Heart-less... (Roxas)

The boy from a land of warm sea-side eventide frowned in the Ice Cavern’s dry gelid gloom, tightly wrapped scarf and fur train of his parka’s hood tickling Roxas’ lips and forehead with the shift in expression. He looked hundreds of feet up again at the now tiny ringlet of light that’d been his entry into this deathtrap and tugged experimentally on dangling length of his repelling rope. Satisfied his means of exit was as secure as it was ever gonna be, Roxas stretched a hand out into the darkness. A memory a young man’s soft voice in his ear, or maybe not his at all, and a double edged silver key the half again the length of his forearm shimmered into existence.

“Light.” Oathkeeper obliged, manifesting his own Heart as luminosity. His spiritual torch seemed tiny in the arctic caliginosity extending far and deep beyond sight. With a sigh made visible by the cold, Roxas began to delve the wintery depths with only a glowing key held and trusty ice-pike received from a farmer in exchange for his ‘musical spellstone’

Normally when Roxas found himself cast through darkness and static into these fantastical delusions he could no longer in good faith call dreams, he didn’t tend to tarry. Logically there seemed only two options. Either Roxas was actually traveling to terrifying alien worlds of seemingly infinite ways to die horribly and where everybody seemed to know his clone, OR he’d be living in a white room with nice soft walls pretty soon, taking horse-tranquilizers with breakfast. Neither choice seemed worth dwelling on.

The mouse-like scratching of his ice cleats on the frozen walkway seemed dangerously loud in cavern’s crushing silence. Oathkeeper’s pale light refracted endlessly off the thickest frozen floes he’d even seen, glistening on their almost aqueous seeming surfaces in a way that played on phantasmal tricks on the imagination. A couple times Roxas had thought he’d spied the dark shape of someone trapped in the ice, only to realize it was his own reflection given the illusion of three dimensionality by the curious curvatures that suffused this chthonic glacier.

More then once during this trek through hyperborean catacombs the novice spelunker had questioned his purpose along with his sanity. But honestly, the worry that he might be crazy was what made this so important. The locals hadn’t been the most friendly to be honest, even when Roxas had traded random articles from his school backpack to get some clothes that blended in better. However, their description of the ‘Waltz’ that'd tussled with a local knight and flown off had been pretty specific, as had the picture they’d shoved in his face. Roxas had no clue what a ‘Waltz’ or a’Black Mage’ was, but the Twilight Towner knew Vivi when he saw him.

Somehow, a part of home, part of the Roxas he was steadily losing piece by piece, was here in this misty hell-hole of clockwork castles and creepy ice caves, and Roxas wasn’t leaving without him.

Yeah, and he was apparently killing people…or something? Knowing Vivi, Roxas suspected that this obvious misunderstanding could be wrapped up pretty quick before they scrammed back home.

Y’know, if he didn’t like slip and break his everything over these damn frost cliffs.

…yup, looong way down.

Roxas eased his way along algid ridges and repelled down hushed chasm of formerly liquid diamond. The unsteady scraping of his cleats trying to find purchase, panic-inducing clatter of gelid chunks breaking off to plummet into unseen abysses, and his own huffing breath seemed the sole sounds of defiant life in this wintry mausoleum. 

The benumbing chill had reached down even through his layered Mu fur parka and thrice knitted Yan wool scarves, when whispers wafted like specters through the aquamarine honey-comb of corridors formed by ambient air bubbles and currents during the glacier’s formation. There came then the sound of static, like when a tram power-line went down in a storm. Roxas’ pace quickened, winding his way toward the commotion. What greeted him after a harrowing vault over a jagged crevice was huge cavern whose vaulted interior of ice-covered waterfalls evoked a primal baroque amphitheater, gilded in rime rather then gold.

Roxas might’ve been struck by its beauty, a reminder of nature’s effortless sublimity, if the scene within hand’t been so blood-curdling.

“Vivi? … VIVI STOP!”




