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With the exception of the hive-minded shadows and occasional apex predator, the Realm of Darkness didn’t offer much in the way of sudden danger. It specialized in decay rather than disaster. Erosion that turned stones into sand, and then into nothing at all. Rot that weakened foundations; mold and mildew that made a place unlivable over time. The insidious urge to creep right up to the edge of a precipice. A gradual doom, relentless in nature and untraceable to the human eye.
The world was full of glass, as well—inexplicably, for a place so devoid of light. Broken windowpanes hung above the towns, glinting in a parody of stars. Full-length mirrors stood along the path like headstones, marking the spots where Aqua lost tiny fragments of herself—not enough to hurt, but enough to cause an itchy numbness deep inside, cutting off circulation to her soul.
And although she didn’t know it yet, at the end of the road, she would eventually find sea glass hidden in the sand, dull and dark and gritty.
Until then, there was one piece of glass that never left her side, except when she dropped it, because she couldn’t stop herself from taking it out of her pocket to hold in her hand. Every time the Wayfinder slipped from her fingers and into the abyssal depths, Aqua leapt after it without hesitation, her instincts becoming more reckless and self-destructive as she followed a fallen star headlong into the darkness.
She should have known better by now—decision-making like that was how she ended up here in the first place—but it was easy to repeat her mistakes when the darkness gave her no incentive to learn from them. Whenever it tired of her freefall, it delivered her impossibly back to the very path she had jumped from, to continue her endless walk from where she left off.
When that path led her to a wide bridge, Aqua crossed it straight down its center, keeping a healthy buffer between herself and the edges. The red bricks and orange lamplight offered the illusion of warmth, drawing her in like a moth. She wasn’t sure why else she was bothering to go this way, except that the road led there, and this world didn’t seem to like it when she tried to choose her own path. Plus, rewinding the clock and repairing the bridge were quite the sunk costs. It seemed almost rude not to accept the unspoken invitation to the castle.
The stairs were shallow enough to take two at a time, but she didn’t. The velvet carpeting was as soft and red as a heartbeat underfoot. Aqua trudged her way to the top, pausing for just a moment to appreciate the absurdity of the lone glass slipper sitting on the final stair. It stood upright in the very center of the steps, angled ever so slightly, as if it were showing itself off in some department store display window.
It was a curious sight, but curiosity took energy, and Aqua had little to spare. She continued on without giving it another thought.
The castle’s interior wasn’t as glamorous as the outside. Whatever restorative magic Aqua had worked on this place seemed to stop at the entrance, lending credence to an old saying of which Aqua had never been a fan: beauty was only skin-deep. But it wasn’t in terrible shape, either—better than she would have guessed. The floors and doorways and most of the furniture were intact, albeit a little dusty. Curtains hung in their usual places, secured with tasseled cords or thick ribbons tied in bows. Aqua didn’t stop to test the integrity of the stairs before the climbed them, but the structure was sound, eliciting not a single groan or squeak as she made her way up to the second floor.
The ballroom was strangely elegant in its neglect. Even the cobwebs seemed intentionally strung, as flossy and silver as tinsel on the high chandelier. Cinderella stood in the middle of the room, gazing up at it, but when Aqua arrived, she turned to the doorway instead. She looked startled, and Aqua almost apologized for not announcing herself, as if any kind of social protocol were expected in this place. But like a passing cloud, the confusion swept away from Cinderella’s eyes and left them clear and blue, shining like a sky that Aqua could barely remember anymore.
“Oh!” the princess exclaimed in delight. “I know you!”
Faint recollection stirred the air between them, and in Aqua’s head, an echo sang, I walked with you once…once upon—
“I’m so glad you could make it,” Cinderella went on, approaching Aqua to extend a more official greeting. Aqua gave her the thin smile of someone who didn’t feel like she’d made it at all. Cinderella beamed, looking her up and down. When she noticed that Aqua’s hands were empty, she inspected the floor around them, then glanced back toward the stairs. “You didn’t happen to find my slipper, did you? I’m afraid I lost it.”
