Birth by Sleep

An Empty World

In the badlands, where the old Keyblades still stood in the ground at the angles they had fallen, an old man had spent a year teaching a boy, and the boy wasn't getting any better.

The old man was bald and dark-skinned, with a curved silver beard, gold eyes and ears that came to points. His back had gone crooked with age, his broad shoulders were hunched, and he stood with his hands folded behind him even while he watched the boy fight, as if nothing that happened in front of him could ever be urgent enough to need them. His name was Xehanort. The boy was called Ventus. He was small and blond, and that day dark things were coming up out of the ground all round him, thin and quick, and he was backing away from them with his Keyblade held much too low.

"Please don't do this, Master," said Ventus. "I'm not strong enough."

Xehanort hadn't brought him there to be spared. He wanted the boy afraid, and then angry, and then something more than angry. "Let the dark impulses waken in the pit of your heart," he said. "Release them, here and now! Sharpen your fear into rage."

He kept on pushing, and the boy kept on refusing, until the old man lost patience with the whole exercise. "Really? You would rather die than use the power? Feckless neophyte. If I must, I will extract the darkness from within you myself."

He put his Keyblade to the boy's chest and pulled.

What came out stood up. It was about the boy's size, masked, in a black suit with red lines running across it, and it was wide awake from the very first moment. Ventus went down on the stones and stayed down. Xehanort looked at the new thing with interest and gave it a name in a little rhyme, the way a man might christen a boat. "Empty creature from Ventus riven, to you, the name Vanitas shall be given."

"Yes, Master," it answered, without the slightest hesitation.

What was left of Ventus had a heart in pieces, and it wasn't going to hold together. Xehanort carried him to a chain of small islands out in the sea and laid him down there. "There, you see? An empty world, like a prison. I imagine you will be right at home."

He had meant to leave him. But the broken heart reached out for the nearest whole one, which belonged to a child born on those islands only a short time before, and it caught there, and held. The boy's hand came up. His Keyblade came into it, and a line of light went up out of him into the sky, even though he was unconscious and shouldn't have been able to do anything at all. Xehanort watched it happen and changed his mind about him. "A Keyblade!"

He took Ventus through a corridor of darkness on foot, the boy walking beside him with his eyes open and nothing behind them. Xehanort talked as he went, as old men do when there's nobody to answer. The corridors, he said, weren't meant for the living. Feelings gathered in them, and a heart that tried to take those feelings in would rot, which was why the ones who used them wore coats against it. He didn't think much of the warning. "But those words of caution are for the weak. I believe that a heart strong enough can withstand the strain."

He looked down at the boy. "I suppose this is of no concern to someone who's closed off their heart." And then, to himself, remembering the islands where he had grown up and the one who had raised him there: "My first mentor taught me of the child of destiny who can connect their heart to others and feel what they feel."

The corridor let them out among grassy mountains, at a castle with tall spires held in place by four golden chains that ran to two pairs of twin peaks. In the forecourt a young man and a young woman were training, and they stopped when they saw who had come. Xehanort left Ventus at the door.

The Master of the house came to meet him. This was Eraqus, the friend of Xehanort's youth, older now, his black hair gone grey and grown to his shoulders, with two jagged scars across his face. He wore a long white hooded coat with wide sleeves. The two of them walked the great hall together, under the stained glass, like men who had once walked a great deal together and had got out of the habit.

"It seems you've settled in," said Xehanort. He glanced back towards the forecourt. "You've taken on apprentices. They seem quite bright."

Eraqus had waited a long time to see him. "Better late than never. You mentioned in your letter that you had one of your own."

Xehanort said that he had, and then he stopped walking and started on something harder. "I'm sorry."

Eraqus didn't let him finish. "There's no need. Your letter said enough. Water under the bridge."

So Xehanort told him about the boy at the door. "Yes. His name is Ventus." He let Eraqus take that in. "I took him under my wing this past year. But, I think he may be the child of destiny." He asked Eraqus to take him on. "Yes. He's a special boy, one who deserves to be guided by a true heir to light. I stand too close to the darkness."

Eraqus looked at him as though he had been handed something very heavy. "Could he really be."

Somewhere behind them, Ventus screamed, and both men turned and hurried to him.

Afterwards, Xehanort walked along a corridor of the castle alone, and found the masked boy there, waiting for him where he had no business to be. "You were to wait at the badlands."

Vanitas wanted to know how Ventus had taken it. When he got no answer, he decided he didn't care. "Whatever. Good riddance."

"I did this for him," said Xehanort. "Not you."

That stung. "What do you mean, old man? Switching sides on me now?"

The old man turned his head. "Hold your tongue, boy. You may be pure darkness, but you are no match for my blade."

Vanitas backed down at once. "G-got it."

They walked on together, and Xehanort told him an old story, as though he were only passing the time. Long ago there had been thirteen ancient darknesses. The Keyblade Masters of old had made themselves into vessels for the seven strongest, four more had been locked away in a world made of data, and two had been destroyed when that world collapsed. "But one survived, it is said, and disguised itself as an ally of light. Perhaps it hides inside one of us, here in this time. Tell me, Vanitas. As a being of darkness, what do you think?"

Vanitas didn't think it had anything to do with him. "I'm my own being," he said. When he was pressed on where the others might be, he shrugged. "Who knows?"

Xehanort asked him, purely hypothetically, why a darkness like that would need to hide. "Fear, perhaps?"

Vanitas laughed at him. "And what exactly would I have to fear?"

"Light," said Xehanort, without hesitating.

Vanitas snorted. "Ha! You think I'm afraid of Ventus? You're dreaming."

Xehanort kept walking. Now he said it, the thing he had been circling all along. The boy's heart hadn't been split into light and darkness at all. "You were not born from it. You inhabited his heart, I surmise. And if that's true, where did you and he come from? Ventus appeared in my dreams as a young lad. Our meeting was not by chance."

For the first time, Vanitas stopped sounding bored. "What do you know?"

The old man only turned it back on him. "What is there to know?"

"Nothing," said Vanitas. "Forget it."

When Ventus woke, he was in a bed in the castle, and he had no idea where he was or how he had got there. Eraqus told him he had always been here.

The two from the forecourt came and stood over him. The young man was tall and heavily built, with brown hair spiked up on top and falling over his forehead, blue eyes, and armour on one arm, and he couldn't keep his questions in any kind of order. "So, are you here to train with us? Where are you from? Who was that man with you? You good with a Keyblade?"

Eraqus answered for the boy. "Ventus cannot tell you anything, because he cannot remember anything."

The young woman had blue eyes and bright blue hair cut short and choppy, and she said less than he did and noticed more. Their names were Terra and Aqua. They took to the boy almost from the start. Terra found an old wooden Keyblade, the kind apprentices practise with, put it in Ventus's hands, and said the words of the inheritance rite over it with a grin, as a joke. "In your hand, take this key. And so long as you have the makings, then through this simple act of taking, its wielder you shall one day be made."

Ven kept it.

Beneath the Same Stars

Four years went by.

The castle they lived in was called the Land of Departure, and for Ventus, who remembered nothing before it, it was the whole of the world. There was the forecourt where they trained, and the great hall, all gold and lit only through its tall stained-glass windows, with three thrones at the top of it. There was a path up the mountain between small trees and thin waterfalls, and at the end of the path a summit where nobody ever went to do anything useful. Ven went there to lie on his back.

He was lying there the night before the examination, all alone, when the sky began to fall to pieces over his head, streak after streak of light. "A meteor shower!"

He was still gaping at it when a face leaned over his, upside down. "Ven, you hopeless sleepyhead."

He nearly jumped out of his skin. "Whoa! Gimme a break, Aqua."

Terra came up the path after her, and the three of them lay out on the rock together to watch. Ven had a question he had never asked anybody before. "Y'ever wonder what stars are? Where light comes from?"

Terra answered it the way their Master had once answered it for him. "That every star up there is another world. Yep, hard to believe there are so many worlds out there besides our own. The light is their hearts, and it's shining down on us like a million lanterns."

Ven wanted more than that, and Terra laughed and wouldn't give it to him. "You're too young to know now."

Ven sat up, offended. "Quit treating me like a kid."

Aqua was laughing at both of them. "I can't help it. You two would make the weirdest brothers."

Terra rolled his eyes. "Oy, sometimes you are such a girl."

She didn't rise to it, because she had something in her lap. "Oh yeah. Terra, you and I have our Mark of Mastery exams tomorrow. I made us good luck charms. Here!"

There were three of them, star-shaped, made of stained glass set in silver frames, with a cord at the top and the emblem of Mastery in the middle. Hers was blue, with cyan at the tips. Terra's was orange and yellow. Ven's was light green, with sea green at the tips.

Ven turned his over in his hands. "So this isn't a real good luck charm?"

"Of course," said Aqua. "One for each of us. Somewhere out there, there's this tree with star-shaped fruit, and the fruit represents an unbreakable connection. So as long as you and your friends carry good luck charms shaped like it, nothing can ever drive you apart. You'll always find your way back to each other. Technically, I think you're supposed to make them with seashells, but I did the best with what I had."

She had put a spell on them to make up for the shells. She held hers up to the falling light. "An unbreakable connection."

Terra looked at his for a long moment and then put it away, as if it were a little too much for him. "Well, tomorrow's the exam. Anybody wanna spar?"

Ven wouldn't hear of it. "Trust me, you guys are ready. You're gonna clean up at the exam tomorrow."

Terra lay back down with his hands behind his head. "I hope it's that easy."

Nobody sparred. They stayed where they were until the shower was over, and it was the last night the three of them would ever spend under the same stars.

The Mark of Mastery

The examination had been Xehanort's idea. Eraqus had meant simply to give his two eldest the title and be done with it, and he had written to his old friend to come and see it done. The letter that came back said that Terra was open to darkness, that a formal test would be the responsible thing, and that Xehanort would of course be delighted to attend.

So the next morning they stood in the great hall under the stained glass: Terra and Aqua before the thrones, Ven off to one side where he had been told to stand, and the old man a little apart from everyone, with his hands behind his back. Eraqus spoke from his throne.