@blackwaltz3

The challenge that he’d made a mistake, delivered as it was in a voice somewhere between a tiger and trash-compactor, and accompanied with a wave of crackling blue-white lightning that illumined the brutally pulverized guardswoman slumped against the glacial wall, made it awfully hard for Roxas to disagree.

Vivi’s clothing was familiar, a blue jacket of coarse fabric and tight sleeves set over pale pantaloons and worn leather boots. The signature steeple of a towering broad-brimmed hat shrouded in shadow a visage even young Ornitier’s friends had never seen, perceptible only as ovaline points of radiance that vaguely evoked eyes, like slitted windows into some seething internal crucible. But Roxas wasn’t blind. These points of similarity were a like a familiar redolence evincing childhood reminiscence even while the merciless passing of years has rendered a place utterly recognizable.

Roxas, a fellow of unprepossessing stature himself, was used to Vivi coming up to about his navel, hat non-withstanding. The Vivi before him was easily triple Roxas’ own height, and could have laid the boy flat across his shoulders with room to spare. He had a stilted lanky frame, one that simultaneously reminded the imagination of a huge marshland bird and a depilated scarecrow standing brooding sentinel over the harvest in Autumn’s encroaching gloom. The combination of avian and manakin was furthered by the soft downy ruff around the upper termination of a long jacket that split into brocaded strips around the legs. It was unclear whether this feathery frill was part of the clothing or a mane-line continuation of grimly magnificent vulturous wings spanning at least fifteen feet in length from the outermost azure pinions. Some instinct told Roxas that it was both, a subtle melding between organic and textile that spoke to how far the figure before him transcended the boy he’d Struggled with just last week.

So Vivi had become a Heartless, or maybe something unto Roxas himself. How? When? Why? The Twilight Towner couldn’t care less. If he needed to literally cut the Vivi he knew out of this screwed up angel of death, then that was that.

“Vivi,” Roxas reached up and pulled down the fur-rimmed hood of his parka and unwound a wool thick scarf from around his throat, baring the fullness of his face in hope it’d conjure some recollection. “It’s me,” blue eyes rose to meet gleaming pits amidst darkness, imploring, “Roxas.”

Ice cleats let out faint clicks as the boy strode across the no-mans-land between him and the looming crow. His feat sank slightly where errant fulmination had scoured and charred once pristine ageless ice, gingerly transversing the hazard, but seemingly not considering violent voltage being actually aimed at his person within the realm possibility. Roxas lacked his Somebody’s extroversion and gentleness, but quietly shared his faith. He knew who Vivi Orniteir was and acted upon that gut-knowledge without a flicker of doubt across firmly set features.

“Im sorry,” he admitted, Oathkeeper held high to illumine the vast icey hollow like a Lampad’s underworld torch. “That I let you down…let you become this Black Mage Waltz thing after all you…” Roxas swallowed, the magician's immensity certainly not becoming less intimidating with proximity. “Look! We’ll fix it though.” Roxas keep his eyes locked on the sorcerer’s as he nodded slowly, clearly hoping he’d nod along. Seeing nothing to reassure him, there came a resolution to the boy’s voice that brooked no dispute.

An empty gloved hand was offered.

“We’re headin’ home now Vivi”




@blackwaltz3

The blinding white of a possible concussion receded with successive blinks until Roxas’ could sorta see the dark blue of the hoarfrost hollow. A skull addled by his concussive impact and slide along the icy floor ached with a dull throb. Thought trickled back in without any order of priority.

Ok firstly, Vivi had learned way more intense pre-Struggle smack talk since his evil growth spurt! Like seriously, the guy used to fiddle with his sleeves and make it kinna awkward on the podium while the announcer got the crowd pumped up, now he was talking about like rending souls from bodies, slow down Vi-crow!

Secondly, holy crap that hurt!

