I woke up in a sunlit garden on a long grassy path, fifteen feet wide or even wider with thick, tall hedges on either side. It went on in either direction as far as I could see, and the sky overhead was a perfect, cloudless blue. No telling what time it was or how long I’d been asleep, then. No telling where I was, either- there was no park like this in the downtown that I knew of. There were other people around, hundreds of them, thousands- so this is where the whole of the city got off to- and quite a few woodland critters as well. It was like the world’s narrowest convention center. Feels like the start of Riverworld, actually.

None of the other people seemed to have a clue what was going on either. Many were still sleeping on the grass, others had woken, like me, but seemed engaged with the talking animals. I noticed with some concern that there weren’t any vessels around. Sherriff, you happen to see any while I was out? He hadn’t. Well, one more mystery for the ever-expanding pile, then.

Wait- talking animals? What the fuck? Whatever Wonderland logic had kept the absurdity of all of this suspended outside my conscious mind had been stripped away while I slept. Suddenly I was entirely too aware that I had been suckered into a magic hole by an opium-smoking caterpillar and talking animals didn’t exist . I tried my all-purpose mantra for reality reassertion once more, out loud this time. “What the FUCK? ”

My shouting drew a few looks but everyone seemed pretty absorbed in their own shit, at the moment. I wasn’t going to wait around. I grabbed a beaver in a newsie’s cap as he waddled by. Wrapped both hands in his chest fur and shoved him up against the hedge wall. “Hey! Listen here you little shit. I don’t know what you bastards are up to but I want out, you hear me? Lemme see that caterpillar or whoever’s in charge of this place or I swear to god I’m gonna get real National Geographic on your ass.”

He stammered wildly and waved his hands. “Oi! Hands off bruv! Don’t know nuffin bout no caterpillar, seen? Just here to help, like. Now how bout you lets us go, yeah?” I wasn’t really sure I could take a three foot beaver, let alone one with a cockney accent. I put him down. “Right! Too bloody right. Downright rude, you people. Ya try to ‘elp someone…” He muttered.

“Shut it,” I said testily. “I don’t think for a second your lot are helping anyone in here.” I looked up and down the long garden hallway, where everyone looked just as disoriented as I felt. “This feels a lot more like a Jonestown than any kind of inter-universal intervention. So take me to your leader, now . And in the meantime, talk . Where are you all from, why are you here?”

We started walking. “Where’m I from? Ain’t that a loaded question? A minute ago I was up against that hedge, and a minute afore that, I was walkin’ behind yas! You want a life story, you’re gonna need to pull up a chair, bruv!”

“Dial it back a few degrees there, you pedant. I want to know where all of you talking animals came from, and why you brought humans here to this… whatever it is.” I gestured widely.

The beaver was still indignant. “Well I want to know why you see such a big distinction between talking animals and people! You lot look like smarted-up apes to me, mate.”

It was getting harder not to facepalm with every passing second. I stopped walking to try and gather my thoughts, and the beaver stopped with me. “Can we just- can we focus , here? Yes, granted, we are all talking animals. But prior to today I have never encountered any talking beavers . You clearly come from somewhere else. Where is that?”

“Ye’re standing in it, bruv!”

Okay actually facepalming now. “ Yes but what is this place?”

The beaver looked around, apparently bewildered by my question. “Well... it’s a garden then innit? You hit your head, mate?”

This was rapidly descending into farce. Either that or this thing was completely stonewalling me. I found a giant titmouse in a dapper chimney sweep’s getup, conversing with a very confused looking elderly man. “Excuse me! I have some questions and it’s possible I need someone other than my guide here. Can you tell me what this place is, and why you, nonspecific plural indicating other talking animals not you literally , brought all us humans here?”

The old man nodded excitedly. “That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to find out!”

The titmouse sighed, in a high-pitched feminine voice, and the beaver patted her shoulder. “Proper thickie, ‘e is. Go on then luv, give ‘im what for.”

She turned and glared up at me. “First of all it’s very rude to interrupt someone’s conversation like this! But to answer your question, yes!”

I waited. God damnit. “... yes, what?”

“Yes I can absolutely tell you those things!”

