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I sat back and sighed lightly as the sunlight played off my skin and gave me a warm feeling all over. As I opened my eyes, I saw a silhouette against the light, which made me bolt upright. The girl who had been standing over me laughed, and I started laughing, too.
“Aw, give me a break, Lily!” I said. She giggled some more.
“Anthony, you lazy bum. I thought we were all going to work on that class project!” she said. I heard a scoffing noise come from behind her, and looked to see another girl. She flicked her black hair back as the sun danced on her mocha skin.
“What’s all this ‘we’ stuff?” she said, striding over. “Seems like I’ve been doing all the work… and for the record, you’re just as lazy as he is,” she said. Lily giggled some more.
“So you noticed, Alex,” she said. I stood up and pointed at our neighborhood.
“Race you home!” I said. “Last one there has to work on it alone tonight.” Alex groaned at me.
“I’ve been working on it alone anyway!” Lily walked in front of us and held an imaginary flag up.
“On your marks…” she started. Alex looked at her like she was crazy. “GO!” she shouted. Alex and I took one look at each other before sprinting off. We all ran back, laughing and smiling. It was a world of just us and the sun and our homes… at least, that’s how it seemed.
I was second, Alex beat me, and Lily got back last. We all laughed at the situation; of course, we weren’t really going to make the loser do all the work, but it was a fun wager to make and it got our blood pumping for the race.
“So, what have we got done so far?” I asked. Alex placed a model of a person down in front of us.
“We’ve got to explain how the Heart and Soul interact with the Body,” she said. “I figured out the mechanical stuff, like how a heart pumps blood, but…” She trailed off and looked to the side. “…the esoteric stuff is hard to put into words,” she finished. Lily brushed an errant strand of light brown hair out of her face before biting her lip in thought.
“Well, I mean… a Heart does… a Heart does…” she said, grasping at invisible straws. I decided to put in my opinion.
“A Heart gives a person emotions,” I said. Alex nodded in agreement and Lily snapped her fingers.
“Exactly! Man, I wish I were that good with words,” she said. I smiled and shook my head.
“I’m not that good.” Alex makes a noise and we both start paying attention again. She points to a small bluish-white smudge on the diagram.
“Now we need an explanation for the Soul,” she said. I raised my hands up in defeat. Even I couldn’t think of how to write down exactly what a Soul does. We admitted defeat, put the diagram and our paper away, and bade each other goodnight. With that, I was on my way home to a good meal and a mom who was willing to help me figure out the answer.
With a full stomach and a sleepy brain, I laid my head down and slowly drifted off to dream land…
… Where was I? It was dark all around, and yet… a light filtered through the cool waves above me. Wait… waves above me? I was underwater? Then, why was I sinking? Still, the cool rush as I sank deeper and deeper was relaxing, and the fact that I could breathe made me even more reluctant to struggle against it. I made an unconscious motion to redirect myself, and suddenly found a hard surface pressing against the soles of my feet. Had I reached the bottom of the ocean? All my thoughts were blown away as the floor erupted into a vortex of butterflies. As they flew up and away, the feeling of being in water slowly washed away, too.
I looked at what had once been dark hard rock and saw a beautiful stained glass window beneath my feet. On it was a picture of me, holding some kind of weird sword with a key at the end, and in the background was a circle filled with smaller circles, and inside those were moons and stars. Around the edge were small circles, each one with a different astrological symbol inside. I only recognized a few, though, since I hadn’t taken too many astrology courses yet.
I felt something tingle in my… me. It almost felt like someone had snuck up behind me, and then passed right through me. I heard a voice echo in my brain…
Keyblade…
Was it really a voice? Maybe it was just my own thoughts, and this weird place made me think it was a voice…
Chosen by the Keyblade…
There it was again. What was a ‘Keyblade’ anyway? And more importantly, why was I ‘chosen’ by one?
In a flash of light, something appeared before me. It was a marble pedestal, and on it was the same weird weapon as the one my stained glass counterpart was wielding. The ‘blade’ was black, and ended in a set of teeth that made a crown in the negative space. The guard was dark purple, and a long silver chain connected it to a small black emblem that had a purple symbol engraved in it: ℏ. It was so odd; it felt like I was supposed to take it. Before I could stop myself, I had grabbed the handle, and it felt like a surge of energy was burning through me like a wildfire.
