Dark Road

The Child of Destiny

On an island with a scattering of small, bare islets round it, a boy and the one who had raised him sat by a fire on the beach, and the boy was being told, yet again, what he was.

"The child of destiny?" said the boy. "Me?"

The one in the blue hood said that he was: a child who would come from these islands, who could feel what was in other people's hearts, who could join his heart with another's and save the world from darkness. The boy had heard it all before.

"You've told me that a hundred times. But what's a child of destiny?" And when the answer came round once more to saving the world, he frowned. "I don't get it."

He was small then, tan-skinned, with silver hair swept back into spikes and eyes that were silver too. He had lived on the island for as long as he could remember, because darkness couldn't easily find him there.

"But we're the only ones here," he said once. When he was told that one day he would have to leave, he looked up in surprise. "Really? But I thought I had to live here so darkness wouldn't find me." He had another question, too. "When I get strong enough, will I get to see my mom again too?"

He didn't really remember her. But there were other people he wanted to meet. "The kids from my dreams. I don't know who they are, but they really like each other. Is that what having friends is like?"

He tried to describe them. "Umm. One's a boy with curly silver hair. Another boy has black clothes and a hat, a skinny boy with pink hair, and a quiet boy with blond hair. Oh, and a girl with dark hair just like my mom. And then there's this other one. Kind of like you." He looked up, because his guardian had gone very still. "What's wrong?"

The dreams were true, and the one in the blue hood knew it. That was part of the reason they believed he was the child of destiny: the boy was dreaming a life his guardian had lived before, among people the boy had never met. They told him, too, that he could see into other people's hearts.

"What?" said the boy.

The years went by. The boy grew into a young man, and the one who had raised him died, and he was left alone on the island.

He still had the dream.

"That dream again," he said to himself. "I've been having the same dream over and over again for as long as I can remember. An unfamiliar world filled with unfamiliar faces and unfamiliar good-byes. As if I'm experiencing a life that belonged to someone else."

The island, the small bare islets, the ocean and the sky were the whole of his world. He gazed out over the water. "But maybe there's something beyond these waters. Maybe there are worlds like the ones I dream of. If I could get to the outside world, would I be able to meet my friends from my dreams?"

Someone was coming towards him along the sand: a man in a brown hood. He called Xehanort his waypoint.

"What?" said Xehanort. "Who are you?"

The stranger only called him his waypoint again.

"What do you mean? Who are you? How did you get here?" Xehanort demanded.

He didn't answer. He said it was Xehanort's destiny to see other worlds, and he opened a way for him: a doorway of darkness standing upright in the sand, black and swirling at the edges, with nothing at all to be seen inside it. It was a corridor of darkness, a road between worlds. Xehanort looked at it for a long time. Then he walked into it, and the darkness in the corridor began, very slowly, to seep into his heart.

Alba and Ater

He came out into a city standing on the water. It went on and on: towns built up the sides of mountains, the mountains themselves made of white and gold buildings stacked one above another, and a windmill turning on nearly every roof. The sky above it was clear, and it stayed clear. A star was set into the paving. This was Scala ad Caelum, where Keyblade wielders were trained, and he was taken in there as a student of a Master called Odin, an old man with a white beard down to his chest and a wide, soft hat worn at an angle that hid one eye.

There were others in his class, and in time they became the whole of his life. Eraqus, a boy with dark hair tied back and white clothes, was late for nearly everything and kept the rest of them laughing when there was least reason to. Vor was small and fierce, in a long purple cloak. Hermod was careful and liked things in order. Urd wanted to see every world there was. Bragi was quiet and rarely said much. Baldr had long, feathery white hair and silver eyes, and a sister among the upper classmen, Hoder, whom he loved.

The days were peaceful and a little dull, and Xehanort thought about that more than the others did.

"Day after day, I spend my time with the same classmates in the same classroom," he said to himself. "The days are peaceful and a little boring, but they're also familiar and comfortable. Even so, my new life is just like the old. A different world, but with the same days playing out over and over again."

Perhaps it wasn't the place that mattered, he thought, but himself, and how he dealt with other people. "All kinds of things can influence the growth of a heart. Change can come from anywhere, from the smallest, simplest thing. From light, or from darkness."

