It was one of those days it didn't pay to wake up, because it all crumbled around you.

Sora rubbed his temples, and sighed.

I, he thought, not altogether joking, need a new life.

Dozens of Heartless lurked in the shadows, waiting for him to move, waiting to pounce. Their glowing eyes made little pinpricks in the darkness, accompanying their restless susurrations and making him nervous. On top of that pending headache.

Sora fingers twitched for the Keyblade, but he didn't dare draw it, not yet. The headache had been mostly his fault: he'd tried to work fire magic too fast, it'd blown up in his face, he'd stumbled and ran into a tree…

Interspaced with the trees and the waiting pools of darkness, there were brambles. Thorns. A trap that could only be of Maleficent's making.

Who knew, maybe it'd been her fault that his magic was going wonky. It could even be her fault about the headache…well, sort of.

The darkness coiled, and—

Now!

Keyblades slammed into his hands, whirled, danced, in a frenzy.

The magic from the array beneath his feet surged up, slammed into the hoards not already dead from the wicked force of Oblivion or the graceful flight of Oathkeeper.

A trap for a trap. Sora smiled grimly. Take that!

The wave of Heartless abated, and Sora waited a moment to make sure they were really fleeing, and not regrouping for another attack.

He warily stepped out of the array, and when it was evident he wasn't going to be attacked again, he let his Keyblades vanish and stepped over to his pack.

He really, really hated this separation.

The absence of any of the four of his companions weighed on his heart, when he was used to two friends, always, by his side.

Guess it can't be helped. He slung on his pack, ignoring all of the wounds and bruises on his body (it wasn't that bad yet, and he couldn't afford to stop for band-aid injuries, and hey, the Cure might explode in his face, anyway), and went on.

- - -

Riku cursed as he sliced through another branch.

Maleficent. I should've known.

His arm stung as he shouldered through the thorns, but he ignored it and continued cutting through.

In addition to the sharp thorns, contact with the brambles produced a sharp sort of lethargy, almost like the feeling of the world going out from before your eyes.

Maybe, Riku thought, fighting off another wave of exhaustion, I should've taken the road.

There was a nice, uncluttered road some feet to his left, but he'd ignored it and decided to cut through Maleficent's little forest instead.

At first it'd been satisfying, to hear the crunch, crash, and bristle of the destroyed branches, but now he wondered if it hadn't been reckless bravado. Surely whatever traps lay on the road couldn't be any worse than this damned energy-sapping lethargy.

Unless that's what she wanted me to think. Maybe this was the trap all along.

Riku gave a short laugh. He'd been worried his companions would be caught in traps; too trusting to suspect the open road. Instead, the one caught was…

Maybe they're the same, he thought tiredly. Maybe the traps on the road and through the forest are…the…same…

Green and gray and blue and black blurred, the world spun.

Riku fell into a thicket of brambles, the sharp thorns digging into his skin as he fell unconscious.

- - -

The flowered Keyblade whirled through the air, striking darkness as tangible as flesh, and yet…not.

Something's wrong.

The Keyblade thrummed in her hands, eager, excited.

Kairi took a deep breath, slowly dispelling the adrenaline of battle, and felt Languor's Heartache subside, returning to a more familiar, calmer hum.

She looked back at the path behind her, frowning, and then at the clearing ahead. The scores of Heartless jumping into the path from the forest of thorns was one thing. But that small clearing ahead was almost definitely a trap.

If we were together we would've handled it by now… she thought, absently throwing a potion, Didn't think it'd be so…persistent.

But they had a princess to rescue. And a prince. And probably a fairy or two, if the forest was being this tough.

Must be a minor fairy, Kairi thought, Flora would've abated these thorns, at least a little.

Which left the question of where the three head fairies were, when the royals they served were in trouble like this.

Kairi stopped at the edge of the clearing, and blinked away the spots at the edges of her vision. I could probably run through. Her eyes swept the clearing, noting the bits of strings tied across it. Jump those hurdles, veer a little…

Kairi shook her head to get a little more awake as she backed up a couple of steps. She couldn't really afford to take another potion.

And anyway, this was running across a measly clearing. She'd faced worse.

She took a deep breath to start, and then her exhale was lost as greenery blurred, her gaze straight ahead. She jumped over the trip traps with room to spare, and as the ground beneath her began to shake and sink, she put on another burst of speed and leaped.

She cleared the edge of the clearing just as the earth completely fell away, and she turned to look at the chasm, coughing.

