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CHAPTER 67:
PERMAFROST TEAR GLASS STAINS
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Author's Notes: The pieces for this Chapter are, in order of scene: 'The First Unison,' from the VALKYRIE PROFILE Original Soundtrack, Disc Two; and afterward, 'Great Cathedral,' from the VAGRANT STORY Original Soundtrack, Disc Two; and afterward, 'Shion ~Emotion~,' from the FINAL FANTASY TACTICS Original Soundtrack, Disc Two; and afterwards, 'Holy Angela's Theme Deluxe,' from the FINAL FANTASY TACTICS Original Soundtrack, Disc Two. The first three compositions can be found in KINGDOM HEARTS Insider's MP3 section, and the last one on Zophar's Domain.
"It's too late… for me to undo m"
"You sacrificed yourself for me?"
"Tricks like that don't fly for your average joe."
"Yes, hearts are powerful when they're connected. But if you put too much of that power in one place, some of those hearts might end up breaking."
"You're all just lining up to lose out. Dooming others to take the fall with ya'."
Xion pushed away any sentiments, thoughts, waking nightmares, and reflections, that were present, and that were even potential heralds of misgiving, and second guesses.
I am an average joe.
So, this trick is going to fly.
Xion sprinted at the collective darkness of Data-Hayner, Data-Olette, and Data-Pence, the Keyblade of Hearts leveled in a low, about horizontal, offensive position, with her Kingdom Key raised in a backwards diagonal vertical defensive one.
"Mare, Elsa, I'll drive them off, or capture them," she shouted, without even turning her eyes, or face, from the fourteenth true darkness before her.
"Then, I'll arrest Runeard, and Hans, as prisoners of war.
"You can get the others out of sight."
The Blox comprising the Data-Pence danced forwards, and whirled into a vertical shield with the edges, and corners, of the Blox facing Xion.
The longer this lasted, the longer it would hurt Roxas.
And, short of attempting to imprison them in her heart, which Xion was willing to endeavor if it came down to it, but she was leaving as a last resort because she didn't know if a replica's heart could do it, particularly with her energy siphoning abilities, if the collective was as formless as Vanitas, and his kin, had once been, the sole thing that had any chance of defeating the data collective was the Keyblade of Hearts.
Xion refused to not trust Roxas wouldn't rashly attack her to defend his true other three closest friends, but she remained wary it was a valid danger, and that Roxas wouldn't be in his human form if he did so.
"You sacrificed yourself for me?"
"Yes, hearts are powerful when they're connected. But if you put too much of that power in one place, some of those hearts might end up breaking."
Xion pushed away any awareness of the genuine reality she might be about to battle Roxas once more, along with the other emotions, and thoughts.
And that, this time, she wouldn't be the one to initiate it.
And, whatever the state of Roxas' awareness was, this time, there wouldn't be any smokescreens obscuring the confrontation, the first Organization's, or hers.
Xion opened her heart in its totality to the pulsating warmth of the Keyblade of Hearts, and any memories she retained of Sora wielding it, and Xehanort's Heartless doing so through Riku.
Her gorge heaved so sickeningly, and she became so faintly weightless, as throbbing molten ice flooded through her, she wasn't certain she hadn't thrown up, at least onto her lips, chin, and face, as she harnessed the knowledge of Isa's Berserk combination strikes, and all the variations of Sora's Ars Arcanum she was aware of, and she somersaulted into the double handed beginning of Sora's dream variation of Ars Arcanum with all the channeled lack of restraint of Isa's Berserk style.
The Blox of the shield that had once been a humanoid Data-Pence rolled, and twirled, until the points were facing the Keyblade of Hearts, and they extended, and closed inward, and down, to seize the Keyblade of Hearts in a vise that entirely arrested its movement.
Xion jolted roughly to a halt in midair.