Just as I was getting used to the rush, though, the thing vanished, and the stained glass mural was breaking beneath my feet. I tried to jump, but it all just broke and I was sent falling down into the Darkness.
I sat bolt up, my chest heaving as I gasped for breath. As I tried to calm myself, I looked around; I was back in my bedroom. I turned on the light on my bedside table and looked around.
“Just a dream,” I said to myself. Shrugging off the feeling of unnerving reality, I turned the light back off and pulled my covers up and over my shoulders, getting nice and snug before slipping back off to la-la land. It wasn’t until the next morning that I thought about my strange dream.
“Man, I had the weirdest dream last night,” I said, Lily and Alex on either side of me as we sat on a bench in a grassy park. Lily nodded a bit and sat forward.
“You, too?” she asked. Alex crossed her arms.
“So it was all of us,” she said. I looked at them both.
“How do you even know what I’m talking about?” Lily threw me a look before staring off into the endless emerald waves.
“There’s a stained glass window at your feet with your picture on it,” she started. Alex mimicked her forward bound stare.
“Then a voice starts talking about something called a ‘Keyblade’,” she said..
“And then, to top it all off, the weapon your stained glass self is holding pops up in front of you on a pedestal, which you then grab, and everything falls apart after that.” I looked first at Lily, then at Alex, before slumping back against the bench and staring forward.
“So… It was all of us, then,” I said. Without looking, I know they both nodded. “What does it mean, though?” I asked. It was all so confusing. We almost didn’t notice that the sky was getting darker bit by bit. Well, less like ‘darker’ and more like ‘dimmer’. Lily noticed it first.
“Does it seem like the sun is less… sunny?” she asked. We looked at the sky and at first, nothing seemed unusual, but then we noticed she was right; the sky and the sun were duller than normal. Of course, with our run of luck, that wasn’t where it stopped. Seemingly out of nowhere, puddles of… dark… just started appearing. It was startling, and we all got up and formed a ring, back to back, so we couldn’t be taken by surprise.
Surprise took us anyway, though, when tiny black creatures started to wriggle up from the puddles. Lily screamed like something had just torn off her arm.
“What are those things?” she asked. Alex shook her head.
“No clue, but let’s be ready to fight!” she said. I nodded, and got into a fighting stance. Alex and Lily followed suit, and we watched as the creepy little black things advanced on us. Suddenly, they began jumping at us. We tried to swat them away, but it was like trying to beat away a shadow.
Keyblade
Keyblade
Keyblade
Keyblade
Keyblade
Keyblade
Keyblade
KEYBLADE
Light flashed, and I was holding that weird weapon from before. I looked to either side, and Lily and Alex were wielding their own versions. It looked like we all had similar… Keyblades? Was that what these things were? As the creepy little things attacked us again, we struck back with our new weapons, and to my surprise they worked!
It was like the… Keyblade… made them tangible. Maybe it was only this particular weapon, or maybe it was the material it was made of… Whatever had happened to make them hittable, I was glad for it. They disappeared in clouds of darkness, but it seemed like more and more were popping up. Lily and Alex stepped forward a bit and broke the circle, which was okay, I thought, since they needed to try and take ground so we would have some to give if we needed. I was pushing forward, too, until I felt something sharp slice into my back.
I cried out, and dropped my Keyblade as I fell to my knees. I didn’t wince as my chest thudded against the ground, tons of those little black creeps closing in around me. Darkness began to eat away at my vision, and I could just barely make out Alex as she slashed through waves of the tiny black menaces. I could hear Lily over me saying something, but I couldn’t make out what she said. I tried looking at her, but she just looked like a black outline. Behind her, though, there was someone else. It was a woman, and I could see her so clearly I almost thought that she was real and Lily was the illusion.
She looked at me with yellow eyes, and her thin, pale primrose lips curled up into a smile as she whispered something to Lily’s silhouette. As she faded into the background, I felt something cold wash over me, and then there was a sensation as though my insides were being ripped out piece by piece. It was the most painful sensation I had ever felt. When it was over, everything was dark, but then there was a bright light. It looked like a shooting star, and it fell from nowhere and hit me. After I was hit, though, I felt rejuvenated, and my vision was coming back to me. Lily and Alex were a ways off in the field, looking at something. I pushed myself up and walked over to see what they were looking at, but when I did I couldn’t believe my eyes.
It was as though time had stopped; people, animals, even the creepy little black things had stopped dead in their tracks. It made me more than a little nervous; thing didn’t just stop frozen in time for no reason. I turned to Lily and Alex, the only other people besides me who weren’t frozen.
