Chapter 0 : Prologue
I've seen it all. I was here. When it fell. When it was silent. When it burned. When it came back. I've seen it all from here. From my little home out in the canyons.
They call it the Great Maw now. That's what they call my home. The people who live over there in the city. The ones who came back.
I like that they are all the way over there. And I'm all the way out here.
Orange-tinted clouds hung low in a purple-hued sky. Hints of blue slid out from underneath them like the light that peeked out from under a gigantic door frame. But Rook wasn't worried about the heat just yet. The azurite colored stones that made up the world's craggy surface kept their nightly cool for hours after the sun came up.
Scraggly bright red hair was shoved away from his face by the knuckles on the back of his hand, and he hefted what looked to be a long old window curtain- grey-brown in color, torn and aged- over his shoulders and tucked one side underneath the draped half which fell down the opposite shoulder, turning into a makeshift cloak.
It wasn't long past mid-morning and his eyes were still full of sleep. In the same sweep of his eyes he focused westwards towards the greater body of the canyons and the winding caverns that lead back in a northerly direction to the town. His eye twitched. He didn't like it. He had become accustomed to the two castles which reached upwards from the horizons. And he was beginning to become less accustomed to the waves of beady-eyed Heartless which marched between the two. Ever since a year or two ago when everyone came out of the city to fight what had to be thousands of them.
He remembered the loud explosions which sounded the invasion. And that kid… spikey hair. Comically-shaped weapon. From atop his perch here, it almost looked like a key. He'd laughed about it ever since. Rook sincerely thought it was a key. How silly.
Every memory of that day panged him with sadness and frustration and anger and loneliness. And any other volume of emotions that turned him into a molotov cocktail of guilt.
'Stop it,' he scolded himself, tucking further back into his ratty cape as though using it to hide from the world. He looked back to the north as his hidden hands fiddled with a small box hidden behind the cloak. "Radiant Garden". What a name. Nothing but bad memories, that. Nothing "radiant" about it. No. Rook liked "the Great Maw" better. It fit.
This world ate things.