They'd thought it was a storm bearing down on them at first, not that unusual in this season, but after an hour it was obvious it was the other way around. They were bearing down on it, a towering wall of thick dark lightning-shot clouds that retained their shape and position despite the wind and sheets of rain, extending as far as the eye could see. They'd closed up tight below, put on overboots and oilskins, and sailed west into it, trading off at the helm regularly, keeping the ship headed west despite the winds and the currents trying to turn them or capsize them. They had no attention to spare for details like time or exhaustion, only for keeping course, and had no idea how long they'd been fighting the storm when a few shreds of sunset light broke through. Their Keyblades summoned themselves, Riku's left-handedly because he was busy at the helm, and they aimed together at those shreds of light. The sunset light struck the Keyblades full on and blazed up like the fire in a Moogle synthesis shop, setting a clear path across the water that Riku followed, zig-zagging against the wind, until there was another blaze of light, and the sound of the storm stopped suddenly.

It took their eyes a few stunned, blinking seconds to adjust to the light, the reddish-purple of a late cloudy sunset, without source or direction, and a great arching sky with drifting, scattered clouds. They adjusted the sails to take advantage of a steady light wind from behind and took a good look around. Behind them was a great stone gate-arch, to left and right were broken walls, behind those walls were broken buildings, and smashed up on the rubble were ships, some so old they were barely identifiable, some new enough that their markings were clear.

"A canal?" Riku said hesitantly, steering around a small wrecked ship and the rubble it was lying on. The compass needle was spinning in slow, steady clockwise circles, and the chronometer was blinking in steady confusion. "Who built this place?"

Kairi peered across at one of the more intact buildings. "It's like the ruins. Thick walls, tiny windows, the same shapes."

Sora, water dripping steadily from his hat, was studying the wrecked ships they were passing. "Some of these are Islands boats! Look, see that one?"

The fishing boat was clearly island-built, run aground on a large patch of rubble, and still showed bright paint; as they passed it, they smelled decay, and not rotten fish. There were others, scattered along the seemingly endless canal, maybe a dozen of them, and they couldn't guess why so many of them were here, this far out of the normal fishing and traveling grounds. Riku pointed out the small towers - guard stations, or toll stations, whatever they'd been - and the skeletons, or partial skeletons, still in some of them, collapsed over the walls or down into heaps on the floor, visible where the walls had fallen in.

After a while, since there was no more rain, they peeled out of the oilskins and spread them out to air out;  Kairi took the helm from Riku.  They sailed straight ahead, for lack of any better plan, passing intersections of three and four canals;  some had been blocked by rubble, and others were still open, with no surviving signs, if there had ever been any, of where they led. There were fewer wrecks the farther they went, but more skeletons, half-buried under rubble or sprawled on walls, and every building they saw had been broken, parts smashed inward or collapsing outward, growing less recognizable as buildings toward what might be the middle, and then more clearly shaped again as they went further along.

"Maybe this is where we came from," Sora mused, staring at the ruins.

"What?"

He blinked and looked up.  "Well, we're all descended from refugees, aren't we? At least that's what the mayor said."  Sora looked back at the ruins, frowning. "Maybe we came from here. Or wherever these people came from."

Kairi thought it over, keeping a close watch for rubble.  "I always thought we escaped from the mainland, but nobody ever really said that.  And anyway, weren't we supposed to have sailed east?  You can't get to any of the Islands sailing east from the mainland;  it's northeast of us already."

"Yeah.  I wonder what happened, because this is ugly."

"Whatever it was, they lost," Riku said. "Maybe that's why they don't want to think about other worlds."

They talked about it for a while until they saw the gate-arch at the other end of the canal;  remembering, they pulled their oilskins back on, before they were swept out into another storm-wall.