Dearest Alice.

After a while, I realized I had already hit the ground.

There was no impact or sound.

I landed on a surface that resembled the stone path from the castle courtyard. Yet it looked even older somehow, like more people had walked this path.

The End Road.

I looked behind me. There was nothing to indicate where I had come from.

As I noted, the forest was gone. No trees lined the path; the landscape consisted of rolling hills of pale grass.

The hills stretched as far as my eye could see; from every side, they stretched. The only thing cutting them was this stone road I kept walking on.

Decorating the hills were flowers; they grew across everything in a density that far surpassed anything I've ever seen. This gave the ground a light purple hue.

I didn't have a name for them; they weren't a species I recognized, which wasn't surprising due to my memories, but I felt my intuition should have provided an answer.

Soft air crossed the valley, which made some of them fly in the sky.

My eyes locked onto them as they flew, a hypnotic scene that would move anyone.

Above it all, the sky had changed. I hadn't noticed exactly when, realizing it only now. Of course, it was still a bit red but lighter now, closer to purple. It was as if the sky were announcing my entry into a new territory.

It possessed the quality of nightfall, though I wasn't sure why. Even when the time didn't seem to change in this place, I felt a restlessness that couldn't be described with words.

My eyes kept looking at the hills around me as i walked.

Then I slowed my pace.

I noticed a figure a bit further than where I was. It was in the hills about a few minutes away from the road itself. She had likely been there all along; I simply hadn't noticed her until then.

Her back was to me. And as I got closer, I noticed her appearance more and more.

She was young. She wore a blue and white dress; her hair was short and held a golden-blonde color.

A notebook rested in her left hand, a pencil tucked behind her ear; she wasn’t writing, only watching the hills as she sat.

I had reached within a reasonable distance of her when she turned around.

Her face was the kind that betrayed her thoughts before she could filter them. The opposite of a poker face. Her expression shifted as she turned; she looked at me, her gaze lingering for a moment.

Her blue eyes stared at me in silence. In contrast to her youthful appearance, she had faint dark circles under her eyes.

She looked at me for a few seconds.

"Oh," she murmured. Then whispered to herself, "...You're late."

I stopped in front of her.

She seemed to realize she'd said it out loud, because she looked at me again. "Sorry, I just. I saw you go into the forest a while back, and then the court appeared, and I thought—" She stopped. Looking at me in silence as if thinking of what to say next, "Are you... alright?"

"I am fine," I said.

She nodded, but she was looking at the blood on my collar. She didn't say anything about it.

"Did you go through the court as well?"

She gave a smile and then nodded. "I did. A long while before you. The knives were really scary, weren't they?" She gave a short, forced laugh.

"..."

We stood there for a moment.

"My name is Alice," she said. "They call me Dearest Alice."

"I am Naoki," I replied.

She looked at me for a bit, then turned around and sat down again and opened her notebook, her eyes on the page.

I waited to see if she would say something else. But she didn't, just kept looking at the hills.

And so I started walking again, following the road without looking back.

After a while, I heard her footsteps draw level with mine, though she still kept her distance. Her pencil was already moving across the page.

She drew flowers as we walked in silence. I could see the page from the corner of my eye, the line work, and the shadows she rendered. She seemed to draw before thinking about it.

As she drew flowers, I realized that she kept giving them two shadows, each one going in a different direction.

"They have two shadows?" I asked.

She looked up and nodded. "I've been trying to work out why. Whether it's the sky or something about the flowers themselves." She tilted the notebook and studied what she'd drawn. "I really am not sure; it feels irritating."

I looked at the nearest flowers I could see. If you looked at the ground, there it was. Two shadows ran in opposite directions across the pale grass.

"Has anything here not been weird?" I noted to myself.

She took it as a question and thought about it. "Maybe. The river?" she said. "Back near the start of the road. I think the river seemed normal."

I looked at her.

She caught the look, and after a few seconds of silence, she laughed. "Your face is funny."

"..."

We walked.

I noticed that this valley's flowers held a faint smell. I couldn't get the hang of it, but it smelled nice.

"You seem like you've been on the road for a while," I said. It was easy to figure out; she seemed to be used to this place more than me.

"Mhm. Long enough," she said with a sigh. Her hands were still sketching; this time, it was the valley ahead of us. "It's hard to count, really. Time doesn't seem right when you focus on it. Where are you headed?"

"To the White Rabbit."

She nodded slowly, as she'd expected it. "Hopefully, it won't get too strange," she added.

"What comes after this place?"

She went quiet for a moment. "There's really no 'next place.' Wonderland does what it wants. There's no logic behind it; you might see a new area, or you might return to an old one."

"Is that why you haven't reached the White Rabbit?"

"No," she said simply. "It seems like I can never reach it, no matter how hard I try. The road rearranges itself, not letting me even see a glimpse of hope." Her expression held a quality of melancholy as she flipped to a new page in her notebook.

The Queen had said that the White Rabbit shows itself to those with a complete record. I wondered if this girl was like me, a person who had lost her memories, and if that's the case, then it might be a bothersome task to leave this world as well.

We went quiet again. The hills rolled ahead, and the violet sky pressed down its color over everything.

At some point, she stopped walking entirely.

I noticed her absence after a few seconds and turned around.

She was crouched beside one of the flowers at the edge of the path, studying it very closely. She reached out and touched one of the petals with one finger. Then she held her notebook beside it and looked between the drawing and the flower.

I waited.

She stood back up. She saw me waiting, and her expression shifted into one of embarrassment. "Sorry."

She fell back into step, and we continued walking. My eyes took a glance at the ground, where she had been walking with one shoe on.

"Are you from Wonderland?" I asked, looking forward.

Alice took a moment, her eyes still on the hills. "What do you think? Am I one of those bizarre creatures? Will I become a giant, or get as small as an ant, or talk to the birds?" She laughed.

"..." I thought of the possibilities of those things coming true. "Then you are from Wonderland," I concluded.

She smiled. "Of course I'm not! I'm human. I want to get out of here, too."

"I see."

The hill on the far side of the valley began its slope upward; the grass thinned where the path widened slightly, and at the crest above us, the sky was darker. The violet color had deepened during our time in the valley.

"Will you keep following me?" I asked.

She looked at me.

"...Yes," she said. "I will." She looked back at the sky, then down at the road ahead, which descended from the hill into something we couldn't make. "Maybe I will never reach him, but you will. And I want to see what will happen then."

She spoke honestly.

I found her interesting; that was the most accurate way to describe my impression.

She uncapped her pencil with her mouth.

After walking a bit, we reached a crossroad. The path diverged into two ways.

I looked at Alice. "Which one would you like to go to?"

She finally looked up to see the path ahead. "Right?"

It was obvious her focus wasn't on the road, but I wasn't sure if it was on her notebook as well.

Her mind had seemed preoccupied since the moment we met. As another human in Wonderland, I couldn't guess what she was thinking.

And so we continued onward, marching to the right.