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CHAPTER 56:
DEPTH OF A NIGHTMARE'S WISH
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Author's Notes: The music for this Chapter is, in order of scene: 'Sorrow – Imperial Version,' from the FINAL FANTASY XII Original Soundtrack, Disc Three; and afterwards 'Final Dungeon-Ark,' from SANDS OF DESTRUCTION; and after it, 'U-DO ~ Febronia,' from the XENOSAGA Episode Two Movie Scene Soundtrack, Disc Two. The first, and third, Tracks can be found on Zophar's Domain, and the second, in KINGDOM HEARTS Insider's MP3 section under WORLD DESTRUCTION.
Xion registered the pain was gone, and a familiar old man with a more plain pointed hat than Yen Sid's, of a lighter shade of blue, was now standing in front of her and to her side, with both of his hands gripping the Keyblade of Hearts and holding it firmly in his chest.
Anything snapped back into awareness as though she'd just been drenched in ice cold water scalding enough to return everything to ordinary sentiment and temperature as she realized what had just happened.
"Am I… the one who did this to you?"
"No… It was my choice… to go away now."
"Then let's go for the win, and be winners, and look for, and discover what that answer is, together.
"I promise Roxas, Lea, and you to do so, with all my heart."
"You are now worthy of becoming my apprentice as the wielder of the Keyblade of Hearts, dear child.
"For you have now murdered your beloved Ven with your very own hands."
"If you aren't Xion, this is the sole warning I'm giving you."
"I don't care.
"I have enough memories to know who my opponent is, and that's all I need to know."
And as always, the sole choice she could make was how to cascade into the night lying at the end of every single decision she made for herself, every single road she took.
"Will someone please tell me why…?" her voice was a hoarse breath of empty despair.
"Why do Nobodies, or their replicas, never have a place to go, or return?"
The next second, the ice sculpture that should have been Roxas was grasping one of Merlin's hands, and then a storm of dancing, twirling grays and blacks flowed over his form and down his hand over Merlin.
When it cleared, Roxas was himself once more, and Merlin was now as coated with ice as Anna had been before she'd broken her curse.
Even that relief, however, barely registered.
Nor did Mickey's voice.
Nor did how the Keyblade of Hearts was once more resting diagonally against the ground, in her real hand.
"Merlin?" he questioned.
"What happened to–"
"All I can risk taking the time to say is that the reason I trained the Arthur of my own world was not just to instruct him in the responsibilities of leadership, but to ready myself to fulfill my own destiny," Merlin's breath came raggedly.
"And after what I did to Elsa, Kristoff, and Christopher Robin when I sought to defy my own ordained fate, while I can never atone, I've waited far too long to do this."
Elsa had been looking at who must be her grandfather standing at Xion's side, if Xion had any reason to make the effort to look, as still as a statue herself, but now her face shifted.
Runeard snorted in derision.
"Don't blame a pureblood human yourself for the crimes of a filthy hybrid."
Elsa staggered violently as though she'd been struck hard enough to send her onto her back, but she remained standing.
Still more inexplicable tears flooded Xion's eyes at the sight of Roxas turning to give her a brief, reassuring smile.
Don't wait for me to return to you any longer.
Mare needs you, or Elsa, if she isn't an older sister to you.
Go to one of them.
I'm not even a Nobody.
Just a replica of even that.
I have no warm hearth and home to bring you home to out of the darkness.
All I can hold you kept safe in is an oblivion even more pitch than nothingness.
Why do you even feel any guilt, at all, for what you did to me?
And not just because I turned into Xehanort and Xemnas and Isa, and I set you up to do it.
It's also because, while Nobodies wrongly believe they don't have a sanctuary within all of endless space, I don't have a hearth of home in either space or time.
I am the sole true nothingness in all existence.
And I never have been, whether you remember me, or you don't.
"I know better than to believe you'll heed my guidance if I advise you not to locate the true Arthur of my visions before the Foretellers, or the Summation Organization Thirteen, do; so all I'll say is, if you seek follow us to Ahtohallan with him safe in your position, or locked away anywhere else, take the utmost care.
"For if you do not, while the Foretellers should have been shaken without the ability to corroborate the prophecies, and scripts, they have already been tasked with with the Book of Prophecies, Maleficent retains the prophecies she's learned from Runeard and other sources, and she has no such misgivings about utilizing the ones she still knows can come true."
But dreams never could.
