FEAST OR FAMINE

ACT ONE

PART SIX: “Garden of Memories” OR “Alice & Alice & Alice & Alice”

> “They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M—”

>

> “Why with an M?” said Alice.

>

> “Why not?” said the March Hare.

>

> Alice was silent.

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

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When I was a little girl, yearning but yet unbroken, all I wanted was to be loved.

I wanted my father to love me more than he loved his years-dead wife, and I wanted to believe that my mother had loved me even though she’d left me. I wanted to be praised, admired, and valued. I wanted to feel like I mattered to someone, anyone, everyone. I wanted to be loved, for what could matter more in this world or any other?

I still wanted love, even as I learned better, even through all the pain. Is it any surprise? A selfish beast can learn, but it can never truly change. So I craved love, and crave love, though I have never deserved it and never will, though all love brings is hurt to me and mine and more. I grasp for it with trembling fingers like a toddler that can’t bring herself to understand that the top of the stove burns.

Though my father looks at me as if I am the sickness that took his wife, still I crave his love. Though friends scorn me and deceive me and inevitably all leave me, still I crave their love. Love is a kind of hurting, but you crave pain when you are numb. In the depths of isolation, even false connection is desirable.

Love is a terrible, ruinous thing when you are a beast unworthy of it. It is moth-light, burning and pale. Even when I knew better, even when I told myself that it couldn’t happen, even when I told her that it shouldn’t be… I really couldn’t help myself. I’ll always take that chance. I’ll never deny a charming face that speaks such pretty words.

So really, in the end, it was all my fault when she hurt me.

…no, no that’s not right. That’s not how it happened. It wasn’t like that, or I wasn’t like that, or… wait, no, these aren’t…

When I was a little girl, arrogant in brilliance yet so naive, I was afraid of monsters.

I was afraid of so many monsters that you could say my very essence was a trembling, shuddering core of fear. I was afraid of the shadows on the walls and noises in the night, of things that skittered and buzzed and crept over soil. The human mind is a hotbed of primeval fears, terror evolved from instinct from a time when every night carried danger of death by hunters in the savannah.

But monsters don’t lurk in dark hallways or hide beneath your bed. Monsters hold office and pronounce laws, or stalk the streets enforcing those laws. Monsters claim the land beneath your feet and charge you for the right to breathe above it. Sometimes, monsters really do live inside your home, but they sleep in a bed like anyone else, and they lie and say they love you.

Our world doesn’t let a child stay innocent for long. You grow a little, you start to notice things, and pretty quick you learn the biggest lesson of all: there is no justice on this dying husk of a planet, only power. People don’t get what they deserve, they get what they pay for.

Millions lose their homes because thousands get greedy. A country goes to war because a politician tells a lie. Forests burn and icecaps melt because doing anything to stop it would cut into that beloved bottom line. Children are shot in the street by the institution sworn to protect them. Workers collapse on warehouse floors, denied a sip to drink. Monsters wear the faces of men, and they are senators and executives, landlords and policemen.

And so I ask myself: what is the value of a human life? Can a life have any value at all if it is put to the subjugation and brutalization of those lives that it deems lesser? Is it wrong to wish for the death of those whose actions ruin millions?

On the news and in callous conversation I hear it told that protest must be civilized and violence is never earned. They say that hatred is a horrid thing, but their complacency feeds greater evils. I won’t apologize for hatred. Never. I hate the monsters that infest this rotting world, and I’d put a bullet in each of their heads if only I had the means.

Evil is a hydra, sprouting a new supremacist and a new magnate with every head severed, but even a hydra can die if you set the stumps alight. Love won’t fuel that kind of fire. Kindness and compassion, empathy and tolerance, those can build a better world, but they won’t slay the hydra standing in its way.

Sometimes, hatred can be righteous.

…my memories, these aren’t my memories. That’s not my voice, I didn’t say those things, but I did, but it wasn’t me, not really, it’s not the same me, it’s…

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of worlds whose wondrous sights would never grace my putrid eyes, and I seethed at the injustice of the denial of my desires.