“Hey thanks man,” the attempt at casualness was maybe ruined by it coming out as a raw choke, just a little. “was kinna gettin chilly for a bit back there.” Oathkeeper’s razor edge sank into the ice melted to slush by eldritch fire as Roxas used it as leverage to drag himself to his feet. A quick glance down at his chest brought on relief mixed with an adrenal spike of danger. Skin curled in blacked horizons of necrosis around unnaturally pale patches of weeping subcutaneous tissue. Only the manifold layers of furs and ample fool’s luck had prevented Roxas’ sternum from becoming a gaping cavity of charbroiled meat. Lancing strips of third degree burns may have been getting off lightly, but damn, sure didn’t feel like it.

“Look Waltz,” his tone managed to be jocularly mocking of the new name despite the searing agony of movement, “take it from another guy made from’a failure everybody likes better.” Taunts flowed as Roxas settled into a guarded stance, trying to keep his sidelong steps subtle. Cerulean eyes didn’t match the banter as they flicked through the angles and distance separating the avian wizard from his prisoner.

“Yeah Sora’s weak,” Roxas admitted to the monster, expressing his personal reservations about the Worlds’ Savior with raised eyebrows and a ‘waddah you do’ face, a concession to rueful intimacy between two shadows of greater lights. “…Hate being compared to him too,” he continued with a not quite affected sigh and roll of the wrist. With an alacrity that’d have been the envy of Twilight High’s pep rally squad, the motion swung Oathkeeper in a accelerating circle of pale light, blade becoming a blur. “…but your’re gonna have’ta do waaaay” cruel juvenile mischief glinted in a grin and held tone, “better then that before people'll stop calling you Vivi.”

With keyblade’s blinding spin transcended finesse and went straight into the overtly supernatural. A touchless dance of tactile telekinesis accelerated the wind-up into an audible saw-like whine. “Want this Key so much Bird-man? Take it!” A snap of his freehand’s fingers brought Oblivion's ebon length to bear in a gemini gyration. “Hell have two!”

A tuck of the chest and bend at the knees, and Roxas went into a discus thrower’s spin as performed on ice. A release of momentum and a mental command sent Oblivion and Oatherkeeper in twin flanking arcs toward what remained of Vivi, their keening flight through the crisp cavern air like a dove soaring above its black shadow.

Alright, go time!

Exhalation came out as a brief incantation, a wide net cast with words and will. Errant photons protested in woeful firefly steaks of light as Roxas’ mind bent their aimless linear paths into his body. Electromagnetic radiation suffused cells and marrow, shifting matter imperceptibly along the energy spectrum. For the span of second, the boy was the sole point of illumination in that cyclopean cave, a newborn star in the stygian void of infant space. Then there was a blaze of motion, a flare in the corner of the eyes, and a scouring scatter of scintillation heralded Roxas’s rocketing arrival by the fallen knight. There wasn’t time to check how badly she was hurt, just a bare moment enough to hoist her staggering armored bulk over a shoulder.

A grunt of effort and slippery scratch of cleats definitely not made to take this much weight brought the boy’s attention to just how stupid this plan was. The whistling return of Oblivion and Oatherkeeper his hands was a comfort though. Their mithril and black iron grips met his palms with eager effortlessness, their paths sliding to him along soul’s strings. The young man glanced down at the exotic weapons with the same affectionate familiarity other boys might’ve greeted their beloved hunting dogs on the back porch.

“Thanks guys.”


@blackwaltz3
Actions
1) Roxas took a critical hit from Fire at point blank range and was knocked prone
2) attempted to land 2 light Holy/Shadow hits on Black Waltz with Dual Strike Raid
3) Used Comet Rush to run over to the fallen knight and hoist them up

Sunset came to the Ice Caverns, a twilight that danced within frigid crystals and streaked up the wall’s glacial floes. The vaulted roof was replaced endless empyrean infinities with the span of an eyeblink, a closed ice tomb becaming a crater beneath a golden aurora. Billowing auric clouds were ablaze with Sisyphean glories, an entire numinous skycape bejeweled with stars. It’s majesty was the breathless allure of the unreachable, the Heart’s quixotic self-injury made manifest in mist.