This was it.
She'd sought a door number three, and then a door of an imaginary number, and all four doors had been trails that led nowhere.
And now, there wasn't even anywhere left for her to try to come home to.
Then a large frame with the same contours as the one Xion could dimly recall Merlin crafting to enable Sora to find the Cornerstone of Light, but far taller, and larger, appeared behind him with the doorway already open.
"It's not a lost cause until it really is," Ephemer interjected, discouraged dismay in his own voice.
Maybe for ordinary people.
"Don't do anything impulsive yourself.
"Luxu altered between playing people all over the realm of light for centuries to ensure they culminated in, and then reared, the people destined in the Book to live the lives of light or darkness they'd been fated to; and relying on the actual oracles seen by the Gazing Eye to know what to do at what specific given time, or what to set up others to do, or directly ensure others did, at those times, in recent years.
"We haven't been able to do the same thing, yes. But we were able to tweak a few of the currents he set in motion, through nothing worse than lies of omission.
"The door Maleficent took to Timeless River is just one example.
"Whether she has more faith in them than the Foretellers or not, she doesn't have as much knowledge of what to tweak, and where, and when, as you're afraid of.
"For that matter, even if the Foretellers are willing to trust in any of the prophecies they know by memory, the same thing is true for them."
Merlin didn't move, but the door didn't close.
"I told her about the different worldlines, remember," Runeard sneered.
"When Maleficent fuses Ahtohallan, and the worlds' data, together with the Once, Now, and Future King Arthur, she won't need to rely on just one set of prophecies any longer."
Ephemer inhaled harshly.
"I surmise you're not going to tell us precisely what Ahtohallan is, then," Isa commented with mild and dry sarcasm.
"If you'll hand over Oathkeeper willingly and put yourselves back in Maleficent's check, and reverse your own light of the past on her own chessboard back to the positions you were in before Sora and Xehanort's Heartless defeated her during Sora's first visit to Hollow Bastion; or even better, before Aqua and Philip and Ven did the first time in her own relative history, I'll do that," Runeard responded.
"Otherwise, you'll need to wait as much as Maleficent for the most onyx of hearts to reveal, not the Final Door, but the First Keyhole," as much as existence had become stable, Xion was surprised she needed to remember to not cringe at the confirmation of that terror, "And learn the truth about how the eddies and tides of memories, information, and dreams work, and how they interweave with the astral tapestry of existence; all on your own, whenever she sees fit.
"And that won't be until she can at last return everything to a cradle of restful darkness, and prevent anyone from even having a light to be born into, far less live in the conditions Cinderella and Quasimodo, or Snow White and Belle, did."
For the first time, Xion's eyes burned when Roxas' face barely shifted, but no new tears at all pushed into them.
Was preventing light from even having pushed back the darkness really that wrong, if it meant all of Borealis' memories of dying without even truly meeting a single person who loved her would be erased, and Maleficent could give Borealis playmates who fell into the darkness with her so she didn't die in entire loneliness before she'd had a chance to even take the first steps Anastasia, and Drizella, had?
"It appears data light and darkness aren't the only things that forget about loose ends," Vanitas interjected from somewhere out of sight.
"Arthur, as we intend it to become, belongs to my clan.
"The Once, Now, and Future King is our trump card; the culmination of all our research into electrical impulses, light, darkness, and everything besides, and our means of; not opening a door to any Kingdom Hearts, true or artificial, and forcing it to give us a place to return to; but directly molding all of the World into whatever refuge we want it to be."
Something Xion could have identified passed through her, somewhere too distant to discern, but then it was gone.
"Or mine, specifically, that is.
"The rest of my kin can rot as castaways forever at this point, for all I care; all I'm concerned with at this point are Namine, and Vmyself; not even my brethren.
"They can keep holding themselves back by remaining loyal to the rest of their ilk, I'm past even loyalty to Organizations, conclaves, sects, my own kind, or truly anyone but myself at this point.
"But whatever my kin feel about that, no one is laying so much as the tip of his, her, or its pinky nail on Arthur without my say so."
"I see you've truly defected back to the cause of your forebears, then," Runeard remarked from Xion's side.
Xion almost didn't remember to not cringe, and violently, this time, as horror seized all of what she simple and clean wasn't at the knowledge realized Runeard was correct.
As Yozora sought to avenge the loss of most of the people close to him, and protect Faerie, Vanitas was now in precisely the same situation with Namine, and Ven.
