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CHAPTER 62:
HUES OF SLUSHY GLASS
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Author's Notes: The pieces for this Chapter are, in order of scene: 'Lost… Broken Shards,' from the XENOGEARS Original Soundtrack, Disc One; and afterward, 'The True Nature Of All,' from the VALKYRIE PROFILE Original Soundtrack, Disc Two; and afterward, 'Hiro's Fight,' from the LUNAR 2: ETERNAL BLUE: COMPLETE Original Soundtrack; and afterward, 'Organization Thirteen,' from the KINGDOM HEARTS II Original Soundtrack, Disc One; and after this, 'People Imprisoned By Destiny,' from the CHRONO CROSS Original Soundtrack, Disc Two. The first four pieces of music can be found in KINGDOM HEARTS Insider's MP3 section, and the fifth one can be found on Zophar's Domain.
"Are you listening to this yourself, Anna?"
Those words registered through the aching and throbbing hotly cold fatigue and stomach sickening dizziness Elsa was imbibed in.
Elsa didn't even waste the time to think about what this might do to her returning awareness, or what the words she could remember hearing as the frigidity had entirely closed around her could mean, for Anna or herself, or both.
She hurled her awareness of anything she could discern within Ahtohallan that tied its cantrips to memory, and then she poured every single reminiscence she could gouge up from inside her of the most minute details of the spells that strung her ice palace together with the force of the most wrathful rapids she could call to mind, inundating every vein and fractal of hoarfrost within Ahtohallan Elsa believed may be able to transfer information with that knowledge. Then she drew a gusting blizzard inwards from where the walls of its core had been before they'd been brought here to storm through those surroundings, in the hope that Ahtohallan would thus drown the memories of Christopher's words in whatever magic was meant to carry them, and thus keep whatever Christopher's voice was saying from being heard by Anna.
The next second, she was standing on a beach that didn't slope down to waves, but to a wide chasm of dark shades of shifting and whirling grayish mists and clouds that descended so far down Elsa couldn't see the bottom, even though the arcs of coal shaded rock that appeared to delineate its opposite side were a great distance away.
The underside of Ahtohallan's dome was still surrounding them, but interspersed in its hemispherical walls at all heights were now large keyhole silhouettes the same color as the one Sora had created to reclaim Tidus from Maleficent's hold, yet with glaring conflagrations of stormy greens and reds and other colors inside them through which morphing shapes of transparently surging and shimmering air in the familiar shapes of the Shadows comprising Dreamreapers, or with transparent and shimmering but stationary Heartless Emblems, were rushing as though they were the thick streams of the tongues of fountains.
Above them, too many Keyblades to count were hanging as though they were a vast chandelier, shaking where they hovered as though suspended in a tug of war between two different forces.
Past the arcs of rock was an amalgamated and continually ebbing and congealing and moving and contorting morass composed of colors similar to those Elsa had seen in the Twilight Town sky and clock tower, the exposed soil and igloos of Arendelle, and light blues.
In front of Elsa stood in the air one of the very last people Elsa believed she would see once again in her life.
All the pain she'd kept away since she'd first heard the real reason her parents had died, since she'd let Ira inform her how the pall of the ice curse she'd believed Anna had at last freed her from the shackles of had shredded a different childhood and claimed uncountable others in eternal horror anyway, was now there through tears obscuring everything but the person in front of her; an aching, far too familiarly debilitating exhaustion that rendered anything but just falling to the floor and not moving anymore, wishing she could just stop breathing and let it all fade out of even empty oblivion until even awareness of the aches inside her were gone.
"Mom?" her whisper was a hollow breath of desperate agonized hope.
"Elsa?" Namine's voice asked as her mother's lips moved, contained tight fear with desperate hope now in her voice.
The walls concealing pains Elsa had never wanted to keep at bay once more were back.
At the same time, however, a different desperate hope of Elsa's own removed the ability to breathe.
Elsa blinked her tears away rapidly at the same time as she asked, "Do you know what has happened to Anna, and if she's hearing whatever Christopher began saying?"
"Kristoff is looking after her, and nothing sounded where we are," Namine answered.
Elsa let different tears back into her eyes, and she barely remembered to keep her knees and legs from giving out.
"We still don't know what happened to Skuld's Heartless, though, after she fell into the Door to Light."
Elsa suppressed the urge to wince.
"I take it this is Ahtohallan.
"Yes, I can tell.
"Partially because that ice curse you cast on Roxas is doing something I can't identify to it, for reasons that are mostly just as indecipherable to me. All I can tell is that it's, at least partially, tied to how Roxas attained the talent to become darkness itself without casting off his body. And also, how he afterwards performed a mysterious Formchange I now recognize he was able to accomplish even though he's a Nobody through merging his own Unversed with him at least partially the same way Sora could Donald, Goofy, and Mickey."
Elsa suppressed another urge to wince.
"Your mother is just a simulacrum, an image created from your heart so you can better understand how Ahtohallan functions."
Elsa let the current of agony through at that, and she clenched her teeth tightly.
Namine inhaled with sharply acute horror.
"Transferring your curse to Merlin didn't redirect his own one, though; it accelerated it, and it's about to run its course!"
Shock rushed through Elsa, alongside angry recrimination she should have known better than to underestimate her talents, as liquid molten icy horror consumed all of her.
He wasn't.
Elsa cast her perspective into the weave of Ahtohallan once more even as she spun to look at Roxas, standing behind her motionlessly with his lips faintly curled up in ruined and exhausted relief he'd at last been given a chance he'd long sought.
Elsa identified two things at the same time.
She realized her own breathing was still strained.
Whatever the cause, she hadn't broken her own curse.
Importantly, though, she could also perceive the state of the curse that had all but frosted over Roxas' heart now, and she knew her understanding of what Roxas was going through had once more proven accurate.
