Chapter Text
Sora didn’t sleep much these days.
When he was a kid, sometimes his nights dragged until he lost track of the difference between sunlight and lamplight. No soft-spoken stories or music or tea would put him out. His stomach would coil as stubborn as a fist, and the more tired he got, the more his bed looked like a trap waiting to snap shut around him.
Once, not long after his twelfth birthday, he spent nearly seventy-two hours with night bleeding into day on a loop. Eventually, Riku showed up at the doorway of his bedroom unannounced, held him down, and wrapped around him like a constrictor, fighting Sora’s furious thrashing until he wore himself down to nothing. All their lives, Riku was the stronger one. He couldn’t have fought his way out even if he wasn’t delirious from insomnia. And after hours locked in Riku’s worldless, unrelenting grip, there was nothing left for Sora to do but let go, and let sleep take him.
It wasn’t that bad anymore. He grew out of it—mostly—and these days, he had Riku’s arms to return to every night. It helped.
He still found himself here most mornings, though.
Sora shifted, adjusting his hands beneath his head. His feet dangled loosely off the outcrop, cooled by the breeze from the tarry, plum-marbled river below. Day and night always blurred into one here. It would get dark for a while—the kind of dark that happened before a storm, where the air felt thick and everything seemed tinted and restless—and then it would ease up again to long stretches of hazy purple-gray.
Sora shut his eyes. He thought of diamond-white beaches and clear, shimmering water, of hot summer sunshine, of lush greenery and crimson flowers, of golden fruit and brightly colored fish glinting in shallow surf.
He thought of Kairi, weaving a bloom the size of her open palms into the storm-gray strands of Riku’s hair while he sulked and scribbled in the damp sand with the end of his training sword, tacitly accepting his penance for losing their bet.
He opened his eyes. The sky overhead was dull and unchanged.
With a sigh, Sora drew up his feet from the lip of the ravine and stood. He stretched his aching joints as he stared out at the barren expanse, sprawling for miles into the horizon.
Despite his restless night, a spark of anticipation surged through him, and he was suddenly invigorated.
No more waiting. This was it.
They were going home.
Before they were stranded, Sora figured nothing could grow here; but the realm had pretty quickly proved him wrong. The forest blanketing the hill over the ravine pushed back against the heavy pressure of the darkness with determination. Dense, scraggly trees with tufts of grayish moss and lavender lichen surrounded him, their waxy leaves making a thin canopy overhead. Creeping vines with black-pearl berries wound around their trunks, and as much as Sora missed his appetite, he was glad they never had to find out if they were poisonous.
The narrow pathways worn into the undergrowth all lead back to one flat, dusty clearing, where the forest’s greatest triumph towered over its admirers. Its gnarled trunk was so wide around that I made Sora feel like he was back in Wonderland, shrunk down to the size of a mouse.
He climbed over its sprawling roots and made his way to the opening between them and the bare earth, pushing through the curtain of vines that hung over the gap and into the cool shade inside. The rotted knots in the bark let in shafts of watery light.
Riku was propped up against the hollow of the trunk, turning a long, smooth bough in his hands. The dirt around him was peppered with pale shavings.
“Hey, you’re up,” Sora said.
Riku hummed, but didn’t look up from his carving. “I wanted to finish this.”
Sora slid down the bark at his side to peer over the slide of his pocket knife. The curved handle under Riku’s fingers was starting to take shape, its arches curling into the talons of a bat’s wing.
Sora made nondescript grabby-hands in Riku’s direction. “I wanna see.”
“Fine, but it’s not done yet.”
He held it out to Sora, wincing with the motion.
Sora took it. It was even and smooth, sturdy enough to bear weight and maybe even blows. The handle fit neatly into Sora’s hand, still warm from the friction of Riku’s pocket knife.
He set it aside with a sigh and hiked up his sleeve. “How long have you been propped up like that?”
Riku pulled a face, and Sora couldn’t help but laugh. If he had it in him to sulk, it was a good day.
“All right,” Sora said, reaching back to tug his loose hair into a tight ponytail, “let’s see what we can do.”
“Deep breaths.”
“Nghh…”
“Riku, you’re not breathing.”
The fist at Riku’s cheek clenched tighter, but his back rose under Sora’s hands, falling into a deliberate rhythm.