Without any tinges of inflected feeling, the data darkness collective commented, "If there was a purpose in it being good to know anything, I'd believe in my light at the knowledge you're at least connecting with me in battle, while you're discarding aside Mare in her entirety for the empty bitty bytes of hurt she is."
A vicious, savage hiss sounded through clenched teeth from Mare's direction.
Anguished self hate flooded at how Xion couldn't even afford to look back in Mare's direction.
She just ignored it, this time, without pushing it away.
She hurled all her heart into the weft of the tapestry of the Keyblade of Hearts, and her memories of Sora, and Roxas, flying with pixie dust, and the Keyblades themselves.
Then, she attempted to rocket into the air, while weaving an array of strings she called to with all her heart to send her into a Flowmotion inside the vise of the Data-Pence Blox, one that would give her enough acceleration to lift the darkness collective, and herself, into the air, and send them rocketing in the direction of the surviving low slopes of the North Mountain.
Almost so swiftly Xion didn't process she'd succeeded, she was somersaulting in a backwards corkscrew a number of times, increasing her acceleration, and then she skyrocketed into the air, pulling the collective darkness, which appeared to include the spheroid, along with her.
Xion bent the Flowmotion enhanced flight forward, as fast as she could summon energies from the Keyblade of Hearts to move.
They were over the low precipices, basins, slopes, and embankments that had survived, or in rarer cases, withstood, Kairi's Demon Tide, and a throng of armored soldiers with trappings they were moving too fast to identify were rushing into it in the direction of spiked walls of icicles, and whatever spare traces of remaining wood, not even enough to create a single small one room dwelling, had been located in the vicinity of the wasteland, and decapitated mountain, Kairi had created.
Xion barely remembered to breathe at the sight of charging combatant of the Treaty of Flames after charging combatant falling backwards in curtains of arrows; the flaming cart colliding with a small group of troops charging up the slope, and detonating into chunks of wood that lanced, or whirled, through the soldiers even as it lit them on fire; and the shrieking, and howling, soldiers in Arendellian armor, and the unfamiliar armor, rolling on the slope near where another cart had crashed, and set off a blaze.
"It's too l"
"But if you put too much of that power in one place, some of those hearts might end up breaking."
She retained her awareness of her own part in this.
A large number of the combatants on both sides weren't just losing their current forms, but actually dying, and the victims of the flaming carts were dying grisly deaths.
Additionally, the death toll was going to continually burgeon.
And a single death itself was as much a horror of war as the most ghastly number of casualties, to combatants and civilians, slaughter could claim.
Attempting to stop the battle, however, through persuasion, power, or a coalescence of both, would just give the data collective free rein to murder, and hurt, by themselves.
The sole way Xion could protect Roxas, Axel, Mare, Elsa, Tidus, Isa, Namine, and the others, was to defeat, or, at least, fend off, the opponent right in front of her.
They were now over the lowest forests of the stump of the North Mountain.
Xion's stomach heaved with such drawn violence tears sheeted in her eyes, and she doubled over, retching so violently spots danced in her vision before she was more than aware at the edges of her perception she was throwing up.
Snow was rushing right at her.
She threw all her heart into the tapestry of the Keyblade of Hearts, and resumed her flight, but without the Flowmotion, the weight, and inertia, of the data darkness collective still dragged her left shoulder smashing into the snow at an angle hard enough to send lances of pain through her left arm, and accompanying phantom agony from her earlier newly healed injuries to her wrists, and that arm.
She still retained enough presence of mind to roll into a Dodge Roll, and curl it to her right to then extend her right foot out, rise into a kneel, and pivot into a whirl that brought her up to face the darkness collective as she took deep breath, after deep breathing, attempting to quiet insides shifting so sickeningly faint blackness kept reaching up to attempt to drag her into its reaches, from whatever had just caused her to retch.
Past it, where the sphere of energy leading to the ice labyrinth should have been, hovered a slightly larger globe of white, black, and gray fuzz resembling the static on a television screen.
Something Xion couldn't identify gripped her limbs, and body, as though she were a marionette who had fallen motionless, and violently yanked her in its direction.
