Looking at the path of fireflies, I realize they aren't waiting for us- they were waiting for someone else. The stars in the sky start blipping out of existence. Then the moon looks as if it's falling from the sky, carelessly wafting downward as it dissolved into a crescent moon. The crickets now fallen silent, as if they know to show respect for what was to come; even the fireflies seemed to remain perfectly still. I go to pick up my bunnies but Frankie just sniffed at the air curiously and Houdini stood up tall both ears half up like he was about to take flight, as I teasingly told him all the time. They weren't afraid.
Hatter moved to grab something from behind the door and I hear him whisper, "Damn guardians." The sound of moving dishes clattering rang crisply through the air. The table looked as if someone grabbed the runner and lifted it with all their force and sent all the glass and silverware flying. Then a pause, everything stopped in midair! "Show off," Hatter muttered under his breath. He is holding what looks like a sawed off 12-gauge shotgun. I inhaled deeply somewhat in shock; he had made one too?! I left my own safely at home in our cottage; I didn't think I truly needed it anymore.
Slowly a man appeared, first the moon turned into his unusually large smile, then the rest of him fell into view like ink sinking into water. My stomach feels as if we were on a 300-foot drop roller coaster, with only shoestring holding me in. He formed in a sitting position in midair, hovering above a throne shaped like a chess tower- tall, narrow, carved from speckled Irish stone that looked older than Wonderland itself. Jagged cracks shimmered with faint light, like the lines on the Tower tarot card just before the lightning strike. It didn’t look placed there. It looked summoned. He looked like a man who had seen things that would make a normal persons' mind shatter.
"Welcome to Wonderland dearie." He waved his hand and all the plates, glasses and silverware floated softly down to the table. The cups filled themselves with different colors of liquids and the table was full of food ready to be devoured. Waving his hand again, the bunnies are put in a small enclosure with fresh carrots with long stocks- they do not look impressed. Hatter and I were pulled toward the table like iron to a magnet, our bodies moving without our consent. We are forced to sit in chairs opposite sides of the table and with the stranger at the head of the table.
With a snap of his fingers, one gold and one silver scale appeared into existence between us on the table. The gold scale held sweets: petite little cakes with dark green shards of glass jutting from the tops in the shape of a crown. They were glossed and smoothed out, but I knew that color anywhere. Vivianite. Beautiful, deadly, and only born from the bodies of the dead. The silver scale held two tiny glass vials, one on each side. Both were filled with swirling emerald liquid; the color of algal blooms back home (damn HABs). Each bottle was clearly labeled in curling script: Poison.
The Guardian waited to see if I understood. "Chose your fate, whatever outcome it may bring- it was always meant to be." He softly sipped a cup of tea.
This must be a trick. A flip. Wonderland logic? Well, I always felt like Alice back home; everything feeling like it was backwards was a concept I was quite familiar with. How did they even get these things here? In my world, algal blooms are toxic—choking lakes, killing fish, turning water into sickness. Vivianite was a rare stone that most people back home wouldn't ever dare touch with their bare hand, much less use it for decoration and eat it! But here? Everything here is what it isn't. The only clue I have is the label. So maybe here the magical looking liquid could be the antidote, right? And the cakes? The pretty, crown-tipped ones? Pure poison- they must be. The guardian must not know exactly where I’m from since I can identify these so easily!
“Wait, don’t," Hatter goes to reach for you but gets pulled back into his chair with what looked like vines. As they wrapped around his head, they covered his mouth and make him bound to the arms and back of the chair. He looked over to see his gun laying a few feet away from the pen the rabbits were in.
"Tsk tsk tsk," the man wagged his finger in a 'no' motion. "No clues are allowed, only sheer will, can solve her problem." His smile stretched even further than humanly possible.
can appear on the iron coffins or on the corpses of humans as a result of a chemical reaction of the decomposing body with the iron enclosure. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivianite
