Behind Sanity

Chapter Forty-Nine

Behind Sanity

Chapter Forty-Nine

1

After a long travel, Alice could finally see the Queen’s Keep, emerging out of a great fog ahead as she followed the cat down the side of a mountain.  The Keep was a tall, dark, twisting structure in the distance, but Alice knew what it was just by laying eyes on it.  There was still a long way to go yet, but here it was finally – what she’d come all this way for.  She could see it now, and her blood began to run hot with anticipation.

The place was colossal, many shadowy towers jutting from it, and she knew that before she could even get inside the Keep to the many treacherous rooms that awaited her, she would have to pass through an extensive tangle of hedges and walls that was the Queen’s own garden.  It was no doubt infested with all sorts of monstrosities, but way before even reaching either of those parts, she would need to use the Jabberwock’s Eye staff as her ticket for entry.  She kept being told that it was the only way into the Queen’s realm, though she had no idea how to use it. 

Well, she would just see.

Coming around a mountain bend, Alice stopped near the rocky edge of the path to look out over the hazy fog that surrounded the structure in the distance.  If she wasn’t already treading the Queen’s land – which she, of course, was – once she got down this mountain, she would be on the Queen’s playing field for certain. 

And all ways were the Queen’s ways.

The Cheshire, quite on up the twisted path already, noticed Alice’s lingering and turned back to her, not quite understanding why she’d stopped.  She’d see the place much closer in the near future, and she likely would wish she could click her heels and return home.

“Having a moment?” he teased, smiling darkly at his own comment.

“It’s been a long time,” she said, somewhat absently.         

“Once you get there, you won’t think it was long enough,” he assured her.

Still, the cat’s words didn’t tear her gaze away.  He was probably right though: the wretched place that lay ahead was surely so full of obstacles that she wouldn’t even have time to stop and catch her breath for the risk of being sliced in half by an enemy’s blade.  While she assumed this was true, there was still a part of her that wanted to take her time going through the danger ahead, no matter how intense.  She wanted to stroll through the courtyard and dance happily with her foes as she chopped off their limbs.  The blood splattering warm across her skin would be sweet and rapturous bliss – but of course, she knew there was no time for pleasantries such as those.  The Queen of Hearts was in there waiting for her, holding her sister at deformed-arm’s length, no doubt. 

Standing there, she recalled what Morgan had said to her before in the hospital room: only one of the sisters would be coming out alive.  Was that a threat, or a fool’s promise?  Alice would find out soon enough.  She broke her gaze away from the sinister Keep and started off again after the cat down the mountain path.

The trail was long, but for once, both of them tread silently.  She thought the cat’s peace quite ominous, but still she did nothing to break it.  Perhaps it was finally the proper time to be revered now.  She could have very well been walking the road to her doom.  She did her best to refuse that belief, but who was to say any different for certain?  The outcome would only be determined once it was reached, she supposed, and she made herself content with that thought.