Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II characters, locations, et cetera, © and ™ Square Co., Ltd., Disney Interactive and Buena Vista Games, 2002-2006. Final Fantasy characters, locations, et cetera, © and ™ Square Co., Ltd., 1994-2006. Xenogears characters, et cetera, © and ™ Square Co., Ltd., 1998.

Additional Disney copyrights: Tron (1982, Walt Disney Pictures), The Sword in the Stone (1963, Walt Disney Productions), Robin Hood (1973, Walt Disney Productions), Gargoyles (1994, Walt Disney Television Animation and Buena Vista Animation), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001, Toon City Inc. and Walt Disney Pictures), The Great Mouse Detective (1986, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Walt Disney Pictures, and Silver Screen Partners II), The Lion King II: Simba's Pride (1998, Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Australia), The Emperor's New Groove (2000, Walt Disney Pictures), The Incredibles (2004, Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios), Pirates of the Caribbean (2003, Walt Disney Pictures, Jerry Bruckheimer Films and First Mate Productions, Inc.), A Goofy Movie (1995, Walt Disney Pictures), Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (segment: "An Adventure in Color", 1961, Walt Disney Animation and NBC), Fantasia (1940, Walt Disney Pictures), The Rescuers (1977, Walt Disney Productions), Holes (2003, Walt Disney Pictures and Green Lake Productions), Hercules (1997, Walt Disney Pictures), "Der Führer's Face" (1942, Walt Disney Pictures), Treasure Planet (2002, Walt Disney Pictures), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, Touchstone Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, and Silver Screen Partners III), and Pooh's Heffalump Movie (2005, Walt Disney Pictures and DisneyToon Studios).

Properties used without permission for nonprofit fan appreciation. It would seriously not be in Disney's interests to sue me. I'm the least of your problems. In fact, I'm like -1 on the Problem Scale. I probably help you. Take care of Mike Eisner and then get back to me.

Questions or comments, please email K.A. here.

This fanfiction is rated R:VLS, meaning it is rated Restricted (ages 17 and above) for violence, coarse language, and sexual content. Reader be advised! Parents, do not let your children read this story without your supervision.

    He thought sometimes that Lae reached out to him in that last moment, before the madness had swallowed him. He liked to believe that there was some shred of self left in that fading ashen form, that begged for his death, and forgave Reno for everything.
    He knew even in the pit of dreams that Lae hadn't. That there was no one even left to call that name by that point, clawing toward him with the maw of a beast open wide and steaming in the cold and filthy rain.
    Reno had memorized the feel of the knife in his hand and how those hollow yellow eyes widened with a scream when he plunged that blade home. He knew now that no ordinary weapon could kill something like that, he knew that he must have done something special, or that he wasn't the one to kill him. Kill it. Because that hadn't been Lae in there, there had been nothing left of Lae in that thing, there couldn't have been. And yet that final scream persisted in his memory. It couldn't leave.
    He didn't always wake in fits and shouts. Sometimes he wound up on the floor, knotted in sweat-soaked sheets, learning he'd screamed unknown names into the darkness for hours, because everyone else had been too afraid to wake him up.
    He knew, consciously, that people were good to him here, and his nonchalance was the least he could offer to repay them.
    The Chasers were known as the King's favorites. And like all favorite and treasured things, they were kept hidden, in the cold vault underbelly of the Castle, where they trained, ate, slept, learned and nursed their wounds. They were descendants of the original keyblade masters, at least in position; a holdover from the ancient Keyblade War. Now there were no keyblades, and plenty of missions. And lots of casualties, and lots of dead.
    It had been the Chasers who had descended upon Midgar the night the worlds broke, and saved the cities when the Company had failed its people. They stormed in, with swords and guns and full battle armor, shouting military urgency on the backs of war chocobos the size of small elephants. Hundreds of them, filing into every plate and ghetto, clearing the city street by shattered street, cutting through the shadows as though their weapons were pure light.
    A squad of three, tall and alien in their ornate plated armor, had found him in the corner of a dirty alleyway, hugging a smeared knife and the limp and heartless body of his older brother. They had dismounted and approached him, tilting their heads, speaking tersely between themselves what the next course of action ought to be.
