There was only darkness at first, then came the colors, exploding from the deepest corners of her minds but beyond that, there was only darkness.
A cacophony of whispered echoed in her ears as swirling spirals of opalescent shades deceived her vision.
The fall, it was the last thing she remembered.
Fleeting, the screaming flesh of her legs and the lack of breath.
Fleeting from who? She didn't know.
Alice was awake yet not conscious, her body encased in a paralyzed state.
She was barely aware of her body being lifted from the ground and dragged away by an unknown force.
Sealed eye-lids leaving her hearing as the only sense left.
Amidst the orchestra of distant sound, she kept listening for any clues to determine who or what was dragging her, but she could only hear the sound of her legs sliding against the floor.
Alice could feel her body weakening with each passing second but didn't cave into the feeling of slumber, mustering all of her remaining strength to keep herself awake.
Suddenly whatever suspended her above the ground disappeared, dropping Alice on the cold floor of the newly entered room.
Alice felt a rush of adrenaline as she made contact with the floor, and the hallucinations disappeared shortly after.
Feeling very awake and responsive she rose from the ground and draw the vorpal blade.
Her eyes and ears started scanning the room for anything out of the ordinary whilst she kept a defensive stance.
Case in point, the room itself was quite out of the ordinary.
It was dark, certainly, yet Alice could see her own body perfectly as if it emitted a light of its own.
As the previous surge of adrenaline died off Alice lowered her defenses and turned her attention on the room in which she stood.
Everything was pitch black, the floor, the ceiling, everything was devoid of all colors.
Yet as her eyes got accustomed to the darkness and her vision cleared she noticed a series of white lines creeping out of the walls and outlining the corners of the room.
The lines appeared sketchy and irregular as if they were drawn by a trembling hand.
"Thankfully I am quite accustomed to this kind of things," Alice commented, being no stranger to shape-shifting rooms herself.
She took a step forward, and so did all the scribbled drawings, slithering like serpents across the wall.
They twisted and turned into incomprehensible shapes until they finally settled into very recognizable objects.
Alice's glared the drawings in distaste.
"Five doors, five benches, a chandelier, and a double door," Alice counted, her expression turning into a frown.
It almost felt as if the room itself was mocking her.
Taunting her seemingly not being able to find the solution to its enigma.
But Alice knew better than to let her emotion run wild, so she kept her usual composure and proceeded forward.
The drawings mimicked the objects from the previous rooms and, albeit crudely made, were easily distinguishable from the background.
Yet when she reached the end of the hallway she didn't come across any drawings of a door and was met with a plain black wall.
She was confused, at first, Alice knew that there was a way out somewhere nearby but she could not figure where she was supposed to go.
She looked at the doodles behind her, they were all white and shaky, as if they were drawn with…chalk.
An idea suddenly struck Alice.
She dug through her pockets and fished out the piece of white chalk, which was surprisingly still intact despite the previous ruckus.
Alice held the little object in her hand and moved it closer to the wall.
"If this doesn't work then I am out of ideas," She muttered under her breath before drawing a crude vertical line.
She continued drawing lines until she had a rough image resembling a double door, complete with handles and hinges.
Alice placed the remains of the chalks in her pocket, and pressed both of her hands onto the newly created "door".
It didn't move, at first, but after applying a greater pressure Alice could feel that something was moving in front of her.
A sound of cracking stone filled her surroundings.
It took her by surprise when the walls suddenly split open and made her fall into a new room, before closing permanently behind her.
"What an eventful day," Alice commented sarcastically after falling face first on the ground.
Sluggishly getting up on her feet, she waited for the dullness in her face to subside and took her time to observe the room in which she stood.
It looked normal, for the most part, a normal looking flat, with normal looking interiors.
Definitely a nice change of pace from the previous environment.
It had a large rectangular table in the middle with four chairs neatly placed on each side.
A single lit candle sat on the smooth wooden furniture, serving as the only light source in the room.
Alice saw a couch, a wardrobe, and various shelves filled with books.
A single pendulum clock stood in a corner of the room, counting the passing seconds with its relentless ticking.
The wardrobe was the first furniture that she inspected, thinking that it might hold something of value, but mostly out of curiosity.
Carefully opening the wardrobe, Alice's eyes lit up with glee as they settled onto the familiar shape of another weapon of hers, the hobby horse.
Part of her was rather suspicious of the presence of such weapon in a place like this, but she mostly overjoyed to see something that wasn't alien to her.
Alice took the blunt weapon in her hands to feel the weight, gladly seeing that she could still handle it fairly well, before shrinking the wooden horse in size and placing it in her apron's pocket.
Wonderland's power still lingered inside her, she noticed.
The young woman then walked over one of the shelves and picked up a book, she flicked through the pages and tried to read a few lines, but found herself squinting her eyes in confusion when she failed to decipher its content, probably written in the same language as the signs she had seen before.