By murdering Ven, she'd created a fourth DiZ, even though Vanitas trusted too much in the darkness, not in the light as Ansem the Wise and Eraqus had, and Yozora had before he admitted what he was.
But you're a many times traitor and reject to both, remember?
He won't see it coming.
Cut him down, right now, before he truly returns to the darkness, and follows in the footsteps of all three of them.
Her eyes throbbed as tears did push forward this time.
No.
He could become a lot worse.
Ansem the Wise and Eraqus didn't admit they were striding in the darkness until it was almost too late, and Yozora didn't admit he himself was for a sizeable amount of time.
Vanitas admitted he walked in the darkness from the beginning.
If he takes the trail they did, he'd be far more dangerous to Roxas, and Axel, than all three of them, Xehanort, Xemnas, and Isa put together.
Cold drenched her once more as she realized, Keyblade of Hearts of not, there was no way someone as inexperienced as her could defeat Vanitas, by an ambush, or not.
"To answer your question, Mickey," Merlin put in, "I'm not sure what happened to Yen Sid and the Fairy Godmother. They were still attempting to free Bernard and Bianca from the primary trap when I last saw them.
"However, I can at least assure you I was able to prevent Chernabog's trick from being successful.
"He wasn't able to utilize the corridor of darkness to get around the differences in relative velocity in a vacuum that typically cause it to require a cataclysmic amount of energy for someone, or something, to annihilate anything larger than a small planetoid.
"I stopped him from directly colliding the dead neutron star with the planet without it losing any force or momentum relative to the planet's while targeting it."
Roxas' mouth opened a little this time.
Isa's blood drained away.
Elsa's mouth hung open herself, before she closed it.
Ephemer inhaled even more harshly.
Mickey sighed heavily in deep relief.
Xion jolted violently, and if anyone else had reacted, or joined them, outside of her field of vision, she didn't perceive it.
The recompleted Chernabog could do what?
And how could Xion care more that Roxas had actually reacted to that, than at how that meant, if Chernabog could do that, Maleficent had now past constraining transcended even the Gods, and Goddesses, of Olympus, and even the Angel of Sin; and through a far deadlier means than enhancing her ethereal power?
Not even Zeus and Hercules, the extra Baymax and Big Hero Six, all the heroes of Olympus and San Fransokyo, and all of the World, combined, could defend a celestial body against a strategy like that if they all combined all their strength together; not if Chernabog was able to find a neutron star moving at a fast enough relative velocity to wherever he wanted to open the other end of the dark corridor, such as one in a galaxy at the edges of the observable universe from its relative target.
If about twelve billion light years worth of ceaseless acceleration built up within the celestial body of something as already inherently supernal as a dead neutron star, now hypercompact and crystalline, was unleashed upon a relatively stationary target at once without any loss of force due to the differences between relative momentum, no single hero, or group of heroes, anyone, anywhere, in all of any cosmos, could defend against it.
Not with pure strength.
And if Chernabog could create that large a dark corridor, so precisely it could get around relative velocity, Xion couldn't even begin to glimpse how anyone could develop an effective counter through a means of outwitting it without the method serving as the effective diversion Maleficent wanted it to be.
Xion wasn't even sure Xehanort, or Sora, would be able to effortlessly contend with a strategy like that with full access to the abilities of the Kye-Blade.
Could anything; not just brawn, but even brain; successfully honestly effectively defend against a strategy as brilliantly fatal as colliding a neutron star with another celestial body without requiring it to lose any of its relative velocity in order to impact with its target?
Why did Maleficent even need the Keyblade of Hearts, or Yen Sid's mastery of magic, now?
She already had close to infinite power, far deadlier than even the darkness of the realm on the other side of the Final Keyhole.
Locking away the Note Blade made no difference.
Not if Maleficent had learned how to do this.
Chernabog clearly couldn't implement this strategy at will, and it was still clearly too inefficient to be fired at will, or there would be literally nowhere to run.
She'd have just sniped any target she wanted to stop getting in her way, that she no longer had a use for, into the abyss, from literally anywhere in the realms.
But that didn't make it any less of a lost cause to oppose it.
Mare strode into her field of vision to plant herself between Roxas and Runeard with more hate than Xion had seen on her face since she'd first agreed to become their friends.
And then, while more tears attempted to push into her eyes, they were aching so much, along with the rest of everything outside and upon and within, Xion was too exhausted for the tears to emerge this time.