    It had been the shortest of them to reach out, the short and stocky female with her pistachio eyes visible through the slits in her visor. She was the gentle one. She had told him that he was coming with them.
    Reno had gone. And worked, and trained, and in the nights cried and screamed and tore long jagged marks into his skin with his nails, but that calmed with age. Whether it wanted to or not.
    He was 16 now, nearly the age Lae had been when the Heartless had taken him away. The difference was that Reno now stared out at life through the slit in a steel visor and dragged a quarterstaff at his side, and he had gotten used to death.
    He never again saw the squad of women-soldiers who had saved him, but upon his induction at Disney Castle he was placed in a small squad of other recruits, other refugees from Midgar or the other broken worlds, names they could only mutter. Wutai. El Nido. Balamb. Ivalice. Solaris. Stars that had been split open right down the center, pouring their lifeblood out into the cold of metaspace. Orphans of time.
    They knelt together, these abandoned children of the multiverse, before the throne of King Mickey. Receiving orders only their ears should ever hear, of things that were always better left unsaid. This was their life now, the devoted knights and killdolls of the Agenda, in all its front of nobility and all its terrible back dealings. Because they each had a debt, and they had nowhere else to go.
    This time it was different. Reno knew it before the King even spoke, because they had woken long before the sirens. They had heard the first distant thunder of the cannons and known that here had come a reckoning, and every last one of them might just lose their lives tonight.
    And this was just as much as the King said. The Chasers are his children, but he gave them no illusions. They were going to die, fighting something terrible and unseen, that was already nearly to their gates.
    There were to be formations. Some new, some familiar. Classic old tactics with a dash of spice to taste, that bitter little trace element of hope more imagined than anything. Because they didn't know, no one knew, not the King or the Assembly of Wizards, but they have to do what they can.
    And then the King wished them good luck.
    As the ranks climbed up from their knees, Mickey turned to a detachment to the side. Nothing special, a group of spatial wastrels just like the rest, but for these, King Mickey said, he has a special mission.
    Reno listened, clutching at his quarterstaff, and the squad leader Tseng's jaw clenched tight under his icelike expression. The others around them --Rude, Irvine, Elena, Beatrix, Biggs and Wedge-- remained silent. They did not ask. They could not ask. They could only accept.
    'Go now,' said the King. 'Hurry.'
    They bowed, and Reno bowed with them. As he bent forward, he lost the inner battle with morning nausea and a flood of dying brothers came out as vomit on the poor King's marble floor.
    The King looked up at him sadly and squeezed his shoulders like a good friend would. He really thought that somehow he was responsible. Reno didn't have the heart to tell him.

    Word had come first as a message in a bottle. The king's insignia, and a warning, and a plea.
    A different kind of enemy, the letter said. No Heartless, no Nobodies; a flesh-and-blood adversary, if they could really use the term. One that shouldn't have had the technology or numbers that it did. Something that was approaching fast through metaspace, leaving a trail of stardust metakliks wide with the residue of shattered worlds. This was something for which the forces of Disney Castle were not prepared and had no means by which to be prepared. And chances of containment were dim at best.
    Please come quickly, the letter said.
    This was a difficult proposition, because the Three (or possibly the Six, depending on how one counted) were used to an escort handling concerns of transportation. One does not simply drift into metaspace, as it was said. But the King said that all members of the Court were needed where they were, so a pick-up was simply impossible.
    There was no time to hold anyone's hand anymore, the King had written as kindly as he could, which was painfully so; the keyblade masters had to step up and take charge of themselves, for themselves, and for the kingdoms. Surely there were ways, where faith and luck were strong. The Three had only to find them.
    'If nothing else,' the King's letter read in closing, 'if this letter reaches you, then our theory is right. There is a path for you, if you can only reach out and take it.'
    They went to the library on the main island, the center of the Destiny Archipelago. Records, they decided; almanacs. Maps of the best understanding of Fate's Waters that local science could reveal; rainfall statistics; wind patterns; current. They pieced it all together with Sora's knowledge of the metaspace, gleaned from his own navigation, his exposure to the spatial winds and seasons and the four-dimensional figures of worlds laid out like constellations, burning bright and feverish in his head. Together it formed a picture, something crude but with some sort of mathematic to it that held at least a certain level of infallibility, some kind of starting point of reference.
