The silence was louder than the chaos had been. Alice's hand hovered over the teacup she had just relocated—from the Hatter's place to the March Hare's. The clatter of mismatched china, the endless switching of seats, the riddle-loop that never resolved: all of it stopped in the space between one breath and the next. The March Hare's ears went rigid. His paw, mid-reach for the sugar bowl, froze in the air. The Hatter's manic grin faltered. For a long moment, he simply stared at the teacup as if it had grown teeth. 'You moved it,' the Hatter said. His voice was not angry. It was something stranger—curious, almost reverent. 'Yes,' Alice said, and her own voice felt far away, as if it belonged to someone else. 'The pattern was... stuck. You switch and switch, but nothing changes. So I changed something.' She pulled her hand back slowly. The teacup sat in its new place, a single chip on its rim catching the twilight glow. It was a small thing—a tiny rearrangement on a table buried in the woods of a world that made no sense. But the weight of it pressed against the air. The March Hare blinked, slowly, like an owl waking from a century of sleep. 'But the pattern is the pattern,' he said. 'Time stopped. Tea never ends. We never...' He trailed off. The Hatter set down his watch with a click that seemed louder than it should have been. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and fixed Alice with a gaze that had gone sharp and clear. 'Do you know what you've done?' he whispered. Alice looked at the teacup. At the Hatter. At the March Hare, who was now staring at his own hands as if seeing them for the first time. 'I think,' she said slowly, 'I've started something.' Above them, the first stars appeared—but the sky had shifted, the constellations unfamiliar. Somewhere deep in the woods, a clock began to chime, though no clock had struck in Wonderland for a very long time. The tea party had never been interrupted before. Now it had.