She was so exhausted she shouldn't have been able to perceive sentiment, or feeling, in any form of perspective.
Because she knew Mare had just realized something else vital to Roxas' role.
Elsa had clearly recognized this as well, because she was already walking in Roxas' direction.
Mare strode past her determinedly, intentionally roughly clipping Elsa in the shoulder as she did so, and positioned herself between Roxas and Runeard.
"I get it now," Mare hissed with fury and hate even more unrestrained than Vanitas'.
"I'm still lacking a lot of the details, but I at last see how Maleficent intends to do it."
Rather than push forward, Xion could barely feel the tears now.
Roxas' face lost all of its emotions.
"The not four, but six, Keyblades, are the vertices, and fulcrum, of a worldline spanning five pointed star akin to a Gummi ship star, Wayfinder, or paopu fruit; one whose Keychains assemble a latticework web of internecine connections between world hearts known as the Wishing Singularity.
"That's why Maleficent's initial conclave was composed of six people; she's been researching the Wishing Singularity this whole time.
"And Roxas' Oathkeeper, due to how he bears the Recusant's Sigil, is the fulcrum."
Isa clenched his teeth.
But the tears had almost left the backs of Xion's eyes now.
"Maleficent wants to free as many world hearts and star hearts from their bodies as possible, not through sending any hearts into darkness, but directly claiming them before they're lost to the depths of darkness after their bodies die, or almost do, with a heart lost to darkness known as the Grim Silhouette.
"Under ordinary conditions, when a Nobody gives into the darkness, his, her, or its heart has nowhere to go, so he, she, or it becomes a Heartreaver, a Heartless that belongs in The Final World as much as any world heart without a Door to Darkness to keep it tethered to the realms farther away from Kingdom Hearts itself.
"But, however Christopher did it, with an entity that exists as darkness itself without becoming a Heartless, that is also a Station of Awakening, all Maleficent needs is a heart drowning in enough darkness that still has a physical form, and a Nobody, and she can gain even gain access to the powers of The Final World itself. If she then completes harnessing the magic of the astral tapestry, she can then exist in all the realms at the same time."
Why wouldn't Maleficent need a part of herself bound to memories, data, and dreams?
Was that part of what Runeard wasn't telling them about what the warp and weft of the astral tapestry actually was?
"She won't just be able to open a door to a Kingdom Hearts with a Keyblade of Hearts if she gains the ability to do that, with a Wishing Singularity suspending much of the currents of light and darkness themselves."
"She'll be able to travel inside one, even the real one, and directly connect whatever she's doing with Arthur, Ahtohallan, and the worlds' data to all the knowledge and memories stored there."
Still no tears came, but something Xion couldn't identify yet passed through her.
"She'll have turned the entire World into something similar to Jiminy's Journal's datascape then, with Kingdom Hearts connected to all of it.
"Then, while the Oathkeeper of a bearer of the Recusant's Sigil draws all the light to drift in one location at the fulcrum of the Wishing Singularity, she'll then use the Keyblade of Hearts a rite I'm in no position to uncover to not just purge the worlds as Kingdom Hearts sees fit, but open the First Keyhole, and First Door, and effectively reboot them as, with the exception of the light at the deepest darkness at the Oathkeeper fulcrum, nothing but darkness from the beginning of even an initialized history, not just infinity.
"The reason Maleficent wanted Oathkeeper so early, and one of the core reasons, if not the essential reason, the Foretellers didn't want her to get it around a week ago, is because it's the sole alternative to Chernabog to serve as Monstro's primary source of propulsion."
Roxas swayed slightly.
Isa clenched his hands around his claymore, and into a fist, tightly.
Ephemer sounded as though he'd staggered back as though struck.
"I promise Roxas, Lea, and you to do so, with all my heart."
As long as she didn't attempt to seek eternal loneliness, while she lived for Roxas, and Axel, and Mare, and Elsa, and Namine, and Isa, and the others, she was keeping her promise.
No matter what path she took, she didn't want to take a dark path.
But perhaps that was what she needed to learn.
And nothing was hopeless.
Because there had never been hope that could cascade into the collapsed night of despair at the beginning.
She was the most onyx of hearts, who had no home in not just space, but time as well.
And you didn't die for people.
You lived for them.
As if the last restraints had fallen away, Xion's voice was a determined sigh of resignation at the same time.
