“Wake up… Alice… wake up…”
The voice drifted from a distant place, sounding surreal and thin.
The young black-haired girl turned over dizzily, the straw-stuffed mattress rustling beneath her. Her mind was clouded with a heavy lethargy, yet a single, clear thread pulled at her consciousness: she had to get up for class.
She let out a disgruntled grunt and pushed herself up with both hands. As she lifted her back, the quilt slid down, and her nightgown slipped halfway off, revealing her pale, slender shoulders.
Bits of straw clung to the snowy skin of her neck and back. The young girl reached behind her at an awkward angle to brush them away. Though the irritating debris was gone, faint red indentations remained on her skin.
Sigh—
Alice let out a long, weary breath and sat on the edge of the bed. Her legs dangled, swaying slightly. She made a cute little whimpering sound, her eyes still glued shut from sleep. Her head felt heavy, and her feet felt light; she desperately wanted to sleep for another hour, but she had no choice but to rise.
Her two dainty, white feet wriggled as if they had a mind of their own, only settling down once they had slipped into her wooden clogs.
The young black-haired girl stood up and took a candle from the bedside. Holding it aloft, the concentrated glow shielded her from the cold wind blowing through the weathered window frame.
She shuffled her shoes toward the stove in the corner of the room. Using the candle to light the charcoal, she leaned over to scoop a ladle of water from a wooden bucket, poured it into the kettle, and set it to simmer by the fire…
“Good morning, Alice,” the candle said.
“Ah—!”
The young girl let out a startled scream. The candle slipped from her hand, but instead of hitting the floor, it suspended itself in mid-air. To her shock, the dripping wax had formed into a face.
“Is this an illusion? A talking candle?” She patted her small head, trying to force herself back to reality.
“Most of this world is fake, Alice, but we are real. Leave the town quickly and go to the upper reaches… This is your destiny. You will save everyone!” the candle said urgently, repeating those last few words over and over.
Alice rubbed the space between her eyebrows hard, trying to break free from the strange fantasy. Perhaps it was because she had read a few pages of a fairy tale book last night.
Just then, a buzzing of wings sounded in her ear. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a small black mass land on her shoulder. She turned her head to find a little crow.
It looked much like the illustrations she had seen in her books—thin legs and tiny wings, with eyes so disproportionately large they took up nearly its entire head. They were transparent and brilliant, like cylindrical gemstones embedded into its skull.
“Good morning, Alice,” the little crow said in a shrill, chirping voice.
Alice’s mouth fell open, her face lengthening in shock. Her eyes turned stiffly toward the other side as she muttered, “I’m doomed. The little crow is talking too.”
Hiss—
The water boiled, and hot steam billowed from the kettle’s spout.
Alice frowned in confusion. This wasn’t the tin kettle she usually used, but a strange thing made of mismatched porcelain shards. There was a hole in the middle of the kettle plugged by a bizarre eyeball. It kept the water from leaking out, but the poor thing had been boiled a bright, angry red by the heat.
Looking closer, tiny tentacles crawled out from around the eye socket, clinging to the edges of the hole in a macabre display. The large eye was composed of countless smaller eyes, each the size of a grain of rice. In its scalded state, it looked like a split-open pomegranate.
“Mr. Ed-Bear says it wants some black tea,” the little kettle whistled through its spout.
“It’s already red enough,” the little candle joked.
“And who is that?” Alice asked, nimbly grabbing a hemp cloth to lift the kettle.
“That would be the gentleman watching you with many eyes.”
“Ha. A little bug.”
Alice lifted the lid. Peerng through the steam and boiling water, she saw the full form of the Gaze Worm. She shrugged and muttered to herself, “The kettle is talking, and the little bug wants black tea. I must be going mad… Whatever. People go crazy every day; I guess it’s finally my turn. At least I don’t have to worry about anything anymore.”
She replaced the lid and sighed. “Sorry, there’s no black tea in the house. If you really must have tea, I can only throw in a few orange peels.”
Alice was a poor girl. She lived in a dilapidated shack, slept on a straw mat, and went hungry far more often than she ate her fill.
The strange hallucinations didn’t break Alice’s rhythm in the slightest; the routine of waking up for school was etched into her muscle memory. She grabbed a cold potato from the large round table, mashed it into hot water with a spoon, and stirred in a pinch of salt. That was her breakfast.
After finishing her meal, Alice wrapped herself in a scarf, picked up her books, and pushed open the creaky old door.
She walked along the cobblestone path toward the plaza in the center of town. The plaza was built on a steep incline, giving the entire area a tilted appearance. Standing at the street corner, she could see the town’s perimeter fence crouching low in the distance. Her gaze could reach beyond the fence to the horizon, where mountains sat like galloping horses beneath a colossal star that occupied half the sky. Even with the naked eye, she could see the magnificent canyons and fractured terrain on the planet’s surface.