    Finally, they found it. A current that could lead them straight into an upstream right into Disney waters. It came with the autumn monsoons, when the winds shifted northeast and dragged seed to far-off shores. Barely weeks away, not a moment to waste, but if they timed things right they might just be able to make it.
    It may, even then, be too late. But there was every chance it might not be, and for that, the Three had to try.
    They started at once on their preparations. They calculated the best day to sail, gauged the size of the ship they would need, and found one that would do the trick. They bribed the mayors' attendant --Tidus-- so that the boat could be stolen from harbor under cover of night, to catch the morning noreaster. They stole supplies from the local shops, wrote the last letters to their confused and distant parents, outfitted themselves with extra equipment and long-neglected secret stashes of cash. They mapped, and planned, and memorized the details of everything from the slightest shore breeze, to the network of stars that would be their only guide when they lost sight of land.
    And then it happened. On the eve of their departure, when they had been three days without sleep for all their preparations, when they were on the way to the very docks, the absolutely unthinkable happened.
    Riku got grounded.
    This in itself was not the issue. The true terror was when the other two snuck over to Riku's house to bail him out, and they found their parents already there waiting for them, saying that it was high time for an "intervention."
    In Sora's opinion, this was terribly unfair. Of all their Others, only Riku's was whispering in his ear telling him to burn things. It was just like parents to make these gross overgeneralizations. And force pills and straight jackets on people.
    Oh, they screamed about it. They made a serious case about urgent missions and little mice-kings that desperately needed their help, but it just didn't work for some reason. The more truth they divulged, the tougher the meds they were given. Even sending threatening letters to Tidus from their padded hospital cells didn't help somehow. It just kept them handcuffed to their bedposts longer.
    The worst was that for whatever reason, none of them could summon their keyblades to escape. Usually this only happened if their concentration was disrupted, but the Three had never heard of walls so thick even the keyblade couldn't cross distances to find them.
    At first they tried compensating for themselves, using what weapons they could find in the ward. Spoons, paperclips, anything that could get a sort of length to it, something that might be able to tease the keyblade out of hiding, wherever it had gone.
    All that did was get the straight jackets on them full-time.
    Outside their padded walls, the monsoon winds swelled and roared with bitter, failed promise. In their respective heads, their Others criticized angrily and really did start to speak of things having to do with lighter fluid and strike-anywhere matches. Namine was the one to start talking about plastic explosives.
    Kairi and Sora celebrated their sixteenth birthdays in those cells. Technically Riku's seventeenth came and went, but a little outburst in the exercise yard involving a warden and his teeth ensured the date did not concern celebratory cupcakes. Apparently Xehanort showed him a little deference and stopped ranting about world domination that night, though.
    No one said 'let's pretend to be sane.' Even if the notion were entertained, their Others wouldn't let them get away with it. Xehanort, Roxas and Namine had fought too hard to gain ground in their hosts' heads to lose it on a plan that had already failed, and Riku, Sora and Kairi weren't about to make them.
    Anyway, acting as expected did nothing-- even basic mundanity carried a label of additional battiness in this place, just by virtue of their presence: talking about the weather wasn't being normal but succumbing to an attention deficit disorder; disliking the food wasn't a valid complaint but some somatic illness. Everything had a long chemical explanation suddenly. There was no such thing as feeling, just "dysfunction." If an outburst got you just the same response as passivity, what really stopped you?
    After a while it was easier to believe they really were there for a reason, that something traumatizing had hijacked their memories, and had them hallucinate everything they thought they'd experienced. And maybe the Others really were just hormonal imbalances in their brains, and Roxas wasn't mentioning the maiming of things with sticks just for the hell of it. Maybe the three of them were crazy.
    As a result, word came next by air. A small brown owl, surely Merlin's, appeared at the edge of the exercise yard one day with a tattered scroll in its beak, the royal sigil hanging from a necklace chain bound round the center. The Three still didn't have use of their hands, so with a bit of coaxing they got the bird to pull the chain off with its beak, and unfurl the scroll for them to read what they could of its contents, which was only the middle part.
    'not too late.'
    The Three met each other's sunken gazes and bowed their heads.
    "It's time to try harder," Riku said.
    "We can't fail them this time," said Sora. "We shouldn't even have this chance."
    "We don't have a chance now," Kairi reminded. "All we know is that they're still fighting out there somewhere. We're still useless. We're worse than useless."
    To be specific, the Three could hardly remember their own names half the time. Not many could say it was only their split personalities that kept them sane and really mean it. The kids were each on the hospital's maximum dosage of the hardest possible antipsychotics, combating the hallucinations they didn't actually have and numbing out what was really there. And they had to escape in this state.
    "We have no boat," she continued. "We have no plan, we have no wind. You remember those charts? The current will get us as far as the edge of the divide and then the doldrums will swallow us up. We'll go nowhere for months."
    "Oars?" Sora suggested dimly.
    "We're not rowing to Disney Castle!"
    "Well, then what the hell's your plan, then?" Riku demanded, snapping his head around at her. His hair was still longer than hers.
    "Nothing," she said. "We do nothing. If we're needed, someone will find their way to us. We can't get away how we are."
    It was Sora, or maybe it was Roxas, who snapped back: "We can't just sit around waiting for someone to give us a hand-up. That's what Mickey was saying in the first place."
    "But we can't do anything but wait, Sora!"
    Sora sank to his knees on the grass with a sigh. "So that's it, then," he said. "We just hang around until we get a break. Or we pretend we're better, which isn't gonna work. Good planning session, guys."
    The Three didn't speak to each other again for the rest of the exercise break. When they were called back in, they went immediately to their respective cells and stayed curled up in the padded corners in silence, resenting each other's ineptitude or childishness while their Other took care of resenting theirs. It was a nice, happy little vicious cycle.
    They fell asleep this way, after refusing their dinner-through-a-straw and getting their daily injection right into the jugular. You know. Routine. Except for the part that wasn't, not that they were going to notice till morning.
    Archimedes, still perched on the outer fence, only rolled his eyes and settled in for a long vigil.

    Many metakliks away, Squall "Leon" Leonhart was having his own problems.
    The Radiant Garden Defense System kept an articulated map of the city and its surrounding areas, from the northern sea to the western mountains. ENCOM technology advanced by Ansem the Wise enabled the Defense System a thorough understanding of the Garden and its surrounding provinces, down to the inch, in size, density, and color. Leon could punch a query into Tron and ask him what the weather was like on the tip of a gnat's nose on an iceberg in the south territory, and Tron could give him the forecast for the next week.
    So it was all kinds of addling when one morning during his routine diagnostics, Tron reported an extra square foot of cobblestone in the town square.
    "You couldn't have just... missed it?" Leon asked.
    "It's not very likely, Sir," the console beeped. Leon had gotten the security program down from addressing him as "Administrator," but the road was a long and hard one. "If nothing else, the carbon make-up is entirely different, and there's far more iron in the molecular bonding."
    "Tron."
    "It's ruddy red brown, Sir."
    "There's a sudden patch of ruddy red brown cobblestone in the middle of the town square."
    "Yes, Sir. And no, Sir, I don't mean fly-by-night street repair; the old stone is still there. But now there's an extra square foot of it."
    Leon pondered over this news, brow creased in growing worry.
    "So basically," he said to sum up, "Radiant Garden has grown by a foot."
    "The entire landmass," Tron confirmed. "Speaking dimensionally, our entire physical space has just expanded."
    Leon was sure there were laws for that. Cid had to know. Or rather, Cid didn't have to know, and actually probably didn't know, but Leon would feel the better for asking. He hadn't been this disconcerted since Scrooge McDuck had run against him for Minister Regent on the Trickle-down Capitalism ticket. Which was as much as Leon was accustomed to being disconcerted about anything and therefore, proportionally, this bothered him a hell of a lot.
    On the other hand, it was one stinking foot of red cobblestone. And that was only if Tron was right and not just going digitally senile, or the wind had moved during the scan, or a one wasn't carried somewhere. Any nimrod could take a stab at it and probably be halfway right.
