pain and hurt were still incredibly dampened.

Donald and Goofy were running, behind Mickey and Kairi respectively, Save the Queen Plus and Save the King Plus out.

And past them, racing just as quickly, were Kristoff and Marshmallow and Olaf and Sven.

A small smile came to Sora's face.

So that was where they had been.

"Mickey doesn't know how to generate one," Riku replied to Sora's unspoken question, "But he knows more about the Door to the Light than the rest of us. Once he figured out what you'd fashioned, he taught Namine how to reach through it and trace yours and Donald's and Goofy's chains of memories to locate Kristoff and Olaf and Marshmallow, and then Mickey redirected the Door to the Light's exit point on this side, split it into three, and enabled us to gather the rest of Anna's and Elsa's friends.

"Anna's friend Kristoff wasn't with Sven, but he was with Olaf, thankfully."

As if on cue, Kristoff picked up his pace and sprinted around the two recompleted Nobodies and then Sora.

Sora didn't need to look back to know that he'd moved directly in front of Anna and was shielding her with his body.

More of the emptiness went away.

Sora was between both Anna and Elsa and Lauriam and Elrena.

He wasn't in front of Anna specifically.

But now someone else who l–

–cared about Anna a lot was.

Riku rushed to Sora's left and took up a ready position next to it, Mickey shadowed Lauriam facing Lauriam at his right, Kairi assumed a mirror position facing Elrena at her left, and Donald and Goofy completed the effort to surround them by stopping in combat positions behind the two recompleted Nobodies.

Marshmallow picked up Olaf and Sven and leapt over Elrena and Lauriam, then landed directly in front of Elsa, turned, and lowered Olaf and Sven to the floor. Olaf, looking uncertain as to what was going on but determined, moved in front of and to the side of Marshmallow, between Elsa and Anna, and Sven did the same relative to Anna and Elsa with Kristoff.

"I don't have as much of an idea what's going on as Sora does," Kristoff spoke to Elrena, cracking his knuckles warningly. "But Anna doesn't need anyone else filling her heart and head with any more nonsense, like I did before I got to know her. If you try, Sven and I are going to teach you the meaning of 'mess with the reindeer, you get the antlers.'"

More of the emptiness vanished, and a smile that was still small, but a decent amount larger, rose on Sora's face.

Kristoff was taking Anna's feelings seriously now.

That was wonderful.

"The woman casts lightning," Sora warned Marshmallow and Olaf. "Keep as far away from her as you can, and don't let her or her spells close to Elsa."

Donald's chest puffed up in the beginnings of a huff that Sora was giving orders again, but then he sighed in resigned approval and smirked with pleased admiration.

It meant nothing to Sora.

Marshmallow grunted in acknowledgment, and Olaf partially squeaked, partially cried out in fear, but he didn't back away from where he was standing.

Lauriam closed his eyes with a pleased and admiring smile of his own, but one that was equally, if not much more, resigned and agonized.

Lauriam reopened his eyes. "You've all found the special strength to protect what matters, as I rediscovered it, and my purpose, when I was recompleted." More of the emptiness disappeared, and Lauriam nodded at Sora in acknowledgment and gratitude.

"But it's too little, too late.

"Elrena wasn't bluffing when she said that a maelstrom of loss and hate is swallowing the cosmos. It's not just the cosmos that it's swallowing. Kingdom Hearts is unimaginably more than just the heart of the realm of light, the realm of darkness, the realm in-between, the great abyss, and The Final World."

Chilling cold consumed Sora, and the emptiness enlarged anew. This itself was going to be extremely bad.

He extremely highly doubted that Lauriam was just referring to whatever the twisted Station of Awakening was that Yozora had created.

"Kingdom Hearts is an infinite potential perceptual phenomenon," Lauriam went on. "It's emotion and dreams and creative force and imagination of such distilled purity in its epitome it defies all existing or possible comprehension or incomprehension save for its own. It's not merely the source of a single space-time continuum comprised of five realms. Every time you feel a choice in your heart, you create as many potential futures as there are choices that you can make, and Kingdom Hearts accommodates for all these possible choices by creating a new worldline forged of the five realms.

"A single feeling, a single dream, can shape all space and time. There isn't just one set of universes in the cosmos. There is an infinite array of Worlds and potential New Worlds, continually created by Kingdom Hearts every instant, as many as there are feelings that tug you in a direction when you're faced with a choice."

Even through the emptiness, awe engulfed Sora, and he saw Kairi give a true smile of amazement and Riku whistle in admiring appreciation.

Their small world wasn't just a little piece of something much greater in a finite ocean of stars.

It was a note drifting through an endless ocean of melody.

And Sora had believed he could be a part of something this immeasurably vast?

He'd even been proud that he supposedly was?

How blind could he have been!?

Then what Lauriam was implying registered, and the emptiness regrew even more.

"You're saying that Yozora and Luxu are a threat to all of these Worlds and New Worlds," Kairi spoke up before Riku or Sora could talk, and a violent chill ripped up Sora's spine. There was a dangerous anger in her voice that he'd never heard before, one that reminded him of Anna using the terms 'forsaken' and 'empt'–

Absolutely not.

Kairi did not possess darkness.

The sole reason Anna had felt and thought as she had had been because she hadn't yet become a Princess of Heart, and she was able to think of those terms once she fully transfigured into one because she, as Isa had believed Nobodies did, remembered what it was like to feel and think those ways.

That was why Anna and Elsa had, and did, appear to be going through those forms of pain again. It wasn't really happening. They were just remembering what it was like to have gone through those forms of hurt before they became Princesses of Heart.

Kairi could never, would never, go through anything like that.

Nor would she feel or think anything as horrific as something dark.

So why did Sora feel like he was going to retch again, and as though he was betraying both Kairi and Anna by thinking this?

Almost against his will, Sora sought out Mickey's eyes.

He was just imagining the concern in Mickey's eyes and on his face.

He had to be.

"The closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes."

Mickey looked as though he was specifically remembering telling Sora t–

No.

Sora was imagining what Mickey was feeling and thinking.

Kairi did not possess darkness, and she would never, never feel or think anything dark, and she would never, never, never, never suffer as Anna and Elsa had.

"Bingo," Elrena applauded sarcastically. "And to effectively threaten all existence, Yozora needs to finish putting his primary actors through their back stage rehearsals. He also needs to end the process he began when Luxu took the box Maleficent and Pete are looking for to its destined place in reality. His central protagonist needs a proper Instrument of the Apocalypse."