“What happened?” I asked. Lily wouldn’t look at me, but Alex turned and my heart began to ache from the look she gave me. Her eyes were so sad. “What happened?” I said again. Alex sighed.
“There was an… an accident,” she began. “When we started to take ground, we accidentally left you open, and those things got you. They tried to take your heart—consume it in darkness. We got rid of them before they pulled it out but…” She gave me a look.
“But what?” I asked. Lily snapped her gaze to mine and choked on a sob before shouting at me.
“I had to strip the darkness from your heart!” she said. “I don’t know how I knew what to do, but I did it and now you have a splintered heart.” I looked from Alex, to Lily, then back to Alex. What were they saying? All this talk about hearts and darkness, it was so far over my head. Yesterday, if you had asked me about things like what had just happened, I would have asked what story book you’d been reading.
“Splintered heart?” I asked. It was all I could think to say. Alex shook her head, and lifted her Keyblade up as she spoke.
“Something whispered to us about using the Keyblade to save you, but… We weren’t sure whether to do it,” she said. “It said that not only was it painful, but it might destroy your heart if you weren’t strong enough.” Lily motioned to everything that was stuck in time.
“This is another side-effect,” she said, then corrected herself. “Actually, it’s a side-effect of a side-effect.” I gave her my best ‘I am confused’ look.
“Come again?” I asked. She laughed a little, but her heart wasn’t in it.
“When I took the darkness from your heart, it was such a cataclysmic event that the Keyhole to our world shattered, freezing time for anyone and anything without a Keyblade,” she said. That really didn’t help me, though.
“Keyhole?”
“The door to our world’s heart.” Alex decided to cut in.
“We need to leave,” she said. I turned my gaze on her.
“Why?” Lily took my hand and started leading me away from the park. I didn’t resist her, but I really wanted an answer.
“This world is in stasis until the Keyhole is restored,” she said. “So now we have to go search for the pieces, bring them back, and then seal the Keyhole to protect our world from those creatures.” It made sense, at least, it made as much sense as anything else that had happened. I followed my two fiends to a small clearing, where they turned to look at me.
“What?” I asked. Alex pointed to something on her shoulder.
“This is called an Armor Pad,” she said. I nodded, and paid attention as she continued. “We’re going to use it to travel to other worlds, like so.” She slapped it, and a bright light flashed for a second. I had to cover my eyes until it had passed. When I put my hand down, I was looking at some metal-plated dominatrix.
“Whoa, where’d that come from?” I asked. She pointed at my shoulder.
“You have one, too,” she said. I looked, and saw that she was right; there was a plate of light gray metal covering my shoulder. I tentatively reached up and tapped it once. My world disappeared in a flash of light and just as quickly it was back. Yet, something was a little off, as though I was looking through a pair of sunglasses. I raised my hands up, and saw they were covered in gauntlets.
“Wow… New clothes,” I said. Lily tapped a light blue armor pad on her shoulder, and she went up like we did. As the glow died down, her form became clearer; she was a lot more streamlined than Alex was. “How did you guys learn about this again?” I asked.
“Well, I found out when I looked at my shoulder and saw the armor,” Lily said. “You know how I am; I just gotta touch stuff sometimes!” I rolled my eyes and laughed lightly. Alex whipped out her Keyblade, which I just realized was red and white, as opposed to my Keyblade’s purple and black colors.
“We need to get going,” Alex said, and threw her Keyblade up in the air. It whizzed off into space, or so I thought. I was then proven wrong when a spaceship-motorcycle-thing zoomed back down.
“Okay, now how did you figure that one out?” I asked. Alex shrugged at me.
“Heck if I know. The world doesn’t make sense anymore, so I think we just need to start accepting things as they come.” I nodded; after all, she was speaking the truth. Copycatting her example, both Lily and myself threw our own Keyblades sky-high and watched as out own glider-things floated down. We all hopped on our own gliders and looked at each other.
“Where are we going now?” I asked. Lily turned towards me and put her hand to her chin in thought.
“Well,” she started, “we need to find out what’s going on, so I say we split up and go to as many places outside of our own world to try and learn what’s going on.” Alex nodded, then revved her glider and zoomed off. Before I could say anything, Lily was off as well, leaving me alone.
“Why am I always the one lagging behind?” I said, and then shot off into the sky. | 