"Today you will be examined for the Mark of Mastery. Not one but two of the Keyblade's chosen stand here as candidates, but this is neither a competition nor a battle for supremacy, not a test of wills, but a test of heart. Both of you may prevail, or neither. But I am sure our guest, Master Xehanort, did not travel all this way to see our youngest prospects in years fall short of the Mark. I trust you are ready." He raised his hand. "Then let the examination begin."

He set orbs of light loose in the hall for them to strike down. Xehanort never moved and seemed to do nothing at all, but the light in the orbs went dark and they stopped behaving like a test. One of them broke away from the others and went for the boy at the side of the room. Ven put his Keyblade through it before anybody could reach him. Aqua was at his side a moment later.

"But Ven, you're in danger here!" said Aqua. "Go wait in your room."

Ven waved her off. "Don't worry about me. You two focus on the exam!"

"He can take care of himself," said Terra. "He's been out there training just as hard as us."

Eraqus let it go on. "That was unexpected, but one must keep a still heart even in the most trying of circumstances. It was an excellent test, one I chose to let unfold. Which brings us to your next trial. Now, Terra and Aqua, the two of you will face each other in combat. Remember, there are no winners, only truths, for when equal powers clash, their nature is revealed. Begin!"

They had sparred with each other for years, and for a while it went the way it always went. Then darkness crept up Terra's arm and settled on his hand. He saw it there, and he stopped and forced it back down. It took him only a moment, but a moment was enough to fail him. On the far side of the hall, Xehanort watched with satisfaction.

Eraqus gave the result himself. "We have deliberated and reached a decision. Terra, Aqua, you both performed commendably. However, only Aqua has shown the Mark of Mastery. Terra, you failed to keep the darkness within you sufficiently in check. But there is always next time. That is all. Aqua, as our newest Keyblade Master, you are entitled to certain knowledge. Please wait here for further instruction."

Terra stood where he was with his fists clenched. "The darkness. Where did it come from?"

Aqua started towards him, and Ven started after her, and he turned away from both of them. "Sorry, but I need some time alone."

Out on the cliffs, where nobody from the castle would see, Xehanort met the masked boy. "What do you make of Ventus?"

Vanitas had his opinion ready. "He ain't gonna cut it. Somebody's gotta break that loser in."

The old man didn't want it done while he was a guest. "Not here, you won't. I have to keep up appearances."

"I know that," said Vanitas. "He just needs a little incentive to leave home."

The creatures that answered to Vanitas were already out in the worlds, sent there on the old man's instructions: to put something in front of Ventus nasty enough to make him fight, and to make the worlds bad enough that someone would have to be sent into them.

Terra had gone as far from the hall as the castle would let him, and he was talking to himself when the old man found him. "There's darkness within me. So what does that matter? I know I'm strong enough to hold it back."

Xehanort came up beside him. "Yes," he said kindly, and let a moment pass. "You are indeed strong. The darkness is nothing to fear. And yet, how frustrating that Eraqus refutes its power. Why, you could train with him forever and still, you'd never be a Master in his eyes."

Terra turned to him as though he had been waiting all morning for somebody to say something he could use. "But why? Help me understand, Master Xehanort. What is it that I have failed to learn?"

The answer was the last thing he expected. "You're fine as you are. Darkness cannot be destroyed. It can only be channeled."

In the hall, Eraqus had begun to teach Aqua what a Master was for, which turned out to be less about fighting than she had expected. "And insomuch as you are now Keyblade Master, you must always be conscious of."

He never finished. A message had come for him, and he listened to it in silence and then answered. "Very well then, I will send my pupils to investigate. Yes, I understand. Farewell." Terra had come back into the hall while he spoke, and Eraqus turned to the two of them.

The message was from Yen Sid, he told them, an old friend and a Master no longer, who still kept watch on the tides of light and darkness. The Princesses of Heart were in danger, and not only from darkness. "Fledgling emotions that have taken monster form. Yen Sid calls them the 'Unversed.'" They were to strike down anything that upset the balance of light and darkness, and these were no exception. There was something else, too. He had tried to pass the news on to Master Xehanort, and he couldn't reach him. The old man had gone.

Terra stared. "Master Xehanort is gone?"

"So here we are," said Eraqus. "I need you two to get this situation under control. Eliminate the Unversed, and find Master Xehanort. I have unlocked the Lanes Between. You may use these forbidden pathways to travel between this world and countless others. The darkness looms closer than usual within these spaces, but your armor will protect you. Lastly, remember that order must be kept. You cannot tell anyone there are other worlds. Now go, and fulfill your duty."

He kept Terra back for a moment and spoke to him more gently than he had in front of the others. "Terra. Consider this an opportunity. A second chance for you to change my mind. You must know, I care for you like my own son. If I could have my way, I would name you Master in a second. But, how can I, when you are so obsessed with power? Terra, you mustn't be afraid of losing. Fear leads to obsession with power, and obsession beckons the darkness. You must never forget."

Terra bowed his head. "Thank you, Master. I swear, I will not fail you again."

Then Terra went, and Eraqus called Aqua back before she could follow. "Wait, Aqua. Before you depart, I have one other. Well, call it a request, of the utmost priority. I told Terra this could be a second chance to show the Mark of Mastery, and I meant it. However, that flicker of darkness he displayed during the examination, I can sense it runs very deep. If he were to. If those powers were to prove too much for him to handle, I want you to bring him back to me at once. It's for his own good. I could not bear to lose any of you to the darkness."

Aqua was quiet for a moment before she answered. "Of course. I would never let that happen. I promise you I will bring Terra back. Only this time, you'll see he has what it takes to be a Master. He's not as weak as you think."

Ven was in his room, where he had been sent, when suddenly the masked boy was in it with him. "Better hurry, Ventus. Or you'll never see Terra again."

Ven had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

"Like right now? He's leaving you behind," said Vanitas. "And by the time you catch up, he'll be a different person."

Ven was on his feet. "Look, whoever you are, you don't know the first thing about Terra. Me and him will always be a team. You trying to pick a fight or what?"

The masked boy only sounded bored with him. "Oh, grow up. Is that what you call friendship? You'll never know the truth unless you go out and look for it yourself. Come on, what could you possibly know when you're stuck here, looking at nothing but what's in your tiny world?"

Ven demanded to know what he had meant about Terra, and got the same answer back, harder. "Exactly what I said, idiot. The Terra you know will be gone forever."

Ven told him that was stupid.

"Stupid, or true," said Vanitas. And then he was gone.

Ven ran. He caught Terra in the forecourt, already in his armour, and tried to tell him. But Terra had troubles enough of his own and was halfway out of the world already, and he didn't stop to listen. He threw his Keyblade into the air, it came down changed into something he could ride, and he rose into the sky and was gone. Ven stood there for about as long as it took to decide. Then his own armour burst out of the plate at his shoulder in a flash of light and closed over him, and he went after him.

Aqua saw him go from the forecourt. So did Eraqus. "No! He mustn't! You have to bring him back!"

So Aqua left with two errands, and only one of them was the one she had been given where anyone else could hear.

The Sleeping Princess

The armour came out of something they already wore, a plate at the shoulder, and closed over them in a flash of light. It was what kept the dark between the worlds off a person while they crossed it. Their Keyblades changed into things they could ride: Terra's was built like a bike, Ven's was a board, and Aqua's was a bow with a platform to stand on. They left one after another, and none of them travelled together.

Terra came down in a country where nobody was awake. The castle was silent, the guards were asleep at their posts, and the only things moving in it were creatures he had never seen before and recognised anyway. "Monsters! The ones the Master mentioned, these are the Unversed!"

When he had dealt with them, he found that someone was watching him: a tall woman in black robes, green-skinned, with a horned headdress and a staff, who seemed to find him far more interesting than the monsters.

"What's this. Why aren't you asleep, boy? That fool Flora cast a spell to put everyone in this castle into a deep, deep slumber." She gave her name as though that ought to have been enough. "Why, I am Maleficent, as all who dwell in this kingdom would know. Now you must reciprocate the introduction. Who are you?"

"I'm Terra. What do you know about those monsters, the ones who attacked me?"

She had no interest in them whatsoever, and said so. When he asked about Xehanort, the name meant nothing to her, though she did remember someone leaving the castle, and she led him gently round to what the stranger might have said. "Perhaps he did speak, about imprisoning 'the light'. 'The light' could be so many things. Could he have meant Princess Aurora?"

Aurora was asleep in a room at the top of the castle, and she would stay asleep. "Her heart is filled with light, not the slightest touch of darkness," said Maleficent. "Just the kind of heart I need." She let him picture it with her: seven of the purest hearts, which together would grant the power to rule all worlds. She had noticed what he was carrying. "Why, that key you hold. The Keyblade, is it called?" It was, she said, the only way to obtain the hearts.

Terra had had enough of being led about. "No more games. Where is Master Xehanort?"

She only smiled. "Impudence will get you nowhere, child. If you wish to learn more, you must retrieve the heart of Aurora."

When he refused, she told him it wasn't a question of why, but of will. "In your heart, there is darkness just waiting to be awakened." And she had power over sleep. "And I can awaken what's inside you. Then you will be free to be who you truly are."

He never saw it coming. The next thing he knew was the room at the top of the castle, and the sleeping princess with the light gone out of her, and Maleficent holding it, delighted. "Here it is. Just what I've waited for. To think that all he spoke of was and will be true."

Terra demanded to know what she had done to him. She wouldn't take the credit for it.

"You speak as if I pulled some invisible strings. No, you couldn't be further from the truth, child. I simply whispered to the darkness you already held inside." Xehanort, she told him, had disappeared into the darkness, and that was all she knew. But now she knew that the Keyblade was the way to gather hearts. "Join me. Collect six more hearts of pure light. Then we will rule all the worlds together."

Terra stepped back from her. "You seem to be mixed up. I'm a peacekeeper, not a tyrant!"

"Hmph. For a peacekeeper, you're off to an exceptionally poor start," said Maleficent. "Remember this. The darkness in your heart cannot be held back by force or strength. Now, my work here is done, as is yours. Wasn't there someone you needed to chase?"

Then she was gone, and the castle was full of Unversed.

He fought them because there was nobody else awake to do it, and afterwards he went back up and stood over Aurora. He believed what he had been told. "It's my fault her light was stolen. It was because I was weak. I'm sorry. I'll get your light back, once I learn to stand up against the darkness."

He stayed a while longer, trying to make the pieces fit. "Why would Master Xehanort imprison the light? The purest hearts of light, do they hold the answer?"