“Your’re wrong”

The light of paradise cast in sharp relief the figures upon the ice into shape relief. Though the chilled glaze of the floor largely reflected the flaxen stratosphere above, black veins of black chair radiated outward from where ionic fury had lanced glaciers to static charged steam and flesh to lifeless carbon. In its ebon epicenter, Roxas knelt, his sheltering furs nothing but smoking scraps of melted hair. The side of his visage that most received the blast was a seething scarlet ruin of burns scars. Skin had become a living Lichtenberg mural of those radial fern-like patterns peculiar to lightning strikes, a result of blood vessels instantly bursting in unison. These seeping spiraling abrasions continued along the his right arm and torso, almost seeming to choke the boy’s body like flowering vines of inflammation. The hand grasping Oblivion twitched spastically, betraying a nervous system crumbling from bio-electric profusion.

Roxas stirred, an aching motion that exhibited non of his previous superhuman alacrity, heavenly light suffusing his body in a corona incandescent amber. But the armored figure at his knees remained still. A sheltered shell of iron had become a deadly iron maiden under the barrage of electric coruscation. She'd boiled to death over Roxas’ shoulder, thrashing and screaming as three hundred thousand kilovolts reduced soft tissue to ash. The cardiac arrest that followed after had been a mercy, a few last agonized palpitations before plunging into painless slumber.

A hiss of pain escaped Roxas’ lips as he rose to his feet. The winged stormcalller received a glance of raw seething hate, an admixture of rage, folly dearly paid for by another, and the shame that followed after. But it was the fallen knight, not the sorcerer, towards whom the keyblader turned. A sudden thrust jabbed Oblivion’s stygian length down into the swordsman’s chest up to the hilt, darkness passing through iron, bone, and gristle as if it wasn’t even there. A frown of concentration and sharp jerk brought Oblivion back out from whatever other-dimensionality it’d occupied. From the corpse’s mutilated form emerged a roseate luminance, a spark of divinity unmarred by the flesh’s travails. The Heart was strong, pure, and true to end. After failing it in life, the least Roxas could do was see that it remained free as well. An arm painstakingly raised Oathkeeper skyward, graceful mithril filigree catching the light of eventide. “C’mon... they’re waiting,” insisted the shoe-in for Charon, mournful but firm. A thin geyser of radiance issued forth from the blessed blade, a beckoning beam towards the hereafter. Rose coral soul-wisps intertwined with the junior psychopomp’s heavenward ray, blending hues until Heart became Key for an instant, brightening to blinding incandescence until it was gone. There was a palpable sense of a door closing, a relieved departure into shrouded realms unseen.

Ferryman duties complete, Roxas rounded on Black Waltz, the golden light above casting long shadows across the scarred hollows of his face. “I’ve known Vivi Ornitier’s since we were kids,” came the explanation phrased as an accusation thick with wrath. “We grew up onna world at the edge of the Light, bout as far from this hellhole as yah can get!” An ragged exhalation of building fury, a feeling of liminal lightness, and Roxas rose on the on the evening ray’s above like a saint achieving transfiguration “He’s human like …" There came the catch, a pause were a statement of homosapien affinity would've once been, but could no longer be spoken in good faith. “…nothing like the Black Mages here!” The rhetorical save, spoken at the expense of Roxas wished he could’ve actually said, made the blood run hot.

He swung in midair toward the corvid conjurer. “You aren’t the pinnacle of anythin’ of man!” The words came quicker as twin blades came down in sweeping arcs towards a mammoth wing, full of self-flagellation’s bitter bile. “Just the third best microwave onna rock full’a knock offs!”