I had sworn never to do a double facepalm but things were getting dicey. Okay, no being polite. But they constantly took offense if you weren’t polite. Last try. “Please, from the bottom of my heart, tell me what this place is. ”

She nodded brightly. “Absolutely! As soon as I finish talking to this lovely gentleman.” She turned away. The beaver tugged my sleeve to get me to move on. I was detecting a bit of a pattern. I began listening in on other conversations as we walked. These Carrollian critters seemed to have a schtick, now that I thought about it. They seemed compelled to engage in conversation, but unable to take it anywhere. They answered every question with a point of order, or an appeal to decorum, or blatant pedantry.

We were walking and talking, but making no progress- there was no end to the tunnel in sight. I looked around. Everywhere I turned, there were people- engaged with the animals. Not each other. Nobody asking questions, nobody working to escape. Where’d all these animals come from, anyway? Every other sentient we’ve encountered was swapped one-for-one with a person.

I stopped a couple of people as we walked. “Hey! You- when you first met these assholes, did they replace someone?” Nobody said yes. One guy mentioned the infomorphs, called them “Big bug-monsters” which wasn’t in accurate, but couldn’t rightly say when the animals first appeared. For all of them it was like they’d always been there. Same for me, in the cab. But now I recognize that this is out of place. Talking animals aren’t normal and they’re clearly stalling us. So why did they take the whammy off of me?

Answer a question with a question, insist on defining minutiae, distract and evade. A sci-fi story I’d once read came back to me. How to be sure… a test- “Hey, what’s your opinion on the state of climate change?“ I prompted the beaver.

“Never been there, guv! Only states I’ve been to are confusion and-”

“Okay shut up… am I talking to a goddamn chinese room? ” I stopped walking and the beaver, always attentive, paused and turned back to me. Thank you Peter Watts.

“Come again, bruv?”

I waved kind of half-heartedly at the hall, indicating all the talking animals. No longer really conversing with the creature, just explaining as I thought. “It’s an old, kind of racist term. A metaphor. Man who only speaks English sits in a room, with three scripts. The first is a big batch of foreign symbols, the second is more of the same, and the third is a set of English instructions for matching the first and second. The man sitting in the room follows his instructions. People put in their questions in foreign languages, he maps them to output symbols, and the room conducts whole conversations in languages he doesn’t even speak. Only you don’t need a man, just an algorithm, is the assertion. Do that and you can fake consciousness up to a point. But it’s only as robust as the scenarios it was programmed for. Pass me the sugar.”

The beaver produced a small bag of sugar cubes and handed them over, looking a bit mystified. “Wot?”

“You didn’t have any sugar until I asked. Lot of tea parties in Lewis Carroll, thought you might have a response. You guys, all of you. You’re philosophical zombies, coded for Wonderland situations. Not sentient, just chat bots. You got us all down here with, hit us with Wonderland logic so we’d go without questioning, and now you’re keeping us here. I asked to see the boss but you’re just stalling for time. What is the Consumption?”

----

“It’s fire,” said the Wiltshire Dog. Haley and the Dog had been walking through the downtown for fifteen minutes, long enough for him to give her the basics. “Just fire. Couched in metaphor and rumor, cloaked behind a wall of meanings too thick for her to remember the truth anymore. But I remember. She was 12, in an arranged marriage to a monstrous old man. Couldn’t stand him. Parents sold her off like so much chattel, and he had her brought here. Didn’t speak the language, didn’t know a soul. Couldn’t escape him.”

Haley shuddered. It was strange- she knew, intellectually, that things like that still happened. But to hear it spoken out loud- how were things like that allowed? She sighed. “Somebody, somewhere, had the ability to stop that and didn’t. Not all cases, not at once, but her case- and every other one- represents a failure somewhere. For that, I’m sorry. The rest of this, though... it’s all just… too big.”

The Dog looked around at the deserted streets. “It felt very small, in the end. He had the power, the money, she didn’t. Now she has power.”

He was silent for a long time. She prompted him- “So, she what- burned him?”