When he had gone, Maleficent came back to the room and considered the work ahead of her. "Seven pure hearts, each completely void of darkness. Such a search may take some time."

In a wood some way from there, a queen kept a mirror. Terra came into her chamber while she was consulting it, and kept out of sight long enough to hear it tell her that someone was fairer than she was: a girl called Snow White, whose heart was filled with light. He looked at the mirror, a white mask floating in the glass, and couldn't help himself. "A mirror that knows and sees everything. How about that?"

The queen saw him.

"My name is Terra," he said. "I'm looking for a man named Xehanort. Master Xehanort. I thought maybe you might have seen him."

She had a price for the mirror's answer. He was to find Snow White in the woods, kill her, and bring back her heart.

He went out into the woods with it. He had already lost one heart of light to his own weakness, and the thought of another sat badly with him. "A heart of light. This Snow White is my best chance right now. Maybe she will lead me closer to Master Xehanort. But what if I. No, I won't let that happen."

He found her in a glade full of flowers, and asked her only his own question. "Does the name Xehanort mean anything to you?"

Before she could answer, Unversed came up out of the grass, and she ran from them in terror, and from him too.

He went back to the queen with nothing in his hands. "A request I chose to ignore. You know, you claim to be radiant, but all I see are shadows of jealousy, hanging thick on your heart."

She turned the mirror on him for that, and it drew him inside. Something lived in the glass, and he had to fight his way out past it. When he came out, he made her do the asking. "Now, you will ask the mirror. Where can I find Master Xehanort?"

The mirror answered in a riddle. "Beyond both light and dark he dwells. Where war was raged upon the fells."

Terra waited for more, and there was no more. "Is that all? Thanks. You've been a big help."

Ven came into the same wood not long after Terra had gone, and had a harder time of it. He found the cottage where seven dwarfs lived, and the dwarfs took one look at him and decided he was a thief. A tall man dressed very like this boy had come through, monsters had come with him, and after that Snow White had gone missing. The dwarfs had put those things together and come up with an answer.

Ven did his best. "That's not nice, treating me like some kind of bad guy. I'm just trying to find a friend. His name is Terra. He's dressed kind of like me, about yay tall."

It didn't help, and in the end he gave up. "Fine, I get it. You want me to leave, I'll leave. Oh, but, can you tell me where I can find some other people around here?"

He found Snow White himself, lost and frightened in the woods, and offered to take her somewhere safe. "Well, I saw a house just up ahead. Come on, I'll take you there. Oh, I'm Ventus. Ven for short."

The way there went through the dark part of the wood, where the trees came alive and reached for her, and he put himself in front of them. "Back off!"

Further on, in a meadow, he met an old woman with a basket who had a great deal to say about Terra. She said he had come to her with a Keyblade in his hand and threatened her, and demanded to be told where Xehanort was. She said it sadly, the way people give bad news about somebody else's friend.

Ven shook his head. "That doesn't sound like him at all. Ma'am, where did Terra go?"

He refused to believe her, but he couldn't stop thinking about it.

A Heart Filled with Light

The Castle of Dreams was a white palace above a town and a wood, and a ball was being held in it. Terra came into that world hunting Unversed, and he left it with something else. A girl lived there whose life had seemed hopeless, a servant in her own home. She had gone to the ball anyway, and it had worked. Before she went, he had told her that she had to be strong.

"Darkness always finds a way into a wounded heart," he had said. "You have to be strong. Strength of heart will carry you through the hardest of trials."

She had remembered him. "Thank you, Terra."

He was on his way out when Aqua came in, and that was how they found each other, the first of the three to meet again. He was glad to see her, and less glad to be asked where he had been. When she told him that Ven had run away from home after them, he went quiet. "No. Actually. Just before I left, he tried to tell me something. I should have listened to what he had to say."

He had something to pass on before he went. "There's this girl here, her name is Cinderella. She made me realize how powerful it is just to believe. No matter how impossible things seem, a powerful enough dream will always be enough to light the darkness. If you see her, give her my thanks."

He told her one more thing he had learned there: the Unversed were being led by a boy in a mask. Then he was gone again, and she watched him go and let herself believe what she wanted to. "He'll be all right. He won't give in to it."

The girl's home had a stepmother in it, and two stepsisters, and Aqua knew what they were within a minute of seeing them. "There was something very wrong about them." At the house she was sure of it. "As I feared. There is darkness here." She had been taught one thing about darkness, and taught it thoroughly, and she had her Keyblade out.

An old woman stopped her with a word. "It's dangerous to fight the darkness with light, my dear."

She was Cinderella's Fairy Godmother, she said, and she appeared to those who believed that dreams come true. Aqua lowered her Keyblade. "Then I'm honored. But why would you advise me not to fight darkness with light?"

"Strong rays of sun create dark shadows," said the old woman. The stepmother and her daughters were jealous of the girl, and jealousy was darkness. "Light and dark go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other." What Aqua ought to do wasn't to strike at the dark but to help the light that was already there. A small friend of the girl's was working very hard at that, and Aqua could go and help him.

She did, and afterwards she found Cinderella and thanked her for something the girl didn't know she had done. "I actually want to thank you, for teaching Terra he needs to keep believing." But the lesson sat awkwardly beside the one she had brought from home, and she said so. "A pure heart filled with light. It's strange, the Master taught me darkness needs to be destroyed. But how, if not with light?"

The Fairy Godmother only smiled at her. "Oh, my dear, you're too young to know. Experience more things, and you'll find the answer. Just trust in your dreams."

Ven passed through the same world by a different door. It shrank him to the size of a mouse, which he took badly. "What is going on? Somebody tell me how I got so SMALL!"

The mice in the walls took him for one of their own, and Cinderella, when she found him, was merely curious. "I've never seen a mouse like you before."

Somebody there asked him what his dream was, and he found he had never thought about it until then. "I wonder. Funny. I'd never really thought about it, at least until you asked me. My dream is to become a Keyblade Master."

Aqua went on to the wood where the queen kept her mirror, and arrived too late for most of it. Snow White had eaten a poisoned apple and was lying in a glass coffin, and the dwarfs stood round it and told Aqua about her.

"From what you've said, she must have been very loved," said Aqua. "But, how did this happen to her?"

She went into the queen's chamber to look for some way to undo it, and the mirror pulled her in just as it had pulled Terra. When she had fought her way out, it told her only that the queen was dead, and gave her nothing else.

In the end, a prince came through the wood and the girl woke up, and Aqua, watching, was more moved than she had expected. "That's so sweet. It's just like a miracle." She thought about Ven, who had never once been out of the castle before this, and found she could see it differently. "Every waking is a new journey. Maybe Ven left, because it was his time."

Ven came to the country where the princess slept and met three good fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, who took one look at him and decided that his heart was pure. He could only stare at them. "Wha. Oh, I'm sorry. It's just, I've never seen anyone so beautiful."

They had Aurora's heart to find, and he found it for them, shut away in a dark place, and set it free. "That should do it." As it went past him, he saw some of what she had been dreaming, and it was a man she was waiting for.

Maleficent was waiting for him when he came out. "Someone has released Aurora's heart. Tell me, child, was it you?" She looked at what he was holding and knew his name. "A Keyblade. You must be Ventus."

He asked her how she could possibly know about the Keyblade.

"My powers ensure I'd know of the key to bringing me hearts," said Maleficent. "Terra gave me a demonstration."

Ven went white. Maleficent let it sink in, and then she told him straight out. "Why, yes. In fact, it was he who stole Princess Aurora's heart."

"That's a lie!" shouted Ven.

"I was asked to leave you unharmed," said Maleficent, "but it seems I have no choice!"

He fought her over it, and he was still fighting her over it when Aqua arrived and heard what was being said. Maleficent saw her and was pleased. "You don't believe me? That's unfortunate, for he agreed so easily." She looked from one of them to the other. "The truth can be most cruel, even amongst the closest of friends. After all, one never knows the secrets of another's heart. I'm sure you'll agree. Ventus. Aqua."

Aqua told Ven he was in danger out here and that he was coming home with her. He wouldn't. "Sorry, Aqua. But I can't go with you." And he ran, before she could stop him.

That left Aqua and Maleficent. "I see you, too, wield a Keyblade," said Maleficent. It was a key, she said, that opened the hearts of men and of whole worlds. She asked whether Aqua would care to assist her too, the way Terra had, and when Aqua refused, she put her in a cell under her castle to think it over. There was a man in it already, a prince, and the three fairies came down in secret to set him free, with a sword and a shield. Aqua went with them.

"I'm going with you," she told them. "There's something I need to know, and Maleficent has the answer."

At the top of the castle, Maleficent had more to say about Terra. "Such a pity, child, that you don't have Terra's gift for obedience. Nor can you see how easy it was for him."

Aqua wouldn't believe that he had given in to darkness, and Maleficent laughed at her. "Quite the contrary. He fully embraced the darkness within himself."

Then she stopped being a woman and became a dragon, breathing green fire, and it was the prince with the sword who finished her.

She wouldn't accept it. "I will not be defeated by something as insignificant as love."

"It's the power of true love that defeated you," Aqua told her. When Maleficent sneered, she didn't back down. "You don't even know the first thing about it. You're too clouded by darkness to see that there's something greater. Try all you want, but you'll never defeat a heart filled with light."

Maleficent drew herself up. "Perhaps. But remember one thing. As long as there is light, there will be darkness. And in time, many more will be drawn to it. Then they will all belong to me!"

Aqua left that country with the thing she had come for, and wished she hadn't. She had defended Terra to Maleficent's face, and she had started to believe her anyway. "Terra. You better stay strong for me."

The Badlands

Terra left the Castle of Dreams with a new question piled on top of the old one. "The boy in the mask who was leading the Unversed. Who is he? Does he have anything to do with Master Xehanort's disappearance? Master Eraqus said he first received word of these events from Master Yen Sid. Maybe it's time I went and spoke with him myself."

The tower stood by itself in a small world of its own, crooked, and it was mostly staircase. As Terra started up it, something small came down past him at tremendous speed, said a word, and vanished in a flash of light. "Alakazam!"

The room at the top was the largest in the tower, with bookshelves and pots and windows cut in the shapes of stars and a crescent moon. The sorcerer in it had a long grey beard parted down the middle and a tall blue hat with stars on it, and very small pupils in a great deal of white, and he didn't look in the least surprised.