Actions:
1) Cast Magic Hour (Duration 3/3)
2) Use Keyblade to release and send off dead NPC's Heart
3) Used Magic Hour's levitation to made two basic melee attacks (Dual-wielding) on Black Waltz

Cooldowns:
Comet Charge 1/2
Strike Raid 1/2

@blackwaltz3

“Alright kay, he’s a machine, you’re machine,” Roxas ceded the point in audible frustration as he had to break off pursuit for a few precious seconds to spiral away as Black Waltz demonstrated his star pitcher potential with a magmatic ball of death. Crazy kill-bot he may be, but gotta give this guy credit. Chef Black Waltz could dish up the hurt in several different flavors and a variety of potion sizes. This guy would’ve even been tough in the old days, before relinquishing his power along with everything else to Sora.

Now?

Bit off a lot here, definitely struggling to chew.

“What I still don’t get though…” the boy continued, the ravenous blaze passing near enough to singe the hair on his arm and send a fresh flare of pain down his already burned cheek. An effort of will accompanied by the strictly unnecessary reflex of a kick-off in midair sent Roxas up after the ascending avian android. “Is what’d you’d need with Hearts then.” Grim as it was, Roxas felt a bit more comfortable egging on this point now that’d he’d released that woman’s Heart, less chance of a ‘let me show you!’ moment. “Not trying to get a weak human Heart of your own are you?” A needling smirk came with the stressed words, not nearly as convincing when grimacing through electrical burns. Honestly, Roxas doubted anything like that was going down, having plenty of experience with actual Heart seekers, but it might get this guy to open up about what the hell was going on. Should’ve really done intel gathering a bit sooner, but …yeah.

It was honestly pretty surprising when Black Waltz tried a legit sucker-punk right to the face. Expecting spell-slinging not slugging, Roxas barely have time to shift a shoulder in front of the blow. A grunt of impact and muttered curse under his breath was all Roxas needed to fold the momentum into his own and swing his blades into a whirlwind pattern.

…except his arms weren’t doing so good on the ‘swing’ part all of a sudden.

Crystalline flakes crept along the surface of Roxas’ skin as if his body were a prairie succumbing to a winter stormfront. It seeped deep, making a numbing permafrost of his deepest tissues. A maddening sluggishness became paralysis, and then drifted down into non-feeling. Deathly cold was replaced by a pythonic grip of painlessness until only the all-too familiar feeling of falling remained.

In his mind, Roxas plummeted in two lifetimes simultaneously. A girl with azure hair cried out as he fell, but the name she uttered wasn’t his. Ice and towering stones became a swallowing tunnel beneath a shining heart that split the sky.


Actions: Frozen and Falling
Durations: Magic Hour 2/3
@blackwaltz3

As if in an attempt to answer, a long ragged breath escaped the small charred form in the machine’s grip. It was tiny sign of life, barely enough to make a sound or bring even brief motion to the limp near-corpse. Yet, their pellucid surroundings seemed to yield before the exhalation like thatch before a tornado. Towering ice warped and unraveled into thick mist, wafting away in seconds of vaporous dissolution. Primeval hoarfrost vanished into darkness as if it’d all been nothing more then campfire smoke in the eyes.

The vast glacial complex of the Ice Caves had become a simple annular mesa swimming in impenetrable void. Its outer edge was lined with two competing rings, one of vibrant sapphire crystals pristine to the point of translucence, and the other of dull opaque ruby that brought to mind long coagulated blood. Within this dueling Ouroboros was a panorama of stained glass, illuminated as if from some internal sun.

A fertile vapor-veiled world was resplendent in verdant textured glass. The faint outlines of castles and wondrous machines chased the eye’s path down its placid curves, terminating in a statuesque depiction of a great tree. Yet, the sphere was not perfect, subtlety flawed in hue and dichotomous in visage. The merest cock of the head or change in angle shifted the perspective and image shown. Lush emeralds succumbed to a sphere of petrified stone set with onyx and jasper. Russet crevices and stony protrusions that pantomimed boneyard-forests covering a hideous corpse-world, desiccated beyond saving. A flick of the eye brought back the beautiful misty panorama, but the dead sphere lingered ever within the suggestion of its circumference, wormwood gnawing at the heart of paradise.

