Oz

Her sister…was the Abyss?

"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked. "You mean she's this dimension, as in you Chains technically live…you live inside of her?" The thought made my stomach turn. No way…could a different dimension exist inside of a person's body?

"Don't give me that look," Alice replied, glaring at me. "We don't live inside someone; calm down. When I said that she's the Abyss, I meant that she is basically a human manifestation of the Abyss."

I still didn't get it. My blankness must have shown on my face, because Alice sighed in exasperation. "The Chains know of her as the Will of the Abyss, because that is very technically who she is. The Abyss speaks through her, the Abyss controls the Chains through her; she is the Abyss. Without her, the Abyss wouldn't even exist."

Oh…so Alice's sister was like a spokesman? No…a puppet. That was more like it. "So what was the Abyss before your sister was the Will?" I asked.

Alice shrugged. "I'm guessing it didn't even exist."

"Like…this entire dimension? It didn't exist?"

She glanced at me. "I think that this dimension was manmade."

My head spun. "Manmade? But that's impossible! There isn't a genius on Earth that could possibly –"

"That's what they might want you to believe," she interrupted. "Think about it, Oz. That sister is my twin. In other words, she's the same age as me. The both of us couldn't have been here since the beginning of all existence. It just doesn't make sense. We would have had to age fifteen Earth years before coming here, which means there must have been at least some time before the Abyss existed."

She was right. She had told me that nothing aged here. She had to have been fifteen when she came here. "But how is that possible?" I questioned. "If you're right, and this place was made by humans, how could that be? The Abyss could have been here in the equivalent to hundreds of years on Earth…back then, people didn't even understand electricity. How could they create a different dimension?"

Alice crossed her legs on the ground. "It might have been an accident," she told me. "It could have been as simple as a cult summoning their evil god and creating an evil world in the process." I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, she fixed me with that glare again. "And I know what you're about to ask: if without my sister, the Abyss can't exist, then how was it able to survive before my sister became its Will?"

I slowly shut my mouth and nodded. Alice was getting good at reading my mind.

"The Abyss definitely has enough energy to sustain itself alone for quite a reasonable period of Earth time," she reasoned. "So when some people – for some rationale – wanted to find a way to keep the Abyss alive, they thought that by having a human become an eternal canister of its will, the Abyss would be able to control its crumbling power. And it worked."

"They took your sister," I said.

She shut her eyes. "I don't know why they chose her over me. Who knows? Maybe they just grabbed a random one, sacrificed her to the Abyss, and stuck the other one into the Abyss as a Chain after destroying her memories. Perhaps it was an interesting experiment?"

I could hear the venom in her voice. She hated those people she believed to be responsible much more than she hated the Abyss. She utterly despised them because they took away her memories.

"Hey, Alice?" I said, breaking through her trance.

She turned to me, her eyes still on fire. "What?"

"Um…I think that while we were unconscious after coming here…" I tugged at my collar. "I think I saw one of your memories."

The fire was instantly extinguished and she leaned forward eagerly, her eyes widened. "Really? What did you see? You have to describe everything. Everything."

I nervously told her about what I had seen, trying to detail the whole scene. When I finished, she was silent. I couldn't tell what she was thinking. Quietly, she sat back in her original stance. "Alice?" I asked after a few moments. "Are you okay?"

"I…I was a little girl," she said softly. "I wasn't made a monster. I was a human."

Before I could even react, tears started pouring from her eyes. I was so alarmed that I could barely even piece together something to say, and when I started I couldn't stop. "A-Alice, y-you don't have to, you know, you don't have to c-cry! I mean, we both knew that you were a human before, didn't we? A-and you were so cute and everything, and you looked so happy! There isn't a reason to cry! We should be celebrating! Yay! Yay!" I felt like I was trying to coo a one-year-old to stop wailing. In other words, I felt like an utter idiot.

I guess that was what it looked like, too, because Alice wiped away the last of her tears and laughed. "You're so stupid-looking, Oz," she told me, smiling.

My eyes were fixated on that happy look on her face. I didn't know why she didn't smile more often…it was really pretty. Barely a moment after I felt my heart skip a beat, she sneered at me again and said, "Stop staring. It's annoying."

She stood up. "Let's get going. It's good to keep moving in a place crawling with monsters."