"Master Yen Sid," said Terra. "My name is Terra."

"Yes. Eraqus's pupil. I've been expecting you. It is the Unversed."

Terra called him Master again, and was corrected. "I am no longer a Master. I doffed that mantle."

Terra bowed his head. "Yes, Master Yen Sid. I thought it best to seek the counsel of one wiser than myself."

The small thing on the stairs had been Mickey, Yen Sid told him, who had also come to him for guidance. "As a king, he is good and kind. But the weight of a crown has not cured him of impetuousness. He has left with an object whose power he does not understand nor know how to control."

Terra said he wasn't sure he even understood what was wrong. "Master Xehanort is missing. And now I've learned there's a masked boy who is controlling those Unversed on the loose."

The sorcerer told him to consider that those might not be two problems, but one.

Terra stared at him. "Master Xehanort and the Unversed are connected somehow?"

Yen Sid wouldn't go further than that. "I must not make assumptions. Find Xehanort, Terra. That is where you should begin."

When Terra had gone back down the stairs, the sorcerer sat on alone and spoke to a man who wasn't in the room. "I had hoped, Xehanort, your heart would no longer lead you astray."

Out in the Lanes Between, Terra heard his name. "Terra." It was the old man's voice, coming from nowhere. "Terra, come see me at once."

It brought him down in the badlands, the same wasteland of old Keyblades the mirror had meant, where the blades stood out of the dry ground at the angles they had fallen and nothing else lived. Xehanort was waiting. Terra had come a long way carrying things he didn't understand, and he said so before anything else. "I have been to other worlds. I know all about the things you've done. I just don't understand why."

Xehanort had the answer ready. "Someone had to safeguard the light, from the demon I unleashed. You must know about the boy by now, the one in the mask. His name is Vanitas. A creature of pure darkness. One of my making."

Terra asked him where such a thing could possibly have come from.

"He came from Ventus," said Xehanort.

He told it like a confession. "Yes. Vanitas is the darkness that was inside your friend. It was an accident. While training with me, Ventus succumbed to darkness, and there was but one way to save him, strip that part of him away. And thus Vanitas was made. In the process, I damaged Ventus's heart in the most horrific way. So I did what I felt was right, and left him with Eraqus. I knew the boy could not stay with me, the man who did him such grievous harm."

It was the kind of thing Terra could forgive. "Master Xehanort. Ventus has gotten a lot better since then. You shouldn't blame yourself for trying to save him."

The old man bowed his head. "Well. Thank you, lad. You know how to put an old man's heart at ease." He had tried to contain the creature, he said, the moment it emerged. But Vanitas used the Keyblade to sow seeds of darkness. "And now, you see, the worlds teem with his ghastly underlings."

Then he asked. "He has no control over the darkness in his heart. The Keyblade is not his to bear. He's an abomination beyond hope of salvation. Lend me your strength, Terra. Right this wrong that I have wrought."

Terra didn't hesitate. "Don't worry, Master. I'll take care of Vanitas."

Xehanort told him where to look. The boy's darkness was drawn to light, to disrupt it and then destroy it. "It stands to reason that he will strike next in the city of light, Radiant Garden."

Leaving the country of the sleeping princess, Ven spotted the masked boy out in the Lanes Between and went after him, and the masked boy let himself be followed, all the way down to the badlands. Ven landed shouting. "All right! What did you mean about Terra being a different person?"

Vanitas didn't answer that. "Good. Let's see what you're made of."

It wasn't a fight. It went one way from the start, and it ended with Ven on the ground and the masked boy standing over him in disgust. "That really all you got? Man, you are worthless. I'd be going against the Master's orders, but so what? As far as I'm concerned, your job here is done."

Something came down out of the sky and landed between them. The newcomer was a mouse, round-eared, about waist high, and it had a Keyblade of its own. "Don't worry! You're safe." He turned on the masked boy, furious. "Tell me where you got that! Keyblades are not something you use just to bully somebody around! Here, I'll show ya!"

Ven got up off the ground. "We both will!"

Between them they drove Vanitas back, and he didn't seem to mind much. "Hmph, you win. Consider yourself on probation." Then he was gone.

The mouse's name was Mickey. He had run off too. "Yep. I've been trainin' under the great Yen Sid. He found out the worlds are in trouble, an' I sorta took off without tellin' him."

Ven laughed for the first time in a long while. "Well, that makes both of us. I ran off, too."

What Mickey had taken with him was a small shard that moved him between worlds, and he was honest about how well he could work it. "All I hafta do is think it, and the Star Shard will take me anywhere I wanna go. At least I thought it would. I haven't quite got the fine points down, like, when, or where. It just kinda kicks in whenever it wants to. But I wouldn't have met you if it hadn't brought me here."

It began to glow in his hand while he was still explaining. "Ya know, it might not be an accident. Maybe it starts workin' 'cause it's reactin' to somethin'." Then it took both of them together, and where it put them down was a city.

The City of Light

Radiant Garden was a place where people lived. A castle in pale colours stood at the top of it, and below the castle lay a town full of trees and grass and flowers. Great fountains were set into the stone of its walls, climbing plants grew over everything, and beyond the walls there was the sea, with green mountains a long way off.

Aqua came to it on Terra's heels, having spotted him out in the Lanes Between, and lost him somewhere in its streets. What she found instead was a very small girl running, with Unversed behind her. The girl was about four, in a white shirt cut like an apron with blue flowers on it and a pink skirt, and Aqua felt something from her before she had even reached her. "I can feel the light."

The child ran straight to her and, frightened, grabbed the hilt of Aqua's Keyblade with both hands, the way a child grabs a grown-up's arm. Nobody meant it to happen, but that was enough to complete the inheritance rite by accident.

Then somebody else dropped into the square out of nowhere, round-eared and waist high, with a Keyblade of his own. "Hurry! Ya gotta get that girl to someplace that's safe."

They fought the Unversed off together. Afterwards, Aqua looked down at the child. "I sense light within this girl. You think that's why they attacked her?"

The mouse introduced himself. "And I'm Mickey. I used to be Yen Sid's apprentice. I came back to him for some more training." Before he could say any more, the thing in his pocket began to shine. "Let's join forces! Oh no, not now! I'll be okay! See ya real soon!" And he was gone.

The girl had picked something for Aqua while all that was going on. "I picked you some flowers. Thank you for saving me."

Aqua knelt down to take them, and asked her name.

"My name's Kairi," said the girl. "Nice to meet you!"

Aqua smiled at her, touched the little charm the child wore on a string round her neck, and put a spell on it. "Wait, Kairi, just a minute. I just cast a magic spell on you. One day when you're in trouble, the light within you will lead you to the light of another. Someone to keep you safe."

Kairi's grandmother came to fetch her home, and on the way Kairi asked for a story. "Could you tell me that story?" The story was an old one, about a time when there was nothing but light and everyone lived in it, and then the darkness came. Aqua listened until they were out of hearing.

Ven had come down with Mickey and been separated from him, and he went straight up to the castle, where two of the guard stood at the doors. One was tall and broad, with black dreadlocks tied back and a lance; the other carried an axe.

"The castle is presently closed," said the one with the axe.

Ven was sure of what he had seen. "But somebody just came this way! He's a friend of mine."

The one with the lance didn't move. "We aren't aware of any visitors. Now run along home, boy, before the monsters get you."

The monsters came while he was still standing there. "They're here!" cried the one with the axe.

The other's lance came up. "Radiant Garden shall not fall under the likes of you."

But Ven was already running at them, and then after them into the town.

"But you're just a child!" shouted the one with the lance.

The two guards would have gone after him, but a thin man in a white coat, with long pale hair, came out of the castle and stopped them. "Now who do you think will defend the castle if you two go skipping off?"

The axe-bearer looked after the boy. "But, that boy."

The man in the white coat was called Even, and he had been watching Ventus closely. "Never you worry about him. He's a special case."

The guard hadn't understood. "A what?"

The one with the lance settled it. "Even is right. Lord and castle come first. The boy will have to fend for himself."

Even stayed where he was a moment longer, frowning after Ven, and said something to nobody in particular. "A heart devoid of darkness? Stripped clean of it, at that. Very questionable."

Ven chased the Unversed down through the town and helped whoever was in their way. An old duck in a top hat thanked him at far greater length than Ven had time for. "Well, could ya make it fast?" said Ven. He came across an old man in a blue robe and a pointed hat, too, and told him, "Mister, get inside. It's not safe out here." The duck gave him three lifetime passes to somewhere called Disney Town, for no reason except that he happened to have them.

Terra came into the city looking for a boy in a mask and saw someone else instead. The old man was walking away from him down a street. "What's Master Xehanort doing here? Maybe he found something out." By the time Terra reached the corner, he was gone.

What brought the three of them into the same square at the same moment was an Unversed bigger than any of them had ever seen, a suit of armour that came apart and put itself back together. Terra was there first, then Ven, then Aqua, and they dealt with it without needing to discuss how, the way they had sparred together for years. When it was down, Aqua was smiling. "We make a good team."

Ven was so pleased to see them that he forgot what he was supposed to be doing out here and dug in his pocket. "Lifetime passes to Disney Town. He said to. He said to take two grown-ups."

Terra and Aqua looked at each other, and then they both told him the same thing: he had to go home. Ven wanted them to know that he could look after himself. "It's okay, Aqua. Trust me, that guy in the mask is history. He'll never bad-mouth Terra again."

Terra turned on him. "You saw the boy in the mask?"

He said it too quickly, and Aqua heard how quickly he said it. She had been to the same worlds he had, and she had heard what he had done there, and she couldn't keep it in any longer. "I'm not so sure. I've been to the same worlds as you and I've seen what you've done. You shouldn't put yourself so close to the darkness."

Then it came out, what she had been asked to do, and Terra understood before she had finished. "You mean you've been spying on me? Is that what he said to do? The Master's orders?"

She had no answer he wanted to hear. He turned and walked out of the square, and he didn't look back.

Alone in the streets afterwards, he said it aloud, as if to fix it in place. "Master Xehanort is the only one I can still count on."

In the square, Ven stared at Aqua. She tried to put it right for him. "So now you know the truth. But the Master loves Terra, and you know that too."