She dug her feet into the snow, and dirt, of the ground, and pushed back against the drag.
Memories of the crowds she'd seen, on cobblestone and paved roads, and on farms and mountainsides, while traveling the worlds claiming hearts from Heartless, flooded her mind's eye, so vivid, and numerous, she could do nothing more than glimpse herself striking down a Defender on the sidewalk at the side of a reservoir in one, a Shadow in a back alley at the side of a multi lane highway in a different one, a Darkball on a steppe behind a windmill tower in another one, an Angel Star while standing on a circular table on a patio in a different reflection, a Battleship floating above subway tracks in another, a Fat Bandit on an ordinary street winding through a suburban neighborhood in a different reminiscence.
"It's too late… for me to undo m"
"Tricks like that don't fly for your average joe."
"It's too l"
"You sacrificed yourself for me?"
Tears pricked Xion's eyes with hot wetness.
She ignored them, however, and she sent orange chains twining in the direction of the globe of static out of the Keyblade of Hearts with all her heart, and the reflections dispersed as they wrapped tightly around the static to rattle, and clang, along its surface as though they were about to shake themselves into fragments.
They held, though.
The sickening faintness receded.
She, however, was reasonably sure she knew what had caused the illness, and the recollections.
"I"
"You sacrificed yourself for me?"
"Tricks like that don't fly for your average joe."
"Nooo!"
"You have been yourselves at home all your lives!"
Xion drowned herself in every detail of the memory of Elsa throwing herself between Roxas', and her, Keyblades, and gripping them to hold them away from each other's body, as the ice around her completed seizing her, so vividly the old Xion would have been terrified she'd literally called the reminiscence up, and in one of the worst ways possible, if not a number of them, or every single last one.
Xion blinked away the tears.
She also ignored the surge of hope that caused her breathing to hitch, at the knowledge of what she had very possibly just sealed, behind a lock at least as potent as a nearly assembled Final Keyhole.
Had this light been at her side, all along, itself?
It took no effort to keep her voice steady.
"So, that's how he's doing it."
It wasn't a question, even though, as adept, and experienced, at subterfuge as Master Yozora, Luxu, and the Foretellers were, she wasn't totally certain.
The darkness collective of the Data Hayner, Olette, and Pence, now hovering before her with the three humanoid partitions standing on top of the sphere, and perhaps facing her with features she couldn't discern, remained quiet.
Xion couldn't tell, too, whether this was because they knew the answer, or, at the least, what they believed the answer was, or because they weren't aware of what Xion now believed.
"This is why Roxas himself was chosen as the last artificial Kingdom Hearts.
"This is why I was chosen to open the Final Door.
"There's no way Sora's heart, all by its own self, could have stored even all the locked doors leading to the memories of me inside every single person, on every single world, in every single realm, who had so much as heard of me from someone who had glimpsed me in passing.
"Not without activating the Kye-Blade.
"And, when Roxas remembered my name, and he convinced Sora to say it, those weren't paths to people's hearts that were unlocked.
"If Sora wasn't wrong, his heart had been storing the actual memories of uncountable people throughout the realms, and worlds, who had forgotten about me.
"They're tied to the ice labyrinth.
"Or, rather, I should say, to the nebula of electricity interwoven with ice that is now the nebula of frozen stardust for the realm of Synchronicity Perceptual."
Xion removed her Kingdom Key from her right hand in curling silver, and gold, and she gripped the Keyblade of Hearts in both hands to aim its tip at the globule of static.
"That just leaves me with this question.
"Are you going to stand in my way as I break it down into ordinary photons of light and darkness, or just watch me do it?
"Or, can I please convince you to give me a hand?"
"I have an additional offer," Christopher Robin's disembodied voice sounded.
Xion suppressed the urge to clench her teeth.
Christopher's talent, as a living Station of Awakening, to travel from world to world, and realm to realm, at will, was becoming as very tiredly old as it was very quickly fatiguing.
