[Solace]

Originally Posted by hyperborealis

Yes. Sayaka has just commented on how everything now is different, now that Mami has died and she and Madoka are caught up in a magical world nobody else knows about. Why then does Sayaka say, "The world changed a long time ago. / We should've discovered this earlier?" What earlier time long ago is she talking about?

You got me there, and that's also a good catch. In most stories where a character narrates from a past tense, it's for foreshadowing purposes, or the character is telling the story from a future perspective. However her lines don't feel like a foreshadowing of what we already expected/saw (that Sayaka would be the stories example of what happens to MG's when they fall), they feel like someone narrating at some future point, after the event(s) occurred.

Although this Sayaka is not "real-world" Sayaka, since the "real-world" Sayaka is sitting on the bench in the train station, and will fall to the ground just prior to her witchification. Is this standing one, with the strange shadows and tail, the incipient witch-Sayaka? Probably we're already into allegorical / witch-world animation phase, and here it's hard to know what is symbolic and what is simply deliberately bizarre, part and parcel of the essential strangeness of the witch's barrier.

As someone else pointed out, it could be SHAFT being SHAFT. It could simply be symbolic or artistic, and not have any direct meaning to the story. It's still strange though.

Golly, could you please remind me where the silhouette image appears? I'd like to go look at it to see what made you interested in it.

I actually posted some speculation about this earlier in the thread. I'm still unsure about it.