    Leon took that moment to drop the tunnel vision and notice the blond spur in the corner of the room.
    Strife was leaning against the control room doorway. His head was bowed, a sign he had probably been listening for a while, in that moody "you're too insignificant to intrude upon" attitude that was too amusing to offend.
    "You got anything to contribute?" Leon asked him, mostly to watch his concentration break.
    Cloud frowned at him in positively feline laziness. "Ask it to do the scan again," he said curtly.
    Leon shrugged. He did.
    There were three more feet of red cobblestone in the town square. There were five new life-forms, four houseflies and one swallowtail butterfly, dust particles were up .00002%, and the Castle had inexplicably grown another chimney. A shiny copper one.
    "Oh," Tron said. "And there's a neon sign buried under two meters of silt in the Gulf of Locke. Do you want to know what it says?"
    "Try us," Cloud answered.
    "'Traverse Town'."

    Sora should have known things were off the moment he woke up. For one thing, he did so on his own-- no buzzer, no intruding warden, just his own body stirring to its own internal clock, and Roxas mumbling about hamburgers in what Sora guessed was the disembodied Nobody equivalent of sleep.
    He woke slowly, muzzily, unused to a wake-up without half a kilo of drugs in his system. With sluggish senses the first thing he noticed was the change in light, much darker against the gray walls than it should have been, with a sort of copper tinge, like sunset. But the air smelled like morning. And it sounded like the twilight before a midnight storm.
    There were two other points of interest, that were a long time in registering. Sora could swear that he was still dreaming, or that the meds really were holding back hallucinations. The first was something the distinct shape of a katana, which was lying on the floor not half a meter from his feet, as innocent and arbitrary as a mislaid nail file. The second was more ominous, and in the circumstances, far more inexplicable: his door was ajar.
    The doors here were never ajar. They were either shut tight under their deadbolts or they were wide open with wardens guarding at the doorway, but there was no such thing as ajar.
    This was a trap. It had to be a trap. Never mind the sword on the damn floor; the door was open. Just what in hell was going on?
    Roxas, who was always drawn out of slumber when Sora's mind was panicking like a deer caught in a bear trap, pointed out that there were other things he could be doing right now, like getting to his feet and finding out what was up. And by the way, swords? Could cut things, Sora. Yes they could.
    What's going on? Sora asked. It's like night outside.
    ~That's because it is night,~ said Roxas, who was never a sound sleeper in someone else's head, and among other things really liked to play games with smells while Sora was in REM  ~And it's morning. It's both at once, with a dash of suppertime thrown in for variety. You better use that sword before its owner comes back for it, you know.~
    What happened?
    ~Hard to explain,~ Roxas sighed, in a way that suggested it was Sora's particular intellect that was proving the obstacle. ~Basically, the room evolved and grew more stuff.~
    Rooms don't evolve.
    ~Mutate. Whatever.~
    Rooms don't mutate! They're not alive! Nonentities!
    ~Oh, sure. Stick it where it hurts. Look, I'm telling you, your room grew a sword. And it grew the swordsman down the hall who's off looking for it, so could you make with the hurrying-up thing?~
    Actually manhandling the katana to cut off the straight jacket was a fairly direct process: the fruits of burgeoning mental clarity, it could be said. When he was done, with minimal cuts and scrapes, Sora was able to stand wobbly to his feet and stretch his arms for the first time in what might as well be centuries.
    He held the katana at arm's length and gave it a few practice swings. He supposed he shouldn't be so surprised how much strength time had stolen from him, but the effects were down and out astounding. He bet even Kairi could take him in a fight this way.
    ...Oh yeah. Kairi.

    It all happened quite quickly after that. By the time the sun rose the next morning Leon was prepared to think an entire year had gone by. Everyone appeared aged as much, shrunken back within themselves in the remnants of Merlin's house, flinching with every thunder roll of a distant mortar.
    Radiant Garden had become a battle zone very quickly. That was what happened when a year's worth of interdimensional warfare showed up at your doorstep in a single night.