Aqua hesitated. “Yes,” she said carefully. “I left it on the stairs. I…wasn’t sure if it was real.”
Saying it out loud like that, Aqua felt that she was very simply going insane. The polite but perplexed smile Cinderella gave her didn’t help, as if Aqua had said something bizarre without realizing it. “Well…that’s all right,” Cinderella said, laughing easily to accommodate Aqua’s faux pas. “I suppose we don’t need shoes, anyway.”
She reached down to remove the two perfectly good shoes she was wearing and laid them right on the threshold, one beside the other for company. She stood up straight again, and even without the thick-soled shoes, she still had a few inches on Aqua.
“Now,” she said, smoothing her skirt and tugging her sleeves down to the same length, “would you be so kind as to do me the honor of a dance?” When Aqua hesitated again, Cinderella added, “That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
Aqua wasn’t sure about that, but then, she wasn’t sure about much of anything anymore, so she decided it was as good a reason as any. She began removing her own footwear, musing that Cinderella’s voice and smile had a quite literal disarming effect on her. Aqua lined her shoes up beside her host’s: winged and metallic against earthbound brown.
Cinderella offered her hands to Aqua’s, which had been looking a little strained lately, almost claw-like, prepared to grasp her Keyblade at every moment. Aqua shed her gloves and immediately wished she hadn’t. Her knuckles were too pronounced, and her veins were starting to press uncomfortably close to the skin. Her fingers looked darker sometimes, too, beneath the nail bed, staining like glass. Peripheral cyanosis, maybe, as her heart finally started to admit its own limitations? Or something even more sinister?
In Aqua’s mind, her hands were emblematic of everything that was wrong with her, but Cinderella took them without reservations. Her own hands were tough and callused, reminding Aqua that even the Realm of Light was never free from hardship. The princess still had blunt fingertips and a firm grip, but although her hands were no longer soft to the touch, their own touch remained soft. Even when they had spent years serving others as tools of thankless labor, they had never forgotten how to be gentle.
Not everyone had had to live such an arduous life, but neither did they receive such happy endings as hers. Aqua herself was no stranger to fighting losing battles, but down here, her fights were more than simple struggles for survival. Each one felt like a test of character, a test of will, with no one to bear witness to them but her enemies. And while Aqua had always considered herself to be a resilient and self-sufficient person, she didn’t know how to pass a test that wasn’t judged.
The only time she was graced with an audience was whenever a wave of monsters sprang up near one of those maddeningly-placed mirrors. Aqua forced herself not to look at her own reflection, especially when the fight was over and her doppelgänger hungrier than ever, waiting for Aqua to make a false move and come close enough to grab. She stood there without pretense, her eyes predatorily flatlined and her palm pressed to the glass, and Aqua ignored her as best she could, always keeping a safe distance from herself.
But it was Cinderella who took Aqua’s hands now, pulling her not through a mirror but along the paths that royalty walked. Aqua would have been embarrassed to admit it—even to herself, even here and now—but she had returned to Cinderella’s world after her work there was done. She had snuck into the castle, even though she would have been welcomed with fanfare and honor as the Princess’s champion. She had sat alone on the balcony, resting her weary feet and battle-worn arms, and gazed down at the dance floor, imagining soft music in the air and soft candles on the sconces, and a warm hand clasped safely in hers, the other lighting on her shoulder like a bluebird.
Aqua had gone out to the courtyard next and sat on the edge of the fountain, just like before. She had imagined someone with her there, too, both of them turning their faces up to the stars with a faint, cool mist at their backs. She had taken a walk through the forest and imagined someone’s arm linked with hers, imagined showing off the road that connected the home of Cinderella’s childhood to the home of her future. “Look!” she imagined herself saying, guiding her companion down a path which was finally free of monsters. “I made this. I did this for you.”
Cinderella brought Aqua to the center of the room, stopping beneath the chandelier. She took Aqua’s hand and laid it on her shoulder, drawing her close by the small of her back. Aqua felt a sudden stab go through her, some unwanted emotion growing deep in her chest like an extra rib. Her heart had always been one of the strongest muscles in her body, but now it caught on that sad, bitter something and tore like lace.