“ Herself. ” The Dog corrected. “She burned herself. Lit fire to the room he kept her locked in. Servants pulled her out, eventually, but she was badly burned and near dead. He had her institutionalized, put money in the right hands, she assumed, and that was that. She was rid of him.”

Haley shuddered. Being immune to fire had certainly reduced the threat that it seemed to pose to her, but the thought of someone burning like that was still… visceral. “And… all this?” She gestured to the Dog, the empty streets. “How did you go from there, to here?”

The Dog shrugged. “I don’t remember much before last night. I was a figment she’d conjure up to rail against. My role was to mock and jibe, but always to guide to truth in the end. She was dissociative, to be sure, pulling out figments from Wonderland here and there to play in her dramas. She couldn’t cope with the horror of what she’d been through, turned it into fairy tales and her own pain into a righteous shield. Then yesterday, something changed.” As he spoke, she noticed a noise growing in the background. A rumble, distant, heard from streets away. A dull roar, growing louder with every second. Ignoring that for now.

Haley nodded “During the Swap.” The Dog looked at her questioningly. “That’s what we call it now. You think I was always 8 feet long and scaley? Hey, here’s another question- where’s all the infomorphs? Little bug guys, swapped here for half the human race. You can’t have missed them.”

“Ah.” The Dog looked away. The roar was getting louder. It sounded like a thousand voices, angry, shouting. A riot? “Yesterday was about the time I felt more… solid, yes. Everything did, all her delusions. Even the monster she was still running from, in her head. I broke her out to get away from Him , and she decided to come here, to help everyone else ‘Consume’ and fight the beast.”

Haley frowned. “Something’s coming. And you dodged the question. What happened to the infomorphs?”

The Dog looked up. “ They did.”

And the mob came.

A thousand woodland animals, rolling over each other in a frenzy, in a tide, came around the corner of the street ahead. They wore the mismatched uniforms of French Revolutionaries- blue and red with white stripes. They carried pitchforks, and muskets, and improvised halberds. They were screaming and chanting slogans, too many and at cross purposes for anything to be made out. At their head marched a mouse in a field marshal’s uniform, waving a tiny sword overhead. He was audible over the din. “ I’LL KILL THE TRAITOR! HE CONSORTS WITH ANOTHER AGENT OF THE BEAST!”

Haley shot the Dog a wry look. “Agent of the Beast?”

The Dog nodded, sadly, already beginning to evaporate into the air. “She didn’t know. The creatures weren’t of us , so they had to be of him.Floormouse summoned the mob on them. I doubt many are left, now, and he’s picked you as the next ‘Foreign agent.’ Meet me at the 8th street park, if you survive.”

Right, survival, yes. Musket shots were beginning to crack out- she was substantially bigger, tougher, and stronger than she’d been even yesterday, when a shotgun had failed to penetrate her skin, but she did not want to test herself against massed rifle fire. The mob barreled closer as she crouched and leapt into the air. She’d had some practice flying during the night ride with Sean, but not in a combat situation. She tried to make her path as erratic and jagged as possible, to avoid the bulk of the shots and thrown objects. Some of them still found her, musket balls skipping relatively harmlessly off her bulk now. One or two left dents and made her wince, but after a few seconds she was free and clear.

Or so she thought. Some of the voices cried out, clearly in pursuit. Oh right, some of them were birds. Shit. Well, she was willing to place odds on her chances in the air versus even the most heavily armed woodland peasantry. It’s kind of what this body was built for. She spun in the air, came to a near-standstill. Hanging a hundred feet up, trapped in a metal and glass canyon, she kept her cool and let them come to her. I really hope you guys aren’t completely real.

They closed the gap, and now musket fire was cracking the air around her again. Fifty, forty- when they hit thirty feet away, she fired. And it was fire now, twice as big as it had been before, lighting up the daytime street and scorching the windows on either side of her canyon. The front row of bird peasantry simply evaporated, and then she was in among them. Bite and Claw and Wing Slap and- the taste of blood filled her mouth for the first time as she tore them apart. She paused, momentarily stunned and disgusted. It was only a second but one of them took the opportunity. A pistol shot rang out, and she felt a sharp bite in her side. Not enough to end her, but- but that one penetrated. Going to need to see to that before today is over. No more distractions now. And there weren’t any. The mob of bird peasantry broke before too long, simply unequipped to deal with the threat she represented. Some justice for the infomorphs, you bastards. She saw them off with another scorching explosion, and flew on, trailing blood.