He didn't often think about the man in the brown hood any more. "The day I met the man in the robe, my world was turned upside down. But I got used to it eventually. Your world can change in an instant. Sometimes all it takes is a single step."

He and Eraqus played a board game called Alba and Ater, white pieces against black, in a white classroom with golden beams and fans turning slowly under the ceiling. Xehanort nearly always won.

"Keep an open mind, Eraqus," he said. "Maybe then you'll actually beat me." The pieces were still standing on the board. "It's almost time for class."

Eraqus didn't move.

Xehanort sighed. "Wait. Aren't you going?" Eraqus only smiled at him. "Always doing things in your own time."

They talked about everything, up at the top of the long stair the city called the Stairway to the Sky, with the water spread out all round them. Once, Eraqus asked him what lay on the other side of the ocean.

"Beats me," said Xehanort.

Eraqus reminded him that he had been found lying unconscious in the city, as if he had come from nowhere.

"Yeah, I was lying here unconscious. But what does that prove?" Xehanort grinned. "Or maybe I fell from the sky." What you could see, he told Eraqus, was only part of the picture. "Not only that, the things you get used to seeing can fade into the background."

Once, when they talked about why they wanted to be Masters, each of them gave a different answer. For Eraqus it had begun as something his family expected of him. Bragi wanted to do what was right, Urd to learn about the worlds and see them, Baldr to protect what mattered to him, and Hermod to uphold the greater order. Vor thought about it and wouldn't say.

Xehanort had his own reason, and it wasn't much of one. "I don't know why. But, I have friends, I want to see again."

More than once, he asked Master Odin how a person got to the other worlds. "How does one get to those worlds?"

Seven Who Did Not Come Back

Two years after Xehanort came to the city, Master Odin gathered the lower classmen together and told them that seven of the upper classmen had gone out to train for their Mark of Mastery and had never come back: Hoder, Vidar, Vala, Vali, Heimdall, Sigrun and Helgi. Nobody had heard a word from any of them. The lower classmen were nowhere near ready, but they would have to go and look. Baldr wasn't among them. He had been given some other task, and nobody had told him that his sister was one of the seven.

Xehanort was glad to go. "The situation is worrying. Which is why I'd rather be part of a search party than sit here and do nothing."

Before they set off, they talked about the worlds they would find. The Keyblade War had swallowed everything in darkness, Xehanort said, and afterwards the worlds had begun to be rebuilt. "But time flows differently in each one."

It depended, he explained, on when they had been remade. "Depending on when and how quickly they're restored. Some worlds are already complete, and their time has begun to flow. But others are not, and for them, time stands still." They mustn't meddle with any world's order. "What I'm saying is that we need to be careful about what we say and do while we're out there."

The first world was a desert city with nobody in it but Heartless.

"They've gotta be Heartless," said Xehanort. When the fight was over, he lowered his Keyblade, pleased. "Not bad for our first battle."

The buildings were all standing, but there were no people anywhere. Xehanort looked round slowly. "Look at the buildings. Maybe living beings are restored last."

The next world had a queen in it, who ruled by rage and whose subjects lived in terror of her, and there was darkness in her. Xehanort watched her and thought about it. "Look at that queen. She believes people respect her power, even though it's obvious they live in fear. That's the kind of delusion that might force our hand down the line."

Once, he and Eraqus found themselves saying the same words at the same moment, words neither of them knew where they'd got. "Darkness can hide anywhere. Even inside someone."

Xehanort stopped short. "Huh?"

Eraqus asked him how he knew the saying.

"Me? I." He couldn't finish. The words belonged to someone else, someone in a dream.

The thought stayed with him. "I wonder, could darkness burrow so deep into someone's heart that they don't even know it's there?" He looked at his friend. "Could you turn your Keyblade on a being that has no idea what they've become?"

Eraqus had no answer, and Xehanort didn't press him for one. "One day we might have to decide."

He and Eraqus stayed on in that world after the others had moved on, watching the queen, and Xehanort came to understand her. Her darkness didn't come from greed, but from wrath, and it was what held her world together. "So many of them seem silly and carefree, but beneath it all, they're afraid. That's how order is maintained here."