Even his combined talents as a Keyblade wielder, and Nobody, couldn't neutralize one of her curses without fulfilling the terms of the incantation itself, ones Elsa became slightly lighter to identify should totally end his own curse.
But the acuity over magic, and the ethereal tapestry, he'd developed with two Keyblades so well he could cast Zettaflare repeatedly, if a limited amount of times, without it taxing him, had become sufficient he must have begun unraveling fringes of its skein as soon as he'd become aware it was still active, very likely when she cast one on herself.
He was now almost done sewing it back together, and Elsa recognized the new terms for breaking it very clearly.
To finish breaking it, someone patched into Ahtohallan would need to use the curse's, and its, ties to Xion, and thus Namine, to work together with Namine to remove all memories he had been the one to exist in the first place from Sora's heart, and the heart of anyone Sora was connected to.
Elsa let the understanding tears through as she extended her own charge over those remaining strings, and dispersed them into harmless dew that evaporated up from Roxas.
Her regained faith she was capable of being a loving big sister had once more been extremely shaken, but she could no longer afford to worry at all about what kind of love she was capable of giving, or Roxas might be seeking.
As Roxas recognized what had just happened, she strode up to him and pulled him into her arms, then his head against her shoulder with a hand that began gently stroking his hair before it even reached his shoulder, the same way Anna had hers so many times Elsa had been emotionally hurt, or scraped or bruised, or sick
Elsa's breath caught.
Her attempt at giving Anna her first true sisterly birthday in years hadn't been as successful as Elsa had wanted it to be, but Elsa would never forget why Anna had told her it had still been the best birthday she'd yet had in her life anyway.
"Hush now," Elsa told him.
"You can stop.
"No matter your heart or its absence, no matter your self or its absence, from the very beginning, you gave Xion and Axel the most important salvation of all.
"A heart isn't something you put yourself first and gain, or regain, remember?
"By guiding Sora to us, you taught Anna that, and then she taught me.
"It's something you give.
"Just as you taught Xion, and reminded Axel, how to give you hearts they weren't even aware they had, as soon as they first met you."
Roxas spasmed violently as though a live wire had just sent electricity through him.
Then he went utterly and entirely boneless in her arms, and he gave out hopeless, ruined, keening wail after wail that kept coming.
Xion inhaled with audibly drawn desperate hope from somewhere Elsa couldn't do anything more than hear.
From somewhere else, Elsa heard a second, male echo she assumed was Axel doing the same.
"Because Axel went to Castle Oblivion, you mean," Grandpa's voice interjected with revolted derision.
"I've been informed long since Isa pointed out Axel didn't actually begin to change until he met Sora, and Axel is the person who first showed Xion she could lean on others with his idea for how she could regain her ability to use the Keyblade.
"You just trailed behind Sora as one of the shadows he casts, as usual.
"That's what caused the light to expose their filth for what it is; you could never have done it all by yourself, landfill of even darkness."
Roxas sagged limply, and Elsa realized he had passed out.
Sora's stomach heaved violently, his eyes tearing as anything inside it rushed up.
However, he was practically incapable of processing that was even happening, after what he'd just heard.
He retained enough awareness of the Kye-Blade in his hands to disperse it to avert the risk of it going haywire in his current state.
Sora wasn't sure if it was the back, hard tip of Maleficent's stave jamming into his stomach through the opening in his guard as she manifested with wisps of green fire flickering inward all over her, or what he'd just heard, that sent a gout of his food and flecks of blood out of his mouth
"Cinder Meteor."
a single small, black cratered rock collided with his stomach, launched point blank from Maleficent's staff, tearing him off the Black Fang and causing his awareness to become black
two large flat surfaces were against his back, catching him in a firm but impact softening brace before he could hit the wall as black spots danced in front of his eyes
the swords of Xion's second body
there was just no point
K
she and Riku couldn't save him any more
Anna, and Donald and Goofy, couldn't, for the same reasons
Kingdom Hearts itself was nothing other than a drugged up tool for creating engines of war
connections themselves didn't safeguard people from hurt, they caused it
the one person close to him who he could call out to without hurting someone else in the process was dead
he'd just laid there and let it happen
he'd made Kairi and Riku murder Boo
"Just let it end, boy."
but he could still cry, so he could still know in his heart his friends gave him power
it wasn't all over
and if he could defeat Maleficent here, for good, or even just cripple her another time, or drive her off, that would give them breathing space to endeavor to discern whether Christopher was telling the truth, if so, why Elsa's curse on herself had been altered, and to think of another strategy that may enable them to defy destiny
Sora couldn't risk the time to cast a Curaga.
Sora spun even as he slid down the blades, giving no heed to how his stomach contorted sickly and his vision darkened in protest and he once more sped himself up, to aim Childhood's Laughter up at the head of Xion's carapace, and segued into an Airstep to then somersault forward into a Flowmotion and swirl upwards to its top.
The Tidal Wave of Verus Night was still howling against the Keyblade of Hearts, and Xion, so that told Sora two things.
First, Maleficent was now restricted to physical strikes.
Maleficent was above the arc of his Flowmotion path now, swinging down at him with the top of her rod positioned to curve under his body and impact with his neck.
Sora's alertness heightened, knowing he had an even better opportunity to exploit the second now, judging the motion of the stave and the inertia behind the movements of Maleficent's arm, while hoping she didn't possess any greater means of accelerating her reflexes than he'd already seen.
As soon as he believed the timing was accurate, and Maleficent was physically extended the most, he cut the Flowmotion and Airstepped another time, weaving a globe of interconnected hexagons he'd seen used many times around himself for the first time as he appeared on the opposite side of Xion's Keyblade of Hearts from Tidus, her body, and her barrier with Childhood's Laughter in a double handed block, not giving anything more than waves of cold from the Tidal Wave of Verus Night time to wash over him.