Sora turned his attention back to the scar. The wound had finally closed, the angry redness quieted to a tight pink, but the muscles around it were seized up again. Sora set his hand carefully between Riku’s shoulder blades, splaying his spread fingers over the scar and pressing his fingertips into the knots that surrounded it.
Riku made a small, choked sound.
“Deep breaths,” Sora repeated gently.
With his opposite hand, he summoned his keyblade, holding it level with the ground. It was just a conduit, anyway. He concentrated, feeling the crackle of magic in his fingertips, and pressed more firmly against the resistance. Riku kept breathing.
“Cura,” he said.
Vibrant green blossomed between them, and Riku unwound all at once. He went limp under Sora’s hands, his breath collapsing from control into relief.
Sora tugged the hem of Riku’s tank top back down to his waist. “Better?”
“Better,” Riku answered weakly.
Sora dismissed his keyblade. He shuffled behind Riku and rose onto his knees. “Okay,” he said. “Up, up.”
Riku righted himself, rolled his shoulders experimentally, and collapsed into Sora’s chest. His forehead was beaded with sweat, his eyes gently closed.
Sora threaded his fingers through Riku’s hair and brushed it back. Riku deflated farther into him as he parted and combed it, twisting the strands into a neat plait. It had grown rough and unwieldy over the weeks, but Sora knew how to tame it.
At first, their morning routine was a desperate bid to get Riku’s ever-present pain under enough control to start building up his strength. Especially in the beginning, when the injury was new, it was sometimes the only thing that could get Riku to his feet at all. But the easier it got, and the stronger Riku grew, the more Sora understood that he needed these moments as much as Riku did.
He tied off the end with a thin strip of scrap fabric, smoothing out the flyaways with the flat of his hand. “There,” Sora said softly, brushing a silver stray from Riku’s forehead.
Riku’s eyes remained peacefully closed. A smile played over his lips.
Sora leaned into Riku’s shoulders, planting his chin on the crown of Riku’s head. “Ready?” he asked.
“Just give me another minute,” Riku murmured, and Sora didn’t mind indulging him.
Riku tested his footing. Stretched his arms over his chest. Shook out his fingers.
“All right,” he said, “let’s try this again.”
He passed Sora his cane, and Sora took it with a dutiful solute. “You’ve got this, Riku!”
Way to Dawn seared to life in Riku’s hand. He held it out in front of him, both hands wrapped determinedly around its grip.
Dark, seething fog bubbled up around it. Riku’s forehead beaded with sweat, and there was a ripple in the air in front of him, the horizon behind warping like skyline over hot pavement. A ring of purple fizzled out, expanding until it was nearly as tall as Riku was.
Through it was the same craggy forest there had been before.
Riku swore. He took a few steps forward, cautious with his weaker leg, and stuck an arm through it. It went straight through to the back, like he’d suspended the weirdest-looking hula hoop in history over the dirt.
Riku groaned in frustration. Sora sank back into the tree, disappointed in spite of himself.
“Still nothing,” Riku said. He withdrew his arm and dismissed his keyblade, and the ring in the air fizzled out. He frowned at his open hand, flexing his fingers. “I don’t get it. I’m strong enough to use the darkness again, but the portals still won’t open for me.”
Sora crossed to Riku’s side. He held the cane out to him, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
“We knew it was kind of a long shot,” he said. A wolfish grin broke out over his face. “We’ll just have to move on to plan B.”
Riku shook his head in exasperation. “I swear I can feel Yen Sid’s eyes boring into the back of my head…”
“I can’t!” With his grin widening, Sora plopped down in the dust and stuck his arm into his bag. He caught the corner and dragged out a heavy, cloth-bound magic tome, its cover intricately embossed with text and decoration that were almost completely indistinguishable from one another. It was the first of its kind Yen Sid had entrusted to him, and he made Sora study it religiously.
Sora hated it.
He flipped eagerly through the heavy pages as Riku settled at his side and rifled through his bag for ink and pens. When he found the center, where the sewn binding was visible along the seam, he paused. Thankfully, this spread was mostly delicate watercolor illustrations that had long since faded into pale ghosts of their original vibrance, and the text on the page was minimal and mostly offset to the corners. Plenty of blank-ish space.