Now, how do I navigate to 8th street from up here?

---

“Ahem. EVERYBODY! I have an announcement.” I stood in the middle of the eternal sun-drenched hedge maze and called for attention. The people and animals endlessly running round each other in circular conversations paused, stared. I put on my most solemn face.

“I would like… to confess! It was I! I stole the tarts. ” I stated, as theatrically as I could. I didn’t think my performance really mattered, as much as the setup for the scenario itself, but why not play it up?

The people around me looked extremely confused. The animals, however, grew excited. They couldn’t help it- it was in their programming. They had to respond. Shouts erupted. “ The tarts! The queen! Convene the court!”

Now we moved. I was spun around by a blur of furred hands, now in some pastiche of courly dress. As I stabilized, one end of the hedge maze came into view. It was a vast manor wall, stretching as high and as far as the eye could track, with a simple wooden door allowing access from the endless hedge. I was bustled through and into the high vaulted nave of an old gothic cathedral. Enormous columns the size of skyscrapers spun up into infinite space above me. The room felt thousands of feet wide but I could still see the sole occupant clearly. Dream logic, right.

The animals swarmed about me, in a complete frenzy. “My queen! My queen! We caught the thief!” She sat on a throne of gold and iron, so overwrought with carvings and dioramas that it looked like a movie prop. She wore no robes or crown- just a rather ordinary-looking teenage girl in a cornflower blue dress, seemingly as bemused by the whole situation as I was.

“You ninnies!” She said, “There is no queen! There never was! I’m just me, Cecilia, and there’s no tarts either. You lot are supposed to be tending to our guests, while the Floormouse rounds up the rest of them! Oh, how are we ever going to finish in time if you can’t listen!” She stood up and put both hands on her hips. The critters, sufficiently cowed, all stood staring at the floor, hats in hand.

“And you!” She rounded on me. “Stirring them up like this! Do you want Him to get you?’

Having got myself here, I wasn’t entirely certain what to next. Best to brazen it out, I supposed. I was not going to be the damsel who needed rescue, not on our first outing. So far playing against the dream logic had worked much better than engaging. “You know none of this is real, right? Whatever’s going on here, it’s in your head. Why did you set all these guys to distract us, and why can I see through it when nobody else can?”

This didn’t give her the slightest pause. “Well of course it’s in my head, and in yours too! The parts we agree on are called reality! Honestly, I just worked this out with the others, I’d hate to have to go over it again.”

“Uh. Okay… I mean, the garden, the guests. The consumption… thing? Nobody else has the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Your animals can’t answer questions, they’re basically automatons. I think you may be the only intelligence in this whole phenomenon.”

She curtsied. She actually curtsied. What year did this woman come from? “Why thank you! It’s so rare to be receive compliments, anymore. We’re in Wonderland, and I brought my animal friends here from other parts to help keep you all calm. You aren’t calm, because you and that beastly lady you were with, are probably working for Him. ”

Okay she was about as dotty as a Jackson Pollock original, and clearly had no idea what was going on with me. “Miss... Cecilia? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not working for anyone but myself. Who is He ?” I emphasized the word, without really meaning to.

She seemed puzzled. “But how can you not know about Him? He’s quite hard to miss, I should think, and his ghastly minions were all over this morning. Though he never had minions before. It’s all quite odd, really. But we’re very used to odd here. It’s even you have to worry about.”

Uh-oh, whatever that meant it couldn’t be good. “And the Consumption?”

She smiled brightly! “Ah! Well, I was going to wait until everyone was gathered up, but surely they’ve got all of you by now? I really don’t want to put it off to the last minute, it’s such a stressful affair, people need time to get on with their day! Let me show you.”

We walked back through the door into the hedge maze- her eagerly, I somewhat more reluctantly. When the door closed behind us and I turned, there was no wall behind me anymore- only more of that eternal maze.