It didn't help. Ven turned on her for it, for all of it, and then he went after Terra, and she let him go.

The Outer Gardens

A man in a guard's uniform stopped Terra in the street. He had dark hair slicked back to his shoulders, a tattered red scarf and two crossbow-shaped guns at his belt, and the manner of a man telling a joke only he understood. "You must be Terra. It's that old coot, he won't stop asking for you. I came all the way out here to get you just so he'd clam up."

Terra didn't follow, and the guard laughed at him. "Ha! Do I have to spell it out? Xehanort, whatever he's called. You know, my prisoner."

Terra didn't smile. "You're apparently not a very good liar. Master Xehanort would never let himself be caught by a thug like you."

The man only grinned. "As if! I've got the old coot at my mercy, see for yourself. I'm holding him underneath the Outer Gardens. You better show up before I lose my patience. Ciao."

Terra watched him go and didn't believe a word of it. "There's no way it's true, but no harm in looking."

Ven, running after Terra, came across a small boy with Unversed all round him instead. The boy had steel-blue hair that fell over one side of his face, and he wore a white coat like the one Ven had seen at the castle, rolled up at the sleeves and still far too big for him. Ven got between him and the monsters and got him out. "Oh. You're on your own, huh?"

Someone was calling through the streets. "Ienzo, where are you? Answer me. Ah, there you are. Didn't I warn you not to wander off, child?"

It was the man in the white coat from the castle. He saw what had happened and thanked Ven properly. "I see we owe you our thanks. We have done our best to raise the boy, since his poor parents are not here to do it."

Ven had only one thing to ask anybody. "Sir, I'm looking for a friend of mine. He's a tall guy dressed kinda like me. Have you seen him?"

Even thought that Terra might be in the Outer Gardens, and he looked at Ven a moment longer than he needed to before he took the child away. "No, thank you, for keeping Ienzo out of harm's way. And. Well, let's say I have a feeling we are destined to cross paths again."

Aqua, meanwhile, had walked straight into the masked boy, and knew him from a description. "A mask? You're the boy that Ventus mentioned."

He was delighted to be recognised. "Ah yes, Ventus. Tell me something, has he learned to put up a decent fight yet?"

She wanted to know what he wanted with Ven.

"I'll be asking the questions," said Vanitas. "And why shouldn't I? After all, between the two of us, I'm the only one who will walk away from here alive."

He was wrong. She put him down, and when she went to lift the mask off him, he laughed, quite unhurt. "Not bad at all. Congratulations. I'll keep you around. Never hurts to have a backup." Then he was through a corridor of darkness and gone, and she was left to work out what he had meant.

Under the Outer Gardens was a place where the city's water was cleaned, with a high viaduct across it. On the viaduct, in chains, was Xehanort. The guard with the guns was waiting. "The old coot certainly knows how to take punishment. Just like I know how to deal it out."

Terra rounded on him. "You monster! What are you after?"

"That thing right there. It's called the Keyblade, isn't it?" Everybody seemed to have one these days, said the guard, even grandpa there, and the old man had told him all about what it could do. How could he not want one?

"Well, you'll find they're picky about their owners," said Terra.

That didn't bother the guard. "Ha, if I heard the old guy right, you're what they call Keyblade Master material. So if I defeat you, that makes me the real keyslinger, if you catch my drift." When Terra started forward, he raised a hand. "Ah-ah, one more step and the coot goes boom. You think I'm gonna fight fair? As if!"

Terra wouldn't fight him. He was afraid of what would come out of him if he did, and he stood there with his Keyblade held low while the guard mocked him. "Hmph. For a Keyblade Master, you're not very, what's the word, good."

Up in the chains, the old man began to shout at him. "What are you doing, Terra? Fight! Never mind me! You must fight! You can't let this ruffian win. Think of your Master, Eraqus, the shame he and your fellow pupils would be forced to bear! Use the Keyblade."

Terra looked up at him. "But Master, you'll."

It went badly for the guard after that. Terra's anger rose up in him and he let it, and the darkness rose with it. When it was over, there was a jagged burn across the man's face, and he was clutching at the eye above it.

The chains were off the old man. He came down to Terra as though nothing had happened to him at all. "Well done, Terra. You have taken yet another step forward."

Terra was staring at his hands. "This power. But I was consumed by anger, hatred. That was the power of darkness."

"Darkness that you channeled," Xehanort corrected him mildly.

Terra shook his head. "No. I succumbed to it. Just like when I stole Princess Aurora's heart of light. I can never return home now. I'm a failure."

"Then don't." Xehanort put it to him simply. "You could be my pupil." Eraqus, he said, was so afraid of the dark that he had given himself over to light, and forgotten that light begets darkness. Aqua and Ventus shone too brightly, and it was only natural that they cast shadows on Terra's heart. "Eraqus." He shook his head. "He's such a fool! Light and darkness, they are a balance, one that must always be maintained. Terra, you are the one who shows the true Mark of Mastery, but he refuses to see it. And I know why. It is because he fears you."

He offered it formally, the place at his side. Then he sent Terra on his way with a title nobody had ever given him before. "See more worlds. Seek out the darkness that upsets the balance. Find Vanitas. And bring an end to him. Master Terra."

Ven caught up with him at the edge of the city, where he was getting ready to leave, and asked to come with him. Terra said no. He said it kindly, and never explained what he was afraid of, and what he said instead was the thing Ven held on to. "I just. When I really need you, Ven, I know you'll be there."

Ven didn't see why that needed saying. "Well, why wouldn't I? You're my friend."

When Terra had gone, the guard came up out of the dark with his face bandaged and both guns levelled at the old man. "Hey, you old coot! You said I wouldn't get hurt! I didn't sign up to be collateral damage! No way, as if!"

Xehanort only looked at him, and that was enough.

"Okay! Okay, fine. Fine! Just, just put that down! You still need me! You still need me to do something, right? And all I'm asking is that you hold up your end of the bargain." The guard tried to laugh it off. "I'm just lucky he didn't steal my heart like Princess Whatever-It-Was. That would've ruined my week for sure."

"Unlikely," said Xehanort. "A powerful light still lives inside of Terra. You see, people like him, they don't have the power to steal hearts."

The guard stopped halfway through lowering his guns. "So wait, you mean, he's not the one who stole her heart?"

Aqua found Ven afterwards. Terra had gone, he told her, and he wanted to go with her instead. She wouldn't let him. "I don't want to put you in harm's way. You understand?"

He didn't understand. "Why won't you let me?"

She told him to go home, and then she went too.

Ven sat down in the square by himself and thought about the three of them. He had the wooden Keyblade out, the one Terra had given him, and he had put it down beside him on the stones. Two boys about his own age came across the square, and one of them picked it up. "This yours?"

The one who had picked it up had bright red hair spiked back off his forehead and green eyes, and he was the kind of boy who talked. The other had blue hair and a crescent moon stitched on his jacket, and he was the kind who didn't.

"Lea, we don't have time for this," said the blue-haired one.

Lea waved him off. "Lighten up, Isa. It'll only take a sec." He turned the wooden Keyblade over in his hands. "You still play with toy swords? That's cute."

He had something better. He pulled out a pair of throwing discs. "Now this right here. Tada! Whaddaya think?" When Ven didn't look impressed, he grinned. "You're just jealous. I'm Lea. Got it memorized? What's your name?"

Ven told him, and Lea wanted a fight. "Okay, Ventus. Let's fight!"

Ven couldn't see the point. "Fight? Why would I wanna do that?"

Lea wasn't going to take no for an answer. "You scared of losing? C'mon. Hope you're ready. Yeah! Now we're talkin'."

Ven beat him easily. Lea lay on the stones getting his breath back and offered terms. "You, had enough? 'Cause I'm willing to, call it a draw if you are."

Isa had seen the whole thing. "From where I stood, the only thing you drew was a big L on your forehead for 'Loser.'" He worked his way through a few more words beginning with L, for good measure.

Lea sat up, wounded. "Wha. Isn't this the part where ya, cheer me up or somethin'?"

Isa looked at him. "Oh, you mean I was supposed to lie."

Lea appealed to Ven. "Ya see what I gotta put up with? Sure hope you don't have friends like him."

All three of them were laughing by then. Lea got up, dusted himself off, and told Ven how things stood between them now. "I'll see ya when I see ya. After all, we're friends now. Get it memorized."

They went off towards the castle together. On the way, Isa wanted to know why Lea kept picking up strangers. "What is it with you and picking up stray puppies?"

"I want everybody I meet to remember me," said Lea. "Inside people's memories, I can live forever."

Isa wasn't impressed. "I know I won't forget you. Believe me, I try all the time."

A Treasure Chest

After Radiant Garden the three of them went on alone, and kept missing one another by a day or an hour.

Disney Town was a festival town run by a queen and a great many rules. There Terra was made to enter a race against a large cat who cheated at every turn, and he came out of it with something he hadn't gone looking for. "I learned that you don't always have to bend the rules to reach your goals. All this time, I've been staring into the darkness." He thought about it. "But, that doesn't mean I have to jump in."

At the Coliseum, a god of the dead introduced himself to Terra at tremendous speed and told him that he had the potential to conquer the darkness inside him, and that he'd be happy to give him some pointers. "Now me, I look at you and I see potential. That's right, kid."

Terra wanted it badly enough to listen. "Well, let's hear it then. How do I conquer the darkness?"

The answer was to fight in the Games with the god guiding him. The whole thing was a trick, and when Terra understood that, he turned on the god in a rage. "Hades! You were just playing me! The darkness, will never have me!"

When Aqua came through later, the god tried the same thing on her, and got an even worse reception. She had heard what Terra had done there. "Terra is my friend. And I hear he triumphed over the darkness. He's not spineless." And when the offer came, she didn't let him finish. "The darkness doesn't interest me!" As she left, she said Terra's name, to nobody. "Terra, you too. Keep fighting."

On a ship among the stars there was a small blue creature, a runaway experiment that everyone said was dangerous, and it stole Terra's charm. Getting it back taught him more than he wanted to know about himself.

"Funny." He turned the charm over in his hand. "This whole time I've been telling myself I want to be stronger, more independent, but the second I let my heart do the talking, I find out how little I really know myself. And how much I miss them."