The sole surprise left was that she felt a little uneasy at recognizing just how much darkness and light now thrummed through the Keyblade of Hearts.
Whatever the entirety of what Christopher had done to her was, it wouldn't take much left now to complete it, this time, most likely, in a sustainable form.
"No, there's a better way," she said.
"Maleficent can't utterly harness a darkness deeper than Tremaine's, and Frollo's, without a Cinderella who is still alive who she didn't first attempt to kill, but she then was okay with letting live later, if in eternal sleep.
"And due to what she said to Riku Replica, that's what I am to her even more than Aurora was, and still is.
"And since I keep my promises late; and Maleficent doesn't believe all hearts return to darkness, so I know she won't be as stringent with this as I assume the Xehanorts were; unlike Sora, you don't need to worry about what I gather happened to him happening with me.
"If I can trust Maleficent will stop targeting Roxas, and ensure she stays true to her end of the contract, with all my heart, I swear this oath to become her Keyblade apprentice for the Keyblade of Hearts, without giving into the darkness, and just as unwillingly as Cinderella served Tremaine."
Before waiting to see how anyone reacted, she brought up every trace of her memory of Sora doing the same thing for Saix at Radiant Garden, and she swept down into as low a bow as she was comfortable with, and she could manage with her past armored self still restricting her movement.
"Otherwise, you can consider this my unconditional surrender, and a request for asylum.
"Leave Roxas out of this from now on, and take me to Maleficent.
"Please."
Kairi didn't shift how she was holding Sora, but she barely registered how numb her arms were from holding him in this position for so long, with Donald and Goofy heavy weights on them not just behind Sora, but beneath him.
Even before they'd met, she'd truly never been able to hold him anywhere sound and safe, but even after how close she'd come to shattering Riku's heart, if there had been any inclination to repeat her past mistake, there wasn't any longer.
The rise and fall of each breath, and shoulder movement, Sora now took was in time with her own, and his warm weight was at rest and securely quiet without the broken chasms of anguish she'd seen in his eyes when she'd caught him in the air, had removed it.
She'd been a danger to Sora even before they'd met, and she'd become the means for the Xehanorts to spy on him.
But while too little, too late, was too late, she was still who she was now.
And if spending the rest of her life attempting to atone for her sins to Sora and Riku never stopped being futile, at the least that itself would motivate her to keep attempting to do so even harder.
She could never be Anna.
But who she was would need to be good enough.
For them both.
Goofy turned his head to face her once more, but Kairi didn't meet his gaze any more this time than she had any other time.
Her heart was made up.
She was not going to ask what had happened until Sora was ready to talk, not even to Elsa, Vanitas, Roxas if someone broke him free of Elsa's curse and reversed his Formchange, or Anna if she returned.
More hate for herself seared through her at the traces of terror of losing Sora to Anna that still wouldn't go away.
Why could she never care about making anyone but herself happy?
But Anna couldn't do it.
Even though she was capable of loving people other than herself.
While all Kairi had sought, since her earliest childhood, so far back she could barely remember it now, was to put her needs, and wants, before those of others.
But it didn't matter.
She didn't know what Sora saw in her, but if she was going to stop putting herself first, she needed to accept it was her he was breathing in twine, and heartbeat, with.
She just wished, after everything she'd done, whether Sora knew about it, or not; after all this time; she could understand why Sora didn't see anything, at all, in Anna.
She almost forgot to keep from altering her breathing, or hold.
And she was now too exhausted to hate herself at the new tears that pushed into her eyes.
No, she couldn't understand.
Whether he admitted it or not, even to himself.
It shouldn't have been a surprise any longer, but somehow, this still was.
And the knowledge of what she'd need to do, once he was as up for it as he could be, unless Sora could definitively convince her there was nothing he was refusing to admit; this time truly to attempt to put his heart before her own, and not to attempt to run away from her problems; until she could truly be sure he wasn't happier with Anna, was still able to pierce the numbness with more exhausted aches of emptiness.
But maybe that was a good thing.
And maybe should start thinking about what Heartless she wanted to possess her own body, and entertain those fears without even having any reason to believe they'd come true.
Riku was gone again, and no matter how many times she went looking for him, he never stopped slipping away.
All she needed to do was find proof the same thing would keep happening with Sora, and he'd never come home for good, and then she'd have no reason remaining to refrain from becoming darkness itself.