When the class came together again, he told them what he had worked out. "There may be more than one dark entity. A single light can cast countless shadows. And as light's guardians, we may have a similar effect. The more we venture out into the world, the more darkness may follow in our wake."

In a world where darkness was the order, he said, the rule they had been taught didn't hold. "The rule that light is right and darkness is wrong just doesn't hold true. It's a question of perspective."

Eraqus stared at him as though Xehanort had just taken darkness's side. Xehanort shook his head. "I'm not, don't worry. What I'm getting at is that if the missing students found themselves facing darkness, and darkness was that world's order, then it's possible they were defeated."

Then they remembered one of Odin's lessons: that long ago darkness had come from outside and spread through people like a sickness, but that as time went on people had begun to make their own, out of their own bad feelings. And Eraqus remembered something else. A week before, Baldr had come to him, worried about his sister Hoder, who was away on her training. Baldr still didn't know that she was one of the seven.

The Mirror and the Lamp

In a wood with a castle and a queen in it, Vor wandered away from the others and found a mirror. When Xehanort and Eraqus caught up with her, she showed it to them. It hung in a frame ringed with the twelve signs of the zodiac, and a white mask rose up in the glass, lit so that one half of it was darker than the other. It answered truthfully any question that was put to it. Eraqus asked it how he could beat Xehanort at chess.

Xehanort closed his eyes. "Eraqus." He turned back to the glass. "Please ignore him." Then he asked what really mattered. "We're looking for some classmates who went missing. Do you know where they are?"

The Mirror told them that each of the upper classmen was acting alone.

Eraqus had begun to ask after Vidar in particular when Vidar himself walked in. He looked at Xehanort and didn't seem to like what he saw. Then he offered Vor a place among the upper classmen, and Vor said yes. When she had been alone with it, the Mirror had told her that if she stayed with her friends she would never grow. Xehanort saw it in her face.

"Her heart and her mind are made up," he said.

Eraqus insisted that the two of them would never change, and Xehanort told him that wasn't how things worked. "Change is inevitable. You should embrace it and learn to build new relationships."

They couldn't reach Odin to tell him, and they quarrelled over what to do. Eraqus wanted to go after Vor. Xehanort wanted to keep looking for the seven. Eraqus was afraid that Vidar meant her harm.

"Even if he is, she'll be fine," said Xehanort. "She's tough. She doesn't need our help."

Eraqus accused him of not caring, and Xehanort turned it round on him. "What about you? Would a friend try to manipulate someone's beliefs just because they don't line up with their own?"

A Keyblade Master, said Eraqus, would know what was right.

"Who's to decide what's right and what's wrong?" said Xehanort. "Unless you know of someone who has a heart of pure light with no trace of shadow."

In the end they split up. Eraqus and Bragi went back to ask the Mirror where Vor had gone, and found the queen of that castle guarding it. Xehanort carried on with Urd and Hermod. "Even if we take different paths to locate the missing upper classmen, we're bound to arrive at the same destination. Eraqus should follow his heart on this one."

In a castle whose master was a beast, two of the upper classmen had stolen a rose. Heartless lured Urd away into a ballroom, and when she was all but overwhelmed, Vala, who was watching from above, struck every one of them down with a single spell. Vala was taken with Urd's stubbornness and asked her to join them. Urd said her mission was to bring them home. So Vala had Vali hand her the rose instead, because it was essential to that world's order, and the two of them left through a portal. Xehanort had heard all of it from the shadows.

"Essential to the order?" he murmured.

Back in Scala ad Caelum, on a windy balcony, Master Odin was warning Vidar about something older than any of them. There had been thirteen ancient darknesses, he said: true darkness, without form, the source of most of the darkness in the world. Seven had been sealed inside the Lost Masters, four trapped in the Realm Between of a world made of data, and two were said to have been destroyed when the old world fell, though nobody could prove it. Vidar ought to learn to tell true darkness from the other kinds.

In the desert city, a man named Jafar asked Xehanort's group to fetch a lamp for him from a cave. When he shook Xehanort's hand, Xehanort felt what was inside him.

"All I know is that when he took my hand, I felt his greed," Xehanort told the others. "He covets power, and he'll stop at nothing to obtain it."