The little creature met all three of them in that world, one after another, and before it was taken away it tried to say their names together. "Ah-koo, wah, fren. Terra. Ven."

There was an island where boys who never grew up lived in a hideout under a tree. Ven fell asleep in a glade there and woke up surrounded by them.

"Name's Ventus. But everybody just calls me Ven." He rubbed his eyes. "Hmm. Guess, when I sat down to rest, I must've fallen asleep."

On that island he found Mickey's Star Shard, then lost it, along with a fairy, to a pirate captain. He got them both back with the help of the boys' leader, a boy who could fly.

The boys kept a chest of treasure, and none of it was worth anything. It was the things that mattered to them. Before Ven left, he put the wooden Keyblade in with the rest, and when they asked him about it, he found it hard to explain. "It's, just something that one of my best friends gave me." He had decided he didn't need to carry it any more. The three of them would be together again soon, and there would be years of it, and better things to keep.

Terra came to the same island. The pirate captain tried to make a flunky of him, and Terra fought the flying boy over a light the boy knew nothing about. "Are you Peter Pan? The light is not yours to take!"

He had got it wrong, and when he understood that, he said so. "I'll say. I owe you an apology. I picked a fight over nothing."

Aqua came last. The boys made her the leader of a treasure hunt, because somebody had to be. The treasure, when they found it, was the chest, and among the junk inside it Aqua found the wooden Keyblade.

She felt someone watching her and turned, and the masked boy was holding it. "So, have a good time hanging out with the kiddies?" He weighed it in his hand. "I think that kid's outgrown such a childish toy, if you ask my opinion. Just like I've outgrown my need for you."

Then he snapped it in half in front of her.

"You freak!" Aqua screamed.

She beat him down until he stopped moving, and she believed he was dead. When she understood that, she let herself fall on the sand and didn't get up. The flying boy found her there with the two pieces of the wooden Keyblade, and he was angrier about it than she was. She was still holding the pieces when she answered him. "It's okay, Peter. Whatever it is that binds us together isn't going to break so easily, and that's our real treasure. I think Ventus knew that. That's why he left this behind."

Two Boys

Terra came to the islands because there was something warm there, and he followed it.

The islands were small. The main one had yellow sand with wooden things built on it: a shack by the water, a tower with a rope running down from it, a treehouse, and a bridge across to a smaller island, where a palm grew crooked out over the sea and bore fruit shaped like stars. Two boys were racing along the beach, and the older one, the silver-haired one, was winning.

"Giving up already?" the older one called over his shoulder. "Come on, Sora."

The younger one had light brown hair that lay flat. He was four, and he didn't give up.

The older boy saw Terra, stopped, and looked at him hard. "Hey. Did you come from the outside world?"

Terra looked at him for a long moment, and kept to himself what he saw. He asked the boy what he wanted to be strong for, and the boy knew straight away. "To protect the things that matter. You know, like my friends."

So Terra held out his Keyblade to a five-year-old on a beach, and did the thing properly, all of it, the way it had never been done for Ven. "In your hand, take this key. So long as you have the makings, then through this simple act of taking, its wielder you shall one day be. And you will find me, friend, no ocean will contain you then. No more borders around, or below, or above, so long as you champion the ones you love." He had never been named a Master himself.

When he had gone, the younger boy wanted to know what the stranger had said, and the older one wouldn't tell him. "I really can't. I've gotta keep it a secret."

Aqua came to the same beach some while later, and she didn't know that Terra had been there. She stood at the edge of the sand and thought about the two of them, wherever they were. "Terra. Ven. I hope we're ready for the storm that's coming."

The two boys ran past her, the older one in front again. "Too slow, Sora! See ya at the finish line!"

She watched them for a while before she said anything, and what she saw in them surprised her. "This boy looks so sincere, just like Terra. And this one, he's the spitting image of Ven. One of you might be special enough. Hey, you two mind telling me your names?"

They told her. The younger one was Sora and the older one was Riku. She looked at Riku and felt what was already in him, and she knew it before she had finished looking. "Someone has already passed this boy the power. Was it Terra?" Then she turned to the younger boy with a question of her own. "Sora, do you like Riku?"

He said that he did.

She had thought of doing the same for him, and she didn't. She asked him for something else instead. "So then if something happens, and Riku is about to get lost, or say, he starts wandering down a dark path alone, you make sure to stay with him and keep him safe. That's your job, Sora, and I'm counting on you to do it, okay?"

He said he would. She walked back up the beach alone, thinking of the three of them at the Land of Departure, and of two Keyblades between two friends. "One Keyblade is enough, for any friendship. I learned it the hard way. I wouldn't wish our lives on those children. Terra, please tell me, what's to become of us?"

A Forgotten Past

The Star Shard, which Ven had carried away from the island, went off in his hand without warning and put him down at the foot of the sorcerer's tower. Two of the tower's household saw the light come down and ran to meet it: a duck in a blue coat and a tall, gangling dog. The duck was already shouting. "King Mickey!"

It wasn't. The duck took it well. "Are we glad to see you!"

They took him up the stairs. The dog couldn't manage his name. "This feller Venquist, Ventilate, Veggie."

"Just call him Ven!" said the duck.

Yen Sid knew who he was. "Ah, Ventus. Eraqus has told me much about you. If I am not mistaken, you were ordered to return home."

Ven explained how he had come by the shard. "I ran into Mickey. But we got sent flying into the light, I don't know where he went. He wasn't in the same world as the one where I found that."

The sorcerer held out his hand. "Where is this clue to Mickey's whereabouts?"

With the shard in front of him, he could see what he hadn't been able to see before. "As I thought. Mickey has been hurling himself from one world to the next. That explains why I could not discern his location." He looked, and found the king at last: in the badlands, lying on the ground and not moving.

The dog was on his feet in an instant. "Just tell us where the King is, Mr. Yen Sid, sir, and me and Donald will go right there and save him!"

The sorcerer looked at the pair of them. "You two? That may not be adequate."

Ven said he would go. Yen Sid considered him for a long moment. "Very well, Ventus. We will leave it to you."

Mickey was where the sorcerer had said he would be, face down among the old Keyblades, and breathing. Ven was kneeling beside him when he heard a voice he knew. "We meet again, boy."

He looked up at the old man, and the year came back.

It all came back at once, there on the same ground where it had happened: the dark things coming up out of the earth, himself much smaller and begging, the Keyblade at his chest, and something standing up out of him. It hit him so hard that he couldn't stand. Xehanort watched him with something like approval. "Ah yes, so you are starting to realize, what you lost. Oh, but not for good. You had to lose in order to find. Now it can all be yours again, if you only reach out and take it. Reclaim the part that left you. Clash with him! Pure light against pure darkness, to forge the ultimate key. The all-powerful χ-blade!"

Ven didn't know the word, and the old man explained it as if to a slow pupil. "Not the Keyblades you and I carry. 'χ'. A most ancient letter. Some say 'kye,' but the meaning is the same. Death. A letter that spells endings."

Ven got as far as his knees. "And I have the power to make it?"

Xehanort nodded. "Correct. Eraqus knows it too. He knows exactly what you are. Haven't you ever wondered? Why he never granted you permission to leave his side, to grow stronger? Eraqus was frightened of you. If you were to learn the truth, realize what you are. He never trusted you. Why else would he keep you within his sight at all times?"

He opened a way in the air, and before Ven could answer, he pushed him through it. "Go. You can ask the man yourself. Learn the truth, and remember you have a greater purpose!"

Leaving the islands, Terra saw Ven far off in the Lanes Between and turned to follow him, and before he could reach him the old man's voice came again. "Master Terra. Find me. We must speak at once."

In the badlands, Xehanort was waiting for him, and he looked troubled. "There is no time to lose! I've terrible news. Ventus has stumbled upon the secrets of his origins." The boy had gone home, he said, in a fury. "If you could have seen the fury in his eyes. I'm certain he's capable of anything. I fear the boy may attempt to force the truth out of Eraqus. Master Terra, you must hurry back and see to your friend's safety."

Terra went.

The Land of Departure

Ven came in through the front of the castle and kept on walking until he was in the great hall. Eraqus rose from his throne to meet him, relieved. "Ventus, you're alone? I thought Aqua would. Well, what matters is that you're home. You don't belong outside this world yet. You need to stay here where you can learn."

Ven didn't bother with a greeting. "That's your excuse, for keeping me imprisoned here, isn't it?"

The Master went very still. "What did you hear?"

Ven told him, all of it, and Eraqus denied none of it. He stood in his own hall and looked past the boy at a man who wasn't in the room. "I knew it. Xehanort, he could never let it go." He had argued with him once, in this very castle, about that weapon and the war it would open, and he had tried to stop him then, and had taken the scars across his face for it. "I failed. I had the chance to stop him and couldn't do it. But I will not fail again."

He had worked it out while Ven was still talking. The weapon could be made only one way, and one of the two halves it needed was standing right in front of him. Xehanort couldn't be stopped. The weapon could. He raised the Master's Defender. "The χ-blade has no place in this or any world. Xehanort has made his purpose clear, and I am left with no choice. Forgive me, but you must exist no more."

Ven couldn't believe it. "Master! What are you."

The blow never landed. Terra was between them, his Keyblade up against his Master's, having come the whole way home without stopping.

"Terra! I command you, step aside!" said Eraqus.

Terra wouldn't. "You may be my Master. But I will not, let you hurt my friend!"

"You will not heed your Master?" Eraqus looked at him as though at somebody he had already lost. "Why do all my attempts to reach you fail? If you don't have it in your heart to obey, then you will have to share Ventus's fate."

Terra opened a corridor of darkness in the middle of his Master's hall, a thing he had been taught never to do. He shoved Ven into it before the boy could protest and closed it behind him. Then he turned round.

He had to use the darkness to do it, and he used a great deal of it. Eraqus saw it rise up in him. "Has the darkness taken you, Terra?"

It had taken him far enough. When it was over, the Master was down on the floor of the hall and Terra was standing over him, shaking. "What have I done. Master. I just. Wanted to keep Ven safe."

Eraqus took all of it onto himself. "No, you were right. I failed you, Terra. Perhaps I've no one to blame but myself for the darkness inside you. And now I've done worse, raised my Keyblade against you and Ventus. My own heart is darkness!"

