Kingdom Hearts: Accordance VI

Series: Kingdom Hearts
Title: Accordance VI
Charas: heroes + Traverse Town
Desc: shut up
Status: um.





Now with 80% more Obscure Crossover.



Accordance VI



They’re in Traverse Town again, looking for the wizard called Merlin. The boy has made no secret of his eagerness to meet a real sorcerer (this being said with a significant Look at the mage, of course). The mage rolls his eyes but offers no other reaction. He is distracted and has been for some time now, and has his own reasons for wanting to speak with Traverse Town’s resident adept. Leon and the others want to know Merlin’s opinion on the Keyblade Master. The Keyblade Master wants to know Merlin’s opinion on the Keyblade Master. Yet an expert’s opinion of the Keyblade bearer is, perhaps strangely, the furthest thing from the mage’s feverish mind.

They leave the underground passage in a mix of emotions. The boy of course is higher than a kite on validation and the excitement of newly activated spells and the promise of further magical education. If he’s still thinking about a beach with white sand he gives no hint. The knight alternates between joining in the boy’s enthusiasm and puzzling over the mage’s unexplained, abrupt descent into brooding dark fury.

“What did you and Merlin talk about, when we were upstairs?” the knight questions, hanging back a little from the boy. He needn’t have bothered. The boy is already talking Yuffie and Leon’s ears off and giving completely unnecessary demonstrations of his new arcane abilities.

“Things,” the mage answers shortly.

“Things like..?”

“Things like things I am not discussing right now.”

The knight blinks slowly. “Isn’t he going to teach—”

“Oh he’ll teach. He’ll give the kid everything he knows about magic,” the mage says bitterly. “But it won’t be enough.”

And he refuses to say any more.

The knight shoots him concerned looks every now and then while the boy obliviously goes on about his business of annoying everyone and everything. The mage pretends not to see. He’s not angry any longer. He’s simply tired.

In the evening they scatter to separate bedrooms. Privacy is a rare luxury, and they take advantage of it when they can.

Caged by the walls of his room, the mage paces.

There are things that being the Royal Wizard entails that he has not mentioned to either of his companions. Duties. Responsibilities. Understandings, some of them in such confidence that not even the knight is privy to them. The only ones who know are the only ones who need to know, like the mage and his King and adepts like Merlin.

It is the duty of those who would harness the energies and elements of the universe to understand the forces they deal with. It is their duty to command and maintain these forces responsibly. It is their duty to care for and keep the secrets of the natural world that are better off left outside public knowledge.

A twist of soft light pulses almost invisibly in the corner of the room. He eyes it absently. A Heartless had been in here not long ago, but it was gone now. Through the door, or back the way it came, through the oddity of light.

It is not an oddity of light.

He mutters a Word of dismissal under his breath and watches the highway entrance dissipate with a soft pop! of displaced air.

Contrary to most assumptions, the Heartless were not actually able to appear and disappear at will. They flicker in and out of solid reality using a method of travel that the mage, and all creatures of the natural world, were intimately acquainted with.

They are called the wild roads. They are secret highways, paths cut through reality by ancient magics. They are tesseracts, contracting and connecting impossible distances. They are the dark, silent, invisible paths of the worlds that run through both time and space. To those empowered to walk them (and not all are, for the highways are not without danger and can sorely test their travelers), they are shortcuts between walls, between cities, between continents, between planets. To vanish through the entrance of one and then appear in another location thousands of miles away is their doing.

The Heartless use them extensively. The Heartless infest them. They have done so since the unexplained fall of Radiant Garden, using the wild roads to travel an afflicted world like worms burrowing through a rotten apple. The highways deteriorate under their use, becoming corrupted and tangled as Heartless and other, more unnatural creatures pour through them. Even the greatest of the wild roads, the King’s Highways that are cut between stars (and the boy thought interspace travel was just aimlessly buzzing from planet to planet) have become unsafe. They are filled with debris and danger, abandoned since the early measures of quarantine were taken against infected worlds. The mage, being the resident pilot and so the one responsible for bouncing off the random meteor, doesn’t think either of his companions really appreciate what kind of horrific shape the King’s Highways have fallen into.