All three Blox figures dropped to one knee, with such simultaneous precision it was practically a single motion, and with the same mirrored movements, they inclined their heads.
Xion solely processed her eyes were widening slightly at the most distant margins of her perception.
Xion adjusted her grip on the handle of the Keyblade of Hearts almost before reality completed returning.
"How about I tell you a long story, give, or take, a minority of centuries, about three best friends from childhood, Yozora, Faerie, and myself, and the days we cavorted in our families' backyards, or among the madly giggling brooks, and the rotting and rusting knives of grass, with the deranged laughter of puffy wool through the breeze under the great wide sky that stretched as big as our eyes could gaze wide?"
Anna, standing in an intersection of igloos down a short street from the foremost ones Elsa was standing past, kept her eyes on her sister. But, Anna was alert for Mickey, and the others, to reappear from wherever they'd gone to talk to Larsa, without their discussion how to respond to the possibility of this war escalating into a genuine interstellar one escalating the war itself, and for Lea to return from whatever she assumed he was doing to attempt to reach Sora.
Anna doubted it would have made any difference whether she was calling on all her years of training in royal composure to keep it together in the face of the battle that had just begun, however.
Other than the departure of a sizeable amount of the slight desperate lightness that, from time to time, had brought tears to her eyes, if no one was looking at her, after Elsa, and Sora, had returned, there wasn't any remaining point, potentialities, pointlessness, misgivings, hurdles, or convictions in concealing, or feeling.
Anna knew better than to shut anyone out herself, but perhaps the sentiment she was the most able to be aware of, if she could even tell the difference between concealing, and feeling, now that hurt and hearths had become as indistinguishably second nature as the most effortless movement, was how much of a blind idiot she'd been to believe, even after she'd thawed both of Elsa's curses, she honestly understood Elsa's hurt.
Intermittently, she'd lose the ability to take in air, out of terror for what she'd do to Olaf, Sven, or Marshmallow if she went anywhere in their vicinity.
She'd erased well over a decade of Elsa's life, for Elsa's happiness to become in far more danger than at any time before.
How could she be relieved, at all, Elsa was back?
Why was Anna upset Elsa had shut her out, to begin with?
At that question, Kairi's presence in Anna peripheral vision caused guilty terror Sora was once more adrift to become more acute.
Even at this time, she still wasn't putting Sora before herself.
Kristoff was nearby, attempting to keep a cadre of officers Elsa had established to oversee the forthcoming potential conflicts in sight at the same time as her.
If she attempted to bring him all the way out of the shadows of the black forest now, that would very possibly give him a lot more surety in his capacity to act as a go between. But, even with how much he was hiding how he felt about what he'd learned he'd done to Christopher, and his family, Anna was too terrified anything short of sacrificing herself for him the way she had Elsa wouldn't cause taking him all the way into her heart to backfire in at least some vital way, if she did so when she knew Kristoff wanted her to worry about how Elsa breaking her promise had hurt her.
And now Anna was selfishly concealing, in whatever sense, how hurt she was Elsa had done this, rather than drowning in terror for how Elsa must feel after her confrontation with Runeard.
"What happened to the baby sister who believed I could just twiddle my fingers and defrost an entire country?"
"She's trying to figure out how to do that for you herself, this time."
Elsa, and Kristoff, weren't supposed to be the ones worrying.
That was her responsibility, as Elsa's sister, and Kristoff's best friend, and, maybe before the end of the d
Tears swam in her eyes.
Not if she attempted to convince Kristoff to stop worrying about her.
He'd just measure himself against Sora's ability to give warmth, once more, rather than see it as her attempting to convince him, just because he didn't show it as openly, that didn't mean he wasn't every flicker as warm as Elsa, Sora, Olaf, Sven, Marshmallow, and the other people nearest in her heart.
Anna could barely tell she wasn't breathing.