A web of splinters quickly webbed over his barrier.
But Sora jumped into a somersault for the Slingshot Reality Shift and activated a Flowmotion around the Keyblade of Hearts at the same time, and as his awareness separated from his surroundings along with his body before he could impact Xion's own strained barrier, he directed the dual potency of the astral grasp he used to throw large opponents with a Flowmotion and the grasp he used to hurl barrels, while also calling upon every thread of torsion he fed into his legs when he made large jumps and directed them into his arms.
Shrieks seared his mind, and fire roared down arms with very bones that were frigid molten agony that Sora was almost certain he could feel begin the greenstick fractures signifying forthcoming snaps.
Though, he mustered all his heart the same way he did when he unleashed the power of waking, and when he'd worked together with Donald and Goofy to deflect even the resolved spectrum of the entire power of the Kye-Blade itself and then vitalize Last Ray to exploit the opening before Xehanort had time to correct his overextension.
The Tidal Wave of Verus Night rose up as though it were a barrel in the Sleeping Traverse Town, grasped with the same Keyblade energies he'd utilized to deflect even Terra-Xehanort's light purple bullets and cut through a series of skyscrapers in one slice the first time he'd confronted the Kingdom Hearts charged Xemnas.
Then it arced directly at Maleficent, who was now not just unbalanced due to attempting to physically attack where he'd once been while maintain a very taxing cantrip, she was also overextended with her physical guard facing a different direction.
"Blended Dissonance!" Maleficent cried in surprised fury and worry.
Gray washed through their surroundings, and then countless giant globules of amorphous and shifting shades of gray, all at least twice the diameter of the height of an average adult human, congealed around them as though the air itself was blotting ink.
A large number of them flew into a vertical filled in circle arrangement before Maleficent, blocking her from the Tidal Wave of Verus Night bearing down on her from in front, while the rest soared in Sora's direction.
Sora sprang into the air over the bubbles as they met, at the same time as the Tidal Wave of Verus Night impacted with the ones around Maleficent, and all of his awareness danced with cacophonous lines and whiplashes and streaks and Sunspot bursts of black and gray chaotically flecking all over what he could perceive.
Below him, Sora could hear, and peripherally see, the grays below him were now bubbling as though they were a massive sphere of lava.
But he still knew the location of Xion's blades.
Another Airstep before he descended, and he was standing atop them and then he jumped down at Maleficent to land on one of Xion's armored body's shoulder pauldrons.
He didn't even risk the time to use any magical acceleration.
He just cut down with a doublehanded slice, ignoring the fire ripping through his arms as he did so.
Maleficent twisted to block with her stave, but from the way she clenched her teeth as she pushed back against the block, when she shouldn't need to strain merely to hold back an ordinary chop from him, Sora knew he'd outmaneuvered her.
He'd feinted too many times for her to be able to keep her magic stable, and her own Tidal Wave of Verus Night began chewing forwards through the bubbles of gray.
Maleficent drew her rod back to break the lock and slashed at Sora's left.
He parried and riposted at her forehead, and she blocked to jab the lower portion of her stave at Sora's right knee.
Sora deflected the blow aside and sliced low at Maleficent's stomach, she blocked the slash, and Sora then met Maleficent in a duel of nothing but their weapons as the Tidal Wave of Verus Night, no longer under Maleficent's gasp, continued to push closer.
He wanted to recall the Kye-Blade, to increase his chances of outmaneuvering Maleficent, but he couldn't risk it after what he'd heard about Anna.
"I've identified the connections between Ahtohallan and the postern Doors!" Xion cried.
"From what the Keyblade of Hearts is picking up, I can't lock them from here!
"But if we can weaken Hringhorn's Wayfinder by shutting down Arthur, or through some other means, I should at least be able to close them from this distance, and seal them in a Keyblade chain prison!"
Maleficent's lip curled in sneering disdain.
Her voice was once more unperturbed, outside of the strain in it as she pushed against Sora's strike.
"All I'll need to pierce those, erected by the Keyblade of Hearts or not, is the last of the New Seven Hearts, and the other four."
Before anyone could say anything else, Elsa's voice sounded.
Sora started, but he still retained the presence of mind to drop Childhood's Laughter low to block a stab by the thin end of Maleficent's rod at his midsection, sweep a strike up at her forehead she raised her rod diagonally upward and inwards to intercept, and then continue trading blows.
"Hush now.
"You can stop.
"No matter your heart or its absence, no matter your self or its absence, from the very beginning, you gave Xion and Axel the most important salvation of all.
"A heart isn't something you put yourself first and gain, or regain, remember?
"By guiding Sora to us, you taught Anna that, and then she taught me.
"It's something you give.
"Just as you taught Xion, and reminded Axel, how to give you hearts they weren't even aware they had, as soon as they first met you."
Roxas began emitting keening wails.
But Sora heard Xion, and what sounded like Lea from however Ahtohallan was bound to wherever they were, gasp.
A minority more tears made it into his eyes, and Sora almost stopped registering the need to continue battling Maleficent.
Hand to hand combat didn't appear to be any more her forte now than it had been the first time they'd confronted each other, but she at least appeared to have enough practical sense to not fall into any patterns, and between that and how much the darkness was enhancing her dexterity and agility, he still had no guarantee he could keep her tied down until her own incantation reached her.
Runeard's revolted and derisive voice then sounded.
"Because Axel went to Castle Oblivion, you mean.
"I've been informed long since Isa pointed out Axel didn't actually begin to change until he met Sora, and Axel is the person who first showed Xion she could lean on others with his idea for how she could regain her ability to use the Keyblade.