It went against Aqua’s grain to let someone else take the lead, and even if it didn’t, she couldn’t remember the last time she was led anywhere she wanted to go. Cinderella handled her with patience, easing her slowly into the dance. “I don’t believe it’s proper ballroom etiquette to forego shoes,” she said in a stage whisper, playfully conspiratorial. “But I’m sure it will be all right.”
She spoke with casual confidence, but something wasn’t adding up, like a song with skipped bars, or a book with missing pages—and Aqua couldn’t bring herself to care. She let go, just for a moment, and allowed this shade of a princess who she once fought for, protected—could have loved—guide her in placid triplet steps across the floor.
“I don’t think I remembered to thank you,” Cinderella said, abruptly but gently. “I still don’t know how you did it, but you saved my life.”
That unwelcome feeling squeezed its way from Aqua’s chest up into her throat. She was barely able to speak around it as she said, “I didn’t…you’re here.”
Cinderella shook her head, still smiling. “It’s because you saved me that I’m able to be here like this, you see? A memory, pure and distilled.” Preserved in glass, Aqua thought. “If I had fallen to darkness,” Cinderella went on, not explaining how she knew any of this, “then I would appear to you as something else entirely. Something once human, but now…not.”
She put Aqua in a slow twirl, and Aqua tried not to think about swarms of shadows with twitching antennae and wide eyes—soulless, but imploring. One head each, one torso, two arms, two legs…bisected by swing after swing of her Keyblade, sometimes rote and mechanical, other times frenzied and feral.
Cinderella started to hum, drifting in time with the tune. “I remember attending my very first royal ball, right here in this room,” she said wistfully. “I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance again. It felt just like a miracle.”
Aqua nodded vaguely. Just like a miracle…
“I remember falling into the deepest sleep afterward. I lay down in a bed of glass, until someone came and kissed me awake.”
Aqua’s nodding slowed. “No…”
“Hmm?”
More missing pages, more skipped measures, filled in with pieces of other stories and other songs. Aqua took a deep breath, but it left her feeling dazed and vaporous. She tried to dig up a more solid memory, anything substantial to cling to and convince herself that any of this had truly happened. Oh, my dear, she recalled a sweet and compassionate voice saying to her. You’re too young to know. Experience more things, and you’ll find the answer.
“What’s wrong?” Cinderella asked, and the question alone gave Aqua a fleeting moment of hysteria. Just trust in your dreams.
Cinderella held Aqua’s cheek in one hand and lifted the hem of her apron to dry her tears. The fabric was rough from a decade of work and wear, with severe pilling from countless harsh washes, but it was the kindness of the act that stung Aqua the most. It felt almost cruel, because—
“This isn’t real.”
The corner of the apron rested beneath Aqua’s eye as Cinderella’s hand went still. She drew it back slowly, making Aqua wish she hadn’t spoken up at all.
She had let her guard down. She’d done her best to remain critical and vigilant, but she was no longer certain that she hadn’t just wandered into another mirror—another reality. It used to feel like diving into water, a change in temperature and pressure to let her know something was off. But everything was always off now, and she had no gauge for what was normal anymore. She was always lost, and everything was always wrong, and at this point, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she’d spent all this time simply jumping from one nightmare to the next, never finding her way back to the original, let alone to the waking world.
She had lost track of how many times she entered the mirror. And worse, she’d lost track of how many times she had come back out.
“This is a dream,” she murmured, trying to soften the entire situation, to blur its edges into something palatable, or at least comprehensible. She wasn’t conversing with a hallucination, or dancing with a phantom. It was only a dream.
Cinderella looked bewildered, trying to decode the meaning of Aqua’s words. They had stopped dancing, but Aqua was still hanging on her shoulder, on her unspoken reply. She was so desperate for reassurance that she was willing to seek it in someone who—if her suspicions were correct—was incapable of providing it.
Midnight tolled for the third hour in a row. One of these times, the clock was going to strike, and Cinderella was going to disappear. Aqua had visited enough fairy tale worlds to know the rules, but she silently begged her to stay, if only for long enough to explain what was going on.