Then something else caught her attention, on the far corner of the living room she saw another dim lit room.
Alice focused her attention on her hearing and picked up a faint wet noise coming from the aforementioned room.
Intrigued, Alice placed the book on its original spot and carefully proceeded towards the room, making sure to make as little noise as possible, almost as if she was afraid to awake its inhabitants.
Alice could not understand, she was used to her sessions in Wonderland, she had seen all sorts of dreadful visions during the last ten years and yet there was something particularly unnerving about this unknown region of her mind, she truly could not understand.
Reaching to the door frame she tilted her head and peered inside the confined space, what she saw inside deeply shocked her.
Inside, there was a humanoid figure lying in a bathtub filled with blood, leaving only its head and chest visible.
Alice could practically feel her bowels contorting in disgust from the foul stench that was wafting all around her, and yet dared to take another peek inside.
The body was disfigured to the point being unrecognizable.
It had a series of cuts all over its shoulders, accompanied by a few stabs wounds on its chest, all leaking with the same crimson liquid.
The neck was severed almost to the bone, leaving the head tilted in a very unnatural position.
It wasn't hard for her to guess how this poor soul perished.
Alice's eyes shifted from one place to another, restlessly, she clearly was disturbed but could not help but wonder who could have such a horrible act.
"But then again I am not better of whoever did this," Alice reminded herself, briefly remembering the dirty deeds of her past.
Pushing what little conscience was left in her, Alice's vision settled on a specific part of the cadaver, its face, or more correctly, the white mask that was covering said face.
The entire bathroom was surprisingly clean, despite the butchered remains in the bathtub, and the mask was no exception.
It was immaculate, perfectly clean to the point of looking shiny, it sat perfectly on the cadaver's face, covering what Alice assumed would be another grotesque spectacle.
The mask's features were somewhat feminine, but It was something that was hard to tell considering the sparse lighting.
Alice's breath slowed down to a normal pace, and stood still by the doorframe, observing the mask from afar.
And then an idea spawn within her sickened mind, she wanted to see its face.
"If I were to recognize this person, then maybe I would get some answers about this damn place," Alice pondered as she scratched her chin with her thumb and index.
She didn't want to do it, all she truly wanted was to wake up in her bed and start another day, but she also wanted to get some answers.
Her dream session was becoming even more unstable, and she wanted to know why.
Placing her right foot on the bathroom's tiles, she studied the interior for anything that could be deemed threatening.
Taking another step forward once she assessed that everything safe, she reached for the drenched bathtub.
Alice looked at the twisted figure below her, she felt a hint of compassion rising within her but ultimately died down when her hand reached down.
Alice's fingers briefly traced the white cheeks of the adornment before clutching the sides in his grip and pulling up.
The mask came off with relative ease, revealing the face that was concealed beneath.
Safe to say, it wasn't a pretty sight.
Just like the rest of its body, the cadaver's bald head was deeply mutilated.
Its eyes, nose, and teeth were all absent, along with large portions of the skin on the cheeks and forehead.
It was a bloody mess, unrecognizable, and ultimately useless.
Alice felt another surge of bile arising from her innards but hastily left the bath before it could move any further.
Making her way through the living room, Alice placed the white mask on the table and was about to take a chair for herself.
She wanted to reflect on her next move, but then another noise called her attention back to the bathroom.
It sounded like water crashing against a hard surface, it was sudden and loud, startling Alice and making her draw her trusty knife.
She spun around to face the source of the noise, and then she saw It.
Standing perfectly straight in a bathtub of blood stood the, not so dead, dead body.
Its empty sockets stared deeply into Alice's emerald eyes.
Blood was pouring out of its gaping mouth and nose, dripping down its skinless face and into the red pool below.
From her position Alice could see the cadaver in its integrity, every wound, gash or cut was visible for the whole world to see.
A display of death and decay which was only briefly memorized by Alice's brain as it tried to salvage what little sanity was left.
Both the living and the dead stood still for a couple of minutes, doing nothing but looking at each other.
The tension in the room was becoming palpable.
The cadaver briefly averted its gaze from the young woman to look at the mask which laid beside her.
It started at the white object for a few more minutes before raising one of its mangled arms into the air and extending its hand towards it.
The dead then shifted his torn limb towards the nearest wall, all the while keeping his unmoving gaze fixed on Alice.
It brought down its bloody fingers onto the wall and wrote an E, followed by a Y, continuing with another E, and ending with an S.
Once it was done its fingers turned limp just like the rest of the body.
The cadaver fell forwards, slipping out of the bathtub and landing onto the cold tiles with a sickening thud, lifeless.
As the room fell into silence once again Alice observed the corpse with wide eyes, out of all the things that she had to see during this night this was the most unnerving of all of them.
Carefully looking around herself, Alice expected to be attacked by other monstrosities but instead found no one else in the room.