After Elsa's confrontation with Runeard, if Anna attempted to talk to Elsa, at all, would Elsa further shut Anna out by worrying she, too, wasn't as open with her warmth as Sora was?
Would Elsa, rather than run herself, claim Anna would be happier with someone whose warmth was starlight beaming through space over light years without end, rather than someone who, while she was just as capable of it, was still learning how to do so?
Why wouldn't that stop being a question?
Anna did not care if she answered it, so why did Elsa, and Kristoff?
Anna turned her eyes to Elsa, as she stood looking in the direction Xion had just flown off in, between Roxas, the path to wherever Sora had left for now, and the new peril to him.
Elsa had two true friends.
Anna had done something for Elsa.
That was what made a difference.
Not Elsa breaking her promise to never shut her out, once more.
Not whether Anna would be happier with Sora, or Kristoff.
"I can never believe that you'd have cared more about yourself than Elsa. What I can, and am willing to, believe in, and choose to believe in, is how blindingly ivory your love for her is.
"And you did love her, and keep her safe, because you never gave up on trying to reach her heart and bring her home, no matter how often and how long she pushed you away for all those years.
"She didn't give up all hope after she blasted you in the heart with the ice fragment.
"If she had, she wouldn't have waited for Hans to kill her.
"She'd have put an end to herself on her own, or used what little control over her magic she did have to die at your hands.
"But she didn't, and do you know why?
"Because, since you kept coming back and endeavoring to reach her with all your heart and bring her into the warmth and home of your love and light and heart and arms no matter how many times she pushed you away from her, or how many years she did it for; she knew, no matter how bad things became, no matter how hopeless things looked, you were still right out there for her, feeling for her and thinking of her and not forgetting her and keeping her close in your dreams; and that no matter how deeply she fell into the darkness, you would always be there to light her way out of it to love and warmth and kindness and home."
How could Anna have meant that much to Elsa, when Anna had been the person who had pushed Elsa too hard, and caused the ice fragment to strike her?
Had Elsa even told Mom, and Dad, how Anna had gotten struck?
Or, had Elsa kept it a secret, at least in part, not wanting to get Anna in trouble for causing the whole nightmare, until Elsa had become so frightened of her talents, and herself, she hadn't even recognized, at least enough, if she just told their parents, or even Granpabbie, what had really happened, they'd recognize Elsa's powers were nothing to fear, and Elsa was eradicating her whole life because Anna had goaded Elsa into attempting to cast a spell she wasn't capable of performing?
Anna hadn't even remembered what she'd done, even with all the memories she'd regained, until the Dregs had assisted her to do so.
Maybe Sora was wrong.
Maybe it hadn't been Anna's presence, right outside the shut door for Elsa, that had kept her from giving up.
Even if Sora had been correct, the Anna he believed he'd known had been as much of an infant's crayon, or chalk, scribble as the reality Anna had once believed in was.
While, at least, Elsa could tell the difference between concealing, and feeling.
Was this how the most hardened guards of Arendelle, patrol people who had actually murdered criminals in the line of duty, a sizeable number of times over, lived?
Anna had attempted to murder a child, and set Roxas up with Elsa.
Anna had just called upon a corridor of darkness.
She was considering, at least a little, doing so now.
At least, if she couldn't accomplish this, through ordinary me
"You look like a crazy trust exercise will cheer you up," Kristoff commented.
Anna started slightly.
Kristoff was standing off to her right, behind the nearest igloo, with a worried, but tiredly reassuring, and assuring, smile on his face.
To her surprise, tears pushed against the backs of her eyes, even with Kristoff right there looking at her.
That was when she believed she'd reached him, and genuinely begun to bring him out of the depths of the dark forest to a fire lit hearth at home sweet home.
When Anna had taken the chance in front of her, and trusted Kristoff to catch her after she let go of the cliffside, and then she'd told him that directly, and patted his shoulder.