Cinderella was staring across the room at nothing—though Aqua was sure now that at least one of them wasn’t seeing the room for what it really was. Eventually, Cinderella started to dance again, swaying back and forth with Aqua as if she were trying to rock a child to sleep. “A dream,” she said slowly, “is…just a wish that your heart makes. Isn’t it?”
Aqua had truly started to cry now. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
Cinderella reached for her face again, but Aqua pushed her hand away. “I can’t,” she said, hardly knowing what she meant, but knowing more than anything in this moment that she needed to let both the words and the tears spill out. “I can’t keep being here like this.”
Cinderella frowned, looking hurt. “I don’t understand. You want to leave?”
“No,” Aqua pleaded, with sobs that were both hard and weak. “I don’t want to leave. I just…want to wake up.”
She bowed her head and let Cinderella guide it down to her shoulder. Aqua clung to her, trembling and crying herself dizzy in the span of a minute. Cinderella stroked her hair, bringing momentary softness and shine to the dull blue. Finally, she whispered, “It’s all right. I know just what to do.”
Before Aqua could ask what she meant, she felt her head being lifted back up. She tried to wipe her eyes, suddenly ashamed, but Cinderella tucked her bangs aside and studied her face openly. She brushed her fingertips down Aqua’s temple to her gaunt cheek, then slipped her hand along her jaw to hold her in place. Aqua was absolutely rapt, jarred out of her sorrow in sheer disbelief. She felt as if this were the first moment of stillness her body had been allowed to have since she set foot in this world.
Very quietly, speaking just for the two of them, Cinderella said, “This always works,” and leaned in.
Her kiss lit a cold fire in Aqua’s chest. She was afraid to return it, knowing that she was just one shaky breath away from crying again, but Cinderella parted her lips to allow Aqua the relief of a small sob. She kissed her a second time, firmer than Aqua expected. She had always seen Cinderella as something delicate, fragile, and rare, but a woman who spent her life carrying laundry baskets and breakfast trays, cleaning clothes on the wash rack, scrubbing surfaces with lye…she didn’t shy away from pressure.
When Aqua finally kissed her back, it felt like freezing to death. It was both warming and numbing, and despite the urgent flicker of something isn’t right, Aqua wanted nothing more than to sink into it, and to let it be the last thing she ever knew.
Cinderella pulled away and regarded Aqua’s face as if she were making sure the magic spell had taken hold. She stroked her cheek tenderly, smiled, and resumed their slow and careful dance. Aqua staggered like a marionette with missing strings. She had even more questions and doubts than before, but she had no energy left to voice them. She followed Cinderella without resistance back into the languid, hypnotic waltz.
When Cinderella put her in another twirl, Aqua closed her eyes to feel the spin all the way to her core. She turned once, twice, three times, before she drifted to a stop again. Her tear tracks were still damp when she opened her eyes, cool and itching in the stagnant dark.
She was alone once more. One of her arms remained above her head, arcing gently like an unstrung bow. Her other hand rested on her abdomen, trying in vain to re-center herself. For a moment, she was locked in place, a music box ballerina who had drifted off her track without even a song left to guide her.
The ballroom looked the way she’d first imagined it would. The cobwebs had caught no stars or dewdrops—only dust. The once-gleaming sconces and railings were tarnished beyond repair, corroded by darkness and time. The floor was broken up, split apart like rough skin in dry air. When Aqua looked closer, she noticed she had left footprints on some of the tile shards, glistening and wet.
Slowly, Aqua lowered her arms. She could barely muster a sigh; she was too tired and unsurprised to feel she had earned one. All she could do was accept that the only thing worse than the dashing of her final bit of hope was the realization that she’d already lost it, long ago.
She gingerly lifted one foot at a time, wasting two Cure spells on her own foolishness. When she felt nothing but the same soreness that she’d walked up the front steps with, Aqua returned to the ballroom entrance. She picked up the only pair of shoes on the threshold, put them back on her aching feet, and continued dutifully on her way, leaving the Castle of Dreams behind without another glance.