He slotted his fingers carefully under the pages at either side of the binding, and, with a relish, ripped it free.
He passed the sheet to Riku, who winced at it like he’d just watched Sora skin an animal. With a sigh, he spread it out in front of him.
He set his pen in the center of the page and carefully sketched the shape of their tree, the hill, and the ravine over the faded illustrations. “Okay,” he started, “if we’re going to find Castle Oblivion, we’re going to need to be thorough—”
R-iiiip .
Riku’s head snapped up. “Sora!”
“What?” Sora said, holding a freshly torn page guiltily behind him.
Riku fixed him with a stern glare, and Sora tossed the loose page sheepishly and scooted closer to look over the beginnings of their improvised map.
“Anyway,” Riku continued, “as long as we can keep track of where we’ve been before, we’re bound to find it eventually.”
“Did you see anything nearby when you first found it? Landmarks or anything?” Sora asked.
“I didn’t exactly find it last time. I just sort of...woke up there.”
“Me, too…” Sora mumbled, his brow furrowing. With a sigh, he sprawled over the roots of their tree. “Welp, it’s the best plan we’ve got. And who knows what we’ll find out there? Maybe there’s another door to light waiting right around the bend!”
Riku folded their fresh map and tucked it carefully into the pocket of his vest. He planted his new cane in the dust and climbed to his feet, slinging his bag over his shoulder.
“You better pack up then, mister bright side. We’ve got an awful lot of bends to cover.”
All said and done, they didn’t have much to pack.
Sora took stock of the handful of belongings they had managed to accumulate: a small stack of kindling; the strips of fabric they had repurposed from Sora’s jacket; the bed of flattened moss they had worn down over restless nights; a fishbone Sora found by the ravine; countless small, lopsided wooden sculptures Riku had carved to get through the mind-melting boredom before he was mobile again.
Sora picked through the last of these a little more carefully. Riku wanted to leave them all behind, but Sora had grown attached to them, and he wanted to keep at least one for himself. He settled on a single charm in the approximate shape of a paopu, although Riku had snapped off one of the leaves by accident while he was polishing it.
By the opening in the roots were the nicks that Riku’s pocket knife had etched into the wall. A tally of the days since they first stumbled into this clearing, exhausted and desperate for shelter.
A month on the day. Or, at least, that was their best guess.
Sora ran his fingers over the grooves in the smooth inside of the trunk.
“We can’t keep going like this. You need to rest. Even if something lived here once, it looks empty now…”
“It’s a nobody tree.”
“…What?”
Riku knocked weakly on the dry bark. “Get it? Because it’s heartless.”
“Okay—you really need to rest…”
A month on the day.
They were as ready as they were ever going to be.
He gave the tree one last pat, grateful for the shelter it had offered them, even as they left it behind. Gathering the last of their things into his bag, Sora shouldered it. He looked out through the roots, where Riku was stretching with his fingers pointed at the sky, and tightened his grip on the strap of his bag.
I’ll protect him, he thought. No matter what it takes.
With all they could carry on their backs, they cut through the familiar brush and made their way down the hill to the edge of the ravine overlooking the tar-black river. Navigating the sheer rockslide to the riverbanks below was treacherous and slow, and they took a moment at the base of the cliff to sit and catch their breath before they moved on along the riverbank.
When the river was narrow and shallow enough, they stripped off their shoes and hitched up their pants, and Riku tucked his cane into the flap of his backpack. He leaned into Sora’s shoulder as they waded through the opaque, marbled current, trying not to waver at the brush of the eyeless river fish circling their ankles. They followed the cliffside on the opposite bank until it veered away, opening over a long expanse of barren earth punctuated by towering formations of stone. The pillars were split like geodes in places, an eerie glow emanating from within, and they made Sora antsy.
Something else started to take shape beyond the mist and the strange pillars of stone. The closer they got, the lower Sora’s stomach sank.
Shattered glass and cracked tile littered the ground, and ahead Sora could make out the fractured shape of a marble staircase. Looming beyond like the back of a massive turtle was the crumbling stone and soil that used to hold this world afloat, its once-lavish architecture keeling to the side as the ground beneath it degraded.