    Yuffie would say it was hilarious, the way they didn't find the King's letters until after the major shelling had stopped. But that was because Yuffie's sense of humor was some of the dumbest the gods had ever devised. Or so Leon was inclined to feel at the moment, the way she wouldn't stop laughing.
    The gist of the matter was this: Radiant Garden was not Radiant Garden anymore. It didn't even pull off being Hollow Bastion. It was as far from anything as the Restoration Committee had ever seen.
    Traverse Town had been the least of Tron's surprises. The spatial expansion had started at swallowtail butterflies and neon signs and graduated up to entire streets and buildings, then the people, then its problems. And by then it was picking up the problems of a lot of different worlds.
    Before the Defense System shut down there were reports of all new trolley systems installing themselves in the downtown, two chocobo stables, a rabidly popular card game, a private art gallery, and a man in a yellow raincoat. The Committee didn't hear anything after that. The next sound was shelling.
    The first major assault stopped around midnight, and that was the first time Leon and the others were able to come out from under the rubble and take stock of their situation. Maybe a third of the buildings --their own and the ones "on loan"-- were completely demolished. There were at least eight deaths and forty-five wounded, although that was Aerith's count and probably on the generous side.
    It was also in the rubble --not their own rubble, but the rubble of their old headquarters in Traverse, of all things-- that they found the letters from the King, a year's aged and depressingly useless now. Oh yes. Knowing you were about to be dead and then finding out that your only possible back-up likely no longer existed was a great comfort in the circumstances.
    It was a wonder any of them lasted to the dawn.
    Leon found Cloud in the shell of the general store, tourniquetting a civilian's leg around the knee, which was about where it stopped. It was the strangest thing in the world to see Cloud helping, right next to seeing Cloud give a damn about anything, but Leon's brain wasn't in a place to appreciate it right then.
    They had all tried so hard. The Committee, the Allied Worlds, everyone. They had every advance warning in the world, plenty of time to brace themselves, maybe even time enough to figure out how to stop things. And it failed because of the postal system.
    "You're staying, then?" Leon asked him, when Cloud rose to wash the blood off his hands. They stood at the edge of what used to be the plaza fountain and watched their broken reflections brown and dull.
    "No," Cloud answered. "Something's not right."
    He had torn his sleeve off to make bandages when the medics had run out. His residual geostigma scars torqued over his skin as it flexed.
    Leon returned his gaze to the water. "The one thing the letters didn't mention," he began.
    "Sora," Cloud confirmed, not raising his eyes. "The keyblade bearer is missing."
    The Minister Regent ducked his head. "It seems we've all been unreliable this time."
    He heard the shift of cloth and looked up to find Cloud's gaze directly on him, his eyes rather unsettlingly blue.
    "You can trust me."
    The words had come out suddenly, like a nervous confession. Cloud's ears flushed.
    Leon grinned.
    "All right."
    "...Don't tell Tifa."
    "Right, right."
    "Or Aerith."
    "Got it."
    "Or... anybody."
    "You don't have to worry," Leon assured him, still smiling widely. "If we all died today I don't think any of us would be anything except pleased as sockpuppets to hear Cloud Strife Finally Gave A Shit."
    It was like a declaration of love, kinda. If love was realizing the bastard who often genuinely preferred you dead to talking to him could almost be your best friend.
    They shook hands under the next volley of mortar fire, red and gray cobblestone dust raining down around them like thick winter snowfall.
    "You find him," Leon said. "You get him to the King."
    "I won't be the only one looking."
    "You'll be the only former Chaser."
    Cloud shook his head. "It's worth less than you think."

    ~You're wasting time.~
    I'm out of shape, and you don't even have a physical body.
    ~And whose fault is that?~
    Whose fault is it that you nag like my mom?
    ~Whose fault is it that your mom stuck your ass in a mental hospital?!~
    Sora flicked the katana defiantly. He liked the feel of it, now that he'd gotten used to the weight. It would be absolutely useless to him up against the average Heartless or Nobody, but the Keyblade was still failing to respond to him, so it was going to have to do. Anyway, there was just as much chance that whatever opponent he ran into could respond just as effectively to a real blade.
