The leaf is the color of dried blood, veined with amber. Alice traces its edge with her fingertip, a slow, deliberate motion, as if she might read its secrets through touch alone. The forest around her is still—unnaturally so, the kind of stillness that holds its breath. She has been walking for what feels like hours, though time in Wonderland is a joke that never lands. She sat down because her legs gave out, not because she wanted to. 'I don't know if I'm brave,' she whispers to herself. The sound of her own voice startles her. She hadn't meant to say it aloud. 'Or just too stubborn to stop pretending.' The leaf crumbles under her finger, flakes of dry brown falling to the dirt. She watches them settle. Somewhere behind her, a twig snaps. She doesn't turn around. She's learned that turning around only leads to more madness—a grinning cat, a weeping turtle, a queen who screams for heads before breakfast. But the sound doesn't repeat. It was probably just the wind. Or a rabbit with a pocket watch. Or the ghost of her own courage, snapping under the strain. She presses her palm flat against the earth. The ground is cool and damp, and it grounds her in a way nothing else has since she fell. 'You're real,' she tells herself. 'You're still real.' The words feel hollow, but she says them anyway, because if she stops saying them, she might dissolve into the absurdity like the Cat's grin into the dark. A single tear slips down her cheek, and she wipes it away with the back of her hand before it can fall. She refuses to cry here. Not yet. Not until she finds a way home. Above her, the sky shifts—a pale lavender bleeding into rose. The trees lean closer, as if listening. And somewhere, impossibly far, a watch ticks. Alice stands. Her knees ache. Her hands are dirty. But she stands, and she takes one step forward, into the deepening twilight. She doesn't know where she's going. But she's not done pretending yet.