Xehanort had come into the hall while he was saying it. He came without hurrying, and he struck Eraqus down in front of the boy Eraqus had raised. Eraqus dissolved into light in Terra's arms, and was gone.

The old man seemed almost puzzled by the look on Terra's face. "What a sight. Why do you trouble yourself with remorse, Master Terra? The man was bent on doing harm to your friend, his own pupil!"

Terra only stared at him, and Xehanort pressed him, like a teacher disappointed in a pupil who has come so far. "You know, at times I find your progress quite striking. But you still fall short. Let all that anger out, my boy. Give your heart over to darkness!"

When Terra wouldn't, Xehanort gave him a reason. "Still so blind. Then I will make you see. Come to the place where all Keyblade wielders leave their mark on fate, the Keyblade Graveyard! There you will watch your dear Ventus and Aqua meet their ends, and the last light within you will die!" He raised his hand and brought darkness down out of the sky onto the castle. "You won't need a home anymore where you're going!"

The world broke apart. Most of the castle came off the mountain, and the four golden chains came down with it.

Ven came out of the corridor onto a beach he didn't know, on the islands where he had once been left to die, and sat down on the sand. Someone was there already. "Going somewhere?"

It was the masked boy, and he was in no hurry. "Well, I'm just getting started with you. You're strong enough now to fulfill your purpose. So what are you waiting for? Join with me right here and now. Become the χ-blade."

Ven had had time to think, and he was calm about it. "No, I won't do it. He told me, the only way the χ-blade can be forged is if you and me fight. Well guess what? I'm not fighting."

The masked boy tilted his head. "You used to be too broken to talk back."

And then Ven remembered the rest of it: the thing that had stood up out of him on the stones was the boy in front of him now. Vanitas saw him understand, and gave him a reason to fight. "Fine. Then I'll give you a reason to fight. Come and find me, at the one and only place to spawn the χ-blade, the Keyblade Graveyard. There you're gonna see me choke the life out of Terra and Aqua. Then we'll see how long you play the pacifist."

He left Ven on the sand to think about it. It didn't take long. "Terra, Aqua. I swear I'll put an end to this."

Out in the Lanes Between after the islands, Aqua found the king adrift and unconscious, and she carried him to the tower. The duck and the dog took him from her and fussed over him, and the sorcerer drew Aqua aside. "Aqua, the stars bring me grave news. Master Eraqus's star has blinked out. I am afraid that means he has been struck down."

He told her who had done it, Xehanort and Terra between them, and she wouldn't have it. "No! That's absurd! Terra would never!"

The sorcerer didn't argue. "I hope with all my heart that you are right about your friend. There are some things even the stars cannot tell me."

But he could tell her where Terra was going. "Terra's heart is leading him to the ancient Keyblade Graveyard, where wielders of those weapons once waged war." And as she went, he called after her. "To this day, many legends are told of the Keyblade Graveyard, but what in these legends is true? Not even I can say for certain. Tread carefully, Aqua."

The Keyblade Graveyard

They came to the badlands separately, and within a short time of one another. A wide crater lay in the middle of a circular valley, with a barren field beyond the ridge and a ring of stone pedestals, and everywhere the old Keyblades stood in the ground. Terra was the first to arrive. "What I do, I do for friendship."

Aqua came down beside him. "The three of us will always be one."

He told her about Eraqus before anything else. He didn't soften it, and he didn't leave out his own part in it. "But I was tricked. Xehanort set the whole thing up, all so he could awaken the darkness inside me. You were right, Aqua, and so was the Master. I did need to be watched. I went astray, but no more."

She heard what he was planning underneath it, and that frightened her more than the rest. "What else is darkness but hate and rage? Xehanort is feeding the dark fires within you, making you fight. You'll go astray again. Tell me, how does that honor our Master's memory, Terra?"

Ven came down last. He had thought about it the whole way there, and he had arrived at one answer. "Xehanort wants me and Vanitas to fight, and make some kind of 'χ-blade.' But the Master said we can't let that happen, and he tried to destroy me for it." He looked at the two of them in turn. "I'm asking you, as a friend. Just, put an end to me."

Neither of them had time to answer. The old man was coming down the ridge on foot, with the masked boy behind him, and he spread his hands over the field. "Behold." He let them look. "These lifeless keys used to be full of power, united with the hearts of their masters. On this barren soil, Keyblades of light and darkness were locked in combat, as a great Keyblade War raged. Countless Keyblade wielders gave up their lives, all in search of one, ultimate key. And it will soon belong to me." He said the last word like a name. "χ-blade."

He looked at Terra with something like pride. "Admirably done. I knew this was a journey you could make, over the unseen wall that divides darkness and light. And I was not wrong, Terra!" He was careless about Ven. "Why, I did him a favor and freed the darkness inside him. Alas, poor Ventus never had the fortitude for such strenuous trials." And to the masked boy: "Go take what Ventus owes you. And take Aqua's life."

Terra's Keyblade was already up. "You will pay, Xehanort! Was my Master, no, my father, Eraqus not enough for you? Leave my friends alone!"

The old man moved the ground first. The valley split along lines of his choosing, and every Keyblade in that part of the field tore itself out of the stone and flew through the air in a storm, throwing the three of them apart. He froze Ven where he stood, and walked him off the edge of the cliff.

Aqua caught him. She was holding him, rigid and cold, when a man came along the ridge with two guns and a patch over one eye. It was the guard from Radiant Garden, and he had changed: his remaining eye had gone gold, his ears had gone to points, and his hair had turned grey. He looked at the frozen boy and grinned. "How 'bout you leave the popsicle with me, so you can go have your little fight with Terra. You can't be too happy about him deep-sixing your Master."

He had come to talk as much as to fight. "You think you two have got some grand role to play. As if. You're only here so that when I finish you off, Terra will succumb to the darkness. So, who wants to go first?"

Aqua set Ven down and stood over him. "Go ahead if you wanna waste your time. Keep trying to drive us apart with your mind games. It'll never work! Terra will prove to you he's stronger!"

She beat him. He hadn't come to win. "I keep forgetting, don't mess with Keyblade wielders. But you know what? That just means I made the right choice! Well, he wanted me to buy time, and I'd say he got it." And he was gone.

Above the wasteland, something had appeared in the sky: a great heart-shaped moon, shining, that had no business being there. It was Kingdom Hearts.

On the far side of the field, Terra fought the old man alone, and the old man kept turning his head to show him what was happening to the others. "You see how powerless you are to save them? Savor that rage and despair. Let it empower you!"

Terra did. It came up in him and he let it, all the way, and Xehanort crowed at the sight. "Yes, boy, that's it! More! Let your whole heart blacken with anger!"

Terra beat him. He did it by going further into darkness than he had ever gone before, and Xehanort lay on the stones and wasn't in the least distressed about it.

The masked boy had come down on Aqua from above. She was on the ground and not moving, and he stood over her with his Keyblade drawn back. Then the ice around Ven broke. Ven burst out of it, hit him from the side and knocked him off her, and this time it was nothing like the fight in the badlands. Ven hurt him, badly, past the point where a body was going to keep working.

The masked boy stood up anyway, laughing, because there was still one thing left to him, and it was the thing he had been made for. "You've done it, Ventus. Now that my body is about to perish, you and I will have to join together! The χ-blade will be forged!" He took off the helmet. Underneath it was a young face, with gold eyes and blue-black hair.

Creatures came up out of the ground round Ven and held him where he was, and he knew them. "The Unversed, come from you?"

Vanitas was happy to tell him. "It happened when you and I were split into two. The negativity took shape as these monsters. They are what I feel, a horde of fledgling emotions under my control. I released them in all the worlds I could, hoping to lure you away from home and isolate you from your Master. We needed to make you stronger. The Unversed were the perfect opponents. And better yet, no matter how many times you defeat them, their negativity flows right back into me. You never stood a chance against us, Ventus."

Then Vanitas forced his way into him. Ven never agreed to it, and it happened anyway. What stood up afterwards wore Ven's face, but Ven wasn't the one using it. In its hand was the weapon: two Keyblades crossed with their teeth turned outward. It had come out wrong, red-orange and smoking with darkness, chipped along the blade, with part of its pattern gone on one side and part of the hilt not there at all. A pillar of light went up out of the wasteland.

Across the field, Xehanort saw it from where he lay. "There, you see? The χ-blade has been forged! And now, Terra, it is time for the final union!"

He put his Keyblade to his own chest. "At last, our moment is here. Out with the old and brittle vessel, and in with a younger, stronger new one! I swore I would survive, and be there to see what awaited beyond the Keyblade War! And now it is your darkness that shall be the ark that sustains me!" He unlocked his own heart and threw it into Terra.

Terra's body straightened. Its hair had gone silver, and it spoke in a voice that was his and yet wasn't. "This heart belongs again to darkness. All worlds begin in darkness, and all so end. The heart is no different. Darkness sprouts within it, it grows, consumes it. Such is its nature. In the end, every heart returns to the darkness whence it came."

Behind it, the armour Terra had thrown off earlier in the fight stood up. It was empty. What moved it was the last thing Terra had been thinking: that the other two had to be got out of this. It turned out to be enough. The thing wearing Terra's body stared at it. "What? Your body submits, your heart succumbs, so why does your mind resist?"

The armour called its Keyblade to its hand, went at the thing wearing Terra, and beat it. But winning the fight couldn't bring Terra back. The armour drove its Keyblade into the ground and rested both hands on the grip, and before it stopped moving, it spoke once. "Aqua, Ven. One day I will set this right."

Inside, where nobody could hear it, the old man explained the position to whatever was left of Terra. "Darkness rules your heart, it gives me control. Muscle and sinew that once obeyed you now rebels against you. How you can remain here at all confounds the mind."

Aqua came round on the stones with the king standing over her, relieved. "Gosh, I'm glad you're okay."

The thing with Ven's face was coming across the field with the weapon in its hand, and Mickey put himself in front of her. "That's not Ven!"

The thing with Ven's face smiled. "Correct. I am not Ventus. His heart has become a part of mine now. This χ-blade will open a door, one that leads to all worlds! Then, Keyblade-bearing warriors will flock here from each and every one of them, to battle for the light within Kingdom Hearts! And just like the legend says, the Keyblade War will begin!"

Aqua got to her feet. "Shut up! I'm sick of your nonsense. Give Ven his heart back!"