“Now then! Hello, everyone!” She said primly. Conversations paused once again, all eyes turning to her. “Hello! Yes. So terribly sorry to inconvenience you today, but it’s for your own good! You see, He is coming . And the only way to avoid his attention, is to Consume! And, to be Consumed. An unpleasant business but it must be done! Attendants, if you’d please-”

At this, her costumed familiars all turned toward the maze walls and produced torches, seemingly from nowhere. Without another word they thrust them into the lush green walls of the hedge maze, setting it ablaze. I jumped and, along with a great many of the people standing around, cried out. “Hey!”

She shouted us down “NOW THEN! YES! Excuse me. All you need to do, is pass through one of the fires, and you’ll be protected! Consume and be consumed! Don’t dawdle too long, it’ll be all the worse if you delay. Now if you’ll excuse me, it looks like my attention is needed elsewhere.” And with a whirl of her dress and a flash of her hair, she was gone.

I shouted over the growing din, before panic drew their gazes too far away. “OKAY! ATTENTION PLEASE. NOBODY DO WHAT THE CRAZY LADY SAID.” People nearby recentered on me, but there were too many- far too many. The fires had already spread, linked up- smoke was beginning to fill the space between the hedges. “Everyone lay down . Center of the aisle, huddle up as close as you can. Shirts over your mouths, breathe slowly, and wait it out. Pass that on, both directions.” Word began to travel in a chain, away from me up and down the hedge row, as everyone did as instructed. It wouldn’t buy us much time before smoke inhalation got us, but it was better than nothing. Oh! I called out again. “And if anyone on either end sees that damn door, tell them to relay that back to us.”

Distantly I heard a voice call out “What’ll we do until then? I can’t see!” I put on a brave face and shouted back. “Don’t worry! I’ve got someone on the outside. Help’s on the way!” Guess I’m the damsel after all.

---

The 8th street park wasn’t too hard to find from the air, once a trickle of smoke started coming up from it. It tweaked Haley’s nose immediately and she arrowed in on the small grass-and-concrete quarter block, surrounded by towering offices on all sides. There were two figures in the park, standing in front of what looked like a… subway entrance? Oh, crap. Knowledge(Engineering) pinged, somehow, and she remembered a fact she should never have known in the first place. The 8th street trolley tunnel, over 100 years old. Goes under half the downtown from East to West. Guess we did have a pseudo-subway after all. The entrance was very on fire. Even as she watched, some poor soul stumbled up out of the tunnel, and through that gauntlet of flames. She could hear the screams faintly, tinny through the still air of the downtown. He didn’t even make it a dozen steps past the inferno before collapsing.

Haley came in so hard she nearly crash-landed, pulling up just short of the only two figures in the park. The Wiltshire Dog sat calmly at the woman’s feet, only his hackles betraying his distress over the situation. The woman herself…

Her age was impossible to tell. If Haley had to guess, from posture and bone structure, she’d put her well over sixty. Her body was a ruin of burns and scars. One side of her face looked like it had run like wax. She was nearly hairless, and her mouth was twisted in a rictus grimace, but the one visible eye still shone with curiosity and engagement. She was delighted by what was taking place. Until she saw Haley, anyway.

It took a moment for the old woman to focus, as if she was coming back from some place far away. In that time, Haley darted through the flames, oblivious to them, and down into the tunnel. There were thousands of people here, stacked as far back as the eye could see along the tunnel’s interior. They must have gone on for miles. The walls were catching fire. The stone walls were catching fire. Smoke had begun to fill the space but wasn’t yet choking. Everyone she could see was asleep or unconscious on the ground, save for a half dozen who were sleepwalking towards that fire at the exit. She’s got them in some kind of dream state.

“Sean! Are you down here?” She called out, desperately. The old woman was yelling something down at her now, about interfering. She strained, listened- he could be anywhere down here. She was so close, but- wait! She heard him, somehow close but distant, as if he was shouting through an invisible barrier.

“Haley! I can hear you! We’re stuck in Wonderland, no I can’t explain that, but we have to go through the fire to get out! You’ve got to get her to call it off! I think she’s following the same rules as us, one mind, different rule set! If that’s true then everything down here is just her, the other animals aren’t really real! You just have to reason with her! I love you!”

