Naminé hadn't known; how could she ever have? How could she have ever known how much trouble a simple action of kindness that echoed somewhere from within her non-existent heart would cause her (or rather Kairi) in the years to come? Yet still, if Naminé thought through her actions on the day she had returned to Castle Oblivion she was never quite sure, even at the moment when everything hung in the balance, that she would ever have done differently in the circumstances. Naminé thought she must have known. Somewhere deep inside her, there was emotion. She knew this. Perhaps it was something to do with being the Nobody of a Princess of Heart, but she felt something when she had looked into the eyes of that tiny child. Naminé thought she may have known all the long where that baby had come from. There was only one real logical explanation, and she knew of the risk she took when she decided to take it away from that Castle, but still... she couldn't have left that baby alone. She had also known when she left again that if DiZ found out about the baby, he would destroy it. He, like her, knew what this baby was, but Naminé pitied the child. A mistake? She thought not. At least that baby now had a chance, but she couldn't care for it. She was also just a child, and she had the job of rebuilding Sora's memories. That's why at the first opportunity, when DiZ wasn't looking, she left the mansion and took the baby into Twilight Town. At least it could have a life there...

Beyond the fall of Xemnas and in the years that followed, nothing much happened to change the peaceful quiet of Twilight Town. Naminé had long since left her dwelling in the old mansion and no Heartless had come to the town in years, neither had Nobodies come to claim new recruits. When the Heartless had first come, nearly twenty years ago now, the Nobodies came with them: the men in black coats, who like the Heartless, stole people away. A young couple had been taken by them: first him and then her. Lumaria. Arlene. No one had seen them again. Heartless and Nobodies were relentless, however and they kept returning, stalking the shadows for the unwary and the dark of heart. But suddenly about fifteen years ago, when HanaRose was just one. It had all stopped. Yes, that was her name: HanaRose, the flower-girl brought from Castle Oblivion that many years ago. She was sixteen now, and now desperately sure that there was something wrong.

HanaRose was a girl who did not really interact well with others. She kept herself to herself most of the time and kept to her flowers. She had heard the stories of Heartless and Nobodies of course. Seifer always told anyone who'd listen (although that number gradually depleted) about how he had scared some off. No one believed him, and anyway, the best stories came from Hayner, Pence and Ollette: how they had saved the worlds with Sora.

Roxas...

This was the one thing in her life that HanaRose did not understand.

Roxas...

It was a name that sounded familiar, yet she was sure it meant nothing to her. That wasn't new though. Even her flowers, which most people knew by now were the most important thing to her, stirred no emotion in her heart. It was like she didn't care about anything: almost as if she couldn't.

That was why she ran...

When HanaRose was sixteen, she had known all of her life that she was not like the other kids. She had never cried in her life, never laughed, never been afraid of anything. She rarely smiled. She spoke in a monotone. She was cold. She was unfeeling. Everyone knew that. But by the time she was growing into a young woman, they knew or guessed that she wasn't complete. Hanarose herself had never known where she had come from. Not even the woman who took her in had known where the blonde girl who had given HanaRose to her had found the baby. No one knew, and that was what began to make them scared.

"Heartless..."
"Nobodies..." The whispers started and HanaRose found it decidedly off-putting. She made her way further and further into the woods outside of Twilight Town, even to the old mansion on the outskirts itself. Pence had once told all the children in Twilight Town that when he was a kid, you looked into the window of the top floor of the mansion and you could see a girl in white standing there. Of course all the children then wanted to see the girl and went to look but no one had ever seen her and by now the mansion was just abandoned, even by ghost hunters. No one came around here anymore: not even Hayner, Pence or Ollette. HanaRose had been the first person to re-enter the mansion, and that led to her finding her way out.

People were afraid of her. No emotions: that was the sign of a Nobody: the shells of people that had been left behind when their hearts had been stolen away. HanaRose knew that; but neither could she confirm nor disprove what some people thought of her. How could she tell if she had a heart or not? She didn't know what to do. She just stayed there in the mansion where no one could find her, and wandered the halls when she couldn't sleep. She got to know that place well, and that was how she found that secret basement, and the computer. It had taken her forever to get into it. She had gone through pretty much every password known to man before she had ended up with the right one: "sea-salt ice-cream". Who had thought of that as a password? Yet still it gave her a little of the information she needed. She found out what she was, beyond all reasonable doubt. Her chest was empty. She had no heart. That made her a Nobody, right? But that still didn't make sense with what else she knew. She didn't understand. However, she was powerful: very powerful. She knew that, and in time, learnt to bend Darkness to her will. So therefore, one day, she abandoned Twilight Town and walked through Darkness she had held into a corridor to another world.

She had decided she liked this world. It was bright and full of flowers, overlooked by an old castle, where she set up her residence. After a time she began to learn the name of her new home: a town called Radiant Garden. It was well-named, but HanaRose was still afraid to venture too far from the castle. She knew how people had treated her back in Twilight Town. They could well treat her that way again. She stayed in the castle and started her research: Nobodies. Once again she had to hack the computer Ansem had created. Ansem: he had owned this castle years ago. No one had lived here for years. There was another man of significance though. There was a portrait of him on the wall of Ansem's study. He looked stern, with long silver hair that fell below his shoulders. She had assumed that he was Ansem initially but began to learn that he was not. Someone had tried very hard to cover up the name of this man, but there was one tiny clue left that she managed to find. Someone had left a message inside the otherwise empty draws to the desk. It wasn't as old as the rest of the room, left at maximum twenty years ago. On the message was four words:

"Xehanort: he is Ansem."

So this was Xehanort... but who was he? He was obviously important. His name was interesting. Remove the "X" and the resulting anagram left "another": incidentally the way to get into Ansem's computer. And there she worked for years, that castle in Radiant Garden until, aged twenty-one she was forced out of her comfort zone. People came up to the castle and so to hide she worked her way deeper and deeper into the basements, eventually slipping into the caverns below the castle. However, after all her research, she still knew very little about Nobodies, Heartless, who she really was. It was really her ventures into the caverns which began her story. Stepping into the Caverns of Remembrance was life-changing for her. Memories lived in those caverns. Memories of people long dead, who probably should have been left alone...