The two of them fought it together, but it was stronger than both of them. It put them down and stood over them. "What's wrong? Giving up already?"

Aqua lay where she had fallen and held on to the only thing she had. "Terra, Ven, lend me strength."

She got up again, and the thing in Ven's body only sneered. "You're just wasting your energy."

Inside Ven, on a floor of stained glass with cracks running across it, the two of them had it out for the last time. Vanitas wanted to finish it. "Our union was not finished. The χ-blade shouldn't stay broken like this. Join me now, and we can complete the χ-blade!"

Ven told him he would break it instead, and Vanitas laughed at him. "The χ-blade is made of your heart, too, idiot. If you destroy it, your heart will vanish forever."

Ven shouted back at him. "At least I have some! I've become a part of their heart, just as they've become a part of mine. My friends are my power, and I'm theirs!"

"Hmph, it's always about your friends, isn't it?" sneered Vanitas.

Ven destroyed him. Outside, at the same moment, Aqua brought her Keyblade down on the weapon with everything the other two had ever meant to her behind the blow, and it cracked. Then it began to break apart. Mickey backed away from it. "Oh no! It, it's gone all haywire!"

It destroyed itself, and its light filled the wasteland as far as anyone could see. The light picked all of them up and flung them out into the Lanes Between, the thing in Terra's body with them. Only the empty armour, kneeling on the field with its hands on its Keyblade, was left behind; the light went round it. As Ven went, his armour closed over him, though he never knew he had called it.

Castle Oblivion

Aqua woke up in the tower. The sorcerer was waiting for her. "Aqua, you lost consciousness. Fortunately, Mickey found you and Ventus drifting in the Lanes Between, and brought you back to me to receive proper care. I am sorry, but there was no sign of Terra."

Ven was there, on a couch by the wall, alive and asleep, and he wouldn't wake. His heart had gone out of him. Aqua sat beside him and said she would protect him, and Yen Sid told her that wasn't what he needed.

"It is not your protection. He needs you to believe. You see, Ventus's heart hangs in the balance. It sleeps in the place between light and darkness. From all I can perceive, that means he will be looking for a friend." He let her take that in. "One who believes in him, to show him the way home. Just as long as you love him, then Ventus will be able to find you when he wakes. He can follow that love back to where he belongs." He looked at the sleeping boy. "The realm of light."

Mickey had laid the Star Shard on the sorcerer's desk, with his Keyblade beside it. He had gone out with both of them and come back having saved nobody. The sorcerer picked up one of them and handed it back to him with a smile.

Mickey turned to Aqua. "Don't you worry, Aqua. I believe in Ven, too. Gosh, he's been as good a friend to me as anybody. And if both you and me believe in him with all our hearts, then he'll have two lights to follow instead of one."

She took Ven home. She didn't know the way, because there was no home left to know the way to. But when she lifted him, the sleeping boy's hand came up, his Keyblade appeared in it, and a road opened in the air.

The Land of Departure was in pieces. The chains were down, the spires were gone, and most of the castle had fallen off the mountain. In the forecourt, lying where it had been dropped, was Eraqus's Keyblade, the Master's Defender.

She picked it up, and remembered the afternoon she had been made a Master, and what he had told her after the others had gone.

"Aqua. Now that you are a Master, there is one secret in particular you must know," he had said. "Should anything happen to me, and you find the legion of darkness at our doorstep, I ask that you take my Keyblade and use it to lock this land away. Generations of Keyblade Masters have been charged with keeping this land safe. Light and darkness exist in balance here, and there are those who would abuse such neutral ground. This is why our predecessors devised a certain, trick. Just use the key, and this land will be transformed. From that day forward, all who visit this land will be lost to oblivion, none ever able to solve the mystery. None, Aqua, except you."

There were three thrones at the top of the great hall. She put Ven in the middle one. "I'll keep him safe, until he wakes. Forever if I have to."

Then she did what Eraqus had taught her, with his Keyblade. She found the Keyhole of that world and locked it, and the world changed around her as she stood in it. It turned white, and became a labyrinth, with no way through it for anyone who didn't already know what it had once been. The room with the thrones in it stopped being a throne room and became a chamber where a boy slept.

She stood beside him one last time. "I know it's a lonely place, but you'll be safe. Terra and I will be back to wake you up before you know it."

She heard Terra while she was still in the corridor, on her way out. His voice came from far off, and it asked her for one thing. "Aqua, put an end to me."

Aqua called back into the dark. "Terra, tell me where to find you."

It took her to Radiant Garden.

The Dark

He was standing in the square in the middle of the city, where the three of them had fought together. A dark, faceless shape hung in the air behind him and went wherever he went. He looked like Terra, with his hair gone silver, and he didn't know what he was. "Who, am I?"

Aqua said his name. He turned it over as though it belonged to somebody else. "Terra, you say?"

Then he came at her and caught hold of her. She felt what was inside him, and gasped. "Such a terrible. Darkness. Fight it. Terra, please!"

He let her go. "Terra's heart has been extinguished, smothered by the darkness within him."

She drew her Keyblade. "My name is Master Aqua. Now return my friend's heart or pay the price!"

She fought him and the shape behind him, and partway through she saw Terra come up through his own face for a moment, fighting from inside. The thing in his body turned on him in fury. "Stop fighting back!" When she had worn it down, it turned its Keyblade on the body it wore, to burn him out. "This'll teach you. Get out of my heart!"

The darkness opened under him and he began to sink into it, and the shape behind him went down with him. Aqua went in after them. She had hold of him inside the dark when she understood that she could put one of them back into the light, but not both. She took off her armour and used it and her Keyblade together to throw him back up the way they had come, with everything she had behind the throw and nothing left to hold on with herself.

"I have to do something or we'll both be lost," she whispered. "I'm with you. Go! Ven, I'm sorry. I might not make it back as soon as I thought. But I promise I'll be there, one day, to wake you up."

She went down with the Master's Defender and nothing else.

In the square, a young man with silver hair lay beside a Keyblade and a set of armour that weren't his. The guard with the eyepatch found him there and went to fetch the master of the castle. "Right this way."

Ansem the Wise was an older man with long blond hair swept back and a short beard, in a white coat with a red shawl over it, and he knelt down beside the stranger. "Young man, what ails you? Can you speak? Tell me your name."

The young man had lost everything but one word. "Xeha, nort."

The guard with the eyepatch looked delighted, and didn't say why. Ansem stood up. "Quickly, get him to the castle!"

The guard was already lifting him. "You can count on me. Dilan, get those for me." The other guard gathered up the armour and the Keyblade that had been lying beside him, and they carried him away.

On the islands, at the end of the day, two boys were sitting on the sand, and the younger one was crying and couldn't say why. He had been perfectly all right a moment before. The older one looked up at the sky, trying to help.

"Somebody up there must be sad," said Riku. He thought about how to explain it. "They say every world is connected by one great big sky. So maybe there's somebody up there in all those worlds who's really hurting, and they're waiting for you to help them."

Sora asked him how. Riku thought about it. "Hmm. Maybe they just need you to open your heart and listen."

So he did.

He was standing in a round place made of stained glass, with his own face under his feet, when something came down out of the dark above him and stopped in front of him. It was a heart, on its own, with no body around it.

"I heard your voice," said the heart. "It cut through the darkness around me." It had come a long way. "All alone, I followed the sound, into a sea of light, and found myself here, with you." It knew him. "You gave me something back when I needed it most. A second chance."

It was tired, and it said so. "But, now I have to go back to sleep again." It hesitated. "Would you mind if I stayed here, with you?"

Sora said it could stay as long as it needed, until it was better.

The heart spoke very quietly. "Thank you."

The place Aqua had fallen into was the realm of darkness, and it had ground of its own: stone with a cold blue light coming up through the cracks, rock shapes jutting out of the walls, and paths that wound and doubled back and joined up again. There was no light anywhere except a white one a long way off, which never came any nearer. She walked.

"Seems like I've been walking for ages," she said to herself. "How long have I been down here?"

Great dark shapes rose out of the ground around her, one after another, more than she could count. She had the Master's Defender in her hand, and she didn't lift it. "Maybe. I should fade into the darkness here."

Then two Keyblades were standing in the dark in front of her, Terra's and Ven's, though neither of their owners was in any state to have sent them. The shapes fell back. Aqua laughed, and it surprised her. "I guess it's been so long, I almost forgot how to smile." She took out her charm and looked at it, blue, with cyan at the tips, and thought of the people she was bound to. "There's always a way." And she walked on.

Inside the young man with silver hair, the argument was still going on, and nobody could overhear it. The old man had no patience with it. "Hmph. Don't even entertain any notions of escaping me, boy. In the end, your heart will be engulfed by mine forever."

Terra wouldn't go. "It's still my heart. You think you can just come in and take over? I'm not gonna sit by and let that happen."

Xehanort was patient with him. "As I recall, you couldn't even handle your own darkness. How, then, will you triumph over mine?"

Terra held his ground. "Wrong. You're gonna get shown the door, old man."

And Xehanort found out why Terra was still there to say it. There was a third heart in that body, and it was standing between Terra and the rest of him. "Oh? So that's how it is, is it? Someone else has set foot in your heart. Eraqus, you sly fox."

Terra wasn't afraid any more. "I'm not afraid of what the darkness holds now. Even if you do wrestle control of my heart from me, even if you cast me into the deepest, darkest abyss, you'll never sway me from the one cause that pushes me to keep on fighting. Whatever the cost, I'm ready to pay it."

Xehanort treated it as a delay. "Brave words, to be sure. But I'm a patient man. We can take as much time as we need to settle this little property dispute. However, know this. You are just one of many roads that I might choose to take. Trust me. I made certain of that."

Some while later, the young man walked along a corridor of the castle at Radiant Garden in a white coat like the ones the men there wore, recovered and remembering nothing. The man with the eyepatch walked beside him, talking at him and getting nothing back. "Hey! Mister Master. Oh c'mon, you don't even know your pal? Please tell me the amnesia was just a sick joke. Boy, this is some cliche." He stopped walking and asked it straight out. "Hey, you're not. Terra?"

He got silence. He laughed it off. "Just gotta check. As if. Well, don't sweat it. I got your back."

Further along, Ansem the Wise was out walking with the boy Ienzo, and the two of them watched the pair go by, and said nothing.