He went anyway, because it was a way into parts of the world they couldn't otherwise reach, and in the cave they found Eraqus and Bragi, sent on the very same errand. Urd guessed that the lamp mattered to the world's order, just as the rose had, and she was right: as they reached it, Vidar stepped out of a portal with Vor beside him.

The upper classmen needed seven lights to defeat true darkness, Vidar told them, and they had lost some of their own, so they were taking whatever each world held most precious, in the hope of finding true light among them. He had given up on the vow not to meddle. All he wanted now was to avenge the friends he had lost.

Xehanort didn't understand it. "We've defeated countless dark entities the old-fashioned way. Why go this far?"

Vidar asked Eraqus to come with them, and he left with Vor before Eraqus could answer. Eraqus was badly shaken, and Xehanort put a hand on his shoulder. "It's okay, Eraqus. None of us have the knowledge or experience to decide. When you do eventually become a Keyblade Master, you may find yourself having to make this very same decision. And maybe then, you'll know what to do."

They told Master Odin everything, and asked him why defeating true darkness should need anything like this. Odin told them what he had told Vidar. A true darkness that had taken a vessel could be destroyed by destroying the vessel, as the Lost Masters had done, and Vidar wouldn't accept any more deaths.

Xehanort asked the obvious question. "If that's true, how do we defeat something like that?"

There was one other way, Odin said, and he didn't trust it.

"Kingdom Hearts," Xehanort whispered.

It needed seven true lights to summon it, said Odin, and it might purge every world along with the darkness. Xehanort understood. "It could even purge the worlds."

Odin took the mission back from them; it was beyond them now. As they left the room, they heard him say, to nobody at all, that the dark seeker would soon be upon them.

The Underworld

They had no idea what to do next, and then Baldr was there, back from a separate task, studying the different kinds of darkness.

"Baldr!" said Xehanort. "What've you been up to?"

Baldr had an idea for them. The dead upper classmen, if any of them were dead, might be reached in the Underworld, below the Coliseum of Olympus. Eraqus let slip what they had been searching for, and Baldr told them what they didn't know.

After he spoke to Eraqus, he had followed Hoder to a world called the Enchanted Dominion, and there he had watched her die. A sorceress named Maleficent had come for him, and Hoder had put herself between them. Baldr had woken up in the infirmary in Scala ad Caelum, and it was then that Odin had sent the others to look for the seven. There had never been any other task for Baldr. He had been given time to heal.

At Olympus, a god named Hades struck a bargain with them, split them up, and sent Xehanort, Eraqus and Bragi down into the Underworld.

"We want to talk to someone who disappeared," Xehanort told him. "Hoder."

A great three-headed dog stood in their way, and suddenly Baldr was there beside them. He and Bragi would hold it off, he said; Xehanort and Eraqus should go on. Xehanort went, but he couldn't quite shake a feeling. "I hope it's just my imagination."

Further in, they found Hoder, and with her Heimdall, Helgi and Sigrun, all of them fading at the edges.

"We were tasked by Master Odin to find all of you, the missing upper classmen," said Xehanort.

They told him how it had happened. In the Enchanted Dominion they had decided that they couldn't help the princess there without breaking that world's order, and in the night Hoder had gone alone to fight the sorceress. The other three had found her fading, fought the sorceress for her, and died too.

Xehanort told them what he had seen in the worlds. "There's a little bit of darkness everywhere. But that's its way, to slowly infiltrate everything. Darkness can hide anywhere. Even inside someone."

Heimdall wondered aloud whether light and darkness were only a matter of how you looked at them, born of beliefs that clashed, and whether some middle ground might be better than keeping them apart. Xehanort and Eraqus didn't agree. Then the upper classmen began to vanish, and at the very last, Hoder asked Xehanort for a favour.

They went back for the others and found Urd alone, and Hades telling them that one of them would have to stay behind. Urd wouldn't hear of it and went for him. Hermod came running to help, and Hades gathered himself for something terrible. Before he could let it loose, a portal opened beneath them and all four were pulled down into a corridor of darkness.

Xehanort found Eraqus lying in the dark. "Eraqus! Eraqus, wake up!" He hauled him to his feet. "Quick, put on your armor. Darkness is all around us. If you listen to its whispers, it'll get inside your head and your heart."