Well, no pressure then. Haley turned and charged back up the tunnel stairs, raking her tail through the fire at the exit to scatter it. It did nothing- there was nothing to scatter. It’s just flames, from nothing. It really is all in her head, then. She turned to the woman, who was still yelling.

“You! You’ve brought Him here! Now they have no time! Floormouse! Floormouse! His agent has lead Him to us!”

The Floormouse and his mob, summoned on cue, bolted around a corner and into the park. They charged angrily through the brush, waving torches and firing wildly through the air. “ KILL THE BEAST! DRINK ITS BLOOD! ” They’d be on her in seconds.

Haley protested, desperately. “I’m not working for anyone but me! Cecilia, you have to stop this! You’re hurting these people, and summoning the monster! If Sean’s right, you’re the only mind behind any of this!”

The Dog at her feet shook his head, sadly. “I don’t think so. She’s certainly not behind me , right now. I feel no inclination to stop you at all. And you won’t get through to her with appeals to compassion. She’s driven by fear now.”

The Floormouse shouted in denial as well “ONLY MIND? ONLY MIND!?! You’ll not dismiss me so easily, witch!”

She sighed. “I’ll dismiss you some other way, then.” The charge of the 100 Acre Woods Brigade was almost on her. Turning, she let out a blast of her fire directly into the face of the Floormouse. He didn’t even have time to scream, dissipating entirely in a heartbeat. His troops followed seconds after- vanishing like so much smoke. She felt the pistol-shot still in her side disappear, and with it a fresh flow of blood. Uh-oh.

Simultaneously, Cecilia snapped upright. “ KILL THE BE- what? You! You’re going to ruin it all! I won’t let you bring Him here!”

Haley shook her head. “Still not doing any of that. That might confirm part of Sean’s theory. He was running the mob directly and you got his emotions when he disappeared. But why was his mind separate? Cecilia! I don’t want to kill you. Put out. The. Fires.” Cecilia wasn’t listening. Around her the ghostly images of a mob of woodland rabble were beginning to coalesce. It was like they were being pulled through, in some indescribable way. Copies, reflected from somewhere else .

Think, Haley, think. Minds are the key here. The Dog, the Woman, the Mouse. Why three functionally separate minds? Why- “Wait a minute.” She snapped to alertness. Are they functional, really ? “You, driven entirely by fear.” She gestured to the woman. “That mouse, the egotist at the head of the mob. As soon as he died, you picked up where he left off.” Now to the Dog- “You, the detached observer and altruist. There aren’t three, there’s one. You’re fragments of the whole, controlling the rest of the manifestations. If she’s Id, and he’s Ego, you’d be… Superego?”

The Dog frowned. “Freud is little more than superstition, girl.”

Haley growled in frustration. “I know ! But it’s what I have to go on. I hypothesize that all three of you are fragments of a single mind. If you… die… she’ll be whole, and maybe I can talk her out of all this. I’d test it first, if I could. But the fires are burning. I don’t see any other way.”

The Dog observed, and nodded. “I see. Well, score one for superstition then. I’ll not make a scene of it, if this is what’s necessary. It was a good life, while it lasted. Make it a good death?” He lay down and presented his throat.

Haley hesitated. This is the crux, then. Could she? Could she end a life, even a half-life, not out of self defense but necessity? A rationalist would do it, would solve the Trolley Problem this represented by pulling the lever. The fire raged behind her. She could hear screams now as more people tried to brave the flames. This isn’t right. All this, this last hour- Sean being separated, the pressure of this last minute decision. This all has a shape to it. It feels like…

Like a story.

That’s it. I know the rest of this. I kill him, her mind is restored but she refuses to listen to reason. The monster comes and we fight. I win, it’s stopped somehow- she dies? I kill her to stop the fires, or the monster kills her, or she drops dead. But she dies. This isn’t a story where the old woman walks away, if I choose to act. She’s just not coherent enough. If I have one choice leading to one outcome, do I have any choice at all?