    The attendants and wardens were not exactly gone, but they weren't around. Hiding somewhere seemed the best guess, though from what he couldn't tell. Apparently Roxas had slept through it too. Cannons, he guessed.
    Some watchdog you are.
    ~I don't live for your benefit!~
    No, you live to jones after your girlfriend. Get a hobby.
    ~I can't get a hobby, you fuckin' twit! Quit stalling and go find your own girlfriend. And your boyfriend.~
    It seemed that the hospital infrastructure had expanded, ballooning up like a great fat animal with angry red stretch marks across its skin. There was the regular ashen linoleum of the hospital, but there was also basaltic flagstone, and shag carpet, and black-veined red marble. Massive intestinal ducting and wires spilled from ancient alabaster pillars and argued with acidic black lichen spreading out from the corners. And then, just as suddenly, the ground or walls gave way to rusty metal grating and riveted sheet metal, great gaping holes in its infrastructure disappearing into shadows or fiery pits where strange voices murmured in forgotten, arcane tongues--
    ~PAY ATTENTION.~
    He didn't register the sound of the explosion over Roxas's shout, but he felt the air shudder, and felt himself begin to rock forward, tipping, falling off balance with no floor beneath him--
    In the back of his brain, the stronger trained reflexes of a keyblade master, which had taken their time in coming, finally kicked in. Sora's body shifted its weight and swung itself down hard on the floor behind it. Sharp burning pain blossomed up through the landed side and Sora cringed, gasping once through gritted teeth, and losing grip on the katana in the process. It spun across the floor in a high shriek and stopped just before someone's feet.
    Viewing him sideways through the smoke, Sora could make out a man of fair height, about middle-aged, in a green oriental tunic and graying waistlength hair, plaited in a braid that swung like a tail behind him. When the ceiling was torn out over their heads, the man merely shielded himself from the dust with a sleeve.
    He had the bearing of some old military officer. He held the katana like he was ready to kill something, with regret, but also with pure and utter certainty.
    The roof torn away, cherry red sunlight flooded in with a gust of ocean wind, a great torrent of light and noise and something like an engine roar, enormous shapes lunging across the sky and over Sora and the man's heads. A foot the size of a shack landed a few yards to their left in a flurry of dust and crushed hospital beds-- a foot made of metal, plated and smoothed, stylized, nothing human, traveling up refined and perfected joints to the torso and body of a giant, easily many stories tall, painted steel and only passingly human, fists curled and arms poised in an unmistakable martial arts stance.
    The instincts that had earlier kept Sora from keeling off the edge into oblivion now were overridden by an even more powerful force, something as strong a passion in the male of the species as the desire for sex, which knew no borders of time, culture, class and context:
    Giant. Effin. Robots.
    There were two. There were more than two, there was a whole group ganging up on the first one, the dark gray weaponless one with the small wings on its back. They struck and it deflected, a sound like the skies were being ripped apart, like the banging of whole ocean liners at sea. Whirring machinery and crunching crippled metal, and--
    The swordsman's voice brought Sora back to himself.
    "FEI!" the man with the katana shouted up at the fighters. To which one in particular, Sora couldn't guess. "FEI! STOP!"
    Sora climbed to his feet. Or made the effort, anyway. "What's going on?"
    The elder man looked over at him, as though seeing him for the first time. He had a distance to his gaze, as if the effort to focus on the boy was difficult, and not because of the glasses.
    "I've failed," he said, babbling. "I was supposed to take care of him."
    Overhead, one of the gang of opposing mecha took a strong hit right to the center of its torso and went hard, toppling with a force so great Sora's body threatened to fall over again.
    The man caught him by the arm this time. He hoisted him up to his feet with the barest gesture of his arm, as if the strength it took were nothing.
    "Fei is a man compelled to fight," said the swordsman, "even though he hates it. It follows him. It will always follow him."
    Sora followed his gaze up to the lone gray robot, still holding its own even as it backed closer up against an outcrop of cliffs, dense vines as good as fine moss on its scale. The mecha was looking weary, had suffered too many hard blows to sustain itself much longer, but still held its stance, determined, defying its opponents...
    "This is wrong," murmured the man. "It's going to go badly again."