I read and dreamed and wished and wrote, cloaking myself in pure imagination. I escaped into every page, drawn into fantasies of distant realms and strange powers, of hidden Wonderlands waiting just beyond the rabbit hole. Oh, how I yearned for it. Oh, how it ruined me.

If love is a lie, which I believe with all my heart and know deep within my aching bones, then love of reading, too, must be deception. What is there to love in a world which cannot be grasped by yearning fingers or seized with the strain of a wanting mind? What love can be found in the prison of a page, in mocking ink and frail pulp-sheet, which taunts and goads with flights of foolish fancy? A book is a siren, that cruel seductress, singing sweet melodies that will lure you to the shallows so you might crash against the rocks and drown beneath cold waves.

With age comes regret, and hatred, and a terrible bitterness that infects one’s every waking thought. Every year, time passing with such dreadful haste, the dream of true magic dims, crushed beneath the boot-heel of desolate, uncaring reality. No Wonderland awaits, no secret heritage or spark of power. We are, all of us, nothing. We are nothing, and our lives are pointless and they will be empty and miserable until the day our feeble brains shudder and seize as our rancid lips breathe their last. We will die, and our names will be forgotten.

What torture, what sick joke, that we are forced to smile and laugh for all the days between birth and death lest our all too understandable melancholy offends the sensibilities of the idiots and the cowards still lying to themselves about the truth of our existence. We are labeled ill—unwell, not of sound mind, deranged, mad—for voicing pain that is the only rational response—healthy, natural, obvious—to the intolerable conditions of this prison of skin and synapse. We are kept trapped here, bound in chains by fellow prisoners.

Why must our agony be prolonged? Why is it so wrong to seek relief—true relief, permanent relief, not the damnable pills or the meaningless talks with dull-minded wardens—for one’s chronic, terminal, inconsolable pain? When the last embers of our hope fade away, why must we condemn ourselves to decades of slow despair and waxing rot? Where is the mercy?

I ask them, time and again, “Why won’t you let me die?” Their answers never satisfy.

When I was small and not yet deadened to the very thought, I sometimes prayed. My father was religious, though more for my late mother’s sake than for his own well-being or mine. I outgrew childish things quickly, dismissing Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny long before my peers, but it would be a lie to say my atheism grew from empiricism alone. How cliche, the atheist and the dead mother.

Sometimes, in spite and desperation, I called to names beyond my father’s God. Devils or demons, faerie princes or unspeakable horrors, I called to anything that I dared dream might be out there. If they would only answer, then I would listen. If they would only extend a hand, then I would grasp it. If they would only bargain, then I would sell my soul. If they would only give me the magic I needed and tear me away from this cruel little world, then I would do anything to repay that debt.

In my moments of weakness, in bouts of frayed delusion, I whispered at nothing, hoping and dreaming that some entity out there would listen and care. With shaking hands I clutched a pillow to my chest, my teary eyes clenched shut, and with trembling lips I pleaded, “Free me of this wretched flesh and I will be your slave.”

I prayed a voice would whisper back and grant my desperate wish.

…another me, or, no, another piece of me. A piece of a piece of me. I am a piece of a piece of me. Pieces of pieces of pieces of her. Which one is her? Which one am I? Where…

When I was a little girl, I never felt like a human being, and with age that feeling worsened and mutated.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I never wanted to feel like a human being. Or maybe I desperately wanted to feel human, and resented its distance. Or maybe I felt too human, and resented its presence. I think all of those might be true, actually. I’m not exactly a very consistent girl, now am I?

…am I? Where am I? Why can’t I see…

See, there’s something really interesting about being a freaky little weirdo. There’s something alienating about it, yeah, but also something really exciting and special, and I always wanted to be special. There’s stuff that comes natural, for sure, little quirks and mannerisms that came from nowhere but my own crossed wires, but then there’s plenty that gets played up, plenty that could have been tamped down but wasn’t because it was more interesting if I embraced that role.