And whatever happened to Princesses of Heart who gave all the way into the darkness without passing on their powers, assuming that didn't cause them to do so, if she ensured her memories went along with her, she'd be beyond the reach of Yozora, Luxu, and the Foretellers as an ordinary pureblood Heartless.
And after all the times she should have slipped away herself, but neither of them would let her, it would be so easy.
As all of the Princesses of her generation, and the new ones she'd met, had learned themselves, connections, be they romantic, familial, or friendship, took an effort and willingness to keep them functioning, in order to keep the ties fast held, and truly bound.
However, Kairi was the sole Princess of Heart who hadn't learned what Aurora, Snow White, Cinderella, Alice, Jasmine, Belle, Anna, Elsa, Rapunzel, and Jessie had.
While Kairi had refused to put the wishes, and pains, of others before herself before she'd even learned what dreams were, or how to strive for them to come true.
And she shouldn't have even had the ability to process the most frayed enunciation of the word, strive.
The sole and only reason Kairi had even had a chance to begin growing up had been because she'd been one of the most gluttonous parasites of all before she'd even genuinely started to learn how to mature into a responsible adult capable of loving others, and standing on her own legs, and feet.
She hadn't even had time for it to become a question of if, or when, she would give into the darkness.
Whether she could return to Sora for good, they remained on again off again for long into the future, or breaking it off this time was irreversible, someone who had been dragging people down so long she literally couldn't even remember beginning could never cause any kind of connection, even that of a briefly passing acquaintance on a street somewhere, to last without severing.
At this point, giving up all the way, and becoming the sole person who was dragged down, should be so effortless it was a sprain.
It didn't matter that she knew, as much as she knew the rest, this was why she'd been offered the most poisonous apple of all, and to escape from the hi-hos of travails and toils.
At this point, as long as she stopped living as the opaque eye of the maelstrom she dragged everyone else into with the indomitable grasp of relentlessly unfeeling obsidian shaded adamant, in a way that at least had a chance of keeping Sora, and Riku, and Axel, and Namine, and the others safe from Yozora, and the Foretellers, she was willing to take it.
And it took a strong will to create a Nobody when you became a Heartless.
If she just let herself slip away, she wouldn't create a second Nobody, while if she lacked memories, there would be nothing to give her away to any of the Foretellers.
Whether she ended up imprisoned in the realm of darkness for all of the future, or someone struck down her life along with her form, turning herself into an all but mindless Heartless was the quickest and most surefire way to get her out of the reach of anyone willing to use her to attempt to endanger Sora, or Riku, or anyone else, any longer.
Even before she was too young to know what danger, or putting others before herself, truly was.
Even by letting the Xehanorts spy on them for most of her life, without actively doing anything herself far more effortlessly, and far longer, than Xion had needed to refrain from actively endangering anyone.
As childish temper tantrums went, Kairi couldn't believe anyone else, literally in all of history, had thrown a larger one.
It took her a number of seconds to be sure she wasn't thinking that because of the footsteps she could hear pounding in their direction that sounded like Axel's, and she knew he would throw a flap open if this was a tent, not an igloo kept at habitable temperatures with carefully, and precisely, applied permafrost.
"Sora, Xion is being a reckless tomfool again!" Axel shouted, his acute terror and drawn concern as clear in his voice as in his eyes, and on his face.
Sora was deftly on his feet, out of Kairi's, Goofy's, and Donald's grips almost before he was aware he'd decided to move.
What will it take to convince the real and existing World to lay off of them, for once?
All he could register now was turning to see the same giant armor that had been flickering around Xion now solidly about her, even though he was able to see her in her ordinary garments in the middle of it.
Ephemer was standing to her left, with Mickey and Isa and Vanitas nearby
Sora blinked away tears at the sight of Roxas, in his natural form once more, and no longer frosted over
while an unfamiliar male with long grayish black hair cut in a majestic style, wearing official looking aristocratic clothes, stood closer to her left, and just behind her, turned at an angle Sora couldn't see his face.
From this angle, Sora could just see Elsa, a girl around Kairi's age with gray hair he knew must be Mare, while a large door similar to the one he, Donald, and Goofy had used to travel to and from Timeless River was yawning open behind them, and
Merlin
he's frozen like Anna almost did
Tiduswaslyingonthegroundbloodpoolingonhimallaroundhimbehindthem
No
couldn't tell if everywhereanything became suspended frost, or was whipping by
nonononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononononoImnotgoingtolethimdielosehim
notthistime
theNoteBladeisstoredawaytheGazingEyeisgoneitsnotgoingtoallgowrongthistimelikeithaseveryothertimeI'vebeenabletoaccomplishanythingatall
don'tberashyourselfthatwilljustmakethiswo
"They're Darkballs.