The air between them was somber as they moved through the ruins. Riku paused at a carved marble pillar, examining it closely, but he relaxed after a moment.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, “I thought this might have been the colosseum.”
“We took down Xemnas. This place must’ve fallen before then…” Sora tried to sound more confident than he felt.
There was a creeping chill on the back of his neck, and he shook it off.
“Come on,” he said. “We gotta keep moving.”
As they turned their backs on the fallen world and made for the expanse ahead, Sora felt something shuddering: a stirring from deep within the rubble.
They locked eyes, and Sora could see his own anxious anticipation mirrored on Riku’s face.
Before they could even turn to meet it, the demon tower burst from the piles of debris. It towered over them, twisting like a funnel cloud full of frenzied ants. Riku shouted his name as he flipped his cane and slid it into his pack, and Sora dashed to his side, his keyblade already manifesting in his open hand.
It was lucky he was a lefty. Covering Riku’s weak side had become second nature in practice—although they hadn’t had a chance to take it for a spin. With Way to Dawn held in Riku’s right and Kingdom Key clutched in Sora’s left, they were practically one body.
The demon tower pointed its writhing mass in their direction, and Sora braced himself.
It surged forward, and they sprung into action.
Riku seized Sora by his free arm and spun him, and the demon tower struck hard earth as they whirled out of the way. While it was gathering itself, Riku flipped Way to Dawn in his hand and slashed through it like butter.
The swarm seethed to cover the gap, twisting back in their direction, but Sora had already swung Riku by the elbow like a dancer. He felt a sudden, bubbling laughter in his chest.
Riku laughed too, breathless with adrenaline. Sora drew back and sent his keyblade spinning out of his hand, cutting clean down the line of the demon tower as it went.
It writhed and shuddered, then turned its full attention to him as his blade snapped back into his hand. It reeled toward them like a spearpoint, its momentum aimed between them, where their arms were locked.
Sora’s vision was obscured by a surge of dark shapes and massive yellow eyes as Riku’s arm was ripped from his. He skidded backwards in the dust, digging in his heels to regain his balance. On the other side of the tower, Riku reached to his shoulder and drew out the cane like he was unsheathing a sword, his momentum barely interrupted.
The laughter in Sora’s chest was gone, and there was something hot and acid expanding in its place.
“Firaga!” he shouted, aiming the blast for the apex of the tower.
The fireball tore a hole through its center. It shifted its shape, curling in on itself, and reeled towards him again, and this time, this time he was ready for it—
It veered to the side, arching straight up, and plummeted down over Riku like a waterfall.
Something fractured. Sora felt it, a hairline crack in pressurized glass, and his ears filled with mindless thunder, shaking outward from his bones.
Beneath Sora’s feet, the earth split.
He shouted, the storm of blind energy in his body burning away to fear as the gap in the ground widened to pitch black, and a hard yank on his shoulder dragged him back from the edge.
Riku.
Riku was fine. The world just split in half, but Riku was fine.
Sora came fully back to himself. His back was flat against the sheer wall of the cliffs, and Riku was panting at his side. The ledge between their feet and the yawning canyon opening before them was wide enough to stand on, but not by much.
The demon tower buckled, collapsing into the rift like a landslide. A cacophony of shrieking echoed out of the crevice, amplified by its depths, and then—as abruptly as if had been shut behind a seamless, sound-proof door—it stopped.
Sora clung to Riku’s arm, his fingers digging into Riku’s vest. They exchanged a nervous look. He offered Riku a small, jittery smile.
Another crack like a lighting strike reverberated off the cliffs. A shadow fell over them as a marble pillar, tilting precariously on the lip of the fallen world, began to tumble.
He turned on his heels and took off along the cliff. Riku was dragging behind him, but Sora barely noticed as he fought to get his feet under him again.
An opening in the stone face of the cliff appeared like a miracle. Without thinking, Sora dove into it.
With a thunderous crash, darkness engulfed them.
Sora groaned. His legs were tangled in Riku’s, his arm caught awkwardly between them, and he rolled himself onto his back.
For a moment, their ragged breathing filled the hollow cave. Sora’s elbow burned, and he didn’t need to see it to know he’d taken off a few layers of skin, at least.
He reached blindly out to his side until he found Riku’s arm.
“Sora?”
