A/N: You know, I think I'm going slightly mad. ( Fudge1's words, not my own ) Oh, apoligies for the weird formatting, I dunno what happened.
Chapter nine – pieces of thee
One two three four five,
Once I caught a cat alive
Why did I let him go?
Because he talked me into doing so!
The door opened and CC, Hare, Hatter, the Lion and the Unicorn entered, still covered in a large amount of ink from fight though the card guards to get into the castle and to the throne room, both the felines licking their paws free of muck as they went, and They saw it all immediately: Alyss's dead body, hardly qualifying to be really called not much more than a mess of blood and bone on the floor, and Mouse standing over it, covered in
(blue blood, royal gore)
a mixture of scarlet blood and blue ink.
"So she's dead and gone for good?" said the Cheshire Cat, only half-questioning and showing his fangs in the first genuine grin in years.
"Yeah," Mouse said absently. She was looking back at the throne. Slowly she started walking towards it.
The creatures exchanged glances.
Mouse sat down on the throne and picked the crown, discarded at some point during the fight, up off the floor. She studied it for a few moments.
"Mouse, what are you doing?" Hare said in a worried voice, taking a step forward.
For a moment, the girl didn't reply. She was turning the
(and her eyes were as black as glass)
obsidian crown over in her hands, staring with a kind of morbid fascination at her reflection in the dark red, glassy stones.
"Such a simple thing." She murmured, running her hands over the nine tines of the head piece and then staring blankly at the red liquid that the vicious points drew. "But it was all the power, you know. She was just a crazy little girl without it." She snorted. "But then, she was just a crazy little girl with it, so that wasn't much use." Mouse giggled wildly, dropped the
(absolute power corrupts absolutely)
crown on the floor with a resounding CLANK and hopped off the throne again, making a beeline for Cat.
She picked him up like a kitten, and he was too surprised to resist, even when she tickled him under the chin.
"What do you want cat? Hmm? Whaddya want kitty-cat?"
That's when he realised something was wrong and she needed to snap out of it. So he did what all cats (ordinary or otherwise) do when in a tight spot – and scratched her across the face.
She gasped in pain and surprise (more the latter than the former), dropped the cat like a hot coal and slowly raised her hand to her face, where three, deep, angry red cuts were beginning to form. The world wobbled dangerously, but somehow she managed to stay on her feet.
"What" she asked, staring at her companions, "Did I do?"
696
The throne was rubble.
The crown was shards, and Mouse had left the body to Cat, who wouldn't tell her what he'd done with it, and from the marks on his face when he returned, she decided she didn't really want to know either.
"Where're our suits, then?" Questioned the unicorn, voicing everyone's thoughts.
I don't know was on the tip of Mouse's tongue.
Then there was an odd feeling, a kind of mental whisper on the corner of her mind, coming from the collapsed black marble shards of the throne. She turned towards it, and as though in a trance, she started to pull at the largest piece of rubble. Cat, hare and hatter, realising what she was trying to do, went to help her, (Cat flowing into his semi-humanoid form to do so) and soon, between the four of them, they had uncovered a dark greyish metal box, about the size of Mouse's head.
CC reached out to pick it up – then recoiled, hissing in pain.
"You'll have to do it, kitten." He gasped, and mouse now saw that the pads of his paws were red-raw and burnt, as though he had placed them flat on a boiling hot stove. "It's iron. None of us can touch it."
Huh? She thought, then remembered, Iron is to the Fae what silver is to werewolves. Corrosive poison. The wonderlanders must be some flavour of Faery.
She picked up the box, and opened the lid.
A/N: Apple! Review!