"I can afford to be careless."
"Who says that I want you overly taking care of me?"
"All right, I'm sorry."
"We're all a lot tougher than Jiminy.
"We're not so easily slain."
"And I'm getting an idea how I prevented you from fully fading.
"Even if any of us do die, unless I'm not paying attention and one or more of you die too fast for me to focus on my faith in you, I should be able to ensure they, and you, can put yourselves back together in short order."
what he'd compelled Kairi, and Riku, to do to Boo, and he'd done himself; and his broken promise; and what Xion had almost done when Sora had attempted to wait her out before, told Sora that applying patience when dealing with Xion was pointless effort
this time, it's going to be over
Sora picked up his pace, tracing his connections and preparing to Flowmotion, or Reality Shift, along the surrounding if it would speed him up.
For a reason Sora couldn't hear, or otherwise discern, Tidus spasmed violently where he lay.
Xion's true, human body then knelt the same way he had in front of Isa, so long ago now it might as well have been something that had happened in another life, in another span of history and reality totally.
Isa jolted violently, and then he hefted the claymore he was holding and shifted to charge the official, regret and self hating guilt in his eyes.
However, the official made a gesture, and then Tidus had flown up through the air to land on one of his shoulders as though he was a sack of grain, and he then hurled himself into the back of the giant armor and sent it, and Xion, careening towards the door.
Sora felt his eyes widen as Merlin merely turned to run in at their sides.
"Grandpa, wait!" Elsa cried, something even more desperately ruined and frayed in her voice now than anything she'd said when he'd first met her, or when he'd initially reunited, and she rushed to stand a little in their path, but to their sides.
Absence removed much of what Sora was still aware of from around him.
The official who was Anna's and Elsa's grandfather wordlessly passed by the granddaughter he clearly knew wanted to be bound to her family more than anything else, and vanished into the door.
he'dmakeithewasalmostinfrontofthedoor
Unwilling to risk Childhood's Laughter would be enough, when he didn't know if the Keyblade of Hearts had created this door, or not, he summoned the Kye-Blade to his hand and picked up the pace he was barreling at even more.
A part of the drawn pain in Elsa's face vanished and hardened into determination, and as the door began to swing shut, and Sora reached for the Kye-Blade, not wanting to take the risk Childhood's Laughter wouldn't be enough, a single rope of ice burst from her right hand to wrap around Roxas and lift him up as she turned towards the door.
"Tell Kristoff he's in command, and his voice is ours, even in regards to the Treaty of Flames!"
Elsa turned, ice washing out from below her feet, while ice skates appeared on her legs, and she was then rocketing at the nearly closed door.
"Hang on, I've got th–"
It was then that Sora registered he was almost on top of the stream of ice, and before he could correct his coordination, he discovered he'd slipped on it.
He smashed into Elsa's, and Roxas', backs, and then he felt something solid and heavy hit him from behind, and then he couldn't tell if he'd once more fallen unconscious, or if the ebony surrounding him was waking pitch.
.
"This is what I remember my mother looking like."-Kyrie
"Of course. The Creator made you, Kyrie."-R'hia
"It all makes sense."-Naja
"You hold the power of the Primal Lords. No mortal hindrance could draw you from your task. Your last and greatest act now awaits, Destruct. Destroy this world. Return it to its primal state, pristine."-The Creator
"No."-Kyrie
"No?"-The Creator
"I won't do it. I won't destroy the world."-Kyrie
"You would break your promise?"-The Creator
"What promise?"-Kyrie
"A promise made between us 'ere you were born. You swore to end this world, no matter what. You are not the sort to take promises lightly. Indeed, you can't."-The Creator
"Is she saying what I think she's saying?"-Agan
"She is. Have you ever known Kyrie to break a promise?"-R'hia
"You have not forgotten our promise, have you, Kyrie? So you play the petulant child? As you will. It is for this reason the Destruct Code exists."-The Creator
"Kyrie…"-Morte Asherah
"You force my hand. So be it. Return the world whence it came. Acta esta fabula."-The Creator
SANDS OF DESTRUCTION