A/N: HELLOOOOOO everyone! What a rough month it has been, and it's been killing me not to update but I think I'm satisfied enough to share this one now. Also, I mention someplace called the "Nox Arbore" pretty early on here, and if you go to my facebook fanpage I will be uploading a very rough concept sketch of what that place would look like. The link is in my profile, but here it is again: /shinseikakumeiART - so please LIKE (and share? 3) for cool updates and stuff. Not sure if I'll upload the picture tonight since I'm submitting this at the last second before having to go out somewhere LOL enjoy though!
Chapter VII: Fragility
Here I am, a rabbit hearted girl
Frozen in the headlights
It seems I've made the final sacrifice
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"Phew!" Zee sighed with shortened breath.
She had run to the Nox Arbore after putting Sunny down in bed – she was determined to follow up with Zexion. It would be wrong to ditch him without a word of notice, right?
"Hm?"
Zexion looked up from the thick book he had been reading through with a curious hum. He nodded to himself with a slight smile, telling himself "oh right, I agreed to this..." With his face down turned, he took one last glance at his book and he closed it slowly. Once closed the book evaporated into a dark mist, reappearing on one of the shelves that lined the room.
The Nox Arbore was one of the more luxurious locations in the castle, and it was all Zexion's. The members all had their own places in the castle that catered to them, in addition to the standardized rooms. These places would construct themselves after a new member joins, the castle itself reacting to a new presence... or non-presence rather. Funny how spontaneous creation comes from the power of Nothing in their world. These are places that had entrances grouped together in The Proof of Existence, where each marker bore a symbol – typically an image of their unique weapon – related to each member. These markers acted as portals that gave fast access to all members at once, and only Xemnas (and Saix, since he's administrative too) had access to it. See, for the sake of privacy these rooms and the routes to them were protected from undesired invasion by dark corridor, leaving other members to have to travel by foot to get to these places. The member that the room "belonged" to was permitted to warp in there though. Not even their bedrooms had this kind of security! This is why the administrators were the only ones who had the means to enter any of these places via Proof of Existence and travel as they please. But in a case such as this, Zexion had given permission for Xirena to enter preemptively.
For example, Luxord has a reasonably sized casino which he aptly named Lucky Luxord's (what it's "official" name was is unknown). Xigbar is a frequent customer there, along with low-level Nobodies like Dusks and Dancers... it was rare that other members showed up to piss their hard earned cash away. Another brief example is The Void of Reverie, belonging to Xirena. But right now, we were in Zexion's space. His room was almost organic looking – it had a single tree with dark bark and black leaves in the dead center of this circular room – the walls nothing but bookshelves – and the tree was home to the perfect spots for comfortable reading. A single beam of light from above illuminated the high-ceilinged chamber, which constantly offered the ideal amount of light for reading. Most of the tree's roots were seen above ground, dipping under every so often. This created labyrinthine paths which spread outwards and all the way to the walls, the "dipped under" points being the equivalent of doorways. Once they reached the edges of the room, the roots were completely out of sight, which created a good space to stroll along up against the bookshelves. The roots weren't HUGE, but they were sizable enough to make it inconvenient to try and climb over them. They also worked as a categorizing system for Zexion's library... one path leads to (x) type of book, another leads to (y) type of book. It wasn't exactly practical, but it made for a neat aesthetic... there was also the fact that Zexion could summon the books to him, but sometimes he liked to take the manual route and stroll around his library.