“I’m okay,” he managed. “You?”
Riku raised Sora’s hand, and he felt the rough cotton of Riku’s tank top. His heart hammered beneath: rapid, steady, and strong.
“I’m okay.”
Sora’s breath started to level again. “Okay.”
Riku squeezed his hand. Sora let his head drop back, the adrenaline leaching out of him. Other than their breathing and the slow, distant patter of dripping water, it was quiet.
“Let’s never do that again,” Riku said.
Apparently, Sora was loopy enough from the relief to giggle. “Agreed.” He turned his head towards Riku’s voice, even though all he could see was velvet black. “What was that?”
“Earthquake?”
“Those can happen here?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
Sora didn’t love the concept. “At least it’s over.” He propped himself up, hissing at the sting in his elbow and the twinge in his knees, and dragged himself upright.
He summoned the Kingdom Key. “Fire,” he said.
A bright blaze flared up at the end of his keyblade, licking obediently at its end, and Sora blinked away the afterimage. He swept his makeshift torch in a slow arc, illuminating the cave walls. The opening they’d come through seemed like an unlikely option; the wide marble pillar was snug against it, and it must have taken a piece of overhang with it when it fell, because the gap between the pillar and the cliffs was sealed off with stone.
The cave was probably part of a larger system. The echo of dripping water couldn’t have been anywhere near them, and there was an opening at the far end large enough for a person…or two.
Riku was frowning. The firelight exaggerated his furrowed brow. “Sora, your arm.”
Sora looked down. He twisted out his elbow as much as he could, and sure enough, he had lost some skin. “It’s just a scrape.”
“It’s bleeding.”
“Come on.” He climbed to his feet, offering Riku his hand.
Riku took it. He planted his cane and hauled himself up, then joined Sora in examining the opening into the caverns.
They exchanged a look.
“Where do you think it goes?” Riku said.
Sora grinned at him. “Only one way to find out.”
Riku eyed him for a second, then cracked a smile, shaking his head in disbelief. “Your enthusiasm is creepy.”
Sora was already ducking his head though the opening. “Come on, Riku, where’s your adventurer’s spirit?”
As soon as he righted himself, Sora felt the space around them expand. The ceiling towered overhead, and there was a long stretch of flat outcrop along the wall of the cavern that disappeared around another bend. The air smelled fresh, though, which meant that air must be moving through it—and that meant there must be a way out somewhere.
Riku shuffled through behind him, and Sora waited for him to fall in step at his side before pressing on. The weight of the cliffs overhead made Sora grateful for the draft.
They skirted the outcropping and turned the corner, where the caverns narrowed to a crack in the stone passage almost too small for a single body to squeeze through.
They paused. Sora extended his keyblade through the gap, and he could see steady ground and a wider opening on the other side.
He glanced back at Riku. “I didn’t see any other way down.”
Riku summoned Way to Dawn and ignited it. “I didn’t, either.”
Sora took a deep, slow breath. He dismissed his keyblade and flattened himself against the rough stone, ducking his head until he could shuffle forward.
It was tight, and Sora had to hold his breath as he inched along. What seemed like a quick squeeze felt eons longer, and the light of Riku’s keyblade didn’t reach him anymore. In the darkness, only the sudden release of the stone’s grip let him know he was through.
He breathed a deep sigh of relief and called the Kingdom Key back to his hand, taking stock of the way ahead. It was narrower, the cave floor steeper and rockier. It would be tricky with a cane, but it was their best shot.
Sora turned to illuminate the opening for Riku to squeeze through, but there was no one there.
He stared.
Riku was just there. He had just been there.
“Riku?” he called.
There was no answer but the echo of his own voice.
The silence pressed down on him, heavier than the miles and tonnes of stone overhead, and Sora felt the cold grip of panic. He had to turn back. He had to go looking.
A call came from somewhere behind him, deep in the belly of the mountain, faint and muffled by distance:
“Sora!”
He spun.
“Riku!” he called again.
The answering call was even fainter.
“Sora…”
He tightened his grip on the handle of his keyblade. He swallowed.
Pushing down his unease, Sora pressed on.
These caves were harsher than the last, the narrow walls stretching indefinitely ahead and the dense blackness impenetrable above. The ground was uneven in the best of places, and there were stretches where the gaps below and the boulders jutting out ahead forced him to quench his light and feel his way blindly over the outcroppings to more stable ground.