"A weapon," Riku replied. "Are you talking about some kind of Keyblade?"

"Two thumbs up for our leading critic," Elrena praised Riku, clapping her hands this time. "Hades knew how to inflate an actress' head when he came up with that one, but he didn't realize that the concept could apply to a critic, too."

"Do not call Riku a puppet again," Kairi snarled, and again a violent chill ripped up Sora's spine.

"The closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes."

Sora shook himself, and shook it off.

"But, though I don't know much about what's in that box, I do know that I wouldn't call it a 'Keyblade,'" Elrena continued. "Or even a 'Kye-Blade.' Even the Kye-Blade ain't got nothin' on what this morsel of a candy cane can do."

"I could care less," Riku responded evenly. "I told Xehanort if he re-forged the Kye-Blade, we'd defeat him anyway and close Kingdom Hearts. Sora made that happen, and the same will prove true for Yozora and whatever scrap metal is in the box."

"I sincerely hope so," Lauriam allowed. "But that's beside the point. Luxu is going to drop his noose around Elsa's and Anna's necks long before Yozora's scrap iron has fully passed through the fire, and you can't prevent that from happening. It's for the best if you don't keep us from enabling them to walk into this with open eyes."

"Sven, get ready," Kristoff said, and Sora could hear Sven shift his hooves.

Then Sora realized something, and he was pretty sure his ability to feel even hurt and pain had been dampened as much as it had within Data-Sora, because he didn't see how it could dampen further.

Sora felt almost disconnected now, as though he was partially removed from reality and what was going on was happening to someone else, somewhere far distant from him.

"Are Anna or Elsa, or both of them, Yozora's 'central protagonist' who he is preparing his 'Instrument of the Apocalypse' for?" Sora was barely aware that the voice speaking those words was his own, or that they were tight and taut with terror and desperation.

Elrena shrugged. "I have no idea."

Sora didn't know whether or not to be relieved by that.

"But what we do know is that Elsa's destiny is to vanish and die as you did," Lauriam went on

Sora knew that blood had returned to his face, because this time he clearly felt all of it drain away, and his legs were no longer there

"Sven, now!" Kristoff shouted, voice whip crack sharp

"No!" Anna cried, voice a mixture of determination and terror and resolve and horror that Sora couldn't even begin to have the most minuscule, most infinitesimal idea of the barest top of the surface of. "I need to know this! Let them finish!"

Sora was too late again

He'd forever and never and always had been, always was, and never and always and forever would be, too late

"That was the wisest choice," Lauriam approved with a sad smile. "For unlike with Sora, who merely vanished into The Final World, Elsa will vanish into – forget it." Lauriam's lip twisted in utter, total hatred and utter, total revulsion. "I don't care how angry Luxu becomes with us, I refuse to so much as say a word about the realm beyond The Final World.

"What you do need to know is that, if Elsa vanishes, there will be no way to restore her.

"And there will be just one way to prevent it. This is the other fate that you can choose.

"You, Anna, will need to take her place, and if you do so, due to the circumstances under which Elsa is destined to vanish, you yourself won't even fade away into the realm beyond The Final World. You'll be unmade from all existence completely, your heart denied even the rest of an unending afterlife, and, as with Xion, all memory of you and proof that you were once here in reality that can be conveyed to others and to the coming generations and that you loved and lived for Elsa will be obliterated from Elsa's memory and from the memories of everyone in all the realms of all the Worlds and worldlines and potential New Worlds, including from the memory of Kingdom Hearts itself, forever. Since you will die and won't return to someone else's heart from which you can later be returned to a body. Yet though, when every memory and legacy of Xion was erased, they left behind the pain of the absence of those memories; if you vanish and fade, Elsa and everyone in all of the realms of reality, and Kingdom Hearts itself, won't even experience any pain at the absence of their memories of you. All traces of you will be cast into everlasting oblivion, and Elsa will live the rest of her life fully happy and content even though you're gone after all that you have done for her and attempted to do for her, while suffering as she would have without you in her life because she doesn't have the tiniest trace of awareness that you were once part of her life, her sister, and that you once loved her and lived your life for her."

Reality wasn't empty or separate from Sora any longer.

It wasn't there at all.

"Although my heart may be weak, it's not alone. It's grown with each new experience, and it's found a home with all the friends I've made. I've become a part of their heart just as they've become a part of mine. And if they think of me now and then… if they don't forget me… then our hearts will be one.

"I don't need a weapon. My friends are my power!"

"I think I understand. I see myself the way you remember me. And you see yourself the way I remember you."

"I always thought Nobodies were doomed to fade back into darkness…"

"Yeah, but you and I didn't. We got to meet our original selves."

"So, we can be together again!"

"That's the heart's true nature – to never ever let go. Wherever they are, Andy and the other toys haven't let go, either."

"The memories… they're returning…"

"My friends… are my power!"

"Chirithy, we're heading home. You should come with us."

"Whaaat…?"

"Take it from me, it's not enough to wait for someone you care about. It's true that hearts are connected wherever you are. If it's impossible to be together, then all you can do is wait. But, if it is possible to be together, then that's how it should be."

"Sora…"

"You know, this really is a beautiful place. But you'd enjoy it so much more with someone you care about. Before, when I was looking around with Kairi, I remembered how important it is… to share moments with friends."

No.

If Anna didn't sever her love for Elsa and connection with her sister of her own free will and let Elsa vanish and die into something endlessly worse than emptiness, she'd shred her connection with Elsa, and her love for Elsa, to frayed tatters in literally every possible way.

This couldn't be real.

This wasn't real.

This wasn't happening.

This couldn't happen.

Not to Anna.

No.

Nonononononononononono

"'Emptiness empty of even emptiness.' Emptiness so empty it doesn't even have the lack of the happiness and joy and sadness and pain. When you're empty there's at least that lack, that knowledge that you're missing something that you can't afford to let go of. There's at least a beginning and an end, a first and a last. But when you don't even have that lack, there isn't even the knowledge that you're missing something. There's the absence of no beginning and no end. Time doesn't have a starting point and a stopping point, but it's not just eclipsed. It's blinked out. And you can't even dream of what you're missing because you don't know that you're missing something so not even dreams can save you. You're just entirely alone in the darkness, abandoned and betrayed past the point of no return."

It was true.

It was all true.

Emptiness empty of even emptiness was all real.

And there was a point of no return.

Anna had known exactly what she was talking about when she'd said that.