At the centered foreground of this planetary bifurcation was lithe figure of silks and skin. Exquisite trappings that tread some liminal liberation between royal court and perfumed seraglio hung from an androgynous personage whose pallid semblance was further accentuated by a tumbling mane of platinum tresses of a consistently that vaguely evoked feathers. Yet there was also something decidedly feline in the way the silver socialite’s thin violet lips smirked at the toy clutched in long delicate fingers. A familiar assembling of battered leather, blue brocade, glowing eyes, and corvid wings struggled in that manic grip, a wounded bird proving flailing amusement to a massive house cat.

Roxas stirred then in the sorcerer’s hands. The prismatic cascade streaming up the radiant glaze below cast odd hues and shadows on the soft facial creasing and blurry blinking that signaled an awakening from deep sleep. Halcyon refractions revealed the boy to now be unmarred by his near mortal wounds, a reprieve of spirit if not in fact. In place of mountaineer furs, Roxas wore a short-sleeved jacket and jeans more common in his shadowed seaside home. Yet, as still disoriented blue eyes lifted to regard Black Waltz with wary confusion, it seemed the keyblader hadn’t escape all scars after all. In the center of his forehead, right before everything vanished into a shaggy blond jungle of hair, was cut the number thirteen, raw and ragged as if applied by a dull knife.

"Wait...what?"

@blackwaltz3

“You have a Heart…”

It was hard to wrap his head around. Black Waltz was by its own word a machine, the latest in a long line of weaponized iterations. Roxas had never heard of a robot that could perform magic before, but the last painful twenty minutes had taught him that ‘Black Mages’ could apparently do just that. Black Waltz’s creator had designed it only to kill and collect people’s souls. How could this thing have a Heart?

But…was it really so out-there though? Wasn’t not too long ago that he’d believed that he was hollow, just something that Xemnas used for pretty much the same purpose as Black Waltz here. Ansem too had regarded Roxas as just a machine in a way, a stray sprocket sprung loose from Sora. He was flesh and bone, the other feathers and glimmering shade, yet shouldn’t Roxas of all people be the guy to accept a Heart seeming out of place?

The boy grimaced as he rose to his feet, knees and shins pulsing with a protesting ache after being dropped right onto the glass. It was when he reached standing height that the image beneath his feet gained enough perspective to be meaningful. As he frowned down at the mural of Black Waltz being tormented by a silver-haired figure, the sorcerer’s earlier statement about his creator ‘dismantling’ him for failure echoed through Roxas’ head. On its heels came the memory of gnawing anxiety that Xion would be the next one to be devolved into a Dusk, of living in constant fear, the bitter taste of one’s own fleeting fragility being constantly shoved in your face.

Roxas wasn’t about to get chummy with some heart-ripping asshat who’d fried his freakin skull. But the Heart’s a tricky thing y’know? If he’d stayed in Xemnas’ service, never had friends to wake him from days of zombified malaise, what would Roxas be like now? Maybe not this dude, but probably not too far off…

Blue eyes lifted to meet Black Waltz’s firefly slits, the young man’s features were caught in some uncomfortable place between a scowl and grudging sympathy, like water still trying to stubbornly stay at a hissing boil.

“You did this actually”

He glanced around at the scene of surrealism, familiar in form but alien in detail.

“You hesitated…” the keyblader said slowly, the solace of this quiet illumined darkness allowing him the chance to remember something besides the agony of megavolts coursing through his grey matter. “Heart wanted a chance to choose?” A sweep of hand indicated the pedestals bearing Fate’s tools. “So uh… here we are.”

An absent hand scratched the back of a downy blond mop, the boy awkwardly breaking eye contact.

“…Thanks by the way.”

@blackwaltz3