And there was a very obvious crazy trust exercise she could ask Kristoff to trust her to let her do for him, to bring him the rest of the way to a warm home from the cold.
It was even possible, by making that referring, on his own initiative, he was talking about establishing a re
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"Whoo-hoo!"
"Slow down!"
"Whoo!"
"Anna!"
"I can't!"
Anna squeezed her eyes shut slightly.
Forget it.
Just forget all of it.
She didn't even know, for sure, she'd reached Kristoff then.
If she had, maybe he wouldn't be concealing his hurt about what he'd done to Christopher, and his family, or think so little of his capability to give the same kind of love Elsa, and Sora, could.
Her insides distorted.
Could she, truly, do this?
Runeard was the very thing Elsa had believed herself to be, and that Anna had been all along, but he was still Grandpa.
If Anna so much as pointed the gunblade strapped to her back at him, far less cut it at him, Anna would defy every any indefinable, discernible, conveyable, potential, past, future, present, or there concept of giving love, and warmth, and putting hearths, and others, before herself she could begin to imagine at the most distantly remote horizons of her most far fetched demented fever dream of insane lunacy.
If Anna did this, to her, at least, there would no longer be any question she'd truly given into the darkness.
That, though, was the most hilarity of howling jape even Anna's cotton headed whimsies could have conceived of in her flighty prancing.
Anna had been a denizen of darkness since she'd first caused Elsa to strike her forehead, with the ice fragment.
If not for her promise to Sora, she most likely would have already have called up a corridor of darkness, to take her to Runeard.
She opened her eyes, and gave Kristoff a weak smile she was surprised she could even recognize held any sincere warmth.
"Thanks, but there's something I need to do," she answered.
How could she recognize the stable vitality in her voice, present alongside the fatigue?
"I'll talk with you about it, after then."
Kristoff shrugged.
"That's a sure thing."
He turned, and within seconds, apparently reasonably reassured Anna was as okay as she had a decent chance of being, at this time, he had vanished around the curl of one of the igloos.
Anna beheld Elsa through tears that were now brimming, to spill down her face.
"Nooo," she whispered, so quietly she knew Elsa hadn't even heard her.
Anna turned, and she cast her gaze over any lines of sight that might see her doing this.
Then, Anna sprinted out of the intersection in the opposite direction from the igloos at what had used to be the entrance to Arendelle, to find a way to sneak onto the battlefield, where she would defeat Grandpa herself, no matter what the cost took, without Elsa anywhere in the vicinity of the confrontation.
Christopher appeared without the air even moving, hovering in the air above, and behind, the darkness data collective of Hayner, Olette, and Pence, with a mildly questioning, and amused, smile on his face, ensconced in the center of a vertical circular megalith of solidly suspended honey that pulsed with altering shades of yellows, and golds, as though it were a firefly that had morphed into a star, Fractured Night in his right hand, with its tip aimed at her.
Xion raised the Keyblade of Hearts.
"If I believed a fight was necessary to keep your discovery from getting out of hand, you wouldn't have even known I was here before you were dead, or unconscious," Christopher commented, in his usual unperturbed voice.
"At this time, I'm of the belief the truth is the most effective weapon.
"Whether you choose to take it that way is up to you."
Xion kept her gaze challenging, and undaunted.
"Say on, then," she responded, her tone level.
"The parts you already know weren't lies, including my physical age," Christopher commented, calmly amused.
"The same is true for my real age, since Elsa murdered my family.
"I merely took the liberty of omitting the part about when, and where, my family, and I, come from.
"Before Strelitzia's terror of herself, and of stepping out of her brother's shadow to become her own person without a safe reality waiting for her to do so, sent us thousands of years into the future, rather than the minority of months her Heartless, and Nobody, attempted to force us to travel, so she could find out what awaited her if she stood up for herself, with the Secret Forest holding the versions of us, and the thirteen darknesses providing the memories.