Well, he can’t do anything about that. The star roads are called the King’s Highways because his power maintains them, and they won’t be cleared until the King returns. If the King returns.

But the in-world highways are the business of those who walk them. Every sorcerer, hedge-witch, magician and adept across every world in the multiverse takes an oath during their apprenticeship to protect and care for the wild roads. The mage had taken the same. He’d pledged himself to give his aid, if and when it should ever be needed, to the traditional guardian of those roads, the creature they called the Majicou.

The mage had never personally seen the Majicou. The mage didn’t know anyone that had ever personally seen the Majicou, except perhaps the King, who wouldn’t ever say if he’d ever personally seen the Majicou. The mage knew the Majicou through reputation and legend only. He was supposedly old, older than Disney Castle, he was supposedly wise, he was supposedly powerful. He was definitely absent, and had been for quite some time as far as the mage knew.

He had been told that the Majicou had his reasons. He believed that. He still believes that. The Majicou is the caretaker of the wild roads and there are always threats to the wild roads. There are always humans who crave power they didn’t deserve and seek to tread where they were not welcome or meant. There are always those whose curiosity leads them down dark paths.

The legends of the wild roads and the Majicou are varied, often contradicting, and more than half of them probably false or greatly exaggerated. The one that isn’t is the story about the Majicou’s great nemesis.

This story said that once, long ago, humanity produced an enemy of the natural world. It said that there appeared a man who sought to understand the secrets of nature and master the unseen forces of life itself. It said that this man was eventually consumed by his obsession. He tortured and maimed innocents in his quest for forbidden knowledge. He tortured and maimed himself. He succeeded, or partially succeeded, and his success flooded the wild roads with darkness and death and nearly brought about the end of all things.

He had several names. His enemies knew as him as the Alchemist, and the legend said that he was dealt with.

It didn’t say exactly how. But it warned that there would always be others who thought the same way the Alchemist had, that they might be the exceptions to the laws of existence. It warned that there would always be other alchemists, deliberately or ignorantly following in the footsteps of the great Enemy.

The mage thinks, looking back, that he’d never quite believed that. Or rather thought it was a possibility, but not a very definite one.

And then news had come to the Castle of an incident at Radiant Garden. A catastrophe. An infection.

A plague of shadows.

It is nine years later and still no one knows the exact circumstances that led to Radiant Garden’s fall. No one knows what happened to that kingdom’s ruler, who they heard later from the King had been researching Heartless. No one has discovered the source of the Heartless invasion. What they know for certain is that darkness overruns the wild roads and forces them into twisting, dangerous tracts, paths that lead to the vulnerable, formerly inaccessible hearts of worlds. What they know for certain are the effects, not the cause.

And the effects are unmistakably those of another Alchemist.

Merlin declares this while the boy and the knight were upstairs in his bizarre hermit’s house, the boy delighted over his new magical abilities and the knight delighted in him. The mage does not hear their rowdy enthusiasm. The mage bows his head, for this is their worst fears realized, and the King is not here to tell him what to do. At this point the Majicou isn’t likely to show up either.

Another Alchemist. An unidentified Enemy. A rogue sorcerer, perhaps, someone who had rejected their vows and sought to exploit the secrets of the natural world for his or her own dangerous, selfish ends. The King’s men had hoped that what had happened at Radiant Garden (whatever it was exactly, that had happened at Radiant Garden) was at best an accident, at worst an isolated incident. The mage had hoped that the corruption of the wild roads was some kind of side effect from the disaster and not the deliberate result. Corruption could be cleansed. Damaged roads could be healed. The packs of Heartless ranging the highways were threats, yes, but mindless and predictable and, if one got right down to it, not all that difficult to handle if you knew what you were doing.

