Disclaimer: Joss Whedon is the official inventor of River-speak. This is an experiment, as is the grammar. Refers heavily to other literary works.
She does not have honeyed strands. She wants them, wants some other life (so does her brother, but he is indecisive). If she had sunshine in her hair, maybe there would be sunshine in her eyes.
But her hands don't know the engine and she is not Alice. A void can not reflect light. Twin blackholes capture the sunshine like dead fireflies in a jar and she can't cut them out. She is sucked in gasping for air but there's none to breathe.
The Jabberwock stalks wonderland, fills her head with ideas but she's not sure what they mean. Nonsense and missense, bits clawed out essential to life, an attempt to put her on inanimate strings. Monsters spring out of the absence to bow mockingly to her, ask her to dance and she doesn't want to!
Lost in a dark wood, she looks back and sees the pass that no person has left alive. She rests and wakes up to needles in her arms in her head (no please NO). It takes all the running she can do to end up where she started from, a journey made of mathematical puzzles and imaginary numbers.
A River drifting, her path is deep and savage. Abandon all Hope, life is but a dream.
Waters still, waters freeze, fall down into the darkest pit, into the vastest lake. The woods turned brown to sleep for autumn, but the snowflakes of winter here aren't kisses, don't make a comforting quilt of white to save the world for summer. Chilling, smothering, a trap, quickly freezing her to the waist. She is alone but for her guide, who looks familiar, but she doesn't know who she is. She has the same dark empty eyes and wields a weeping knife, and her new family lies broken at her feet.
Hands blue from the cold rest on her shoulders. You did this to them, little black kitten, whispers the howling wind, you brought this upon them, accuses the beating of six terrible wings.
(let them go let them go let them go LET THEM GO!) She's finally dancing, the laughter is long and cruel and she keeps at it until it stops.
A stream drips down from her hands onto the icy glass. Not theirs, not theirs, oh not theirs. Her pain. She is grateful for that.
Simon doesn't understand why she smashed the mirror.