Here, I’ll give you an example: when I was small, I tasted chocolate and I didn’t really like it. I didn’t hate it, not really, and it was perfectly serviceable if you mixed it with a bit of peanut butter, but I didn’t love chocolate, and that was weird. It stuck out; I stuck out. And I liked that. So the next time I told someone, I didn’t say that I kinda disliked chocolate or that it wasn’t really my thing, I told them I hated chocolate, hated hated hated. A lie, but only a little one, barely a lie at all. And it worked.

Attention is a very human need. It’s paradoxical, too. Sometimes you do things for the attention, and sometimes you do the very same thing and hope nobody notices, you hope nobody calls you on it. Or at least, I do. But hey, I’ll say anything.

…anything, why can’t I feel anything? It’s all just noise and noise and noise and…

I was always an odd duck, and sometimes that hurt me, but I was the obstinate type. If someone told me I shouldn’t do something, couldn’t do something, I’d do it anyway to prove them wrong. To defy them. I’m all about defiance, really, whether it be authority figures or social norms or common sense. Or myself.

I’m kind of my own worst enemy, when you get down to it. Me, myself, and I, we don’t get along. Oh, sometimes we get along swimmingly, but most of the time we’re trying to drown each other. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that I hate your guts and think you should do us all a favor by slitting those ugly wrists and pouring bleach down the disgusting hole you call a throat, but you’re far too much a coward to ever even try, aren’t you?

Ha, only kidding. Only kidding. Just another little lie.

…lies, all of these memories are lies. They’re lies because I’m…

I feel like I’m talking in another language, or like there’s a wall between me and everyone else that won’t come down no matter how hard I try to dig under it or climb over it or hack at it with a sledgehammer. I can pretend the wall isn’t there, I can smile and laugh and play the mask, but we’ll never really communicate. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’m not really trying, when I claw at that wall with all my fury. Maybe those are just excuses so I can stay nice and comfy far away from all the humans. Like I’m not one. What a freak.

Maybe, if you stripped me down and flensed my skin—and there’s an idea, you should get on that, grab the paring knife and start hacking—you’d find a mask. Just a mask. I mean, think about it: if all someone sees of you is a mask, then isn’t that mask your face? If every interaction is a mask, if even the rawest and bloodiest performance is still a performance, then what difference is there between the mask and you? It’s not a real difference.

…not real. I was never real. When I was a little girl I wasn’t, never was, never have been, never never never…

They never listen, you know. I warn them. I always warn them that I’m a mess, that I don’t play well with others, that it never ends well. They never listen. They think they can help, they can fix me, they can endure me. They can’t. We’re not the same species.

…never lived those memories, never met those people, never had those thoughts. This isn’t me, because I’m none of them. I’m…

Hey, are you even listening? You should really be paying attention. This is for your benefit, you know. I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to guide you. I’m—

—Alice. I’m Alice. I’m Maven Alice, and none of these are my real memories. None of these people are me. They’re copies, splinters, pieces of her. Her memories. So many memories I nearly drowned in them.

But I don’t know if I’ve stopped drowning or if I’m just holding my breath.

Phantom memories barrage my mind, suffocating my senses, but I scatter them with force of will and set order to my thoughts. I am Alice, and the only memories that matter are the ones I’ve made since I woke up in this terrible Labyrinth. I’m, what, barely a week old? That’s unpleasant, but it provides focus. Everything before that can be discarded, at least until I have space to process.

Space might be all I have, right now. Touch and smell and sight and hearing all come back to me, freed by the banishing of the memory deluge, but I don’t like what they tell me: I’m underwater. I’m drifting in dark water, cold water, somewhere lightless and deep. The water stings my eyes and tastes of salt and leaves me weightless.

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I’ve always been terrified of the ocean. It’s not the water, because I can swim in any pool so long as I stifle the dysphoria and avoid the other swimmers, and it’s not the ocean as a whole because I’ve been to the beach without any issues. It starts in the deep ocean, in that paradoxically isolating openness, and it gets worse the further you sink. When the light of above gets caught and filtered away by detritus and depth, that’s when shivers turn to real terror.