I do. There’s always a choice. God or DM or whatever , let me be right about this. She dated, quick as lightning, and her jaws snapped closed around the neck. The body, the last corporeal remnant of Cecilia, erupted in blood in her mouth before turning entirely to smoke, as though it had never existed.

The Wiltshire Dog stood up in shock and anger as she attacked its mistress instead of it , but staggered. “YoU. WhAt iS HaPPenInG-”

She closed her eyes in relief. Not a murderer yet. “You’re a good dog. You’ve got all of her, now. I’m hoping you handle it better than she would have, that some part of her survives this. The fires.”

The Dog’s eyes- now Cecilia’s- snapped wide. “Oh, no. What- what have I done?”

Haley turned, calm now. “You tried to help these people. You made a mistake. You can fix it, now. Put out the fires , Cecilia. And then run.” I’ve done what I can, to alter this course. If you’re going to live, you have to change now.

The Dog staggered again. Its’ voice wavered between the deep baritone she’d heard before and the higher tones of Cecilia. “The fire . It made me a monster. He’s a monster. He’s here.”

And he was.

---

Surrounded by smoke, and fire, and screams as I was, I could still see it when the Jabberwock came to Wonderland. He towered over the burning hedge maze. His height, his distance, were impossible to judge. He was vast, he defied measurement. He had the rough shape of a man, hunched and huge at the shoulders, but that was where any similarities ended. He wore no clothes, and his body- it was just parts. Impressions, flashes- eyes and teeth and wicked, grasping hands, thorns sharp enough to split a man, all whirling and absorbing and becoming in an endless mad orgy. It was obscene . It was maddening. People plunged into the fires then, dozens- anything rather than look at that thing . And then he began to move. Towards us.

I’d heard her argument-slash-fight from here. We’d all heard it. It was as though none of us were more than a few feet from her, despite the miles of burning hedge maze. Everything had shuddered when she forced the minds to merge into the Dog, but the burning reality of our situation had reasserted itself. “ Haley! ” I shouted. “ Really could use some good news about the fires, and hopefully you see that guy!” I could still hear her, clear as if she was speaking in my ear.

“I see him, Sean. I think- I can’t fight him. Too big. Sean, I’m going to have to-” her voice broke. She thinks she has to kill Cecilia.

I’d spare her that, if I could. Wonderland rules. I could still exploit them. “No dear, you don’t have to pull that trigger yet. One last trick to play, here. That’s a big monster, but Wonderland has an answer for those. Tell her to give me the sword, she’ll know what I mean. Then talk her down. I’ll buy the time.”

I waited. It felt interminable. The fire, the heat , the shouting and the endless haunting steps of the beast. He was almost on us. Then I felt it, in my hand. The weight of a hilt. The vorpal sword. It was a funny thing. It had no ornamentation. No gems or gilt. But it felt like the most dangerous weapon ever made. And… how interesting, I couldn’t see the edges of the blade. If I tried to track from the center out, my eye just kept going forever. If I started from outside in, they never found sword. There was an edge there, but it was like the concept of sharpness.

Right then. I stood up, head into the smoke, fire scorching, raging on either side of me. Wonderland rules, right? I popped two of the sugarcubes in my mouth, bit down. Felt the change begin to take me. “Time to grow.”

---

The thing, to Haley’s eyes, was striding across the open space of the park. A hundred feet tall if it was an inch. Dog-Cecilia was frantic, racing. “He’s here ! They have to burn or he’ll have them! You brought him! The fire, though! It made me a monster!” She dropped to her belly on the ground, overwhelmed. The story still has her.

Haley almost launched herself at the beast approaching. Almost condemned them all to burn, in despair. I thought I changed course but it’s happening all the same. But then she saw him. Rising out of that other place, dreamlike, a man- carrying a sword, growing taller by the second as he strode towards the monster. Sean. I don’t know how, but- maybe it takes more than one of us to change course. Right. Focus.

One last gambit, then. “Cecilia. Look at me.”

Cecilia shook her head, still staring into her hands. “No. No. M’a’monster. Yr’a’monster. Can’t help. Can’t stop.”

