Based right after KH2. The prelude is the end of the story, for those who don’t catch on. Feel free to guess who the Keybearer is, but please understand that I’m not telling. I don’t own Kingdom Hearts. I just own an absurd amount of copies of it.

Prelude

Murder.

It was nothing less. Sure, the man was an enemy, a criminal, even a murderer himself, but that made the act no less wrong. However, the murderer found himself apathetic, unable to care. As the sun dipped into the ocean and he raised his Keyblade, poised to strike the final blow, time seemed to freeze.

For an eternity, he stared into the frightened eyes of the helpless man before him. For a lifetime, he felt the echo of his best friend’s cry. Don’t do it!

The sun’s upper rim disappeared into the ocean, twilight overtook the beach, the eternal second passed. The Keybearer plunged his weapon deep into his enemy’s abdomen.

The man uttered a choked gasp and slumped forward over the Keyblade, struggling for breath. He looked up, a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth tracing a dark path down his chin. “So, this is your choice, boy,” he said.

In response, the Keybearer casually twisted his weapon, and the man convulsed in agony. Blood gushed from the wound and ran down the Keyblade’s shaft, a stain its Master somehow knew would never come out. Again he could feel the echo of his best friend, of his heartbreak. That was okay. His best friend was in the light, where he belonged. “If this is my destiny,” he told his dying opponent, “I bear it gladly.”

Somehow, the man wheezed out a laugh. “Take care,” he coughed, a dribble of blood running down his chin. “Or the darkness…will eat you. It will always try to claim you, though you protect it.”

The Keybearer bent down until his face was mere inches from his enemy’s. “As it now claims you,” he whispered.

“Such is my destiny,” the man replied. “I have done what…is needed. If the balance is…restored.”

Savagely, the boy jerked the Keyblade free, the man’s mangled entrails ripping out with the prongs. The man whined feebly, far too weak to scream, and the Keybearer watched as the life faded from his eyes. He fell forward, face down in his own blood and gore on the beach, and the boy turned away.

It was not that he felt sick or disturbed by the sight of the man he had murdered. He simply turned to watch the last rose light of the sunset fade from the horizon. It was the last time he would see sunlight, he knew. With this deed, he had sealed his destiny. He was the scion of darkness now; light was anathema to him. And better him, he believed, than the other.

Turning from the sunset, the light, his best friend and home and all he had once loved and held dear, he summoned a rip-portal to that world of darkness he had once feared. Before he stepped through, he took a moment to listen to the cries of his best friend. It was for him that the Keybearer had done this, though the friend would never forgive him and never accept it. It hurt, knowing that. The Keybearer felt a hint of sorrow, enough that a tear slipped down his cheek. Wiping it away, he banished the cries from his heart. If he listened to long or thought too hard about it, he might falter, and he couldn’t afford to. The balance depended on him now.

Summoning a rip-portal, he turned and walked through it without a single glance back, vanishing from the light forever.