"Yozora's, and Faerie's, efforts to alter the future, and bring me home to them, cost Faerie her life, and heart, in this space time tapestry, and turned her into an endless slave of the very things she opposed in Gaes; and the rest of Yozora's closest friends, their own hearts, lies, or both.
"The rest was the new history.
"Then Elsa took my blood family from me, and after Maleficent found me, I learned my surrogate older brother, and surrogate older sister, would be glad to be dead.
"Assuming, even though my literal age isn't even fifty, given how time works in the Secret Forest, and Never Land, I can't be sure I'm not actually older than even Faerie's real age, at this point.
"If it's Synchronicity Perceptual you intend to nip in the bud, by all means.
"What's become of the ice labyrinth is a different matter.
"I need it intact, in its current shape.
"Synchronicity Perceptual has its merits, but, while it's an improvement on the sandbox you, and the rest of the members of the white piece, keep reassembling every time the waves wash your castles away, it still falls short in too many of the same ways the New World of the other six Associations do.
"Assuming even Xehanort's failsafe contingency can be called a New World.
"Or, rather, the seven world hearts of pure light, and thirteen of pure darkness, his last two selves are attempting to establish, and maneuver into clashing."
This time, Xion didn't lower her guard.
She let her eyes widen slightly, but reality didn't vanish.
"Mare's New World is a fossil.
"I just betrayed Maleficent here, and declared war against the other six Associations.
"No loyal members of those Associations are present at this vortex, there's no fated place for the sacrosanct war to purify darkness, so they don't need to be, but with this honest statement of purpose that should suffice for the Keyblade of Hearts, and a lock constructed by it, I will now undo it."
Christopher casually, and lightly, flicked Fractured Night in the direction of the chains.
Xion shifted to aim the Keyblade of Hearts at the chain almost before Christopher had completed the statement of purpose necessary for his strike to work.
White hot anguish speared through her heart, and the Keyblade of Hearts shifted, and bulged, as though it were liquid, glaring stormy rainbow colors washing over it, and through its contours, similar to the ones that had been inside the Final Keyhole, as Xion understood Christopher had just used his connections as a Station of Awakening made manifest to deceive the Keyblade of Hearts into attempting to complete itself, when it was in no condition to.
The chains entwining the globule of static started to violently jerk, and pull, in disjointed, haphazard directions, as the lock began to give.
Xion clenched her teeth, but she ignored the tide of despair, and self hate, that cascaded up to attempt to close around her.
Whatever Christopher could do now, if not before Sora, Donald, Goofy, Jiminy, Anna, Buzz, and Woody had even met him, even a human Station of Awakening connected to Luxu shouldn't be able to break the lock of a Keyblade of Hearts while battling her, whether, or not, the data true darkness collective of Olette, Hayner, and Pence was assisting him.
Xion dropped the Keyblade of Hearts into the snow, and brought the Kingdom Key into her right hand in arcing golden, and silver.
She then sprinted forward, at both of them.
Christopher rolled his eyes.
He swung Fractured Night down once in a tightly sharp, horizontal cut.
Dancing gray, black, and white hued flakes of static the size of hailstones surrounded Xion, and they solidified into solidly featureless pitch night as a single thick white line, similar to the one a television showed when it was switching off, appeared right in front of her, and thinned into nothingness.
Xion was barely aware the snow was impacting with her face, and she was on the brink of unconsciousness.
"I"
"Tricks like that don't fly for your average joe."
not this time around
Xion reached for the Keyblade of Hearts with all her heart, and when its weight solidified in her left hand, she called up any fiber of awareness she retained to
turn the fall into a Dodge Roll directed at the chains around the globe
the Dodge Roll into a forward somersault
the forward somersault into a single swing around the globule she cannoned out of to soar over the precipice, back in the direction of Arendelle
into blackness
.
"There was a time when I hated my role in life. That all ended once I embarked on this journey! That role I hated… it was all just in my own head!"-Prince Ceodore Harvey
FINAL FANTASY IV: THE AFTER YEARS