Black and violet mists began to swirl and drift out further down the corridor behind Lauriam and Elrena and the rest of them, emanating out from a growing whirling portal in the floor of dark blues and night black and pallid, glaring neon white and deathly lighter purple. As the portal grew, deathly neon white and pallid lighter purple motes ascended upwards out of it, and waves of flowing ebony and darker purple fountained up from the center of a purple.

Reality returned with a violent jolt as Sora realized what was going on, and a different kind of complete, total horror and complete, total terror consumed his entire being wholly.

"Mickey, hurry to the Keyblade Graveyard and see if you can figure out how to call all of those ancient Keyblades to Arendelle by yourself right now!" he snapped, chest so tight with terror and horror that he couldn't believe his heart could beat.

But Mickey hadn't needed to be told that. He'd clearly recognized what was happening, and he was already hurrying past Elsa in the direction of the Door to the Light, no doubt to attempt to do just that.

Sora whipped in Lauriam's direction.

"You said that you weren't going to try to hurt Anna or Elsa," he spoke. "Dismiss the Demon Tide. You know what it can do to them."

At that, Lauriam's and Elrena's eyes widened, and they whirled around.

Lauriam's scythe appeared in his right hand in a detonation of cherry blossom petals, and Elrena's kunais slid between her fingers in crackling yellow lightning.

A volcano of black and glowing phantom yellow eyes erupted from the portal, smashing through the ceiling of the hallway as though it were tissue paper and sending chunks of stone showering down around them.

"We aren't calling it, you moron!" Elrena snarled. "Luxu must have set us up! Lauriam, we're getting out of here!"

She held her hand before her, and a partially oblong sphere of darkness appeared in the air before them. She sprinted into it with Lauriam at her side and it disappeared.

Sora chanced a glance behind himself this time, and saw Mickey leaping into the Door to the Light well behind Anna, now crouched on the floor besides Elsa who was huddled in on herself with her arms wrapped tightly around her and tears spilling down her face, Anna's arms around Elsa as she held her close and tight and rocked her back and forth with tears of her own spilling down her face.

As much as Sora hated it, he couldn't afford to pay any attention to Anna or Elsa now.

If this Demon Tide was as deadly as the one they'd confronted at the Keyblade Graveyard, and not just the one that had been chasing after Olette, Pence, and Hayner in Twilight Town, he couldn't afford to spend a single instant paying attention to anything but the Demon Tide.

He pleaded that this Demon Tide was just like the first one he'd encountered, and that this one would just flee once they began shredding it.

Or, at worst, that this one would begin the size of that one and then would evaporate into darkness without growing.

Sora wished he knew how to tell whether that would happen.

For all his combat experience, he understood very little about how the Demon Tides functioned, or what their strengths and weaknesses were.

He still had no idea why the first one that he'd met had run away, or why in the world it had been pursuing Hayner, Olette, and Pence.

It had almost been as though it had been trying to prevent Olette, Hayner, and Pence from meeting him and enabling him to take away Roxas' pain.

The Demon Tide roared out of the portal, which contracted shut below it, and soared in an ascending rough spiral into the air.

That was silly, though. Even if Xemnas and Ansem, who had wanted him to restore Roxas, hadn't called the Demon Tide, Luxu knew better than to believe that stealing Hayner's, Pence's, and Olette's hearts, or even killing them, would be enough to stop him from giving Roxas back his heart. So Luxu likely wouldn't have been idiotic enough to spend the energy to unleash a Demon Tide on three regular people. He'd have just sent regular Shadows after them.

The sole other reason that Sora could think of for a Demon Tide to chase after Pence, Hayner, and Olette would be if it had been attempting to keep them from further causing Sora to feel Roxas' pain, and if it had been attempting to protect Sora.

But that was even sillier. Why would a Heartless attempt to protect him? To do that, it would have needed to retain its awareness, as he initially had when he'd given his heart up to protect K–

A deathly absolute zero chill of frozen frigid ice ripped violently up Sora's spine, much of reality vanished again, and his legs practically gave out beneath him.

"What Data-Sora and Data-Riku believed was Data-Sora's Heartless was Data-Kairi."

Data-Kairi had been terrible comparable to the gigantic Demon Tide and the Lich.

"It's not something that we should be talking about now," Jiminy answered for Namine in a tone that said that the topic was closed regardless of what Kairi or Sora said or did. "Soon after Namine attained a body, she came to me about this for my advice, because she felt that, as someone who had been entrusted to be a conscience by the Blue Fairy, I was the sole person who had received her message in the Journal that she could talk to about this matter."

"I…" Jiminy looked uncertain for a few seconds. "…Thought this over, in-depth and at great length, and I arrived at the conclusion that this is not something that needs to be discussed until the Foretellers have been defeated, particularly not in Kairi's presence.

"I shouldn't conceal as much as Namine and I have spoken about, because Kairi deserves to know at least a little about this, but this is as far as these matters go.

"Drop them," Jiminy said strictly. "Now."

"No way…" Sora breathed, and, though it took everything that he possessed and it went against every impulse that he knew to do it, he turned horrified eyes in Kairi's direction and reached for the connection between their hearts that he'd established with Kairi when she'd come up with their shared one-winged angel One Heart dual technique.

Kairi didn't possess darkness.

Anna didn't possess darkness.

They certainly didn't possess enough darkness to create Heartless as unimaginably terrible and horrific as the enormous Demon Tide and the Lich.

"The closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes."

Do you seek our liege?

Why in the World was he remembering that mysterious voice from Twilight Town now?

Sora lost the ability to move.

That was no memory.

That had been another voice speaking directly into his heart.

Just as Kairi had talked directly into his heart when he'd been losing hope in Traverse Town during his first journey, and when he'd been losing hope on the Dark Margin after defeating Xemnas with Riku and he'd heard her voice as he'd read her letter.

And hearing those words just now had felt precisely the same as those two times.

And hearing those words in Twilight Town when he'd been facing Roxas' hurt and pain before the Dusks had appeared had felt precisely the same as well.

Then, and now, that was Kairi's voice.

Kairi had been saying that she was there for Sora to protect him, and she'd been telling someone – or something – to find Sora in order to be able to do so.

Sora whipped his head the rest of the way in Kairi's direction.

She was looking in the direction of the Demon Tide with her hands clenched so tightly around the hilt of Destiny's Embrace her knuckles were white.

And, now that Sora was looking at her, he could sense her heart as he'd been able to do when they'd unleashed their One Heart combination strike.