Haley stepped backwards, into the fire at the tunnel’s entrance. Let it surround and cloak her entirely. “You’re not a monster, Cecilia. Fire doesn’t make monsters.” God I hope this works. She’d felt the new ability come online just minutes ago, during the flight from the mob. I guess I’m officially a ‘Very Young’ dragon now, hooray. Change Shape. She stepped out of the fire again, transformed, human. Human again. “Fire only changes one thing into another. You have to shape what comes next.”

Dog-Cecilia stared, stunned. Oh yes, I suppose I haven’t been wearing clothes all day now. Press on. She walked back to the striped mutt, knelt down, stared into her eyes. “There are no monsters here, Cecilia. Only people. Only ever people. Look at him.”

Cecilia turned. The… thing was fighting Sean, clawed hands and thrashing spikes against flashing sword. Sean was getting the worst of it. “How can you say there are no monsters? He’s horrible, I can’t bear it!”

Haley looked. “All I see is a man. Just a man.”

And, just for a moment, He was.

And the sword went snicker-snack.

---

I felt myself wake up, and for a moment a wave of disorientation hit me. I’d been 100 feet tall, more , standing in that strange gothic nave against the monster, and now- I was a man again, heaped with a thousand others in a stinking damp tunnel. The smoke and fire were gone- my injuries, however, were very real. I could feel the red-raw patches where the hedge had scorched me as I stepped over and through it. I could feel every inch of the deep cuts the Jabberwock had landed in our fight. I could feel- the sword? It was still in my hand. Huh.

We ventured up out of that tunnel slowly, many coughing, others limping. I don’t know how many never crawled out at all, or had to be retrieved later. A few of the burned, the most unfortunate or those who bolted early, littered the ground around the exit. The smell was… haunting.

It felt like thousands of people pouring out and away, silently splitting around the tableau in the park at the tunnel’s exit. A woman stood there, tall, statuesque , with long black hair, looking like some kind of mix between a literal demigod and Gal Gadot, with catlike yellow eyes and a pair of tiny golden horns sweeping her hair back. She stood ramrod straight, naked as the day she was born, scanning the crowd that came up until her eyes found me. Then she moved.

All I could get out was “ Haley-?” before she swept me up in the best hug from a nude Amazonian I’d ever had. She didn’t say a word, just held me tight. She was bleeding from a- is that a gunshot wound to her side? Guess we both took some hits. Words escaped me momentarily, but I soon recovered. “I feel like something’s different. Changed your hair?”

She smiled and bit back a sob. “If you say one word about ‘Trading up,’ mister, you’re going to find out what a punch in the arm from an Olympian feels like.” She didn’t quite have to kneel down to get on eye level with me, but I was definitely looking up when she kissed me now. It was an odd feeling. “I love you.”

Well that was an easy one. “I love you too. Always. What-” I gestured at the empty chair behind her. “Just. What?”

She nodded, sadly. “The Dog. The story wanted me to kill her, to end the fight. But I couldn’t. The Dog was the most coherent of the three. I destroyed the other two, and it got what was left of them. I don’t think it did her any favors. But she listened to reason. With the monster gone she put out the fire, finally, and then she vanished.” She paused. “I hope I did the right thing.”

“You did what you could. More than you could. You were brilliant.”

“And you.”

“Uh, what story? I still don’t know why my mind didn’t snap to the wonderland logic in the end, like everyone else’s.”

She considered. “I think… she had her story, and you were part of mine. Maybe you can’t belong to both at the same time? I don’t know. There are too many things I don’t know, right now.”

We stood, a moment, in silence for the departed. So much pain. Why had this happened? Were there things like this going on all over the world? Were we going to have to stop them all? Too many unknowns. Eventually, she spoke again. “Uh. It’s a bit chilly this afternoon, isn’t it.”

I grinned, observing. “Heck yeah it is. You gonna change back?”

She shook her head. “No. No, I am going to enjoy this. But I need clothing, we both need a doctor, and we still have a job to do before we go back. Let’s get moving.” Always on a mission, this one. That’s my girl.

It was precisely at that moment that the phone in my pocket rang. Wait. I don’t- I didn’t bring my phone. What?

And that was the first 24 hours of the end of the world.

----

END OF ARC 1

----