You never know what could be lurking in those waters, just waiting to lunge from the dark and wrap around you. Horrors with needle-teeth and angler-lights, mucus-ridden flesh and overlapping scales. The awful weight of it, the pressure of all that water above you.

So I should be panicking, right now, in these lightless, crushing depths, but all I feel is numb and confused. It’s like my brain is a computer stuck in its boot cycle, sorting through hard drives for some missing component that’s vital to operations. Reading files and validating them, over and over, trying to separate the chaff from the essentials.

Electrical impulses reach my limbs and I move an arm, wave a hand in front of my face, though I can’t see my hand and the motion is slowed by water resistance. I try to breathe, an instinct wildly inappropriate for the bottom of the ocean, but I don’t start drowning as my lungs fill with water. My chest isn’t tight, no demand for fresh air.

Oh, right. I don’t need to breathe. I haven’t for some time. How much of my life have I lived without that basic human requirement? Most of it, I realize. All of it? I guess I don’t know how human I really was before taking Cheshire’s hand. Were any of the biological needs I felt real, or were they just simulation to deceive me?

I keep trying to breathe, just circulating water, as digits twitch and I drift in cold darkness. Where am I? Why is this happening? This doesn’t make sense.

My head is full of memories that aren’t mine, but I remember what happened before I woke up in this lightless place. I remember another dream, a vision of Reska and Homura, one full of revelations and questions about Prevara and Contrition and more, but I don’t care about any of that right now.

The Demiurge made me an offer, and I accepted. I took her deal, answered her plea, agreed to her terms. Is this the fulfillment? Is this barrage of memories and this strange watery void how I become her Intercessor?

My quiet contemplation is interrupted by the sudden sensation of something soft and clammy wrapping around my ankle. My mind flashes to horrors of the deep, a slithering appendage of some horrible oceanic abomination, but the reality is more unsettling: it’s a hand.

I kick at it without thinking, trying to maneuver my other leg into position, but a second hand grabs that ankle and pins it in place with a grip like iron. A spike of fear runs through my brain, but with fear comes clarity; I’m not a normal girl lost at sea, I’m a monster all my own. I focus on the point of contact and shout the spell in my mind: [Feast or Famine]!

Nothing happens. Not even a spark of recognition, just like the last time I tried to use it, when Nyarlathotep was pouring into my brain. I shiver at my powerlessness, alone and trapped in a lightless sea, but now I think I know whose hands are tight around my ankles. The fear is still there, but a shock of anger splices in with it.

“Demiurge,” I say, though no sound escapes my lips. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” her voice purrs from behind me, so close I can imagine her lips almost brushing against my ear. A second set of hands latch on, gripping my calves, and then more follow up my legs. I tense, grit my teeth, but there’s nothing I can do, is there? If this is the game she wants to play, I have no choice but to put up with it. She gave me my magic, and she chooses whether it works on her or not. Without that… I have nothing but my words.

“What are you doing?” I ask, trying my damnedest to pretend I’m not unnerved by this display. Pointless, really, since she’s just reading my thoughts. “What is this? You promised me power, not…”

“And power I’ll grant, my little glass doll, but not without a touch of ceremony.” Then more of her hands are grabbing at my arms and dragging my wrists together, pinning them in place in front of me. I fight back with futile effort, pushing demonic strength through my limbs to try and keep my wrists apart, but she overpowers me like I’m made of paper.

“Well you can skip it!” I snap at her, unable to hide my trembling anxiety. “I agreed to your deal! You said you needed my help. You said you didn’t care about making me a priestess.”

She only laughs, and then arms are wrapping around my waist and it dawns on me that all her many limbs are against my naked skin, her flesh against mine, my clothes nowhere to be found. Her doing, no doubt. She pulls me close to her, to whatever body she’s using right now, something soft and warm. All her clammy limbs heat up, every bit of her growing so hot as to almost burn as she presses against me, her warmth driving away the cold of the dark ocean.

Of all the girls to pin me down and hold me close, why this confusing goddess? I know the answer, of course, since it’s the same answer that nearly broke me some minutes or hours prior: I’m a copy of her, or some part of her. That doesn’t really make things easier.