It was like looking into the core of a star burning with such ebony blackness it had been wholly hollowed out with incandescent ivory night.

"No…" Sora breathed with complete, utter desperation and denial.

He couldn't trust his own heart any longer. He was wrong. That was it.

That must be it.

"Riku," Sora spoke to his best friend tightly. "Use your darkness nose to smell Kairi."

"Why?" Riku asked, tense and at the ready, looking up at the whirling Demon Tide with Braveheart in a guard position. "This isn't the time for that."

"Just do it!" Sora snapped, and Sora instantly knew that that had been a mistake, because Kairi now jolted violently at Sora's tone, turned her head partially in Riku's and in his direction, and would thus now know what was going on if Riku sensed what Sora had.

Sora opened his mouth to beg Riku not to do it, but it was

Forever always never always never forever always forever never always never always forever always never would be helpless and powerless and a failure and worthless and hopeless and pathetic and insignificant and nothing more than a random particle of matter that had no value or purpose or meaning or point in existing within anything greater far, far too late

too late.

Riku clapped one hand over his nose as though a skunk had just sprayed its scent directly into both of his nostrils and staggered back, clamping his mouth shut to struggle not to heave up all of his food.

It was all true.

"Sora, Riku, what…?" Kairi asked.

Her eyes widened.

Sora saw the complete, total horror and terror in her eyes as she realized what he and Riku had just felt, and why the Demon Tide had appeared.

Anna would wholly sever the most blindingly incandescent connection with Elsa Sora had experienced in all of his life and heart and mind and memory no matter what she chose, Anna or Elsa would die in the process, and if Anna did she'd lose even an everlasting afterlife and no one would know she'd been here in existence or care that she was gone.

Sora had just caused Kairi to become aware that she had created the vast Demon Tide and the Lich in the Keyblade Graveyard.

There was nothing left now. There never had been. Namine had been worried that his heart would break, but it hadn't broken.

He'd never had a heart.

He never could have had a heart.

All that wasn't left were just the tears in his eyes and spilling down his face and emptiness empty of even emptiness as he deserted Kairi and Anna and left them entirely alone in the darkness, abandoned and betrayed past the point of no return.

Kairi didn't say anything for several seconds.

Then her mouth opened, and her voice came out as a strangled, cracked, chapped, broken whisper, yet one that was nearly inflectionless and devoid of all emotion at the same time. Tears were in her own eyes and spilling down her face.

"I did it, didn't I?" she whispered.

"I gave birth to the Demon Tide from the darkness in my heart. I gave birth to the Lich. I temporarily murdered all of you save I myself and forced Sora to abuse the power of waking so much that, after I let Xemnas capture me and Xehanort judge me guilty of the death penalt… kill me… I murdered Sora permanently.

"I formed the Demon Tide that pursued Pence, Olette, and Hayner in Twilight Town, the Demon Tide that attempted to prevent Riku and Mickey from reaching the Keyblade of Darkness," Sora didn't even have the capability left to start a little, "The two Demon Towers that tried to keep Riku and Mickey from protecting Aqua, and the Demon Tide that Aqua had to sacrifice herself to to protect Riku so he could close the Door to Darkness, and that, if she hadn't, would have murdered Riku.

"Didn't I."

It wasn't a question.

"I tortured you. And I murdered you. I tortured you all.

"I murdered you all, and Sora for good."

Kairi closed her eyes and sagged forward with a barely audible, broken whimper, and the Demon Tide whirled down and about and around her and then erupted outwards and upwards in every direction in a volcanic tornado of amorphous writhing and thrashing and contorting and flowing and shifting and moving black and infernal deathly ghostly pallid yellow eyes.

---

Sora had believed he'd find himself as a light blue ghostly silhouette once more in The Final World when the blackness cleared, or he'd discover that he was falling into darkness and losing his memory because he'd become a Heartless once again.

But the black didn't clear.

It contracted and retracted, and somehow, relief was actually able to weaken the legs he shouldn't have still been able to stand on when he saw that no one in the hallway appeared to be injured, though that was no guarantee that they all still had their hearts.

The ceiling of the hallway was fully gone now, as were all the ceilings above it, leaving the hall open to the blue sky above that, mercifully, wasn't overcast with gray blizzard clouds.

Then the relief vanished as Sora beheld what had become of the Demon Tide and Kairi.

This Demon Tide wasn't the cyclonic conflagration the first vast Demon Tide had been.

It was a thin pinnacle that enclosed Kairi, who was still standing

–Sora couldn't feel her heart any longer, but his connection had been torn asunder when the Demon Tide had grown, so that didn't mean she'd lost her heart herself, oh thank the stars–

in the same position she'd been in before with her eyes closed and tears streaking her face.

The pinnacle of writhing and morphing shadows and infernal yellow stretched up a lot farther than the enormous Demon Tide in the Keyblade Graveyard had, reaching the apex of its funnel just below the clouds.

But that wasn't what scared Sora, assuming it was possible for him to still feel fear.

In the air all around Kairi and around the Demon Tide, the air was distorting and bending and warping and shimmering and flickering in a second phantasm of shifting, contorting pale grays and blacks and whites, as though everything that comprised reality itself around Kairi and the Demon Tide had been smeared and blotted out and bleached and incinerated clean of all life and color and substance and shade and even light and darkness themselves.

For all of its lethal fury, the Demon Tide in the Keyblade Graveyard hadn't accomplished anything like this at its worst, and this Demon Tide wasn't even on the offensive yet.

Even if – and that was a very big if – Mickey returned with millions of Keyblades, would that be enough to even make the shallowest ripple in this thing?

Even if Mickey returned with all the Keyblades from the Keyblade Graveyard with the exception of the Kye-Blade, innumerably more than Sora had wielded to defeat the first vast Demon Tide, would even that make more than a shallow ripple in this thing, if even that?

Could anything stop this monster, or was their sole defense against it to try to get as many people as they possibly could off of this world before the Demon Tide scoured it clean of all hearts and life?

Would even that be enough?

Heartless could open corridors of darkness.

Kairi undoubtedly could now.

And that assumed they even needed to.

There was a definite chance that something this lethal could break through the lock on the Door to Darkness that had sealed the hearts of every world away from the Heartless and corrupt Arendelle's heart, thus destroying the Gummi wall around it, or simply break through the wall directly and unleash itself upon the realm of light those ways.

Sora's chest constricted a little.