Each of them touched the plate at their shoulder, and armour closed over them in a flash of light, from helmet to boots. Urd and Hermod did the same. It bought them time, and not much else.

"We need to find a way out, but. How?" Xehanort looked round wildly. "What do we do?"

Hermod went down first, overcome by the dark. Then a shadowy figure came out of it. Urd knew it for a friend, and it killed her and Hermod both. Xehanort and Eraqus fell the same way, and it came for them next. Then there was light. Master Odin had come, the Master's Defender in his hand, and the figure couldn't finish them. Odin opened a way out.

When they came round, Odin told them that they were the only two who had come back. He was surprised to hear they'd seen Baldr. Before he could say any more, the city came under attack. He called the No Name Keyblade down from where it hung on the wall above them and went out to get the other students to safety.

Eraqus asked Xehanort if he knew who it was.

"I almost wish I didn't," said Xehanort. Baldr had lost his sister, he said, and anyone would be weak to darkness after that. It was Baldr, and Baldr had killed Bragi. "And Hermod and Urd."

The Darkness That Was His Own

There was fighting in the city's streets. Eraqus ran straight out into it, and Xehanort went after him. "Eraqus, wait! Things seem to be under control here. Let's leave it to them."

Then Vidar, Vala and Vali came through a portal. Eraqus turned on them for letting Hoder die, and he wouldn't be held back.

"Eraqus, no," said Xehanort. "Don't let your anger take over. That's what happened to Baldr."

When it was over, Xehanort had to drag him off. "That's enough, Eraqus. You wanted to defeat the darkness, not your classmates. Remember?"

Then Xehanort looked round. "Wait, where's Vor?"

Baldr came to them, floating above the street, wrapped in darkness, and Xehanort felt his pain like a blade in his own chest. "So it's true."

Baldr sneered that they had never found their seven lights. When Eraqus swore that he would save him, the darkness in him said it was too late. Then it left them, making for the tower, and Xehanort understood. "The tower. He's going after Vor!"

Vor hadn't seen him coming. He told her how it had happened: seven days of grief that turned to blame and then to anger, and a darkness growing inside him that urged him to purge the world by giving the thirteen lights to the shadows. It had killed Hoder, he said, and once it had his body, it had killed Sigrun, Heimdall, Helgi, Hermod, Urd and Bragi. Vor raised her Keyblade against him and was overwhelmed. Vidar, Vala and Vali came to help her, and that was how Xehanort and Eraqus found them. Baldr called up a Heartless so huge that it filled the room, and it cut down the three upper classmen with a single stroke.

"Vidar!" shouted Xehanort.

While he and Eraqus held the monster off, Vor went for Baldr, and he ran her through with darkness.

"Vor!" She was gone before they reached her. Xehanort knelt beside her. "Vor."

Baldr went up to the roof, as if the occasion deserved it, and they followed him. There he told them what he wanted. Thirteen lights given to the shadows would summon Kingdom Hearts, and the world would be born again in darkness.

"Thirteen darknesses?" said Xehanort. He didn't follow. "Wait. Calling on that power would purge the world, which means that darkness, you, would disappear."

It had been a plan, once. Kill Hoder, and Vidar would want revenge; kill the others, and he would want it more; and when Vidar learned that he would have to kill Baldr to end it, he wouldn't be able to, and he would turn to gathering the seven lights instead.

"And he'd turn to Kingdom Hearts," said Xehanort.

But Vidar had given it up, and so Baldr had come to kill the lower classmen and summon Kingdom Hearts with the thirteen darknesses himself.

He took the shape of his great Heartless, and they fought him until both sides were spent. Eraqus turned aside a last blow, brought them both down, and told Xehanort to drive the darkness out of Baldr. Xehanort gathered the light into his Keyblade to do it. Then he stopped, and raised it to kill instead, and Eraqus cried out against it.

Darkness closed round the two of them, Xehanort and Baldr alone inside it.

"What's going on?" said Xehanort.

The darkness said that it wasn't one of the ancient ones.

"Then prove it," said Xehanort.

It said it hadn't been born in Baldr's heart, either, but out of the darkness of the people Baldr had known, and it asked Xehanort whether light or darkness ruled his heart.

"I." He couldn't answer. When it told him that the two of them were alike, he said instead, "You don't know what you're talking about." And then, slowly, "The darkness grew and became his own."