I hate the power she has over me. I love the attention. I get angry when she plays games with me. I’m terrified of what she’d do if I tried to stop her. I don’t understand her. I’m not sure I want to understand, but maybe I need to.

Her grip tightens and I’m shaken into speech once more. “This is—you’re acting like you were before, but that was just an act, wasn’t it? I saw the exhaustion on your face, you sounded broken and desperate. Was that a lie? It can’t have been.”

“A lie is beautiful and precious,” the Demiurge purrs, “but what you saw was real. I’ve simply set that face aside for the moment; she was useful in winning your cooperation, but now I find myself bored of that personality. I’ve got a new mask in my sights, or a very old one.”

What does that mean? What madness goes on inside that mind?

Her multitudinous hands crawl up my shoulders and gently squeeze my neck, then rise further to caress my cheeks and run through my hair. A finger traces down my spine. When she speaks again, her voice is right in front of me, close enough to taste. “I’m going to give you everything you’ve ever wanted, but first we need to peel away all that dead skin clinging to your soul. You don’t need it anymore.”

Before I can even try to comprehend what she’s talking about, hundreds of fingertips turn sharp like knives and sink into my flesh. Her nails peel my skin in strips and scraps and I scream my agony as I am torn apart.

How can she do this if she wants me to serve her will? What point is she proving? I’d thought I was finally starting to understand the Lucid Demiurge, but how can I? She humiliates me and tortures me before begging for my help, then goes right back to torment once I accept her terms. Does she even see me as a person?

That question echoes around my head, somehow clearer and sharper than all the pain wracking my body. What am I, really, to this entity so vast and beyond me? I have to know. I have to see, even if it burns me, because I am so terribly afraid.

She’s cutting me open to make me stronger, peeling away weakness to forge a core of strength, but I’m afraid. Afraid of pain, afraid of loss, afraid of the dark. Afraid of what I might become if I don’t resist her sculpting.

I tried to look on her true nature once before, in the temple garden with Cheshire, and it cost me dearly. I saw spiraling infinity and impossible colors and unthinkable images. It had felt like my eyes were being scoured, melted, boiled, burst. My demonic second sight ceased functioning as a direct consequence, scarred by the afterimage of what I had seen.

But I wonder something: was that really the Demiurge, or just a piece of misdirection? If I’m a piece of a piece of her, then is she really so far beyond my comprehension? Or was the assault on my senses just a trick to keep me from realizing her true nature before she was ready to reveal it?

I have to know. Damn the consequences, damn the pain, I have to know.

My extra sense was burned by the Demiurge but it’s still there, waiting for me like a light switch in a dark room. I fumble a little, scrabbling in the dark, but its presence is familiar even after a stretch of disuse. I find the metaphysical switch and flip it on.

Immediately all the pain that had been kept at a distance comes roaring to the forefront of my consciousness, a wall of agony putting itself between me and the knowledge I seek, but I won’t be cowed so easily. Though it hurts like nails being driven through my eye sockets, though hideous noises and awful colors invade my senses, still I persist.

Her eyes burn into me, gold against black like stars in a sea of darkness, but those aren’t the eyes she showed me when the walls came down. I disbelieve this infinity, and just like that it shatters. Rainbow glass crashes around me, too loud and too bright, but all my attention is on what I see through the gap left behind.

In a place outside the universe there is a room with a locked door and sterile tile flooring. Flickering light strips illuminate metal tables—dozens of them, maybe hundreds—that are exactly like the autopsy tables which fill a morgue, though this room is not a place of death.

A woman stands before an autopsy table. Her eyes are sharp and bright, her mouth is wet with blood, and her teeth gnaw on the corner of her lower lip. A dirty lab coat is open in the front, the only article of clothing she wears, but any risk of obscenity is spared by a distinct lack of flesh from neck to groin. Ribs and spine and pelvis are stained with long-dried blood, scraped of all meat except where they border limbs and head still flush with lively material.