Worse, could this nightmare break the lock on the Door to Darkness itself?

And if it did, by closing the Door to Darkness, had the Final Keyhole also been closed and annihilated?

Or would breaking the lock on the Door to Darkness enable the Heartless and the darkness on the other side to flood out into the realm of light without the necessity of fashioning another Final Keyhole and Keyblade of Hearts and completing that Final Keyhole?

If that was true, this time there were no Princesses at the Final Keyhole to hold the darkness back, assuming they would have been able to contain the darkness at all once Ansem had opened the Door to Darkness itself.

If the lock on the Door to Darkness was broken, even if the Final Keyhole had been wrecked, it might be unnecessary since the door had been opened once.

It might be possible to just reopen the door from either side, or both sides, simply by reaching it.

Had Sora just transfigured Kairi into the newest potential destroyer of the whole realm of light?

Sora felt Anna take his left, free, hand–

–he knew it was her, he would never forget what the emotions in her grip felt like–

–and move his arm and hand into the position that she'd used to block Hans' sword and that he'd moved her arm and hand into when he'd realized that she'd felt the concept of darkness more terrible than Xehanort's when Elsa had struck her in the heart with the ice fragment.

Only Sora now knew Anna hadn't just felt the concept of it then, or just recently.

She'd genuinely felt those ways.

Nevertheless, when his arm and hand were in the position Anna's had been in both times and she intertwined her fingers and hand with his and squeezed it tightly, the emptiness empty of emptiness receded enough that he could feel light and confident and actual belief and hope again, and Sora discovered that he honestly partially believed that somehow, things could still turn out okay.

"How is Elsa?" Sora questioned, keeping as much terror and concern out of his voice as he could.

"I've done all I can do for her now," Anna responded, clearly doing the same things with her voice that he was, but because she was endlessly more capable of love than he was, he could tell it was taking most of what she had to prevent her tone from being too sick or tight or tense or asphyxiated. "You need me, too."

"You don't stand a chance against this Heartless," Sora told her. "Not even if Elsa has improved her skill and power a lot since we last met. Take Elsa and Kristoff and the others and run away through the portal I arrived in. You'll be safe there, at least for now."

"And you stand a chance against this yourself?" Anna questioned back. "Forget it. I'm not leaving anyone again. If our fate is to die, we're all going out here and now together."

The emptiness empty of emptiness was back. Anna was more determined than Kairi and Riku and Donald and Goofy put together. Arguing with her further would be futile.

But he still had to try.

"Mickey might return with a lot of trump cards," Sora objected. "Then I might be able to defeat the Heartless and save Kairi."

"According to the," Anna's lips twisted a number of times, "Slimeballs who just ran, I'm the same kind of person that Kairi is. You requested Mickey to try to return with more of your 'Key Blades.' Kairi has one herself. If Kairi can wield those swords, I can, too, and you'll do a better job fighting with a lot of them at once if someone else is helping you do it."

Sora hadn't thought of that. If he and Anna and Riku all wielded millions of Keyblades at the same time, and fought as a team, there was a legitimate chance that they could win this.

But Riku wasn't paying attention to them.

"Kairi," Riku spoke with calm, soothing reassurance. "You can put an end to this. And you can ensure that your darkness never hurts us or endangers us again. Remember how I told you that Namine taught me to conquer my darkness."

The emptiness empty of emptiness receded again, and desperate hope surged through Sora to consume him fully.

Why hadn't he thought of this?

Sora knew the answer.

Because Riku was the true wielder and the Keyblade Master.

Not him.

He was an accident of random chance.

"Don't be afraid of your darkness," Riku went on. "Accept it. The Demon Tides are likely to you what Ansem was to me, and your own darkness is to you what my own darkness was to me.

"Stare into the darkness unflinching and know that it's there, but see through it to the bright light beyond it without giving in to the darkness itself. Then you'll be in charge of it, and your darkness won't cause us any problems again, just as mine hasn't. At worst, you might need to take the form of this Demon Tide for a short period of time or longer, but I was still in charge of the darkness as Ansem, and if I could regain my original self, you can, too.

"You can do it. I could do it, and that was after I'd willingly given in to the darkness. You haven't even started to go that far."

But Kairi gave another barely audible, broken whimper.

"I can't," her voice was hardly even a whisper now, and was mostly just a ghost's breath of despair. "If I stare into my darkness, that will mean feeling it, and that might mean discovering that there's a part of me that… doesn't like you as much any more."

Riku inhaled and the blood drained from his face, and the emptiness empty of even emptiness was back.

Sora knew as well as Riku did what word Kairi had refused to say.

"I can't betray you, or Sora, again, even to lessen my chances of betraying you further in the future."

Riku stepped back as if struck, and he squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds in agony.

Sora suppressed the urge to remove his hand from Anna's.

That would hurt her.

But he should.

He'd just terribly wrecked and ruined Riku now, as well.

"Just put an end to me," Kairi went on, and Sora knew that he might have begun to remove his hand from Anna's anyway now if Anna hadn't squeezed it more tightly. "Here and now. Before I hurt anyone again. I'm begging you. Please."

Sora hated the concept of influencing Kairi's heart without her say so almost more than anything else, but he had no choice now. He needed to be Kairi's light in the deepest darkness as she had been his, whatever it took.

If she wasn't going to take charge of her darkness, he'd do it for her.

He brought up Oathkeeper and pointed it at her chest, reached for his One Heart bond with her as a one-winged angel, and fired a platinum ray with a spiral of silver twining about it at Kairi's heart.

The white feathered angelic wing burst from his left shoulder, but no corresponding wing burst from Kairi's right shoulder, and the platinum ray struck the same kind of clear rippling barrier Xehanort had used to deflect his Last Ray with the Kye-Blade before reaching the phantasm adumbrating the Demon Tide, and then it dissipated.

The white wing retracted in a scattering of feathers.

Sora didn't even bother to shift his face.

He wasn't surprised.

He had no heart, as Kairi did.

There was no way that he could be her light in the darkness.

Kairi's eyes flew open in abject horror, and she shook her head slowly in despair and denial, yet, blessedly, love and empathy as well.

"I severed our connection?" Yet Kairi's voice was even more of a ghost's breath now. "Oh, Sora. I'm so sorry."

In response to this, the phantasm washed out in all directions and from within it countless thrashing and shifting columns of shadow and infernal light detonated in every conceivable direction.