    "How?"
    "Fei is not as strong as his body thinks it is. When he can't cope anymore, another part of him takes over. Something that was never meant to exist."
    Even in the heat of the smoke, Sora felt cold.
    The swordsman was watching him. "Go," he said. "It's you they're really after." He smiled weakly. "I'm not entirely sure how all this now has suddenly come about, but seeing you explains one thing to me. There's hope for us all yet."
    "I..."
    "Go." And now he really was looking at him, as intensely as Sora had ever been stared at in his life. "You're the keyblade master; they won't stop until they have you. Even Fei's Other can't hold them off forever."
    He released his grip on Sora's arm. The skin ached, as if the touch had left a bruise.
    Sora backed up, toward the lower hall, where the exit lay. He moved hesitantly.
    "We'll meet again," he told the man. The kind of promise that had become a prayer, a kind of godspeed, which he gave to all those he had met in the other worlds. Whether it was possible or not.
    The man smiled like he, too, appreciated such small hopes.
    Sora ran. Down the twisted, gnarled hallways, through the cracked and crumbled gates. Under sunset light and the blinding glare of the ocean, between the metal titans that fought their war heedless of the ground below.
    Destiny's central island had virtually nothing of itself left now, its shape either distorted or destroyed, a broken scattering of disconnected buildings and shrapnel of ideas, smoke and fire and the first evening stars, far fewer than there had been.
    The docks seemed so far away now, a distant point in a bucking, shuddering sea. The more Sora ran, the farther away it seemed, a sanctuary nearly breached through a battle zone of metal giants and gunfire and mortars. There were ground troops too, whole fleets of soldiers running in packs like wolves, ten different armies and points of history without any understanding of what they were fighting, but knowing full well it ought to be dead.
    He found Riku in an alley, out of breath and with a bloody Souleater shaking at his side. He hadn't quite done away with his straight jacket, getting as far as cutting the sleeves and leaving them hanging like tribal fringes around his wrists, and when he caught sight of Sora his first response was to curse at him.
    "You moron," he gasped, getting him into a headlock with his free arm. The muscles twitched. "You complete and utter fucking moron. I thought one of those things had squished you."
    He released him, and they had a moment there, where boyish perviness won over and they spoke animatedly of shoulder joint articulation and anti-grav thrusters, and ooh, didja see the green one? Because some things couldn't be helped. They quickly regained themselves, however, mainly on account of one of the military mecha crash-landing about two yards to their right. Something about massive destruction and a force of wind hard enough to knock a pair of sturdy teens off their feet has a way of sobering up any nerdy fanboy tendencies.
    They ran together, Sora with his hands empty and Riku with the Souleater at his side, and Sora didn't really want to ask what it was Riku had had to do to get this far.
    To be truthful, he was grateful. Sometimes it was like Riku was the strong one so Sora didn't have to be.
    They emerged from the last line of buildings onto the shore, eight kinds of sand kicking up behind them as they ran. The screeches and wails of the mechanical battle raged on behind them, daring a last look, but there was no time now. The docks ahead of them were breaking, disintegrating in splinters into the water, and a familiar girl was shouting frantically at them from its edge--
    And then that image was gone.
    It was too near to really register the event in sequence. One moment there was an open vista of a turbulent sea, and the next moment there was a wall of sand. The two boys dug their heels in and stopped fast and staggered, coughing, shielding their stinging eyes. When the dust began to settle, Sora discovered that one of the mecha had fallen along their path. It was battered nearly beyond recognition, bloody with oil and coolant and its cockpit cracked open like a walnut shell. Sora looked harder at its shape and realized the mecha was the one he had seen at the hospital, the unarmed one, Fei.
    He peered into the cockpit. There was a man there, only kept from falling out due to the chair restraints, sickly white skin and fiery orange hair, a wicked laughing smile chuckling through the blood streaming down his face.
    In his mind, Roxas seemed to lock up, to freeze.
    It can't be, Sora struggled to think, as his own body went cold.
    "~Axel?~" Roxas whispered, through Sora's tightening throat.
    "My liege," said Id, still laughing through his wounds. "It's an honor."
    And then everything blacked out.