I've jumped across bigger chasms than you, so! she childishly wanted to say, but right then the thorny branches closed in, creeping across the chasm and stretching out its branches to its brethren on the other side. In a few minutes, the road backward was completely blocked.

"Unpleasant, aren't you?" Kairi said aloud, turning around to face forward. She coughed, and then reached into her pocket. She really needed that damned potion now.

- - -

If the plan was to have us attempt the rescue from all directions, it probably wasn't working.

That was what Donald probably would've thought, if he wasn't angry enough to jump up and down yelling at the stupid thicket.

"Fira! Fira, Fira, Fira!"

And all that happened was the brambles he was aiming at got more singed and scorched, not burning or disintegrating at all.

If the plan was to have us come from all directions, he thought huffily, building up his magic for one hell of a whammy, it's not. Working.

- - -

"Hmm…"

Goofy stood, considering the blocked path before him.

I wonder if all of the other paths are dead ends?

The five paths leading to what they supposed as the center of the forest of thorns was naturally suspect. But you didn't travel with Sora without taking some really obvious choices.

"Well, if there's no path, I'll just make a path!" he said to himself, and, pulling up his shield, Whirli-Goofed the front edge of the thicket to start, and then, holding his shield up in front, simply walked through, leaving a Goofy-shaped tunnel behind.

- - -

When Sora finally hacked through the last of the thorns, he found himself facing a castle.

"…whoa." He was too exhausted to say anything else.

A rustling of branches, and Kairi was by his side.

"…whoa." She looked up at the castle. "Why didn't we see this at the edge of the forest?"

Sora shrugged. More magic. He looked around, noting the absence of more crackles and exclamations…

Kairi caught his gaze, and they both shifted.

Sora sighed, wishing now they hadn't all agreed to go on if they got there first. They'd made that plan on the grounds that if one of them lingered long enough, there was surely a trap waiting. But looking around, Sora felt like this didn't look like a trap.

Still, those clearings hadn't looked dangerous, either.

He shifted his pack to his other shoulder. "Let's go."

Kairi moved her gaze to him, and nodded.

- - -

Donald took a moment to gape at the looming castle, before bolts of luminous green fire rained down on him and he had to jump away, not without much cursing.

"Let me iiiin!" The force of built-up frustration propelled him halfway across the grassy yard, where a wild volley of Blizzaras took out the small legion that passed for a castle guard, and then he was at the entrance, having nimbly darted through the frozen guard.

With another angry snarl and a blast of magic, the castle door slammed open, and Donald marched inside.

- - -

His head hurt.

That was the first thing he noticed, and as he opened his eyes, he noticed he was also cold.

Too cold to still be in the forest of thorns.

As his eyes adjusted to the dark (which still happened more quickly than he was comfortable with, even after all this time), he saw that he was in a cell, stone underneath and around, metal door, metal bench that he was lying on, metal encircling his wrists….

Riku closed his eyes. Someone must have dragged him here from the forest. Riku…didn't really want to think about that.

"Here" was probably Maleficent's castle, but was it the place the forest of thorns protected? And if it was, did he arrive before or after the rest? They could all be lying in cells like his—on second thought, he didn’t really want to think about this, either.

Riku sat up, the motion making the rest of his head groggy, but he shook it off and stared at the door.

If he wanted Maleficent to come, Maleficent in person, he had to cause a ruckus. He couldn't count on her coming to gloat, while he knew she most definitely would, he didn't know when she might be inclined to do it.

And he also didn't know how many torture visits she spared on just one person….

Riku shook his head again, which, he was glad to note, didn't send lancets of pain through his body, and looked around the cell for something he could use to stir up some trouble.

He needn't have bothered, as it turned out. Barely fifteen minutes (or it seemed to him like fifteen minutes) after waking, the lock turned in the door and Maleficent, in all her evil splendor and beauty, walked in.

Riku managed a glimpse of the guard outside the door, and noted that it wasn't a Heartless. If she had other soldiers…

And then Riku had no more attention to spare, as he faced Maleficent. Any amount of conversation between them tended to be harrowing, as Riku well knew, even when he'd been on her side, or she on his.

- - -

Breaching the castle gates was a success. But the lack of sentries inside the castle proper was suspicious.

Donald stopped at the junction of three hallways (the third being the one he had been traversing), and considered his options.

The left way smelled of powerful magic, and not necessarily of the friendly kind. The right way was filled with the sounds of footsteps and laughter. It had to be a trap. So. Which was the less dangerous trap?