Not so if they were facing a human Enemy. A human enemy, likely a powerful sorcerer, that would actively fight them. An Alchemist would lead them astray if he could. An Alchemist would sabotage and tangle the highways without a second thought, disrupting that world’s natural flow of energy and poisoning it from the inside. An Alchemist would command the Heartless and use them cleverly, dangerously, to his best advantage. An Alchemist would plot, analyze, adapt. An Alchemist would kill without hesitation.

They are in serious trouble if an Alchemist waits for them at the end of their quest to defeat the Heartless.

The mage asks if Merlin has any clues to the identity of this Enemy. Merlin does not. Merlin has freely admitted his ignorance over the causes and specific events of this crisis, as well as how precisely to deal with it. The mage is more than a little shaken by such admissions. He had thought, very logically, that they would be able to count on an adept’s knowledge of the situation to help them out. With Yen Sid and the King and the Majicou all so very conveniently out of reach, Merlin is one of the last authorities that might have had some idea what was going on.

And all he can tell them is that their Enemy might be the most dangerous kind of all; the cunning and discreet.

Merlin strokes his beard, looking a great deal more grim than when he’d been dealing with the boy. His vows prevent him from discussing the Alchemist and the wild roads with anyone who was not an initiated member of the magical community, but he has said he will leave the choice to share information, relevant or irrelevant as it might be, up to the mage. For now, this is a council for wizards only. He speaks in an old, formal tongue of his homeland for the sake of discretion. There are shadows even here in this sanctuary, and some of them may be listening.

“We know little for certain,” the old sorcerer says. “The Alchemist, any incarnation of him, has always found it necessary to work through proxies. It is possible that all our obvious enemies, as we encounter them, will turn out to be nothing more than pawns of a puppet-master.” He sips his tea. “As we are perhaps pawns ourselves.”

Pawns of an absent chess player. The Majicou also found it necessary to work through proxy. The mage knows this, it is a famous part of the legend surrounding him. The mage swore an oath at the beginning of his magical education to serve Majicou and the wild roads as one of those proxies, should the guardian ever require it of him.

But there has been no word from Majicou. No word from him or any of the other adepts or from the King, save what small news Merlin brings. Orders from their absentee monarch. ‘Teach the boy.’

“Is he really the right one?” The mage has to ask. The boy was content with Merlin’s agreeing to teach him a few spells as proof of validation, but the mage had been watching the old man’s face. Just because he was an adept did not mean that he was an accomplished liar.

“Is he really the key of destiny?”

“He fulfills the requirements, at the moment,” Merlin answers cryptically. “And he would very much like to believe that he is the one. In the end that may be the more important quality.”

The mage crosses his arms. “That’s not an answer.”

Merlin remains serene. “It is all the answer I have to give you.”

“So we’re supposed to treat him as the real thing just because he wants to be.”

“We would be far unkinder treating him as the real thing if he were unwilling. The King believes in him, in any case. And you do, I assume, trust your King?”

“Of course I do!” the mage snaps, stung. “But, it’s just, if it turns out that he’s wrong—”

“He is more likely than any one of us to recognize a Keyblade Master, being one himself,” Merlin reminds. “And I am also convinced that the boy was not chosen arbitrarily. He is key to all of this; the coming darkness, the wild roads, the puppet-master. He must be instructed in his role.” The old man pauses. “He tells me you will not teach him magic.”

The mage has been expecting this. He replies, suddenly wary, that he is not qualified.

“Your credentials would suggest otherwise.”

“My credentials exaggerate. Yen Sid is Disney Castle’s non-resident adept, I’m just the guy at the front desk.” He lowers his gaze and executes the most formal of bows, a wizard’s apology. “It is not my place. I cannot teach the Keyblade Master.”

