55 Layers

I was swimming in… memories. I think.

It was odd, like walking through a disjointed gallery of hundreds of different people's memories, collated haphazardly in a confusing mess of crossed wires as a hundred souls interact on the border of what was effectively a dangerous chemical reaction.

The description I could give was already insane enough, let alone the real thing around me. But for me it was strangely calming.

I don't know what it was about my newfound powers that seemed to be synonymous with calmness, but it was especially evident when I waded through the waters that burst with excitement, fury, hate, loss, and any other of an uncountable list of emotions that seemed to make up the essence of human existence.

Though, it was obvious that there was a distinct lack of positive emotion, either so few and far between and dulled to the point of it being like looking through a shattered kaleidoscope as you tried to interpret when emotion it even it was.

This was the deepest I'd delved into a soul that wasn't Suzumi's, and on that particular occasion I barely remembered exactly what it felt like while I was inside her soul. Being here gave me invaluable insight into how a Hollow works internally, and also a strange understanding of just what my capabilities were within someone else's soul.

It was complicated, and even more abstract. I was both ultimately capable, and ultimately restricted.

I could easily unmake the Hollow's soul, pulling at the loosest strings and watching it unravel. It wasn't something that I would be able to do to every being I come across, but for something that was so strong, letting its hungering soul starve to the degree that it has, the process for doing so was almost easy.

But the same could not be said for changing it. A soul was not as inviolable as some would like to believe, and even Tessai had proven that 'fact' to be a total lie. He had carved the Chains of Fate from my girlfriend's soul, and I had healed it from the traumatized state it'd been in afterwards.

Yet, I couldn't just bring the Hollow's dominant identity into an unassailable position. For some reason, that broke the conventions of how a Hollow's soul worked. Sure, I could promote it, just like I had with Suzumi's own soul. I could set up neutral ground between two parts of the soul, to structure it more clearly and succinctly, but I couldn't have locked away that Hollow within Suzumi any more than I could have entirely destroyed her own personality, her own identity.

So that was what lead me to wander through the dark waters, inky black and staining my skin the more I pushed forwards, the hungry soul desperate enough to chew on the projected energy of my soul that I was inside of here.

Nothing stopped me from walking forwards through the Soul that was in disarray, nothing could stop me. My own soul was far more stable than it was, like a massive metal ball at the bottom of a pool of water, almost serene in comparison to the shifting blackness.

It didn't take long for me to find what I was looking for, the edit that had been so prominent within my mind as I looked at the being with the eyes of a Life Bringer.

Elevated just above the surface level of the waters was an almost fully realised man, sickly and pale to a degree that he looked dead. He was risen out of the water, but not untouched by it. The water had congealed around his legs, around his lower torso and up his back, also pulling his arms apart and holding him in bondage. It was as if he'd been crucified, his skin weeping with wounds large and old, black blood seeping from him in tiny dribbles, the very last of the blood he could offer to the ever-hungry waters that surrounded him.

His head was slumped over, long black hair drawing a curtain around his face, matted with his own blood and the sticky black of the waters. I walked up to him, he who lived in torture within the soul of a Hollow, still powerful enough to live despite his atrophied muscles and pallid skin.

I came within a metre of him, feeling the black waters below pull at my legs with a fervent desire for me to leave, to not come near to its most reviled part. The one that still holds power over the waters, even now as he dies.

I didn't speak, because he wouldn't be able to hear me. But I waited, for just one sign, just a little sign that he still lived, that he still wanted to live on enough for me to reach out.

There was silence within the waters for a long moment, the darkness overwhelming enough to make even me feel claustrophobic while my spiritual senses observed my surroundings, forgoing the use of my eyes completely like I had been since the moment that my powers truly awakened.

Then it happened, something so ordinary and mundane that you'd be forgiven if you missed it's importance.

A breath. There was no sound to it, for it was too weak to make a sound loud enough to hear. In fact, the only reason that you'd be able to notice would be the slight filling of the man's chest and the pull that the breath had on his own dangling hair.

I looked the man's emaciated body over one last time, looking at his borderline skeletal form, the arms that had lost any and all muscle, remaining as only bone beneath ashen skin. Yet this being, this man, still took breath, defiant against the crushing will of the soul that surrounded it.

I see now. With such a strong will, how could he be anything but the dominant identity?

The next action was predetermined, as if it were always meant to be that way, as I pulled the ribbon sword from my side, the mere image of the true sword itself, just as I was an image of my true soul within this realm.

The silver sword pierced into the man, and the body gasped with pain, the breath that he'd only just taken leaking from his lips as the world around both of us faded, leading us somewhere else entirely.

Inside the man's own mind, separate from all the others.

I could feel the soul struggling to permit the world that the man still held within him, only ever so slightly grey in comparison to the darkest black that a Hollow's soul seemed to desperately promote as it lived without a true 'heart'. The world, however, was built under both my and the dominant identity's demand. With our words combined the weaker components had no choice but to acquiesce.

And then, unceremoniously, I was there.

Standing in front of me in a room of eclectically shifting whites and blacks, stood a man lost within a world of memories that he had sacrificed to stay alive, offerings to the soul that vies so desperately for his absolution. He stood within a world of his mind's making, created in desperation to remind him of the moments that his soul no longer allowed him to keep.

