The Two Hearts

In the dark wood nothing really hurts you: the beasts drive you back, and the hill stays where it is. From the gate down it does, and hits are counted from there to the bottom, because with the wanderers clutching at you and the wasps stinging, a danger that costs nothing stops being a danger. You are the only thing down here that can fall, which is the same reason the damned have no bar to empty.

Two hits and not three, decided by the player: with two the count stops being a scale and becomes one question, have I still got one or is this the last. A hit is worth half your life and never steps past more than one heart, so somebody a breath above the lower heart lands exactly on it instead of losing two at once. There are no potions: one hit comes back every ten seconds of peace, after five seconds untouched, and coming back whole takes twenty seconds plus the lull.

At zero the screen goes out for two and two tenths of a second and you return to the last step you closed: it is not a death, it is falling and getting up where the way was marked. The hearts are drawn and not typed, seventeen pixels a side and scaled by a whole number, with the narrow point and wide lobes of fourteenth century miniatures, the century of Dante and of the heart he watches being eaten in the Vita nuova («vide cor tuum», Vita nuova III). They empty from the bottom like a jar, sit at thirty per cent opacity while they are whole, and never vanish entirely, because with only two hits an indicator that disappears is one you consult too late.