“You can, magician of the court. You can and you will.” Merlin’s voice is gentle but steely. He draws himself up without moving and the room seems to expand with his presence, his shabby blue robe becoming somehow stately, his face lined and stern like a stone saint’s. The air groans with the weight of old power. He is an adept, after all, perhaps the greatest of his kind, and his words are crystallized prophecy when he wishes them to be.

“Your King requests this of you. The boy is to be your apprentice.”

The mage had taken a step back despite himself, now he stiffens. His beak opens and closes without sound.

Teaching the boy a few handy tricks is one thing. The mage had already more or less resigned himself into being persuaded to that. But taking the boy as an apprentice, a full-fledged apprentice…that was something else entirely. A magician’s apprentice is more than a mere student. He/she is the center of the teacher’s world, as close as or closer than blood, closer than child, sibling, or spouse. A true magician’s greatest achievement is meant to be their heir. A true magician’s legacy is the knowledge and perspective they can impart to another, the connection of a perfectly matched, understanding, almost intuitive partnership. A student is meant as the successor of a soul. A student is meant as the culmination of all the teacher’s goals and hopes.

The mage and the boy can’t even agree on where to eat lunch on any given day.

“You must be joking,” he hears himself say.

Merlin doesn’t bother to respond to that.

“No.” The mage stares. “Just. No. No.” He watches the adept’s gaze flatten and recovers himself hastily. “I can’t. Yen Sid himself has said I’m barely more than a talented amateur. I’m not ready to take an apprentice. I am definitely not ready to take someone like him …the Keyblade Master.”

“And he is not ready to be taken,” Merlin says calmly. “Yet, you both are here, and there is no other time.

“But— ”

“If the orders of your King will not compel you, your vows as a wizard should,” the old man adds.

The mage comes close to snarling. This is ridiculous. This is more than ridiculous. “It is also my right to refuse. My vows include an apprentice only of my choosing.”

“Your vows hold you to the preservation of the wild roads and of Kingdom Hearts. I have promised the Keyblade Master an education in the basics, and that is what I will deliver. I am, after all, somewhat experienced in the instruction of young boys.” Merlin smiles slightly, as if at some private joke. “But,” he continues, “that will not be enough. He will require more than a few sporadic lessons to play the part destiny has scripted for him. He’s going to need someone there day to day, and you are the only one in that position.”

“But you said…” The mage gestures angrily, helplessly. “We don’t even know if he’s the right one!”

“Belief is power. His belief has carried him this far.”

The mage glares. Adept or not, this is manipulation, and his temper frays under its cut. “I said no.”

“Circumstances have not given us that option.” Merlin sighs, as though the mage is trying to be difficult over something very simple. “Surely you can see that. There is no one else.”

“Us? What is this ‘us?’” The mage’s voice climbs. That was the last vestiges of his patience burning away, and though he’ll probably kill himself later for yelling at an adept, more than that a personal idol, he’s too angry at the moment to think straight. He jabs an accusing finger at the old man. “What I see is you pushing the responsibility on someone else, an adept driving an amateur into something he can’t handle and telling him the whole while that it’s necessary, that there’s no one else who can do it but him! What I see is the whole lot of you shoving your malarkey into someone else’s lap in hopes that he’ll somehow take care of all your problems for you! Fight the Heartless! Save the day! You’ll do just fine, or you’d damn well better, because there’s no one else that can.”

Merlin waits for the rant to end, eying him patiently, almost curiously. He asks, finally and gently, “Are you speaking of yourself, or of the child?”

The silence is so loud it rings.

Merlin continues after a moment, still in that same gentle tone. “I am sure the two of you have been doing the best you can for him. Your King will understand that.”

More silence.

“But you will not believe it from me, I suppose. That is understandable.” The adept speaks almost to himself. There is a drawn out pause, and then he continues in a more normal tone. “I can advise you only to continue the quest as you have been. Stay with the key. Defeat the shadows, lock the worlds, and look for the source of the darkness. In Majicou’s absence we of the magical community are acting guardians of the wild roads. You are Majicou’s proxy in this as well as your King’s. If an Alchemist awaits you, you know what must be done.”