Then Hoder came out of Xehanort's heart, a spirit, the favour she had asked of him in the Underworld, and she spoke to her brother, and the thing inside him cracked. Baldr told her, all in a rush, what it had been like. All his life he had felt what was in other people's hearts. From Hoder and from Eraqus he had felt only light, and from nearly everyone else, darkness. It had frightened him. It had gathered inside him, and slowly it had become his own. With Hoder he had felt safe. When she was gone he had fallen the rest of the way. There were two kinds of people, he said: those whose light was pure, and those with darkness in them, in whom it grew.

"Two kinds of people," Xehanort repeated.

Brother and sister reached for each other, and then, not trusting it, both summoned their Keyblades.

"Wait!" cried Xehanort.

The darkness took Baldr's body and struck, and golden chains caught him and held him fast. The dark around them broke apart. The chains came from Master Odin's Keyblade.

"Master Odin!" Xehanort cried.

Odin told Xehanort to drive the darkness out of him. But Baldr could still fight. He clashed with Hoder and they both fell, and Hoder faded away. Baldr looked at Xehanort and said that he saw himself in him. He asked him to understand: that those whose light was pure would coldly condemn those with darkness in them, and that Xehanort must go and find the answers, about darkness and about how unjust the world was. Xehanort pointed his Keyblade at him as if to purge him. Then he changed his mind, and killed him.

Baldr faded. Odin grieved for yet another of his students.

The Graveyard

For a month Xehanort kept to his room. Then he took flowers to the graveyard on the far side of the city, where there were eleven new graves, and laid them down one by one, saying the names of the people he had sat beside every day. "Hermod. Urd. Bragi. Vor. Baldr." At the last grave he stopped. "Now you and your sister will always be together. You'll always have the light to share."

Eraqus came with flowers of his own.

"Eraqus. I didn't expect to see you here so early," said Xehanort.

Eraqus was worried that he'd brought too many, and Xehanort shook his head. "I don't think there's such a thing as too many."

Xehanort asked after Odin, who had been glum ever since it happened. Eraqus called him a glum old man, and Xehanort very nearly smiled. "I'll be sure to tell him you said so."

"And you're still you," he said. "Always the joker."

Eraqus announced that he was sunny and delightful, and Xehanort raised an eyebrow. "Is that really how you see yourself?"

Life ought to be fun, said Eraqus. Xehanort looked at him. "Says the person weeping loudly night after night, alone in his room."

Eraqus accused him of listening through walls.

"You're in the next room," said Xehanort. "I couldn't tune you out if I tried."

Odin wanted them to sit the Mark of Mastery as his last students, Eraqus told him, and Xehanort stared. "Really? Already?"

And afterwards, Eraqus said, Odin meant them to replace him, and to go and live somewhere that wasn't Scala ad Caelum.

"Oh," said Xehanort.

It was time for a change, Odin had said, and after a moment Xehanort nodded. "Maybe it is."

Then Eraqus suggested a game, to lighten things up, and Xehanort gave him a sideways look. "Do you really want to lose that badly?" They went back up into the city together.

When they had gone, someone else walked through the graveyard: a figure in a black coat, in no hurry at all. He was disappointed. He hadn't found a chosen one here, though he thought this Xehanort might still be useful.

He was remembering the Underworld. Baldr had found Bragi alone down there and threatened him, and Bragi hadn't been afraid. If Baldr came back without him, Bragi had pointed out, it would only prove what Xehanort already suspected. Bragi had even wondered aloud whether he ought to take Baldr's body, and decided it would make keeping a low profile difficult. Baldr was no match for him, and when he attacked, Bragi simply turned to walk away. He wouldn't get in the way of Baldr's plan, he said; he would just disappear. Beside himself, Baldr struck him down and left without making sure he was dead.

The figure pushed back his hood in front of the stone with Bragi's name on it, and the face underneath was Bragi's. It was Luxu, and he was annoyed. With his name carved into a gravestone, he could hardly go on being Bragi in Scala ad Caelum.

The Master in the Black Coat

A year after the upper classmen went missing, it was decided that Xehanort and Eraqus would be tested for the Mark of Mastery, and before the exam a wielder had to go out alone into the worlds. Xehanort went by the corridors of darkness, in his armour, and thought about the first time he had walked one, when he left the island.