Her hands are busy with a project, her nimble fingers draped around two scalpels of differing sizes. She picks apart a scrap of meat, a chunk of flesh, perhaps a severed piece of some vital organ. The grisly sight is repeated across the laboratory, a bit of human detritus lying on every dissection table filling the room. Scraps of skin, mutilated muscle, quartered heart and diced lungs, some tables just stained with blood. All of them, with the exception of the live project and two more lying on the tables nearest it, are blackened as if burnt.

The sight would discomfort a weak stomach and alarm the naive mind, but this room is not a place of death; no murder has taken place here, no evidence disposed of, no victim’s body torn from its resting place by the woman with sharp eyes and sharper knives. These organs are her organs, this skin is her skin, and that blood is her blood. She is the only student of a very singular subject, and she has been drafting her thesis for a very long time.

The woman sets down her blades and picks up the gobbet of flesh, dangling it in front of her. She smiles at it with full lips and bared teeth, though the expression never reaches her eyes. “I’m almost done, I know I am,” she speaks as much to herself as to the meat twitching in her grasp. “I’ve gotten it right this time, I must have. Just a little further, and I’ll have the answer I’ve been looking for.”

The meat screams in the language of meat, shuddering and bleeding, but that’s only natural; it has been ripped from its body and cut open, and so it aches as all flesh aches when trauma is applied. Flesh is so weak and fallible, is it not? There’s something fascinating about the signals our mortal meat sends to try and communicate with us. We feel pain when certain stimuli are introduced, but not all pain is equal. We must learn what each kind of pain means, what it is meant to communicate, and whether it should be ignored as an overreaction by a body that does not understand the world it reacts to. With age and experience, we find that sometimes pain can even be desirable, almost rapturous. There is catharsis in pain, and that too is worthy of study.

The meat understands little of pleasure and catharsis, of course. It only knows to send a given output when it receives the matching input, and the rest is for the brain to interpret. So it screams, yes, aching with pain, uncomprehending that it is the same flesh as that which wields the blade that carves it. The meat is as disgusting and stupid as it is beautiful and intelligent, and it is hers. It is her meat, to mutilate as she wishes, for she knows that the reward will be well worth the pain. This room is not a place of death, but of lively discovery.

The woman drops the gobbet of flesh to splash against the cold metal table, the shock of impact triggering a new wave of reactive signals. “I do hope I’ve gotten it right,” she sighs to herself. “It would be such a bother to start cutting up one of my limbs, and I’ve run out of material in between.” She looks back at the rows and rows of tables with their burnt offerings, frowning at the blackened meat and dried blood. “Perhaps I could do a bit of recycling if I scraped off the charcoal, but that’s such a slippery slope. No, no, we must press on.”

She picks up her scalpels and returns to her work, and as steel touches flesh the lights above flicker out and the laboratory is plunged into darkness.

In darkness, warm hands claw at my skin and peel me apart. My blood mixes with the cold water of a deep, dark ocean. This too is not a physical space but merely a representation of some process my brain can’t begin to truly understand. The meat cries out in pain as it is dissected by its owner.

How far will she go? She doesn’t see a person when she looks at me, she just sees another piece of her body. I’m another scrap of her humanity to be dissected on an operating table that is a scale diorama of the universe. Reska was Love and Homura was Justice, so what does that make me? Identity?

If she completes whatever it is she’s doing to me, how much of me—this me, this self, this conscious mind—will be left? Pick the meat apart, douse it in chemicals, transmute it to another form and it is still the meat of your body. Meat has no concept of ego death. But I do.

I can’t let that happen.

Her hands plunge inside my chest, burning hot, and through the pain and the fear I scream out, “I changed my mind! The deal is off!”

The Demiurge laughs. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it? You already made your choice. It would be quite rude of me not to fulfill my end of the bargain.”

Something bright and painful is in her hands, pushing its way inside me. White heat burns my flayed body. Still I resist. “It’s not my choice anymore! I—I didn’t know the terms! It wasn’t an informed choice, so you have to stop. Those were the rules, weren’t they?”