He gets a response at last. A slow nod from the duck, who is staring very intently at the ground.

“I have not seen the wild roads in such a state for many centuries,” the old man admits quietly. “Things are about to become very bad for everyone. Do not let your guard down. The hearts of the worlds must be protected.”

Another slow nod. A resigned one.

“As for the boy..”

“No,” the mage repeats. Quietly, but firmly.

“He needs a teacher.” Merlin is implacable.

The mage is just as implacable, but he speaks to the floor. “I will not teach a human.”

Merlin considers him for a moment and says simply, with all the weight of all eternity, “Ah.”

Then, “we are finished here.”

The knight and the boy choose that very moment (or perhaps are compelled to choose that moment) to return to the main room, buzzing and loud with their usual enthusiasm. They don’t appear to notice Merlin’s closed expression or the mage’s unusual reticence. They thank Merlin and listen to his advice and spill out from his house in an energetic wave. They carry the mage out in their wake without any effort from him.

He and Merlin do not speak to each other as they pass.

The mage stares despondently at the green wall of his appropriated room. This was not how he had planned his long awaited interview with the great adept Merlin going. Yet, he can’t think of any way it could have gone differently.

Okay, so maybe he hadn’t needed to screech like a woman, but he’d been angry. And he definitely had every right to be angry.

They’re lying to the boy. All of them, the mage included, every day that they let him continue believing he is some kind of destined hero. He may have the talent (the Keyblade wouldn’t have chosen him otherwise), but Merlin had implied that he was simply one choice of others possible. Not the best. Not the only.

Was the boy really the Keyblade Master? Was he meant to be, or was he only trying to fulfill a role that other people had laid out for him, just because he had a little bit of aptitude for it and they were desperate?

…or, as Merlin said, did it even matter, so long as the boy chose his fate for himself?

The mage didn’t know. The mage didn’t know that and he didn’t know a lot of other things, like how they are supposed to restore the vanishing worlds and purify the wild roads and fight an Alchemist all on their own.

He is sure that the Keyblade is the answer. The King is sure, Merlin is sure, and the boy is sure. But having the tool is not the same thing as being able to wield it, and the Keyblade is a magic weapon.

‘Teach the boy.’

“He is to be your apprentice.”

The mage suddenly wants very badly to break something.

He would not admit this to Merlin, or Yen Sid, or even his King, but the mage has already formed a few theories of his own about the Heartless invasion and the corruption of the highways. He knows the legends about the Alchemist. He knows the history of the wild roads. He knows that the old magics are always so threatened by human intervention, because of human curiosity, and is more than sure that the galaxy is in such a state today because of human mistakes. Because in some way, he is sure, of the notorious inconstancy of the human heart.

Disney Castle is powerful among the worlds. They have the Cornerstone, they have their King, and they have the teachings of adepts like Yen Sid, and most of all they have little to no interference by humanity. The wild roads were never meant for human travel. Magic, one might argue, has never been at its best in human hands, unless the human in question has been radically changed by it, as is often the case with the surviving adepts. Merlin and Yen Sid have lived far longer than any normal human. They are not, technically, completely mortal any longer.

But the rogue sorcerers of history are always human. Because the wild roads do not bend for humans the humans resent, and because the humans resent they begin to meddle. And when they meddle, they upset the natural order of things.

And when they stop meddling and begin to try and dominate, as humans are so unfortunately prone to doing, they willfully destroy the delicate balances of existence itself.

This is not to say that all villains in the history of ever have been human. The mage is not that illogical or narrow-minded. This is also not to say that humans with some limited talent for magic (Aerith and the boy himself, for example), are necessarily bad people.