"You just trailed behind Sora as one of the shadows he casts, as usual.
"That's what caused the light to expose their filth for what it is; you could never have done it all by yourself, landfill of even darkness."
Xion let herself clench her teeth tightly at that one.
Although not so hard the pain could risk distracting her from how she was extending her perceptions through her memory transference abilities, and what she could discern of Ahtohallan's make up.
Countless familiar serrated lancing sears of desperation and hate for herself shrieked and howled at her to stop this before she put Elsa in even more danger, or she fulfilled her destiny in the now and here.
Among too many other terrors and recriminations, Xion still didn't have that much grasp on the precise details of what Christopher had done to her, if even all of the vital ones, and the new mysteries inherent in how her new functionality as a sinkhole of history and reminiscence was affecting Elsa, just made it worse.
As well, Xion had very likely been straining her siphoning, at least of Namine, since she'd first been such a reckless blunderbuss she'd lowered her guard and let Christopher begin this process in Scala ad Caelum.
But this was no longer the time to think about paths, and where they led, at all.
Just about beliefs, and the hardships and hurdles right in front of her.
For Roxas' sake, though, this one merited an answer.
All she could think of was a variation of Woody's words to Young Xehanort as he'd begun implementing the last stages of the experiments the Xehanorts had been performing since Ansem the Wise first discovered him, and giving her new life.
But it would need to suffice, until she could think of some way to definitively convince Roxas there was nothing wrong with him for who he was, and nothing limiting his choices about who to become and be at all and any place and time.
"You can spew off whatever backwards thinking insular bombast out of your pampered and entitled royal life where you've wanted for nothing you feel like, it won't make one whit of any difference!" Xion cried.
"We are not factory products rolled off an assembly line with bar codes; in every solitary single way, we are individuals with hearts and minds of our own; the ability to be whoever, and whatever we choose, at all and any times; the same capacity to understand or reject others, and all the sentiments anyone else can recognize, or remember; and the same hearts with the same reserves to inflict pain, and love, anyone else has!
"The Recusant's Sigil will never be proof we're a them and there's an us, no matter what you say, or do!
"It will everlasting and forever be the emblem of the bond we share!"
Isa's voice sounded faintly from somewhere, a mixture of familiar guilty determination in his voice, but also tremors of disbelief he'd discovered a way to make amends for his own sins with his own hands, rather than through go betweens like Even and Demyx.
"You can leave Runeard, and his nightmare of a hyperion Arendelle, to me," Isa spoke.
"And when I have the chance, it won't be the floor I'll be casting my gauntlet at.
"It will be his teeth.
"I don't need words to display my glory before a buffoonish cur who has spent his whole life digging for scraps at someone else's table," Runeard responded with affronted disdain.
Xion was no longer worried, after all these months, Isa still hadn't grown up enough to know not to dignify that with a response.
Nothing but silence was Runeard's answer.
Xion heard the sound of the grandiose sweep of a cloak, very clearly Runeard's.
Xion ignored it herself.
"This incessant prattle has become wearisome," Maleficent commented, but Xion could hear tendrils of strain in her voice.
"Hans, guard the precipice and keep anyone out of Ahtohallan's depths until Pete has finished his provisional tunnel of wards through the hexes there."
Xion started violently, and she carefully disentangled herself from around Tidus and moved back to get to her feet, hoisting both Keyblades as they returned to her hands in swirls of gold and red and blacks and silvers.
After what Runeard had just said to Roxas, Xion couldn't justify not letting the rush of new self hating guilt through at how, if she hadn't given up and Maleficent's investigations of the Real Organization Thirteen hadn't enabled her to recomplete Xion on top of everything else, maybe Xehanort's strategic and tactical acumen wouldn't have been as much of an inspiration for Maleficent as it kept proving.
Maleficent did have at least one other bird she was efficiently attempting to kill with a stone, at this time.
"Narissa, see this finished."
An ovular morass of dark shades swelled in front of them, and the woman who resembled Maleficent, but who wore more stately robes, walked through, keeping the corridor open behind her.
Xion wished she could justify clenching her teeth one more time at how, even after everything she'd just pulled through, she'd need to leave Maleficent to Sora.
But Narissa, and whatever role, or roles, Maleficent had deeded her with, was the foe in front of her.
Xion armored off all feeling once more.
She didn't break her promises, but she'd completed her part of this Mission, and she hadn't sworn Maleficent any more of an oath than she'd been willing to serve Xemnas.
She could do more than just interpose herself between strikes.
She positioned the Kingdom Key and the Keyblade of Hearts, and charged.
Narissa raised her hands, palms forward, and more than one thick tongue of emerald lightning writhed out of each of them in her direction, tracing sizzling sparks along the transparent polygons around them as the ones extending from Xion's right washed directly at her, and the other curved a long, tight arc in from Narissa's right.
Xion gauged her distance, and then dropped and tucked into a Dodge Roll between two of the streaks of the onrushing lightning tongues, rising into an upward swing at Narissa's chin with the Kingdom Key that connected and sent her chin snapping back while she kept the Keyblade of Hearts positioned to cast a defensive spell over Tidus if Narissa targeted her.
Narissa snorted in amusement as she backstepped quickly a number of times to gain distance, her lightning sparking into nothingness.
"It never fails to entertain me when people like you make the indulgent presumptions you can find your own glory in giving up an advantage in a battle for the sake of someone else.
"I'm no hypocrite about who I am, and what I live for.
"I don't sugarcoat my crimes as worthwhile sacrifices for a greater good, my own or anyone, or anywhere, else's; I just acknowledge what needs to be done without spending any time with the trappings of honor, hypocritical as with Runeard and Maleficent, or fanciful as with you and Sora.