Sora’s fingers found the lip of another overhang, and he dragged himself onto blessedly flat, solid ground. When he righted himself, relieved to have his firelight back, his foot snagged on something.
He looked down to find the tangled sprawl of a root system protruding from the surrounding stone. Sora held his light out to it with a frown. This system was deep in the mountain; he couldn’t imagine what could be growing…
He reached out, running his hand along the cool, ropey wood. The roots were twined like the mesh of a net, and there was something protruding from them, suspended on the wall…
Fingers. They were fingers.
Sora jerked back with a shout, and something shimmered in the firelight, refracting off a human face.
It was Kairi. Her eyes were closed, her face thorn-scratched and vacant. Ensnared in the roots trapping her chest was the faint glow of a heart, its light leeching away into the roots that surrounded it.
Kingdom Key clattered to the ground. For a moment, the cavern was plunged back into darkness as Sora tore frantically at the roots with his fingernails, his heart hammering in his mouth. When the flame swelled again, the snare beneath Sora’s hands was nothing but empty, gnarled roots and stained stone.
He took a step back. He snatched his keyblade from the floor and swept it across the roots again, looking for any sign that Kairi had been there.
“What…?”
He backed away until his heels hit the far wall. I need to get out of here. I need to get out of here now.
As if in answer, a faint, watery light began to spill into the caves. It was the hazy purple of the Realm of Darkness’ ever-overcast sky. It was open space and breeze. He could taste it.
With the hair rising on the back of his neck, Sora crept towards it.
The stretch ahead was flat and straight. As he grew closer to the light, a sound like the grunt of an animal reached him. He braced in anticipation of heartless, of enemies, of anything he could actually fight, but as the sound echoed around him it was overwhelmed by the hitch of ragged breathing and the drag of something heavy over stone.
The passage opened up into a cave, and Sora found Riku.
He was collapsed against the wall, his face hidden in the mess of his hair, the braid loosed and the tie that bound it lost. His hand was plastered over his injured side, a smear of bright, vibrant red oozing from between his fingers and pooling on the cave floor below.
Sora’s heart slammed to a standstill, and his chest threatened to collapse into the vacuum.
He scrambled forward on the stone.
“Riku, Riku, Riku—”
He dropped to his knees, reached for Riku’s face, and his hands dropped through empty space and scraped their calluses over the bare stone.
This time, when Sora got to his feet, his eyes were blurred with tears. The pressure in his chest expanded, and he felt the sensation of splintering glass inside it again.
He made a break for the watery light, any thought of caution obliterated.
The opening of the cliffside towered. A silhouette obscured its mouth, and was impossible to make out any detail beyond the brightness behind, but as the figure turned Sora realized there was no detail to see. His own shadow stared back at him, its round, empty eyes like headlamps on a distant highway.
Without even breaking his stride, Sora drew back his blade and tore the apparition in two.
He stumbled out into the light. The ground dropped away, and he found himself tumbling, ducking his head into his arms by pure instinct as he rolled and skidded to a stop.
He blinked up at the sky. The cliffside towered over him on one side, the canopy of an unfamiliar forest on the other.
His eyes spilled over, and he buried his face in his elbows. Just for a moment, bruised and aching, he let himself be lost.
Sora’s throat was raw from shouting as he worked his way along the strips of ground between the base of the towering cliffs and the edge of the woods.
He cupped his hands over his mouth again. “Riku!”
The rustle of the brush was the only answer. Sora coughed into his curled fist. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been walking, but he didn’t want to move too far from the last place they’d been together. With a groan, Sora turned to make his way in the opposite direction, hoping Riku found an exit from the caves somewhere farther down.
Something echoed along the mountainside. He froze, worried that he might be hearing things, but the call came again.
“Sora!”
Sora’s heart fluttered. He started walking, then jogging, then running in the direction of the call.
Finally, a figure stumbled out of the brush. Scraped, rattled, but alive.
Riku’s cane clattered at their feet as Sora wrapped him in a crushing hug. His cheeks were wet and streaked with dirt, and his hair tickled Sora’s face.
