In their desperate struggle, they'd offered up their Princess to him. A feeble attempt at fending off the mass of shadows which he commanded, but an interesting choice nonetheless. Their battered gates stood firm, but barely. Outside of their crumbling walls had stretched a sea of black, his legions upon legions of shadowy Heartless. They had stood by silently, unmoving, as the gates slowly opened to allow their purehearted Princess to be forever consumed by the Shadow King. The Heartless could sense the purity of her heart. The King could too. In utter silence, he'd taken her up onto her chariot and ridden away.
Now, on the precipice of the cavernous hole that seemed to stretch for an eternity down under the glass of Seraj Isa, she stood in awe. The skies twinkled above against a dark sky, a soft curved moon peeking out from behind heavy clouds. It was a foreboding sign: though the beautiful night cosmos shone down upon them, soon the area would be drenched in a downpour.
The King's voice was otherworldly as it sounded behind her, causing the Princess to whirl around and face him. What she saw was black: not the dark gray of the distant clouds, but pure black, as though all the light had been sucked away just several paces in front of her. But slowly the darkness seemed to coalesce into a discernible smoky shape that looked almost humanoid. Two piercing red eyes seemingly opened within the darkness, and out of the shadow came a towering man, skin of ash, hair whiter than the blinding light of the sun.
He stood there staring down at her with those glowing red orbs now, unmoving as he sensed her heart beating faster and faster in his presence. Something in him began to stir, a human emotion perhaps, something that must have been a craving. Yes, that was it. He craved her heart, wanted nothing more than to spin her around, shove his shadowy tendrils of a hand into her back and extract that bloody purity in all its beating glory, to consume and replenish himself. He could almost taste the blood on his lips.
And yet he couldn't.
She reminded him of her.
Her.
The first of them, and the purest. She had given her heart to him, and if he had a heart somewhere in the black pit of his restlessness he might have given it back to her. But she was hidden away now, a dying presence somewhere in this sea of glass. Her heart had been corrupted by his touch. He should have consumed it then and there, but he could not go through with it. And now he sought a replacement.
"Take one last look at your world, girl," came the voice of Ark'han, deep and rumbling, light and nasal, everything in between. It was a voice as layered and as fluid as the shadows themselves. His form seemed to dance in and out of focus in front of her as he gestured to the enormous hole before them.
"Take one last look before you enter my kingdom. Forever."