Butterfly Wings

Shadows and Light

It's really just amazing the little details that are there in the game. Throughout Wonderland I'll pause and examine something closely, and there will always be some subtle yet deliberate flaw in it.

-

There was a strange blank painting on the floor-wall, the color more like unmolded clay than paper, set in a green frame. Sora stared at it for a moment, confused. Another fake part of this room, he guessed.

He looked about.

There was a pile of books...or, books standing up against the wall...next to a gap in that wall, where the stonework had broken below the wooden paneling to leave a black hole. If he'd learned anything, it was that he had to keep going every time a new path opened up. He climbed up the giant, wordless spines and stepped through.

For a second he felt like he was in a shallow cave. The ceiling was close over his head, and it was eerily dim. It took him a second to understand.

He had known that the sky of the painted forest was as fake as the rest, but it had been easy to think of it as sky when he was at the ground. Close up, no such illusions remained, The ceiling right above his head above was textured dark green, turning to darker blue beyond. He could see the sharp edge where wall transitioned into what was not truly sky. In the other box, with the fat, murderous red queen and her boxy hedges, it all had been brighter, less unsettling. But whatever light illuminated the room, he was not near it, and where he stood was darker than when he'd walked along the ground.

He looked about him, unsure. He didn't see any new doorways, just the same painted room.

"What do you think, Sora?" Goofy asked.

"Maybe-" he started to say, when Kimi poked her head in.

"Why are you wasting time here?" she demanded. "I want to light up those lamp things on the wall!" She grabbed Donald by one arm and dragged him back.

Sora shook his head, looking down again. Maybe, if he stepped off the edge here - I'm not afraid - he'd find the next link in the strange chain of pathways and doors, get a little closer to wherever the shadows or the cat had hidden Alice.

He walked slowly to the edge, then took a final set and fell.

He landed in a crouch, tense. But at first, he thought there was nothing there. No shadows sprouted from the ground or blossomed out of the air. The area was clear of monsters.

And something moved.

He spun. Something white and red was there. For a second, he thought it wasn't a heartless, and then he saw between the soft, harmless looking light outfit and the round, silly looking bright hat a black head with two horrible yellow eyes. It twisted and shook before him.

The key was in his hands. He swung. The blow hit and the heartless spasmed, jumping away. He felt a second of hesitation and then remembered the trick of those red heartless before, and he swung again.

And then, it was gone. Not destroyed like he'd destroyed so many other ones, the darkness breaking apart and relinquishing scraps of light, but gone like that first ragdoll heartless he'd seen, out of sight to lurk.

He looked at Goofy. "What - what do you think that was?"

Goofy shrugged. "This world seems to have a lot of strange heartless."

Jiminy Cricket hopped off his shoulder. "Maybe a weak one?" he offered. "Or an incomplete one. I haven't seen it before. It looked a bit like a mushroom, I thought."

"I think...it might be waiting somewhere for us." Sora looked around the painted forest again. Somehow the idea made him feel more unsettled than simply when the heartless had popped into existence out of thin air. At least when you finally killed them they were gone. Here...what if it was hiding, watching them? Or what if it was like a stronger one of those red floating ones, needing time to ready its attack...