“Here’s what’s precise,” he said, and his voice was now the rustle of a billion unseen things. “You came looking for answers. But answers are just doors with ‘Exit’ signs painted over them. You don’t need to leave, Alice. You need to realize there was never a room.”

The Duchess’s pepper-pot had long since stopped sneezing, the Queen’s croquet match had devolved into its usual charming chaos of screams and decapitations, and even the Hatter had run out of bad puns. The quiet was, for Wonderland, suspicious.

But when she stood up, the ground felt suspiciously like a grin beneath her feet.

Alice found him on a branch of the old Twistwood Tree, which grew in impossible directions—some limbs pointing down into the earth, others curling into their own knots like thoughts trying to escape.

The Cat vanished. Then, from her left ear: “You think you’re falling.” From her right: “You’ve been standing still the whole time.” His face reassembled in front of her nose, upside down. “Wonderland isn’t a place you visit, Alice. It’s the shape your sanity makes when it’s tired of being a square.”

The grin winked out.

Alice felt the ground tilt. Not dangerously. Just… reorienting.

Alice folded her arms. “I wasn’t aware we had an appointment.”

Alice sat alone for a long time. The toadstool had stopped squeaking.

“We have an appointment every time you look at the sky and feel too big for your own skin.” The rest of him poured into existence: a striped head, then a torso that shimmered like heat haze, then a tail that ended in a question mark. “Sit down, or don’t. Both are equally uncomfortable.”