His arms were so tight around Sora’s waist that he could barely breathe, and it just made want to cling tighter.
“Thank god you’re all right,” Riku murmured, the words wavering. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought, but—”
“I know,” Sora said. “Me, too.”
Riku relaxed his grip, but he didn’t let go. “I found somewhere we can rest.”
The forest on the other side of the cliffs was different from the brush that grew around the nobody tree. It was denser, the trees growing so close in places that they nearly formed a wall. The canopy was thicker, letting in even less of the faint daylight. Some of the roots grew long and winding as rivers, and others formed thickets of thorns so dense that they had to circle around them.
Riku picked his way through the undergrowth, leading Sora by the hand through an arch below a root as big as the trunk of a palm, where the bases of intersecting trees formed a small, flat basin. Riku’s bag was already tucked in a hollow log, and he drew it out and spread their makeshift map between them.
A handful of new landmarks joined their nobody tree. Marble Ruins. Cliffside Caves. Thicket Forest. The beginning of a familiarity Sora wasn’t sure he’d ever have.
They cured the worst of their scrapes and bruises and wrapped the rest in the scrap cloth they’d salvaged from Sora’s jacket in their early days, mindful of conserving both bandages and magic between them. Riku cleared away a smooth stretch of ground, and Sora dug a small pit and kindled an equally small fire, more for comfort than for warmth.
The weight hanging over them as the shade of the forest thickened into night was too heavy to call by name. Sora wanted to ask what happened when Riku disappeared in the caves. Wanted to ask if he’d seen things he wasn’t used to seeing when he was awake. If he’d seen Kairi. If he’d seen Sora… but when he thought about the questions Riku might ask in return, he couldn’t find the words.
When they did finally curl up on the hard forest floor, their arms a little tighter around each other than the night before, Sora might have spent a while with his head rested on Riku’s chest and his eyes fixed on the small pink ripple of the scar visible below the hem of his tank top.
Tonight, Riku’s arms weren’t enough.
Their fire had burned down to powdery white embers by the time Sora left.
His eyes were blurry with exhaustion, but he couldn’t handle what he saw when he closed them. Even in the dead of night, there was plenty of light for him to wander by, and he kept a clear line of sight to the low arch of the root over the basin where Riku slept. The leaves rustled overhead, the strange, distant chittering of unfamiliar creatures carried on the breeze. Sora wondered if this place had animals, or if they were all just heartless. He’d never seen one, but the plants had been a surprise, so why not?
A stream of the tar-black water ran sluggishly through a clearing ahead, and Sora finally slowed. He rubbed his eye, and it made his head throb. They didn’t need to eat anymore—or, at least, they hadn’t since they were first stranded here—but Sora thought of warm milk and honey and wanted it so badly he could taste it.
There was a snap across the clearing, and Sora shot to his feet so fast it made his head spin. He braced his back foot and summoned his keyblade instinctively, gripping it in both hands in front of him.
For the second time, his own face stared back at him.
It wasn’t the distant, hollow stare he saw on the illusion in the cave—in fact, this apparition seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see it. Perched on the wide bough of a bare tree, with one leg casually hitched over it, the apparition surveyed him. His hair was black, his eyes flashing gold.
Am I dreaming?
Sora found his voice. “You’re not real.”
The apparition’s stare grew piercing and calculated. It straightened, swinging a leg back over the bough. It answered in Sora’s own voice, flatter and rougher: “You don’t look as sure as you sound.”
Sora blinked once, but it didn’t disappear. He blinked furiously.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” the apparition drawled.
“I won’t fall to darkness,” he said sharply. “I don’t care what you show me. I’ll never give in.”
After a long moment, it cracked a sardonic smile. “Huh,” it said, swiping a hand over his mouth. “Interesting…”
Sora’s grip tightened. “We’re getting out of here one way or another. Do you hear me? We’re getting out.”
The apparition turned on the branch and slipped off, dropping the nearly ten feet to the forest floor like it was sliding off a riverbank into a placid water. It hit the ground with one hand down for stability, then righted itself and glanced over its shoulder at Sora.
“Good luck with that,” it said.
Sora gritted his teeth and drew back to strike, but then he heard Riku calling his name, and he twisted to look back towards the basin.
When he turned around, the gold-eyed apparition was gone.