His eyes were looking upwards, his form no longer restrained like it had been in the reality of his soul, even his hair was only shoulder length instead of the absurd length of oily, matted hair he'd possessed. I looked up to where he was looking, his eyes clouded over as he painfully tried to remember where he had seen the silver blade that was thrust through the defences of his mind, sprouting with radiance from the sky of his constructed world.

"You've seen it before, haven't you?" I asked quietly, and that was all it took for the man's eyes to snap to mine, and for the world to shift from the black and white disarray into a foggy grey mirage of a road.

"Who are you?" He asked, his voice dull and exceedingly flat, to the point where I would have though he couldn't feel at all, thought his eyes told a different story.

"Am I not a usual part of the fever dreams your existence has become?" I smiled, the half joke coming out more as a sad prognosis than anything, "I am a man who requires something of you. A man who knows you've been touched by… something like me in the past."

His look was almost hateful, though his expression stayed so neatly placid.

"You did this to me." He stated, "You made me into this." He widened his arms to show the surroundings, or total lack thereof. IT was all a grey mist, a nostalgic sight for me, though now I could see right through it, into the gears that worked to create the half-baked rendition of a memory the man had once held.

"I didn't, but someone like me did." I didn't let the man continue, dropping my voice to a warning whisper, letting my power bloom, "And the only reason you still exist, with even the torturous autonomy that you have now, is because of what they once did to you." My voice boomed against the fog, battering it away to reveal the world that he really lived in.

A small box, the only spot of realised space within his entire soul, the rest being pure chaos.

"I am not here to apologise. I'm here to offer you absolution, either in death, or in a life to do with as you please." The voice of certainty vibrated out from my chest, the silver energy from my sword glowed brightly from the roof of the small box, assailing the man's eyes but entrancing him ever deeper.

I couldn't possibly understand what he was thinking in that moment. I'd only exchanged a efw words with him, but I could feel the power of his pure will, and I couldn't even begin to measure against it with my own. I was talking to a being that had survived decades of torture, being turned into a Hollow, and a severe restructuring of his soul. There were likely very few that could match that.

The man, who actually looked like a late teenager, turned back to me, his shoulder length hair swaying as it covered over one of his dark eyes, his face displaying none of the emotions that I was sure he was feeling. He closed his eyes for a moment, before sighing.

"I took a deal the last time I met one of you." He said quietly, his eyes searching my form, squinting as if he were looking into the sun. "I don't remember what it was anymore, I just remember that I needed to do it to protect…" he looked down to the ground, jaw clenched slightly as he struggled to remember, "my brother."

I pulled my lips into a smile, the expression more one of sadness than any joy. "And now I'm here to ask you to protect everyone else too. After that?" I paused, looking for the right words, words for a man that I'd only know for moments but felt like I needed to help, as if it were my duty. My responsibility.

"After that, you can wish upon a star, and I'll grant it. I'll do whatever I can."

---

That man had appeared, like… well, Sora couldn't remember exactly who they were, but someone else had appeared just like they had in the past.

And now, he was somewhere else than his little box. No time had passed from his perspective, after agreeing to the man's request. He'd deliberated on it for as long as he could before he started to find it difficult to remember what he was thinking about, then forgetting what was going on around him.

So, in the end, he didn't have much choice. The man cloaked in silver, so bright and defined against the misty grey that had surrounded him for… however long he'd been like this, was almost deific. Of course, Sora wasn't going to believe that the man was a god, that was just too much, but he had offered a deal that he quite literally couldn't refuse.

And then the sword stuck in the ceiling had filled the room with its glow, and he was here instead, a perfectly white room, unblemished and indestructible. Well, it was more complicated than that of course. Even Sora could feel the timer on it, his soul so destroyed by the lack of his energy intake that it couldn't possibly maintain itself for long.

His soul had been squeezed like a fruit for all of the energy that it could produce, for only a day's worth of peace, just enough for him to do what the man wanted and receive his wish.

"Can you hear me?" A soft voice questioned, radiating out of the walls of white, almost surprising Sora. He blinked, realising that he could think clearly, his thoughts from only a few moments ago not fading into oblivion anymore.

"I can?" He said warily, though the other voice only laughed. The voice of the man that he had made a devils deal with.

"You can." He agreed, "You can actually talk too, it seems. Though you still sound like a Hollow."

"A Hollow?" Sora asked, confused by the strange terminology, making the man's voice halt for a moment.

"I will explain later, if you want me to." He said finally, "Until then we have work to do, and you are on a timer. I'm Grayson, by the way." Sora reeled from the sentence of three different topics all melded into one.

"I, uh," Sora paused, coming to a small realisation of just how long it'd been since he'd talked to someone, "I'm Sora, I guess?"

"Sora, huh?" The man's voice—Grayson's voice, rather—chimed back through the walls of the white space. "Well, Sora, I suppose I should tell you exactly what I'm expecting you to do." Sora felt his eyebrows twitch a little, warily waiting for the rest of the man's sentence.

"I'm going to have you eat a bomb."