"Though, there is no greater good to be found in not dispatching an opponent as efficiently as possible.
"Remember what the Angel of Sin said.
"You can't save everyone; every risk you take at letting me win to keep Tidus safe just puts someone else at risk."
Xion didn't even spend the time acknowledging the anguish that pulsed through her at that comment.
She rushed Narissa to close the distance, swinging in low with the Keyblade of Hearts and high with the Kingdom Key.
A transparent clock face appeared in front of Narissa, blocking both swings.
The next second, the minute hand and hour hand whirled in opposite directions, catching both Keyblades and locking them against the second hand between them.
Xion attempted to pull them back, but the clock then rotated upwards with enough fast torsion it swung her into the air without her feeling any of the lightness she should recognize from her feet leaving a purchase, and she knew Narissa was altering gravity as well.
The clock hands began spinning around, faster and swifter, and Xion felt their grips alter in such a way they were most likely preparing to throw her.
Xion didn't pull either Keyblade back, though.
She bent her wrist slightly to release the Kingdom Key in a Strike Raid, using its ability to pass through surfaces to send it whirling into Narissa's midsection.
The clock, and its hands, shook, losing their grip on the Keyblade of Hearts.
Xion dropped to her feet.
"No talk, just the mission, is that how it's going to be?" Narissa snarled, slight annoyance in her voice now.
"And I'm supposed to believe you're anything other than a hound of war who needs a muzzle stuffed back on her?"
"It takes one to know one," Xion shot back, not because she felt any need to prove anything, but because she was waiting to see if the clock in front of Narissa disintegrated, or otherwise came apart.
The second hand vanished.
Tidus gave out a blood choked cry of agony behind her.
Xion twisted so she was looking at Tidus on her left, Narissa on her right, and this time she was able to keep new hotness from pushing into her eyes, or emotion from pushing into her heart, at the sight of how the second hand had appeared behind her to attempt to rocket, point first, at her back.
Tidus, however, had either regained consciousness or awareness of his surroundings, because he'd reached up his left arm to attempt to intercept it.
Only for the point to ram right into it.
It punctured through within seconds, and Xion could see it drill through the back of his arm as attempted to push all the way out the other side, but Tidus rolled forwards and dug in his feet, before he then braced his wounded arm with his right one.
"Leave her… be!" he gasped out agonized cries as Xion saw blood begin to flow down his right arm as his feet slid back, no doubt from the point of the clock hand beginning to sink into Tidus' right arm.
"She just… wants to… make a team play… for the goal!
"Please… please just stop… making her just… take… foul after foul… for them!
"I won't let… anyone keep her from… scoring her… win any longer!"
Xion let the tears, and aches of terror and recriminating hatred at herself, return, at hearing that.
But not enough to obscure her vision so much, or deter her, from running in Tidus' direction to cut the second hand apart, as she pushed away the pragmatic part of her that told her she needed to knock Tidus out herself to keep him from doing this a third time.
Narissa snorted.
The clock appeared in front of Xion to lunge into her own midsection before she had time to lower either, or both, Keyblades in a block, and breath was forced out of her as she was thrown backward through the air.
"That's the thing about rays of Sunshine that attempt to brighten the days of the downtrodden," she commented, her words sounding as though they were echoing in air that was now shimmering to the sides, and above them, in the rough shape of a hall, and Xion knew Sora had no way to know what was going on, and that he needed to intervene.
"They really are fleeting, and as effortlessly dispersed as the morning dew."
totally and utterly completely frozen molten horror seized any of what wasn'tmayhavenotcouldn'twouldn'tforevertherenowcan'tletthisnothappeningonceagain
A howl similar to Skӧll's resounded, and then what Xion assumed was Hans' voice, cultured and smugly triumphant, reverberated from nowhere
every last solitary fissured fragment of an inflected enunciation was suspended anywhen, even as it condensed into the period of a single refined distilled preservation
very perhaps interposing from somewhere else, Vanitas stood on a pale blue bridge, two rusted Keyblades that might have been Keyblades of Darkness in his hand as he continually intercepted a thick and blocky Keyblade with colors including light purple, and crimson on it, that was wielded by a short girl younger than adolescence in a green sweater, the angry expression on his face making it clear he wanted to strike back, but he knew better than to do so
Yuna was lying on the roof of Memory's Skyscraper, her wings sliced to ribbons with shards of them lying at odd angles as bones and limbs stuck gruesomely askew from her all but motionless body
Yuna held Tidus' forehead against hers with one arm, while the other, barely able to remain steady, held a transparent blade filled with flowing blue water up
thisisn'trealthisisanillusion
nowaynowaynowaynowaynowaynowaynonononononononononononononononononononononononononononowaynowayletmeknowwhat'sgoingondon'tleavemeinanexecutionhood
Xion didn't pay any attention to the absolute sheening terror clearing drowning any wasn't might nots and extended her perception, carefully searching for Tidus, and the clock hand even with her insides squeezedgripped so tightly she knew breathing would be an incredible challenge
"As we gambled, Merlin tried his best.
"But he spent too much time with the trolls when researching how the memories and dreams of Christopher's book function, so he's in no position to separate fact from the lenses of the ethnic discrimination between the trolls and the spirits."
"Vanitas, Vanellope, I can't tell what the all the specifics are, but this isn't safe!"
Namine's voice, flooded with terror and rage drenched hate at herself, and now understanding
"The Lanes of Ingress are open," Hans broke back in
"Even as, through Hringhorn's Wayfinder, Ahtohallan resonates with the currents of the Ocean Between, while Ahtohallan's and Arthur's chords have been harmonized with that of the Ocean Betweens of every single other worldline.
"Putting others first will bring you to your place, and not a heart willing to do whatever it takes to claim hold of it, do tell?