For a moment, for a single shuddering moment, she stops. Her questing hands freeze in place, the burning doesn’t get any worse. She told me before that it has to be a choice. That Azathoth, the Dreaming Sea, and the will of thousands would reject our pact if it was forced.

And yet a moment later she laughs once more and shoves her hands deeper inside my flesh. “Informed enough.”

No, no, no, no! I scream as I am unraveled, and she only laughs. Her voice, so close to me, taunting me from what must be mere inches away. Close enough to touch. Close enough to taste. Close enough—

In a fit of desperation, I jerk forward with all my strength, still caught in her ironclad embrace but able to move just enough to reach my target. My mouth finds hers and I bite as hard as I can, hard enough to draw blood. She’s surprised, or maybe just uncaring, and she doesn’t move away as I bite into her lip and taste her spilling blood, swallowing it down with the seawater.

I can’t use my spells against her, can’t bring my magic to bear, but what does that matter? Drinking her blood is a symbolic act, and this universe runs on symbols.

So I drink and I drink and I drink, blood and seawater mixing inside me, as her hands flay my skin and push a star inside my chest. I taste her essence, heady and overwhelming, the enormity of it threatening to drown me, but I only need a little more. Her soul invades my meat and burns out memory after memory, but those were never my memories; I discard them, sacrificed for my escape.

I bite off a single speck of her infinity, a trillionth of a trillionth, but even the smallest infinity is still infinity. I seize that spark and flood my body with its power, limbs surging with sudden strength.

I push away with all my might and tear myself from her grasp with shocking ease, her fingers slipping away as I am thrust deeper into the lightless ocean, surrounded by stinging seawater and blood from two bodies. For dreadful seconds I drift in that space, not trusting the nightmare to be over, no idea how to get any further away from the god-thing that has imprisoned me. I will myself deeper down into the dark, but I am terrified that her grasping hands will find me again and this time not let go. I bleed and burn, her process interrupted but the damage still lingering.

And then, in the blink of an unseeing eye, water and blood vanish and I slam against hard ground.

The breath is knocked from my lungs—though no seawater bubbles out of me—and I spend an uncomfortable length of time just wheezing and aching, thoughts scattered by the unexpected impact. My body complains, but it doesn’t scream like when the Demiurge had her hands on me.

Shaky hands dance across my limbs, my face, beneath my shirt—and I’m wearing one of those again, and more, fully clothed—but find no bleeding wounds, no signs of flensing. I’m not burning, either, though my chest feels oddly warm to the touch.

I keep taking in ragged breaths, trying to steady myself. I’m shaking, my whole body shuddering from fear and tension. What have I done? What will the consequences be? And where am I now?

Wherever I am, it’s still cold and dark, but I’m not underwater anymore. The floor feels like stone, level and smooth. I think I’m safe, for the moment, if that means anything. It probably doesn’t, actually.

All my messy emotions finally convert themselves to nervous, coughing laughter. I need to sift through all the information I’ve learned, all the revelations that have piled on top of each other and threatened to bury me, but where do I even start? What do I do now? I have no idea.

I feel like throwing up. I feel like a walking corpse. I feel like I’ve got electrified wires digging into my muscles. I feel… I don’t know how to feel. What have I done?

“Why?” I whisper into the darkness. “I don’t understand. Why, why, why?”

I’ve started crying again. I clutch at my head, pulling on my hair hard enough to hurt, and I screw up my eyes to try and stop the tears. I hate this. I hate all of this so much. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be in Wonderland.

I feel so lost and lonely, but what does that even mean? I have no home to go back to, no loved ones that might miss me. I’m not a real person, I’m just a copy. Just a fragment. I’m just a gobbet of meat being cut up in a lab.

In the depths of my despair, as I sob on the cold stone floor, red light pierces the darkness. I shield my eyes, blinking away the disorientation, but then my brain catches up and my head snaps to look at the source: a girl with red eyes and dark hair, standing in the doorway of this stone chamber, an orb of glowing crimson levitating over one outstretched hand.

Homura Annatar Bloodfallen smirks down at me and says, “Hey there, new girl. I think you and me should have a nice, long chat. What do you say?”