Sora let go of Anna's hand and stepped in front of her, raising Oathkeeper in a block, Riku ran in front of the others near Sora and did the same with Braveheart, Goofy sprang before Donald with Save the King Plus extended before both of them, and Donald yelled, "Gather!"

But they all knew that it was almost certainly futile.

The Demon Tide was attacking now.

Gray and white and black and yellow and ebony flooded all of Sora's awareness in morphing, distorting, rippling, cacophonous chaos, but he felt no pain and neither the corona of reality nor the phantasm of shadow touched him.

He whipped his gaze behind him and saw Anna's eyes widen in a still further different kind of horror.

The Demon Tide wasn't striking at them.

It was striking at the castle and the people inside it.

For the first time, Elsa moved.

She rose to her feet as though she were an uncoiling snake, held her head up, spread her arms and hands to the sides with palms facing outwards, and a raging blizzard of dagger-sharp icicles detonated outwards from her palms in every direction but at Anna, him, Kristoff, Marshmallow, Olaf, Sven, and Riku.

The infernally glowing eyes of the shadows in the conflagration flared softly, and the icicles all evaporated into moisture within less than a second.

Elsa slashed her hands down to her sides, and glaciers extended extremely rapidly over the thrashing cacophony.

The glowing eyes flared softly once more, and they, too, evaporated.

Then one of the pairs of eyes nearest Elsa dimmed a little, and a single current of Thunder's lightning coursed over Elsa in an arc from just above her head.

She cried out and fell in a heap, eyes open and fully aware and a little short of breath but clearly too winded to use her magic any further.

Anna inhaled in shock, and Sora shared her sentiment.

Elsa had suspended an entire reasonably sized Kingdom in ice and snow at least indefinitely, if not literally eternally, and then forged a detailed palace out of more ice and snow crafted down to the fine details of each room and fashioned Marshmallow on top of all that.

And the Demon Tide had effortlessly brushed Elsa off and swatted her down as though it were scrubbing away a germ with soap, without taking even a superficial wound.

Even if Mickey returned with all of the Keyblades of the Keyblade Graveyard but the Kye-Blade and he and Anna and Riku did work together to wield them all, did they have any hope of defeating this nightmare even then?

A few more seconds passed, and the columns and the phantasm pulled back.

Sora looked around, and even with his heart blinked out, he felt sick and a small amount of blood drained from his face another time.

The castle wasn't a ruin.

It was gone.

So, too, was the town that had lain beyond it that Sora had seen from the slopes of the North Mountain, the pier and the fishing boats, the enormous lake, and all of the slopes and the complete peak of the North Mountain itself, leaving them standing on a wasteland of cracked dirt.

Anna's eyes widened, and for a fraction of a second something passed behind them that wiped away the blink and the emptiness empty of even emptiness.

"Don't!" Sora cried. "You'll end up doing the same thing Kairi is!"

Anna forced a strained smile. "I know," she attempted to reassure him, but Sora wasn't the least bit reassured. "I'm not stupid."

A single chaotic column detonated from the Demon Tide and washed over Marshmallow, and with a last moan of, "Elsa…" he, too, was gone.

Kairi's eyes widened at the realization that she'd just cost another one of Sora's friends his heart or life, and two more columns erupted from the Demon Tide to flood over Olaf and Sven, claiming them as well.

Then two more burst from within the funnel and corona of the Demon Tide, the first in the direction of Kristoff, the second in the direction of Elsa.

Anna snapped and whirled to face the columns, and Sora's legs at last gave out and sent him falling to the ground as black tendrils and fire roared into being around her, no doubt the prelude to a Demon Tide or a Demon Tower of her own.

But then night almost pulled Sora away from consciousness anew as Anna brought her right palm forward in a gesture similar to the one Riku used when he was about to launch a Dark Firaga, and Sora realized that it was unfathomably incomprehensibly worse than that.

Anna wasn't just letting her darkness act on its own.

She was intentionally and actively wielding her darkness.

"Enough!" Anna shouted, eyes and face blazing furiously. "Big Bang! Forsaken Null!"

Kairi's eyes flew wide as she became aware of the indescribable horror of what she had just brought about this time, and then ebony wisps and fire of her own rose to adumbrate her within the funnel of the Demon Tower, and she held up both palms of her own in Anna's direction, the two of them cupped before her stomach in Anna's direction.

Sora lost awareness of everything save Kairi and Riku and Anna and Donald and Goofy.

He didn't know if he was still in danger of fainting, but he couldn't care.

"Kairi!" he screamed so hard and so loud it ripped his throat raw. "Stop! Don't do it!"

But Kairi didn't acknowledge him.

In a broken, resigned whisper, she spoke, "Super Nova."

A pinpoint of white enclosed by black crackling with violet and blue energies as deep as the abyss rocketed out from Anna's hand; then a second light, an orb of shrieking and roaring crimson flecked with ellipses of white and crackling black and indigo followed it at a separate arc.

The first light screamed into an ellipse of blue darker than sapphire with tendrils of white lightning fanning out like threads from a horizontal oblate sphere of pitch black at the center.

It sliced the column aiming for Kristoff in two, the front portion dispersed into night dark smog, and the black portion retreated into the Demon Tide.

The crimson orb flared into a wash of far more unrestrained red interspersed with darker maroon flecked with ellipses of indigo, a fountain of globes of shifting black and magenta expanding at its sides.

The column aiming for Elsa evaporated entirely.

Kairi's strike was a globe of incandescent cloudy layers of shifting red, orange, yellow, green, white, and blue-white around half again in diameter that she was in height that detonated into a brilliant even more cloudily layered flower of all the colors of the rainbow and white and gray and black as well when it was almost upon Anna.

Anna extended her left hand down, back facing forward, and snapped the fingers of it closed below it. "Divine Ultima!" she shouted in return.

Then black gathered in front of her chest over her heart. "Bloody Sin!"

A blue-white succession of orbs around a beam of ebony soared out from Anna's fingers to erupt into a partially frisbee-shaped expansion of ebony and amethyst, shredding the layered flower into wispy tatters, and then a circular diagram with concentric further circles of black and white and gray inside it sailed out from in front of her chest at Kairi.

Kairi held her left ring finger up and her right arm and hand up over her head in the pose Tidus used when beginning his trademark Jecht Shot that he'd learned from his father.

"Neutron Ring," Kairi whispered back. "Ultimate Jecht Shot."

Sora didn't even have it in him to cringe that Kairi had just dragged Tidus into this too.