"Then why have the open doors of infinity displayed that this is what happens, in far more worldlines than it doesn't, when rays of Sunshine try to warm the frost of a reality of torment and adversity with their beams?"
"For us both… you'll be my living… dream…"
Yuna raised her head, and her lips weakly brushed against Tidus' before her head fell back, unmoving, and her breathing stilled
Tidus was standing at the Altar of Naught, facing the large, and a great amount close to complete, artificial Kingdom Hearts with a necklace of thalassa shells that ended in a wayfinder clearly put together from paopu fruit around his neck with a blue and white striped blitzball with a smiley face painted as its center, singing a song that sounded like a hymn with hands arms and hands moving inwards to cup in what Xion recognized as the blitzball sign for victory
with lethal swiftness, Xemnas rose up from a crouch behind Tidus to thrust the double crimson beams of the Ethereal Blades through his back and cleanly through his front, one through his heart that severed the chain of his necklace and sent the paopu falling to the ivory of the altar to bounce along it out of the range of the vision, the other one through his stomach
"Take it from the thirteenth who has been willing to do what Roxas will not since he first paid the toll of his own freedom.
"How many times has Sora brought someone home, just to discover another person, or other people, are lost?
"The cycle has repeated throughout time on too many worlds to name; history itself shows the path I walk is the correct one.
"The downtrodden rise up against their oppressors and then grind them into the mire, one way or another," faint aversion passed through Hans' voice at that word, "Applying strength and relentless law to ensure their former oppressors the ones who have their faces smeared in the mud by their own boots.
"Otherwise the enemies will just keep coming."
Even now, destroying the Gazing Eye and locking away the Note Blade had sacrificed An
"How many times do I have to beat"
Xion ignored the doubts, and she kept probing her surroundings.
"All you all have had to show for your endeavors, every single time, is to lose someone else, or wind up right back where you've begun.
"There is solely one cost of severing the shackles that mire history and the stars, and that is power."
Xion's became aware her eyes had widened as, under whatever conditions Ahtohallan and Arthur were in, she now registered a different presence brushing against the edges of her awareness.
Why had Riku become her Dream Eater, rather than Sora's or Kairi's?
"Did you find the right answer?"
Riku's voice, the new layers of resigned tiredness in it telling Xion this was no memory.
She couldn't overlook this for a path.
"No," she answered, and lightness vitalized her at how it took no effort to bring conviction into her voice.
"Because I've finally learned what I need to know about how to find my own.
"Thanks, Riku.
"See you soon."
Then there was Tidus, being moved carefully and steadily over the top of the Tidal Wave of Verus Night, in a position where Narissa could drop him onto one of the gray globules far to Sora's right and behind him.
For the first time, Xion moved the lips of World of Glass.
The voice that emitted from it was hollow and echoing, as though emanating from the bottomless depths of a hollow suit of metal, but that didn't bother Xion at all.
"Sora, above you, and behind, to your right!"
Sora tracked his peripheral gaze in the direction Xion's telepathic voice had alerted him to look.
Before he could process what he was beholding, though, Tidus threw himself forward in the direction the thin spear, or whatever it was impaling him, was moving, yanking his arms off the spear while spinning and tucking into a roll directly at Maleficent.
Maleficent must have heard the air move, for she traced her own peripheral gaze up.
Sora acted as soon as he saw her irises begin to shift.
The next second, he lanced a precise thrust with Childhood's Laughter at Maleficent's forehead right above her off hand.
Maleficent froze as she realized she was now totally overextended, and Sora slid smoothly into an Ars Arcanum into which he fed the legacy of the sentiments of not just Maleficent's latest victims, but the legacies of Leon and Yuffie and every single one of her victims who had wished they could effectively safeguard others against her, but who lacked the Keyblade to do so.
Each blow connected, Sora somersaulted into the Finis, and the additional momentum and acceleration of the flipping overhead strike sent Maleficent staggering backwards with enough lack of coordination the remaining globes of Blended Dissonance dispersed.
The tsunami of Maleficent's own dark cantrip roared into her from behind, and it bulged in all directions at the same time as it contracted in on itself as though it was a grotesque float that belonged in one of the carnival attractions Sora had been able to harness before he'd used the power of waking the wrong way too many times.
It imploded, and then nothing but pitch black could be seen anywhere in the vicinity, no matter what the distance was.
The ice of the chamber of Ahtohallan was beneath them once more, Maleficent and her unleashed incantation still in whatever astral plane they'd been taken to, gusts of chilling cold washing from the direction of where the entrance into the deepest reaches of Ahtohallan was located.
Sora was already springing, however, to catch Tidus and land on the transparent hexagons below them.
"Look at what just happened, Vanellope," Namine's voice sounded, her voice both defensive and assuring.
"No matter who you are, you can find a light in the darkness.
"Tidus doesn't even have a Keyblade, and he isn't a learned combatant like Leon or Cloud, yet he just assisted Sora in defeating one of the most adept enchantresses in all of the realm of light."
Her next words were filled with tremors of almost broken hopeful disbelief.
"And I showed Vanitas how to find his.
"So please, he's been through enough."
"That's right," an unfamiliar older male voice put in, sounding guilty, but as though he'd just recognized something.
"My best friend is you, yourself, because you're on the other side of the screen, and you don't wreck things.
"Dreams are all the better because they are different dreams.
"Yeah, if you can't, that's just plain lousy.
"But think about it.
"If Empyreal had been fast enough to save me, and he didn't need a speed demon like you among his friends, would you have as many rad racing escapades to wow him with?"
Sora was lighter hearing that.
He'd keep that in his heart, too, along with every other heart that had become part of him.
The male's voice now sounded apologetic.
"And I'll keep that in mind myself, from now on.