"As I walked along the path, darkness whispered to me from all around," he remembered. "Though I couldn't understand what it said, it stirred emotions deep within my heart." Hatred, jealousy, doubt: things he had never felt before, some of them aimed at him. "Regardless of where these foul emotions were coming from, they gave me comfort. They helped me realize that my heart could still feel."

The armour kept most of it out, but not all of it. "My armor provides protection, yet every time I pass through, the darkness seeps further into my heart. I can feel it, faint though it may be. But if my heart is strong enough, maybe it could weather this maelstrom?"

He was the child of destiny; he had been told so often enough. So he let the armour go. The darkness came flooding in, and he fell.

He woke with a start in a wasteland full of old Keyblades standing in the earth. "Whoa!"

A figure in a black coat, hooded, was sitting nearby, and seemed rather pleased with him. He called Xehanort the singularity.

"Who are you?" said Xehanort.

The answer made no sense at all, and Xehanort sighed. The stranger said he had saved his life.

"You what?" Then Xehanort saw that it was true. "Oh."

"Well, what about you? Why were you there?" he asked, and the stranger said he had once been a Keyblade wielder.

"Really? I've never heard of you," said Xehanort. He didn't trust him, and he called his Keyblade to his hand. The stranger simply called it out of Xehanort's hand and into his, then gave it back. Did Xehanort trust him now?

"Even less," said Xehanort.

He shouldn't go into the corridors unprotected, the stranger told him, and he held out a black coat like his own. It would keep darkness out better than any armour.

"What's this?" Xehanort turned it over suspiciously. "Are you trying to sell me this coat?"

It was free, said the stranger, and Xehanort kept eyeing it. "Still don't trust you."

Xehanort explained why he had been in the corridor at all, and it turned out that the stranger didn't know what a Mark of Mastery was.

"I thought you said you used to be a Keyblade wielder," said Xehanort.

In return for the coat, the stranger wanted a favour, and Xehanort frowned. "I thought you said it was free."

He wanted Xehanort to take a look, the stranger said, and Xehanort asked, "At what?"

At people's hearts, the stranger said: to see how tangled feelings, and differences in power, could hold light or darkness. Even what people felt for the ones they loved, he said, wasn't always light.

"Whoa, where did that come from?" said Xehanort.

When the stranger began to sort people into two kinds, Xehanort wouldn't have it. "People shouldn't be categorized in extremes. And even if I was either type, it doesn't mean that I carry those dark intentions."

The stranger asked him whether what he had already seen hadn't shown him that he was wrong about people. Xehanort didn't answer.

Some time later he came back to the wasteland with what he had seen. There had been darkness growing in every heart he looked into. He had come away disillusioned, and certain that nothing would keep the world from chaos unless he took hold of it himself, with darkness if need be. The black coat felt familiar to him, and so did a path he could feel in his heart, though he couldn't have said why. He wouldn't need the coat much longer, the stranger said; soon he would command the darkness instead of hiding from it. Xehanort asked him how he could possibly know that. Then the stranger told him his name, and what he had been: a Lost Master. And he was gone.

Thirteen Lifetimes

Two years after that, Xehanort and Eraqus sat in their old classroom and talked about what their travels had taught them.

"It made me think," said Xehanort. He was quiet for a moment. "About a lot of things. The events of the past, what's to come. What about you? Wasn't it always your dream to travel abroad on your own?" But he had learned something else too, and it came out of him slowly. "It made me realize that one lifetime is too short. It's not enough."

Eraqus said that a person could always pass on what they had to the next generation. Xehanort shook his head. "Yes, but. I'd rather do it myself."

How many lifetimes did he want, then? Eraqus asked.

"Hmm." Xehanort considered it. "Twelve. No, thirteen."

Eraqus asked him why, and Xehanort answered at once. "That's what it'll take to rebuild the world." He thought for a moment longer. "Scratch that. One more to explore the new world."

Eraqus stared at him.

"We all have our dreams," said Xehanort.

He asked what Eraqus's was. "Yeah. What's yours? To become a Keyblade Master?"