It is just, the mage feels that there are certain boundaries that ought to be respected. All animals, intelligent or otherwise, have an intuitive understanding of the energies that make up their worlds. Humans do not. Some humans can be taught, but they are more likely to flail and falter, and grasp for power where they should not. It is not precisely their fault. They are missing an integral sense, like smell or sight, an instinctive, primal capability that comes into use when one tries to manipulate energy.

How can the mage make an apprentice out of a human child, when it would be like trying to teach a deaf person to play music? How can the mage explain to someone else what was never explained to him, because he instantly, instinctively grasped the form and concept of his teacher’s lessons? Humans should teach humans magic, if humans needed to be taught magic at all.

Merlin said, the Keyblade is also born of the natural world’s energies.

Merlin said, the Keyblade is more than a weapon.

Merlin said, that boy is not what you think.

The mage has no idea what that is supposed to mean, but he can’t see how this is anything but a bad idea.

He stares at nothing for a long, complex moment, and then raises his hands. Four fingered hands. Wings, a thousand years of evolution or mutation ago.

The change moves slowly at first. A ripple of light, building in his palm, bleeding color into the white and re-arranging bones with tiny cracking noises. It moves up his arm, lengthening, solidifying, replacing. Muscles jellify and firm into unfamiliar, packed shapes. Tendons and nerves re-string. Tissues bloom. He stretches, contorts, rears up.

This is no amateur’s glamour. Illusions are easy to cast but difficult to maintain, and will not withstand physical contact or higher level magical scans. Shape-shifting is the better solution to their disguises when they travel to other worlds, the mage has found. The initial spell takes longer to cast (and to undo) and there are definite drawbacks to the vulnerability of mid-change and just after, when one has not yet adjusted to new balance or extra limbs. But a true shape-shift will hold under the physical punishment of combat and show up as nothing special under a scanning spell.

The mage opens his eyes (an old habit, he’s never quite been able to break himself of closing his eyes during the transformation) and, swaying a little as he adjusts to his new height and the shifted center of balance, observes the human staring back at him from the mirror.

Pale skin, nearly albino. He had to work on that. Short white hair in tufts that look almost like feathers underneath the hat. Eyes so dark blue they are almost black. A human face that is not strikingly handsome (the object of a disguise being anonymity, after all) but comely, in its own alien way. The body looks to fall somewhere between Leon and Cid’s ages, or so he’s been told; he doesn’t have all that much experience with the physical aspect of human age. Not that it matters much with a form he can change at will. If he told the spell ‘child’ it would probably produce something like the boy, if he told it ‘adult’ it would produce this. He supposes ‘teenager’ would be somewhere between Yuffie and Leon.

The blue shirt had morphed and stretched along with the rest of him, but it looks odd draped across a different frame. He dismisses it with a flicker of will, leaving only the gold cuffs and the hat. If he wasn’t wearing pants, he might as well not wear the top. He understands human codes of dress and modesty but he is, after all, currently in the privacy of his own room.

He looks at the naked reflection in the mirror critically; counting toes, judging the curves of certain muscles, measuring the length of bones. Everything seems to be in order. He’s gotten rather good at calling up this particular form, it’s been very useful as a disguise in some of the worlds they’ve visited that were not used to seeing intelligent, talking animals walking around. Useful, at least, until he’s required to run or fight in it, or do anything that reminds him he’s not in his comfortable, normal body. Useful until he remembers that the people he encounters would look at him with shock, scorn, or even fear if he were to reveal his true self.

The boy is the worst, though. He stares constantly. He says it’s always so strange to see the mage and the knight in human forms. He gets quiet and reserved, like his companions somehow become strangers by changing their shapes, and he trails along behind them meekly because they suddenly look like the adults they are.

The mage’s lip curls slightly in annoyance. He watches it in the mirror, detached, and lifts a five-fingered hand to the strangeness that is a flexible human mouth rather than a proper beak. Some things, he thinks, he will never get used to, no matter how much time he spends in this form.

How could he teach something this clumsy to command magic?

The empty room holds no answer. He’d more or less expected that.