"I'm really sorry I was so close to raising a major spat about you having wishes I don't.
"I want you to be who you are, not a Bad Guy, or Bad Girl."
Maleficent staggered out of the corridor of darkness.
Sora raised Childhood's Laughter, pushing away his intermingled hope and terror about how Namine now directly protecting Vanitas would affect him, ready for her to Formchange into her dragon.
The worlds were still connected by interspace when I did this the first time, but this isn't going to turn out like my rematch with Xemnas.
We're taking different routes, but I don't need to know where the light is, this time.
Maleficent's face shifted in contained rage, very likely because she knew Elsa was now totally capable of matching her.
Then she turned with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders to face the other woman clothed in black, who was standing behind her with Xion behind them, and Elsa nearby, holding a Roxas who appeared to be sleeping.
"Completing the meld of Arthur's science and Ahtohallan's sorcery can wait," Maleficent said, nothing more than a muted trace of irritation in her tones.
Sora shifted the balls of his feet until he was light on them, but he knew better than to attempt anything with two opponents facing him, and Hans and Pete potentially lurking anywhere, until he knew precisely how Maleficent intended to escape this time.
"If you would then become the raft to carry me through the Lanes of Ingress to the first of the other worldlines, Number Three."
Shocked horror sheeted through Sora.
He couldn't take any chances, then.
Green fire spread over the other woman and obscured her, and then a giant green scaled claw reached out of it and picked up Maleficent.
"I'm utterly thawed, from when Elsa thawed the others, but I'm sorry!" Merlin's voice sounded.
Oh, no.
Sora brought himself up into the air as the ice beneath their feet separated.
Rather than the floor beneath them vanishing, though, it was the white door they'd entered Ahtohallan through that shot up in front of them, parted slightly open, as the scaled talons pulled Maleficent back past Elsa, Roxas, and where it rose, the same foggy wall and columns and glimmering diamonds they'd seen before surging to cover every location before them but the door itself.
"But, I'm staying here until you determine how the spirits aspire restitution!
"There are still Northuldrans alive in here!"
Elsa's jaw dropped open.
"I held up an end of my own, and I chained what Maleficent did!" Xion cried back.
Sora barely remembered to reposition his feet to keep from falling.
At the same time as Xion's voice sounded, Runeard's tones snarled in viciously savage furious hate from somewhere Sora couldn't identify.
Hans' voice interjected before he could say anything, though, clear tones of warning in his voice.
"That means I will have more subjects, to bestow the glory of the new Arendelle upon once I have inherited it, and we have become that Arendelle.
"The Northuldrans aren't in our way, and until such time as they cease to be our allies, they are not our enemies."
"Or would you prefer to choose a different heir to succeed you?" Hans' voice was now smugly and assuredly affable.
"You appear to have forgotten who needs whom, jolly old chap, and a lot more now that you've delivered our declaration of war."
At the last, indelible confirmation the nightmare had come to pass, and Arendelle; Anna, and Elsa; were now embroiled in a full scale war, Sora's stomach heaved so sickeningly he was very uncertain he wouldn't have violently retched if he wasn't so badly injured.
But he couldn't even afford to spend any feeling, or thought, for that.
Not until he found Robert.
"If you but say the word, I'll be off.
"But I'll be taking most of the Treaty of Flames with me."
Another snarl of savagely vicious rage sounded from Runeard.
"With that established, we will now be off," Maleficent put in, in a voice of imperious command.
"The hour has not yet reached us, so we can locate the last one later."
The next second, the voice of the girl named Vanellope yelled in affronted fury, "Ralph, get these Blox off of me!"
"I'm gonna' wr"
Sora barely registered the new horror rushing through him as sprinted at the door, or the sick exhaustion inside him, and he contorted his body to wedge his shoulder into the opposite side of the door and push it open at the same time as he moved through it.
Before him was a massive, ordinary gleaming yellow gold portal with a thick wall of ice blocking the entirety of its open space
processed
falling face forward at the hard ground of Arendelle below
as horror cleared practically all recognition of anything, even what it meant to comprehend delineations, or their lack, or even the concepts of what the most indecipherable emotion or thought was, from
at the awareness of what it was Elsa hadn't told
what she'd done to Anna before Christopher
knee went forward
caught
"I didn't let Christopher talk to her, whatever he said!" Elsa called from behind.
"Elsa!?"
Sora didn't know if it was Elsa's words that brought the aches back, and caused him to realize he couldn't distinguish the ice wall from the tears in his eyes and the burning stinging from a vision far too strained in the past week, or Anna's faint but starkly and desperately terrified voice, and the effulgent warmth of her love for Elsa washing away all the pain and terror the same way it never failed to when he was around her.
Practically hysterical footsteps pounded against an unseen surface, and then Anna's face was on the other side of the ice, tears spilling down a drawn and slack face below eyes that appeared to be gazing up, with a desperate begging appearing to be clutching onto futility itself as though it were a life raft and she were drowning, from the bottom of an abyss of such pitch night it could barely have perceived perceive the bright light always brilliantly incandescent within it even if it was right in front of her, as clear as day.
Sora's insides were rippling with too much molten cold terror to heave now.
Had she heard Christopher, after all?
Sora suppressed the urge to choke down what might have been an almost gibbering laugh.
Sora was the sole person who could tell Anna.
"You went somewhere I couldn't follow, this time," however Elsa had woven the ice, it clearly didn't block sound, because Sora could clearly hear the empty cavity in her ruined and desiccated breaths that were Anna's words even though the wall was just beginning to liquidate.
If not for what he knew it would do to Anna, Sora knew he would have found he'd fallen to his knees, and most likely onto his front, at his recognition he could say something to this.
"You've never needed to," Sora answered.