Eraqus said he wanted to stay true to the light, and Xehanort looked at him curiously. "Hm? What brought that on?"

If anyone were ever lost in darkness, Eraqus told him, he would be a beacon for them, so that they could find their way back.

"I see," said Xehanort.

Eraqus asked whether he was laughing at him, and Xehanort shook his head. "No, it's the perfect dream for you."

Anyone who tried to escape the darkness on their own, said Eraqus, would only sink deeper into it. Xehanort smiled. "It's true that running away isn't my forte, unlike someone I know. Thanks for always being there."

Four years on, Xehanort laid fresh flowers on four of the graves and told Eraqus that he was leaving, alone, to see what Odin had never shown them. Eraqus asked whether they'd had some good times.

"Yeah," said Xehanort.

Eraqus tried to talk him out of it, and Xehanort said nothing for a while. "I just want to see more of what's out there before the Mark of Mastery exam."

He had seen the other worlds already, said Eraqus, but Xehanort only shrugged. "Not everything."

Eraqus didn't stop him. He would be back, Eraqus said; they still had a score to settle at chess, and he named it, generously. Xehanort corrected him. "You mean 107 wins, 323 losses, and 7 draws."

Eraqus said that was close enough.

"Do you seriously mean that?" said Xehanort. Then he went. "See you."

He went back to the world where the queen ruled by rage. She had forgotten him the last time, and she was still full of darkness, and he stood before her waiting to be tried. "You don't remember me? I knew it."

Eight years after he had come out of a corridor of darkness into a city standing on the water, he and Eraqus passed the Mark of Mastery and were made Keyblade Masters on the same day. Eraqus, the true heir, was given the Master's Defender. Xehanort was given the No Name, so that the Lost Masters' resolve might pass to him along with it.

A year later, they fought. Xehanort had decided what was to be done about the world. "Kingdom Hearts is the only way."

Eraqus wouldn't hear of it. "What about our duty as Keyblade wielders?"

"Our duty is to protect the world," said Xehanort. "This is the path we must take."

"To think we became Keyblade Masters only a year ago, and now this," said Eraqus. "You were bequeathed a Keyblade from the era of the Lost Masters. You were supposed to have inherited their weapon, and their resolve."

The title meant less than Eraqus thought, Xehanort told him. "We were both given the title, but you alone are the true heir." He hadn't come to this lightly. "Since coming here nine years ago, I've contemplated what it means to protect the world. This decision did not come easily."

"But summoning Kingdom Hearts is a drastic measure," said Eraqus. "How can you be so sure that's the answer?"

Xehanort turned it back on him. "And how can you be so sure it's not?"

Eraqus raised his Keyblade. "Life has taught us far different lessons."

Xehanort looked at it. "Do you stand in my way as a true Keyblade Master?"

"No," said Eraqus. "As a true friend."

And the two blades met.

The Mirror

A long time passed. Fifty-four years after the upper classmen went missing, the two old friends stood in the Land of Departure, where Eraqus now taught, and argued once again. Xehanort had turned his mind to the χ-blade, and to another Keyblade War, and Eraqus couldn't talk him out of it. Eraqus tried to stop him by force, and Xehanort answered him with darkness. It left two scars across Eraqus's face, and on it the look of a man who couldn't believe what his oldest friend had become.

Ten years after that, Xehanort went back to the Mirror. He was old now, and bald, and the white mask came up in the glass just as it always had, lit unevenly, with the twelve signs round the frame.

"Do you recognize me?" said Xehanort.

The Mirror remarked on his head, and Xehanort ran a hand over it. "A demonstration of my resolve."

He had a question, and he'd had it ready for a very long time. "Over the years, I have lost many comrades. Some passed on, while others chose a different path. However, there will always be a special place in my heart, for those friends I never met save in my dreams as a young lad. Alas, my efforts to find them have been in vain. I don't even know their names. But I can see their faces still. I ask you: did they ever exist, or were they merely a figment of my imagination?"

Some of them, the Mirror told him, were still alive.

He could hardly believe it. "How can you be sure? Without even their names?"

The Mirror was sure, and Xehanort leaned closer to the glass. "Where are they now?"

It told him where to find one of them, and he knew the place at once. "The Keyblade Graveyard!"

A year later 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."