Anna's Bloody Sin halted approximately midway to Kairi and expanded into a much larger diagram of similar colors that fired a gray beam flecked with ellipses of light and dark straight for Kairi.

A vertically whirling ring of gold and amber with spots of orange and red dancing aimlessly inside it soared from the front tip of Kairi's left ring finger at the beam, and the two energy assaults shredded each other into wisps.

Chunks of crimson and coal-ebony rock gathered together around Kairi's right hand, formed into a sphere roughly resembling a blitzball, and arced over the path of her previous strike at Anna's head.

Anna held her right palm up to mimic Kairi's gesture, though her hand wasn't in the Jecht Shot pose, and extended her left hand up to the side of and in front of her left shoulder with the palms of her fingertips mirroring her right palm.

"Terror of Zanarkand," Anna responded. "Meteor Swarm."

A spiraling coal-black roughly spherical boulder shot in a contracting spiral out of Anna's right palm to strike Kairi's Ultimate Jecht Shot and break both rocks into showers of fragments.

Then eight more smaller bone dust white rocks with a larger one almost the size of Anna's palms behind them ripped out from above Anna's left fingers with surprising speed, rocketed through the Demon Tide's corona and the Demon Tide itself as though they were rocks plunging into a pond and causing it to ripple, and sent Kairi staggering back with a cry of surprised agony.

Sora inhaled.

He hadn't believed Kairi or Anna would actually be able to hurt each other.

"Stop it now!" he shrieked at them both, once more tearing his throat raw. "Please, stop!"

Kairi just brought up her right arm, fingers almost fully closed in front of her palm like it was a dragon's maw, and raised her left leg and foot and snapped it down sharply, whispering, "Teraflare. Merciless Judgment."

Crescents of incandescent orange and red and green and purple flames shrieked out of Kairi's right fingers at Anna even faster than Anna's Meteor Swarm had moved, and whiplashes of countless light and medium and dark shades of blue and purple flowed out from below Kairi's left foot toward Anna at a slower pace.

Anna had no time to counter, so she crossed her arms in front of her as Terra-Xehanort had to attempt to shield himself from Donald's Zettaflare, and braced her legs.

The inferno of crescents tore bloody, charred gashes into Anna's arms and hands, and then the whiplashes struck her feet and sent her reeling back and crashing to the ground.

Even now Sora lost his ability to breathe.

"Stop it! Stooooooooooop iiiiiiiitttttttt!"

Anna didn't turn in his direction. She placed her right palm behind her and to her side and beneath her and pushed herself back to her feet, and before she was fully standing again she raised her left arm and her left palm above her, curled her left fingers inwards above her left palm, and snarled, "Grandstone, Dark Physical Assault."

Kairi brought up her right palm in a similar position with her fingers splayed out and bent backwards. "Phantasm, Dark Magical Assault," she whispered in response.

A gigantic roughly vertical boulder holograph of pure light and energy, comprised of diamond and platinum and gold and silver and bronze and copper, shifting with flowing waves of all the precious minerals that Sora could think of, manifested in the air above Anna's head and rocketed in an arc at Kairi's head.

A triangle of ivory and shades of light violet and light blue, with innumerable globes of the night black of space whirling chaotically inside enclosing twinkling stars that danced even more cacophonously, appeared over Kairi's palm, turning and tumbling in all directions, and launched diagonally forwards and downwards in a straight line at Anna's chest.

The Grandstone plunged through the corona and the Demon Tide, the corona wavered and disappeared as though it had never been there, the Demon Tide dispersed into black smoke and faded away, and the Grandstone impacted with Kairi's brow hard enough to send her head snapping back violently and leave a wide, tall crimson gash in Kairi's forehead that trailed blood into her eyes.

The Phantasm ripped into Anna's chest and tore apart in a spray of triangles and ivory and blue and violet and globes of space and starfire. Anna doubled over, coughing up gouts of blood.

"Kairi!" Sora shrieked. His throat had been strained so much by now he could barely form the words, but he managed. "Anna! The Demon Tide is gone! It's over! You can stop now!"

He attempted to move to push himself to his feet, but his limbs refused to do what he said.

He couldn't do it.

He'd dueled and battled Riku before, as himself and with Ansem in control of his body and as a replica, but he couldn't strike out at Kairi or Anna.

Riku, Donald, and Goofy apparently didn't have as many reservations.

Wearing similar expressions of miserable, contained anguish and determination, Goofy moved to Kairi's side, Donald moved to Anna's, and Riku moved between Goofy and Donald, ready to assist whichever one of the two needed to be backed up the most.

Sora waited, pleading with whatever was left of the heart he'd never had and never would have that this would be enough.

If Kairi and Anna kept this up they might murder each other, or, at best, cost each other their hearts.

The dark aura around Kairi started to flicker and lessen in size, and she began to sag.

More tears clouded Sora's eyes.

That had ended it.

Then Anna's eyes blazed and the ebony flames around her flared blindingly night bright and enlarged around her and rose up far higher, and she brought both arms down to her sides with palms facing the ground.

"Insanity Prelude!" she shrieked.

Sora's heart stopped.

Kairi no longer wanted to fight. It was over. Anna had to know that.

Anna understood love and pain better than anyone he'd met. Anna knew what Kairi meant to him.

Anna wasn't doing this.

Anna, immeasurably more than Kairi, would never do this.

Thick, crimson fog spilled out of her palms and two chains with blood red anchors at the end rocketed into the ground and vanished into it, the fog rushing around the chains and downwards and engulfing them, concealing them from sight.

Six serrated, wickedly curved crimson talons like the teeth of a maw from a nightmarish fever dream erupted out of the ground around Kairi, and more thick, crimson fog cascaded out from around their lower portions to hide Kairi below the waist.

Kairi started, and her head snapped up, and for the first time true emotion returned to her face.

She glared at Anna with wholly unrestrained, sheer, pure, undiluted hatred.

Kairi's dark aura was back around her, crackling about her body like a second skin that was simultaneously a reactor about to go critical.

The two chains erupted from the ground to Kairi's two sides and lashed out to whip around the serrated talons in ascending circles, forming a roughly circular fence imprisoning Kairi.

"Sora trusted you," Kairi hissed through clenched teeth, hands fisting at her sides.

Deathly pallid frisbees of ghostly white started spiraling in at Kairi from the tips of the talons and the tips of their serrations, but Kairi cut Destiny's Embrace in an incredibly swift series of arcs and turns around her, deflecting every frisbee and causing them to disperse into paler light and then vanish.