"You don't just always stand with us no matter how far apart we are, we always stand with you.
"I've fought for Kairi and Riku, and Donald and Goofy, the entire time.
"But you're the person who showed me what it is to fight with all my heart, and a cause that gave all that striving for them a purpose.
"You don't even need to be with us all along to pick us back up."
A frail but thankful smile curled up Anna's lips, but it was so broken it was as though she was having an incredibly hard time even remembering smiling, and frowning, weren't just the same thing, there was no such thing as any differences in the heart or reality at all to make distinctions, or comparisons.
The ice was now nothing more than slush that fell away.
Kairi was running up far behind them on the light blue bridge, though, vigor coming to her movements as she did, with Donald and Goofy at her side, Donald picking up his rate while more springs came to Goofy's step and an ornament the size of a Keychain gleamed in the grip of his right hand.
Witnessing that was enough for strength to keep Sora on his own legs.
Whatever else had happened, whether the light never went out or black devoured all colors, he could still believe in his own light, and give it to Kairi and Donald and Goofy and Anna, and the others.
And they'd at last rendered Maleficent a setback.
While the Gazing Eye was gone, untying the Foretellers' knots strangling the currents of space and time in the realm of light along with it.
And for once, winning that major a victory against a severely capable sect of dark denizens hadn't stranded one or more hearts as new castaways at the same time.
Perhaps black would just devour all colors in the end anyway, but it hadn't all been futile.
There hadn't been one single time they'd even been able to accomplish that much against the Xehanorts.
Every time they'd struck a major hindrance against the Xehanorts, for each heart found and brought home, one or more others had been stranded, at last ending with Sora's himself.
But they'd actually destroyed the Gazing Eye, and for the first time, they'd all made it back sound and warm.
That had been Anna's doing, not his, but
"And you can't know that by sending that much of his light into Boo's, you just killed her, while you forced Kairi and Riku against their intention to participate in the murder of the innocent, helpless little girl you just committed.
"One…
"Zero.
"Your time has run out.
"And your meaningless existence along with it."
Anna was flexing the fingers of her left hand as though she'd made a guilty and resigned decision, as though remembering holding her palm in a way Sora knew all too well.
Sora couldn't have fallen if he'd wanted to, now.
He couldn't move, even enough for his lungs to refuse to breathe.
All he could do was gaze in horror at the distillation riveted into the foundations of mad and hallucinatory insane fever nightmares.
oh, no way
no she no didn't
Anna saw where Sora was looking.
Her face firmed, and she nodded.
Anna had actually done it.
Even after everything Sora had said to her to caution her, she'd opened a corridor of darkness, with full knowledge this time of what that portended.
Kairi's arms wrapped around him from behind, and Sora became aware he hadn't passed out this time, but he'd been sitting on the ground with his eyes closed, as she pulled him back into a lap, and his head back against her left shoulder.
Warm lips pressed against his face below one eye, and a streak of water there.
Then their warmth covered tears below the other.
What was the point for her to keep doing this, though?
What was the point of Donald's and Goofy's, or Anna's, group hugs?
There was nowhere left to land.
Nowhere left to go, or call, or remember, or return.
Whatever he'd believed he'd known wasn't genuinely gone, and never coming back.
It really had been nothing more than a deranged prank to dash people on the cold hard withered desiccated waste of ineffaceably remorseless reality with sadistic euphoria.
The impulse to pull his hand free surged, but before he could even choose whether or not to go through with it, everything just drained away but aches that stole even the energy to struggle to breathe, and he found himself collapsing back against Kairi as though he was a punctured balloon that had wholly imploded of even the lacuna that had never always been inside him.
No.
Don't go.
His insides seized, and he was practically certain he was going to violently retch up if he didn't, at least, say this.
"You were correct, however, not to doubt we'd pull through," he spoke, his voice an emptied and wrung out thread of a whisper that barely made it out of his mouth.
"This time, you found all of us."
At the effervescent revitalized sentiment, and genuine hope, in Kairi's next words, Sora's eyes burned so much faint, barely perceptible shock flickered through him that tears remained yet even at this time to push against the backs of his closed, throbbing and lancing eyelids.
Kairi's arms and hands pulled him back more securely and tightly near against her.
Her left arm remained wrapped around him, as her right hand rose to brush tear after tear off of his face.
"We have pulled the first thread loose from the skein that can unravel the whole spiral, then," she spoke back.
"So, let's think of a way to keep things like that."
.
BOOK SIX: THE WEFT AND WARP OF INTERCONNECTED CRYSTAL FRACTURES
.
Fin
.
Begin
.
BOOK SEVEN: MANDATED MIRACLES
.
"Fragments of promises well up and spill over
Unable to leave so much as a mark on my heart
I send you the lies and truth that slip through my fingers
And my response to the
Echoing heartbeat I realize I had lost sight of
.
"The gate of sadness keeps returning without end
Transforming endless, distant tears into a warm light
I hope that they reach you
.
"Teardrops flow down my cheeks
And, gathering them in both hands
I erased the shrinking remnants of my memory
Even in a tomorrow where prayers fall on deaf ears
I realized I would find a future in that echoing heartbeat
.
"If there is ever an end to the distant pain and sadness
I hope that the path I start down will be illuminated
By the tiny lights they emit
.
"I send you the lies and truth that slip through my fingers
And my response to the
Echoing heartbeat I realize I had lost sight of
.
"The gate of sadness keeps returning without end
Transforming endless, distant tears into a warm light
.
"If there is ever an end to the distant pain and sadness
I'll gather up a single ray of light
And I'll hope that it reaches you
I'll hope that everything that's hidden
In my teardrops reach you"
'Tears'
GUNDAM SEED DESTINY HD Remaster Project Director's Concept Music Video Four