Zaarin’s Creation

The Duchess started up her odd little song again, and Alice—caught somewhere between curiosity and feeling totally out of her depth—realized she was getting hungry just by peeking past all those tangled words toward the court. Everyone spoke with their own weird rhythm, and it threw her off, like meaning could flip just because someone changed their tone. One minute, she half expected a fish to wander up and politely announce he was leaving for good. The next, she heard someone sobbing so loudly off to the right that it almost rattled her bones.

“Who in the distance?” someone called out, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Nobody answered, and instead someone else grumbled about how far away everything seemed. The Hatter, never one to let an argument go, piped up—why bother asking questions at all? A shepherd boy popped into view for a second, then vanished as a huge sneeze split the moment in two.

Just like that, the courtroom noise rushed back. Someone shouted, “This proves his guilt!” while another insisted the Queen had just called them the real authority yesterday. “Sit down, all of you,” someone barked, but no one really listened, not even the creatures that could talk. Alice felt her nerves prickling, but she kept her ears open, determined to catch something that made sense.

The Dormouse mumbled from one corner. The March Hare cut in from another. Father William’s old speech floated overhead like a stray cloud. The Gryphon chimed in, soldiers yelled, and words just tumbled out everywhere, as if language itself had decided to run wild. Alice tried to keep up, but nothing followed the rules today—everything was so strange that even following directions seemed risky, though ignoring them felt just as bad.

She turned away for a second, and that’s when she caught the whisper: “She’s under sentence of execution.” The world seemed to tip sideways, and for a moment, everything went quiet and uncertain again.