"Sora loves you so much that he feels your pain in his heart when he doesn't even feel mine and Riku's unless we've previously actively established a connection."

The frisbees continued to spiral out from the serrations and the talons, and Kairi continued to deflect each one, not missing a single beat.

"Learning what Luxu wants you or Elsa to do hurt him as he's never been hurt before."

The frisbees ceased emanating from the talons, and the talons and chains broke into fragments and vanished.

"And this is how you return his feelings and his trust?"

She pointed Destiny's Embrace forward, and at long last her own one-winged angel wing erupted out of her shoulder.

But it wasn't white like it had been before, or like his was, or black and flesh like Cloud's, or black and feathered like Sephiroth's.

It was feathered, but the feathers and the wing itself were no more than the barest sooty outlines of wings and feathers; and the air and space and being and reality itself everywhere in front of it and around it and behind it appeared to bend and blot and smear and bleach inwards, without taking on grays or whites or blacks or doing anything to provide evidence that something unnatural was happening to them, and even the bending and blotting and smearing and bleaching air and space and being and reality itself appeared to bend and blot and smear and bleach inwards, as though they were all being pulled relentlessly and inescapably towards an infinitely bottomless maw.

"Ultimate Break," Kairi hissed with unrestrained, undiluted hatred through her clenched teeth.

A single, thin beam of white as ghostly pallid as death swung in an arc out of Destiny's Embrace, whirling silver maelstroms like spiraling galaxies revolving in opposing alternating clockwise and counterclockwise circles all up and down the beam while crimson flecked with red stardust washed up around the beam and the spiraling galaxies in a relatively thin column.

Sora could barely even register that he could barely even register anything now.

The beam and the circles of galaxies and the column cut over Anna's chest.

Space and the air where Anna was, now clear of anything blocking Sora's view of them, rippled back and forth over her a number of times as though it were an eye in the deepest slumber going through rapid eye movement, and then contracted closed in a whirlpool vortex of pitch ebony for a brief instant as though that eye were now blinking shut.

Then the ebony disappeared and the beam and the circles of galaxies and the column of crimson stardust disappeared, and Anna was lying unmoving on her back.

"She's alive and she still has her heart," Kairi told him quickly with an absolutely exhausted breath, her one angelic wing pulling back into her shoulder and the dark aura around her wavering and vanishing. "I wouldn't hurt you like that."

She collapsed forward onto her knees, her head hanging limply forward, and her eyes slid closed again in further exhaustion. Her arms and hands fell to her sides and Destiny's Embrace vanished in sparkles of light.

But Sora's ability to perceive existence appeared extremely unwilling to return.

Sora could tell that Kairi was exhausted as much now from straining her heart as from the emotional turmoil that she had just suffered through.

What Kairi had named Ultimate Break had taken everything she had out of darkness so deep it had crafted this latest, unimaginably lethal, Demon Tide when she hadn't even been trying to wield her darkness at all.

Kairi had been attempting to wield her darkness just now.

What in the stars had that assault just been?

Just how deep did Kairi's darkness plummet?

And Anna's?

Kairi raised her head weakly and opened her eyes. "Never mind what I said about you ending me," she spoke in a voice that wasn't a whisper but that was still cracked and broken, and Sora could at last fully perceive existence once more, and he could feel what he was lacking as well.

Did that mean…

"I'll do what Riku advised me to," Kairi said reassuringly. "I'll stare into my darkness, accept it, and look through it to my light, regardless of what I discover that I feel about Riku," Riku made his face a mask, "Or anyone else.

"I applied Riku's and Namine's lesson when I unleashed Ultimate Break." New tears blinded Sora's eyes and spilled down his face, but the lack didn't recede. Kairi wasn't going to hurt herself or anyone else with her darkness any longer, but the same couldn't be said for Anna.

"The darkness has no sway over me anymore. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was an idiot. But there won't be any further Demon Tides or Liches or Demon Towers unless I need to change my form like Riku did with Ansem, and even then they won't be a threat to you.

"Let's just figure out how to give Marshmallow and Olaf and Sven and the rest of the people here their hearts back without anyone needing to abuse the power of waking, and see what we can do for…" Kairi pressed her lips together to keep herself from frowning, "Anna and Elsa."

She looked at Donald. "I've already badly violated the world order. This is our responsibility now, since I brought this about. Can you please not tell us that we shouldn't spend funds and resources from Destiny Islands and Disney Kingdom to rebuild the town, the castle, and the pier and the ships?"

Donald crossed his arms and looked away. "Yeah, yeah," he grumbled, but it wasn't under his breath.

The danger appeared to have passed for now, so Sora dismissed Oathkeeper in currents of pearl.

He put his hands to his sides and began to move his legs and arms and hands to push himself up, but Kairi shook her head.

"I told you, I'm a little better now," she reassured him again.

"You don't need to strain yourself for me. Can you please just give me a few minutes or longer? We've done all that we can do for now."

"I wouldn't say that," a familiar voice carried out of nowhere, and an oblong dark corridor rose into being behind Riku and Donald and Goofy.

Riku whirled with a scowl, and a familiar figure sauntered out of the corridor with a pleased and approving grin on his face.

Sora needed to remind himself why he shouldn't give into the darkness.

"Luxu," Riku snarled. "Keep your distance. Sora and I aren't tired, and Mickey will be back soon, with or without more Keyblades. The three of us are fully capable of taking you out."

"Maybe, maybe not," the supposed Nobody – who might still be a Nobody, for all Sora was aware – who Sora had once known as Xigbar replied noncommittally. "But I'm not here for rough-housing."

He looked at Kairi and his grin widened. "I'm here to give a round of applause to our central protagonist and the chief heroine of our little theater production for taking the stage at long last."

.

'I couldn't protect anyone. They all died. And it's my fault.'-Shinji Ikari

'Shinji… Surely you… understand how I feel. I will erase everything. This world of sadness… This world filled with despair… It will become one… so no one suffers anymore.'-Gendo Ikari

'So no one suffers… So no one is sad… …I will end everything. Loving… Being loved… Receiving… Losing… So I don't have to think of anything… Everything should end… …so no one is left in the world.'-Shinji Ikari

"Is that… …your wish?"-Rei Ayanami

'Yes… …that is what… …I hope for.'-Shinji Ikari

NEON GENESIS EVANGELION Volume Fourteen:

Stage Ninety-One: WHERE LIGHT RETURNS and Stage Ninety-Two: BIRTHDAY