He pulls a cloak into existence and, draping it carelessly over his shoulders, steps out onto the room’s balcony. The stars look different to human sight. The night wind tugs playfully at him. It is only pleasantly cool outside but he shivers absently, used to feathers and down blocking the air. He notes the prickle of flesh on his arms. Cold, his new nerves inform him. He watches as mammalian hair rises in ancient, unconscious response.

Humans are animals as well, he supposes. He is not sure why they have lost the animal’s instinctive understanding of magic. Perhaps as some kind of safeguard, or an evolutionary accident. He himself retains that extra sense, even in this form, because no matter what shape he wears his heart is still that of a beast.

He lets go of the cloak, raises his strange human arms to the clear sky, and calls open the wild roads.

The wind that engulfs him is instant, arctic, and gale-force. He can hear what sounds like voices, the sounds of other animals, the sounds of life itself. Noises and smells assault him that are too complex for his developed brain to decipher but are immediately recognized by his oldest instincts. They are the residue of thousands of years, of thousands of travelers, of thousands of souls that have worn this highway into its current tract. Ghost shapes pour past him in their own ceaseless passage. Animals or other, less easily defined creatures that walked this road yesterday or tomorrow or a million decades in the past

The highway yawns wide to take him in. He can feel something like a membrane, invisible but stretched taut and uncomfortable across his unfamiliar skin. He pushes, twists, caught at the very threshold of reality. It gives but will not break and he knows why. He surrenders with a sigh and lets the human shape dissolve from around his soul, like melting ice surrounding a flame, and rises in an explosion of wings and light in the Greater shape that all travelers assume on the highways.

Inside all animals, perhaps even some humans, are the trapped essences of ancient lives. A housecat evolved from the fifteen foot long ice tigers that stalked the frozen wastes, from the snarling black leopards that hunt the jungles. This or that fish evolved from something with staring eyes and snarling teeth that swam through primordial oceans. A dog was once a yellow-eyed wolf, with plumed tail arching over powerful haunches as it runs down a caribou three times its size, or perhaps descended from some spotted predator with wide, batlike ears that trotted over the oldest deserts. The wild roads were their roads first, and in some ways they still walk them.

Within the highways the mage is both not himself and more himself. His wings measure nearly thirty feet from tip to tip, full of snow white and tawny cream and dark brown shadings. His eyes are golden and huge. His massive beak tapers to a razor point; his black talons could crush stone and steel or carry off stock animals if he so chose. His wingbeats are thunder in the airless, dimensionless, gray void of the wild road. The downsweep of his enormous wings is a gale in itself.

The roc contents itself that this particular highway is untouched by darkness, as so few are these days. It opens its beak and cries its triumph, the shattering scream of a million years of successful avian predators. It sweeps gracefully away in satisfaction, winging back to the highway’s end and to its other, impossibly contracted life.

Humans, the mage thinks when he can think again. Traces of the other him still linger, muddling his brain and pouring unaccustomed predatory, base instincts through his nervous system. He has a brief but wild urge to eat a mouse.

Humans. Humans are not meant for the wild roads. Humans like the Alchemist damn them with their touch. The legends spoke of the one eyed cat Majicou’s defeat, so long ago, at the hands of the human he loved. Before becoming the Majicou he had lived a life under the name Hobbe, and he had been the Alchemist’s cat.

How could a human save the wild roads?

The mage’s brain has no answers for that. The mage’s brain is still sluggish, his body full of pre-history; borrowed memories of flight, of hunting, of nesting and eggs and lonely mountain crags.

Stop that, he tells the rest of himself. I’m a duck. Duck on a mission. I have to think. I have to concentrate.

The rest of him says, sleep now. It registers night as a period of de-activation.

Sleep now.

But the boy—

Sleep now.

But the Keyblade—

Sleep now.

And so he does.










Parts 1 & 2 here.
Parts 3 & 4 here.
Part 5 here.