-o- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN -o-

once upon a time

When the next watch took their post, Axel led me through the village to the water's edge and we crawled back into the canoe.

Axel rowed, and I gazed at the water treading behind us from the back of the canoe. I couldn't believe how different I suddenly felt; a few hours ago, I had been fighting and clinging for Mulan's life, anxious and afraid. At that moment, gazing into the moonlit marsh, I felt oddly peaceful. There was something special about this place.

"Why did you ever come here?" I asked him suddenly. "How did you know this is exactly where we should come to help Mulan?"

Axel sighed with the next heave of his shoulders to lift the oar. "I could tell you, but I'm not really a great storyteller - it would be easier to just show you."

I wrinkled my nose in suspicion. "Show me?"

He chuckled. "Magic, Kairi. Get used to it."

Before I could snipe back a retort, he released one hand from clutching the oar and placed it on top of mine. His mind, his memories, became my own as naturally as blinking.

On official Organization XIII business, Axel had come to this world to scout it for a potential source of Heartless. It seemed like an easy target, a pastoral place without obvious sorcery or advanced weaponry - not much to offer in quantity, but the quality of hearts present was substantial.

I watched him and felt it all as though I was him, failing utterly to subdue the Powhatan people, and being made their prisoner. Like a fool, he underestimated them. The local healer, Achak's father Kekata, indeed was familiar with some of the elemental magic, at least enough to put a bind on Axel's magic. No portals, no fire; he was as helpless as a human.

The Algonquians didn't mistreat him or leave him to rot, however. They put him to work. He helped the women in the cornfields, tended to the younglings at play, and cared for men wounded in the hunt or in battle. When news of the outsiders, the white men in huge boats, poured in from neighboring tribes along the coast, they brought Axel to meet Grandmother Willow, to see if she could get information from him about the white men. They learned to their dismay that Axel was a different kind of outsider altogether; he had no insight into the white men's intentions.

"I can make a fair guess," Axel told them all with a cavalier shrug. "They're probably here to do what anyone goes to new worlds to do- to take what isn't theirs."

They were his memories, colored by his feelings, and I knew he wasn't just being callous. Living with them, working with them, he had grown an attachment to Powhatan and his people. He felt a kind of humanity with them; even as a prisoner, living among them had been the closest thing to real life he'd ever known in his brief existence as a Nobody. He cared for them; he wanted to help them.

He negotiated an odd arrangement with the elders; a way that he could accomplish what the Organization had sent him to do and potentially help the Powhatans in the process. They had confirmed rumors of a white settlement in a place they called Roanoke- Axel proposed that if he was allowed to leave, he would return with Organization members to wipe out the Roanoke settlement by robbing its inhabitants of their hearts. That, Axel assured them, would make these white invaders think twice before returning.

I was still processing these events, and the wildly complicated magic that allowed Axel to so easily put his own memories into my own, when the edge of the canoe bumped the earthy edges of Grandmother Willow's perch.

"We good?" asked Axel, watching my face with a kind of amused smile. "You know from my memories that G-Willow has a way of getting the truth out of people… sometimes pulling out truths buried so deep people don't know it themselves. So I figure… let's tell her about this vision of yours."

Reeling, I nodded slowly and let Axel help me out of the canoe and onto dry land. I watched the camouflaged bark features of Grandmother Willow's face come to life as she yawned and fluttered her eyes open. Had she been sleeping? I wondered. What do trees dream about?

"Back so soon, Heart Stealer?" croaked the willow. "And with a lovely companion."

She inspected me thoughtfully while Axel explained that I needed a dream interpretation, and gently prompted me to tell her as many details as I could remember. She listened intently as I explained being carried into the woods by my Grandmother, and the boy who watched.

"In this vision," she asked. "Do you ever burn?"

I shook my head. "I never walk into the fire. I hear the boy scream, and then it ends."

"And the boy- do you see his face?"

"No… he's standing just outside of my field of vision."

"Hmmm. The heart is powerful, and has its own language. It speaks to us in strange ways. Is the boy truly out of sight, or is your heart afraid of who it might be? Is the fire really going to hurt you, or are you merely afraid to see what lies beyond it?"

"So to make sense of the dream... I need to finish it? If I finish the dream, will I know more about my past?" I explained to her more details about my childhood, the chilling context necessary for her to really understand the implications of the dream.

Grandmother Willow murmured some things to herself, then asked slowly, "Why are you so certain this vision is about the past?"

I scratched my neck. "Because I'm a little girl in the dream. I'm the exact age I was when I was sent to Destiny Islands. I think this dream has something to do with what happened to my family."

"This could be. But maybe what lies beyond the fire is not your history at all. Maybe the fire is your future, and that is why it stands in your way. Your dreams seem to be showing you the past, yes, but perhaps they are not showing you all of the past. Let me tell you a story."

"A story?" I eyed the mystic creature suspiciously. I was sleepless and desperate, and I had come for wisdom, not more riddles.

"Stories help children learn the ways of the world. Perhaps this one will help you."

I sighed. "Yeah, I know… I have a school project about it that I never finished. Does it start with, 'once upon a time?"

Grandmother Willow chuckled. "As you like. Once upon a time, in a quiet kingdom, there were two children who had extraordinary powers. One, the princess Kairi, was the daughter of a witch and a warrior, and it was prophesied that she would be the greatest ruler the world had ever known. She was betrothed to her childhood playmate, Cale, the son of a powerful family. Princess Kairi dreamed of the day when she would be a woman, marry her sweet Cale, and become queen. But an evil sorcerer had plans to take the kingdom for himself. He had the Princess's mother and father killed, and would have done the same to the Princess. Sweet Cale called upon her Fairy Godmother, who cast a spell to hide the princess in a far away place. Cale remained and battled the evil man, and then went to rescue the princess. They returned to the kingdom to marry and rule, and lived happily ever after."

I sunk to the damp ground, my legs crossed. "Scrooge told me that my parents were killed by Ansem, and that I was supposed to marry a boy named Cale. But I don't understand. Is the story supposed to be about me? How could you know this? How can there be an end to the story when I'm still in the middle of my own story?"

"Stories are not the same as truth. Stories carry across time and Worlds, but they get twisted and changed. All that remains is the heart of the story. It gives us comfort, as we find our own way to the truth."

I sighed. Speaking to her reminded me of speaking to Yen Sid. They both seemed to know more than they were letting on, but insisted on speaking in mysteries. "All that happens to the Princess in that story is that she hides and then gets rescued and gets married. How is that supposed to help me?"

"Focus on what's missing," Axel interjected. Grandmother Willow smiled at him approvingly. "Fill in the blanks."

"Well, I mean... where's the Princess for the whole story? If it's really me, I was in Destiny Islands..." A crushing realization landed on my chest. "Hiding. I was hiding from Ansem there, that's why they sent me away. I really was waiting to be rescued all along. When Ansem came to the Islands, I snuck out through the door, into Darkness. And it was Sora who rescued me... but he only brought me back to the Islands. He brought me back while he went to the Castle that Never Was, and I was just waiting again."

I turned my head slowly, watching Axel as he stood a few feet away, partly in darkness, partly illuminated by the wide pale moon.

Maybe waiting's not good enough, I had said. And then he appeared and spoke.

My thoughts exactly. Act, don't wait.

And then I understood.