That was when it finally it her, the room had no exits, neither doors nor windows could be seen.
Alice's breathing briefly became erratic but slowed down shortly after before it could degenerate any further.
"Calm down Alice, remember the doctor's breathing technique," Alice's body shivered at the mention of her former doctor, but the breathing technique turned out to be very useful, much to her surprise.
Alice took a seat for herself, she needed to find a way out of this nightmare and had to concentrate.
Alice's gaze fell upon the word the cadaver wrote before dying once again.
"Eyes," Alice repeated the word a few times, she had seen the cadaver pointing at the mask that she had taken.
She shifted her attention onto the expressionless mask beside her.
The pieces were starting to align in her head.
"Eyes, mask, the cadaver's mask, the cadaver's eyes, through the mask, through the eyes of the dead," Alice spoke loudly in her thoughts.
Jumping from her seat, she took the mask her hand and turned it around so she could see the inside of it.
Hesitantly at first, Alice brought the mask to her face and looked through the eye sockets.
Her vision was blurry at first but as the images became clear Alice found herself in a room that was completely different from the previous.
What once was a cozy living room now looked like the inside of an abandoned mansion.
The walls were stained with an even layer of dust, only interrupted by patches of holes that filled its structure.
The disconnected floor was littered with the debris from the collapsed ceiling and rotting wood.
The furniture was broken beyond recognition, decaying, and stained with the same filth that tainted the walls.
The nauseating smell of stale air filled the air around her.
Alice looked around, still keeping the mask glued to her face, and noticed that the bathroom was mission altogether and in its place stood an open door to a pitch black void.
Reluctantly at first, Alice approached the door with extreme awareness.
She peered inside to see what lied ahead but was met with the same dense darkness.
Plunging through the blackness, Alice moved forward without looking back, if that was the only way out of this hellhole then so be it.
At first, it was hard for her to distinguish the environment, but as her eyes got accustomed to the darkness Alice started to pick up a few important clues.
The place was large and shaped like a tunnel, a tunnel which apparently had no light at the end of it.
It was large enough that she could hear the echo of her own footsteps.
Alice looked down and saw what appeared to be train-rails on the ground, but about four times as large as any normal train rails.
Was she on some sort train track? Alice could not even bother to know at this point.
After all of her years in Wonderland, even the most outlandish architectures looked reasonable to her.
Suddenly, a booming noise reverberated throughout the tunnel and very ground started shaking violently.
The British woman spun around and saw the distant figure of a locomotive, coming her way.
The machine was somehow unaffected by the overall darkness.
Its engine whistled and roared like an angry beast, leaving a trail of dense smoke at it moved along.
As the animal of metal shortened the gap between Alice and itself, it revealed its true nature to the young woman.
And for the first time, Alice felt genuine terror.
What looked like a normal train abruptly morphed into no other the infernal train itself, the massive amalgamation of cathedrals that devastated wonderland.
It was noticeably smaller than its original counterpart but it still towered above Alice.
Pure horror rippled through Alice psyche as she witnessed her presumed-dead enemy coming back to finally put an end to her existence.
Wasting no time with senseless questions, Alice turned around and ran as she had never done before, a breathless, erratic run.
But despite her speed, the infernal train was largely faster than her, being able to gain additional ground with each step Alice took.
She needed to find a hideout, and she needed it quickly.
The tunnel seemed endless, stretching in a single direction as far as her eyes could see.
But then, in the distance, Alice spotted the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, or in her case a light on the right side of the tunnel.
It was a large opening that stood on top of a slight elevation.
With the train mere feet away from her back, Alice accelerated her pace for the final rush and leaped into the air.
For the second time, time slowed down to a crawl, and everything moved as if it was underwater.
Alice looked back at the infernal train and noticed a dark figure perched on top of one of its many spires, it briefly looked at Alice dead in the eyes before disappearing.
Alice landed onto the hard floor of the opening with the train following shortly after.
Its immense size sent shockwaves through the shorter structure, cracking parts of the walls and ceiling.
Alice laid down on her stomach and put her arms over her head to shield herself from the incoming rain of falling debris.
Destruction waged all around her as the train wrecked the haven with its sheer size alone.
After a full minute of tremors, the train finally proceeded its course through the dark tunnel, leaving nothing but death and destruction in its wake.
When the noise subsided, Alice meekly opened her eyes and recognized the place in which she stood, or laid.
Moorgate Station, the place where her tribulation begun.
She wanted to say something witty to comment on this ironic turn of events, but she truly felt devoid of all energy, all she wanted was to know what was happening to her.
Groggily rising from her cowering spot, Alice removed the remaining debris, some stuck in her clothes, some stuck in her very flesh.
Alice looked at the stone staircase with eyes full of hope.
There was only one place where she could return to the real world.
"I'll get the answers that I want….if it's the last thing I do.